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Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance – 11 Years Later

Posted by BinaryMessiah on 08/23/2013

Posted in: Game Boy Advance, Gamecube, Nintendo, PlayStation 2, Retro Consoles, Sony, Xbox. Tagged: deadly alliance, fatality, fighter, gameboy advance, gamecube, gba, Microsoft, midway, mortal kombat, Nintendo, playstation, ps2, Sony, xbox. Leave a comment

Publisher: Midway

Developer: Midway

Release Date: 11/16/2002

Available On

Deadly Alliance was a turning point in the series. MK4 got mixed reviews from fans and critics and wasn’t exactly what they wanted. Being only the second 3D Mortal Kombat game, it was another reboot that took itself more seriously and became more complicated and deep. It featured three different fighting styles and long combo chains that you had to memorize, and gone were the days of fast button mashing. You now have to think ahead about your next move and strategize. It was the most robust and sophisticated fighting game ever made at the time, but it didn’t come without its flaws.

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Deadly Alliance was the first MK game to venture out from just fighting in a core title. The team added a Konquest mode, which is a giant tutorial on how to use every fighter and learn all their moves. This is pretty big for a fighter and can be a lot of fun. You follow Raiden down a long path across various MK worlds and learn about each fighter. They each have three different fighting stances: two regular and one weapon stance. That’s not all, though; these can combo into and out of each other for major damage. Characters with blade-type weapons can impale their weapons into the opponent to make them bleed out, but they lose the weapon for that round. This more technical fighting style for MK had mixed reactions, but I like it a lot.

One thing I wasn’t fond of was the lack of special moves and fatalities. There’s only one fatality per character, and a lot of them are mediocre at best. They aren’t as gory or as awesome as previous games. Cyrax is missing his net move; a few characters only have 2-3 special moves, so it feels weak. At least the mini-games make a return because they haven’t been seen since MK1. A new Test-Your-Sight mini-game is added, which is a cup-and-ball game. The team also added a currency system and a Krypt to unlock costumes, videos, art, and interviews. I love this a lot, and it is great fan service. However, once you unlock the entire Krypt, there’s not much else to come back to. Unless you are playing with a friend on the couch, the game is seriously lacking in single-player content, which is why I got bored with it after a couple of months.

The graphics were decent for the time, but the gore looks like balls of Jell-O, and the characters look like plastic dolls. The woman’s breast physics looks like swaying punching bags at 100 MPH, even when you tap forward slightly. The sound effects are a bit weak, and a few are recycled from MK4. The arenas are also kind of boring, and many of them are new. The overall game is pretty solid but needs more polish. I also wasn’t too fond of the new characters. A few were likable, such as Frost, Nitara, and Drahmin, but all the rest just felt forced or rushed. I also didn’t really like a lot of the redesigned characters, such as Sonya and Johnny Cage. The character design is just really lacking here, but that could be just me being a picky fan.

Overall, Deadly Alliance is a nice change for the series, and the more complex and strategic fight style may not be for everyone. The lack of content really hurts his game, and it suffers from an overall lack of polish. It’s still worth getting in your bargain bin for some couch time-fighting.

Reviewed On

Rogue Legacy

Posted by BinaryMessiah on 08/22/2013

Posted in: Mac, Microsoft Consoles, Nintendo Consoles, PC Reviews, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, PlayStation Vita, Retro Consoles, Sony, Sony Consoles, Steam Deck Verification, Steam Deck Verified, Switch, Xbox One. Tagged: indie, pc, platformer, playstation, rogue legacy, Sony, vita. Leave a comment

Publisher: Cellar Door Games

Developer: Cellar Door Games

Release Date: 6/27/2013

Available On

2D platformers have had a huge comeback in the past 5 years, but none of them really offer a great challenge. Rogue Legacy offers a lot of replay value thanks to the randomly generated dungeons and characters. I love Rogue’s character selection system. You get to pick between three different people, and when you die, their attributes make an offspring that is similar. Some characters walk upside down, and some have extra strength, health, MP, HP, and various other passive effects. This is really neat, and sometimes you are forced to choose one particular character so the other bad genes are wiped out on your next death. You can upgrade your weapons at each rebirth, and you can give up 30% of all the gold you find to lock down the castle if you liked the previous layout. When you enter the castle, you must forfeit all your gold, so you start from scratch. This is a cool feature and doesn’t really get in the way.

When you actually play, you will be greeted with great controls and fast-paced and challenging combat that’s similar to Mega Man and Castlevania. Breaking open objects gives you gold or items, and enemies can be really tough and fast. You have to stay on your toes because you can die really easily. I died around 15–20 times before I even got to the first boss. You also get items that use MP, kind of like in Castlevania. Honestly, this game felt like Castlevania meets Infinity Blade, which isn’t a bad influence. I wasn’t frustrated because sometimes the rebirth was for the better. After a while, it gets kind of hard, so it’s only fun in short bursts. I found the game very addictive, and the variety of enemies kept me coming back for more.

The whole point is that you become more powerful every time you die, so it’s not like other games where all your progress resets. You are always progressing, no matter how good or bad you are at the game. After a while, you start learning the enemy patterns and eventually even a favorite layout. The graphics are actually pretty good with nice 8-bit sprites; this is actually one of my favorite platformers in a long time since ‘Splosion Man and Fez. There’s really not much wrong with the game other than the lack of level variety, and the game can be way too hard. This game relies solely on skill to advance, and the better you are, the longer you can survive.

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Don’t let the simplicity and small scope of Rogue Legacy turn you away. If you love platformers and challenging games, this is for you. The game has a great chip-tune soundtrack, nice graphics, and solid controls. The constant dying and respawning can get tedious sometimes, and the progress you made before can feel like it’s all for nothing. Thankfully, there are many upgrades and items to buy to keep you coming back for more.

Reviewed On

Xbox 360 Controller for Windows

Dirge of Cerberus: Final Fantasy VII – 7 Years Later

Posted by BinaryMessiah on 08/22/2013

Posted in: PlayStation 2, Retro Consoles, Sony. Tagged: dirge of cerberus, ff7, final fantasy vii, playstation, ps2, shooter, Sony, square enix, vincent valentine. Leave a comment

Publisher: Square Enix

Developer: Square Enix

Release Date: 8/15/2006

Available Exclusively On

This is one of those games that Final Fantasy fans don’t want to admit they played. It got a lot of hype when it came out because it was a shooter set in the FF universe, which is very odd and abstract from the typical JRPG formula. Many people didn’t have high hopes for it since Japanese gamers don’t really play shooters, but I passed it up due to the flak and poor reviews it got. It came out at the tail end of the PS2 life cycle and was overlooked by the hype of the next generation and many other games coming out. This was one of the projects for the Final Fantasy VII extension. This game tells the story of Vincent Valentine and how he came to be and delves deeper into his relationship with Lucrecia, the FF7 team, Hojo, and a few other characters. Honestly, the story is very confusing unless you have played FF7 already; in fact, all the FF7 projects make no sense unless you have played the PS1 classic. I never played it as a kid, so the story made no sense. Even if I had, it’s pretty dry, dull, and uninteresting until the very end. Vincent doesn’t really say too much, and the story is poorly edited and feels chopped up and mixed around.

The action is at least halfway decent and pretty fun. You get three different guns in the whole game: a pistol, a machine gun, and a sniper rifle. You can customize these weapons with different barrels, materia for magic, and various other effects. It’s nice to see this in an FF game, but the customization feels very limited due to the limited gun types. As a Final Fantasy game, you can use various potions, limit breakers, and phoenix downs, which revive you when you die. The game has a Final Fantasy vibe all around it, but the action part is lacking greatly. It feels fast-paced and snappy, but the game is linear to a fault and offers almost no challenge. I blew through boss after boss without even dying or losing much health. Once you level your weapon parts up enough, you are unstoppable early on. You chew through enemies like candy, and there is just a huge lack of challenge. There are a few turret sections and a couple of cinematic on-rails segments, and that’s about it. 90% is running around the same bland environments and shooting the same bland enemies for 6 hours.

There is some melee combat thrown in, but it’s very weak. Just a quick 3-hit combo, but when you are in beast form, you are more powerful using melee attacks. There are items scattered all over the place, as well as hidden items for extra endings and whatnot. It’s the same dated shooter stuff with keycards to open gates, button pressing, and other dated shooting mechanics. The game is only fun because the environments change a lot, but they are still bland no matter what. The enemies repeat often, and this really weakens the game. The hallways can be so small that they are the width of Vincent himself, which just feels restricting. On top of all that, the game is just poorly balanced. I stuck with the pistol through the whole game because switching up weapons isn’t really necessary because the game is so easy. The final level is really awesome because Vincent is in Chaos form and you are mega-powerful, but it’s all a ruse for JRPG players who aren’t shooters. You can tell this game was geared toward casual players and really just FF fans. The confusing story is evidence of that.

Overall, Dirge of Cerberus is a fun weekend rental, but nothing more. Non-Final Fantasy fans won’t really care for this because there are much better shooters on the PS2 that offer more depth and better stories. Final Fantasy players won’t really like it because it’s too action-heavy and gives a false sense as to how shooters really play out. It tries to run a middle ground and veers off constantly with no real direction. A few months of polishing would have done this game some good. It’s a nice departure from the series and an interesting side project. It doesn’t really fail, but it rides on the borderline of being a bad shooter.

Soul Sacrifice

Posted by BinaryMessiah on 08/20/2013

Posted in: PlayStation Vita, Retro Consoles, Sony. Tagged: action, japan, playstation, rpg, Sony, soul sacrifice, vita. Leave a comment

Publisher: SCEA

Developer: SCE Japan Studio

Release Date: 4/30/2013

Available Exclusively On

Soul Sacrifice is one of those games that looks cool, but when you start playing, you will be completely lost for a while. The game starts out with you being captured and put into a cage with bones everywhere. A book wakes you up and starts talking to you. It’s the journal of a mad sorcerer, and he later explains that you need to stop this powerful sorcerer, but in the meantime, you need to level up, gather strong weapons, and learn about his past. The story never really pans out, and it is just stretched so thin that you lose track of what’s going on. The presentation is interesting, with literal storybook pages and an ominous narrator, but I would have liked something more.

You basically just select a mission, and it will tell you what you’re supposed to kill. There is tons of fantastic and memorable lore wrapped around every enemy and battlefield. These stories read out like Grimm’s Fairy Tales, and I was really hooked and couldn’t wait to read the next one. The enemy designs are really neat and unique, as well as the bosses. You can customize your character’s looks, albeit not by much, and then it’s off to equip your weapons. Weapons are arranged in several categories: armor, arm, blood, power, shield, etc. You get weapons for defeating monsters, and they are awarded to you. These weapons can be combined with dupes to give you a higher cast count, or they can be fused into new weapons. This is a great idea if the game doesn’t constantly throw crappy weapons at you. Halfway through the game, I was still dying several times per boss because I just couldn’t get any powerful weapons. It’s like they all did very little damage. Some bosses and enemies are weaker to certain elements and types. Some bosses you can’t get up close to at all, so you need powerful projectile weapons. If you don’t know that going in, you have to restart and re-equip. This trial and error is frustrating and one of Soul Sacrifice’s many flaws.

If that wasn’t enough, you are limited by how much you can use each item. You can equip up to six different weapons for each match. Some can be passive for healing, but if you run out of casts, you break your weapon, and it’s gone forever. You have to use a special vision mode to find hidden regen points for your weapons, but they are limited. Several times I ran out of casts for all my weapons and had to restart because I couldn’t beat the boss. Thankfully, a special sacrifice power allows you to do massive damage, but at the cost of sacrificing something. One power lets you burn everything around you, but your skin becomes burned and your defense is halved. To get rid of these conditions, you need Librom’s tears, and these are only granted every so often by exiting the book and checking his eye. A neat idea, but frustrating nonetheless.

That’s the combat, and that is the sole focus of the game. It’s great and fun at first, but very frustrating and monotonous early on. You just fight the same types of battles over and over again, and you have the same enemies as well. The only thing keeping you going is to see more of the story. I honestly got tired of the side quests and just stuck with the story to get it over with. Another major part of the game is leveling up your health or magic. You can sacrifice or save enemies after they fall by holding L or R. This is a unique idea, but you can be stunned and killed while doing it. Your teammate can fall, and you have to resurrect them or sacrifice them for a boost. Once you do this, you need Librom’s tears to bring them back. They can revive you, thankfully, but many times they died right when I did, or vice versa. There’s also an online co-op to solve this issue, which really helps, but most people aren’t going to do this.

As it is, Soul Sacrifice suffers from constant repetition and a lack of polish. Not having powerful enough weapons, lackluster customization features, and a weak story kind of hurt this game. The graphics are fantastic, but that isn’t what makes a game good. I was hoping for more variety and more of a cinematic story, not a menu-driven battle selector. If this game had more variety and something else besides killing the same enemies forever, it would have been one of Vita’s best games.

The Last Zombie

Posted by BinaryMessiah on 08/20/2013

Posted in: Comics, Other. Tagged: comic, dead new world, the last zombie. Leave a comment

Zombie entertainment is a dime a dozen and has been since the 1980s. The Last Zombie is an interesting inside story of the zombie apocalypse, with a small team of US soldiers and two scientists. They need to make it across the country to find one of the scientists’ wives and see what’s out there while they are at it. They have a tank and an APC and have to stand up to anything they come across. The problem is that the zombies have been dying off and are becoming more sporadic. This leads to the idea that the virus is gone and is no longer around. The problem is that this team needs to worry about living humans more than zombies.

There are some unique additions here, such as a surviving tribe of lepers and a bandit group that robs anyone they come across. The story takes quite a while to build up, and the first two issues aren’t all that interesting. I honestly couldn’t really connect to any of the characters, but you definitely feel the tension between them, which is what matters. The last comic is the best one, with everything going to complete crap and finding out the twist ending to this mini-series. At the end of each comic, there are little mini-stories ranging from a little zombie boy and how misunderstood he is to WWII Nazi zombie adventures. It’s fun to see a little mini-story at the end, but they could have filled it with more of the main story instead. The art is also in black and white, which I didn’t really like. I know it is trying to be atmospheric (or cheap?) but some color would have been nice. It’s really hard to distinguish one army soldier from the other because they all look the same, and half the time I didn’t know who was talking.

As I said, the first 3 issues are kind of boring, and the last 2 are great. The encounter with the leper colony and the fight out with the highwaymen are great, and the little twists that pop up are entertaining. The Last Zombie has a lot of potential, and I can’t wait to see what’s in store. It really does take a different approach to the zombie apocalypse in a unique way.

Assassin’s Creed: Director’s Cut Edition – 5 Years Later

Posted by BinaryMessiah on 08/20/2013

Posted in: PC Reviews, Steam Deck Playable, Steam Deck Verification. Tagged: action, adventure, altair, assassin, assassin's creed, crusades, director's cut edition, directx 10, pc, steam, ubisoft. Leave a comment

Publisher: Ubisoft

Developer: Ubisoft Montreal

Release Date: 4/8/2008

Available Exclusively On

Nothing is true. Everything is permitted. This is a saying heard throughout Assassin’s Creed, and it really sticks with you. So does the thick plot that has come to take the game industry by storm, as well as one of the greatest game characters of all time: Altair. The plot is actually weird at first because it’s a sci-fi story. You are actually Desmond Miles, captured by modern-world Templars. They stick you in an animus and use your DNA to access your ancestor’s memories to find the Piece of Eden, which can be used to control people’s minds. That one ancestor is Altair, set during the crusades. The second story is of Altair, who ends up losing his rank and status among the Assassin Brotherhood by failing a mission due to his eagerness and stupidity. Your master, Al Mualim, sends on special missions to assassinate key leaders throughout the holy land (Acre, Jerusalem, and Damascus) to keep them from taking the Piece of Eden and using it to win the war.

As you can see, the plot is very interesting, with a lot of twists. How is the game, though? You have a huge open world that is full of side missions and hundreds of buildings to climb. Assassin’s Creed has a parkour climbing system as well as a puppeteering system. You control each of Altair’s limbs in two different states. The “socially acceptable” state allows you to use eagle vision, which can show enemies and key targets. You can gently push people away from you, and this is key because if you’re running around the city knocking people over, the guards will come after you, and towards the end of the game, everyone is highly suspicious of you, and just a few people knocked over will have the entire guard on your tail. The third thing is obviously combated, but if you hold down the run button, you start climbing buildings, grabbing people to toss them, and jumping around.

Assassin’s Creed really tried to introduce crowd psychology into the game, and it works here but does feel limited. If you climb buildings, people will react by stopping, staring, and saying things accordingly. If you use ladders, people don’t mind so much. While using rooftops is faster and keeps you away from most guards, you must watch out for guards on rooftops who will shoot you with arrows if you don’t get down, kill them, or move away quickly. The climbing works well enough, but there are some control issues, clipping issues, and other issues with the camera. When Altair is facing a different way than the camera, he will jump in his direction instead of the way you’re telling him to. Also, if you run around a pole or near a crate, he’ll start climbing it instead of just jumping over or going around. This can get downright frustrating when you are running away from a dozen guards and trying to find a hiding spot.

The game also introduces anonymity via a symbol near your health bar, which stays white when no one suspects you but will turn yellow when you are watched and flash red when guards are on you. When it does this, get away quickly or kill whoever is watching you. Don’t just kill out in the open, or people will run around screaming and calling guards. Get away from dead bodies quickly because guards will come by and try to find out who killed them, or citizens will give you away. If you are caught, you need to kill all guards after you or hide. To do this, you must break their line of sight, and the symbol will flash yellow. When it does find a hiding spot quickly, it turns red again. You can hide on benches between people, on stacks of hay, in groups of monks praying, or on draped boxes on rooftops. Stay there for a few seconds, and you will be anonymous again. You can avoid all this chaos by just jogging, staying calm, not flailing around and jumping around like a monkey in crowded areas, etc.

This whole crowd system is really something else and works well, but it feels repetitive and predictable because of the recycled sayings and animations, and it always happens the same way. The combat is the same way because, while you can gain new abilities, it feels like a counter-festival. You can attack with a sword or short sword and throw daggers, but most guards always block, so you just stand there with the block button held down and wait for someone to attack and then counter, which is usually an instant kill. This gets repetitive, and the combat isn’t as deep as it could be since combos are limited and animations are repeated often. It does control well and feels smooth, so I guess that’s better than broken.

The most repetitive thing and the game’s biggest flaw are the constantly repeated missions that repeat dozens and dozens of times. You can save citizens, do some time-trial flag gathering missions, escort missions, assassination missions (probably the most fun), interrogation, eavesdropping, pickpocketing, and climbing tall buildings to find viewpoints to put more missions on your map in that area. Sure, they are fun at first, but after you have saved the 30th citizen or climbed the 50th building, it gets old, and you just want it to end. Some more mission diversity would have been nice.

While it’s cool to be an assassin, sneaking up behind a guard and shoving a punch dagger in his gut and then running away while he falls to the ground without anyone suspecting otherwise is satisfying, and you must look good doing it too. Assassin’s Creed looks amazing, even today, and the PC version sports DirectX 10 graphics with some slightly higher resolution textures. The game looks a lot better than console versions and is well worth another play-through just for that alone. While the graphics are amazing technically and artistically, the game feels very Middle Eastern, with a great soundtrack to support that and voice acting, and the whole game feels true to its time. The architecture is great, as are the clothing, lifestyles, and jobs people do in the game, but it all kind of looks the same with a lot of grays, browns, and whites.

Overall, Assassin’s Creed is an amazing experience with a story you will talk about long after you finish the game, great crowd simulation, and the true feeling of being an assassin. If there was some more mission diversity, visual diversity, and smoother controls, the game would be perfect. This is a game you cannot miss, and every gaming fan should play it.

Reviewed On

Xbox 360 Controller for Windows

Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty HD

Posted by BinaryMessiah on 08/20/2013

Posted in: Microsoft, PlayStation 3, PlayStation Vita, Retro Consoles, Sony, Xbox 360. Tagged: hd, hideo kojima, konami, metal gear solid 2, mgs, playstation, ps2, ps3, sons of liberty, Sony, stealth action, vita. Leave a comment

Publisher: Konami

Developer: Bluepoint/Armature

Release Date: 8/21/2012

Available On

This game kind of haunted me growing up. Everyone was raving about it; it was always rented out at Blockbuster. I saw commercial after commercial for it but never understood it. I finally bought it when it was in the bargain bin years after its release and was still too young to understand the game. It was confusing, and I didn’t have the patience for stealth games. Now that the HD version has been released, I figured I would give it another go. The game is fantastic, has a memorable story and some of the best stealth action out there, and holds up well for today. Honestly, if this game had current graphics, you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.

The game is made up of two chapters, one on a tanker and one on Big Shell. The tanker section is the shortest, and this is the only time you play as Snake. You are introduced to the basic controls and gameplay, which is pretty simple. The controls are a bit hard to get used to and aren’t planned out very well, but they work. The whole point is to get to your objective without being seen. You can knock out guards through the melee, drag their bodies into lockers to hide them, use tranqs, or just plain old head shoot them with a silenced pistol. This stuff isn’t just handed to you, though; you have to go find these weapons. The game also has exploration elements, but this can really frustrate some people because you have to use a lot of trial and error to get through some spots and find out where to go. The level design is really great, though, and each section is small enough to memorize very quickly. If you die, you restart that one section instead of going back away. I really liked this a lot, and you are allowed to save anywhere you want. The stealth elements really take getting used to and feel stiff in spots. You can’t kneel and walk at the same time. If you crouch and move forward, you go into a crawl. You can hang from ledges with a stamina meter, go into first-person mode for accuracy, climb boxes, etc. This all adds up to being tools to use for the stealth experience. How you use them determines how well you get through each section.

Each section is completely different, but you can’t just run around killing everything. There are guards that have to check in every minute or so, and if you knock them out and they don’t respond, a response team will come check it out. If you are spotted, your radar disappears, and you have to go into a cool-down mode while the enemy searches for you. The AI is great in this game, and you can really tell how far ahead the game was for its time. It gives you a sense that you can’t screw around, you can’t exploit the AI, and you can’t exploit the levels; you just have to do things the right way. You have to memorize enemy patrols, figure out where the cameras are placed, use chaff grenades, hide in boxes, etc. Don’t worry, though; there is some action in the game in the form of great bosses.

Fighting Vamp, Olga, Metal Gear RAYs, and a Harrier II are all exciting. The bosses are great, and you can tell they don’t make them like they used to. Health slowly widdles down; you have to stay on your toes, and healing items aren’t thrown at you constantly. You have to memorize the enemy’s moves and patterns and then find what weapons work the best. The Metal Gear RAY fight is extremely tough, yet somehow very fun. You have to constantly dodge and roll, quickly switch to the first person, and then roll around again. Using the high-frequency blade uses the right analog stick to swing the blade around, which was very unique at the time. The game is highly cinematic and was probably the most cinematic game ever made at the time. One thing I have to mention is the long-cut scenes. They can be over 10 minutes long toward the end. You will go through real-time cutscenes and then 5 minutes of radio dialog. It’s not necessarily boring, but the ADD in you will want to do something else while you listen.

Metal Gear Solid is also known for extras that are hidden from fans. Things like Zone of the Enders boxes and posters, strange little things that you can do that will trigger dialog from your radio—these things aren’t really seen these days. Most developers don’t put the time or effort into doing these things, even though a select few will only see them. Most people may not care, but I like seeing little, hidden Easter eggs everywhere. This game will only be enjoyed by the patient, though. Running around everywhere trying to kill everything isn’t going to work in this game, but I did hate the lack of direction. If you don’t know any better or check the FAQ, you will run around aimlessly, not knowing what to do. Especially when you try to disarm the bombs in Shell 1. There are quite a few, and each bomb is tough to get to. Half of them I just couldn’t find, and the other half was a pain to get to. If the game had a bit more guidance, it would pretty much be perfect, and don’t forget the weird controls.

As it stands, MGS2 is one of the greatest games of all time for a reason: it’s a perfect symphony of story, cinematics, stealth action, action, great boss fights, pacing, and character development. The HD upgrade for Vita and PS3 adds texture filtering, some aliasing, and even some reworked textures. It looks very smooth and crisp, but still looks dated. If you can look past all that, you are in for one great game.

Reviewed On

Rule of Rose – 7 Years Later

Posted by BinaryMessiah on 08/19/2013

Posted in: PlayStation 2, Retro Consoles, Sony. Tagged: atlus, horror, japanese, playstation, ps2, rule of rose. Leave a comment

Publisher: Atlus

Developer: Punchline

Release Date: 9/12/2006

Available Exclusively On

This is a very hard game to review. I wanted to like this game so bad, and it had so much potential. The beginning cutscene is disturbing, and the excellent and eerie soundtrack playing out is fantastic. It starts out like a Silent Hill game with the gritty film grain and the dark atmosphere. I honestly can’t tell you what the story is about because it is never explained at all. Even at the very end, I didn’t know who the bad guy was, why I was doing all this, or who was what. I can tell you that you get dumped off at an orphanage via bus with your little brother Joshua. You walk up to the creepy orphanage, and you immediately know something’s not right. Kids with paper bags over their heads are beating something bloody in a canvas sack. You sneak around to the back, and after a few cutscenes, you realize you’re running errands for this creepy child, but the purpose is never explained.

Once you start playing for a while, you will notice many of this game’s flaws. There’s no map and no sense of direction. You will get lost and not know where the hell to go through the whole game. For most of the game, you are wandering from room to room looking for items for your dog Brown to find. He will sniff these items out and find the next item for you, and you just follow him. If it weren’t for this, the entire game would be broken exploration-wise. Like Silent Hill, there are many secrets in the game, but you won’t care about them. The airship that you wander around is so big and confusing. Each room and hallway look the same, and you can’t tell where you are going even if you memorize it. Some parts become familiar because you go through them over 50 times during the game. I also didn’t even know why I was on an airplane! Nothing made a lick of sense through the whole game.

Let’s start with combat; it sucks big time. Holding R1 will put you in ready mode, and X will swing. This would be great if you moved more than a centimeter so you could go in for a kill. Enemies will knock you down, and you will go through a long and grueling recovery animation only to get knocked over again. There are very few healing items around unless you have Brown sniffing out items like ribbons and socks to bring to the Aristocrat Club to be exchanged for healing items. What’s the Aristocrat Club? I have no idea, but it’s just there. There are three boss fights in the entire game, and they are annoying because the combat is slow, sluggish, and cumbersome in this game. I can’t express it enough. If that’s not bad enough, running around trying to find all these damn items will give you a headache. After you find them, you just drop them because they are no longer needed. Your inventory is constantly cluttered with useless crap that you just end up dropping. Why have this mechanic?!

The game itself is very short, running about 7-8 hours if you follow a walkthrough step by step. If not, you probably won’t even finish this game. I also have to comment on the controversy surrounding the game; there’s nothing all that bad in here. There were claims of the girls being molested in cutscenes, but the worst I saw was an old guy rubbing a girl’s head and her arms a lot. There are no rape scenes; nothing is even sexually provocative. The game is very bloody and downright sick and twisted, but nothing on the other spectrum.

Apart from that, the game had a lot of potential. The atmosphere is there, and it’s pretty scary at times and very disturbing. I just wish I knew what the hell was going on. The story is completely convoluted and doesn’t go anywhere; you can’t make a single bit of sense of it. The combat is atrocious, and the lack of direction and the constant backtracking will make 99% of players quit early on. I really wanted to love this game, but as I got through each hour, the score kept dropping in my head, and the reasons why were piling up. If you are really curious, I would pick it up at a low bargain bin price, but nothing more. If a friend has a copy, borrow it because it is a strange experience and worth talking about with friends.

Dyad

Posted by BinaryMessiah on 08/19/2013

Posted in: Mac, PC Reviews, PlayStation 3, Retro Consoles, Sony, Steam Deck Unknown, Steam Deck Verification. Tagged: dyad, indie, pc, playstation, ps3, Sony. Leave a comment

Publisher: SCEA

Developer: Right Square Bracket Left Square Bracket Games

Release Date: 4/26/2013

Available On

Dyad is a game where you do things in a spiral tunnel. That pretty much sums it up. You are a thing, and you shoot things like the tunnel whizzes by faster and the tempo of the music picks up. Each stage has an objective, such as getting through levels as fast as possible by chaining together the same colored orbs, which will give you a speed boost. Running into these orbs slows you down. I felt the shooting levels were the most fun, and there are a lot of levels here, so don’t worry.

The biggest issues are the constantly changing colors and the sense of speed. It will make some people small or dizzy. When you’re focusing on something, even for a couple of minutes, it will make you dizzy. There can be so many colors on the screen that you get lost in the craziness, and that’s a serious problem. I couldn’t play for long sessions because my eyes would hurt or I would get so confused that I would need a break. Thankfully, the environments vary from stage to stage, and the enemies get changed up.

It’s not as easy as blasting everything. You need to avoid some things because if you shoot, it will hurt you. Some missions just end up being way too difficult, to the point that you can barely pass the minimum requirements. This is all due to the crazy colors and the weird sense of speed. You can see your lane as far as the game will let you. At least you don’t have to wait for things to come up right in front of you to shoot. This adds a bit of strategy as you spin around the tunnel, trying to think ahead of your moves. For a while, it feels pretty awesome to think on your toes and line up the perfect path for the highest score. There’s really nothing much else to say here; you have to play it to see how fun it can be. This game isn’t for everyone, though; if you are sensitive to motion sickness and flashing colors, I would stay away.

Dyad is a rare game that doesn’t come around very often. While it may slip under everyone’s radar for that big blockbuster title, it reminds us how simpler games can still be fun. The action can be too hectic and can get lost in the ocean of rainbow colors swirling around the screen, but there are plenty of levels here to keep you busy and a great soundtrack to listen to.

Reviewed On

Xbox 360 Controller for Windows

Virtua Tennis 4

Posted by BinaryMessiah on 08/18/2013

Posted in: Microsoft, Microsoft Consoles, Nintendo, Nintendo Consoles, PC Reviews, PlayStation 3, PlayStation Vita, Retro Consoles, Sony, Steam Deck Unknown, Steam Deck Verification, Wii, Xbox 360. Tagged: Microsoft, playstation, ps3, Sega, Sony, sports, tennis, virtua tennis 4, Xbox 360. Leave a comment

Publisher: Sega

Developer: Sega

Release Date: 6/24/2011

Available On

First off, I’m not a tennis fan. I just like playing the occasional game, such as Hot-Shot Tennis. I just like the competition and the strategy behind it. You need to trick the player into going where you want so you can set them up for failure (or, at least, I think that’s how you play tennis). I don’t know! I’m not a pro player! Secondly, Virtua Tennis 4 isn’t the best tennis game I have ever played; it’s very dull and lacks any excitement or flair. It doesn’t need to be a crazy arcade-type game, but give us more than just green, two players, and a ball.

The game is very confusing to start. The career mode is pretty lame, and I didn’t like it. You move around a world map with a piece of paper and markers. You get random move cards instead of dice. Some spots are for training; others are clothing shops, tournaments, face-offs, and various other things. Every time you get into a match, whether it’s for training or not, your condition decreases, and this apparently affects how you perform. I honestly didn’t notice a difference, or the AI was just so bad that it didn’t affect anything. This board game idea is nice, but it’s so dull. The menus look like absolute crap and are flat and lifeless. There’s no tutorial on how to play, and each move pretty much felt the same. The only one that felt different was the lob.

During a match, I felt every player played the same. You serve with a power meter, and I could never figure out where my ball was going. Some sort of reticle on the ground would have been nice. I would smack the ball for 10 minutes, and nothing would happen. It was so hard to trick the AI into doing what you wanted, and it took so long. I wound up losing match after match trying to outbeat the AI; otherwise, I was stuck in an endless volley. The matches themselves, outside of swinging, are boring. There’s no commentary, the characters look horrible, the pros don’t look like their real-life counterparts, and the graphics look about 5–6 years old.

I understand this is supposed to be a tennis sim, but you can still make it fun. Even after playing 10 tournaments, I still didn’t unlock any new clothes; my character was taking forever to level up, and it just felt like the same thing every freaking match. It felt like it would never end. During career mode, the stupid reps and managers would pop up with lifeless dialog that you just didn’t care about. The only real way to go is multiplayer, but no one is playing online at all. I just feel that the game is a huge, boring mess with terrible AI and lifeless characters. The controls respond pretty well, but I didn’t feel a difference between any of the hits. The game could have been so much more. As it stands, this is the worst tennis game I have ever played. Even major tennis fans will be disappointed in this lifeless borefest.