Battlestations: Midway

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

skate.

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.

Fight Night Round 3

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.

Iron Man

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.

Bully: Scholarship Edition

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

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.

Transformers: The Game

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.

Driver

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.