The perfect valentine game-gift: Flower

Valentine is coming and as a gamer this year it's your chance to be traditional and original at the same time as far as the gift for your beloved one is concerned.
Rather than buying your girlfriend or wife the usual bunch of flowers buy her Flower, the just released PSN game by That Game Company.
Flower would obviously be the perfect Valentine gift for a chick gamer but not only, even though your sweetheart is not a game fanatic (yet) you can still purchase Flower for her.

Just create her a personal account on your PS3 and buy Flower, then buy a pad and some lovely gift wrap to make for a nice, tangible, present (unfortunately there are no pink nor red pads yet!). Turn your PS3 on and make her play your gift. It may be a lovely way to incline her to be interested in video-gaming if she's not and a sweet way to say "I love you" to a chick gamer.

Flower does not require much experience with the pad since it makes use of the Six-Axis movement feature and it's very intuitive and easy to play.
It does not require any button pressing either (just hold any button to go on, at least in the first levels) and it can really appeal a girl: beautiful graphic, lovely environments, lots of flowers and a gentle background music (the flowers you catch also emit notes).

A really romantic way to make for a non-traditional present to your girlfriend, wife or someone you'd like to be more intimate with ;) whether she's already interested in gaming or not!

Happy *play-full* Valentine!
Ivy

My 2009 Games

I should probably have started this the 1st January but actually had not thought about it :). I want to keep a list of the games I play to have a record of my background as a chick gamers :). 2009 games (most recent are on top):

Red Faction: Guerrilla (just started)
InFamous (story finished both good and evil, missing stunts for Platinum)
Killzone 2 (story mode to finish, online with the new maps)
Assassin's Creed
Plants VS Zombies (!!! great game!)
Sims 3 (quit after a while, not so exciting after all, much poorer than I expected :()
Heavenly Sword (not finished)
Resistance 2 (only multi)
Loco Roco 2 (playing)
Dawn of War 2 Beta (co-op campaign finished)
Mirror's Edge (story mode finishes, playing Time trials)
Prince of Persia (finished, started in 2008)
Gears of War II (story mode and horde finished)

2008 Games
LBP
Force Unleashed (not finished)
Fable II
King's Bounty the Legend
Spore (:()
Castle Crasher
GTA4
Gran Turismo 5
Everybody's Golf 5

Ivy

Heavenly Sword, a game with two chicks as main characters

Well, it's been out for a while but I got it only recently: it's a platinum title and I thought it was a shame not to have played it and I was totally RIGHT!

All in all this really is a CHICK game, with two beautiful girls (Nariko and Kai) as main characters. Nariko is actually the star but one gets to play Kai as well and also quite a lot which is really fun as one jumps between their two combat styles (melee and ranged) both with their own, very nice, peculiarities!


What's Heavenly Sword? It's a beautiful action-packed game with a great movie-like feel.
The cut scenes really seem a movie, the characters expressions are REAL, the characters are vivid and lively. Each one of them has got a very strong personality (Nariko, Kai, Shen, Flying Fox and so on) and their peculiarity is present in every aspect: expressions, behaviour, movements, way of talking, voice!
What is mostly amazing while playing are the beautiful, large vistas/panoramas and the great cinematic feel/cut of everything, the cinematic is great!
On the "behind the scenes" one of the creators mentions they developed a fighting engine that could handle up to 2000 enemies in the scene and in fact such scenes are really cool, so many people they look like a giant wave of fighters.
The animations are amazing (beautiful and fluid) and combat is very varied and funny, simply spectacular to watch and perform.
There is a great mix of moves, all very dynamic Hong-Kong-movies-like. They took a bit of something of many different martial arts to create a style that is unique and over-spectacular.

The characters are really excellent, on some details one can spot too few polygons and joints don't always look awesome but overall they are really great!
The detail on the skin/textures and the shaders is great, they are just like beautiful renders moving in a very fluid way.

The story is also quite nice, with bits and little revelations discovered while you go on, it feels like you're in a epic movie, like you're driving your own epic battle (which was the developers' goal).

I also really enjoyed to watch the behind the scenes, very insightful and interesting (and a few chick in there too ;))!
I'm really curious to see what Ninja Theory have up their sleeves next since I'm sure they can produce something even more stunning and beautiful after the Heavenly Sword experience!

Want to know more?
Official Site: http://www.heavenlysword.com/
Wikipedia (look out for spoilers!):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavenly_Sword
Ninja Theory site:
http://www.ninjatheory.com/
& http://www.ninjatheory.com/games.php (check there for images!)

Love & Play!
Ivy