REVIEW: 'Resident Evil 4' Enjoyable
681931
Shotgun at the ready, I inched along the muddy path toward a ramshackle wood shed shrouded in the foggy distance. After countless run-ins with possessed villagers in the new video game "Resident Evil 4," I'd learned to take each step with trepidation.
449735
Gabe: The mood in the office this morning is somewhat tense. We all spent the weekend playing FFXII and we came back today completely divided regarding its quality. I have to admit that after putting in nearly fifteen hours over the past two days I"m prepared to call it the best FF game I"ve ever played. I know that"s at odds with what I said on Friday but it"s the truth. Tycho and Robert are actually playing together and they"re at about the five hour mark. They came in this morning saying the game was trash and I can"t blame them. They"re knee deep in what I"d describe as the tutorial phase of the game. If you played Kingdom Hearts II you"ll remember that"s a game that doesn"t actually start until nearly eight hours in. I don"t mean like you don"t start having fun until then, I mean you literally don"t even see the title screen until you"ve dicked around with Roxas for eight fucking hours. FFXII felt the same way to me. It"s extremely slow to start but now I"m having a hard time putting the controller down.
588776
The latest installment in this PlayStation 2 action series tries to be all games to all players. To its credit, Jak 3 largely succeeds. By Chris Kohler.
278734
Shooters, RPGs and simple pleasures -- it was a very good year for videogames. Wired's gaming scribes salute 2007's finest titles.
442645
The fourth time's the charm for this durable (and frankly downright endearing) Bruce Willis franchise.
67547
It doesn't break new ground, and the plot is a little sparse, but thanks to its visual quality and ability to suck you into its world, Half Life 2 is probably the best game of 2004. By Suneel Ratan.
30270
The game isn&#39;t for everyone because of its graphic violence and coarse language, but mature fans of this 32 million-unit-selling franchise who want to know if this sequel lives up to its hype, the answer is a resounding yes.
704636
Gabe: I took the Wii home over the weekend and was able to put quite a bit of time into Zelda. There was what I would describe as a bru ha ha over at Joystiq when one of their bloggers claimed the game was a flop. He cited its terrible graphics as reason enough to dismiss it entirely. The response in the thread afterwards was heated with lots of people claiming that the graphics weren"t as bad as he claimed and that the game actually looked really good. Having played it all weekend I"m here to tell you that"s not the correct response.
376362
November 01, 2004 - It looks like the folks at Capcom Entertainment were only kidding when they sternly insisted over and over again that the GameCube action-thriller Resident Evil 4 would forever remain exclusive to Nintendo&#39;s console.
574165
Zombie sequel Resident Evil: Apocalypse goes straight to the top of the north American box office chart.
52900
LOS ANGELES - The undead came alive once more over the weekend as "Resident Evil: Apocalypse" debuted at No. 1 at the box office, bringing in $23.7 million...
173327
Tycho:  There was so much news, we had to poke it with a schtick.  I'm allowed one or two puns like that a year.  At least, I hope.    The value of each leisure minute has increased exponentially since the holiday deluge began, that's not precisely news, but the games that are losing out over here are of such a high caliber that it's a little scary.  I downloaded the demo for PGR4 and loved it, in fact I still play it - I'm playing it right now, and you would be horrified if you knew how.  This said, I have no idea where I would fit this game into my life.  This is patently ridiculous - a game of this obvious polish and pedigree would command that tray for weeks at any other time of the year.  We're both in love with Zelda, but can so rarely consummate this love as bright baubles are constantly rolling in.  Gabriel doesn't even make time for nightly Halo - his evening is entirely routed to The Lion War.  When Call of Duty 4 hits on the fifth of November, I have plans to betray our collective in a similar fashion.    The time I did have yesterday wasn't even invested in the long-form retail games that I see as the core of my responsibility to you.  Every moment not devoted to Halo was soaked up by Every Extend Extra Extreme, an XBLA game I had already played on the Playstation Portable and the PC, only to find that its true calling was on the console.  Another game with a strong audio focus from the creators of Lumines and Meteos, the entire objective is to blow yourself up in such a way as to create the most casualties - I can't wait until Jack gets ahold of this one.  It has other modes, but that's the basic idea, and of course it's all very abstract.  Like other games from Q Entertainment, how much you derive from it is often a function of how open you are to its audiovisual synergies.  It's fun, but that fun is not a result of complex systems.      I also picked up Everyday Shooter for the PS3, in further dereliction of my duties, having a series of profound experiences with it that might be too strange to describe.  The game's author expresses a debt of gratitude toward Q's Mizuguchi and others, but he's accomplished something wholly his own here.  Superficially it's one of these dual analog, robotronian shooters every platform is weighed down with now.  Don't be fooled by that trope, and certainly don't think you can come to any conclusions based on screenshots.  Where Lumines or Every Extend Extra draws from electronica, a great match for their style of presentation, Everyday Shooter disarms the player with a suite of earnest, analog songs played on guitar.  At times, during the course of ordinary play, I felt as though I were interrupting him.     In gameplay terms, each level apparently plays around with the idea of chains and combinations, and I say "apparently" because I've only played two levels in - every time I die, I get sucked in by his menu.  It's just a bunch of text, but moving down or right produces a single note, and pressing left or up produces a two note chain.  Pressing a face button produces a string of four notes, and with these rude tools one can actually augment the title music quite well.  I didn't realize I was doing it at first.  When Gabriel came in perhaps fifteen minutes later, I felt as though I had been woken from a dream.
484278
Second Sight offers a compelling storyline that keeps gamers coming back for me.
112941
The zombie flick "Resident Evil: Apocalypse" opened at No. 1 at the North American box office this weekend, taking in $23.7 million. Milla Jovovich returns as Alice in the film which is based on the video game of the same name. The new thriller ...
305759
Tycho:  In case you are wondering, cats apparently need regular maintenance, like cars.  And, like an oil change, this juicing process can be done (I'm told) at home, preferably with the curtains drawn and a couple inches of sawdust laid down.  That's right: you can wring out your own cat's asshole.  This is the kind of helpful information you can expect when you visit Penny Arcade.  Don't everybody run home at once.    I've been playing a lot of Prism on the DS, even though the Zelda cartridge seems to squeal as I remove it.  I understand there's some kind of Ghost Ship?  I forget all of my cares, and also the cares of Princess Zelda, once those beams begin to refract.    They've ginned up some ridonculous crap about light eating space monsters to support their gameplay, which is very solid, and requires no extraterrestrial photophiles.  It's a puzzle game.  When I put pieces of a puzzle together, I never think about how alone each piece must feel, longing only to congregate with similarly knobbed partial images.  So, discard that.  Discard also the truly nasty presentation, no doubt a result of hard time done in already the Mobile and PC Casual markets.  Part these imperfections like tall savannah grass, and gaze into the game's rich core:  the creation of sometimes very complex circuits.     Inside each puzzle grid, the player is given some combination of Light Emitting Entities, Reflective Mirrors, Splitters, or Prisms.  You must jigger the aforementioned until light of the correct colors is distributed to targets around the edge of the field.  That's it, and the fun comes from how complicated this process can become.  There are quite a few cooperative puzzles as well - where each player has access to half the grid, and they must work together to route everything.  If you try this mode - and I request that you do so, as you only need one (1) cartridge and a willing accomplice - I recommend that you each turn your DS sideways, so that the UI is along the bottom.  That will make it so that "left" and "right" and "up" and "down" all mean the same thing to each of you.  Trust me, you want this.  The game is hard enough without the horror of fully relative terms.    Prism actually taught me something fairly significant about why I play games, and I think it's because the gameplay is so clean and the presentation so spartan that I could pick up on it.  I like games that generate communication.  This is why team-based shooters, roleplaying games, and tactical games are my delight - every one of these entails a suite of custom language to describe it, they require constant dialogue, and, most importantly, all other things being equal these games can be won by the efficient use of language.  Working out puzzles together in Prism has a strong logic component, but in large part the challenge was communicating ethereal notions succinctly.    I suppose this is also why I torment you here, thrice weekly: even when playing a game by myself, I am harvesting the experience so that it may be reconstituted here.  So, thank you for reading.  You dignify my leisure hours.          The Playstation 3 in the office has been more than acceptable for playing the sometimes short, often bad games that have arrived on it - but this holiday, with the titles to prove out the claim, I had to "get mine" in the bawdy parlance of the young.  What tipped my hand wasn't the four hundred dollar system on offer, rather, it was the three hundred and seventy nine dollar model.  These are probably mostly a mail order proposition, but any of those rare twenty gig models the platform launched with got bumped down by the new price.  It's inexpensive by PS3 standards, but it's positively cheap for a Blu-Ray device.  Now fully franchised, flexing all the rich benefits of Sony citizenship, you may expect me to be even more brutal in my critique.
191014
Tycho: Two things: first, I forgot to mention one of the game's coolest features. When you wreck another person, their camera snaps a shot of them. And it's exactly the shot you would expect! The best ones I saw were from a guy who had a friend over, which showed him clearly frustrated and his cohort cackling with joy. It really added a lot to a game I was already really enjoying.Also, in a radical reversal - like you might see in a wrestling match - the Playstation 3 version is clearly the better of the two. Clearly. People can talk about the contrast of the comparative images all night, if they would like, slight texture differences and so forth. Both look excellent. The 360 version quite simply doesn't have it in the performance department. It runs, and well, but once you've played it on the PS3 you start to notice performance dips and lost frames that used to just fade into the background. Also, this is the rare case where the 360's consistent UI is actually a hindrance to a cohesive experience: PS3 owners pull up an entirely in-game menu to select friends to play with. 360 owners get the same experience up until the end, when you leave the game UI altogether while this huge blade thing sweeps in and obscures the game. Typically, joining and invites occur outside the actual game experience. It's only jarring here because the distinction between single player and multiplayer is so liquid. Still, I thought it was interesting, particularly if that becomes a trend. (CW)TB
282606
The third installment in the video-game-derived series of films is not exactly dull but never interesting either.