Meow to Tail a Story

HIGH Witty dialogue and great voice acting make the characters more personable.

LOW Getting stuck because I couldn't see the one object I needed to interact with.

WTF How every character seems to possess advanced knowledge of quantum physics.

Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate hits the 3DS and WiiU in March, and I'm hoping that a lot of you out there who haven't tried the game yet will decide to jump aboard. If you do, be aware that Monster Hunter has always been utterly terrible at welcoming newcomers. Even though it eventually became one of my favorite games of all time, I fully admit that my first few experiences with the series were nothing short of awful.

I'm trying to make a serious effort towards trimming down my backlog this year, so I decided to give Bayonetta one more shot. I've started and quit the game twice before, but it comes up in conversation so often and in such positive terms that I'd feel like I wasn't doing my critical due diligence unless I gave it a least one more try.

Just like Handel, the digital craftsman Hidetaka Suehiro seems equally excited, baffled, and reluctant to continue work on his most successful game yet, Deadly Premonition—a game that, dare I say it, could be a similarly-praised work hundreds of years from now. The game is being re-released this March as a PlayStation 3-exclusive entitled Deadly Premonition: The Director's Cut. I was lucky enough to be able to sit down with the man and his producer, Tomio Kanazawa, last week to discuss the details. It was an event that was sometimes as intentionally mysterious as the goings-on in the game's fictional hamlet of Greenvale, but thrilling nonetheless.

We are reaching into the listener mail bag again! We learn Brad's favorite food, and what game is like Amelie...if Amelie could fly! Also, Special guest Christopher Floyd stops by to talk in his Irish accent. Oh yeah, we also talk about what we've been playing and have a lively discussion about the Steam Box! With Chi Kong Lui, Brad Gallaway, Mike Bracken, Richard "Sexiest Thumbs Alive" Naik, Special Guest Christopher Floyd and Dylan Collins.

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Please send feedback and mailbag questions to podcast (at) gamecritics (dot) com.

Cogs Keep on Turning

HIGH "I have free will and a maglev unit. And I... am a floating bomb."

LOW Hunting for the right pixel to let me find the power source in the scrap heap.

WTF Why doesn't the portable sensor help me find this power source?

If Agent 47 and Sam Fisher had a Lovechild, Absolution Would be its Name

HIGH Absolution has the most realistic living world I've experienced in a game.

LOW The checkpoint system is totally broken.

WTF Who casts badass Vivica A. Fox just to give her a tiny bit of dialogue?

The Invisible Knife Cuts Deepest

HIGH Knifing four enemies in the same turn for a come-from-behind win.

LOW The graphics.

WTF Why isn’t there a sequel yet?

Agents is a game by Recursive Frog (Patino) created for last month's Ludum Dare online game jam. The game is very simple on the surface, in that it's an audio-only adventure where players control two nefarious field agents solely via "voice calls" on their mobile phone. The task is to get them in to a guarded complex, then out, while helping them work together to stay alive.

The Denpa Men: They Came By Wave is a title I had been looking at in the e-shop since the day I picked up my 3DS, but I just wasn't convinced to buy. It was cute enough and it seemed weird enough, but the demo didn't sway me and I left it on my wish list for later.