'Splosion Man

'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

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

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

HORROR WEEK: DOOM

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

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.

SHMUP WEEK: Ikaruga

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.

Worms

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

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

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.

Frogger

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

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.
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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.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 1989 Arcade

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.

Bionic Commando: Rearmed

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

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.

Sneak King

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

Galaga Legions

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.

Age of Booty

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

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

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

Ticket to Ride

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