Crackdown 2 is the smoking of video games: it epitomizes the moral that just because something is addictive that doesn’t mean it’s good for you. Once every enemy is fallen and every orb safely collected, you’ll be left drained of any energy with only a sickly feeling to keep you company.
Alan Wake has finally been delivered to Xbox 360 owners after so many years of waiting and hoping, and like all healthy newborns, it’s come out screaming and bloody. It shrieks, “I am Twin Peaks! I am The X-Files! I am Stephen King! Love me, for I am more than just a game!” While it is a decent one, Alan Wake is very much a game, just like so very many other games. But it could have been special.
I’ve revisited Tim Moore’s Do Not Pass Go recently. It’s an entertaining travelogue of London which as the title suggests incorporates Monopoly. Moore explores the history of each of the board’s locations along the route, memorably early on opting to play a round of Monopoly with a Brazilian-born transvestite hooker he encounters in King’s Cross – as you do.
This article was originally published at TheGameReviews
As budgets have gotten bigger, as the market has expanded, and as the resources have become ever more diverse, gaming’s music has simply gone from strength to strength. These days we’re regularly treated to a range of incredible songs in every game we play, carefully choreographed music that amplifies our experience, making each success and each failure that much more dramatic.
You have to hand it to Signal Studios; they actually found a unique way of presenting World War I combat. While the Army Men and Lego series have taken some of the freshness out of living plastic figurines, Toy Soldiers’ authentic representation of kids playing with miniature troops makes interactive historical combat feel more harmless than usual. It’s surreal fun to see these plastic soldiers burst into bits after being shot, as is looking down from your fighter plane on the painted landscapes and cardboard backgrounds below. Also, it’s not another first-person shooter, which certainly helps.
Who doesn’t love word games? OK, some people don’t. Maybe most, actually. But I do, so for me, XBLA’s KrissX (pronounced “Kriss Kross”) offers a welcome diversion from the platform’s sea of twin-stick shooters.
The faint trickling of water. Blue neon flickers in the shadows. To your right, a garden of large coral glows crimson, overwhelming a decaying stairway. To your left, a silhouette standing tall with chest out, arms aloft, and judging all caught in its stony gaze. Above you, the decorative bronze that once flaunted freedom with pride is now overrun with a scrawling of Revelation 18:2 that shrieks out: “Fallen. Fallen is Babylon.” In the darkness of a vent, a pair of small yellow eyes shine out, watching every one of your slow, uneasy steps into the horrors beyond. Welcome back to Rapture, son.