A couple of days ago I saw that the first Grand Theft Auto 4 review got a perfect 10 from the Official Xbox 360 Magazine. I can’t help but feel the urge to retch in an attempt to vomit the contents of my stomach onto my monitor to cover such a pathetic concept. Im sure there can be a billion reasons why, and hey it might have happened before. But I am pretty unimpressed by this kind of gesture. To get a perfect 10 the game can have nothing wrong. Nothing at all. The sound has to be perfect, not repetitive, controls, PERFECT, visuals, PERFECT, it has to be able to be entertaining until the end of time and have NO bugs. For a game to get this before it’s released to the public is just BS.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure the game is great. I’ve even bitten the bullet and decided to get it, but I am also positive it won’t hold my attention for too long, and I can’t see myself playing more than the bare minumum of the single player game. I am very interested to see how this will go once GTA4 is released to the public. Will the fans give it the same 10 score, or will there be brooding, cynical assholes like me SEARCHING for flaws in the game. I hope the latter, because I will be on here bitching about every single thing wrong with the game once in my possession.

Apart from making me angry, the review got me thinking, exactly how many games do you know that actually live up to the hype? Im not talking games that you hadn’t heard about, but were quite pleased with in the end, I mean games that got big publicity and were actually that damn good. Here is a quick list of 5 games I can say had justifiable hype put behind them(the list is just what I think, if you think of others, feel free to add):

• Super Mario Brothers 3 - Announced in the movie “The Wiz” starring Fred Savage. Having a movie as the official release was just incredible. The game wasn’t shown properly and if I remember the sound and level was screwy, and what happened didn’t make sense, but the damage was done. People everywhere flipped out, and rightly so. This game was just awesome. Especially after the lesser of the NES trilogy in SMB2, the 3rd game went back to real side scrolling roots and added some excellent ideas.
• Mortal Kombat - How could it not make this list? Sold as the most violent fighting game around, Mortal Kombat pretty much shaped all things to come. Heaps of games tried to outdo MK in violence and ‘death moves’ were popping up everywhere in games, but in the end, Mortal Kombat is still going, where Killer Instinct, Primal Rage and others fell. Although the later games are almost better forgotten, the first 3 games are always on high rotation on my systems.
• Street Fighter 2 - Another game that was just awesome in it’s time. The main competition in arcades was this or Mortal Kombat. Where MK was bloody and simple, SF2 offered a more complex fighting system. If you really understood the moves(and glitches) it was just an amazing game. To this day people perfect glitch fighting and even with the disadvantage of having an abomination of a live action movie with it, the next Street Fighter game is soon to be released and people are itching to get to it.
• God of War - I have only played this game through once and it was one of the most fun games I have ever played. I was promised blood, glory and women and I was not let down. Kratos had some very imaginitive moves, AWESOME finishing moves and boss battles, and puzzles that were difficult enough to slow you down, but not enough to make your heartbeat slow down. The added feature that it was based around Greek mythology was just the icing on the cake for this geek.
• World of Warcraft - There isnt really a lot to say about this. Warcraft was an awesome game. Warcraft 2 - Tides of Darkness, again, AWESOME game. Warcraft 3 I was a bit meh about(meh enough to complete all the campaigns though). I have a level 70 warrior, I have had an excessive amount of other characters and I still play very casually. The thing with this game, it was hyped to a ridiculous level and is still in gamespot’s top ten list after however many years. 5 million people can’t be wrong…. can they?

So there we have it. I know there has got to be more out there, but I’m tired.

I downloaded this the other day from the PSN from reviews by friends saying it was alright. To recommend a beat-em-up or a fighting game to me is pretty hard. I know what I like in fighting games and it has to be damn good for me to give it a thumbs up. Think God of War 1 & 2. I have flagged off games like God Hand(actually I didn’t mind it, I just didnt have time to get through it), Heavenly Sword, Assassin’s Creed and Devil May Cry 4(to some extent). So, yes, I am a hard man to please. Not to say there arent elements of the latter games that I didn’t like, it just wasn’t enough to make me think ‘damn that was awesome’.

The Condemned 2 demo he;d my attention for around 6 minutes. For a beat em up game, the controls were very clunky and not well thought out. Very few games use the R3(clicking joystick) at all, let alone use it for an action like a kick. Combine this with the fact that the same joystick is the one you use for viewing means that a failed kick can either not strike, or move your view, or move the view then strike at the empty spot. In fast paced combat this would be a huge problem till you developed the right sensitivity. Luckily, the gameplay is some of the slowest I have seen for this kind of game. Within the first area I fought 4 guys. 4…. And they weren’t even together. I appreciate that you are meant to feel the atmosphere of the game, but thats damn slow for a beat em up. The punches and combos don’t connect as you would expect and the entire feel is that of a FPS when you run out of ammo.

There are weapons and whatnot to increase the violence of the attacks, but I only managed to get a pipe in the beginning, and after swinging wildly and connecting(not on the person but they seemed to fall over anyway) I lost interest in looking for more. For a game where the character moves around at a walking pace, the enemies are pretty fast, and the darkness of the game makes some ground roaming critters quite hard to kill. Im sure there are more ways to kill things, better things to kill them with and in general heaps more to the game, but it is NOT a beat up em. It’s a first person shooter, where you only have melee weapons, you need stealth and tactics like say, Manhunt. For FPS fans this game would be quite awesome, if you are expecting a nice beat em up, maybe its best to look elsewhere. For me, there is a slim chance I will play this again, and an even slimmer chance I will change my mind. 2 Stars.

I downloaded the Devil May Cry 4 demo from the playstation store the other day, and I am damn impressed. The usual flaws with games like this is the inability to lock on. When the character uses a weapon like a spear or sword, trying to change enemies is a real issue, but you can actually lock onto an enemy to reveal their life remaining. It would have been nice to see this bar all the time, but hey, its not that important. You can charge your sword up to have a quick devastating flurry of attacks, and he can hang in the air almost forever shooting round after round into the baddies. You also have a demon arm, which you can use to grapply areas, throw the enemies, or grapple towards enemies. R1 seems like a power up, as in, you can hold it for more powerful attacks, which is really cool.

The game is unbelievably pretty and the videos I do could never do it justice. The ‘only’ thing that kind of annoys me is that you have to hold the powerup button to dodge. Not really an issue at all. The camera does well to follow your character around, but can get a bit behind in the action if things get really frantic and you start dodging and jumping around.

Anyway, on with the show:

This fight are against these pleasant chappies called Frosts. They aren’t particularly difficult to kill and don’t put up much of a fight. You can throw them into each other, cut them up and generally shoot the crap out of them easily enough.

This is the Berial fight. You face Berial just after the battle with 3 Frosts. I haven’t played Devil May Cry games before, but if Berial is the boss they will release in the demo it usually means he will be the first level boss. In saying that… oh em gee. This guy is a freakin titan. Imagine the Balrog from Lord of the Rings, if it had 4 legs and looked a tiny bit more insane. It took me quite a few goes to bring him down as his moves are just nuts, and having a huge, flaming, 6 limbed beast that has a gigantic flaming sword and somewhat aggressive attitude is very distracting. Like I said, the video cant to it justice so go and download the demo.

Okay, after a few weeks break, I have started making videos again. For the record, there are about 25 characters remaining from the original 60… or 61, I forget. Next requests have been Rain and Reiko, so unless someone says otherwise, I will choose 2 others. The ones just posted are:

• Noob
• Kung Lao
• Drahmin
• Reptile

I have also added in the Wii controls for the main page. I cant vouch for them cos I don’t have a Wii, but if someone could let me know, that would be great.

Enjoy!