A surprisingly good clone of the Grand Theft Auto games. The plot isn’t as good, though, and it suffers from some bizarre and frustrating bugs.
The new features are fantastic (practice mode, cooperative multiplayer), and there are some excellent songs in this version, but the game doesn’t jell the way the first one did. I am glad I’ve got a new plastic guitar to replace my old one — the whammy bar had broken off and the strum bar was getting a little flimsy.
For the first five days I owned an Xbox 360, this disc barely left the machine. On top of the ridculously‐high replay value, this game is also a really fascinating look at what Japan thinks about American culture. The “Mark of the Sniper” scene (grab the game script and do a search) seemed to be a direct rebuttal to the 1992 Rodney Peairs/Yoshi Hattori incident.
Wow. This game scores very highly on my RTS rubric: full camera control, no forced micromanagement, sane multiplayer, and a forgiving learning curve. It’s so engrossing I’ll forgive it for indulging in the boilerplate “noun of noun” naming convention for World War II video games.
Gaming Archaelogy: R.O.B. R.O.B. was Nintendo’s Robotic Operating Buddy, the toy red herring robot that got the original NES into stores after the video game crash of 1983. I have vague memories of this thing, but totally forgot how freaking slow it was.
Perfect playthrough of Night Trap, one of the first games to use full‐motion‐video. This game seems like it was made just so that some schmuck would make fun of it on his blog twenty years later. As SeanBaby puts it: “Night Trap is exactly like switching between eight different channels — only at any time, seven on them are static shots of empty rooms and one is the worst show you’ve ever seen.”
At the beginning of an episode of X-Play on G4TV.
Do you like rhythm games at all? If so, I cannot recommend Guitar Hero more highly. The joints on my fingers ache from holding down fret buttons all weekend. It’s hard to find — I had to go to the Best Buy in Cedar Park to get my copy — but it’s worth the…
