What we’ve been playing: AMAZING EASTER SPECIAL!

RISE FROM YOUR GRAVE!

Hello everyone and welcome to the Easter Monday edition of this thing I do every week! That’s right, it’s time to stuff your face with chocolate in the name of our lord and saviour the Easter Bunny. Bunnies don’t even lay eggs though. So that’s some food for thought. Anyways enough ramblings, it’s time to grab all you sweeties and read about what the people who do a writing for this website played last week.

Will it be Easter related? Probably not. But I’ll try my hardest to make it!

Stevie ‘Chocolate’ Grant- Writer of Top 10 Worst and Boss Attack:
I played and beat Portal 2 which is amazing. Now all I need is someone to play co-op with. Please dear reader can you buy Portal 2 so I can do co-op? Thank you so much.

Other than that I haven’t done anything much. Another episode of Sam and Max. Next time you read this section I’d have finished season 2, so you can hear my thoughts on it then if you wish. Oh, I’ve also got The Fancy Pants Adventure on XBLA which is amazing. Reminds me of good old 2D Sonic. Yeah it’s that good.

(oh BTW go buy the new humble indie bundle. It’s amazing.)

Brett ‘Easter egg’ Hatfield- Community Manager and Writer of Megadriving:
Finished up Yakuza 4. Thoughts on that wonderful thing are in my review, which you ALL SHOULD BE READING. Currently finishing up some loose ends on BlazBlue Continuum Shift, and once PSN comes back, I plan on grabbing a bunch of CAWs for Smackdown 2011. Might play a bit of GT5 too. Just because.

Alexander ‘Sweets inside of the Easter egg’ Sargeant- Writer of Retro Reviews:
Not much outside of the obvious Portal 2. Mostly tidying away some old things, although I have got slightly tucked into ‘Cargo – The Quest for Gravity’, which is pretty much ‘Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts’ only replace the clockwork enemies with tiny naked people.

Also Section 8: Prejudice, which is much better than that stupid name makes out. It feels a little like Tribes on a smaller scale, but for an arcade title the quality is astounding. Lots of weapons to play around with, and you never feel underpowered. There are actually times where you’re a marine in a super-powered exo-suit riding ANOTHER super-powered exo-suit. You also spawn in by being fried out of a ship in the sky towards the ground, which can actually kill people if you land on them perfectly.

Also the two Toaplan shooters that made it to the Genesis, because Cave have never stopped being awesome and they’re releasing yet another game this week. And trying to finish, but I wasn’t actually close to doing so, 999 on the DS because I’ve been listening to ‘Warning! A Huge Podcast’, and they were talking about the director’s latest game. I love how rambly the author of it gets.

Josh ‘Hiding eggs in the bushes’ Newey – Writer of With Great Power Comes Great Games and Underappreciated Gems:
I just started up Conduit 2 today, and it’s… alright so far. My thoughts are pretty in line with Alex’s, at least on the control front. I’ve been playing around with a few different control schemes, and while the sensitivity of the Classic Controller hasn’t really bothered me much, I found the Wii Motion Plus capabilities way too accurate… as strange as that might sound. I’m only about an hour and a half in so far, so I’m hoping I can get overcome that sensitivity soon. I’m also eager for the story to pick up a bit more. I’m always down for a solid Aliens Vs Humans Vs Humans story, and this one looks like it could be a fun little story to play through, even if it is a bit generic.

Monday was my birthday this week, and so I also got a couple new games for my 3DS. I’ve been playing a ton of Rayman 3D, and as a person who’s never touched the game even after ten years, I must say I am loving it. This kind of adventure is exactly why I ever became excited for a 3D handheld in the first place – deep, multi-dimensional environments that manage to be somewhat more engrossing, expansive and immediate than some of their 2D counterparts. While I will admit that a lot of the gameplay is kind of outdated and a good chunk of the 3D is pretty slapdash, I really have fallen for its charms as a charismatic and fun little platformer. Reviewers out there have really been understating this thing.

Oh, and finally, Pilotwings Resort has been pretty great too. I’m kind of bummed it’s become the Wii Sports placeholder, though. I am just getting so sick of looking at Miis in all of my Nintendo games. I feel like I’m playing with Fisher Price’s Little People.

John ‘Crucified’ Doherty- Writer of Take Cover:
I recently completed my collection of Burger King games. In celebration I’ve been trying to beat them all. Sneak King may be the creepiest game ever made. I literally hid in a garbage can, jumped out when I saw a lady and then gave her a burger, which mind you was in the garbage can with me. Amazing. I’ve been beta testing Petroglyph’s new MOBA named Rise of the Immortals. It’s an interesting take on the DOTA formula. They are trying to add a PVE element to a PVP game. I’m not sure how successful they are going to be but the concepts seem solid enough. While it’s fun to hang out in a hub city with a ton of other people, there are only a handful of champions so everyone looks the same. Beyond that I started my spring break so I’ve been catching up on sleep and going out with friends.

Tom ‘Long good Friday’ Kyzivat- Artist and Podcast Co-host:
Happy Easter, everybody! Hope you’ve all decapitated your chocolate bunnies by now. I’ve actually played stuff this week besides Marvel vs Capcom 3! I tried out Conduit 2 at High Voltage/Destructoid’s 24 hour livestream event. I enjoyed the game, but the Wiimote made it very difficult to play (I’m a Wii noob) and, like Alex, I felt that it didn’t add a whole lot to the first person shooter genre. I haven’t played enough of it to really get a feel for the game as a whole, so I’m sure there’s a lot more in store for the player than what I saw. From what I did see, the boss fights are really cool and the multiplayer is a lot of fun–some of the weapons are a hoot to use! It’s a good mix of FPS standards like machine guns and pistols and more unique weapons like this gun that charges up electric bolos that kill the hell out of enemies. The level design for multiplayer is pretty impressive, too.

I also played the new Mortal Kombat, which is really fun so far! It definitely goes back to basics–which might feel a bit more like “bare bones” at first–but after you get the hang of some of the new features, it gets to be pretty engaging. One such feature, the x-ray attacks, are the equivalent of a hyper combo in MvC3. It takes three bars (which doesn’t take long to accumulate) and they are easy to pull off, hard to block and do an ungodly amount of damage, which seems a little cheap at first. We’ll see how I adjust to them as I keep playing. But it’s great to have the classic roster back without the glut of characters the later games had, and everybody seems to be at their classic best. I’ve only played it for one night so far, so I’m eager to keep playing! The story mode is supposed to be really cool, and there’s a ton of extra features and modes and all that good stuff. MORTAL KOMBAT!!!! *cue techno music*

Kris ‘Jesus Christ’ Knigge- Reviewer and Podcast Co-host:
Nothing. At all. Not a great week for me.

Alex ‘Ive run out of Easter related things to put in peoples names’ Riggen- Editor in Chief and Podcast Host:
I have been playing Conduit 2 this week. I had some pretty high expectations for the singleplayer and while it is a huge improvement over the first game’s its still not quite there for me. I’m happy that there’s no more conduits spitting out infinite enemies all the time but the level design overall still gets repetitive and the story can be corny at times. Also, the Wii Classic Controller takes a lot of getting used to for playing with dualstick controls. I’ve got the hang of it now after a few hours but the sensitivity is drastically different from a 360 or PS3 pad. That’s not really a gripe against the developer as they’ve included a lot of customization within the controls but just that Nintendo developed a controller that didn’t work very well for this genre. I’m sure the Wiimote is the most accurate way to play the game but I’m just a standard controller kind of guy.

And that was our Easter special! We sure learnt a lot! Or did we? No. We did not. So what was you gaming Easter like? You can tell me in the comments if you like. Go on do it. Do it for Jesus. He died so we could eat chocolate hidden by an egg laying rabbit after all. Or something like that I don’t know.

See you next week for a less chocolatey version of this section. HAPPY EASTER EVERYONE!