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Star Wars Battlefront Renegade Squadron for PSP is worth a second look at $17.99 from EB and with a score of 8.0 from GameSpot. This titles single player campaign takes place during the original trilogy and revolves around a band of rogues struggling to keep the Alliance alive. Renegade squadron allows you to customize your character in unique ways, for example creating a Wookie from the Black Sun crime syndicate. The first few missions throw you directly into the action and you'll find yourself trading hot plasma, on the ground and in space, with the likes of Boba Fett , IG-88, and Darth Vader.

What's incredible about Renegade Squadron is just how many ways you can prosecute missions. This is a continuation of the Battlefront series meaning weapon loadouts are customizable and combat non-linear. Just when you think your Blaster Rifle, Grenade Launcher, Wrist Rocket, Personal Shield combo is the ACME of Storm Trooper stomping, you'll run into a mission where a Sniper Rifle and Remote Rocket Gun will give you twice the bang with half the effort.

Layered over the ground combat is space combat, which will leave you excited in ways you haven't been since the original X-Wing. You'll enjoy missions such as retrieving a Holocron from the exploded remains of Alderaan, or destroying the gravity well generators of an Interdictor Cruiser so the Alliance can escape. Flight controls are dumbed down for the PSP, but you could never land in a Star Destroyers hanger and assault on foot after blowing up its shield generators in the original space sim. Each ship class, A-Wing, X-Wing, Y-Wing, and Transport have different flight characteristics reminiscent of older X-Wing titles.

Last but not least, the cut-scenes in Renegade Squadron are excellent. Each sequence is presented web comic style with beautiful concept art conveying the gritty Star Wars universe from dusty backwater bars to high tech briefing rooms on capital ships. These cut-scenes are something to look forward to because they add to the Star Wars Cannon while setting up each mission.

Renegade Squadron is a step closer to my Star Wars dream game which would be a GTA/X-Wing/Freelancer/KOTR mash up. I want to be able to pickup a mission in a bar, fly from ground to space, eject and board someone else's ship, shoot my way to the bridge, and fly that ship to another solar system. George, you can have my idea for free, or hell, I will pay you to make my game. In the meantime, on your way to work, everyone should check out Renegade Squadron, you'll enjoy it a hell of a lot more than pretending to check your Iphone.

Now that your hands aren't at ten and six due to gas prices, food prices, and the pay cut you take every year from inflation, you owe it to yourself to get your hands on something to make your commute enjoyable. The underrated PSP is now as low as $170 and the bargain bin at GameStop is your friend. Since I deal with gameplay at GameSpot, I thought I'd go back and dig up a game or two that we loved but previously didn't have footage for. Also, if you haven't played God of War: Chains of Olympus (PSP), that should be your first stop.

First Game

Chili Con Carnage is a shooter focused on one thing, slow motion blasting fools. The action is spicy and so is the south of the border humor. The targeting system is elegant for the PSP, right bumper plus trigger kills people, left bumper plus trigger kills objects. There are a number of highly entertaining special moves that do anything from stacking your hands with guns like a Looney tunes character, to giving you machine gun guitar cases much like Desperado, to a bull attack that lets you run around at high speed smashing dudes. The music goes in tune with your killing streak so by the tenth body you'll be feeling it. Watch me tornado some fools.

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Next I'm playing Star Wars Battlefront: Renegade Squadron (PSP)

Remember 3d? Hint, it was directed by Francis Ford Coppola.

Cheaper by the Dozen is up. Kevin VanOrd and myself slaved away at the top 12 free massively multiplayer online games out there to bring you worlds beyond the screen. If your fancy is Sci-Fi, Fantasy, Eastern Promises, or Miscellanious assortments of online skullduggery this article is for you. Come one come all.

Looks like the hotly anticipated Spore has released a Creature Creator this week on its main site (http://www.spore.com/). This creator is a well made, albeit highly limited, appetizer. The creator comes in a free trial version or a purchase version for about ten dollars. The pay version will allow players to import their creatures into the final build of spore once it's released. The creator uses highly intuitive controls which allow users to drag and mold creatures to their hearts desire. It's worth killing twenty minutes to build your Frankenpet that may some day take over the galaxy. Long live LobsterRevenge!

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Is the NeoVisus Gaze prototype the next Narbacular Drop? In 2005 a couple of senior students at DigiPen released a game involving a princess, puzzles, and the ability to bend time and space. By October 10th, 2007 that game had been snazzed up to become the now critically acclaimed Half Life-Portal. Portal was admittedly the first truly "out of the box" development in the first person shooter genre in a decade. Fast forward to 2008, Martin Tall, a master's student at Lund University, has developed a simple UI interface to go with eye tracking software that allows computer users to navigate their desktop with a steely gaze. This concept applied to gaming has potential, lots of potential, industry take notice.

One genre in particular that hasn't sat well in the console's stomach is real time strategy. Playing RTS with a standard controller is like trying to eat Chinese food wearing oven mitts. You can do it, but it's sloppy and leaves a mess. Two RTS games I've played lately Universe at War, and Supreme Commander, were intensely bogged down by controls. Currently, on the fly mixed unit selection in the heat of battle falls under the category of in your dreams. What if players could select units with a glance? What if screen scrolling and map navigation were hands off? Being someone intensely looking forward to Starcraft II but not wanting to buy a PC that could run skynet and bring down the entire western seaboard, I would relish new technologies for the Xbox 360 and PS3 to make RTS more accessible to console developers. Technologies such as NeoVisus could be the first major innovation in RTS this decade. Inevitably, new technologies are always regarded with caution, the industry is still trying figure out how to apply Portal to the common FPS, and virtual reality STILL hasn't caught on, but innovation has proven itself in this generation of games and consoles. Gamers overwhelmingly supported fresh ideas with their time and money. Games are the new frontier of entertainment and I'm looking forward to gaming with my eyes in a few years, maybe even shooting portals with my eyes.

Robert Ludlum's The Bourne Conspiracy (X360) is one built for the couch fighter MMA generation with focus on watching a guy dismantle another guy in the most awesome way possible. Bourne has a memorable series of matchups including, face vs. neon sign, face vs. jukebox, spine vs. door, and of course the crowd pleaser, face vs. concrete pillar. Probably the biggest bane/boon to the simplified three button fighting system is the cheat called a "takedown." As Bourne fights he builds up adrenaline to be used in the event of getting his arse handed to him. About three quarters through any given fight Jason can unleash this adrenaline attack for an instant/many instant kills. Normally this fighting style could be considered cheap, but in Bourne's case it's good because the guy throwing down fisticuffs usually has a buddy with a shotgun. Even though the actual fighting system is about as advanced as Rock'em Sock'em Robots, involving two buttons back and forth or simultaneously, or even holding down one of those two buttons for more than a second, the settings on Bourne, "Trainee, Agent, or Assasin" are inflated to make up for it. "Trainee is actually the normal setting for the average gamer while Agent is similar to a hard setting. Expect to die often. The last worthy mentionable in Bourne style combat is the sucker punch cut scene reminiscent of Dragon Quest in which after being lulled into a false sense of security players are asked for a random button press and given what could only be described as an attention deficit second on crack to respond before dying/failing. I suppose the developers felt it was only fair that the bad guys get the cheap takedown every once in awhile. The overarching point however, is that Bourne is a solid casual fighting game that stays fun because of it's changing environments in which the fighting takes place. Players will want to lead their opponents around each level, embassies, subway trains, airports, etc. just to experiment with how the takedown button will combine a bad guy with a random object. It certainly made me want to get back to the gym and start throwing elbows.

Ok, so I finally did go back and play through Rainbow Six Vegas. For starters, combat in this game is freaking awesome. The advent of the cover system completely changes the flow of gameplay for the better. There is a large selection of weapons and a lot of satisfying ways to shoot baddies. Watching cars and trucks blow apart around you while terrorists curse and fire wildly is only topped by watching the bank robbery scene from the movie Heat while drinking red bull.

That being said, the game is excessively repetitive. Kill a guy, look under a door, kill a group of guys, repeat. New weapons and gear are not unlocked as you progress and ultimately I just wanted to finish. The storyline in Vegas is non existent, she is bad kill her, the bomb is bad diffuse it, this guy who was supposed to be good who you never saw before is bad, shoot down his helicopter. Lazy, lazy lazy. A lot of this is made up for by gameplay elements but a better solution is to HIRE A WRITER. I'm going to wait a month or two to play the next one which is equally awesome plus some of the customization largely missing in the first one.

I went out and plunked down my forty quarters for Iron Man, this past weekend, which was collecting rave reviews faster than doughnuts at a weight loss seminar. What I saw, was a shallow video game storyline that was totally bland and uninteresting. The film should have been about collateral damage and Tony Stark coming to grips with the fact that his inventions maim and kill people. This film could have even gotten into the fact that there are people out there who rightly hate Americans because we sell weapons like cheeseburgers and are complacent to the fact that those weapons are out there killing innocent people. The film started going in this direction for about twenty minutes, but instead Mr. Stark built a shiny suit that was supposed to distract the audience with its shiny shininess and make them forget the plot had gone AWOL. In lieu of anything that would be memorable, the film went on a tangent building to a boss battle which belonged only in the subsequent video game release. I'll admit that Robert Downy Junior was genuinely funny at times, but this film could have been so much more, sigh. This week I also played the Iron Man, videogames, plural, for X360, PS3, and PS2, in which you basically fly around shooting at imperceptible ants, while being raped by missiles, and forced to fly the same map multiple times. The developers felt if they re-skinned the map with Ice or Dirt you wouldn't notice it was the exact same level. Overall, I expect a lot more from my Comic book turned films. As a matter of fact, I think the last Hulk film with Eric Bana, the one everybody is trying to forget was ever made, was one of the best examples of how to actually get into the mind of a conflicted super hero. Let's hope the sequel gets it this time. I'm cringing at the Incredible Hulk trailers because I'm afraid they fell into the same videogame boss battle storyline hole that Iron Man fell into. I don't like my villians in black and white and judging by the ratings of shows like The Sopranos, most people feel the same way. We are long past the days of G.I. Joe, give me some creme in that coffee.

So my girlfriend and I are coming up on our one year anniversary. No, I'm not coding a marriage proposal into bejeweled, that takes way too much effort and my girlfriend doesn't play videogames, and we're not quite there yet. But we are celebrating our anniversary and the idea of gifts came to mind. My family forwent surprises a long time ago for the much more effective, "what do you want for your/our
__choose a noun__," strategy. So when my girlfriend asked me what I wanted for our one year, stones, rocks, rings, nope, I jokingly replied, "how about an X360."

Apparently she took this suggestion to heart, so now I'm giving a romantic getaway and a "relationship," ring in the form of a claddagh. I am receiving a "relationship" Xbox 360. Being a gamer I think this is the most damn romantic thing I've ever heard, especially because she knows it means I'll spend a little, and I stress little, less time with her because of it. Now of course our families had some opinions, mainly leaning on the, "that's not very romantic" side. So sue me, she can draw a heart on it. I'm wondering if other gamers out there have successfully mixed love and gaming. Hey there's always banking on multiplayer.