Review: Enslaved: Odyssey to the West

When Enslaved: Odyssey to the West was announced I was pretty excited. First of all, it's a game developed by Team Ninja, the developers behind one of my favorite - yet underrated - PS3 titles, Heavenly Sword, that alone guaranteed my release-day purchase. Enslaved is a gorgeous platforming action-adventure game inspired by the Chinese novel "Journey to the West," and the History Channel apocalyptic documentary "Life After People."

The game stars Monkey and Trip, two humans that are being taken by enslavers aboard a ship. Trip, being a tech genious, manages to escape her containment cell and heads to an escape pod. Monkey, using brute strength breaks the containment cell and follows her. After managing to escape and while Monkey is unconscious, Trip puts a headband on Monkey which will allow her to "enslave" him and if he disobeyes a command will be in pain, if he hurts her or she dies - he dies!

E3 2010 Retrospective

Now that the dust has settled from E3's and pretty much every blog under the sun has written something about it, it's time for PS3 Gaymers to make their own contribution. We're mainly going to focus on Sony's presentation, but obviously there's [a little] more to E3 than PlayStation, so we'll be looking at Nintendo's launch of the 3DS, and Microsoft's presentation of it's new Kinect technology and the PS3 Slim-alike, the revised Xbox 360 model.

Christopher Parkes

Sony's conference this year was probably the least risky and least surprising of the "big 3". There was a heavy focus on the PS3's future: Move, 3D and new PSN services, even going so far as to clear space for them by announcing three new major iterations in it's biggest IP's before E3.... but it's overtures to it's core audience of gamers were very welcome, and at one particular moment, actually quite moving.

Review: ModNation Racers

ModNation Racers is the second game to follow  Sony's new Play, Create, Share ethos established by LittleBigPlanet. Comparison's to Nintendo's Mario Kart are inevitable, but what kart-racing game is not bound to be compared to the godfather of the genre? Fret not, for this is no Mario Kart clone, and more to the point, it's creation tools are far more accessible than the digital Meccano set found in LBP.

Play

ModNation racers is not a necessarily a hard game, especially when you get down with the whole drifting aspect of the game. Drifting is necessary not only because it will help you speed up a bit, but also because every time you drift your boost meter goes up. The boost meter can be used to speed up for a while or to raise a shield and defend yourself against other players' attacks. Thing is, you will be drifting a lot and raising that shield even more; the game's AI is unforgiving. You can do everything right in the game, you can be the first one and be a few inches away from raceline in your last lap and still lose. The AI suffers from major rubberbanding issues and it will not let you win. This wouldn't be a big issue if it wasn't because in order to move on you must finish first (in some races) or top three in others.