Dead Rising makes me really sad. Because there is a lot it does right - slashing/smashing up zombies is way fun, and the general game environment is a blast to run around in - but it has a menagerie of flaws that just make the game a pain in the ass to play.

Set in a mall filled with hordes of the undead and a handful of survivors, Dead Rising's core gameplay lies somewhere between "real-time mission-based survival adventure" and "zombie killer arcade game." The main game takes place over a 72-hour period in which several missions come up, depending on the time and/or your location within the mall, almost always with the goal of rescuing survivors. Or, you could let them die, or ignore them completely. You earn points (more on this later) for rescuing people, but it's not necessary to "finish" the game. Strictly speaking, you can even ignore the series of missions that fill in the game's plot, and just survive for 72 hours; but it would be pretty boring. (An hour in-game is five minutes in real time.)

While these missions are going on, you'll have to navigate through a mall filled with the shambling undead. The good news is that there are plenty of weapons at your disposal; the bad news is that they all break after some number of uses, and so you'll need to stock up and keep your eyes open. Some weapons are conventional, like guns and knives. Some are unconventional, like sledgehammers, baseball bats, and lawnmowers. Some, like potted plants, are just fun. Expect to kill hundreds, nay, thousands of zombies throughout a play-through of Dead Rising.

You earn Prestige Points, or PP, for being a "prestigious" fellow in Dead Rising. You'll get them for rescuing survivors, for meeting zombie kill milestones, for taking nice pictures (oh yeah - the main character is a photojournalist), and generally for doing cool stuff. Get enough PP and you'll level up, which bestows upon you bonuses such as increased inventory space, more health, stronger attacks, and new abilities, like being able to jump on top of zombies.

All of this is just as fun as it sounds, if not more so. Unfortunately, there are some real flaws that make playing the game unnecessarily frustrating. For one thing, it's extremely easy to die - zombies have no problem catching you by surprise and taking out a chunk or two of your health, which you never really have enough of. Once you run out of recovery items, escaping is basically impossible; save points are rarely easy to get to, and if you find yourself in a tight spot and decide to backtrack, guess what? The zombies you killed on your way in have probably respawned. When you die, your options are to restart from your last save - losing all form of progress since - or to restart the game and carry over your Level/PP stats, which I've done a depressing number of times just to avoid losing hours of zombie work.

Some of the game's "bosses," unruly survivors, are also frustratingly difficult, particularly when they have guns. The aiming controls in Dead Rising are completely awful (not that this stops your AI opponents from being excellent shots), and if the boss is packing, trying to fight with anything but a firearm is borderline pointless. One encounter in particular, early in the game's second day, has you up against a guy with a sniper rifle who's able to kill you in a matter of seconds.

There are some other miscellaneous complaints I have - survivors can have weapons, and often end up hitting you by accident (friendly fire); the in-game map does a poor job of showing you how to get to meaningful places; since the same button is used for attacking with a weapon and recovering with a food item, it's all too easy to break a weapon and waste a recovery in a button-mashing situation. In general though, my real problem with Dead Rising is how easy it is to waste hours getting to a meaningful part of the game, then die quickly and lose it all. As I said, I've already carried over my level to restart several times, but better stats only help so much.

I will keep looking for a way to make progress in this game and have fun at the same time, but for the moment, it just pisses me off.

Progress: Level 10, still on the first day

Guerrilla aims to bring the previous Red Faction games' innovative-for-its-time environment deformation, together with the game structure du jour, a third-person shooter with open-world missions. As such, a large part of the game's strength (or weakness) will lie in the execution of the game world, which I wasn't terribly impressed with in the demo; being set on Mars, the game has a mutated case of "Everything is Brown" where instead, everything is red. But the destructibility is a big turn-on - smashing a building with a huge hammer is fairly satisfying, and using a construction vehicle to drive through a structure, even more so. Still on the fence, but I'll be keeping my eye on this one.

Progress: Gave Up -- Played the demo mission

Tales of Symphonia's 3D take on the Tales battle system was fun and interesting at the time, but five years on, it is feeling a little stale. And a stale battle system is about the worst problem an RPG can have, giving way to underleveled characters, and thus frustrating boss encounters. The incredibly long-winded story conversations don't help, either. Truthfully, I could not wait for my party to die just so they'd shut up.

Progress: Gave Up -- Died to the final boss in the demo

It's a real shame that the whole game couldn't be like the demo. Despite occasional camera frustration and slow-down-to-kill-enemies sequences, it is the best attempt yet - better than the first Sonic Adventure - at translating Sonic's high-speed action into a 3D game that is also fun. At least, the daytime sequences are. It's rather telling that the nighttime, werewolf sequences are omitted from the demo. Had they been omitted from the retail game, I might be inclined to play it, too.

Progress: Gave Up -- Finished the demo

Really, Perfect Dark was little more than an extremely competent shooter, made in an era where such a thing was still ultra-rare on consoles. So it shouldn't necessarily come as a surprise that the sequel fails to breach the current shooter game standards. But the fact that it doesn't really distinguish itself is pretty disappointing nevertheless. Where the original PD pushed the envelope for console shooters, PDZ is content to settle in familiar territory, and no amount of laptop sentry guns can save a game from that.

Progress: Gave Up -- Tried the demo

It's easy for gimmicky shooters to fall into the trap of the one-trick pony, where depressingly trite FPS tradition is given a band-aid of slowing down time or turning into a monster or some crap like that. What Fracture does right, and brilliantly at that, is actually incorporate its gimmick into every aspect of the game world and gunplay. Fracture's claim to fame is environment deformation, and your commodity tools for this - raising and lowering the ground, and destroying structural supports - can be used for everything from creating cover, to removing enemy cover, to reaching new areas, to absolutely hilarious killing blows. It's not just an element for environmental puzzles, and it's not just an element for changing up the basic combat: it's both, and it's actually quite fun. Of course, nailing the basic requirements of a shooter (aiming, grenades, etc) helps, too.

Progress: Finished the demo

In a word: vapid. Dynasty Warriors represents the ultimate in brainless hack-and-slash gaming: hordes of enemies eagerly swarm around you just so they can fall to your sword. The fanservicey Gundam take on it seems no different, with the possible exception that Milliardo's whip attack left me with literally no recourse, as I was juggled to death. I have no idea what I could have done to avoid death, and really, I don't care either.

Progress: Gave Up -- Played demo, got raped by Milliardo

When I saw Eternal Sonata's battle system, I instantly disliked it. Each character having a limited time gauge for his turn, running around like idiots on the field of combat, seems like it removes all semblance of strategy from an RPG. But what I didn't realize until I played it, was that the time is not always ticking: until you move or take action, you can let your turn's time bar sit, and figure out your plan of attack. This actually works out to be a really fun combat scenario, as it strongly divorces real-time action from static planning, while retaining the best parts of both (tense pause-action strategy and button-mashing fun).

The game's premise, that it takes place in a dream world inside the deteriorating mind of Fredric Chopin, is something I liked since I'd first heard of the game. And the graphics are absolutely beautiful. As for the other RPG stuff, like insipid town NPCs, as far as the demo's shown me they are at least harmless. So next time I've got weeks to burn on a lengthy RPG, this might just do the trick.

Progress: Finished the demo

Like Zone of the Enders, this is a game many people would not have bought except for the highly-anticipated game demo that came with it at the time (Halo 3). Unlike ZoE, it has also enjoyed a healthy amount of success on its own right, because it is a charming little game. While games like True Crime had already tried a good-guy take on the Grand Theft Auto sandbox formula, Crackdown takes that perspective and adds a robust RPG-like system of leveling up individual attributes. More than that - leveling up doesn't just make you powerful, it makes you amazingly superhuman. This is a sandbox game where you can become a supercop that leaps over buildings, and tosses SUVs at gang members. I honestly don't know how deep the game gets, but the basic gameplay has me sold already.

Progress: Tried the demo

Yes, it is a competent action game set in the Conan universe. No, it is not as good as God of War. Yes, it also has tits. No, I probably would not care about it, if there were no tits. But since there are, this is a perfect candidate for inexpensive, cheap-thrill video gaming.

Progress: Finished the demo