After what has seemed like an unbelievably long wait Gran Turismo 5 has finally arrived. The fifth installment of the best selling racing series ever still has the most accurate handling physics of any console racer, but is it starting to loose some of its charm?
I typically begin each review with a little paragraph describing the context of my review and giving a little back story to the proceedings. Such an introduction is unnecessary here. In any context, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 is a horrid abomination of a video game, and should be avoided like a plague.
Go to any video game message board and you are bound to come across this phrase – “Games today are stupid! They were so much better when I was younger, back when they had more challenge/depth/length/story/nostalgia/mascots/two-dimensions!” It’s a common chorus, though those who say it often neglect how some of the changes to gaming have vastly improved the pastime.
Since this past week marked Thanksgiving as well as the fifth anniversary of the Xbox 360, I though I would take a moment to share my appreciation for a few of the things this console generation that have made our leisure time a bit easier, a bit more social, and simply a bit more cool.
In a holiday season dominated by secret agents and assassins, it can be easy to overlook some of the smaller games. While EA was busy focusing its marketing efforts on the Medal of Honor reboot and the latest Harry Potter game, Create managed to sneak onto the market and steal my heart. Sure, it is not a perfect game. Not even close. But it does have a certain pick-up-and-play charm, and at its best, it is capable of eliciting shouts of victory and high fives just as much as most other holiday releases.
The basic idea of Create is that you must complete set objectives by building Mousetrap-esque contraptions. Like a Rube Goldberg creation, the end result will often be over-engineered and elaborate. The catch is that you are only given certain items in each level, and you may only use a set number of these items to make it to the end, so you will have to think about how best to utilize the limited objects. For example, in one early level you are tasked with getting a package on one side of a canyon through a hoop on the other side of the canyon. In order to beat the level, you must attach a balloon to the package so that it will float, position a fan above the package to blow it across the canyon, and then position another fan to blow the balloon into a spiked outcropping, popping the balloon and sending the package falling through the hoop.
It seems that many of the digital distributors are looking for ways to distinguish their holiday sales from all the others. First Direct2Drive gave buyers a 1-in-5 chance of getting their order for free, now Steam is giving 30 winners the top 5 games on their Steam Wish List, every day. What’s a Steam Wish List? It’s that new marketing stunt that Steam want you to sign up for, so that you can pester your friends to buy you games from Steam (And your friends can pester you).
My brother has almost exclusively played sports games in the last decade, although recently he has started playing other kinds. A couple weeks ago he bought Call of Duty: Black Ops, and after playing a few story missions he’s been pretty exclusively playing the online with his friends. There’s nothing wrong with this, but he made a comment I disagreed with, to the effect that playing with your friends is much better than single player. I’ve seen even more extreme versions of this idea in posts on the Internet, going so far as to say even including an offline component in an online-focused game like Call of Duty is pointless. I’m not actually worried about developers abandoning single player modes in games in the future, but I thought I’d explain why I think it’s an important part of gaming and why I like them so much.
Without any doubt this weeks’ PS3 chart will be dominated by the release of Gran Turismo 5. For those who may have been living under a rock for the last five or so years, the constant delays for the releasing of GT5 only seem to have increased the anticipation for this huge and deep racing sim. Other than GT5, the stand alone Red Dead Redemption: Undead Nightmare Collection should be worth picking up for anyone who enjoyed Ded Dead, or has a love for all things Zombie related.
