By UnSub

2008 was a year of death for the MMO genre. As economic conditions changed, a number of titles died or were cancelled. It was a tipping point - launching a MMO wasn't enough for it to be successful any more; instead you needed a strong basic offer and continued improvement to keep players subscribing and interested.

By comparison, 2009 was a year of pain. There were fewer dead MMOs (although some that died were still very notable) but that was because of the number that went out in 2008. Instead, 2009 was a year of layoffs, mergers and lawsuits.

2009 is too depressing for commentary. So, here we go:

An odd game this.  In order to accurately mimic its source material, the developers have put together some pretty unwieldy controls here, since much like the characters in the movie, the game is designed so that you spend as much time accidentally destroying your surroundings as you do actually hitting your target.  If this weren't a game based on the Ghostbusters, I'd likely be panning the spastic fishing game style controls of trying to wrangle a ghost into a trap, but instead the game stands as a fine tribute to the movie, even if it's not a particularly good game.  Honestly, I'm not sure how you could do the controls better and still stay true to the license, so I've been inclined to give them a pass.

I have a few other nitpicks as well.  To start with, while you can't exactly play a game based on a movie from the 80's and complain that it relies to heavily on nostalgia, I do wish they did a little less rehashing of the movie.

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(sent in by Azazel)

This review would have been more relevant a year ago theatre Presents:
Far Cry 2.

OK, where do I start?

We'll start with characters and story, I guess. Please meet Far Cry 2, no relation really to Far Cry 1 except in name and the most general sense. It doesn't follow up on the first one, it's by a different developer, the characters are all different, and... well, yeah. For the record, I loved Far Cry 1, despite it's veering off into Island of Dr Moreau territory later in the game. I liked the open gameplay, the lush green setting, and being able to snipe people in the head from a kilometer away on the top of a mountain.

I knew I would buy this game the first time I heard some press on it back during the last E3.  The premise of being able to write out the word for a particular object and have it appear in your game world as an aid to solve puzzles is the kind of thing that immediately captures my imagination.  So, does it live up to the hype?

Yes...but maybe not entirely.  There is no doubt that this is a clever, and in at least one regard ambitious, little game.  It works pretty much as advertised.  You are presented with a scenario where you do in fact have to think up of objects you want to bring into your world to help solve the puzzle or complete the action (there are two different modes that are Puzzle and Action, but they aren't so different as to be worth splitting hairs over).  For example, in an early level I am presented with a scenario where a boy is sleeping upstairs in a house.  A girl is downstairs.  My goal is to wake the boy, and feed the girl.

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Finally, the Hello Kitty Online Beta. I've been waiting five years for this, so I may as well play it on day fucking one. It will go down as the second shortest amount of time that I have spent in an MMOG, 1st place prize still held by Vanguard. I lasted about 6 minutes in the latter and I lasted about 12 minutes in the former. Mostly because I got lost while I was fresh off the boat. Yea, you start as a FOB, so what? I had the plan of making an 8 year old little girl and entrapping predators with my doe eyes and a child's vocabulary. It was all going fine until my first quest, but let's not get ahead of ourselves.

Sabrina is (or was) a blue eyed, blue haired member of the Hello Kitty Aryan Army. Don't question it, aryans have blue hair in animu world. Ask your weaboo friend you won't take out in public if you don't believe me. ANYWAY, I start making small talk in chat.

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That's right. The book of the thread of what may be the most incredible playthrough ever of Baldur's Gate has been released. After five editing passes, I'm 100% sure there are still grammatical and spelling errors. That's just how things go when you're so indie you can't afford a UPC code. Anyway, buy the damn thing! Available NOW on Blurb.

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Dissidia: Final Fantasy is an action RPG on a portable system that's jam-packed with the kind of features you would expect in a Final Fantasy game on a non-portable system.

The heart of the game is a fighting game set in expansive, full 3D environments. The combat system itself is more in depth than your typical button masher and is somewhat overwhelming at first. The game also lets you take full advantage of the 3D environments by, among other things, running up walls, sliding around on rails, and fighting in the air a la the final battle between Cloud and Sephiroth in Advent Children (though you can't actually fly).

There is a story mode where you play the main characters from FF I - X on their quests to save the world from the ultimate evil, blah blah blah. There are also a number of other non-Story related Battle modes that let you fight against a CPU-opponent or another person in ad hoc mode.

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So having gotten tired of playing the same handful of tracks in Rock Band Unplugged I decided to give DJ Max Fever a try. The game is pretty much what you would expect from a "falling bricks" rhythm game with a few notable differences from something like Rock Band or Guitar Hero:

1) You are actually playing the notes/sounds
2) The game is very forgiving when you don't hit notes exactly
3) The game can be freakishly hard with up to an 8 button mode (also has 4, 5, and 6 button modes) and multiple speed settings

For 1) when you press a button you hear a note/sound at that time even if the note hasn't gotten close to the bar at the bottom yet. In GH and RB you would hear a "missed note" sound instead. In DJ Max it feels more like you are playing the music, since, well you are.

With 2) it only counts as missed note (a "break" in DJ Max parlance) if the note falls off the bottom. If you hit it too soon or too late (but before it drops off the bottom) you just don't get as many points for that note.

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Basically Rock Band in a portable format except no plastic instruments or singing into a mic, you need to constantly switch between instruments (tracks) a la Harmonix's earliest rhythm games Frequency and Amplitude, and NO MULTIPLAYER.

The way the instrument switching works is you play a particular instrument and if you successfully complete a "phrase" that instrument will play on its own for a while so you then switch to another track, play that phrase, and repeat. There's an "Extras" mode where you can play just the instrument(s) you want but on the World Tour mode, which is just like the World Tour mode on the non-portable systems, instrument switching is mandatory.

I'm mediocre at best at rhythm games but I found the difficulty levels well-suited for my skills. Easy is almost snooze inducing. Hard is doable for most of the songs and Expert I fail a lot at.

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Let's get this out of the way first thing:  You should play this game.

Anyone unfamiliar with the comic book version of Batman (like myself) may think this game to be yet another lame movie licensed tie-in.  It isn't.  It doesn't resemble Dark Knight in any tangible way other than its high quality production values.  The basic gist of the game is this:  You've just captured the Joker, and it was a little too easy.  You escort him back to Arkham Asylum.  You sense something is afoot, so you escort him all the way into the facility just to make sure everything is kosher.  Problem is, that seems to have been his plan all along.  Long story short, Joker takes over the facility and you've got to find a way to dislodge him, saving various doctors and VIPs along the way.

The way you go about this is through some pretty standard gaming conventions, but Rocksteady has done a really great job with implementation.  The stealth parts are stealthier and just plain fun.

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Warning:  There will be minor spoilers as a fairly important game mechanic is added partway into the game.

Let me start off by saying that my experiences with the original campaign weren't entirely pleasant.  The plot took forever to get anywhere, I didn't like any of the party members, and the bugs, oh god the bugs!  It was a little over a year ago that I played through the OC, and even that long after release there was one spot where I had to go online and look up how to go into the command console and trigger an event that wasn't working (and thus wouldn't let me advance the story).  Maybe this has been fixed since then, maybe it hasn't.  God knows after installing MoB and Storm of Zehir, the game spent somewhere around an hour and a half downloading and installing patches, so maybe that part was fixed.  I mention this for two reasons though.

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This game is an Xzibit joke waiting to be made. Although I can't vouch for the Castlevania aspects, not playing one since 2, there sure is a lot of Metroid in it. There's a little Uncharted in it also, as the Nathan Drake resembling main character is voiced by the same guy that did Nate in Uncharted. He's enough Nate that I don't remember his actual name in game.

My 360 is now cabled and has been powered on in the first time since beating Fable 2 in late 2008.  I really struggled with the decision to let the power brick out of its wooden prison and let the 360 roar to life again.  However, the draw of a Metroidesque sidescrolling adventure, getting good word of mouth and available for cheap, was irresistible.  A demo was available, which allowed me to possibly not waste $15 if for some reason I'm the 5% that hates the universally loved game (see Braid).

Perhaps, the best praise for a demo can be that it leaves you wanting more.

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Having just come off of playing Uncharted, a game which I felt had a beautiful setting and good story but mediocre shooting, I now find myself playing a game with those strengths and weakness reversed.  The gunplay, while not much different than Gears 1, I'm finding to be head and shoulders above that of Uncharted.  In fact, the aiming and cover in this game might be a little too good (or perhaps it's just that the enemy AI hasn't been too great so far).  Halfway through Act 2 (on Normal difficulty), and I haven't died once.  The only times I've ever even come close were because I was being completely careless.  One good thing I'll say about Uncharted, the bad guys made an effort to flush you out of cover.  Here, not so much.

The other big issue I have with Gears 2 so far is that the levels drag on way too long.  Act 2 starts you off in an underground cave, which you'll get tired of looking at a couple chapters in.

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So I finally found a place that wasn't selling Uncharted for near full price (although I actually hear that it's going to the Greatest Hits line in a few days anyway.  I'd been looking forward to playing this game for quite a while now, but having gotten to Chapter 13 so far my feelings are a bit mixed.

Naughty Dog put a lot of effort into creating a really detailed setting.  The graphics and level design are amazing.  I don't generally care too much for story outside of Western RPG's, but what's here is well done for what iit is.  The problem is that Naughty Dog took all this and then used it to make a below average third person shooter, with the occasional climbing around bit.  Even for a console shooter, the controls are very imprecise here.

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