At the start of Ratchet & Clank: Quest for Booty Ratchet doesn’t have his huge arsenal of weapons. He’s restricted to using his wrench which doubles as a mini tractor beam. The first level is designed to teach players to pull levers and grab blocks with the wrench. The tractor beam wrench is Ratchet’s only [...]

When atomized, Super Stardust Portable is Super Stardust HD minus the HD and an analog stick. Similar to Me & My Katamari the face buttons act as a makeshift second analog stick. You guide the ship with the analog nub and shoot by pressing the face buttons. Controlling bullets is slightly less accurate as Super [...]

Right now Lips looks like just another karaoke game. The main difference during the singing mode is players tilt the microphone upwards to activate a “Star Stream” for bonus points. Players not singing can mash buttons on one of the four wireless controllers to play sound effects. I switched between clapping, banging drums, and roaring [...]

The Jam mode demo for Wii Music had five songs: Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, Turkey in the Straw, Yankee Doodle, From the New World, and the Super Mario Brothers theme. I chose the last option and picked the lead trumpet and started jamming. You play the trumpet and other wind instruments by pressing the 1 [...]

I talked about the versus mode before, but Naruto: Ultimate Ninja Storm has a lengthy single player story mode that goes all the way up to the rescue Sasuke arc. And yes, Sasuke transforms to cursed seal level two. I’m getting ahead of myself because I didn’t get up to the fight at the Valley [...]

Natsume is a developer and publisher in Japan. In North America they are only known as a family friendly publisher. However, Hiro Maekawa, President and CEO of Natsume’s US subsidiary, has dreams of making games, ballroom dancing games. He teamed up with Cave, notable for bullet hell shooters, to create Princess Debut. The Nintendo DS [...]

During the middle of the game the difficulty in Valhalla Knights sharply changed from medium to hours of grinding. Xseed plans to fix this issue in Valhalla Knights 2 by streamlining the difficulty. In the US build it’s easier to level up and items drop more frequently. Also if you have save game data from [...]

  Sheva Alomar is the support character who will be joining Chris Redfield in Resident Evil 5 when the title is released in March of 2009.  Little is known about Sheva at this point, apart from the fact that she is a member of the BSAA, an organization that seeks out and eliminates bioterror threats [...]

Wario Land: Shake It! didn’t appear in Nintendo’s press briefing and it wasn’t on the show floor. The game was tucked away in Nintendo’s appointment room where only a select few got to play it before it comes out in Japan. The game should have gotten more attention since it’s the kind of classic platforming [...]

I liked the feel of the 1:1 motion sensitivity of Wii MotionPlus enough to play the sword fighting game in Wii Sports: Resort multiple times. In the beginning you can test the accuracy by slicing an immobile log and sharpening a pencil. I was impressed how the Wii MotionPlus accessory allowed me to cut the [...]

I sat down for the Bayonetta presentation expecting something like Devil May Cry. The presenter from Sega of America wasn’t shy about acknowledging the competition in the stylish action genre when he said, “There are a couple of games that claim they are the most stylish or action packed, but we are going to set [...]

MadWorld is set in a violent game show where contestants are rewarded for “creatively” killing the competition. During the demo I didn’t see much creativity. The same street sign through the face deathblow seemed effective enough for Jack to move through the level unscathed. More points were rewarded when Jack skewered other Death Watch players [...]

Konami announced their yearly Yu-Gi-Oh PSP game in Japan, but it won’t see a release in North America. Don’t worry Yu-Gi-Oh fans, a game based on Yu-Gi-Oh 5Ds is in development for the Wii. Usually, this isn’t the kind of thing I would report, but my interest piqued when a Konami representative told me it [...]

  Q-Games' third title in the PixelJunk series was on hand at the Sony press booth at E3, where senior producer Deborah Mars gave an introduction to the game’s unique play mechanics and explained the title's collaboration between Dylan Cuthbert, president of Q-Games, and Baiyon, the Kyoto-based visual artist and DJ.  The latter designer is [...]