Dante’s Inferno
Reviewed for: Playstation 3 and Xbox 360
Also available for: PSP
From: Visceral Games/EA
ESRB Rating: Mature (blood and gore, intense violence, nudity, sexual content)

It isn’t very original to half-dismiss “Dante’s Inferno” as a “God of War” knockoff, but guess what? “Dante’s Inferno” isn’t very original, either, because guess what? In every way beyond the source material that inspired its storyline, “Inferno” is the “God of War” knockoff to end all “God of War” knockoffs.

It’s good to preface this by stating that this isn’t necessarily a bad thing or even a criticism, because for the most part, “Inferno” pays pretty good tribute to the game that so obviously provided its blueprint. Dante executes his arsenal of moves with the same fluidity as does Kratos, and “Inferno” tosses nine circles’ worth of demons, behemoths and the damned at him without any wear whatsoever on the action, which cruises along at the same rocksteady framerate for which “War” is so well known (and, to Visceral Games’ credit, few “War” imitators get remotely right).

Though some will never see the transformation of the 14,000-line, 14th century Divine Comedy into a high-octane video game as anything short of blasphemous (and though they certainly have an argument), “Inferno” doesn’t trample the poem’s memory as it so easily could.

Visceral whittles Dante’s odyssey down to consumable levels, piecing the nine circles of Hell into objectives and environments designed around their themes. But while the game takes liberties in order to be a game, it stays faithful to the outline. Those who accept “Inferno” for what it is — a gutsy reimagination of a seemingly completely incompatible art form that in no way is meant to replace the original form — the translation is quite an achievement in terms of the balance it strikes between reverence for the original work and an understanding of what it needs to work in this context.

And if you don’t care about any of that, “Inferno” still is a solid action game that, like “War,” borrows from legend to create some visually awesome locales for its fights, platforming challenges and environmental puzzles. Chunks of the game fall prone to fights against the same old enemies, and the last circle absolutely phones it in with a series of challenges entirely too contrived to sustain any sense of narrative immersion. But “Inferno” hits more than it misses, and some of the imagery Visceral brings to life — waterfalls of the damned splashing into lakes of fire, walls made of souls screaming for redemption, rivers of blood — is effectively unnerving.

As if to acknowledge the fact that “God of War III” is barely a month away on the PS3, EA has sweetened the pot on the PS3 side with a forthcoming bonus prequel level that will be free to download in March. The PS3 edition also includes a making-of documentary, soundtrack, digital artbook and digital reprint of the poem.

But “Inferno’s” real downloadable treat (for both consoles) might arrive in April in the form of an online co-op mode that also allows players to create and share their own custom-designed circles of Hell. No telling yet whether it’ll be good or how much it’ll cost, but the teaser video on the disc hints at a pretty robust level designer that, in the right hands, will give the game some inspired additional legs.

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Darksiders
For: Playstation 3 and Xbox 360
From: Vigil Games/THQ
ESRB Rating: Mature (blood and gore, intense violence, suggestive themes)

Games imitating games isn’t exactly press-stopping news, but it’s pretty well impossible to ignore the influences — “The Legend of Zelda” here, “God of War” there, a few other surprises in between — at play in “Darksiders.”

It also isn’t a bad thing, most particularly because in borrowing so many little things that make “Zelda” games what they are, “Darksiders” also manages to do one thing — kick players’ tails — they haven’t done in forever. “Zelda” fans who admire the series’ clever dungeon designs but long for the days when the games used to punish players might want to give this a hard look, because it’s pretty clear Vigil Games got tired of waiting and just took matters into its own hands.

“Darksiders’” story — in which War, the first Horseman of the Apocalypse, must redeem himself after accidentally igniting a war on Earth between Heaven and Hell — is darker and bloodier than your typical “Zelda” tale, but the little things that series (and often, only that series) does are nonetheless peppered all over this one.

A fairly robust overworld notwithstanding, the game’s primary action takes place in dungeons — some of which (wait for it) contain an item that (surprise) comes in handy in defeating that dungeon’s boss enemies. One of those items? It’s a boomerang, which War utilizes via a targeting system that’s an unmistakable descendent of “Zelda’s” near-proprietary Z-targeting system. Numerous puzzles utilizing the boomerang (and, among other “surprise” items, bombs that grow in plants) are cleverly designed in “Darksiders,” but “Zelda” pros almost instinctively will have some semblance of how to overcome them.

But while “Darksiders” isn’t short on influences, it also isn’t short on surprises. And while its dungeons are evocative of “Zelda” in numerous spots, they regularly surpass “Zelda’s” offerings in terms of scope. The satisfaction of toppling them comes compounded by the fact that, wholly unlike “Zelda,” the enemies lurking inside are formidable and occasionally brutal.

This is where the “God of War” influence rolls in. If you’ve thrown down as Kratos, a considerable chunk of “Darksiders’” combat — from the camera perspective to the controls to War’s finishing maneuvers to the orbs enemies spew upon perishing — should instantly resonate. “Darksiders” takes some welcome liberties by placing additional emphasis on evasion and counterattacks, and some will certainly appreciate that War’s finishing moves require only a single button press instead of a series of monotonous prompts. The weapons, move sets and terminology also are original, even if their influences are laid pretty bare.

Sincere forms of flattery aside, the sum total gels well… mostly. “Darksiders” occasionally stumbles when influences clash — relying on a targeting system designed for a much easier game can lead to fatal camera problems in tight areas packed with enemies, for instance — and there are occasional encounters that propel the difficulty to an arguably cheap degree.

For some, the biggest problem “Darksiders” will pose is its inability to change difficulty settings midstream. Players of so-so ability may want to swallow some pride and play on Easy, lest they continually succumb to one of these spikes and have no recourse but to start the game over.

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Chime
For: Xbox 360 via Xbox Live Arcade
From: Zoë Mode/Valcon Games
ESRB Rating: Everyone
Price: $5

Even if you don’t like “Chime,” you can feel good about giving it your five dollars, because developer Zoë Mode is donating more than three of those dollars to the OneBigGame initiative, which distributes those donations to the Save the Children Fund and the Starlight Children’s Foundation. Fortunately, players who love puzzle giants “Tetris” and “Lumines” most likely also will love “Chime,” which takes portions of both games, mixes in some Tangrams, and emerges with something serenely unique. The object in “Chime” is to arrange shapes (some straight out of “Tetris,” others inspired by it) into quadrants with the eventual hope of filling every block on the playing grid before time runs out. As in “Lumines,” a virtual beat line slides horizontally across the screen, and portions of the song play in concert with how many squares you clear in any given measure. “Chime’s” excellent five-song soundtrack, along with the fact that players arrange shapes at their pace instead of catch them as they fall from the top of the screen, makes for a experience that’s considerably more tranquil than those from which it draws inspiration. But while “Chime” offers enough mode flexibility to engage just about anyone, those looking to tackle all five levels with 100 percent completion will be shocked to find out just how entertainingly tall an order that turns out to be.

Posted in Playstation 3, Xbox 360, Xbox Live Arcade

Mass Effect 2
For: Xbox 360 and Windows PC
From: Bioware/EA
ESRB Rating: Mature (blood, drug reference, sexual content, strong language, violence)

“Mass Effect” marked a bold venture for Bioware, which took the underpinnings of its superlatively deep role-playing games and crammed them into a tactical third-person shooter with combat as real-time as in any other sci-fi action game. Surprisingly, it worked: The combat was highly imperfect but easily sufficient, and the branching storylines, deep character progression and ridiculous interplanetary scope made for one of 2007’s best games.

How impressive, then, that “Mass Effect 2″ comes along and makes its predecessor look like a rough draft by comparison.

Principally, “ME2″ doesn’t mess excessively with what worked previously. In particular, the storytelling — and the absolutely amazing branching conversation trees that allow the player to mold the personality of chief protagonist Commander Shepard and, by proxy, the story and galaxies around him — retains its considerable polish. “ME2″ is as saturated with planets, alien races and mythology as “ME1,” but it also benefits from not having to introduce it all to the degree its predecessor did. The story takes a sharp turn straight away — a dramatic change of fortune and a pretty serious turning of some tables dictate the game’s first sequence — and while “ME2″ has hours’ worth of optional side missions in tow, pretty much everything operates in the name of barreling the story forward.

(Side note for those who missed “ME1:” While “ME2″ offers additional benefits to players who are already familiar with the characters and alliances, Bioware offers enough guidance to bring new players up to speed without boring those who need no introduction.)

Though “ME2″ is large enough to span two discs on the Xbox 360, Bioware has done a commendable job of cutting fat where it needed cutting. A slick mining mechanic allows players to explore barren planets from the ship instead of via a pointless ride in the Mako buggy, which has been excised completely. The side missions, by extension, have more consequence in the overall ecology, and a cleaner set of menu interfaces makes it easier to (among other things) jump from one mission to another with little downtime in between.

Speaking of saving time, the famously long load times from “ME1″ are considerably more tolerable (and more elegantly presented) this time around. Even more importantly, the wretched save system — which almost everyone learned, the hard way, didn’t autosave like it appeared to — has received a very user-friendly overhaul. (It works, in other words.)

But what truly is remarkable about “ME2″ is how profoundly Bioware transforms the weakest ingredient of “ME1″ into this game’s most jaw-dropping asset. The combat in “ME2″ is more than just sufficient: It’s completely indistinguishable — in terms of speed, control fluidity, explosiveness, and enemy/squad A.I. — from the best cover-based third-person shooters available today. A stunning visual presentation, led by perhaps the best camerawork the genre has yet seen, arguably puts it at the top of the heap.

Best of all, Bioware sacrificed exactly none of the role-playing underpinnings that carried the combat in “ME1.” Those systems worked together well enough back then, but they sing in perfect harmony this time around, putting “ME2″ in a class all its own when it comes to blending two traditionally disparate genres into one.

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Tatsunoko vs. Capcom: Ultimate All-Stars
For: Wii
From: Capcom
ESRB Rating: Teen (mild language, mild suggestive themes, violence)

Fans of Capcom’s lighthearted “Vs.” fighting games have felt understandable pangs of jealousy since the distinctively beautiful, meticulously polished but decidedly more serious “Street Fighter IV” raised the bar for fighting games nearly a full year ago.

Fortunately, “Tatsunoko vs. Capcom: Ultimate All-Stars” doesn’t simply end the near-decade-long “Vs.” game drought; it also closes the gap almost completely between Capcom’s 2D fighting past and the arguably perfect mix of two and three dimensions that made “SFIV” such a staggering treat for the eyes and thumbs.

This being a Wii game, “TvC” understandably cannot match the level of visual detail “SFIV” pulled off on more powerful hardware. But in borrowing that game’s approach — characters animating in full, fluid 3D but fighting on a 2D plane — it reaps the same benefits: The fighters pull off spectacular moves with abandon, but the removal of unnecessary 3D space whittles the fight down to the same psychological science that made “Street Fighter” so special in the first place. (“TvC,” to its credit, closes the graphical gap by opting for a cel-shaded visual style that really makes its infectiously outlandish style pop.)

Though the fighting shines under the guidance of the new engine, “TvC” is unmistakably a “Vs.” game at heart. The two-on-two matches represent a paring back from “Marvel Vs. Capcom’s” three-on-three insanity, but the speed and accessibility of the fighting remain several notches beyond “SFIV’s” more methodical leanings. Per brand tradition, “TvC” provides a generous arsenal for button-mashers while reserving the really good stuff for players who hunker down and learn each fighter’s respective intricacies.

Whether the roster is a boon or burden will come down to individual tastes. The Tatsunoko half of “TvC” consists of anime characters who are big in Japan but significantly lesser known here, but while the relative obscurity robs “TvC” of the dream fights “Marvel” had, it’s an arguable benefit to players intrigued by the multitude of surprises 13 brand-new (and often wildly designed) characters will afford them. Capcom’s 13 offerings should prove a bit more familiar, but the wide diversity of the cast — Ryu and Chun-Li are here, but so is Mega Man, “Dead Rising’s” Frank West and characters from “Lost Planet,” “Viewtiful Joe” and “Rival Schools” — means a bounty of quirks and highly divergent (but reasonably well-balanced) styles awaits discovery on both sides.

“TvC” complements its polished gameplay by offering enough control styles (remote/nunchuck, Classic controller, Gamecube controller) to suit everyone, and it provides plenty of longevity with a 26-ending single-player component and online multiplayer (two players) that worked without incident in pre-release testing. (Whether that holds up under the stress of thousands of players remains to be seen, but so far, so good.)

Just for fun, Capcom tosses in a “Tatsunoko vs. Capcom: Ultimate All-Shooters” mode, which is a bizarre but surprisingly filling top-down shooter that features the game’s cast and supports up to four players. The mode has absolutely nothing to do with anything else in terms of gameplay. But neither the freebie “Geometry Wars” mode that snuck its way onto “Project Gotham Racing 2,” and look how that one turned out.

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Dark Void Zero
For: Nintendo DSi via the Nintendo DSi Shop
From: Other Ocean Interactive/Capcom
ESRB Rating: Everyone (fantasy violence)
Price: $5

Capcom’s infatuation with making mock Nintendo Entertainment System games in the 21st century isn’t new (see “Mega Man 9″ and the upcoming “Mega Man 10″), but “Dark Void Zero” takes the trick to a new level of imagination. Like the new Xbox 360/PS3 game “Dark Void,” “Zero” is a standard shooter that sets itself apart by strapping a jet pack to the player’s back. In the case of “Zero,” though, that translates into a sidescrolling action game that looks, sounds and acts like a game from 1988. In a vacuum, “Zero” is perfect for the price: The controls are polished and responsive in spite of the retro presentation, and with three difficulty settings and a tough-but-fair continue system, it’s challenging without resorting to “MM9’s” level of punishment. But “Zero” is especially cool when viewed in context. The nostalgically sparse story sets “Void’s” table surprisingly well, and it successfully manages to imbue a sense of history into a franchise that doesn’t actually have any. The developers really run with the joke, too: “Zero’s” digital manual includes a mock story detailing why it didn’t come out in 1987 as originally intended, and the composer responsible for “Void’s” score also orchestrated an 8-bit facsimile for “Zero.” Other clever and funny touches await — including one right when the game boots — but they’re best left unspoiled.

Posted in Nintendo DSiWare, Nintendo Wii, Xbox 360

Army of Two: The 40th Day
Reviewed for: Playstation 3 and Xbox 360
Alternate version available for: PSP
From: EA Montreal
ESRB Rating: Mature (blood, intense violence, strong language)

The things that polarized players of 2008’s “Army of Two” return either mostly or completely intact in “Army of Two: The 40th Day,” and depending on what side you’re on, that’s either somewhat unfortunate or the best news this review could provide.

That’s because, feelings about the things “AO2″ did aside, it was those things that made it a wholly unique third-person shooter in an era crawling with them. “Day” is designed to be played with a friend (or, failing that, a surprisingly capable A.I.-controlled partner), and while its attempts to stress the value of teamwork come off as pretty contrived, they’re also pretty effective if you’re willing to play along and take advantage.

For its part, “Day” at least learns from some of its predecessor’s missteps. It still places a premium on one player drawing fire while the other moves around and flanks the enemy, and it still communicates this technique with the occasional enemy who only takes damage from behind and an entirely manufactured “Aggro” meter that shows which character has the enemy’s attention and which is free to advance and find cover.

But while the first game compounded these techniques with levels so obviously designed to take advantage of them in terribly obvious ways, “Day” offers larger, more open-ended environments that afford players considerably more strategic freedom. The set pieces are pretty cool to experience just on a visual level — war-torn Shanghai falls spectacularly apart while the action pushes forward, and some buildings become so torn that indoor and outdoor levels blend together — and the ability to tackle them numerous ways is never a bad thing.

With that said, the increased scope regularly finds “Day” elongating fights, trotting out soldiers as if from a clown car to engage in battles that sometimes drag out longer than seems reasonable. That, along with a puzzling save system that often places checkpoints right before (not after) unskippable cut scenes players potentially will have to watch multiple times, represent the game’s most unfortunate slips.

One also could argue that “Day,” broken down, is just one similar firefight after another for five or six hours. But while that’s somewhat true, “Day’s” gunplay and control fundamentals are so sound that the moment-to-moment action is too fun to grow stale during any reasonable sitting. That’s especially true for those who take advantage of the staggeringly deep weapon customization system, which allows players to customize and outfit their arsenal (and, with armyoftwo.com’s help, their outfits) in the same manner a racing sim lets them customize cars.

As it did with “Two,” “Day’s” teamwork methodology trickles down to multiplayer. The campaign, as mentioned, is playable via local or online co-op. And while the competitive multiplayer modes — deathmatch, territory and objective-based — are the usual standards, the unique team distribution (up to five teams of two players each) and special techniques that arrangement entails give “Day” more legs than if it was just another third-person shooter doing the same old thing.

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Alien Breed Evolution: Episode 1
For: Xbox 360 via Xbox Live Arcade
From: Team17 Software
ESRB Rating: Teen (blood and gore, violence)

Connoisseurs of 20-year-old computer games might remember the Amiga game “Alien Breed,” a fairly traditional overhead shooter in which players defended the corridors of a spaceship from waves of aliens bent on hijacking the ship and taking humanity down with it.

Two decades and numerous technological advancements on, the premise remains unchanged in “Alien Breed Evolution: Episode 1.” A new ship is under attack by a horde of bug-like aliens, little human life remains aboard, and the object — fight off the aliens, escape with your life — hasn’t changed.

Because this is a $10 downloadable game and not a big-budget reboot, “Evolution” is, indeed, little more than an evolution. Polygons constitute the graphics instead of pixels, but the action still takes place from an overhead perspective, and it rarely gets more complicated than “shoot aliens, go to checkpoint, trigger switch, repeat.”

Taken for what it is and within the constraints of its old-fashioned sensibilities — and it’s important to emphasize that these old methods most definitely aren’t for everyone anymore — “Evolution” gets far more right than it does wrong. Like “Shadow Complex” and “Bionic Commando: Rearmed” before it, the game deftly mixes 3D graphics and 2D perspectives, resulting in animation and visual effects that weren’t even imaginable during the Amiga’s prime.

The general gameplay benefits in kind. Doubling back to avoid encroaching aliens, for instance, is easy because the animation and controls are so fluid. And while this isn’t a dual-stick shooter in the same vein as “Geometry Wars” and its ilk, “Evolution” uses both joysticks to great effect, making it easy to strafe and shoot when aliens attack from multiple directions. As contemporary solutions to old gameplay problems go, “Evolution” gets the important stuff right.

With that said, there’s a reason these games don’t appear as often as they once did. “Evolution’s” moment-to-moment gameplay is fun, but it sticks to a formula, and little happens in the last chapter that doesn’t also happen in the first. A secondary Assault mode, which supports co-op play (two players, local or online) and ditches the exploration in favor of punishing players with ridiculous waves of aliens, is a nice bonus. But that mode is as straightforward as it sounds, and no part of “Evolution” dares to be different than the many overhead shooters that preceded it.

Consequently, it’s a bit puzzling that “Evolution” is coming at us in three episodic installments. The first episode’s gameplay and production values make it an excellent value in its own right, but its storytelling — to say nothing of the iffy end-episode cliffhanger — leaves a lot to be desired. Whatever lies in store for the second episode, it’ll need to provide more than a continuation of a story that, so far, isn’t terribly engaging. Paying $10 after 20 years for an updated take on “Breed” is an entirely recommendable act, but dropping another $10 a few months later won’t be if episode two is nothing but more of the exact same thing.

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Serious Sam HD: The First Encounter
Reviewed for: Xbox 360 via Xbox Live Arcade
Also available for: Windows PC
From: Croteam/Majesco
ESRB Rating: Mature (blood and gore, violence)
Price: $15

Here’s the easy part: “Serious Sam HD: The First Encounter” is a perfectly proficient high-definition repackaging of the PC first-person shooter of the near-same name. It looks sharp (albeit unmistakably aged), moves at a recklessly high speed, and includes four-player co-op support (online only) for maximum fun and insanity. The harder part is whether, in 2010, you want to play a 2001 shooter that itself is a callback to (or arguable parody of) shooters from 1996. All the hallmarks of old shooters — brain-dead AI, tissue-thin storytelling, enemies that spawn behind you from nowhere and create occasion for very cheap deaths — are here, and the perks one from a 21st century shooter are completely nonexistent. That isn’t an altogether bad thing: “Encounter” comes alive as a brutally tough test of twitch reflexes more than just another series of engagements against the same old enemy, and its weird sense of humor and wonderfully bizarre enemy design are a callback to the days when arcade games stopped at nothing to break players first and entertain them second. Given how quickly contemporary games drop to $20, “Encounter’s” $15 tag is $5 too high, but for the crowd that loves this game as much now as it did then, a return on investment is assured regardless.

Posted in Playstation 3, Xbox 360, Xbox Live Arcade

Bayonetta
Reviewed for: Xbox 360
Also available for: Playstation 3
From: Platinum Games/Sega
ESRB Rating: Mature (blood and gore, intense violence, partial nudity, strong language, suggestive themes)

The net worth of “Bayonetta’s” idiosyncrasies is game for debate until time ceases ticking. Some will marvel at the insane narrative theatrics and some will find the overt sexuality of the vixenish titular main character either genuinely titillating or so overt as to be farcical. Others will be repulsed or embarrassed by what they view as a sophomoric display of adolescent fantasy come bursting alive, while still others will find themselves unable to tolerate how little sense the story makes or how incomprehensibly noisy the whole production generally is. (If you’re on the fence, both systems offer a downloadable demo that should clear up any confusion.)

But “Bayonetta” is what it wants to be and probably wouldn’t dream of being something for everyone. And while what it is makes it impossible to blindly recommend or pan, how it goes about being what it is is almost inarguably impressive.

Themes and imagery aside, “Bayonetta” plays in the “Devil May Cry” and “God of War” school of action games, and it matches those games in terms of combat arsenal, control responsiveness and general visual and technical polish. Button mashers can wreak havoc on the easier difficulty settings, while a huge list of special attacks allows more skilled players to deal damage with a surprising degree of strategy for such a frantic game.

Most impressive about the combat is the emphasis placed on fighting defensively. Dodging enemy attacks the instant before they connect — and every enemy has tells — temporarily sends all but the player into slow-motion, allowing Bayonetta to unleash unspeakable damage before the enemy even knows what happened. Bull-rushing the enemy on normal or higher difficulty is a recipe for trouble —  like the best of these kind of games, every fight in “Bayonetta” has the potential to cost dearly — but using these defensive techniques is so much fun that no extra motivation is necessary to learn them.

Structurally, everything else falls in line. The polish and fearless design translates into labyrinthine levels and massive, multi-part boss fights that give “War” a run for its money, but “Bayonetta” complements these ruthless fights with a generous checkpoint system that lets players of all disciplines fight dangerously. Old-school pattern memorization comes in handy when taking on tougher enemies, but the controls are so fluid that it’s easy and entirely fun to wing it and take Bayonetta’s combat arsenal for a ride. All that zaniness will rub people different ways, but it does translate into a healthy variety of environments that keeps things interesting over the course of a satisfactorily lengthy single-player trip.

A review of “Bayonetta” would be incomplete without mentioning that Platinum Games, which developed the Xbox 360 version in its entirety, passed off some of the Playstation 3 version’s development load onto Sega’s internal studio. A review copy of the PS3 edition wasn’t available for evaluation, but while the games remain identical in terms of content, reports of performance issues in the PS3 version — in particular, some ugly slowdown and longer load times in spots — are commonplace enough to recommend picking up the 360 version if it’s an option.

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Sky Crawlers: Innocent Aces
For: Wii
From: Project Aces/XSEED
ESRB Rating: Teen (mild language, violence)

Those unfamiliar with Project Aces or the origins of its latest dogfighting game won’t know it just to look at it, but “Sky Crawlers: Innocent Aces” comes courtesy of the same development shop behind the deservedly-beloved “Ace Combat” games. So while the $30 price tag and slightly out-of-left field release might make “Aces” look like just another budget flight sim on a console that’s already full of them, its pedigree suggests something else entirely.

Happily, pedigree beats perception, in large part because “Aces” soars and stumbles in much the same way the “Combat” games do.

The stumbling happens, albeit innocuously, when “Aces” tries to tell its story. Fans of the “Sky Crawler” novels (and eventual animated film) have more than enough guidance in the game to know exactly what’s going on, but those who come in cold won’t get as much from the narration as they might want. Like “Combat,” “Aces” sets the table with some nice cutscenes and some compelling mythology, but also like “Combat,” it leaves much of the storytelling to between-mission briefings that look and sound great but can do only so much in terms of character and environmental development.

Fortunately, a bare-bones understanding of the situation is enough to enjoy the game, and those bare bones (world at peace, greedy corporations disrupt peace, war erupts) aren’t terribly difficult to grasp.

Where “Aces” gets it right, as Project Aces always does, is in the air. Neither the air combat nor the art of banking and diving is mindlessly simple, but “Aces” places a premium on action over simulation and backs it up with fast, intense dogfights that are accessible to anyone in spite of the challenges they present.

Additionally, “Aces” lets players play their way within the confines of its tempo. Control schemes range from traditional (Gamecube/Classic controllers included) to a motion scheme (nunchuck emulates the yoke, Wii remote emulates the throttle) that works pretty well with practice. Per developer tradition, “Aces” also allows players to view the action from inside the cockpit or behind their plane. The former adds an extra layer of immersion and challenge while the latter allows less experienced players to play without handicapping the action.

“Aces’” more substantial misgivings arguably are more the fault of the system its on than the game itself. It looks great but obviously cannot touch what “Ace Combat 6″ did visually on the Xbox 360. That game’s online multiplayer functionality also doesn’t cross over — no surprise, given that the odds of an online community forming around a niche flight simulator on the Wii is basically nil.

But “Aces” also costs a full half of what “AC6″ cost when it first released, which more than compensates for some unavoidable graphical downgrades and the loss of a mode most people likely would ignore anyway. XSEED has done an admirable job of importing great Japanese Wii games, localizing them and selling them for a song, and if the Wii’s first notable game of 2010 is any indication, there’s more to come in that department.

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Polar Panic
For: Xbox 360 Live Arcade and Playstation 3 via Playstation Network
From: Eiconic Games/Valcon Games
ESRB Rating: Everyone (mild cartoon violence, tobacco reference)

Most puzzle games aren’t actually puzzles so much as color-matching reflex tests, but the charming “Polar Panic,” which stars players as a polar bear who has to get his paws dirty to keep trappers off his back, embodies the genre’s name quite nicely. “Panic” takes place in a series of top-down, maze-like levels, and the general objective is to eliminate the trappers by pushing ice blocks off maze walls and, eventually, straight into them. There’s an element of action to the challenge — the trappers don’t stand still — but pushing the ice blocks off the right sequence of walls in order to line up a direct shot at each trapper (or better yet, multiple trappers at once) requires a good degree of on-your-feet thinking once the game takes the kid gloves off and starts delivering harder levels. “Panic’s” 50-level Story mode is its arguable centerpiece, but the 50-level Puzzle mode (which ditches the trappers and tasks players simply with escaping the maze in as few moves as possible) and Survival mode (take out as many trappers as possible, ad infinitum) do wonders for giving a simple concept a ton of legs for the price.

Posted in Nintendo Wii, Playstation 3, Playstation Network, Xbox 360, Xbox Live Arcade

Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: The Crystal Bearers
For: Wii
From: Square Enix
ESRB Rating: Teen (alcohol reference, crude humor, fantasy violence, mild language, suggestive themes)

For better or worse — and a trip through this game provides ample evidence of both — “Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: The Crystal Bearers” is trying to do exactly what Wii games should be doing in the system’s fourth year of existence. Whether the result is good or not — and again, the pendulum swings both ways — “Bearers” does things that are unique, weird and physically impossible on other hardware.

“Bearers” certainly gets off to a fun start — first, by tossing players into a free-falling shootout in the sky, and then by putting them at the literal wheel of a humungous airship for a chase sequence through tight canyon corridors. The convoluted storytelling aside — and per “Crystal Chronicles” tradition, the tale of good, evil and crystals is a potpourri of incomprehensible mythology and bad dialogue — it’s clear almost immediately that “Bearers” is going for a much more action-oriented bent than its series predecessors.

The game’s primary means of action also steps far outside traditional “Final Fantasy” bounds: Using a cursor-centric aiming system, players point the Wii remote at people and objects on the screen and then lift them into the air, Darth Vader-style, to move or toss them around. Anyone who played “Star Wars: The Force Unleashed” can grasp the combat and level-manipulation possibilities here, and while “Bearers’” control scheme and camerawork leave plenty to be desired, it nonetheless fulfills that promise.

The combination of this core mechanic, a sloppily passable story, “Final Fantasy” iconography and a consistent barrage of experimental diversions — from Chocobo races to a flawed but fun stealth challenge to a completely bizarre game involving girls, a beach and good balance — is enough to make “Bearers” fun when it works.

But “Bearers” often falls short, and when it does, it falls hard. Worse, the most offensive problems stem from lousy design decisions that would seem almost mandatorily avoidable in 2010.

Far and away the game’s biggest issue is the onscreen prompts it uses to instruct players on what to do during these one-off diversions. Too many of them are confusingly vague, while a few are cryptic to the point of misleading, throwing up meters without explanation and displaying controller animations that only barely resemble what a player is supposed to actually do. “Bearers” is generous with save checkpoints and many of these diversions are impossible to completely fail outright, but stumbling your way through a badly-designed challenge isn’t fun simply because it doesn’t halt your progress.

The problems are less acute during the main adventure, but they’re no aggravating. The opaque map and navigation system feel strikingly unfinished given Square-Enix’s experience with interface design in traditional “Final Fantasy” games, and getting lost or slogging from point to point is entirely too easy. That isn’t helped by the fact that during these slogs, there simply isn’t much to do. For every example of blinding ingenuity “Bearers” displays, there are two or three that feel perplexingly amateurish, and the ratio may prove too much for all but the most ardent and adventurous “Final Fantasy” fans to handle for very long.

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Borderlands: Mad Moxxi’s Underdome Riot
For: Playstation 3, Xbox 360 and Windows PC
Requires: Borderlands
From: Gearbox Software/2K Games
ESRB Rating: Mature (blood and gore, intense violence, mature humor, strong language)
Price: $10

Though entirely enjoyable as a solo first-person shooter experience, “Borderlands” relies on a story, quest and inventory structure that’s best enjoyed with teammates (four players online, two locally) via cooperative play. Happily, players who want it both ways have the flexibility to play parts of the game alone and bring in friends on the fly without starting over as a new character.

Good thing, too, because whether you’ve played “Borderlands” alone, with friends or both up to this point, there’s pretty much no point in playing the “Mad Moxxi’s Underdome Riot” downloadable expansion without help.

As its name somewhat implies, “Riot” ditches the typical exploratory nature of “Borderlands’” quests in favor of post-apocalyptic arena combat: Moxxi is the host, and her “sport” consists of a survivor or four shooting their way out of a labyrinth that’s parts shanty town, stadium and game show studio. Moxxi emcees the action, and between her amusing taunts and the general gaudy design of the three arenas, “Riot” is a fantastic demonstration of the audiovisual spectacle that makes “Borderlands” so unique in spite of its bleak setting and genre.

Just don’t bask in the spectacle alone unless you really enjoy punishment.

“Riot” divides each match into five rounds, and those rounds split into five themed waves. Completing each wave consists of mowing down every enemy in the arena, and the reward for doing so is a brief supply drop of ammo and health. When all five waves of a round are wiped out, Moxxi drops a few items of actual value beneath the stage. Complete all 25 waves, and the match ends. Easy, right?

Not so much — and definitely not if you’re playing alone. Players who succumb to the enemy can continue to assist in the fight, but are confined to a penalty box until the next wave. If all players get sent to the box, gameplay halts and the round starts over from the first wave.

The task of conquering the harder waves and rounds is daunting enough, particularly when Moxxi alters the rules to remove gravity, nullify certain weapons useless or even strip away players’ shields. The challenge amplifies when fighting alone, and it’s made arguably unfair by the fact that if you get banished to the penalty box, the round automatically starts over by virtue of your having no teammates on the ground. Because “Riot” puzzlingly awards no experience points for killing enemies in the arena, it amounts to a lot of effort for no reward.

Though the continued emphasis on teamwork in “Borderlands” is admirable, it would’ve been nice, just this one time and only because the pool of “Borderlands” players has understandably shrunk since October, if Gearbox backed down a little and allowed solo players to enlist an A.I.-controlled teammate or two. “Riot” offers players a mountain of content and perhaps the stiffest challenge so far, but unless you make a pact with friends to take it on together, proceed with caution.

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Piyo Blocks
For: iPhone/iPod Touch
From: Big Pixel Studios
iTunes Store Rating: 4+
Price: $2

Turnabout appears to be fair play to “Piyo Blocks,” which borrows some unmistakable design points from a game, “Zoo Keeper,” that itself was a pretty transparent knock-off of “Bejeweled.” If you’ve played “Bejeweled” — and pretty much everyone in the world has at this point — the core gameplay in “Blocks” offers little surprise: A grid of colored blocks fills the screen, and players switch two blocks to create as many rows of three or more as possible before time runs out. Creating rows clears the blocks and adds some time to the clock, and meeting certain quotas (as defined by “Blocks’” three separate modes) advances the action to new levels with trickier (albeit randomly-generated) starting patterns. Though it doesn’t have “Keeper’s” charming animal characters, “Blocks” still pretty faithfully mimics that game’s cheerful, intentionally blocky good looks. More importantly, it gets the basic mechanics of “Keeper’s” controls — including the ability to string combos together while the game clears other blocks away — down perfectly. For a game that costs less than a bag of chips, the level of polish, if not the originality of the concept, is most impressive. For good measure, Big Pixel includes support for the OpenFeint network, which provides online leaderboards, friends support, chat functionality and achievements.

Posted in Nintendo Wii, Playstation 3 Downloadable Content, Xbox 360 Downloadable Content, iPhone/iPod Touch

Where the Wild Things Are
Reviewed for: Playstation 3, Xbox 360 and Wii
Also available for: Nintendo DS
From: Griptonite Games/Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment
ESRB Rating: Everyone 10+ (comic mischief, fantasy violence)

Invariably, once Christmas wraps and the annual holiday onslaught of megablockbusters eases up, there remain a few games that bear the scars of coming out at precisely the wrong time and being completely overlooked for doing so.

In 2009, that dubious distinction belongs to “Where the Wild Things Are,” a not-necessarily-for-kids’ game hopelessly tied to the release date of a not-necessarily-for-kids’ movie and subsequently overlooked for coming out smack in the middle of a tidal wave of bigger releases. A long history of lousy games based on kids’ movies, and the perception that creates for this game, didn’t help matters.

But “WTWTA” borrows heavily from the Playstation 2 classic “Ico” and, surprisingly, succeeds where other like-minded games failed. Players control Max, the mischievous little boy who washes up uninvited on the island of the Wild Things, and most of the game’s action consists of the same mix of light combat and ledge jumping, rock climbing, and environmental puzzles that “Ico” did so masterfully well. Max is easy to control, and the semi-fixed camera angle — also borrowed from “Ico” — presents each environment in a manner that’s intuitive without making traversing it a complete cakewalk. The Wild Things add a wrinkle to the challenges by lending a hand and further altering the landscape whenever they can.

As should be expected from a game based on a movie that itself is based on what practically is a picture book, “WTWTA’s” story isn’t exactly a narrative barnburner. But Griptonite makes good on with what it has to work with: The game looks pretty good and animates nicely, and the Wild Things emerge as really likable characters in spite of their secondary role throughout most of the game.

Like so many other family games, “WTWTA” pads the main story content by dropping various collectables in each level. Unlike as with most games, though, rounding them up is something a worthy pursuit. The game doesn’t overload the environments with hundreds of useless objects to round up, nor does it hide items in places players would never bother to look. There’s a challenge in finding everything, but it isn’t so obtuse as to be a waste of time, and finding them pays off in the form of rewards — some of them leading to fun new optional challenges — in the hub level that doubles as the Wild Things’ home base.

The sum of this content (there’s nothing to do beyond the single-player adventure) doesn’t quite justify the full price the game commanded back at launch, but a quick price drop means finding “WTWTA” brand-new for upwards of $20 less already is a feasible proposition. At that price, it’s hard not to recommend it: Younger players will appreciate a game made for them that doesn’t insult their gaming intelligence, and their parents — or really, anyone in need of an “Ico”-style fix — might come away surprised by just how much this innocuous piece of tie-in merchandising gets right.

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Guitar Hero: Van Halen
For: Playstation 3, Xbox 360, Wii and Playstation 2
From: Neversoft/Activision
ESRB Rating: Teen (mild lyrics, mild suggestive themes)

“Guitar Hero’s” previous single-band releases, devoted to Aerosmith and Metallica, were already of questionable quality before “Rock Band” kicked the bar out of the atmosphere with “The Beatles: Rock Band.”

Though a perfectly tenable game for reasons to be detailed later, “Guitar Hero: Van Halen” doesn’t brighten the picture. Depending on your opinion of Val Halen’s present-day relevance and your tolerance for “Guitar Hero” releases in the span of a single year, it might even constitute a leap backward.

Per convention, Van Halen’s visual fingerprints are all over the box and interface, and the band’s likenesses come to life in typical semi-cartoony fashion. This time, though, politics and squabbling have left former bassist Michael Anthony and former lead singers Sammy Hagar and Gary Cherone off the bill. Consequently, none of the band’s Hagar- and Cherone-fronted catalog appears, either. Whether the loss of that music and iconography is a big deal will vary from fan to fan, but there’s no arguing it doesn’t splinter whatever hope “GH:VH” had for documenting its subject matter the way “Beatles” did.

Then again, Neversoft’s inability to learn from “Beatles” — or the failings of its own single-band games — torpedoed that hope without the band’s help.

“GH:VH’s” 47-song track list is, like those other games, significantly smaller than the numbered (but same-priced) “Guitar Hero” game. Bbut the real issue comes from 19 of those songs being either Eddie Van Halen guitar solos or the product of bands other than Van Halen. The game claims the other music has some stylistic connection to Van Halen’s music, but one look at the track list (Fountains of Wayne? Third Eye Blind? Weezer?) suggests otherwise. Whatever effort would have been necessary to kiss and make up with Hagar, if not everyone from Van Halen’s past, would more than have been worth it if it resulted in a coherent, complete tribute to the band’s catalog. This, by contrast, feels like a track pack tucked inside a full-priced game with some extra filler to justify the price.

On that note, it comes down to whether the tracks, which would cost nearly $80 if totaled up as downloadable content for “Guitar Hero 5,” justify the purchase. “GH:VH” at least does things — namely, a new career mode and a new suite of achievements/trophies in the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 versions — a track pack alone cannot.

But do you want to buy something Activision seems reluctant to sell? The company gave the game away to anyone who purchased “GH5″ earlier in the year, and it waited two months to sneak it onto shelves after most people’s holiday shopping had concluded. Pushing the game out the door at full price after previously giving it away seems like a move made for the half-hearted heck of it, which seems to have been “GH:VH’s” artistic approach as well. Watching a publisher practically wash its hand of a product doesn’t affect the quality of the product itself, but it’s hard to get excited about a game when the people who made it seem not to care.

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LittleBigPlanet: Pirates of the Caribbean Premium Level Kit
For: Playstation 3 via Playstation Network
Requires: LittleBigPlanet
From: Media Molecule/Sony
ESRB Rating: Everyone (comic mischief, mild cartoon violence)
Price: $6

Media Molecule has made more than good on its promise to consistently support “LittleBigPlanet” long after its late 2008 release, so the appearance of a “Pirates of the Caribbean” level kit would superficially seem no more interesting than the numerous other costumes and packs that preceded it. But with this level kit comes a new element — water — whose significance needs no real  explanation for those already familiar with “LittleBigPlanet’s” modus operandi as a physics-heavy 2D platformer. And beyond the clumsy introduction — the Playstation Store’s description of the pack doesn’t even mention water, much less its significance — the new content works just as one would hope it would. Media Molecule’s attention to physics detail has gone a long way toward establishing “LittleBigPlanet’s” identity, and its year-in-the-making take on water enjoys the same level of care. Implementing it in new and existing level designs is as easy as adding any other ingredient via the game’s level creation tool, and the tool’s extreme flexibility allows players to utilize and control water in a multitude of imaginative ways. That, in turn, gives a game with near-endless legs even more staying power going into 2010. Not bad for six dollars. (For those who care, the rest of the pack, which includes “Caribbean” character costumes, five new single-player levels, new PSN trophies and new music/objects/stickers/materials with which to further modify levels, is pretty hearty as well.)

Posted in Nintendo Wii, Playstation 2, Playstation 3, Playstation 3 Downloadable Content, Xbox 360

The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks
For: Nintendo DS
From: Nintendo
ESRB Rating: Everyone 10+ (mild fantasy violence)

Twenty years on, “Zelda” games are creatures of habit to their own detriment. Link never speaks, Zelda’s always in trouble, and the road to fixing that trouble typically runs through approximately eight dungeons, which each contain a special item that numerous times thereafter will come serendipitously in handy.

Superficially, it all holds true yet again in “The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks,” which brings back the cartoony art style and stylus-based control scheme that worked pretty well two years ago in “The Phantom Hourglass.” “Tracks” even recycles a few ideas “Hourglass” introduced — most prominently, setting half of its dungeon-related content inside a single building Link will have to revisit multiple times before the credits roll.

But “Tracks” also gets right what “Hourglass” got wrong. Players don’t, for instance, have to start the dungeon from scratch each time they reenter: This time, whenever the story dictates a return to the tower, a new door takes Link straight to the next portion. More importantly, there’s no time limit hanging over Link’s head, which means the challenges are free to be a little more intellectually interesting than they were in “Hourglass.”

These portions also benefit from Zelda joining Link in (literal) spirit as a playable character. Players can chart a path for Zelda to take, and she can distract and even possess enemies while Link works elsewhere. Stealth levels are nothing new to “Zelda” games, and “Tracks” doesn’t go overboard with them, but the dual character control makes them one of “Tracks’” better assets.

The smarter central dungeon design trickles down to the rest of “Tracks’” labyrinths, which appear to have benefitted greatly from Nintendo’s further refinement of the control techniques it introduced in “Hourglass.” The brainteasers in “Tracks” are among the most satisfyingly intricate to appear in a “Zelda” game this decade, and the dual-screen boss fights, while easy, are nonetheless clever.

As always, a new “Zelda” game introduces some new items to complement the usual bombs, sword and boomerang. Revealing them here would spoil the surprise of finding them, and opinions will diverge on how ingenious or annoying Nintendo’s application of the DS’ special abilities are with regard to using them. If you plan to play “Tracks” in a public space, just know a few items — including the musical instrument that once again provides mock spell-casting capabilities — require you to blow into the DS’ microphone and potentially look a little strange doing so.

No mention of “Tracks” would be complete without discussing the train. The wildly convoluted (but, to Nintendo’s credit, satisfactorily explained) storyline explains the train’s importance, but its utility — like the horse and boat before it — is to get Link and Zelda around the world map.

This, likely, will amount to most players’ least favorite portion of “Tracks.” Controlling the train’s path, though a mix of route planning and speed/track switch toggles, is actually pretty fun, and the experience improves once you outfit it with some necessary weaponry. But after a few instances of backtracking across the map to a village before trucking back to the next dungeon, the experience loses its luster.

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James Cameron’s Avatar: The Game
Reviewed for: Playstation 3 and Xbox 360
Also available for: Wii, PSP, Windows PC and Nintendo DS
From: Lightstorm Entertainment/Ubisoft
ESRB Rating: Teen (animated blood, mild language, mild suggestive themes, violence)

If “Avatar” movie experience is as extraordinary as early critical returns seem to imply it is, then, “James Cameron’s Avatar: The Game” doesn’t do it a great deal of justice. Rather, it’s one of those highly imperfect games that, if engaged with dampened expectations and viewed presentationally as nothing beyond a respectable companion to the film, still can amount to a good time.

Problems and deficiencies are never game-breaking, but they are numerous and creep into most facets of the experience on some level — and regardless of whether, as an early storyline twist explains, you play primarily as the invading human military or the indigenous Na’vi tribe.

Most visibly flawed is the combat, which feels dated and awkward by the standards of modern third-person games. There’s no cover mechanic when shooting, nor is there a way, with most weapons, to stare down the sights for a more precise shot — a surprising omission given the slight behind-the-shoulder perspective the game adopts. Some weapons have a semi-automatic aim, but the vast majority feel unwieldy and underpowered.

Melee combat, which plays a major role on the Na’vi side of things, feels similarly unchained thanks to some loose character movement that also makes traversing narrow, elevated terrain dicier than it should be.

And so on. The game’s A.I. occasionally loses its mind on both sides of the battle. The mission structure is primarily some variation of kill x enemies or fetch x items, and the occasional offshoot mission feels predictably half-baked for one reason or another. All of it ties together around a storyline that takes place two years before the events of the film but struggles mightily to wrap an engrossing scenario around several hours’ time.

But with all that air cleared — and if you can believe it or not — “Avatar” still emerges as a pretty fun (and pretty lengthy, especially if you replay it from the other side) single-player game. The action mechanics are dated, but the game sends lots of targets at you and moves at a high enough speed to engender some old-fashioned, arcade-style fun. For good measure, there’s a nice upgrading mechanic that affords you unique weaponry and some very handy special abilities unique to both sides.

Lastly, while the game’s storytelling is spotty, it nonetheless adequately educates players about the world in which “Avatar” exists. Between story content and an encyclopedia of people, places and things, the game hands off a ton of mythology that can only help players’ appreciation for the more narratively capable film.

For good measure, if not much else, “Avatar” includes a multiplayer component and fills it out with the usual batch of modes found in a game of this ilk. It’s hard to argue with more content for the buck, but given the rash of amazing multiplayer games that have released in the past couple of months, it likely will be equally difficult to see a lively community develop around this portion of the game.

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Crazy Snowboard
For: iPhone/iPod Touch
From: Ezone
iTunes Store Rating: 9+ (infrequent/mild cartoon or fantasy violence, infrequent/mild horror/fear themes)
Price: $3 (free demo available)

With all due respect to Ezone’s naming conventions, “Crazy Snowboarding” isn’t terribly crazy at all. To the contrary, it rather conventionally acts just as one might hope a pick-up-and play iPhone snowboarding game would. Tilting the device controls the onscreen snowboarder’s steering, and a tap or hold on the screen preloads a jump when a rail, ramp or mound of snow is near. Once in the air, touching each of the four corners of the screen activates whatever trick players have assigned to that corner. The dead simple control scheme makes “Snowboard”  a no-brainer to play, but achieving gold medal scores requires some skillful trick stringing and sharp risk/reward management while in the air. “Snowboard” currently offers 30 missions, and the Halloween- and holiday-themed levels suggest Ezone will occasionally add more as more special occasions pass by. A modest rewards system allows players to use their points scored as currency toward unlocking new boards, outfits and tricks. And while the current online leaderboard system is pretty bare-bones, Ezone says the next update will incorporate support for the Plus+ social network.

Posted in Nintendo DS, Playstation 3, Xbox 360, iPhone/iPod Touch

LittleBigPlanet
For: Playstation Portable
From: Studio Cambridge/Media Molecule/Sony
ESRB Rating: Everyone (comic mischief)

Despite what the name implies, “LittleBigPlanet” isn’t a straight port of the 2008 Playstation 3 game of the same name, but a legitimate followup with an entirely new suite of single-player levels.

Better still, despite what common sense and a knowledge of that PS3 game’s sky-is-limit scope might imply, the PSP incarnation of “LBP” also isn’t a watered-down tribute to its predecessor, but a full-featured game that matches it in terms of ambition and possibility.

The overriding style, of course, remains the same. For those unfamiliar, “LBP” is a 2D platformer that incorporates real-world physics to an exponentially deeper degree than, for instance, “Super Mario Bros.” Objects slide, swing and topple according to their real-world properties, and even your playable character — the obnoxiously adorable, highly customizable Sackboy — runs and jumps according to the rules of inertia and gravity.

These physics, combined with the use of multiple planes on a 2D playing field and a reward system built around discovery more than mere survival, allows “LBP” to present levels that simply aren’t possible in other games. The generous checkpoint system and modest penalty for failure also frees the game to challenge players far more than its charming exterior would imply. Mining each level for its every last secret is a dicey endeavor, and Studio Cambridge really lets its cruel flag fly during some brutally tough side levels that, fortunately, are there for fun and don’t prohibit player advancement.

All of this extends to the game’s level creation engine, which sacrificed almost nothing during its migration from the PS3. Some additional controller gymnastics are necessary to overcome the PSP’s button and joystick deficiencies, and the graphics and physics calculations obviously aren’t as refined. Two-player level creation isn’t possible — there’s no wireless multiplayer of any kind in the PSP version — and levels designed in one game aren’t playable in the other, which is to be expected but nonetheless is worth noting for those who might hope for the impossible.

Elsewhere, though, “LBP” has everything it needs to develop a community on the level of its PS3 counterpart. Learning to harness the level creator’s insane power isn’t a blink-and-you’ll-get-it affair, but the game’s exceptional presentation coaxes newbies in and makes it fun to learn and make mistakes. The toolbox responsible for the single-player levels lies completely at players’ disposal, and sharing levels online and downloading others players’ creations is as simple here as it is on the big screen. As always, “LBP” has an online leaderboard for every created level, so there’s always a record waiting to be broken.

“LBP’s” true value will become apparent in the coming weeks, but some inspired levels have already appeared online, and things look promising. The PS3 game continues to pay dividends a year later even for those who ignore the creation tool altogether and simply download other players’ designs, and having a similarly bottomless well of gameplay on the go is just about the best thing this series could have done for a second act.

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Tony Hawk Ride
For: Playstation 3, Xbox 360 and Wii
From: Robomodo/Activision
ESRB Rating: Everyone 10+ (Lyrics, mild suggestive themes, animated blood)

Without being behind the scenes, it’s impossible to discern whether “Tony Hawk Ride” is a case of hardware failing software or software not properly utilizing hardware.

At least on appearance, it isn’t due to shoddy hardware workmanship. To the contrary, the board controller that ships with “Ride”  — picture a wireless skateboard deck sans wheels — feels durable enough to easily outlast the mountain of iffy plastic musical instruments that paved its way. It looks good, too — like a sophisticated piece of electronics instead of just another one-trick toy.

Most importantly, in fleeting bits and pieces, it also works. The board rocks from side to side and nose to tail without demanding too much effort, yet it isn’t so malleable as to make it easy to spill out of control. Performing basic flip tricks is simple enough, and it’s fun to let loose, take one foot off the board, place the other on the far nose or tail, and perform a 360 spin while your onscreen skater does some facsimile of the same. Small sensors located on all sides allow for grab tricks, and between the lower body acrobatics and the fight to maintain optimum balance, “Ride” sneakily provides a good workout for muscles you may not otherwise work.

It’s unfortunate, then, that the game designed around the board fails to cater to what makes the board fun to use.

In stark contrast to the string of recent open-ended “Tony Hawk” games that let players ride freely and take on objectives at will, “Ride” is stiflingly straightforward: Each city breaks into a few small levels, and each level offers a handful of objectives — typically a time trial, trick session, collection of five mini-challenges and half-pipe trick session — that require a few minutes each to experience. “Ride” offers a free skate option, but the levels aren’t built with that in mind and there’s nothing to do during these sessions. A multiplayer component (eight players locally sharing one board, four online on the 360 and PS3) consists of the same events recycled under party play rules.

The abrupt, linear nature of “Ride’s” trick and race sessions makes it hard for players to just let loose and have a creative good time on the board, and the precise demands in the challenges create needless aggravation because the board simply isn’t smart or precise enough to consistently discern different flip tricks from one another. Instances of nailing a trick, only for the game to claim you didn’t, are aggravatingly common here, and there’s little reward for getting it right thanks to a bare-bones presentation that just trots out more of the same.

Ultimately, “Ride” feels like a half-finished game hastily designed to complement a board that maybe took longer than planned to complete. Maybe the board’s true calling will be as a snowboarding game controller or something else entirely. The potential is there. Right now, though, “Ride” adds up to an experience that, in its current state and at its current $120 price, just isn’t worth the investment.

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Backbreaker Football
For: iPhone/iPod Touch
From: NaturalMotion Games
iTunes Store Rating: 4+
Price: $1 (free demo available)

NaturalMotion’s Backbreaker football physics engine has sparked lingering curiosity since its 2007 unveiling, and if its first playable appearance in the wild is any indication, it’s no mystery why. “Backbreaker Football” isn’t a complete football game by any stretch, but a low-concept arcade game in which you, as the ballcarrier, must evade oncoming would-be tacklers and reach the end zone. Tilting the iPhone controls your directional movement, and some onscreen buttons allow you to juke, spin, sprint and, if the end zone is in sight, showboat. Evading defenders in style nets you points, stringing moves together results in bountiful combos, and the more times you can reach the end zone without being tackled and losing all your turns, the better your placement on the game’s leaderboards. “Backbreaker” backs the simple concept with a series of challenge levels, an endurance mode and multiple difficulty settings, but it’s the technological underpinnings that elevate it from a decent time-waster to bona fide addiction. Even on the underpowered iPhone, the tackle and running animations look fantastically authentic, and reading a would-be tackler’s body momentum — and countering it with perfectly-timed, perfectly-placed evasion — is a skillful undertaking rather than a matter of guesswork. Seeing this tech in motion on more powerful hardware can’t happen soon enough.

Posted in Nintendo Wii, PSP, Playstation 3, Xbox 360, iPhone/iPod Touch

Assassin’s Creed II
Reviewed for: Playstation 3 and Xbox 360
Also available for: Windows PC
From: Ubisoft
ESRB Rating: Mature (blood, intense violence, sexual content, strong language)

Most games, broken down, are simply collections of similar actions and commands repeated over and over. But most hide it better than 2007’s “Assassin’s Creed,” which combined majestic core gameplay with an oppressively patterned quest structure that neutered its inventive storyline and instilled some serious déjà vu in many players.

Almost from the start, though, “Assassin’s Creed II” demonstrates that it has learned its lesson. The storyline, now set in 15th century Italy as well as present day, receives the narrative justice it deserves: The present-day cast accrues some essential dimension, the characters in Italy are exponentially more likable than the first game’s humorless cast, and the game lets the story breathe by staying in place over multiple missions instead of continually jumping back and forth in time.

“Creed’s” timeline liberally and cleverly mixes factual and fictional history to reconstruct the legend of its characters’ lineage, and witnessing this reconstruction is miles more rewarding this time around. An optional collection of puzzle-oriented missions unlocks even more doors, connecting everything from Adam and Eve to John F. Kennedy to engineer some wild possibilities for future series installments.

The anatomic improvements extend to “AC2’s” gameplay, which reaps the reward of a quest structure that no longer requires players to complete X number of side missions before assassinating subject Y, jumping through time and repeating. The side missions return, but they’re significantly more diverse and more savvily ingrained into whatever else is happening in the landscape, which feels more alive thanks to some sharper A.I., the introduction of an economy and some great (albeit gamey, so relax your sense of disbelief) new mechanics for managing notoriety and seeking cover from guards while in a crowd.

The main storyline missions integrate themselves better as well: “AC2″ makes it easy to start a new storyline mission almost the instant the previous one concludes, and the game tells much of its story while the player directs the action. Players who skip all that markedly improved optional content to beeline through the main story will do themselves a disservice, but “AC2″ at least leaves that decision up to you. However you approach it, there’s always something to do, and there exists no lingering sense of familiarity haunting the game despite the 15 to 30 hours of gameplay it has in store.

Elsewhere, “AC2″ doesn’t mess with what made its predecessor so great in spite of its unmistakable shortcomings.

The simple act of getting around Italy as Ezio is as fun as it was traversing the Holy Land as Altaïr: The cities are meticulously designed, and Ezio’s freerunning capabilities — combined with a control scheme that’s fantastically intuitive in spite of the demands it puts on a gamepad’s button real estate — make it tremendously fun to scale buildings, leap rooftops and position yourself for the perfect takedown.

“AC2,” for its part, offers a larger repertoire of weapons and techniques to wield, and thanks to the presence of Ezio’s good buddy Leonardo Da Vinci, the inventions — including a flying machine that practically doubles the fun all by itself — pour in throughout the entirety of the adventure.

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New Super Mario Bros. Wii
For: Wii
From: Nintendo
ESRB Rating: Everyone (comic mischief)

The worst thing about “New Super Mario Bros. Wii,” besides its abysmally uninspired title, is the way Nintendo itself has misrepresented it as a shell of Super Mario games past that requires four players in order for fun to be had.

Fun indeed is had by turning what traditionally has been a solo endeavor into a two-, three- or four-player free-for-all, with all active players running through the game simultaneously as Mario, Luigi and two Toads. (The princess, per usual, has been kidnapped.) Nintendo doesn’t change one iota of the levels regardless of whether one or four players are running through them, and the results are predictably and often hilariously chaotic.

Players can cooperate and spring off one another to perform amazing stunts and reach impossible heights. But they also can antagonize one another, going so far as to pick other players up and toss them to their demise. It’s a riotously fun time, but those who want to ace the game — finish every level, find all three special coins in each level, discover every hidden pathway and, of course, rescue the princess — will be impossibly hard-pressed to do it with the “help” of friends.

Fortunately, wonderfully and despite implications to the contrary, “NSMBW” is an equally amazing game as a solo experience, meeting and arguably exceeding the bar set by “Super Mario Bros. 3″ and “Super Mario World” some 20 years ago. Ideas introduced in those games return fearlessly reinvented here, and “NSMBW” continually surprises with new platforming contraptions, level designs and power-ups. The new penguin suit is possibly the most versatile Mario upgrade ever, while the propeller suit ranks with the best of the best on the fun scale.

Classic characters and level archetypes also return, but 20 years of technological and graphical advancements allow them to do things that simply weren’t possible before. Happily, beyond the new suits, the same doesn’t apply to Mario and friends: Nintendo keeps the control scheme classically simple, and instances of motion control in “NSMBW” are infrequent enough to be novel and surprisingly fun in how they function in conjunction with the levels in which they appear.

Totaled up, “NSMBW” is, to perhaps an unprecedented degree, that rare game that is as magnificently enjoyable for long-suffering 2D Mario fans as it is for those who have never played one and had no idea a 19-year drought even existed. It’s an enormous value simply by being a full-featured game that offers two diametrically different experiences that can be cherished on wholly separate levels.

The only bug in the pancake batter is the lack of an online co-op option. Four-player “NSMBW” is a farcical mess in person, and Nintendo is dead right in assessing that the mood wouldn’t translate nearly as well online. But for those who lack the means to set up a local game, having an online consolation prize still trumps not having it.

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WireWay
For: Nintendo DS
From: Konami
ESRB Rating: Everyone (comic mischief)

Given the myriad of fun possibilities, it’s somewhat amazing only one game — “Bust-a-Move DS” — has prominently leaned on a control mechanic built around using the Nintendo DS’ touch screen as a virtual slingshot.

That changes rather dramatically — albeit imperfectly — with “WireWay,” which builds an entire adventure game around the idea.

“WireWay” stars you as a strange little alien named Wiley, and the completely weird storyline — which deliberately is silly to the point of genuine amusement — has Wiley on a quest to gather valuable stars that are useless to Earthlings but extremely valuable to Wiley and his strange kind.

But the game isn’t about controlling Wiley so much as the areas through which he must navigate. Each level starts with Wiley grabbing onto the lowest-hanging wire, and you propel him forward by pulling back on the wire, picking your angle and launching him at stars, special items, enemies and other wires. “WireWay” introduces new contraptions as the game soldiers ahead, but the primary mode of transport involves firing Wiley around the level like a rock in a slingshot.

It isn’t a perfect science. The action takes place on both screens, and the space between screens translates into a blind spot that can complicate your shot selection. A nice touch allows you to shift the camera using the D-pad, but doing so also limits how far back you can pull the wire in certain directions. Practice makes near-perfect and it’s never a game-breaking problem, but it would’ve been preferable if “WireWay” let you zoom in and out rather than simply shift the viewpoint.

Other than that, though, the mechanic makes for a fun trick around which to build a game, and “WireWay” helps itself by regularly introducing variety to the levels and making them challenging to complete. For those who enjoy perfecting games, a grading mechanic that scores your ability to grab all the stars, find the special items and get to the ship as quickly as possible should induce a nice amount of replayabilty. Acing the game is no easy feat.

“WireWay” complements its goofy storyline with a two great challenge modes. Flick Trials limits how many moves you can make to send Wiley to the ship, while Strategery — the jewel of the game both in name and concept — forces you to pause the action and draw in the wires and contraptions yourself. Both modes use the same scoring system as the story levels, so they offer the same level of replayabilty for perfectionists.

All those calls for perfection make “WireWay’s” multiplayer mode, which turns the action into an anything-goes race to the ship, a pleasantly mindless change of pace. Four players can compete locally using one copy of the game, but only two courses are available unless everyone has their own copy. Online play isn’t available, but it’s hard to imagine a niche game arriving smack in the middle of the holiday blockbuster season accruing a major online following anyway.

Posted in Nintendo DS, Nintendo Wii, Playstation 3, Xbox 360

Left 4 Dead 2
Reviewed for: Xbox 360
Also available for: Windows PC
From: Valve
ESRB Rating: Mature (blood and gore, intense violence, language)

What does a sequel look like when it’s turned around in a year by a studio notorious for taking twice as long to develop an episodic expansion pack?

Actually, if you’re the audience Valve is targeting with “Left 4 Dead 2,” it looks pretty good. “L4D2″ is a wholly incremental upgrade over its 2008 predecessor, but it hits all the marks — new campaigns, new characters, new modes and new infected freaks to play as online — it needed to hit to command another $60 from players who still have the original in heavy rotation.

Elementarily speaking, “L4D2″ changes nothing: It’s a first person shooter, starring you as one of four human survivors navigating a zombie apocalypse (this time, in New Orleans and its outskirts). The objective: Kill hordes of attacking zombies, as well as less common but exponentially more dangerous special infected, whose attacks are more powerful and harder to circumvent.

As per last time, the game splits into five bite-sized, hour-plus-long campaigns, and it dynamically rearranges how and from where the infected attack each time you play. You can take on campaigns solo (with three A.I.-controlled allies) or with friends (two-player split-screen, up to four online).

While a couple of the new campaigns feel like uninspired bridges between the better offerings, “L4D2″ hits more than misses. The introduction of daytime campaigns provides a dramatic change of mood to the action, and some of the locales — a shopping mall, an amusement park, a concert stage and a storm-drenched cornfield you have you traverse back and forth without alerting a band of witches — are pretty inspired. A new Realism mode toggle, accessible from any difficulty level, removes a few video game safety nets in favor of forcing players to communicate better and stay continually on their toes.

“L4D2’s” new survivors don’t add as much as one might hope: They say little between missions, and they pretty much just emulate “L4D’s” foursome when the heat is on. Much more impressive is weapons list, which expands to include better rifles, upgradable ammo rounds, new explosives and some disgustingly effective melee weapons.

But “L4D2’s” most notable (and necessary) bump is in the modes department. The Survival mode, added to “L4D” as downloadable content, is intact from the start, while a new Scavenge mode tasks survivors with collecting fuel for an escape before time runs out while playable infected try to stop them. The standard Versus mode also returns, and this time it supports all five campaign maps and features a more inclusive scoring mechanism. “L4D2″ introduces three new special infected types, and all three are a treat to play as in Versus matches.

The only thing “L4D2″ doesn’t improve is its general indifference toward solo players. The single-player suite consists strictly of the campaigns — all other modes require multiplayer participation — and if you refuse to play with friends or head online, too much of the experience remains off-limits to recommend this as a full-price purchase.

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Modern Warfare 2
Reviewed for: Playstation 3 and Xbox 360
Also available for: Windows PC
From: Infinity Ward/Activision
ESRB Rating: Mature (blood, drug reference, intense violence, language)

“Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare” spins in gamers’ drives to this day because of its multiplayer suite, which took traditional first-person shooter multiplayer and tacked on a leveling system that rewarded players with special weapons and tactics as they racked up in-game experience points.

As such, it’s best to head off a review of “Modern Warfare 2″ by stating that the competitive multiplayer suite (18 players online, four players offline) returns fundamentally unchanged. There are 16 new maps, new weapons, new ways for players to accrue experience and some amazing new perks, including a tactical nuke that instantly ends a match and an EMP bomb that can neuter the nuke. Some nagging issues, including a matchmaking system that regularly tosses novices into the fire against pros with perks to spare, also return, but Infinity Ward’s terrific technical underpinnings — lag-free combat, spot-on control — ensure it’s built to last another two years.

“MW2’s” more significant improvements take place in the single-player campaign, which resumes five years after the events of “COD4″ and follows a storytelling bent that’s more “24″ than “Saving Private Ryan.” Infinity Ward spins a cool yarn about a misunderstanding that leads to a Russian invasion of the United States, but it does a clumsy job of explaining how one crazy twist leads to another. All the details are there, but they’re half-heartedly scattered during between-mission cutscenes that play down the significance of these explanations to a damaging degree.

In action, though, “MW2″ finally addresses issues that have plagued the series for years. The enemy A.I. is drastically improved: Where “COD4’s” soldiers stood in place and pelted you almost the instant you left cover, “MW2’s” enemies are more kinetic and react to your actions more accordingly. Your allies are similarly capable, able to dynamically call out enemy locations and tactics as they’re happening in battle.

The shift in behavior gives some overdue breathing room to more stealthy missions. Whereas “COD4’s” centerpiece stealth mission was rigid to the point of failing you the instant the enemy spotted you, “MW2″ gives you a chance to fight back and get back into hiding. Best of all, taking down an enemy doesn’t magically respawn another one in his place until you advance past some arbitrary invisible line, so you’re free to fight defensively as well as offensively.

Numerous instances still exist in which you’re more a participant in a scripted action scene than the director, and there’s still one mission objective in which “MW2″ forgets itself and bombards you with legions of soldiers blasting you from every direction. But this, finally, is the exception rather than the rule.

“MW2’s” campaign lacks co-op support, but Infinity Ward’s consolation prize — a 23-mission Spec-Ops mode — is arguably better anyway. The missions better emphasize cooperation than the campaign, and the objectives and scenarios (and in several cases, levels) are exclusive to this mode. The mode is also available for solo play, effectively doubling the amount of original single-player content that “COD4″ had.

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Buzz! Quiz World
For: Playstation 3
From: Relentless Software/Sony
ESRB Rating: Teen (drug reference, mild language, mild suggestive themes, mild violence)

“Trivia game” and “cutting-edge graphics” aren’t terms you regularly find arm in arm, but they’re practically making out in “Buzz Quiz World,” which excels magnificently in its audiovisual recreation of the prime-time quiz show format.

That it looks so pretty is, of course, secondary to numerous factors ranging from user-friendliness to the quantity and quality of the questions buried inside. But it also speaks to a larger facet of what makes “Buzz!” the best of its breed and easily worth a look on a system normally reserved for blockbuster action bonanzas.

For those who already picked up “Buzz! Quiz TV” last year, “World’s” presentational splash isn’t any great surprise, nor are the features that debuted in that game and slide over in improved states.

“World’s” online multiplayer is the most significant beneficiary, doubling the player count to eight and allowing for “Family Feud”-esque four-on-four games in which every player has his or her own buzzer controller. “World” also supports voice chat, and if you’re a fan of Sony’s Playstation Home service, you can win prizes for your virtual apartment. Locally, “World” still supports eight players and, if you can commandeer two bundles’ worth of buzzers, eight buzzers.

“World” also introduces some welcome interface improvements. You can set up customized games in advance that cater to your preferences, mixing modes liberally or, if you prefer, leaving out the gimmicky variants and sticking to straight trivia. You can save your player profile this time, and in a nice touch, your always-affable host (named Buzz, of course) will address you by your name if it’s in the game’s directory.

All the question packs released for “TV” — either as downloadable content or free user-generated content created at mybuzzquiz.com — work in “World,” which also includes 5,000 new questions on the disc. Unfortunately, sorting through user-created quizzes isn’t any easier this time around: Sony can’t realistically vet every quiz for quality and accuracy, and the in-game tool for finding the good stuff isn’t as refined as, say, its “LittleBigPlanet” counterpart.

“World” also doesn’t provide much for single players to do: The smattering of available modes pales in comparison to what players can do with friends locally or online, and while that’s understandable — this is a party game, after all — it’s still a bummer that quiz fanatics who prefer to fly solo have no rewarding single-player path through what easily is the best quiz video game in existence.

If this is your first “Buzz” rodeo, it’s worth noting that the game only supports the Buzz controllers and not the standard PS3 controller. The good news is that the bundle that includes four buzzers commands the same $60 as a typical standalone PS3 game. That isn’t a reflection on the quality of the controllers, either: They’re satisfyingly sturdy and, because of how they emulate a game show buzzer, fun to use. Just pick up some AA batteries in the same trip, because they aren’t included.

Posted in Playstation 3, Xbox 360