Final Fantasy Gaiden: 4 Warriors of Light
Nostalgia is a funny thing, the way that it tampers with reality, our memories and associated feelings. It’s the reason why hearing a word like ‘Mother’ may, for some, result in an impulse purchase on eBay rather than a long neglected letter home. Or why receiving a video game for Christmas, even as I’m pushing thirty and there exists a long list of more “practical”...
Last Window
To point out that games are designed to be played seems self-explanatory to a degree (hopefully) forgoing any necessity for the comment. Created as an interactive form of narrative, the player’s participation largely defines the experience, creates it, really. However, I’ve taken a different stance with Last Window: Mayonaka no Yakusoku (Promise in the Dead of Night), the successor...
Sakura Wars: So Long, My Love
I’m going to let you in on a little secret: playing the original Sakura Wars (via the PSP port) was actually one of the game experiences that I personally found to be most enjoyable in 2009. Well, the first half of the game, but we’ll get into that shortly. The game certainly showed its age, as a package complete with excessive load times, CG originally generated for the Sega Saturn,...
Aliens vs. Predator
There is a dark corridor, illuminated only by your flashlight. You hear a faint scraping sound from the shadows behind you and quickly spin around, the sound now gone and the hallway eerily quiet once more. You begin to make your way down the hallway again but are quickly grabbed from behind by something you can't identify. The last thing you see before everything goes dark is the head of a Xenomorph,...
Sin & Punishment 2
The quality of a work of art is, by its nature, rather subjective. Scholars and critics are free to jargon up a critique in order to elicit the necessary recognition of “standards” demanded by their peers, but in the end, even the most eloquent appraisal is muted against the ears of the participant (which is what we are when we engage with games, and “art”) who is wholly...
Resonance of Fate
Announced a couple of years ago as End of Eternity in Japan, Resonance of Fate was spawned as a joining between publisher Sega and developer Tri-Ace, best known for their work on the Star Ocean and Valkyrie Profile games. This represents the first time in recent memory that a Tri-Ace game was published by anyone other than Square-Enix. I recently got a chance to sit down and play though the Japanese...
ModNation Racers
ModNation Racers is definitely a game that lives up to its name. During my experience playing the games recently released beta, I can now firmly say that I can’t wait for this game to come out. Developed by United Front Games, ModNation Racers is sort of a spiritual sibling to LittleBigPlanet, by sticking to the same mantra of “Play Create Share”. The beta, available to those with a download...
Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker
You know a game that starts with a quote from Immanuel Kant’s article Perpetual Peace is going to be good. A demo for Metal Gear Solid Peace Walker, a spiritual sequel to Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, was released December 17. It is a surprisingly beautiful PSP title, the accompanying flash cut scenes done by Ashley Wood have style, but does MGS PW have the substance...
Bayonetta
In the demo titled “First Climax," one of Bayonetta’s combos ends with a giant high heel appearing above her and crushing her target. Moves like these build up a “Torture” combo where she throws an enemy into an iron maiden made of her hair, then she turns into a panther. This pretty much explains what to expect from the rest of the game. Designed by Hideki Kamiya, creator...
Pokemon Rumble
A new Pokémon game is on it’s way to WiiWare this coming Monday, and though it won’t be making as big a splash as, say, Diamond or Pearl, for die-hard Pokémon fans, this is definitely not something you’ll want to miss. The biggest element to the game seems to be the multi-player mode, which allows players to jump in and out of the game during play, as well as providing both competitive...
