BananaHammock

Penny Arcade Adventures: On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness is a fun game with a long winded title. The game offers a good Japanese-RPG style game mixed in with a point and click adventure and some Penny Arcade humor. I never read PA before getting this game and I still enjoyed it so let's just get it out of the way that you don't have to be a PA fan to like this game. That being said you do have to like J-RPGs at least a little.

While this is a J-RPG it is a very light J-RPG. There is very little grinding and it is fairly linear compared to other games in the genre. There are potions and special attacks for battle but the attacks are not complicated.

The battle system is in real time so you can't just sit there thinking about what attacks to perform. You have items that you can use, a regular attack, a few special attacks, some support characters and some blocks at your disposal. After battle your characters level up and learn new abilities as in any other RPG.

The faithfulness to the PA comic strip is very good. The humor is definitely intact. There are lots of nerdy/gamey jokes such as how you role a 20 sided die at the beginning of battle to see who goes first and that your weapon through the whole game is a rake. The graphics reproduce the comic's visual style pretty well although I still feel like there is something missing.

There is very little sound in the game. There is no voice acting and generally
the only thing accompanying you through the world is some quiet, repetitive music. This all makes sense though because the whole game is made to look like a comic strip.

Overall the game is very good. The story is silly and over the top but that's what makes it funny. $20 is a little pricey for a game that takes about 5-6 hours to finish and offers no real reason to play through again. That being said though the 5-6 hours are a blast and you should still check it out because it is a funny, solid RPG.

When MGS4 was released I knew I wanted to play it but wouldn't be able to because I don't have the money to buy a PS3 so I decided to play through MGS1 since that's the only one I haven't played through.

I liked the game a lot.  It was better than 2 but nowhere close to 3. Back in 1997 the story was the main attraction and that's one of the problems. I know that MGS games are very story centric but you gotta have some gameplay or else it's not a game. If you were to skip all the cutscenes and codec calls you would probably finish the game in about 3 and a half hours. Being a Metal Gear fan I already knew most of the story twists and surprises but the short-term story stuff was interesting.

The gameplay reminded me alot of MGS2 and now I realize that the core gameplay didn't change much until MGS3. But this is not a bad thing the stealth action is fun and exciting. The intenseness of waiting for a guard to pass by and not even know you're there is still fun as ever. There are some sections in this game that are truly memorable and outside the box such as the fight with Psycho Mantis and the temperature sensitive key cards these parts really stand out.

While there isn't as much gameplay as an average game, the total package is still great overall.

BF: BC is a military first person shooter in the battlefield franchise. This is the first battlefield game to have a meaningful story campaign. In past battlefield games the real meat of the game was the multi-player component.

The story of BF: BC follows Bad Company, a group of misfit convicts that don’t get sentenced jail time and instead get placed in the army. The crew completes their missions as they are told to by their superiors. After fighting their way up a hill they discover that they are fighting mercenaries hired by a legionnaire who loves gold. This sets off the Three Kings style quest for gold.

The story is actually really good. It’s a humorous take on war told through cut scenes viewed through your characters eyes. The fact that you usually only fight with three other soldiers allows to connect with them easily. The story keeps you entertained all the way through the game until a final battle with the legionnaire which ends the game abruptly. By the end of the game you realize that the game isn’t all that long.

The gameplay is usually the standard FPS type gameplay broken up with a few vehicle segments. All the vehicles you see in the game are fully drivable. An interesting new design choice that makes the game pretty easy is that when you die you respawn with no penalty back in the world. All the enemies you killed and objectives you completed before dyeing stay the way they are.

A back of box feature that the game includes is almost fully destroyable environments. Basically if you cause an explosion on or next to a wall or a tree or something it gets blown up. The reason I say *almost* destroyable is because while you can blow holes in walls the foundation and certain parts of the building stay invulnerable and trees can only break at a certain point. In single-player this would feel like more of a feature and not a gimmick if the AI were to use their own holes to get to you. However, in multi-player this is used more effectively

The multi-player is extremely fun. It offers the same leveling up system from Call of Duty 4 and the same team oriented, class based, competitive gameplay from past Battlefield. The game offers several different maps with good variety in landscape but they generally play the same. This was supposed to be the first single-player centric although being a Battlefield game the real meat of the game is the multi-player.

The game comes with only one gametype on the disc. It’s a fun gametype called goldrush in which one team must defend crates of gold while the other team must destroy them. It offers for some good strategy but from my experience the attacking team usually seems to win more often. It’s a real bummer that the game only comes with one gametype but developer Dice says that they will patch in more for free.

Battlefield: Bad Company offers a good but below average length single-player campaign and a fun multi-player component that will keep me coming back for more.

Before buying braid I was totally turned off by the art style and aesthetic but once I played the game I realized that it was easy to ignore it. It's not that the game has bad graphics in fact the graphics are kinda neat It's just a combination of the main character's suit and tie, the background violin music and the manor in which the story is told that just turns me off a little bit.

However, like I said before the gameplay is so good that the art doesn't even matter. Basically this is one of those games that makes you feel smart for figuring it out. The game plays exactly like a Mario game but you have the power to rewind time as far back as you want, there's no limit. You use this time control to solve various puzzles in various ways.

In the beginning you can only rewind time. Later you can rewind time but some items, like a key for instance, won't be affected. In a later level you can rewind time and your future shadow self will do actions for you. In the next level you are given a ring in addition to you time rewinding abilities. When you drop the ring time slows down in the area around the ring. These powers are never used outside of their respective levels however.

The main goal of Braid is to use your time powers to collect puzzle pieces that unlock the next level. Some of these puzzle pieces will be very hard to get while others you'll know how to do immediately. By using a walkthrough you are in a way ruining the game for yourself because collecting these pieces is the game but sometimes I don't know how the answer is supposed to even get in your head.

When playing through Braid I finished the game in one sitting. This isn't to say the game is short ,because it actually is average length for an XBLA game at around 4 or 5 hours, I just loved the game so much I couldn't put it down. It really is one of those "just one more and then I'll go to bed" games. After completing Braid there's not much to do other than a single level and a full game speed run mode, but I can't really complain because the game was so fun while it lasted.

Braid is a game for smart people but if you think long and hard enough you'll figure it out. So, if you're someone who can handle games with little or no replay value and doesn't mind getting frustrated, Braid is worth your 15 bucks.