PS3 Informer

Games to Avoid this Holiday Season

This is a list of high profile games that retailers and game publishers were banking on for the Holiday blitz. Unfortunately, lackluster gameplay, ill-conceived pack-on peripherals, and anemic game modes will kill any chance of them being good games. Avoid at all cost!

DJ Hero

With these types of games, it really is all about the fun factor. If a game is too complicated, the fun is sucked right out -- especially if the stupid slider doesn't flick to where you think it'd be, and it messes up your chain. Peripherals will sell a game if they mimic well enough their real life counterparts. The magic is in retaining the fun factor. Plastic guitars with whammy bars -- Great! A cheap DJ set with flimsy plastic nobs and sliders -- not so good. And please, please include more songs. A 90-song playlist doesn't cut it when we're talking 3-4 remixes of each song.

Tony Hawk Ride

Whichever schlock executive thought up this skateboard peripheral surely had dollar signs popping out of his head. It's all about selling kids overpriced game bundles: yep, those $199 and $250 Guitar Hero and Beatles Rockband bundles helped shoot the retail prices sky high. Too bad the exec didn't have the foresight to include a playable game with this hunk of plastic. And for the pricey tag of $120, you'd think they would have invested some money into prettying up the fugly graphics. For their next project, I suggest packing in a plastic tombstone with their game -- Tony Hawk: RIP.

And if you don't know well enough by now to avoid Guitar Hero and Rockband games, you are beyond our help.

Gran Turismo PSP

Maybe it was a case of overhype. Maybe it stewed in the pot too long. Whatever the reasons, the lack of a career mode was the tipping point that had fans scratching their heads over how Gran Turismo ever became such an enduring franchise. It certainly doesn't show with the downloadable PSP version. Has GT run outta gas? Can Polyphony publish anything other than demo-level games a la GT5: Prologue and GT PSP? Hot upstarts like Forza and the unfathomably good Need for Speed: Shift certainly has GT on the run? Votes are tallied by sales figures and it seems NFS has left GT in the dust.

Modern Warfare 2

Have you ever bought a hyped-up game only to be disappointed? Well, if you want to have that horrible experience, go ahead and pick up MW2. Don't say we didn't warn you though. We tried telling you to stay away in our One-Word Review of Modern Warfare 2 and we reached a definitive verdict in our open discussion. But ultimately, the final judgment rests with you... let it be the right one.

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