No More Heroes is fucking nuts. Think Metal Gear Solid, but on meth. You’re a video game nerd who buys a lightsaber on eBay, and is trying to become the number one assassin in the world. You save the game by taking a dump in your shithole apartment. There is a pixelated tiger in the corner of the screen that seems to serve no purpose at all. When you kill a guy, blood and money spurt out of his or her dismembered body. You have to recharge your lightsaber by making masturbatory motions with the Wiimote. Should I go on?

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.

I don’t understand why terrorists are attempting to take Las Vegas in “Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Vegas,” Ubisoft’s franchise redesign with a long name. In it, you play as Generic Military Dude Logan, and, with your teammates Generic Asian Dude and Generic Black Dude, you fight terrorists throughout the streets and casinos of near-future Las Vegas.

“Rainbow Six: Vegas” represents a distinct attempt to bring the Rainbow Six games back onto Ubisoft’s A-list, after they began languishing in semi-bargain territory with almost yearly releases since 2002 for one console or another. The name went from one of the more well-respected PC shooter series to sort of high-profile shovelware.

One recent game in the series, Lockdown, was referred to as a “door opening simulator,” and an online video demonstrated that if you were standing with your head poking out slightly you would take damage, but standing in open sight in the doorway was perfectly safe. In short, they sucked.

“Vegas” changes all this, as well as reinventing the series’ basic conventions. It’s still a tactical team-based shooter, but now there’s a cover system similar to the one in Gears of War. (The two games, oddly, were released within two weeks of one another.) Pulling the left trigger causes the player to stick to nearby surfaces, and you can pop out at any angle with the stick. It’s slightly less fluid than Gears’ cover system, but allows for more precise and varied shooting abilities. The controls are fairly well designed overall, allowing for just about all your abilities in an uncomplicated fashion, though switching between this game and Gears of War is disorienting, to say the least.

The series also rips a few ideas from the Splinter Cell games, including a fiber optic camera for looking under doors and a combo pair of thermal and night vision goggles. It also features a lot of cool context options, like being able to “fast rope” down walls in places and rappel slowly as well. Additionally, when rappelling, you can shoot your pistol and even rappel onto a window and then break through dramatically.

Your two AI squadmates generally take care of themselves pretty well, and ordering them around is pretty easy, even if you can only order them through line of sight. It’s very easy, however, to order them to be stealthy and return fire only, or to break through a door and then flash-bang the interior.

The missions, while featuring the totally unexplained terrorists-attack-Las Vegas premise, are pretty well designed and refreshingly difficult. You’ll need to learn good squad tactics and use of your equipment, including flashbangs and smoke grenades, to make it through the campaign. Stupidly, though, your enemies tend to yell out what they are about to do in English, despite the fact that they have accents and could easily speak whatever language they speak natively. Like I said, the plot is “24″-level stupid and just an excuse to shoot terrorists in shiny casinos.

The game itself is gorgeous, with Unreal Engine 3 powered casinos glistening in the darkness. Of special note are the effects when you are hit by either bullets or a flashbang; your character’s vision becomes messed up when you are hit, adding another incentive to keep under cover. (Oddly enough, and completely illogically, your health regenerates like in Halo.)

The multiplayer, unfortunately, is a giant pain in the ass to use. The quick match function rarely works, and when it does, you might be waiting a good six minutes to begin play if the match just started. Developers: Rip off Halo 2. Once you’re in, you’re golden, though, and it’s a good extension of the single player. Notably, you can play through the entire campaign in co-op over Xbox Live or split screen with up to four players, though I haven’t tried it myself.

One neat feature is face mapping. If you have an Xbox Live Vision camera, you can use it to make the game create a creepy avatar of your head. It works okay, though it really doesn’t work if you have longer hair. (This is the military, I guess.) I saw one guy online who had clearly taken a picture of his baby’s head, which was hilarious.

Overall, this is an excellent game. Though there are a few issues, it’s one of the best shooters on the 360, and is definitely worth considering for purchase.