But even I can be wrong–savor the flavor, kids, because this doesn’t happen very often.  I tried Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: Echoes of Time and got a pretty good surprise out of it.

As for the plot…wow.  On RPG Cliche Day–okay, on a young man’s sixteenth birthday, he oversleeps, gets up late and dashes off to his Coming Of Age Ceremony.  Yes, they even CALL it the Coming Of Age Ceremony.  I’m both amazed and horrified.  Anyway, after completing said ceremony, he returns to the village to discover that his best friend’s little sister has contracted some kind of mysterious illness that resembles nothing so much as radiation sickness.  No, really.  And it gets better.  So now, on his sixteenth birthday, the boy has to violate the laws of his village and actually LEAVE to go find medicine to heal the “crystal sickness”.

Yeah, you heard all of that right.  An opening jam packed with cliches leads to a little girl getting radiation sickness that, if she survives it, will actually mutate her into being a super-strong entity with rapid healing powers, which turns out to be the exact same disease the hero had, and then the hero will actually break the law to go fetch medicine but no one seems to care about the legal issues here at ALL.

This may well be the most predictable and yet the most ridiculous game plotline I’ve ever heard.  I can’t remember the last time I’ve seen so many tropes in one place, only to be followed up by a ridiculous series of plot holes sufficiently large to drive a herd of chocobo through.

And yet, the game play isn’t half bad.  You’ll get some mini-games in the middle of this full-blown series of adventures, and there’s plenty of variety to be had here.  Sure, it’s all a bit cookie-cutter and plain vanilla, but there’s nothing necessarily wrong with it.  It’s a fairly fun game, and with a little bit of excitement.

Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: Echoes of Time isn’t exactly the greatest game ever, but it’s a far cry from the worst, too.  There’s reason enough to give it a try that it’ll make at least a decent rental, even if it won’t wind up taking over your life.  If you’ve got a yen for RPGs and a decent tolerance for half-baked plotlines, you’ll probably have a good time with this one.

Seriously, this is the second time you’ve rereleased a game from 1996 and called it good enough.  Is there no limit?

But okay, you’ve done it, and now we have to live with it, so off I go, to review Resident Evil.  Again.  Thanks, Big N. Thanks ever so.

Resident Evil Archives is about a group of special forces types, the S.T.A.R.S (Special Tactics And Rescue Service) team, who’s gone off to investigate a rash of murders out in the wilds of the Arklay Mountains area just outside of Raccoon City.  And when the S.T.A.R.S team doesn’t report in, Alpha Team is sent in to track them down.  What they find is nothing short of horrifying, as genetically altered mutations now rule the Arklay Mountains region.  When Alpha Team takes cover in a sprawling mansion after being chased by a pack of mutant dogs, they discover that their night of horror has only just begun.  Now missing nearly half the team, the remnants of Alpha Team have to find out what happened to everyone else and get out alive, in the process discovering the truth behind what’s going on in the Arklay Mountains.

It’s no secret that the original Resident Evil was the start of something amazing.  It’s no secret that Resident Evil was a spectacularly fun game and if you’ve never had the pleasure of trying it out then you definitely should.  And I’ll even go so far as to admit that the Wii version really does have loads better graphics.  I only WISH the original Resident Evil looked this good.  But I’ve got serious problems with Resident Evil Archives.

One, there’s the obvious.  i really question the value of this game’s existence to begin with.  Considering that the PS2 is fully backward compatible with the PS1, and the PS2 is still selling like hotcakes, why would you need the Wii to play it in the first place?  This just reeks of massive sleazy cash grab.

Two, holy hell, the CONTROLS.  I don’t know where the nunchuk’s major malfunction was, but when it’s taking me a good three minutes to try to push the bureau into position in that damn sculpture room so I can snag the first floor map, I’ve got a serious problem here, and I don’t think it’s an issue of my own fine motor skills.

Three, there’s something very seriously wrong with the difficulty here.  I run into that first zombie, just off the dining room?  My first response has always been to back into the hall so I can line up my shot.  And I’m firing into this thing in as rapid a fashion as possible, but it just shambles up and starts chewing on me.  Next thing I know, I’m down two-thirds of my starting ammo capacity and my EKG’s blinking at me that I need a health powerup and bad.  Since when do these zombies absorb fire like that?  Oh, and you can forget about trying to take head shots.  That’s all apparently randomized now, even if you could get it to aim solidly.

So all things considered, this is a great game for anyone who hasn’t yet had the sweet joy of Resident Evil and longs to see it in brilliant clarity but not necessarily with the greatest control scheme.  If you’ve got a Playstation, or a PS2, or you’ve already played Resident Evil, there’s no reason at all to crawl through the Archives.

The plot–and yes, there’s a plot, which actually elevates this one a couple notches–puts you as a young fisherman (in the generic sense–you can be a fisherwoman if the mood so strikes) who’s gone venturing out with his pet dog (or her pet dog, or either of theirs’ pet cat) to become the world’s greatest–a Fishing Master.  And of course, the only way to be a master of anything is by going forth and doing it repeatedly.  If you want to be a Pokemon Master you have to catch a load of pokemon.  But if you want to be a Fishing Master, you’ve got to catch a lot of fish.  Along with plenty of other stuff, including the keys to the boat that’ll be carrying you around the world.  You’ll play various tournaments all over the world, and engage in various quests besides.

The Wii, as you’ve probably already figured out, is pretty much tailor-made for any kind of fishing game.  With its motion capture technology and lower emphasis on graphics, it’s perfect for the kind of gameplay that fishing games require.  You can pull back on the Wiimote to cast, and the nunchuk makes for an excellent rapid-reel system.  The combination of a perfect rod controller and a perfect reel controller, plus a solid overall environment that doesn’t need a whole lot of graphic processing capability–how much computing power do you need to portray a lake with some fish?  They’ve been doing that since back before the PS1, so even the Wii can’t flub this job.

Granted, it’s a fishing game.  More specifically, it’s JUST a fishing game.  All you do is fish.  You’ll cast your line out and you’ll let it sit until you get a bite.  You’ll have the option of selecting various baits, as well as regular chances to upgrade your rods.  But no matter how many fancy bells and whistles are ever attached, at the end of the day it’s still just throw line, catch fish, repeat.

This brings me back nicely to my original point, that this may well be the best chill game I’ve played since Hot Shots Golf.  You cast your line, you catch fish.  But the fish will FIGHT.  And when you get that fight, you’ll really be in for a fight, snapping your rod back and forth to tire out the fish so you can reel it in.  It’s unusually frantic for a game like this, in fact, it’s almost out of place.  But it fits, in its way–that’s what real fishing is.  Long periods of calm punctuated by a fish fighting for its life against nearly impossible odds.

There will still be, however, plenty of long periods of calm, and staring at that bobber, waiting for a fish to strike can be downright reflective.  Relaxing.  And just enough to make Fishing Master: World Tour one of my favorite chill games.

As for the plot, you play a random traveler on his way to a certain city that’s populated entirely by cheerful anthropomorphic animals despite the fact that your character is clearly human.  Those of you wondering if your avatar is, in fact, some kind of closet furry join me in wondering the exact same thing.  Your new town is admittedly rather small and quaint, but boasts a clothing shop, a museum, a bus station, and a general store run by everybody’s favorite loan shark / raccoon, Tom Nook.  A word about Tom Nook–he operates the general store Nook’s Cranny (ba DUM bum!) and will give you your first home loan to purchase a place in the small town.  He will then offer you a job in Nook’s Cranny to get you started paying down your debt, but he’ll promptly fire you after one day with a huge amount in mortgage left.  At least I think that’s the currency of choice there; I’m a little spacey on that detail.  Anyway, the good news is that Nook’s Cranny deals in pretty much EVERY ITEM KNOWN TO MAN OR ANTHROPOMORPHIC ANIMAL, and thus, you’ll be able to sell Nook any random piece of garbage you find anywhere to pay down your house debt, despite the fact that he could literally stay within sight of his shop and get the exact same thing himself for free.

Seriously–it’s actually quite possible to pay off a home loan in Animal Crossing City Folk with cherries you find on public trees.  No wonder Tom Nook’s a loan shark–people can pay him off with shiny rocks and sticks they found on the ground and he’s required by some kind of law to take them.  He’s got to charge ridiculous fees just to keep ahead of the deflationary curve!  If I went down to MY bank and asked if they take cherries on a mortgage payment they’d probably have me arrested.  Or shot.  Possibly both!

This game is just the epoch of absurdity.  For instance–after getting fired from Nook’s, I went to the town’s bulletin board on my first day and left a rambling, profanity-laden diatribe about how I wished every resident of the town would die in a series of horrible tragedies just to see what would happen.  Sure enough…they greeted me with cheerful smiles and sunny waves and offers to join them for dinner or bridge or knocking over garbage cans or whatever giant anthropomorphic animals do for fun.  You can’t get a rise out of these people, thus you’re left to play the game as intended.

Which is, sadly, boring.  You go fishing.  You find fossils which you take to the museum where they make appropriate oohing and aahing noises over before putting them on display.  Occasionally you can go into the city (hence the name, City Folk) and see a movie or go shopping.  It’s like life, if your banker were a raccoon that accepted tree bark on a mortgage payment and your neighbor were a five foot tall pig that walked on its hind legs and sent you a vase on your birthday.

And frankly, if I wanted my games to be more like real life, I think I’d just stop, you know, playing games.

This time in the greatest first person shooter that man has ever known, you’ll board a riverboat bound for Point Lookout, Maryland (which is, apparently, an actual place, unless I’m being hoaxed.  This is possible as I’ve never been to Maryland, but a cursory net search suggests that there really is a Point Lookout) with a goal in mind before you even get off the boat–to find a young woman’s missing daughter.  Of course, once you’re actually in Point Lookout, you’ll discover that there’s an incredible opportunity to be had here, as there’s virtually no one in sight when you actually get off the boat.  You can loot as you please!  And there’s PLENTY of loot to be had here–you’ll walk into a mostly abandoned seaside town / amusement park complex where there’s only one person, and she’s tending a shop.  But right away, you’ll notice there’s something very wrong with Point Lookout, and it’s not just the psuedonuclear shambles that every other place in the Capitol Wasteland is.  The Point Lookout motel contains scenes of horror even a raider would shrink from.  The Pint-Sized Slasher even makes a bit of a reappearance (he’s not just a newspaper blurb any more!) and the secrets, lies, and mysteries contained in that swamp are more than you could ever imagine.

There’s all manner of new equipment to be had here, but most of it is a little on the mundane side.  An axe, a shovel, a lever-action rifle that fires 10mm rounds and a double-barrelled shotgun will all make appearances, as will simpler things like workman’s coveralls and a Confederate cap, which is somewhat ironic as Maryland was a border state that leaned heavily toward the Union with only a few dissenters.  In fact, a whole LOT of Point Lookout seems to be done in that antebellum style of the Civil War-era South.  The huge manor houses, the relentless bayous…a lot of it just screams Louisiana.

Now, just so you know, I didn’t go in there cold.  I had recently reset my character to get the full experience back when Broken Steel came out, so I was a bit behind, but I took the riverboat at level fourteen, with the full loadout from the Project Anchorage vault.  I had my Chinese stealth armor, I had my Gauss rifle and a laser rifle with plenty of microfusion cells, I even had a Gatling laser, and I was getting chewed up at virtually every turn.  I don’t know how these “swamp people” who seem to have no more armor than their overalls are managing to absorb metal pellets fired at near-relativistic speeds when I’m blowing away Enclave troops in powered armor within three hits with the same hardware.

That’s about my only real gripe here–Point Lookout is some amazing fun, even if I do need to bring the equivalent of a light armored division or maybe Liberty Prime itself just to pacify the populace.  I love the darker tone and the subtle infusion of horror gameplay, something that game companies should definitely take note of.  Imagine this game with ZOMBIES.  And I’m not talking ghouls, but actual zombies.

One thing, however, remains crystal clear–Fallout 3, and by extension Point Lookout, is still the best action RPG I’ve ever played.

I had to admit, after the sludgy wreck that was the original Transformers game, I wasn’t expecting much of anything out of its sequel.  It’s a general rule, at least in movie circles, that the sequel is almost never better than its predecessor.  In fact, a lot of games behave that way too–how many people played Resident Evil 2, for example, and were disappointed to discover that the house would have nothing to do with what they were playing?  I was, and I doubt I was alone.  Not that it wasn’t fun, it just wasn’t the same.

However, in the case of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, the fact that it isn’t the same actually works in its favor.

This time, you’re once again put in the role of either the Autobots or the Decepticons (you’ll get to choose when you start a new game).  Megatron’s been long since blasted and the Allspark is just plain old out of the picture, but the Decepticons aren’t exactly curling up and dying since losing their leader.  In fact, if Michael Bay was actually paying attention for twenty seconds to the source material for a change he’d have realized that everybody’s favorite obsequious toady Air Commander Starscream was probably waiting for a moment like this with baited breath.  Anyway, old Megatron may not be as dead as everyone thought, and this is all badly timed for the Autobots, who now find themselves not only taking on the still very active Decepticons but also trying to protect Spike Witwicky and dealing with the arrival of a mysterious object from space that looks like it might tip the rather fragile balance of power squarely into the hands of the Decepticons.

So this time, you’ll be launching back into a full-on action title just like the last one, only this time you’ll also get RPG elements on the side.  You’ll run and jump and blast things and even occasionally fly, all in the name of pounding Decepticon chassis and protecting humanity.  When you do break open a Decepticon, you’ll collect actual Energon cubes that can be collected and used to buy options and expansions between stages.  Those would be the RPG elements, an interesting way to shake up otherwise predictible gameplay (do you add on to your maximum health first, or do you focus on your gunnery?) and a downright welcome addition.  Oh, and those rare times you’re allowed to fly?  Great fun.

This time around, however, there are some new problems.  For instance, battling in Singapore I found it rather difficult to keep track of where my enemies were at any given time.  They had a tendency to blend in with the many buildings, and, despite the radar, it was tough to tell if they were at ground level or running along rooftops. And if so, WHICH rooftops were they on?  Also, I definitely didn’t like the new transform mode, where now you hold down a button to remain in your vehicle form and release it to come out.  The problem is, the button you have to hold down is your throttle button.  Thus, in order to slow and go around corners you MUST use the brake.  There’s no other option.

So yes, it’s true–Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is a vastly better experience than its predecessor, with a deeper storyline and deeper gameplay and some really fun flight scenes.  However, it’s far from perfect, and thus should only be intended for those who really enjoy Transformer games or clearly action-based games.

Later though it was revealed that he had survived and would be present for at least some of the sequel. Now BioWare’s Casey Hudson, the executive producer on the title has revealed that not only has Shepard survived to the sequel, he may even make it to the final chapter of the trilogy. I say ‘may’ however not out of any ambiguity on the part of the developer- the choice rests on the player. Mass Effect 2 will have certain events or differences based on choices you made in the original (assuming you played it and still have your save file). As you’ve probably heard, depending on your actions characters can die in this game. Hopefully it won’t simply be due to the rigors of everyday combat, because in the original I generally found myself the only one standing at the end of nearly every encounter. Not only can your teammates die, but Shepard himself can be offed.

Of course if you fail to keep him alive, he’ll be replaced by a stand-in character in Mass Effect 3 so as to not force the developers to create two different plotlines, but if you play your cards right the hero can survive the supposed suicide mission he embarks on in #2 and head out for another attempt at defeating overwhelming odds.

But first, the incredibly confusion Square-Enix brand plotline.  A long, long time ago, before Cid got old and showed up with his airship in every Final Fantasy game EVER, Cid was just a young treasure hunter looking for a power source so he could build that airship.  And he, along with his partner, the titular little yellow bird, thinks he’s found it in the form of Timeless Power, a fist-sized jewel that seems to have a small galaxy inside it.  Anyway, just as he’s about to collect his airship battery, it’s stolen from him by a rival treasure hunter and he, his rival, and their pets are transported to an alternate dimension in which the ringing of a clock tower bell causes a vortex to open up behind a person’s head and steals their memories.

Still with me?  Good.  Because this hasn’t even gone off the rails yet.

That’s going to happen when the star baby named Raffaello falls out of the sky and lands in front of the clock tower.  He’s contained inside a rather large egg, and when it hatches, he emerges.  Raffaello has the power to open the memory-stealing vortexes, enter them, and start sobbing uncontrollably while clinging to a rainbow-colored floating puzzle piece (representing lost memory), thus forcing you (playing as the Chocobo) to follow him into the abyss and rescue him from what looks like nothing at all.  Repeatedly.

I’m only slightly kidding on that last part–you’re going to have to fight your way through a series of enemies to reach Raffaello on each level, but somehow floating star baby just wandered right through the horde of monsters you’ll have to fight.  Ah well, it wouldn’t be much of a game without the fighting, now would it?

I admit, that when I started playing this, I was pretty enthusiastic about it.  An action-driven RPG for the Wii? Sign me up!  And indeed, the gameplay was pretty solid and fun, and there was plenty of humor to be had in the dialogue, and the stories were pretty solid and compelling (except for the overarching one featuring green-haired star babies that hatch from eggs that are capable of surviving planetary entry but can be broken from the inside by a baby), but I rapidly found a flaw in the game.

Specifically, the sheer repetition.  I found myself dragging my Chocobo through dungeon after vaguely similar dungeon with only new monster types and new items to break up the monotony.  And sadly, the story wasn’t THAT compelling to keep me that interested.  I’m still trying to get my head around Raffaello.

I admit, this particular review is going to be highly subjective.  I was basically disappointed in how much of the game seemed similar to the rest of it.  I tired of doing the same thing over and over again.  And I’ll admit, the rest of the game was solidly done enough to make it a really good game.  So if you can stomach repetition, and don’t mind when things repeat themselves, and have a fair tolerance for redundancy (not to mention repetition and repetition), then you and Final Fantasy Fables: Chocobo’s Dungeon should get along together nicely.

Super Paper Mario may be the most surprising epic I’ve ever found, featuring Mario and Luigi hanging around their house and wishing that something would for crying out loud happen already.  Naturally, they get their wish and Princess Peach has been kidnapped once again.  Suspecting Bowser, King of the Koopa, the brothers rush to his palace only to discover that, for once, he had absolutely nothing to do with it and the plumbers had landed on him while he was planning to do what had already been done.  The discovery is made that a new evil, in the form of Count Bleck, was the one behind the kidnapping.  Count Bleck has a plan that easily trumps anything Bowser ever came up with for terms of sheer catastrophic evil, namely, the summoning of a massive void that will destroy all reality everywhere as the inhabitants know it.  It’s up to Mario to go forth and tangle with Bleck and his numerous minions to rescue the princess and save all reality.

While the game itself controls much like the original Super Mario Brothers, with the Wiimote held like an original two button NES controller, you’ll occasionally use the Wiimote in its newest form to analyze monsters and locations for added effect.  This is a fairly interesting new twist on an old classic, which lends a note of credibility to the proceedings.  But the new twists don’t stop there–early on, Mario is given the ability to “flip” between dimensions, allowing him to go from 2-D to 3-D and back again.  But spending too much time in 3-D is clearly taxing on the normally flat plumber, as spending too long “flipped” causes Mario to take damage.  You’ll be able to collect and use a whole host of items for attack and defense, and you’ll also run into different fairies called Pixls that give Mario various special abilities.

It’s downright surprising to see Mario adapted into RPG status, though it’s happened before with the Paper Mario series, and even farther back with Super Mario RPG.  This time, Super Paper Mario gives us an entire large and sprawling storyline to go with your standard action elements.  Even many of the stages you’ll troop through bear a striking resemblance to those from the original Super Mario Brothers.  I found bonus level pipes in Super Paper Mario through vague half-remembrances of the original game, and this was a development that made me doubly happy.  Sure, the graphics are Wii-standard and lag way behind the next gen, but this is a truly minor point as there are so many good points to this game.  It’s a lot of fun and the control schemes are pretty nicely adapted to the Wii.  I have to admit, I liked this game, and there’s plenty of reason to believe that you’ll like it too.

That’s why THQ and Relic Entertainment are unveiling Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine. Amongst the various forces and factions of the futuristic universe are the human forces of the Ultramarines, foremost amongst their ranks are the Space Marines, the blue armor clad elite of their army. The action RPG game will have players controlling individual units in a ‘narrative-driven story campaign’ and of course in large scale online battles. Relic Entertainment is bringing years of experience developing games under the Warhammer licenses to the table along with THQ’s own history of success. The title is being developed for both the Xbox 360 and the PS3

Their next game after the Conduit is released will be Gladiator A.D., a brutal title which says that it takes its inspiration largely from recent film 300, meaning that we’ll probably see a decent amount of stylized blood and some slow-motion.: “The concept for Gladiator A.D. is to recreate the brutal fighting and high tension of the gladiatorial arenas of ancient Rome,”

As you might expect you’ll be fighting via slashes and stabs of the Wiimote and there’ll be multiplayer as well as several different story lines based on which gladiator you choose. Plotlines will be affected by your choices as after you defeat an opponent you’ll have the option to either kill them or leave them alive. Each character is more than just a slightly different story and background. They’ll all feature customizable equipment with a wide range of weapons and armor, some of which will be unique to each character. Two that have been mentioned so far are a druid and a Egyptian noble girl.

The combat system is still gesture based though, so this isn’t the true 1:1 fighting game that many have been hoping for, but it certainly seems to have the potential to be one of the next big hardcore Wii titles.

Despite the many RPG stylings of the original it remained quite heavily combat focused and the developers are promising a lot more content in this area. There’ll be more variety of weapons, including some heavier weapons systems and the ability to hinder your opponents by blowing off limbs. There’ll also be a new vehicle which they say controls better than the Mako.

There will of course be even more planets, locations and alien species to further flesh out the already detailed universe. Players will travel to a Krogan planet, an Asari planet which is compared to Coruscant from the Star Wars series and even an ‘anti-citadel’. Apparently you will play as Shepard, though it isn’t specified for how long. There’ll be familiar faces, places and items although depending on your choices major supporting characters can and will die.

The story still involves Shepard’s quest to destroy the Reapers, but additional events will involve the Cerebus corporation and its enigmatic leader. Bioware will reveal several things at E3, including the fate of Shepard, how the new travel/exploration systems will work and who you ultimately play is, meaning that even if Shepard is alive he’s not going to be your main character.

NIS America has recently released the above trailer for their upcoming Wii title Phantom Brave: We Meet Again, a game that is sure to appeal to fans of classic SNES-esque RPGs.

The developers are calling this a “strategy RPG that lets you do whatever you want” with over 500 skills, 9999 level limit and 8 directions of movement.

No honestly though, Phatom Braave: We Meet Again is shaping up to be a worthy sequel to the PS2 title Phantom Brave. We’ll have to hold judgement until we get our hands on the game come June.

Now Dragon Age: Origins is coming back to, well, its origins. Green Ronin Publishing will be releasing a pen and paper version of the game to accompany the digital adventure this summer. “We’re delighted to be working with Green Ronin to explore more of the Dragon Age universe through a pen and paper role-playing game. We’re excited to deliver Dragon Age’s unique dark, heroic fantasy to our audience in a brand new way – a perfect complement to the landmark game we’re launching on PC, Xbox 360 and PLAYSTATION 3 this fall,” said Dr. Ray Muzyka, General Manager and CEO, BioWare and General Manager and Vice President, EA.

The initial release will be a boxed set with more boxed sets and expansion books to be released later. An interesting possibility given that Bioware is including the suite of adventure creation tools is the possibility of user-created adventures being purchased and put out for the tabletop version.

As is usual for an initial announcement they’re short on details, but fans of the series who weren’t as happy about Bethesda’s version will be a little more interested when they hear that Obsidian Entertainment (a studio founded by members of Interplay’s Black Isle Studios) are doing the actual developing for the game. When asked about what engine it’d be using, the spokesperson said that you could ‘make educated guesses’ so we’ll probably be seeing another first person perspective game. It’s set for the same consoles, PC, Xbox 360 and PS3 and set to release in 2010.

The plot is pretty much as advertised–you defend crystals from being captured by various monsters, and you’ll do so by stationing various Final Fantasy figures like soldiers, black mages, monks and archers along paths leading to your crystal storehouse.  Then, a series of monsters will walk those paths, and you’ve got to lay enough firepower out to make sure that the monsters can’t reach your crystal storehouse.

I know, you’ve already played this kind of game several times before, and sometimes you’ve even played it at work when you were supposed to be doing something else, but I definitely don’t remember ever being able to play it on my Xbox 360.  So for the shockingly cheap price of eight hundred Microsoft points, you too can have an extremely pretty good time with a game you’ve played before, but never with one that’s looked this good.

Rise of the Argonauts puts you in control of King Jason of Iolcus, who was about to get married when his bride to be was suddenly assassinated by representatives of a supposedly dead assassin society called the Blacktongues.  King Jason, of course, didn’t take this lightly and went on a killing spree of everyone in the palace who wasn’t supposed to be there.  But after the blood was mopped up and the corpses were dragged out of the palace, King Jason was still left with a dead fiancée.  Thus, he set up a massive quest above the most technologically-advanced boat of all time, the Argo, to go forth and recover his fiancee’s soul and get it jammed back into her body before it boils off into a kind of metaphysical sludge throughout the cosmos.

In order to do this, you’re going to have to proceed through a series of quests to bring the earthly descendents of Ares, Hermes and Athena to the island of Delphi, where the descendent of Apollo, the Oracle, is already waiting.  Doing other side quests will also allow you to gain bonus traits and powers, giving you advantages in attack and defense as well as resistances and health bonuses.

There is, actually, a ready comparison for the gameplay on this one—it plays a LOT like Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic with multi-level dialogue choices and customizable team-building with AI controls over your teammates.  It’s actually kind of fun in this way, but only kind of.  This allows for a pretty nice story to be instituted, and give you a lot of interaction sort of challenges to do.  How do you handle a situation?  Do you try and convince your conversation target to agree with you?  Do you appeal to their sense of justice?  Or do you just bludgeon your way through the conversation and hope for the best?  These options are available to you on almost every conversation, and will help determine how you progress through the game.

See, Rise of the Argonauts has a LOT of problems to it.  One, it’s going to focus heavily on that dialogue, and the voice acting is not that great.  Two, there’s not a whole lot of fighting to be had here.  I spent way too much time running around between goals and not nearly enough time busting heads.  And when I get into a game like this I expect to be busting a lot of heads from the moment I walk in the door.  I shouldn’t have to be waiting to start the beatdown for everyone to stop talking.  That’s just not right.

However, if you’re into a good story, Rise of the Argonauts will definitely provide plenty of that.  You just have to be willing to accept that you won’t have a whole lot to DO with that story, and if you can handle that, then you’ll likely have at least a rental-grade good time with this game.  Otherwise, you’ll probably want to go find a game with a lot more action in it..

You’ll play a pilot in the service of a megacorporation that helped redeem earth from catastrophe and expanded outward into the stars.  Along the way you’ll battle pirates, mine asteroids, redeem bases from the grips of their automated defense systems and plenty more besides.  The galaxy is a pretty big place, and so, there’s plenty to do.

I love how they combined so many elements that probably shouldn’t have anything to do with each other and brought them together into a massive, beautiful whole.  This game is hours of fun, and all for sixteen hundred Microsoft points.  Try this sucker out–you won’t be disappointed!

When you’ve been gaming for a few years, you start to get used to seeing the same thing done over and over again with varying levels of success.  One of these terribly familiar tropes is the game collection game, essentially where a studio takes a large quantity of its earlier releases and bundles them together into one larger collection.  Namco’s done this several times, as has Capcom, but quite possibly the most frequent repackager is Sega.

And now, Sega brings us Sonic’s Ultimate Genesis Collection on both PS3 and Xbox 360.

When they say “Ultimate”, I’m relatively sure they mean it.  How can I tell?  Check out the list:   Alex Kidd in the Enchanted Castle, Alien Storm, Alien Syndrome, Altered Beast, Beyond Oasis, Bonanza Bros, Columns, Comix Zone, Congo Bongo, Decap Attack, Dr. Robotnik’s Mean Bean Machine, Dynamite Headdy, ESWAT: City Under Siege, Ecco the Dolphin, Ecco: The Tides of Time, Fantasy Zone, Fatal Labyrinth, Flicky, Gain Ground, Golden Axe, Golden Axe II, Golden Axe III, Golden Axe Warrior,  Kid Chameleon, Phantasy Star, Phantasy Star II, Phantasy Star III: Generations of Doom,  Phantasy Star IV: The End of the Millennium, Ristar, Shining in the Darkness, Shining Force, Shining Force II: Ancient Sealing, Shinobi, Shinobi III: Return of the Ninja Master, Sonic 3D Blast, Sonic & Knuckles, Sonic Spinball, Sonic the Hedgehog, Sonic the Hedgehog 2, Sonic the Hedgehog 3, Space Harrier, Streets of Rage, Streets of Rage 2, Streets of Rage 3,  Super Thunder Blade, Vectorman,  Vectorman 2 and  Zaxxon.

This constitutes the single biggest list of Sega games that I’ve seen in one place outside of an Electronics Boutique in 1995.  Seriously, there’s something here for everybody.  The down side, of course, is that many of these games are games you’ve already played on other “ultimate Sega collections”.  By the time we get to the next generation of gaming, there will likely be another “ultimate Sega collection”, and maybe, just maybe, it will finally have Splatterhouse.  But then, I’m looking forward to the remake too, so maybe that means I’m just weird.

You can tell from the list that there are plenty of opportunities for fun here, whether you just like a quick casual beat-em-up like Streets of Rage or Golden Axe, or if you like a deeper RPG, there’s plenty of those too, just not with all the amazing graphics that we’re all so used to since Square-Enix pretty much refused to release a game without them.  The sheer versatility of the disk makes it well worth it to spend a little time with it—you could probably go for a couple weeks straight just sampling all the games.  Plus, if you’re an old school gamer like myself, you’re probably already neck-deep in a reminisce about the first time you played some of this stuff, or the first time you took on your friends in two-player, or maybe the time you got your girlfriend hooked on Sonic.  Possibilities all, and possibilities well remembered.

As an aside, it’s also very interesting to see the differences in gaming technology and perception on an anthropological level–used to be, you’d save your money for weeks to buy Streets of Rage.  Now you can play similar games online for free; they’re called “casual” games now.  What a difference a decade makes, huh?

Leaving aside the fact that this game is probably a horrible buy, because you’ve already bought one or two “Ultimate Sega Collections”, there’s a lot of reason to like it, even if you only just rent it.  There’s just too many fun things to do with this disk to turn it down outright.

Fresh, hot, and recent– it’s the expansion for Fallout 3 that I’ve been waiting for since it came out: it’s called The Pitt, and it’s easily the most story driven expansion yet.

For those of you not already familiar with Fallout 3, and heaven help you because this is easily one of the best games ever, you are a lone wanderer in a post-apocalyptic war zone doing various things to help the world or help yourself. And in this case, you’ll have that same dichotomy as you venture into the ruins of what used to be Pittsburgh. Yes, I know that’s something of a contradiction in terms because Pittsburgh in its normal state looks something like a ruin anyway, but that’s just me being snarky. Anyway, once you’ve downloaded this particular expansion you’ll receive a radio transmission directing you to head north. Once you reach the designated meeting point, you’ll find a man in the midst of a fight for his life against three raiders. But these are not ordinary raiders—these are subhuman wastes of flesh from a settlement of woe known as The Pitt (see, Pittsburgh? The Pitt? Get it?) who are using large quantities of slave labor to rebuild the city’s steel milling industry and use it to advance their own goals. You of course will have the option of freeing the slaves or siding with the raiders, as is fairly standard for this sort of game.

As I said previously I’ve been waiting for this expansion since the original game came out– I even went so far as to get a fully repaired and fully armed gatling laser, because I had every intention of walking into that town of human filth, cleaning it off the face of the earth in a shower of heavily charged ions . Or possibly protons–physics is not my strong suit. And picking the carcass clean of every scrap I could sell for a bottle cap, of course– I considered that my just reward for killing that many raiders.

So why was I disappointed?

Maybe I built it up too much in my mind in advance. Maybe my visions of frenzy were just too much for any one game to provide. Maybe I was irked by the fact that I’d have to work around slaves; no wandering in and blasting everything in sight, no sir, not for this boy… there might be collateral damage. Maybe I was really irked by the fact that I would temporarily be a slave to get into The Pitt.

By the time I got into that particular expansion, I was carrying enough armament to sink an entire battleship by myself, possibly even sink Rivet City itself. I had my gatling lase, I had the Gauss rifle from the Operation: Anchorage run, I had my alien blaster, and I had maybe fifty raiders to shoot.

And the looting opportunities were not the greatest, either. While I DID get some sweet new guns in the form of the Metal Blaster (which is basically just Protectron’s Gaze for laser rifle, sweet on all counts and blows Biwwy’s freaking Wazer Wifle right off the MAP) and of course, The Mauler (a refined version of something called an “auto axe”, which is basically a sawblade made from a hubcap mounted on a stick with a gas throttle), I found myself downright disappointed that there wasn’t A. more to use these sweet new weapons on and B. more places to loot dry. Half the fun of Fallout 3 was wandering into houses and such and turning them upside down in a quest for bottle caps and such. There just weren’t that many places in The Pitt, aside from the raiders’ quarters and an abandoned apartment building, which irritated me. I’m in PITTSBURGH, for crying out loud. There’s GOT to be more loot than this in PITTSBURGH!

Ah, but then, I’m looking at this the wrong way. The Pitt is merely PART of Fallout 3. It isn’t a new game…it’s just a piece. And as a piece, it adds a definite flavor to Fallout 3 that’s plenty enjoyable. And maybe if you play The Pitt first, you’ll have a lot more to use those fantastic new weapons on. But either way, The Pitt will provide plenty of extra fun to your copy of Fallout 3 for just a few dollars more.