Two thousand and nine is here and with it comes the pledge of another great year in the video game industry. But out of the hundreds of titles that are certain to be of the highest quality, only a few carry with them the sort of hype which demand the attention of even the most disinterested of players.
1. God of War III – the rage-full Spartan warrior turned god of war, Kratos, marched onto the Playstation 2 with the ferocity and unapologetic fervor only capable of a vengeful deity of Greek mythology. The polish and prowess by which his games showcased both the (then believed to be aging) PS2 hardware and the uniqueness of a franchise that delved i nto a culture barely touched upon in video games before easily reserved its place among Zeus’s pantheon. The third iteration appears to be no different from its predecessors as fans agonize over the wait for the PS3 finale of Krato’s siege on Mt. Olympus.
2. Killzone 2 – Back in 2005 when the hype wars between Sony and Microsoft were in full swing and both companies were campaigning for their respective next-gen consoles, Sony whipped out the show-stopper which was Killzone 2’s premier trailer. Brandishing nearly photo-realistic graphics (for what Sony falsely claimed to be images rendered in real-time) set the bar for the game’s expectations to the point where most believed it could never live up to its promise. This is no longer the case as extensive footage of the game has showcased detail and graphics reaching way beyond the limits of its original debut and has brandished Killzone 2 as the must-have first-person-shooter of=2 0this year.
3. Street Fighter 4 – Ryu, Ken, Guile, and Chun-Li; these names hold some of the sweetest memories for those who cherished the by-gone days of the arcade parlor and the harassing of one’s parent’s for just one more quarter. After a number of remakes and unsuccessful spin-offs, the series has finally come back with a sonic-boom worthy of our favorite broom-haired combatant in a fourth sequel years in the making. While enveloped in a new art style and bookended with original anime story elements, the game promises to retain the same 2D-fighting character’s we’ve howled “hadoken!” with countless of times before.
4. Resident Evil 5 – The Resident Evil series has been around since the days of the original Playstation and very few other series have succeeded in making its audience terrified of the dark as it has. Borrowing from the play mechanics pioneered in the franchise-revitalizing Resident Evil 4, Resident Evil 5 intends to take the terror of its audience to the next level by making the day just as chilling as the night.
5. Ghostbusters – “Who ya gonna call?” If you know the answer to that question then you’re probably among the millions of fans craving for more of the famous slime-covered patrolmen of the paranormal. Ghostbusters the video game seems to be just that as the likes of Peter, Ray, Egon, Winston, and Slimer make their return to the world of pop-culture with their new game set to come out this summer. Add the fact that the original actors will be reprising their roles for the game and that Dan Akroyd and Harold Ramis (the writers of the two movies) are penning the script as the official third chapter in the Ghostbuster cannon, and you have a game worth crossing
the streams for.
