You guys love repeating the same tricky section of a game over and over just to defeat a challenging boss, right? Neither do we. Prey tries a new tactic to reduce the death penalty and make gameplay more fun. Instead of loading your last save every time you die, Prey has you play a brief minigame to restore your health and vital stats before the game reinstates your corporeal body right back where you died. Any time a dev adds fun where most games add heartbreak, we’ll salute them!
www.prey.com, ESRB: M
We were afraid that George Lucas had tainted the Episode 1 badge forever with The Phantom Menace. But Half-Life 2: Episode 1 not only proves that Episode 1s do not have to suck but also gives us hope that episodic gaming will provide us more frequent, if necessarily shorter, tastes of our favorite games. Going episodic will force developers to maintain quality throughout their games—after all, if Half-Life 2: Episode 2 sucks, no one will buy Episode 3.
www.half-life.com, ESRB: M
We love game devs who take the time and money to write and record dialogue for the underappreciated, hapless stooges who are the cannon fodder that make our games fun. It all started with No One Lives Forever, but this year, Hitman: Blood Money used stooge dialogue to inject needed comic relief in a brutally brilliant game. Creeping through missions, we heard everything from Mob bosses calling in hits to musings on the meaning of being a professional henchman.
www.hitman.com, ESRB: M
Comments are closed on this article
Print
