GBA Goes BAM!

BAM! Games showed off plenty of killer games at the show, and their GBA offering was strong stuff. My favorite would have to be Ecks vs. Sever 2 which takes FPS on the handheld even further than the first game. I was sold the first time I grabbed my sniper rifle, sighted down some joker and laid him flat. Yes, on GBA! Samurai Jack, although early, already looks excellent. The graphics and visual style look like some kind of Asian wall scroll and watching Jack slice his way through these levels was quite a treat.

There is reported to be an Ecks vs. Sever movie on the way, but the big movie licenses BAM! was showing on the small screen included Sound of Thunder and Reign of Fire. The latter you've probably seen promoted already, and the former sounds like a variation on a theme, with you as an adventurer out to save the world when time traveling experiments go bad and bring vicious creatures into an unprepared, quiet future city. Things like morphing environments and special visual effects should make this special, as well as multiplayer cooperative and competitive. And last but not least is Dexter's Lab Chess Challenge, a chess game from a top-down perspective that uses characters from the Cartoon Network series as pieces on the board and plays animations that follow actions in the game. I'm not sure every gamer out there is ready for full blown chess, but nobody can say we ain't got culture now, eh?

Finally, a bunch of licensed characters in games that don't suck!