Infamous

Who doesn’t love being a super hero?  The powers, the gadgets, the spandex, the babes!  In comic book form (or more recently, in film)  they wield incredible powers and cut a swath of destruction through the puny henchmen of whatever super villan of the week appears on the radar.  So how come being a super hero in a GAME is so difficult to pull off?  Other than Batman: Arkham Asylum I can’t think of a game that truly makes you feel like the savior of a city.  Infamous, even more so than Batman, captures this feeling due to its great sense of scale and strong main character.  The fact that the universe of Infamous is an original IP lets the game build the hero, villains, and setting in such a way almost perfectly suited to gaming.

Ghostbusters: Needs more Rick Moranis

No no no I said DON'T cross the streams, jerkface!

Who doesn’t love Ghostbusters?  The cheesy 80s music, the ridiculously over-the-top special effects, and the bumbling antics of Peter Venkman, Egon Spengler, Ray Stantz and Winston…  Churchill? (IMDB says his last name was Zeddmore.  Do they ever say that in the movie?  I certainly don’t remember it.) quickly became cultural icons from 1984 and well into the nineties.  Cartoon shows were created.  Delicious flavors of Kool Aid were spawned.  The merchandising potential was endless.

So then fast forward about twenty years when Ghostbusters writers Harold Ramis and Dan Aykroyd got the old team together and decided to produce a game as a sequel to Ghostbusters 2.  Aykroyd, Ramis, Bill Murray and Ernie Hudson all gave eachother one final high-five and teamed up to do some of the best voice acting available in current generation games.  But don’t go busting out the proton packs just yet.  Ghostbusters has its share of problems as well, and you’re not going to be able to make them go away by stashing them in a containment unit.

Heavy Rain (Fighting Crime with Jerky Controller Motions)

The problem is choice. Remember when The Matrix movies said that and it felt pretty deep in the theater, but then later you realized it mostly pretentious mumbo jumbo and you wished there was less talking and more upside down Kung Fu? It turns out that the mumbo jumbo part was mostly spot on, but choice is the core concept of Heavy Rain.

Heavy Rain calls itself an “interactive drama”. The game involves controlling one of four characters at a time using contextual controls, which is the first departure from tradition. There is no control scheme that you can memorize. The X button might be making you drink orange juice, put a car in gear, throw a punch, pull a trigger, or shoot a basketball. Heavy Rain also makes what is probably the most intuitive use of the PS3′s six-axis motion controls in the consoles lifespan thus far. Pushing open a window? Shove the controller forward. Swinging a two by four at somebody’s head? Quick left! While initially the entire control system can be confusing, by the time the action really starts rolling your comfortable enough to be able to handle it. The situation onscreen dictates how the controller will be used (or not used, in some cases) and changes in practically every scene of the game.

Final Fantasy XIII: like a fat man on rollerskates

Final Fantasy has become a household name, but it also has made essentially every review I’ve seen of the game completely unreliable.  When it comes to stories and game play mechanics, the Final Fantasy series has seen it all, with varying degrees of success.  But now, everyone expects the series to be exactly the way it was when they fell in love with it, and every time someone mentions the name Final Fantasy, it’s immediately followed by what the latest game should have been.

Imagine that you live in a delightful neighborhood on top of a hill, in a small Podunk town somewhere in the north-east, with charm just dripping off of every branch.  An orphanage for woeful children is at the bottom of the hill, which your whole town contributes to on a regular basis.  Your next door neighbor is a three hundred and fifty pound, reliable pork barrel of a man, who lets call, oh, I don’t know, Brett.