Don't play this game directly after The Last of Us. In fact, better advice might be to not play this game at all. I was planning to give Okami HD on PS3 a whirl, but seeing as the download from PSN had another 20 hours to go, I turned to Resident Evil 6. Oh dear. If you want the perfect example of a modern game sticking to age-old ideas and standard mechanics, this is it.
Capcom clearly loves switches, ridiculous puzzles (shoot the bells, and then the really small bells), multi-stage boss fights, and terrible voice acting. To be fair, maybe the voice acting is only awful because the script and timing is so bad, but the result is still awkward laughter during what probably should be intense moments. Perhaps Resident Evil 6 was just unlucky to be my next game, but it also looks rough as hell compared to The Last of Us, with plastic-faced character models, gamey animations, and terrible hair - a point that must be made due to Leon's appalling bonnet.
Despite not getting on with them in recent times, I've got a lot of time for Level-5. For this reason, when I heard they were releasing Layton Brothers Mystery Room on iOS I was, at least, intrigued. Basically a mish-mash of everything the developer has been getting into recently, it's borderline insane.
It is oddly addictive, though. You're doing little more than solving mysteries - hence the title - and anyone familiar with the studio's work won't be surprised to hear that there's A LOT of dialogue and, on occasion, it wants nothing more than to walk you through the experience. I do like it, mind. The music is enough to destroy the ears of anyone around you, and some of the conversations don't makes any sense but still. Mystery Room is very well thought out and is intelligently developed for a mobile device.
Look for our review next week.
In the hope of being able to install more than half a dozen games on my Vita, I feel like I've spent more time using the Content Manager Assistant than I have actually playing anything, transferring save and application data back and forth all week in some kind of memory-management meta-minigame.
In all seriousness, I still can't believe quite how badly Sony has fudged the memory situation on Vita, or how it continues to exploit customers looking to increase their storage space with unreasonably priced memory cards. £54.99 for a 32GB solution? In 2013? The sooner Sony releases an upgraded model with decent on-board storage the better.
When I did eventually clear enough space to install a handful of games, though, I managed to blast my way through Hotline Miami and sink some time into Escape Plan. Much to my surprise, they're almost as brutal as one another: one appearing to reflect the twitchy, neon-fused highs experienced by a substance abuser, and the other the slow, depressing comedown. Drugs are bad mkay, but after whizzing through it in only a couple of sittings, Hotline Miami is something every Vita user should experience at least once - provided they can find the space.
I finally finished The Last of Us this week, and was shocked to find that the ending is as good as everyone was saying. (People tend to over-egg these things.) A great game, all around.
Then there's Dark Souls, which I re-bought for PC. I really shouldn't have, given that it's pretty much guaranteed to destroy your life, but that's the power of Steam - games are so cheap that you can't not buy them. Thanks, Steam.
