Tony Hawk’s American Wasteland

One has to wonder what has happened to the Tony Hawk series as of late. The series began dying out, so Activision put out it’s Underground game, a refreshing new addition that was fun to play yet featured too many similarities to previous installments. THUG 2 was just more repetition that caused almost endless boredom. However, this negligence is greatly overshadowed by Tony Hawk’s first foray onto the Xbox 360, Tony Hawk’s American Wasteland.

The fact that the game can be played in high resolution truly only makes the games flaws, including its terrible graphics and sloppy animations, all the more apparent. Can Activision truly be any more lazy? One would figure that they would at least try to make a solid first appearance on next-gen consoles, however that is not so. Tony Hawk’s American Wasteland, or THAW for short, really should have been thawed out prior to its release, since it will leave gamers feeling nothing but icy resentment towards the game.
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Madden 06

Given the ridiculous popularity of the Madden series, it wasn’t surprising in the least that Madden 06 for the Xbox 360, the first Madden on a next-gen system, was going to by hyped, hyped, and hyped up some more. The Madden series is one of the most popular franchise of games of all time and, especially considering EA now exclusively owns the NFL license, it dominates to football market for games. However, domination of a market doesn’t mean that the company, in this case EA, is going to put out the best product possible. In fact, the product usually lies on the opposite end of the spectrum. Sadly, that dark side is where Madden’s next-gen debut finds itself.
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Amped 3

Finally, it has arrived. After two successful installments in the highly prestigious series, Amped 3 has hit shelves for the Xbox 360. Most of the hype generated for the game has been minimal due to Microsoft selling the license of Amped and a couple other of its sports games to 2K Sports, the new force on the field of the sports genre. So the real question now arrives: does Amped 3 repeat the quality of its predecessors?

Although that question will be answered later, there are a couple strange aspects of Amped 3. Namely, one must wonder why it was developed exclusively for the Xbox 360. Despite the fact that, in the past, Amped has been Xbox exclusive due to Microsoft owning the license, now that 2K Sports owns the license, it is truly a strange thing indeed that the game would only appear on Microsoft’s next-gen console.
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