Scary new games

There are lots of new games at this time of the year. It's E3 again! Well, Los Angeles is too far and I couldn't afford the journey anyway. I could afford a trip to this year's Gamescom in Cologne, but it's still too early to know if I will be able to go. Well, what about all the new games? There are just too many, so let me talk about just a few of them.

The Guitar Hero games were getting stale, so Neversoft's main competitor Harmonix has decided to present the new, innovative Rock Band 3. Now there's a keyboard, and there will even be MIDI guitars and the possibility to connect your real MIDI instruments (like my really nice Roland drum set) to the game. The good thing about this is probably that these games are slowly leading advanced players to real musicianship, as the advanced difficulty is almost like playing a real instrument. The bad thing is that, well, you are still playing along other people's music. What I like about playing (about real playing, not the make-believe variety that these games brought to the table) is that you can change the solos, improvise, try a new rhythm to make things more interesting. Because I'm a musician myself, I feel there's still a limit to what these games can offer me. I don't want to play along a song: I'd rather just play a song, because I can, because I have the chops for it.

Let me give you an example: it's cool to follow Pink Floyd's "Another Brick on the Wall", but what happens if you just want to jam for a while and just keep playing? Here's a video of my old band doing just that. But with Rock Band you just mimic the song, and that's the end of it. Will Rock Band titles give you that opportunity in the future? That would be really cool. But would regular players even want that? I'm not the best person to answer that.

Super Scribblenauts promises adjectives that offer a lot more options than before. But are these new options any fun? Because the problem with the first game was not the lack of options, but their faulty implementation. Guys, we don't want more options, we want better options. This time you are not fooling anyone with the "hey, you can do anything!" hype. Just give us a good game, OK?

Homefront is... well, just a stupid far right wet dream turned into a videogame. Inspired by one of the most absurdly paranoid movies ever, Red Dawn. It's usually easy to present the Russians as the bad guys, but in this case the developers try to sell the idea of a Communist invasion making it look as real as possible, if real means "Korea is just like Nazi Germany". You know, Modern Warfare 2 wasn't just a good example of great storytelling, but at least they bothered to create an acceptable -even if flawed- excuse for the main conflict (you know, that level). Now it's just "Koreans are crazy and want to kill us all!"). I'm curious about the game, but I can tell you now that I'm not going to pay a cent to fuel paranoid fantasies, even if it turns out to be really good.

There are just too many new games to comment about all of them, so I just won't. Oh, but there's another thing... Today Super Mario Galaxy 2 has been released in Europe. You should definitely check out that game. It's awesome.