Dead Island

Lifeless

HIGH The new character's hand-to-hand fighting style is a hoot.

LOW Watching zombies infinitely spawn, clown-car style out of a tiny wooden shack.

WTF It's got the jankiest menu system ever created. How was this approved?

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.

If you read this blog with any regularity, you probably remember that I was a huge fan of Dead Island last year. So huge, in fact, that I was one of the critics who chose it as our overall game of 2011. We got more than a few funny looks from other critics when we made the announcement, but I still feel good about the choice in comparison to what the competition was, and I definitely think it was the right direction to go.

It's the Opposite

HIGH Clearing out the prison showers with impunity.

LOW Weapons unequipping in the middle of zombie gangbangs.

WTF Repeating ambush points until weapons degrade into useless scrap.

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.

I never play racing games. There are a number of reasons for this, but part is that I'm not very interested in cars in general, and I'm even less interested in playing a game that makes me repeat sections over and over and over in an effort to get my performance exactly right.

Sun, Surf and Septicemia

HIGH Randomly finding scattered survivors in need of aid.

LOW All the pre-patch bugs and glitches.

WTF Using cash to repair and upgrade weapons makes no sense whatsoever.

I'm now convinced that Larry the Comic Book Enthusiast should totally have been a selectable character in Dead Island. His stamina, hygiene, usefulness and likeability won't ever be very high, but he would surely make up for it with funny quips and witty commentary and girlish screams. Something Techland should consider for the next DLC.

Tsk, tsk. The ends little boys will go to for a brief glimpse of some video game zombie vajayjay.

(Btw, skip forward to 1:55 to get to the good stuff.)

Broken Island

HIGH Getting the timing just right and lopping the heads off of two charging Infected simultaneously.

LOW Spending two hours on the same fight because of a badly-designed save system.

WTF Headshots not only don't kill zombies, they barely even do bonus damage.