Go Play Lumberjacks is, oddly enough, part of Majesco's new Go Play line of family-friendly titles. Of course, on the Nintendo Wii, family-friendly generally translates into mini-games, and Lumberjacks is no different. The game actually has quite a few nifty features, including Wii Balance Board support and the ability to unlock a whole host of secret characters, one of which is your Mii. I heard you all gasp with delight right there.

Unfortunately, too many of the mini-games amount to me standing in front of the television pantomiming masturbation, something I don't generally do unless I am watching CNN.

Have you been eyeing a budget title at your local game store but just aren't prepared to take the plunge sight unseen? Feel free to use the comments section to suggest more games you'd like us to play So You Don't Have To.

So what it Battle Rage: Mech Conflict? For an in-depth explanation, I took the liberty of copying the official sales blurb from the game's Amazon.com listing.

Customize your deadly giant Mech to be the ultimate war machine. Choose from 20 different weapons and equip up to three at a time. Strike the right balance between speed, power and armor before you head into one of 10 different arenas to take on other robatic challengers.

Robatic, huh? Nice.

Apparently the same care and attention to detail went into the game's development as well. As per usual, I'm terribly sorry about the auto focus. I used a much better camera this time around, but the trade off is I have no idea what I am doing, all over again. Whee!

Witness my early attempts at racing here with Codemasters' new multi-format racer GRID, or Race Driver: GRID for you folks in Europe, who apparently need the extra clarification. It's quite sad, but at least I'm having fun, right? As I mention in the video, look for a full review next week, once I get into the swing of things.

As promised in the vid, I've dug out the original posting of the intro song, and I am happy to report that after playing the game for a good hour I am pretty sure I am not dead.

Not too shabby really. I'll definitely be picking the game up, if only to lord having it over my nephew. It's the tiny victories that matter.

Why do I own Catz 2 for the Wii? Because I was so disappointed by the gameplay of Kane & Lynch: Dead Men that I traded it in for Ubisoft's Catz 2, just to spite it. Seriously - that's how I roll, yo. I figured my roommate would get a kick out of it, and I do have a certain fondness for cats myself, so I brought it home last Thursday to start raising kittens that I could visibly treat better when my own real cats were bad. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that Catz 2 for the Wii isn't a pet sim, but an adventure game, complete with shops, quests, and a villain so diabolical he ranks right up there with the best Final Fantasy has to offer. Witness as our hero, Rufus, embarks on a journey of high adventure in this (poorly edited) clip of the game in action!

The controls are far too simple for a serious fighting game. Shake the Wiimote to slash while maneuvering with the control stick on the nunchuck. Holding down A and shaking does a power attack, while holding B summons forth a special attack. There is no jump button. None. Nada. Bleach men can't jump. As you hit and get hit the bankai meter fills, and once full giving the 'chuck a shake activates your bankai, which ranges from your character glowing slightly to your weapon becoming a giant freaking skeletal snake. I know this is straight from the series, but it's kinda sad when your opponent suddenly fills the whole screen and your only response is to glow menacingly at them. Rawr! I glow!

In an attempt to mix things up a bit, when two characters' power attacks land at the same time, a little rock, paper, scissors-type mini-game ensues, with vertical, horizontal, and stabbing attacks. At the end of five rounds of this the character with the most wins performs a special attack. Interesting at first, but pnce I kicked the difficulty up to hard it felt like entire rounds were made up of an endless string of these. Highly annoying.

With cutscenes comprised of still pictures with captions mixed with in-game cinematics, I wasn't all that impressed with the overall presentation of the game. Still, for fans of the anime and manga there is plenty of extra content to unlock on top of a grand total of 32 playable characters. You win coins by playing through arcade and story mode which you can use in the shop to unlock extras, so you at least they've got the fan service down pat.

As for the awesome new character created for the game...well, here he is.

I wouldn't recommend Bleach: Shattered Blade to anyone but the most fervent fan of the show. It's a simple little fighter with almost no gameplay depth whatsoever. Any game I can beat simply by simulating masturbation with the Wiimote needs to tweak it's difficulty level somewhat. Either that or I am just really good at it.

I meant the game, you perverts.

Knowing I am probably the farthest from the target audience as possible, in order to give the Icicle Creek a fair shake I first had to get myself into the mindset of a teenage girl. After spending an hour drawing hearts with Crecente's name on them on the outside of a battered old spiral notebook, I felt I was ready to fully appreciate the life of a young female detective.

Our story begins, like all good detective stories, on my Windows desktop...

And thus was the stage set. As Nancy Drew, I am invited to work undercover at the Icicle Creek lodge. Dangerous accidents, sabotaged properties, and explosions are followed by a mysterious white wolf appearing at each incident.

The game is a relatively standard adventure in the old school vein. Arrows to move from area to area, an inventory to manage, clues to guide you along, etc. Nothing too fancy, but for Nancy the mystery is the star, not flashing scene transitions or awesome 3D animations. I did not some near little touches as I explored the inside of the lodge, such as a newspaper with side stories about a man attacked by a wolverine and a sasquatch sighting. Going to give the developers the benefit of the doubt and chalk that up as a Marvel comics reference. Clever!

Now I am ready to venture outside, to see what lay beyond the dead-animal draped walls of the stuffy lodge. What would I find there? Danger? Excitement? Dare I say...love? I grasp the doorknob, heart beating wildly with all the possibilities, and then my cell phone rings. It's the lodge owner, and she's pissed. Apparently my undercover guise as her maid and cook, like great power, comes with great responsibilities.

And that was it. I seriously couldn't bring myself to finish this mini-game, and I could see no other way to progress. Maybe I just didn't dig deep enough into my feminine side, but that would assume that women enjoy cooking and cleaning, and you know what? Just going to shut up about that. All I know is that after I was done I handed the game off to my mother, and she loved the damn thing. Go figure.

The White Wolf of Icicle Creek is just one of sixteen of this games, with another due out later this year. They are available in stores or direct download from Her Interactive, and despite some of my comments during that first video seem to be just the kind of wholesome fun that young girls need to keep them from turning into...average young girls these days. If you can catch them during that two week period between them wearing sundresses and calling you "Daddy" and getting their bodies pierced and calling their boyfriend "Daddy", you just might postpone the dreadful process for a week or two. Got to get your innocence where you can these days. Michael Fahey

Hit the jump for a more in-depth look at the game, including a couple clips complete with color commentary courtesy of my patented stack of DVD's on the coffee table with a camera on top video capture system.

Prince of Pirates

At World's End wants to be Prince of Persia. I suppose if you are making a game about high adventure in exotic lands it doesn't hurt to borrow from the definitive game on the subject. Like PoP, you'll find yourself running up walls, hanging from ledges, making impossible jumps, and navigating various insidious traps in between combat sequences. It does many of the things Prince of Persia does, but just not nearly as well. Sadder still, the few bits that don't feel like a PoP game just aren't very much fun.

Hack, Slash, Repeat

The combat system is being touted as the most dynamic swordplay ever. I'm not sure how they came to that conclusion, but I'll go ahead and run with that. The most dynamic swordfighting ever consists of hitting the A button three or four times. There's also a punch button, so you can do crazy sword-punch-sword combos. When an enemy is about to attack a red circle shows up under their feet, and if you move the stick towards them you will dodge in various piratey ways, which I suppose is kind of dynamic. Fill up your skill meter and you can even perform a rather poorly animated finishing move, killing your opponent by sticking your sword through (or more often near) them.

The obvious solution to this dilemna, of course, is to make some places where the 'Get There' button doesn't work for no real apparent reason. Some enemies require you to use the special finishing moves to defeat them in an obvious effort to make people like me shut up.

Hop, Skip, and Jump

Somewhat more enjoyable that the combat, the platforming elements in At World's End can take a little getting used to.

Aside from the obvious knife in the face issue, what really gets in the way of the fluidity of the platformy bits is, oddly enough, the graphics. In a highly detailed pirate-themed world it is often hard to figure out that the rope in the corner of town is for you to climb on and not simple set dressing. Rope is as important to a pirate as rope with a steel claw on the end is to a ninja.

Too Boring For Video: Boss Fights

Here's where the game ground to a screenching alt for me. Just as I am beginning to squeeze some enjoyment out of the jumping and fighting bits, along comes a boss fight the pits Captain Jack Sparrow against some random pirate lord, and instead of pounding away at my dynamic A button I find myself squaring off on a 2D plane playing a bastardized version of captain combat from Sid Meier's Pirates. Instead of watching a dramatic standoff, I am watching three dots on the side of the screen that tell me how to dodge in order to fill up a meter that allows me to counterattack. Basically your opponent will go high, low, or lunge at you, and you have to move the analog stick to match it. Aside from the odd mid-fight event sequence, the whole thing is dreadfully boring. It was at these times I really felt that I didn't want to play the game any longer.

Now that I think about it, those sequences probably play much better on the Wii. It feels like a wiimote tailored sequence ported to the 360, shades of Raving Rabbids. Odd.

The Look, The Feel, of Pirates

The game certainly doesn't look like a Wii game at least. The environments are so finely detailed and atmospheric that you almost ovelook the repetitive NPCs and enemies you encounter within them. Almost. Hard to ignore a prison run almost exclusively by fat, tattooed bald guys.

The characters, for the most part, look like their real life counterparts. Particular attention was paid to the hair - Jack's dreads flow majestically while Will Turner's ponytail bobs along. They've got Sparrow's animations completely nailed. From the little finger wiggle thing he does to his particular swaggering walk, it's in here. They may even have gone a bit too far - when the character comes to a stop from a run he always pulls up short, as if he were getting ready to run the other way. At first it comes off as a nice little homage to some of the films' best scenes, but eventually it will wear on you until you wind up spending a good hour playing the Jack Sparrow is Scared of Everything game. You had to be there. You would have been there, but I got so wrapped up in it my camera batteries died.

Here's Some Rotten Fruit For Your Pirate Booty

The header above was actually said to me by one of the random NPCs in Port Royale, and will remain atop my list of best video game lines of all time. It needs to be sampled into a techno song as soon as humanly possible.

At World's End sound is very passable indeed, though as a guy who has dabbled in voiceover work the sound-alikes are so obviously soundalikes it makes me wince to hear them talk. The actors do a fine job for not being Depp, Knightley, or Bloom - they're just not Depp, Knightley, or Bloom. Call it the audio equivalent of uncanny valley.

Otherwise the music and sound effects come together nicely to make the locations and combat believable and as exciting as combat like this can get, which is what it's supposed to do. Go sound!

At World's End's End

I stand behind what I said at the beginning. This is pretty much Jack's pirate videogame, and when he is in it doing what he does best, you can almost tolerate the inane combat system, the repetitive enemies, and the overall average gameplay. As with many licensed titles, it all comes down to how big a fan you are. If Pirates of the Caribbean is the world to you, you've already got the game and are busy trying to recruit a friend to try out multiplayer while trying to unlock all the secrets in the game.

If you're like me and the movies are just something to satiate your perfectly natural pirate curiosity, there are better ways to spend your time and money. From what I hear there's some good films opening this weekend. Michael Fahey