Skyrim's "Dawnguard" May Have Me More Excited Than Skyrim Itself!

I played a little bit of Skyrim, and though it would barely run on my PC, I've played it on others and I thoroughly enjoy it. I honestly wish I had the technology to withstand Skyrim's power so that I could delve deep into the story, but with the release of Skyrim's DLC trailer, "Dawnguard," I think I may just try and force it to work on my computer.

How can you argue with a flying vampire? "Dawnguard" focuses on the vampires in Skyrim and offers new twists like crossbows, full vampiric transformations and new enemies and locations. This is...badass. Not that Skyrim wasn't tantalizing enough already, why not just throw in some well-equipped bloodsuckers with extensive features in both weaponry and narrative. It is set for a summer release on Xbox Live and will cost 1600 Microsoft points, so be prepared to spend some money. It won't be on PC til later. I love a good supernatural thrill, don't you?

Horror Game "Among The Sleep" Could Be My New Nightmare

This is such a genius idea, I cannot believe I did not come up with it first. As a long, long-time follower of horror games, I feel I own a decent amount of expertise on the subject and can spot when a horror game goes right, or wrong. "Among the Sleep" is a first-person horror game where you are a two-year old experiencing this terror with the mental capacity of a toddler. Therefore, reality is warped and the very creatures that live in your nightmares may seem to come alive. Don't you remember when you were a toddler? I saw shadow creatures dancing down the hallway next to our living room in the depths of the dark. Life through the eyes of a toddler is very different than an adolescent's or adult's. I'm not sure if the game plays on this, but paranormal research says that young children are more sensitive to the paranormal, like animals. In other words, this game could go in a number of creative directions and I am extremely interested to see where they plan to take it. Since you are a toddler, your perspective is lower to the ground and makes the camera angles more intense, for you have to constantly look up and around. Who knows, next time you glance up could be into the hood of some dreaded dark figure. Just saying.

How I Made My Life Into A Video Game

I work at JCPenney, and as far as anyone can tell, it is hardly the bowels of the retail universe. Okay, it's a pretty great job. Matter of fact, one of the first I've actually felt like a part of something. You know, like that block in the neighborhood where everyone knows everything about the other and no one can leave the house without being spied on or gossiped about. But if one is hurt, the others flock to help; yeah that kind of neighborhood. What people DON'T know is my job and the schedule of my hours depend entirely on how many credit card applications I can shove down peoples' throats.

Every shift, it's the same. "Is this going on your JCPenney card today?" Over and over...and over. This quickly led to me not asking, which resulted in less hours and a talk from my boss, instilling the idea in my head that if I did not bring in my quota of credit card applications, hours would be cut.

So what does this have to do with video games? Well, you know how in Sonic you have to collect rings, and if you get 100 rings you get a life? Or in Croc, you have to collect or "save" the Gobbos? Credit card applications soon became rings, Gobbos, coins, stars, wompa fruit, you name it. Suddenly, I was scoring credit card applications left and right, while in my mind I was earning lives, saving Gobbos, playing a game with myself.

This month, I have received the most credit card applications I've ever had since I've started working at JCPenney August 2011. In my head, I tally the numbers and greedily bask in the glory of my success like savoring the image of a new high score. Kids, don't listen to your parents when they tell you life isn't a game, because in all honesty, life is absolutely a game with the best graphics, memory space and narrative. Fusing my video games into real life is maybe the nerdiest thing I've ever done, but it sure as hell gets the job done.

Silent Hill: Downpour Rained On My Parade

Where to begin? As a hardcore Silent Hill fan and an impatient admirer for this new installment, I am extremely disappointed. Lead character, Murphy Pendelton, is in prison and being transferred to a different facility. While in transfer, his bus crashes and he escapes. Murphy wanders into an unfamiliar town known as Silent Hill (of course, very familiar to the rest of us). I will note a couple positive things about the game, proving the new developers did acknowledge the complaints of die-hard fans. The use of weapons in this game was purely based on luck and what you manage to find in the area. You pick up a weapon and use it until it breaks. There are rocks everywhere that you can utilize. Fence posts are also pretty abundant. As you travel deeper into the game, weapons become more advanced, such as a fire ax (my personal favorite) and guns. Why is the fire ax my favorite? Easy. It gets the job done and while you're at it, you can smash off the boards into the next room without running around trying to find the appropriate weapon to do so. Saves time and energy. I liked this new system, I'll admit. I wasn't out of bullets or weapon-less, ever. Matter of fact, I think I played through the game using a shot gun maybe, a few times? I stuck with the fire ax, mainly. Thank GOD for auto-save! Finally,  new Silent Hill developers ditch their annoying save system, where it depended on the character reaching the next save point in order to advance. I hated dying, and having to go way back to my last save point and do everything ALL over again. Abundance of health pickups was incredible, almost too easy at some times. I always had health kits readily available and never ran out. Since you can now choose to bitch out on a fight and run for your life, health isn't that much of a concern unless facing a boss. By then, you are all stocked up on health kits. A huge complaint about earlier games was a lack of health kits which made the games incredibly hard. I am grateful for this, but with the bosses (very FEW bosses) not even being that hard, I did not find myself using a lot of health kits. Sidequests were a great addition to the Silent Hill series. I loved wandering around the town and running into random sidequests. Matter of fact, this was the first time I hadn't gotten lost in Silent Hill. I beat the game using a map and finding my own way and my own items. Sidequests allow for longer gameplay and a stronger need to play through again (if you just wanted to beat the damn thing first, like me). The environment was nicely put together. You can tell someone worked really hard to bring the environment of the new and improved Silent Hill to life. It is unlike any other Silent Hill game, environment-wise. It really sets the mood for a survival horror game. The transformation of the falling ash (from previous games) into fog was a nice touch and made it seem creepier. Although, the ash always confused me as a kid and with a lack of understanding came more fear as to what could be causing the ash. I have mixed feelings about the ash-to-fog change, but nevertheless, it didn't hurt, but rather added to the new environment. Here is an example of a screenshot of the environment.

Now I have a lot of problems with this eighth installment of Silent Hill. Maybe the biggest problem I have with this game is the creature design. All I can say is, it's been done, man. With all of the hype from this game, I really expected something bold and new in terms of creature design. A lot more gore, really f@#$ed up stuff. But what I got was original ideas from previous Silent Hill games built on to. Things I have seen before, or imagined before.

This looks a lot like the scythe-thing from Homecoming (I think it was that game), that had the sickle hands and crawled everywhere, not the lurker, but something else. The name escapes me. But only this has normal hands. Really, this doesn't scare me, and because this design is not scary, they make it jump out at you a lot in the game to make it scary. Here is another example of the another creature from Downpour.

I'm not kidding, these things rode around in police cars in Silent Hill, and if they saw you, they stopped and attacked in swarms of four or so. What is even going on in the face here? It seems Downpour went with a more gloomy tone of design rather than a gore-filled collection. This feels very "Japanese-teen-horror" to me, like the film The Ring. After the first couple times of killing these things (and they are EVERYWHERE), I got bored with it and it became to easy to kill.

Another new introduction to the list of enemies was the mannequin, and I can admit, it sure fooled me the first time I came in contact with it. You can see in the middle image as it stands as a mannequin. Once you get close enough, ghostly shadows of the figure run around the room attacking you while the shell waits and watches. In terms of design, this was my favorite in the game. Very creative and successful.

Yes, believe it or not, this is an enemy. If you ask me what it is, I can only respond with I don't know what the hell it is and I never really found out. The depths of Murphy's hellish past coming back to attack him? I dunno. All I know is I had to run, fast, to get away from it or it would kill me. I absolutely disagreed with the existence of this insignificant enemy. It was a total waste of time, running into things and down wrong corridors. The appearance of the red eye did nothing for my character or the story. A failure in character design and one really annoying portion of the game.

And finally, you have these guys, who are mostly hiding out in the prison. Sometimes they have crazy chained people with them, and sometimes they don't. Aside from this one guy above with the cool dog people, you are usually fighting mutant human beings that pop out of jail cells as you run past. BORING! Give me something that spits blood, or scales the walls like a spider. These guys got annoying, really fast. Especially when they fight in groups, it takes a while to get the pattern down in tackling them. I got bored. That's it for character design. That's the game, pretty much. Besides the final boss, who turns out to be crazy easy once a routine is obtained in his destruction, there aren't really that many significant Downpour characters; and I don't want to spoil the final boss for you. Therefore, there is a TOTAL lack of characters in comparison to other Silent Hill games. Moreover, where the heck are my nurses at? I guess developers thought it was time to ditch the nurses and the famed Pyramid Head. They weren't needed, but the game could've used way more enemies. So was this game too easy? Maybe, I might have to bump up the difficulty level next time. Story lacked, GREATLY. I breezed through this game and by the end cut scene, I had no idea what had happened. Nothing made sense! Nothing added up or came together with the ending I had, like I had hoped. So, what, play through it again? Maybe for the sidequests, but after finishing it in five days (that's with full school days and work), I thought I'd wait til it went on clearance. Maybe one day someone will create a whole new survival horror game that will fill that emptiness inside of me that has resided there since the completion of Silent Hill 2. Some screenshots of creatures from Silent Hill Homecoming, for comparison.

Beyond Good and Evil 2 Screenshots Released!

Before I post the teaser trailer for Beyond Good and Evil 2, I want to talk about the first game.

I know it is a little cartoony, and I wasn't all too sure about it when I started playing, but soon I took a liking to it as I had with other cartoon games like Crash Bandicoot and Spyro, games you just want to keep playing.   Hands down, the story is good, the action is a little lacking but still keeps me going. And the fact that you get to use a camera to take pictures and earn money is even better, for all those photography lovers out there. I took so much of a liking to the characters that when something happens to one of them, I feel even more determined to get them back. This game created an emotional connection with me, one I usually make while reading engaging books or watching good movies. You become a part of the story and forget all about the rest of the world. Here is the teaser trailer for Beyond Good and Evil 2, granted this video was uploaded in 2008, which goes to show just how LONG they have been putting this game together.

I like the redesign of the characters. For those who played the first game, this is a huge step already for the graphics, and it has such a different feel to it. I am excited to actually get to play this game, and have installed the first one back on my Steam to finish it. Below is an official gameplay trailer uploaded by Destructoid which was sent by Ubisoft (so it's official, not fan-made!).

Can I just say, how cool is this? This game already has a completely different feel than the other one and it is too early to say whether that is good or bad, although I am strongly hoping it is a good thing. The cartoon aspect, as we can see, is gone. BGE has graduated to finer graphics along with the rest of today's video games, which already enhances the action and characters. The game has no official release date yet as the creator, Michel Ancel, has been working on Rayman, but with these bits of information coming out, we all hope it won't be too long before we can get our hands on this game. I leave you with some official screenshots uploaded May 19, 2012.

Internet is Restored!

Finally, after almost three weeks, internet has been restored. I will hopefully start to publish MUCH more frequently now. Future posts include a full review of Silent Hill Downpour (it needs to be done) and others as I slowly move out of the dark ages.

Sonic: Generations; Don't Buy It, Just Rent It

I bought Sonic: Generations last Fall after playing the demo. I liked the style, reminiscent of old Sonic games with classics like Casino Nights and Chemical Plant. I was ready to spend countless hours, like I had in previous Sonic games, beating my brains out and raging over levels. I actually enjoyed the game at first. Check out some gameplay.

So this is how it works. There are two Acts for each level, and in order to access these Acts you need to switch Sonics. There is Classic Sonic and Modern Sonic. Modern Sonic plays the updated version of the level while Classic Sonic is the typical side-scrolling platform game. Modern Sonic can do things like boost, bounce from enemy to enemy (killing them in the process) and has a different style. I didn't mind this style at first.

The bosses gradually get harder and harder. The last boss before the final boss really ticked me off and I spent A LOT of time trying to beat him. The way the game is set up really pisses me off sometimes, because especially in the boss level, sometimes Sonic doesn't grab the rail and sometimes he does. I don't do anything different. And thus I lose out on an opportunity to get a hit on Robotnik. This happens in other levels with Modern Sonic when he has to jump from balloon to balloon and sometimes he just doesn't feel like "attaching" to the next balloon and you fall to your death. It is a really faulty timing system that I just don't agree with. Near the beginning of this entire game, I raged A LOT. I mean, I got so mad I rage quit because it would make me so crabby. I almost didn't enjoy it.

The final part of this boss fight is friggen ridiculous. You and Robotnik are flying through this tunnel and you must avoid his hits with very little control of Sonic while holding down your boost button to catch up to him to get in a hit. Good luck if you run out of boost power, you are pretty much doomed. Then you have to start ALL over again and it just pisses you right off. I think I won out of luck, I just happened to get in that last hit, on my last ring of life, before he could hit me. Check it out.

After I finally beat this boss, Egg Dragoon, I was SO happy and SO ready for some new levels only to find I had to get two more gems (which I did easily after a rival battle with Shadow and a rival race), and then that was it? No more levels, just the final boss. Old Sonic games always seemed like they lasted forever, and there was always another level. This game is TOO short! I bought this game because I expected to work on it for awhile. In comparison to old Sonic games, you know it will never measure up. I gave this game a chance because I thought it would. I have avoided most other Sonic games because I knew they wouldn't amount to the same success old Sonic games did. But I figured since this one took old levels and revamped them, it would give me a chance to reminisce. Eh, not so much. Apparently, there is a DLC out there with Casino Nights (pinball style?), but I think I am done pouring money into this game. I tried the final boss, and I am not even sure I care anymore. At this point, I think I might just trade this game in to Gamestop for store credit towards Diablo 3.

Still Without Internet

Still waiting to get out of the temporary apartment so I can get internet. I am thinking next post will be on Sonic: Generations, since I made it to the final boss. I have some things to say about that since I am a long time player of Sonic.

SSX: Deadly Descent, Unsure of My Feelings

I saw this trailer and I wasn't sure what to think. Being an SSX veteran, I'm used to goofy character design and ridiculous tricks in midair. When I saw this, I felt a little gloomy inside. SSX finally went serious. 

So, yesterday while I was browsing Family Video to pass away the dark ages in my internet-less, cable-less temporary apartment, I saw the new SSX. What the heck, let's try it out. I started playing and besides making characters and maps completely serious and realistic, I liked it a little. Although, I am not so keen on not being able to select a character, though I haven't played with it much and this might come later. I have only played World Tour and the courses are pretty neat, the trick maneuvering is advanced but easy to get a hang of, but eff the windsuit. 

I am not even completely sure what "Team SSX" (as they call themselves now, like cartoon super-secret agents or something) is fighting for besides against their previous teammate Griff who left Team SSX. I honestly don't know where this lame story came from and I have no idea where it's going and how it includes the entire world. Maybe I wasn't paying attention. I just wanted to race. The races are categorized by style, such as trick, race or survival. Each location has a survival subject, like ice or trees. Shopping for new clothes, boards and gear sucks, mainly because you can only view five or so at once and usually they aren't that great. 

So SSX, I am afraid you have sort of let me down. Despite being able to do crazy tricks in midair still, it just doesn't feel the same, even with the song "It's Tricky" playing, remixed, in the background.