ADVENT RISING:  This high-budget Majesco release got a lot of grief from the mainstream press... and indeed, it deserved some of that criticism.  The frame rate dips faster than George W. Bush's approval ratings during intense moments, and the gameplay borrows heavily from that king of sci-fi shooters on the Xbox, Halo 2.  Fortunately, there's an engrossing storyline to carry you through those rough moments, as well as generous checkpoints and an automatic save function that keep the frustration to a minimum during those times when you're up to your elbows in bloodthirsty aliens.  They just keep comin' and comin'!

NEED FOR SPEED CARBON:  I'm going to split this review evenly between the Xbox 360 and Nintendo DS versions of the latest Need for Speed.  It's no big surprise that the Xbox 360 release is the better of the two games, but what blew my mind is that the Nintendo DS serves up some sweet night racing action too.  Rather than chimping their rides like they did with the DS ports of Burnout Legends and Need For Speed: Most Wanted, Electronic Arts put a lot of effort into this conversion.  Even with its sleek graphics, licensed soundtrack, and tight control, Carbon on the DS lags far behind its Xbox 360 counterpart.  I was blown away by the online demo... it's everything I loved about Need for Speed Underground 2, with five times the visual splendor and none of the disc-snapping frustration!

A BARD'S TALE:  I've said it once (in a decade-old review of the Sega Saturn dud Shining Wisdom) and I'll say it again... if you're going to make fun of lackluster RPGs, you'd better make sure your own game doesn't fall into that category!  In A Bard's Tale, you play a man of questionable morals and sour disposition, whose sole joy in life is to mock the tired conventions of traditional adventure games.  He treats demanding non-player characters with the rudeness they deserve!  He skips cut scenes with a gruff, dismissive "Heard it!"  He... runs around slaying hundreds of monsters and springing open treasure chests from an overhead viewpoint.  Oh crap, the game's become the very thing it was trying to mock!

Time to play a little catch-up!  Here's what I've been playing in the last week...

ZELDA: TWILIGHT PRINCESS:  Last but not least, there's Twilight Princess.  Other critics will warn you that this one starts off slowly, and they're totally right... you'll spend nearly an hour fishing and herding goats before you wrap your hands around a sword and battle your first Moblin.  By the time you get that far, you'll wonder why you bought a whole new system for a game that clearly doesn't need it.  Twilight Princess has sharply rendered characters but decidedly substandard backgrounds, and the Wii's remote controller doesn't bring anything new to the table aside from unnecessary confusion.  Sure, pointing a slingshot is a little easier with the Wiimote, but fighting and adjusting the camera- which I can guarantee you'll do a lot more often- is more awkward than simply tapping a button or tilting a camera stick.  Twilight Princess lives up to the pedigree of past 3D Zelda games, but with a GameCube version readily available (and almost exactly the same), there's no logical reason to drop an extra two hundred and fifty dollars on a Wii.  Wait for a true exclusive that'll make you proud of the purchase.

SO LONG, AND THANKS FOR ALL THE HEDGEHOGS: After years of limping through the console wars, it seems the Dreamcast may finally have reached the end of its long but tragic life. Kotaku reports that production of the Dreamcast's proprietary GD-ROM disc has come to a halt, preventing the release of future officially licensed games. It's been a fun eight years, Dreamcast. · · · SLOW DOWN, TAKE IT EASY: Oblivion producer Todd Howard claims in a recent issue of Electronic Gaming Monthly that porting the popular RPG to the Playstation 3 was made more difficult by the system's Blu-Ray disc drive. Howard states that the drive's sluggishness forced the design team to print key data on the disc multiple times, speeding up access. · · · NEVER SAY NEVERSOFT: Activision is keeping it in the family! Now that Guitar Hero developer Harmonix is a division of Viacom (along with the International Justice League of Super Acquaintances), Activision is saving money on the development of the next Guitar Hero game by having its own subsidiary, Neversoft, create it. · · ·

Two months ago, that time came.  The Sanyo fizzled out on me, the victim of a broken vertical deflector.  It took a while before I could afford to replace the set, but once that money came, I went all out, picking up the best television money can buy.  Well, as much money as I had, anyway!  The Sanyo, all one hundred pounds of it, went out the door, replaced by a 32" flatscreen LCD TV with nearly every video port you could imagine.

One of those ports was put to the test shortly after setting up my Olevia.  I took the woefully underused VGA cable I purchased for my Xbox 360 last summer and plugged it into the back of the set.  I crossed my fingers, hoping for the best... and boy did I ever get it!  The already stunning Oblivion looked even more gorgeous in high-definition, with every lapping wave of water, every stray blade of grass, and every stone cast to the side of the road looking almost real enough to touch.

The other video inputs yielded less spectacular results.  I was satisfied with the Wii's composite cables back when I was playing Wii Sports, but the more ornate detail of Zelda: Twilight Princess demands better.  Too bad finding a component cable for the Wii is almost as tough as tracking down the system itself!  Next, there's S-Video... although still noticably blurry, it's good enough to get the job done for the Playstation 2 and Dreamcast. 

You definitely don't want to go any lower than that on a high-def set, though.  If you're planning on scratching that old-school gaming itch, you're better off getting it through emulators or classic game collections.  Most early game consoles only offer RF output, and few things look worse than a lowly RF connection on a high-def TV!

It's an exciting time to be a Nintendo fan. The company which once ruled the video game industry fell on hard times in the past decade thanks to missteps like the Virtual Boy and Nintendo 64. Throughout much of the 2000's, the once mighty console manufacturer became the whipping boy for a new generation of gamers, which dismissed it as "kiddie" and out of touch. Now, after what seems like a lifetime of scorn, Nintendo is finally gaining back its lost relevance with hardware that injects new ideas into an industry which has become complacent and stubbornly resistant to change.

As a long-time fan of the company (and a vocal critic of its competitors), I would very much like to see Nintendo beat the odds and reclaim its throne as the world's most popular and influential game developer.  Unfortunately, I'm more in love with the thought of Nintendo making this miracle comeback than I am the system they're using to achieve those means.

Yes, that's right... I'm not impressed with the Nintendo Wii.  Not just yet, anyway.  The irony is that it was a lot more fun to hunt down the incredibly elusive system than it was to actually PLAY it.  I wouldn't have gotten a Wii at all had it not been for the efforts of a kindly GameStop clerk, who had a unit tucked in the dark recesses of the store's mysterious merchandise closet.  He told me to come in early the next morning to pick it up.  With every other store picked clean of consoles, I eagerly complied, and the next afternoon, a Wii was perched proudly in the middle of my entertainment system, where a GameCube once had been.

Before I fired up the included game, Wii Sports, I decided to play around with the system's interface.  The first move I made was switching on the built-in wireless receiver.  It was a move I would quickly regret.  The system asked for a firmware update... not such a big deal, since this kind of thing usually takes just a couple of minutes, right?  On another system, sure, but the Wii dragged the process out to over an hour, only to demand another update immediately afterward.  In a hobby where first impressions are killers, this was a shotgun to the face!

Two hours later, the Wii has finally had its fill of updates (heaven knows I've gotten sick of them).  I took this opportunity to become familiar with the system's BIOS.  Unlike the colorful user interface of the Xbox 360, or the dark yet stylish GUI of the Playstation 3, the Wii's operating system is blindingly bright, with a plain white background holding a neatly arranged cluster of rectangular icons.  Selecting one of these onscreen options is as simple as aiming at it with the remote and pressing the A button... but enduring the background music is considerably more difficult.

Some of the features offered on the Wii include a web browser based on Opera, a picture slide show, and perhaps most intriguingly, a weather network that allows you to check out a five day forecast for both your hometown and anywhere else you could imagine.  It's information you could just as easily find on the Internet, but only the Wii lets you grab the edge of a virtual globe and give it a good, hard spin!

The web browser isn't nearly as endearing, with a difficult to use interface and a dearth of available options.  There's no apparent way to adjust the size of the text without resizing the entire page.  If you choose to zoom in on the page you're visiting, you'll miss a lot of onscreen detail, but if you leave it at the standard size, much of the text is reduced to a blurry, unreadable mess (especially if you're stuck with the composite cables packed with the Wii).  If that weren't enough, you also have to put up with the dreadfully slow access times that make downloading updates and other software almost unbearable.

Finally, there's the slide show.  It's not as impressive as the photo album offered by the Playstation 3, where a series of life-like Polaroid pictures are dropped one by one onto a scrapbook marked with handwritten dates.  Nevertheless, the presentation of each picture is effective, in a cheesy mid-80's sitcom kind of way.  You get a lot of camera pans of every snapshot, coupled with heartstring-tugging music which you can thankfully swap out for the MP3s copied to your SD card.

Speaking of which, there's no Wii channel devoted exclusively to music, and you can't pop in your favorite music CDs... a glaring oversight when you consider that nearly every other home console from the past decade had these capabilities.  You know there's a problem when your latest system's multimedia functions are lagging behind even the lowly 3DO!

However, if it's games you've come for... well, the Wii doesn't seem to offer much in this department either, if Wii Sports is any indication.  It quickly becomes obvious why the game was included with the system, because there's just not enough meat on its bones to justify a stand-alone purchase.

It's not just that the games are simplistic... the control never feels as natural as advertised.  Maybe playing twenty years of games with a joystick has trained me to be resistant to other forms of input, but nevertheless, I can't help but think that something's not quite right here.  In Bowling, I feel like I'm mimicing the movements of the onscreen character, rather than hurling a ball at a crowd of pins.  When I step outside that field of movement, I'm given an error message and dragged behind the red line to do it all over again.  Baseball and Tennis are even worse, leaving me frantically flailing at a ball I can never strike.

When I'm not reliving fond memories of the late 1990's on my PSP, I'm playing Chibi-Robo for the GameCube.  I've been interested in this one since I played the demo at GameStop last fall... just not fifty dollars interested!  However, after the price dropped to a miserly fifteen dollars, I just couldn't resist the purchase.  Five solid hours with Chibi-Robo has made me very glad indeed that I waited for a price drop.  There's certainly nothing wrong with the game, but if you're expecting action-packed platforming action... well, you're not going to get any of it here!   

Chibi-Robo is as laid back as a dead fly, playing like a more tightly focused Animal Crossing.  Instead of doing chores simply to pass the time, you'll pick up scraps of paper and scrub away dirty pawprints in an effort to win the hearts of your adoptive family and befriend the toys that come to life each night.  As you proceed through the game, you'll be rewarded with weapons and items which further illustrate your tiny size... baby spoons become shovels, and unused toothbrushes double as floor mops.  Using any of them will drain your already dwindling supply of energy, forcing you to recharge frequently at one of the power outlets scattered throughout each room. 

As you perform your duties as the Sandersons' micro-maid, you'll learn more about the increasingly dysfunctional family and its financial difficulties.  Will the shapely Mrs. Sanderson finally be able to convince her husband to get a job, even if it's as Captain Lou Albano's stunt double?  Will the mystery of little Jenny's unhealthy obsession with frogs ever be revealed?  And are there any toys in the house that aren't completely obnoxious?  Because you can't skip through the lines of dialogue (accompanied by the most irritating gibberish this side of Okami), you'll discover the answers to all these questions whether you're interested or not! 

Next to the drawn-out dialogue, the feeling of helplessness the player must face while playing Chibi-Robo is probably the game's greatest shortcoming.  Your chrome-plated custodian can't jump, and his laser cannon can only vaporize stickers and the occasional mechanical spider.  New locations are dangled just out of your reach, and will remain there until you collect the right items.  While the pint-sized perspective will remind you of Katamari Damacy at first, you'll feel like your progress is a slow, uphill climb because you never get any larger, and your surroundings never become any less intimidating. 

On the plus side, the game's got more purpose than its inspiration Animal Crossing... not to mention better graphics!  There are no flat expanses littered with sprite-based trees and houses... the Sanderson home is far more detailed, with plenty of nooks and crannies to explore.  Rooms have blinds over the windows, desks with pens and paper strewn on top of them, and wastepaper baskets tucked in each corner, making each environment seem more tangible and organic.  On the other hand, the sound is a bit too whimsical for its own good, with different tones punctuating your robot's every step over tiles, wood, cement, and grass.