What are our excuses? Have you SEEN the games that are out right now? Gears of War 2, Fallout 3, Fable 2, Dead Space, Chrono Trigger, Mother 3, Left 4 Dead, Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia, Dragon Quest IV. I'm sure I'm missing some. Or lots. Still, that's a ton of Good Gaming.

And personally, I've been busy with this whole "graduating from college" thing, which required a bit more focus than I'm used to.

Anyway, we're back, and we've got two reviews that have been sitting here for awhile, just waiting for Mr Editor to get off his ass and . . you know . . edit them.

World of Goo (PC) - Highly Recommended

The art and design of the game immediately made me wonder if Tim Burton or Terry Gilliam, or even Tim Schafer had had a hand in it at some point. The heavy shadows and industrial set decoration at some points evoke a vaguely disturbing feeling of elementary school paranoia, but tempered with cartoony foregrounds and the boundless enthusiasm of the blobs themselves as they move about and exclaim things when they attach to structures.

Dead Space (360/PS3/PC) - Highly Recommended

Glen Schofield and his team at EA Redwood Shores deserve the best kind of acclaim for what they have done here. Instead of trying to reinvent the wheel, or, alternatively, cranking out a feeble clone of a popular game, they have instead created an original IP that takes everything good from all the best examples of the horror game archetype and forges them together in a cohesive, fun, and brilliantly polished whole.

Now that the backlog of material is cleared, we promise to get back to regularly writing about the wonderful ridiculous world of the gaming industry.

So hop on in to enjoy five tasty, bite-sized mini reviews of Braid, Bionic Commando: Rearmed, Castle Crashers, Galaga Legions, and Geometry Wars Evolved 2.

PROS:

-Really over-the-top, in a good way. The Apprentice's powers are wackily strong to begin with so it plays like Star Wars as directed by John Woo or something. Lots of explosions and crushing deaths.

-The Lightsaber combat is very arcadey and not at all like Jedi Outcast from what I can tell, but it works well. The emphasis has really been switched to force powers, but there are several saber/force combos that are really fun and actually Make Sense.

-For the first time, they got doors right. Why would a jedi trek halfway across a military installation to find a key to a locked door? Screw that, just blow the door open with blunt Force trauma (damn, that was clever. props to me).

-Stuff shown in the old trailers is acutally doable. Push them, zap them, toss an explosive at them before they notice it. Or just pick them up and mess with them a little.

-Looks really nice and while the framerate is not rock solid, it keeps up.

-Some really clever gimmicks to take out big enemies. As long as they keep it varied and don't use the same few in the full game it's going to be heavily amusing.

-Difficulty is really good. You don't feel like a wimpy little girl with a lightsaber starting out, but if you get sloppy and let yourself get heavily outnumbered you get get in trouble quick.

-Controls are good, you can control gripped objects in every axis and toss them wherever, and pretty much every damn button on the controller is mapped to a different way to kill a guy.

LESS PRO:

-Camera is pretty lame.

-A really strong emphasis on throwing stuff at people meant there was simply TOO MUCH loose junk sitting around in the environments. Hope this was just for the demo.

-Quick Timer Events for enemy fatalities. Thanks God of War.

-No dismemberment to speak of. I can throw a guy half a kilometer into a bulkhead and into a void but I can't lop his arm off? Come on now.

-Blocking is pretty weak, and should be on a bumper instead of a trigger for something so time-sensitive, hopefully this will be upgradeable and remappable.

TOTALLY NOT PRO:

-Why could Soulcalibur IV spring for James Earl Jones, but this game that features Vader as a main character, can't? Impersonator is just Bad.

IN SUMMARY, the demo was not without flaws, but very impressive and has actually excited me enough to want to buy this. I can't remember the last time that happened. As long as the full version keeps it up, it should be a hoot. It feels like this is a game that the developer wanted to make and is proud of. Which doesn't happen enough anymore.

If you've got XBL Gold, go get it now. PSN comes later today, and it will eventually show up on XBL silver if you're one of Those Guys.

Games You Care About

• Fallout 3 . . . turns out it's Fallout 3. Shocking. I mean, it's good and all, but it isn't really news.
• Gears of War 2. See above.
• Banjo Kazooie 3 & Viva Pinata 2. Rare makes sequels, film at 11. Ok, no, seriously they look pretty good. Winter 2008.
• Guitar Hero 4 - 85 master tracks, lame stuff we already knew about ("make your own tracks!!!"), lame stuff we don't care about ("WHOAAA GUYS! SUPER SPECIAL TREAT FOR 360 GAMERS . . YOU GET 3 REM TRACKS! NOT FREE OR ANYTHING . . JUST LIKE . . AN EXCLUSIVE PACK. TO BUY.") Also the new Metallica album will be available as DLC for GH3 and GH4 whenever it actually gets released.
• Rockband 2 - 84 tracks on the disc (the leaked list was mostly right), all RB1 content is compatible and transferrable, 360 exclusive at launch (which will be worldwide this time for reals). Shooting for 500 tracks available for RB2 by the end of the year.

Dashboard Refresh
Remember a few months ago when there were leaks from inside Rare saying "Uhhhh, guys, Microsoft is making us rip off Nintendo in a Big Way and it makes us feel dirty." Totally true. The new dashboard coming this fall is all social crap all the time. It's got fake-Miis, fake-photo-sharing-app, fake everything. I would not be surprised if they make us pay a quarter for a shirt like they do with gamerpics right now.

Good news: they're expanding their video stuff. Not only will there be new partnerships for normal video content, but the new dashboard will bring Netflix streaming capability to the 360. It'll work just like That Roku Thing, except you already have one.

Games You Don't Care About

• Scene It Sequel, bleh.
• Lame Camera Stuff, bleeh.
• Partnership with the tools responsible for 1 vs 100, Big Brother, Fear Factor, etc to produce "Live" versions of shows like 1 vs 100, ultra bleh.
• Lips. It's a Karaoke game. From iNiS, the guys responsible for Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan! and Elite Beat Agents. Unfortunately it isn't innovative. It's just Karaoke.

XBLA Stuff

• Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved: 2: Colon: The Game: The Sequel: JUMP IN. It's Geometry Wars, with 4-player MP, and extra crazy stuff.
• Galaga Sequel from the same team as PacMan CE. May be sacrilege. I am reserving judgement until a demo is out.
• Portal - Still Alive. It's a level pack, and if it isn't being released on Steam I will go on a rampage.

Super Secret Bonus Stuff
Square Enix dropped a bomb: Final Fantasy XIII is no longer PS3 exclusive. Sucks to be you, Sony Defense Force. Also, inexplicably, they are releasing Last Remnant on the 360 and PC. Why? No one knows.

That's all for today, Nintendo and Sony are tomorrow. Get your press conference bingo cards ready.

You might want to sit down.

Here's the good news: It's actually finally being released! For reals this time! Also you get nine "exclusive" songs, though you might only actually care about one or two.

And the bad news. . well . . damn, where do you even start? The date they've set is 23 MAY 2008, a smooth 6 months after the North American release. Why'd it take so long? Who knows. Probably the stand-by excuse of "TRANSLATING THINGS IS HARD!", but it probably also has something to do with Licensing Hell.

Then there's bundles & prices. Unlike the US release where you had options of "Everything" or "Just the game", Europe gets to pick from a ton of crap. There's an "Instruments" set which just has all the controllers, there's drum and guitars sold separately, and there's just the game.

And then the real fuck-you from EA: the pricing.
Instruments Bundle - GBP 129.99 / EUR 169
Wireless Guitars - GBP 59.99 / EUR 79.99
Drum Kits - GBP 69.99 / EUR 89.99
Game-only - GBP 49.99 / EUR 69.99

This might not have sounded too bad back when the dollar was, you know, actually worth something, but look at the conversion now: 180 GBP is about 360 USD, over twice what the whole shebang retails for over here.

No firm dates or prices are set yet for the PS2 or Wii versions, the best we've been told is that they'll be out "later this summer", which in EA-speak could mean pretty much anything.

Source: Eurogamer

Apart from being ported to the PC where, you know, you might not experience as much terrible texture pop-up, the announcement over at VoodooExtreme mentions the following updates, which I assume were made solely to piss me off, as they fix my main complaints with the game:

• Optimized controls designed specifically for the PC.
• High resolution visuals – Mass Effect for the PC features highly detailed textures, characters and environments.
• Fully customizable controls – PC gamers can re-map the control scheme any way they like.
• Run & Gun Control – Players can assign biotic powers or skills to ‘hot keys’ allowing them to play Mass Effect with a heavier focus on action.
• New decryption mini-game.
• New inventory screen GUI and functionality – The enhanced inventory system makes it easier for players to equip and modify their weapons and armor.

So lets look at that list a bit more in-depth:

1) Better prettier pretties (and probably less popup). Hopefully the PC will be able to handle the U3 engine better than the 360. It sucked - a lot - to walk into a building and have everyone skinned in super ultra low-res shit because the 360 just couldn't keep up. It really distracted from the fact that otherwise the game was beautiful.

2) Better controls. The radial menu was neat, but it meant that without pausing the action you couldn't switch what power you were using. The 360 just plain didn't have enough buttons, and now that's not a problem.

3) New Decryption mini-game. Anything (seriously, anything) will be better than the "press this button when we tell you to" crap that was in the 360 release. Mass Effect had the hands-down worst unlock/hack/disarm/decrypt/etc minigame I've ever seen in any RPG ever. With stuff like the pipe-dreams clone from Bioshock out there, "LOL PRES BUTAN WIN OMNIGEL" was just pathetic.

4) New Inventory UI. To go along with the completely inexcusable decryption minigame, the inventory UI was also one of the worst in the history of videogames. Major problems? No sane sorting of any matter, lag (Yes, lag. I'm not joking. It would lag between selecting each item because it had to load and skin what the item looked like, even though it was effectively just a crate.), cryptic submenus, a hard-limit on how many items you can hold, no collapsing of items (Shit, guys. Final Fantasy has had this forever. Why do my sixteen Rail Extension XVII's have to each take up their own slot?), I could complain about it for a long-ass time. Since you couldn't - for instance - sort by type, it was incredibly hard to tell what lame stuff you should be selling. And since modding stuff was hidden in a sub-sub-menu, I've heard reports of people making it through the entire game without doing any modding because they simply couldn't figure out how.

No word on if the PC release will include the content from the March DLC, but it probably will, since the content is pretty much in the can right now, and it wouldn't make sense for them to release it as a separate expansion.

I will wait a moment for that to sink in.

Got it? Alright. As for why it got delayed, well, it's our good old friend and favourite whipping boy the PS3. Back in August when the delay was announced, the justification was "technological problems", and in a recent interview with MTV Games, Rockstar dev Jeronimo Barrera clarified that, stating "It's really no surprise to anybody that the PS3 was definitely a contributing factor to that." He goes on to explain that it's all cool now, but still. Delays.

But hey, who cares about delays? Game's going to be out in three months.

Right, Take 2? Right? Please? No takebacks this time.

Valve has two options to fill the Weighted-Companion-Cube-Shaped void in your life: Full-size plush (6" cube) or Fuzzy-dice-sized (4" cubes).

They've got other new stuff, too, like some new Aperture Labs Propaganda Posters and an Aperture Labs Mug.

Then there's the older stuff. If you haven't seen it, it's new to you! A few weeks back they released three lithograph prints, a set of Aperture Labs Holiday Cards, a Portal shirt, and Aperture Labs parking tags.

They also had some super neato Team Fortress 2 posters, but unfortunately it looks like those sold out. Damn. But hey, to replace one thing going away, they brought back headcrab plushes and headcrab hats. That's a good enough replacement for me.

So, get out of here! Go buy! Buy! Buy! Buy! If you hit over $50 you get free shipping!

So . . . it looks like we're down to three omni-platform super-developer/publishers now. In one corner we have EA, the only company allowed to make sports games, and who will be making sports games with tiny little incremental upgrades every year until the end of time. They also have a stranglehold on the cross-promotional branded shovelware market, and have lately been bolstering their army of developers by buying-up companies like Bioware/Pandemic.

In the next corner we have the newly-formed Activision Blizzard. Activision on their own is already in the middle of a record season thanks to Guitar Hero 3, Call of Duty 4 and Tony Hawk 39, and as for Blizzard, well, Blizzard is always in the middle of a record season thanks to having the MMO industry by the balls. Normally when a company I like (such as Blizzard) gets gobbled up in a large merger like this I get worried, but in this case I'm not concerned at all. I'm pretty sure everyone involved knows Blizzard knows full well how to make mountains of cash without any intervention from whoever their corporate masters are this week. Furthermore, I'm rather sure everyone involved knows not to try and mess with Blizzard's practices.

In the last corner we've got Ubisoft. . . . but really, in light of this merger, Ubisoft is looking kinda weak. I mean, they've only got a tiny fraction of the licenses either EA or Activision Blizzard have rights to, and have only 3 or 4 studios compared to the jillions EA and Activision Blizzard have.

I'd watch your back, Ubisoft. Looks like you might be next.

Oh and they announced that their first game would be another multi-platform Deus Ex.

With no Warren Spector, or any of the original dev team.

The studio's general manager had this to say:

"This game was very highly rated at its release in 2000, and we have this great huge mandate to do the third one, and everybody is very excited,"

Why yes, Eidos has already tried to cash-in on the name and FAILED MISERABLY. And that time they actually had Spector and what was left of Ion Storm on board.

Oh well, we'll see if they manage to flub this one again in a year or so. Please prove me wrong, Eidos Montreal. Please please please please please.