Xbox 360

I would never have guessed it, but I've been completely addicted to Trials HD on the Xbox 360 this week. One of the spotlight Summer Arcade releases, it's basically an updated version of the venerable NES classic Excitebike hopped up on stupidiculous amounts of steroids.

I'm not a fan of games that feature timed runs as a core part of gameplay, and I'm not usually a fan of games that emphasize an extremely high degree of technical precision, but in spite of those preferences, I got hooked immediately and I've been putting an unusual amount of time into it every night.

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?

An expansion of Microsoft's XNA Creator's Club initiative, the Community Games area (now known as Indie Games) is a place for creative individuals, independent developers and small studios to have their work seen by the 360 audience at large. Anyone who thinks they've got a great idea can enter a submission through the Indie process and eventually have a game ready to be sold and downloaded to hard drives all across the world. It's a great opportunity, and the only program of its kind to be available on a home console. Unfortunately, Microsoft has given this area of Live very little attention, and despite being an incredibly exciting and innovative feature, very few players know the first thing about it.

With any luck, this article will help change that.

'Sploding with brilliance

HIGH The game is elegance incarnate.

LOW Players might be fooled into thinking it's as amiable as The Maw.

WTF The ending is ridiculously (and I mean that literally) awesome.

Nevermind, Scotty... Don't bother beaming me up.

HIGH Thawing out the anachronous survivors.

LOW The repetitive, needlessly bloated mission design.

WTF The amount of wasted potential on display here.

Huge thanks to Anonymous for tipping me off on how to defeat the gorilla boss in world four of Cocoto Platform Jumper (WiiWare).

It's a simple little game that by all reckoning should have been a complete cakewalk, but this gorilla seemed invincible and all efforts to find answers on the Internet were a complete fail. My frustration at this part had grown to the point that I had actually quit the game in disgust, and I was contemplating calling Nintendo to complain that they were selling a piece of defective software. Then, lo and behold, Anonymous chips in with a comment and solves the mystery.