Tag: Mass Effect

Mass Effect 3 Multiplayer: Drells

May 16th, 2012 · · text No comments - Tags: , ,

Me3drellvanguard

Drell Adept

  • Reave is a lasting attack. It drains health, adds damage protection, can be buffed against armor and barriers and can set up or trigger biotic explosions.

  • Pull is useful against health-only enemies. It can get them out of the fight and give you a chance to focus on bigger enemies. It will also strip Guardians of their shields and you can detonate it with Reave.

  • Cluster grenades causes multiple explosions, cover a wide range and can detonate biotic explosions. Reaving a group of enemies and hitting them with grenades does huge damage and if very effective against tough enemies like Atlases, Primes and Brutes.

  • The Drell are frail but they are quick and agile. You get movement speed bonuses and you get a very good encumbrance bonus that allows you to have fast cool downs with even heavy weapons. A Drell Adept might do well to take a sniper rifle or a scoped pistol.

Drell Vanguard

  • A Vanguard’s most important attack is its charge. The Drell Vanguard is no different. With a fast cool down, you can charge every 3.5 seconds or so.

  • Pull is useful against health-only enemies. It can get them out of the fight and give you a chance to focus on bigger enemies. It will also strip Guardians of their shields and you can detonate it with Biotic Charge.

  • Cluster grenades causes multiple explosions, cover a wide range and can detonate biotic explosions. They are very effective against tough enemies like Atlases, Primes and Brutes. Helps if you have a Warp-capable squad mate to set up biotic detonations.

  • The Drell are frail but they are quick and agile. You get movement speed bonuses and you get a very good encumbrance bonus that allows you to have fast cool downs with even heavy weapons. A Drell Vanguard can have over 150% cool down bonuses with decently upgraded shotguns. Charge → shotgun → Cluster Grenades can be very powerful against big enemies, especially if you’ve got a fast firing/high damage weapons and the 25% power bonus after a charge.

Mass Effect 3′s Ending

March 31st, 2012 · · text No comments - Tags: , ,

Attention! Major Mass Effect 3 spoilers ahead!

There’s been a lot said about Mass Effect 3 and its ending(s) over the last few weeks. I heard rumblings about the discontent with it while I was still playing the single-player campaign and I went into the ending expecting to be a little disappointed. In my gameplay diary, I pointed out how frustrated I was with the shoehorning-in of Kai Leng as a big baddie after having been only in the novels up till this point, and that his execution was a little hollow. You feel good about killing him not because he was a worthy adversary but because he was a cheap enemy and you’re just glad to be rid of him.

The assault on Earth (at least on Insanity) is a mess of endless enemies. I was also seriously miffed that Morinth (who I let live in Mass Effect 2) shows up as a banshee and it would seem as though there’s no way to save her from this fate. Then, during your final push, the game has a silly missile fuck up so that you have to guard a second missile battery against another seemingly endless wave of enemies.

Then there’s the beam. While the beam gave us Marauder Shields (all hail him!), any time a game starts with the “slow motion walking” I want to strangle it. (MGS4!!!) I’m fully on board with the Indoctrination Theory that’s been floating around out there. The trees from Shepard’s dream are mysteriously on the battlefield and Shepard has the headaches once he’s up on the Citadel. His pistol has an endless supply of ammunition and the only reason for this would be the “destroy” ending. I hope that the Indoctrination of Shepard was the goal of this “ending” and that the original goal of Mass Effect 3 was to have the “destroy” option wake Shepard back up so that he could fight through the Indoctrination and ultimately defeat the Reapers and save the day.

My hope and my fear is that Bioware was going to pull off this Indoctrination trick and it would’ve really been the best ending of any game up to now. However…do to either pressure from EA or a self-imposed deadline, they didn’t get the real ending they wanted done out. It’s a real shame if this is the case. I’m afraid/hopeful that they’re going to put out the true ending as DLC. If it’s paid DLC it’s just going to piss people off even more because they’re having to pay for the real ending or they’ll put it out as free DLC which won’t piss anyone off except that the initial experience of playing Mass Effect 3 will have been forever ruined.

Mass Effect 3 Critique

March 12th, 2012 · · link No comments - Tags: ,

Don’t know if you knew this, but at the top of the site is a link to “ME3″. Here you’ll find my spoilerrific semi-daily updated critique of Mass Effect 3 as I play through it. I’m not making it a blog post because people might accidentally have something ruined for them story-wise, but it’s here if you want to read it.

Mass Effect 3: Krogan Soldier

March 5th, 2012 · · text 3 comments - Tags: , ,

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I think I’ve figured out the Krogan soldier in Mass Effect 3 multiplayer. I was having a hard time with it at first. I was carrying too many weapons and I was dying every time I got in close. I unlocked the Claymore Shotgun and decided to go one weapon only. I’m still not sure if it’s the best solution, because I miss half the time (or the game’s glitching!). I’ll try again with an assault rife. The Krogan’s best weapon is his melee. The Carnage ability is powerful, but it’s slow to cooldown. The Inferno Grenade is quite useful, but you could run out and pumping precious ability points into grenades in the early levels of your Krogan’s life seem wasteful. What I would suggest is to pump up Fortification. I hardly used it at first, because the shield improvement it gives you isn’t really noticeable visually, but it’s there. You can enable Fortification without starting a cooldown that might affect your Carnage. This can allow you to fire Carnage, fire some rounds at a distant enemy and keep your shields up. Then you can charge towards the enemy, purge the Fortification and give your melee a 75% damage increase and heavy melee everything in sight. I found it to be a very good use of the Krogan’s strengths and I decimated the Cerberus enemies in the demo. If you have a Krogan unlocked and haven’t had much luck, give this strategy a try before you get too frustrated.

Buy Mass Effect 3

Mass Effect 2: Infiltrator Insanity

March 1st, 2012 · · text No comments - Tags: , , ,

Repost from Pixelsnatch

Just Another Day at the Office

I started another play through of Mass Effect 2 the other day for some reason. It’s not a save file I intend to carry over to Mass Effect 3 or anything, but I just wanted to play a real Mass Effect game while I wait for Mass Effect 3, I guess. Even more frustrating than the enemies being heavily shielded and armored, Shepard’s a lot frailer than he is on Normal. Maybe the Infiltrator class has less health than a Soldier or a Sentinel, but Shepard gets killed a lot more easily than I’m used to. I used my Lazarus Project power for Barrier. With a maxed out Barrier, it last for 60 seconds, gives you a 100% shield boost and the cooldown is shorter than the 60 second power duration. Unfortunately, using other powers like Tactical Cloak and Incinerate tend to get in the way of using Barrier again right away. After getting used to Mass Effect 3′s weight/cooldown system where I got pistol only, it’s hard getting used to long cooldown time’s again.

At the start of my play through, I cruised along nicely except for the third door on Garrus’ recruitment mission. Grunt’s and Jack’s were relatively easy. Then I got to Horizon. Jesus Christ. The Collectors’ barriers take forever to whittle down, but those Husks kept getting me. I don’t remember them having armor on Normal. It also didn’t help that I put all my talent points for me and my team into offense didn’t give any defensive buffs to my squad mates. I made the bold move of taking Mordin with me to Horizon and Miranda and he died a lot. After a few deaths in the final area of Horizon, I realized that once you take out the Husks, the Collectors tend to stay in their cover. (Also, they won’t come out of cover is Shepard is cloaked!) The fight would’ve gone a lot better if I had some tougher squad mates, but Mordin’s Incinerate was quite useful against the Husks’ armor. (I just wish he hadn’t died so much and so easily!)

After the rest of the world opened up, I went to Illium and bought some upgrades and talked to all the necessary people to get access to the next missions. I’ll probably take on the Shadow Broker mission next or soon so I can get the Insanity achievement for completing it. All that’s left achievement-wise is to finish Shadow Broker on Insanity, finish the story on Insanity and the Brawler (kill enemies while they’re knocked back by a punch) which is proving difficult on Insanity.

Vanguard, Maxed

February 27th, 2012 · · text No comments - Tags: ,

Repost from Pixelsnatch

Maxed

I’ve been playing a decent amount of Mass Effect 3 multiplayer lately and I finally maxed out my vanguard yesterday. The level cap is 20 and you accrue enough points to max out 4 of the 5 categories. If you leave one completely empty, you’re able to fully level up all three powers plus either the “Spectre”-like category or “Fitness”, which everyone has. So, my vanguard’s maxed out and is a killing machine. I can charge into almost any situation, Nova everyone around me, and charge into the next enemy before they have a chance to get their bearings. I’m tempted to go sans-weapon with the Vanguard because you wind up getting a 200% cooldown bonus if you’re unarmed. Most of the time, I don’t need anything other than my powers and my melee biotic punch. The only times I use my gun (heavy pistol-only) is when I’m thinning out a cluster of enemies before they get too close, when I’m fighting a Guardian, or when I’m defending the landing zone while waiting for extraction.

The Biotic Underground

Since I love my biotics (sorry infiltrator) I started building up the adepts. I maxed out my human male’s Singularity so that it detonates when it expires. The best thing the human adept has going for it is the singularity/warp bomb. Throw a singularity, catch some enemies in it, use warp, and BAM, everything gets rocketing into the sky. It’s the most impressive site in Mass Effect 3′s multiplayer that I’ve seen (so far). The human adept is stuck with Shockwave like its vanguard brethren, and I hate the shockwave. It’s the only thing human biotics have to deal with Guardians and it’s crap. Drell vanguards get Lift, which makes Guardians lose their shields and Asari have Stasis, which also causes Guardians to lose their shields. The Shockwave is lame.

The singularity warp bomb is really all you need as a human adept though. It’s fantastic. For some reason though, the Asari adept has Stasis instead. I figured singularity would be a bigger deal and require better biotic skills (which the Asari should have) but they get Stasis, not Singularity. Stasis can make warp bombs (or Throw bombs too!) The detonation doesn’t seem to be as large though. Maybe it’s because my warp isn’t leveled very high and the Throw detonation isn’t very good.

I’m really looking forward to eventually unlocking the the Drell characters and the Asari vanguard. I have a blast using biotics. I’ve seen Engineers and Infiltrators do fantastic things in multiplayer, but I’ve been only mildly effective with my human infiltrator and I only used my Quarian engineer once.

And One Last Thing…

If you’re a group of level 7′s, don’t try to play on Gold. I got lumped in with a group of low level players and they were trying Gold. My vanguard hung in there, but after all three of the other team members had been slaughtered, the whole of Cerberus came after me.

Vanguarding

February 20th, 2012 · · text No comments - Tags: , , ,

I have fully embraced the Vanguard. I didn’t like it at first. Playing as a Vanguard was so different from Soldier or Sentinel, which I had been using in the first two ME games, that I didn’t fully understand it. Then I played around with it more and saw its potential. I was bouncing back and forth between using Vanguard and Adept, because I knew I want biotics. But after running the Vanguard through its paces in multiplayer (MP) and watching some videos of Vanguard gameplay on YouTube, I have a better understanding of how the class should be played.

I will admit, I cowboyed Vanguard pretty hard at first. I charged into everything, and on Bronze, that’s a viable option. On Silver and Gold, it’s suicidal. You need to hang back sometimes and be smart about when you’re charging. Also, shotgun-only is a bad idea once you get past the first few waves. A shotgun doesn’t help unless you’re up in the enemies’ faces. Going heavy pistol-only might be a better option. It’s lighter, which gives you a 170%~180% cooldown bonus and it’s much easier to headshot than a shotgun. If you level up your melee damage, you can get away with doing up-close damage with your biotic punch instead of shotguns. So far, I’ve focused on Biotic Charge and Nova, but I need to put more points into Fitness and I haven’t even opened up Shockwave. Shockwave (in MP) would be great for handling Guardians. As it stands, Vanguards aren’t great against those giant shields. A Shockwave (or a Pull in single-player) would do wonders.

I’ve also only been able to use a human Vanguard. The Drell and Asari versions have been unavailable to me so far. I watched a great video of a Drell run on YouTube and was impressed with the Drell. All Vanguards have the Charge but the Drell also has a Pull and Cluster Grenades. The person in the video never uses the Pull, but seeing a Vanguard with Cluster Grenades makes me wish the Shepard Vanguard had grenade abilities (he doesn’t). Pull is available in the single-player and since it creates a singularity-like biotic orb, you can charge into it and detonate it a la a Warp Bomb. (Bonus: if you have an Adept in your party, charging their Singularities will detonate them!)

Also, I’ve become painfully aware of the need to have a party that works together. After the first night of playing online, I’ve had trouble finding people that actually used their headsets or even worked as a team. A mid-level Vanguard (12, currently) is powerful, but still not powerful enough to last against large groups of Silver or Gold caliber Cerberus agents when they have no support from behind. Far too many people are playing Soldier, and very few people are playing Adept or Engineer. All the times I have done well in MP have been when the party was diverse and working together. In fact, the only time I made it through extraction was just a team of three, but the party was me (a Vanguard), an Adept and a Sentinel.

Mass Effect 3 Demo

February 16th, 2012 · · text No comments - Tags:

Repost from Pixelsnatch

Mass effect3 3

It’s been a long wait, but the Mass Effect 3 demo finally arrived a couple days ago. The second half of the demo is pretty much what I played at TGS 2011, but there were a couple new additions in the new demo and the first part on Earth was totally new to me.

Reaper Invasion of Earth

The demo opens on a kid flying a model of an SX3 spacecraft. Right away, I was surprised at how sharp the graphics in Mass Effect 3 are. When they show the faces of Shepard, Vega and Anderson, the awful looking shadows of the first two games were gone. Ashely’s face looked creepy, but that could just be because she’s a freak of nature and I hate her. Kaidan looked fine, but c’mon, he’s dead.

On your way to talk to the Alliance brass, you get a chance to do a little conversing with Anderson, and I got to use my new Kinect for the first time in Mass Effect. The Kinect performed fantastically, and as long as you’re not mumbling (a little mumbling seemed to be okay) then you’ll have great luck with the voice recognition stuff in Mass Effect 3.

Then the Reapers show up (huge surprise!) and you’re given a pistol and a couple rounds of ammo. The game starts you slowing by having you follow Anderson’s lead while you make your way back to the Normandy. I noticed that if you should happen to get ahead of Anderson, the game snaps Anderson forward in front of you again. You have to pop a couple husks with your pistol and then you must melee a couple more.

Then, there’s this awkward scene involving a child (not that kind of awkward) and no matter what you say to him, the result is the same. As you get closer to your destination, you find a radio to call for help, and then you have to defend your position until help arrives. I found out through multiple play-throughs of this demo, is that this defense of your position will not end until you’re out of ammo (or close to it).

Overall, the first part of the demo sets the stage for what should come later, but it’s not fun to play. I wish there was a way to just skip it, because after playing through it the first time, it’s a bother if you’re playing the demo multiple times to try out all the classes and their new abilities.

Krogan Rescue Mission

The second part of the demo (which is mostly what I played at TGS) is the real meat of the Mass Effect 3 demo. You’ve got lots of skill points to play with, and you have just enough to fully max out one skill plus add another skill in addition.

TGS Demo Differences

Not a lot has changed since the demo I played last year. The Cerberus agents have a portable turret that they can deploy, the “gap jump” is used in the newer demo and more classes are available. Back at TGS, only Soldier, Sentinel and maybe Engineer were available. All six are available now.

Vanguard

The first class I tried out was Vanguard. I had never used Vanguard before and was excited to try out the biotic charge. Essentially, you phase shift, passing through solid objects and slam into enemies. It’s very useful, but you often wind up in situations you can’t easily get out of. There are upgrades you can get that will sometimes let you auto-recharge your power and bounce off to another target right away, but when that doesn’t happen, you can be left open to attacks from enemies you didn’t finish off with your charge. The Vanguard has access to other biotic powers like Nova and Shockwave, but I had limited success using these powers. The Vanguard’s distanced attacks are pretty weak.

Infiltrator

The Infiltrator is a mix of combat and tech abilities. You get sticky grenades (which are great), sabotage and AI hacking, Overload and a tactical cloak. I think I may have been using tactical cloak wrong. I kept using it to get in close, but it may be better to use to attack, cloak, and then escape. Playing as an Infiltrator was pretty easy, but I really missed the sense of power you get from having biotic powers.

Adept

This was the first time I played as an Adept too. There is a tremendous sense of power that comes along with being an Adept. The Throw in ME3 gives you a final upgrade that can shoot two Throws at once and take out two targets. It’s pretty damn amazing. It’s my favorite power in the game by far. The Adepts also have cluster grenades that seem to let you toss grenades at more than one target. The Adepts can also get upgrades that make their power recharge in a matter of seconds. The only downside I found while playing as an Adept is that they’re kind of worthless against enemies with shields. However, if you keep someone in your party who can use Overload, you should be alright.

Sentinel

Ah, the Sentinel, my old standby. The Sentinels get a bad rap. The Tech Armor they have is sometimes a “Win” button. It lets you take a lot of damage and you can often just walk into enemy fire, use a throw and a warp, fire off a couple rounds and your shields are just fine. If you get surrounded, you can detonate your shields and do damage to all enemies around you. Sentinels have basic biotic powers and basic tech abilities. They can handle pretty much any situation. You can hang back and fire off biotics and tech abilities or charge in and shotgun enemies. It’s the most versatile of all the classes, but for that very reason, Sentinels get ragged on a lot. Sentinels don’t give you the sense of power like Adepts do, the combat isn’t as interesting as an Infiltrator’s, but overall, you’re the most prepared to handle a variety of encounters. The only bad thing I saw with the Sentinels’ abilities were the lift grenades, which are supposed to lift enemies off the ground and leave them vulnerable, but I had a lot of trouble making them effective.

Melee Combat

The omniblade has gotten a lot of coverage in Mass Effect 3‘s build-up. The omniblade doesn’t exist for Vanguards and Adepts. They have a small biotic blast that they do. Other classes have omniblades, but I found the biotic blast to be more effective and more likely to hit a target even if you’re not square to them.

Multiplayer

Since I didn’t buy Battlefield 3, I haven’t been able to try out the co-op multiplayer as of yet. Hopefully, I’ll be able to get in there Friday night and mess some fools up.

Top Five Games I Played in 2011

January 1st, 2012 · · text 2 comments - Tags: , , , ,

This list is about the five best games I played this year not came out this year. I often wind up playing games well after their release because I’m trying to save money or just because it takes time to get it over to Japan from the US.

NextGN LA Noire Screenshot 01

5. L. A. Noire

L.A. Noire is a great example of what a cop TV show would be like as a game. The cases take about an hour each and the pacing fits that of a TV drama. The types of cases are pretty varied, and they usually don’t take too long to finish that they get tedious. The facial animations were outstanding, the voice acting was top notch, but at times the interrogations didn’t feel completely natural and driving in Rockstar games (no matter which studio) is always bad. Luckily, you can have your partner drive for you in most situations.

L.A. Noire

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4. Batman: Arkham City

Arkham City received a lot of criticism not because it was bad but because it followed up Arkham Asylum, and Arkham Asylum felt so fresh when it came out a couple years ago. Arkham City gives Batman a chance to spread his wings (literally) and you get to interact with a lot more of Batman’s famous villains. The combat with groups of enemies still relies entirely on combos and losing the combo string is annoying and frustrating at times. Read my buddy Krystian’s write up about Arkham Asylum’s combat (which is the same in Arkham City) for more.

Batman: Arkham City

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3. Red Dead Redemption

I was on a real Western kick at the beginning of this year, and back in January, I got around to playing Red Dead. I was into the game for its setting, but RDR fixes the one thing I always hated about GTA: the driving. By putting you on horseback and making you move more slowly than a car, the floaty driving of the GTA series doesn’t come into play. There’s a pretty big open world you can explore, and there are lots of side quests and challenges to complete.

Red Dead Redemption: Game of the Year Edition

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2. Mass Effect

I feel really dumb that I just now got into Mass Effect. I actually played Mass Effect after Mass Effect 2. I think Mass Effect has a much more engaging story than Mass Effect 2 but the vehicle stuff with the Mako is extremely frustrating and the side missions are really bland and annoying, mostly because of the horrible sequences with the Mako.

Mass Effect

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1. Mass Effect 2

While I did say that Mass Effect had a much better story than Mass Effect 2, ME 2 is infinitely more fun moment-to-moment. The combat is (maybe a little too) streamlined compared to Mass Effect but the vehicle stuff is gone except for some DLC missions and the environments are much more varied.

Mass Effect 2

TGS 2011 in Review

September 26th, 2011 · · text No comments - Tags: , , , , , , ,

This is a repost from Pixelsnatch

TGS is a monster. It’s open to the public and the mass of people (growing larger over the last few years) has made it impossible to move around without bumping into someone every ten seconds. I’m not even sure why everyone is going there. The Japanese game industry is going down the toilet, right? The show this year had over 200,000 people attend between the two days. I’m sure some of those (including me) were there on both public days, but that’s still a lot of people. The lines for the PS Vita were so congested that by the time I made it inside the building (11am, after waiting in line outside for two hours just to get in), the lines had been shut down and they weren’t letting anyone else even queue up for it. When it was still like this on the second morning, I decided to forget about getting to play with a Vita and focused on trying out games I could realistically get to play.

PS3

Assassin’s Creed Revelations

S1 ecetia com files 2011 05 Assassins Creed Revelations

Because Sony’s booth was such a nightmare, I only actually played one game with a PS3 controller. Sure, I played a lot of games that are multi-platform, but I wound up playing almost all of them at Microsoft’s not so crowded booth. (It’s easy to see which is the preferred platform amongst Japanese gamers.) That solitary PS3 game was Assassin’s Creed Revelations. I didn’t know what to expect for the ACR demo, since the video they were showing in line was just a CG trailer, but I was surprised the demo was multiplayer. They had us playing the basic assassination mode that existed in Brotherhood. No teams, just a free-for-all. Unlike the multiplayer in Brotherhood, there’s no little arrow guiding you to the location of your target. You get a picture of your target, and then it’s up to you to suss out which of the lookalikes is the real target. The area you had to work in was far smaller than in Brotherhood. There were a lot of invisible walls preventing you from getting too far from other players. I imagine, though I can’t be sure, that these barriers will be removed from the full game. Although, with areas as big as those in Brotherhood, not having that little arrow to guide you in the general direction of your target may lead to lower scoring matches and many more mis-assassinations.

Xbox 360

Mass Effect 3

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I don’t know if you know this, but I love me some Mass Effect. But I almost missed the game entirely. EA’s booth was hidden away behind Sega’s and I didn’t spot it until 15 minutes before the end of the first day. I caught a glimpse of the ME 3 signage and begged the staff to let me play it. They had already closed the line for the day, but after pleading with them, they gave me 5 minutes of play time. I went back the next morning and played the demo straight away. And then again for a third time in the afternoon. I really wanted to get as much time with the game as possible. Mass Effect 3 feels a lot like Mass Effect 2. If you wanna know how it feels to be in combat in Mass Effect 3, just imagine ME2, but now you can tap A while in cover to jump to another cover point. That’s pretty much the only change. The bigger and more important change is in the skill tree. The skill tree in ME1 was much deeper than the one in ME2 (if you can even call ME2’s skill tree a tree), but overall, it was more fun being in combat in ME2. For Mass Effect 3, Bioware added a branching skill tree where after the first three skills for your class, the upgrade path splits into two. One path is a more aggressive one and the second is more about finesse. It’s like the final upgrade in ME2 where you had two similar choices for an upgrade, but each had tradeoffs. Mass Effect 3 has these kind of tradeoffs, but they appear to be a little more stark. The demo was pretty limited. It’s the same demo that’s been trotted out for E3 and Gamescom. You fight off several waves of indoctrinated Cerberus soldiers, and at the end you take on a Cerberus mech. The battles weren’t difficult, but there was a 15 minute time limit imposed on you so not knowing where to go in the environment to flip all the right switches wasted a lot of time. Luckily, on the second full play-through, I managed to take down the mech. It got my Mass Effect appetite going again and led to lots of great Mass Effect conversation at the bar on Saturday night.

Binary Domain

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Binary Domain is the Yakuza team’s attempt at a third-person shooter. They tried doing a zombie shooter in OF THE END and it was awful. It had all the trappings of a zombie shooter from 2004 and felt way behind the times in 2011. Binary Domain eschews OF THE END’s control scheme for a standard two-stick shooter setup and controlling my character in the demo felt fine. A special addition to the control scheme is that pulling LB (on 360) will let you talk to your squad. Depending on which members you choose for your squad, you will be asked different questions. I chose a sniper and an engineer and was asked if I like to drink. Someone else I talked to picked the tank-looking member and got asked about if he liked sexy women (or something to that effect). When that guys asked me what I thought about Binary Domain I said, “It isn’t terrible,” and his response was “That’s the best thing you can say about that game.” It feels like a Japanese team trying to build a Western game after being told what Gears of War was like, but they didn’t actually play the game. The robots you’re shooting at feel just dropped in to the environment as opposed to being really in the environment. Japanese developers also usually shy away from blood and the amount you’d be required to spill in a 25 hour shooter would be more than they are willing to shed. If it’s not zombies or monsters, robots are your next best option.

Asura’s Wrath

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Everybody seems to think Asura’s Wrath is bat-shit insane. And they’d be right. It is a pretty nutzoid game; but in a very good way. It’s being developed for Capcom by CyberConnect2, the developers of the PS2 Naruto games. Those games reveled in their ability to go crazy and Asura’s Wrath is carrying on that tradition. There are two demos out there for Asura. The one I played involved fighting a giant Buddha while an airship behind him shot at me. After you defeat him in that stage, he grows so large that Earth can’t contain him any longer and he fights you from space by pointing at you to death. He sticks his index finger down on you from space and drills you into the dirt. Through a very satisfying QTE, you uppercut his fingertip so hard that it creates a crack that runs all the way back up to space and destroys his whole body. It sounds nuts and is nuts. I had a great time with it, and with boss battles like this, I hope the random running around and beating up henchmen is kept to a minimum so that I can enjoy more set-piece boss battles.

Dragon’s Dogma

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Dragon’s Dogma is another Capcom game. It’s a PS3/360 game but the line was so long at the Capcom booth, I wound up just playing it at Microsoft’s. From the trailer I saw at Capcom’s Premium Theater, the game’s story has a bit of a Game of Thrones vibe. I won’t spoil Game’s story like I did for Billy Berghammer. (Sorry, Billy!) The combat plays a bit like Monster Hunter. You are in a party of four, and you come across enemies in the field, but you’ll also come across bigger monsters. I played the strider demo which gave me dual blades and a bow. In my demo, my party was fighting off some orcs when a griffin came swooping in. I shot the griffin down with flaming arrows and then my party slashed it when it fell to the ground. I saw one of my party members jump on top of the great bird but I wasn’t able to figure out how to do that myself or if I even could. The Monster Hunter style gameplay would lend itself well to co-op.

3DS

Shinobi 3D

Shinobi 3D was the least interesting game I played/saw at TGS this year. It looks pretty but it’s a pretty bland side-scroller with swords, shurikens, and a grappling hook. Attacking requires you to stop moving, so combat is pretty jerky. If you stop short of an enemy you’re coming up on, and your sword slash is just out of range, expect to take damage. I doubt anyone but longtime Shinobi fans and Japanophiles itching for something Japanesey will get much enjoyment out of it.

Bravely Default

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Bravely Default: Flying Fairy is a weird one. While there was a trailer showing some gameplay, the game wasn’t playable at the show. Instead, they had an AR movie that you could watch through the use of an AR image on the floor and a 3DS. They gave me a card to take home and if you download the Bravely Default app from the 3DS e-Shop, you can watch the movie again at your leisure. I watched it once more at home because the show floor was so loud I could barely hear what was being said in the movie. The game looks an awful like Final Fantasy: 4 Warriors of Light. It’s a beautiful game, and I loved the music in the trailer. Unfortunately, there was no game to be played, so I’ll leave it at that.

Rocket Slime 3

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I had never played any of the Rocket Slime games, but after being urged by my friend on Saturday night, I made sure I played the game on Sunday. Rocket Slime 3 doesn’t look a lot better than a regular DS game, but it’s not ugly. It’s filled with Dragon Quest characters and music, so that goes a long way to up the appeal of its presentation. The mechanics of the game involve you holding and pulling the bodies of slimes so you can catapult them into items so they can pick those items up, or catapult themselves into canons and launch their bodies at enemy ships. While not making up the whole of the game, the demo I played had you in a ship battle. Both ships had life bars, and the goal was to shoot projectiles at each other until the other was at 0 and then fling yourself across so you could dismantle the weaponry of the other ship. I wasn’t all that good at the game since I had never played the series before, so I didn’t win the battle. I was pleasantly surprised by how much fun I had though. I had previously avoided Dragon Quest spin-offs like Dragon Quest Monsters because I saw the spin-offs as being lesser quality. While Rocket Slime is no true Dragon Quest adventure, I really liked it and want to play it when it’s released.

Metal Gear Solid Snake Eater 3D

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I waited a lot for this game. I waited in the sense that I’ve been wanting to play it since the 3DS’s launch. I waited for Konami to open the lines after closing them due to congestion. And then after getting in line, I waited another two hours. Snake Eater 3D is exactly what I expected it to be: MGS 3 in 3D. It looks almost as good as the PS2 original. All the Subsistence upgrades are there. It’s got the new camo system where you can take pictures of stuff and then turn the color into camo for Naked Snake. But after that, there’s not much more. And the game is severely handicapped by its controls. It suffers from the same problems that all games with 3D cameras have on PSP and 3DS: camera management is a pain in the ass. The shoulder buttons let you interact with the world, item management and item use have been shifted to the touch screen, and the A, B, X and Y face buttons are controlling the camera. It’s not a good system. I’ve never liked the idea in any other game, and I don’t like it here. It’s not that it doesn’t work, cause it does. It’s functional. You can play the game with this control setup. It’s just that it’s not as good as it once was. And with MGS3 coming out in HD this fall, I can’t see why you’d really want to play the gimped version on 3DS.

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Kurohyo 2

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I love the Yakuza series. Er, I loved the series. The first Kurohyo game and OF THE END put me off of the series in the past year. Kurohyo’s problems were great. The main character changed, and wasn’t nearly as likable. Instead of being a well-meaning somewhat older gangster, Kurohyo’s main character is a snot-nosed punk. (There Kurohyo TV show just made him look even worse.) The biggest problem with Kurohyo is who it’s made for. This game isn’t made for grown-up gamers. It’s made for junior high and high school boys. Tatsuya, the main character, looks like he stepped out of a bad rendition of The Outsiders and he’s mad at the world. They took out the boozing and really open nature of the PS2 and PS3 Yakuza games and made the game much more linear. The world doesn’t flow as well as before. The PSP can’t handle Kamuro-cho. There’s constant loading as you run around, the graphics are dark and muddy, and all the cutscenes have been turned into manga-style interludes. The cutscene change was probably for the best, seeing as trying to do a real Yakuza-caliber cutscene would be nearly impossible on the PSP, or would at the very least eat up a ton of the UMD’s storage capacity. Since the first PSP Yakuza wasn’t released outside of Japan, you probably haven’t played it, or even heard of its existence. I never got into the game and I don’t think I’m going to be picking up the new one either. It’s more of the same and I didn’t enjoy the first one. I do find it interesting though that for the second Kurohyo game, the title has changed so that Kurohyo now comes first instead of Yakuza. Also, no new Yakuza game was shown this year. Team Ryu Ga Gotoku, the dev team behind the Yakuza series is putting all its effort into Binary Domain. While I don’t know if Binary Domain will be that great when it does come out, I’m glad that the Yakuza series is getting a little bit of a rest. One every year was going to kill the franchise.