Splosion Man : An XBLA Must Have

Splode! Splode!! SPLODE!!! If you haven’t played the game Splosion Man yet, go to your Xbox 360 (assuming you have one), rush over to the XBL marketplace and download it right now! Splosion Man is a fun, frantic, and extremely challenging puzzle platformer from developer Twisted Pixel. In Splosion Man you play as Splosion Man. Pretty straight forward right? Wrong! This is a fast paced game where you have to be quick on your thumbs and guide your splosion man through high intensity levels with tons of platforms, barrels, and scientists that go boom!!! The game even has 4 player local co-op, so you and your buddies can splode off of each other and work together to get through the stages as fast as you can.

Splosion Man is a game that I think anybody from any degree of gaming experience can play. There is only one action in the entire game, and that is to SPLODE. Splosion Man is also a very funny game as well. The people at Twisted Pixel have a great sense of humor and I look forward to the sequel to Splosion Man….Ms. Splosion Man. So stop reading this and go download the demo and SPLODE till you can’t SPLODE no mo’!!!!

ZOMG!!!!!

STOP THE PRESSES!!!

BUNGIE signs a publishing deal with videogames giant ACTIVISION!!!

Whats this mean for Halo lovers? What crazy stories will unfold? DO you even give a shit???!!!

Hell if I know.

15 Minutes of Fun

Earlier this year, Xbox Live Arcade had a sale on Turtles in Time Re-Shelled. Being a huge Ninja Turtles fan (Please check out the comics!) I decided to jump on the opportunity and pick it up. 5 dollars, or 400 Microsoft points, later I lost interest. I didn't even play the game. Those of you who are following this blog may have noticed a trend in my gaming habits. Often times I buy games and let them sit there until I have nothing else to do and since comics come out every week, I always have something else to do. This weekend I had nothing to do, so I decided to go on and play Turtles in Time Re-Shelled. 10 minutes later, I was done. Ok, well maybe not 10 minutes but it must have been a few hours, very few hours. I had beaten the story mode the whole way through and was sitting in front of my tv wondering what to do next. Well of course! Write a review!

The game itself is not bad. It has a weak storyline, that's almost not there but the gameplay is good. I had fun playing it but like all older games, it suffers from certain pitfalls. I breezed through the first 6 levels and then the difficuly kicked up ridiculously. I did not die until level 6 where I died once. Then three times on seven and twice fighting the final boss. There are also certain points in the game where enemies tend to corner you and take a good amount of your life. Here's an example: One guy knocks me down, then another throws a shuriken and as I get up the first knocks me down again. Rinse and repeat. This gets frustrating at times but the game is an older game that has gotten a facelift. I remember older games having problems like these so I expected it.

I am going to assume that the fun lies in the multiplayer aspect of if. The problem however is that I was unable to find and online quick match. I do have a few friends who own the game and I will try it with them, but until then I have not been able to play the multiplayer. Overall this game is not bad. It isn't great, but for the price I paid it's well worth it. Playing online with friends and at home with family may provide additional hours of gameplay and hopefully add to the value of the game.

Let's Go To War!

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away...ok so maybe it's a long time in the future but humanity goes to war. We face an opponent that will decimate us and crush our hopes but thanks to one man, Spartan Sierra 117, we wil perservere and we will win...all in one convenient trilogy available for the Xbox (Halo 1 and Halo 2) and Xbox 360 (Halo 3). But for those of us who are geeks and wanna know more there is another part to the story. No, I don't mean Halo 3: ODST, which wasn't a bad game but was somewhat of a disappointment to many. I mean Halo Wars by Ensemble Studios.
Now I played part of this game when it came out and it received pretty good scores, if memory serves me right. But somewhere along the line I lost interest in it. Maybe it was the real time strategy instead of a shooter or maybe it was because Master Chief was nowhere in sight, but I dropped the game like my New Year's resolution to lose weight. Recently I decided to be more disciplined and decided to pick up those things I had left behind. Realizing that my New Year's resolution would be alot of work, I went back to Halo Wars, and wow was I surprised. I really enjoyed this game. The main story is a combination of different mission goals such as survive until reinforcements arrive or protect an item until you reach the end. But the best part of the game is the multiplayer/co-op. Doing missions with your friends changes the way the level is played. Different tactics are employed and you can even feel like a real General by assigning jobs to each player. The multiplayer offers many maps that you can battle your friends on and gain achievements through. As with most other games, there are things to collect. Like all Halo games you can collect skulls that will alter the way the game is played. Of course there are achievements doing so. one for your first time (aww how sweet) and one for collecting them all (Pokemon!). There are also Halo timeline events that are unlocked by retrieving black boxes during the missions and by playing a skirmish game on each skirmish map. Halo Wars also features dosnloadable content which adds a different dimension to gameplay with different modes of gameplay and different maps to play them on. As of today, two DLC packs have been released.

Finally, my favorite moment of this game is the cut scene before the final mission. This scene shows 3 Spartans taking on a small army of Elites and killing every single one of them. It also features Forge, the main character in the game, taking on the Arbiter successfully. Just watching this cutscene brought a smile to my face and made everything worth the gaming. I really enjoyed this game and would recommend it to everyone. You can find it at your local game shop for around $20 or you can even download it via Xbox Live's "Games On Demand" for $29.99. In this situation, do yourselves a favor and pick it at your local game shop. So until next time, that has been your game review for the moment!

RAIN CON 2010 (it was really Wondercon...shhh!)

(CLICK ON PICTURES FOR FULL VIEW)

Wonder con 2010. We came, we saw, we conquered....

Then this SHIT happened on the way home.

Worst...Game...Ever...

In our time here at Game Raptor we have gone back and looked at games that people may have looked over. We picked games that we thought were great and have recommended them to the people who read this blog. Today, I want to go down a different route. I want to talk about a game that I hope everybody stays as far away from as possible. Bullet Witch. This review will be short and sweet. This game is horrible. Its super short (tooke me about 4 hours on normal), has revolting dialogue, ("Take two of these and call me in the morning" from a soldier shooting some sort of monster), and finally, for us achievement hunters, beating it on normal only gets you about 300 GS. And to get the rest? You wil have to replay the game several times and put 15 hours into it, Something nobody will want to do. The aiming in this game is a problem. A very slight movement hardly adjusts the reticle. Move it a little bit more and the reticle jumps from spot to spot. There is one moment where I was surprised, a plot twist that I did not see coming. Also, there are a few visuals that are neat but neither of these two save the game. Please people, don't waste your time on this game. For this price (I paid 8 bucks for it) you can get Dark Sector, a far superior game which you might actually enjoy.

This is Why We Bring Up Old Shit!

So earlier in our blog history, my dear comrade fernandope asked "why you gotta bring up old shit?" He went on to review an old game that was well made and was glanced over by most people. Today I want to follow his lead and talk about an old game that received average/below average reviews but due to its content and origin, found a place in my heart. Like all those people who buy Dragonball Z fighting games despite how repetitive and horrible they are because they are fans of it, I enjoyed Wanted: Weapons of Fate.

Like most shooters, the game comes with three difficulty settings: "Pussy", "Assassin", "The Killer". There are a total of 9 acts with 3 tutorials at the beginning of the game and an achievement for each act under each difficulty setting. This may not seem super important but for you achievement hunters, myself included, this is a secondary motivation to play this super short game. Completing this 6 hour game on "The Killer" difficulty awards you 620 gamerscore points. This brings me to my next point about this comic book inspired-movie inspired game. Yeah, its a game based on a movie thats based on a damn fine comic book, or as those elitist jackasses would call it now that it's been collected, a "graphic novel".

This game is a super short game that moves quickly. The action is fast paced and there are very few game mechanics so that getting into the game starts quickly. There are only two weapons in the game. A pistol and a pair of submachine guns. so there is no fiddling around with weapons for the most part. There are two sections where you will use a mounted machine gun turret and two others where you will use a sniper rifle. These sections however, end quickly when done right and provide a much needed change of pace. The game also features the movie inspired "curving" of the bullet and the very "Matrixy" bullet time named the EQM. Again, the game is short but for the price of under $20 the game is well worth it.

There are also some reason to replay the game. There are also "Reward Items" spread throughout the levels which unlock things such as pictures, comic book covers and photos. The game also rewards the player with Headshot mode and Close Combat Mode once the game is completed. These modes require the player to eliminate a certain amount of enemies with headshots or close combat attacks accordingly. Finally the game has other unlockables which are obtained by using numeric codes found in the game and the movie. Personally, I skipped the work of looking for them and used the internet to find the codes. These codes unlock alternate suits and charaters which are usable to get more achievements.

So to tie things up, Wanted: Weapons of Fate is a decent game that was overlooked by many. It's nothing special but for under $20 this game is well worth it. If your ot in the market to buy it, then try a rental or get it used from Gamestop and return before seven days. Just go out there and try it.