Downloadable Content

July 04, 2011 by Greg Noe

I just finished up my playthrough of the hardest difficulty in Mass Effect 2, and in the process finished unlocking all the game’s achievements along with playing all the downloadable content released after my first playthrough. I missed quite a bit of content, including Overlord and Lair of the Shadow Broker, but that’s all been played and reviewed now.

Which leaves me with just Arrival, the most recent and supposedly last piece of DLC released in February 2011. It is meant to bridge the gap between Mass Effect 2 and Mass Effect 3, and from the E3 preview of the third game, it will kick off with Commander Shepard feeling the repercussions of his decisions in the DLC. An interesting decision to place a semi-major plot element in a paid piece of content, but that’s business.

After a bum-rush of Mass Effect 2 related reviews over the past few months, this is probably my second to last piece on the game. I’m planning a Daddy Issues feature and that will be it (unless BioWare sneaks another piece of downloadable content on us, which seems unlikely). But don’t worry, I still need to write about all the different comics in the Mass Effect universe, so there is still more to come.

Mass Effect: Arrival costs 560 MS points or $7.

Lists

July 01, 2011 by Greg Noe, Nate

We've all grown up among an onslaught of advertisements. It is almost impossible to look anywhere in a semi-urban place and not see some sort of ad. Television has perhaps been their most successful medium, and video games have been advertising on the same tube we play them on for as long as they have been around.

So to celebrate the hundreds of video game ads, we present the Top 10 Video Game Commercials of All Time. This is the definitive list, carefully developed by our writers and then culled down by Greg and Nate. Blood was shed and tears were wept as we narrowed our "short list" of 25 ads down to just these 10. Without intention, we managed to select a set of ads that not only cover over 20 years of gaming from Nintendo, Sega, Sony, and the PC, but a wide variety of types of ads, from live action re-enactments to comedy to musicals.

This is the first official "list" we've ever posted, and we promise more in the future. They may seem easy to make, but we spent hours putting this together and had a ton of fun doing it.

Full Review

June 29, 2011 by Nate

One of the fun attributes of film noir is that, while often filmed in a stark black and white style, the characters and situations aren't so easily sorted. Good guys can keep bad habits, damsels in distress can turn femme fatale, and the line between cop and crook gets muddy. Black and white is the look, but gray is the tone.

L.A. Noire, Rockstar's latest critical smash, pays tribute to film noir's unclear nature not only in style but also in its design. A vast open world is the stage for a linear story. Modern gunfights and street races play nice with adventure game relics and intuition simulation that should prove to be the game's lasting legacy. And, given the task, I'd place L.A. Noire somewhere in the spectrum between pretty good and almost great.

But to be honest, that's not really what this piece turned out to be. It's not quite a review, but not really just a critique, either. Want a review? Here: "L.A. Noire isn't a bad game by any standard, but it's more an interesting experiment than it is a great experience." I'll even throw a number at you. "7." Bam, reviewed.

With that addressed, the following is a look at a few of the ways L.A. Noire straddles many seemingly opposite design elements. Sometimes this leads to nagging issues, others to surprise delights. But more often than not, it's hard to say either way.

Book Review

June 27, 2011 by Greg Noe

You may be surprised to find out the Mass Effect novels are not about Commander Shepard, or any of his squadmates, or feature any of the major events that take place during the games. BioWare and author Drew Karpyshyn have been very careful in not allowing any kind of canon Shepard to be declared. An individual’s Mass Effect experience is heavily influenced by the decisions they make, and the writers don’t want any outside influence to indicate someone is doing it right or wrong.

But the novels have successfully created their own small cast of characters and locations. Mass Effect: Revelation served as a prequel to the series, and while it introduced us to Captain Anderson and Saren, Kahlee Sanders quickly became the character to identify with. Ascension follows Sanders through her run in with Cerberus and training of human biotics, but also teases at some of the locations we would see in Mass Effect 2.

Now with Mass Effect: Retribution, we continue to follow Kahlee, but seemingly brush up against the world of the games a little closer. In most ways, Retribution doesn’t feel as much like a prequel to Mass Effect 3 as Ascension did to 2, but some groundwork is laid.

Here is my review of Mass Effect: Retribution, written by Drew Karpyshyn and released in July 2010.

Blog Post

June 24, 2011 by Paul Eastwood

My name is Paul Eastwood and I used to write for this site. Not only did I write, I hosted and produced the one and only official First Hour Podcast (accept no substitutes!) Where have I been for the past however-many-months? Well, I’ll explain a little of that in this post, the follow-up to my last post, in which I discussed adults who grew up with video games.

To put it simply, I don’t play games any more. In fact the date of the last podcast closely coincides with the last time I played a video game. Now I know what you’re thinking: “What in the zarking fardwarks?” I suppose it is hard to imagine. Me, who spent so much effort to carve out time to play video games. Me, whose childhood and high-school years are largely dominated by what games I was playing at the time. Me, whose normal conversation incorporates similes involving obscure video game characters.

First Hour Review

June 22, 2011 by Nate

"Gathering dust" has become the meme of regretful Wii owners everywhere. I can't even count the number of times I've seen these words used to complain about the dearth of worthwhile Wii games. As someone who has found plenty of variety and quality in Gamecube 1.1's software lineup, I've let out innumerable deep sighs in response.

And yet, I must admit that my Wii has sat silent for over six months now. After a year that I wouldn't hesitate to call the system's very best, even the most forgiving Nintendo fanboys couldn't deny that Wii has been a ghost town in 2011.

But all that changes now, as I just picked up the brand new Wii Play Motion! Yes, I think it's safe to say that the 2011 Wii drought is officially over. Because if anything can get hardcore gamers excited about Wii again, it's a minigame collection bundled with a controller!

All sarcasm aside, Wii Play Motion's various motion-centric minigames were created by several different studios, tasked with outdoing each other in finding a fun and unique use of the bundled-in Wii Remote+'s capabilities. Featuring such contributors as Prope (Yuji Naka's new studio) and Good-Feel (the minds behind the excellent Wario Land: Shake It and Kirby's Epic Yarn), it at least has an interesting pedigree. Or a collection of interesting pedigrees, I guess.

So I synced my pretty new Wii Remote+ and popped in the disc. In just over an hour, I tried out every singleplayer minigame in the collection (as far as I know). And lucky you, I recorded video of all of them! Hopefully each video will give you an idea of how the player interacts with the minigame and what kind of depth it may offer.

Downloadable Content

June 20, 2011 by Greg Noe

With Lair of the Shadow Broker, Mass Effect 2 finally gets the add-on fans have been waiting for. Additional characters in Zaeed and Kasumi are great, and Overlord was a decent side story, but Shadow Broker is the real deal.

The DLC not only brings back fan favorite Liara from Mass Effect 1, but features a pair of excellent boss fights and some awesome action set pieces. There’s also a handful of bonuses available after the action is over, extending and expanding upon the main game’s feature set.

Available for 800 MS Points ($10) since July 2010, here’s my review of Mass Effect 2’s penultimate DLC, Lair of the Shadow Broker.

Movie Review

June 17, 2011 by Greg Noe

Stay with me for a moment. Yes, I’m reviewing Grandma’s Boy, the lowbrow comedy produced by Adam Sandler five years ago starring Allen Covert. Yes, its connections to video games is loose, but when I started reviewing movies a few years ago, I didn’t just want to write about crappy game-to-movie adaptations (see Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life). I also wanted to write about movies about video games, even if they’re just used as a backdrop and MacGuffin (see Grandma’s Boy).

But buried beneath all the gross out humor, pot smoking, and before-he-was-famous-but-still-fat Jonah Hill, there’s actually quite a bit of video gaming in Grandma’s Boy. Some of it is flat-out hysterically wrong, but a small chunk is actually interesting video game history.

So here’s my review of Grandma’s Boy, focused mostly on the relevant video game aspects of the film, without forgetting Freaks and Geeks’ awesome Linda Cardellini.

First Hour Review

June 15, 2011 by Nate

I vividly recall some trials and frustrations in my time with the original inFAMOUS (not the least of which was that horrible spelling which will henceforth be abandoned), but overall I really enjoyed the game. As much as the sticky platforming, messy mission design, and transparent morality system bothered me, I ultimately had a great time surfing on power lines, tossing electric grenades, and guiding a concentrated lightning storm down alleys of soon-to-be-corpses. It was inevitable that the game would get a sequel due to its ending (and the sad, predictable nature of this industry), and I really hoped that Sucker Punch would iron out a few of the teeth-grating problems I had with the original.

Lo and behold, it's one month and two years later, and there's another Infamous game. Boasting a locale with more colors than gray, melee combat that's not completely worthless, and the promise of acquiring more elemental powers, Infamous 2 certainly seems like the kind of sequel that boasts incremental improvements over the original and hasn't yet worn out the franchise's welcome. Pretty typical of a "2," really.

I find it amusing that the game arrived in my mailbox last Monday, the same day that Sony featured a trailer from the game in its E3 conference. Shortly after their presentation, I had my first taste of Infamous 2. I grabbed three clips from my first hour: arrival at the new sandbox city of New Marais, the first new power tutorial, and an early choice between good and evil sidequests.

Half-Hour Handheld

June 13, 2011 by Paul Abbamondi

My favorite game is—and most likely will always be—The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. It's a videogame that raised me, coddled me through the early years, showed me the potential games held, and reminded me that there's still good in this world. And strangely, there's never been anything quite like it since its debut way back in November 1992. I guess some games do come close: 3D Dot Game Heroes, Alundra, Beyond Oasis, and Dragon Quest Heroes: Rocket Slime. Not surprisingly, nobody does Zelda quite like Nintendo.

Nintendo's 2011 E3 conference opened with some love for the Zelda franchise, now twenty-five years big, and a surprise announcement was that The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening was going to be available very soon on the Nintendo 3DS eshop. Sadly, I never got to experience this game before on the GameBoy, and a quick bit of research revealed that it both looked and played similar to what I consider to be gaming nirvana. Well, I downloaded it as soon as I could. Let's hope it lives up to my lofty expectations...