Review: The Beatles: Rock Band

Posted on September 23, 2009 by geelw

Platform: PS3/Xbox 360/Nintendo Wii

Developer: Harmonix Music Systems

Publisher: Electronic Arts

# of Players 1 – 6 (Online: 2 – 6)

Rating: T (Teen)

Score: A

You don’t need to be a die-hard Beatles fan, hardcore Rock Band groupie or even a blazing fast Guitar Hero to appreciate The Beatles: Rock Band. Harmonix has come up with a supremely accessible Magical Mystery Tour through some of the best of the Fab Four’s catalog and thanks to the stellar presentation, this is one Ticket to Ride that will leave you Feeling Fine up to Eight Days a Week. If you’re a Rock Band fan looking for the game to be a big step forward, you may find Something lacking. The experience isn’t quite the Revolution you’re probably expecting, but after A Hard Day’s Night of rocking, you’ll find the game has its ways of making you Twist and Shout ’til the cows come home.

Continue reading →

Preview: Dead Space Extraction – Bringing Cinematic Sci-Fi/Horror to the Wii

Posted on September 22, 2009 by geelw

Visceral Games in on a two-part mission with its upcoming Dead Space Extraction and it’s an important one. The first part is done: they’ve gone and created a great-looking, dynamically frightening console game designed to scare you right under the couch (while also laying the groundwork for future Dead Space titles). The second part is a bit tricky, meaning it’s all up to YOU to assist by buying the game and experiencing all that hard work put into the project for yourself.

I had the great opportunity to sit in on a live (and informative) Q & A session with a few members of the dev team, who all spoke passionately about the game while dropping a few interesting facts about developing it as a Wii exclusive.

Continue reading →

Interview: Valhalla Knights: Eldar Saga Q & A

Posted on September 21, 2009 by geelw

Well, it took a little while, but given that Valhalla Knights: Eldar Saga is shipping next week, the timing is actually perfect. I initially thought this would be a simple Q & A session with an Xseed employee or two, but thanks to Xseed’s Jimmy (“New Daddy!“) Soga and busy-bee PR guy extreme Scott Fry, the Q’s got sent out to Japan where I’ve the pleasure of noting that they were answered by Kiyoji Tomita, Section Chief at KUROGANE (the Osaka-based team assisting K2 with the development and localization process). How’s that for service?

Anyway, here we go – enjoy!

Continue reading →

Gallery: Adventures to Go

Posted on September 21, 2009 by geelw

OK, I’ll admit it: Natsume’s upcoming Adventures to Go really intrigues me (and a bunch of other folks out there). Sure, random dungeon generators are nothing new to an “old” guy like me. Hell, I remember playing games such as Dungeon Hack on the PC, A D & D Slayer on the 3DO and Dungeon Creator on the import PlayStation ’til the cows came home. Then… there’s that brutal Nethack intervention I went through some years back, but we won’t discuss that in public (“the horror… the horror…”)…

Continue reading →

Review: WET

Posted on September 21, 2009 by geelw

Platform: PS3/Xbox 360

Developer: Artificial Mind & Movement (A2M)

Publisher: Bethesda Softworks

# of Players: 1

Rating: M (Mature)

Official Site

Score: B

The best way to enjoy Bethesda’s new action game, WET is with tongue planted firmly in cheek, controller planted firmly in hand and butt planted firmly on couch. The game is a fun, funky mash-up of cinematic influences – Quentin Tarantino, Robert Rodriguez, John Woo and more than a few others all get riffed on here and for the most part, it works perfectly. Despite the metric tonnage of “grindhouse” gimmickry, the game manages to click from the moment you press START and the fireworks begin. With its over-saturated color palette layered with an intentionally scratchy graphics filter, actual old movie intermission reel clips and outrageous, bloody arcade-style action throughout, the visual overkill outdoes itself over and again as the levels fly past.

Continue reading →

Gallery: Yu-Gi-Oh! 5D’s Tagforce 4

Posted on September 20, 2009 by geelw

Had some quick hands-on time with this at Konami’s NYC press event a while back. Nice anime visuals, deep gameplay, plenty of battlin’ cards and creatures and a more “mature” feel than your Pokemon games, for sure. Fans will be completely enraptured, newbies will be baffled, very helpful tutorials aside. Interesting side note: Konami spells it Tagforce, but it seems to list at most retailers as Tag Force. “Potato, Poh-tah-toe, Tomato, Toh-mah-toe….” and all that…

November 17, 2009 is the release date, so mark your calendars accordingly.

Continue reading →

Random Art: Playing Around With MS Paint…

Posted on September 20, 2009 by geelw

Had a bit of Internet downtime around here a few days ago, so I started playing around with drawing for a few hours using markers for one piece and Microsoft Paint (which I generally hate) for the rest. Anyway, as I haven’t drawn in a while with standard pens or pencils, I wasn’t expecting much, but the piece came out OK. Using a mouse was a bit more time consuming, but I think I did pretty good for my first ever MS Paint efforts.

Here’s what I came up with, in case you’re interested:*

Now, guess which one was hand drawn (it’s pretty obvious, actually) and which were done in Paint!

* These and other works are on my Facebook page, so some of you folks may have seen ’em already.

Agetec & UFO Announce Way of the Samurai 3 for PS3 and 360

Posted on September 19, 2009 by geelw

In a unique co-publishing agreement, Way of the Samurai 3 is set to hit stores on October 13, 2009 thanks to the fine folks at Agetec (PS3 version) and UFO (Xbox 360 version).

According to the press release, Acquire’s latest entry in the ongoing swordplay saga is an all-new Action/RPG that promises a “completely new, highly refined style of gameplay, a rich weapon crafting system, beautifully detailed graphics and a deep branching storyline that that will unfold multiple endings based upon player’s actions.”

With that in mind, here’s a look at the game’s story (click the pic to enlarge and read) and characters (ditto) as well as a nice set of screenshots and a pair of CG stills from what looks like the intro movie. In addition, an exclusive iPhone/iPod Touch app has also been announced – see below the jump for all the details…

Continue reading →

Review: Scribblenauts

Posted on September 18, 2009 by geelw

Platform: Nintendo DS

Developer: 5th Cell

Publisher: WBIE

# of Players: 1 (Wi-Fi: 1 – 2)

Rating: E10+ (Everyone 10+)

Official Site

Score: A-

The first two things you’ll need to realize about Scribblenauts are as follows:

1) it’s not a platformer at all
2) Trying to play it as such will make for quite a bit of frustration

The game is actually a fantastic hybrid puzzle/brain salad sandbox experience that lets you dive in to test your word power in a lot more interactive manner than traditional pen and paper word games. There are a load of puzzle as well as action based challenges that require a bit of thought if you want to see all the game has to offer. If you’re like me (that is, ancient enough to actually remember those classic Infocom or other text-based PC adventure games), what’s here is a bit like those oldies. However, you get to see what you input as text materialize on screen and you can interact with your choices in a number of amusing ways. Of course, you can simply sit back and let what you’re called forth do whatever it wants to do, which in my opinion, is the beauty of Scribblenauts’ design.

Continue reading →

Obscure: The Aftermath Hands-On

Posted on September 17, 2009 by geelw

Way back in 2004, a scary little survival horror/adventure game called Obscure crept onto the PlayStation 2, Xbox and PC, receiving mixed reviews before disappearing from the scene and becoming something of an eBay collectible. The game still sold in well enough numbers that a sequel, Obscure: The Aftermath (or Obscure II, depending on where you’re reading this) was released in 2007 for the PS2 and Wii. Thanks to Playlogic and developer Hydrovision, that sequel is headed for the PSP on September 29 and thanks to their PR department, I’m writing up this hands-on of a preview build. Featuring disturbingly detailed visuals, plenty of “teen slasher flick” ambiance and wireless drop-in/drop out co-op play, this is one game horror fans looking for a wild ride won’t want to miss.