People are DESPERATE to play pretend football, especially, and the only way we can be sure of selling the games is by taking pre-orders. And nobody pre-orders. The only way stocking sports games could be less attractive is if the cases came with free jail rape.

HALO 1.7: ODST – In other news, we received ODST nearly a week before release, officially. Unofficially, we received it on November 15, 2001, when Halo 1 came out, a date that also roughly coincides with the end of the golden age of gaming. Yes, the dream team of Bungie and Microsoft are so deathly afraid of alienating their core audience that they won’t even improve the sluggish look speed. You have to go into the options screen and make the game playable all by yourself.

And that two hour campaign to make the Halo 3 Ultimate 1337 Map Pack value up to $60? Imagine a six-inch wide middle finger doing unspeakable things to Mickey Mouse and you have a good idea where we stand on this turd. Sure to delight the hardcore fans, but then again so do shiny blue bottle caps.

Kingdom Hearts: 358/2+27X5 Days – Does for Kingdom Hearts what Crisis Core did for Final Fantasy; Turns it into a miserable fucking grindfest through environments that might have been put to decent use in an actual RPG. Tells the story of the KH universe’s Raiden, Roxas, for all the yaoi fangirls who give a shit.

Square-Not Square keeps doing better and better things with the DS’s 3D graphics, which means this game is somewhere near peak PS1 visuals. Which counts for… what, exactly? Also, you’re kind of a passive observer to the story this time around, meaning you’re only really catching glimpses of what made the other games interactive.

Another interesting Square attempt at a modular experience system makes it worth a rental, but only if you’re really, really into Kingdom Hearts AND yaoi (kids: Google it!)

“IGN gave the game 5.9, stating that Ubisoft hasn’t done enough to the original game to justify its price point, comparing its value against ‘Splosion Man. It also criticises how there is no option to play the game in its original form. Many gamers were upset about the lack of effort that went into the game.” “Yeah, total arcade. Cement Man, Shredder warping you in the sewers, no Super Shredder. I’ll skip.”

“Ok, the port kinda sucks. The Konami music? NOT THERE. Technodrome level? GONE. It just sent me from the sewers to Prehistoric Turtlesaurus with no rat king fight.”

“Turtles in Time: We Cheaped Out on Character Licensing Edition. Slash was replaced by some fucker named Cement Man I never heard of, AKA a giant turd made of mud, and Bebop and Rocksteady replaced with Tokka and Rahzar.” “He’s from Megaman. They actually went overboard with licensing. The final boss is Mickey Mouse, now owned by Square-Enix.” “The level Tokka and Rahzar appear in wasn’t even in the arcade, Bebop and Rocksteady weren’t ‘replaced’.” “Yeah, I’m pretty sure Bebop and Rocksteady are in the train level.”

Sacred 2

What the FUCK? Did somebody’s college project to put Diablo in 3D, except shitty, get a next gen facelift? Kill five bandits, take this to that dude down the road, slowly insert sword into enemy and possibly miss. This is what Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance would be if you added about fifteen ascii dicks to the code base.

Put another way, I played about eight minutes while drunk, turned it off, tried the next day sober and only lasted another two. Maybe the multiplayer makes it worth it, I don’t care.

Dynasty Warriors Gundam 2

Dynasty Warriors with Gay Pride robots instead of ancient Chinese longbeards, and a lot slower. The first mission has you fighting as you descend through an atmosphere. Sounds awesome… then you discover it’s the same fucking thing as the last game, only they were too lazy to design a ground. They add one for subsequent missions, as well as annoying goddamn boss fights that have you nickel-and-diming some giant Voltron-ripoff’s life bar for fifteen minutes before he wipes you out and you have to start over. Fun? You betcha, right between your visit to the dominatrix and accidently suffocating yourself in the closet with a bungee cord around your cock.

Pass. And I LIKE the regular Dynasty Warriors games.

PS: How do so many people fuck up games about giant robots and ninjas? And what happens if we put the two together?

Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Another Goddamn Grey Cube

I have lost all point of reference. I can’t tell if the Riddick games are merely so-so or if they have a low level of suckitude. I mean, what the hell compells developers to send us through at least a  dozen sewers and eighty vent shafts? Tenchu didn’t have those and it was prime stealth action once upon a time. Better yet, we’re getting a shipment of brand new We Love Katamari, which presumably takes place above sewers that the Japanese devs were polite enough not to make me explore.

Still, I finished this and the “remastered” Escape From Butcher Bay that’s included on the disc, so maybe it’s actually good. Certainly it’s interesting at points, when it’s not being utterly predictable (oh look, the woman is being hopeful! Who’s gonna shoot her in the back? Who’s gonna… THE BLACK DUDE!… I am not making this up, I called that one as it occured). And most of the time, Riddick is some kind of Marty Stu self-insertion fanfic for Vin Diesel, who takes a sci-fi backdrop and uses it to deliver glib one-liners as he murders people.

If you’re a fan, go for it.

This is basically the entire game. I played through both parts and I’m still not sure what the enemies look like.

Bionic Commando

Mike tells me that the 360/PS3 downloadable, Bionic Commando Rearmed, was supposed to whet our appetite for this game. They should have made Rearmed about ten times shittier if that was the aim. The crappy combat system and extreme linearity make this a near combination of Time Crisis and Spider-Man 2: Lite Edition. It’s nice and colorful… for another damn demolished city (must be the new sewer of gaming), and it’s animated fairly well. But gothing up a character that used to look like Weird Al and punishing you relentlessly for the slightest mistake is not fun.

I tried to play through this game. Really I did. But the sparse checkpoints make it even more frustrating, and at one point I played for fifteen minutes, killed myself to go back and get an item I missed, and started way back at the old checkpoint. Wow.

It’s not like I expected much, after listening to one of the devs take the question of picking up the NES games storyline seriously (for fuck’s sake, you pick up moon boots and keycards and you blow up Hitler’s face! That’s the story!), but congrats to Bionic Commando for actually falling short of my expectations. Just like how this guy falls short of my expectations for how a face should look:

What the hell? Striking out at too many goth clubs?

I should justify my mention of how insanely linear the game is. Big bilious blue clouds of radiation on either side of the intended path. Might as well add a German Shepherd that bites me in the thigh if I go the wrong direction, assholes. This is not 1992, and there is no good excuse for this shit.

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.