Reviews PS3

Review – Valkyria Chronicles

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Strategy games have proven to be a bitter mistress for me. It is an unfortunate genre because it is home to one of my all-time favorite games, X-Com. When I first boot up a strategy game, especially one that has a similar mechanic to X-Com, I find myself comparing whatever game I may be playing to the venial alien blasting classic. When this happens, almost all games fail and I end up ditching the discs in one of my many binders, never to play it again.

It was with a great amount of trepidation that I purchased Valkyria Chronicles. I loved what I had seen of the game, the story is set in an alternate WWII universe, it is graphically an anime-styled game, and you get to run over people with a big ass tank. I really wanted this game to work out; I strove to fall in love with it. And in the end, I did. It is an event on par with the appearance of Haley’s comet when a video game meets or exceeds all of my expectations but I can safely proclaim to the world that I am in love with Valkyria Chronicles and if the law allows, I may indeed marry it someday. →  All this can be yours, if the read is right.

Review – Flower

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If you haven’t noticed…and you probably haven’t, I have not written much lately. Truth be told, there hasn’t been a lot in gaming that has inspired me in the past couple of weeks. That is, until tonight. Flower has been on the Playstation Store now for roughly six or seven hours and in that time, I can safely say this game has answered the video games as art argument with a resounding, YES!

This review is not going to be very long because the game is not very long and it is hard to do justice to it without letting you just play it and experience it for yourself. The premise is simple, tilt the controller and press any button to make the wind blow. That is it. Of course there is more to it, but really how much can I say about a series of flower petals blowing in the wind? At first glance, the game looks like some kind of tech demo you would see at a video game convention but there is so much more to this game it is crazy. →  Read awhile, and listen.

Review – Prince of Persia

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The games and film industries are currently obsessed with the concept of reboots. While this is not a new concept, traditionally reboots are greenlit for franchises that are fairly old, and only when the IP holder feels that it will remain commercially viable after a modern facelift. Certain entities in the gaming world have bucked this trend, prescribing reboots for series that are still currently popular, and have likely had at least one new entry in the last five or so years. From a theoretical standpoint, this makes sense. If you are choosing something to to reboot from a list of modern franchises, it is much easier to determine their viability when your audience still remembers them. It also allows a publisher to continue churning out sequels at a steady clip without the new entries feeling immediately stale.

That being said, the industry’s reboot decisions have often been poorly made. Tomb Raider just had one not long ago with TR:Legend, and already Eidos wants to consider another. →  This post are sick.

Review – Street Fighter II HD

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The number of permutations of Street Fighter 2 is one of gaming’s oldest punchlines. Though the joke still has teeth due to plain old nostalgia, savvy gamers now realize that the arcade revisions of Street Fighter added important tweaks and upgrades (and the console versions were various attempts at porting them to limited hardware). This slow burn through the 90’s finally culminated with Super SF2 Turbo, the last major revision and a game still played today in the tournament scene thanks to its familiarity and balance. The fact that fighting game fans won’t let go of Street Fighter 2 is a testament to its quality, and is the justification for why Capcom chose to make yet another major revision after years of silence. SF2 HD Remix (the full name is much too long) is a landmark release in the series, made exactly the way it should be at this point in the series’ life.

If it seems strange to you that Capcom has invested so much into Street Fighter 2 in 2008, you aren’t crazy. →  Shining Post: Legacy of Great intention

Review – Resistance 2

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Resistance 2 from Insomniac Games is the highly anticipated sequel to the fairly enjoyable Resistance: Fall of Man. Insomniac is one of Sony’s prize jewels, an exclusive PS3 developer who makes big hits on a tight time schedule. This time around however, (for the very first time in fact) I wasn’t pleased with their output. This game has its moments and is sure to be enjoyed by many, but I’ve played too many shooters to accept a second-rate product from a first-rate company, especially in the saturated season we fortunately find ourselves in.

Resistance 2 continues the story of Nathan Hale and an alien invasion that takes place on an alternate earth in our World War II era. The all-powerful Chimera have filled America’s skies with massive warships and are exterminating the nation in a maelstrom of nuclear fire. Playing Hale, you will visit various locales throughout the States, gun down the inhuman enemy in droves, and perform the standard suite of special forces-type missions that are always used in games to explain how one man can destroy whole battalions of troops, obliterate massive pieces of architecture, and change the course of a war. →  And so it games…

Review – Dead Space

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In April of 2007 a man by the name of John Riccitiello began work as the new Chief Operating Officer of Electronic Arts, one of the two largest video game conglomerates on earth. EA had fallen victim to its own massiveness in the years prior. In order to grow it had purchased and then cannibalized smaller, more imaginative game developers, absorbed the talent into their own offices, and centrally ran all operations.

As a result, the people and projects they assimilated became infected with the shortcomings of the company entire: there was too much bureaucracy and too many levels of hierarchy. This took decision making and creativity away from the game development teams. As a result EA earned a rather poor reputation for making nothing but thin sequels, movie tie-ins, and sports games that did little to differentiate themselves from year to year.

One of Mr. Riccitiello’s first tasks was to issue a surprisingly frank mea culpa for the company. The big, bloated, centrally operating model was called a mistake. →  Speak softly and carry a big post.

Review – Call of Duty: World at War

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As expected, Activision has pimped the hell out of 2008’s yearly Call of Duty release, World at War. The savvier gamers out there have not been fooled, and have spent their energies trashing it before it even got a chance to prove itself. They know that WaW was developed not by series creator Infinity Ward, but by Treyarch, whose two game Call of Duty pedigree has been viewed as less than stellar.

I assert that this judgment was unfair. Big Red One was developed for last gen platforms, and managed to be very clever given its hardware limitations. As for CoD3, the snarky blog commenters betrayed their true lack of intelligence. It should have been obvious to anyone that the game was a stopgap, a way for Activision to “exploit” a favorite moneymaker with a yearly release. World at War has twice the budget and development time that CoD3 did. If you truly want to judge Treyarch’s ability compared to IW, this is the time to do it. →  2 h4rdc0r3 4 U.

Review – Little Big Planet

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Now that the game has been out for a while and I have eased myself off of Fallout 3, I feel it is time for me to kick in my two cents about Little Big Planet. I must admit that prior to the game’s release I was caught up in the euphoria surrounding LBP. I basically bought my Playstation 3 to play it and waited anxiously for each new video that was released in the weeks before the game came out. Once those evil lyrics about Islam had been properly disposed of and the game finally came out, I rushed home and barricaded myself in my room to play the game for almost an entire weekend straight.

Things you need to keep in mind when considering Little Big Planet:

1. The game is a side-scrolling hop ‘n’ bop. If you do not like the aforementioned genre, stop reading now, you will probably not like Little Big Planet.
2. Being a side-scroller, Little Big Planet is the latest in a very long and distinguished lineage of games, and to be truly honest, other games *cough*Super Mario 3*cough* do a better job mechanically of representing the genre. →  May God smite me if I stop reading here!

Review – Fallout 3

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Writer’s note: At the time of this writing, Fallout 3 is a bit buggy on all platforms, and extra buggy on the PS3. I do not wish to neglect these issues, but for the time being they are not featured in the review. If the first patch for the game does not fix many of these issues, I will bring them up in a future piece, but I wish to avoid talking about bugs at the moment as it takes away some of the timelessness of a review. Fallout 2 was broken in many ways upon release, and no one talks about that these days.

We here at videolamer strive to provide timely reviews for major releases. The bad news is that juggling real life responsibilities and funding our own gaming budgets makes this a challenge. The good news is that each year the industry makes meeting this challenge less and less critical, since every year it becomes plagued with an even stronger case of Hype Fever. →  Up to 6 billion readers.

Review – The Force Unleashed

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Star Wars: The Force Unleashed is now the fastest selling Star Wars game of all time. Being the biggest closet Star Wars fan on this site, this was reason enough for me to check it out. The current general sentiment about the game is that it is a rental at best, and perhaps not even worth that due to a variety of issues.

Some of these gripes are valid, but others appear to be the usual negatives that spread thanks to speedy reviewers (and the comment section trolls that parrot what they hear from them). Force Unleashed is buggy and filled with many of modern gaming’s worst tropes, but it also has decent action bolstered by the sheer fun of using The Force, and it tells a story that tries hard to be worthy.

Force Unleashed begins like so many other games of its ilk. The opening stage explains very little about your abilities, hoping players either read the instructions or can button mash their way through. →  Your right post comes off?