Weekly Gaming Roundup (5/24 – 5/30) | Visionary Nexus Network

Weekly Gaming Roundup (5/24 – 5/30)

by Light on May.31, 2009, under Games

infamous damnation personal-walking-trainer

We have one of these for anime, so I figured why not one for games? Even if we’re currently in some of the worst months in the year for gaming, I suppose they still deserve their fair share in this blog. So, here goes. Please be warned that the following is a direct attempt at being as horribly sarcastic, snobby, and egotistical as Moonlily, and we apologize for all offensive material beforehand. Now, onto this week’s biggest games.

infamous_leadin inFAMOUS

The big title of the week, inFAMOUS is an open world game exclusive to the PS3 which puts you in the shoes of some random guy who wakes up and finds he now has electricity coursing through his veins, giving him the kinds of superpowers not seen since we all watched Static Shock(!!!) on Saturday mornings as children. Yes; lightning, leaping, climbing, a health bar, and the inability to climb fences highlight your grandest of powers as you try and solve the new problems plaguing your world.

The world around you apparently used to be picnics and frolicking, but now it’s turned into a crime-ridden, government-quarantined rathole thanks to a random huge explosion (Careless Monday managed to reach Empire City, apparently) which killed thousands of people and destroyed huge amounts of property, and yet is also responsible for you gaining superpowers, proving that most of the time, the world is totally unfair. The story is almost a standard comic book affair, with the exception of branching paths that you must take in making either a good choice or bad choice that will either make you a good guy or a bad guy in the end, though sometimes the choices aren’t always so black and white.

Classic combat moves like shooting lightning blasts are present, as well as unlockables like sticky grenades or shockwaves (grrrrrrrr) for you to blow away the enemies, which are lurking around every street corner, ensuring that you’re never bored walking around the city.

Varied missions, combat, and choices make this a worthwhile open world game in the end, deserving of its high status among professional game reviewers. Considering the lack of options for PS3-users, this should be a must-buy game, especially if Prototype doesn’t live up to its lofty standards in the coming weeks.

damnation_2 Damnation

If you play Damnation, what you will be getting is just that, DAMNATION. Damnation tries to rewrite U.S. History around Civil War time and just beyond and then puts its story into a game, turning a truly remarkable and exciting era into 2009 shovelware. Ugly visuals, poor controls, dumb AI, technical errors, and physics that give Issac Newton a slap in the face all highlight this forgettable game.

Damnation’s levels are excrutiatingly long, and made even more boring by the fact that your enemies rarely try to shoot you and more often than not stand around waiting for you to shoot them, and they can afford to do that because it takes about 20 shots to even put a dent in their health. No wonder steam-powered sniper rifles didn’t last long. Aiming with a shoulder button and reloading by clicking the left stick does nothing to ease the pain, and occasionally driving a motorcycle that looks like it was made from legos only makes it even more dull.

All in all, an avoidable game that you should only play if you’re looking for some very expensive laughs at the sheer folly executed within it.

Further highlighting the lack of quality games during this season while we await Prototype and BlazBlue is UP the video game, based on the upcoming Disney/Pixar flick, UP.

UP is exactly what it should be, a game based directly off its Disney counterpart with poor gameplay disguised by a colorful box, that children will nag their parents to buy them after watching the movie and falling in love with a child, old man, and a house somehow held up by helium balloons, dealing Issac Newton another slap in the face.

I won’t discuss the game too much, since it’s just your standard Disney movie game affair, with bland platforming and redundant minigames. Suffice to say that this game should be bought only to appease your whining children, though I’d just as soon strike them upside the head if they forced me to spend any of my own money on this dreck.

Personal Trainer: Walking

Because we all need training to know how to walk. Yes, Nintendo thinks all of us consumers have the intelligence of one-year old infants; and they have a case, considering how all of our money has made them rich as fuck while they’ve been making a console with previous generation specs and only a handful of decent games available for it.

This title, being sold for $50 (FIFTY DOLLARS HOLY SHIT NINTENDO THINKS WE’RE DUMB), is basically an overpriced electronic chart that tracks your walking habits, complete with two DS-compatible pedometers, that are admittedly much more advanced than the standard pedometers you see being sold seperately.

You sync up the pedometer to your game, and then walk around until you want to check how much you’ve walked so far. You then sync it up again and data will appear on the DS, giving you your totals and how they match up to their recommendations, and that’s really about it.

So, a game lacking in content with a gimmicky peripheral, being sold for a whopping $50, which you could use to buy New Super Mario Bros. and have enough left over for three meals at any fast food joint. Yes, this has to be a Nintendo game.

I knew Nintendo was trying to be insulting to its hardcore audience by releasing Animal Crossing: City Folk as its big hardcore title last year, but this walking game is just ridiculous. Not only is it overpriced and gimmicky, but it tries to contradict a true gamer’s philosophy by encouraging actual physical activity. The whole reason some of us play games is because we nearly failed PE in high school, and now this thing comes out to berate us when we can’t walk the distance it wants us to walk in a day. All for fifty bucks. Brilliant.

I will not be surprised to see this get sales from the casual audience who thinks this is compatible with Wii Fit or something. I will simply seethe in rage at what Nintendo has become.

That’s all for this week’s new games; stay tuned as we’ll have full E3 coverage this coming week, as well as next week’s edition of the weekly gaming roundup, plus much more.

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