Sly Cooper and the Thievus Raccoonus
This is basically a cartoony Metal Gear Solid. In this single-player game, you assume control of Sly Cooper, a raccoon renowned for his thieving skills. The object is to sneak around and retrieve the family’s heirloom, the Thievus Raccoonus—a book that holds the secrets of raccoon thievery. The emphasis in Sly Cooper is on sneaking around, dodging lights and using stealth and smarts over brute force.
The game looks pretty enjoyable. It’s the typical “run around and get stuff” game, but using stealth rather than just barging around requires some depth of strategy. That plus the cartoon-style graphics, which were pretty cool, makes the game fun to play.
Twisted Metal: Black
This is another game in the well-known Twisted Metal series, where several players drive around in souped-up cars and try to blow each other up. (Add some bass-cranked stereos and some Eminem, and you have an average Saturday night in my hometown).
The graphics are pretty good, and the ability to drive into other people like a maniac without having to stop and exchange insurance info afterwards is cool. But this game still feels like most other drive-and-shoot games out there. If you like the duelling car theme, check this out, but if you just want to cause vehicular mayhem, I’d wait for Grand Theft Auto: Sin City.
Twisted Metal also supports the network adapter, which means you can now blow up the cars of people you’ve never met, as well as your friends who come to play at your house.
Rachet and Clank
Imagine if Super Mario had a giant cartoon gun and ran around some futuristic, acid-soaked world shooting robots and other giant, non-scary menacing things. That was sort of how I thought about Ratchet and Clank. The game was notable for having huge immersive levels. This game has a lot of different worlds players can explore (and presumably blow stuff up in.)
In the game, you play some sort of animal that looks like a blend of Crash Bandicoot, a lion and a lemur (Ratchet) who runs around with a robot on its back (Clank) shooting stuff. It’s really cartoon violence (there’s no blood or anything…though I could have sworn I saw a single tear roll down the cheek of this one robot as I shot him off a cliff) and this game should appeal to younger gamers. The graphics were pretty good, but the game play got repetitive after awhile.
