Daniel Weissenberger's blog

So I finally got around to playing half an hour of Halo 3: ODST last night, and while I'm not planning to write a review of it any time soon, I wanted to comment on the weird experience I had with the game.

I was playing a friend's game, so I just sort of dropped in medias res, and had no idea what was going on plot-wise, so I'm not going to bother commenting on that aspect. What I will say is that for the first fifteen minutes of my playtime I had a blast. So much fun that I couldn't remember why I'd hated Halo 3 as much as I did (by which I mean "not really that much at all").

Way of the Samurai 3 came about back in November, but sadly it remains the best game I haven't played yet. Why? Because it was only released in Japan, and although PS3s are admirably region-free, the Japanese language's stubborn refusal to transform magically into English has transformed the prospect of importing a copy of it from a delightful dream into an utter waste of money.

So, until some publisher spends the absolutely minimal amount of money required to turn the menus and text into English, I'll have to be satisfied with a brief preview of a game that may never see a North American release.

(sigh)

I can't stress that strongly enough. It's an attempt to make an utterly serious stealth game about a sexy lady killing Nazis who are in no way vampires. Here, just take a look at the screenshots.

With the recent spate of demos released over Xbox Live, I thought it was a good time to take a look at what they have to say about the products they’re marketing to us!

This time around, I'll be covering UFC Undisputed 2009, Red Faction: Guerilla, Sonic Ultimate Genesis Collection, X-Men Origins: Wolverine, Bionic Commando, Up, and Battlestations: Pacific.

There are times in my life in which I have felt despair, in which the presence in my life of the guiding force of a just and loving universe has not been immediately apparent to me. From now on, whenever I feel that way, I simply need to remember one thing—in just a few short months, everyone's favorite CoteWiNoLo is going to be back on the streets of Grant City...

Namco is publishing Dead to Rights 3.

Typing that sentence feels like being kissed by angels. Seven years after the original, five years after the attempt to make a sequel, four years and two years after the assets left over from that failed sequel attempt were crudely re-fashioned into Dead to Rights 2 and whatever the hell that PSP thing was, Namco has finally employed a development house to produce what the gaming community (by which I mean me) has been screaming for—another Jack Slate adventure!

While I never read previews, it's rare that I make it through a week without checking on The Magic Box a few times. As a result, 99 percent of my information about upcoming games from a few isolated screenshots, often blurry scans from Japanese magazines.

Most of the time, I don't draw anything but the broadest conclusions about a game from these pictures, but today I came across shots so bewildering that I found myself compelled to share them with you, the person reading this blog post.

I present Splatterhouse 2009: The Screenshots, and the snarky comments that accompany them.

Oh good, it's a generic monster with grey skin and tubes sticking out of his back. Because that went so famously well in The Suffering, Van Helsing, and Resistance.

Once you've beaten Mirror's Edge it's only natural to want to check out the Time Trials and Speedruns. While the skills you learned playing the game should get you through each Time Trial smoothly enough, obtaining a three-star rating can be quite a challenge for all but the most dedicated gamer!

That's where the audiogamer's Time Trial Tutorial comes in. Simply cue up this audio file, load up your copy of Mirror's Edge, and let me walk you through a smooth, easy-to-learn path that will ensure you a three star rating on 'Playground 1', the first of the game's Time Trials.

Impress your friends! Humiliate your nieghbours! Remind all that live who is the ruler of all that is, was, or ever shall be!

Just don't let anyone know you've got the Audiogamer to thank.

Wink.

Download the file by right clicking here and choosing to save the target! Or Just click on it and your browser will probably open a player or something like that.

When I gave Grand Theft Auto IV the insultingly low score of 85%, quite a few people suggested that I had some kind of a secret grudge against the game that kept me from giving it the glowing adoration that it so obviously deserved. Well, I'm finally ready to admit that yes, I did have a secret predjudice against the game, one that I'll reveal through the medium of crudely-edited video:

I doubt I can be much clearer than that.

So anyway, there's a mistake in my review of Operation Darkness. Well, that's not entirely accurate. The review is a perfectly honest accounting of my experiences with the game, and my analyses of them, both qualitative and quantitative. The problem is that I was playing the game incorrectly, and that mistake coloured my opinions about the experience, which led to me being unfairly harsh to the game in one important area, the difficulty level.

Like most of the civilized world, I downloaded and played the Star Wars: Force Unleashed demo today, and I was a little surprised by what I found. There were a couple of surprises, at first pleasant, and then soon after, decidedly less so.