Playstation 3

Dead Nation Review

Dead Nation was one hell of a roller coaster ride from start to finish. Gorgeous graphics and disgustingly detailed audio contribute heavily to the hopeless atmosphere of the game, and the constant swarms of enemies will leave you gasping for breath after each encounter. Despite the game’s excellent production values and taught pacing, I could not shake a certain feeling the entire time I played the game. At first, I could not quite put a finger on it. But as waves of zombies and special infected bombarded my co-op partner and I, and we were really pushed back against the wall, I realized why I realized that this feeling was deja-vu. To put it bluntly, Dead Nation is Left 4 Dead, only from a top down perspective.

Being a PS3-exclusive game, it is entirely possible that you will pick up Dead Nation having never experienced any of the 360 and PC exclusive Left 4 Dead games. If this is the case, and a top down zombie survival game sounds appealing to you, Dead Nation is a safe purchase. The game mechanics are largely high quality and your fifteen dollars will get you a surprisingly long and intense campaign. But anyone who has played one of Valve’s seminal zombie games will notice exactly how derivative Dead Nation really is. Perhaps this should not be a huge surprise, given that Housemarque’s last game, Super Stardust HD, was essentially Geometry Wars on a sphere. However, in the case of Super Stardust, Housemarque added power-ups and new modes of play that were not present in the competition at the time, elevating the game to classic status. In this case, innovations are few and far between. Sure, you can purchase new upgrades for your weapons in the safe rooms, but that is about the only thing aside from the perspective separating Dead Nation from Left 4 Dead. As much as I enjoyed this game, the similarities often proved too much to overlook.

Majin and the Forsaken Kingdom PS3 Review

Majin and the Forsaken Kingdom is a game of odd contrasts. On the one hand, I admired its beautiful art style, its emphasis on cooperation, and its solid gameplay. On the other hand, poor graphics, awful voiceovers, and corny dialogue mar the experience. This is a game that certainly has its quirks. Look past the blemishes, though, and you will find a fairly interesting action/puzzle game in the vein of Ico or Enslaved. Cooperating with an AI-driven partner may not be the most original concept nowadays, especially with The Last Guardian gathering plenty of post-E3 buzz, but if you are intrigued by Majin’s world, or if you find yourself unable to wait for Team Ico’s next project, you would do well to give this game a shot.

In Majin, you will step into the shoes of thief-with-a-heart-of-gold Tepeu. Fearful for the future of his land after an army of dark, gooey demons begin to attack, Tepeu ventures out into forests in search of the mythical Majin. It is said that the Majin possesses magical powers capable of vanquishing the dark hoards. Almost immediately upon starting up a new game, Tepeu finds the Majin imprisoned in an elaborate series of caverns. He frees the creature, and together they set out to escape the Majin’s prison and save the world. It quickly becomes apparent that years of inactivity have weakened the Majin greatly, and thus he can only access a fraction of his powers at the outset of the game. These powers include superhuman strength and fire breath. Over the course of the game, the Majin will grow stronger and stronger, gaining new abilities that will prove useful in combat and puzzle solving. The change in the Majin’s power level will be given physical representation by the amount of plant life growing on his back. As he gains more strength, more plants and crystals will grow out of the Majin’s back, giving a nice physical representation to his growth and giving you the feeling that you are really making progress through the game.

New Ghostbusters Game Announced

Atari have announced that a new Ghostbusters game, called Sanctum of Slime, will be coming for download on Xbox Live, Playstation Network and PC.  Sanctum of Slime will be a four-player action adventure game that can be played locally or online, and you play as the rookie hired by the original Ghostbusters who featured in last years Ghostbusters: The Video Game. Unfortunately, none of the original actors from the films will be lending their vocal talent to the game. Not too many other d

PSN and PS3 Store Releases for 11/30/10

Not much new content to get excited about this week in the world of Playstation. For store releases, Borderlands: Game of the Year Edition is a re-release of the full game with some extra content. Nail’d is an off-road racer, and Deadliest Catch: Sea of Chaos must be one of the first games where your aim is to catch King Crabs in the Bering Sea.

Gran Turismo 5 (PS3) Review

After what has seemed like an unbelievably long wait Gran Turismo 5 has finally arrived. The fifth installment of the best selling racing series ever still has the most accurate handling physics of any console racer, but is it starting to loose some of its charm?

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 PS3 Review

I typically begin each review with a little paragraph describing the context of my review and giving a little back story to the proceedings. Such an introduction is unnecessary here. In any context, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 is a horrid abomination of a video game, and should be avoided like a plague.

Create PS3 Review

In a holiday season dominated by secret agents and assassins, it can be easy to overlook some of the smaller games. While EA was busy focusing its marketing efforts on the Medal of Honor reboot and the latest Harry Potter game, Create managed to sneak onto the market and steal my heart. Sure, it is not a perfect game. Not even close. But it does have a certain pick-up-and-play charm, and at its best, it is capable of eliciting shouts of victory and high fives just as much as most other holiday releases.

The basic idea of Create is that you must complete set objectives by building Mousetrap-esque contraptions. Like a Rube Goldberg creation, the end result will often be over-engineered and elaborate. The catch is that you are only given certain items in each level, and you may only use a set number of these items to make it to the end, so you will have to think about how best to utilize the limited objects. For example, in one early level you are tasked with getting a package on one side of a canyon through a hoop on the other side of the canyon. In order to beat the level, you must attach a balloon to the package so that it will float, position a fan above the package to blow it across the canyon, and then position another fan to blow the balloon into a spiked outcropping, popping the balloon and sending the package falling through the hoop.