Xbox 360

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.

Always one to support smaller development houses and those exploring the downloadable space, I was fortunate enough to get the chance to have a brief exchange with Max Wagner, one of the co-founders of brand-spanking (sort-of) new Signal Studios. The studio's first game, Toy Soldiers, was just revealed at the most recent Tokyo Game Show and will be leading the assault on Microsoft's Xbox Live Arcade service in the very near future.

Super Heroes? More Like Pretty-okay Heroes...

HIGH Going multi with Luke Cage and Iron Fist, together again.

LOW Generally poor selection of heroes from Marvel's vast universe.

WTF What happened to the QA process?