I would've liked to see what you thought of the game pitted against other sidescrollers outside of the Nintendo realm like LittleBigPlanet in your comparison part. It'd be an interesting thought.

I'm so glad to live in Canada for this. Not a single banned game, which, for a change, pictures Canada as a rather open and progressive country.

Let's just hope this doesn't change...

That review saddens me a bit, I felt like the game could've had a fair bit of potential but it's let down by its very RPG roots.

We need to get away from the D&D structure, it's no more appropriate for modern games!

My sole question would be: why the Wii? Are the motion controls used at all (I didn't seem to notice any mention of them in the review)? Are they essential to the overall experience?

I don't want to bash, but it just pains me that every single game that reviewers say "buy it, it's a good Wii game!", I notice that the game either doesn't use the Wii motion controls or allows you to use standard controls which end up being more reliable.

It just strikes me as odd. I'd love to play this, in any case!

Good for the Spiderman font, but I actually loved those touch buttons.

I'll live on just fine with the "old" PS3 :)

1. Freelancer: A game which I cannot possibly stop playing and working on. Its modding community is still strong 6 years after its release and despite no help from the developers whatsoever. It's addictive, worse than drugs!

2. Guild Wars: The best MMO-like I've seen. Its business model, awesome developer, great ideas and flexibility create one of the most enjoyable games I've ever played. I'm glad the game is massively successful and even moreso that a sequel's shaping up.

3. Company of Heroes: The best RTS ever. 'Nuff said.

4. Sins of a Solar Empire: A very novel and interesting game that takes cues from both 4X, turn-based games and RTS games. It's the best of both worlds, its modding community is flourishing, its developer and its publisher have to be by the best in the industry and the game is just plain fun in all cases.

5. Transport Tycoon: A blast from the past, I know. This game is the precursor to Rollercoaster Tycoon, but I find it better in almost every respect. Its OpenTTD flavor, an opensource clone of the game, is fully compatible with modern systems (the original was released in the mid 90s) and removes all the limitations of the old game. You just start with a pile of cash and you get a huge transportation empire running from there. It's awesome.

For some reason I was *sure* Big Rigs would be #1... Maybe it's just that special!

Makes me feel like playing GTA IV killing dozens of innocent people :P

Nice article GR!

I kinda liked the "M-M-M-MULTI KILL" voice of the Unreal Tournament announcer...

Oh and, add the "You're winner!" from the craptacular game that was Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing.

Many of those look GOOD, but not necessarily revolutionary. Mass Effect 2, Tiger Woods, Scribblenauts, Heavy Rain, The Old Republic, Natal and Borderlands have potential to be. The rest of the lot are evolutionary steps (remember that doesn't stop them from being excellent games in themselves).

Meh. It was OBVIOUS, were you to consider things financially, that the Wii would win. The article could've been resumed to a few words.

That doesn't mean I'm excited for the Wii's lineup at all though. Casual gamers will buy anything that rings a bell with their decaying memory (Mario, Zelda, movie tie-ins) or anything which is trendy (Fit). It's not rocket science.

I think the whole thing about motion control is that it goes against one of the fundamental principles of gaming: that you want to escape reality with them. If you take a good look at it, you'll quickly see that real-world applications (see: Wii Fit, Wii Sports) work not too bad. But what do Uncharted, Call of Duty, Halo or Gears of War have in common? They portrait characters which the common gamer could NEVER emulate! You just don't have the physical strength, the reflexes or the speed to do what they do on a 1:1 basis; you need a controller which lets you drastically multiply every movement you do, you need simple buttons that you can use to make complex on-screen actions. I know I'd never manage mimick Altair's free running or Master Chief's perfect aiming at all times, but with a controller which somehow simplifies the experience, I can enjoy it. Motion controls require you to be able to do the every actions the character does, which in turn limits gameplay. Look at Red Steel 2: while it might be nice to hack and slash enemies all by yourself, you'll notice there isn't so much acrobatics or fancy moves like in Assassin's Creed, Prince of Persia or Wet.

All in all, I just hope the motion control crave dies down quickly so we can go back to good old gaming the way it was meant to be :)

I kinda expected it... The casual audience is killing the whole deal for actual gamers.

I can only pray the disease - yes, it's definitively a disease - doesn't spread to the 360, PS3 and PSP too much, otherwise we're doomed. Why would any corporate guy spend huge amounts of cash on a complex and involving game like GTA IV or MGS IV when they can just as well release a crappy movie tie-in on the Wii for a tenth of the price and make similar sales?

Thanks GR for showing me this world is doomed.

Okay, I laughed a bit too hard on this one... Great work :D

I loved the effect from Mirror's Edge. I actually felt it gave a lifelike look to the game and made you FEEL how it would be to be... dangling up from a two-hundred feet building, running at ludicrous speeds while a heli is trying to transform you into a large piece of swiss cheese.

Actually, I think the split-screen TV would be very possible, at least for two players. Take a 120Hz television, two pairs of glasses a bit like the nVidia GeForce 3D Vision and modify them a bit: instead of hiding one of the eyes for 1/60th of a second, make them hide BOTH eyes for 1/60th of a second. Then, synch both glasses so they are dephased by 1/60th of a second and make the computer alternate between displaying both screens. Bingo, two-player (not) split-screen!

It'd become harder for n>2 players, since you'd have your eyes hidden for (n-1)/60th of a second and open for 1/60th... which would likely be visible.

Making this article must've been hell... There are so many good devs out there, but a lot of them, at their beginning, made crappy games!

Bungie? Oni wasn't all that great.

Relic? The Outfit sucked.

Infinity Ward? The CoD series is their SOLE work, so maybe they didn't fit the size criterion. On top of that, I'd say CoD2 could've been better.

Ubisoft? Oh gosh, just look at the gazillion FarCry offshoots or the Imagine games (yes, Babyz is made by them).

Square Enix? Don't know them much, but I guess within the huge amount of FF games out there, maybe one sucked.

Level 5? No idea, all their games are great. Maybe they felt Dark Cloud was a tad low on Gamesranking, but that'd be nitpicky, eh?

Ensemble Studios? Eh, great games, but Halo Wars is on the lower end of the spectrum...

Sounds good, but I'll stay with my Freelancer thank you :)
(No modding, no going here)

With GameSpot giving this a 6.5, I think my initial feeling has been confirmed. This game is really just milking the name with something pretty generic and lackluster.

I hope M$ (and everyone else, for that matters) understands that RTS games belong to the PC, final. But since M$ seemingly wants to kill PC gaming, I'm guessing they'll be pushing again soon...