Nicholas Bale
The S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series has always been something of a unique game. Sure, each element of its gameplay has been used in other games before, whether it's the shooter gameplay, the bleak atmosphere, the equipment upgrades, or the free-roaming, mission-based gameplay. Read More.
Kazuma Kiryu is not a man that you want to mess around with. He's been through quite a lot of crap, as the first two Yakuza games demonstrate. He's beaten up government officials, Yakuza bosses, killers, men in diapers (yes. Men in diapers), regular thugs, big thugs, red thugs, blue thugs, basically half the people in Tokyo. Read More.
Dawn of War 2 came out as a sequel heavily diverging from what its predecessor had created. It was a tactical experience, focusing more on micro management of individual squads, levelling them up between story missions that saw no base building or resource management, but complex firefights and evolving characters. Read More.
I'm not entirely sure how to review this game. I've been writing something, deleting it, writing it, deleting it again, because I'm not quite sure what to say. Read More.
Boasting an impressive feat of being able to play with up to 255 other players at the same time, MAG always looked impressive, at least in theory. Whether or not the gameplay would live up to the technical ability, however, was a different matter entirely. Read More.
Greed: Black Border is a game that doesn't quite feel like it knows what it's doing, or what it wants to be. At first glance, it looks to be a Diablo-esque title, where loot is the name of the game. But then they forget the loot early on, try to add in a lackluster plot…things quickly devolve and everything becomes worse as time passes. Read More.
As I sit here, in a plane, thousands of feet (38005 feet to be precise, according to this little flight map) above the earth's surface, I contemplate Might & Magic: Clash of Heroes for the Nintendo DS. With this thought comes a desire to put my feelings of it into words. Read More.
Let me present to you a hypothetical situation: your entire class is going on a field trip to Kyouto, city of history and temples and beauty (not to be confused with Kyoto, the similar city of history and temples and beauty). What are you doing while you're in the city? Read More.
Until I saw James Cameron at the Ubisoft press conference in this year's E3, I had not heard of his movie nor the game based on it. And until I had played the game, I hadn't seen a single piece of marketing dedicated to either. So I was pretty much going in with a blank slate of what to expect, except for the usual mild form of pessimism that results from playing as many movie-to-videogames that I have. Read More.
At the time of Modern Hits' release, it is the third version of On Tour in less than a year.
The game is, well, Guitar Hero. You play songs, progress further, play more songs. Modern Hits uses the same hardware as previous On Tour titles, the handheld four-button piece of equipment that you slot into your GBA slot in the DS and DS Lite (keep in mind, this means that it won't work on the DSi). Read More.
Nostalgia is a title that is aptly-named. Playing it evokes memories of role-playing games from years past, of games heavy on dungeoneering and light on story, of simple turn-based battles and two-dimensional enemies that rarely had motivations beyond destroying/ruling the world. Read More.
The dungeon-crawling genre has never had a complicated formula: you kill stuff, you get equipment, you kill bigger stuff, you delve deeper. Repeat as necessary. Torchlight is, well, no different. But it does it well. It refines many aspects of the genre, adds some more options to the top, and tops it all off with an attractive style that is pleasant to look at as you cut down swaths of enemies. Read More.
WET is a game about shooting things. And guns. More shooting, then some backflips. It's essentially the video game equivalent of an old-school Quentin Tarantino or Grindhouse film filled with, well, guns and bullets. Rubi is a Fixer, and though what that means is generally left ambiguous, it's safe to say that she's a gun for hire that performs. Read More.
When I played the original Uncharted, I was impressed. It was a really good blend of platforming and cover-based shooter mechanics, all wrapped up in a stellar presentation and story fit for cinema. So it was hard to believe that Naughty Dog could strike gold again with a sequel, making a game that was as good as Uncharted: Drake's Fortune. Read More.
Demon's Souls...Demon's Souls is not a game about success and victory. Demon's Souls is a game about death, about dying, and about mistakes.
You may have heard this already, but let me say this, just to make sure: Demon's Souls is hard. This is not the same kind of hard that comes from too many enemies attack at once, from having your level too low to fight a boss, or from having too many guards to take out, lest you be seen. Read More.
