My review of Resident Evil 5 is up at SciFiWire.com. It's been a while since I played any of the Resident Evil titles, and the transition from the old survival-style games to the new run-and-gun games (ok, more like "run and then gun" games) was a bit jarring.

The current Resident Evil game is also obviously influenced by the movie series; there are a lot of cinematic, super-cool interactive cut scenes that could have been ripped from any of the films (dodging a possessed, chain-wielding motorcycle gang for example) but it's a hybridization that works.

The run-stop-shoot mechanic in this game is going to infuriate FPS veterans, but honestly, those folks should be playing Left4Dead instead; it's horde mechanics and four-player co-op play is more in line with what they want anyway. For those who like to be a bit more methodical (and occasionally panicked) in their zombie playing should enjoy Resident Evil 5. 

Blue Dragon Plus is a role-playing game/real-time strategy game mash-up and portable sequel to the Xbox 360 original JRPG. Blue Dragon was a game that I'd hoped to check out when it was released for the 360 back in Winter 2007 -- I was in a bit of an RPG drought at the time, and it looked interesting -- but got sidetracked by life.

When the chance came to review Blue Dragon Plus for the DS -- a platform that I'd love to have another good RPG for -- I leapt at it. And landed in something unexpected. From what I've heard of Blue Dragon, it was a fairly traditional, turn-based Japanese RPG featuring your standard cast of adventuring heroes out to save the world. Blue Dragon Plus, however, is decidedly non standard. 

My review of Lord of the Rings: Conquest is up on SCI FI Wire, which is SCIFI.com's newly redesigned and re-launched hybrid of the old SCI FI Wire web site and Science Fiction Weekly. This is my second review for the new site (the first was of Prince of Persia, which ran back in late December). The new format is a challenge to write for because the word count is much lower, but it's a good kind of challenge to have. It's certianly helped flex my shortform writing skills.

As for the game itself? It's a definite "meh". There's no really strategy to this strategy game; it's almost entirely about hack'n'slash button mashing. It also has one of the most annoying narrators of all time, who  admonishes you to "take that tower" or "slay those orcs" every 15-20 seconds, which is particularly annoying when you've wandered off the battlefield and really aren't sure how you're supposed to get to your next objective. 

The Xbox Live version of Ticket to Ride is a faithful port of the popular board game, recreating the train-themed game on Microsoft's game console. The game board features a map of the continental United States with its major cities connected by different colored train routes.

Players draw different colored tickets from a deck each turn, which can be used to complete the corresponding routes. Most routes require one to six tickets to complete, though a few are grey, and can be completed by any color tickets (though you still need the right number of said tickets).

Completing routes scores points, but that's just the short game. The long game involves completing completing enough routes to reach a destination. At the start of the game, players draw three destination cards -- e.g. Seattle to New York, Los Angelos to Miami -- and then pick two. The rest of the game sees players vying to complete these destinations. Each destination is worth a certain number of points; relatively short-haul ones might only score six or eight, but long ones -- like the Los Angeles/New York run -- can yield upwards of 20.

War. War never changes. But thankfully, it does gets upgrades. Fallout 3's all about those upgrades, presenting the best damn post-apocalyptic America this side of Thunderdome.

Just as in the first Fallout from the late 90s, you stumble out of a subterranean Vault and blink at the toxic wasteland. Only now it's rendered in millions of colors, instead of 256, and you're looking through the character's eyes, not at some isometric landscape.

Your first stop is Megaton, a town built around an undetonated thermonuclear bomb. Founded on the outskirts of Washington, D.C.,  Megaton has everything needed to survive the wastes -- ammo, water, medicine -- but it's also home to Church of the Atom, which worships the bomb's Holy Radiation, and a nefarious man in black who wants to pay someone to detonate it.

Or not.

Roger Ebert has famously said that video games may have the potential to be beautiful, well crafted, and technically competent … but they are not art. In a later column, he asked what video game made to date could possibly stand up against the greatest movies ever made?

Admittedly, I find his premise faulty; I don't think a movie has to rival Casablanca or The Godfather in its brilliance to be considered art, nor do I think that a video game has to clear that hurdle. But I think eventually they will … and BioShock is the proof of that.

Halo saved the Xbox. Prior to its arrival, the gaming console was an also-ran; afterwards it was the definitive reason to buy Microsoft’s PlayStation competitor. Gears of War may be the Xbox 360’s Halo.

Like Halo, Gears of War features humanity fighting a desperate, last-ditch war against alien destroyers. As the game opens, the far-off human colony world of Sera has been decimated by the Locust, bipedal horrors that emerged from deep underground 15 years ago and sacked most of mankind’s cities and nations. As humanity’s last city teeters near collapse, an elite group of soldiers known as “Gears of War” show up at a maximum security prison to break out one Marcus Fenix, a former soldier imprisoned years earlier for going against orders and attempting to save his father from the Locust. Now it turns out that his father may have had the key to defeating the alien menace … and Fenix has to help find it.

My review of LEGO Star Wars II is up on SCIFI.com. I enjoyed the game alot; it's perhaps the first game for the Xbox 360 that I really love, though that's not saying much for the 360 since the game's available on, well, every other freaking platform out there.

The game has also inspired a sort of Star Wars awakening in my three-year-old daughter Jordan, who was previously terrified of the series thanks to the Darth Vader trailers for Episode III. Watching my play LEGO Star Wars, she's really gotten into the story (which I have to explain to her, since there's no dialouge). It helps that LEGOs are innately harmless (even Vader is cute rather than menacing) and it has a Princess (and Jordie is all about the princesses).

A few months ago I reviewed Futurama: The Game, and I was disappointed. Where Futrama the series was funny and entertaining, the game was repetitive, frustrating and boring, with none of the wit that made Futurama so damn good. It had the look, but it just didn't have the feel.

Now I've got The Simpsons: Hit and Run in my PS2, and I'm pleased to say that this Matt Groening game succeeds where its scif-fi cousin failed.

In Hit and Run you control one of five playable characters -- Homer, Marge, Bart, Marge and Apu (why Apu? Well, why not?) -- as you drive crazily through Springfield on a variety of missions. Each character is given their own portion of the game -- Homer kicks things off, ditching work so he can investigate mysterious black vans that have shown up all over town. Then it's Bart's turn, as he attempts to get a copy of a highly-coveted (and thus banned) video game. He goes missing at the end of his story arc, and then it's Lisa's turn, with her quest revolving around finding her brother. And so forth and so on.