Spittin' Game

So let’s get this out of the way: This is the game that comes with the chance to download the Halo 3 beta when it’s released. Crackdown is probably worth your money on its own, though. In a sort of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup stroke of genius, the geeks at Microsoft have thought to combine comic books with Grand Theft Auto. The game’s mostly linear, your only real objective being to hunt down gang leaders and kill them one at a time. And what passes for a side mission in Crackdown would be considered a stat-boosting minigame in most sandbox titles, but the fact that you can kill a gang lord by throwing a truck at him and then shooting it with a rocket launcher keeps the game from getting monotonous.

 

 

 

March is a slow month for video-game releases. So now’s a great time to dig through the used bins at your local game store and grab cheap-ass backward-compatible games you never would’ve paid full price for. Indigo Prophecy’s a perfect example. This weirdo adventure game is now worth its price (about $12 where I got it). As an adventure game it’s actually pretty crappy: The puzzles are weak, and you have to complete an ungodly amount of Simon Says games to advance the action. But as a Tex Murphy/Wing Commander/other-embarrassing-old-guy-example interactive movie, the plot’s intriguing enough to keep you playing. You start out in a bathroom committing a murder against your will and spend the game running and trying to clear yourself. Pretty cliché, but you also play as the two detectives trying to hunt your ass down, leading to some interesting dilemmas. It’s not exactly brilliant, but for $12 you get a pretty good time. The urge to make a joke about your mom here is almost overpowering.