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.

Animal Crossing - City Folk

• Platform - Wii
• Release - Later this year
• Looks and plays like previous installments
• Send text messages to friends or the message board with the usual mail system.
• Makes use of the new Wii Speak peripheral, which isn't a headset but a room microphone.

Wii Sports Resort

• Full sequel to Wii Sports, includes the Wii MotionPlus.
• MotionPlus is a new Wiimote plug-in (with pass-through for the nunchuck) which brings even more precise motion control to the Wii, specifically advanced positional and rotational data.
• Beach-resort themed, features tons of new minigames. Three were shown off:
• Disc Dog - Frisbee mini-game. With a dog. Sorta like darts.
• Jetski - Hold the Wiimote & nunchuck like handlebars, twist rapidly to accelerate like real throttle controls
• Swordfighting - Like boxing, but with SWORDS. Controls look really tight.
• Launches next spring

Wii Music

• Makes you look like a complete spaz in BRAND NEW WAYS.
• Far more laid-back than Guitar Hero or Rockband, you just sorta do whatever you want vaguely in time and something resembling music happens.
• It has a cowbell. COWBELL HERO LIVES.
• Unfortunately, it looks like it would only be enjoyable if you're really young or really drunk.
• Launches later this year

Miscellaneous Wii Games

• Shawn White Snowboarding - It is what it says, relies on the Balance Board for primary input. Fall/Winter 2008.
• Star Wars: The Clone Wars - Looks great for a Wii game, will probably give us the proper Wiimote Lightsaber control we've always wanted, even moreso than The Force Unleashed. Winter 2008.
• Rayman Raving Rabbids: TV Party - Yet another Rabbids party game, now with Balance Board input. You have one of those, right?
• Call of Duty: World at War - Coop war stuff, P1 uses the zapper, P2 helps out with the Wiimote

Miscellaneous DS Games

• Guitar Hero On Tour: Decades - Yes, we're getting a sequel this early. No we don't know much about it, but it'll be compatible with the current version and you'll be able to trade songs back and forth.
• Spore Creatures - Stripped-down Spore is still coming, it's got a reworked creature creator and an analog to the early portion of the full game. The ability to trade critters with your friends is still in, just with the usual hoops you'll have to jump through for a DS game.
• Pokemon Ranger: Shadows of Almia - Sequel to 2006's Pokemon Ranger. Like most Pokemon games, it's like those which precede it directly, with some minor upgrades and more things to enslave. Out on 10 NOV 2008.
• Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown - We have no idea what this will be. Top-down old-school GTA? Third-person new-school GTA? It is a mystery. Later this year.
• Cooking Navi - IT'S A COOKBOOK. A COOKBOOOOOOOOOOOK.

No Megaton, Nintendo? Nothing from Square Enix's remake-machine? No real new hardware? No Mother 3? No retooled less-lame online system? For shame.

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

A few weeks ago Andy picked up the Nintendo Wii Zapper and was - as we assume many people were - completely dismayed by the fact that it wasn't compatible with Resident Evil 4. The problem stems from the fact that the zapper and all other third-party gun-type attachments for the Wii Remote all depend on either a mechanical switch that presses the B button, or on opening a hole for you to be able to press the B button on your own. That's all fine and well for games like Link's Crossbow Training, but RE4 uses the A button as "shoot" and the B button as "draw weapon".

So, of course, Andy took things into his own hands, got himself a toy electronic gun, and started soldering.

The result was the RE4 Gun, a wonderful ugly mash-up of a toy gun and Wii Remote, which can work just as well for A-Trigger and B-Trigger games.

Interested? Check out the detailed post-mortem he wrote up over here: Hardware Hacking for a Better Wii Zapper.

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.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED
BioShock - PC / 360 - The best single-player game I've played since System Shock 2.
Portal - PC / 360 (and eventually PS3) - The second-best single-player game I've played since System Shock 2
Team Fortress 2 - PC / 360 (and eventually PS3) - For a game this outstanding, the 8 year wait was worth it.
Metroid Prime 3: Corruption - Wii - Arguably the best console FPS ever. Please ignore the Halo fans.
Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney: Trials & Tribulations - DS - Get your future-lawyering on in the last GBA->DS port in the Phoenix Wright series.

RECOMMENDED
The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass - DS - Somehow both Phantom Hourglass and its predecessor Wind Waker left me feeling like there was like a whole third of the game that Nintendo forgot to develop. Still good, though.

NOT RECOMMENDED
Raw Danger! - PS2 - Horrible controls, disjointed plot, insane localization, clothes made from plastic bags duct-taped together . . but hey, at least it's a budget-priced title, right?

Expect the next batch of reviews in about a month, once all our wallets have a chance to recover, and we get a chance to spend some quality time with Guitar Hero 3, Rock Band, Beautiful Katamari, Mass Effect, Mario Galaxy, Unreal Tournament 3, and probably several others.

Oh well, the good news is that this way it won't drown under the unbelievably solid lineup of games coming out as 2007 winds down. I certainly know that by the time December rolls around, I'm still going to be playing TF2, still going to be slagging through Mass Effect (assuming it's really as giant as Bioware claims), still going to be playing weekly (fingers crossed!) DLC from Rock Band, still going to be dominating in Unreal Tournament 3, and so on, and so on.

Yes, the endlessly recurring rumor of "OMG IF YOU DO [insane/impossible thing] IN [a Smash Bros game] IT TOTALLY UNLOCKS SONIC!!1!1!1" is now real. No movelist yet, just an announcement and some screenshots. There's also a video at that link to introduce him, and there's another one over here, but it doesn't actually involve Sonic at all, it's just a video that was shown at the same event where this was announced.

Based on how they've done updates in the past, we might see a movelist update tomorrow or Friday, or we might get something even bigger, or we might get an incredibly important update about something irrelevant like the home-run bat.

Update: Looks like there's more news and it doesn't look good. We might have a delay on our hands. At the event Nintendo held in Japan yesterday / today (depending on your timezone), they announced a month-and-a-half delay for Japan. The game is now slated to launch over there on 24 JAN 2008. Over on the US site the release date (expected to be 3 DEC 2008, if Reggie's E3 keynote is to be believed) and the MSRP are still listed as TBD. I hope they get the release date stuff cleared up, and I really hope they don't wait for next week's E for All to drop a bomb like that.

Sure, we were told from the start that online multiplayer over WFC was one of the whole points of Smash Bros Brawl, but remember: this is Nintendo, the undisputed kings of squeezing out lame online experiences. Today's update to the Smash Bros Brawl website shatters that, showing that we'll have friend-list MP, random MP, statuses, custom icons, pre-configured taunts, and a warm-up mode where you can beat up the sandbag.

Apparently (and unfortunately) random MP is going to be quite a bit like in Mario Strikers: Charged, there will be no form of communication, no names, no records, nothing. Just you vs random people. It'll be like fighting the computer, except with lag. But still, this is an important step for Nintendo. It's finally a step in the right direction when it comes to online MP. Now they just need to loosen up on the whole hardcore anonymity.

Unfortunately, this is another one of those news items where everything you need to know is going to be in the post slug. Activision just sorta tossed it in as part of a corporate conference call. There just isn't much else to say.

So here's a video from the field trip the Score Hero guys made to Neversoft HQ a week or so ago, where they got to play Dragonforce's "Through the Fire and Flames". Doesn't that just look so much fun!?!! I can't wait to never be able to beat this shit!