Highly recommended – Page 12

O tempora: Mafia: The City of Lost Heaven

04/09/2010 28/06/2019

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

15/07/2010 28/06/2019

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.

In love with: Split/Second

30/05/2010 18/01/2022

There was a short review of Modern Warfare 2 that went something like this: “So then you do the ratatatat, and it’s all BOOM, and fwooosh! And wow! And Holy crap!” If I remove the ratatat and return the swears, I could use the same text to review Split/Second. But I can’t be that laconic.

Read more“In love with: Split/Second”

Silent Hill: Shattered Memories. Shattered Dreams

02/02/2010 28/06/2019

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…