No review this week.

Lego Indiana Jones: The Original Adventures (Xbox 360)

Since Lego Star Wars was a smash hit, we can now expect every possible franchise to be Lego-ized, starting with this summer’s Lego Indiana Jones (and later on, Lego Batman). Expect Lego Desperate Housewives, Lego Requiem for a Dream, and Lego Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by 2010.

Anyway, this one’s the original trilogy of Indiana Jones films, the ones produced in the 20th century (sorry, no Lego Shia LaBeouf). And they really missed the mark here. The combat has been replaced with an emphasis on puzzle-solving and platforming, and here’s where the wheels come off. Platforming is very frustrating when you have a fixed camera, so your Lego people often go flying off into the abyss when you mean for them not to. The combat has also been messed up – it’s all melee, but since the characters are so small, you’ll often be punching thin air when you mean to be killing faux-Nazis instead.

The graphics are another sticking point. You’d expect a Lego game to be brightly-colored, but nearly every level is an overwhelmingly drab conglomeration of black, grey, brown, and green. It’s all earth tones here, and it is not pretty.

Good points? Well, the silly Lego humor is still there. They’ve mercifully cut out vehicle levels, for the most part. And no game with a Lego Kate Capshaw can be completely bad (I’m looking forward to Lego Space Camp).

I really am disappointed with this game. I’m hoping that Traveler’s Tales doesn’t continue to churn out formulaic, uninspired Lego games like this, and instead realize what made Lego Star Wars good (decent kid-friendly combat and fun co-op, not frustrating platforming!). But with another Lego game in the hopper, and Lego God only knows what next, I’m not too optimistic.

2 out of 5

Grand Theft Auto 4 (Xbox 360)

One of the cardinal sins of the game industry is hype. Standout titles are hyped endlessly for months before they are released, and they almost never live up to the expectations that are built up so impossibly high. Take a look at X-Play these days – they spent half of each episode hyping the same dozen or so games, and maybe getting in two or three reviews a week, when it once was odd that they didn’t do more reviews in a day.

Rockstar, of course, is guilty of this ridiculous hype machine. GTA4 was being previewed for something like two years before its release. And, of course, upon release, the mainstream gaming press lauded it universally – it currently has a 98 score on Metacritic, the highest for the Xbox 360. But… why? GTA4 is a pretty game, yes, and Liberty City is huge, but the gameplay isn’t that great. The physics engine has been overhauled to be more realistic, which just means that cars are impossible to maneuver at high speeds, and God forbid you should even tap a cop car. The targeting system has been refined, and it works well when you have a few enemies in front of you, but if there’s a guy offscreen five feet away from you, half the time Niko will try desperately to target some guy you can see that’s fifty yards in the distance while the first guy blows your face off at his leisure. You can turn off auto-aim, sure, but since the combat is now Gears of War cover-pop-up-shoot-repeat, it’s often hard to see people to shoot them.

And then there are the missions. Rockstar’s penchant for asymptotic difficulty curves means that once you get about halfway through the game, you hit a wall and have to keep trying missions over, and over, and over. That wouldn’t be too bad, except every time you have to start over, you have to spend 5-10 minutes driving/taking a cab to the starting point, getting set up again, only to have your face blown off again. I spent an hour one night just trying to get through a single mission – and I only retried it three or four times!

One of the most annoying new aspects of the game is that you have to spend time with your friends, otherwise they won’t like you. I’m not honestly sure what happens if they don’t like you, but it’s aggravating when you’re on your way to another mission and you get a call from one of the jackasses you’re stuck with in the game wanting to play darts, so you either have to ignore them and they hate you, or you have to drop what you’re doing and schlep all the way across town to pick them up and go play some stupid minigame. This might be a little more understandable if Niko wasn’t such a misanthrope. He never shows any interest in anything (aside from getting paid for doing bad things) throughout the game aside from some random snippets about finding a guy that betrayed him. I don’t see why he’d want to hang out with any of these people except maybe his cousin, out of family loyalty.

The story, by the way, is incredibly bland, to the point where I started skipping most of the cutscenes. It’s a far cry from the snappy, short cutscenes of Vice City. The characters are all of the stock GTA variety – you’ve got a Rasta gunrunner, a dirty cop, a roided-up type-A personality, and plenty of hateful, psychotic, and/or avaricious gangster types. I understand that GTA isn’t going to be all flowers and candy canes and whatnot, but I would appreciate the homophobic and misogynistic dialogue be dialed down a bit. A constant flow of “bitch”, “titties”, and gay jokes is not what I could call clever dialogue.

Okay, okay. The game’s not all bad -- far from it. The city is a beautiful interpretation of New York City and northern New Jersey. It’s amazing when you get to go up in a helicopter and see everything from a bird’s-eye view. There’s a lot of side missions to do, as is normal for GTA, and there’s something intensely gratifying, at least to me, in dressing Niko up in a suit, equipping the handgun, and popping enemies off with headshots like he’s a James Bond badass. And the first third of the game or so, before the difficulty ramps up, is very enjoyable, social aspects aside. I’m just disappointed that such a universally-praised game isn’t, well, universally-good.

3 out of 5

Guitar Hero 3: Legends of Rock (Xbox 360)

Once again, we have a game that you pretty much have to be deaf not to have heard of. Guitar Hero 3 follows in the traditions of Guitar Hero, Guitar Hero 2, Guitar Hero Rocks the 80s, and Guitar Hero: Cocaine and Groupies Edition. It’s a music rhythm game, sort of like Dance Dance Revolution, except completely different, including the fact that playing a fake plastic guitar is a hell of a lot cooler than jumping around on giant plastic arrows. Also: no j-pop.

I’m not a big fan of rhythm games, as I usually don’t do very well at them (damn you, Space Channel 5), but I used to play the bass, so I guess I retain enough vestigial musical talent to not completely suck at Guitar Hero. If you’ve just awaken from a persistent vegetative state and don’t know how to play Guitar Hero, it’s like this: left hand holds down buttons, right hand presses a “strum” bar. Like a gruesome homunculus of a real guitar. And it’s fun to rock out! There’s not a whole lot of depth to the game, it is a rhythm game after all, but it’s a lot more engaging than Boom Boom Rocket, that’s for sure.

GH3 isn’t perfect, by any means; some of the songs are absolutely terrible (I’m looking at you, Social Distortion and Slipknot), there are songs that are only unlockable via co-op play, the boss battles are absolutely annoying, and the difficulty curve shoots up to “ridiculous” on the last couple sets of songs. It would also be nice if any of the “buyable” (through in-game-earned money) songs were of bands anyone had ever heard of, Stone Roses notwithstanding. These are all relatively minor quibbles, though, and if rocking out is a favorite pastime of yours, GH3 is absolutely worth buying.

4 out of 5