Gaming Thoughts 1/19/12

So, I've had my hands in a ton of games over the last week, and I thought I would share some quick impressions here.

For one - I almost never download demos, but the clever tie-in between Kingdoms of Amalur and Mass Effect 3 where playing one opens up some items for the other appealed to me quite a bit.  Of course, those are two of the games I am most anticipating this year, and already have a reservation down on Amalur and will no doubt do the same for Mass Effect 3.

So, my quick impressions of Amular are overall pretty good.  The action moves along pretty nicely, and the visuals while a bit cartoony are still impressive nonetheless.  I may not have particularly loved the facial expression of my character when he first awakens, but I was quite taken with the lightening effects and vibrant colors.  There were a few notable glitches, specifically the audio doing odd things at times, but I've read several reports that state the dev team is aware of them and that they are fixed for the actual game.  The download size was 1.90 gigs on 360, so there's some beef behind it, but overall I enjoyed my run of it.  For those interested, I saw a few postings that Mass Effect 3 will go live with its demo on Valentine's Day.  I'll be playing it (don't judge me - my wife's out of town to be at Disney World with her best friend).

Next up - Final Fantasy XIII-2.  I'll preface this by saying I really did enjoy XIII and rated it pretty high, and this is more of the same, with more new items added.  I really enjoyed the demo.  I heard some people commenting that the action and camera focus were all over the place and that it was distracting, but I found it immersive.  It probably won't be a day 1 buy for me because the first title dropped in price quite a bit (you can find it for about $15 now) and because I have too many other games on my plate, but I suspect I'll be acquiring it by years' end.

Asura's Wrath is one of those titles that has struck me as quirky for some time, and I've been mildly curious about, but this game's demo did nothing for me really.  It wasn't bad, but it wasn't particularly good either.  Maybe a rental or a borrow from a friend, but I doubt this title makes my cut this year as I still have entirely too many other titles to work through.

I've gotten my hands on a few new games of late too, especially for the 3DS.  My son bought Devil Survivor Overclocked, and so far really likes it.  I've picked up Star Fox 64 and Street Fighter 4, and already had been playing quite a bit of Dead or Alive 4, Mario Kart and Samurai Warriors.  I've enjoyed them all, and there will eventually be more reviews - but that's still a ways off.

I just finished my run of Dragon Age: Origins, and will likely have a re-review posted in the somewhat near future.  I've also been busy with Skyrim still.  Oh, and I recently acquired several handheld titles (not including the PlayStation Plus freebies like the minis and Back to the Future games) such as Bastion, Bloodrayne, Street Fighter III and Dungeon Defenders.