I’ve never played a Metal Gear game before. The closest I’ve ever come is playing the beginning of the original Metal Gear on the NES, which held my attention for all of about five minutes before I took the cartridge out and replaced it with Super Mario Bros. 3. Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance, a spin-off of the Metal Gear Solid series, recently released for PC almost a year after its console release, and for someone like me it’s the perfect window into the Metal Gear series.
I’ve never read a single issue of the Fables comic, but that makes me the perfect audience for The Wolf Among Us.
It takes a simple premise and flips it on its side. All the fairy tales we heard about as kids, Little Red Riding Hood, Snow White and the seven dwarfs, Jack and the beanstalk, they’re all real. But rather than living happily ever after, they were forced from their homes by ‘The Adversary’ and now live in a place called Fabletown in New York City, where they live among normal people hiding their true identities with spells called glamour making make them look human.
If you have any interest in playing Gone Home, don’t read past this paragraph. Just go buy it and play it. It’s best played blind, without any pretense knowledge, and gives you an experience that can’t be replicated in movies, books, or other mediums.
It is 1:15 AM on June 7, 1995. You are Katie Greenbriar, just coming home on a dark rainy night from a year traveling through Europe. You arrive at the house, but no one is home. There is a mysterious and ominous sounding note on the door. Where is everyone?
Every day I do the same thing. I wake up and walk to work at the edge of Arstotzka, where the border has finally re-opened after six years of war with neighboring nation Kolechia. I should feel lucky. Thanks to the labor lottery, my family and I have a place to live, and I have a job to support them. It’s not a luxurious position, but I can help keep the borders safe by detaining criminals, denying foreigners with forged papers, or identifying terrorists. Glory to Arstotzka!
If the first Dead Space is a survival-horror game, and Dead Space 2 was all about its sense of dread, then Dead Space 3 tends to lean the side of action-horror. You won’t be guns blazing all the time like in a Call of Duty campaign, but the action does kick up whenever human enemies are involved. Despite this, Visceral manages to balance the tension and action with environments that look amazing and sound design matching what set the first Dead Space apart.
I’ve never played a Devil May Cry game before. I have no context of what Dante was like before, only murmurings from the internet of how he was either a caricature of a superpowered anime character, or a torn, conflicted man called to fight a war between angels and demons. Whether that makes Ninja Theory’s reboot appeal to me more or less doesn’t matter. What matters is how DmC plays and feels on its own, and if it plays to the strengths of Ninja Theory’s cinematic visuals, vibrant design, and developed narrative.
Back to the Future: Episode 2 – Get Tannen
Though not technically part of the Tomb Raider series, Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light is a great example of what can happen when fresh ideas come to a seemingly dead franchise. Available only through download, Guardian of Light takes a detour from the normal experience of Tomb Raider, setting the player in an isometric perspective. High replay value combined with local or online co-operative play makes Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light one of the best Tomb Raider games in recent years.
Mass Effect 2 Review
Developer: Bioware
Publisher: Electronic Arts
Genre: Role-Playing Game
ESRB Rating: M for Mature
Platforms: Xbox 360, PC
Mass Effect was one of the decade’s best science fiction games. It combined RPG elements found in classic Bioware games like Baldur’s Gate with an epic space opera setting that created a galaxy of its own. Mass Effect 2 takes all the best parts of the first game and improves on the rest, taking the criticism and feedback and turning into a game that feels right and personal.
