Shooting

Get thee behind me, Satan

HIGH It's got a great concept—playing for the evil side hasn't been done much.

LOW It doesn't deliver on the concept—it might as well be any random shootfest.

WTF Satan can't get past locked doors?

It's like a profane version of Triad Election on the Nintendo DS

HIGH Losing a maxxed out wanted level by smashing cops into every bridge abutment in sight is surprisingly entertaining.

LOW The end of the story feels rushed and isn't even remotely satisfying.

WTF The bisexual stepson of the triad boss keeps trying to get me to have a threesome with him—and another dude.

I very much enjoy Left 4 Dead and Team Fortress 2. I have over 100 hours logged both games and I continue to play today. So, when I first heard the announcement of Left 4 Dead 2 less than a year after the release of the original, my thoughts were of the skeptical variety. A sequel? Really? They hadn’t even released the map tools for the first game at the time. And where the hell is all the DLC Valve promised?

Dead Space was one of the better games of last year—an atmospheric blending of Event Horizon and Alien that gave me hope that maybe game developers can still come up with compelling original properties instead of just churning out sequels.

The game's already spawned a comic book, an anime movie tie-in, a sequel game and a on-rails offshoot title for the Wii—all this on top of the feature film version we’ve been hearing about for some time now. 

Answer the call, but only if it's not using your peak daytime minutes

HIGH The story and characters ring truly Western.

LOW The action never heats up past a mild simmer.

WTF Why are the one-on-one showdowns so sloppy, random and loose?

If you didn't get a chance to play Resident Evil 5 on your Playstation 3 or Xbox 360 earlier this year, but you own a gaming rig, then this may be good news for you.

Capcom has announced the official release date for Resident Evil 5 on the PC. North America can start slaughtering zombies on September 15, while Europe has to wait three extra days.

The big selling point for this PC version comes in the form of 3D. Gamers will be able to experience all that Resident Evil 5 has to offer in Nvidia's GeForce 3D technology. Infected people will come right out of the screen, apparently. Even the cutscenes will be presented in 3D. The only bad news here is that you'll have to shell out for some of those fancy 3D PC glasses separately.

If you're curious about this whole 3D thing, you can download a benchmark and tech demo for the game here (you'll need all the 3D vision hardware for this to work, naturally…). If you don't have a 3D ready video card, you can still play the game in the standard mode.

Bad news for anyone hoping for another trip to the underwater utopia of Rapture this year. Shacknews is reporting that BioShock 2 has been delayed. The title has shifted from its original November 3rd street date to a much more vague "sometime in the first six months of 2010".

Once the wave of initial disappointment wears off, this might actually be for the best. Releasing Bioshock 2 in November makes sense (it's out in time for the holiday rush), but as we all know that's a window where there are too many games and not enough time to play them all. Moving it to sometime after the holidays (or even to June of 2010) gives gamers a triple A title to look forward to during what is the biggest gaming drought period of the year, and it pretty much guarantees that Take Two will sell more units as there's not much in the way of competition. Metal Gear Solid 3 and Grand Theft Auto IV released in a similar fashion and both did well. There's no reason to expect that BioShock 2 won't reap the same benefits.

That being said, it's still a bummer. I was really looking forward to duking it out with Big Sisters this November…