FuzzyCo

Arkham City takes the beat-up-some thugs action of Arkham Asylum and opens it up to a whole section of Gotham City. The plot makes little sense. And Alfred is really kind of jerk on the radio. But hey, at least you get to be Spiderman zip around the city on grappling lines.

FuzzyCo grade: A-

Bulletstorm is a big dumb FPS that had just enough interesting narrative touches to keep me interested in playing the whole thing. For one, the game starts with the video game cliche of "the elite assassination squad was just being used and they were killing innocent people" and the motivation for the rest of the game is revenge for that discovery. And it's just a detail, but the game has such an awesome explanation for why the infinitely capable resupply points won't just give you all the bullets and weapons you want—they were a experiment by that same evil general to produce better troops by only rewarding the best soldiers, as determined by a computer system monitoring how creatively you dispatch your enemies. And there's the hint that really this is a terrible idea and probably contributed to the failure of the evil general's troops to pacify the mutants who now overrun this once vacation planet.

FuzzyCo grade: B+

I came into the game Alan Wake with almost no preconceptions, except maybe something about the box cover gave me the impression that it might be kind of like the Silent Hill or Resident Evil games, ala some kind of survival horror. And sure, I guess it's in that genre. But I was blown away.

First of all, it's gorgeous. I'm pretty impressed that with the same old Xbox 360 that's been out for five years, they're wringing this kind of graphics from it. Maybe I haven't been playing enough recent games (I do usually follow my "buy games when they're two years old and cheap" method—Shaun just happened to have a copy of this one lying around) but really, it looks so good.

And secondly, the story holds together. I mean, it's about dreams and writing and insanity and the act of creation, so there's plenty that's illogical, but it all makes sense. And it's obviously all of a piece—there was no last act hurriedness or anything. So many games I've played have a good idea and it's obvious that a lot of time and attention has been paid to the opening sequences and then you get near the end of the game and it all falls apart—the team ran out of money and time and attention and just slapped something together to finish it off. Not this game.

I was so impressed with the game that when I finished it, I immediately bought the two downloadable bonus episodes (the first time I've done something like that with the 360). Those, unfortunately, I was not so impressed with. I thought it was a little too evident that they were trying to craft something fresh out of the limited models and characters available to them in the base game. And, not to give too much away, but the total dream-world stuff that was so effective as the very end of the main game, felt too fakey in the bonus episodes. It made me realize that a big part of the attraction of the main game for me was that it was always just a skewed reality, rather than a completely unreal landscape.

FuzzyCo grade: A+ (main game), B- (downloadable episodes)

I love Hellboy. I love the character and the mix of myth and noir and I love Mike Mignola's style and design. I love the comic books and I've liked both movies. So, sure, a game, sign me up. The plus side of Hellboy: the Science of Evil is that it's really captured the look of a Mike Mignola comic, and with Ron Perlman voicing Hellboy for the game, it sounds perfect as well. The downside is that the gameplay is basically punching a whole bunch of similar looking enemies over and over and over.

FuzzyCo grade: B-

Limbo is an Xbox Live Arcade downloadable game set in a misty, dreamy greyscale world, where the protagonist and his foes are only ever seen in silhouette. There's no musical soundtrack, but just the quiet noises of water dripping, chains creaking, giant spiders sticking their talons through your brain…

Limbo is a platformer and The Boy (your character) dies a lot* and it was, somehow, very affecting. In many video games, your character often dies, and often bloodily, but there was something about the quiet, understated way that The Boy is just disposed of by the Limbo environment that got me each and every time.

It's a fairly short game, but every section uses some completely new variation of game play, so there's a variety that keeps it lively. And the design is topnotch, all the way through.

FuzzyCo grade: A+

* Some games have Achievements like "complete the game without dying". Limbo has one that's "complete the game while only dying five times".

There were some fun things about Crackdown. For starters, I think I've played so many games where you're a mercenary or everyone is against you, or like Grand Theft Auto where you're an outright criminal, that to be a police agent and have other cops come to your aid as you're cruising around the city was kind of refreshing. The sandbox nature of the world and the fact that missions were all available in any order (you'd be a fool to go straight after the big bosses right off the bat, but you could if you wanted to) was cool. And the progressive nature of your superpowers made the landscapes feel fresh when you came back to the same area with new abilities.

But the boss missions were very repetitive—there was only one of twenty-one with any sort of puzzle. And the narrator voice was super annoying, often giving "helpful hints" that were way off base. After I've collected 300 of 500 "agility orbs" I don't really need to be reminded that collecting agility orbs increases that ability. Thanks, jerk. And speaking of that jerky voice. OK, SPOILERS (for a three year-old video game) …

Prey is a first-person shooter with some really interesting ideas for gameplay—there are portals (ala Portal), variable gravity zones, and your character can 'spiritwalk'—and none of those ideas are really used to their full potentials. After a while it just turned into "shoot some more aliens, some of whom happen to be upside-down on the floor/ceiling".

FuzzyCo grade: B

A great thing about getting a console four years after everyone else is that you can see what's become a 'classic' and pick those games up for cheap at Gamestop. Gears of War is only two years old, but the principal stands. While everyone else is off saving up $60 to preorder Gears of War 3, I'm playing a $7 used copy of the first game.

I hadn't played a FPS for a while and I have to say I feel like I blundered my way through the game a bit. I guess I got pretty used to the cover system, though, because in the next FPS I played I kept wanting to hug walls and glom onto little barricades. And I'm strictly a solo player, which I understand might be cutting off a large part of the game for me. But it's enough of a struggle for me to find time to play at all—why would I want to spend that time being beaten by a 12-year-old in Tulsa?

FuzzyCo grade: B+

OK, so I can't do fighting game combos. Ask Shaun or Erica to describe the hilarity of watching me try and do the first XXY combo in a Mortal Kombat tutorial. So when I had Bayonetta borrowed for two days while Shaun was in Vegas, I made a very deliberate choice that rather than struggle through the first few chapters on Normal I'd just crank it down to Easy and see if I could get through the whole game.

And with the gameplay reduced to wild button mashing, that left more time for me to pay attention to the story. And the story is crazy.

SPOILERS!

Bayonetta is the last (+/- 1) of an ancient line of moon-worshipping witches, supposed to be the balance to a sect of sun worshipping-sages. Each faction controls an "eye of the world" and the two are never supposed to meet. But 500 years ago a sage and a witch had a baby, and that was Bayonetta, and then she was put in a coffin for 500 years. And now she has to kill a bunch of angels every day or she'll be dragged down to Inferno. Maybe. It's mentioned once or twice and then doesn't ever seem to matter. (though, to be fair, maybe it doesn't matter because you do kill a lot of angels in the course of the game.)

So Bayonetta gets attacked by a lady in red, who we know from the intro is her BFF witch but Bayonetta has amnesia from all her time in the coffin, and decides to go to this Spanish city to investigate. Once there, Bayonetta kills bigger and bigger angels using punching and guns and her hair (which is also her jumpsuit) until she finally figures out that the last of the Sages (who is her father, of course) is trying to wake up the Creator, using the two eyes of the world, so that the Creator can unite the three realities (Paradiso, Inferno, and Terra) into one. Bayonetta wants to stop him because... well, just because. "Because I'm a wise-cracking sexy witch!" seems to be most of her reason. It's really kind of odd that Bayonetta doesn't ever seem to ask the question whether combining all the realities is a good or bad thing. "You're for it, so I'm against it" seems to be the whole of her motivation. I mean, if nothing else, if she really is in thrall to Inferno and in danger of being drug off to hell, might she not want Inferno to go away?

Oh, and there's a little girl who is Bayonetta herself as a child. Whatevs.

Long story short, Bayonetta defeats the Sage (who is also her father) but then it was a trick and he sticks her in a rocket and shoots himself and her into space and into God's eyes, who wakes up. The end.

Wow. What subversive storytelling. Maybe Bayonetta was the villain all along and the Sage had the right idea. There's an Epilogue, so maybe that will just be God uniting the realities and then Bayonetta realizing the error of her ways.

Or... maybe the red witch from before will ride her motorcycle into space, wake up Bayonetta, who will then have the biggest boss-battle ever and beat up God (with punching and shooting and her hair) and then throw him/her into the sun.

And then the ending calls back the opening (dear lord, I totally forgot to mention the low-rent Joe Pesci knock-off) and we're back to beating to angels, hahaha, freeze-frame!

What?!?

Also, the character designs, especially of all the various angels, are excellent. And I hear that if you can do those fighting-game combos, that part is challenging and engaging.

FuzzyCo grade: B-

I had some complaints about Blacksite: Area 51, but I'm still riding on my "whee! lookee me playing a 360" high, so I was happy to just finish the game and earn some Achievements. Also, as you may remember, you can't trust anything I say about a Midway game because I occasionally do some work for them. Also, any quibbles I might have about the game pale in comparison to what the designer tossed out right as the game was hitting the shelves. Classy.

FuzzyCo grade: [redacted due to conflict of interest]

At first I thought I was going to be bored with Bioshock since the mechanisms of the game were virtually identical to System Shock II, which I'd played all the way through. But the story was so compelling and the immersive feel of the collapsing underwater Randian-Utopia city (say that five times fast) was so complete that I wasn't bored for a second.

The details are what really made the game for me, like the whirr-huff-click sounds of the various electro-mechanical and pneumatic machines and the fact that the 'turret guns' are mounted on swivel office chairs. And I found that learning the history of Rapture largely through it's citizens' discarded "Audio Diaries" to be oddly engrossing.

Oh, and it was a lot easier than SS2, which, for me, was a bonus.

FuzzyCo grade: A

So, hey, disclaimer-ville, you can't trust anything I say about a Midway game, because they pay me money, occasionally.

That said, Stranglehold was a good game for my first Xbox 360 game (gamer tag FuzzyGerdes if you want to add me to your friends). It was pretty, and short. The game is intended to be a direct sequel to John Woo's 1992 Hard Boiled and it does pretty well in that regard -- Chow Yun-Fat didn't talk much and did a lot of shooting in Hard Boiled as well.