My Top Games of 2011
So this year I decided not to do a game of the year because well I’m not a huge fan of that concept to be frank. I’ve decided this year to do my favourite games of 2011 and some honorable mentions. To be up front I haven’t played every single game that came out in Q4 this year. There isn’t enough time to play every single game yet afford to buy all those games.
My top games of 2011
1. Batman: Arkham City – Who doesn’t like Bruce Wayne. Arkham City is basically Arkham Horror but with the ability to roam the streets of Gothom and experience
the open world in your quest to find a cure and to stop The Joker and Hugo Strange. Along the way if you bought the game new or bought the DLC you’ll get to enjoy a few missions as Catwoman there fun but not necessary in order to enjoy the overall game. Rocksteady refined the fighting mechanics and brawling couldn’t be easier and more fun. The story was very well told the various sub plots always kept me wanting to play. The challenge rooms are back and been updated. How many bad guys can you kill and how well can you use stealth. The real fun happens when you start new game plus mode where you start a new game but carry over all upgrades, gadgets you earned through the first play through and face tougher enemies. Overall I had a ton of fun, didn’t experience many issue with game and enjoyed a well written extremely polished game.
2. Gears of War 3 – This was my most anticipated game of the calendar year. It’s no secret that my love for this franchise and characters is out of this world.
Considering that this was the third game in the franchise. There were a lot of questions that needed to be answered in game and Karen Travis did an
outstanding job putting the story together. We found out where Chairman Prescott went, what happened to Adam Fenix and mostly importantly in my eyes the truth
about the Locust and why the E-Day happened. There was some new weapons in this installment The One Shot and Sawed off Shotgun and the roadie run, cover mechanics
where polished. The storyline was filled with up’s and down’s and cheers of joy and tears of sorrow throughout the game. The end of Act 3 without spoiling it
was one of the sadness moment’s I’ve had in a game and generally brought a tear to my eye, well more than a tear to be honest. I felt connected and joyful that
Delta squad finished what they had set out to do 6 years ago. Horde mode was refined and had added a tower defense element to it which is an unique addition that
makes the player think about what defenses to buy and what to upgrade in order to survive against the Locust. Any Gears fan knows how bad the multiplayer
was in Gears 2. Epic couldn’t just get it right in that game. Epic set out from the beginning to ensure this didn’t happen this time and it didn’t. Gears 3 moved
from player hosted to matches to dedicated servers, no more host advantage with the shotgun!. It’s Gears competitive multiplayer without issues which really
tickles my fancy. Also a good fun edition was Beast mode which allows you to play as the Locust in Horde mode. It’s genuinely a lot of fun to tickler and run
around and cause havoc!.
3: Uncharted 3: Drakes Deception – Another 3rd game in the franchise coming out this year and having to live up to the expectation’s set up by Uncharted 2: Among
Thieves is a really tall order and Naughty Dog was up to the challenge but didn’t deliver on exceeding those expectations. I’m not saying Uncharted 3 was a bad game at all, I’m just saying it wasn’t as good as Uncharted 2. Uncharted 3 started off really slowly for me and didn’t pick up until we hit the ship yard at that point I was questioning why we were in a ship yard and the relevance of these chapters were to the story. I got really hooked into the game once we were at the airport the action picked up, I was engrossed into the story. One of my biggest complaints about this game was the shooting mechanics they were horrid!. There was a patch to address these concerns but I was already 2/3rd’s through the game and I wasn’t completely convinced the patch had made a difference. I really enjoyed how Uncharted 3 ended which was for once wasn’t a boss battle. When Alana and Drake left together holding hands in Uncharted 3 I felt satisfied. I haven’t gotten
much time to sink into Uncharted 3 multiplayer but I have dug in and finished all the co-op missions with my dysfunctional guest writer DartAlbertIII (Scott). I
hope Naughty Dog continues and supports this mode and also looks at ways to incorporate more puzzles into the mix and stay true to the Uncharted franchise.
There were many other great games in 2011 and some titles worth mentioning are Resistance 3, Forza Motorsport 4, Killzone 3, Assassins Creed: Revelations, Alice: Madness Returns, F1 2011, Saints Row 3,Kinect Sports Season 2 and Deus Ex: Human Revolution.
read moreGames of the Year
2010 was a year of many great games like Mass Effect 2, Red Dead Redemption, Civilization 5, StarCraft 2, Grand Turismo 5, and Call of Duty Black Ops to name a few. With a pretty darn good year in video games how could I possibly pick a game of the year? The simple answer is I couldn’t. When I sat down to think about the year in review 2 titles came to my head Mass Effect 2 and Grand Turismo 5. Both games brought me many hours of joy and in the case of GT5 continue to do so.
But before I dive into why I choose GT5 and Mass Effect 2 I wanted to take this time to try and understand how we come to the conclusion on criteria is used for game of the year. What makes a game worthy? is it the most polished, most complete package? is it the game that we had the most fun with, is it the game that left us with the most awe dropping moments?
For me I sit down and thought of 2010 and instantly thought of Mass Effect 2′s opening scene where the Normandy is attacked and my living rumbled by noise of a battle of two ships. I was blown away and knew I was in for a very good ride. I sat down after worked and played for about 5 hours. I couldn’t put the game down but knew I had too. Bioware did a great job in allowing the decisions I made in Mass Effect to be carried forwarded and ultimately help shape some of Mass Effect 2. This was an evolution in the gaming industry in 2010 for myself and I sincerely hope Bioware takes this a step further in Mass Effect 3. I’m going to get into some spoilers here so stop reading the rest of this paragraph if you haven’t played Mass Effect 2. The plot generally involves the Illusive Man bank rolling Commander Sheppard’s operation. Sheppard travel’s around the universe recruiting individuals than goes out to ensure he has their loyalty by doing specific missions for those characters. They ultimately find the collector base and Sheppard needs to decide to destroy or preserved the Collector base. I sat there for almost a half an hour weighting the pro’s and con’s of each decision before ultimately coming to the conclusion that the Collectors need to be destroyed. Mass Effect 2 had me on the edge of my seat for most of the game but for when I was bored out of my mind mineral hunting.
After 6 years of development, a delayed launch and finally a very low profile launch of Sony’s biggest title of the year Gran Turismo 5 failed to live up to a lot of peoples expectations of perfection. This game is far from perfect, from it’s horrible UI, unlocking of damage, and confusing online lobby system when you get down and dirty and look past these faults this is a simulation racing game at it’s finest. Buying, racing and tuning car’s has been a blast. I just enjoy it, no gimmickie rewinds or anything, just pure racing if you screw up it’s your fault. The game has been out over a month and we’ve already seen 3 huge patches to the game. To me this means continued support as we wait 12 year’s (I’m only joking) for the next Grand Turismo game.
For these reasons I listed above I must co-name Mass Effect 2 and Grand Turismo 5 my games of the year.
ModNation Racer’s Review
Ever since the launch of the PlayStation 3 and the inevitable delay of Gran Turismo 5 there has been a huge gaping hole in Sony’s first party line up for racing games. Now that’s all changed with the release this week of ModNation Racer’s which was developed in Vancouver, Canada by United Front Games.
We all remember Sackboy and Little Big Planet the flagship game that brought the whole family together to “Create” levels together, “Play” levels together and finally to “Share” where they tackled puzzles in one of the best platformers of all time. United Front games has updated kart racing to the 21st century as their motto is also Create, Play and Share while keeping with some of the traditions that we all grew up loving in the Mario Kart franchise. Don’t freak out fan boys I’m not saying this is here to replace Mario Kart, this is just a new take on kart racing and I’m absolutely loving it so far.
The game’s lobby is something we don’t see very often, long gone are the menus and say hello to the Mod Spot. The Mod Spot is little track you race around in to get from one place to the next. Want to check out the top karts, top tracks, hot laps drive on over to it. Another little feature is that or Mod’s can enter your track and race around. I’ve had plenty of good laughs playing king of the hill on this little jump in the middle of the spot where all the racers would pile on top. Who knew you could have so much fun before the game has even really started.
How much you want to customize your character is totally up to you, you get a factory pre-set character but you can spend hours tricking him out. You can essentially start with a blank character and design him or her however you want. From the colour of skin, the type of eyes or mouths and then there’s clothing options like shirts, pants, hats, horns and so much more. Then there are basic shape stickers along with layering them allows you create one of your kick ass logos or you know the logo from your favorite movie or game.
Don’t like the way your kart looks? No problem there is a zillion different options to customize it. The first day I looked at the top karts available for download it was a Ferrari F1 car. Honestly, how freaking cool is that? That I can pretend to be Michael Schumacher driving around the tracks like a mad man while dropping power ups on my fellow drivers
When you feel like you’re ready to make your track so you have everyone on Playstation network test out your design skills you’ll have 4 preset themes to choose from – alpine, desert, seaside and jungle. Pick one and get to work by using the right analog stick to control any elevation changes you want. Make it is as high as the sky or dip low into the ground and maybe a figure 8 to boot. When you’re done designing the track it’s time to lay down the asphalt and if you want throw some chickens on the track for good laughs or have the game auto-populate everything for you.
Once your done creating it’s time to move on to single player career which is essentially training for the online XP races or XP series. ModNation Racer’s is a kart racer racer that allows players to race there way around tracks collecting power ups to blow other racers to kingdom come, while hitting boost pads, with drifting and drafting. You need to place in the top 3 to move on and you do unlock items to be used in creation mode. There are a ton of different power ups that feature 3 levels and didn’t features across each level. Drifting and drafting are important as they allow the player to fill up their boost meter to provide them with a shot of turbo or allow them to use that power to block enemy attacks. Getting point’s is easy, blow up a fellow racer or drift. The drift mechanic is really well done and it makes the game a ton of fun. The only disappointment about the drifting mechanic is that if your drifting in to a left hand turn you cant switch that into a right hand drift for the next turn. You need to stop and restart your drifting. So once your power meter is filled up the big question is do you use it for boost or do you save and try to block attacks from fellow racers. The attacks are the typical rockets, lightning, etc and these attacks can be quiet devastating however they can be also be annoying. On many occasions I’ve found my self getting blown to pieces only to respawn and get blown up as soon as I respawn. I’ll talk more about that in the multi-player portion of this review. I also feel like I need to mention that during the progress of your career that AI get’s stupid difficult and can make it very tough for you to progress to the next race.
I need to mention that this game as some of the worse load times I’ve ever seen in a video game. I’m not sure how these got through certification. I’ve gotten so frustrated with the load times I’ve almost quit playing the game. I’ve literally had time to do the dishes in between races that maybe a bit of execration but you get the point.
The multi-player portion of this game consists of playing with friends or for XP. There are only 2 races types in the XP mode which are XP races or XP series. The XP races are fun if you don’t have much time to play but the real meat is the 5 race XP series. I haven’t experienced any issues with lag so that’s gotta mean United Front Games has developed some really solid net code for this game. I’ve had an absolute blast playing against a solid group of players for 5 racers. If you have the chance I highly recommend to hop online and play the game. Like I mentioned earlier you can get spammed by enemy weapons and it’s one of the most annoying parts about playing online.
ModNation Racer’s is a solid game with very easy but deep creation tools. The game mechanic’s are fairly solid and it’s just a ton of freaking fun. This game isn’t perfect it has it’s faults but definitely worth spending your money on. Oh yes I forgot to mention it does feature 4 player split-screen for you family gamers.
read moreReview :Heavy Rain Chronicles: The Taxidermist
The first piece of downloadable content for Heavy Rain has arrived for $4.99 USD. This puts back into the game as Madison Paige as she cruises on her motorcycle on her way to continue investigating the Origami Killer story. You arrive at the Taxidermist and low and behold he is not home and Madison needs to find a way in to the house so she can begin to investigate the situation and create an article for her paper. Madison ravages through the house and stumbles upon a room covered in blood, guts in a sink and a dead body in a bathtub. She stumbles out of the room. I won’t reveal what happens next as its pacing, background noises and following game play are some of the best in Heavy Rain. It’s unfortunate that this chapter was potentially cut from the game.
The issue I have is it’s only 15 minutes in length, very short piece of game play for $4.99 however if your like me and loved Heavy Rain this is something you should play.
read moreGod of War 3 Review
The Good
- Awe Yeah, the combat is just fun
- Stunning Visuals
- Boss Battles are Challenging
The Bad
- It ends
- No Help / Hint’s during puzzles
- No HUD/ on screen navigation
My first exposure to the God of War franchise was when Sony released the re-mastered God of War Collection (God of War 1 & God of War 2) on 1 blu-ray disc including trophies. It was a great first exposure to the characters, story and game play. We all remember the ending of God of War 2 where Kratos was on the back of the Titans while they scaled Mount Olympus in search of Zeus and looking for Revenge. This means one thing and one thing only it’s March and Kratos our beloved God of War is back making his debut on the PlayStation 3.
Obviously the game starts with Kratos standing on the shoulder of Gaia a titan, who urges her fellow titans to climb Mount Olympus and kill the gods for once and all ending the rein of all mighty god Zeus. The camera pans around and shows this mere molecule (Kratos) enjoying the ride. Kratos main job is here is to protect Gaia from the relentless attacks from Poseidon with most the battle taking place on the titan herself. A confrontation with Gaia ends up with Kratos arriving in the land of the dead where he must battle Hades and defeat him. I personally had such a hard time battling Hades the game recommended I switch difficulties.
Next up it was time for Kratos to make his way into the City of Olympia and track down Helios during the course of wandering through the city you poised to help a titan by shooting down Helios using a ballista. This was like target practice, quite challenging at first but shooting him down provided me with instant gratitude. Using the head of Helios to light the way it’s time to head down the path of EOS. Later on you’ll battle your bitter rival Hercules and after disposing of him it’s time to check out Poseidon’s chamber where you speak to the goddess herself Aphrodite. Next it’s time to make for the Pit of Tartarus and look for the Omphalos Stone. Remember Crono’s from God of War 2, he’s back and it’s time to rumble.
After that it’s Time to return to Daedalus’s workshop, escape Hera’s Garden, then head into the hidden passageway to find Pandora and to escape the Labyrinth before it’s too late. Finally you arrive at the Chain of Balance where you must break it and return to Pandora. It has arrived time to Battle the mighty Zeus.
There isn’t a whole lot changed in terms of combat, it’s the same formula just polished up from previous versions. Of course there is a bunch of new weapons like the blades of exile; the army of Sparta is one of my favorites. These Spartan Warriors surround Kratos with shields and spears, these warriors attack those who cross Kratos path. You also are immune from taking damage during the casting of this spell. The Claws of Hades are cool but you have the blades of Athena and I haven’t found much use for them. One of the favorite new items is the head of Helios this allows the Kratos to shine a light and kill enemies. The finishing moves are just over the top, gratuitous, fun to execute and enjoying to watch. One of the big things I’ve noticed over its predecessors is that the level design and the variety is quite noticeable and makes the game a lot more enjoyable. The boss battles are challenging, fun and cross between fighting the Gods and the Titans is a good mix up. I wish I could battled more titans.
Sony Santa Monica has developed a visual masterpiece, the sense of scale of is incredible, the way the camera pans out to show everything and you see Kratos this little spec on screen. One small noticeable improvement all game developers should take notice of is during quick time events placing the buttons on the side of the screen. This draws the player’s attention to focus on the quick time event so they can enjoy the action. The camera, I loved how the camera pans to show the incredible sense of scale, detail and just awe dropping moments throughout the game. However, I wish I had more control of the actual camera at times. I’d love to be able to look out the titans or gods from Kratos point of view.
One of the biggest dislikes in the franchise I’ve noticed and still isn’t rectified in God of War 3 is there is no HUD system on screen. This is more of a personal preference rather than a fault of the game. I am not a great puzzle solver at any game and the lack of “hint” system in place has caused me great frustration at different stages of the game. Sure when you get to a puzzle the camera pans around showing you where you start and where you end. If you half way through solving a puzzle and get stuck why not implement a “help” button similar to Uncharted 2? It’s simple, easy and if you don’t want to use it don’t press the button.
Honestly there isn’t much wrong with God of War 3, the things I mentioned above are small personal preferences I like in games. I understand why there not there. The facts are God of War 3 does what it does and does it better than the original 2 game’s. Isn’t that what sequels are for? Improving over the original games while sticking to the key successes of the franchise and God of War 3 does that well. If you like Kratos, the storyline, the button mashing and the gruesome finishing moves and oh yea did I mention an artistic masterpiece? God of War 3 will sell a ton of copies, hell it may even sell a few additional PlayStation 3 systems. Why would you miss out on potentially one the best games of this generation.
read moreDual Triggers for PS3
I came across these a few months back while browsing on amazon.com, by snapping onto your PS3 triggers they are suppose to replicate what the Xbox 360 controller triggers feel like. As someone who spends the majority of his time playing on his Xbox 360 the PlayStation 3 controller can feel like a foreign object in my hands. Thanks to the Dual Triggers for the PS3 designed by PDP using the PS3 controller feels more natural and has allowed me to spend more time playing games on my PlayStation 3.
If your interested in buying them check out Amazon.com or PDP’s website
