Genre: Adventure
Platform: PS3
Publisher: Insomniac
Release Date: October 27th, 2009
Number of Players: 1
ESRB Rating: E10

In the name of saving the universe, Ratchet must rescue his best friend Clank, but discovers that Nefarious’s plot is really only beginning (We knew this). Another epic piece of the saga from Insomniac games exclusive to the PS3. Discovering the truth about both characters origins, “A crack in time” will offer the user the ability to play as both roles. This game is more like a CG Movie. You will think you’re in a Pixar movie as you interact with insanely rich environments loaded with high-tech gadgetry. If you own a PS3, this is a must have title. If you have kids and own a PS3, need i say more?! The game is available in stores today, don’t wait as most stores will only receive shipments of pre-orders plus 1 or 2 extras.

Super rich environments and never-ending game play

If you have a ps3, Ratchet & Clank: A Crack in Time is a must own title!

Incredible weapons & gadgets.

* Ubisoft
* Ubisoft Montreal
* Historic Action Adventure
* Release PC: Q1 2010
* Release XBox 360 & PS3: 11/20/09
* ESRB: Mature

After two years of waiting, finally Ubi-Soft Montreal is ready to get their game on! Assassin’s Creed 1 was awesome until you hit the 60% marker when slowly redundancy began to set in. Around 80% completion I began to beg for the ending and could hardly stand the animus breakaway’s anymore. There were just missing elements to the game, but fret not, the two years between titles has given Ubi-Soft a chance to enhance what was already great about the game, and add additional features that propel this game into 2009 game release greatness!

First off, the game goes from graphically amazing to jaw-dropping gorgeous! Lucy, the much maligned & uptight scientist goes from video game noty to video game hoty as she sheds the stiff lab coat for a sleeveless and snug space scientist outfit. The game picks up literally right where it let off, however, Lucy is now jettisoning you in a whole new identity to Florence, the feature city in the game, for the Birth of the Renaissance.

Lucy manning the Animus as you depart to historically accurate Florence.

As mentioned, this time Lucy drops you into a new character named Ezio Auditore, the protagonist of Assassin’s Creed II.  So it won’t be long into the game before you find yourself running across rooftops and wasting fools with a wreckless, but fashionably stealthy, abandon.  As expected, there will be the typical starter missions to re-acclimate yourself to the fighting controls of the game.

The rooftop runner extraordinaire!

The part of the game I think will be critical this time around in proving this isn’t another clone of the first title is money.   This time around you get to manage a store, and money will play a large part in breaking the monotony of completing missions and simply advancing the game story.  Your character will be able to loot enemies and buy better weapons and armor and then sell or better yet, keep the old gear and hang it up on a wall in your crib, errr villa!  No ground breaking creative inclusion there, but possibly the motivation needed that was missing from the first title!

Needless to say, this is a must pick-up title to close out the 09 gaming calendar.  See ya on the rooftops!

Rockstar Games Rockstar Leeds
Modern Action Adventure
Release: Oct 29, 2009 »
ESRB: Mature

Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars is a whole new saga in the critically acclaimed Grand Theft Auto series.  This release ushers in a whole new level of interactivity for its spacious sandbox environments. On the PSPGO, players navigate their way through the streets as they uncover the truth behind an another epic tale of crime and corruption within the Triad crime syndicate, delivering the unprecedented amount of depth that has become a true trademark of the franchise. If your job is long and boring, this game is for you!

Also on:
* iPhone/iPod Touch
* DS

Check out this video here: chinatownwars_psp

* Price: $4.99
* From: Gameloft
* Genre: Action
* Release: Oct 15, 2009

Another classic game hits the iPhone/iPod touch scene. (I love side-scrollers) Live or re-live the wacked adventures of Earthworm Jim in this sleek & visually appealing remake of the classic action/platform game. There’s just something cool about a superhero that is a earthworm. Must be a guy thing! Hey, did i mention the 4 different styles of gameplay aren’t to shabby either!

A little history: Jim was an ordinary earthworm who did very normal earthworm things. One day, during a battle in outer-space, a suit dropped to Earth and landed on Jim, (remember, suspend your dis-belief) mutating him into a big and intelligent (by earthworm standards) superhero. When Jim learns of the evil plans of PsyCrow and Queen Slug-for-a-Butt, he decides to rescue Princess What’s-Her-Name. I know it sounds pretty dramatic, but at the end of the day, it’s pretty darn fun to.

This version of the game offers 12 types of enemies and 9 boss battles over 16 levels including the challenging mode of the original game. The game has the same cool cult soundtrack but what’s even more cool is you can play your favorite songs from your iPod library while playing the game!

I'd like to see Jim square off against the Tick! I'll take Jim in 3!

This game will easily keep the kids quiet in the back seat if you can trust them with your iPhone!

GTA-Chinatown-It's as EZ as that!

Publisher: Rockstar Games
Developer: Rockstar Leeds
Genre: Modern Action Adventure
Release Date: Dec 31, 2009
ESRB: TEEN
ESRB Descriptors: Drug Reference, Strong Language, Strong Sexual Content, Violence

Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars is a whole new saga in the critically acclaimed Grand Theft Auto series, and on the iPhone, it ushers in a whole new level of interactivity to its sandbox environments. With the use of the iPhone touch screen, players navigate their way through the streets as they uncover the truth behind an another epic tale of crime and corruption within the Triad crime syndicate, delivering the unprecedented amount of depth that has become a true trademark of the franchise. If your job is long and boring, this game is for you!

The game will put your fingers in the chinese puzzle after 20mins!

Also on:
* PSP
* DS

That's a cool 100pts to someone!

If you enjoy counting cash (guess if i had some i would) and you’ve found Bejeweled pretty addictive, you’ll love Cash Cow, the coin-counting, farm-themed iPhone puzzler with lots more depth to it than meets the eye.

Cash Cow is an addictive coin-counting puzzler for the iPhone and iPod touch based on the popular PC original (downloaded over 1.5 million times so far), but enhanced with a wacky new storyline and the physics-based mode which is actually really cool.

1.5 million accountants have already downloaded!

In a nutshell, you earn money by dexterously counting and grouping loose change into larger denominations to amass an ever-increasing pot of cash. You can use the money earned to repay Bankin’s loan or to buy items to rebuild your farm.

Build out your farm before the evil bank tries to take it from you!

You can also buy animals, crops, and decorations. Furthermore, the game allows you to choose colors and set a custom placement for most items.

Additional bonus levels are available between stages and you can choose between five game modes that allow you to play the game from minutes to hours.

Cash Cow enhances its PC counterpart with the new physics mode based on the accelerometer sensor. In this mode, you move your device in order to maneuver realistically-weighted coins around obstacles and into a bucket.

Maneuver weighted coins around obstacles and into a bucket.

Developer link:

Published by: Valve
Developed by: Valve
Genre: First-Person Shooter
Release Date: US: November 17, 2009
Europe: November 20, 2009
Australia: TBA
MSRP: $59.99

ESRB Content Descriptors: Mature-Blood and Gore, Intense Violence, Language
Also Available On: PC

Left 4 Dead 2 is set in the American South; there’s going to be more of a narrative thread that connects the campaigns this time around, as opposed to just the seemingly random campaigns of the first game. The story starts in Savannah and works its way to New Orleans. The Savannah campaign is intriguing because all Chet would say is that it’s a city where the zombie infection hasn’t hit yet. We played the New Orleans campaign, called The Parish. It represents the final map in the narrative: the goal is to battle your way through the city, including the famed French Quarter, to reach a military helicopter for extraction. In between, it sounds like there may also be a swamp-based campaign, but that’s all we know for now.

The first thing that surprised us about The Parish is that it takes place in full daylight. Yes, the zombies may like to come out at night, but they’re apparently not indisposed to tearing your guts out in the middle of the day. While it’s weird to be battling zombies while the sun is still up, it’s certainly pretty; there’s something about the friscalating dusklight that makes you want to stop shooting zombies for half a second and just soak it all in. Not every campaign is set during the day, but it does make for a nice change of atmosphere. It also affects the gameplay, as zombies can behave differently during the day. The biggest example of that is the Witch; during the night she likes to sit and cry. However, during the day she likes to wander around like a homeless old woman and cry, and that’s a big recipe for trouble. Chet says that the Wandering Witch has a nasty habit of showing up at the worst possible times — say the middle of a frenzied zombie horde. You might not even notice her until it’s too late.

Much of Left 4 Dead 2 is designed to shake the existing gameplay up. The crescendo moments from the first game turned out to be too easy to defeat. These are the times that you have to hit a switch that alerts the zombie horde; most people simple holed up in a corner with their teammates and simply rode out the storm. To eliminate camping as a tactic, the crescendo moments have been rethought. Now you might have to hit a switch that alerts the zombie horde, but then you have to battle your way through a mess of undead in order to hit a second switch that actually stops the zombies from swarming you. In another crescendo moment, there’s no switch. Instead, there’s a parking lot stuffed with cars, and every one of them has a car alarm. Now imagine that a swarm of zombies hits you while you’re in the middle of this lot; you have to be very careful, or else a stray shot could make your predicament a lot worse, and things can cascade from there.

The finale of The Parish campaign is also a change from those found in the original game. There’s no last stand while you wait for rescue; instead, you must battle your way across a lengthy highway bridge that’s cluttered with cars, trucks, and zombies. It’s a ridiculously fun blast to run through, as there are all sorts of hazards, including a lack of railings that could send you dangling off the edge (or, more likely, have a tank or charger send you flying off). There are also different routes that you can try and take, like climbing atop the tractor trailers.

The director will also have spatial control over parts of some levels. Yes, it can and will change the layout of the map to challenge you. The example in The Parish campaign is the cemetery; if you’re familiar with New Orleans, you know that they don’t bury their dead because the water table is so high; instead, cemeteries are full of crypts. Now the director can alter the layout of the cemetery based on how well you’re doing. If you’re doing poorly and need help, the route through the cemetery might be as simple as a straight line. If you’re doing well, the cemetery is more like a maze and can lead to dead ends. The idea is you can’t know the pattern beforehand every time you play.

Off the bat, let me admit to not having very much in the way of Resident Evil knowledge; I’m not a hardcore fan of the series. But while I enjoyed my recent hands-on time with two levels of Capcom’s second on-rails lightgun shooter, Resident Evil: The Darkside Chronicles, which takes you through re-imagined levels from Code Veronica and RE2 along with some original stages, I’m a bit surprised by the game’s overall lack of suspense. Theoretically, it’s creepy to walk around darkened hallways of abandoned buildings, but the effect is pretty much ruined when you’re not on the edge of your seat waiting for the next zombie that may or may not jump out at you around the next corner.

In the two levels I played, my character walked extremely slowly. On occasion, they’d sprint forward of their own accord — hence, being on-rails — but other times, they would just move forward at an excruciatingly slow pace. It’s not that I don’t have patience; it’s just a bit jarring to walk so deliberately when the characters are speaking so animatedly and the background music sounds like a spirited JRPG fight theme. Not that that’s a bad thing — it’s just incongruous. It doesn’t do the suspenseful tone any favors either.

I give this game a score of 4.0 because no doubt i detect the capitalistic hand of the publisher making the developer go insane with ridiculous requirements and time constraints. As such, i wouldn’t waste 5$ bucks on this title if i saw it in the bargain bin at Wal-Mart during Christmas-unless i had a fringe enemy i needed to get a present for!

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