ThatFuzzyBastard

Shift is a cool idea, but doesn't it seem like it'll make the game too easy?

Also, does this get the award for the most uses of "classic" in a three-minute video? It's like they're begging us to forget about the last few...

Risk: Black Ops is beautiful and I promise to care for it, always.

But will I really?

I'm still sad about losing picture-taking! That was my favorite part of Dead Rising---putting lots of goofy hats on zombies, then waiting until they were arranged in the funniest way possible.

This does sound like Antigrav. Which is great, 'cause I loved Antigrav! If this is basically a version of Antigrav that works in low-light conditions, it'll make buying Natal entirely worth it.

The challenge conditions posts are cute, but what the game needs is a Halo 3-style machinima system. If you could record, edit, and distribute movies of your best car-weapon takedowns, then you'd have something worth sharing.

Looking forward! I didn't mind RF:G's story---for an open-worlder, too much detail just gets in the way, and I thought they did a pretty good job of building the narrative without it. But it'll be fun to see them try.

And while we're praising everything else RF:G got right, let's take a moment to heap laurels on the head of whoever had the bright idea of putting direction markers DIRECTLY ON THE WORLD! After playing RF:G, I just can't put up with Grand Theft Auto's stare-at-the-minimap driving.

You know, and I know, I'm nice like that.

It's a little hard to say what's a puzzle game and what's overlooked, but for a personal favorite underappreciated puzzle-ish game, "Kuru Kuru Kururin" for the GBA was a pretty fantastic puzzle/twitch game that never got the love its wonderful design and white-knuckle gameplay merited. Polarium, too---lotta fun, generally overlooked.

Boo-freakin'-hoo, guys! Eyepet probably won't be my thing, but honestly, the real-world interaction they showed in the trailer, if it works, will be vastly more innovative than another running-driving-shooting game.

Look, much as y'all need to fill column inches with stuff for people hardcore enough to read a gaming blog, there's really, really, really no dearth of action shooters. There is a dearth of games that do something unusual, and especially a dearth of kid/family games with innovative technology. Eyepet looks to be exactly that, making it a vastly more interesting proposition for Sony, and for people interested in games and technology, than yet another game that plays kinda like Driv3r.

And the weird moralism about "selling out your fans" is just silly. If they were making games that urged kids to, say, snort coke and kill their parents, that might be a moral problem (depending on how you feel about coke and parents, I suppose). But there's really nothing immoral about making games for kids, even if it makes the people who buy new games weekly into sad pandas. Y'all have lots and lots of big, violent, sweaty games you can play, and plenty more coming, so stop crying like your diaper's wet whenever someone makes a game that you maybe won't like.

So---is Portal going to be a standalone XBLA title, or do we need Orange Box to play it?