The Bundle helps give to needy causes in two ways; it brings awesome games to those deprived of quality indie-tastic entertainment, most likely small children and unemployed young men who would be cage-fighting next to hobos in an abandoned warehouse for kicks otherwise, and also directly by donating a portion of the proceeds you determine to a charity or starving game developer with every purchase.

This year’s pack includes Crayon Physics Deluxe, Cogs, And Yet It Moves, VVVVVV, and Hammerfight. As a bonus, anyone who buys the Humble Indie Bundle 3 will now also get access to Minecraft through August 14^th! Filthy degenerate homelessmen don’t pay off half as good as this sweet deal and I’m sure most of you have given one of them money before.

These guys make it so rewarding and easy donating feels like you’re winning a prize in some sort of wonderful raffle where all you need to buy a ticket is goodwill and the loose change you found in your vacuum cleaner. Even if you are a tight-fisted douche-bag you can go ahead and pat yourself on the back while you make your cheapskate $2 donation and laugh deliciously at what suckers they are, and feel good about it. But keep in mind, the more you give the more inherently selfless and sexually attractive you will appear to the opposite sex.  While you’re at it Casanova, why not throw on an extra download for the lady?

What are you waiting for? Get in on this action!

-By Laura Gaddy

CVG also reports that they might be introducing a new controller with a built in screen, and will work in backwards compatibility with current Wii titles. The system’s early projected release date is for sometime in 2012, so as long as the Mayans are wrong about that end of the world thing, we may be in for a treat. Time to come out and play with the big boys!

-By Laura Gaddy

-By Laura Gaddy

Kinect- The most potential for  collateral damage of any motion controlled gaming device yet. Sure, getting to hand-wave through menus like Tom Cruise in Minority Report is pretty cool and it works flawlessly when hired acrobats and gymnasts use it in completely empty rooms, but what will it perform like when you‘ve pounded down a few shots and the designated driver is swinging his arms around having a heated philosophical debate with a guy who passed out on the couch with sunglasses on while two people clumsily have sex on a pile of coats beside you? Racket put this to the test at E3 by playing a few rounds while drunk. The answer- not so well.

Nintendo 3DS- Basically, like looking into a box through a tiny magical window. Now imagine this box is shackled to an attractive but cheerfully disinterested woman while brightly colored characters sway and jump around in it and you pretty much have the same experience others waited in line an hour and half for. That said, it looks awesome.

Sony 3D- Ever think to yourself, “I wish I could experience in-your-face fast-paced racing action… at the bottom of a lake!”? Well, hold on to your waterlogged hats because Sony’s new 3D technology brings you all the fun of navigating through a murky haze like a myopic grandpa wearing sunglasses, while still letting you enjoy the anti-social luxury of giving everyone else in the room watching the screen a throbbing migraine.

Rage- From id, the people who brought you the original FPS, comes an impressive grungy mutant-fest post-apocalyptic shooter with a hefty side-helping of turret equipped go carts. Enjoy traipsing through garbage piles laced with Tetanus as a slew of WTF looking creatures come snarling at you as fast as you can pump rounds into their fetal alcohol syndrome mangled faces.

Rock Band 3- Sure, you are a Rock Band master, but somehow, until now, you couldn’t shake the shame of the haunting truth that you still don’t actually know how to play an instrument. You’re not playing guitar, you’re playing a weird real-time Simon Says and screeching into a toy microphone like a wounded banshee. Well, Rock Band 3 kicks that criticism right in the junk with their revolutionary new Pro Modes. They have done the unthinkable. With any MIDI controller (guitar, keyboard, err, keytar), you can play and ACTUALLY learn how to play songs. Genius. For those of you still desperately clinging to your full blown denial, don’t worry, there still are the regular modes. For the rest of you willing to brave it, they have baby steps to work you up from hitting root notes on an honest-to-God fretboard to showboating like a rock star, if you can make it that far. To earn the respect of panty-tossing groupie fame still requires doing that shit on expert before we can start to talk. You won’t be a real musician, or ever get laid, but at you won’t be flushing hours of your life away down the toilet just to get carpel tunnel for nothing.

Traffic's a Bitch...

Tron- Stays true to its vision of a futuristic computer world with lots of glowing blue things where cutting people off in traffic is perfected to a well honed skill by even the most casual motorist and ugly people will be able to project much more attractive versions of themselves onto helmets, which they will wear around constantly.

Homefront- Leading marketing with a full-fledged assault including marching a fully uniformed militia through the halls of the Expo center. I was too dazzled by the building tall banners, flag decorated Humvees, and thousand man mass-choreographed dance routines to find out what the game was actually about, or realize my family was starving. I think it is some kind of western. Just kidding… it’s about killing Asian commies.

Little Big Planet 2- Holy crap! This is an arm-chair game designer’s floppy sack filled dream come true. Homebrew ingenuity has a new muse. More modifiable than ever before, the freedom you have to create stages is truly mind boggling. They’ve even added grappling hooks! Yes, just like Batman. This game looks set to rock the socks off the entire planet.

Nexon did a good job this E3 of pairing the Korean’s obsession for online gaming with American fervor for giant bags and free fluffy red wolf hats with built in mittens. Well played. Their giveaways had people clamoring over each other and flashing tits like they were tossing out mardi-gras beads… and I’m not just talking about the women. The stable of assorted combat geared games they were trotting out, like Vindictus, did seem pretty badass, though.

Jurassic Park/Back to the Future- Tell Tale Games is poised to take over all realms of time, past and future, with their announcement of their plans to release game episodes for both the Jurassic Park and Back to the Future franchises. We don’t know much except no, you can’t ride the dinosaurs, but they did let us pose with a hoverboard.

Fallout New Vegas- Apparently, the half-life of what happens in Vegas is the hot ticket environmental issue of the future. That, and the impact of Cirque du Soliel on wildlife/ammunition prices.

Scribblenauts 2- Now with adjectives! Add monocles and top hats to anything you want.

Assassins Creed 3- Now you can climb around and play yackity-sax stealth parkour tag with townsfolk while wearing even fancier clothing. Also, there are cannons.

Kung-Fu Riders for Sony Move- If Jackass and Japanese game shows had a sex in a cubical while shoving a well oiled Wii-mote up their ass, this would be their ADHD ridden love child. Pretty much the most fun you can have with an office chair that doesn’t involve a fractured femur or chaps and late night dictation sessions with your secretary.

Lucha Libre AAA: Heroes Del Ring- When I played the game, I was blown away. The game features exceptional customization, everything from your entry dance, grappling moves, and your luchador can be personalized. Having actually had the fortune to have seen the spectacle that is a lucha libre match, I can attest to the fact that Slang captured it in its purest form. Taunts, flamboyance and fighting moves as theatrical as they are devastating all amount to a game I can’t wait to own.

MMA Supremacy- Apparently, the first rule of MMA Supremacy is, you don’t ask about MMA Supremacy. The developers couldn’t answer a single question anyone had. All I could tell was it looked like the aftermath of an Ed Hardy themed back-alley abortion.

That concludes Racket’s journey through the wonders of E3, we hope it was as magical for you as it was for us.

- Laura Gaddy & Jonathan Yost

Split/Second
Disney Interactive Studios/Black Rock Studio
PS3/Xbox360
7/10

Disney made a racing game? And it’s set in… a reality television show set? I was skeptical but I have to admit, Split/Second is actually pretty darn fun. I was expecting whimsical vehicles that talk and Justin Bieber to be an unlockable driver, but if you came for that prepare to be pleasantly disappointed. Think Mario Kart with explosions. LOTS of explosions.

Disney admittedly is the master of mixing facades with charm so the massive rigged stage-settings being incorporated into the game play seems like a natural move for them.  The tutorial you get is simple enough, and gives you the perfect blend of how to do it without holding your hand. “There’s a button for go and a button for stop. Got it, can I blow shit up yet?” The answer: yes. The amount of carnage found exceeded my expectations, as did the ease of game play. The reality television angle is odd at first but when the action starts you quickly forget about the plausibility and just have fun. Racing games are generally not my forte as they require finesse and an understanding of basic laws of physics. Not Spilt/Second. All you need to do is keep your eyes on the prize and on your opponents, who are hard to blow off but easy to blow up.

After gaining some points on a meter, you can make bad things happen to other cars. Things like, oh, exploding a bus that they’re driving next to or dropping a building on them. It is a delightful game of “screw your neighbor”.  There is a satisfaction that is fiendishly rewarding in dishing out some pyrotechnic payback and mayhem at 200mph.

Along with blowing your opponents to digital hell, you can also cause some catastrophic damage to alter the course altogether. Blow up a bridge? Here, drive through the mall. Only thing I that would make it better? I would love to have hit a button and charge through Space Mountain or have the Matterhorn shoot a bobsled onto my opponents. Maybe they will have an expansion pack…

-Jonathan “The Emperor” Yost & Laura Gaddy

Ratchet and Clank
A Crack in Time
Insomniac Studios
8/10

The hardest working lombax in the galaxy is at it again, ready to take on a soap opera worth of cosmic drama with guns blazing. Shocking reveals, long lost relatives, and time travel hijinx keep you busy while jetting around on the heels of villainous madmen up to no good. Meanwhile your trusty companion Clank is off on a mystical mission, floating around tinkering with the fabric of time and space like it was a broken remote.  If you have played the series before, the game lives up to the quality of its predecessors and delivers more familiar fun with a few tweaks to spice things up. What’s new this round? More colorful ways to blow things up, some slick new hover boots to jet around in, richer more interactive space stages that are actually fun to explore, and diverse game play that that switches things up and gives Clank a more hefty role then he has had in games past.  Some of Clank’s levels that make use of his brand new chronoscepter have some pretty clever puzzle sections that will have you scrambling over a pack of your digitally recorded clones.  Another great addition to a series of consistently fun games.

-Laura Gaddy

Bio Shock 2
8 out of 10
2K Games

Daddy’s home! Rapture is looking a bit more strung out than usual this time around. 10 years of smelling like fish chum and being damp has made the residents a bit cranky it seems. This time around you play the beefy Big Daddy- part overzealous dentist, part salvage yard worker, topped off with a set of brass balls big enough to sink a tanker. You stumble to consciousness after a bad day at work and can’t wait to get out of your diving suit and see how the your precious little angel’s day was, only to find that the Missus has flipped and is literally bouncing off the walls and threatening to kill you.  As she goes off on a rant and grabs the kids and storms off, you think you hear her say something about staying at her mother’s house and the word “divorce”.  News spreads like wildfire and pretty soon she’s got the whole neighborhood turned against you. It’s going to be a long day.

The game-play itself is Mousetrap on steroids with a morbid twist on Take Your Daughter to Work Day. It doesn’t take long though for your lumbering step to go from the boom shuffle of lead lined boots down a blood stained corridor to a downtrodden and browbeaten foot drag. Unfortunately, the dubious promise of getting to play as Mister Big-Stuff himself never realizes its full potential. A good chunk of the game is taking a lot of sass from punks your Grandpappy woulda washed the mouth of out with brine and soap before tossing them clean down the hallway and wringing them out to dry.  The diving suit makes you feel less like an unstoppable tank and more like a thick-skinned fat kid. People can’t stop talking smack and trying to pick fights to take your lunch Adam.

This go around Rapture didn’t feel as compelling or immersive as the previous game did. The missed opportunities and particularly lackluster storyline tarnished the experience. First of all: Big ass drill + massive glass walls + being the only one in the room dressed for wet weather. Do I have to spell it out? Picture if you will, you’re surrounded by enemies dressed in non-preshrunk woolen jumpers, they think they’ve got you cornered but, no! You spy a crack in the ocean view bay window, your drill whirrs to life and with a smug grin you quip, “Sea you later!” before smashing through the glass and flooding the banquet hall with a jumbo order of sushi as a beluga whale fighting a giant squid armed with a bayonet are carried in on the massive wave. The last thing the chump goon sees before he sputters out his last breath as he is being tentacle raped is you walking away, calmly smoking a cigarette inside your helmet. Why did this not happen? Seriously.

Another huge oversight, why didn’t we get to fight sea creatures? There is a huge god damn ocean out there full of crazy shit and all we get to do is go for a stroll and collect sea slugs? You’ve got to be kidding me. Instead, you just wait around as wave after wave of enemies mindlessly attack you with little personal investment or gusto while madam dominatrix wannabe harps on about you from the overhead PA’s. The dull cult based plot-line lacked inspiration and felt like a cop out.

But, on the plus side: Double fisting and multi-player. So, there’s always that.

Overall though, I was disappointed.  It felt like an honor student who settles for a low B. You can do better guys… See me after class.

-Laura Gaddy

Dante’s Inferno
EA Games
7/10

Based on Dante’s epic poem about descending through the 9 circles of Hell while being guided by Virgil, who you may remember as the owl-guy from Mighty Max. In an effort to bolster buzz EA Games launched a series of contrived promotion gimmicks, including trying to claim the game was being boycotted as “immoral” by staging fake protests with paid bible thumpers, and bribing reviewers with $200 checks, which we here at Racket are still waiting to receive. The only thing blasphemous about this game is the sacrilegious perversion of literature it is committing. Good thing selling people on gore and weird-ass gothic imagery is like shooting fish in a barrel. In this case a barrel filled with blood and writhing body parts. Wayne Barlow, the designer behind Guillermo del Toro’s films, provided the concept art. But for all its desire for edginess and raw carnality it brings little new to the table. They had a premise handed to them on a silver platter and still managed to mess it up by making it seem less like a  feast and more like warmed up leftovers. It feels like an elaborate and tightly form-fitting gothic themed God of War skin.  The hard-on for the GoW franchise is repackaged, capitalized on, and rammed down the public’s eager throat with much the same tact as the way silicon replicas of beloved porn stars are made into shiny branded dildos.  Belabored language and quickly repetitive game-play reduce the thrill of the experience far too soon into it.  Much as Kronos devoured his own children this game is going to be eaten alive by God of War 3.

-Laura Gaddy

I’m not going to apologize for reviewing a children’s dress up game- deal with it. Jojo’s is my guilty pleasure. Where other fashion games are mostly empty fantasies in taffeta and bubblegum pink, Jojo’s  steps it up with style boot camp that pulls looks right off the hottest current day runways to make addicts out of even the toughest fashionistas. I’ve whiled away countless hours on the other two incarnations, sucking in friends along with me.  Jojo’s is more than a dress-up game, it is like  Rosetta Stone for fashion.  It teaches you to look, lust, and learn. By the end of it, you’ll find yourself obsessively style scoring strangers in front of you in line at the movies and waking in a cold sweat from nightmares about going out in public without your shoes.

World Tour features realistic styles and current looks that feel more wearable than ever before.  Pieces inspired by the street style from Amsterdam, Tokyo, and London  will make you wish they had a “Buy Now” button built into the game. It was a thrill to get to work with clothing I would personally see myself and my friends wearing in real life.   Even the models and graphics were wonderfully detailed and realistic and had a more mature look. 

Not all the fashions hit the mark though, like kimono and bridal inspired designs, and it often felt  like there was too little overlap between different styles to provide challenge. Where the previous games forced you to budget your items and think about your strategy to maximize their potential putting together outfits this time around just feels like a mindless matching game.  Points were given out like candy, making it more of a challenge to fail a stage than to beat it. The scoring system seemed almost arbitrary, and the overly difficult to obtain and distinguish signature outfits served no real purpose at all. Many images were too small to pick out some of the finer details and the controls seemed awkward, which when working against the clock can be needlessly frustrating.

The game boasts that you can see how well your custom designs potentially would score on the runway but not all the elements that you get scored on get represented or even appear as options. Rather than a numerical gauge to let you know how well you are doing there’s just a rudimentary and woefully incomplete word bank at the top of the screen.
It felt like there should have been more diverse challenges to harness the potential of the game. The game does away with all but their signature stages and leaves a void as nothing is added to replace them. Straight forward runway stages quickly become repetitive as the same outfits crop up again and again.

This game could have been so much more but it makes a lot of poor choices and clumsy mistakes that do a disservice to the reputation it garnered with previous games. World Tour tantalizes you with its most inspiring fashions yet while only giving you agonizingly limited ways to use them. Jojo’s World Tour proves to be the classic tease in an unfortunate case of “Look but Don’t Touch.”

– Laura Gaddy

After returning home from their previous adventure and finding themselves the unquestioned rulers of the world the over-eager duo decide to celebrate with a global back to back Magnum PI marathon and in the process end up accidentally causing the death of everyone on earth when they forget to specify the need for snack breaks. After traveling back in time to try and set things right they return home ready to give themselves a hearty pat on the back only to find none other than Hitler rolling through the streets of London with a gustepping clone-a-saurus crew, scheming to befoul the rivers of time with his vile presence.

Ah, Hitler- The historical Bond villain everyone loves to hate. In this case though, is the grumpy little guy really to blame? You would think that being responsible for the death of the entire human population, committing Jock-genocide, endangering existence as we know it, and causing a laser-vision version of Hitler would have earned Dan and Ben a shot at the title of history’s greatest evil-doom-bringers, but their lovable bumbling and witty quips are just too darn charming to fuss about piddling things like that.

I thought I would take this opportunity to talk to you a little about time travel. I know we all love to fantasize about going back through history to face off against the Fuhrer, but if you think about it, as epic as that is it’s not really the best bang for your time-traveling buck. Getting even for the Holocaust is all well and good, but practically speaking, it isn’t the best way to go about it. I mean, if World War I didn’t happen then Deutschland’s national pride would most likely not have been injured enough to let angry Charlie Chaplin win an election in the first place. The industrial revolution would still have been in full swing, and most importantly enormous handlebar mustaches would still be in fashion.

And the way I see it, if these dinosaurs are doing all the dirty work then it is reasonable to assume the rest of the citizens aren’t busy being Nazis. As nice as it would be to be able to believe in the good of humanity and vindicate the German people of any war-related wrongdoing, the harsh reality though is- We need our Nazis. Just think: No Indiana Jones, no more fetishly erotic historical WWII slash-fic, no slam-dunk Oscar nomination holocaust films,  Skinhead family fun day picnics, or charity e-bay auctions for swastika decorated teapots. The Internet as we know it wouldn’t know what to do with itself. Can we really live with that guilt?

Truly, the greatest monster is ourselves.

At the core “Time Gentlemen, Please!” is a delightful buddy adventure with well-thought out puzzles that feel both original and nostalgically familiar while still offering a surprise or two up their sleeve, and take the extra care to not just go for the easy way out or use contrived indecipherable logic. The game sets itself apart as one of the most true to the spirit of the old Lucas Arts games as has come around in ages. There is nothing but love for the genre and the way its creators painstakingly crafted the game is a sign of that. Small details like including a settings bar to adjust the level of racism, and the authentically recorded sounds of an ancient PC idling while you clunkily type away really set the game at a whole new level. While you can opt to speed through the game I was both happy and eager to go through all the dialogue options to hear the rich assortment of fun responses. Having played both the first game and “Time Gentlemen”, I was pleased to see this one take on much more of a personality of its own, though there is a clear undeniably meta feel to the structure. The genre references take a distinctively surreal turn, reaching way back to when the first adventurers emerged from the primordial ooze. Be forewarned, in this game you can be assured that you will be handling everything and anything unpleasant, including a host of bodily fluids both natural and artificial. So bring gloves, or just an easily manipulateable sidekick.

While fighting Hitler, dinosaur armies, escaping jail cells, and traveling through time are scenarios others have explored before I doubt you will find many games that make them more fun. And it does offer something that no other game has: A balloon in the shape of a woman’s ovaries.

Join Dan and Ben next time on their up-coming quest to prevent Archduke Ferdinand and his menagerie of sultry henchwomen from ruining Christmas.

–Laura Gaddy

Play the free demo of Time Gentlemen. Please! or purchase the full game for a mere $5ish dollars HERE.

You can also play the whole glorious entirety of Ben There, Dan That! absolutely FREE!