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Seamless, jaw-dropping environments, engaging combat, and a slew of new features such as weapon crafting add considerably to the Fallout experience. Unfortunately, I never really felt like I was playing a meaningful, developing character influencing the world around him. This version of Fallout strips out what I enjoy about the game most: the RPG elements. I never felt like my own villain or hero (removing the karma system is a huge letdown), and the built-in voice acting and dialogue for the main character is largely hollow and uninteresting. Even after utilizing mods to make the dialogue choices mimic Fallout 3, the whole experience seemed impersonal and boring. Settlement building seems out-of-place and distracts from the urgency of an ultimately underwhelming main story. Overall, Fallout 4 chooses to go in a different direction instead of capitalizing on its predecessors' strengths, and what we're left with is just not as strong. That being said, it's a fun game with a lot of memorable moments, and the addicting gameplay of looting, pickpocketing, hacking, and being incredibly empowered in an intriguing wasteland is here. Overall, though - Fallout 4 is an extremely disappointing way to follow up two phenomenal games.

Parkitect takes everything that was good about the classic Rollercoaster Tycoon and Theme Park series and improves upon it. Nothing has drastically changed here: there's a graphical overhaul and more inventory management (you're responsible for routing inventory to shops). The reason Parkitect is such a great is experience is due to how smooth and frustration-free the whole experience is. The UI is greatly improved from the RCT series - nearly everything is intuitive here. Cloning and placing decorations is easy, and while building coasters can still be a little frustrating for the uninitiated, the process is extremely gratifying. Parkitect's campaign is a ton of fun, excelling at showing you the ropes while making you develop parks from the ground up with various challenges. In the second level, for example, you are tasked with creating your park on the cramped runways of an airport. You'll have to carefully manage your money and the decisions you make in these campaign missions, but there aren't too many immense challenges here, which may be a letdown to gamers looking for something more grueling. Overall, Parkitect is not just the reigning champion of the Theme Park genre (especially as the recent entries of Planet Coaster and Roller Coaster Tycoon World leave much to be desired), it's one of the most addicting management games I've ever played.

Terraria fans will often go to great lengths to convince a newcomer that the game isn't just 2D Minecraft. To be fair, it really is, in a lot of ways. You start the game off in a procedurally generated world with essentially nothing, chopping down trees and working through stone and ore with your pickaxe. The materials you collect allow you to construct and improve your shelter, and they also allow you to craft new gear. This SHOULD sound like Minecraft in a 2D space. However, this isn't necessarily a bad thing. For one thing, navigating a 2D space is much easier than navigating a 3D space for your average casual player, which means that Terraria gives its world's enemies a few more energy drinks than your average Minecraft foe, leading to more intense combat situations. In fact, Terraria ups the ante with its combat encounters with a huge array of challenging bosses to fight, which are an awe to look at and fight (not to mention how ridiculously huge many of them are). Implementing a mind-blowing number of items is a lot easier when you only need a single sprite drawn in the game's classic 8-bit style, too, so Terraria checks this box off and provides an absolutely preposterous arsenal of weapons, gear, potions, etc. This makes all the exploration and crafting you do much more gratifying. Before long, you'll be hovering around at super speeds, shooting flaming arrows out of your demon bow with a funny-looking hat to boot. All of this frantic, silly, boss-fighting action is made much more fun when you play with friends, so this is how I'd suggest you play the game if you can. Despite how excellent I think the amount of content in Terraria is, I'm slightly disappointed with the overall presentation and execution of things. For instance, accessing and manipulating your inventory is seemingly easy, but for some reason, it's much less intuitive than it is in Minecraft. The inventory screen itself is pretty cluttered, and I had to look up a lot of things to figure out how they worked, exactly. Additionally, hosting and joining servers is a little unrefined, and I also found a bug in the way the server software handles connections; it's disappointing that the developers didn't fix this and makes me question their support strategy. Overall, something about the way the entire experience is wrapped up seems a little rough, which is a let down for a game that has so much potential to go down in history as one of the best games of all time. Regardless, Terraria is a very fun experience with a lot of content. When it comes to collecting and crafting a lot of awesome, useful stuff and fighting epic bosses, it excels.

The Escapists is a prison-break game with a lot of potential. The idea is simple: escape from prison. Achieving this is not-so-simple: you’ll need to perform tasks for the other inmates to earn $$$, craft items that will help you plot and execute your escape, and dupe the guards using stealth, tactics, and some RNG. At first, the game seemed like a playground. It begged me to try different things in an effort to escape. Unfortunately, most of them didn’t really work the way I expected. The game uses trial-and-error to teach the player what works and what doesn’t, and approaches should intuitively work sometimes don’t work. For example, putting a guard uniform on that you swipe from the laundry quite rapidly increases their suspicion of you, when I would expect it realistically to increase a little slower. The guards in general are pretty trigger-haired, so making mistakes is punished quickly. You’ll often end up in the infirmary or even solitary confinement, the latter which will result in you losing all of your hard-earned items. I’m a fan of brutally challenging games, but no matter how challenging a game is, good game design rewards the player at a regular cadence. The Escapists instead opts to require you to slowly plot a plan of escape over a number of days, and it then dispirits you when you fail. An easy way to fix this problem would be to make the first prison a poorly designed facility with ignorant guards, resulting in a trivial escape. The next would be a bit harder and require you to be more clever. This is how games generally teach players how to succeed. Another option would be for the game to allow the player to reload and try another approach without having to start the next day with literally nothing. Unfortunately, The Escapists seems content to be a slog. While I don’t doubt that the game will eventually teach you what is useful and what isn’t, the trial-and-error approach of the game was not fun enough to get me there. The humor and flavor of the game grows old remarkably quickly, and I kept awaiting the first real dopamine rush the game had to offer: escape.

I have never struggled with a game so much as I have with Bioshock. To clarify, my struggle was not with the difficulty of the gameplay as far as challenging encounters/progression, but I struggled with the experience. Bioshock is a beautiful game that has an important, wondrous story to tell. The game takes you to the underwater city of Rapture, a disturbing dystopia of genetically altered (and unhinged) humans, free from government control, free to alter and enhance themselves as they see fit. The theme, atmosphere, and story are inspired by Ayn Rand's philosophy and work Atlas Shrugged, and it's refreshing to see a AAA video game take such inspiration from a historical and culturally significant work. I can't understate how wonderful the game looks. Torrents of water flooding through hallways through broken glass windows practically never get old. Old-timey neon buildings illuminate the world around in a charming manner. The gameplay consists of using plasmids (genetic modifications) to manipulate enemies and your environment: you can electrocute the water around you (usually taking out several enemies), telekinetically hurl enemies through the air, set foes on fire, freeze things, etc. All the archetypal "spells" that tend to be present in fantasy games are here, and they all work well. To make matters more interesting, besides the deranged Splicers you'll be facing, you also have to deal with Big Daddies in every level, which are giant, lumbering mini-bosses with the sole purpose of protecting Little Sisters, who are little girls that are actually a major source of genetic material (opportunity for the game to add a morality mechanic). A Big Daddy isn't hostile unless you attack it or the Little Sister it guards, and you'll need to have a very good plan to take them out. All the pieces of a phenomenal game are here: an immersive story, unique gameplay, and a captivating atmosphere. However, for me, they just did not come together in a satisfying manner. The main problem I have with Bioshock is that for all that it offers, it's incredibly repetitive. The first few times I encountered Splicers, it was thrilling; they aren't just slow, clumsy zombies, but dancing, charging maniacal psychopaths. However, when I realized that Splicers are pretty much the main enemy I would be facing in the game, I started to dread seeing them. Surely not every messed up genetic reject of Rapture would be the same? I also grew tired of the Big Daddies very quickly. Defeating them requires carefully timed dodges. Waiting until an enemy charges you, moving aside, and then using an attack is boring if you have to do it several times in every level. Yes, you can use combos of plasmids to do some very interesting things to Big Daddies, but it's still the same thing over and over again. If you don't time everything right, you'll probably find yourself on the losing end of the battle, and then you're better off dying (resulting in a respawn) or reloading a save. The weapons don't offer anything superb, either. You are basically equipped with a marginally less impressive arsenal then your average sci-fi/fantasy shooter. The combat in Bioshock would probably be a lot more satisfying if the environments varied, but the entire game looks and is structured pretty much the same... which is consistent with the narrative and atmosphere in the game, but I really get the sense that the concept of the game is constantly fighting the gameplay, resulting in boring slogs from objective to objective. There's not really a lot to explore in the game, and it's completely linear. Even when I did wander off to find an interesting corridor or room, I was ambushed by Splicers, continuing the monotonous, one-note feeling of the game. Many fans of the game will tell you that the story carries the game alone. I unfortunately found that the game is more about crafting a believable, intricate world than telling a compelling tale. For me, this meant that once I had a good sense of the world I was in and how it came to be, I was ready to move on to the gameplay... which ended up being lackluster, as previously described. I wanted to like the morality dilemma this game poses with the Little Sisters, but at the end of the day you're presented with two polarities that are ultimately decided by a single decision that you keep making again and again; this is far less interesting than other FPS games of this nature, e.g. Mass Effect or Fallout 3! Bioshock SHOULD be amazing, given everything it has going for it. However, I don't feel like it really comes together as a fun, enjoyable video game. I almost feel like perhaps it is a commentary on itself: you may have the freedom to do great things, but the outcome may be terrifyingly abysmal.

Animal Crossing: New Leaf may very well be the king of casual gaming. Having arrived in your new town by train, the local residents mistake you for the mayor. Despite your pleas to the contrary, they are completely convinced, and you hilariously end up taking upon the role. The quirky, humorous charm of the game starts here and pervades every facet of the adorable world you’ll be a part of. The goal of the game is simple but open-ended: expand your town and furnish your house. If the game has one shortcoming, it’s that the various activities you can take part in gradually unlock as you progress through the game. The first few days in particular give you very little to do besides catching bugs and fishing, but after that, there is a massive amount of content that awaits. Massive is no understatement: yes, the main activities include fishing, catching bugs, planting and harvesting fruit, buying and selling items and furniture, and doing favors for residents, but there’s so much more here. You can inflate prices of items and convince residents to buy them on the flea market, shake beehives out of trees and carefully swipe the bees for a generous profit (this can be tricky at first to do without getting stung), acquire a golden shovel that allows you to literally plant money trees, open a coffee shop that you can work at, and even travel to a tropical island that has extremely valuable bugs, fish, and a slew of mini-games that provide you with medals to buy special items (not to mention exotic fruit you can swipe mid-game). Making money (or “bells” in this series) is a central part of Animal Crossing: New Leaf. You’ll take out loans to expand your house, which you’ll pay back with large sums of bells. Public works projects (e.g. bridges, police station, coffee shop) cost bells, as well as items, tools, and furniture. The great thing about the game is that most activities are very viable for making bells. There are extremely valuable fish and bugs, as well as fossils that sell for very good prices. Shaking trees often results in items and bells falling out, not to mention the aforementioned valuable bees. Even hitting rocks with your shovel will occasionally result in valuable ore or again, a ton of bells. There’s even a sort of stock market with turnips in the game that can yield incredible profits. Even more impressive is the fact that the game world is constantly changing without you even doing anything. The game plays out in real time, so if you are playing at night, it’s night in the game, which means you can do certain things like attend nightclub shows that you couldn’t do during the day. As the seasons change in real life, the seasons change in Animal Crossing, which affects the availability of bugs and fish, the look of the town, and what events take place. Special events keep the game exciting. On April Fool’s day, a character will show up in your town and impersonate villagers, and you are tasked with figuring out who the impostor is. Every so often, fishing tournaments are held. A fun spin on trick-or-treating takes place every Halloween. Overall, New Leaf is pretty close to being the ultimate casual video game. There’s an astounding amount of content here, and one could easily spend hundreds of hours exploring all of it.

Years before the very chaotic and ridiculous NFL Blitz was released for the Nintendo 64, there was Mutant League Football on the Sega Genesis. Mutant League Football was essentially Madden '93 turned on its head: your teams were made up of mutants, aliens, skeletons, and other weird creatures, a variety of violent plays could be used to actually kill your opponent's players, and cheating by bribing the game's refs was encouraged and extremely useful. The game is a classic of over-the-top, thrilling sports gameplay, and I'm still quite enamored to this day. To my pleasant surprise, Mutant Football League (a slightly different title) was released for the Nintendo Switch in 2018, essentially a remake of the Genesis classic. Mutant Football League does not exactly stand up to modern football games in all the ways sports game fans might expect: you don't get all the fancy game modes and a ton of features, you're not going to see beautiful replays with dynamic cameras, and it's not an evolution of the Madden series in any sense of the word. However, when taken as a spiritual successor or remake of the classic Genesis game, MFL succeeds. The classic gameplay of Mutant League Football has been revived and updated in just the right ways. There are a plethora of "Dirty Tricks" you can call instead of normal plays, resulting in the football exploding at the end of the play, your players to spontaneously become gigantic, and other outcomes which will likely result in your opponent's players' untimely demise. You can also injure and bodyslam other players after plays to deal more damage, taking a cue from NFL Blitz's violent playbook. Each match is commentated by a number of unsavory individuals who meander from cheesy to vulgar to just plain strange, and while it most definitely gets old quickly, it's an important reminder that this game isn't meant to be taken seriously. The problem with many sports games is that lingering feeling that the AI is cheating. In Mutant Football League, cheating is the name of the game, so make sure to cheat back! You can once again bribe the refs to have random penalties called on your opponent, in which case they will surely try to kill the offending ref (which can be avoided if you can run him out of bounds)! It's actually refreshing that you're able to inflict some unfairness upon your AI opponent, which is not the norm in modern sports games. So what is actually significantly different here from the original? The major difference in Dynasty mode. This is essentially a create-your-own team franchise game mode. You are tasked with leveling up a mediocre team from the ground-up, making smart free agent signs and trades with other teams when prudent, and figuring out who is going to be your best backup when a star player inevitably dies during a match. The roster management is simple but fun. At the end of the day, Mutant Football League doesn't really innovate when it comes to football video games. Instead, it takes a classic formula that works and improves upon it. For fans of the original, this is a definite buy. For people that want a solid football experience that doesn't take itself seriously, this is worth a look. For everyone else, maybe look elsewhere.

Grand Theft Auto: Vice City could easily be seen as GTA III with a fresh coat of paint. The game isn't even branded as GTA IV, a title which was given to a later game in the series. Before anyone writes this game off as some sort of standalone expansion or spinoff, however, they need to understand how incredible this game really is. Vice City's gameplay is essentially unchanged from GTA III, but the setting is Vice City, a fictional city based on Miami, which is much more lively, fun, and colorful. You play as Tommy Vercetti (voiced by Ray Liotta), a recently escaped criminal that ends up on the wrong end of a drug deal gone bad. Your goal is essential to seek vengeance against the ones who wronged you, but the plot comes second to the overall theme and flavor of the game. The Scarface-inspired world of Vice City has more character than almost any game I've played. You'll be hurtling down streets at fast speeds in stolen motorcycles, watching the neon glow of the buildings around you zip by as extremely catchy 80s synth pop plays. The soundtrack is absolutely terrific this time around, and it makes the experience so much better. It's hard to point out what's so much better this time around other than the experience as a whole. Improvements include the aforementioned motorcycles/scooters (which are insanely fast and incredibly satisfying to drive), characters that are actually interesting and funny (straight out of classic gangster films), a variety of houses you can purchase to use as save points, and a city that is much more immersive and alive. Additionally, most missions are satisfyingly accomplished by using Vice City's playground of items and vehicles. Need to take out a certain target? You can seek out a rocket launcher or some grenades to help, but you can also choose to find a sturdy vehicle to ram your way through. Perhaps you'll just opt for a helicopter to deplete the enemy forces by air. The number of options here makes the game incredibly fun and replayable. Very few games have the flair and attitude of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. Exploring this new world is an absolute blast, and even when sticking to the not-exactly-groundbreaking missions, the cinematic touches and well-placed, cheesy references will put a smile on your face and keep you in the game.

Mass Effect revels in its superbly epic homage to classic sci-fi and fantasy fare, creating an incredibly endearing cast of characters that will seem familiar to anyone somewhat versed in the genre. It's a good thing the characters are good, too, because most of this game involves you (Commander Shepherd) talking to them. The Commander Shepherd you decide to be over the course of the game has long-lasting and potentially universe-changing consequences, and these consequences extend into the sequels of the series, should you choose to import your character (which you should absolutely do). This sense of consequence creates an immersion that few games even come close to. The FPS gameplay is solid, but by itself a little uninspiring. However, the character classes and their associated skills are what really make the gameplay of Mass Effect shine. You can play as the typical but somewhat dull run-and-gun class, but you can also play as a support class that can levitate and throw enemies, as well as overloading their shields. You can even play as a character that has the ability to hack robotic enemies and make them attack their own cronies. The classes are fairly distinct and they require different approaches to be successful. In addition to the skills, the game has a good number of weapons at different levels that can be upgraded for you and you are squadmates. People that don't care much for RPG-style upgrading may find this a bit tedious (I did), but it definitely adds variety to the gameplay. As far as how the game looks and sounds, it's still an awe to look at after all these years. The film grain and synth soundtrack give the game a sense of timelessness, and detract from the outdated textures. The character models are pretty to look at (especially the armor), and the environments are varied enough to keep things fresh (especially towards the end of the game). The voice acting is fantastic. After I finished Mass Effect, I was pretty blown away from the entire experience, and felt even more rewarded that Commander Shepherd's legacy would live on for the second game. The fact that I pondered over the decisions I had made throughout the game for days afterward is a testament to the immersion of this sci-fi marvel..

From the moment it starts to the moment it ends, Half-Life is a wholly immersive experience. The game eschews the use of cutscenes or narrative text, telling an unfolding story through the eyes of the voiceless scientist Gordon Freeman. While this style of cinematic storytelling is commonplace these days, in 1998, it was revolutionary. The game begins as you arrive to work (late) via a subway tram. It seems to be just another day on the job until the experiment you run goes horribly wrong and Earth is overrun by vicious aliens. As Freeman, you will navigate your way through the extremely large and complex Black Mesa complex, battling a variety of enemies and obstacles. Each level has a distinctly different central mechanic and theme, and the action never cuts away: the game is one long set piece, and this makes it all seem extremely real, even to this day. Half-Life’s pacing is nearly perfect: after overcoming a certain type of combat encounter or series of obstacles, the game makes sure to mix things up or transition before you get too bored of it, for the most part. The major exceptions to this are an extremely long outdoor combat segment (which was still exciting throughout but had me anxious for the next level) and the penultimate chapter, which honestly felt like a slog compared to the rest of the game. The game smartly alternates between intriguing platforming sections and charged combat situations, both of which have aged very well (for the most part) and are appropriately challenging. The game is also incredibly creative with combat. You’ll have to stealthily avoid the tentacles of a cranky alien beast, lure a large, menacing creature into an electric trap, and take potshots at enemies while riding down a high-speed rail cart. Every new chapter offers something fresh and exciting. Even in 2019, the combat in Half-Life is frantic and appetizing. The more typical weapons pack a punch and give satisfactory feedback, while you’re treated to an array of more interesting weapons such as a couple experimental science-y guns, a homing rocket launcher, an alien limb, and a disturbingly manic beetle.. Despite everything great about Half-Life, it is far from perfect, especially in the current age of video gaming. As breathtaking as most of the game is, the pacing really suffers towards the end, as mentioned above. I was glad to get to the final boss encounter, but I did find it pretty frustrating compared to everything that came before. There’s very little margin for error, here. I would not say it was a complete letdown, but it was not the most enjoyable end to the game. On the gameplay mechanics end of things, ladders can be a little sketchy: you may be quite certain you are on a ladder when the game thinks you aren’t, causing you to plummet to your death. Crouch-jumping is also somewhat awkward (by nature, honestly). Finally, not being able to quick-switch your weapons is pretty inconvenient: you’re forced to use the mouse wheel to switch between them, and then click again to select a weapon. Aside from these minor quibbles, Half-Life is still a near-perfect and phenomenal first-person experience. It’s mind-blowing how well it stands up today, and I felt no lack of excitement and emotion playing through it decades later.

Ocarina of Time is a gaming experience like no other, even to this day, and the 3DS remake does everything right to make it feel modern while still preserving its brilliant, time-tested approach of game design. Within the first hour of the game, it's apparent that Hyrule is a large, sprawling, wondrous place. Super Mario 64 introduced gamers to extremely large levels chock-full of exploration, but Ocarina of Time introduces gamers to an entire WORLD. It's honestly a bit intimidating, getting used to controlling Link and his initially small set of abilities and weaponry, along with figuring out where to go and what to do. Ocarina of Time often relies on subtle hints and puzzles to inform the gamer of how to best progress, which can sometimes be frustrating, but nonetheless adds to the game's sense of magic. Anyone who toughs it out through the first few segments of the game will have their patience awarded: the game really starts to shine after its first third, bringing to the table some of the best level design I have ever seen, coupled with the immersion of a living, breathing fantasy world. You'll face physics-defying temple rooms and unbelievably epic bosses, separated by very humorous moments with NPCs and all the simple, satisfying moments: riding around Hyrule Field on your horse, playing one of the many useful tunes on your Ocarina (used to warp between locations and solve puzzles), and uncovering a hidden item that you didn't first realize was there! There's so much content here that an ambitious gamer will have his hands full. If I have a complaint, however, it's that much of the optional content is extremely hidden, and there are often few or no clues to find it. Without a guide, you will probably never find that last heart container that's hidden under a very specific spot with no discernible markings. Still, the fact that much is not obvious in this game somehow adds to the immersion of this magical fantasy world. On the 3DS, the game undergoes a graphical makeover, and everything looks phenomenal and up to the standards of the rest of the handheld's library. The remake makes use of the system's gyroscope for looking around and aiming, which works well, but finds itself in conflict with the system's 3D setting - the game is better played with 3D off. Other than the graphics, this version of the game has a few minor gameplay improvements, most notably making navigating and progressing in the Water Temple more intuitive; I can honestly say that this dungeon was extremely fun to play through, though not entirely without frustration. Overall, every moment of Ocarina of Time that I disliked was soon erased by something amazing that came soon afterward. The game is not flawless, but it does everything it can do to be a revolutionary masterpiece, and to do this day, I have a hard time believing otherwise.

Grand Theft Auto III is an extremely ambitious attempt to bring the series' ultraviolent mayhem to the 3D world for the first time. In 2001, no one yet had really tried making a game like it, with the exception of Driver, which was an intense chase game with less grandiose expectations for itself than GTA III. You play as the silent Claude, a recently escaped prisoner who ends up taking all sorts of dirty jobs around town. Even though Claude doesn't say anything or really have much of a personality (I suppose you get to choose what kind of person he is), the other characters in the game do. Most everyone you meet has a few screws loose and is up to no good. The darkly humorous exchanges you'll have with these characters adds to the atmosphere and style of the game. The main premise of GTA III is that you wander around a living, breathing world in which any car is free for you to take (though not necessarily with the blessing of the owner or police). There are no rules. There are a lot of different vehicles in the game, and they all drive differently as well. You can drive a blazing fast sports car or a dangerously heavy-duty fire truck (with which you can spray out fires, or just harass pedestrians with the hose). Almost everything is fun to drive, thanks to a solid physics engine. Your car will realistically spin out of control when a cop rams you, and when you're going fast, you FEEL it. Even if you're going for a relaxing drive across the incredibly immersive city, cruising is still fun thanks to the ability to listen to a variety of in-game radio stations. There's hip-hop, 80s pop, classical, and more, and a lot of the stations are straight-up infectious. Listening to talk shows or radio DJs is hilarious, due to the care Rockstar has put into the pervasive satire and dark comedy of this game. I found myself laughing a lot when I first started playing. The game does irreverence perfectly. GTA III has missions scattered around the city for you to find. Most of the missions involve driving around town, often killing rival mob members. While the third-person shooting mechanics are much more difficult and clunky than most first person shooters from this era, the ridiculous, over-the-top violence makes it tolerably satisfying. You can easily dispatch other characters into bloody corpses on the streets of Liberty City. If you lose all your health, you end up outside the Liberty City hospital - a nice touch. This game is full of little touches that improve immersion. While the game's missions are straightforward, there's a lot of freedom when it comes to approaching them. You may choose to kill a target with a grenade... but then there's the Uzi... or perhaps, just run him over a few times for good measure. The game gives you multiple options, and the missions are usually a lot of fun (especially when they involve explosives). The unfortunate aspect about the missions materializes when you fail them: you are forced to find the mission giver again, and go through the entire process. This starts to get annoying quickly, especially as many missions will have you driving all over town. The missions are hard enough that you will be going through a lot of retries to beat them, but luckily there are nearly always multiple missions to choose from. Another problem with the missions is that you frequently need to quickly get to locations that aren't on your map. A paint shop that disguises your car is extremely useful when the cops are on your tail, but where is that shop again? Leaving these locations unmarked makes these situations frustrating. The amazing thing about GTA III is the freedom. The tools it gives you to cause mayhem are varied, and you can get pretty creative with all the options. Sure, you can go to the gun shop and buy something, but you can also equip your car with a bomb. Maybe you feel like stealing a vehicle and throwing it into a trash compactor. The game continually reveals differing means of destruction, and then let's you use them as you like, even if you have no goal in mind. If you really feel like being a productive member of society, you can charge cab fare to take people to various locations or put out fires with a fire truck. This truly is an open-world video game. Besides your chaotic influence, computer-controlled cars will ram into each other, gang members will start shooting, and the game generally does a fantastic job of convincing you that it's real while making fun of the real world at the same time. Rockstar created a dense, smart, cool, and awe-inspiring world with Grand Theft Auto III, and it still shows today.

The Stick of Truth is an attempt at perfectly recreating the irreverent magic of the television show: it’s a side-scrolling turn-based RPG that looks and sounds identical to an episode of the show. In the Stick of Truth, you play the new kid in town, and as such, you get to craft your own South Park character. The game gives you the freedom to create a pretty damn good representation of yourself in the classic cardboard South Park style. Your character never speaks throughout the game, a point that actually aids immersion and becomes a running gag throughout the plot. As expected, you are quickly assimilated into the infamous gang of Stan, Kyle, Cartman, and Kenny. The plot largely concerns a small tree branch known as “The Stick of Truth”, which frequently changes hands between the fantasy-clad children of the video game. You’re quickly let loose to explore the entire town of South Park, Colorado, and the game’s strengths become immediately apparent. The recreation of the town is perfect, crammed with references to episodes and characters from the show. You can spend hours exploring the various houses, shops, and locations in the city, and there are plenty of secrets and gags that await you. Exploration is usually worth it, even aside from the clever humor: you’ll frequently find weapons and items to help you on your journey. The characters you pass around town will frequently say humorous things; the immersion is pretty high, overall. The game follows a fairly standard quest system. The main quest contains the bulk of the cutscenes and follows the plot of the game, but there are numerous side quests you’ll find throughout your journey. As every quest fits into the context of the preexisting South Park universe, it all feels very necessary to ensure a proper recreation of the show. The gameplay is a humorous rendition of a standard turn-based fantasy battle system. You utilize melee, ranged, mana-based (all which involved flatulence), and power-based attacks against your foes, and you fight most battles with a buddy (e.g. Butters, Cartman, Kyle) that can be swapped out before/after or during battle. Each buddy has a unique set of powers that you can freely trigger on their turn, and as each opponent will have a unique set of strengths/weaknesses, you will learn how to use each character effectively as you play. The make things even more interesting, many of the power-based attacks involve timed events that you need to execute well to maximize your damage. I rarely found myself getting bored of the streamlined yet engaging combat system, which honestly felt more satisfying than most turn-based RPGs I’ve played. The variety of powers (based on a standard character class you choose at the start of the game), weapons, armor, etc. you can unlock is pretty staggering. I can’t imagine that any two playthroughs would leave you with the same loadout. While you can only have so many copies of the same item, your inventory is otherwise infinite, a design choice that takes a lot of tedium out of the game. Once again, South Park: The Stick of Truth streamlines gameplay in every respect, and this makes the game move quickly and keeps things interesting. Besides turn-based battles, the game is chock full of gameplay twists. One quest is a humorously satisfying stealth endeavor. Another quest portrays the country of Canada (of course) as a top-down 8-bit Zelda-like adventure, and this is recreated flawlessly, guaranteed to generate some belly laughs. Many other quests take the nasty vulgarity of the TV show to its extreme, which is a bold statement to make for a game based on the controversial series. This leads me to confidently proclaim that South Park: The Stick of Truth lives up to the funniest, most intelligent, and best moments in South Park history. The game comes across like a 10-hour top-tier episode of South Park with barely a lull to be encountered. The cutscenes are indistinguishable from scenes from the television show, with the exception of seeing your character embedded in them. If you enjoy South Park at all, this will likely be one of the most humorous video games you will ever play, and you are forced to actively take part in some very graphically questionable moments (usually as quick time events). However, if you don’t enjoy the vile, hard-edged nature of South Park’s jokes, steer clear. Trying to come up with shortcomings in this game is extremely difficult. One obvious one is that it uses save checkpoints instead of allowing you to save whenever you’d like. This is a minor frustration, however, given how frequent most of the checkpoints are. Other than that, the game is South Park, through and through, and there are very few stand-out moments from the show that are missing here. Even aside from the franchise, the smart, streamlined gameplay elements and amount of exploration content make the game an extremely competent and enjoyable RPG.

Postal 2 provides an intriguing premise to players that like a little bit of edge to their gaming: decide how much the world around you pisses you off, and act accordingly. Jaded with your shallow, sex-obsessed, politically correct surroundings, you start the game off outside your trailer, tasked with menial chores bestowed upon by your **** wife. The idea is that while trying to complete these simple errands, you are so inconvenienced by what you encounter that you simply will opt to pull out a machine gun and start taking people out. The reality is that you're usually just dealing with a line of a few people. Besides how superficial everyone in the game you encounter is, I didn't really feel like the violent route was the only way to complete the game's tasks. However, if you don't go the violent route, you are in for a really boring game. This poor attempt at the illusion of choice was underwhelming, but I decided to play the game the way it's meant to be played, and went all out with the arsenal of weapons the game provides. This proves to be pretty entertaining at first; while the gunplay in the game is mediocre at best (this is no AAA shooter), blowing people's heads off with a shotgun is pretty satisfying, as is pouring gasoline onto people and lighting it up. I even got a good chuckle out of pissing on people, things, and places, at least for a little while. The game definitely offers some inventive weapons that are satisfying to play with. The problem with Postal 2 is that this all gets old after a short time, and as previously implied, there isn't really a lot of freedom in the game. You'll find secret passages here and there, but it's nothing that other games haven't done before, and it's pretty bland here. The sexual innuendos used to name a lot of the game's locations are funny at first, but they tire out fairly quickly, and there is nothing more to the facade of the jokes other than the names themselves (there isn't additional content to explore). The missions really are just menial chores, which aren't much fun. Even if you decide to try to complete the whole game non-violently, the game throws random sequences at you that involve terrorists of various kinds, which are pretty much deux ex machinas, forcing intense action moments upon you whether you like it or not. The game would have been a lot more interesting had it provided some serious challenges that could be completed in various ways, which several other games out there offer. The last problem with Postal 2 is that the satire just isn't very smart. If you want some better sharp-edged satire, then something like the South Park RPGs would probably suit you better. The humor here is pretty juvenile, and while it was funny enough to make me laugh for the first while, it grows repetitive. Postal 2 had a lot of potential, but it just doesn't offer enough to be worth playing over other games in the same vein.

Worms. Worms 2. Worms Armageddon. Worms 3D. Worms Forts. Worms: Open Warfare. Have they made enough Worms games yet? More than 20 games exist in the main Worms series, and there's still games like Worms Blast and Worms Crazy Golf that take the physics of the Worms games and apply them to other mechanics. What improvements were made from, say, Worms 2 (1997) to Worms: Reloaded (2010)? Umm... Worms: Reloaded did have hats. Don't get me wrong, aside from the period where things went off the rails and the Worms games went full 3D, many of the newer installments have been quite good, but they just haven't really added or changed anything worthwhile. I would be perfectly happy playing one of the original games. Worms W.M.D is literally a game-changer. W.M.D takes the classic 2D Worms formula, and adeptly outfits it with enough new shiny mechanics and enhancements that it's a wonder it wasn't done before. This installment of Worms adds vehicles: tanks, helicopters, and mechs, etc. Each vehicle has a set of disadvantages and advantages, and they all look and sound amazing. The drillboat is capable of traversing land OR water, which can be extremely useful in certain situations. While you can cause some major destruction inside of these vehicles, don't get caught in a bad spot; it's going to hurt when one of them explodes with you inside. Additionally, the game adds machine guns, flamethrowers, and other stationary weapons around the map for you to use as you crawl around the map. Nothing in this game feels superfluous, and it all has a reason behind it. I've found myself realizing game after game about the sometimes not-so-obvious merits and side effects of the new map elements. Over the years, I've bought new Worms games and enjoyed them, but frequently found myself disappointed when some of the great classic weapons were removed. I'm proud to report that W.M.D brings back ALL of the best weapons from the series, as far as I'm concerned. Banana Bomb, Concrete Donkey, Super Sheep, Holy Hand Grenade, Sentry Gun, Carpet Bomb - they're all here... and they can be upgraded. In Worms W.M.D, a new crate drop has resources that you can use to craft weapon upgrades, as well as new weapons. This means that you can upgrade your Concrete Donkey to an Angry Concrete Donkey, which falls through the earth covered in FLAMES. The Shotgun can be upgraded into a Training Shotgun, which has laser sights on it. And if you are having a hard time finding the classic Ming Vase, the Dynamite upgrades into it, which makes sense, as having them be separate item slots would be redundant. The Ninja Rope is back again, and the physics are actually shockingly similar to the classic Worms games, which will be a relief for roping veterans. Maps now will usually have buildings on them if they are enabled. When inside a building, your worms can crawl through their tunnels and seek strategic vantage points. If you don't have any worms inside a building, you can't see any enemies that may be inside. It's very well done, and adds an extra stealth element to the game. While the game still very much shines as a multiplayer/party game, the single player modes are engaging and exciting. There are many challenges of different sorts for you to complete, and as you complete them you will unlock various goodies, such as new speech banks (accents) for your worms. The sound effects, particle effects/explosions, and environments are all fantastic and set a new standard for the series, too. Excellent. Having played MANY of the Worms games in my lifetime, I can confidently say that Worms W.M.D is the best game in the series. It honors the wisdom of the original games by retaining their strengths while innovating in just the right ways. If you have ever found this series even remotely interesting, you need to buy this one.

Surgery is hard. Really hard. You can't just click on a scalpel and a body location in real life. It's more like Surgeon Simulator, in which each finger needs to independently and delicately curve, retract, and extend at the precise moment. Alright, I'll admit I'm full of it... but so is this game. Surgeon Simulator is a tongue-and-cheek "simulator" of performing surgery, in which you literally control each finger on each hand and are expected to perform surgeries on patients, using a variety of both normal and ridiculous surgical instruments. The fun part is that you're going to be clumsy as all hell, knocking beakers over, accidentally injecting yourself with syringes, etc. Other than the obstacle of dexterity, you're just trying to get to the organ in question any way you can and remove it or replace it. A delicate touch is required, because piercing the body will cause it to bleed out, and if you're not careful, the rate of bleeding can get very fast and cause you to fail your surgery. It the aforementioned mayhem isn't enough for you, you can perform a surgery in a moving, swerving ambulance (for some reason). Just make sure a lung doesn't fly out the back door! Surgeon Simulator is worth a shot for some laughs. It's actually quite a bit of fun, but there's not a lot to the game. It's very casual, which definitely bears some irony...

The premise of Comedy Night is a simple but endearing one: simulate an open-mic night in a video game, in which players may take part as audience members or performers. This simulation is done rather well on the technical side. You can create a funny looking character that either looks like you or matches your style, and you can modulate the pitch of your voice up or down. While you can push keys to make hand gestures or facial expressions, you need to use your mic to actually tell jokes (unless you're merely miming). The players who are audience members have an assortment of emotes, cheers, etc. they can use, as well as using their mics to heckle. The only objective as an audience member is to sit back and enjoy the show, and feel free to lend your opinion. The problem with Comedy Night is that the user base is made up of a very specific demographic, namely a pubescent one that is obsessed with racial slurs, particularly the "N-word". Clever comedians will often get booed off the stage in favor of ones that simply repeat racial slurs over and over, with literally no set-up or routine. Now, there have been a few occasions in which I've seen a brilliant set of comedy, but you really have to hunt for it, and it's likely that the server's users will sabotage it. There are other modes that include rap battles and karaoke, but the essence of Comedy Night is the standup, and that is mostly ruined by puerile racism. One could argue that this was not the intent of the developers, but was it not foreseen, and is there no mechanism that could prevent this or encourage more diverse performances? Maybe the real problem with Comedy Night is that there is really no point at all.

Fallout 3 is one of the most immersive, gut-wrenching, and rewarding RPGs of all time. Period. You literally start your adventure from the womb, learning the controls of the game as you navigate around as an infant. Typical for RPGs, you'll allocate points into base attributes: Strength, Perception, Endurance, Charisma, Intelligence, Agility and Luck (S.P.E.C.I.A.L). The game fast forwards you to pre-adolescence where Dad teaches you how to use a gun on your birthday. The whole thing plays like a first-person shooter, with several dialogue choices to pick from when you talk to other characters. Your character is YOU, and looks like you want him/her to. After the "tutorial" is through, you walk out of the "vault" you grew up in, into the radioactive, post-apocalyptic world of Fallout. Your quest is to find out what happened to your father, who has gone missing. If that doesn't sound open-ended enough, it's important to note that you can literally do ANYTHING at this point. Feel free to head off in any direction and start your new life as a Wastelander. Whatever you choose to do, you will be rewarded. Along your journey you will find many interesting guns and weapons, and pieces of clothing and armor to wear which will change your appearance. There are a ton of weapons to collect in this game, and you can even create your own from schematics you will come across, provided you've collected the right materials. There are rifles, all sorts of explosives, and even a gun that shoots garbage at enemies! As you level up, you'll be able to improve skills such as Lockpicking, Speech, and Science, which will allow you to more easily unlock doors, persuade others, and hack computer terminals, respectively. The combat initially seems like nothing special, at least unless you use V.A.T.S, a combat mode that essentially pauses the combat (it really slows things down to an imperceptible crawl) and lets you target limbs, each with a different probability to hit. This basically allows you to treat firefights as turn-based combat, which is cool from an RPG standpoint, and awesome when you realize how exciting it is when a Super Mutant's head flies off from the blast of a shotgun. Regardless, the combat is fast, exciting, and punishing. The enemies in Fallout 3 are of the creepy, mutated kind, for the most part. They make weird noises and the ones that can talk will sometimes curse at you. This is definitely not a "family" game, the whole thing has a very bleak, edgy feeling to it. It all adds to the atmosphere, however. The Capital Wasteland is sprawling and alive. As you travel throughout it, you will find groups of people, settlements, lone wanderers, etc. that all have stories to tell and quests for you to complete. This all makes for very good plot and immersion, and most of it is done fantastically. The dialogue choices are very interesting and allow you to "react" in character. A high Speech skill will allow you to convince stubborn characters to do things they would otherwise be resistant to. While the environment of the wasteland is not "pretty" in the classical sense, the soda machines, propaganda posters, and lots of other little touches make it real and fascinating. Who you are in Fallout 3 is your choice. You can choose to steal, murder the innocent (I believe you can kill almost EVERYONE in this game), and do "evil" things, which could be objectively advantageous, but will reduce your Karma. Likewise, good deeds increase your Karma. If you have low Karma, unsavory characters will take more of an interest in you, and honest characters will dislike you. This adds to the immersion and excitement of the game, especially when playing "evil", as the guilt will start to sink in rather quickly. I like to roleplay a certain temperament and act accordingly. The choice is yours. If aimlessly wandering around and amassing wealth and weaponry isn't satisfying enough (though it really is), the main storyline in Fallout 3 is phenomenal. There are many exciting missions and moments that will not leave your memory, and will shake and challenge you to your emotional core. When it's over, it's very likely that you will have only explored a fraction of what the game has to offer. Should you choose to start over, you owe it to yourself to make different choices and see how the game unfolds. It may surprise you; as much as the Capital Wasteland can change you, you can change the Capital Wasteland.

Alpha review: When I think of some of my most fond video game moments, I often remember sitting at my computer in the darkness playing NetHack, navigating my Orc Rogue through perilous dungeons, carefully applying my lockpick to each locked door, slowly but surely getting more experienced and geared up. The game never became predictable due to the procedurally generated levels, but if even if it did begin to become repetitive at times, choosing a different role would introduce a completely unique gameplay experience due to the very different strategies that would need to be employed to be successful. 30 years after NetHack was released, yet another roguelike, Streets of Rogue, was introduced into our world. Streets of Rogue is a real-time roguelike game set in a futuristic cyberpunk-ish world. The game never takes itself seriously, and is frequently hilarious. The premise has something to do with a mayor who promises lower taxes and beer, but follows through with higher taxes and prohibition. You're essentially going to go through level after level, attempting to complete a predetermined set of tasks before you can go on. Just like most other roguelikes, if you die, you start over. Similar to the classic roguelike games, you'll choose a character before you embark on your adventure. The character are clever and unique: you can be a stereotypical Hacker, complete with poor hygiene, capable of using his laptop to remotely hack computers in buildings to release toxic gases, disable security systems, and open doors. The Gangster can phone up some of his cronies to assist you in your adventure, the Wrestler can pick up and throw pretty much any object in the game, and the Investment Banker has a lot of cash and get can good prices. The character you choose will drastically change how you approach the game. If you're a Hacker, you're likely to die rather quickly should you choose to run into a room and attempt to beat down enemies. You need to take a more careful and stealthy approach to your entry, utilizing computers and holograms to be effective. A Gorilla, on the other hand, is incapable of communicating with other characters, but is absolutely devastating with its bare hands. The available and unlockable characters in this game are a blast, but if you feel such an inclination, you can actually create a custom character, which has traits and starting items of your choosing. The possibilities now become ENDLESS. I plan to create characters based on my friends in real life, complete with all their idiosyncrasies. The gameplay is fast and frantic, and a groovy, funky electronic soundtrack only helps with the immersion. The enemies in the game explode with money and all sorts of fun items when you kill them (and if you kill them HARD enough, their guts end up everywhere as well). After you complete missions, you collect items to help you on your journey, and you have the ability to gain traits after you complete levels, as well. Otherwise, you're playing a roguelike, so your goal is to keep progressing and improving until you die a shameful death. As far as persistent unlockables, everything you earn in-game comes from a pool of traits, rewards, etc. that you have unlocked. if you want to potentially gain certain things in game, you have to spend chicken nuggets (a persistent resource across all your attempts) to unlock them, and then whatever you have purchased will be in the "pool" of things to earn during your future attempts. You are also free to spend chicken nuggets on weapons for your next attempt, but if you die, they are gone forever. If you happen to have friends outside of your computer, Streets of Rogue supports cooperative play up to 4 players. I'm not promising that this will necessarily make things easier (especially if taking a stealthier route), but the more, the merrier! Streets of Rogue is a really a modern remake of a classic roguelike games. If Rogue, NetHack, Moria, etc. were ever games you were interested in or loved, this game is a no-brainer. If you weren't, this game is still worth a shot due to its near-flawless execution of frantic, RPG mayhem, even in its current Alpha state. Just make sure not to die, because nothing will ever quite be the same.

Ultimate Chicken Horse is a brilliant casual multiplayer game that maximizes its replayability due to its emphasis on fast, creative gameplay with a heavy dose of sabotage and dexterity requirements. The object of every "round" is the same; get to the end of the level before your opponents do. As the levels are relatively empty, it initially seems like this will be a boring task. However, before each attempt, each player will simultaneously add a platform, contraption, obstacle, etc. to the level, and things get interesting QUICKLY. Now, you have to dodge flaming tennis balls, carefully time jumps over platforms, and be careful not to slip on the ice as you frantically scramble to the finish. UCH is competitive platforming as its most chaotic. On top of the gameplay, the game has an infectious funk soundtrack, and the sound effects are silly and endearing. The game also has an obligatory plethora of unlockables, which include costumes for your farm animals and levels, each with an interesting, unique built-in mechanic. Ultimate Chicken Horse = creative, competitive chaos at its finest.