Hunt the world’s deadliest criminals in Interpol: The Trail of Dr. Chaos (yep, that’s the title) which is a new arcade game on Xbox Live for 800 points. The game is basically a collection of eye spy puzzles, which is a very different change of pace from the action packed testosterone pumping assortment of games the 360 usually plays host to.

Surprisingly I actually found this drastic change kind of relaxing and refreshing. Also, any game that can convince my mom to come play a video game with me for three hours and not be on the Wii gets some credit in my book. Interpol is not a game I would recommend to any gamer looking for the next big thing to play for a long time, but as a nice little distraction for a few hours it holds up pretty well.

The “story” is laughably bad (who knew I could catch the world’s most wanted criminals by finding 8 crowns in a picture) and it’s just there as a method to move from puzzle to puzzle. The story has you chasing Dr. Chaos and his gang of henchmen all over the globe looking for clues to stop his reign of terror. The locations you visit offer nice scene changes in the pictures you stare at. You visit such exotic locales such as Paris, Beijing, Moscow, and Barcelona. There are three areas to search at each location which fleshes out to a respectable 33 puzzles (plus a couple bonus puzzles).

Gameplay consists of picking a location, loading a picture, and then looking for certain items in the picture. It sounds very simplistic and it is. You highlight the objects with the left thumbstick and press the A button to “find” them. If you miss then you hear the miss noise, if you find it the object flashes, disappears, and then gets crossed off your list. There are at least eight items to find in each level with some levels having more. They supply you with a magnifying glass to zoom in and see the smaller objects you have to find.

If there is an object that you can’t find no matter how much you search, the game supplies a very generous hint system, generous being they show you right where it is. You have 4 of these giveaways per location with the ability to find more in the pictures. I actually liked the hints because it kept the game from getting frustrating and allowing you to progress at a nice pace. You are also forced to pay attention to a very lenient timer on the puzzles (30 minutes per location), which is just a very thin way of adding tension.

Overall, Interpol is a very bland game that might have some appeal for puzzle fans but ultimately is not worth most gamers’ time. A price reduction would go a long way to making this game worthwhile, but the only way I can suggest a verification of the $10 price point would be if you have family or friends to play with.

Deciding which plastic instruments deserve that place in your living room? Think Rock Band is too much of a party game? Are you really into old rock and metal? Then Guitar Hero: World Tour (GH:WT) might be the game for you. With classics like Ozzy Osbourne’s “Crazy Train” and The Eagles’ ”Hotel California” to new stuff like “Scream Aim Fire” by Bullet For My Valentine and “What I’ve Done” by Linkin Park the game has a decent variety of music to jam to.

If you buy the “complete band game” you get one guitar, drum set, and mic to play with. All the instruments are well built and fun to play and they all work for Rock Band as well. The instruments in the package are great but the game…not so much.

If you’re someone who is interested in buying this game for the guitar then by all means buy it, but if your more into the drums you might want to hold off. Personally I love playing guitar but after Rock Band I am also really into playing the drums. This is my biggest problem with the game. The note charts for the drums are not fun at all. Guitar Hero supplies you with an awesome drum set with five well placed and well built pads, but only really uses three of them in most songs. The songs on expert focus really heavily into the bass pedal and not much on hitting the pads. This was a huge letdown for me because I thought for sure with how great the guitar note charts are the drums would be great too. On the other hand the guitar playing is awesome.

The guitar is the shining point in the whole Guitar Hero bundle. Not only is the actual piece of hardware great, the note charts are just as awesome as usual. Hitting the hammer-ons and pull-offs gives you the feeling of being a guitar god just like it always has. The note charts fit under your fingers perfectly and are a blast to play. They changed the timing of the hammer-ons and pull-offs from the third game forcing you to be a little more accurate with your presses, but they did this mainly because of the new mechanic with the touch pad.

The touch pad is used to hit notes that are stringed together by this purple rope. The touch pad doesn’t work as well as it should mainly because you can lose your place on the pad easily. With some practice I’m sure it would become easier but it’s definitely not something for casual players to really use. These parts of the songs work just as well with the buttons. When you play the stringed parts using the buttons you can tap along to the notes without having to strum even if you miss a note. The guitar is great and if you loved it from previous games this is worth the buy for the new hardware and songs to play.

Singing takes a few interesting changes from Rock Band’s. During sections of the song where there is no singing you can free form sing. During these parts you can sing whatever you want and if you stay in rhythm with the song you get extra points. There are also sections of the song meant to get the crowd pumped up where you scream and shout into the mic. The singing works just like it should and the amount of fun you’ll get out of it is mainly based on how much you like the songs.

Career mode for Guitar Hero has you playing a bunch of sets in different locales, which never really becomes anything more than a method to play through all the songs. I’m actually OK with that because all I want to do is play the songs anyway. You earn money for every song you play whether or not you’re in career mode. I had a huge problem finding a place to spend the money so it didn’t matter to me. Something I found very absurd is when playing with friends you have no option to save each other. This really hurts Guitar Hero’s party game potential since if your friends suck you will never finish a song.

Overall Guitar Hero: World Tour is a fun game for guitar enthusiasts but comes up short in the drums sections. I love playing drums on Rock Band and found myself hating the time I spent playing them on Guitar Hero. The hardware included is great enough on its own to warrant the purchase so if you’re in dire need of new plastic instruments Guitar Hero is the way to go, but if you already have them Rock Band is the better choice (especially if you’re a drummer).

Reviewer’s note: The Xbox 360 version was tested for this review

I was surfing the Playstation Network when I discovered a little treat, there is a demo up for a game I am particularly looking forward to next year. Lord of the Rings: Conquest is an action game made by Pandemic Studios (the guys behind the Star Wars Battlefront games). If you haven’t ever played one of those games, they take a different approach to licensed games by having you play the everyday foot soldiers in the big epic battles instead of the heroes we all know and love.

In LOTR:Conquest you can be a soldier (melee), archer (long-range), mage (magic), scout (stealth), and every now and then one of the heroes if you do good enough. The demo contains the tutorial level and two multiplayer maps. The tutorial teaches you how to play the four classes and the heroes. After the tutorial, which is pretty cool, the multiplayer is waiting with EA hosted servers for your lag-free enjoyment. Minas Tirith and The Shire are available for battle and the games support up to sixteen players rampaging through the streets at once.

After actually playing the demo I have to say that I like it…a lot. It feels just like the old Battlefront games but now with swords and arrows instead of lightsabers and blasters. The Lord of the Rings property really couldn’t be a more perfect fit for this type of game. All the grand battles you’ve seen in the films, From Helm’s Deep to the Battle of Pelennor Fields, will be playable from both armies points of view. Seeing all those grandiose encounters from the perspective of the everyday foot soldier is a very cool idea and the promise of grand multplayer battles is just the icing on the cake for me.

Lord of the Rings: Conquest comes out January 13 on the Playstation 3 and Xbox 360.

“Interactive Art” is what the creators of Linger in Shadows label this experience as and never before has a term been applied better than in this case.  Linger in Shadows has minimal gameplay,  no story, or length for that matter.  It is a six minute long movie with certain pauses for puzzles.  The puzzles are not that long and always end in an explosion followed by the next section of the movie.  The first one of these really surprised me because I didn’t know what I did, the screen just exploded and moved on.  The “game” is very unique and anyone interested in art (which if you play videogames you should be) should really check this out. Especially for the price there is no excuse to not give this a shot.

The graphics, and largely the art style, are the best things about this (since it is an art game, duh).  Just watching the movie play from start to finish is actually the coolest thing to do.  The game bits are cool the first time through but just get in the way of admiring the art in repeated viewings.  I do have to give a little bit of credit to the puzzles because they involve using the controller in some interesting way with the sixaxis.  They are also just hard enough to make you think (well one at least) without getting in the way of enjoying the art. There are certain sections in the movie where if you pause it and move the controller some way, usually with the sixaxis, some things will turn or move around the environment and you can even use this way of doing things to make it look more visually appealing in certain places.

The camera follows a sweeping narrative that is not describable, I tried…not possible. They pretty much just picked things to put in the short film they thought would look interesting in this art style. There is a dog, cat, panda statue, black mass of who knows what, and a cool tentacle squid thing. The hair on the animals is unbelievable. The whole point of this download is to look as cool as possible and it succeeds.

In the “game” they offer an explanation of what this kind of thing is. They call it a demoscene. Basically they just do what they can to make whatever you’re looking at and experiencing be as interesting as possible. Demoscenes are usually used to show off certain techniques in programming, animation, art, sound, and music, they can also be used to show off the power of a certain machine.

This piece of “Interactive Art” is 6 minutes 50 seconds long and in my opinion unique enough to warrant the $2.99 purchase, and for all you newly found trophy whores it even has 16 trophies to earn by finding secrets in the world. This is something worth coming back to from time to time purely for the eye-candy and definitely something everyone with a HDTV and an eye for artistic flair should check out.

By now most people have probably heard the story of Jonathan Mak creating Everyday Shooter by himself complete with an original amazing soundtrack, pretty tight controls, eight levels to blast through, and a sweet system for conducting it all.  The game is a dual stick shooter from the Playstation Network for $9.99 and it’s completely worth every cent. The unique thing about Everyday Shooter is that the game is based almost entirely on music.

The game starts with a simple blue screen with some writing in the top right corner and some options for play in the bottom right corner.  Calming music plays while you browse the options and choose what to play.  The only option available when you first get the game will be normal mode.  In normal mode you play through the game’s eight levels in order.  Tutorial help pops up on screen while you are playing the first level but never gets to a point of unreadability.

The game functions just as any two stick shooter (although you can play with the d-pad and buttons) would play.  Move with the left stick shoot with the right.  The aiming never quit feels perfect because you can’t tweak it as slightly as you would want to for those tight shots.  This is brought on mainly because you can play with the buttons so the only directions you can shoot are the cardinal directions (including southwest, northeast, etc…).  Chaining is the best method in the game to get tons of points.  Every level has a different way to start chains which can then catch the normal filler enemies and get you more points.  Figuring out the way to chain and then using that chaining method to help beat the level is one of the main draws of the game.  This game also has a Ninja Gaiden feeling of constantly getting better the more you play which helps add to the replayability.

The game does have a cool method of helping you advance in the game though.  Everyday Shooter, like most two stick shooters, is not an easy game.  It gets hard pretty quick especially when you first start playing it.  To alleviate this every point you score in the game translates into unlock points which can be used to buy useful things like more lives to start with or special visual effects.  This alone emphasises and requires multiple playthroughs of normal play which is not a bad thing.  Going through the first level multiple times can get a little tedious but by that time you should be able to buy the levels individually with your unlock points.

The audio of this game is the real showpiece with originally recorded tracks, by Mak himself, for all eight levels of the game.  The music is very guitar specific, with the player adding to the music on the fly.  You can hear things happening in the audio while your playing.  Whenever you shoot something you can hear the music be tweaked a little bit, not too much, but it’s cool to hear the audio reacting to your actions.

Visuals are super slick in the game as well.  Some levels get crazy when all the action is going on, with the visuals in the background pounding and changing with the on screen action.  One level has the background light up and raise itself when you pass over it and when the action gets crazy it looks cool.  Your character on the screen is just a little white dot but surprisingly I never really lost it.  In all the confusion of the bullets and other things attacking you something makes this dot stand out.  There is like a ring around the character that draws your eye to it, so you never lose it in all the carnage.

Overall this game has some problems with the aiming and the difficulty but is definetly a game worth your money and time.  I find myself going back to try and beat my score and get farther in the game over and over again.  If your even remotely a fan of two stick shooters you should buy this without another thought.  The biggest crime this game commits is it doesn’t have a demo for people to check out because after playing even one level of this great game way more people would be, and should be, willing to buy and enjoy.

Fable 2 is a game of limitless possibilities where each of your choices has some kind of effect on the world around you. At least that’s what Lionhead wants it to be, fortunately this game comes way closer than Fable 1 did.  Fable 2 tries and really succeeds to keep you immersed in the world of Albion for as long as your willing to be.  This game has a ton of social interactions and choices you can make as the player to stretch the gameplay out, but that is my main complaint about the game, you as the player have to work to make the game last any length of time.

Fable 2 starts out with you as a child living with your sister on the streets of Bowerstone Old Town.  A merchant entices the crowd before him with a magical box for only 5 gold pieces and a mysterious woman tells your sister you should buy it.  After you do enough little deeds to earn the five gold pieces, which basically serves as the game’s tutorial, the story really kicks in.  The story is about finding heroes to help you stop the bad guy.  I did not think the story in Fable 2 was quite as good as Fable 1 but the game as a whole is better.

Everyone is probably the most interested to find out about the one button combat we have all seen in the previews and the good news is it really works.  The X, Y, and B buttons all correlate to a different kind of attack you can perform.  The X button is melee attacks, the Y button is ranged attacks, and the B button is your will (magic) attacks. The best for this one button combat is the melee.

After leveling up you can hold X to block, tap X to do a quick slash, hold X and point in a direction with the analog stick and you do a flourish.  These three moves all work on one button and allow the combat to flow really well between the three different means of attack.   Everyone who had any doubts about the combat feeling good for both the hardcore and the casual your fears can be laid to rest.  The best thing about the combat is you can make it as deep as you want to make it without it overwhelming anyone who just wants to smack around some hobbs.

Fable 2′s online component is actually pretty good for a RPG.  Throughout playing the game you will see floating orbs hanging out all around Albion.  Now depending on your settings these orbs can be just your friends or they can be everyone playing Fable 2.  If you turn on the feature where you can see everyone’s orbs the game takes on an almost MMO feeling with all the players gathering in the town’s marketplaces to share advice or do a little trading.

This feature alone might give the game some legs.  The actual co-op is ok, since you don’t take your main character in the game the second player becomes a generic hero and is able to help the main hero on quests.  For me this got kinda boring quick.  While you can take the experience you earn back to your world your not getting any farther in your story.  So co-op might be something to mess around with once you beat the game but it’s just not my kinda thing since I prefer to play my RPGs by myself.

Fable 2 has an interesting way of dealing with player death.  When you die in the game your character falls to the ground and lays there for a couple of seconds, after that they stand back up.  So what’s the punishment you may be asking? Your character gets a scar somewhere on their body that will never go away.  For some people this will actually work.  This actually worked for me, at least for my first character, but after a while I stopped caring and actually thought the scars looked kinda cool.

So obviously with this kind of punishment the game is a tad on the easy side.  There is no real challenge in the game.  This is to make the game more accessible to the casual crowd, which is a unfortunate, but it really doesn’t affect the overall game.  This is a good game to be able to play without worrying about dying all the time.

We all know the big angle of Fable is the choices you can make when being your character.  For me this is also a place where the game falters a bit.  The only real affect your choices have on your character is the way they look and the way people respond to you.  No matter if you choose good or evil the main quest progresses the same way.  The only difference is sometimes somebody will say something about how bad or good your being.  I would have liked it if the person I’m trying to save the world with would notice when I am being a complete jerk to everyone around me and always doing the wrong thing.   The game is also a little on the short side which is my main problem with the game.

If you are willing to dig deep into all the interactions and jobs and side quests, you can make the game last a lot longer, but this will have to be something you as the player have to do.  Even though the main quest is short it’s still a quality story, but by all means the more you put into the game doing sidequests and becoming your character the more you will enjoy this game.  The folks at Lionhead knew that some players would just blow through the game and try to go straight through the main quest, so they added a reputation to the game.

With this reputation mechanic you are forced to do some sidequests and things like that so the people you are about to take a quest from have heard of you.  This make you stop and do the extra stuff found in the game which in my opinion is a very good thing.  Rushing through this game is a really bad idea.  Everyone should take their time and explore the world of Albion and do the extra quests because there really is some quality content to be found outside of the main storyline.

Fable 2 has an amazing art style that never got boring to me.  The game world is so full of color and life that it is really easy to look at for long stretches of time.  It looks really good to stare at all the lush vegetation in the world.  This game doesn’t compare to the likes of Gears of War 2 in terms of technical graphics, but the art style is more than enough to make up for it.  Being the big game that it is there are also a good number of glitches and bugs that will be noticed along the way.  The sound in Fable 2 is nothing amazing although I do really like the music.  The music is that very classical in nature airy, lighthearted when it needs to be, sort affair.  It works really well and fits in the game.

Another shortcoming of the game is the lack of a true open world like Oblivion.  There are pretty long load screens in between each region which can get really annoying when traveling for side quests and trying to explore.  Also the fact that the worst framerate in the game is found in the menu is a problem that will continue to confuse me.  Every time you pull up your menu (which you have to do a lot) the game chugs to catch up with what your doing which takes a good few second to do.

Overall Fable 2 is a really good game with some unfortunate occurences in it to bring the overall experience down a bit.  If you liked the first Fable then there is no doubt you should enjoy this one but if you weren’t a huge fan this game probably won’t change your mind.

Bigger, better, and more badass. That is what Cliff Bleszinski promised the world with his sequel to the Xbox 360′s smash hit Gears of War.  Does he deliver on his promises? Well in all three accounts, I would have to say a resounding YES!

Bigger is definitely a word I would use when describing Gears of War 2.  The scale of the game has grown considerably since the sequel. No longer are you stuck navigating the small cramped scenery of Gears 1. Now you fight on everything from the top of a COG derrick as it drives through a mountain range, to the wide open caverns of the Locust hollow.  The vistas are jawdropping with so many little textures and details to make the game really come out of your screen. From the Razor Hail to the Avalanche that sweeps through a particular multiplayer level the game never lets up on just how gorgeous it is. This game is an absolute treat for anyone with a HD TV. That being said there are a couple of things that make the graphics look not so great, mainly the horrible texture pop-in thanks to the Unreal Engine 3. This problem occurs almost every time you load a new environment for the first time, like when you first start up a multiplayer map, it only takes a few seconds to fix itself but it is still very noticeable.

Bigger is also a good descriptor for the game itself. Housing three different modes for players to spend time in.  The single player campaign is a roller coaster ride of awesome, even if the story isn’t the greatest thing ever written.  The multiplayer can provide days of entertainment for a group of friends looking to rip each other in half with their chainsaws. There is one big problem with multiplayer right now and that’s matchmaking. Sometimes you can find games instantly, other times it takes ten minutes and you still dont get in a game. This could be fixed with a patch and some network tweaking but as of right now it’s not very good, although bots do help alleviate the pain of not being able to play with other people.  Finally Horde is one of the best additions to the game.  The biggest comparison to this can be drawn to Terrorist Hunt in Rainbow Six Vegas. You start out on any one of the 10 new multiplayer maps (you get five more classic maps remade if you buy the game new so don’t go cheap and buy it used) and you fight wave after wave of increasingly difficult to kill locusts. There are 50 waves to battle through with 4 different difficulties to try them on.

The enemies you fight also received quite the size upgrade.  Reavers are back and deadlier than ever now landing in the middle of massive firefights and wreaking havoc with missiles and machine guns.  Boomers now have multiple types for Delta squad to contend with.  From Maulers to Butchers to Grinders, these big baddies take multiple rounds to kill and can really do some damage if left unchecked. The new Kantus enemy can revive those “down but not out” enemies that are crawling on their knees.  The only real problem I have with the enemies are the difficulties which can be a bit easy through the campaign for people who are good at shooters.

Better is a word applicable to almost every aspect of the game. To the tighter than ever control scheme, to the revamped multiplayer (no more shotgun rolling thank god!), even the graphics which looked unbeatable in the first game have seen enough of an improvement to be noticeably better , every little bit of Gears of War 2 has been paid a lot of attention and care to.  This is a game you will be going back to months after it’s release just because of how well it plays.

Finally more badass.  This game lives up to that moniker no question.  The chainsaw is back and better than ever with the new chainsaw dueling mechanic.  More weapons that all feel really well made and fit in the game are included. From the Mortar that rains death on enemies up to 150 meters away to the Scorcher that burns enemies close to you, all the weapons feel really responsive and, well…badass.

So all in all this game is a very good purchase this year. If your looking for a good triple A shooter to take up some of your time this holiday season there is none I can recommend higher than Gears of War 2. Although the story is a bit on the weak side and there can be some obvious graphical glitches this is still a game worth your time and money. So grease up your chainsaws and get ready to saw through some locust scum because it’s going to be a fun ride you never want to end.