Reviews
About an Adult Swim Flash Game: Robot Unicorn Attack
Feb 13th
What is a “game” but an alchemist’s mixture of disparate concepts that by themselves don’t mean much, yet somehow make sense as a whole when paired accordingly?
Gears of War’s cover mechanic has no use in a two-dimensional fighter. A licensed Barbie title (maybe) doesn’t need Castlevania’s map system. And – obviously – Guitar Hero’s flurry of scrolling musical notes and reliance on plastic peripherals would never make sense as a musical zombie shooter starring, let’s say, Neil Patrick Harris and Felicia Day.
So where does that leave Adult Swim’s latest attempt at destroying workplace productivity? Robot Unicorn Attack, developed by Flash game creator and the one-man band at developer Spiritonin, Scott Stoddard, takes two seemingly opposite concepts — a looping ethereal audio track and the get-as-far-as-you-can gameplay of Canabalt — and mashes them into a fabulous union. The title implies certain gameplay elements, among other things (like some unicorns are, in actuality, robots), but I doubt you expected it to feature licensed music. Oh, it does. And it’s offensively wonderful.
Review: Ratchet & Clank Future: A Crack in Time
Feb 10th
by Tyler Martin
Sony came back in a big way in 2009. The PlayStation 3 had an unmatched first-party line up of titles that included Killzone 2, Infamous and Ratchet & Clank Future: A Crack in Time. While the console’s most successful title was Game of the Year award winner Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, the latest Ratchet & Clank was no slouch. If it wasn’t for Nathan Drake’s amazing sophomore adventure, A Crack in Time would have been the exclusive selling point for the platform last year.
Review: Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (Xbox 360)
Dec 16th
What more can be said about the so-called largest entertainment launch in the history of mankind?
It’s tempting to boil down Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 to a vaporous obligation, an experience that divides gamers into the haves and have-nots. But that’s putting blind faith in a product based on its advertising blitzkrieg. Aren’t we supposed to be discerning consumers?
The climate around Modern Warfare 2 is now adequate, a month after release, for a steady-handed dissection of gaming’s latest chart-topping champion — far removed from the pre-release hype. This critique won’t convert the detractors or embolden the fanatics, but it will hopefully read as an alternative education on the latest Call of Duty, a game that flirts with failure as much as it tastes success.
Review: Forza Motorsport 3
Dec 1st
Forza Motorsport 3 is just about everything you would want from a sequel. While it doesn’t bring any revolutionary changes to the formula established by Turn 10 Studios with Forza 1 and 2, the game adds plenty of new features and improves on almost every feature from Forza 2.
Co-op Review: Borderlands (Xbox 360)
Nov 16th
Editor’s note: Just like in our last Co-op Review, our goal here is to offer two viewpoints on one title; a title that’s explicitly meant to be played with friends. Borderlands is a fast-paced co-op lovers’ dream, and as such Aaron and Nick worked through the game multiple different times with varying numbers of participants. Enjoy, and let us know in the comments what you think about this review.
Review: Red Faction: Guerilla: Demons of the Badlands (Xbox 360)
Oct 19th
It’s hard to review Demons of the Badlands without addressing its parent game, Red Faction: Guerilla. Although Silicon Sasquatch hasn’t published a review, the general consensus is that it delivered an unabashedly fun orgy of destruction in both single player and multiplayer, even if both modes had their limits.
Guerilla launched in early June of this year, and Demons of the Badlands followed in mid-August. Promising new weapons, a new protagonist and a whole new landscape to demolish, it was devised as an encore to a relatively one-of-a-kind experience. In developer Volition’s defense, Demons of the Badlands delivers on exactly what was promised: The add-on feels just as polished and exhilarating as the rest of the game, and the new weapons add a much-needed dash of variety to keep the experience from feeling stale. However, for a ten-dollar add-on, Demons of the Badlands is woefully short, comprising three story missions and eleven side missions that can be completed in a mere two hours.
Review: Canabalt (iPhone)
Oct 14th
How can a story be told in a game?
I’ve heard the question come up more often in the last few months than I have in the previous decade. This year in particular has seen more narrative-driven blockbusters with a sophisticated approach to storytelling than ever before. Batman: Arkham Asylum and Uncharted 2: Among Thieves have both been lauded for their intricate (and wildly different) approaches to developing a narrative in tandem with a long-term experience.
The debate even manifested recently in the comments section of Doug Bonham’s recent editorial on storytelling in games. Does a story always improve a game? Does it ever improve a game?
I think the question is best answered by asking how we define storytelling. Is it the preliminary text explaining the player’s motivations and mission? Is it the thousands of lines of melodrama that fill each installment in the Metal Gear Solid saga to the brim? Is it as insignificant as being told the president has been kidnapped by ninjas, followed with a simple query: Are you a bad enough dude to rescue the president?
I sought to find a good example of how even the most minimal amount of overt storytelling can have a profound effect on how a player experiences a game. And I found it in Canabalt.
About an Adult Swim Flash Game: Meowcenaries
Oct 12th
Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim is one of those rare media brands that absolutely understands its demographic.
From the nightly bump cards to the merchandise and the numerous concert series and beyond, Adult Swim has succeeded in making money by airing deranged programming to a young population of insomniacs who were tired of the same old talk shows and infomercials after midnight.
While I’ve been a devotee of the late-night programming block for years, I’ve never played one of Adult Swim’s growing cadre of free Flash titles. The games portal opened on the official website a few years ago, and each title generally boils down to an example of extremely violent behavior under the guise of sick humor — well-tuned to the network’s signature style.
After watching Metalocalypse, Superjail! or Aqua Teen Hunger Force, is it that shocking to stumble upon a game where cats wearing bandannas fire at each other with Uzis and rocket launchers? Read the rest of this entry »
Review: Batman: Arkham Asylum (Xbox 360)
Sep 17th
It’s hard to believe that, at one time, Adam West in his campy 1960s Batman television show was the best portraiture of Batman creative minds had to offer.
Even then, when “Biff! Pow! Zing!” became a clever way to spice up awkwardly choreographed fight scenes, the tragedy of Bruce Wayne was a much darker affair than fluorescent purple and cheese-ball dialogue. A boy witnessed his parents’ cold-blooded murder and, once grown, pledged to annihilate the evil in his city. The Batman rose from the ashes of a once-spoiled life to be the protector of a seedy metropolis called Gotham.
Spandex doesn’t sound like a good idea under those circumstances.
Yet over the last few years the concept of what and who Batman is to a mainstream audience has experienced a revolution in reassessment thanks mostly to director Christopher Nolan’s two movies, 2005’s Batman Begins and 2008’s The Dark Knight. Both films washed away a decade of popular culture nay-saying after the franchise hit a lull in the mid-1990s because of two awful movies by Joel Schumacher et al. Thanks to Nolan, Batman’s been given a clean slate for a new generation of consumers.
Unfortunately, the Caped Crusader’s forays into videogames haven’t assisted in improving his image. A plethora of developers and publishers have been handed the property over the last few decades to produce titles vacillating from mediocre to awful. It’s easy to think there would never be a quality Batman game available, especially after seeing the most recent films and realizing how great a Batman project can turn out.
Well gamers can officially chill and count their blessings in batarangs, as Rocksteady Studio’s Batman: Arkham Asylum is not just the unequivocally best Batman videogame to ever sit on store shelves — it’s also one of the most engaging titles released in a very long time, let alone 2009. Arkham Asylum treats its source material with the utmost respect, and successfully blends the comics with a cinematic atmosphere to create an exciting and near-perfect interactive experience. Read the rest of this entry »
Review: The Sims 3 (iPhone)
Sep 15th
The Sims is unlike any other game brand in existence. While most find success by focusing on delivering a fun, exciting experience, The Sims excels not by being fun — which it typically isn’t — but from its uncanny ability to be fascinating on a humanistic level.
Like most of Will Wright’s games (SimCity, Spore, etc.), The Sims eschews the traditional need for linear progression through a series of tasks in a static game world. Instead, players are given an impressive set of tools to create characters, objects and environments and watch as life unfolds. It’s a formula for resounding commercial and critical success, and it still works as well as it did twenty years ago. But almost all of Wright’s games were built for computers, which carry with them the expectation of a greater commitment of time and effort on the part of the player.
Adapting The Sims to the iPhone, then, was no easy feat from a technological or a design standpoint. On iPhone, The Sims 3 is an impressive example of shrinking a massive game down to phone-size proportions without losing most of the elements that gave the series its clout: the requisite customizable characters, charming set pieces and robust decision-making aspects are all retained from its flagship PC release. But it is the very fact that so much from the original release was crammed into such a minuscule and difficult interface that makes The Sims 3 almost impossible to recommend.