Fallout 3 Review: A Boy and His Dog
Most of the time when I start playing a game, if it fails to really sink its teeth into me or doesn’t seem that fun in the beginning, it ends up another discarded case on my pile of shame. With my limited free time and the never-ending stream of games to try, I don’t have the patience or hourly resources to force myself to play something just because reviewers say it’s “good“.
When I heard that Fallout 3 received multiple game of the year awards and was generally praised in the gaming circles, I wanted to give it a try. After I started looking into the artwork, gameplay and features — an action RPG with exploration and moral choices — I bought it outright, something I rarely do in this economy.
The problem was that I was so behind on the games that I had, I put off playing Fallout 3 until this past summer. When I finally got the chance to sit down with it and started my vault dweller, I hated it.
In the beginning I was having fun and I thought it would evolve into a game I could play for a while, but once I had been playing for around 5 hours, I started to become frustrated and wanted to stop. The game just hadn’t been what I had expected.
I told myself I would give it until I reached Level 10 to turn up the fun dial (another 5 hours or so). All I can say is that I’m glad I did. What started out as ten hours of mediocrity ended 100 hours later as one of my favorite games ever.
Resident Evil 5 Review: What Was That?
Even though I never had an original PlayStation, I knew people that did, and these people seemed to always have Resident Evil games. As I mentioned in my Dead Space review, I’m quite fond of the survival horror genre, and Resident Evil is no exception. I was particularly happy when Nintendo decided to re-release the original on GameCube so that I finally had the chance to own one of the games.
Over the years I’ve spent a good amount of time familiarizing myself with the games, the back-stories, the characters and (shudder) the movies. When Resident Evil 4 was released, I purchased it day one. I thought the reboot of the series and control style were very ingenious, but sadly, I never did finish that game, and it remains one of the great games on the top of my pile of shame.
After that, Resident Evil fell off the map for me and I continued my gaming life without it. When Resident Evil 5 was announced, I got excited but I also worried that it would suffer the same fate as the fourth game and become another forgotten gem. After being turned off by the demo, I finally decided to give it a shot a couple of months ago. And it is awesome.
HotD: Overkill Review: Welcome Home
Some of my favorite types of games to play at the arcade (as in the actual building kind) are light-gun shooters. There’s something about those games that calls to me when I enter these places that makes me happily jump into the role of cop, soldier, mercenary and even John McClane. That something could be that these games are generally a good time, or it could be that every other game in today’s arcades is crap in a cabinet.
House of the Dead: Overkill brings the light-gun experience to your living room on the Wii. I had already played through some of Resident Evil: Umbrella Chronicles, and even though I’m a huge Resident Evil fan, the game just didn’t click with me. I think RE:UC’s biggest problem was that it was trying to be a good game, and this philosophy goes directly against what light-gun games are about. The reason I enjoyed Overkill so much, and I did, was because it knew it was a bad game and had a lot of fun with being bad.
Dead Space Review: Meet Your Marker
Survival horror games are right in my wheelhouse. Whether that involves fending off zombies in an abandoned house, crawling your way through a diseased town, or fighting off the disgusting manifestations of the characters own mind, I’m in. I love being frightened while playing games.
Dead Space is a great newcomer to the genre, and with it being a Sci-Fi setting, it’s hard for me not to love it immediately. Well, almost. The demo that’s available on Xbox Live left me confused as to how a game that is essentially a third-person, survival horror space story left me underwhelmed. It’s just not good. Once you play the first chapter however, it becomes clear what is great about this game.
Everything.