God, I hate it when things download slowly. Ever since I moved to my Dad’s place it takes fucking forever for me to actually download something from the Playstation Store, and I have no idea why it does that. If I’m downloading something on the computer, it’s quick and easy, but once I download something from the Playstation Store, it takes over 3 hours for a motherfucking demo. But thankfully, the PS3 decided to be nice to me today. The Motorstorm: Pacific Rift demo only took about 45 minutes, and the Brothers in Arms: Hell’s Highway demo took about an hour. That is quite a long time for 2 demos, but I can live with it. And now that I’ve played through both of the demos, I’ll give you some impressions of them.

Motorstorm: Pacific Rift

The Motorstorm: Pacific Rift demo features one track and 3 vehicles (a bike, a racing truck and a monster truck), and you have the option of playing by yourself or playing against a friend. The track you’re given is a great track to play on, but it doesn’t really show off the new things the developers have added to the game, aside from the split-screen mode, such as breaking the environment to slow down your opponents, cooling off your car by driving into water – you know, the small details. To be honest, those small details are the only things the developers added to the gameplay, unless you count the ability to bunny hop on bikes and pressing R1 to ram into your opponents as major change to the game. But whatever. The only thing that matters is that Motorstorm: Pacific Rift plays like Motorstorm, meaning lots of crashes, great graphics, awesome tracks and awesome vehicles, and that’s the only thing you should worry about. The demo isn’t going to convince anyone who hated the first game to buy this one, but for the people who loved the first game – me – it’s great.

Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway

I know I’m pretty much alone when I say this, but I don’t hate World War II-themed games. I still find it enjoyable to murder Nazis with a Thompson, and Brothers in Arms: Hell’s Highway is not going to change my mind because it is a fantastic shooter. For those of you who don’t know, Brothers in Arms: Hell’s Highway’s main gameplay hook is its squad commands, and the way you perform them is very simple: hold in L2 to bring up a little cursor, point it an object of interest, release L2 and your squad members will do your bidding. This whole thing is context-sensitive, so if you point it at some Germans they will unleash suppressing fire on them, allowing you flank them; or if you point it at a place where they can get in to cover they’ll get in to cover. It’s very, very simple and it works very, very well.

Graphics-wise, the game rarely disappoints. A murky texture here and there pops up, but you totally forget about that when the game zooms in on a German and shows you his head exploding in a shower of blood because of the perfect head shot you made, or when you watch a group of them go flying in the air while you see them lose their limbs in slowmotion. Sure, it might be a bit gruesome, but you’ll too be busy going “OH SNAP” to care.

I guess that’s it.

I really don’t want to get up at to go to school on Monday. I hate it when your holiday’s about to end. Ugh.