ActRaiser's mix of action and civilization building is unique, but it's the masterful art direction and music composition that will win you over.

The Good: Action and sim portions complement each other; multilayered backgrounds and large bosses show what the super nintendo entertainment system can do; soundtrack is beautifully orchestrated.

The Bad: Action and sim portions are a little plain by themselves; character animation is stiff.

ActRaiser was one of the first games to hit store shelves following the launch of the SNES in North America and also one of the first games to really show off what the system could do. The juxtaposition of side-scrolling action levels and top-down city building portions was innovative at the time. The graphics demonstrated the system's ability to push rich 16-bit colors, multilayered backgrounds, and large bosses, while Yuzo Koshiro's emotionally evocative musical score raised the standards of what people would later come to expect from video game soundtracks. Now that ActRaiser is available for the Wii's Virtual Console, it's remarkable to see that 16 years of time has hardly dulled the game's ability to delight the senses and to hold a player's attention from start to finish.

Action levels culminate in a battle against a large guardian monster.

In ActRaiser, you play the role of a god that has to rid the world of monsters and guide the development of human civilization. Each of the game's six lands consists of two action levels and a simulation portion. The action levels are side-scrolling stages reminiscent of those found in such games as Castlevania or Ghosts N' Goblins, where you jump between platforms, hack away at monsters with your sword, and ultimately face off against one of the devil's guardians. Defeating the first guardian in an area allows you to construct a temple and give life to a couple of followers. You will then guide these followers in the top-down simulation view, which is akin to a relaxed rendition of Sim City. For example, you'll direct the people on where to build or cause natural disasters to clear away rocks and trees to give them more land to cultivate. Other that that, you'll sit back as they build their homes and make babies. You'll also spend a fair amount of time moving your cherubic angel character around and shooting cupid arrows at monsters until the people seal up any surrounding monster lairs. After they do so, you can tackle the remaining guardian in the land's second action stage. Your survival in the action levels is somewhat dependent on your success in the simulation portions because you gain additional health points and magic scrolls with each population increase.

Taken together, the action and simulation portions really complement each other. In addition to the items they bring you, the people in the simulation view will often approach you with stories about artifacts they've found or strange events that are happening. You can choose to do nothing and see how things play out, you can perform a miracle, or you can bring back an item from another land to change the outcome. The variations in population size and character sentiment that result from your actions make building the world seem like a malleable process. The tearjerker stories also give you motivation for going through the action levels and explain some of the things you'll see in them.

On the other side of the coin, the action levels provide the visual punch that the simulation portions lack. With that said, the character animation merely gets the job done. For example, monsters aren't knocked back when you attack them, while your own character only has a single jump and a couple of attack animations. However, everything else about the graphics is top-notch, both in terms of art style and technical aspects. The various forests, temples, deserts, or icy wastelands are colorful and lush. The multilayered backdrops frequently employ scrolling effects that bring the gigantic waterfalls and thick cloud cover in the background to life. The bosses are a menagerie of armored goliaths, sphinxes, dragons, or other mythical creatures that get bigger and bigger with each land you visit.

In the sim levels, you use natural disasters to help your people cultivate the land.

Throughout the whole quest, your ears will delight to a dozen different pieces of beautifully synthesized music composed by Yuzo Koshiro. Although Koshiro is mainly known for his work on the Streets of Rage series, his ActRaiser soundtrack is arguably his best work and one of the best video game soundtracks ever produced--period. His classically themed pieces run the gamut from soothing or dramatic to outright bombastic. You'll never forget the opening notes that lead up to the title screen, the haunting melody that accompanies a tragic death in the land of Kasandora, or the symphonic crescendo that continues to build for minutes after you beat the game until it concludes with a Star Wars-style climax. Some of the synthesized instruments will sound artificial to ears that have grown up in an era of CDs and iPods, but not so much that a few sharp notes will get in the way of enjoying an otherwise blissful soundtrack. The sheer variety of rich notes and melodies Koshiro was able to coax out of the system seems even more impressive now that we can look back to reflect upon how only a couple other games in the Super NES library possess soundtracks that rival ActRaiser with regard to symphonic bluster or durability.

Unless you're prejudiced against 2D games, ActRaiser will charm your socks off and keep you captivated for the entire five or six hours that it'll take you to finish it. That alone should more than justify spending 800 Wii points. But in all likelihood, you'll find yourself playing through the game multiple times just to reexperience its unique blend of gameplay styles and awesome soundtrack.

Planet Puzzle League offers a puzzle game experience that is familiar, flawed, and fun, all at once.

The Good: Brain-bending puzzle mode; interesting combo mechanic; robust online options; you can talk to other players via voice chat.
The Bad: Normal game often degenerates into chaos; so-so graphics; not as new as its price tag.
Planet Puzzle League is the latest block to drop in an old series of simple puzzle games known as Puzzle League (or Panel de Pon). The idea in these games has always been to shift like-colored blocks into rows or columns of three, prompting them to politely vanish. It should sound familiar, and not just because the series has been around for 15 years. Everyone, at some point in their gaming career, has matched colored blocks and made them disappear. So what separates Planet Puzzle League's colorful cubes from the other blocks, jewels, and pills you've sorted in your life? Two things in particular: The DS stylus, which makes sorting blocks easier than ever before, and global Internet play, so you can challenge the square-pushers of the world. These two new features make Planet Puzzle League a nice place to revisit, though its staying power is questionable.
Back evil rectangles! You shall not have my squares this day.
In case you aren't familiar with the series, colored squares rise from the bottom of your screen. You can drag them horizontally, but not vertically, to match up with like-colored squares. Like Tetris, if a block touches the top of the screen, you lose. Also like Tetris, the game moves faster as you score points. So while the blocks rise slowly at first, they eventually speed up.
The intellectual meat of this game is setting up the blocks in a way that creates a chain reaction: Your first matchup leads to a purple block falling between two other purples (for example), which in turn leads to another score, and so on and so forth. Planning these sequences, or at least recognizing them, is what has always made Puzzle League fun and engaging.
However, this leads to an odd flaw in the gameplay. To set up a sweet chain reaction, the screen must be mostly full of blocks. Yet, if the screen is nearly full, you're nearly dead. In the early going you have time to work sweet magic, but as the game accelerates, you're reduced to simply flinging blocks around, praying for random chain reactions. This creates a perverse sense of guilt every time you do something cool, because like a bee setting up a perfect sting, you're hastening your own demise.
This is probably why Puzzle Planet never became as popular as other giants in the puzzle genre--you're constantly working against yourself. However, there are more modes than just the normal game, and these are far more rewarding. The best is puzzle mode, which confronts you with an assortment of blocks that must all be neutralized within one or two moves. These are well paced, usually with four or five easy puzzles to keep you winning, and then one mind-bender to get you thinking.
Another cool mode is active puzzles mode, though it requires some explaining. When matched blocks disappear, you have a split-second to shove a nearby block into the space, hopefully leading to another series of matched blocks. So, every active puzzle begins with a series of blocks disappearing, and you have to quickly move the one or two blocks that will keep the combo rolling, until all the blocks are gone. These puzzles are where the game earns its money.
Then there's daily mode. This mode contains three challenges you can attempt only once per day. So you'd think these would not be challenges you could easily attempt outside of daily mode anytime you wanted. After all, what would be the point of that? But alas, they are, making this feature utterly pointless.
This leads to a greater problem with Planet Puzzle League: its total lack of continuity and purpose. Sure, there are tons of puzzles to solve, but there's nothing to motivate you aside from your own lack of anything better to do. Once you put this game down, it's easy to forget about, because there are no rewards or anything else to look forward to. Also, the various elements, while good in and of themselves, do not connect in any meaningful way.
At least the head-to-head content is nice and atavistic. If you break open a nice, big combo, you'll dump giant blocks on your opponent's pile. And if you work certain item blocks into your combos, you might reshuffle your opponents' pieces, freeze up one of their rows, or simplify the colors on your own board. Not only can you wirelessly challenge your friends, you can also take on complete strangers from around the world. What's more, with the DS headset (not included), you can even chat with your opponents. Now, if you want to discuss the psychological effects of orange blocks versus blue with a like-minded puzzle nerd, you finally can. You can also let interested DS owners download a free demo of the game.
As you can see, the DS engine handles both squares and circles with ease.
Planet Puzzle League has solid graphics, though colored squares haven't exactly been cutting-edge since oh, 1980. And the backgrounds are murky, fuzzy, and dull, and are much better when you don't even notice they're there. The music is upbeat electronic stuff that's typical for your average puzzle game.
Even though the game itself is far from puzzle-perfect, Planet Puzzle League is a fun title with enough worthy challenges to warrant playing. Its weird, paradoxical combo scheme keeps it from approaching the greatness of games like Lumines, Tetris, or Super Puzzle Fighter, but if you're looking for a new way to flex your brain and test your reflexes, this piece is a solid fit.

Crush is a one-of-a-kind action puzzle game, and its unique concept makes for a refreshing and bizarre experience.

Genuine originality in video games is rare, and when it comes to puzzle games, doubly so. Even some of the best, most recent examples of the genre, such as D3's inventive Puzzle Quest, have merely been really good amalgams of well-established game concepts. Crush for the PlayStation Portable is an action puzzle game that owes very little of its novel concept to games that preceded it, and it capitalizes on its M.C. Escher-inspired gameplay with a healthy number of increasingly involved puzzles. It's challenging without being too frustrating, and it's easily one of the more unique puzzle games to come around in years.
Do some mental calisthenics before you start playing Crush, or you might sprain your brain.
One thing that makes Crush rare as a puzzle game is that rather than simply serving as a suite of logic puzzles, it offers some real story progression to accompany your advancement through the game. What's more, the story is surprisingly engaging. Danny is a troubled young man who can't sleep. His insomnia becomes so severe that he's sent to an institution, where he's put in the care of the prototypically Freudian psychologist Dr. Reubens. There's a madness to Dr. Reubens' method for curing Danny, which hinges on the mad science of a device he built called C.R.U.S.H., which stands for Cognitive Regression Utilizing Psychiatric Heuristics (which, as Danny points out, means it should actually be called C.R.U.P.H.) This contraption allows Danny to travel into his own damaged psyche, through which he has to go on a sort of vision quest to get to the root of his mental malady. You'll get semianimated sequences at various points in Crush as Danny travels back in time through his own psyche, which, along with the game's warped, through-the-looking-glass aesthetic, go far in setting a surreal tone.
This dovetails nicely into the actual gameplay, which revolves around our perceptions of 2D and 3D space. The levels in Crush generally look like somewhat abstract 3D platforming levels, and your primary objective in every level is to collect a number of Danny's lost marbles, which will then unlock the level exit. Make your way to the exit, and you're on to the next level. As simple as this sounds, you'll quickly find that Danny's basic jumping ability won't be enough to get you very far, even in the very first level, which is where Danny's ability to crush the level comes into play. By tapping L1, you'll effectively flatten all of the level geometry, turning the action from 3D to 2D. Depending on where Danny is standing, as well as which way you have the camera facing, this can create walkable pathways where before there was nothing. Move the camera so that it's looking straight down at Danny, and crushing will allow you to walk across a series of platforms too high to climb as though they were flat land. Crushing from 3D to 2D can also turn what appeared to be marks on a wall into solid platforms, and it can also turn certain types of solid 3D blocks into invisible 2D blocks. There are even types of supersolid blocks that cannot be crushed if Danny is standing in front of them.
There's more to concern yourself with than just crushing, though. You'll often have to actively affect your environment in order to advance, and the levels are regularly littered with giant barrels and metal balls that you can push around, as well as pressure switches you can stand on to change the very geometry of the level. You'll also find "thoughts" throughout the game, which manifest themselves as glowing neon signs on walls and floors. Thoughts can be activated only when the level is crushed, and they remain active only as long as they're visible onscreen. The most common thought is the trophy thought, which makes a trophy appear on the screen that, if collected, unlocks a special time-trial level. You'll find other thoughts that are critical to your progress, such as the lightheaded thought, which increases Danny's jumping ability, or the temporal thought, which stops time. Just like in real life, not all thoughts are helpful, and the dimensional thought prevents you from uncrushing the level.
The basic concept behind Crush is pretty mind-blowing, and the specific behaviors of different types of blocks can be a lot to soak in at once. The game very wisely walks you through a series of tutorials early on, giving you a good amount of time to get acclimated. The levels become more involved and more challenging as you progress, though never to a fault. New concepts are introduced every 10 levels or so, such as infinitely thin blocks that appear invisible from certain angles; giant, antagonistic cockroaches; alarm clocks that will wake Danny up, effectively yanking him out of his dream world; and more. Since Danny is basically just dreaming his way through the game, and since Crush doesn't play by The Matrix rules, death in the game doesn't have significant consequences. The game won't let you uncrush the level if Danny is standing on a platform that doesn't exist in 3D. If you do manage to put Danny in harm's way, be it by jumping off the edge of the level into oblivion, jumping from too high a ledge, getting attacked by a giant cockroach, or getting smooshed by a moving platform, the game will simply take you back to a previous checkpoint in that level, of which there are usually many.
Playing Crush for extended periods of time may have adverse effects on your perception of reality.
Some might be quick to point out that the recently released Super Paper Mario for the Nintendo Wii also played with the relationship between 2D and 3D perspectives. There's a similarity, to be sure, but the concept is much more integral to the gameplay in Crush, and as such, it's much better developed here. The look and feel of Crush is also markedly different, evocative of a Tim Burton movie, complete with an eerily big-top-inspired Danny Elfman-style soundtrack.
About the only slight that can be made against Crush is that there could've been more levels. There are more than 40 levels in the game, and hidden unlockables like time-trial levels and concept art serve as pretty good reasons to revisit levels. The game's length is fine; it's just that the experience is so mind-bending and unique, you wish that it kept going--a fault more games wish they had.

Crush is a one-of-a-kind action puzzle game, and its unique concept makes for a refreshing and bizarre experience.

The Good: Crushing mechanic is refreshingly unique; thoroughly explores the relationship between 2d and 3d; levels become harder and more complex at a manageable pace; distorted presentation complements the subject matter; it's a puzzle game with a story worth following.
The Bad: Would have benefited from more levels.
Genuine originality in video games is rare, and when it comes to puzzle games, doubly so. Even some of the best, most recent examples of the genre, such as D3's inventive Puzzle Quest, have merely been really good amalgams of well-established game concepts. Crush for the PlayStation Portable is an action puzzle game that owes very little of its novel concept to games that preceded it, and it capitalizes on its M.C. Escher-inspired gameplay with a healthy number of increasingly involved puzzles. It's challenging without being too frustrating, and it's easily one of the more unique puzzle games to come around in years.
Do some mental calisthenics before you start playing Crush, or you might sprain your brain.
One thing that makes Crush rare as a puzzle game is that rather than simply serving as a suite of logic puzzles, it offers some real story progression to accompany your advancement through the game. What's more, the story is surprisingly engaging. Danny is a troubled young man who can't sleep. His insomnia becomes so severe that he's sent to an institution, where he's put in the care of the prototypically Freudian psychologist Dr. Reubens. There's a madness to Dr. Reubens' method for curing Danny, which hinges on the mad science of a device he built called C.R.U.S.H., which stands for Cognitive Regression Utilizing Psychiatric Heuristics (which, as Danny points out, means it should actually be called C.R.U.P.H.) This contraption allows Danny to travel into his own damaged psyche, through which he has to go on a sort of vision quest to get to the root of his mental malady. You'll get semianimated sequences at various points in Crush as Danny travels back in time through his own psyche, which, along with the game's warped, through-the-looking-glass aesthetic, go far in setting a surreal tone.
This dovetails nicely into the actual gameplay, which revolves around our perceptions of 2D and 3D space. The levels in Crush generally look like somewhat abstract 3D platforming levels, and your primary objective in every level is to collect a number of Danny's lost marbles, which will then unlock the level exit. Make your way to the exit, and you're on to the next level. As simple as this sounds, you'll quickly find that Danny's basic jumping ability won't be enough to get you very far, even in the very first level, which is where Danny's ability to crush the level comes into play. By tapping L1, you'll effectively flatten all of the level geometry, turning the action from 3D to 2D. Depending on where Danny is standing, as well as which way you have the camera facing, this can create walkable pathways where before there was nothing. Move the camera so that it's looking straight down at Danny, and crushing will allow you to walk across a series of platforms too high to climb as though they were flat land. Crushing from 3D to 2D can also turn what appeared to be marks on a wall into solid platforms, and it can also turn certain types of solid 3D blocks into invisible 2D blocks. There are even types of supersolid blocks that cannot be crushed if Danny is standing in front of them.
There's more to concern yourself with than just crushing, though. You'll often have to actively affect your environment in order to advance, and the levels are regularly littered with giant barrels and metal balls that you can push around, as well as pressure switches you can stand on to change the very geometry of the level. You'll also find "thoughts" throughout the game, which manifest themselves as glowing neon signs on walls and floors. Thoughts can be activated only when the level is crushed, and they remain active only as long as they're visible onscreen. The most common thought is the trophy thought, which makes a trophy appear on the screen that, if collected, unlocks a special time-trial level. You'll find other thoughts that are critical to your progress, such as the lightheaded thought, which increases Danny's jumping ability, or the temporal thought, which stops time. Just like in real life, not all thoughts are helpful, and the dimensional thought prevents you from uncrushing the level.
The basic concept behind Crush is pretty mind-blowing, and the specific behaviors of different types of blocks can be a lot to soak in at once. The game very wisely walks you through a series of tutorials early on, giving you a good amount of time to get acclimated. The levels become more involved and more challenging as you progress, though never to a fault. New concepts are introduced every 10 levels or so, such as infinitely thin blocks that appear invisible from certain angles; giant, antagonistic cockroaches; alarm clocks that will wake Danny up, effectively yanking him out of his dream world; and more. Since Danny is basically just dreaming his way through the game, and since Crush doesn't play by The Matrix rules, death in the game doesn't have significant consequences. The game won't let you uncrush the level if Danny is standing on a platform that doesn't exist in 3D. If you do manage to put Danny in harm's way, be it by jumping off the edge of the level into oblivion, jumping from too high a ledge, getting attacked by a giant cockroach, or getting smooshed by a moving platform, the game will simply take you back to a previous checkpoint in that level, of which there are usually many.
Playing Crush for extended periods of time may have adverse effects on your perception of reality.
Some might be quick to point out that the recently released Super Paper Mario for the Nintendo Wii also played with the relationship between 2D and 3D perspectives. There's a similarity, to be sure, but the concept is much more integral to the gameplay in Crush, and as such, it's much better developed here. The look and feel of Crush is also markedly different, evocative of a Tim Burton movie, complete with an eerily big-top-inspired Danny Elfman-style soundtrack.
About the only slight that can be made against Crush is that there could've been more levels. There are more than 40 levels in the game, and hidden unlockables like time-trial levels and concept art serve as pretty good reasons to revisit levels. The game's length is fine; it's just that the experience is so mind-bending and unique, you wish that it kept going--a fault more games wish they had.

Mortal Kombat: Armageddon is a good entry point to the series, but if you've played any recent Mortal Kombat game, you'll notice that most of this stu

The Good: Every Mortal Kombat character, big and small, is here in some form; interesting single-player story mode; supports the classic controller.

The Bad: Reuses a lot of stuff from the previous MK games; custom fatality system lacks personality; not a ton of differentiation among the game's 60+ fighters.

Mortal Kombat: Armageddon is Midway's attempt to take most of the stuff that has appeared in a Mortal Kombat game since Deadly Alliance was released back in 2002 and mash it all into one big game. It is a send-off of sorts of the current fighting style and game engine for the series. It was also a fitting send-off of the previous generation of consoles when it was originally released on the PlayStation 2 and Xbox last year. Now, that game has come to the Wii, where it automatically becomes one of the best fighting games currently available on the platform simply because the options are limited. Armageddon reuses a little too much content from previous games, and as a result, it feels like it is coasting. But it's also the first substantial modern fighting game to be released on the Wii, and that alone, makes it notable.

Can't these robot ninjas just get along?

There's a real kitchen-sink mindset at work in MK: Armageddon. If you can think of a Mortal Kombat character that has appeared in any of the previous games, real or rumored, chances are he or she makes some kind of appearance in this game. There are more than 60 playable characters in the game, each with his or her own fighting styles, though in practice, most of the major differences come down to their special moves. Each character has a handful of special attacks, and the classics are all present. Scorpion will still jab a spear into your chest and yank you across the screen, while Sub-Zero can still freeze you solid for a free attack. And yes, Stryker will still whip out a gun to blast you. All in all, the characters feel balanced, which is a feat, considering there are a ton of them. On top of that, there's a robust character-creation system that lets you customize the look and moves of a fighter, which can be cool if you're willing to put some time into it.

That sense of creation has also crept into the game's grisly finishing moves. While fatalities in previous games were unique, canned sequences of gruesome-yet-usually-hilarious violence, now you can choose how to eliminate your opponents by executing a series of moves after the fight has ended. These moves are simple and include changing your opponent's position, ripping off limbs, punching his or her head off, and so on. It's a clever idea that, unfortunately, totally lacks personality. Sure, it's up to you to decide how to finish your opponent, but nothing that you can do matches the thrills of setting your foes on fire, kissing them to make them explode, or performing any of the other classic fatalities that the MK series has demonstrated over the years.

The interesting thing about the Wii version is that the game has been updated and altered to fully support the Wii Remote and Nunchuk combo. You can do these special moves by holding down the trigger on the Wii Remote and swaying it in a specific fashion. For example, if you move it away from your opponent then toward him or her with Scorpion, you can do the spear. It's a neat idea that is hampered a bit because the Wii Remote never feels quite right. It's difficult to get a high level of accuracy and timing with such an imprecise control method. On top of that, the game maps all of your normal attacks to different directions on the Wii Remote's D pad, which isn't very friendly when it comes to tapping out combos. It's sort of fun to mess around with it, but once you get serious about actually playing MK: Armageddon, you'll be thankful that it has support for the Classic Controller and GameCube controllers.

In addition to the basic arcade mode, where you'll fight your way to the top and take on a boss, the game has a gimmicky-yet-charming kart racing mode, called Motor Kombat. It also has a konquest mode, which is an interesting single-player story mode where you'll run around 3D environments, collecting items, interacting with the various characters from the MK universe, and getting into a lot of fights. If you're familiar with the konquest mode in MK: Deception, you'll be happy to know that this is a much more in-depth and interesting mode than the one in Deception. Along the way, you'll unlock plenty of alternate outfits, new characters, music, concept art, and so on. Most of this unlockable stuff surfaces in the krypt, which is a menu featuring page after page of little knickknacks and curiosities. It'll probably take most players about six hours to navigate the fights and traps of the konquest mode, which is one of the game's high points. There's also an endurance mode that's exclusive to the Wii version of the game, and like similar modes that appear in other fighting games, it has you face off against one opponent after another, stopping to give you a little health boost after every few fights.

It's unfortunate, though understandable given the lack of online Wii games at this point, that MK: Armageddon doesn't have any kind of online support. Being able to fight or kart race against players around the world was a substantial part of the PS2 and Xbox releases, so it's worth noting that the Wii version lacks any sort of online play. However, you can fight against another player in the game's versus mode, and up to four players can play Motor Kombat via split-screen. So if you're surrounded by MK fanatics, or really, anyone who is up for a fight, you probably won't care. As in most fighting games, the game is best when you're playing against a similarly skilled human opponent.

Endurance modes are nothing new in the fighting game world, but this one is exclusive to the Wii version of the game.

Armageddon has a good look to it, with plenty of painful-looking strikes and flashy special moves. Like most aspects of Armageddon, it's a little less impressive if you've been following the series on other platforms because a lot of the animation has been reused. Many of the background stages look really nice and, as an added bonus, have stage-specific fatalities that can end a fight quickly. You can knock people into fans, lava, and all other sorts of nefarious traps. The soundtrack helps move the game's dark feel along nicely. The sound effects that go into the strikes and attacks also help make them all sound like they really hurt. While you get the impression that a Wii-specific game could have looked better, this port still looks just fine.

Though you may find yourself nonplussed by the latest MK entry if you've been following the series for any length of time, Wii owners who haven't kept up with Midway's fighting series will find plenty of thrills, a ton of characters, and a lot of different things to do. The utter lack of good fighting games on the Wii certainly doesn't hurt either. If you're a Wii owner looking to knock off some heads and own a Classic or GameCube controller or two, Mortal Kombat: Armageddon is pretty kool. Er…cool.

Forza 2 delivers on nearly every aspect you'd want in a Forza sequel. It drives incredibly, it's wonderfully presented, and it's rich with modes and f

The Good: A phenomenal driving model that's appealing to both beginners and experts; races just feel right, from the great car physics to the top-notch opponent artificial intelligence; framerate consistently holds steady at a brisk 60 frames per second; tons of cars to buy and modes to race them in; customization is ridiculously deep.
The Bad: Racing sound effects aren't as varied as they could be; could have used a few more tracks.
It's exceedingly rare when you can say that a driving game is built for everybody. Considering how splintered the driving-game audience can be, with the hardcore sim-savvy fans on one side and the more casual, arcade-oriented crowd on the other, most games that have tried to appeal to both markets haven't pulled it off. However, Microsoft's Forza Motorsport for the Xbox flew in the face of other such failures. It created a game that was both easily accessible and remarkably deep, with a challenge level so scalable that you'd be hard pressed not to find some setting you liked. Now, Forza has come to the Xbox 360, and expectations are understandably high. In most regards, Forza Motorsport 2 delivers on those expectations. Not only does it continue to improve and tweak an already fantastic driving model, but it also piles on more cars, more tracks, more modes, and more features than you'll know what to do with. That's not to call the game flawless, but for every little quirk that pops up in Forza 2, there are a myriad of awesome elements to make those issues practically irrelevant.
Forza makes its debut on the 360, and what a debut it is.
Forza 2 cobbles together more than 300 cars from 50 major manufactures; a ton of licensed, aftermarket parts and upgrades; and 12 racing environments, several of which are real-world tracks like Laguna Seca, Mugello, Sebring, and the dastardly Nürburgring. It's a healthy jump in content over the original Forza, especially with the cars. Looking down the list, you'll race in everything from a Volkswagen Golf or Mini Cooper to top-of-the-line Ferraris, McLarens, and Saleens. It's a huge list, with tons of custom-built variations on popular rides and exceedingly fast racers. Between the 12 tracks, 47 different ribbons are available, meaning many of the tracks can be raced through a host of different ways. The best tracks in the game tend to be the ones based on real life. A couple of the tracks can be real snoozers, but even they have a ribbon or two that can be fun, given the right situation.
None of those cars would make a bit of difference if the game didn't drive well--so it's good that it does. Cars are built out in such a way that they all have an individual feel on the track. Of course, you'll feel the difference between an Enzo and a Beetle, but you even feel the differences between a Beetle and a Golf. No two cars feel quite alike, and that's understandable given the wide variety of statistics and parts unique to each car. In nearly every case, cars feel just right as they speed around the track. Each car's physics are spot-on, and you almost never get the feeling that the car you're driving isn't behaving true to life. The only time the physics get a little wonky is with collisions. Basic bumps and rubs look and feel right, but big head-on collisions seem oddly understated.
Another thing that sets all the different cars apart from one another is the new performance index rating system. Cars are still classified through a lettered system (D-class cars are the lower end of stock, store-bought rides; S class is all high-performance vehicles; and so on), but the new performance index now separates out cars within their own class by assigning each a numerical value based on individual stats in speed, acceleration, braking, and the like. Upgrading cars with new parts boosts the PI, and if you go over a certain number, the car will actually move into a new letter class. Seeing the PI of opponent cars versus your own lets you know exactly what you're up against and, in some cases, if you need to spend some cash before you're able to compete.
The new braking-only driving line aid is a fantastic addition. So is the option to force players not to use driving aids during online play.
What primarily makes Forza 2 such a joy to drive is the way you can scale the difficulty to your own skill level. If you're a novice player and don't know a Gran Turismo from a Need for Speed, Forza 2 eases you into simulation driving nicely with several driving-assist features. There are basic ones, like stability control, antilock braking, and traction control that all work to keep your car on the road without too much duress. The big feature in the original Forza was the dynamic driving line assist, which essentially put a big line of color-coded arrows along the track (green means accelerate, yellow means slow down, red means brake), dictating the ideal driving path. This same line is present in Forza 2, but there's also a modified version of it that only shows braking spots. This ends up being the ideal line to use, as the original line has a tendency to become something of a crutch. Here, you're really only getting help with the turns, and once you've run a track a few times, you can usually get a good feel for where every ideal spot for deceleration is. If you're already into the hardcore driving sim genre, these features probably sound more annoying than anything else. Fortunately, you can turn it all off and get the full, realistic driving experience if you like. Doing so does make the game significantly more difficult, so consider yourself warned.
Even with all the assists turned on, careful driving is a must in Forza 2. Take a turn slightly too fast, and you're spinning out in the rough. Likewise, driving too passively will drop you down in placings fast, as the artificial intelligence will capitalize quickly. That's what you'd want in opponent AI, of course, and in most every situation, opponent drivers behave smartly. Unless you give them a reason to, opponents rarely bump or slam into you; instead, they concede corners if they can't pass you cleanly. And if you happen to start slamming around like bumper cars, the AI will adjust accordingly, with more easily intimidated opponents backing off and more aggressive opponents knocking you off the track if they get the chance. Generally though, they'll stick to their racing lines and drive professionally. In a sense, you know the AI is good because you don't find yourself thinking about the other cars much, except at moments where you're fixing to pass them or one of them is aiming to pass you.
There's more to Forza 2's driving model than great physics and smart AI. The driving interface is another huge factor in what makes the game so enjoyable. While driving, you can bring up a variety of different menus that show where your car is damaged, the temperature of your tires, and even some advanced telemetry data that might look like gobbledygook to a more casual player, but these give fantastic insight into the performance and status of your car for those who know how to read it. These options are what sets Forza 2 apart from other games of this type.
Perhaps the best overall aspect of Forza 2 is that it gives you so many ways to experience its fantastic driving model. You can start out participating in exhibition races or time trials, hop online to take on the rest of the world, or dive right into career mode, which is the true meat of the game. Career mode starts you out picking a region to call your home, with options of North America, Asia, and Europe. Specifying a region essentially dictates what brands of cars you want to establish a relationship with early on, and you'll quickly find yourself earning discounts with automakers from your region.
With over 300 cars in the game, it'll take you a while to collect 'em all.
With a region picked out and your first car bought, you'll be presented with only a few unlocked racing series and a driver level of one. From here, it's race, race, race. The career mode is where you earn all your cash and boost your driver level. Boosting your cash flow lets you buy new cars and part upgrades, while upping your driver level earns more discounts on cars and unlocks new races to take part in.
What's neat about the career mode is that it finds ways to keep the progression fresh, even if it is putting you on the same courses again and again for dozens of hours. You'll encounter region-specific races, class-specific races, ones limited to certain levels of horsepower, and the ever-sadistic endurance races that have you racing on the same course for far, far longer than the average five- to six-lap endeavor. The lack of track variety starts to wear after a bit, especially considering how long the career mode is, but there's enough variety to the types of races to keep you very much interested in finishing your career.

While you'll probably be able to think of a few Taito games you wish were included, there's just enough here to make it worth checking out Taito Legen

The Good: Contains good solid hits, like Space Invaders and Rastan; good screen rotation options.

The Bad: Contains too many different versions of Space Invaders.

Taito Legends Power-Up for the PSP is a different compilation from the two volumes that have appeared on the PlayStation 2. This collection culls games from both volumes and puts them into one all-new-but-still-old package. The emulation feels good, and the options are about what you'd expect from a retro compilation, so if you're into these games, it's worth checking out Taito Legends Power-Up.

While it might be hard to get too excited about something like Chack 'N Pop, games like Elevator Action are still fun.

There are a healthy number of games included. On the disc, you'll find emulated versions of Space Invaders, Space Invaders Part 2, Space Chaser, Crazy Balloon, Balloon Bomber, Lunar Rescue, Phoenix, Qix, Space Dungeon, Alpine Skin, Elevator Action, Chack 'N Pop, The Legend of Kage, The Fairyland Story, Return of the Invaders, KiKi Kai Kai, Rastan, Kuri Kinton, New Zealand Story, Raimais, and Cameltry. There are a few bright spots in the list, as well as some more obscure stuff. You get the options you'd expect to find in a game like this, which really boils down to multiple screen modes. For vertically oriented games, such as Space Invaders, you can opt to rotate the screen and hold the PSP sideways. This is great for looking even goofier in public places than you already do, but you also get a bigger view of the action, so let those onlookers scoff; you're the one that gets to play a quality emulated version of Qix on the bus. They're just jealous.

In addition to the emulated Taito games, there are four "deluxe" games in the collection, which are 3D remakes of some of the arcade games. Crazy Balloon, Balloon Bomber, The Legend of Kage, and Cameltry all get "2005" appended to their titles for these deluxe versions, which really makes them feel like state-of-the-art games. Or, well, maybe it would have two years ago. For the most part, they're just ugly polygonal versions of the original games that don't really play as well, though it's still an interesting inclusion that adds a little something extra to the package.

While some of Taito's best arcade games, such as Bubble Bobble and Double Dragon, aren't included, there are enough good old arcade games on this disc to make it worthwhile for fans of classic compilations.

Whether you're a fan of the cartoon or a fan of fighting games, Legend of the Dragon is a total disappointment.

The Good: Offers a variety of single-player modes.
The Bad: Awful fighting system; does a terrible job of duplicating the cartoon's look and feel; uninteresting opponents.
Legend of the Dragon is a fighting game from Game Factory that's based on a cartoon that currently airs on Toon Disney as part of its Jetix programming block. It's about a pair of 15-year-old twins, Ang and Ling, who are on opposite sides of a martial-arts-themed conflict involving humans that can transform into beastlike creatures. The fighting in this game is uniformly terrible, giving you the feeling that the product was constructed as a licensing tie-in first and a game second, but the ugly graphics and lack of character speech mean that this probably won't do much for fans of the show either, making it a failure from every angle.
The different fighters can transform into various creatures, but most of the attacks are identical.
The fighting is stripped down, with only one punch and one kick button and very basic combos that string those two attacks together. While you can push in a direction to execute different punches and kicks, you don't have any special moves in your human form. As in most modern fighting games, as you fight, a meter fills up with energy. Once it crosses a certain threshold, you can transform into your character's guardian form. For the main characters, the forms are largely human still, just armored. Others turn into decidedly snakelike, or ratlike, people, and so on down the line. Your basic abilities don't change when you're transformed--you can still attack, and the game still plays like a bad 2D fighter with 3D ring movement buttons. But you can also use your power meter when transformed to execute three different special attacks that make the game feel like it's trying to ape the Dragon Ball Z Budokai series. One attack launches a DBZ-like energy beam at your opponent, and at that point, a button-mashing frenzy breaks out, which either causes more damage or nullifies the attack, depending on which player can mash faster. Another special attack has the player enter six button presses or controller motions at random. If the opposing player can memorize the string and enter part of it, that player will block the incoming attack. The third attack launches a series of fireballs in a rhythmic fashion, and the defending player can dodge these with well-timed button presses or controller waves. Unfortunately, these attacks are identical for every fighter in the game.
In addition to a stock of standard fighting modes, like survival and practice, there's a quest mode, where you move Ang or Ling around a map screen as though it were some kind of board game. There are temples at several spots on the map, and at each temple, there's a challenge for you to complete. The game tries to get clever here and change things up by giving you stipulations for each fight, like in Soul Calibur's quest mode. So some fights have time restrictions, others can be won only with specific attacks, and some fighters are only susceptible to combos. If any part of the fighting were even remotely enjoyable, this might provide an interesting change of pace. But it only manages to frustrate, because it's very easy to knock opponents out of the ring accidentally, which will lose the fight for you if you needed to do something else to your foe.
Graphically, Legend of the Dragon has bland visuals, with a generic cel-shaded look and weak animation that makes all the characters look bad. The backgrounds are also ugly and plain, though the smaller screen of the PSP makes this version look a little cleaner than the PS2 and Wii versions. Because the game is based on an animated series, you'd hope for some form of voice acting. But other than the typical fighting game grunts and a few very short voice clips, it plods on in silence, using text to convey the quest mode's nonstory.
Because of the game's dull fighting system that doesn't play well against the computer-controlled opponents or against a live human being, it seems almost impossible to have fun with Legend of the Dragon. When you factor in the total lack of detail in the attempt to mimic the cartoon's look and feel, you're left with a game that even diehard fans of the relatively obscure cartoon will probably hate. Do yourself a favor and keep your distance.

Mad Tracks is the sort of idiot-simple game that you'll forget about five minutes after you play it.

The Good: Fifteen races and minigames; online and split-screen play for up to four players.
The Bad: Each of the races and minigames can be completed in roughly a minute or two; racing is no fun at all; online mode has no way to keep friends in a lobby once a game is finished; charmless visuals and grating audio.
Words like forgettable, disposable, uninspired, and superfluous--these all sum up Mad Tracks pretty well. A sort of Micro Machines and Mario Party mash-up for the Xbox Live Arcade, Mad Tracks will hold your attention for exactly as long as it takes to play each minigame and race once or twice, play a few online matches, and then exit out to the system's dashboard, never to load up this trite, lifeless game again. In this case, that ought to take you about a half hour, at most.
See, all the environments are filled with gigantic versions of everyday objects, because the cars are small. Get it? Isn't it clever?
Mad Tracks sets down tiny cars on a variety of real-world-sized tracks and arenas and has you either racing or participating in some sort of competitive minigame. The game's racing is a bad knockoff of the Micro Machines/mascot kart racer formula, with a few ghetto power-ups and weapons scattered throughout the tracks that are barely effective in most situations. The cars handle rather poorly, though that does seem somewhat intentional so as to give them a toylike feel. There's even a battery that decreases as you hold down on the accelerator. Still, the battery thing is just a gimmick that rarely causes you any real problems during a race. The racing is just universally not fun, simply because there's no real skill or challenge to any of it. You race--sometimes you win, sometimes you get blasted by missiles and thus do not win. That's all there is to it. Yes, you can turn up the AI difficulty, but it doesn't really make the racing any more skillful or challenging--it just makes it cheaper and more annoying.
Minigames here are notably better, though they also get old quickly. There's an interesting variety of them, including a foosball game where you and a partner play on an actual foosball table, trying to score goals with a rather floaty ball by driving the ball toward the net; a game of 8-ball where your goal is to drive onto a pool table and knock all of your colored balls into the various pockets first; a darts game where you launch your car off a jump and try to land on a dart board as close to the center as possible; and a mess-making game where you and your opponents sit on a table and try to knock as many toys as possible off of it. Conceptually, all these games are pretty neat, but once you actually jump into them, you'll realize that after you've bested them a couple of times, there's not much reason to ever go back. They're quickly digested, rarely taking more than a minute or two to beat, and they just aren't fun beyond the initial play-throughs.
While there's certainly something to be said for playing these games online against friends, the online setup is woefully inadequate. Namely, there's no way to keep a group of friends together for more than one match, even in player matches. Once you beat one game, the game spits you back out into the main menu. Granted, it only takes a play or two of each game for the entertainment value to dry up, so maybe that doesn't even really matter. For what it's worth, the online matches we played worked fine. They weren't fun, but they worked.
If this were actual foosball, it might actually be fun.
Mad Tracks doesn't offer up much with its presentation, either. The graphics look clean, but they're bland and bereft of charm. The car designs are boilerplate Micro Machine rips, and the tracks are just what you'd expect them to be, with lots of gigantic home furnishings to demonstrate that, yes, your car is very tiny. The game's audio is more irritating than anything else. The repetitive soundtrack turns into white noise after a bit, and the in-game sound effects are tinny and overly loud. Every weapon noise sounds like it's being filtered through a series of tin cans, and the car engines have this high-pitched whine to them that certainly plays to the toy-car vibe but isn't pleasant to listen to in the slightest.
Ultimately, Mad Tracks is a paper-thin game that tries to disguise its flimsy value by offering up a bunch of games that take almost no time to beat at all. Supposedly the developers are planning to add more minigames to the package via microtransactions, but by the time that actually happens, you'll have completely forgotten about this utterly unimpressive racer and moved on to any number of something elses. Unless you're really hot to drop $10 on something that's barely amusing enough to fill 30 minutes, you can safely skip out on Mad Tracks.

Hanging 10 in this movie-licensed surfing game has its moments--just don't expect to enjoy it for very long.

The Good: Solid gameplay design complemented by a decent trick system; good visuals and voice acting.
The Bad: Championship mode can be beaten in 90 minutes, and there are barely any supplemental modes; physics and animations can sometimes get kooky and glitchy; lame soundtrack.
Thank god for the occasional bucked trend. Surf's Up could very easily have been yet another lamely produced platformer or action adventure game based on an animated film. Instead, it's an oddly competent surfing game. The game eschews any attempts at retelling the film's story, and is instead content to act purely as a companion piece, letting you play as all the key characters from the film in a game that feels like a combo of Kelly Slater and Wave Race for kids. It's not a remarkable game, but at times it can be a decent bit of fun. It's just a shame that it offers so little in terms of content.
Surf's Up isn't remarkable, but it's a decent little surfing game; and hey, it beats the heck out of T&C Surf Designs any day.
Jumping into a game of Surf's Up is a little off-putting at first. Your chosen surfer essentially travels through the level on rails, and it's up to you to guide him or her past the various obstacles that litter the game's courses. All along the way, a constant wave moves along with you, and you can use this wave to perform tricks. The trick system is rudimentary, only tasking you with moving up the wave until you get to the peak, then jumping off by hitting one of the trick buttons. While you're in the air, you can do one of several different trick types, from grab tricks to special tricks that can only be performed once you've built up a special trick meter. This meter is also tied to speed boosts, which you can use to power past certain obstacles or opponent surfers.
As you go, you'll also be trying to pass through various gates, collect power-ups, grind on various rails, and occasionally go crashing through stuff. All these tricks net you points, and the goal of most levels is to hit a certain point target. There are actually two point targets in each stage, but you only have to hit the first to progress.
The trick system works fairly well, and the controls are solid. The Wii version is the only one that deviates from the standard control scheme, but it doesn't go overboard with motion controls. The only motion you use in the game is to swing the Wii Remote downward to engage a speed boost. However, the one caveat is that the Wii version is also missing a trick type, seemingly because of the controller's lack of buttons compared with all the other console versions. The Wii version doesn't necessarily suffer because of this, as it's pretty easy to hit the score targets without this trick type, but it does come off as lazy that no effort was made to keep the missing trick in the game.
If there's any real complaint to be lobbied against the gameplay on all versions, it's that it's occasionally bewildering. The tricks and other mechanics are quite simplistic, but getting your surfer to engage in certain actions--rail sliding, for instance--is an inconsistent process. The game is unpredictable with when it wants to magnetize you toward a rail to slide or have you miss it altogether. You also may end up wrecking into a few more rocks or other immovable objects than you'd prefer due to character movement not being quick enough or the sometimes-wonky physics pushing you toward an object even though you were turning in the opposite direction. These issues don't really make the game frustrating, as the difficulty is easy enough to where even crashing on a regular basis doesn't detract from you passing a level. They're just kind of annoying.
The other issue of note with Surf's Up is that there's just nothing to it. The game's primary mode is the championship mode, where you move from level to level, hitting the score targets and eventually taking on the big kahuna of surfing, Tank, in the last stage. However, besting the championship mode doesn't take more than an hour and a half the first time through. Granted, you won't collect all the various idols and other hidden doodads in one play, but it's hard to imagine anyone taking more than three or four hours to pull that off. Beyond this mode, there's a basic multiplayer mode that's for two players on the Wii and PlayStation 2 and four players on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. It's not online, and the number of maps you can race on is limited, but it's there. Finally, there's a lame side game called Leaf Sliding, where you're lugging a big leaf down one of three down-sloping courses. This mode is mildly amusing once, but that's about it.
If only there were more to do in the game than…well, just this.
The game does at least have some decent presentational values backing it up. The graphics aren't stellar, but the characters look good, the water moves nicely, and some of the trick animations are pretty cool. Other animations look stiff and glitchy, but not horrifically so. Of course, the 360 and PS3 versions look significantly better than the Wii and PS2 versions, but for its hardware capabilities, the Wii version actually looks quite good, too. The PS2 version is another story. The frame rate is much choppier in that version, and all the neat little visual effects on the water and environments are pretty much absent, making it look a lot blander than the other versions. The game's audio is decent, mostly because some of the actors from the film reprise their roles here, albeit in an extremely limited fashion. Most of the dialogue comes from little news blips that act as surf reports before each stage, and though most of the jokes are pretty dumb, the voice acting isn't half bad. Less entertaining is the soundtrack, which is mostly generic rock, including some exceedingly generic songs from bands like Simple Plan and Homegrown.
Surf's Up deserves a bit of credit for turning in something that isn't just a cakewalk action platformer that does a lousy job of retelling the film's story. Sure, it would have been nice if the developers had included any story to speak of, but from a gameplay perspective, the surfing-on-rails mechanic works better than you'd expect and provides periodic moments of legitimate fun. It won't appeal much to older players, and regardless of which platform you pick it up on, it's not worth its overly expensive price tag, given the barren amount of content the game offers up. But for younger kids who dug the movie, you'll get everything you need out of Surf's Up over the course of a rental period.

The Darkness Update--To the Otherworld

Starbreeze's darkly comic action game is nearly complete, and our recent sample of the game was the most impressive yet.
It's not an exaggeration to say The Darkness has looked better every time we've seen it. That's not to imply it ever looked bad to begin with, but after developer Starbreeze set the quality bar so high with its last game, The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay, we've been expecting a lot from this new game based on the sinister Top Cow comic series of the same name. Publisher 2K Games has trotted out the same three-level demo of The Darkness several times during the past few months, all of which was set in similar areas of New York City and consequently left us wondering what other, more disturbing surprises the game would have in store. Now that we've seen some of the grislier and more stirring scenes from later in the game, we're more excited than ever to finally play through it at the end of June.
As a quick refresher, the game casts you as Jackie Estacado, a young mob hit man who's coming of age to find he's being screwed over by his uncle Paulie (along with some help from a corrupt police captain and several other shady characters). But Jackie's got a secret that will help him fight back. He possesses the Darkness--or maybe it's more accurate to say that the Darkness possesses him. At any rate, Jackie has a malevolent dark presence that, in practical terms, means he's got a couple of gnarly demon-snake heads jutting out of his shoulders that can rip apart his enemies and give him all sorts of cool powers. These include picking up heavy objects with a giant tentacle and creating a black hole that will basically delete his enemies from existence. Jackie even has command over the darklings, a group of darkly humorous creatures that will visit all sorts of unpleasantness on the mobsters and other bad guys that get in your way. Naturally, the only catch here is that you'll only have full use of these powers when you stick to the shadows.
This is definitely not your average World War II shooter.
Previously, we only saw selected sequences from earlier in the game when Jackie was just discovering his Darkness-given powers and fighting uncle Paulie's thugs. According to 2K, you'll spend about three-fifths of the game in New York City, taking on not only your uncle's goons but also some very corrupt members of New York's finest. (In fact, we got to see one particularly rousing ambush scene involving the NYPD's finest that we can't show you just yet.) But the remainder of the game will be spent in a place called the Otherworld, which is located, well, somewhere else. We're not sure if it's an alternate dimension, a dream world, or purgatory. But we do know it's an unpleasant place from what we've seen of it so far.
The Otherworld is styled after what 2K refers to as "a never-ending world war." In practical terms, this hellish environment seems to be modeled after a mixture of both World Wars I and II because you'll see both trench fighting and wide-open battlefields that stare off into a murky, featureless abyss. Your enemies look vaguely Nazi-esque, judging from their uniforms, but closer inspection reveals that their faces and bodies are stitched together from disparate pieces of flesh. The segment of the Otherworld we got to see didn't involve any environmental puzzles, as we've seen in the New York areas, just a lot of killing these zombie soldiers. But you will have your Darkness powers at your disposal. For example, we saw a segment where one power--which involves using a Darkness head as a stealthy camera that can climb up walls and kill silently--came in especially handy while infiltrating an enemy bunker. Interestingly, you'll be fighting alongside allies in different-colored uniforms who also appear to be created from body parts à la Frankenstein's monster. But again, we're not sure how they figure into the storyline just yet.
What madness has led Jackie to this hellish dimension?
While we don't know what the Otherworld is exactly, we do have a good idea of how Jackie ends up there--but 2K has respectfully asked us not to spill all of the game's secrets just yet. Suffice it to say that Jackie will have some nice catastrophic events to deal with during the course of the game's storyline. In fact, from what we've seen, this is one of the more creatively violent and downright disturbing games in recent memory. But that shouldn't be surprising because Riddick had its share of shankings, broken necks, and so on.
Starbreeze continues to apply little touches to The Darkness that are fully bringing it in line with the studio's last impressive outing, at least in the areas of graphics and presentation. More subtle motion blurs and lighting effects have been added, which amounts to one of the nicer-looking Xbox 360 games we've seen yet. There's a lot more we'd like to say about the game, but that will have to wait for a few more days. Considering the game seems on track to meet its late-June release in just over three weeks, you'll get to check it out for yourself soon enough anyway. In the meantime, don't forget to read a new Q&A with Starbreeze conducted by our sister site, GameSpot Australia.
-GameSpot