Arkthemaniac

    Let's get right down to it: in a slew of Xbox games, one game stood above all, even above Halo. That game was The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind. It is a staple in modern gaming, creating the best game world yet to be seen. You could spend hours upon hours playing this game, but the odds are that you wouldn't see everything it had to offer. It is, to put it simply, a masterpiece, and easily one of the best games yet created. It's because of this that Oblivion is such a massive disappointment. While the game leaves a terrific first impression upon you, digging any deeper than that and you will find a game that is at times magnificent, frustrating, and even broken.
    It begins similarly to Morrowind: you are a prisoner, who is set free by the emperor, although your freedom is just a by-product of the emperor's actions. As the story unravels, you find yourself hunting down members of a daedric cult known as the Mythic Dawn to help avert a catastrophe the likes of which the land of Cyrodill has never seen.
    While the main quest is engaging, it is ultimately very short compared to Morrowind's epic journey, although is presented in a good way. In fact, the quests in general are superior in Oblivion, giving you more variety than Morrowind. You're rarely just grinding out the same kinds of quests, which makes the game more fun and engaging. The combat is also improved for Oblivion, as is the class balance. Mages are actually playable in Oblivion. Along with that, the graphics are terrific. The world looks great for the most part, and everything just has a good layer of polish over it.
    These are the very things that create that deceptive first impression. The first thing that really catches your attention is how mutilated the voice acting is. The voice actors on hand are generally either subpar or slightly above passable (except for Patrick Stewart, who provides some of the best voice acting I've ever heard), but the issue is that for the entire game, there's no more than 20 voice actors. Oftentimes, a voice actor will be engaged in a conversation with himself, and when they talk in unison...oh lord, it's bad.
    The voice acting issues are passable. They're annoying, but they are in no sense damning. Where the true damning comes from is the world itself. While I called Morrowind the best game world yet to be created, Cyrodill wouldn't make the top 10. This is simply because the world is too similar to our own. Morrowind was a world populated by strange creatures that we've never seen before, like Nix-hounds and Guar. Oblivion has only the classic fantasy fare: goblins, liches, the works. Because of this, Oblivion has a distinct lack of personality and uniqueness. Because of that, exploring is a damn chore, whereas in Morrowind, it was like walking on Mars.
    Even that isn't the worst part, though. A simple fantasy game can still pull it off, even if slightly inferior to its predecessor. The final nail in the coffin comes from the leveling system. It's broken, but I'll explain why it's the final factor. As you level, the environment levels around you. This means that at level one, you will find rabbits in Grapetree Meadow, but at level thirty, you will find ogres. It's very hard to keep up, and unless you spec out your character perfectly, it takes forever to fight these things. But let's say that it didn't take forever. Let's say that you could kill them with a little skill, and they died in a few hits or so. This aspect of the game would still be completely FUCKED, and here's why: It takes any feelings of epic adventure of a living world out of the game. You're so aware that you're playing a game because of this small fact. In Morrowind, if you walk into the wrong cave, you get roasted by a Flame Atronach. Oblivion, there's no fear of that. Because of that, there's no danger. Because of that, there's no point.
    Oblivion could have been great, but the development team lost their balls midway through development. To be fair, the game is not a complete shithouse, but it's so inferior to Morrowind that there's seemingly no reason to play it. Oblivion will be forgotten, yet Morrowind will be remembered. Let's just hope Bethesda has learned from their mistakes.

    Horror games don't work well on hand-held gaming systems. This is a fact that people have accepted since the dawn of time. A scary game has to be atmospheric and engrossing to be scary, which is something that a hand-held can't dish out. Hand-held systems are for Pokemon and Tetris...right? Wrong. Dementium: The Ward successfully shatters the myth of horror games being exclusive to consoles, gives a great control setup as well as a buggy save system to make a game anyone looking for a good fright should check out.
    The story in Dementium is vague. The game opens with your character being rushed into a dilapidated hospital as a young, ghastly-looking girl watches. After this, you are given free range to continue with the game, starting with only a flashlight and a notepad, used for taking notes on puzzles. As you progress, you find a 9mm pistol, a shotgun, a machine gun, and an electric buzz saw, as well as others. Your goal is simple: get the hell out. Oh yeah, and find out what the hell is going on with that little girl, if you must.
    The control setup is good and easy to work with. The top screen shows you the action, while the bottom screen is where you see your life, change weapons, access your notepad and map, as well as adjust the control. To move, you use the D-pad. If you're a lefty, you can use the button pad instead. The right trigger uses your weapon. To aim and look, you move the stylus around the bottom screen, which keeps your hand out of the action up top. Everything works well, and when you fully nail the control, you can switch weapons seamlessly. That is unless, of course, you aren't panicking.
    As far as scariness goes, Dementium exceeds in miles. While you may be able to see some enemies coming, some can surprise you, but almost all of them will give you a scare, particularly the flying heads. Yeah, there's flying heads. The graphics add to this, running at a smooth frame rate, with very detailed environments. This game really wowed me as to the capacity of the DS platform. The sound is good and haunting for the most part with the exception of the buzz saw, which pierces even the toughest eardrums.
    The save system, however, is not so great. It works so that it autosaves every time you enter a new room. If you turn it off and on again, you'll pick up where you left off. If you die, however, you start back at the beginning of the chapter, which can be very frustrating, especially when the hard boss is at the end of a chapter. This takes frustrating to a new level when you fight the last boss.
    Even so, Dementium provides a great gameplay experience for shooter fans, horror fans, and most in between. If you can get over the frustrating save system, there's a great game to be had here, and any DS owner would do themselves well to give it a shot.

    Let me start by saying that I've put in at least 200 hours cumulatively into all of the Playstation 2 Grand Theft Auto games. I loved and cherished them. They played well, had good humor and made you feel like the world's greatest badass at times. Grand Theft Auto 4, with a budget of $100 million and a development time of over four years ultimately proves that Grand Theft Auto relied on more than just the city to play in. How you play in that city matters even more, and this is where GTA4 falls short of it predecessors.
    GTA4 has a much longer story than the other games in the series, and it's more unique as well. You control Nico Bellic, a Serbian war veteran who is escaping from his past. He comes to Liberty City in hopes of finding the vivid American Dream that his brother Roman has been so willing to tell him about. When he arrives, he finds nothing of the sort, and instead becomes wrapped up into a life of violence much like the one he was trying to escape. Nico is a good main character, and his obvious humanity truly affects you in certain ways. The storyline is pretty good, but the dialogue is questionable and feels very out of place, which is where I believe GTA4 suffers the worst.
    When you buy GTA4, you are buying a completely schizophrenic game. What I mean by this is that the different parts of the game do not mix: it feels as though you are playing two separate games, constantly conflicting between gritty realism and goofy arcadeishness. This can easily be displayed through a simple run through an even that will happen to you often in GTA4. You are driving a car running away from the cops. When you go to take a turn, you spin out and end up facing the other way. When the cop car hits you head on, you fly out of the windshield. You then get up, take a few rounds in the chest, and eventually succumb to a couple shotgun blasts. Let me break it down. When you spin out while driving, that was an attempt at realism. In the other games, the driving was much more arcade-like. However, you die after getting shot at least 4 times and flying through a windshield into a nice bed of pavement, officially making your character a flattened piece of swiss cheese. It takes a lot to kill you, just like in a more arcade-style game. These shifts in gameplay can really throw you off. Then there's the dialogue, as I mentioned above. Characters look real and act as real as they can in a video game, but the things they say are so absurd sometimes that you won't know what to think. You could say that this is a play on how big-city dwellers are all crazy, but I say that GTA4 is a victim of the times, stuck in the age of realism when it just wants to goof off.
    The missions are better than common GTA fare. Sure, they're still mostly escort quests, but there's some gems thrown in, such as one where you have to find a person by talking to them on their cell phone. Your cell phone is used for many things in this game, be it to receive text messages or get missions. However, the text messages stuck out like a sore thumb at me as an example of somewhat questionable writing. Text messages in real life often involve shortening things like "hahahahahahaaaaa" to "lol" or "I'll see you some other time" to "cya". However, the inhabitants of Liberty City are all both completely literate and thumb gymnasts given by the messages they send you. Some are so long and winded that it's maddening, especially when they take the time to say meaningless things, such as "and sh**". This is a small detail to some, but it becomes aggravating when the game is trying to be realistic but doesn't bother to go beyond the city.
    Speaking of the city, despite some glitches here and there it's easily one of the best game worlds to date, despite showing an utter lack of creativity, but that's OK, because that's their choice. Everything feels fairly alive and bustling most of the time, even though the pedestrians don't have a lick of street smarts. It really is a great playground of destruction, and I think it's the limit. I don't really want to see a city in a game get any bigger than this, just more interactive. Any bigger and driving will be a chore, just like in real life. Speaking of real life, I could go on and talk about all the useless crap that you can do in the game but there's not really a point. If I want to watch TV, I'll watch TV. If I want to watch Kat Williams, I'll put in a freaking DVD. Lemme shoot stuff.
    The date/hetero-man-get-together aspect of the game is also pretty tedious. You can go bowling, play pool, go out to eat, or hit up the strip joint, but it's not really that fun, except when you go to the bar, get drunk and drive home on the sidewalk, which is a blast, not only because you're drunk, but because the most fun by far that I had while playing this game was hitting pedestrians in my car and watching the Euphoria physics engine work it's magic. It's really amazing, actually, and it helps explain where all the money went.
    The combat in this game is improved over the others in the series, but isn't as good as other third person shooters out there, mainly that one where you play as a bottle of steroids. Still, it works well after some getting used to and bears resemblance to The Godfather, just as the police chase segments bear resemblance to Scarface.
    Because I'm tired of talking about everything in this game, and believe me, I probably covered barely more than half of the elements in the game if that, I'll sum it up with this: Grand Theft Auto 4 is fun, but not nearly as fun as it could have been if it stuck to its roots. It's gritty when it shouldn't be, which is pretty much whenever it's gritty, and it's a shame. I'd recommend playing it because the basic GTA formula is here, it's only worsened a little. The city is worth exploring and Nico is worth knowing, but I don't think it's really worth putting another 200 hours into.

    Oh man, what a fool I have been. Here I was, stuck in ignorant bliss of the world around me, excited for every Wii game set to come out. Escape From Bug Island, well, it has a stupid title, but gameplay>graphixzorz! It'll be great! Not only does this game effectively break anything good about survival horror games from the past, but it singlehandedly made me cry and sent me into horrific diarrhea, shattering all hopes for good in the world and made me feel like self-mutilation. Here, I shall explain why.
    You start off by seeing 3 blocky people get off an even blockier boat. One of them has a rifle, for no explicable reason. It then takes you to a controls tutorial where your gun-bearing friend teaches you how to play the game, and then teases you for liking the girl that went on the trip with you. He then talks you into asking her out at night by the campfire: the ultimate romantic setting. Then, just as your about to ask the question, he asks her out instead. then they up and leave, and don't come back.
    Before I start vomiting up my intestines due to this completely and utterly retarded "twist", let me clarify some of the things I've already said. When I say controls, I mean pressing two buttons at once and swinging the remote. It doesn't matter how you swing it. Your character will always do the same motion over and over again. And you have to hold two buttons at once to to pretty much everything, which shows a lack of though or insight in the controls. A lack of thought pretty much sums up the game, really. Almost everything involves swinging the remote, and they don't even work that well. Your attacks are the same thing over and over again, so no immersion is had at all. Immersion is the first and most pivotal rule of survival horror that this game defecates upon.
    Next, lets discuss the graphics. Super Mario 64 trounces this game in that category. I don't even mean because it's more colorful. I mean it's technically more impressive than Bug Island. That's all I have to say on the matter.
    And my absolutely favorite part: the dialogue. It's so bad, I put it in its own category. Everything your character says seems to have no purpose or meaning other than to awkwardly progress the stupid plot, sometimes inexplicably. Everything is short fragments, and it seriously reads how you would expect a 4th grader's dialogue between two friends would read. The story is pure crap at best, the cause of nuclear genocide at worst, leaning towards the latter.
    If you manage to make it past the terrible dialogue and cutscenes where, for some inane reason, Butch McGunslinger keeps aiming his 12 gauge at your eyebrow every time he says anything, you'll find some enemies, some of which are stupid, others of which are OK. There's these little fish larvae that can jump 30 feet in the air to divebomb you from the sky. To kill them, you hold down two buttons and waggle. Big surprise. Then you have the Mantis creatures, which is really the only good thing about this game, that these creatures have the potential to be frightening. You kill these by holding down 1 and up on the D-pad on the Wiimote, and pressing up and down simultaneously on the joystick. Okay, I made that up, but it might as well be that in terms of intuition. Each area has a certain amount of Manti, moth creatures, which are hard as hell to hit, and cuccoons. It deals out points according to how many you killed.
    In the first area, there are a few cabins. When you go inside to check them out, you'll find the funniest notes in videogame history. The notes will say things like, "My girlfriend just got ripped in half and devoured. I hope she's alright." It really would make me laugh for hours on end if the music that played during the letter cutscenes wasn't the worst, most grating orchestra score I've ever heard. Just thinking about it makes me want to perform emergency brain surgery on myself. You also meet up with some stupid gorilla thing that you have to fight.
    Now, you may be wondering why I keep talking about the first area so much. The reason is that this game is so horrible, I TURNED IT OFF AFTER HALF AN HOUR, which is far too much time to put into such an abomination.
    The only thing I feel bad about in this whole review is my comparison to Super Mario 64. To all Nintendo fans, SM64 was the classic of its time, and I can agree it may have been wrongful to even mention it in the same review as this game, but It served its purpose. Don't buy this game. Don't even rent this game. Don't even think about this game anymore. Once you're done reading my review, clear it from your mind. I played the game, so I will suffer the awful memories that follow. I've been given a curse, and that curse is named Escape from Bug Island. Like I said before, a half hour is too much time to invest in this game, unless it involves getting together with the neighbors, throwing the disc into an oil drum and lighting a match, all the while mumbling a prayer to guarantee the games condemnation to the seventh circle of Hell: a fate far too merciful.

    I got Red Steel a few days after we got a Wii, so sometime after Christmas. My brother and I were excited to see a shooting game on the Wii, and also wanted to engage each other in sword-fighting duels. In fact, everyone was interested, and had hopes in  the clouds for this game. Unfortunately, the game seemed to have only the bare minimum. All things aside, this game is one or two bugs from being broken.
    You play as a Japanese American named Scott, who is called "Scott-san" to my great annoyance, who is currently dating the daughter of a Yakuza mob boss. It starts the game at a restaurant/hotel complex where you are meeting your will-be-father-in-law for the first time. Just at that moment, expectedly, a rival Yakuza gang breaks up the gathering. The game then leads you from California all the way to the land of Ninja and Samurai in a quest to save your would-be wife, helping piece together the broken parts of your father-in-law's empire and restore the honor held by your family....err....family-in-law.
    First off, let's address the story. It follows an unoriginal template set down by countless Steven Segal flicks, making everything incredibly predictable. It doesn't help that the cutscenes are awful, and the dialogue as well as the voice acting are bottom of the barrel in every regard. Next, the gameplay. While the controls of the shooting aspects of the game work somewhat well (even if the avatar's wrist is constantly moving around in an annoying fashion), the sword-fighting is one of the stupidest attempts of its kind. While the controls don't read nearly as well as they should, the sheer concept of these skilled swordsman bashing swords around like cavemen makes the game unappealing. The shooting also suffers from having minimal customization as far as the controls are concerned, since the bounding box and sensitivity cannot be adjusted, and the bounding box as it stands is far too wide.
    Also, the multiplayer is a course for concern. There are four maps available and only three game modes, which leave little variety to be had. The maps are unimpressive and the gameplay is full of bugs, such as how your wrist looks broken all the time, grenades getting stuck in air, and your starting weapon being more powerful than a shotgun. Also, there are no bot opponents. This isn't necessarily a huge deal, since games like Halo don't have them, but it's always a nice addition. Also, there was no sword-fighting multiplayer in the game, but after seeing how it played, that might be a very good thing.
    When I think about it, it's really amazing that Red Steel was as much of a failure as it was. The first two things that gamers thought of when they saw the Wii mote was shooting games and sword-fighting, particularly Jedi sword-fighting. Ubisoft literally jumped on the chance and combined the two, yet made both completely lackluster. Top that off with numerous technical issues and graphical glitches, and you got a big winner.
    All in all, the game was thoroughly disappointing due to its derivative story, uninteresting multiplayer and overall lack of effort. This game should be a poster child for games that try to rush to meet a launch. If it isn't as good as it should be, don't send it out. Games could benefit massively from that simple statement, as could gamers. Red Steel is one of the biggest letdowns in years.

    I don't think anyone really thinks Steven Spielberg made this game, or even had a large role in making this game. It was probably more so that he helped to make the concept, and let the developers put his name on the box to bolster sales. A cheap move, really, putting someone's name on the box when they weren't all that involved. Oh wait, this is actually good. Really good. While some modes are bland, others are fantastic, and almost every game in the package uses the Wii remote well. I can safely say that this game, unlike most Wii party games, is only made possible by the Wii platform, and just wouldn't work on any other console.
    Boom Blox has fairly simple gameplay dictated to you through the title. You make blox go boom, but there's more to it than that. Some games have you shooting blox, others have you pulling blocks, and then theres the ones where you makes stuff go boom. All of the game's modes are available to you in the single player modes, set as goals to achieve. These generally involve either knocking over as many blocks as possible in just a move or two, keeping one block off of the ground as you dismantle the tower it sits on, and so on. You use the Wii remote to throw different types of balls at whatever is in your way. You do this by aiming at the screen to where you want to throw the ball, then pressing and holding A. You then go through the motion of throwing and let go of A when you would let go of the ball. It has great tactile feel and is, for the most part, completely functional. In your journey through boom blox, you will run into a variety of block types. There are Bomb Blox, that explode upon contact with the ball, Chemical Blox, that explode upon contact with each other, Vanishing Blox, which disappear when hit with the ball, and so on. The large variety of blocks makes for many possibilities in the levels provided, as well as in the Editor mode. More on that later.
    Single player is divided into story mode and challenge mode. Story mode is like a storybook,  with all the characters looking very cartooney, and all the text given in a nursery rhyme format. Challenge mode is more straightforward, as it cuts out the story and just has you doing challenges. How much fun you have generally boils down to the section you're in. While the bomb sections are great and the Jenga-style sections fantastic, the shooting sections are much less fun by comparison, and these become a chore to play. Progressing through the story mode awards you prizes and gadgets to use in Editor mode. Again, more on that later.
    The game's multiplayer aspects are much more fun and have more lasting value than single player. This is a party game, after all. There are many different modes to choose from, which keeps the overall experience fresher for longer. Get a group of people that really get into it and Boom Blox is one of the better party games yet made, standing out like a shining diamond amongst a sea of crap, like Deca Sports.
    For me, the level editor stole the show. Not only is it the best application for an editor I've seen in a game, but it's executed very well. If you're bored of the levels provided for you in the package, make some more. The most compelling part of it for me, though, is being able to make Rube Goldberg projects (like the board game Mouse Trap). There's a lot of options here. Get some creative people together with the drive to make something and you can come up with some really great stuff. The only issue I've had with it is that it seems as though the path changes for some things, making it so you have to tweak your device every time you open it.
    All in all, though, Boom Blox is a worthy addition to any game night, a good fit between having partial deafness from Rock Band and thumb arthritis from Smash Brothers. Much like these games, your enthusiasm makes everything all the more fun. There's a lot of fun to fun to have here.

    First person games are few in far between. Okay, let me slap myself in the face for lying to you. OK, first person games that aren't shooter-based are few and far between. While they can be used for superb immersion, many people look to other styles for their non-shooter games. Condemned is a welcome exception to this rule. While there are guns in this game, they are a smaller part than most other FP games, which makes it unique from the start. Couple that with a genuinely interesting story and goosebump-filled atmosphere, and you have a treat.

    The Wii gets a lot of flak, and I mean a lot of flak for its control setup. Often called "gimmicky", "pointless", or "childish", it is the bane of all that the traditional gamer stands for, or at least that's what some select haters would lead one to believe. The points made on why the control setup doesn't work were completely shattered with Metroid Prime 3. While the game is fundamentally very similar to the prior two games, it represents better than any other game on the market what the Wii's goal is: changing the way you play the game.

    Mushroom Men left me feeling a little confused on what to give it for this review. On one hand, the game's protagonist, Pax, is charming and likeable, as are his allies and companions. The design for the characters is also superb, as is the entire look of the game, which is in no small party due to the phenomenal art direction at work. The game also has the musical videogame debut of Les Claypool, bassist of Primus, and he produces some of the best videogame tracks I've heard in a while. No exaggerations. On the other, uglier hand, the combat is weak, and the game is over far too quickly. Nonetheless, Mushroom Men deserves some attention.