June 13, 2011: wallet threat level green

If the early reviews are to be trusted, things aren’t looking good for Duke Nukem Forever. Raise your hand if you’re surprised that a sequel to a 15 year old shooter feels like a sequel to a 15 year old shooter.

Alice: Madness Returns has the advantage of being a sequel to a more recent but middling platformer, so it doesn’t have far to go to be better than the original. The latest Transformers game is in a similar situation. I don’t have any desire to play Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time again, but if I did, I’d probably want to play it on the Nintendo 3DS. It looks great, even (especially?) in 3D. It’s enough to make me almost sorry that I don’t have any desire to play through yet another Zelda game.

But this week’s biggest wallet threat is probably Child of Eden, a wigged out puzzle game from the creator of Rez, one of the original wigged out puzzle games. With full support for Microsoft’s Kinect and Sony’s Move, this might be one of those games that makes your fancy controller a not entirely worthless investment.

Finally, hey look, it’s Wipeout: In the Zone! At last, a Wipeout game for the Xbox 360 (pictured)! I don’t remember it looking quite like that, and it seems odd to me that it’s published by Activision, particularly now that it’s available as a free “I’m sorry” download from Sony because the Playstation Network being down for so long. But it’s about time such a great sci-fi racing game has slipped the surly bonds of the Playstation hardware.