This Week In Gaming 11/27 - 12/4

Games Played: Urban Reign (PS2), Kinetica (PS2), Smackdown vs Raw 2006 (PS2), Borderlands Pre-Sequel (XBOne)

Had lots of fun with the games on this list, most of them favorites of mine for years.  The uptick in PS2 gaming is a direct result of sharing my HDTV with my nephew while I use the older CRT TV. It's been fun reconnecting with the console, especially these old favorites of mine.

SVR 2006 is still an incredibly fun game and as far as I understand is the last of those older faster paced wrestling titles.  The newer games are too slow for my tastes so SVR is always a fun game to go back to especially the laugh out loud hilarious Hell in a Cell matches where characters go into proverbial comas after falling from the top of the cell.  Me and my nephews have had a lot of fun with this one lately.
Recommendation: A really fun and solid wrestling game that has a timeless appeal in its core gameplay.  The quick pace is what I think is missing in many modern wrestling games.  Even if you like those, try this one and spend a whole day of your life creating characters and tossing them off the cell.





I played Urban Reign on a whim after playing some Tekken and wrestling games.  I'd never beaten Urban Reign before despite the many years its been in my possession, so I figured now would be the perfect time to do so.  Urban Reign is a 3D beat-em-up, a favorite genre of mine, that's made by Namco.  There is a heavy Tekken influence in the attacks and other animations of each of the game's fighters and there are even unlockable Tekken characters in the game. This time around, I had a lot of fun pulling an all-nighter to finally beat the game from start to finish.  It was tough, with some really unfair moments, but it was fun overall.
Recommendation: Solid mechanics and extra modes make this one a blast.  Too bad the characters were a little too generic to leave a lasting impression, otherwise this one would be remembered more fondly.  Still, I put this in the same vein as Def Jam: Fight For New York (which I hold in high esteem.)  So try it out if you like beat 'em ups like Streets of Rage, Final Fight, or The Warriors.



My nephew randomly fired Kinetica up one night and asked me to play it with him.  After completely annihilating him in each race I got the urge to unlock all the tracks and racers.  Surprisingly those few skills I learn while playing this game more than ten years ago have stuck with me along with the strategies.  It felt great to boost, siphon, stunt, drift, and collect my way to victory and the topsy turvy track design was still exhilarating after all these years.  Just today alt. racer Steyer took me to victory in all three season modes.  Now to unlock the three secret racers.
Recommendation: Not an ordinary racing game by any stretch.  I think I like Kinetica so much because winning relies as much if not more on strategy than it does superb piloting skills.  The sense of speed is only really there when you're boosting and sometimes the track design does work against you even when you know what's coming, but all in all this is one of my all time favorite racing games and I don't like too many.  So if strapping into motorized roller skates and going hundreds of miles per hour on stages that would give Sonic the Hedgehog a head rush while listening to trippy techo songs sounds like fun then you should definitely give this one a try.



Borderlands has been my favorite shooter series for the last two generations and playing through Pre-Sequel on the Xbox One has been a blast.  I purchased it digitally after my nephew was complaining about the lack of split screen games in modern gaming.  I, of course, remembered fondly playing through both BL 1 and 2 side by side with each of my best friends. After going out and buying an extra controller we started a new campaign, him with Nisha and me with Aurelia.  When he's not playing, I play as The Doppelganger.  There's not much I can say here about the game without going on at length about it, so I'll save it for a later post.  Just know that this installment is fun and unique.
Recommendation: Well worth the buy.  There's not as much content as BL2 but that game was just about perfect when it came to DLC.  Go get it now if you haven't.

Next Gen Gaming Bonanza at E3

This year's E3 can be described in many words, the ones I choose to use are confusing, drama filled,  and distracting.  We watched as Microsoft put out a barrage of hard hitting titles and other titles that looked good but will probably disappoint (I don't think Ryse will be that good).  They were the masters of ceremony and what they successfully did, at least for a day, was pull the wool over people's heads.  Their rapid fire blast of exclusives hit hard and trumped up a ton of excitement.

I think their smartest move was grabbing up that super polished looking Dead Rising 3 as an exclusive.  Dead Rising as many of you know is a game that I have a mostly hate filled relationship with and one that I am currently analyzing to see why people like it so much.  This new Dead Rising actually got me excited to play with it's overhauled game engine, one that looks very similar to my beloved Resident Evil 6 I might add.  It looks like it might be the systems killer app to me.  Everyone's on a zombie kick and this looks like it'll be in many a household by the time it comes out.

My friends and I were bad mouthing the Xbox One for several days before Microsoft's press event but you wouldn't have known that by the way my friends were talking about Dead Rising and buying a One just for it.  This, along with the rest of the high octane trailers and the excitement on social media sites like Facebook got me thinking.  Did Microsoft just successfully distract people from their horrid gaming model (which from what I'm hearing may not even be that bad but more on that later.)  I certainly wasn't "duped."  I was as salty as ever.  From what I was hearing Sony would adopt a similar strategy for used games and so I felt like I was overall done with console gaming.  This and the Kinect and 24 hour internet check-in debacle on Microsoft's end made me want nothing to do with this "next generation" of gaming.  I felt that they had already started a slippery slope of gamer abuse with our current generation of Downloadable Content in games that weren't finished from the get go and DLC that was already on the disk that you still had to pay for.

I feel that when something gets too big that it never fails to start overreaching and that's what I felt and still feel about console gaming.  To be a console gamer (which I've always solely been) it requires a lot of dedication.  You buy a system that's expensive as hell and you shell out a quarter of your paycheck on new games for it.  Now we all pay an additional $50 or so to join or respective system's online service.  If you have both PS Plus and Xbox Gold yearly memberships then you are shelling out roughly that much for both depending on whatever hookups you may have.  You also pay for your own internet and the additional electricity that these consoles drain.  That's a lot of money.  That's a lot of money to pay for someone else to still have control over what you can do with your product.  I don't believe in that.  I also don't believe that these games that are coming out are worth all this money and effort.  I've been having more fun lately playing my PS2 than I have playing my Xbox 360, that I just got mind you.  I just don't see anything out there on the market that's worth all this hassle and hubbub.  I've preordered the Ouya and am hoping that they do something interesting with that.  The fact that it's so indie friendly and cheap makes me confident that I made the right purchase.

This article has trailed on a bit so I'll write a follow up to this in the coming days.  I need to investigate this whole Xbox debacle anyway but from what I'm hearing the Xbox One's "bad" features are not nearly as bad as we thought, there may even be a way to turn them off but I'll go into that and Sony's funny jabs at the competition and break down their statements.  Like always thanks for the browse!