Midway

Rebooted into Respectability

HIGH The story mode is one of the best ever seen in a fighter.

LOW The AI vacillates between "invincible" and "lobotomized".

WTF Shang Tsung's "Joker" fatality.

OSHA-Approved Kombat

HIGH People want to play a game as Batman. This game allows them to do that.

LOW The fatalities are universally terrible.

WTF Here's a memo, Midway. I own this game. I'm not standing in an arcade with people in line to play. So, if I want to pause the game so I can look up a website to find out how to do Batman's… ugh…"Heroic Brutality"… then I should damn well be able to pause the game.

When I go through a pile of used games, I usually have a pretty good idea of what I'm looking for. I keep tabs on titles that look like solid "maybes"—games that may have a few good points, but are sketchy enough to discourage me from risking $50 buying them new. It's pretty rare that I'll end up bringing something home that I hadn't already targeted as such, but Surreal Software's The Suffering was exactly one such game.

Game Description: Honor is his code. Vengeance is his mission. Bloodshed is his only option... Experience the excitement of the true next-gen action while continuing the story of John Woo's influential action film, "Hard Boiled" starring Chow Yun-Fat. Ensnared by a crime boss with a gripping secret, Inspector Tequila is forced to cross the line from sworn duty to bloody revenge. Engage your enemies with intense cinematic gun battles and cause massive environmental damage in real-time or revolutionary slow-motion Tequila Time.

Rampage may be unique among videogame franchises in that, across six titles and twenty years, not a single one of them has ever actually been a good game. No, Rampage has squeaked by on the strength of its premise alone.

According to ESRB, this game contains: Violence