PROJECT SYLPHEED: ARC OF DECEPTION (T)
Rating: ***1/2
Square Enix
Xbox 360
After playing “Project Sylpheed,” you might want to step outside and look up at the night’s sky just to remember how relaxing outer space is when it’s big, black and empty because this game’s version of the heavens is frantic, flashy and cluttered with hundreds of enemy spaceships attempting to lock their missiles on you. Add to that an assortment of colorful but confusing particle effects and two generally useless wingmen screaming in your ear, and you’re in for quite a challenging intergalactic dogfight.
Fortunately, your spacecraft is a veritable Swiss Army Knife of armaments, and you get to upgrade these toys after every satisfyingly tense space battle. The story moves you from one battle to the next, but it’s your usual “Star Wars”-meets-anime yarn rendered in Square Enix’s gorgeous-as-always cut-scenes. The real attractions are the aerial acrobatics, which are guaranteed to wear down you thumbs until you’ve restored space to its regular, spacious status.
VAMPIRE RAIN (M)
Rating: *1/2
AQ Interactive/Microsoft
Xbox 360
How do games like these get made? It’s as though the designers accidentally made the levels open-ended, but wanted players to take one specific path. They achieve this by making it impossible on the wrong paths for you to sneak past the super-human vampires undetected (odd for a stealth game), and then they make your weapons too weak to harm the vampires once they’ve found you (which begs the question: Why do you have weapons at all?). When you stop seeing the “Game Over” screen, that means you’ve found the intended path. And when you’ve quit playing, that means you’ve found an even better one.
GRIMGRIMOIRE (E10+)
Rating: ****
NIS America
PlayStation 2
What begins as a “Harry Potter” rip-off (at a school of wizardry, protecting the philosopher’s stone, no less) quickly evolves into one of the most original genre-bending titles of the year. It’s a real-time strategy game with a side-scrolling view in which you use your grimoire spellbook to conjure everything from elves to imps to march into combat at your command. By carefully micro-managing your minions, you can manifest a tiny egg only to hatch it and level it up into a dragon that eventually overwhelms half the screen. Let’s see you do that, Potter!
SMASH COURT TENNIS 3 (E)
Rating: **1/2
Namco Bandai
PlayStation Portable
Is this “Smash Court Tennis” or “Smashed Court Beer Pong”? The way my avatar lethargically stumbles across the court, I’d swear he was drunk. I guess that’s how you play when you’re the 300th ranked tennis player in the world. “SCT3” is more of a straight up simulation than an arcade-style sports game -- which is why it saddles you with such a ridiculous handicap at first. You’ll sober up once you’ve broken into the 100s, if you’re willing to wait that long.
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]