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Eurogamer Expo 2011: Day 2 Part 2 | PSNStores

Eurogamer Expo 2011: Day 2 Part 2

Posted by on September 23rd, 2011 | 0 Comments | Tags:

I emerged from the House Of The Dead mentally unscathed. Little did I know that Inversion would be waiting for me. Oh, Inversion. If I were to be overly dismissive of the efforts of Sabre Interactive, I would describe their latest game as “Fracture with physics”. If I were to expand on that, I’m going to have to ask if you remember Fracture. It was a mediocre FPS from a few years back with a gimmick based entirely around moving the earth. Of course, after you make a stone pillar rise up out of the earth the first few times, the novelty soon wears off. Tragic. Inversion has that feel, but with a gravity gun. Sending enemies up in to the air was entertaining, but when they instantly steady themselves and then have a vantage point in you, it became significantly less so. Handing my controller to a younger man than I, I said only a few words in warning. “You really don’t want to”.

Speaking of “not wanting to”, Ninja Gaiden 3. I didn’t want to perform quick time events to kill enemies. I didn’t want to lose my ability to perform a flying swallow, and I certainly didn’t want to lose the ability to chop off limbs. Now that that’s out of the way, I can say that what I was left playing wasn’t really a Ninja Gaiden game. You want to know how I came to that conclusion? I played it on hard, and made it through the first fight with nary a scrape. I’m terrible at Ninja Gaiden, and I hardly doubt that I got better over time, skills at that game don’t age like a fine wine. They get corked.

I promised myself I’d say something nice about the 3DS at some point in my life, so I’m going to say that having inventory management on the bottom screen in Snake Eater 3D is kind of cool. The actual game gave me a headache, and made my eyes hurt. With aching eyes and a heavy heart, I stumbled in to the que for Arkham City. Crikey, what a pick-me-up. Gliding around an open world Arkham was incredible, and I only wish I could have spent more time with it than a paltry 10 minutes. The rest of it is pretty much like you’d expect from a sequel to Arkham Asylum. Fights are even more lovingly animated, Batman has some wonderful new toys, and controlling Catwoman felt reassuringly familiar. It really is everything you could possibly want in a superhero game.

One open world deserves another, so off to Skyrim I ventured. I’ll admit to not playing these games in a way suited to a 20 minute demo. Rather than running to the nearest town and taking on a quest, I chose to climb a mountain. This mountain took me 10 minutes to climb, and I was killed by a wisp as I was nearing the summit. The new world Bethesda has created is remarkably vast, and I’m sure I’m going to love peeking into some of the hardest to get to places in its expanses. The rest of my time with the game was spent chasing after a moose, hurling fire at it.

With Skyrim done, I spent a little more time with SSX, and then headed home, where I’m currently writing an article. Perhaps it’s this one, I’m not sure at the moment. I’ll be back tomorrow with more impressions, including Counter-Strike: GO. I’ll also play more with the Vita, and SSX, desperately trying not to make the game crash as much as I did today. Goodness gracious.