Brad Gallaway's blog

It's hard to describe, but when bullets start filling the screen and death seems imminent, a quick revolve turns everything on its side and impenetrable curtains of projectiles are flipped to a different plane. This revolve mechanic provides an easy escape form certain death, and the player's ship shifts into another area of 3D space. Words really can't do it justice, but trust me, the effect is incredibly impressive.

So, tonight is the first night of my week-long XBL Indiefest. Looking at my hard drive, I've got well over three hundred demos saved up, and these are just the ones that looked halfway interesting. I don't even know how many I've passed up due to boring screenshots or a first impression that didn't grab me.

I'm still working my way through Gods Eater Burst on PlayStation Portable. I haven't mentioned it here at the blog yet, but it's basically a "lite" version of Monster Hunter with a strong anime slant and combat that runs a hell of a lot faster than it does in Capcom's game—not that the speed itself is necessarily a good thing. (Spazzy alert: GO!!!)

Still putting time in with Crysis 2. I've got to say, it's pretty damned entertaining.

An unsolicited copy of Crysis 2 showed up at my door today (always a pleasant surprise when that happens) and I put about an hour into it. I've heard that the multiplayer demo available wasn't too well-received, but I never got around to checking it out and I never played the first Crysis either, so I was coming into the game basically as fresh as possible. First impressions of the campaign? Very positive.

Although I haven't mentioned it here at the blog yet, I've been spending most of the last week with my oldest son. He's here for his Spring Break, so the lack of updates is mostly due to the fact that we've been staying up late every night trying to squeeze every last minute out of every day. He's a fantastic kid and I love him very much, and I am more than a little proud to say that he's cutting his game-playing teeth on Monster Hunter, Trials HD, and a number of other things that might not be traditionally seen as kid-friendly fare.

So at this point, I'm about fifteen hours or so into Dragon Age II. I am going to be doing a full review so I won't go into a great amount of detail here, but I will say that if I wasn't going to be submitting a formal review, I would have already quit the game and traded it in for something else. Not even kidding a bit. In the interest of keeping things brief, here's a quick list of bullet points highlighting the issues I have with it.

I had originally planned on posting a rant about Dragon Age II tonight, but the day didn't quite unfold the way I thought it would. So, although I don't have enough time to do a full-on posting at the moment, my conscience is screaming out to me that I need to do something in order to warn people against buying it.

I'd been hearing some chatter about the recent roguelike dungeon crawler from NIS called Zettai Hero Project: Unlosing Ranger vs Darkdeath Evilman (PSP) and I finally managed to lay hands on a copy. I'm a fan of the genre when it's done well and word on it had been fairly positive, so I had my fingers crossed.

The first one I checked out was Wizard's Keep, put out by the folks that created Miner Dig Deep. It's basically a dungeon-crawler with very primitive graphics and a simple level-up system. I put a few hours into it hoping that it would blossom, but no dice. It was as straightforward as it initially appeared to be. I might not have minded shooting through the game just to say that I did, but the combat was too frequent and too annoying to put up with.