• LittleBigPlanet 2 — I picked it up Jan 21st. (It’s been on loan to my sister, and I just got it back. I should go back to playing it.)
• Batman Arkham City — Released October 18th, and I have it in my hands right now.
• Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception — Releases November 1st, and I wait with baited breath. I love that franchise.
• Star Wars: The Old Republic — Releases sometime around December 20th. This is for Josh and I to play together.

I wasn’t sure when I was going to pick up Batman Arkham City, but when some friends of mine mentioned yesterday that they too had preordered it, and expected it to arrive on release day (Tuesday, Oct 18th 2011), I was bummed. The early reviews were positively glowing. And Amazon is offering a preorder bonus — you get $10 credit to most future purchases.

Now this was just too much for me, so I preordered it late yesterday afternoon. The website was still promising to deliver it tomorrow, but I was still incredulous. Lo and behold, UPS shows up at my house less than 24 hours later, and drops this off.

Unbelievable.

I made a little time to play the game after I picked up the kids this evening. I played for maybe 30-45 mins. Wow, a great looking game. I hope I get some free time on Saturday to play some more.

Batman Arkham City for PS3

Recently, we’ve been borrowing Ultimate Alliance 2, which is your typical button-mashing videogame, but it features the pantheon of superheroes and supervillains from the Marvel Universe. I thought it was an okay game, but Josh enjoys the game. He likes to switch to different characters, and trying them out. I wouldn’t say it was a tough game to beat, or one with a thought-provoking storyline. There is a story, but it’s an excuse for the players to mash buttons against waves of indiscriminate foes. Soldiers, robots, and boss battles against other heroes and villains. The character models look good too.

What I found to be the best feature was the co-op play. Up to four local players can play together, so we played through most of the levels. Uncle Robby came to assist midway when we reached a difficult boss, but for the most part, casual difficulty was the level best suited for the casual gamer and his five year old son. We haven’t unlocked all the characters, so we’ll probably replay it again. Josh wants to be the Hulk.

However, after some time away from most games in this genre, I got into third-person (over the shoulder) games like the those of the Uncharted series, and also Heavenly Sword. I like them better, because you can still be the character, and yet see what’s going on around. Who’s in front of you, who’s behind you, who’s creeping up next to you with a shotgun. It’s the best of both worlds. In comparison, first-person shooters seemed a little…… I’m not sure how to describe it. I guess what unnerved me was that in those first-person games, you can’t see someone behind you or sneaking up next to you. I don’t like scary surprises — I’m the kind of guy who doesn’t even like showering with my eyes closed. Call it paranoia.

Back to the present — it’s been nine months, and I hadn’t played Bioshock yet, but I knew it was a fantastic game. I mean, I heard, anyway. Early last year, I had downloaded the demo, and it was some scary shit. The visuals were beautiful, but the geez, the atmosphere was too real. The background sounds, the dangerous splicers off in the distance talking, the occasional approaching footsteps that aren’t your own. Man, talk about unnerving. It was scary, and yet exhilarating. I was unnerved (probably unnecessarily since it’s just a game), but since it’s so beautiful and enthralling, I was so intrigued.

Bioshock is one unnerving game experience.

So, there was I was this month. It was a quiet weekend, I’d recently beaten Uncharted 2 a few weeks earlier. I popped in the Blu-ray game disc, and bam!, back to be freaked out. I’ve played only a few hours so far, but wow, it’s a fantastic game. The visuals of this art-deco city under the ocean are stunning and enchanting, and the gameplay is….. well…. it’s well-done, but utterly unnerving. Twice so far, I’ve walked into a room, and then the lights went off. Footsteps approached quickly, and I was attacked.  So yeah, a guy who doesn’t even like to close his eyes in the shower, and there I’m fighting in the dark for my life.

So what’s the premise? The game is set in an alternate 1960 in the underwater city of Rapture. This fellow named Andrew Ryan built a city underwater, and took the so-called “best and the brightest” with him to create a utopian society, far away from religion, capitalism, and communism. Down there, scientists discovered some sort of sea slug that could be used to synthesize this stuff called ADAM, which could be used to make various plasmids. These injectable plasmids would rewrite your DNA, and give you abilities like shooting electricity, fire, etc, out of your hands.

Somewhere along the way, the utopian society gave way to madness and anarchy. Most people went crazy, and started killing each other. Your airplane (you are Jack) crash lands in the water near the Rapture, and end up in this decaying, falling-apart city under the ocean, and surrounded by the surviving denizens of Rapture, now called “splicers.” Oh, they’re all quite mad. Quite, quite mad. People walking around with large butcher knives, blood splattered on the walls, freaky stuff written on the walls in blood, people wearing those weird animals masks (a la The Shining.) One time, there was this one woman crying over a coffin. I walked up to her, and she turned around and started attacking me, while wearing a bunny mask. I killed her, and looked in the coffin. It was empty, except a cake.

If the story and the visuals weren’t so amazing, I would have thrown the disc into the fireplace a long time ago.

Man, what a great game. Pulse-pounding action, great story, awesome visuals, and wonderful voice acting. I’ve embedded a short AP video (a la YouTube) where AP interviewed some of the key actors in the game. I can’t wait for the next installment (please tell me there will be another game) to see where the next adventure with these characters will go next.