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I spent a chunk of the weekend picking through the 1,500 plus iPhone games out currently, as I started pulling together a gift guide for the iPhone. As you can imagine it's quite a challenge to try and find a handful of gems among all of those games. Sure a bunch are shovelware, but there are also quite a few excellent titles.
Among the game related things that found their way to my door step while I was gone was the new Donkey-Kong-themed edition of Jenga.
James Yu over at GameSpot has just posted an excellent hands-on comparison of the old Sony PSP 2000 model and the shiny new PSP 3000, announced just last week at the Games Convention in Leipzig. While we've already posted the comparison that showed up on Famitsu, the GameSpot article has a few things going for it. More comparison photos of the screen, which looks to be where the biggest noticeable differences lie, and the fact that James writes in easy-to-understand English, always appreciated by us English-exclusive humans like myself. Hit the link below for the full skinny on what has changed in obsessive detail, right down to the surface textures of the plastic.
Sony PSP 3000 Hands-On [GameSpot]
Last week I received a Halo Covenant Plasma Pistol pack in the mail. The laser pursuit gaming set comes with two Covenant pistols and two targets.
I spent a bit of the weekend playing around with them and came away fairly impressed, though their are some things that make using them for honest to goodness gameplay a challenge.
The developers of the toys seem to have spent quite a bit of time incorporating a Halo 3 flavour into not just the way the devices look, but how they operate.
Each post has a trigger and a reload button. The guns, according to the instruction manual, can fire off 50 regular shots before having to be reloaded, which produces the reload sound from the game. You can also do super shots by holding in the trigger to overheat the gun. Firing off one of these shots takes up a tenth of your ammo and causes the gun to remain overheated for five seconds, meaning you can't fire for a bit.
The side of the guns have a little red light which blinks when you're out of ammo and the front of the gun glows green when it is powered on. The green light flashes brighter when you fire.
The best thing about going to E3 are the little surprises - games you either didn't know about or hadn't paid attention to that simply knock you off your feet. Blue Omega Games' Damnation is just that sort of game. Due to be published by Codemasters for the Xbox 360, PS3 and PC, Damnation combines third-person shooting with acrobatics in a unique steampunk setting to create a game that has amazing potential, both online and off.
Damnation takes place in an alternate early 20th century U.S. where the Civil War has been raging for decades. Now a wealthy industrialist is hatching a plan to wipe out both sides of the conflict, and it's up to your character and his teammates to stop the bastard from recreating the country in his own twisted image.
I actually got to play through a bit of a level of the game with Blue Omega's Jacob Minkoff and Richard Gilbert guiding me through. The level starts with the main character and a couple of AI teammates (one of which can be played by a friend for co-op action) tasked with destroying a far off bridge before the enemy forces can cross, decimating a small, strategically located town. The only problem? The bridge spans the middle of a large chasm, which you just happen to be standing on the side of.
Resident Evil 5. An eagerly awaited game awash in a sea of racial controversy that seems silly when every morning for the past week I woke up, look out the window, and was greeted by a 200 foot tall advertisement for Tropic Thunder featuring Robert Downey Jr. with his face painted black. I think the gaming public has pretty much moved on at this point, which is nice, because I don't want my hands-on impressions of Capcom's E3 demo for the game sullied by conflict.
The demo starts off with my character (Chris) holed up in a shack with Rosario Dawson.
Okay, so she isn't Rosario Dawson, but the South African B.S.A.A. member Sheva Alomar bears a striking resemblance to the Clerks II actress. In fact, throughout the demo I could be overheard mumbling, "out of the way, Rosario" or "I'll save you Dawson!" Perhaps an unintentional likeness, but I'd like to think that if I found myself in the middle of a zombie apocalypse Rosie would be nearby, just in case.
Before speaking to Castlevania's Daddy Koji Igarashi earlier today, I got a chance to step into the shoes of the series prettiest little thing, Maria. Okay, their prettiest little female thing, though I did get a chance to beat up Alucard, the franchises prettiest little male son of Dracula.
As Iga said, Castlevania Judgment is not your standard 3D fighting game. You move in full 3D, almost as if you were playing in a room in one of the various attempts at bringing the platformer to into the 3D arena. There are objects to smash (and in Dracula's case, possess), power ups to be gained, and spectacular special moves to master, but at its core the gameplay is a very simple, pick-up-and-play affair.
Late last month I got a chance to sit down with Will Wright and a few other game writers to check out the full Spore. Having spent a week or so creating meatspace Fruit Fuckers, Spiders and a TickleMeKotaku, I was already pretty versed on the game's Creature Creator.
The full Spore, as we've talked about in detail before, is broken down into five phases which allow you to take a single-cell organism and run it all the way up the evolutionary ladder to a space-exploring civilisation.
My concern, after watching the Spore demonstration in Leipzig last year, was that the game wouldn't live up to the spectacular creation tools that are so integral to Spore. I worried that it may be more of a series of toys strung together than a full-blown game.
My time with the game managed to ease some of those concerns.
Ultimate Band is Disney Interactive's answer to those people who want to have the music band game experience without the need for all of those expensive, room-filling peripherals that are required for titles like Rock Band and Guitar Hero World Tour.
This band game light is both peripheral and original music free, using only cover bands so the developers would be allowed to tweak the music to better fit the game. Those tweaks include the ability to have the lead singer be either a man or a woman, no matter who originally sang it.
The Disney folks told me that they did a number of focus tests during their development of the game. In them they asked potential gamers which of nine versions of the game they would want to play. The options ranged from a peripheral-heavy version of the game with original music, to the game they ended up producing. All of the tests showed, they told me, that gamers wanted a game that didn't require peripherals.
EA Redwood Shores was on hand at last week's EA Label gathering to show off a bit of Dead Space, the deep-space thriller that, until last week, left me feeling rather cold... and not in a good way.
Leading up to last week's event all of the stuff I saw about the game made me feel like it was another shooter, albeit one set in space, but one that didn't seem to offer anything new or interesting to the formula of scary shooters.
But after spending ten minutes or so watching a demonstration and then a few minutes controlling a hapless space engineer, I've got a taste for the game.
