Columns

Tonight, the evening of October 27, gamers and journalists from across the country gathered at the Experience Music Project in the heart of Seattle to celebrate the release of PopCap Games' newest offering: Bejweled Twist.

Despite my hesitation to comply with the $15 price point that's been occurring more frequently on the various download services, I've been hearing nothing but good about World of Goo via WiiWare and decided to take the plunge—thankfully, the word on the ‘net was correct.

The art style is great

 

With the resounding success (on any platform) of the download model, publishers and developers are now starting to cash in as the price for electronic delivery creeps up.

Although $10 had been originally thought to be the sweet spot for consumers (I agree), more and more titles are now sporting a $15 price tag.

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.

I've seen tons of screens and read lots of articles, but PSN had a brand-new demo up so I gave that a whirl... The gist of the game is that you're a soldier from the Unreal school of how-do-you-move-in-that-armor? character design and you've got a gun that can affect change in the landscape tectonically. With a shot from your high-tech gee-whiz machine, you can raise small hills or create sinkholes, among other things.

There's a little bit of a lull in game releases right now before the total insanity of fourth-quarter holiday sales get started, so I'm taking the time to catch up on a few older titles. I played on PS2 last week and had a good time with that (check the review ) and this week, it's also on PS2.

This may not be news to anyone, but I recently signed up for the XNA Creator's Club on Live. For those who may not be familiar with it, this is the program that enables players to make their own game on a PC and then upload it to Xbox Live.

Played two demos recently, neither one convincing me to drop the cash. On 360—. From the Behemoth, the same wacky guys that brought us comes a four-player side-scrolling beat-‘em-up in the vein of just about anything that was in arcades during the 90's.

It’s as sure as death or taxes that anyone who takes up videogaming will find themselves rooting through a bargain bin or scouring pre-owned shelves sooner or later. Welcome to the twentieth installment of a semi-regular feature here at GameCritics.com—the Bargain Basement, in which we'll be covering Folklore, Clive Barker's Jeicho and Saint's Row.

Like most of the civilized world, I downloaded and played the Star Wars: Force Unleashed demo today, and I was a little surprised by what I found. There were a couple of surprises, at first pleasant, and then soon after, decidedly less so.