Games Cheats and Reviews

Banging things into other things has been a major form of entertainment since the pilot episode of “Caveman Jackass” back in 20,000 B.C. There’s just something endlessly appealing about controlled destruction. So, if you’re stupefied by slaughter, dumbfounded by demolition, and enthralled by evisceration, you’re sure to be tickled by Slick Entertainment’s new XBLA title, Scrap Metal.

Sitting somewhere between a straight-up arcade action title and a lightweight racing sim, Scrap Metal has drawn comparisons to Rare’s R.C. Pro-Am — but the similarity to that old classic is mostly skin deep. Really, Scrap Metal’s casual-game veneer hides a robust (if somewhat overly sensitive) physics engine, more levels than a Byzantine ziggurat, and a grip of imaginative set pieces. Both multiplayer (Scrap Metal offers local and online) and single-player are challenging without being too intense, offer plenty of tweaking without being overly detailed, and feature charmingly over-the-top graphics.

Shoot 1UP is described by Mommy’s Best Games as a shoot-em-up for “normal gamers,” but “normal” is not a term I’d quickly associate with the developer’s output. After all, its first Xbox Live Indie release was Weapon of Choice, an over-the-top, Contra-like shooter pumped full of gore, outlandish weaponry, and heavy metal music. And Shoot 1UP, with hand-drawn tapestries populated by pies, beached whales, and a large robotic woman with metallic, projectile breasts that fire waves of glowing bullets, strays just as far from the ordinary.

In a genre notoriously targeted at the hardest of hardcore, Shoot 1UP is an anomaly. Sure, you can recreate the traditional “bullet hell” experience — just select Serious difficulty, kick the game speed up to 200%, and go hog wild. But for those of us without the patience or skill set to endure even relatively mild shmups, Shoot 1UP presents something fresh — a more action-packed entry that scales wonderfully between casual observers and aficionados.

Tower defense games can be frustrating. No matter how well the game’s defensive structures perform, I find it hard not to feel that they could do better — fire faster or aim more accurately. Toy Soldiers is ostensibly a tower defense game, but it solves this genre-entrenched problem by allowing you to jump directly into any of your defensive units at any time. What a difference this small addition makes; it changes Toy Soldiers from another, simple tower defense title to a strategy/action hybrid. And manning the guns personally always feels rewarding.

The titular Toy Soldiers are of the Great War — World War I. It recalls the broad strokes from the heady days of history class, without the oversaturated familiarity that comes with a World War II theme. The story itself is kept simple, using slide show vignettes to recount important battles. But as the name implies, these are toys through and through. The game doesn’t recreate actual battles; instead, it’s presents the war from a child’s perspective: a youngster racing home from school to play with his tin, fighting forces in a diorama-style set. The result is a nostalgic motif that recalls how kids may have played war games before words like “headshot” entered the vernacular.

With Super Mario Kart, Nintendo proved that game mascots can still be in great games outside their “regular jobs.” Since then, Mario’s now-friendly rival, Sonic, has tried to keep up (pun not intended). The bog-standard Sonic Drift series on Game Gear and the well-liked, but still baffling, on-foot racer Sonic R were far from grasping the potential of a great Sonic racing game (and who knows what they were going for with Sonic Riders). How can a character known for speed not properly harness it? Well, in their latest attempt, Sega has decided to throw the blue needlemouse back onto the track with a host of friends from other Sega universes; Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing is a racing game that’s the best any of its characters have been in yet, but it serves more as a gift to Sega fans than to all-ages kart racing players.

It is quite a gift, though. There’s Sonic, of course, and Tails, Knuckles, Amy… and Big the Cat, who’s somewhere on the short list of Most Hated Sonic Characters. But outside of that group, there’s the other “All-Stars” like Super Monkey Ball’s Aiai, Billy Hatcher, Amigo, Jet Set Radio’s Beat, and even more relatively obscure characters available for purcahse with earned “Sega Miles”: Ulala, Jacky, and Akira from Virtua Fighter; shallow, Shenmue protagonist Ryo Hazuki; Fantasy Zone’s sentient ship Opa-Opa; and many more surprising appearances. (Just no anthropomorphic Daytona car.) It’s a great, varied roster that pretty much confirms developer Sumo Digital as the best professional Sega fan around.

You can’t tell much from the title, but you could probably guess that something called The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom would be a light-hearted romp of some sort. And you’d be correct; indie developer The Odd Gentlemen’s debut puzzle game uses simple mechanics and a charming art style to create excellent fodder for the “are games art?” debates while not sacrificing pick-up-and-play fun.

On paper, Winterbottom’s gameplay draws obvious parallels to Braid: you bounce around a heavily stylized world, altering time and interacting with your clones to collect glowing objects in hard to reach areas. But thematically, The Odd Gentlemen’s game goes in a completely different direction. You’re a thief bent on collecting pies; one day you start to chase a pie that bends time and space, allowing you to create clones that you can stack up, smack around, and hit switches with, thus allowing you to collect even more pastries. Everything’s created in a minimalistic, black-and-white world with a pervasive, old-timey piano theme in the background. It’s much less about an undercurrent of hidden meaning, and much more about finding creative puzzle solutions to gathering pastries.

There’s something appealing about a good, old-fashioned dictatorship, so long as you’re the dictator. It’s a tempting kind of fantasy, whether you feel like being a despotic tyrant, the architect of a tropical utopia, or more likely, a fumbling idiot yanking ineffectually on the reins of power as the cart of society plunges into the ravine of tortured metaphor — which is fun in its own way. Tropico 3 delivers on those fantasies better than any game in recent memory, but that’s sort of an easy thing to say, given that city management sims have long since taken the trophy for World’s Deadest Genre, and none of them ever bothered much with giving us banana republics to run into the ground. But I don’t want to damn the thing with faint praise. Tropico 3 is a great distraction, if a bit dated and minimal-looking.

Tropico 3 isn’t going to blow anyone’s eyeballs off with its graphics. Not that graphics are usually why anyone plays a game like this — there’s enough detail, and you can zoom in close to admire the crumbling tenements or the graffiti on the high school walls, but far more time will be spent trying to figure out whether to make your money off tourism or tobacco exports, in between fending off assassination attempts from people who caught on that you were rigging the elections.

Somewhere out in the vasty wilds of the internet there’s a huge, experimental, virtual world populated by adorable, little green stick people. Recently, however, it’s been imperiled by the mundane yet powerful evil of an email virus… and only you can save it! That’s a fantastic self-insertion fantasy if I ever heard one, kind of a Neverending Story for computer dorks. Everything about Darwinia goes toward selling that premise, from the classically nerdy appearance of the world’s creator to the glowing vector lines and demoscene music that accompany its Tron-like opening flythrough. It’s exactly the kind of ridiculous but compelling fantasy that hooked so many of us on computers and videogames in the first place. Hell, this universe is revealed to be residing on a cluster of obsolete, Spectrum-like, ’80s home computers. Even better, all this world building just happens to be wrapped around a damn nice real-time strategy game.

Darwinia came out five years ago to damn near universal critical adulation. It was not, however, a bestseller. At least, not until it finally got some eyes on it through price-slashed promotions on Steam. And its multiplayer semi-sequel, Multiwinia, hit with all the explosive thunder of a kitten thrown at a pile of really soft pillows. Actually, our own review described Multiwinia as being “to RTS games what Velveeta is to cheese,” which I can’t help thinking is a little unkind. Sure, it’s not a particularly nuanced thing, but I don’t mind dunking a pretzel in it from time to time. Oh, and Multiwinia’s pretty alright, too.

BioShock 2 has a big reputation to live up to. The critically acclaimed BioShock put together a stylized, provocative world; it wasn’t a perfect game, but the story — a red-herring-filled plot mixed with existentialist (and objectivist) philosophy — turned the game into much more than a shooter; BioShock was a game that made you think. And while BioShock 2 borrows heavily from its predecessor’s aesthetic and solid gameplay, it fails to provide the strong narrative that made the original so compelling.

In case you’re not up on all your BioShock lore, here’s a quick recap: Andrew Ryan built the underwater city of Rapture to be the first true Utopia. While living there, a member of his team found a species of sea slug, which excreted a substance called ADAM that allowed instantaneous genetic modification; ADAM serves as the in-game currency that allows you to purchase Plasmids. And Plasmids allow for a wide-range of swappable abilities, such as shooting fire or ice from your fingertips, or hypnotizing foes to fight each other instead of you. To harvest and process this material, young girls were turned into mobile ADAM refining units called Little Sisters, and Big Daddies were made to protect them. And the Little Sisters needed these Big Daddy bodyguards because of the ADAM-addicted Rapture citizens (called “splicers,” due to them splicing genetic modifications into their bodies) who still patrol the mostly abandoned city.

When people refer to a game like Conan or Heavenly Sword as a “God of War clone,” they typically mean it’s in the third-person hack-n-slash genre and shares a few features like the button-pressing minigames or camerawork or giant bosses. So for the sake of clarity, it’s probably best not to call Dante’s Inferno a “clone” and lump it in with those descriptions, because Dante’s is as complete a forgery as games come, taking approximately 90% of its key features directly from Sony Santa Monica’s game.

But because it copies those features with a lot more technical precision than most others that have tried, it’s also pretty fun; the game just comes up a bit short at making them all gel together. God of War uses its tools to make you feel like you’re on an adventure, constantly seeing new things and playing a key role in the story. Dante’s Inferno feels like a bunch of well-designed combat rooms that happens to have a loose story wrapped around it.

Like the old saying goes: “In space, no good deed goes unpunished.”

Or maybe I’m mixing my aphorisms. Still, you’d be hard-pressed to come up with a more compact summation of Mass Effect 2’s overriding ethos. See, when last I teamed up with Commander Yukiko Shepard of the SSV Normandy, she’d just saved all sentient life in the Milky Way from a vast, intergalactic threat. Thanks to her unflagging sense of ethics, she made the difficult choice to sacrifice human lives and resources and protect the Galactic Council, outer space’s xenophobic ruling body. The Council’s response? They ignored Shepard’s warnings of a greater threat, sent her off to deal with trivial non-issues in far space, and even revoked her credentials once things hit the fan. That’s gratitude for you.