Perpetual Burnout

El Shaddai is an action-platformer for the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3. It is based on Judeo-Christian myth. You play as Enoch and your mission is to track down and purify (kill) some fallen angels who came down to Earth. Background Enoch is featured in the book of Genesis and lived for 365 years before he was taken to heaven by God, being one of two humans noted in the Bible that never died.  There are apocryphal works that indicate Enoch eventually ascended to archangel status, where he was known as the Metatron--"he  is appointed guardian of all the celestial treasures, chief of the archangels, and the immediate attendant on God's throne." (wikipedia.org) Plot (no spoilers) Enoch eventually tracks them to a tower set amidst a distortion in space-time. This takes him several hundred years. (Although he is human in the game, he is immortal.) Within the tower are various floors, each ruled by a fallen angel and each its own little world. This is the backdrop in ...

Dragon Age 2 is a stark contrast to the epic saga of Dragon Age: Origins. Origins followed the saga of the last Grey Warden as he gathered an army to stop the darkspawn Blight. The story culminated with an epic battle against the Archdemon itself. While the story is formulaic, the implementation was top-notch. The overarching plot was epic in scope, and within that were 3 fleshed-out subplots where you had to win the allegiance of the factions which pledged their aid to the Grey Wardens during a darkspawn Blight. Add a large number of side-quests and some interesting companions, and you have DA:O. DA2 eschewed the traditional fantasy epic to follow Hawke, a refugee, as he arrives in the city of Kirkwall and ascends to power over the course of a decade. The game focuses on a single city and the politics within that city, rather than the broad view of many factions and cultures that DA:O provided. This is not a bad thing! Not every person can be a world-saving hero, and I'd ...

Dragon Age 2 is an enjoyable, if deeply flawed, successor to Dragon Age: Origins. To paraphrase Ron Case (my brother-in-law) "Even if it's one of Bioware's weakest offerings, it's still much better than many other games out there." I whole-heartedly agree. I am personally torn between rating on its own merits and comparing it to its predecessor. As the game is part of a franchise, one most examine both aspects to give the game a balanced review. As I have a lot of ground to cover, I'll review the mechanics and plot separately. I played DA:O and DA2 on Nightmare difficulty on the PC, so my review will be coming from that perspective. And when I say "review", I mean "list of things I found notable". Platform: PC Difficulty: Nightmare Combat is faster paced-- I'm not entirely sure how to quantify pacing in combat, but it certainly feels like things happen quickly. This is a good thing, although it barely affected my experience as I...

I've been playing Fable 3 recently. As with previous iterations of the game, I don't know what to make of it. It's a game loaded with potential, but with a clunky implementation which makes it fall short of being something truly great. As it is, it's a fun game that doesn't take itself too seriously, and that's not necessarily a bad thing. It's a fairly good implementation of a sandbox game--they have a fleshed out main story and impart a sufficient sense of urgency to keep you chugging along the primary plot line. At the same time, at any given time, you're typically provided access to a middling range of side-quests that you can take or ignore as you please. Overall, I'd say there are 3 main issues that prevent the game from being great. 1) The game is stupidly easy.  They have an achievement for never getting knocked out. This is not hard.  The only way you could fail to get this achievement is by being bad, through inattention, or lack of...