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Fuel Game Review–Freedom to Ride

Racing games and I generally do not get along.  I find them somewhat dull and repetitive, even after the initial adrenaline shock wears off.   This left me with something of a quandary as I discovered a racing game that was actually pretty entertaining, and it’s a new one out for the Xbox 360, PS3 and PC called Fuel.

Fuel assumes a future in which Al Gore is allowed by Federal law to laugh and point at everybody who can’t produce a receipt for a copy of An Inconvenient Truth.  Seriously, though–it’s an “alternate present” in which the weather has only very recently gone completely insane, turning large areas of the United States into “no-go” zones, or areas where no human being can safely live.  Thus, humans pack themselves into huge megacities, a la Judge Dredd, except these human hives are apparently warm and comforting places powered by wind and solar and biodiesel, and thus everyone lives in Al Gore’s fantasyland.

There are, however, a few mavericks who realize that, the sudden cessation of gasoline usage has left a whole LOT of spare capacity just sort of lying around, and thus, this gives them the opportunity to take it for their own use.  Hey, why not?  Not like anyone ELSE is using the stuff anyway!  So they appropriate large quantities of fuel and use it to stage quasi-legal offroad joyride races.

To that end, you’re dropped into a scale area of roughly five thousand square miles and set to race.  You’ll be able to select various races against other competitors, as well as having an opportunity to engage in “free riding” but more on that in a minute.  First, we have to deal with the races themselves.  In this way, Fuel is a lot like literally every other racing game on the market.  You drive around trying desperately to pass other people and reach the finish line.  In this way, Fuel is just as good as any other.  The graphics are solid enough, the controls are a little twitchy and take a little getting used to but still do fairly well, and the background music is appropriately rock.

Fuel would be a game much like any other if it weren’t for one critical difference–the free ride mode.  Free ride does just what it sounds like it does; free ride allows you to tear around the map in literally any direction you please, pulling tire-squealing turns on roads, donuts on the beach, whatever you like,  There’s even some structure here as your free ride mode allows you to drive to places where challenges are being held.  Completing these challenges nets you extra fuel, which in turn allows you to buy other vehicles.  Plus, you’ll be able to obtain new parts for your livery, find fantastic views at so-called vista points, and just generally run riot all over the map.

Fuel is, therefore, a game of surprising depth and substance, as well as plenty of fun.  For those of you who already like racing games, you may well have found the ultimate in racers right there.  But for those of you who haven’t been very fond of the racing game subgenre, then you may well want to give Fuel a try.  This is the game that just might change your mind about racers.

Monkey Island Coming To XBLA

LucasArts might be raking in money hand over fist via a near-continuous stream of Star Wars games but without a doubt one of their most popular series was the Monkey Island games, featuring aspiring pirate Guybrush Threepwood and gaggles of jokes. From an era when unimpressive graphics forced developers to either craft addictive gameplay or use cunningly written stories full of intrigue, humor or both.

The Monkey Island series was very heavy on the humor, wit endless jokes, humorous solutions to puzzles and general silliness. Originally released in 1990 it was an adventure game which still delights fans to this day. A listing for a ‘Special Edition’ re-release has hit German ratings board listings for the Xbox Live Arcade.

Unfortunately since this isn’t an official announcement there are few other details, but a graphical update would be likely, given the extremely low quality of the original visuals.

Forumwarz Game Review–A Game Possibly Unlike Anything You’ve Ever Played

Today marks one of those days that I’m really, really glad I’m a functioning video game reviewer–I’m going to review a game that I’m absolutely convinced you need to be told about.  Chances are very good that you haven’t actually heard of it, which is why I get the opportunity to use my good offices to fill you in.  It’s called Forumwarz, and it may easily be the most unique game I’ve ever played.

You’ll play as a young forum-goer, like so many other internet users out there, who’s just starting out in the world.  You’re out to make a name for yourself in the world, and as such, you go out and attempt to “pwn” internet forums, a name for causing such disruption that you make a forum uninhabitable.  Along the way, you’ll meet a series of other internet users with a series of different goals and interests who want to employ your skills to advance those goals and interests.  You’ll run into everybody from conservative talk show hosts with bizarre proclivities to furries to indie rock figures and beyond.  But what’s lying beyond all these disparate interests?  Who are you really working for?  You’ll find out in a tale of surprising depth and intrigue.

In fact, you start out so new that your opening rank is actually “Jimmy the Re-Re”.  Please don’t bother with flames—that’s a quote.  In fact, they’ve devoted such detail to this rank that your two attacks as Jimmy are “bash keyboard with helmet” and “drool on keyboard”.  After a little time spent as Jimmy, you’ll be allowed to select a new class of character, each with different kinds of attacks and defenses—you can be a hacker, a troll, an emo kid, a camwhore or a permanoob.  You can even play through the whole game as Jimmy if you’re so inclined, but this is discouraged for all but the most extreme player.

The gameplay itself is unusual, as you select an attack, resolve the result, let the forum get in ITS attack (they’ll try to flame you with varying degrees of success) and then the process repeats until either you or the forum is down in flames.  The closest analogue is a collectible card game.  Every day, you’re permitted four “forum visits” to wreak your havoc, and the number resets at a set time each day.  This may sound somewhat restrictive, but I haven’t told you the best part yet—the game is free to play.

That’s right, the entire first chapter of Forumwarz is free to play.  The second chapter, however, you’ll have to pay to play, and the cost is minimal at best—just ten dollars.  You’d pay more for a Xbox Live title, and instead, you get a game that’s fantastically fun to play, and you can play for days in small installments.  I like to start my day with a round of Forumwarz, and frankly, I think you will too.

Oh, sure…Forumwarz doesn’t have the action and the explosions of some first person shooters and suchlike, but what it does have is clever gameplay and plenty of laughs.  .  It’s almost nice to be able to play a game that I can only play for about a half-hour or so a day instead of taking a few hours at a crack, because the trade-off for that is that I can play it for weeks and still get a great experience with something new every day. Forumwarz is great fun, and in the end, that’s what counts most in a game.

Leisure Suit Larry: Box Office Bust Game Review–Well, At Least It Tried

It’s strange, when an old series that you’d thought was long dead suddenly decides to crop up again, from literally out of nowhere.  You’d honestly begun to think that you’d never see it again, and in some cases, you might well have forgotten it ever existed at all.  That was the case with the Alone in the Dark series, and now, it’s the case for a whole new generation of PC games suddenly making their revival into the next-gen console market.  This time, we’ve got none other than Leisure Suit Larry back for more raunchy fun in Leisure Suit Larry: Box Office Bust.

And frankly, I’m having a hard time figuring out just what to say about it.

This time around, you’re playing as Larry Lovage, the young horndog nephew to the great scion of the franchise, Larry Laffer, who has recently made good as a cinema magnate.  You’re hired on for a summer job doing grunt work at uncle Larry’s studio, and in the meantime, you’re also out to expose a mole hired by a rival studio to publicly air all of Laffer and  company’s dirty laundry.  In some cases, quite literally.

If you’re familiar with the movie industry at all, it will not surprise you in the least when I tell you this was written by Allen Covert of Happy Madison Productions, convincing me thoroughly that Adam Sandler is out to destroy humanity.  They’ve brought plenty of second-rate B-list star power along to do voiceover work, including Jay Mohr, who’s reprising his seemingly favorite role as a slimeball theatrical agent, not to mention a host of lesser names like Artie Lange, Dave Atell and Carmen Electra.  There are other names in here who probably shouldn’t have been here in the first place, like Patrick Warburton, Jeffrey Tambor and Shannon Elizabeth, but I guess everybody’s got to have a side project.

The gameplay is the most tedious sort of fetch gameplay—go here, get / do that, come back, repeat until you want to throw things, but considering your character is playing the lowest kind of studio grunt (if his title’s not production assistant I’ll be downright amazed), this actually makes sense.  There is a sense of humor here, but it’ll wind up being entirely too devoted to off-color humor of every stripe to be a whole lot of good.  One particularly funny bit occurs in one of the many loading screens, suggesting that your grandmother would LOVE a copy of this game for her birthday.  My grandmother would shatter the disk into bits and force-feed them to me if I ever actually gave her a copy of this.  I just know better.

You may be interested to note that this is the second recent Larry title (the first being Leisure Suit Larry: Magna Cum Laude), and also the second created with absolutely no input from original Larry designer Al Lowe.  Maybe this has something to do with why they suck so badly.

But I’ll give it this much, it’s nice to NOT play a first person shooter for once, and in this industry, any game that’s not a first person shooter or a sports game has to get extra credit by virtue of SHEER ORIGINALITY.  Leisure Suit Larry: Box Office Bust might be worth a rental just for a little bit of something completely different and a few laughs, but it’s not going to be something you want to bring home to mother.

Or home to grandma, for that matter, despite what the loading screens suggest.