Halo Wars

This is the way the franchise ends. Worth: $4
based on 360 demo and videos

Mom, can I keep these guys?

I'm a Mac guy, so I knew about Halo way before it came out on Xbox and then PC. I first heard about it as an idea for a Mac-only RTS. Later it was going to be a Mac-only FPS, but at the time I promptly forgot about Halo the RTS because RTS games are tedious, stressful, and more often than not you spend hours on something that doesn't work out. In other words, you can lose.

To hell with losing. Getting my butt kicked, sure. Getting my ass handed to me, fine. But losing? That's too much like real life. I like FPSs, Racers, and RPGs because ultimately you're going to win. The only strategy game I've liked since Myth:The Fallen Lords was Civilization Revolution, which is an RTS like Will Farrell is Phil Hartman. CivRev is strategy-Lite, which is fine because it's so much less challenging than the typical hardcore strategy game. When I played CivRev I felt confident that my three hours of gaming would end in world dominance and not in frustration.

Halo Wars may not be totally hardcore, but it's still got the tedium of building a base and moving your little guys to the battles. The problem is, I'm not having any of the fun. All my little guys are. The game itself works great, the controls are easy to learn and use, the maps are easy to navigate around on, and c'mon, it's Halo! It's got to be good, it's Halo! Halo!!!

But it's not Halo. This game is why the minds at Bungie circa 1998 switched Halo from an RTS to an FPS. It's boring. They should have made another Halo 3 expansion like H3 Recon (aka ODST <- terrible name!). Why not H3 from the Arbiter's POV? With so much rich material it's a shame that this much talent went into something so forgettable from an otherwise stellar franchise.

Fallout 3

Future's so dark, I gotta wear a Haz-Mat suit. Worth: $60
based on 360 retail

No really, it's good radiation.

This sprawling, radioactive sandbox RPG is the most dualistic game I've ever played. It's huge, but you know it's just a small portion of the actual world affected by the story. There's a palpable sense of scarcity, yet you can always find more ammo. It's gorgeously rendered, but bleakly monotonous.

It's also super-gory. Heads, arms, legs, (and sometimes all of these) come flying off at least half of your victims. It's so detailed that you can actually see your enemies' eyeballs burst out of their sockets and land on the ground, where they remain for your gruesome inspection.

The world is spectacularly well realized, but this accuracy to post-apocalyptia is also a turn-off to the GamerGal. As she puts it, "You go from one desolate shithole, turn a corner, and surprise! Another desolate shithole!" While the monchromatic and uniformly forlorn game-world is pretty depressing, it's also fascinating, and jammed with things to see, do, and of course, blast into limbless gore-splattered torsos.

I loved Bethesda's earlier RPGs (Morrowind and Oblivion) and I love Fallout 3 also. If you like the idea of a big RPG / FPS / 3rdPS / sandbox mix (and I'll bet you do) than you may also enjoy devoting an entire month of late nights to playing this game. This may be the best game of 2008, which has been an excellent year. I give it my highest recommendation.

PROS: Big, fun world. Well-written characters and stories. Excellent weapons and armor. Good mini-games for locks/hacking.
CONS: Very short main quest. Leveling up stops very early at 20. Main quest has unsatisfying finale.

(Reading my CONS make me realize that I'm looking for more of a good thing.)