phdr_vrba

The game looks absolutely beautiful on Vita and graphics are the best thing on Muramasa. Story is but a necessity to be ignored, but the characters are quite well written, which makes it enjoyable nontheless. Combat is fast, with responisve controls, but I'd appreciate if the enemies had less HP and more tricks up their sleeves, since it takes unreasonable long time to take down most enemies even when you are clearly superior and they can't put a scretch on you. Some enemy types are rather annoying to deal with like that, they can't harm you, but will happily deflect most of your attacks. Not much fun to be had then. Boss fights on the other hand are quite different and much more enjoyable, since each comes with its own playstyle. The pinnacle of combat for me were the second endings of each character, which are super fast paced and 90% of attacks ends up witch clash of the blades. Kisuke's 1st/3rd ending boss fight also had a nice emotional drive to it. What was really disappointing is the repetivnes of the game: Locations are greatly copy/pasted, and you are required to basically just run back and forth through them with random fights thrown in more than I'd care for the playtime gets ridiculously inflated with that. Also inventory navigation/use could be more user-friendly if you want to use multiple items, you have to re-open the inventory for every single one. This being considered a metrodivania game, I'd expect gaining new abilities throughout the game, but you gain access to the new areas simply by obtaining a specific sword. And the swords, in essence, are all pretty much the same, thus the gameplay does not evolve a bit over the course of game, which is a real shame. For a metroidvania game on Vita, I'd say the Guacamelee! is a better choice. But when you play a Vanillaware game, you play it mostly for the art.

Okay, this is the final review update. There is stuff mentoned some **** may consider a minor spoilers. After the prologue, where you can already drool over borderline next-gen graphics, game slows to a crawl and stays there for some 4-5 hours about 1/4 of the whole game. During that time, not much interesting happens, you'll just learn about the game mechanics and weird and somewhat clunky control scheme. You may also notice a bunch of bugs and graphical glitches the game has quite a lot of those, especially when compared to Uncharted games. Eventually you'll meet the guy named Bill and things will slowly get better. You'll start to get the hang of stealth and combat and, more importantly, the story of Joel and Ellie will start grow on you. To be honest, caring about the main characters is the main drive of the whole game, because while stealth will get good, it never quite gets great and shooting on its own felt kinda crappy all the way till the end. The resulting mix of stealth and action does however feel very natural and not being for various AI cheats, The Last of Us would have passed for a great stealth game. But the AI cheats and that kinda undermines your efforts to stay hidden. Enemies sometims just start walking towards you for no reason, or some script will send them your way, or reinforcements will come from who knows where, already aware of your position, etc. The hearing mechanics that allows you to detect enemies behind obstacles if they are making noise does not work on those in "other areas" and it is not good when "nobody around" turns into "four guys right in front of you" just because you walked through some door or went up the stairs. AI cheating is probably the problem #1 I have with this game. There are various less important things there, actualy there is quite a lot of them TLoU certainly could use more polish on many fronts but I'd say that only the AI related stuff has serious impact on gamplay. (Ok, maybe some "levels" like hotel or campus could be shorter and the part in the snowstorm was boring pain in the ass.) Relationship between Joel and Elie is the meat of the story the events through the game are but a way to shape that relationship and the ending, while emotionaly strong, was quite predictable in its conclusion. At first I thought TLoU is a failed game that I Am Alive is a better choice with similiar atmosphere. But nah, the strengths of The Last of Us lie elsewhere. You have to endure some mediocore gameplay to get to the good stuff, but in the end it was worth it. It won't be a GOTY for me, but it is definitely up there.

Along with the first Starcraft and Tiberian Sun, Original War sits at the top of the RTS genre. Think real-time mission-based simplified Jagged Alliance where you build bases and vehicles. If you don't find this appealing, something is wrong with you. Anyways, english voice acting is probably terrible (the czech one is, but it's the laughable kind of terrible) aand that's probably it on the negative side of things. Story is interesting, characters are as well, lots of options, the 2D graphics still looks pretty good, missions have great variability, overal gameplay is unique, challenging and fun. Now do yourself a favor, move your ass to **** and buy this dirt cheap, if you haven't already.

Resonance of Fate is rather unique take on jRPGs. Combat has really complex mechanisms that aren't very intuitive and pushes you to learn them on your own and finding ways to increase your damage output feels really rewarding. And although the combat may sometihmes seem a bit repetetive, you don't really have to grind if you take care of all the sidequests. Story is definitely there, but in the background of things and I have to admit I am not 100% sure about what was going on there. Most of the game is about little things in life of the main protaginist trio and it takes time to find out that they fit into the seemingly distant story, more so to find out how exactly so. The game works more with emotions, rather than with narrative. Resonance of Fate certainly isn't for everyone. But if you look for a jRPG that is different, go for it. Hopefully the combat system won't scare you off.

Not everything about Last Light is a step forward. With Artyom now being hardened ranger rather than some nobody from station at the edge of metro, the tunnels don't really feel as mysterious or dangerous as they used to. The atmosphere is still there when visiting the stations, but the impact it used to make in 2033 is somewhat gone. Since nothing else like 2033 came out since then, that isn't really much of a problem. What certainly is a problem and what I consider the greatest flaw of the game, is how easy the stealth approach is. In 2033 you cold try and go stealth from time to time, but since everyone knew exactly where you are the moment someone hardly glimpsed you, it worked rather as a way to take down a bunch of guys before the shooting started stealth wasn't really a safe option. In Last Light however the stealth is made super-easy to the level where I had about 3 open firefights with human enemies in a whole game. Enemies are near-blind in "darkness", take considerable amount of time to acknowledge your presence in light and are positioned in such way that you can take out almost all of of them without anyone noticing. It just isn't really much fun things should go bad more easier, it should be more challenging to make a silent kill, ways to distract the enemy should be available and necessity for silent removal. Firefights in 2033 were simply more enjoyable than stealth in Last Light. And you can't really go guns blazing when playing on Ranger Hardcore difficulty. Now, the fact that Ranger Hardcore difficulty is a paid DLC/pre-order bonus didn't bother me much, since 1) I did pre-order, 2) I am a clerk at the games retail store and all copies we have do have the DLC included, which is the case with most of the early "limited" copies of games. What baffles me though is that this technically paid-for DLC is broken. One of its features is the game being HUDless and certain actions don't have reliable feedback outside the HUD, most obviously secondary weapon selection process has to be done with almost no indication that anything is happening. Being able to visually check how much ammo/currency I have or what upgrades does my current gun sport would be helpful too. Last Light obviously looks great and runs pretty good even on less powerful cards. I have to say though that 2033 graphics felt a bit more... hm.. sharp. Crisp. Last Light sort if loses some detail. I have similiar problem with Crysis games from technical standpoint, the first one seems to look the best to me. Last Light is nontheless one of the best looking games out there and some of the sceneries are just breathtaking and storms on the surface are pure awesome. Hm.. what else is there to say... combat with mutants got a lot better, although their dead bodies still act like inflated with helium for some reason and slowly float to the ground so it's hard to tell if they are already dead and I don't really get how you can screw this up in a first place. There's a bunch of bossfights, two maps before the first one (I think) there are almost no resources scattered around the place so I ended up going against it with 30 seconds on gasmask and 30 bullets in the gun. Got to reaload older checkpoint and sprint through to save up on ammo and filters. I know I am rather critical there, I usually am pinpointing mistakes is just that easier, but bear in mind that in this decade there aren't many FPS games on comparable quality level since Metro 2033 (which I do consider a shlightly better game than Last Light if you didn't figure it out by now) only Far Cry 3, Crysis 2, Deus Ex 3 come to mind, as far as I am concerned.

World of Tanks is a great free2play title for several reasons: - Production values are great the graphics are very nice, gameplay is solid, quick reflexes are welcome bonus, yet far from necessity and you'd have to really **** at games in general not to get the hang of it during the first few matches. And you don't have to pay a dime for it. - You don't need to pay to win. Throwing money at the game will get you faster progress, less grinding. You won't get any significant advantages in combat. Only very few items that can be bought for gold (acquired for real money) cannot also be bought in some form for credits you make by playing the game. Only extra garage slots and premium tanks come to mind. - You are likely to throw some money at it anyway, simply because it feels like a full retail game experience that deserves to be paid for. (I may have spent around 150$ on the game over some 4 months, as far as I am concerned it was worth it. I don't really like grinding... or selling tanks I like, so, yeah a lot of garage slots were bought.) Eventualy though, somewhere around tier 7 vehicles (out of 10) your tanks will start to make less credits than the costs of repairs and ammo refills, so you will have to either grind credits with lower tiered tanks, or pay for premium account, which gives you +50% credits/xp. So far I have just one tier 7 tank (Porshe Tiger) and unless I do at least average damage in a match, I lose credits on it. Personally although I somewhat enjoy playing the Porshe Tiger, most of my favourite tanks are in fact tier 3 vehicles (most favourite being 38t). And you can get to tier 3 within a few hours. What pisses me the most about WoT (besides scouting) is... the ****.. expressing their discomfort with abilities of their teammates. Matchmaking if fairly random, so outside high tier battles most your team will be bad regardless of what you end up with, so stop whining about it. And then there are czechs and to some extent polish people spamming chat with their crap. (And I am czech, so I know.) That in particular however won't be a problem unless you are from europe. Well, World of Tanks is still pretty enjoyable in the long term even if you are not into online stuff, random battles means random maps/enemies/game modes and there is always a lot of strategies you may want to try out with current setup. Various medals are attained for exceptional perfromance and usually you feel well rewarded for your efforts. It can be annoying when you end up being the worst tank in the roster, or when someone one-shots you at the first clash, or when you can't hit a thing with the artillery, but in most cases the game is still fun, you just need to find yourself the tanks you enjoy playing. Oh and by the way I got to World of Tanks through Girls und Panzer anime. I'd reccomend to everyone getting a GuP music pack, personally I find it way more appropriate and more enjoyble than the original music. Fans may also consider using some of the voice packs (I used to use Hippo team, now I roll with the Turtle) or some other GuP related mods. Panzer vor!

New Vegas stands for something I did not think is possible to achieve these days. It is an RPG with living, breathing world, where consequences of your actions can leave marks at seemingly unconnected places, it is filled with deep characters one can remember. It is what the old Fallout games are, in the constraints of Fallout 3 system. And so while we still have to put up with the terrible pipboy inventory and sort of weird combat system, most of the game has the spirit of Fallout smeared all over it and I really just could not believe I play such complex, sprawling, content-filled RPG in 2010. Even with all the bugs (which I admit there are many and can be often annoying) and aging graphics I have absolutely no idea what kind of primitive **** could prefer Fallout 3 over this. Unless of course you're in for shooting with stats and hate when NPCs talk too much. In which case fck you.

I was never quite fond of Bethesda-made RPGs: Morrowind felt like an utter chore and despite several attempts I could never force myslef to whitstand the tedium of slo-mo hiking for more than few hours. Oblivion was kinda fun, but only stealthing through dungeons, really. rest of the game felt sterile, copy-pasted and NPC were (and still are in all their RPG games) a joke. So obviously I wasn't sure what to think, when I found out that Bethesda got their hand on Fallout series, which I loved and Fallout 2 is imo still one of the best RPGs of all time, second only to Planescape: Torment. Then the teaser trailer came out and I was thrilled, for the mood was just right. Then all the gameplay interviews with that Todd Howard came out and watching him launching teddy bears and mini nukes on orc-like supermutants, while stating how he and the team love original Fallout series sew the seeds of doubt. In the end, things ended up better than expected, as Fallout 3 got many things right and it was no doubt the best Bethesda RPG released at the time. On the other hand, it was also still the worst Fallout game, should I ommit the Brotherhood of Steel piece of crap that came out on PS2. Point is, that even with VATS, randomized loot, and new pipboy aside (which are both crippled alternatives to what FO1/2 had to offer), the core stuff was ****... not really there. NPC had little to no character (although at least one could have an actual dialog with them), quests were mostly flashy stuff with zero substance and had zero influence on wasteland beyond their respective locations. And the main story was just pathetic, as water shortage was never a thing outside the Vault 13 of FO1 and Modoc village of FO2. Wasteland has never seemed to care about how clean is their water supply and so I could never take the main quest too seriusly. Then Enclave came into picture with their own plans and I was like 'why did we even bother.' It sorta had the right atmosphere, but it just was meh, wrong in its design. And yet kiddos and critics love it, happily ignoring the existence and greatness of the first two games. I can understand the kids who were simply too young to play or appreciate the qualities of first two Fallout games, but from proffesional critics who often played games for longer time than I am even alive, I would expect their experience to reflect on FO3 and comparison to FO2 should have been made where possible. Hell or even with other, newer, great RPG games, because FO3 simply is not one of those. And instead they were drooling all over it like a bunch or **** kids. And mind you it is not like the greatness of the old Fallout games wasn't relevant anymore, New Vegas has proven that much. So here we are, drolling over this cripple of a Fallout game, ignoring great FO1/2 games for being too old and whining over bugs in New Vegas the one which brought much of that greatness back to present day. How can I take the co called proffesionals seriously, if they act like the '3' at the end got there by some silly accident?

Challenging puzzle game with mild dosage of humour, though I am not sure how that translates to english language. Anyway, if you are looking for something to tease your braincells with, look no more. Both Fish Fillets games are really hard, the second one howerever sports smoother controls a greater variety in its puzzles. If you get stuck, you can always go and try solve another room, or you can go back to one of the older ones, and complete it while also collecting up to three stars, which in turn will give you access to other rooms. Or at least I think it worked like that, it has been a few years for me. Anyways, one of the greatest and hardest puzzle games out there. If you like those, buy it.

The initial PC release had a tendency to crash, but that seems to be resolved by now. Besides that, Fez is about as good as you could expect: nice pixealart graphics, interesting and unique game mechanics and levels/puzzles that make it shine. And unless you plan on getting all the secrets, Fez is also rather short and easy, and I didn't really mind that, because... ...while the game is fine as it is, I did not feel like playing something memorable and there are acpects of the design that are simply bothersome. First there are those black hole things that block your movements. They are just annoying and in most cases reentering the level makes them dissapear. And this does not seem to be a bug. I am not really sure what is the point of having those obstacles, if I can just get rid of them and even if I don't, there does not seem to be any kind of reward for navigating around them. Then there is the matter of traveling across larger distances in the world. The world itself is a bunch of interconnected levels with a few (like 5) hubs that allow instant travel between them. Also at the end of some of the levels there are small teleports that will get you to closest hub. So, travel between the hubs is fast and easy, but getting to the actual puzzle further away from the hub requires you to jump again through all the levels on the way. Which is as annoying as it sounds, if not more. I really wish that I could just get instantly to any level I have already been to. Furthermore the retro 3-colored levels are pain to navigate and the world feels just incredibly empty. The village at the beginning is just filled with interesting NPCs, and there is a similiar one near the end of the game, but inbetween, all those locations feel just like puzzles with fancy props, devoid of any actual life. A bunch of reappearing NPCs throughout the world would help the immersion so much, but no luck thre either. So, yeah, Fez does what was expected of it and does it well, but there is not much more beyond that, which is kinda shame. And yeah, there seem to be loads of secrets that might ramp up the playtime and difficulty considerably, but the game wasn't really that fun for me to bother with those.

I have just started the Dark Arisen version, but since I have started the new game from scratch, it will take some time, before I'll be able to talk about its additions. So let me just go over some points of the original Dragon's Dogma, the best RPG game released in 2012, that I'd like to address. Reason why DD never quite hit the mainstream is, I think, how incredibly dull the first few hours of the game are. I was looking out for DD pretty much since first videos. My guts were telling me this is going to be Demons Souls big and they were ultimately right, but the first day or two I was playing DD, it felt like money flushed down the toilet. The game starts with short linear piece in shoes of another Arisen, who is predecessor to our own hero. Point of this piece is to get player familiar with compat controls, but they are simply too complex for that and ultimately your pawns will do most of the job on their own. Still you are likely to get the hang of it to some extent to enjoy the fight with the chimera at the end. The creation of our own hero follows and with all the options it is easy to kill an hour or two just with that. Then after a short fight and class selection you are thrown into the game in the small fisherman village of Cassardis (or something like that), which is about as dull as villages can get. Afternoon sun burns into everyones backs and who would really do anything in such weather. Short run around the beach will reveal another of DD's bigger flaws, which is overall level of detail of things, which is rather pathetic for 2012 game and the way props apper out of nowhere just a few meters in front of you is just sad. Thankfuly DD often manages to look strikingly beautiful anyways, mainly thanks to the suberb lightning. All in all before you get to create your own pawn, several hours are gone and hardly anything happens by that time. And it takes about a dozen hours before you get to capital city, get familiar with vocation changing, weapon enhancing, etc. and start taking on quests that will lead you to yet unknown parts of the land, which is where DD is in its best. So, yeah, the start could have been better. Exploration in Dragon's Dogma is a great thing you have to go places by foot and you can never be quite sure what kind of monsters you will encounter in those unknown lands. DD is not as hard as Souls series, but your survival in those encounters is nowhere near granted. Now if you are on your way to the fartherst regions of the map, you'll almost certainly not make it in before the night falls. And unlike in Skyrim, nights in DD are DARK. You won't see a thing unless you shine on it with something and lanterns give you just a few meters visibility. Nights are super dangerous with extra/tougher monsters being spawned and you just don't want to be out at night. I remember when I met my first Wywern it was in the middle of the night and boy were we screwed. There are actually small camps in the farther regions where you can get before sunset and spend the night in safety, but you have to find them first. Fighting. Enemy lock would be kinda handy, but you can do well without it. Each class/vocation has its set of skills and you can change those classes at will in the capital city. Passive skills transfer between classes so it is good idea to try them all to make your unique build. Fighting skills are well varied and while the number of skills you can select for use in combat is fairly limited (3 for most weapon types), there are some powerful combinations to be found for many different playstyles. Skyrim has absolutely nothing on DD in terms of combat and its dragons look like a big joke next to drakes, wyrms, wyverns of DD. And you can climb the bigger **** and those who can fly will often get aloft with you on their back a will try to get you fall. Combat is simply fun and downright epic when it comes to bigger enemies. Crafting is an area of the game I am not quite happy with. All the equipment and enhancing are great, but there are literally tons of garbage lying just about everywhere and if you won't pick it up, your pawns likely will. It as annoying as it is useless since most of the stuff you can create you will never use. This area definitely needs a lot of cuts and streamlining. And that's about it. Capcom should streamline the whole crafting side of things, level-up the graphics detail and get pawns more variety in dialogues (see Zero Punctuation). Music is great, so is combat and overal atmosphere. You just have to be patient with the begining, those who hurry into action will spend too much time getting to it to be happy with the game. Dogma has a bunch of aforementioned loose ends, so it does not work as well as a whole as Dark Souls do, but if they take care of that with Deep Down (I am already pretty sure they didn't with Dark Arisen), the result is going to be pretty damn awesome.

If you liked the first one, you will LOVE Zeno Clash 2. It has more of the good stuff and the less good stuff (combat) has been considerably refined, although if you didn't care about all the art and story in the first one, you probably won't find much here to like either. This time the world is actually open, with day/night cycle and lots of things about the nature of Zenozoik and its inhabitants are revealed, so if you're fan, this is going to be just as great adventure as the first one and I really wonder where ACE could go with the third one, because this level of epicness may not be sustainable, given the circumstances. Combat is no longer frustrating, but I woldn't call it great either. There are collectbles with rewards, stats to upgrade, some (very simple) puzzles to solve and more. I did encounter a few bugs, but none of them were gamebreaking. ZC2 could still use some more polish, but does not really need it.

Antichamber constantly plays with your mind as it forces you to question what you think you know about the rules and think out of the box about the problems at hand. And as such Antichamber is another gem those who look for new interesting experiences in gaming should not miss. The solutions to the puzzles are often incredibly primitive, it really is the matter of noticing them in the first place. Only problem I had with the game is the fact that while some mechanisms are hardly/clearly shown at work before you are expected to utilise them (which can be frustrating, but is in line with the rest of the game I guess) there is one that wasn't shown at all afaik and I made my progress through it by accident. Then again, Even accidents can help you progress.

Beautiful bittersweet game with great story, characters, visuals, music, atmosphere. Definitely one of those titles making a strong point about games being art. The combat feels a bit clumsy (in a Resident Evil-ish way) and as the game nears its finale, it gets ridiculously stretched with lots of pointlessly long corridors, especially when combined with backtracking. This last quarter (time wise it's more like a third) of the game is by far its weakest part and sans a few strong moments feels more like a necessary evil on players way to the finale, which itself is fine, though not among the strongest parts of the game either. If you're like me and look for new and interesting experiences in games and, don't miss out on this one, its rough edges are definitely worth it. (Played on Dolphin emulator with x360 gamepad mapped LT for A, RT for B, Rstick for wiimotion.)

It does actually have some flaws there are obviously stealth elements that never made it into usable gameplay mechanics, tools lack description or at least comprehensible names and most of the weapons have no actual combat role to fulfil. Does any of this matter? No. Everything those before me wrote here is true and you are likely to lose tens of hours in that world, if you choose to try it. Mass Effect could easily learn from it and there are loads of unique working mechanisms and the visor effects like terrain scanning and object/energy source detection are just badass sci-fi stuff. Also if you have ever longed for a quality StarGate game, try this as it is obviously heavily influenced by the original movie. There is also a fan sequel in the making called Open Outcast. Being a part of the dev team for a few months I have to admit I don't keep my expectations high, but the artists on team are awesome and it sure looks pretty nice, so check it out.

As many others PlayStation positive I have expected the new TR to be a meh Uncharted clone. As it turns out this new Lara has a few tricks of her own and I can say I had more furn with the new Tomb Raider than I had with the Uncharted 3. It is basically the same shooting/climbing formula, but with a few twists: What I admire about the new TR the most is how it often isn't really linear at all. At several places you get this rather big area filled with collectibles to find, even the linear sections have their small share of detours and dead ends with some kind of reward to be found there. Lara occasionaly returns into some of those big locations with new gear that opens previously sealed paths, Zelda-style. Combat is where older Uncharted games come off better, but that does not mean firefights in TR are bad. Just a bit less polished. You won't really be able to stealth/bow your way through the enemy, but to some extent this is always a possibility and even in open firefight the bow is still quite handy against a smaller group of enemies. From all the bow-enhanced games that came out lately, TR seems to handle it the best. Graphics are pretty great, too bad that after all those patches and driver updates I still can't afford to run the tessaltion unless I'd fancy me some glitches and crashes now and then. It is really a shame for this is probably the first time I found it worth having tesselation turned on. On the bad side of things, characters aren't likeable at all, story might as well be nonexistent and the way devs torture Lara throughout the game is just plain sick. Regarding the "****" scene how the can anyone see a **** attempt in that, unless they have a fetish for strangling or suffocation?! Leveling-up is a nice addition, same goes for weapon upgrading, though I'd wish for a bit more realistic approach to this. Puzzles are simple and short and I am perfectly fine with that. Overall great easy fun game hindered by lame characters and dull story.

There are those fancy "art" games, like Journey, or Knytt Stories. Then there are games that pretend to be "art," like The Path, or Proteus. These two games are somewhat similar in concept but no matter how much I despise The Path for pretending to be fancy art with deep meaning, it is still ways better than Proteus. At first sight Proteus seems to sport a nice retro pixelized look, but that is soon disrupted by all the low-polygonal stuff that just does not work with all the big pixelized sprites, most notably the terrain itself. Then there are the points of interest on the island only thing one can do is to check them out. There aren't many of those and (unlike those in The Path) none are really interesting in the first place. So you check the places out, then the night comes, circle of light appears, game shifts into next season. Things change color, and that's about it. You can go check out the places again, but there is no point really. Then again you won't have anything better to do in this "game" so you might as well do so. Then the night comes, next season, and yeah, why even bother. Go get some food from the fridge, take a piss, while games shifts to the next season again. Proteus is ugly, not interesting at all. At a few rare occasions the music is kinda nice, but most of the time its headache-inducing cacophony of bleeps. Mostly it does not feel like a game at all, even next to Dear Esther it does not feel like a game. Damn there is a game called 4 minutes and 33 seconds of Uniqueness (made by the Crayon Physics guy I think) and all you have to do there is to run the game for said time as the only person on Earth and it still felt more like a game than this one does.

When I read all those positive reviews I kinda wonder whether I played the same game. Handling guns feels better than in first two Bioshck games, since they are powerful, accurate and (thank god) you can actually turn off the mouse acceleration in the settings. Combat overall is more streamlined (=simplified) experience, but feels right nontheless. Elizabeth is one of the greatest npc companions to be seen in fps game. On the other hand, overal graphical detail is a joke and although from artistical perspective can be sometimes beautiful, Columbia simply wasn't my thing. Main problem I have with the game (besides the absolutely ridiculous hype it somehow managed to create) is how the story fits into the game. It doesn't. Almost all of it (the important parts anyways) is stuffed to the last few chapters and how much sense it will make depends solely on how many hints you manage to find on your way there. That is simply not how storytelling is supposed to work, not to meniton the comlete lack of choice have in it. Were the gameplay and story in some sort of balance, resulting game would be about the third of its size at best. The storytelling is just terrible and it makes the story look way more complex than it really is and that's probably what generates all the hype. The story itself is pretty intereting and somewhat complex and would've made for a great movie, but the way it is told here is just sad and it hardly supports any actual gameplay.

For me this is the number one racing game among the high-speed ones. Wipeout has nothing on it and someone definitely should make a good HD remake of this. (And by someone I mean a professional game studio.)

With 98 opponent times I always felt like I was making progress and stages so long that 20 minutes per run were pretty common. Only once or twice did I finish the first rally of the championship, usually the car didn't pass the technical check somewhere halfway through. Loved it anyway. Today (feb2013) the once "photo-realistic" graphics may look like crap, but the atmosphere is still there, when you ride in the middle of the night, with the lights turned off, since their near-dead flickering only hindered you ability to see the white road in the darkness as more snow slowly falls around you. And then you loose the second gear. Enjoy the rest of the stage, your position slowly falling with every remaining time check. Man I wish current rally games with graphics like Dirt 3 had 99 positions to place at (so I am not almost always last...ahem) and well made stages one drives through for twenty minutes instead of two. Oh and no **** people talking about pointless crap all the time I can't even skip. Why do those Dirt games have to act like rally events are some kind of energy-drink parties for rich parent's kids?

So, this was supposed to explain some things regarding the Mass Effect 3 ending. As it turns out, you are better off pretending there is no Extended Cut. It is simply better to keep the holes in the story, than to fill them with crap.

Gravity Rush may look quite interesting and beautiful, but in the end it is shallow in pretty much every aspect. The world you move through is but a dead background, where people move aimlessly until you catch them in your gravity stream as you fly around, only to release them a bit further where they usually end up falling to their death in the bottomless emptiness beyond the city. And nobody seems to care. Story is kinda interesting, but you are never quite told who is who in this weird, almost surreal, world and in the end I just felt kinda pissed that I do not know anything about the city and its inhabitants, about the monsters that attack them, about the nature of the world itself. It just feels random as if there is no real background and the whole thing is just a bunch of ideas smashed together. Gameplay itself is fairly limited in options and the combat mechanics could use a good game designer, because the potential there is much, much greater than what the game ultimately has to offer. Now this is all rather negative and I'd like to stress out that Gravity Rush is not a bad game, but my expectations for it were considerably higher and the potential to fulfill them was rather obvious. Decent game, but shallow and therefore disappointing to sum it up.

The parts where you can actually control the character are in fact pretty crappy, 6/10 stuff at best. Combat is boring and utterly repetitive play the game on easy to reduce the amount of repeated moves and combos, there is not much point to play on higher difficulty anyway. The crappy combat does not actually matter, for its real purpose (besides making this classifiable as a game) is to help you to better connect with Asura and his wrath. And same actually goes for (effectively pointless) quick-time events throughout the cut-scenes. This game tells a story filled with emotions (well, mostly wrath, duh) and the story, the animations, the game's ability to make you feel those emotions is the real meat here. If you like anime over-the-top stuff like Gurren Lagann, Naruto (those non-emo pre-shippuuden parts anyway) or any other fighting anime about overcoming your own limitations, you will love Asura's Wrath for all the epic moments and fights it will throw at you. And unless this turns out to be lie, get the Nirvana DLC as well, it's at least as awesome as the basic game, gets you the real, definitive ending and I could swear the visuals get way better in it. (The DLC .5 episodes on the other hand are just pretty crappy ugly 2D animations with QTEs. The second one was okay, I guess, but the first one felt like utter waste of money.)

Graphics, dialogues (I'm playing with polish dubs), animations, the world - all of that is made of pure win, just as everyone says. So let me tell you what I did NOT like about the Witcher 2 so far (about 10hrs of gameplay). Combat system is a huge downer for me, because even though there seems to be a decent sytem underneath, the super-fast pacing of the combat does not really give me any time to properly learn and utilize it. I am dying a LOT because of that (medium diff.) and combat often feels like a semi-random button smashing. Interfaces, while slick in design, are lacking in functionality - ability to compare equipment you are about to buy with stuff you have equipped at the moment is nonexistent, better recipes/plans sorting would be handy, but is absent as well, junk is only visible in "all" section of the inventory and you cant sell it all with one click, etc... Oh, and the HW requirements.. I was just fine with my GTS250 1GB until now >_< but W2 looks appropriately good, so... never mind that :) Well, it will probably still manage to snatch best RPG of 2011 title, since Bioware does not even try these days (and their RPGs are basically just Kotor clones anyway), Skyrim will likely end up sterile and empty as any other TES game so far, Dark **** a bit different kind of beast, and who knows when Risen 2 is going to be released. I also have to say that so far, I liked the first Witcher more, mainly because it did not punish me for my slow reflexes all the time, just for my bad decisions. (Which is just fine and bioware (and western rpg makers in general) should learn to punish players for bad decisions, not just hand them everything on a silver platter.) Sure, Witcher 2 looks, sounds, is animated and voiced much better, but the first one is pretty decent in these areas too and nothing of that makes the core of RPG gameplay.