The fact that you end up playing as one of them for half of the game was quite a betrayal of expectations. But “Halo 3: ODST…” Well, if you squint and look at it hard enough you might see a version of “Halo 2.”

After all, it takes place entirely on Earth, and the player is always fighting the Covenant invaders. You spend a lot more time defending New Mombasa than Master Chief does in the second game’s opening levels. Additionally, the radio play you assemble through picking up collectibles really drives home the fact that this is a city on Earth that people used to live in. It also calls back to the excellent pre-”Halo 2″ “I Love Bees” alternate reality game’s radio drama, and for good reason – some of the same people are responsible.

The game’s mechanics are also a callback to the original “Halo.” The absurdly fun yet incredibly overpowered scoped pistol makes a silent return, and its balance is no longer a problem thanks to the lack of competitive multiplayer.

You also have a health bar again, and pick up refills for it, just like “Combat Evolved.” ODSTs also take fall damage after a large enough drop, just like Master Chief did in his freshman outing.

Of course, there are many things about “ODST” that are the same as “Halo 3,” or wholly new to the series. You don’t fight elites, for instance, just brutes, and nearly all of “Halo 3′s” weapons make an appearance alongside the reborn pistol and silenced “Halo 2″ SMG. However, it is curious how many of “ODST’s” changes are callbacks to Bungie’s original breakout hit.

There was palpable disappointment following the release of “Halo 2,” and not just due to the ‘well, I guess we’ll stop here’ ending. From the first teaser, the tone of the marketing campaign was that you (well, Master Chief) are the only guy who can defend Earth. Combine that with the “I Love Bees” alternate reality game, which concluded with the characters’ lives being interrupted by air raid sirens, and you were ready to save humanity from the Covenant when you walked out of that store on November 9.

The fact that you end up playing as one of them for half of the game was quite a betrayal of expectations. But “Halo 3: ODST…” Well, if you squint and look at it hard enough you might see a version of “Halo 2.”

After all, it takes place entirely on Earth, and the player is always fighting the Covenant invaders. You spend a lot more time defending New Mombasa than Master Chief does in the second game’s opening levels. Additionally, the radio play you assemble through picking up collectibles really drives home the fact that this is a city on Earth that people used to live in. It also calls back to the excellent pre-”Halo 2″ “I Love Bees” alternate reality game’s radio drama, and for good reason – some of the same people are responsible.

The game’s mechanics are also a callback to the original “Halo.” The absurdly fun yet incredibly overpowered scoped pistol makes a silent return, and its balance is no longer a problem thanks to the lack of competitive multiplayer.

You also have a health bar again, and pick up refills for it, just like “Combat Evolved.” ODSTs also take fall damage after a large enough drop, just like Master Chief did in his freshman outing.

Of course, there are many things about “ODST” that are the same as “Halo 3,” or wholly new to the series. You don’t fight elites, for instance, just brutes, and nearly all of “Halo 3′s” weapons make an appearance alongside the reborn pistol and silenced “Halo 2″ SMG. However, it is curious how many of “ODST’s” changes are callbacks to Bungie’s original breakout hit.

This post originally appeared at Bitmob.

Improvement one: No failing all the time. “Lego Rock Band” promotes “Rock Band 2′s” progress-disabling option from second class citizen to the only way to play. “Lego Rock Band” developers Harmonix and Traveller’s Tales and “DJ Hero’s” FreeStyleGames arrived at the same conclusion I did last summer: Failing sucks, and stars are a much better measure of progress.

To unlock more songs, venues and other crap, you just need to exceed certain career star totals. Since it was impossible to pass a song with less than three stars in previous “Rock Band” titles, the progression is basically the same thing, only you avoid the frustration of failing a song. You just practice until you get good enough.

Improvement two: The rough edges of the Rock Band tour experience have been smoothed out (perhaps excessively, depending on your point of view). The character creator is now Lego people, and consequently, there are exactly four parts you get to change around: hair, head, shirt, pants. The world tour mode, previously a web of interlocking cities, venues, and unlocks, has been simplified into a straight line with the same sort of theme: get a bus, get a manager, what have you. Currency is no longer an abstract number of dollars and is instead simply a running total of the same points you earn playing songs. The entire soundtrack is also unlocked in quickplay as soon as your turn on your console, so if you don’t want to bother with the metagame, you can just play all the songs you already paid for. Brilliant!

Of course it all has that Lego aesthetic most of us are familiar with by now. It’s nothing you haven’t seen before, but it has the same charm as the rest of Traveller’s Tales Lego lineup, and this time, there’s Lego Queen and Lego David Bowie! Unfortunately, they don’t sing together on “Under Pressure.”

The tour mode also has a lot of fun Lego mixed in. Silly dialogue-less animated cutscenes accompany your band’s rise to stardom. There are special events that are similar to “The Beatles: Rock Band’s” dreamscapes, in that they are specifically tailored to whatever song you are playing. The first one had my band, Mostly Puppies, rocking out hard enough to help a demolition crew take down a Lego building. You can also buy and unlock various accessories for both your characters and your “Rock Den,” which is just a graphical menu system that represents how awesome you are. One of the first things I got was one of those classic green Lego trees, and I hope there’s more of the awesome old school Lego callbacks that remind me of when I was but a wee boy.

This is all really window dressing on what is basically a Rock Band song pack, though, and the song selection is pretty schizophrenic. It’s all rated E for everyone, and there are some fun choices like “Ghostbusters” or “The Final Countdown” padded out by a whole lot of whiny-ass modern rock that I personally am not a huge fan of. It certainly seems to skew pretty tame as far as difficulty goes, if you care about that sort of thing. Fortunately, for a small fee, the entire thing is exportable to “Rock Band 2″ on consoles that have a hard drive (sorry Wii owners), and the lineup can be augmented with a subsection of the Rock Band catalog Harmonix has deemed acceptable for a family audience.

Still, the Lego-ness has its place. I’d certainly play this until I hit the brick wall (ha) in tour mode, and this is ideal for people new to music games. It and “The Beatles: Rock Band” should do a lot to expand the audience of the genre, though they don’t do all that much to advance its core. Maybe “Rock Band 3.”

Impressions based on a rental of the Xbox 360 version of the game after roughly three hours of play.

I want to be upfront about the amount of time I spent playing the Wii version of “Samba” – probably only about 30 minutes. I will also be candid on the amount of time I spent on the Dreamcast original and its Japanese sequel – it could probably be counted in days.

For the uninitiated, “Samba de Amigo” was and is a rhythm game about shaking maracas at various positions to the beat of saucy Latin tunage. The Dreamcast version used an accurate but flimsy set of maraca controllers. (I went through three sets!) Unfortunately, what the Wii version gains in durability, it loses tenfold in accuracy. It’s simply difficult to make the Wii version recognize where you are shaking your Wiimotes.

The reason for this is that though the input is superficially the same – moving objects in your hand to various heights – it is actually very different. Whereas the Dreamcast original was asking you to position the maracas at various heights along two columns, the Wii version is asking for you to position the Wiimote in different directions.

Example time! In order to hit the notes in the top right circle, the Dreamcast version would have you raise one of your maracas to the top right and shake. On the Wii, you have to angle one of your Wiimotes at a 45º angle pointing upward. This only kinda works because your hand sort of naturally does these angles when you raise or lower them to the appropriate levels. However, the other half the this game’s entire design – shaking to the beat a la maraca – breaks that entire idea apart.

The system only works on the level of “okay” when you are trying to learn it, and might work fine for new players on lower difficulty levels, but if you try to get into it and really let loose while enjoying the ridiculousness of shaking around what are now fake fake maracas, you are not going to hit notes consistently, and if you try to play on harder difficulties, you are really not going to hit notes consistently.

It is not hyperbolic for me to say that, personally, this is probably the most disappointing thing ever related to the Wii. Official Sega-brand Dreamcast maracas go forabout $100 on eBay, and on top of that, often ship from Japan, so a good version of Samba de Amigo on a modern console with a durable controller was something of a holy grail for me. And it even supports downloadable content! On the Wii! Holy shit! Too bad it’s intrinsically broken at its core.

This failed experiment does provide an interesting perspective on “Samba” the game, though. It does feel very simple in this post-Harmonix world, but this is not a bad thing at all. Through the layer of shit that is the controls, I was still able to catch a glimpse at the gameplay that had entranced me years ago, and hot damn, does it still seem like fun! …which makes this all the more tragic.

It is hypothetically possible the upcoming Wii MotionPlus add-on might solve the problems that led to “Samba’s” gimped, broken control scheme, and just maybe, a poorly-reviewed rhythm game about shaking maracas to Latin music might sell enough in this Rock Band-dominated world to warrant a follow-up that would require rewriting large amounts of the game code to use an add-on device, but I’m not holding my breath.

The character seems to have the same sort of rules. You have momentum and can no longer turn on a dime. Jumping still kinda sucks, though, and it was hard to tell what fences you could grab onto and get over, and it was easy to accidentally not make a jump over a short object.

b- There’s a lot of neat procedural animation, even if the whole game isn’t procedurally generated. The game tries to adjust the character so if you are standing with your feet on uneven surfaces, the animations compensate, and you don’t clip through or hover over one. It looks neat.

iii. The multiplayer works exactly like Burnout Paradise.

4. The new wanted system works exceptionally well. Instead of a flat star rating, the first cop that sees you and gives you that one-star wanted level has a radius around him, and if you can escape it then you get off. Any other cop that spots you before you escape also has the radius, and as you get more stars, the size of all the radii increases. The size of a helicopter’s was too big for me to even see on the minimap.

I’ve gotten through what I suppose were three missions in Deus Ex. It’s astonishing how well it has held up over the years in some ways, but in others it is really dated. The core gameplay can still stand with the best of them – it in fact stands far above many others that have come after it. There are countless ways to perform even the first level’s objectives, and this is before you really get into customizing your character’s abilities and find all sorts of neat toys. This is truly sandbox gameplay and it’s astonishing that this was accomplished eight years ago. The world feels very organic for an Unreal Engine 1 game, thanks largely to the open level design and light RPG elements.

What isn’t faring so well in 2008 is the character models. They look silly. (Perhaps they would look better if this computer actually had a dedicated graphics processor.) The presentation overall, however, is very competent, if a little boring. The cutscenes don’t feature any kind of flair, like moving cameras or any sort of advanced character animation. However, the writing is amazing, and astonishingly relevant and resonating considering the game was made before the 9/11 attacks. Must play more, as UNATCO, the counter-terrorism agency you work for, is seeming more and more evil of late.

Thanks to Gametap, I was able to find out that Civilization IV runs astonishingly smooth on this hardware. (Frankly, I was amazed it ran at all.) I only played a few turns, and I’m told that it slows down late in the game, but it was very pretty from what I saw, and I could feel the tendrils of addiction creeping out of the monitor and wrapping me in their cold, uncaring embrace. For this reason, I have placed it on hiatus until I can tear a sizable chunk out of The List, at which point I might have a more capable computer that could to the game justice. (A few games on that List this computer could not do justice: Far Cry, Company of Heroes, Rise of Legends.)

Next time (probably): More Planescape: Torment.

I can’t imagine how hard it would be to make this game in 3D. The first two areas I’ve visited have been so lavishly detailed in 2D, but trying to get this amount of artistry in 3D would be so prohibitively expensive and time-consuming. The dialogue is another matter – every character or object has dialogue dripping with detail and emotion, fully drawing you into the world. Anything like this would be utterly impossible in the world of voice acting and polygonal graphics, which is a shame. At the same time, a world built in 3D with proper production values automatically gains just that much more in credibility and immersion with the player, thanks to the medium of delivery. It is abundantly clear, however, that the industry has not yet completed its move to 3D after playing this title again. Until art of this caliber (in 3D with voice acting) can be produced for a comparable price as its two-dimensional counterpart, we have a long way to go as an art form.

When you are on the first planet, and the crazy man in the shed is going on about the end of the world, you don’t have to listen to him, you can just punch him in the face! It’s like your own personal MST3K of a sci-fi movie. I can’t wait to get to the part where the weird guy on the citadel asks you for his autograph.

The campaign is, in general, roundly mediocre. It’s really the same sort of game that the other Call of Duty games are: Utterly scripted thrill rides through a few different war zones. Sure, COD 4 developers Infinity Ward made the first two, and they were slightly better than the consoled-out spin offs and Call of Duty 3, but they are all riffs on the same formula. Call of Duty 4 has famously jettisoned the series’ World War II setting for one in what I can only assume is the near future. The player switches between an American and British soldier fighting in eastern Europe and a Middle Eastern country that is never explicitly named but is clearly Saudi Arabia if you have any amount of geographic knowledge and pay attention during the pseudo-Google Earth setting change animations.

The game’s opening credits sequence has the player in the role of an ousted Saudi leader as he is taken through a city and then shot by the revolutionary that has just taken over the country, providing the conflict that fuels the rest of the game. The storytelling technique on display here is one of the game’s cooler touches, and there are quite a few interesting devices used to tell the game’s story.

The problem is that the story is really not worth paying attention to. It’s sub-24 level crap, for the most part, with the same number of contrivances and utterly illogical occurrences. In one mission, where you have to capture a dude as the British SAS unit, you chase the guy across a series of small towns, with your commanding officer repeatedly making sure that you all know that you need to capture the guy alive. Then in the next cutscene, after torturing the fellow and getting some information (because that works), your commanding officer proceeds to shoot the guy in the face.

One problem with the series making the jump to modern day is that it really doesn’t make sense to have your character being ordered around by an NPC. In the WWII games, the player is experiencing the Last Great War through the eyes of an anonymous soldier. Modern-day conflicts don’t carry the same weight, especially considering the large-scale opposition to the kind of war on display for the American side of the campaign.

Politics aside, it sucks that your character is so helpless that he can’t even open doors without the help of other soldiers – you have to wait for them to do it for you. Your character can’t do anything that the other soldiers do. You can’t push a dumpster down the street for cover, you can’t lean out from cover or even take cover in the same way that Gears of War or Rainbow Six: Vegas characters can, and you certainly can’t order your soldiers around to intercept incoming enemies.

Speaking of enemies, I hope you like shooting them, because they just keep coming out of these shacks and buildings like they’re some kind of terrorist clown car. Your character is really just supposed to move down the preselected path and shoot enemies they see. The idea of saving grenades or other special weapons for large groups of enemies is irrelevant, since there’s not a predetermined number of enemies per area – they just keep coming until the player manages to advance past an arbitrary line in the level, or kill an enemy inside the shack/house/damaged building that the other terrorists are apparently budding off of asexually.

The only reason this design works is because the levels are as linear as an arcade lightgun game. It might look like you were just dropped off in a warzone and told to get to a building on the other side, but you can’t choose your path in any way, shape or form. You’ll be following a preset path, and any attempt to deviate from it will result in you totally breaking the game’s scripting or you dying. (In one area, to keep you on a set path, there are signs like the mine field signs in the first two games, but this time they are radiation warning signs – because radiation just stays in tiny pockets throughout the landscape.)

If you’re willing to totally turn off your brain and just shoot at things that move in front of you, there are some fairly memorable sequences in Call of Duty 4. One sequence in particular offers a glimpse at another sort of game entirely, where the horrors of war are laid bare in a way I’ve never seen before. But, the ultrapatriotic 24-inspired Call of Duty 4 is not that game. Too bad.

Other than that, it really sucks when you play Burnout with someone who can’t do a challenge, but you don’t want to cancel the challenge and be like, yeah you suck let’s do another one, but if you try to tell them how to do the challenge you just come off as a condescending douchebag.

The demo for Devil May Cry 4 is… dumb. It might know it’s dumb, but it’s still written for what seems to be 12 year olds. The giant demon boss at the end assures you that he has conquered fire hell. The combat feels exactly like it did in the last three games, stilted controls and all. Perhaps I’ve just had enough of throwing guys into the air and juggling them with pistols. Considering I never even finished the first one, skipped the second and only rented the third, that’s probably not the reaction Capcom wanted to elicit.

Burnout Paradise has proven me wrong and is totally fantastic. Almost all the misgivings I had about the demo are still valid, but the core design and philosophy behind the final product is so focused and perfect that they don’t matter. You can’t pick events from a menu, but that’s okay because the city is small enough that it’s not too difficult to get around, and interesting enough that you want to explore it between events. This also helps you learn your way around the city.

It’s also a new standard for online integration, as well as the perfect system for online in an open world title. I’m going to be disappoint when GTA IV doesn’t work like this. You can invite a friend or be invited from an easy-to-use D-pad menu, and then the world you are in becomes the online world seamlessly. The host can then decide to make a race event and can set the start and end points anywhere on the map. There’s also challenges, which are just little goals like “boost 400 yards on this street” or “do three barrel rolls on that jump” but when four or five people are all trying to do that, hilarious things occur. This also forces you to learn the nooks and crannies of the city. The design is all-encompassing in its scope, and it’s far more than the sum of its parts. It actually feels astonishingly new – the series has totally reinvented itself for the second time. That said, it’s not perfect. The crash mode replacement sucks really bad and the soundtrack thankfully allows you to toggle off individual tracks. Still, it’s great.

Other than that, I got alien laid in Mass Effect. It’s starting to wear thin; I’m glad I’m near the endgame. I also played Pokemon Pearl a bit on a car trip.

That is all.

Saints Row has the luxury of being the first Grand Theft Auto knockoff out on the next generation. The game places your create-a-character in a generic-ish American city called Stilwater and charges your multiracial gang with the task of subverting various other gangs that are made of various ethnic stereotypes.

The game is frighteningly derivative of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. There have been Grand Theft Auto clones for a while now, such as True Crime: Streets of LA, but they all generally had their own angle on the formula, even if they sucked. This game literally rips the feature list of the 2004 title right down to buying clothes at stores and changing your haircut, though the game does only feature one city. It does add or change a few things, like being able to aim 360 degrees when shooting out of a vehicle, and removing the auto-targeting system in favor of a first-person shooter style right analog aiming system.

The game is also frighteningly generic in all aspects. The characters in the game look like they were made out of Poser models. (Poser is an easy to use 3D model posing program with famously bad stock artwork.) The game’s city and buildings are generally the same way. There’s just no sense of art direction or style present at all. San Andreas might not have had a gung-ho, omnipresent art style that jumps out at you, but it generally has a feeling of consistency that differentiates the three cities and the countryside, while still having an overall unified feel to it.

The game’s story, though I did not get very far, seemed to be similar to the Los Santos section of San Andreas. You have to take over the city with your gang buddies. The characters I saw were generic and bland, though the game sports an impressive array of voice actors vocalizing this bland story-line. Should’ve dropped the name actors and hired some artists.

Despite this laundry list of complaints, Saints Row is actually a pretty fun game, in a bad movie sort of a way. It’s derivative, but it looks nice, has no frame rate issues, and is fun to play for an afternoon if you’re ready to make fun of it. The best thing about it, at least in my brief experience, was the hilariously awful ragdoll physics on the pedestrian models. It’s hilarious when you can hit an old woman with your stolen VW Bug and she cartwheels 10 feet into the air and bounces off a streetlight.

Saints Row is a rental at best, or one of those games you pick up on clearance for $10 or so. Of note is the game’s omnipresent bugs, none of which are really gamebreaking, but still hilarious in that same bad movie way. Google “Buggy Saints Row” and watch the video.

A quick word about the Xbox 360 game Dead Rising. The idea of taking on a mall full of zombies with whatever I can find there is appealing. Having 800 zombies on-screen at once is fantastic. The game essentially being unplayable on a regular standard definition television because the text is to small to read on anything lower than 720p. Not cool, Capcom, not cool. In fact, I feel pretty damn ripped off. Maybe one day, when I’m cool enough to have an HDTV, I can actually play this game for more than just messing around with zombies and ignoring the missions until I die.