Brütal Legend

Photo by Dan Siney

BRÜTAL LEGEND

Platform: Xbox 360

Publisher: Electronic Arts, $59.95

Eddy Riggs, voiced by Jack Black, is a roadie who loves heavy metal and hates his life because it’s not the 70s anymore so he can only find work with shitty bands who play for tween audiences. He is magically transported back into ancient prehistory, the Age of Metal, where chrome trees grow exhaust pipes, spiders spin bass strings, panthers shoot laser beams from their eyes, and humanity is enslaved to demons in S&M wear, except for a ragtag resistance group based out of an ancient monument called Bladehenge. Naturally this is paradise for him and he can’t wait to turn his roadie skills to saving the world, especially now that his guitar can light monsters on fire.

So if you know someone who likes heavy metal, there’s a good chance that someone will like this, provided they also like action and real-time strategy games.

DEAD SPACE: EXTRACTION

Platform: Wii

Publisher: Electronic Arts, $49.99

Dead Space: Extraction

, a prequel to last year’s

Dead Space

, is an excellent light-gun game, a genre that really should be seeing a renaissance on the Wii but that isn’t because sales of games rated more strictly than E for Everyone on the Wii are terrible. Shame!

Very much not for those with delicate sensibilities,

Dead Space: Extraction

is an engrossing and often frantic shoot-’em-up featuring lots of gore and dismemberment and a really decent narrative that tracks the lives of a handful of people trying to escape the planet from the first game—it begins with the extraction of the Marker and ends with a radio playing the transmission that began

Dead Space

. I wish the Wii had more games like this.

If you know a gamer who owns a Wii but hardly ever plays it because all the sorts of games he or she likes tend to come out on the Xbox 360 or PS3 instead, this’d be perfect.

GRAND THEFT AUTO: CHINATOWN WARS

Platform: PSP

Publisher: Rockstar Games, $39.99

The original

Grand Theft Auto

was a simple game with an overhead perspective, where you could play a guy running around the streets of Liberty City or jack cars to drive around instead.

Chinatown Wars

is an experiment in returning to that formula—once again, you’re a guy on foot, running around streets viewed from overhead, with simple melee and gunfight controls. What they kept from the later installments was the writing.

Chinatown Wars

has you play the spoiled, useless son of a dead crime boss from Tokyo delivering the family’s ancestral sword to his uncle in Liberty City. The sword is stolen at the airport and you’re stuck running errands and dealing drugs for the uncle while you try to figure out how to get the sword back.

The game earns points because while the protagonist is spoiled and useless, he’s not a brat and knows his own shortcomings, which lets him snark at everyone without being insufferable. The writing is as sharp as ever for a GTA game, so any fans of the franchise should find something to like here.

KINGDOM HEARTS 358/2 DAYS

Platform: Nintendo DS

Publisher: Square Enix, $34.99

Other

Kingdom Hearts games drew their audience by featuring a collision of characters both from the Disney animated movies and the Final Fantasy series of games, coupled with a startlingly complex story.

Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days

tends to focus on the original content from the three previous Kingdom Hearts games. You take the role of Roxas, the secondary protagonist of

Kingdom Hearts 2

, and see what he did between the events of the first and second games, when he was a member of the black-cloaked Organization XIII. You’ll visit Disney worlds, but since the Organization is a secret, you’ll mostly sneak around behind the Disney characters’ backs instead of actually interacting with them.

The gameplay is really nice, though—very pretty combat organized into missions that take from five to 15 minutes to complete. The game’s story is told in cut scenes between missions and is just as complex as in the other Kingdom Hearts games. Fans of the series will find much to like here, but I wouldn’t recommend jumping in at this point unless you’re eight to 12 years old and used to appreciating stories you can’t quite understand.