PS2

Finished The Longest Journey last night, and it was fantastic, if not a bit awkward at times. The "battles" are strange in that since I can't fail, I can stand completely still and do nothing while the monster just looks at me and waves its arms. I'm aware that Dreamfall has a combat mechanic but my friends tell me that it isn't very well done. I'm curious if something akin to Shadow of the Colossus (which I haven't played) or the new Prince of Persia would work here.

This review is irrelevant... like this game!

HIGH The moment early in the game where the main character must turn on his allies is almost perfect.

LOW The rest of the game is just downhill from there.

WTF Super Saiyans? In MY Drakengard?!

Bustin' makes me feel really, really good

HIGH It feels exactly like playing a never-released Ghostbusters movie.

LOW Bill Murray has a few good lines, but mostly phones in his performance.

WTF The last level is the weakest, most trite in the entire game.

It looked like the big screen adaptation of Castlevania was basically dead in the water not too long ago. Director Sylvain White was gone and all signs pointed to the film spending a lot of time languishing in development Hell. Turns out that's not the case at all, actually, as Bloody-Disgusting has got the exclusive scoop that director James Wan (one of the co-creators of the Saw franchise) has come on board the project as a director and co-writer.

More than a mouthful

HIGH Retains all the classic SMT elements dripping with style and polish.

LOW No voice acting for the dialogue.

WTF Why is the encounter rate set so high?

Been sort of scattered with the gameplay lately… at the moment, I'm still working my way through the excellent CaveIn: Miner Rescue Team on Community, in addition to the also-excellent Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Summoner 2—Raidou Kuzunoha vs King Abaddon on PlayStation 2. How's that for a title?

As for the rest of the game tidbits I've got under my belt, I'm saving them up for tomorrow night's podcast recording. We've been on hiatus for a few weeks since both Tim (the show's host) and I each had newborn sons enter our lives, but now that things have settled down a bit, we're getting right back to it. If everything goes according to plan, it should be posted before too long, and I’ll have a link to it here when it's ready.

Those of us that were looking for some real closure to Indigo Prophecy (Fahrenheit)—the ending didn't live up to expectations—will have to put our hope to rest. While publishers have approached David Cage, co-founder of Quantic Dream, about publishing a sequel—something I find really hard to believe—Cage himself has no interest in going back to that well.

Maybe it's for the best. That leaves him all the time in the world to focus on Heavy Rain. All accounts point to Heavy Rain as a worthy, spiritual successor.

In between projects at the moment, I spent most of my game time today (which was not much) checking out the various Community games I've downloaded over the last few weeks.

Every Wednesday when I check out the new stuff on Live, I make a point of looking at the new Community offerings and queue up the trials for a day just like today when I want to play something, but I'm not quite ready to commit to something substantial. Anyway, I think I tried something like ten or twelve different titles, and only one of them was worth a damn.

Called Trino, you take on the role of a small, aquatic-looking life form that creates triangles in space. The point of it is to trap enemy creatures within the triangles to earn power ups and move on. It's sort of half-puzzle, half-action, and it has a very polished and "complete" feeling to it. I didn't spend a lot of time on it, but I paid for the download happily and I'll be getting to it in short order.