More, please!

Bionic Commando: Rearmed. Yeah, I'm excited :) More remakes, please! I'm also kind of excited to learn that we'll be getting a free copy of Undertow on XBOX Live Arcade in response to the network outages over the holidays! While the demo didn't blow me a away, it's not at all a bad game, and free is always nice.

NHL08 seems to have gotten pretty easy as my "difficult" season has progressed, but it's still the best hockey game out there, and it is fun, so I guess I'll manage ;) Also, I've almost finished The Two Thrones, and, thankfully, that arduous puzzle-to-minigame-to-boss-battle sequence seems to have been the worst of things as the final chapter is progressing along quite nicely.

I also finished TimeShift. There's a lot of potential for an original experience in there, but the pacing really holds things back. The novelty of the time shifting gameplay wears off pretty quickly, and first half of the game starts to drag; combat becomes either frustrating or gimmicky, and travel from point to point feels tedious. While I had a lot more fun during the second half, I don't think it was because of a drastic shift in gameplay (though the missions did seem shorter, and the combat more frenetic) or because my guys started making some real headway in the war, but rather because the plot started to make a little more sense and I had a compelling reason to finish the game. The over-arcing story in TimeShift is revealed through painfully short and horribly fragmented (and thus mildly confusing, even without the time travel motif) cutscenes interspersed throughout the game. That was a bad idea. Give me a solid intro movie, reveal important plot points through cohesive and non-intrusive means throughout the first act, give me the big honkin' plot twist after the midway point in the form of the the whole movie that you hacked to pieces, and then build towards the climax and give me a rewarding cutscene for the finale. I say that the game has potential because all of these components are present in the final version of TimeShift, but are so mangled that it takes a concerted effort to understand just exactly what is going on, let alone the importance of the whole story. TimeShift could've been a more action-oriented Half-Life-esque title, but instead we got a dumb, gimmicky action game that narrowly fails at delivering any kind of redeeming narrative... Still, it's worth a rental.