Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Turtles in Time Re-Shelled

Turtles in Time for the Super NES is one of my favorite games ever made. I’ve never gotten to play it in arcades, so when I heard that it was coming out on XBLA, I was pretty excited, after all, the first TMNT arcade game was pretty fun for the 360, why wouldn’t the best one be? I’ll tell you why.

The first mistake the made was redoing the graphics and audio. A game like this thrives on nostalgia. Taking that was a foolish maneuver, because a game like this does not belong with modern games. If they had just rereleased the arcade game, or (ideally) made a four player version of the Super NES game, I would have been happy.

You see, this genre doesn’t really exist in gaming any more. There’s just not enough to it. You go forward and smash the attack button. Since they redid the arcade version of the game, it doesn’t even have all the levels I remember. It was amusing to play through this once four player, but by the end of that I was already getting tired of the game.

Re-Shelled is a totally competent game. Everything works, it looks and sounds fine. But it is not the game people were looking to play. Maybe kids will get a kick out of it, but do kids these days even know what TMNT stands for? Like, I know there was that CG movie a while ago, but did that even do well?

Your XBox Money is better spent on getting a game like Shadow Complex or some sweet DLC.

Red Faction: Guerrilla

One of the best experiences in gaming is when you destroy something. The developers behind Red Faction: Guerrilla know this, and they built a game to deliver that experience as well and as frequently as possible. This is a great game.

You play as Alec Mason (a name I confuse with Alex Mercer from Prototype) a dude who showed up on Mars to chill with his brother and do some mining. Unfortunately for him, his brother is caught up in the resistance against the Earth Defense Force, the dudes who run Mars, and quickly ends up dead. With no alternative, Mason joins the resistance, the Red Faction, and begins working to liberate Mars and defeat the EDF.

As a miner, Mason starts with two weapons, his trusty sledgehammer and remote mines. With these you can take apart pretty much anything in the game, buildings, signs, vehicles, people. And your arsenal keeps expanding throughout the experience too, you’ll get some guns and more sci fi weapons as you go. Destruction is the heart of this game and it is a truly satisfying experience taking apart a building or running through it in a giant robot.

Your objective is to inspire the people while weakening the EDF, so you’ll go on missions to free prisoners, blow shit up, steal stuff, and straight up raid bases. It’s all fun, except I didn’t really care for the transporter missions, where you had to drive a specific car to a specific base in a specific amount of time.

This is up there with Infamous for my game of the year right now, I really recommend investing in this adventure.

This summer I played five new video games. You’ve already read about Rock Band: Unplugged and Infamous, so here’s a quick look at the other three.

Prototype

Hulk: Ultimate Destruction was easily one of my favorite games of the last generation. When I heard that Prototype was pretty much going to be that same game but in HD, I thought for sure that I had found my game of the year. Sadly, this is a game that did not quite make the transition to next gen without losing something.

You play as this dude who wakes up and finds out his has super powers and the military is all over his ass. As New York falls apart around you, you go on a mission of revenge, while greatly expanding your powers along the way. You can grow claws, turn your hands into massive hammers, fly, all sorts of crazy shit. It’s even possible to absorb someone, taking their memories and appearance.

The big problem with this is that you are a walking murder machine. Which is a lot of fun, but a hero it does not make. So when the game tries to make you sympathetic toward Alex Mercer, and more importantly make him a hero to the people of the quickly being destroyed New York, it just rings false. The story is so stupid and written so poorly that it becomes a problem.

But the game is a lot of fun to play. The controls are a little difficult at first, but you will get that hang of them and then Prototype opens up into one of the bloodiest good times I’ve had all year.

Extract

Years ago Mike Judge wrote and directed the cult classic that is Office Space and now almost 10 years later he’s back to the workplace with his latest dark comedy Extract starring; Jason Bateman, Mila Kunis and Ben Affleck to name a few. I’d pondered if Judge could repeat the subtle genius of Office Space and hoped for the best but with Extract, the laughs didn’t quite flow as freely and there was just something missing.

Jason Bateman stars as Joel, the owner of an Extract plant plagued by incompetent employees with a home life that isn’t much to speak of either. Surrounded by a plethora of wacky characters including; a redneck employee threatening the plant with a lawsuit (Clifton Collins, Jr), an annoying neighbor (David Koechner), a slow-witted gigolo (Dustin Milligan) and a two-faced con-woman (Mila Kunis), Joel must find a way to rise above everyone attempting to take advantage of him.

It doesn’t sound like much but if anything I found the story to be fairly clever. The silly little twists and turns almost make up for the film’s lack of big laughs and I was certainly never bored. Judge’s characters are often quite amusing, a lot of critics have been calling them “one-dimensional” but I rather enjoy their stupid demeanor… I mean who does stupid better than the man who created Beavis and Butt-Head?

There are a lot of great bit parts and cameos, from Gene Simmons as an overly-aggressive lawyer, to Hal Sparks and some other guy as loser guitar salesman, to Judge himself as one of Joel’s simple minded employees (I wouldn’t of recognized him if it wasn’t for that low voice with a hint of Butt-Head) Judge’s supporting characters are always worth note and always amusing.

All in all it’s a funny little movie but nothing more than that. Not something you need to see in theaters but worth a rent. With King of the Hill ending I’d really like to see Judge stick to movies rather than animated television but he’s an unpredictable guy, so who knows what’s next.