Xbox 360 Reviews, Previews and Screenshots

When I picked up Pimp My Ride, I expected it to bad, but I didn't expect it to be the worst game I'd ever played. I expected that a game about pimping out cars would have, at the very least, a compelling tool for customizing cars. And just maybe there'd be some driving involved and that it wouldn't totally suck. Seriously people, with all the prior art out there, how much chronic do you have to be smoking to screw up driving?

Quite a lot is my guess.

Juiced 2: Hot Import Nights wants to be an innovative and sexy racing game. Instead, it's a rather weak example of the genre. What saves the game from being an incredibly dull and pointless racing game and elevates it to being merely mediocre are the few unique features that it boasts.

Juiced 2: HIN is an extreme example of style over substance. Right down to the cage dancers in the background of just about every non-racing screen.

First thing: Be very suspicious of anyone that tells you this is a good game. It isn't. It can be fun at times. It can be fun for a time. But it's repetitive, unimaginative, and in the end, quite tedious. Earth Defense Force: 2017 is, in fact, hilariously bad. Sort of like a 22 hours Godzilla movie with giant ants, spiders and robots. And no Godzilla.

The lowest review score that I've linked to, by the way, is 6.8. The rest are between 7 and 8 out of ten. So, when these same review rags give Halo 3 a 10 out of 10, remember, that's only 3 points better than EDF: 2017. If I were to rate this game on scale, I would give it, at best, a five out of ten. And that's because while the game is really awful in a number of ways, it still has some merit, and can be fun. But not lots of fun, and not for a long time. It's certainly nowhere near 70% of perfect.

I am a sucker for racing games. Fully half of my gaming library is devoted to fast cars. So, even though I played the demo for DiRT and hated it, I picked it up anyway. And I'm glad I did. The demo may have sucked, but so far, the game is alot of fun.

Stranglehold begins as a fun-enough, if utterly forgettable third person shooter. But then the difficulty ramps up and the framerate plummets, and you die. And that is not fun.

Stranglehold is, apparently, the sequel to the John Woo movie Hard Boiled. I wonder if seeing that movie is a prerequisite for enjoying this game or caring about the plot, because in the end, neither happened. In it, you play one Inspector Tequila, investigating the kidnapping (and eventual murder) of a fellow officer. As you might imagine, there is much violence. While this could have been a good game, just about every aspect of the game from the graphics, controls and plot to the framerate conspire to create an utterly forgettable title. One which you'd be better off forgetting before you get it.

This review is all wrong, and you should ignore it. Go see the good and proper review instead. I only keep this version to remind myself of how not to do a review.

Oh, how very witty, they replaced the “D” in dragon with an “E”. Seriously? A name like that just screams “Emo” to me. And not in a good way. Is it possible to scream “Emo” in a good way? A topic for another day, perhaps.

In considering the game Eragon, we have to consider that it is a game based on a movie. Now, how often does a game based on a movie surpass the original in quality? Not very. The KoToR series surpasses the original Star Wars, but that’s just my opinion because I think the Star Wars movies are stupid. (which isn’t to say that didn’t enjoy them as a small child). With that in mind, let us reflect on the fact that according to Rotten Tomatoes, Eragon earned a whopping 16%.

That’s really bad, by the way.

As I may have mentioned, I recently picked up the 360 Elite. As it turns out, the box I got was defective in some way. Specifically, it doesn’t like playing Tony Hawk’s Project 8 in HD mode. The box was a little iffy from the get-go, with random crashes, but it was Tony Hawk’s Project 8 that helped me diagnose the problem for good. See, on my new Elite, by using Tony Hawk’s Project 8, I could guarantee a hardware crash with 5 minutes. So, for that I’ll always be thankful.

Thank you, Tony Hawk’s Project 8 for diagnosing my hardware problems!

After playing Cabela's African Safari, I was pretty excited to try Cabela's Alaskan Adventure. That didn't last long. It became almost immediately clear that this game was going to be somewhat dreadful to play because even the menu controls are unintuitive and unforgiving.

It's really too bad too, because this game is the more ambitious of the two. Of course, with greater ambition comes greater risk of spectacular failure. Where African Safari is a relatively simple and streamlined killing machine, Alaskan Adventure is more of a hunting simulator. Too bad it's a pain in the ass to play.

I imagine the pointy heads at Microsoft and Realtime worlds getting together saying and to each other something along these lines:

Wow GTA is doing really well, that's a hot commodity. We need to make something just like it, except better. Or different enough that people won't call us rip-offs. Hey, I know, we can do it in the future. Instead of playing a criminal, you'll play a genetically enhanced supercop.

At least, that's how I imagine Crackdown was born.