Strangle.. Woah

Stranglehold is definitely a pleasant surprise. When I heard, "John Woo presents" I immediately decided that it would be a much more polished and well presented game, far from that of the matrix. Come to think of it though, the Wakowski brothers did the Matrix and John Woo had nothing to do with it. Either way, I figured it would be a good game. I got a chance to play the demo on PS3. I was simply blown away. The way you can slow down time and how it's not just jumping slowly, but jumping off of walls, sliding down railings, sliding on small push carts, shooting down a billboard sign, shooting a transformer pole down and watching it fall on your enemies, is all what makes this game unique and yet innovative. You can practically damage anything in the game, and the storyline makes for an entertaining premise of a 'one cop does it all' theme. The fact that this game isn't a franchise, and is not a sequel makes me even more excited. Because in today's "madden generation" of games that are only bought for franchise characters, or sequels, it is good to see a game with no predecessors come out and deliver in a well put together fashion that should be recognized positively by the general gaming public. Go get this game.

-Jeremy

The Crisis is that it isn't out yet

Final Fantasy 7 Crisis Core is looking good...well at least the trailer looks good. I felt as if I was watching Advent Children. And if we know anything about Square-Enix, they know how to put a great story, mixed with great music, into a great innovative, enjoyable game. The only downside about this game is that it isnt out yet. I have yet to buy a PSP (but with the new price and slimmer model, that might change very soon), but if this game were out, I'd run to my local Target and get one now...right now..right as I'm writing this. That's simply how much I love the Final Fantasy series and virtually anything Square-Enix produces. And even though the game is coming out in Japan this fall, (Can Americans get it at the same time? Please? No? Ok I need to move to Japan) we can still expect a great game whenever it decides to grace us with its presence here in the U.S. I have found out that the game will take place in real time, but the battles will be random, opposite that of where the Final Fantasy series has started to go (see FFXII). I am very much looking forward to more and more details about this game. Until then, enjoy the video.

-Jeremy

I may Cry

Devil May Cry 4 is finally coming out...sooner rather than later, or is it the opposite? It seems as if the good games, or at least the anticipated good games, always come out later than expected and Devil May Cry is no different. It doesnt debut until next year, and when it does it should be a solid game. Even though the main character, Nero, not Dante, is headlining the game, and looks almost identical to Dante (where is the creative juice here?), the game is supposed to be much better. At the Tokyo Game Show the booth around Devil May Cry was packed and it was found out that Dante is actually going to be a boss fight against Nero. Good luck trying to remember which white hair, blue eye character you are. Every time you think you are winning, it might actually be Dante kicking your butt. But we wont know until early 2008, that sucks.

SMASH HIT!

Ok So I havent played this game yet, but it HAS to be a good game. It is pretty safe to say that if this was the ONLY game for the Nintendo Wii I would buy the Wii and play this game. I cannot wait for this game to come out in December. And from the screens I have see, there looks to be a significantly deeper cast of characters including Diddy Kong and Solid Snake. If excitement was a high fat food, I would be gaining weight all the way until the game came out. Enjoy the video.

Super Mario Galaxy looking good

Super Mario Galaxy is looking better and better each time I check out a new video or read about a new feature of the game scheduled to launch in early November. Maybe we will finally be able to see a quality Mario game that we have been starving for. As for the Video Game Aid, you know I will be all over this game the day it comes out because it looks as appeasing as any solo Mario game I've seen since the release of Mario 64 eons ago. Dare I say it, this game looks to be more fun, and more interactive, and more likeable, and whatever other adjective you want to throw in there, than Mario 64 was, and that was one of the best games of all time. Lets just hope it lives up to the hype.

Yawniro- Party 8

Dice blocks. Red spaces. Blue spaces. Mini-games. Green Spaces. And the ever present star. These all are part of the experience that is Mario Party 8. Wait...isnt that what the experience for Mario Party 1-7 was? Ok ok, so not much has changed for the italian plumber and all of his friends. The one innovation that was expected and known was that the minin-games were to feature the Wii remote in motion sensing capabilities such as that of Wario Ware. So if you are looking for a game that features the roll of the dice, many heartaches from stars being taken from you, and only six levels of game-board playing, then look no further than Mario Party 8. There is nothing inherently unique about this game other than the fact that there are motion sensor controllers involved. The biggest knock I would have on this game is that it is only 6 levels of playability. Sure it can get fun when you have 2 or more people playing but overall it is too stale of a game to be fully enjoyed alone. If you are looking for a party experience with friends, roommates, and siblings, this is a great game, if you are looking for something to just pick up and play by yourself, this is not your game.

Spidey needs more web fluid

I was extremely excited for Spider-Man 3 the game. I expected it to be much better than the first two installments of the series and hoped it would be fast paced and non-repetitive. I was hoping that it would be like Ultimate Spider-Man minus the shortened story line. Well I got two out of three. The game starts off fast and gets faster, especially when you are playing with the black suite. The only thing about this game that makes it repetitive is the fact that some of the missions become frustrating enough where you might just want to chuck your $50.00 siaxis controller out of the window. Common sense prevails in this case because you realize that one controller is as much as a new current generation game. When you get your cool back all of the missions are beatable. The God-of-War-like in-cinema game-play is a nice shift from the traditional cut-scene. Rather than boring some with a cut-scene, or having others enjoy the cut scene but not be involved, Spider-Man 3 does a good job of making some great cinematography while also including the player in the game. Some of the button combinations got tough, especially on the last boss fight as you are supposed to press certain buttons the instant you see them with little or no accident or miss-timed forgiveness. All in all you basically have to memorize some of the combinations when it comes to trying them over again after you have failed the first few times. The bad part about this game, and I don’t know why this happens with Spider-Man, it’s too short. The game could have so much in it and it’s too short. Ultimate Spider-Man was the same way, it was a great, fast paced, no busy work, game. But it’s ultimate downfall was that it was too short, I feel the same way about Spider-Man three. One of the big things one of the creators of the game relished on was the fact that there were ten different story lines that could be taken throughout the game, but what he failed to mention is that each of those story lines probably had only five to 10 missions, the latter number being for the main story line. Fun game, too short.

Guitar Hero

When I first saw Guitar Hero I had no idea what the game was. Then about a three months later I picked up the color coded string based plastic guitar and rocked the house. Of course I was only on medium difficulty at the time, but who cares.
Guitar hero did for me what dance dance revolution would do for someone who has no rhythm. It made me feel as if I could actually play guitar in real life. Some of the more notable points of Guitar Hero are the facts that it weaves you into harder difficulty with the songs getting harder and harder as you play through the difficulty. By the time you beat all the songs on one difficulty, you are inevitably ready to take on the easiest song of the next difficutly.
Guitar Hero mimicks the motions of moving up and down the frets pretty well. I found that I did a lot better in hitting notes that I otherwise might have been late hitting if I simply slid my hand up and down the frets rather than trying to take my finger off the fret and putting it on another fret. Again, mimicking real guitar playing.
The song selection in my mind was great. There were a lot of songs I recognized, and I'm not even a rock fan. I also like the fact that the song selection was spread out with a little bit of rock, pop rock, and somewhat jazz like tunes. Overall, if you want to feel like you can rock out and get on stage with the best of the best (while still knowing you only completed easy mode), Guitar Hero is a great game.

Kingdom Hearts 2

Kingdom Hearts 2 is a significant step up from its predecessor. Not only is the game-play virtually one dimensional as in the last game, i.e. the magic attacks were all forward firing magic attacks, the attacks were the same three combo moves and the innovation of gameplay just was not there; but the story line is also up to par.

Coming froma player who did not play Chain of Memories on Gameboy advance, I had no problem understanding the story line. It's not the hardest story line to understand, but that's not to say that you can skip over all of the drawn out and multiples cut-scenes throughout the game.

Kingdom Hearts 2 brought something that I did not expect from the Kingdom Hearts franchise. It brought the sense of a true RPG in an easy to understand module that was extremely fast paced. Take for example the triangle button. This one button, during different parts of the game, allowed you to perform various enhanced attacks that are otherwise unavailable to the traditional 3 part combo move displayed using the X-button.

Therefore this makes the gameplay much faster and interactive and less boring. It also adds the extra movie element to the game where the player feels like they are in control but just enough out of control to watch amazing action.

The teamup attacks are probably one of the best innovations of the game. Not only can you fight side by side with multiple Disney characters including Mulan, Captain Jack and Simba, but you can actually team up to control them using, you guessed it, the triangle button. This is the part of the game that makes it a lot more fast and interactive than games past.

The story line of the game follows pretty much the end of Kingdom Hearts, but with a twist. Instead of just having the heartless, there are beings known as the Nobodies. Sometimes it seems that the Nobodies are battling the heartless and the heartless are battling you and you are battling both, which can make for some extremely confusing scenarios.

Overall, the fast gameplay, the collective fighting with other disney and Final Fantasy, characters, the new summons and drive meter, and the unbelievable story line to intertwine all of this makes for an exciting game.

Marvel Ultimate Alliance

Outside looking in this game looks to be amazing. Not because of its unique game play (since it is almost identical to the X-Men Legends series), not because of it's graphics, and not because of its pretty well molded story-line. This game looks amazing because there are so many different marvel characters. I admire what Marvel tried doing, I really do. What haunts me is the fact that I didn't know half of the villains. Unless you are a fan of most of the Marvel comics you'd have a hard time identifying some of these villains too. Radioactive Man? Yeah I thought it was cheesy too. Where's Hobgoblin? Venom? Sandman? Mr. Sinister? Kingpin? The Sentinels? And many many more villains? Ok, I can understand that Marvel can't put in all of the characters, but at least when you say I can play with over 20 characters, make them characters worth playing with. I had no interest in Spider-Woman and Ms. Marvel. Give me Beast, Magneto, or even make Venom a good guy. Contrary to the statements so far, I liked this game a lot. The game was fun and has pretty decent replay value pending that you are interested in seeing the alternate endings for things that you decide to do and not to do. But overall I feel that more could have been put into this game to make it superb. Maybe number two will be better.