True story: before the new Punch-Out!! for Wii came out, I thought the franchise was actually about boxing. I guess that's like thinking that Mario games are actually about plumbing. Sounds pretty retarded when I put it that way.

Anyway! Nintendo offered this downloadable mini-game as a gift to people who've bought too many Nintendo games, so I decided to (finally) give it a whirl. I have a new appreciation for the Punch-Out gameplay formula, but don't really care much for it - as a test of memory and reflexes, it utterly flummoxes me.

If you're a person who's good at video games, though, it seems like this (meaning, the full game, not this borderline racist preview) would be right up your alley.

Progress: Gave Up -- Couldn't beat the Doc

Remember two hours ago, when I was halfway through the game? Since then, I got a drink, tooled around on the web, finished the game, waited for my website to come back up, and then typed this. I guess I just April Fools' pranked myself.

So yeah, my total completion time was somewhere south of 4 hours, even with numerous dies-and-retries in retarded chokepoints full of dead-eye Russians. I won't even bother mentioning the countless minor issues with Rogue Warrior - except that it is stupefying how often reloads get cancelled - since, at their worst, they will only last a few hours.

If you're like me, and have an unhealthy obsession with bad games, this is a great one because of how short and vulgar it is. Otherwise, just watch the credits and forget that there's a video game preceding them.

Better than: Kane & Lynch: Dead Men (PC, PS3, X360) (Rogue Warrior is funny!)
Not as good as: real video games
Seriously: watch those credits

Progress: Finished on Regulars (normal)

There is one good thing about Rogue Warrior: attitude. It is basically a non-stop sequence of stabbing and perforating dudes, narrated by Mickey Rourke's superb cursing. You'll never laugh so much at dead North Koreans as you will listening to this game.

Aside from that, though, it is terrible. The controls are shoddy, the game balance is stupid, the level design (and checkpoint locations) are just wrong, and it's phenomenally short - I'm at the halfway point after about two hours - although that may actually be a good thing.

It's plainly evident from playing for more than a few minutes, that Rogue Warrior is not the game that it was initially designed to be. Stealth portions, when they work, work well; it sometimes feels like a foul-mouthed Metal Gear Solid. But when you're detected, it turns into a shitty shooting game, where all the guns are terribly inaccurate, and cover frequently fails to cover you.

Not that I would have liked it much if Rogue Warrior was a completely stealth game. But its split personality makes it successful neither as a shooter nor as a sneaker.

Progress: Mission 5

When I ordered Rogue Warrior on sale (more to come on this one!), GoGamer threw in a copy of Maelstrom for free. I only got a few minutes into it before I realized that the unintentional hilarity wasn't worth the effort.

The writing, the voice acting, the animation, the graphics, the sound quality - this game's presentation is abysmal. Come on, 2007, you can do better than this! As for the game itself, all I saw was a mediocre squad-based RTS with useless AI and baffling controls.

I'd say this is the worst game to have installed SecuROM on my computer, but....

Progress: Gave Up -- Hahaha!

Torchlight is the game architecture and mechanics of Diablo, plus some features and enhancements from Diablo II, with the art style of World of Warcraft - but without the multiplayer capability of any of these.

Calling Torchlight "derivative" would be an understatement. There is a dungeon with a few dozen levels, separated into several "sections" like mines and a crypt. Above it is a small town of quest-giving NPCs and merchants. Magical items are useless until you uncover their attributes with a Scroll of Identify, and you can get to town instantly with a Scroll of Town Portal. Even the fucking sound effects are pitch-perfectly identical.

That it so intimately imitates Diablo isn't really a bad thing; the formula is good, and Torchlight tunes the experience (e.g. through item drop rates) such that the stick holding the carrot is just in front of your face. But the game's scant additional features really don't make it feel different enough. I played this game ten years ago.

Which is startlingly like another game I recently bought - but while the 2010 version of Perfect Dark added online multiplayer, this 2010 2009 version of Diablo removed it. Huh? As what is apparently an engine proof for a real multiplayer game, Torchlight is pretty good - and you can do worse with $5 - but as an actual game I find it hard to recommend. Even if WoW is the closest you've ever come to Diablo II, you're really better off getting Blizzard's version, so that you can play it with friends.

Better than: Diablo
Not as good as: Diablo II
Not worth $20: good thing it's almost always on sale

Progress: Gave Up -- Level 10-ish

This game sucks, and you should never play it.

Alright, I'll elaborate.

There is a core game, in Red Steel, that is not awful. It isn't great, but it's competent: make tactical weapon choices, take advantage of the level layout to survive, aim at dudes' heads with the Wiimote. And there are even a few clever moments, like analog zooming on the sniper rifle by pushing and pulling the remote. But it's so weighed down by complete shit that this core game is absolutely impossible to enjoy.

I stopped playing in a stage, not quite halfway through the game, where Red Steel stopped being laughably terrible and started being retardedly frustrating. I kept running into three kinds of enemy encounter-

1. Room is filled with dudes with shotguns, who are amazingly great shots; I cannot turn quickly enough to shoot them, and cover is insufficient to keep me from rapidly dying.
2. Room is huge, and multiple dudes with sniper rifles attack me. Sniper shots take away half of my health bar each. I die quickly.
3. Sword fights. Defensive moves do not work. I end up just flailing the remote around and waiting for the fight to end.

Everything about this game is poorly executed, from the shoddy movement controls to the farcical swordfighting, from the boring level designs to the baffling enemy balance, from the half-baked story to the lackluster graphics and nonsensical music.

Really, it's just terrible. Never play it. I claim (below) that Red Steel is better than Kane & Lynch, but that's a tough call, because at least Kane & Lynch allowed me to share my suffering with a co-op partner.

Better than: Kane & Lynch: Dead Men (PC, PS3, X360) (guh)
Not as good as: The Conduit (blegh!)
This game sucks: and you should never play it

Progress: Gave Up -- Gave up in the dinosaur egg room (??)

Red Steel 2's release is imminent, so I figured it was about time to catch up. Hearing about Red Steel's faults, though, and actually playing them, are two different matters.

Red Steel's problems aren't limited to the terrible controls that everyone already knows about. And boy are they terrible! The aiming dead zone is way too big, and the target/zoom function is just abysmal. But like I was saying - there are plenty of other problems, too, like laughable AI and unfair health/damage balancing (the Yakuza has snipers, and they're not afraid to use them!). The sword-fighting - which is to say, the "steel" part of the Red Steel title - is a joke, nothing more than an insipid mini-game that periodically interrupts the shooting action.

The menu system is easily the worst I've ever seen in anything, game or otherwise; it requires you to drag-and-drop options to select them. Loading times are shockingly long, and the game visibly hangs between almost every encounter, for seconds at a time, to auto-save the checkpoint. To top it off, the storytelling is dumb, the cutscenes are awful (like someone put them together from stock photos and clip-art over a weekend), the graphics are shoddy, and the music is an absolutely nonsensical blend of grunge rock and J-pop.

The one thing this game does right is the weapon variety. Even early on, the guns are satisfyingly differentiated and all fun to use (when the aiming isn't getting in the way).

At least, in this regard, Red Steel beats Kane & Lynch. So far.

Progress: Just got to Tokyo

So I've been playing through the campaign on my own in Agent (easy) difficulty, and co-op with a buddy in Special Agent (medium). Both have been frustratingly difficult - primarily because mission objectives are stupidly unclear, and the levels are somewhat labyrinthine. Ten minutes in, we'll discover that we've failed an objective because of something we did that... well, we really have no idea. I guess I underestimated how much of my previous success was reliant on the Players' Guide.

The multiplayer is still wicked fun, though, especially since it can actually run at a decent framerate. I wish there was an easier way to unlock all the weapons for it.

To reiterate: the "Game" settings allow you to prohibit auto-aim in local or private XBL matches, but not in a "Quick" match (Game settings don't exist in that mode). So much for quick play on XBL.

Progress: Saving the President

Yeah, I'm done with this. It didn't take long for the game to start to challenge me, and frankly, I'm not motivated enough to see it through. The story just isn't interesting enough. Parts of it seemed goofy, which I guess is the writing's fault, but there were also moments where I'm almost positive that the English localization wasn't giving me the correct impression.

Not for me.

Progress: Gave Up -- Chapter 1-5

I started playing this the other weekend, but uh, something else got in the way. Not that it had a difficult time doing so - Radiant Dawn, at least so far, has really failed to ignite my interest.

Granted, I am definitely not a series fan. I played Path of Radiance on Easy just to see the story, and go through the motions of the basic mechanics. But comparatively, Radiant Dawn's narrative is really underwhelming; all the characters seem pulled straight out of the Big Book of Japanese RPG Tropes.

The gameplay is also boring me, not that that's the game's fault - since not only did I set it to Easy again, but I also imported my Path of Radiance save data, which gives a few characters in my party stupidly high stats. They could play this game by themselves, if they wanted.

Progress: Chapter 1-5