Publisher: EA
Developer: Visceral Games
Genre: Survival Horror
Rating: Mature
Release Date: Available now

Two years ago, I charted my review through Dead Space by calling out the various gaming archetypes that the developers pulled from in building a better deathtrap. That game borrowed from the best, drawing inspiration from genre giants like Resident Evil 4 and BioShock. Then, like a great musician steeped in the movements of those who came before him, they churned out a killer symphony that immediately made Visceral Games a developer to watch. As I slowly made my trek through that game’s nightmare, I stopped taking stock of its influences and found myself swept up in the ride. Dead Space was a big, brawny adventure that made its mark on my psyche and left me wanting to know where fate would fling Isaac Clarke next. In Dead Space 2, we catch up with our intrepid engineer and find that his journey through the doomed Ishimura was merely one ring in a rapidly spiraling Hell.

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Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment
Developer: Ready At Dawn Studios
Genre: Action-Adventure
ESRB Rating: Mature
Release date: Available now

God of War is one of the most gory, gratuitously violent game series I’ve ever seen. In an industry driven by scantily clad fan-service (male or female) and trying to force as much carnage into one screen as possible, that says a lot. The original God of War came out back in 2005 and the mayhem hasn’t stopped since. God of War: Ghost of Sparta tells of what happened between God of War and God of War II.

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Publisher: Blizzard Entertainment
Developer: Blizzard Entertainment
System requirements: Windows XP/Vista/Win 7, 1.3 GHz Pentium IV or equivalent CPU, 1 GB RAM, GeForce FX/Radeon 9500 or better graphics card, 25 GB hard-drive space, broadband Internet connection
Genre: MMORPG
ESRB rating: Teen
Release date: Available now

How does one review something that is vast? World of Warcraft has had its cataclysm, and now everything is changed. All of the old zones in Azeroth have been modified in one way or another. Aside from topographical changes such as chasms and volcanoes, there are lore-based alterations such as castles built and towns destroyed. There are also numerous quest changes, with each zone receiving a thorough overhaul in quests and storyline. There are also a number of new zones, two new races, a new profession, a gear and talent overhaul, guild advancement, and many other things. A month ago when I wrote about the changes to two of the zones, it took me seven paragraphs to barely scratch the surface. Today I will try to describe an entire world, so let’s get started.

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Publisher: Atlus
Developer: Atlus
Genre: RPG
ESRB rating: Everyone 10+
Release date: Available now

While dungeon-delving RPGs used to be standard fare, everyone has been trying to make them different, new and exciting in some way so that they will appeal to new generations of gamers with different standards. From adding some unique system to overcompensating for the “old” gameplay with flashy graphics, there’s always a gimmick to spruce up the tired formula. Atlus’s Etrian Odyssey series stands out in that it does just the opposite. It takes the classic, first person, dungeon-exploring, turn-based RPG formula and wholeheartedly embraces it. Etrian Odyssey III: The Drowned City tries to add some subtle twists without straying too far from its core principles.

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Manufacturer: PurePC
Review unit specifications: Intel 3.33 GHz Core i7 980x CPU (water-cooled), twin ATI Radeon HD 5870 graphics cards in Crossfire, ASUSTek Rampage 3 Extreme motherboard, 6 GB Kingston HyperX DDR3 RAM at 1333 MHz, 1 TB Western Digital Caviar Black 7200 rpm SATA-II hard drive, 80 GB Intel X25-M Mainstream solid-state hard drive, Asus 12X BD-R Blu-ray optical drive (250 ms), Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit OS
Price as configured: $4,525.00
Base price: $2,940.00

One of the reasons why the PC is the superior gaming platform is its flexibility. Game developers are limited by console hardware characteristics, which have changed very little (if at all) since the beginning of the current console generation. But with a PC, a developer is free to let his imagination run wild, because he knows that PC hardware is constantly evolving. The downside of all of this technology is its expense. A pre-built, mid-range gaming PC is quite an investment, and some bleeding-edge rigs can be priced higher than a decent used car.

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Publisher: Rockstar Games
Developer: Rockstar San Diego
Genre: Shooter DLC
ESRB rating: Mature
Release date: Available now

Looking to extend your Red Dead Redemption experience? Undead Nightmare offers more than just the same gunplay of the original game. Rockstar gets credit for concentrating on a single-player DLC story extension when so many developers seem to focus on the multiplayer aspects. That is not to say that Undead Nightmare doesn’t offer any such goodies; one of its new multiplayer modes prompted me to turn my back on normal life and camp out in my living room. My legs are numb, my thumbs are raw, bloodied stumps, and I have to sleep with the light on.

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Publisher: Rockstar Games
Developer: Rockstar San Diego
Genre: Action adventure
ESRB rating: Mature
Release date: Available now

If, like me, you grew up on a staple diet of Clint Eastwood westerns you would have received the release of Rockstar’s Red Dead Redemption with anticipated excitement. The game was released after a sustained media plug and seen as the successor to Rockstar’s earlier Grand Theft Auto series. So is the game worthy of such hype? Slide off your dust covered saddle, hitch up your horse and come sit down by the campfire. Pour yourself a cup of warm coffee and stretch your aching limbs, and I’ll share my buckshot’s worth of opinion.

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Publisher: Activision
Developer: Treyarch
Genre: Shooter
ESRB rating: Mature
Release date: Available now

Call of Duty games have been around for awhile. Until recently you’d have to have been living on a deserted island to not hear about them. Games in the series are known for being highly rated and wildly entertaining. Call of Duty: Black Ops, developed by Treyarch, is the most recent one to hit store shelves and digital download queues. Can this entry in the famous series live up to the hype?

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Publisher: Activision
Developer: Eurocom
Genre: First Person Shooter
ESRB rating: Teen
Release date: Available now

The cult of Goldeneye is a strange one. For all intents, the original N64 version never should have succeeded. It was a licensed game, released a year too late because of development issues on a misunderstood platform that was using cartridges when the industry had moved on to disc-based media. In those tween years of video gaming, shooters were the bastion of the PC world, which looked down upon every sophomoric attempt made for the lower-class home console crowd. But Nintendo held a wild card in Rare, a British-based third-party developer that shared the Big N’s commitment to exhaustive quality control and expert game design. Both houses were dedicated to releasing products only when they had been fine-tuned towards one unwavering goal – providing a fun gameplay experience. And like Mario Kart before it, Rare’s Goldeneye 007 pushed sales of extra controllers like few other games, with a compelling four-player split-screen multiplayer mode that offered the next best alternative to a home-based LAN party. More than a decade later, Activision hopes to celebrate this nostalgia by bringing James Bond back to the company that first gave him that coveted license for virtual kills.

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Publisher: Raptisoft
Developer: Raptisoft
Compatibility: iOS 3.0 or later
Genre: RPG/Action
iTunes Rating: 9+
Release date: Available now

Solomon’s Keep is my favorite iOS game so far. It’s one of those items that I want to tell all of my iDevice-owning friends to buy. Heck, I even bought a copy on iTunes as a gift for a friend. Keep was developed by Raptisoft, a company of which I had been unaware, but judging by this game and the offerings on their website, they’ve got a good thing going. Keep takes elements from dungeon-crawlers, rogue-alikes and RPGs and wraps them up into a package that’s perfect for mobile gaming. If you’ve played and enjoyed hack’n’slash RPGs such as the Diablo series, then you must play this game. And if the items I just mentioned are unfamiliar, you’re in for an eye-opening treat.

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Manufacturer: SunFlex
MSRP: $35.00

When it comes to game controllers, I find that I usually like the standard. I can remember when new gaming control pads were introduced for the original Nintendo, but I usually just found them to be uncomfortable. I only mention this so you understand my usual level of skepticism of “new” controllers, especially those from 3rd party vendors. My belief is that when the software designers aren’t on the same team as the hardware designers, it’s probably not going to work out all that well for the gamer. And then I was asked to review the Snakebyte Wii Premium Remote XL+.

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Publisher: Bethesda Softworks
Developer: Obsidian Entertainment
Genre: FPS/RPG
ESRB rating: Mature
Release date: October 19, 2010

After the huge commercial success of Fallout 3, the post-apocalyptic action role playing game set in the ruins of Washington D.C., another game in the franchise seemed almost guaranteed. Fast forward to a couple of years later, and gamers are getting their wish with Fallout: New Vegas. Not a direct sequel to the previous title, New Vegas is simply a new chapter in the same world that has been expertly crafted by Obsidian Entertainment.

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Publisher: Valve Software
Developer: Turtle Rock Studios
Genre: First-Person Shooter
ESRB rating: Mature
Release date: Available now

Just in time for Halloween, the Left 4 Dead series is back again offering its players a brand new campaign to try out – The Sacrifice. For the sake of new players, let’s quickly summarize the gist of the previous L4D games: four people kill as many zombies as humanly possible while traversing over various landscapes. The Sacrifice offers more of the same (in a positive way), by letting players experience the events after the ending of the first Left 4 Dead game, but before the episode The Passing, which was released earlier this year and crossed over the characters from the first game into the sequel.

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Publisher: Frictional Games
Developer: Frictional Games
System requirements: Windows XP/Vista/Win 7/Linux/Mac, 1.5 GHz Intel Pentium 4 or equivalent CPU, 2 GB RAM, 128 MB Graphics Card, 3 GB hard-drive space
Genre: Survival horror/adventure
ESRB rating: Not rated at press time
Release date: Available now

Going all the way back to the classic Alone in the Dark, PC game developers have made many attempts to capture and re-create a sense of chilling fear to cause players to jump from their seats and scream in terror. Most of these efforts have fallen flat, resulting in laughably clumsy scenes that have no emotional impact or—even worse—backfire. Now Frictional Games, the creators of the well-regarded Penumbra franchise, have released a new first-person foray into this challenging niche—Amnesia: The Dark Descent. Can this game succeed where others have failed?

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Publisher: Square Enix
Developer: Square Enix
Genre: Action RPG
ESRB rating: Everyone 10+
Release date: Available now

Square Enix’s Kingdom Hearts series has inspired a kind of rabid, cult-like fan base that few games acquire. The Internet is crawling with cosplayers, fandom, fan art and fevered debates about the nature of the fabled Kingdom Hearts itself. All of this means that the series has a lot to live up to as fans doggedly tear apart anything they don’t feel lives up to their expectations. Birth By Sleep is the first PSP entry in the series and the first that features neither Sora nor Roxas as the main character.

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