There are very few people who thought this game would ever be released, and apparently there are plenty of people who never wanted this game to be released ever. Generally, the reviews posted about Duke Nukem Forever have been extremely negative, however I find it a little strange that some of the reviews I’ve read are talking about Duke Nukem being offensive in terms of his lack of political correctness rather than focusing on the flaws present within the gameplay itself.

With that in mind, I’m going to attempt to write-up my own views of the game as a fan of Duke Nukem and as someone who has being enjoying video games over a period of 20+ years. Did Gearbox Software do the right thing in bringing Duke Nukem Forever back from the brink of death? How does Duke Nukem Forever hold up against Duke Nukem 3D? Will we see more of Duke or was this a one-off event? Can I stop asking one question after another like an idiot?…

After playing the hell out of this game over the last couple of weeks, it’s about time that I got around to actually writing an entry about it…

I didn’t pay much attention to Borderlands when it was released and it ended up taking me a year or so to actually get it and play it. Though once I actually got my hands on it I couldn’t put it down for two weeks and ended up spending 170 hours on it… yeah I’ve done the math already, I realise I spent LITERALLY half of those two weeks playing Borderlands…

E3 2010 is on the way and we’ll be seeing lots of media regarding many new games on the way… which means it’s a good time to take a little look into the past at a game that very few people played but is very much appreciated by most of those who did.

“Look. I’m a cleaner. I can feel no remorse from seeing a dead body. To me, it’s merely cold, rotting flesh.”
— Garcian Smith

I have previously mentioned killer7 in my entry for No More Heroes so it seemed only natural to talk more about the game since NMH has gained Suda51 a lot more fans than he used to have. Of course, as I said in that previous entry, killer7 is a different kind of game than killer7 and although it contains Suda51′s unique styles, it is in many ways alien to No More Heroes…

“Shit! There’s more than 14. Those bastards are breeding…”
— Dan Smith

Recently the Xbox Live Arcade version of Perfect Dark was released and everyone except Perfect Dark fans who don’t own a 360 rejoiced. It’s taken me awhile to download it but I did a few days ago and have been playing through it and enjoying it just as much as I did back in the day when it was a Nintendo 64 game.

So how does this revamped HD version stand up to the original? It seems like a stupid question considering the fact that crisp visuals, solid frame-rates and online support are all a very big plus for the game… but as I have been playing through Perfect Dark, I have been noticing some small factors that seem oddly different… or just plain MISSING from the Nintendo 64 version.

This month has been pretty slow. I’ve been spending too much time in the real world away from the Internet with a job and all but also playing a lot of video games too. I guess I’m spending way too much time PLAYING video games, not enough time writing about them lol.

There’s nothing much going on under the sea, just a whole lot of salt water and a whole lot of sea life… and then there’s that underwater utopian society of Rapture, a haven for the working man to make his living, the artist to express himself and the Big Daddies to protect their Little Sisters. Too bad things went oh so terribly wrong…

Unless you’ve decided to poke your eyes out and become a deaf-mute, you would have heard about a certain highly controversial scene from Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 that has hit a bit of a tender spot among various people.

I’ll try to get through this without giving too much away in terms of spoilers for all those concerned… and there will be warning where I have given some it away…

Following paragraph contains some minor spoilers.

The scene in question where you, the player, take part in massacring innocent civilians in a terrorist act during the game was apparently leaked to the public not long ago. Before too long, the game and developer, Infinity Ward, was being accused of promoting terrorism. It has even made a few gamers question whether they really want to play through this themselves.

// End of spoilers… for now.

Obviously it’s going to make people feel uneasy (or worse) about taking part in such a horrifying act, even if it is just pixels on a screen and no one real is getting hurt. You aren’t meant to feel good about it no matter where you stand on the issue… and that really is the point of why that scene is in the game.

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.

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.

All of the Game Spotlights have been focused on highly recommended games, until now. Now it’s time to talk about a game that no one should play… or possibly play just to experience how bad it actually is. Ubisoft made a lot of promises with this game, however the only thing anyone got out of it was a guide on what NOT to do with Wii development.

There seem to be many factors as to why Red Steel was made of so much fail. The use of the Unreal 2 engine, the obviously rushed development process despite much support from Nintendo… but mostly it was just the fact that Ubisoft wanted to make this game for as cheap as possible to try to prove that you can make cheap games on Wii that are still quality works. From Ubisoft’s point of view, this is a great thing. After all, Ubisoft did convince quite a lot of people to buy Red Steel, including myself. From the beginning of the game’s development, they were continually assuring people that they were the ones to lead the third party charge on Wii. Ultimately Ubisoft has become a source of “shovelware” for the system.