Our two resident pinball wizards, Donell Tucker and Ernie Moreno, took a look at the new Zen Pinball 3D for the Nintendo 3DS. These are their thoughts on the game!

Zen Studios pushes their successful pinball game to the Nintendo 3DS, bringing pinball fanatics a stereoscopic 3D experience with Zen Pinball 3D. While the handheld version produces realistic pinball physics and enchanting audio to enrich your play through over and over again, it doesn't quite deliver the full pinball exeperience that the console versions do.

• REVIEW: Pinball FX 2

What Zen Pinball 3D includes are four original crafted tables, which are Earth Defense, Shaman, Excalibur, and Eldorado. In addition, Zen Studio will support additional downloadable content in the future, but for now, you only get four tables. Just like the original Zen Pinball game, your objective is to gain a high score by keeping the silver ball in play using the side flippers which are the right and left bumpers on the Nintendo 3DS. Also, you have the option to shake the table a bit with the analog stick to slightly move the ball from left or right. Beside your main goal on getting the high score, you have specific missions to complete within each table in order to achieve big points, which offers players a more complex and challenging game.

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Gears of War 3 players, let’s go back. Way back. . .all the way back to just after E-day. That’s where you’ll find yourself in RAAM’s Shadow, DLC numero dos for Gears of War 3.

As someone who doesn’t really care about multiplayer enough in general to get jazzed for map packs or new character skins, RAAM’s Shadow is perfect for a guy like me. This DLC is a three-hour chunk of campaign set before the events in the original Gears of War.

You play as Zeta squad made up of a couple old favorites (Lt. Minh Young Kim and Tai, my favorite mysterious shaman and face tattoo enthusiast from Gears 2) and two new fish: Alicia Velera (yay! another female character to help me towards my lady medal in MP!) and Barrick, whom I just refer to as “mutton-chops.”

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Pinball FX 2: Mars Table DLC Review Verdict
240 Microsoft Points
Available Now

Pinball FX launched on the Xbox 360 back in 2007, and in 2009 creator Zen Studios also released Zen Pinball on the PSN. Not exactly sure why they needed the name change, and Zen Pinball actually featured exclusive tables, one of which was Mars. Mars was originally released in July 2010 for PSN users, and the team has updated that table's graphics and physics, and it's now available on Xbox Live Arcade. But is it worth the 240 MS points (three bucks) that you'll have to shell out for it? That's an easy answer: yes.

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Reviewed by Dan O'Halloran

Superbrothers: Sword and Sworcery EP Review

Pros: 

• Immersive gameplay
• Unique soundtrack
• Awesome 8-bit graphics

Cons:

• Slow pace is not for everyone
• Puzzle solving sometimes too easy
• Restricted to iOS devices

Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP takes the classic point and click adventure game and brings it to a whole new level. The developers have carefully designed every aspect of the game to be a slightly strange and totally immersive experience. A perfect combination of simple puzzle solving, retro graphics and finely-crafted audio. It’s a work of art masquerading as an adventure game. A true showcase of what games can do on new platforms.

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Reviewed by Jason D'Aprile

Mass Effect 2: Arrival DLC Review

Pros:

• More Mass Effect is always a good thing
• Lots of combat
• Narrates a major plot point for the third game

Cons:

• Not much new here for $7
• Very straightforward action
• No real character interactions or even major decisions to make

Its one last hurrah for Mass Effect 2. Bioware’s final downloadable mission is a solo mission for Commander Shepard and dramatically bridges the gap between this game and the upcoming finale of the trilogy.

Downloadable content is always a hit or miss proposition, but Bioware has a great track record for the Mass Effect games. The last two downloadable missions for Mass Effect 2—Lair of the Shadow Broker and Overlord—were terrific additions to the epic sci-fi adventure and well worth buying. So, with the bar set so high, it makes the latest add-on, Arrival, seem downright disappointing.

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The Battlefield: Bad Company 2 Vietnam map pack was released last week, and inquiring minds are wondering if it is worth picking up. At $15 for this piece of DLC, that’s a sizeable investment for four new maps (with a fifth on the way), 15 new era-specific weapons along with six vehicles popularized by the unpopular war. Is it worth it? Hardened Battlefield vets will give you an immediate “yes.” But if you’re a casual Battlefielder, you might want to pass on Vietnam.

Vietnam is a multiplayer-only map pack and weapons upgrade for the game, which brings along six new vehicles, including the iconic Huey helicopter. The new weapons range from a flamethrower to the chattering AK-47 to the ever-popular “Thumper” grenade launch, and the entire piece of DLC is basically a Vietnam “skin” that you’re applying to your standard multiplayer. Besides giving you new toys to play with, it’s not changing the BFBC2 that you’re used to at all.
As with most multiplayer games, new maps are always a welcome addition.

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Truly worthwhile DLC is hard to come by. Mind you, worthwhile doesn’t always mean entertaining. In most cases, the content is fairly one-note, an amusing addition good for a few hours of tangential fun before being tossed away completely. In the event of the Mass Effect franchise, pretty much everything up until Lair of the Shadow Broker felt like an insubstantial add-on. With regard to Fallout 3, Broken Steel, Mothership Zeta and Operation: Anchorage offered little more than mindless running-and-gunning in visually distinct environments whereas Point Lookout offered the real deal, chock-a-block with new puzzles, characters and storylines. Generally, with DLC, the odds aren’t in your favor if you’re looking for the same level of attentiveness and creativity given to the core game. So how does the first content pack for Fallout: New Vegas, entitled Dead Money, hold up?

Thankfully, quite well.
 

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Zombie slayers, rejoice! Then find a damn good hiding place or a gun with a spare bullet for yourself because the “The Sacrifice” DLC for Left 4 Dead AND Left 4 Dead 2 is pretty brutal. 

This campaign shows the fateful events leading up to the crossover DLC “The Passing” (Read our Left 4 Dead "The Passing Review) and the demise of chain smoking Vietnam vet, Bill. That said, Bill doesn’t have to die here: any one of the survivors can sacrifice themselves to save the team...if they can survive long enough.

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There was a point when my plastic guitar collection was reaching increasingly higher into two-digit numbers, until I scrapped almost all of them. All of them except the outdated Gibson X-Plorer wired controller for GH2 on 360, because I still think it’s the best guitar to date.

That’s why I’m happy to report that the new Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock guitar is probably closest in feel to the X-Plorer than any instrument that’s come out since. The strum and whammy bars feel comparable though, aesthetically, flames aren’t my first choice of decoration for anything; however, the design -- very in step with the graphical look of the game -- is inoffensively campy.

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I've been following Mass Effect 2 DLC since its release (read my reviews of Kasumi – Stolen Memory, the free Firewalker DLC pack, and Overlord) and while I enjoyed Overlord, you still walked away from the experience with nothing more than an upgrade and some achievements. Lair of the Shadow Broker is different with a unique payoff on completion that gives you a reason to re-visit the content post-mission as well as successfully bridging the narrative of Mass Effect 3. It's a fantastic addition to the Mass Effect universe as the cycle for sequel DLC fades in transition for future Mass Effect games.

The story revolves around the Shadow Broker, the enigmatic head of a universe-wide clandestine organization that deals in information; if it's out there, the Shadow Broker has his fingers involved with it. He's also not the nicest dude, and while there's deep nerd stuff on why that is (read the Mass Effect Redemption comic for more), to keep it simple, the mission has Commander Shepherd helping an old friend, Liara, rescue her old friend, all while putting a stop to the Broker's way of doing business.

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I’m not sure how I feel about EA and Bioware’s new DLC strategy these days. At first, I loved the idea of incremental content which added an hour here, an hour there to games that I already enjoy but now that I’ve played it that way, I’m not sure it’s working.

To be fair, Kasumi - Stolen Memory, the first of Mass Effect 2’s premium DLC, is a fine addition to the ME2 universe. Ringing in at about $7, Stolen Memory introduces a new character, Kasumi Goto, a master thief with the ability to cloak herself to stealthily dispatch bad guys. While Kasumi can simply become a member of your crew, it’s her loyalty mission that adds new content to the game with a heist mission that plays out as one part covert op spy thriller, one part action shooter.

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You've just inhaled a potentially deadly swamp fruit as part of a bizarre tribal ritual. A stranger cracks your skull open and rips a piece of your brain out with their hand -- the piece holding you back from embracing spiritual enlighten, they tell you. After awakening, sadistic and distorted memories of your past dance in front of you, the ground has become the sky and there's a never-ending bombardment of Coca-Cola bottles exploding into nuclear bombs. Actually, correction: Nuka-Cola bottles.

I was up until the wee hours of the morning this week diving swamp-first into Point Lookout, the fourth, latest and largest downloadable expansion for Fallout 3. Point Lookout is not only the most open-ended add-on Bethesda Softworks has released for its post-apocalyptic epic since it was released last October, it's also the best content the company has produced post-release, rivaling some of Fallout 3's best moments.

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