Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City has gone all action…
By Paul Blackburn
April 15, 2011
… and Leon Kennedy looks really shiny. There’s another Resident Evil game with a rather uninspired name on the way, and it looks like we’ll be playing it as a whole new cast of multi-lingual super-secret Umbrella soldiers – also they don’t seem very nice.
I’m honestly not sure what I think about the look of this new Resident Evil, but then again I was never sure what I thought about Resident Evil 5 either. It was a great coop experience, and there was a lot of fun to be had shooting zombies and other such things with a friend online or via split-screen, but it was definitely more action-based than fear-based, and unlike its classic fixed-position-camera predecessors, I wasn’t scared by it once.
While it’s clearly set in the original location of the series – Raccoon City – we’re going to be seeing it from the perspective of these brand new characters, who seem to have an interweaving story to that of Leon Kennedy’s in the time of Resident Evil 2. It kind of looks like they’re pushing even further in the action gameplay direction with this new game, too. However, at least it doesn’t appear to be all bright, sunny, day-time weather in this one:
Dome Keeper is an excellent little spin on the tower defense game, in which you play the role of a jetpacking miner defending his base from swarms of aliens, whilst searching for a hidden relic buried somewhere beneath him. And now, with this huge free update, you can play it with friends.
I want to talk about Cloudpunk, a game where you get to be a flying-car delivery driver in a futuristic cyberpunk city. Its world is an incredible achievement of environmental design, and while the gameplay itself may be basic, the city of Nivalis is a thing of beauty to behold. Nivalis is built out of hundreds of hand-modelled cuboid buildings; there’s nothing procedural about it. Apparently it took 3 years for the devs to design the city, and it really shows.
I do love me some quality pixel art, and it doesn’t get much better than this. Cast n Chill is a cozy side-scrolling fishing game by small indie dev team Wombat Brawler, with absolutely gorgeous visuals. It’s simple to play, and you you can dip in and out of it at your leisure, making it a fine addition to our collection of coffee break games.
One of my all-time favourite gaming memories is playing Haunting Ground with my mates at the flat in Baldock for 16 hours straight. It was me holding the controller for almost all of those 16 hours. It’s a bit obscure, so if you haven’t heard of it, it’s a survival horror game by Capcom, in which you play as a pretty little fragile girl called Fiona, who must escape from a huge labyrinthine castle. Oh, and you can’t fight. Your only option is to run away and hide from the nasty people that are out to get you. You do have a companion throughout though, the best dog in gaming, a white German Shepherd called Hewie.
I’ve played many versions of Mario Kart, first on the Snes at a friend’s house, followed by my own copy of the N64 version. The Nintendo DS edition got a lot of play during the various anime conventions that I attended between 2006 and 2011, where you could LAN it up via Bluetooth with anyone else in the vicinity. But the version I truly have the fondest memories of has to be Mario Kart Wii.
I was not a fan of Uncharted 3, but this new ad for Nathan Drake’s supposed final adventure is only 30 seconds long and somehow managed to tug my heartstrings… I wish I had a PS4.