Leveling Down

Kratos and his mighty blades cross over to the PS3 in HD thanks to this PS3 remake.

Between all of my random gaming sessions on my PC, 360, and PS3 since I bought my PS3, I’ve been devoting time every once in a while to making my way through God of War: Collection, the PS3 HD remakes of the PS2 original God of War and its PS2 sequel, God of War II. I’ve finally completed them both and starting God of War III now. In any case, before I get too far into God of War III and it starts skewing my thoughts on the first two, let’s get to the review.

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Some of the already announced E3 2010 titles I’m looking forward to – can you guess what they are before the jump?

E3 2010 takes place this week starting tomorrow from June 15 through Thursday June 17, so there should be a lot of notable gaming news and announcements that we’ll be very excited to talk about. While most of the good stuff is probably under lockdown until E3 when they are announced, some publishers have already revealed their (partial) E3 2010 lineups. I’ve gone through and pulled out a few titles that I am definitely looking forward to hearing more info about in addition to any other crazy potential surprises!
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Dante’s Inferno sounded good on paper, but ultimately ended up a waste of time.

Dead Space is one of my favorite new IPs in the last couple of years, courtesy of EA’s own internal studio, Visceral Games (formally named EA Redwood Shores). The combination of action, adventure, and horror made the original Dead Space game seem closer to being a sequel to the Resident Evil games than Resident Evil 5 did. Dead Space Extraction on the Wii was also an entertaining (albeit short) horror shooter game, and it worked. I am totally a fan of Dead Space and a supporter of the studio. When I first heard that the studio behind Dead Space would be making an action/adventure game based on Dante’s Inferno, I was instantly interested. Action/adventure + horror in a hellish theme setting from the developer behind Dead Space? Sign me up! Unfortunately, it’s nowhere near what I hoped it would be. Luckily for all of you, I played through this game so you don’t have to. Read on for my review and why this game disappointed me so.
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The Dante’s Inferno demo has prompted me to determine why Western action-adventure titles don’t quite match up to the Eastern ones.

The Dante’s Inferno demo went live about a month ago, and I’ve been meaning to write up some impressions on that but haven’t had a chance to. The good thing is, now that I’ve completed Bayonetta, I was able to revisit the Dante’s Inferno demo again to see if any of my feelings on the demo have changed since playing Bayonetta. I started writing about it, but I found myself getting sidetracked from really writing completely about the demo, and instead I’ve divulged into analyzing Eastern versus Western game design. Read on for a little bit of my thoughts on the Dante’s Inferno demo, and a lot of my thoughts on Eastern versus Western game design philosophies for action/adventure games.
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Bayonetta finishes combos by weaving her hair into huge attacks

Bayonetta Bayonetta. Where do I begin. Funny – this is a game that when I started playing I was prepared to blog an impressions entry on it. My initial impressions were somewhat negative, but part of me felt like I was missing something so I decided to hold off and play through it more and just go for the review. As I continued to play the game past completion, I started to reach a zen-like trance with the game. Now, 20 hours later, I can say I love it. Read on to see how my first few hours with this game started off on the wrong foot but eventually found its way into…my heart?
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Last week I happily drove to my local Gamestop after work to pick up my pre-ordered copy of Bayonetta. As a fan of Japanese action-adventure games like Devil May Cry and Ninja Gaiden, Bayonetta is like a late Christmas present for myself. The reviews for the game have been phenomenal: perfect score (40/40) in Famitsu, and it’s currently sporting a 91 Metacritic average (ranking it higher than Assassin’s Creed 2 and Left 4 Dead 2). Imagine my surprise then, when I walked into Gamestop to proudly pick up my pre-order of Bayonetta but shocked to see that practically every shelf behind the counter sat dozens of copies of Darksiders and the clerks were gushing to the shoppers about Darksiders. Apparently Darksiders and Bayonetta both released on Tuesday last week, yet I hadn’t even know what Darksiders was until it rained on my Bayonetta launch-day “parade”. So what is it? And why does it look like some World of Warcraft Blood Elf in the middle of an urban city?
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Last week cmfl3x and I presented you with a list of games that we felt were good value from a standpoint of being enjoyable for pretty much every type of gamer. This week we’ll share more “niche” titles – games that you can enjoy – provided you’re into the genre. Again, we want to look at games that are good value – ones that either have a lengthy/replayable single player campaign or plenty of multiplayer hours to keep you coming back while at the same time being enjoyable while being inexpensive.

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Are Avatar’s six Achievements really worth 1000 points if they can all be unlocked in a minute?

I’ve managed to score a 50k+ Gamerscore in my years with the 360. And while that pales in comparison to the guys with 6 digit Gamerscores, it still sometimes manages to illicit some responses from players in online matches (both good and bad). But what is the point of the Gamerpoint score anyway? In this discussion topic, cmfl3x and I will discuss our thoughts on the implementation of Microsoft’s Achievement system and this new site we joined called TrueAchievements.com.

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Devil May Cry 4, a game that looks modern but still clutches to the good and the bad of old school Japanese game design.

For anyone trying to complete all of Devil May Cry 4′s Achievements, you’ll be playing for a very long time as I have quickly learned. Often times I write reviews on games after I’ve gotten every Achievement I planned to get in the game, but with Devil May Cry 4, I don’t think it will be possible. It’s going to take me dozens of hours more to have a chance at getting every single Achievement, but even then, I don’t know if I’ll be skilled enough to get the most difficult ones. Still, after having gone through it once on the easiest difficulty I believe I have enough to formulate an opinion of this “hardcore” game.

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