Exclamation point Exclamation point One

Few of my readers, which is to say mostly friends who are polite enough to read my blog, have an XBox360. Those who do, should at least check out the trial version of I MAED A GAM3 W1TH Z0MB1ES!!!1 . It’s just another damned twin-stick shooter, and there are certainly better ones than this available (See: Geometry Wars), but this one wins out in terms of inspired lunacy. It also only costs a buck (Er, 80 MS points), but you can pretty much see what there is to see in the trial version. Check it out.

Ladies and gentlemen, here are….

The Beatles: Rock Band released a couple o’ weeks ago, but circumstances have prevented me from picking it up until now. So far, I’m very impressed.

I was born after The Beatles disbanded, so I missed the whole thing. I still grew up with their music, of course, and while John, Paul, George, and Ringo were around (until 1980, anyway), their collective effort was kind of a distant-past mythic thing to me. Each studio album is like a book of a holy text from a band that went back to their hall on the other side of the Rainbow Bridge.

Of course that’s hyperbolic and silly, but the point I’m making is that The Beatles are really important to me. So now, given the chance to fake-play-along with them in TB:RB, well, it’s super awesome. The devs at Harmonix treated it with the same kind of reverence I have for the band, making it just about perfect. Highly recommended to any Beatles fan.

Spaaace Huuulk!

I got the new Space Hulk the other day. Apart from the 1993 computer game, I’ve never really played it, so I decided to go ahead and spend too much to buy a copy of this. Thanks to the awesome proprietors of Krier’s Cards and Comics , I got a significant discount on the MSRP, but still… I could have got the new Cosmic Encounter for $30 less on Amazon.

While Cosmic is a great game, the basic truth is this: Nobody I know particularly understands it. A 5 player game only works if you have 5 players, y’know? While Space Hulk has a simple premise and only needs two people. Game-for-the-buck wise, it’s a better purchase for me.

I’m excited to play this thing. It comes with great models and an impressively thick embossed cardstock board. I’ll let you know how it plays.

Space Hulk Terminators, unpainted.

(iPhones really aren’t good for closeup photos, but you all knew that.)