MARIO STRIKERS CHARGED (E10+)
Rating: ****
Nintendo Wii
Forget David Beckham -- Mario is this country’s most exciting new addition to soccer, and he’s a lot more likely to get Americans interested in this global sport. Of course, that may be because Mario Strikers Charged only bears a passing resemblance to European football. With its insane power-ups and last-minute reversals, the frantic gameplay is a lot closer to that of Mario Kart. You can grow to enormous size, fire red and green shells at your opponents or charge up your shot to launch multiple soccer balls at the goal at once.
Since possession of the ball relies heavily on body checking (which is a lot closer to hockey than soccer), it’s important for the game to put you up against suitably challenging and aggressive A.I. Unfortunately, your adversaries -- an assortment of Mushroom Kingdom regulars -- tend to take it easy on you, which is why Mario Strikers Charged works best as a multiplayer game. And with fantastic online support, this should prove to be one of the more popular Wii online titles … until the new Mario Kart comes out this winter and reminds us again that Americans don’t care about soccer.
ALIEN SYNDROME (T)
Rating: **
Sega Wii
Sega’s classic arcade shooter gets an RPG Wii-fit and thus becomes one of the dullest exercises in extra-terrestrial extermination in recent memory. Generic alien bugs are too sluggish to be a challenge but too thick-skinned to be quick kills. There’s a temptation to skip past them altogether, but the cruel RPG game design demands that you blast every worm in order to level up, or you’ll find yourself too weak to tackle the boss. So be prepared to circle-strafe yourself into a state of vertigo.
GLORY DAYS 2 (E10+)
Rating: ***1/2
Secret Stash Games Nintendo DS
Rather than making you a ridiculously powerful one-man air force, this sidescrolling DS shooter has you lend air support to tanks and ground troops. Since you have to deploy paratroopers to take over key targets, there’s an element of strategy to what would otherwise be another edition of Shoot Everything That Moves. It’s a nifty game, but the cumbersome controls may require several hours of flight experience to master.
PICROSS DS (E)
Rating: ****
Nintendo Nintendo DS
Thank God I’m single, because Picross is the kind of game that could ruin a relationship. At first, the game would only distract me from doing the occasional chore, but as the puzzles grow longer and more complex, I’d begin to ignore her altogether. She wouldn’t understand my addiction because, to the uninitiated, the game looks like meaningless grids and numbers. But finding the hidden pictures in these graphs would inevitably lead me to forsake decorum, human interaction and any chance of a meaningful existence. Awesome.
When Las Vegas Weekly contributor Matthew Scott Hunter realized his career as a lab technician was seriously interfering with his gaming, he pink-slipped himself into a successful career as a freelance writer. Bug the hell out of him at [email protected]