Recently, a game landed onto the Xbox 360 that left me a little cold.  It was called Red Faction; Guerilla, and was yet another sequel to the first person shooter original and first sequel.  And when I first laid hands on this one I sighed in the deepest resignation and dragged out my thesaurus hoping I could find a new word for “craptacular”.   Seriously, I’m so very tired of first person shooters.  There are so few good ones.

But then I got it in, and I’ll tell you, I was pleasantly surprised.  Surprised is almost too weak a reaction, but is it really possible to be pleasantly shocked?

Anyway, you play a miner whose focus is in demolitions freshly landed on Mars a while after the earlier events of Red Faction.   The Earth Defense Force, which for some reason isn’t even ON Earth any more, is acting as an occupation force on Mars, backing up pretty much ever evil move that the Ultor Corporation (THQ just loves the name Ultor, I guess) makes.  This is doubly odd since, originally, the Earth Defense Force was a collection of GOOD guys who assisted Red Faction.  So much for that, huh?

So now you’re on planet, and the EDF just wiped out your brother for “crimes”.  No one really bothered to tell you what they were before they blasted him with what looked like a vulcan cannon, or before they came after you and discovered that you had explosives in your trailer (you’re a mining engineer with a demolitions specialty, remember?) so you, in response, joined Red Faction out of necessity and the desire to get payback for your dead brother.

The game itself plays a lot like some other titles, especially Saints Row, Grand Theft Auto, Just Cause and Mercenaries, and offers many of the same elements.  You can steal cars, which look a lot more like moon rovers and have apparently enhanced suspension to handle the rocky terrain better.  You’ll roam around a map with multiple zones, blowing things up, knocking things down, and shooting holy hell out of the EDF in an effort to wrest control of Mars away from them and put it back in the hands of the people.

There is a truly incredible variety of things to do in this game, make no mistake about that.  Within my first few minutes I had blown up several abandoned buildings, collected scrap from said buildings to upgrade my weaponry and hardware, and shot about thirty five stormtroopers—err…EDF troops.  I do enjoy a game that’s about more than walk from point A to point B and shoot whatever wanders in front of you.  As a result, this may actually be my favorite Red Faction game just by the sheer fact that it actually includes something different to do.

Granted, it’s not that much different from a first person shooter—its biggest difference may well be just a matter of perspective (no pun intended), but with the addition of driving and setting explosives and collecting items, it does elevate the game slightly above its predecessors.  It’s a good rental, no mistake there, but whether or not it’ll be a good buy depends on just how much you like shooter games with some solid action.

I really, REALLY, hate Clive Barker.

It’s bad enough that he unleashes his misery on us in book form and in movie form, but recently, he’s dropped a video game on us too.  Not his first, I know, but it’s no less painful for the fact that it isn’t first.  If anything, it’s actually MORE painful, because he did it to us once already—now he’s come back for seconds.  It’s called Jericho, and it’s out for the Xbox 360, Playstation 3, and PC.

Anyway, this time, Clive Barker’s bringing us the story of the Firstborn, which he claims is part of Apocryphal and Gnostic texts (parts of the Bible in case you don’t follow that sort of thing) as the first thing God ever created.  It’s not male, it’s not female, but it’s both beautiful and horrifying all at once.  God, not surprisingly, turned out not to like the thing he made and thus shut it up in the Abyss.  He then followed up with humanity, which turned out much more to God’s liking than the androgynous singularity he’d made earlier.  And then, just to prove that Clive Barker’s grasp on logic is as tenuous as his grasp of sanity or writing a decent book, it turns out that the Firstborn decided to not be banished any more, and so, he wasn’t.  He made seven attempts to break out of the Abyss, and every time, God sent him back, but not without taking a piece of the planet with him.  The empty chunks of earth became fragments of time and space, and then did bizarre things to the world around them.  The U.S. government, as represented by the Department of Occult Warfare, sends in the Jericho Squad to investigate one such singularity, which one of its former members is using as a gateway to bring the Firstborn back into the world.

See, that’s a real mouthful of a storyline until you consider that Jericho is yet another first person shooter.  This is like trying to put a Ferrari chassis around a moped and expecting people to believe you own a Ferrari.  Seriously, they’ve put everything into this—time travel, various occultic stuff…lesbians…yes, lesbians.  They’re part of the plot, even though they’re really not here for anything more than the inevitable “hey look at this!” effect.

And while the game has spectacularly creepy visuals, the gameplay itself is suffering from some kind of mild brain damage, because your elite team of master soldiers dies a lot more often than master soldiers really should.  That may be the worst part about the whole thing—even I have to admit that this is a really impressive story, even if it requires massive suspension of disbelief.  And what do they DO with this story?  They strap a chain gun barrel to it and say “Here, go shoot something.  A lot.”  Great—why do I find myself utterly unable to care?  Maybe it’s because my character is just a gun barrel people talk to.

While this might have made a pretty good movie (or even series thereof), sadly, it doesn’t make a game worth a hill of beans.  There are much better first person shooters out there, with much more action and adventure and fun than this could ever generate.

Today marks one of those days that I’m really, really glad I’m a functioning video game reviewer–I’m going to review a game that I’m absolutely convinced you need to be told about.  Chances are very good that you haven’t actually heard of it, which is why I get the opportunity to use my good offices to fill you in.  It’s called Forumwarz, and it may easily be the most unique game I’ve ever played.

You’ll play as a young forum-goer, like so many other internet users out there, who’s just starting out in the world.  You’re out to make a name for yourself in the world, and as such, you go out and attempt to “pwn” internet forums, a name for causing such disruption that you make a forum uninhabitable.  Along the way, you’ll meet a series of other internet users with a series of different goals and interests who want to employ your skills to advance those goals and interests.  You’ll run into everybody from conservative talk show hosts with bizarre proclivities to furries to indie rock figures and beyond.  But what’s lying beyond all these disparate interests?  Who are you really working for?  You’ll find out in a tale of surprising depth and intrigue.

In fact, you start out so new that your opening rank is actually “Jimmy the Re-Re”.  Please don’t bother with flames—that’s a quote.  In fact, they’ve devoted such detail to this rank that your two attacks as Jimmy are “bash keyboard with helmet” and “drool on keyboard”.  After a little time spent as Jimmy, you’ll be allowed to select a new class of character, each with different kinds of attacks and defenses—you can be a hacker, a troll, an emo kid, a camwhore or a permanoob.  You can even play through the whole game as Jimmy if you’re so inclined, but this is discouraged for all but the most extreme player.

The gameplay itself is unusual, as you select an attack, resolve the result, let the forum get in ITS attack (they’ll try to flame you with varying degrees of success) and then the process repeats until either you or the forum is down in flames.  The closest analogue is a collectible card game.  Every day, you’re permitted four “forum visits” to wreak your havoc, and the number resets at a set time each day.  This may sound somewhat restrictive, but I haven’t told you the best part yet—the game is free to play.

That’s right, the entire first chapter of Forumwarz is free to play.  The second chapter, however, you’ll have to pay to play, and the cost is minimal at best—just ten dollars.  You’d pay more for a Xbox Live title, and instead, you get a game that’s fantastically fun to play, and you can play for days in small installments.  I like to start my day with a round of Forumwarz, and frankly, I think you will too.

Oh, sure…Forumwarz doesn’t have the action and the explosions of some first person shooters and suchlike, but what it does have is clever gameplay and plenty of laughs.  .  It’s almost nice to be able to play a game that I can only play for about a half-hour or so a day instead of taking a few hours at a crack, because the trade-off for that is that I can play it for weeks and still get a great experience with something new every day. Forumwarz is great fun, and in the end, that’s what counts most in a game.

Vikings make great characters for video games.  Their history is one of huge quantities of fighting and destruction, and I say this being of Danish descent myself.  Okay, sure, the Danes didn’t have quite the fighting past of, say, the Norwegians or the Swedes, but we still got our blades wet from time to time.  Anyway, that’s probably part of the impetus behind Sega’s recent release of Viking: Battle for Asgard, now available for Xbox 360 and Playstation 3.

In this one, you’ll play a local boy named Skarin, who’s about to get a serious promotion from random sword-toting schmuck to champion of Freya herself.  This is actually much like the relationship between Kratos and Athena.  Except, of course, Skarin wasn’t a homicidal psychopath like Kratos.  Anyway, Skarin is now part of the big war between the gods, fighting on behalf of Freya to take out some of the footholds that Hel, goddess of the underworld, has on Earth.  Just in case you wonder, Earth is called “Midgard” here.  For every bit of Midgard that Skarin takes back from Hel, Freya uses her weird goddess powers to make it green and vibrant again, like nothing ever happened.

There are an uncomfortably large number of comparisons available between Viking: Battle for Asgard and God of War—both feature a human elevated to godly champion status, both will feature occasional battles with large monsters that require a series of timed button presses in order to beat, both will have you find small red orbs to recharge your powers and whatnot—the more I play Viking: Battle for Asgard the more I wonder if it really ISN’T just God of War in a Norse mythology skin and with a lower development budget and a whole lot less promotion.

This isn’t to say, of course, that Viking: Battle for Asgard is all that bad a game.  In a lot of ways, it’s actually rather fun, and it does distract from the endless flood of first person shooters out there.  Getting anything other than one of those is actually a cause for some minor celebration these days.  Think of it as God of War with less bloodshed and more fetch questing and you’ll have a pretty good idea of what’s going on.  Admittedly, it’s still plenty fun to wander around a map and repeatedly jam a blade in things–you’ll get to do likewise with an axe and a whole host of special moves which, for some reason, must be taught to you by ghosts who will require payment in gold first, but there’s room to shake things up here and that’s always a good thing.  Plus, you’ll get to imbue your blade with various elemental powers as part of your agreement with Freya, thus introducing a small note of strategy into things.  Do you freeze the monsters and try to thin out the crowd?  Or just set everything on fire?  Your call!

These are strange days in gaming, when just by virtue of not being a first-person shooter you get a little extra bonus to your originality score.  Granted, this is only one step beyond that—a THIRD person slasher / action game—but still, it’s a step, and a step is better than nothing.

Despite this, you should still be able to get some fun out of this one, especially if you were really into the God of War series and are sort of jonesing for a little of that old god-driven bloodsport.  There’s enough action and adventure to go around, and this should also ensure that you get some fun out of the whole affair.  In the end, that’s better than nothing, if not by a whole lot.

It’s strange, when an old series that you’d thought was long dead suddenly decides to crop up again, from literally out of nowhere.  You’d honestly begun to think that you’d never see it again, and in some cases, you might well have forgotten it ever existed at all.  That was the case with the Alone in the Dark series, and now, it’s the case for a whole new generation of PC games suddenly making their revival into the next-gen console market.  This time, we’ve got none other than Leisure Suit Larry back for more raunchy fun in Leisure Suit Larry: Box Office Bust.

And frankly, I’m having a hard time figuring out just what to say about it.

This time around, you’re playing as Larry Lovage, the young horndog nephew to the great scion of the franchise, Larry Laffer, who has recently made good as a cinema magnate.  You’re hired on for a summer job doing grunt work at uncle Larry’s studio, and in the meantime, you’re also out to expose a mole hired by a rival studio to publicly air all of Laffer and  company’s dirty laundry.  In some cases, quite literally.

If you’re familiar with the movie industry at all, it will not surprise you in the least when I tell you this was written by Allen Covert of Happy Madison Productions, convincing me thoroughly that Adam Sandler is out to destroy humanity.  They’ve brought plenty of second-rate B-list star power along to do voiceover work, including Jay Mohr, who’s reprising his seemingly favorite role as a slimeball theatrical agent, not to mention a host of lesser names like Artie Lange, Dave Atell and Carmen Electra.  There are other names in here who probably shouldn’t have been here in the first place, like Patrick Warburton, Jeffrey Tambor and Shannon Elizabeth, but I guess everybody’s got to have a side project.

The gameplay is the most tedious sort of fetch gameplay—go here, get / do that, come back, repeat until you want to throw things, but considering your character is playing the lowest kind of studio grunt (if his title’s not production assistant I’ll be downright amazed), this actually makes sense.  There is a sense of humor here, but it’ll wind up being entirely too devoted to off-color humor of every stripe to be a whole lot of good.  One particularly funny bit occurs in one of the many loading screens, suggesting that your grandmother would LOVE a copy of this game for her birthday.  My grandmother would shatter the disk into bits and force-feed them to me if I ever actually gave her a copy of this.  I just know better.

You may be interested to note that this is the second recent Larry title (the first being Leisure Suit Larry: Magna Cum Laude), and also the second created with absolutely no input from original Larry designer Al Lowe.  Maybe this has something to do with why they suck so badly.

But I’ll give it this much, it’s nice to NOT play a first person shooter for once, and in this industry, any game that’s not a first person shooter or a sports game has to get extra credit by virtue of SHEER ORIGINALITY.  Leisure Suit Larry: Box Office Bust might be worth a rental just for a little bit of something completely different and a few laughs, but it’s not going to be something you want to bring home to mother.

Or home to grandma, for that matter, despite what the loading screens suggest.

Playing through Army of Two is an experience that’ll leave you sad, in a way.  You’ll want to enjoy this game–you really will–it’s just that the game won’t actually give you very many good reasons to do so.  And yet, when it actually DOES, you get your sense of hope back, only to have it quashed once again by virtue of having no further reason to enjoy it.

The plot of Army of Two, sadly, won’t be a huge help either in terms of making you love this game.  You follow Army Rangers Tyson Rios and Elliot Salem as they become disenchanted with the army and leave to join a private military contractor outfit called SSC, Security and Strategy Corporation. From there, they’ll be running various missions over the course of fifteen years, and even be indirectly involved with a scheme you may have seen recently in theatres—to privatize the military.  And they’ll even work to bring about the downfall of said scheme, which is kind of weird considering they’re working for a company that would directly benefit from such a scheme.  And, even better, after fifteen years with SSC, they start their own company, Trans World Operations.

Yes, that would be the pun…two guys who make an army of two, who eventually become the army of TWO as an acronym.

This is actually a pretty fair storyline, and will send you all over the world doing a whole bunch of awesome stuff in an effort to keep organizations like yours, and the one you’ll found, strictly on the sidelines.  Of course, the problem with Army of Two is that you’ll have almost nothing to DO with any of this awesome stuff because you’ll be too busy running around and shooting stuff.

Much has been made over the fact that, if you’re playing alone, you get an AI partner.  This definitely qualifies as an interesting development, if it weren’t for the fact that your partner has mental candlepower somewhere in the crustacean range.  Seriously—I was holding a car door to use as a shield for this brain-dead troglodyte in Somalia so that he could get behind me and shoot.  I figured he’d be able to aim easily since I had my car door held in a fashion that suggested that every car in Somalia has somehow been reinforced with some kind of steel plating (seriously, folks, if you’re ever in a gun fight don’t use the car door as cover.  Any round of any serious power will blow right through it.  You’re MUCH better off ducking behind the engine block, because that thing requires a chain hoist to move.  But I digress.).

Wait…where was I?  Oh yeah, moron with the car door.  Anyway, I’m holding this thing, and I discover that my partner is so brain-damagingly stupid that I not only have to hold the cover up but I also have to walk him in FRONT of the enemy I think he should shoot because his skill with a rifle marks him as a CLEAR graduate of the Spooky Mulder School of Firearm Use (motto:  We’ll empty an entire fifteen-round clip into a swamp but we STILL can’t hit an alligator the size of a small car from a range of eight feet.).  And don’t even get me started on what happens if you give your partner a boost up to a ledge or overhang or some such and he gets shot before you can get pulled up to join him.  That’s just annoying.

You’ll also get to dress up in costume, including wearing patently ridiculous skull-shaped face masks (yes, that’s a brilliant move…nothing like going into combat with absolutely ZERO peripheral vision!  Clearly, their time in the Rangers taught them this.) and when you do a whole lot of killing you’ll be allowed to give your colleague a congratulatory fist bump to let him know he done good, because otherwise this knuckledragger would have nary a clue that he was doing something right.

Special side note: Army of Two must have some kind of problem with the military because they make it ABUNDANTLY clear how much more awesome it is to be a private military contractor.

Anyway, if you ever wanted to play a first person shooter from third person perspective and thought it would be awesome if Lenny and George from Of Mice and Men could handle the action, then Army of Two is the game you’ve been spending long nights awake for.  Otherwise, just walk on past and maybe try ANOTHER first person shooter.

So when I saw that someone had converted the latest James Bond shooterific epic into a game, Quantum of Solace, now available for Playstations 2 and 3, the Wii, PC, DS and the Xbox 360, I sighed the sigh of a man who’d been here many, MANY times before.  I knew without so much as looking at the back of the box that it was going to be a first person shooter and heavily resemble the movie.  This was the case for virtually every James Bond title since Goldeneye’s incredible success, and since then, everyone’s been pretty much imitating Goldeneye.

This time around, there will be some differentiation as Quantum of Solace incorporates events from TWO different Bond installments–Casino Royale and its namesake Quantum of Solace, with a few events unique to the game–Bond is out to recover Mr. White, and fights his way through a small army.  Getting Mr. White back to Siena, Bond discovers that Quantum, an organization Mr. White is part of, has agents that have managed to infiltrate MI6.  From here, Bond proceeds onward through a whirlwind, worldwide adventure, gaining his vaunted Double O status, and ultimately attempting to take down Quantum.

And indeed, what I believed would be the case before I slapped the game in my system was to be—it was a first person shooter that mirrored the events of the movies fairly closely, albeit with some noticeable differences, and I thought that it was going to be yet another in a long string of games that I had already played before.  The unusual thing about the whole mess was that I actually had some fun with this one.  Maybe it was the smoothness of the controls, or the way I got a variety of weapons right out of the gate.  I don’t know what it was, but I both had fun and did NOT get seasick, relative rarities as far as first person shooters go.

And that’s the problem, isn’t it?  It’s a first person shooter game.  If you’re not a huge James Bond fan or really into first person shooters then there’s only so much fun you can have here.  Indeed, I started getting bored with the whole thing after I shot up Mr. White’s pocket army at his house.

There is some further help on this one—there are several multiplayer modes to help improve playability and long-term replay value.  A first person shooter DOES make a good party game with lots of action, so there’s some value here, unless you’re chronically playing alone.

Let’s be clear—Quantum of Solace may be one of the best first person shooters I’ve ever played, but still, it’s only the best first person shooter I’ve ever played.  It’s like finding that particular brand of rat poison that makes you throw up the least when you mix it in a milkshake.  Or maybe the particular brand of anvil that hurts the least when you drop it on your foot.  I’ve only seen a handful of really entertaining first person shooters in my time, and admittedly, Quantum of Solace is one of them.  It’s a good rental, but sadly, not much else than that.