So it’s coming.  It wants you to be all social and stuff.  It is the Fall Xbox 360 update for 2009.

This update has had the usual fanfare.  The MajorNelson twitters, updates to his site, Kotaku reviews, podcast mentions, what have you.  I signed up for the Xbox Dashboard Update Preview Program a week or two ago, figured I would give it a shot since I made the cut one other time as well.  I made the cut, but was never notified, even though I know all my contact details are correct in Microsoft Connect (their beta testing portal).  I only discovered that I was in because I turned on my Xbox on Friday and suddenly I had a system update….ok then.

The update itself didn’t take painfully long, I’d say 5 or so minutes.  Upon reboot of the Xbox I noticed nothing different.  Upon searching other context blades, menus, whatever you call them, I discovered under Community two new ones for Facebook and Twitter.  There was also a new blade for Zune Marketplace, which had the Last.fm module in it.  I’ll take them in turn below.

Last.fm – For some reason I thought these would all be part of the update, however I discovered it did require a small download, similar to the Netflix add-on that was released earlier this year.  After downloading the application, I launched it, using my last.fm account credentials for an account that already existed.  It immediately brought up all the stations and artists I usually listen to on the last.fm website.  Seamless.  Navigating was swift and it started streaming almost at once.  This is all over a 15/5Mbps connection mind you.  If you are on old old DSL your mileage may vary.  Overall I was very impressed with the add-on, and it performed well beyond my expectations.  One niggle though, you cannot do anything else on the Xbox while it is running, which I’ll address again below.  Sure you can bring up the center button menu and do stuff in those blades, but you can’t say…go browse something else.

Twitter – Again, download a little app, run it, enter in your account info, and it just works.  I was able to tweet, browse over other people’s stuff, view their details.  What I wish it had (that I’m submitting to MS Connect as a feature request): The ability to tweet from the messaging blade on the center button menu.  Other than that, it worked great, just remember you can only do Twitter and nothing else.  Organization and style were almost identical to the Twitter site.

Facebook – Download the app, run, account info (repetitive much, where’s my Single Sign On?).  Worked good enough, things were sorted in the Xbox Dashboard context menu style.  It dishes out the basic info, and you can write on people’s walls, update your status and such, but overall I didn’t see the attraction.   Given that I already have Facebook available on multiple computers and my phone, there are plenty of other opportunities to get this experience.  It is functional and fast though.

Overall, the update looks good.  I found all the apps to be easy to use, technically sound and speedy, their usefulness in everyday life still to be determined.  At the point of this writing, the beta preview program is closed and as far as I’m aware will remain so until release.  Look for this update coming to an Xbox near you in the very near future.

- Ben Mazhary-Clark

UPDATE (on the update?) 11/13/2009:  Latest reports put the dashboard update as mentioned above will be released to your hot little xboxen on November 17th.

It’s a given.  I love driving games.  Most games involving a car and/or motorcycle I’ve at least booted up once or tried the demo of.  They don’t have to be bad or good, but I usually have to try them.

A little while ago, two separate companies released Baja off-road rally type games around the same time.  These were Baja: Edge of Control by THQ, and SCORE International Baja 1000 by Activision.  On the surface, they appear to be almost identical, but on a deeper dive, THQ’s shone more brightly.  After appreciating the amazing work that was put into DiRT by Codemasters, I thought I would give Baja: Edge of Control (B:EoC) a shot and traded for it on Goozex.

The game starts you off in Baja California, with one class open, the VW Baja Bug.  While this isn’t a bad vehicle overall, at this bottom level in the game it is torturous.  Even after upgrading everything on the Bug, you are unlikely to completely win many events at this lowest class.  Also, the learning curve is rather steep.  Right off the bat, you are being bounced all around on very uneven terrain, having to pick up the controls that were not very well explained in the manual or in-game help.  The gist of taking most hard corners is to e-brake slide into the turn, then pop your clutch on the way out.  Once you have this down and get up into the higher levels, it becomes quite easy to keep ahead of the pack.

After you make it beyond the grind of the lowest VW Bug level, other classes open up and you can buy vehicles to race in these classes as well.  I found that if you re-ran several events in the lower classes, you could completely avoid whole classes and just buy the truck or what have you in two levels up and skip over something not as exciting, say “open wheel”.  Furthermore, when you bank up a whole bunch of money in the game, and buy a new 4 wheel dream of choice, you often will have enough to max out all the upgrades at this level.  If this is done, and with proper e-brake/clutch technique, you should be able to clean up almost all events first time through, making the learning/difficulty curve rather skewed: amazingly hard at the start, a challenging but attainable win after the first two classes.  Classes are unlocked with XP earned in racing, and easily unlocked classes ahead of me as I progressed.  Money can be earned by wining races and splattering sponsorships on your rally vehicle.  Sponsors will pay based on how many body panels you still have left at the end of the race, which for me was usually about half.

Events and tracks are varied enough to keep things interesting.  About half way though you will know a large quantity of them quite well, as many repeat with subtle changes.  Tumbleweeds and small rodents or bunnies (can’t figure out which) do sometimes cross the road in front of you.  Scenery of course looks a bit like a desert, no big surprise there, but it certainly doesn’t have the spice and thrill you’d hope for after hours of driving.  It feels accurate, and we’ll leave it at that.  You can fall off cliffs and run into trees, and occasionally roll.

Damage is modeled well when you run into trees or other cars.  In fact, it is modeled so well that they have damage gauges for many parts on your vehicle: tires, oil pressure, temp, suspension, etc.  As you tool through a race, these indicators will decrease.  When they do, the overall performance of your desert rat will decrease as well.  There is the option to pull off the road into a hot pit stop or helicopter to get repaired, but I usually found that even with a blown tire and steaming radiator I had enough of it together to make it the 3-4 laps on a standard rally without repairing.

Which brings us to race types in the game.  Included for your racing pleasure you can do: hill climb, circuit, point to point rally, open world non-race touring, and more that I’m likely forgetting.   There are also major rally modes for the Baja 250, 500, 1000′s.  These can take hours to complete (4 hours on the 1000 I think?) so I didn’t bother trying them out.  In these long modes you would certainly have to make use of the repair facilities, if not for your truck, then for your thumbs by the end.

Overall I was very happy with playing through it, though I didn’t have the passion about the game to finish every nook and cranny in it as I did with DiRT.  The driving certainly keeps you on your toes at all times, regardless of how much you upgrade your vehicle.  It is a good rental, though hopefully you would have it on long term rental, as the game would only get enjoyable for you after you get past the first class or two.  I personally got it off Goozex and will be putting it back up there soon.  I’m sure it is cheap enough to buy now as well, given that it has been out for a while.  Graphics are decent, gameplay is solid once you figure out what the controls all do.  It makes for a nice aside to play when you want something a little more casual but spirited than another game you might be playing at the time (*cough* Fallout 3 *cough*).  Recommend for those of you who want to feel like you know how to race in the dirty dirty.

- Ben Mazhary-Clark

There have been a lot of Star Wars games.  A LOT.  In my experience, only a few have made the cut at all in terms of quality.  I think the last good one I played was X-wing vs. Tie Fighter.  Maybe Jedi Knight.  Rogue Squadron?  Please.  So along comes a game where you get to fully explore the dark side of the force.  I was intrigued.  Never before had we been given an opportunity to slay down anything in our path, with no regard for who it was that you were mowing down.  After a few looks at screenshots and descriptions, I ordered Star Wars: The Force Unleashed off of the Best Buy site on basically a half price deal they were doing the day after Christmas here.  After a very painful process to actually get the game in my house from Best Buy (took over a month and somehow I ended up with two copies of the game) I was able to sink my teeth into the game.

This game fills in some new back story with Vader.  It occurs after the events of the 3rd movie (Episode III), after Vader has been created.  Vader has taken on a new apprentice, behind the Emperor’s back, in hopes to overthrow the Emperor behind the scenes.  The game leads you through a storyline as his apprentice, with the time line coming rather close to the 4th movie (Episode IV), as there is a Death Star already being built and functional.

First impressions were good.  You start the opening level as Darth Vader so you have no issues slaying all the Wookies in front of you, though I did feel a little bad about it at first.  Once that level is down however, you are left to fend for yourself as Vader’s apprentice.   The first HALF of the game was truly painful as this character.  You rarely had enough power or experience to really do the damage you needed to.  Boss battles were often very hard.  Given this, you end up spending half the game attacking and hiding and dodging to keep alive until you level up enough.  Whenever you level you are given points that allow you to add to stats or abilities, similar to a mini-RPG.  The decisions are not very difficult.  More force power that recharges faster?  Yes please.

Once the second half of the game kicks in, you are in the swing of things.  Powers are readily available and you can easily meet the objectives of each level without a redo.  There is certainly joy in wreaking complete havoc on your environment.  Force push here, lightning there, jump in here and sith slay with your saber.  Rinse and repeat.  Most large enemies are easily taken down with running in circles and force lightning them.  Kind of a cheat, but it also feels great to be your own personal electric chair.

When you tire of hacking through levels (as this game really is just a hack and slash), there is a sum of training and challenges you can do.  I wouldn’t expect them to take more than an hour all told, and are usually best done after you are fully leveled up near the end of the game.  For the most part they aren’t very difficult, as long as you engage the most troublesome enemies in the room first, then deal with the rest afterward.

Overall the game is very satisfying.  Once you get a fair amount of powers under your belt, the game is enjoyable, though before that it can feel like a grind.  Like most Star Wars games from Lucasarts, it feels like they put a lot of thought into it, but didn’t take the time at the end to put in the extra polish a truly excellent game usually has.  I experienced many glitches, where I’d fall halfway into the floor, the enemy I was fighting would disappear, and once the save game even became corrupt, causing the game not to boot anymore and moving it off from the hard drive to a memory card made it suddenly work again.  Amazingly, these still didn’t take enough away from the experience to make it miserable.  I liked the game, and had a great time with it.  However once you are done, there isn’t much replay value, and off to Goozex it goes with my two copies.  I’d recommend picking this up if you enjoy the Star Wars universe.  If you are looking for a basic shooter or hack and slash game, your money might be well spent somewhere else.  A solid rental for sure, buy if you are a fan.

- Ben Mazhary-Clark

Another game based off a movie, yeah great.  When are those ever any good?  You’d be hard pressed to find one.  But this is different.  It’s an old movie, a classic movie.  this can’t just be a shameless plug for the latest blockbuster.  Sure, you CAN go buy the movie at your local retailer… but this is far from the typical movie game made to be a piece in the media blitz puzzle.  Though the game obviously has roots in the movie, it doesn’t try to integrate itself to it.  Instead it creates it’s own universe.  The the cool part is, then it tosses you the keys and says “Go ahead, have some fun… be home before dawn”.

When one looks up this game on the EA site they see it classified under the “Action/Adventure” genre.  Ok, there’s action in it, and I would say there’s a bit of adventure… though i don’t see a fedora or a bull whip anywhere.  But if you stop and think about it, doesn’t EVERY game qualify as such?  I mean really, what else is there?  The Boredom/Monotonous genre went out of vogue in the late 90′s.  So, in the quest to better describe this game i hereby offer a new genre.  Hence forth, this type of game shall be referred to as a Sandbox game.  A sandbox game is one where a world is given to you with several vague objectives and you can do whatever the heck you want.  If you want to follow the objective, more power to ya.  If you want to drive around as fast as you can running over as many people as you can… go for it.  Examples of this sort of game are game such as Crackdown,  Grand Theft Auto, and yes… The Godfather 2.

So now that we have that ironed out, what about the game?  You start out in Cuba, the day that Castro takes power.  When the dust settles from the revolution the family is forced to change their plans… which is where you come in.  The whole point of the game is to take over rival family’s business, then take out the rival family completely.  The game provides some guidance along the way, but how you do it is decided entirely by you.  You can bomb business, perform hostile take overs, or just go rob banks all day.  Whatever floats your boat.

You also get some partners in crime.  That’s right, you get your own family.  How that works with the movie logic?  Haven’t figured that out yet.  You’re a Corleone, he’s a Corleone, wouldn’t you like to be a Corleone too?  Regardless, you’ll get to recruit and promote 7 “made men” that you will then use to attack and defend territories in 3 different cities.  These men will have varying skills.  There are safecrackers, engineers, medics, demolitionist, arsonsists, and bruisers.  You’ll need to make sure you have the right men for the right job.  You can also upgrade your character as well as your family members… increasing accuracy, amount of health, and so on.  These men will prove vital in helping you secure every possible business and defending again rival families that are coming after you.  Treat them well.

I found my 10 or 13 hours of game play to be interesting and slightly addictive.  I found the need to completely stomp out all competition to be strangely compelling, which disturbs me a little.  The combat was fairly smooth, if not a touch on the arcade side.  Driving physics were HORRIBLE, but most sandbox games suffer the same affliction.  Graphics were quite good making for some inspiring fire balls, and surprisingly realistic animation.  Be VERY aware, this game is rated M for a reason.  There is nothing pleasant about shooting your way in to a rival family’s strip club, beating the owner in to submission, and then accidentally shoving your shotgun in his mouth and making a mess on the wall behind him.   If you’re sitting in your dorm room causing mayhem, that’s one thing.  Don’t buy this game for your kids, play it around  kids, or discuss it with kids.  Unless, of course, you want them to grow up to be a Don.

- David Hayes

The Nintendo DS is certainly prone to a slew of developers just putting out crap for them to say they have a title out.  Thus, with the DS (and the Wii) there are so few games actually worth trying out.  Some feel as good (bad) as a flash game port.  Often, 1st party games end up being the safe bet, and they are usually the highest quality.  Quality of course is completely personal opinion and experience.  In my experiences, the games below for the DS are a “safe bet” when starting your collection or looking for something new to try.

So here it goes in extreme summary mode, in no particular order:

New Super Mario Bros – brings back classic NES action, new layout, combo 2d/3d look
Mario Kart DS – great action similar to the Gamecube version, 4 players off one card
Kirby Canvas Curse – best use of the touchscreen I’ve seen yet, one of my lasting faves
Puzzle Quest – think Bejeweled with RPG elements
Animal Crossing – more kiddish, but it’s a casual fun game, can make up to 4 chars
Professor Layton’s Curious Village – one of the hardest games I’ve played, 300+puzzles
N+ – very simple 2d ninja level hopping puzzle game, works great with d-pad controls
Rune Factory - do farming and adventure RPG, etc.  Think Animal Crossing meets Zelda
SimCity - PC classic ported to the DS, hours of city building
Kung Fu Panda – yes, it’s a total movie sellout, but I had fun with it
Space Invaders Extreme – awesome redo of this game, play against people over wifi/inet
Ninja Gaiden Dragon Sword – book style play, all stylus no buttons, amazingly difficult
Elite Beat Agents – fun rhythm based game, all touchscreen
Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles – RPG game, I found it lots of fun

Nanostray - impossibly hard spaceship shooter, good challenge though
Geometry Wars: Galaxies – great use of d-pad and touchpad, always entertaining

Peggle Dual Shot – eliminate all the pegs with a set number of balls, good physics
Grand Theft Auto Chinatown Wars – classic GTA action in your hand, lots of replay value

Hrm, guess that’s about it.  I’ve played many others, but these are the cream of the crop in my opinion.  I usually get all my DS games used at Gamestop, Game Trader, Craigslist or off Goozex.  Another great resource is Cheap Ass Gamer, which keeps track of the deals and sales all around.

- Ben Mazhary-Clark

Well, Hollywood strikes again.  Every time anyone has a good idea Hollywood scoops it up, ruins it, squeezes every penny it can from it, makes us choke on it, then cuts it’s losses and runs away with a devilish little giggle.  That’s exactly what they’ve done again with WANTED.  For those of you not paying close attention, Hollywood has already moved past the A List comic books (Superman, Batman, Spiderman), burned through the B List (Hulk, X-Men, Fantastic 4), and made us suffer through the lower echelons of the comic book world (DareDevil, Electra, Iron Man).  But now, they’ve gone from mainstream to some of the less known, but highly respected comic books such as Spawn, Watchmen, and WANTED.  First came the movie starring the always lovely Angelina Jolie… and some other guy.  Now comes the video game.

WANTED: Weapons of Fate is another foray in to the world of a “Fraternity of Assassins”.  Can you imagine their pledge week?  Anyway, the back story on all of that is made fairly clear in the movie, so i won’t rehash it.  The game picks up 5 hours after the end of the movie.  The main protagonist, Wesley, has his home intruded upon by members of the French Fraternity and thus starts both an evolution of his skills as well as a journey of discovery in to who or what he is.    Along the line comes several upgrades to your abilities and weaponry that really make for the most interesting part of the game.  There are plenty of predictable plot twists and turns that delve deeper in to his past before ending with ever present boss fight.

Before you ask… yes, you get to bend bullets and slow time and all those fun ideas.  It’s not very smooth or quick… but it’s doable and becomes almost your primary tactic as the game progresses.  The practice of doing so takes more work than you might imagine.  For instance, yes you can bend bullets… but before you can do so you must stand up out of your cover spot while being shot at, then tell the game you want to bend a bullet by finding your target then pressing the special button, THEN you have to find the correct trajectory for the bullet.  WHY?!?!  You’re a super assassin that can bend bullets, but you can’t have the instincts to know the best trajectory?

The other major tactical factor in the game is your use of cover.  It’s rare that you find a shooter where staying under cover is so important.  The cover system was good, though not perfect.  It did a better job then most, particularly when moving between cover, but every so often the game did something less than logical that would cost you your life.  Very frustrating.

Level design was adequate, if not repetitive.  Lots of cover spots, lots of bad guys.  Not bad at all.  Most of the game is spent in either Chicago or Paris, so there’s a little diversity there.  One thing that should be noted is that i finished the game, at the hardest difficulty level, in 4 hours and change.  It’s NOT a long game.

Overall this game is a quick fun jaunt through the world of WANTED.  I liked it enough to play it through twice in 2 days.  The graphics aren’t great during cut scenes, but game play is acceptable.  Game play moves quickly, though it  too can get a bit repetitive if you don’t get creative.  And for all you Xbox360 Gamerpoint addicts, if you play on the hardest difficulty you’ll get 3 achievements for 80 gamerpoints per completed level.  All told, not bad for a weekends’ worth of escapism, but definitely not on anyone’s “must have” list.

This may just be a good rental for you, or perhaps trade for it and throw it back into the pile.

- David Hayes

Heart thumping, getting so close to the end of the race, if only you could get those three black cars off your tail that keep smashing you into the wall, then you can make it safe to the finish, unscathed. However it is unlikely that this environment will be forgiving enough for you to make it to the finish. This is Burnout Paradise, the fifth in a series of explosive racing games that pushes your reaction times to the limits but rewards you with spectacular crashes when you fail to make the grade.

Criterion Games gave the Burnout series a fresh new feel this time around. With an almost menu-less system for starting races and taking on challenges, the new open world dynamic brings a lot of new concepts and features to a series that is certainly middle aged. Previous iterations of the Burnout series were deep in menus to get into the action. With Burnout Revenge even having multiple levels of maps and menus to get through just to start a race off. No more! Burnout Paradise (aka BOP) takes a hint from the Midnight Club and Grand Theft Auto series and gets rid of the menus. All you are left with is a large island to explore. You are left to your own, with a basic car. It is up to you to actually find all the races on the map, which there is indeed an achievement for.  Roll up on a race, hit both gas and brake, and you are good to go, the race starts, and you are off.

The world is instantly interesting.  First off you have to repair your car, and then it’s off to exploring.  I easily spent hours getting the lay of the land, trying out a few races, and finding those elusive gate smashes that are scattered throughout the city.  Even when exploring, you can set top road rule times on all the roads, to the envy of your online friends (who can see them when they are crusing around).  After you win a few races, you have the chance to take out special cars that add them to your collection.  Tons of fun.  The race types vary; from straight out end point races, to being the marked man, my favorite road rage, and so on.

Not only can you play these all offline, but with a quick flip of the D-pad pop-up menu, you can join an online party with other fellow racers.  The online options include both racing in a couple different varieties, as well as a large handful of group challenges.  These give the game extra breadth and depth after the single player game becomes too familiar.

Graphically and auditorially the game is amazing.  True to form for a Burnout game, crashing looks awesome, with shards of your vehicle spinning off in all directions.  Sounds boom and roar, with the life of the city all around.  It is usually fairly easy to hear when a car is coming up behind you in surround.  Ambient sounds also make you feel like you are in a city full of activity.

The game as it stood out of the box on release was impressive on its own.  I personally put over 50 hours into the base game, with more than half of that online in Freeburns and Races.  However over the course of the next year and a half, Criterion has gone to great lengths to contually add to this game.  Iniitally, these updates were free.  This first set of updates added in new online race types, and even a whole motorcycle subset of the game, which is a first for the Burnout series.    Then later they added the option to buy exotic new cars, an offline pass-the-controller-party mode, and even a whole new section of map in the form of another island.  Criterion has not only made this an excellent game, but also a platform.  Using downloadable content packs and micro-transactions, they have extended the life of a game that likely would have lost interest after 6-8 months.  However more than a year later, it goes on strong.  I hope in the future, game developers and publishers take the hint from this success.  Forget putting out another iteration of the same game every year, but how about adding the same functionality into the existing game as DLC?  Here’s hoping for the future.

Come join the party online with your own copy!  Alternately you can trade for it or rent it, but I’d recommend keeping it for the long haul.

- Ben Mazhary-Clark

Halo.  The game that launched the Xbox in to the console world AND made the First Person Shooter acceptable on consoles.  It was the Master Chief versus a never ending supply of aliens, and then mutants, all bent on destroying the human race.  Wow, what a game.  Eventually that game became a series of games (none of which lived up to the original by the way).  And now, this franchise has spawned another child.  It’s called Halo Wars and it’s like no Halo you’ve ever played before.

Halo Wars marks the first time that you could play within the Halo universe and never fire a gun.  That’s because this game is NOT an FPS.  It’s a Real Time Strategy game.  Hear this and hear this well… this game is not like any other Halo game you’ve ever played.  You are not Master Chief, you do not carry a weapon, there is no odd ring shaped planet to destroy.  Instead, you command an army.  You build bases, create armies, then send them around to do your will… or at least to meet the objective given to you by the game.

There’s no doubt that there is room in the world for this type of game.  The opportunity to oversee vast armies and determine their fate will definitely appeal to some.  However, my experience with the game was somewhat less than satisfying.  Of course i knew there wouldn’t be any running or gunning in this game, but the way the game is laid out left a little to be desired.  We were told that this game would be the war before the war.  A prequel to the original games that would entail huge armies and epic battles.  That was not my experience at all.

The game is divided up in to many battles which are anything but epic.  Plant a base, make some troops, complete the objective.  Lather, rinse, repeat.   The maps were surprisingly small and objectives were not hard to reach.  I often found myself being patient and building up resources to create what i thought would be a necessary invasion force, just to find that i could have completed the objective with half the armies that i had taken the time to create.  So on to the next mission, and all those troops and technologies that took all that time to create are going to continue through the struggle.  Right?  Wrong!  Each battle starts you over from square one.  In other words if took the time and resources to upgrade your units to carry RPG’s in mission one you’d have to do it again in mission two.  This got tiresome extremely quickly.

All things accounted for I found this game to be very repetitive and disappointing.  Undersized maps and the constant need to rebuild items that you already built shortened my attention span exponentially.  Though the controls were acceptable, troop movement became labored and inconsistent as your armies grew.  Camera control was a bit less than intuitive, particularly if you tried to split your army up to attack two fronts at the same time.  Cut scenes and other graphics were leap years ahead of any previous Halo games, but that’s to be expected after so much time and a genre change.  If you are a console RTS fan then this game might be worth a try, but it’s probably not worth the effort otherwise.  You could always just trade for it on Goozex or rent it and then put it back on when you are done.

- David Hayes

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