In Third Person

During a lapse in my gaming itinerary, I decided to pop Mirror's Edge back into my 360. Last time I wrote about this game, the game tried really hard to make me not like it. The game succeeded at that. I still love the premise of a free-running first-person game, but I stopped at the end of the second level in frustration, after dying roughly 50 times.

After a few minutes in the training level, I thought I was ready to go. What the training mode didn't prepare me for was encountering trial-and-error gameplay and crappy combat.

The biggest issue for me was that the game doesn't make it clear enough for where you need to go. There are obvious elements for you to grab onto, which are coloured red, but it's usually not that clear in the heat of battle. In the third level, I got to a point where I had absolutely no idea how to get out of the area before the guards came. I had to watch a YouTube video for the answer and when I saw it, I said to myself, "WTF!@#" I never would have come up with that solution myself. Due to the way the levels are designed, I get that feeling all the time. I could follow along with one of the many guides online if I really wanted to, but a game really shouldn't make me resort to that.


To compound the issue of getting lost, oftentimes you're under the gun by guards. In a game designed around running, the combat feels horribly out of place and leaves you greatly underpowered. Hand-to-hand combat is really clunky and enemies can kill you very quickly. Picking up a gun doesn't help much either, since the actual shooting mechanics are pretty bad and carrying a gun actually slows your character down.

I applaud Dice and EA for trying something ambitious with Mirror's Edge. I can see why some people absolutely loved this game. When it has you free-running and doing crazy acrobatics, it can be some of the most exhilarating action you'll ever experience. But to counter-point, there are a lot of people that hate this game, too. The problem is that the game isn't that awesome all the time. The experience is hampered by somewhat clunky controls, level designs that aren't easy to navigate on your own and terrible combat.


A sequel to this game has been confirmed, and it'll be interesting to see how they handle it. A lot of people have asked for Mirror's Edge to go third-person, but I think that would take away the most unique aspect of the game. Without being in first-person, it's just another Prince of Persia or Assassin's Creed style game. I do hope they polish the controls and make the areas easier to navigate. As far as combat, they can either improve the game by improving the combat mechanics or stripping combat from the experience completely to focus on the acrobatics. I won't be the first in line to pick up Mirror's Edge 2, but I'll continue to hope they refine this idea to perfection.

The other day, I received my DJ Hero setup in the mail. Not having bought refurbished products before, and being a bit concerned over the condition of the stuff they sent me, I was very quick and thorough with my inspection. The game was opened, yet the disc and manual looked to be in mint condition. As for the turntable and mixer, it looked just fine as well. Considering the fact that I can't even get DJ Hero used for anywhere close to what I paid for this refurbished version, it was a steal.

Within a few minutes of playing DJ Hero, it's clear to see that it's one of the more technically advanced music games on the market. There is a steeper learning curve to it than most, partially because of all of the elements involved in handling it and the general unfamiliarity with turntables that I expect most players to have when first trying DJ Hero. At the expert level, you have to think about pressing the three buttons on the the platter, rotating the platter forwards and backwards for scratching and back-spins without losing track of where the buttons are, moving the cross-fader, turning the effects knob and activating the euphoria button at the right time.


If that freaks you out, it shouldn't (yet). There are a number of difficulty settings, with the beginner setting giving you the bare minimum and every difficulty setting above that gradually introduces new gameplay elements to the mix. There's no shame into jumping into the game at beginner. As for me, I started out at medium and had a blast. By the end of my first day with DJ Hero, I had begun gaining 5-stars on the early mixes on expert difficulty. I don't expect myself to be the next DJ Q-Bert anytime soon, but the thrill of tearing through a mash-up is pretty awesome.

Speaking of the mash-ups, the game is made up entirely of mash-ups. This "genre" of music isn't necessarily my bag, but these all sound great and are almost all fun to play. There are two downers though that come with this package. The first one is that the set-list reuses a lot of songs. A lot of the songs get used more than once, and at least one song gets reused four times. The other downer comes from the implementation of the music. Outside of the back-spins and the effects knob, there's no room for your own creativity. In other music games, such as Guitar Hero and Rock Band, that isn't much of a problem, because you want to play the songs the way they're meant to be played. But the nature of DJ-ing lends itself to a certain type of creativity that you just can't do by replaying someone else's mix.

OK, I lied; there's one more downer in regards to the music in DJ Hero. The game also comes with 10 mixes which can be played with a person on the turntable and another person on guitar. I appreciate the gesture, but these mixes are the least fun to play and sound very forced. In particular, the guitarist is getting the short end of the stick, having to play fairly boring guitar charts. Even if the tracks were great to play, 10 tracks isn't much to work with. DJ and guitar mode will probably last you an hour at most before both band members run out of stuff to play.


If you're in single-player mode, you will be spending much of your time in the game's career mode. This mode feels very bare-bones, especially compared to the likes of Rock Band, which does a lot outside of the gameplay, such as a loose story and unique challenges to spice up the experience. In DJ Hero, you simply move from set-list to set-list, earning stars to unlock characters and accessories as you go. There's no story or extra motivation beyond that. The other weird design choice here is that songs are grouped into sets, and you can't progress unless you beat all the songs within a set. While I see the benefits in being able to play through multiple songs without having to navigate a menu, it is a bummer when you come up short on the very last song, and have to play through the entire set again to redeem yourself.

DJ Hero is a pretty good game that has reinvigorated my interest in music games. It's core gameplay mechanics are a joy to experience if you can overcome the learning curve. In order to compete with the likes of Rock Band and Guitar Hero, it's going to provide a deeper experience outside of just mixing music, such as a more compelling single-player mode and more downloadable content. I look forward to seeing what improvements Freestyle Games has in store for DJ Hero 2. Personally, I'm praying for the ability to hook up two turntables to one mixer for "real" DJ-ing action.

Before I go, I should talk a bit about the value proposition that DJ Hero at regular retail price offers. At the price I paid for it ($50 refurbished), I can fairly easily overlook the game's shortcomings and scratch away. However, at regular retail price of $130, I don't know if I could justify owning the game for that much, even though I think it's great. As for the special edition of this game, which is $220 in my country, forget about it. If you can get this game for under $100 and you're a fan of music games, then this may be right up your alley. At regular retail price, I would pass.

Yesterday at the Game Developer Conference, Sony finally announced the name and some more details about their new motion controller. The controller (and sub-controller) are now known as the Playstation Move. I'm not going to go into details about how the thing works, or what games were just announced to support it, but I'll be happy to direct you to places that have that type of information.

What I wanted to do is use this announcement as a jump-off point for my current perceptions of motion control. Back in 2006, I was all aboard the motion control train. With Nintendo - my favourite game company - backing this technology, there was nothing that could go wrong, right? Wrong.

I bought my Wii on launch-day and had a blast with it. For the next few weeks that winter, every party with family and friends was a Wii party. While motion controls did bring something new to the table, Nintendo's initial stab at motion controls brought with it a number of problems.

For anyone that has played a Wii, you've figured out by now that the Wii remote doesn't translate your movements 1:1 into the game. Rather, it reads a gesture you make and then plays out the action on screen if you've done the gesture properly. What happens in most Wii games is that you end up not truly simulating the motions you try to do. Instead, the remote doesn't read your motions correctly and does something you don't want it to do, or you end up doing "short-cut motions" that work just as well as the full motion, which kills any immersion the game was supposed to provide. Flicking your wrist to throw a bowling ball works just as well as a full-body throw.

The lack of buttons, poor game translations from regular controls to "Wii" controls, games going crazy when the remote isn't pointed at the screen and a sudden shift in focus towards casual games made a lot of what the Wii was supposed to be about not that fun for me. I have tried the motion plus attachment, but having to constantly reset the controller to work properly is a pain. Within a few months of buying the Wii, I caved and bought my first non-Nintendo system since the Atari 2600 because I wanted to play games that controlled with buttons, d-pads and analog sticks. I still love me some Wii Bowling and Boom Blox, but most of my gaming time is now motion controller free.

Regardless of how I feel, the Wii has basically won this console cycle, leaving Sony and Microsoft floundering to try and capitalize on the success of motion control. Sony has taken a very "me-too" approach with the design of their Move controllers, and Microsoft is going way out in left field with the controller-free Project Natal. While they both claim to have better solutions to motion control, I have my doubts. Watching the Playstation Move in the video below only further fueled my doubts, as the person in the video punches wildly in the air and the game does nothing to respond to his movements.



I'm not even going to get into the myriad of other challenges Sony and Microsoft have specifically in trying to launch these products into the marketplace. I just want to talk about how these control mechanisms work and what it'll take for me to fully buy into them as a main form of input. I'll break it down into three key points:


1) Accuracy

In my 20+ years of gaming, I've never had problems inputting a command with a button press. The game only has to decipher whether or not the button is pressed down or not. With motion control, there are so many more variables involved, and therefore, a higher percentage of error. It's so frustrating to play games like any Wii boxing game and see your physical energy go to waste when you throw a real-life hay-maker and see that my character is standing still.

The Playstation Move looks to be better than the Wii remote, but still appears to suffer from some accuracy quirks. With the Natal, we have no idea how accurate that setup will be when it hits living rooms around the world. I know it's a lot to ask, but I will always prefer pressing a button to doing a gesture if the gesture isn't accurate enough.


2) Purpose

Very early on in the Wii's life-cycle, a lot of third-party developers thought they could cash-in on the Wii hype train by shoehorning motion controls into traditional games. Time and time again, we've seen this strategy fail miserably. Often times in the case of motion controls, developers simply substitute a button press with a gesture, which usually doesn't feel good, doesn't accurately reflect the action on the screen and takes you out of the action more than brings you in.

Motion control games need to have a clear purpose for being in the game or don't bother. Developers need to create experiences that work with the strengths and weaknesses of the interface in mind and not force the player to flail their arms to substitute a button press. Throwing a baseball at a stack of blocks in Boom Blox feels awesome. Having to draw a star on the screen to activate slow-motion in Trauma Center feels awful and makes no sense.


3) It has to feel right

While this particular point applies to all motion controllers (even you, Tony Hawk: Ride skateboard), I'm most concerned about the Natal on this one. Microsoft has hyped this up as the most natural gaming experience ever, but I don't see what's natural about flailing your limbs around to hit balls that are projected at you or driving a car by pretending to hold onto a steering wheel and pretending to hit pedals with your feet that aren't there. The big promise of motion control is the ability to give players a more realistic and immersive experience. Poor motion control implementation just feels even more awkward and out of place than any button press would.

While I am currently not much of a fan of the current implementation of motion controls in today's consoles, I'm reluctant to write them off completely. I know that motion controls are here to stay and will improve with time. By the time these things work as planned, maybe I'll warm up to them more. I'm still not sure if I'll ever be ready to let go of sitting on the couch and pushing buttons, but we'll talk about that when motion controllers finally come of age.

I'm officially 1/4 of the way through Dead Space, and there was something about the overall feel of the game that I thought was worth mentioning: the underlying sense of deja vu.

Normally, that wouldn't necessarily be a good thing. And to Dead Space's credit, it does do a few good things to make the game stand out on its own, such as the emphasis on shooting limbs and everything that happens in space or low-gravity scenarios. But it's pretty clear to see that Dead Space is clearly built off of other influences.

The third-person shooting action and survival horror elements are directly lifted from Resident Evil 4. The story progression though big events or small collectibles such as audio logs came from Bioshock and Metroid Prime. Much of the space station aesthetic comes from Metroid Prime. Outside of games, Dead Space takes a ton of cues from the "Alien" series of movies.

To be fair, if you break down 99% of anything ever made, you can find all the elements that came before it to create the final product. In Dead Space though, the game doesn't try and hide where those influences came from. If anything, I really feel like they tried hard to at least match its influences in terms of quality, if not surpass them.


Throughout my experience so far, I always feel like I'm playing a mash-up of a bunch of other people's ideas. But damn, they're executed so well in Dead Space. The overall level of polish and detail so far is spot on with what I think this game should be. It's fun, very exciting and constantly scaring the pants off of me. There is a moment towards the end of chapter 3 where you encounter something that is 10 times more insane than anything you've encountered up to that point and I almost lost it. I was actually yelling at my TV and mashing buttons during a moment that required precision because I couldn't help myself.

All of the things it borrows from other games kind of makes Dead Space a more "comfortable" experience. Not in the sense of being less scary, but being able to quickly jump into this world and have fun. It's always in the back of my head that I'm not playing something wholly new, but as long as it stays this good, that's totally fine.

After playing The Lost and Damned, I wasn't sure what to expect from The Ballad of Gay Tony. While the Lost and Damned did a lot of things to separate itself from the core Grand Theft Auto experience, I don't think all of it was worth while. I really loved the characterization in The Lost and Damned, but there was a very distinct point where the focus gets taken away from the main conflict and when you finally come back to it, the conclusion doesn't give you the payoff you were hoping for. All the while, I was struggling to get re-acquainted with the Grand Theft Auto controls.

I'm currently about 8 missions into The Ballad of Gay Tony, and it's starting off on much better footing for me than The Lost and Damned did. Controls are no longer a factor with me, now that I've had the entirety of the TLAD to get used to them. Not exactly a ringing endorsement, but I'm not thinking about them any more when I play. While this game is currently lacking in innovation in comparison to TLAD, where it has it beat hands down so far are the missions. The game doesn't really have any "warm up" missions and goes straight into the crazy stuff. The second mission features you hitting golf balls on a driving range into a guy tied to the vehicle that picks up golf balls. From there, it's been increasingly bombastic and awesome.

My only gripe so far with Gay Tony is the plot and the characters. The story of Luis and Tony is probably the weakest of the three GTA IV stories, even though both characters are very likable. The main story arch is built around one person having to clean up another person's mess, which kind of has been done to death in this series. This even happened in TLAD, but it was offset by a great tension between Billy and Johnny. The antagonists in TBoGT just aren't as strong.

Thankfully, Rockstar got the missions right, which is the most important part of any GTA to me. TLAD had some missions that felt almost broken in design to me, which upset me more than anything else in that game. Everything so far in Gay Tony has been smooth as butter. I can overlook a somewhat weaker story when I'm busy driving away from a biker gang, the cops, a tank and a low-flying helicopter and throwing remote sticky explosives at them all.

Back in 2008, I was very intrigued by Dead Space. After E3, the buzz going around was that it was like the evolution of Resident Evil 4. Since that game is one of my all-time favourites, Dead Space was very much on my radar. The reviews came out great and it eventually went on to sell at least enough to warrant a greatest hits re-release.

So why didn't I pick it up back then? I don't know, really. At the time, I know I was busy with Rock Band 2, Gears of War 2 and Left 4 Dead. After I was through with those games, I would always look at that box every time I went into a game store, but never acted on it. I even saw this game brand new for $10 and still didn't buy it. For whatever reason, I just kept passing it up.

That is, until this past Christmas break. Using a gift card I received, I picked up Dead Space...and let it sit on my shelf for two months while I played through Modern Warfare 2, Assassin's Creed 2, Lego Rock Band, The Lost and Damned, Borderlands and Silent Hill: Homecoming.


I'm only about half way through chapter 1, but dude...Dead Space is kind of rocking my socks. For the few of you who aren't familiar with this game, I'll give you a quick rundown. You are an engineer who has been assigned to fix this giant space station. You and your crew crash land on the space station, and quickly realize there are aliens on it. In terms of tone, mood and atmosphere, this game is very much like the movie Aliens.

What the game is currently lacking in innovation, it makes up for in polish. Even in 2010, Dead Space graphically is one of the best games out there. Audio wise, my goodness. It has some of the most amazing sound of any video game. The ambient sound really sets the tone of the game and does a great job of freaking you out to the point where you're not sure if those creepy noises are coming from the game, or something in the other room of your house. Leading up to the release, EA was hyping up how the game doesn't have a heads-up display in the traditional game sense. Instead, information such as your health and amount of ammo in your clip are displayed on the character himself and all menus are pulled up within an in-game floating "screen" that you can look around. This is supposed to keep you immersed in the game, but I would have been fine with a regular HUD. Nice touch nonetheless.

In terms of the horror elements of Dead Space, it's about on par at this point with Resident Evil 4. The "horror" you feel mainly comes from jump scares and the tension you feel when your character is physically threatened, which is a lot. If you're looking for a more psychological horror experience along the lines of Silent Hill though, then this isn't it.


The one thing that has me tripping up at this point are the controls. Granted, I've played this game for less than two hours at this point, but some elements of the layout and how they work are taking some time to adjust to. For instance, when you're not aiming your gun, the right stick acts as an independent camera control rather than controlling where your character is looking. What this means is, you can swing the camera around so that you're actually looking at the front of your character. It's weird when I try and look around from the perspective of my character using the stick and instead it moves the camera independent of the character. I'm also not a fan of left bumper acting as the run button. Having that handled by pushing in the left stick would work much better in my opinion.

Despite all the negative things I've said about Silent Hill: Homecoming over these last few posts, I was ready to let all that slide. I was already over half way done the game, and I thought I could put up with the game's faults for a few more hours for the sake of completing it. That will never happen now. Or ever.

In my last Silent Hill post, I said I would continue playing it until the game committed a heinous act against fun. It just did.


I played the game for about half an hour just now, and I got to the puzzle pictured above. The only picture I could find was of the completed puzzle. When you start out, the pieces are all scrambled and you have to slide them around the space to create that emblem. No big deal, right? These types of puzzles have been in thousands of video games before, and can usually be beaten if you slide the pieces around enough. Not this time. I tried it over and over again, but there was one piece in particular that would be stuck on the opposite end of the board. I normally don't have the patience for these types of puzzles in games, so the moment I get stuck, I hit a guide.

To my horror, the very first step in every guide I found said to move the double block in the top right hand corner one space to the left. I looked at my screen and realized that my screen didn't have a double block in that position. I watched video solutions on YouTube and realized that my blocks were laid out completely differently from what everybody else got.

Dude, what?

So in fact, the puzzle the game gave me really was impossible to beat. I did more research on this, and apparently I'm not alone. This IGN forum user ran into the exact same problem as me. The only solution for her? Restart the game from the last save point. In this GameSpot thread, user peetowser said he wasted 3 hours of his life trying to solve this glitched puzzle until he realized it was broken. When he reloaded it, it worked fine. For those forum users, maybe their tolerance towards the game's deficiencies are higher than mine. But for me, this game ends right here. I've been force-feeding this experience to myself since the beginning, and if the game requires me to go back 30 minutes into the game just so the puzzle pieces can reset, it can go to hell. I am not giving that game any more of my time.

Even if I pass that, there's a chance that the game's next set of puzzles might glitch out for them too, just like it did for these people. Just like with Fight Night Round 4, I refuse to support games that are broken to the point that they actually prevent you from finishing them. I don't have any immediate plans on checking out any of the other entries in the Silent Hill series, but if they're as janky as this, I'll dedicate my gaming time towards other things.

With not much going on in my life right now, I spent most of today in my basement completing The Secret Armory of General Knoxx. I know, this is the third Knoxx post in as many days, but now that I've beaten the main quest and most of the side missions, I'm ready to write down some final impressions of the DLC.

As mentioned in my first two posts, this DLC starts out ludicrously hard. If you just completed playthrough 1, or have a maxed out level 50 character on playthrough 2, you will die in the beginning. A lot. I got destroyed by the very first bad guy I saw, and continued to be dominated throughout most of the experience by flying drones. I can see a lot of people giving up on this DLC at the start, but if you can tough it out, you'll be rewarded with a really good add-on.

If you're starting this DLC in between level 35 and 50, then your experience will vary wildly. My brother is level 43, and this was how I found out that General Knoxx does not scale to your character. If you play with a level 43 character in playthrough 1, you will demolish everything in your path. If you play with a level 43 character in playthrough 2, you literally wouldn't stand a chance against anything.

For me, the moment I hit the jail level was where the experience finally came into its own. The jail level was easily my favourite part of the DLC because I felt that level captures Borderlands at its best. Yes, that's half-way through the DLC, but at this point regular encounters were tough, but fair. From that point on, it played just like you would hope it would. You get to shoot lots of guys, level up your character, and there are no shortage of big-time guns (elemental ones in particular).


The ending to General Knoxx was much more satisfying than the main game. Without spoiling it, the boss fight is much better (and still tough) and the payoff is much improved (and exciting).

The only major aspect of this DLC I haven't tried yet is the ultimate boss. There is a level 64 boss that is practically impossible to beat by yourself, but with a party, you may stand a chance. If you beat the boss, you will have a chance to get some of the best guns in the game. The boss will never go away, so you can take a crack at it as many times as you want.

For 800 MS points, you get a lot of content from The Secret Armory of General Knoxx. Lots of new gear, quests, missions and a raised level cap are more than enough motivation for someone who just beat the game to go back to Borderlands. Playing through the main quest and the side missions will take you approximately 8-12 hours, which is very good considering the price. Just be warned that if your character is in the low 40's, you won't find a playthrough that fits for you and if you're coming into it maxed out, you're in for a rough start.

Dante's Inferno hits my soul in a very weird spot. I don't even care about actually playing any of the games in the same category of Dante's Inferno, because it's just not my thing. From everything I've heard about its gameplay, it plays competently. However, I've been thinking about this game for quite a bit over the last year because I absolutely hate the thinking behind this game.

If there was a game that you could say a marketing team had too much control in making, it's this one. In my head, I think the thought process behind the game went down like this:

Marketer A: "Hey, our sales are down. How can we make more money?"

Marketer B: "How about if we make a game like God of War? Those games sell like crazy, and if we make one just like it, we'll sell like crazy too!"

Marketer A: "Genius! Ok, where do we start?"

Marketer B: "Um...We need something like Greek mythology but not exactly Greek mythology."

Marketer A: *goes on Google* "How about the Divine Comedy and Dante's Inferno?"

Marketer B: "Awesome! Does he fight in it?"

Marketer A: "Not really. But maybe in our version, Dante can be a warrior. And he can carry around a giant scythe that works like the God of War chain-blade thing! And he'll fight through the seven layers of Hell, named after each sin."

Marketer B: "You're on a roll! But I just wanted to say one thing. This has to sell to teenage males, because our demographic research show that they spend the most money on these types of games."


Marketer B: "Ok, this is just a thought. How about, in the Lust level, we have giant demon women and when you cut off their nipples, spiders come out. And they have 8-foot vaginas that you have to grab and throw into other 8-foot vaginas?"

Marketer A: "That's what the kids would call, "Cool.""

Marketer B: "Isn't "cool" an old expression by now? Why don't you find the new word for cool on that Urban Dictionary thing."


Pardon me for being pessimistic, and maybe a bit condescending towards marketers (even though I've worked in both advertising and marketing), but this game is creatively bankrupt and conceptually a blatant cash-grab first and a game second. I'm not a communist, I understand that people make games to make money, and I understand that not every game needs to push the medium forward, but how can you not see what Dante's Inferno is at its core? Even the great reviews for this game call it a rip-off of God of War.

Maybe the game plays just fine, and if you enjoy it, great. But my sentiments against the product's existence are so strong that I already feel insulted as a gamer from knowing this product is available now and will probably sell well. If there's any statement I can make to show my displeasure, it's to not buy the game and not talk about. I won't be buying Dante's Inferno, and I'll stop talking about it...now.

I've only been playing this game for about four hours. At this moment, what's another four hours? I could still get to experience what is good about this game, if I can bear with its weaknesses. There are also achievement points to be had, which seem to be coming at a decent rate. Ultimately though, I should be playing games because their fun, right? And there are definitely other games I could play that would be more fun. But maybe this game will be fun enough for the four more hours I'll need to beat it.

Maybe I'm just a game snob, but I don't like having to think about whether or not I want to continue playing a game. If it's good, I'll keep going. If it's not, forget it. But when you play a mediocre game and already have invested some time in it, the choice of whether or not to play it gets murkier than it really should.

So what am I to do with Silent Hill: Homecoming? I have decided to play it through to the end on two conditions. One, I will only play from one checkpoint to another. I don't ever want to get stuck want to quit between checkpoints ever again, and I won't know when the next one will arrive. The other condition? If this game commits another heinous crime against fun, then I'll bury it once and for all.

Last time I spoke about Silent Hill: Homecoming, I focused mainly on how freaked out the game made me. It took a lot of will from within for me to overcome my psychological shortcomings to get through that opening sequence. As a survival horror game, I thought it started out really well.

Unfortunately, my mental fortitude hasn't been pushed nearly as hard since. Part of that has come from growing familiar with the world. But most of my growing weariness towards the game comes from the game's design faults and squandered potential.

I guess before I talk about the game it could have been, let me preface this post by saying that I'm still far from finishing it. I've only gotten to the Grand Hotel, which should be enough of an indicator for those that have played it and not enough of a spoiler for those that haven't. Also, let's start by talking about what I think is still good about the game.


Sound-wise, this game is spectacular. The music is appropriately haunting all the time. During action moments, it does a wonderful job of making your toes curl in fear. On the other hand, during down-time, the game's music does just enough to make you not feel comfortable. Sound effects are also equally appropriate at accomplishing tension. I consistently get freaked out when I walk into a random object in the world and hear it fall over. For a game released in 2008, the visuals hold up fairly well, particularly during the "nightmare" segments. The visual filters do a great job if making the game look "gritty".

It's past that where the game really begins to unravel. When I got past the "nightmare" segment and into the desolate city, the world of Shepherd's Glen and Silent Hill so far come off as boring rather than creepy. A lot of the tension is lost when you're walking around a foggy and plain-looking city.

I enjoy the game's more "traditional" approach to survival horror, but it also takes with it some really annoying design elements. I hate having to wander around each and every inch of the world, constantly hitting the "A" button to make sure I don't miss an item. If I were in the shoes of the character, there's no way I would be carefully scouring through my environment looking for stuff. I'd be doing everything I could to get the heck out of there. Due to the nature of the world's and how the developers want to lead the player down a certain path, there are a number of locked doors and closed off pathways. This wouldn't be a problem if the game wasn't designed to be explored. In turn, this forces the player to check every single door in the game, of which 80% of them are "locked" or "jammed" or whatever other excuse the game gives you for not letting you go beyond the door.


None of this though is as offensive as the game's fundamentally-flawed and arguably broken combat. In any survival horror game, the biggest fear you should have as a player is physical fear. The fear that something or someone is going to kill you. However, the moment your health is in danger, all you can think of as a player is, "Crap, I need to go through this combat junk."

The basics of how combat works is that the majority of your confrontations are (to this point in the game) one-on-one affairs. You hold the left trigger to lock onto your enemy, then you have the choice of attacking with a quick or strong attack. The problem with the trigger is that it doesn't always center the camera or your guy to the bad guy. I've had the game both not center the camera on the bad guy and not even adjust my character to face the enemy, which leads to me wildly swinging my weapon in the wrong direction.

Even worse than this is the actual act of combat. Neither of your attacks feel good to execute and neither of them feel like they have any weight to them. The combo system is also a joke, which boils down to you hitting two quick attacks and one strong attack repeatedly. You have the ability to dodge attacks when timed correctly, but I have yet to make this work with any sort of consistency. During my last playthrough, I got a gun, which has been pretty useless thus far. The weight and impact of your shots isn't there, and it seems like it takes a whole clip to take anything down. In a game where you only get 10 bullets every 30 minutes, that isn't going to cut it. Regardless of what you do to kill your enemy, it doesn't feel like you do anything more than stand in front of your enemy and hit buttons until your enemy dies. All of the tension and fear is lost when it just looks like you and your enemy aimlessly flailing at each other. I've heard that combat in the Silent Hill series has always been an Achilles heel to the point that the latest version of the game removes combat completely.

I'm at a crossroads with this game. I love the music and am intrigued to find out where this game's story goes. But is that enough for me to bear with checking hundreds of doors and having a horrible time beating up zombies and other monsters one at a time? Maybe it's best to cut this homecoming short.

With the release of Bioshock 2 only days away, I thought I would take a minute to reflect back on my time with the original Bioshock.

I vividly remember reading video game sites and listening to podcasts who were hyping up how amazing this game was. I didn't care. The screenshots looked pretty, but I didn't care that it came from the guy who made the System Shock games cause I'd never played them before. I didn't care about the Little Sister dynamic. I didn't care that you could add elemental powers to yourself to add variety to the combat.

Then I played the demo. Oh, my, God.

The way that game starts has to be one of the greatest openings in video game history. When your plane crashes and you find the pod that leads you to this incredible looking underwater city, it's mind-blowing. Then you get in there, and the world is equal parts beautiful and creepy. Without spoiling the demo (which if you haven't already tried, you really should), it's wonderfully paced to a climactic end that left me saying, "I need this game. Now."

So within the span of 45-minute demo, I went from indifferent to "zOMG!!!111". I bought that game the moment my local Best Buy opened and hunkered down on the sofa to explore the world of Rapture.


Throughout the game, the atmosphere of the game was always my favourite part of the Bioshock experience. I loved exploring the fantastically-designed world that was part futuristic, part historical and part apocalyptic art deco. Each of the different zones brought something slightly different to the table, which made the game wonderful to look at. To add to the experience, the music was spot-on for the environments, as they went with old-time music from the era the world of Rapture existed in before everything crumbled to crap. At the time, the tapes that were left behind added an extra layer of depth to the world by narrating to you what happened before you got there. This idea has been done to death since, but Bioshock really made that popular.

Character design was also a big win for Bioshock. Save for the last boss, everything you encounter in that game from the splicers to the Little Sisters are wonderfully designed to fit that world. The Big Daddy's themselves have become so iconic, that it's hard not to talk about this generation of gaming without mentioning them.

Speaking of the Big Daddy's, these were arguably the best and one of the weaker parts of the game. As a player, I was always intimidated by them initially due to their size and arsenal. But thanks to the chambers where you were brought back to life with little penalty, it took a lot of wind out of fighting a Big Daddy. Knowing that you could die and come back with the Big Daddy at the same health you left him took away a lot of tension once you figured that out. I also did not like the Little Sister choice system. On a base level, I get the concept of either saving a Little Sister to revert her to human or killing a little sister to harvest her energy. However, the game doesn't really reward you for going down the middle, or harvesting all the Little Sisters. The moment you harvest one little sister, you automatically get the "bad" ending and lose out on the achievement points you would have gotten if you saved them all. Maybe I would have ended up a stronger character in the end if I harvested all the girls, but I beat that game just fine.

I don't know if it was just me, but actually playing the game wasn't as great as the world they gave you to play in. I thought it played fine and the combat was fun, but it's not as good as the top first-person shooters on a mechanical level.

One other thing I wanted to say before I wrap this up: the plot and pacing of Bioshock was incredible...to a point. There is a very distinct point in the game where the plot peaks and slowly devolves from there.

At the time of its release, Bioshock to many was game of the year, and to some the best game of this generation. I'm not sure if I could go that far in stating my love for the game, but the overall product was (and still is) excellent. Here's to hoping that they did not ruin the Bioshock reputation with the (in my opinion) unnecessary sequel.

I was never the biggest Sonic the Hedgehog guy, but I have a soft spot in my heart for the first two games. Also, he's one of the most recognizable figures in this medium I love. It was downright tragic to see Sega drag the franchise down into the gutter. Even when the fans vehemently asked for a return to the series' roots, Sega would completely ignore their cries and graft on another stupid gimmick to an already bad 3D game.


Sonic the Hedgehog 4 doesn't guarantee us much of anything, other than it being a 2D Sonic game that will be downloadable in episodic form. It could still suck. It could still feature some of the elements that made the more recent Sonic games awful. But I am glad to see Sega finally care about the people it makes games for and at least attempt to create a product with them in mind. Will Sonic rise to prominence on par with Mario like he did back in the early 90s? Maybe that's a bit much to ask. Let's see if we can get a good Sonic game first, then we'll talk.