Thanks to a Spring blizzard and my lack of life I was able to check out five games over the weekend. I spent a little time playing Ape Escape, Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30, Xbox Doom 3, Rise of the Kasai and NARC.

I was surprised at what a good job was done porting Doom 3 from the PC to the Xbox. I made the mistake of playing the game late Friday night after work. At one point, due to the unfortunate timing of me snoozing off in the middle of the game, I was jolted awake by the unholy advance of a score of zombies. Needless to say, that put me in a very frightened frame of mind for the rest of the game. I actually stopped playing because I was starting to feel sick to my stomach. I think I actually like this version more than the PC original, which felt a bit forced to me. So, to summarize: Doom 3 packs all of the horrors , moody lighting and visceral details of the PC version, but somehow manages to come off as not so canned, and I'm a big wuss.

Ape Escape On the Loose is probably the closest thing I've seen to date as a flop on the Playstation Portable. The camera angles are a pain, the cut scenes are way to often and too long, the load times drive me nuts. And to top the whole thing off, the pay-off is you playing a five minute level running around thonking monkeys on the head and then netting them. I suppose there are people out there that will like the heavy-handed plot and light as a breeze gameplay, but I'm not one of them.

Oh NARC, what have you done? Don't get me wrong, there's a lot to like about the remake of the classic side-scroller. I like the fact that it's been converted into an open-ended GTA-style shooter and that despite this it still manages to retain its arcade-like qualities. But the game and the map seem far too small. It's almost as if Midway decided to cut their losses and stop developing the game half-way through. Fortunately, this doesn't affect the mechanics at all, which are razor sharp. The basic play style is also a lot of fun. It's just the lack of locations and repetitiveness of the game that will leave you wanting more. But what do you expect for $20? The game feels more like a tease to a sequel than its own full-fledged game. Maybe the sequel will pack the punch I was expecting.

I was starting to think that I didn't like first-person shooters anymore, and then along came Brother in Arms: Road to Hill 30. Almost everything about this game is impressive. To start with the entire story was lifted from the real-life events of a unit in the 101st Airborne which were dropped behind enemy lines for D Day. Add to that a much more faithful adherence to the real world elements of war, like health and ammo. This game makes you keep a very close eye on both. I especially like the squad-command system used in the game. With it you can order movements and cover fire with relative ease. The game also has a cool little feature that lets you pause the action and float up to a bird-eye view of the action, so you can plan your strategy. Adding a commandable squad to the mix and an above-view map, transforms the game from your basic run-and-gun shooter into something much more complex and almost resembling a real time strategy title. This was, by far, my favorite game of the weekend and likely the only reason I didn't get to six games.

I'm at a bit of a disadvantage here. I never played Mark of the Kri, so I didn't know what to expect for Rise of the Kasai. Man was I blown away. The highly-stylized cut scenes are riveting and the way the game slips between time periods and character sets really helps to keep things interesting. The best part of the game, of course, is its unbelievably cool fighting style, which lets you sweep a targeting flame around you in a quick circle and then attack multiple targets using three different buttons. I'd rank Rise of the Kasai as having the second most innovative fighting style (Rise to Honor tops my list.) and the animations are just unreal to watch, talk about vicious attacks.

So here's the breakdown: I'd likely pass on Ape Escape and NARC, but devote some hardcore play time to Doom 3 and Rise of the Kasai. Don't buy Brother in Arms until you have at least an entire weekend to blow, think of the game as a fine whiskey that needs to be savored.

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