Howdy folks, it’s time for another addition of Tee Time With Doctor Cyborg, in which I put someone’s critical heart surgery on hold to squeeze in a round of golf, but, while golfing, talk to you (my people) about something that I have done recently. In this case “Resident Evil 5”, the newest addition to the Resident Evil series. So pour yourselves a straight shot of Everclear (one shot of Everclear! chase by licking whatever surface you happen to be standing on. Be careful I’ve heard this can make you go blind) and come along! Fore!

Resident Evil 5 was released a few weeks ago, but I am just putting up a review now because up until now I have been busy playing it. This is actually the first game I’ve purchased that was released for the Playstation 3, and I must say I think it was worth it. Which isn’t a lie, but right out of the gates I will also say I didn’t like it as much as I liked Resident Evil 4.
Just like RE4 this is a third person shooter and just like RE4 this game has a crappy story. I don’t think the series will ever recover from moving away from classic zombies. Not that I think the story in any of the games were any good, it’s just they had a creepier feel when they were about zombies, and the games just don’t seem scary anymore without it.
What I like more then RE4 about this one is the fact that it is two player, making it easier to play over and over again, which is saying a lot because I played through RE4 five times in the first month. The problem is the Co-op play makes the game much easier, and even less scary. Not that you still can’t play it alone, it’s just it doesn’t seem as fun to play it alone because it is annoying and frustrating when the computer does silly shit with your partner and gets you killed or wastes all the good ammo, whatever, it isn’t as fun alone.
The partner recovery system is what I think I like the least about this game. How it works is every time you are in danger AKA almost dead. It sends you into partner recovery mode, where you can’t do anything except walk slowly. If your partner can’t get to you in time then you die. Although if you are standing next to each other it is pretty much impossible to die.
EAGLE!!!!!!!

So that is my biggest gripe, that it is so much harder to die, although since they did this system it seems you are more reckless and enemies do more damage, so you spend a lot more time near death then in other games.
Now I will regale you about my biggest complaint in RE4, something I call instant deaths, in which during a cut-scene they will tell you a button to press, and if you don’t press it fast enough you will automatically die. These are so fucking annoying, and they don’t add anything to the game at all. I was hoping that they saw the error in there ways with the instant deaths, but they are still in RE5 although I think they toned them down a bit from where they were, they are still slightly annoying.

On the plus side, the creatures in this game are a tad more frightening, and the game looks much better in general. Although they toned down the gore in my opinion, and they made the blood so bright that it feels faker then ever before.
Once again I want to stress the point that the story is god awful, It isn’t worth watching, and there are even some levels that add story that you can’t skip, so you are forced to mute the television at times.
One thing that got old fast about this game was the weapons. For two people and how much they expect you to play for all the additional content, some of the guns that you get are quite boring, and I wish they had a wider selection. Also just like in RE4 they should have had special upgrades for each of the weapons, which sadly in this game they do not.
On the extreme plus side there is tons of additional content. Not all of it is worth unlocking, but it’s the thought that counts. Right?
Well it turns out I like focusing on the negative aspects of a game, this review is no different. People that have read this far will say this isn’t a review but a tangent, or else it sounds like venting. I don’t care.

Therefore the thing I was let down about most recently was the unlocking of the harder difficulty, ‘Professional’.

I usually like getting good at a game and then play it on the hard setting, RE4 had a really good hard mode. RE5’s is ridiculous. Even wearing special protective clothing everything that hits you in the game is a one hit kill, and so where as that does sound more challenging, I can’t tell that anything else is different. Essentially how it works is that you stay really close to your partner and shoot things waiting for your partner to die so you can heal them immediately, if you both happen to get killed at the same time you continue, and start again from step one. With very few exceptions you do this for about 8 hours and you have then beat the game on professional. I didn’t think it was that fun, but in their defense they successfully duped me into playing through it anyway, so kudos to them.

To sum it all up. Resident Evil 5 is really fun, but lacking some of the elements from the earlier RE games that made them stand out. It’s really easy to immerse yourself into because it’s so easy to recover from mistakes. If you liked RE4 I think you will like this one, I just don’t think it is quite as good. As always the story and characters in this game are lame. Play only if you think it’s fun to kill things that resemble zombies.
3 1/2 out of five stars.

This is Doctor Cyborg signing off from the eighteenth green. I have just defeated Tiger Woods at a heated round of laser golf during a lightning storm.

I did it.

This particular post has a lot to do with the multiplayer:

Serving All Your Supernatural Elimination Needs
For Ghostbusters Multiplayer we wanted to include featured locations from the Single Player game, but adapt them for Multiplayer use. All of the maps are designed to suit a majority of job types; it was critical that we allowed enough space for more enemies, more players, and more action! Threewave has some of the best level designers in the business and their expertise was critical in this regard.

Refining the different Job types took a long time. We had a good idea of how we wanted each to play but since we had no real network code for several months, our prototypes changed a lot over time. Once we were able to test the different Jobs, we quickly iterated on the rules and came to some solid decisions on what we felt was the most fun.

We also soon discovered we needed a few extra things to keep players challenged in Co-op Multiplayer as compared to the single player game. Four “live” Ghostbusters ended up completely destroying the AI ghosts! Teamwork was something we needed to focus on; in the Single Player game the other Ghostbusters help you, we wanted to make sure players did better by working together in Multiplayer.

Over the course of prototyping and development we decided to introduce limited ammunition and powerups; this choice really allowed us to reward teamwork and create some unique Multiplayer “Ghostbusters” technology items, such as the Proton Accelerator and the Ghost Shrinker.

We also added some unique Multiplayer AI “aggro” behaviours to challenge players even more. Some of these include ghosts that go berserk or even split in two when angered.

Persistent online ranking, automatic difficulty scaling and Most Wanted Ghosts to find and catch were added to keep players coming back to play again and again.

In Ghostbusters, ghost wrangling and trapping is one of the key elements players do over and over. The first time we tried Multiplayer wrangling, we knew we were on to something fun. In the Single Player game, if there are more AI players holding a ghost, the less the ghost struggles. We emphasized and added to this feature for Multiplayer Ghost Wrangling. If players work together, ghosts go down faster, and everyone gets a better score.

Check out the full post at IGN.com.

Our friends over at Proton Charging had the scoop on this new footage:

The gameplay trailer has some amazing sights, particularly the various weapon types (BOSON DART!), but the trainer level has everything you want – Bill Murray dialog, the destructible environment, using the throwers to wear a ghost down, slamming them to get them into the trap, overheating packs, dodging ghost attacks, the ecto-goggle/PKE combo, and even the suggestion that – as you’d expect – walking into someone else’s stream isn’t a good idea. As well, we get a taste of how the movie soundtrack will be used in the game – it works really well!

Jump on over there to check out the videos!

Whats better than a normal boring white Xbox360? A black one of course. And whats better then a black one? A sexy sexy red one. Add to that a sexy red controler and a 120GB hard drive and you’ve got the new ‘Resident Evil 5’ Xbox 360. You can pre-order it at Bestbuy for $399 and you get the game, which this robot doesn’t give half a shit about, and also Street Fight II Turbo HD Remix. Basically if you don’t have an Xbox 360 and have been looking at getting one this sexy ass thing is a good reason too.

Geekologie has the story after the jump.

I’ve got good news and bad news everyone:

Bad news first:

Bloody Disgusting‘s posting rumors that Robert Rodriguez’s Troublemaker Studios is slated to produce a Predator “Reboot.” However, this team of commandos is up against more than one group of intergalactic hunters. Sadly, these franchises don’t know when to quit movie wise…

And now, the good news!

I’ve been on an Alien trilogy (the fourth one doesn’t count, it’s a piece of shit) kick the past few days and have been scouring the internet nerdy alien life cycles, merchandise photos and old TV ads. I managed to find out that Sega and Gearbox are currently developing a FPS based on the film franchise and the game is due out sometime this year on PS3, XBOX360 and PC. From what I’ve gathered the game takes place shortly after Alien 3 and puts you in the ranks of a USMC unit investigating the whereabouts of Ripley, Hicks, Newt and Bishop. From what I’ve seen it looks pretty solid and knowing that Gearbox is one of the developers responsible for Halflife and porting Halo to PC, it seems to be in good hands.

manettes_wii1

This made me chuckle, the ending is the best part…

As far as I know these are the first screenshots to be released thus far. Very little is known about the DS version of Ghostbusters: The Video Game. At the begining of December, Proton Charging had posted a list of the details released to date.

Lots of news on the Ghostbusters: the Game. You can check out some kick-ass screen shots at this German website.

There’s a really cool article here that shows the production time line of the game.

And lastly, some “leaked footage” of the game:

A few weeks ago Playstation put out a game on the Playstation network by the name of Castlevania Chronicles. This game was never released outside of Japan until 2001, and was originally released on the Sharp68000 which is apparently a home computer that was also only put out in Japan. It is the second remake of the original game, Castlevania IV being the first remake. In all of the above mentioned titles you play Simon Belmont, and fight a vampire named Dracula.

I was surprised to find out that this game was released after Super Castlevania IV because this game doesn’t look as good, and they also take away a lot of the whip functions that they introduced in Castlevania IV. I also think that Castlevania IV sounded a lot better. (I have never got over how great it feels to hear the sound of grabbing a boss orb in CV4.)

Now if anyone remembers Castlevania IV, it is a difficult game. In a lot of ways it is just as hard as the original. It seems to me that the reason that the original is so hard is that Dracula is so tough to kill. Castlevania IV’s Dracula is also pretty tough, but most of the challenge comes from the levels and getting to Dracula. Castlevania Chronicles puts both of these games to shame. In the original mode released on the S68k, it is plain fucking ridiculous. Luckily for us, in the U.S. versions they have two game modes, “original” and “arrange”. In arrange mode you can select a difficulty level of easy, normal, or hard. Also you can change the amount of lives you get per continue. 2,3, or 5 I believe. I played on normal, with the standard 3 lives, and it was still tougher than the other two games. (This was only after playing the first four stages of the original mode, getting frustrated, and then giving up.)

Normal mode, seems to be exactly half as hard as the original mode, although original mode seems plausible the more I think about it, it is just terribly frustrating. Although in all fairness that could be a lie. Because there were at least three times during the normal play through that I felt like throwing in the towel.

The biggest disappointment was actually Dracula himself. Getting to him was the hardest of all the Castlevania platform games that I’ve played to date, but other than Castlevania 2 this was the easiest Dracula. (On original mode perhaps the 2nd hardest?) The toughest being Dracula X’s.

I would rather be raped by Large Marge –Slugtron ~when asked if he would fight Dracula X.

I thought this was a good Castlevania game, it had all of the hallmarks of the other games, but it definitely had it’s own unique feeling at the same time. Especially the difficulty of the levels. It feels to have a bit more of a set pattern then the others do, so once you memorize exactly what terrors you are going to face, devise a plan, and take your time, you have a fairly okay chance to come out of it at the end.

All in all I really like this game, it’s more challenging than it is fun, but at the end of the day this is what I like about video games the most. I hate to go off on a tangent about games not being like they use to, but here we all are.

I am sick of new video games that kids are playing today, like the lego ‘whatever’ series. Designed to be fun for a six year old, because you have infinite lives and there are only two buttons that you need to press. When I was six every game was so hard it took years away from your life, hell even Micky Mousecapades would put hair on your chest. The point I am trying to make is my six-year-old robot nephew plays twice as many video games as I did when I was his age, but they make games so easy now that he has no patience for a challenge. When I pop in any of the old NES games I used to play, he gives up after five minutes. Even the new Castlevania games fall under this net a little bit. (They usually offer modes that are very challenging) But in all the old school games you have at best 4 hit points, and there are serious consequences to continuing. It is a rarity that you have to figure out a boss pattern now a day! I don’t mean to be Billy Mitchell here and I feel this argument could go on for a while, and so I just want to end it now by saying ‘fuck lego games’

If you own a PS3 and have a internet connection, you can buy Castlevania Chronicles for 6 bucks!*note: If you don’t have a PS3 then the investment looks more like $406 buckaroonies. It is really good and really challenging I highly robot recommend it!

Also if you buy it for the PS3, and have a PSP you can download it, and play it on the PSP as well. What a deal!

Dr.Cyborg gives this title 241 out of 256 stars. Thats pretty good. Murder all humans, why not?