Whilst I enjoyed my time with Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, the game is only around ten hours long, and as such, I managed to beat it in around two days. However, I'm now left wondering what I should play next.

I'm really intrigued by Heavy Rain, but I don't know if I'll like it enough to warrant paying full price for it. Right now, I can't decide whether I should just leave it, or give in and buy it in a sweaty, heavy-breathing-impulse-buy-frenzy.

If I don't buy it, I also have a number of options: wait until Friday for Battlefield: Bad company 2 to come out, play Call Of Juarez: Bound In Blood, which I've had from my rental service since October (!), and haven't even started yet, or I could finish my second play-through of Bayonetta and Bioshock 2.

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X-Men Origins: Wolverine is one of the more recent games in a long-standing series of movie tie-ins. And truth be told, we all know how those games usually fare: from Friday the 13th to Enter the Matrix, 99.8% of movie games are pretty garbage. The other .2% can be counted on one hand - Aladdin (Genesis FTW!), Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay, Goldeneye, and two of the Lord of the Rings games, for starters - and as much as I had initially thought otherwise, Wolverine just doesn't deserve to be in the .2% list.

The game had a fairly decent demo that dropped in May of last year, which actually compelled me to buy the game in the first place. On first impression, the game impresses: it's full of gore, lunging, slashing, and more lunging, and in the first few minutes you rip a helicopter pilot out of his seat and decapitate him with his own chopper's rotors. You then leap from the crashing helicopter, only to plummet towards the ground at a million miles an hour, turning an unsuspecting soldier on the ground into a mist of blood as you make your landing. It's a great start. Unfortunately, poor storytelling, poor combat desicions, and even poorer pacing made me eagerly awaiting the end of the game hours before it was through.

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I've spent a couple hours with F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin, and despite the fact that the HUD is the most annoying thing ever, I might end up finishing it. When I first played the demo a year ago, I had promised myself that I was never going to play the full game, for fear of crapping my pants. Out of fear.  You see, I don't really mind crapping my pants, but my wife hates to do laundry.  I have a hard time with ghosts, and scary things just popping up out of nowhere. The game's sound effects don't help either; I HATE that sound made famous by The Ring, which is a creepy mix between a dog whistle and guitar feedback.  Luckily, a lot of the scares don't come out of nowhere, and there's usually the "everything goes fuzzy" cue right before my little heart goes pitter-patter.

The gameplay itself is standard FPS, although it feels much more loose than I remember.  I'd even go as far as calling it "loosey goosey".  There are a few combat elements that are just plain broken; I never want to throw another grenade in this game, ever. There is a slo-mo feature that turns the game from fairly easy (I am playing it on Easy, of course) to ridiculously easy. It even makes the bad guys glow blue, further making them perfect bullet sponges.

The thing that makes me want to keep playing the game is that it's going by really quickly.  After two quick sit-downs, I'm nearly 25% done with the game already, with nice little 15G achievements strewn about every 20 minutes or so.  The story is mildly compelling, and even though I never played the first game, I don't feel like I'm missing much.  All in all, this is a solid FPS whose scares make it a much more memorable experience than I expected.

Plus, the obscene amount of gore is pretty amusing:


BAM! no comments

I know Demon's Souls is a ridiculously difficult game, and this knowledge has heretofore kept me from spending money on it. Why would I want to spend money on something so hard that I'd be frustrated with it? Simple solution: borrow it from someone that's already finished it. Success!

I jumped into the game pretty well prepared: I've read all sorts of reviews about it, had several discussions about it, and have even sat down and watched some HD videos of people playing it on YouTube. Knowing full well that I'm not the best player of the video games ever, I was ready to die a lot. Knowing all of this, I still was caught off guard by three aspects:

1. No pausing, no savepoints. If you're like me, you've played RPGs resting on the fact that you can always hit the "inventory" button and take a break from the action at any time. Yeah, inventory manipulation happens in real-time here, buddy. Even hitting the PS button keeps the game running in the background. And after an hour with the game, I couldn't figure out when the game was saving and when it wasn't; in the end, I just turned off the game and settled with the idea that I'll just pick up wherever the game left me off.

2. Dying really, really sucks. The game relies heavily on the number of souls you harvest from killing demons. Some baddies give more souls than others, but the highest amount of souls I had at one point was 450. When you're killed, you lose all of your souls, but they wait patiently for you at the spot where you died, and if you can get back to that spot before dying again, you can recover all of them. I did just that, and got my 450 back (plus another 450 for re-killing all those enemies again), and then I died from the same guy again. It took me 15 minutes each time. This cycle not only keeps you retreading familiar territory in order to get your souls back, it makes my real-life soul ache in fear of getting killed by some demon's cheap shots.

3. You're on your own. Sure, the game allows you to see "bloodstains" of other fighters and the last few seconds of their lives in order to learn from their mistakes, and you can leave messages to other players, but at this point in the game's life cycle, they're not really helpful. The majority of the messages are pranks or somewhat amusing insights (there was a message that said "poor guy!" on top of a dead horse), and the bloodstains are full of less-than-skilled flailing (read: just my type of play style). In the end, I felt completely alone in this quasi-online title, and it makes the experience even more difficult.



I never really planned on playing this game all of the way through, because I knew that it would consume me. I would die so much that my play time would be twice as long as that of your average gamer. In the end, my mind hasn't changed; I'll play it a couple more times, but it's just too much for me. I'm not saying this isn't a good game - I'm actually really impressed by how original the gameplay is despite its somewhat derivative story and level design - it's just not for me. no comments

When Bioshock first released in 2007, it was an incredibly ambitious game that practically re-wrote the rule book for game design. Developer Irrational Games took the time to ensure that every aspect of the game was original or innovative in some way - the setting, the characters, the plasmid abilities, the story - all of it was conceived with ingenuity in mind, with the simple goal of creating a unique, autonomous ecosystem.  Like all of the best ideas, Bioshock was designed to be a singular, self-contained entity; a once-in-a-lifetime adventure. By definition then, any attempt at a sequel would only ever serve to dilute the franchise – which Bioshock 2 definitely does.

With this in mind, the biggest problem that plagues Bioshock 2 is that very little of it feels new or inventive. All of the innovation from the first game has been irrevocably lost, and replaced instead by something far more workmanlike. Worse still is the fact that the game feels like it was developed by a talented team, but one who felt that the game was just as unnecessary as most consumers did. It's a pity too, as amidst the myriad of retreaded ideas, there are some legitimate, albeit brief, touches of brilliance.
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I think we all remember The Casting video that was shown at E3 almost four years ago. We watched in disbelief (or belief) as the female protagonist demonstrated a raw emotion that was unheard of in videogames back then. It was a realism, not only in graphical detailing and animation, but also in how compelling and convincing she was. I think we were all intrigued by the conceptual basis of the demo and how it would translate into a full game. Once we saw gameplay footage, we were once again curious of how those seemingly simple button presses would evolve into something plausible. Not only does its idiosyncrasies make Heavy Rain what it is, it takes all of the elements of the traditional adventure game and makes them shine in a progressive and thoughtful piece of entertainment.

David Cage preludes the Heavy Rain with the forward, "How far would you go to save somebody you love?" It may not be the most nuanced question when it comes to modern day narratives, but in the videogame world it automatically sets it apart. It has more in common with films (think Magnolia) than it does with any other games. Don't expect epic fight sequences; battles are fought with sheer will and desperation. Fitting neatly in the psychological thriller genre, the focus is on the characters; father and architect Ethan Mars, insomniac reporter Madison Paige, FBI agent Norman Jayden and P.I. Scott Shelby. All of them are somehow involved with the Origami Killer - a serial child abductor and murderer that haunts the city. no comments

When tomorrow arrives, two important things happen in the UK: Silent Hill: Shattered Memories finally releases, and I, for the first time since No More Heroes, finally get a reason to play my Wii.

For anyone who doesn't know already, I'm a huge fan of the Silent Hill games, and replayed through the entire series (including Origins and Homecoming) around six months ago, in preparation for this game.
As strange as it may seem though, it was only six months ago that I first played the original Silent Hill, and I'm really curious to see how the two games stack up against one another. I've heard that Silent Hill: Shattered Memories is completely different from the original, so I can't wait to play it to see what they've changed.

As the game has been out in North America for quite some time, have any of our readers had a chance to play it? If so, and you have anything you want to say about the game, then feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments section below -- just make sure to keep it spoiler-free though! no comments