So here I was thinking this game was going to be something completely new and exciting when I realized it was pretty much a port of A Link to the Past. That’s not really a bad thing, since many younger gamers have never played that game before. What I also didn’t like was just how easy and short the game was. The dungeons themselves aren’t really all that hard, but they are more confusing, and some puzzles are really hard to figure out. With that said, the game is enjoyable, but some may not like it.
It all comes down to feeling like every other Zelda game out there. There’s not much to set this apart, and when you’re done with it, you will just shrug and move on to the next game. The dungeon layout and the bosses are clever and fun, but I just wish there was more to this game. One thing I also didn’t like was having to buy the equipment to keep it. If you rent equipment and die, it will be sent back to Rovio’s shop, where you have to go back to your house, rent it again, and return to the dungeon you were in. At least there are warp spots, which are a serious lifesaver. In all honesty, if these weren’t here, I doubt most people would be able to stomach getting around.
Most dungeons involve a certain element or weapon. The boss in each dungeon also requires this weapon to defeat it. The sand rod, fire rod, ice rod, bomb, and various other weapons from past Zelda games make an appearance. However, the story involves sages being turned into paintings, and that’s where the whole “Link Between Worlds” thing comes in. This feature is actually quite gimmicky, and the game would have been fine without it. It’s used as a segue between puzzles or just briefly to get around. Flattening against a wall and shuffling side to side isn’t exactly a game-selling feature, and I felt it was poorly used here.
The game’s 8 dungeons may actually be enough for most people, especially Zelda fans. The most frustrating part was how to get to each dungeon since you can easily get lost or spend hours just wandering around aimlessly. The lack of direction has been abundant in the Zelda series, and I feel it needs to change. However, once again, some fans may be happy with this, and that’s fine.
Overall, A Link Between Worlds is one of the best games available on 3DS and a fine Zelda game. It’s the only issue that it’s the same type of Zelda we have played numerous times, not the revolutionary Zelda we have come to expect from games like Phantom Hourglass. The 3D effects don’t really do much for the overall experience (like 99% of 3DS games) and can be just as enjoyable with the 3D turned off.
So here we were. Everyone who grew up in the 90s has gone through four PlayStation console cycles. I remember 11 years ago, when I got my PS2, I thought that the PS3 was going to be something incredibly futuristic, akin to something out of a sci-fi movie. While that wasn’t the case at all, the PS4 gets us one step closer. The PS4 may not be the huge leap that the PS2 and PS3 were, but it’s enough to completely create a whole new generation of gaming.
First Time Look and Setup
When you get the big, blue, hefty box home, you realize that the thing is huge. It makes the PS4 seem five times as big as it really is. Outside of the design of the box to get you to buy it, it’s rather plain inside. The first thing your eyes are drawn to are the sleek edges of the PS4. It has a much better design than the George Foreman grill-esque design of the original PS3. It actually looks like a space monolith. A third of the console has a sleek black look that is known to Sony products (and the fingerprints). While the rest of the top has a rough black material similar to the slimmer PS3, The front bezel is designed like it was cut at an angle with a knife. It’s double-tiered, with the disc drive to the left and the USB ports nicely hidden to the right. The power and disc eject buttons are well hidden and lined up with the LED line separating the slick and rough parts of the top casing. The rear of the console shows the vents and a simple Ethernet, HDMI, power, and audio optical cable. Very simple and easy to understand. The PS4 logo is shown nicely on the front left bezel of the console. This is a sexy console and probably the best-designed one from Sony since the slim PS2.
Setting up the PS4 is really simple and easy. Once you get your HDMI and power cable in, you must power it on via the console button. I didn’t know where the power button was until I read the quick start guide. It’s really hidden, and you wouldn’t even think of it being lined up with the LED bar. After it turns on, you must connect the PS4 controller with the USB cable included to pair it with the system. After this, you log in to your PlayStation account and set up your WiFi. It’s really as simple as that.
UI and Settings
The PS4 UI breaks away from the XMB that was born with the PSP and used on the PS3, along with some early Blu-ray players. However, the system still uses the foundation of the XMB bar mixed with the Vita’s app switching. Settings, friends, PS Store, messages, and all that stuff is one click above your games, movies, and media library. I like this double-stack instead of a long menu full of submenus. However, it’s very plain. There are no themes or wallpaper settings, even as of this review. Hopefully more are to come.
There are a good number of settings that allow you to pretty much adjust everything on the PS4. The PS4 now has a standby mode that is more advanced than the PS3. You can charge controllers, download updates, and perform various other tasks, including (at a later time) immediately resuming a paused game. The only issue is that the standby mode uses more energy than previous consoles ever have.
The system also records your gameplay footage and will snap screenshots with the touch of the Share button on the controller. I thought this would be useless, but I have actually captured some awesome footage and shots that I thought were only possible on PCs.
Under the Hood
The PS4 is the most powerful of the three next-gen consoles. The PS4 has finally moved away from custom-made hardware seen in previous Sony consoles that made coding a pain. The system uses 64-bit hardware that is seen in PCs today. The system has two quad-core Jaguar CPUs developed by AMD. The GPU runs at 2.75 GHz and can compute 1.84 teraflops. The system also has 8GB of GDDR5 RAM, which is faster than the standard RAM seen even in most high-end gaming computers. The system has a 500GB HDD that can be swapped by the user, which is a nice gesture by Sony. The USB ports are 3.0 instead of the 2.0 seen in previous consoles. For the first time ever, this is the first Sony console that does not have an analog output; this is HD only. What does this all mean? The PS4 is 16 times as powerful as the PS3 and is the most powerful next-gen console (a little like the last generation as well).
My biggest complaint about the hardware would be the lack of a 5 GHz WiFi card. The system only supports the slow 2.4 GHz bandwidth, which will not give Sony the faster download speeds they need for the larger next-gen games and streaming of games. If you can set your 2.4 GHz band to wireless N mode, you can get the most speed out of the PS4. This also causes issues with the Vita’s remote play over WiFi. I could not get a stable connection, and ultimately, the PS4 had to connect directly to the Vita itself for stable true remote play.
The Controller
My favorite part of the PS4 is the amazing controller. The PS3 controller wasn’t all that great, but Sony made a huge comeback with the DualShock 4. The ergonomics of the controller are just fantastic. The handles are longer, the analog stick is concave with better rubber grips, and they are spread further apart. The triggers (R2 and L2) are much improved and no longer make your fingers slip. The newest addition is the touchpad on the front of the controller. Most people probably shake their heads wondering what Sony is doing to their controllers again, but this thing is actually useful. It doesn’t get in the way and can be used to navigate maps, quick-time events, and text input, among other features that haven’t been thought of yet. This is probably technology left over from the rear touchpad of the Vita. The DualShock 4 also has a strange LED light on top that has upset many gamers. It’s extremely bright and is really leftover tech from the Move. It’s used to track the controller with the PlayStation Camera. However, it is used as an indicator in games such as health and notifications. The controller took a page from the Xbox 360 controller and added a headset jack to the controller to get rid of the long cables that had to connect directly to the console.
This controller even tops the Xbox 360 controller, if you can believe that. Another major move is the banishment of the Start and Select buttons so often remembered on PS controllers. There is now an Options and Share button on either side of the touchpad. The Options button is used to start and… It’s rather useful and is the evolution of the select and start buttons. The Share button is for social media goers, and I promise you will be hitting that button more and more as you have the console.
In the end, the PS4 delivers some great content, but it’s very limited as the first batch of next-gen games gets released this holiday. The PS Store is pretty empty and lacks demos for new buyers. There are not many features to keep you busy for days, and even the games are slightly limited. But the PS4 has great hardware and a great future ahead of it. The $400 price point was a smart move compared to the terrible launch of the PS3.
The Ninja Gaiden series is very beloved by longtime fans. The reboot for Xbox was considered one of the hardest games ever made at the time and required extremely precise skill. Yaiba is a spin-off of the series and takes a kind of comical take on it. This isn’t exactly good. Taking the helm is a studio notorious for terrible games like Legendary. That game was considered the worst game made that year. Spark Unlimited has a lot to live up to, and I’ll cut this short: they don’t live up to it.
The Z stands for zombies. Yes, and you don’t even play as Ryu Hayabusa. In fact, you play as someone he’s killed who gets a robotic arm and wants to seek revenge. He’s accompanied by a busty, intelligent woman who relays your objectives to you. The story is pretty throwaway, but Ninja Gaiden is known for fantastic combat. Yaiba has a good combat system, but the game relies on fighting way too much and doesn’t break up the monotony.
A weak, powerful, and flail attack are all available. The fighting is lightning fast, but sometimes way too fast. Zombies are represented by comedic puns and act just as stupid. Life is acquired by performing a finishing move on a stunned zombie. The gore and finishing moves are cool, but only the first five times. The rest of the game is made up of overly easy parkour that is performed with quick-time events. The boss fights are slightly more interesting, but not by much.
The combat gets hard in the sense that it feels unbalanced. Some enemies can disable your flail arm; sometimes too many are thrown at you, and there’s a really irritating knockback animation that can’t be interrupted. Occasionally, the environment can be interacted with, but I honestly saw the same patterns on the second level. This game could have been so much more, but it turns out to be a frustrating, unbalanced joke.
The graphics also take on a comic book style, which is way different from the traditional Japanese art style seen in the other games in the series. They also look technically unimpressive, with ugly low-res textures. Most fans will be highly disappointed in a game bearing the Ninja Gaiden name and not take it seriously. Maybe a more talented developer could have done better, but what’s here is something that never should have been.
The House of the Dead was a hit zombie light-gun game back in the 90s in arcades. This huge Sega hit spawned a game called Typing of the Dead that featured Agent G and heroes wielding keyboards instead of guns. The game was highly addictive as words and sentences popped up on enemies. If you typed everything correctly, the zombie would die. A reimagining using the Wii hit House of the Dead: Overkill takes the main game and turns it into a keyboard typing fest, and it’s a blast.
The story and voice acting are intentionally left to be cheesy to make fun of the absolutely abysmal voice acting from the original games. It adds a comedy factor. While it’s not nearly as bad as previous games, it’s still enough to bring back memories. Agent G and Washington are after a man named Papa Caesar who has somehow killed Washington’s father and released a zombie virus around the world. Along the way, you meet various characters, but none of them are really memorable. The wacky story and over-the-top adult content, such as swearing and gore, are a blast.
The game is on the rails like any light-gun shooter. As zombies pop up, you just type away with what you see. Each level is unique, with its own themed zombies and bosses. The zombies are well done, and the game can sometimes be downright gross. The bosses are both funny and disgusting to look at, but overall, the typing portion of the game is only as difficult as your typing skills permit. Thankfully, you don’t have to include punctuation or anything like that. Just type what you see as fast as you can. Sometimes you have to save civilians for more points, but outside of killing zombies, there’s nothing else in the levels. If you spam the Tab key, you can get all the hidden extras, which makes it much easier to unlock everything.
Thankfully, this is only half the game. The other half is the actual light gun game, using the mouse to shoot. Basically, it’s two games in one, but if you play through one, it will be tough to get through another due to repetition. It’s not like you can choose another ending or go down multiple paths. The game is really only good for one playthrough unless you are extremely bored. The extras aren’t really anything worth unlocking either.
For what it is, the game offers a lot of content for a small price, but playing through the game twice in different modes just doesn’t seem appealing for the amount of cheese the game layers on.
Mobile gaming hits are usually casual-friendly, like Angry Birds, Farmville, Flappy Bird, and many others. Most of those games are fairly mindless and don’t require much thought. Along comes Threes, a game that requires strategy and thinking beyond just a simple tile-sliding game.
Threes is simple, minimalistic, and quite charming. The board is made up of 16 tiles. You get six random tiles made up of numbers 1, 2, or 3. You must slide these tiles into each other to add them up. If you slide to the left, everything on the board will slide to the left. This single gameplay element is what distinguishes it from regular slider puzzles. With this in mind, you have to be careful to slide all the tiles in the right direction. Once you get 3, you can slide 3 and 3 together to make 6. Two of those make 12, and so on. However, the higher the number you have, the harder it is to get another number like it together to join those two. It’s a brilliant gameplay design that gets extremely addictive.
It takes a lot of practice, and sliding randomly won’t get you anywhere. You can easily gridlock yourself without even realizing it if you aren’t careful. Thankfully, Threes is pleasant to look at and listen to. Each number tile has its own voice and caricature, and the simple, washed-out white design is easy on the eyes. Even the music is charming and great to listen to. This is the kind of zen game that Angry Birds or Clash of Clans can’t get to.
Even if you aren’t a fan of numbers or math, you are missing out on one of the best mobile games ever made that doesn’t require microtransactions. Even that alone is worth the purchase.
I haven’t been so misled by a game as Murdered. A murder mystery game about a cult in Salem, Massachusetts (my favorite type of murder mystery) is all wrapped around a serial killer known as the Bell Killer. You play a ghost detective named Ronan who gets murdered by this killer during an investigation. You have a bratty teen named Joy who helps you in the real world, and the story all comes to a nice close at the very end.
It’s everything in between that really disappoints. This game not only feels about 10 years old but is sometimes downright boring. In each area, you have items that need to be “examined.” This turns into pixel hunting like the adventure games of yore. Sometimes I found myself too frustrated because the examine button wouldn’t come up unless you were facing it just the right way; that’s glitchy and annoying. Once you find all the clues in an area, you conclude the investigation by picking three of the clues that relate to the scene. This is where some of the nonsense gameplay comes into play. Most of the time, you don’t even need all the clues to conclude, and most clues are pointless for the scene. I feel like I’m hunting for all these clues as just filler for gameplay.
Is there any combat? Not really. A shoehorned combat scenario was put in by sneaking around demons and executing them with weird button combos. Sneaking around them is pretty tense, as is running from them. But was this merely an excuse to be able to die in the game and call it a full-on game? The only other way I died in the game was by getting hit by a ghost train in one area. There’s also an open world that is boring and lifeless. The game is also full of items to find, which is archaic and just plain boring. Why would I run around in an empty, boring world, finding items I could care less about?
There are actually rules to this game, though. Just because you’re a ghost, you can’t walk through everything; otherwise, you’d be clipping into the gaming abyss. Most items can’t be walked through, and there are some that don’t have a blue aura around them. You can teleport yourself, which only comes in handy for a few parts of the game. You can possess people to read their minds or influence them during an investigation. This isn’t nearly as cool as it should be.
The only thing that kept me going was the story. The twists and turns were just interesting enough to make you think you figured it out, and then it turns out to be something else. The game actually has a satisfying ending with no cliffhanger. When I played through this whole game, I just couldn’t help but feel how dated it looked and played. The graphics, while not ugly, are simple and boring. This game would have looked amazing about 5 years ago. I also didn’t feel an attachment to any characters because of how boring and cookie-cutter they felt. Ronan is just your typical New England cop, Joy is a snotty goth brat, and the other characters don’t really show up enough for you to care about them. Soul Suspect had a lot of potential, but in the end, it felt like there wasn’t really a goal for what to do outside of the story.
If you’re a fan of adventure games, I would give this a shot. Murdered isn’t going to revolutionize the nearly forgotten point-and-click adventure-style gameplay, but it is worth slogging through the gameplay for the interesting story.
If you see Ben Templesmith on the cover, you know the series you are about to read is going to be full of horror, death, gore, and insanity. Choker is chock-full of that. The story revolves around an ex-cop, Johnny Jackson, who gets called back by his old boss to bring a prisoner who escaped back. It doesn’t turn out well, as the department is using a steroid-type drug on their cops called Man Plus, which is somehow connected to the prisoner’s drug ring. The story takes a long time to catch your attention. It starts out with you completely lost and characters talking like you already know what’s going on. Later issues backtrack to catch you up until you hit the final wall.
Choker isn’t the best series I’ve read, but I read it mainly for Templesmith’s art. His sick and twisted watercolor drawings are fantastic and one-of-a kind. He’s one of my favorite comic artists. Sure, it looks messy and sloppy compared to most artists, but it’s unique in a way that it matches the story it’s telling. Choker doesn’t have the most memorable characters; it’s too short to keep you hooked for long, with only six issues; and the story is kind of predictable. The whole 20-minute-in-the-future setting is nice, with a scummy city like Gotham City or even Neo Tokyo. I wanted to know more about Shotgun City and its inhabitants, maybe some side stories.
If you like crime dramas, you will like Choker. It has vampires, gore, cops, mutants, and crazy characters. Just don’t expect to be in it for long because it ends before you even realize it started.
Episode Two takes place right after Episode One, but this time we play strictly as Elizabeth. I love this move-in perspective because Liz can’t fight like Booker can, and it’s noticeable right off the bat. Liz has to sneak her way around using crossbows, vigors that turn her invisible, and ones that add extra armor. She only carries a shotgun and pistol, but very little ammo. The new weapon is one that microwaves enemies, but I was only able to use it a couple of times in the whole episode.
The story still doesn’t make much sense unless you play both BioShock games. This DLC is really for the fans of those games. Elizabeth is on a mission to save Sally, the little sister you were trying to find in Episode 1. With Booker dead, it’s up to you to run from everything bad in Rapture to find her. This includes Atlas, Andrew Ryan, and even Suchong. These characters won’t mean anything to anyone who hasn’t played the first game. I loved the setting and the brief trip back to Columbia, but the atmosphere is really great in this episode, along with less backtracking. Sure, Liz can’t fight off Big Daddies in this episode, but it makes everything more intense. The game is about twice as long as the first episode but can still be finished in a few hours.
I really appreciated how the stealth sections were interspersed with just exploring and cinematic events; it felt balanced. Sneaking isn’t just as simple as ducking and hiding from enemies. They now have an alert meter above their heads, while a new lockpicking mini-game has been added but is mostly lackluster and just filler. You can even use this mini-game to hack turrets to fight against you, but there were maybe only two opportunities to do this in the whole game. The new crossbow weapon with gas, alarm, and sleeping darts comes in handy, and the shotgun does a lot of damage. I felt the revolver was nearly useless, though.
With all that said, Episode Two really feels like an extension and slight evolution of Infinite in a good way, but anyone who hasn’t played previous games will be completely lost.
After the horrific events of the previous chapter, Return to Barrow gives us all-new characters and a whole new terrifying event in Barrow. If you thought what happened wasn’t bad enough, there are crazy people still living there, even though it’s the main target for vampires. A new sheriff moves into town with his son. Due to the events of the past volume (where the original survivor writes a book exposing vampires), the vampires are now leaderless and want everyone in Barrow exterminated.
I honestly have to say I feel this chapter is a cop-out. Why do we have to return? Sure, I can understand that the vampires want to wipe everyone out, but why fully concentrate on this event again? It feels like a re-hash, and even though these people are better prepared, it was the frightening concept of everyone not knowing what was going on that made the first chapter so memorable. I like the new characters, and the tension is there along with the dialog among the vampires (these guys are vicious bastards).
If you’ve read previous chapters, go ahead and read this. There are actually decent fight scenes, a lot of tension, and a surprising amount of atmosphere oozing out of this series. I also have to appreciate the continuous flow that a lot of comics tend to forget to provide.
First-person platforming isn’t attempted often. A Story About My Uncle keeps it basic with grappling, anti-gravity jumping, and various puzzles. The story is fairly simple and doesn’t really mean anything until the very end. A boy is trying to find his uncle, Fred. He finds his uncle’s lab, where he straps on a weird jumpsuit and takes off to some unknown land. He eventually comes across a species of frog people, and a little girl from this village befriends the protagonist.
The jumping is actually quite exhilarating. You jump really high, and your character’s hands swing around, which makes you feel vertigo. The sheer speed and height this game creates is something not really seen in most games. As you make your way across bottomless chasms and dark caves, you begin to wonder what all this means. What’s the point? The jumping puzzles get progressively harder, to the point of downright frustration. The grapple has three shots. Once these run out, you either need to land or you’re falling into the abyss. Later on, you get rocket boots that allow a quick boost if you miss your shot or your next grapple point is too far away. One of the hardest obstacles is the windmill. I actually had to manipulate the physics by landing on one for a split second so my equipment could recharge. The game gets so tricky towards the end that casual players may not make it. Sure, the game is only a couple of hours long, but the complicated jumps are just mind-boggling.
With that aside, the music is great, and the game looks beautiful. While it uses the dated Unreal Engine 3, the art style is superb. I honestly felt like this was Journey to the Center of the Earth meets Mirror’s Edge. There’s nothing else out there like it, and the ending is extremely touching. Well worth the play through to get a few heartstrings pulled.
I just wish there was more to the game. Sure, jumping around gets fun, but sometimes I feel areas drag on forever with too much nothing in between. It’s a step in the right direction for this type of game. With more stories being pushed out and some variety in gameplay, this game could have been something even more incredible.
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Try multiplayer. A lot of fun !