Time Played: 10 hours

The original Mario Galaxy is the game that turned me off of the Wii for a while. Waggle attacks, choppy levels, and forced pointer controls combined the things I hated most about the Wii, and after 30 minutes of playing it I had more than enough.

Flash forward a year or so later.  I have a new Wii, and a more enthusiastic view on Wii games in general, when my brother brings home a copy of Super Mario Galaxy 2. Having nothing else to play, I decide to give the Galaxy series another try. The result this time? Much more positive.

Read More

This list might be painfully short compared to my Wii one, but that shouldn’t be taken at face value because I have played a lot more 360 games recently than I have Wii games. Alan Wake, Bioshock 2, Mass Effect 2, Splinter Cell: Conviction, and others would be on this list if I hadn’t already played them, so keep that in mind when comparing these lists. Also, I’ll mention that I almost always play multi-platform games on my 360, mostly because I love seeing my Gamerscore go up, which will weigh heavily in the 360’s favor when compared to my PS3 list.

Read More

Time Played: 20 hours

• Single Player: 17 hours
• Multiplayer: 3 hours

Outside of the cancelled-way-too-soon TV show Firefly, I’ve never been a fan of Westerns. However, when I first saw a preview for Red Dead Redemption something immediately interested me. Maybe it was the badass protagonist, the movie-esque trailers, or just the fact that this wasn’t another cookie-cutter FPS, but I knew I had to have it.

 I rarely get games on their release dates, instead choosing to save money by using Goozex, so I had to sit around and read the reviews that talked about how amazing Red Dead Redemption was, especially the multiplayer free roam mode. My anticipation was at a boiling point when I finally got my hands on a copy a couple of weeks ago, and, although it was a wild ride, it was ultimately pretty disappointing.

Read More

 It took an awesome showing at E3 and an Amazon Warehouse deal to do it, but I am once again the owner of a Nintendo Wii. I’ve had the Wii for a little over a week now, and I have only played one game (Monster Hunter Tri), but already I feel like this was the right time for me to get back on the Wii bandwagon.

Read More

Difficulty Played: Realism (hardest of 3)

Hours Played: ~11 Hours 30 Minutes

• Single Player Story: 7 Hours 
• Other Modes: 4 Hours 30 Minutes 

It’s been 8 years since the original Splinter Cell wowed the gaming world with amazing lighting and a main character who could do a split to support himself between two walls. Five games later, Sam Fisher isn’t as limber as he used to be, but he still knows how to hide in the darkness, snap necks, and make green goggles look cool.

To be honest, I never really got into the Splinter Cell series. I’ve always been more of a head-on kind of person, so the idea of a game where stealth is almost mandatory really turned me off. So when I heard that Conviction stirring up the Splinter Cell formula I decided that it was time for me to see what Sam Fisher had been up to all of these years.

Read More

What amazes me most about the  Sony Conference is how they can show so much, and yet show so little at the same time. For whatever reason, Sony seems to absolutely love montages where they show maybe 5 seconds of a game before jumping to the next. Thankfully, between the montages, rants about the Playstation brand/move/future, and an entertaining appearance by none other than Kevin Butler, Sony managed to show off some decent stuff.

Read More

I’ll start off with a story. When the Wii was first announced I was as excited as anyone for the possibilities it offered for new gameplay. So, with the help of my friend Shaun, I pre-ordered the Wii and got it on launch day. Unfortunately, the Wii’s disk drive was dead on arrival and I had to go to a friend’s house to experience the magic, which might have been a foreshadowing of events to come. The Wii was amazing at first, but a few months later I was sick of waggle controls and my Wii collected dust as I played beautiful HD games on my new Xbox 360. Soon after that I sold my Wii to my aunt’s boyfriend and, thanks to a strong line-up for the 360, I never really regretted it. I never regretted it, at least, until I finished watching Nintendo’s 2010 E3 press conference.

Read More

Last year’s Ubisoft conference was infamous for having a senile old man come up on stage for roughly 20 minutes and talk about the most generic sounding story ever. That man was Steven Speilberg talking about Avatar, an event which has forever tainted my opinion of that movie and has prevented me from watching it to this day. Thankfully, Ubisoft didn’t invite Speilberg back for a sequel, although they did bring Joel McHale back to host the show. Although McHale seemed awkward as hell when reading from prompter, his random jokes, such as when he thanked a producer’s mustache for the movie Maverick, helped pump some life into what was otherwise a mediocre showing from Ubi.

Read More

EA is the second of the EA Press Conferences today, and so far it is the best, although that didn’t take much. EA mostly played it safe by showing off stuff for Dead Space 2, Madden 2011, and Crysis 2, but that doesn’t mean that it was a bad showing. EA’s approach seemed to be that they knew they make something for everyone so that is exactly what they were going to show, which is the complete opposite of Microsoft’s baiting the “core” gamers in with Black Ops, Gears 3, and Halo Reach before switching over to flail-your-arms fun hour with Kinect.

Read More

While watching the Microsoft E3 Press Event there was one thing that I was constantly thinking: thank God I now own a PS3. Microsoft began strong by howing off games that people actually care about, there was nothing announced that we didn’t already know about. Things couldn’t seem to get worse when the Natal stuff started, but  it drug on for the next hour or so and led up to the final “announcement”, which, in typical Microsoft fashion, was already leaked this week (the 360 Slim.) So while it was kind of interesting to see footage of Call of Duty: Black Ops and Gears of War 3, the Microsoft conference can’t be seen as anything but a massive disappointment for the “core gamers.”

Read More