The Five Hats of Gaming present…

…the top five games not worth full price

Brought to you by Fedora Man

Well it’s finally March; or rather it has been March for half a month now, whatever. It’s hard keeping track of time when you’re on another planet fighting the living embodiment of anger with nothing but hat based weaponry and your wit; not to mention making love to all the alien women who all suspiciously speak English (call me). In fact it’s nearly impossible to keep track of the time when you’re fighting robots and defending humanity twenty-four hours a day seven days a week (or sometimes eight days a week depending on where I am) so cut me some slack on the issue. But in between throwing my Fedora-rangs (not a rip-off of Batman) and solving super crime in my Fedora Cave I did manage to get down to Gamestop to browse the selection. I was thinking “Damn, I need some new games to play in between sleeping and fighting five dimensional creatures that my mind can’t fully comprehend.” Because honestly, what the hell else am I going to do in my spare time but play games on my super computer?

A horrible thing happened as I browsed the new games list: most of them weren’t worth the displayed price and I’ll be damned if I spend a cent of my billions of dollars if it’s on something overpriced and uninteresting. At first I believed some crime was afoot. Perhaps my non-arch-nemesis (but a nemesis nonetheless) The Emo-inator replaced all the great new games with some games that were released last year and already had at least thirty dollars shaved off the price tag in reality. But I quickly found out he was still in jail after his last big scheme (replacing all the pen ink in my mansion with black eyeliner). So I returned to Gamestop and demanded answers! “Why are these games priced at sixty dollars!” I demanded to know. “There is no way in hell they’re worth that much money!” I grabbed that pimply faced bastard by his collar and pulled him close to my face to show him I was serious. The rest after that was a blur, but I’m pretty sure the police came and I think I was trying to explain my innocence to them while being beaten with their night sticks. I couldn’t do anything since I wasn’t in costume (my fedora) so I just had to take the ass kicking. There is some good news though: I did manage to write down a list of games to bring to the public’s attention before I got sent to jail. Now the list was hastily scrawled on a dollar bill and there’s also a lot of blood on it but I’m pretty sure I can read it so I hope you can appreciate what I’ve done for you in the following list.

Number 5: Halo Wars

If ever there was an argument for Starcraft 2 to come out in the year 2009 this game would be it. With what looks like completely unbalanced gameplay and some craptastic AI; Halo Wars makes me yearn for the glory days of the RTS when Starcraft was out and kicking some ass. Or at the very least it makes me yearn for a computer RTS instead of this watered-down console game. Sure the controls worked but everything else was terrible compared to almost every other RTS on the market. Want to build a defense line at a chokepoint? Well you can’t build outside the designated bases. Do you like managing resources and armies to win strategically? Well I hope you do since it’s a Real Time STRATEGY. The only trouble with that is they only put one resource in the game and you can’t really hotkey or select units you aren’t looking at directly so micromanaging is nearly impossible. So do you want to kill the Prophet of Regret’s vastly inferior forces with your army of super death? Well have fun getting killed by his stupid laser. What about the AI? You might as well take out the “I” in that because there’s nothing intelligent about the computer. Even on the hardest difficulty and with the handicap of being a human (the entire human race tends to suck horribly in this game) I still managed to destroy the computer with minimal effort.

Admittedly the above was all part of the demo but a demo is designed to make you want a game and this demo did nothing but make me look at Blizzard’s website to see how far along Starcraft 2 was in production (and now I’m going to stop talking about SC2, I promise). “But there was a harder difficulty in the real game”, or so I’ve been told. But the thing about that is I don’t want to buy a game only to find out it’s not the least bit challenging. If someone else wanted to buy the game for me then sure I’d play it, the point is I just don’t want to pay $60 for it.

Number 4: House of the Dead: Overkill

Call me crazy (and I’ll punch you) but I’ve never been much for rail shooters. There was something about the lack of freedom to choose where I wanted to go (or move) that always got me. I guess they were alright in an arcade where I never had anything better to do and I had a friend handy. Other than that it never appealed to me to want to play a rail shooter at home because I could always do something different. “Let’s see do I want to play a game where zombies attack me and I’m not smart enough to take a few steps back? Or do I want to play Mario Kart?” Mario Kart won every single time. So although I haven’t played House of the Dead: Overkill, I have played rail shooters and previous HotD installments and can say that with one hundred percent certainty that this wouldn’t be worth fifty dollars.

Number 3: Tom Clancey’s HAWX

I don’t think demos are really making me want games anymore. First Legends of Wrestlemania (yeah your favorite superhero Fedora Man likes wrestling, sue me) with its “I don’t want to download because I’m an asshole” attitude. Then Halo Wars was like “I don’t feel like trying”. Then there’s this game, and I honestly can’t decide what this game’s message is. On one hand it could be “I’m not fun!” On the other hand it could be “what the hell is going on?” Both of those would actually work for this title. Maybe I was just stressed out from lack of sleep and from all the clowns I was punching in the face and the game simply appeared to not be enjoyable. Or maybe everyone telling me how great the game would be made me build up false expectations that it would be the next Starfox (minus that stupid Starfox Assault failure). Whatever the case may be it was not really all that great as a game. This could have been because I had no idea how to fly my plane in a way that didn’t cause me to experience vertigo. It could also be attributed to the fact that it felt like I wasn’t really accomplishing anything during the course of the battle. On one hand I could cut it some slack because it’s just a demo. But on the other hand I’m sworn to uphold the law in whatever way I see fit and if that doesn’t give me jurisdiction to be a douche for no reason then I don’t know what will.

Number 2: Halo Wars: Limited/Collectors Edition

Now I know what you’re thinking, and no I don’t have the ability to read minds I’m just that good. You’re thinking “but you already did Halo Wars! You’re so lame!” You’re probably considering destroying your Fedora Man action figures and burning all the T-Shirts with my face on it. You might even go pick up monopoly, dig the hat out, and eat it just to prove a point. Although firstly I’d like to point out that’s not a fedora, it’s a top hat. Secondly don’t lose faith! There is a very good reason I’m putting the special edition on this list.

For a while I debated just putting this down as an honorable mention and putting MLB 2K9 on this list instead. But then I realized that not only was it a sports game but it was one about baseball and no one would even read what I had to say about it because no one cares. I probably just pissed off some baseball fans that are no doubt injecting steroids and getting angry at me at this moment (zing). However I really can’t care because none of them parade around in my merchandise and play Dungeons and Fedora Man in their free time. In truth I shouldn’t make fun of baseball fans just because of our differences in what we like to watch. After all professional wrestling also has steroid use so I can let that slide (note: Fedora Man does not use steroids he is naturally a buff ass kicking machine). I do apologize for those last remarks, but only if you wear a fedora tomorrow to recognize my heroism.

Hey it looks like I’m getting off topic. Let’s get down to Halo Wars: Special Edition. Now I’m not sure when every major release had to have a special edition but I think it was around the time Halo 3 came out. In any case the special edition is priced at a nice eighty dollars. With it you get a disc on how they made the game, you know, in case you ever want to make a Halo Wars game yourself, in your basement. Actually it’s probably because they love Halo SO MUCH they just HAD to get it! Since figuring out how the game was made makes the experience so much better. Aside from that you also get a Spirit of Fire patch so that you can become the coolest kid on the block! (Note to self: get Spirit of Fire patch for costume). You also get some useless crap like trading cards and a book that details the history of the characters in the game. Now I’m no rocket scientist (okay yes I am) but I’m thinking that should have been included as an encyclopedia in the game or in the instruction book. Look I don’t mean to talk about Starcraft again but this just came up and it’s very important. See when you bought Starcraft it came with a huge manual that, aside from telling you how to play, detailed the history of each individual race as well as several heroes. Maybe it’s just me but I’m pretty sure that part could have easily been included in the game.

However the biggest reason this is on the list is attributed to the Halo 3 map code. I’m just wondering if somewhere along the line openly treating the customer like an idiot became the norm. The maps are going to be ten dollars on the xbl marketplace but now you can buy them for the low, low price of twenty dollars! Seriously? Maybe people really want all that other crap (anyone want to give me an ultra hip Spirit of Fire patch?) but I’m quite certain the majority of people bought the special/collectors/limited edition for those maps. So if you want to pay ten dollars more for the maps then go for it, just be sure to give me the Spirit of Fire patch.

Number 1: Resident Evil 5

So I get to play Resident Evil 4 again? Well that’s cool, it was a fun game and I’m sure they’ll change it so it doesn’t get boring while still delivering the great gameplay I expect from the fourth game. Oh but what’s this? You took out the merchant (the best character in the game) and the attaché case? So I can only carry around nine measly items? Well I guess they’re going back to their roots with survival horror in a way right? They’re limiting the items, it’ll totally work! Except they’re giving you mounted mini-guns with unlimited ammo so they can’t be trying to make it survival horror-esque again. But hey now they’re giving you cooperative mode, that’s awesome right? Except it ruins the gameplay for single player entirely which you might think is odd because it’s supposedly a single player game. One could argue Resident Evil 4 had an annoying partner you had to take care of. The difference here being Ashley could hide inside of dumpsters and not die like a jackass. She also decided that trying to run up and hug a man wielding a chainsaw was a bad idea, unlike Sheva whose battle strategy involves running right up to the chainsaw man and trying to shoot him. Oh and that’s another thing, Ashley never wasted my ammo. Hell when I think about it all the complaints I have about the game boil down to “my teammate is a moron”, that and they pretty much downgraded everything from the fourth game. I’m not going to spend a cent of my billion dollar fortune on Resident Evil 5 when I could invest that money in something much cooler… like a space ship shaped like a Fedora.