Now this is more like it. One week after the release of a massive game like Xenoblade Chronicles, we should get a short reprieve of game releases. I guess that’s one way of describing this week’s rather paltry releases. On the bright side, I get to tell you about an overlooked game out of last year.

Remember. Release dates are quite literally made at the whims of the publisher. The following are subject to change without any warning.

20/20

Child of Eden (Xbox 360, PS3)

Original Release Date: June 14, 2011 (Xbox 360), September 27, 2011 (PS3)

What happens when your game looks more like a pothead’s hallucinations than anything coherent? Simply put, people ignore it and pick up Duke Nukem Forever instead. No seriously, the NPD shows DNF as the second best seller of the month of June while Child of Eden sold a paltry 34,000 copies in its first two weeks.

Garnering an 84 from 81 critics, Child of Eden most certainly did not lack critical support. It does lack clarity however. Most games can be easily described by its genre like Role Playing Game, First Person Shooter, Puzzle, or Platformer just to name a few. At its heart, Child of Eden plays like any other On-Rails Shooters like Panzer Dragoon or to an extent Dead Space: Extraction, but saying so would be a disservice to the game. In motion, Child of Eden takes the player on a sort of musical journey experienced through an On-Rails Shooter. As evidenced by most of the reviews that brought up this fact, the game mostly succeeds showering the game with high, or at least higher than average, praise while critics who weren’t so enraptured by the experience tends to give the game an average score. Basically, Child of Eden fits into the genre that Rez, the spiritual progenitor to Child of Eden if you will, made back in 2001.

You may have heard the occasional rumblings from gaming journalists about mainstream gaming’s dearth of original ideas and games. Child of Eden might as well be the poster child for just why that is the case. Originality doesn’t sell. Shooting monsters, aliens, terrorist, zombies, Nazis, and combinations of these do. To be fair, Child of Eden does have a couple of things that dragged it down somewhat, namely its price. At $60, a 90-minute long game can be a little hard to swallow for most who want the most bang for their buck. These days though, the game sells for roughly around $40, and I’ve seen a good number of Internet outlets selling them for even less. If you’re looking for something truly different in gaming today, you have two choices. Scour the thousands of independently developed games floating about on the Internet, and take a chance on one of them. Or spend at most $40, and give this game a shot.

Coming This Week

Tuesday April 13, 2012

Spirit Camera: The Cursed Memoir (3DS)

Despite the small screen and its inability to truly absorb the player, developers continue to try and make a horror game on the handhelds, but at least they’re trying to do so with a new tool. The 3DS’s Augmented Reality capabilities will be utilized to its fullest in this Fatal Frame spin-off where you’ll have to use the 3DS’s camera to find the spirits that is supposedly physically around you and take their pictures to essentially defeat them. The game also comes with a small pamphlet called the Book of Faces that the game will interact with and draws you into the world beyond the images on the book. I’d love to see you try to play this game on the bus.