When I turn on my 360 to play a combat flight game, all I really want to do is hop in a plane, shoot down some guys, and maybe do a bombing run or two. If I can cause a few million dollars in damage to a rival army's air force, life is good. What I don't want to do is deal with stupid A.I. allies, stupidly hard escort and "defend your base" missions, and mind-numbingly slow breaks in the action.
At its core, H.A.W.X. 2 is a fantastic middle ground between a hardcore flight sim and an arcadey dogfighting game a la Crimson Skies. The action is fast and frantic, and the responsiveness of the controls allows for some crazy stunts without feeling so weightless that it's unrealistic. Don't expect to stop on a dime here; paying attention to your surroundings is vital to not becoming a pile of shrapnel sticking out of the side of a building.
Spider-Man has been around a while (since 1962, to be exact), and like every superhero, he's gone through big changes both cosmetic and practical over the years. But it's still surprising that developer Beenox chose to take three recent incarnations of the web-slinging superhero and bring them together in the same game: Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions. When the evil Mysterio breaks into a museum and the Tablet of Order and Chaos is broken, problems in multiple realities ensue -- to set things right, Madame Web tasks the Amazing Spider-Man (voiced by Neil Patrick Harris) to work with three of his counterparts from other dimensions: Spider-Man 2099, Ultimate Spider-Man (in the symbiote suit but without any evil side effects), and Spider-Man Noir.
The result of this team up allows you to switch between four different play-styles (to change things up between stages), and you can also choose the order in which you play the levels within a given act. But this latter freedom really only serves to make the already weak story feel more disjointed. Each level feels completely separated from the others, and it's only during the final act that there's any sort of communication between each of the Spider-universes. With a plot penned by comic veteran Dan Slott, it's a shame that the generic story is one of the game's largest shortcomings.
First off, let's be clear about what you're getting in Dead Rising 2: Case Zero. This five-dollar download is no paid demo. None of the content is lifted out of Dead Rising 2. It's a unique location, with characters and places you won't encounter in the full game. In fact, I've seen much of the full game, and I'm pretty sure a key piece of information about the main characters is only available in Case Zero. It's a small detail, but it's a detail I would have hated to miss.
Case Zero's premise is simple and effective. Manly protagonist Chuck is stranded in a small town and needs to find five parts to build the motorcycle that will carry him into Dead Rising 2. But there's a catch. The military will arrive in 24 hours, at which point his adorable but infected daughter will be locked away in quarantine, effectively dooming her to zombiehood. Unfortunately, while Dead Rising 2 is happy to imply child zombies, it shies away from actually showing them. Too bad. Child zombies are a mean-spirited staple of the genre. I guess even Dead Rising has its limits.
Scott Pilgrim: The Game is made to appeal to your sense of nostalgia. A beat-em-up in the vein of old 8- and 16-bit classics with a purposefully pixelated art style, your mission is simply to get from one end of the map to the other while beating the crap out of everyone who gets in your way. And, for a game that celebrates the simple pleasure of button-mashing, it's highly effective.
The game effortlessly weaves together nerd-culture references (from Super Mario Bros. to Akira) with levels and playstyle created to remind you of games like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and River City Ransom. Miniscule background animations and character details ensure that, even when you're just wailing away on clones of enemies you've seen in every other level, they all look distinct. And like RCR (or more recently, Castle Crashers) you also level up your character -- earning new powers, greater strength, and more incentive to keep going, the further along you go.
We've all long since stopped bemoaning the death of the side-scrolling beat-em-up, I think. The torch was passed to 3D spiritual successors like Devil May Cry and God of War, and outside of oddities like Castle Crashers and a crapload of flash games, the genre hasn't really shown its head in a while (and barely moved forward when it did). Then Shank comes along and reminds us all that hey, these things could have continued evolving down a completely different branch of the great cladistic tree of videogames, to become something completely new and every bit as kickass.
Shank is bloody, violent, adolescently indulgent, and absolutely beautiful in execution (and in its executions.) Two things absolutely need to be understood if you're even a little bit on the fence about the game: It's gorgeously, fluidly animated, in both its cut-scenes and within the actual gameplay, and the game's controls are split-second responsive even with the absurd amount of lovingly rendered action happening on screen. Even better, all these obsessively detailed eviscerations are animated in a style almost indistinguishable from Genndy Tartakovsky (Samurai Jack, Star Wars: Clone Wars) against a backdrop that's pure Robert Rodriguez (El Mariachi, Desperado, and the upcoming, and remarkably similarly titled Machete). All that makes for one stratospherically anticipated game.
Mafia stories are about the pursuit of the American dream. Typically, they're tales of a character who tries to claim a share of the world's wealth and riches. And, as is true with all mafia tales, these rewards come at a great cost. In the case of Mafia II, our hero doesn't want to be the Don, nor is he power hungry. He is in this life because this is (what he believes) to be the only thing he's good at. He simply wishes to exist and make as much money as possible. If he happens to meet a dire end as a result of these actions, so be it. Instead of giving players a character who will rise through the ranks to achieve the rank of Best-Mobster-Ever -- like EA's approach to the Godfather videogames -- we're given one who is content with being the middleman. But in the process of trying to create a serious narrative, Mafia II falls into the trend of other sandbox games: it reminds you time and time again with "you're playing a videogame" moments that break the hard work put into crafting this narrative in the first place.
It's a common problem: in these fully realized worlds, you're often given the ability to create moments that don't fit into the world you're playing in. Games like Grand Theft Auto 4 or Saints Row 2 get away with this because their created fiction is full of puns and tongue-in-cheek humor. Mafia II on the other hand, a game that tries to create a serious narrative and a world full of colorful characters, instantly falls apart as soon as you're allowed to toss random pedestrians off a boat pier. Or when you comically pick up a Playboy magazine and are forced to view the centerfold in the midst of a heated gun battle.
It's telling that the first thing you see when you hit "new game" in Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days is a camcorder on a tripod; more than just about any other videogame in recent memory, Dog Days looks and feels like a movie. The in medias res opening, where the titular characters get tortured by an nonchalant fellow wielding a box cutter before flashing back to "two days before," looks as though it's been shot and cut by a young Joe Carnahan (I'm thinking Blood, Guts, Bullets, and Octane or Narc -- not the Carnahan behind A-Team). I've seen plenty of "cinematic" openings in videogames, but not many that use film editing and visual techniques to evoke the feel of specific directors.
This overall aesthetic gives Dog Days an utterly distinct feel from other modern, urban crime shooters and even from other videogames. I wouldn't be surprised if the developers at IO Interactive simply pitched Dog Days' style as: "Michael Mann by way of YouTube." The scenario, story beats, sense of place, and dialogue evoke Mann's penchant for tough and terse crime professionals making their way through a real, defined setting. Yet these tropes are visually portrayed through the same sort of handheld camera work as the average YouTube video or, at most, a faux-mentary such as The Blair Witch Project, Cloverfield, or Paranormal Activity.
One of the greatest gaming experiences of my life involved two friends, three Game Boy Advances, and a slow afternoon burning through The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords Adventures. Even though co-op has become en vogue since Nintendo's strange experiment with connectivity, a follow-up to Link's quirky multiplayer adventure has been woefully absent from the world -- even though the number of DSes and Wiis in the wild would make a sequel much more feasible than its predecessor. After years of wishing and hoping, little did I know I'd be able to scratch my multiplayer-puzzle-dungeon-itch with Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light -- a downloadable Tomb Raider game of all things.
Lara Croft tends to have some of the most predictable adventures in gaming, but Guardian of Light adds some much-needed innovation to the series without changing its fundamental mechanics. Just like in any Tomb Raider title, you'll play around with a number of powerful weapons and a grappling hook while leaping over dangerous pitfalls, though this time around the game is viewed from an isometric perspective zoomed atypically far from Lara herself. And while Guardian of Light doesn't make multiplayer mandatory, the levels are specifically designed to take advantage of Lara and co-star Totec's unique array of abilities. The single-player mode simply gives your chosen character all of the skills necessary to complete the game (and tailors some levels to make single-player success possible), but it lacks the fun of piecing together the solutions to puzzles with a friend.
The Madden NFL series is in a tough spot. When developer EA Tiburon changes a small detail here or a gameplay mechanic there, it inevitably enrages one set of diehard fans and gets the other half to hop back on the wagon so to speak. This year's iteration in the more than a decade old series has brought me back into the "drinking the Madden Kool-Aid" fold, because it's improved the things that matter to me. That said, Madden NFL 11 still needs some improvement.
The thing that first struck me when I booted up a game was the revamped broadcast presentation. Madden NFL 11 embraces the TV broadcast presentation in a way I haven't seen in years. Since Madden made the jump to Xbox 360 in Madden NFL 2006, the focus on how the game was supposed to be viewed shifted from a clear, Sunday TV perspective to listening to a radio broadcast from the bleachers in the stadium. Since that entry in the series I've felt that Madden's presentation has been lackluster and it under-utilizes the ESPN exclusivity license EA has held for years now. (I've said it once and I'll say it again, NFL 2K5's ESPN broadcast integration is the benchmark I hold all football videogame broadcast presentations up to.)
Castlevania: Harmony of Despair baffles me. Is it a cheap, hacked-together work of desperation, or is it a bold and innovative masterstroke of creativity?
Ultimately, I think it's a little of both. These concepts aren't mutually exclusive, after all. Besides, as they say, necessity is the mother of invention. In this case, I'm pretty sure "necessity" took the form of Konami giving producer Koji Igarashi the mandate to create a downloadable, high-definition Castlevania game with a budget equivalent to the loose change we fished from between the cushions of our office couch last week. And what Igarashi came up with -- Harmony of Despair -- can only be described as "weird."
BlazBlue: Continuum Shift is ARC System Works much needed revision of last year's title, BlazBlue: Calamity Trigger. While Calamity Trigger was a fast-paced, unique, and easy-to-pick-up fighting game, the unbalanced roster resulted in only a few of the characters being viable on a competitive (or even casual) level, which led to many players dropping the game after only a short while. Continuum Shift not only addresses the balance issues of the previous game, but adds new characters and tweaks to the overall gameplay system, resulting in a far more complete package.
If you're new to the BlazBlue universe, you'll find the game has a small cast compared to other fighting games on the market, but makes up for it with a diverse roster. The four main attack buttons -- A, B, C and D -- chain together easily to form combos with each character's Drive attack, which makes each feel immediately distinct. For instance, Arakune's Drive Attack lets him curse his opponents, while Ragna's can absorb his opponent's life with each attack.
Strip the internet of all the pornography, box cat videos, and idiotic Facebook status updates and you're pretty much left with one thing: lots and lots of "Who would win" forum threads. From what I can tell, the only thing more universally appealing than conflict is conflict that's extremely unlikely or altogether impossible -- like we're hard-wired to argue about whether a bear could take a shark or something. Even the most recent Fight Night sported an imaginary bout between Muhammed Ali and Mike Tyson on its cover.
Someone at Spike TV clearly understands mankind's need for far-fetched bloodsport, because Deadliest Warrior: The Game (and the television show that inspired it) taps right into the spirit of "this vs. that" internet discussions. Ever wonder what would happen if a Spartan hoplite went toe-to-toe with a ninja? What about an Apache warrior against a medieval knight? Deadliest Warrior takes those questions and answers them with a fighting game that's one part Soul Calibur, one part Bushido Blade, and almost entirely too generic for its own good.
Over the past ten years, the original arcade Hydro Thunder has lodged itself in my brain, albeit for a strange reason: the game seems to exist (perhaps by law) at every rest stop within my home state of Ohio. On my long-distance travels from point A to point B, I inevitably have to pull over at some point -- and when I do, Hydro Thunder is there, offering cheap thrills for a mere 75 cents. I usually find myself falling for Midway's siren song, if only because they made the original Thunder during those desperate days of the arcade, when a developer had to rely on a steady supply of outlandish spectacle and elaborate housings in order to succeed. Who knew that Hydro Thunder Hurricane would come along to remind us just how charming the games of the not-too-distant-past could be?
Many games get called "arcadey," but Hydro Thunder Hurricane is the very definition of the word. Sure, it's based on an arcade game of yesteryear, but the fundamental mechanics haven't exactly been updated for the demands of a modern audience. Even though you're surrounded by opponents, the eight courses of Hurricane don't offer you any direct means to destroy them -- in fact, actively trying to ram or otherwise impair an enemy vessel will end up hurting you in the long run. The only thing that matters in Hurricane is speed, and grabbing the power-ups necessary to maintain this speed. It's a game that's more about reflexes than strategy, and also one that stresses the old art of finding the best shortcuts, in the vein of classics like San Francisco Rush.
Limbo does a great deal with very little. Stark black-and white-visuals and a simple two-button control scheme ("action" and "jump") highlight the power a talented developer can wield by keeping things simple. While the game's story (and its abrupt ending) leaves a bit to be desired, the framework surrounding it provides more than enough reason to explore the game's haunting world.
At its heart, Limbo is a puzzle game: you interact with the environment and overcome obstacles while trying to avoid an untimely (and messy) death...but you'll die a lot anyway. Learning to find the dangers cleverly concealed in the game's shadows keeps you aware of your simplistic surroundings, and draws focus to the minute details of the landscape. Limbo presents it's fair share of platforming and precision button pressing as well, but unlike, say, Mega Man, you're never forced to start back at the beginning of a stage. Any frustration you might feel at an inopportune death melts away when you respawn right next to where you failed. And when you finally figure out the solution to open the path forward, you feel like you've accomplished something. Limbo is not a game that gives up its secrets through mere trial-and-error -- its puzzles demand thought and contemplation.
While titular character DeathSpank attempts to convince an orphan girl to get into his bag (there's context to this, which I will leave for you to discover for yourself in-game), she demands that he find her a cell phone. You then have to choose from a bevy of adventure game dialogue-style options, one of which expresses confusion with, "What does an orphan need a cell phone for?" To which she replies, "To update my blog, of course!"
That is the kind of humor that peppers DeathSpank (the game): a sort of deadpan absurdity where pretty much anything -- no matter how anachronistic or fourth-wall-breaking -- gets said as naturally as we would discuss the time of day. The unflinching delivery of some of the most surprising and out-of-left-field (yet flowing and not at all awkward) dialogue makes DeathSpank simply one of the funniest games to watch and listen to. The script, filled with references and quips covering topics from fantasy RPG tropes to the secret history of felt to the value of unicorn excrement to even sly references to other games, positively shines with classic designer Ron Gilbert's influence. The jokes hit on so many topics that something is bound to make you chuckle -- multiple times even. Even the diverse color palette, the Animal Crossing-esque "on-a-hill" perspective, and the visual gags, along with the voiced dialogue, all make DeathSpank a charming standout compared to other games of its ilk.
When EA Tiburon's NCAA Football 11 experience is hot, it's hot. I'm playing as the University of Southern California Trojans in the BCS National Championship versus the Alabama Crimson Tide. With only 23 seconds left in the game, USC is only up by four points with 'Bama just feet away from scoring a touchdown to take a very late game lead. The Crimson Tide has been deadly in the Red Zone for the entire game so I'm prepared to take the loss and gear up for next season. As the Tide's QB throws the ball into the end zone though, everything changes as I make a final push for a big play -- I take control of my corner and leap up and grab the ball for an interception. The rest is history as my corner runs to the opposite end zone and scores, sealing USC as champions of the world (for this season at least) and making me leap off of my couch in happiness.
If only that situation described every moment in the game, NCAA Football 11 would be close to pigskin perfection. But while it does so many things much better than even Madden has pulled off recently, EA's collegiate level football offering misses in a few key areas that affect the game as a whole.
I'm kind of in love with the idea behind Blacklight: Tango Down. Here's the gist: Take the persistent multiplayer component popularized by the Call of Duty and Battlefield franchises, surgically remove all the story mode fluff, and put whatever's left up for download at the bargain-bin price of 15 bucks. Based on the number of people I know who've never even fired up the single-player campaign in their copy of Battlefield: Bad Company 2, I'm actually surprised more developers haven't taken a crack at Blacklight's affordable, online-only approach to first-person warfare.
Despite its budget-priced status, Blacklight's stocked with nearly all of the amenities you'd expect from a post-Call of Duty 4 FPS. You know the drill by now; killing enemies and accomplishing objectives nets you experience points, which contribute to your overall rank. Rank up enough and you unlock new weapons, armor, and other equipment for personalizing your character. These include your typical upgrade fodder like improved scopes, stocks, and barrels for your guns, but there are also just over 100 special trinkets (think keychains or fuzzy dice) that inexplicably imbue your faceless soldier with additional stats when hung from your weapon. It's a bit silly, sure, but it's also one of the more original aspects of Blacklight.
Holy F***ing S***! I don't even know how to morally rationalize the atrocities you commit in Naughty Bear. The game is like Manhunt, except with adorable teddy bears. Wait -- can you compel your victims to kill themselves in Manhunt? No? OK, maybe Naughty Bear's actions are slightly worse.
Just because blood and gore are replaced with stuffed animal innards doesn't make it any less vicious. Don't be fooled by the cuddly, teddy bear demeanor; Naughty Bear is incredibly violent -- I even felt a pang of guilt and uncomfortable remorse after the massacre I inflicted on innocent townsfolk in the first mission. It helps that Naughty Bear's cute and cuddly victims either stay completely intact or disintegrate, no matter how you murder them; you can't prance around the game's setting, the Island of Perfection, with a decapitated head in tow. And I'm not kidding about the cute factor -- with teddy names like "Daddles," and gentle mumbling voices, you may feel disgusted while crushing their heads flat with a car door. Or, you'll completely adore it.
At one point in Ninety-Nine Nights 2, a character remarks that there are simply too many enemies. "What the hell's up with these guys?" he says, "They keep coming outta no where! If this keeps up, there's no point in beating 'em up!" I've never seen a game so accurately comment on its own greatest weakness.
The character is Maggni, a brutish blue monster that looks like Street Fighter's Blanka as reinterpreted by Tetsuya Nomura. He's one of five playable characters in Ninety-Nine Nights 2 (or N3II), whose stories intersect with and occasionally contradict one another as they try to stop the Lord of the Night. Each of the characters inhabits a rote fantasy archetype with a distinct Japanese flavor. The other heroes include a lonely warrior with a painful past, a suspicious goblin assassin, and not one but two busty elven maidens.
I'm sure anyone reading this text has already glanced over to the right and seen that I graded this game a C. Let me clarify this immediately: Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge is among the greatest games ever made. It is one of the most tightly-designed, brilliantly written, timeless adventure games out there, and just might be my favorite sequel to anything, ever. If you depend on arbitrary scores to make your purchasing decisions, know that Monkey Island 2, as a game, is easily an A+. If you enjoyed the first one, I heartily recommend picking up its sequel.
The game itself is irrelevant to this review. I am instead approaching this as a review of Monkey Island 2: Special Edition as a package. Think of it as a DVD versus a movie, if that helps -- rather than focus on the original work, I am going to focus on the presentation, the new features, and the overall "specialness" of this Special Edition, which is a much more valuable use of our time.
To my knowledge, there's only one game in the world that lets you team up online with three friends playing as super-powered SWAT agents, make a rendezvous by leaping over skyscrapers, pile everyone into (and onto) one car, tear down the street at 100 mph (rendering a road-clogging zombie horde into a messy green spray), then crash that car into a terrorist hideout in an explosion that rips through most of the bad guys inside. That game is Crackdown 2, and for that reason Crackdown 2 is ridiculously fun.
The problem is, four-player co-op is really all the game brings to the table over its predecessor. Doubling the number of Agents capable of teaming up over the previous game was a great move and makes Live play exponentially more entertaining than before. But everything else about Crackdown 2 is a letdown: The best parts are those lifted straight from the first game, while all the new additions are annoying at best, infuriating at worst. Crackdown 2 is ridiculously fun, but it owes that success entirely to the first game.
That's it, videogames; I've officially had it with audio logs. They were a cute diversion a few years back, but now it seems like every post-BioShock game environment is strewn with more recording equipment than a Guitar Center. Aside from the latest Batman -- excused for being set in an insane asylum -- I've never been able to comprehend why anyone would capture the intimate details of their day-to-day lives on tape, only to leave said recordings out in the open for any caped crusader or genetically-enhanced super-soldier that might be passing through. Then again, I guess I still don't really understand the point of Twitter, either.
Anyway, Raven Software's newest first-person shooter, Singularity, absolutely overflows with that sort of atmospheric junk. And that's just one of the many, many ways Raven's game gives off a serious BioShock vibe. For starters, Singularity opens with a helicopter crash over the Pacific Ocean -- BioShock, a plane crash in the Atlantic. Both games drop their silent protagonists into strange and perilous ruined cities where mysterious, flesh-mutating substances have been unearthed. They also both allow you to collect and trade the aforementioned gene-altering materials to customize and upgrade your abilities. I could go on for days, honestly, but all that's really missing here are guys in retro-looking diving suits, a soundtrack loaded with Bing Crosby songs, and the ability to unleash swarms of bees from your hands.
Grading Lego Harry Potter is difficult. It's simultaneously the best and the buggiest Lego console game for various reasons. To the game's credit, Harry's magical world fits superbly with the series and grants the Lego formula some very welcome refreshment. But it's also a dishearteningly frequent perpetrator of bugs, glitches, and, shockingly, what seems like sloppiness; though expertly polished over all, in specific instances, the game just seems like a downright rush job.
LHP takes one of the best additions to Lego Indiana Jones 2 -- the seamless co-op splitscreen feature, which smoothly splits the screen into two parts when the players separate and joins the screen again when the players reunite -- and puts it to good use in terms of level design. But this is where things get sloppy: The game's camera angles don't always seem calibrated properly for co-op play, an arguably integral part of the Lego console games' appeal. Oftentimes, I found my co-op partner and myself either at opposite edges of the level, or at opposite edges of the screen, while still being close enough to one another that the splitscreen effect hasn't activated. And in those cases, I frequently encountered difficulty seeing my own character, or the in-game object my character was trying to manipulate. At times, key items can be obscured from view or, frustratingly, be put out of reach, depending on where both characters are standing at the time.
I tend to enjoy board games most in video game form. Titles like Carcassonne or Catan take the busywork out of setting up a complicated game. Risk: Factions isn't content to be a mere "port" of the classic board game. Instead, it riffs on a complex game, while keeping the spirit of the original alive.
In many ways, Factions doesn't stray far from the source material. Armies claim territories, and you roll virtual dice to determine battle victors. The game can be won by controlling territory, or by fulfilling objectives that grant bonuses. For purists, it even includes a Classic mode with the standard world map, along with a wealth of new maps developed for Factions mode.
Growing up in the '80s was probably one of the best things to ever happen to me. Things like Star Wars, Indiana Jones, decent Star Trek movies, Nintendo, Sega and of course cartoons permeated the consciousness of kids everywhere. And I was smack dab in the middle of it. In retrospect, Optimus Prime was like the greatest babysitter ever. My mom would plop my brother and me in front of the television and we would learn about sacrifice, honesty, truth, and never giving up in a fight. Then we would grab our Transformer toys and go playing in the backyard. Ah, innocence. And while the film franchise is on the cusp of dishing out another terrible flick, it's nice to see that High Moon Studios gets Transformers "right" with War for Cybertron by including everything from heavy-handed dialog to a Stan Bush song in the ending credits.
"Right" can be a subjective term when talking about Transformers lore. From what I understand, the overall story of the videogame differs from the canon of the Transformers origin story. As a fan of both Star Trek and Star Wars franchises, I've run into many canonical issues time and time again (how does one explain Star Tours anyway?), so I can understand the frustration of Transformer purists out there. But if you decide to pass this game up because you can't get over the fact that Megatron turns into a tank instead of a gun, you're doing yourself a disservice -- War for Cybertron really is a lot of fun to play.
It's easy to write off a movie tie-in videogame; so many of them are nothing more than blatant attempts to cash in on fans that pour out of the theater and want to continue the experience at home. But Avalanche Software-developed Toy Story 3 game is not only a great movie game, but a genuinely fun title that anybody can enjoy.
Most movie tie-ins' difficulties are tuned for a young, not particularly game savvy audience -- so much so that anybody that's even familiar with traditional game mechanics is usually alienated from the game. Toy Story 3 actually manages to appeal to all ages. While the main story missions are primarily third-person platform stages with the occasional on-rails shooter section thrown in for good measure, they provide just enough challenge for a reasonably seasoned player to enjoy.
If the current crop of consoles has taught me anything, it's that game developers have a real knack for transmuting my childhood memories into a revenue stream. New Super Mario Bros. Wii, for example, struck the nostalgia center of my brain like a laser-guided missile. Nintendo can call it "New" all they like -- that game ostensibly boils down to four-player Super Mario Bros. 3, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. So when I heard that a multiplayer, high-def remake of Earthworm Jim was on the way, I thought, "Sure, I'll bite."
This latest, juiced-up classic to hit Xbox Live Arcade brings with it just about everything that was so great about the original Earthworm Jim: varied run-and-gun platforming, surreal environments, and absurd boss battles against walking non sequiturs (like Bob the Killer Goldfish and Queen Pulsating, Bloated, Festering, Sweaty, Pus-filled, Malformed, Slug-for-a-Butt). To top it all off, everything sports a fresh coat of fancy, high resolution paint, so the game looks good.
After getting hooked on the seriously addictive -- and worth every penny -- Tiger Woods Online just two months ago, I did something I haven't done in years: I anticipated a console version of a golf game.
Not since EA's European Tour on the Genesis from way back in the mid-'90s have I done much but idly glance at back-of-the-box info for upcoming Tiger Woods games. But I felt back in the golfing groove, and so kept my eye on Tiger Woods PGA Tour 11. Now that it's released, I hate to say it, but I'm disappointed.
With a band-themed music game -- Green Day Rock Band being no exception -- it's too easy to say "if you like the band Green Day, you'll like the game. If you hate Green Day, this probably won't change your mind." But this game presents more than just a simple Rock Band expansion with new songs. Just like The Beatles Rock Band, the featured group injects their personality into everything from the menus and in-game performances to the unlockable live concert footage. Though, also like The Beatles Rock Band, Green Day fails to try anything truly innovative. Still, developer Harmonix proves that they not only know how to craft a fine music game, they know how to pick just the right subject matter, as well.
I'm not a music critic, so this is a review of the game, not the band. But as someone who hasn't listened to a Green Day album in its entirety since Dookie, I was surprised by the wide focus of the band. Dookie is just as infectious as it's always been, but I wrongly assumed that the group had kept making those same pop-punk tracks in subsequent years. However, songs like "Peacemaker," which mixes surf rock and gypsy guitar rhythms, or the Latin rock-inspired "¿Viva La Gloria?" stray from the band's typical sound, yet remain catchy enough that I was still humming them the next day. While nowhere near as influential as The Beatles, Green Day certainly proves that they have the range to support a full videogame around their music, without the setlist becoming stale.