FuzzyCo

Heavenly Sword must have some drastic difficulty-adjusting going on behind the scenes, because it’s supposedly a game all about building up and executing big combos and everyone knows I can’t do a simple X-X-Y combo to save my (video game character’s) life. And yet I was able to finish HS. Also, there’s a number of times you’re supposed to use the Six-Axis tilt controller to guide arrows or other projectiles to their targets and I ended up turning that off and just using the control sticks. Also, there are a couple of seriously creepy villains, but I had to turn on the subtitles because they’re talking so creepy I couldn’t understand what they were saying.

FuzzyCo grade: B-

Blood Stone holds the promise that it’s going to be a fully new James Bond adventure. It starts a little awkwardly, with a rather marionette-y opening sequence, and at the very end it just kind of stops. In between those, it’s a short but fun Bond game. Oh, and then, at the end, they loop that one song over and over through the whole credit sequence. I’m the sort who actually watches video game credits, but it drive me batty.

FuzzyCo grade: B+

You know, it’d be kind of cool if someone made a video game out of Journey to the West. Until then we’ve got the post-apocalyptic Enslaved which kind of picks and chooses and borrows from the stories. And you know, the burly Monkey hits robots with a rod.

FuzzyCo grade: A-

Journey is from the same developers as Flower and it shares with that game a sparse control system and being gosh-darn beautiful. Journey has an even more enigmatic narrative, though. It’s obvious that something is going on, but exactly what is very open to interpretation. I’m not sure it’s even a spoiler to say that at the end I wasn’t sure if I’d died or just found a new home.

FuzzyCo grade: A+

Dead Space is a survival horror game set in, duh, space. The lighting and sound design is pretty darn creepy, unless you make the mistake of playing it like a game instead of going with the narrative flow–when I’d back-track to pick up some supplies or something, I realized that all the super-creepy sounds and lights were triggered by my passage through specific areas, rather like a fun house. That took something out of the spookiness.

FuzzyCo grade: A-

I’ve played about six hundred Ratchet and Clank games. So, yes, I like a video game where a little guy jumps around and hits some robots. Ratchet and Clank Future: Tools of Destruction just isn’t quite up to spec.

FuzzyCo grade: B-

There's a point in Uncharted 2 where you're being led through a Tibetan village and, except for the fact that all the cows look exactly the same, it actually feels like a real village that real people live in, going about their lives. Which then meant that later, when I was hanging off a 500-ft tall mechanism built to guard some ancient treasure, I was thinking, "wait, who actually built this thing—this system of giant locks and gears seems like a really inefficient way to keep this treasure protected." Probably just me.

FuzzyCo grade: B+

You know what's great when you get a new gaming console is to have an awesome brother-in-law who lets you rummage through his stack of games like it was a library. Uncharted has been out since 2007, so it's pretty much ancient history in video game terms. Pretty fun for a game that so obviously wants to be be an Indiana Jones game :-)

FuzzyCo grade: A

Man, I love being an over-muscled Batman beating up a bunch of over-muscled goons and really over-muscled supervillians. Pow. Thwack.

FuzzyCo grade: A-