It’s one thing to drop fifty-odd bucks for a one-game gift for one person, quite another if the whole household is going to share the fun playing it. Here are some spread-it-around family titles.
Parents old enough to remember when the James Bond franchise was at its best – when Sean Connery starred – can now kick back with their older kids who might not even know there’s more than one 007 in “From Russia with Love.”
Game play, though rated Teen for suggestive themes and violence, is standard third-person action-adventure stuff. It features gadget-assisted sneaky spy action, intrigue and berserker shooting. But it is graciously easy and retro-flavored, complete with Sean Connery’s smokey cool voice, trademarked quips, “sonic cufflinks” and that pimped-out Aston Martin.
EA; GameCube, PS2, Xbox; $40; Rating: Teen (13+)
Based on the new film “The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,” the game of the same name has eye-popping visuals and a ton of artistic merit, a stock, but solid, representation of the action- adventure genre.
Rated Teen for fantasy violence, the game is plainly too intense for really young gamers but mostly innocuous for everyone else in the house.
What’s more, the game allows a second player to jump in and join the action already in progress at any time, jump out again when the toast pops up or the laundry beckons, while the original player carries on with the ogre thrashing and Minoboar bashing.
Buena Vista Games; Game-Cube, PS2, PC, Xbox; $40-$50; Rating: Teen (13+)
Everyone in the house can do competitive cardio with Konami’s celebrated “DDR” games. These games are best played standing up and pounding down on a floor-mat controller (bundled or sold separately for $15 to $35 each) while following visual-step cues on screen and in sync to popular tunes.
The latest in the series includes “DDR Ultramix 3” for Xbox, “DDR Extreme 2” for PlayStation 2 and the custom-branded “Dance Dance Revolution Mario Mix” for GameCube (published by Nintendo), which is easily the most wholesome of the bunch, with all those cheesy Nintendo tunes disco-fied while you and the fatheads bust moves and stomp Goombas.
Konami; GameCube, PS2, Xbox; $40-$60; Rating: Everyone (6+) and Everyone (10+)
Though some will deny it to no end, everyone is a karaoke singer at heart. Getting scored on your vocal prowess – tone, pitch, cadence – in Konami’s phenomenal “Karaoke Revolution” games makes it all embarrassingly competitive and hard to put down once you’ve got the show on the road with up to eight players in a virtual “Household Idol”-type contest.
Konami; GameCube, PS2, Xbox; $40-$55; Rating: Everyone (10+)
Shaun Conlin is a freelance games reviewer for Cox News Service. E-mail him at shaunconlin@evergeek.com.
