Game Spotlight: Assassin’s Creed + Assassin’s Creed II
Isn’t it great when a game is released that has a great imaginative and interesting story that is made even better with very well handled gameplay? When it happens, the game will either become very popular due to the right kind of exposure given to it, or it will end up becoming what some people like to call a “cult hit.”
Ubisoft knew that they had something special brewing with Assassin’s Creed, and anyone who has played the game will know first hand that they have set it up to be a trilogy or possibly a long running series. But not even Ubisoft themselves were prepared for the high sales that the first game saw. Their efforts had struck an extremely good nerve with gamers, and their surprise is very understandable too since the first game of a new IP never does anywhere near as well as Assassin’s Creed did.
Even better than that, Assassin’s Creed II blew everyone away, from reviewers to the gamers themselves. I know I was blown away by the improvements they made and… some other things…
Game Spotlight: Dead Space: Extraction
I do admit that I’ve been posting up a lot of Game Spotlight entries for Wii titles lately and I really should focus on some more 360 and PS3 games, but I think I should get this game out of the way since I have already posted up an entry about the original Dead Space.
The first game in the series gave us sights and sounds that created quite the atmospheric dark and lonely experience. If you didn’t have a huge HDTV, a Dolby Digital capable surround sound system and a room where you could turn the lights out, draw the curtains and sit in the pitch black darkness with only the glow of the TV in front of you, then you weren’t experiencing the game the way it really is meant to be played.
On the other hand, Dead Space: Extraction is an entirely different beast to the original…
Game Spotlight: Metroid Prime Trilogy
I’ll admit right upfront that I don’t actually own Metroid Prime Trilogy for Wii yet (it comes out on October 15 down here, minus the awesome metal case… damn you Nintendo of Australia!!), plus I’ve already played the hell out of the three games individually for GameCube and Wii. But forget about that and imagine the eerie, whistley theme of Metroid Prime is now playing in your head… MANUALLY.
As a long time Metroid fan, my first impressions of Metroid Prime being a first person game weren’t very positive at all. How could anyone turn a game series like Metroid into something that is so alien to the series? It’s impossible, it will never work and these developers I’ve never heard of are way over their heads… All of us who had doubts are very glad that we were dead WRONG about Retro Studios and their excellent work on Metroid Prime, Metroid Prime 2: Echoes and Metroid Prime 3: Corruption. They had the balls and the support they needed to take a very old and loved series and showing us that it can be more than just a 2D action platformer.
Game Spotlight: Three Wii games you don’t care about
I was going to write three separate Game Spotlights for these games, but then I realised that it’d be a waste of time considering that people really don’t care about these games to begin with… of course, these games aren’t that great anyway.
The three games I’ll be talking about are The Conduit, Deadly Creatures and Disaster: Day of Crisis. All three games seemed to have had high expectations by Wii enthusiasts but ultimately received very low sales.
Game Spotlight: Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars
I don’t particularly go out of my way to buy Grand Theft Auto games, in fact, I’m not much of a fan despite playing through most of the series. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a good series, nothing wrong with a bit of GTA… it’s just that with the whole rehash list they’ve come out lately which is just “bigger and better” versions of GTAIII, it can get tiring.
When Chinatown Wars was announced for the Nintendo DS, my interest was peaked when I saw images of an oldskool style top-down GTA of old. I was excited but still sceptical… after all, most people don’t remember the first and second Grand Theft Auto. Gamers who experienced the third person variants see the first two games as well as Chinatown Wars as alien entities… not “true” GTA games.