I missed last week due to my vacation, but judging from the amount of titles that have been rated since I last published, there wasn’t much there. So I am now back and have two weeks worth of rated games to cover. Scanning the list I see the usual tripe of sequels, milked IPs and kids titles. However, a couple of names caught my eye from some of the big publishers, but the biggest name on this list belongs to a long-awaited title for the Xbox Live Arcade.

PC, DS and Wii contributed 30 of the 38 titles to this weeks rated titles, but the quality is scarce as usual. What you will find are another Mario money grab (Dr. Mario Online Rx – Wii), a Digimon game (Digimon Word Championship – DS) and casual games being charged for (Lifetime Fashion Solitaire). There looks to be a sliver of hope with Crazy Golf (Wii), Family Table Tennis (Wii), Space Chimps (Wii, PC) and Neverwinter Nights 2: Storm of Zehir (PC). Overall, there are more titles that people probably won’t be interested in than titles that they would.

The Xbox 360 again flies the banner for the next-gen platforms with seven rated titles, while the Playstation 3 only had three. Both consoles shared two of EA’s titles, NCAA Football 2009 and NFL Head Coach 09. In addition, the PS3 had some sort of Vampire Rain sequel (Vampire Rain: Altered Species) rated. Hopefully it isn’t as bad as the Xbox 360 version of the game. The other titles for the 360 are Space Chimps, Beat’n Groovy, Domino Master and Don King Presents: Prizefighter. The final rated title for the Xbox 360 is the long-awaited XBLA release of Castle Crashers. While it won’t release this week, I would like to see it hit the service on either June 25th or July 2nd.

The title of shame this week was an easy choice for me personally. The Political Machine 2008 has landed the dishonor, for nothing more than placing more politics at the forefront and being a sequel to boot. While some people may get into the whole nasty underworld of Politics and want to run their own campaign, this to me is nothing more than a waste of money, time and resources by Stardock. I won’t go any deeper into the discussion on this topic, as I know it will only tick more people off.





Title
Publisher
Rating
Platforms


Castle Crashers
The Behemoth
Teen
360


Madden NFL 09
Electronic Arts
Everyone
DS

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