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I wanted to make a different kind of gaming best-of list this year, but it’s hard. Indie gaming is growing, but there’s just not enough for a catch-all critical list like you’d find at Pitchfork Media for music. But I do my best for now. Here, you will not find Metal Gear Solid 4, LittleBigPlanet, Wii Fit, or most any other bloated crapware in this list. Sorry. I did mention a couple of those in my buyers’ guide a few weeks ago, and I apologize for that as well.

Best Gaming Award: “Soulja Boy Award for Games To Play If You Drink And Get Drunk or Smoke And Get High”
GiantBomb.com isn’t great, but it is good.

Best Interactive Art: Braid
No release this year better combines creative puzzles and artistic design with an emotional goal. It’s remarkable when you press a button to make time rewind in Braid. It’s more remarkable when, a few levels in, your attempts at memory recall are jumbled because some things don’t follow you to the past. And when the character’s emotional toil in the game catches up to express why this gameplay trick exists? The result is beyond literary.

But there’s an important question to ask before diving in: when you close your eyes, can you see exactly how the original Mario jumps? His bounce, his weight, his gravity? You better, because this game demands that you jump all over the place, carefully, repeatedly, in tricky situations. Rewinding time helps here, but old-school frustration doesn’t do Braid’s storytelling any favors. Oh well. Still incredible.

Best Toy: World of Goo
On the other end of the spectrum—games as shameless toys—World of Goo wins handily. You’re given clumps of stringy goo and are told to build towers, bridges, and ladders from point A to point B. Cartoony architecture. But you can’t just throw digital Legos on a screen and expect success; here, half the fun is in the learning curve. Each new type of goo and each gameplay tweak is eased into the game so that most puzzles serve as an instruction manual without the player realizing it. The strain-to-satisfaction ratio is divine as a result, helped even more by a unified, quirky aesthetic experience that’s more Seussian than any motion picture tribute in the past decade. With everything WoG gets right, consider it a living design primer.

Most Inconvenient Game to Love: Left 4 Dead
Do not play this game alone. Do not play this game with anonymous assholes on the Internet. Fanboys have complained about L4D’s relatively small size, but there’s a reason—it’s hard to round up three other friends for this game’s hour-long zombie kill-gasms, and you need a four-strong team to make it work. And as a short-burst group game, L4D spends its resources not on more maps, but on the thrilling bits that have made it infinitely replayable since its release last month. The game’s balanced thrills do not wane. Shame that they damn near require a LAN setup in the basement—pizza is not optional.

Best Arcade Game: Primeval Hunt
At Seattle’s GameWorks, Big Buck Hunter meets Jurassic Park. Not a typo; this showed up in town maybe a month or so ago. Shoot a Diplodocus in the head with a crossbow. Nail a T-Rex in its abdomen with a shotgun. Jonah will never have to write one of these posts again.

Best Game to Play Badly: Burnout Paradise
You can play this racing game the “right” way—win races, pull off stunt runs—and have a fine time. But Burnout Paradise is far more fun as a wreckfest. Fling your SUV off a bridge into a rocky river. Drive to the top of a parking garage and try to jump your car on top of a bus. Earn the super-powered van and clear the roads with your Bub Rub driving skills. It’s the best-looking driving game of the year, which makes endless wrecks through a massive gameworld all the more satisfying. I have played no game more this year than Burnout Paradise.

Most Interesting PS3 Game: Pixeljunk Eden
The PS3 is a disaster, which is sad, because Sony’s Santa Monica studio has been quietly pumping out gold for the thing—typically cutesy, 2D designs under the Pixeljunk moniker. Their Monsters game is a cool mod on the Desktop Tower Defense craze, but Eden, whoa boy. You hop around a living screensaver, revealing floral forms across the screen that you then hop and swing along. Up to three can play together. Music’s awesome; progression is breezy and rewarding. Nothing transcendental here, but you’re wasting your PS3 if you miss this.

Best Game For Assholes: Fallout 3
You can blow up an entire fucking town. And you should, asshole. Quit griefing me in online games, and go screw with the virtual citizens of post-nuclear Washington, DC instead. Fallout 3 has hookers, booze, and makeshift rocket launchers, too. Combine all three and write to Dan about it.

Most Interesting Wii Game: Cubello
This WiiWare puzzler isn’t perfect, but who wants another recommendation for Smash Bros. or Mario Kart? For $6, you can get the first great 3D mod to the Puyo Puyo/falling-blocks puzzle genre. Cubello is a rare bit of joy in the Wii’s otherwise awful 2008. Maybe Nintendo will smarten up and pound out a sequel next year, fixing blatant errors and adding an obvious multiplayer mode. Or maybe they’ll fart out Wii Music 2: Caribbean Queen, and I will shit my heart in exasperation.

Best Fighter: Hulk Hands
No, I do not mean some Incredible Hulk video game. Go buy Hulk Hands and punch your friends in real life. Until someone makes a fighting game that does something new—uses the Wii remote for motion-controlled combat, or uses analog sticks to control individual limbs—everything else is a rehash, and you’re better off with fake, green glove-fists. If you disagree, you are a fanboy who already owns Favorite Fighting Game Part 7, so what do you care?

Most Interesting DS Game: Space Invaders Extreme
Space Invaders finally gets some speed and replayability, and it’s not a bastard to figure out. Play it to shoot stuff, or learn the new combo systems and go nutty for the high score. Professor Layton is a very close second, even if the game is worthless after one playthrough. And the new Phantasy Star game out this week in Japan is a treat—here’s to hoping it sees American release next year.

Most Interesting DS “Lifestyle Application”: KORG DS-10
Lots of dinky, adult-focused stuff on the DS lately—like when CD games first came out for PC, and all you’d find on shelves were Mavis Beacon and Encarta. Guh. Same thing nowadays, with Jamie Oliver Cooking and the Quit Smoking game topping the current DS lists, but stuff like the fully-fledged KORG synthesizer actually proves worthwhile, as its touch-screen techno party is a rare case of requiring the DS. My hope for 2009? That the Quit Smoking game gets a sequel done in the style of those weird boy-boy touch-fests for Japanese DSes. You wouldn’t want your habit to disappoint poor, shirtless Yahto, would you?

Most Interesting Gaming Machine: Xbox 360
The Xbox 360’s Community Games portal is a monster, and it’s the perfect platform to attract indie developers with any hope of making money, a huge contrast to piracy-stricken PC development. There are other big games on the Xbox as well, sure, and its Xbox Live Arcade selection is stellar, but the community portal is the most hopeful thing a major gaming corporation has done since id Software welcomed game modders with open arms in the mid-90s.

Worry not, computer purists. This award will go back to the PC as soon as someone comes up with an MMO that doesn’t hang for dear life from Dungeons and Dragons’ fender.

Lips
(Microsoft/iNiS, Xbox 360)

I’d like to prattle about the potential of Lips, Microsoft’s first-ever karaoke game, but I’m just as tempted to merely say that my family adored it, and my nerdy friends did not.

Mom and sis each had favorites out of the 40 songs spread across all genres (John Denver and Rihanna, respectively). They liked the songs’ original videos as the backdrop while they sang; they liked the focus on duets and people taking turns singing; they liked the no-fail aspect and not having to “unlock” any songs. And they liked having a reasonable scoring system that proved the “winner” on a given song’s duet.

On the other hand, I’ve had short spurts of play that ran out of steam quickly with friends. Like when Savant co-creator Jon Golob came by and put his special atonal twist on Destiny’s Child and “Survivor.” You have a limited song selection, not much progression for solo play, and a lack of Rock Band’s bells and whistles. Fun, full of laughs, but brief. (Though if each copy of the game came with a shlub who badly sang the Beyonce tracks, replay value might skyrocket.)

I should note that Singstar on the PS3 is just about the same. Licensed songs with videos. Duets. Easy to learn and use. You probably don’t own both of these game consoles—and if you do, you’re possibly not the target audience for owning every karaoke game ever made. So, sure, you’ll be fine with either, though Lips has a couple of things going for it. First off are its slick microphones. Wireless is good; motion-controlled “dance moves” are not, as the sensors in the things aren’t perfect. You can ignore the dance stuff, and well you should. Lips also has some cheeky battle modes, which I tend to ignore, but they’re there if you really want to make your on-screen avatars, um, kiss.

More interesting is the ability to import songs from a networked PC or an MP3 player. The game will sift through whatever’s connected to the Xbox, show a list of songs, and let you pick favorites to import. Bad news—no lyrics or official music videos are on the screen while singing these songs. You’ll have to bust out a laptop, Google a given song’s lyrics, and wing it.

If you’re okay with that hurdle, Lips’ vocal recognition is pretty durn good. In repeat tests on imported MP3 songs, the scoring reflected who was superior—even after I attempted to cheat my way to a win by mouthing the guitar noises in a song or two, since the game will give you points for any noise you make mid-song. Besides, why pay $2 per track—TWO BUCKS, REALLY??—when you can rig up the iPod and have a Beatles karaoke-off for free instead? The official Lips song store for extra songs is currently barren, so MS is making your mind up for you there.

Once the iPod’s in the equation, you can use Lips as a party’s stereo system, and the game’s promo videos encourage this. Import your favorites to the game, delete the default game songs you don’t like (peace out, Trace Adkins), and hit “jukebox.” Your Xbox will then play all of its tunes on shuffle mode. During a party, if people decide they’re drunk enough for karaoke, they can shake the remotes and get a duet battle going for whatever song is playing. Or you can totally ignore the Xbox and let it play on as a stereo system, no harm, no foul. It’s this implementation that kinda blows my mind—treating Lips as a party centerpiece, rather than a dedicated game, makes more sense when you consider that the title has nothing in the way of progression, unlockables, or other typical game shit.

But what are you paying for, then? Two nice microphones, a half-decent set of songs that’ll run out of steam too quickly, and a chance to sing over songs on your iPod without lyrics on the screen to help you along. The potential for an infinite karaoke machine is interesting, but the hassle makes it less than ideal, and I gotta wonder if another, less massive company would’ve greenlit the ability to type in your own lyrics and give the import feature actual legs. Still, for a music game without the intimidation of plastic drums and guitars, Lips is slick and interesting enough, and Mom still loves it, so I guess Microsoft deserves credit for a decent music product… for once.

This week, National Geographic announced it would publish its first-ever video game: Africa. Sony released this photography game in Japan on the PS3 but thought Western gamers would have a distaste for its pacifism. Going on safari, looking at semi-realistic African wildlife, and not hunting it all to extinction with a rifle? A-hyuck.

Having been to Uganda, I have watched this title for some time, and I’m glad NG is taking the risk of bringing it Stateside. In many respects, Africa appears to get the experience right—the slowness, the waiting, the appreciation as time lapses and you realize the world around you doesn’t need an animal sighting to be rich. (The above trailer doesn’t reflect that, trying to make the game look tense. It’s not, thankfully.) But while Sony has tried to tout the PS3 as the ultimate 3D machine, this game only goes so far. The environments and animals look fantastic on first impression, but once you try living in it, the vegetation looks digital, and the animals interact in a robotic way. But the hyper-realistic photojournalism genre needs to happen—call it lamer than the real thing, but it’s more interesting as a game than another friggin’ shooter—and I can only hope this game’s release next year lays some groundwork.

In other news, Seattle’s Penny Arcade turned 10 this week. Congrats. Since I’m cheap, here’s your birthday gift: Your second video game is a little better than your first (reminder: I really liked the first), and I look forward to the time when I can actually sit down and play it.

Of course, same goes for Fallout 3 and Fable II, two titles that I haven’t sat with much since their release. Wuz the holdup?

Fable II (Xbox 360) lost me early on. It tries to be a lot of games—a Zelda action-quest, with swords and arrows and magic; a life sim, with friendships and karma and marriage (Fable 2 voted no on Prop 8); a money management sim where you acquire property, steal, and/or work odd jobs. You can kinda do what you want, and for people who aren’t typical gamers and like dicking around with houses and wives and whatever, that’s there for you to do, but it’s not very engaging. If you want to be a “good guy,” interacting with other people is done via expressions (wave, pose, fart, give thumbs-up gestures) and gifts. For a little kid, this may come off like a deep version of Zelda, but the game’s rated M, so there goes that. For a person with an actual social life, it’s hokey and gets old mighty quickly; there’s little of the virtual give-and-take that The Sims is obsessed with, so it feels tacked on to the action-quest stuff rather than a core mechanic worth messing with.

Or you can roll as the bad guy. That playstyle matches better with Fable II’s hokey nature—kill civilians, steal their knickknacks, and bang loose men/women (though you’ll get debilitating STDs if you don’t wrap it up).

The main game, an action quest, is a straight-line affair that you’ve played before. Looks nice, controls well, has some hidden treasures, lots of killing and magic, not many puzzles. This is where the extra stuff should hook us as players, but even being evil becomes one-dimensional after a while, and the lack of a solid story that keeps anyone’s attention is a death knell for a game so obsessed with virtue and karma.

Worth noting: you get a dog as a quest pet, but that’s as cute as you want it to be. I know people who repeatedly pet and feed their virtual dog because they love dogs, not because the game requires it. It’s a tangential gimmick, but for some people, it’s an incredible one—certainly better implemented than the pets in the world’s largest game—and that’s more than fair.

Fallout 3 (PC, PS3, Xbox 360) - I lump this in with Fable because they’re both obsessed with karma. In that comparison alone, Fallout 3 wins handily… on the surface. It’s not perfect—you can be a jerk and steal/pickpocket/hack people’s things all the time and still be called “good.” But those are petty decisions. More pronounced choices—piss someone off in conversation, give a criminal over to the police, do work for a mysterious benefactor—change the gameworld dramatically, and often surprisingly, enough so that you’ve changed your entire play experience from that point on.

It’s an overwhelming design decision. In Fallout 3, you’re in an open, post-nuclear world with a simple goal—find your dad. But this goal turns pretty epic thanks to large numbers of quests, conversations, choices, and varied environments. And the game’s not just huge; it’s playable and compelling. The story truly works, complete with serious voice-acting, a smart crew of writers, and proper presentation to keep the plot essential to the experience, not distracting or annoying. And you have full-fledged gameplay choices; you can play as a sneaky guy, a combat guy, or a conversational charmer (or a mix), and each style is discrete.

But because of this, Fallout 3 forces an immense amount of OCD onto gamers. An example: You approach a guard at a gate that you’d like to enter. You save your game, then ask him if you can get in. He gives you a few options, and you ask yourself—do I bribe him, try to charm him, kill him, or sneak around him? And you try all of these out, loading the old save file after a likely screwup. Then you get into where he was guarding and realize you could’ve tried another way, so you load the old file again. Or you kill him with a silenced pistol, get into the stronghold a long distance away through the gate, and suddenly find a bunch of people trying to kill you—how could they possibly know you were the murderer? The AI will short-circuit like this often enough to make your “real decisions” feel less than authentic, forcing yet another reload.

Fable II may have felt more linear and non-controllable, but it never got tiresome as a result. When a game gives you every option in the world, “value” and “worth” for a huge game become meaningless if the options take you out of the game in a save-load-save-load way. Your mileage may vary; for me, the way Fallout 3 punishes failure, I spent too much time watching load screens and trying, trying again.

As a huge sandbox, Grand Theft Auto IV proves better as a basic game. But as a huge quest, Fallout 3 has more content worth investing in beyond the mere stimulus-response of running around and fighting, which just about makes the OCD stuff worth slogging through. If only the two games met halfway.

Blood, guns, killing, yawn. So many video games pile on this heap, and usually, we’re better off replaying the old greats–Half-Life 2, Far Cry, Call of Duty 4, even Goldeneye. You’re putting me in a first-person view and telling me this is worth another $60? Get out. My broke ass is off to the bargain bin to pick up a better, older game instead.

Yet I’m willing to concede that two shooters break out into the top tier this season–though both require that you have friends. Worry not, loner Sloggers! These are worth the social anxiety.

Gears of War 2 (Xbox 360) isn’t an obvious innovator. I got more than a few angry texts from Jonah after he cleared through the game’s default campaign and immediately sold his copy in frustration. “It’s forgettable,” he repeatedly complained. And he’s right.

Just like last time, the focus here is on duck-and-cover moves (and it’s still the best game out there with this mechanic). You hide behind barriers and work with a squad to flank enemies, winning as much with firepower as with position. But contrary to the hype machine that built this Gears as a more epic, varied campaign, these firefights are often more straightforward than last time. Many of the maps don’t encourage flanking, so you instead run in a straight line, and in multiple missions where you fight from a moving car, you’re forced to sit still and mindlessly hold your trigger down. There’s little three-dimensional sense to most of the combat, as you’re instead holding back lines of enemies from a distance (even when doing co-op with one friend).

Worse, cinema scenes stretch on while mining the usual action-movie cliches–loss of family, questionable orders from government, surprise deaths, “mature” cussing–with neither a sense of humor nor an attempt at believable humanity. Are we supposed to laugh? Should we invest in these characters? Neither extreme gets consistent treatment, and while plot’s never the make-or-break point in a shoot-’em-up, the endless, worthless cinema scenes don’t help the “forgettable” accusation we’re levying.

So, uh, why the recommendation? Take this sucker online. The first title’s multiplayer was an afterthought, but here, the battle modes are incredibly varied, and the gameplay is tuned to perfection. A few creative twists on capture the flag round out much of this mode, and the competitive stuff finally feels like what the game always aspired to be–a virtual paintball war. But what has gotten most people excited is the “Horde” mode. In this, your five-man team picks out positions in a big level, then battles an onslaught of computer-controlled baddies that grows tougher with every “wave.” This is what the campaign mode should’ve been–an increase in teammates, not in cinema scenes, and level design that accounts for the team size. This is what feels epic. This is what’s memorable. Way to sell your copy, Jonah.

But why wait for the next eventual Gears to get it right? Left 4 Dead (Xbox 360, PC) is already a lengthy co-op game obsessed with that “Horde” mechanic, and it’s edging toward game of the year status as a result. (Reasons why are after the jump.)

(demo out today, full release coming 11/17)

Bonus points already–no plot! Instead, you’re thrown into one of four stereotypical zombie-movie scenarios (an abandoned town, the wilderness, etc). After watching an intro video, your foursome is told to run to a safety point, fending off “infected” along the way. These are 28 Days Later zombies, by the way. They run, they scream, and they usually roll in packs of at least 20.

L4D is loaded with memorable moments, but the most impressive come when 30 or 40 zombies run at your crew, their arms flailing, their cries growing in the distance. No shooting game has delivered this level of mass enemy terror since Doom, and while newer games since have tried copying the original, L4D’s the first to outdo it in terms of sensation. The atmospheric lighting mixed with spaces of utter darkness; the randomization of where a zombie crowd will appear every time you play; the speed and numbers; the way these crazies’ arms and legs and faces contort at will in a swarm; the best art direction yet in a Valve game; the terrifying triggers of new swarms, like when you set off a car alarm and know what’s coming. A good game will have you yell “oh, shit” when such challenge approaches; a great game can repeat that sensation so many times, it replays in your dark-pink eyelids.

And because of the way enemies approach–in huge numbers, but weak individually–the co-op aspect really works. The way I see it, this is a rare feeling, because most “co-op” games run in parallel–your friends are having solo experiences next to each other with occasional, token gestures. Ho hum. But here, the experience is perpendicular. You need four guns working these weak masses down. You need a point man on your six to keep an eye out for the next randomly generated wave. You need help when super-zombies pop up in the crowd and render a player useless for a few seconds. You need cover when you have to reload or apply a bandage to yourself in the middle of a firefight, else you die.

Yet none of these moments feels forced or tacked-on; they’re indispensable because of L4D’s panic, and the game makes it easy to find teammates in the crowd by color-coding them. When your friend shouts that he’s being choked by a Smoker, you can see his glowing outline, even if he’s far away; this not only makes it easier to find the guy but also encourages him to shout for your help.

Getting everyone into the act is the most crucial part, and it’s not just the atmosphere that nails it; L4D is perhaps most astounding at how it brings new people into the fold. Inexperienced teams will have their difficulty auto-adjusted, and being able to save each other’s hides makes it less intimidating for stragglers to keep up. In all my playtests so far, the newcomers have probably been the most stricken by L4D. (Even ol’ Jon Golob came along for a test, having never played a computer FPS before, and he left the session babbling like a fool, craving more.)

Versus mode is the same as single-player, only the humans’ opponents control super-zombies. They die easily, and they have to wait forever to come back to life, but they can see through walls and try to catch the humans off-guard. Sneak behind and pick off a straggler? Find a hidden cache of dozens of normal zombies and wait for an assault? Wait for a Boomer to barf, thus blurring everyone’s eyes, and then ambush? Get all four super-zombies together for an Abbey Road-style walk? It’s a weird combat mode, but leave it to the folks behind Team Fortress 2 to make this versus mode stand out in a crowded market.

L4D has only four campaigns, each split into five chunks. That’s not long, so Valve expects players to replay each campaign again and again, upping the difficulty with every retry and being continually surprised by the game’s “Director,” an algorithmic system that randomly creates enemies and encounters every session.

This approach originally seemed funky, but Gears 2’s “Horde” mode is even more limited, asking players to bunk down in a particular map and master it through dozens of enemy waves. And people are eating that up. Bellevue’s Valve Software outdoes Gears 2 by creating pacing and momentum with their worlds–the abandoned city, the expanse of non-linear farmland, the bloodied airport. Loaded with bottlenecks, wide-open spaces, time-sensitive stakeouts, and hidden nooks that contain either ammo or death, these worlds are worth studying and memorizing for future run-throughs. More new campaigns may come in the future, as Valve’s been known to give out free updates and allow user-made mods (Counter Strike, Team Fortress 2).

The game is perfectly playable by yourself or with just one friend (though split-screen on a single Xbox 360 is a bastard to get used to). AI teammates are serviceable enough, helping you out and staying alive. But the computer can be boneheaded at the worst times, and that means the full game is nothing without a four-deep crew. No crew? No “game of the year.” But even with strangers, L4D encourages you to make new friends in all of the right ways; as long as you can get online with a headset, you’ll be terrified.

While trying out Rock Band 2, I’ve enjoyed not having to review it. It’s the same basic concept as Rock Band 1, which was already Guitar Hero on steroids–two people on fake guitar/bass, one on a USB microphone, and one on a four-pad drum kit play along to popular rock songs from the ’60s to today. Play songs to unlock more songs, along with trinkets for your virtual egotists.

There are improvements, and I’ll get to those, but by nature, RB2 is decidedly similar. New songs, same play. So I’ve paid more attention to the way people digest it.

Perhaps you have a posse who loves the game, and your dedicated foursome racks up RB scores by memorizing complicated song passages. That’s a different review. My experience has been mostly with people who stumble upon the game—showing up at the wee hours with a buzz, seeing plastic instruments strewn about, and figuring they may as well give ‘em a shot.

For these players, it’s a rush to the drum set, which plays 1:1 with the music. You are banging along to a real beat; even if it’s on a plastic kit, it’s still the most successful portion of the “be a rocker” experience. Then somebody grabs the microphone—they’re drunk, they wanna sing along with the Go-Gos or Journey. Whatever. The mic picks up your pitch, but not your words, so you can mumble-hum your way through songs. The plastic guitars get picked last, which control the same as they did in 2005—so they still don’t control like real guitars. With five buttons, rather than a real guitar’s endless array of notes and chords, the play becomes percussive (though certainly less intimidating for a party’s sake).

In a perfect session, everybody’s taking turns and trying it all. It’s not typical. Somebody doesn’t want to sing. Sometimes, they’re insecure. Most of the time, they’ve run out of songs they’re comfortable singing–this is not a karaoke kind of selection, which means less Neil Diamond, more Sonic Youth and Grateful Dead. Casual singers have been underwhelmed after burning through the game’s obvious hits.

Meanwhile, other people hate playing the fake guitars–either the feeling of them or the whole “press a button, then strum” mechanic. Even with the new, welcome no-fail mode, and even with intoxication in the mix, some people do not budge in the face of RB’s party potential.

On the other hand, when you have a group that’s on a roll, the play turns mechanical. Not so much laughing at bad singers and people faux-strutting with their stupid guitars. Instead, everyone stares at the screen to keep up with constant note patterns. You shouldn’t pay $190 for four people to gang up and ignore each other–why not make interaction more inherent with this new iteration?

I did find the sweet spot for some of my play. With the right mix of experts and novices, we laughed it up, made fun of each other, got the hang of the fake-rock system, and found ways to interact even when the game didn’t make that inherent. The song selection is pretty broad, balancing its duds with party-perfect fare (and you can borrow someone else’s RB1 disc and, for a $5 fee, pump those songs into the new game, which doubles the game for newcomers). RB2 has enough tweaks, if not massive changes, to make this near-essential for anybody who already blew cash on the old instruments last time—slicker interface, 84 new songs, new online modes. Hell, what else are you going to do with those old instruments?

But the full instrument+game pack is $190, as is the same pack from Guitar Hero World Tour, seeing release in a week or so. People will soon nitpick over which fake band setup is better—GHWT has slightly better drums and a make-your-own-song studio, while RB2’s new wireless gear is quite solid, and its song selection is larger (though before dropping cash, hit Wikipedia to compare the games’ song lists). Flip a coin if you’re concerned about the slight differences; I’m more interested in when the virtual-rock bell curve will start dipping. With so few new features here—and nothing to compel players to interact with each other in-game—I’m guessing sooner than later.

Remember Tetrisphere? They called it 3D Tetris, because the word “Tetris” will sell anything, but this N64 game played more like a jigsaw puzzle on a sphere. Instead of fitting every piece together perfectly, you connected like-shaped pieces to make them vanish, eventually clearing off the game board.

I’m a puzzle-game freak, so I enjoyed it, but like most Tetris retreads, it never approached the original in mass popularity. The biggest reason I lost interest was that it didn’t make the most of its 3D aspects. You played on top of a sphere, but control was limited to a 2D plane.

I can’t help but think of Tetrisphere when I find myself enjoying Cubello, the second in Nintendo’s new Art Style series on the Wii. A few weeks ago, this downloadable series debuted with a re-release of an obscure Japanese game, but it looks like the series will also host new, experimental titles like this one.

The screen displays a tower of colored cubes, and you’re told to clear them all out. Instead of knocking them down a la  Boom Blox, you aim with the Wii remote and shoot colors at the stack to create four-of-a-kind chunks, which then vanish.

The catch, and what distinguishes this from other “match-the-color” puzzle games that have been around for decades, is that this tower rotates in 3D. What’s more, you cannot push a joystick to move the tower around; instead, your shots make the tower spin.

At the beginning, this spin-and-wait is an enjoyable sensation as you wait for the next shot to show itself in the busy playfield. Doesn’t hurt that aiming shots with the Wii pointer is more precise than should probably be expected. As the game gets harder, you’re not just aiming to clear the stack; you’re also aiming to line up your next shot as quickly as possible. It’s a welcome, er, twist.

The rotational effect, and how it smartly blends into the basic experience, reminds me of why Tetrisphere seemed so cool in the mid-90s. This time, there’s an engaging 3D puzzle experience embedded in the effect, as maneuvering through a 3D tower and lining up perfect shots–and eventually combos–is a rare breath of new in an ancient genre.

Perhaps the game’s most compelling fact is that Nintendo doesn’t ease players into Cubello. The music and sounds are grating, future-synth stuff, complete with a creepy robo-voice announcing the action. The challenge ramps up immediately after a brief tutorial. And the bombardment of visual elements can be confusing even after learning the game’s rules. Compared to Nintendo’s recent roster of safe, Mario-loaded games, Cubello feels decidedly experimental. Like an indie garage game.

And at the price of $6, Nintendo can afford to put out bizarre, experimental titles. It probably costs them peanuts to have a small team develop something like Cubello; they don’t have to pay for advertising or publishing, either. Just toss it up on Wii Ware, price it at $6, and see if lightning strikes.

It may not strike with this game, genius as its concept is. There’s no two-player mode, which Cubello’s begging for; imagine a battle mode where you attack your opponent by freezing his tower-spin for a few seconds. Brutal. Also, like Snood, you can get stuck at a puzzle’s end with garbage colors that no longer have a match since you’ve cleared the board. This wouldn’t be so bad if the game didn’t tend to reduce its timer like crazy when you reach this point. It feels cheap.

Nintendo could fix these issues with a patch. They could even release a retail version, complete with extra modes and an option to turn off the robo-voice (oh, Jesus, please do this). But even if not, Nintendo’s on to something with these Art Style games. Keep giving your developers an outlet to try crazy shit. I’d much rather pay for eight of these, gems and bombs alike, than another Metroid game.

It’s not until I abandon my city of monsters that Spore finally feels right. I’m in a spaceship, zipping across a Milky Way-sized galaxy and managing an empire with equal parts diplomacy and combat. My six-legged creations are light years away, and the distance is doing me some good.

It’s because by then, Spore has given up on evolution-based gameplay. Growing from a single-cell organism to a space-crazy empire sounded intriguing when Sim-lord Will Wright announced the video game years ago, but he never made it clear how it’d be converted to something worth playing.

There’s little evidence that his team figured that out, yet the issue isn’t the game’s ambitious sprawl between single cells and spaceships. Rather, Spore suffers from a disconnect between its brilliant creation system and the gameplay duct-taped to the back of it.

I’d do a disservice if I didn’t rave about the game’s organic Lego kit. Understand that Wright and his crew have made a system where you can mix and match hundreds of body parts in highly unsustainable ways, and yet the game will take your seven-arm, three-leg, four-vagina bastard and convert it to a lively, sentient being. Natural, procedural animations; emotional responses; maybe even realistic Kegel exercises (I didn’t check).

You can make something in ten minutes that looks and acts more alive than most game characters.

The pre-space chunk of Spore keeps these creations busy in four development stages: single-cell, creature, tribe, and civilization. The hope is that you’d create something and, through the game’s evolutionary system, feel connected to it through the growth process. With real-time adaptation, the game would always feel fresh.

Spore has no interest in this idea. By the time you take your critter to land, you’re confronted with the game’s hard-fast rule of advancement: either eat other species, or befriend them.

Your constructions can be abstract and bizarre, but their actions don’t have that luxury. Couldn’t I appease a more powerful beast by bringing it food? Befriend a brainy creature by serving as its sharp-toothed protector? Make myself look like a leaf and poison deer that bite me?

Nope. Either click the mouse repeatedly to kill, or get into an insultingly easy game of Simon to befriend. No natural adaptation happens—certainly isn’t necessary for this black-and-white system. More arbitrary limits show up, such as the lack of stacking. Say, if you cover your critter in 20 spikes, it’s no stronger than a single-spiker. You are not rewarded for creating wild, fun creatures; Spore would rather you study point values attached to these bits than experiment.

Don’t bother jacking up the difficulty. With such creative limits, you can’t use strategy to get through harder content. Rather, it just takes longer, proving how oversimplified Spore is. Why all the dumbing down and lack of creative options? Games like SimCity and The Sims were huge hits because they were nerdy, open, and intricate.

As you proceed, the Lego kit expands to make castles, factories, tanks, ships, and boats for your tribe and civilization. Again, they’re really fun to tinker with (and Maxis has pre-loaded content in case you don’t want to bother), but because you’re zoomed out in a Starcraft-style camera, you can’t enjoy their detail while playing. Worse, there’s no thinking needed as a tribe or a civ. Rack up huge armies of either military folks or priests, then conquer–like the creature stage.

The final space phase is fun—it’s huge, has considerable depth and tactical variety, and is remarkably easy to figure out. Other semi-sim space exploration games have come before it, and Spore borrows from the best of ‘em to make an open-ended, long-term journey through space accessible for the Sim and Flash-game crowds alike. No real ending or extreme goal here, unlike the other modes.

I’ll bold this line to give credit: Spore’s space mode is the bulk of the game, the one you’ll spend the most time with, and good enough to override a lot of these criticisms.

But it renders the entire game that preceded it useless. Was all that evolution stuff a tutorial? Could’ve skipped it; I had to learn a new system of flying through space and managing alliances. Were the evolution modes fun? No, and they’re so repetitive, I see no possibility of new fun in playing them again.

Nitpick time. There’s no autosave feature. Tread carefully. Worse is Spore’s online DRM, which only allows three lifetime installs. If my PC dies and I reinstall, my copy of Spore has to handshake with EA for permission. If that happens a third time, my permission runs out. This means installing to my laptop for to-go Spore is an iffy proposition. Considering the game is already on BitTorrent with DRM removed by hackers, and considering Spore has no Internet multiplayer, what are paying customers getting? Other than the ability to download their friends’ custom penis creatures? Angry fans are bombarding the Amazon customer review site, killing the game’s rating there. Good on them.

Of course, for a game with so much hype and expectation, Spore delivers on enough of its promises to redeem itself. But there’s something peculiar about this uneven game–the fact that you can get the creature editor all by itself for only $10. Based on my many hours with the game, that may be enough of the Spore experience for a lot of players.

Me, I’m heading back to space.

Too Human
(Xbox 360)

Two of gaming’s oldest archetypes collide in Too Human: the stupidity of the Van Damme genre and the timesuck of amassing RPG crap like experience points and treasure. Not my dream blueprint for a game, but I did reserve a little hope, as TH’s designers were responsible for 2002’s Eternal Darkness, the first really good 3D scare game by a Western studio. (That game would throw up fake Blue Screens of Death. The hell is scarier than that?)

Sadly, the creative folks at Silicon Knights didn’t know when to pull the plug on TH, finally released today after a decade of development. This game would’ve been a dandy on its original destination, the Playstation 1, and that’s a good way to put it, because the game feels dated—as if a lost PS1 game by some forward-thinking developer was unearthed 10 years later.

Credit’s due here. For starters, in the world of clichéd gaming themes, there’s something, er, unique about this one: Norse mythology colliding with plasma rifles and rocket-launching robots. (Steam-narök, maybe?) Might sound cheesy, but the art team here sure ran with the idea. If the game feels old, it sure doesn’t look it—while rough around the edges, TH’s set designs and architecture rank up there with the immaculate God of War.

That mythology core takes its toll on the plot. TH is too full of stereotypes and one-liners to be taken as seriously as Silicon Knights so desperately wants us to (and geez, are there a lot of cut-scenes and town-crawls). At the same time, there are too many shades of gray to determine who’s worth liking in this tedious story. Worst of both worlds.

The core battling has its moments. In earlier stages, your gun-n-slash hero can whip through a chain of 30 baddies at once, and maneuvering these kill-combos has a certain Viking grace. You’ll slash one dude, throw another one in the air, hold that mid-air guy up with a cloud of gunfire, then “slide” with your sword in a bee-line to the next foe, only to slam your fists to the ground and fell a mass of six critters simultaneously.

Like in Diablo, this mindless baddy-genocide is fun with a friend. Loot sharing and co-op moves are well done here; certainly better than last year’s Army of Two. But that mode is online-only, and without a friend to talk to and kill with, the game’s shortcomings are more oppressive. Missions run in a straight line; all killing, no puzzles. Since all enemies look pretty much the same, monotony sets in quickly. The game tries to hook players with Diablo-style treasure (all the swords you could want, nerds!), but Diablo beefed up its virtual treasure hunts with winding, crazy dungeons and a ridiculous variety of creepy crawlies. Not so much here.

I could describe other issues in detail: awkward controls, wonky cameras, clumsy item management, wonky fricking cameras. Those are all annoying, if not deal breakers. But more than any of that, Silicon Knights has no clue what the word “difficulty” means. In TH, you will die. Often. Over and over. Holy crap, are you going to die. Not that it matters, though—your character comes back to life after every death in the same spot with barely any penalty for it.

I’m fine with the free revival concept, but not the execution. It’s only there because TH gives players no other solid way to stay alive. New weapons and armor don’t help; the enemies scale up automatically, so you rarely feel like a total badass. And healing and dodging are nerfed. Once the difficulty very suddenly ramps up, you will spend more time dying and waiting for revivals than playing the damned thing.

Again, muffle the criticisms if you’ve got a pal to tear through this with. Co-op doesn’t so much save the game as flatten out the complaints (for one, you’ll die a lot less). But that’s not a ringing endorsement. Fanboys who love virtual treasure have too many hurdles between them and their gold, while if you were hoping for a great story, quality acting, or a new echelon of action gaming, better luck next time.

Soul Calibur 4
(Xbox 360)

The Xbox 360 edition of Soul Calibur 4 adds Yoda to the fighting, and the marketing tie-in seems tacky at first. Even kinda cheap—uh, you can’t throw Yoda, and in Soul Calibur, that’s 1/4 of the 3D battle. But I’ve come to appreciate the grammatically challenged half-pint.

Tiny is he. Hops around all over the place. Is weaker. Can summon the force. Why, that sure seems different for Soul Calibur, doesn’t it? In a fighting game where many Euro-centric characters swing their oversized swords/hammers/axes the same way they did in 1999, Yoda forces a strategy reboot. Maybe a healthy dose of the supernatural could do this ancient series some good.

Sadly, that’s as far as Soul Calibur 4 gets in upgrading a core fight that was already phenomenal in the 1999 original. Back then, it was the first good 3D fighting game with weapons. The second and third versions lost that luster by adding mere tweaks; this one sees more tweaks, HD graphics, and online play.

We could take the easy way out and call this the best Soul Calibur yet, which it is, but then I remember my complaints from weeks ago. It’s 2008–can we get started on some severely different fighting games?

Here’s my biggest issue. You have muscle-bound folks wielding implements of death. Yet nobody gets impaled? No amputation? Not even cuts or bruises. You might consider using that “block” button from time to time if it might save your wrists. And when you slam somebody with a hammer the size of an adult cow, maybe the Xbox 360 should display something other than a flash of light?

We didn’t get that next-gen progression, sadly. And if you’re a casual player who doesn’t want to memorize frigging combos–if you just wanna mash buttons and battle your friends–then a fighting game in this era should at least give that player some level of oomph. I don’t bring this stuff up to sound like a violence freak, but, well, this isn’t Tetris, and there are too many other beat-em-up games to choose from. Stand out or step aside.

To be fair, Soul Calibur as-is still brings the fun–button-mashers can pull off cool-looking attacks, or you can learn the ropes and find a deep, balanced challenge that’s significantly different from the likes of Tekken. Reduce your expectations (or be entirely new to Soul Calibur), and you’ll be fine–especially if you’re a whore for HD visuals, which are a first for the series here.

But even low expectations don’t deserve SC4’s busted online modes. Essentially, Soul Calibur requires quick responses to block sword swipes, but this game’s networking code doesn’t compensate for online lag. So if an enemy hammers a super-quick poke over and over, you can’t disrupt them with a proper block. I’ve been spam-killed like this too many times (and that’s when the game’s broken auto-connect system actually finds me an online foe). Shame.

As a Soul Calibur lifer, I’ll still play the hell outta this game. Grudgingly.

Braid
(Xbox Live)

Not often do you see a video game both thank Italo Calvino in the credits and pay tribute to the author’s time-toying books, but such is Braid. The chief twist in this Mario-esque side-scroller is time manipulation. At first, it’s simply a convenient button-press to reverse death or a missed jump; rewind time a bit, try again. Soon, you can’t get anywhere without bending time.

An example: You’ll see a critter in a later level that glows green. Even when you hit the “rewind” button, this thing keeps moving forward in a backwards world, and you have to use its immunity to finish a puzzle. Later, your footsteps will make time go forward or backward, or you’ll have a ghost that moves forwards while you go back in time. Stuff like that.

Each level’s time twist comes with a story about memory, perspective, and broken relationships. The writing can get away from the author at times—just because it’s confusing doesn’t make it brilliant—but the story’s mix with the gameplay has weight, adding a pleasant layer of “ohhhhhh”/closure to the puzzles’ conclusion.

Braid has that going for it, along with some brilliant puzzles and great turns in both art direction (watercolors that melt with the passing of time) and music (tasteful classical and Irish folk). It’s a fiercely independent game–coded almost entirely by one guy–and while that helps, the game’s stumbles seem to come from a lack of group review. There’s no instruction manual–seems at first like “learn by playing” design. But some of the challenge just comes from answering the question of how the game works. A basic instruction set would actually answer a few hard puzzles, and once you realize that, they’re less satisfying. This isn’t a dominant flaw, but since the game’s short (I’ll get to that), offenders stand out and feel cheap.

Also, for all this game does to blow away the Mario standard, it still adheres to it. Braid has lots—and I mean LOTS—of precise jump challenges. Personally, I think the “rewind” feature makes this okay. But if you’re not a fan of pixel-perfect jumps and pogo-hops off of enemies’ backs, like in super-hard NES games of old, then prepare to get needlessly pissed.

And, yeah, the price–$15 for roughly four hours of play. That’s about a week and a half of a game rental, but to be fair, it’s also five bucks cheaper and two hours less than the best game of 2007, Portal. Is Braid in the same league as Portal? Close. The aforementioned cheapo challenges are a drag, and the plot isn’t as magically crafted as fanboys have been saying. Portal’s better—more accessible, superior pacing, more emotional response with its dark humor.

But when Braid gets things right, its puzzle/plot combo delivers an intangible level of satisfaction that you don’t often find in the stimulus-response world of most boring video games. At the very least, get the demo. Think about it.