1 video game review every day

'Splosion Man

2011-01-31T23:16:00.003-05:00

'Splosion Man

When everyone involved with a project clearly loves it, it shows. Soulless cash-in movies and games are everywhere, and then there are labors of love that just radiate polish. I come here to praise 'Splosion Man, not to 'Splode him.

"A platforming/puzzle game with a heart of gold (and explosives)" is the phrase that best describes 'Splosion Man. But here's another look:

Jenkins swiped his card and the airlock hissed open. He stepped in and steeled himself for the rush of nitrogen-rich air pushing down on him from the vents above, smelling slightly of ozone today. The buzzer rang and the green klaxon spun, so he pressed the ‘open’ button and stepped into the facility.

He’d been working here for a little under a year, and still had no idea what the entire project’s goal was. His department, the one he’d been recruited from Celsius AB for, was working on new ballistic propellant systems. He imagined it was a top-secret government project, but found it odd he hadn’t met with any G-men to get his Secret clearance renewed.

The whole building was just a little strange – very high ceilings, long hallways to nowhere, strange L-shaped dead ends that required you to call a liftjack just to get to the area you needed, but the pay was outstanding and he was free to work in an environment that rewarded results instead of incremental advances tempered by safety precautions. He liked that about this facility.

What he didn’t like, was Dinkelman. That corpulent leviathan was trundling towards him even now, a bearclaw in one hand and a clipboard in the other.

“Huh heh, Jenkins what are you doing down here?” he said, an errant crumb tumbling out of his mouth and onto his white smock, where it settled on top of a fold.

“I need to talk with Abernathy about a theoretical emulsifier for my project. Is he in his office?”

“He’s around. Think he went in the break room. We got a new air hockey table!” Dinkelman was never one to talk shop when he wasn’t at his desk. Jenkins pushed past him and followed the glowing blue arrows to floor 1-13’s office wing, glancing up at the mounted smartgun as it trained itself on him. Security was a top priority here.

Abernathy was in his room, standing next to a large lever. Jenkins rapped twice on the blue force-field to catch Abernathy’s attention and the red-bearded scientist, eyes covered by a pair of slitted view-goggles jerked and looked over, pulling the lever to lower the force door and let Jenkins in.

“Ahh, Jenkins,” Abernathy said. “How good to see you today. How are things down in 2-3?”

“Not bad. The acid baths seem to be tempering the propellants the way we want them to. It’s actually what I wanted to talk to you about. There’s a system subroutine that’s acting up and –“

Jenkins cut his sentence short as the floor rumbled slightly. Both men looked around for the source; subsonic vibrations were not uncommon, though it usually meant something had gone wrong somewhere and that there would be an announcement shortly. The two men turned their heads and listened, but the sound had stopped.

A moment later, though, the doughy scream of Dinkelman echoed off the walls, along with a high-pitched whine of the smartgun spinning up. The two men listened in horror as Dinkelman was apparently shredded by the smartgun’s caseless ammunition tearing into his flesh, and the screams were getting louder – as if Dinkelman was actually advancing on the gun’s position in spite of it barking fire at him. The screaming finally stopped, and Abernathy lowered his head. Jenkins followed; even though he despised Dinkelman professionally, he was still a human being.

There was a loud report, followed by two more from below, loud enough to spook Abernathy into raising a second, closer force field locking himself in with the lever and computer terminal. A bright glow came from the nearby junction, getting brighter and accompanied by an unconscionable cackle. As Jenkins turned in horror, the true purpose of the facility became clear – the munitions, plasma field research, augmenting intelligence programs, it all fell into place as the monstrosity came spinning over the lip of the column.

They were building a living bomb.

The thing - Jenkins didn’t know whether to call it a man or not – ran directly at him. Jenkins could feel the heat coming off its body, black Kirby dots crackling throughout its frame and giant optical receptors looking like two frosted bunt cakes turned on their side resting atop the pile of flames. He turned to pound on the blue force-field.

“Abernathy, you monster! Let me in! I’m out here with this…this creature!”

Abernathy shivered visibly and pointed at something directly over Jenkins’ shoulder. The heat was unbearable, but Jenkins managed to twist his torso and turn his head enough to put his eyes level with what could only be described as the creature’s mouth, gaping open with white textbook-sized square teeth.

It leered at him, the heat melting Jenkins’ pass-badge to his lab coat, and uttered a single word.

”Splode?”

It's just a great, fun game. Everyone should play and love it. The fact that there are literally two full campaigns, one designed specifically for co-op, is great. The achievements are perfectly done, there's not one but two ending credits songs, live-action setpieces and a delightfully off-kilter design ethic through the whole thing.

Graphics: Awesome. 'Splosion Man looks great, and the scientists are adorable. 4.
Sound: Better than amazing. Between the song about pastries and 'Splosion Man's Daffy Duck impersonation, you couldn't ask for more. 5.
Controls: The mappable controls from the menu are a highlight. 5.
Tilt: Completely endearing from start to finish. 5.
Overall (not an average): Tendrils' Top Pick.

Secret of Monkey Island

2011-01-28T17:08:00.005-05:00

The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition

So you've got your gang in high school. You're all nerds, you play Magic at lunch, you get together for marathon D&D sessions that run from the last school bell on Friday until everyone passes out from O.C. (Cheetos Overdose) sometime Sunday afternoon. Life is good, and you are happy with your gang. Then something happens. You grow up a little. Puberty hits, you discover girls, start working out with the baseball team. Your friend in electronics classes starts taking early enrollment at community college to knock out his Electrical Engineering degree faster. Your computer buddy starts working tech support at an ISP. But one friend is still wearing ratty "WIZARD!" t-shirts and quoting Monty Python loudly in the halls at you. When he stubs his toe, he yells out "CROM!" instead of a normal swear, and you cringe a little. He still has his birth-control glasses taped together and a Terry Pratchett book sticking out of his back pocket. You don't invite him to your party, and slowly the gang drifts away from him.

Secret of Monkey Island is that friend.

People bemoan the death of adventure games all the time, and when they pine for the genre, make sure they ask a 13-year old today to play this game with no rose colored glasses. Guaranteed they won't make it past the "oh-so-hilarious rabid death poodles."

Sandwich-style review here, a piece of praise in between two complaints: the Special Edition of this game is a great update. I hope someone at Digital Eclipse plays this game and weeps silently in the corner for an hour. Even though you can play this game in all its pixelly glory, it has been repainted and updated with new sprites and full voice acting from everyone in the game, from real voice talent like Rob Paulsen. This is how you update a game: lovingly recreate everything in full HD with music and voice upgrades.

Unfortunately (bottom slice of bread here), Monkey Island's secret is that it isn't very good. While the writing can be clever in spots, it overall is just as groan-inducing as that friend from the first paragraph. While the game is good-natured and never strikes so wrong a note as to upset you, it just never appealed to my sense of humor.

The gameplay is what sinks this game, though. There is so much game-length-padding backtracking going on, and sadly you're forced to watch Guybrush walk through the same four environments over and over, especially the slow-zooming "just got here" part of the animation. You can try and queue up "go here" buttons, but it still is simply terminal how slow the game plays. Compounded with inscrutable puzzles that require you to "think like the developer" instead of having a sane solution may make you feel like the smartest nerd at the Star Trek convention when you get them, but are just annoying when you spend a half-hour trying everything and failing.

At one point you have to adjust a fulcrum and rock setup, then go up some stairs and drop another rock on it. If you miss your target, you have to go back down the stairs, push or pull the lever, then go back up and pick up another rock, set it down, then push it again. Pure trial-and-error gaming; Record your results in your copybook, now.

It turns what is a fairly smartly-written game into a slog of trial-and-error and kills any of the exploration joy you feel when you have to keep dealing with setbacks that are asinine and dealt with by game designers in the decades since this game's release.

Graphics: No complaints, this game is gorgeous. 4.
Sound: Again, hits the perfect note. Great and varied voice acting. 5.
Controls: Why can't you cycle through commands? Other than that, acceptable. 3.
Tilt: A breezy and fun game, sunk by atrocious, ancient gameplay. 0.
Overall (not an average): 1.

RISK: Factions

2011-01-27T13:46:00.004-05:00

RISK: Factions

I want to talk about another game before I talk about RISK: Factions - the old '900 number' call-in games from comic books in the 1990's. "Help the X-Men beat Magneto," the double page spread would beg. Then you'd get a parent's permission and call in, ready to press 1 to use Optic Blast on Toad, and the announcer would talk as slow as possible to rack up the per-minute charges. Of course you didn't ask Mom's permission, you took the phone in your room, hid under the bed and hoped you could stop Magneto's plans in just a minute or two, but it never worked out that way. Keep that experience in mind.

First things first, this is a pretty fun version of RISK. They do a lot to change up the maps (though they aren't dynamically generated) and the different colors for team choice are realized in a fun way. Red (whose general is Commandant-64, an 80's toy robot) and Yellow (Generalissimo Meow, a tinpot dictator kitty-cat) are both highlights. The combat animations are fun and colorful, and the music, though obviously repetitive, fits the mood and doesn't get too grating.

The single-player campaign has a fairly funny storyline with fully-voice-acted and animated cutscenes attached to it, though it's just over an hour long.

But on to the flaws. First the offline flaw: the game's information delivery. While the combat is skippable, every time an objective on the map changes hands or comes online, and every award claimed at the end of a round, is meticulously mapped out and animated, which gets old by the second time you see it. When a hotly-contested property like the Temple gets passed around in a round, it becomes absolutely hair-pulling, and ultimately sinks local multiplayer, which - by the way - again does not support hotseat play, which is absolutely asinine for a game with literally no actions available for non-active players.

Secondly, online play is completely worthless. I've always maintained, despite others begging for a computer game RISK with online play, that it would be worthless. Locally, you're still in the guy's house when you throw up your hands and quit; online you just press a few buttons and you are gone, off to Call of Duty land. But RISK: Factions still lets you join another game right away, leading to endless ragequitting with pubbies, meaning you can only play online with your friends.

Ultimately, better matchmaking/ragequit penalties and customizable animation levels would make this a perfect arcade game, but unfortunately it ends up with a very few, but very critical errors that make it not worth its price.

Graphics: Very fun, bright colors and good animations. The "Domination" animations are a highlight. 4.
Sound: Full voice acting, and a score that never quites gets under your skin or on your nerves. 4.
Controls: Fairly intuitive. You can't abort a fast attack, but other than that, no complaints. 4.
Tilt: You will love playing this once, but ultimately the overlong and far-too-frequent "informative animations" just get annoying. 1.
Overall (not an average): 2

Two Worlds

2011-01-26T03:32:00.000-05:00

Two Worlds

"Ahh... bandits." The first time you hear this immortal line, spoken by the baritone lead voice actor, in response to meeting a pack of wolves, you will be a little perplexed. But by the time the mounting insanity of this game reaches its fevered pitch, you will be absolutely in love with the characters.

Let's get one thing straight: Two Worlds isn't good. Not in the traditional sense, where high production values and a smart script come together with novel gameplay concepts to make an instant classic. Two Worlds is bad. Insanely bad. Ostensibly an Oblivion-like RPG in a boring faux-Britannia peopled by badly-acted wooden caricatures handing out quests to your hero like candy.

There is a lot of content to explore. There are a dozen factions to curry favor with or betray, dungeons to raid, side quests and hidden areas, and taints.

Yes, the "Big Bad" in this game is "The Taint," and the characters say it out loud over and over, and it never stops being funny.

But with a bit of interpretation, the game becomes something amazing. It is the perfect deadpan, never breaking character or winking at the audience at all, but somehow reveling in its badness. It seems to be daring you to buy into its ridiculous hero, a John Freeman for the swords'n'sorcery set.

Your hero is never far from a non-sequiter; he's a chatty hero (though never to anyone in particular) and seems to be the natural, real-world expression of the sociopathic characters from D&D games from the 1980s that were all about loot and killing. He seems to be just trundling through the world, duct-taping katanas together and riding a skeletal horse around, causing mayhem, and if you buy into that conceit, the game really does shine.

Two Worlds also brings a lot to the table in terms of novel gameplay concepts. Their handling of inventory is pretty novel (though having 255 different sets of gloves is annoying when you're trying to combine matching ones), and the world is big and full of varied quests. It just takes a particular mindset to enjoy it.

Graphics: Brown and green everywhere, and every model is edged with jaggies. 2.
Sound: Howlingly bad dialogue reading and a very limited palette of monster/attack sounds. No soundtrack to speak of. 1, or 4 Ironically.
Controls: Competent until you get on a horse. 2.
Tilt: With the right mindset, incredibly enjoyable. 4.
Overall (not an average): 5

MotorHEAT

2011-01-24T08:00:00.001-05:00

MotorHEAT

Let's go back, back to the halcyon days of 1992. You're at the mall, you've got a fat wad of birthday or babysitting money, and you're at Toys 'R Us, back when that was the place to get your games because no specialty stores existed. You pick up a cardboard box and look at the name, flip it over for a few screenshots and a description that more than likely is written "in-universe" to describe what the game is supposed to depict - like, "Help Dash Dengar fight off the alien hordes through 8 thrilling levels" that don't actually talk about the gameplay.

Remember that? Remember picking up games and hoping against hope that they were at least competent? MotorHEAT is the game industry's apology for that dark time before metacritic and internet message board opinions. Out of the box (or from the download screen) it looks like a cheap game, a throwaway cash-in tech demo or student final project. But from the moment you start, it reveals a depth and a knowledge of what fun is that really strikes you.

MotorHEAT only has three buttons - left, right and TURBO. That's it. Don't worry about acceleration, MotorHEAT knows you want the pedal to the metal the whole game, and so you start at, and cannot go less than, MAX SPEED. They do a good job at recreating the wanton destruction of Burnout 2 mixed in with the speed from WipeOutXL. It's a gestalt of the best racing games from the PS1 era, with great graphics for a 1-dollar game. More importantly, though the graphics aren't 1080i at full resolution, they don't have anything in them that takes away from the experience.

MotorHEAT even does a few things for three dollars that several full titles don't. While it doesn't have true Achievements, it does feature a few dozen in-game "awards," along with a metrics screen that tracks how close you are to achieving each one. It also seamlessly integrates with the XBox Message Center to send challenges/boast to your friends (and also give people who may not have even seen the Indie Games section a game to buy).

While it certainly wears out its welcome in extended-play sessions, MotorHEAT - when enjoyed in half-hour sessions while chatting on Party Chat or waiting for a slot to open in a multiplayer game with your gang - is pure bliss.

Graphics: Good PS1/N64 quality. Some blurriness in the backgrounds, but it has customizable player cars. 3.
Sound: A little muted. The music is forgettable and the vroom-vroom sounds anemic. 2.
Controls: It only has 3, and you only need three. You feel as in control as you can at 220kmph. 4.
Tilt: A perfect distraction, with lots of polish and a few tricks full titles could learn from. 4.
Overall (not an average): 4.

Ninja Blade

2011-01-21T08:00:00.000-05:00

Ninja Blade

From Software's title Metal Wolf Chaos from a few years back had a little bit of a cult following due to the sheer absurdity of the plot - Aliens attack, so the President of America gets in his Mech Walker and shoots missles at them on the Washington Mall. Ninja Blade is a verrrry loose sequel (it's more a case of taking place in the same universe), where you are a ninja and also a member of a military special ops team who parachutes into Japan to fight giant mutated zombies using blade boomerangs that shoot fire when you're not manning a helicopter minigun.

If that sounds a little insane, you've got the right idea. From set out to make a game that plays like a balls-out action movie, and it straight-up delivers. Ninja Blade doesn't play around with twisting storylines or romantic subplots, nor are they particularly interested in character progression. The game is all about setpieces - and boy does it have some amazing ones.

Mechanically, the game is almost a clone of the God of War series - you use a variety of weapons to beat up mooks, get orbs, upgrade your gear and advance through the level. It does a good job of making movement a priority, making you feel suitably ninja-like as you swing across rooftops and wall-run with the best of them. The monsters look freaked out and suitably gross, and you have several customization options for your own character's appearance (which are carried over in cutscenes, thankfully).

The reason to buy a ticket for this particular ride, however, is the boss battles. If you've played the first hour of God of War II, you have a good idea what "epic battle against giant opponent" is like. But Ninja Blade blows that fight out of the water. The moment you fall in love with this game is when you are fighting a giant snail, who vomits the contents of a parking lot at you while you're in midair. You then fly down to a motorcycle, start it up and proceed to drive down the backs of other cars as they're thrown at you before hitting the snail with the motorcycle just as you throw a shuriken at the gas tank.

Basically, Ninja Blade asks the question, "Would a 14 year old boy think this was awesome?" and if the answer is "No," they leave it out of the game. It's a constant game of one-upsmanship that always leaves you smiling. Ninja Blade doesn't tackle any elements of the human condition; it knows what it is and does it very, very well.

It doesn't have the legs that an RPG or online fighter/shooter has in terms of replayability, and seeing the monster a second time when you're replaying a level for a time attack score lacks its initial punch, but the ride that is Ninja Blade is well worth the time you invest in it.

Graphics: Acceptable. The creature design is stellar, though the levels have a lot of "sameness" 4.
Sound: The weapons go whoosh and clink, and the monsters groan, but it isn't anything that stands out, for good or bad. 3.
Controls: The game piles a lot of options and it turns into a finger-contorting Simon once you're fully-powered. 3.
Tilt: Just fun as hell. A short ride, but time-attack modes gives it some replay value. You'll have a smile on your face start to finish. 5.
Overall (not an average): 4.

HORROR WEEK: Special Comment

2010-10-29T12:00:00.000-04:00

And now, as promised, a Special Comment about games.

One of the better compliments a baseball player can receive is that he 'plays within himself,' a phrase meaning that a batter who is a contact hitter doesn't try to hit homers and thus create more outs than runs. The term sounds derisive at first, as if to describe someone who is unable to do whatever is asked of him, but nothing could be farther from the truth.

Throughout history, the arts have struggled to find the best way to express emotions and ideals. The different humanities each have something that they do best. You don't see many movies about the internal dilemmas of a man coming to grips with his fading vigor in his old years because internal conflict like that plays out best in the context of a novel that can explore internal monologues; likewise, the action and bombast of a triumphant war movie plays poorly as a poem but makes for a fantastic summer blockbuster. The arts must learn to 'play within themselves.'

Starting with, probably, the last-gen systems the constant bickering over whether 'games are art' debate has been pretty firmly put to rest, pretty much on the back of Silent Hill 2, though rumblings of 'games are art is visible even earlier, in spook-fests like the original Alone in the Dark. And games, as an art form, have one genre that is really and truly "in their wheelhouse" so to speak: Horror. When games (no pun intended) play within themselves,' they do it best capitalizing on the Horror genre.

Every art plays on one or more essential connections to the human psyche. Video Games combine the visuals and storytelling language of movies, but lack their ability to control information to the viewer. The sense of controlling the action is unique to games, and this sense of power is where the ability of games to craft a sense of horror and dread come to the forefront. The general conceit of controlling an avatar's actions on screen plunges people deeper into vicariously living the lives of the characters onscreen, building a stronger bond with their representatives than even an epic novel can offer. This bond created between player and character is literally divine; you are both God and his will given flesh onscreen, a duality unlike anything else in the arts.

This bond is absolute; the character's victories are yours, and you feel a sense of pride about every one of your avatar's accomplishments. Similarly, your character's defeats sting that much more than the tribulations of a character on screen or stage. And the unique connection becomes all the more intense when the risks facing your avatar are increased, your challenges made Herculean, your resources depleted and your enemies made legion.

This risk and realization of triumph in the face of overwhelming, dooming odds is what the great games are made of. You are emotionally invested in your avatar in a way you aren't reading or watching a horror tale, because (for lack of a better term) you are living the horror as it unfolds; you scream as a door opens to reveal monsters and command your avatar to run away, just as you yourself would. The real risk to your continued survival is heightened as you run the real risk yourself of dying in the most unpleasant fashion imaginable (and sometimes even in fashions beyond imagination!).

With the continuing advances in sound design, control scemes, graphical capabilities and raw storage size, games get closer and closer to you living the events on-screen as they play out. While a convincing game that depicts human-to-human interaction is still as far out as a Turing-Test-capable AI, a human-versus-environment game is real now, and the most effective way to capitalize on it in a way that movies, stage, the written word, song and poem can never hope to do is to scare the pants off of the player.

HORROR WEEK: The Darkness

2010-10-28T12:00:00.000-04:00

The Darkness

Sometimes it doesn't pay to spend your time being a virtual hero, fighting against things that go bump in the night. Sometimes, you just want to do the bumping. For those times, there's The Darkness. Written by Garth Ennis, based on his own eponymous comic, The Darkness weaves a twisted underworld fairytale as only the master of gratuitous violence and hilarity can. If you're not a comic fan, you've probably never heard of the mad Irishman Ennis, but rest assured he's one of the most demented brilliant writers working today.

Our game starts out as a extraordinarily generic first-person shooter: you're a Mafia hitman whose boss set you up, yadda yadda. But then you come into possession of a demonic entity's powers, and you use them to slaughter endless waves of Mafia mooks, crooked cops and undead Nazis in creative ways, all the while smashing lights and shooting streetlamps to keep yourself in good health. The suitably creepy Mike Patton provides the voice of both the angry entity (the titular Darkness) and its minions, the goofy yet ultraviolent Darklings.

The sound design is top-notch, and the graphics are grim and gritty (though a bit overdark, like a normal FPS's bloom-fest in reverse), with the storyline pulling no punches as it drags you through hell and back for the love of your girlfriend. There are collectables aplenty, handled in a unique way as you collect phone numbers and call them in on a pay phone, and the wit of Ennis really shines as many of them are darkly hilarious.

I'll admit, a console isn't the best place to play a first-person shooter, and this game is no exception to that rule. The autoaim is frustration, and you move and turn very slowly compared to the badass assassin you're built up to be; the sense of speed and urgency is missing from your normal interaction with the world. But the creativity with which the game delivers all the standards of the genre (phone numbers as collectables, a subway station for a warp hub) and the endless chatter available from people who have no impact on the game shows a lot of care was put into this game.

It was slept on by most, but The Darkness is a great single-player experience that deserves a playthrough, especially at the used prices it can be had for nowadays. The game's replay value is low (an atrocious multiplayer offering doesn't help), but for that twelve hours or so, it's a thrill ride with a lot to offer in terms of a richly-realized world, with fantastic voice acting and a spit-shine.

Graphics: Standard for this generation. Face models and speech are beautiful, but play on an SD TV at your own peril. 4.
Sound: Mike Patton is an awesome foil for our "hero" Jackie Estacado. 5.
Controls: Wonky and unresponsive. 2.
Tilt: Great, dark fun. It's a monster movie where you play the monster. 4.
Overall (not an average): 4.

HORROR WEEK: DOOM

2010-10-27T12:00:00.000-04:00

DOOM

Way back when computers were new, there was no internet, no great hivemind telling people what to think. There was only your friends, telling you about this awesome game that Jimmy was playing last time they were over. And for 90% of us, DOOM was that game. While not the progenitor of the FPS, DOOM was such an influence that the term First-Person Shooter had to be coined because too many games were being described as "DOOM Clones," which begged the question to the customer: Why not just play DOOM?

What makes DOOM great, even to this day, is not the graphics (which are not just dated, but now painfully archaic) or the MIDI-based sound, but the level design. DOOM takes its cues not from what we understand of on-rails FPS's or even Light Gun games of the day, but of the text adventure games of the era, offering dozens of secrets, shortcuts and of course 'monster closets' that open up behind you at the most inopportune times. Levels are set up almost as puzzles, with the monsters serving as both an impetus to keep moving and an obstacle in the way of progress.

The lack of a Y-axis sorely hurts DOOM on a modern replay, even moreso than it lacking a true third dimension, as we have grown so used to it that not having it feels almost foreign and retarded (in the classical sense of the word), although the sound design holds up shockingly well. DOOM does an impressive job of making the player intensely aware of sound cues having a specific vocabulary of meanings, and although they are chiptunes at this point, the themes from DOOM are still effective at portraying the immediacy of each stage.

Replaying DOOM now, you realize, much as with a modern replay of the original Legend of Zelda, that these games were punishgly hard and rewarded memorization and repetition as much as playskill. The fun, however, is still present in force, as you attempt not just to make it through the stages, but with your sanity and ammo count high.

Graphics: No excuses, this game is disgusting by modern standards. Releasing a port onto XBLA without at least touching up the sprites is unforgivable. 1.
Sound: Aged like fine wine, and the monster sounds are suitably creepy to this day. 4.
Controls: They feel infantile, which is of course what they are, but no crippling deficiencies. 2.
Tilt: Still great fun to this day, either solo, deathmatching or co-op. 4.
Overall (not an average): 3.

HORROR WEEK: Penny Arcade Episode 1

2010-10-26T12:00:00.000-04:00

Penny Arcade Adventures, Episode 1: On the Rain-Slicked Precipice of Darkness

There was a time when Penny Arcade was relevant and funny. Then World of Warcraft happened, and there was a fundamental shift away from jokes that were gaming-inspired to jokes that were gaming-derived. So it was with no small amount of trepidation that I started up OTRSPOD, fearing the worst. I was pleasantly surprised to discover a good old-fashioned RPG under the hood, quasi-real time combat mixed with levelling heroes and weapons and a decent-enough plot. Best of all, the comedy is derived from the source material, not from pop culture or in-jokes (with the notable exception of the presence and centrality to the plot of the Fruit Fucker 2000).

Tycho of PA is a brilliant if verbose writer, and his riffing on Lovecraftian themes, coupled with good, lowbrow humor and a sense of whimsy really plays into a great tribute to early 20th century horror author tropes, with genuinely laugh-out-loud jokes littered throughout. The graphics are gorgeous, hand-drawn everything that integrates your created character well. There are some sections that summon the phrase "chintzy Flash game" to mind but overall a positive impression, graphically.

Because the entire game is a throwback to text-based interactions, there's no voice-acting to speak of except for a narration at the beginning and end (and a credits song by MC Frontalot!), so the moody music and ghostly, repetitive monster attack sounds will have to serve you. And, being a throwback game at heart, get ready for lots of walking around, though the game wisely avoids "random encounters" entirely, making you full aware of what awaits you before each combat begins. The flow of the real-time attack meters and countering moves is an interesting combo; you have to wait for attack animations to finish, but at the same time pay attention as there is dexterity-based portions to each combat.

As part of a planned Quadrilogy, the price tag of $20 is a little steep, as the game railroads you pretty hard into the same planned progression each playthrough, offering no different experiences, and grinding is pretty much impossible as sections remain locked until you have finished a suitable amount of story ahead of it. While it isn't a scary game by any means, it does shamelessly and deliberately ape the stylings of H.P. Lovecraft and August Derleth, turning their monster's conventions on their heads and cracking wise, and for making you laugh during your fight with their version of Cthulhu, they get major props at least.

Graphics: Hand-drawn everything, with solid animations, but nothing really mind-blowing. 3.
Sound: A spooky soundtrack, but no voice work and reptitive monster sounds. 2.
Sound Supplemental: A credits song, by MC Frontalot: +1
Controls: The dexterity of blocking/dodging feels shoehorned into an otherwise classic turn-based RPG system. 3.
Tilt: Lots of jokes at the expense of mimes, fruit, carneys, urinologists and Lovecraft. 4.
Overall (not an average): 3.

HORROR WEEK: Dead Space

2010-10-25T10:30:00.000-04:00

Dead Space

I am a gigantic sissy-girl when it comes to horror games. I'm not ashamed to say it, I have a lot of trouble playing 'scary games.' Which is odd, because I'm the biggest gorehound I know, and have an encyclopedic knowledge of horror movies and horror authors; I love the genre, but there's something about playing a game, where you are the one being chased, attacked or dismembered that makes it completely unnerving.

Dead Space is pretty much the scariest thing you will ever play. I am not exaggerating in the least when I say it is endlessly unsettling and outright terrifying. The irony is it is such a completely lame and overdone plot, but like the great horror films, it realizes the point is not an interesting storyline, but pants-crapping fear that matters, and the less "story" that gets in the way, the better. Horror and Comedy share these traits in cinema, books and games.

Issaac Clark (as in, Asimov and Arthur C., get it?) is a repairman who has to put together a drifting spaceship that has been ovverrun with the animated corpses of its staff, and his long-distance girlfriend is somewhere on the ship as well. What Dead Space skips in plot, it makes up for in jaw-droppingly gorgeous setpieces and extraordinarily intelligent design. The game's director very clearly takes influences from the standard tropes of monster movies, and learns his lessons well.

Shadows shift and change, monsters grumble and skitter even when they aren't attacking, and the ship groans and creaks like a dying behemoth you are trapped in the belly of. For the full experience, playing this game with the audio routed to a pair of headphones will set most over the edge.

The best touches are the little ones, what we call 'polish' in the games industry. Unlike a normal shooter, this game makes sure every time you have to go anywhere, there's not just one path. There's always an alternate route, one bathed in darkness, that even though your digital breadcrumb trail says is useless, you find yourself checking out "just to be sure." Whenever you walk up to a closed door, the icon reads "Open?", a question you don't really want to answer 'yes' to, since you know death awaits on the other side.

Graphics: The best you'll see this gen. Everything is coated in a layer of polish, showing off the details better that even Silent Hill's famously painted backgrounds, only in true 3-D. 5.
Sound: Better and spookier work than anything you'll endure elsewhere. Good luck playing this game after dark. 5.
Controls: Issac is just a bit too slow and lumbering, though whether this is by design or not is debatable. 4.
Tilt: White-knuckle thrill ride incarnate. 5.
Overall (not an average): The definitive survival horror game of all time. It's questionable that this game will ever bested in this gen, or even the next one. 5.

SHMUP WEEK: Ikaruga

2010-06-23T19:35:00.000-04:00

Ikaruga

Ikaruga is the most accessible of the "Bullet Hell" shooters that have become the standard in cabinets across arcades everywhere. As the community around actually going to an arcade instead of staying home and playing online has shrunk, the demand for either a more unique experience (like the expensive input devices of Dance Dance Revolution) or a more hardcore challenge, Japanese developers (notably Cave) offered up some of the most insanely difficult shoot em ups in history. While the Americas aren't particularly interested in going to arcades anymore, we have no problem buying discs and downloaded titles of the best Japan has to offer.

Ikaruga follows that most famous of shmup plots: Aliens (or something) are attacking, let's send out some ships to defend Earth (or humanity)! The Ikaruga is scrambled to fight in this top-down shmup across a relatively short game of just five levels, but every moment is a treat to the eyes.

The central conceit - shoot enemies of a "light" or "dark" coloration in groups of threes to build a combo meter - makes for some torturousskill shots as you navigate your ship and pick and choose. Being able to hotswap your invulnerability shield from light to dark bullets also gives you a bizarre cavalier attitude in a genre known for scurrilous movements to avoid taking a hit.

The enemies and stage dressings you face are a technophile's dream, a proto-robotech world fraught with industrial machines that spit out spherical threats in an unending wave. There's a lot to process on the screen, and it's even more amazing when you realize that this is by far the easiest bullet hell shooter around.

Graphics: Crisp, but nothing groundbreaking. 3.
Sound: The music is passable, but I wish there was more coming from the enemies. 2.
Controls: With a "screen rotate" option, this game goes out of its way to make you comfortable. 4.
Tilt: Plenty of fun alone, even better with a co-op buddy. Right on the cusp of controller-throwing hard without being a breeze. 3.
Overall (not an average): 3.

SHMUP WEEK: Einhander

2010-06-22T18:02:00.000-04:00

Einhander

When you think "side-scrolling shoot-em-up," the first developer on the tip of your tongue is probably not Square, home of the cutscene and spikey-hair angsty protagonist. But back in 1998, Square stunned the world with the criminally under-appreciated Einhander, a shmup with something to prove. The side-scroller takes the conventions of the genre and adds something that really hasn't been seen since - honest-to-goodness RPG-like choices in loadouts.

The Einhander ship itself is your first choice - there are three different configurations to start with, each with their own set of advantages. They all look, like the rest of the game, completely fantastic - Einhander compares favorably with any game of its era, and really a little bit into the next era. Because it uses 3D models in a 2D setting, its 2.5-D display looks great, and allows them to play quite a bit with your expectations of what "side scrolling" really means. The bosses are gigantic, but it's the drawn backgrounds, like Final Fantasy's, that will really blow you away.

Music is suitably epic and post-apocalyptic, and the standard gatling gun on all ships is deep and resounding, but pretty grating after a long play session. The special weapons, in all their creative glory, are fantastic. The lighting-call and lightsaber are both highlights, but the RPG launcher also stays with you.

The challenge is up there, and while this is far from a bullet hell style shooter, it does have plenty of problem-solving elements that you'll have to work with (solving paths on the fly with limited information, or enemies with conditions that must be met before destroying them) all while handling an upper-level challenging shmup.

Graphics: Mind-blowing. Shows off Square's specialty in a genre known mostly for endlessly tiled forests or clouds. 5.
Sound: While not Final Fantasy-quality orchestrals, a cut about simple horn-based battle loops common to the genre. 4.
Controls: Rewards canny manipulation and hot-swapping your limited-ammo special weapons while managing turret placement on your main gun. This is all handled decently, but the PS1 controller was not designed for such tortured manipulations. 4.
Tilt: Einhander was the hotness when it came out, and it continues to be a misunderstood classic. 5.
Overall (not an average): 5.

SHMUP WEEK: Life Force

2010-06-21T13:05:00.000-04:00

Life Force

Welcome back! We're going to take it a little old-school today as we explore several different shmups this week. First up, Life Force, the sequel to the seminal Gradius, known to some as Salamander. Full disclosure: My first experience with this game was on the NES, and it was on its release, when I was 8 years old. I was only treated to one game per month, so when I chose this, it was with the knowledge that I would be playing only this for a full month. And I played the hell out of Life Force.

The story is actually pretty cool, as far as space shooters go: an ancient, giant alien galaxy-being is going around eating planets. As the Vic Viper (or as player 2, the Road British), you actually fly into the heart of the being, kill it and escape by the seat of your pants. The level design reflects this - the first stage you fly past giant teeth as you enter the mouth, and it goes on from there. The classic Gradius style - shoot enemies for powerups, cash them in for better and better tools, and the ever-present 'Option' are all there, and thankfully the game features instant respawns instead of having a checkpoint-based system like the first Gradius.

Graphically, the game holds up remarkably well, even today. While the monsters are simple two-frame sprites, the stages are the real stars, with suitably creepy intestines and brain matter fighting for screen real estate with more terrestrial design. Alternating between top-down and side-scrolling action also gives you a better idea just what the Vic Viper looks like. The bosses are grotesque, starting with the grasping brain-eyeball at the end of the first stage, and only grow more freakish as you go deeper into, literally, the belly of the beast.

The music is catchy but not fantastic, and unfortunately does suffer from its chiptunes roots compared to what we're capable of today. The sound effects are tinny, annoying and numerous; the game is an unapologetic arcade coinsink, and has the bleeps and bloops to prove it.

Given the limitations of a two-button controller, Life Force decides not to fight it and simply has one button fire all weapons simultaneously and builds in rapid-fire. The Vic Viper thus lays down a wall of firepower that looks fantastic and makes you feel like an actual space ace as you tackle the terror from beyond.

Once you play through the first stage enough to generate muscle-memory of where each powerup, enemy and safe route are, you'll be able to breeze through it, and die horribly three times very quickly at the beginning of stage two. And you'll love every second of it. This is as it should be; the tag Quarter Pounder is very applicable here.

Graphics: The enemies (other than bosses) are simple affairs, but the stage dressing is creative and fun, even today. 5.
Sound: Forgettable music and chintzy effects. 2.
Controls: Doesn't try to do to much, and is the better for it. 4.
Tilt: A balls-hard shmup with a creative setting. 5.
Overall (not an average): Tendrils' Top Pick.

Plants vs Zombies

2010-04-26T17:54:00.000-04:00

Plants vs Zombies

Tower Defense games are all the rage nowadays. Disposable, survive-this timekillers that run on minimal resources and require you to make the tough decisions on when to build that new tower. PopCap is probably the best casual developer to have ever developed casually. So when PopCap came out with a tower defense game, the result was expected to be fairly good.

But good God, this game is fan-freaking-tastic. The concept - zombies are invading your yard, and only plants - powered by sunbeams - can fight them off. The art style, cribbed directly from Penny-Arcade's whimsy, pits ultra-adorable "pea shooters" and smilin' sunflowers against zombies that drive zambonis and wear ducky innertubes is instantly endearing. There's literally nothing not to like in this game. But don't take it from me; here's EuroGamer, which says everything I want to but far more succinctly:

A masterful combination of serious strategy and cartoonish delights - and by adding mini-games, survival modes and a shop, PopCap is practically rubbing it in. The result is as fresh and accessible as Super Mario, and as refined and considered as Left 4 Dead, wading into another established genre and polishing the central ideas in a way that will make it a hard act to follow.

If I can have any complaint at all about this game, it is that there is an element of dexterity in harvesting your sunlight that feels out of place, a slight bit of twitch gaming in a whole that is solidly in the strategy genre, though it is a minor nitpick, and there's certainly a polished way of expressing that to you in-game via plants that glow a moment before releasing their golden manna.

This is a short review, because there is literally nothing wrong with this game. Buy it right now.

Graphics: Brightly colored with hilarious and accessible enemies and utilities. 5.
Sound: Minimal music still sets the mood, and the zombies groan appropriately. The Thriller Zombie is a high note. 4.
Controls: Not too much really needs to be done, but everything controls brilliantly. 4.
Tilt: It's got zombies. And seed packets. There's nothing not to like. 5.
Overall (not an average): Tendrils' Top Pick

Battlestations: Midway

2010-04-23T17:12:00.000-04:00

Battlestations: Midway

Battlestations: Midway is pretty much the most complete game that was released on the 360 in 2007. Lots of games did some of the stuff in it better, and some games did everything it did, but not as well. But Midway is the pinnacle of 3rd-person action blended with overarcing strategy and oh hey, howzabout some kickass multiplayer with a community that's as tight-knit as it is skilled. It says something when the demo for a game two years old still has lobbys filling up almost instantly.

There's a lot to like here. For the historical buffs, there's tons of pages of information about how the Pacific theater war was actually fought. For the strategists, plotting courses and commissioning your fleet's deployments just right is very rewarding. And of course the dogfighting/bombing runs are pure adrenaline. At its core, Midway is a strategy game; realistically the computer is as good or better than you at actually executing the attacks you request, but eff dat noize, bombing runs, bitches. The sparse, Horner-esque soundtrack lets the big war machines make their mark, and it's great fun listening to something as big as the Yamato rumble into life and start firing those big guns.

It isn't all nose art and sneak attacks, though. The learning curve can best be described as "up a greased brick wall," and the tutorial is well over two hours long - and necessary - as the sheer number of options weighs down on you. Skilled micromanaging players from days of Starcraft yore will have the full scale of choices baffling them with the sheer variety available. The controls, once you are used to them, never really feel comfortable, though they are more than servicable, and as noted earlier, the computer really is better than you at basic actions.

The controls aside, you really can't ask for more from a game. It's ambitious, unique and competent. If you're a history buff, the most famous battles are faithfully recreated for you to either win again or change the tide of history as the other side. I can't recommend it enough for anyone who has the patience for its difficult-to-master control scheme.

Graphics: The ships look great, though the water and skybox aren't the lush eye-candy you'd get from a true AAA title. Given the scope, that's acceptable. 3.
Sound: Great rumbles from engines, budda-buddas from guns and booms from bombs. 5.
Controls: They try and do a lot with just an XBox Controller, and succeed - but it isn't pretty. 3.
Tilt: Great fun, populous multiplayer, but the single-player campaign is quite short. 4.
Overall (not an average): 4

Worms

2010-04-22T12:56:00.001-04:00

Worms

There's good and bad in the Worms port to XBLA. Worms as a game in general is a Top Pick; its combination of adorable avatars, cutesy weapons and over-the-top violence are a winner for all-time, but this is a review of the port, and as a port, it's lacking.

The number-one thing it lacks is weapons. Many of the most-fun weapons are completely absent, notably the Holy Hand Grenade. Ninja Rope is present in all its glory, unfortunately, taunting you with the moves you can cheese out of its use. There is also no level editor, a common absence because MicroSoft hates user-generated content (a snide person would point out that UGC means selling DLC becomes harder), but Team 17 could've forced it through.

Graphically, it's a mixed bag. The worms are expressive, but unfortunately the backgrounds are chosen from only 4 or so locales, and the pregenerated maps have only 3 configurations, limiting the creative carnage possibilites. Sound packs to customize your wormsclamations are free and fun, and the weapons sound nice for the most part, so no complaints there. Porting a mouse-based game to the console has a unique set of challenges, but Team 17 nailed it.

Allegedly, a remake of Worms World Tour is in the works for XBLA/PSN, and nothing would make me happier, but until it arrives, for just five dollars you could do a lot worse than owning this version of Worms.

Graphics: Nothing great, but nothing bad either. 3.
Sound: Worms are cute, guns go boom. 5.
Controls: Servicable. Some buttons are a little unintuitive, and no option to remap. 3.
Tilt: You could do far, far worse than this evolution of Scorched Earth. 5.
Overall (not an average): 2

Marble Blast Ultra

2010-04-21T12:59:00.000-04:00

Marble Blast Ultra

Some games are just brilliant in their design, and require nothing else. Marble Blast Ultra is such a game, and yet they added tons of additional features. The basic concept should be very familiar to gamers: You are a marble, and must get to the exit as fast as possible. Dodge obstacles and collect powerups to do so. There are gimmick stages, as well as stages designed for skill and stages that have a "trick" to finishing them in a flash. There are endless pinball bumpers situated on ice terrain that are controller-busting infuriating, and you'll love every minute of it.

The colors are bright, and your options for a ball include several fun options, as well as a few that show off their lighting engine in reflections. The music and sound effects get the job done, with subdued techno thumping and loud, brash sound effects that give audio cues when you use a power-up or 'blast' with your marble's ability.

Some of the puzzles require you to preform moves that aren't fully explained, and there isn't really a "practice zone" to try things without suffering through a long death scene, so it can be frustrating at high levels, but it's a minor complaint that is handled best by "play more, scrub."

But that's not enough. MBU also has comprehensive leaderboards and a pretty swank multiplayer component that features tense, gem-collecting, smack-talking elements while you compete to see who can knock their opponent off the edge the most (not the de jure goal of the multiplayer mode, mind you). They further kept their laurels un-rested by releasing even more DLC, more maddeningly-difficult stages to mess around in. Marble Blast is so good, I want to take it out behind the middle school and get it pregnant.

Graphics: Servicable. Bright colors and abstract landscapes get the point across, crucial in a puzzle game. 3.
Sound: Repetitive but non-annoying soundtrack and jarring (in a good way) sound effects. 3.
Controls: Responsive, but with enough play to make you keep going back to set a new best time. 5.
Tilt: Great puzzles, great action, great multiplayer, great developer attention. 5.
Overall (not an average): 4.

Carcassonne

2010-04-20T12:54:00.000-04:00

Carcassonne

There's a certain subset of hardcore gamers, people who aren't quite to the point of detailed, Battle for North Africa-level wargaming but who refuse to play the standard fare available in the toy aisle of most stores. For this market, a small group of European companies full of creative folk basically invented and defined a genre almost a decade ago with the release of Carcassonne, which started the trend of "German Board Game" as a label for a style of play- highly conceptual math, bartering and trading, and a finite, usually tile-based system instead of moving tokens around a circuit.

Carcassonne is the granddaddy of this genre, and makes the transition to video game form flawlessly. The basic idea is to build castles with tiles that have either grass or castle edges, with the occasional road piece thrown in to mix it up. Your limiting resource is that you only have 7 "Meeples" to claim things with, and you get them back only when your road/castle/church is completed, forcing you to decide whether to finish the castle early to get your meeple back or try to expand it.

The music is typical, just generic middle-aged fife and bells, maybe a minute and a half long, and the sound effects are similarly cheap, but no one plays it for the graphics or sound design. With five-player multiplayer (including local multiplayer, though sadly no hotseat play.) the fun comes in politicking your cause, and enticing everyone else to try and screw their neighbors before they realize you've been playing them all along.

If it's even possible, the video game version is actually better than the original, since it eliminates all the bookkeeping and loose pieces that can make the game a bit of a chore to score at the end, though the as-you-go scoring makes it a little tough to build a commanding lead. The DLC for the game adds an eight-tile beginning set that puts a massive river through the middle of the board, but realistically it adds little to an almost-perfect experience. The learning curve on this game is steep, but highly rewarding, and since it was offered free last year for a week, online is suitably populated, making finding a game even today easy.

Graphics: Servicable. Zoomed in all the way, there's a lot of nice touches, but nothing groundbreaking. 2/5
Sound: You'll be plugging your iPod in for this one. 2/5
Controls: Simple, but the game makes few demands. High score for not trying to be too cute. 4/5.
Tilt: As a multiplayer experience, it eclipses everything that made the original the Origins Award winner for Board Game of the Year. 5/5.
Overall (not an average): 5/5.

Alone in the Dark (360)

2010-04-19T10:42:00.000-04:00

Alone in the Dark

Alone in the Dark tries to do a lot of ambitious stuff, and for the most part succeeds in doing what it wants to do. Unfortunately, what it wants to do isn't very much fun. The Alone in the Dark franchise was the progenitor of the entire "survival horror" concept, where a common man (Edward Carnby, in modern day New York City for reasons that are vague and best left undiscussed) once again battles back against forces of ancient, Lovecraftian evil. The game presents itself as several discrete, independent stages that can be selected like DVD chapters and played through in any order. Allegedly, you don't need to have played the game linearly to understand it, but that's bunk, especially in a game as convoluted as this one.

The game offers unparalleled freedom. Everything is a weapon, and you're free to find your own way (sometimes), shooting locks out of doors and bashing in the window and hotwiring any car you can find. Unfortunately, the game also wrests control from you and forces you into retarded jumping puzzles over and over again, or worse, forces you to drive anywhere. The combat controls are similarly unweildy, at once naturalistic with their pressure-sensitive "rear-back-and-swing" setup and idiotic with no lock-on and context-sensitive 'up' like the old tank-movement games from Resident Evil's ignomious past.

Edward Carnby looks suitably grizzled and unkempt, and the monster design is fantastic. The visuals in this game are top-notch, and the sound design is up there with any of its contemporaries, but the game is just... a chore. There's no other way to say it. It's less than the sum of its parts, which on their own offer a lot of good ideas, but just aren't put together well. One really nice touch that more games should do is subtle hints. In the first stage, you have to creep along outside a building ledge 20 stories up. At one point you're required to hop up and hang from your fingertaps and wiggle across a gap. Instead of a giant arrow, or a pop-up prompt (this is part of a long tutorial), when the scene begins the camera swoops in, and you can see a few rats running across this same ledge. It's an elegant, in-game solution that rewards careful observers. Unforutunately, this is also infuriating when the in-game hint is vague or you don't have the exact same thought processes as the designers.

Graphics: The character models are great, and the scenery lush (though not Silent Hill levels of creepy). 3/5
Sound: Equal to any of its contemporaries, though doesn't distinguish itself from the pack. 3/5
Controls: There's a button to blink your eyes, which you need to do when you're in a smoky room or just waking up from being drugged. Combat is a chore and doing all the things this game is capable of is just annoying. 1/5
Tilt: I keep using the word "ambitious" because that's what this game is. It overreaches and can't deliver, but there are repeated moments that make you go "Huh. That's sweet, I wish more games did that. 4/5.
Overall (not an average): 2/5

CSI: Hard Evidence

2010-04-16T13:52:00.000-04:00

CSI: Hard Evidence

CSI: Hard Evidence is terrible. Just, awful in every way. So instead of reviewing it, I'll be reviewing an imaginary version that exists only in my mind of what should have been a cool game. Differences between my imagined game and the actual game will be italicized.
****
CSI: Hard Evidence is the latest installment in the critically acclaimed, hugely popular series of investigation games based on television's #1 show. In the game, you're the latest recruit to the Las Vegas Crime Scene squad, and in the game, you'll have to solve five delightfully demented mysteries, following the evidence to a proper conclusion.
The graphics are passable, with crisp resolutions and detailed scenes, conducive to actually investigating the tiniest detail in pursuit of the criminal. The game looks great, natively rendered in glorious 1080i with several pre-rendered cutscenes showing the investigator's current suggested scenarios for how it went down.
After being introduced to each crime scene, you have to start collecting evidence. To do so, you use an intuitive interface, holding down the right trigger to bring up a wheel with the various tools of your lab kit, selecting the tool using the right stick, then releasing the trigger to start working on the scene. The left trigger brings up the cell phone you use to call the Lieutenant to request warrants or place APBs, or to call other members of the CSI who are specialists in their field (of course, at any time, you can take over for them and accomplish the task faster).
The brilliance of the game is that in each level there are a number of suspects (the suspect list is the same in every game), but the evidence will lead to a different culprit each time, using a series of rotating location and interrogation clues.
You are able to interact with and process a startling amount of information at each of the scenes, some of which is a total red herring, and some of which is vital to the case; however, what is a red herring this playthrough could be a vital clue the next time through.
The music and ambient noise is a fine complement all around, mixing slightly urban instrumentals with the show's actual soundtrack and effects work, and the voice acting is provided by all the principal cast members as well as a few "guest stars" just like the show (we won't spoil who they are, but one is a common haunter of the environs of Las Vegas).
While the different "mini-games" for processing evidence aren't terribly deep, they do require a bit of skill and a keen eye; thankfully you are able to progress at least to the next section without every single shred of evidence, though warrants and confessions may be tougher to come by, though there is the tiniest bit of wiggle room.
Most impressive, though, is the ability to reach a false conclusion. At the end of the case, there's a denoumant that explains (with classic CSI flashbacks) how the crime went down, although in some cases, there's an overwhelming amount of evidence against one person, and you are able to get an arrest warrant for them, because a piece of exculpatory evidence was missed. In these cases, you'll see a quick screen explaining how the killer was set free (and receive a poor review grade and miss the achievement). The scary possibility of sending innocent people to jail because you screwed up is integral to making CSI a winner instead of a boring point-n-click farce where the interrogations have no dialog trees, you're just required to press A every so often.

Graphics (Imaginary Good Game Score in Parentheses): Agressively bad - muddy textures in a pixel-hunting game, and often times completely black swaths with no way to illuminate them contribute to a painful experience (the crisp colors and ability to use blacklights or a traditional flashlight make the game challenging but not limited) 1 (4)
Sound: Great effects and music (the original cast and a few "stunt voices" make a cool bonus) 4 (5)
Controls: Mean-spiritedly obtuse, making no use of any buttons except A and LB, ever. (intuitive and clever, with slick animations) 1 (5)
Tilt: An unfun chore - you're better off just watching the show (expands on the show and puts you in the middle of the action) 1 (4)
Overall (not an average): 1 (4)

Frogger

2010-04-15T12:58:00.000-04:00

Frogger

Frogger is exactly what it has always been: a very-low-input game about patience and exactitude. Digital Eclipse, the company largely responsible for these no-effort ports onto XBox Live's Arcade, basically did a sprite-swap, and despite looking a thousand times better than its original blocky state, they actually managed to make it worse.

The gameplay is the same: You're a frog. A frog who can't swim, but still a frog. And you're on a highway median. You need to cross a highway that is extraordinarily poorly designed, with traffic flow reversed from lane to lane, and vehicles that are clearly not street-legal (like bulldozers and salt-flat racers) zipping along. Then, turtles attempting to qualify for a synchronized swimming team will assist you in getting from log to log, and if you play your cards right, you'll end up at home with a little lady frog to make you some hot cocoa.

Where Digital Eclipse goes wrong is in offering an upgraded graphics option. While it's nice to have more detailed backgrounds and pretty sprites for the various objects, high-level Frogger play is about very exacting jumps, weaving between traffic with only pixels to spare. The "upgraded graphics" add just enough blurryness, just enough questionability to the range which is "safely on the log" versus the range that qualifies as "in the water, start over froggy" that you end up having to simply turn off the upgraded mode. The most frustrating jumps relate to the Frog Homes, which now have rounded-off edges that make judging the center much more difficult.

Overall, the game is a fun diversion, and while depth was never the strong point of early-80s arcade classics, you and George Constanza would both be well-served in giving Frogger a shot in this millenium, if only to piss off Jeff Minter.

As a side note, this will be the last dailyreview article until the last week of the year, as I am going on holiday to play a whole bunch of games and refresh my opinions on a few before posting reviews.

Graphics: Upgraded graphics are prettier (at least SNES quality), but destroy high-level play. 2.
Sound: Chiptunes and public-domain piano licks were weak 20 years ago. 1.
Controls: The left stick stands in amenably for an arcade joystick. 3.
Tilt: Disposable and cheap, just like a true arcade classic. 2.
Overall (not an average): 2.

Boogie Bunnies

2010-04-14T10:55:00.000-04:00

Boogie Bunnies

Boogie Bunnies is deeply, deeply flawed. It's unfun on a primal level, uses a common new technique in the exact wrong way, and sucks all the life out of what is supposed to be a puzzle game and injects it with insipidness instead. It's a chore to play or play well, and "multiplayer" essentially boils down to yelling at your buddy over and over because you think you know better.
...
...
What? Are you waiting for the "but, it's fantastic!"? There isn't one.

Boogie Bunnies does pretty much everything wrong en route to a traveshamockery of an arcade puzzle game. Even the load screen is terrible, overindulgent and mostly way too long. The graphics (never a key point in any puzzle game) are agressively bad. They're about on par with an SNES game, and while that wouldn't normally be a breaking point, the game makes central to its concept that these bunnies, who apparently are Extremist Muslims, as they are ecstatic to be blown up and sent to their final reward whenever three or more of them are together spend half their time dancing, spinning and chirping. Due to the quasi-3-D design, this causes you to be unable to tell which bunnies are in which row, and the color sceme (various pastels and cool colors like blue, purple and teal right next to each other) does you no favors. This 'visual pollution' is all the rage nowadays in puzzlers, and while there's a correct time to use it, Boogie Bunnies proves that there is also a worst time to use it, and that time is any time you are playing Boogie Bunnies.

The music is somehow even worse than the dodgy graphics, as there's a romping, jovial side-scrolling game's music wedged in as the default music. This song is forty-five seconds long, and then it repeats, while squeaky-voiced bunnies chirp through three or four sayings endlessly. The "boogie" part of the game comes in when, at seemingly random moments, they start dancing to a eurobeat sound that crawled out of 1999's butthole to torture your ears. Best of all, the bunnies all "YIPPEE!!" whenever their ranks are thinned via a combo or two.

Controlling the bunnies, when they aren't dancing and actively confusing your attempts to fire, is actually not terrible, and it's the one place this game innovates in a good way. You can move your bunny along the bottom to the column you want, or up the sides and fire into the row you want. It's a neat trick and handy for generating the long combos you're looking for to fill up your boogie meter and move on to the next stage, each time hoping it is the end of our long national nightmare of boogeying rabbits.

Overall, I have to say, there is definitely a market for a breezy, light game about retarded bunnies that dance like idiots. But that market is solely occupied by Rayman Raving Rabbids, and Boogie Bunnies isn't even on the same plane. If you're looking to set ten dollars on fire, just put a match to a Hamilton, tape it, and put the video on YouTube. It will be far more entertaining than actually playing Boogie Bunnies.

Graphics: Alternatingly retarded and infuriatingly incomprehensible. 1.
Sound: You'll wish your speakers were broken. 0.
Controls: Has some signs of innovation. 3.
Tilt: It's like Sierra made doo-doo butter in your mouth. 1.
Overall (not an average): 1.

TMNT

2010-04-13T12:55:00.000-04:00

TMNT

Ahh, a movie tie-in game. Fantastic, time to rip this game a new--what? It's not terrible in every way? Oh, well then I'll slag it down for late-era PS2 graphi-- eh? It's a joy to look at? Well then, time to rip it apart for its piss-easy challenge- what, not going to cut me off? Oh, it does take four hours to finish start-to-end with no replay. Well then.

The new TMNT movie was suprisingly good; not nearly as much so as the original Elias Koteas vehicle (which holds up shockingly well today, especially the puppetry), but an exceptional bright spot on the long, CGI-laden wave of 'kiddy flicks.' The game is no different- it's pleasant enough, above average with a few shameless nods to better games, but does nothing to really make it a hidden gem.

Graphically it moves like a Ninja Gaiden; most of the animations make you feel like a gimped Ryu Hayabusa, which is not the worst thing they could've shot for. There's great subtle color-coded pathing to keep you headed towards the path you need to be on (though it's mostly pointless as unfortunately TMNT is a game world where two-foot high bushes and chain-link fences make effective walls against masters of ninjitsu. The game employs a sort of quasi-cel-shaded effect for the characters, and bears a pretty effective likeness to the movie, which you basically replay over a few hours time.

The sound effects are pretty much canned through-and-through, and while Splinter's occasional voice-over hints are nicely done, the constant angsty internal monologue the turtles keep during gameplay is aggrivating. Music is straight from the movie's soundtrack, with no throwbacks to either the beat-em-up or cartoon that spawned it. This is a game determined to ignore its pedigree.

Controlling the turtles is actually pretty fun the first time through- they have wall-running, sheer-rock-face-climbing and nunchuck-wave-gliding down and it is fun to do. Unfortunately, you'll spend most of your time just holding up and running forward. Absent any real challenge (enemies only spawn at pre-set "Fight Scene" locations), you're left with a long slog through pretty and generally non-repetitive but completely useless hallways.

In the end, with about five hours of boring gameplay, TMNT ends up being a very pretty, very long interactive movie. I heartily recommend watching the new movie, but the new game gets a pass - unless you're an achievement grinder, as every achievement is storyline-based and you will get all 1000G from a single evening's gameplay.

Graphics: The game shines here, the locations are varied and well-integrated with the design ethic. 4.
Sound: Repetitive sword-swings and "hi-ya!"s when you jump get old fast. 1.
Controls: Actually pretty fun, but the lack of a chance to test your skills gimps it. 2.
Tilt: Challenge-free fun. Play it for a night on a rental or GameFly, never think of it again. 1.
Overall (not an average): 1

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 1989 Arcade

2010-04-12T12:55:00.000-04:00

TMNT 1989 Arcade

There's something about a well-crafted beat-'em-up that's just timeless. Endless goons, fun animations and a solid strategy that exists at a higher level if you want to find it, that makes for an excellent Saturday afternoon at the mall with a pocketful of quarters. Digital Eclipse get shit on a lot for no-effort ports to XBLA, but with the TMNT Arcade, they managed to get everything important right, and restore honor to this game after the terrible NES port all those years ago.

The plot is pretty straightforward, and should be familiar to any child of the 80's: Shredder has kidnapped April, and the titular turtles must rescue her and defeat Shredder. The colors are vibrant and there is no slowdown or clipping, remnants of the limitations of the NES port from days of yore. The sprites run around in 2.5-D, slashing and throwing Foot Clan soldiers on their way to the Technodrome. The bosses look great, colorful and oversized with their trademark voice samples intact.

The music is a faithful recreation of the original arcade's tunes, reworking the original TV series's thirty-second song into several compositions. Slashes and explosions are just as you remember them, too, but no mastering for surround-sound systems (a fault to hold against Digital Eclipse, I suppose). While the music is nostalgic and all, I can't help but wonder if another company with a little more effort might have created new arrangements to give each stage more of a personality.

Controlling the turtles on the 360 is a breeze, but there is no button mapping available. Thankfully, the attack and jump buttons are all you use, so there isn't too much fault to be had (unlike, say, TRON, which tried and failed to emulate a dial-wheel controller), and while oddly the netcode is unforgiving to HPBs and their dial-up connections, lag is throttled by a full-party pause rather than clipping and creating more problems.

There isn't too much to say about this game: the tight controls, solid beat-em-up street cred and nostalgia for a simpler age of play does what it wants, and does it well. 'Drop in-Drop Out' play would be welcome, but doesn't jibe with the 20-credits-to-beat-the-game plan the game lays out for you. Fun Fact: TMNT 1989 was the first Arcade game to have Secret Achievements, with 1 for 0 G ("In the Dark"). I wish I could give this game a 3, but it just doesn't innovate enough. A faithful port, but at the end of the day, it is exactly the game you played as a kid.

Graphics: Exactly as you remember them; top-notch SNES level sprites. 3.
Sound: Faithfully recreated, but doesn't try to do anything fancy. 3.
Controls: No button-mapping and occasional laggy netcode. 2.
Tilt: It's a relaxing stroll through the Turtles world, but offers little replay. 3.
Overall (not an average): 2.

Thrillville: Off the Rails

2010-04-09T10:51:00.000-04:00

Thrillville: Off the Rails

Tycoon games are tough. Too complex and you drive off everyone who isn't a CPA; too simple and you make it boring for anyone with half a brain. Thrillville errs on the "too simple" side, making you the teenage grandchild of a scatterbrained theme park owner, tasked with bringing the many parks back up to code, building and researching new rides, and helping other hormonal kids hook up while they're at the park. The last part is just as creepy as it sounds.

Colorful graphics and a very nifty no-load-screen cheat bring a lot of charm to the game, and dozens of intricate animations are running at any time, while every single guest in your park can be interacted with, using fairly unique dialog trees. While cartoonish, the graphics are bright and fun, with a lot of diversity in the fifteen "worlds" spread across five parks to enjoy. The two dozen or so minigames feature PS2 launch-title graphics, but being minigames, you aren't forced to suffer through them more than once if you don't want to.

The music is atrocious- there are 3 three-minute long pop songs, and they unfortunately all have insipid lyrics, playing in a loop in every part of the game down to the starting menu. Reach for the iPod or streaming music from moment one, or these bubblegum songs will stick with you forever. On the plus side, every conversation and dialog tree is voiced by a convincingly different assortment of voice actors, keeping it from feeling like you're talking to the same voice actor with a different accent all game.

The many Financial screens are laid out in a decently user-friendly intuitive format for a console game, and engaging in most actions is straightforward; sadly the game (barely more than a port of the PS2 title from a year before) does not capitalize on the greatest controller ever created, and this 360 title's unchangable button-maps at times feel like they've been shoehorned instead of assigned more natural.

The game's breezy challenge level is clearly tied into it's target audience of tweens, and nowhere is that more obvious than the puppy-loving "dating sim" portions of the game, where you have to learn from previous responses what sort of things a particular teenager likes and dislikes before you run out of conversation options to get them to be a "Love Interest." If you succeed, a hug from the date is the reward. Since the game keeps firm to its "E" rating, you won't find any creepy lines, but the innocence is sickly in its own saccharine way.

Graphics: It's a PS2 port, with very little work done to hide that. 2.
Sound: Full voice-over work is fine, but the soundtrack is dreadful and mercifully short. 1.
Controls: Intuitive menu navigation, but the minigame controls are a mixed bag. 3.
Tilt: Absent of any challenge, but also lacking the charm of a true "chillaxin' and playin' games" game like Uno or A Kingdom for Keflings. 3.
Overall (not an average): 2.

skate.

2010-04-08T10:53:00.000-04:00

skate.

skate. (yes, with the illogical period) is a breath of fresh air coming from the old, "press A to crank a 900°" school of skateboarding, and it represents a change in the very ethics of how skating games will be made from here on out. Tony Hawk already cancelled their 2008 offering, ostensibly to "retool" their scheme, but really it's because skate. so soundly kicked their ass that they are scrambling for some kind of answer, and it isn't coming from their dev team.

The central, defining point of skate. is its unique, analog "flickit" controls, 100% analog representations of your on-screen activities. Gone are ridiculous fetch-quests, 1000 foot grinds or "big air" measured in football fields. It's just street skating along the fictional roads of San Vanelona (San Francisco, Vancouver and Barcelona mixed together), with the occasional challenge thrown in as you take your created skater through the ranks to achieve super-stardom (and a cover shot on Thrasher magazine, natch).

While the graphics are perfectly servicable, with a full, real world to explore with no loading times, and the music and sound effects perfectly adequate (even through the stilted deliveries of pro skaters liberally littered across the landscape), it's the control sceme that will keep you coming back. Literally every move in the game is available from the moment you start the tutorial, and the only limit is your own ability to hit the exact placement on the right stick for any particular move.

With a beautiful online integration, and the ability to seamlessly share videos and pics (a personal favorite of mine being Clang Clang), skate. offers a full plate of interactivity and community to go along with the single-player mode. The challenge ramps up just gradually enough, and button-mashing will get you nowhere in the frenzied calm of a high-score trick contest. I literally cannot go on enough about the tactile sensation that comes from trying a trick twenty times in a row (easy as pie thanks to a genius checkpoint-maker that can reset you to the top of a hill to try that gnarly transfer one more time) only to finally nail it after a long string of bone-breaking crashes.

Graphics: The entire city is explorable with no loading times whatsoever, and even though the hats all look slightly 'off,' everything about the city itself looks great. 4.
Sound: Nothing fancy, and the soundtrack has too much of a mish-mash feel. You'll be plugging in your iPod very soon. 2.
Controls: The star of the show. It's never felt so good to try something twenty times in a row. 5.
Tilt: You can't get closer to skateboarding without grip tape and a truck key. 5.
Overall (not an average): 5.

NBA Street Homecourt

2010-04-07T10:46:00.000-04:00

NBA Street: Homecourt

Every sport it seems has a "street" variant released for it, which adds a hip, pick-up-and-play variant - usually spawned from a quarter-pounding arcade cabinet - that works to varying degrees. The NBA Street franchise has a solid pedigree, and EA Big went all out on their first next generation Street offering, NBA Street Homecourt. The results are nothing short of fantastic.

Rendered in full 1080i, Homecourt was one of the first true HD titles, and the extra work spent on character models shows through. With a game like basketball, where the players always play in full view of the crowds, with no headgear at all, minute details are immediately discernable if they are missing. Homecourt doesn't miss, though - every aspect of each NBA and WNBA star, as well as the unique local characters, hit every note, sport every tattoo and braid every hair just right.

The Create-a-Player story mode features the classic "pick up a player from the losing team" that we all remember from street ball, as well as hilarious RPG-like addition of "team discord," if you feed 'Melo the rock too much, eventually Rip Hamilton will complain and if you don't address his wants, quit the team! The sound effects and voices are breezy and forgettable, but the soundtrack is great. '80s breakbeats will have you busting out the refridgerator boxes, and entering the Gamebreaker mode triggers Herbie Hancock's seminal "Rockin' It."

The create-a-trick mode is perhaps ill-named, but you do use the face buttons in combination with the four shoulder buttons to individually direct your jukes and fakeouts, as well as (during Gamebreaker mode, filled up when you do enough tricks and reversals) breakdancing moves like up-rocks and UFO's. And of course, the jams. Oh dear, the double (and triple) jams, slam dunks that laugh at things like physics and world records for high jumps. The game playfull ignores all that nasty 'reality' stuff and offers over-the-top gaiden dunks if you've got the gamebreaker for it.

There is a very exploitable strategy when playing online, which only supports 1v1, that basically boils down to "camp Shaq under the hoop and goaltend like a motherfucker," and while doing so makes you win, it absolutely killed the online community for this game, and so unless you have a local buddy to co-op or VS with, the game's 8-hour long single-player career won't hold your interest as well as a fully-realized multiplayer like NHL 2k9's vaunted 5v5 season mode. Still, the beautiful character models, fluid animations and throwback soundtrack will make any time you spend on the blacktop with Homecourt worthwhile.

Graphics: Stellar character models in beautiful 1080i. 4.
Sound: Nothing crazy in the sound design, but the soundtrack is a fantastic throwback. 4.
Controls: The create-a-combo system is fun and rarely gets old. Context-sensitive AI directions mapped to the D-Pad are a welcome addition. 5.
Tilt: In co-op or VS this game is great; solo play is fun but limited with no online community. 3.
Overall: (not an average) 4.

NFL Head Coach 09

2010-04-06T10:57:00.000-04:00

NFL Head Coach 09

While Madden's gameplay has been increasing in quality only incrementally over the years, their front-office options have been exploding. Finally, in 2006 NFL Head Coach was released, and was a steaming pile. While it's unfair to boost a game's score based on previous iterations, NFL Head Coach 09 is pretty great if the following phrase describes a game you'd like: "It's like D&D for the jocks who beat up the kids who played D&D back in high school."

While graphics aren't at the heart of this strategy game, they are entirely servicable. The create-a-coach feature, however, is awful. Instead of perhaps 4 sliders for hair, eyes, skin and beard, instead you are forced to cycle through all 130+ configurations, each taking over a second to load. Once you select your team (a clever way to disguise selecting the difficulty level), you're off to the races, training players, scouting collegians, and occasionally playing a game of football.

I hate to keep bringing up Head Coach, but this game really is so far beyond it in pretty much every aspect. The game goes through real time, without artificial restrictions on when you can do specific activities like hiring and firing, but allows you to advance to the next "forced" event (like training day) on the fly. Quests are handed down, and you have to manage your support with the quest-givers (Owners, Fans, Players, and Media being the concerns you need to juggle) without weighing any one too heavily.

The actual on-field elements are competently handled, with an interesting "Emotion Selector" allowing you to respond either with passion or logic. The personnel you have on the field determines which choice was correct, whether players need an even keel or a warrior on their side. Playcalling itself is identical to the more-interactive Madden companion game.

While it isn't really a football game, I can't recommend this strategy game to a non-football fan; there is just too much that is predicated on an intricate familiarity with football knowledge and front-office machinations, but if you're the kind of person who simmed whole seasons of Madden just to get to the meat-and-potatoes of the offseason, Head Coach 09 is pretty much exactly what the box describes, no more, no less.

Graphics: Nothing outstanding, but then, there isn't much asked of it. 3.
Sound: You'll need your iPod for this game, as most of the time you're listening to a short looped clip of the same music. 2.
Controls: Most of the clickthroughs are fairly intuitive and consistant within each menu's context, but the game doesn't take any chances. 2.
Tilt: For a fantasy football nerd, this game is Nirvana. 3.
Overall (not an average): 2.

NFL Tour

2010-04-05T10:52:00.000-04:00

NFL Tour

At some point, you have to just roll up a newspaper, smack every game on the nose and yell "No! Bad Video Game! We do not do that in the living room!" With NFL Tour, that moment happens about six minutes into the game. It's just terrible in every way, an attempt at a street-ball style that fails on every level, despite having its puppy heart in the right place.

NFL Tour starts out hopefully enough, with slick graphics and character models- the face models look great and even zoomed out to field view you can easily recognize the faces of the NFL's biggest stars. But then you realize the backgrounds and repetitive fields have the confetti-crowd repetition of, at best, an end-of-generation Playstation 1 game. The fireworks shows are canned and superimposed, lacking any of the dynamism of next-gen physics-based effects that are the hallmark of high-quality games.

The players chatter and trash-talk with appropriate voice work, and Trey Wingo snarks through the play-by-play, but unfortunately there's not a whole lot to hear. After one game, you'll have heard everything the announcer has to offer - twice. It's just depressing because Trey Wingo's lines are actually funny, but unfortunately there are so few of them that the laughs stop about halfway into the second quarter. Scott Van Pelt's work on Zombie Ninja Pro-Am is much better, and both are eclipsed by Frank Caliendo's absent-minded Madden impersonation in Blitz II, which is leaps and bounds better than Tour as a street-ball game.

The controls and playbook both take a massive step back in the name of "simple, arcadey play," nailing the simplism and completely forgetting to offer any arcadey action. Running is worthless and passing is mindless. The 'one-touch passing' feature is the worst possible scheme, where you key in on a receiver before the play, and have to manually cycle if he can't get open. To make the game tolerable, you'll have to switch to classic, Madden-style controls before starting. Once you have control of the ball, absent the truck stick you'll be forced to mash on the A button to bust through tackles. Of course, in the time you aren't running, another tackler will appear to knock you down anyway, so it's a moot quick-time event.

When there's only 9 total plays to pick from, though, you don't have to worry too much about picking the wrong play. They're all the wrong play, except "All Go." Just live by "All Go," and score on every posession. The game has a few extra atrocious minigames you will play once for the Gamerscore and then never look at again. It's just depressing because EA has the exclusive NFL license, yet because of that feels the need to innovate is completely absent. Hopefully Blitz II will put up the sales on the scoreboard to make EA come out with a true streetball game, but NFL Tour is definitely not that game.

Graphics: The characters look great, but the backgrounds and crowds are atrocious. 2.
Sound: Genuinely funny commentary - for about six minutes. Then, it's just grating. 1.
Controls: Weak, and the default setting is unplayable out of the box. 0.
Tilt: For about ten minutes, it's kinda fun, but you very soon regret the purchase. 1.
Overall (not an average): 1.

Fight Night Round 3

2010-04-02T10:45:00.000-04:00

Fight Night Round 3

There's a lot of room on a control pad. EA Chicago makes the most out of the least with Fight Night Round 3 - its totally analog punching feels fantastic, and the demise of the studio is more the pity with weak iterations of the Sport of Kings prancing around the ring as if they owned it.

While it was very nearly a release title on the XBox 360, FNR3 has polish and slick appearance that even games coming out in the last few weeks fail to match. The boxers are fantastically detailed- of course the actual fighters look amazingly lifelike- and literally every bead of sweat is rendered and moves in a convincing fashion. I seriously cannot state enough how amazingly, jaw-bustingly gorgeous every hit looks, and the extra touches, from the round card girls who have visible C-section scars to the disturbingly busted-up faces of your opponents in the later rounds, bring a sense of realism to your TV. And the knockouts - oh, the knockouts! Lovingly replayed in super-slow-motion, to see the eyes roll back and the limbs go limp as you utterly crush some ham-and-egger in a dingy gymnasium are a sight that makes you cherish your high-definition television purchase.

There's a lot to like about the straightforward career mode, starting from the bottom and building your way up, a Cus D'Amato clone with you the whole way. The training minigames are occasionally unfair, but generally you'll be able to shape your fighter into something resembling the lights-out superstar of your dreams. The sound effects in the game are very convincing, and the grunts and smashes sound convincing, so there's no complaints on that front, while the soundtrack fits right in, neither being forgettable studio tracks nor out-of-place licensed music.

But you didn't come to the ring to see pretty boy prerendered cutscenes or listen to music, you came to box, and box you shall. With a "minute to learn, lifetime to master" wholly analog control sceme, you'll be alternating jabs, crosses and uppercuts quickly, as your character makes his way up the leaderboards. The left stick controls your footwork, while the right stick, moved in quarter-circles, half-circles or sweeping Hadouken-like maneuvers you can control the flow of the fight. Taking the life bars off the bottom of the screen does shockingly little to alter your play, as the visual cues in this game are so strong that you'll be able to tell when a feather will knock over the opponent. Counters are handled intelligently, as the computer will keep you from pummelling them into oblivion while you have to fight defensively to win.

Really, it comes down to enjoyability, and this game has so much to offer even someone who isn't a boxing fan. Moreso than an over-the-top world fighting game like DoA or Street Fighter, FNR3 hits the sweet spot of being easy to pick up, intricate enough to offer repeat playthroughs, and with a customizable Haymaker punch, allow you to inject some life into your created fighter.

Graphics: Top-notch. This game looks fantastic. 5.
Sound: Nothing offensive, but few high points. 3.
Controls: Revolutionary and familiar at once; a premonition of EA's analog hard-on perfected by skate. 4.
Tilt: You'll say "oooh, did you see me lay that guy out!" more than once. 4.
Overall (not an average): 4.

Fallout 3

2010-04-01T15:02:00.000-04:00

Fallout 3

War. War Never Changes.

It must suck to be GTAIV right now. Last November, there was an absolute glut of great, great AAA titles, and Rockstar wanted nothing to do with fighting BioShock, Mass Effect and their friends. So they brought out their next-gen urban crime sandboxer in May of this year, and when I played it, I immediately crowned it Game of the Year. Nothing could touch it in production values or overall unifying aesthetic. Then the "Summer of Arcade" took the pressure off full disc releases, and it looked like, with Dead Space being great but not perfect and a few other titles faltered, GTAIV looked sure to sweep the year-end accolades.

Oops.

Fallout 3 is not the best game this year. It is the best game made so far. In games. Period, full stop. Bethesda so completely nailed the setting, and their attention to detail spilled over into every thing about the game being fantastic. In the ten years since Fallout 2's release, there's been endless fanboy gnashing of teeth, and while this won't satisfy them (nothing would have, let's be honest), this game delivers at the end on all the promise it offered at the start. Ostensibly, the game follows the progress of one of Vault-Tec's underground Vault Dwellers as he or she makes their escape into the blasted wastelands of a post-apocalyptic future/past Washington DC and affects the world around them on the search for his/her father, who ran away too.

Graphically, there isn't a lot to dislike. It has a draw distance that is essentially unparalleled, thousands of intriticately detailed character models, weapons, landscapes and enemies. More importantly, Bethesda totally nailed the design ethic of a future world where the rock-n-roll revolution never happened, and idyllic 1950's culture endured into a world of fusion cars, talking robots and of course, nuclear holocaust.

The sound runs the gamut, from traditional (but well-choreographed) 'fight music' as enemies approach, to a smattering of classic big band tunes on the various rogue radio stations still broadcasting to the wastes. No expense was spared on voice talent, either, as Malcolm McDowell lends his vocals to the voice of President Eden, and Liam Neeson takes on the role of your father. And of course, Ron Perlman reprises his role as narrator. Weapons and explosions are suitably booming, and the laser weaponry is pew-pew-y enough to harken 1950's space invader paranoia without parodying it.

The controls are daunting at first, but once the realization sets in that the game is essentially an RPG with turn-based combat, it becomes a lot more fun. All projectile weapons are terrifically inaccurate when fired from the hip, but once you enter VATS (a timestop action point based combat system) the enjoyment floods back into the game. The minigames really nail the feel of the actions they mimic; the hacking game in particular is rewarding, as you guess and filter clues to find the correct word out of a list, using a process of elimination, while the lockpicking minigame has real tactile response and overall pressure factored in to it.

Fallout 3 really shines not in the main story (which almost seems intentionally stunted and cropped to get the player to really explore) but in the almost endless variety of sidequests, and the absolutely jaw-dropping amount of things there are to do. There are simply too many things to do in this game, and you cannot possibly do them all. After having sunk over 70 hours (that's not a typo; there's a reason there's a week's gap in posts) into this game in the last month and still playing every day, I haven't explored even half of the game's world. The best parts of the game aren't even in the side quests, they are - like Heaven itself - in the details.

In one corner of the map, you will find a series of giant satellite dishes. Climbing up to the top of them reveals a pile of potato chips and several empty liquor bottles, lying on the top of the dish. And at first you are baffled, but it makes perfect sense. As the world is totally going to hell around you, it'd be pretty sweet to watch the nuclear sunrise from the highest point you can get to; just hanging out on top of a satellite dish and watching the stars as the world decays. There's really nothing I can say about the game that tops that, once you realize that that sort of attention to detail and logical concluding pervades every single step of the game, and you appreciate how much work went into making it, you have no choice but to laud it for basically the crowning achievement in building, populating, and convincingly destroying an entire world.

Graphics: Absurdly good. Highly-detailed walls, ground and a twinkling night sky, unique setpieces everywhere and the longest draw-distance I've ever seen. 5.
Sound: Great voice-acting, especially from the 3 "real stars" brought in, though some characters obviously have the same actor, but the effects and music (both licensed and original) are stellar. 5.
Controls: Not an issue. The only complaint is the inability to jump while on an incline, but that's an engine issue that can be avoided by not trying to glitch to inaccessible areas. With the choice to play any or all of the game in a 1st-, over-the-shoulder- or 3rd-person view, you shouldn't have any complaints. 5.
Tilt: Completely off the charts. Captures the dark human, fatalism and grittyness of Fallout without devolving into parody or taking itself too seriously. Secrets and easter eggs are everywhere. 5.
Overall (not an Average): Tendrils' Top Picks

Bionic Commando: Rearmed

2010-03-31T10:56:00.000-04:00

Bionic Commando: Rearmed

Once a series gets itself a hit, job one of everyone at the company is immediately milk that franchise for all it's worth. Nintendo understands this most succintly, slapping its properties' names on absolutely everything in order to push units. Other companies produce spinoff after spinoff or just keep cranking out sequels, innovating little and just upgrading graphically. Bionic Commando entered the "Iconic" phase of its career after just one fantastic game, and nothing was ever made of it, save for maybe a lazy port or two on a handheld system.

This changed during the "Summer of the Arcade," and Bionic Commando: Rearmed was (along with Castle Crashers) the cornerstone of that campaign. A full-on reimagining along with totally upgraded gameplay that still keeps the charm and no-jump-ness of the original, along with its balls-hard challenge.

Bionic Commando: Rearmed starts with a very simple formula: A platforming side-scroller with no jump button, instead you need to use your claw to swing through environments, rescue the POW and stop General Killt from completing the "Master D" project. Nothing fancy, but Heaven is in the details. The original dealt with the chiptunes and color palette of the NES, but the Reimagining (calling it a remake is completely unfair) goes all-out. It is also a proof-of-concept as a piece of salable advertising for the new, fully-3D next-generation Bionic Commando game releasing early in 2009. While it wasn't expected to turn a profit, it sold like gangbusters and proved that with enough hype and (gasp) effort, you can make an AAA title on a digital distribution service to console gamers profitable.

This is a beautiful title, and while it is unashamedly 2-D, this just lets them put that much more work into gorgeous painted backgrounds. New puzzles abound, and for those that played the original like crazy, things are both familiar and new to them. Bosses make a triumphant return as something to be 'solved' rather than simply ignored in favor of blowing the main control panel in each stage, and Groeber is now truly a force to be reckoned with instead of a recurring sub-boss.

Controlling Joe is just as fun as always, and swinging from lamp to lamp is a joy. There's really nothing more to say; there's a few physics-based quirks to take advantage of in the game that weren't in the original, but the mechanic remains totally unchanged from the original twenty years ago. The music, likewise, is stirring and suitably patriotic for your missions.

Honestly, this is a title that could easily have released at twice its price, and the fact that it didn't shows a lot of guts on the publisher's part, sticking to their guns to get this game in as many homes as possible, and the gambit worked. The game is just as challenging as the original, but with proper new-generation "three lives per level, not ever" ethics it is a firm but fair difficulty.

Graphics: Superb for any generation; superlative for its price tag. 4.
Sound: No voice acting, but the music and sound effects are great. 4.
Controls: Aggrivating in a good way; you know exactly what you want to do and how to do it, it's just down to execution. 3.
Tilt: Nostalgia meets actual effort in a port - make than a reimagining of an almost-forgotten classic. 5.
Overall (not an average): 4.

Tron

2010-03-30T10:41:00.000-04:00

Tron

Tron is another movie tie-in game, but this one actually makes sense, since the movie it's tying into is based on playing videogames. It's circular logic at its best, but unfortunately the chiptunes and nostalgia don't hold up under the withering gaze of today's discerning gamers.

There are four minigames to play, each of differing levels of interest, representing the different tasks in Tron. In order, their enjoyability is thus: Light Bikes, Tanks, Spiders, and MCP Core. Light bikes are just plain fun, and although the computer is predictable and beatable, it's still fun to zip around on the board. Tanks takes a little strategy but has its moments. Spiders is not a terrible difficult game, but neither is it fun. MCP Core is completely inoffensive, simple and quick.

Graphically, it's very faithful to the arcade it came from in 1983, representing a massive missed opportunity. Digital Eclipse is known for its, shall we say, "faithful" ports, and they don't disappoint. Nothing is missing, and nothing is added. This is definitely a 25 year old video game. There's nostalgic beeps and bloops around, but nothing to stir the heart on the sound side, either.

In the original, which I spent at least $50 on when I first encountered it, the control scheme was unique and fun- you were given a flight stick that glowed blue and a spinning wheel like Arkanoid to work with. Unfortunately, the XBox 360 controller, for all its positives, has nothing that can remotely support this, and so playing certain stages (notably Tanks) is a chore because you aren't fighting the enemy, but the control scheme itself. The "half-spin, then directions reverse" setup is the reason Tempest is an unplayable mess on the Arcade as well.

For $5 Tron is a fine addition to the Arcade - it stokes nostalgia, offers a quick diversion with local and online multiplayer (although lobbies are expectably dead) with a unique "Pressure Cooker" game mode that allows you to pile on the difficulty to a faltering opponent to knock him out of the match. But you get what you pay for, and Tron is unashamedly a bare-bones port of a 25-year old quarter pounder.

Graphics: Servicable, but Digital Eclipse upgrade nothing from the 1983 original. 1.
Sound: Nothing of note here. 1.
Controls: You'll fight with the lack of a scroll wheel, but it's not too damning if you select control scheme "C" (Absolute) from the Menu. 2.
Tilt: A trip down memory lane, but also a sober and welcoming reminder that things have gotten better and there wasn't a halcyon day when every game was good. 2.
Overall (not an average): 2.

Iron Man

2010-03-29T10:18:00.000-04:00

Iron Man

Movie Tie-In games are always a crapshoot; many times they get rushed out the door in a terrible, unplayable mess. Iron Man dodges this ignoble fate - barely. If you were jazzed about the movie (and let's face it, it was a pretty awesome movie), this game does a great job recreating several scenes from it, completely with original Robert Downey Jr. voice-over work (which is pretty classy for a tie-in game), while being a servicable mission-based beat-em-up.

The graphics are uneven - Shellhead looks great, but the backgrounds and enemies are repetitive, nondescript and brown. There's a lot of space to explore, and some locations are reasonably unique, but to capitalize on the game's strongest asset (flying), the stages are huge, and thus either bland and empty or just uninteresting as you go hurtling past them.

The music in the game is present pretty much only in the menus, and then is just a score, but the explosions seem resounding enough. The complete voice-over preformance by Robert Downey Jr is something I can't stress enough. There is almost no excuse in this day and age not to have the best voice-acting talent available. Mass Effect managed to have full voice-overs for a giant, branching RPG for both a male and a female character; no game should aspire to less.

It's clear that one concept was emphasized throughout: "How Awesome would it be to fly around like Iron Man?" The team at Secret Level took that idea and absolutely ran with it, and flying feels great, although the controls do have a steep learning curve, but the aim-assist mitigates the difficulty involved in moving in three dimensions. But when the After-burners kick in and the Bronze Bombshell flies in to save the day, there's really nothing like it. Unfortunately, the missions he participates in do drag on pretty quickly, being barely interesting as it becomes checkpoint blasting at its finest. A little structure is never a bad thing, but this game takes it just far enough to be restricting, but not as far as, say, The Club, where the missions are tight enough to be endlessly replayable in search of a high score.

There's a lot to like about Iron Man, but it is in the end just shy of being a great game.

Graphics: Iron Man looks fantastic and his movement is slick. Still, the environments he plays in are lacking. 3.
Sound: Great voice-over work by Downey; everything else is so-so. 4.
Controls: Steep learning curve to getting Shellhead to do what you want, but flying feels great. 3.
Tilt: If it were a T-shirt, it would be sized "Extra Medium." 3.
Overall (not an average): 3.

Sneak King

2010-03-26T10:00:00.000-04:00

Sneak King

Given the tragedy of Yaris as an adverware disaster, you have to give Burger King credit for making their charming trilogy of games, and the best of the three is undoubtably Sneak King. The game is pretty straightforward: There are hungry people out there, you are the Burger King, go give them food. But don't get caught!

The game is $3, so you really can't expect much, but it does have its moments. There are three unique areas, full of marginally-interactive environmental events and hungry people. The graphics are honestly not that bad, as good as a mid-range PS2 game, and the missions (while all obviously based around delivering food) have challenges that are varied enough that the game doesn't get more stale than the one-note stealth game it already is.

The main complaint here is the camera, which is non-intuitive and you will find yourself fighting with it far more than the hungry denizens of Cul-de-Sac, Mill or Construction Site. This is overcome by the absolutely ridiculous animations for surprise deliveries and the administration of Whoppers and Chicken Fries. There's enough Dadaist humor here to overcome every complaint except the shallowness of the gameplay.

A school of thought goes thusly: People are stupid, but like to think they are smart. Sneak King grasps this conceit totally, and instead of trying to subtly work in Burger King references, goes in the entire opposite direction, becoming so blantant and obvious that people will think themselves clever as they mutter "Ha ha, they think they are advertising, but I see through their tricks." And thus, the subvertisement occurs in earnest.

Graphics: Nothing fancy. Backgrounds are generic and there are few characters in the world. 2.
Sound: Weak to nonexistant. Audio cues are distinct, but that's about it. 2.
Controls: The game's shortcoming. You'll fight with a camera that is unnecessarily free-floating as you deliver food to the masses. 1.
Tilt: The overexuberance of the hungry and the ambient creepyness of the King lend a certain charm to the game. 3.
Overall (not an average): 2

Bully: Scholarship Edition

2010-03-25T14:01:00.000-04:00

Bully: Scholarship Edition

Grand Theft Auto has assumed the mantle of "It's like X, but..." when describing games nowadays. Everything has to have the free-roaming, beat up anything, drive anything mentality to be a proper sandbox game, and yet most games fall on the wayside, championed by a few diehards while the main GTA franchise continues on unopposed. Not suprisingly, the most compelling GTA clone to come out in the last eight years was by GTA's developer, RockStar, and their "GTA, but in Boarding School" offering Bully. The version reviewed here is the much-improved Scholarship Edition, which uses the upgraded power of the 360 to touch up character models, sweeten backgrounds and increase draw distance.

What Rockstar did in Bully, though, was craft a great narrative. While they've always told stories, Bully pulls you through Jimmy's life as he tries to get by and earn the respect of his classmates, and with a unique and more importantly relevant timer/clock, and required missions, the game leads you through the sordid and Lord of the Flies-esque world of high school, and does it in an incisive and very funny series of missions.

The controls are standard fare for a Rockstar sandbox game; you'll recognize the configurations instantly and that level of familiarity makes actually playing the game relaxing. Music cues and dozens of unique voice actors are suitably distinctive and juvenile, and the game puts a lot of stress on not making itself so open that you feel lost. Missions have structure and fall organically into each other.

Bully is, most of all, funny. It has laugh-out-loud moments and is full of heart. The game will ring true to anyone who went through high school as an outcast, and the sweet satisfaction of the main story's resolution, despite the deus ex machina denoumont, will leave you smiling to yourself. The game does have shortcomings, though: Most alternate weapons in the game will be used solely to get their related achievements and then filed away. Collect-a-thons are back, unfortunately, a yoke Rockstar seems to never be able to get off its back, but thankfully escort missions are few and far between. No quick-warp between the world's four areas is a major letdown, as there's nothing to see in its "loading tunnels," and load screens are still present from time to time.

Graphics: Not the prettiest ever, but certainly competent for such a broad and deep game. 4.
Sound: The voice acting of the main character and the variations on the main theme are all fantastic. 4.
Controls: Breaks no new ground, but doesn't trip itself up with obscure configurations either. 3.
Tilt: Great story and acting come together in an idealized, predatory boarding school to paint a bitterly sarcastic take on growing up. 4.
Overall (not an average): 4.

King Kong

2010-03-24T11:02:00.000-04:00

Peter Jackson's King Kong the Official Game of the Movie

I guess it isn't really fair to label this game an abomination. For its time, as basically a launch title for the 360, it does sport some impressive character models, not-atrocious acting, and it certainly has moments of greatness.

But, from the ludicrous full title on down, this game is a mish-mash of missed opportunities, poor design and outright bad play. The death knell to the game comes from the moment the first cut scene ends and you assume control of your player-character... and it isn't Kong. This game features completely straight-forward play, the worst of the worst in on-rails first-person action, with the occasional "get red key, open red door" action. The backgrounds are an endless sea of re-used backgrounds and flora, the worst I've seen since the Library in Halo. The game has survival elements in that you have to conserve ammuntion because the endless rib-bones available are more than useless (they cause no melee damage, only when thrown), but some enemies are mysteriously invincible to bullets and can only be hurt by native weaponry. Then again, every few stages your skillfully stored-up ammunition is all stripped from you, so why bother saving ammo?

The game becomes absolutely fantastic the moment you gain control of King Kong, though, offering a smorgasboard of racing-style tree swinging chases and brutal, violent combat (V-Rex assassinations are particularly satisfying), but you almost don't want to fight the bosses because it means you're about to return to playing as Jack, the worthless human. You're left wondering why the whole game didn't just eschew the humans and go for "GTA: Skull Island."

The controls are painfully slow: you walk at a snail's pace, you turn even slower, the unintuitive buttons are mapped badly and not adjustable. The gunplay is uninspired, hit location irrelevant, and melee nonexistant. The complaint that it is little more than an interactive movie is very apt; there's very little in the way of overarching goals or multiple paths to solve a puzzle, though occasionally you can brute-force a solution instead of following instructions, though this occasionally will cause the NPCs to ignore the trigger to advance the plot.

All these complaints ignore the most important detractor: length. This game is 6 hours long, with next to zero replayability (though a welcome level-select screen did allow me to replay the Kong chase scene, which again is really the highlight of the title). As a $60 title, this would leave a terrible taste in mouth; thank God it was only a GameFly rental for me.

Graphics: Backgrounds and common enemies are repetitive, but Kong himself looks great, as do most NPCs. 2.
Sound: Mostly absent. Appropriate hisses and rustles abound, but it's unmemorable. 2.
Controls: Atrocious. Everything is slow and plodding, and you're either button-mashing (Kong stages) or endlessly fighting a slow-moving, slow-turning Jack. 1.
Tilt: It's just like the Peter Jackson movie: Long, boring, occasionally aggrivating, with a few awesome scenes mixed in. 1.
Overall (not an average): 1.

Mass Effect

2010-03-23T16:00:00.000-04:00

Mass Effect

Remember all that stuff I said yesterday about StarCon 2? Yeah, Mass Effect blows it out of the water on almost every level.

As Commander Shephard, you use your unique skill set to bring a rogue cop to justice and eventually save the galaxy from a threat beyond time. Along the way, you make some friends, make more enemies, and learn more about Krogan testicles than you probably wanted to. Saren, a galactic James Bond-type, has gone missing and stolen some pretty valuable information, information you too accidentally came into posession of, a warning of doom from beyond. The race is on from the very first scene in the game to save the galaxy, though the shape of that galaxy once the major crisis is averted is up to you and your actions entirely.

First, here's everything that's wrong with Mass Effect: Needless wandering across planets in a difficult-to-control MAKO all-terrain tank, squadmates that require constant supervision, an occasional chugging framerate, repetitive "dungeon" assets and a storyline that honestly isn't all that branching, compared to Star Control II.

I'll address these in turn:

I personally loved the MAKO sections and running across the different planet types. With hundreds of detailed descriptions on everything, there's so much going on it's ridiculous. Planets have their own identity, even minor ones with little or no quest-related activities.
Your squadmates are actually a lot more competent than people give them credit for- Mass Effect is the first game ever that I felt comfortable letting my teammate operate a sniper rifle on.
The chugging framerate is the price for such a dazzlingly beautiful game; Mass Effect is what people mean when they say "next-gen game." There's so much going on, with so much intricate detail the game occasionally simply demands you stop a second and just take it all in.
The repetitive "dungeons" I thought were sufficiently explained by the economies of standardization that would be required for any sort of interstellar colonization, and besides any "storyline-centric" planets got their own, fully-realized designs.
The non-branching storyline is due to Mass Effect being the first of a planned trilogy, and now that the engine and many art assets are already banked, the sequel should be beyond fantastic.

The music is so far beyond anything we've had in games before; it's evocative of Vangelis (composers of the Blade Runner soundtrack) as well as the brooding of more menacing sci-fi films like Aliens and Life Force. Each area has its own permutations, but like a great opera, they all tie into the main theme.

Gameplay-wise, it's a testament to the game's quality that the only bad things people have to say are about bugs, which are present in every game, and far from game-crippling in this one. It's so easy to get lost in this game, running around, visiting with people who have interesting tidbits of information for you, none of which is integral to the plot. I've spent hours in the Codec just reading the various entries into species' histories and triumphs.

Combat in this game is satisfyingly visceral, and there is a real learning curve to it. Fortunately, right around the time you get the hang of it on your first playthrough, you become an unstoppable killing machine assuming you're paying attention and specializing your squadmates for their normal roles.

I'd like to take a quick aside here and bemoan the death of the Instruction Manual. With the notable and thankful exception of RockStar games, the art of a well-crafted, in-universe and evocative instruction manual that comes packaged with a game has fallen by the wayside, and in this case, it's a glaring omission. Most times, a game has a ham-handed tutorial shoehorned into the first half-hour of gameplay; Mass Effect does nothing of the kind, and without a manual that really breaks down your options, most common complaints I've seen of the game are from players who don't know how to wring the most from it. Mass Effect is ironically one of the tighter and more interesting squad-based third person shooters out there, despite being firmly in the RPG camp.

I sunk more hours into this game than any other in all of 2007; it really was simply the best thing you can possibly play on the system up until the release of Fallout 3. The ending was suitably satisfying, whether you were playing as a paragon saving the universe or a renegade just getting by and surviving the best s/he can.

Graphics: Perfection. Enemies, locations, vehicles, all had a strong and evocative design, from the top down fully realized. 5.
Sound: The best score in video games easily since Silent Hill 2, although some NPC chatter can be inane, and the Male Shepherd voice-actor, while not bad, is demonstrably worse than the female one. 4.
Controls: Slick use of all the buttons on the controller, though the menu system is abysmal. 4.
Tilt: This is a sci-fi epic, and I have never had an experience as glued-to-the-screen fantastic as the last three hours of this game, a rollercoaster of epic proportions. 5.
Overall (not an average): Tendrils' Top Pick.

Star Control II

2010-03-22T13:29:00.000-04:00

Star Control II

There's a definite rose-colored tintings in effect for a lot of games journalism. The medium is so young that its main proponents were impressionable kids when playing some of the seminal classics that informed a generation of game designers. While by no means "bad games," some of the classics do not hold up to scrutiny by today's standards, even adjusting for hardware limitations.

Star Control II is most emphatically not one of those games. It is fan-fucking-tastic.

It starts out fairly generic- the pride of a human science outpost on Vela V returning home to find Earth enslaved, with you being the last, best hope for rescue. And then the game goes blank on hints. Explore nearby stars, pick up hints, and wander your way through the entire galaxy, meeting new races and either befriending or blasting them to smithereens.

While the graphics hold up - barely - today, the sound is what makes the game. Each race has its own musical cues, unique voice and speaking style, each gloriously realized with full voice acting and a chiptunes score to go along with it that reinforces each race's unique outlook on the galaxy.

As an RPG, much of the control issues are bypassed, since there are very few moments where precision maneuvering is asked of the player, though space combat can be depressingly brutal as the AI never has issues with using the cumbersome keyboard to preform what would be child's play on a modern game system's control pad.

Standing on the cusp of the graphics arms-race that is the last 15 years of gaming, looking fondly back towards unforgiving, open-ended 'watch it, berk!' text adventures, Star Control II expertly straddles the line and delivers the most complete storyline experience ever. Not "one of," not "possibly the greatest," this game earns its accolades as the pinnacle of storytelling in games. Your actions have a real, definable effect on the world around you - you can raise or raze whole species by your actions, or your inactions. The tragic villians are some of the most wholly realised in video game history, and make for fabulous antagonists to spur you on to adventure.

Graphics: Rough. The character models are great, but with only three total frames of animation it can leave you wanting. 3.
Sound: Top-notch. Music, voice-acting and ambient scores are all evocative and great. 5.
Controls: Competent for an RPG, but the combat sections feel gimped. 3.
Tilt: You'll never play in a universe more dynamic or predicated on your actions. 5.
Overall (not an average): Tendrils' Top Pick

Transformers: The Game

2010-03-19T17:39:00.000-04:00

Transformers: The Game

Movie Tie-in games are almost universally awful. There are rare exceptions, and when they are good, it's usually in spite of the movie license, not because of it. Guarenteed sales because of well-meaning but clueless parents/grandparents make it a dicey proposition to devote any more resources to a game than the bare minimum, and it shows.

Transformers: The Game is sadly not one of those exceptions. The average gamer's age is hovering in the late 20's and rising - these are your core game-buying demographic, and they grew up on the Generation 1 Transformers. Even if you were going to slavishly base your game around the atrocious 2007 eponymous movie release, failing to include the ability to switch to Generation 1 skins (at least, switching without disabling achievements) is a major failing of the game. While the animations are slick and the game looks nice (although with a painfully short draw distance, especially for an open-worlder with so many tiny collectables), there's nothing more cringe-inducing than trying to enjoy a game where you play as a hideous exoskeleton robot.

While that's a lot of fanboy whining, there's a lot to dislike about the game otherwise. Your protagonist is always silent, even for characters that voicework was provided for in other scenes, and I desperately wanted something to attach myself to the robot on screen, just a simple "affirmative" or "on my way" would do the trick. The game does feature some nice destructible environments, but also ball-busting difficulty out of nowhere on certain missions, usually due to the game's sad choice of making your weapons into pea-shooters that will not fire straight unless you use your lock-on skill, which is locked to the speed and angle your camera can turn - not the direction your arm could aim. Driving (and flying, which has no altitude, pitch or yaw control, so basically driving without roads) is a mess top to bottom.

The most frustrating thing about this game by far is that it could have been that Hulk: Ultimate Destruction or Chronicles of Riddick that ends up being one of those "WTF" titles on your shelf that people laugh at when they come over and you get to lord your "Diamond-Finding Rough-Searching Skillz" over them as you explain why this tie-in was a blast.

Graphics: Everything is very, very pretty, when it's not totally pitch-black because there's no gamma control to lighten up things when you're indoors or after dark. 4.

Sound: Things crash and explode with appropriate booming resonance, but there's a startling lack of voice acting, especially since they clearly had people do voice work for the characters you control in the game. 2.

Controls: Abysmal. Getting to do the things that make this game fun are a chore. 1.

Tilt: There's a lot to like in the potential of this game, but in the end it falls flat. 2.

Overall (not an average): 2.

Galaga Legions

2010-03-18T12:48:00.000-04:00

Galaga Legions

It was a crazy summer for the Xbox Live Arcade. A lot of AAA titles came out, one after the other, week after week. Consumers were inundated with two dozen must-have titles across every genre imaginable, and one title in particular seems to have been completely glossed over: Galaga Legions. Developed by the same team that made Pac•Man: Championship Edition, itself one of the best titles available on the Arcade, Galaga Legions takes the main tenets of Galaga and stands them on their head.

Princpal in the conceits of this update is that Galaga Legions is at its heart not really a shooter; it's a puzzle game, requiring the combination of quick reflexes and future planning based on quick glances of information of a Tetris or Dr. Mario. While the main gameplay of shooting at waves of enemies that arrive in a predetermined series remains, pretty much everything else has been updated.

Instead of having to force the capture and recovery of your ship for an extra set of lasers, you have two satellites to direct with a flick of the right stick, and their placement can lead you to an easy victory, but one mis-flick will have you scrambling to make it to the next wave. While the game lacks any sort of multiplayer, the leaderboards are your multiplayer buddies in this game, as you have to maintain an accuracy count while blasting everything onscreen.

I can't talk enough about the graphical updates to this game. The backgrounds are suitably spacey, and the enemies glow, pulse and flow with the sort of visual pollution that is the hallmark of other Arcade shooters like Space Giraffe and Geometry Wars Evolved. True fans of the series will of course get a kick out of the "Vintage" skins available that harken back to the space bugs of yesteryear.

The challenge in this game comes in buckets; it is not for the faint of heart as it combines the agility necessary for a true shmup along with the puzzle-managing elements of a block-falling game. You will die in bunches, and fail a lot of stages before you begin to get a feel for the ebb and flow of the game and the best placements for your satellites. Still, the game is such a joy to play, both as a simple challenge to beat, and as a mechanism to get another, higher score. For ten dollars, you really would be hard-pressed to find a better game.

Graphics: Suitably space-aged, with glows, sparks and stars where they need to be. 4.
Sound: Booms, zaps and plinks with the best of them, and the soundtrack is suitalbly alien. 3.
Controls: Unique scheme reduces most events to simply flicks and button pushes. Elegant. 4.
Tilt: Offers two genres expertly mushed together. 4.
Overall (not an average): 4.

The Club

2010-03-17T09:05:00.000-04:00

The Club

The Club is the most ambitious shmup of all time. Or possibly the most creative third-person shooter of 2008. The basic premise is that shmups don't have to be horizontally-scrolling with spaceship sprites to be called a shmup. The Club takes all the conventions of R-Type, Ikaruga and DoDon Pachi and instead applies them to a "Most Dangerous Game" storyline with gritty and worn-down environments.

In an FPS, you'd be able to dispatch a few enemies and then stop to appreciate the work that's gone into these pretty-nice-looking backgrounds and environments. But that sort of thinking belongs in another a game - The Club only cares about one thing, the constantly-draining score multiplier. You take one of your over-the-top caricatures of killers through the cunningly designed on-rails paths, using whatever weapons are available to mow down endless mooks in search of the ultimate combo kill, using fancy moves, death rolls and the tagging of hidden skull icons to keep your precious, precious meter full to the brim.

There's a visceralness to the game, as the grinding soundtrack, grunts and heaves of straining enemies and crunches and crashes of shattered entryways and windows as you make your way through a level. Apparently the Announcer from Unreal Tournament was on vacation, as announcements such as "Penetrator" and "Rico-SLAY!!" are exulted upon your avatar for shooting people through walls or bouncing bullets off of surfaces into their brainpans.

There's a few balance issues, as certain guns are more than useless since 99% of the time the various SMGs available are always going to be the best weapon for the job. Characters have three stats, but they all play almost identically unless your choice has the most extreme splits in statistics, so realistically the only thing that matters is which character's appearance you prefer.

While not necessarily the greatest game of the year, especially in the same year as Dead Space, GTA IV and other luminaries, this game is certainly the most ambitious title of the year, mashing up third-person tactical shooters, classic shmup play and a dash of arcade racing into The Club. The constant yearning to beat your last high score will always be there, offering infinite replayability even though the online community has dwindled.

Graphics: Travel to interesting, varied locales, meet highly-detailed enemies and environments... and kill them all, with style. 4.
Sound: Over-the-top announcer voices never get old, and the grimy scenery is matched with appropriate screams and crashes. 3.
Controls: A slight stutterstep, some placements of buttons are cumbersome, and the game feels like it should have a cover system that it lacks. 2.
Tilt: Great, trashy fun with a good amount of replayability. 4.
Overall (not an average): 3.

BLITZ The League: II

2010-03-16T12:35:00.001-04:00

BLITZ The League: II

Let's get a list of reasons to play BLITZ II out of the way:

Can't get enough medicine-based minigames from Trauma Center, and want to jam a giant goddamned syringe into your own hand to heal yourself when your fingers all get shredded by somebody's cleat
Like to do the Randy Moss "We Whipt Dey Ass" endzone celebration when you don't input the right celebration move (ie the real celebration is more hilarious)
Enjoy managing heat levels based on which supplements of varying levels of legalities to juice your apparently helpless teammates with
Want to hear Hall of Fame Linebacker Lawrence Taylor say "What the fuck do you want?"
Get to gamble on and fix your own games (theoretically you can choose not to, but I didn't want to cross the mob in this game. This football game.)
Hear a crowd chant "BULL - SHIT!", ECW style if the game becomes a blowout
After a dirty hit to knock a guy down, curbstomp him into the mud and call him a stupid motherfucker. No really, the line is "C'mon, get up you stupid- *stomp* - mutha - *stomp* - fucka! - *stomp*"

If any of those activities sound like fun, Blitz II is for you. It is pure arcadey football, playground rules and late hits everywhere, along with horrifying, horrifying injuries, the bloodiest and most disturbing you will ever see. All the while, the game charms you with its adorably horrible characters fighting and yelling at each other. Blitz II isn't just the anti-Madden, it's the cure for Madden.

There is literally nothing not to like about this game, unless you are a football purist. Its play is quick and the bullet-time-like "CLASH PLAYS" make you feel suitably like a badass. The character creation mode is a breath of fresh air in a world of stale slider bars and pregen faces, completely eschewing your character's appearance in exchange for defining his personality. The other teams' intro movies are frequently laugh-out-loud funny, and the game takes itself not at all seriously (the star DE for Philadelphia is, of course, a fan who liked to fight so much in the stands the team offered him a contract). This is a great game to kick back and have fun with, and realize that video games are supposed to be fun, after all.

Graphics: Everything is suitably dingy and disgusting where it should be, but a nagging shinyness to surfaces looks to be the vestiges of a failed design concept 4.
Sound: Voicework is funny, but in the end nothing here really stands out. 2.
Controls: Occasionally the responses to your inputs are counterintuitive, and your avatar will do something you didn't intend. 3.
Tilt: It's what a arcadey football game should be, a violent, degrading, hilariously un-PC experience. 5.
Overall (not an average): 4.

The Bigs

2010-03-15T09:53:00.000-04:00

The Bigs (Wii)

Growing up, there was an arcade in my town that had a virtual baseball game. It let you step into a cage, swing a chintzy aluminum bat with cracked and peeling reflective tape wrapped around it at baseballs hurled from a cartoon character on screen, and you swung the bat in a home-run derby style game. For $1.25, you got 10-12 swings of the bat, and I pumped a lot of tokens into this machine.

With the release of The Bigs last year, that entire experience is completely blown away. When people talk about the revolution of the Wii, this is what they are talking about. You actually play a major league ball game, swinging the bat with velocity through the strike zone, contorting your arm to make the ball dance as a pitcher, fielding with... well, just leave auto-fielding turned on, trust me.

The Bigs is arcadey as hell, and completely unashamed of the fact. Players have gigantic arms, pitchers throw baseballs that actually erupt in flames, and the game features Bullet Time. No joke, bullet time. There's, I guess, a single-player mode, where you create a hitter and take him through training camp and a series of challenges, but this game is all about local multiplayer. Getting off the couch and actually swinging the Wiimote like a bat is pretty much the most awesome feeling I've had with my Wii yet, and I truly feel like this is what they meant when they said "next-gen gaming."

Not that The Bigs is flawless. Obviously if you don't have a roommate or spouse to harass into playing against you, the single-player modes are lacking. Fielding ranges from "low-A ball" to "atrocious." The graphics look like high-end PS2-era pixels, ameliorated by the cartoony art design. And it almost doesn't seem worth complaining about in sports games anymore, but the announcers are repetitive and annoying.

Since pitch speed and hit placement are controlled by the 1-micron-wide accelerometer in the Wiimote, you will find yourself actually going through Major-League-level pitching and batting movements. Keep an ice pack handy for extended play sessions; this game takes at least a moderate amount of physical skill and ability, and you will wear out if you play all night - which leads to the other problem. Since there is physical baseball skill involved, the learning curve is somewhat steep; people with no concept of baseball may struggle their first few games, while you - the owner of the game - soundly thrash them. Not the biggest deal, but this isn't quite the party game that a WiiSports or WarioWare is.

If you like baseball, or trash-talking with your friends, this is a good game. If you like trash-talking your friends about baseball, you need to buy this game immediately.

Graphics: Good for a PS2-era game, but not exactly next-gen. 3.
Sound: Crowd roars and inane announcers ahoy. 2.
Controls: These are who we thought they were, pretty much a baseball simulator. 5.
Tilt: Fun against a competent human opponent, but not a party game or a single-player experience. 4.
Overall (not an average): 3.

Age of Booty

2010-03-12T10:43:00.000-05:00

Age of Booty

Yarr! If ever t'was a game stumblin' up from the briny deep to make other online experiences walk the plank, this here be that game, matey!

No, but seriously, if this game can accomplish the same feat as Uno and Marble Blast Ultra and establish itself as "one of those Arcade games everyone gets when they buy an XBox," it would be in esteemed company. Or, more likely, Marble Blast and Uno would be in esteemed company. The multiplayer component of the game is seriously that great.

The basic idea is that, as a pirate, you need wood, gold and rum to continue to extend your piratey reach, and to that end you take over towns while other pirates, emanating from their own lairs on the other side of the hexagonal map, are doing the same. The art direction is great, not too cartoony, but still with flourishes (Cadillac fins appear on a fully-upgraded Speedy pirate ship) that remind you this is a game about sailing the high seas. Tilting the right stick up zooms the game in and drops the perspective from overhead to a gorgeous side view that really shows off the art direction. Sounds are sparse, but effective. Cannons boom deeply and resources fill up with a satisfying *ka-ching* or *glug-glug* depending on their type.

The singleplayer experience does have its faults. The friendly AI is worse that useless, and completely undirectable, so it becomes you versus the enemy fleet in most missions, which gets frustrating quickly, but this is a minor quibble, as there are only 21 total stages in the single-player game to complete before you're ready to either hop online with a crowd of scurvy sea-friends and tackle online, which is infintely more interesting as ships will coordinate attacks and defend appropriately (since they're helmed by humans who are working together), or start messing around with the all-but-forgotten in today's games Map Editor.

You heard me right: This game has a map editor, and the ability to take these maps online. That means, literally, infinite replayability as you challenge friends to conquor your own devious inventions. Yo ho ho, indeed.

Graphics: Colorful, creative and elegantly expressive. 4.
Sound: No catchy pirate songs, but clear audible cues for off-screen activity. 2.
Controls: The pathfinding is great, and most activities are automated. Minimalism at its best. 3.
Tilt: Avast, ye dogs! This be the greatest pirate-based game of 2008. 5.
Overall (not an average): 4

Feeding Frenzy 2

2010-03-11T12:01:00.000-05:00

Feeding Frenzy 2

Everything Feeding Frenzy did, Feeding Frenzy 2: Shipwreck Showdown improves upon. The graphics are far more varied and interesting, and there are little touches everywhere, from the shimmering wakes your fish leaves in the water as he moves to the tiny wiggle animation of clamshells before they snap shut. Gameplay remains wholly unchanged; you still zip around a screen, eating up everything smaller than you until you grow big enough to devour everything on screen.

For some reason, there's a story in the main campaign mode, based around unravelling the mystery of the shadowy new fish in the cove, but it's as irrelevant as the first Feeding Frenzy's "Dethrone the Shark King" storyline. FF2, however, adds in twenty additional stages, several multiplayer modes and an "Easy" mode, though the main game is once again easy as pie for an experienced gamer.

If you never played the first, this game exceeds it in every way, and if you did, the new graphics, longer music score and new abilities (Jumping out of the water! Summoning Fishing Lures!) give you enough to justify this buy. Still no on-line co-op, but local co-op features a few simple minigames, nothing special but better than nothing. The game is so simple, though, that online co-op would basically be "Private Chat + Some Fish Game."

Graphics: Massive upgrade over the original. Fish are bright, colors are rich and the whole game exudes fun. Nothing next-gen, but points for improving over the original. 3.
Sound: More music, but still not too much going on. 2.
Controls: Crisp, but the simple controls aren't something that needs a lot of work. 3.
Tilt: Improves in every way on the original, this is the definitive "fish eating game" on the 360. 4.
Overall (not an average): 3

Feeding Frenzy

2010-03-10T11:01:00.000-05:00

Feeding Frenzy

There's a certain point where you totally zone out and no longer realize you're even engaging in inputting commands, simply reacting to the events on the screen. It's a rare state, one desired by combat fighter pilots, and comes effortlessly to those of us who slammed quarters and tokens into pressboard and plastic cabinets filled to the brim with bits and bytes of digital stimulus.

Feeding Frenzy taps into that, with a game that is completely primal, twitch-based gameplay. You play a small fish, eating smaller fish until you get bigger, and can now eat the fish that previously would have eaten you. That's it, and the game would be lessened by the inclusion of anything else.

This is classic, classic gaming. The modern-day graphics are colorful and expressive, and the music inoffensive, but in the transfer to a home console, minus the unstated purpose of drawing quarters out of your sweaty hand, the challenge scales way, way down. Without the danger of completely unfair enemies and cheating AI included solely to get you to put in more change, the game evolves beyond a mere twitch-game into some sort of Zen-like experience, where the goal shifts from "Win" or even "Get a High Score" to simply "relax and have a good time."

While the lowered challenge bar can make it an uninteresting interactive aquarium screen saver, the game does offer the high-end "keep your combo up" type gameplay that can entice the more competitive to grind through this game more than once to get higher on the leaderboards.

Graphics: No better or worse than a fancy screen saver - colorful but clearly done on the cheap. 3.
Sound: One short. relaxing riff that seamlessly replays, and simple sound effects do no wrong, but don't stand out either. 2.
Controls: Crisp response time makes this eat-em-up not a chore to play. 3.
Tilt: The game can meet whatever expectations you have, but it's doubtful that it will exceed them. 3.
Overall (not an average): 2

BioShock

2010-03-09T15:13:00.000-05:00

BioShock

It's hard to write a review of BioShock. Not because it is such a bad game that I couldn't make it through, or even because it is so good as to be flawless, just because so much ink has already been spilled on it. The limitations of writing about a game every single day while not being part of a media establishment that receives new games constantly has brought me to this.

BioShock is a first-person shooter, in the loosest sense, with several unique features, but most importantly is the story and writing, which are sharp, deep and much-discussed. But for me, it was the sound design and polish that totally drew me into the game.

The tiny visual cues, creaks and moans of a decaying undersea world really sold the game to me as almost a survival-horror experience, and even on Normal, when I rarely ran out of ammo or faced death, I found myself terrified to go around corners, listening to the inmates all around me running the asylum.

While much of the game is nonsensical (steam-powered chainguns with visual recognition devices in the 50's? Floating in midair while you hack cameras?), there's so many tiny little touches that completely immerse you in the game. It is far and away the game experience to have in 2007, so much so that we are still talking about it in 2008.

There are large swaths of the game that do not ever have to be explored to complete it, yet some of the most powerful moments are contained therein. In one section of Neptune's Bounty, we find a pair of near-mummified corpses on a bed, surrounded by open bottles of pills. A nearby audio recording details their grisly and tragic end, yet this section, full of original art assets and scripted events, is completely inacessible without working to find the unmarked secret entrance to the room. Why waste resources on this scene? Because BioShock is so wholly realized, so completely imagined it is more than the sum of its parts, which is why it rightly deserves the title of "Game of the Year."

Why much ballyhoo has been made of its relatively short length (less than ten hours from start to finish) and lack of multiplayer, I can't imagine it being any longer without beginning to drag, and multiplayer deathmatch would be an abomination, destroying the mystery and mystique of visiting Rapture by reducing it to specced loudouts and "nubby combo bxr" cries. Less is more, in this case.

Graphics: Perfect. Beautiful backgrounds and detailed effects, with fantastic water and finally real-looking fire. 5.
Sound: Eminently creepy. Disturbing and evocative, even without a real score. 5.
Controls: Nothing groundbreaking, but get the job done. Competency is the order of the day. 4.
Tilt: It's not Game of the Year for nothing. 5.
Overall (not an average): 5

Ticket to Ride

2010-03-08T09:04:00.000-05:00

Ticket to Ride

Ticket to Ride is one of those games that is just tailor-made for an online upgrade. The core mechanics are easy to translate to a few button presses, and the most annoying parts of the game - scorekeeping and setup - are taken care of. In Ticket to Ride, you play trains on various routes through the US, the goal being to have the most points, either through route length alone or by completing Destination tickets. But you need colored train cards to be able to claim routes, which you have to draw off the deck or from a public pool. When one player's trains are gone, the game ends and scores are tallied.

There's a ton of strategy to be had playing against humans, and the AI is sufficiently dastardly without being Madden-AI cheap. The graphics are not the best they could be, as they're maximized for HD televisions, making the 70% of us still playing on SD TVs have to strain our eyes to read the text on some of the smaller graphics and cards. There are a few animations of zeppelins coasting across the country and such, but nothing distracting, no bright colors or flashing anything.The sounds are clean and crisp, but there is no music whatsoever; you'll have to plug your iPod into the XBox during marathon TtR sessions to keep yourself aurally stimulated.

Perhaps most miraculously of all, Ticket to Ride has managed to hang on to its online community, despite its fractions paid Downloadable Content and atrocious lobby system that forces you to back almost out to the main menu to change the maps you're searching for. It really is a testament to the amount of fun to be had "playing trains with friends."

Controls are fairly intuitive, with just the right amount of redundancy controls- not too much to slow down play, not too few so that you accidentally do something wrong. Without a turn time limit, though, you're free to go your own pace and make sure everything's set up the way you like it. With 2 different DLC maps already released for this game and local multiplayer offered, it's a sure buy, since there's so many different ways to play- online, local and single-player. And if that doesn't convince you, consider this: The actual cardboard-map game, available in stores, runs $40. At 800 points, this game is the best steal of the year.

Graphics: Bare-bones and unobtrusive. Gets the job done with no frills. 2
Sound: Spare tinkling glasses on a diner car and player-piano tunes occasionally show up. 1.
Controls: Intuitive and exacting, no deep sub-menus, just crisp cursors and button selection. 4.
Tilt: The value of this game is in the fact that it is superior in every way to its tabletop ancestor, but a foreigner to the game might be daunted by the advanced strategy. 4.
Overall (not an average): 4

Driver

2010-03-05T08:51:00.000-05:00

Driver

I have never played Driver. Perhaps that's the wrong phraseology. I have never played the campaign mode of Driver, not seriously, not for more than a few minutes back in 1999 when the game first came out. It may well be a very good game, who knows? Driver comes with a number of gameplay modes out of the box, including a full story to play through that pits you as an undercover cop working as a wheelman for a gang, or something.

That is irrelevant, you will never select anything at the starting screen other than "Survival" mode.

Survival mode is a very, very simple game. You start out in a slow, poorly-handing beast of a '70s muscle car in the Art Deco district of Miami Beach, the Barnett Building viewable in the exceptional-for-1999 drawn distance. And every cop in the city is psychotic and out to kill you.

Not pit you out, or take down your car, but kill you. They fling their super-powered, slingshot-launched cars at you with reckless, Blues Brothers-like abandon. They spawn endlessly, accelerate, turn and ram much faster than you. You have no chance, and you will die. The only question is, how long can you survive?

The cops spawn with some regularity; one we've dubbed "Hell Cop" comes screaming in at your starting point every time from about the 2 o'clock position, and after endless hours of passing a controller back and forth, my roommates and I worked out a couple "best practices" to get your time up to about 1:20.

While the fun of ramming roadblocks and swerving at the last second so that the cops following you slam into and pile up on an invincible palm tree is fun enough to make this game a top pick, it has another feature that puts it over the top: a real, robust movie editor. The movie editor has a number of different cameras you can swap through on the fly and save the replay, and really get an idea of the carnage you cause (a personal favorite - after sliding along the shoulder past a roadblock on a bridge, the cops chasing me clipped the cars making up the roadblock, flying into the sky hundreds of feet before disappearing in the skybox).

Graphics: Great for 1999; humdrum compared even to today's PS2 games. Everything that matters is visible and clear, so no complaints. 3.
Sound: Funky '70s music, and great smashing sound effects, but a limited number of both. 2.
Controls: Floaty, arcadey driving that sends you spinning out of control the instant you clip anything - and I wouldn't have it any other way. 2.
Tilt: Handing a controller back and forth has never been better, mostly because you can't stop laughing at how hilariously your buddy just crashed. 5.
Overall (not an average): Top Pick.

Go! Go! Break Steady

2010-03-04T12:35:00.000-05:00

Go! Go! Break Steady

Zuma is a game. Bust-a-Groove is a game. Go! Go! Break Steady is both those games in one.

Being a huge fan of both the originals mentioned above, it is great to get both of them in one package. The music is catchy and unobtrusive (except for the obligatory disco-styled track, but that's par for the course for rhythm games), and the challenge gets intense as the game throws you all sorts of puzzles on top of puzzles, new ways of presenting the beatniks, and a new trinket to "collect" by knocking out coins on each stage.

The action centers around knocking out an ever-growing but finite ring of "beatniks" (little Dr. Mario-inpired looking guys) by getting 3 or more together, but instead of just being given beatniks, you'll have to earn them by matching musical button-pushes during a series of urban music numbers, while your crudely-animated Flash avatar dances and sways. The game utilizes a "visual pollution" handicap similar to Space Giraffe to make the game more challenging as you get closer to a perfect combo meter, but this actually adds to the ambiance of the game instead of making it unplayable as in the aformentioned shooter.

This is not a game that tries to be more than it is, and by playing within itself it is competent, but not especially memorable. Some of the ways the notes come swinging in make it exceedingly difficult to actually figure out when they are passing through the ring denoted when to time your button presses, and the learning curve is unrepentant in its obtuseness, failing to give you even cursory explanation when a new gameplay mode is sprung on you.

Online is a lot of fun, assuming you can convince a friend to buy this game and play it with you - like all Arcade games not named Uno, the multiplayer for this game is deader than Dillinger, but the co-op is great because while both players work on their own rings of beatniks, you can see your partner's ring and watch his moves... and of course yell at him when he screws up.

Graphics: A half-dozen or so static, painted backgrounds and 3-frame animations of your avatar don't do this game any favors. 2.
Sound: Good song selection representing the B-Boy age of the late '80s in NYC. 4.
Controls: Moments of frustration when the notes come in a concentric pattern, but overall tight inputs. 4.
Tilt: If you're a fan of either of these type of games, you'll like this game. If you're a fan of both, you'll love it: 3
Overall (not an Average): 3

LEGO Batman

2010-03-03T10:36:00.000-05:00

LEGO Batman

At a certain point, kids have to grow up, and leave their toys behind, living on in their memories as they grow more distant and tinted the color rose. We all had a favorite toy growing up, but no matter your toy, everyone loved LEGO blocks and the cool stuff they built. Traveller's Tales has made a company out of harnessing that good will, coupling it with something else from your childhood, and selling it to you for $50.

LEGO Batman is no exception. It's the tried-and-true Traveller's Tales formula: action platforming, mild puzzle-solving elements, and shoddy driving stages. TT have something a lot of other developers don't, a sense of humor, and the super-severe attitude of modern Batman really lends itself to the LEGO style of wacky hijinks. A lot of the cut scenes and loading screen texts are genuinely funny, and that goes a long way to excusing the now-nearly-tired gameplay formula. You jump, punch, shoot and build your way through 30 stages, including frustrating non-puzzles that are obvious if you have the mindset for them and impossible if you don't.

The backgrounds are lush, and the music (mostly from the 1989 Batman movie's score) are great, and instead of standard grunts, there are over a dozen little effects giving each brick-shaped character a personality, from the Joker's goofy method of pulling levers to Catwoman sashaying instead of walking across a room. Surprises and easter eggs abound, and the achievements are a fun collection of goofy puns and fun side missions.

If it sounds like this is a glowing endorsement of the game, it's because it is. The formula improves everything about the LEGO series: more jokes, less tedium, interesting puzzle and neat unlockables, coupled with a great respect of its source material. There are some balance issues (why ever use the Riddler or Scarecrow when the "mind-control character" Mad Hatter is better in every way?), and the most tiresome parts of free play are cycling through the endless goons/useless bat-suits in each stage to get to who you need. And the frustration of your buddy getting hung up or simply not staying put while you try and solve a puzzle is an annoyance they've never quite figured out, it's generally not enough to seriously detract from the game.

If you've never played a Traveller's Tales LEGO game before, I'd be hard-pressed to recommend any other one than this one, and if you're a long-time fan, this is a more-than-successful send-off to the LEGO series, as TT has said that they're sick of doing them and want to move on. While I love my little square superheroes, I can't say I disagree with the decision.

Graphics: Beautiful backgrounds and unique animations, but doesn't push the system to its limits. 3.
Sound: Great effects and grunts from the characters, and a fine selection of the Burton score. 3
Controls: Platforming can be tricky, and your AI's pathfinding is as wonky as ever. The driving stages are improved, but still counter-intuitive. 2
Tilt: Fun, and more importantly funny game riffing on Batman. Evokes childhood delight and is just a joy to play. 5
Overall (not an average): 4

Yaris

2010-03-02T16:14:00.000-05:00

Yaris

Yaris is an interesting proof-of-concept: Can we completely subvertise a product in a game, and convince gamers to play it? Answer: No, not with this game at least.

The old adage "no such thing as bad press" is proven wrong, as the horrific controls of this game make it a nearly-unplayable mess, and make me want to not buy a Toyota Yaris, especially if giant green sumos on mini-bikes are going to wave their arms at me as iPods with angel wings fire concentric blue rings at me.

And that's the problem with Yaris: There's certainly a fantastic game there, hiding underneath. But it isn't underneath shameless and blatant product plugging; for all its maligned "adverware" titling, the Toyota tie-in is the least of this game's problems.Set in a gray, featureless tube you must roll down, shooting at enemies with your gun that is held by a freakish tendril affixed to the roof of your car. And the enemies are creative, varied and esoteric (the aformentioned sumos-on-minibikes, angel iPods, spiders made of gas station hoses), but ultimately with the aim-assisted tendril-cannon, you end up just racing in a straight line, holding down fire.There's certainly a market for a trippy futuristic halfpipe racer on XBox Live, along the lines of WipeOut, and Yaris is deeply disappointing just because it could have been that game, but it lacks the sense of speed that future racers are known for, and the muddy, unresponsive controls detract further from that sense of movement. And if I thought I could *zoom* down alien corridors in my Yaris, maybe when I was looking for new cars, I might swing by the Toyota dealership, which would be the ultimate goal of the game, anyway.

In the end, Yaris is a great concept, but with *deeply* flawed execution. I cannot stress enough how un-fun the game is to play, and it isn't because of the adverware roots of the game; the gameplay is bad and slow, with no sense of actually "racing" so much as just barely rolling. It's a shame because the relative failure of Yaris will probably steer other companies away from releasing Adverware, which is a net loss for gamers, most of whom are (hopefully) too savvy to be swayed by viral marketing such as this, but would certainly play and enjoy a good game that was free and plastered with ads.

Composite Rating (not an average) : 1
Graphics: 2
Sound: 3
Controls: 1
Tilt: 2

Shadowrun

2010-03-01T09:00:00.002-05:00

Shadowrun

Shadowrun is an interesting case study in why the "Holy Grail" of PC vs Console gaming is a fraud. As one of a few titles that supports cross-platform play (and incidentally, one of the same few titles that allows online play using an XBL silver account), Shadowrun steps into almost every pitfall of the experiment, and is worse for it.

The idea is solid - take PC darling Counterstrike, add in the mythos of a popular cyberpunk RPG/franchise, and make something unique. It certainly is. The game looks great, even by today's standards, and has all the quirks that blending a "trolls and machineguns" RPG with everyone's favorite vent blocking simulator should have. The "powers" you can get in your loadout are awesome and several are really unique and haven't been done since. It has a (rather ingenious) way of getting around Counterstrike's "Welp, you're dead, wait 6 minutes doing nothing until next round" issue.

The problem, as with most things, is the players. Shadowrun as a gameplay experience has a learning curve like a brick wall, and it appeals in conceit to a very small subset of very hardcore players, who have in the two years since this game's release, become very, very good at it. Combine this with an unforgiving damage system and the fact that half of the players effectively have aimbots on due to the increased accuracy of KB+M versus a gamepad, and it quickly becomes apparent why this game was unsuccessful.

Which isn't to say it's an unfun game, far from it. It's a lot of fun, you just have to set yourself up for it - which means not joining pubbie games or trying to play in "the community." This game is inexpensive enough that all your friends either have or can easily acquire a copy, at which point playing 5v5 or more with all humans vs all AI bots on "Very Hard" is great fun. You can even contribute to a team without a headset, thanks to another bit of subtle brilliance in using the D-Pad to issue status updates and requests.

Graphics: Very good. Stylized character models and a great eye for interesting level design. 4.
Sound: The weapons and spells all sound great, but the characters could have more personality. 3.
Controls: Intuitive, with tons of nice touches. 4.
Tilt: Impossible to play with the public at large, but a fun distraction or "time-killer" game with friends. 2.
Overall (not an average): 2.