Pacific Rim fever hit me harder than an Elbow Rocket to the face on opening weekend. I turned my brain off and bore witness to Guillermo Del Toro's mighty robot Jaegers as they thrashed colossal Kaiju up and down a huge Imax screen. After it was all finished I was hooked. I needed so much more. Going against everything I know about licensed games, I decided to pick up the Pacific Rim XBLA game. I have one word of advice for you: Don't. 

I took the new Deadpool game for a spin a few weeks ago. I shot, stabbed, and wisecracked my way through the third-person action title in around nine easily-paced hours. Deadpool is one of Marvel’s most popular characters, at least that’s what it says on the game’s webpage. I’ll get the “merc with the mouth” line out of the way now. There. I typed it.

I first answered the call for Hotline Miami back when it came out last winter on PC. As I’ve mentioned before, my mouse and keyboard skills are laughable. I managed to stab, shoot, and stomp my way to chapter four of the surreal bloodbath before rage quitting. I just didn’t have the skills to handle the insanely accurate and viciously aggressive AI. I even stumbled with the patched-in gamepad support. The white-suited gangsters meant business. I failed, but I kind of liked it. When I heard Hotline Miami was coming to PlayStation 3 and Vita I decided to give it a second chance.

I had no interest in The Last of Us until the reviews came in and blew up Metacritic a week before E3. I’ve attempted to play through Uncharted and Uncharted 2, buy Naughty Dog’s combat system makes me want to punch things. Having a tagalong AI character is the stuff of my digital nightmares. I know it worked in Bioshock Infinite, but could there really be two successful, quality games based entirely on the loathsome escort mission in one year?

It must be my lucky day! -or two weeks, or whatever. I recently played through two Ubisoft-published titles which have been absolutely amazing. ($15 worth of amazing, let's not get carried away here.) The first was Far Cry 3 Blood Dragon. The impressive homage to 80's action movies greatly improved on an already solid FC3 experience. Then there's Call of Juarez: Gunslinger, which is the first CoJ game I ever played. I never really found the series that intriguing, but something about this one appealed to me.