Baby got an atom bomb.

Is this what it feels like to be back on schedule? Righteous!

Crash Bandicoot: Mind Over Mutant
Achievements: 48 (all offline, 1000gs)

There's really not much to say about this. Mind Over Mutant is just more of the same (admittedly solid) railed platforming, which sees the return of the titular Titans from the last game and gives you the new ability to store one while you run around. Oh, and you can dig underground now. Other than that, nothing new.

If anything, I think this one was a bit easier when it comes to extra challenges, as well. The grind this time around, instead of meeting certain conditions on each level, is more leveling up yourself and all the different kinds of Titans.

The co-op was handled a bit better this time around as well. Instead of carrying the other person on your back and swapping with a double jump as in CotT, now the second player can switch between being another bandicoot or a mask, in which case they follow around the lead player and have the ability to fire projectiles aimed with a crosshair onscreen. While the old way was a bit more fun when it came to actually cooperating with someone, this setup makes it a lot easier to bang out the coop achievements with just having a second controller on.

Worth a rent, but no more than that unless you collect these games for some reason. You could probably bang out all the achievements in about a week, two tops.

Age Of Booty
Achievements: 12 (10 offline for 160gs, 2 online for 40gs)
MS Points: 800

From the demo, this seems like a pretty clean cut semi-strategical game. You control a pirate ship, and you're out to take towns, and I'm going to assume other ships as well as the game progresses. You collect resources floating on the sea or from the towns and tribal villages you wipe out, and use those to upgrade your ship back at your base.

Cashing in on "internet people" and their hard-on for pirates, it's a fun little game but nothing mindblowing. Achievement spread looks fairly easy, mostly clearing all the challenges and doing some fun stuff with items, with the online stuff just being winning some matches. Eh.

CrazyMouse
Achievements: 12 (8 offline for 135gs, 4 online for 65gs)
MS Points: 800

You're a blue mouse that eats stuff, in some moderately puzzle-like levels. Sometimes you're up against a rival, sometimes there are enemy creatures out to end your pig-out session.

Controls are well and good for such a simple game, but visually, it feels really phoned in. Very flat-looking 2D characters on a vaguely 3D background that looks off-putting, like a really cheap Flash game. In some ways, it actually reminds me of those LCD handhelds from back in the day, where all the characters and objects on screen were just specific areas that were darkened when active. If things had been kept a little more on par in one direction or the other, it would be less jarring.

Oddly enough, a quick google turned up no results for a previously existing Flash form of this game, but there is a Windows Trojan by the same name. Go figure.

All you really need to do for most of the gamerscore is let the game sew your asshole shut and keep feedin' ya, and feedin' ya, and feedin' ya. There're a few tricks that require a bit more thinking, but really, it's cake.

Not a pun. Not the best use of your funds, either.

F.E.A.R. Files
Achievements: 41 (34 offline for 850gs, 7 online for 150gs)

Fuck this game. I was willing to look past the blocky graphics, vague and disjointed story, and mediocre level layout until this piece of shit bugged out twice in the exact same place.

After you get through what I guess is the prologue chapter of the first campaign, you're running around in the catcombs under a church, following this ghostly thing with red eyes and shooting anything that shoots at you. Eventually, a few of these red-eye things run into a small room, and given there's nowhere else to go, you have to follow them and then get locked in said small room.

The first time I followed them, it was basically a closet with a bunch of crates, and you could hear this weird whispery noise. I tried messing with everything, and eventually just grenaded myself to go back to the last checkpoint and try again.

The second time, the room went all black, with a small light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel glow in front of me and a bunch of the red-eye things dancing around in the darkness. Thing is, you can't move towards the light, you can't jump, your flashlight doesn't work, your time dilation doesn't work, shooting things does nothing, and grenades just get thrown into the ether with no effect, not even on you.

You can turn around to look at a whole lot of nothing, but that's it.

PS - fuck this game.

Eragon
Achievements: 37 (all offline, 1000gs)

Shitty game for a shitty movie based on a shitty book. A bunch of swarm-based combat sections tied together by a few short platforming elements. Everything is ugly. The end.

Your achievements come from beating all the levels on regular and hard difficulties, but regular was pretty damn easy, so Hard is probably a breeze. Oh, and there's one for finding all the hidden eggs, of which there's one per level.

Easy 1000 if you can stand the lame, and I think you actually have to play through twice as I do not believe the Normal/Hard clear achievements stack. Rent it and then never touch it again.

Fatal Inertia
Achievements: (48 offline for 940gs, 2 online for 60gs)

What we have here is the 360's answer to the Sony-exclusive* WipeOut series. Anti-gravity craft racing around tracks with an assortment of exotic weapons, with the sponsorship of different corporations, whose craft all look and handle differently.

The nice thing is, they actually took a somewhat original take on how the weapons function, and gave almost all of them two firing modes, to boot. The focus seems to be more on screwing up your opponents' driving than blowing them up, which in Wipeout seemed to be a more 50/50 balance, especially in the higher-level cups.

Replay value is pretty decent with Fatal Inertia as well, as there's a lot of stuff to unlock, between all the different craft, all the upgrade parts you can get for them, and all the optional logos and paint job options available.

Given that the tracks aren't smoothed over in any way, being built out in the wilds outside the cities OF THE FUTURE to avoid collateral damage, the environment comes into play a great deal more when it comes to piloting than it has in similar games, with some collision points being a very good way to ruin your entire day. There's a "reset" button that puts you back on the track instantly, but without any acceleration, so your opponents tend to take advantage of the situation very quickly.

Achievement spread is based mostly on game completion, with achievements for each of the cups in the game, and some side stuff for using the different weapons well and learning other essential skills and when to use them, like doing barrel rolls to clear weapons off you and so forth.

All in all, a much better game than I expected for a title that's been dirt cheap for a while and looked kind of shoddy upon first glance at the ship designs. If you like the WipeOut games, give this a try.

Unless, of course, you have a PS3, in which case you should already have WipeOut HD
and be going through several packs of fresh underwear. Oh man, WipeOut HD.

If I weren't trying to pick up the pace when it comes to getting through the alphabet, especially with the holiday gamedump dragging down my Gamefly queue, I'd keep this one around a bit longer. It's definitely getting some priority when I start coming back to things.

* - The exception being WipeOut 64, the Nintendo 64 port of WipeOut XL. I'm still not entirely sure how or why that happened.