Katamari Forever Review
Is it possible to sum up the entirety of a culture with a single retail product? I wouldn’t think so for many countries, but I do believe that the Katamari Damacy series absolutely nails what makes Japan such an interesting spectacle to many of us gamers. Giant robots? Check! Hyper-bright neon colors everywhere? You know it! Widespread chaos caused by untamed behemoths? Of course! With thousands of unexplainable oddities ready to be seen, Katamari Forever is bringing the series’ unique brand of inspired lunacy to the PlayStation 3, but has the novelty worn off after five years of ball-rolling exuberance?
Check out the audio review below, or hit the jump for the full text review.
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Wet Review
You know how you sometimes flip through cable channels after midnight, hoping to stumble upon something to keep you from being grappled by the inescapable clutches of the Sandman? Wet would be considered the holy grail of late night cable television. It is a game that absorbs the best aspects of the past few decades of Hollywood B-movies and revels in them, delivering an action-packed experience that made me giggle gleefully more times than I’d care to admit.
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Check out the audio review above, or hit the jump for the full text review.
The HD-lemma
Joe here. Regular listeners of the podcast will probably know that I have a somewhat (un)healthy video game collection obsession. While I won’t drop $20k on a gold NES cartridge, I have hunted down some of the rarer gems of previous generations, and have amassed quite the colorful collection of classics. With this lifelong compulsion in mind, I sometimes worry about the HD era, and discussed this very issue during my recent appearance on Gamernode’s VS Node #7: The Resolution Revolution podcast. Modern day games look absolutely phenomenal on high def TVs, but what of the classics that were never meant to be played that way? Are we losing the ability to play those games as originally intended with the move towards plasma and LCD televisions? With certain aspects of gaming–namely lightguns–not being ready for newer technology, could we one day live in a world where Duck Hunt is no longer playable as originally envisoned?
G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra Review
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Check out the audio review above, or hit the jump for a full text review.
The Complexity of Shadows
Shadow Complex is the best game that I never wanted. While Super Metroid and it’s ilk are radcakes, the steady string of portable Castlevanias left me burnt out on this type of title. I just couldn’t muster any excitement for Chair’s latest, a generic looking Metroidvania from a subsidiary of the studio that crushed my hopes and dreams with the abysmally unoriginal Gears of War 2.
Then I played Shadow Complex, and the transformation that followed can only be described as Seussian. To paraphrase my second favorite Christmas cartoon, “And what happened then? Well, they say that Joe’s small heart grew three sizes that day. And then - the true beauty of Shadow Complex came through, and the grumpy podcaster found himself playing through the night, ’til two! “
