Saints Row began years ago as little more than a lazy clone of Grand Theft Auto, albeit one with an amusingly in-depth character creator. I got bored of its stale antics quickly, but my friend managed to create a startlingly accurate portrayal of George W. Bush as his avatar and squeezed quite a bit more fun out of the game as a result. Perhaps this could be seen as an early testament to the game’s true strength - outrageous, unbridled fun. 

With the third installment, Saints Row has truly become its own beast. Hover bikes, VTOL jets, fluffy pink game show mascots going on murderous rampages through the streets, a streaking minigame, and more goodies that would be a shame to spoil here are densely packed onto this disc.

Imaginaerum

Uncertainty set in the moment I glanced at the track listing. “I Want My Tears Back”? “Turn Loose the Mermaids”? “Scaretale”? Who in their right mind let Tuomas label his creations with these hideous titles?

Nightwish has always been a band best experienced with no knowledge of the lyrical content, and Imaginaerum is no different, so let us continue to more important matters.  

“Taikatalvi” leads in with a hauntingly simple melody and the band adventurously deciding to lead in with their native language. One can’t help but take a quick glance at those track titles and wish they did this more often. “Taikatalvi” is undoubtedly beautiful, but there’s not enough here to satisfy. As with most pointless intro tracks, it ends right as its momentum builds to a peak, a great idea without a proper song to contain it.

Transitioning that momentum into lead single “Storytime” doesn’t do Imaginaerum any favors. Annette’s screechy vocals and the bored choirs ooh-ing in the background give off a decidedly lazy single vibe. “Storytime” is almost conspicuously generic, as if Nightwish knew they needed a traditional lead single to sell the album but their heart wasn’t in it. This is Nightwish composed by checklist, a feeling that slips into many of the band’s efforts to capture their more traditional sound on the album. It feels out of place among Imaginaerum’s wild experiments. 

While the attempt to add something resembling a decent story into the routinized trenches of the MMO space is a noble goal, one has to question what the appeal of an MMO is in the first place. Grounding a gigantic interactive universe in compelling fiction is well and good, but that effort is meaningless if the players don’t care. I’m willing to bet this is the mentality of the average MMO player.

That’s not meant to be a dig. It’s simply a matter of the strengths and weaknesses of the genre.

From my distant, ignorant perch, Cowboy Bebop always seemed to be one of the pillars of anime. Along with Evangelion and a select few other choice favorites, I have heard it pulled out time and time again as an untouchable favorite of countless anime fans everywhere.

While I enjoyed my time with the odd crew of the Bebop, I can’t say I empathize with the level of unbridled reverence lavished upon what seemed to me to be a slightly above average action romp.

Perhaps the weight of such lofty expectations prematurely killed any chances of me joining the ranks of the Bebop faithful. Perhaps I somehow missed the point. Perhaps I simply wasn’t paying enough attention. One way or another, this anime classic failed to instill the wonder in me that I was hoping it might.

Then the day finally comes. Rushing toward the magical gift, you can’t open it fast enough. Paper flies in every direction. The beautiful exterior is shredded as if by a cat on a catnip-fueled rampage. As the ruins of the colorful paper lie in tatters on the floor, you finally glimpse the package’s contents. This is the moment you have been waiting for. The truth takes a few moments to sink in. You don’t want to believe it at first. Inside is a giant box of tube socks. 

L.A. Noire is that giant box of tube socks. Its impressive visual wrapping quickly gives way to a mundane, repetitive, and unsatisfying gameplay experience that fails to capitalize on the wonderment it once instilled in you. All you’re left with at the end is frustration, disappointment, and a giant box of proverbial tube socks.

Much has been said of the dream team of sorts that came together to develop Shadows of the Damned. Suda 51, known for such wonderfully bizarre titles as Killer 7 and No More Heroes, acted as Executive Director and Writer. Shinji Mikami, creator of the Resident Evil series, was the “Creative producer”, whatever that means. Finally, Akira Yamaoka, sound designer for the Silent Hill series, worked as the sound designer. This trio of talent, with the help of the rest of the folks at Grasshopper Manufacture, created a game that clearly shows the influence of all of its creators. 

Your character is named Garcia Hotspur. His precious girlfriend, Paula, gets brutally murdered and then kidnapped (yes, in that order), by Fleming, lord of the underworld. He’s hard to miss - just look for the dude with three skulls stacked on top of one another. Garcia, of course, must delve into the underworld to come to Paula’s rescue. Luckily he happens to be a demon hunter already, so he knows how to kick some ass.

The setup is basic, but the magic is all in the execution. The gritty grindhouse aesthetic and knowingly immature writing make something that’s both gory and extremely cheesy at the same time, like all of the best B-movies. Whether Garcia is threatening to carve his name into some demonic baddie in his thick Latin accent or traversing the shadowy depths by using the writhing, half-naked form of his giant girlfriend as a bridge, the straight delivery of the absurd material is sure to have you cracking a smile. A certain tolerance for dick jokes and stupid humor is very much required (your phallic gun slash constant companion is named Johnson quite deliberately), but it only rarely becomes too much. I usually have a relatively low tolerance for dumb laughs and I found most of Shadows of the Damned’s writing plenty entertaining.

Anyone who has played No More Heroes might expect nothing less than absurdly humorous greatness from Suda 51, but the best part of Shadows of the Damned is that lurking behind the entertaining facade is a game that’s actually fun to play.

Symphonic metal is a crowded genre. It seems especially popular in a few strange European lands where so many imitators have sprung up all over the place that one imagines the want ads simply overflowing with requests for violinists and choir singers. 

Unfortunately, most of these bands seem to have no idea what makes this style of music compelling in the first place, content to stick with the formula of “big ass choir + big ass string section + repetitive metal music + dumb, melodramatic lyrics = symphonic metal”. There’s precious few unique ideas out there and even fewer bands that get the mix right. It’s not a matter of simply mashing the component elements together. You have to weave them carefully in and out of one another, achieving a delicate balance of soft and hard, metal and melody, epic and personal. 

Nightwish is one of the few bands to consistently achieve this feat. Tuomas Holopainen, the genius behind the Finnish symphonic metal masters, has mastered the creation of songs that deserve the verb “composed” instead of merely being “written”, integrating the melodic and the metal in a way no one else can seem to match. 

With this in mind, placing Within Temptation on a pedestal next to Nightwish is not the insult it might at first appear to be, even if the implication is that the Dutch band plays decidedly second fiddle to the true masters. Within Temptation have historically been good at what they do, but there’s a reason they’re not considered the leader even though their band was actually formed in the same year as Nightwish.

Sharon den Adel and company built their band’s sound on a foundation that could be generously described as “melodramatic”. There was something compelling about the almost absurdly over-the-top nature of their music, but that same quality robbed it of the emotional punch of Tuomas’s compositions. When thinking of Within Temptation, I always conjured the image of a listener sitting alone in a tiny chair in a huge empty room being somehow beaten over the head with an orchestra.

That’s an amusing way of saying that the driving force behind their music has long been choir, strings, and vocals. Everything else has been backgrounded and the result left one wondering why such a band needed two guitarists. It was catchy, generally well done, and fun music, but it was hard to take seriously. 

With The Unforgiving, Within Temptation have managed to evolve their sound into something far more mature and whole without sacrificing any of the fun or epic feel that made them interesting in the first place. The result is undoubtedly the strongest album they have yet released.

Precisely this same train of thought strongly compels me to share my thoughts on the game anyway. You see, F.E.A.R. 3 is designed as a multiplayer experience first and foremost.

“Surely you jest!” I hear you mocking sarcastically. “A shooter that places multiplayer on a higher pedestal than single player? Such things have never been heard of!”

The truth intended by your mocking is correct, of course. The single player shooter is a sad and abandoned animal, having been neglected and forgotten in favor of the far more lucrative multiplayer shenanigans that comprise the overwhelming majority of the online gaming scene these days.

F.E.A.R. has always been different to me. I’m not sure it actually is different, as this isn’t the first F.E.A.R. to place a heavy emphasis on multiplayer modes. I still remember being miffed at how many of F.E.A.R. 2’s achievements centered around its multiplayer efforts.

I never had an interest in F.E.A.R. 2’s multiplayer, and I have none for F.E.A.R. 3’s either. They may well be fantastic, and I do, in fact, hear from proper reviews of F.E.A.R. 3 that it is a far better game when shared with a friend. That doesn’t change the fact that I don’t want to play F.E.A.R. with others. I want to lock myself in a room, turn off all the lights, and soak up the wonderful horror atmosphere. Even the shooting itself seems secondary to me, more a way to relieve tension than the primary draw. 

F.E.A.R. 3 moves the focus squarely to action, and specifically action with other people.

However successful it may be in these attempts, Child of Eden’s artistic aspirations are also worthy of note for more pragmatic reasons. When viewed as a $50 piece of art that uses a controller, an HDTV, and a good sound system as its mediums, the experience is untouchable. There’s simply nothing else like it available today. Playing it transports you to another world, another mindset. It’s a magical experience that you can relive over and over again, just like getting lost in the depths of a good painting.

Memories are vital. They are to be cherished. Clinging onto them in the foolhardy hope that things stay the same so as to relive those memories instead of embracing the creation of new ones, however, does nothing but harm both the medium of gaming and your enjoyment of it on a personal level.

That said, as glad as I am that we have gotten past some of the unfortunate design trends from the early days of gaming, there was a benefit to the stifling technological limitations that created so many of that era’s annoying quirks. Most creative minds will tell you that restrictions are great for the imagination. They’re annoying, sure, but they force you to be your best and to think outside the box. 

Well, the technology of gaming’s past was nothing if not restrictive. There’s an almost magical simplicity to the best the retro generations have to offer that modern games just can’t match.

The culprit is indulgence.