Perhaps the funnest game of this very minute, Lego Star Wars II: The Original Trilogy reminds us all that there's a small child inside of us, screaming to be let out. And, it need not be said, but this small child wants to stab a lot of Lego Stormtroopers in their coal black hearts with a lightsaber and then collect small widgets to redeem for unlockables.

As one of many Lego-style Star Wars characters, you can have a grand old time. The game is part adventure, part platformer, and pretty much all tongue-in-cheek. As Ben Kenobi, you can use your strange Force powers to disorient Stormtroopers by twisting their helmets so the eyepieces are facing the wrong way. As whiny farm boy Luke Skywalker, you can toss together Lego bricks to form an AT-ST walker to trample dunderheaded foes in your path.

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Gamecube_2CNN.com columnist Chris Morris grades the PlayStation 2, GameCube, Game Boy Advance, and Xbox in terms of their performance.

Morris correctly lists the order of finish for the consoles when he writes that Sony wins without breaking a sweat, Xbox streaks in to second, and the GameCube finishes last. But this is like saying when you wear a meat suit into the tiger cage, you can expect a marked increase in pain and, also, death.


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"Who would dare to supercede me? Super, super, superwho?" -- John Updike

Recently, the Man of Steel -- to put it in the colorful, rough-hewn lingo of the streets -- has been the Man of Ass when it comes to his videogame outings. Superman 64 for the Nintendo 64 was a fetid, steaming pile of horse dung -- and that was just the cartridge. The game itself was a chainsaw tonsillectomy, only carcinogenic and with more flying through hoops in a Metropolis choked by green Kryptonite fog.

Superman: Man of Steel for Xbox was pretty awful, too. It featured Superman punching robots, and although it's hard to mess up punching robots in the face, the Man of Steel did that and managed to be boring and bleary-looking in the process.Visual_target_image_3lg

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The last time I heard this news, I fell off my dinosaur: Microsoft is developing a handheld console system similar to the Sony PSP.

Now, however, the news is picking up steam, and Reuters news service is reporting on it.

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Eidos' Urban Chaos: Riot Response is perhaps the violentest video game to come down the pike in a long while. Or, rather, it would be the violentest, if indeed violentest was a word.

As a duly appointed peace officer, it's your job to shoot hockey-mask wearing thugs in the face, thus exploding their heads in a spray of crimson gore and allowing you to proclaim loudly that no omelete was ever made without the breaking of a few eggs. You can also incapacitate bad guys with a Tazer, by which we mean keep applying the juice until the victim catches fire. Again, omelets and eggs.

Urbanchaos

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Guy_game_cover_1I almost forgot about The Guy Game. But then I had to go and write about the Sex in Videogames Conference and there went that repressed memory.

I reviewed the game for the now dearly departed magazine Xbox Nation. As reviews editor for the magazine, I fell on the grenade; none of the freelance game writers would touch The Guy Game.

To say it was a big pile of dog feces is to greatly insult dog feces. Watching that poorly shot spring break footage; wondering exactly how many IQ points I was losing per minute; trying to fathom how the best part about The Guy Game was not the fact that you got to see naked women's breasts, but rather play Skee-Ball, fairly well wrecked me for life.


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It was one of E3 2005's most intriguing games, if not its flashiest, and now it's gone. CNNMoney.com is reporting 2K Games has canceled Snow.

Snow was a turn-based strategy game (and sadly, the CNNMoney.com article announcing Snow's cancelation refers to the game as a real-time simulation). You were a drug dealer, and you had to push coke and other drugs, hire mules, pay for assassins, and make sure you smuggled in enough product to keep you floating in $$$, yet still free from the iron grip of the man.

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There's a great scene in the Jaws Unleashed videogame where you (a remorseless eating machine) must grab a scientist with your monstrous, razor-toothed mouth, and carry his flailing carcass to a nearby card reader in order to lift an underwater gate and bust out of an aquatic theme park.

Although the game's camera and its control scheme suck like a Hoover, Unleashed does allow players to engage in a lot of everyday shark activities, such as destroying oil refineries by picking up explosive barrels and spitting them at outflow pipes, and hunting for license plates, tin cans, and model wooden ships in order to collect bonuses.

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