Game Time
Too cold to play outside? Play indoors and play well with these new video games
Sam & Max: Culture Shock
Telltale Games
PC
Sam and Max, a crime-fighting detective-dog and psychopathic-bunny duo, debuted nearly two decades ago in a cool comic book before becoming a classic LucasArts computer game. The duo also made it to TV as a late-90s Fox Kids cartoon series.
Now they're back as playable pixels for your gaming pleasure.
The manufacturer Telltale is treating the game like a TV series, with a half-dozen three-to-five hour episodes comprising the game's first season. These can be bought individually as a full season or via GameTap, a broadband gaming service with a monthly fee.
In Culture Shock, the private investigators, er, "freelance police" must stop the Soda Poppers, a group of former child stars who have turned to crime. It's a pretty straightforward point-and-click adventure game with clever puzzles and tons of personality thanks to the contribution of creator Steve Purcell who makes sure the game retains Sam & Max's trademark old-school film noir feel, stylized 3D animation and a sense of humor made up of equal parts snark and slapstick.
Justice League Heroes
Snowblind Studios/Warner Bros. Interactive/Eidos
Multiplatform
Once upon a time, all licensed videogames sucked. But just as movies based on comic books have soared on the backs of Spiderman and Batman, so too have superhero games enjoyed a creative revival.
Justice League Heroes is a co-op brawler with RPG elements designed to appeal to DC Comics geeks. The game features obscure characters such as the witch Zatanna and green-skinned Martian Manhunter, as well as those who only know the big three — Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman.
You can only have two characters onscreen at a time, compared to Legends' four-mutant teams, and there's no multiplayer co-op mode. But for superhero fans who have waited a long time to take the Justice League out for a spin, it's still a blast punching, zapping, lassoing and flying through the mayhem to stop evil robot Brainiac from doing whatever it is that evil robots do.
Viva Piñata
Rare/Microsoft
Xbox 360
What would it look like if Animal Crossing and Pokémon were mixed together? Imagine a brightly colored population of living, confection-filled creatures, which is what you get with the wonderfully weird next-gen gardening simulator Viva Piñata.
You begin with a piece of land that must be tilled, seeded and tended to grow different plants that will attract the more than 60 species inhabiting Piñata Island. The other side of the island is theoretically home to vividly plumaged piñatas in the popular computer-generated cartoon on Fox in the U.S. and YTV in Canada.
Most of your time will be spent strategically managing resources to keep your piñatas happy, well fed and housed so that when the mood is right, they’ll get romantic and breed little baby piñatas. You can also customize and trade piñatas with pals over Xbox Live.
Though it’s more like The Sims than a traditional console game, there are constant dangers facing these fragile papier maché beasts — bird piñatas like to prey on worm piñatas, for instance. So have fun creating your cute little ecosystem but be prepared — a lot of candy will be spilled.
Valkyrie Profile 2: Silmeria
Tri-Ace/Square-Enix
PS2
Valkyrie Profile 2 is a prequel role-playing game set several hundred years before the two-dimensional PlayStation One original, a cult hit that nowadays often fetches a pretty penny on eBay.
VP2 tells the tale of Silmeria, a rebel valkyrie (valkyries help guide fallen human warriors to the afterworld of Valhalla) whose spirit winds up in the body of a princess named Alicia. Alicia was abandoned by her father, who assumed the voice she was hearing in her head meant she was way crazy. She is now being chased by the god king Odin. The literally inseparable duo hit the road and dungeon-crawl their way to preventing an all-out war between earth and the heavens.
The storyline is epic, though the cut-scenes are perhaps too long and plentiful. The turn-based multi-character fighting scheme is complex and the graphics offer an unusual mix of lush 2D side-scrolling environments and 3D battles.
This game is certainly not for everyone. But if you dig Norse mythology and are into Japanese RPGs, then VP2 is, well, a gift from the gods.
Dragon Quest Heroes: Rocket Slime
Square-Enix
Nintendo DS
Uh-oh…practically the entire plopulation of Boingburg has been slime-napped by the evil Plob!
Set in the world of Dragon Quest — a long-running and 40-million-selling RPG series — this DS adventure stars DQ's most iconic enemy, the adorable, blue and ever-blobby Slime.
In this spin-off, DQ's bad guys have turned on each other and it's up to Rocket, the sole remaining slime, to elasto-blast his enemies, rescue 100 of his compatriots, and restore the island kingdom of Slimenia to its formerly gooey glory.
Rocket Slime boasts a top-down view, Legend of Zelda-style action-RPG gameplay, colorfully effective 2D graphics and amusingly pun-filled dialogue. But where it really shines is with the awesome tank battles. Most videogames make item collection a drag, but here all those found objects, and even captured enemies, can be used as ammunition for the tank cannons.
The fights between dual-screen tanks can also be played against up to four friends over DS wireless (though not with Nintendo's wi-fi service). But whether solo or multiplayer, Rocket Slime still equals fun.