You don't need me to tell you that music-based rhythm action titles are hot shiz these days. Is it because the combination of music with skill-based activity triggers endorphins? Stimulates the brain's reward center? I'm not a neurologist, but I like to pretend to be one. In fact, the cops are looking for me right now, something about a "botched" brain surgery. While I'm hiding out in a secret underground bunker, I've been playing Ontamarama, the latest Japanese beatmaster to reach our shores grace a the good folks at Atlus, hoping a new rhythm title will help pass the time and make me feel good. Sort of like a crack addiction, but without the depression, poverty or the soiling myself.

A good rhythm-action title just might make me wet my pants, though. So is Ontamarama the latest game to make me wish I had quarters with which to launder my delicates? Before you read this review, please watch the above Japanese advertisement for the game, and then hit the jump.

view full story + comments

I hate tactical games. I hate strategy games, real-time strategy games, and tactical RPGs. I would rather drive screws into my nostrils with the business end of a power drill and, of course, apply a nail gun to my eyes than play a tactics title. But Linde stole all my Castlevanias, kidnapped my cat and said I can't play Trauma Center until I wrote this review. I drove a few screws into the soft part of my skull in an attempt to assuage his evil, but alas, he made me do it anyway. 

And I, consummate professional that I am, picked myself up from the kitchen floor still moist with the tears of my tantrum and set out to give this one a good, fair shake. Perhaps Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn would be the game that finally opened my mind, reconciled me with my nemesis, opened for me the doors to a new realm of gaming. So did it work?

view full story + comments

I am the Hero of Legend. The planet's fate rests in my hands. I will not be stopped.

My travels have spanned the world, and my prowess as a hero has steadily grown. With each stroke of my weapon I grow stronger; with each tick of passing time, my mastery of ancient arts grows. In the darkest crevice of a long-forgotten temple, I was bestowed the power to summon a hail of fire; in the sweet embrace of an immortal aquatic faerie, I learned the art of materializing a lethal typhoon, seemingly from the aether of air itself.

I continue in my quest to command the universe's mysteries -- one of the world's greatest powers lies dormant still, buried in the annals of an ancient ruin, behind a barred door. This locked portal of ordinary wood requires a key, of course, and all my ancient magicks cannot cause it to yield.  view full story + comments

I am the Hero of Legend.

Long have been my travails in a vast and mysterious world, an environment largely hostile to me. When I departed the tiny, peaceable village where I spent the whole of my childhood as a mere farming boy, armed only with a sword and shield made of wood for which I was charged 100 gold by the inappropriately cheerful blacksmith whose very future rested squarely on the shoulders on my success and mine alone, I found the vast, unfolding landscape unexpectedly hostile. Here, even the birds behaved as if possessed by a mysterious mathematical evil, forming neat ranks and hovering, impossibly in line, and taking precise turns to attack me with vicious swipes of their foul beaks.

In the outside world, the crows, the wild pigs and even the tuberous root plants are possessed of elemental magic power. Would that I had known this as I toiled on my humble little farm!

But alas, the days of lamentation are behind me; now is the time of action. Hit the jump to read more of my epic tales of legendary heroism. view full story + comments

After 1,000 years, the Dark Lord has, against all odds, re-emerged into the world.

We hadn't thought it possible. Our people had, through a use of time- and space-rending magical power, with the aid of a great celestial coincidence and a sentient, priceless artifact, sealed away the threatening power, never to return. Alas, the utopia in which we thrived for generations is now threatened again by the encroaching of that dark power, summoned by a darkly insane harbinger, a madman with the goal of purifying the world through its destruction.

And of this genteel, utopian race, previous possessors of untold magical gifts, I, an ordinary fifteen-year-old boy, am the only one who can stop this evil. 

Hit the jump for my magical, powerful, not-in-any-way-derivative tale.

view full story + comments

I beat that damn werewolf.

I complained recently that the current era's intuitive, "easy" games might have blunted my legendary, meticulously-honed gamer skillz of old, like a one-time champ who's over the hill. A little backstory on the complaint: before picking up Dracula X Chronicles, the games I played most recently were Dawn of Sorrow, Portrait of Ruin, Phantom Hourglass and Zack & Wiki. Portrait in particular is my zone-out title of the moment; after dinner I lie on the couch for about twenty minutes or so, and I just kind of leap around the castle, whittling away at my goal of 1000% map completion, hoarding money and idly whipping succubi across their naked bosoms. Phantom Hourglass requires just a bit more attentiveness, unless I'm just up to my usual business of meticulously lawnmowing for Rupees. Take that, plants.

Let's go back to a time when zoning out brought us not cheerful relaxation amid tittering cuccos, but deadly violent werewolf death.

view full story + comments

So, extending my... extended Castlevania kick recently, I started playing Dracula X Chronicles on the PSP over the weekend. Firstly, it's a toe-curlingly good remake -- when Richter first crosses the bridge and it begins to rain as the theme plays, your hair will stand on end. Ayami Kojima is one of the best character illustrators in the history of game art, and the whole works just looks great-great-great. A remake of Chi No Rondo was long overdue, and finally having this update on the PSP is like filling in a big, naked gap in your bookshelf. Dude, it's like you had a collection of really fancy encyclopedias and you just now finally bought the letter "S".

I can't freaking beat the first boss. view full story + comments

Donkey Kong Barrel Blast is the latest racer for the Wii. If you’re unfamiliar with the backstory, we’ve been promised the game for quite some time – it was actually supposed to be a GameCube title, using the accompanying bongo peripherals. Instead, it’s been being reworked and picked at all this time, and now it’s finally knuckle-dragged onto the Wii, where instead of playing video game bongos, we can now flail video game remote controls.

It features monkeys flying on rocket-powered bongo drums. Is this awesome? Hit the jump to find out. 

view full story + comments

So have you got Teh Haloes? Yes, no?

I haven't. Even though I've yet to hear a recommendation against it; even though it is, by all accounts a solid game, and by some accounts, a revolutionary game. Most of all, I've yet to see a heavily critical rating.

So why aren't I interested? Hit the jump; maybe you can tell me. 

view full story + comments

So we know that wedding proposals take place in MMOs all the time, sweet touching moments of deep connection that occur when real people start to forget that Azeroth is not a real place, as their concept of reality becomes ever more distant. Then come ceremonies that are so nerdy you feel embarrassed when your galpal hauls out the wedding video, and would prefer to avoid watching it because the conflagration of geek is visceral enough that just by watching it, it seems you can almost scent the room's odor discoloring, faintly.

Do videogame proposals result in happy marriages? Only time will tell if they bear some other fruit besides humiliating, awkward nights in when one person just doesn't feel like wearing the elf ears and tension fills the air -- but until then, a good alternative is to propose to your girl in games that are a little bit cuter and mass-appealing.

Such was the idea that a dewy-eyed paramour from Jacksonville, FL had when he decided to take his attempt to convert his lady-love into a gamer to the next logical step -- in Viva Piňata, of all things. Hit the jump to read all about it. 

view full story + comments

Anytime someone says that games aren't art, we're up in arms burning straw effigies of Ebert. Any time someone says games are destructive, we want blood. Half of us want to pretend that games are only toys, and the other half of us devote thousands of our best thesaurus words to dissertations on the validity of our medium. We want to be taken seriously -- and yet, every time we see a game that isn't meant to be strictly fun, we dismiss it out of hand.

Lots of gamers don't really get Ian Bogost, and that's fine with him. His company, Persuasive Games, isn't designing for you. But if games are more than just toys to you -- if you're a proponent of the view that games are powerful experiences that shouldn't be relegated to some "violent teenage emo kid" niche, and if you appreciate the possibilities in the medium of gaming beyond breast physics and the pew-pew-pew, then you can't afford not to get him.

And by the way, in addition to being a freakin' genius, Ian's just all-around a completely rad guy. Hit the jump to be enlightened. Otherwise, the next time some desperate politician or mass media fathead dismisses gaming, you best sit down and shut up. 

view full story + comments

So yeah, obviously we're all excited about Rock Band, duh. Are you really excited? Wanna get your hands on it now, before anyone else -- and be on national television?

The tender dreams of hilariously ironic rock superstardom that you lovingly cultivated in your living room while you became better than anyone else you know at Guitar Hero can actually be a reality. That is, if you're made of awesome at rhythm games.

Interested? Hit the jump for a special message from VH1. 

view full story + comments

Samus likes it on top, boys. Gamasutra and CVG are both reporting that Metroid Prime 3: Corruption is in the top spot on the all-format sales charts, possibly outdoing BioShock in its first week of sales.

Actually, it looks pretty close, with both of their numbers rolling in at about 400,000 in the first week. Tough to believe Metroid could be the winner? Not so much, when you think about the size of the Wii's install base and how long Wii owners have been waiting for a title worth buying (and no, Mario Strikers Charged doesn't frickin' count). As for me, the little darlin's laid dormant for months, weeping silently and sweltering in the punishing heat waves radiating from the Xbox 360 that sits beside her. 

Some people might say that super-strong performance for Metroid on the Wii might suggest that there's still quite a big place for more hardcore titles in the Nintendo world -- that while Nintendo might sell a whole bunch of Wii Fits to Grandma and possibly your Mom, it will still make much more dough (as if it needed it) selling, you know, videogames, to you and me. 

I doubt that, say, the Deus Ex and Gears kids would call Metroid "hardcore," and maybe the fact that we'd even consider styling it as such indicates the tiny white darling of the console world has put us in desperate straits for her love. What do you think?