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.

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.

1) The cars handle really crazily now; I guess they are more realistic? The shitty cars I got to use had a hard time handling at high speeds, and really couldn’t drive on grass at all.

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.

Mass Effect is a pretty good game, but I think I’m having way more fun playing through again as a douchebag. Your character says hilariously assholish things to everyone, but they don’t really react beyond maybe a few words, and then it’s back to the normal script!

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.

Rez HD is marvelous in every way. It’s a port that’s gotten better with age. I noticed in my playthrough last night that it draws a line between enemy and background by having the enemies never pulsate to the music. The game world draws a line between what is good (the player and the world) and what is bad (things you can shoot) by how things react to music, which is pretty subtle but a really cool effect. It’s most apparent in the boss in area 2 that you get wrapped up in. In other news, you can use extra controllers as extra vibration feedback, which is awesome.

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.

T-shirts, hoodies, patches, buttons, keychains, refrigerator magnets, a special ugly edition Xbox 360 console with a wireless headset to match, incredibly tacky controller designs from Todd McFarlane, tiny replica guns that don’t seem to serve any real purpose whatsoever,, and a special edition Mountain Dew flavor. Halo 3 is easily the most hyped game, since, well, Halo 2, and it pretty much lives up to the hype, as well as including a whole load of features no one asked for or even thought of putting on consoles and in FPS games before now.

The long-awaited campaign is definitely the most polished in the series to date, though it isn’t without flaws. Bungie’s level designers are firing on all cylinders here, with only one real dud in the entire lineup. (The eighth level. You know the one.)

The Halo series has always shined in large-scale open-area combat, and Halo 3 is no exception – it ups the ante significantly in both enemy numbers and arena size. Graphically, the game might not be quite as stunning as games like Gears of War or Bioshock, but you see where all that power went when you arrive at some of the title’s larger setpieces. There can be dozens of units and vehicles in a single battle, and it’s glorious. The battles can happen dozens of different ways, and they really showcase the unscripted nature of Bungie’s AI programming and level design, especially when you get stuck at a particularly hard checkpoint. After one death, you might see a few marines decide to take off after a wraith in a warthog, and in another they will decide to go after a fortified turret defended by infantry. It does wonders to keep the game fresh as you play through it, though some ability to control the computer-controlled marines would be welcome.

The game’s smaller infantry-based encounters are a little more complicated. On lower difficulties they are a cakewalk; the computer-controlled marines can take care of things alone in many encounters. Walk through; shoot Brutes; carry on. To a player on normal or easy, they are either filler just some fun mindless shooting. On heroic or legendary, they become almost a tactical grind, requiring careful management of ammunition, equipment, marines and enemy attention to survive.

Equipment is one of Bungie’s new additions to its formula, and it’s a great way to throw a little more flavor into battles. The items integrate smoothly into battles, which is no small feat considering how fine-tuned Halo’s combat is. Bubble shields, which form a protective sphere around the player, can be exactly what you need to move back on the offensive, and power drains, which can both remove enemy shields and disable vehicles from movement, and be incredibly damaging at the right moment. The AI uses these items incessantly, but the player generally has to cast a more careful eye on his supplies.

Halo 3 also introduces an impressive array of new weapons and vehicles. Many of these have an art style reminiscent of the brutes, the game’s replacement for the elites of the first two games. One is a gun that shoots razor sharp spikes, and a new kind of sticky grenade that functions similarly. Unfortunately, these don’t work like Half-Life 2′s crossbow: You can’t pin an enemy corpse to the wall with a well-placed kill shot burst. A welcome addition is the ability to rip a turret off its stand and fire it while walking around. The game’s new vehicles are generally rather unremarkable. A new human air vehicle, the Hornet, functions as sort of an airborne Ghost, as players can strafe side-to-side, and the new Brute Chopper is a motorcycle-esque ground vehicle that can ram stuff to great effect and explosion. All the new weapons and vehicles fit so well into the previous arsenal that you can scarcely imagine the game without them.

The campaign’s narrative is unfortunately quite scatterbrained. It seems at times it is trying to evoke this feeling of danger and the idea that the story may end with Master Chief’s death, but for most of the game it forgets this and is completely focused on the larger happenings with the Prophets and the Flood.

A gripe of mine is that the character of the Arbiter seemingly has no overt motivation other than “don’t die and Brutes suck.” Despite the fact that Master Chief meets the Arbiter in the opening cut scene, the two don’t really exchange dialogue until the beginning of the next level, and they never exchange anything of substance. Some additional lines might have alleviated this particular narrative problem, but Cortana’s story arc in the game builds up to, well, nothing, and it’s highly disappointing.

It also fails to cash in any of the emotional potential that setting the game on Earth could bring. One might have walked through a hospital with civilians in it and overheard them talking, or simply flown over a devastated city, but most of the game’s Earth time is spent on the African savannah. Only once are civilians involved in fighting: A group of construction workers armed with pistols rush a Covenant battle line. They die. It’s underwhelming, to say the least.

I would contend that even Halo 3′s prerelease ad campaign, “Believe,” offered better look at the sort of human cost of war, and it was far surpassed by Halo 2′s landmark “I Love Bees” campaign, which really made you feel like Earth was worth defending. However, humanity has never been the focus of Halo’s actual storyline, though, just its ancillary properties, and this is either an odd choice of Bungie’s or a failure of their storytelling ability. The story of the Forerunners, the Flood and the Covenant comes to a relatively satisfying conclusion, but what has happened to humanity over the course of the war?

Of note is Bungie’s throwback to its old Marathon style of storytelling by including a series of terminals once the player reaches a new location midway through the game. They are reminiscent of Bioshock’s audio diaries and are a welcome addition to the game’s storytelling repertoire. A casual player can ignore them, unlike extended cut scenes, but they are there for anyone who seeks more.

Halo 3′s campaign is designed to have replay value beyond one playthrough. (Most of the game’s Achievements are focused around the single player.) It is the first in the series to offer four player cooperative play over Xbox Live, and, like its predecessors, it offers support up to two players on one console. This experience works very well, and can produce many great moments like one player dropping the other on the back of a scarab to blow it up, then scooping the player back off the top, where the two fly away from the explosion dramatically. Having any number of players also opens up great tactical abilities, but the game can be rather hard on the default settings. Players can turn on skulls, which can be found hidden throughout the campaign, to ratchet up the difficulty and make the experience a challenge for four players.

Bungie’s other addition to the campaign is scoring, like the arcade games of yesteryear. You get a set number of points for killing an each enemy, which can be multiplied by a headshot or a series of kills in short succession. Additionally, the aforementioned skulls can be activated to make the game harder, but lend additional multipliers to the final score. This is a fun feature to turn on for coop, where players can compete for the most kills, and it would be just as fun alone were it not for the lack of leaderboards, an incredibly huge oversight for a title that online play is woven so very deeply into.

Of course, the rest of the online functionality is really second to none. Halo 2′s excellent party system is back and improved, with the ability to switch between the game’s various modes as well as party up with strangers you meet online. It remains the single best way to play with friends online, and Halo 3 is a great game to tie it to.

Halo 3 sports a greater variety of matchmaking playlists than Halo 2, and its multiplayer in general is a refinement of its direct predecessor. It has better balance, generally more interesting maps, and another layer of added gameplay thanks to equipment. In short, matchmaking behaves exactly as you would expect it to.

The multiplayer in general is great fun, but not a huge change from Halo 2, despite what some might have you believe. It’s mainly balance changes and gametype

The real shining jewels of Halo 3′s featureset are the theater system and Forge. The game automatically saves complete replays of every game you play, campaign or multiplayer, and allows you to comb back through them from any angle or speed to capture screenshots or, in the case of multiplayer, short clips of choice moments where you died spectacularly, or made others die even more spectacularly. You can then send these to your Xbox Live friends, or save high-resolution anti-aliased 1080p (in layman’s terms, incredibly good-looking) screenshots on your PC from Bungie.net. Saved films can also be flagged using a Bungie.net account linked to your Xbox Live Gamertag, so that the next time you log in to Halo 3 on your Xbox they will automatically download in the background.

These features are incredible. Ease of use pervades the entire system, so that a friend can e-mail you a link to his triple kill from the previous evening and you can click “download” and then watch a full replay of the action from any angle or perspective. Reiterating, this feature is a sight to behold and unmatched in any other game on the market.

Theater mode isn’t quite perfect, however. The interface makes it difficult to rewind precisely, and rewinding is completely impossible in campaign mode replays. One also can’t fast forward large chunks of time at once, which is quite annoying if you want to capture a screenshot from the end of a two hour campaign session. Still, these features are an incredible technical achievement that is just as incredible for the player. The general polish

The other shining jewel is Forge. In short, Forge is Garry’s Mod lite. For those unfamiliar with Garry’s Mod, Forge allows players to rearrange nearly everything about a level and then save custom layouts and game modes to share with their friends or on Bungie.net alongside their films and screenshots. Though this may not be as complicated as modding tools for various PC games, this is a huge advance in features for consoles and will extend the the life of the title immeasurably. It, like theatre mode, is a revelation in the world of consoles, and compared to any PC solution it is still a revelation in ease of use.

Halo 3 is a great game. It might not be deserving of all the hype, the barrage of 10/10 perfect scores, and 3.3 million in sales in a mere seven days, but it’s an experience few Xbox 360 owners shouldn’t miss, and its featureset is a new high watermark in the industry and redefines the term “complete package.”

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.

In the past few weeks, Xbox Live Arcade has had a flood to make up for the relative drought of recent months. Two of the most complete and, well, retail-like game experiences hit, in the form of Worms and Alien Hominid HD. Today is all about Worms, since Alien Hominid is way too hard. (Translation: I am a pansy.)

Worms is a sort of “reboot” of the long-running annelid strategic combat simulation series. Recent games had taken place in three dimensions, and were not as well-received as the older, 2D ones. Even the recent 2D iterations were a little too crazy and random to really be called strategy games. The weapons were just a little too insane; when you have multiple weapons in your inventory that can tear apart a huge chunk of the playing field, a lot of the strategy is removed.

Worms for the Arcade scales things back a bit. Like the PSP and DS versions, this one goes back to basics. Most of the unbalanced weapons are gone, leaving behind many that require more skill to use. Here you’ll need to learn to toss a grenade accurately or how to use the bazooka in relation to the wind. Some of the easy weapons still remain, such as dynamite or the sheep and the banana bomb remains a crazy weapon you’ll only find as a pickup. The most missed weapons are the Holy Hand Grenade and the baseball bat, but perhaps they’ll appear in a downloadable content update. (Just don’t make them part of the normal inventory.)

The weapon selection really brings out how strategic Worms can be. I, being raised on Armageddon and World Party, never thought of Worms as anything more than a fun diversion. The insanity of the 3D games reinforced this. The new version is a sort of revelation to me. I’ve learned the subtle art of the ninja rope. I’ve learned how to place grenades so that the worm bounces into that cluster of mines after being hit with an explosion. It’s an awesome refocusing of the series, but be warned if you’re expecting Super Sheep, Holy Hand Grenades, and old ladies. (Again, the banana bomb remains as a pickup in most game schemes.) One annoying omission is the lack of fire erupting from the barrels when they explode. A cunning Worms World Party player could blow up a barrel and send a cascading fire flow of death down onto a worm in a valley, but not so in the Live Arcade edition. Bummer.

There are problems, however. The single player game is just a series of progressively more unfair challenges against computer players. It would be totally worthless if there wasn’t an achievement attached. Additionally, in true Worms tradition, the AI opponents can make utterly insane shots. They can bounce grenades off four things so they land perfectly next to one of your worms. They can make perfect use of the wind for bazooka shots. It’s frustrating. However, they usually aren’t all that smart. They leave themselves in large clusters or ignore nearby item pickups. They are also programmed to occasionally completely screw up and blow themselves up. You can beat them, but only through cunning exploitation of their weaknesses.

Multiplayer, like all Worms titles, is the real star here. Online or offline for four players, it’s a riot. Xbox Live play generally works pretty well. I had some trouble connecting to a game on occasion, but it usually worked OK. Gameplay is lag-free, I guess. (Not that it really matters.) Oddly, voice communications come through before you actually see what happened on a particular player’s turn. You’ll often hear someone exasperatedly exclaim “dammit,” and see their worm’s grenade land right next to them and send them into the sea. One annoying feature omission is the lack of guest play in Xbox Live games. I can’t have two people play on my console against others online.

A few random annoyances I haven’t woven into the proper text: The in-game font can be hard to read on non-HD televisions. It’s not as bad as Dead Rising, but it’s worth noting. For some reason, the number of custom teams you can create is capped at four. Really, guys, I have enough space on my hard drive. I swear. Control is not true analog. You can’t aim just a little bit or move the reticle slowly with the analog stick. It reaches a threshold and it suddenly begins moving full speed. Seriously, Team 17, it’s 2007. Come on.

Overall, though, I have to recommend Worms. It’s a sweet title, online multiplayer or offline, and it only costs 800 points, or $10. Avoid it if your friends won’t play it with you, or you can’t play online.

Unlike most games on the Xbox 360, this one is not one that 14-year-olds might consider “mature.” In fact, they would probably call it “gay.” But that doesn’t matter, because Viva Piñata is, in fact, totally awesome.

Viva Piñata is the latest game from venerable British studio Rare, and really, their first truly great game since the N64′s Conker’s Bad Fur day, though Perfect Dark Zero and Kameo were both fairly decent from what I’ve played.

In the extraordinarily brightly colored world of Viva Piñata, you play a disembodied gardener who has to build a nice place to attract piñatas. The game works in a similar fashion to the older Dungeon Keeper games for PC, or the more recent Evil Genius. You build it, and they come.

Assuming, of course, that you build it correctly. You choose from a variety of landscaping options and various accents and plants and such, and those determine the kind of piñatas you can attract. For example, getting a bunch of water and aquatic plants attracts newts, and putting down bread attracts ducks, and flowers for bees and so on.

Of course, if you want your piñatas to mate and make wee baby piñatas, you have to also meet the requirements for that. You’ll need piñata houses, and various other niceties. Of note is the games total lack of penalization for piñata incest. It doesn’t even matter if the mommy piñata and her son have babies! They produce perfectly normal children.

Not many games give the sense of satisfaction from construction that this one does. Back in the day, the first real-time strategy game I played was Age of Empires. I had never experienced anything like it before, and simply building my base in the tutorial was accompanied this amazing feeling of pride at my creation. Of course, the feeling has been lost over years of construction in Starcraft and The Sims, but Viva Piñata is the first game that has almost perfectly recreated that feeling for me.

The game is deceptively deep. I have played it for around 12 hours, and I still don’t really feel like I’ve given it quite enough time for a review. I’ve seen crazy awesome piñatas off in the distance I haven’t been able to attract! (Like that cool deer, and an elephant!)

The game is also deceptively difficult. Obviously, since this is a super-colorful cartoon game with an animated TV show tie-in, you would expect it to be pretty easy. The final product doesn’t really resemble “easy” in any way. There are a great many dangers your piñatas can face, assuming you can even attract them competently. Evil “sour” piñatas will come out of the wilds to attack your own, and your piñatas will get into fights with each other.

Also of note is the fact that your piñatas have no trouble at all eating all of the delicious candy that pours out of one of their recently deceased brethren. I can see how this wanton display of cannibalism could be quite traumatizing to young children. I was quite upset when a treasured hedgehog piñata by the name of Mudbutt was tragically murdered by an evil fox piñata and then devoured.

Games in the vein of Viva Piñata usually appear on the PC, where a mouse and keyboard provide ample interface options. This is one of the game’s weaker points: The interface is quite clunky to use most of the time, with way too many menus, submenus, and load times to get to these menus. Needs to be much simpler.

The interface is worth negotiating if you’re a fan of games like this. Unfortunately, there’s no demo for this on the marketplace, but it’s definitely worth playing. Sadly, the game’s sales are what one might call “abysmal.” The average 360 owner – one who has paid $400 for the privilege – probably wants nothing to do with a game this colorful. It definitely deserves attention, though, and it might just herald the return of Rare as a consistently awesome game developer.

In conclusion, Viva Piñata is an awesome game about incest and cannibalism.

Crackdown is a game that screams with potential. Its content seems somehow unfinished. It is also sometimes quite buggy. It is obviously setting up for a sequel. It is a game that draws attention away from its obvious deficiencies through the sheer coolness of the idea behind it. Despite all this, it is extraordinarily fun to play.

For those who have not investigated that game on the disc with the Halo 3 beta invitation, Crackdown is an open-world sandbox game designed by the creator of the original 2D top-down Grand Theft Auto. In it, you play a genetically modified super cop setting out on a quest to kill a whole bunch of organized crime leader stereotypes. You start out weak, able to jump a few feet into the air, and pick up and throw small objects, like car doors or benches. As the game progresses, you become stronger and more agile, enabling you to jump ridiculous amounts and throw cars and buses and stuff. You can also level up your explosives, driving and firearms skills.

Crackdown is very light on storyline. You are dropped into the world and told to go after gang members and their leaders, as you work your way up to taking on the gang’s kingpin. Rounding out our three sets of enemies are the Latino stereotype called Los Muertos, the eastern European/Russian stereotypes called Volk, and the Asian stereotypes called Shai Gen. A disembodied narrator voice that sounds kinda like the host from Smash TV accompanies you throughout the game, but, disappointingly, is not the secret final boss.

Crackdown’s most interesting quality is that it is a sandbox game all the way through. How you complete the series of objectives you are given is up to you, there are no mission structures. You have to find them, and figure out the best way to kill them. I’d love to see this idea explored further. I’d love to see my guy locate an enemy, use a sniper rifle on a fire alarm or something so that the kingpin has to come outside, and then I fire a heat-seeking rocket at him. Or maybe, on this same boss, I could set off a timed explosive on one end of the compound, drawing attention away so I could sneak into the other side and then kill the guy that way.

Unfortunately, the game isn’t really like this. There’s a bit of strategy to be formulated in, essentially, getting to these gang bosses. You die a few times, and figure out, “Okay, so if I swim around back of the rock outcropping, jump across onto the second story, blow that door with a mine while I kill the dudes up there, and then run in as the alarm sounds, and jump up and unload my rocket launcher on the boss right away, then I can avoid getting my ass handed to me by angry Asian stereotypes with heavy machine guns and heat-seeking missiles.” This kind of strategy is pretty cool and evokes some of the memories I have of beating really hard missions in GTA3 with a bit of ingenuity and taking advantage of a bug or two.

The skill advancement system is pretty neat, as well, but also flawed. It works mostly by the mantra “skills for kills,” a phrase which the omniscient narrator dude will repeat over and over again. Shoot a dude, get experience for leveling firearms. Grenade kills for explosives. You get the idea. Unfortunately, by the time you get to the end of the game, your skills are not necessarily at their highest, and once you’re done, there’s little motivation to get them any higher, aside from messing around and, if you have Live Gold, cooperative play.

Cooperative play, though, might be reason enough to. The entire game can be played online with one other person. You can jump in and out of another person’s single player game if they so desire. Think of the amount of fun you can have just messing around the game world in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, and then add a friend and superpowers. If this game has any longevity aside from downloadable content, it’ll be here. Unfortunately, there’s no split-screen co-op at all.

Let’s talk about bugs. There are lots, but none of them are really game-breaking. They’re mostly just funny. If you shoot at a dude while standing next to a railing, your character will pistol whip the railing. Take that, concrete. Occasionally, disembodied announcer guy will say something like, “What a breathtaking view, agent. Finest in the city.” Putting aside the fact that he declares this more than once and at different places, sometimes the places are an alley with a dead guy next to a dumpster.

The entire game really feels a bit like a tech demo for the engine technology, which is fantastic. It has amazing amounts of objects on the screen, as well as incredible draw distance and nice physics and it is co-op enabled. I just can’t help but think about the great games that could follow this one. For a sequel, they could take the superhero angle further and make it so you design a character and choose ability sets to develop. Think City of Heroes, but not an RPG or online. I could design my crazy psychic warrior guy and get online after leveling his powers to play with my friend’s flying ice spraying flying dude. Then we would fight crime! It would be awesome.

Sadly, though, Crackdown is not this game. It is a really fun game, though, just too short and too buggy for me to wholeheartedly recommend. I’ve had a lot of fun with it. There’s a really cool game in this concept, and it’s almost shining through with Crackdown. Maybe we’ll see it for Crackdown 2, guys.

I should start this by saying I haven’t really played this game to a point where I would feel comfortable reviewing it properly, so consider these opening impressions. However, as all I have been playing lately is endless games of Lumines Live!, and Gears of War co-op on insane, this is what I have for you.

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.

Microsoft’s Xbox Live Arcade download service has been one of my favorite things about the Xbox 360 thus far. For between $5 and $15, you can download any number of classic arcade titles or even newly developed games created specifically for Xbox Live Arcade. Most of the games fall for $5 or $10, and you can demo any of them before buying. Despite this, I’m still going to review all the ones I’ve bought so far.

“Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved” is the quintessential Arcade title, from what I understand, since it was the standout title at the system’s launch, and has maintained its popularity. I’ve written about it once before, in a way, talking about the freeware PC/Mac clone “GridWars.” The guy who wrote “GridWars” has since received a cease and desist notice, and for good reason – it’s pretty much the exact same thing! The thing in question–an exceedingly frantic arcade shooter that takes advantage of the new-ish technology that is dual analog sticks–is definitely worth the $5 they’re charging. Verdict: Buy.

“Lumines Live!” is an enhanced port of the PlayStation Portable puzzle game/launch title. The player must make 2 x 2 blocks of one color out of 2 x 2 mixed color blocks that fall. It’s really, really fun. Unfortunately, the pricing structure is, shall we say, lacking. It costs $15. I can understand this. There’s a lot more content here than your average Arcade title. Unfortunately, it’s going to cost you more to get to the entire game: Another $7.50 for the advanced pack, consisting of another mode and a bunch of skins, and another $1.25 each for the full allotment of levels for mission mode and puzzle mode. Verdict: Try before dropping what is already a large amount of points on a game and then being prodded to spend more on it around every corner.

“UNO” would be a port of the card game you played on family vacations and when the electricity went out as a child. Live Arcade needs more stuff like this (I’d kill for Live “Scrabble”). You can just chill out and play UNO with people online–it’s a very polished adaptation. Also, some people have Xbox Live cameras so you can make fun of the people with and laugh at their reaction after you play that skip card. Verdict: Buy, assuming you have an Xbox Live Gold account and can play online multiplayer.

“Assault Heroes” is some kind of unholy combination of “Smash TV” and “Geometry Wars,” with a dash of “Contra.” For $10, you get a top down shooter with dual analog controls and getting in and out of vehicles. It controls like pie, and not just any pie, but the most awesome pie you have ever tasted. Unfortunately, the game is a bit short, but the achievements give it a bit of longevity. Verdict: Buy.

“Zuma” is a Popcap game, which means you can get it on PCs, Macs, iPods, cell phones and probably abacuses. It’s just as fun here, and controls well using the 360’s analog stick. Side note: The entire concept is a blatant ripoff of a 1998 Japanese arcade game called “Puzz Loop.” $10. Verdict: Try, you make the call. It’s also on the DS as “Magnetica.”

I would say one major downside to the Arcade is the glut of, well, arcade games. The service is cluttered with them. This in itself is not terrible, though more original content is always preferable to a reheated arcade port. The problem is the Xbox 360’s D-pad. It’s just not any good for old-school stuff that requires precision like Pac-Man. For the lack of a better term, it’s mushy. It makes playing games like Pac-Man an exercise in frustration.

“Gauntlet” and “Smash TV” are online-capable ports of the classic cooperative arcade games that control well, unlike many. Nothing exciting to report, but they’re only $5 each and awesome for chilling out and playing coop, same screen or online. Verdict: Buy.

“Street Fighter II” is self-explanatory. Unfortunately, the Internet play is laggy if you can even find anyone playing, and it’s less-than-suited to the 360’s controller layout. Verdict: Try, and don’t buy for the Live play.

It’s worth noting for the broadband impaired that a fair few Live Arcade titles are on store shelves in a compilation called “Xbox Live Arcade Unplugged Vol. 1” or some such wordage. However you have to do it, I definitely recommend checking out some of the games tucked away in that Xbox Live Arcade button in your Games blade. There are some real gems, and unlike Nintendo’s Virtual Console games, the ports on here get enhancements like leaderboards, achievements and online play. New game every Wednesday, guys.

Epic Games’ “Gears of War” finally, truly validates the existence of the Xbox 360. The insane amount of detail the system allows the game to put on screen underscores and enhances the atmosphere of desperation the game seeks to build, which is enhanced by the gameplay style it utilizes.

For those not nerdy enough to read about video games all day, “Gears” is the third-person shooter brainchild of “CliffyB,” an outspoken nickname enthusiast and game designer whose other main source of notoriety is designing the good “Unreal Tournament” from back in 1999. “Gears” is markedly different, obviously, since it is a single-player focused third-person game.

The game is set on a planet humanity colonized and built what appears to be a idyllic civilization, with many massive structures in classical Greek or Roman style, but one day a race of intelligent “locusts” bursts out of the ground and begins to attack the colonists. This sounds ridiculous as I type it, but the game presents it with much more skill. I will admit that the actual scripted story the player follows is often ridiculous, and nothing much happens, and the dialogue can be painful, but the world the game builds screams “desperation,” and it really feels like even if you win the next fire fight, you’re probably screwed in the long run anyway.

The game’s combat system underscores this. In “Gears,” you are not Gordon Freeman or Master Chief or the “Doom” guy. You can’t run in guns blazing and kill all the bad guys without as much of a scratch on you. In “Gears,” you have to hide behind pieces of rubble, and pillars, and furniture – pretty much whatever you can find–and then pop out and shoot at the bad guys and go back into hiding once they start shooting back. If you get shot you will die. The fact that you are so vulnerable underscores the feeling of desperation that pervades the game’s art direction.

One cool idea present here is that of “active reloading,” meaning that if you can perfectly execute a series of button presses during a reload, you can reload faster and possibly get a damage amplifier. It makes reloading a more tactile experience, and results in a more intense game with less player downtime. Another great feature is that the entire game is playable in co-op mode, even online. You can be playing the game alone, and one of your friends can see you playing and take control of one of your squadmates seamlessly.

The multiplayer mode is, well, there. It essentially boils down to a four-on-four riff on the “Counter-Strike” formula of one life per round. It’s just unremarkable, though extremely fun.

“Gears,” overall, is one of the best games to come out last year. It uses the Xbox 360 to its fullest realized potential to date, as well as making excellent use of Xbox Live. If you have dropped $400 on the system, pick it up without hesitation.