Max Payne 3 has looked like a controversial game ever since the announcement. From the start, it had people who refused to believe in a game with Max without NYC and Remedy. It was clear that this franchise, that originally taught early 00s gamers the word “noir” (without explaining what it meant), was to become something else entirely. But change is never just bad or just good.
Tag: great soundtrack
Happy about: Kane & Lynch 1 & 2. Dead Dogs an’ all sorts
I finally got to playing Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days – a game that I wanted to play ever since it was announced. I’m a bit slow with this, perhaps, but at least I can do something I’ve planned from the start – make a double review. I played the original game when it was released, so with this one out, I wanted to make a kind of a comparison of games. Now, with both of them completed, I can talk about them without fear that I misremember anything. Are the games as bad as some say? Are they as good as fans say? Why is the camcorder in 2 never running out of battery? Okay, I’ll skip the last question, but will try to answer the first two.
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O tempora: Mafia: The City of Lost Heaven
O tempora is a series of retrospective posts where I play games from ages before to see if they stood the test of time.
Mafia: The City of Lost Heaven was really big back in the day. Well, in the PC gaming space. This incredible project was extremely well received, but a lot of people missed it partially due to the PC exclusivity for a long time (and later released console port wasn’t good) and partially due to the expectations set by GTA III released a year earlier. People expected an explosive sandbox, rather than a linear story driven experience in an open world. I remember loving the game back then, but years later, can it still be great?
O tempora: Parasite Eve 1 & 2
O tempora is a series of retrospective posts where I play games from ages before to see if they stood the test of time.
SquareSoft’s Parasite Eve had a weird fate, probably not something both developers nor its first fans expected. Both of the games in the series were popular, both sold well, both were critically acclaimed. Aya Brea is still considered to be one of the best female game protagonists. Yet, they tend to not appear in “important” lists of “important” gaming websites. Despite being so loved and well known, the games got somewhat forgotten. And I’m actually somewhat confused that Square Enix decided to announce another sequel for this or next year (though it is a spin-off) to arrive on PSP. But today, I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about two games that I love dearly that definitely stood the test of time.
O tempora: Crash Bandicoot & Spyro
O tempora is a series of retrospective posts where I play games from ages before to see if they stood the test of time.
For most people from post-soviet countries Playstation was the fifth generation of consoles. All of it. Sega Saturn was barely known, N64 not well known and it felt outdated due to the usage of cartridges instead of CDs, 3DO was known to only a few, no one ever heard about Jaguar and I still don’t know what an Amiga CD even is. That’s why, PS1 titles were so memorable. And most knew that a crazy mascot of PS1 was a bandicoot called Crash. But he wasn’t the only one competing for being the mascot. Apart from Gex, whom I still love due to Gex: Enter the Gecko (best 3D platformer, fight me), Spyro became extremely popular as well. And today, almost 15 years since the original Crash Bandicoot, I’ve finally decided to play these classics for the first time. So I didn’t even have to fight my nostalgic memories.
Silent Hill: Shattered Memories. Shattered Dreams
There are game series people tend to play just for gameplay, that remains mostly unchanged from game to game. People just expect “more of the same, but preferably better” from sequels and it works for a while. Until people get fed up with a lot of the “same” and while it tends to depend on a franchise, there is always an inevitable need to refresh the series. Some of these refreshin attempts are controversial but work out just fine (like Resident Evil 4), some are just failures.
Silent Hill as a series weren’t about gameplay. They were always more about the mood and the theme, more on the “experience” for the player. And this is where I need to say that I started losing interest in the series starting with 3. In it, a lot of the uncertainties and mysteries were laid bare and it had a lot of emphasis on gameplay, something that was always pretty clunky in the series, often intentionally so. So it didn’t come as a surprise to me when we eventually got to Homecoming, which was all about the mechanics and had barely any kind of mood to itself or good writing. This is where Shattered Memories come into play…
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