This is a passable first-person shooter set in a future in which humans have taken their wars to the colonies.

Players are enhanced with suits of power armor in which they are dropped into military zones from orbit and are equipped with all manner of firearms.

This game was designed for multiplayer combat operation excitement. While there is a single-player story mode it is beleaguered with weak writing and weaker voice acting.

Like I said, passable, but not much more than that.

Cross-posted at the Georgia Straight

So many games developed for the Wii have tried – and failed – to make good use of the motion-sensing controls that it was a relief to play Muramasa because it eschews that feature in favour of basic button controls.

This is a side-scrolling action game in which players take on the role of two different characters, each with their own story. Kisuke, a ninja, has lost his memory, and Momohime, a ronin, has been possessed by a spirit.

The objective is to progress through the levels, fighting enemies with your assortment of swords. That’s right, you’ve got more than one. When one breaks, you can draw another to continue the fight. These swords, which can repair themselves while sheathed, are Demon Blades, made to fight demons, but attracting them at the same time.

While it is certainly repetitive, Murasama succeeds because its Japanese-developed sensibility has been maintained for the North American release and because it is rendered in a beautiful art style.

Cross-posted at the Georgia Straight

I fell in love with Bethesda’s Wet the first moment I laid eyes on it.

Our star is the beautiful and deadly Rubi Malone, voiced by Eliza Dushku. Rubi is Clint’s Man with No Name, Yun-Fat’s Tequila, Uma’s Bride. Rubi is, well, Rubi, an extreme and violent wetworks specialist, which is a sanitized way of saying she kills people for a living.

This game, from Montreal developer Artificial Mind and Movement, owes a debt to the filmmakers who brought those characters to life. It’s got the style of Leone’s spaghetti westerns, the craziness of Woo’s Hong Kong gangster flicks, the cool of Tarantino’s assemblage.

Rubi’s story is one of excess and stylized violence. It’s intentionally over the top. Structurally, it’s a simple game. Rubi moves from one carefully designed set to another, where she has to eliminate the enemies with as much style as possible. Run up a wall and backflip off, slide under tables, leap around corners, targeting bad guys everywhere.

There are also collectible elements to encourage exploration, but the developers really shouldn’t have bothered. We’re not playing Wet to find symbol-bashing monkeys. We’re playing it to get Rubi dripping with the blood of those who stood in her way.

Armed with two pistols and a katana, Rubi heals by taking a swig of whiskey. When she fails to land a jump she doesn’t die, but the movie we’re – literally – playing rewinds a few seconds so she can try again. If she goes down in a hail of bullets during the major fight sequences, the screen bubbles as if the projector lamp has melted the cellulose film.

Now, I don’t want to hear any talk about how Wet gets a bit repetitive. Or how the controls are a little wonky and it’s more than a little frustrating when Rubi falls off a balcony because she jumped instead of hanging off the railing.

Nobody’s perfect, after all.

With me and Wet it was love at first sight. I’m glad that now we’re living together, the magic is still there.

Cross-posted at the Georgia Straight

It’s a good time to buy a video game console. Prices on all the big three home systems have gone down recently, and the new PS3 price comes with a newly designed – slimmer – piece of hardware.

It’s the subject of my “Joystuck” column in Fast Forward Weekly that published today.

On the last weekend of September, during the Tokyo Game Show, Nintendo finally joined Sony and Microsoft in announcing a price drop for its console.

In today’s edition of the Georgia Straight is my interview with a few of the people involved in making one of the best selling video games of all time: FIFA Soccer.

The new version of the title, FIFA Soccer 10, adds a couple of new features that really bring the game to a new level.

But it’s significant that the video game, while developed in Canada, is created by a team that’s itself made up of footy fans from around the world.

FIFA Soccer has generated more than US$2.5 billion in sales since its debut in 1993, making it one of the best-selling video-game series developed by Electronic Arts. The success of the franchise is understandable given the worldwide popularity of the sport. What may come as a surprise is that the FIFA Soccer games have all been developed at the EA Canada campus in Burnaby.