Demon’s Souls an experiment in design over accessibility

Demon’s Souls, as you may have heard, is a difficult game.  There is no “Easy” mode that you can play to just make it through the game.  The tutorial is very brief and basic and actually doesn’t give you nearly enough information about the game before it literally ends in your death.  Unlike other unforgiving games like Ninja Gaiden that ask if you want to reduce the difficulty after you die, Demon’s Souls actually takes away half your maximum life and makes the game even harder (and getting back that half of your life is not an easy task).  And if that weren’t bad enough, every time you die you drop all of your experience/money (they are one and the same in the game), and can only recover them if you make it back to where you died the first time from the beginning of the level (the game auto-saves this, so no cheating your way out of death).  Oh, and there’s no “pause” function in the game.  Yes, really.

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Ghostbusters Impressions

I have played Ghostbusters, and it is good.  Better, in fact, than I think the current Metacritic rating of 78 would portend. 

You can really tell how much attention to detail was lavished on this game.  The firehouse and levels from the movie are beautifully rendered, the voice acting and writing are top-notch, and the gameplay makes you feel like you actually are a ghostbuster.  In fact, after re-watching a (sponsored, natch) presentation of the movie recently, I was surprised to see just how many beloved locations and characters showed back up in the game. 

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The Demo doesn’t Kill

I downloaded and played through (a couple times) the Killzone 2 demo last week and I’m still left with this overriding impression: “That’s it?”

That’s not to say that the game doesn’t have some potential, but just that the demo really doesn’t do a great job of showing it off.  Sure, it looks pretty, but it didn’t really blow me away as significantly better than, say, something like Call of Duty: World at War (which I just finished playing on the PS3 as well).  To be honest, it really doesn’t play much differently than Call of Duty: World at War either (you seemingly walk slower and a bit more “loosely”, and they switched a couple buttons around like the zoom in and grenades, but most of the other controls are the same).

And with such a short demo (it probably takes a maximum of 15 minutes to play… which is about how long it took me to get through it the first time after spending several minutes trying to figure out what “bridge” I was supposed to blow up and what “elevator” I was trying to get to), there’s just not much to sell me on why I should buy Killzone 2 if I’ve already played Call of Duty or other recent first person shooters (or why I should buy Killzone 2 over Call of Duty if I haven’t played either of them).

In order to play the Killzone 2 demo I had to pre-order the game from Gamestop, but playing the demo was actually making me question whether it was still worth getting the rest of the game at the full $60 price.  Based on my skimming of some reviews, it sounds like the multiplayer is where the game really excels.  If that’s really the case, Sony really should’ve included some multiplayer or even made it the focus of the Killzone 2 demo, because I think they’re ill-served by the one currently out there.  I actually think the game will probably turn out better than the demo, but the fact that the demo is a Gamestop exclusive right now is probably a good thing for Sony, as I’m honestly not sure how many people this demo would sell on the game who weren’t already almost definitely buying the game (and yeah, that includes the priceless fanboys who will love the game no matter what and are actually upset with Adam Sessler’s 5/5 review of the game.  Wait until they see Edge’s review!)

Jeff’s most overrated games of 2008

Unfortunately, my list for Best game of the year is going to be a little delayed as I try and catch up on the vast quantity of games I can now get back to after completing (for now) Fallout 3 (I don’t want to give any potential contenders short-shrift).  So, to compensate, I’ll just list what I believe are the most overrated games of the year, as I think I can probably do that already.

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Geoff’s Games Of The Year 2008

I’m going to be in Steamboat Springs and Australia starting at the end of the week, so I’m getting all of the game of the year nonsense out of the way before I go.  I’ve always found the idea of anointing one game “the best” of its peers to be subjectively absurd at best and downright flamebait at worst.  So why am I doing it?  It’s entertaining and I think it’s worthy of debate, if not resolution.

So herewith, my games of the year, for each console which I own.

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Obsession’s Fallout

I realize I haven’t posted in awhile, and I do apologize. Indeed, my excuse is pretty lame.  Essentially, I’ve just been trying to relax and enjoy the holiday season, and I’ve wanted to play Fallout 3. Work has been extremely stressful as of late, so my first desire hasn’t gone so well so far, but I sure as hell have been playing a hell of a lot of Fallout 3 lately anyway.

It’s hard to describe exactly the kind of hold that Fallout 3 has on me because it hasn’t really happened with a game in a really long time, or at least not nearly as powerfully and lengthy.  The closest it comes is to something like World of Warcraft, which I certainly sank quite a bit of time into (for about 6 months), but I’m not sure I found it nearly as enjoyable when I played and it’s also probably not the best example.

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And while I’m complaining about Gears of War 2…

Epic actually paid someone to write this story?  Without giving anything specific away, let me list off a few complaints:

• The game borrows heavily from several different popular series including Star Wars, The Matrix, zombie movies, and probably others that I’m not mentioning here. I suppose this is to be somewhat expected, as this is a very well-mined genre, but still…
• There are a few jumps in the storyline that are made without much explanation at all.  You’ll know what your current mission is, then suddenly you finish it and you’re told that you need to go somewhere else even if you’re not really sure why.
• As far as I can tell, there’s a critical plot point in the game that undermines the entire reason for continuing onward.  When it came up, I wondered if I understood it correctly.  It becomes a crucial focus of the game, and indeed, I understood it correctly, but was left sort of dumbfounded as to how this could actually be the direction of the story as it basically made no sense.  If you’ve played the game, you probably know what I’m talking about.
• In addition to this, seemingly crucial plot advances/twists are left somewhat unexplored and therefore unimportant to the storyline, despite the fact that they’re originally played up to seem important… I guess they plan to explain them more later? (Though I believe people said the same thing after GoW 1).
• The dialogue is, for the most part, terrible.  This is, unfortunately, the least damaging part of the writing.

The game is pretty well polished and at least a story is told in a somewhat interesting way.  I don’t mind if every loose end isn’t tied up at the end of a game, though it would be nice if they could figure out a way to actually tell a full story within the scope of a single game.  As it is, I feel like we learned very little about some of the more interesting reveals and instead we get basically the framework story of finding another way to try and wipe out the Locust horde.

Guitar Hero to out-Rock Band Rock Band?

I’ve already bought Rock Band 2 and a significant amount of downloadable content for the original (which, of course, also works with Rock Band 2), but I have to say that 1up’s Guitar Hero: World Tour preview, which gives 10 reasons why you should still get it even if you have Rock Band 2, makes it sound pretty damn good.

Once Activision (finally) confirmed cross-instrument compatability with Rock Band instruments I figured I’d be picking up the game anyway, but even the new hardware for the game is sounding pretty impressive.  Not only that, there seem to be several gameplay tweaks that actually do a bit more to change up the game than what Rock Band has added.  Based on this list and what I know about Rock Band 2, here are what I consider all the significant new additions/features in the games:

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PAX Impressions Part 1

Yes, it’s been a bit over a week since PAX, but since I was still on vacation and still gathering my thoughts, I figured I’d wait until this week to post on it. I’m going to do this post in multiple parts. The first few parts I’m going to basically give my general impressions of the PAX, what I liked and didn’t like overall, and what I would maybe do differently if I went again. In the last part I’ll discuss the games I played and saw there in as much detail as I can remember. I think this will probably be 3 parts total, but we’ll see how it goes. So, without further ado…

Convention Organization

The convention has a somewhat overwhelming amount of stuff to do, which is certainly a good thing considering the number of people who decided to attend this year. But, it is a bit daunting and can lead to some confusion. PAX is basically divided into 4 different parts:

1. The Expo Floor -Basically where all the new, mostly unreleased games are being demoed, as well as other companies booths like mega64 or Razer.
2. Panels/Demos/Presentations - Includes playthroughs by the developers and forums like the Penny Arcade Q&As, the Gamer Dad panel, the Wil Wheaton panel, and even a gaming-themed Family Feud contest
3. Playing/watching games - Includes PC, handheld, and console freeplay, as well as various tournaments and of course the Omegathon, for which all rounds can be watched. Tabletop games also have tournaments and freeplay.
4. Concerts/Movies - Jonathan Coulton, Freezepop and others played, and/or you can watch various movies (or continue with gaming freeplay until 3 AM).

If I’m missing something specifically, it probably fits into one of these categories. In any case, within these categories there’s quite a bit to do, and I think perhaps this is where my confusion came in. I think I went to the convention mostly just to try out a bunch of new, unreleased games. In retrospect, however, I’m just not sure if this was the best use of my time.

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Too Human Quick Impressions

I picked up the retail copy of Too Human today despite lukewarm reviews and it’s more or less exactly what I expected, which is to say that I’m having fun with it.  Here’s some things I’ve noticed though:

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