Daniel Weissenberger's blog

So anyway, there's a mistake in my review of Operation Darkness. Well, that's not entirely accurate. The review is a perfectly honest accounting of my experiences with the game, and my analyses of them, both qualitative and quantitative. The problem is that I was playing the game incorrectly, and that mistake coloured my opinions about the experience, which led to me being unfairly harsh to the game in one important area, the difficulty level.

Like most of the civilized world, I downloaded and played the Star Wars: Force Unleashed demo today, and I was a little surprised by what I found. There were a couple of surprises, at first pleasant, and then soon after, decidedly less so.

When the reviewer wasn't being unfairly disinterested, he was flat-out wrong. So I decided to make my review a little different, and take the reader, point-by-point through why its author was not just wrong, but unprofessional. How unprofessional? I suspect he played very little of the actual game.

When I look at my long and storied relationship with games, there's every other game in my childhood, and then there's Double Dragon. How much did I play this game? So much that, without fear of hyperbole, I can state that if I had set aside every quarter I put in the machine, I likely would have been able to pay for college entirely in loose change. Although that would mean that I would never have played all that Double Dragon, and I can't imagine what kind of person I'd be today if that were the case*.

It came as quite a surprise to discover that Geometry Wars 2 had been released last week. I’m an intense fan of the first game, as evidenced by the fact that my first ever blog post dealt with my twisted obsession with obtaining a high score in the game. Also, it’s the only game that has ever driven me to swear loudly and throw my controller across the room. I’m not usually so emotional about games, but when snakes spawn in a ring while I’m touching a wall it’s an unbelievably cheap instant kill, so can you really blame me? I know the people in the next apartment over do.

Remembering that yesterday was S-Day (the day Calibites celebrate the release of a new Soul Calibur title), I headed down to the store to pick up a copy. While I'm not a full-on Calibite, I don't own action figures or costumes or anything like that, I'm enough of a Soul Calibur fan that I'm generally happy to see a new game in the series coming out.

Werewolves + Rocketlaunchers > Nazi Vampires. And if they're not, god help us all.

I downloaded Doom on a whim off of Live, and I've got to say I'm surprised by just how good it still is. Great level design, interesting enemies, good weapon balance.

This year, one game stood head and shoulders above all the others, the chasm in quality between it and even its nearest competition was such a yawning chasm that it would take 8-12 Batmobiles to vault across it. Which game was it? Discover within...