I've been playing Mirror's Edge for about 2 or 3 hours now, so I figure I could give it a mini-review.

The Good
- Cityscape is beautiful
- Soundtrack, when played, fits the game perfectly. Has an open air feel to it.

The Bad
- There's not enough good about this game
- Combat is clumsy and almost impossible to manage which would be a problem if...
- They didn't force you to fight in 3 - 1 or 5 - 1 battles.
- Mastery of the moves is necessary otherwise...
- Lack of fluidity in the game because sometimes thinking on the fly isn't possible
- What I've come to call load-kill. Loading at key points can really break up the pacing and kill the intensity of a chase
- Elevators. Did you hate Mass Effect's Elevators? Even Stormwaltz could make fun of Mirror's Edge elevators.
- Hidden QTEs. Remember disarming in training? It's a masked QTE necessary for certain "scenes" in the game.
- Too much time spent inside buildings, sewers and tunnels. Layouts are bland.
- Some things thrown in just to make you use the moves.

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http://www.foddy.net/Athletics.html

Have you ever watched a toddler take those first few halting, tottering steps before faceplanting into the carpet and thought 'Ha ha, what a doofus!  Walking is easy.  You are so dumb, baby'.  Well now the joke's on you, you insensitive prick.  Imagine having a button for each major muscle in your legs and having to press them with the correct timing to walk.  Now imagine that instead of just walking, you're having to run a 100 meter dash with a long jump at the end at the Olympics.  Well, you just imagined QWOP.

QWOP is more toy than game, but so was SimCity, and that did well.  You will inevitably break your avatard's neck 20 or 30 times before you figure out how to even take that first step.  Then you will do so 100 more times before figuring out how to make that first 10 meters.

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I have not played any of the other DS CV's but I have played the GBA ones and this is a significant step up. Rather than using the one giant castle design yet again this game provides distinct levels, allowing for a lot of variety and outdoor areas. It still maintains some feel of exploration but in bite-sized chunks. More action and less backtracking.

I really enjoy the different weapons in this game and the way that you obtain new weapons by absorbing glyphs. Different enemies require different weapons but because you can rotate between three active sets there isn't a lot of futzing around in menus. For the most part the proper set of 3 weapons is more than enough for a given level.

If you like 2D action/adventure games this is an absolute no brainer. One of the most fun games I've played this year.

Verdict: Buy it.

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Well, this should be a simple BiiF.
It's more of the same, but a ltitle better looking and a little crazier. New side missions with only 6 levels of each instead of 8 and the addition of motorcycles are nice. There doesn't seem to be a talk radio station anymore unfortunately. Lots of fun though. Online players are still 90% gangsta-wannabe mouthbreathers.

I'd sum it up this way.



Since I answered yes to the first two questions, my answer is Buy It.

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So yeah, the Penny Arcade game. I bought the first episode when it came out and it was basically everything I thought it would be; an incredibly shallow but playable game driven by the writing of Jerry Holkins (Tycho) and the art of Mike Krahulik (Gabe).

Episode 2 is um, more of that + the ever pointless addition of higher difficulty modes and achievements. Whoopie.

Basically take Super Mario RPG and swap the turned based system for a Final Fantasy style real time system. Tada, that's it. Mini-game button pressing events for special attacks, timed blocks, simple combat. The combat is still boring to say the very least. You find out what your enemies are weak against, be it team-attacks, basic attacks, special attacks, or a weapon type, then you use that until they're all dead. If you're really itching to get it over with you can use some of your never ending supply of buff/debuff/attack items to speed things up.

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Joe (you know, the guy from Waterthread and uhhh, f13) made an RPG with Shannon Drake. Just in time for election day, I say! Yes, I'm pimping it. Having heard about it years ago (hell, having read some of it years ago), I'm surprised they actually finished it. Everything beyond the link here is from the man of the hour. No, I don't mean Obama. I mean Joe. Who really isn't the man of the hour... he's just a guy who actually finished something he started.

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As a long-time fan of the classic Fallout games, my first impression of Bethesda's baby was: what butt-vomit did I just pay for?  It felt clunky, buggy and way too similar to a game that starts with 'O' and ends in "fuckyourself."  Yet soon after I stopped sleeping regularly. And I stopped caring about whether it was or was not truly Fallout.

Yes, this is Oblivion done right.  With guns.  Less fat, tastes great.  If you enjoyed TES4 for what it was, then you will enjoy this game at least twice as much because it has exploding baby carriages and 4000% more needless decapitation™.  VATS is truly awesome--take the work out of Max Payne's bullet time, add some (mostly) well-done random camera work and turn up the number of bloody jawbones flying around.

Bethesda has wrung every last drop of beautiful out of my computer, even shaking off the gross little hairs underneath.

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The Hinterland sales pitch is many a PC RPG fan's wet dream.  Take your isometric action RPG and mix it in with a city-builder.  Anno 1503 meets Diablo.  Sacred meets Cleopatra.  Majesty meets. . uh, Majesty, except you control the guys.  Gameplay consists of running out to the wilderness to kill foozles and gather gold, returning to town to spend the gold on new building and upgrades, rinsing, and repeating.   NPCs can be swapped back and forth between the adventuring party and their town function, though there's little point in taking your farmers and innkeepers out to get slaughtered.  Your party will generally be town guards plus a cloth-wearer or two. 

Unfortunately, the novelty and the buzz from the hybrid gameplay wears off fairly quickly.  It's a little unexpected in an indie game.

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Been looking forward to this one for a while now.  That Warren Ellis worked on the backstory, and his Fell collaborator Ben Templesmith did the art for the comics (watch the somewhat animated versions on gametrailers.com) only increased my enthusiasm.  Add to that the DVD release of Dead Space: Downfall (which I likely won't be picking up), and it's obvious that EA's ambitions for Dead Space go far beyond just games.  Of course if the game itself ended up being shit, none of those plans would matter.  So, having played a couple hours of the game so far, how do I feel the game itself stacks up?

The first thing that caught my attention was how effective the complete lack of an HUD feels.  Getting rid of all the clutter on screen really does a lot to help the atmosphere, and I wouldn't be surprised to see Bioshock 2 copy some of Dead Space's ideas in this regard.

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Submitted by Ingmar.

So, I played through the demo 5-6 times this weekend at Blizzcon. For those of you who are wondering if Diablo 3 is in the spirit of the prior 2 games, you can stop worrying; the answer is a resounding yes, in 84 point blinking red caps with a MIDI hallelujah playing in the background. The core gameplay of clicking on a ridiciulous number of monsters to blow them up for a ridiculous number of fancy items is completely intact. If that's all you needed to know you can go back to cutting yourself while you wait, because I don't expect the game, as fun and polished as the part we saw was, to be on sale til probably 2010.

A few important points:

- The game is fucking gorgeous. Complaints about the lack of darkness are unfounded; the dungeon we were able to play through was plenty dark. I would say in fact that had it been much darker it would have been annoying to play.

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It's something of a tradition here at F13 for us to sit down with Raph Koster of Areae.net at least once a year and accost him with all manner of exotically-themed questions. This year is no different; while we weren't able to meet up at the recent Austin Game Developers Conference, we did manage to get a few minutes of Raph's time before he jetted off to London.

Not as good as 2, about as good as 3, better than 4 or 5. The graphics are 8-bit Mega Man and on the Wii they look crisp even on a 40" HDTV - I stopped registering the 8-bitness after the first 5 minutes. The music is pleasant but so far I've yet to encounter a tune that compares to 2 or 3. The bosses are not as lame as the later 8-bit games that introduced luminaries such as Mop Man and Lint Man.

This is a hard game and flirts with borderline cheap but never crosses the line. Every level has one or two hard parts with the rest being no big deal, and levels are very short once you can get through them without dying repeatedly. Being sent back to the start or midpoint isn't bad when it's a 30 second trek back and it cultivates a strong "I'll try just one more time" feeling. And you can always grind for items to make your life easier if you fail at Mega Man games.

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"Interactive Novels" and point-and-click adventure games have been one of my favorite genres past even FPS titles and RPGs since I first played "Law of the West" on my Commodore 64. Snatcher is in my top 5 list of favorite games ever, "Sherlock Holmes: The Case of the Serrated Scalpel" is in my top 20, I bought the Police Quest Collection even though it was a collection of games over a decade old packaged with a free piece of software (DOSBox), and I own the entire "Ace Attorney" series even if Apollo isn't as cool as Phoenix. Now Konami brings over a new interactive novel with time travel and high production values? Squeeeeee.

After seeing a preview for Time Hollow about a year ago I was depressed since it obviously had way too much text and too high of production values (voice acting, music, video) to get a localization. I was wrong, which is awesome.

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You're Skarin a mighty Viking warrior that everyone thinks is absolutely insane. For some reason or another Freya has decided that you're the best man for the job she needs done. What job is that? Slaying Hel's forces and thwarting her evil plan to take over Asgard/Midgard. I know they're both different places, but it would seem whoever wrote the voice dialogue couldn't decide which one they liked more, so they constantly switch between saying either place. The game is broken up into 3 seperate areas, each of which is quite large and takes about 3-5 hours.

The game drops you into a city without much direction and without a tutorial you're not quite sure what's at your disposal. After much fumbling I figured out what exactly it is my character was tasked with doing. It turns out Hel's forces have captured some of your forces, so before you can launch your assault on one of their base camps, you have to save these men to increase the size of your army.

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From Cyrrex:

I’m probably as incurable a Star Wars freak as can be found.  Does that mean I gobble up everything that LA puts out under this license?  Close, but not quite.  I was excited when I first heard this title was coming out, but I’ve learned to mix in a healthy dose of apprehension.  When I played the demo for the first time, I was “meh” about it.  A second run through the demo had me feeling a little better about things, as I was getting used to the controls.

Enter the game proper.  From the word go, I already like it better than my experience with the demo.  This really is a game where you are putting your force powers on display, so it is immensely helpful that you are familiar and comfortable with the controls.  You could snooze your way through this game with minimal effort, just going through the motions and executing the bare minimum of fancy attacks, but you’d be missing the point.

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