Whereas many of my installments in this series contain nothing but C- games, this chunk contains some good ones. First off, Pixeljunk Monsters Deluxe. Along with Beyond Good & Evil, Pixeljunk Monsters is one of those games that anyone who reads this site often must get sick of me talking about. I love the game. This year, I bought a PSP, and Pixeljunk Monsters Deluxe is nearly the only thing I’ve played on it. And you know what? It’s totally worth it. The game includes new towers, new monsters, and a whole new island. It’s essentially a third expansion pack that’s for the PSP only. As such, it’s one of my favorite games of 2011. It gets an A.

Next off, the Android version of Plants vs Zombies. I played the PC version of this game and got 100% of the Steam achievements, and then later went back to it to finish off new Steam Achievements that they’d added. And now I’ve got the mobile version on my phone. I hit some issues at first where the game would pause at odd intervals, but that was fixed by uninstalling all updates to Google Maps on my phone. Who needs GPS when there are zombies to fend off? There was a period of a month or so where I did without the Maps updates in order to play Plants vs Zomibes. The game is still great. B+.

Ahh, Portal 2. Definately one of my favorite games of the year. It’s become nearly forgotten amidst such fare as Skyrim and Arkham City, but I really do plan to go back and finish off that second run through the game some day. After all, I’m like 85% done and I still have achievements I want to get. The Smash TV and Overclocker achievements have me particularly intrigued, although I’ll probably never get most of the co-op achievements. I’ll just be happy if I can go back and run through the newest co-op levels.

The Portal and Half-Life series are Valve’s best and most valuable properties, and as such, I’ll buy (and probably love) every one they put out. Along with half of The Internet, I’ve been eagerly awaiting Half-Life 2, episode 3, but it’s looking more and more like we’ll never see that one. Half-Life 3 seems more likely. In any event, Portal 2 was a triumph. Again. A.

Trine 2
As I mentioned recently, the release of Trine 2 completely caught me off-guard. Since I’ve still got a bunch of PSN dollars from a card I bought a while back, I’ll likely snatch this one up on December 6th. I loved the first one, and it’s the only platinum PSN trophy I’ve got.

Amy
Amy was supposed to come out in September, then on Halloween. Then it was supposed to come out in November. Guess what? November is over now. Still no Amy. But the videos look so good. Let’s hope that the delay has given the game extra polish. I loves me a good survival horror game.

The Last Guardian
This release date has been pushed and pushed, and currently sits at some point in 2012. It’s probably my number one most-anticipated game for 2012. Oh, look. It was my most-anticipated game for 2011 too.

Mechwarrior Online
The latest in the Mechwarrior series has been re-envisioned quite a few times, but now looks to be a free-to-play title. It may very well be the first free-to-play game I actually try. I’ve been a big fan of Mechwarrior, if not a fan of online multiplayer games.

Pixeljunk Monsters Browser Game
What’s even more ridiculous than Greg wanting to play a free-to-play online multiplayer game? I’ll tell you what. Greg wanting to play a browser-based MMO. My love for Pixeljunk Monsters is that strong. Hopefully the browser game is half as good as the amazing PSP edition.

So often, I’ll have fifteen minutes at the end of an evening, and I don’t want to start playing Bioshock 2 or Metroid Prime. It might take half of the time I’ve got just to start playing one of those. So what casual games am I currently digging?

Chime Super Deluxe (Playstation 3)

After the Playstation Network came back up following the crash, I grabbed a Playstation points card so that I wouldn’t have to store my credit card info on Sony’s servers. While my main intent was to use it for Beyond Good and Evil HD, I tried the demo for Chime Super Deluxe and found that I really enjoyed the game. And it’s got multiplayer, which I know that my wife and I will enjoy, even if she does kick my ass at the game.

Chime Super Deluxe is a musical block placement game. The blocks don’t fall like Tetris – instead you’re given an irregularly-shaped game board and charged with filling as close to 100% of the board as possible within the alotted time. The music plays, and a vertical line (“the beat line”) moves slowly from left to right. As it passes over the blocks you’ve placed, completed square groupings (“quads”) of blocks are registered in the grid in time with pleasant musical cues, and each quad adds to your completion percentage. Create enough quads between passes of the beat line and you get a bonus.

It’s a very zen gameplay experience, and the music is enjoyable. I hear that there’s even a PC version of the game somewhere out there that includes Jonathan Coulton’s Still Alive as one of its songs.

Plants vs Zombies (Android)

I’ve played Plants vs Zombies a lot. I played it when it came out on Steam and got 100% achievements over the course of two playthroughs. Then they added additional achievements and I played through the game again to get all of them. Recently, they released an Android version of the game, and Amazon’s Android app store gave the game away free for one day, so I snagged it. I’m currently midway into my second playthrough, and I haven’t yet begun to put much of a dent in the game’s achievements.

In the unlikely event that you’re totally unfamiliar with Plant versus Zombies, it’s a tower defense game in which the zombies shuffle from right to left, heading towards your house in five lanes. You plant sunflowers to produce sun, the resource you spend to create more plants. Peashooters and cabbage-pults attack oncoming zombies, wall-nuts block them, and squash do as their name would imply. There are dozens more plants, and many types of zombies. Nighttime fogs obscure the field, the backyard’s pool requires that you place plants on lillypads to stop scuba zombies, and defending on the slanted roof prevents direct-fire attacks. The game’s got more complexity than you might think.

I had some issues with PvZ for a while, but I was able to fix them by backing out updates for Google Maps on my phone. It’s a ridiculous and insane solution since using my phone as a GPS is far more useful than playing Plants vs Zombies, but I’ve written to Popcap about the situaton. What can I say? I like the game.

Pixeljunk Monsters Deluxe (PSP)

I have a confession to make. I have an unnatural zeal for Pixeljunk Monsters. After having a slightly above-average reaction to the demo in 2007, I purchased PS3 game, and then the expansion. I played with Linda. I played alone. four years later, I was still playing. I completed every level of the game with Linda. I got 100% of the game’s trophies separately in single-player. Then I found the PSP game, which included an additional dozen or so levels and a game that included extra enemy types and new towers. I’m playing Pixeljunk Monsters on the PSP a lot, and I love the game. My obsession has grown, and it’s nearly the only thing I ever do with my PSP. I do own more games for the device, I just don’t play them.

Hoard (PS3)

Hoard is a fun game, and I still play it, even if I don’t play it as frequently as I once did. I’ve gotten gold medals on all of the Princess Rush levels and on all but two of the Treasure levels. The Hoard levels are all insanely dificult – staying alive for five minutes is a challenge I haven’t yet completed. But with levels that top out at ten minutes, it’s fun to play when I’ve got a few minutes to kill.

WordFeud (Android)

I’d been playing Words with Friends on my phone for a while, but I switched to WordFeud. I like the bonus tile layout better, and having an avatar image is nice. I only wish that they’d disallow you from trying words an infinite number of times until you find one that works. Games with more than two players would be nice as well.

What casual games do you play?

Yes, I could name any of those as plausible reasons why I just went out and bought a PSP. But the truth is that I bought a PSP because I’ve finally one-hundred-percented Pixeljunk Monsters after having played the game consistently for three or four years, and I need a new version of the game. So when I bought my PSP, guess which game I picked up with it? My copy of Pixeljunk Monsters Deluxe cost me five dollars. W00t!

In general, I’ve found the PSP port of Pixeljunk Monsters to be the same game as on the PS3, but harder. They’ve eliminated (or at least locked away) the fire tower, which was absolutely essential to rainbow many of the game’s levels. With a shielded monster, your only option becomes the Tesla tower, which in the PS3 version had a range of about 4 pixels. They’ve now made the Tesla and ice towers more effective, which is nice. That ice tower was damned useless in the PS3 version, but after about 15 attempts to rainbow the medium-difficulty level “smile”, I’m beginning to feel that three or four ice towers may be my only chance to stop those damn spiders. They haunt my dreams. Okay, no. Not really.

Although I currently only own the one game for the system, I’ve done a bit of research, and I’m going to lay down the other PSP games that I’d like to try at some point. It’ll be hard in my mind for the PSP games to compare with such amazing DS fare as Phantom Hourglass, The World Ends With You, Elite Beat Agents, and the Professor Layton games, but I’ll give it a go.

God of War: Chains of Olympus

I’ve played the first two God of War games on my PS2, and although the second wasn’t nearly as good as the first, I did enjoy both. This PSP title is on my list when it comes to PSP gaming, but not at the top. What? Oh yeah – I guess it is at the top, but I’d kind of put together this list as a best-last thing, you know? Smartass.

Patapon 2

Until I installed the demo on my PSP, I’d had no exposure to Patapon. It was a rhythm adventure game, and the third game in the series just came out, which means that some people must like it. I gave it a brief try, and was surprised to find that the demo allowed me to save my game, which I have done. It’s intriguing, and I’ll go back to finish the demo at some point, at which time I’ll decide whether it’s a game I’d like to buy.

Dungeon Siege: Throne of Agony

I loved the original Dungeon Siege, but could never get into the second title in the series. Still, I’m interested in this portable version. I just really enjoy the whole improve-skills-as-you-use-them approach to leveling. I haven’t read reviews or watched gameplay videos yet though, and I’ll need to do the research before I decide to buy it.

ClaDun: This is an RPG!

I’ve heard glowing praise for CalDun: This is an RPG!, but before I pick up the game, I may have to wait until I’m in the right mindset to spend hours wandering in circles and stabbing boars. From what I read in Kotaku’s review, ClaDun has a very intricate “magic circle” party system, and very quick two-minute dungeons. Color me intrigued. Hmm… intrigued must be one of those new colors in the Crayola 256-pack, alongside Sunburnt Cyclops and Booger Buster.

Silent Hill: Shattered Memories

The reviews I’ve read make this game sound almost like more of an interactive movie than a game. Apparently, there’s no combat. Zero. None. Still, running away from enemies can make for good gameplay. I actually quit Penumbra: Overture because I was forced to fight enemies rather than running. Shattered Memories is rated higher than a lot of the other games in the series, and the primary criticism seems to be that it sticks too closely to the formula established in previous Silent Hill games. Well, guess what? I’ve never played all the way through a Silent Hill game! I started the original title back in my PS1 days, but never progressed far. All I really remember is running around in the fog and listening to static on a radio. So maybe this is a good entry point for me.

Half Minute Hero

I remember Frank talking about Half-Minute Hero years ago, and I remember being quite jealous. After reading about the game’s various modes on Wikipedia, I’m really interested. It’s an RPG, it’s an RTS, and it’s a shoot-em-up. I might give this one a try sooner than I’d originally intended.

Tenchu: Shadow Assassins

I’m interested in Tenchu despite its poor ratings, mainly because I loved the original PS1 game. I found it cheap online and have already ordered the game. Please don’t suck. Please don’t suck. Please don’t suck. Please don’t suck.

Dungeons and Dragons Tactics

D&D Tactics really sounds like a cult game. People love it or hate it. In reading about it, one person wrote that it was much like Temple of Elemental Evil. Say no more; I’m sold. Create chararacters using the D&D 3.5 ruleset and conduct strategic battles? Yes, please. I’ll have my spiked-chain wielding fighter with whirlwind attack and my multiclass sorcerer/monk up and running in no time. There are some sanity-challenged vendors on Amazon selling this game for $70, but I found a copy online for less than twenty. Expect a report soon.

And whereas the Playstation 2 absolutely dominated the market with such titles as Shadow of the Colossus, God of War, and Katamari Damacy, the Playstation 3 has until recently had no such list.

But check this out.

Heavy Rain
I’ve written about Heavy Rain plenty. It’s a phenomenal interactive murder/mystery. I’ve already bought a second copy as a gift for a friend, largely because I needed to share the experience. If you have the means, I highly recommend picking the game up. It’s so choice.

LittleBigPlanet
I haven’t written about LittleBigPlanet on this site, largely because I haven’t played the game much, although we do own it. My wife, on the other hand, played through the game nearly to completion. I’m sure that I could lose myself in the game’s creation engine as I once did with Neverwinter Nights’ Aurora Engine creation studio. But for now, I’ll continue to resist.

Pixeljunk Monsters
My love for Pixeljunk Monsters seems to know no limits. Years after buying the game, I’m still playing it. And just a few weeks ago, I finally unlocked the second-to-last level in the expansion. It is very hard.

Trine
I know that there also exists a PC version on Steam, but Trine on the Playstation 3 is superior, if only because you can play the game with three players. It’s also the only game on which I’ve ever managed a platinum trophy. Not easy.

Uncharted 2
Everyone else seems to love this game more than I do, but I’ll admit that it’s a good game. I’m probably less than halfway through right now. I’ll have more to offer as I progress further.

In addition to the above, I’m interested to try the punishingly difficult Demon’s Souls, and I know I’ll soon pick up a copy of God of War 3. Also, as soon as The Last Guardian hits store shelves, I’m all over it.

The most recent example is Trine. The game immediately interested me, since the puzzle/platforming multiplayer co-op sounded like exactly the type of game my wife and I would enjoy playing together. Downloading the Steam demo sealed the deal. While I may have bought the game without having tried the demo, the demo removed all doubt. I now plan to play the game when (and if) it’s ever released on PSN.

Trine PC Demo

A game that I likely would never have bought without trying the demo is Pixeljunk Monsters. Like many other PSN demos, I downloaded it on a whim and it probably sat on my Playstation’s hard drive for a week before I even installed it. When I started playing it, my initial take was that the music was a little annoying and the graphics were too cartoony. But as I do with most demos, I decided to play through to the end before making any kind of decision. The game got addictive. The music was actually catchy. And I wanted more levels. I’ve now grown to love Pixeljunk Monsters, and it’s without doubt the game I’ve put the most time into on my Playstation 3.

Plants versus Zombies was a similar story. While it sounded cute, I expected it to be very much like the Peggle and Bookworm Adventures demos I’d tried: fun, but not worth buying.

After completing the demo levels, I had to play the full game. And it turned out to be the only game I’ve ever played on which I’ve completed every single achievement.

Plants vs Zombies Demo

The last demo that’s floated its way into my mind – I nearly forgot about this one – is the demo for Dark Messiah of Might and Magic. It was a lot of fun. I got caught up in the stealth upgrades and in kicking orcs and goblins off of cliffs. The game was rated horribly, so I didn’t buy it immediately, but when I saw it in a Target for $12.50, I snatched it up with no hesitation. And it’s a keeper. You can get it on Steam now for even less than that.

Dark Messiah of Might and Magic Demo

Now I’ll grant you – not all demos are representative of the actual game. The Playstation 3 demo for Resident Evil 5 was terrible, but the game was actually pretty good. The Playstation 3 demo for Star Wars: The Force Unleashed was excellent, but the game itself was horrible and frustrating.

In closing, I can’t write about demos without mentioning the venerable but hilarious demo for Typing of the Dead, which is still available here, especially after having read such a well-written article about the game last week.

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.

Keepers is a weekly segment in which I discuss games I’ve played that I’ve seen fit to keep after playing. I generally sell a game that I’ve finished, so the only reason I keep one is because I plan to replay the game some day. Classifying a game as a “keeper” is generally a badge of merit.

Okay, okay. So Pixeljunk Monsters is a downloadable PSN game, and as such I couldn’t sell it even if I wanted. But still, I’m playing the game from time to time even though I’ve had it for over a year. And I still haven’t gotten halfway through the expansion. It’s a great game, and if you haven’t yet read my three part strategy guide, you should check it out.

My first impression of Pixeljunk Monsters was not a good one. I took it as just another tower defense game, this one with a cutesy theme. Oh boy how the game grew on me. It’s probably my most-played Playstation 3 game now.  The layout of the trees on each board and the patterns in which the attacking monsters travel really lends a lot of complexity to the game. There are land-bound and flying monsters, some immune to fire, some immune to cold. You collect gold to buy towers and gems to upgrade the towers or purchase new tower types. Each tower has a different upgrade path, so it’s important to know with each upgrade whether you’ll be improving a tower’s range, speed, damage, or area of effect. I’ve created a pdf guide to help with that.

I finally just got past the “Paku-Paku” level on the expansion by using nothing but arrows and cannons, and one black hive near the end of the game to help kill the boss. I have a feeling that I’ll do with Pixeljunk Monsters what I did with Mariokart DS – take years to finish every last piece.

It seems like every online guide calls most of the monsters by different names. The names I’ll use here are mostly in keeping in line with what you’ll see in other guides, but nobody seems to know what to call the simplest, weakest enemy in the game: the small white circle with arms and legs. I’ve heard them called ants, acorns, kuri, and puffs. I always thought they looked a bit like pandas. After taking a very close look at them, you can see that they’re actually acorns with arms and legs, wearing that big white mask that all the game’s monsters have. So I’m calling them acorns. The other name that’s hard to put a finger on is the weakest of the fliers: a small acorn-looking thing with pink maple seed pods for wings. Sometimes it looks almost helicopter-like. For lack of a better name, I’ll refer to these things as fliers.

Acorns
The big white round acorns are the most common of enemies. Early in the game, cannons are your best defense, along with an arrow tower or two near the village to pick off injured stragglers. Later, you’ll find that fire or tesla towers take these guys down like dynamite does tadpoles. Mortars are also very effective.

Spiders
Spiders are the fastest enemy in the game, and that’s what makes them so damn tough. Your cannons can sometimes do a bit of damage, but spiders are good at dodging cannon fire. Arrows are the most surefire method for killing spiders. Later on, fire and tesla towers also work very well.

Golems
The token slow-moving blobs of hit points, golems can take a lot of punishment. Cannons are by far your best bet early in the game, as arrows do practically nothing to golems. later in the game, buy fire, tesla, or mortar towers to take down the golems.

Flyers
The easiest of the flying monsters to deal with, these flying maple acorn things will generally succumb to a couple anti-air towers. Placing a few arrow towers close to your village will help to assure that none sneak through. Later in the game, you’ll find that lasers cut through them like a chainsaw through rotted gauze.

Bats
Bats are the fastest of the flying monsters. Anti-air towers work well, but if you can line up a laser just right, it’s even better.

Bees
The big, fat, slow-moving bees are nearly invulnerable to arrows and anti-air towers. The only way you really stand a chance of stopping them is by using lasers.

Stompy the Golden Idol
He’s the boss of easy levels, and he really likes to stomp things. So I’ve named him Stompy McStomperson. He’s big, he’s golden, and he’d like nothing better than to stomp his way over to your village and stomp everyone there into flat nasty villager goo. Gold is a soft metal, but arrows will still bounce off. Fire towers and cannons are your best bet. On the easy levels, you likely won’t often be buying tesla towers and mortars, but they work too.

Mumford Mossback the Mean-spirited Misanthrope
On the medium levels, you get Mumford Mossback. He moves faster than Stompy, largely due to the fact that he’s got actual movable legs. He’s also a bit tougher. Use lots and lots fire towers. Cannons and tesla towers also help, as do mortars when you need extra range.

Horace the Nightmare Snail
Ironically, it’s the snail boss in this game who moves most quickly. Horace is a big jerk. Don’t underestimate him – he’s the toughest creature in the game. Pelt him with all the fire towers, mortars, and cannons you can. No mercy, or he’ll do unspeakable things to your villagers.

In part one of this article, I discussed general gameplay strategies. Now, let’s take a closer look at the game’s individual towers. For your convenience, I’ve also created a printable pdf quick reference guide. Yeah, it’s really ugly – I know.

Arrow Tower

The only tower in the game (other than a hive) that can hit both flying and ground enemies, the arrow tower remains useful throughout the game. It’s especially useful at the beginning, as it’s the only way you’ll prevent waves of spiders from getting through. They also work very well when placed near your village as a last resort to pick off wounded monsters that have made it past your other defenses.

Every upgrade except the final upgrade to black is merely a range upgrade, so it’s generally not worth it to spend the gems or the time dancing in upgrading an arrow tower.

Cannon Tower
Cannon towers are the only power weapons you’ll have available early in the game, before fire and mortar towers become available. Later in a level, although they’ll do less damage than fire, tesla, or mortar towers, they’ll still be the backbone of your defense since you’ll have so many built. The greatest flaws of cannon towers is their short range and slow rate of fire.

You have to be very careful when positioning cannons. If they’re too close together, they may both fire at a single monster that could have been killed by one attack, thereby wasting a shot. Since their rate of fire is so slow, other monsters can then sneak by before the cannons can fire again. Also, cannons must be placed as close as possible to the monsters’ paths. Ideally, you want to place them where their area of fire covers a place where the monsters spend the most time. Corners tend to be good places to place cannons, since the cannons will attack the enemies the entire time they’re going around the curve. Every level of upgrade on cannon towers increases power, so upgrade them as much as you can.

Anti Air Tower
Until you can get laser towers, the anti-air tower is the absolute best defense against flying monsters. They’re fast and they have very good range. Although they don’t do much damage, they fire so quickly that the damage will add up. Unlike arrow towers, it’s definitely worth it to upgrade anti-air towers, since every upgrade increases the speed at which they fire. If that means a tower fires at a monster six times as it passes instead of only three, you’ve doubled the damage. The final upgrade is power, and as such is very useful. Unlike cannons, anti-air towers work well when grouped together.

Fire Tower
The fire tower is everyone’s favorite tower, and with good reason. They’re incredibly strong. They’re great for mowing down acorns and golems, and are even fairly effective on fast-moving spiders. They’re also an excellent way to attack bosses. But more so than many other towers, you’ve got to carefully consider where to place a fire tower. The fire comes out in a line that damages any monsters in the stream. The fire keeps coming out for a few seconds, and will continue to do damage to any monsters in the stream, but once it fires it will not change direction. This means that you’ll want to place the fire tower in such a way that its stream will hit as many monsters as possible. You should also never put fire towers right next to each other.

Upgrading fire towers is important, and it’s especially important that you get them to red as quickly as possible. The first upgrade from green to yellow increases the tower’s range, and the second upgrade from yellow to red increases the fire tower’s power, or damage. Going from red to purple increases the fire’s spread, and going from purple to black will give you extra range. Getting fire towers to the red level is critical, and the purple and black levels make it even better.

Ice Tower
Aah, the ice tower. If only Pixeljunk Monsters’s ice towers were as good as the freeze towers in Desktop Tower Defense. Alas, they are not. They don’t slow down enemies nearly as much as they should, and do close to no damage. As a result, the ice tower is easily the most useless tower in the game.

If you do use ice towers, focus on upgrading them to red as quickly as possible, since the first two upgrades increase the damage they do. The final two upgrades to purple and black only increase the spread, or area of effect.If you didn’t need to spend gems to unlock ice towers, I’d probably use them from time to time. As is, I never use them.

Laser Tower
The laser tower is at the same time one of the best towers in the game, and one of the most difficult to use well. Proper placement of laser towers is critical, because one of their greatest strengths is the ability to hit many monsters at once. Lasers have unlimited range. What? What’s that? Yes, let me say it again. Unlimited range. Laser towers will not fire until enemies come within their marked range, which is about the same as an anti-air tower. By itself, that’s good. But once it does fire, the beam continues to the end of the screen, hitting any flying monsters in its path, even if they’re all the way across the screen. So it’s critical to place the lasers in a location such that when they fire, they’re firing along a path of monsters, hitting as many as possible. If you place a laser tower poorly, it may fire across the line of monsters, hitting only one or two.

The laser tower’s first two upgrades are speed, which is good because the tower starts with a very slow rate of fire. The third upgrade to purple is range, which helps the tower fire earlier. The final upgrade is power, so it’s in your interest to fully upgrade the laser tower as quickly as possible.

Mortar Tower
At first, mortars may seem like no big deal, but in the end they’re just bigger cannons, and as such they do have a use. They’ve got great range, and the blast area of their explosions hits everything in a very large area. Upgrading a mortar is a bit of a mixed bag, as upgrading to yellow, red, or purple only increases the area of effect. But that final upgrade to black doubles the mortar’s speed, which is like having two mortars. Mortars aren’t as important as fire or laser towers, but they’re definitely useful in the right situation.

Tesla Tower
There seems to be a consensus in the online community that tesla towers are mostly useless. I’d like to disagree. In the right situation, I’ll use them in place of fire towers, and they do a good job. For example, in “Hard 1”, the level is constructed in a way that makes fire towers very difficult to use – it’s tough to place fire towers such that the flame will hit more than one monster at a time. But there are a number of places where two or three grouped tesla towers can wreak havoc when upgraded.

Tesla towers begin with a terribly short range, and usually must be upgraded to be useful. I’d suggest only upgrading them as much as you need to reach passing monsters, as every upgrade only increases range, and the fully upgraded range can sometimes be more than you need. There’s no point in spending gems so that you can reach forested areas where monsters can’t walk.

When fired, a tesla tower will attack every monster within range, which is fantastic. Not just enemies within an area like cannon or mortar towers, but every single monster it can reach. This is the power of a tesla tower. Once that range gets big enough, you can hit lots and lots of monsters at once.

Hive Tower
You can only build one hive tower on a level, but it can reach anything on the screen, including flying monsters. I’m not a big fan of the hive, primarily because it requires you to aim for it. The bees that fly out of the towers head directly for you, attacking any monsters along that path. In order to do acceptable damage, you really need to upgrade the tower fully.

The first two upgrades make the bees come out more quickly, and the second two increase damage. If you plan on using a hive, you really should upgrade it fully as quickly as you can.