XBLAwesomeness
In what little time I've had to relax (meaning: for a couple of hours this morning), I've been indulging in a few of the latest gems from Xbox Live Arcade. Now, a portion of this column is supposed to be dedicated to covering the latest XBLA releases, and so I'd like to spend a smidgen of time on the pair of beauties I've been lucky enough to pull off of Xbox Live Marketplace a tad early.
Aces of the Galaxy: This classic-style shooter is actually surprisingly reminiscent of an old arcade game known as Galaxy Force. You pilot a ship as waves of fighters, frigates and dreadnoughts assail you in a 3D rail-shooter fantasy. It's pretty staggering in terms of visual impact and it's clear that developer Artech Studios spared no expense when purchasing its shipment of flashy laser beams, cluster missiles and mushroom cloud-laying torpedoes. It's not quite as frantic or challenging as the likes of Ikaruga, but honestly, what game is as frantic or challenging as Ikaruga anyway? The one drawback that I could see was in the weapon upgrade system which will allow you to boost the power to only one weapon at a time. This could be viewed as a way to balance things out a bit, but if the upgrades were only slightly more difficult to come by the game would be incomparably sweet if you could power your ship up to god-like awesomeness.
Aces of the Galaxy is a fairly delightful diversion for anyone looking to fly around in a gorgeous 3D star field packed with gigantic space ships that all fire kaleidoscopic lances of coherent light at you. For people that positively love such experiences (like myself, for example), it's mandatory.
Wolf of the Battlefield: Commando 3: Continuing in the vein of classic arcade mechanics all gussied up with snappy next-gen graphics, we have WOTB: Commando 3. It's essentially just a re-skinned Smash TV (or Robotron 2084 or Loaded or (most aptly) Assault Heroes) with some snazzy comic-style cartoon caricatures where bare-chested, blood-soaked game show contestants used to be. Of course, we're already aware that this is a winning formula, so it's not terribly shocking that Commando 3 is at least mildly entertaining. What this game features that many do not is the ability to play co-operative multiplayer over Xbox Live with two of your friends (presumably because there are only three cartoony characters in the game rather than four). Unfortunately, while most of the combat is pretty cool, the bosses tend to fall prey to being entirely too similar to one another, so there's not a lot of variety to be found at the end of each level besides a gun-studded tank of titanic size.
Still, if it's some mindless, three-quarters perspective violence you want, then you could probably do a lot worse than Commando 3 and although the comic booky art direction might turn some off, I found it to be a nice change of pace from all of the stylized realism I've been submerged in while playing GTA4.
And that's about all the time I have this week, which is kind of a shame since I wasn't actually able to get around to telling you all about my lovely fiance's growing love for Grand Theft Auto IV (although even I am starting to feel like that game is getting a bit too much press, so perhaps it's all for the best). As always, feel free to email me with any comments you might have about this column, 'Spy-Hunter or how much you miss Patrick.
