Grave Gamer News & Views — review

“Black Flag quickly ranks as my favorite Assassin’s Creed. It’s everything an open-world game should be: enormous, addictive, and completely worth pouring hours into…

Ubisoft does a magnificent job of making you feel like a high seas hardass. The development team didn’t lightly nudge into the pirate theme, it tackled it full-on.”

“It may feel like the Basil Karlo interpretation of Arkham – giving itself away as a mere copycat when pressure is applied – but Origins is still adept at capturing that empowering sensation of being The Goddamn Batman.”

Much to my unwittingness, last week’s debut of Mortal Kombat: Legacy’s sophomore season didn’t just see the first episode posted online – the whole damn ten part arc launched at once. I was of the expectation that it’d once again have the staggered release schedule season one did.

To hell with my expectations. You’re able to down the whole affair in one sitting, like I did, starting with Episode One.

To reiterate, Legacy’s first run of episodes impressed the pants off me. I didn’t care about blasphemous character reinterpretations or sudden budgetary dips. The series was stylish, thoroughly chocked with TV-MA action, and got way closer in spitting distance of the source material than 1995 and ‘97’s royally cheesy film adaptations.

So. Is Legacy’s second season a flawless victory? Short answer: no. Long answer: hit that Read More.

The success of Telltale’s Walking Dead games doesn’t rest squarely on the comic branding, nor did gamers go crazy about the first five episodes because of a loose tethering to the AMC show hanging in their mind.

Telltale’s Walking Dead was its own monster; a licensed game that carved its own path deep into gamers’ psyches by forcing us to shed the voyeuristic barrier of comfort that comes in merely watching these characters suffer by putting us right beside them, by making us choose their fates, usually within no more than a moment.  Hard choices are nothing new this generation; Bioware solidified that idea through the mainstream success of their Mass Effect games.  But whereas Sheperd’s dilemmas were often clearly laid out in black and white (or red and blue), The Walking Dead demanded you navigate its conversation webs with your own moral compass.

There are games and then there are experiences.  With Naughty Dog’s recent step up in pedigree through its widely acclaimed Uncharted trilogy, I went into The Last of Us expecting quality, of course, but I came out the other side of its campaign unquestionably floored.

I really hadn’t anticipated to have my very emotions put through the ringer like this.  Over the course of about ten hours, I went on a grueling, thoughtful, gorgeous, and almost tough to swallow adventure that echoed the sentiments of countless apocalyptic literature and film so effectively that, often, it transcends the works it set out to pay respects to.

Let’s cut the pretense and get down to brass tacks.  The Last of Us is not just the best game to come out of Naughty Dog’s doors, and it’s not just the best exclusive title the PlayStation 3 has ever housed.  And it’s not just the best original IP of the year (which it is, even with more than half a year left of 2013).  No, no, that’s too small of scale to view this rarity of a game on.  Believe you me, my next words are not ones I loose unto the world lightly nor often:

The Last of Us is easily one of the best video games ever made.