Neo: Right now… we’re playing a video game?
Morpheus: Is it really so hard to believe? You can steer and accelerate. The interfaces on the top and bottom are gone. There are objectives. Your response now is what we call Residual Self-Delusion: it is the digital projection of your fanboy self.
Neo: This can’t be a game.
Killzone 2, as evidenced by the recent demo, has two problems. One of them is fixable. The other is not, though being someone besides yours truly may lessen the sting. The fixable problem is a trifle, the sort of thing you’d know if you watched a human being play the game for more than zero seconds. A good game wouldn’t have something like that, right? Then again, Burnout Paradise needed a “Retry” button since January of 2008 and we have only now received one. Criterion is a saint among game developers, so fixing the obvious may not be, um, obvious. I am not hopeful.
Fable II is a bad game. If you like it, you’re a bad person. Consider it the ultimate moral judgment in a game that does little else. This is clearly what the original Fable was supposed to be: a go anywhere, do anything RPG where your choices shape your character and the world around you. At first glance they’ve succeeded. The levels are larger, the combat is better, and your choices of what to do are more varied and interesting. But this doesn’t excuse the obvious lack of polish and thoughtfulness in every aspect.
Dead Space is a triumph. I’m supposed to say something about how unusual this is for a publisher like EA, but who else (besides Ubisoft) could conjure a title of this quality? THQ can’t even make the menus of its off-road racing game Baja as exciting as the powerfully dull Forza Motorsport. If this is a sign of the “New EA” I’d better divert the funds I was going to put towards that Snickers bar and buy a controlling interest. Sorry. Economic apocalypse joke, not funny. I’m glad to see this original idea and attention to detail has rejuvenated what I assumed was a bland Madden and Need for Speed franchise machine. Did I mention I’ve already finished the Dead Space animated movie, preordered Dead Space 2, and bought all 37 items of Dead Space content from Xbox Live?
Give Mega Man 9 to a child and let them play it for a month. You’ll end up with either a gaming prodigy or precise numbers on the stress of a controller cable as it constricts a human trachea. Capcom made this game because it loves its old gamers, and we scream for more as their cat ‘o nine robots flails our dignity into a bloody, pixelated mess. No one designs a game this difficult by accident. It must have taken countless play testing sessions to expose humanity’s weaknesses. What horrors the Quality Assurance team must have suffered! The ledges, timings, and attack patterns are designed to unwire Homo sapien’s conditioned response to a platform shooter.