Author: Steve Haske

When you review games for a living, it’s all too easy to start treating everything you see with a healthy dose of cynicism.

We Castlevania fans all love Symphony of the Night. And if we didn’t play the original, we’ve probably either all bought it on PSN, XBLA (or even bought it again) or played it on the PSP’s Castlevania: Dracula X Chronicles.

If I had a dollar for every time I came across a rote first-person shooter, I’d be able to quit writing for a living. That isn’t how life works, though, so I have to sit through games like Singularity.

I’m one of the few people that enjoyed Michael Bay’s Transformers films. Yeah, they involved human characters, and you had put up with some kowtowing to middle America with stupid jokes and obnoxious characters from time to time.

Apart from those rare diamond-in-the-rough classics that have enough replay value to pay for themselves 10 times over, video games aren’t usually known for having a very long shelf life.

I’m just going to put this out there: E3, or the Electronics Entertainment Expo for the uninitiated, kind of sucked this year.

There’s something to be said for viewing a game’s setting as a character. Few games are able to pull this off well, arguably because, much like game design itself, time and place are so often overused.

Gamers that consider themselves knowledgeable about indie console efforts are probably familiar with Gaijin’s Bit.Trip series and, most likely, have been following them avidly since the first of the tetralogy launched in 2009.

You have to hand it to Ubisoft Montreal—when it comes to big-budget titles, they really know how to put together a well-made game. Aside from the likes of the Assassin’s Creed series (whose pedigree has come a long way since inception) and Splinter Cell, arguably their biggest—or at least most well known series—has been Prince of Persia, beginning with last generation’s Sands of Time.

More so than almost any other big Japanese RPG franchise, you can always count on the Atlus’ Shin Megami Tensei series to do something original and thought provoking.

If you’ve played a multiplayer deathmatch-style game in the past few years, you know that damn near all of them are first-person shooters either set in modern day or, as is the standby trope of the genre, World War II.