Brad Gallaway's blog

 

With the resounding success (on any platform) of the download model, publishers and developers are now starting to cash in as the price for electronic delivery creeps up.

Although $10 had been originally thought to be the sweet spot for consumers (I agree), more and more titles are now sporting a $15 price tag.

Haven't had a whole heck of a lot of time to game this week, but what little time I did have was devoted to Sega's Yakuza 2.

This guy is one seriously badass motherf*cker

I'm not going to talk a lot about it right now because I feel an ethical responsibility to review it and I want to save some ammo for that future piece, but I will say that I think it's great. For those who don't know, the game is basically a real-time brawler with some light RPG elements bound together by an extremely well-written crime drama storyline -- and in this case, i do mean well-written. It's not a parody or a caricature of a story twisted around and made to fit all sorts of absurdly contrived game nonsense... it's a real, honest-to-goodness, straight-up serious crime drama.

Not enough memory in here.

The amount of storage available on the Wii is truly pathetic, and not at all appropriate for the current environment. Adding insult to injury is the fact that you can only fit a small handful of games (never mind demos or movies) and I'm not able to delete the totally unnecessary news and weather channels to free up space for things that I actually want.

It's a long, hard road to get to this scene.

I just finished Raw Danger! on PS2 a few minutes ago... as I said earlier, it started out being a real struggle mostly for technical reasons, and that remained true all the way to the end. In terms of production, it was extremely rough and the budget for the game must have been practically zero. I'm still totally in love with the concept of surviving a natural disaster as the basis for gameplay, but the execution here was just too severely hampered to ever be totally enjoyable.

I've seen tons of screens and read lots of articles, but PSN had a brand-new demo up so I gave that a whirl... The gist of the game is that you're a soldier from the Unreal school of how-do-you-move-in-that-armor? character design and you've got a gun that can affect change in the landscape tectonically. With a shot from your high-tech gee-whiz machine, you can raise small hills or create sinkholes, among other things.

The post-PAX love continues... Thanks to the new PAX-10 event highlighting indie games development, Casey Muratori's intriguing Sushi Bar Samurai was brought to my attention, and it's definitely one to watch for in the coming months. Below is a brief discussion on Casey himself, his game, and of course... games as art. What else?

There's a little bit of a lull in game releases right now before the total insanity of fourth-quarter holiday sales get started, so I'm taking the time to catch up on a few older titles. I played on PS2 last week and had a good time with that (check the review ) and this week, it's also on PS2.

The post-PAX love continues... Next up is a few words with Devon Detbrenner, Assistant Producer at Backbone Vancouver (at the time the interview occurred), and one of the hip cats behind the upcoming Wii and DS title, .

The post-PAX love continues as I'll be featuring a series of interviews with the developers of games from the show that caught my eye. First up is my chat with Frank Wilson, CTO and Engineer at Twisted Pixel Games, and one of the people behind the upcoming XBLA title, The Maw.

The post-PAX love continues as I'll be featuring a series of interviews with the developers of games from the show that caught my eye. First up is my chat with Frank Wilson, CTO and Engineer at Twisted Pixel Games, and one of the people behind the upcoming XBLA title, The Maw.