It’s no wonder why licensed games sell well: even as I was still sat in the theater watching Iron Man 3, I thought to myself, “Man, I really want to play a good Iron Man game!”

It’s fun to think about: what weapons and abilities you could use, whether the suit would take cosmetic damage or whether there is enough money in the world to get Robert Downey Jr to voice act in the game (spoiler: there isn’t). Not to mention what villains would appear, what the structure of the game would be, etc… There is a lot to juggle in something like this. I personally think an open-world game, like Infamous or Arkham City would be best. Just think of it like Far Cry 3 or Mercenaries: give me a big open world, lots of things to do and let me play. Maybe even throw in some War Machine for 2-player co-op goodness and it can’t miss!

Read the rest of this entry »

With the recent success of BioShock Infinite, it may be time to revisit the “favorite video game sidekick” topic. Sure, no character will ever beat Mass Effect’s Garrus Vakarian for me (he’s like space-Batman except he shoots people), but the usefulness of Elizabeth in BioShock Infinite may catapult her to the top of many lists.

She finds ammo, health and Salts for you, doesn’t get in the way during combat and her ability to open tears can be handy in a pinch. While shepherding Elizabeth through Columbia is essentially an extended escort quest, the benefits of having her around makes you wonder who’s guiding who. Add that to the fact that she’s an interesting, well-rounded character and you have yourself a strong case.

Of course, there’s always the old stand-by Alyx Vance, but as the saying goes “out of sight, out of mind” and it’s been a long while since we’ve seen her. So, what do you guys say? Who’s your favorite video game sidekick?

There are so many outlets to get games these days. Amazon, digital and all the various retail stores that are still left standing. Although the number of places to purchase games is shrinking, there are still plenty of options, all with different sales, bonuses, trade-in credits and promotions to lure your hard earned dollars to their specific business. So rather than wonder any longer, I thought I would ask you guys: where do you buy your games?

It’s a simple question, but an important one. And it can vary, depending on what game you are buying and what platform. If buying on the PC, we all will likely say Steam, but what console games and other times when physical media is the only way to go? Personally, I am all about Amazon. Their trade-in deals are better than GameStop’s and their prices are usually more inexpensive as well. Not to mention that supply is rarely an issue. If I go into GameStop or Best Buy, they are going to have Call of Duty, but what if I am looking for something a tad more obscure? Amazon fixes that issue for me.

Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to “GamerSushi Asks Friday”.

Like a lot of you guys, I’ve played many, many video games throughout my life, but no matter how many more I play or how much time has passed since playing certain games, there will always be aspects I can remember once I get my hands on a controller.

Recently I was watching my girlfriend play through The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D when she got to Jabu Jabu’s Belly and got stumped at some point. Having played Ocarina of Time quite a bit I thought I could tell her how to get passed the puzzle, but unless I am holding the game in my hands, I can’t remember. If I’m playing the game, then I have no problem. The same thing happened recently when I was feeling a little nostalgic and put in Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3: I could recall where every SKATE letter was and where all the secret tapes were, and I had no problem chaining together massive combos.

I guess it’s kind of like riding a bike in that you brain just never forgets when something is ingrained into your memory like that. Do you guys have any games where no matter how many years it’s been since you last played, you can pick up the controller and instantly be a pro at it?

It’s GamerSushi Asks Friday!

One of the most important aspects of a shooter is the weaponry, but beyond that, having a powerful, satisfying shotgun in your virtual arsenal is key. Sometimes a shotgun can make or break a game, so we’d like to ask you what your favorite video game shotgun is.

Personally, I just can’t think of a better shotgun than the M90 Close Assault Weapon System from Halo: Combat Evolved. The first time you find this beastly firearm, you’ve just encountered the Flood and are hoping for a weapon that will put down the larger combat forms in one hit. The M90 CAWS is the answer to that prayer and for the rest of the game, this scattergun will occupy one of your two precious weapon slots whether you have ammo for it or not.

Runners up would be the Gnasher from Gears of War, which can turn you into a living meatgrinder in multiplayer if you can get the hang of it, or the SPAS-12 from Battlefield 3. I recently discovered that equipping slug rounds on the SPAS-12 turns it into a one-hit kill weapon at medium range, and it requires a bit more skill than the other full-auto weapons availible.

I may be skewing kind of modern here, so I’ll pose the question to you guys one again: what is your favorite video game shotgun?

I prefer being Small Mario.

I didn’t use to be this way. I used to love having Mario all powered-up, Mushrooms, Fire Flowers, Cape, what have you. But Mario’s time as a powerful plumber never lasted long. I always got careless and lost it.

But then something would happen. I would tense up, focus and suddenly become twice the gamer I was before. Being one hit away from death made me better. I enjoyed the tension, the finesse it required knowing I was skirting the precipice of doom. It got to the point that I would ignore power-ups and stay vulnerable because it made the game more exciting and made me a better player. Also, there is the fact that Small Mario is less of a target than Super Mario.

This happens with other games at times. For instance, there may be a section of the game that is built up to be very hard, so I go in very focused and end up beating it handily. This will occur on everything from RPG’s to FPS’s. I mentally psyche myself up and it translate to major pwnage of the game, sometimes leading myself to wonder what the big deal was about that section.

Am I alone in this phenomenon? Or does this happen anyone else out there? Let me know in the comments!

Games, guys. Games. Well, more accurately Borderlands 2 and some other stuff, but still. The big season is picking back up and there’s already too many damn things to play. I can’t keep track of it all, so I thought I would make a handy dandy post so you guys can write down the titles current spinning in your console or taking up your hard drive.

The top of the list for me is Borderlands 2, and I’m already in the new game + mode, or “True Vault Hunter”. Yes, Axton and I are going through that game again and the loot you get on the second run through is just insane. There’s an old World of Warcraft joke “green is the new purple” and that’s very apropos here. Just as an aside, the Commando is so much better than the Soldier from the first Borderlands. Having a turret that is able to rotate 360 degrees is a godsend.

Other than that I’ve been playing some FTL (including the ill-fated Flight of The Sushian), Black Mesa and Battlefield 3. I picked up Spec Ops: The Line for super cheap and I’m excited to start that. I also need to finish Mark of the Ninja and I have Sleeping Dogs waiting in the wings, so yeah. A lot of stuff.

What have you guys been playing? Any of the above games or something different?

I’m usually late to things. Not just physically late, although I am always chronically 5 minutes behind schedule at any given time. And no, moving my clocks early won’t work because I KNOW that I set it earlier, because I can do math and calculate the real time quite easily. It’s a gift.

No, I mean I am usually late when it comes to other things, like music, TV and video games. I didn’t start liking Radiohead until 2005. I didn’t watch Mad Men and Breaking Bad until a few months ago. And as for games…well, my first time playing Halo was in 2007. I didn’t play Gears of War until over a year after Gears of War 2 had been released. Same with Mass Effect. Some of this is easily explained: I didn’t have a 360 until then, so of course I wasn’t going to play those games. Now that I have a gaming PC, I am about to play Counterstrike for the first time. I will give you a moment to recover after that bombshell.

But what about the other games I let fall by the wayside, like Metal Gear Solid or Ico and Shadow of the Colossus? Why did these seminal games escape my grasp? No real reason, other than that I was likely busy playing something else, but even coming to the games well after the initial hype had subsided, I still found most of them to be terrific games. I’m just now getting through all the Metal Gear Solid games and even some Jak and Sly Cooper games I missed out on. I don’t mind being behind the times every now and then, but what about you? Are there games you “discovered” years later? Why did you miss out on them in the first place? Let’s hear it!

Holy crap guys, has this been a strange month or what? Things are usually pretty dead in August (there have been some exceptions) but this year takes the cake. We’ve seen Darksiders 2 and Sleeping Dogs drop last week, and today we’re getting Transformers: Fall of Cybertron and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive.

You can probably guess which release the GamerSushi crew is excited for, but what about you guys? I’ve heard that both Darksiders 2 and Sleeping Dogs are quite good, and surprisingly so in Sleeping Dogs’ case, seeing as how it’s a resurrected version of True Crime: Hong Kong. The melee mechanics are supposed to be brutal and a pretty good imitation of the fist-fighting in the Batman games. You can even beat a guy to death with a fish, so that’s nice.

I was originally looking forward to Transformers: Fall of Cybertron, but I recently found out that the campaign co-op was removed, so I think I’ll be passing on it. I don’t know why that would be taken out, other than that the level design wasn’t made with two players in mind. That said, the first game didn’t seem to be made that way either, so I don’t know what happened there.

Enough about me though, what are you guys getting up to? Are you playing any of these new games, or digging in to your backlog?

It’s already June, Sushians, and you know what that means: another installment of What Are You Playing, the recurring post where you get to tell us what currently occupies your PC or console and what you think of it.

May saw a couple big releases, namely Max Payne 3 and Diablo 3, but given that we’re also in somewhat of a draught from now unti September, this is also a good time to catch up on your backlog.

Personally, I’ve been getting back into Battlefield 3 a whole bunch, especially since it’s just had another huge patch which has fixed some of the glitches that the last patch brought on and has tweaked some things that needed it, like suppression and a number of weapons. It’s nice that DICE is committed to upkeep on their game, but this just shows how unprepared Battlefield 3 was when it launched in October of last year. The game has changed in a lot of fundamental ways and I expect it will continue to do so with all the DLC coming out over the next year.

Enough about me though, what are you guys playing? Something new, or maybe catching up on the backlog?

While I like to think that I am a savvy consumer, the truth is that I don’t always make the best purchases when it comes to games. Sometimes there’s that one franchise that, even when I know the game will most likely be a steaming pile of crap, I still need to pick it up just in case.

Time and time again that franchise has been Spider-Man, which hasn’t had a really good game since Spider-Man 2 (Shattered Dimensions was pretty decent, but nowhere near that level). I’ve tried them all, from Spider-Man 3 to Web of Shadows, to the aforementioned Shattered Dimensions and the horrible Edge of Time. With the upcoming Amazing Spider-Man movie tie-in game, I might just get fooled again. The new Web Rush mechanic sounds really cool, and the Batman: Arkham City inspired fighting might just spruce up the sections of Spider-Man games that have traditionally been the weakest link.

Before you get to judging me, think back and see if there are any gaming series that draw you in every time, even if history says you should save your money. What are they, and why do you keep going back?

We sift through tons of news stories for you kids, always trying to find the gems that are Sushi-Worthy. When a mainstream media site like Yahoo gives us a list of Stale Franchises that need to take a break, my job becomes a whole lot easier. Especially since one of the games on the list is super popular and still critically acclaimed: Assassin’s Creed.

The other games on the list are expected, such as Sonic and Tony Hawk, but the idea that Assassin’s Creed needs a break is one that is starting to gain some steam. I was against turning that franchise into an annual release, but Ubisoft has done a great job at churning out high-quality games. It’s only this year that fatigue is starting to set in. I think they should take a break as well, but after the expected release of Assassin’s Creed 3 in November.

What other franchises could you use a break from? Hit the comments now!

Source: Yahoo Games

It’s rare, but sometimes the games we love just don’t appeal to us anymore. Sure, things may start off great in the beginning, but eventually something sours and we turn against even our most cherished titles.

This phenomenon happened to me recently with Battlefield 3, something I talked about a bit on Episode 37 of the GamerSushi Show. Since then I’ve tried to get in a few games to see if I could get back into it, but the magic is gone. I don’t know if it’s a case of preferring the way that Bad Company 2 handled, or if the netcode is really bad on my end, or what, but Battlefield 3 has just dropped off my radar.

It’s kind of a shame considering how hyped I was for this game, something my fellow staff members and regular readers would know fairly well. I posted every trailer and every snippet of news about the game, but now I can’t even go fifteen minutes without turning it off.

I wish I knew what made me turn my back on the game, but it’s very hard to pin down. At first I was enjoying the beautiful environments and the destruction (toned down as it was), but then I noticed that I was getting killed behind cover a lot, or I was being killed by five or less shots when I’d already fired a whole magazine, or no one on my team was PTFOing. When Back to Karkand came out it helped revitalize my affection for the game, but after hours on Wake Island (which is somehow now a terrible map to play), I’m considering leaving BF3 behind for good.

I don’t lone wolf all that often, but I’ve been doing that more now that my normal squad mates have left. Maybe it’s a case of me trying to fit in to a team-based game, but even the most team oriented titles allow for a little solo play. Has anyone else experienced something similar with a game? Have you started off enjoying something and end up not standing the sight of it?

Good things come in three’s. Or is that celebrity deaths? Who knows, but what we do know is that November is full of threequels, lots and lots of them. A threequel, in case this is your first day alive, is the 3rd installment of a franchise. This month alone we are treated to Uncharted 3, Saint’s Row: The Third, Modern Warfare 3, Assassin’s Creed 2: Revelations (the third game in the Assassin’s Creed 2 trilogy and yes, it counts) and already in September and October we had Gears of War 3, Battlefield 3 and Resistance 3. Whew!

Our friends at Wired’s game blog GameLife have pulled together a list of the best threequels in gaming history. There are some great games on here, including some that you may not have heard of or may not have thought were “Part 3′s” in their respective series. I look forward to finally trying Metal Gear Solid 3 when I get the Metal Gear Solid HD collection for Xmas. Take a look at the list and tell us what they left off! 1, 2, 3, GO!

Source: Wired

One thing that I’ve found hard to do this Fall is resist the temptation to buy a new game every week. So far I’ve failed spectacularly in this endeavor because I bought Spider-Man last week and Dead Rising 2: Off the Record this week, and I’m seriously tempted to pick up Forza 4 as well.

The desire to get Forza mostly stems from some of the screenshots I’ve seen of the Autovista mode which look stunningly photorealistic. I’m not even a real big “car guy”, but I can’t resist those screenshots. They call to me, saying “look at these cars Mitch. Aren’t they pretty? You should pay sixty dollars so you can look at them any time”.

So far I’ve stayed my hand and with Batman next week and then the November to end all Novembers coming I might be able to hold off. I’m wondering if you guys have had a similar problem this year? Any titles singing their siren’s songs to you? How do you resist buying something you really want but know you should save your cash for a different game?

We might have to do a What Are You Playing every Tuesday from now until the end of the year because it’s about to go down, people. There’s maybe about a billion games coming every week for the next few months on this exact day, except for Skyrim, which hits on a Friday (also known as “Eff Your Weekend Plans, Here’s Skyrim” Day). Naturally, we’re curious about your gaming tastes as it helps us format the content for the site and it also lets us know that your care enough to respond. That said, let’s dig in.

Because I’m a crazy person, my purchase today will be Spider-Man: Edge of Time, Beenox’s sophomore attempt at this property. I enjoyed their last effort, Shattered Dimensions, so who knows, I might like this one too. Other than my guilty pleasure we have RAGE and Dark Souls, one of which I know Anthony is salivating ferociously over. I also picked up the Witcher 2 on Steam for 30 bucks and of course there’s the Battlefield 3 Beta and Gears of War 3 when I get a moment. Who ever said that gamers are lazy should really look at the 2011 release schedule. That’s a lot of gaming to get done with so little time!

So what’s on your docket? RAGE, Dark Souls, something else? Polishing off the backlog maybe?

It’s a sad thing, but sometimes we lose our precious gaming hardware through the cruel machinations of an uncaring universe. I know the pain of lending a GameBoy to a friend only to have it returned minus an intact screen and case, or felt the sting of seeing all my game discs laid out bare in the hot afternoon soon, or resting upon the heat dispersal vent for the Xbox 360.

I’ve never had anything really truly horrible happen to me aside from the aforementioned GameBoy incident, but I do know of a computer that has melted not once, but twice. The first time my friend booted up his PC only to be greeted with an unfamiliar beeping noise was a harrowing experience, and when it happened again recently, we knew the device was toast. In both cases, it had been the video cards that had melted; they were originally in a RAID configuration, but over the six years of that computer’s life span, they both bit the dust.

As is so often the case here on GamerSushi, I bring this topic up because I was wondering if any of you have a similar story, or perhaps worse. Ever throw your Wiimote into the TV, or cracked a controller in a fit of rage? Let us know in the comments, you crazy kids.

How’s your holiday weekend going, GamerSushi-ites? Me, I’ve been tucking into the Gears of War 3 beta again after doing a marathon Portal 2 session where I polished off the whole game, both single and co-op. I’m pretty sure that we’re going to do a “What Are You Playing” sometime this weekend, so we’ll table that discussion for later. Segueing from that, I am planning on checking out Mortal Kombat soon, which frightens me mostly because fighting games are one of the genres that I totally suck at.

To be totally honest, in a multiplayer standpoint, I’m really only good at first person shooters. Even though I’m loving the Gears 3 gameplay, I’ll admit that my Kill/Death ratio is pretty terrible, with one often outpacing the other (guess which one). The same thing goes for real time strategy games, where I can maybe hold my own in a campaign or a comp stomp scenario, but once I get out into the wild, everything just goes right down the tubes.

All that pales in comparison to how badly I perform at fighting games like Street Fighter, Marvel vs Capcom 3, Tekken and the like. I’ll maybe win the odd round, but more often than not I’m getting Hadoukened back to last week.

It’s rare that anyone admits that they’re bad at games, but we’re all friends here, so go ahead and let us know what genres you aren’t that great with. Fighting, racing, shooting? Drop them comment bombs, yo.

Here on Gamersushi, we are some nosy people, always asking you what you’re playing, what you want to be playing and what you’re going to be playing. But on the other end of the DO WANT spectrum lies DO NOT WANT: the games that you honestly couldn’t care less about it. You know, the ones that get a lot of hype and discussion, but if someone paid you, you would probably not even play it.

For me, this Homefront game is one of them, but I’m keeping an open mind should any reviews make it sound worthy. Also, I don’t really care about Prototype 2 at all, despite any apologies/improvements the developers may make. Crysis 2 is another that rates high on the “meh” meter and sad to say, I don’t have high hopes for the next Mortal Kombat.

What about you? What games that are coming out this year are so far off your radar that they might as well be invisible? COME AT ME WITH COMMENTS!

It’s no secret that I’m a big fan of game music, mainly Square Enix games, naturally. I’ve shared my favorite moments in game music with you several times, but I’ve never asked you, dear reader, what game music moves you. The reason for my asking is Eddy and I have both been on a game soundtrack kick, but we didn’t realize the other was doing it also until yesterday.

Eddy has been uber-productive at work while listening to the Final Fantasy VII soundtrack, no doubt rocking to One-Winged Angel and Jenova, if he has any sense. Meanwhile, across the country, I’ve been jamming with the Chrono Cross soundtrack, drifting away on memories of a game played 10 years ago. Which is why we think game soundtracks are so awesome to listen to. In a way, it allows you to replay and revisit those awesome moments in your head. Frankly, there’s nothing like it.

So, that being said, what game soundtracks do you like to listen to when you want to set a certain mood, such a nice stroll down memory lane or something to pump you up before a night out on the town? Are there any hidden gems we need to listen to? Speak now!