61 Frames Per Second

Browse by Tags

• Whatcha Playing: Earth Day Edition

  April 22nd, the day we all take off from work and gather at our local mosques and synagogues to solemnly pay respects to our mother Earth on the anniversary of her creation... or something. So do your part and take your game time today away from blasting zombies and chainsawing aliens in half, instead playing games all about helping mother Earth. Here are the four games that I'm playing for Earth Day: Chibi-Robo: Park Patrol for Nintendo DS Rather than cleaning up a house and helping with domestic troubles, this Chibi-Robo has been tasked with turning a barren field of sand into a lush flourishing public park. Like SimCity, you get to design your own world, laying paths and streams, rocks and hills, even benches, fountains, clock towers, statues, and mini-games to your liking. The nicer your park, the more visitors it gets each day. You also have to befriend local toys (including Molly Mapletree, seen above) to help you build up your park and battle smoglings who aim to pollute all the beautiful nature you've brought to the park, but the majority of gameplay is planting flowers. It's actually a lot more fun than it sounds, thanks to the charm and playfulness found in all Skip-developed Nintendo games. Read More... Posted Apr 22 2009, 04:30 PM by Derrick Sanskrit with | with no comments Filed under: whatcha playing, playstation 3, nintendo ds, derrick sanskrit, wii, wiiware, psn, chibi-robo, skip, eden, pixeljunk, pixeljunk eden, flower, earth, bonsai barber

• Vandal Hearts Resurrected, Has Terrible Character Art

  You’d never suspect that, once upon a time, strategy RPGs were a rare and beautiful beast. Twelve years ago, you wouldn’t open a magazine and think, “Ah, yes, I see. This month there are thirteen different Game Boy games coming out from Namco, Square, Inis, Nippon Icchi, and Atlus that will allow me to train tiny warriors to walk across a colorful grid to slaughter evil beasts. Oh, look, there’s six more on Sony’s Playstation and nine more on Sega’s Saturn. Can’t wait to see next month’s haul. I’ll be moving across those grids and having fun until the sun goes out, by gum!” It just didn’t work like that. There were only a few of them. There was Tactic’s Ogre, which was made by Yasumi Matsuno. Then there was Final Fantasy Tactics which was, um, made by Yasumi Matsuno. But then there was Vandal Hearts, a dead ringer for Matsuno’s SRPGs that was, in fact, not made by Matsuno. Read More... Posted Apr 13 2009, 06:00 PM by John Constantine with | with no comments Filed under: playstation 3, game boy, xbox 360, konami, sony, sega, psn, Saturn, Suikoden, final fantasy tactics, tactics ogre, yasumi matsuno, vandal hearts II, monster madness, john constantinel xbox live arcade, vandal hearts, vandal hearts flames of judgment

• The Art of Heavy Rain

  We have absolutely no clue what Heavy Rain is going to be. Well, we have some idea, sure. We know that Quantic Dream’s unsettling detailed three-dimensional characters and environments recall the world on its most, dreary rain-soaked day, shades of grey and brown and green. We know that the character’s have facial expressions that dip so low into the Uncanny Valley that they stop being repellant and become entrancing. We know that the game will be played predominantly through quick time events. We know that, if Indigo Prophecy and Omikron are anything to go by, Heavy Rain’s going to be, if not good, one hell of an interesting game. Truth is, we know so little because Quantic Dream hasn’t shown the actual game to anyone besides a small handful of journalists and employees of Sony Computer Entertainment. They’ve shown two demos as examples of the technology and style that will make up Heavy Rain. That’s it. No actual game. Quantic Dream are mysterious Frenchmen, so they are. Today, we can add some new pieces to the Heavy Rain puzzle. This concept art may not tell us a whole lot about the game’s story or what it will actually be like to play, but they speak volumes about its tone. This game is going to be unsettling. How unsettling? Follow the jump. Read More... Posted Apr 06 2009, 08:00 PM by John Constantine with | with no comments Filed under: john constantine, playstation 3, uncanny valley, sony, indigo prophecy, heavy rain, quantic dream, omikron, ps3, scea, Fahrenheit

• Sony’s Xi: It’s Something to Do in PlayStation Home

  Because I am a relatively sane human being, I hadn’t noticed the strange new alternate reality game that has apparently been teased in PlayStation Home for the past few weeks. That would have required me to play Home, a nightmarish exercise that no good person should have to experience more than once. But these aren’t normal circumstances. This is Xi, Home’s first alternate reality game, which officially launched yesterday. Never mind that the point of ARGs is to take place in the real world, while Xi looks like it will take place primarily in Home: I didn’t re-enter Sony’s hellscape of marketing to argue semantics. I went in to figure out if you should chance it too. Everyone knows the strategy of the average Home player goes thusly: 1. Find a female 2. Turn on bubble machine 3. Dance like an idiot until female leaves/turns into fat man. Xi ups the ante on these players: now Home’s sexiest alpha tester has disappeared! So if you’re ever going to find her, to gloriously Charleston with her, you’ll need to figure out whatever crazy, cryptic thing she was doing, as well as the mysteries that lie in Home’s super-secret Alpha Zones. Read More... Posted Mar 24 2009, 03:00 PM by Joe Keiser with | with 1 comment(s) Filed under: playstation 3, joe keiser, Playstation home, quincy, alternate reality games, xi

• Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2 and the Second Chance

  There’s just something about a re-release. Not a remake mind you, I mean a game being released a second time, possibly ported to another system, with a few ancillary new features thrown in to entice previous owners to cough up more cash. Sometimes they just get me angry. Resident Evil 4 and Metroid Prime on Wii with new controls? Why?! You can buy perfectly good versions of those games for half the price and play ‘em the way they were supposed to be played! Grumble mumble whyioughta. That’s just the idiot inside, the natural born fanboy hungry to defend an allegiance, doesn’t matter to what or who. He’s easy to ignore, but hard to suppress. Most of the time, I love a good re-release. Resident Evil 4 and Metroid Prime on Wii with new controls? Excellent! Those are great games that more people should play, glad they’re getting a new lease on life. It is too much to ask that a game be better than it was the first time around. Read More... Posted Mar 17 2009, 01:00 PM by John Constantine with | with 6 comment(s) Filed under: john constantine, playstation 3, persona 3 fes, nintendo, wii, sony, resident evil 4, ninja gaiden, metroid prime, tecmo, ninja gaiden 2, devil may cry 3, ninja gaiden sigma, ninja gaiden sigma 2

• Sony's Trailers Are Graphics Whores

  We get it, Sony, the Playstation 3 is the most powerful of the three current-gen home consoles. You don't have to flaunt it over and over to make yourself feel better for being in last place in sales this generation. You seem to be treating this as a beauty pageant, and you're certainly not in the running for Miss Congeniality with these repeated boasts. I'm referring, of course, to the recent trend of all of the PS3's exclusive AAA titles featuring trailers of all in-game footage. This would be fine, in fact commendable, if not for the fact that they have to tell us, heavily implying that other trailers rely on CGI cutscenes (they mostly do). The latest offender is this one for Sucker Punch's Infamous. It may be all in-game footage, but I'm pretty sure all that excessive blur and reverse time were added in post-production (the slow-down may very well be part of the game). See said trailer after the jump: Read More... Posted Mar 13 2009, 12:00 PM by Derrick Sanskrit with | with 103 comment(s) Filed under: playstation 3, derrick sanskrit, sony, trailer, killzone 2, uncharted 2: among thieves, infamous, god of war iii

• Alternate Soundtrack: Noby Noby Boy vs. Daft Punk

  As John previously mentioned, Spring is in the air here in New York. Coats and coffee have been replaced by t-shirts and...well... some people still have coffee. I've been rocking the cranberry juice myself. With all of this new life in the air, I find myself returning to my summer lover, Alternate Soundtrack, and where better to begin than with Bandai Namco's newest Springtime insta-classic, Noby Noby Boy. As I'm sure you know, because you're all just that well-informed, oh wonderful 61fpsers, Keita Takahashi's Noby Noby Boy is a game all about relaxed play. In fact, the game's title is a pun on the japanese words for "loose" and "stretch," much like how the original Katamari Damacy was a visual pun in that the two kanji were nearly identical, but I digress. While Katamari was notorious for its ridiculously catchy and enthralling soundtrack, Noby's is much more subdued. Introductory tuba and bells clear the path for sedate acoustic guitar plucking. That's about it. Thankfully, Noby uses just about every feature of the PS3's Cross Media Browser, including the ability to play music from the hard drive, allowing you to make your own soundtrack with incredible ease. I found that the game works wonderfully with Daft Punk's Discovery. Read More... Posted Mar 10 2009, 10:00 AM by Derrick Sanskrit with | with no comments Filed under: playstation 3, alternate soundtrack, derrick sanskrit, daft punk, psn, namco bandai, keita takahashi, noby noby boy, spring

• Trailer Review: Infamous

  The media blackout on Suckerpunch’s Infamous is finally lifting. Some very positive, extensive previews of the game have started popping up. Edge’s recent cover story got me particularly pumped. This new trailer is light on play but heavy on ambiance. Still very cool. Read More... Posted Mar 05 2009, 06:00 PM by John Constantine with | with no comments Filed under: john constantine, playstation 3, trailer review, sony, scea, prototype, killzone 2, infamous, suckerpunch

• Multi Multi Boy?

  A new "daydream" appeared on the official Noby Noby Boy website over the weekend. It's presented as a sort of comic strip and labelled "#1", implying there might be more of these to come. That's not actually all that interesting, though. What's interesting is the contents of this "daydream", which I've made into the animated gif seen below. Might this be a hint at a Noby Noby Boy update in the near future? Read More... Posted Mar 02 2009, 04:30 PM by Derrick Sanskrit with | with no comments Filed under: playstation 3, derrick sanskrit, katamari damacy, multiplayer, noby noby boy

• The 61FPS Review: Killzone 2

  NOTE: The following review and the grade attached to it are based entirely on Killzone 2’s single player campaign. Stay tuned to 61FPS for a follow-up, post-release examination of the game’s considerable multiplayer component. Guest contributor Adam Rosenberg covers games from his secret lair in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, typing, reading and playing the days away as his dog Loki looks on in bewilderment. In addition to the noble pursuit of video games, Adam enjoys spending time with fine film, finer food and his fine fiancée Bekah. There may be hundreds of them, but first-person shooters can really be broken down into two categories. The first type of FPS is marked by a strong balance between play, narrative, difficulty and pacing. If that balance is good enough, the game warrants a full playthrough. The other type is competent and even entertaining, but it’s just one more game with a gun. For one reason or another, maybe the challenge isn’t engaging enough to keep me going, maybe it’s the story, this type loses my interest long before the credits roll. Guerilla Games’ Killzone 2 almost falls into the latter camp for me. Had it not been for the demands of this review, I never would have finished the game. I’m glad I stuck it out though. Killzone 2 stumbles in its first half. Unwieldy controls, awkward combat dynamics and an unfocused, impersonal narrative are a lethal combination. But during the game’s back half, everything gels. It just takes some time to get Read More... Posted Feb 27 2009, 03:00 PM by John Constantine with | with no comments Filed under: playstation 3, killzone, sony, call of duty, 61fps review, gears of war, call of duty 4, killzone 2, Adam Rosenberg, guerilla games, killzone liberation

• Up All Night: X-Blades and the D-List Preservation Society

  “We need new pornos!” – “Spaghetti Western” by Primus Les Claypool was right. We do need new pornos. We need new trashy entertainment that borders on the pornographic. It’s essential. No, seriously. Come back. For all my highfalutin talk about the creative potency of games, I relish those games that might be a little base. A little crass. Sometimes, those games are terrible. That’s a good thing. I’ve been suffering a weird fascination with Gaijin Games’ X-Blades ever since it first popped up on Kotaku way back in November 2007, when it went by the name Oniblade. Its origins got me curious. There are hundreds of games out there that, even if you’re a rabid fanboy or a member of the press, you’ll never hear about. Korean MMOs, unlicensed Brazilian Genesis games, and, yes, weird action games from the Eastern Block; it’s impossible to follow everything. There’s just too much. So when something like X-Blades, some Russian paean to Japanese action games, pops its head far enough out of the ground you take notice. Especially when it’s coming out for consoles notorious for exorbitant development costs and marketing budgets. Read More... Posted Feb 24 2009, 07:00 PM by John Constantine with | with no comments Filed under: john constantine, playstation 3, up all night, xbox 360, PC, sega, ds, golden axe, simple 2000, x-blades, gaijin games, southpeak interactive, onechanbara, transformers, ninjabread man, transmorphers, golden axe beast rider

• Where Is SSX?

  Let me ask you a question, EA Canada: must it all be so gosh darned realistic these days? I’ve played Skate and Skate 2. Cool games. Cool games that helpfully reinforce, digitally, that my brain is not ready to take up skateboarding. The sheer amount of things I need to take into consideration whilst performing a simple trick in Skate terrifies me. If I tried to do this in real life, and I had to think about all the different things I was asking of my body, a plank of wood, some wheels, and gravity, I would experience complete ego disintegration right before rupturing my testicles on a railing in some public park. Why oh why can’t you take me back to the good ol’ days of extreme-with-a-capital-TREME sports, EA Canada. Why can we not head back to the mountain for some good times with a new SSX, the awesomest fake snowboarding game of all time? SSX 4 showed up on a few release lists back at the end of 2006, right around the time that the Xbox 360 was ending its first year and just before the release of the Playstation 3. These were the systems said to be home for such a wonderful sequel. Alas, that game was never ever officially announced and has failed to materialize since. A sort of remix of SSX 3, SSX: Blur, came out for Wii in March 2007 and it remains the single most frustrating game I have played in my entire life. Read More... Posted Feb 23 2009, 07:30 PM by John Constantine with | with no comments Filed under: playstation 3, ea, microsoft, xbox 360, where is, sony, burnout paradise, criterion games, dj atomika, skate, skate 2l john Constantine, ssx 4, ea Canada, ssx, ssx blur

• Rite of Spring: Flower and What’s Lacking in the Romantic Games Movement

  Last week was full of everything you want out of a vacation: a change of setting from urban sprawl to glorious mountain range, rancid air exchanged for clean winter wind, great food, better scotch, and the best company. Of course, there was also a smorgasbord of great portable games. Retro Game Challenge, Atlus’ under-the-radar curiosity My World, My Way, and Kirby Super Star Ultra made for marvelous palette cleansers, washing away the last traces of Epic Holiday Gaming morsels still stuck between my gaming teeth. It was restful, brief, and rejuvenating. When I returned, I knew that it was going to be time for 2009 hardcore gaming to go into high gear what with Street Fighter IV and a Killzone 2 demo waiting, but the first thing I had to spend some time with was Flower. As soon as it had finished installing, well, it felt like my vacation had just gotten an extension. The game is exhilarating. Having grown up in rural upstate New York, the contrast of Flower’s city-bound preludes and its soaring bucolic playgrounds pulls at very specific heartstrings in me. The game is brief but I’m no less taken with it. Jenova Chen and ThatGameCompany are damn good at eliciting just this sort of emotional response with their games. Their debut Cloud was rich with the same bittersweet catharsis that characterizes Flower. Both are something like the game equivalent of a symphonic poem, their fluid flight-based gameplay replacing music as the visceral informant of a visual/audio narrative. They’re games unified in subject too; Cloud and Flower chronicle escapes to a pure, natural world from metropolitan confinement. They are concerned with beauty and simplicity. I wouldn’t say that Chen and TGC started it, but they’re certainly poster children for what appears to be a burgeoning romantic movement in game design. Read More... Posted Feb 19 2009, 09:00 PM by John Constantine with | with 2 comment(s) Filed under: john constantine, playstation 3, nintendo ds, xbox 360, psn, xbox live, atlus, braid, Retro game challenge, cloud, façade, procedural arts, jon blow, my world my way, flower, thatgamecompany, jenova chen, flow, Kirby super star ultra, rite of spring, that game company, Stravinsky, scotch is awesome, windows

• Ghostbusters: There Are No Words For How Good Bustin' Makes Me Feel

  Guest contributor Adam Rosenberg resides in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, where he slaves away daily as a contributing editor for UGO’s Gamesblog as his dog Loki looks on in bewilderment. In addition to the noble pursuit of video games, Adam enjoys spending time with fine film, finer food and his fine fiancée Bekah. I haven’t seen shit that will turn you white. The shit I have seen, namely a fresh build of Ghostbusters: The Video Game for Xbox 360 and PS3, will make you green. With slime. And envy. Last summer, a preview build featuring a portion of the widely seen New York Public Library level made the gaming press rounds. The unfinished code appeared out of thin air, its sender listed only as “Evil PR Monkey”. The demo was raw. Very raw. But not so raw as to diminish Ghostbusters’s promise. There were Ray Stantz, Egon Spengler and Winston Zeddmore (noVenkman in the demo), fully voiced by Dan Aykroyd, Harold Ramis and Ernie Hudson. Aykroyd and Ramis’ script, even just that tiny chunk, was characterized by the same wit that made the original films such classics. Then a few weeks later, Activision announced that, following their merger with Vivendi, they would not be hanging onto the Ghostbusters license. News on the game since, even following Atari’s confirmation that they would be publishing Ghostbusters in June 2009, has been disturbingly light. No more of the actual game has been shown since that messy preview code. Until last week. While I didn’t actually get to go hands-on with it, I did get an eyes-on playthrough of the remainder of that library level. And now… well… I ain’t afraid of no Ghostbusters. Read More... Posted Feb 18 2009, 06:30 PM by John Constantine with | with no comments Filed under: john constantine, playstation 3, microsoft, xbox 360, sony, Ghostbusters, dan ackroyd, atari, bill murray, william Atherton, walter peck, ghostbusters 3, stay puft, ghostbusters the videogame

• NYCC 2009 - DC Universe Online

  Editor's note: I'm still pretty darn worn out from the frenetic pace of New York Comic-Con this past weekend. My entire body hurts. Expect a good amount of post-con reporting over the next few days as I sift through my notes, photos, and edit together a few videos which will hopefully be fairly rad. For now, though, let's just start off with something easy, the first massively multiplayer online game to officially license characters and scenarios from one of the biggest pop-culture publishers in the world...oh lord, what am I doing? One of the biggest crowd-pleaser games at New York Comic-Con was Sony Online Entertainment's DC Universe Online. The massively multiplayer online action title was set up for anyone to play using either keyboard and mouse or or the Playstation DualShock3 and there was a panel discussion about the game featuring several members of Sony's design team along with human-style-guide Jim Lee and story and scenario writers Geoff Johns and Marv Wolfman. Those names should sound very familiar to you if you're read any superhero comics in the past twenty years or so. That they referred to it as an MMO action game rather than an MMO RPG is very telling in what we saw from the presentation and our play sessions. It plays just like all the other open-world action brawlers, only you're playing with other people to either cooperate or compete in objectives which are continuously sent to you from the game's servers (cleverly disguised in Hero mode as Oracle from Batman and Justice League). Run, jump, smash, repeat, no arcane spell casting. Read More... Posted Feb 09 2009, 03:00 PM by Derrick Sanskrit with | with 1 comment(s) Filed under: playstation 3, derrick sanskrit, dc universe, mmo, sony online, dc comics, nycc

• The Five Characters You Won’t See in Street Fighter IV

  Written by Cyriaque Lamar On February 17th, a numerical Street Fighter sequel will come out in America for the first time in ten years. In an act of unprecedented video game democracy, the good folks at Capcom allowed fans to vote for the characters that would appear in the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 versions. Their shortlist included such perennial favorites as the panties-flashing Sakura and the leotard-clad M16 agent Cammy. As in the 2008 presidential election, sex appeal commanded the polls. But what about those fighters who didn’t make the cut? Join me as I take a look at Street Fighter’s lesser-known pugilists and postulate why these lovable losers didn’t earn a silky-smooth 3D sheen. Rolento Who? Rolento debuted as a boss in the 1989 arcade beat-em-up Final Fight. As a boss character, he was entitled to certain amenities players were not, such as a baton, incendiaries, and a subscription to the Ginsu-Of-The-Month Club. When he turned up in 1996’s Street Fighter Alpha 2, he returned with all of his thwacking, exploding, and stabbing habits intact. Why He Should Have Been in SFIV Rolento is an absolute hoot to play. For a game full of high-flying karate-men, it’s surprising that the most agile character is the guy with grenades strapped to his pectorals. Rolento’s moves include a wide array of flips, rolls, and the ability to use his baton as a pogo stick. Playing him is like playing a paramilitary spider monkey. Furthermore, his backstory is hilariously bad even by Street Fighter standards. As he puts it, Rolento aims to create a militaristic new world order free of “panty-waist politicking”. Revolutionary rhetoric. Why He Isn’t We suspect his absence has something to do with all those unfair knives, grenades, and super moves involving trip wires and impaling opponents with crane hooks. The moment you bring a goddamn crane to fisticuffs is the moment you’ve left the realm of “street fighting” and gone headlong into “demolition derby” territory. Read More... Posted Feb 06 2009, 05:00 PM by John Constantine with | with 3 comment(s) Filed under: playstation 3, street fighter, xbox 360, capcom, final fight, street fighter ii, street fighter iv, arcade, street fighter iii, cyriaque lamar, street fighter alpha

• Trailer Review: Demon’s Souls

  From Software, you guys got some weird in your blood. Who in the hell makes console exclusives these days? Not only that, who in the hell makes exclusives for every console on the market? And who in the hell makes console exclusives that are spiritual successors to cult hits that were console exclusives in the previous generation? You guys, whew, you guys are nutty. You’re nutty nut bars and I love it. It’s a big month for From Software. Just last week in Japan, they released Ninja Blade on Xbox 360. Ninja Blade is a third-person action game that is a modernization, in both tone and technology, of their Xbox-only franchise Otogi. Today, they released Demon’s Souls in the land of the rising sun. Demon’s Souls is the Playstation 3 version of From’s PS2 oddity King’s Field, a series of distinctly western RPGs full of the dungeon crawling and character customization Elder Scrolls fans go ga-ga over. As you can see from this trailer, Demon’s Souls is a real odd duck. Read More... Posted Feb 04 2009, 05:00 PM by John Constantine with | with 3 comment(s) Filed under: john constantine, playstation 3, trailer review, microsoft, xbox 360, sony, playstation 2, xbox, king’s field, Demon’s souls, ninja blade, otogi, from software

• Flower - A Zen de Blob?

  thatgamecompany's long-awaited "Zen game" Flower is finally being released on the Playstation Network next week, having been originally teased way back at the Tokyo Game Show in 2007. So far the game has caused all who've witnessed it to find themselves unable to accurately describe what the "game" is, only that it is captivating. VentureBeat's Dean Takahashi was recently treated to a demonstration by Creative Director Jenova Chen. While it is still nowhere near as telling as an actual hands-on experience with the game, it is most definitely insightful. Video after the break: Read More... Posted Feb 03 2009, 11:59 AM by Derrick Sanskrit with | with 2 comment(s) Filed under: playstation 3, derrick sanskrit, shadow of the colossus, psn, de blob, flower, thatgamecompany, jenova chen

• Cross-Atlantic Buzz!

  Guest contributor Adam Rosenberg resides in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, where he slaves away daily as a contributing editor for UGO’s Gamesblog as his dog Loki looks on in bewilderment. In addition to the noble pursuit of video games, Adam enjoys spending time with fine film, finer food and his fine fiancée Bekah. Relentless Software’s Buzz games are multi-stage quiz challenges modeled after television game shows, right down to the snarky announcer. Players compete for points in multiple rounds, each one revolving around a different gimmick for rewarding or punishing correct and incorrect answers. The thing about Buzz is that it’s always been big in Europe, but not so much over here in the States. The series debuted in the UK back in October 2005 with Buzz!: The Music Quiz and it saw three sequels before hitting North America in October 2007. The PS3 debut, Buzz! Quiz TV, featuring both user-created quizzes and online play, is Sony’s most focused attempt to establish the series in America. When I approached the new American Culture Quiz Pack expansion, I wondered: how does the ‘American angle’ come out in a game so firmly rooted in its British origins? Is American trivia the key to Buzz’s potential cross-continental success? The allure of a game show is, after all, rooted in the American Pop Dream. When television first proliferated as an entertainment medium during the 1950s, quiz shows were some of the biggest attention-grabbers. All of a sudden, Joey Everyman could stand in front of a camera, answer some trivia questions and go home several thousand dollars richer. Fame and fortune; just what every American wants. Read More... Posted Jan 30 2009, 04:30 PM by John Constantine with | with no comments Filed under: playstation 3, nintendo, wii, sony, scea, wii play, Adam Rosenberg, buzz, are you smarter than a fifth grader, jeopardy

• At Least Batman: Arkham Asylum's Story Will Be Good

  It’s been pretty disheartening to see so many people losing their game industry jobs these past few months. First and foremost, it’s terrible to see thousands of talented people out of work. It’s also tragic to see so many games get cancelled. I’m still upset that Free Radical’s Star Wars Battlefront 3 will never come out. That game looked unbelievable. That’s not always the case with cancelled games though. For example, I think the world’s a better place now that Pandemic’s The Dark Knight tie-in won’t clog up shelves across the land. From the sounds of it, that game was troubled with a capital OUBLED. It’s cancellation also means that Rocksteady Games’ original Batman game, Arkham Asylum, will have a much better chance of getting noticed by the millions upon millions of people obsessed with Bruce Wayne and Joker. This new trailer doesn’t have any play in it, so it’s pretty useless for giving an impression of Arkham Asylum as a game. What it does have is plenty of story. Competently written and awesomely voiced story. Read More... Posted Jan 29 2009, 08:30 PM by John Constantine with | with 3 comment(s) Filed under: john constantine, playstation 3, trailer review, xbox 360, PC, playstation 2, the dark knight, eidos, batman, urban chaos, rocksteady games, pandemic, arkham asylum

• 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

• Survival of the Knittest: How To Make Better LittleBigPlanet Challenges

  Media Molecule's LittleBigPlanet delivered on its promise of providing players with all the tools they would need to design their own dream stages. Unfortunately, we then all learned that building a satisfying game level is pretty damn hard. Thankfully, a few of the cool kids from Media Molecule's design team put together this very helpful tips video, reviewing everything you need to make your survival challenges successful as compelling game experiences. They even show a few examples of excellent user-generated survival challenges to show what those people are doing right: Read More... Posted Jan 28 2009, 01:00 PM by Derrick Sanskrit with | with no comments Filed under: little big planet, playstation 3, derrick sanskrit, video, media molecule

• Curveball: Hands-On With Wanted: Weapons of Fate

  When I first saw the trailer for the film Wanted, my brain immediately said, “Wow, a Joe ten years younger than current Joe would have thought this was the best movie ever made.” Current Joe still hasn’t seen the movie, but briefly getting my hands on Wanted: Weapons of Fate, the feeling was distinctly similar—that a younger version of myself would be completely blown away by this specific vision of adolescent bombast. I’m pretty sure I’m complimenting my time with the game when I say that. Read More... Posted Jan 23 2009, 02:00 PM by Joe Keiser with | with no comments Filed under: playstation 3, warner bros, joe keiser, Wanted, preview

• Mega Man 9: Powered Up and LittleBigGalaxyMan

  Every now and again, I curse the internet and its countless paths. It’s easy to get lost in here. it’s easy to lost literal hours of your life on completely meaningless, mindless drivel. How many times have you, dear reader, fallen into a YouTube spiral, clicking related video after related video until the moving images no longer hold meaning? Every URL is perilous I tell you. Then I come to my senses and remember the all important truth about the 21st century: the internet is awesome. As is meaningless, drivel, and the access we have to it. Despite my recent renaissance with the game, I probably wouldn’t have found out about this brave soul’s Mega Man: Powered Up adventures if it wasn't for aimless internet wandering. They've made a close-to-perfect recreation of Galaxy Man’s stage from Mega Man 9. Read More... Posted Jan 22 2009, 12:00 PM by John Constantine with | with no comments Filed under: john constantine, little big planet, playstation 3, psp, mega man, mega man 9, mega man powered up

• Ode to the Light Gun or The Only Peripheral You’ll Ever Need

  Peripherals are bothersome. A controller is fine; it’s compact and, with the ubiquity of reliable, long-lasting wireless technology, they’ve become easy to store and maintain. These days, controllers just aren’t enough for developers. Every game has to have its own little thing. Oh, I need plastic guitars and drums to play this? A little plastic wheel to act like I’m steering? A massive twenty-four button console array meant to simulate the cockpit of a gigantic walking tank?! Well, la-di-da, Mr. Game Developer! I don’t live in some kind of mansion, I’ve already spent all my money on your products. I don’t have room to store a billion and one plastic devices used for only a single game. Like every gamer born before 1990, though, there’s one peripheral my gaming home needs: the light gun. Nintendo may be the young family’s best friend these days, providing safe, accessible entertainment for all, but back in 1985, their consoles came with fake firearms. Those of us who grew up in the US and Europe got a grey Laser Tag knock off that was clearly — a toy later re-colored neon orange and grey to appear even more like a toy — but look at the original sumbitch Gunpei Yokoi designed for the system. Read More... Posted Jan 16 2009, 03:30 PM by John Constantine with | with no comments Filed under: playstation 3, nintendo, wii, nes, rambo, sega, namco, house of the dead, famicom, guncon, light gun, house of the dead 4, time crisis 4, silent hill the arcade, zapper, house of the dead overkill

• Star Ocean and the HD-JRPG Conundrum

  After literal years of anticipation on the part of geeks across the world, Square-Enix will finally release Star Ocean 4: The Last Hope for the Xbox 360 on February 24th, 2009. It’s a momentous occasion for the genre. Star Ocean is the first A-list JRPG franchise to make the leap to HD consoles. You can argue that Tales of Vesperia earned the honor first, but Namco’s Tales franchise is more a brand/masthead than a bonafide franchise, one even more diluted than the Final Fantasy heading. I’ve never cared for the Star Ocean series’ battle system – Penny Arcade said it best when they described Star Ocean’s battles as “deciding which character gets molested by lizard men” – and its science-fiction narrative has always been more interesting in concept than in execution. I want to be excited about Star Ocean 4, but not because I feel like I’m missing out on a series that so many other gamers seem to love. I just want to be excited about an HD-JRPG. JRPGs have been enjoying a renaissance on the DS, not unlike the one they had on the PS1 some twelve years back, but the genre has been woefully underserved on the 360 and PS3. Read More... Posted Jan 14 2009, 06:00 PM by John Constantine with | with no comments Filed under: john constantine, little big planet, playstation 3, nintendo ds, xbox 360, final fantasy, lost odyssey, hironobu sakaguchi, infinite undiscovery, tales of vesperia, call of duty 4, persona 4, persona 3, Playstation 1, The last remnant, star ocean 4, blue dragon

• Indiana Jones, We Hardly Know Ye

  It is very, very strange that there are so few excellent Indiana Jones games. The characters and fantasy-20th-century that make up Henry Jones Jr’s world are uniquely suited to the tropes and traditions of game design. This isn’t to say that Indy hasn’t had some success in the medium. The arcade game of Temple of Doom is a memorably colorful quarter-muncher (though, the less said of its home ports, the better,) JVC’s Indiana Jones’ Greatest Adventures on Super Nintendo is the best platformer that studio produced, and Lucasarts’ point-and-click adventures, an adaptation of The Last Crusade and an original story called Fate of Atlantis, are rightfully beloved for both their branching stories and their taxing logic puzzles. The rest of Indy’s gaming oeuvre, however, ranges from tolerably mediocre, like Traveler’s Tales’ Lego Indiana Jones, to plain bad, like Windows/N64’s Infernal Machine. (Infernal Machine is especially notable because it’s the only game in the franchise that falls into the genre most-suited to Indiana Jones, the Tomb Raider-styled 3D platformer. Tomb Raider has always been modeled on Indiana Jones’ particular brand of archaeological adventuring. Raider’s spiritual successor, Uncharted, is even more explicitly inspired by Jones, right down to the sarcastic male lead of dubious morality with a heart of gold.) It’s true that officially licensed videogames have something of a history when it comes to sucking, but given Indiana Jones’ Lucasfilms/Lucasarts pedigree, you’d expect the franchise to have at least as good a track record as Star Wars. (By my calculations, you get one good Star Wars game for every three terrible ones. Luckily, that equates to a lot of good Star Wars games.) Today, the pertinent question is not why are there not more good Indiana Jones games, but why aren’t there more Indiana Jones games period? Read More... Posted Jan 12 2009, 06:00 PM by John Constantine with | with 3 comment(s) Filed under: playstation 3, xbox 360, indiana jones, lucasarts, nintendo 64, staff of moses, last crusade, lego Indiana jones, temple of doom, John constaninte, infernal machine, traveler’s tales, fat of atlantis, kingdom of the crystal skull

• The 61FPS Review: Valkryia Chronicles – Part 2

  For Part One of the review, click here. As it turns out, Valkryia Chronicles doesn’t hold up all the way through. As one gets closer to the end, the story veers off the path of “historical allegory” and gets lost in its fantasy elements—something about an ancient race with sacred blood that could manipulate their version of oil to make themselves death-dealing gods. Here the story becomes vague and generic, and much, much stupider. If this wasn’t enough to make the ending unsatisfying, the battles also lose their way as the finale approaches. Combat scenarios that previously required the player to think about situations tactically and outmaneuver the enemy became increasingly gimmicky, culminating in a final boss battle that is incredibly simple (not easy, but simple-minded) and cheap. So as the story progression made me roll my eyes more and more, I turned to the game’s saving grace in the end times: the skirmish mode. Read More... Posted Jan 12 2009, 03:00 PM by Joe Keiser with | with no comments Filed under: playstation 3, 61fps review, sega, joe keiser, valkyria chronicles

• Life Without Playstation

  The future is a funny thing. If you had told me back in the fall of 2005 (what I regard as the height of the PS2) that Sony would be a money-bleeding mess three short years later, I probably would have slapped you out of pure contempt. It wasn't that I was a Sony fanboy, you see; it's just that the thought of a powerful company taking such a fall from grace was something once regarded as sheer lunacy--hell, even when Nintendo was sucking with the N64, they at least had the Pokemon brand to pump billions of dollars into their coffers. Sony? ...Not so much. Read More... Posted Jan 07 2009, 08:00 PM by Bob Mackey with | with 2 comment(s) Filed under: playstation 3, sony, sega, ps2, ps3, Saturn, bob mackey, economy, business

• Sony’s New Year’s Resolution

  For all intents and purposes, 2008 was an excellent year for Sony and the Playstations. Was it the salad days of 2001, when the Playstation 2 was coming into its own and Sony was crushing every proverbial ass in the world? Certainly not. But the Playstation 3 managed to finally get itself a stable of quality exclusives that weren’t completely ignored by the public and panned by the media. The Playstation Portable, despite receiving only a scant few notable games, had a banner year in Japan and continued to grow its install base in the rest of the world. The Playstation Network worked out a few of its kinks, and even if it’s the ugliest baby since Sloth, at least Home launched. And the good ol’ Playstation 2 continued, eight years after its birth, to both sell and play host to great new games. The end of the year, however, did not look so hot. The Playstation 3 got trounced by its competitors leading up to Christmas. You see, it didn’t matter how damn good Resistance 2, LittleBigPlanet, Motorstorm: Pacific Rim, or Valkyria Chronicles were. What mattered is that the average person in every country where the system is sold does not have $400 for a videogame console right now. Read More... Posted Jan 07 2009, 07:00 PM by John Constantine with | with 1 comment(s) Filed under: john constantine, playstation 3, motorstorm, psp, sony, playstation 2, Playstation, littlebigplanet, resistance 2, valkyria chronicles