There are a lot of mixed reviews out for the new Twisted Metal and I figured I might help clear the air by giving a short list of things you can expect from the game. Anyone reading can draw their own conclusions as to if they can dedicate time to a lost bloodsport from the 90s, car combat.

• If you ever liked Twisted Metal growing up buying this is a no brainer. It’s everything you remember.
• You will race through destroyed buildings from floor to floor chasing down an opponent travelling on an adjacent highway, only to break through the windows to cut them off.
• You will become increasingly frustrated by how hard it is to get into a game.
• The games UI will make you sick. It’s like someone let their toddler design the UI in MSpaint.
• You won’t be fighting with precision. Don’t expect Call of Duty caliber pinpoint accuracy in this game, instead expect to engage in chaotic battles while smashing headlong into obstacles and enemies alike.
• The controls might frustrate you at first but learning how to use them is the ultimate key to success. That said, they seem almost as complicated as jet fighter controls. Every button is practically pulling double duty here.
• You might not enjoy single player, as it always feels like the odds are against you. If you keep at it though the rewards are worth it (2 single player unlocks that carry over to online).
• You will get Dragula stuck in your head and you will have conflicting feelings about that…

• Nothing will be explained to you, at all throughout the game. If it is explained somewhere, it’s hard to find and practically useless. Experience is the best way to learn.
• Getting into the flow of combat, you’ll have a blast fighting your way to the top and crushing your opponents in the frenzy of each match. It’s nothing like what’s currently out there on the PS3, or Xbox360 for that matter. If you’re looking for a change of pace from military shooters you’ve found it.
• Lastly, the online portion of the game seems almost downright broken. We’re talking connection errors everywhere. Hopefully it’ll be fixed soon as this sort of thing can make or break the community, but until then expect to be frustrated any time you’re not in a match.

I’ve always been a fan of the Twisted Metal series when I was younger (TM and Warhawk were the first games I got for my original PS1 way back when) so I’m shying away from writing out a full on review. I have hours of the game played though and I’m personally loving every second of it (well, not the time spent navigating the shitty UI trying to get into a game), but it’s not going to be for everyone. Choose wisely, then PM me with your PSN name so I can give you a trial by fire.

Buying games for PSP really never crossed my mind (except the few Metal Gear games they released for it of course). At the time there were really only sloppy console ports out for the system that I had no interest in. Movies were just long enough to keep me entertained during my trip. It’s effect on my commute and the limitless entertainment that was available to me via the PSP was priceless. Once I installed a custom firmware on it everything changed and I was playing SNES and GBA games all commute, err’y commute. Without emulation my PSP would have collected dust almost as soon as I moved closer to my job.

Now I live about ten minutes from my office, that’s really not a lot of time to spend doing anything but waiting and staring vacantly into subway space until my stop let alone play vidya on expensive handhelds. I’ve tried playing games on iPhone but I’ve begun to dislike them more and more. Most of the games lack any sort of substance and are just dumbed down to “cut this rope” and “shoot those birds” and other such generic puzzle games. My main problem past all of that though is that I can’t see anything past my thumbs.

At this point I’m convinced this is my problem and mine alone. I’ll read a glowing review for a game and download it in excitement, only to find that prime screen real estate is taken up by my meaty thumbs. Hardly any reviews mention this at all, maybe it’s just a known fact that thumbs will be in front of shit you want to see so you need to get over it. In some games this is manageable and I can ignore it, others it’s downright impeding on the gameplay (I’m looking at you Super Crate Box). And don’t get me started when a game has on screen buttons, there has to be an innovative way to play iOS games without tilt controls that make me look like an idiot or buttons all over the damn screen. The obvious solution is the iCade device that plugs into your iPhone/iPad and makes it a virtual arcade machine. This is too much to play a $1 game for 3 minutes at a time, IMHO. Plus this makes bathroom playing nearly impossible. Let’s be honest here, a handhelds bathroom functionality will make or break it.

You know you’ve got a good console that you love if you stand up after a long crap session with completely dead and numb legs.

iPhone games are kind to people who don’t want to spend unhealthy amounts of time on the toilet. Most games I have on my iPhone can’t keep my attention for any extended period of time. Try going into the bathroom for a quick deuce with Final Fantasy Tactics on your PSP, ain’t happening.

I’m hotly anticipating the launch of the PS Vita, even though I considered swearing off expensive handhelds after buying the 3DS on day one. The only game I really played that I enjoyed on it was Ocarina 3D, and that’s a game I’ve liked since I was a kid. I just feel like the 3DS launch was terribly mismanaged and I went months at a time waiting for games to come out just to play it, that’s not a good start.

Okay, I lied; I spent more time playing Nintendogs 3D than anything else, I’ll admit. It was honestly the only game that appealed to me at launch, being a person who wants to own a real dog myself but can’t due to apartment restrictions.

My pup, Dracula (a french bulldog), was energetic and sweet. We had a great time together until I lost the game. I was devistated. If this was my intro into pet raising then it was a piss poor effort on my part. Luckily just before I sold my 3DS I found him buried deep beneath junk in my book bag. Relieved, I pressed the cartridge into the console to say one last goodbye. I was sad to see that he was extremely fat and covered in garbage, not the sort of closure I was looking for. I promise I’ll do better with a real one…

As far as Vita goes, the launch title line-up seems promising and the other games they announced that are soon to be released are exciting. It’s expensive as hell and has a ton of hidden fees (proprietary memory cards and 3G data plans that are constantly changing, etc.) but I’ll buy the cheapest package I can find and take it from there. If only they’d release a pet sim, preferably on PSN, I can raise Dracula right this time…

Back in college I was a huge fan of Metal Gear Solid. I loved the characters and over-the-top cinematic aspect of the games that served as it’s trademark. When the third game came out I played it almost exclusively for about a year, beating it over and over again to see if I missed anything cool hidden around in the environment. It was definitely my favorite in the series to say the least. I loved skulking around the wooded areas, plugging anyone who got too close with tranquilizer darts. I was impressed by the meta-game of eating to survive and performing surgery on yourself when you were greatly injured. When I heard about the game being re-released in HD as a part of a bundle (including MGS2 and Peacewalker) I bought it solely to play the game again in glorious HD. It was good to be back with my belly against the forest floor.

I never dared play the game on extreme so I figured now was as good a time as any. I noticed a lot had changed in the jump to the highest difficulty (not counting european extreme):

• A russian soldiers first reaction to seeing a box anywhere in the environment is to shoot it over and over again, and then kick it over. Even when I was hiding in a warehouse filled with boxes they still came right up to me with their whole, “HUH? A BOX?! HERE!!??” act and it never worked.
• There’s no radar, you’ve gotta rely on your wits. At first I just went head first into each area but that effort was immediately thwarted. You’ve got to take your time and survey the land.
• Enemies have the eyesight of a hawk or eagle. No matter where they are in the area in relation to you, if they saw something move they’re putting the whole crew on alert.
• Shooting people in the dick with tranquilizer rounds is super effective and a good way to work out your frustration if you’re stuck on an area for too long (pretty sure this has nothing to do with the difficulty though.)

Every time I’ve approached this game I spent almost all of it slowly crawling around so I figured I’d give actually standing on my two legs a shot for a change. This is not a good idea at all. They will see you. Any time I ever popped my head up for anything they saw me, always. You gotta keep low.
Take the boss fight with The End for instance. I always loved this battle, it’s an epic sniper duel that could last an hour if you did it right. He’s out there watching you, somewhere in that vast forest and all you can do is keep your ass to the ground and shimmy around looking for clues to his whereabouts. After a while I’d get frustrated and stand up, figuring he wasn’t in the area and almost immediately I’d hear his old man cackle all around me and get shot in the eyeballs with tranq darts until i dodge-rolled my way to safety. Then you have to go into the survival viewer and extract all these tiny darts from your skull before you pass out.

Snake really is a man of many talents. Not only is he an expert foodie, taking time to deliver his opinion on each delicacy he finds on the jungle floor, but his abilities as field surgeon are unmatched. Through the course of the game I successfully removed countless arrows and bullets from his head and lived to fight on. That takes some serious skill.

I loved this game and I always will love this game.

Aegis Wing is a free XBLA game that a couple of interns put together one summer. That said, Jay and I decided to give it a try and it’s pretty boring.

In this video: Playing: Joe, Jay; Spectating: Jimmie, Andre

Soul King is one of FEAR 3′s best competitive modes. Everyone starts off as the wizard from Heman and you have to possess bodies to kill other dudes and steal their souls all while doing the same to the other active players to prevent them from amassing a collection of their own. After getting the hang of it we had a lot of fun with this mode as you could clearly hear from the increase in screaming and controller clacking compared to the last video.

First off, I refuse to spell the name of the game as it appears on the box. The numeral “3″ pulling double duty in a title as a letter and a number shouldn’t put you off though, this game isn’t half bad. We picked it up from Amazon ($15) and Best Buy ($5, closer to what it’s worth) and for the most part had some fun with it. Andre and I blasted through the campaign which had all the lasting appeal of a typical summer blockbuster movie and then enlisted Jay for some of the other co-operative modes that the game offers. The video above is us failing miserably in ‘Fucking Run’ mode, a setup that has you fucking running away from a murderous wall of death. Gotta go fast.

FEAR 3′s co-op modes are ambitious to say the least. Next time we take a look at more weird online modes…

To put it lightly, I mad.

Look at this garbage, it looks like they used MS Paint to put this shit together. Twitter and Facebook integration?

The game is a clear indication that Capcom does not have a single fuck to give when it comes to preserving the IP. The presentation looks cold and has no character compared to the original, how are you supposed to actually appreciate the game when your giant thumbs take up half of the screen and under them bulky controls set at a slight opacity loom in front of the action like a photograph of the Mona Lisa with a shit smear on the lense. At this point I won’t blame you for thinking I’m overreacting because I’m a huge fan of the game and that I should just chill out and let people enjoy it. But at the same time, Chrono Trigger was released on iPhone and is nearly a pitch perfect representation of the classic game with slight modifications to make it more at home on the iPhone. Final Fantasy Tactics on iPhone is pricey as all hell but it’s also a good example of classic games being treated right in a new popular hand-held market.

If you buy any of these you should never be allowed to contribute to our already in shambles economy ever again. You're doing no good here.

eff yea! nostalgia! oh man a giant bumble bee lookin guy already on the first stage aaaaawwwweeeeesooooooome

oh yeaa check out that UI... normal people probably don't even give a shit why am i wasting my time? honestly.

This is a dead horse topic. Mega Man fanboys that are far more passionate than I have already plastered all sorts of forums across the internet with their pissed off ramblings so I’ll just leave my argument at this: please stop. If you really want to play this game just get an emulator and find a rom.

/ass pained ranting

Dungeon Defenders You can find this game on XBLA and PSN but recently it was $3 on Amazon marked down from $15. The game is an addictive blend of tower defense (a genre I’m not really too fond of) and RPG loot-n-levelin’, a combination that works way better than it should. The pace is fast for a tower defense game and the waves of monsters is diverse and fun to extinguish, either by well placed towers or by good old fashioned melee (playing as a squire, definitely buying the character pack as i basically got away with stealing this game at its sale price). I love it, but if you don’t have a good group to play with the experience will quickly sour. People are very serious about this game and I’ve been kicked a few times just for being new and inexperienced on the layout of the level at hand. I’ll show them, the fuckers!

STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl A downright classic, and at $5 on Good old Games recently I decided to give this game a proper play-through. I pirated this game when it was first released and now that the company has recently closed down I intend to pay what’s due (at a steep discount of course). The game is fantastic, there’s nothing like roaming around the vast open areas and stumbling across a group of fellow loners fighting off a pack of wild dogs or the first time you enter the Zone. I nostalgia’d…

The Witcher 2 Holy crap game’s look like this!? I mean, I’ve been playing consoles and games look good but they don’t look like this! Not only that but there’s substance behind the style. I picked this up for $16 on Amazon and I was blown away just playing through the tutorial (my swordsmanship needs a lot of work). The story is rich and engrossing and the atmosphere is nearly breathtaking. The studio is planning on releasing the game on Xbox 360 in May of 2012 at what I’m assuming is going to be the lowest graphical setting the game offers. If you can’t run it on your PC then I would pre-order it now (assuming you have an xbox) and start believing the hype. HYPE! You can currently buy this at gog.com at 40% off and it comes with a free copy of the first game, bonus!

Humble Indie Bundle 4 I haven’t passed up a humble bundle so far, usually i just beat the odds (pay the avg lowest price) of this pay what you want collection of indie games which usually ranges around $4. This bundle in particular got my cash for its offering of Super Meat Boy (extremely awesome and fucking hard platformer) and Cave Story+ (extremely awesome and fucking hard platformer metroidvania style game). Worth it.

DEFCON I think this was in a previous Humble Bundle that I bought but I’ve never played it before recently. If you’ve ever just wanted to nuke the shit out of your enemies in RTS but hated teching up just to launch one nuke every 15 minutes this is your game. All you basically do is blow up the entire world until you’re the only country left with people who survive to a world that is probably much akin to the Cormac McCarthy book The Road. Rad.

Keep in mind I’ve probably played a max of an hour each of all of the games above (save Meat Boy and Cave Story which I’ve played before they were bundled together) but I don’t regret buying all of these games at all and would have probably paid full price for them had I known of their awesomeness in advance.

Plus I’m playing all of these on a MacBook Pro with bootcamp. Eat that, haters!

The keyboard gets very hot…

Accurate depiction of my face while reading Skyrim posts on release day before actually playing it myself

For the life of me I can’t get excited to play Skyrim anymore. As soon as I load the game I start dozing off. The thought of fighting another dragon makes me yawn, and so help me if one more bandit decked out in nothing more than a loincloth and a dagger comes at me while I’m in my full dragon bone armor…

Well I don’t really know, I just dont want to deal with that shit

Most of the things I’m tasked to do in Skyrim just seem extremely tedious, especially considering my newly appointed dragon-born status. I’m not going to run around collecting gems for some dickwad in a bar so he can marry his lizard girlfriend, I will however use my fire-shout in there and incinerate everyone just because you dared to bring up the matter while I was minding my own business. The sad state of the matter is that if I did do that it would have little to no impact on my surroundings. The NPCs that are quest integral would stand up and brush the soot off their jean jackets and some bumbling guard would just run in and tell me to pay the meager fine. After that I wouldn’t be shunned as the dickhead that went around shout-burning everyone, all would be forgotten (my many save files is proof of this).

Most of the time I find myself following the waypoint arrows to quest objectives, which just sucks the life out of the concept of questing. I found that the game really only shines when I go out on my own and just skulk around the countryside fighting Skyrims plentiful wildlife. As soon as I interact with one of its denizens I’m immediately turned off by the game. Exploration is really the only thing I find redeeming in the game, and even after a while of doing just that you’ll start to get sick of raiding the same copy/paste dungeon (at least they used more variety than Oblivion or Morrowind) and fighting the same zombie looking Nords that issue no challenge.

Also if you don’t pride yourself in making puzzles as a game company you certainly shouldn’t pepper your game with them. I’ve found those turning stone puzzles more taxing and annoying than anything else. How could they possibly keep your tomb safe from intruders? Are the Nords really that stupid that they can’t match symbols at a first grade level?

All in all I just feel let down by the hype, naturally. By the way people talk about this game I expected it to blow my fucking socks off instead it provided a few cheap thrills and some very interesting and entertaining bugs. I’ll probably end up shelving the game for a while to revisit after I play some cheap steam sale games.

But then again all of this griping makes me want to play… curse you Skyrim and your supernatural hold!

This month I’ve been playing a lot of games that were hyped up to an almost maddening degree before their releases. Let’s take a look and see if they lived up to it.

Skyrim

This game is pretty fantastic. It has a ton of bugs, which is fairly standard for a Bethesda release, but the sheer amount of time I’ve put into it just exploring ruins and shouting bears to death has been pretty enjoyable.

Instead of elaborating on my statement I’ll leave you with a story from my adventures.
While dicking around in Dragons Reach looking at items strewn across the ground (knocked off the tables after I tested out my new shouts) I accidentally stole an apple off the floor because I hit the wrong button. No one was around so I thought nothing of it, then I saw some punk looking kid that’s been making stupid cracks at me since i got there (well the same one over and over again, something about licking the Jarls boots). He doesn’t do shit so I go on with my business. Days later in the mountains fresh out of raiding a random dungeon when I see a few hired thugs coming at me. One fire shout and they are burned alive, on them a contract signed by that little fucker from Dragons Reach. That kid put a hit out on me for stealing an apple or a loaf of bread or something! This makes almost no sense Bethesda. To punish him I entered his home at night as a werewolf and ate his family.

Saints Row the Third

I loved Saints Row 2 because of the sheer off the wall nonsense it was brimming with. The game was a psychotic playground of activities and malice that was yours for the taking. I had a blast playing the Third online with Andre, but I’m pretty disappointed in the game. Everything that made the second great was stripped from this title, presumably to be added in one of the upcoming “40 weeks of DLC”. It’s incredibly easy to finish any mission quickly and they removed the tiered activities (now once you’re done with one you have to move on to the next areas activity, no more rank 2, rank 3 etc.). Still a ton of fun though, slapping people around with a dildo bat seldom gets old.

All my hatin’ aside the game really moves some other things in the series forward. Respect now plays a part in leveling up. You can effortlessly steal cars by jumping straight through the window like an action hero. The humor in Saints Row wears its crudity on its sleeve and it’s a great guilty pleasure to just indulge in nonstop fart and dick jokes in games like this (you can unlock a fart in a jar as an alternate to your flash bang grenades). You won’t often catch Saints Row 3 taking itself too serious and it’s almost a mutual understanding that the game won’t expect you to take it too serious in return.

Sonic Generations

I was never really a part of the Sonic game hype. By the time I played through Sonic Adventure I pretty much knew the games would never be the same as they were and I shouldn’t look forward to any future releases. I was right, for the most part Sonic games have been known to be garbage. This game was supposed to change all of that, a return to form for Sonic and they did it justice finally. Familiar platforming is at the forefront here in terms of gameplay all while going real fast, of course. Playing on Xbox 360 I had some framerate issues here and there, but nothing too bad. It’s a little frustrating to keep up with when Sonic is moving at the speed of light, though. The vibrant landscapes and colors are worth noticing as you’re jetting by but it’s a little too saccharine. This might just be a byproduct of playing this during my Skyrim downtime though, where the colors in game are mostly Gray. I’d easily recommend Sonic Generations to any Sonic fanboy that’s been butthurt by every iteration since the good old days, even if talking Sonic and his portions of the game sent chills down my spine.