An Xbox 360 Christmas at My House

With three kids and two gaming parents, it was pretty obvious that we were going to end up with some Xbox 360 games in our home this Christmas season.  I haven’t had enough time to play with each of the games to give a full review but here are my first impressions:

Lego Batman: The Video Game is fantastic!!!  I wasn’t a huge fan of the Star Wars or Indiana Jones Lego games (they were fine but were either too hard or too easy) but this game, so far, is just perfect.  It’s cooperative so you’ve got to figure out what each character should be doing and sometimes you need to decide on what suit your character should wear.  You can play as a hero or a villain (I really just like playing Batman but Catwoman is pretty awesome too).  I think it’s worth trying.

Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe elicited screams and yells on Christmas morning as my son unwrapped it and figured out what it was.  The gameplay is what you would expect from both an MK or DC Comics game so there aren’t really many surprises there.  The main thing is basically that it’s fun to make these two groups face-off against each other.  It’s also pretty straight-forward to play so that’s a real bonus.

My oldest child is notoriously picky and even slightly boring in her choice of video games.  She normally sticks to puzzle games or things like Pac-Man so I was not overly optimistic when she decided to give  Mirror’s Edge a try.  Surprisingly, she liked it.  She thought the controls were easy to figure out and, naturally, loved the fact that it was a quest-type game with a female character in the main role.  For myself, the jumping, wall-walking and acrobatic moves are a bit too nauseating so, if you’re at all prone to motion-sickness, don’t even attempt to play this game.

You’re in the Movies was the biggest hit of them all in our house.  The are issues with the game (like the background needs to be perfect in order for the game to not eliminate entire portions of your body and players really need to be almost the same height) but, overall, it’s a real crowd-pleasure.  Even my 81-year-old grandmother got up and did 4 rounds to make a movie of her own.  Not that was a sight!  I highly recommend this game.  I’ll write a more detailed review soon.

images: xbox.com