Best Work

Lapsing into formulaic predictability just moments past the title screen, Ubisoft Montreal makes players repeat the same tasks from start to finish while crisscrossing its beautifully-rendered cities an absurd amount of times, wrongly hoping that the impressive means of navigation would be enough to fool people into believing there's any sort of interesting, engaging gameplay to be found.

The advertisements for Halo 3 promise an epic tale of tragedy, sacrifice, and heroism that Halo 3 really had no hope in hell of ever delivering. More troubling, however, is the fact that after playing the game, I can say with some certainty that they promised a game that Bungie didn't even bother trying to produce.

From the moment BioShock began, I knew I was in for something special. Its opening sequence, placing the player in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean surrounded by the fiery debris of a sinking plane, is one of the most dramatic prologues I've ever seen in a videogame.

Like Final Fantasy VII, Rogue Galaxy also has a malicious world-shattering entity, but the similarities end with a supposedly feminine archetype. Whereas JENOVA seemed rather vague except through her influence of arch-villain Sephiroth, the entity in this game is a hungry and malicious being who thrives on the idea of absorbing other life. (To go into more detail is to spoil the story.)

I can talk about why the game is fun, but I can't lie and say the game is brilliant. Mario isn't what he used to be. There are glimmers and flickers of greatness in this game—moments where I felt the magic might almost be back.

On page two of the instruction manual, director David Cage states that his dissatisfaction with videogames' emphasis on action and neglect of emotion led him to create Indigo Prophecy. He clearly states that the game's goal is to sacrifice neither the interactivity nor the narrative in an attempt to create an experience that is richer and deeper than "killing monsters in corridors and shooting crates to find ammunition."

There is one thing that all would likely agree on: Capcom has produced a game that may seem like a throwback to halcyon days of yore, when adventurers pointed and clicked their way to the end of a game, but it drips modern style and gun action along with rivers of blood.

I play games. My fiancée Gina plays games. We play together on the couch, but we don't usually play the same game at the same time. Although neither one of us would put the First-Person Shooter (FPS) genre at the top of our lists, I thought that the review copy of Unreal Championship 2: the Liandri Conflict might be a good chance for the two of us to broaden our play habits a bit and bond a little at the same time.

There's a moment halfway through Devil May Cry 3 when protagonist Dante battles a prostitute made out of bats (yes, a prostitute made out of bats). After defeating her, he's cradling her body in his arms when—poof—the bat-prostitute suddenly transforms into a purple electric guitar (yes, a purple electric guitar). What does the ever resourceful Dante do? Of course, he launches into an impromptu guitar solo.

On a September 2004 episode of X-Play on the G4 Tech TV cable network, Way of the Samurai 2 was reviewed and given the negative rating of two out of five stars. While everyone is entitled to their opinion, what I found particularly disturbing was this comment: "The open ended gameplay is similar to Grand Theft Auto 3 (GTA3), but at times feels too loose." Why did X-Play decide the two were similar in gameplay?