Demon’s Souls from Atlus doesn’t care for your Halo 3. It’s not interested in your rapid health regeneration. It laughs in the face of your frequent checkpoints. In short, Demon’s Souls has seen you and found you wanting.
After playing Demon’s Souls through three aggravating, airborne controller hours. I reflected on my first night with Demon’s Souls and felt an intense satisfaction that I hadn’t felt in quite some time. Achieving even the smallest feat in the game brings immense pride: you’ve actually done something right in a game that is brutal but fair.
The game is remarkably inaccessible – there are no objective arrows, no mission briefings, nothing to guide you beyond the merest glimpse of direction of your final quest. The world has been over run by demons. Go kill them.
The roguelike mechanic of currency loss is a vicious balance of risk versus reward. Go forwards and lose everything? Or turn back without accomplishing your goals? It’s up to you to decide if you can hack it.
Even the weakest for in the game can bring you down if you move without thought. The slow, methodical progression of the game is the antithesis of modern hold-your-hand action gaming. It’s a challenge – a real challenge – and despite being infuriating (or perhaps because of it) it’s incredibly fun.
So the cat’s out of the bag on new networks for both TELUS and Bell this November. Talk about the worst kept secret in Canadian mobility! It seems like it was over a year ago (it was) when savvy mobile users started picking up the first traces of a non-Rogers HSPA network.
Of course the ground breaking announcement was: we’ve finally got iPhones! Please but them from us! Which is both great and terrible for Canadian smartphoner customers.
It’s great to see that the GSM stranglehold has been broken.
It’s not so great that Canadians are putting all their Smartphone eggs in one basket. Between BlackBerry, Android, Windows Mobile, and Pre there is a huge landscape of smartphonex that offer so much to Canadian smartphone users. Carriers need to market them in order to avoid an Apple hammer lock on the industry (and this is coming from a devoted Mac user!)
The other obligation here is for Handset vendors to ensure that their hardware and software is up to par when it comes to taking on Apple. Everyone’s making strides. Let’s hope they can keep up.
