VIDEO GAMES.

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.

If you’re a Beatles fan, or a music game fan… or both, you should buy this game. The music is superb, the visuals are phenomenal, and there’s a ton of fan service for Beatle-heads including unlockable photos and loading screen “never before heard” audio clips from their recording sessions. With multiple difficulty modes, tons of game specific achievements, and promises of at least three more full album downloads, there’s plenty of Beatles here that’ll keep you and your parents busy for a long, long time.

Jason Flemming: he is no one, and he his everyone. He is also your main character in Shadow Complex, the last title in the Summer of Arcade line of games for 2009. Created by Chair Entertainment (part of Epic Games and of Undertow fame), Shadow Complex actually takes place within the Empire universe made famous [...]

‘Splosion Man is a classic platformer with changes made in all the right places. It’s a great looking, sometimes hilarious, often frustrating game, but its a hell of a lot of fun. Hearing ‘Splosion Man yell “GET TO THE CHOPPAH!” in a chipmunk inspired voice while blowing the meat out of a scientist makes the hair pulling seem not so bad and honestly, who doesn’t like explosions OR meat? Bad people, that’s who. Having the single player alone makes this game worthy of the price tag, but throwing an entirely separate cooperative mode makes it an incredible value. If you’ve got any love for the old platformers and want to see what a well done, more recent entry can pull off… go buy this game.

That’s about all there is to it. Giving away much more would be ruining the only thing this game may have going for it (the plot). Its been mentioned before that creating humor in video games is a difficult thing to pull off, and when you’re banking on dialog to drive your game but it doesn’t resonate with the player (me) you’ve got a tired, archaic, and downright boring game. I admire what Telltale is trying to do, and being a huge player of many adventure games in my youth, in theory it sounds like something I would have been all for. I can’t help but think though that this type of game does not have a place in the current landscape of titles. Do yourself a favor and try the demo first, if you dig the humor and the characters, there’s a great chance you will like this game. I however, didn’t.

Xbox Live Arcade has seen it’s fair share of tabletop games, most of which translate very nicely while some seem like simple cash in takes on social gaming. Thankfully, Magic the Gathering: Duels of the Planeswalkers falls into the earlier category with a title that streamlines and somewhat simplifies the complex rule-set of MtG which can be daunting to learn for beginners. While the ‘seasoned’ player will certainly find faults, for the price point it truly is a great way to get some some quick and entertaining games of Magic in without having to brave the nerd shops and spend all your disposable income on boosters.