Best Work

The sublime power of Flower

HIGH One of the most satisfying and appropriate closing credits in a video game.

LOW Getting stuck for about 20 minutes and having no idea what to do next.

WTF Long credits made me wonder "How many people does it take to make a game this short?"

Confessions of an RPG Nerd

HIGH Finding an RPG hero and villain who aren't exactly like every other RPG hero and villain in video game history.

LOW Non-skippable cut-scenes. Really, should I have to watch five minutes of dialogue again just because I suck and died on a boss?

WTF There is a dog in your party. A dog who fights with a knife and smokes a pipe.

A lot of games I like are about running around finding things. Although I only know where a few places are in my town and go everywhere else with my mother or a friend, I've remembered the layout of Hyrule in A Link to the Past without having played it for years. While I have a lot of trouble navigating 3-dimensional space that I'm physically in, it's much easier to find my way around a 2D expanse on a screen.

A lot of games I like are about running around finding things. Although I only know where a few places are in my town and go everywhere else with my mother or a friend, I've remembered the layout of Hyrule in A Link to the Past without having played it for years. While I have a lot of trouble navigating 3-dimensional space that I'm physically in, it's much easier to find my way around a 2D expanse on a screen.

Even before I played Dynasty Warriors 6, I was dreading having to write this review. For a critic, there's nothing worse than having to review games that we really like (yes, I'm a fan). Contrary to popular belief, critics do try to enjoy ourselves and we don't point out flaws for the sake of being negative.

Lapsing into formulaic predictability just moments past the title screen, Ubisoft Montreal makes players repeat the same tasks from start to finish while crisscrossing its beautifully-rendered cities an absurd amount of times, wrongly hoping that the impressive means of navigation would be enough to fool people into believing there's any sort of interesting, engaging gameplay to be found.

The advertisements for Halo 3 promise an epic tale of tragedy, sacrifice, and heroism that Halo 3 really had no hope in hell of ever delivering. More troubling, however, is the fact that after playing the game, I can say with some certainty that they promised a game that Bungie didn't even bother trying to produce.

From the moment BioShock began, I knew I was in for something special. Its opening sequence, placing the player in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean surrounded by the fiery debris of a sinking plane, is one of the most dramatic prologues I've ever seen in a videogame.

Newsweek's Level Up journalist and blogger N'Gai Croal speaks at length with GameCritics.com regarding Roger Ebert's statements about videogames as art, the Manhunt 2 banning and the purpose of game criticism.

Like Final Fantasy VII, Rogue Galaxy also has a malicious world-shattering entity, but the similarities end with a supposedly feminine archetype. Whereas JENOVA seemed rather vague except through her influence of arch-villain Sephiroth, the entity in this game is a hungry and malicious being who thrives on the idea of absorbing other life. (To go into more detail is to spoil the story.)

I can talk about why the game is fun, but I can't lie and say the game is brilliant. Mario isn't what he used to be. There are glimmers and flickers of greatness in this game—moments where I felt the magic might almost be back.