

Platform: Xbox Live Arcade
Publisher: Microsoft Game StudiosLimbo is a weird, short, atmospheric side-scrolling platformer. Entirely in black and white, by which I mean mostly black and grey, you play as a boy trapped in, well, limbo, or at the very least some creepy wrong world full of bear traps, giant spiders, brainworms, and other little kids straight out of Lord of the Flies. The controls are simple—use the stick to move left and right or climb ladders, A is for jumping and B is for grabbing things or pulling levers.
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Platform: Wii
Publisher: CapcomThe Monster Hunter franchise is huge in Japan but hasn't really made the transition to North American popularity yet, for understandable reasons. It started out on the PS2, made the switch to the PSP, and was going to head to PS3 when Capcom looked at how much it'd cost to make it for a high-definition system and said "Screw that, do it on the Wii; it's got a bigger customer base anyway."The latest installment is interesting. The thing you have to understand about it is it's basically a monster-hunting simulator, and not a game with a story where you just happen to be a dude who hunts monsters. The gameplay is built around hunts—either you have to kill a bunch of monsters within a time limit, or you have to kill one big monster. Each monster exists in an environment and has certain attack patterns, and a lot of the game is "Pick the right weapon for the monster's movements, pick the right supplies for the environment it's in." The rest of the game is "Go kill the monster." When you're done, you get loot, which you can use to go after bigger monsters. There's really nothing to the game except the hunt. In single-player, you're protecting a village. In multiplayer, you're working out of a city. There are a lot of quests only available in multiplayer.
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Platform: Xbox 360
Publisher:ActivisionI am a fan of Cybertronian lifeforms. When I was five, all the toys I liked were Transformers or Lego. I had Transformers: The Movie and the cartoon episodes "The Five Faces of Darkness" and "The Return of Optimus Prime" on a VHS tape and I watched them endlessly. I liked Beast Wars (Beasties up here in Canada because we have rules against putting the word "war" in kids' cartoon show names) and Beast Machines and Transformers: Animated and even the first Michael Bay live-action movie.Transformers: The War for Cybertron is the Transformers video game I've been waiting for. There is not a damn thing wrong with it, and no reason not to play with it. It's visually rich, controls well, has an online three-player co-op enabled single-player campaign of decent length, and has a multiplayer mode I actually like.
Most of the time, it is a decent third-person shooter. You control stompy robots using the "L-trigger to bring up your gun, R-trigger to fire it" control scheme I love so much. A click of the left stick transformers you to vehicle form, in which L-trigger is a speed boost and R-trigger fires vehicle guns. The transformation animations are dynamic in the sense that you can transform on the move, so you don't have to stand there like an idiot and get shot while converting. In robot mode you have an excellent melee attack mapped to the right stick. All of this together means you will be doing a lot of the following: Shoot guys from a distance for a while, then transform into a vehicle and drive up to them, then transform back to a robot and sword them in the face. This is awesome when you're playing as a jet because you don't so much "drive up" as "swoop down."
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