XBLA Weekend: Torchlight, The Dishwasher: Vampire Smile, and others

Torchlight is an excellent dungeon crawler.

Saturday evening turned into a bit of an XBLA proving ground. I downloaded a whole host of titles in my continuing mission to find a game worthy of my 800 points. In and amongst the games were a few choice highlights and a very certain lowlight. Winner of the night – Torchlight.

Summer of Arcade: The Kid loaded up Bastion, and it was good (XBLA)

Bastion looks new and familiar all at once.

After much hype and fuss since I first heard of its development, SuperGiant Games’ Bastion finally saw release this week, as part 1 of Xbox’s Summer of Arcade season. If the trial version is anything to go by, this is a very impressive little title.

Alice continues to dazzle and delight; Alan is barely awake

The swift justice of the Vorpal Blade really shows off A:MR's visuals.

After another week of playing, I’ve seen even more of the alphabetically prime Alice: Madness Returns and Alan Wake, the latter of which I finished last night. Asides from that, I took some time to try out a couple of releases; some new, and some not so new on the XBLA Marketplace.

First Impressions: Alan Wake (X360)

Alan ain't afraid o' no ghost.

Last weekend, Amazon delivered two new bright young things to Notre maison d’amour numérique: Alan Wake and Alice: Madness Returns. I spent the week mostly engrossing myself in the psychological thriller that is Alan Wake, and took a backseat to watch my girlfriend work through Spicy Horse’s sequel to American McGee’s Alice. Both games deal with eerie worlds in almost diametrically opposed ways.
Alan Wake plays like a television series – the game goes so far as to even be split up into ‘episodes’, whilst Alice: Madness Returns is a more whimsical affair, though its cute and colourful visuals look to belie a serious, blackened core of a story. Essentially, both of the protagonists in these games are disturbed by their thoughts, and suffer in varying degrees as victims of their own psyche. Whilst running and gunning certainly has a time and place in terms of good, clean fun, I have always found myself to be most drawn in by a good story, and if there can be even so much as a dash of suffering, I’m on board. Let’s take a look at Alan Wake first-off.

New Adventures in XBLA

Journey isn't on XBLA, but it represents how I feel when I sit at the Marketplace menu.

A recent change in both location and situation has left me with substantially more free time to spend playing video games. Laden with such time, my first port of call was my list of older games I wanted to catch up on, and after some deliberation I chose to start with the serially-delayed Remedy joint, Alan Wake, of which many good things were heard. Having then placed the order with my good friends at Amazon, I opted to pass the waiting time by delving into the cavernous realm of Xbox’s Game Marketplace to try out a few mostly-recent demos. Here are my impressions on them:

The Nostalgia Buck: Is Gaming going the way of Hollywood?

Child of Eden has all of the colours, all of the sounds, all of the time.

Last week, not one, not two, but three separate hotly-anticipated sequels to three relatively antiquated titles saw release: the testosterone-laden shooter Duke Nukem Forever (Duke Nukem 3D, 1996), the synaesthesia-influenced Child of Eden (Rez, 2001), and gothic fairytale-retold Alice: Madness Returns (American McGee’s Alice, 2000). All three of these originals share a common trait of having been considered singular at their time of release and yet have made for a combined wait of thirty-six years to finally escape into the market. But was it worth the wait? And is this a sign of a wider, darker trend in games development?

E3 Round-up, Duke Nukem Forever, Silent Hill 2

Duke Nukem 4eva, baybee.

Another year, another post-E3 week, with only a mere 358 days until the next event. Get marking your calendars, people who attend E3. Disclaimer: I wasn’t at E3, though it has long been an ambition of mine to attend it. Ideally, that would be in a professional capacity, though. Anyway, I thought I’d touch on the announcements that piqued my interest most throughout the event.

E3 2011: Impressions of the Nintendo Conference

Reggie Fils-Aimé working his Force Lightning pose.

In many ways the most highly-anticipated of the Big Three this year, everyone was perched and poised, ready to witness the unveiling of the first console to be a member of the next generation. Running at just around half the length of Microsoft’s media extravaganza, Nintendo of America CEO Reggie Fils-Aimé came armed and serious, confident in an outcome that wowed us all.

E3 2011: Impressions of the Microsoft Conference

You can't see how much I love Don Mattrick because he's so small here.

Well, I’m a day late but guaranteed to be not a single dollar short. I managed to catch the Microsoft E3 2011 Press Conference last night after work and I have to say I’m still not quite sure what I thought of it. They definitely know what a Kinect is, of that much I’m sure.

Unbearable Entertainment: The Survival Horror Genre

The wretched and foreboding beginning to Silent Hill 2.

From big-budget franchises such as the Resident Evil and Silent Hill series, to lesser-known titles such as Overblood and Illbleed, the Survival Horror genre is one of the most remarkable areas of the gaming world. I say this because I feel that it marks itself out from much of the rest of gaming based on its founding principle – It is not fun to play. You do not ‘win’ a survival horror game in the traditional sense. You make it out alive, barely.

DJ Hero 2, or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love Rhythm Games

I still prefer calling it DJ Herp.

Asides from my early teenage forays into Konami’s Guitar Freaks series, and a mild preoccupation with Beatmania, DDR, and Stepmania, I was never much into rhythm games once they made their way across the earth and became a bit of a thing in the western gaming world. Does that make me a games hipster? Perhaps, although my main problem with them was always firmly rooted in the difficulty levels I encountered, or rather didn’t, as it were.

Living under a rock: Portal 1 (X360)

Hole-ly disappointing.

Well well well, talk about late to the party on this one. Portal has pretty much been a mainstay of Internet gaming culture since it was released way back in 2007. I still remember the hype in ’08 of the game coming to Xbox 360 as part of Valve’s infamous The Orange Box package deal. For some reason, I was completely unenthused by its release at the time. I put this down to the fact that I have a fear of playing sequels before their original iterations, and TOB being primarily comprised of Half Life 2 left me quaking in my OCD boots. Furthermore, it was never fully explained to me that all of Half Life 2 was there, and not just Episode 2, which was the impression that I received from all the news. That’s no doubt my own fault for not paying attention in games class. Finally, last week, I got a chance to play through Portal from start to finish, a process that took me two sessions, if I remember correctly.

Netflix Instant Streaming, or What it means to truly feel love

All Netflix employees go to heaven, too. Just sayin'.

Two posts in one evening. Be still thy beating heart, dear reader! Fear not, this is simply a rabid burst of productivity, and normal service will resume promptly. We have our top men working on dragging me down, so simply enjoy this content overkill whilst it lasts.

I want to write many, many words here, but it simply must be stated: Netflix Instant Streaming is probably the most amazing advancement in modern home entertainment. There, I said it. When I think of Netflix Instant Streaming, I want to write sonnets about it. I want to take it out to dinner, and laugh at all its jokes. I want to sit with it in the evenings, and hold it close while it reminisces with me about that time we watched Johnny Mnemonic but it turned out to be terrible and so we had to go to bed without finishing it. In short, I never want to be without Netflix Instant Streaming.

Post-match Analysis: PAX East

PAX East Expo Hall from the Skybridge.

Well, call off the hounds. Here I am, back again on British soil. PAX East was an experience and a half, to say the least. If you are reading this, and you have not been, there aren’t enough superlatives in the world to justify a description of just how best it was.

So, I figured that rather than spew all the same coverage you will find on the various quality video game sites, I would eschew that approach for a brief overview, alongside some lessons learned from the experience.

PAX East: Preparing For Launch

What will get in my way?

Today is one my final few days in the country before I depart on a journey that will ultimately take me to Penny Arcade Expo East. Being my first experience of a convention, as seems in fact to be the case for many people I to which I have spoken, I am really keen to witness this quintessentially American experience. Of course, there are similar conventions that exist closer to home, but when it comes to the crunch of indulging and nourishing a niche market, the vastness of The States lends it a considerable advantage.