Played a bunch of demos:
The Polynomial - Space of the Music: I saw Groo and a bunch of others playing this so I tried the demo. Really really good music, awesome lightshow, but the gameplay seemed kind of slow and boring?
Puzzle Dimensions: Saw a few people raving about it and Eurogamer gave it a 9/10. Kind of liked it but the controls seemed unintuitive. Too easy to fall off when trying to just look around.
Blade Kitten: You know, if this didn't have 1) horrible deviant art style and 2) extremely floaty physics/controls, it'd actually be a solid game if the level design is up to par. Double jumps, wall jumps, speed running, wall climbing, it's got the right mechanics for a good strider/shinobi game.
Owl game: black screen, PS3 froze. Can't say I liked this demo. Sorry Gaz.
Majin and the Forsaken Land: Not bad. The combat is still way too shallow and gets boring after 5 mins like their other games, but the giant guy makes things fun and the environments are neat. Image quality is awful. Looks like a PS2 game on PS3 version. But the art style and texture work is solid. Reminds me of FFXII or Rogue Galaxy environments. Might give it a shot when it's cheap.
Vanquish Challenge Room Demo: I'm still waiting for my replacement copy since Amazon lost my original copy, and man this is soooo good. Love everything about it. Can't wait until I can finally play the full game.
Need for Speed Hot Pursuit: It wasn't terrible, but it was far too much NFS and far too little Burnout. I really felt the 30fps as the cars felt a bit sluggish and I don't like the boost system. As the cop it was sort of fan smashing cars and setting roadblocks, but the smashing wasn't as good as burnout. As the racer it was just dull compared to burnout. It's basically REALISTIC BURNOUT which means Burnout without the super speed, non-stop boosting, constant crazy jumps, and hidden shortcuts everywhere. Which also made it a lot less exciting. Will pass and pick it up for $20 on a steam sale for PC.
Fist of the North Star KENS RAAAAAAGE: I played as Rei since he had a stage. At first I thought this was awfull. There is this huge lag when controlling the character because he is supposed to be BIG MUSCLE MAN and have tons of weight. But after I got the hang of the controls and was dodge dashing around and doing combos and signature moves and throwing stuff....it was decent. The motion blur was really bad though. It was set too high and gave me headaches. I think the game is good enough that fans of FoTN will love it. I mean if they made this same game with something like BESERK I would be all over it and put in 50 hours. But I dunno anything about FoTNS beyond WATATATATA, YOU ARE ALREADY DEAD, and heads exploding so the characters/setting doesn't do it for me. Which is probably a good thing since that way I can stick to my "1 mindless musou mashing game per year" rule and just play Gundam Musou 3 in December.
