In addition to my regular Games of our Lives column, I've got a review in The Onion AV Club this week.
Games of our lives looks back at Thief:
You robbed the bank. That's good! But you dropped the money all over the known universe. That's bad. But you have a spiffy car to drive around and pick it up. That's good! There are cops everywhere. That's bad. But you can occasionally blow them up for big points! That's good! You want to play Pac-Man, but you can only find a cheap imitation! That's Thief!
Gameplay: Using a joystick, you drive your little car around the ugliest maze in the world. Your goal is to pick up all the dollar bills so you can advance to the next level. Opposing you are four little police cars. They don't have names, but you could safely call them something like, oh... let's randomly say Inky, Pinky, Blinky, and Clyde. If they touch you, you'll blow up in a magnificent fireworks display. However, if you pick up one of the dollar signs scattered around the maze, a siren will sound and your enemies will become ghost cars that you can run into for bonus points.
[. . .]
It's a little embarrassing to watch Thief try to be as cool as Pac-Man, but it's still a really fun game that works extra-hard to keep players happy. The game plays a super-cool police-scanner soundtrack right out of a '40s movie, and when you're down to your final life, Thief helpfully says "This is your last chance!" Can you remember the last time Pac-Man said as much as "Hello" to you? Didn't think so.
And I reviewed X-Men Legends 2: Rise of Apocalypse:
Whether to get out of homework, exact revenge on a bully, or just impress a potential date, every kid wants to be a superhero. But the Earth's yellow sun gives its native population sunburns instead of superpowers, and radiation is likely to make you a cancer patient rather than a mutant. So what's a wannabe to do? Retreat to the basement with X-Men Legends II, of course! In this follow-up to 2004's X-Men Legends, Apocalypse threatens to destroy Earth. In the face of this mighty adversary, the X-Men team up with their arch-rivals from Magneto's Brotherhood to defeat him, presumably so they can get back to fighting each other.
Final judgment: X-Men Legends II is more of an action-based button-masher than a sandbox RPG, but there's nothing wrong with that. The few limitations are easily offset by just how enjoyable it is to play this game.
I realyl liked both of these games. In fact, Legends 2 is so much fun to play, I got a copy of it for PSP so I could play it when I wasn't at home . . . which brought to mind an interesting idea: wouldn't it be cool if you could have some sort of online place to save your games, so you could play them on different platforms and keep your progress in synch?
