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Muramasa: The Demon Blade (Wii)
Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood (360, PS3, PC)
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Yes, there’s a whole platoon of solid-looking shooters this year – Modern Warfare 2, Halo ODST, Singularity, Wolfenstein – but they’re all set between WWII and the sci-fi futureverse. Real fans should also be loading their six-shooters for this gunslinging Western tale.
For one thing, it’s visually striking – most everything’s brown because it’s the Old West, but scenes like one shootout we had in a burning cornfield are still impressive. Plus, there’s variety. In one half-hour session, we shot up a bar, stormed out of town on a stolen stagecoach, traded hot lead with the sheriff’s posse as they galloped alongside us, and used a cannon to blow up a riverboat. Plus, it’s the only shooter this year that let us fan the hammers of two pistols at once. Physically impossible in the real world? Maybe, but exhilarating in a game.
Split/Second (360/PS3, PC)
We’re about to say something that might rile you: screw Forza and forget Gran Turismo. They’re boring. Our E3 racing game of choice is destructo-combat racer Split/Second. It looks as hot and feels as fast as any other racing game out there, but buries the needle on the excite-o-meter by giving each driver the power to trigger environmental hazards. BIG environmental hazards. In the airport level we raced, the lower-tier items were things like exploding roadside gas tanks. But build up enough power (by drifting, jumping, or having close shaves) and you could first demolish the control tower, revealing a new shortcut, and then bring an entire jetliner crashing down into your opponent’s grill. Best of all, the game tells you when your enemies are in range of a hazard, so you can watch the carnage happen in front of you instead of glancing at it in your rear-view mirror.
Dementium II (DS)
The first Dementium was a surprisingly successful attempt to make a spooky first-person game on the DS. The setting, a psychiatric care facility stuck in an alternate reality and crawling with various ghosts and zombie fleshbeasts, was chilling. It looked better than a DS game has any right to look. The controls worked well – heck, even the real-time in-game flashlight was well handled. Little is known about this sequel outside of a cryptic trailer advertising a mental health hospital (most likely the setting for the game), but it only has to be as good as the original to be one of the year’s best DS titles.
