This is the funniest part of the game. And a joke about Mass Effect's loading elevators. It doesn't get any better than those! Unfortunately.

The last level did have a few humorous touches - jabs at game studio employees - but it in no way made the rest of the game, or even just that level, worth it. Eat Lead may be a short game, at around 6 hours from start to finish, but is still too long for what it is. The lame jokes and tiresome gameplay wear out their welcome within the first two levels.

Really. Don't bother.

Better than: Kane & Lynch: Dead Men (PC, PS3, X360)
Not as good as: Fracture
Instead of playing this: just watch Arrested Development

Progress: Finished on easy

It stinks!

On paper, Eat Lead is a great idea. A comedic send-up of established video game tropes, tied together by a parodic fourth-wall-breaking story, should be good even if the gameplay sucks. And it does suck! As with Kane & Lynch, I knew going in that the game was, metrically, bad. The shooting mechanics are not as offensively awful as in K&L - Eat Lead actually has a halfway-respectable cover system, somewhat marred by glitchy controls. It also has ridiculous difficulty settings (impossibly easy or impossibly impossible), retarded level design, wave after wave of mindless enemies, and disappointingly uninspired weapons.

Anyway! Like I was saying, this would be fine if the game was as funny as something starring (the voice of) Will Arnett should be. But the writing is terrible. One or two genuinely funny moments aside, the majority of the game's scenarios, dialog, and pratfalls are just lame. Not even lowbrow, just, not funny. "Master Chef?" Really? Come on.

The tragic flaw of Eat Lead is that it "makes fun of" stupid game design decisions by doing them. The design doc for this was probably a riot. But in actually executing it, the game misses the point! Running around in circles because you can't find the exit; waiting for a pointless loading screen; lazily headshotting zombies for minutes at a time - these are funny when they happen to someone else.

The upshot is that the game is obscenely short. I'm maybe four hours in now, and should be finished in another one, two tops.

Progress: Finished the boat level

I'd been looking forward to Dark Void for a while. It seems to hit all the vital points of a simple formula: science fiction + robots + lasers + jetpacks = awesome. But the demo, I don't know - it just didn't feel awesome. The controls were a little loose, which is one thing, but also the game's environments, the acting, the pace of the brief demo set-piece... I don't know. It just seemed bland, and insignificant.

It's completely possible that the real, full game is better-scripted and -designed than this demo, and that my concerns are for nothing. But the demo left me with a bad feeling, and Dark Void is no longer on my most-wanted list.

Progress: Gave Up -- Finished the demo

Wow! This game is frustrating.

I think we can all agree that Kane & Lynch has a great premise - a squad-based shooter, in the context of bank robbery and other high-action crimes, would be a fantastic experience. And if it was bolstered by a gritty, Hollywood-style story, even better! Unfortunately Dead Men delivers on none of this.

The first thing you'll notice about the game, and arguably its greatest failure, is the controls. It's just damn near impossible to do anything in Kane & Lynch. Movement is shoddy; aiming is terrible. The auto-cover system never works when you want it, and always gets in your way when you don't want it. Checkpoints and goal locations are rarely as easy to get to as the mini-map has you believe. And AI is absolute shit, which compensates for your inability to shoot effectively, but makes the set pieces fairly dull and disappointing.

This much I pretty much knew going in, but I at least expected the story and dialog to make the game seem worthwhile. Nope! The background plot might be good, but I have trouble saying for sure, because the game is having a hell of a hard time telling it. Characters refer matter-of-factly to their dark pasts, almost never mentioning any interesting details. I can make inferences about what's happened to them, but the game script does nothing to make me feel engaged or intrigued. Kane, Lynch, and everyone else only really seem to care about the immediate present - which amounts to nothing more than terrible shooting.

My buddy and I got halfway through the game in a (short) sitting, so we owe it to ourselves to finish it off. But it's going to have to work pretty goddamn hard for any sort of redemption.

Progress: Breaking some assholes out of prison

Mercenaries is a good game, and I had quite a bit of fun with it. But Red Faction: Guerrilla did most of what Mercs does, better (technical hiccups aside) - so it is hard to go back to it, now.

I may return to Mercenaries at some point, if I run out of open-world destruction games to play, but that's seeming less and less likely anymore.

Progress: Gave Up -- Captured the Ace of Clubs

During my previously-glogged playthrough of Red Faction: Guerrilla, I had my graphics settings near (but not at) their highest. I thought the game looked great, but could run better in certain circumstances - especially during occasions of heavy on-screen activity. Well, I just plugged in a new graphics card, and turned the graphics all the way up, after which, the game had a periodic stutter making it mostly unplayable.

The Internet suggested that I turn off Ambient Occlusion, so I did that, and now it runs too fast. Not just fast enough to make me think it was slow, before; fast enough to be unreasonably fast. In fact, this'll happen if I lower any graphics settings at all. It seems like the game just isn't designed to throttle itself correctly.

This is apparently a known issue running RF:G (and Saints Row 2?) in Win7, and Volition has no intention of fixing it. Thanks, assholes.

I also had a ton of difficulty getting the game to run in the first place - there is a whole rigamarole to go through in applying a patch, thanks to Games for Windows LIVE - but I was willing to write that off as a fluke. I guess the free DLC was to make up for not doing due diligence in debugging the PC version.

It's a shame to say, because the game is stupid fun and plays great with a mouse, but maybe you are better off with a console version.

Progress: Liberated Mars

Demons of the Badlands is - well. It's typical to expect "more of the same" from downloadable campaign content, but I can only really describe this pack as less of the same.

It excises the concept of salvage, which Red Faction: Guerrilla used as a currency reward for destruction, opting instead to unlock items based purely on how many missions you complete. And the mission types I really liked (assaulting and protecting areas, using mechs to destroy EDF stuff, rail-shooting segments with a rocket launcher) barely exist, here; most of the Guerrilla Marauder missions are retrieving vehicles, or destruction puzzles, which are ... fine, but not my favorites.

Furthermore, the entire thing only has three story missions, and you'll need to destroy most of the EDF property in the sector in order to unlock the final one. So by the end - two, maybe three hours, tops - there's almost nothing left to do, anyway.

Demons of the Badlands is simple, destructive fun; but it lacks the variety, the scope, and the satisfaction of any one of the original campaign's sectors. As much as I liked the core game, this DLC pack is entirely skippable.

I'm glad it came free with the PC version, because if I paid for this, I might be harsher on it.

Better than: horse armor
Not as good as: Overlord: Raising Hell
Red Faction's story sucks: so a prequel is kind of stupid

Progress: Finished the story missions

In the final missions, there were so many explosions that I literally could not see anything. Red Faction: Guerrilla likes ramping up the difficulty by throwing more dudes at you, which is sometimes a nuisance. But then you find the tank, or the missile walker, and everything is peachy-keen again. So although this continuous arms race develops to a somewhat ridiculous extent, it does a great job of making every mission feel more epic than the last.

As I expected, the Marauders ended up being slightly (very slightly) more than meets the eye. There is a retarded plot twist near the end, and you enlist their help in the final battle against the EDF. I don't consider this a spoiler because the game's story is stupid. It's a good thing, then, that completely ignoring the plot is easy and fun. Sure, RF:G might have been better with a gripping narrative, but it's a fantastically entertaining game even without one.

Once the main story is wrapped up, all the game's guerrilla missions (regardless of whether or not you completed them) unlock again, and the entirety of Mars becomes your playground. This is awesome! and I'm seriously considering doing missions I skipped and finding collectibles I missed. But my urge to blow shit up is almost fully satisfied, and I still have to play through the DLC missions.

Better than: Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction
Not as good as: story-wise, Grand Theft Auto IV
More explosions than: everything else, combined

Progress: Liberated Mars

There are some features of Red Faction: Guerrilla that make for easy comparison with other recent games. Guerrilla missions, for instance, are functionally similar to recon missions in Assassin's Creed - the difference being that Red Faction has a lot of mission types, almost all of which are fun. And the free-roaming nature of collecting salvage to upgrade is not unlike Crackdown's power-up orbs, although Alec Mason is upgraded more through his weapons than through his personal attributes. (Also, Michael McConnohie is the voice of your commander in both Crackdown and RF:G. Interesting!)

Red Faction may share ideas with some other sandbox titles, but the amount of fun I'm having is difficult to compare to. It's rare to find a game where failure is enjoyable, but when I fail a mission in Red Faction, I am almost invariably looking forward to trying it again. It really nails the simple pleasures of destroying things.

Back when RF:G was new, there was a popular critical opinion that the default game difficulty was too high, and that optimal fun could be found in Easy. Not to toot my own horn, but I'm having no qualms about Normal. Recently I had been feeling pretty fragile in the game's tougher firefights; and then, a new armor upgrade opened up. Of course, death is expected, and in certain missions, frequent - but like I said, I still have fun doing these missions the umpteenth time. I'm not opposed to the idea of switching to Easy to find fun in a difficult game. I'm just saying, for Red Faction, I don't see this as significant.

As for the narrative, it's showing some signs of, uh, trying to do something; I'm still not impressed. There are these Marauders, basically Mad Max rejects wandering out in the Martian desert, who appear to just be hyperviolent savages but may hint at a deeper secret. All I know is, beating them to death with my sledgehammer is great fun.

Progress: Liberated Badlands sector

Corollary: playing Red Faction: Guerrilla while drinking is amazing. The low penalty for dying (you restart at a safehouse with full ammo), and the fact that death is usually spectacular (e.g. a tower falling on you), conspire into something that's really incredible with even just a bit of artificial suspension-of-disbelief.

Progress: Just walked through a building in a mecha suit. Whoa!