Posts tagged PlayStation Network
Silicon Sasquatch’s Honorable Mentions of 2009: Aaron’s picks
Dec 30th
While our Top 10 Games of 2009 deserve attention for their overall excellence, we can’t neglect this year’s other fantastic games — titles that just missed the final cut. Be it their charm or presentation, our Honorable Mentions were simply hard to forget. We now present a five-part series of articles, one from each member of the Silicon Sasquatch staff. Today, Aaron brings us our penultimate installment in this series with his list of honorable mentions.
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.
The Backlog: Scribbling Sporty Beatles edition
Sep 18th
This, metaphorically, is what the release calendar looks like for the next few months
It’s been a busy week for all of us here at Silicon Sasquatch. Doug’s been camping in the cold-yet-wait-it’s-hot-again Oregon weather, and enjoying the rebirth of his broken Xbox 360; Nick’s been playing through five or so games at once while writing, writing and more writing; I’ve been composing an extremely long review of Batman: Arkham Asylum in addition to enjoying a social life and trying to forge videogame industry public relations contacts.
Oh, and that feeling creeping down the back of your spine and into your pocket to make your wallet tingle with fear? Well, that’s the start of the Great Game Goldrush of 2009 — this previous week had quite the prodigious release schedule. Among the horde of games were NHL 10, NHL2k10, WET, Mario and Luigi: Bowser’s Inside Story, Scribblenauts, Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 and Need for Speed Shift.
Next week, Halo 3: ODST releases. You can discuss (your praise for or condemnation of) that fact in our comments section.
See what we’ve been up to, game-wise, after the break. Read the rest of this entry »
Silicon Sasquatch Podcast #2 – The Summer Drought
Aug 3rd
We’re all familiar with the summer doldrums — the scorching heat, the long days and short nights, and the almost total lack of good games being released in stores. But was it always like this? And thanks to the digital distribution market, are things changing?
Site editors Nick and Aaron were joined by our number-one (and possibly only) fan Tyler for this discussion. Although the show weighs in at a mere 40ish minutes this time around, we did find ourselves sidetracked a few times. It just goes to show that if you get a few nerds together to talk, the discussion will invariably devolve into an argument over which Final Fantasy is the best.
Editor’s Note: It’s Final Fantasy VI.
Review: Resistance: Fall of Man (PS3)
May 6th
Resistance: Fall of Man can be thought of as a modern first-person shooter captured in its adolescence. It arrived on the tailwind of the best and brightest PlayStation 2 and Xbox shooters, and it follows their lead with panache, sporting engaging firefights, creative weapon designs and exciting combat. But unfortunately, it suffers from last-generation conventions that leave the player feeling beleaguered too often by mazes of corridors, uneven pacing and a sorely missed online cooperative play mode.
Yet in spite of feeling a bit frayed around the edges and worn with age, Resistance is an undeniably fun and engaging journey that’s still worth taking.
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 »
Co-op Review: Resident Evil 5 (Xbox 360)
Apr 28th
Editor’s Note: We’re trying out a new approach to major game reviews here at Silicon Sasquatch: The Co-op Review. Because Resident Evil 5 was designed to be played cooperatively (and because Nick and Aaron played through the game several times over Xbox Live) it serves as a great opportunity to give this collaborative review style a test-drive. Let us know what you think in the comments section!
It’s gotta be tough to work at Capcom these days. After all, it’s a nigh-insurmountable task to create the latest and greatest blockbuster action game in a market flooded with big names like Halo, Gears of War, Resistance and Call of Duty. But when you’re the developers responsible for the one game that arguably gave rise to the latest generation of action gaming — Resident Evil 4 — you’ve got to feel that burden more than anyone else.
But the day of judgment is finally here: Resident Evil 5 (RE5) has hit store shelves all over the world. But skepticism is not unexpected, as every fan must be asking the same question of him/herself: “What are you buyin’?”
Well, here’s the good news: Resident Evil 5 has a robust selection of things on sale, stranger! Aside from a couple of quirks and the inexcusable omission of a certain creepy trenchcoat-wearing arms dealer, this is the sequel almost every Resident Evil fan has been hoping for.
Review: Prince of Persia Epilogue DLC (Xbox Live)
Apr 21st
Last year’s Prince of Persia was a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Fans of the series’ earlier games often dismissed it out of hand as an oversimplified, brain-dead rehash of a platforming game, and a pale shadow of the franchise’s former glory.
Frankly, they don’t know what they’re missing. Prince of Persia was designed to be an enjoyable experience from start to finish, and for my money, it delivered almost flawlessly. What it lacked in precision platforming and twitch-reflex combat it more than made up for with simple (but not oversimplified) controls and a rhythmic balance between tense combat and laid-back, serene exploration sequences. It may not have appealed to everyone, but it was precisely what I had hoped for.
And that’s what makes the epilogue so baffling. It tries to appeal to both the game’s fans and its harshest critics, and what resulted is…well, a bit of a mystery.