Tim Schafer

It's unclear if Grim Fandango creator Tim Schafer intended to change the way games are financed or not, but his latest venture could have long-lasting repercussions on the hobby we all know and love.

It had the Chrome but Not the Polish

HIGH Crashing a flaming zeppelin into the enemy stage at the end of a long battle.

LOW The aforementioned long battle.

WTF Pardon me, but I think about a third of the story has gone missing.

After completing Brütal Legend, there were several pictures of the development team on screen as the credits rolled. The people on view all looked like nice, upstanding, hard-working citizens of the game dev community. As these snapshots appeared, I felt an intense wave of something approximating some kind of bizarre guilt because actually having faces attached to the game made Brütal Legend's failure somehow more tangible. More terrible.

Tim Schafer is a brilliant guy and I have tons of respect for him, but he's just been off lately. I don't care what anybody says, Psychonauts was a big bag of fail to me, and although Brütal Legend is better, it's still not anywhere near what it could've been. In fact, I'm not even really sure what it is.

Sometimes Even An Umlaut Isn't Enough

HIGH The world is metal.

LOW Almost everything else isn't.

WTF "Everybody thinks I'll betray them someday. Now gasp as I betray you!"

You'd be hard-pressed to find anyone who enjoys high concept games more than I do, but regardless of how fancy or sophisticated the idea is, there still needs to be a solid core of enjoyable play behind it. Psychonauts's premise hooked me from the start, and though I have great respect for what creator Tim Schafer has contributed to the world of videogames, I found the "mental spelunking" experience here to be lacking both in terms of plot and content.

Double Fine's Psychonauts combines psychology and parapsychology: we have personal experience with our own brains 24 hours a day, but a boy with psychic powers and a gateway into people's heads can still prove that the human mind is strange as all get out.

According to the ESRB, this game contains: Cartoon Violence, Crude Humor, Language