Originally Published: September 21, 2010, on ClassicGameRoom.com
I and CGR Undertow present a video game review of DEAD RISING 2 CASE ZERO for Xbox 360 from Capcom. This CGR Undertow video game review has video game play footage and commentary. This video game is an Xbox 360/Xbox Live Arcade (XBLA) exclusive release.
Originally Published: June 22, 2010, on Lundberg.me, NationalLampoon.com, and SportsRev.TV
This week I give my winners and losers of E3 and review Super Mario Galaxy 2 for Nintendo Wii and Mega Man Zero Collection for Nintendo DS. My hot chick pick of the week is Lindsey Strutt.
Originally Published: February 11, 2010, on Examiner.com
Two of the year’s most anticipated titles have new release dates, and neither is as soon as were previously hoped.
At today’s X10, the Xbox 360 centered video game expo, being held in San Francisco, the folks from Remedy Entertainment announced that the industry wide speculated release date of April 13th for Alan Wake was false and that their anxiously awaited, episodic psychological thriller for the Xbox 360 and PC, would not see store shelves until May 18th.
Not really a surprise considering how many delays this game has seen since its original announcement, what is another month to those willing to shell out the $59.99 for it?
For those of you caught unawares, Alan Wake sees the title character, a horror writer, and his wife taking a vacation in a tranquil Pacific Northwestern city trying to help Alan overcome his writer’s block. Once in the town though, Alan starts having nightmares and wakes up one night to find his wife is missing and a story he can’t remember writing has come to life. As Alan scrounges about the wilderness collecting pages from his otherworldly novel, trying to find his wife and unravel the mystery of where the book came from, he must combat members of the community who have been consumed by a poltergeist-like darkness.
Done in a cinematic like style that sees each level of Alan’s exploration broken down into something like episodes out of the X-Files (even with a nice little narrator’s “On the last episode of…” montage between levels), Alan Wake is a story that can’t help but pull you in.
I had a chance to play a short demo of the first couple of levels where Alan must use any light source he can find to wane the darkness off of the townspeople he encounters before giving them a proper beating. From what I saw, the game could use an extra month of tweaking. It seemed as if the audio in some of the cinematic scenes was out of sync with the gameplay and the game glitches at the worst possible moments for the survival horror like action sequences. Maybe I had the displeasure of picking up an older demo, but with any luck this game will finally see the light of day come May 18th and with all the rough edges smoothed out.
In other release date news, Capcom removed the Q1 label from their next highly anticipated foray into survival horror, Dead Rising 2. Unfortunately, but not unexpectedly, Q1 was an optimistically unrealistic time period and so Capcom announced that Dead Rising 2 will hit North America on August 31st, 2010, with Japan getting it September 2nd and Europe September 3rd.
Not much else was revealed from Capcom besides screenshots and trailers that had already been released, but the fact that the game has a solid date now that actually lands in this calendar year is just another reason to this New Yorker that the summer months can’t get here soon enough.
Originally Published: August 14, 2009, on Examiner.com and 1050ESPN.com (now ESPNNewYork.com)
Some of my fondest memories from my childhood are my dad and me or with a few friends heading down to the local arcade. Some of my earliest video game memories were formed here and we even had my 6th birthday at the Electric Circuit (that was the name of the arcade). I would feed endless quarters into classic games like X-Men, Spider-Man, The Simpsons, Tekken, and House of the Dead. As we got older though, places like Electric Circuit started to disappear as games evolved and became oriented more towards the home living room, making places like arcades unnecessary. Once my friends and I got our driver’s licenses, we would have to drive farther and farther to try to find decent arcade hangouts until it got to the point that it just wasn’t worth searching anymore. So, in many places, like the local video store being forced out by services like On Demand and Netflix, the arcade is almost extinct and only lives on in many of our memories.
With similar dreams of childhoods lost, Microsoft saw the perfect opportunity to conjure up some nostalgia when they created the Xbox Live Arcade, where you can download, for a small fee, an endless array of games that have been digitally converted. Every console has a system like this in place, but I focus on Xbox’s Arcade because, in what is becoming an annual summer push for old-school games, two of my old arcade favorites have been re-released.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Turtles in Time and Marvel vs. Capcom 2 were actually sequels to already smash-hit arcade games, but brought brand new wonders to their respective franchises. Turtles in Time incorporated new characters from the, at that time, recently released film TMNT 2: Secret of the Ooze. MvC2 nearly doubled the roster of fighters from the first game and added a third member to their revolutionary roulette system that allowed you to switch between active and benched fighters in the middle of combat effortlessly.
After downloading both these games for small fees (Turtles in Time cost 800 Microsoft points, roughly $10 dollars, and Marvel vs. Capcom 2 was 1200 Microsoft points, roughly $15 dollars) Amazingly, not only do the games maintain their original greatness, but the tweaks and additions given by Microsoft make these classics well worth the download.
In honor of the Turtles’ 25th anniversary, Turtles in Time: Re-Shelled Edition has completely revamped and upgraded graphics and the gameplay now includes a full 360 degree attack arc. The difficulty has been amped up a little as well with four different levels and the classic survival mode has been included from when the game was originally ported to the SNES almost 20 years ago. The game also includes up to four player co-op like the original and you can find extra players over Xbox Live if you don’t have enough controllers (or friends willing to play an 18-year old game with you in the middle of the night). Add in that the voice actors from the current TMNT cartoon have voiced-over what was originally text during the few cinemas from the game and Turtles in Time: Re-Shelled Edition will make you feel like a kid again while still appreciating just how far gaming technology has come.
The only downside to the experience was that the game is only a port of the original arcade game and the extra level that was in the SNES version that allowed the inclusion of Bebop and Rocksteady was not included in this version. Also, none of the classic Turtles music was included and this saddened me a little as a hardcore fan. Still, for only $10, this download was well worth it.
Marvel vs. Capcom 2 doesn’t have any major upgrades in the visual department and the gameplay is largely the same as the arcade version. The only real upgrades were the addition of a training mode to really refine your 100-hit combos and the ability to play opponents over Xbox Live with your stats tracked on Marvel vs. Capcom 2′s official website. Unfortunately, there are a lot of glitches with the game at this time, but I’m sure Capcom’s tech-heads are hard at work trying to smooth these out to ensure everyone gets their classic arcade button-mashing fix in.
Hopefully, these two arcade classics making their way to home consoles will open the floodgates for more classic games like The Avengers, Virtua Cop, Time Crisis, or Fatal Fury to make their ways back into our hearts and minds. At the very least, these games give us a chance to reminisce and appreciate just how far gaming has come over the past couple of decades and remind us that true classics can stand the test of time (even if sometimes they need a little extra work for that to happen).
Both Turtles in Time: Re-Shelled Edition and Marvel vs. Capcom 2 are available now on Xbox Live.
-Ray Carsillo
RayCarsilloWrites.com 