Zombies are quite a big deal nowadays. We've got another Left 4 Dead game coming out in November, and what is promising to be a great film in Zombieland coming out on October 2. Zombie Apocalypse for Xbox Live Arcade and the PlayStation Network is capitalizing on the strong undead love and making a short and sweet top-down shooter where you do nothing but annihilate hordes of brain-feasting infected.
It seems like, no matter which Katamari game I play, nothing I do is ever good enough for We. I roll a Katamari big enough to roll him up, and he still insults me…or shoots lasers at me. I thought things might be different this time around with Katamari Forever, since I have had over five years to craft my skill, but all I found in the end were ruder, and even more cleverly worded insulting comments coming from not one, but TWO King of All Cosmos.
Despite wanting to see Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs for the past few months, I still haven't seen the movie. So I got the DS game and was excited to add to my knowledge of the movie: there's a guy with brown hair who makes gadgets and gizmos, there's a blonde news reporter, and there are giant meatballs. I began to play the game as the guy with the gizmos and brown hair, who is named Flint. He's joined on his journey by the support and direction of other townspeople, who interact with him from the top screen as he runs through the streets on the touch screen.
The Warriors, for the unaware, is a cult movie from the 1970s about street gangs in New York City. Rockstar brought the brand back to video game prominence with the fantastic The Warriors for PlayStation 2 and Xbox, with a later port to PSP. The Warriors: Street Brawl, currently only for Xbox Live Arcade, is a far cry from the 2005 original, as it is just a boring 2D brawler with very little of the personality of the film.
Back in 2005, Nintendo released a game called Another Code: Two Memories otherwise known as Trace Memory in America. The game followed the story of Ashley Mizuki Robbins, a Japanese American teenager whose scientist parents vanished when she was just a child. One day Ashley received a letter from her father, Richard Robbins, whom she presumed dead. The letter explained that he was indeed alive and waiting for her on Blood Edward Island. Ashley traveled to the island and while searching for her father befriends the spirit of a deceased young boy known only as “D”. Through a series of events, Ashley helps D unlock his past all the while allowing her to learn the dark secrets of her family’s past, including the truth about her mother’s murder.
The predecessor to Dirt 2 came out in 2007, and sadly, Colin McRae, the acclaimed rally driver and the name attached to the Dirt series, died in a helicopter crash around the time of the original's release. Dirt 2, or Colin McRae: Dirt 2 as it is called in Europe, is a veiled love letter to the late driver as the game centers around getting to the Colin McRae Tribute Cup. On the way to the cup, you journey through a fantastic mixture of arcade and simulation racing in this top-line rally racing video game.
James Patterson sure knows how to write an interesting story. Right off the bat, the player is thrust onto a crime scene involving a young Asian woman washed up on the shores of San Francisco. James, you have my full attention.
In 2008, Disney launched a new state-of-the-art attraction at Disney World and Disney Land called Toy Story Midway Mania! It's all in 3D and is based around the riders participating in carnival games. With a premise like that, it made perfect sense to transform the ride into a video game, and they did. However, Toy Story Mania, developed by Papaya Studio exclusively for Wii, doesn't work as a game as it has a few confusing issues and just boils down to how fast you can press a button and whip the Wii Remote pointer around the screen.
A lot of the buzz said that Scribblenauts was something unlike anything anyone had seen before. I think I even heard rumors coming out of E3 that if you typed "Cure Cancer" into the game you would actually cure cancer. In the grand scheme of things, though, Scribblenauts isn't a perfect cancer-curing video game, but it still has one of the most innovative ideas I've ever seen in a video game.
Let's get one thing out of the way first: This isn't like Kid Icarus. Despite the fact that the original name of NyxQuest: Kindred Spirits (Icarian: Kindred Spirits) is similar to Nintendo's long dormant franchise, Spanish developer Over the Top Games' debut game has little in common with Kid Icarus besides the subject matter.
For a long time, I lampooned Wet. With its humorous title, ridiculous premise, and publisher issues, there was a lot to make fun of. After spending some time with the recent release, I can safely say it proved me wrong. Wet has its issues, but its Tarantino-esque style makes it a raucous romp.
When I first heard about Batman: Arkham Asylum, I thought it was too good to be true. I figured it would end up being nothing more than a typical disappointing licensed game. Then the pieces started coming together: Kevin Conroy and Mark Hamill of Batman: The Animated Series fame were set to voice Batman and the Joker respectively, the combat seemed to capture the Dark Knight's signature style, and the story was being penned by prolific comic writer Paul Dini. At the end of it all, Arkham Asylum turned out to be one of the best licensed games I've ever played, and one of the finest games of its kind.
When playing the first installment of the Professor Layton series, I was intrigued by the twists and turns of the storyline, characters, and even the puzzles. Its recently released sequel, Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box, had me wondering what intriguing story line they could possibly come up with. At every turn of the plot, I found myself remembering the first game and expecting those surprises to come through, but they didn't. In fact, even more interesting story lines emerged, retaining some much loved characters but adding in some others, such as Sammy. Long story short, Diabolical Box is everything Curious Village was and more.
