PS2

Why so serious?

HIGH Getting to be The Joker is probably a dream most comic fans have—Lego Batman allows you to cross it off your list of life goals.

LOW Being stuck in an area for half an hour, unsure of how to progress because the game's awful platforming mechanics had me convinced that the jump I knew I needed to make (and failed at multiple times) wasn't the correct one—and it turns out it was.

WTF Killer Moth? The Mad Hatter? They really scraped the bottom of the barrel for some of these villains.

Game Description: Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 4 is a console role-playing game (RPG) for Sony's PlayStation 2. Persona 4 takes place in a rural town named Inaba where mysterious murders occur whenever there is fog after heavy rain. The town has a television channel that airs only at midnight called Mayonaka TV, during which it is said that one can see their "other half" while staring at the screen. After hearing about a recent unsolved murder, some characters realize that they had witnessed the murder victim while watching Mayonaka TV. Chronologically the sixth installment in the Persona series, Persona 4 is a suspenseful countryside murder mystery with multiple twists and turns in the plot that will have you guessing all the way to the end.

Bears live inside your TV

HIGH The hilarious mid-summer camping trip.

LOW Unskippable cutscenes and long stretches between save.

WTF One character's totally unexpected mid-game reveal... Literally.

An article in the November 2008 issue of IEEE Spectrum Online describes how Guitar Hero is being used to help "train" artificial arms for amputees. It's part of the Revolutionizing Prosthetics (RP) 2009 project, sponsored by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). One of the RP 2009 project's goals is that:

[i]n four years, DSO [the Defense Services Office] will deliver a prosthetic for clinical trials that has function almost identical to a natural limb in terms of motor control and dexterity, sensory feedback (including proprioception), weight, and environmental resilience. The four-year device will be directly controlled by neural signals.

Guitar Hero: World Tour - 1
Rock Band 2 - 0

Finding Flaws in a Final Fantasy Masterpiece

HIGH The point in the story about four-fifths of the way through, wherein the characters all abandon their misguided faith and fight for what's right instead.

LOW Having to level up for three hours in order to defeat the final boss.

WTF The rock track "Other World" that plays during the final boss fight. Very strange for a fantasy game.

A Spectacular Crime Drama Bringing "Mature" Content to New Heights

HIGH Some of the best writing and character work in video games, ever.

LOW The technical side could really use a revamp.

WTF I have to go out and aimlessly "enjoy the city" again?!?

Game Description: The sequel to Sega's ambitious adventure game set in the heart and underbelly of Tokyo.

Haven't had a whole heck of a lot of time to game this week, but what little time I did have was devoted to Sega's Yakuza 2.

This guy is one seriously badass motherf*cker

I'm not going to talk a lot about it right now because I feel an ethical responsibility to review it and I want to save some ammo for that future piece, but I will say that I think it's great. For those who don't know, the game is basically a real-time brawler with some light RPG elements bound together by an extremely well-written crime drama storyline -- and in this case, i do mean well-written. It's not a parody or a caricature of a story twisted around and made to fit all sorts of absurdly contrived game nonsense... it's a real, honest-to-goodness, straight-up serious crime drama.