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Giant Bomb

Whatcha Playing This Weekend? Independence Day Edition

Wizard needs gamepad badly!

It's a longish weekend for those of us in the U.S. this week as the date of our independence draws nigh. And besides visiting dueling barbecues for a time on Saturday to compare the relative merits of their beef ribs, I'll be spending the next few days doing what many of you are probably also doing: staying in the house playing games. Here's what's on my short list. What's on yours?

Trine

Well, I gotta review it next week. But more to the point, it looks super slick, with beautiful visuals and what looks like unique aiming and platform mechanics, and a whole lot of physics, from the little bit I tried so far. Who else is digging into this one after yesterday's early release?

Professor Layton

Nearly finished climbing the tower! St. Mystere's dark secrets are almost known to me--plus, I need to finish it before the new one comes out. This copy's going to my mom when I'm done with it.

Gears of War 2 or Grand Theft Auto IV?

My pile of shame is a mile high (Fallout 3 and Fable II yet remain essentially untouched) but I've played enough of these two games that the idea of finishing them is at least approachable. But I can't decide! One of them has a thin enough storyline that I can probably get back into it after a few months away from it, but then, the other one was our Game of the Year last year. OK, you guys tell me which of these to play.

More importantly, tell me what you're playing this weekend to fill the time between setting off illegal fireworks and cramming processed meat products down your gullets. For bonus points, discuss your preferred brand of hot dogs, and why. Happy eating! I mean, playing! Both! Whatever!

Your Most Wanted Achievements

POOOOOINTS!

The achievement tracking feature we rolled out back in May has proven to be pretty popular with you guys. It's probably one of my favorite things about Giant Bomb, and it's only gotten better over time. In addition to tracking your Xbox 360 profiles and World of Warcraft accounts, we're now keeping stats on PC games that use Steam to offer achievements. And I'm hoping that we'll be able to get PlayStation 3 trophies in the mix in the relatively near future. All of this gives us a great deal of data to play with, and we're thinking about different ways to let you play with it down the line.

So I figured I'd share some statistics with you that I found pretty interesting. These figures cover data that goes all the way back to the mid-May launch of our achievement stuff. In the future, I'll be limiting the data to shorter timeframes so we can all see how it changes from week to week.

For starters, here are the top five achievement lists on Giant Bomb. Whether people are searching on Google or just navigating the site directly, these are the five full achievement lists that you've been asking for more than any others.

Considering how well UFC seems to have been selling, I can't say I'm too surprised to see it up there. Also, it might say good things about Red Faction: Guerrilla's sales that it's already ahead of UFC, even though it hasn't been out for as long. After seeing the above list, I'm not too surprised to see achievements from some of those games on the most popular achievements list. Oh, and keep in mind that we've yet to build in proper support for secret achievements, which may skew the data a bit.

With that, these are the ten most popular individual achievements on Giant Bomb.

Another DID YOU KNOW moment here. DID YOU KNOW that we allow people to comment on individual achievements? It's true! We've done this so that people can get in there and help each other out. So if you're working on The Fowl Player in Fable and can't figure out how to get the chicken suit, well, our achievement page happens to already have the answer. So sync up your accounts today, and if you've been waiting to get your PSN account and trophies up in there, hang tight. Hopefully we'll be able to have something for you before too long.

I Got Next Gets Got

I'm sure true appreciators of documentaries are irritated by this trend, but as someone who doesn't enjoy being bummed out for 90 minutes with depressing "messages," I'm all for the trend of documentaries that focus on the peculiar passions and infatuations of mundane or otherwise insignificant people. Spellbound, Wordplay, Scrabylon, and maybe most obviously, The King of Kong were all pretty fascinating to me, so it's of little surprise that I'm pretty intrigued by Ian Cofino's documentary about the people whose lives revolve around hardcore competitive fighting games, I Got Next.

What started as a short-form documentary senior project for Mr. Cofino has since turned into a feature-length documentary, though it looks more interesting than you typical student film. The focus of the documentary appears to be on the upper echelons of the professional US fighting game scene and the East Coast/West Coast rivalry that exists within it. He gets access to a number of the top players, most prominently Ryan "Gootecks" Gutierrez, and while I can't say I get much from the talking-head bits in the trailer, the combination of The Go! Team and rooms packed full of dudes ABSOLUTELY FLIPPING OUT over video games is enough to get me excited.

So how can you see I Got Next? Well, the film already had an online "premiere" on UFragTV earlier this week, though if you missed that, you'll be able to download it straight from the official I Got Next website in the near future.

Fez Confirmed For 2010 Xbox Live Arcade Release

With a friendly graphic (seen below) and a headline screaming FEZ IS COMING TO XBOX LIVE ARCADE EARLY 2010, Polytron has finally confirmed release details for its upcoming puzzle/platformer/indie darling thing.

In the game, a little guy named Gomez will wear a fez and move between 2D and 3D for the purposes of puzzle solving. It won an Excellence In Visual Art award back at the 2008 Independent Games Festival and has been straight blowin' up ever since.

The 2010 date represents a bit of a delay, as it had been previously listed as a 2009 release.

The Best Possible News About Tekken 6: No Character Unlocks

See ya soon, you crotchety old bastard.

Heihachi be praised, Namco has seen the light!

There's a time-honored tradition among fighting games of forcing you to play through the arcade mode--against the boring AI, naturally--over and over ad nauseam to open up access to all the playable characters. Thankfully, it's a tradition Namco Bandai is finally casting off with Tekken 6, according to an interview on VideoGamer.com with director Katsuhiro Harada (saw this on 1UP). Good news; in my view, Tekken has generally been the most egregious offender in this category.

Why we locked the characters originally was that in the arcades, it was kind of to extend the life of the game by gradually unlocking characters. And also with the home versions as well, because you can rent games or whatever, it was to protect us against that.

That’s kind of outdated now though, especially with online play. If we were to have locked characters it would irritate a lot of people, to be playing against others online and to not have all the characters available. So I think it’s no longer useful.

'Tis music to mine ears, because, man, that is one outdated mechanic. I very grudgingly played through Street Fighter IV just enough times to get almost everyone, but I never did get around to unlocking Seth. There's no bigger bummer than getting a new fighting game and hopping online only to face characters you can't choose yourself, and I'm glad Namco's come around to that fact.

Gut check time: Who's still a Tekken fan around here? It's a big year for fighting games; is this your game? Here's a reminder of how it's shaping up.

Review of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen

Platform: (X360)

3 out of 5

One shall stand...

Contrary to the spirit of its namesake, Activision's Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen game is exactly what meets the eye: a mindless, mildly entertaining tie-in shooter based on Michael Bay's mindless summer action movie. The game does a good job of implementing a transforming mechanic that blends shooting and melee combat with vehicular action, and it also has a decent grasp of what makes a good third-person action game in general. It's fun enough to use your big robot to blow up other big robots in short bursts, but a lack of variety in the mission design makes it run out of steam before you can blast through all of its available action.

Revenge has separate Autobot and Decepticon campaigns that relate to the movie's storyline. But the missions and locations in both campaigns range from similar to identical, so the only reason to play through both of them is to play as all of the available Transformers. Each of them has different sorts of weapons and, of course, turns into a different sort of vehicle. You can use the transforming ability to pull off a handful of neat tricks, like speeding down the road as Bumblebee in Camaro form, hitting your turbo boost, changing to robot mode and leaping straight into the air, then grabbing onto and climbing up the face of a building like you're King Kong. The controls are generally responsive in both vehicle and robot forms, and the melee and shooting are competent and satisfying enough as well, if a little repetitive.

...one shall--wait, wrong movie.

All the characters you'd expect from the Bay movies are in here, from Optimus Prime and Ironhide to Starscream and Megatron (and, of course, the ones you've never heard of). You'll get to do some flying as helicopters and planes from time to time, but most of the Transformers turn into ground-based vehicles, and all of them handle about the same. Each of the robots on a given side have different weapons and special abilities, but those are mostly mirrored by a character from the other faction, so again, the gameplay starts to feel stale when you finish one side's storyline and then crack into the other (though at least you can play them both concurrently if you want).

You get a marginally interesting progression mechanic by earning experience during missions that you can cash in back at HQ for upgrades like faster weapon cooldown times, more health, and a bigger turbo meter. There are also one-off challenges to complete, like getting a certain number of headshots with a given character, and these unlock some goodies like concept art and several entire episodes of the original Transformers cartoon series. It's faint praise for Revenge of the Fallen itself that my most exciting moment with it was watching "S.O.S. Dinobots" for the first time in two decades--but then, it's tough to beat the Dinobots.

Going from robot to vehicle is actually pretty fun.

The action is solid enough, but there just isn't much to do from mission to mission. The objectives rarely get more complex than "kill all the enemies coming at you until the mission is over," and when they do, they merely add a simple escort or protection layer to the basic combat. The levels feel a little bit like an open world, but in reality they're just rectangular maps that sort of let you go anywhere, until you hit their artificial boundaries. As it stands, the game is entertaining enough that it's fun to blow away nameless fodder robots for two or three missions per session, but Revenge of the Fallen really could have used a more elaborate world, more intricate mission designs, or something with more substance to wrap its basic combat mechanics around.

That combat at least translates reasonably well into online multiplayer with a handful of modes. They're all stock competitive game types--capture the shard (er, flag), a VIP mode, a control point mode, and team deathmatch--but at least there's a decent number of them. The multiplayer isn't anywhere near as serious as what you get in your Call of Duty or Halo, but there's enough entertainment value there that if the idea of taking Prime online against Megatron sounds like fun to you, it's worth doing a few times.

Actually, that pretty well describes the ideal audience for Revenge of the Fallen in general. If you're just a regular Joe looking for a great action game, you could do better. But if you've still got a special place in your heart for the Transformers series--despite what Michael Bay may have done to it in recent years--the game is fun enough to be worth taking a look at.

Release Date:

Review of The Conduit

Platform: (WII)

2 out of 5

The ASE lets you open doors and find secrets.

The Conduit is slow-moving first-person shooter with a flat story and dull enemies. Considering first-person shooters seem to be getting released at the rate of one or two a month, you'd think there wouldn't be room for a game that doesn't come close to meeting the standards of the genre. But The Conduit carves out a decent niche by being one of the few games that take place from this perspective and were developed solely for the Wii. As a Wii-only release, The Conduit is kind of neat and certainly unique. But it's more interesting for the way it uses a Wii Remote and Nunchuk than it is as an actual game.

The game's story is your typical alien-filled and shadowy government conspiracy that doesn't really go anywhere. All you really need to know is that the bug-like alien troops come out of glowing portals called conduits. So a lot of the gameplay tasks you with fighting your way up to a conduit, and then shutting it with a grenade. You'll also have to pull out the all-seeing eye, a glowing orb that acts as your primary way to interact with computers and as a beam that reveals hidden objects in the world. Sometimes you'll use this to unlock doors that block your forward progress. Other times, you'll use it to open up secret pathways to additional weaponry, disarm normally invisible mines, and so on.

You can hold two weapons at once, and you'll encounter weapons from different factions, including secret high-tech energy weapons, alien rifles, and regular human technology. You'll also grab a lot of grenades... seriously, sometimes it seems like every single enemy has a grenade on their corpse. You toss grenades by shaking the Nunchuk, which isn't always as responsive as you'd want.

Playing The Conduit requires a Wii Remote and a Nunchuk. The control is pretty intuitive, but it takes time to get used to aiming and turning by pointing at the screen. I probably fumbled around with the aiming control for around half an hour before I started getting comfortable. The game offers a lot of different sliders and options for tweaking the control, but I ended up leaving it alone in the end. The more I changed things, the worse the control felt. But even once you get the hang of the controls, it all feels a little delicate. The lock-on targeting jerks your view around, which can be disorienting. The turning radius never feels quite right and makes the game seem sluggish. In fact, all of the movement feels deliberately slower than the average shooter. But the game seems like it was built with that in mind, as it's a fairly low-impact experience overall. The instances where it gets more hectic quickly became my least favorite parts of the game, since that's when the game's control wasn't up to the task at hand.

You can open fire on live targets in the online multiplayer mode.

Overall, the campaign is short and uneventful, with plenty of repetitive moments and enough atrocious voice acting to make you almost glad that it's not particularly long. It's backed up by some decent multiplayer that comes in deathmatch, team deathmatch, and a capture the flag variant where players attempt to capture the ASE. While the control sort of got in my way here from time to time, there's really nothing else quite like it on the Wii. Heck, it even has support for the WiiSpeak peripheral, which hasn't seen any use since it was released alongside Animal Crossing: City Folk. Unfortunately, you'll have to exchange friend codes with other people who own a WiiSpeak if you actually want to use it, as it's disabled in games with random opponents. But if you've been following the way Nintendo rolls with its online feature set, that probably won't come as much of a surprise.

It has a generic look to it, but The Conduit doesn't look bad. The environments can get sort of large, and the areas are detailed well enough. You'll probably notice that those environments aren't destructible, and the enemy design is kind of lame. It also maintains a good, smooth frame rate throughout.

If you're just comparing it to other action games released on the Wii, The Conduit does some interesting things with its control and with its multiplayer modes. But other aspects, like the poor story, bland design, and awful voice acting, would be just as bad on any platform. It's that stuff that drags The Conduit down into an area where it's tough to recommend without providing a boatload of caveats. Release Date:

Review of Guitar Hero: Smash Hits

Platform: (X360)

3 out of 5

Oh, and it looks like Guitar Hero, in case you were wondering.

Guitar Hero: Smash Hits is a nearly fully featured Guitar Hero game based on the foundation laid by the last full game in the series, World Tour. It offers a song list full of tracks that have appeared in previous Guitar Hero games, but don't get your anti-rehash pitchforks out just yet. Since this is based on Guitar Hero: World Tour, you can now play as a full four-person band with vocals, drums, guitar, and bass. So it doesn't feel like warmed-over leftovers from the series' past. That said, something about the game's full $59.99 price tag doesn't quite feel right, either.

Maybe that's because these songs all appeared in games that were chosen for their guitar parts. It's no surprise that a game called Guitar Hero would have songs with great guitar parts... but that doesn't mean I want to try to sing or play drums on "Through The Fire And Flames" by DragonForce, either. Also, the game's guitar parts have been retracked with new note patterns. If you're a Guitar Hero purist with fond memories of which buttons you needed to press back in the good old days, this might bother you. But considering how much the difficulty in Guitar Hero games has ramped up since those early days, retracking the songs to place them more in line with the modern releases allows the songs to still be a challenge on the higher difficulties.

While the game has support for the goofy GHTunes feature, where you can create tracks using various instrument samples and freely share them online, it doesn't have support for the proper, paid downloadable content that you may or may not have been buying for World Tour. This seems kind of silly. Also, while the Guitar Hero series hasn't been big on exporting tracks from a disc for use with another Guitar Hero game, you should probably know that you can't export the Smash Hits soundtrack and just play it in World Tour. This would have been a nice feature, since Smash Hits is little more than a collection of new songs to play with your existing hardware.

Yup, still Guitar Hero down here, too.

Beyond that, this has the same features you'd expect to find in a Guitar Hero game. There's a career mode that provides a progression through the songs when playing alone or as a group, or you can just go to quick play, where everything's already unlocked. There are also a bunch of online modes that let you compete against or cooperate with players on the other side of the Internet.

Even though some of the songs appeared as covers in the previous games, they're all being done by the original artists now. In some cases (probably cases where the original masters weren't available), the game doesn't have the original recording. For example, Pantera's "Cowboys From Hell" is a live track. So, provided you're pleased with the feature set, it really comes down to a desire to play the songs on the disc. Probably the best advice I can give you is to take a look at that song list, weigh it against your desire to play them across multiple instruments, and go from there. There are definitely some quality songs on the list, but I think I would have rather been able to pick and choose a few of them as downloadable content for World Tour than be forced to buy them as a package.

Release Date:

Review of Fight Night Round 4

Platform: (PS3,X360)

4 out of 5

Warning: Game features punching, hitting, and gloves.

Fight Night Round 3 proved to be a great early example of the graphical prowess of the current generation of consoles. The 2006 release had well-conceived control that let new players pick up the strategy of boxing, and on top of that it looked terrific. Round 4 picks up where that game left off, offering better graphics, a similar control scheme, and a lot of underlying differences that might not seem immediately apparent, but actually add meaningful depth to boxer selection and fighting styles.

The big difference with Round 4 is that fighter heights and reach are now a factor. When you pick the taller guys with the longer reach, you'll do better if you can keep the fight at arm's length, hammering away with jabs and straights while the (hopefully) shorter fighter can't even effectively retaliate. But those shorter fighters can be way more explosive once they do manage to get inside, with hooks and uppercuts that are built to knock dudes down. At the same time, the taller, outside fighters don't excel at closer ranges. So in these fights where there's a meaningful difference in height, those stylistic differences sort of dictate the pace of the fight.

A big part of the gameplay in Fight Night now focuses on counterpunching. Sure, your normal shots do damage when they land, and you can swirl the right stick around in different ways to throw all sorts of combinations, but you're going to need to figure out the defensive actions if you want to do well at higher difficulty levels or against skilled human opposition. You can block high or low and sway around in different directions to dodge punches. The catch is that you want to time those actions just right, blocking or dodging at the last second. When you do, you set yourself up to land a counterpunch, which is more effective than your standard punches. The game feels like it sort of slows down for a second when a counterpunch is possible, and when you land one, there's a bright flash as it hits. Considering that the timing windows for both setting up and landing a counterpunch can be sort of tight, slowing it down makes total sense from a gameplay perspective. But in a game that feels mostly focused on realism, the system feels a bit more "gamey" than you might expect.

Outside the ring, Fight Night Round 4 starts to struggle a bit. Aside from "fight now," which is the game's exhibition fight mode where you just set up matches and go, there's a career mode, called Legacy. The core idea is that you want to set up your created boxer's legacy and retire as the Greatest of All Time, and to do that you'll need to play through your fighter's career and complete certain tasks. The career mode is needlessly wrapped in layers and layers of unnecessary menus, like an e-mail inbox that literally never tells you anything of any value. Or a calendar that forces you to simulate the days leading up to your fight, even if nothing that matters to your fighter actually happens on those days. A simple screen that lets you select your next opponent and choose how many training sessions you want before your next fight (with the trade-off being that the more time you spend fighting, the closer you get to getting old and needing to retire) could have streamlined this process without losing anything meaningful along the way. In this mode you'll also have the option to play a few training minigames. If you choose to auto-train, you only get 50 percent of the maximum benefit you could get by acing the training session. I did so horribly at my first few sessions that I decided to auto-train for the rest of my career. That decision never came back to haunt me.

Dodge right after he winks, then counterpunch!

Fight Night Round 4 has 48 licensed fighters in it, many of which come from the annals of boxing history. I mean, it's awesome that Muhammad Ali and Mike Tyson are in the game and on the cover, but it's kind of a sad commentary on the state of boxing that these great, long-retired fighters are still the most recognizable faces in the sport. Even the commentary in the game makes a reference to how boxing used to be a major sport. But with the game's great create-a-boxer features, you can fill out the game's roster however you see fit.

While you can go through the standard process of adjusting sliders to move brows and tilt noses, the game also supports photo imports, both from the cameras on the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, as well as via EA's website, where you can simply upload much better, higher resolution photos. From there, the game seamlessly downloads the photos, you adjust a few markers to point out the features of the face you're importing, and it generates a head. While it can go wrong in several ridiculous ways, when it gets it right, the head importing feature is kind of scary. Beyond the faces, you can also place your created fighters into different weight classes, select from different fighting and blocking styles, tweak your height or your reach, and place points into multiple attributes, such as right arm strength or stamina.

While you can certainly spend a lot of time fighting against the various levels of AI in the quick fight or career modes, this is a boxing game. It almost goes without saying that you'll enjoy it more if you're playing against another person. Naturally, the exhibition fight mode lets you square off locally. But the game also has an online component to it. It offers the standard ranked and unranked fights, but there's also a cool mode that revolves around the created fighters and has separate leaderboards, complete with a champion. This mode, called World Championship, levels the stats across the different created fighters and lets you duke it out, work your way up the rankings, and hopefully challenge for the belt.

Presentation-wise, the game's got great graphics. The crowds in the larger arenas, specifically, look great. Faces deform in a slow-motion replay that shows off punches that make fighters fall down. And punches generally look like they're doing damage and glancing off of blocking fighters properly. The audio of the fights is great, and the commentary is solid, at least at first. The duo on commentary have plenty of great stories about the real-life fighters in the game, but those only come up outside of career mode. Created fighters don't have any such stories, so the guys run through some various anecdotes. You'll hear every single one of those after 10 or 20 fights in career mode, which makes the commentary kind of annoying. Also, it's worth noting that you can import your own music and use it for menus and boxer entrances on the Xbox 360, but you'll have to disable the existing music entirely to use any external music, which seems a little weird. If you want to just import one track for your fighter, it seems like you're totally out of luck.

Some of the things surrounding the boxing in Fight Night Round 4 are kind of annoying, especially if you're planning on primarily playing the game by yourself. But the fighting itself is fantastic and the online feels sharp enough to substitute for local opposition. Provided you haven't completely shifted any love you might have for boxing over to mixed martial arts already, you'll probably love it.

Release Date:

Review of Sam & Max Save the World

Platform: (XBLM)

4 out of 5

The Secret Service dance number is a real high point.

The six episodes of classic adventure gaming found in Sam & Max Save the World make for some of the funniest moments in the past five years of gaming. Compiling them into one download and only charging $20 for them feels like some sort of clerical error... well, at least it does until you pick up the controller and start playing. Translating a point-and-click adventure game over to a gamepad makes everything feel just a touch slower, and after an hour or so of play, I found myself wishing that the phony "warp drive" option in the menus actually did something.

But the pokey cursor movement that you get when translating a mouse cursor to a gamepad and the game's occasionally choppy frame rate are probably the only bad things you can say about this collection. The characters are charming and memorable, the dialogue is often hilarious, and the game is technically proficient enough to usually convey that dialogue with the appropriate comic timing. The episodic nature of the set lets Sam (the dog) and Max (the rabbit-like thing) get into plenty of wild situations. While each episode manages to be fairly self-contained, they play off of one-another enough to make the whole season feel like a cohesive story. As such, allow me to advise you to play through all six episodes in order, even though the main menu lets you take them on however you please.

The gameplay itself is pretty standard as point-and-click adventure games go. You're primarily solving puzzles to move forward, and you interact with objects by, you know, clicking on them. Clicking on an open area lets you walk around the environments, and you also have an inventory of items that you use in conjunction with other items. So, for example, you might pick up a plate and set it on a cow's head. Or maybe you'll pull out your pistol and shoot objects, just for kicks. The puzzles you'll solve are generally pretty clever, and since moving past the puzzles gives you more opportunities for hilarious dialogue on topics including hypnosis, child stars, goofy songs, old video game hardware, the mafia, and Abe Lincoln, moving through the game is appropriately rewarding.

Graphically, the game stays fairly cartoony, with just enough facial detail for the characters to give knowing glances to each other, or the camera. There's enough fidelity to the environments to make things you'll need to interact with plainly visible, though the frame rate can get pretty dicey in spots. The audio is fantastic, with great voice acting across the board and great music backing it all up.

Funny games are still something of a rarity, so even though these episodes of Sam & Max originated on the PC two years ago, they still totally stand up against more recent releases. Also, with six different episodes to move through, you'll probably end up spending something like eight to 12 hours playing through them all. When taken as one long game, the quality stays high throughout, making that $20 investment well worth the money.

Release Date:

Review of The Legendary Starfy

Platform: (DS)

3 out of 5

It's a great-looking game by 2D standards...

Since we're not likely to see another Mario platformer on the DS anytime soon, I was pleased to find out that Nintendo and developer TOSE were finally bringing the Starfy series to the Western Hemisphere. The Legendary Starfy is the fifth game in this aquatic action series and the first to make it out of Japan, and I'd hoped it would scratch the same itch that New Super Mario Bros. did on the DS a few years ago.

Starfy's gameplay isn't as dynamic or satisfying, however, as it was in Mario's last handheld outing. The game's artwork and characters are cute as heck (almost sickeningly so), making it suitable for any DS-playing rugrats you have running around. As a pure platformer, though, it didn't have the chops to satisfy me in the same way other, more refined games (many from Nintendo itself) have done.

The Legendary Starfy is a joy to look at, full of big, colorful, well-animated sprites and a tasteful combination of 2D and (where appropriate) 3D backgrounds. You've got all these exaggerated characters based on all kinds of marine wildlife--starfish, lobsters, clams, a space rabbit (?)--yapping away at each other in nicely animated cutscenes that tell the game's simple storyline.

...but the platforming is a little too simplistic.

The dramatic interludes intrude on the action a little too often for my taste; everyone but the silent Starfy is too talkative for their own good, and though the game was translated into English according to Nintendo's usual impeccable standards, the dialogue is too earnest, and not nearly clever or tongue-in-cheek enough, to warrant the amount of jabbering that stands in the way of the action. There are a few laugh-out-loud moments, though, and the characters are all likable enough, even when you wish they'd just stop jawing and let you get on with things.

When you do get into the gameplay, you'll find Starfy has a rather basic set of platforming moves: double jumps, gliding, a spin attack, and so on. You can team up with your space rabbit friend to assume a few alternate animal forms with special powers, and there's the occasional special level that has you doing things like riding in a mine cart. But mostly, the game is about exploring simplistic levels to look for hidden items, spin your way through some benign enemies, and find the doorway to the next section of the level.

You do get different controls depending on whether Starfy is underwater, where you can swim very quickly, or on dry land, where the game plays more like a traditional platformer. This helps give the gameplay a little more variety, but there were also times where I felt like I was switching between the two styles--which use some of the same buttons for different actions--too quickly to keep up with which button did what. The collision detection is also a little weird in spots, so overall the action doesn't feel as precise as you'd expect it to in a game like this.

Kids will probably love it.

There are a few other features around the game's periphery, but they don't really address the core action. You can collect a bunch of outfits and accessories to dress Starfy up in, but it would be nice if these actually applied to your in-game character rather than just a 3D model in your menu screen. There are a ton of secret levels to unlock outside the main story ones, where you can find more secrets, and you can invite a second player to control Starfy's female counterpart Starly for boss battles and at a few other predefined moments (though the bosses are generally easier to manage by yourself than with another player gumming up the works).

The Legendary Starfy really seems targeted at a younger audience. With its cartoon-like visuals and light challenge level, kids will probably eat it right up--and it's surely a higher quality game than most of the child-oriented DS games on the market, coming as it does with the highly polished sheen characteristic of all Nintendo games. Maybe if Starfy had been around in the Western market for years and engendered the same sort of nostalgia that we older gamers feel for franchises like Mario, I'd be more forgiving of this game's simplistic nature--but as a newcomer to the series, I found myself wanting for a platformer with a little more meat on its bones.

Release Date:

Review of Ghostbusters: The Video Game

Platform: (X360)

3 out of 5

The gang's all here! But is that enough?

Ghostbusters: The Video Game belongs to a rare strain of movie tie-in video games. Rather than serving as an expensive marketing bauble for a new theatrical release, this game--alongside titles like The Godfather: The Game and Scarface: The World Is Yours--is designed to mine the longstanding affection for a long-dormant film franchise. As mercenary as that might sound, the involvement of the original writers and the good majority of the original cast made it sound like this might actually offer an authentic Ghostbusters experience, and for the most part, it does. The game is absolutely bursting at the seams with details that only a line-quoting Ghostbusters fan would notice and appreciate, and the story itself goes to great lengths to incorporate major aspects of the Ghostbusters fiction. That heavy emphasis on nostalgia can't completely distract from the game's dearth of actual laughs, or the repetitious, scuffed-up feel of the gameplay.

Taking place a few years after the events of Ghostbusters II, Ghostbusters: The Video Game puts you in the role of a nameless, mute new recruit who's been brought on as an "Experimental Equipment Technician," which is another way of saying "your proton pack has all kinds of new tricks." Right off the bat, you're hanging in the firehouse with the boys, listening to Janine take bizarre calls, striking up conversations with Vigo the Carpathian, and generally just soaking in the rich ectoplasmic atmosphere. Once the game kicks in, you'll go on a whirlwind tour of memorable Ghostbusters faces and places, starting off with the recapturing of Slimer at the Sedgwick Hotel, moving to Times Square to face the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man, and then on to the main branch of the New York Public Library to finally bring in the silence-loving Grey Lady. The story even does a fairly admirable job of tying it all back into a story about Gozer the Gozerian. For the first few hours, I honestly found all the loving fan service intoxicating. Even the new characters and locations seemed to mesh well.

It's like a Ghostbusters wax museum!

Eventually, though, I realized that, while there were moments of amusement, there hadn't been an honest laugh in the game. The references and call-backs are relentless, but just saying "hey, remember that?" isn't inherently funny. The tone of the material itself isn't great, but part of the blame definitely rests on the voice work itself, which often feels flat and disconnected from the action. Still, you can tell that someone is really proud of the fact that they got Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Harold Ramis, Ernie Hudson, Annie Potts, and William Atherton to reprise their roles, because it seems like there's barely a moment that someone's not chatting your ear off. Characters are constantly explaining your next objective, providing some backstory, or shouting out helpful tips when you're going at it with ghosts. Again, it's rich in volume, but it can feel overbearing, and it has a habit of recycling certain lines a little too often. It bums me out to admit it, but after spending some six hours playing through the story in Ghostbusters: The Video Game, I don't want to hear any of those actors' voices for a while.

The process of trapping a ghost is an involved one, and in Ghostbusters: The Video Game, a terrific-looking one, as well. The way your energy beam chaotically twists around your targets and blows apart any unfortunate objects that might get in your path, and the way a ghost will stretch out and try to claw its way away from the trap look as good as it ever did in the movies. The characters look uncannily like 19-year-younger versions of the actors playing them, though there's something about the way they animate, particularly during cutscenes, that feels cartoony in a way that doesn't quite match the characters or the voice work.

The gameplay is reliant on the basic act of busting ghosts and the familiar hardware associated with it. There are a lot of lesser spooks that will evaporate if you hammer on them long enough, but you'll also spend a lot of time going through the full capture process, wearing down ghosts and wrangling them into a trap. You start off with a basic neutrino wand and ghost trap setup, but as the story progresses, you'll be granted upgrades that allow you to shoot more concussive blasts of energy, "freeze" ghosts with a stasis beam, neutralize toxic black slime with your positively charged slime blower, and more. Some of your proton pack's abilities--specifically the capture beam and the slime tether--let you play with the game's physics, allowing you to engage in some occasional light puzzle work. You'll earn money for every ghost you take out, which you can put towards various upgrades, but for as regularly as the game introduces new toys for you to play with, I didn't feel like the core of the gameplay really changed that much from the beginning to the end, and it all feels a little bit sloppy. I won't deny that it's unique amongst third-person shooters, but even still, what was exciting the first few times eventually felt rote to me.

There's no question that trapping ghosts is a cool-looking process.

Most of the time, the game puts you on a narrow, straightforward path. Turns out this is a good thing, as it's rotten about giving you cues as to where you need to go next, which can lead to some aimless wandering on the rare occasion that it opens up a little bit. You'll spend most of the game rolling with some combination of the Ghostbusters team, who will occasionally lead you down the right path, back you up in a fight, and revive you if you get knocked down. Your AI-controlled teammates can get knocked down too, and it seems like that happens rather often, leading to a number of chaotic situations where it feels like you're spending more time babysitting the AI than actually bustin' ghosts.

Perhaps most baffling to me about my experience with Ghostbusters: The Video Game is, as problematic as I found the single-player experience, how much I found myself enjoying the multiplayer. This online mode consists of six different four-player co-op "job" types, which you can attack one at a time, or in a few different three-level mini-campaigns. It's mostly just variants on arena-based multiplayer modes you're probably already familiar with, but the unique tools of the Ghostbusters put an interesting twist on them, and there's some good persistence with the money you earn and a "most wanted" list of ghosts to hunt down to keep you coming back. Some modified weapon behavior aside, it doesn't really handle much differently from the single-player, but the pacing is tighter and playing with live teammates is far more gratifying. This, no doubt, is a point that will irritate PC players, as that version of Ghostbusters: The Video Game features none of the multiplayer action found in the PS3 and Xbox 360 versions.

Ghostbusters: The Video Game is nothing if not enthusiastic for the source material, which will undoubtedly be enough for some to have a good time. It certainly kept me going for a good while, but nostalgia alone couldn't quite carry the whole experience. This is one of the pitfalls of something as recognizable as Ghostbusters. It comes with a built-in audience, but that audience can come with some high expectations.

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Review of Rocket Riot

Platform: (XBLM)

4 out of 5

There are a bunch of different level themes, including pirate ships, haunted houses, warehouses, and more.

Rocket Riot looks and sounds like some kind of downloadable remake to a cult Amiga game that never existed. It seems like the remake of the sort of game that your closest British friend constantly pesters you about, chastising you for not being up on how popular the Amiga and the C64 were in the UK. That's not to say that Codeglue's Xbox Live Arcade game really has anything in common with Paradroid or Sensible Soccer. But it's just the general vibe I get from this fun, cool-looking jet-pack-based shooter.

The shorter version of an already short story is that a legless pirate escapes captivity and steals everyone's legs. Scientists come up with a jet pack that screws to your ass, and... you know what? It doesn't matter. The story pops up between segments in the single-player mode and serves as a cute little diversion that doesn't get in the way.

There's a whimsical art style to Rocket Riot that also gives the game a very light-hearted feel. In-game, everything has a blocky, pixelated look, but the camera perspective bends just enough to let you see that these are fully polygonal characters, not flat 2D sprites. As a little dude with a jet pack and a rocket launcher, you can fly around the game's blocky environments at will, popping off missiles in any direction with the right stick. While that technically makes the game a dual-joystick shooter, you have to cock the rockets back a bit by holding the right stick in a direction if you want to get the most movement out of them. Gravity takes hold after that, so you're firing a lot of arcing shots, forcing you to adjust your aim to compensate on longer shots. That concept--aiming your arcing shots to score hits--is the core of Rocket Riot. It feels right, with just enough control over your aim and how hard you launch your rockets to make the whole thing feel like second nature after an hour or two with the game.

Of course, there's a bit more to the gameplay than boosting around and firing rockets. Rocket Riot has a collection of power-ups to collect, like homing missiles, bigger rockets, faster rockets, a shield, one that repels incoming fire, one that makes you smaller and harder to hit, and so on. Furthermore, there are a bunch of different rulesets that come up in the single-player game. Most of the time you just need to kill a number of enemies to proceed. But some have you digging around through the blocks in search of a specific character. Or eliminating marked sets of blocks while fending off enemy attacks. Or another that has you grab a football and drag it over to a set of goalposts to score. The single-player mode also has boss fights that put you up against a bigger, more resilient opponent.

Most levels simply ask you to destroy everyone who gets in your way.

In multiplayer, the game lets you enter into standard deathmatches, or other modes like Golden Guy, where you attempt to grab a gold suit and survive for as long as possible while wearing it. Or Rugby Riot, which uses the same sort of ball rules as the single-player. Of course, playing against human opposition is way more exciting than playing any of the other modes, both because humans tend to be a bit smarter and because having opponents that don't die in one hit makes you have to think a bit more.

The only real downer about Rocket Riot is that it does begin to get repetitive when playing offline. Most of the levels are brainless battles against dopey enemies that rarely shoot straight, and the game types you'll see in each 10-level cycle tend to be identical. Plus, there don't seem to be too many people playing the game online at the moment, especially if you're looking for something other than a standard deathmatch. Of course, the game launched immediately after some Xbox Live technical issues, so it's hard to say how the player base will change over time.

With that in mind, you should know that Rocket Riot will eventually wear thin. But its great looks, clever gameplay, and huge roster of unlockable characters give you plenty to do, and the end result is quite a bit better than the game's $10 price tag might initially lead you to believe. If you're after a faux-retro jet-pack game with multiplayer modes or a more action-oriented Worms game, or anything even remotely resembling those descriptions, you'll probably enjoy most of what Rocket Riot has to offer.

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Review of Rock Band Unplugged

Platform: (PSP)

3 out of 5

I think that crazy tiger is following me.

Harmonix and Backbone go for a fusion of old and new with Rock Band Unplugged for the PSP, which has the multitrack-juggling gameplay of Frequency and Amplitude, but with the structure and aesthetics of Rock Band. Conceptually I find this whole package incredibly appealing, though in practice, the game is hampered by performance issues, lots of recycled Rock Band songs, and the lack of any social aspect. So yeah, it's got issues, but it still capably captures much of the Rock Band feel, and it's still fun to play.

When you first load it up, it's immediately apparent that this is Rock Band. The menus retain those distinctive psychedelic hues, and even though the texture quality and the number of polygons has been noticeably reduced, it's still a clean, sharp-looking game. The focus of the game is primarily on the world tour mode which, aside from its diminished scope, is nearly indistinguishable from the console version. You're still trotting the globe, playing gigs to earn money, fans, and stars, and unlock bigger and better transportation options and support staff. The key difference, and this is something that penetrates down into the core of the gameplay, is that rather than being a member of the band, you are the band. When you create your band, you'll choose the name and the look of all four band members, and you use the money you earn to buy new gear and clothes for the whole group. The whole creation/customization element in Unplugged doesn't go as deep as it does in a full-blown Rock Band game, with fewer things to customize and fewer ways to customize them. On the other hand, you've got a four-piece of rock dolls to play dress-up with, instead of just one person.

Whether or not you've played Rock Band, there's going to be a little learning curve to Unplugged, since you're now playing all four instruments on a song instead of just one. You're still hitting buttons in time with notes as they scroll down the screen--multiplied by a factor of four. This probably sounds crazy, but the game makes it manageable by essentially auto-playing an instrument for a while after you play a section without making any mistakes, allowing you to switch over to another instrument. To pull this off flawlessly, you need to not only be aware of when the track you're playing will clear out--something that the game highlights with an extra-large note at the end--but which track you need to play next. The four instrument tracks are lined up side-by-side, which means that you'll often have to quickly hop over a track or two before getting to the right one. It can be manic, and if you don't get to the track you need to clear on time, or if you just make a mistake, it can feel like it's taking forever for the next eligible section to scroll down.

I'm pretty sure this is the only time a one-man band has even been remotely cool.

But even with the added track-juggling stuff and the lack of instrument controllers, Rock Band Unplugged still taps into that sensation that you are really playing these songs, like some kind of one-man, headphone karaoke. The note patterns on medium were a little sparse for my tastes, but playing on hard, I found it to be really satisfying and enjoyably challenging. It's unfortunate, then, that the frame rate in Unplugged occasionally stumbles. Most of the time everything is moving smoothly enough that it seems fine, but once you get a lot of notes on screen, and you switch on the score-multiplying overdrive effect, things get crazy choppy. A solid frame rate is one of the most critical things for a rhythm game, and it's disappointing that Unplugged doesn't quite nail it.

The track listing may be another sticking point for some folks. With a few, wonderful exceptions--like Jackson 5's "ABC"--the music is a mix of songs from the main Rock Band games and DLC. It's a lively, interesting mix of music, but if you've played a lot of Rock Band, there's a good possibility that you're already kind of worn out on a lot of the songs in Unplugged. If you're looking for more music, there's a PSP-specific music store built into Unplugged. There are ten songs in the PSP music store as of this writing, and Harmonix has promised more in the future, but my issue here is that of value. Currently, all the songs being offered are $1.99 a pop, same as you'd pay for most regular Rock Band DLC. I understand that Harmonix still has to spend the time mapping out note paths for all four instruments, and the licensing fees are probably no different, but it's harder for me to justify two bucks for a song when I can't even play it with my friends.

It's an imperfect package, but even the sporadic frame rate chop and well-worn track list couldn't conspire to keep me from really enjoying most of my time with Rock Band Unplugged. There aren't many rhythm games on the PSP, but this is easily the most satisfying experience I've had with the genre on the PSP, warts and all.

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Review of Prototype

Platform: (PS3,X360)

4 out of 5

Stepping to a walking supervirus is ill-advised.

Radical Entertainment surprised a lot of people on the last generation of consoles with The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction, an over-the-top open-world take on Marvel's green-skinned beast that let you do things like hurl city buses directly into helicopters. Now Radical is back on modern hardware with Prototype, which is basically the same game as Ultimate Destruction with an original (still comic book-like) storyline and a startling number of new combat abilities bolted onto the existing framework. Radical almost went too far with its kitchen-sink approach to combat design, but the gameplay here is satisfying and broad enough that you can have plenty of fun with it even without mastering the nuances of every last combo and attack.

You can soar over the Manhattan skyline and hoist tanks over your head in this game, so it's tempting to stick Prototype in the "superhero" category. But there's really nothing heroic about the protagonist Alex Mercer. He's patient zero at the center of a horrendous, engineered viral outbreak that's turned most of New York City into a quarantined hellhole. Post-infection, every district is occupied by hideous monsters or the military trying to quell them--and unfortunately, both sides are out for your head. Luckily, the infection has turned you into a one-man bio-army capable of bashing, slashing, and demolishing your way through just about any obstacle.

Mercer is on a quest to find out who inflicted this curse on him--and then exact vengeance--and he doesn't care who he hurts in the process. No shades of moral gray here; you'll unavoidably (almost gleefully) massacre hundreds of civilians and military personnel with your newfound powers as you follow the trail of evidence and approach the slightly convoluted truth of what brought about all this madness. The storyline is a little disjointed and the cutscenes a bit clumsy--and both of them intrude on the action more frequently than I would have liked--but they do a decent enough job of moving you from mission to mission, where the game's real value is.

The number of combat moves you can pull off feels almost endless.

Name a type of gameplay, and odds are Prototype has it covered. There's combo-based melee. Lock-on shooting. Vehicular combat. Urban free-running. Disguises and stealth. You'd expect a genetic superman like Mercer to be able to do just about anything, but the game almost--almost--collapses under the sheer volume of options available to you during combat. The upgrades screen includes dozens of abilities spread across numerous pages, and not only did I get nowhere close to unlocking them all during my first playthrough, but I didn't even think to use all of the powers and moves I did get access to. The number of button combinations you'd need to remember and bust out on the fly to utilize every last ability is too overwhelming for them all to be useful concurrently while you're in the thick of the game's often dizzying action.

The good news is that you don't really need to use every last ability to enjoy Prototype's outrageous combat, since the game does a good job of making the various styles of gameplay blend together so you can easily pull off a lot of cool, flashy combos. You might glide over a battalion of troops, ground-slam into their midst, grab a dropped rocket launcher, leap a hundred feet into the air, and fire it multiple times at a tank before hitting the ground, then grabbing the burning husk of that tank over your head and flinging it into a group of soldiers. Or you could run straight up the face of a skyscraper, jump kick a helicopter, then remove the pilots from their seats and take control of the chopper to lay waste to a group of mutated monsters before hitting the ground and unleashing your tentacle-like mutant appendages on the survivors in a series of whirling combos. The game doesn't nail any one area of the combat as well as it could have if the developer had focused the game's scope more tightly, but it's hard not to be impressed by the sheer range and audacity of things Mercer can do, and the wild scenarios these powers can create.

That's all once you get past the slightly daunting learning curve, that is--and even then, the game will throw you a curveball here and there. Prepare to be frustrated from time to time when the mission difficulty amps up to insane levels and you feel it's you against the entire world all of a sudden. There are ways to mitigate the onslaught, things like consuming enemies for health and unleashing last-ditch "devastator" moves, but from time to time you'll likely feel like you missed grabbing an essential weapon or making a critical jump because of some overly long animation or camera-angle quirk. In general, you'll need to master all the ins and outs of the high-flying movement and various survival techniques to get through the tougher missions without throwing your controller at a wall. You might end up doing that anyway, but when you do get good at juggling all your abilities, the combat is quite rewarding and hard to resist coming back to even when it gets a little abusive.

The game's version of New York is sparse but functional.

Outside Prototype's 30 story missions, there's a good number of side activities to engage in that will net you experience points to buy more upgrades with. The optional missions mostly focus on arbitrary challenges like "kill a bunch of people with this specific power in three minutes" or "use your glide powers to land in the middle of this target." In other words, they don't tie into the storyline or add any color to the game world, though you do have a good couple hundred people who make up the "web of intrigue" that you can track down. By killing them and absorbing their memories, you can fill in brief video vignettes that fill in small bits of the events that led up to the current outbreak. I wish Radical had put more effort into making the game's version of New York feel livelier; the streets are full of screaming citizens and traffic jams ripe for destruction at the appropriate moments, but otherwise there's not a lot of personality hiding between the game's generic-looking skyscrapers.

Prototype is really all about player empowerment, ramping up the number and intensity of larger-than-life superhero abilities consistently as you go. If you've ever harbored fantasies about soaring over skyscrapers and going on destructive urban rampages involving wantonly thrown automobiles--and who among us hasn't, really--odds are you'll find a lot to like about this game.

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Review of Red Faction: Guerrilla

Platform: (PS3,X360)

4 out of 5

Mason surveys the landscape.

A healthy dose of satisfying destruction can really go a long way. In this case, the ability to destroy raises Red Faction: Guerrilla up from being a fairly standard open-world game with plain-jane missions and scattered optional tasks into something really special. When you round it out with an interesting Martian theme and factor in the game's solid multiplayer, the end result comes out feeling mostly great.

Guerrilla is the third game in the Red Faction line, and it's the first one to be released in quite some time. It opens with you, as miner Alec Mason, arriving on Mars to see your brother and put in some good, honest work. Before too long, your brother is dead and you've been sucked into a brewing rebellion with the rest of the Red Faction. The reds are fighting against the EDF--that's the Earth Defense Force--who seems to be pretty good at oppressing the labor class on Mars. Seeing as how they just gunned down your brother and you've narrowly avoided being their next victim, you quickly join up and start taking on tasks to slowly disrupt the EDF's control.

That control is region-based, with each region of Mars offering a number of tasks that can lower the level of control that the EDF has over a sector while also raising the morale of the people, inspiring them to fight at your side should you find yourself in a public battle. The control level is what gets you to accomplish side tasks, as you won't be able to liberate a region without first lowering the level of control below a certain threshold. Doing so unlocks the final mission for a region, which liberates it and moves the story forward to a new area. Most of the story missions are straightforward, though some of the longer ones start slow and end frantically. While the longer missions provide checkpoints, there were a couple of cases where I wished they had one a little closer to the tricky part.

There are plenty of ways to blow things up on Mars.

The side missions in Red Faction: Guerrilla are broken up into categories, and each area has a few of each type. For me, the most interesting and fun missions were the ones where you ride around in a turret on the back of a car and have to destroy a bunch of EDF property while protecting your vehicle from damage. This one's great because it plays right into the game's destructive strengths. Others, like having to drive a car from point A to point B before time expires, or another that has you rescuing hostages from trigger-happy troops and returning them to safety, are decidedly less exciting. Here's another note for you completists out there. Upon finishing the 20 main story missions, the game dumps you back into the world and lets you clean up any remaining business, like side missions or finding collectibles. But it also makes many of those remaining missions harder than they would be normally. So you'll have an easier time if you completely clear out each sector one by one before liberating them.

Even though a lot of the single-player stuff in Red Faction: Guerrilla sounds a little boilerplate on its own, the end result is still a fairly exciting campaign. You'll purchase enough weapons and upgrades along the way to keep the new stuff coming, and there are enough side mission types around that you're almost guaranteed to enjoy at least one of them--and you don't need to do too many of them before unlocking an area's final mission. So it rarely feels like you're grinding it out just to move on. The weapons are satisfying and, well, you blow up tons of buildings along the way. It's the inclusion of a robust physics model that makes destroying structures so much fun. Everything behaves roughly as you'd expect, so taking out key points of a bridge's foundation, for example, is much more effective than just grabbing your hammer and punching random holes in the bridge itself. Seeing buildings collapse and watching smokestacks crumble, often falling onto other structures on their way down, is the game's most exciting feature.

Blowing things up is a key component of the game's offline multiplayer, a pass-and-play mode called wrecking crew. There are multiple minigames to play here, and all of them are centered on you taking one weapon into a small cluster of buildings and blowing them apart. Some give you limited time to blow up as much as possible, others give you limited ammo to force you to make every shot do as much damage as possible, and so on. It's a great showpiece for the game's destructible structures.

Oh yeah, there are also walkers. They don't move fast, but they tear up everything in their path.

There's also a full-on competitive online multiplayer mode with Halo-style matchmaking. I'm of the mind that most open-world games that have tried to include competitive multiplayer haven't really worked out so well, so I have to admit that I was pretty surprised by Red Faction: Guerrilla. The multiplayer strips away the open world of the single-player in favor of tighter, more focused maps. The weapons from the single-player appear in some form, and you can also wear various backpacks that give you special abilities. The jet pack from the single-player game appears, as well as things like a vision pack that lets you see enemies through walls. Or a fleetfoot pack that makes you run super-fast when triggered. Or a stealth pack that makes you mostly invisible for short periods of time. I especially enjoyed the rhino pack, which unleashes a powerful forward charge when triggered, busting through walls in the process. The weapons, backpacks, and demolition-friendly buildings make the multiplayer modes--a mostly standard set of deathmatch, capture the flag, and other objective-based options--a lot of fun. The game also gives you a steady stream of unlockable characters and other objects as you gain online experience.

While there are clunky bits at the fringes of Red Faction: Guerrilla that give it a handful of frustrating or disappointing moments, the core moments of the game are exciting and well-conceived. Factor in a thrilling multiplayer component and the sheer satisfaction provided by the wholesale destruction of huge structures and you've got more than enough reasons to get your ass to Mars.

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Review of Boom Blox Bash Party

Platform: (WII)

4 out of 5

We like the blox, the blox that... yeah.

It's taken some time for third-party developers to really capitalize on all the strengths of the Nintendo Wii, and last year's Boom Blox still stands as one of the finest examples of a third party really nailing it. The simple concept of knocking over blocks was broadly accessible, the motion controls were satisfyingly tactile, and the boxy, playful presentation even made the best of the Wii's relatively limited technical horsepower. There were a few issues with level design and the overall flow of the game, but it was still a great eight-to-eighty kind of experience. Almost exactly a year later EA's got a sequel with Boom Blox Bash Party, a game that does pretty much what the last game did, only better. There's more levels, new gameplay mechanics, better online, and even if the new stuff is a little hit and miss, the package has been generally refined to make it easier to get to the stuff you like.

Like the original, Bash Party is fundamentally still a big physics-based toy that taps into the primal satisfaction of breaking stuff but without any consequence. It generally doesn't take too long to get a hang of the controls, and when you do, it's basically electronic bubble wrap. Using the Wii Remote, you'll chuck balls at towers of blocks (or is it blox?) yank the blocks out Jenga-style, blast them apart with cannons, or use the new slingshot mechanic to knock them around. The slingshot stuff isn't my favorite, mostly because it requires you to move forward and back with the remote to line up your shot and determine how much power you put behind it. It's a motion that has never felt right to me on the Wii, so the slingshot suffers for it. That's more than made up for, though, by the new color-matching mechanic, which gives you different colored balls that you can toss to change the colors of blocks. If three blocks of the same color make contact in any configuration, they'll disappear. It's an age-old puzzle-game conceit that Bash Party injects with some physics-based chaos, and the game ends up getting a lot of mileage out of this concept.

There's a ton of levels in here, and you can make your own and download others, too.

How you actually got to all the fun stuff was kind of an issue in Boom Blox. It was structured in such a way that you often had to bang your head against levels that were either too tough or that you just didn't like in order to get access to the next cool toy. Bash Party is structured in a similar, but modified fashion. The game is split up into single-player, co-op, and competitive levels, and within each of these sets, you're presented with a theme park map, where each of the themed areas represent a different set of levels. There's a pirate theme, a space theme, a superhero theme, and others, though they're not just for looks, with underwater and space levels that affect how the physics of the blocks behave. Like Boom Blox, you have to meet certain win conditions on earlier levels to advance to later ones. But, if you find yourself stuck in Bash Party, you can use the Boom Bux that you accumulate from clearing levels to buy your way through. It kind of feels like a cheat, but it works.

At the bottom of just about every menu screen in Bash Party, there's a satellite icon that you can hit to connect to EA's online level repository, where users can share levels they've built using the game's own level editor. The online stuff is ridiculously simple and fast, and since there's no direct online interaction with other players, it's able to bypass any friend codes or credentials--just hit the button, and you're there. You can sort through the available levels in a number of different ways, and the actual levels are incredibly small so there's virtually no waiting when you find one you want to play. If you find a level that you like, you can save it locally, and even take it into the game's level editor and tweak it. There's a decent amount of stuff on the server right now, some of it produced by EA, though it's tough to say if it'll get the same community toehold as something like LittleBigPlanet in the long run. Still, even with no actual multiplayer, I'm really impressed with how smart the online in Bash Party is.

It's not a massive change, but it's worth noting how the look of Boom Blox has evolved with Bash Party. It still mostly looks like a theme park filled with cuboid animals, but the art has gotten a little weirder and a little darker. It's kind of a junior-high-to-high-school or comic-book-to-graphic-novel type of shift, but it's noticeable.

Even though it's a categorically better game, Bash Party doesn't benefit from the exciting kick of such a fresh idea that the original Boom Blox did. It's still a terrific game, though, and one that's easy to enjoy for anyone with an appetite for destruction.

Release Date:

Review of Raiden Fighters Aces

Platform: (X360)

3 out of 5

Your little ship can totally decimate that big one if you just keep shooting.

Raiden Fighters Aces collects and emulates three top-down, vertically scrolling arcade shooters and ships them out at a budget price. The three games comprise the Raiden Fighters series, starting with the original 1996 arcade game, its 1997 sequel, and Raiden Fighters Jet, originally a 1998 release. These are all pretty good shooters, and the game offers enough different options and modes to ensure that the collection can appeal to players of all skill levels.

The game boots to a menu, where you can tinker around with display options and choose which of the three games you'd like to play. The visual options are fairly detailed, letting you adjust the size of the game screen, rotate the view (in case you've got a sideways TV), turn on and adjust scanlines, and so on. Once you've selected a game, you're presented with another menu where you can adjust the difficulty and play in a few different modes. The difficulty adjustments are pretty key and make a huge difference. For example, when you set the game to practice mode, the enemies don't fire back. That makes it (and most of its achievements) pretty easy. If you turn on expert mode, enemies explode into a cloud of bullets. That makes it, well, quite a bit harder. You can set the number of continues, replay for a higher score, or practice specific sections to get them down just right. When you're done playing, you can save recordings of your performance for later viewing.

The games themselves are fairly iconic vertical shooters that don't change that dramatically from one game to the next. Each one lets you pick from a variety of different ships that have different weapon systems, but the main upgrade path has you choosing between collecting missile power-ups or laser upgrades. Typically, the lasers home in on their targets. The games have a lot of tanks and jets to blow up along the way, but they're also focused pretty heavily on boss battles against huge war machines that spew bullets and take a real pounding before going up in flames. Each game isn't terribly long on its own, but provided you're playing on a difficulty setting that puts up a fight, it won't be a total breeze, either. Even on its hardest setting, none of the games delve into bullet hell territory, which helps make them feel like games you might actually be able to complete without being some sort of twitchy superhuman.

At $19.99, Raiden Fighters Aces compares favorably to the standard Xbox Live Arcade pricing structure, where each one of these three games would probably run $10. So if you have a hankering for this type of classic scrolling shooter gameplay, Raiden Fighters Aces is a strong package that you'll certainly enjoy.

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Review of inFAMOUS

Platform: (PS3)

5 out of 5

There's a lot of city out there to save.

Let's go ahead and get InFamous' short list of downsides out of the way. Technically, the game is a little rough around the edges; occasional frame rate and draw-in issues and some questionable character animation make it look slightly less impressive than what you'd want from a PlayStation 3 exclusive. It's a little on the hard side in the first few hours, before you start building up your wild electrical superpowers and you can really fight back against the large number of enemies the game throws at you. Oh, and I guess your portly sidekick Zeke is kind of annoying from time to time.

OK, now that those minor complaints are out of the way, I can spend the rest of the review talking about how much fun I had blasting, zapping, climbing, and flying around the big urban comic book world Sucker Punch created for this game.

InFamous really is a comic book transposed into the video game format. It even starts out with a quick, outlandish origin story: You're bike messenger Cole McGrath, delivering a routine package that turns out to be a mysterious, unusual bomb. After unwittingly leveling half of Empire City, you wake up in the smoldering crater with the sudden ability to control electricity and use it as a weapon. You'll need all the help you can get, because the city is placed under quarantine as a plague ravages the survivors and a bunch of gangs terrorize the populace. It's clear the government isn't coming to help anytime soon, so Cole has to step up and try to make a difference amidst all the madness.

In the wake of the bomb, there are a bunch of other comic book-style villains and supporting characters coloring up the ruins of Empire City. There's a frail, embittered old man with telekinetic powers; a freaky telepathic lady with some serious jealousy issues; your aforementioned chubby friend Zeke; your now ex-girlfriend who blames you for blowing up her sister along with half the city's residents; a mysterious Illuminati-esque organization which may or may not have engineered the blast; and, of course, the shadowy, hooded, mechanical-armed figure who's actually pulling all the strings.

The electric powers are a ton of fun to use.

I was worried the story would get a little boilerplate (it is a video game, after all), but it throws several major twists at you in the second half that really ratchet up the pace and make you want to keep playing to find out what the heck is going on. It helps that the cutscenes, which are presented like an animated graphic novel, are really slick and well-produced.

Even if the story was trite or nonexistent, though, the quality of the action would be enough to carry InFamous. The speed and feel of the movement, aiming, firing, dodging, climbing, and jumping has a looseness and fluidity that makes the game extremely satisfying to play. Navigating the urban environment is also a pleasure; Cole automatically grabs for ledges and handholds, allowing him to make his way up building faces, lampposts, and just about any other city feature with ease, so you can get around as easily as you can dish out your attacks.

The brilliant controls work with the array of superpowers at your disposal--which mostly mimic established shooter archetypes like grenades, rocket launchers, and sniper rifles, and a few borrowed from Star Wars like a kinetic push and a ground slam--to make it incredibly satisfying to use all your destructive tools against the game's many enemies. There are almost endless ways to combine the many powers together dynamically in a big firefight; it's enough to keep the combat totally engaging till the end of the game, especially since you get access to new powers at regular intervals right up to the last few missions.

Your decisions influence what kinds of powers you have.

You earn experience points for just about everything you do in the game, from stylish enemy takedowns to healing injured civilians, and you can cash these in on numerous upgrades for each power that follow one of two paths, depending on your moral alignment. Stop me if you've heard this one before, but the game presents choices throughout the storyline that lets you play Cole as a good or evil character. Some of the choices seem a little contrived, while some make more sense in context; all of them are explicitly outlined to you by voiceover right before you get to decide, so there's never any mystery about what your options are. You'll probably want to stick to a single alignment throughout a single playthrough, since there are three levels of both good and evil karma to upgrade through.

Anyway, in practical terms your alignment primarily determines which upgrades you have access to. The powers all have three upgrades, one for each karma level, and each subsequent upgrade adds some kind of damage boost, extra effect, or modifier, making it well worth maxing out as many of them as you can. The good versions of the powers focus on restraining enemies without killing them and minimizing civilian casualties, while the evil powers are all about big, wanton destruction. Your alignment also makes your electricity blue or red, but it doesn't have much bearing on the storyline--other than a couple of minor points, and the way the populace reacts to you--so if you don't have any moral hangups, you can tailor your choices to the sort of weapons you'd like to use. Both styles are fun to play, just in different ways.

There are some crazy, bigger-than-life characters in here.

Empire City is a big open world with three distinctive islands, so like Grand Theft Auto or any of its innumerable ilk, you're free to approach the core story missions and a number of side activities with some flexibility. A few side missions are only available to either good or evil characters, and there are enough different types of objectives that I never got tired of doing side missions, until I reached the end of the game and realized I'd actually done all of them. (It helps that side missions net you a lot of experience points.) The same goes for the game's collectibles; I kept getting derailed from the storyline to climb around looking for blast shards (numbering in the hundreds) and "dead drops," or audio recordings wired into satellite dishes (around three dozen). These collectibles have actual purpose, since the shards increase your charge capacity (essentially your ammo), and the dead drops fill in background story elements by playing back the audio logs of a missing secret government agent who's been working the Empire City case since long before the blast.

Aside from the minor technical issues, there are a lot of good things to say about InFamous' presentation. The city is densely packed and nicely designed with a variety of different building styles (which is nice, since you see them up-close so frequently). In lieu of a repeating day-to-night cycle, I like that the story is broken up into specific days with preset weather and lighting conditions, so the visual backdrop can work to help set the tone of the story. The music is great and has a really gritty, urban feel to it with a lot of driving percussion; I just wish you got to hear more of it. It's a nicely produced package, overall.

But it's the quality of the central action in InFamous that I keep coming back to. Everything else would be fancy window dressing if Sucker Punch hadn't nailed the basic gameplay elements, the simple moving and shooting, as precisely as it did. InFamous feels like a game designed from the very ground up to be fun to play, so I guess it's no surprise that as soon as the credits finished rolling on my good version of Cole, I started up an evil one to play it all over again.

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Review of Terminator Salvation

Platform: (X360)

3 out of 5

These little flying machines aren't hard to kill, but they can be annoying in numbers.

Everyone's favorite genocidal cyborgs return with Terminator Salvation, a game from Bionic Commando developer GRIN that seems to take as much, if not more, inspiration from Gears of War as it does the film upon which it's based. There's a very narrow focus on cover-based action here, and while it's got some decent energy to it, the whole thing feels very barebones.

That barebones feel starts with the story, which is, well, kind of nonexistent. It's more about basic motivation than character development or specific plotting. You play as John Connor--who, here, looks a bit like a poor-man's Commander Shepard--and while you're ostensibly on a mission to save a guy named David from something Skynet related, it all boils down to constantly running towards or away from murderous machines.

Terminator Salvation is a product of our post-Gears of War world, and it strips that cover-based third-person shooter formula down to its basest elements. The game is, essentially, a series of brief firefights against small packs of those murderous machines. The places that the firefights take place in always seem highly contrived, with bits of cover conveniently scattered, usually in some sort of semicircle configuration, around the area where your enemies will eventually stroll in, hunker down, and start firing away at you.

It would seem that, at this point in the Terminator mythology, Skynet hasn't diversified production much, as you'll encounter a whopping six different types of enemies over the course of the game. Probably the most interesting of the bunch are the spidery T-7-Ts, which are too heavily armored for you to take head-on. This requires you to rely on your constant AI companions to distract them as you sneak around by hopping from one piece of cover to the next and blast away at their tender and exposed backsides. It's the most tactical thing you'll do in the game, but the game is generous to a fault with the tactical advantages. There's always ample ammo, you're regularly given the higher ground over your enemies, and the machines very rarely stray outside of their designated attack areas.

These rubber-skinned T600s are as close to Arnold as the game gets.

There's something actually enjoyable to the constant-cover philosophy at work here. Part of it comes from the fact that John Connor looks pretty awesome sliding and rolling from one piece of cover to the next. They're much more dynamic-looking than most of his animations, which look kind of pinched. His run animation specifically makes him look like he's constantly looking for the bathroom. There's also a semi-circular on-screen guide that shows up when you're behind cover, which makes the process of moving from one piece of cover to another feel very intuitive. For as derivative as most of the action in Terminator Salvation is, this little trick struck me as something that other Gears of War-style games could benefit from.

The individual firefights can be fun, but the game never lets itself build up any momentum. Almost every enemy encounter takes place in a small, contained area, and they're usually bookended by a short cutscene. There are numerous sequences where you'll literally walk from one cutscene to another, without any action in between. The game mixes things up with the occasional on-rails sequence--you'll man a turret in the backs of trucks, subway trains, and dune buggies--but these are even simpler and more straightforward than the rest of the game.

In addition to not offering a terrific amount of variety, Terminator Salvation is a short experience, too. Playing on the normal difficulty, it took me a little under five hours to see the credits roll. There's no real reason to revisit the game once you're done, either. There's a split-screen coop mode, but no online option, and both the PS3 trophies and the Xbox 360 achievements are based entirely on clearing the individual chapters. If you play it on the hard difficulty, you can get everything in a single play-through.

Terminator Salvation ultimately just feels too small for a $60 game. Even the environments, which consist mostly of war-torn streets and boxy, brownish interiors, give you little sense that there's a world outside of the path that you're on. It's not a bad experience, but what it offers is so simple that it would feel repetitive if it were any longer. As it is, it doesn't do enough to justify a purchase.

Release Date:

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Currently Playing: Fable 2, Fallout 3, Sacred 2, The Witcher: EE, Saints Row 2, Dead Space, many more

Favorite Game of all Time: Too tough to determine currently.

Platforms: PC, Xbox, Xbox 360, PS2, PS3, PSP, DS

Favorite Genre's: Sports, Action, FPS, MMORPG, RPG, RTS, Puzzle

Twitter ID: Artanas

Xbox Live Gamertag: Artanas

Playstation Network: Artanas

Guild/Clan Name: alea iacta est

Movies: The Matrix Trilogy, Alien Quadrilogy, LOTR Trilogy, Blade Runner, Predator, Gladiator, 300, Troy, Full Metal Jacket, Crank, and so on and so forth...............

Television: Not that big a TV watcher. BSG, sports, that's about it.

Books: Otherland series by Tad Williams, Sword of Truth series by Terry Goodkind, The Forgotten Realms series of books, Anita Blake series by Laurell K. Hamilton, Ender series and spin-offs from Orson Scott Card, Mythology by Edith Hamilton, numerous books by H.P. Lovecraft (good lord, if you don't know who this is, just look up Cthulhu), H.G. Wells, Dan Brown, Tom Clancy (yes, I have read all of his long ass drawn out, explicitly detailed books) Steven King, Tananarive Due (most notably, My Soul to Keep, The Living Blood, and The Good House), Robert Jordan (RIP), Terry Brooks, Tolkien, can I stop now? Please??

Bands: Not much into rock music, mostly jazz, r&b and soul for me.

About Me: Working on getting this page back up, be back soon...........

How did you hear about GAX?: Been a long time fan of MOG and was a member of the first GAX site.

Email Address: artanisdualblade@gmail.com

Website: http://thoughtsofartanas.blogspot.com

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