Brad Gallaway's blog

As someone who grew up loving the Choose Your Own Adventure paperbacks, finding titles to play on my PSP that were essentially the same thing blew my mind—rather than turning the concepts into a clunky platformer or simplistic action game, the good people at Laughing Jackal translated the books themselves into text-based adventures with short minigames replacing the dice-rolling and combat that real-life readers would have performed.

So, the Mass Effect 3 demo. I hesitate to bring it up, but I can't let it pass without making at least a few brief comments. First off, I really hope that the game addresses Ashley's radical make over... if the game hadn't told me that's who it was, I never would have recognized her, and I don't mean that in a good way.

Dynasty Warriors wouldn't generally be considered broken, but it has been negatively seen by a large portion of critics out there. This series saw its best ratings early on, but as time passed, the ratings continued to drop. Warriors (as a whole) isn't safe from the ire of the gaming masses, but it's still a game that I love to call my guilty pleasure.

If you play games with any regularity, it's inevitable that you'll eventually come across a roughly-made, unbalanced, unpopular, or straight-up broken title that you grow attached to regardless of how low the score on Metacritic drops. Whatever the reason, I'm betting that every gamer out there has at least one of these awkward, ugly ducklings that they hold dear—and I've invited a group of guest writers to kiss and tell.

It's been quite a while since I spent any time with the Soul Calibur series... I think the last one that I really got into was probably the original SoulCal on Dreamcast. The series kind of dropped in terms of quality (for my taste, anyway) and it fell off of my radar until today when GameFly sent me Soul Calibur V.

So, used versus new... It's a huge topic to begin with, and it's only gotten more complicated due to the various tricks made possible by online connections. Thanks to these "innovations", something that has never been black-and-white to start with is now more grey than it's ever been. That said, let me try to pick apart the various strands of the problem as I see them, one by one.

I'm still trying to complete Yakuza 3 before anything big comes in for review, and I'm almost done. If my guess is correct, there are only one or two chapters left, so I'm hoping to wrap it up tomorrow. I've got to say, out of the three Yakuza titles I've played so far, this one has definitely been the weakest.

It's time again for another quick check-in on my regular reads...

Although there are some must-reviews coming down the pipe pretty soon, the industry is more or less in a big lull right now, and that's perfectly okay with me. I've really been enjoying knocking games out of my backlog, and the latest one up at bat is Sega's Yakuza 3. Straight up, I love Yakuza.

I haven't been up on my download titles and the way I should lately, so I've been trying to rectify that over last week or two. I decided to comb through the PSP Minis store alphabetically and see what caught my eye. There's a whole lot of junk in there, quite frankly, but there are some nice titles if you look hard enough.