Skrutop

Before November of 2005, few people had any exposure to the rhythm games outside of some stumbling on a DDR dance pad after a couple of margaritas on a Saturday night at Dave and Buster's.  Then unknown companies RedOctane and Harmonix completely upended the rhythm genre by introducing a fiendishly simple, yet insanely challenging rock simulator.  Guitar Hero quickly rose from an obscure title to premier game franchise to cultural phenomenon.  RedOctane and Harmonix quickly became must-have properties for some of the biggest names in videogames and music.  They shook hands and went their own ways, ready to build on and refine their rock formula.  With their first post-split effort, Harmonix blew out their concept from just the guitar to the entire band.  RedOctane decided to keep it simple and stuck to what they know works: Guitar Hero.

Though the tiny plastic guitar was put into the hands of Neversoft, best known for the dozens of Tony Hawk games they've created, make no mistake: this is still Guitar Hero.  At first glance, GH3 seems like a vast improvement over its predecessors, especially with the high quality of the track list, the made-over presentation, and the "better late than never" addition of online play.  Unfortunately, when you focus on the more fundamental changes that Neversoft made to the game, GH3 doesn't seem to rock quite so hard.

Let's start off with the good.  First, the basic mechanics haven't changed at all.  You pick a song, you pick the difficulty, and simply to get to rockin'.  As the song plays, different colored circles careen towards you in time with the guitar track.  Using your Les Paul-shaped guitar controller, you hold down the correct colored button, or buttons, with one hand and click the big black strum bar with your other.  As you keep going, the notes come faster and faster, and you're required to navigate more complicated  patterns of notes.  Can't keep up with that?  There are star-shaped notes that will fill up your Star Power meter when hit.  If you get that meter high enough, you can tilt the neck of your guitar to the heavens, shout "By The Power of Grayskull!" and activate your star power.  Everything turns electric, your score doubles, and you'll find your rock meter back in the green...provided you keep hitting the notes.

Though this is still good ol' Guitar Hero, there are a few tweaks that will take experienced players a bit of time to get used to.  First, GH3 is much more forgiving on the timing of your button presses.  Anyone who had difficulty keeping up with the fast notes will find them much easier to hit this time around; the window for hitting notes has been expanded drastically.  Also, hammer-ons - notes that don't require you to strum - still work the same way as before, but their placement in the song is very, very different.  In Guitar Hero 1 and 2, the hammer-ons were determined by the game.  Basically, if a series of notes were close enough together, the game marked them as hammer-ons regardless of whether or not the actual guitarist strummed the notes.  Neversoft did away with that in GH3.  Every hammer-on is hand-placed by the developer, who worked under the guideline of "if the guitarist strummed it, you strum it."  Notice the word "guideline."  There are still some sections with a ton of hammer-ons, but for the most part you'll be strumming a lot more.  Though it's a jarring change at first, eventually you'll grow to appreciate how, for instance, Carlos Santana plays a bit differently than Eric Clapton.

Don't be fooled by the generous timing; this game is hard.  It's really, really, really hard.  Guitar Hero 2 focused on blistering solos and crazy end wankery, where the notes seemed to just fly in all directions with little discernible pattern.  GH3 tones that down a bit, though songs like "Cult of Personality" still have insane solos, to focus on chord-heavy tracks with memorable riffs.  In order to combat the more repetitive songs, Neversoft needlessly made the riff patterns overcomplicated.  For instance, The Who's "The Seeker" is in the middle of the setlist, but its chord transitions are closer to the later tracks in Guitar Hero 2.  By the time that you make it to "3's and 7's" and "Before I Forget," you'll be required to make extremely quick and difficult three-finger chord transitions over and over again.  These chord patterns feel like nothing more than the developers inserting artificial difficulty into the game just to see if the players can keep up.  While the challenge is fun at first, it quickly grows frustrating and tiring.

The biggest new feature is "battle mode."  Rather than trying to outplay your opponent, you actively try to sabotoge him/her.  When you hit a series of star-shaped notes, you gain an attack instead of Star Power.  Now, when you flip your guitar to the heavens and yell "By The Power of Greyskull!", your opponent will be handicapped with one of a handful of maladies, including double-notes, increased difficulty, a broken string, or the dreaded "lefty flip."  The point is to screw your opponent so bad that they fail the song.  This is not as much fun as it sounds.  Most matches tend to be extremely brief, as many of the attacks are too difficult to recover from, especially on the Expert difficulty.  Also, Guitar Hero is a game of skill, where you're primarily competing against yourself rather than the opponent.  Think about if you were playing golf, and could randomly switch out your opponent's ball with one that will hook far to the left every time it's hit.  Sure, it would help you win, but it's not as satisfying as simply beating him with your own superior skill.

Most people think that the presentation of this game isn't that important, since you're just focused on the flurry of notes coming at you.  They have a point, but the presentation makes a big difference in keeping you engaged.  Neversoft understood this, and completely made over just about every facet of the presentation.  The biggest improvement is in the load times.  The load times are so tiny that you probably won't be able have time to read the snarky comments on the now loading screen before you're onto the rocking.  Also, if you can tear your eyes away from the scrolling notes, you'll notice that the drummer is hitting the right drums, the bassist is grooving through the bass track correctly, and the bass-mouthed singer is lip-syncing to the song.  These little touches add that much more authenticity to the rock and roll experience that Guitar Hero is known for.  There are a few framerate hiccups, especially when activating star power.  It's a minor gripe, because you get used to it, but it's hard to imagine that this game is really pushing the Xbox 360 hardware.  It's a surprising blemish, especially since the other presentation elements are so well done.

Despite all of the improvements to the presentation, the track list makes-or-breaks a music game.  GH3 has the single most impressive track list of any Guitar Hero game to date.  Everyone has different tastes in music, meaning that you can always argue about how the soundtrack could be better.  That sort of nitpicking may be fun, but it has less validity this time around.  Before you can even say, "why isn't Led Zeppelin in there," you're countered with inclusions of top hits by The Who, The Sex Pistols, Santana, and Metallica.  Oh, and they went ahead and threw in some original compositions from Slash and Rage Against The Machine's Tom Morello for good measure.  You can see how much more respected Guitar Hero is as a franchise now, as the developers were able to skip the semi-obscure songs like "Last Child," "Can't You Hear Me Knockin'," and "Strutter."  Instead, you can now play legitimate hits like "Same Old Song And Dance," "Paint It Black," and "I Wanna Rock And Roll All Nite."  Some of the newer tracks, like Priestess's "Lay Down," aren't out-and-out hits, and they haven't had the time to become classics, but you won't really care because they're a ton of fun to play.

Upping the ante even further, about half of the 40-plus licensed tracks are recordings by the original artists.  This includes just about everything from 1990 on, as well as a smattering of the older tracks.  That may not seem like a big deal at first, after all we've been playing covers all along, but playing the original version of "Bulls On Parade" just rocks harder and feels much more authentic.  However, not everything is an original recording, and you might think that the covers now stand out like a sore thumb.  While that is true for a few of the stinkers, most of the cover versions are the best of any Guitar Hero game.  You might be surprised when you see "as made famous by" pop up, because you were sure that it was the original recording.

Sadly, the bonus songs could no longer include the wacky tracks by Made in Mexico, the sloppy rock of Vagiant, or all-around fun of Honest Bob and The Factory To Dealer Incentives, because most of the bonus bands from Guitar Hero 1 and 2 are made up of the Harmonix staff.  Neversoft took a different approach and included a dozen or so bands from Europe, as well as some indie bands from the States.  The change is a welcome one, as the bonus tracks still manage mix it up quite well.  It's nice to hear singers scream in German and French for a change.  Neversoft also continued the tradition of adding in some ridiculously difficult tracks to the bonus setlist, including the most frightening song ever put into a Guitar Hero game.  "Through The Fire and Flames" by Dragonforce is a seven-plus minute, 3722 note terror that few will ever survive for more than 2% of the song.

The addition of online play is a welcome addition, and all multiplayer modes are supported.  For anyone who worried about lag, rest your fears, because it is not an issue.  Playing along with a friend, or foe, you'll see every note that they hit and every Star Power phrase that they miss, as well as an up-to-date score, note streak, and multiplier.  Or do you?  If you can tear your eyes away from the flurry of notes coming at you during Slayer's "Raining Blood," you might catch your opponent's score skipping up a few thousand points, as well as their multiplier resetting, well after they've stopped playing a section.  This reveals that, though there is some lag, the game compensates for it and doesn't screw up what you're doing.  This is a very minor problem if you're neck and neck with your opponent during a pro-face off session, but it's more of a problem during battle mode.  Typically, you want to time your attacks to screw up your opponent when they're hitting a section that will give them an attack.  Because of lag, you'll attack them late, causing them to retaliate by smacking your side of the screen during a blistering solo.

Playing online works great, but setting up matches is painstakingly difficult.  Halo 2 came out three years ago.  How do companies continue to ignore its matchmaking model today?  All you need to do is set up a lobby, get some friends together, and start matching them up randomly until they want to stop.  Instead, you have to set up a private match, then invite an individual to game.  That whole process can take a minute or more, depending on how many times they need to switch their guitar model and character's color scheme.  Then you get to play between 1 and 7 songs with them.  If you want to play more than that, you have to go through the same process all over again.  If you're into playing random people, you can jump into a quick match and play whatever mode that user has set up.  You can filter that to avoid battle or co-op, if you want.

When you tally up all of its virtues, Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock is still a great game, even if it's not as fun as the earlier Guitar Hero games.  While Neversoft left the core mechanics well enough alone, the new coat of paint, superb tracklist, and online play are wonderful additions.  However, there's a subtle but significant difference between Neversoft and Harmonix.  Harmonix are a group of musicians who make videogames.  Neversoft are game developers who love music.  This difference is felt in the charting of the songs, and the throwaway battle mode.

Tekken 5 is easily the best game in this incredible fighting series.  The only element keeping it from true perfection is the lack of online play.  The fighting is truly fantastic, the graphics and sound are absolutely stunning, and Namco has included a plethora of extra features that make this game a hard package to pass up.

Fortunately, the designers at Namco were willing to admit that they had made a mistake with the fighting system of Tekken 4, and decided to revert combat in Tekken 5 back to the style of Tekken 3 (still with me?). Gone are the difficult crouch controls and "free walk" style from Tekken 4. Now, blocking low attacks goes back to holding down on the d-pad, as opposed to hitting down+back as in T4, and tapping up or down executes the quick and extremely useful sidestep. The rest of combat follows Tekken's obligatory ultra-responsive control scheme, and most of the characters' moves are a breeze to execute, but difficult to master.

Tekken 5's presentation is simply stunning.  It's a wonder how Namco were able to push the PS2 hardware so hard to produce Tekken 5's visuals.  If you have a big, 16:9 TV with progressive scan turned on, the game looks practically next-gen. The colors are lush, the backgrounds are varied and interesting, and the fighters look amazing. On top of that, the load times are practically non-existent, which is another amazing feat given the level of detail in the characters and fighting arenas.

The sound effects also lend satisfying brutality to each hit.  Smash someone into a wall and you'll cringe a bit with the sound.  It's not uncommon for players to grunt "Ooh, that hurt" a few times per match.  The music is not totally on-par with past entries in the Tekken series, but it doesn't detract from the game in any way.  When you're fighting for your life, you likely won't notice it anyway.

Tekken 5 contains every character that has been in past Tekkens, with the exception of Kunimitsu, or some updated variation thereof. Additionally, two all-new characters are included.  Raven is an American ninja, who inexplicably looks like Wesley Snipes, who has a very tricky and difficult-to-combat style.  Feng Wei combines brutally powerful strikes and quick kicks.  Even some of the older characters will surprise you, as they have been changed up a bit. For example, Wang still shares a lot of moves with Julia Chang, but his animations have been changed to make his kicks look different than her's. This not only makes his moves look more distinctive, but changes his range a little bit.

On top of the entirely new game, Namco also included arcade ports of Tekken 1, 2, and 3 on the disc, as well as the short brawler, The Devil Within. The old games don't quite hold up, especially compared to Tekken 5, but it is fun to take the trip down memory lane and have a few matches with friends.  There's not much to say about The Devil Within game. It's pretty boring, but necessary to unlock the Devil Jin character and his stage within Tekken 5.  In The Devil Within, you'll simply run around monotonous levels, fighting the same people, using the same combinations, and that's about it.

Overall, Tekken 5 is truly amazing.  Even the small misteps of the Devil Within game and the lack of online play, don't detract from the overall quality of the entire package.   This game is simply so good that anyone who even has a passing interest in fighting games should pick up Tekken 5.

Forza Motorsport is the Xbox's attempt at simulation racing, but more specifically it's Microsoft's attempt at a "Gran Turismo Killer". While the game is undoubtedly fun, the core gameplay is nowhere near as refined as Gran Turismo 4. The graphics aren't as good as GT4, the sound isn't as good as GT4, and the car selection isn't as widely varied as GT4. However, Forza Motorsport has one feature that should polarize the population of racing game fans; online play.

If you're looking for an excellent online racing game that requires driving skill, luck, and a lot of trash talking, then Forza is definitely the game for you. It doesn't have quite the pick-up and play appeal of a Burnout or a Project Gotham Racing, but the learning curve isn't so steep as GT4. Pretty quickly, you'll start to appreciate the importance of taking the racing line correctly, applying the brakes and throttle to blaze out of a turn at the right time. Forza also gives a good sense of speed when you're in a Porsche Carerra GT (sooo pretty). Against other humans, you'll experience a big change in how you race. The computer AI, while pretty good, is relatively predictable. It'll generally stay on the line, brake when it should, and take turns slower than you will. But people are another beast. They'll spear you to take the inside of a turn, bump your fender, and generally try to rattle you while battling for 1st on a straightaway. The online setup is about what you'd expect; it's easy to get into a game and start racing.

If you're more interested in collecting a huge garage full of nicely modeled cars, and are looking for beautiful graphics, punishing physics, and the steep learning curve indicative of a simulation racer, than GT4 has this game beat hands-down. Some people complain that GT4 doesn't impart a sense of speed well, but I'd argue that Forza doesn't impart a sense of weight properly. Cars are way too forgiving in the turns (on the default settings), and turns that I'd be punished for in GT4 are doable in Forza. Go to EB and play a race on the Nurburgring on GT4, and then try the same car and the same track on Forza. You'll see that your car in Forza can whip right around the turns without too much difficulty. In GT4, your car feels like the lumbering beast of steel that it is. It's like MS tried to make this game a little too accessible and toned down the difficulty in racing.

While I rate this game as being "good", it's because it's fun to play. But that's not why I bought it. I bought it so that I could play the equivalent of GT4 online. Despite what the ads tell you, Forza is good, but it's just not as good as Gran Turismo.

X-Men Legends is a competent, if not especially deep, action-RPG. The gameplay follows pretty similar to the vein of Diablo where you take your crew into an area filled with bad guys, beat the crap out of said bad guys, and level up your powers. There's a pretty interesting story to the game, and the inclusion of playable classic X-men stories, like "Night of the Sentinels" or Juggernaut's break-in at the X-Mansion. The graphics do what they need to do, but are never intended to be all that great. This game is fun, even if it's a little repetitive.

This game plays sort of like Diablo or Baldur's Gate:Dark Alliance, where you barge into areas filled with enemies, tear them apart using standard attack combos and unique abilities, and then finish off a boss. The real difference here is that you move in a squad of four instead of solo. A pretty quick tap on the d-pad changes who you control, and you will need to change quite a bit. The controls are pretty tight, and there are a number of combos that you can do to your opponents. You'll quickly find that the mutant power combos are indespensible, as they deal out a ton of damage. The melee attacks follow a set number of combos that will knock your enemy back, juggle him, or trip him up.

Some characters are naturally more useful, while others are pretty much useless (*cough* Beast). The characters all follow a similar pattern. You can build 2 attack powers, like claw slashes or optic blasts, 1 "buff" like Iceman's ice armor, and 1 "Xtreme" power with which you'll unleash hell on any onscreen enemies. Also, you get a number of stat increasing abilities like more HP, mana, and augmenting your attacks with your abilities, like Iceman adding cold damage to his attacks.

They used cell shading and low detail to provide a comic book feel. It does what it needs to do, but I'd hardly call it inspired. The soundtrack is ok, and does a nice thing where it'll play a nice ambient background until an enemy shows up. Once faced with danger, the sound maintains the same theme, but picks up into action mode.

As you go through the game, you'll run into 3 types of unlockables. First, you find sketch books that unlock concept art for the game. Meh. Also, you'll find comic books that permanently increase the stats of your X-Men. Naturally they are very useful. Lastly, you'll get CDs that unlock Danger Room missions. The Danger Room missions are generally pretty cool, and get nice and tough by the end. I especially like the character challenges as you get to unload a case of ass whooping using your favorite character. By far, the coolest unlockable was reliving a few missions from classic X-Men books. It's cool to see your characters in their old 70's gear battling against squads of Sentinels.

Prince of Persia: Warrior Within (WW) just went wrong somewhere. It's really a combination of a few different things, but where The Sands of Time (SOT) just felt right as a whole game, WW does not. The major areas that I paid attention to are the new combat system, the puzzles and how difficult they were due to sloppy controls and poor camera angles, the unwise change to an "extreme" theme, and the crappy audio on the Xbox version.

The game itself hasn't changed that much since SOT, with the exception of how combat handles. There's a whole system of moves and combos based on button presses, which is a step up from the simple 6-hit combo and stab with the dagger from SOT. You can pick up different offhand weapons and dole out major amounts of two-handed justice, but in the end the experience is still repetitive. There are a few moments where battles are mixed up, but mostly you'll just use the same tactics over and over again.

The time powers aren't all that different from before. Likely, you'll find that the "rewind time" and "slow-motion" powers are all you'll need. You can go into a Wolverine style berserker rage, and do an earthquake style attack, but really you'll keep your sands filled to use when you mistime a jump.

The puzzles themselves are a carbon copy of the stuff that you did in SOT. The biggest difference that I found in WW was that the camera was always in the position that made it the hardest to judge distance. I'm sure the camera angles looked spectacular from a cinematography standpoint, but they really sucked in terms from a gameplay standpoint. This might fit in with the new "dark" theme, which I'll get to in a bit.

The biggest problem with the puzzles was that the controls felt sloppy. It could be that I couldn't judge distance as well, but I never remember making as many poorly timed jumps in SOT. In WW, it felt like I was pressing the button a half-second too late, so I adjusted accordingly. I can count on one hand the number of jumps that I missed by jumping early. I can't count on ten people’s hands the number that I missed because I jumped late.

The "extreme" theme was horrible. I guess you're supposed to think of the Prince as being a total badass, but it was forced. I liked the somewhat soft and younger prince from SOT; he had charisma. The new Prince has a permascowl and looks like he's trying to be tough and pissy. I'd rather think of the Prince as an acrobat first and a fighter second. Ubisoft, however, disagrees with me.

Lastly, the Xbox version had audio glitches, which were mentioned in the GS review. They happened constantly. The audio, particularly the background music, would just suddenly cut out. It was really, really annoying. Supposedly the 'Cube doesn't have this glitch; I'd get that version. If you're interested in having Xbox Live support, don't bother. The features are worthless.

Soul Calibur III is one of the most frustrating gaming experiences in recent memory. On one hand, the core fighting is still great, the graphics are simply amazing, and the character customization options are very robust. However, the user interface is abysmal and inconsistent, the gam modes actually get in the way of putting you in combat, there's no online play, and the sound is uneven. That Namco can screw up a proven formula this badly is infuriating and totally inexcusable.

Being Soul Calibur, you'll expect the core fighting to be excellent, and it is. The returning cast of characters pick up the obligatory few new moves, and the three new characters really fit in well. I've found some characters are better balanced, so I've had to pick up some new characters to beat my friends. It's a nice touch that I can't dominate with Mitsurugi anymore. There is the creepy feeling that the fighting is starting to get stale, but Namco did do enough to freshen up the battles a little bit without revamping the entire fighting system (a lesson they learned from the lukewarm response to Tekken 4).

The graphics are great, as always. The stages and background are absolutely gorgeous, the animation is top notch, and most of the characters look awesome, like Sigfried, Setsuka, and Zasalamel. However, some of the Soul Calibur crew, like Tira, look a little cartoony, while other characters' faces look like porcelain dolls. The character customization is very robust. There are a ton of hairstyles, face styles, clothing, armor, and accessories that you can put on your character. And if you don't like the color of the gear you have, you can change it to pretty much any color under the rainbow; it's really slick how you can change so many aspects of your character. There are a number of fighting styles that you can choose from, which keep the characters fresh. My only complaint is that you have to pick the fighting style of your character up front (big sword, knives, hands and feet, etc.) and can't change it once you create the character.

The user interface is absolutely horrible. The autosave doesn't save at enough points, and too often you'll back out of a screen and lose your changes. If I want to autosave, don't ask me about saving; just do it. The menus are also horrible. I have to wade through menus to get where I want, and wind up in the wrong mode. An example is the Chronicle of Swords mode. If I accidentally choose it instead of Tales of Souls, I have to either go into the game, select my sortie, and start the tale before being able to back out or reset my PS2. When I go into Chronicle of the Swords, the default selection is "New Game" instead of "Load Game". Again, I have to go into the game, go through setting up characters, and then back out. This smacks of a) being rushed, and b) not getting any game testers to play around with the finished menus.

This is a fighting game, not an RPG. The Soul Calibur series' biggest weakness was it's bloated, pretentious, and often stupid plot. Yet again, the whole attempt at being epic falls flat. Fight introductions have voiceovers that say things like "This is an endless tale of souls and swords". This "epicness" is forced and simply not very good. With SC3, they seriously take their time in getting to the fighting. Each fight is generally one round (one round!?), so the "Now Loading" screen gets more time on my TV than an actual fight does. The cutscenes go for a Resident Evil 4 feel and require you to press a button to avoid a trap that will damage you before the next fight. That's an interesting idea, except that you see the same cutscene every time you play the game. It gets really repetitive to dodge the same thing every time, and since they're interactive, you can't skip them. This is a fighting game, not a strategy game. Chronicles of the Sword simply does not need to exist. It could make for a decent minigame, but it's basically half of the single player portion of SC3. Though you do get to use a custom character, the battles are repetitive and the strategy aspects of the game are a joke. There's nothing glaringly wrong with Chronicles of the Sword, but it just feels unnecessary. You'll only play it to unlock gold and items for my custom characters. However, if the player needs incentive to play a game mode, beyond simply enjoying it, it shouldn't exist.

Because this is a PS2 only game, Namco got away with not including online play. It seems fishy that they didn't put this game on the Xbox; maybe its because Microsoft wouldn't let Namco get away without having Xbox Live support?  Obviously the PS2 won't force online play, as it's never been a core strategy of the system. But this will be the last time Namco can use a "get out of online play" card. This is very upsetting because online play is just expected these days, while it wasn't when SC2 game out.

The sound is a mixed bag. A lot of the sword swings sound ok, but a lot of them sound off. The clanging of swords sounds more like there's a factory banging away in the background, rather than what you'd expect weapons to sound like. Zasalamel's scythe and Siegfried's Zweihander were most indicative of that problem. The voice acting, as always, is really bad. They should've had the characters speak their native languages, rather than English. "Hadoken" will always sound cool, while someone yelling "Futile Effort" sounds stupid. Personally, I'd like to have heard Zasalamel speaking in Arabic, Siegfried speak in German, and Voldo...well Voldo probably can stay as he is.

The GBA has been a goldmine for classic 16-bit RPG gaming. This includes ports of old favorites like Final Fantasy, Breath of Fire, and Sword of Mana and new takes on classic RPGs like Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga and Riviera. Like the other new takes on old favorites, Golden Sun borrows heavily from its ancestors and creates a great original game that feels like an SNES classic.

Your story starts off in typical RPG form. You're a child in a small village that protects the secret of Alchemy. Naturally some bad guys show up and unlock Alchemy, causing chaos throughout the world. You then set about on a quest to save the planet from those that would let chaos reign throughout the world. Obviously this is a huge gloss over what becomes a somewhat complicated plot, but you can see that no RPG cliches have been left unturned by the story.

One of the great things about this story is how it's presented. As you would expect, there's a lot of text to read, but it's supplemented with very cute and expressive characters. When your characters are sad, a speech bubble with a frowny face :( appears over their head. Surprised characters display a "!", etc. It's cutsey, but it works well to give the characters some emotion. Similarly to Final Fantasy VII, when you enter a battle, your characters and enemies take on a more serious, though still cartoony, appearance that fits the mood of combat very well. Your special attacks and magic are exceptionally well animated, especially for the GBA.

The battle system in this game also harkens back to the SNES days, though it has its own nuances that keep combat fresh. In combat, you assign all of your character's actions before any of them are carried out. You can choose from a simple attack, using "Psyenergy" which is just magic, using your djinn, summoning, using items, or defending. The djinn and summoning systems are very interesting in execution. You join djinn, which are little magical animals, to your characters. Each djinn has a different action that you can use in battle. This ranges from protecting your characters for a round, resurrecting KO'd characters, or causing damage and status ailments to your enemies. Each time you use a djinn, it goes into "standby" mode. After this, you can summon powerful creatures that put a major hurting on your enemies. The more djinn you have on standby, the more powerful the summon. Following a summon, your djinn can be called back into action. It's a really interesting system that offers a lot of strategy to your combat. About the only complaint I have with combat is that your characters do not attack intelligently. If you assign a character to attack an enemy that's already been defeated, your character loses his turn rather than attacking the next available enemy. This will cause you to miss a lot of attacks, and can be quite a pain at times.

The puzzle-based dungeons are also a lot of fun to crawl through. You may have flashbacks to The Legend of Zelda, though I kept thinking of Wild Arms 3 when I was playing. You'll need to use your characters' Psyenergy to freeze puddles, lift rocks, and knock over logs to get from Point A to Point B. This keeps the dungeons interesting, and the level design is top notch. There aren't any really difficult puzzles until the end, but you'll find yourself scratching your head a few times to figure out how to get across a room to the next door. Travel between the dungeons is a bit more of a drag, unfortunately, since you don't get an airship or anything like that. The map is fairly linear, and there's not much more than trees and plains to walk through. Some sort of vessel would've helped to speed along those sections.

My biggest complaint about the game is that it wraps up a bit quickly. I pretty much got every major item and found every djinn, and it still only took about 15 hours to beat. The story really just drops off of a cliff at the end as well. This is mostly because it feeds directly into Golden Sun: The Lost Age. Really, GS and GS:TLA are a single game spread across two cartridges, in that you'll have to play both to get the full story. Thank goodness the games are as good as they are, or it'd just feel like a way to make me pay $60 to finish the story instead of $30.

Golden Sun is a fantastic game, with a deep combat and magic system. While the plot is of the obligatory "small kid sets out to save the world" variety, the top notch production of the game keeps it from getting dull. I highly recommend this game to anyone who likes RPGs, and recommend that you pick up Golden Sun: The Lost Age as well.

Golden Sun: The Lost Age is the conclusion to the two-part Golden Sun story. As such, you really can't play this game without having played the first one. There's a brief introduction that tells you what happened in the first GS, but I doubt it explains enough for you to really know what's going on. However, if you've played GS then you'll be able to jump right into GS:TLA. Like all good follow-ups, GS:TLA builds on the successful formula of GS, but adds more depth and difficulty to keep the gameplay fresh.

GS:TLA gets its inspiration from classic 16-bit RPGs. If you've played any of the Final Fantasies on the sNES, you'll feel right at home. Most of your time is spent wandering around the world map, fighting random battles, diving into dungeons, killing powerful bosses, and leveling up your characters and items. This time around, however, there's much more to see and do.

The world map has been dramatically expanded this time around. In the first GS, you were limited to traveling on foot around one continent. GS:TLA gives you access to the rest of the world, and a ship to do it with. You'll find a wide variety of places to go and things to do. This expanded scope also makes GS:TLA longer than GS, which was a complaint that I had about the first game.

Like GS, there are a number of dungeons to traverse. GS:TLA keeps the puzzle-based dungeons, but they noticably ramped up the difficulty in getting around. I scratched my head at a couple of puzzles in GS, but GS:TLA really does have some difficult puzzles to figure out. Also, you'll find that you won't be able to get through a dungeon the first time that you visit it. You'll have to go out and get a new Psyenergy power and come back later. By the end of the game, you'll have to use a combination of Psyenergy from GS and GS:TLA to get through the dungeons. I really liked that I had to put more foresight into getting through a room, and enjoyed the difficulty offered by these puzzles.

The battle system hasn't changed, but you will gain access to more powerful abilities and summons. While GS:TLA draws its inspiration from classic RPGs, there's definitely some combat elements in this game that draw from more modern RPGs. First, the graphical effects are suprisingly rich for the GBA. Your characters make critical strikes often when attacking. With a magical weapon, this unleashes a special effect like fire damage, life leeching, or stunning your enemy. The really powerful weapons unleash very impressive visual effects that make it feel like you're blasting your enemy. Summoning is also more reminisent of something you'd see in more recent RPGs. Classic RPGs usually displayed a summon by showing a large creature descend on the enemy and attack. More recently, RPGs have been using overly long and sweeping animations to emphasize that you are raining an unholy amount of pain on your enemies. GS:TLA takes that tack, and the results are very impressive. If you complete the sidequests to gain access to more powerful summons, you'll see more and more overblown summon animations. Fortunately, you can skip these with a button press when you get tired of seeing them.

The very deep djinn system has been retained with practically no changes. This is a good thing, as balancing your djinn amongst your characters changes how you'll use each character and how well you'll do against the bosses. Combat is not any more difficult than in the first GS, but you'll fight stronger enemies than GS, since your characters become more powerful. Alas, there's still no intelligent targeting, so you'll waste a lot of turns when a character you're attacking has already been defeated.

I did have a beef with the final boss. You can beat on him for 30 minutes with a good pattern and he'll randomly bust out an unblockable attack that will cripple you. I had to fight him a number of times to finally beat him, and it was by sheer luck that he didn't pull out that critical attack. I appreciate difficult bosses, especially when it's the last boss of the game, but that was just really cheap.

Overall, GS:TLA takes all of the successful elements of Golden Sun and expands on them. The already impressive dungeon elements and battle system are given a bit of a boost without changing their formula, and the story will keep you engaged throughout the entire game. Golden Sun: The Lost Age represents 16-bit role-playing gaming at its finest and is recommended to anyone with a passing interest in RPGs.

It's often the case that the second game in a series is really what the developers wanted the first game to be. Typically, a lot of features get cut out during the first game's development because they're either too difficult to create in time for release, or there are other things (physics engines, AI, etc.) that have to be created first. The X-Men Legends series seems to be another example of this. X-Men Legends II is much more deep than the first game, which adds a lot of subtlety and fun to what could have been just another action-RPG.

X-Men Legends II: The Rise of Apocalypse picks up with the X-Men teaming up with the Brotherhood of Mutants to battle back against the evil Apocalypse. Apocalypse is waging war on the world, and Magneto and Professor X intend on stopping him.

Not surprisingly, the Brotherhood and X-Men don't get along very well, and I think the game captures that in the cutscenes and through interactions with the NPCs very well. For instance, approaching Angel as an X-Man gets a different tone than approaching as Magneto. The two leaders, Professor X and Magneto, definitely understand their need to work toghether and keep everyone in line. It's an interesting dynamic, and it's always good to see that while Professor X and Magneto don't agree in their goals, they still have a deep respect for each other.

Plot aside, this game plays basically like the first X-Men Legends. It definitely follows the Diablo formula. Enter a room, attack, attack, attack, kill everything, and collect the loot. However repetitive this may seem, XL2 doesn't get old. The variation on the theme is that you control a squad of up to four mutants, controlling one of them at all times. A simple tap on the d-pad changes who you control, so you can stay on top of the action. This system works very well, and you'll be using it constantly. I find that I control the melee "tank" characters most of the time, but will switch off to Cyclops or Bishop to attack from afar. Also, different sequences of attacks do different things, like popping an enemy into the air, or knocking them against a wall. You'll find that different enemies go down quicker to different attacks and change up your strategy quite a bit. It's a fun system, and the variety of having four characters to control keeps it fresh.

Most of the cast of characters from the first X-Men Legends game return. You can control the likes of Cyclops, Wolverine, Jean Grey, Nightcrawler, Iceman, Storm, Colossus, and Rogue. However, this time around you also can add the Brotherhood of Mutants to your squad like Magneto, Toad, Sunfire, Scarlet Witch, and Juggernaut (my personal favorite). Along the way, you also run into some other familiar faces who offer missions and background for the story. It's a bit of a tradeoff for some of the characters that are gone. I missed Magma and Psylocke. but am really glad that Beast isn't a playable character anymore. Most of the characters are varied, but you'll still find yourself using maybe half of the available mutants. A great adition to this game is that when you put a specific group of characters together (like all women, all melee characters, or The Brotherhood), you get a bonus. This might be a 5% increase in XP, added defense, or increased attack speed.

Character Management is one place where XL2 separates itself from the first X-Men Legends. The system is much deeper now, but also offers you the ability to totally skip that part of the game if you're not interested. This is a great idea, as different people will want to play this game for different reasons. I like to control every aspect of my characters, so I get into maximizing every stat and ability. However, you can set it so that the game automatically assigns skill and stat points, and lets you just smack around enemies all day. The abilities are much more varied this time around. Each character still has abilities you would expect. Cyclops uses optic blasts, Magneto can fly and move metal, and Juggernaut can basically slam through anything. However, each character has other abilities like defensive shields, beserker rages, etc. Like Diablo II, you can build your character's abilities to suit your individual tastes. I like to keep Storm in the back row, so I stick with tornado attacks. But, you could augment her combat with lightning so she deals out a lot of melee damage. The system has a lot of flexibility built in, which the first game really didn't.

Item collecting is much more involved in this game as well. While it's not as deep as Diablo, you'll find yourself constantly gaining new and better equipment, going back and forth between the base to buy and sell items, and switching up your team to make sure that they have the best gear equipped. Everytime I fight a boss, I rush over to see what kind of armor he leaves. There's a lot of variety in the items that you get, and it's a rush when you receive an incredible piece of gear only to be deflated to find out that you have to level up to wear it. Like leveling up, you can set it so that the game automatically equips the best items for each character whenever you pick up an item or the character levels up and can wear it.

Another big change to this game is the addition of Xbox Live support. You can team up with 1-3 fellows and kick Apocalypse's behind. While I didn't really use this feature much, it is a great addition to add online co-op play.

While the core gameplay of the series hasn't changed drastically, XL2 offers a lot more variety than the first X-Men Legends. I highly recommend this game to anyone who likes action-RPGs and has a passing interest in playing as the X-Men.

Chuck Norris Superkicks is the most amazing game that has ever been created. There is nothing like it. There is nothing that can be like it. If you went back in time, Benjamin Franklin would tell you that he discovered electricity so that Chuck Norris Superkicks could someday be given to us by God. And by God, I of course mean Chuck Norris.

But, a WARNING! DO NOT LOOK DIRECTLY AT THE SCREEN! Have you ever seen Raiders of the Lost Ark? That wasn't the 10 commandments in there, just a copy of Chuck Norris Superkicks. I only glanced at the screen, using a mirror, for 1 second and I still almost went blind from the reflected glory. That's the price that I paid for my arrogance. Do not make the same mistake as me.