The Japanese ad for The Saint’s Flow Energy Drink shows Pierce, the hip and youthful face of the Third Street Saints brand division, being mercilessly beaten on a basketball court by armed punks. The situation looks bleak, until an anthropomorphized purple can of Saints Flow descends from heaven and gives him the strength to throw off his attackers, unleash a savage volley of fists, kicks and a clothesline before shooting a Ryu-style fireball from his hands and closing out the performance by atomic dunking a basketball that appeared out of nowhere to a shower of neon stars. The Third Streets Saint’s lifestyle has been canned and is ready to be swallowed.
Category: Gameplay Analysis
Metroid: Zero Mission: A Screw Attack to the Cerebral Cortex
Go immediately left from the start of Metroid: Zero Mission and you’ll find the Morph Ball upgrade exactly where it was in the original Metroid. This is the first in a series of discoveries that shows how the remake beautifully modernizes galactic bounty hunter Samus Aran’s first adventure that celebrates the past while recognizing the journey her series embarked on following it, rebuilding the original release in the structure of influential classic Super Metroid.
Continue reading “Metroid: Zero Mission: A Screw Attack to the Cerebral Cortex”
Resident Evil 4’s Silent Tutorial
Fifteen minutes into Resident Evil 4, Shinji Mikami and his design team test your comprehension of the mechanics they’ve been invisibly teaching you since you selected ‘New Game’. Former rookie cop Leon S. Kennedy had just fought his way through the Ganado’s Village and now finds himself catching his breath on an old dingy farm. Stray slightly from the beaten path and you’ll find a radiant pearl necklace enticingly suspended above a barrel of putrid water, patiently waiting for you to find it. Retrieving this necklace is your test. You can’t just reach out and interact with it, so you draw your handgun and shoot it loose- and immediately fail as it falls directly into the barrel of sludge beneath. When you pull it from the filth, your inventory lists the item as ‘Dirty Pearl Pendant’, its picture a grimy mess. Looking back at the barrel, you notice the 2×4 propping up the lid, so you shoot that next and watch it create a cover. Since you didn’t learn the lesson before, you do now: Resident Evil 4 rewards tactical gunplay.
Let’s study the notes:
Snappin’ Pics on a Pokémon Safari
More than any other medium, videogames possess the ability to immerse people in worlds, of giving them a sense of place, one that can be populated, filled out and come alive before our eyes. But great worlds contain memorable characters with their own personalities- Pokémon has long had one of those worlds. Pokémon Snap is built around this singular idea- it puts would-be photographers on a Safari in a Pokémon nature preserve and equips us with a camera to witness, interact and record.
The Streets of Arkham City Are Prowled By Lunatics
Batman: Arkham City is an incredible sequel to a game with some of the most robust mechanics you’ll find anywhere in the medium.
Picking up six months after the events of Batman: Arkham Asylum, the inmates of that institution and the violent prisoners of Blackgate Penitentiary have been rounded up after events that transpired in a comic series leading up to this game into a prison known as Arkham City at the behest of Dr. Hugo Strange. Strange, who came into possession of Batman’s true identity by unknown means, has thrown Bruce Wayne within the confines of the fences controlled by his TYGER guards to incite deployment of his shadowy ‘Protocol 10’. By its end, Batman will run up against many of his legendary enemies including The Joker, who is suffering from fatal side effects to his exposure to his Titan experiments from his previous takeover of Arkham Asylum.
Continue reading “The Streets of Arkham City Are Prowled By Lunatics”
