Playstation 3

Digital High Episode 12

Hold onto your socks, because Vince talks about a game he likes, which is Rage. I discover the explosive hidden gem that is Split Second and, as always, Donna helps us discuss the week’s news and stories from the video game world. Gears 3 holds the best launch this year with 3 million units sold in a week. We talk quite a bit about Sony’s new advert for the PS3 and what exactly the core message is behind it, and that new Syndicate trailer turned out to be quite awesome indeed.

In other news: Mass Effect 3 multiplayer rumors still continue, LA Noire studio Team Bondi are officially shutting down, an RPG based on the popular Game of Thrones TV series will hit sometime in early 2012 and, what everyone has been waiting for, an app for the windows phone that turns it into a 360 controller. Finally, I can throw out all those clunky pads and use my 360 properly.

You can catch all the episodes of Digital High on the official podcast page! http://playeraffinity.com/podcast.html

Rage Review

Rage is iD Software’s first game since Doom 3 was released back in 2005.  The first time that Rage was ever shown was in 2007 as a tech demo, which places the development cycle for Rage at about 5 years (1 year to complete the stuff for the tech demo and get everything ready to show, then 4 years since 2007 until it was officially released).  With the amount of time that it took to develop, many people had expectations on what Ragewas actually going to be.  Some thought that it would be a full racer with not much first person shooting, while others thought the exact opposite.  Well, Rage finally came out on Tuesday, and I can say that it is a very fun game to play.

Comparisons will inevitably be drawn to Fallout 3 and Borderlands, and while these may seem apt, they are mostly wrong.  Sure, in all of these games you control a character in a post apocalyptic setting who fires guns at menacing-looking enemies, but I find that the depth that Rage has is quite different from the others.  Most of this depth comes from the fact that unlike the other two games, the main customization aspect is with the buggies.  In fact, there is absolutely no skill tree to plug points into your character.  In addition to this, you are also assigned a generic looking guy whom you play as throughout the entire game.  While your character does get armor early in the game, it is apparent that iD focused on the gunplay and driving, because once you put on the armor, you will be very hard pressed to find other pieces of armor.  After about 4 hours of play, I was still wearing the same armor that I had received within the first hour, because that was the only option.  Instead of finding armor, the loot that you will be picking up in the aptly named Wasteland will either be ammo, parts to build various mechanisms that will help you in your quests, or garbage that can be sold at the store.  Occasionally, you will find weapons, but finding weapons is a muc rarer occurrence than in a game like Borderlands.

Even the Japanese Mafia Can’t Keep the Zombies Out

There’s some great news from Sega today for everyone’s favorite
Japanese-culture/Japanese-mafia game series, assuming you love you some
zombies.  Yakuza: Dead Souls, previously known as Yakuza: Of the End,
will be making a western debut next March!  Prepare yourself to face
zombies, mutants, and members of the Yakuza in battle, play Pachislot, a
new minigame for the US release of Yakuza: Dead Souls, and spend your off-time with lovely hostesses.

PAYDAY: The Heist Delayed

According to the PlayStation Blog, PAYDAY: The Heist has been delayed. 
The game’s release date has been pushed back to later this month by SOE
and OVERKILL in order to further polish the gameplay and insure the
overall quality of the title is satisfactory prior to launch.

Resident Evil: Code: Veronica X HD Review

Sometimes, a game is a classic despite glaring problems.  Sometimes, a game is a  classic because of those same glaring problems.  Sometimes, gamers fall in  love with a gameplay element that is very “of the moment” and really  only exists because of a technical hurdle.  Sometimes, gamers look past  an unwieldy control scheme and awful acting to enjoy the tense  atmosphere and startling scares.  The first Resident Evil was all of these things. Resident Evil: Code: Veronica more or less continued that tradition ad nauseum, and the HD release of Resident Evil: Code: Veronica X brings it all back.

Yearly Sequels: Are We Getting Sick of Assassin’s Creed?

In the middle of November we will be getting the third yearly entry in the Assassin’s Creed series since the second game. 

Like most people, I was very skeptical ifBrotherhood was going to be good, but then it turned out to be quite awesome and I began to wonder: Can Revelations do it again so soon?   Brotherhood certainly didn’t feel like a full sequel to Assassins Creed 2. It was more like a really well made expansion pack, similar to those made by  many PC developers.

Playstation Steps Up Its Downloadable Exclusivity with “Only for PSN”

A system is only as strong as its downloadable content, and with the announcement of “Only for PSN” this morning on the Playstation blog, Playstation looks to be throwing its hat into the ring with Microsoft.  While the Playstation Network was never necessarily lacking in content between PS1 classic releases for around 6 dollars a piece in addition to the more expansive, cross-platform games, the amount of games that were PSN exclusive were not as vast as, say, Xbox Live exclusives.  A while back, there was an announcement that Playstation had spent roughly $20 million dollars on content exclusive to the PS3 and the result of that enterprise is this program. In addition to releasing an expanse of downloadable games, Sony plans to release PS2 classics such as God Hand and Maximo: Ghosts to Glory.