Did you guys see that new Hitman Absolution trailer? I felt super bad for those cops getting picked off one by one! They gave the cops more personality than 47 ever had in all of the previous Hitman games combined. But that's the nature of the character, right? He's a sneaky assassin and doesn't afraid of anything. As a fan of the previous games, Blood Money in particular, I'm pretty stoked that there's going to be a new one, even if it seems a little bit more Splinter Cell: Conviction than maybe I'd like. But the developers already allayed fears before they even showed us plebs any of the game by announcing a difficulty mode for the 'hardcore' and the ability to play through the game without killing anyone except the target. It's rare that developers try to assure the fans so insistently before even showing off their game. I don't envy their task of placating fans of the franchise whilst trying to broaden the appeal of the game.

So as you may have noticed, I'm back to blogging. Hopefully some people will still see this on their feeds and read this (hello!), and maybe comment below. I'm just going to talk about some games I've been playing now, most of all Dark Souls.

I'm not going to talk about how hard it is.

Yes, it's a difficult game, but it's the part that always gets overstated. Slow and steady wins the race, in a lot of cases. I finished the game yesterday after playing obsessively for a week, clocking almost 60 hours. I went to every area and defeated every boss there is to beat. For a long time I felt this game just kept revealing more and more of itself, feeling almost endless. Sadly it does end, but with a first playthrough easily taking at least 50 hours, for a lot of people undoubtedly a lot more, there's little reason to complain.

Perhaps what I love more than anything about Dark Souls is how dense and deep it is. Unlike the extremely convoluted World Tendency system in Demon's Souls, Humanity is fairly easy to understand, even if the game goes to great lengths to obfuscate its meaning. There are nine covenants to join, some of them extremely well hidden, and most of those confer some pretty awesome benefits, like having a dragon-head that can bellow flames. NPC's will follow unique paths that intersect with yours, sometimes culminating in an epic battle, and sometimes in a tragic finale. The many different facets of this game encourage players to come together to talk about them and share knowledge and theories, both in the in-game hint system and on message boards. I'd like to think FROM made the game intentionally obtuse for just this reason. Just check out the gamefaqs message board. Look at it for 20 seconds, refresh the page and look again. It moves insanely fast. There's a sense of mystery and mutual discovery that very few games have anymore. Apparently even the official guide contains some errors.

I'm probably going to write a review soon, to say what I need to say about the game. It's a better game than Demon's Souls, and praise the sun that it got made.

RAGE

I pre-purchased the PC version of RAGE on Steam, figuring that an id game would obviously be best on PC, right? Well, yes and no. After installing the latest Catalyst drivers and manually creating a config file to make the game look good, I'm still baffled by some of the low-res textures and some awful shadowing work. From a distance, the game looks great. Get up close to stuff, and oftentimes not so much. The disparity between the good-looking parts and the bad-looking parts is huge, like a 2011 game overlayed on top of a 2001 game. It's that serious.

Looking past that, it's just a really fun game. The shooting feels exceptionally solid, which isn't really a surprise coming from the company that basically invented the FPS, but it's nice to know they've still got it. The card game is also surprisingly fun and addicting, actually making you want to find the collectibles for reasons other than achievements. There's not a lot else to say, it's just a fun, no-nonsense shooting game in the same way that Singularity was last year, only nobody gave that a second look, which is unfortunate for that game and Raven Software.

Resident Evil 4 'HD'

The battle over HD Remasters is still raging on forums the world over, mostly because a number of companies insist on slapping 'HD' behind the title of a PS2-era game, upscaling it to 720p and shoving it out the door. This is another such case, where no apparent work was done on any textures or models to make them look better. While I may not approve of Capcom's recent mercenary ways of taking old content and repackaging it with some new content overlayed on top of it, it's hard to argue against the notion that this is still probably the best incarnation of Resident Evil 4. Compared to the recent ICO collection, which clearly has been lovingly updated by the same team that did a damn fine job on God of War 1 & 2, or likewise Ocarina of Time 3D, it just doesn't deserve the HD moniker.

So should I feel bad about supporting this practice or just enjoy RE4, looking decent on a 37" HDTV, because it's still a damn fine game for $20?

Thanks for reading!