Viking: The Battle for Asgard is an action adventure/hack n' slash which follows in the footsteps laid down by Conan which followed in the footsteps laid down by God of War. It has the tragic hero. It has legions of bad guys which your tragic hero stomps on. It has lots of brutal, brutal violence. It even has quick-time-events. The only thing it's really missing are environmental puzzles. And you know what? I'm ok with that. For me, the puzzles in God of War were always just another thing getting in the way of bashing on monsters. The really new thing that Viking brings to the table is colossal battles between a Viking army that you raise (which includes dragons) and the legions of Hel.

The sheer enormity of the battles in Viking evidence some serious technical skills on the part of Creative Assembly, which is only relevant, of course, if the game is any fun. And it is. I have been glued to my 360 pretty much non-stop for the last for four days.

Dark Sector is one of those games that makes me glad that I'm not being paid to write these reviews. If someone was paying me for to review Dark Sector, I'd have to play the whole game. And that, dear reader, would suck. That would have me reconsidering my choice of career. Dark Sector is a 3rd person shooter that really wants to be something else. Sometimes. Except for when it doesn't. It tries really hard (and fails) to be a brutal close combat game. Sometimes, it will try to be a action adventure with environmental puzzles. And this too, it will fail at. Based on the first 30 minutes or so, you might think that it was intent on delivering a high concept story with well developed characters. And on that point, you'd be wrong.

The only really good thing I can say about Dark Sector is that it annoys early and often, thereby allowing me to get on the with the business of playing games that don't suck.

The premise of Turning Point: Fall of Liberty is simple: Winston Churchill dies early, and without his powerful leadership, Europe falls to the Nazis during the big WWII. Emboldened by their success overseas, they launch a massive attack against our Eastern seaboard capturing several important cities and the White House. You get to play the part of "Carson" the construction worker turned hero who becomes a critical member of the resistance movement against the Nazis.

As many reviewers have pointed out, Turning Point is a fairly flawed game. Despite those flaws, I had some fun with it.

There was once a time when the common FPS protagonist could carry every weapon he encountered and a full load of ammo for each. Likely as a result of the success of games such as Halo, which have a more realistic limit on weapon carrying, this has become somewhat less common. Nowadays, you're typically limited to a couple of guns, some ammo, and maybe some grenades. Condemned 2: Bloodshot takes this its (il)logical conclusion: not only are you limited to carrying a single, solitary weapon, but if that weapons happens to be a firearm, you're only allowed to carry the ammo in the clip.

As a gameplay mechanic that forces the player to scavenge his immediate area for improvised weapons, it's kind of interesting. But it also flies in the face of common sense: even the most drunken and idiotic of ex-cops (which your protagonist certainly is) probably has a couple of pockets in which he can stick some extra bulltets, or failing that, his gun once the bullets run out. Seriously, if I've got room for a flashlight, a radio, and a digital camera/UV light/audio spetrograph, then I've got enough room for a couple of extra .38 shells.

And that's just the most obvious and pervasive flaw you'll encounter.

My first impressions after playing the 360 demo for Conflict: Denied Ops were incredibly negative. Oh great, just what the world needs: another FPS, and a crappy one at that. But, dedicated reviewer that I am (or is that OCD?), I picked up the retail version when it came out. Surprisingly, by the end of the first mission — even though the demo level was a shortened version of the first mission in the retail copy — my mind was changed. When it came time to choose my next mission, I decided that I kinda of liked this game.

That would last until the mission in Africa which, in addition to being a kind of sucky mission, had a serious glitch which put me off the game for a week.

After playing Lost Odyssey for about 10 minutes, I thought to myself "hey, this looks like the same engine as Blue Dragon", and moments later "except that this actually looks cool". Only minutes ago did it even occur to me look at the developer credits and confirm that, oh yeah, it is from the same people that did Blue Dragon: Mistwalker. As with Blue Dragon, Lost Odyssey's big claim to fame is that its producer is the same guy that created the Final Fantasy series.

For once, though, Hironobu Sakaguchi has deviated from the stereotypical JRPG trope of children late for school saving the world whilst the adults stand around with their thumbs up their collective asses. Instead, the main character is an adult. And while he may look to be, at most, 22 years old, he's actually an immortal who's lived for a thousand years. Of all of the JPRGs I've played, Lost Odyssey is one of the few with a story, world and cast compelling enough that I actually care what happens.

One of the 360's biggest problem areas is its lack of good RPGs. Dark Messiah of Might and Magic: Elements does nothing to solve this problem. Elements is nothing more than a console port of the PC game of the same name (minus the Elements). In fact, it's less than a port. Elements is a prime example of what people mean when they complain that console games are dumbed down. This isn't just a case of tweaking the interface to account for console controllers (which happens to be the only improvement they made), but rather one of removing the elements which made the game interesting to play.

In porting the game, they fixed the interface (and presumably, some bugs) but broke the game. The original, which I enjoyed, I eventually had to give up due to game wrecking bugs. Here, I just gave up because, wow, I really can't be bothered when I've got so many good games to play.

The Club is a 3rd person shooter where you play as one of eight thugs that have been drafted by nefarious forces to fight in a set of modern day gladiatorial gunfights. The more people you kill and the more stylishly and quickly you do it, the more points you get. And the game is all about points which are secondary, of course, only to overall survival; you can't win if you're dead. Despite being a modern shooter, something about how The Club plays brings me back to the days of Contra, an absolutely punishing game, where to have any real chance of winning, you had to memorize every single aspect of each level.

While I find the (admittedly shallow) concept of The Club kind of interesting, and the overall gameplay to be fun in limited doses, I'm not sure I can recommend it to anyone but the most hardcore of OCD afflicted gamers.

Devil May Cry 4 is an action adventure/beat 'em up that takes place in some magical land that I've never heard of. In fact, I still don't know where it occurs. While DMC4 has a serious case of sequelitis, it doesn't actually suffer from it. I have no idea what's going on. I don't who this "Nero" (the main guy you play) is, and I don't know who this "Dante" fellow is either. And when, 8 hours into the game, I get to play him instead of Nero, I still don't know who he is. And I don't really care.

Up until that 8th hour, DMC4 is a blast. Nero kicks ass with a sword and looks good doing it. His controls are utterly fantastic and tight and the brutal decimation of demons has never been easier or more fun. Unfortunately, just as Nero is really getting his groove on, you get to (by which, I mean have to) switch to playing Dante. And to top it off, you get to play Dante in the same places as Nero, just going the opposite direction.

And that's when I start hating this game.

Because I played the original Turok on the N64, I had a sneaking suspicion that this new incarnation would be stupid. Check. I also figured that it would probably suck. Check. There were also some expectations of dinosaurs and some idiotic racial stereotypes. Check and check. These are all qualities that existed back in the N64 days and this new version fails to disappoint. It also fails on just about every other level as well. Except financially, of course. Like the original, and despite this review, it will probably sell like hotcakes.

It doesn't matter how much you like the FPS genre. It doesn't matter how much you like dinosaurs. This game will only make you want to throw your controller through the screen. Or, if you're feeling clearer minded, at the developers. If you must get some sort of FPS/Dinosaur fix, then rent Jurassic Park and play Halo. Seriously, you'll be better off.