Split into three acts, the campaign of Fracture starts in San Francisco with an initial conflict between the western US - who have developed self-enhancement technology based on genetic manipulation - and the eastern US, who have outlawed such bioengineering, and instead rely on exosuits and other electromechanical tech. The story is short, full of utterly un-memorable characters, has a lame non-ending, and serves primarily as a vehicle for delivering the different acts' environments; but at least the premise (a new civil war) is pretty interesting.

The demo left me chomping at the bit for more of Fracture's environment deformation and unique weaponry. Unfortunately, the game's first and longest act is mostly devoid of this. Traveling through tunnels and caves and dark corridors, simply shooting oncoming enemies, I spent much of the first act wondering why I was playing through these banal areas. I respect the fact that Day 1 managed to create a huge, cohesive environment, but I would just as soon have skipped a lot of it.

Acts 2 and 3 ramp things up - in that they are shorter, and new tech comes more rapidly - though they still aren't perfect. Your commander often shouts mission objective help at you through the comm-link, but is completely unhelpful for some of the game's tougher enemies, who require unique strategies to take down. The game is also fond of making an area difficult by simply pouring enemies into it, which gets old pretty fast. Since there is no snappy cover mechanic ala Gears of War (even though Fracture has borrowed several other gameplay tricks from Gears, like a motion-blur run), huge fights usually become a matter of careful and methodical sniping, lest Jet drown in a sea of enemy forces.

Oh yeah. The main character's name is Jet Brody. Wow.

The disappointing thing about Fracture is that, even though it has some awesome weapons, none of them really overshadow basic gunplay. Which is good in the sense that it creates a solid shooter game, but bad in that the game's unique charms languish in the background. Aside from a few (sometimes confusing) environment puzzles, the terrain deformation never really gets any more sophisticated than in the demo's "tutorial" level, although it should be said that even this is done better than most one-trick shooters.

Though I sound down on the game, the fact is that it is well put together. Greatly aided by Lucasarts' impeccable ability to make anything sound like Star Wars, the sweeping orchestral soundtrack makes the whole game feel like an epic adventure. The shooting gameplay is, as I've said, very competent and well-executed, if sometimes a bit tiresome. And checkpoints are (with a few exceptions) extremely frequent, so there's rarely any frustrating repetition.

I don't really intend to try the multiplayer, but there is another neat extra feature that I've already blown some time in: a Weapons Testing area, where you can just tool around with the game's weapons. It plays like a developer's debug level, and you can even spawn enemies to fight at will. Collectibles you find in the campaign (which are easy to backtrack for thanks to a Mission Select option) unlock new weapons for the testing area, but I'm not really so motivated by this as to try and find more of them.

So all in all, it is a fairly solid game, but the impressive physics toys are really in second billing behind the gunplay - which still isn't quite as good as, say, Gears. Fun, but ultimately forgettable.

Progress: Finished on Standard difficulty

If you play Dead Rising with the intent to accomplish something - e.g. advancing the story and/or saving survivors - it ceases being an open-world zombie slaying game. Instead, it becomes a survival horror comedy game. And the methods it uses of creating am-I-gonna-die tension are much like the pre-4 Resident Evil series: frustrating control issues at critical times, propensity to run out of items (both offensive and healing), an unclear map, and fuck-you-in-the-ass design quirks.

Some highlights:

• As I last mentioned, if you get stuck in a crowd and mash your way to victory, there's a high likelihood of breaking your weapon and accidentally using up a heal when you may or may not need it.
• ...but healing items don't actually heal you until you're done with the eating/drinking animation, so if you're at low health and something shoots you during that ~3 second time, you're probably going to die.
• When you level up, a certain aspect of your character improves, be it item inventory, physical strength, max health, or learning a new combat skill. These are random. If your early level-ups happen to give you nothing but useless skills, well, whoops.
• I would not have gotten to the end of 72-hour mode if I hadn't already reached level 10 from previous failed attempts. I thoroughly believe that this game is impossible - or at least ridiculously unreasonable - to complete from level 1.
• I also would never have made it that far if not for guidance from the Internet. There is an in-game map, but it does not divulge the locations of specific weapons and other items, which are, by all accounts, necessary for specific moments in the story progression.
• Getting shot knocks you back, and all the bosses who have guns also have superpowerful melee attacks, and know that if you get close, all they have to do is knock you down and get some range. Fighting these enemies is usually (not "sometimes") unfeasible unless you exploit a dead-zone in the environment where you can hit them but they cannot fire back.
• Your friend Otis back at the security room frequently calls you on a walky-talky to tell you about security camera footage, e.g. of survivors you can rescue. When you are answering this message, you cannot attack (and he has an uncanny ability to call you right in the middle of a zombie horde). You can leave it unanswered, but then it rings, constantly. And if the message is interrupted by you bringing out a weapon - or getting attacked - he calls back, and has the nerve to tell you not to hang up on him.
• The (very) few occasions that I had spare time to rescue survivors, they were an enormous hindrance upon themselves. If there is even one zombie in their way, they will get stuck. They often get stuck on each other. And there is always that one survivor who cannot keep up, burdens the rest of the group, and ultimately gets eaten purely because he/she walks 10% slower than everyone else.
• The center of the mall is a park, that spawns a group of escaped convicts in a buggy with a chain gun on the back. As with most guns, this is easily able to utterly destroy you, and being attached to a vehicle doesn't help, either. Killing them is not the hardest part of the game, but they respawn at certain times of the day, making some rescue missions all that much more unbearable.
• Sometimes when certain enemies kill or capture you, instead of being given the chance to load your last save, you're tied up in a room. And you can escape, but then you're left outside in the middle of zombie territory, and all your items are gone! All this really means is that instead of being able to load your save straightaway, you need to restart the game and go all the way back to the title screen to start again.
• Toward the end of the 72 hours, special forces come to clean up the mall. What could be more irritating than a mall full of zombies? A mall full of soldiers with machine guns. Ridiculous.

This isn't counting numerous other "little" things, like the time that the game told me I had several hours to complete a survivor follow-up mission, but when I got back to the security room, the survivor was gone for the rest of the game.

The zombie-slashing game is not just fun, it's extremely fun; which is why it's such a shame that the story-based game is so flawed and frustrating. If I hadn't received extensive help from the Internet, I would have been extremely disappointed with this game, rather than somewhat disappointed as I am now. And even then, the frustrations of that last bullet point have me throwing down the controller trying to do the "Overtime" mode, and as such I may never see the game's "real" ending.

The fixes are straightforward:

• Checkpoints at every room transition, and the option to retry these (rather than retrying the entire game)
• A pause-screen option to load a save
• An on-screen minimap, with clear indicators of nearby items
• Clearer indicators of the utility of particular items (which foods heal for 4, and which for 1? which weapons work, and which are complete wastes of time?)
• Some indestructible items, or at least better physical abilities, so you aren't left completely helpless when respawning hordes break all of your items
• Less knockback attacks
• Damage from zombies should be taken after you have a chance to repel them, not before
• Superpowerful enemies should not respawn
• A lock-on for aiming firearms, since clearly the enemy AI has it
• Different buttons for using weapons and healing items (and healing items should heal faster)
• A level-up skill/stat progression that actually makes you able to meet the game's challenges as they progress

I feel the same way about Dead Rising as I did about Sly Cooper. There is an amazing game here, that is being held back by design decisions that are, in a word, retarded. The difference between Sly and Dead Rising is that Sly Cooper's sequels are already out, and I know they've fixed those flaws (albeit I haven't played them for myself yet). As for whether Dead Rising 2 will fix what's wrong here, well, I can only hope.

Progress: Finished 72-hour mode

Controls are the popular concern about the upcoming Bionic Commando reboot, and frankly, they are valid. A few minutes with the multiplayer demo on Xbox Live has left me anxious - but also wary - toward how they will work out in the final game. By my second match, I had started to get the hang of the arm's zip-line feature; but being able to use it effectively to scale sheer structures etc. still eluded me.

Here's hoping that the single player game has a good tutorial, or a proper beginning sequence that eases into the control system's finer points. I admire GRIN's goal of enabling complex player behavior with a complex control set, but it doesn't mean anything if I can't play it.

Progress: Tried two matches of the Multiplayer Demo

Progress: ...and four-star in all stats

And just like that, I've cleaned up the city. Yes, Crackdown is on the short side, and once all the criminals are gone, the city really isn't as interesting anymore. Things you can do when you're finished fighting crime:

• Different difficulty levels (a hard mode, and a super-hard mode)
• Time trials, re-doing gang boss battles to try for a quick time score
• Checkpoint races, both vehicular and on-foot
• Two-player co-op
• Just resurrect the gang members and give it another go
• ...Achievements

To be fair though, Crackdown is the kind of game that Achievements were made for: marking your accomplishments not just for killing crime bosses, but for blowing up hundreds of cars, or climbing to the top of the city's tallest building.

I should note that, although I beat the game in three or four sittings, Crackdown isn't that short; probably south of 10 hours, but not by much. Every time I sat down to play, I found it extremely difficult to put the controller down. The compartmentalized nature of the gang boss encounters, combined with the fun of exploring the city, and the essentially-nil penalty for death (you go back to a respawn point), made the addiction unbearable. If Realtime Worlds can replicate this kind of gameplay in an online multiplayer form, all hope for humanity may be lost.

Anyway, I might work on my Driving stat - I've maxed out the other four already - but other than that, I think I'm pretty much done with this. Then again, it is the perfect kind of pick-up-and-explode game that I could find myself playing again on a boring weekend.

Progress: Finished on "Tough" difficulty (normal)

I grabbed it on sale from Amazon for $10, and I'm starting to think I wasted my money.

The concept is fun enough: a puzzle game where you, as an escape artist ("Mr. Esc"), rescue helpless people from life-threatening disaster situations. You have to navigate areas like fire-filled rooms and flooded boats, and help the survivors get to the exit. Jump over obstacles, move crates, use items.

Unfortunately, the controls are terrible. I'm not even sure how to describe it. It's never been so hard to go up stairs. Atari 2600 games were easier to play than this. My god.

Progress: Stage 2-5

Comparisons to GTA fall apart quickly - while Crackdown has the open-world violence thing going, the gameplay really feels different. For one thing: driving sucks. Cars handle like hell, and since your bioengineered crime fighter can jump over buildings (and run faster than most cars drive anyway), I haven't even bothered trying to drive since my first couple missions. Also, the aiming is very different, using an accuracy mechanism that makes it more ... fun, like a minigame.

On the one hand, the game is definitely short. In two sit-downs (of a few hours each), I've already maxed two of my character's five primary stats, and cleaned the crime-ridden city of two of its three criminal organizations. On the other hand, these hours have been amazingly fun. Between leaping across rooftops to find agility upgrades, exploring Pacific City for new criminal hideouts, and just plain tooling around looking for thugs to mop up, there's (almost) never a dull moment.

The game is not without flaws; sometimes the aiming gets caught on things you don't want to aim at, sometimes a target is unreasonably difficult to find and takes some wandering around to get to. And like I said, it's definitely short. But man, is it fun.

Progress: Cleaned up Los Muertos and Volk

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