Fresh Loaf

(Photo courtesy Amazon.com)

MLB Front Office Manager
Rated E for Everyone
Released Jan. 26
Xbox 360, Playstation 3, PC
Published by 2K Sports

Apparently the M in MLB stands for menus. That’s my take-away from MLB Front Office Manager, at least. The game’s a great idea strongly undermined by indifferent execution. I’m a crazy baseball fan, with an all-consuming obsession for both real and fantasy baseball. I’m so single-minded during baseball season that my amazingly patient wife can now talk about park effects and VORP and ERA+ like a hardened sabermetrician. She’s convinced my irrational anti-Jeff Francouer ranting is going to give me an aneurysm some day. I’m passionate about baseball, so I was both excited for and disappointed by MLB Front Office Manager.

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The Lord of the Rings: Conquest
Rated T for Teen
Released on Jan. 13
Developed by Pandemic Studios
Released by Electronic Arts

The Lord of the Rings saga, available in both book and convenient film formats, has always prioritized grandeur, pageantry, silly names, and ridiculously bloated lengths. A straight-up hack’n’slash button-mashing game adaptation might seem at odds with all that, but it’s not inherently a bad concept. The idea does have at least one major strike against it, though. It’s 2009, and Lord of the Rings is about as fresh and exciting as Jay Leno. The caboose to this Tolkien gravy train should’ve come chugging along a good while ago. Even Star Wars merchandise fell off the map between Return of the Jedi and the late-’90s special editions. Yeah, the first couple of Lord of the Rings tie-in games were surprisingly good at the time, but that was back when the title of “worst president ever” was still a twinkle in W’s squinty eye. Middle Earth and its characters are no longer exciting to visit in and of themselves, so any game will have to approach them in a fresh or novel way.

Unfortunately, little about Lord of the Rings: Conquest is fresh or novel in any way. (more…)

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Skate 2
Rated T for Teen
Released on Jan. 21, 2009
Xbox 360, PlayStation 3
Developed by EA Black Box
Published by Electronic Arts

Skate It
Rated E for Everyone
Released on Nov. 19, 2008
Nintendo Wii
Developed by EA Montreal and EA Black Box
Published by Electronic Arts

Some video games are easier than stealing a flat-screen TV from a Grant Park condo. (more…)

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Valkyria Chronicles
Rated T for Teen
Released on Nov. 4, 2008
PlayStation 3
Deveoped and published by Sega

You know what would’ve made World War II better? Miniskirts! Or so says Valkyria Chronicles, Sega’s excellent new tactical role-playing game. It’s not officially about World War II, but the parallels are blatant, with a fascist power marching across a continent called Europa while imprisoning a dark-haired ethnic minority. The big picture is similar, but the details are all wrong, like a history class essay by a 15-year-old who spent the entire semester doodling record covers.

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Samba de Amigo
Rated E for Everyone
Released on Sept. 23, 2008
Nintendo Wii
Developed by Gearbox Software
Published by Sega

Samba de Amigo, Sega’s beloved maraca-based rhythm game for Dreamcast, seems like a natural for Wii; gamers are already accustomed to rapid arm movements thanks to Wii’s motion controls. The resolutely bright and colorful game also possesses Sega’s most adorable mascot, a sombrero-sporting monkey that’ll kill the kids with cuteness and the adults with kitsch. Yep, this remake should’ve been a quick and easy process, just a matter of improving the 9-year-old original’s graphics, maybe tacking on some sort of online mode, and bundling in a pair of wireless maracas. Nothing could be simpler, absolutely nothing. (more…)

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Wonder World Amusement Park

America’s got more Wiis than diabetes, but many critics and gamers regularly disparage the little white box. Their tremendous skepticism might seem like sour grapes, as if nontraditional gamers are trampling over their hallowed subculture, but it’s not entirely unwarranted. Despite a few great releases early in the year (No More Heroes, Boom Blox, Super Smash Brothers Brawl, Okami), 2008 saw a painful dearth of high-quality traditional video games for the Wii.

There wasn’t much to appease gamers interested in the sort of long-form, story-based experiences that have typified gaming since the original Nintendo Entertainment System. That doesn’t mean the Wii had a light release schedule, though; there was a deluge of Wii titles in 2008, both technically minimized installments of multi-platform hits (Call of Duty, Guitar Hero, Lego Batman), and mounds of carelessly produced rush jobs that have helped earn the system its bad reputation.

At first glance, Guinness World Records: The Video Game and Wonder World Amusement Park both look like the latter. (more…)

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Lips
Rated T for Teen
Released
Xbox 360
Developed by iNiS
Published by Microsoft

All you need to know about Lips is that it’s a karaoke game. If you like karaoke, you’ll probably like Lips. If you’re a fan of Karaoke Revolution or Sony’s Singstar series, and have been hoping something similar would come to the 360, then here you go. If karaoke frightens or repulses you no matter how many scorpion bowls you’ve downed, then Lips is most certainly not for you. (more…)

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Animal Crossing: City Folk
Rated E for Everybody
Released Nov. 16
Nintendo Wii
Developed by Nintendo EAD
Published by Nintendo

The Sims has always confused me. Video games exist to help us forget about our jobs, families, bills, Irritable Bowel Syndromes, and all of life’s other inconveniences. Why would we want to simulate the life we’re trying to avoid? Where’s the fun in that? Now, replace all that semi-realistic stuff in the Sims with a magical fantasyland populated by anthropomorphic animals with the temperaments of spoiled and highly caffeinated children, and you’ve got yourself a game. Nintendo’s Animal Crossing: City Folk to be specific.

Animal Crossing isn’t a typical video game. There are no levels, no enemies, no concrete goals other than being friendly, and there’s no end to it. Ever. Like the Sims, Animal Crossing is about living life, but a highly absurd and unrealistic version of life. The bulk of the game play consists of interacting with neighbors – running errands for them, writing letters, trading objects, or even just hanging out and chatting. You can also collect furniture and other decorations for your house, buy and design clothing, go fishing, dig up fossils, get sassed by an attitudinous pelican post office worker, hang out at the museum café and listen to noted dog troubadour KK Slider… you know, the sort of typical mundane junk that you do every day in your real life. (more…)

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Gears of War 2
Released Nov. 7
Xbox 360
Developed by Epic Games
Published by Microsoft Game Studios

Con Air is one of the best movies ever made. It’s also one of the most misunderstood. It’s a pitch-perfect parody of big dumb action movies, hitting every idiotic note with outsized aplomb, and with a roster of fully committed actors who play their cartoonish stereotypes with conviction. Those idiots that make Epic Movie and Date Movie never need to do an Action Movie, because Con Air got there first more than a decade ago, and did it with far more subtlety than those guys could ever hope for.

Gears of War 2 just might be the Con Air of video games. (more…)

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Fable II
Released Oct. 21
Xbox 360
Developed by Lionhead Studios
Published by Microsoft Game Studios

The concept of choice in video games is tricky. Does free will really exist in a situation where every possible decision has been programmed in by another person? Fable II wants to say it does, and the game impressively presents an illusion of meaningful decision making. At heart, though, no matter what the player chooses, he or she is merely treading down one of many branching paths laid by an overworked team of programmers and game designers. That doesn’t make Fable II a failure by any measure, but knowledge of the fundamental lack of free will does run somewhat counter to a large part of the game’s appeal. (more…)

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LittleBigPlanet
Released Oct. 27
PlayStation 3
Developed by Media Molecule
Published by Sony Computer Entertainment

Earlier this month, I wrote down some thoughts after poking around in LittleBigPlanet’s online beta testing period. Newsflash: I liked it, a lot. The beta revealed how far the game’s potential reached, as user-created levels both fantastic and mundane continually sprouted up. It didn’t give a good impression of the single-player mode, though, as only the first few tutorial stages were available. Well, after months of hype, and a last-minute one-week delay, the game has finally arrived, along with the 50 or so levels designed by the developer. They didn’t change my mind about the game one iota. Although fundamentally an old-school 2-D platformer, LittleBigPlanet transcends its limited run-jump-and-grab game play via a comprehensive suite of editing tools and an irrepressibly adorable design aesthetic. It may not be the best game of 2008, but it’s hard to think there’ll be one memorable and important than LittleBigPlanet. (more…)

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Dead Space
Released Oct. 14
Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, PC
Developed by EA Redwood Shores
Published by Electronic Arts

Dead Space, a thoroughly enjoyable new entry in the survival horror genre of action games, has helped me realize some heady truths about myself. If I’m ever stranded on a massive spaceship during an infestation of flesh-eating aliens, I’m pretty much gonna be totally screwed. Even with tri-beamed plasma lasers and deployable saw blades, I’ll probably get eviscerated about a thousand times over. It doesn’t matter how many razor-sharp mutant limbs I blast off, or scurrying balls of sudden death I stomp into smithereens, there’ll always be at least three more around the next corner waiting to graphically vivisect my incompetent self. Yes, I really suck at surviving. (more…)

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Lego Batman
Released Sept. 23
Wii, Xbox 360, PS3, PS2, DS and PC
Developed by Traveller’s Tales
Published by Warner Brothers Interactive Entertainment

Batman is the third cultural touchstone to get the Lego videogame treatment after Star Wars and Indiana Jones. It’s a better fit than the previous two, with a richer, deeper body of source material to tap. It also shares more of a focus with the series’ primary game-play mechanic, which is pretty much just busting stuff and handing Lego dudes their blocky asses through a variety of foot- and fist-based techniques. Oh yeah, and vehicles. You can’t have a Lego game without ’em and Batman’s got a ton, from the Batamaran to the Segway Personal Batsporter. So it’s basically a perfect combination of franchises, right? A surefire recipe for endless hours of fun, no questions asked?

Well, not quite. (more…)

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