superfrickingbigmac 2010-05-23 19:56:30

Dead Rising 2

Pop-quiz time in Sin City! You have 10 minutes to kill as many zombies as humanly possible. In front of you lies a giant hammer and a wideopen street packed with hundreds of moan-faced shufflers. What do you do? Answer: Institute Hammer Time, of course! Go all crazy and bang away at them to see if you can collect enough points to meet the requirements. But what if it takes longer than 10 minutes? Get creative and it won't. In Dead Rising 2, you aren't limited to just the straight and narrow - you have plenty of other ways to skin a reanimated cat...er, corpse.

We went all hands-on with a short but meaty new area in Dead Rising 2's zombified Vegas strip - a street lined with newly infected undead, odd little retail shops, and a handful of out-of-the-way workbenches for creating interesting new weapons. Using something the game calls "Combo Cards," you're able to combine disparate weapons and items into more powerful, wacky death-dealers. Approach any workbench with an object, put it on the tabletop, then find a second item to combine it with. If there's a marriage to be made between the two, you'll come away with something truly special. And hopefully brutally lethal.

For one combination, we used the workbench to stick bowie knives onto a pair of boxing gloves. Either weapon alone would work just fine in the sea of enemies; but together, you're swinging the makeshift equivalent of Wolverine's adamantiuminfused claws, using quick jabs to put the serious hurt on giant groups of baddies. The combo weapons don't last indefinitely, but you can stack them in your inventory to access anytime until they go bust. In fact, we kept our paddle-'n'-chainsaw combo for as long as we could to do enough killin' to meet the 10-minute goal of 20,000 Prestige Points (PP).

But what if you're looking for a quick fix instead of chasing down combos for workbenches? If you've got the paper, you can poke your head into any number of shops along the strip. Some carry straight-up weapons - like a, ahem, "massager" that's really just a pleasant euphemism for something much more risqué - while others offer pre-made combo weapons for purchase. Picking up a propane tank that's already wedded with some spikes makes for a nice kaboom-style bomb if you manage to stick it on a zombie's head and shoot it with a firearm. There are seemingly countless ways to dole out pain to the shufflers on the street, and half the game's fun might just be finding all of them.

When we finally passed the 20,000 PP mark, though, we were treated to a special unlockable: the chance to ride a motorcycle equipped with dual chainsaws that can cut a mad swath through the masses. How does this small nibble of Dead Rising 2's overall gory glee fit into the main crux of your story-based adventure? Will the whole game be broken up into these mini-challenges? We're still waiting for the answers, but until then, we've got Combo Cards to find.

The Verdict 9.0

:D The zombies almost never look the same so yeah it's awesome
:D I love the fact that anything you see is a weapon.
:( It kind of has a Left 4 Dead feeling to it i like playing games with new feeling.
? why does he always has that raceing sports jacket.
Red Dead Redemption

Red Dead Redemption may just set a world record for Biggest Multiplayer Lobby Ever. Rather than sit in a menu with a text list of 16 Gamertags, you have the entire Sonoran desert to hang out in while you set up matches with your friends. Bide your time in the Wild West, where you can shoot wild animals, wrangle bandits, and even meet up with your posse to tackle missions together, earning experience points as you level your character all the way up to rank 50.

Red Dead feels a lot like Grand Theft Auto IV. With no cars in sight, however, a big part of getting around the massive multiplayer maps is on horseback. Fortunately, the mighty steeds are up to the challenge, handling easily.

Spur them on by pounding the A button (but not too much, lest they buck you off!), and ease them down by tapping RB. Conveniently, they'll automatically leap over small hurdles like boulders and fences. And the higher your rank, the stronger and faster your horse. Whistle for him anytime by pressing up on the D-pad, but if you're a low-level newbie, a literal jackass will mosey on over to schlep you across Arizona.

We tried several game modes once we were done fooling around in the "lobby." All of them start with everyone in a circle or each team facing each other in a duel stance. You'll be prompted to "Draw!" and then aim to be the last man standing. Only then does the proper round begin.

Shootout and Gang Shootout are simply Red Dead's terms for solo and team deathmatch, making great use of the big towns and their buildings. You can snipe from hotel balconies, inside saloons, or while on your horse. Gold Rush and Hold Your Own are solo and team-based capture-the-flag variants, and they proved to be our early favorites. With gold-bearing towns on opposite ends of the region, you'll need to ride over to get the goods, avoiding stationary turrets and authentic lead ball-firing cannons(!) as you dash across the desert. Boom!

Not surprisingly, Rockstar is keeping a few cards close to their chest. We'd have to imagine (and hope!) that one of the unrevealed multiplayer features is an entire mode built around the duels that start each match. Featuring equal parts tension and trash-talk, they're practically begging to be showcased in a more formal capacity. We'll find out at high noon on May 18 and yes i just got it hahaha assholes.

The Verdict

:D I love westsern games like this like Call of juarez bound in blood while that was a great game too bad i'm not reviewing it.
:D I love quick shooting i can kill three people in 2 seconds awesome truely awesome
:D i also love the shootouts with my friends on Xbox live.
? why are the bad guys so smart sometimes it's hard to kill them because they run into building, hiding behind stuff you know?

Alan Wake

You can approach this axe-wielding, boogeyman-dodging thriller in two ways: as a literate, sophisticated mystery told in the form of a videogame, or as a frantic, pulse-pounding actioner about rationing ammo and light sources. The two paths sometimes cross with great effect, but in a game that's all about balance - light and dark, choice and fate, literal and figurative - for one of them to succeed, the other has to stumble a bit.

First, meet Alan Wake. A wildly successful fiction writer with a penchant for dipping into darker territory like crime novels, Alan's also madly in love with his wife, Alice - even if he's sometimes too big of a crank to show it with any consistency. With Alan facing a bout of writer's block, the couple toodle off to the scenic smalltown-ville of Bright Falls to take a break; and maybe in the meantime, the author can get his money-making, novel-penning mojo back as well. Bonus.

Naturally, their best-laid plans go crazy-wrong. Alice vanishes under what can only be described as very mysterious circumstances, and Alan blacks out, only to wake up in a wrecked car several days later. What happened? Where's Alice? And why the hell are black-cloaked lumberjacks trying to decapitate you in Bright Falls' forest at night? Oh, and could someone please explain why pages of a manuscript you don't remember writing are scattered across town...and even worse, why the events covered therein are coming true?

If it all seems strangely familiar, we can see why. Pop-culture-y, psycho-thriller flicks like Flatliners and Jacob's Ladder have explored plot-twisty, "Is it all a dream?" terrain like this before, so it's to developer Remedy's credit that their immensely talented writers do the exact opposite of phoning it in. Alan Wake goes deep into surprisingly literary territory, pulling from a dizzying grab bag of influences: David Lynch's cinematic dream-logic, Mark Z. Danielewski's meta-meta House of Leaves, the brain-teasing TV series Twilight Zone, and even...wait for it...a little Faust? Wake lovingly wears its references on its sleeve, but it ends up delivering a slam-bang stunner of a tale that's compelling yet deliciously