Mass Effect (Xbox 360)

BioWare, the creators of Mass Effect, were also the creators of Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, which was one of the greatest games ever made. Period. Mass Effect is not one of the greatest games ever made, but it’s pretty damn good. If you haven’t heard of Mass Effect, it’s a science fiction RPG (like KOTOR) with shooter elements (not like KOTOR). You play Commander (Your Name Here) Shepard, who leads a multi-species task force to take down the bad guy, Saren. Not exactly revelatory, but it works.

The main quest is nearly perfect – aside from some dialogue-heavy parts when you’re on the Federation (or whatever it’s called) space station, it’s an expertly-crafted blend of action and exposition. Combat is pretty darn fun, too; even if, like me, you’re no good at shooters, the game can be adjusted to where you don’t have to precisely aim to hit your enemies. Combat also requires strategy, as you have to take cover and assault your foes from there, rather than just rushing into a group of enemies, firing blindly. Depending on your character class, you can also use Biotic (it’s basically the Force) and Engineering abilities to augment your combat skills.

I can easily think of a half-dozen problems with this game – the side quests don’t have much variation in them, the good/evil dialogue system isn’t very deep, the vehicle you use to get around planets is annoying to drive sometimes (especially on the minor planets you visit, which look like they were slapped together with a random terrain generator), and the lack of in-game tutorials makes menu navigation and the use of special abilities cumbersome (I didn’t figure out how to use Biotics until about halfway through the game). If you can live in the imperfect world of Mass Effect, however, you will have loads of fun.

(Also, as a quick aside, I have to mention the voice acting – one of the villains is voiced by Marina Sirtis. Yes, Counselor Deanna “I will have you ejected into space!” Troi is in this game. That alone is awesome.)

5 out of 5

I Played This Game for Five Minutes: Nintendo DS Edition

Contra 4

The DS’s d-pad doesn’t do diagonals very well, which is kind of important for a Contra game. Also, didn’t we get rid of the one-hit-you-die thing around the time slap bracelets became popular?

Kirby: Squeak Squad

It’s just like, well, every other Kirby game ever made. Except with uninspired level design.

New Super Mario Brothers

NSMB takes too much from the original Super Mario Brothers and not enough from the more revolutionary (and better-designed) Super Mario Brothers 3 and Super Mario World. (I actually played this one for a couple hours, hoping it would get better. It never did.)

Star Wars: Lethal Alliance

I never thought anything would make Shadows of the Empire for the N64 look like a brilliant Star Wars game.

Fatal Frame 2: Crimson Butterfly – Director’s Cut (Xbox)

Oh, J-horror, what have you wrought? This time it’s Fatal Frame 2, which is, presumably, the sequel to Fatal Frame, and in it, you play as one of a pair of prepubescent Japanese twin girls who are dressed rather inappropriately for their age. And you fight ghosts with a camera that’s imbued with the power to send spirits back from whence they came. And that’s the comprehensible part of the plot – it has something to do with a sacrifice of another pair of twin girls to prevent something bad happening a long time ago. I think. It could very well just be their version of Ghostbusters.

Anyway, the game is creepy as hell, although it sometimes goes overboard on the sudden sound effect—“Oh shit it’s a ghost!” kind of scare. Unfortunately, the combat sucks. It really sucks. The ghosts attack you by grabbing ahold of you and scaring your wits out, but your camera, which you would think is a ranged weapon, won’t do much damage unless you’re right on Casper and he’s about to touch you inappropriately like he’s a pedophiliac uncle. It doesn’t help that to use the camera, you switch into a first-person view and have to aim precisely at the damn things’ heads. So if you’re fighting two ghosts at once, you’re pretty much screwed if they’re not both in front of you. Further compounding matters is the annoying survival horror cliché of fixed camera angles. Step out of one shot at the wrong moment, the game switches views, and you get disoriented enough to let the ghouls get the upper hand.

It’s a shame, because aside from combat, this game is very interesting. It sometimes goes overboard on the Ring-esque scratchy film effects, but the atmosphere of the game is terrific. I just had to give up after the nth frustrating battle – although, having played for about four hours, I was already at least at the halfway point of the game, so it’s not exactly a lengthy play.

2 out of 5

The Simpsons Game (Xbox 360)

The Simpsons have never had a good track record with video game spinoffs. From Bart's Nightmare to Bart vs. the Space Mutants to... Christ, did every late 80's/early 90's Simpsons game star Bart? Anyway, the Simpsons arcade game was the only good one, and the Simpsons Game doesn't do anything to change that.

The one thing this game has going for it is the writing, which was done by actual Simpsons writers and is sharp throughout the game. They never miss an opportunity to lampoon video games, running the gamut from modern games like Grand Theft Auto and God of War, to switching up the actual gameplay into parodies of old-school classics like Space Invaders, Gauntlet, and Missile Command.

Unfortunately, while the humor is strong, the gameplay is not. Combat is clunky, mainly entailing button-mashing and hoping you don’t get hit too much. The platforming, like many 3D games, is hit-or-miss, in the sense that you’re never sure if you’ll make it to the platform you’re aiming for. One of the elements of the game involves Comic Book Guy popping up to make fun of game clichés when you encounter them. The obvious question is: if they’re clichés, why include them in the first place?

Playing through the Simpsons Game is a frustrating experience saved only by the quality of the writing. You’d do better to look the game up on YouTube and watch someone else play it to see the funny bits.

2 out of 5

Bioshock (Xbox 360)

One of my obvious biases is my disdain for first person shooters. I don't have the twitchy reflexes of a 13-year-old hopped up on Mountain Dew Code Red, and I don't like to play games online yelling about how I pwned you while questioning your sexual orientation. Bioshock is a welcome relief from the usual fare, injecting a decent storyline and impressive design elements while keeping gameplay to a level where someone such as myself can succeed.

If you aren't familiar with the plot, just put a copy each of Atlas Shrugged, The Manchurian Candidate, and The Usual Suspects in a blender and frappe until they're about the same consistency and you'll have a pretty good approximation. It's nothing brilliant, but it's a lot more literary than the usual video game plot of "these guys are bad, go beat them up". I won't go into details, except to point out that one of the main characters is superbly voiced by Star Trek/Buffy alumnus Armin Shimerman. He brings just the right amount of hubris and pomposity to the role to really nail it.

I also really loved the design of the game. It takes place in a steampunk underwater city that was built in 1947. Everything, from storefronts to vending machines to advertising, is designed in the art deco style, which is a welcome change from the usual futuristic/alien or industrial/grungy stylings of most shooters. (As an aside, my architecture geek boyfriend points out that by 1947, they would have been out of art deco and into modernism, but we'll just pretend that they were the last holdouts.)

As far as the actual gameplay is concerned, it's a shooter. I played it on "easy" and didn't die once throughout the whole game, so it was pretty merciful to me. What keeps the game from achieving greatness is the pacing: the middle third of the game is bogged down by a series of fetch quests, and after the shocking plot twist is revealed, the last third of the game seems more like an afterthought than anything. Still, blasting mutants with a shotgun never goes out of style, and the "Plasmid" system that gives you superpowers is great fun. Some people like shooting bees out of their hand, but I like the old standby: incinerate. Setting enemies on fire is ridiculously useful in the later stages of the game. And fun. Fire is always fun.

4 out of 5

The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass (Nintendo DS)

If Nintendo knows how to do one thing, it's milk a cash cow. Phantom Hourglass is the latest iteration of the basic Legend of Zelda equation: visit x number of dungeons, collecting y number of items and mystical elements of power, in order to save Princess Zelda. The twist is, instead of the oh-so-20th century method of using a controller to make Link move, swing his sword, and solve switch puzzles, all his movements are controlled by the DS stylus. And, actually, it works. For the most part. Combat sometimes becomes the equivalent of button-mashing (stylus-scribbling?), and fine controls can sometimes be hard to accomplish, but they've implemented this as well as they possibly could have.

That's the good news. The bad news is there is an incredibly frustrating component to this game. Namely, there is a dungeon which you have to keep returning to, about five or six times throughout the game, each time delving deeper and deeper. Except you have to go through the entire freaking dungeon each time. Oh, did I mention it's basically a long stealth mission, too? And timed? Two of my least favorite video game cliches? Yeah. Also, since this is a sequel to Wind Waker, you're still stuck in the island paradise version of Hyrule. So there's more boating fun. You don't have to control the boat this time, you just draw a course on the map, but you still have to look out for enemies popping up every 15 seconds, and sea traps that you have to time a jump over (the boat can jump -- I don't understand how this works, exactly).

Why they had to saddle this otherwise decent Zelda game with these annoying quirks is beyond me. The other dungeons are actually well-designed, and the boss fights aren't annoying, aside from one or two (frigging Gleeok). But when you spend about half of the game trudging through that stupid beginning dungeon or making your nth trek across the seas, it's hard to appreciate the rest of the game.

2 out of 5