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 wasn’t expecting much from “Nitro” on the DS, mostly because you can count the number of good racing games on the platform on one hand. I am pleasantly surprised. “Nitro” is a solid game, though not spectacular.

Before I get to the impressions, some perspective. I am not a serious racing fan. I think the best racer is one that doesn’t take itself too seriously. I love “Burnout” games, “Mario Kart,” and “Mashed.” “Forza” and “Gran Turismo” are, for the most part, beyond me. Perspective provided, moving on.

Instead of trying to show up “Forza 3,” “Nitro” wisely features exaggerated caricatures of real cars. The game pays little attention to reality, other than the fact that the cartoon fancy sports cars are in the higher tiers. Your first choices will include ’60s VW vans, Renault hatchbacks, and Nissan Cubes.

The cars are cosmetically customizable, but the only way to improve your performance is to switch to a different vehicle.
Surprisingly, driving using the DS’ D-pad feels great. It basically controls like an older console game, not taking advantage of the touch screen at all, which is completely fine. It just doesn’t need it. The game also looks quite good for a DS game – the solid framerate contributes to a nice sense of speed.

There are a few interesting mechanics sprinkled into the standard gas-brake-drift racing gameplay. The first is the context-sensitive X button, which basically makes you do an insanely ridiculous trick involving whatever is in front of you. This can be driving on two wheels between cops that randomly appear to block the track, and it can also be doing front flips over your opponents, if you draft them long enough. This is a fun mechanic that really embodies the game’s style.

Winning in “Nitro” requires a bit more than just getting first place – you also have to get the most stunt points. In addition to the expected drifting and airtime, you can also drive through a series of icons to paint your logo on nearby buildings. This easily nets the most points, and the first racer through an area has the first chance to grab these icons. Thus, if you are in first, you will end up with far more stunt points than your lagging competition, so this mechanic essentially becomes meaningless. However, it doesn’t really detract from the racing, and it’s fun to spray your customizable icon up on sections of the track.

The game’s structure is really its Achilles’ Heel. You go “around the world” (pick things from a menu) and do races at various exotic locales. The DS seems to lack the car upgrades its console cousin features, featuring only cosmetic changes, so career basically boils down to doing the same four event types at six different tracks. There are four “levels” of play that basically repeat the same six tracks. The tracks themselves are fairly mundane, with a small number of alternate routes and hazards – they don’t really do anything interesting, like risk/reward shortcuts.

The DS version of “Nitro” is probably best played in small doses – that was the only way I was able to enjoy it. More than two or three races in one play session really starts to drive the game’s weaknesses into the forefront. Still, “racing game with real cars” is not the most common kind of game on the DS, and hey, there will certainly be a sequel that might improve on the game’s flaws next year.

The recent video game versions on Xbox 360 have been a far better experience, but they were a bit overproduced – you don’t want to watch poorly animated cutscenes, you want to answer trivia questions. The new mutliplatform “Scene It? Bright Lights! Big Screen!” has fixed many of the annoying issues with the previous games, but I’m not sure if that’s just because it seems to have been produced with a much smaller budget.
I’ll start with the good stuff: This is easily the best version of “Scene It?” ever released, mainly due to what appears to be a vastly decreased budget. There are no fancy animated backgrounds or between-round cinematics that attempt to shove a narrative into a party trivia game, just basic abstract background art with simple transitional animations.

The annoying host remains, but he can be disabled completely. There are also a transitional animated shorts that occasionally pop up, but they are indeed short and easy to ignore. Overall, it’s very clean and streamlined, which is ideal for a general-interest party game.

There are unfortunately some problems. The font used throughout the game is extremely small, especially for a Wii game. It was annoying on a smaller HDTV, and it had all the players squinting on an average standard definition CRT.

The game also only supports four players, which is a shame. This kind of game should support as many players as possible, and it would’ve been feasible to increase that count to eight by supporting nunchuks or Gamecube controllers. The game also lacks Mii support, instead opting for generic characters like “pirate” or “sexy space lady.” Miis are always better than generic avatars.

Overall, “Scene It? Bright Lights! Big Screen!” is a pretty decent party title. I’d recommend it if you are looking for more Wii party games friendly for new gamers, and it will be a lot more palpable once it’s cheaper than the $40 launch price.

“Band Hero” is also a bad idea for a game to its very core.

Upon first inserting your “Band Hero” cart, you are prompted to create a truly heroic band and character. The default state for your new rock hero is standing around in his or her underpants, instead of something generic like, say, a pair of jeans and a T-shirt. After choosing from face types like “anime” and “elven” (nothing says RAWK like elves), you are prompted to choose the skin color. Activision are very progressive, so among the reality-based colors like “brown” and “lighter brown” are colors like “cyan,” “magenta” and “jet black.” The path of least resistance involves being green skinned and flaunting it in those hilarious heart undies, so that’s what I did.

After creating my rocker, “Formerly Bruce Banner,” I instruct him to play every instrument in my band simultaneously and head off to pick a song. The interface is geared for creating playlists, so you basically check off songs you want to play and then push a check mark. It’s easy to not realize what’s going on here and select and deselect a bunch of songs while just trying to get to the game, but it’s an understandable design choice. After all, when you’re playing a portable game, you’re going to play it for long periods of time, and not quickly while waiting in line somewhere.

Sarcasm aside, it’s a terrible interface and terrible default choice, especially when you consider that “Band Hero’s” target audience is supposed to be the tech-challenged mass market. Even if this was a game for power users, a group that puts up with bad interfaces, it’s impossible to sort the song list by difficulty or artist — it’s just alphabetic by song, with no artist alongside it. Additionally, the entire song selection interface only displays about four songs at a time, and it has a huge amount of wasted space that could be used for artist, difficulty, the entire song title instead of “Crazy Little Thing….”

But if the gameplay is good you can put up with all these problems, right? Well, it’s bad. I have never played a DS “Guitar Hero” title, so this is my introduction to the guitar grip peripheral. It is the most difficult thing to hold ever, for no good reason. It doesn’t make you feel like you are playing a guitar, and it makes the game a literal pain to play. Strumming the touch screen does not feel like using the strum bar on a proper guitar controller, and the frets are just hard to press while holding the system steady in your hands.

Drums are okay. They are controlled with a rubber drum condom that fits over the system and pressed the face buttons for you. There is no strumming here, though. Just hit the drum when the gem crosses the hit zone, like “Dance Dance Revolution.” Unfortunately, the silly drum skin is arranged with the drums in two vertical stacks, which is counterintuitive when the game arranges them in the traditional horizontal row on-screen. It’s technically possible to play without it using just the face buttons, but the game’s UI doesn’t change to show button names to make up for the lack of colored pads. Once you get used to it, it’s better than guitar, but that’s not saying much.

The instrument play is broken up by silly minigames that have you doing touch screen crowd surfing, stage diving, and T-shirt tossing while the song still plays without you. These really make me feel like I’m playing an instrument and not a video game that felt its core gameplay wasn’t adequate enough to stand alone! Thankfully, these can be ignored entirely, if you never accidentally press that part of the touch screen while strumming.

Here is the core problem, though: Even if you like the guitar and drum play in Band Hero, do you really want to lug around a bunch of instrument peripherals for your portable system? This was a bad idea with “Guitar Hero: On Tour,” and the addition of the drum face just exacerbates the problem. Here is another problem: These peripherals are for the DS Lite only. That guitar peripheral you see above will only work with a GBA slot, and the rubber drum condom fits the Lite perfectly, though it might also function on the DSi. “Band Hero” was a chance to rethink the guitar game and start over now that the DSi is out, but that apparently would’ve been too much effort, as the box brags: “Exclusively for the Nintendo DS Lite!”

Singing, a peripheral-free activity, is the most functional part of the game. It works pretty similarly to singing in “Rock Band” or “Guitar Hero,” but it’s definitely not as difficult — I was able to pass a Queen song on my first try. I imagine they had to lower the sensitivity of the singing because of the DS’ lower quality microphone. It’s great that the DS now has a singing game worth playing, and I look forward to seeing it played in the public places where people enjoy playing portable games, because that is certainly a thing that will happen, and making a singing game for a portable system is not an inherently flawed concept conceptually.

Overall, Band Hero is a really bad game. It’s a shitty implementation of an even worse idea. I guess if you were able to tolerate past DS “Guitar Hero” games, then it might be worth checking out, but I can’t recommend it at all. Look to “Elite Beat Agents,” “Rock Band” for iPhone or “Rock Band Unplugged” for a rhythm gaming experience that remembers it’s on a portable platform, and is designed accordingly.

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.

It seems impossible to write an introduction to this review, especially considering how self-explanatory the title is. Here: “The Beatles: Rock Band” is a “Rock Band” game with the Beatles in it. You have guitar, bass, drums and this time, up to three microphones, and you faux-play music using on-screen guides. It is amazing. If you have any affinity at all for “Rock Band” and the Beatles, you should go to the store and purchase it.

“Well,” you say, “that was a shitty review! How about some details and comparisons. What makes it amazing?” Okay.

The rest at Nintendorks…

“Ghostbusters,” or as the PR people would put it, “Ghostbusters®: The Video Game,” is of course a followup of sorts to the Ghostbusters movies from the 80s. If you don’t know what that is, you should probably just stop reading now. This game was built assuming that you thought Ghostbusters was awesome as a child and continued to be funny as an adult, and being unfamiliar with the source material would remove the only reason anyone ever paid attention to this already unremarkable game.

The game takes place a few years after “Ghostbusters II.” You are a new hire, which allows all the famous characters to keep referring to you as “chief” and “the rookie” instead of giving your character an identity. You run around various locations in Manhattan, using the sweet proton pack laser beams on various ectoplasmic baddies. The controls are basically that of a first person shooter, and the default setup works fine. Good thing, too, as there are no customizable controls. (This game is no “Conduit,” thank god.)

Combat basically consists of blasting ghosts enough to either destroy them or tire them out enough for you to “wrangle” them into those sweet traps that you also wanted the toy of as a kid. There are plenty of variations on this, including tossing various things around gravity gun style, as well as new attachments for your proton pack. The one I got was basically a shotgun.

One issue I had is that the basic beam doesn’t really feel like it’s hitting anything when you actually hit your target. A health meter starts to tick down, but there is no visible reaction otherwise. It’s especially jarring because the environment is awesomely destructible. Overall, the combat isn’t quite as engaging as you’d like it to be, but it never really gets annoying or overly difficult, and it would be worth putting up with if the rest of the game was great.

It, unfortunately, is not. Dan Akyroyd’s script is wasted on cutscene directing and editing that could be called horribly pedestrian at best, and at worst, simply bad. Either way, it’s not good. Don’t get me wrong, it elicits a chuckle here and there, and it is indeed a pleasure to see these characters doing stuff again, but timing is a huge part of comedy, and, from what I saw, this game largely fails at it.

I have a feeling Mr. Akyroyd was not prepared for the amount of dialogue necessary for an entire video game, nor does he understand how it should fit into the game. There are one or two movie-type scripted scenes in between each level, and then it’s largely all incidental “over there, kid!” type dialogue until the end each section of the level, where you are treated to 10-15 seconds of exposition followed by more of you and one other character running around bustin’ ghosts. Basically, there is very little interesting dialogue during gameplay, which is unfortunate, because game writing is at its best when it actually involves the “game” part.

I don’t mean to sound so negative – it’s not terrible. It’s just not good. The good parts are these:

• Cartoon chariacture graphics are vastly preferable to the uncanny valley fest present on the other consoles.
• Original voice actors are largely unawkward and turn in good performances, though it’s pretty easy to tell they recorded separately from one another.
• Good level design from what I saw, aside from the Wii-specific level that replaces the streets of New York section early on.
• It is not difficult, which would completely wreck anything it has going for it. You would not play this game for the tactical combat experience, and it knows it.

Unfortunately, it basically boils down to it being just about the sum of its parts. Okay script + okay combat and mechanics + good graphics = okay game.

Wii Sports Resort
Mass Effect 2
Alan Wake
Halo 3: ODST
The Beatles: Rock Band
Tiger Woods Wii, Split Second, Army of Two PSP
Blur, DJ Hero, Span Smasher
Dark Void, Forza 3, Dirt 2, PSP Go

ALSO, here is a video of me playing the Conduit multiplayer, and a podcast where I talk about the whole experience.

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.

Ninjatown the brand is apparently a spinoff of a thing called Shawnimals, which are admittedly amusing cute-ified designs of everyday non-ninja objects. Let’s face it – at this point, ninjas are Interneté passé. Nerds on forums have picked the ninja corpse funny bone clean. (I’m hoping this fate does not befall hoboes, which are currently my go-to amusing group of historical individuals.)

Ninjatown, though, is so damn charming it overcomes its ninja cliché roots and is just plain hilarious. Behold, the Ninja Consultant. His skill with charts and graphs will make your troops just that much more efficient. However, unlike its art style, Ninjatown can’t quite pretty up the gameplay enough to make it stand totally above and beyond the myriad of other takes on the genre all over the Internet. Though it is derivative and it brings nothing truly innovative to the table, it’s an excellent execution of the concept and it’s a hell of a lot of fun.

Ninjatown is a corridor-based TD game, none of this free-form, place your towers wherever you want insanity. Bad guys (in this case, demons who want to steal the ninja cookie recipe) walk down a path, and you have to stop them from getting to the end. Standard stuff.

I am probably not the most skilled TD player around, but I have played a fair amount of them, and Ninjatown is hard. You’ll start to be challenged after only a few levels, and it quickly gets even more challenging, but in a fun way. The fact that the game is separated into levels, unlike the traditional marathon structure, means that the difficulty never feels unfair, and the short levels encourage experimentation with different strategies, which will be required. The game isn’t too cruel to players new to the genre, however; MY GIRLFRIEND had never touched a TD game and was able to progress without too much frustration.

There are a few twists to the gameplay. The old man ninja, seen lurking to your right, gains a number of stylus and microphone based special powers which can be used directly by the player to great effect in the right situation. The maps can also contain various twists on the formula that occasionally stumble, but generally enrich the experience with a bit of variety.

Ninjatown’s greatest strength is its premise. The art is buoyed by appropriately hilarious writing and plot developments, which is augmented by its fun-but-pedestrian gameplay. The tower defense genre is rather appropriate for a handheld, and I hope to see more of them on the DS, but it will be hard for one to top the charming premise present in Ninjatown.

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.

Unfortunately, failing a song absolutely kills the mood at a party. If players couldn’t completely fail a song, then the game would be much more friendly for social situations. Just letting the song limp along with some sort of “assisted help” mode once a player screws up bad enough would be a lot better than the usual “well, let’s do something else!” result of people failing at a party.

But would lacking a fail condition make higher-level play worse, assuming that failure-free play wasn’t relegated to being an option or just one mode? I know the feeling of just barely scraping by on a song but succeeding is great, but the awesome feeling of totally nailing a song would still remain.

Perhaps the star system could replace failure to some degree? In single player and band world tour mode, you might have to earn a certain number of stars in a set or on a song to pass, but the game never tells you that you suck so explicitly, just that you need to do better. The feeling of just barely scraping by could still be preserved, since you might’ve just barely gotten three stars, instead of just barely finishing the song.

Hopefully, for the inevitable follow-up to Rock Band, Harmonix addresses these concerns in some capacity. This is one of many design and interface changes that could be made to Rock Band without damaging the core band gameplay, and I feel that the gameplay can indeed rise to new heights if video game-centric design choices like failing a song are revised to fit in with the game’s core, augmenting rather than hampering the enjoyment of the full band experience.

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.