I haven’t been this excited about a game since… Kid Icarus Uprising? OK, not exactly a long time ago, but From Software seems to have taken Demon’s Souls and turned it into a Western-RPG slaughtering monster.
Promises include an open world without a decent map system (hoorah for exploration!), the same frighteningly accurate difficulty and a non-existent class-system forcing you to shape a character from scratch.
It’s also set to be released this year. In other words it’s GOTY. It just has to be.
Funny thing. When you are making toys you want to sell a lot of them. Makes sense right? So when you’ve got a set of toys, it’s a bit silly to cast them away next year to be replaced with new ones. Why, all that design work could be put to good use again.
And lo! You simply bring out the same toy in different colours; it’s a repaint. Or you change some minor parts of it slightly so it’s different enough to be a new toy; it’s a retool.
Demon’s Souls must’ve been one of the bigger surprises of 2009 for me. The positive exposure it got just about everywhere was intriguing, but even as I slid it into my PS3, I was expecting it to be somewhere between Monster Hunter Freedom Unite, Phantasy Star Universe and grinding a diamond to dust. What I got was basically Bushido Blade in RPG-form.
It’s weird. Some time ago it was announced that Ninja Gaiden Σ2 would contain less blood than its Xbox 360 original. I remember applauding that stance back then. I had played Ninja Gaiden II at that point in time and the amount of blood in there seemed unnecessary. Especially when I also recalled how stylish and elegant the original Ninja Gaiden for Xbox was in censored shape and how jarring the gore was in the sequel.
It was a bit of a no-brainer to me; it would take away the focus on juvenile gore and provide a more clean environment befitting of the graphical style of the game. But when I played the demo of Ninja Gaiden Σ2, I found myself reversing my stance. Weird…
It’s actually quite hard to pinpoint exactly what makes Batman: Arkham Asylum so good. That’s not to say that there’s nothing to point at, but rather that there is so much to point at. Instead of reinventing the wheel,it seems developer Rocksteady just copied the original plans for that wheel four times and created a muscle car with it.
Moody doesn't even begin to describe it.
Hidden within its play areas are: Metroid‘s hidden items guarded by skills to come, a brutal combat-system that seems to understand God of War, Shenmue‘s Quick Time Events used in ways that make sense and don’t frustrate, stealth sections from Splinter Cell that empower you rather than annoy, Zelda‘s ‘overworld’ linking everything together andBioshock‘s atmosphere told through a powerful art direction and scattered audio-files. There’s so much in there that you can trace back as a successful experiment from another game. And then this is all covered in a thick Batman-sauce.
