Breaking Windows

One of the numerous games stuck in "development hell" for years, Jaws Unleashed finally makes it into a barely finished (and "finished" depends on your personal definition) $30 release published by Majesco. It's a game that seems to have the right pieces in place, like developer Appaloosa Interactive who crafted the memorable Ecco the Dolphin games. It also has a giant shark that eats people.

While there are those out there who feel differently, people fear change. They hate it so much they're willing to deal with the status quo no matter how dull it's become just to avoid having to start over. Why else would fans of the King of Fighters franchise stick with it year in and year out?

Arrrh.
1. A loose approximation of what a stylized pirate might utter.
2. An onomatopoeic representation of the (somewhat) voice acting in Sid Meier's Pirates! Live the Life. Sid Meier is a name that most gamers will recognize as the famed creator of the Civilization series, one of the few game designers to gain public recognition for his works. His fans tend to await each new game announcement with a slavish devotion, usually rewarded by a deep, compelling strategy game.

And sometimes not.

Things in life I learned from Black:

We need lawyers who understand video game programming. People like that would be able to dig into something like Van Helsing and slap a multi-million dollar lawsuit on Vivendi Universal for plagiarism. This is a 100% clone of Devil May Cry in every way, and if one were to look deeper, it wouldn’t be surprising to find lines of code stripped right out of Capcom’s franchise.

Controversy sucks. That said, so does 25 to Life. This abysmal, cheap, generic, ugly, and flat out disgusting 3rd person shooter exists solely because Eidos knew it would cause the mainstream media to jump on it. That translates to sales, and the more people that play this one, the fewer gamers we have in the world. They won't stick around after this.

There's one thing you need to be aware of when picking up a copy of Outlaw Golf 2: This is one of the best golf games ever created. Yes, better than Hot Shots, better than Tiger Woods, and better than any other low level contender you can purchase for the Xbox or PS2. It's unthinkable that an offensive, abrasive, and M rated game of golf could be this successful, but it is.

Letting no football license escape their grasp, EA Sports gives us only the second Arena Football video game, leaving little memory of the Kurt Warner fiasco on the PS One from Midway. This is an oddball game of football, one that doesn't seem to know what it's trying to be, while missing numerous standard features we're accustomed too. It's rushed, sloppy, and limiting, but as an alternative, it's fun.

The first game to use the Halo engine (outside of the Halo series itself of course), Stubbs the Zombie is what happens when a group of game designers spend far too many late nights discussing ideas. It has the sickest, most twisted, and utterly absurd sense of humor you'll find a video game this year, but sadly not the gameplay to back it up. Controlling a zombie, whether he's a chain smoker or not, isn't fun.

Batman Begins - a good game? It was bound to happen someday...

Just talking about games such as Batman and Robin, Batman Beyond, Batman Forever or Batman Forever: The Arcade Game with someone who reviews video games should trigger something in their head which will make them talk about how horrendous those games were for months. Batman video games are sort of like president jokes on a late night show to a video game reviewer. Hell - I could probably base an entire stand-up routine derived from those games.

Following up to what many consider to be the greatest first-person shooter ever made, Half-Life 2 is deep, ambitious, and to put it in a single word, incredible. While there's plenty of gunfire to go around, this sequel to the 1998 PC classic features plenty of puzzle solving action. This mostly revolves around the game's most enjoyable aspect: physics.

While obviously somewhat inspired by Koei's Dynasty Warriors series, Spartan Total Warrior starts off as an epic. The battles are bigger, cleaner, and far more packed than the competition, and combat it what the game does best. About halfway through though, it dies a painful, slow, frustrating death, and one that easily could have been avoided.

Over the top for no reason other than to be over the top, Blitz: The League is this years sole console alternative to the Madden franchise. It's a familiar game, obviously a basic tweaked NFL Blitz engine. The things that cause the controversy, including fights, endzone celebrations, language, and sending escorts to the opponents hotel rooms, are pointless.

It's almost impossible to make your first-person shooter stand out on gameplay alone any more. There are not a lot of directions left to take the genre, but Capcom can try all they want if they end up like Darkwatch. Brilliantly combining adult themes, humor, brutal violence, and eerie style, this is one of Capcom's best in years.

To say Indigo Prophecy is one of the strangest games you'll play this generation isn't a statement that far off base. What little control the player has over the characters is awful because of the camera, yet the concept is so engrossing and so unique, it's a new achievement in video game storytelling. It's a shame it loses focus towards the end and spirals downward rapidly, but it's worth fighting through the quirks to experience all it has to offer.

I originally played Sid Meier's Pirates (SMP!) almost 20 years ago on a friend's PC and then later Pirates Gold on the Genesis. This year 2K Games has published the updated SMP! for both PC and Xbox. It is amazing how much of the game has stayed the same after all these years.

A golfer steps back, looking at a par 3 that will earn him a championship if he can make birdie. He lines up his shot, adjusts for the wind, and begins his back swing. However, this is Tiger Woods '06, and none of that is necessary. Charge the gamebreaker, start your swing, and jam on the A button. Instant hole-in-one.

One tweak is all it took to radically changed the Burnout series. The latest addition in Burnout Revenge, same direction traffic checking, is the wildest transition into new territory for the series since the Crash mode was created in Burnout 2. It's something that may not sit well for those accustomed to dodging every piece of extra traffic, but it becomes a new experience, a completely new game.

Wisely borrowing gameplay elements from the fan favorite Mortal Kombat II, Shaolin Monks shakes the curse of the first two action titles set in the series universe. Bringing with it almost necessary co-op (err, ko-op as the game of course calls it), this new addition to the line brings new life to the franchise. This is Mortal Kombat II, just with a wild new move set, and the familiar gameplay classic gaming fans have become attached to.

Rogue Ops is one of those games that blatantly steals from far better software. It doesn't offer a single idea that's original, and it doesn't perform as well as the games it's trying to emulate. It's a lost budget title, and Splinter Cell has nothing to worry about.

Obviously tired of passing in video game football, EA's Madden team introduces cone vision passing in 2006. This new feature stands out as the biggest tweak to the game, and it's one that adds an unnecessary, yet realistic, twist. It's going to be a love it/hate it feature.

Tolkein purists, your bane has arrived and its name is LOTR: The Third Age.

The best introduction for The Bard’s Tale game comes straight from the introduction portion of the game manual: “[The Bard’s] tenure as a barrel maker came to an abrupt end when his barrel mentor Henry, the proprietor of The Barrel Barn, ran him out of town for producing barrels that shattered with a mere whack of a sword. ‘A key won’t even be safe in these things!’ Henry screamed…” Not exactly your typical RPG character history, but then again The Bard’s Tale is not your typical RPG.

More so than any other medium, video games have the ability to let players experience something they would otherwise never be a part of. It can put them anywhere, and with Men of Valor, that's Vietnam. In a flood of wartime shooters, Valor stands out for its intense and thought provoking depiction of the war and the issues surrounding it. It's one of today's games that prove what a capable story telling device they are.

Video games are meant to grab a player immediately, draw them in, and then keep them there. That's what the Medal of Honor series has always done well, offering staggering accounts of real World War II events in game form. It's always incredible, and the opening level of MOH: Frontline, still stands as a masterpiece of game aesthetics. That's still true for Rising Sun, opening with the brutal, hard to even watch telling of Pearl Harbor. After that, this is the same game it's been since 1999.

Keeping promises is tough, especially when you're dealing with a fickle group of video game players. Director Peter Molyneaux has the ideas; there are just times when the technology isn't there to match them. Fable was promised to be so much more, yet when you're done with this 10+ hour adventure, you'll never realize things that were promised were missing.

While nothing will ever replace them, classic sci-fi schlock like Plan 9 from Outer Space has probably inspired more modern cinema and video games than true classics like Earth vs. the Flying Saucers. The parodies are constant, and Destroy All Humans runs with just that. It's been regarded as Grand Theft Auto with an alien, and it's hard to find a better description.

The brilliance of the original Oddworld, and even the sequels, doesn't really lie in the puzzles or gameplay. It's the world they're inside. It's one of the games that really created an entirely new place to visit, something more games seem to be doing as hardware power can match up with a creator's vision. Lorne Lanning and his team completely redesigned the series in Stranger's Wrath, and created the best game in the series (and one of the best showcases of true video game art in the process).

It's nothing new for a licensed title to borrow ideas from other games and end up with a decent core. How Batman Begins was screwed up, borrowing ideas from some of the best games on the market, doesn't really add up. It had all the potential in the world, only to toss it to the way side for better graphics and production values.

Out of all the platformers and space shooters over the years with the Star Wars license, there has only been one beat-em-up. It's a shame too, considering that Jedi Power Battles was abysmal, and the film series lends itself to the genre so well. Enter Episode III, a solid, repetitive, old-style movie licensed title with enough basic combat to carry it through about six hours of game time. A little variety would have helped make it an easier ride, but this is an enjoyable way to play through the film.

In just a few short years, Bioware made a name for themselves simply for producing a critically acclaimed Star Wars game that was far better than anything to come out of Lucasarts in years. Ditching the license, Bioware has crafted Jade Empire, an involving character building action-RPG that may not be as deep as their previous efforts, but it's far more accessible, and arguably, more fun. It's also too easy (and occasionally frustrating for reasons other than difficulty), and you can breeze through it on anything other than the hardest setting.

Sega's Spikeout never pretends to be anything more than update to a seemingly lost genre. It doesn't have a gimmick like the disastrous Rise to Honor on the PS2, choosing to instead put the focus where it belongs. It's a true beat-em-up for the hardcore crowd, and it doesn't need to be anything else.

"X-Men 2" was one of those rare movie sequels that turned out (debatably of course) better than the original. The video games didn't fare as well. "Wolverine's Revenge" is a bare bones action beat-em-up with little to offer fans of the comic, the movie, or games in general. It's not a total loss, it's the just the potential was never fully realized.

As sports gamers, we take a lot for granted now. If we don't have real players, teams, stadiums, commentators, or TV endorsements, it's immediately considered flawed. Most people playing these games don't remember when all we had was just the red and blue team in the 80s. That's how games like "Inside Pitch 2003" are shoved to the wayside. Yes, there are better baseball games out there, but it still plays a solid game and this likely could have become a solid series had Microsoft not released their sports division programmers.

I have just spent a few hours playing Jade Empire. I got the Limited Edition, which contains one extra character, one extra fighting style, a G4 video, and a few game demos. I will get to the Limited Edition at a later date.

Suffice it to say that for the same exact price, you get the LE edition. The main reason is for Monk Zeng and his Monk Spade style. The other bells and whistles are just there to sweeten the deal. This LE version of Jade Empire was only pressed once, and you can find it at retailers until supplies run dry. Did I mention it is the same price as the version without all the goodies?

DOOM 3 is finally out on the Xbox! And they actually packed more features then the PC release into the Collector's Edition for the Xbox. In this case, it really is worth the extra $10.00. Sure you get some frilly videos, but you also get Ultimate DOOM and DOOM II to play on your Xbox to boot! Oh and then there is Xbox Live, I almost forgot that.

When John Tobias teamed with Ed Boon for "Mortal Kombat," the fighting game arena was different. It was a small, blossoming genre with little competition. Having left Midway to create his own company, Studio Gigante, Tobias came back with another original fighter, this one caught in a sea of them. That's why "Tao Feng" fails.

It's understandable that the true die-hard "Mech Warrior" fans have shunned the series' major change on the XBox. The game has pretty much been stripped clean to work in a console environment and optimized for fast paced online play. For the rest of us, it works. This is a blazing hot blast-a-thon all the way through, but it's a shame that it's so geared for online play. Single player has suffered in the process.

Knights of the Old Republic (KOTOR) was a revolutionary game, but we had no doubts that BioWare could pull it off. I mean it's BioWare! New developer Obsidian takes the reigns for KOTOR 2: The Sith Lords.

I meant to post this weeks ago, as I beat the game only a week after I offered my first look at this most anticipated of XBox titles.

In all I clocked just over 20 hrs. in game to beat the final boss. This is quite short for an RPG. It might have been short, but it was sweet. There are four endings in the game, and I have seen both of the good endings. I may sometime play the game again as an evil character to see the other two endings, who knows.

Some people have knocked Fable for not being hard core enough of a RPG, but I think it was the right mix of everything. Fable has been one of the best games I have played in a while.

Mech games generally fall into 2 categories: The 100-button, bogged down, control freak type and the "blow sh*t up" kind. "Mech Assault" assuredly falls into the latter category, but has a few minor issues that keep it from absolute greatness. However, most people will still keep it around for its enthralling multi-player gameplay.

It's rare when a company actually listens to consumers anymore. Why else do we still get "Tomb Raider" games? Here is a rare case when a company actually took to heart everything that was criticized about the first game (for the record, it was quite the list) and fixed it, but in the process created a whole new list of unforgivable issues that consumers will again have to wait to be fixed in "RAW 3" (if it ever surfaces of course).

The stories in video games have always been clichéd, historically speaking. Whether it be the save the damsel in distress or make sure the universe stays in one piece, we've seen it all a million times. When a game centers around the murder of a mans wife and newborn child, gamers take notice, especially when the game plays so well that it grips players in it's plot better than any RPG. Max Payne does just this and takes players through an interactive action movie that's better than, well, most action movies.

Warning: This review contains useless thoughts and phrases. It also contains numerous segments not even relating to the game being reviewed. You may completely lose interest or fall asleep in that bowl of Frosted Flakes right in front of you if continue reading. You have been warned.

The NBA is a mess. Shooting percentages are at an all-time low, teams are moving, the league has reorganized divisions, and the number of truly talented players is pathetic. Maybe that's why "ESPN NBA 2K5" fails miserably on multiple levels. Actually, it's probably because the game is just a sad representation of the sport.

While some people may consider the Xbox a computer in disguise, it's main function is still a game machine. For a lot of us non-PC gamers, this is a blessing. The FPS genre has always ruled the PC with a few exceptions such as Goldeneye, but Halo has finally bridged the gap and made consoles a major contender in the FPS war.

I'll get it out of the way right now.... This game is gorgeous. In fact, it's quite possibly the best looking game I've ever seen. Of course, as die-hard gamers, we know that graphics don't make a game. "Dead or Alive 3" stays pretty close to its predecessor's roots and very little has changed in the area of gameplay.

Peter Molyneux and Lionhead satellite Big Blue Box have finally after more then three years released an amazing action-RPG that deserves your hard earned simolians. If you like your hack and slash with a bit of role playing mixed into the fold, you can't go wrong here.

Fable has been one of the most anticipated games for the XBox. Forget Halo or Halo 2. Fable has (publicly) been around under one name or another since 2001 when it was introduced at E3.

Never before in the history of video games has a series improved like Criterion's "Burnout." The original was a nice but unremarkable arcade style racer, while the sequel added in addictive qualities with the spectacular crash junctions. Now published by EA but developed by the same team, "Burnout 3" is the best racer this week, this month, this year, this decade, and possibly of all time.

I'm NOT an RPG fan. The occasional one may catch my interest, but they really are few and far between. I'm more of the hack/slash/kill repetitively type. Hence why I'm so infatuated with Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance here on the X-Box. There are a few instances where you'll be annoyed, but most of this 8-hour romp should be a highly enjoyable experience.

The Dreamcast had quite a few flight games in its time. Game such as Iron Aces, Aerowings, and it's sequel set a high standard for the console. A little known game called Air Force Delta popped up on the console soon after launch and was largely overlooked. (Honestly though: flight sim, Soul Calibur?) Had more people taken notice, the masses would've found a game strong enough to stand up to Namco's awesome Ace Combat games. Konami has taken the same basic foundation laid down by the first game, juiced up the graphics, added full 5.1 surround sound support, and has created one of the best arcade style flight games ever.

You know what the hardest part of being a game reviewer is? Deciding whether or not you enjoy the game your playing. Not all the time of course, games like Halo make our lives that much easier. It's when a game like Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball come our way. It's not really a game, and it's not even what it claims to be on the box. So, am I actually enjoying myself....or am I being taken in by lots of glitz and glamour?

Volleyball? Yeah, it's here, but it's more of a mini-game. You can gamble, buy gifts, buy swimsuits, and receive a bunch of items you will never (ever) need as far as gameplay is concerned. Actually, when you being to think about it, you don't even have to play volleyball to actually, well, "beat" the game. Then again, there really is no ending, nor is there any point to the proceedings either.