After a solid two weeks with Dark Sector, I feel fully qualified to make this statement with absolute certainty: I played Dark Sector. That’s honestly as objective as I can be, but if you want to know my true feelings of the game, please continue.

For anyone not in the know and/or recovering coma patients, let me explain what Dark Sector is. Dark Sector is a third-person shooter/body part dismemberment simulator (except in Australia, where you instead throw rainbows at people who react with sprays of chocolate and hugs). Sounds awesome, right? Well, it is and it isn’t. I’ll explain…

Let me first start by saying that Dark Sector is by no means a bad game. That being said, let me go over the things I didn’t like about it.

First and foremost, it doesn’t feel right. That’s a highly subjective thing to say and something a good many people will disagree with, but I’m sure many people will completely agree with me on this as well. Hayden Tenno, your avatar in the game, feels sluggish and slightly unresponsive at times. Then at other times, he does exactly what I’m trying to make him do. This inconsistency baffles me, and while it isn’t a design flaw, there are plenty of those as well.

My biggest peeve is that I have to look straight down to smash open an ammo box at my feet, which results in me kicking it instead of doing my usual glaive-swinging melee move. Of course I can just throw my glaive at the box, or even shoot the box (I’m a genius, I know), but that doesn’t change the fact that I have to stare straight down if I want to kick it.

In the grand scheme of things, these control issues are relatively minor. It still says something about the polish of the game in that it could have used perhaps a bit more of it. There are, however, other control issues that a lot of reviewers seem to have a problem with.

A lot of people complained about the cover system, which I totally disagree with. Compared to Gears of War, Dark Sector’s cover system is superior, though both games are inferior to Rainbow Six Vegas. Like Gears of War, Dark Sector’s running and covering mechanic both work with the same button. In Gears of War, sprinting into a wall made you press against it and take cover — Dark Sector requires that you push the button again to take cover.

While all the whiny kids out there will complain about the extra work involved in hitting the cover button again (the horror!), Dark Sector’s system prevents you from sticking to walls that you are intending to run past. This is a problem that frequently pissed me off in Gears multiplayer (among other things — I’m looking at you, mister shotgun), and has lead to me never wanting to play GOW multiplayer ever again (which Chad can attest to).

Speaking of multiplayer, Dark Sector’s multiplayer is a bit of a letdown. You basically have a choice between VIP and Team VIP. Infection (VIP) has one character as a tricked-out Hayden while the rest of the fools play as sorry-ass hazmat soldiers. The entire point is to kill Hayden, in which case the round ends and you become Hayden. This means that while you are a hazmat soldier, you have only one enemy, and instead of working with the other hazmat players to bring Hayden down as intended, you are competing to get the kill shot. You are basically encouraged to kill-steal.

Epidemic is the same thing except you have two teams, each with one Hayden, and the point is to kill the Hayden on the other team. This mode is highly preferred over Infection, but it still begs the question: Why is there no deathmatch mode where all characters are beefed-up bad-asses?

Another letdown is the story. I don’t mean to say the story is bad, but it really is hard to spot the story enough to tell whether or not it’s bad. There is apparently a lot of history prior to the game’s opening, a history that isn’t fully explained. A comic book that was supplied to me by D3 does give a brief history lesson on Lasria and the unexplained outbreak of the infection, but Hayden remains a mystery.

Finally, the icing on the cake is that the book is only 7 pages with 2 additional pages for the credits (although it’s in 3 languages, so it’s actually 25 pages total). Not counting the table of contents, end user license agreement, and customer support information, the actual instruction booklet is a measly 3 pages. Three pages! Maybe I’m alone in this, but I like sweaty, meaty manuals with big muscles, not these pamphlets we get nowadays — it just feels cheap.

Now that I’ve said all that, you’re probably thinking that I didn’t much enjoy the game. Well, you’re wrong. Despite its shortcomings, Dark Sector is actually a pretty good ride. It is basically the equivalent of a Michael Bay flick — lots of action and explosions with little or no story. Dark Sector’s explosions are mainly of the arterial kind, but the action keeps you interested despite the fact that there is little context to it.

There were so many jokes I thought of for this picture that I couldn’t decide on one…
I compromised by making no joke at all.

The biggest draw would obviously have to be the glaive. Soon after Hayden becomes infected, he gets attacked by a guard and defends himself by birthing a giant ninja star from his hand, slicing his assailant’s chest, and then decapitating the poor motherfucker that walks in a second later. Awesome…

You soon learn the ability to pick up items with your glaive, and eventually you can steer your glaive after throwing it and cut off some limbs in slow-motion. This is one area where the PS3 version had a slight bit of extra cool in that you could use the tilt-sensing to steer the glaive, much like in Heavenly Sword. I personally found the analog stick to be more accurate, though, but that’s just me. I also find the 360 controller more comfortable in general since I’m not 12, nor do I have the misfortune of having little girly hands… but again, that’s just me.

The glaive is also used for a majority of your finishing moves. Wear down an enemy enough and they glow red, meaning you can finish them with a melee attack. These finishers consist of anything between gutting your foe to chopping off his arm or leg. Sneaking up behind enemies also nets you a one-hit kill, and is especially effective in multiplayer.

I also liked the art direction of the game (though I liked the sci-fi Hayden of the early version better), and the graphics themselves are pretty stellar. You may be fooled into thinking this is the Unreal Engine, but it’s not, and it actually runs much smoother. There is no graphical pop-in like in Gears or Mass Effect, and the load times throughout the game are generally only a few seconds.

I also liked how the game starts in black and white and pulses into color when you get infected. The controls after waking up are pretty neat as you stumble around all drunk-like. Clever girl…

Overall, Dark Sector is a good-not-great little game. It was entertaining, like a videogame is supposed to be, but it’s not going to win any awards or hold any special place in history (other than “first next-gen game” even though it came out after so many other next-gen games). If you’ve got a thing for decapitations, however, this game is for you — Dark Sector gives you more flying head than Paris Hilton on an airplane.

What does this score mean? Check out our review scoring breakdown.

Now that Puzzle Quest has seen the light of day on PC, DS, PSP, Wii and XBLA –- whew, that was a mouthful – publisher D3 has seen fit for an expansion to be released exclusively on XBLA. Oh, and the working name sure does spark creativity and excitement: Puzzle Quest 1.5. They need your naming help, and they know it.

Starting March 21st, you can visit the Puzzle Quest website and see about helping them come up with something a little more awe-inspiring than “Puzzle Quest 1.5”

I never really delved past the first few battles in what GFW Radio has called Bejeweled with mana, so I’m not entirely sure that I’m one to judge when it comes to the “incredible amount of content”. That’ll be something for fans to look forward to.

The new content includes four new hero professions in the form of a Bard, Rogue, Ranger and Warlock – along with 25 “challenging” quests, 50 new spells, and 40 new magical items.

And oh yeah, there’s a new ultimate baddie of the universe — Antharg, the Lord of Plague, sibling of Lord Bane. I’m guessing he’s the baddie from Puzzle Quest 1.0?

The only inkling we have as to a release is spring and for now, only on XBLA.

Source: BusinessWire via Joystiq

Unlike most sequels, the Game Developers Conference Day 2 did not suck. The Ripten crew actually did stuff today! Amazing!

We met up in the press room to get our schedules straight (again), eat muffins, and get our daily recommended allowance of Mountain Dew. Jon Zungre drew first blood by attending the Independent Games Festival Mobile Awards, making us all look bad with his go-getting initiative.

When Jon got back, we headed over to the D3 Publisher’s GDC 2008 Press Event. While we were there, we got some hands-on time with the Dark Sector multiplayer, which we can’t talk about, and got demoed three more upcoming games.

The first and only game we are allowed to talk about was NARUTO: Ninja Destiny for the Nintendo DS. It was surprisingly solid for a handheld 3D fighting game. Look for our full impressions of the game later this week.

The other games we were shown were Bangai O Spirits and an as-yet unannounced game that we will spill the beans about next week, so be sure to check back for that. We were treated to some cheesecake and cupcakes before heading back out into the recently nerdified San Francisco. We had a few things to see, so we split up from here.

Jon and I went to see a new game called Freaky Creatures, an MMO game from Abandon Interactive. The concept was actually very cool, and even though all of the art and effects weren’t in the game yet, we walked away pleased. Look for our full impressions of the game very soon.

We headed from there to a press conference about the Emotiv headset, a device that reads your thoughts, emotions, and facial expressions. The event was almost a complete train wreck, mainly because the douchebags in the audience refused to disconnect themselves from dork headquarters — all those wireless signals in the room were messing up the headset’s reception. They promised us some hands-on time with the thing tomorrow, so hopefully we can get a better idea of whether it’s actually cool or just another expensive way to make me look more retarded.

While we were doing all that, Chad went to an ominously vague PC announcement, which turned out to be this. The invite did a good job of making it sound extremely important while also not saying anything at all. Those crafty bastards!

He then met up with a few others at the Sony Online Entertainment party. Apparently, Sony really wanted to solidify the competition they have with Microsoft by throwing an equally shitty, fallopian tube party — the female version of Microsoft’s Sausage Fest 2008. Packed with a bunch of old ladies, Chad fled the scene before the combined might of their mental undressings left him naked (the room was cold, too, so we couldn’t have that).

After that, we all took refuge in our overpriced dumpster that is somehow considered to be a hotel. As I said before, we don’t get to bite into the meat of the GDC sandwich until tomorrow (or technically today, considering what time it is), so things will only get better from here on out. If we somehow manage to stay awake and experience it, we’ll be sure to tell you all about it first because you are our very bestest friends.