I still have a handful of original Xbox games that I play between some of the 360 titles I’ve purchased. Halo, obviously, Star Wars: KotOR, and Spider-Man 2, to name a few. I enjoyed the latter so much that I almost went against my better judgment and purchased its follow-up, the absolutely mediocre Spider-Man 3. [...]

I have a hard time deciding an actual quantifiable feeling toward this game in the form of a letter grade. There are so many feelings toward this game, and they’re all so varying, that I can barely put them together in one thought. If someone asked me to sum up the experience of playing Force [...]

There’s hardly anything to say about Rock Band 2 that you can’t discover from its Wikipedia page. It’s the first game with nothing drastically changed, only improved slightly. Chords can be hammer-ons or pull-offs, which are now easier to see; the track list I think is much better, with very few songs that I don’t [...]

Morrowind really helped pull itself head and shoulders above the crowd by developing a realistically complicated world in such an unfamiliar setting that its players can’t help but explore every nook and cranny, finding new reasons to love it every time they play.

One of my ambitions when writing for a development team is never to have my plots compared to Jade Empire’s.

If Portal had done with elevators exactly what Mass Effect did, the game would be the stuff of legends, as its last remaining discs were ground into a fine powder, sold on the black market, and eventually snorted by Asian businessmen seeking to imbue their body with the power of fucking incredible.

I promise not to write about KotOR every time I write this column, but it really is a wonderful example of realistic character writing in games, and should, along with its sequel, be considered more carefully before we try to move on to a third installment in the series.

Plot twists and background stories are one thing, but to demonstrate realities in fantastic characters living in a universe where lightsabers are less interesting than politics?

I may be biased as a fan of the developers, but in all honesty, previous BioWare RPGs have done wonderful things, like KotOR’s original and impressive (despite being set in the Star Wars universe) plot, and Jade Empire’s identifiable and likable secondary characters. Even KotOR II (not BioWare, but obviously based off of their game) [...]

 
 
 
Players: 1
Publisher: Nintendo
Developer: Nintendo
Genre: Action Adventure
Review By: Mike Ireland
 
“Beautiful, new classic Zelda.”