It has been a long, hard road for veteran game designer Tim Schafer. Most of his games while critically applauded, never sell very well, so it’s a nice change of pace to see Electronic Arts putting a bit of marketing muscle behind this one. Much like other Schafer titles, the strongest aspects of Brutal Legend are the writing, humor, and story despite having a large emphasis on multiplayer. As long as you’re willing to overlook some annoyances and typical trappings of the open world genre, you should have a lot of fun throwing up your horns while Jack Black drives Deuce into the sunset.

My biggest problem with Need for Speed: SHIFT isn’t that it’s a bad game… it’s just an average one. There’s really nothing here to make it stand out. With other racing titles in a similar vein right around the corner, EA seems to have really played it safe and didn’t want to shake the trees. They’ve done what they tried to do, create a competent, but not particularly outstanding or interesting, racing game.