Weird

Mega-Publisher Eidos, one of the largest and most powerful companies in videogames today, has taken notice of a small but growing fanbase here in America. The people targeted? Gamers who crave something fresh. Rather than be sated solely with the next by-the-numbers FPS or 3D adventure title, they're looking for those rare, rough-edged fringe projects so full of creativity that they don't fit cleanly into any one genre.

Rez is something of an odd duck to review, like many recent genre-bending Sega games. I can definitely appreciate its richness and vibrancy, but I can also understand why it didnt exactly become a blockbuster hit.

Playing Rez can be highly infectious even if for just a few minutes, so even the casual gamer might want to try that stage "just one more time." The mix of visuals and sound makes it as fun to watch as it is to play.

It's only March, and it's already been a great season for diverse gamers. For proof, we need look no further than the niche genre of music gaming. For a category of entertainment that had formerly been labeled too Japanese for western tastes, music games seem to be here to stay. It's funny to look back and see that such a thing was almost unthinkable even as recently as five years ago.

Gitaroo Man is probably the most demanding of rhythm games I've played and seems more improvisational in terms of working with beats than other music games like the flexibly challenging Dance Dance Revolution (DDR) series or Sega's more tempo-forgiving game, Rez.

According to the ESRB, this game contains: Mild Language

Game Description: Gitaroo Man is an entirely new type of music rhythm game, in which your instrument is actually your weapon in the fight against evil. Unlike traditional music games that simply require the player to press buttons in rhythm with onscreen actions, Gitaroo Man makes players use both the analog stick and controller buttons at the same time, thus manipulating the onscreen characters with jumps, ducks, and attacks.

According to the ESRB, this game contains: Use of Tobacco & Alcohol