Daniel Weissenberger's blog

My first encounter with Deadly Premonition came when I spotted it on the shelves of a local video store. Suffice to say, the cover art stood out from the crowd. In a field of sports games, militaristic shooters, space marines, and the occasional swordsman v. dragon, a hooded person screaming as blood runs down their face counts as something of an anomaly. The axeman, naturally, sealed the deal. I rented the game immediately, and started playing it later that night. Just two hours in I'd already decided that I had to purchase my own copy, which I proceeded to do the next day.

Some years back I played Dead to Rights and found its plot so captivatingly, amazingly ludicrous that I wound up writing a fifty-odd page review of it. It was relatively well-received by people who worked on the game, and even wound up being mentioned in 2005's prequel, Dead to Rights II. Now, to celebrate the release of Dead to Rights: Retribution, I've decided to repost the review here, now with illustrations! Hopefully the occasional image and video will help make it a little more palatable—yes, I'm well aware that it's TL, and I won't be offended if you DR.

Well, I finally finished Heavy Rain, and was startled by a lot of things about the last few chapters. The identity of the killer, the lack of resolution offered to many parts of the story, and a certain twist that invalidates nearly everything that occurred.

Welcome to part 3 of my SPOILER-intensive analysis of Heavy Rain's story!

Look, we all know that this is basically just another Saw game, and given how bad the actual Saw game was, I understand why hopes were high for Heavy Rain, and why we'd want to give it a pass for its unoriginality. But I thought I'd take a moment to acknowledge just how similar the premises are. They're both stories about a crazed killer who kidnaps people and then creates elaborate traps inside crumbling edifices deep within America's post-industrial wastelands, designed to test how much a victim will sacrifice to save a life.

It's fair to say that I don't have the greatest confidence in David Cage's ability to create something that makes sense. Still, I decided to delve into Heavy Rain and see what he'd produced this time around. Now, four hours in, just having completed "The Bear" I'm ready with some initial comments—and these are just going to be plot things, since this isn't an official "review" of the game. Also, unless it gets really egregious I'm not going to comment on the awkward phrasing caused by the game's sometimes iffy translation.

So I finally got around to playing half an hour of Halo 3: ODST last night, and while I'm not planning to write a review of it any time soon, I wanted to comment on the weird experience I had with the game.

I was playing a friend's game, so I just sort of dropped in medias res, and had no idea what was going on plot-wise, so I'm not going to bother commenting on that aspect. What I will say is that for the first fifteen minutes of my playtime I had a blast. So much fun that I couldn't remember why I'd hated Halo 3 as much as I did (by which I mean "not really that much at all").

Way of the Samurai 3 came about back in November, but sadly it remains the best game I haven't played yet. Why? Because it was only released in Japan, and although PS3s are admirably region-free, the Japanese language's stubborn refusal to transform magically into English has transformed the prospect of importing a copy of it from a delightful dream into an utter waste of money.

So, until some publisher spends the absolutely minimal amount of money required to turn the menus and text into English, I'll have to be satisfied with a brief preview of a game that may never see a North American release.

(sigh)

I can't stress that strongly enough. It's an attempt to make an utterly serious stealth game about a sexy lady killing Nazis who are in no way vampires. Here, just take a look at the screenshots.

With the recent spate of demos released over Xbox Live, I thought it was a good time to take a look at what they have to say about the products they’re marketing to us!

This time around, I'll be covering UFC Undisputed 2009, Red Faction: Guerilla, Sonic Ultimate Genesis Collection, X-Men Origins: Wolverine, Bionic Commando, Up, and Battlestations: Pacific.