Let’s not beat around the bush: Saints Row is creatively bankrupt. The latest in a long list of Grand Theft Auto imitators, this clone replicates Rockstar’s controversial games so closely that the uneducated eye could mistake it for the real deal. But unlike past rip-offs, Saints Row is actually a…
Football is a game of inches. The same goes for the Madden series. Each fall, a new Madden game arrives, with a roster update and an incremental change in the game-play formula. Last year brought a “cone of vision” for the quarterback, which mostly just annoyed the fans. Madden NFL…
LocoRoco arrived with impossibly high expectations. This ridiculously cute new game for the PlayStation Portable debuted as a demo in April, and since then, the gaming press has tripped over itself to anoint it the successor to Katamari Damacy or Guitar Hero. Now the game’s finally here, and at first…
What could be more fun than monkeys trapped in plastic hamster balls? That’s the strange philosophy of Super Monkey Ball, a puzzle series that debuted in 2001. Much as with Marble Madness, the goal here is to cross the finish line without falling off a floating platform. Except that this…
The mall in Dead Rising is pretty much like any other you’ve visited. There’s a bunch of women’s clothing stores, a movie theater, and of course the obligatory food court. The only real difference is that it’s teeming with enough zombies to fill a stadium. Dead Rising opens with freelance…
Have you ever looked into onrushing traffic and imagined how much damage you would cause with a simple crank of the steering wheel? If so, FlatOut 2 is the racing game for you. The latest entry in a genre best described as Evel Knievel meets NASCAR, FlatOut 2 lets you…
For most people, the words “role-playing game” conjure images of sweaty Dungeons & Dragons-obsessed weirdos, wearing cloaks and screaming “Lightning bolt!” at each other. But even non-RPG players gave the genre a try when Final Fantasy VII debuted back in 1997. The beautiful graphics and heart-tugging story made it an…
Like a real war, Chromehounds involves long stretches of tedium, occasionally broken up by a few moments of sheer terror. After what feels like weeks of ponderous marching from point A to point B in your titular “Hound” (a walking tank), combat erupts. The fighting is fast and ferocious and…
In 2004, Jason Hall, the head of Warner Bros.’ new videogame division, did something remarkable: He promised to end bad movie tie-ins. By then, gamers had become well acquainted with the suckiness of movie-based games. Ever since Atari’s E.T. — a game so bad, tons of unsold copies were buried…
Native American heroes are a rare commodity in video games. Turok: Dinosaur Hunter, released a decade ago, is the most prominent example. Now Turok finally has company. The best way to describe Prey is “Doom meets Cherokee mysticism.” And while most critics are fawning over this first-person action/horror title, don’t…
Flight sims — games that emulate the experience of being in a cockpit — are plenty popular on PCs, but have never taken off on home consoles. This is partly due to their inherent complexity. When it comes to recreating an entire cockpit’s worth of buttons, levers, and gizmos, the…
The history of football videogames is one of adding layer upon layer of complexity. Tecmo Bowl, the first great football game, had just four plays to choose from. Fast-forward to the latest Madden, and it’s more like 400. The logical result of this evolution is Electronic Arts’ NFL Head Coach,…
From Pokémon to Dragon Ball Z, Japanese pop culture has captured the imagination of American kids. The latest import craze is Naruto. Anyone hip to Harry Potter will find the story familiar: A bunch of otherwise ordinary kids, including titular hero Naruto Uzumaki, study ninjitsu (rather than wizardry) in a…
For comic geeks, an X-Men game that promises to fill in the backstory between movies sounds hotter than a date with Jean Grey. Finally, we get to discover what Wolverine has been up to between films — besides winning Tony Awards as alter ego Hugh Jackman, of course. That’s the…
Not long ago, video games were about collecting coins and rescuing the princess. Now you’re more likely to gun her down in a drive-by. Or eat her alive. Welcome to JAWS Unleashed. You’re a pitiless great white, hungry for human flesh. Unfortunately, this absurd and aimless chompfest can’t decide whether…
Gamers are so used to Mario that the fundamental weirdness of his exploits no longer raises an eyebrow: A dumpy Italian plumber journeys through a fairy-tale land, where turtles throw hammers, mushrooms bestow magic powers, and a kingly turtlebeast holds a princess captive. Where other videogame plots might have been…
Face paint? Check. NoDoz? Check. Deep wellsprings of violent nationalistic pride? No doubt, mate. Yes, it’s time for the World Cup, that quadrennial spectacle that consumes the globe for a month of TV marathons, street parties, and patriotic gestures by men with shaved skulls. That means it’s also time for…
If the creepy, self-flagellating albino monk in The Da Vinci Code really wanted to suffer, he’d drop his flesh-shredding cat-o’-nine-tails, pick up a controller and play The Da Vinci Code video game. It’s that bad. Now it can be told: The Da Vinci Code game is one of the crappiest,…
Yet another Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) has come and gone, and this one was the biggest yet. Exhibitors know all too well that a strong showing at E3 — an event heavily covered by both industry and mainstream press — can turn a great product into a blockbuster and a…
Mom always says that videogames rot your brain. Hell, some say that Grand Theft Auto trains kids to kill. So Nintendo’s claim that its new portable offering, Brain Age: Train Your Brain in Minutes a Day!, actually makes players smarter has been received with a mix of curiosity, cynicism, and…
If you’ve gazed at a record player and imagined you could scratch as well as the next guy, you’re not alone. Guitars, drums, bass — all these instruments appear to require real skill or at least blisters. But who can’t drop a needle? The problem is, cutting beats and transplanting…
The biggest innovation videogaming saw in the past decade or so was the invention of the “sandbox”: Programmers create settings and consequences, but give you, the user, free license to do with them what you want. Grand Theft Auto is certainly the best-known of these games. The carjackings, the hookers,…
