"The game industry seems to be fresh out of creative, original ideas executed in an entertaining manner, and I do not have a game-caliber PC or Xbox console!" That is what many PS2 fanboys are saying, in my imagination. Well, has Majesco got JUST the PORT for YOU!:



Psychonauts! It's only the best game I've played all year, and likely will play all year. Buy it! It would seem that if you have a PS2 then your Psychonauts will have crappier textures and jaggy edges and almost-unbearable loading times, but if you have a PS2 you should not be surprised by any of that. Instead of being surprised, you should be driving to a store and pledging to return to that store on June 15 to purchase one or several copies of Psychonauts. Buy Psychonauts. Unrelated note: I strongly believe that you should buy Psychonauts.



*crickets*



It looked like the demo kiosks for Crave's upcoming The Bible Game were not functioning! "I guess someone up there doesn't like something about The Bible Game LOLOLOL," I said. It was only after patting myself on the back for being so witty and subversive that I realized it was 6:00 PM, and the floor was closing for the day. So these guys were probably turning them off, rather than fixing them. Still, The Bible Game needs fixing. A long time ago, a failed game developer decided that the true path to fortune would be to illegally circumvent the NES licensing lockout and release their own games for Christian families. For the most part, newly-renamed Wisdom Tree's efforts consisted of taking one of their lousy action games (such as Menace Beach), changing all the enemies to environmental hazards such as birds or steam, and adding Bible trivia interludes (Sunday Funday), and not working too hard at it since they'd sell anyway. But that was a long time ago! Today, the possibilities are endless! Crave, however, is not interested in possibilities except the possibility of making a lot of money without being too creative or working too hard, so they made a game where you wander around and battle demons with Bible trivia (GBA) and a game where you play minigames and battle your friends with Bible trivia (PS2). All of this is a shame because if you've read the Bible, you know that there are some totally awesome gameplay possibilities in just the first few chapters alone! (Are you reading this, David Jaffe? Ha ha ha, of course you aren't!) Also, it's worth noting that the beginning of the Book of Mormon is totally an RPG. This guy kills another guy and takes his armor, and they form a party, and they camp somewhere and get their HP back overnight. Seriously!



VIDEOCRAB E3 EXCLUSIVE!: Here is a homeless man at a nearby gas station who had a shoulder-mounted cat. The cat had obviously been raised to live on his shoulder the way our cats live on couches. Sometimes, but very rarely, I don't want Los Angeles to fall into the ocean.



"This is Burnout Revenge. Have you played Burnout before?" Ha. Ha ha. Have I played Burnout before? Ho ho hoooo. I play Burnout the way some people play Final Fantasy. I am One with Burnout. It makes me feel like I am 9 years old again, smashing Matchbox cars together. Perhaps there is somebody reading this, possibly a female, who hasn't played Burnout. Basically, Criterion made racing games fun again by removing anything even remotely realistic, rewarding the player for risky driving maneuvers, and adding an awesome realtime damage model for crashes (Burnout). Then they implemented a puzzle-style mode based entirely around crashing your car into busy intersections (Burnout 2: Point of Impact). Then they centered the game around not simply racing well but also forcing your opponents to crash spectacularly (Burnout 3: Takedown). What could they possibly do to make Burnout more fun? Simple: they tweaked the physics model to allow for high-speed rear-impact collisions with the miscellaneous cars on the road. What this means is that you can now shunt pesky rush hour traffic out of your way, plow the first-place guy into a pylon or something, and boost onward to glory. There's even a new mode centered around this, called Traffic Attack, which starts you out with 20 seconds on the game clock; for every unsuspecting car you take out along the way, you earn points and extra time, with bonuses awarded for multi-car pileups left in your wake. It took me a second to get used to the idea that I could hit traffic without crashing, but once it all clicked, I went into The Crazy Taxi Zone. Traffic comes in clumps in the Burnout world, and I was causing accidents and boosting onward to find that next clump of cars before the timer could even start to count back down again. Incidentally, I set the highest score the demo guy had seen all day, boo and yah! Oh: and now, when you crash, you can press a button to make your wreckage EXPLODE, which is very satisfying when two computer drones think they're so clever by working in tandem to run you into a wall. You may have crashed, but you can now send them (and any nearby objects) flying in a fiery ball of physics. I don't know how they got the game ready for E3 while also working simultaneously on Burnout Legends for the PSP and their innovative new first-person shooter "Black," but I believe I've already mentioned that Criterion has the programmin' skillz to pay the billz and get bought by Electronic Artz. September 13th can't come soon enough. I, um, really like Burnout. And Psychonauts. Buy Psychonauts!