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Violent? Check. Gory? Check. Full of superheroes? You bet. What happens when you crash the super violent world of Mortal Kombat into the long legacy of DC’s most popular superheroes and villians? Well, you actually end up with a pretty fun game.

This game is essentially just a Mortal Kombat game with some DC characters thrown in for fun. That doesn’t mean that it’s a joke though, it is actually quite entertaining and full of all the usual combos and super moves that you’d expect in any modern fighter. Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe is also a blast to play multiplayer style, taking on someone that you can trash talk right next to you.

One of the many violent gameplay moments

Although it may seem a little goofy, Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe is actually a lot of fun to play. Just don’t try and follow the “plot” (quotes intended) because it doesn’t make much sense.

My review: Surprisingly Good
Pick it up for: Cheap
GameRankings.com score: 75.28%
Metacritic score: 72 / 100
Wikipedia Link

See more games I’ve written about here.

TimeShift is a normally mediocre first-person shooter that makes itself unique by allowing you to control time. Sure it may have a standard sci-fi plot and only decent graphics (good, not great) but the time control aspect of the game is actually pretty fun. Essentially the game allows you to stop, slow down or rewind time at a whim.

This in turn allows you to do some pretty interesting things within the game. Encountered a group of baddies? No problem, just stop time, steal one of their weapons and fire a bunch of rounds at the rest before starting up time again and watching the havoc ensue. Even multiplayer lets you play with time, albeit it in a somewhat restricted ‘time sphere’ way.

TimeShift is certainly not the best game I have ever played, but for the little bit of money that I spent on it, it was actually pretty fun.

My review: Mediocre
Pick it up for: Cheap
GameRankings.com score: 70.59%
Metacritic score: 70 / 100
Wikipedia Link

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I really liked Red Faction: Guerrilla. It’s sort of a cross between a straightforward third-person shooter (Gears of War, Lost Planet, etc.) and a sandbox game (Grand Theft Auto III). You play the role of what I would call a terrorist revolutionary, fighting to rid Mars (your new home) of the evil Empire. This basically has you running around and removing evil ‘influence’ from various areas of the world by blowing stuff up. It’s like if the guys from Star Wars solved all of their problems by not just blowing up the Death Star but also by blowing up anything vaguely related to the Empire.

What you blow up is more or less up to you. There are both low and high priority targets that you can take out at your leisure as well as loads of missions to further the story. Red Faction comes equipped with what they call the Geo Mod engine which basically means damn near anything in the entire game can be destroyed. This is an awesome feature that I think many more games should adopt. It also makes for some ridiculous and satisfactory explosions. Want to bring down that skyscraper with a hammer? Yeah you can do that, but it might not be as quick as using, say, your rocket launcher.

My review: Great
Pick it up for: Any Price
GameRankings.com score: 85.33%
Metacritic score: 85 / 100
Wikipedia Link

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Virtua Tennis 3 brings fun pseudo-realistic (but really more arcade style) tennis game play to the Xbox. It has all of the usual features including playing as the various tennis stars, picking different courts and a custom character career builder. The bulk of the game exists within this custom character career where you’ll need to balance a training / tournament / resting life balance in order to succeed. Some of the training levels are quite funny and completely unrealistic. Whether it is the tennis bowling or the tennis bingo there is quite a bit of variety to be had.

Multiplayer is also a lot of fun. Up to four players can play simultaneously in a 2 vs. 2 partners match or compete in the various training modes. And that’s about it. There really isn’t much more to this game. And that’s really my only complaint. Once you play a couple of matches and mess around in the training modes there isn’t much left. Not that I expected there to be but it still somehow feels… lacking.

The ball will return in the direction of the arrow

My review: Surprisingly Good
Pick it up for: Cheap
GameRankings.com score: 80.19%
Metacritic score: 80 / 100
Wikipedia Link

See more games I’ve written about here.

Half real-time strategy (RTS) and half hands on naval/air-combat, Battlestations: Midway straddles the line between a wartime simulation and a flight to the death action game.

Throughout the course of the game you’ll get to command and control everything from destroyers and aircraft carriers to submarines and airplanes all while re-enacting famous historical battles. And while it is really neat to be able to control all of these different vehicles, the combat sadly just becomes so routine that after a couple of missions I ended up playing the game almost exclusively from the tactical map screen (i.e. RTS mode). Battlestations: Midway also has you micromanaging fleet formations and ship repairs. If you are like me and forget to keep checking on your ships, you may find that they are sinking very quickly because you simply forgot to issue them repair commands. That kind of sucks. The game’s campaign is also very cookie cutter with the only difference between the various missions being the starting intro movie and the locale.

Battlestations: Midway isn’t a bad game… it just isn’t a great one either. If you’re looking for something a little different or something to fill the Xbox 360 simulation/strategy void than this might be it. Otherwise, maybe not so much.

You sunk my battleship!

My review: Mediocre
Pick it up for: Cheap
GameRankings.com score: 73.74%
Metacritic score: 73 / 100
Wikipedia Link

See more games I’ve written about here.

There has been quite a bit of activity on The Linux Experiment over the past little while. Check out the site here or quickly jump to the post that I wrote below.

Big distributions, little RAM 3

How do the ‘big time’ distributions handle on constrained hardware? Take a look.

How to install sun-java6-jdk and Netbeans in Ubuntu 11.10

A simple process to install the official SunOracle Java JDK and Netbeans IDE in the latest Ubuntu.

Ubuntu 11.10′s WiFi crashes my router

The new Ubuntu release is pretty good. Unfortunately it also causes my router to crash.

Gentoo (A.K.A. “Compiling!”)

My first post for the second Linux Experiment where I speak about my Gentoo first impressions.

How to enable reboot/shutdown in KDE on Gentoo

Closed source AMD/ATI drivers, wireless networking and Flash in Gentoo

How to update your (whole) Gentoo system

A trio of small posts that walk new Gentoo users through setting up and doing some basic things in their new desktop.

How to play Red Alert 2 on Linux

I managed to get this classic game to run great on Linux. It even includes a bit of a hack that allows you to play LAN games. I don’t think you can even do that on Windows any more.

Oh Gentoo

My final post of the second Linux Experiment. Includes my conclusions on running Gentoo as a day-to-day desktop system.