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Review: Download Games Roundup

30 Jul 2010 at 4:00am

Stack! Glide! Trundle! Plunder! Pallurikio!

The only problem with swimming in the download pool is that it completely rewires your gaming habits. Sampling upwards of ten games every week is like stepping back into that mythical past when you'd come home with a bagful of cheap games (or, more likely, a C90 cassette rammed with the latest pirated gems).

Back then, games had to impress you immediately. There was no time to wait for a slow-burn intro. No time to mess around learning complicated control schemes. You were already impatient enough as it was, what with hideous loading times. Designers cut to the chase, and knew they had to grab you in those first few minutes, or you'd move onto something else fairly swiftly.

Sometime after the PlayStation launched, that all seemed to change - seemingly forever. We all got increasingly sucked into playing sprawling epics, and demanded lavish production values. Happily, the growth of the download scene has proven beyond any doubt that there's room for both approaches to flourish side by side.

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Review: Alan Wake: The Signal

26 Jul 2010 at 4:15pm

The end is the beginning.

Alan Wake is best when it's ending. That's a compliment. The game hits an aesthetic high whenever one of its episodes draws to a close, with a stark title screen and a cut of music that's perfect for the moment. I savour those few seconds when the text ("End of Episode Five" or what have you) slinks on-screen in tendrils of smoke, and I love that the song makes everything you just played feel like a grand journey.

So at the conclusion of the new downloadable episode The Signal, when the closing sequence came up on my screen with another spot-on song selection, the whole game once again became profound in retrospect. Alan Wake has a pernicious ability to burnish itself in memory. All its finer trappings - the rich darkness of its American Northwest setting, a well-rounded supporting cast, the stabs at emotional complexity - make it a wonderful thing to reflect on after the fact. I wish I could fall into that same reverie while actually playing The Signal. It might turn an inconsistent episode into the transcendent experience it aspires to be.

Although not much of the story is clear-cut in the messy seventh chapter of the Alan Wake saga, it's reasonably well established that the action takes place in the imagination of tortured novelist Wake. Sinking deeper into the mysterious Dark Presence, Wake conjures a funhouse version of Bright Falls that you traverse as his mind attempts to save itself. One misplaced thought from our hero makes the street collapse in on itself; another grows a nightmarish forest of flickering street lights.

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Review: Hydro Thunder Hurricane

26 Jul 2010 at 1:00pm

Buoyant.

If Limbo, last week's inaugural Summer of Arcade release, aspired to the art house aesthete's choice - Braid through a glass, darkly - Hydro Thunder Hurricane is a hyperactive celebration of balls-out, dumbass, American videogame-ness. 25-foot racing boats, whose engines roar in Texan accents, roll and bounce through white water rapids. They gobble down speed boost capsules like froth-mouthed junkies under a maelstrom of distorted keyboards and six-foot snare drum clacks.

Delicacy and finesse be damned, screams developer Vector Unit into the wind and spray: videogames are about domination and high-speed spectacle; they're about shaving a few seconds from the times of every last name on your Enemies List; about finding the odd secret bonus and, every three laps or so, making your jaw hang slack as a giant f**king sea serpent explodes out of the water and sends your boat ricocheting off into a rock face.

Videogames should exaggerate physics in search of perfecting the chemistry of play, the game argues. Spin out on a corner and you need only stab the back button for a rolling reset: combo the endorphins without pause for thought. If Limbo's deadly waters represented a cloying quicksand to oblivion, Hydro's undulating waves are ramps to the stars.

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PC Video Game Reviews from 1UP

Disciples III: Renaissance Review

13 Jul 2010 at 2:19pm

Disciples games had their own comfortable sub-niche in the genre of fantasy strategy. Unlike games with finicky tactical combat, Disciples focused on the units moving around the strategic maps. Battles played out quickly on a simple grid rather than the extensive, chess-like encounters that characterized games like King's Bounty, Heroes of Might and Magic, Master of Magic, and Age of Wonders. It was simple, fluid, and uniquely slick.

But for whatever reason, Disciples III has decided to be like the competition. Now it's virtually identical to King's Bounty and Heroes of the Might and Magic, except for the fact that it's nowhere near as good as either of them. If you're going to compromise your unique identity, the worst thing you can do is do it poorly.

APB Review

6 Jul 2010 at 2:58pm

my three years of writing for 1UP, APB may be the first game to make me seriously question my sanity. After sitting down with what promised to be an experience full of potential, I walked away from my first few hours a broken man. This was what Realtime Worlds had spent years working on? This, from the man instrumental to the Grand Theft Auto series? To confirm that my brain was free of perspective-altering tumors, I cruised the Internet, seeking out user impressions of APB's "Key to the City" preview event.

To call the response negative would be putting it lightly; after reading paragraph after paragraph laced with anger, frustration, and disappointment -- all describing with great accuracy the game I just played -- I realized that I was indeed sane, and something very bad was happening in APB's city of San Paro. Aside from the roving bands of murderous street gangs, of course.

Puzzle Agent Review

1 Jul 2010 at 6:02pm

I certainly didn't see this coming. In the nearly four years since the first Sam & Max episode debuted, I feel like I've developed a pretty good sense of what to expect from Telltale Games. The company's point-and-click adventure games have resuscitated a fading genre with their excellent writing and hilariously obtuse puzzles -- but one thing they ain't is surprising.

It turns out Telltale throws a bit of a curveball with Puzzle Agent. The developer's latest downloadable release is less Tales of Monkey Island and more Professor Layton -- mixed with a dash of The X-Files and Fargo. Puzzle Agent puts you in the shoes of Nelson Tethers, a bubblegum-addicted investigator with the FBI's Department of Puzzle Research who's being sent out on his first official case in ages.

Metacritic.com: PS3 Reviews

BlazBlue: Continuum Shift

27 Jul 2010 at 10:00am
Fighting, from Aksys Games

Sam & Max: The Devil's Playhouse Episode 4 - Beyond the Alley of the Dolls

20 Jul 2010 at 10:00am
Adventure, from TellTale Games

Little League World Series Baseball 2010

13 Jul 2010 at 10:00am
Sports, Baseball, from Activision

GameSpot's Reviews

PSP | Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands Review

30 Jul 2010 at 9:12pm

The well-designed levels in The Forgotten Sands do a good job of sucking you into this 2D world, but minor control issues and lame combat distract from the fun.

Score: 6.5 / fair

Get the full article at GameSpot

Wii | Little League World Series Baseball Double Play Review

30 Jul 2010 at 9:11pm

Poor controls and a wonky camera strike out Little League World Series Baseball: Double Play.

Score: 5.0 / mediocre

Get the full article at GameSpot

PlayStation 3 | BlazBlue: Continuum Shift Review

28 Jul 2010 at 10:21pm

New characters, modes, and gameplay refinements make Continuum Shift the best version of this great 2D fighting game.

Score: 8.0 / great

Get the full article at GameSpot