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            I realize that that summery seems rather short, but then the story modes are all pretty short and repetitive.  There are collectables for each race, but the only interesting ones are for the humans, which allow you to listen to audio logs to help build the atmosphere.  The story mode is little more than a practice for the game’s real strength: the online multiplayer.

            You can fight in a number of matches, but I’m going to be focusing on the death matches for this review.  Once you get online and jump into a match, you’ll quickly realize that this game is horribly broken in a number of ways.  The funny thing is that it’s broken for each race, so it all evens out in an odd sort of way.  Each race, under the right circumstances, is practically invincible against another.  A predator, when standing still, is totally invisible to a human and can take its time in how to pick him off.  The only thing a human has to see through the predators cloak is the sniper rifle, which no one ever uses during a death match because it gives you tunnel vision, and you might as well hang a steak around your neck.

            The predator’s weapons are also overpowered.  The plasma castor when charged will lock on to an enemy and will instantly kill them and damage, if not kill anyone near them.  The disc will usually kill anyone it hits, and it bounces around making it hard to avoid.  The land mines are a real pain for other players, and the spear, though hard to use accurately, makes no sound and doesn’t require your laser sights, so your position isn’t given away when you throw it.

            The humans would seem to be at a striking disadvantage if not for their motion tracker and firepower.  The motion tracker let’s the marines know if something is sneaking up behind them and, with their assault riffle, can hose down any advancing alien before it can get within striking distance.  Sadly the humans have no instant kill move, get knocked to the ground by just about anything, die if they fall too far, and most of their weapons are worthless in multiplayer.  The flamethrower and handgun are a sick joke put in the maps to kill newbies.

            Some of the more skilled players are surgeons with the assault riffle and can kill just about anything within two seconds of seeing it, and a group of marines working together can sweep right across a map killing everything in their path.  Their melee attack is only useful to interrupt an enemy’s strong attack, and it stuns them long enough for another blast of bullets.  The assault riffle also comes with a ninety-nine round clip, which means you’ll probably die before you run out of ammo, and the grenade launch is pretty powerful, though it doesn’t do as much splash damage as the predator’s plasma castor.

            The aliens have no long-range attack, get torn to pieces by machine guns, and will give you vertigo just by watching someone else playing.  They move at such a ridiculous speed, so low to the ground, and can run up walls, pillars, and upside-down on ceilings with such ease that it can make you nauseous.  They also have a bad habit of overshooting their targets, disorienting the player, and getting stuck because some surfaces the automatically cling to while others require you to press a button, yet despite all of this they can be the most frustrating of enemies.

            The alien can not only see through a predator’s cloak, but it can see through walls, floors and ceilings, giving it an insane advantage, especially when you consider that both the predators and aliens have an instant kill move from behind.  Add the fact that aliens can climb on almost any surface, and the predators can’t look behind them, and the mighty hunters fall easy prey to the xenomorphs.  This was made painfully clear when my friend won a team species death match against four predators, and two humans on the pyramid map with thirty-two kills while he was the only alien. 

            He did this by taking advantage of another broken aspect of the game.  Each race has a combo that is almost unblock able against one of the other races.  For the alien it’s the tail swipe.  During melee combat, the aliens and predators have a fast, weak strike, and a slow, strong strike that breaks through blocks.  If an alien is on a wall or ceiling, it quickly lashes out with its tail as a strong attack. Not only does this break through the block, it stuns the enemy long enough to launch another attack, making your opponent helpless.

            The predators have a similar move that works on humans.  They can jump-strike a human and knock them to the ground.  Then they walk over and do two fast attack while the human is trying to get up and kill them.  Again, there is nothing the human can do once hit with the initial strike.  The humans don’t really have any comparable attack other than using the grenade launcher, which can kill the human himself if he is too close when firing it.  The smart gun, though popular, is only useful at medium range if there is no cover for the enemies.  It will auto track any target even if they are cloaked, but it won’t go for a headshot, and the tracking is lost if the target runs behind a pillar.  The weapon also doesn’t do that much damage.  As I mentioned the flamethrower and handgun are a joke, the sniper rifle, though powerful, has a slow rate of fire and a small clip.  The only useful gun aside from the assault riffle you start with is the shotgun, but it only works when the enemy is close, and the strategy with the marine is to not let them get close.  Also its damage seems inconsistent.  You can kill an alien with one shot to the foot, or pump five rounds into its chest at close range and it still manages to kill you.

            The hit detection is another problem with this game.  Predators and aliens often duke it out with melee combat, but it’s a rock paper scissor ordeal.  If you block a weak attack you can counter, a power attack breaks through a block, and a fast attack interrupts a power attack.  And when you add the fact that this is all first person so your depth perception is shot, and your viewpoint goes spinning when you take a hit, its no wonder that both the alien and predator were given instakills, which are also the greatest source of frustration in this game.

            You spawn into the match at full health, take two steps, and then an alien grabs you from behind and your dead.  All they have to do is get behind you, press X and watch you die.  Now you might think that this makes them overpowered, but the fact is that every time they do one of these kills, they go into an animation that can last up to five seconds, leaving them totally helpless to anyone who wants to shoot or instakill them.  This little situation leads to a conga line of death, which is almost comical to watch.

            When you die you watch the map through a camera that you can pan around and see the action.  I actually wish that this were an online option, to just watch the matches from this perspective, as it is rather entertaining in and of itself.  Usually your spawn time only takes about five seconds before you’re thrown back into the thick of it only to die again because the average life expectancy is about one minute if you’re lucky.

            So with all of these glaring flaws, bugs, and frustrations, the game has to be terrible right?  Well no.  Granted if you have any kind of temper, you should only play if you have some friends in the room with you to help keep you calm since this game will piss you off, but it is still pretty fun to play.  The death scenes are gory and entertaining, the action is fast paced, and there is a very satisfying feeling when you frag someone.  If you have X-Box live, you should at least give it a try.  If not, the story campaign is worth a rental if you’re a fan of the franchise, but it’s not very challenging, and I don’t think it would be worth buying for you, at least not at full price.  Enjoy.

            The basic story is that some guy went nuts and started eating people, and for some reason he has control over the psychic clone troopers, seriously, these guys really are supposed to be clones.  Rather than send a whole army to fight these guys, they send you and a handful of expendables in to sort out the whole mess.  You fight in abandoned buildings, office buildings, and underground secret labs chasing around these guys while they hunt down everyone who had anything to do with some secret project.

            Most of the enemies you fight are you typical faceless, armored head to toe badies that sound a lot like the Helgast from Killzone.  Most of these guys are pretty stupid, but they have really good eyesight and will spot you in the dark from a mile away even with your flashlight turned off.  Later on a few of them will have thick armor, some mechs show up, and there are even really annoying invisible ninjas that run up and smack you around until you put enough led into their heads to make them lie down. 

            Like any halfway decent FPS F.E.A.R. has a good variety of weapons to choose from, and you can even duel wield some of the smaller ones, but you can only carry three guns at a time, and in this game you can run out of ammo rather quickly even on the easier difficulty settings.  My advice to save on ammo is to us the bullet time mechanic in the game and run up close to the enemies with your shotgun.  1-3 shots will kill most of them, and enough of them carry this weapon for you to keep it loaded for most of the game.  The fact that it can blow an enemy in half is also a nice bonus.

            You also get grenades, but these things caused me a lot of trouble.  For starters, I can never get them where I want them.  They either roll right past the enemy, or they bounce behind a piece of cover and do no damage to the targets.  Another problem is that they explode instantly when they hit someone.  That might sound like a good thing, but if I’m near the bad guy and it goes off before I can take cover, I take damage as well.  The other problem is that there are supposed to be several kinds of grenades and even land mines, but I can’t figure out how to cycle through them.  I checked the games controls, but they only state how to throw the grenades, but since I have so much trouble using them, perhaps this was a good thing.

             Most of the other weapons are machine guns, the aforementioned shotgun, and a few high tech weapons, which are a lot of fun, but like most FPS games you don’t get a lot of ammo for the powerful ones during the campaign.  You’ll mostly be using whatever the enemy drops, and most of them use the more basic machine guns.  One odd thing to note is collecting the ammo.  Sometimes when you walk over a weapon that you already have you automatically get the ammo for it, but sometimes you have to hold down X to do it.  I have no idea why this is.  The same is true of medpacs and armor.  Sometimes you just get them, and sometimes you have to hold down the button.  It seems like a small complaint but it gets annoying after awhile. You should automatically pick up ammo for any weapons you are carrying in a game.

            Another odd thing about the ammo is when you pick some up, it tells you a different number than what is added to you inventory.  It will show 112 up in the right corner, but I’ll only actually get 13 bullets, which confuses me to no end.  Perhaps this is another example of SDTV not working well with the 360.

            As if these little problems weren’t annoying enough, the game’s hit detection is very odd.  When you get shot there’s no vibration, no sound effect of your guy saying “ouch” the most you get is a flash of red on the screen that is barely noticeable, and sometimes you don’t even get that.  Half the time the only way I know I’m being hurt is my health starts to go down.

            Yes, this game has a health meter, or rather counter.  You can carry up to ten health packs at a time, and even find little boosts that increase you max health and bullet time gauge, though here it’s called adrenaline.  Fortunately the adrenaline gauge slowly refills whenever you’re not using it, much like your flashlight, and this is a game where you need your flashlight.

            Much like Doom, some areas of this game are pitch black, and you will miss many hidden areas and items without some illumination.  This ties into the games horror element, which feels out of place most of the time.  The game does have some very good jump scares, turning around to see a creepy little girl right behind you in a similar style to the Ring, but most of it boils down to some invisible force throwing things off the shelves like a poltergeist.  Occasionally the main bad guy will talk to you in your head while showing you phantom visions of himself doing things, but since none of this hurts you until the very end of the game, it looses much of its tension.

            I think the main problem with any scary game, or movie for that matter, is that in order for it to cause fear, you have to like, or at least care about the main character.  It only works slightly in this game because of the first person perspective, but your character never says a word.  You never see him react to anything around him.  You don’t really care what happens to him.  The closest thing you get to that is a woman you meet more than halfway through the game that you have to escort, but she isn’t around long enough for you to really get to know her. 

            It’s also kind of hard to be afraid of anything when you’re carrying around a weapon that fires three missiles at once.  I think that’s a serious problem with most horror games: they are just shooters that have monsters in them.  Even towards the end of the game when all hell brakes loose, I know that all I have to do is shoot at it until it goes away.  The thing that confuses me the most in this game is a twist that makes no sense at all.    I won’t spoil it, but anyone who pays attention to the game will figure it out long before it’s supposed to be revealed, and you’ll understand what I mean when I say that this revelation is totally inconsistent with everything that has happened to you in the entire game.

            If that wasn’t bad enough, there is no boss fight in the game, no real enemy to speak of, and one of the closest thing with get to a villain you actually interact with is annoying and as threatening as a frog.  And the worst part is you don’t even get to kill him.  Believe me I tried; I wasted every bullet I had trying to shoot this guy in the face, but if you’re not supposed to kill them, you bullets pass right through.  And I really have to question the business practices of a company that spends billions of dollars developing some “super” soldiers that one guy can slaughter single handedly. 

            In short, F.E.A.R. is just another generic shooter with a few jump scares thrown in.  It’s nothing great, but it is enjoyable running around shooting bad guys while a tormented ghost girl tries to mess with your head.  It’s worth renting and should keep you entertained for a weekend, but don’t expect anything epic. Enjoy.

Destroy all Humans: Path of The Furon for the X-box 360 is the fourth installment in the Destroy all Humans series, and it continues the trend of corny humor mixed with mindless violence.  You play as Cryptosporidium, a horny, homicidal alien who was sent to earth to harvest human brainstems in order to save his race.  Each game takes place in a different decade.  The first game was in the 50s, the second was in the 60s, and Path of the Furon takes place in the 70s.

            Despite being president of the United States in the second game, Crypto has been relegated to a casino owner in Vegas.  He’s been steadily gathering human DNA over the years, but now some mobsters are moving in on him.  Being the trigger-happy lunatic that he is, Crypto slaughters nearly everyone in the town and burns it to the ground, including his own casino.

            This is probably the main reason this game is inferior to its predecessors: the story.  The previous titles gave clear motivation to both Crypto and his enemies, but here the game just throws you into Vegas and says that someone is muscling in on your turf, so you blow up the entire city.  Then you find out they were being helped, so you go and blow up another city, following a trail of breadcrumbs looking for whoever it was that bothered you when all you had to do was kill the mobsters and go back home.

            Most of the old weapons come back in this game along with a few new ones.  I personally enjoy the Venus human trap.  You also get a new saucer equipped with new ways to cause chaos and destruction including a tornado gun.  The abduction beam acts more like a vacuum in this game, automatically sucking up any humans it catches even if you’re holding a vehicle at the time.  Some of the old weapons even get an upgrade; especially the anal probe which can now sodomize multiple targets at once, and my personal favorite, the dislocator disc, also returns. 

Crypto also gets a new super power, the temporal fist.  This allows you to freeze time and use your telekinetic push on multiple targets at once.  He learns this technique from another Furon who takes on the role as your martial arts master, much to the chagrin of your disembodied boss, Pox, who is still a hologram ten years after the second game.  Another body from the second game that is absent is Natalya.  I know that if I had a cloned Russian sex slave, she would never leave my side, yet she isn’t even mentioned here.  I’ve read that this was explained in the previous title, but I haven’t played Big Willy Unleashed. 

This time Crypto’s love interest is a reporter, but she is more of a minor character and she doesn’t seem to mind letting a gray alien into her pants if it gets her the story, so there’s no sexual tension like there was before.  Another minor character is Jack, a man who looks, and sounds just like jack Nicholson, and serves as Crypto’s favorite pair of human jeans.  This was undoubtedly the game making fun of itself in response to Crypto sounding like the famous actor.  You also run into several characters that are clearly references to movies or groups including scientologists, the bad Asian guy from Blood Sport, and the Godfather gangsters who smoke cigars larger than a turkey drumstick.

As with the previous game, Crypto can enter people’s heads through their nose and run around in their body, or rather jog. For some reason the running option is no longer available, but you can restore your host’s health by reading people’s minds, and their thoughts are as raunchy as ever.  Pox and Crypto continue their hateful superior, subordinate relationship and constantly try to get on each other’s nerves, even breaking the fourth wall to do it, though some of the jokes and references they use are pretty obscure. 

            Speaking of Hit and miss humor, the game play itself can come off as a sick joke at times.  Anyone familiar with previous tittles should have no trouble getting the hang of things.  Crypto fly with his jet pack, shoots people, levitates cars and turns them into ammo, but many of the story missions are sadistically difficult to figure out.  In order to activate a landing zone, the Furon god tells you to jump on his idol’s head.  The problem with that is that you can’t press the jump button near him.  I had to back far away, jump and fly over him, and land on his head, but even that didn’t solve the puzzle.  You have to walk around on top of the very small space before he gives you your reward.

            There are a few missions like that in the game where you are given almost no hint whatsoever as to what you are supposed to do.  This problem is compounded by the fact that I can’t find any strategy guides for this game.  It’s rather annoying when some of the other puzzles are so easy that Pox mocks you and tells you the solution, but on others the only help you get is “use the temporal fist,” which doesn’t seem to help much.

            You do get to travel around to some new places, Paris, Vegas, and even a Furon city.  You can blow up buildings, abuse the local populace, and even get to fight new alien enemies and bosses, but despite being on the 360, the graphics don’t seem like that much of an improvement over the previous titles which makes me feel that the game didn’t reach it’s full potential in this area. 

            Destroy all Humans: Path of the Furon my be inferior to its predecessors, but if you liked them, you’ll probably enjoy this one as well because it’s more of the same.  Abusing humans with supernatural powers and advanced weaponry while listening to Pox and Crypto antagonize each other.  The game is also log enough to make it worth buying with collectables and a story mode that will take you longer than a weekend to complete, but you might want to buy it used as it does have some flaws, and even a few bugs.  Enjoy!

Black site :area 51 for the X-Box 360 is a first person shooter with a very contrived story which has you fighting aliens and mutant soldiers in Nevada as you make your way into Area 51 through backyards, trailer parks, desert, and driving sections while being accompanies by two AI partners.

I believe that for any FPS to be good, it must have at least one of the following. An interesting and immersive story, smooth control, a wide range of interesting weapons you can use to blow things up, likeable characters, imaginative locations, exciting multi player. Sadly Black site has none of these. The controls are sluggish, the story’s ridiculous, there are only two alien guns, you want to kill half of the characters yourself, half the game takes place in suburbia, and you’ll never find anyone who wants to play this game with you.

The game starts you off in the middle east trying to destroy a chemical weapons plant. You play as the faceless mute whose name is so unmemorable I can’t even recall it. Even in cut scenes you don’t say anything, and the only time it switches out of first person is when you die to see yourself lie down like a mannequin. In order to compensate for this, the game gives you two porters. Mr. sarcastic and Mr. loudmouth. Loudmouth does nothing but make lewd jokes and brag while Sarcastic makes smart ass remarks and witty retorts.

The three of you make your way to the missile base by running around and blowing up check points. The weapon you’ll be using for most of the game is already in your hands, a machine gun. You also get a pistol but you’ll never use that, and you’ll find a sniper rifle on the way to your objective but you’ll rarely use that. Grenades can be picked up but they are rare and you seldom throw them where you want them, so just get used to your machine gun.

Eventually you’ll get an army humvee and go into a rail shooting section which has you manning the turret while your two friends bicker like a married couple over whether they should turn left or right. This is the part of the game that destroys your disbelief, and its sad that it happens in the game’s first chapter. As you drive around through oil refineries and through drainage ditches while being shot at by everything in sight, your partners talk as if they were off-roading in Texas rather than racing for their lives. Despite an entire refinery blowing up around you, and I hope you enjoyed that part because there are several such vehicle sections in the game, some of which have you as the driver. The most annoying part of these sections later in the game is that you’ll have to abandon one vehicle, go through an area, and find a new vehicle just waiting for you on the other side for no reason.

The three of you make it through without a scratch. Loudmouth even insists on pulling over so he can take a leak, and the game encourages you to learn about the zoom function at this point by getting a closer look at him while he’s doing it! Now at this point I feel I should point out that in most of my reviews I try to avoid spoilers in the story, but in this case it is impossible to talk about this game without spoiling it, but it can hardly be considered spoiled since you see every plot twist a mile away. For that reason I have no problem referring to the only woman you meet in the game as Mrs. Evil scientist, because you figure out pretty fast that she’s morally bankrupt as all hell. She gives you guys some shots without really telling you what it is, and goes with you into battle using only a handgun.

She is the main source of my disbelief in this game because she is so morally bankrupt that any sane person would shoot her in the head, but your character just keeps following her orders without reason through the game, even when she lies to you, gets your friends killed, and shows no remorse whatsoever for her actions. She even admits to conducting inhuman experiments on innocent people before burying them alive, and yet your character trusts her. The most laughable part is that she is the one who occasional points out just how immoral she is. I know that doesn’t make sense, so let me give you an example of one of these lines. “we tortured them, experimented on them, cut into them and then burred them under concrete and abandoned them. What did we think was going to happen?” this is something that your character should be saying to her, not something she should be saying right after asking one of her victims, “why are you doing this?”

Her lies aren’t even convincing. When you first run into a mutant, one of your buddies asks what’s wrong with the guy and she says, “he has encephalitis….a lot of encephalitis.” and when you run into a giant underground snake monster she says it’s a mutation. And her amount of stupidity is staggering. She leads two soldiers into a base telling them you’re there for bombs when she is really looking for a floating crystal, and she doesn’t pay any attention to your friend who walks over and touches the damn thing.

She’s not the only unbelievable character either. Later in the game when you have a commanding officer, his reactions to you are completely over the top. The idiot tells you not to kill any of the enemies that are swarming the base, and is livid when you do in order to defend yourself. I actually reset my game the first time I went through this mission because I honestly thought I wasn’t supposed to kill them, but it’s impossible. Your melee attack does more damage than your guns, so much so that you can actually shatter cement barriers with the butt of your gun. And even the reason you are called to Nevada makes no sense. Evil scientist says its because you saw the thing in Iraq, but why should that matter? You didn’t do anything special. There is no reason to call you into this situation.

The only answer you ever really get is, “that’s classified.” in fact this game isn’t really a game, it’s writer ripping on the government. Just like books such as Congo, Starship troopers, and Sphere, Black site started out with the premise that the government and military are evil and immoral, and then tried to slap on a plot around that. The result is a completely unbelievable mess.

Even if you completely ignore the story, the game is still only mediocre. The only two alien weapons you get to use is a strange shot gun that can bounce its bullets, and a bazooka. I really feel disappointed by this because you’re storming area 51, and I expected more creativity in the technology. The game has a Gears of War health system but does it very badly. In Black site, you will look fine as you take hits, and then suddenly your screen will have a red tint as you are near death which means you only have two states: perfectly fine, and about to die.

The controls are a little odd as well. You can press the left analog to crouch while you hold it down, but you can press the D-pad down and stay in a crouch until you press it again. The one control and function I actually like in the game is that you can command your AI partners by targeting the area you want them to go to or item you want them to interact with and press a button. This does make the game even easier because you can tell your partners to go into a room without you to do the fighting.

Another problem with the game are the enemies. It’s bad enough that they are inexcusably stupid, they run past you and start shooting at your friends while keeping their back to you, but most of them can be recognized from other games. Giant underground snakes from Prototype, small skittering monsters that blow themselves up from Gear of War 2, infected humans from Halo, and the special pops guys from Area 51 on the PS2 all make an appearance. Even the aliens form War of the Worlds show up in a more nightmarish form. Now to be fair, Black site came out before most of these games which leads me to believe that those game developers cannibalized this one for content because they figured no one played it, and you shouldn’t.

The game play is mediocre, the story is utterly ridiculous, and the game is short. I beat it in one sitting and didn’t want to play it again. You can collect dossiers which contain background information on the characters and events, but I honestly couldn’t force myself to care enough to find them all. I don’t recommend this game for anyone unless you just want something to laugh at with your friends.

Batman Arkham Asylum on the X-Box 360 has you running around the insane asylum where batman drops off the super villains after he catches them. The game starts off with you bringing Joker back to his home away from home, but it turns out he arranged to throw a bigger party than any of the guards expected. He breaks loose and starts causing mayhem while you have to try and stop him.

You start out with just the trusty batarang and grapple gun as you make your way around the island, crawling through air ducts and hanging from gargoyles. You can run and climb, but for some reason you can’t jump on command but rather do so automatically if you run to the edge of a cliff or if you are near a space you can jump up and climb to the game will prompt you to press A. If you jump from high up you can glide with your cape. You can also drop long distances and your cape will act like a parachute near the bottom to cushion the fall.

Perhaps the area where the controls shine the best is the combat. I honestly don’t know how the developers and programmers managed to make batman react so quickly and fluently to button commands from the player. The combat almost seems like something you’d see in a cut-scene rather than something you actually get to play through. You press one button to launch combos and direct which person to attack with the analog stick. Rather than just punch over and over again, batman lets loose with an array of attacks which are a joy just to watch.

When an enemy is going to attack you, there will be a marker over his head. Pressing the Y button makes batman counter the attack, and the longer you go without taking the hit, the more vicious batman’s moves become until he is sending guys flying across the room with every hit and lunging to strike the next one. You also have a stun attack to knock enemies with knives off balance for a moment so you can let them have it, and you can dive out of the way if you feel pressured. once you knock an enemy to the ground, you can put their lights out by pressing two buttons near them to jump on top of them and punch their face into the ground, but make sure no enemies are nearby or they will hit you during this vulnerable moment. You’ll know when you’re done because the game goes into slow-motion when you knock out the last thug, allowing you to enjoy them falling to the ground, holding their head in agony.

Occasionally enemies with guns show up, and even batman isn’t bulletproof. This is when the stealth aspect of the game comes into play. There are nearly a dozen ways to go about taking enemies down quietly without being damaged. You can hang upside-down and wait for someone to walk under you, then snatch them up like spider man. You can sneak up behind them and smother them. You can do a glide kick and then knock them out before they get up. As you unlock new gadgets you get even more options to take out thugs without being detected, and as you do it, you truly feel like batman.

Another tool is your detective mode which highlights objects of interest and lets you see enemy skeletons with X-ray vision. This vision mode also shows you what weapon the enemy has and their stress level. As you take out more and more of their friends, the bad guys start to freak out until there is only one left who is practically wetting himself with fear. I felt a tremendous sense of predatory power as I crouched on a gargoyle directly over the last man standing as he fired in all directions while crying to himself.

You gain experience points by beating up thugs, completing objectives, and finding Riddler clues. You use these points to power up your items and combat moves so you can thrown enemies and break their limbs. The Riddler clues are either trophies hidden around, a map in each area of where the clues are, an invisible question mark you can only see while in detective mode, the chronicles of the man who built the asylum, and items belonging to other criminals which Riddler gives hints to. Sadly these hints are pretty easy to figure out, but some of the trophies are hidden rather well. You also find therapy session tapes for the super villains giving insight into their personalities. Collecting these items provide you with character trophies which you can view from the main menu, and bios of many characters in the batman universe, including those that don’t appear in the game.

The asylum itself plays out like a Castlevania symphony of night, or a Zelda map. You unlock new areas as you progress through the game by obtaining new items, but this does lead to a lot of backtracking, and you have to make a mental note of where an out of reach vent was early on in the game so you can go back and get to what’s inside it after you get the bat claw. The asylum itself changes as the game progresses forcing you to find different ways into some of the same areas, but thugs don’t endlessly respawn. Once you beat everyone in the map, they shouldn’t return unless you have to pass through the area again as part of the story.

I honestly can’t think of anything really negative about the game. You can’t drive the bat mobile, but that makes sense in the context of the game. The game is also pretty easy except for a few occasions when you aren’t allowed to be spotted, but even these events aren’t too difficult. The only area the game really fails is the boss battles. The only fight that feels like a real boss fight is with poison ivy, and she’s also the only one who managed to kill me. Any other boss fight either boils down to you beating up a bunch of thugs while the villain cheers them on, or if you’re fighting a hulking guy, you just dive out of the way and let them hit the wall before wailing on them or jumping on their back and riding them like Master Blaster. Even the final battle is rather disappointing, though the following cinematic is just plain badass.

In all, Batman Arkham Asylum is a solid game with very few flaws. I highly recommend it for just about anyone. It has the stealth action of any assassin game, the beat’em up fun of an action game, and it’s by far the best Batman game I have ever played which truly makes you feel like you are the dark night. Worth at least renting, or if you want to beat the challenge modes, buying.

Transformers Revenge of the Fallen for the X-box 360 is a movie tie-in game which relies heavily on the franchise and suffers from many of the same problems as the film. The cast of characters is rather small, and some missions only allow you to play as one of them. If that wasn’t bad enough all of the characters feel the same except for the fliers. Everything is so loud and noisy that it’s hard to tell what’s going on, and the voice acting is rather bland.

You get to choose to play as Autobots or Deceptecons, but their missions are very similar, and the only real difference is who you get to listen to the whole game Ironhide, or Starscream, and they tried to make Starscream sound different than his movie counterpart. Most of the Autobots sound right, except for some reason Ratchet’s voice is much harder to hear than the others, but perhaps that was just my copy.

No matter who you play as, the controls are basically the same. Giant robot is your default form. You can run around, punch, shoot , and jump. The game does do a good job of conveying just how heavy the transformers are in that they shake the ground when they land. The problem is than they are also rather slow, but that’s what your vehicle mode is for. Unlike the movie, the Autobots in the game only turn into vehicles to get around faster, not to hide what they are. The problem is that the controls are so convoluted you’ll find yourself stumbling over your fingers in the middle of combat. To jump you press X. You hold right trigger to transform, and automatically drive while in vehicle mode. You press while holding right trigger to boost, but if you hold down X and release the right trigger you transform and jump at the same time. It may sound easy, but it takes a lot of practice to remember especially when the attack button can be used in a similar way while in vehicle mode.

Another annoying control scheme is the combat. You have to press another shoulder button to enter shooting mode in which you have a primary and secondary long range weapon. They don’t run out of ammo, but they do overheat, so you basically just fire one until it needs to cool down and then switch to the other. The primary weapon can be charged up to do more damage, or lock on to the enemy. While you are firing in this mode, you can dodge to the side and move, but it feels very stiff. It is so rare that you will get close enough to an enemy that I don’t even know why the game added a melee button. Enemies turn into vehicles and run away if you approach, or they shoot you to pieces before you can get to them.

The hit detection is also a problem. The transformers are surprisingly hard to spot for giant robots, and even the red life bar is little help, but when you get one in your sights, your weapons cause so much smoke and fire upon impact that you can’t tell if you’re hitting the enemy or the tree next to him. As if that wasn’t bad enough, the game actually insults you during the between mission cut scenes about how bad you’re doing, saying you waste ammo or take too many hits. The best method I found was to get within medium range and try to shoot what I looked like the head until they died.

The game tries to mix up the levels with rescuing humans and such, but they all boil down to entering shooting mode and blasting anything that moves. Even the boss battles are more annoying than exciting because all you do is move to a distance, unload weapons, if enemy gets too close, turn into a car and move away. Throw in the fact that your health regenerates, and you can breeze through the game rather quickly. In order to make the game seem longer, most levels have an unlockable optional mission that you can play through, and you can level up different stats which seem to be universal for all of your faction members.

On thing I liked about the game is the unlock able consent, namely the old transformers episodes you can watch, and not just clips, full episodes. If they had the entire series with this game, I would recommend it, but as it stands, you’re better off just buying the DVD box set. This game is too boring for an adult, and its controls are too awkward for a kid. Afraid I just can’t recommend it as anything more than just a rental, and even then only so you can form your own opinion.

Bayonetta on the X-box 360 is a fast paced action game in which you play as a rather icy witch with amnesia 20 years after she wakes up in a coffin at the bottom of a lake. Now she goes around killing angels so the demons that she sold her soul to won’t drag her back down to hell, and all of this is explained to her by her driver at the beginning of the game which is bayonet’s largest flaw: terrible story telling.

The narrative flow of the game is very awkward as well as its character development and dialogue. A guy thinks a woman ripped his father limb from limb, and yet he can’t decide if he hates her or has a crush on her. Bayonetta’s motivations are equally unconvincing. The angels she’s fighting only seem to be attacking her because she’s trespassing or she’s trying to kill them. One of them even says he doesn’t want to fight her, and she shoots him in the face. And then there’s the acting itself. I don’t know how a video game can have such hammy performances unless it’s intentional. Luka is awkward, enzo is annoying, and Bayonetta herself is just plain unlikable. But perhaps the game developers considered the story to just be an excuse to run around and beat things up. I mean, how seriously should you take a game in which the main character says she should have been a pole dancer? The main meat of the game is the action, so let’s look at that.

The fighting system reminds me of devil may cry with fast acrobatic attacks done in the flashiest way possible, but Bayonetta adds a sexual twist in that she removes sections of her clothing to perform her finishing moves. In fact sexuality seems to be the main theme of the game. Bayonetta makes sexual remarks throughout the cut-scenes and game play, poses and makes suggestive gestures, and some of her attacks have a very s@m feel to them. For her regular attacks, Bayonetta has guns attached to every limb, or you can pick up the angelic weapons dropped by your enemies do to various attacks. You can also obtain various other weapons such as a sword or big claws by getting collectable records in the game. You also buy combos and new abilities using angel halos as money for the demons. You even get to practice these moves before you buy them, and fool around with them during the loading screens. The problem with all of that is that during combat you only need to know how to push the dodge button.

Dodging at the right moment when your being attacked puts you into bullet time and allows you to do significant damage to your enemies while they move in slow-motion. Dodging is also a necessity when you consider how quickly Bayonetta will die if she keeps getting hit. Many of the optional portal fights only allow you to be hit a few times before you fail, and health in this game is actually pretty hard to find. Add the fact that you can’t tell what’s going on if there are more than two enemies on screen at the same time and you end up with chaos. The only way to survive is to press the dodge button like mad and hope that you get lucky enough to evade at the right time so you can land some hits safely.

The longer you go without taking a hit while dealing damage, the more your torture kill meter fills up which allows you to kill an enemy instantly. You earn extra points during these kills by pressing a button repeatedly to fill up a meter. Add this to the dodging mechanic and combat turns into one giant Quick-time event that you’re trying to survive. If your any good at the game, these button mashing events will happen so often that you’ll feel like your fingers are participating in an Olympic event. The only thing that might make it worth the effort is making female angels orgasm to death. No, I’m not kidding. Speaking of quick-time events, Bayonetta takes one form the pages of the only thing I didn’t like about resident evil 4 and puts them right in the middle of a cut-scene without any warning.

The game’s only saving grace, aside from so much sexuality that I consider it to be soft-core videogame porn, is the level design. You travel through the worlds in a kind of pocket dimension. You can see invisible outlines of people, but they can’t see you. This allows you to mess with them by destroying things around them and watching their panicked reactions. You go through a religious town, ancient ruins, fiery caverns that I think are supposed to be hell, and heaven. The levels look beautiful and surreal. Some of the later levels can actually make you dizzy when you start walking up walls. Many of the enemies you fight are also stunningly beautiful and creative, not to mention bizarre. A two headed dragon with an upside-down face for its chest?

You obtain ingredients as you travel around destroying things which you can combine to make items for healing and stat bonuses. My only real problem with this system is that it’s needlessly complicated by the fact you have to mix a certain amount of one of three ingredients to make an item and then spin the analog stick to mix them, so even item creation is a mini QuickTime event. After the chapters you play a strange little shooter game to earn an extra item or halos, so Bayonetta is comprised of soft-core porn, Devil May Cry action bogged down with QuickTime events, needlessly complicated item making, and mini-games thrown in between chapters as well as a driving level which is far too long.

Needles to say I can’t recommend buying this game for anyone. It might be worth a rental for those with a juvenile sense of humor who want to see Bayonetta spreading her legs while sucking suggestively on lollypop, because the only selling point for this game is it’s gratuitous sexuality, but honestly if you want to watch porn, just watch porn. If you take away the games female character what you end up with is a generic action game with a terrible story, unforgiving difficulty curve on its harder levels, and no real replay value for anyone other than the obsessive-compulsive types that really need a challenge. The sad thing is they could have done a lot better with this game.

The Walton is the San Andreas version of an old 1950s Chevrolet pickup truck.
Speed and handling: This is a slow truck. It starts slow and it stays slow. It’s steering is fair, but that’s mostly because you will not be going very fast, any way. It can take some damage, at least a little more than the average car in this game.
Locations:You can find the Walton most commonly in the countryside, and quite often on the roads in the desert regions. If you are out in the nowhere lands of Back O’ Beyond, there is usually a Walton parked by a wooden bridge. There often is also a Walton parked behind the Angel Pine Sawmill, and you can usually find one parked around any farms.

Washington

This car looks something like a Lincoln.
Speed and handling: The Washington is not a fast car, but it makes up somewhat for that in the fact it is heavy enough and strong enough and durable enough to knock other cars out of its way. The steering here is mediocre, probably mainly due to the length of this vehicle making it somewhat difficult to make sharp corners.
Locations:There is almost always a Washington parked in Tierra Robada at Mike Toreno’s ranch. Otherwise, you can sometimes find a Washington cruising along in any of the cities. It seems a bit more common in San Fierro than in Los Santos or Las Venturas.

Wayfarer

This motorcycle is basically a Honda Goldwing.
Speed and handling: It is hard to do stunts with a Wayfarer because it is a slow motorcycle, but this is still a good bike, especially for those with a low motorcycle skill. Why? Because it handles better than any other motorcycle in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.
Locations: The Wayfarer is pretty common on the roads and highways in the desert and countryside, and sometimes is parked at restaurants and truck stops outside the cities.

Windsor

The Windsor looks something like a Jaguar from the 1960s.
Speed and handling: This is a fast vehicle, and has great acceleration. But it tends to fishtail around those tight curves. Also, being an older car, even if it is a sports car, it’s a bit heavy. Which means it can take a fair amount of damage before catching fire.
Locations:I’ve seen the Windsor most commonly throughout Las Venturas, but I’ve also seen it a few times in Los Santos and San Fierro, but not necessarily in any particular places.

Related links

The “Y” Vehicles Location Guide for Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas

The “Z” Vehicles Location Guide for Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas

The “A” Vehicles Location Guide for Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas

This four-door sedan appears something like a Chevrolet Monte Carlo from the 1980s.
Speed and handling: The Tahoma might not look like much, but it’s an all-around solid vehicle. Decent speed, acceleration, handling. Even seems able to take its share of damage.
Locations:The Tahoma appears in both country and city, so you can just about find it anywhere. It’s most common in Ballas territories in Los Santos.

Tampa

The Tampa appears to be the Grand Theft Auto version of a late 1960s Chevrolet Corsair, and to make it look even older each Tampa comes in a mix of colors, making it look as if it’s been put together in someone’s garage.
Speed and handling: A lot of players don’t seem to like the Tampa, but I think it’s an alright vehicle. Sure, it handles badly and the speed could be much improved, but its durability seems fair and its top-end speed isn’t awful.
Locations:Sometimes you can find a Tampa parked at the gas station down near the docks in San Fierro. Also, in Jefferson in Los Santos there is a used car lot that often has a Tampa. On the roads, I usually spot Tampas cruising around in eastern San Fierro.

Tanker

The Tanker is a great big rig!
Speed and handling: This vehicle is pretty slow, but it’s acceleration is fair, at least for such a large truck. It’s handling is adequate, but again, mainly for such a large truck. You don’t want to make sharp turns with the Tanker because you’ll just end up going off road and perhaps bumping into things. At least the Tanker is big, strong and sturdy, thus there is not much it can’t simply knock out of the way.
Locations:The Tanker is the most common of the big trucks in San Andreas and is found on the roads of the countryside and the deserts. Try looking around Mt. Chiliad, Tierra Robada, Bone County, and other locales outside the cities.

Taxi

Yep, it’s the Taxi. And it’s not a bad vehicle. You can use it to complete, of course, the Taxi mission. And once you pass that mission in San Andreas, any Taxi or Cabbie you climb into will have nitro for that extra speedy boost.
Speed and handling: Overall, I would say the Taxi’s stats are slightly above average, but not great. It has fair speed and acceleration. It seems slightly more durable than many cars, thus able to take some gunfire and survive a few crashes. And it has pretty good handling and doesn’t fishtail out of control much, unless maybe when hit by a really big vehicle like a tank or rig. However, I wouldn’t suggest taking it off road or onto wet grass.
Locations: This has got to be the most common vehicle in all of San Andreas (though sometimes it feels like the police vehicles are), so you shouldn’t have any problems finding one. The Taxi is more common in the cities, but sometimes you can even find one on the highways of the desert and country areas.

Tornado

This car looks like a Chevy Bel Air from the 1950s.
Speed and handling: Despite its old appearance, the Tornado is actually a pretty good car. It has decent acceleration and top-end speed. It seems quite solid, able to take a goodly amount of gunfire. And it even steers pretty well, following your controls with ease and not spinning all over the place whenever it bumps into something.
Locations:Unfortunately, for all its good qualities, the Tornado is not an easy vehicle to find in San Andreas. Usually it can be found in Vagos territory, mainly eastern and northeastern Los Santos, but even there it can sometimes be quite rare, especially late in the game when normally your CJ character will have just about wiped out the Vagos.

Tow Truck

What an original name. Tow Truck. And that’s just what it is. It looks something like a Ford F-150 pickup truck with a tow bar on the back. You can have some fun with it, however, because you can lower and raise the arm on the back of this truck and actually use it to tow other vehicles.
Speed and handling: The Tow Truck is actually quite durable. It’s capable of taking a lot of gunfire before exploding. It also also good speed, though the acceleration is not the best. It’s steering is a bit sluggish, meaning it seems slow to take you commands. Also, while the Tow Truck doesn’t flip over easily, it doesn’t have much speed or nearly as much control when you take if off road, so stick to concrete and blacktop.
Locations:The Tow Trucks seems quite rare, but I’ve found it near the docks in San Fierro, on the desert highways and around the docks in southeastern Los Santos. There is usually one parked at the Angel Pine junkyard.

Tractor

It’s exactly what its title says. A tractor. Like the Tow Truck, you can raise and lower the little arm on the back of the Tractor to tow cars and trucks.
Speed and handling: Slow, slow, slow. Perhaps the slowest vehicle in San Andreas. But it digs in well and can take steep hills with ease, just slowly. It over steers way too much, but what can you expect from a tractor?
Locations: Tractors are pretty common in the countryside, even sometimes on the highways. You can find one parked at The Farm and at a trailer park just south of the Flint Intersection. Also, look around the safe house in Flint County, because the Tractor can be found parked quite often in that area.

Trashmaster

It’s a garbage truck. That’s about it. It doesn’t do anything special.
Speed and handling: The Trashmaster is slow and sluggish, but it can take a fair amount of damage and is big enough to knock smaller vehicles out of its way. It handles about like you expect, slow and sluggish, just like its speed.
Locations:The Trashmaster is a very rare vehicle, but when it spawns on the roads it is always within a city. The few times I have seen one has been near docks, such as in eastern San Fierro or southeastern Los Santos.

Tropic

The Tropic is a big boat, perhaps the biggest in San Andreas.
Speed and handling: This sucker is big, but it’s also slow, slow, slow. Don’t expect to win any boat races with a Tropic. It handles decent enough, but you’ll be taking those turns without much speed. Don’t expect quick changes of direction.
Locations: The Tropic is usually found floating on the waters of San Andreas, but most often near or out in the oceans.

Tug

It’s a little vehicle for use mostly at airports. Ho hum.
Speed and handling: The Tug takes a long time to get going, but it actually has decent speed once you’ve had metal on the pedal for a while. It steers okay, but nothing special. It doesn’t get up enough speed to spin out of control, though it is just a tad bit top heavy and wants to flip over on its side when encountering rough terrain.
Locations: The Tug is found within airports in San Andreas, and sometimes outside airports but near. The only exception to this is you can find it in the secret underground base in Area 69 in the desert, but good luck surviving since the military will be gunning for you the second you draw near the base.

Turismo

The Turismo is one of the best vehicles in all of San Andreas. It’s based on a Ferrari.
Speed and handling: Everything is great about this car. It has fantastic speed and acceleration and it handles like a dream. Really, you won’t spin out of control often with a Turismo unless maybe you’re flying along at top speeds. However, it is built for the road, not dirt or sand, so stick to the highways and streets.
Locations:The Turismo is very hard to find. It is not parked anywhere, so you can’t just pick one up. The only place I’ve seen the Turismo is along The Strip in Las Venturas, so look to jack one there.

Related links

The “R” Vehicles Location Guide for Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas

“S” Vehicles Location Guide for Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, Part 1

“S” Vehicles Location Guide for Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, Part 2