Dead Space 2 plays like the film Shutter Island - except Isaac Clarke isn’t tripping nearly the balls that Leonardo DiCaprio does.

Glitchoris BLUF (Bottom Line Up Front)

The game has its moments.  The first thirty minutes inundate the player with perplexing shadowscapes,  creepy-assed sounds, and freaky necromorphs.  Then the last ten hours basically do the same thing.  I recommend, in order to get the full effect, that you play in short bursts so that your short-term memory doesn’t help you in the pathways.  Because if you sit and play for anything longer than about 20 minutes, the predictability overpowers the scare factor. Continue Reading

New Vegas is like the hottest woman in a room full of relatively unattractive women.  Somehow, we are pulled into her center of gravity, but the moment we leave the room, we forget she ever existed.  Like this relatively attractive woman, New Vegas displays a couple kick ass moments in gaming, but overall, we just can’t believe we stared at her for an hour played the game for over fifteen hours.

Glitchoris BLUF (Bottom Line Up Front)

Play Fallout: New Vegas.  However, I can not in good faith recommend purchasing the game because it glitches too frequently.  Find a friend or lesser enemy who will loan it to you for a twelve pack.

A Story With No Real Main Character

You may have just read this header and asked yourself, “Is that even fucking possible?”  Yes it is.  The main character is us, of course.  But as a main character, we are fairly weak.  We do not develop a coherent set of morals or values.  This is because when trying to be nice, you just get the urge to shoot someone in the face to save about twenty minutes of quest time.  When we become a perpetual dick to everybody, we eventually played nice because we got better things that way.  It seems Obsidian just wanted to point out to us how shallow we truly are.  If that is the case, touche Obsidian…touche.

We just are not a convincing alpha male.  We can’t just go around shooting up casinos to get what we want; we will get our heads blown off.  We can not be nice to everyone, because that has not worked since about kindergarten.  Plus, it does not help that our character lacks an actual fucking voice.  C’mon now Fallout.  You know better than to not give your main character an in-game voice.

When Thinking A Part Will Be Easy Or Hard, Chances Are It Will Be Exactly The Opposite

Scenario #1: Gain good standing with the Boomers. Here is a part that I thought should be relatively easy, and it ended up giving me an aneurysm.  The Boomers are a gang that are good-natured but wholly skeptical of outsiders.  Numerous side missions later, for some reason, I still do not have good standing with them.  So I just found their leaders and turned their heads into canoes before I left Dodge.  Why didn’t I just kill them forty minutes earlier?  This was not the first time I asked myself this regarding side quests.

Scenario #2: Eliminate the Brotherhood of Steel by blowing up their bunker. Yeah, because walking into a bunker filled with heavily armored paladins while all I am rocking is a leather suit and fucking sunglasses should be difficult…right?  No.  You see, I feign interest in their cause, pickpocket all the key cards from their leaders (how they do not pick up on this is beyond me), pickpocket a bunker key, and initiate a crash override to self-destruct the entire bunker.  Then I stealthed out and headed home.

Think Outside The Post-Apocalyptic Box

Thinking will get you places in this game, and for that I applaud Obsidian.  If you just take some time away from furthering the storyline and explore your surroundings, odds are you will gain much greater insight into how to best accomplish this game.  It is an open world game after all.

You may learn how to create better items like healing powders and foodstuffs.  Killing and skinning vermin and animals is a quick way to gain experience points at the lower levels and subsequently give you the upper hand in the later fights.

Plus the sound of the wind and the radio are stellar features.  I have yet to run across a game where the rustling of the wind made me look out my windows to see if the outside tree branches were moving.  Surreal and entirely effective.

If you want the most bang for your buck while not playing multiplayer, Dragon Age: Origins can offer you this.  About 10 hours in, I understood the thrust of the game: unite the races against the upcoming Blight: the undead assholes trying to annihilate the world.  About 20 hours in, I understood there was a lot left to play.  30 hours in, I broke apartment to get some fresh air.  At 37 hours and 32 minutes, I finally killed the damn mother dragon.

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God of War 3 taught me something that no other game has taught me: I can still love a game and hate the main character.  Raffman was right when he said that the storyline is nothing new, but Kratos is less dimensional than a fucking piece of paper laying on the floor.  But then again, I didn’t drop the dough to listen to Kratos talk.  I played it to kill anything that moved.

Glitchoris BLUF

If God of War 3 is not the industry standard today, it will be tomorrow.  Less puzzles, cranks, and levers, and more fun weapons and larger bosses highlight this third installment.  You may not take the day off work to press through it, but you can schedule a solid hour or two a night after your daily cubicle time to release the stress.

Kratos, meet Jules

Remember when Pulp Fiction released?  Everybody was reciting Ezekiel 25:17, and even Saturday Night Live acted a skit where Jules coached a teenage hockey team in all of his homicidal fury.  Kratos always had this style, but he never had the panache of Sam Jackson.  Well, he has it now.  When Kratos face-stomps Poseidon, all I can hear is Sam Jackson stating, “Well allow me to retort.”

It took until the third installment to pull it off, but the devs found the way to match Kratos’ vengeance with superior camera angles.  They do this so well that when the angle changes from third-person to Poseidon’s first-person point of view, I actually thought the game transferred me into Poseidon’s character because I lost the fight.  Then I snapped to reality and crafted a quiet smile.

Boss Fights That Make Sense

For someone who has played endgame for each World of Warcraft installment, you get really used to having to research boss fights.  Raid leaders might go so far as to require that you watch the video of it before you try it out yourself.  Now, that may be all well and good for an MMO, but for a console game, that’s a little out there.  And by a little out there I mean it’s pretentious.  And by pretentious I mean the devs are being pricks.

I should be able to figure out a boss fight in about the first three seconds.  Whether that is through visual or audio cues, I’m a fucking twenty-eight year old with an undergraduate degree from a tough university, almost thirty hours of post-grad work, and I run two businesses outside of my full time job.  I get systems.  I get problem solving.  And I love God of War 3‘s boss fights.  They make sense!  After pummeling Hercules, I take his bear-faced boxing gloves from him.  They are so hard they can punch through onyx.  So an hour later, a giant scorpion descends upon me with onyx legs.  I equip the gloves and punch him like Mike Tyson in his pre-fucked up era. Boss fight over.  No running to the internet to read about how someone else figured it out.

It’s As Long As It Should Be

That’s what she said?  You will be done with this game in a mere two weeks if you play sparingly.  And that is just the first play through.  Of course Santa Monica plugs a second playthrough with bonuses found the first time around.  You familiarize yourself with the map fairly early, and many spots will be revisited upon later times, so you are constantly being drawn in to a second and third playthrough.

An example of a game that stretches this limit is Castlevania: Lords of Shadow.  It’s fairly puzzle-heavy, and at times that can distract from the fluidity of the game.  Not with God of War 3 though.  Most of the time, when you get in a rhythm, you just keep plugging away and reap all the red orbs your body can muster.

God of War 4?

All the gods are dead, so I don’t know what the storyline would be.  But I’m sure Kratos will find someone to headhunt. Rumors say 2012…