I wrote my first user review a few months back, and have enjoyed writing them since. I noticed recently that when looking at my ratings for games, I had scored them all pretty highly, and I also noticed this on a few friends pages as well. Part of that would be because games that probably deserve the lower scores I simply aren't interested enough in finishing. There are also some games that I haven't tested features which are probably required for a complete review of some games, usually multiplayer. So here are some mini-reviews/impressions of a few games I've played recently but don't feel qualified to write a full review.

Medal of Honour Heroes 2 - Wii
I played about 5 levels over the course of a couple of weeks before I decided I just wasn't liking it enough. What is interesting is that I think the controls (at least for the Zapper) are mapped very well, and you can do almost anything you could in a first-person shooter with more traditional controls. When in aim mode, you can tilt the Zapper to the side to lean out, which is pretty neat. The controls generally feel pretty good, and you have plenty of options of changing the turn speed and the bounding area until you start turning. One major sloppy part is that when there is a tutorial, it requires you to press the A button to skip it, which is on top of the Zapper; this should have been swapped to the B button when you select the Zapper as your preferred control scheme.

The game looks pretty nice for a Wii game. The enemy AI is both stupid and terribly accurate. It is obvious that the enemies are pathed as opposed to running around freely, sometimes running directly past you to get to the spot where they are supposed to be before they start shooting, so if you have to repeat a section, they will always be in, or be running towards, the same place.

As said above, the enemies are pretty accurate. MOHH2 adopts the 'stay out of fire to heal' standard, but it is just a tad too slow to recover. Sometimes I had enemies swarm and I would be hiding behind small cover, but still have a small section of me able to be shot. They would plink away, with the odd hit dealing more damage than I was recovering until I was dead. It doesn't take too many hits in quick succession to die, so usually standing up to fire back would result in death anyway. This compounded with infrequent checkpoints. To be honest these would probably be par for the course in a standard FPS, I think the effort of raising the Zapper makes them feel so much longer. These two issues eventually made me find the game a little too tedious for my liking.

Frontlines : Fuel of War - Xbox 360
I'm not big into multiplayer, and this is a multiplayer game, and I only played the single player campaign (scandalous!). Apparently multiplayer can have 50 players to a map, and some of the single-player levels also have you fighting alongside and against a fair number of enemies. The storyline is there if you care, but it didn't excite me too much, that in the future the world has been plunged into chaos because nearly all the oil has dried up. Guess what you are fighting over?

You are tasked with capturing control points or destroying targets. While you may have AI team mates, only you are able to complete these specific tasks. You can't issue them commands which is a bit of a bummer, as usually if you die, they all come running away from the objective to support you as you respawn a short distance away. There are no checkpoints and the action is continuous, meaning there is little penalty for death early in the game. Halfway through you suddenly have limited deployments, and capturing objectives seems to give you more deployments. You can take a bit of damage and in later stages may find yourself near death fairly often, but actually dying is infrequent (at least on normal).

There are a few loadouts you can choose and can choose a different one if you die, but everything but the assault cIasses are fairly useless. The sniper rifle is atrocious, giving one hit kills only if you get a head shot, which is rare given that it never seems to hit what you are aiming at (which made the solo recon mission suck). Why choose the anti-vehicle cIass when many levels give you a rocket launcher to pick up anyway? The assault rifles sound and feel pretty chunky though, and I never tired of using them. An interesting feature is the drones. Find a hiding spot, release your drone, and remote control it. These can be mini-helicopters armed with mini-rockets, or a little buggy with a machine gun. These were quite fun to use.

There are some vehicles, but I didn't care for them much. I think I just suck at controlling tanks (sorry raven, I don't know what type they were). Unless I was facing off against other armour, I had more fun getting out and taking people out on foot. Everything looks pretty nice. Levels take place mainly throughout wartorn towns, but some of this involves going indoors. The last level in particular is very large, comprising an assault on a town, and heading into some of their largest buildings to take out specific objectives. The single player campaign is fairly short, somewhere between 6-8 hours, though the last level probably took me over an hour by itself (but I admittedly play carefully). While the game was obviously designed with multiplier first and the campaign tacked on, I still found it to be a good experience. While I don't play multiplayer, I imagine the different loadouts, various drones, and large player count could make for some pretty fun play.

Call of Duty 4
The reason I don't feel qualified to review this is again because I am not really interested in the multiplayer. In short, if you have any inkling to play single player first-person shooters, play this game. If you are tired of first person shooters and only want to play the absolute best ones, play this game. If you don't like first person shooters... you should probably still try this game.

I will keep this one short. The game excels on every level. It contains some of the best graphics I've seen for games this generation, the attention to detail is simply amazing. Controls are sharp and responsive. Sound is used effectively to convey what is going on around you. There are plenty of scripted events that take place throughout the levels, but they are executed brilliantly. Some of the cinematics and events in-game actually moved me, far from the stupid bravado chatter we get in a lot of these games. There is a fair bit of variety, including sniping and evading enemies with a spotter, and attacking enemies from above using night satellite imagery (if memory serves)

About the only thing I can complain about is the length of the single player campaign, which only clocks in at about 6 hours. If you are like me and only interested in single-player that may not sound like much bang for buck, but those 6 hours are some of the best I have spent gaming. It may not make it a must buy, but it is a must play.

Super Smash Bros. Brawl - Wii
I'm not going to say I dislike this game, more that I just don't quite 'get' it. I played a little bit of local multiplayer as well some Subspace Emissary. I might go back and play Subspace Emissary in the future, as I didn't mind this aspect. I also won't say that the multiplayer wasn't fun to a degree. It was certainly entertaining to watch. I just didn't feel in control. It felt too button-mashy to me.

I could tell that there was plenty of depth and nuances there if I wanted to dig and discover everything that was on offer. I knew if I put the time in, eventually I would 'get' it and understand all the moves and which ones took priority, which characters performed better against others, understanding all of the jumping techniques to stay in the level, and all the other stuff. However, it seemed to me that the gap between mashing buttons and mastery was very large, and one I was not interested in crossing.

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There are a few other games I've given a single play session but just wasn't interested enough to play more. Conflict : Denied Ops, Haze and Kane & Lynch are games that I gave a shot in co-op, but didn't find them compelling enough to give a shot in single player afterwards. I already mentioned Ninja Gaiden 2 recently and I never quite felt in control, plus it seemed a bit buggy; slowed down to about a third of the speed at one stage until I turned off the console, and another time I ran past some enemies and fell down a pit. I had to climb a ladder, and always got shot by some archers and fell off the ladder, but they were too far away from me to lock on with my shuriken attack, so I had no choice but to eventually die. The first boss pummelled me several times, I hadn't learnt any successful strategies for avoiding the attacks or getting decent hits in by that time, so I gave up. It wasn't a bad game; it was feeling like I lacked control and the punishing difficulty that turned me off it.

There are a couple of games with multiplayer aspects that I think I could review. The first is Stranglehold, since I've heard that no one plays multiplayer in that and it was subpar in the first place. The second is the Orange Box, as 4 out of 5 parts are single player-centric, so long as I make that clear at the start of the review that I won't be covering Team Fortress 2. What are your thoughts?