PS3 Features

Something for Halloween: I Dream of Dead Rising

In the spirit of Halloween, I’m going to air some of my wishes for a game that I really hope comes out at some point, and nothing says Halloween like zombies! I am talking about Dead Rising 3, or whatever they decide to call the next game in that series. My time with Off the Record a couple of weeks ago really allowed me to narrow down what exactly the next game simply needs to have in order for me to carry on buying them.

One of my favorite things to do in Dead Rising (as of 2) is build the combo weapons and hunt for new ones. This system is really fun, but can get annoyingly particular at times with what it actually lets you bind together with the magical powers of duck tape. A couple of examples that always bug me, you can attach hunting knives to boxing gloves, but not machetes or butcher knives. You can attach chainsaws to paddles, but not plain old power saws or just a bunch of swords for that matter. Any sense of realism has always been left at the door with Dead Rising, and I really wish they would ease up on how exact these combo weapons are when there are other combinations that would yield the exact same effect. If there were, say, at least two variants on some of the rarer combo weapons it would be a huge improvement. If this is asking too much, then there at least needs to be a way to store or repair your combo weapons for future use. Repairing would be simple enough: find a work bench, which fortunately there are tons of in Dead Rising, and pay money to fully repair it. Allowing the player to do this three times per creation would really encourage them to build the more (for lack of a better word) interesting combo weapons.

How Batman Made Me Realize That Superhero Games are Dead

I just finished Batman:
Arkham City last night, and after completing it, I can easily say that it
is one of the most enjoyable experiences that one can have on a platform.  But throughout my playthrough, I
continually wondered what it is that Arkham
City does right that superhero games up to this point haven’t been able to
do.  True, there have been a few
good superhero games that have been released (the Spiderman games of the PS2
era come to mind), but for the most part, many of the releases that were tied
to superheroes were just uninteresting. 
After finishing the game, I started to realize what makes the Batman
games (especially the ones made by Rocksteady) so intriguing.

One of these realizations was the fact that Batman is
essentially just a smart guy that just happens to have cool gadgets and a way
to self fund new ventures.  Because
his powers come from his tools and intellect, Batman lends himself very well to
a progression based game, such as Zelda,
where he can get another weapon in his arsenal at a set period that opens up
much more of the world.  Yet even
when he does have something like the line launcher, he still feels powerful
enough as to where he is fun to play as. 
Also, because he is a regular guy, the dynamics of the game can be much
different.  Throughout Arkham City (and even in Arkham Asylum), the bosses are tough to
beat, but the much more difficult battles are when you find yourself fighting a
group of 12 different guys.  Unlike
someone like Superman, Batman can fairly easily go down to a group of 12 guys
if you do not keep your guards and counters up.  Rocksteady was able to realize that this was the case,
developed accordingly, and made an exciting experience from it.

Why I like Ratchet and Clank

 I’ve asked myself this question many a time ever since I started playing these games back in the early days of the PlayStation 2 and I still come back to the same answer: simplicity and fun.

There was a time not long ago when simply being fun was good enough for most games, when giant weaving stories weren’t required, when narrative was a secondary feature at most, when all that mattered was whether or not what you were doing was rubbing the pleasure center of your brain in the way only a truly enjoyable experience can.   Now I’m not saying the evolution of gaming as a medium to revolve more around things besides raw entertainment is bad, nor am I saying that a game with a great story and a lot of mature, meaningful content cannot co-exist with a more traditionally fun experience since after all, we have countless titles this generation that demonstrate as much.

The Wonderful World of Live Streaming

I was never the best of my friends at video games.  Due to my disability and the increasingly shooter heavy selection of games, if I ever wanted to play, I found myself trying to do with one hand what Mountain Dew filled 12 year olds across the globe were doing with two, which led to a two-fold conclusion; first, my KD ratio would be much higher in the D area than the K, which in turn created the second, which was that I stopped playing shooters for the most part.  But while I stopped playing them myself, I still occasionally wanted to see the top level play that created the intrigue to play the game in the first place, and this is where I found Ustream.tv.  For those who don’t know what Ustream.tv is, it is a place where people can stream what they are doing live, so you can essentially watch an event as if you were there.  Ustream had thousands of streamers that would stream everything from sports to politics, but what I was most interested in was the games.  On Ustream, I could watch top-level players playing pretty much any game that could be played, and while the majority were a lot of Starcraft 2 and LoL/HoN players, if I searched, I could find someone playing whatever game I was in the mood for.  On the release of LA Noire, there were at least 15 channels that were broadcasting the game, and while a large part of LA Noire is the story which could be ruined, live streaming provided that look into the game that you could get before buying to make sure that it is something that you wanted.

Is GT5 Spec 2.0 enough?

After an extremely long development period Gran Turismo 5 launched at
the end of 2010.  Although GT5 was underwhelming to say the least,
Polyphony Digital has not given up on it, in fact they have been
providing steady updates to improve and refine the game.  The continued
support is encouraging but it has not been enough.  Almost a year has
passed since the game’s launch and details of DLC and a significant
update have only just recently surfaced.

Ratchet and Clank: All 4 One Preview

After four releases on PS2 and three on PS3, Insomniac Games is handing over the latest entry in the series, entitled All 4 One, to its secondary studio which was foundered a few years ago.  While the primary Insomniac team is busy working on its cross-platform title Overstrike, it will be interesting to see if their newer team can meet the high bar of quality that has been set by the main studio for many years since its first release.  In all honesty, I was pretty burnt out on Ratchet and Clank after the last game and although I have been a fan since the original and own every one of them (save for the PSP releases), I didn’t think I would be interested in another and after hearing that a new studio is working on it, I initially thought this was a good reason to move on from the series.

But gosh darn it, All 4 One looks so fun!  While the original gameplay videos showed a much slower paced game with a massive emphasis on co-op that I wasn’t really liking, the latest videos demonstrate the single player campaign and somehow it just looks much faster and more close to what I know and love about RnC.  Now I’m all excited once again.  So much so that I decided to review it in two weeks.  Who knows?  I might end up liking the co-op even more than single player, as one would hope, since the game is built around it.

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.

I Sure Wish I Could Play This on My Television

Speaking
as a gamer and technophile, I absolutely want a Playstation Vita the
day it makes its way to North America.  Speaking as a person with bills
who needs to set aside money and make plans for unnecessary purchases,
like entertainment and media, I’m not certain if the right kinds of
games are coming to make it worth my $250.

HD Remakes Will Be the End of Me

As I write this, I am eagerly awaiting the moment I wake up tomorrow, fore the 27^th marks the release of two of my all time favorite games on the PS3: Ico and Shadow of the Colossus. Yet while I wait for these games to be released on the $40 disc that many PS2 classics have been ported to, I have to wonder if we would even be having this conversation six years ago, before the release of the PS3. Back when the PS2 was current, the need for disc remakes of PS1 games was unnecessary, because every PS2 could play close to any PS1 game via backwards compatibility. That being said, now we have reached an age where it seems like the gamer is being ostracized through these “HD Remakes.” The big wigs at the head of the game hardware companies have realized that they can make more money off of gamers by not including backwards compatibility, instead re-releasing old disc-based products.

Uncharted: What Does it Mean to the PS3?

A lot, actually.  If you asked me which exclusive PlayStation 3 title is the most important, I would tell you it is Uncharted, by an astronomical unit.  Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune dropped onto the PS3 as Sony’s answer to Gears of War.  Where Naughty Dog arguably wasn’t able to match the standard set in Gears’ gunplay, they succeeded in developing an amazing action-adventure universe.  Naughty Dog was able to capture those classic adventure genre set pieces, create compelling characters and then weave them into a story with amazing cinematic presentation.