There's really only one problem with monster-selling games like Rollercoaster Tycoon and Theme Park: they're no fun. Somehow, these micro-management games found a way to strip all the amusement out of amusement parks. Can Thrillville change it all?
The simpler setup feels like a good start: You're the young relative of a theme park tycoon and he's thrilled that you're coming on board to help him run the place (and stop Globo-Joy from taking it over). You've got carte blanche to improve
Now that Earth has recovered from its collective World Cup hangover (except for Italy, where the party still hasn't quite wound down), it's time for soccer superstars and regular joes alike to go back to collecting a paycheck. EA Sports focuses back on international leagues with FIFA 07, promising gobs of new features, innovations and enough frantic button press combos to make Winning Eleven fans sit up and take notice.
We got to kick the ball around the pitch in PS2 and Xbox preview versions
What do you do as a follow-up to a bona fide hoops smash hit? At EA, the answer is "More. Lots more" (Side note: we love competing videogame sports franchises). Just as last year's NBA Live 06 reintroduced the star power of the flashiest, dunktastic players in the world, this fall's NBA Live 07 promises to focus even more on highlighting the unique aerial escapades and lockdown stopping skills of your favorite
Your mullet is muy thick, senor. And it streams gloriously in the wind as you throw yourself out the plane and plummet toward an island hundreds of miles below, where whores live in volcanoes, and roaming militias of bloodthirsty madmen slaughter each other for land and power.
The ground approaches rapidly, and you can see a highway winding through the wilderness, so you pull the cord and the parachute flares out. You float down into oncoming traffic, land on the roof of a car, then leap
Every once in a while, an aging series needs a shot in the arm. When Spyro the Dragon originally debuted on PlayStation back in 1998, it was a cute platformer that still managed to be enjoyed by young and old alike. Eight years and over a dozen games later, the series has devolved into something mostly for the kids - who, in fact, largely ignore it.
As the title of the game implies, Legend of Spyro: A New Beginning hopes to reverse all that, taking the little purple guy back to his roots and
Hands-on time with LEGO Star Wars II: The Original Trilogy only confirms what you already knew: If this adorable game does not make you smile, you have no soul. Of course, cute ain't everything, and that's the real reason why our time traipsing through Episodes IV (A New Hope) and V (The Empire Strikes Back ) in a preview version of this Xbox 360 action/adventure was so satisfying. Not only is the game almost huggable (all these warm-fuzzy screens are taken from the Xbox 360 version), it's a
If you think Family Guy is a peculiar cartoon, wait until you see what the Griffin family get up to in the game. Baby Stewie's battling his half-brother Bertram (see the episode when Stewie goes inside Peter's body Inner Space-style) as both try to take over the world.
Meanwhile, Brian the dog's been wrongly imprisoned for impregnating Mr. Pewterschmidt's greyhound Seabreeze and Peter thinks he's starring in a videogame after taking a bang on the head from a satellite dish. Oh, the
Okay, you couch-bound, wannabe PGA pros - consider yourself called out. You may rock at the Tiger Woods golf games, but that doesn't mean you can swing a club in real life. The first shot in the money-where-your-mouth-is campaign was fired by Real World Golf, with its unique, gloves-with-strings controller. But the big gun might be ProStroke Golf, which uses the standard controller you already have to show Tiger a thing or two about "realism" - and may expose your weak skills along the
Fact: one in 1,368 readers will be struck and killed by a falling meteor while reading this. Okay, so that's not entirely true, but similarly absurd situations and scenarios jam the subversive, satirical action-title Bad Day LA way past chock-full. Rock star game designer American McGee pokes fun at our national pastimes of racism and classism during our Bush-Era culture war of fear - but does so using everything from a guy in a hamburger suit to toxic waste-spawned zombies.
Our hands-on look
Theme-park simulators are nothing new, but Thrillville might be the first to mix roller-coaster building with third-person exploration, interactive conversations, first-person shooting and nearly every other conceivable gameplay style to date. Casting players as a kid who inherits a chain of crappy theme parks from a rich uncle, Thrillville tasks you with cleaning up your new playgrounds and building badass attractions to draw in guests.
So, OK, that part is old hat. But once the guests are
