Bullet Witch
2007-03-20 23:38:29
We all remember those Christmas’ from our childhoods. Excitedly opening the rectangular package that you knew to contain a new game, only to find some obscure title that was sure to suck. You grudgingly played it once, but you weren’t happy about it.
Yes, we all know my point. Video games are indeed boring. At least most of them. My formula for reviewing this onslaught of mediocre titles is to mention the few good points, make an off-color remark or two, and then proceed to badmouth the title enough to convince one of you random people not to buy it for your kids.
Bullet Witch
is a typical addition to the supernatural hero with a gun genre. Alicia is the Bullet Witch, a demon-possessed gothic heroine with magical powers and a gun fused to a broom. An impressive intro to the game describes the series of disasters that have made up the drawn out apocalypse. Earthquakes, famines, and biological warfare have shaved a few billion off of the world’s population. No
MLB 2K7
2007-03-16 23:13:49
There are a lot of things out there that people pretend to like. Neckties, tofu, birds and fish (as pets, not food); nobody really wants these things, but in an attempt to appear unique we act like we like things that no one else likes. For example, “Derek lives to live underground and play video games when he’s not at his job entering data.” I think baseball is one of these things. Try to convince me otherwise, and I will call you a liar. “How many old men love baseball?” I will ask. “How many of them fall asleep during 90% of the games they watch? How many of them deny falling asleep afterwards?” Exactly. That is because these old men want you to think they like baseball, when in reality they just want you to think they like something, other than sleeping.
At first, I thought I would love MLB 2K7. It has all that slow, strategic, and, um, boring stuff that I for some reason enjoy (Balance of Power, anyone?). Mixed in with some qu
Crackdown
2007-03-12 00:59:39
It says something about a game when - in the process of reviewing it - I repeatedly have to look down at the box to remember what its name is. Granted, among the GTA-clones that are out there, Crackdown
is one of the most original, and therefore I should have no problem remembering its name. Unfortunately, however, these original moments were sandwiched in-between hours of boring, trigger-fire combat or try-not-to-hit-the-pedestrians driving.
I will confess that I am not one of the biggest fans of GTA, having gotten over the style of driving central to it with GTA 2 (no, youngsters, I’m not talking about Vice City). And frankly, though the GTA series is often lauded for its supposed go-anywhere, do-anything aspects, I generally think - though this has gotten less true as the series has progressed - that the only things you can really do are drive around and shoot people. There are plenty of pretty buildings, but you typically can’t interact with them in any meaningfu
Battlestations: Midway
2007-02-27 00:59:32
Battlestations: Midway
is the best truly 3D RTS I’ve ever played, and succeeds in taking a normally boring genre - naval combat - and turning it into something that gets your adrenaline levels up. Yes, in real life, naval combat is all about 5-ton lumps of mashed potatoes and trying not to sit next to the boy or girl that you’re in love with. Naval combat is about being bored, all of the time, unless you are in danger of dying in one of the more painful ways possible (drowning, burning, getting impaled by burning metal while drowning, etc.) I suppose that’s why Captain Walker is so pissed off.
And he’s not pissed off in some pansy-assed “god-can-hear-me-cuss” sort of way. Sounding less like a bosom addicted 40’s huckleberry and more like a jaded suburbanite, Walker appears tough while still being gracious towards the apparently genteel Japanese Empire.
It should have been predictable that - at some point - a WWII game focused on the Pacif
Zillion
2007-02-16 22:40:48
When I was in college I wanted to be hip, so I tried to figure out as much as I could about music. That way, when I was at some stupid party and some tight-pants man started talking about Captain Jazz, I would know all about it. We’d be friends, and we would cross our arms and complain about the squares. Yes, of course the women don’t want to talk to us, we figured: they’re intimidated because we’re so ridiculously cool.
Nowadays, I use my love for video games as my excuse for not getting laid (man, am I going to bring that up in every single review?), so I feel the same way about Zillion as I once did about Shalabi Effect: it’s the best game you’ve never heard of (actually Shalabi Effect is crap, but whatever). In fact, I’m gonna get all crazy genius on you and say it’s not only the best game for the Master System, but the best 8-bit game ever made. The Beatles can go screw themselves.
Now, maybe that’s just my childhood brand aff
Lego Star Wars II
2007-02-14 22:27:36
Lego Star Wars II is pretty much universally acclaimed as a fun and simple platformer. It’s the kinda game you hear described as being “delightful,” something best played in the family room with a warm mug of Ovaltine, right after a helping of both the first and second installments of The Santa Clause. It’s great for kids, since their tender sensibilities will not be offended by the decapitation of Lego people (because they’re so obviously fake, right?).
Yes, this game is for the wee ones. It’s for people who did not graduate college, do not start websites, do not have jobs. And that is why - after many hours of being frustrated by puzzles designed for people younger than ten - I feel so intensely stupid.
Either that, or this game totally sucks. True, I am viciously opposed to most games with a great reliance on puzzles (excluding anything with “Zelda” in its name). I feel like life - with it’s collection agencies, building inspect
Sid Meier’s Pirates!
2007-02-12 18:24:04
If I have to play another game romanticizing the life of a pillaging, raping Hun, I’m going to rape and pillage myself. Assembling a horde, besieging cities, romancing the Byzantine emperor’s buxom daughter, looking for buried dinars while trying to get strong enough to burn Ravenna to the ground…it is just so played out! Oh wait…no it’s not. No one romanticizes the Huns. Or Genghis Khan and the Mongols, or Timur the Lame, or the assorted Central Asian slavers who preyed on southern Russia for centuries. Generally speaking, we don’t celebrate these vibrant and mobile civilizational outliers who preyed on our slow-witted peasant ancestors. We do, however, celebrate pirates.
The last person who could be reasonably called a “Hun” probably died 1500 years ago, and yet we still haven’t forgiven the Huns for delivering the coup de grace to Rome. But pirates? Some poor container ship crewman is probably being filleted by ruthless pi
Read more: Meier
, Pirates
, Sid Meier
Dead or Alive: Xtreme 2
2007-02-09 23:47:25
I’m just not sure what “extreme” means any more. There was a time, not too long ago, when doing something that was “extreme” involved some possibility of death or mutilation. Religious extremists blew up buses, extreme temperatures froze your toes off, extreme poverty caused people to eat their dogs and live out of old washing machines, etc. Nowadays one is extreme when they drink a bad-tasting soft drink or do a lot of in-line skating. Or, apparently, when someone takes a game - say, Dead or Alive
- in which people beat themselves to death and turns it into a soft-core vacation sim in which the main objective is to buy people presents: that’s when the game becomes “xtreme” (so extreme that you drop the e).
Now, I get that the extremity of this game is due to propensity of sexy ninja girls in bikinis. But the fact that they are still in their bikinis, and do nothing more racy than play volleyball and lounge around makes me wonder if
Read more: Xtreme
Splinter Cell: Double Agent
2007-02-07 20:14:58
To Whom It May Concern:My name is JD Dobson, and I am writing in regard to the super-secret criminal high-tech ninja spy position advertised in Splinter
Cell – Double Agent
(and every international jewel thief/spy/assassin movie or book I have ever watched or read). The sheer volume of these depictions has convinced me that a global network of highly trained agents-for-hire with catlike reflexes and an inexhaustible array of high tech gadgetry must actually exist. Furthermore, I am confident that my proven performance in Splinter Cell demonstrates that I can excel in this position. Unfortunately, I have been unable to ascertain to whom I should submit my credentials. But if you are reading this, I can only hope you are an international criminal network recruiter with a google alert set for “super-secret criminal underworld” and “position.”As noted, I believe I can make a valuable contribution to your organization’s important work. First, I am comfortable with ambiguity. Thi
Call of Duty 3
2007-02-04 19:16:57
As a professional video game review writer, I end up playing alot of games that really suck. And really, it’s not that bad. If you have ever seen that show “Dirty Jobs,” then you appreciate that there are ways to make a living out there much worse than playing crappy console games. Still, sometimes I am forced to play a game so bad that I envy the manure shovelers and hemorrhoidal surgeons of the world.
Call of Duty III by Activision and Treyarch seemed like a game I might actually rent for fun. I love firing authentic WWII weapons at real Nazis, so why wouldn’t I love a game based on the same concept? I hadn’t played much of the previous two games, but I had seen the awesome commercials on TV. In short, I was really expecting this to be a top tier shooter.
Boy was I wrong.
Call of Duty 3 plays like one of those arcade shooting galleries with the neon guns that you see in the mall or movie theater. Nazis pop up and you shoot them, then more Nazis appe
Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin
2007-03-24 17:23:04
Imagine for a moment that you’re the magical whip-wielding scion of an ancient family of warriors against evil. You can jump so high you’re basically flying, you can easily swing massive swords the size and weight of motorcycles, and – as if this all weren’t enough – you have at your disposal a number of paranormal powers. Now imagine further that the year is 1944, you are in central Europe, and looking to kill someone evil. Any ideas about who you’d like to go after? Yes, me too: Dracula. But if for some reason he weren’t available? Then probably you’d want to go after some other vampire, but more obscure, someone you’d never heard of, right? Like the great, evil Brauner?
It’s hard to blame Konami for worrying that we’re bored with laying low the same undead Transylvania aristocrat over and over. But going after the previously unknown Brauner – who in the game has staged some sort of vampire coup against Dracula and taken over his castle – seemed lik
Read more: Castlevania
, Portrait
Viva Piñata
2007-03-30 04:03:15
I think I can safely say, without risk of hyperbole, that Viva Piñata is the best video game ever made. It is also better than all of the video games ever not made. With the possible exception of “Viva Piñata 2: Baby Panda Island.”
The secret to Viva Piñata’s wild success…with me…is that it contains:
Cute animals.
Cute baby animals.
Flowers.
It seems like a simple formula, I know, but you’d be amazed at how often other video games miss the mark. Halo 2, for example.
The goal of the game is to attract different and increasingly exotic Piñatas to your garden by growing different and increasingly exotic flowers and trees and buildings. You might see yourself as sort of a humble gardener, struggling to eke out a living by making your garden amenable to the picky Piñatas. Though actually, I choose to see myself as more of a malevolent god, whose Piñatas should feel lucky if I deem them cute enough to live in my garden, and thus refrain from beating them with my shovel.
Disney Pixar Cars
2007-04-04 01:49:44
You can discern most of what you need to know about this game from the title. Specifically from the word order, which evokes a law firm or piece of legislation more than it does a game. In firm or bill names, the sorting of proper nouns doesn’t have anything to do with alphabetical order, but is instead indicative of the relative power and influence of, for example, “Taft” and “Hartley.” And so even though I doubt Disney
and Pixar
actually want you to say “Disney Pixar Cars” (although they want you to think it), the name says a lot about this game. And that is: the cars come last
Disney
Disney has become such an incomprehensibly huge company that it’s hard to say just what its focus is, and therefore what one might expect it to emphasize in a game. Amusement parks? ABC Nightly News? Cryogenically preserved chief executives?
Probably all of these things. But also: coming up with characters and storylines that kids find compelling. And this game does try to flesh
Earth Defense Force 2017
2007-04-18 00:13:09
EDF: 2017 is proof that sometimes a plot just gets in the way. This is the third in a series of B-movie monster attack shooters by Sandlot. A low budget game without the low budget actors. You are one of the nameless, skinny heroes entrusted with saving humanity from the onslaught of giant ants, robots and dinosaurs which hope to destroy you and your city.
This game is a pure arcade shooter, a no-nonsense homage to the genre. It’s also a ton of fun. The act of mowing down hundreds of school-bus sized ants swarming over the city skyline must of toggled some sort of pleasure center in my brain, because I couldn’t get enough.
You advance through stages by surviving huge waves of aliens, a task which often proved impossible on the hardest difficulty. The most basic shock troop, the ant, was also my personal favorite. They can swarm over any building or obstacle on the map to reach you.
As the monsters die, they leave behind health packs, armor upgrades, and weapon icon
Read more: Earth
, Defense
, Force
Eragon
2007-04-25 00:32:54
I’ve wanted to play a video game that features Jeremy Irons as a character for quite some time now. Now, granted, I wanted the character to actually look like Jeremy Irons, rather than the younger, slimmer version of him who probably looks like the guy who shows up in Jeremy Irons’ mirror when he’s drunk. And I wanted the character to actually have his voice. And I wanted the game to be based on The French Lieutenant’s Woman, rather than Eragon
. Other than that, though, I am satisfied. A vague approximation of Jeremy Irons is indeed your running buddy in Eragon for the Xbox 360. So: mission accomplished. On to the next game.
Or maybe not. I spent almost ten bucks renting this game, and this made me feel obligated to spend ten hours or so suffering through it. Which in turn makes me feel obligated to, in a sort of victimization cycle, inflict my suffering on you. And by you, I mean Derek, Joe and Kate. Hi guys!
So: Eragon. I should probably concede right off the bat
Virtua Tennis 3
2007-05-04 01:04:33
Sega Studios - “Hey look, it’s the Virtua Tennis
guys! Took you a while to find the new building, huh? Yeah, listen guys, I’m really, really sorry about this, but we ran into a jam with the whole move and everything so, um here’s your new office - um, no, actually it’s used to be a bathroom, I mean, you could still use it that way, if you need to. Look at it like this: you guys all have your own personal, executive bathrooms to go along with your usual office space. No it’s fine if you don’t take that long - listen, between you and me, people are gonna buy this - no pun intended - this crap as long as it has the Virtua Tennis
name on it. I mean, what - same game, new stars, people buy it right. A tweak here and there. Virtua Tennis… Three!“
Okay, Derek talking now. Okay, I shouldn’t imply this, right? I mean obviously the creation of this game wasn’t analogous to the conclusion of the digestive process. Or ma
Guitar Hero II
2007-05-09 15:02:20
If you haven’t spent a lot of time in college dorms lately, you might not be familiar with this game. In a nutshell: it comes with a big plastic guitar with five buttons at the end of the neck where you would press down on the frets, a sort of click-toggle button where you would strum the strings, and a whammy bar where you would whammy. The game consists of pressing the correct fret button with your left hand (or your right hand, freak) and clicking the strum toggle with your right in rhythm with a song. Because the controller is a big guitar, and because the game can demand a lot in terms of dexterity and rhythm, a lot of people who spend time playing this game eventually find themselves asking “I’ve gotten pretty good at this game…I wonder if that means I would be good at playing a real guitar?”
The answer, of course, is no. Playing a real guitar has very little in common with playing Guitar
Hero II – and I’m saying this not as some arrogant guitar player, but simply
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Settlers of Catan (Xbox Live)
2007-05-22 07:28:06
Ahh, settlers. While other civilizations have violent, savage conquerers - the Huns, Vikings, Mongols, etc. - we Americans like to think that we merely “settled” our country, riding over empty plains a ‘la Oregon Trail, with innocent, bonnet-headed bliss. Because of the - ahem - accidental spread of smallpox to the largely naked native peoples, our ginourmous new country was basically empty, right? We just settled in like a family moving into a recently leased apartment. Sure, there might be a homeless guy sleeping in it, but once we - ya know - come to an agreement, well then everything will be just fine.
The varying competing parties in Settlers of Catan have a similar nonviolent approach to competing for territory. Catan is a turn-based strategy game identical to a board game of the same name. It was created by German Klaus Teuber, who might have been inspired by the modern German Army by making a game in which one races to build expensive, pacifistic ar
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, Xbox Live
Herzog Zwei
2007-06-05 07:36:22
Many modern reviews of Herzog Zwei start with a discussion of whether this game is or is not the first ever RTS, but since I’m so amazingly original, I’ll… oh wait, I guess it’s too late. Simply by watching the game, it’s pretty obvious that it contains many of the same tropes as our favorite RTS’s. It has a top down, bird’s eye view, has various units that you give commands to (and which subsequently get lost on their way to places), etc. What it does not have is many other, um, “qualities” that have become associated with the genre. There is no resource hunting, no discernable plot (at least until you win the game), and no construction of buildings. Since I’m not a huge fan of any of those latter attributes, I can’t help but wish that more games had aped Herzog, instead of the later, more popular title Dune.
Honestly, it’s a bit of a mystery to me why things didn’t turn out that way. Herzog Z
Lost Planet: Extreme Conditions
2007-06-27 18:43:51
The Inuit have 100 words for snow. Well, not exactly. Modern linguist who study the Inuit language have trouble coming up with a list of even a dozen words for snow. So why the long standing misconception? It’s not exactly an insult (unlike calling an Inuit an Eskimo, a local slight meaning ‘eaters of raw flesh’). It’s not that we assume that a culture needs scores of terms to describe their habitat (Did you know that the Polynesians have 100 words for Island?) The answer is that people love to exaggerate. One of the first cultural anthropologist to document the Inuit wrote down that they had four words for snow. The next guy says they have 8 words, and the next guy 16. Pretty soon our grade-school textbooks are telling our children that half of their vocabulary refers to frozen water, Inuit girls never rub noses on the first date, and that there are more pie factories in the Arctic Circle than anywhere else in the world.
Speaking of the victims of hype
Read more: Lost Planet
, Extreme
NES Play Action Football
2007-07-06 08:33:22
As sports go, football is not my most hated sport. But I do have some powerful and deeply ingrained negative associations with the game. My brain is wired to equate “football on tv” with “no one paying attention to Kate.” This “attention deficit disorder” was so severe during my childhood that I ran away from home. But my exodus was cut short when, while doing some reconnaissance work on my former home, I discovered that my football-watching family hadn’t even noticed I had run away.
Even though I had left them a farewell note on the floor in the middle of the room.
Sniff.
If I had been a smarter five-year-old, I would have realized that the obvious solution to my problem was to become a professional football player. And I still consider that option to be on the table. But if NES Play Action
Football
is any indication — and I have no reason to think it isn’t — I probably don’t have any natural aptitude for the game..
My older brother and I used to p
F.E.A.R.
2007-07-16 08:16:03
If fear evolved to help us avoid danger, then you have to assume that our fears must be largely rational, even if they don’t seem that way at first glance. Fear of mice might not make much sense today (unless you are a nice, ripe piece of cheese). But it makes a lot of sense if you’re a barely-upright primate scampering around the savannah trying to stockpile enough berries to keep from starving, and clever mice keep eating your berries. So I don’t necessarily expect my fears to line up precisely with the things that could actually hurt me. But why am I so cripplingly afraid of little girls?
To be more precise, why am I so afraid of little girls whose long, dark hair obscures their faces? The weird thing about my paralyzing fear of little girls is that I wasn’t always afraid of them…or at least I don’t think I was. But ever since watching the first few Japanese little-girl-centric horror movies that crab-walked their way across the Pacific over the past few yea
Head Coach
2007-08-27 00:10:32
I like the word “sucker.” Aside from the obvious connotations involved with using a word with “suck” in it, I like the way it sounds: the harsh “ck” and snakelike “s” sounds go well with a sarcastic and mocking tone (which, incidentally, is the tone I use most often). I especially like using this word when it relates to other people, and similarly feel extra bad about myself when it is used on me. Unfortunately, though, I can come up with no other word that better describes the way I feel after having bought (!) this game nearly a year after it came out, and after having read countless articles about how awesomely boring it is. And guess what? It’s even worse than I had read, which makes me not only a sucker, but the worst kind of sucker: the kind who cynically exhudes a smarter-than-though air while lambasting the suckiness of a product, only to inevitably give in and realize how weak-willed and stupid he in fact is. When EA
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Wartech: Senko no Ronde
2007-09-12 17:30:09
Regular readers of this site are undoubtedly familiar with my basement-dwelling, wanktastic lifestyle. So it may surprise some of you that I occasionally dig myself out of the ground, go to bars, and get drunk. After an evening of talking about how I’m not going to talk to girls, I go home and do what I normally do: Play video games and pretend that I live a meaningful life (actually, not so much that latter part). But this time I’m drunk, so while playing these games I learn things about my drunken abilities that I really should have realized earlier on in my life: I shouldn’t drive while drunk (thanks, GTA), I shouldn’t command a naval squadron while drunk (thanks Battlestations), I shouldn’t play professional football while drunk (Goodell would suspend you anyway). And sometimes I realize that… I am really drunk and I have no idea what’s going on. Such was the case with Wartech, although once I sobered up and played it again I still h
Rush ‘N Attack (Xbox Live Arcade)
2007-10-07 00:19:58
Do you hate commies? I mean, really hate them? And I’m not talking about the “communists” making iPods and Tickle Me Elmos in Guangdong Province, or the “communists” converting Cuba into the premier sex tourism destination in the western hemisphere (after your mom’s bedroom, yo!). I’m talking about the real deal: Russians. Or more precisely…Rush ‘Ns.
Now don’t get me wrong: I know no one likes communism any more. But to play Rush ‘N Attack on Xbox
Live Arcade you have to really, viscerally loathe them. Any world leader can sit in his air-conditioned office and press the button that starts WWIII, which puts you at a certain emotional remove from the ensuing carnage. But Rush‘N Attack scoffs at this sort of sanitary, technological warfare. This game requires you to kill dozens, hundreds of Soviet footsoldiers with naught but some sort of prison shiv…just knifing them, one after the other, wave after wave, in a fashion that can only be described as work
Read more: Xbox Live
The Bigs
2007-11-03 11:06:30
True to form, us here at videogamesareboring.com have slacked off enough to write a review of this game not only several months after it came out, but a week (or so) after the baseball season is over. In any reasonable world, no one would care about baseball anymore because – as I’ve said before – baseball is mind-numbingly dull, and shouldn’t even be cared about while it’s going on. Yes, this “thinking man’s game” involves so much boring standing around that people have plenty of time to think about other stuff (like why the hell they’re watching people pretend like they’re going to do something), which is why I think baseball needs some radical re-adjustments to entertain the “I want everything now” generation. Fortunately some radical thinkers have already solved this problem. The solution to the boring-ness off baseball is… performance enhancing drugs.
I’ve got to admit: even though I hate baseball, I really enjoyed playing The Bigs. It is a simple
The Mafat Conspiracy
2008-03-05 15:19:38
The internet is pretty popular these days, and a lot of people like a lot of different things about it. But in my opinion, the best thing about the internet, other than this, is the way it has liberated us from having to draw our own maps. There was a time when to create a [...]
Read more: Conspiracy
Bioshock
2008-01-01 11:43:05
I enjoyed Bioshock
quite a bit, but I have to admit that the hoopla surrounding it is starting to drive me up the wall. I occasionally am exposed to conversations about whether video games can be “art.” As a failing musician often surrounded by budding (and broke) artists, I am particularly annoyed by [...]
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