My roommate just signed up for GameFly, and got Dark Sector. I was never really all that interested in the game, but I figured I might as well play it since he's only renting it. I'm not going to write a full review since I haven't finished it (and probably never will), but I want to talk about a few things. For the record, I got to chapter 7 (out of 10) before I stopped playing.

Quick Thoughts

Dark Sector isn't a terrible game if you're a fan of the genre, but there are a lot of weaknesses. Enemies respawn far too often, which amounts to you ducking behind a wall for ten minutes shooting the same enemies. It copies Gears of War too much, including things that don't make sense: as GiantBomb pointed out, your running and sprinting speed is the same as GoW — which makes no sense here as Hayden (your character) is a skinny guy, not a giant man in armor.

The "glaive" is great, and is one of the only things that sets this game apart. It's a blade that acts as a boomerang; throw it to slice enemies in half, and it'll come back to you. You'll gain an "aftertouch" ability which lets you slow down time and actually direct the glaive mid-flight, which is what I spent most of the game doing.

Aside from that it's a pretty standard shooter.

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We finally got on the bandwagon! I've been really busy lately, so I haven't had time to make videos or write reviews, but I really wanted to talk about these two DS games. I got my friend Neofletcher to do a podcast with me, since he's also obsessed with the DS.

Both of these podcasts are very in-depth (i.e., LONG), and we really just did them for fun. We'll try to make future podcasts shorter. Originally it was going to be a single podcast, but I decided to split it in two because of the length.

See videos for both games at the bottom of this post.

Part 1: Space Invaders Extreme (Tommy Gun + Neofletcher)

This is an update to Space Invaders, similar to what they did with Pac-Man CE on Live Arcade. New enemies, new weapons, and best of all, the whole game thumps to the music (think Rez, Lumines)! As of this recording it's an import, but it's coming to the US on June 17th.

20 minutes, 8MB:

Corrections and Additional Info:
It's called "Fever Time" not "Frenzy."

I found out that the bosses in the PSP version are not shrunk down, it actually is a differently shaped field than on the DS, although they remove the borders on the PSP to give it slightly more height than the main PSP levels.

Part 2: Nanostray 2 (Tommy Gun + Neofletcher)

A sequel, this is a very traditional shmup (more so than Nanostray 1). Has D-pad control or touch-screen control.

43 minutes, 17MB:

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I loved Deus Ex, but halfway through my save file got corrupted, and I couldn't finish it. I really love cyberpunk, so this game really interested me. After I beat it, I made some videos of it, and decided I might as well review it while I was at it. This was about a year ago, and all this content has been sitting on my hard drive since then. So, while this review was mostly done, keep in mind that I may have left some things out. Links to both videos are in the review below.

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With the writer's strike still on, I've had more time to play games, and I just beat this game a few minutes ago. It got such great reviews that I've wanted to play it for a while. After finishing it, do I now wish I had a magic dagger that would let me rewind time to avoid ever playing it?

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This is part 2 of my review, also see part 1.

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Note: we have it for the Xbox 360. Each person needs to be signed into an Xbox profile (it can be the same one). Some things may be a bit different on PS3.

I started writing this review right after getting the game, two months ago, and have since added to it. There is so much more to say about the game, though, that I have left some things out to talk about later. I have broken it into two parts, and apologize for the unorganized format. It's not so much a review as it is a discussion.

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My own quick thoughts on GH3: It's a solid game. It's fun, with great songs, but a lot of it is hard for the sake of being hard. The timing window is much bigger, which makes for sloppy playing. You can pretty much just mash the buttons during the solos.

Speaking of mashing, that's basically what you have to do during "Raining Blood" Expert ("Mosh 1" section). After trying it around ten times, I got sick of it and quit, even though it was the only song I had left to beat on Expert, not counting the end boss. Then I got Rock Band. I have not played GH3 since. The Guitar Hero series will always have a place, especially playing solo; but without Harmonix, it's missing something — and I don't mean drums and a mic.

I read the following review of Guitar Hero 3 on a forum, and loved it. It really sums up a lot of people's feelings about GH3, even if they couldn't verbalize them. I asked the writer's permission to repost it here, and he agreed. So here is the full review, by ThunderPeel2001:
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I had been looking forward to TimeShift for a while, but getting closer to release my excitement had been waning a bit. People sounded a bit unimpressed, the time powers weren't really as interesting as they first seemed, and the delays meant it was no longer as groundbreaking as it may have been. I was able to borrow the Xbox 360 version from a friend, so I quickly played through it (I think it only took around 10 hours to beat). Overall, it was a fun, solid game. But, I feel like there were many things they missed out on.

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I've had this game sitting on my shelf for over a year. With the remake coming out, I figured I'd at least throw it in and play for a little bit, and then wait for the remake to actually finish the game. Well, guess what? I got hooked on it. Finally I checked online to see about how far I was, and I was halfway through, so I decided to just finish it (total of four sittings). I don't think I even need to say that I absolutely loved it.

The good thing is that the game saves all the checkpoints, so you can replay any part you want — so as long as the same is true about the remake, I won't have to play through the entire game again (not that that would be a bad thing). I'm hoping one of my roommates will get it and beat it, so I can just go back and play my favorite parts, and the new content.

So what's so great about this game? Well…
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Update: Since posting this review, I created a promo video for Thylus.
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The Thylus is a thumb stylus designed for PDAs, Nintendo DSs, and other touch screen devices. The makers were nice enough to send us a few to test out. We tested them on a DS, DS Lite, and many different games.
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