Racing games and I generally do not get along.  I find them somewhat dull and repetitive, even after the initial adrenaline shock wears off.   This left me with something of a quandary as I discovered a racing game that was actually pretty entertaining, and it’s a new one out for the Xbox 360, PS3 and PC called Fuel.

Fuel assumes a future in which Al Gore is allowed by Federal law to laugh and point at everybody who can’t produce a receipt for a copy of An Inconvenient Truth.  Seriously, though–it’s an “alternate present” in which the weather has only very recently gone completely insane, turning large areas of the United States into “no-go” zones, or areas where no human being can safely live.  Thus, humans pack themselves into huge megacities, a la Judge Dredd, except these human hives are apparently warm and comforting places powered by wind and solar and biodiesel, and thus everyone lives in Al Gore’s fantasyland.

There are, however, a few mavericks who realize that, the sudden cessation of gasoline usage has left a whole LOT of spare capacity just sort of lying around, and thus, this gives them the opportunity to take it for their own use.  Hey, why not?  Not like anyone ELSE is using the stuff anyway!  So they appropriate large quantities of fuel and use it to stage quasi-legal offroad joyride races.

To that end, you’re dropped into a scale area of roughly five thousand square miles and set to race.  You’ll be able to select various races against other competitors, as well as having an opportunity to engage in “free riding” but more on that in a minute.  First, we have to deal with the races themselves.  In this way, Fuel is a lot like literally every other racing game on the market.  You drive around trying desperately to pass other people and reach the finish line.  In this way, Fuel is just as good as any other.  The graphics are solid enough, the controls are a little twitchy and take a little getting used to but still do fairly well, and the background music is appropriately rock.

Fuel would be a game much like any other if it weren’t for one critical difference–the free ride mode.  Free ride does just what it sounds like it does; free ride allows you to tear around the map in literally any direction you please, pulling tire-squealing turns on roads, donuts on the beach, whatever you like,  There’s even some structure here as your free ride mode allows you to drive to places where challenges are being held.  Completing these challenges nets you extra fuel, which in turn allows you to buy other vehicles.  Plus, you’ll be able to obtain new parts for your livery, find fantastic views at so-called vista points, and just generally run riot all over the map.

Fuel is, therefore, a game of surprising depth and substance, as well as plenty of fun.  For those of you who already like racing games, you may well have found the ultimate in racers right there.  But for those of you who haven’t been very fond of the racing game subgenre, then you may well want to give Fuel a try.  This is the game that just might change your mind about racers.

Again Nintendo prevails on my deeply ingrained sense of nostalgia by bringing a game that I actually recognized from my original straight-eight days of gaming. See, way back when, before Mike Tyson was a gigantic practical joke / train wreck, he was a professional boxer. And a good one, too! So good that Nintendo commissioned a game around him, dubbed Mike Tyson’s Punch Out. As time went on and Iron Mike’s career went wildly off the rails (and his contract expired, unrenewed), Nintendo then sought a way to re-release their game without paying Tyson. Thus, the game was shortened to Punch Out and Iron Mike was replaced with a no-name called “Mr. Dream”.

And now, Nintendo has once again released its Punch Out line, this time for the all too appropriate Wii. You’ll once again step into the role of the Bronx’s boxing sensation Little Mac, looking to make a name for yourself along with your trainer Doc Lewis. You’ll take on a series of outrageous characters with a series of different boxing styles until you face your final opponent. You’ll also be able to completely replay the game in a whole different way by selecting the Title Defense mode, in which you’ve already won the title but are now out to hold onto it against every boxer you defeated. And they’re none too happy about the loss.

The first thing that I have to tell you, if you’re going to try this game is, for the sake of all that’s holy, STRETCH FIRST. It may not be intuitive—stretch before playing a video game? Preposterous!—but you’re going to save yourself plenty of hurt if you stretch your arms and shoulders before playing. The way this game is set up, there’s two ways to play—with the Wii controller horizontally inclined like a normal controller, or using the motion sensitivity features of the Wii to make regular air punches, and believe me, you will be throwing a LOT of punches. The boxers you’ll face are downright turtles in their capacity for blocking, and you can pretty much count on one in every two or even three of your punches landing. That is, of course, unless you’ve studied a walkthrough or videos or even practiced in advance so you already know each boxer’s pattern.

Each of the boxers you’ll face does have a pattern, and generally, it won’t take too long to learn just where to lean and where to block and where to throw punches like a lunatic, but still, in the intervening space you will be wasting PLENTY of motion. All of this can do horrible things to your arms and shoulders if you’re not careful. Trust me, I still ache from my bout with King Hippo.

But still…I’m pretty satisfied with this game. It’s got decent graphics and excellent background musical effects and fun gameplay that’ll actually be a halfway decent workout. That’s the one really interesting thing about the Wii, really—a lot of their games make good workouts. And this is a workout that’s surprisingly plenty of fun, too, making it one of the best kind: the kind where participants will come back.

Sports games have always been a significant portion of the gaming landscape—be they football, baseball, basketball, or another other sport, there’s no shortage of people looking to step into the roles of their favorite players, racers and fighters and try and do those things that their heroes do every time they show up on television.

This is no different with the release of Smackdown Vs. Raw 2009.

I’d give you the plot synopsis for this one, but it’d take a couple pages.  See, one of the really truly awesome things about Smackdown Vs. Raw 2009 is that each of the characters will have a positively huge storyline.  Just for a for instance, if you play as The Undertaker (my personal favorite), not only will you get to pound both Santino and Finlay into the ground (possibly opening up the patently ridiculous Hornswoggle as a management character), you’ll also go into the heavyweight championship to take on the Great Khali when both Santino and Finlay will form a coalition specifically intended to take out The Undertaker.

I have never been so convinced that Transmetropolitan was right.  TV wrestling is, indeed, phallocentric soap opera for, among others, intellectually lazy intellectual people who get off by cultural slumming. I admit to enjoying  a bit of the brain candy every so often, and there’s really nothing like this for brain candy.

Of course, it’s not all about just really arrogant ways to say “brain candy”, no sir—this is also about pounding cultural stereotypes into oblivion.  Santino, for instance—he’s from JERSEY.  His accent is thicker than Olive Garden’s alfredo sauce, and he comes in with an on-screen graphic that features a waving Italian tricolor flag.  It almost—ALMOST!—felt like I was beating the hell out of Italy itself.

I will say this much for Smackdown Vs. Raw 2009—they really have captured the pomp, circumstance and majesty that this entire sport is built around.  When I walked the Undertaker in for Royal Rumble, they actually had a dozen guys wearing hooded cassocks line my path with live torches.  It was probably unnecessary, but really, I’m glad they took the trouble.  Why the Undertaker doesn’t show up in more horror flicks is beyond me.  But anyway.

Sure, the gameplay is sort of limited—pound hell out of a competitor until he refuses to continue and then attempt to pin him.  But you can’t really blame the game for this, as this is pretty much all that wrestling actually is.  That whole saw about silk purses and sow’s ears?  Yeah, that was made for games like this.

If you’re already a Smackdown / Raw / ECW fan, then you probably don’t need me to tell you that this is a fairly fun game with some interesting storylines.  Thus, this next remark goes out to those who already aren’t watching the show with any regularity, much like myself.  You don’t need to have a really intimate knowledge of the show to be able to follow the game, so if you want a quick introduction to the world of Smackdown / Raw / ECW, then you’ll have exactly what you need in Smackdown Vs Raw 2009.  For fans it’s a must-buy, and for everyone else, it’s actually a pretty good rental.

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.

Snowboarding games, to me, may well be the only kind of sports game that makes just a little less sense than skateboarding games.  Oh, sure, when you snowboard you get to wear a lot of thick winter gear which functions as padding, and you’ll also be falling into snow, which is just a kind of cold padding.  But then again, I’ve really never heard of anyone who either froze to death or got buried alive while skateboarding.  And these are two very real dangers of snowboarding.  One word: avalanche.

So when I latched on to a copy of Shaun White Snowboarding, now available for the Xbox 360, the Playstation 3, PC and PSP, I wasn’t all that sure what to think.  See, it’s not like this game has a whole lot of plot to it.  You’ll play a snowboarder who launches through a series of challenges like slalom racing, and straight out races, and other kinds of snowboarding fun, as well as an opportunity to sail down some very nicely set up courses and do tricks and flips and whatnot.  Playing the challenges allows you to get cash to trick out your board and gear, and you’ll also get to advance to different kinds of courses, like mountain peaks, back country hills, parks, and of course, Target Mountain, which is basically just one giant commercial for Target, assuming you bought your game at Target.  The best kick in the teeth about the Target Mountain pack is that it costs more than the regular, so you’ll basically be paying Target a premium to advertise itself to you.

That particular kick to the teeth aside, Shaun White Snowboarding really surprised me.  I had a surprising quantity of fun throwing myself down a mountain to a positively outstanding funk soundtrack comprised of songs like “Play That Funky Music”.  Tricks weren’t terribly difficult to pull off, and it did a really nice job of capturing the feeling of speed as you go flying down a mountain with a chunk of fiberglass strapped to your feet.  I actually managed to blow a lot of time just cruising down the various mountains, sliding in and out of the pine trees, jumping off ramps and wood piles and houses and suchlike…there’s plenty to do here, and you’ll probably be able to enjoy it repeatedly, giving it all sorts of replay value.

Okay, granted—if you like to have a storyline when you play your games, then Shaun White Snowboarding’s miserable attempt at a plot is going to be a spectacular joke to you.  There’s only so much narrative value in “improve as a snowboarder and travel to various locales where you’ll continue trying to improve as a snowboarder”.   As for action, it’s also in pretty short supply here, because you’re basically playing a sports game.  While you’ll get to chuck snowballs at your fellow racers when you’re in the Death Race portion of the game, you’ll never lay hands on, say, a shotgun or a chainsaw.  And I’m sorry, but I think being able to handle a chainsaw or shotgun would just up the awesome factor of a snowboarding game like a million percent.

The key point to take away from all this is that you’re snowboarding.  If you like the feeling of speed and the exhilaration of gravity as you take a long drop off a mountain with nothing between you and a shattered spinal column but sheer momentum and a hunk of fiberglass.  They did a solid job with it, but there’s only so much you CAN do with it by dint of the material itself.  If you’re okay with the inherent limitations of the source material, then you’ll love this game.

For the many gaming addicts hooked on to Wii, watch out for more peripherals coming your way as Nintendo has announced the release of two new motion controls to make your gaming experience better.

The new Wii MotionPlus accessory will hit U.S. retailers on June 8, taking the motion-sensing controls of the popular Wii system to new levels of precision and performance. What’s more, these control enhancements will be on vibrant display when the Wii Sports Resort game launches on July 26, offering a beach-themed follow-up to the groundbreaking Wii Sports game.

Wii Sports comes packed with the Wii console. It grew into a worldwide phenomenon and continues to attract millions of new players to the world of video games. Each Wii Sports Resort game comes packed with a single Wii MotionPlus accessory.

When used with specially designed games, Wii MotionPlus tracks players’ movements in finer detail and with greater accuracy than ever before, building upon the innovative wireless function of the motion-sensing Wii Remote controller. Even the slightest twist of the wrist or turn of the body is replicated exactly on the TV screen, allowing users to become even more immersed in Wii game play. Designed for easy attachment to the Wii Remote controller, the Wii MotionPlus accessory will be offered at an MSRP of $19.99.

Wii Sports Resort takes the inclusive, fun and intuitive controls of the original Wii Sports to the next level, introducing a whole new set of entertaining and physically immersive activities. With the deep control enhancements of Wii MotionPlus, veteran Wii users and newcomers alike can enjoy unprecedented gaming precision as they cruise on a water scooter, duel with swords, throw a Frisbee and much more. Wii Sports Resort and Wii MotionPlus will be offered together at an MSRP of $49.99.

(Source) Press

Ever have one of those days when you’re feeling restless?  Like you’ve just slammed a quart of Red Bull laced with Pixy Stix?  Got a lot of excess energy to burn off?  Then what you need is one of the newest games on Newgrounds, a massive and hyperkinetic version of Pong called, strangely, Pwong.

Pwong, much as the name and my last sentence implies, is basically just a massive, spectacular game of Pong, with MULTIPLE BALLS.  And when I say, “multiple balls”, I don’t mean three or four.  I mean as many as ten or twenty on the field at one time.  Frankly, I couldn’t keeep an accurate count because they were flying so fast.  Scoring is the simplest a complex sports game can offer–each ball you miss is deducted from your score, while each ball your opponent misses is added to your score.

Just to give you an idea, at one point I was at negative seventy-five points.  Things picked up and I soon got to a hundred and one on my first try.  This qualified me for “pre-beginner” rank, and left me feeling vaguely ashamed of myself for the rest of the afternoon.  But it won’t stop me from coming back later–nor should it stop you from giving this one a try.

I’m not normally a huge fan of sports games.  Most of the time it feels like the same thing I’ve played before, over and over.  I mean, do we really need a new Madden every year?  For a while there, that’s exactly what we were getting.  Whether we needed it–whether we WANTED it–or not, we were getting it.  Sure, they’d tack on enough new features to make it feel slightly different, but it was still the same basic concept over and over again.

One place where the difference almost feels necessary is racing games.  And today, after trying Pure, I can say that sometimes, the same old same old is exactly what we need.

In Pure, you play as one of a group of racers, out for glory on the Pure circuit for their own reasons.  There’s a brother and sister rivalry, there’s the son of a seventies rock star who wants to make a name for himself and get out of his father’s shadow, there’s a Japanese wildman who just has a gift, there’s a girl who worked three jobs to afford her own ATV, and so on and so forth right down the line.  But these stories are little more than window dressing for the main event–getting on your fully customizable ATV, going to some of the most beautiful places on earth, and blasting through them at somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred miles an hour on a motorized seat with wheels that doesn’t have so much as a roll bar.

When I say “fully customizable”, I mean it–you’ll build an ATV literally from scratch, starting with the frame, going through such necessary parts as brakes and engines and even working your way up to such superfluities as hand guards and Nerf bars.  You’ll even get to decide the COLOR of most components, and add on decals and stickers and everything but a Hello Kitty bobblehead on the handlebars.  Which would be kind of cool, but I digress.

And when I was talking about a roll bar, you’ll want one.  These beautiful places–a mountainous island in Italy, an old logging camp in Montana, a crater in New Zealand–have lots of steep drops and big angles that you will, not surprisingly, use as jumps.  I’m no mathematician, but if I’m getting the scale right some of these drops are a couple hundred feet up.  And being the sort that you are, of course, you’ll take these huge drops as an opportunity to flip or spin your ATV in mid-flight or jump off it temporarily or do all sorts of irresponsible and potentially fatal things in mid-flight.  These are called “tricks”, and you will have the opportunity to do plenty of them.  The interesting thing is, if you DON’T do these tricks, you will be refused access to your nitrous oxide boosters, which is likely to put you at a serious disadvantage in the race.

This of course makes no sense in the real world–normally nitrous boosters are on a switch, and the switch really doesn’t care if you “catch mad sick air” before you use it, but this is a game so allowances have to be made.  Also, nitrous tanks will not refill mid-race because they have such respect for your ability to perform tricks…but again, game, allowances, yadda yadda.

But the key thing to take away here is that Pure is an unsettlingly adrenaline-fuelled experience.  The next-gen graphics really do help underscore the beauty of your surroundings, while at the same time also giving you the feeling of being about to wet yourself after a couple hundred foot drop off the side of a cliff.  While you’re hanging off the back of the ATV doing something called a “Superman”.  The music is a fair accompanyment, but I’d like to hear a little more variety from some more recognizable names.  Come on, guys–was Blink 182 that busy?  A little Offspring, perhaps?

Still, Pure is a surprising experience that should get your heart pumping as you do horrifying and ridiculous things you’d never do in real life.  At the very least, a fun rental, and if you’re already into ATVs then just go whole hog and get the game.

The casual gaming phenomenon has been running for quite some time now, and it’s always a little bit of a surprise to see it segue into the console market.  What I’m about to say may be a little controversial, but I confess, it’s how I felt:  Facebreaker for the Xbox 360 is a casual console game.

You’re not alone in considering this odd–I certainly did.  Console games, unless they’re specifically marketed as such and generally packaged in collections, should not be so simple to play and so simple in construction that they can be called casual.  But this is the case–you play one of several boxers who’s out to win fame and glory and the right to punch a whole lot of people in the face.  And that’s ALL you do.  You punch. You have your choice of high punch and low punch, you can add dash moves to your punch, and you can even use SPECIAL punches called “Breakers” in conjunction with your regular punches.  But no matter how you slice it, you’re still just swinging a fist.

Some have criticized the game’s broken AI being unnecessarily difficult and thus unplayable.  And after playing a few rounds I can’t help but agree with them.  When the game itself actually TELLS you, even on the easiest settings, that you WILL lose and you WILL lose frequently until you figure out each boxer’s specific weak point, someone may have made a serious mistake designing the AI.  A game should never have to openly declare its own difficulty as though it were a box of cookies announcing its fat content!

This is actually pretty sad—the game itself is a good idea.  It’s clever, it’s funny, some of the boxers have really amazing backstories and are downright entertaining.  For instance, fighting Steve in the arcade pits you against a short fat kid in a ninja suit who’s the trivia king of his fantasy gaming guild.  There’s a Russian boxer by the name of Molotov who fights while wearing a belt of explosives.  There’s a certifiable lunatic, a giant with the mind of a child, a voodoo priest, a Japanese schoolgirl…and a legion of other great choices.  The whole thing is done in a cartoonish style, and the visible facial deformations are a riot to watch.   The character voices are nicely done—watching the audition tapes is a laugh and a half.

There are even celebrity boxers involved or at least scheduled to be; ever watch an episode of “Keeping Up With The Kardashians” and say, wow, I wish I could just slug Kim a few good ones?  With Facebreaker, you actually CAN!  Spencer Pratt and Heidi Montag can actually square off via Facebreaker.

But all of these wonders together can’t quite exempt Facebreaker from its biggest problem—an AI so damaged that it’s virtually impossible to play in single player mode.  I can’t say how the multiplayer would work out—I generally work alone.  But the key point remains: playing Facebreaker is like trying to drive a Ferrari with a busted axle.  It looks great, it sounds great, it’s a beautiful system, but man…it’s not going anywhere any time soon.  And trying to go anywhere with it will only do more damage and leave you seriously frustrated.