Well, sorry for the lack of missives as I’ve recently found employment (albeit, temporary) and with all of the end of year holidays, it’s hard to keep up on some of the little things. Although, I’ve found enough time to play my share of mostly bad games lately. I’ll still keep this post short, but I will give you all a tad of what’s been filling up my limited spare time.

Geometry Wars: Galaxies (Wii) - I am a big fan of the 360 arcade title, but this game doesn’t even come close. The idea is there, to use the controllers “handy-wavey” technology, but it just doesn’t flow well. Trying to do a full circle onscreen ends up making you look like you’re putting yourself in a sleeper hold. Plus, downgrading the graphics to the Wii version takes away a lot of the luster that the Xbox brings. I do like the idea of additional levels, but not enough to save this game. 1.5/5

Carnival Games (Wii) - Yet another Wii title that could have been a lot more fun. It was great to play some of the old carney games that I remember (ski-ball, clown-head-balloon-pop, ring toss, etc) and it was definitely fun. For about 20 minutes. Once I played all of the games, there wasn’t any incentive to keep playing. Some of the single player challenges were so ridiculously hard that it wasn’t worth the time to even try to beat them. I guess just like real life! 2/5 (just because ski-ball!)

Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords (Wii) - Exact same as the DS version. Except the graphics and the controls are bad. .5/5

Battalion Wars 2 (Wii) - Finally, a game worth it’s weight. I like this game. A lot. The controls are good and fluid, the game looks nice, and it was fun to play. I encourage everyone to give this a shot as it’s nice to see something of quality make it to the little white system here. It’s a nice little 3rd person, RTS type game that does a good job of being different. 4/5

Timeshift (360) - I liked this game at the beginning. In fact, things were awesome once I got the exploding arrows. But, like any puzzle incorporating FPS, there is always a point where you just give up because the developers decided to make life more complicated than necessary in order for you to advance. That is the point that I promptly took it out of my Xbox and sent it back to gamefly. Why do you have to have stupid puzzles ruin a perfectly good time of blowing people up? Oh, and I might be the only one, but I enjoyed the time freezing and slowdowns. Especially when it meant you could walk up to an enemy and just unload a barage of shotgun blasts at him in slow-mo! 3/5

Clive Barker’s Jericho (360) - This game started out bad and quickly got worse. I wanted to like Barker’s signature on the game and the darkness and creepiness was evident. But if it takes an entire clip to kill one of these freaks, then it’s overkill (no pun intended!). Not to mention that your AI buddies routinely walked into the line of fire and quickly found themselves a bloody heap in the middle of you and several monsters. Of course, then you had to go back and “heal” them just to do it all over a few minutes later. Oh, and somebody should have told them that the game should be dark (as far as storyline) but not dark (as in “I can’t see a friggin’ thing!”). 1/5

Well, I hope all of you don’t get any of these games (except Battalion Wars) for Christmas. If you do, maybe you can exchange them in and get yourself Rock Band or something!