In previous blogs I've asked you, the people of Giant Bomb, if you thought professional reviews are "just opinions" and whether or not they are preferable to community reviews (jury's still out on that one, by the way). Well, this blog follows in the same vein. After reading this article on Kotaku, I'm curious to know what Giant Bomb thinks about review events, how they impact the industry and whether or not they are a necessity of today's video game scene.
 
Personally, I think a lavish review event could easily color the opinion of a professional journalist, and in that respect, yes, it's bad for the industry. However, I also think that any journalist who allows themselves to be influenced by such external factors probably
 
A) Doesn't have a lot of pull in the industry anyway, or won't for long.
B) Would find a way to be influenced even if the event wasn't around.
 
Basically, I'm saying that any journalist who allows their opinion to be colored in such a way is probably pretty dishonest and need not be listened to, which would be all fine and dandy if we could just weed the buggers out. Unfortunately, the dishonest journalist is not so quickly plucked from a crowd.
 
So to sum up, let me restate my question: what do you think about AAA-title review events? Do they hurt the industry, and if they do, is there a way around them?

 I guess I should preface this by saying that I’ve played a lot of Borderlands, and when I say a lot, I mean two and a half playthroughs worth of Gearbox’s loot shooter. So while it should come as no surprise that I was excited for the announced DLC, you should also be aware that I was more than a little burnt out on the game when I started up the Zombie Island of Dr. Ned expansion.
 

 
It’s not, by the way.

Initially concerned as to how zombies would fit in with Borderlands’ otherwise frantic pace, I was pleasantly surprised at how tense moment-to-moment game play is. The zombies, though slow and not much of a threat on their own, are constantly zeroing in on your location, spawning in legion and dragging you down with a number of somewhat frustrating snare abilities. This is illustrated particularly well by a Left 4 Dead-like climax scenario presented early in the story, wherein you are forced to fight off wave after wave of undead predators whilst waiting for a rusty and impossibly slow elevator.

I’ve still got a ways to go with the Island, but if it’s able to keep its pace and the narrative is strong enough to support it, I’m sure I’ll be enjoying the zone long after I’ve finished the main arcs.

Thanks for reading,
End Boss.

  Hey folks, figured I’d write a short little blog to let you know what I’ve been up to for the past little while. For the past couple of months I’ve been reading and attempting to collect a graphic novel series that indubitably some Bombers are familiar with called “The Walking Dead.” The acclaimed series depicts the trials and tribulations of a constantly fluctuating group of survivors attempting to carve out a new life for themselves in the post-zombie-apocalyptic landscape of Middle America.
 
TWD's writer (Robert Kirkman) has been both praised and criticized for being unflinchingly brutal in his story telling, crossing lines that most books won’t even go near and some that even his devoted fan base won’t follow him over. The artist (Charlie Adlard), while a little inconsistent from time-to-time, brings home the barrenness of the post-apocalyptic wastes well through his stark black-and-white imagery. I absolutely recommend the series to anyone and everyone who will take the time to seek it out. Which just happens to bring me to my next point: The Walking Dead is becoming increasingly hard to find. Though there are still pockets of E-Bay and Amazon deals floating around, the series is quickly becoming scarce, which is why I’m so glad that I finally finished my collection the other day.

 
-End Boss.
 
EDIT: Just noticed that book one is being covered up by book two. Ah well. Just pretend it's there.

Just finished reading an article on Destructoid that decries user feedback on video game reviews. While the article makes some strong points, I think the author may have taken his faux seriousness too far, descending dangerously close to the level that the folks he's criticizing reside on, which in turn runs the risk of alienating his more moderate fanbase. A little civility and dignity would have gone much further to prove his points than vicious verbal attacks and petty generalizations about the video game community; well, at least in my mind.
 
So here's the question(s), Giant Bombers: do you think professional reviews are more than "just opinion"? If so, how? Do you think user reviews are more trustworthy than professional ones? If so, why?

IN THIS BLOG:

Thoughts on the PS3's online capabilities, Demon's Souls and Borderlands.

 
However, none of this is to say that the console itself is lacking; the PS3 has some excellent exclusives both recently released and coming down the pike, it’s great to not have to cross my fingers every time I turn my console on and multi-platform performance on the PS3 is quickly closing the gap with the 360. With all that in mind, however, some major changes will have to be made to PSN for me to make the full switch.

Speaking of PS3 exclusives, I’ve been playing a lot of Demon’s Souls lately, a game which really seems to split the collective gamer consciousness down the middle. On the one hand there are those who embrace its old-school difficulty and… Well, it’s old-school difficulty. On the other hand there are those who violently reject the difficulty, those who the Bombcast aptly describes as “experience gamers,” a term that may seem derogatory to the hyper-sensitive 12-year-old ninnyhammers out there, but actually just helps delineate the difference between Atlus’s target audience and the audience that games like Uncharted 2 play to (a game that I have unfortunately not yet experienced; no pun intended).

Anyway.

 I’m finding I must fall somewhere between these two groups, since the difficulty of Demon’s Souls was initially extremely appealing; I yearned for something with the real meat and substance that my nostalgia-goggles tell me used to be present in video games. Unfortunately, while Demon’s Souls nails the difficulty, it doesn’t seem to really do a whole lot else all that well. The world isn’t terribly compelling, the storyline is fairly dry, archetypal fantasy fare and the game play itself can seem a little loose from time to time, particularly when fighting enemies that require a more refined strategy than “block, swing, block.” Also, there are times when I feel the game gets a little lost in its difficulty, to the point where I didn’t want to play by the rules anymore (ie, walkthroughs, tutorials, etc). While I’m all for a challenge, Demon’s Souls seems to like its difficulty a little too much, which is extremely salient in the second boss fight against a huge armored spider, due to your foe not having any discernible weak points or chinks in its strategy. It’s hard to put to words how disheartening and frustrating Demon’s Souls can be, but I guess that that’s only fair because it is equally difficult to explain why the game keeps you coming back for more punishment. I guess if I had to give Demon’s Souls a numerical score, I would give it three and a half stars out of five.

The only other game that I’ve had any time to play is Borderlands, which I’ve played a lot. I’m currently on my second play through as a level 45 Berserker and am still completely enslaved to the game’s curiously addictive loot system. What could have made Borderlands better, then? As far as I’m concerned, it just needed some more time in the oven. There have been significant technical problems (people losing entire save files to data corruption, excessive frame rate drops, etc) cropping up left and right, and the online componentneeded more testing before it was pushed to live, what with the connection issues and lag spikes that are all too prevalent. Anyway, I talked a lot about Borderlands in the blog just before this one, so I won’t spend too much time on it here. Four out of five stars. 
 
Thanks for reading,
End Boss.

Don't Worry, Bro; No Spoilers Here.

 
As for the content itself, it has the kind of charm you’d expect from the game’s art-style; though it’s gritty and at times gory, it never takes itself too seriously, and that’s definitely to its benefit. The quest line I played through was a fairly simple “fetch this, kill these and assemble this so you can fight a boss” affair, and in the context of an MMO-esque game, that usually wouldn't bode well; however, Borderlands is also a shooter, and let’s face it, if the RPG elements were entirely absent from it, you’d still be shooting shit, so the “kill this many of so-and-so enemy” quest style never really detracted from the experience.

Aside from the issues mentioned above, Borderlands is a mechanically sound game. The guns feel pretty good, and enemies (despite their “attack until you can’t attack no mo’” AI) pose a pretty healthy challenge.

Borderlands really is the Diablo of the firearms world, and if it can overcome its technical issues, I think it will find a healthy user base, particularly among those who played the Diablo series; if you liked (or loved) those games, you’ll definitely be down for what Gearbox’s newest title has to offer. I know I am.

Thanks for reading,
End Boss.

 With my XBOX 360 that is. I just can’t deal with it anymore; the other day I had my third 360 Red Ring on me. This after having just bought a 12-month subscription to Live (thankfully, I didn’t get a chance to put the code in before the damned thing burnt out). Having already decided that I would rather buy a PS3 than send my X-Brick to Microsoft for a good three weeks, I thought I’d try a home remedy that has had pretty positive feedback since its discovery. Well, whether I don’t have the technical expertise, am too hasty or just damned clumsy, I did something to further worsen my situation: as it stands, my ex-XBOX can’t even boot up, much less play games. I’ve decided it’s going to stay that way.
 

 
Now, I just want it to be clear that just because I’m frustrated with my current situation (and I am very frustrated) doesn’t mean I will henceforth hate the XBOX: it’s still a great console with some really top-notch games. Unfortunately, I just can’t put up with the shoddy hardware any longer, and although I know that the PS3 does have some issues similar to the Red Ring, I also know that they are far less common.

So, I guess anyone on Giant Bomb who has me on their friends list can go ahead and delete me. I may edit this space with a PSN tag once I get to that point. Thanks for reading.

-End Boss.

Hello Again, Giant Bomb.

 
Batman: Arkham Asylum: This game surprised me. I, like everyone else, had heard all the hype about how ambitious it was, had seen the innumerable trailers released by Rocksteady and read of the game featuring the (much acclaimed, apparently) cast of the animated series. Still, I was skeptical. Would Arkham Asylum be the first licensed game to break free from mediocrity? Was that even possible?

Well apparently it was, because Arkham did it. From scene one I realized that the world Rocksteady was presenting us with had been lovingly crafted in exquisite detail: the environments, character models and animations all evoked the dark, brooding world that Batman has become synonymous with. 

I haven’t finished Rocksteady’s homage to the Dark Knight yet, but I have chosen a favorite moment which I believe will be hard to top (spoilers ahead!): when Batman encounters Scarecrow for the second time and is injected with a large amount of said villain’s hallucinogen… Well, it was the most fascinating, entertaining break in the fourth wall I’ve seen since Metal Gear Solid’s Psycho Mantis battle. From experiencing the game’s initial cut scene again as the Joker to the moment where the game “glitches” and locks up for a few seconds (I actually restarted my XBOX because I thought it had red-ringed) before returning you to the madhouse, Arkham Asylum had me scrambling to pick up my jaw.

Certainly there will be people who say, “yeah, but it isn’t all that hard to do that stuff.” And you’re right; it isn’t. But that’s not what makes it so great. What makes this breaking of the fourth wall great is its rarity; very few developers have the stones to go that far just to fuck with the player’s head. I for one am glad that Rocksteady is saddled with a sizable pair. Anyway, I’ll not rant too much on Arkham, but I will say this: go get this game. Rent it, buy it, do whatever you have to. You owe it to yourself to at least give it a look.

 Champions Online: Cryptic sure knows how to carve a niche. They did it first with their City of Heroes/Villains game, and it looks like they’re set to do it again with Champions. There was a lot of buzz surrounding this title (at least within the MMO-world), and for good reason: it’s a solid MMO with some real flair. That being said, it’s not perfect; I’m finding the difficulty (or rather lack thereof) is a real problem, with almost all content being solo-able, even the “super villains.” Perhaps this was in Cryptic’s game plan, but it just doesn’t seem all that smart to make your MMO (a genre of games that relies heavily on community to succeed) an insular experience. To be fair, I’ve heard there are endgame instances (or “lairs,” in keeping with Cryptic’s comic book theme) that require five or more heroes to band together to defeat tougher enemies and complete more complex objectives, seemingly in the same style that World of Wacraft so successfully implemented. I’ll probably write more about Champions as I climb the level ladder, so I’ll leave off on this: Cryptic has created a solid MMO and it’s worth a look for fans of the genre; just don’t expect it to revolutionize much.

Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2: Oh man, I was so excited for this game. After reading Marvel’s Civil War story arc, I was starving for more. When I heard that MUA 2’s storyline was being lifted right from said arc I was, in a word, stoked. Did MUA 2 deliver? Well, yes and no. Yes, it’s Civil War, but there’s enough changed that I felt cheated when approaching the end of the game. Many of the events that made the comic pack such a punch were conspicuously absent from the game. That isn’t to say that MUA 2 is bad: the mechanics are rock-solid (fans of the original will be pleased) and the art style (also lifted from the comics) is fantastic; I just wish Marvel had made more of an effort to keep the story intact. Still, I recommend the game for fans of the original MUA as well as Civil War fans; just don’t expect to get the full story.

As I said, I’ve also been doing some creative writing; you can check that out here.

Thanks for reading,
End Boss.
 
P.S. My XBOX did actually red-ring, days after playing Arkham Asylum. Motherfucker.
P.S.S. Giant Bomb's image insertion process remains fucking nightmarish.

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