PC

This one time, me and my friend Keith...

HIGH: Barreling through all four survivors with the charger.

LOW: Rochelle's extremely bland character.

WTF: Why can't the tank pick people up like the charger does?

Frodo, meet Commander Shepard

HIGH Superb characterizations, story, and role-playing.

LOW The combat system is a mess.

WTF Screwing up a quest by missing one line of dialogue 20 hours beforehand.

As first-person shooter campaigns go, it's definitely in the 95th percentile of enjoyable shooting galleries. But it's also a campaign that worries me. While playing through the brief solo mode (roughly five hours), I couldn't help but be reminded of the stereotypical Bay film: Things blow up, uber-macho soldiers shout, the player performs wild stunts (like jumping into a helicopter for the umpteenth time), and loud orchestral music plays. It doesn't seem to matter that the plot is poorly paced, makes very little sense, and no characters are developed. If I'm a typical M-rated gamer, all I'm supposed to care about is that I shot people and stuff blew up real purty.

Stephen Totilo of Kotaku provided a fascinating look at Zach Gage's Lose/Lose, a curious statement-game (I would call it an "art game," but that label comes with its own baggage and may obfuscate the analysis below) that posits players in a pretty lousy situation:  Get "killed" in the game, and the application running the program is deleted from the computer. Destroy "enemies," however, and a file on your computer—represented graphically in the game as a blurry mess of pixels scrolling down the screen in true Galaga fashion—gets deleted. That's right. The game deletes your files. Of course, that's only if you choose to play the game as a game... and not experience it as a question of will and complicity.

Guybrush Threepwood, Mighty Pirate-at-Law

HIGH The Harry Potter-esque way that the plotline connects back to Chapter 1.

LOW The gameplay connects back to Chapter 1 (i.e. the jungle) as well.

WTF Morgan?! Nooooooo!

Three Heads Are Better Than Two

HIGH Excellent concept, great production values.

LOW Lack of any real boss battles.

WTF Experience comes in glowing green bottles?