Post-Halloween

October might be my favorite month. I typically couldn’t care less about horror movies, but for some reason I always need to watch at least a few of them around Halloween (always the awful ones, a habit i’m trying to break myself of). And having moved to San Francisco last July, I was excited to experience the holiday in the city for the first time (the Castro did not disappoint . Also, its the always the time of the year I get struck with that ‘oh shit, the years almost over’ feeling and force myself to swallow everything I may have missed in it’s first 9 months and drown my girlfriend in my thoughts. So I finally made a solid effort to catch up on games in the last 4 or 5 weeks and walked away feeling pretty good about most of them.

RECENTLY PLAYED

Spec Ops : The Line

I’m pretty sure my experience with SO:TL is the only time I’ve actually benefited from waiting to pick up a game. With all the ‘is this game great or garbage?’ talk that came out surrounding Spec Ops when it was released earlier this year, I was hesitant to check it out at all. After a few weeks I decided to focus on living life and forgot about it entirely until I saw it for super cheap and decided to finally pick it up having lost track of all preconceived emotions i had felt before. I made the right decision.

Yeah, the gameplay was middling at best, the disparities between the characters personalities in cutscenes and in gameplay annoying, and I died one-too-many times due to limitations the game accidentally placed on me by being somewhat broken. But the totally intelligent, effective and well paced plot-line and climax made up for it entirely; I, admittedly, had to take a moment to reflect on my actions after that epilogue. I don’t know, maybe im too easily effected, but I found the whole thing refreshing after having lost 5 hours of my life to yet another Modern Warfare last year.

Dishonored

The original Bioshock is a contender for my favorite game ever. I understand the issues people have with it in hindsight (combat, mainly), but I spent a whole lot of time happily wandering Rapture, wrench in hand, simply soaking up the atmosphere. I haven’t been as into a games mood like I am with Dishonored since that first Bioshock game. The art-style, clothing/architecture defining time period and musky other-world elements all combine into something that I just feel. Even if the gameplay wasn’t great (which it is) I’d still recommend Dishonored to anyone in need of something to help get them through the wait for Infinite.

Dust: An Elysian Tale

The whole Furry issue surrounding Dust’s release was of no interest to me. You want to dress up like an animal in a room full of others doing the same, you go right ahead. The fact that I spent a whole two minute reading a thread on the whole thing means it had too much of an impact on me. I have no issue with any of it, I simply think the animals in the game are just kind of obnoxious. If these voices/personalities belonged to human characters I would be just as annoyed, which is kind of a drag because I like the story/combat a whole lot. I just wish I could experience them without having a Fidgit in my life. Euch.

Asura’s Wrath

Man, I would have never expected to enjoy Asura’s Wrath as much as I did. Apparently, I haven’t matured as far from my childhood love for DBZ-vein anime nonsense as fully as I thought, and after having fist-pumped my way through an entire games worth of brutal, limb-destroying melee battles I put the controller down a little unsure of how I felt about myself. It took me a day or so to shake my confusion and come to terms with the fact that AW is just a great game as long as you’re willing to dive headfirst into something new and kind of frightening.

Borderlands 2

I’m not going to spend any time with this one because everything has been said, which is the reason I walked away from B2 after only a few hours. Gearbox should have just named it Borderlands 1 - 2. You can’t argue it’s a bad game, it just wasn’t different enough to inspire me to spend any time with it.

Sleeping Dogs

I’ve been totally burnt out on open world games in 2012. After spending a lot of last year in Skyrim, Saints Row: The Third and Minecraft, I began to miss the super-linear plot-driven games I grew up with. Then Sleeping Dogs came along and reminded me of how good it can feel to simply jump in a car and waste a whole grip of time. Super fun Batman-style combat, in a gritty GTA style city with a hint of Saints Row insanity, the whole game welcomes the player with arms outstretched like a forgotten best friend.

November

Now that games are starting to come out more often (and I am a little more financially stable) I’m sure there won’t be any lack of new titles for me to check out next month. Hopefully, a mac port for Hotline Miami will surface before I break down and have to hijack a friends PC, I'm getting real desperate.

If there even is a proper word for the confusing mixture of emotions I felt in the first 30 minutes of booting up the long-awaited add-on to last year's utterly exhilarating Dark Souls, it's not in my repertoire. What I do know, is I was immediately struck with a very profound childlike excitement that had me giddy, all due to the fact I was simply doing something new. Having spent well over 200 hours exploring the dense, beautiful and wholly unique world FromSoftware had granted me last year, I pretty much knew everything you could about Dark Souls proper. Every pressure-plate triggered trap, every well-hidden enemy, every nonsense attack a boss could throw at me. Every single obstacle the game could lay on me I had painfully experienced, triumphantly overcome, and gloriously mastered.

But not today. Today, I was walking down a new corridor. It looked familiar, sure. Still a part of Lordran, the over-world the game exists in that I had come to love. But never before had I been down a tunnel that looked just like this, that snaked in this exact fashion, that finally come out into this specific sunlit plateau. And just as all of these pleasant feelings crescendoed in what was beginning to seem like such a sweet song, I met the Sanctuary Guardian.

For a surprisingly large (and questionably masochistic) fan-base as dedicated to collecting souls as I am, the eagerly awaited Artorias of the Abyss content is a breath of fresh air. The newly added story-arch and accompanying sub-world didn't even need to be amazing, it just needed to be more Dark Souls. Thankfully, however, it's pretty special.

In typical Souls fashion, the minor story throughout the new content is vague (and really only told through optional dialogue with it's morbid, defeated charaters) but as effective as ever and covered in a surprise sci-fi sheen.

After being seized by a giant, ugly hand belonging to what could only belong to some hulking monster, you arrive in the abyss plagued land of Oolacile, home to a few foil characters from the main game. You quickly discover you've not only travelled in terms of distance, but also back in time (around the events that provided as reason for the former Oolacile residents to have abandoned their land in the first place) to aid in the fight against the abyss swallowing everything it can.

Even though there are a couple new NPC's (one being especially badass) to interact with and some decent story beats, Souls fan know what it is they want from AOTA. The DLC-only boss fights are just as remarkable as the originals (the highlight being Knight Artorias) and the new loot adds, at the very least, some new tools to take charge with.

The only issue I ever had with the new content is that it didn't quite feel like something we've been waiting a year for. It's so incredibly streamlined into the main game that if someone was to start the original already having purchased the new content, they probably wouldn't realize at what point they had crossed over. I have no doubt that FromSoftware considers this a triumph. To have expected post-Gwyn content would have been foolish. The original game made sense. You had learned early on what your goal was, and by the end you had completed it.That was your story. But having spent a year roaming the same areas over and over again for the past 12 months made me want something a little more dramatic. The creators had painted themselves into a corner.

Many frustrating deaths after my initial introduction to the Sanctuary Guardian, I finally beat him. I had memorized his lengthy set of attacks, discovered which of mine were most effective, and decided exactly what must be done. And as I stood above his rapidly deteriorating corpse with a broken weapon, without potions, heart racing at 200bpm and poisoned, i collapsed alongside him. It was such a perfect moment, sitting by myself in my dark apartment, the previous 30 minutes of anger overwhelmed by a new sense of accomplishment that I laughed out loud to myself, respawned, and ran ahead in search of my next death.

Radical Entertainment’s 2009 release of Prototype was welcomed with open arms, even though it dropped a month after the fundamentally similar Infamous. Over 400 thousand people were happy enough to aid in its journey to reaching Platinum status (which it did fairly quickly) for obvious reasons. Being an open world game centered on a biologically enhanced anti-hero capable of scaling buildings and slaughtering entire military units in a fashion that brought to mind John Carpenter’s The Thing, none of this came as much of a surprise.

While that first game offered a significant amount of free-roaming and an abundance of opportunities to cause between-mission mayhem, it ultimately suffered for the same reasons it was a success. Players quickly grew tired of gameplay that had been exhilarating just hours before. It will all laid out on the table too quickly. Even with its fairly gripping story arch, the burning flame at the core of Prototype dimmed all too quickly.

The release of a second Prototype game is cause for excitement because of the things the dev team did well with the first. With the solid framework already laid, and a stronger idea of how to keep people's interest, Radical Entertainment have the potential to release something truly great.

Well, the above teaser trailer for the second entry in the Prototype franchise was announced way back at the 2010 VGAs, and since then there has been a steady stream of videos and information released about the sequel. And with how long Prototype 2 has been in the works, Radical seems to be taking their time to ensure the issues from the first game don't show up again; a fact that will benefit the game in the long run, but may have made the task of following the game's development somewhat difficult. In order to free up some time potentially spent browsing the internet for information, here is what we've been shown thus far via trailers.

With the first proper trailer from July last year, we are reintroduced with post-outbreak New York, and it is implied via newscast that conditions have only worsened in the 14 months since the events in the first game. Mentions of 'sightings' of the first games protagonist, walking biological weapon Alex Mercer, let us know that he is still around, and that the press seems to think he is entirely to blame.

Also, we are granted another look at Prototype 2's leading man, Sergeant James Heller, shown in the original teaser. We've previously learned that Heller had returned from war overseas to find his family dead and his former home a warzone. Originally fighting his way deep into the eye of the storm seeking only death, something changed. He now possesses abilities comparable to Mercers, not of the common infested civilian.

Offering a quick re-cap of the events that transpired in the original Prototype, the second cinematic trailer also brings us further up to speed on what has taken place since.

Since the Manhattan outbreak of the Blacklight virus, New York (NY Zero, as it is now referred to) has been split into 3 different sections based on that areas level of affliction. The corporation responsible for the virus's creation, Blackwatch, has covered up it's malicious acts by placing blame on Mercer. His actions from the first game, typically based on saving the lives of innocent, are coated in a false sheen of malevolent destruction.

Also, at some point in the 14 months since the Manhattan events, Heller came into contact with Alex, who personally hand-fed him some yummy virus. We are shown footage of Heller acting out against Blackwatch military units in a fashion similar to his predecessor's work, but with ultimately unknown intentions. Does Heller simply seek revenge against Mercer? Or will these emotions manifest into something far more frightening?

If the game manages to play on the successfully emotional tones of the trailers we have seen over the past year, it could all play out effectively. Activision games aren't typically known for their ability to strike at the hearts of their players. We'll find out come April if those over at Radical Entertainment are the only ones who don't seem to know this.

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