Billy Mitchell – Donkey Kong

The self styled King of Kong that featured heavily in a 2007 documentary, Billy Mitchell was one of the earliest professional gamers on record, holding world record high scores on Donkey Kong since the 1980’s, and also Pac-Man, in which he held the first ever perfect score of 3,333,360. Until his hubris brought him down, and curious minds at Twin galaxies, the de facto arbiters of gaming records, looked a little closer than he would have liked at some of his tapes. A VHS tape he gave to the site during the 2007 films production would prove to the site that his scores were set through emulator, instead of original arcade hardware, causing his scores and his crown to be stricken and the man effectively blacklisted from competitive gaming.

Metal Gear Solid 3 is a fan favourite, and Snake Eater still plays like a dream, So we’re HALO jumping into the thick of it to celebrate what’s frequently deemed the best of the entire series, and talking about the battles of a young Naked Snake during Operation Snake Eater. Because they deserve to be celebrated… and to get it out of our system.

The many encounters of the Ocelot Unit

The unique and highly trained soldiers that report to Major Ocelot himself aren’t quite on the level of the rest of the bosses such as Volgin and the Cobra Unit, but to underestimate them is to invite disaster upon yourself. Whereas a typical KGB solider that you’ll see throughout the game might act more rashly and give Snake more openings, the highly trained special operatives will take more precautions, such as tossing grenades instead of charging in, and generally being more aware of their surroundings. 

As part of how much detail there truly is in Metal Gear, Snake can encounter the squad twice beyond the initial encounter at the bombed out factory at Rassvet. Should Snake take the chance to kill The End early, he’ll instead contend with a full squadron of snipers from the unit. Even later than that, should Snake not remove a planted transmitter, they’ll track him down following the torture scene. 

The series has roots all the way back to an arcade side-scroller in 1987, before the console wars of Genesis and SNES were so much as a whisper on the playground and during a time when Sega was a large player in arcades. Largely featuring Joe Musashi, the titular Shinobi, who has to match strengths against the Ninja Crime Syndicate Zeed to prevent them from reverting Japan to a civil war torn nation. Yeah, game narratives were fun back in the late 80’s.

Interestingly, the original Shinobi game never made it to the Genesis console, since it wasn’t quite a thing at the time, making it to the little remembered Sega Master System a year later and then to basically everything else, including the NES by the end of 1989. The game was designed to be easy to grasp and enjoy, with jumping, melee and shuriken attacks, and Ninjutsu moves being mapped to three buttons and a joystick on the arcade cabinet. Home console ports were generally well received, probably because they toned back the quarter gobbling difficulty by altering mechanics, such as giving Joe a health bar.

The huge popularity of the original arcade release spurred Sega to begin considering Joe Musashi as one of their headliners, and thus the floodgates would open with both Shadow Dancer and The Revenge of Shinobi launching in 1989. The second and final arcade entry would borrow almost all of the mechanics from the first game, and also do a dog companion many years before games called it innovation.

Revenge of Shinobi is where the series finally hit the big time, where it was a huge player in Sega’s 1989 lineup for the Genesis console, intended as a showpiece for the brand new hardware. Director Noriyoshi Ohba would take the series in a decidedly new direction, not only lifting earlier console port’s decision to introduce a life bar for Joe, but to have the series tweaked to better fit onto a home console by making it more story driven. So in the spirit of the 90’s, the ninjas from the first game kill his master and kidnap his wife. What a time to be alive.

Perhaps that bravery to laugh in the face of copyright infringement was what made the series so memorable in the first place, since to Ohba’s own admission the reason you see Joe Mushashi go toe to toe with Rambo, Terminator, Spider-Man and even Batman appear as bosses in the game comes from a lack of his creativity, and not passing the memo along to the character designer that he was supposed to add their creative touches to them. The wall crawler himself is part of a fun piece of trivia for the game; it’s the only Genesis game to receive a revision 20 years following release, since his presence prevented rerelease due to licensing. So before the Wii Virtual console rerelease, they removed the Marvel credit and made him pink, making it ok.

The earlier arcade title, Shadow Dancer, would receive an adaption on Genesis called Shadow Dancer: The Secret of Shinobi. Enhancements to the control were well received, while the game strangely maintained the single-hit lives from the arcade. Depending on what manual you ask, the protagonist is either Joe’s son Hayate Musashi or Joe himself out of retirement. The game maintained mostly positive reception, aside from some outlets who believed that it was too difficult and a step back from the previous game.

It would be three years of Master System and Game Gear spin offs before Joe would resurface from retirement once again to take on Neo Zeed. Originally, Sega wanted the game to launch a year earlier, but apparently, they had some standards in 1992. Sega delayed and reworked Shinobi III: Return of the Ninja Master by a year, after a handful of gaming magazines had already released coverage on their game including screenshots and reviews, apparently because the publisher was not satisfied with how it performed for those reviews. Likely the right choice to make, since the Genesis version of the game is still widely considered one of the best titles on the system. While the game did remain well received, it also began to shy away from the staple difficulty and mechanics of the series, instead focusing on speed and style over difficulty, which some developers didn’t quite care for.

And just like the flash of a blade in the night, the Shinobi series would disappear before it even really began. Shinobi X on the Sega Saturn felt like a half-hearted attempt to reboot the series on the Sega Saturn, but the 3D craze had taken full hold by this point. There was no room in a 3D world for a 2D action game, and Sega was falling fast. The review scores reflected this change, and Shinobi would only see one more true sequel, as the Dreamcast title eventually launched for the PS2 in 2002. The repetitive gameplay left it wanting as well. That title did just well enough to gain a sequel in Nightshade, but little else.

Shinobi has remained in the shadows of its former glory for 7 long years at this point, following on from a rather disappointing 3DS entry that tried to do the Retro Revival thing, and the mini-game touch compilation thing at the same time, long after both had somewhat fallen out of vogue. Shinobi slipped away almost completely in lock step with a Sega that found itself flailing around, desperately trying to keep its consoles alive, and that’s what I feel brought the series down with it. Could Shinobi have a future? Sega made promises in 2017 that it was going to start listening to fans that it needs to pay off. Could Joe come out of retirement once again with a Platinum Games led revival? We need a new ninja to walk into the scene since we’re short a Hayabusa. We need a Shinobi.

Note: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, GamingBolt as an organization.

What originally set, and kept Burnout apart from their competition throughout the entire run of the series was how they turned the goals of a racer on its head, asking players to take big risks by driving against traffic, ramming their opponents off the road and a general disregard for safety, all wrapped together with what were at the time very technically impressive car crumpling slow-mo shots that just fulfill some primal thrill. The original title had some rather humble origins for what it would become though, as an under the radar gem published by Aklaim.

The game featured a collection of cars that would get it laughed out of the locker room when you put it beside racers today, and their hundreds of customizable rides, with a small grouping of 9 cars in four different classes, all ranked by how easy they are to handle in the game’s championship events. From a Supermini to a Bus, players have to barrel through oncoming traffic and cross busy intersections at speed if they want to make it into the winners circle, building boost through more daring feats like near-misses against traffic, and weaving through the wrong lane.

While the game didn’t see much mainstream recognition at this level, it certainly had fans of the over the top driving and detailed, at least for PS2 standards, crash physics. The popularity of which inspired the series insanely popular Crash Mode, which debuted in Burnout 2: Point of Impact on PS2 just over a year later. While the championship remains very much the same, Crash mode places the player onto specially designed situations with tons of traffic, and asks them to aim for a high score by managing to cause as much havoc as possible.

The Crash Mode, as well as other additions to the standard gameplay loop like Pursuit Mode, where you had to take down a criminal car to unlock it, really resonated with racing fans, and is where the Burnout Series first really came into its own, with sites like Gamespot, GameSpy and Eurogamer granting the title insanely high accolades, praising the game as one of the most compelling arcade driving titles of it’s era. A more diverse range of vehicles with more apparent stat differences between them helped raise the star of the series just a bit further, but it would take one more game before things really took off.

With the fall of Aklaim in 2004, Burnout 3: Takedown and all subsequent entries in the series were published by Electronic Arts, though still developed by Criterion. This wasn’t always going to be the case however, with the studio and publisher having previously fallen out over creative differences over a skateboarding game. Burnout 3 only was made after EA came back to the studio, and made the game happen with the condition that EA would have no say in the creative process. It turned out very well for them.

With Criterion’s firm hand still very much on the wheel, they took a “If it’s not broke” approach to tuning the series and introduced the Takedown mechanic, which made the already adrenaline filled racing experience that much more personal. Players were able to slam other racers into crashes, and have that tie back into the all important boost mechanic, encouraging players to not only dart between traffic, but to get their sonic sumo on as opposing players worked to disrupt their rhythm. This final piece of the puzzle felt like it finally completed the Burnout experience, and both critics, and thanks to a little bit of EA marketing money, gamers just adored the highly tuned racer.

Burnout 3: Takedown went on to receive an impressive collection of awards, including two magazines even ranking the title as Game of the Year. Remember that this is the same year we saw Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, just to put into perspective the heights that the series had risen to. For the first time, a Burnout game was dominating the sales charts just as hard as its hardcore players were dominating on the track, with regions like Australia seeing the game hit top 10 for both Xbox and PS2.

Even today, Burnout 3: Takedown is considered a highlight and triumph not only for its series, but for arcade racing games in general. General consensus is that the game easily stands with the best titles on the two sixth generation systems with its track design, mode selection, sense of speed and varied modes. The standing 94% on Metacritic for the Xbox version speaks for itself.

With this third title having Criterion and Burnout easily among the pantheon that once belonged to Need for Speed and Gran Turismo, unfortunately the only place to go from the top is down. The 2005 follow up in Burnout Revenge was decidedly given a different direction, with a grittier aesthetic that pushed the takedown mechanic even more into the forefront. Alex Ward, Director on most of the series, would later comment that while they purposely didn’t want to just create Burnout 3 again, he doesn’t believe that any of the games following quite captured the same spirit.

Between Burnout Revenge, which allowed players to check traffic into other racers and went full Michael Bay to the slight detriment of the skill that racing took, and their true follow up in Burnout Paradise, we have a quick aside to the black sheep of the series, Burnout Dominator. No, we… we don’t talk about the underwhelming handheld games. While EA used Criterion’s name, they were busy creating Paradise and so, EA UK took the reigns on the one and only game since the original Burnout to ditch the lauded Crash Mode, among other elements such as traffic checking, online multiplayer, and racing wheel support. The game saw a noticeable drop in critical reception, which tends to happen when a game is so obviously pushed out to stall. But if the Burnout series was only going to get one more lap, what Criterion had in the garage was worth waiting for.

The last official release, aside from an App Store Crash spin off, to this very day is Burnout Paradise, which came out of Alex Ward wanting to bring a little bit of Crackdown into the Burnout series. The concept took the form of a racing game without defined tracks, and a spider web of roads making an open world in which players can explore at their leisure and take on events in any order they choose. The tiny world of Paradise City is a bit cute ten years later, releasing in the same year as a game like Forza Horizon 4.

Despite lack of any real faith from EA next to the Need for Speed series, Burnout Paradise rocketed to the top of sales charts, selling over 1 million copies within three months of release, and provided the foundation upon which racing games are being built upon until this day.  While it didn’t quite hit the heights of Takedown, Paradise managed a Metacritic within the 80’s depending on which platform you looked at, and took many Best Driving Game awards for the year.

Given the heights and acclaim that the studio had brought themselves, it almost seems like Burnout just stalled for no real reason. The fact that EA could rerelease the last entry in the series ten years after the fact as Burnout Paradise Remastered, and critics found that time had done very little to dull the adrenaline rush that the game embodied speaks to the passion and creativity of the team. The influence of the series lives on within Need for Speed and Forza Horizon. So what gives? At first, nothing gave at all. Criterion was handed the keys to a new ride, which EA had happily given when Criterion developed 2010’s Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit, and then 2012’s Need for Speed: Most Wanted. Both sold pretty well and got decent critical reception too. But the team was a bit hamstrung by the expectations of Need for Speed. The heart just wasn’t in the games anymore, and the fast action definitely wasn’t either.

Criterion simply slipped back away into the shadows as their brand and baby was thrown aside, eventually leaving studio creator and director, Alex Ward to publicly put out on Twitter that the studio was moving away from racing games. A mere four months later, in September 2013, 80% of the staff was moved to Ghost Games UK to work on Need for Speed, leaving a tiny 17 person team to be the shell team we now know as Criterion, helping create vehicle segments for DICE.

There’s a world out there where EA cultivated the Burnout series for the interesting titles that they were, right alongside Need for Speed. But this is the darkest timeline, and the slow fall of Criterion and the Burnout series go hand in hand, as the minds behind one of the best arcade racers on PS2 slowly, surely got mulched into a support team for pod racing. No EA, it was not a good trick.

Note: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, GamingBolt as an organization.

Short for First Encounter Assault Recon, the unique blend of first person shooting, sci-fi horror and lore tied together lovingly by the talented team at Monolith Productions. The ones owned by Warner Brothers, not the ones behind the Xenoblade series, to be clear. The game was developed with the PC in mind, and brought to PS3 and Xbox 360 afterwards, where the first game took off to great critical reception, likening the series to Half Life. Which is just about the highest honour you can receive as a PC focused shooter.

We haven’t see a new entry in this series since 2011, and before digging deeper, it might be easy to believe that the studio joining the Warner Brother’s publishing umbrella forced them into a licensed game purgatory. However, it’s worth noting that the first game, F.E.A.R., launched in 2005, following the acquisition. Unfortunately, we can’t really blame the disappearance directly on WB here. Through an exploration of the series history, we’re hoping to discover just why we haven’t seen any games in so long.

When the series launched in 2005, it was going up against quite a lot of other shooters with the rocketing popularity of the genre. However, Monolith smartly leveraged a few design decisions to make their horror game stand out, the first being the genre. Survival Horror games would usually be modelled after Resident Evil at the time, for no reason other than the fact it was the most popular series in the genre. More involved shooting mechanics than those common at the time made the game unique from a play perspective as well. The supernatural elements of F.E.A.R., which sees the player take control of the F.E.A.R. team’s point man and leveraged powers such as Bullet Time to give them a feeling of power against rather shockingly intelligent AI enemies. At least, all before the antagonist Alma takes it away.

Alma, and the intricate plot and lore that the series would grow and develop over its short run, stands as its legacy today. Throughout the first game, visions of a girl in a red dress haunt Point Man, and laptops provide insight on the terrifying experiments conducted on the woman named Alma. Her torture granted her frightening powers somewhat like the girl from The Ring and Slenderman – with an attitude. The entire plot of the third game takes off from a rather violent sexual assault she performs on the hero in the second game. Did I mention that this series is far less campy than its contemporaries?

Two expansions would come out of the original game that built on the story and characters, as well as fleshed out the also unique multiplayer modes on offer, which leveraged the shooting mechanics and Bullet Time, but it would be 4 years before Monolith would give us a true sequel in F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin. Unfortunately for all the novel things the game did with its story, the genre had caught up to it in the interm. The beginning of an unfortunate drop in the Metacritic average began here, as the team just didn’t improve much upon the base foundation.

Taking place almost simultaneously as the events of the first game, players take on the role of someone new, Michael Becket, an operator on the Delta Force Team that was supposed to support the team of the first game, as he undergoes his own trials thanks to Alma, and discovers his own dark relation to the events that shaped her. As alluded to earlier, the game ends with Becket being forced to impregnate Alma, setting up the events of the third game. F.E.A.R 2 was generally liked and debuted at the number two spot in the US and UK sales charts for the platform, despite the critics finding that the game didn’t do anything that new.

By the time F.E.A.R. 2 came around, the unfortunate reality was that the landscape of the medium had been irrevocably changed. Publishers all wanted to chase that money, forgetting that they had an audience already there. This environment is where we now find the development of F.E.A.R. 3, or F.3.A.R., which was handled by a completely different studio and generally received the same critical reception as the previous game. The sales were a different story altogether.

Day 1 Studios had previously assisted with porting the first game to consoles, but otherwise was completely new to the series. This resulted in numerous changes to the formula, many of them based on popular ideas at the time, such as a game needing Co-op to be successful. This led to the game showing the hero and villain from the first game teaming up to find the pregnant Alma, both for their own reasons. Generally though, the team at Day 1 Studios failed to capture the spirit of the original 2 games, which reflected in the critical reception.

There is a distinct change in the tone of reviews from F.E.A.R. 2 to F.3.A.R, with outlets such as Gamespot and Eurogamer being generally unimpressed by the scares, and considering the core of the series, that psychological horror, as secondary to the action. IGN’s Colin Moriarty literally included the words “Something set in a unique, horror filled atmosphere” to describe the game as a shooter first. While strong shooting was in the DNA of F.E.A.R., it was never really the major draw.

Really, the story of why F.E.A.R. disappeared is much about the story of why Survival Horror games disappeared. Publishers went on the action gold-rush that defined much of the previous generation, but left the audience they did have out in the cold. F.3.A.R. sold very poorly, and saw the studio lay off 100 people following disappointing sales. A 2013 attempted free-to-play online multiplayer game called F.E.A.R. Online would never even make it out of open beta due to a lack of support and general apathy from a gaming audience.

Unfortunately, while both the lacklustre sales of F.3.A.R. and the total failure of F.E.A.R. Online might mean that it’s time to pour one out for Monolith Productions best known game series, things have gotten better. The era of shooters seems to have come to an end, leaving them to return to more interesting ideas once again. More importantly, some high profile successes in the indy market and even from publishers such as Bethesda with The Evil Within series have started to see the genre make something of a resurgence. Resident Evil 7 made a glorious return to form and we still lament the fact we’re in the darkest timeline where Silent Hills never happened. I guess the moral of this episode of “Publishers ruin everything” is that even a totally dead genre can rise again.

Note: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, GamingBolt as an organization.

The talented people over at Rocksteady took a DC Icon and managed to create one of the best series of the last decade out of Batman, and managed to pave the way for Spider-Man by showing that superhero licensed games didn’t have to suck, or be a one-in-a-million fluke like Hulk: Ultimate Destruction. Given the huge success of Spider-Man, it doesn’t take a genius to call a very real future with a Marvel Game Universe that gets just as much love as their MCU, but what of DC? Batman pulled it off, but there’s a rather important name missing here. 

It’s not that people haven’t tried to translate Superman to video games, to…well, let’s be generous and say various results. So why hasn’t Batman opened the way to his bestie getting his own title? Will we ever get to see those highly original reviews say that you can “feel like Superman”? Well, we can think of at least 15 challenges that Superman poses to being translated to a game. Be sure to share your thoughts in the comments below.

It’s a small world after all

We all know that Superman is faster than a speeding bullet. Much like Sonic the Hedgehog, Superman would simply find himself constrained by even the largest of open worlds that we can build on current hardware. As visual fidelity demands of players have risen, the ability for developers to hand create a wide swath of interesting content becomes a bit more limited, and handing that kind of thing off to programs is how we get No Man’s Sky at launch.

Jesse Moerkerk – Longest Game Session In Freefall

Some might say that Super Mario Galaxy 2 and the gravity mechanics within are out of this world, but gamer Jesse Moerkerk took that a bit more seriously than Nintendo intended when in 2011, he spent 18 minutes and 52 seconds within an indoor sky dive playing the game mid free fall. The 6’5” man was said to be very graceful while remaining suspended, though I imagine the waggling of the Wii Remote could have easily sent him into a tailspin.

Arthas – Warcraft 3

The tragic tale of Crown Prince Arthas Menethil, knight of the Silver Hand was a man of principal, and who’s tragic fall came from his deeply seated sense of duty to his people. His ever more desperate bids to keep the kingdom of Lordaeron from falling to the Plague of Undeath caused him to take up the cursed blade Frostmourne, which led to the once proud hero eventually becoming the dreaded Lich King.

"While the Wild West aesthetic pitted against the cyberpunk setting of the game is a rather fresh take, the few ideas that are added to the game due to that don’t do nearly enough to stretch out for the 9 separate challenge episodes the expansion asks of you."

But The Surge is also receiving this expansion over 18 months after launch, and after the announcement of a full sequel which will hopefully help to iron off some of the rougher edges of the first game. Not to mention that the game never really set the world on fire to begin with, what place is there for The Good, The Bad And The Augmented? Well, not a lot.

Ahead of the announced sequel, The Good, The Bad and The Augmented unfortunately doesn’t follow suit with selling itself as a distinct thing from the Souls series, at least not well. It certainly breaks from the highly established progression formula where you fight your way around an interconnected world and open shortcuts, helping you gain more and more ground as you develop both your equipment and yourself as a player. Instead, the new expansion takes a drastic right turn into a series of trials, pitting players against a variety of combat situations on designed maps, with specific goals to change up how you need to approach the brawl for the most rewards. 

While the Wild West aesthetic pitted against the cyberpunk setting of the game is a rather fresh take, the few ideas that are added to the game due to that don’t do nearly enough to stretch out for the 9 separate challenge episodes the expansion asks of you, or even begin to combine them in ways nearly as interesting as they probably could. You’re not having to change your play style that much to account for the heat of the sun beating down on you and slowly draining your resources. You won’t find yourself needing to learn drastically different enemies or be fast on your toes around networks of runaway mine carts. You’ll exhaust the new ideas that the expansion brings within a few missions, and it never gets better.

"Narratively, there is very little tied into the rest of the game or world to be found in The Good, The Bad and The Augmented. "

The expansion of course, just like A Walk In The Park, also introduces a bevy of new weapon and armour sets to gun for, though aside from fun cosmetic differences that somewhat clash with other areas of the game, like putting a Mexican wrestler mask on before heading back to the main game to see what a Guacamelee crossover would look like, the equipment doesn’t justify itself much through power or function over items obtainable before the content launched. Items which were likely levelled up far beyond any of the new pickups well before the DLC ever launched in the first place. 

Narratively, there is very little tied into the rest of the game or world to be found in The Good, The Bad and The Augmented. The Supervisor, the mysterious figure who created the trials you undergo, simply challenges the player to see if they can “modify the west”, with little relation to CREO or the player character’s journey. To cap off each of the nine episodes, which are typically closed off within 30 minutes, the player will fight against a “Challenger”, which are all unfortunately, relatively normal looking. The rest of the expansion clearly isn’t taking the lore of the game seriously, very much to the game’s credit. So why not go big and extravagant with the bosses in ways that other action RPGs do? It’s a missed opportunity in an expansion almost completely focused on the combat.

Though the bosses are nothing special to begin with, if you don’t quite have a handle on the controls after a while away from the game, then Lucky Coins, found in areas ahead of that final showdown, can offer an extra shot against the big bad of the area. It’s a surface level change all told, and doesn’t really add the kind of risk and reward element the team was going for. Unfortunately, the general theme of the entire expansion comes out to be “Well, it exists”. There simply isn’t a lot going on. 

"With a sequel just around the corner, The Good, The Bad and The Augmented is a bit tricky to recommend to all but the most dedicated to The Surge. "

What helps stretch the game out a lot further beyond what would otherwise be a 5 and a half hour run time is the modifiers that you can take on once you clear an episode for the first time, which multiply your gains for every one you equip. Sure, you did it once, but can you do it again with no sound, a film grain and that old spaghetti western piano plunking as your only backdrop? What about if your enemies explode should you not properly dismember them like a Dead Space Necromorph? Weapon roulette needing you to be proficient with every kind of instrument? It’s an additional layer of challenge and distraction that can help prop up repeated playthroughs of a challenge, but otherwise isn’t bringing in anything major.

The unfortunate thing is that while this mechanic does help smooth over the short runtime by some margin, the fact remains that you’re still replaying the same content again, for rewards that don’t mean much and an unconnected piece of story that doesn’t tie back into the base game. Natch.

With a sequel just around the corner, The Good, The Bad and The Augmented is a bit tricky to recommend to all but the most dedicated to The Surge. But while the aesthetic is interesting and the challenge modifiers you can play with after the first mission are fun, there’s not a whole lot else to be found in the expansion outside of strangely missed opportunities. You could have capped off these crazy challenge gauntlets with the giant spider from that Will Smith movie, Deck13, but you didn’t. You didn’t. 

This game was reviewed on the PC.

The main rules to keep in mind for this list are that we deliberately avoided major crossover titles like Smash, PlayStation All Stars and MvC because then it would be no fun, and that really, that fun, is what this is all about, so you probably shouldn’t take it any more seriously than we are, which is not at all.

We begin our journey in the inconspicuous little golf game, Everybody’s Golf 5, perhaps better known in North America as Hot Shots Golf: Out of Bounds on PS3 takes us for a relaxing day on the links. As it turns out, even patricidal Greeks get a bit of downtime now and then. Kratos, the Ghost of Sparta, was introduced to the game in 2008 as a playable DLC character, where he could channel his unquenchable rage into something a bit more productive, using a rather unique chain club. Since this was before 3, I guess he chilled out between his latest PS4 game by taking up pottery instead?