Soul Calibur: A Tale of Swords and Portability

First: Project Soul is working on yet another Soul Calibur game. Second: It's on PSP. Third: It's looking pretty damn good.

Yup, that's pretty much the gist of it. Another entry in the venerable Soul Calibur series, this time portable thanks to the PSP. So the next time you want to take a giant axe to the obnixous toolbox on the bus, you can! So long as he has a PSP...or you're ok with substantial prison time. If it's the latter please move away from your monitor and to the nearest psychiatric hospital.

Now, for all you non-sociopaths, this entry comes to us under the title of Soul Calibur: Broken Destiny. If you're looking for an entirely original entry into the series with all the requisite upgrades...well you're deluding yourself. This is more or less a portable version of SCIV sans Star Wars characters (Mitsurugi FTW!).

At least one thing you can be assured of already is that the title looks fantastic for a portable game. And yes, if anyone actually has to ask, Ivy still looks like a surgically enhanced, bondage-fetish slut. Thank God/How immature.

Free Fists of Plastic!

There's something of a deal going on at the Playstation Store right now, and that deal is Ragdoll Kung-Fu: Fists of Plastic.


I remember when this game was originally released for the PC via steam, but since then it has apparently made the move to consoles, remaining a downloadable title.
The game is free for one week on the Playstation Store, and since it is quite fun, I highly recommend adding it to your hard drive.
You get yourself a little plastic action figure/ragdoll, customize to personal preference, and then beat the crap out of similar characters. You aim your attacks with the left stick, punch with square, kick with triangle, jump with X, and block with circle. There are some SIXAXIS dependant special moves as well. At first these seem completely unnecessary (and probably are) but it's somehow fun to jerk your controller left and watch your character go flying left on the screen.
The single-player mode is really just a set of tutorials, and there's no online functionality, but if you have some live, tangible friends by your side, there is fun to be had. The lack of online play really hurts the game, but you CAN fill in slots with bots, and since the game is at it's best with all 4 player slots filled, you would be best served to make use of said bots. The multiplayer has standard modes like deathmatch, king of the hill, and capture the fish (flag) as well as the somewhat unique Dodgeball. Dodgeball still plays like a deathmatch but has a deathdealing dodgeball that will kill any player it hits in a single blow and is probably the most standout of multiplayer modes. There's a decidedly Super Smash Bros. feel to the game, with the fast-moving chaos of fighting and random weapons/powerups that fall from the sky, but Ragdoll Kung-Fu definitely does not live up to the same standard of quality as Smash Bros.
That said, the chaotic gameplay, jerky motion-sensitive special moves, and general sense of humor make this game a worthwhile download...while free. Once May 21st hits and the game goes back to its regular retail price of $10 however, you'd be better off spending your money elsewhere. And good luck getting the annoyingly catchy theme song that plays from the XMB out of your head. "Aaaaaahhhhh Ragdoll Kung-Fuuuuu..."

Apocalypse Later. Darksiders: Wrath of War

So ign has a pretty nice pre-E3 preview of THQ's Darksiders: Wrath of War up. The game seems to be shaping up pretty well, but I still find it annoying there has yet to be any mention of this game's original announcement back in 2003 as a PS2 game, but maybe that's because the only known details at the time were that you played as at least one of the Four Horesmen attempting to stop the coming apocalypse...I don't know.

The graphics, especially on some of the characters, still kind of bug me. In some shots they look just fine, yet in others look almost as if it's from the latest World of Warcraft expansion (easy WoW fanatics, the art direction is excellent, but technologically speaking it's definitely last-gen). Like I said, something's just...off. The game is still in development though, so I'll save final judgement until then.
Anyway, if you're interested in more detail on the game than my rambling will get you, I advise you to check out the preview.

Bionic Commando

Well, yet another game about saving a city after a cataclysmic explosion got reviewed this week, this time it's Grin-developed Bionic Commando. This follow-up to the classic NES game (which received a remake last August, also handled by Grin.) is available on the PC, PS3 and Xbox 360.
There are two reviews you can check out, courtesy of joystiq and ign, both of which paint the game in a pretty favorable light.
The general setup is as follows, series protagonist Nathan "Rad" Spencer (yes...I know, but ridiculous names are what you get when your game is based on a title from the '80s) has been imprisoned for the past 10 years after being framed for a crime. Said framing is also responsible for creating a negative attitude towards any bionically-enhanced persons. So Nathan sits in prison with only one arm (I get you don't like bionics, Ascension City, but not even a prosthetic?) until a terrorist group sets of a big explosion that levels Ascension City and commanding officer Super Joe (damn you '80s) sets him free to put a stop to the terrorists.
Commando Nathan is promptly reunited with his arm and regains the Bionic prefix before setting of for all kinds of swinging, gunplaying, car-throwing, dreadlock-having gameplay. From what I've read there are a few issues with the game (slow start, rigid linearity) that chip away at its overall quality but since I haven't played it you're probably better off reading through the reviews on either site (or both!).

Uncharted 2: Six Minutes of "Hells yeah!"

Although I doubt anyone out there is anticipating Uncharted's sequel quite as much as I am due to my rampant Naughty Dog fanboyism, (any job openings, guys?) you can probably still appreciate this nearly six minutes (5:40) of gameplay footage from Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, courtesy of ign.


First, put on some sort of protective headwear in case of an actual mind-blowing, then click here.

Sucker Punch delivers inFAMOUS or inFAMOUS delivers sucker punch?

So developer Sucker Punch's latest game inFAMOUS is about a week away from release now, close enough for it to be getting review scores from some of the bigger gaming publications (both print and digital) and if Metacritic is any indication, Sony has nabbed itself another slam-dunk exclusive for it's Playstation 3.
For those of you that haven't been following the game, inFAMOUS gives you an open-world city (Empire City) in the vein of Grand Theft Auto 4 while adding the "climb whatever you want" headline of Assassin's Creed and a dash of electricity based superpowers for protagonist Cole.
The story goes like this: Cole is a bike messenger, just a regular guy, until one of the packages he's delivering goes "BOOM!" As in a city-levelling "boom." So the city's left more or less destroyed, the government's quarantined it (I wonder if that took as long as it did to get water to the Superdome?) and Cole's left in a coma. That is, until he wakes up with more electricity at his fingertips than someone wearing wool feety pajamas in house made of shag carpet.
The game then sets off to let you fill your superhero/supervillain fantasies in pursuit of an answer to the question "Do you save it all, or destroy what's left?" that was asked in the inFAMOUS debut trailer. What this means is you'll spend the game facing morality choices determining if you're a good witch or a bad witch...I mean superhero. Some of these choices are obvious ones that the game points out to you by actually pausing things and asking if you want to be good or bad, others just depend on how you act throughout the game; do you drain passerby of their body's electrical energy to refill your own powers or maybe use your hands as defibrillator's on the heart failure victim laying on the sidewalk? The bigger morality choices that the game points out to you are in fact handled slightly better than the choices offered in other games where morality is a factor in gameplay; there's actually realistic justification for the "bad" decisions. In fact, "selfish" or "benevolent" are more accurate desciptors than "good" or "bad."
All in all inFAMOUS sounds like it fully delivered on its awesomeness quota. With the PS3's recent ability to pump out truly AAA exclusive titles one after another the only thing that really seems to be holding back the system's success is Sony's refusal to drop the price low enough to not require a payment plan. Oh well, there's always "surprise" E3 announcements. And here's to hoping God of War 3, Heavy Rain, and Fat Princess keep up the current trend.

Artistic Differences