Catherine starts out with an introduction into the world before dropping you into your first puzzle sequence.  You’ll be taught the basics of the game and the simplicity of the puzzles at first hide what is to become some truly difficult climbs.  Mostly you are just going to climb and Vincent(your player character) will do that when you press toward a block.  He can climb anything that is one block higher.  Next you find you need to push or pull a block to make Vincent a path up.  This again is very easy at first.  Finally you’ll learn to push enemies out of your way.  That’s actually everything you’ll ever need to know as far as controls go.  The difficult comes in the various techniques you’ll need to master in order to make your way to the top of a wall.

The game does an excellent job of teaching you various techniques for building yourself a way up.  But the difficulty is unrelenting.  I played the game on normal difficulty(and the game warns you that this might be too high when you pick it) and found myself having to repeat quite a few sections of the different puzzle walls until I got it right.  The game is forgiving on the amount of tries you get and on the lower difficulty levels(including normal) you get to take back several moves in case you screw up.  There will be times when you can’t find a way up even if you back up 15 moves.  It’s best to just restart if you’re not too far away from the checkpoints on the wall.

The difficulty for me was never truly a problem until the very last wall in the game.  I found that I needed to know a technique I hadn’t learned during the other levels of the game and ended up watching a Youtube video of other players tackling the last wall before I was able to finish it.  The victory wasn’t quite as sweet as it should have been because of the help I needed.

The other half of the game is mainly a visual novel or a point and click adventure type game.  After each puzzle section you’re presented with several cutscenes which will culminate into the local dive bar Vincent frequents with his friends.  You then have a chance to talk with your friends or have a few drinks.  The drinks actually speed you up during the puzzle nightmares that night.  There’s also an arcade game in the corner called Rapunzel.  It plays like the puzzles you face each night except there’s not time constraint.

It’s during these parts of the game that you’ll make many of the choices that push you toward one of the game’s possible endings.  There are different endings for ending up with Katherine, different endings for ending up with Catherine and at least one ending where you end up with neither.  What ending you receive relies on a myriad of different influences.   The obvious influence is how you answer the questions you are asked during the nightmares.  The ending also relies on the interactions with your friends or acquaintances at the bar or with stray sheep during your nightmares as well as how you respond to text messages from each of your two girlfriends.  The game presents you with a changing morality bar so you’ll know which way your lean.  I found it best to just play the story based on what my own choices would have been and I enjoyed the ending I received.

The real question is whether or not these two halves make an effect whole.  I’d definitely say they do.  The two serve to compliment each other.  For each nightmare puzzle you complete(and these can feel like nightmares to play as much as they are nightmares for Vincent) you are awarded with a section of game that doesn’t require twitchy puzzle mechanics or quick thinking on your feet.  I found it to work quite well.

Before I give this thing a glowing review, that me just say that the controls need some work.  They’re a little too twitchy.  I found myself having to use the back button to take back moves quite a bit throughout the game because Vincent would push a block instead of pulling it or he’d push it the wrong direction.  This likely has more to do with the crumby d-pad on the 360 controller than it does with the game, but for those of you with both systems it might be better if you pick this up on the PS3.  The controller there is more suited to the types of puzzling done in Catherine.

Once you have completed the game you unlock some special features within the game, but I found myself disinterested in these because they mainly are puzzles without story around them.  By themselves the puzzles can get frustratingly difficult and without some story to offset it I just lost interest.  I’m more apt to just let this one sit on the shelf a while and then I’ll come back to it and play through the story for the other endings.

Finally, the localization is excellent.  I tried out the Japanese demo on Xbox Live and I have to say I’m impressed with the work done bringing this title stateside.  The voice work is particularly good and Laura Bailey as Catherine really brings the sexy.  That’s especially impressive considering she’s also the voice of Shin Chan.

One Sentence Review : It’s not easy mixing a brutal and fast paced puzzle game with a visual novel but Catherine pulls it off well.

Score : 4/5

I love racing games.  I really do.  I like Gran Turismo, although the career mode is slow.  I like Forza, and I have that same complaint about career mode.  I enjoy the more arcade titles like Project Gotham Racing 4.  And finally, I like the ridiculous ones that involve power ups like Mario Kart and Blur.  So what is it that makes this one different?  Cheap AI and excessive rubber banding.

Let me back up a bit and explain what Split\Second is.  This game is a racing game, but it’s also about survival and blowing stuff up.  When you describe it from the outside, it sounds awesome.  You and 7 other drivers complete for first place on a track designed to blow up.  As you race you gain power from drifting, drafting and other scoring moves.  Once you’ve built up a bar of power you can unleash set up explosions on the track to blow up rival drivers.  You can unlock short cuts to gain the lead.  If you build up a full power bar you can unleash devastating track changing attacks that can rocket you to the lead position.

I know, it sounds awesome.  The problem are two-fold.  Firstly, the game’s AI is too good and always has power built up.  Unless you’re in 8th place things are going to blow up in front of you.  It’s uncanny that you can be in 7th place and yet the guy in 8th has enough power built up to fire multiple explosions in your way.  It gets worse when you’re in 3rd or 4th.  Without some luck you’ll never see the guy in first again.  Secondly, this game rubber bands the AI more than any other racing game I’ve played.  It’s bad.  You can be in 1st place, hit one explosion and when you drop back on the track you’ll be 5th at best.  Now, that is something that can happen sometimes.  But after blowing up your rivals and busting yourself up to 1st place it’s odd that every single time you get blown out of it there were 4 or more guys right on your ass.  And it only works for the AI.  You never get rubber banded.  If you get way behind, you’ll never see those guys again.

It’s not only frustrating, it’s inconsistent.  Sometimes I’d just pull first place in a race or other event.  It’s not that I did anything different.  I just managed to get lucky and the AI didn’t successfully knock me out.  There are also balancing issues.  The standard race event requires a fair bit of luck to pull 1st place.  The detonator events on the other hand are easy to pull first place.  This just serves to make the race and elimination race event AI problems shine that much brighter.

The game is structured as a 12 episode TV show.  The best way to describe it would be like American Gladiator, but with cars.  You’re competing over a season of the show on a points scale.  Each individual episode has a theme, although it’s really hard to care what those themes are.  Mainly this is because there are few actual locations in the game and the episodes don’t focus on one location, despite pretending just that.  A preview for one upcoming episode shows a bridge being blown up on a specific track, but unless you trigger it that’s unlikely to happen nor does it keep you from triggering it in a different episode that hits that same location.  Not that you’ll even care.  Toward the end of the game you’ll have blown up the same building/bridge/damn/etc several times and it always blows up the same way so it becomes nearly meaningless.

I think the main reason I have such a hatred for this game is from how good it could have been.  There are so many things they got right.  Explosions are insane.  Blowing up a rival at the last possible moment and passing them for the win is a great feeling.  Taking out a helicopter with missiles is really run, even if it really only happened because you dodged some red dots on a track.  But when the game is beats you with something cheap like rubber banding, it’s just disappointing and anger inducing.  The game could blow you up, but instead you just lost because you took a turn wrong and got passed by 4 different rivals.

It just goes to show you, the number one important thing in a racing game is getting the racing right.  And that’s still true when you put in things that explode.

One Sentence Review : Split/Second provides momentary fun and excitement before settling into a functional but flawed racing/action game.

Score : 2/5

For more info check out the NISA forum post(especially page 12 where an NIS employee weighs in) or the original press release here.

I first entered the world of Disgaea with the PSP port of the original game, Disgaea – Afternoon of Darkness.  I was introduced to Laharl, Etna, Flonne and the rest.  These characters are still my favorites out of the series(so it’s not surprising they usually show up in sequels).  It was this game that introduced me to interesting concepts like picking up and throwing party members in order to make it across the map quickly or entering my own items in order to level them up or the effects of colored blocks and tiles.

With each subsequent game new concepts were introduced, although unless you really delve deep into the games you may never notice the changes.  Maybe it’s just that “3″ in the name, but they don’t really do a great job of explaining some of the more advanced features of the game.  You’ll get tutorials explaining the basic features, but the game expects you to know some of the other stuff on your own.  If you really want to get into the post game stuff you’ll likely be running back and forth to gamefaqs or trying to find a strategy guide for the game.

Disgaea is a tactical rpg and it excels at it.  But there are several features that really make it stand out.  First is the colored floor tiles and boxes that modify the effects of those tiles.  These vary between helpful and harmful.  Some, like the experience boosters, allow you to gain levels faster.  Others, like mighty enemy, make it next to impossible to take out the enemies without first dealing with the box first.  These effects stack too, so it’s possible to have squares on the map that provide invincibility and cause damage at the same time.

Many maps start with an advantage for the enemy.  Your first task on these maps is usually canceling the effect by destroying the box causing it.  That brings up the other important part of the color tiles and boxes.  When you destroy a box that is a different color than the tile it’s on, all the tiles will change to that color.  So if there’s a green box on red tile then destroying that box changes all the red tiles to green tiles.  It sounds simple but it can get very complicated.  You get bonuses such as extra experience or hell(the game’s money) when you manage to chain color changes.  It’s a very deep system and it’s hard to explain well in a short review.  Just know that these modifiers can make for an amazing amount of variation in how you play each map.

Another interesting feature is towers.  One of your characters picks up another giving you a stack of two characters.  This stack can then be picked up by a third character, and so on.  You can make a tower as tall as you allowed allies for a map(usually 10).  This is a good way to move farther than you are normally allowed.  After you have the tower built, the person on the bottom can throw the whole tower several tiles away.  Then the new bottom of the tower can do the same thing.  You can get a character all they way to the other side of the map in most cases using this technique, and it’s really useful for dealing with color blocks on the other side of the map quickly.

Towers have been around since the first Disgaea game, but in Disgaea 3 it’s even easier to build your tower.  You can now bring allies out of your base panel directly onto the tower you are building instead of having to pick up each character.  It greatly shortens the amount of time it takes to set up.  What’s more, there are now some tower special attacks that can be learned.  These involve using your tower of allies to hit enemies farther away than you could normally attack, or to hit an enemy with every ally in the tower.  These special attacks are nice to have but I found myself not using them all that much.

Disgaea excels and replay value and the item world and class world really drive that point home.  Item world is a place where you can actually enter your items as if they are a dungeon.  Your goal is simply to get through each floor of the item until you reach an item boss, which occurs every 10th floor.  Beating a floor allows for some variation.  Sometimes you can just walk onto the exit panel.  Other times you must kill an enemy guarding the panel.  For every level you do complete the item levels up.  You can make some really powerful items, weapons or armor using the item world and it’s also great for leveling up your allies.  Class world is nearly the same as item world, except in class world you’re entering one of your allies in order to level them up.  Both features are great for grinding levels, and in a game where max level is 9999 that’s a good thing.

Yes, the max level is 9999.  You either knew that or you’re reeling from it.  The most interesting thing about Disgaea is the ability to get characters all the way to level 9999.  They’ll do more than a million hp of damage in one hit.  But don’t let it scare you.  That insane amount of grinding isn’t required.  In fact, you can beat the game without breaking level 100.  That’s where the remarkable balance of Disgaea really shines.  This is a game that works for the rpg fan that hates grinding and only cares about the story as well as the one that loves nothing more than making the most powerful character possible by grinding for 300 hours.

Disgaea 3 handles some of the balancing in the classroom.  This is where you’ll go to convince the school council to pass various modifications.  Some of these are simple like the “Stronger Enemies” bill or the “More Expensive Stuff” bill.  You’ll use these to level up the enemies in the game so that you can keep grinding if you like.  A casual gamer may never pass the “Stronger Enemies” bill.  A hardcore grinder might pass that as soon as they can.  And that’s a stackable bill, meaning you can pass it more than once.  Additionally, there are bills you can pass that add new maps to tackle.  It takes quite a bit of work, but you can open up the House of Ordeals or the Land of Carnage and really give yourself a workout.

Disgaea 3 has a great story and it’s fully voiced.  The voice work is excellent and I found myself really liking the characters as I played the game, although they still somehow aren’t as endearing as the group from the original game.  The story is fun and despite playing as a group that should be the bad guys(demons from the Netherworld) it’s all in good fun.  This game is really a comedy when it comes down to it, and it’s pretty funny at times.

There are only two things I’d mention that I didn’t like about the game.  The first is the trophies in the game.  The trophies in Disgaea 3 are nearly impossible to get without being a grind fest fan.  I’ve beaten the game and played an extra 20 hours of bonus content including the Raspberyl DLC chapters.  Currently I have 4% of the trophies.  Most of them involve beating specific random characters in the item world or stealing by reverse pirating which requires you to at least find a pirate first which are randomly found and fairly rare.  It’s not that big a deal unless you really need trophies to feel like you accomplished something.  The other problem is a small bug.  There are 3 zoom levels with the camera in the game.  It works on an isometric view like you’d see in Final Fantasy Tactics or Sim City 2000.  The 3 options you have are normal, zoomed out and a more raised up view from a higher angle.  Once you have one view you like you’ll probably use that all the time.  The problem is it goes back to default after cut-scenes and at the end of a fight.  It’s not every time, but it’s enough to get annoying.  Your setting will still be how you set it, but it will be back on default.  So you have to cycle through all 3 views again to get back to your preferred one if it’s not the default.

Don’t let my nitpicking turn you away though.  These are very minor issues with an otherwise outstanding tactical rpg.  You can spend 40 hours and experience the fun story or spend 300 or more and take on some really challenging battles.  I’ll  also point out it’s only about 20 dollars new.  You’ll be hard pressed to find more gaming for your dollar than Disgaea 3.

One Sentence Review  : Disgaea 3 is a can’t miss tactical rpg for PS3 and should be experienced by fans of the genre or fans of NIS.

Score : 4.5/5

I’ll be talking about 4 games.  Catherine, El Shaddai, Bullet Soul and Gal*Gun.

Catherine – I may not understand what’s going on in this demo, but it’s certainly easy to figure out how to play the puzzle parts of the game. It’s a little like Q*Bert, if you remember it. You are tasked with making your way to the top of a wall of blocks. At first it’s fairly easy but it quickly becomes a frantic and at times frustrating experience. As you ascend the wall the blocks below you are torn away by a demonic arm. Sometimes you have to push blocks to ascend to the next level. Sometimes you must destroy them to make a path. I can see this getting to be difficult, and some gamers might find it frustrating to figure out the best path while the clock quickly ticks away. On the bright side, this game is coming over stateside and Atlus is supposedly toning down the difficulty for the US release. The release date for Catherine is currently set for July 26, 2011.

El Shaddai : Ascension of the Metatron – Now this is an amazingly beautiful game. The demo puts you in a surrealistic world that feels like a painting. At first it plays like a 3rd person action adventure game. There are some platforming elements involving jumping. These can be difficult due to the camera angle. Fights involve impressive acrobatics, which is probably to be expected from the guy that made Devil May Cry. After the first 3rd person section ended the game switched to a side scroller and involves a great deal of platforming. These sections are pretty impressive. Again, the US audience is lucky as this game is coming over July 26, 2011.

Bullet Soul – I think 5pb meant for US gamers to get a Japanese account so they could try this game out. Bullet Soul is a shmup, short for shoot em up. These are games like the Gradius series or the more recent(at least for US fans) Ikaruga. The interesting thing for Bullet Soul is the game was released region free. US gamers can import this game and play it on any US 360 instead of needing to import a Japanese system. As far as the game goes, it’s pretty standard fare for a bullet hell style shmup. Persistence, practice and memorization of patterns are the norms for these games, and this one is no different. If you’re a fan of the genre this is a good choice, especially since you can try out a demo first. I’ll have to admit I haven’t picked it up though.

Gal*Gun – Wow. Just wow. This is one of those games that show you just how different the market in Japan is compared to the US. I still can’t read Japanese, so I can’t for sure tell you what this game is about. But the opening cinematic seems to show an underage girl dressed as Cupid. She takes aim at a boy on a school campus and fires. An unintentional barrage of arrows come out and fill the boy with an excess of love. It seems Cupid accidentally fired too much and now you have to shoot your love on all the girls on the school campus. Yeah, you read that right. This game involves you going around what appears to be an all girls school shooting girls in their school girl uniforms with your love. You have to shoot as many as you can and you can’t let any come up and give you a letter. I’m not sure what the letter even means. But I got the general idea. This one is worth checking out just for the sheer insanity of it. Don’t expect a US release on this one. Ever.

So there you go, 4 games you can check out yourself by setting up a Japanese region Xbox Live account.  Setting up an account is easy.  Just make a new Live account like you normally would and when it asks you for your location tell it you’re in Japan.  That’s all there is too it.  Just be aware when you log in with this account your Xbox dashboard will be in Japanese as well.  As long as you remember where things are on a US region account, it’s mostly the same.

Have fun!

Rockstar is on a hell of a roll.  Last year they released Red Dead Redemption and it was praised by critics(including myself).  This year they’ve released L.A. Noire and while you might have considered Red Dead something along the lines of grand theft horse, L.A. Noire doesn’t invoke quite the same feelings.  You play a detective.  You’re finally on the side of the law Rockstar usually has chasing you down.  And while you might expect that to mean you are going to be a corrupt and flawed individual, it’s not nearly to the level you might expect.

First of all, let’s clear something up.  This game takes place in an open world.  It’s like GTA or Red Dead Redemption.  It’s the world you expect out of a Rockstar game.  You’re in 1947 Los Angeles.  It’s 8 square miles of digitized world.  It’s amazing.  But the story is completely linear.  You can’t branch off and tackle different parts at different times.   There are specific cases and they have to go in the order of the story.  There is some openness in how you complete certain parts of a case.  When chasing a suspect in your vehicle you can stop their vehicle in different ways.  When chasing on foot you can tackle a suspect or you can fire a warning shot if they have a gun.  But you can’t get your gun out manually.  It will be out if it’s allowed.  When investigating a crime scene you can’t really continue the  case until you’ve found all the clues.  The game will allow you to visit some locations out of order at times, but if you need something from an earlier location you’ll find yourself back there.  Sometimes you’ll be forced to charge a suspect with a crime despite knowing you haven’t covered all the evidence.  It’s linear, but not necessarily to a fault.  The story is engrossing and should keep you entertained for the length of the game.  You can also choose to enter the “Streets of L.A” for each of the different divisions you’ll work in.  This gives you the chance to access the open world and tackle some of the street crime cases or just drive around without being in the middle of a case.

In L.A. Noire it’s 1947 and the war(WWII for those not up on your history) just ended.  Our boys have come home.  You play Cole Phelps, a marine and war hero.  He’s come back home to his wife and kids and is now working his way up through the ranks of L.A.’s finest.  He starts off on patrol which acts as a tutorial for the game.  You’ll learn the basics of investigation here, which main means walking around a crime scene pressing the A button when you see something out of place or hear a sound or feel a controller vibration.  The game does a good job of letting you know there’s a clue nearby and when you’ve found all the required clues there will be a sound to let you know you’ve got all you need.  The other main meat of the game is interrogation of witnesses or suspects.  This is where the game’s facial capture really shines.  You’ll ask questions and wait for a response.  After each response you have to decide whether the person was telling the truth or if you doubt them or if you think they are lying and you have proof.  The facial capture they did allowed for real life actors to act out all these lines so you have to read a realistic person and decide.  Sometimes it’s easy.  You see someone get all shifty eyed and you know they’re up to no good.  Sometimes it’s hard.  They don’t change expression at all when they lie.  Some people are good liars and some aren’t.  The game does a great job of reflecting that.

As a police officer you’ll also be required to chase suspects or get into fire fights with law breakers.  These sequences are never too much of a hassle.  As with other Rockstar games, combat lacks the polish of other AAA titles.  But here it’s never a difficult task and the cover system works reasonably well.  However, it’s overly “magnetic”.  Once you are in cover it’s a bit of a fight to exit cover.  You probably won’t be in much danger while fighting it though.  Most of your deaths in combat will come when you’ve taken cover on the wrong side or the game popped up an enemy right next to you.  These instances don’t happen often, but they can be very annoying.  It’s not enough to ruin the experience.

The graphics of the game aren’t what I’d consider top notch.  I ran into framerate issues, low res textures while i waited for the city to load and a few times the game even locked up momentarily while it loaded the city around me(on the screen I hit a while wall that slowly filled in with city a little like being in the Matrix or Inception).  I don’t remember having issues like these during RDR or GTA4.  They aren’t going to kill the game for you, but it’s going to take you out of the game momentarily which is a shame considering how engrossing the world can be.  There’s something truly amazing about driving through a more or less realistic 1947 LA.  There are billboards for products that no longer exist.  There are cars you’d only seen in a museum today.  The radio plays the stuff your parents called oldies.  People wear a lot of hats.  The fact that you can floor the pedal in your car and it takes a good 20-30 minutes to get from one end of the map to the other is just impressive.  It’s also going to make you use the fast travel option and let your partner drive after the awe of the city has worn off.

As I already stated, the facial mapping animation(and in some cases full body animations) are incredibly impressive.  These represent what is a likely next step in game animation, although I have mixed opinions about it.  Animations in the game are very realistic and I love the results in L.A. Noire, but it also means the game is much more closely tied to a movie-like performance.  We’ll have to see where the technology leads.

As a side note I picked up the Rockstar DLC pass which grants you access to all the DLC through July.  Currently there are a few cases worth checking out.  If you get the DLC before you play the game these cases will show up in their correct story order.  Otherwise you’ll need to access them  through the cases menu.  I would say it’s almost worth waiting until after July to play through the game.  I played through Naked City in story order(it was preorder bonus at GameStop so I had it already).  In this context it made a lot of sense and really added to the story.  I played through A Slip of the Tongue after I’d completed the game.  While it’s still an engaging story and the case is interesting, it’s hard to forget how the game ends and hard to remember what was going on with Cole during the case you’re jumping back into.

Finally, let me bring up something about our protagonist Cole Phelps.  This is going to be a spoiler, but it’s one I’m going to freely relay because it pissed me off and I don’t want others to get blindsided by the story.  The game spends some time driving home the point that Cole is a good person.  He’s a clean cop.  He’s a war hero.  He’s just all around good people.  But suddenly about 2/3 of the way into the game you suddenly find out he has a flaw.  You get about 15 minutes of foreshadowing before the flaw is revealed.  Then the game just goes haywire for a while.  You’ll end up playing as a different character named Jack Kelso who doesn’t get along well with Cole but also happens to be an all around good person and a marine war veteran too.  It took me a while to really come to grips with the changes.  Some people find that the ending doesn’t do the game justice.  I felt the ending was exactly what it needed to be.  I just would have preferred a little more foreshadowing on the flaws of Cole Phelps.  Hopefully my warnings here will prepare you for it without giving away what it actually is.

One Sentence Review  : A few graphical hitches and story issues really don’t detract from what amounts to be an excellent period piece story in an amazing open setting.

Score : 4.5/5

But the real question is whether they can take a short game like Portal and turn it into a full fledged experience worthy of being all by itself.

The short answer is absolutely.  Read on for my review.

The original Portal is one of those rare games that managed to really show you something new and different.  The fact that it’s also an enjoyable experience doesn’t hurt any either.  But it’s hard not to be a little disappointed or maybe even angry when you find out the sequel is going to be 60 dollars.  When Portal came out as a downloadable title it was 20 bucks.  But it was popular so Valve is obviously just out to screw us gamers out of our monies.  It’s amazing to me that any gamer might still feel this way after playing Portal 2.  Portal 2 is easily one of the best games we’ll see in 2011 and I expect will be the #1 game on several lists for this year.  While some are complaining that it’s short, I’d find it hard to believe a player can get through this game in under 6 or 7 hours unless they’re are ignoring everything going on but the puzzles.  And that’s just for the single player story.

If you’ve played the original Portal(and shame on you if you haven’t) then you’ll know what kind of gameplay you’ll be seeing in this robust sequel.  The puzzles this time around deliver the same kinds of experience you would expect, at least at first.  But several new additions to the game mechanics really amplify the puzzles to new levels.  The new gels are particularly impressive and sometimes require some pretty inventive use.  However, just like the original Portal, the difficulty balance feels just right.  You’ll feel a real sense of success without thinking the game is holding your hand.

What’s truly great about the single player experience is the story.  Valve has fleshed out the world of Portal and the backstory of Aperture Science in a way that is both gripping and hilarious.  It’s hard not to fall in love with the characters, even the ones working against you.    Voice work from J.K. Simmons and Stephen Merchant really work in this setting and you might wish at times they were real.  Go check out Valve’s youtube videos to hear some of J.K. Simmons’ excellent work.

If all I got in Portal 2 was the excellent single player experience, it would be enough for me.  But Valve really went the extra mile.  There is a new co-op multiplayer mode and it represents an entirely different set of puzzles designed for a 2 person(or in the game’s case robot) team to tackle.  This new mode basically adds a whole new game to the mix.  And the best part is they allow you to play this one split screen so it doesn’t require Xbox Live like some co-op games these days.

You’ll experience some excellent moments when playing the co-op game.  There is quite a bit of game there you should really check out.  And it’s a lot of fun to shoot a portal under your friend when they’re not paying attention.

The game is beautiful both graphically and aurally.  The game looks really good and stark contrast between the upper levels of Aperture and the older lower levels really put you in the right mood for each area.  The sound is what you’d expect but the voice work is really where this game truly shines.  They really add to the experience and I can’t imagine this game without the people doing voices here.

If I haven’t made it clear, you should get this game.  The only real question is which system you should get it for.  That’s a tough one(especially with Sony’s current PSN problems).  On the 360 you’ll get the game which will net you achievements but you don’t get the Steam integration you’d get from either the PS3 or PC copy.  The PC copy is likely the cheapest and does offer the advantages of Steam integration.  The best choice according to Valve is the PS3 version which not only nets you the game on PS3 with Steam but also allows you to have a copy on the PC as well.  But don’t start thinking you can sell it.  It requires you to activate it through your PS3 copy so you can’t really have one without the other.  I personally chose the 360 version because I prefer the controller and like the achievements on 360 better.  But it’s more or less personal preference(except when PSN goes down and you can’t get your game online).

Score : 5/5

One Sentence Review : Portal 2 delivers an impressive single player experience and amazing multiplayer experience in one thoroughly enjoyable package.

It’s hard to say why gamers flocked so willingly to Red Dead Redemption over Alan Wake. They are both excellent games. But one thing is certainly true. It’s hard to really show you what Alan Wake is without giving away too much. The marketing campaign had to be a careful ballet, building hype for the game without ruining it for you. In the mean time Red Dead Redemption can show you all kinds of scenes that make good comparisons to Eastwood style westerns. It’s unfair considering the excellence of Alan Wake.

It’s hard to really give an in depth review of Alan Wake without giving away too much. The story is heavily reminiscent of Stephen King’s style. If fact, King is referenced several times and even quoted. You can tell these guys love a good King thriller. There are a few The Shining moments. There’s a little bit of Misery in there. Other references include Twin Peaks(for the small town in Washington setting) and the Twilight Zone(for the Night Falls TV shows you will encounter during the game).

With all the references it’s surprising how original Alan Wake feels. The story is both familiar and new. And it’s damned scary, at least at first. When I first sat down to play Alan Wake it was around 1 in the morning and completely dark. Starting up the game and playing the opening scenes had me jumping at times and scared to leave the safety of the lights in the game.

The problem is you get used to it. And once you’re used to it the game loses some of that thriller punch. The game is split into episodes and by the third one you’ve seen all the different game mechanics that will show up. The drive to continue comes more from the story than from the gameplay. Thankfully, that’s not really a problem. While the story is by no means fresh in the world of pop culture, it’s not something you get every day in a video game. In a field where the common game has you fearlessly running around shooting everything in sight with unlimited ammo it’s nice to fall into a game where it’s sometimes better just to run away.

Remedy chose to deliver the game content in a different way than you might be used to. Alan Wake is organized much more like a television series. The game consists of 6 “episodes” that slowly unravel the story. At the beginning of each episode(sans the first) is a recap of the previous episode. These serve as good stopping points for the player, although it’s hard to tell if you just turn the game off during the end of an episode whether it will start the next with recap or make you replay the end of the previous. In retrospect I wish I’d have tried that. Most episodes end in a cliffhanger that will draw you into the next episode and end with a song that generally fits the tone of the episode. You’ll hear artists like Roy Orbison, Nick Cave or David Bowie along the way. These songs really fit the mood of the story well. I also found myself really enjoying the in game story related song called “The Poet and the Muse” which you’ll hear in episode 4.

The game both looks and sounds beautiful. Much of the gameplay is based on shining light from your flashlight on the “taken” in order to weaken them enough to be handled with more conventional weapons like a revolver or flare gun. The light effects truly look amazing, but it’s important to note that there is significant frame tearing when playing the game in 1080p. It’s noticeable but not necessarily a game killer unless you can’t help but pay attention to it and the problem is heavily reduced if not eliminated by dropping into 720p on your xbox.

As I said, the game plays out like a 6 episode TV series. The main plot is more or less resolved in the game, albeit with some heady consequences. There are two dlc “specials” that can be downloaded. Each functions as something of a off season special meant to sit between the first season and potential second season. The first dlc special, “The Signal” came free in the special edition. I went ahead an played through this and can safely say it doesn’t bring much new to the table. It actually raises more questions than it answers and practically requires you to pick up the second dlc special “The Writer” in order to get a resolution to the plot elements it raises. I’d suggest leaving it alone unless you’re okay with picking both up.

Alan Wake :

Score : 4.5/5

One Sentence Review : Alan Wake provides a Stephen King style thriller and lets you experience it first hand.

The Signal

Score : 2.5/5

One Sentence Review : This dlc pack for Alan Wake raises more questions than it answers while bringing nothing new to the gameplay of the original.