Publisher: Telltale Games
Developer: Telltale Games
Genre: Adventure
Release date: Available Now

Earlier this month at E3, developer Telltale Games announced that Guybrush Threepwood and the denizens of Monkey Island have joined the developer’s growing stable of character-driven episodic adventure games. Fans of the old LucasArts adventures can now check another buried treasure off their wish lists and set their hopes high for a potential Full Throttle or Grim Fandango reunion. Of course, it was Telltale’s expert handling of the beloved Sam & Max series (originally released on the PC two years ago) that paved the way for the return trip to Monkey Island. PC gamers and Wii wagglers have had their chance to reacquaint themselves with the canine gumshoe Sam and his psychotic little buddy Max, and now Xbox players finally get to enjoy their hijinks in the recent release of Season 1 of Sam & Max Save the World.

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Publisher: PopCap Games
Developer: PopCap Games
Genre: Puzzle
Release date: Available now

Freude, schoner Guterfunken Tochter aus Elysium. Anyone with some training in classical music will recognize this snippet of German as a lyric from the fourth and final movement of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9. Moviegoers might know it as the featured music in the final scenes of the original Die Hard film, but gamers of all shapes and sizes will recognize this phrase from Pop Cap’s multiplatform puzzle-game hit Peggle Deluxe. Turns out, the game is equally as memorable as the music.

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Publisher: Mommy’s Best Games
Developer: Mommy’s Best Games
Genre: Side Scrolling Shooter
Release date: Available now
Review by: Christopher J. Troilo

The age of home gaming was revolutionized by the NES, and most owners had a few staple titles in their collection. If the mood struck you to run-and-gun your way through endless bad guys and aliens, then most likely you were popping in the all-time classic, Contra. While the age of shoot-em-up 8-bit games is long gone, there are still some trying to improve upon their designs and introduce their brand of fun to a new generation of players, which is where Weapon of Choice comes in.

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Publisher: Microsoft
Developer: TikGames Inc.
Genre: Puzzle
Release date: Available now
Review by: Ryan Asher

That fiendish old criminal Dr. Chaos has escaped, and now his crew of equally clichéd conspirators is up to all sorts of evil shenanigans. Worse yet, they’ve cut short your vacation (the bastards!). Before you think about bursting through doors, guns blazing, blasting your way to these Buzz Killingtons, the makers of Interpol have a different type of game in mind. You’ll be exercising that keen eye of yours instead of that calloused, trigger finger.

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Publisher: Fervent Interactive
Developer: Fervent Interactive
System: XBLA
Genre: 3D Platformer
Release date: Available now
Review by: Ryan Asher

With the introduction of Xbox Live Community Games, independent developers now have an easy way to reach the consumer and showcase their hard work. Totem is one result of this effort – a game combining creepy, multi-colored totem faces and a style similar to Tetris.

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Publisher: Hothead Games
Developer: Hothead Games
System: XBLA
Genre: Adventure
Release date: Available now
Review by: Ryan Asher

It’s the same stuff, different day for your main protagonist as Episode 2 of Penny Arcade Adventures begins, but this time it’s not a skyscraper-sized robot thrashing your pad. It’s your old buds Gabe and Tycho barreling recklessly into it with their truck. Cue the start of another random, hilarious and sometimes socially awkward misadventure starring the fine duo from Penny Arcade.

After the formalities of your now destroyed home are discussed between the duo and your character, who you can import from the first episode, you’re off to Anne Clair’s for mission details. If it’s the blood of evildoers you crave, no worries; it isn’t long before you’re outside the local loony house cracking the skulls of loitering crazies. The characters feel the need for change when it comes to their various instruments of death. Sure, Gabe still utilizes his fists to dish out his brand of hilarious justice, but Tycho has transitioned to the shotgun and you’ve moved on from the rake…to a hoe.

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Publisher: Gamecock Media Group
Developer: Blazing Lizard
System: XBLA
Genre: Sports
Release date: Available now
Review by: Ed Humphries

There’s a great line in Robert Altman’s 1992 Hollywood satire, “The Player.” A desperate screenwriter pitches potential projects as mash-ups of established properties, describing them as “It’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s meets Psycho,” each more ludicrous than the last. The idea is that audiences crave the familiar, rejecting anything new and innovative. The game industry isn’t immune to this Reese’s school of thought (take two great things and make one great taste) with sequel after sequel cannibalizing the innovations that have come before to seemingly build a better game (when Sonic is employing Bullet Time, you know we’ve got problems.) It’s a notion that developer Blazing Lizard has embraced heartily, melding pirate chic with ninja cool in its recent XBLA release, Pirates vs. Ninjas Dodgeball. Based on my time with the title, I can safely say that no one’s got their chocolate in my peanut butter.

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Publisher: The Behemoth; Microsoft
Developer: The Behemoth
System: XBLA
Genre: Adventure/ RPG
Release date: Available now
Review by: Christopher J. Troilo

With home consoles staking a larger and larger claim to the videogame market, it’s hard to remember the days when pre-teen Friday nights were spent in the arcade at the local mall. I used to love going with three of my friends, pumping quarters endlessly into the giant machines and tackling epic beat-em-up games such as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, The Simpsons or X-Men. What made these games a blast was their simplicity. You moved left to right beating up anybody who wasn’t on your team. For hours this formula of action and comedy enthralled me; it was the perfect recipe for entertainment. The creators of the new XBLA game Castle Crashers clearly remember those arcade days and pay wonderful homage to them.

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Publisher: Capcom
Developer: Backbone Emeryville
System: XBLA
Genre: Action
Release date: Available now
Review by: Ryan Asher

When you play a game that is mindlessly fun and addictive, but really has no redeeming value whatsoever, how exactly should it be classified?

I think it shouldn’t be. It’s beyond classification, one might say. It’s like your drunken buddy who always does something embarrassingly hilarious around respectable company, or playing midnight street hockey and being obnoxiously loud – these things are all highly entertaining, but you’re looked down upon for enjoying them.

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Publisher: Capcom
Developer: Backbone Entertainment
System: XBLA
Genre: Shooter
Release date: Available now
Review by: Andrew Clark

1942: Joint Strike stimulates my thoughts of the future. Will prevalent games such as Grand Theft Auto IV eventually be remade or reworked on some future platform? Should we expect that a game’s graphics will shadow its predecessor’s, as Joint Strike’s do its arcade grandfather’s? The possibility breaks some fifth-wall process in my mind and makes me wonder all kinds of magnificent things, not only in the visual department, but also in terms of gameplay extensions developers haven’t yet begun to imagine.

Joint Strike is a reconditioning of a 1984 arcade shooter in which you control a World War II-era fighter in a battle against squadrons of Japanese planes. This time, however, every aspect of gameplay and graphics has been expanded, polished and toned to accommodate both the modern gamer and fans of the original. Elements from all of the 194X games are combined, giving the player multiple planes to select, health bars (instead of 1942’s one-hit kills), a compliment of powerups to augment your firing pattern, charge shots, and the ability to eliminate every enemy on screen with a super bomb.

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Publisher: Microsoft
Developer: Number None
System: XBLA
Genre: Platform
Release date: Available now
Review by: Ed Humphries

Braid is the single most important game released this year.

Ever since technology caught up with our hobby and evolved it from simple beeps and blips and tests of hand-eye coordination into a medium capable of spinning a decent yarn and taking players away to awe-inspiring worlds of wonder, the argument that games are art has gathered strength.

In the past year, the debate has raged, with film critic Roger Ebert famously battling author Clive Barker over the topic. Ebert declared that no game could be considered art since the creator hands over control to the user to craft the experience. Barker countered that exact point — that art is defined by the experience we take from our own individual encounters with someone else’s creative endeavor. Ebert’s assertions seem rooted in the past; the Neolithic 8-bit era and earlier (yes, gaming lacks a Cave Art period). Many of Ebert’s readers tossed Shadow of the Colossus into the mix as proof that this medium can inspire and stir the soul. The jury is still out on whether he agrees.

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Review by: Ryan Asher

Presumably tired of the effeminate males hogging all of the screen time in every Japanese RPG ever made, Gabe and Tycho, stars of the popular Penny Arcade cartoons, have decided to turn a page in their careers. Instead of simply riffing on your favorite videogames in their comic strip, the sarcastic and witty duo is headlining their very own RPG, Penny Arcade Adventures: On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness: Episode 1.

Gabe and Tycho are teaming up with your completely customizable game persona and taking to the gritty streets in a rather deep turn-based RPG available on the Xbox Live Arcade for a mere 20 bucks. I say mere, because the game itself, a roughly six to seven hour campaign, as well as its intangibles, rival most fully priced offerings.

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Review by: Ryan Asher

Set your lasers to fun. Rocketmen: Axis of Evil has hit XBLA and it’s going to take one itchy trigger finger and a heavily gyrating thumb to obliterate the latest Martian menace.

Rocketmen is a top-down shooter set in the same vein as Smash TV or, more recently, Hunter the Reckoning and Monster Madness. For about 99 percent of the game, you’re going to be surrounded by several things trying to kill you, and your objective is going to be making sure that doesn’t happen. The person you control in order to achieve that objective is completely customizable. And since I choose to create likenesses of myself in videogames, I naturally went with the default option (a busty, African American woman with blonde hair). While you can’t really tell so much while playing because of the view, the characters are all cell-shaded, which fits the quirky mood of the game.

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Review by: Michele White

It seemed harmless enough. Word Puzzle sounded like an innocuous little game that would be played once and soon forgotten — or so I thought. Though very similar to puzzles that can be found at places like MSN Games, Word Puzzle is a word search game (like the books mom used to give you for long car rides when you were little) that gives up to four players the opportunity to battle it out and discover which one of them is the Puzzle King. Find the word and highlight it before your opponent does or time runs out. Score points for finding bonus and secret words, and in theory, compete with others online via the Xbox Live Arcade.

The download was quick and painless and took less than two minutes. Rated E, Word Puzzle can accommodate one or two players offline, while two to four can duke it out online via Xbox Live Arcade. At a cost of 800 marketplace points (about 10 real dollars), it isn’t a bad deal. There’s nothing exciting about the graphics, but they do an adequate job of making the visuals interesting. Obstacles to vision include a dancing native, a solar eclipse and a lightning storm that make solving the puzzle more difficult.

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System: Xbox 360 (Xbox Live Arcade)
Developer: Capcom
Players: 1-4 (both online and offline)
Review by: Matt Bosko

Editor’s note: This is a regular column in which Matt Bosko reviews Xbox Live Arcade games. Since XBLA titles are smaller in nature than full-blown retail releases, the reviews are shorter and forgo the Criteria page.

If you’re like me, when you hear the title, “Street Fighter,” the timeless series of fighting games comes to mind. Well, Capcom is trying to roll that same classic feel into their puzzle fighting venture, Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo HD Remix, the game where it’s good to build up to knock down your opponent. The question is, though, will this title build us up or let us down?

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