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Swords, Sex and Sorcery – A Preview of The Witcher 2: Enhanced Edition

Released on the PC over a year ago, The Witcher 2 was an excellent Western, medieval fantasy RPG. However, the ‘Enhanced Edition’ port coming to the Xbox 360 this April aims to be something bigger, and earn the much more prestigious title of ‘the best console RPG ever’. This alone is quite a task, and combined with converting a PC-oriented game to be accessible with two joysticks and a handful of buttons, CD Projekt Red are certainly taking ambitious steps towards making their flagship title available to a much wider audience.

The phrase ‘wider audience’ tends to have negative connotations for plenty of hardcore gamers, and thus my main concern when sitting down to play a completed build of the game was, ‘has it been watered down?’ Thankfully, CD Projekt Red have done a stand-up job of making The Witcher 2 play as if it was an Xbox 360 game from the ground up.

Dance if you Want to: A Review of Break Blocks

What is a man to do with a broken heart? The wrenching strain of rejection, lost time, and unrequited passion is often too much for a man to simply grin and bear it. He gets crushed, slowly, inexorably, his head driven closer and closer to the very toes that try so hard to maintain his standing dignity. As the crown of his cranium reaches the floor, he submits, his arms limp. As they touch the floor, Netwonian mechanics take over: his feet rise, his head assumes its role as the new foundation, and gravity begins to sway him to and fro. He fights this new wrenching strain, this gravitational torque. Its force quickly matches and thus counteracts said emotional forces, providing relief, but soon it overcomes them. He finds himself locked in a battle of centrifugal forces, neck torsion injuries, and the awestruck hoots and hollers of bystanders. He has forgotten the pain of unrequited love, he has found the blissful release of a septuple headspin.

And then he thinks, this would make a kickass videogame.

Time Flies: A Review Of Sine Mora

We like to dwell on time. Time wasted, time remaining, where it goes and how much it’s worth to us. We elevate it to such a status that it becomes the very measure by which we live our lives – time is money, early to bed early to rise – these maxims have been drilled into us to the point of axiom. Our fascination with time is a morbid one, centered around our utter powerlessness and inability to control it or influence it in any way. We are completely and inexorably beholden to the ebb and flow of time, and we spend our lives intrinsically obsessing over it.

Sine Mora is a game that takes our hardwired obsession with time to an extreme degree. The world in which Sine Mora is set is extemporaneous, its denizens having mastered time so that past, present, and future have all become merely academic concepts. And yet the game’s story (which admittedly strains under the weight of some incredibly unnecessary lore) ultimately belies the carefree nature with which the characters manipulate the flow of time, driving home the fact that our attempts to master time are all reduced to the temporal equivalent of spitting into the wind.

Artificial Badass

Remember back when videogames were hard? I mean really hard – controller throwing hard? When hard-fought victories were short and merely punctuated punishing grinds through seemingly impossible levels? Well the days of punishing game difficulty are all but over. At some indeterminate point in time, games saw something of a paradigm shift that subtly ensured nobody would ever throw a controller again.

So what happened, exactly? It’s en vogue to say that videogames have gotten “easier,” but that’s over-simplifying. Games haven’t gotten easier, they’ve simply changed what their emphasis is so they no longer feel as challenging to play.

A Day With Namco Bandai: Ridge Racer Unbounded and Armored Core 5

Last Wednesday I was invited down to the Namco Bandai offices in London to test out some of their latest titles including; Naruto Shippuden Ultimate Ninja Storm Generations, Ridge Racer Unbounded, Saint Seyia Battle Sanctuary and Armored Core 5.

Read on after the break to see my hands on preview with Armored Core 5 and Ridge Racer Unbounded!

Lucrative Warfare: A Review of Syndicate

The year is 2069. The Dart 6 chip, invented in 2017, has dramatically reorganized the world’s infrastructure. Corporations succeed nations as organizing bodies; neural implant chips make handheld technology obsolete; the privileged class of humanity plugs in to the dataverse while the rest are left to the gutters. The world of Syndicate is grim indeed.

The reboot of classic strategy title from Bullfrog Studios arrives 19 years after the original with a fresh vision. Instead of a top-down, turn-based title, developer Starbreeze Studios have taken to ground and situated players within the body of Miles Kilo, agent of the world’s leading syndicate, EuroCorp. Syndicate tasks players with literally eliminating the competition amidst a tense powder keg of corporate espionage. While Syndicate fails to engross players in its promising but shallow universe, it delivers some of the strongest shooting mechanics in recent memory, a suite of powers and abilities to compliment the experience, and a rewarding cooperative campaign.

The Green Isles: A Retrospective of King’s Quest 6

I wake up alone on the shore of an island. My ship is wrecked. I have no idea where I am or where my crew went. I’ve been looking for Princess Cassima and the Land of the Green Isles for months. There’s an ominous-sounding guy who keeps narrating my every move. I’m only allowed to walk, touch, look, talk, or use an item from my seemingly bottomless bag. I look around, find my ring and a copper coin amongst the wreckage and place them in my bag. I can see a castle in the distance. I head towards it.

My name is Prince Alexander of Daventry.

One Sword to Rule Them All: A Review of Brand

 “Yo bro, go make this sword amazeballs.” With that one simple sentence, a young hero sets out on a dangerous journey. Okay, that isn’t exactly what the knight-commander tells you in the single opening frame, but you will probably wish it was just to break up Brand’s arduous journey. Get ready to die.

Circus Maximus: Why Assassin’s Creed is not a Stealth Game

The drums pound. The lights flash and set the smoke aglow. The crowd claps and cheers in anticipation. Everything bursts into life. Lions roar, performers soar, cannons fire, swinging higher. Knives are thrown and flames are blown until finally each performer converges on their mark. The fabled eagle cries. The target is killed. The audience applauds.

You are playing Assassin’s Creed.

Assassin’s Creed is murder made theatrical. Death comes not as a result of silent assassinations but circus executions; a choreographed routine by a brotherhood rigorously trained and skilled in their art. But this art is different from the discipline in which I am trained. This is not stealth. This is stealth entertainment.

Assuming Control: A (P)Review of Mass Effect 3

Editor’s Note: Here at Pixels or Death, we’re dreamers, always dreaming big. Sometimes, (ok, most of the time) these dreams are of the “fever” variety, descending upon us like a drunken epiphany while we’re mid rage-quit blackout (Call of Duty’s lesser-known gametype “Whiskey Headshot” is a hell of a game). But because we’re oozing almost as much journalistic integrity as we are vitriol and spittle, we feel like we should share even these depraved insights with you all; what awaits below is just such a dream.

You probably would have figured this out anyway, but needless to say, this isn’t a “real” review of Mass Effect 3. We didn’t play the game early, and are in no position to make any sort of legitimate commentary on its contents or story. So if you’ve clicked this link hoping for a hot scoop into what the “real” (whatever THAT means) Mass Effect 3 is like, sorry, I guess. But what we can offer you here is so much more. Nothing so base as mere “entertainment” (though we hope you derive plenty of that from this as well), but more importantly, we can offer you a glimpse into the mind of a dreamer. A look at what some of our favorite games COULD be. And hope. Hope that one day, an ambitious developer picks up on our lofty ideas and wild imaginings, and being the brave soul that he or she is, makes sure they never, ever see the light of day.

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Mass Effect was, in its time, an innovation.  With its rolling space-scapes, well defined characters and a story deeper than the Mariana Trench, it led western RPG gaming into battle from the back of a majestically armored steed – a steed whose legs had been violently surgically removed and replaced with moon-bouncing low rider hydraulics, but a magnificent beast none-the-less.  Mass Effect 2 shoved an upgradable assault rifle into our trembling hands after discharging a hot round into the creature’s demented, jittery brain.

Mass Effect 3 is the end-all-be-all of western RPGs, offering an experience so blindingly immersive that even Skyrim begins to resemble a cheap, next-gen adaptation of Super Mario World.  This is a universe that you will willingly lose yourself in and scorn the gods of heaven for their inability to create such an engrossing, believable experience when crafting the Earth and its so-called “real life”.