Xbox 360 Previews

Floating above the enormous swarm of mecha ants clamoring beneath me, eager to tear my flesh asunder with their razor sharp titanium mandibles, I’m reminded of a quote from Henry David Thoureau:
“Thank God men cannot fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth.”
How wrong you were sir, how wrong you were.

It’s awesome when you can support a game that doesn’t have a trillion dollar Slurpee campaign behind it. For our office, Earth Defense Force has always been that game. There’s nothing grandiose or eye catching about the title on paper, yet it still delivers on every conceivable level. It’s a mystery why there aren’t more games simply focused on delivering nonstop thrills, wave after wave of giant enemies, and a ridiculous amount of upgradable weaponry that any person who’s played a game in the last ten years can easily understand instantly?!

Earth Defense Force: Insect Armageddon is the type of video game that knows it’s a game and revels in it. The game sports a plot similar to that of a B-level action flick – massive insects have begun an invasion of our planet and it’s up to the Earth Defense Force to put a stop to it. Having gotten our hands on this goofy title at E3, it took us no time at all to figure out why developer Vicious Cycle’s previous EDF games have gathered such a loyal cult following. Put simply, the game is fun. Big, stupid, constantly one-upping itself fun.

The game's called Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard. It's a third-person shooter. It's coming out on PS3 and 360 early next year. It's being made by Dead Head Fred developer Vicious Cycle Software. But who exactly is Matt Hazard, where the hell is he returning from and why should we care? To clarify the first two points, watch the video below. To find out if we should actually give a monkeys, keep reading after the movie

So, Edge of Twilight, then. This is the part where we say it’s like X game crossed with Y game, ripping off Z game, right? Unfortunately, yes. Sort of. Let’s just say this is ‘Too Human, but hopefully a lot better’ and be done with it.

El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron is a Japanese-developed third-person action-platformer based upon the Book of Enoch, an apocryphal (read: not considered legit) Judeo-Christian text that was part of the Dead Sea Scrolls. But don’t go thinking you know El Shaddai just because you’ve read your Bible; the game takes a few liberties with its already questionable source material. For example, the main character is a well-cut blonde man prancing around in designer jeans trying to find seven fallen angels in order to stop God from flooding the Earth. Yes, you read that sentence correctly. This. Is. A.Weird. Effing. Game. But that’s actually what makes it so damn interesting...

It's pretty tough to stop a group of renegade angels. No one knows this better than Enoch, who has been charged by God to do just that. After a group of winged ones called the Grigori, who were appointed by God to look over humans, became fascinated by their earthly subjects and decided to defect. Rather than allowing God to flood the Earth to rid it of the angels, Epoch made a deal: If he could capture and return all the angels to Heaven, then God wouldn't doom all of Earth to a watery fate. Seems fair, right?