Never Not A Nerd

Bad Company 2 is the latest game from DICE/EA that takes part in EA’s struggle to take back dominance in what they believe to be rightfully theirs, the first-person shooter genre. When the last time they feel like they had said dominance I am not sure.

You play as Preston Marlowe, a member of a four-man military squad known as B-Company. It’s where they put the misfits, and apparently their branch of the military only has four misfits.  After the first game ending with your squad getting away with some trucks full of gold you’re all back for another adventure. I don’t think they mention why exactly you’re back shooting people.

Is this game what EA has been looking for to take the FPS throne from Modern Warfare 2?

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A few years ago when the next generation consoles were first being announced, Quanitc Dream released a technical demo of their new game called Heavy Rain. The demo showed a startlingly life-like woman on the screen delivering an intense monologue about the loss of her son and how she desperately wants revenge. After the video of the demo went live on the internet, Playstation fans had a new weapon in their arsenal against other systems. Years later and  Heavy Rain has finally been released on the Playstation 3. Does the game reignite that flame that coursed throughout the industry or does it arrive all wet? Read the rest of this entry »

Bioshock 2 is a game that really shouldn’t have a sequel. The way I remember the ending of the first game, because I harvested a couple of the little sisters, was that everyone in Rapture (including the splicers) got out and ran rampant on the world.  But, now suddenly everyone is back.

The developers promised the story would make sense even for the people that played the first game. They also promised it’d be more challenging than the first, with less of an abundance of vita-chambers (where you re-spawn when you die).  Did they deliver?

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Army of Two: The 40th Day is the second and latest game in EA’s series.  It focuses on two mercenaries, Tyson Rios and Elliot Salem.  In this game they get a simple job to plant a few beacons on a building in Shanghai . Once the job is done some bombs within the city go off and all hell breaks lose.

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The Saboteur is an open-world game in which you play as Sean Devlin, an Irishman tasked with clearing France of the Nazi occupation one sniper tower and AA gun at a time. It was the last game Pandemic Studios, the studio behind Star Wars: Battlefront and Mercenaries, will have ever developed. I’m sure Pandemic planned for it to be their swan song, but unfortunately for their ‘legacy’ I cannot agree.

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It has been a long time since a Zelda game has been released and since Twilight Princess was a poor Ocarina clone, the world is in great need of a action RPG with a heavy reliance on inventory implementation. Those of you counting down the days to even look at Nintendo’s new iteration into their ancient and unchanged series look no further for a game that looks and plays better – Vigil Game’s Darksiders. Darksiders is essentially the offspring of Devil May Cry and The Legend of Zelda in combat and overall structure. The combat borrows greatly from DMC in the way that you want to commit to all out offense when facing your common foes. Dungeon layouts, inventory reliance during boss fights, and even the mini map all scream Zelda to the point that you expect the Nintendo logo to flash at the bottom of the screen when in the pause menu. Despite Darksiders constant borrowing from great games of former generations, it does manage to stay in a plain of existence all its own as few development teams lately have not even dared make a game close to Nintendo’s text-only game series.

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Whether or not you think Bayonetta looks like Sarah Palin she certainly kicks angel ass in this over-the-top title from Platinum Games.  It’s catching a little bit of a bad name for how sexual it can be at times, but we’ll get to that.

Bayonetta is the latest game from Hideki Kamiya, the creator of Devil May Cry. Unlike in Devil May Cry, where you are a person who is part demon killing demons,  you play as a witch who kills angels and ‘warriors of heaven’ throughout the game. While it is an original IP, it feels like a sequel in some ways. Mainly in the theme of the game , and it’s combo-heavy combat system.

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This is the list of our favorite games released in 2009.  It was made from combining picks by myself and Andrew. Just like the 10 Best Films of 2009, this list is in descending order. And instead of trying to re-cap the year in a few sentences let’s just get right to the action.

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I want to start this off by first saying, if you were scared by the length of my Assassin’s Creed 2 review, I’m sorry.  I also want to apologize for again waiting so long to post a review for a game I played a while ago.

Ratchet and Clank Future: A Crack in Time is the latest entry in the Ratchet and Clank franchise.  The greatest action platforming franchise ever! Yes, that’s right, greatest ever.  Few platformers even exist anymore, so I want to take this time to thank Insomniac for keeping platformers alive with Ratchet and Clank.

A Crack in Time is the ending of the Ratchet and Clank Future trilogy. So, is this a fitting end to this PS3 trilogy?

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A lot of people really liked the first Assassin’s Creed.  Some journalists went completely crazy over it and named it their game of the year for 2007.  For a while I was one of those people who liked it.  That was because I played it over the course of two years.  When I realized Assassin’s Creed 2 was going to be coming out soon I figured I should finish the first game. That became the first time I played it for extended periods of time, and I HATED a lot of it.  There was only about seven things to do in the entire game.  Sure, getting around the game world was fun,  but it didn’t excuse that ending.

So here we are.  The second Assassin’s Creed was released two years after the first (sorry I waited so long to write and post this review of it), and many people are having even better reactions to it than they did the first.  Has this praise been well-deserved or is Assassin’s Creed 2 going to make people who felt suckered by the first game say “shame on me” ?

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