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Review: Order Up!

I love food. Who doesn’t? I will openly admit to the fact that I enjoy Cooking Mama, Diner Dash, Pizza Tycoon, and all of those other food-related games. Perhaps it’s the fact that they are much more convenient than actual cooking, or they’re much less of a hassle. For whatever reason, they’re tons of fun, and Order Up! for the Wii serves up a whole mess of fun.

Order Up! puts you right in the shoes of either a male or female chef who wants to make a splash in the restaurant industry. Upon starting the game you make this decision, though it has no bearing on the route you will take on the way to becoming a revered chef. However, everyone must start somewhere, so in order to get to the top, your aspiring chef superstar is put straight to work at one of the greasiest burger joints around–Burger Face.

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Review: Zoids Assault

Do you remember Zoids? No? Don’t worry, I’m sure not many people do. If you’ve never heard of Zoids, it’s a Japanese toy line that consists of animal-like mechs that are exceedingly popular. It’s spawned a few anime series, tons of manga, fanbooks, and unfortunately, games. In the eighties the toy line was released in America, but didn’t catch on as well as planned. A couple years back Zoids made another Stateside debut with an anime series on Cartoon Network, as well as a line of models that you could collect and play with your friends every morning in the cafeteria. Like many fads, its popularity waned, and eventually faded into the background. Now, in 2008, Atlus has made the decision to release Zoids Assault for the Xbox 360, in a move that both baffles and repulses me, because this could very well be one of the worst Atlus titles-or out of any game I own, for that matter-ever.

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Review: Silent Hill: Homecoming

Silent Hill: for fans, that name is synonymous with fear, psychotic episodes, trippy visuals, and mindbending storylines. For everyone else, it has meant playing with the lights on, confusing and convoluted plotlines, and horrible controls. With the recent release of Silent Hill: Homecoming, the sixth entry into the Silent Hill franchise, Double Helix Games sought to better your survival horror experience. Did they succeed? Yes, in a number of ways.

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Review: Ben 10: Alien Force

As far as video game tie-ins to cartoons go, most are pretty horrible. They’re carbon-copies that do great injustices to the more popular titles of the genres, and for the most part they’re usually not worth your time. Ben 10: Alien Force is no exception. Based on the popular cartoon of the same name, it’s your average, run-of-the-mill 2D brawler that offers little challenge and an extremely short single-layer campaign.

If you’re not familiar with the cartoon, it follows the events of the original series, Ben 10. A teen named Ben Tennyson is in control of a watch-like device named the Omnitrix. The Omnitrix allows Ben to transform into several different alien forms, but only for ten minutes each time. Long story short, Ben is a threat to all the evildoers in the universe.

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Review: Skate 2

Though legions of fans mourned the dissipation of the Tony Hawk franchise, I am one of the few who will proudly usher in a new age of skating titles, which began back with EA’s smash hit Skate, and continues with the equally satisfying Skate 2. It can most definitely be said that this is the definitive skating sim, as Skate 2 brings with it an impressive bevy of improvements to the original formula as well as some comfortable sameness that one would expect a successful sequel to provide.

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