DEMOlition
Demo Impressions: Brütal Legend
Sep 23rd
Tim Schafer (left) watches as Jack Black does something with a ridiculous expression on his face. Jack Black is a funny man.
What’s in a name? In the case of Brütal Legend, a whole hell of a lot.
- Jack Black stars as Eddie Riggs, the world’s best roadie who’s transported to a dimension of awesome metal-inspired brutality.
- Rob Halford, Lita Ford, Lemmy Kilmister, Ozzy Osbourne and…Tim Curry all have been tapped to lend their voice talents to the game. From what’s been shown so far, each looks to be perfectly at home in his or her element.
- Tim Schafer is the game’s creator; his previous credits include Full Throttle, Monkey Island, Grim Fandango and Psychonauts.
Schafer’s games all have an expected pedigree of quality when it comes to establishing setting, story and characters — in that regard, Brütal Legend won’t disappoint. But what about the game’s design? How well is it implemented?
After romping through the demo four times, there’s little doubt that the game itself does an admirable job of wrapping all this larger-than-life, metal-soaked goodness into a tasty little love burrito.
DEMOlition: Red Faction: Guerrilla (XBL)
Apr 30th
Editor’s Note: Welcome to our first DEMOlition article here on Silicon Sasquatch! Our hope is to analyze recent game demos and offer a preview of the content presented in a given title. While we’d never pass a final judgment on a game based only on its demo, the fact is game companies hand the general public a piece of their work to recruit consumers still on the fence about a pending, or newly available, release. Because demos might be the only opportunity for many gamers to get a hands-on experience with the game, what’s in the demo matters quite a lot. Thus, we’ll be offering our professional comments, criticisms and questions of just what gamers might expect a complete game to offer based on its demo content. We hope you enjoy the format and find these to be genuinely useful. Feel free to send us your comments and criticisms via the comment system.
Let's call this a "Coversplosion"
Red Faction: Guerrilla (RFG) is a third-person action title set on Mars and the third entry in THQ and Volition, Inc.’s Red Faction series. It’s been nearly seven years since Red Faction II, the last game in the series, and since then Volition has been hard at work perfecting its new game engine in an attempt to revolutionize environmental destruction in videogames.
Players enter the 10 minute-long demo as protagonist Alec Mason in a rather spacious but sectioned-off demo map — straying too far will invoke the wrath of a game over screen.
Even so, the assorted set pieces, ranging from granite buildings to explosive metal tanks, fit the Mars aesthetic well. This certainly is a large demo to explore, and subsequent play-throughs nearly always result in discovering something new to blow up. To think this is just one tiny slice of the full game is quite encouraging. Read the rest of this entry »
Get ready to Ride the Lightning: The Guitar Hero Metallica demo is out
Mar 20th
Like Guitar Hero: Aerosmith, but without Steven Tyler's gaping, Lovecraftian mouth.
Color me disappointed. I was all ready to title this demo review “Sad but True: The Guitar Hero: Metallica demo is out,” thinking I’d cleverly turned a Metallica song title into a jab against the band’s very own game. But after playing through the handful of included songs, I’m writing this article with an unexpected humility. It’s definitely not for everyone, but Neversoft is slowly (and finally!) starting to breathe new life into a franchise that’s quickly beginning to show its age. Read the rest of this entry »