Category — reviews

Reviews: Metacritic 73%| Game Rankings 77%
Reference: Achievements|
Walkthrus:  WikiCheats | GameFAQ   | Mahalo
Developers: Konami | Double Helix Games
Genre: survivor – horror
Status: Abandoned after escaping hospital

As explained in my “Video Game-induced Nausea, Dizziness and Headaches” post, I had to abandon Silent Hill Homecoming due to nausea caused by the inability to invert the Y-axis.

It came as a shock to me that, while there is an option to invert the Y-axis when shooting, Silent Hill Homecoming does not give you the player the option to invert the Y-axis when walking around, fighting or doing anything else in the game. This is extremely rare in modern video games.

A quick Google search to see if there is a patch, cheat code or some other way  to rectify the situation yields posts like this one and flame wars like this one. It seems that Konami is aware of the issue and just doesn’t care. No patch is available and none is in the works. It’s truly bizarre that Konami does not provide an across-the-board option to invert the Y-axis in a major title such as Silent Hill. This is a standard option in virtually every console game that comes out these days.

The upshot for me - the game was unplayable. I tried. I killed some nurses and critters, got a couple achievements and made it out of the hospital. But 25 minutes of playing without inversion made me too dizzy and nauseous to continue. FYI, the game also suffers from reliance on quick time events – which I detest.

Thank goodness this was a rental. Back it goes.

Tags: inversion, nausea, quick time, silent hill

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Reviews: Metacritic 73%| Game Rankings 72% | zero punctuation
Reference: Achievements|
Walkthrus: Mahalo |  WikiCheats | GameFAQ  
Developers: Pandemic Studios | Pi Studios
Genre: Third person shooter
Status: Abandoned after first level

As a shooter fan, I was looking forward to Mercenaries 2: World in Flames. Unfortunately, I had to abandon it after the first level due to nausea. 

Mercenaries 2: World in Flames was fun – as far as I got. Nothing spectacular, but some good old-fashioned sand-boxy, shooter fun.

I unintentionally ended up playing the hottie female character, Jennifer Mui, pictured to the right. I’m not sure how that happened because I didn’t necessarily intend to pick her. But she was fun to play nonetheless

The weapons were fun, the controls were responsive, the vehicles were enjoyable. I liked the tracer-bullet effects (would like to see that in more shooters). The sounds were realistic. The collecting cash bit was a bit cheeky. It looked like it was going to be a fun romp.

But, within minutes of starting, that old-familiar dizziness, headachy feeling that, in me, leads to nausea, reared its ugly head, forcing me to stop playing an otherwise enjoyable game.

It’s been awhile since nausea (in this case for the x-factor reason) forced me to stop playing a game. Having also been forced to also stop playing Silent Hill Homecoming due to nausea (caused for a different reason), I decided to write this “Video Game-induced Nausea, Dizziness and Headaches” post.

I hope those with stronger stomachs/heads enjoy Merc 2.

Tags: mercenaries, nausea, pandemic, pi

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  (3.5/5) 
Reviews: Metacritic 72%| Game Rankings 72%  | zero punctuation
Reference: Achievements|
Walkthrus: Mahalo |  WikiCheats | GameFAQ  
Developer: Lucas Arts Genre: Action-Adventure
Engine: Ronin, DMM, Havok and Euphoria

Pros: engaging story – music – excellent auto-save points – genuinely fun – first rate physics – achievable achievements – fair

Cons: some camera issues – use of quick-time controls – boss battles – no co-op or online modes – corridor corralling

Fun

Simply put, for action-adventure fans, Star Wars: Force Unleashed (SWFU) is a fun game, with a nice difficulty ramp, good auto-save points and challenging for players at all skill levels.  The primary gaming mechanic are force powers similar to the telekinesis powers in Deus Ex: Invisible War  While a tad glitchy, the game was generally solid. Unlike so many other games, (except for the star destroyer boss battle discussed below) I didn’t feel cheated by silly gimmicks to prolong game-play or artificially make the game more challenging. It was generally all-round good fun.

Star Wars Story Between Episodes III and IV

Star Wars fans will enjoy the story. It is a reasonably immersive, entertaining and well told story about Darth Vader’s apprentice, Starkiller and his love interest Juno Eclipse. The story takes place between Episodes III and IV of the Star Wars series. However, it wasn’t a ‘bridge’ between the two episodes as I had been lead to believe. It was more or less an irrelevant side-story (much in the way the Enter the Matrix game was an engaging side story to the Matrix Trilogy) involving some of the familiar Star Wars characters (Darth Vader, Princess Leia (using Carrie Fisher’s likeness but not her voice), Senator Organa (using Jimmy Smits likeness and his voice), Senator Organa (briefly using Ewan McGregor’s likeness) , R2D2, Emperor Palpatine, among others).

CONTINUE READING →

Tags: force unleashed, lucasarts, quick time, star wars

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Reviews: Metacritic 65%| Game Rankings 68% | zero punctuation
Reference: GameFAQ |
Developer: Silicon Knights, Engine: Proprietary Genre: Action-RPG
Status: Abandoned after 3 hours

Pros: beautiful, well-rendered environments - user selectable save points - good graphics/character models - solid cinematic production values - good death/penalty system - online co-op (though oddly without story elements)

Cons: no camera control - nausea inducing - story didn’t grab me - too complex for little pay off - too much button mashing - ballistic aiming was poor – too much HUD – no story/direction screen

As a Canadian, with the Silicon Knights development studio just a few miles across Lake Ontario from me in St. Catherine’s Ontario, I felt obligated to give Too Human a try. Plus, after listening to dozens of interviews by Denis Dyack and with all the controversy swirling around this game, I was curious.

I made it just past the point where you have to choose to go the human or cyborg paths (about 3 hours in) where I abandoned the game. I’m generally not an RPG-playing, levelling-up, inventory-managing, kind of guy though I enjoyed both KOTOR and Mass Effect enough to finish them (I similarly abandoned Oblivion after a few hours, though I made it through a good 10 hours or so of Morrowind).

Camera Control Issue

Lack of camera-control is one of my bigger video game pet-peeves. Too Human is one such game. I listened to Dyack go on and on about the cinematic advantageous of allowing the game to control the camera - analogizing that movie viewers don’t control the camera. Sorry Denise, movie-goers are passive by definition. While your game was among the better games without camera I’ve played, every game like this is a looser for two big reasons:

1. they always make me nauseous (Too Human was no exception); and
2. I need/want to control my view to fight the battles the way I want to fight them - not the way a game designer intends.

I’ve only played a few games to the end that did not allow me to manage the camera: God of War 1, God of War 2 and Munch’s Odyssey. Most others I won’t even try. I’ve never managed any in the Resident Evil series for more than 10 to 15 minutes without needing to toss my cookies.

CONTINUE READING →

Tags: denise dyack, silicon knights, too human

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  (4/5) - shooter

Reviews: Metacritic 86%| Game Rankings 87% 
Reference: Trophies - none|
Walkthrus: WikiCheats | GameFAQ | IGN
Developer: Insomniac Games
Engine: Insomniac Engine

Note: The pros and cons portion of this post was written in  April 2008. I am posting this entry on November 4, 2008 – the day I purchased Resistance 2. I have back-dated this post to April of 2008 to reflect the time period when I played the game.

Initial Experience – Pre Rumble

I picked up Resistance Fall of Man (RFoM) the day I purchased my PS3 in August of 2007). However, my initial experience wasn’t good. After years of playing console-based shooters on my Xbox 360, RFoM didn’t feel right without rumble - regardless of its merits. After a level or two, the game was set aside … until …

Resistance Fall of Man – Post Rumble – Ummm…. Good!

In mid April, 2008, Sony finally released the Dual Shock 3 controller with rumble. After figuring out how to get rumble to work (details here), I gave the game another try.  I’m glad I did. I liked it so much I played through the entire game and then played 50% of it through again on the hardest level.

I was surprised and delighted with how much I enjoyed the game. It took me awhile to get into it but was really enjoying it once I figured it out (especially the unique weaponry).

CONTINUE READING →

Tags: insomniac, ps3 exclusive, resistance, resistance fall of man, rfom

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