Diehard GameFAN

Author: Mark B.

  • Review: Ragnarok Odyssey Ace (Sony Playstation3)

    Ragnarok Odyssey Ace Genre: Action/RPG Developer: Game Arts Publisher: XSEED Games Release Date: 04/01/14 For as much as developers seem to be easing into the idea that emulating the Monster Hunter model may potentially make them some cash, the main changes they seem to almost universally attach themselves to is the idea of making the…

  • Review: Dark Souls II (Microsoft Xbox 360)

    Dark Souls II Genre: Action RPG Developer: From Software Publisher: Bandai Namco Release Date: 03/11/14 So, here we are, together again, to discuss Dark Souls II. Returning readers will remember that I’ve been something of a cheerleader (if a qualified one) for From Software as a development house and have spent far more time playing…

  • Review: Earth Defense Force 2025 (Microsoft Xbox 360)

    Earth Defense Force 2025 Genre: Third Person Shooter Developer: Sandlot Publisher: D3 Publisher Release Date: 02/18/14 If you’ve been hanging around here a while, you’re probably aware that I’ve made no secret of being kind of a cheerleader for the Chikyuu Boueigun.Earth Defense Force series here on the site. I absolutely loved the original US…

  • Unboxing the Dark Souls II Collector’s Edition and Collector’s Edition Strategy Guide

    If you’ve been kicking around here for any length of time, you probably have a good idea that I’m a pretty big advocate of From Software in general and Dark Souls in specific. The series has made quite a splash in the western market, so it makes sense that we’d see a bit of an…

  • Walkthrough: Dangan Ronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc

    (Note to anyone who might be arriving here looking for a walkthrough for Dangan Ronpa 2: Goodbye Despair: you can find it here.) Hello and welcome to Diehard GameFAN’s Dangan Ronpa walkthrough! While Josh took the lead on the review for the game, I’ve been having a substantial amount of fun with it, and thought…

  • Book Review: The Art of Titanfall

    The Art of Titanfall Publisher: Titan Books Cost: $34.95 (MSRP)/$26.65 (Amazon.com) Page Count: 192 Pages Release Date: 02/25/14 Get it Here: Amazon.com Military-style first person shooters may not seem like the most obvious games to create art books for, when one thinks about it, but a game like Titanfall generally isn’t your typical entry in…

  • 10 Thoughts on… the Titanfall Beta (Microsoft Xbox One)

    Unless you’ve been living in a cave for the past several months, one of the two hot new FPS properties in the next-gen gaming wars (alongside Destiny) is Titanfall, and with good reason. The development team responsible for the game, Respawn Entertainment, is headed up by Jason West and Vince Zampella, formerly of Infinity Ward,…

  • Review: Toukiden: The Age of Demons (Sony Playstation Vita)

    Toukiden: The Age of Demons Genre: Action Developer: Omega Force Publisher: Tecmo Koei Release Date: 2/11/14 Though it’s taken a while for the genre to pick up steam, Monster Hunter style games are starting to become more common, stateside and abroad. US fans have already seen a few releases, with games like Dragon’s Dogma and…

  • Starbound updated to beta version Furious Koala – Notes and Observations

    As I anticipated at the time I wrote my Ten Thoughts piece on the Starbound Beta, Chucklefish wasn’t far from releasing a new update to the beta build. Dubbed “Furious Koala,” the build changes a fairly decent bit of the content in the game and patches a bunch of issues that existed in the game,…

  • 10 Thoughts on… the Toukiden: the Age of Demons demo (Sony Playstation Vita)

    While Monster Hunter is probably one of the hottest things going in Japan, there’s been a general dearth of games that have attempted to put their own spin on the “hunt giant monsters” concept, both in Japan and the US, until fairly recently. While there have been games that borrowed certain elements from the Monster…

  • Monster Hunter 4G and Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate announced!

    Capcom made two huge announcements regarding the Monster Hunter franchise over the weekend, one of which shouldn’t be terribly surprising to anyone, while the other was the announcement a lot of franchise fans have been waiting for patiently (and less so) for quite a while. The first major announcement was that of Monster Hunter 4G…

  • 10 Thoughts on… the Starbound Beta (PC)

    With the success of Minecraft and Terraria on the PC, it was inevitable that more people would try to get into the act of making games where you start with nothing in a procedurally generated world and become God-King through lots of building and crafting. While a lot of games that are trying to do…

  • Diehard GameFAN’s 2013 Video Game Awards

    So here we are, at the beginning of 2014, looking back on the accomplishments, good and bad, in gaming for the year 2013. The year saw the much awaited and discussed debuts of two new consoles, in Sony’s Playstation 4 and Microsoft’s Xbox One, both of which launched with a handful of upscaled ports and…

  • Diehard GameFAN 2013 Year in Review Staff Commentaries

    So here we are, a few days before the end of 2013. As usual, several of the Diehard GameFAN staff have sat down and written up their own personal “Top Ten Games of the Year” list. This gives you, the reader, a chance to see each of our own specific tastes and preferences. It also…

  • Review: RESOGUN (Sony PlayStation 4)

    RESOGUN Genre: Shooter Developer: Housemarque Publisher: SCEA Release Date: 11/15/2013 With all of the big retail releases, both multi-console and exclusive, sometimes it’s easy to forget that there were some interesting digital releases at launch on the PS4 and Xbox One. Microsoft got the bigger roster of exclusive digital titles overall, with Killer Instinct, Crimson…

  • Review: Dead Rising 3 (Microsoft Xbox One)

    Dead Rising 3 Genre: Action/Adventure Developer: Capcom Vancouver Publisher: Capcom Release Date: 11/22/2013 It’s weird to think about it, but Capcom publishes an astonishingly large amount of games with zombies in them. While Resident Evil has progressed into a series about genetic experiments gone wrong overall, the undead are never far from being in one…

  • Review: Zoo Tycoon (Microsoft Xbox One)

    Zoo Tycoon Genre: Simulation Developer: Frontier Developments Publisher: Microsoft Game Studios Release Date: 11/22/13 Consoles don’t get nearly as many business management simulators as the PC market does, so when one comes to the console market it generally has to be something interesting to catch the eye of anyone who isn’t into the genre. Frontier…

  • Review: Call of Duty: Ghosts (Sony PlayStation 4)

    Call of Duty: Ghosts Genre: First-person Shooter Developer: Infinity Ward/Raven Soft/Neversoft Publisher: Activision Release Date: 11/15/2013 Another year has passed us by, and we are once again graced by another Call of Duty release, this time by the Infinity Ward team, more or less. The team has gone through some significant restructuring in the past…

  • Review: Freefall Racers (Microsoft Xbox 360)

    Freefall Racers Genre: Racing Developer: Smoking Gun Interactive Publisher: Deep Silver Release Date: 09/06/13 Mario Kart might be a successful franchise for Nintendo, but even when a developer can manage to hit all of the right notes in their own interpretation of the franchise, that doesn’t mean they’re going to catch anyone’s eye with it.…

  • Review: Madden NFL 25 (Microsoft Xbox One)

    Madden NFL 25 Genre: Sports Developer: EA Sports Publisher: Electronic Arts Release Date: 11/22/13 Generally speaking, when a publisher provides us with multiple review copies of the same game, we like to spread them out amongst the staff. While some sites like to let one reviewer handle both games (since that allows for an easier…