I have a shocking true-life confession. I never played Assassin’s Creed. Look, I WANT to have played it, but the truth is… I just never got around to trying any of the games in this massively-successful franchise.
“You can have this game for fifty bucks, but for sixty, I’ll make it slightly less enjoyable”. That’s not a good deal, but that’s what has been offered to gamers with many titles released in the last year or so.
So, here it is May 21st, and you’re still on Earth reading Player Affinity while the righteous have all been taken to Heaven in The Rapture. Well, your lifetime of virtual misdeeds while playing murder simulators is obviously the reason why God hates you. Read on to find out which games you should never have played because they endangered your soul.
Co-op gameplay is certainly nothing new in the gaming world, however, it is very rare that it is executed as well as in Portal 2. Even taking aside what it did right, it smartly avoids several mistakes that other games do not. For me, one of these is actually supporting local coop which is getting very rare these days. Saving individual progress for the player while integrating that into a co-op session is also something that you don’t see a great deal of either. However, it isn’t these things that make the experience what it is, nor is it the superbly polished mechanics, it’s the way the game makes you feel while playing cooperatively that makes it stand out from everything else.
Going by the numbers it is
obvious that people are ready for some more Gears and this coming Monday will
suck just that little bit more. Anyway, I’ve already gone over quite a lot
regarding the content of the beta, so now I’m going to deploy my flame shield
and list the main issues that have emerged over the past four weeks. These are
the things that will hopefully be acknowledged and rectified to guarantee an
amazing launch for the full game on September 20th.
Do you
consider yourself a gamer? If so, then what would you say makes you, or anyone
for that matter, a gamer? Most people would say it is because someone plays
games, but how many or how frequently must you play in order to be labelled a
gamer? More importantly, why must somebody who plays games be labelled in the
first place? Does playing games somehow make you different from those who
don’t? That’s a lot of questions to open with, so allow me to make some
statements on the subject.
Mass Effect was one of
those titles that I had zero interest in until it came out. For some reason I decided
to give it a try. That approach doesn’t always work out so well, but in this
case it led me to what I felt was the best game of 2007 – one that I ended up
playing through three times. I enjoyed the universe so much that I’ve read the
novels by Drew Karpyshyn, who also wrote the story for the game. The soundtrack
was easily the best of the year and one of the most unique in a long time.
Needless to say my anticipation for Mass Effect 2 was extremely high.
We’re at the
halfway point so far in the Gears 3 beta and hopefully tomorrow will see the
release of some new stuff. In the mean time, it’s time to discuss the maps
currently available and how best to play them to avoid as many brutal deaths as
possible. Let’s get to it.
Checkout:
By far the
most teamwork-orientated map in the beta, there is an insane amount of cover
and corners to hide behind to take advantage of the chainsaw and sawed off.
Don’t get too camp happy though because the digger launcher and sniper are on this map
and they can easily break a camp heavy setup. There are also two sets of
grenades on this map, which is something you should really take note of, and nade
plants don’t seem to be anywhere as common as they are in Gears 2.
That’s
something you can take advantage of; people aren’t anywhere near as
cautious as
they used to be regarding these. The golden rule of this map is teamwork
and if you’re communicating and working well with your team you’re
going to
do well on this map. Rifles are pretty dominant for anyone with a sharp
eye,
too.
Although a whole ton of folks bought themselves a Kinect since the fancy peripheral was released over six months ago, that’s one bus I haven’t jumped on yet. My DJ Hero turntable, PlayStation Move controller, and Street Fighter arcade stick will be glad to tell you my tales of buying peripherals that I use a few times and then relegate to collecting dust (I suppose I could include my Wii on that list as well). However the Kinect is so uninteresting to me that I haven’t even found it worthy of dust accumulation.
While Child of Eden looks gorgeous and is something I’m absolutely picking up, being the spiritual successor to Rez, there’s no way I can play it without a controller. Thankfully behind all the personal trainer and dancing titles on the horizon there’s one game that you may not have even heard of that could finally get me to go out and buy one of these fancy cameras: Project Draco, a spiritual successor to a Sega series that has sadly drifted away from the spotlight called Panzer Dragoon.
About a month ago we started a feature from the Xbox Team
entitled “What We Want.” I’m now adding a slight spin on it with “What We
(Would) Want” which will discuss a sequel that we may not be guaranteed to receive.
For example: Deadly
Premonition 2. Deadly Premonition 1 was unarguably a cult classic. It had its
haters (and for good reason) but it also had its many lovers that adored the
charm the game was filled with and even dug deep enough to realize the story
was quite interesting and filled with deeply disturbed yet lovable characters.
While Deadly Premonition was a very fun game to play through, it had its
issues. And if we’re ever lucky enough to be graced by the Swery gods with a
Deadly Premonition 2, here are some things the charismatic developer should
keep in mind.
