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.