PS3

Lara Croft's big adventure

HIGH Reaching the top of a particularly troublesome climb.

LOW Dying repeatedly because of the awful camera.

WTF Lara's outfit choices for an arctic expedition: wetsuit or skimpy wetsuit. Apparently no one has ever heard of exposure to the elements. Neither outfit has shoes...

A measure of quality

HIGH Getting to have a 16-player deathmatch on a faithfully updated version of "Facility" from GoldenEye.

LOW There are stealth sequences. In a first person shooter.

WTF Why is the Golden Gun a rapid-fire grenade launcher?

I've been paying close attention to Electronic Arts' new IP, Dante's Inferno, since it was rumored a few months ago. A video game based on a classic piece of literature is intriguing enough (although I'm hoping Pride & Prejudice & Zombies never makes the jump to game-dom, even if it features Nazi zombies…), but one that's not only based on literature but set in Hell and looks like a God of War clone sets my geek-o-meter buzzing well into the red-zone.

Here's the first trailer for the game. Obviously, someone on the development team played and loved God of War—but is that a bad thing? If you're going to imitate something, you probably should imitate something really good—and it's hard to get much cooler than God of War when it comes to action games featuring giant set-pieces. The only real negative I see here is the giant multi-headed hellhound things looked cheesy to me. Maybe they'll fix them—or maybe I’ll like them more when I see them in the actual game. Too early to tell.

No word on a release date yet, but I'll keep you posted.

This has been an eventful week for downloads on the PlayStation 3. Flower and Noby Noby Boy are now both available through the Store, and although I think it's correct to put them both in the same general category, my reactions to both couldn't be more different.

Flower is fantastic. I don't necessarily think it's the second coming as some seem to report it, but it is most definitely the kind of thing that makes a player step back and re-examine their entire conception of video games.

Capcom was nice enough to send me a note mentioning that a new Resident Evil 5 trailer was available on the press section of their site recently, so I went and grabbed it. Unfortunately, 12 drunken monkeys are probably better at figuring out most computer crap than I am. So, I had to head over to YouTube to find a version I could actually get to post on the site. Anyway, here’s  the coolest trailer to date for the game. Enjoy.

I’m getting out of here now, before I blow up the entire internet…

The great film director Howard Hawks once said that "A good movie has three great scenes and no bad ones." Lately, I've taken to pondering how this sentiment might apply to video games.

When I think about big cinematic games like God of War, Resident Evil 4, Call of Duty 4, and Metal Gear Solid 4 (damn, that's a lot of games with "4" in the title), I think the formula holds. These are all games that, for me anyway, never really had any bad parts, and had at least three great segments that really stand out in my memory. I can still vividly recall fighting the giant hydra, clashing knives with Krauser, getting hit by a nuclear blast wave, and riding a motorcycle through an eastern European city. I'm a sucker for games that give me only a few amazing moments, even if the rest of the game never rises above being merely not bad.

There are times in my life in which I have felt despair, in which the presence in my life of the guiding force of a just and loving universe has not been immediately apparent to me. From now on, whenever I feel that way, I simply need to remember one thing—in just a few short months, everyone's favorite CoteWiNoLo is going to be back on the streets of Grant City...

Namco is publishing Dead to Rights 3.

Typing that sentence feels like being kissed by angels. Seven years after the original, five years after the attempt to make a sequel, four years and two years after the assets left over from that failed sequel attempt were crudely re-fashioned into Dead to Rights 2 and whatever the hell that PSP thing was, Namco has finally employed a development house to produce what the gaming community (by which I mean me) has been screaming for—another Jack Slate adventure!