Cole Reviews

2009-03-12T22:05:00.001-04:00

Yeah I give up.

2009-02-14T13:00:00.002-05:00

No review this week. I'm going to stop the "once a week" thing and it'll be more "whenever I feel like it". Just haven't had the time lately.

2009-02-07T08:27:00.001-05:00

One Paragraph Reviews: Xbox Live Arcade

Castlevania: Symphony of the Night

This is by far the best game on XBLA. Originally for the PlayStation, it revamps the Castlevania formula into an action-RPG system that involves different weapons, armor and items you can use, and experience that you gain from killing enemies to level your guy up. It controls well, there is a lot of area to explore, and although it can be tough early on, once you’re leveled up you can kick some undead butt. It’s just a shame that Konami has copied this formula for every handheld Castlevania game since then.

Verdict: Buy

Fable 2 Pub Games

In case you really liked the pub games in Fable 2, this is your game. Personally, I thought they were terrible – fortune’s tower is impossible to make money off of, spinnerbox is boring, and keystone is mediocre at best. The promise of fabulous prizes you can transfer to your Fable 2 character is kind of flimsy when it takes you more time to earn them than it’s worth.

Verdict: Don’t Buy

Battlestar Galactica

The Cylons were created by man. So was this game. I’m not sure which was the worse decision. It’s a 2d space shooter with 3d graphics, mediocre controls and pointless gameplay. Not much else to say about it, it’s just lame.

Verdict: Don’t Buy

2009-01-31T09:11:00.002-05:00

Heavenly Sword (PS3)

Hey kids, are you tired of games that are good? Want to play a mediocre action game with ridiculous characters? Then Heavenly Sword is the game for you! Not only will you be piling up the doctor bills will the carpal tunnel that all the brainless button-mashing will give you, you'll also curse the awkward controls when you have to shoot arrows at distant targets that are a slightly different shade of brown from the background!

And for lovers of the "quicktime events boss battle", boy oh boy are you going to have fun. No pedestrian method of having to defeat a boss with your regular attacks, you'll have to do the same long sequence of button presses with split-second margin for error, then when you fail you'll have to whittle the boss's health down for the nth time and do it all over again! I can't imagine anyone who wouldn't love this collection of modern gaming cliches! Buy it now, unless you like innovative gameplay!

2 out of 5

2009-01-24T15:09:00.002-05:00

Resident Evil (PS1)

Going a little old-school this week. Resident Evil was the game that launched a thousand survival horror titles. Of course, being the first (or at least the first widely successful) game, it's not perfect. One of the hardest things to survive is the so-called "tank" controls, in which pressing up moves you forward, pressing back moves you backward, and left and right turns you around. Which makes combat a challenge, especially since aiming from a third-person perspective is more of a guessing game than anything. (Seriously, crows should not be harder to kill than zombies.)

This is not to say that the game is unplayable, it's just that you'll be running around like a drunken sailor most of the time. Otherwise it's still a pretty fun play. You'll be doing a lot of backtracking thanks to the limited inventory system, but there are a number of creepy locales you'll visit (mansion, garden, mine, laboratory) and several different varietals of deadly creature to fight. And both the live-action beginning and voice acting are still so hilariously bad they're good. I'm not sure about the surfeit of other RE games released in the intervening years -- Code Veronica X sure was horrible -- but this one is still worth a play.

3 out of 5

2009-01-17T08:37:00.000-05:00

Ratchet and Clank Future: Tools of Destruction (PS3)

The Ratchet and Clank series consists of a number of platforming action games which involve a space cat and his robot pal fighting their way through hordes of robots and such to… do something. I don’t know what, exactly, because I was too bored to care.

People love this series, but I don’t know why. I mean, the combat is awkward, the platforming is uninspired, and the gameplay is ultra-linear. There’s a great variety of weapons and a lot of silly humor, but that just doesn’t do enough to interest me. I liked a few of the segments, such as using the Sixaxis controls to navigate one’s freefall descent, but for the most part I was just uninspired by this game. I’ll admit I didn’t play very far, but the problem here is the fact that I don’t want to play any more. That, to me, is the biggest indication that you’ve got a problem.

Some people might think I rate everything badly just so I maintain my cynical façade, but I really don’t care for the games that I pan. That’s why I don’t review, say, sports games, because I hate sports. Or racing games, because I’m absolutely terrible at them. But action games I can do, just as long as they’re not messed up gameplay-wise, or as uninteresting as this game was.

2 out of 5

2009-01-10T10:13:00.001-05:00

One Paragraph Reviews: Xbox Live Arcade

Here’s a fun new feature for the games that aren’t complex enough to warrant their own reviews and was not just thrown together because I have no other reviews in the hopper. Instead of a rating I’ll give a “buy”/”don’t buy” recommendation.

Missile Command

The annoying trend with XBLA is to take a moldy game from the early 80s, give it some whiz-bang 3d graphics and sell it for $10. You know, the reason we don’t play Atari anymore is their games weren’t very sophisticated. It might have been impressive during Reagan’s first term to simulate nuclear warfare with blocky four-color graphics, but we’re over that. Pac-man Championship Edition updated the simplistic gameplay; this one just updates the graphics. And it’s not worth playing for more than five minutes.

Verdict: Don’t Buy

Zuma

The great thing, from a publisher’s standpoint, about casual games is that they’re cheap to make and people love to play them. Zuma is case in point: you have balls rolling down a spirally track and you have to shoot balls in between the balls to match up three or more balls of the same color, and they disappear. Do this to get enough points to stop the balls before the balls fall into a hole in the middle of the screen (and then finish off the rest of the balls) and you win the level. It’s simple, but fun. It’s a little quirky to use the thumbstick to aim your little frog guy’s ball-shooting mouth, but it otherwise works well.

Verdict: Buy

2009-01-03T12:07:00.002-05:00

No review this week, but exciting news: due to an unexpected insurance windfall, my boyfriend nagged me into buying a PS3, so now I'll have two seventh-generation consoles to bitch about. Happy new year!

2008-12-27T15:49:00.001-05:00

No review this week.

2008-12-20T09:25:00.000-05:00

Dead Rising (Xbox 360)

This is “Dawn of the Dead: The Video Game”, so much so that they had to include a disclaimer on the front disavowing any connection to George Romero or his iconic zombie movie. In it, you play Frank, a photographer who goes to Willamette Mall (the apocalypse starts in Oregon, I guess?) to investigate the strange goings-on. And what’s going on? Zombies, of course.

So, here you are in survival horror as only the 7th generation of video game consoles can produce. Once the game starts going, you basically have to use whatever items (and there are a lot of them) you can find in the mall to slog through hordes of zombies, rescue survivors in the mall, and advance the plot. And it’s pretty darn fun… Although not at first. You see, you have to level up in order to walk faster than a geriatric candidate for hip replacement, to have more than four measly bars of health (getting grabbed by a zombie will more often than not drain at least two of them), and to have kickin’ hand-to-hand combat skills so you won’t immediately die when your only weapon breaks.

Oh yes, your weapons break. That’s kind of annoying, but I guess that’s what happens when the American manufacturing base gets shipped over to China. There also are a lot of weapons you can pick up that are pretty much useless. Unless you find the idea of killing zombies with an electric guitar amusing (which, since they squeal guitar riffs when you connect, it is, kind of), you’ll be pretty much sticking with stuff like knives, chainsaws, mannequin torsos (they’re deadly, don’t ask me why) and, in the later parts of the game, machine guns. The good news is if you die – and in the early stages of the game, you will die a lot – you can start the game over with all of your experience intact.

As with all good monster movies, you will find out that the real monster is man. From time to time, you’ll have to take down various psychopathic non-zombified humans that are up to no good. Again, early on this is annoying as hell, because you’ll probably be stuck with a peashooter of a pistol that takes maybe one pixel of health off with each shot. And the game, depending on how much of the main story tasks you complete, has a multitude of different endings to enjoy.

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention – the game is 72 in-game hours long, or 6 hours of gameplay. At night, the zombies become more dangerous, and all of your main and side quests occur at certain points of said 72 hours. It’s an interesting way to present the game, but it’s kind of a shame that there isn’t a sandbox mode (not counting the infinite survival mode where your health constantly ticks down) where you can just mess around.

So there you have it. It’s survival horror with not-so-bad controls and interesting gameplay. I’m kind of annoyed that the mall is somewhat unrealistic – how many malls have a big park in the middle? And where are the department stores? But the rest of the game is good, although you have to be patient at first. Also, if you’re into that kind of thing, you can run around in a dress and Mega Man helmet.

4 out of 5

2008-12-13T11:10:00.002-05:00

Prince of Persia (Xbox 360)

There are a few things that I generally dislike in video games. (I know, only a few?) Prince of Persia aptly summarizes three of them:

1. Trial-and-error gameplay. There are few things more frustrating to me than having to repeat sections of a game over and over because there is only one solution, which must be perfectly executed. This is the basis for Prince of Persia's gameplay, in which you have to parkour yourself around a bunch of identical ruined vaguely-Middle Eastern vistas assisted by your magical princess friend Elika. Now, in the Sands of Time trilogy, you could rewind when you made a mistake back so you could retry from where you screwed up. Not so here. Instead, Elika rescues you, but you have to start back at the last bit of solid ground, so in extended sequences, one screwup will cause you to repeat it over and over.

2. Blocking-based combat. I don't enjoy combat that involves you standing there holding the block button until the enemy combatant finishes his attack, at which point you attempt to whittle down their health by a few bars, then start over. It's long, frustrating, and generally not fun. Compounding this is the many enemies who can enter a state where they are only affected by a certain type of attack (grab or magic, depending; neither are as useful as the sword).

3. Idiotic writing. In this game, the main character is not a prince. He's just some kind of thief who cracks wise constantly like a brain-dead action movie star, and shocker of shockers, his companion is an icy high-born princess. Can they put aside their differences to save the world, and maybe even fall in love? Original plot, huh?

Well, the game's not unplayable; there are parts that are fun to play, but like Mirror's Edge that amounts to only a fraction of the total time. Most of the time will be spent swearing at the non-Prince to do what you tell him to, or at the ridiculously-cumbersome and aggravating boss battles.

2 out of 5

2008-12-06T08:28:00.001-05:00

Mega Man 9 (Xbox Live Arcade)

You can’t go home again.

Mega Man 9 is a retro platformer with 8 bit graphics and it’s bad. It would be one thing if it were a challenging game, but this game is sadistic. It’s like the developers played a Mega Man game for about five minutes and thought, “hmm, this is okay, but it needs death spikes everywhere”. It’s ridiculous. Not helping matters is the fact that the Xbox 360 controller, while superior in many respects to the NES controller, does not have the sensitivity you need to perform the precisely-timed jumps this game constantly demands of you. I can’t count how many times I careened off a ledge into the abyss because the jump button didn’t respond at the correct time. At least, until I got fed up with the game and deleted it. Then I tried it again a week or two later, and it took me about 20 minutes to give up again.

Basically, this game is for old-school obsessives and masochists only. It looks cool in a retro 80s kind of way, but it’s just not fun. You know, the reason we liked Mega Mans 1-4 and X. I can count two examples of bringing retro gaming into the 21st century actually being a success: Pac-man Championship Edition and Bionic Commando Rearmed. Every other game has been boring, frustrating, or uninteresting after the first five minutes.

1 out of 5

2008-11-29T09:45:00.001-05:00

Fable 2 (Xbox 360)

Peter Molyneux, as you may well know, likes to make big promises. Big, extravagant, bold promises that he inevitably can’t keep. He managed to bite his tongue, more or less, for Fable 2, but there was still the inference that it was going to be great.

And… well… that depends on your definition of the word “great”. By the Peter Molyneux Standard of Greatness, a game should do everything short of making you breakfast or giving you a blowjob (M-rated games only). And Fable 2 is nowhere near that. But taken as a standard action RPG (complete with Legend of Zelda-esque “find the three heroes to defeat the bad guy” plot), Fable 2 is great.

It’s been a long time since I played Fable the original, but Fable 2 seems to be just a refinement of the original. The morality is still black and white (except there’s a new meter for purity/corruption in addition to good/evil), so you’re either hated and feared or loved and adored. Interaction with NPCs is also binary: tap left on the d-pad to do something that will annoy people, right on the d-pad to do something that they will enjoy. There are a bunch of expressions you can perform, but honestly everyone only wanted to see me dance and fart.

You’re supposedly able to affect the economies of the cities you visit by either a. taking jobs and buying things, or b. committing crimes. I couldn’t figure out whether anything I was doing actually affected things. You can buy pretty much every building in the game, which leads to some game-breaking problems: keep buying up property and you get rent money, which you accumulate (to an extent) even while not playing. So, pretty soon you can afford the best weapons in the game. Which you have to buy, because the Digital Armaments Storage Act of 1999 mandates that treasure chests only have potions or money in them, instead of something, you know, useful.

Combat is a mixed bag. Your experience goes up primarily depending on what kind of attacks you use (melee, ranged, or magic). Melee combat is mostly button-mashing with the occasional “charge up attacks to break an enemy’s blocking”. I played through the game focusing on ranged combat, which was more fun: you can learn abilities to target enemies more efficiently, and can often take out enemies at a distance before they get to you. (There are also more varieties of weapons now: in addition to crossbows, you get guns.) Magic can be frustrating to use: rather than having an MP meter, you hold down the magic button to charge up your spells. The longer you wait, the higher the level (assuming you’ve earned the upgrades), and the larger effects and more powerful the spell. Which is great until you get assaulted by a half-dozen enemies that cut you to pieces before you can unleash your spell.

Oh yeah, another kind of stupid thing: there’s no penalty for death. You get a permanent scar on your body and lose some experience, but that’s it. Basically, unless you’re obsessive about your character’s appearance, you can play the entire game without buying a single healing item.

Overall, Fable 2 is a pretty good game. It’s an enjoyable action RPG, but I can’t say that I’ve been overwhelmed by Peter Molyneux’s genius.

4 out of 5

2008-11-22T11:55:00.000-05:00

Mirror’s Edge (Xbox 360)

Mirror’s Edge, or as I like to call it, Dystopian Future Anime Parkour Challenge ‘08, is a game in which you, in first-person perspective, run around along rooftops and in buildings trying to avoid falling to death or getting swiss cheesed by guys with guns. It was hyped as an innovative, exciting, breakneck experience.

See, this is the problem with game trailers: they lie. If you believe the hype, you’ll be blasting along rooftops and seamlessly knocking out enemies with flying kicks for the whole game. The reality is, the exciting free-running portions of the game make up about 10% of your whole gameplay experience. The other 90% of the time, you’ll either be trying to scrutinize which tiny ledge you’ll need to jump up to next, trying to jump to that ledge over and over and missing, or trying to take out enemies who have guns with just your bare hands.

The gist of it is, this game is really damn frustrating. You’ll be hearing the splat noise that you make when you fall to your death dozens of times each level, as the gameplay is trial and error. Combat should have either been removed or made better, because as it stands you either have to knock an enemy out and take their gun (which falls under the video game ammunition capacity rule: enemies have unlimited ammo, but you’ll run out after ten seconds), or try and run away from them, which works if there’s one enemy, but not typically if there are multiple ones. And then there’s one of my most hated things: being chased by a helicopter with a chaingun. I hated this in Half-Life, and I hate it here. It’s obnoxious because you can’t take five seconds to figure out which way to go before it turns you into a small, formerly-parkour runner-shaped lump of flesh.

One thing I do like about the game is you actually have a physical presence. You cast a shadow and you can see your arms and legs and everything. Too often, you’re represented in FPS games as a floating camera with an invisible bag of weapons. It’s a nice touch, but overall, Mirror’s Edge is ridiculously frustrating and you get a medal if you can finish it without putting a controller through your screen.

2 out of 5

2008-11-15T10:11:00.001-05:00

Guitar Hero: World Tour (Xbox 360)

Running about a year behind Rock Band, the Guitar Hero franchise has now entered the realm of the full-band music game. And, while the game is good, the difference between this and Rock Band 2 is striking. While the Rock Band games take a somewhat more serious approach to the game, with a cleaner, simpler graphical style, Guitar Hero continues in the goofy, cartoonish tradition set forth by its predecessors.

The best thing about this is they’ve toned down the difficulty a bit. Hard on GHWT is actually equivalent to hard on Rock Band now, not Expert. The songs, overall, seem to be charted better than Guitar Hero 3’s sometimes random explosions of notes. And they’ve even made bass interesting by adding open notes (strumming without pressing any of the fret buttons). They’ve also made the guitar duels with scary Viking Zakk Wylde and right-wing has-been Ted Nugent much less annoying than the duels in GH3.

The bad thing is they’ve barely updated the tour mode from previous games. The only difference is rather than picking one song and having an encore at the end of each tier of songs, you instead pick from two to five-song setlists and most (but not all) of them have encores at the end. And that’s it. You either do that or play a setlist you pick. There’s no variation in the setlists once you’ve played through them, no random setlists, no challenges like Rock Band 2 has. Oh yeah, and if you’re an anti-corporate type, you will hate the constant product placement.

As far as the music selection goes, they’ve mercifully reduced the number of crappy metal songs in favor of more classic rock, modern rock and some indie. It’s unfortunate that a lot of the songs overlap with Rock Band 2, but I guess it’s hard to help that when you’re developing your games simultaneously.

Overall, there’s nothing bad about GHWT – it’s actually a quite good, if somewhat basic, music rhythm game – but when you compare it to the brilliance that is Rock Band 2, it comes up short.

4 out of 5

2008-11-08T14:30:00.001-05:00

Star Wars: The Force Unleashed (Xbox 360)

There is a long tradition of mediocre-to-bad Star Wars games, and Star Wars: The Force Unleashed happily carries that tradition on. In this one, there’s a twist: you play as the bad guy. Specifically, Darth Vader’s “secret apprentice”, as played by Battlestar Galactica’s lovely Sam Witwer. Set in that fun twenty years between Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope, you rampage around alien worlds and hunt down Jedi that escaped the Emperor’s purge.

And, while this game certainly looks good, it plays like crap. Force powers are all mapped to individual buttons, which is good, but trying to use them is a crapshoot. Throwing objects/people around requires manipulation of the thumbsticks, and often that results in it flying off in a direction you didn’t intend. Platforming sections are also awkward, and if you fight an enemy near a ledge you have a 50/50 shot of getting thrown off a ledge and dying.

Then there’s the fact that the game itself is buggy as hell. There is no lack of large metal doors that block your progress, so you have to throw stuff at them to bash them open. Which, aside from being a pointless attempt to make the game longer by stopping your progress, often requires you to bash them over and over in the hopes that this time, it’ll actually open the door the extra inch you need to slip through. Why you can’t just cut the doors with your lightsaber, I don’t know.

Overall there’s no point to playing this game. It’s just another crappy Star Wars cash-in, with a ridiculous plot and dull, uninspired gameplay. Skip it.

2 out of 5

2008-11-01T09:23:00.001-04:00

The Political Machine 2008 (PC)

I am, if nothing else, a political junkie, especially when it comes to elections. I love elections. Results, statistics, polls, all that stuff makes me happy. Yes, I’m a freak. So I couldn’t resist picking up this budget title in which you run a campaign for president. And, ehh… It’s not very good.

Basically what you do is all the typical campaign trappings: travel the country, fundraise, make speeches, and produce ads. The problem is the strategy here is not very deep, and the computer AI is not very intelligent. The easiest way to win the election is to build up “political capital” points (gained from building a certain type of campaign office) and win endorsements from interest groups; it’s a lot easier to gain name recognition and support this way than to, you know, campaign. The AI helps you along because it tends to focus exclusively on winning one state – when you’re playing against a Republican, said Republican has a keen interest in the state of Kansas.

There’s also not a lot of realism in the electoral map. I realize it wouldn’t be exciting to have every campaign be about Ohio and Florida, but it’s kind of ridiculous when you can have Barack Obama winning Wyoming and yet losing Minnesota. Fundraising is pretty much equivalent to the size and wealth of a state – there’s no reason to fundraise in any state that’s not California or New York. Overall, the game only bears a passing resemblance to an actual 21st century election in the United States.

The Political Machine 2008 is a fun diversion if you’re into politics, but not much more.

2 out of 5

2008-10-25T14:15:00.001-04:00

Lego Batman (Xbox 360)

Here we have yet another Lego game from Traveler’s Tales, but thankfully they’ve learned from the mistakes of Lego Indiana Jones. This time it’s the Batman mythos that they’re drawing from, taking inspiration from all sorts of places: the comic books, the corny 60’s TV series, and the movies. The conceit here is that all of the villains have broken out of Arkham Asylum and the Riddler, the Penguin, and the Joker are each planning their own separate caper. The clever bit is that once you beat each caper from the Batman POV, you can then turn around and do it from the villains’ POV. So instead of having three episodes with interminably long levels like Indiana Jones did, you’re back to the Lego Star Wars six episodes with six properly-sized missions each.

Combat is still hand-to-hand, but is much improved over Indiana Jones, as your characters now actually move to hit nearby enemies rather than standing there and punching air. There are a bunch of new abilities, such as being able to use your Bat-zipline to go up buildings and toss Batarangs to destroy stuff onscreen. The graphics are much improved as well; although the backgrounds are often still dark and drab, the characters and onscreen objects are comprised of cartoony, bright colors for contrast. Finally, the platforming has been reduced, thankfully. The only drawback is the obligatory vehicle levels, which they have yet to figure out how to make fun.

Overall, Lego Batman is, shockingly, not a deep game, and it’s not going to take you too long to beat it, but if you have a friend or significant other to play it with, it’s an entertaining time.

3 out of 5

2008-10-18T13:38:00.001-04:00

CSI: Hard Evidence (Xbox 360)

Hey, you know that show CSI, where crimes are solved in an hour through the use of forensics, snappy dialogue, and obscure factoids? Well, now you can pretend to be a CSI your own self! And holy Moses, this isn’t a very good game.

Okay, I wouldn’t call it terrible, either. But really, this just is an inexplicable bit of corporate synergy. The main component of this crime-solving adventure game is the collection and processing of evidence, which, if you’ve ever seen the show, is distilled down into minute-long montages backed by pop music. Here it’s pixel hunt at the crime scene, use the right tool (out of the two or three options that you’re given; there’s no penalty for picking the wrong one first, aside from having to hear the same “that’s not the right tool for that” type comment from your CSI partner), then take it back to the lab and point-and-click until you’ve either matched the fingerprint, DNA, or trace sample. With no chance of failure, it just becomes trial-and-error over and over again.The other part of the game is interviewing suspects, which is even more pointless. You just click through all the dialogue options until they’re all done. Then when you’ve discovered something else, you go back and do it again.

Really, the whole thing screams budget title. It’s like Telltale Games had the CSI license shoved at them and told, “here, make a game, and make it cheap”. There are five cases, which take an hour or two to complete each, and characters and locations are reused in two of the cases. Achievement whores will rejoice, because all 1000 gamerscore is unlocked from playing through the game. They couldn’t even get the entire cast to voice their characters: Marg Helgenberger (replaced by some woman who makes Catherine Willows sound somewhere between a sultry ingénue and someone’s grandmother) and Jorja Fox. If you’re a CSI fan or an adventure gamer, you’ll probably enjoy this enough to play through it, but since there is zero replayability, nobody should buy this game, ever.

2 out of 5

2008-10-11T09:23:00.001-04:00

Bionic Commando: Rearmed (Xbox Live Arcade)

There is a glut of games on Xbox Live Arcade that is basically taking an 80s video game, giving it splashy new graphics, adding a few features, and calling it a remake. Of these, the only good one so far has been Pac-man: Championship Edition, because it does something new and interesting with the game. Otherwise it’s just another retread of a game that, at the core, is only worth playing for about ten minutes at a time. After all, there’s a reason these old games were popular in arcades.

But Bionic Commando: Rearmed goes a little farther into the 80s than Galaga or Missile Command, instead taking an old Nintendo game… and giving it splashy new graphics and adding a few features. Not that it’s necessarily a bad thing in this case; Bionic Commando works better because it’s a more complex game than the aforementioned quarter-eaters; it’s an action-adventure title with a non-linear world map! In the mid-80s!

In the game, you play a guy with a bionic arm who can attach it to stuff and swing around (in lieu of jumping). Which can make platforming awkward at times, but they have really made the game a lot smoother than it played originally. There are still some frustrating sections, usually anything involving the spikes of death, but overall it’s a pretty fun experience. That’s pretty much all to say – it’s just your basic Nintendo platformer, except with swinging instead of jumping. The only real bad thing is that the game is ridiculously short – you can easily finish it in 2 or 3 hours, but at the price of $10 (or 800 Microsoft Itchy & Scratchy Dollars), it’s certainly worth the investment.

3 out of 5

2008-10-04T18:16:00.001-04:00

Rock Band 2 (Xbox 360)

Oh, Harmonix, you know the way to my heart. The sequel to Rock Band isn’t exactly a great leap forward, but since the original worked pretty damn great in the first place, that’s not too bad. At this point, I have renounced the Guitar Hero franchise, because everything about Rock Band is superior. The downloadable songs, the presentation, the note charts – everything is slick, clean, and functional.

The biggest change over Rock Band is that rather than having a solo play and a band world tour option, the band world tour has been made available to friendless loners like me who play by themselves. This opens the game up a lot from “hmm, what song should I play” to “what set of songs should I play” or “screw it, I’ll let the computer choose ‘Everlong’ for the fiftieth time”. But seriously, it’s more fun when you can choose sets and whatnot. The difficulty has been pushed up a notch or two, as the highest-tier songs will generally chew your wrists up and spit them out. Aside from that, most of the changes are cosmetic, but the menus in particular do look a lot nicer now. And you can choose your band stand-ins, so you can have a set band rather than having the guys from GWAR or Solid Snake show up in your band randomly.

As far as the setlist goes, it goes a little too far into Guitar Hero territory with a bunch of crappy metal tunes, but there’s a whole lot of 70s, 80s, 90s, and today hits to balance it out. They’ve even managed to find the one decent Modest Mouse song, ‘Float On’. My only quibble is that their decision to go with original masters only really hurts the chance of getting more rock from the 60s – the only 60s songs on here are ‘Pinball Wizard’ and ‘Spirit in the Sky’. By the by, there are 85 songs on here; nearly twice what the original RB had. In addition, for the low low cost of only $5, or 400 Microsoft Itchy & Scratchy Dollars, you can rip the songs from RB (except for three, due to rights issues or whatnot) and use them in RB2. So, no disc switching if you have a particular urge to play one of those songs.

The instruments associated with the game are also new and improved, but I have none of them at this time, so I can’t comment. I don’t imagine the microphone can be improved on that much, but the drums and guitar are supposed to be a lot better. Regardless of whether or not you want the instruments, though, Rock Band 2 is a must-buy for the plastic rockin’ out aficionado.

5 out of 5

2008-08-30T12:50:00.001-04:00

Going on hiatus through September -- there's nothing good out for me to review right now.

2008-08-23T12:56:00.001-04:00

I Played This Game for Five Minutes: In Lieu of a Review Edition

Ico (PlayStation 2)

Between the unintuitive controls and obtuse puzzles, there’s no wonder this became a cult classic.

Spider-man 3 (Xbox 360)

It’s never a good sign when your game crashes while trying to load the title screen.

skate. (Xbox 360)

Just like real skating, the point is to gain corporate endorsements and go professional. Trademark issues prevented the original title from being used: Tony Hawk Simulator 1.000.

Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved^2 (Xbox Live Arcade)

I imagine this is what being on LSD is like. Warning: May induce epileptic seizures.

1942: Joint Strike (Xbox Live Arcade)

Yet another in the series of endless remakes of old arcade games. To quote Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, just because we can do a thing, it does not necessarily follow that we should do that thing.

2008-08-16T15:10:00.001-04:00

Star Trek: Legacy (Xbox 360)

There is a long legacy, that’s for sure: Star Trek games that look good on paper, but turn out, well, not so much. In this game, you chase down some Vulcan scientist, T’Uerell (seriously, that’s how it’s spelled), who is trying to take control of the Borg for some damn reason. In a neat little twist, the game progresses from the Enterprise era to the Next Generation era, including voice acting from all five Star Trek captains. The bad thing is they spend an entire third of the game on Enterprise. Who the hell cares about Enterprise that much?

The one good thing about this game is the graphics. They’re quite pretty. Everything else about the game is mediocre to bad. It’s ridiculous that the single-player campaign mode is only 15 missions long, which you can complete in probably a few hours. They consist of at least one of these two things: a. combat, or b. performing some dull tasks like scanning ships or destroying asteroids. There’s multiplayer, but it just amounts to “fight until one side loses”. The controls are… okay, aside from sometimes having ships in your fleet just sit around and do nothing.

Seriously, though, this game does look good. It’s a shame that they didn’t think to build a better game around the graphics. If you’re a Trekkie, you’ll probably want to play it just for the nerdgasm factor, but that’s about it.

2 out of 5

2008-08-09T12:37:00.001-04:00

Alone in the Dark (Xbox 360)

Alone in the Dark is another in the series of survival horror games dating back to the early 90s on the PC. Edward Carnby is the protagonist, and he’s really ugly. But that’s okay, because the game is so damn dark you won’t be able to see him, or much of anything else, for that matter.

This game is buh-roh-ken. The controls are quite possibly the most unintuitive controls ever in the history of video games. Even something as simple as picking something up and putting it down requires separate buttons. Combat generally involves moving the right thumbstick around wildly hoping you actually do something right. And then there’s the inventory screen, in which moving the left thumbstick only vaguely corresponds to what you intend to select onscreen. It would help if the onscreen tutorials weren’t so hard to see that you can’t tell what button you’re supposed to press. Often, picking up an item means you unequip whatever you’re holding, so you have to dig out your flashlight for the hundredth time.

Using the gun isn’t too bad, but it’s kind of pointless since the enemies are hardly affected by bullets. I think I unloaded about a dozen shots into one monster before he dropped to the floor. For about ten seconds. See, you have to burn enemies to kill kill them, which generally means grabbing a flammable object, lighting it on fire (incidentally, the fire effects in the game are nice, one of the few good things about it), then chasing them down until you can touch them with it. Exciting! This all makes moving Jill Valentine around in Resident Evil seem like a ballet in comparison. And the much-vaunted MacGuyver method of cobbling together weapons never actually took off, because by the time I gave up on the game, I still hadn’t collected enough items to make anything.

The one thing I like about this game is the presentation: it’s set up like a DVD (the game has eight chapters, akin to TV episodes, even beginning with a “Previously On Alone in the Dark” recap), so you can skip ahead if you want. I find that an incredibly clever idea and I wonder why nobody else ever thought of it first. The only problem with this is, if the game is so bad you have to skip forward to continue playing, why play it in the first place?

1 out of 5

2008-08-02T14:06:00.000-04:00

Assassin’s Creed (Xbox 360)

One of the massively-hyped games of 2007, Assassin’s Creed is a stealth game in which you play a Crusade-era assassin named Altair who has to go assassinate a bunch of Knights Templar. This is framed around a futuristic storyline in which some guy named Desmond, who is apparently a descendant of Altair, is being put through some sciencey bullshit (see, he has Star Trek DNA that does things real DNA doesn’t, like retain memories) to remember the location of some mystical object of power so that the evil corporation can take over the world or something like that. I don’t know, all you need to know is that the scientist’s assistant is voiced by Kristin Bell. Yes, Veronica Mars herself in a video game! What more do you need to know?

Okay, well, the actual assassinations take place in the Middle East cities of Jerusalem, Acre, and Damascus. Which, despite being in different countries now, are all located a short horse ride away. Just take the expressway, but watch out for the cops, they’re real jerks about the speed limit. Regardless, the cities are rendered absolutely wonderfully, and are just stunning to see.

Now, I’ll admit that the gameplay is repetitive. You do pretty much the same thing for all nine assassinations: climb towers to expand the map, help citizens in distress, collect flags or perform kills for hapless assassins, and interrogate local blowhards, in order to get enough information to make each kill. But, I don’t know, I liked it. The controls are tight – most of the time. Combat can veer between sheer awesomeness and sheer frustration, especially at the beginning. But running and jumping around on the rooftops is completely effortless and fun.

Aside from the repetition, there’s also not much replay value in this game. There was a lot of bullshit about how you can do the assassinations multiple ways, and that may be true, but I can’t say I’ve felt the need to try that out. Also, the ending is about the most abrupt ending ever made in a game since the days of “CONGRATURATION!” It couldn’t scream “We’re making a sequel!!!” any more if it had a megaphone. Despite these flaws, I think Assassin’s Creed is a good game, and is not deserving of the scorn it receives (outside of the mainstream game press). Doesn't mean that the mainstream game press is right about it being great, though.

3 out of 5

2008-07-26T17:46:00.001-04:00

Halo 3 (Xbox 360)

The Halo series is much-lauded for its online multiplayer. I don’t care about that, as you should well know, so I’m going to look at the single-player campaign mode.

In Halo 3, you play space marine Master Chief on his quest to save his holographic buddy Cortana and stop the Covenant from killing everyone in existence. No pressure. The combat in this game is… serviceable. Unlike the fluid, precise shooting of Half-Life 2, Halo is more in the military mindset of “shoot a bunch of bullets/plasma/whatever at it until it dies”. Seriously, I don’t think it’s possible to kill a single enemy (aside from the little munchkin-sounding things that spend more time running around in a panic than they do shooting at you) without unloading half a clip on them. Lucky for you, you spend most of the game with a squad of Space Marines or friendly alien dudes, so the herky-jerky shooting doesn’t mean you’re stuck facing all these enemies alone.

The dreaded vehicle sections show up every now and then, but they’re mercifully brief. I don’t understand who made the decision to have the controls be: press forward, move in the direction the camera is pointed. So you’re stuck trying to move with one thumbstick and steer with the other. It’s kind of ridiculous. You can let the computer drive, but it has worse driving skills than a paparazzi in the Channel Tunnel.

Really, there’s nothing particularly bad about the game, at least until you get to the last part. You get thrown into some nasty alien organism thing that you have to find your way through, and fight hordes of Flood (who are basically a ripoff of the zombies, headcrabs, and other nonhuman enemies in Half-Life 2), while the complete lack of light gives you eyestrain and a headache from squinting. It was at this point that I had to put the game down, so it may have the best ending ever, I don’t know. The whole experience is like eating a good, but somewhat bland sandwich, but the last bite has a dead cockroach in it.

That was kind of a strained simile. Anyway, I’m sure if you like shooting things in the first person, you already have Halo 3 and think I’m an idiot, but if you don't, I wouldn’t recommend it.

2 out of 5

2008-07-19T14:01:00.001-04:00

Rock Band (Xbox 360)

Second verse, same as the first. Just like Guitar Hero, Rock Band is a game where you pretend to be a rock musician, except with the added bonus of pretending to play drums, pretending to play the bass, and pretending to sing. Okay, the singing is actually singing, but it’s not going to make you the next American Idol.

Now, as I’m a misanthrope, I don’t have friends to play this game with, so I only have a guitar, no drums. Thus, my review is from that point of view, with my boyfriend occasionally playing it with me, handling the vocal duties. Regardless, it’s obvious that Rock Band distills everything good about Guitar Hero, subtracts the bad parts, and adds even more goodness on top. The presentation is much more refined than GH; everything from the notes to the score is presented in a cleaner, more subtle manner, so the game is much nicer to look at. You also can create your own characters, rather than relying on a half-dozen or so music clichés; the character creation is kind of limited, but it beats having to see that ugly-ass singer from GH again.

Song choice is also much better. GH’s inexplicable obsession with metal is jettisoned in lieu of a more mainstream rock soundtrack. The best thing about RB is the much-improved expandability: whereas GH only offers a handful of track packs to download, a multitude of songs and even a few complete albums have been released for RB, and the best part is you can download individual songs so you can take the good but not take the bad. Take that, Mrs. Garrett!

Even playing from my limited perspective, it’s obvious that Rock Band has the upper hand in the Guitar-Based Rhythm Game War. The next Guitar Hero is basically going to take everything that Rock Band innovated, so it’ll be interesting to see whether they succeed with it.

5 out of 5

2008-07-12T08:21:00.001-04:00

Dark Sector (Xbox 360)

Dark Sector takes place in the fictional former Soviet republic of Lasria, where in 1987 some biological infection which turns people into Colossus, except with the unfortunate side effect of insanity, was accidentally unleashed. Whoops! Fast forward to The Present Day, where you play as Hayden, a black ops type on some mission in the aforementioned generic country (so as not to offend any foreigners) who gets infected and grows a badass spinny blade thing (although it would be more badass if it didn’t make such a goofy noise when spinning through the air) out of his hand.

Sounds awesome, right? Well, it’s not. Dark Sector is the epitome of a mediocre game, taking a lot of cues from previous third-person shooters like Gears of War, Resident Evil 4, Gears of War, Resident Evil 4, Gears of War, and Gears of War. Combat is generally one of two scenarios: cover-based whack-a-mole with enemy soldiers, or trying to fend off a horde of mutant zombie types before you have to deal with the awkward, button-mashing melee combat. Boss fights also fall into two categories: blow up helicopters/tanks with a conveniently-placed rocket launcher, or fight some big thing with an inscrutable weak point until you give up and consult Gamefaqs.

Your weapon choices are limited, as once you complete the first mission you’re stuck with the spinny blade thing and your pistol (and no ammo). You can pick up fallen soldiers’ weapons, but thanks to the strict gun control laws in Lasria, they all have lockouts that cause them to short-circuit after about 15 seconds. Eventually, you can buy new weapons from the… sigh… “black market” (The Black Market: conveniently located under every manhole cover in the greater Lasrian metropolitan area to serve you better!). You do gain new special abilities as the game progress, which is a nice touch.

There’s not much that’s really bad about this game – just a couple of obnoxious timed sequences, and the aforementioned incomprehensible bosses – but there’s nothing that makes this game stand out, either. It’s just a generic action title with an incomprehensible storyline.

3 out of 5

2008-07-05T09:48:00.001-04:00

Devil May Cry 4 (Xbox 360)

You know, there’s something charming about the sheer earnestness of the Devil May Cry series. Between the blaring rock music, giant swords, large-breasted women, and oh-so-cool main characters, they’re just so determined to get teenage boys to shout “awesome”. Of course, this comes with a price. The story is nigh-incomprehensible (there are some religious guys, and as we all know, in video gaems religion = evil, and you have to save the girl, which seems odd because there’s more sexual tension between the two guys), and the dialogue veers between ridiculous and painful. But really, if you’re playing these games for the writing, then you have bigger problems than I can address.

So Devil May Cry 4 is the first game on the seventh-generation consoles, and I suppose in an attempt to appeal to a wider audience they’ve toned down the trademark DMC difficulty to a point where I am able to beat the game on the easiest mode. Developers, I thank you. I’ve tried to play DMC 3 and I got my ass kicked from here to Pakistan on the third mission or so. Of course, this seems to come with a price: as it’s more a “My First Devil May Cry” game, you get stuck with a trainee character, Nero. Nero is pretty much a teenage version of Dante (yeah, there are two silver-haired demon-men who dress in red and black leather in this universe), but he’s got a magic hand that can grab enemies and punch them. You eventually get to play as Dante, but only for about a third of the game, and it’s kind of disappointing to go back to Nero at the end because Dante is a hell of a lot more powerful.

If you’ve played a DMC game before, you’ll be familiar with the combat. If you haven’t, it’s pretty easy to pick up on, although the default controls are kind of dumb (who can hold down the right shoulder button to lock on to enemies without developing carpal tunnel syndrome?). Your sword is controlled by one button, and you can string together interesting combos by pressing the button in different rhythms (at least, once you purchase upgrades). Your guns are controlled by another button, and there’s not much you can do with them except button-mash, but you probably won’t use the guns much anyway since they do virtually no damage. I’d ask why bullets are less effective than swords, but then, in the DMC world, terminal velocity – hell, gravity, even – is a relative concept, so I’m not even going to guess at the physics here.

The game is pretty fun; aside from a few frustrating boss battles, combat moves smoothly, and it challenges you to figure out the enemies’ weaknesses without beating you over the head with giant glowing-red weak spots or whatever. Only bad thing is the game is really short – if you skip all the cutscenes (and unless your tolerance for cheese is high, you will probably not want to sit through them all), you could probably finish the game in about 6 hours. Of course, given how adrenaline-fueled the combat can get, even on the easy setting, you might have to put the game down after two or three missions (the game being broken up into 20 of them). The brief length is a little ridiculous, since half of the Dante missions involve backtracking through the same areas that Nero went through in the first part of the game.

There’s no point recommending this game to DMC fans, since at this point they’ve bought it, finished it up to and including Dante Must Die difficulty, and complained loudly on the Internet about what an annoying pussy Nero is. If you enjoy action games like this, or if you’re just curious as to why there is a possibility of Beelzebub being sad, it’s worth a play.

3 out of 5

2008-06-28T14:57:00.001-04:00

No review this week.

2008-06-21T16:23:00.000-04:00

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

2008-06-14T08:53:00.001-04:00

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

2008-06-07T14:28:00.000-04:00

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

2008-05-31T08:09:00.001-04:00

The Orange Box (Xbox 360)

If you’ve played a video game in the past ten years or so, you probably have heard of Half-Life. It revolutionized first person shooters, yadda yadda yadda. If you’ve played a video game in the past year, you’ve probably heard of The Orange Box. It collects five games produced by Valve: Half-Life 2, Half-Life 2: Episodes 1 and 2, Team Fortress 2, and Portal. It’s sequel mania!

I’m going to skip TF2, since I don’t play online, and get right to the Half-Lives. At its core, Half-Life 2 is an excellent, exciting FPS with tight controls. The only problem is its length. In an attempt to make the game last longer, though, Valve felt the need to put in segments of the game that are more frustrating than enjoyable. Vehicle sections, which are the work of the devil, pop up twice in HL2 and again in HL2E2. All of the games involve multiple instances of shooting down helicopters or stalkers (spindly War of the Worlds robot things) with rocket launchers that require you to stare at them so the rockets can be guided via laser to their targets. While the enemy has free rein to shoot at you. Yeah, fun. And then of course there’s the “avoid the helicopter/stalker shooting at you as you run around blindly trying to figure out where to go next” parts in HL2 and HL2E1. These are all parts of the game that repeatedly caused death followed by much swearing from me. Plus, Valve has to show off their physics engine with the same damn physics puzzle in every game: put heavy objects on one end of an inclined plane to raise the other end so you can continue. Exciting.

I’m also a bit disappointed that Valve recruited some great voice talent, namely Robert Guillaume and Michelle Forbes, and barely used them. Pretty much the only character that shows up for extended periods of time is your friend Alyx Vance. (Oh, by the way, if you were wondering about the story, it’s basically: aliens took over Earth so humans are fighting back in dystopic Eastern Europe.) And, this being a FPS, your character is mute, so nobody ever asks you if you want to do something ridiculously dangerous, you just get ordered around. Being Gordon Freeman is really a pain. Oh yeah, and where does he keep all those guns? He totes around a pistol, revolver, machine gun, shotgun, rocket launcher, pulse rife, gravity gun, crossbow, grenades, and that damn crowbar. Seriously, he must have some major back problems by now.

Anyway, this is not to say the games are bad. I really enjoyed running through the streets of City 17, blasting away Combine soldiers. And HL2 features a foray into survival horror as you creep through the zombie-infested Ravenholm. It’s just annoying when you get tripped up by these parts of the game, especially when they take up precious time in the very short HL2E1 and E2, which took me 3 ½ and 4 ½ hours to complete, respectively. (HL2, incidentally, required about 15 hours of play.)

3 out of 5 (Half-Life 2)
2 out of 5 (Half-Life 2: Episode 1)
2 out of 5 (Half-Life 2: Episode 2)

Let’s move on to Portal. There’s been a lot of nerdlove slathered on this game, particularly stuff like the Weighted Companion Cube, “The Cake Is A Lie”, and “Still Alive”. If you can manage to ignore the irritating memes spread by Internet geeks, you will find that Portal is a clever, innovative puzzle game. It’s set up as a FPS, except instead of shooting things, you get a gun that shoots portals: one blue, one orange. This magic technology, on loan from the Road Runner, I think, allows you to travel from one place to another by stepping through said portal. What ensues is a series of puzzle challenges, as you’re “guided” by the often-hilariously-deadpan computer GLaDOS. It’s a short game, one that you can finish in an afternoon (I think it took me 3 hours), but there are a number of challenges that are unlocked after you finish it, if you’re a competitive sort or a completist. Or just addicted to gaining gamerscore. My only complaint with Portal is that the pacing is really thrown off in the last third of the game. It goes from a series of challenges that last around 3-5 minutes to one long, unbroken section. But aside from that, Portal is well worth playing.

4 out of 5 (Portal)

Well, there you have it. Five games for the price of one, although considering the length of three of them, it’s more like three for one. It’s certainly a good value for Valve/Half-Life devotees, but the rest of us would do well to tread with caution.

3 out of 5 (The Orange Box)

2008-05-26T13:32:00.001-04:00

A Thought On Ratings

I didn’t give much thought to the ratings system when I set up this site. I just went with X-Play’s system of 1 through 5, because it was the simplest. Since, after all, Metacritic is the ultimate arbiter of what rating a game should get nowadays, I figured any rating I gave would be pretty much meaningless. So for what it’s worth, here is the interpretation of my rating scale, retroactively:

5 – Buy the game. Shut up, don’t question me, just buy it.
4 – Buy the game if you like the genre it’s in. At the very least, rent it, even if you don’t like the genre. You might be surprised (like I was with Bioshock).
3 – Only buy it if you’re really into the genre. A safer move would be to rent.
2 – Rent it if you’re curious, but don’t spend a lot of money.
1 – Don’t bother touching it.

2008-05-24T14:36:00.001-04:00

Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga (Xbox 360)

This is a repackaging of Lego Star Wars and Lego Star Wars II: The Original Trilogy. There are a few new bells and whistles, like a couple new missions, but for the most part it’s the same two games over again. If you haven’t played these games, they are pretty much what the titles imply: retellings of the two Star Wars trilogies, with Lego characters taking the part of seemingly every character in the entire movie series, including random droids and Bossk, the reptilian bounty hunter that was on the Star Destroyer in The Empire Strikes Back. It’s amusing seeing the Lego-ized Star Wars scenes being played out in pantomime, albeit with some changes to the story (I don’t recall the Jawas stealing R2-D2 and C-3PO back after Luke bought them).

The games were designed with children in mind, so they’re not really “difficult” in the traditional sense – you have infinite lives, and most of the puzzles are solved by blowing something up or building something with Lego bricks scattered around the levels. The real challenge is collecting enough Lego studs to purchase all of the characters, vehicles, and powerups, and finding all of the hidden stuff in the levels, which requires at least two playthroughs for each level.

This isn’t a very deep game, but it’s fun to pick up for an hour or so, and I appreciate the fact that it’s a two-player co-op game, something that seems to be lacking these days, so my boyfriend and I can play it together.

3 out of 5

2008-05-17T09:46:00.001-04:00

Silent Hill 2: Restless Dreams (Xbox)

Silent Hill 2 is a creepy, psychology-driven survival horror game in which you play James, a guy who’s looking for his lost wife. (No points for originality on this one, as the original involved a guy who was looking for his lost daughter.) I say psychology-driven, because you really need a degree in psychology to understand what the hell’s going on here. Every monster you fight is some manifestation of his subconscious, and the endings are extremely abstract and obtuse. I don’t know, I never took psychology in college. Of course, I never graduated, either.

On the subject of gameplay, the game eschews the survival horror trappings of tank controls and fixed camera angles, making the town’s gibbering inhabitants easier to deal with -- almost too easy, in fact, because since I was always flush with ampoules of health medicine and ammunition for the various firearms you pick up, I was never in any serious danger. Danger is an important part of survival horror; you know, the survival part?

Now, as an aside, I play games on the easiest setting. I do this because I’m not a hardcore gamer, nor am I a masochist; I just want to have fun. Sometimes, however, the developers make the easy setting a little too easy – a few challenges never killed anyone. I think they did that here.

The design, however, is wonderful. The town looks so disgusting, corroded, and decaying, it sets the atmosphere perfectly. The difficulty on the puzzles can be selected to be easy or hard, and since I chose easy, they wouldn’t make a mentally deficient caterpillar scratch its head twice. This I don’t mind – I’m playing Silent Hill, not a Dreamcatcher game.

Finally, this game is short. I think it took me about ten hours to beat. And most of those involved trying every single door in every single building, which is the most annoying and tedious part of this game. If there’s one thing the town of Silent Hill needs, it’s a locksmith. Whenever some poor soul gets sucked into the demonic town, the first thing they learn is that 90% of the doors in the town have broken locks or otherwise won’t open. Regardless, it’s an enjoyably creepy experience that relies on atmosphere over cheap scares (I’m looking at you, Resident Evil).

3 out of 5

2008-04-27T09:53:00.001-04:00

No updates will be posted for the next two weeks, as I'll be out of the country. Afterward, reviews will be posted on Saturdays.

2008-04-27T09:46:00.001-04:00

Sam & Max: Season 1 (PC)
Sam & Max: Season 2 (PC)

If you played computer games in the 90s, you may remember Sam & Max Hit the Road, a point-and-click adventure game developed by LucasArts (back when they still made games without the words “wars” or “star” in them). If you don’t, here’s the deal: Sam, a dog, and Max, a rabbit, are “freelance police” who solve crimes, usually through the use of violence or sarcasm. They started out as a comic book in the 80s, then the aforementioned game was released, and I think there was even a cartoon series, albeit briefly.

Flash forward to the wonders of the 21st century, where Telltale Games has created Sam & Max: Season 1 and its sequel, Sam & Max: Season 2. Why are they called seasons? Well, due to the magic of the otherwise-mediocre game service GameTap, the games are released episodically, with six episodes in the first season and five in the second. In each season, Sam & Max must solve various seemingly-unrelated mysteries that nevertheless are generally linked by common threads (hypnotism in season 1, apocalyptic occurrences in season 2). Thus you have a point-and-click adventure game, with each episode lasting about 3 or 4 hours of gameplay, which centers on puzzle-solving. The puzzles aren’t very taxing; sometimes they can be unintuitive, but fortunately Telltale’s website has walkthroughs if you get stuck.

The real focus of this series is the sharp writing – filled with humor, each episode guarantees a number of laughs, whether it be social and political satire, ridiculous wordplay, or biting sarcasm. The characters are over-the-top and two-dimensional, but that’s kind of the point – every episode in Season 1, for example, involves Bosco, the paranoid inventor and proprietor of Bosco’s Inconvenience, putting on an even more ridiculous (and completely transparent) disguise to hide his identity, and selling Sam & Max an expensive-sounding (and costing), but ultimately cheaply made, technical device to further the plot. The only bad thing about this episode content is the reuse of characters and places throughout the series, especially in Season 1; it can be groan-inducing to see them again and again, especially the annoyingly-voiced former child stars The Soda Poppers.

Really, the biggest downside to playing the games episodically is that they’re kind of expensive considering the amount of content: each episode costs $8.95, which is a bit much for such short games. You can purchase the entire seasons at $30 for 1 and $35 for 2, though, and you can always subscribe to GameTap for a month or two to play through them.

4 out of 5 (Sam & Max: Season 1)
4 out of 5 (Sam & Max: Season 2)

2008-04-20T10:43:00.000-04:00

Resident Evil: Code Veronica X (PlayStation 2)

I have a confession to make: I was completely out of the loop in regards to video games from about 1999 to 2004. I blame the Nintendo 64; I was such a Nintendo fanboy that I had to have it. Shame it only ever ended up having two or three good games. So the original PlayStation passed me by. The first Resident Evil game I ever played was the GameCube remake, which I liked quite a bit. Then I played Resident Evil Zero, which was okay, although nothing great. Resident Evil 4 kicked my ass across the room for a couple weekends before I gave up on it.

Then there’s this game. I should know better than to purchase anything from GameStop’s “Under $10!” bins. That has never been, is not, and will never be an indication of quality. In Code Veronica X, you play Claire Redfield, who’s looking for her missing brother, and of course she gets sent to an island prison run by the Umbrella Corporation, who must have one hell of a lot of lobbyists in K Street to cover for all the bad shit they do.

The problem with this game compared to the remakes is the weapons. You start out with a knife. A knife. The most useless zombie-fighting weapon ever made. You pick up a handgun in the first ten minutes or so of the game, but you might as well be given a slingshot for all the zombie-slaughtering firepower it has. It takes upwards of 7-10 shots to take down one garden-variety zombie. You eventually pick up other weapons, but the ammo for them is so hard to find that you’ll be resorting to trying to run through the crowds of zombies that magically appear even after you’ve cleared a room. (Yeah, I know zombies show up after a while again in the other RE games, but not to the ridiculous level this one does.)

I gave up on this game about the time the big nasty creatures with the ridiculously-long single arm started showing up on nearly every screen -- the ones that can hit you clear across the room despite you pouring slugs of hot lead into their bodies. This game is frustrating, long, boring, and generally not worth your $8.

1 out of 5

2008-04-16T08:25:00.001-04:00

I Played This Game for Five Minutes: Xbox Live Arcade Demo Edition

Boom Boom Rocket

It’s a rhythm game with some ridiculously-cheesy remixed public domain music on it. I actually kind of enjoyed the one song I played, but it’s not worth my $10, since I generally suck at rhythm games.

Discs of Tron

I thought this game was the coolest thing when I was about 8. I was a stupid child.

Space Giraffe

Space Giraffe creator Jeff Minter had a much-reported hissyfit about the relative popularity of Space Giraffe compared to Frogger on the Xbox Live Arcade. I think the problem is that a fistful of oily rags stuffed into a Virtual Boy and set on fire would compare favorably to the graphical vomit that is Space Giraffe. Space Giraffe is fun to say, though.

Rez HD

I honestly have no idea what happened in this game, but judging by the trippy visuals and pulsating music, I think it requires a hit of ecstasy to enjoy.

2008-04-13T13:54:00.001-04:00

Bully: Scholarship Edition (Xbox 360)

There was a lot of verbal diarrhea about this game in the mainstream press upon its release, most of it from Jack Thompson, who called it a Columbine simulator. Of course, none of the sanctimonious pundits ever manage to play these games that they decry, because if they did, they would realize that Bully is not so much Grand Theft Auto for kids as it is… well, Grand Theft Auto for kids. But only in the sense that it takes the open-world, mission-based gameplay of Grand Theft Auto and sanitizes it for teenage gamers. The worst things in this game are fighting and boys kissing other boys. Moral decay ahoy!

So anyway, in Bully you play Jimmy Hopkins, a trouble-prone kid sent to Bullworth Academy, a private school, to get out of his mother and stepfather’s hair. Jimmy finds out that the school, shockingly, is divided into cliques: nerds, jocks, preps, greasers, and bullies. So Jimmy decides to take over the school in an attempt to stop the rampant bullying. Sure, he’s an anti-hero who takes a Machiavellian approach to gaining the respect of the various factions, but you’re still trying to put an end to the bullying, as opposed to the media bloviating about how it’s encouraging it. And it’s interesting to note that Rockstar doesn’t paint any of the cliques as being completely good; even the nerds get sadistic and vengeful when their leader, Ernest, gets a little bit of power.

But enough about the sociological impact of video games. Bully: Scholarship Edition is a re-release of the PS2 original, with some added content. I can’t really comment on the editions, as I never played the original for more than a few minutes. What I can say is that Bully: SE is a deep, fun, addictive game that will have you playing for at least 20 or 30 hours. In contrast to other Rockstar games like the GTA series, the difficulty does not range from moderately challenging to psychotically hard. Instead, missions range from the more traditional approach of easy to hard. All I have to say is, thank God, because I get tired of the “go to the starting point, start mission, watch cutscene, go to point a, die five seconds later, reload, etc. etc. etc.” syndrome that Rockstar seems to enjoy. Unlike GTA, you do have to be wary of the time – you can be busted for truancy during classes you haven’t completed or for violating the 11 P.M. curfew, and you have to be in bed by 2 A.M. or you’ll pass out where you’re standing. It feels kind of restrictive at first, but once you get used to it, it’s a nice touch of realism, as opposed to GTA, where you could run/drive around for days on end without having to stop.

The missions are the usual fare of fighting, escorting, fetch quests, stealth, and other tasks, but there’s enough variety that they never get tedious. In addition, there are classes you must attend, each one involving a different minigame. For example, art is a knockoff of Qix, math is a multiple choice test, biology is a Trauma Center-esque dissection game, and music (my personal favorite) is a rhythm game involving out-of-tune public domain songs like “When the Saints Come Marching In”. For the completists out there, there’s plenty of peripheral stuff to do, from collecting hidden items (rubber bands and trading cards) and clothes (ranging from the prep hangout Aquaberry to a hole-in-the-wall barber/clothing store for punk paraphernalia) to completing bike races and other non-plot-centric challenges.

I can really find little to criticize in this game. Interacting with people can sometimes be a little buggy, and the load times are excessively long for a 360 game, but this is probably the best game Rockstar has put out. I am especially appreciative of the fact that the romance aspect (it’s just kissing, really) of the game involves some of the male students. It’s nice to know that there’s at least one developer who realizes there are gay gamers out there, and that homosexuality can be more than just a joke in their games. That being said, I fully endorse Bully: Scholarship Edition for the 360. Now let’s go beat up some nerds.

5 out of 5

2008-04-06T11:36:00.001-04:00

Katamari Damacy (PlayStation 2)
Beautiful Katamari (Xbox 360)

Katamari Damacy is one of those things that could never have come from anywhere than Japan, like squid flavored potato chips or tentacle rape porn comics. The basic concept is that the King of All Cosmos, who is a giant man with a hammerhead and a large codpiece, manages to royally (no pun intended) fuck things up. In Katamari Damacy, he gets drunk and destroys all the stars. In Beautiful Katamari, he manages to rip a hole in the fabric of space-time, causing a black hole which sucks most of the universe through it. So, rather than owning up to it, he sends you, the Prince, to Earth to roll stuff up into balls called katamari to replace the celestial objects he’s destroyed. I don’t think he’s getting a tie for Father’s Day this year.

Therein lies the gameplay: you roll a sticky ball to pick up stuff and make a bigger ball before time runs out. That’s pretty much it, but there is fun in that simplicity. There is a large variety of items, from yen coins and fruit, to boxy humans and animals, to skyscrapers and sea monsters, that you pick up over the course of the game. Both games have simple, colorful graphics. Beautiful Katamari benefits a little from the superior processing ability of the 360 over the PS2, but there can be so many objects on screen at once, they have to be kept pretty simple. Also, the music is one of the series’ high points – both games’ soundtracks are filled with a collection of weird, catchy, utterly Japanese songs. You control the Prince using the two thumbsticks, which can be hard to get used to at first, and after a while, your thumbs start to get sore. The controls were tightened up on Beautiful Katamari; in Katamari Damacy, there was no lack of opportunities to get stuck between two objects and spend precious seconds trying to dislodge yourself.

The difficulty is pretty easy – I only failed one mission in Katamari Damacy the first time through, and the missions that require you to pick up a certain kind of item don’t seem to have any requirements for success. Beautiful Katamari can be a little tougher, as the time limits are often just barely enough time to achieve the right size katamari. There are also one or two ridiculously-difficult missions, such as the one where you have to collect hot items to increase the katamari’s temperature, which I couldn’t manage to finish. Run over one fire extinguisher and you’re screwed. Beautiful Katamari has four extra levels that must be purchased on Xbox Live Arcade – at 200 points, or $2.50 apiece; suffice it to say I did not purchase them

Aside from the occasionally frustrating controls of Katamari Damacy, the worst part of these games is their length. Both Katamari Damacy and Beautiful Katamari can be completed in a weekend of playing, and there are some extras that you can mess around with, but I for one don’t have any interest in online play, or time attacks, or any of that silliness. They’re fun, silly games that are certainly worth a rental if not a purchase.

3 out of 5 (Katamari Damacy)
3 out of 5 (Beautiful Katamari)

2008-03-30T13:30:00.001-04:00

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

2008-03-25T08:19:00.001-04:00

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.

2008-03-23T14:09:00.000-04:00

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

2008-03-19T08:13:00.001-04:00

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

2008-03-17T08:16:00.001-04:00

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

2008-03-16T12:59:00.001-04:00

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

2003-07-13T21:06:00.000-04:00

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