Fucking nice.

That’s not a dig at the game’s difficulty level, or anything; on the whole, BioShock 2 is an unquestionably more difficult experience than its predecessor. Gameplay-wise, it’s also a much more enjoyable one. I just happened to meticulously plan out every little fight and carry around a shitload of health packs to the point where, at the game’s finale, I realized I’d never actually seen the inside of a Vita-Chamber. And that was awesome.

More after the jump.

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I recently wrote/shot a few editorials about Mass Effect 2 for Destructoid. I took a pretty fatalistic stance on the ending, and the fact that the entire game was one hundred percent winnable if you cared about your team enough. Rather than being able to simply get everyone out alive by choosing your team correctly and getting everyone loyal, I argued, it would have been less dramatically self-defeating if people had to die — if you had to make choices that, directly or indirectly, resulted in the deaths of NPCs whom you loved.

It wasn’t until I rewatched this great video that I fully understood why I felt that way. (Vague spoilers for Fable 2, Mass Effect 2, and Dragon Age.)

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I’m going to be on a panel at GDC. I’ll be talking — as I tend to — about Far Cry 2. If you’ve beaten the PC version of the game and still have your save files lying around, I could really use your help.

ENORMOUS SPOILERS FOR FAR CRY 2 AFTER THE JUMP.

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Just because you can make a game harder, doesn’t mean you should.

The very first major fight of Bayonetta – not the introductory one in the graveyard, but the one featured in the demos — is incredible. You simultaneously fight many enemies of varying size, strength, and attack speed. As a good deal of these enemies don’t have very much HP, the battle has an immensely satisfying rhythm to it: you use area attacks or brutal directed assaults to kill one or two guys, quickly dodge an attack from a larger guy (hopefully activating witch time), and eventually work your way up to the most powerful dude in the room.

The moment-to-moment gameplay is satisfying not just because of the ridiculous attack animations, but thanks to the fact that you’re given the opportunity to lace together brilliant and brutal combos with some degree of relative ease. The demo fight is easy, yes, but it’s also flashy and well-paced and smooth. At one point, I chained together three kills in ten seconds, the last of which was a torture kill. Magnificent.

A few hours later, however, things get less awesome.

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