christiangamer

It can be a beautiful, beautiful time in a gamer’s life – this deluge of highly anticipated games all coming out at around the same time.  But I tell you it’s downright sad for my wallet!  Here is a list of the some of the most interesting games coming out this season (pre-Christmas):

Fable II – I’m playing this one now and it’s great!  If you liked the previous Fable on the original Xbox then this is a game you will love.  It’s rated M for mature though kids, and it earns it for being dark (you can be a very bad guy, or a very good one), cartoon-like violence, and some potty-humored and grown-up interactions with in-game characters.  There’s nothing pornographic in the game – but it has some high-school-health-class material…

Fallout 3 – Interestingly enough, this very grim role-playing game starts out in a very hopeful way, using inspiration from the Bible to get you started.  I hope the hope that the scripture offers is meaningful to all who play through it.  I don’t know how the game ends yet; but I have a feeling that things are going to get worse before they get better.  This post-holocaust rpg is rated M mostly for some very graphic violence and some foul language.  You can also opt to be a dastardly villain in the game; which kind of negates the issue of hope altogether doesn’t it?  You can for instance, choose to detonate a bomb that the town of Megaton was unwisely built around or you can disarm it and save all of those silly townspeople.  It’s a huge and high-quality RPG from the folks at Bethesda that gave us Morrowind and Oblivion.

Little Big Planet – So I have some people come over to my house 2-3 times a week to play games.  Since this game was released it’s pretty much been all we play.  It reminds me a little of Castle Crashers with it’s four-player “co-opetition”.  Except this is a huge game that just may save the PS3 from it’s dust-collecting habit.  LBP is absolutely the cutest, craziest, family-friendliest fun that you can have playing video games right now and will bring non-stop insanity to your next game night.  Easy enough that grandma can play it – difficult enough that core gamers will enjoy it – and it’s essentially a never-ending game since you can make your own levels and download other’s levels from the internet.  It’s rated E and the only thing I would caution parents about is that other people’s levels could have whatever content they want to put in them.  I haven’t seen anything gross or hugely inappropriate yet – but there are some levels with some Nightmare Before Christmas style artwork in them.

These are currently taking up all of my game time; but there are more releases out there that I will be grabbing such as:

Gears Of War 2 – The follow up to 2006 blockbuster Gears of War will be gooier than the first, but Epic Games has put a gore and swearing filter in the game so that those who like the game – hate the goo can have their gears.  It’s very rated M minus the filters though.  Why can’t more developers do this?

Left 4 Dead – I don’t usually get into zombie games; but zombie games where you play with three of your friends and have to work together to survive sound great.  All of the press on this game leads me to believe that this will be a big hit on November 18th.  I don’t know a lot about the game yet.  I know it’s M rated and I would “venture a guess” that it’s gonna be violent.

Parents should be cautioned about Dead Space.  It’s apparently a very, very gory and scary survival game that has you “strategically dismembering” alien infested humans with sci-fi space tools for weapons.  The videos I’ve seen of the main character getting killed are some of the gruesomest, yuckiest visuals I’ve seen since the Manhunt 2 research I did.  I will try and rent it at some point to get a first hand idea – but I’ve heard something about alien-infested babies coming after you and I think that might be a tad disturbing…

Call Of Duty: World At War looks OK but I am a little skeptical.  I doubt that they can surpass the awesomeness that is Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare without resorting to simply getting more wordy and violent (both of which they apparently did increase).  I’m a big fan of Jack Bauer, but I’m not necessarily stoked about hearing him throw around f-bombs in my military games (Kiefer Sutherland is a voice actor in the game and in a preview video I watched he did say a variant of that there dirty word).  It looks intense, but so far, eh…

That by no means wraps things up.  There’s still Mirror’s Edge; Tom Clancy’s EndWar (the demo is cool), Banjo-Kazooie, Prince of Persia, The Last Remnant, Resistance 2, Valkyria Chronicles, Clone Wars Lightsaber Duels (please be good), Mines of Moria for Lord of the Rings Online and more…  all before 2009!

Also notice, parents, that MOST of the big games coming out for the Holiday season are rated M.  Be careful out there.  I will try to keep the content reviews coming… until then a friendly warning: BEWARE THE GAMES AVALANCHE ELSE YOU BE COVERED IN NO MONEY FOR CHRISTMAS!!!!

Man I didn’t even list any DS or PSP games… or World of Warcraft expansions…