Wet - PS3 Review

Don’t go by the name,its not some 2 cent porn game. In fact this raucous bloodbath is fun, has intuitive and exciting acrobatic combat and a great soundtrack making it very entertaining!

In the first scene of Wet, you slide down a long table in slow motion, smashing through towers of champagne glasses and a giant cake as you gun down thugs who are trying to kill you. Then you leap off the table to fly over a dragon-shaped ice sculpture as you pump bullets into even more goons. After you whip out your sword to finish the last one off, you’ll have killed a dozen enemies in a bloody display of stylish, slow-motion savagery within a few short moments. Wet’s gleefully bloody combat is a combination of high-flying acrobatics and brutal gunplay that is consistently entertaining, despite some rough movement mechanics. And while the seedy plot and cuss-happy characters aren’t anything to write home about, the story is very well paced and propelled by a fiery soundtrack that perfectly suits the over-the-top action. Wet is a high-speed thrill ride that barrels over its own speed bumps and potholes at such a rollicking good pace that you can’t help but have a riotously good time.

You play Rubi Malone. When things go afoul on a job she’s hired to do, she wants payback, and she’s got the skills to get it.  Rubi’s substantial move set is introducded at a measured pace, giving you just enough time to get comfortable with each ability before you unlock a new one. You start out jumping and sliding, but you’ll work your way up to pole swinging, wall jumping, and a host of other acrobatic maneuvers. You’ll use your abilities to traverse a variety of gritty environments as your work your way through the underworld to get at the guys who wronged you. For the most part, navigating is straightforward and fairly easy, though the loose controls ensure that you’ll make your fair share of missteps. If you get stuck, you can hold a button to highlight areas that Rubi can grab onto or run to, which will generally get you on your way. However, some jumps are incongruously tough, and a few sections make your next step frustratingly unclear.

Rubi can run and gun fairly well, but it is much more entertaining and rewarding to gun while doing something besides running. If you start shooting while doing anything remotely acrobatic, time will slow down and the real fun begins. Rubi is a dual-wielding kind of gal, and when you enter the slow-motion shooting mode, one of the guns automatically targets a nearby enemy. You can then aim the other gun freely, which allows you to take down multiple enemies without breaking a sweat. This pairing of auto-targeting with free aiming is intuitive and uncomplicated, and Rubi’s flexibility allows you to cover a wide degree of firing angles. The shooting mechanics and slow-motion effect combine to imbue every enemy encounter with cinematic potential. To take out a cluster of enemies, for example, you could leap toward your enemies and use your pistols to stop the charging swordsmen. Then you can land in a slide, switch to your semiautomatic guns, and spin your torso around in a full circle, spraying hot death in every direction. The slow motion not only makes this massacre possible, but it also allows you to revel in your deliciously deadly abilities.

The only other places you’ll encounter awkwardness are in the cutscenes and character dialogue. The character models aren’t particularly sharp, and there’s a good amount of graphical clipping and lip-syncing clumsiness. The plot is a serviceably violent romp through the underworld and takes you to a variety of detailed locations that, while not exactly beautiful, have a number of nice flourishes. The voice acting is solid but not great, and some of Rubi’s quips wear out their welcome pretty quickly (”Say goodnight, Gracie!”). The whole game is overlaid with a grainy filter (which you can turn off) that echoes Wet’s grind house inspiration, but the best part of the presentation is the soundtrack, which boasts a robust number of grimy surf rock tracks. These chime in at timely intervals, punching up the action and psyching you up to do some more killing.

When you’re done with the story, you can replay each level to try to beat a target point score or take on the obstacle-course challenges, though the latter tends to expose some of the game’s weaker elements. Wet isn’t a particularly pretty game, and a lingering awkwardness can interrupt the acrobatic platforming from time to time. Fortunately, you’ll usually be too busy enjoying the action to notice. The combination of auto-target, free aim, and slow motion makes combat relentlessly entertaining, and the vigorous soundtrack and great pacing give the game a satisfying sense of momentum. Though there is a certain roughness to the action, Wet is still a raucously entertaining adventure.

Quick Facts:

Compnay: Bethesda Softworks and A2M

Genre: Action

Release: Sep 15, 2009

ESRB: Mature

Here’s the trailer for it:

Dead Space Extraction - Wii Exclusive

only gets worse for the USG Ishimura in the upcoming Wii-exclusive Dead Space Extraction from EA’s Visceral Games development studio. This platform-exclusive survival horror game functions as both a prequel and side story to the acclaimed Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 original.

Check out the Gamespot Exclusive video for this:

Batman: Arkham Asylum Review Xbox 360

After many many…yes…many years, we finally get a Batman game, that feels, like a Batman game. Arkham Asylym is one hell of a ride. Now, if you don’t read comics, it’s conceivable that you might be unfamiliar with Arkham Asylum. The iconic psychiatric hospital is essentially Gotham City’s Alcatraz, and it has housed just about every villain Batman has ever tangled with at one time or another.

With “Batman: Arkham Asylum,” players don’t just punch out relentless streams of henchman. RockSteady goes far beyond the stock beat-’em up and creates an experience that captures nearly every aspect of comics’ most complicated hero. Batman defeats squads of armed foes using stealth and smarts. He tracks down hostages by investigating crime scenes and spotting clues that will lead him to his objective. He even outsmarts murderers like Killer Croc and Harley Quinn (as always)

This dedication to the character, along with sizable contributions from the team behind “Batman: The Animated Series,” makes “Arkham Asylum” so special. Even more so, because Joker with the Voice of Mark Hamil and Kevin Conroy doing Batman’s voice was the icing on the cake for me.

Structurally, the game is set up like “Metroid Prime.” At first the Cape Crusader only has access to parts of the island. He can pull grates open and sneak through areas undetected. He can use his grappling hook gun to swing across gargoyles so that he can stalk armed criminals patrolling the grounds. He can knock them out temporarily with his batarang.

During the adventure, he’ll face huge boss fights and hordes of thugs. Winning these battles unlocks new equipment that opens up new routes and doors for Batman.

This is standard stuff for the genre, but “Arkham Asylum” melds this structure so well to the plot that you don’t even notice. The game just flows at an exquisite pace.

It makes sense for Batman to head to the Batmobile upon reaching the island surface. Getting the codes from the warden helps the Dark Knight unlock electric barriers that have blocked off areas of the game.

Another well-crafted element is the upgrade system. The game’s difficulty changes depending on how players improve Batman’s equipment. Often, the difference between breezing through a puzzle and struggling through it is picking the right upgrade at the right time. The feature provides a nonlinear element that also helps with the Riddler’s puzzles and trophies hidden through the world.

If you’re a fan of Batman comic books, you should feel very at home in Arkham Asylum. There are plenty of nods and winks to inmates who don’t actually appear in the game, and even some of the minor characters have neat backstories that are faithful to their previous, infrequent appearances in comics. You shouldn’t feel intimidated if you’re not that familiar with Batman, though, because the game does a great job of giving you all of the information you need, as well as plenty that you don’t. For example, taking the time to read prominent character Harley Quinn’s bio and listen to her patient interviews offers valuable insight into her motivations that might add to your enjoyment of the game, while unlockable information on such characters as Prometheus, Calendar Man, and Humpty Dumpty just adds a little flavor.

More significant unlockable content comes in the form of eight challenge maps, which come in regular and extreme difficulties for a total of 16. (24 on PS3 if you include the platform-exclusive free DLC option to play some of them as Joker, whose abilities are quite different to Batman’s). The maps are based on areas that you visit in the Story mode, and the challenges are split 50/50 between purely combat-oriented sequences and stealth-based “Predator” gameplay. In the former, you’re pitted against four increasingly tough waves of enemies and score points for performing combos, avoiding taking damage, executing ring outs, and using a variety of different moves. In the latter, you’re dropped into a level where every enemy has a gun and your goal is to take them all down as quickly as possible. The twist is that to earn a respectable position on the leaderboard in the Challenge mode, you also have to earn medals, and in order to do that, you have to deal with some of your enemies in very specific ways. During a stealth challenge, for example, earning the maximum possible three medals might require you to perform a silent takedown from behind and an inverted takedown, as well as pull an enemy down from a walkway while hanging from a ledge.

Regardless of whether you’re getting sucked into the Story mode or competing for high scores in the Challenge mode, Batman: Arkham Asylum does an outstanding job of letting you be Batman. Everything about this game–the impressive visuals, stirring soundtrack, superb voice acting, fiendish puzzles, hard-hitting combat–feels like it has been lovingly crafted by a development team that’s both knowledgeable and passionate about the source material. Miss out on this one and the joke’s on you Bat Boy!

Check out the image gallery below:

G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra Review - xbox 360

The 1980’s animated series G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero famously featured a series of good-natured public service announcements. These PSAs taught youngsters safety lessons, like not to play with electrical wires and to be careful with campfires. They did not, however, tell you not to play G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, so if you need an official warning, let this be it: Don’t do it! Even in the realm of licensed tie-ins, this monotonous third-person action game is particularly poor, managing not only to screw up the mechanics it rips off from other games, but also failing to get even the basics right. An awful camera, atrocious vehicle sequences, and dreadful storytelling are just a few of the inhumanities you’ll face on this mission to spoil the latest scheme from the terrorist group Cobra. Local co-op play eases the tedium and frustrations, but even the closest of friends can’t rescue you from this snake’s venomous fangs. So now you know–and knowing is half the battle.

G.I. Joe borrows liberally from Contra and Gears of War. You and another Joe (controlled either by another player or the AI) run through a series of 3D environments, blasting everything in sight to earn points and occasionally taking cover and popping out to fire at the more resilient nasties. Bringing enemies down consists mostly of holding down a trigger to shoot and hitting a button to tumble or hide behind conspicuously placed barriers. There should have been fun here. With more than a dozen different characters to unlock and play, G.I. Joe could have delivered action enthusiasts some fast-paced gunplay, or amused franchise fans with a fun and entertaining story. Instead, you get ugly cutscenes, bad dialogue, and deadpan voice acting that expresses all the excitement of a long yawn. And the gameplay itself is not only sloppy and boring, but it fails to get a number of essentials right.

G.I. Joe’s fixed camera is the first example of a simple ingredient gone sour. You get absolutely no camera control. As you traverse the environments, approach downward slopes, and turn corners, the camera will swoop around to give you what is apparently intended to be a proper view of the proceedings. But it leads to disaster. You’ll be shot at from offscreen enemies, or have to run toward the camera, unable to see where you are going. When the camera view suddenly flips while you are moving, the controls often won’t adjust properly, so your Joe may go running off in some direction other than the one you intended. Plenty of games with fixed or semifixed cameras (think Devil May Cry) have managed these camera shifts properly; there’s no excuse for the issues here. Things become even more disastrous when you jump into any of the game’s slippery vehicles. You always push the stick forward to move the vehicle forward, but your view of the action may be from the side, from slightly above, or even from in front. And the camera will move about as you drive, forcing you to constantly rethink which direction you need to push the stick in to make the tank move in the direction you want it to go.

Another standard component done poorly: the targeting system. The Rise of Cobra selects a target for you automatically. You can switch targets using the right stick, but if you take cover and select any enemy other than the default target, the game will automatically switch your target back to the default if you don’t fire for a few seconds. Why? Who knows. The fact that you can fire at certain power-ups to reap their benefits only complicates matters. The game doesn’t distinguish among foes that can hurt you, buildings that cannot, and these score-enhancing cubes. Thus, you’ll be surrounded by Cobra grunts but firing at some offscreen power-up because the game can’t prioritize a dude with a gun over a harmless cube hovering in the air. When an enemy does fall, the targeting may not lock on to nearby foes because they are behind you–which happens often, given the rotten camera. If you play on the middle or upper difficulty level, you may die once or twice, almost always because of the awful camera or the awful targeting.

The bits stolen from–er, inspired by–Gears of War don’t fare much better because they don’t feel right in this context. For example, a single button sticks you behind cover, but it also makes you tumble. Given that the action is generally quick and the camera view is constantly changing, the one-button-does-all approach might cause you to take cover when you want to roll and roll when you want to take cover. Or you’ll take cover on the opposite side of an obstacle, thereby turning your back to the enemy and proving that cover systems like this only work when the player is always viewing his or her character from behind. These oddities make battles feel loose and messy, though the game still manages to scatter in a few moments of fun anyway. When you get room to move about and don’t need to worry about cover all that much, the simple action isn’t notable, but it’s decent in small doses. The action kicks up a notch for boss fights, but the rampant invisible walls and predictable mechanics knock it back down a few pegs.

In addition to a basic melee attack and a basic ranged attack, each character can perform a special attack or skill, and some of these are amusing to unleash. Unfortunately, some of these abilities are also imbalanced. Ripcord’s turret-laying ability, for example, will make mincemeat of standard enemies and minibosses. And speaking of imbalances, if you are playing with AI teammates, you’ll want to take Gung-Ho along. The friendly AI is invincible but does very little damage, no matter whom you take along. However, Gung-Ho’s missiles will knock enemies down, which is a lot more helpful than an AI-controlled Joe that just soaks up damage. Things pick up a bit when you replace the AI with another player. Your AI teammate doesn’t really take cover in competent ways or try to avoid fire, but it doesn’t matter because he can’t die anyway. At least with another player, you can coordinate attacks and try to steal power-ups from each other in hopes of getting the higher score. You’ll want to stick close together, though, because the camera may get hung up if you veer too far apart.

The most enjoyable moments Rise of the Cobra offers are those that involve the accelerator suit. Every so often, you can temporarily activate this parka of power, which makes you invincible and lets you move about with blazing speed and do lots of damage. More single-button double duty may cause you to activate the suit by accident (the same button opens doors and activates computer terminals). But assuming you mean to use the suit, you’ll probably get a bit of glee from the results, if not from the great power you wield, then from the tacky, awesome music that you trigger. That vigorous short theme is the one aspect of the game that gets the G.I Joe vibe right; it’s too bad that the rest of the sound design doesn’t follow suit. The soundtrack is fine; the sound effects, however, range from mediocre to outright terrible. The tinny din of the weapons is enough to make you reach for something spongy to shove in your ears, and other sound effects don’t sound right at all. For example, when you break open crates, the flying debris sounds more like the whirring of a computer in a bad 1960’s sci-fi movie than ricocheting rubbish.

G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra is full of things that make you go “hmm.” Why do midlevel checkpoints update your score but not save your game, forcing you to restart from the beginning if both characters die? If you’re going to steal from Gears of War, why steal the slow-walking, earpiece-cradling mission updates? The game isn’t all bad; there are a few moments of fun to be had with the simple combat system. But G.I. Joe doesn’t do much beyond the fundamentals, and sadly, it gets very few of them right.

Take complete control…with just 1 remote!

Once upon a time I thought it was very cool to have 5-6 remotes laying around the table. It probably showed that you had SO many cool devices!! We had remotes for VCRs, VCD players, DVD players, Hi-Fi decks, Gaming consoles and guess what? Before you knew it, you were sitting on your couch and fumbling around with what remote turns on what device!! If you had all of them the same brand, you were liable to be even more confused!! I can tell you the number of times my mom’s had a fit over pressing a button and some weird thing gets turned on. Well I’ve seen a lot of all in one remotes, but they don’t get the job done very well - they’ve been aound for over a decade now…but now comes along a revolutionaly product which will solve all that!

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