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…

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…

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.

Back in 2007 I bought my first game that was either published by EA or developed by one of the many studios it has devoured. That game was The Godfather: Blackhand Edition for Wii and I liked what I played despite it being from EA… and as you can probably tell, I’m not much of a fan of the company… despite this, later in 2008 I finally got my second EA game, Dead Space.

The first words you’ll hear anyone utter when you ask them about Dead Space is most likely going to be, “It’s like Resident Evil 4″… and it is for the most part, though that’s definitely not a bad thing. In fact, as you play through this game you will realise that they made it to try to do everything that Resident Evil can’t or has stopped doing recently.

As you can probably tell, I chose to use this image because it contained great quantities of side-boob action from none other than Selvaria. I hope you appreciate the thought that went into selecting the image to use for this blog entry.

I wrote a review of Valkyria Chronicles quite some time back and while it is one hell of a great game, it’s unfortunate that not many people are buying it and discovering how great it is for themselves… well at least until recently when we started getting reports that Valkyria Chronicles got a sudden sales boost. A lot of why I think the game is getting a boost in sales is because of the newly released Valkyria Chronicles anime in Japan, however it may also have to do with the download content popping up on the PlayStation Network spurring people to find out exactly what this game is all about.

I’m about to have a huge epic co-op game of Resident Evil 5 with Jeff in about an hour so I thought this would be a good time to talk about my favourite Resident Evil game and how, even in its ported form on Wii, it still manages to impress after all these years.

Originally released on the GameCube in 2005 and ported to the PS2, PC, as well as to mobile phones (lol) and Wii. This game has been around, though for good reason. It’s a great game and Capcom obviously wants to milk as much from it as they can. Even with all of these different versions floating around, the undisputed definitive version is the Wii edition.

For the second Game Spotlight, I thought I’d try something different. Instead of putting the spotlight on a game that’s already been around for awhile, why not preview a game that hasn’t even been released yet? The game I’ve chosen is the Resident Evil 5 demo which was just released on Xbox Live a few days ago.

As has been much publicised, Resident Evil 5 is heavily focused on co-operative gameplay, so I thought, “Why not have a co-op article to go with it.” When the full version of RE5 is finally released on March 13, Jeff (aka Moelman) and I are going to be playing it together in online co-op mode all the way through to the very end.

But for now, Jeff and I are going to share our thoughts about our experience with the Resident Evil 5 demo…

Some games get all the attention while others are simply swept under the rug and forgotten. Most of the games swept under the rug really do belong there, but there are some that deserve to be among the others in the spotlight. I’d like to take some time to educate people about one these games because it truly deserves to be bought and enjoyed.

Many people who have played this game will tell you that if you own a Wii, you MUST own this game. I happen to be one of them, and also one of the few who actually seemed to have bought this game in the first place. What Capcom has achieved with Zack & Wiki is a well balanced point and click adventure by combining great gameplay, great visuals and a tonne of style and fun.