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• Trailer Review: Bayonetta

  You’d think that with time and experience and the accumulation of knowledge, a man would move past certain things. He’d start to develop more refined tastes that reflect a growing passion for life’s finer stuff. You’d think he’d exhibit a predilection for more metered explorations of the human experience, subtle meditations on adult relationships and history. You’d think that witches who have guns built into their shoes, who get naked while attacking monsters with their hair wouldn’t be the sort of thing that would interest him. Nope. Bayonetta is about as cultured as I’m likely to get. Read More... Posted Apr 13 2009, 05:00 PM by John Constantine with | with 2 comment(s) Filed under: john constantine, trailer review, devil may cry, platinum games, hideki kamiya, bayonetta, sega, resident evil 2

• Bayonetta: Not As Gratuitous As You Think

  Nah, I’m playing. Bayonetta is totally as gratuitous as you think. Sega came to NYC today and they brought Platinum Games’ Xbox 360/PS3 debut with them. I wasn’t allowed to get my hands on the controller, only a guided playthrough of the game’s first stage, but that was enough to say that Bayonetta’s every bit as over the top as its initial trailer made it out to be. It also looks like a hell of a good time. Read More... Posted Jan 28 2009, 05:00 PM by John Constantine with | with 4 comment(s) Filed under: john constantine, playstation 3, xbox 360, devil may cry, platinum games, hideki kamiya, bayonetta, sega, ninja gaiden, devil may cry 3

• Double Dragon in the Flesh. The NAKED Flesh.

  I don’t get to write about one of my greatest and longest lasting gaming loves here on 61 Frames Per Second. It’s understandable, after all. They simply don’t make beat ‘em ups very often anymore. In the realm of three-dimensional interactive entertainments, you rarely find a game that is purely about punching people and/or monsters in the groin and dropkicking them in the face. Yes, there’s God Hand, but more often than not, you have to get your thrills from weapons-based affairs like Devil May Cry and Ninja Gaiden. Even more rare is the 2D brawler. Castle Crashers was a succulent feast for my starving soul last year. Most of the time, when I need to get a fix of beating the ever-loving hell out of semi-defenseless sprites, I need to go back to the well of yesteryear. I need to fire up the Saturn for a little Dungeons and Dragons: Shadow Over Mystara. When I’m feeling especially punchy, I’ll even indulge in a smattering of Maximum Carnage on Super Nintendo. And, of course, there’s always a time for Double Dragon. Sometimes, the only thing that will make you feel whole is making a guy wearing a spandex onesie knee a seven foot tall bald man in the chest. Lucky for me that the modding community keeps reimagining classic experiences like these. It keeps things fresh. Gaming, like marriage, occasionally needs a little spice after twenty years. This, however, is not necessarily what I had in mind. Read More... Posted Jan 13 2009, 05:00 PM by John Constantine with | with 2 comment(s) Filed under: john constantine, devil may cry, double dragon, ninja gaiden, super nintendo, castle crashers, maximum carnage, dungeons & dragons, abobo, ikkitousen eloquent fist, shadow over mystara, god hand

• New Year's PS3 Wish List: part 1

  I was planning on putting this up before the new year started but I had an end of the year computer melt down. Maybe I should add “get a new computer” to my resolution list. I have no idea if that'll happen but I do know what I'd like to pick up this year: a PS3. It took a long time, but Sony's expensive machine has accumulated enough of a library to interest me with quite a few more good looking titles set to come out this year. With high hopes that the PS3 will see another price drop, I present my list of PS3 gems, old and new, to snatch up in 2009. Read More... Posted Jan 06 2009, 09:00 PM by Amber Ahlborn with | with 1 comment(s) Filed under: devil may cry, prince of persia, amber ahlborn, ninja gaiden, ps3, littlebigplanet, top 10, ratchet & clank future

• Top Ten: Favorite Bosses part 1

  The first game to sport a bona fide boss fight was dnd, a computer role-playing game released in 1975. Since that time, boss encounters have become a mainstay of video games. The very best sorts of boss fights are ones you remember long after the game is finished and I thought I'd highlight some of my favorites. Dipping into my game library, it became apparent I had a lot to choose from so with difficulty I limited my choices to one boss per game; enemies that offered up a fun fight, or were hard and interesting without being cheap, or simply scared the piss out of me. !! Spoilers Ahoy !! Read More... Posted Sep 19 2008, 11:00 AM by Amber Ahlborn with | with no comments Filed under: super metroid, devil may cry, amber ahlborn, star fox, yoshi's island, top ten list, soul reaver

• Trailer Review: Golden Axe

  In the grand pantheon of beat-em-ups, brawlers, hack-and-slashers, kiss-your-mother-with-that-mouth-ya-jerk, dick-punching games, Golden Axe is a middleweight. Hell, it started as a welterweight in 1989. The fantasy setting, magic powers, and ride-able dragons and chicken-salamanders were novel, certainly, but how could it compete with Final Fight, a game that let you be a pro-wrestling mayor who compulsively took off his clothing? How could its triumphant trio of sword-guy-in-underpants, little person, and Red Sonja-cosplayer compete with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles? Golden Axe was plain outclassed for its first couple of games. That is, until arcade-only sequel Death Adder’s Revenge came out, a game so gorgeous, strange, and playable that it stands as the best beat ‘em up ever made outside of Capcom and Konami (yeah, that’s right. It’s better than Streets of Rage. All of them.) Right when the series started showing its mettle, it all but disappeared. Death Adder’s Revenge’s legacy lived on in a cruddy Genesis sequel, a Saturn fighting game, and a bizarro PS2 remake of the series debut. Until now! Read More... Posted Sep 04 2008, 05:00 PM by John Constantine with | with 2 comment(s) Filed under: john constantine, trailer review, up all night, devil may cry, capcom, konami, sega, god of war, heavenly sword, golden axe, conan, teenage mutant ninja turtles

• The 61FPS Review: Ninja Gaiden 2 Part 1

  When Team Ninja’s Ninja Gaiden finally released, it was mind-altering. No three-dimensional action game played as well, looked as good, or had its raw scope, and no one in the world was expecting it to deliver as it did. After all, the game had been vaporware for half a decade. Remember when Tecmo announced it as a game for Sega’s Project Katana (the development codename for Dreamcast)? How about when it was supposed to be a Playstation 2 launch title? By the time Team Ninja announced that they’d be releasing it as an Xbox title, I was starting to wonder if the game existed at all. When no screens or video of the game materialized for another three years, it was fair to assume that Gaiden was destined to be little more than trivia fodder. But then February 2004 rolled around and there it was. That month will, in my mind, always be a benchmark in the history of action games. Ninja Gaiden has aged well in four years, its multiple revisions and expansions right through the Playstation 3 remake Ninja Gaiden Sigma proving its foundation to be sturdy and engaging. 3D action games broadly, however, have surpassed it. God of War brought bigger, more exciting environments and enemy confrontations while improving accessibility and even Ninja Gaiden’s immediate forebear Devil May Cry added more depth in its third and fourth entries. Even the lackluster Heavenly Sword took away Ninja Gaiden’s crown as the genre’s most visceral visual spectacle. I’ve been lukewarm on Ninja Gaiden II since it was announced last year. I couldn’t tell what was wrong. Something about it just seemed so sterile, so rote in comparison to everything else hitting the new wave of consoles. Dynamic limb removal is the big innovation? Really? This is Ninja Gaiden II! Time to redefine 3D action a second time! I realize that’s an unfair expectation to put on a game but it isn’t unfair to expect a modicum of refinement, some change to the established formula that utilizes both hindsight and the power of new technology. That’s why Ninja Gaiden II is, initially, so disappointing. Read More... Posted Jun 09 2008, 02:00 PM by John Constantine with | with no comments Filed under: john constantine, xbox 360, devil may cry, 61fps review, Playstation, ninja gaiden, dreamcast, god of war

• Capcom to Date, By the Numbers

  Late spring is always an interesting time to watch videogame publishers. With the close of the fiscal year, companies sit their investors and the media down to talk about how things have been going, what people are playing, and, most excitingly, what’s on the horizon. They also occasionally drop information that is ripe for trivia. For example, Capcom, the publisher you may remember as the one I have an unhealthy relationship with, released a list of all-time series sales numbers for the company. The usual suspects like Street Fighter and Mega Man are all over the list but, surprisingly, neither of those series take the top spot. Capcom’s best-selling series over the past twenty-five years has been Resident Evil, with over fifty games released world-wide and 34.5 million sold. Mark that down for quiz night. Hit the jump for the top ten. Read More... Posted May 27 2008, 12:00 PM by John Constantine with | with no comments Filed under: john constantine, street fighter, next-gen, devil may cry, resident evil, capcom, final fight, mega man, dino crisis, disney, monster hunter, onimusha, ghosts 'n goblins

• Clover Returns, Heavy as Platinum

  While the final months of 2006 were exciting times – the Wii and Playstation 3 were released mere days apart while the Xbox 360, DS, and PSP really started to heat up content wise – it was also a time of mourning. Just after the release God Hand and Okami, Clover Studios disbanded. Parent company Capcom absorbed much of the staff while the designer trinity of Shinji Mikami (Resident Evil), Hideki Kamiya (Devil May Cry), and Atsushi Inaba (Viewtiful Joe) went off to form a new independent studio. Clover’s games were true rarities in the industry, each one an artistic ziggurat built on a foundation of violently colorful worlds and idiosyncratic mechanics. Viewtiful Joe’s comicbook world of an empowered movie buff that found the player manipulating the action with VCR commands, Okami’s sumi-e fantasia that allowed the player to literally exert their will on the world through painting; truly special stuff. That’s why it’s so exciting that yesterday’s rumors about their new games turned out to be absolutely true. Read More... Posted May 13 2008, 02:00 PM by John Constantine with | with 1 comment(s) Filed under: john constantine, playstation 3, nintendo ds, xbox 360, devil may cry, infinite line, no more heroes, shinji mikami, viewtiful joe, platinum games, resident evil, wii, hideki kamiya, psp, clover studios, madworld, capcom, bayonetta, atsushi inaba