I needed to take a break from wading through the story in yet another JRPG, so I downloaded a couple demos – including the demo for ‘Splosion Man. After a mere few minutes going through a couple of the first levels, I was hooked and had to get the full game.

‘Splosion Man is a puzzle/platformer where the aim is to clear levels by using your character – a lab-created experiment, apparently – to explode, thus performing many tasks depending on the tools and the environment around you. At first its nothing but exploding off the ground or walls to get to higher places, but later on you’re faced with roving enemies out to get you, laser guns that will zap you, pits of acid that will melt you and many, many other obstacles to overcome. There are various devices placed in the environment to help you accomplish the task of making it through the level, such as exploding barrels that propel you higher, switches to unlock various gates and even scientists controlling the aforementioned obstacles, which you have to take out to progress.

You only have three explosions available before you have to “recharge” yourself by touching the ground, a wall or an exploding barrel, which adds to the strategy of clearing the stages. If you fail to hit one of those rechargers in certain cases, you’ll fall back to the ground or, sometimes, to your death. However, death is very forgiving – there are frequently-placed checkpoints and an unlimited number of lives. One feature I like, mostly because I’m not really all that great at these types of games, is the “Way of the Coward” option. After you’ve died so many times on a particular level, you can skip the rest of the level altogether. However, you get an insanely high completion time (for no hope of placing anything higher than dead last on the leaderboards) and are forced to wear a tutu through the next level. (Once you complete another level the way its supposed to be completed, the tutu disappears.) Some might call that feature stupid, I call it good game design for catering to many different skill levels. I can clear most obstacles in most levels, but there’s one or two that weren’t worth the trouble of continuing to bang my head against.

The character – Mr. ‘Splosion Man himself – is a joy to control. He’s full of life, has many different animations and his dialog (if you can call it that) can be quite hilarious at times. Control, for the most part, is accurate and not very wishy-washy, which I find refreshing in a platformer. Also, some of the acrobatics that you are forced to perform to clear some obstacles are amazingly fun when accomplished correctly.

Unfortunately, the single player game is where all the fun is. The multi-player is just plain annoying. The goal of most multi-player levels is to somehow manipulate both characters in a manner that will precisely move them in a way so as to clear obstacles. There’s basic tutorials to help you do these things, but it doesn’t explain much how your characters are supposed to move when these “moves” are performed. Many times you have to move at the same time and explode off of each other to move in opposite directions, yet it seems haphazard in the direction your character moves. One time they’ll “bounce” off each other and move in opposite direction, other times while performing the same “move” they’ll both move in the same direction. Its hard to control and more of a headache than any fun. Its a shame the multi-player isn’t more multi-player-friendly, to make this truly an awesome title. There is a countdown you can activate to help time your jumps, but for the most part, it doesn’t help in practice.

Overall, this is a great diversion and an awesome addition to the Xbox Live Arcade, if only for the single-player experience. A definite “must buy”, especially for the whacky dialog and the fun of blowing stuff up.

Score: 7.5 (out of 10)

Its been a while since Tales of Vesperia came out for the Xbox 360. In fact, that was one of the driving forces behind my purchase of the system last year. I figured if the Talesfranchise, of all things, is going to the 360, I need to buy one for fear I miss out on great JRPGs. Oddly enough, I haven’t played the silly game yet. However, I found it cheap on Amazon the other day, and it should be arriving in the mail any day now. It’ll give me something to do while my wife is out of town.

If I had never purchased my 360, I’d be glad for the day that the game hit the PS3, which it will be doing before too long. In fact, a demo of the PS3 version just went up on the Japanese PSN not long ago, new playable character and all. Wait, what? New playable character? That’s right, with the re-release on the PS3 comes many new additions and improvements. I’m not sure how I feel about this, honestly. Why does the PS3 get content that owners of the original Xbox 360 version not get? Will 360 owners ever get that content?

Here’s what should happen – any changes to the story, game play or mechanics (like bug fixes or whatever) – should be patched into the 360 version free of charge. I will compromise on the next part and say that any new characters and outfits given for “free” when you buy the game on the PS3 should be put up as cheaply-priced DLC for the 360 version. Truth be told, that DLC should be free since 360 owners usually paid just as much as the PS3 owners for the game, but I’ll concede that there can be a slight charge to the DLC. Anyone who is madly in love with the game would buy the DLC without much thought anyway.

I’m not a fan of the practice of giving one system different or exclusive content compared to another system – especially between the PS3 and the 360. I hated what they did with Soul Calibur IV, and I dislike re-releases of “exclusive” titles a year later with “bonus” content like Bioshock and, now, Tales of Vesperia. Its great that they’re adding more value for your buck to the game – that’s not the problem. The problem is giving one system content that the other one doesn’t get, for no particular reason. Perhaps they think that since the Xbox 360 players got the game a year earlier, the PS3 players should get something for the time they waited. Sure, if Square-Enix adds loads of exclusive content to the 360 version of Final Fantasy XIII to make up for the past fifteen years of Sony exclusivity, then I might let it slide. But, that’s not exactly going to happen.

I’m not a “fanboy” of one system over another – if anything I’ve become more accepting of the various systems in the last few years. I just think it’s a crappy move on the part of whoever is behind this to offer content on one system and not another, especially a year after the original release. Who knows, it may very well be announced that all this stuff will be provided as DLC for the 360 version. That would be cool, but I won’t hold my breath.

I honestly find it hard to start this review, frankly because I don’t know where to start.  Do I start with the over-sexualized, scantily-clad, smack-talking heroine?  Or do I start things off by talking about the awkward, too-sensitive, mind-of-its-own camera?  How about the boring, repetitive combat?

I have this thing that I do with all my reviews – I try to find at least one thing that this game does well.  I did find that – the artwork and environments are eye candy, on a visual level.  I enjoy the fact that you can tear apart parts of the environment and there aren’t many invisible walls in the games different “combat zones”.  Ayumi, our heroine in this tale, is nicely designed, but a bit over-the-top.  It is nice to see an anime-inspired action game, which is the whole reason I rented this game to play in the first place.  See, I’m trying to be positive!

The issue is, there’s so much that is negative about this game that it snuffs out the few glimmers of light.  The story is overly cliché and not explained very well, although I was impressed with the few stylized cut scenes that were scattered throughout the game.  I was disappointed there weren’t more of them – after every couple “combat zones” I expected to see one, shining new light on some little nuance of the story, yet I was disappointed nearly every time.  The battling felt so monotonous and long-winded that it would have done well for the game to flesh out the story by adding more cut scenes.  But, I digress.  Its likely the audience the developers were searching for would disagree with my RPG-minded brain chemistry.

The controls themselves were fine, and fairly standard for a title like this.  My problem was with the camera.  I seriously felt like pelting my 360 controller through my TV every time the camera would either whip around Ayumi on its own when I was trying to look somewhere else or when it wouldn’t move at all when I wanted it to.  Sometimes it was way too responsive, other times it wasn’t responsive enough – if at all.  This complicated battle sections that were already too long.  Maybe I was doing something wrong, maybe not.  It seems a bit long-winded to have to sit there hacking and slashing for 20 minutes before you clear one battle area.  That’s called artificially inflating the length of the game.

As far as the game mechanics themselves, things were sound, although it didn’t seem like the basic tutorials were enough to really let the player understand how things work.  The new spells and abilities – both “light”- and “dark”-based – were fun to use, when they worked.  Again we have the same problem that we had with the camera, it seemed that spells like the “fireball” often would not even cast when I tried, even when the cool-down was up.

Unfortunately, the armor-less eye candy that is Ayumi couldn’t keep me focused.  The camera needs to be tighter, the story more engrossing and the game mechanics easier to grasp.  I applaud the efforts of the developers to attempt to introduce an anime-inspired hack-and-slash action title to the North American minds infatuated with God of War, but in the end it was likely more of a detriment than a benefit to the genre.

Score: 3.0 (out of 10)

It scares me. A lot. Its daunting and intimidating. Its kind of like a box of chocolates – you never know what you’re going to get. Of course, it’s “home” to millions of gamers out there and, if the last outage for scheduled maintenance a few weeks ago was any indication, many of them feel lost without it.

Gamers have had the ability for voice communication while gaming for years, well before Xbox Live was introduced. The majority of my experience with voice communication over the Internet has been with Ventrilo. I used to use it quite often while playing WoW, especially back in my hardcore raiding days. Even after that, I used it quite frequently to talk to other friends and guild-mates while playing around in Azeroth. Voice communication in general isn’t the issue. The problem, for me and I’m sure many other gamers, is that, with a service like Xbox Live, you come into contact with complete strangers all the time.

Unlike a close-knit group of friends, such as a guild in an MMORPG, Xbox Live thrusts you into a world of mostly strangers. I used to be a very shy person. I still am, to some extent, but its gotten better over the last several years. I’m very cautious about jumping right in and talking shop with complete and total strangers, even in a semi-anonymous setting like this. But that, in and of itself, isn’t where my true phobia originates. What’s worse than dealing with a different set of total strangers in each different game and setting that you can find yourself in on Xbox Live? Being at the blunt end of a nerd rage attack that happens more often than not because of the aforementioned semi-anonymity of these services.

Basically, people don’t really care who they’re yelling at and don’t take anyone else into consideration, because its all about them and what they want and what they feel. True, there are rating systems in place, and if its too bad it can be reported and/or you can ignore the offender. That still doesn’t change the fact that nerd rage conniptions happen far too often. That, my friends, is why I tend to steer clear of Xbox Live communication.

Now, I’m not the sort to be offended by every little thing that someone says or does. One time, some friends and I were playing Halo 3 and, to be honest, we weren’t very good. We were playing online in the “newbie” games and having a lot of fun. Of course, even in the “newbie” games, veteran players tend to come in just to show off and stroke their own ego. In one game we finished, there was one such person with quadruple the number of kills that the best player of us four friends. We didn’t do a thing to him, besides be on the opposing team. A few minutes later we had a voice message from him telling us that we sucked. In fact, according to him we were so bad we should never play Halo again and take our game down and sell it. Now, we got a good laugh from this. It was both funny and sad at the same time.

I would like to know how lame someone’s life must be that they have to take time away from perhaps more game play or whatever, to record a voice message to send to us to tell us something we already knew – that we weren’t that good at Halo. Seriously people? How much easier it would have been to just ignore us low-scorers and continue on with your gaming. No, but this dude had to stroke his own ego by sending us a voice message telling us that we sucked.

This one instance we laughed it off. It was all the rage the rest of the night, that’s for sure. It helped matters a lot that he sounded like a 12-year-old. But, I can only imagine that it has to get to a person who is on the bum end of a nerd rage rant on a fairly frequent basis. It gets hard to laugh off eventually. And, this isn’t the only time I experienced a similar scenario.

Experiences like that are enough to “scare” me away from spending much time with my headset attached and in free-for-all voice communication with the randomness on Xbox Live, or any similar service. What can be done to curb this? Nothing, really. Jerks will be jerks, especially when given a mostly anonymous way of communication with other human beings. There’s no force in the world that can stop a stupid person from doing what it is they do. I speak from experience.

I would definitely enjoy being able to communicate verbally with those I’ve befriended, but I don’t play multi-player online games enough to have a very large friend’s list. Besides playing with friends, I tend to stay away from these experiences because the bad apples ruin it.

I’m not saying all this to diss Xbox Live, definitely not. It’s a great service and has proved quite useful on many accounts. Its boosted the gaming industry overall and helped usher in a truly new generation of how we play and experience games. However, I can’t imagine I’m the only one who feels this way – I’d rather just avoid the voice communication aspect of the service in most cases, instead of finding myself upwind from a pungent dose of nerd rage.