

Platform: Xbox 360
Publisher: Square-EnixI love terrible inevitability in my narrative.Three years after the original Kane & Lynch: Dead Men's release, I hardly remember its shit gameplay. Its characters stick with me. Poor Kane. Poor Lynch. Such stupid, tragic assholes.Both balding, both overweight, both over the hill, both shlubs. Both former family men. Kane, the coward, who wants to be a team player and a decent man who stands by his friends and protects his family, but who cuts and runs when things get tough, leaving his teammates to die and always telling himself there was nothing he could do. Lynch, the loser, who wants to make it big as a criminal because there's nothing left for him—he's not just a loser, he's a psychopath, and off his medication he kills anyone helpless and alone in his presence, including by all evidence his own wife. Like Quentin Tarantino's character in From Dusk Till Dawn only with less rape and slightly more self-awareness. Amazing, that the first game successfully sold Lynch as the conscience of the pair—sure, he killed important hostages a few times, but he never betrayed his allies.
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Platform: Xbox 360
Publisher: 2K Games
Mafia II is an open-world GTA-type game where the big city has one linear quest line and no meaningful subquests, and the shooty bits of each mission are short (I want to say, "About half as long as the average shooty mission in Mass Effect 2"), but padded out in length because you have to drive through the open city to get to them.So my impressions aren't positive.It's got great graphics! I mean, during winter actual snow piles up on the cars. I haven't seen that in a game of this sort before. And it has some really smart-looking trenchcoat-and-fedora combos for your protagonist to wear, with really nice texture work on the fabric so it looks like felt and not shiny plastic. Facial animation, voice acting, and writing are decent.
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Platform: PlayStation Portable
Publisher: Atlus
Persona 3 Portable is the best version of one of the best JRPGs of its console generation, provided you're willing to live with an absence of animated cutscenes (which were never put to great use in P3 anyway). If you've been on the fence about this one, or you've heard about it but never quite had the time or inclination to grab one of the previous versions, hop on now.It is a JRPG. Its protagonists are attractive teenagers and it's full of angst. These are givens. That said, it's quite intelligent for a story of its genre. The backstory is, about ten years ago, some scientists were doing an experiment that broke time, introducing a twenty-fifth hour into the day, an hour that exists in the moment between 12-midnight-and-zero-seconds and 12-midnight-and-one-second. During this so-called Dark Hour, most human beings fall into a torporous slumber and transmute into coffins, while a few rare vulnerable human beings are free to wander around and get their minds devoured by creatures called shadows, embodiments of the collective suicide-urge of humanity. Some people, however, have the ability to fight shadows during the Dark Hour by summoning up psychic embodiments of their own identities through ritualistic suicide acts—that is to say, magic teenagers fight monsters by shooting themselves in the head with fake guns to call up their brain-demons.Like my previously-reviewed Persona 4, P3P is divided into two modes. During the day, you go to school and do after school activities, make friends, date, and otherwise form social connections to empower your brain-demons. This mode is a "dating sim," although there's less actual dating and more just making friends. During the Dark Hour, you can climb Tartarus, a giant randomly generated tower-dungeon, full of monsters to fight. P3P improves over previous versions of P3 in that it incorporates a lot of combat revisions from P4 (like, you can manually control your teammates now; they're not just AIs), and also you can choose whether your protagonist is a boy or a girl. Girl-Protagonist has a different set of social connections and a few of the major plot points turn out differently for her. Also she gets new, different music and her menus are pink instead of blue. Finally, you no longer have time limits on how long you can explore Tartarus in one sitting, which makes playing the game in short bursts a lot easier—appropriate for a portable game.It's a great set of revisions to an already great game. Check it out.STEPHEN LEA SHEPPARD
