With a long legacy of high quality titles named [blank] Rain such as Vampire Rain, Chocolate Rain, and Blood, er, Rayne, Heavy Rain has some pretty big shoes to fill. Joking aside, Heavy Rain is the first game in a while (not including Fahrenheit, a long while,) to covet the notion of an interactive movie. It almost feels like the ‘interactive movie’ idea has become a dirty word in the current climate; I guess angels fear to tread where one such as Rob Schneider has failed…
The kind people at Rebellion were gracious enough to spare one of their developers and send him down to visit us in NZ. Paul is one of the producers on the ever more imminent Aliens vs Predator. The reason for the visit was to show off the multiplayer portion of the title and expand on what we (read, Wugga) had already seen at E3.
If you’re unfamiliar with the first instalment would you kindly do a google and find out you’ve missed out on, it’s pretty spectacular and well worth picking up this long since its release. The sequel is something many people are looking forward to, with much anxiety, while others reserve a slight amount of trepidation that a return to Rapture will taint their past happy experiences. While this recount of our play through of one of the levels won’t sway either party in any particular direction, it will show that there is a game of some substance in the works from 2K.
Now when comments like “The spiritual successor to Baldur’s Gate” are thrown around in the land of Role Playing Games someone is either taking the piss or has some mighty big Cojones and better be willing to back themselves. But when said comment comes from a little team that call themselves Bioware, the hype machine kicks in and D&D geeks worldwide start clutching their D10 dice in anticipation.
Not having any dice, I made do with equipping my Rose Tinted Glasses of RPG Fondness and entered the realm of Ferelden to see if things would live up to my own high expectation.
Did you love the first game or was it not quite your cup of tea? Were there perhaps some elements that tainted your experience? The great thing about Uncharted, is that almost everyone has an opinion, I know I did when I reviewed it, and for the record I loved it, not in a creepy, unwanted homoerotic stalker fan fiction kind of way that the review might have hinted at, but like a fat man loves cake. Understandably I was excited when the review code found its way to my doorstep, 5 hours later I realised I was still wearing my pyjamas and hadn’t showered, eaten, or brushed my teeth when my ride arrived. Sounds like its going to be a good game right? Either that or I have decided that personal hygiene simply isn’t my bag.
Okay, hands up who’s been let down or disappointed by a Need For Speed game in recent years. Alright put your hands down. It’s no secret that the NFS franchise, although reasonably popular with the masses has lost the faith with some in the racing genre community. Full credit to EA for evolving the series and trying new things with their NFS releases. But they’ve been missing that ‘wow’ factor, that special something that makes it hard to put the game down. Enter their newest title, Need For Speed: Shift.
Westerns are almost an untapped area of inspiration in the current console cycle and have been massively overlooked in the past as well, the recent attempts haven’t managed to capture my attention so I was interested to see what Red Dead Redemption would have to offer when the Rockstar guys showed up to let us have a look at an early build. Will it be the adventure that the shooter that gets people interested in the old west? That’s a question that will have to wait for the final release, but my level of interest after the walkthrough is something that can be gauged.
Making their self publishing debut on the Playstation Store is Shatter from Sidhe, a break out game in the style of nothing I’ve ever played before. Our video focuses on the main points of the game to give you a feel for what to expect when you download it, and you should download it. But there is a lot more that could be explained, like how intricately the boss battles have been designed, how challenging it is to work out angles of reflection on the fly, the combination of pure simple block breaking or the extreme pace of having multiple balls on the fly.
We recently attended a preview event with a few upcoming games on show. I drew the short straw and got a hands-on with Red Steel 2 to write up. Or at least that’s how it appeared at the time. In all honesty this game caught me by surprise. Having been burnt by the first game, I really did not expect much at all. The first Red Steel was a Wii launch title, and while not a terrible game it was certainly not great (or good) either. It was bogged down by some performance issues and controlled relatively poorly. One would think that a game switching between a sword and hand gun would be perfect for the Wii, but alas the lack of fidelity in the Wiimote controls were really brought to light and the game suffered for it. Red Steel 2 was built on a new game engine and requires the Wii Motion Plus peripheral. The demo I played through ran silky smooth. My research indicates that its locked at 60 frames per second, and it looks great.
I’ve been amassing a small stockpile of PS3 titles that I think has reached critical mass and now need to be given away. There are a few Singstar titles along with the new Wireless microphones and some other games like LittleBigPlanet, KillZone 2, inFamous, 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand, Warhawk, and Buzz Quiz TV.
The details on how to enter the competition are in the last two podcasts, here and here.