Like Matt Peckham of former gaming website 1up.com, we only spend fifteen minutes playing a game before judging it for your consumption. Unlike him, we admit it. Enjoy.

Need for Speed: Undercover

Assorted thoughts as they occured to me:

*To quote the penultimate episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000; “Here’s your loser actor boquet!”

*They settled on this chick because she was kind of Asian, but not so much that they came off as fetishists, right? Thigh shots, check. Cleavage shot… attempted, check. This chick is Mariah Carey all over again.

*Hoo boy. NfS still hasn’t given up on trying to capture that Fast & the Furious thunder, only now they’re moving into ripoff land.

*Wow, this game looks GOOD! Handles pretty damn well, too. First race was pretty much a cakewalk. Let’s wander around the open map and… it’s pretty devoid of things to do besides get into more races, which you can pretty much zoom to by pressing a button. So meaningless choice, really.

*Highway battle? Really? Cool! I can impersonate those douchebags who almost kill entire families to satisfy their craving for attention stemming from a lack of sexual ability and a surplus of income they wasted on underpowered rice rockets!

*Wow, civilian traffic swerves all over the road. Like ALL THE WAY ACROSS THE HIGHWAY. I’ve lost twice in a row because of shitty AI and this is no longer fun. Fuck it, I’m going to go pick my nose and think about dinosaurs.

Tomb Raider: Underworld

*Okay, why the hell is Lara’s mansion burning down? Didn’t the last game end with her going through the magic door to Avalon to find her mother? Did I really just say that? Oh look, a “Previously on Tomb Raider” video. Maybe that’ll shed some light.

*No. No it doesn’t. In fact, it has scenes I don’t remember. When the hell did I toss the Queen of Atlantis into a pit of lava? Why aren’t they showing the evil naked chick in her costume that consisted of two belts and a liquorice stick? WHAT’S GOING ON? Oh well, back to the game. Maybe my questions will be answered.

*Right, or not. Mansion goes boom and we go back two weeks to a dive Lara went on, apparently to find Avalon. Because who needs magic glowing doors at the end of Tomb Raider: Legend that had big neon signs that said “This way to Magical Avalon!” that we WALKED THROUGH when you can just start the next game off in completely different cicrumstances. This is stupid.

*Wow, this is dark. Like dark with that German umlaut over the letter a, and it’s starting to flirt with the r in defiance of all rules of grammar. I’m not sure where I’m going, the sonar map is no help, and the caves are hard to find. You can go into the menu to hear an audio hint and lock onto the destination, but that’s a crappy way to cover for lackluster game design and having to go into the menu to utilize it is just sloppy. Take a hint from Uncharted. That game waited a minute until it knew you were an idiotic tourist and prompted you to press a shoulder button if you needed to zoom in on the answer. The only thing I can say in its favor is that it’s pretty damn large and does make you feel like you’re actually exploring on your own. Still, aimless wandering is not fun.

*In fact, this game kind of feels like a step back in general. I loved Legend, but the obtuse level design and the Xbox360-brand darkness is killing me. I finally get inside a cave and it’s just more of the same from this series.

*WHOA, TENTACLE! Good thing the Japanese didn’t design this game, or Lara would be in serious trouble right now. The visuals… when you can see them… are pretty damn good. But overall, the lack of cohesion between the end of Legend and the start of this game are kind of killing my mojo, the difficulty in seeing is something we should have ditched in the late 90s, and the gameplay isn’t throwing much new stuff at me so far. I’ll keep with it for another fifteen minutes, but if it’s just more of this you can count me out.

Mortal Kombat vs DC Universe

*Oh yay, Marvel vs Capcom 3! Oh… wait… it’s Mortal Kombat’s announcer shouting names of DC heroes and villains through the usual thick screen of throat cancer.

*Mike said he pretty much knew what to expect. Mortal Kombat’s wonky controls and animations that amazingly reconstruct the jerky stop-motion animation the series was founded on. I have to say, the character models look good… even if the DC characters look a bit out of place with the caricaturish modeling the MK team does. Really, the sub-goth aesthetic of the MK franchise kind of reminds me of this guy I ran into the other day. He was trying to strike up a business relationship with my friend who runs an anime shop. I overheard him say “I’ve been studying gothic-lolita since 1995 or 1996″ when my brain shut the fuck down and my body left the shop on its own. There’s really no point to this tangent other than this; If you ever find yourself saying shit like that, pay a friend to hit you with a wooden bat until you feel better.

*We’ll go with Story Mode, because arcade MK is for guys with jean jackets with the arms cut off and silly hair. At least, that’s how it was last time I was in an arcade. Also, Mortal Kombat trying to do a story should be hilarious, especially when you mix in schizo comic ethos. And we’ll go with the DC side.

*The story is pretty much disposable, as predicted, but I’m mildly surprised. I’m actually enjoying the usage of DC characters within the MK engine. The story mode seems to trade off characters at will, you won’t be sticking with a single one throughout. Starts with The Flash, and they actually do a good job integrating his powers into the standard control scheme. I’m a little more optimistic… but featuring a just off-screen beheading in the opening cinematic reminds me of how they’ve replaced the fatalities with “finishing moves”. At least, according to rumors flying around the wasteland that is the internet. I’ll probably never know because the part of the brain people usually reserve for memorizing arcane button patterns to make one set of pixels rip open another set of pixels, I put that aside for shit that was actually useful in life.

*Catwoman seems to be smuggling a couple of fleshy bowling balls in her shirt. When did they decide to start ripping off Black Cat?

*Like most fighting games, this one seems to quickly ramp above my ability. Still, it’s not getting impossible, and not nearly as fast as Street Fighter 3 (second fight, basically.) But still… I suck at fighting games. And driving games. And probably hunting games, but I have all my teeth and I don’t give a damn about those.