While there are a myriad of different models, the important ones are 20GB and 60GB are hardware based compatible with playstation 2 games. The early 80GB models have software based PS2 emulation. This results in a few graphical and sound errors, but supposedly has a 98% playability. If you want to upgrade your harddrive, it's an easy procedure. Be careful, the blue screw is very very easy to strip.

All Playstation 3 Games are region free, but PS2 and PS1 games are region-locked. However Playstation 1 games can be downloaded from any region's Playstation Network.

• Ace Combat: Assault Horizon (also on: 360)
  • costel: A Reeses Cup of Modern Warfare and Ace Combat, audacious and utterly familiar, it has consistently surpassed my expectations for it. Even if those expectations were rooted in deep skepticism for a series I adore beyond all recognition.

• After Burner Climax (also on: 360, Arcade)
  • Felix: Very short, explosive, Sega-gorgeous rail shooter that might be too fast the way that modern Sonic might be too fast. Honestly not very replayable, but it evokes Outrun 2 and that's more than enough. Also, the world needs more AM2 ports.

• Alone in the Dark:Inferno
  • Rudie: This is easily one of the best games I've played this generation. I love the mountain of ideas this game has, even if they didn't use all of them all the time. It needed 6 more months of development time so they could put more stuff in the game. As is, the 10 hours it takes to beat are excellent. There is pretty good driving sectons, pretty good Uncharted style sections, and suitably awkward combat.

• Alpha Protocol (also on: PC, 360)
  • Tulpa: I played Alpha Protocol twice and had a riot of a time the second time through. I loved the first time through as a totally ridiculous game, but the second time showed me how versatile the game was.
  • space_jam: alpha protocol is a mess but it's a totally fucking amazing mess
  • costel: Alpha Protocol is at times, one of the most engaging games I've ever played. A purely stealth based character has been somewhat difficult to manage, but more than anything I find myself at odds with what to do regarding the characters I interact with. Faced with meaningful choices and consequences, is an experience that I was completely unprepared for.

• Armored Core For Answer (also on: 360) - forum thread forum thread
  • drobe: When correctly handled, AC:4A is a game that makes you feel that mankind is capable of so much more, largely because the physical dexterity and visuomotor reaction speed required to play the game is something so much more than man should be capable of. A must for a lonely individual in a dark, lonely room.

• Armored Core V (also on: 360) - forum thread

• Battle Fantasia (also on: 360)
  • Sniper Honeyviper: Around the same time they experimented with the ambitious RTS/action game Guilty Gear 2, Arc System Works debuted a friendly, accessible 2.5D fighter with gorgeous graphics, set in the world of a Tales-esque RPG. Neither of them sold, so they went back to over-complicated 2D anime wankfests with characters like soggy cardboard cutouts. Truth be told, Battle Fantasia isn't particularly unique or remarkable in the genre, but its sheer playability, satisfying crunchiness, and undeniable charm are enough to secure its place as an unsung classic. It's always a treat to play a fighter that doesn't belong to an established series, anyway. Many of the characters' movesets are interesting variations on the SFII cast: Guile is a shotacon altar boy, Ryu is a spunky kid with a chainsaw-motorcycle, and Balrog (Boxer) is a pirate captain with a move called HEAT MY JUSTICE. The 360 version got a retail release in America, the PS3 version is PSN-only.

• Battlefield 3 (also on: 360, PC)
  • Rudie: Has probably the best sound design of any game. Playing it on a good sound system is an amazing experience. The single player is shit. If you can get a friend or two the multiplayer will give you many many hours of giggling.

• Bayonetta (also on: 360) - forum thread forum thread
  • Loki: An obscenely fun 3d beatemup about a witch killing angels.
  • Rudie: It also really makes you feel awful for dying and I kind of resent the game for it. I enjoy it when I played it then I die and it pretty much kills all my interest again and again.

• Brutal Legend (also on: 360)
  • Rudie: This was a pretty good way to spend 12 hours! It definitely IS an RTS though.

• Burnout Paradise (also on: 360)
  • gatotsu2501: Have you ever wondered what GTA would be like if the car physics were actually good and Rockstar wasn't so fetishistically focused on enabling the player to mass-murder pedestrians? It'd probably be something like this. Zooming around the city just for the hell of it is really a joy, and trying to wreck your car in the most spectacular way possible never gets old. I've played it for hours and hours now and barely even done any races.
  • Felix: Has almost nothing that I liked about Burnout; bizarrely lonely open world that badly lacks a sense of design. It works on the same level as GTA for some people, but not for me.

• Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (also on: PC, 360)
  • P1d40n3 : It's MW! A crunchy and well-paced campaign, enjoyable multiplayer…what's not to love? Consensus puts the best difficulty at Hardened; Veteran degenerates into memorization of enemy placement (no Halo style dynamic combat here; one mistake is death), and everything else is far to easy. That being said, Mile High Club (Epilogue mission) on Veteran is the providence of the Elite, and almost worth the price of admission.
  • gatotsu2501: The very premise of war shooters has always made me fairly uncomfortable, and Modern Warfare does little to ease that discomfort (no, not even the nuke level). On a purely mechanical level, I found the gunplay far too hectic to enjoy, and the targeting too demanding for a console controller. On normal mode you barely even need to do anything, as your AI teammates will take care of most of the opposition.

• Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (also on: PC, 360)
  • Rudie: It's MW2! The predictable less filling, but bigger sequel to Modern Warfare 1. The online is occasionally great despite what others may say. It's not perfect, and at this point it's probably filled with hackers.

• Catherine (also on: 360) - forum thread
  • Rudie: The block pushing adult drama by the Persona Team. The story can take wildly different paths based on your actions and responses. Everyone on SB should definitely give a try.
  • gatotsu2501: “Adult” is a relative term. The writing is still pretty hokey and juvenile by non-video game standards, and in the last act the plot takes a turn for the retarded. That said, it's still worth playing simply for being completely different from any other current-gen game, a throwback to a seemingly bygone era where console publishers were willing to experiment with offbeat and conceptual premises in their big-budget games.

• The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena (also on: PC, 360)
  • gatotsu2501: Renders “Butcher Bay” irrelevant, as the entire game is included here with updated graphics in addition to the shorter but entirely competent sequel. Both games are so aesthetically masterful that I'm willing to forgive the fact that their gameplay is fairly dated and the stealth mechanics often quite frustrating. You will probably enjoy the story more if you have seen the movies, and thus are already familiar with the character of Riddick, because otherwise he just comes off as a sadistic asshole. It's not a necessity, though.

• The Darkness (also on: 360)
  • gatotsu2501: Rough and unpolished shooter with some really neat ideas and excellent presentation - the voice acting is some of the best I've heard in video games, the environments are beautiful, twisted and haunting, and there are some truly unforgettable event sequences thrown in there. The 360 version looks better and runs smoother.

• Dark Souls (also on: 360) - forum thread forum thread forum thread
  • Youpi: Dark Souls makes me wish the internet didn't exist so I could only get my information about it from the other kids trying to sort out the useful strategies from the ludicrous playground rumors.
  • Adilegian: When I got to the first boss, that guardian drake thing of the crypt, I thought, “Oh, haha From, this is where I die and get taken somewhere or something. You can't fool me!” And then I just died!
    • Adilegian: Holy crap this game is hard.
  • TXTSWORD: I would certainly not say it's perfect — there are valid complaints… but the positives so far outweigh any problems that I just can't bring myself to care too much. A lot of their ideas were so ambitious that there are bound to be problems and to me this only shows great promise for the future of the souls games. More refinement on solid ideas and probably more ambitious ideas that maybe don't work perfectly but so fucking what. It's progress and it's daring and it's brilliant.
    Last weekend I decided I'd Dark Souls'd out after making 3 new character to completion in less than 2 weeks time. I made it almost a week before I started Generic Knight and I've had as much fun as I've ever had. I'm sitting on several more character ideas I'll want to make. Sometimes I'm freshly aware and appreciative of how bizarre and wondrous the world design is and how interesting and gorgeous the environments are. I'm so appreciative of a game that isn't trying to be “bad ass”. I mean reading¹⁾ the game's producer talking about his refusal to include gratuitous blood and gore seems so refreshing. It's not so much the exact subject — blood and gore — as the mindset. It's a sort of desire for refinement, for quality, for a cohesive and unique vision and direction. For having principals. It's as if the game has respect for itself and refuses to lower itself to people who want a hard ass protagonist spouting one liners (as an example). It's the kind of thing I'm not used to seeing and I don't think it's occurred to me just how deeply I appreciate and respect that. It's kind of difficult for me to articulate, and for that I'm sorry.
  • spectralsound: Both Souls games are amazing even if only for the fact that they're content with keeping quiet about some things, and leaving it up to the player to determine what that character's history is or what his motives are or where he's going. It's honestly about a much of a selling point for me as the gameplay is, especially in this era of Skyrims and Mass Effects, where every random villager or space tourist has this dense backstory that is presented to you in text dumps with such frequency that it becomes suffocating. Playing Dark Souls after playing those games feels like zen meditation.
  • remote: Dark Souls is a bit more ambitious than its predecessor and is thus more engrossing (or just as engrossing, but perhaps with greater longevity) despite a couple of late areas that feel like big ideas with disappointingly very little to be seen or explored. I can't really bring myself to say that Demon's Souls was hands-down the better game, but “more graceful” might be an apt enough way of putting it. It feels more elegant and complete in its simplicity, whereas Dark Souls has left me wanting more, driving me to keep playing and experimenting with covenants, new characters/classes, PVP and co-op, narrative aspects I have not yet discovered, etc. I'm definitely consumed by it as well.
  • Tulpa: Tulpa: I think one of the most aesthetically appealing things about Dark Souls, especially compared to other fantasy games, is the way it taps into a mythopoeic style of fantasy as opposed to an ersatz medievalism+monsters.
    Within Dark Souls, the player character interacts with gods and demons from the very start and fights to change the cosmology of the world instead of wandering around a traditional and ultimately unsatisfying fantasy setting that feels like pop culture medieval earth plus orcs.

• (Deadly Premonition) Red Seeds Profile (JP) (PS3 version is Japan only) (also on: 360) - forum thread
  • Rudie: Looks like I need to man up and talk about DP here. It features one of the best characters in a game, FBI Special Agent Francis York Morgan. That guy has the world's most perfect smirk! The game is half awesome Shenmue but set in Japan's version of the town from Twin Peaks and half limp wristed trudging survival horror. I strongly recommend you buy a copy of this game right now, even with how much of playing it made me groan. It looks like the world's best Dreamcast game + bloomlighting.
  • This Machine Kills Fascis: Man, I hate that all the positive reviews for Deadly Premonition reduce it to some kind of so-bad-it's-good midnight movie game.
    It's more like the sort of midnight movie that you see and you realize, “Oh wait, this is doing stuff I've never seen in a big studio movie. I mean, clearly they had no budget, but there's actually a spark of unbridled creativity and a thoughtfulness here.”
    I mean, at no point during Deadly Premonition did I feel like I was condescending to the game or its creators. Y'know, when I'm playing something like Gears of War I'm forced to try and enjoy the game's mechanics despite feeling like I'd avoid the people who made the game if I saw them at a party. I've said before that I don't want to play Mass Effect, because I don't want my “open world” choices constricted by the biases of developers who seem to have an outlook on the world that grosses me out. I don't want to climb into someone else's fucked up head. With Deadly Premonition, I didn't feel this same tension. It felt like a game made by people that are actually interested in exploring what kind of game they could get away with making.
    And, c'mon, you have to respect their chutzpah. They basically decided to make Shenmue with a thousandth of the budget and probably improved on the formula (offering a more obvious central story thread to focus on).

• Demon's Souls - forum thread
  • CubaLibre: An sb sacred cow, revered only slightly less than the immortal God Hand. A bleak, desperate 3D dungeon-crawling action-RPG where combat is about commitment: there are very few cancels, and every action leaves you open to attack. Lethally difficult but always strictly fair. Features inventive online modes that revolve around death and resurrection, the game's central theme. Perhaps most notable for the way it embodies the principle of story and atmosphere through mechanics rather than text dumps or mere cinematography.
  • Rudie: I still think extremely highly of this game even if it made me sigh a few times. The bosses aren't as challenging as they could have been, and the New Game + is just numbers are higher. You absolutely must play it as it is still a stellar game.
  • ChairTax: This game was easily my favorite game from this console generation and it's no hyperbole to say that it completely reshaped how and why I play videogames.

• Devil May Cry 4 (also on: 360, PC)
  • Rudie: When you want 1/3rd of a video game.
  • Sniper Honeyviper: “1/2 of a video game, played forwards then backwards” seems more accurate. I actually enjoyed it (on 360) quite a bit until the blue-balling “puzzle” stages, Nero's got a genuinely interesting moveset even if it was obviously unfinished.
  • P1d40n3: There is no reason to play this if you can play DMC3 or Bayonetta.
  • boojiboy7: I would play this over Bayonetta any day of the week. DMC3 is still better, though having the ability to switch Dante styles on the fly in DMC4 is pretty interesting, and makes me hope for a full game of it sometime. Nero is more interesting than people give him credit for though, as Sniper hinted.

• Earth Defense Force Insect Armageddon (also on: 360) - forum thread
  • Rudie: It's EDF with an online mode! EDF! EDF!

• El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron (also on: 360) - forum thread
  • Rudie: A gorgeous adventure, then they ran out of time/money.
  • gatotsu2501: I'm tempted to make a joke about Evangelion, Xenogears, and the curse of Japanese pop entertainment based on the Bible, but I just can't seem to tie it all together.

• Fallout: New Vegas (also on: 360, PC) - forum thread
  • CubaLibre: It's ok. The way the story branches and accommodates you is probably as good as the first Fallout, but the atmosphere is still a little too themepark and the FPS mechanics just suck compared to old action point tactical stuff. Plus it's still a goof-glitchy Bethesda halfdisaster. Their best effort since Morrowind though certainly.
    • Tulpa: So long as you don't use VATS (or play with the realism mod²⁾ I keep recommending) the FPS mechanics work pretty fine (or better than most shooters). One of the big things about the realism mod is that it makes the AI act intelligently. They take cover, they flank, they use grenades. They don't charge you. If you stealth kill an ally of theirs, they will look for you. Even if they just find a dead body a little while later. Your companion doesn't step in the way of bullets anywhere near as often.
      While I can kind of see the theme park criticism, it's a lot less present than in Fallout 3. Mostly comparable to Fallout 2 (which makes sense, it's by the same guys.). There's a weird diversity to environments like in FO2 (the disconnect between the old west feel of most of the world and the New Reno feel of New Vegas was jarring and certain factions feel out of place), but there's some attention paid to how these people live. There are farms, people herd cattle. There aren't untouched abandoned convenience stores fifty feet away from a town with a food shortage. The world actually feels lived in, at times. The game is just very similar to Fallout 2 but with a more interesting plot.
      I don't think there are any generic respawning shooting gallery enemies other than wildlife. There's maybe two patches of feral ghouls in the entire game and only one group of unfriendly super mutants which can be dealt with without any ridiculous fucking bossfights (OR AVOIDED ENTIRELY). Everyone else actually has a place in the world. I kind of want to try a pacifist stealth/diplomacy run of the game but that might be near impossible.

• Journey - forum thread
  • Felix: Incredibly beautiful, focused ninety minutes that has co-op as novel and enchanting as Dark Souls', and manages to cash in on the minimalist aesthetic without seeming like it's disingenuously aping Ueda. Rivals the first Portal for its successful brevity alone; accessible to and deserves a broader audience.

• Kane and Lynch 2: Dogs Days (also on: 360, PC) - forum thread
  • Rudie: Okay, maybe I am retarded for games set in East Asia. I still liked this game a lot more than either Gears. I think the level design is fantastic for encouraging co-op flanking maneuvers. It has two levels that I had been wanting to see in action movies forever. It is an excellent 5 hour affair that I have now replayed several times over, just because I enjoy it that much.
  • Broco: I got Dog Days on the recommendation of folks here, played for 10 minutes and was pretty meh about it. It certainly has a distinctive visual style — the title screen in particular is really cool — but that style collapses as soon as the camera starts tracking your character in the usual videogame way. Then it's just a pile of jerky and imprecise third-person shooting, and it doesn't help that the first mission feels like it's already padding for length with repetitive, story-irrelevant content. May not bother playing further unless someone tells me it really gets better. I think it's the kind of thing where you know in advance whether you really like the style and that makes you forgive the rest.
    • CubaLibre: I feel like you are way off the mark here. the guns are imprecise on purpose, none of the content is story-irrelevant (well; none of it is theme-irrelevant). it's one of the most coherent games I've ever played in terms of every single element being bent towards a singular emotional goal, as good or better than valve's best.
    • CubaLibre: The effect it's going for is to be as much like a shitty digital Youtube cam as possible while still allowing you to play a cover shooter. The fact that it's a playable cover shooter is very important, because the point of the game is that any protagonist of a cover shooter is a fucking maniac. it's taking the old http://actionbutton.net/ABDN “drake kills too many people” argument and putting it front and center.
      It's also a hellaciously tense and busy shooter, in part because the guns are fairly inaccurate. Lead is spraying everywhere and chewing through the scenery. getting up close is very dangerous but also rewarded in that you can hit things much easier. The game wouldn't work if it wasn't good, for obvious reasons (no game works if it isn't good). You get a kind of dull grinding feeling for lack of variety of weapons and attacks that's offset by some great variety in level design. And it's all extremely short, playable in one long sitting. Pretty delicious.
  • Dracko: The point is, the first level is significant. It's part of the story. So is the second, the third and so on. Every element of the game is purposeful, and not just from a story stand-point.

• Little Big Planet
  • boojiboy7: An interesting experiment, if not always a great game. The idea of making a game based largely on user-generated content reveals that at least 90% of users have no clue what they are doing, but the 10% that do make up for it. The game is wrapped in a fairly charming skin as well, with a narrator that manages to sound both like a children's book and a snarky ass occasionally. The multi-plane platforming works for the most part, but occasionally makes getting to various parts of the levels an unnecessary pain. Still a lot of fun to be had, and a fairly simple game to explain to anyone who has ever played Super Mario Brothers.
  • Felix: Fairly successful game design / crowdsourcing / what-have-you project that has unbelievably, heartbreakingly bad physics.

• Lost Planet 2 (also on: 360, PC) - forum thread
  • Rudie: Another game of 2010 that got slammed by critics but was especially great. The problem is you need people to play with. Which should be relatively easy, because a lot of SB has a copy. Also: Space Mexicans.

• Metal Gear Solid 4
  • boojiboy7: An awesome horrible amazing trainwreck of a videogame that manages to be a lot of fun and entirely offputting for a lot of people. Hideo Kojima flips a giant bird at anyone who gave anything resembling a shit about the plot of Metal Gear, tying up plot ends nobody knew existed and making everything die or get married. Also comes with the amazing Metal Gear Online, which turns the rules of Metal Gear into a playground to mess with.
  • Rudie: Everytime I think about it I want to die. This is a game funeral. Metal Gear Online is pretty fucking sweet though.
  • Felix: The “Adaptation” of the MGS franchise; an Ouroboros joke on its main character's name, ten years in the making. May break your heart, but it's a worthy spectacle despite being substantially less fantastic than MGS3. A pretty bad “game” without the online mode.
  • gatotsu2501: Temporarily setting aside the (ahem) issues with the story, the entire way through the game I was waiting for it to finally let me play Metal Gear Solid. It never did. Like Mario Galaxy, its obsession with novelty means that it never settles into its own rhythm. It's so committed to twisting the series formula (with mixed results) that it never actually establishes one of its own, or even really lets you do the basic stuff you want (well, I want) when you pop in an MGS game. Maybe each of the Acts should've been its own game. Also, the boss fights after the first one are all overlong and infuriating.

• Mirror's Edge (also on: 360, PC) - forum thread
  • drobe: It's a game that really tries to convince you that you're running along a mile-long A4 drawing beautiful calligraphy with wallruns and rolls. At times it actually feels like that, but it usually ends up feeling a lot like riding a runaway train while being chased by an even larger, angrier runaway train. The construction site was quite fantastic, I think.
  • Felix: By far EA's best conceptual effort of recent years. Slightly overproduced, and decidedly mixed level design.

• NieR (also on: 360)
  • Rudie: A great Zelda-like from cavia that killed said company when it didn't sell. It features great genre mixing with bullet-hell bosses and a visual novel dungeon as examples. The characters are wonderfully entertaining. Also: Boar Drifting.

• Ninja Gaiden Sigma (also on: Xbox)
  • gatotsu2501: The crown jewel of 3D action games. The controls are fricticious and delicious; the combat is beautifully fine-tuned and the difficulty is impeccably balanced. I've never played another game with difficulty that felt so organic and fair; every time you fail, you know it's because you screwed up, and every time you succeed you know it's because you damn well earned it. In every encounter you feel evenly matched. The major thorn in this game's side is the painful and exasperating camera, though if you think it's bad here you should try the Xbox versions, which use strictly Ocarina of Time camera controls (minus lock-on). I must confess to never having played Ninja Gaiden Black, which I've heard is the definitive version.
  • Felix: I've actually lost track of how many times they've remade this game across the past two console generations and how many releases are actually sequels, but nevermind that. It's a really good, less technical but no less interesting take on Devil May Cry (better than Bayonetta / God of War / etc.) that, due to various little flaws, never makes you feel quite good enough for winning or bad enough for losing.
  • boojiboy7: Ninja Gaiden inevitably ends up boring the shit out of me. I want it not to, but it always does.

• Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2
  • gatotsu2501: Not in the same league as its predecessor in terms of level design, pacing and balance, but the reworked combat mechanics and greater emphasis on weapon variety make it perfectly worth playing on its own merits. I haven't played enough of Ninja Gaiden II for 360 to properly compare them beyond superficial elements (though, yeah, the censorship in Sigma is pretty ridiculous).

• Portal 2 (also on: PC, 360)
  • gatotsu2501: PS3 version contains Steam integration for co-op and achievements, and comes with a free digital PC copy to boot, so if you have a PS3 this is probably the version to get.

• Ratchet and Clank: A Crack in Time
  • Rudie: If you've played one Ratchet and Clank game, you've played a Ratchet and Clank game. This is the most recent one. They are fun 12-15 hour video games. I'd recommend you try one, and then decide whether you want more of that.
  • Felix: Like all of Insomniac's games, it's good maximalist fun, but a tad too floaty to actually be exceptional. If your character were a bit better at dodging and could take fewer hits, would be a great game.

• Resonance of Fate / End of Eternity (JP) (also on: PS3) - forum thread
  • Rudie: THE REAL FINAL FANTASY XIII.
  • boojiboy7: It's a really strange game from a lot of fronts. It is a jRPG with a pretty decent little story, except it doesn't shove the story down your throat and relies on you making a lot of connections that aren't explicitly stated. The combat system is ridiculously complicated and meat-y, and even 20 hours in, I was figuring out some new tricks with it. There are some random bouts of anime humor, unfortunately, but they are somewhat isolated, and almost comedic for how little they fit the tone of the rest of the game.

• Shadows of the Damned
  • Rudie: Better than we were all expecting. Akira Yamaoaka's soundtrack carries the game though.
  • gatotsu2501: Disappointingly bland, which is just about the last shortcoming you'd expect from the talent involved.

• Siren:Blood Curse
  • Rudie: They took Siren, and made a playable video game out of it.

• Stuntman: Ignition (also on: 360)
  • Rudie: Pass the Controller game of the year 2008. By the makers of Beetle Adventure Racing!
  • gatotsu2501: Fun fact: the scriptwriter for this game, Jared Hedges, also did script adaptations for No More Heroes 2 and the English dubs of several anime including YuYu Hakusho, Fullmetal Alchemist and Crayon Shin-chan.

• Super Street Fighter IV (also on: Arcade, 360, 3DS)
  • Rudie: SUPER STREET FIGHTER IV YOU FUCKERS.
  • P1d40n3: Not the greatest fighting game of all time, but it will doubtless prove the be an important one.

• Uncharted
  • CubaLibre: Indiana Jones as played by Nathan Fillion. Some of the only legitimately good voice acting in videogames. And the shooting's pretty fun too.

• Uncharted 2
  • CubaLibre: Like the first one, with lusher graphics, better setpieces and possibly the best pacing of any videogame in history. Not a single boring moment. Includes also a smattering of multiplayer modes which, contrary to all expectations, are quite compelling.
  • Rudie: The logical bits of this game bothered me more than in Uncharted 1 and parts of the dialog really got to me. It does have better setpieces, but I like Uncharted 1 more.
  • Felix: As a platformer, it's the Sands-of-Time-failure-doesn't-matter mentality taken to its logical, depressing conclusion, which is basically “you can't fail, so just enjoy this movie about jumping.” Uneven stealth sections and Kane-and-Lynch-style clumsy gunfights are both initially frustrating but certainly intentional. In any case, it's one of the most polished and best-acted games ever made, and despite the many, many concessions to the almost automatic pacing, gets progressively better up to the very end.
  • gatotsu2501: I'm a little bit tempted to wag my finger at Naughty Dog for so often falling back on combat to provide entertainment in what is ostensibly a platformer, but they're so much better at the combat segments than the exploration and platforming ones that I can't really blame them. As in the first game, the shooting's hella fun just as long as the chilling disconnect between the story and gameplay's respective portrayals of Nathan Drake doesn't bother you. It bothered me.

• Valkryia Chronicles
  • Rudie: After 7 chapters of 18, I think I'm done with this. I see what it's doing, but the combat isn't as engaging, but I couldn't give the developers suggestions on how to make it better. Download the demo for a really good idea of what you are getting into. Features Vyse and Aika of Skies of Arcadia for what it's worth.
  • Felix: The narrative is, for lack of a better word, appalling (jRPG tropes out the yin-yang + alternate history WW2 = liberating cel-shaded concentration camps), and makes you wonder if Skies of Arcadia has really aged that poorly. Pacing is also a bit funny – you go from a somewhat protracted introduction to a succession of gimmicky battles that make you long for a chance to just play with the core rules of the game. Suffers slightly from Final Fantasy X syndrome when it comes to building your characters, in that you're forced to approve a bunch of non-decisions manually. In spite of all that, this is easily the most inventive narrative-driven strategy RPG on a console that wasn't made by Matsuno, and pretty much the only game of its class in close to a decade. Makes as many smart design decisions as dumb ones; fans of the genre have no reason not to pick it up.

• Vanquish (also on: 360) - forum thread
  • gatotsu2501: Level and enemy design are a bit bland and the story, even as little of it as there is, is jarringly atrocious. That said, the controls and core mechanics (shooting, dashing, using your suit powers, etc.) are solid as steel, and it's still a better action game than just about any other you're likely to play.
  • CubaLibre: It's a pretty good game with a couple of very crippling flaws. It could have been truly great, but instead it's just pretty fun.
  • TORUMASUTA: It's not the THIRD PERSON SHOOTER BY THE MAKERS OF GOD HAND AND BAYONETTA that you think it's going to be, but it's hella fun for a single playthrough. Of course, I got the game for less than 20 bucks, so one playthrough of the campaign got me my money's worth—your appreciation might vary.
    • There's a DLC weapons pack that costs something like three dollars which adds in three weapons. It's one of the few DLC packs that I can wholeheartedly recommend; one of the weapons is this giant Laser Cannon and it's a lot of fun to use. The other two weapons in the pack aren't too different from what's already there, but the game pretty much forces you to use the Assault Rifle for most of the game, and having the Boost Machine Gun to mix it up occasionally is great. Never got much use out of the Anti-Armor Pistol, but it's cool because it's an ANTI-ARMOR PISTOL.
  • Baseballkappe: I think I saw Dracko comparing it to MDK here and it's absolutely true and it's great fun and I kind of really love the game.
    If anything it's the most cheerful militaryish shooter on the market.
    Also boosting right through enemy lines and trying to attack them from the rear while being showered with bullets is cool.

• Virtua Tennis (also on: 360, PC)
  • Rudie: Virtua Tennis in next generation Sega hideous. Why would you even consider ever playing pong?

• White Knight Chronicles
  • Rudie: Absolutely not. This game is boring offline/online JRPG with inane semi-real time (the enemies keep hitting you, you have to wait to hit) battle system. The plot and environments are as absolutely generic as possible. This game continues to prove Level 5 can't make a good game without outside assistance. The best skyboxes I've ever seen though.

• Yakuza 3
  • Rudie: It's more of the Yakuza action as you can expect. The US version took out about 15% of all the bonus shit you can do. It's mechanically just about the exact same game as Yakuza 1 + you are in Okinawa too. It does have Boxcelleos which honestly, is good enough to be a standalone PSN shooter. Will probably be completely outclassed when Yakuza 4 reaches Western shores.

• Yakuza 4
  • Rudie: This time it isn't just Kiryuu. It also only has Kamurocho. It definitely tightens up everything loose about Yakuza 3 and has no cut content.

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