American McGee's Alice
Platform: PC
Genre: Role-Playing Game
Manufacturer: EA Games
You remember Alice, don't you? Cute girl, hung out with a talking cat and some crazy guy with a big hat, drinking tea in a psychedelic land of make-believe? Well, Alice has grown up a little, and now she's got some new toys and one heckuva mean streak.
Alice returns to Wonderland when a fire kills her family and puts her into a psychotic state. Her beloved fairy-tale land has seen some hard times, though, and it's rotting from the inside.
To save Wonderland, Alice has to go round-for-round with some old friends like Tweedledee and Tweedledum and the infamous Red Queen.
The key is to keep Alice sane while she's traipsing through her old stomping grounds; the more she gets "hurt" in Wonderland, the crazier she gets back in her hospital bed. Too much damage and she's going to plunge right over the edge into full-blown dementia.
She's not mixing it up empty-handed, though. Among her new stash of weapons is an exploding jack-in-the-box and a set of razor-sharp jacks that home in on their target with deadly efficiency.
With amazing graphics and crystal-clear sound, this game does justice to the world of fairy-tale animation. No details are skipped, either, as evident by the bloodstained apron Alice is sporting these days.
Movement especially jumping takes a little while to get used to. The placement footprints show where Alice is supposed to land, but you can move her around in the air, so it becomes more about feel than landing markers.
The biggest disappointment was the overall challenge of the game. With few exceptions, most of the enemies are pretty simple to defeat, and the "puzzles" are almost laughable.
The linear, simplistic path through the game shows that most of the emphasis was put on the artwork, but in this case that's not such a bad thing.
For those of us who grew up with this childhood favorite, this is a fitting modern-day sequel. Just don't expect a soothing bedtime story with a happy ending this time around.
Grade: B+
Kelly Martin, Scripps Howard News Service
Blade
Platform: PlayStation
Genre: Role Playing/Action
Manufacturer: Activision
What's most disappointing about Blade is knowing what it could have been. The half-man, half-vampire Blade is a vampire-killing comic book superhero fave, but unfortunately his legacy has been done no justice with this flawed effort from Activision.
Blade tries to pattern itself after the vastly superior Resident Evil series, but comes up far short. Its failures are not the result of the gameplay, the premise, the graphics or any one thing there are just a number of small details that add up to big trouble for this game.
For example, although Blade has an impressive array of weapons at his disposal, you shouldn't have to be forced to select them while multiple enemies are attacking you.
Different enemies require different weapons, so keeping on top of what you're wielding wastes a lot of brain space, and results in a lot of damage as you try to pick the right weapon to kill what's killing you.
You can hit the R2 button to find out what kind of weird human/vampire hybrid you're facing, but should you have to? Who cares what it is, just let me kill it!
Blade's graphical issues are particularly disappointing. What you can see of the graphics looks good, but the environments are so murky and poorly lit that it isn't unusual to take on heavy damage while something you can't see is killing you.
Camera angles are also a problem for the same reasons. Villains frequently appear out of your line of sight and blow you away before you can even turn around.
With these difficulties ironed out, Blade might have been super. But if a great comic-book game is what you want, don't look here. Instead check out Activision's much superior Spider-Man.
Grade: C
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