[ Currently: CRANKY ]
Call of Duty 3

This game, like real warfare, is a chore to play that will often make you feel like there is no hope of winning, cut down your morale constantly, and make you feel like stabbing yourself in the knee, just so you’ll feel something other than frustration. War is not a game, it is hard work. So is this game. It is not fun.

While earlier Call of Duty titles were bloomed with patriotism and had interjections by real veterans telling their stories of dead friends and lost limbs to pull on your heart strings, Call of Duty 3 is a light character piece. It feels more like a weak WWII movie that was shot after John Wayne died than a deeply emotional first person look into what World War II was, why our grandparents and great grandparents had to fight, and how every single man’s death was a tremendous tragedy, not only to their comrades, but to the family and community they had left across the Atlantic to do their duty for their country. Your comrades have their own personalities and identities, but there is no emotional attachment to them because the game is a constantly oppressing series of assaults. Your fellow soldiers are a lump of pixels that get in front of your shots occasionally, not a human being and fellow American/Pole/Canadian/Brit whose life you want to help preserve.

As a mindless FPS that focuses heavily on stop and pop elements to get through the level, Call of Duty 3 is a meager portion of more of the same. As a historic testament to a great and dying generation, it is a total failure.

X-Men: The Official Game

I did not finish this game. That’s how bad it was. They spent all of their money getting Alan Cummings, Hugh Jackman, Patrick Stewart and John P. Guywhoplaysbobbydrake to do voice acting on this game, and skipped out on cinematics, a storyline, and gameplay. This is a tedious and unrewarding game that represents everything that is wrong with licensed games. Another strike for Marvel’s games division, which not long ago kept cranking out great games, like The Punisher and The Incredible Hulk. Now, it can’t get a truly good game out to save its life.

Stubbs the Zombie

Just as Conker’s Bad Fur Day before it, Stubbs is a genius and beautiful game that took full advantage of the hardware it came out on – just before it died. Considering that this game was made for the original X-Box, it’s a little more salt in the wound that it looks a lot better than X-Men: The Official Game. The gameplay mechanics are a little tedious, and basically boil down to striking an enemy twice and then eating their brain. But its a lot of fun to create an army of undead to just unleash upon all of your enemies – particularly during one segment of the game which is nice and wide open, and as you steadily amass fellow zombies from the corpses of your fallen foes, they sort of go off to do their own thing and you get to watch as your legion multiplies exponentially.

The game falls apart when it comes to a story. There really is no hint at who Stubbs is, how he died, and why he crawled out of the ground until the final chapters of the game, and the end of the game? Well, it isn’t very satisfying. Until that final hour, it just seems like a mindlessly violent parody of 1950s American drive in movies. And disgusting, too – Stubbs has a sizeable shotgun wound in his left side, and you can see some decaying organs bouncing around inside him throughout the entire game. On the plus side of the campy 50s angle they took on, there are some great updated classics of some old pop tunes, especially the new "My Boyfriend’s Back" and "Lollipop." Hearing them every once in a while throughout the game is a great reminder as to how the generation after Call of Duty 3’s contributed to good ol’ all American rock and roll.

Unfortunately, Stubbs is way too short to merit a purchase, and has no enticements for a second or third play through. It is still a great rental, especially if you have a friend to play co-op with. Or if you just want to see a zombie eat Fonzie’s brain.