I played a lot of games in 2009. I could manage to count 23 of them, since I’m only looking at games that I played for the first time. This means that I’m not counting Thief: Deadly Shadows, Dungeon Siege, Warcraft 3, Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, and Beyond Good and Evil, since I’ve played those all before.

That being said, I’m going to go through my list in alphabetical order and try to give some kind of brief rating and review to each of them.

Braid

Amongst downloadable XBox Live Arcade titles, Braid is a superstar. While it doesn’t quite fit in with the casual fare that permeates downloadable console catalogs, it’s a good game to play in small chunks. Many of the puzzles can be so maddeningly difficult as to break your brain, but there’s an immense sense of satisfaction when you finally figure them out.

I played the PC version, since I have no XBox, but while the Steam release had some issues, it was worth the wait. I played it, my wife played it, and I wrote a series of hints that ended up near the top of the google search results.

Braid’s story was a bit hard to follow, introduced as it was in small chunks at the beginning of each of the game’s six worlds, and it got really odd at the end. But the game was more about the puzzles than anything else, so all else is forgivable. I’ll give the game a B.

Crysis

Before its launch, and for a number of months afterwards, Crysis‘s big marketing line was that it would bring your $2000 gaming rig to its knees with its amazing graphics. That’s probably why it didn’t sell as well as the developers might have hoped. Crysis was good, although overall I’ll say that I preferred CryTek’s earlier title Far Cry.

Crysis was almost like two separate games, as the gameplay during the second half is drastically different from the first half. Personally, I prefer the first half, as it was much closer to the gameplay in Far Cry. I could sneak around to scout an area, snipe off a few men, then let the rest come to me. It felt strategic and fun. The zero-gravity segments in the second half of the game were disorienting and confusing. I found myself backtracking unintentionally, and the alien enemies weren’t nearly as interesting to fight as the human opponents. The segments in which you fly a fighter jet were even worse. More often than not, I’d crash and burn but never know exactly what killed me.

Towards the end of the game, during a battle on an aircraft carrier, the game froze. Every time. I was never actually able to see the end of the game, which I assume was well under an hour away. I must have tried twenty times to get through that battle, but the game froze every single time. Considering the non-fun segments and the bug at the end, I’ll have to give Crysis a C+.

Defense Grid: The Awakening

As far as Tower Defense games go, I found Defense Grid to be strictly average. It held my attention long enough to play through the entire game, but I found the aliens to be generic, the story to be uninteresting, and the computer narrator’s melodramatic dialogue to be unbelievable, as the computer got more emotional about a hinted-at past war than most humans would get. The computer’s odd fixation on raspberries was a bit funny, but that small bit of humor didn’t make up for the rest of the game. I’ll give this one a C+.

Dead Space

Being the best survival horror game I’ve played in years is no mean feat. That’s what puts Dead Space in the running for the best game that I played in 2009.

It’s nearly impossible for me to talk about Dead Space without comparing it to Resident Evil, as I believe that Dead Space has neatly filled in the survival horror niche once occupied by the earlier Resident Evil games. But Dead Space is certainly its own animal, and is an entirely new generation of survival horror title. For one thing, Dead Space is more of a shooter than any of the original survival horror games (Silent Hill, Resident Evil, Clocktower) ever were. It has the best collection of weapons I’ve seen in a shooter since Doom 3, a weapon upgrade system that I like even better than Resident Evil’s, and some excellent gameplay elements such as zero-gravity areas, vacuum areas, ship-mounted weaponry for firing at targets in space, and the kinesis and stasis modules.

Dead Space is certainly a game that I’ll return to and play again some day. I’m doubting that I’ll go for the trophy where you have to play the entire game with only a plasma cutter and no other weapons, but I’ll enjoy my replay nonetheless. Dead Space gets a solid A.

Desktop Tower Defense DS

I was a huge fan of the flash version of Desktop Tower Defense for a long time. I still believe it to be one of the best tower defense games ever made. As simple as it is, it’s got a lot of complexity and balance. Building new mazes for the creeps to traverse and arranging things perfectly can be quite a challenge, and if you start on advanced strategies like juggling, things get even more complex. The game begins simple, but has a lot of nuance.

For some reason, since I bought this game, I haven’t played my DS nearly as often as I used to. So I haven’t put a lot of time into the portable verion of Desktop Tower Defense. But they’ve added quite a lot of new modes, plus a number of achievements. Although not being able to share those achievements online somehow detracts from the experience, I’ll still enjoy trying to get them. Probably on an airplane at some point in the future. I’ll give Desktop Tower Defense DS a B-.

Dragon Quest 4 DS

Back in the day, when I played this game on a friend’s NES, I absolutely loved it. The charm and the fun are still there. I haven’t completed Dragon Quest 4 since beginning the NES version, but I’m easily halfway into the game. Once again, I just haven’t spent much time with the DS recently. I know that will change when Scribblenauts drops. But as far as RPGs for the DS, I haven’t seen many better. C+

Fairway Solitaire

While Fairway Solitaire is without doubt a casual game, it takes plain old solitaire and adds a golf theme to make it really interesting. Streaks where you don’t have to use cards from the deck become “long drives”, sandtraps and water hazards become cards that are inaccessible, and you can collect extra golf clubs that act as cards up your sleeve. While explaining these intracacies are beyond the scope of this mini-review, you should take my word that this game is amongst the better casual games that I’ve played this past year. B-

Fallout 3

While I didn’t go through all the expansions like Brandon did, I spent a lot of time playing Fallout 3. I played three characters, and maxxed out my levels on two of them. And even though it wasn’t entirely deserving of the “Oblivion-with-guns” moniker that it got in so many reviews, there was enough of that to detract from the game. All the things that I disliked about the Oblivion engine were still problems in Fallout 3, and none of the things that I’d loved so much about Oblivion were replaced with adequate substitutes. The charm of the first two Fallout titles was likewise lacking. As you can probably tell, I much preferred Oblivion to Fallout 3.Still, I did enjoy my time playing Fallout 3. GFW, while it does suck, gave me the ability to grab some achievements, and I got about 90% of the ones available, including every damn bobblehead in the game. I loved tearing up slavers with the shishkebab, I loved melting Combine troops with a plasma rifle, and that nuclear explosion was a thing of beauty. I’d just love to have seen more Wasteland in Fallout 3. You know, some snake squeezins, or perhaps a Scorpitron. Fallout 3 gets a B.

Far Cry 2
I wasn’t sure what to expect from Far Cry 2. I knew that it was an open-world game and that it was significantly different from both the original Far Cry and from Crysis. Far Cry removed a number of the elements that I’d liked so much about those two games: The science fiction elements, and lying prone for purposes of sneaking. I wish I’d been able to record achievements in the game. I went out of my way to grab every diamond in the northern section of the map – had I been able to get an achievement for it, I’d likely have done the same for the southern map. The game also has some really silly conventions.

Final Fantasy 12
The only other Final Fantasy games I’ve played are Final Fantasy 4 on the DS and Final Fantasy 9 back on the original Playstation. These are loong games. I’ve been playing Final Fantasy 12 for years now. I tend to play for 4-6 months before getting burned out and shelving the game for a couple months. But then I go back to it. I’m still only about 2/3 of the way through the game and I plan to go back to it soon, although I’m sure I’ll quickly shelve it again when Borderlands and Dragon Age: Origins come out in October.

Final Fantasy is about story, but it’s also about level grinding. Lots and lots of level grinding. The game’s battles are simply too hard if you move from place to place battling only story-essential foes. Level grinding is absolutely essential. It harks back to old RPGS that I’d played on the Sega Master system. And in Final Fantasy 12, it’s actually a lot of fun to level grind. There’s a lot of inventory management and skill management to do – I’ve got a couple sheets of notebook paper where I’ve got notes sketched out on how my characters’ gear and skills are set up. It reminds me of mapping out Bards Tale or Wizardry dungeons on graph paper. Final Fantasy 12 gets a B. Square Enix knows what they’re doing when it comes to JRPGs.

Galactrix
I absolutely loved Puzzle Quest. And so I was very excited for Galactrix. I’m sad to say that I was seriously disappointed with the game. The touch screen controls are terrible. Selecting the item you want with the stylus is often more of a challenge than fighting battles. And the game’s loading screens are frequent and very long. The game’s minigames can be fun once you unlock them, and tricking out your ship with improved equipment is probably the best part of the game. Overall, Puzzle Quest was a far better game. Galactrix gets a D.

Ghostbusters
Ghostbusters was a mixed bag. There’s a lot of good, and a lot of bad. My biggest complaint about the game is the uneven difficulty. There are some moments that are just way too hard. This forced me to play through the game on “casual” difficulty. I also hit a number of bugs where certain plot triggers just wouldn’t fire, and I had to reload my last save, after which things worked fine.

If you’re going to play this game, play it for the story and the atomosphere, because those were great. The game totally nails the feel of the original movie, and having all four ghostbusters voiced by the actual actors is fantastic. The game is very well written. The plot is probably better than that of the Ghostbusters 2 movie, and there are some really funny one-liners in the game. I have to give this game a C+.

Lost Planet
Seldom have I had a worse experience with a game that I had with the PC port of Lost Planet. Most of my complaints had to do with the fact that it’s the worst PC port of a console game that I’ve ever played, but the game engine is also terrible – I have a hard time imagining that I’d have enjoyed the 360 version much more. This is the only game in my list that gets a definite F.

Mad World
I understand that my negative take on Mad World is primarily opinion. I know that other people (such as Brandon) really enjoyed Mad World. But I didn’t like the game at all. At all. I played nearly halfway through it (I’m guessing) hoping that it would get better, but I eventually just got bored and frustrated.

I’d been expected a new-school brawler that felt like SmashTV or Double Dragon, but what I got was not nearly as fun. At all. I had many complaints about the game overall, but the bottom line is that I just didn’t find it to be fun. At all. Mad World gets a D.

Mass Effect
If Brandon doesn’t kill me for my take on Mad World, then he’ll probably kill me for my take on Mass Effect. In a word: meh. The game was fine, but I didn’t get nearly as much out of it as everyone else seemed to. The story was really interesting, I’ll give you that, and Bioware always does an amazing job with the dialogue. But to me, the gameplay’s the thing. And the engine that Mass Effect ran on (actually, the engine that a lot of Bioware games have run on) felt old and klunky to me.

I played through the whole game – start to finish – but it didn’t grab me. I enjoyed the story, but the gameplay wasn’t there, so I can’t classify it as a keeper. Mass Effect gets a C.

Okami
I’d heard about Okami for a long time before having picked up a copy. I got the Wii version, although Okami was originally a playstation 2 game. And I loved it.

The gameplay in Okami is a lot like the gameplay in the more recent Zelda games – action/adventure. Fetch quests and conversations with some minor platforming and a whole lot of fighting. Also, plenty of minigames. Add to that the innovative magic brush mechanic and you’ve got a winner. But what stood out most to me about Okami were the graphics. They don’t excel by being photorealistic – just the opposite – the stylized graphics in Okami are an excellent argument against photorealism. They look amazing in a far more cartoonish way. Okami gets a B.

Penny Arcade Adventures: Episode 2: On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness
I’m a big fan of Penny-Arcade. I love their style of humor, and of course I love the bulk of their subject matter: video games, tabletop gaming, and general geekery. I’ve played and loved both their games. How can you not love a game where you’re battling hobos, mimes, barbershop quartets, insane asylum inmates, and robots with a perverse sexual attraction to fruit? I give this one a B. It’s inexpensive, and if you buy it on Steam, you can shoot for the Steam achievements.

Pixeljunk Monsters
I’ve certainly written enough here about my love for Pixeljunk Monsters. Although I didn’t start playing it in 2009, I likely won’t finish before the end of the year. Honestly, I’ll probably end up putting it aside again as I start playing Muramasa and Scribblenauts. Although I’ve only got two levels remaining in the expansion, there are still plenty of trophy challenges for me to tackle. The “Four Tree Rainbow” challenge is harder than it looked, and the “Rainbow Team” challenge looks to be incredibly difficult. In Pixeljunk Monsters lingo, to “rainbow” a level is to complete it perfectly – without losing a single villager. Pixeljunk Monsters gets an A from me simply because I can’t think of many other games I’ve ever gotten so much prolonged play out of.

Plants vs Zombies
While I’ve enjoyed many Popcap games in the past – Bookworm Adventures and Zuma come to mind – I don’t think I’ve ever enjoyed any of them as much as Plants vs Zombies. I only played the game for a couple weeks, but during those weeks, I played it hard. My initial take on the game was a poor one – how could a tower defense game with only six linear lanes have the depth of something like Desktop Tower Defense? You know what? I grew out of that one quickly, and became a Plants vs Zombies addict. Steam offers achievements for the game, and PvZ became the first game on which I’d ever gotten 100% of the achievements. Plants vs Zombies gets an A. It’s all about the spikerocks, gloom shrooms and garlic.

Prototype

I can imagine Prototype being a far better game on a console. Firstly, it might not freeze as often as it did on my Vista machine, although I’m willing to concede that the freezing issue may be related to the import version of the game I’m playing. While the PC controls weren’t terrible, I had some issues with the dashing controls. Firstly, the double-tap on the ‘W’ key for an air dash wouldn’t always register – I’m sure that’s my own fault, but the double-keyboard-tap isn’t the easiest motion on which to get 100% accuracy. Similarly, I found that when dashing, you corner like a passenger jet. So often, I’d sprint past a waypoint or someone I’d intended to grab, then take at least 5 seconds to turn around and run back. And when you’re in a timed event and you’ve only got 60 seconds to do what you’ve got to do, that 5 seconds can make a huge difference.

Although I’m playing a weird Russian import version that I got on Ebay and I can’t actually register achievements, I managed to complete nearly every challenge. I got gold on all but one gliding challenge and managed to complete every infected consume event. The military consume events where you’ve got to consume the commander and then end the alert before getting in can be HARD. And although I found destroying hives and bases with a tank to be super-easy, helicopters are nearly worthless. Granted, they’re the best for fast travel, but they’re difficult to hijack and they get destroyed by one hit from anything.

Also, like Ghostbusters, I can’t imagine playing Prototype on any difficulty other than ‘Easy’. Prototype gets a C+, but it might be a B- on consoles.

Resident Evil 5

I played the Playstation 3 version of Resident Evil 5, and while it was inferior to its predecessors in different ways, it wasn’t a bad game. Resident Evil 5 tried to be Resident Evil 4. But it wasn’t different enough from Resident Evil 4 to really shine, and it didn’t have the charm of Resident Evil 4. There was no mine cart chase, no jetski sequence, and no chance to harpoon lake monsters. There was a nice sequence where you could shoot at enemies from machine guns mounted to the back of a jeep, but that alone didn’t measure up.

Resident Evil 5 only really shines when played co-op. I played with my brother on his XBox over Christmas vacation, and having the game be a shared experience really changed it. For the better. The partner AI in Resident Evil 5 is laughably bad at times. The game gets a B.

Street Fighter 4

After having beaten Seth with every character in the game other than the three big bosses whom I have yet to unlock, I’ve been playing Street Fighter 4 far less. I’ve gotten somewhat competent at online matches, although like so many other online games, the people still playing are the ones who play all the time, and are thus much better at the game than I am. But the game did bring back a good bit of my Street Fighter 2 nostalgia, and despite my hatred of Crimson Viper and Rufus, I really like the game. B+

Star Wars: The Force Unleashed
This game totally fails, which is sad. It seemed like it had so much going for it. Great story, a very nice engine with good graphics, and the upgrade and combo system seemed like it was going to work out very nicely. If only it weren’t for all the bottomless pits. There is nothing as maddeningly frustrating as falling into the same pit for the fourth time when you have to wait for 5 minutes in between attempts. Star Wars: The Force Unleashed gets a D for bad platforming.

Strong Bad’s Cool Game for Attractive People

I love HomeStarRunner. I really do. So I was super-excited to hear that there was going to be a StrongBad-themed WiiWare game, and I snatched it up as soon as it was available. Sadly, I’d forgotten that I don’t generally like point and click adventure games. And that I’m horribly bad at them. So while HomestarRunner.com gets an A, Strong Bad’s Cool Game for Attractive People gets a C-.

All in all, it wasn’t a bad gaming year. Granted, there was nothing that stood out like Half-Life 2, Oblivion, or Shadow of the Colossus, but the year isn’t over yet, and I’ve still got to play Scribblenauts, Muramasa, Brutal Legend, Uncharted 2, and Dragon Age: Origins.

Greg wrote about how MadWorld disappointed him, so I figured I’d offer an altenate take.  If you haven’t read his take on the game, please do so.  I’ll wait.  Oh, spoilers will be included so if you don’t want to have things ruined, now is your chance to leave.

Ok then.  So here we go.  MadWorld is, so far, one of my favorite games to come out of this year.  I gave it pretty high marks at GameShark and generally think that it kicks a whole lot of ass.  I loved the style, the humor and the various ways in which you could dispatch foes.  Initially the level structure bothered me, but once I got into the groove of things, I quite enjoyed it.  In MadWorld, you have thirty minutes to finish the entire level, boss battle included however you can’t just stroll in and take on the boss.  The boss battle itself doesn’t unlock until you’ve scored enough points with points scored by not just killing but killing with style.  For example, simply beating a guy to death, while effective, doesn’t score a lot of points.  Stick three signposts in his head, jam a tire over his arms and then chuck the whole bloody bundle into a giant spike will net you considerably more points.  Along the way as you score points you’ll unlock new weapons, new challenges and new enemies.  Oh sure, it sucked when you died during a boss battle and had to do a level all over again but honestly, in this case, it’s not that bad.  Now, usually if I hear that a death during a boss battle means you start over, I won’t even pick up the game in the first place, so for me to say it’s not that bad means that it’s really not that bad.

Now that we’ve covered the basics, I’ll speak to Greg’s various points as I’m not feeling particularly creative today and pulling my own opinions into a cohesive whole is tantamount to inventing cold fusion.

“After the thirtieth time of putting a tire around a guy’s waist, spearing him through the head with a street sign, running around to find a garbage can to jam over his head, and then picking him up and walking very slowly over to some spikes to impale him, it gets old. Actually, for me, it took less than thirty times to get old.”

Yeah, for me, it never got old.  Part of that is because I thought it was hilarious, part of me was because doing all of those combos was necessary to get the boss battle to unlock so that you’d have enough time to beat the boss, so the combos become a necessary evil.  Plus, as you progress through the game, the levels start offering more and more variety as to what you can use to kill guys and the enemies start getting wise to your tactics, requiring you to change things up.  Everyone’s tolerance for repetition is different, especially if one person finds a game engaging and another doesn’t, but for me, I never got bored.

“It doesn’t have even the depth of combat that Double Dragon 2 had.”

I can’t speak to this as I don’t think I’ve ever played Double Dragon 2.  Does Jack have a large set of moves?  Well, no.  He has a few chainsaw moves, some fist moves and a dash and a dodge.  Instead of moves though, he has the environment and there is plenty to use there to take guys out with.  Now, you can certainly say that picking up a lamppost and jamming it through someone’s head is no different than doing the same thing with a signpost and you’d be right, but it’s when you take what you can do with the signpost combined with what you can do with this weapon and this moving train and Jack’s weapons and there is a lot to do.  Is it really, really deep?  No, but there is a lot to do.  Personally, with a game like this, I want simple.

“But this one stayed easy for a while, right up to the point where a grim reaper on roller skates with an instant death attack appeared. This is how the game increases difficulty: instantly killing you.

I found that the difficulty curve ramped up nicely.  Yeah, the roller skate guys were annoying, but they never killed me so I can’t speak to the annoyance of them.  I think there were two levels that I had to repeat and one was because I was being stubborn during the boss fight.  The second one was just straight up difficult, however things seemed to level out after that.  I never felt that the game wasn’t so hard that I couldn’t handle it, as long as I switched up my tactics and got creative, which is a big part of what the game was all about, killing creatively.

“Probably because while the other games used violence to tell the story, I felt like Mad World was a game created solely for the violence. The violence was its raison d’etre.”

I think that Greg hit the nail on the head here.  The game’s entire purpose was violence, but for me, that only increased the impact of the story.  The basic premise of the game is that terrorists take over the city and infect all of the citizens with a virus.  They then tell the citizens that if the citizens kill each other, whoever does the killing will get an antidote.  In short, the only way to survive is to pick up a weapon and kill.  The terrorists have also released horded of psychopaths into the city for the citizens to fight as well.  Jack enters the city with the intial intent of rescuing the mayor’s daughter, but as the story goes on, his real motivations are uncovered.

I guess what go to me about the game’s violence is that as the player, we’re supposed to be appalled that the terrorists would do such a thing, after all, we’re in the city to stop it, yet we’re so eager, and happy to take part in it ourselves.  As the player you’re encouraged not to stop whoever did this horrible thing, but to enter the games and win them.  That’s an important distinction. Instead of getting into the city and only killing those that get in our way of investigating the attack, we’re supposed to win the game which means taking part in the very thing we’re supposed to be condemning the terrorists for.  To this end, the violence is important because by taking part in the violence, it makes us complicit. It shows us that if we’re willing to do these horrible things to these guys, even if they’re “bad” guys, we’re really not any better.

Finally, once you do everything you need to and you win the games and you find out who is behind the whole thing, Jack is standing over his enemy who is hanging off a building.  The guy asks for help, which Jack doesn’t provide, and then plummets to his death.  Looking over the newly smashed corpse, Jack delivers the last, and best line of the game: I don’t help people, I kill them.  For some reason, this line stuck with me for days and days.  It felt like almost like a condemnation of sorts of all of these violent games we play.  So much of what we play involves killing and while it may be done in the interest of saving the day or being the hero, what stands out is the violence, not the end results, which is to say nothing of the countless multiplayer matches played every minute where the sole objective is just to kill.  We don’t play games to help, we play them to kill.  There are very few games out there where the job is to work with another person towards a common, non-violent goal.  Most of what we do is kill, kill and then kill some more.

Now, I’m not saying that all of this is bad, although I’m sure that it ain’t entirely good, I’m just saying that between the violence, the premise and that line, it made me think about this hobby and about the types of games we enjoy and what that means about us.  It probably doesn’t mean anything.  Kids have been playing soldier or cowboys and indians for generations, shooting each other with their fingers or with sticks so all we’ve done is gussy up the stick, but at the same time, the game gave me pause and made me think, and honestly, I wasn’t expecting that.  Not from this game.

So yeah, I loved it.  I enjoyed it while I was playing it, but I enjoyed it a hell of a lot more when I was done and could take the time to think about it.  Based on the sales numbers, I’m one of the few, which is a shame because games that make you think and examine your actions are never a bad thing.

In a recent comment, Brandon asked “MadWorld disappointing?  How is that even possible?” So I figured I’d take this time to explain how I managed to be disappointed. It wasn’t really as difficult as you might think. Since I’m primarily making a point here, this article will be more of a complaint about the game than it is an actual review.

When you first see the game pop out at you in black, white, and red, the style is indeed striking. But that’s about the only thing the game has going for it. After the thirtieth time of putting a tire around a guy’s waist, spearing him through the head with a street sign, running around to find a garbage can to jam over his head, and then picking him up and walking very slowly over to some spikes to impale him, it gets old. Actually, for me, it took less than thirty times to get old.

I’ll admit that the above is my chief complaint – the game is a brawler with just about no brawling. Either you’re picking up guys and walking slowly around to the various environmental hazards to score extra points, or else you’re using the chainsaw for max damage. It doesn’t have even the depth of combat that Double Dragon 2 had.

I also found that the game went from too easy to too hard far too quickly. Easy in the first couple levels is forgivable, since the player needs to learn the controls to play the game. But this one stayed easy for a while, right up to the point where a grim reaper on roller skates with an instant death attack appeared. This is how the game increases difficulty: instantly killing you.

Gameplay aside, I had a bit of issue with the violence. While I have no problems with blowing people into chunks in Fallout 3, tearing enemies in half in God of War, or slicing up countless foes with a beam katana in No More Heroes, something about the violence in Mad World bothered me. It didn’t offend me, it annoyed me. Why? Probably because while the other games used violence to tell the story, I felt like Mad World was a game created solely for the violence. The violence was its raison d’etre.

I haven’t gotten very far into Far Cry 2, and I plan to give the game more of a chance once my current Final Fantasy XII spree ends, but my initial impressions of the game are not good. The whole malaria thing doesn’t add to the game at all – frankly, it’s annoying. And the open world reminds me of S.T.A.L.K.E.R., which I did not like at all.

Some of the things I’d liked most in Crysis and the original Far Cry seem not to be present here. There’s no detection meter which shows when enemies see you, and you can’t lie prone. I’ll grant you that I’m less than two hours into the game, but initially, I’m disappointed.

Mad World was even more of a disappointment. I’d expected the frantic action of SmashTV, the cheezy old-school plot of Running Man, the humor of No More Heroes, and maybe the beat-em-up goodness of Double Dragon. What I got was repetitive running around, stabbing signposts into the necks of foes who might as well all be carbon copies, all for points. The violence existed only for violence’s sake, and the difficulty quickly goes from far too easy to way too hard, with very little time in any kind of sweet spot. The story is closer to Escape From New York than Running Man, and there’s little of either movie’s charm to be seen. The segments on the bike are terrible, and I quit the game just after beating a big Sumo Wrestler wannabe who kept throwing helicopters at me.

I guess the happy ending to this article is Galactrix. Initially, I was terribly terribly disappointed. The loading times on the DS are frequent and long, and the touch controls are the absolute worst I’ve seen in any DS game. It frequently takes me 5 or 6 tries to select an item from a list menu. I’ll touch “Get Missions” with the stylus, for example, and instead of highlighting and selecting that item, it will cause me to fly a bit away from the planet, which is especially annoying since it then takes me 2-3 seconds to bring up the menu again and try to select an option again.

The game has a definite learning curve,and once I’d gotten past it and begun to unlock more of the game’s different minigames, it got fun. And it began to grow as addictive as Puzzle Quest. Because of my first two complaints, I don’t find it to be as good a game as Puzzle Quest, but I’m enjoying it.