Eat My Bomb’s founding tradition was that of the Summer games spree. The idea was to finish off a few of the almost-finished games that were staring us in the face day after day. After some careful consideration, the editing staff has opted to move this tradition to Winter, a time when it makes more sense to sit inside and play games all day. Winter will be here in two days so I’m asking editors and readers for their Winter Games 2006 lists. Start with 5 games and add more as you knock them off.

If you’d like to keep track of our collective progress, click the Winter Games link up there at the top right under ‘Dig Deeper’. Or just click here.

You look tired, you should take a nap.

In other news, Hitman: Contracts ate the bomb this weekend. It is another terrific addition to the Hitman franchise. One interesting thing about this latest installment is that it contains a few of the great missions from the original Hitman: Codename 47. This was a great idea since the original is pretty buggy in some spots. I get the feeling that the developers are saying, “This is how it was meant to be in the first game.” There are only a few of these classic missions, the rest are original, intricate, and suspenseful as ever. Jesper Kyd’s music for Contracts is once again a knockout and the mission/environment designs show great attention to mood and detail. The game’s 12 missions left me satisfied and eager for the release of Hitman: Blood Money.

Rating: BUY

Like an epic mini-series, my battle with Prince of Persia: Warrioir Within is finally coming to an end. After the climactic scene involving a hammer and some violence, consider this review the denouement that sends you home with a feeling of resolution.

I’ll pick up where I left off with my first impressions of the game back in November. Things went from mediocre to hammerlicious shortly after that post. Bottom line: this is a game that was haphazardly cobbled together in order to get it out by Xmas. Aside from the numerous bugs, terrible camera angles, endless back tracking, and bad level design Warrior Within also suffers from a bad story.

(Read on …)

Paradise in a box

It seems to be something fundamentally interwined with males on a cellular or perhaps even genetic level. Some mutation in our DNA that has arisen in the past 30 or 40 years. Every guy, big or small, short or tall, wants to have an arcade cabinet or pinball machine of their very own. No matter how powerful the home consoles get, no matter how far they surpass the arcade machines in graphics, story, style, and control, no matter how much emulation can be found and downloaded, every man wants his own quarter-muncher (set to Free Play, of course). Lately, this dream is becoming more of a practical reality than ever.
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Please, God, think of the children!

Time is short here - as I’m trying to get some holiday shopping done in between the endless holiday party parade that is December. With all the late nights and rum-soaked fruitcake, I haven’t even had the strength to play World of Warcraft in the last five days….and thats saying something (my alter ego ‘Hariseedz’ usually spends more time playing at night than i do).

So last night as I was searching for some room to free up on my harddrive I stumbled onto an old favorite - Sacrifice. After playing it for a few hours I remembered how fun and truly different it was. I didn’t realize it at the time, but this is the game that introduced me to RTS and RPG both.

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It turns out I’m a big fan of capitalism. If I were to rank the world’s socio-economic strategies in a list, capitalism and all that it entails would be atop the heap; a sort of “king of economies”, if you will. Unfortunately, capitalism engenders a certain money-at-all-costs mentality which lingers about society like an embarrasing and potentially odorous relative, a mentality which causes much wailing and gnashing of teeth amongst those to whom the term “hippy” could apply. The worst of capitalism’s bastard children has to be advertising, and the darkest spawn of that inbred family is the sponsored link. IGN - which will remain unlinked in a silent protest - perpetrates these insults by peppering their articles with such phenomenal links as these:

It’s not totally unexpected for a costumed hero to meet a major physical set-back on the job.

Go ahead, click on the link. I warn you, however, that it may cause confusion, exasperation, and indeed even rage.

When I click on a link I expect an extrapolation of the topic at hand that provides me the chance to expand my knowledge base of said topic. When I click on the link I expect a pretty lady to jump out of the cake to wish me a happy birthday. At IGN, the only thing that bursts from the confection is Martha Stewart, and she wants to explain the ins and outs of decorative frosting. Damn you IGN. We will be enemies until the firmament crumbles.

On the upside, .hack//mutation ate the bomb and I’m enjoying Sonic Heroes. I’m not going to recommend either game with any kind of vigor, but Sonic Heroes is a pleasant distraction from reality. It features team play in which you select one of four teams each with a speedster, flyer, and brawler member to take on Eggman. Each team has a slightly different storyline but all play on the same levels; the diffence is mostly in cosmetic execution and difficulty. It does lose something in the translation from 2-D to 3-D so it’s not as fun as the classic side scrollers, but it entertains. Making up for that fact is the classic “challenge” mode. Remember running down the tube trying to collect more rings than your friends? Oh yeah you do. I give it a BORROW.

I don’t know Tails, why don’t you go and ask it while I keep running.

Best Buy: Satan’s favorite place to shop?

Last year you may remember my tips for holiday shopping at Best Buy. I mentioned some of the problems with Best Buy, and being careful if you decide to shop there (or don’t shop there at all).

Well, after a 3-year boycott of Best Buy, last September I decided to give Best Buy another shot. After all, perhaps they have gotten their act together, and maybe some of my criticisms were undeserved. I needed to buy a new D-Link router (the Netgear one I had wasn’t working quite right with a couple games I was playing), and Best Buy was advertising one for a very cheap price after two rebates.

I was careful about making copies of the rebates, filling out all of the correct information, and sending them in on time. How could I go wrong?

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Elaine! What are you doing here?

Agent 47 is back on the money train. In my latest Hitman: Contracts adventure, I got a chance to see how the other half lives…and dies. The contracts in the game are getting much more elaborate and complicated to execute. On this most recent job, I had to knock off the Beldingfords, a wealthy father and son at a hunting estate. Here you can see one of my targets sleeping with a woman who I assumed was his daughter (Making the target out to be an incestuous swine makes the job easier on me mentally). For some reason, these two don’t use sheets but maybe that comes with being filthy rich. The first time through I tried to poison the old fellow’s bedside milk but the noise woke him up and wouldn’t you know the bastard keeps a gun in his bed? Needless to say, I had to use excessive force and that’s just not the way I roll. On this reattempt, I quietly smothered the life out of him with a 360 thread count, 100% Giza Egyptian cotton pillow. I have nicknamed this method “The Softy”.

One great advance I’ve noticed in this latest installment of the Hitman series is that characters in the game take random paths when walking/patrolling. That means that you can’t always watch for a pattern in their movements. This forces the player to be constantly aware and ready to improvise. More to come as I continue to spoonfeed Hitman: Contracts the bomb.