Daniel Weissenberger's blog

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.

When the reviewer wasn't being unfairly disinterested, he was flat-out wrong. So I decided to make my review a little different, and take the reader, point-by-point through why its author was not just wrong, but unprofessional. How unprofessional? I suspect he played very little of the actual game.

When I look at my long and storied relationship with games, there's every other game in my childhood, and then there's Double Dragon. How much did I play this game? So much that, without fear of hyperbole, I can state that if I had set aside every quarter I put in the machine, I likely would have been able to pay for college entirely in loose change. Although that would mean that I would never have played all that Double Dragon, and I can't imagine what kind of person I'd be today if that were the case*.

It came as quite a surprise to discover that Geometry Wars 2 had been released last week. I’m an intense fan of the first game, as evidenced by the fact that my first ever blog post dealt with my twisted obsession with obtaining a high score in the game. Also, it’s the only game that has ever driven me to swear loudly and throw my controller across the room. I’m not usually so emotional about games, but when snakes spawn in a ring while I’m touching a wall it’s an unbelievably cheap instant kill, so can you really blame me? I know the people in the next apartment over do.

Remembering that yesterday was S-Day (the day Calibites celebrate the release of a new Soul Calibur title), I headed down to the store to pick up a copy. While I'm not a full-on Calibite, I don't own action figures or costumes or anything like that, I'm enough of a Soul Calibur fan that I'm generally happy to see a new game in the series coming out.