Kinectimals
Microsoft
There’s no denying that these cats are cute. But honestly unless you’re under 10-years-old and are obsessed with wild cats (see: me in the early ’90s) then you’re not going to be into this somewhat clunky virtual pet game. Still, many people can probably get a solid day and a half of adorable good times here, which is enough for a rental.

Adrenalin Misfits
Konami
I know that wolf and dragon look kind of cool. Trust me, they aren’t. If listening to the dumb ape announce refer to you as “my baby” isn’t enough to get you to turn the game off, the slow, boring gameplay will finish the job. You’re not missing anything here.

Sonic Free Riders
SEGA
I’m not sure why so many people are into the Sonic style of talking animals, but yeah. If what you want in a video game is to stare at Tail’s butt as he leans forward to turn on his hoverboard, then this is the game for you. It’s actually a pretty fun little hoverboard kart racer, assuming you can get the controls to work properly, which take a good deal of patience.

Dance Central
Harmonix
I know, it’s not actually a furry game, but I’ve been to enough fursuit dances to know you people need some new moves. And this game actually teaches you some pretty cool (and some pretty lame) dance moves. If there is any reason to get Kinect, this is it.

Note that most of these games work pretty well even in fursuit. Yeah, I do my fucking research for you people.

Now I liked the first Super Mario Galaxy just fine. It had its issues, but the game was a lot of fun, looked good, and was definitely the best thing on the Wii that year. However I didn’t get pulled into it and wasn’t motivated to fully beat the game.

Galaxy 2 has that right combination of fixing the problems I had with the first game, and adding new things that make the game better. The story is completely different, making the game more of an alternate title than a sequel (so if you never played the first one, don’t worry). And it’s a much better story, going back to the simpler roots of the series. Bowser steals the Princess, Mario has to save her. It’s basic, but it works, and honestly, I don’t need a ton of exposition in a Mario game. The story that is there is amusing, and the dialogue is humorous. The jokes even get a little self deprecating, which is weird and awesome coming from Nintendo.

Oh and did I mention Bowser is a giant in the game? Nintendo seems to be making their main villain go the Godzilla route, because this is the fourth game in three years where he’s all macro. Just sayin’.

It’s all about the level design in Galaxy 2. These are just straight up fun planets to play on. Everything explodes with style, and the gameplay switches up so often that it never gets stale or repetitive. Sometimes you’ll be running around with a giant drill having to punch through the entire planet. Or you’ll be in a sidescrolling plant level, swinging off giant flowers. Or in a haunted house avoiding ghosts. Or hopping through clouds. I never got to a level and went “Oh this again.” I did however get to plenty of levels and think “This is really cool”, and that’s becoming a rarer occurrence these days.

Yoshi is definitely a welcome addition to the game, and I’m thrilled to see him back. The transition to 3D for the dinosaur is actually pretty smooth. He plays just how you’d expect him to in Super Mario World on the SNES. Plus he’s got three different powerups, all of which are fun. Combine those with the numerous classic and new suits for Mario, and there’s a ton of variety to make the game eclectic and awesome.

Galaxy 2 is also packed with homages to Mario’s entire career. From the music to the themes of the level, it’s a tribute to the spunky plumber. If you’re a fan it’s great, and if you’re not a fan it’s fine because it’s not some inside joke you have to “get”. It’s more of a visual “best of Mario games” collection.

Really my only complaint with the game is that some of the cooler levels that require some serious, unadulterated platforming skills are only unlocked after getting all 120 stars. I would have liked to play those throughout the entire game instead of having them in one huge chunk at the end.

If you own a Wii, there’s really isn’t a reason not to get Mario Galaxy 2. It is, quite possibly, the best Wii game I’ve ever played, and one of the best platformers ever.

Basically SEGA All-Stars Racing is Mario Kart with SEGA characters, which sounds like the worst thing ever. But, unlike other attempts to inject Sonic and friends into games (looking at you Tennis and Olympics!), this one is actually fun.

I’ve always enjoyed a good kart racer, but somehow Sonic and racing has never been a good match. But Sumo Digital did it. The racing mechanics are solid, despite some framerate issues. The tracks are gorgeous and fun, all based around famous SEGA games. There’s a ton of style, with the character animations and weapons. And the game is actually challenging, so it doesn’t feel like a kid game. If Sonic Heroes, or Sonic Riders, or that other Sonic Riders game were even half this good, I wouldn’t have thrown them in the garbage.

Calling these characters “all-stars” is a bit of a stretch for anyone who wasn’t a big Dreamcast fan. But since I was a SEGA brat until early 2000 I instantly recognized Beat, Ulala, Ryo, the ChuChus, and BD Joe. It’s all the bastard children that SEGA has forsaken, reuniting like a cheesy reality show.

And yes, there are a ton of Sonic universe characters, good and bad. Sonic, Tails, Knuckles, Shadow, Amy and, for some weird reason, Big the Cat are all playable characters. Sorry you freakshow Rouge the Bat fans.

Xbox 360 owners get a bonus: Banjo & Kazooie and the Avatars are playable characters. PS3 owners get shafted. It’s out for the Wii too, but I rarely, if ever, recommend a Wii version of a multi-console game.

The best part of the All-Stars Racing, by far, is the annoying commentator who shouts at you as you race. He has “witty” comments whenever any player does anything. He would be terrible except half of the things he says sound sexual out of context (the other half sound sexual even within context). You get to hear a guy that sounds like Adam West shout things like:
–Tails took a real pounding there!
–Big, showing he can take as well as give!
–AiAi takes a bruisin!
–Sonic taking it where it hurts there!
–The big cat gets the cream!
–All Billy can do is just lap that up!
–Ouch, Amy takes a nasty one!
–Ulala, taking it like a champ!

Despite SEGA’s best intentions, there are still fans of Sonic the Hedgehog, and most of them seem to be in the fandom. It’s definitely worth adding to the collection for Sonic or kart racing fans. This is the first 3D game starring Sonic I’ve genuinely enjoyed in a decade. And yeah, I’m labelling this as a Sonic game. If him being a stretchy armed werewolf or a knight of the fucking round table count, then so does this.

I don’t have anything against High Impact Games, but why does Sony keep giving it popular franchises to fuck up? I could understand letting the team try Ratchet and Clank games since it’s made up of former Insomniac guys, but Jak and Daxter isn’t even their franchise.

The game is not terrible, let me say that much. In fact, for a while it feels a lot like the first game in the series The Precursor Legacy. It’s a lot of old school platforming, with less of a focus on the gunplay, though that’s in there too. The basic mechanics of the series are here: double jumbling, spin attacks, and levels full of floating platforms. Added into the mix are flying levels which are also pretty fun thanks to the ability to customize the plane’s weapons and stats. The gameplay get’s somewhat tedious since every mission seems to go on just long enough to stop being fun. And there are some serious camera issues that makes platforming harder than it needs to be.

For fans of the series the story is going to be where the game really fails. Naughty Dog does great cutscenes, and unfortunately High Impact can’t match it. The characters are stiff and one dimensional, unable to convey the seriousness of the plot with any emotional impact. Max Casella still shines as Daxter, though his lines are far less clever and snarky. And while The Lost Frontier is supposed to be the fourth game in the series, the writers don’t even bother to keep canon, choosing to ignore any and all significant events in Jak 2 or Jak 3. There are no returning characters, and all of the new characters are just terrible.

And of course, then there’s Dark Daxter. Thankfully High Impact changed the voice acting from the earlier demos it showed, so he comes off less retarded, and more Hulkish. For those of you wondering, his transformations are an instant purple flash, and there are very few instances of this. There is one moment where he outgrows and beats up some bad guys, but usually he’s just throwing energy balls at spiders, or completing very rudimentary puzzles. Not fun, and not hot.

Daxter proved that a Jak and Daxter PSP game by a different developer could work. The Lost Frontier is nowhere near as good. The world feels diluted with the bad characters, weak plot, and lackluster gameplay, despite the throwback to earlier games. Good thing it’s on the PSP and PS2, so only, like, six people will ever play it.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Smash Up is pretty much just Super Smash Bros Brawl with the Turtles. Not to say that it’s an exact clone, but it’s similar enough to make the comparison fair. It’s a four player fighting game that focuses on powerups and items, and features large, multi-tiered levels. You can either beat the shit out of your opponent, or throw them off the level and have them fall to their death. You play as any of the Turtles, Splinter, April, Casey Jones, Shredder, or a few other characters. It’s not a big cast, especially compared to the games it’s based on, but it has the main characters from the recent film.

In fact, TMNT: Smash Up has less of everything. As far as characters, levels, and items go, it’s more on par with the N64 Smash Bros. It definitely would have been nice to throw in some more characters, even if they were just clones. I wouldn’t care if Usagi Yojimbo played exactly like Leonardo, I’d still pick him.

The game isn’t bad, and honestly if you were unfamiliar with Smash Bros you’d probably love it. But at the same time the only reason you’d grab this game is because you were familiar with Smash Bros.

I love the Turtles, and I love Splinter even more (yeah yeah, old rats get me going), and the developers tried to give love to all fans. The cutscenes are based on the original comics, the design is reminiscent of the CGI film, and the levels have a very over the top original animated series feel.

Speaking of the levels, those are by far the best part. There are multi level arenas like the sewers that will blast you deeper down the drains where hungry alligators wait to eat you. There are moving levels like a cruise ship that hits an iceberg and sinks, forcing you to hop along ice rafts and avoid hungry sharks that want to eat you. Hell, if you like seeing the TMNT cast get eaten, you’d better just buy the game now because it happens a lot.

There’s no way TMNT: Smash Up can replace Brawl as far as character-driven multiplayer fighting mayhem party explosion games go, but it’s nice to have another game in the genre.

Don’t get me wrong, “ODST” is a good game, and in some ways I like it more than “Halo 3”, but for $60 I expect a little more game in there. The development team, comprised of a fraction of Bungie’s main team, did some interesting things with the title, mostly in the way the story is told.

The ODST, that’s Orbital Drop Shock Troopers are a special ops type of group on a secret mission. Things go bad and the team gets separated, and you get your ass knocked out for six hours. Most of the game centers around The Rookie, a nameless filler character you play, as he searches the ruined city of New Mombasa for his missing team. As he finds clues, the game switches perspectives to fill in the missing time. So you keep switching characters, and jumping around in the six hour timeline, playing different roles and unraveling what went wrong. There is also a side story, told through audio recording found throughout the city, that explains a little more about what happened before you arrived on the scene. The voice acting is great (though the character models look a bit funky), and the story is compelling and interesting, even if you’re not a fan of the series. It’s a very character driven story, without as much of the alien governmental religious bullshit from the main games.

Much of the game feels like a toned down version of the main game, a “Halo Lite” if you will. All the normal villains from the previous games are here — Grunts, Brutes, Hunters et al — but the scale of the battles has been pulled back. Sure there are a few huge fights, but nothing to the scale of “Halo 3”. The fact really hits home when you fight a Scarab, the massive spider looking tank that was stomping and blowing up shit left and right in “Halo 3”. In “ODST” you shoot its butt a few times from the safety of the air, and it’s toast.

If you don’t die a bunch, the story mode is around five hours, which is about as long as it took me to beat “Disney/Pixar’s Up”. That’s just way too short for a first party title with this much hype behind it. Sure, you can go back and try to find more audio files, but that’s not really a compelling reason to replay the same levels. There is a co-op multiplayer mode called Firefight, where you defend against waves of enemies. It funny because this is the closest thing that comes to the scale of the original games, and it seems like they could have worked it into the campaign, since that supports co-op anyway.

If you don’t own “Halo 3” there is a significant bonus in that “ODST” comes with a second disc of “Halo 3” multiplayer. It allows you to play online in one of the most popular games on Xbox Live, with all the maps, including the DLC ones. But chances are anyone who bought this game was a Halo fan anyway, so it’s just a useless extra disc.

It’s hard to recommend a purchase for “ODST”. The game is solid, but nearly everything good about it is the same stuff Bungie has made for three other games now. The storyline is interesting, the voice acting is great, and the gameplay is good, though mostly just an easy version of Halo 3 with limited environments. But it’s also only a few hours long, and most of the multiplayer is literally the same as the last game. If you need a little Halo fix before “Halo: Reach” comes out, or you have hard on for Nathan Fillion (and who doesn’t?), go for it. But maybe just a rental.

Let me break the story down for you (illustrated, of course).

First, a bunch of the toads in Mushroom Kingdom get suddenly and inexplicably inflated. They blow up all big and round, and end up completely immobile. So Princess Peach calls on the Mario Bros to help solve the mystery.

Meanwhile, Bowser (who is just the biggest dumbass possible in this game), gets tricked into eating some mysterious mushroom by an absolutely bizarre little guy who uses the word “chortle” with no irony whatsoever. He’s the main villain of the game, and the source of most of the zany shit that happens.

Eating this mystery mushroom doesn’t make Bowser strong enough to defeat everyone. Instead it causes him to start inhaling everything around him and swallowing it. And when he heads to Mushroom Kingdom, he sucks up every main character in the game and gulps them down, trapping them inside his body. Somehow they shrink along the way, so Bowser’s body is a huge new world. And this world, of Bowser’s guts, muscles and brain is where the plumbers spend nearly all of their time.

The Mario and Luigi portions of the game should feel familiar to anyone that’s played the previous two games in this series. Turns out Bowser’s insides are laid out much like classic Mario Bros levels. There are some minor platforming elements, coin boxes, and other classic Mario fare. But when Mario jumps on an enemy, instead of flattening him, you’re taken into a turn based RPG battle. A lot of it is based on timing and team work, but it’s pretty standard RPG stuff.

Most of the game actually centers on Bowser, which is a nice change of pace. When Bowser comes to a roadblock of some sort, usually something requiring a boost in strength, Mario and Luigi zip over to the are of his body that needs attention, fighting impurities, or helping jump start his system.

Like the previous game, the battles can jump from the top screen to the bottom screen. Bowser has the ability to inhale his opponents and gulp them down. Once inside Mario and Luigi can beat them up a bit, then kick them back out.

The game doesn’t get stale because every few minutes you seem to be doing something completely different. Sometimes you’re solving puzzles, then you’re punching down walls, then you’re helping Luigi stuff his face until he’s morbidly obese to perform a special attack (there’s another kink!).

But my favorite had to be taking a trip to “Rump Command”. Yeah, that sounds dirty enough as it is, but take a look at the picture there. That’s not where your rump is. Add in the fact that you’re entire purpose there is to shoot lasers around to make Bowser’s adrenaline spike and it becomes pretty apparent that the Bros are right where those freaky cock vore fan fiction stories end up.

Oh and did I mention that when you do shoot his nuts up, he goes into a rage and grows all macro? Because he totally fucking does. And then proceeds to beat the shit out of stuff, Koopzilla style.

Now even if you’re not the type that’s going to need to tuck it into your waistband before you play this in public, “Bowser’s Inside Story” is great. The dialogue is hilarious, the fake Italian voice acting is borderline racist (and awesome), and every single part of the game is a blast to play. It never gets boring, and that’s saying something considering the game is dozens of hours long.

I can’t recommend this game highly enough. It’s a fresh and fun RPG, and it’s practically tailor made to appeal to the entire fandom.

The gameplay is standard “Rock Band“. (I’m not going to elaborate because if you’re reading this website you should know what that game is and have an opinion on it.) Some love it, some are sick of it. I still like the game, and don’t mind more of it.

It’s all about The Beatles, not you. No character creation, no naming a band, no customizable anything. This is an interactive documentary of the boys from Liverpool.

The Beatles are one of the only bands that can carry an entire music game (sorry Metallica, Aerosmith, Queen, and ABBA games, but it’s true). And with 13 albums, there are hundreds of tracks to choose from, so the fact that there are 44 on the disc is kind of bullshit. I get that the developers and publishers want people to buy the upcoming DLC, but there could have easily been 60 songs with no problem. Hell they didn’t have to be all of their Top 20 singles, load some of those B-sides and lesser known songs in there and educate people! You think anyone under the age of 40 is going to spend money on those random unfamiliar tracks from “Revolver” or “Abbey Road” anyway?

That said, what is on the disc is gold. These songs are great, and despite being bombarded with them for the past few months, I still love listening to, playing, and singing them. The dreamscapes are really cool, and actually make the game fun for parties of more than four. Watching the world shift and transform based on the song is more interesting than any part of that stupid “Across the Universe” movie.

I never bothered to figure out which Beatle sang what, or when the songs were recorded, and “The Beatles: Rock Band” does a good job of educating me. The story mode follows the career of the Fab Four, and is broken up into different venues and song sets from their brief but illustrious career. It’s nice to know that my favorite years for the Beatles are 1967-69, and that I have a soft sport for George Harrison tunes. I thought I hated that guy.

A few other notes. Three part harmonies are harder than they look, but fun when you do it right. And “Realistic” mode makes the crowds scream so loud that you can’t hear anything. No wonder these guys stopped touring.

This game really is a must buy for anyone that enjoys “Rock Band” or The Beatles. Of course you’ve got to be a sourpuss of monumental proportions to dislike either of those. It’s out now, so go get it.