Wesley Fenlon | Not with a bang but a whimper.

Remember Mission to Mars and Red Planet, the two films Hollywood cranked out in 2000 that coincidentally starred imperiled astronauts on desperate trips to our closest galactic neighbor? If not, I can’t blame you — despite solid casts, both movies managed to be utterly blase. That’s what I was expecting when one of my friends showed up with Red Faction: Guerrilla last week. I’d hardly even been aware that the game existed. Maybe I’d skimmed over a demo on Xbox Live, but I quickly assumed Red Faction: Guerrilla was just another third-person shooter, an average action game with nothing but the setting of the rocky Martian surface separating it from its contemporaries.

Boy, was I wrong.

The open-world, third-person action game genre remains as flooded as ever; this year may be even more jammed than the last, with Infamous, Prototype, and Red Faction: Guerrilla all competing for sales in the month of June alone. Compared to the anticipation I’d seen on the web for Sucker Punch’s first Playstation 3 outing and the ultraviolent screenshots of Prototype, Red Faction hardly garned a bit of hype. But after a couple hours of playing Guerrilla — followed by a couple days of playing Guerrilla — I realized this sandbox action game is much more Total Recall than it is Mission to Mars. Totally ridiculous, but in such a good, good way.

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Alan Wake has clearly been a troubled project. Remedy Entertainment last released a game in 2003 with the crime drama The Fall of Max Payne. Six years is a long, long time between projects, and Alan Wake has been on the horizon of upcoming Xbox 360 games for half that time. Sadly, those three years have come and gone with fewer and fewer public appearances from the mysterious game; every E3 has brought with it another Microsoft press conference making no mention of Wake. But now, at long last, the game has resurfaced with a (hopefully final) release window of next spring, and Wake still looks to offer something original despite how long it’s been since the project’s inception.

This year’s gameplay demonstration gave me hope for a genuinely unique take on the survival horror genre. Remedy are doing their best to blur the line between thriller novels and the scary sector of video games: Wake stars a writer whose tales of the macabre come to life, and it seems to feature a chapter-esque episodic structure. It may essentially work out to be little more than a traditional mission system, but the twist is interesting nonetheless.

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Gotta catch ‘em all. It seems so innocuous, doesn’t it? There are lots of these little Pokémon fellas, and your challenge is to grab each and every one. But no, it’s not quite that innocent. Nintendo’s catchphrase invokes a youthful enthusiasm by deliberately tapping into the psychology behind game design, a never-ending, insidious cycle of collection and reward that we wholly by into with no reservations. Practically every game on the market entices us with collectable coins that lead to secret unlockables, or trophies to chart our progress — something to tap into that unconscious addiction to collect ‘em all.

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I played Resident Evil 4 for the first time about a year after its release in January 2005. And in early 2006, I was still utterly floored by how damn good it was. That year couldn’t diminish the impact of the immaculate presentation, exhilarating combat, extensive weapon system, or lengthy quest. Admittedly, I never cared much for survival horror as a genre, so I was eager to see Resident Evil stray from its roots and delve deeper into no-holds-barred gunplay. A few facets of the previous games remained, and movement still felt constrained for an action game. But compared to the Resident Evil of old, it was easy to give the controls a pass and embrace them as a step in the right direction.

I’m not quite so late to the Resident Evil party, this time around — it’s only been a couple months since Resident Evil 5 made its global debut. Around that same time I wrote a post about how much I love co-op in videogames. And after devoting most of the past week to Resident Evil 5, I’m pretty darn sad to realize that just about every aspect of the game falls short of the lofty bar its predecessor set 4 years ago, in part due to the focus on cooperative gameplay. I’ve even spent 99% of my play time with another human being backing me up — relying on the AI would’ve made things much worse.

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If you read GameSpite, chances are you’re just as hot and bothered about the approaching release of GameSpite Quarterly #1 as I am. A few weeks ago, articles for the upcoming publication were pouring in and a veritable boatload of awesome Game Boy games were being covered in loving detail. Sadly (perhaps even tragically) I never owned an original GameBoy, so I missed out on most of these treasures. But when I bought a Game Boy Advance a year or so after its launch, I had the good sense to snatch up The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening DX, along with the Oracles duology. I lost Ages and Seasons somewhere along the line over the past half-decade, and who knows where that old Game Boy Advance is now. Somehow, though, I managed to hold onto Link’s Awakening, and the Quarterly hubub had me itching for some old school Zelda goodness.

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Poor Final Fantasy VII. If you hadn’t been so wildly popular, such a spectacularly successful smash hit for Sony’s fledgling disc-based console, perhaps you would have remained a happy memory. But that’s not how things worked out. When you sell more than 10 million copies and introduce a new generation of gamers to the role-playing genre, it’s hard to be bound by the realm of nostalgia. It makes me wonder who’s more to blame for the Compilation of Final Fantasy VII nonsense — Square Enix, eager to whore out their most popular characters for all the money they can grab, or the fans, who eagerly lap it up and still clamor for that PS3 remake.

The whole thing really began with Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children. Now, just three years after the release of the original movie, Advent Children Complete is out, resplendent in 1080p and jammed with 25 minutes of extra footage. Supposedly it’s not the end of the line for the Compilation, but it’s all we’ve got for the foreseeable future.

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Picture yourself in the bustling streets of ancient Rome, weaving your way through the narrow avenues of open space between the tightly-packed crowds of shouting vendors, haggling housewives, and stern centurions. Imagine sitting in the majestic colosseum, eyeing 40,000 Romans just like you who are watching a particularly vicious gladiatorial bout. Now dial it all back a notch — those aren’t real throngs of Romans haggling over produce prices in Latin. They’re avatars, similar in detail to those in Second Life, and nearly every one is being controlled by a 12-year old. And you’re not really sitting in the Roman colosseum — you’re sitting in a classroom, learning the history and culture of an ancient civilization from a video game.

It makes sense, if you think about it. We’re living in the information age — Twitter spreads messages across a vast network in minutes, millions of people sink time into alternate identities in World of Warcraft and other MMOs, and video games are right in the middle of the burgeoning new media sector, pushing the wave of HD displays and challenging how we interact with technology. So why isn’t that same technological advancement carrying over into the classroom, where textbooks still reign supreme? After listening to one of the co-founders of GameTap, Al Meyers, talk for two hours on Tuesday about his new project ReinventED, I was convinced — video games are an untapped resource for expanding the scope of what our kids learn in the classroom.

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Growing up equal parts voracious reader and student of capitalism and imperialism (Monopoly and Risk, respectively), you’d think a game like Scrabble, combining the fun times of a competitive board game with the trapping of lit’rature would be, well, up my alley.

It wasn’t.

As a kid, and well on up into my teen years, I loathed Scrabble. The mere mention of it as a contender for family game night rendered me vehemently opposed, eyes ablaze and jaw firmly set in an unequivocal veto. Well, mostly I just whined. But you get the point: the two of us didn’t mix, jive, or coagulate whatsoever.

I always assumed it was the game itself — which is a little odd, considering my aforementioned appetite for all things fiction. Turns out, that wasn’t it at all. Because, you see, I hate Scrabble, but I love Lexulous. If you’re unfamiliar, despair not — I was among your sorry ranks but a few weeks ago. Lexulous is, basically, free Scrabble for the Internets, written in Java and as competent as any of the simplistic gaming services offered by Yahoo! and, well, whoever else offers free Java games.

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It’s something most of us have to deal with, sooner or later. We all reach the age when parents begin to hand off household responsibilities, exposing us to one of life’s bitter truths: washing dishes sucks. That must be why The Dishwasher: Dead Samurai feels so right — the seeming absurdity of an undead dishwasher exacting bloody vengeance on legions of cyborgs makes a little sense, if you think about it. The torturous existence of a career dishwasher must surely fill a reservoir of repressed, unhealthy rage…and when that reservoir overflows, well…. Or at least, that’s my justification. Paper thin or not, it makes about as much sense as the vague, blurry comic book narration jammed between each level of The Dishwasher’s story mode, which somehow manages to be more nonsensical than I’d expected.

Thankfully, story isn’t really a major concern when it comes to the beat ‘em up genre. Weapons, combos, enemies, and levels are what matter, and Dishwasher delivers those in spades. Each of the five weapons can be upgraded to unlock new attacks, as can the health and dish magic capacities. Castle Crashers is arguably the premier brawler on XBLA, but Dishwasher provides some surprisingly fierce competition. While I miss the four-player co-op, comprehensive leveling system, and wonderful aesthetics of The Behemoth’s $15 title, The Dishwasher may have just stolen my heart; it’s the 2D equivalent of Itakgaki’s Ninja Gaiden, right down to the medium and heavy attacks, brutal finishing moves and blood-spurting, eviscerated torsos. But as much as I love all of those things, there was one final element that pushed it over the edge: the chainsaw.

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Fez, I have a confession to make. I’ve been watching you from afar for over a year, peeking over the top of whatever I’m reading to catch an innocuous glance as you pass by. Just an innocent look, really. But I started to feel something. And then, just as quickly as you entered my life, you disappeared. I thought these feelings would go away. I thought the emptiness of the long, long months since I last saw you would temper my emotions. It didn’t. And it got hard, some nights. I’m a little ashamed to admit it — I mean, I don’t know exactly how to say this — but sometimes I had to watch videos of you on the internet. I just had to see you again. And now you’re back in my life. This time, I caught only the briefest glimpse. Barely a minute. You’re playing with me, aren’t you? Toying with my heart? Well, it doesn’t matter. You had me from the very start.

Fez, I think I love you.

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