This is the second week of my personal, three week journey through blood and horror. Beginning with a review of the highly anticipated Dead Island, this month started off rather well. If you liken it to a plot in a good B-movie horror flick, this would be around the time we get a twist. Whether it’s a good one will surely depend on your point of view.

While horror films are lauded for their incongruous material, that’s not something you really want to see in a video game. Not when incongruity means poor design, lack of depth and self mutilation. On that note, I have to say I feel my review of BloodRayne: Betrayal is going to hurt me more than it hurts you.

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The last bit of New Vegas DLC is finally here! The core premise of Lonesome Road is a final confrontation with Ulysses – the mysterious courier that passed up the job that almost got you killed. What are his motives? Does he really want you dead, or did he just try and save his own skin?

More importantly: is the DLC worth buying to find out? Read on for the answer.

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Two years ago a colorful little Pong-like indie game took me by surprise and unexpectedly rocked my world. With its addictive gameplay and fantastic soundtrack, the charmingly retro Bit.Trip BEAT  introduced me to what has become one of my favorite series of all time. Over the last couple years Santa Cruz-based Gaijin Games’ delivered some of the best games of the generation in the last place you’d ever expect to find them — WiiWare.

Though that platform may have limited the series’ audience, most that are lucky enough to have stumbled across the Bit.Trip games have nothing but kind words to say. They helped remind me why I began to love games in the first place. Hopefully now that they have been compiled on physical media for retail release these games can reach a wider audience.

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With Diablo 3 and Torchlight 2 right around the corner, there is no better time to fill that desire we all have for an enjoyable dungeon crawler than right now. Crimson Alliance sets out to do just that. And in all honesty, it can — if you let it.

This co-op action RPG for the Xbox Live Arcade is a throwback to titles like Gauntlet and  provides the most basic elements of your typical dungeon crawler. This isn’t a bad thing, but it is up to you to decide if that will provide enough content to your liking. For me, it did.

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I admit that I barely heard of Digital Reality’s SkyDrift, an aerial racing game available on Xbox Live and PSN, just a couple of weeks before it launched. However, what I’d seen impressed me. For a downloadable game, SkyDrift looked like a truly polished title. I had high hopes for this aerial racing game, and luckily most of them came true.

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You’re on Banoi, an island paradise off the coast of Papua New Guinea. You’re on the job so you can’t enjoy the beaches, the tropical climate and whatever else this pacific island promises. So you don’t want to be here, not like this, going through one loathsome motion after another. Then, like an unsuspected monsoon, a zombie outbreak quickly turns loathsome into terrifying.

While that’s the general situation for all of Dead Island‘s playable characters, those who pick up the sticks for this title must sample similar loathing for some of its mechanics. There is so much promise and beauty. Yet, you can’t avoid the biting flaws threatening to tear this game down. After all the hype, Dead Island mostly teeters between the extremes of awesome immersion and near rage inducing frustration, creating what can best be described as a love-hate relationship with the player.

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As a series, Dungeon Siege has always had an odd position in games industry.  Dungeon Siege III‘s predecessors were adequate PC dungeon crawling romps that stood in the colossal shadow of Blizzard’s incredibly popular Diablo games. While it proved to be a moderate success, the franchise seemed to fade away into obscurity shortly after release of the sequel.

Now, Square-Enix has acquired publishing rights to the series . This time around Dungeon Siege has the jump on Diablo III, and is on both consoles and the PC.  Dungeon Siege III set out with ambitious promises to deliver a revamped, reworked Dungeon Siege experience. In practice it’s one that often falls short, leaving us with a mildly entertaining, linear hack-and-slash game.

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When DeathSpank released on PSN and XBLA last summer it received no shortage of praise. Headed up by legendary Monkey Island designer Ron Gilbert, that title combined the strengths of adventure games with those of hack and slash titles like Blizzard’s Diablo seies. While there were some problems with gameplay execution, DeathSpank won gamers over with an irreverent sense of humor.

While The Baconing might not bear the moniker of its predecessors, DeathSpank is back. The hero to the downtrodden has put on too many undergarments and has thus brought on the apocalypse. He must cast the thongs into the fires of Bacon to stop the end of the world. Yes, it’s that typical sense of humor you’ve come to expect of the series. I wish I could say that the same quality was there. But that would be a straight up lie.

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Last year, Cipher Prime followed up their auricular puzzle game, Auditorium, with yet another puzzler, Fractal for the PC. Long story short, we enjoyed it. Short story long, the game featured simple yet challenging puzzles set to a mellow soundtrack. It stole the hours from under your oblivious feet.

The game is back and this time it’s for the iPad in the form of Fractal: Make Blooms Not War. After getting caught nearly numb pushing hexagons to an fro for who know how long, one must say that it’s as much a match made in heaven as a game and platform can get.

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Let me tell you a story. It’s a story about a small gold fish and the wacky world he lives in. Don’t write off this pint sized piece of aquatic cuteness, however. That’s what he wants you to do. When your back is turned he’ll pounce. It’s what he’s good at.

This a story of deception and rage. This is Launching Pad Games’ Mighty Fin.

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Be honest, you already have preconceived notions about this game. That’s fine, I get it. After all, it is an annual sports franchise that, for the most part, takes an incremental approach year in and year out. However, last year was no such year with the introduction of GameFlow and Game Planning. Sure, it might not have been a feature for everyone, but the impact it had on the game was as important as the introduction of Focus was to the Tiger Woods franchise.

Fact of the matter is that Madden NFL 11 opened itself up to be much more accessible without taking anything away from the hardcore.  While the game wasn’t perfect, it was innovative and took a necessary step in the right direction. Madden NFL 12, on the other hand, falls right back into that incremental approach. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing though. Read more… »

In its heyday, the JRPG was one of the the most well loved, paradigmatic experiences in the entire medium of videogames. Unfortunately, all empires must eventually fall and the the tale of the JRPG has been one of stagnation and decline. Rapid technological improvements brought many eastern studios into an uphill battle, where all too often gameplay suffered at the expense of modern graphics.

We are left with an aging genre where stories are often absurd and incomprehensible, combat is frustrating and needlessly complicated, and high-definition visuals are prioritized above all else. Luckily, Xenoblade Chronicles proves to be a rare exception.

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