Street Fighter IV (PS3)-- I got pretty into Street Fighter II when they released the HD Remix edition for Xbox Live a while back, so I felt right at home with IV. It's... pretty much like Street Fighter II, but with shiny graphics, a few new characters and online play. The latter works a lot better than expected, except for the cheap sons of bitches online -- I guess I can't blame the developers for that, though. I guess. It's a very familiar game, and there are definitely some balance issues (pick Sagat and you win), but it's still an incredibly solid and engaging fighting game.
Peggle (Xbox Live Arcade) -- It's hard to explain the appeal of this game; you've just got to play it. There's a demo right here for your PC. It's very simple. Either you don't get it, or you spend hours bouncing a little ball down rows of pegs in order to clear all the orange dots on the screen. I've had good experiences with the multiplayer, though when I say good I mean the pure luck involved in this game sometimes fills me with an unspeakable rage that would frighten my mother.
Resident Evil 5 (Xbox 360) -- The demo for this game really turned me off. After loving Resident Evil 4, I was disappointed to find that the game hadn't really evolved at all. There was the same tank-like controls that, in the four years since RE4's release, have been improved upon greatly by games like Gears of War and Dead Space. Resident Evil 5, in the year 2009, does not allow you to move and shoot at the same time. At first I thought this was a real gamebreaker for me--the demo shot the game down from an instant purchase to a definite rental for me.
I sat down to play the game this weekend, and was really surprised with the results. The controls don't matter too much after about half an hour, and the same unique visceral feeling that permeated RE4 starts to shine through. Besides the incredibly polished and detailed graphics, the only real new wrinkle is a co-op mode, which really does add a lot to the game. It makes proceedings a bit less frightening (though the fear of getting your head cut off by a chainsaw-wielding maniac is still there), but the action remains as tense as ever. The teamwork dynamic is very well suited to this game.
The series director has said that the next game in the main franchise will be another big reboot/retooling like RE4 was. I believe it. This game is like a huge tribute to (or a museum for) old school game design, for Japanese development especially. There are the bosses and enemies with big bright and obvious weak points, bosses that you have to lure into traps of fire, buttons to push and levers to pull. Hell, there's even a level full of conveyor belts that just keeps feeding flammable containers into a furnace -- a veritable exploding barrel factory. That and the tons of unlockables and fun arcadey Mercenaries mode really scratch the right spots for a longtime "hardcore" gamer like me.
Noby Noby Boy (Playstation Network) -- Can you call something a game if there's really no objective, or um, point to it? Sure, stretching your snake-like body around simple, clean storybook levels is fun, but why? Yeah, I giggle every time I eat something and a big bump slithers down my body until I poop out the object (or person) unharmed, but does that really justify an official software release? For five dollars, I felt like I had my money's worth in fun and dicking around doing nothing. And isn't that really what games are for, anyway?
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