perpetual memory loss

So I have been hard at work on my paper this entire weekend. Actually, I was supposed to be working on this paper all weekend.  However, instead of doing actual work I have been procrastinating, well, like it’s my job.  So Sunday I turned on my XBOX 360 so I could listen to some music whilst writing, but before I started playing my writing music, I started looking at some of the new arcade games.  One game in particular caught my eye, The Dishwasher: Dead Samurai (and also check the developers blog).  I decided to check out the demo, and damn I was hooked with a quickness.  Although $10 can be a steep price for a broke ass student like myself I didn’t think twice about buying it.  This game is amazing and I spent the better part of my Sunday afternoon furiously killing some fools.

The game is about some dude who washes dishes–amazingly I don’t think he is Mexican haha–who dies or something and somehow lives and wants revenge.  Someone also kidnaps his sister and he needs to save her.  The cut scenes are done as comic strips and the whole style of the game is very comic booky.  The game does a very good job of feeling like a comic book come to life.  Each level feels like individual frames of a comic book that you are slowly progressing through.  Obviously this is all part of the design, but the fact that it comes through so clearly, and works so well, speaks highly of the designer not dropping the ball on his vision.  The actual gameplay though is kick ass and the closest approximation for it is Ninja Gaiden.  If you like Ninja Gaiden you’re going to like this game.  If you like the action of Ninja Gaiden, but your fingers aren’t nimble enough to hit the combos (coughneverbesocialcough), you will most likely enjoy this game.  It has all the cool action without the mind-numbing and finger contorting combos of Ninja Gaiden (although if you play for long enough your hands will cramp up like the caretakers).  Oh yah by the way did I mention that there are zombie in the game?  No?  Well there are, so bonus points for the zombie slayage, and you even get a chainsaw in the game to slash those zombies back to hell.  Also of note there are sweet executions that you can perform to finish off your enemies.  One of my favs is when the Dishwasher grabs the psuedo-FBI agents gun and uses it to splatter said agents brains onto the wall.

There are a ton of cool elements in this game and I’m not even half-way through it yet.  The katana that allows you to teleport a la Nightcrawler (it even looks like Nightcrawler when you teleport) is genious, and it adds a whole new element of strategy when you’re fighting.  So far the game has some well designed levels, and one of the most creative levels I’ve played, is where the Dishwasher is sliding down a ramp and he is being attacked by some robot dudes with jetpacks.  Needless to say it’s a very creative level that mostly takes place in the air as you are sliding downwards.  It’s very kinetic and loads of fun.  Besides the story mode there is an arcade mode which is also insanely fun.  Each level in the arcade mode has a set amount of monsters that you need to kill, but the cool part is that each level switches up which weapons combo you can use and they change some of the game presets.  For instance in some levels you life is slowly draining away, in others the damage is increased, and in others the monsters move at half speed.  Another game mode is the Dish Challenge where you try to complete a level with as large of a combo as possible, and then you can upload your score online.  My current best is a pathetic 55 million whilst the top score is somewhere around 735 million.  It’s still a lot of fun though, and with three different modes plus online coop this game has huge replay value.  For me this is this years Castle Crashers.  Amazingly there are still things about this game that I haven’t talked about like guitar solos and the ability to use your Guitar Hero or Rockstar guitars in the game.  I’m sure I have forgotten even more, but the important thing is that you should go buy this game.  It’s well worth the $10 and it goes to support a good independent game designer.  So boot up your 360 and buy it already.  But whilst you are waiting for it to finish downloading check out the trailer and some screenshots to whet your appetite for blood and guts.

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