Shooting

Hallways… In… Spaaaaaaaaaaace!

HIGH The second half of the game.

LOW The first half of the game.

WTF Why is there so much filler here?

Horrific in All the Wrong Ways

HIGH The touchdown on LV426 is adequately realized.

LOW Everything else.

WTF They released this colossal pile of dross at full price?

A Beautiful Bore

HIGH The new bow is pretty sweet.

LOW The final boss is everything that's wrong with boss fights.

WTF I can't punch a thin wooden door down? This is still a thing?

A Night to Remember

HIGH Finally bringing the entire team on a mission.

LOW Dr. Chakwas was a no-show.

WTF Finding Kasumi going through Shep's panty drawer.

Indie developer and fighter of good fights Mommy's Best Games recently released Serious Sam: Double D—XXL on Xbox Live Arcade (XBLA). The big cheese of Mommy's Best Games, Nathan Fouts, explains everything anyone needs to know about XXL, and a few other topics came up, to boot. Apart from the noogie he gave me (it still smarts!) the interview went rather well.

Cinemablend ran an article recently that leveled some pretty serious charges at the gaming press. The article uses terms like "publisher-bought gaming media" and maintains that gaming press needs to come clean before games come out if they're bad. This article, if you haven't read it already, is fallacious and unnecessary.

Second Time's the Charm

HIGH Eight lasers firing at once, annihilating everything onscreen.

LOW Where are my Golden Guns, MBG?

WTF This time around, I'm going to say... dynamite-powered unicycle.

It's not a backlog title, but I managed to get a copy of Fire Emblem: Awakening for Nintendo 3DS, and I've been putting some time into it… it's not title I was eagerly anticipating, but I needed a portable title and word of mouth from people that I trust was almost universally positive.

The Easy Way Out

HIGH Taking out an entire encampment of privateers at close range without being detected.

LOW The final mission in the "Buck" sideplot is just gross.

WTF Can I please face one major boss I don't kill in an apparent hallucination?

Bloodbath Island

HIGH Leaping off a zipline and driving a machete into one pirate, then slashing his friend's throat before he realizes what's happening.

LOW Being asked to make one of the stupidest endgame choices in history.

WTF Okay, that's a lot of Komodo Dragons all in one place.