There are plenty of reasonably cool videogames coming out this week that should be good enough to hold us over until ‘Marvel vs Capcom 3’ and ‘Bulletstorm’ hit later this month. Wii fans should be particularly excited, since a new Nintendo published game is hitting the system.
Mario Sports Mix (Wii)
There’s only one name you can truly count on when buying Wii games, and that’s Nintendo itself. The latest for the system is published by Nintendo but developed by Square Enix, which makes for an interesting pairing.
‘Mario Sports Mix’ features the usual assortment of Nintendo characters playing a variety of sports including volleyball, ice hockey, and dodgeball. If you’ve played any of the Mario themed sports games in the past, you know what to expect here – gameplay that’s a little shallow but incredibly fun.
As an added bonus for Squeenix fans, you’ll find familiar characters like Cactuars, Moogles and slimes from the ‘Dragon Quest’ series.
Dungeons (PC)
Richard Cobbett of PC Gamer summed up this game perfectly in the first paragraph of his review. “Some games wear their inspirations on their sleeves,” he writes. “Dungeons wears a Dungeon Keeper T-shirt, drives a red and black car with a ‘I heart Dungeon Keeper’ sticker on it, and visits a plastic surgeon every Tuesday to ask if he’s ready to give it that Horned Reaper look it so badly wants.”
That’s not an insult to the game, though. ‘Dungeon Keeper’ is one of my favorite PC games of all time, and nothing has come close to pulling off the style since. The ‘Overlord’ games were a good start, but nowhere near what I was looking for.
‘Dungeons’ looks incredibly promising, despite a few gameplay flaws and an overemphasis on micro-management.
Test Drive Unlimited 2 (360, PC, PS3)
The tenth game in the ‘Test Drive’ series revolutionizes the genre. Your job is to drive cars fast. Not just fast, but faster than other people who are trying to drive faster than you. You can even get better cars for driving faster than people, and then use those better cars to drive even faster.
Did I lay that on thick enough? Yeah, I thought so. Look, ‘Test Drive Unlimited 2’ is a racing game, and unless the word “racing” is preceded by “Rock ‘n Roll,” then I just plain don’t care.
