Being a huge fan of the Gabriel Knight series, I was looking forward to this for years. And I have to say it... only partly disappointed.

Yes, it is not the genius game that I would have hoped for. Not as dark as I had hoped (which I was already afraid of when i saw the age rating for the first time) and sometimes, the production value was disappointing. Not in terms of gameplay graphics though. In my opinion, those are absolutely gorgeous and quite a bit more detailed than I expected! In harsh contrast to back then when I first played Gabriel Knight 3, which was not on par with games released back then.
No, what was disappointing in terms of production value to me was the fact that apparently, at least two major characters were dubbed by the same voice actress. Maybe even three. I simply was unable to get over that.
The cheap style of the cut scenes was also not something I particularly enjoyed but I was able to get used to that after a while.

As far as other things are concerned... I felt that the difficulty was alright, I actually applaud the fact that there were only roughly as much as needed interactive objects in the environment (pretty much like Gabriel Knight 2 & 3, not the confusing mass of details as in "classic" adventure games such as also for instance Gabriel Knight 1) and the story clearly has its Jane Jensen mark (which I consider to be a very good thing).

So all in all, I hope that this will generate enough budget for there to be a sequel and hopefully the few issues mentioned above will be taken care of then. I would love nothing more than to have another true Jane Jensen masterpiece in my hands.

when the controls of a platformer aren't decent, nothing else matters. the laggy feeling no matter whether you're in the air or not makes this game horrible to control and thus irrelevant.

in the beginning, it looks like it might be a story with an interesting twist, which maybe deals with the inner thoughts of a psychopath. after about halfway through, it is becoming clear that it's just another run-of-the-mill pseudo-mystery story which has about as much complexity as the story of house of the dead 2.

i continued playing because i hoped there might still be a twist coming but pretty short before the end, i'm not even interested in seeing some cliche ending.

also, the control scheme is pretty awful (no ability to run and at times it's easy to mistakenly walk up and down stairs - during which one loses control of the character) and while some of the images were interestingly surreal, they IMO should've shown a lot more gore and maybe if the camera was more close up, it would've been nice especially for the gore.

puzzles are nice and pretty logical though, that (and the fact that it does have a nice overall design) is the reason why i still rate it 5/10. but i wouldn't recommend it.

unlike probably most who will be reading this, i've been introduced to music games using additional controllers back when drummania, guitarfreaks and the first dance dance revolutions were released. i also love karaoke revolution, so i naturally was very excited about what i hoped would be another konami music gem.

unfortunately, just as with dance dance revolution X, this recent attempt to try something new and maybe appeal to a broader audience, somewhat failed.

what's positive about this game is the music selection, which has even more modern rock (and hardcore, numetal, ...) than rock band - at least that's positive if you're into this kind of music.
i also liked that they didn't ditch their 2d-style vertical scrolling layout from their original bemani games. worked just as well for me as it did some 7 or so years ago.
and i did like the fact that the pedal seemed to respond better than in guitar hero or rockband.

but... these things are overshadowed by some incredibly stupid choices. e.g. i can't even begin to understand what the hell drove them to not display band names in the song selection. as i just said... that's simply stupid.
also, i couldn't figure out the health system - is it supposed to be those bars on top of the screen? (i just played it at a friends and we didn't want to check the manual) if it is, that placement is also very stupid because i just can't look that far up while playing. and in any case, it's way too easy to pass songs at least when you don't play alone. e.g. i passed one song with over 200 misses and a total percentage of around 40. i think the lowest i've ever gotten after successfully completing a song in guitar hero was around 80...
oh and... no singing?! are you fucking kidding me?! in a game released by the very company who created karaoke revolution?! once again: very stupid.

while i probably won't play this a lot in the future, i still hope the game will find enough people who play it, so konami will make another one and has the chance to fix at least the very stupid things. because without those, i think that game could be really nice.

when i first played the game, i put it away after about two hours and didn't look at it again for about two weeks. i just felt like the game wasn't really finished, i was distracted by things like the ridiculous hair design and the way plants look. also, the cutscenes weren't all that motivating for me because of inconsistent character artwork and animation of also inconsistent quality.

but when i picked it up again and decided to go through it at least once, i somehow got hooked. i got used to the hair and the plants and appreciated the beautifully designed environments even more than i did before. and after a couple of hours, once i really (well... kind of...) got the hang of the controls, i noticed how well done they were.

after seeing the (unfortunately not really spectacular) ending, i thought i'd give the time trial mode a try (usually i don't enjoy time trial...) but instead of just trying it for a couple of minutes, the minutes turned into hours. of course, you'd have to be into score hunting to enjoy that because the only bonus you get are star ratings.

by now, i've read a couple of times that the game's difficulty is supposed to be pretty steep at times. i have to say - i don't see it. of course, some of the time trial times are pretty crazy but after playing through on "normal" difficulty and spending maybe 2-3 hours on time trial, i didn't have much trouble playing through the story mode on "hard" without ever shooting an enemy.


if you're someone who only plays games for their story, i'm guessing the rating you'd give this game would be more like 7/10 but if you enjoy high score challenges, i'm pretty sure you'll play the game for a lot longer than just once through the story mode.

i really wanted to like this game since i'm a huge jrpg-fan and the only really good one i got to play on the 360 so far was lost odyssey.
unfortunately... not story, not graphics, not gameplay could keep up with lost odyssey by a long shot.

the main character isn't just the "usual kid who doesn't know any better" but the one who is usually portrayed in jrpgs as the "annoying punk". but even if you put that aside, the story is pretty cliched and hollow.

the graphics range from "halfway gorgeous" (some parts of cities - but even there texture resolutions can be too low) to "horrible" (environments with textures which are about as detailed as those of an average n64-game but still there are framerate issues. also, character models can be pretty rough at times).

the towns are pretty uninteresting, nothing much to explore, just point A to B, basically just a minor distraction between battles.

what's positive is the interesting battle system and the fact that party members manage the equipment themselves (one of "infinite undiscovery's" major issues...).

if you really just can't wait for FF XIII and you've already finished lost odyssey, this might still be the most interesting choice available (unless you can deal with the frustrating battle system of eternal sonata - then that might be the best one) but i'd rather recommend playing some old jrpg on an old console or emulator rather than this thing.

i'm currently near the end of the third season and i really have to say that this show could have been so great... all the mysteries, interesting characters like jarod and angelo, also the interesting relationship between jarod and sidney

BUT...

there is one character who is so far behind all others that it sometimes really hurts me watching this show - ms. parker. with her intelligence (which is at the level of about a seven year old... and i hope seven year olds who might read this aren't insulted by that...) i bet she still uses her fingers for counting. the only character that manages to surpass ms. parker is brigitte. what the hell were the creators thinking?! "we need a character that competes with ms. parker but it still needs to be clearly visible that she's even stupider than her. ha! i know! let's stick a lollipop into her mouth!"

luckily, jarod has more than 50% screen time... and he hardly ever does something stupid. which is why i still rate this show higher than 5/10. but who knows - maybe i'll downgrade it once i get to the very finish. i just needed to vent and writing a review to warn people who still haven't watched the show and are wondering if they have to bear ms. parker and brigitte for long - you do. so if you don't like the rest as much as i do, better stay away from the show.

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having just watched the last episode, i have downgraded my rating from 7 to 6. the whole ms. parker stuff gets even more annoying in the very end and the quality of the dialogue also gets worse - right to the level of some van damme action movie.

... don't get this album.

apparently, george sarah was into techno before he decided to give trip hop a try. i can't even rate this thing since it would be stupid to give it a bad rating just because i don't like techno in general...

..by far. and i've played through all of them. also, in contrast to the many gamers who got bored by the series, i've enjoyed every part a lot - up until this one.

i don't know what the people at neversoft were smoking while they were designing this game. it's like they thought "hey, we'll just throw away all the great basic functionality that made our games great and replace them with crappy stuff that makes for horrible gameplay".

take for example the camera... why don't they just glue it to the ground? the fact that it's not centered behind and - more importantly - above the player any more makes finding e.g. markers on the ground and hitting targets precisely much more difficult than it used to be.

then there's the new balancing scale - what's that all about? that damn thing is all over the screen. i guess the old one was too subtle and easy to handle.

they also figured "ah... who needs a special meter... we had that since... [ can't remember any more - i'm guessing part 2] but who cares about that anyway?" and for taking this one feature out they've thrown in like ten new ones about which i don't really care for.

and just on a side-note - the overall design of the city is incredibly boring.

and on another side-note - keeping all those huge changes in mind, what do you think about the fact that neversoft says that with the tony hawk game they will release this year, they want to do something completely new, in order to keep up with the competition (skate)? what was THPG then? that thing featured more changes than ever before and it turned out to be crap - so what will a game be like when the developers actually set their mind on creating something completely different? but well... back to this game.

what i have to give it credit for is the huge amount of goals and the great-as-always soundtrack. but that's it. if i wouldn't be so addicted to tony hawk games, i probably wouldn't have played it longer than an hour or so.

so if you're a fan of the series like i am, you might still enjoy it, even though you might feel like a masochist at the same time - to other people i'd strongly recommend playing just ANY older part.

this is one of the rare trip hop albums, i now and then find that manages to blow me away. not that there's a lot of trip hop i don't like listening to, there just isn't really a lot of trip hop around to begin with.

but anyway... i discovered torrini because i was listening to "summerbreeze" (which was played on buffy) and figured "let's see what else she did". i think i listened to samples of her music once before and didn't get a good impression and now i know why - this is her only trip hop album. pretty much like every other trip hop artist i know (take e.g. portishead), she abandoned that style. instead, she decided to only do pop/country-sounding stuff afterwards (except for collaborations).

it's really a pity since i was amazed by this album right from the first time i listened to it. beautiful und melancholic sounding instrumentals and just as beautiful singing... this is probably what björk would sound like if she would sing in a "usual manner" (a lot of people have mistaken emiliana for björk in a song that was played at the end of a part of lord of the rings) and use instruments not quite as experimental. because also in "love in the time of science", there are some strange sounds thrown in... but they integrate very nicely, they don't produce too much chaos within the song... which is the feeling i mostly get when listening to björk's songs.

to sum up: if you like trip hop, you just have to at least listen to samples of this wonderful production :)