Star Wars: The Force Unleashed II Review

When the first Force Unleashed game came out, I really enjoyed it. Despite its mixed reviews, it had a solid story that not only fit neatly into the continuity of the movies, but also provided some back story for the origins of the Rebellion. The characters were well-acted, and the main ones were even memorable. The game play had its flaws, sure, but it was undeniably fun to use your Force powers to toss enemies around (I always took a perverse delight in using Force Grip to lift an enemy up off a ledge, move him out into open space, and then just let go).

Perhaps The Force Unleashed's biggest flaw was that, to keep everything nice and tidy, protagonist Starkiller was dies during the canon ending. The game made money, and the developers decided a sequel was in order... but how do you do a sequel when you've killed off the hero? Maybe plays as Darth Vader (the intro level where you play as Vader was pretty awesome)? Or maybe Vader gets a new secret apprentice? Or why even focus on Vader's apprentice... maybe the Emperor was looking for someone to replace Vader the way Vader replaced Dooku. Maybe they could make a game about fan-favorite Emperor's Hand, Mara Jade?

Or they could take the easy and uncreative out and go with a clone. Which is what they did.

Easy and uncreative pretty much sets the tone for the whole game. While the story in the first one was interesting, with betrayals within betrayals and new insights into the early days of the Rebellion, The Force Unleashed II opens on Kamino with Vader telling Starkiller that he's a clone. Starkiller get's a little emo, decides he cares more about Juno Eclipse (his love interest from the first game) than anything else, and runs away to go find her. That's it, that's the whole plot. Which brings me to my second complaint... the game is really short. I mean, the first one was kind of short, but TFU2 is like half the length of the first game. There's the starting level on Kamino, then Starkiller goes to Cato Neimoidia to find Kota (whom Vader mentioned was there), just to ask Starkiller where Juno was. For some stupid reason (and fan service), Starkiller goes to Dagobah (which really isn't even a level, as there's no enemies and is completed by walking from point A to point B), before going to the ship in the Rebel Fleet that Juno is on. Bad stuff happens, Juno gets captured, and that ship becomes the third level in the game. Then Starkiller goes back to Kamino to rescue Juno and confront Vader. The end. Without spoiling anything else, at least both endings to the Force Unleashed II leave the plot open for more sequels now.

Despite my complaints about the crappy plot and the brevity of the game, it's really not all bad. In face, the game play has been a little tweaked. Not only is it still fun to tear through armies of Stormtroopers with your Force Powers, it's actually more fun now. You've still got your basic grip, push, and lighting powers, but they seem more effective now. It's easier to kill with a Force Push now, or once you've grabbed something (or someone) with a Force Grip, you can charge it with Force Lightning so that it (or he) explodes after being thrown. Distilled to its basic elements, the Force Unleashed II is a game that's more fun to play than the first one.

Improvements to game play don't really make up for the game's shortcomings, though. The fact that you can probably beat the game in one sitting (it took me three, but I was playing pretty casually) combined with the weak plot practically screams, "I'm a half-assed and half-done sequel that was rushed out in time for the holidays!" Because yeah, it's kind of fun to play, but it's ultimately a game that's too short to justify its $60 price tag on consoles, or even its $40 price tag for the PC version.

If you liked the Force Unleashed and wanted to check out the sequel, by all means give it a rental. But no one, not even the most hardcore Star Wars fanboy, should waste the money to purchase it.

Final Score: C-

Happy Birthday, NES

As a child of the '80s, there's a lot of pop-culture influences on my childhood. But nothing, and I do mean nothing, influenced me quite like the Nintendo Entertainment System. I remember playing the games, but I also remember stuff like the Power Glove, Captain N, Nintendo Power, the Nintendo Cereal System, the Super Mario Bros Super Show, GamePro TV (ok, technically that was early '90s), and Video Power (again, technically early '90s). Pop culture of the late '80s and early '90s was heavily influenced by the NES in a way that modern gaming couldn't possibly replicate. And without the NES, I probably wouldn't have spent the last 25 years playing way too many video games instead of doing something worthwhile like curing cancer or something.

Well today, October 18th, marks 25 years since the NES's debut in America. And in honor of Nintendo's iconic console, here are my 10 favorite NES games off all time. They might not be the best, mind you, but they were the ones I played the most and have the fondest memories of. So, in no particular order...

Mega Man 2 - The game that introduced me to Mega Man, which went on to be one of my all time favorite series (I had all of the NES games except 6).

Mega Man 3 - I know I'm a minority, but I've always thought that this was the best of the NES Mega Man games. The soundtrack was awesome, the bosses were awesome, plus you got to fight the Robot Masters from Mega Man 2. And Proto Man!

Super Mario Bros 3 - Pretty much every kid that had an NES had the original Super Mario Bros. I remember when SMB2 came out thinking how disappointing it was because it wasn't much like the original (it would be years before I'd learn why). SMB3 wasn't just a return to the gameplay of the original, it was a vast improvement in every way. The result was probably the best NES game of all time.

The Legend of Zelda - The instruction manual to this groundbreaking game explained the story, but the game itself had you start, alone and unarmed, in the middle of the screen with absolutely no direction. And this was before the internet, so you couldn't just look for where to go or what to do next on Gamefaqs. I remember roaming the land for weeks looking for dungeons, heart containers, and other secrets, and sharing what secrets I found with other kids at the lunch table. You kids who grew up thinking Ocarina of Time was the greatest game ever don't know what you're missing, as later Zelda games fail to capture the magic of the original.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2 - As a kid who loved the Ninja Turtles, I thought that the arcade game was about the coolest game ever (indeed, much better than the first TMNT game on the NES). I was super stoked when I found out that it was coming out on the NES. I remember saving up my allowance to buy it. Ah, memories...

Punch Out!! - The best boxing game ever made, until the new one came out for the Wii. Never could get past Bald Bull, though.

Final Fantasy - Technically, I got this game because a friend of mine already had an SNES and let me play Final Fantasy II, but I'll be damned if I didn't have an awesome time with it, trying out different parties, hunting down and beating a WarMech, etc.

Dragon Warrior III - While Final Fantasy might have reigned supreme for me during the SNES days, this was the definitive RPG of the NES era.

Castlevania III - I never did get Grant, but I still got further in this game than the first one. I didn't like the second one.

Duck Hunt - The only game I ever owned that used the pack-in Zapper.

Honorable mentions go to Super Mario Bros, Castlevania, Mega Man, Mega Man 4, Mega Man 5, Rescue Rangers, Batman, Super Dodgeball, and Skate or Die 2... they might not have had quite the impact the other 10 did, but I still spent way too much time playing them.

So how about you guys? What 10 NES games were your favorites? Sound off in the comments.

Transformers: War for Cybertron Review

Licensed games were once the bane of all gamers. A big summer blockbuster would come out, and a crappy game would inevitably come with it. Sometimes, this is still true (I'm looking at you, Iron Man 2: The Game), but with recent titles like X-Men Origins: Wolvernine and Batman: Arkham Asylum, games based on a license are starting to get good. And not just good enough for fans of the license, but really good. In fact, had BioWare not released Dragon Age: Origins last year, there's a good chance that Arkham Asylum would have been my pick for game of the year.

Amidst this renaissance of licensed games, Transformers: War for Cybertron was announced. As a huge Transformers fan, it was hard for me not to get excited. After all, this was a game being developed by professed fans of the franchise, being billed as a sort of origin story free not just from the mythos of Michael Bay's... reimaginings, but of any continuity at all. A clean slate, but one who's transforming robots clearly bore a resemblance to the beloved cartoon of my youth. Could War for Cybertron be the Transformers game I'd always craved?

Well... not exactly. But I'd say that High Moon studios has come closer than any previous developer.

We'll start with the good. War for Cybertron is a well-crafted third-person shooter. At the start of each of the game's ten chapters, you'll be given a choice of three characters to pick from, each with different starting weapons and abilities. Each character has been lovingly rendered with parts that move and twitch, even when he's standing still. Plus, each character's movement is fluid and natural, so you always have the sense that you're playing as a living being who happens to turn into a vehicle, and never a vehicle that turns into a clunky robot. The levels are also very well designed, so that one minute you might be racing down an open road, only to switch to bot-mode to hop across some spinning platforms to get the drop on an enemy sniper before ducking into a narrow corridor. It's a game that would be fun, even if you weren't playing out my described scenario as Optimus Prime.

But that's part of the game's problem. Even though you play as popular Transformers, even though the game is constantly referencing other Transformers material (especially the 1986 animated movie), the game felt as much like Gears of War to me as it did Transformers. I suppose it's to be expected on their home planet, but I never really got the feeling that I was a 20" tall robot. Each campaign had a epic boss fight with a huge Transformer, but neither felt as epic or as huge as the fight against Tidal Wave did in the PS2 Transformers game. And while the developers were hyping how this game was going to become the new basis for official Tranformers canon and how it was going to be full of deep revelations about the Transformers' past, the story was actually more like a "Megatron's scheme of the week" episode from the old 80's cartoon... that didn't include even one fight between Optimus and Megatron!

All-in-all, I think it was a good try, and I'm looking forward to seeing if High Moon, Activision, and Hasbro will make sequels. Aside from some minor flaws, War for Cybertron is a solid shooter and probably the best Transformers game to date. If you're a fan of shooters, check it out. If you're a fan of shooters AND Transformers, quit reading and go buy it.

Final Score: B+

Alpha Protocol Review

In the late '90s and the early part of this decade, you couldn't talk about PC RPGs without mentioning two names: BioWare and Black Isle. While BioWare has gone on to develop some very successful RPGs (Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, Mass Effect, Dragon Age) Black Isle sadly went down with publisher Interplay.

Several members of Black Isle went on to form Obsidian Entertainment, and Obsidian's been something of a mixed bag. Knights of the Old Republic II was pretty good, but buggy and lacking some of what made BioWare's original so great. Likewise, Neverwinter Nights 2 had an interesting story but failed to live up to the original.

Despite Obsidian's "good but..." track record, I'd been eagerly anticipating Alpha Protocol since it was first announced. Early details pegged it as an RPG with shooter elements and a rich dialogue system... something like Mass Effect, replacing the sci-fi elements with a 007-esque spy story.

Early reviews, however, were somewhat mixed (the game currently has an average score of 65% for the PS3, 64.1% for the Xbox 360, and 74.8% for the PC version at Gamerankings.com). Reviewers have complained that the game is buggy, the AI is poor, that combat with most weapons is useless, and that the stealth elements are fundamentally broken. While I can't deny that the game definitely had some bugs, I'm going to call bullshit on the rest.

I think a huge part of the problem comes from how the reviewers approach the game. I even recall one reviewer belly-aching about your ability to hit a target isn't simply a matter of where you aim your reticule (I wondered if said reviewer complained about that same fact in Mass Effect, but I was too lazy to look it up). The impression that I got was that most reviewers associate spies with stealth, tried to play Alpha Protocol like it was Splinter Cell, and declared the game broken when that approach didn't work.

Newsflash, video game press: Alpha Protocol is an RPG.

As someone who plays tabletop RPGs, I feel comfortable telling you that all RPGs come down to probability, and statistics for yourself and your enemies that modify probability. On a tabletop, everyone rolls dice. On a video game the dice-rolling might be simulated behind the scenes, but trust me, it's there. So in a game like Alpha Protocol, if one guard doesn't notice you killing his friend two feet away but another catches a few strands of your hair peeking out from behind cover from down the street, that's not an AI issue. One guard rolled high on his ability to notice you, the other didn't. And let's not forget that the enemy rolls are likely against a roll on the player's part to stay hidden, or that the player's ability to stay hidden is affected by any armor worn. Likewise, shooting at an enemy in an RPG isn't enough by itself to hit that enemy. Your ability to attack, stat boosts from the weapon being used, and defensive stats for the enemy all factor in.

To be fair, if you hate that sort of thing, then you probably won't like Alpha Protocol, and if you expect to play Alpha Protocol the way you play Splinter Cell, you're bound to be disappointed. However, it strikes me as unfair to criticize Alpha Protocol for being an RPG and not a stealth-action game with RPG elements.

As an RPG, Alpha Protocol is actually pretty good. You play as Agent Mike Thorton, a new recruit in a super-secret agency called Alpha Protocol. The agency and the protocol its named for apparently exist in extra super secrecy so that they can act in what they determine to be the country's best interests while leaving the American government total deniability. Thorton's first mission for the agency is to track down some missiles believed to be stolen from an American company and used by terrorists to shoot down a passenger airliner. There turns out to be more to that than meets the eye, and Thorton finds himself on the run from everyone, including the agency he works for. Throughout the game, you're never entirely sure who you can and can't trust. When dealing with some of the major characters, you'll have two to four dialogue choices. How you decide will affect how the characters treat you and sometimes have serious repercussions. It's true that you'll play the main missions no matter what, but the order you do them in and the relationships you have will affect how those missions play out. It's a great system that has me looking forward to replaying the game in the future just to see how differently things could play out.

The gameplay is also pretty good, once you accept that it's an RPG. I chose to play the game as stealthy as I could. While this meant that I could often sneak up on an enemy and take him out silently, I soon realized that it was impossible to never be spotted. Unlike games like Metal Gear or Splinter Cell, where being spotted meant your were screwed, being spotted in Alpha Protocol meant fighting some guys until you could turn the alarm off. Which brings us to your gear selection. You can take two weapons, armor, and a few gadgets. You actually have four choices of weapon, though, and the armor you wear affects things like how many gadgets you can carry, how much ammo you can carry, how much endurance you have, how much damage reduction you have, and how stealthy you are. I chose stealthy armor, a pistol, and an assault rifle. I used the rifle in most of my fights, but I had a silencer on the pistol and developed a skill that would let me kill an unsuspecting enemy with a critical headshot. The game reviewers who complained that the pistol is useless in a firefight are 100% correct, but they're missing the fact that it's supposed to be, and that's why you take two weapons on every mission.

Of course, stealth isn't the only option. You can wear heavy armor and simply charge enemies, guns blazing. Or you can build up your tech skill and use an array of gadgets to distract enemies while you go around. It's all about how you build your Thorton. I even built up my Martial Arts skills, so that by the end of the game I found that unless an enemy was a good distance from me that it was often more affective to beat the living snot out of him with my bare hands.

Alpha Protocol's biggest problems aren't enemy AI or broken stealth mechanics. Alpha Protocol's biggest problems are game bugs and it's inventory system. I leveled my stealth skill up until I turned my basic Awareness ability (an ability you start with that lets you know what direction enemies are facing, even if you can't see them) to advanced Awareness, at which point it just stopped working. I'd hit the button to activate it, the game would make a sound, and nothing would happen. Sometimes the game would pause as if loading, then when it resumed a second later the camera would be pointed at the ceiling. And let's not forget the time I went through a door and stepped off the world, falling until I reloaded an older save.

As for the inventory system, I mentioned that you can carry two weapons out of four types. The game has pistols, shotguns, submachine guns, and assault rifles. As I mentioned, I found that assault rifles were great in a firefight, and that a silenced pistol was good for the occasional stealth kill. I played the entire game using those two, and never once did I feel like there was a reason to try the other two. Also, while it was easy enough to figure out if another weapon was better than the one you were using, weapon upgrades were a bit of a mess. Lastly, there didn't seem to be enough of it. As you ran about, collecting money and upgrades, you rarely got new weapons or armor. In fact, when you found money it was often a small percentage of the cost of a new weapon. I replaced my starting piston and my starting assault rifle once each, and my armor twice over the course of the entire game.

Minority though I might be, I actually feel like the game's pros far outweigh the cons. Like I said before, if you're expecting something else Alpha Protocol might not be what you're looking for, but taken for the RPG that it is I found it to be a very engaging game well worth the 15 hours or so that it took me to complete my first play through.

Final Score: A-

Getting caught up with mini reviews

Things have been a little hectic lately, but even I was kind of surprised when I realized that I hadn't posted anything in two months. Did this mean I wasn't playing games or doing anything else worth reviewing? Nope... it just means that when I haven't been working, I've been trying to play games.

At this point, I feel like it'd be a waste of time to write full reviews for everything, but I'd like to at least give you my basic feelings in case you were actually counting on me for such reviews. So here goes...

GAMES

God of War III (PS3): If you've played God of War or GoWII, you should know by now what you're getting into. Not a lot has changed... you start of the game all bad ass, something happens to de-power you, you run around getting powered up for a final boss fight. Considering that the final boss fight that you're preparing for is the same final boss fight you were preparing for in GoWII, the whole setup feels a little contrived. Another thing I didn't care for was how most of the weapons you collect in the game are essentially variations on the chain blades you've been lugging around for the whole series. It's almost as if the developers have come to accept that we don't really care to use a sword when we've got knives attached to chains to swing around. Thing is, giving us more weapons attached to chains doesn't make us any more likely to use them instead of the one we've started with, so just to make sure we have to use the new weapons, the developers threw in obstacles and enemies that can only be overcome with one type of weapon. Despite these minor quibbles, God of War III is both visually impressive and the combat is as fun as it ever was. Final Score: A

Gundam Assault Survive (PSP): Essentially, GAS is a sequel to the well-regarded Gundam Battle series. The controls are the same, the game engine is the same, and the game is still divided into eras. As you might expect by now, another campaign era is added in the form of the next Gundam series in the UC timeline (F91, for those of you keeping score at home). A bit more surprising is the addition of campaigns for Gundam SEED and Gundam 00. Then there are a few minor changes to the game's formula. The most welcome change is that you don't have to pick a side for a campaign. Once you've created your pilots, you can play both the Federation and the Zeon sides of the 0079 campaign, for example. This makes it easier to unlock all the mobile suits on one save file. Another change I like is that you earn credits for doing missions, and the credits can be used to buy new units, buy special parts, or buy tune points. You no longer earn tune points for playing with a suit, so when you get a new one you can start tuning it right away. Less-liked changes are the fact that everything's been re-balanced. Most enemies take more shots to kill, even after you've tuned your mobile suits. Likewise, the most kick-ass suits are not the killing machines they were before. Getting new suits is a pain as well. You don't unlock suits, you unlock the ability to buy them. However, most mobile suits will need to be developed before you can buy them. For example, after you have the Zaku II S-type, you'll need to find or buy a part to equip on it, then buy the development plan for Char's Zaku II just to unlock the ability to buy Char's Zaku II. This can make unlocking many of the game's suits an expensive chore.

But the biggest change in the game, and one I'm on the fence over, is the addition of multi-map missions. The first missions in a campaign may only have one or two areas, but later missions in the game will have up to nine. Finishing a mission now isn't about simply completing an objective; you will have to try to control different areas and defend your ship while trying to complete an objective. Sometime an objective might be to destroy a certain mobile suit, but that mobile suit won't appear until conditions are met like destroying enemy ships or controlling certain areas. The result is that many missions are longer and less-suited toward the bite-size gameplay the PSP is best for, and there are fewer missions. Indeed, missions like the War in the Pocket mission in previous Gundam Battle games are now a number of areas in just one mission. So while the new tactical elements are a plus, the way it's implemented can often be a minus. If push came to shove, I'd have to say that Gundam Battle Universe is still the better game. Final Score: B-

Pokemon SoulSilver (DS): I admit to having a certain weakness for core Pokemon games. There's a part of my brain that likes collecting stuff (it's the same part that compelled me to find all the Riddler Challenges in Arkham Asylum, or to unlock all the costumes in a Dead or Alive game). And when you get down to it, Pokemon is a basic, but fun, turn-based JRPG. Back in the days of the Gameboy, I liked the original, and I thought that Gold/Silver/Crystal were better. In recent times, I've enjoyed the newer ones but always felt that they were a step down from Gold/Silver/Crystal. SoulSilver is basically a DS remake of Silver. While newer moves and secondary types have rebalanced the game since the days when the Gameboy Color was king, SoulSilver (or HeartGold, if you prefer) is still probably the best of the Pokemon games. Final Score: A-

Battlefield Bad Company 2: I enjoyed Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare when it came out. When Modern Warfare 2 came out, it was a huge letdown. The characters in the game are unlikeable and possibly insane. The plot is convoluted and at times doesn't even make sense. Infinity Ward more or less jumped the shark, and I've pretty much lost any interest I had in the Call of Duty franchise. Battlefield: Bad Company 2 is the new modern-military FPS hotness. All of characters in Bad Company 2 have their own unique (if sometimes stereotypical) personalities. This makes for likeable characters, humorous dialogue, and the occasional dig at Modern Warfare. While the plot is a little ridiculous, you can actually follow it without going "WTF?!" after every mission. And the combat is pretty much what you can expect from modern FPSes. My only real complaint is the amount of smoke in the game. Grenades will kick up dirt, wood will splinter, brick will crumble, and buildings will collapse. All of it kicks up dirt and dust that obscures your vision, but never really seems to bother the enemy AI. If you like FPS games, you owe it to yourself to pick up BFBC2, as it's better than Modern Warfare 2 in pretty much every way. Final Score: A

Forza Motorsport 3 (Xbox 360): Since the advent of Gran Turismo, racing games have been divided into two catagories. On the one hand, you've got your arcade racers, which range from Ridge Racer to Need for Speed to Burnout. On the realistic side, there's been a few games like TOCA Race Driver, but only Forza Motorsport ever really seemed to compete with Gran Turismo. The physics were better, and you didn't spend a ton of time screwing around in used 1989 Honda Civics. Forza 3 is hands down the best of the Forza series. Even though I thought Forza is better than Gran Turismo, Forza and Forza 2 were still too tedious for me to really get into. Forza 3 had me completely hooked, though. The career mode spans six seasons. Each season has a championship series, and you pass the time between championship events by racing in other evens. Different events will have you racing different cars in different classes. Forza 3 makes it easy to figure out what class you car is, and provides ways of automatically upgrading it to the top of one class without going over into the next one. For example, you might have a car that's an E class, and you might want to race it in a D-class event. You can choose to automatically take it up to D without accidentally going into C. As such, you don't spend too much time tuning, and you spend more of your time driving. The only (and I do mean only) complain I have about Forza 3 is that the game sometimes doesn't know when you've got too much of a good thing. Most races early in the game are two or three laps on a short track, but championship races in later seasons can be several laps on extremely long tracks. It's not uncommon for one race event to take a half-hour to complete. While it's sometimes fun to try to beat your best lap time on such a race, it can also be a little dull when you've actually lapped mos to of the competition and start to zone out. Final Score: A.

Silent Hill: Homecoming (Xbox 360): This was the first Silent Hill game I'd played since the original back on the first PlayStation. I remember really liking the first one, and I'd picked up Homecoming on clearance at a Best Buy. It's been sitting on my shelf for probably over a year now, unplayed. I decided to give it a whirl, and I'm actually sorry that I did. The game is complete rubbish, and it's really the fault of the combat system. People have complained that the combat in previous Silent Hill games have been the game's weakest points. In attempting to fix it, the developers actually made it worse. Homecoming is frustrating to the point of unplayable. Final Score: F.

Halo: ODST (Xbox 360): I have no clue why Halo is still so popular. Sure, the original was fun in its time. I didn't particularly care for Halo 2, but I could see people still being into it. But by the time Halo 3 came out, there were plenty of better FPS games, both for single-player and multi-player. I guess Bungie knows that the Halo fans will pretty much buy a sack full of turds if they put the Halo brand on it, and that's pretty much what they did with ODST. The gameplay, which has gotten worse with each new Halo game, is just awful in ODST, so I'm finding myself not caring about any of the characters. The story's kind of pointless, too, since by now most fans would know how Master Chief wins the war. The only positive thing I can say about ODST is that a lot of the voice cast are from Firefly (Nathan "Malcom" Fillion, Alan "Wash" Tudyk, and Adam "Jayne" Baldwin). Final Score: D-.

MOVIES:

Hot Tub Time Machine: Probably one of the funniest movies I've ever seen. What I really like about it is that it makes no excuses and attempts no explanations for how over-the-top ridiculous it really is. Final Score: A+

The Bounty Hunter: You'd think a movie about a bounty hunter trying to collect on a bounty that's on his ex-wife would be funny. The previews certainly make it look funny. But it's one of those movies where all the funny stuff is in the previous, and the rest of the movie is a predictable and dull romantic comedy. Final Score: D+

Clash of the Titans: It's a movie about a guy sets off on a quest to save a city from Hades. Not because he really cares about the city, mind you... mostly because he's pissed at Hades for killing his family. As he goes about his quest, he fights a lot of monsters. All-in-all, Clash of the Titans doesn't offer a lot in the way of plot or surprises, but watching a pissed-off dude fight monsters makes for a decent popcorn flick. Final Score: B

Iron Man 2: It picks up where the first one left off. Tony's dealing with being both the rock-star head of a huge corporation AND a superhero in the spotlight. Iron Man 2 is a little busy at times, though. We're dealing with the government wanting Stark to give them Iron Man, we're dealing with Ivan Vanko wanting revenge of Stark, we're dealing with Justin Hammer wanting his company to one-up Stark for military contracts, we're dealing with Stark's friendship with James Rhodes, we're dealing with Stark's daddy issues, and we're dealing Stark confronting his own mortality. It's all played brilliantly by the cast, but it feels rushed, especially the few brief fight scenes. It's a solid movie, just not as good as the first one. Final Score: A-.

Mega Man 10 Review

As a child growing up in the 80's (and early 90's), I have a lot of fond memories of the NES.  At the time, if you played video games, you owned an NES.  There was Nintendo cereal, a cartoon for Super Mario Bros and the Legend of Zelda, plus cartoons like Captain N and Video Power.  We had movies like The Wizard, and accessories like the Zapper, R.O.B, the Power Pad, the Power Glove, the Advantage, and the Game Genie.  Back then, we didn't check GameFAQs when we got stuck, we shared tips and secrets at the lunch table at school.

A lot of games from that era haven't held up that great, but one series that I feel has was one of my all-time favorites: Mega Man.  I played and replayed all of the old NES Mega Man games (except 6, which got lost in the transition to the Super Nintendo) more times than I could count.  I even took a copy of Dragon Warrior IV I'd received for Christmas back to the store, resisting the urge to open a new game, just so that I could get Mega Man 5 instead.

In 2008, Capcom surprised the gaming community by announcing Mega Man 9.  The last official game in the "classic" Mega Man series was released over 10 years before on the original PlayStation, and rather than continue to improve the graphics Capcom and developer Inti Creates decided to make it 8-bit, in the spirit of the old NES games.  Between the nostalgia factor and the fact that I'm a huge fan of Mega Man games in general, I couldn't have been more excited.  And yet, when the game came out, it was kind of a letdown.  At some point, Mega Man games had got a reputation for being hard, and Inti Creates decided to make Mega Man 9 one of the hardest.  Thing was, the game wasn't hard because you had to learn enemy patterns or try to figure out what boss weapon worked on which boss.  It was hard because it was cheap, with more spikes, pits, and blind jumps in a given Robot Master's level than previous games had in their Wily levels.  I've played and beaten all six of the NES Mega Man games plenty of times (1-5 on the NES, 1-6 on emulators, 1-6 on the Mega Man Anniversary Collection, etc), and even I thought Mega Man 9 was so frustrating that I never even finished it.  I could only imagine how many gamers who might have been newer to the series were completely turned off by Mega Man 9's insanely cheap difficulty.

In an attempt to appeal to a wider audience, Mega Man 10 was released with a Normal difficulty (still really hard), and an Easy mode.  Despite the fact that players can chose which difficulty they want, many hardcore players cried foul.  Easy mode, they said, was simply too easy.

I can safely say that, yes, Easy mode is too easy.  Aside from being able to take more damage, floating platforms are scattered throughout the levels in places where players are likely to miss a jump.  But the thing is, while Easy mode might be too easy, Normal mode (and Mega Man 9) is still too hard.  It's one thing to enjoy a challenge, but only a sadomasochist could love Mega Man 9's level design.  And when push comes a shove, I'd rather play a game that's too easy than too hard.

Funny thing is, since I wasn't throwing my controller, cursing, and pulling my hair out in frustration, nostalgia did take over.  It was like being back in my childhood, getting excited to be playing a new game in my favorite series, running through levels and figuring out what order was the best to beat the Robot Masters.  It was the feeling that I'd hoped I'd get from Mega Man 9.  And as short as it was, Mega Man 10 became an instant classic, a game I'd played through twice (once as Mega Man, once as Proto Man), and a game who's downloadable content (Mega Man Killers! Playable Bass!) has me more excited than big-name releases like God of War III.

I would like to see Inti Creates come up with a better balance for Mega Man 11 (and I do really want a Mega Man 11 now)... maybe an Easy mode as easy as 10's Easy mode, a Hard mode as hard as Mega Man 9 and Mega Man 10's Normal Mode, and a Normal mode that's somewhere in between.  But even if Easy mode was too easy, it made Mega Man 10 fun enough that I'd pay another $10 if Capcom would re-release Mega Man 9 with an Easy mode.

If you've ever had even a passing interest in the Mega Man games of the NES era, you MUST play Mega Man 10.  It's the kind of game that Mega Man 9 should have been: the kind that makes me want to blow the dust out of a gray cartridge and pop it into an NES.

Final Score: A+

Dante's Inferno Review

If imitation is flattery, then the developers at Visceral Games are trying to get to third base with the God of War team.

Not that this is always a bad thing.  Fact is, people can enjoy their Halo and their Call of Duty because people wanted to imitate Doom and Wolfenstein 3D years ago.  You've got your Final Fantasy and your Dragon Age because people wanted to imitate Dungeons & Dragons.  And Soul Calibur owes its existence to Virtua Fighter, which itself was an evolution of a genre practically defined by Street Fighter.

Imitation isn't always a good thing either.  How many lame street racing games flooded the market after Need for Speed Underground?  Or for every good FPS like Crysis there's going to be a Darkest of Days or two.  And frankly, you can't throw a stick in a Gamestop without hitting an anime-inspired JRPG.

I'm pleased to say that Dante's Inferno trends more toward good imitation than bad.  Despite some liberties taken with the story (instead of a poet taking a tour, Dante's a crusader fighting to win back the soul of his girlfriend, Beatrice), the circles of Hell that Dante fights through are lifted from Dante Aleghieri's Divine Comedy.  So many games borrow from other mythologies that it was kind of refreshing to see one tackle Christian literature.

Combat in Dante's Inferno is fast and fluid.  Like God of War, you have light and strong attacks, you can block, and you can evade with the analog stick.  Where Inferno falls a little short, though, is variety.  Dante never gets a melee weapon that isn't his scythe.  And while Dante learns a few magic attacks along his journey, you can play the game and easily never use more than the first one you're given.  The only other attack you really have to mix things up with is a cross that fires cross-shaped projectiles.

One area where Inferno does diverge from God of War is the upgrade system.  In God of War, you collect souls and them apply them to a specific upgrade.  In Inferno, you have a Holy and an Unholy skill tree.  You can collect souls by killing enemies or from certain fountains, but some enemies and some characters from the poem will present Dante with the option to absolve or punish them.  Punishment gives you Unholy experience, and absolution gives you Holy experience.  When you collect enough experience, you can invest in skills from a higher tier on the appropriate tree.  At first, this might seem like a morality system, where you must chose one set of skills over the other.  In practice, I decided that I'd punish any enemy creatures and absolve any shades that I came across, and I had unlocked everything but the highest tier for both skill trees.

Perhaps Inferno's greatest misfortune is coming out just over a month before God of War III.  It's hard to recommend it in light of the fact that you can just wait for what will almost certainly be a superior game.  But I actually do want to recommend it, especially if you can get it on sale like I did ($40 at Target), because while it might not be as great as the game it so shamelessly copies from, it is still a good game.  Sometimes that's good enough.

Final Score: B

Darksiders Review

When Bayonetta was released, it was high on my list of anticipated games for 2010.  Not only did it get very high review scores from both Western and Japanese gaming press, it was also the pet project of Hideki Kamiya and followed closely in the footsteps of his excellent Devil May Cry.

Bayonetta wasn't the only well-reviewed game released that day, though.  A new video game developer released their first game, an original IP from comic book veteran Joe Madureira.  Based solely on the positive press the game was receiving, I decided to give it a try.

Darksiders, a term that's never actually used in the game, is the story of War, one of the four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.  The Horsemen serve a body known as the Charred Council responsible for maintaining the status quo between Heaven and Hell until such a day that mankind will have grown enough to figure into the conflict somehow.  So when the forces of Hell start attacking the Earth, then the forces of Heaven start fighting the forces of Hell right in the middle of town, War shows up thinking that it's Armageddon time.  Turns out he's the only Horseman to show up, because it wasn't really the Apocalypse after all.  War gets stomped by a big ol' demon and mankind is wiped out it what I guess is some kind of false alarm.

War is saved from death by the Charred Council only to be stripped of his power and sentenced to death by said Council, who believe the whole mess is somehow War's fault.  War argues for a chance to prove his innocence by going back to Earth, which is now overrun by demons.  Figuring that War would probably die in the attempt anyway, the Council agrees.

Back on Earth, War figures that the best way to prove his innocence is to take out the demon he believes is behind it all, the Destroyer.  But since he's be de-powered, he seeks the aid of Samael, a powerful demon imprisoned by the Destroyer.  Samael agrees to help War if War will slay the Destroyer's Chosen and bring him their hearts.  This quest becomes the bulk of the game as War travels to different areas with Zelda-esque dungeons to find and defeat the chosen.  Also like Zelda, War picks up new abilities as he goes along, some of which are clearly Zelda-inspired in and of themselves, like the boomerang and the hookshot.  Other abilities, like the portal gun, borrow their inspiration from other games.

There are plenty of demons, and even some angels, who get between War and his dungeon puzzles, and the combat is brutal.  Some reviewers have compared it to God of War, but I don't think that's really accurate.  God of War allows players to mix quick and heavy attacks to make satisfying combos.  In Darksiders, different weapons are mapped to different buttons.  X (or square for PS3 owners) is only for War's sword, and no other button does sword attacks.  So for the first quarter of the game or so, your only real combat option is to mash the X button.  Later you'll get weapons you can map to the Y (triangle) and R-trigger (R2), only to find that R-trigger items are more for puzzles than combat and the weapons you can map to Y are pretty useless compared to the sword.  So while you'll have other options, 90% of the game is still all about mashing the X button with an occasional dodge in combat.

The Zelda-esque dungeons do help to set Darksiders apart from other action games.  Figuring out how to use War's abilities to solve the various puzzles that he comes across is often much more satisfying than than combat.  They can be genuinely clever and only occasionally involve moving boxes.  They can be occasionally frustrating, though, due to the fact that War controls like a tank.  Honestly, I died less in combat than I did from accidentally falling off a ledge trying to line up a jump.

Darksiders' biggest flaw, though, is its story.  The plot gets very convoluted near the end, with betrayals heaped upon betrayals by characters making drastic decisions on the flimsiest of reasoning.  I might have made more of an effort to follow along, though, if the characters weren't such dull archetypes.  War is a duty-bound warrior with no personality.  Uriel a hothead bent on avenging her leader.  Azrael is the guy who helps the badguy come to power thinking it's for the greater good, only to regret and help the hero take out the badguy.  And Samael is the badguy the hero has to make a deal with because the big badguy is worse.  Samael is actually one of the things the plot really fails on.  You're told from the get go that he's a real baddie; next in line for the throne of Hell until the Destroyer imprisoned him and went to take over Earth.  You spend the bulk of the game killing the guys he tells you to hill, then bringing them their hearts.  He tells you that you need to do this for him to help you get into the Destroyer's tower, but the game is constantly hinting that Samael has an ulterior motive.  When you eventually find out what it is and that he's been playing you, you confront him... only for him to send you on your way to the tower.  And then he's not mentioned for the rest of the game.  I'd like to think maybe he'll have some part in any sequel the developers might make, but nothing's really foreshadowed in the game.

The one thing I would really like to give Darksiders praise for is its art and design.  Characters are detailed and unique.  Bosses are suitably impressive in appearance.  And for an world overrun by Hell, the different areas of the game manage to be visually distinctive and at times even colorful.

At the end of the day, Darksiders is a fun game.  The combat does get a little tedious, but the game does take the Zelda model of dungeon exploration and use it to good effect.  It's just a real shame that such great game design was wrapped up in such a generic story populated by such dull characters.

Final score: B

Mass Effect 2 Review

When the first Mass Effect was released it instantly became on of my favorite games.  Bioware had crafted an amazingly rich and detailed universe, populated it with genuinely interesting characters, and used them to tell one of the best sci-fi stories I've experienced.

What Bioware did with Mass Effect 2 is to improve on the first game in almost every way.

From the get go, you can import a save from the first Mass Effect.  The choices you made in the first game do have an impact on the second.  What I found pleasantly surprising were some of the way even minor things from the first game carried over into the second one, helping to increase the sense that the world of Mass Effect is a living, immersive world.  For example, while riding in an elevator during the first game I heard a news bit about a person named Kitt putting together an all-elcor production of Hamlet (which is funny if you had talked to the elcor ambassador and learned about their emotionless way of speaking).  In the second game a terminal was actually advertising this production.  Similarly, a minor character who gives you an optional side-quest in the first game turns out to be a more important character in recruiting a particular party member.

The story itself is slightly darker than the first.  After nearly being killed, Shepard is revived by the terrorist group called Cerberus.  During the time that he was out, the Alliance and the Citadel Council have convinced themselves that Sovereign's attack was an isolated incident and that the Reapers aren't really a threat.  Human colonies are disappearing, though, and the Illusive Man behind Cerberus believes that a mysterious race known as the Collectors are behind it.  More importantly, the Illusive Man believes that the Collectors are working for the Reapers, and he's recruiting Shepard to put together a team to stop them.

And what a team Shepard puts together!  Without giving too much away, only two of the party members from the first game return.  This seems disappointing at first, but you quickly become attached to the new crew.  In typical Bioware fashion, each of the member of your party is a well-developed character with their own personality and back story.  In fact, it will sometimes make it hard to do choose which members to take on certain missions.  You might know that a certain party member will be more effective against a kind of enemy you expect to face on a mission, but on the other hand you might really like another less effective member.  Mordin Solus, the salarian, was a particular favorite of mine.

The most jarring change is probably to the gameplay itself.  Many of the RPG elements have been stripped down.  All of the characters have fewer options for using their skill points, fewer ranks to buy, and fewer points are awarded.  There are fewer weapons, and once you find one any party member that can use that kind of weapon are upgraded to it automatically.  There are no weapon mods (special ammo becomes an ability for different characters).  And Shepard is the only character who's armor you can customize at all.  Combat is less about a weapons damage, accuracy, and heat stats and more about how well you as a player can aim and how much ammo you have.  Heath and shields also deplete (and recharge) much faster, placing a greater emphasis on finding and using cover.  At first, this seems like a turn off, but the reality is that after playing for awhile it makes the combat more intense and the inventory management much more streamlined and certainly more accessible to a wider audience.

2010 is just a little over a month in, and I know we've got a ton of great games to look forward to this year.  I wouldn't be surprised, though, if Mass Effect 2 is mentioned in Game of the Year discussions a year from now.

Final Score: A+

Bayonetta Review

In 2001, Hideki Kamiya delivered the first Devil May Cry game for Capcom.  Later, some of Capcom's biggest talent formed Clover Studios, which delivered critical-favorite Okami and the sequel to (and PS2 port of the original) Hideki Kamiya's Devil May Cry.  When Capcom decided to close Clover (while retaining the IP), members of Clover formed Seeds Inc.  Seeds merged with another studio to form Platinum Games.

Bayonetta isn't the first game from Platinum Games, but it's the first one with Hideki Kamiya at the helm.  And perhaps unsurprisingly, it borrows a lot of elements from Kamiya's earlier Devil May Cry.

The game tells the story of Bayonetta, a witch found in a lake where she'd been sealed in a coffin for the past 500 years.  Bayonetta has incredible powers and a talent for killing angels, but she doesn't have any memory of who she is.  Driving back from completing a mission, she's attacked by someone who sparks a memory from her past.  Using her informant, Enzo, supplies her with enough information to track the attacker back to an old European country called Vigrid, where she recovering her lost memories is the key not just to solving the mystery of her attacker, but saving all of creation.

As I mentioned earlier, Bayonetta borrows a lot from Devil May Cry.  The game is broken into 16 chapters, with slick cutscenes to fill in some of the story between the action-packed levels.  Like DMC's Dante, Bayonetta can attack with weapons or guns.  The big difference here is that Bayonetta can equip weapons in both her hands and on her feet, which can make for some pretty interesting combos.  The enemy design is top-notch, too.  While there's only a few different types, they do an excellent job of being both majestic creatures that really could be the Bible's angels as well as otherworldly, monstrous creatures.  That fits well with the game's mythology, that light and dark, Heaven and Hell, angels and demons are opposite sides of the same coin with a careful balance maintained between them.  This mythology provides a solid base for a surprisingly interesting story.  For the first chapter or so, it's pretty easy to dismiss Bayonetta as a shallow sex-selling heroine.  But as Bayonetta's past is explored, she's revealed to be a strong heroine who's playful innuendo hides the fact that she really does care about the people around her, with a sense of justice that's not a simple as "angels good, demons bad."

If I had to find fault with Bayonetta, is that it very much feels like a button-masher.  While you have a button for shooting, a button for your hand weapon, and a button for your feet weapon, and tons of combos that you can make out that combination, the action is fast-paced and rarely allows you to think about what combos you're going to use.  The thing is, mashing the buttons can still produce some very slick effects and you're never really penalized for doing it.  The only other real flaw I can find with it is that it's a tad on the short side, with my first playthrough taking about 8 and half hours.  There's some replay value to be had, though, with chances to improve your scores on the levels and plenty of hidden stuff to find.

Ultimately, Bayonetta is a stylish, fast-paced, well-polished action game.  You're not going to push crates around or look for a crest to open a door under a fountain.  You'll chop, smash, shoot, impale, crush, and otherwise brutalized tons of angels.  If you're looking for a more evenly-paced adventure you might want to look at other games, but if you're looking for action there are few games that pull it off as well as Bayonetta.

Final Score: A-

Best of 2009

As much as I wish otherwise, I'm not actually a professional reviewer.  I don't get to play crap tons of games (I average like, what, one a month?), and they all tend to get decent scores from me because if I'm going to spend money on a game to play for fun (then just write about it in my free time), chances are I'm going to play something I think has at least the potential to be fun.

Anyway, the idea here is that I don't play enough games to have best games of certain genres, best music in a game, best console-specific game, etc.  All I can tell you is what's the best.  And the best is...

Dragon Age: Origins.

This is not an opinion, mind you.  This is a fact.  Dragon Age went up against some stiff competition, sure, but there was simply nothing else I've played this year (or last year, for that matter) that was so deeply engaging.  While I was playing it, everything else in my life (work, sleep, food, etc) became an irritating necessity that kept me away from Dragon Age.  And when I wasn't playing Dragon Age, I was thinking about playing Dragon Age.  Dragon Age: Origins is the Game of the Year for 2009.

Here's some claims I feel comfortable making.

Best Wii Game: New Super Mario Bros Wii.  Granted, it was the only Wii game I bothered with in 2009, I feel it's still worth mentioning.  It's classic 2D Mario Bros, and that really tells you everything you need.

Best PS3 Game: Uncharted 2: Drake's Fortune.  Again, the only PS3 exclusive game I played this year, but it's also the first PS3 game I played that really justified the console for me.  There have been PS3 exclusives I've enjoyed before, but the best of them were still more, "I can play this game, since I have a PS3" and more "That goodness I own a PS3, so I can play this game."

Biggest surprise of the year: Batman: Arkham Asylum.  I've played games based on comic books before.  Most are crap.  Some are good.  Arkham Asylum is the first comic book game I've played that's actually great.  Like, so great that if not for Dragon Age it might have been Game of the Year.

Best Downloadable Game: Shadow Complex.  The apparent love-child of Metal Gear Solid and Super Metroid, its only flaws being wonky controls and the fact that it was over too soon.

In other, non-gaming related notes...

Best Movie: Star Trek.  It's really incredible what Abrams pulled off here... a movie that rebooted Star Trek continuity, but did it within Star Trek's continuity.  A movie that pleases Trek fans as well as casual movie-goers.  A movie with fresh young actors that totally nailed their 40 year old characters.  I'm not they type who likes to watch a movie over and over, but I loved Star Trek so much I saw it twice in the theater.

Best Cellphone maker: HTC.  Everyone on the internet loves to bitch about how lame Windows Mobile is, but HTC managed to make not one but three WinMo phones I wished I could have (the Imagio, the Touch HD2, and the Touch Pro2).  I let a friend of mine with a Droid play with the Touch Pro2 that I wound up with, and he was impressed.  Of course, if you really prefer Android, HTC's got you covered there too with Android phones available on three out of four of the major carriers (AT&T currently doesn't have any Android phones, but an HTC phone codenamed "Lancaster" is rumored to be their first).  Whether you go with WinMo or Android, HTC delivers stylish phones, then goes the extra mile to make the software look just as sleek with TouchFLO on their WinMo phones, and Sense on Droid Eris and the Hero.  The smartphone market has matured enough to offer real alternatives to the iPhone, and a lot of the credit goes to HTC.

Best Operating System: Windows 7.  All-in-all, it's been a pretty good year for operating systems.  Mind you, Windows, Mac OS, and Linux (in the form of Ubuntu) all has their best releases ever this year.  But Snow Leopard was mostly minor improvements to Mac OS X Leopard.  And Ubuntu, while much improved, is still using the GNOME desktop environment, and I've always preferred KDE (the KDE variant of Ubuntu, Kubuntu, is still suffering from the awkward transition from the dated-but-solid KDE 3.5 to the pretty-but-problematic KDE 4).  Windows 7, on the other hand, seemed like a godsend.  Gorgeous, with new features that are actually useful, while maintaining a focus on compatibility and trimming the fat from Vista?  I couldn't get it on my computer fast enough.

So how about you guys?  Disagree with my pics?  Have a favorite in a category I didn't mention?  Post in the comments.

Need for Speed Shift Review

In the world of racing games, there's pretty much two types.  There's the arcade racers, and the sim racers.  On the sim side, the field's been pretty much dominated by two franchises.  For the PlayStation owners, there's been Gran Turismo.  For the Xbox crowd, it's Forza Motorsport.

On the arcade side, there's a lot more variety.  Some games use licensed cars, others fictional.  Some have real tracks, some have over-the-top fake ones, and some take place on city streets.  There are many great arcade franchises, but the clear king (by sales) is the Need for Speed series.

In addition to being a mostly-solid series, Need for Speed has occasionally reinvented itself.  This has given us some great additions like street racing and police chases.  Not all changes are for the best.  This time around, it's like EA looked at the reviews for Need for Speed Undercover (a game I really enjoyed, critics be damned), decided that same changes were in order, then tossed the baby out with the bathwater.

Despite the name on the box, Need for Speed Shift is hardly a Need for Speed game.  I could understand why you'd think so.  The menus are very Need for Speed-ish.  Like every other NFS of this console generation, you start out with a bevy of cars you might actually own (Chevy Cobalt, Volkswagon GTI) and graduate up to cars you'd be lucky to even see in person (Aston Martin DB9, Lamborghini Murcielago).  And like other NFS games you can buy performance upgrades, body kits, and vinyls to tart your car up.

But the similarities stop there.  Because, in an effort to reinvent itself, Need for Speed crossed a line it was never meant to: Need for Speed Shift is a sim racing game.

To be sure, it's a fairly competent game.  The career mode consists of earning stars in different racing tiers.  Once you've earned enough stars, you can go for the World Cup.  A bevy of driving aids will help ease NFS fans into the sim shoes.  The car models are great.  Shift doesn't really do anything wrong, per se.

The problem, though, is that it doesn't do anything exceptionally well, either.  The car selection is limited to 65 cars, which is pretty good for a NFS game but far below most sim racers.  There's just 18 tracks.  Career mode is driven mostly by selecting racers from simple menus.  And car customization isn't particularly deep, either.

EA is essentially alienating the huge base they've built with the arcade racing crowd in an attempt to muscle in on the sim racing crowd.  And frankly, the timing couldn't be worse.  A minimalist sim racer, no matter how pretty or competent, just isn't going to stack up when compared to other sim racers on the market.  It really can't help when Forza Motorsport 3, and infinitely superior sim racing game, released about a month later, or with Gran Turismo 5 coming in February.  Luckily, Shift does seem to be an aberration; Burnout developers Criterion studios is working on the next game in the franchise.

Final Score: C+

New Super Mario Bros. Wii Review

As a child of the 80's, I grew up with the Nintendo Entertainment System. I can remember when we didn't say we were going to play a game, we said we were going to play Nintendo. I remember when we didn't call our games discs or cartridges, we called them tapes... even though they actually were cartridges. I remember terrible cover art, I remember the Zapper, the Power Pad, and the Power Glove. I remember a time when a game took you months to beat, if you ever did, not because it took a long time to get through but because whenever you died or shut the system off, you were starting at the beginning.

Some statistics to help frame this review (release years are based on the US release).
Super Mario Bros. came out 23 years ago in 1986.
Super Mario Bros. 3 came out 19 years ago in 1990.
Super Mario World came out 18 years ago in 1991. To put it another way, children have been born and graduated high school since the last time a "proper" 2D Mario game was released on a home console (although we did get the original New Super Mario Bros. on the Nintendo DS in 2006).

As a huge fan of 2D Mario games, New Super Mario Bros. Wii is all kinds of old-school good. Just like Super Mario Bros, Super Mario Bros. 3, Super Mario World, and New Super Mario Bros, NSMBW will have you hopping, collecting coins, eating mushrooms, and fighting turtles through a variety of environments spread out in ever-increasing difficulty over a number of themed worlds. There's not a lot I can really say about the gameplay; either you've played a "real" Mario game or you haven't (feel free to argue with me, but Super Mario 64, Super Mario Sunshine, and Super Mario Galaxy are fun, but they're not real Mario games).

It's hard to put into words what exactly makes Mario games so fun, to the point that even the old NES games hold up much better than most games from that era (the only NES games I like better are the first three Mega Man games). It's colorful, it's got memorable enemies, and the level-design is top-notch. None of that's changed in the past 24 years. And if New Super Mario Bros. drew its inspiration from the original Super Mario Bros, NSMBW is taking cues from Super Mario Bros. 3 and Super Mario World. The Koopalings are back. There are airship levels. You can't keep him after a level, but some levels have Yoshi. Bowser Jr. fights in a clown car like the one from Super Mario World.

For all the nostalgia borrowed from the NES and SNES Super Mario games, what holds NSMBW back from being as huge in my mind as New Super Mario Bros. on the DS (which I named Game of the Year 2006) is how much it borrows from the DS game. The Wii game looks like a more polished version of the DS game. The world maps are laid out the same, you still have one mini-castle in each map, you still have flags at the half-way marker of a stage, and you still have a big flag pole to jump on at the end of each level. There are still red-coin hoops and three large star-coins in each level. As much as things stayed the same between the various Super Mario Bros. games, each one felt new and fresh when compared to the previous one... until now.

New Super Mario Bros. Wii is not, however, a Wii-ified port of the DS game. Some changes are welcome. All of the levels are new, even if they're in worlds that look that they were pulled from the DS version. Some power ups are gone (the Mega Mushroom, the Turtle Suit) and new ones take their places (Penguin Suit, Propeller Suit, and an Ice Flower). Instead of random bosses like a giant Cheep Cheep or Petey Piranha, the Koopalings from Super Mario World and Super Mario Bros. 3 are back. Amazingly enough, the designers did an amazing job of making sure that each battle with each Koopaling is unique. The Wii version uses an item storage system similar to Super Mario Bros. 3. Instead of carrying an extra item that could be activated mid-level, you store them so that you can use them to power up before entering a level. And, perhaps most welcome of all, you can quick-save anywhere instead of just after castles.

Some changes are less welcome. The star-coins you collect, instead of opening up alternate levels, are used to buy gameplay hint movies. And of course, they had to stick waggle in the game somewhere. There are in fact a few times you'll use it. For starters, shaking the Wiimote will cause Mario to do a spin jump. Unlike the spin jump from Super Mario World, there's no real advantage to it in NSMBW. In fact, a few times I accidentally spin-jumped to my death because I was moving in my seat, and the Wiimote took that as shaking. The Propeller Suit is powered by spin-jumping, and it functions like the propeller pads in the DS game. And in some levels, there are screws that move parts of the level around. To use them, you have to shake the Wiimote while standing on them. The final use for shaking is, while holding the 1 button, you shake the controller to pick up objects. Why they added this extra motion to something we've been doing since SMB3 is beyond me. The other way the Wiimote is used is that there are some platforms that tilt when you tilt the Wiimote. This is less irritating than shaking the Wiimote, but given the series awesome pedigree, I'd rather leave Wii-specific controls out of the game entirely and include an option to use the much more comfortable Classic Controller.

The two biggest additions to the game are Super Guide Mode and the ability to play with four other people. Frankly, I don't know about the multiplayer. When playing with someone of similar skill on one of the earlier levels, I can see where competing and cooperating might be fun. But the second half of the game is hard, and having other players seems like it'd be a distraction. This is especially true if you're playing with someone who's skill at the game is lower than your own.

Speaking of the difficulty, the Super Guide is used whenever you die eight times consecutively in the same level. A green block will appear, and hitting it will cause the game to ask you if you'd like Luigi to show you how to do the level. After he does, you'll be given a choice to try it again on your own or to skip the level. I've heard some people complaining that it's a dumb idea, but I'd like to say I think it's great for a couple of reasons. For one, whether or not you use it is up to you. Two, it's not even available until you've died so many times on the same level that you might actually want to skip it, and three, the game is really hard. Of the five Mario games I've mentioned, NSMBW is far and away the hardest. I've cursed, I've thrown my Wiimote, and I used the Super Guide to beat not one, but four levels for me. And this is coming from someone who thinks Mega Man 2 is easy.

All-in-all, New Super Mario Bros. Wii is too much like it's DS sibling and too lacking in originality to be better than SMB3, Super Mario World, or New Super Mario Bros. That also means that, especially with a kick-ass game like Dragon Age Origins still fresh in my mind, it won't be winning any Game of the Year awards from me. But it's still a 2D Mario game, which makes it one of the best 2D platformers available and one of the best reasons to own a Wii.

Final Score: A-

Dragon Age Origins Review

I have said this before, and I'll say it again: I have never played a bad game by BioWare. And I think pointing that out is the best way to start this review.

BioWare is best known for their RPGs, and there are many reasons for this. In addition to creating games that are fun to play, BioWare has a knack for creating deep characters with complex personalities and huge, living worlds. This is especially true of their original IPs: they've created rich histories, local legends and complex politics for Jade Empire, Mass Effect, and Dragon Age that are every bit as fleshed-out as Dungeons & Dragons or Star Wars even without the 30+ years of history behind them.

Dragon Age has all the hallmarks of a BioWare game. The Tolkein-esque story is simple: an uprising of creatures known collectively as Darkspawn are rising up in a "Blight" in the kingdom of Ferelden, and naturally it's up to the hero you create to save the world. Along the way you'll deal with werewolves, the undead, and other monsters, as well as betrayal, politics, and magic gone awry, as you seek to recruit allies in your fight against the Darkspawn. What makes the story unfold in such a gripping way is how it's told. You will learn about the history and culture of humans, elves, and dwarves of Ferelden. And if you take the time to engage your party members in conversation, maybe give them a gift or two, you'll also get to know a lot about them. They all have rich back-stories that make them engaging, three-dimensional characters that you will develop feelings for. This is furthered by the banter between themselves whenever they're in your party while your traipsing about the countryside.

As for the gameplay, I can't comment on the console versions, but anyone who's played an MMO like World of Warcraft will be right at home with the PC version. Although the PC version gives the option to pan the camera up for an overhead view similar to Neverwinter Nights and Baldur's Gate, I've found it's easier in most situations to use the standard behind-the-back camera and the WASD keys for moving. Combat seems easy enough. You right-click on an enemy, and your character will attack that enemy. As your character levels-up, he or she will learn a number of abilities or spells based on their class. These skills can be placed on a quick bar. They require stamina or mana to activate, and just like an MMO they require a cool down period before they can be used again.

After getting a feel for the combat, it can actually be remarkably deep. Your party members all have tactics slots, so you can dictate what they should do in a variety of situations. If necessary, you can click on their portrait to take direct control of them, and at any time combat can be paused by pressing the space bar. While paused, you can still issue commands to characters, which allows you to set up combos. For example, you can have a mage cast Freezing Cone on an enemy, which will freeze them in ice. You can then have a character with training in bows use Shattering Shot for a chance at instantly killing the frozen enemy. Or you may have a Warrior use a stunning attack, only to have another party member follow it up with an attack that takes advantage of the stunned enemies lowered resistances.

The combination of gameplay, story, setting, and characters makes Dragon Age Origins a highly addictive game. For a good long while, if I wasn't sleeping, eating, or at work, I was playing Dragon Age. I couldn't put it down, and even when I was eating or at work, I'd be thinking about playing Dragon Age. The downside to that is that I started to look for other games to play on the side if I didn't think I'd have at least an hour and a half to devote to playing Dragon Age (which is how I was able to not just play Modern Warfare 2, but actually finish it first). Playing Dragon Age won't just take up a large portion of your free time for a few days, either. It took me almost 45 hours to finish the game, and BioWare included plenty of reasons to replay it. For starters, depending on the options you pick when creating your character there are a total of six unique origin stories to play through. And even after they merge, there's a lot that you can do differently on subsequent playthroughs. While there's no clear-cut good and evil paths to pursue, at many points in the game you'll be forced to make a choice. And they're not always as simple as A or B, either... sometimes you'll have many options available. Sometimes more than one will seem right, and sometimes you'll be forced to make hard calls to pick the least-bad choice. You can easily play through Dragon Age Origins twice and never make the same decision in both games, and even then you'll need to play through yet again to explore other decisions. If all that's not enough to keep you hooked, BioWare has an ambitious two years of downloadable content planned, with two quests and some armor available at launch and another quest announced for December.

In a year when a number of big games were moving into 2010, I've found a number of games that have been able to impress me this late in the year and be serious contenders for a game-of-the-year award. I'm happy to say that Dragon Age Origins crushes them all. It's not only the best game I've played this year, but it's easily better than anything I played last year, Fallout 3 included.

Final Score: A+

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 Review

THIS REVIEW WILL CONTAIN SPOILERS! Mostly because it's impossible to talk about how stupid the plot is otherwise.

Ah, Call of Duty... once a sort of niche game held in high regard by the PC shooter crowd, the franchise has become another whore for Activision to pimp annually since the launch of the Xbox 360 back in 2005, split between series creator Infinity Ward and Treyarch. Traditionally, the Infinity Ward games have been stellar while the Treyarch games have been a tad more mediocre. Last year's Treyarch-developed Call of Duty: World at War bucked that trend with a slick presentation and by taking place on World War II's Pacific front, a front rarely covered despite the over-abundance of games set during World War II.

Sadly, Modern Warfare 2 also stands against convention as a somewhat lukewarm sequel to 2007's Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare.

To be sure, the game has all of the hallmarks of an Infinity Ward Call of Duty game. You've got some intense firefights and adrenaline-pumping scenes. Main characters can and will die. When Modern Warfare 2 is at it's best, you'll think it's one of the best games available today. Three problems prevent it from living up to its potential, though.

For starters, the game is way too short. I was only playing it when I only had a half hour or hour of free time. If I had more, I was playing Dragon Age: Origins. Three days of playing it off-and-on was all it took to run through the single-player campaign. It's shorter than the first Modern Warfare, and maybe half as long as World at War.

Second, every time you finish a level and think, "Man, that level was awesome!" the next level is going to suck. One of the early levels has you infiltrating an enemy base in the snow to recover a module from a downed satellite. You've got some stealth bits before all hell breaks loose, leading up to a big firefight and a snowmobile chase. It was great! The next level, though, has you slogging through some Brazilian slums chasing some informant. The local militia is trying to stop you, and the level more or less consists of you moving to a spot where you have cover, shooting an impossible number of enemies, moving up a little bit, and shooting more enemies. The number of enemies is so ridiculous that it kills your suspension of disbelief and ruins any immersion you had, and the level is flat out boring to boot.

Lastly, the plot makes no sense. Granted, Call of Duty has never been a series known for its gripping narratives. For many of the games in the series, simply playing out the life of a soldier against the backdrop of one of the bloodiest wars in history is enough the carry the game. Without that historical setting, Modern Warfare was forced to come up with a plot about a Soviet ultranationalist funding a terrorist takeover of an unnamed Middle Eastern country to draw attention away from his own attempts to restore Russia to its Soviet days. Modern Warfare 2 picks up that thread five years later, but makes zero sense out of it. See if you can follow me here... one of the followers of the main bad guy, named Makarov, is committing acts of terrorism in Europe... because he hates Europeans? I don't know. A general named Shepard recruits a fellow named Allen to infiltrate Makarov's cabal. Makarov takes Allen with him on a mission to kill a bunch of people at an airport, except Makarov kills Allen too. Allen is exposed as an American, and somehow instead of investigating for any ties to the European terrorism, the Russians invade the United States. They're able to sneak attack, because somehow the Russians had an American military satellite, and it had some kind of codes that were cracked before Task Force 141 could retrieve it. To stop the war, Task Force 141 decides to get some intel on Makarov in the hopes of exposing him. All they can figure out though is that there's a prisoner in a gulag that Makarov hates. So 141 decides to get the prisoner, and it turns out it's Price from the first game. He joins 141, but he's crazy now. He thinks he knows how to end the war, so he takes 141 on a mission to take some Russian sub, which he uses to launch a nuke at the United States. Great plan, right? When that doesn't seem to stop the war like Price thought, the 141 try to find Makarov. They split into two teams, and while they don't find him, one team finds intel that proves he was behind everything. They bring the intel back to Shepard, and Shepard kills them because... I have no idea. Then the remaining two members of the 141 (Price and his buddy Soap) decide then that it's more important to kill Shepard now than to end the war or capture Makarov. So that's what they set off to do. The campaign does end with Shepard's death, but that also leaves the war and the whole thing with Makarov unfinished.

If you're a fan of the Call of Duty franchise, Modern Warfare 2 is still a good game. I'm sure the multiplayer will keep people entertained on Xbox Live until the next Infinity Ward Call of Duty. But in a market over-saturated with shooters, Modern Warfare 2 is a little shorter, a little more stale, and a lot more stupid.

Final Score: B-

Uncharted 2: Among Thieves (P)Review

I didn't technically finish Uncharted 2 yet. You see, Dragon Age Origins came out, and I've lost any interest in anything else. I'm at the second to last chapter, though, and I wanted to write something about the game for you guys. You can probably take this review as definitive, unless something happens during the last chapter to make me change my mind. But I doubt I'll get back to it until I'm done with Dragon Age.

I my little home theater setup, I use my PlayStation 3 a lot... as a media player. I play DivX files on it all the time, I use it as my main DVD player, I use it when I want to listen to music on the big speakers, and it's my only Blu-ray player. But when it comes to games, I'm rarely using it. It seems like the Xbox 360 gets more better exclusives (Project Gotham, Forza, Mass Effect, Ace Combat 5, etc), or when games come out for both consoles the PS3 version gets the short end of the stick (Fallout 3 not getting the DLC until later, Bioshock not coming out on the PS3 until later, games like Ghostbusters and Bayonetta looking like shit on the PS3 compared to the Xbox 360 version, etc). For people thinking about the PS3 as a game machine, especially if they already own a 360, it can be a hard sell. Sure, it's got some exclusives, and some of them are even pretty good. But I think the PS3 has been lacking that one killer exclusive that single-handedly justifies purchasing the console. I figured that exclusive wouldn't come until God of War III comes out next year.

Turns out, I was off by a few months. If you're on the fence about getting a PS3 and the recent price drop/redesign hasn't swayed you, Uncharted 2 is all the justification you need.

The original Uncharted was a good game. It was very impressive graphically (for a console game), and it had very human characters with believable dialogue and top-notch voice acting. Uncharted 2 becomes a great game by taking all that was good about the first one and taking it up a notch. The game's plot, which is sort of like Indiana Jones with a touch of James Bond, blurs the line between a cinematic movie experience and a game. On the game side, you're looking at a mix of platforming, puzzles, and gunplay that makes you think, "This game is like Tomb Raider, if Tomb Raider stopped sucking and became awesome!"

The game opens with our hero, Nathan Drake, hanging from the end of a train that's falling off a cliff in the Himalayas. You have to climb up the train (often as it's falling), grab a gun, and fight your way to a cliff... before the game goes back to the beginning of the story to explain how Drake got there. Without giving too much away, it starts with Drake being hired to help steal something from a Turkish museum and winds up with him fighting some guy who could have been a Die Hard villian.

As good as the game is, it's not perfect. Fortunately, my complaints are few. For starters, a lot of the game is starting at point A and trying to figure out how to get to point B. This is usually done by climbing and jumping around the environment. The problem here is that the game's graphics are so good that it's not always obvious what you're supposed to be climbing on. Which brings me to my second complaint. While the controls feel tighter than the original's, they can still be imprecise at times. I can't count how many times I've died because when I jumped Drake went a little to the left and missed his ledge, or how many times I've fallen off a roof trying to line up a jump. My last complaint, and this one might seem a bit odd, is that the game is a little too long. For the majority of it, it's an absolute blast, but near the end you start to feel like, "Ok, another area where I have to climb and jump on shit. Oh, and another enemy ambush at the end. Haven't I beaten this game yet?"

Minor complaints aside, Uncharted 2: Among Thieves is the single best exclusive games on the PlayStation 3, and one of the best games of 2009.

(Maybe) Final Score: A

Macross Ultimate Frontier Review

Some of you are probably wondering what I've been up to. After all, it's been nearly a month since I reviewed Arkham Asylum, and all I've mentioned since then was a F.E.A.R. 2 micro campaign that took me something like two hours to finish. The short answer is work, with some Fallout 3 on the side.

The long answer, which will give us our review, is Macross Ultimate Frontier.

Macross Ultimate Frontier is the sequel to last year's Macross Ace Frontier, which I reviewed just over a year ago. A lot of what I wrote about the gameplay still applies here. You still take your pilot, grab one of the games mecha, then run or fly around shooting other enemy mecha. The graphics and gameplay have been a little more finely tuned, though, so this feels less like Macross tacked onto a Gundam game and more like a genuine Macross game.

But those aren't the only improvements. In fact, most of the complaints about MAF have been addressed. The Macross Frontier campaign extends the whole way to the end of the series. In fact, the original Macross show does too, ending with Kamjin's assault on on the SDF-1 rather than the final battle of Space War One. Macross Zero is given a campaign, as well as Macross Dynamite 7 and the Macross Movie "Do You Remember Love". The Extra campaign still has the over-the-top waves of enemies missions, but it also includes missions and units from non-canon Macross II show and the canon Macross VF-X2 PlayStation game.

The number of playable units has also greatly increased, from 57 to 102. All of the units from the the canon Macross animes are present now, including the odd exclusions from Macross 7. That's more of an increase than it seems, since units with FAST, Armored or Super packs are no longer separate units. On the Player or Partner tab at the hanger, you can choose what optional equipment to install, if any. With the default selection of "Type B" for any equipment, your weapons and special attack will change, and you'll get a second health bar. When that bar is depleted, you'll lose your optional parts. You may also chose to dump them manually.

The tweaks and additions sever to make Macross Ultimate Frontier the best Macross game in the franchise's 27 year history. I can see some room for improvement, though at this point I might just be being nitpicky. Basically, despite the additions, we're still missing a few canon and plenty of non-canon Macross units, like the VF-3000 Crusader and the VF-14 Vampire and pretty much every unit from Macross II that isn't a Gilgamesh or the VF-2SS. And the handful of Extra missions from Macross II and Macross VF-X2 feel like a tease. What I'd really like to see in the next one are actual campaigns for Macross II, Macross M3, and Macross VF-X2 that would include all the missing mecha from those games and series. In the Extra campaign, throw in some missions for the Stealth Wing Experiment, and toss in the SW-XA1 and SW-XAII. And with new movies coming out for Macross Frontier, either addition Frontier missions or a new campaign with new missions, mecha, and optional parts like the Tornado Pack from the movies.

In the meantime, every Macross fan needs to get a PSP, and get Macross Ultimate Frontier.

Final Score: A

F.E.A.R. 2 Reborn Micro Review

It's no secret that I'm a huge fan of Monolith's F.E.A.R franchise. As a matter of fact, up until Arkham Asylum came out F.E.A.R. 2 was looking like a strong candidate for my Game of the Year award. Although some criticized it for not deviating very far from the original in terms of mechanics, I'd thought that those mechanics were tight, making for a solid experience. And after playing mediocre fare like Wolfenstein (and less-than-mediocre fare like Darkest of Days, but I'm sure we'll talk about that another day), I was definitely interested when F.E.A.R. 2 Reborn, a downloadable expansion for F.E.A.R. 2, was released. What really sealed the deal was when Steam was selling it for half price.

Let's just say I'm glad I waited.

I'm not saying that F.E.A.R. 2 Reborn is bad. The gameplay is still very tight, and it's much more challenging that the original campaign. The story's pretty interesting, too. You take on the role of Replica unit Foxtrot 813. At some point during the events of F.E.A.R. 2, you're sent to reinforce Replica forces in Auburn. Everything seems like it's going okay for 813, until he starts hallucinating, hearing voices, and killing is squad mates. The rest of the campaign is all about 813 finding the voice that's calling to him.

The biggest problem is that it only takes about two hours to do this. During those two hours, you'll continue to hallucinate, but the campaign lacks any of the slow-burn horror of its predecessors. Indeed, the campaign seems to take you from one firefight to the next, giving you a chance to run through a laundry list of enemies that were in the main campaign. The ending possibly makes it worthwhile, if you're a big F.E.A.R. fan who's been following the story. Like the ending to the main campaign, it has a sort of cliffhanger that makes you long for a F.E.A.R. 3.

The story and gameplay are good, but ultimately the campaign is too short to be worth the $10 price of admission. If you're a fan of F.E.A.R. and you can get it on sale like I did, you might want to bite. But otherwise I'd have to recommend a pass.

Final Score: C+

Batman: Arkham Asylum review

As a comic book fan (granted, more Marvel than DC, but still), I was curious about Arkham Asylum. And I know that some of my readers, who've never really cared for comic books or enjoyed comic book-based movies (even Spider-Man!), who have basically been hearing the press about AA and thinking, "good comic book game, but not for me."

It's time to fix that line of thinking.

Batman: Arkham Asylum is a good comic book game. I'd agree with the reviewers who have said that it's the best comic book game ever, and it's certainly the best Batman game by a large margin. But to simply label stop there would be doing the game a huge disservice. Forget that Batman's a comic book; Arkham Asylum is a great game. Period.

The story, by long-time Batman scribe Paul Dini, is actually pretty basic. Batman had caught the Joker with suspicious ease during his latest caper. More suspiciously, a fire at Blackgate Prison caused a large number of criminals, many former members of Joker's gang, to be transfered to Arkham Asylum on the same night. Figuring that Joker was up to something, Batman decided to personally escort Joker all the way to his cell at Arkham. What Batman hadn't counted on was that the Joker wasn't planning an escape, he was trying to take over the Asylum with a little inside help. So it's up to Batman to rescue Commissioner Gordon, defeat a couple of super villains, and stop the Joker's master plan.

What really makes AA shine is the execution. At it's core, the gameplay is fairly simple. The camera is a third-person over-the-shoulder camera similar to recent Resident Evil games or Dead Space. The X button is the attack button. This is an important distinction from being a "punch button," because if three goons are attacking you from three sides, you might tap X, X, X and Batman might punch the first goon then throw and elbow back at the second goon before spinning a kick at the third goon. The Y button is for counters. When an enemy has blue lines by his head it signals that he's going to attack, and by pushing the Y button Batman will counter that attack. This makes combat fluid and somewhat free-form instead of just churning out the same combos over and over. It also makes you feel like Batman when you're kicking, punching, kneeing, elbowing, flipping, parrying, and blocking, surrounded by eight goons, and taking them all out without taking any damage.

Combat, while very satisfying, isn't actually a major focus. In fact, when enemies have guns, they can do a lot of damage to Batman very quickly, and sometimes it's best to be a little stealthy. Batman's stealth isn't the same as Sam Fisher or Solid Snake's, though. Batman isn't trying to get by undetected. Batman's still going to take enemies out, but with stealth takedowns or by picking off stragglers in a group then fading back into the shadows. (A little advice on this note, buy the "Inverted Takedown" upgrade as soon as humanly possible. You'll thank me later.) One of the game's highlights for me was taking out no fewer than ten armed enemies in one room without being seen.

Mostly, though, Arkham Asylum is about getting from point A to point B. Arkham Asylum might be comprised of a few buildings on an island, but the entire game takes place on that island. You might find that your current objective has you go to one area, where you get info that leads you to another area, only to follow your objectives back to the first area. Events that happen in the game will cut off some routes or open new ones, and some areas will be unaccessible until you get a certain upgrade, ala Metroid.

If fantastic combat and exploration are like cake, the game's atmosphere is like a creamy filling. I've heard it compared to Bioshock in that sense, and while I'm not sure they're conveying the same sense of atmosphere, the level of atmosphere each game brings to the table is similar. Arkham Asylum is a run down, creepy mental institution in a run down, creepy town. Even without any supernatural enemies, the game can tread close to survival horror at times. Some of the best scenes, including one very reminiscent of the boss fight with Psycho Mantis in the original Metal Gear Solid, are when Batman is suffering from the effects of Scarecrow's fear toxin.

The icing on all this delicious bat-cake is the voice acting. I think the voice acting in a lot of games today has come a long way from the "Jill Sandwich" days of the original Resident Evil game, but Arkham Asylum's voice work is truly a gem. Fans of the DC Animated Universe will recognize Kevin Conroy, Mark Hamill, and Arleen Sorkin as the voices of Batman, the Joker, and Harley Quinn, respectively.

If you like video games, even if you don't really like Batman or aren't really familiar with him outside of Christopher Nolan's recent films, do yourself a favor and play this game. With a lot of game's slipping into 2010, and even as much as I loved F.E.A.R. 2, Arkham Asylum has become my front runner for Game of the Year.

Final Score: A+