VALIANT HEARTS: THE GREAT WAR   (T) ***1/2 Ubisoft PlayStation 4 Most historical war games put you in the combat boots of a lone super-soldier, capable of single-handedly taking down the entire enemy army, one headshot at a time. Valiant Hearts takes a different approach, presenting you with four characters reluctantly

TRANSFORMERS: RISE OF THE DARK SPARK   (T) *1/2 Activision Xbox One For the last few years, video games have been the last sanctuary for Transformers fans determined to protect their childhood memories from the brutal assaults of director Michael Bay. Those days are over. After two surprisingly good games featuring

SONY AT E3 While Nintendo and Microsoft kept the focus squarely on the games at last month’s Electronic Entertainment Expo, Sony elected to dedicate a lengthy portion of their press conference to new PS4 multimedia services, while the crowd of hardcore gaming onlookers let out a collective groan. Beginning this

MICROSOFT AT E3 Last year, Microsoft annoyed hardcore gamers by focusing their press event on the Xbox One’s exotic multimedia features. It was a futile effort to lure in the casual gaming crowd, but as it turns out, casual gamers don’t buy Xbox Ones. Nowadays, they get their gaming fix

NINTENDO AT E3 The 20th annual Electronic Entertainment Expo kicked off last week at the Los Angeles Convention Center, where game developers from all over the world converged to showcase their wares. As usual, Nintendo had a large presence on the show floor, but for the second year in a

MARIO KART 8   (E) ***** Nintendo Wii U The Mario Kart series is a 22 year-old car that hasn’t had a substantial tune-up in about eleven years, and while this reliable old clunker could still always be counted upon to get you where you needed to go, it began to

WATCH DOGS    (M) **** Ubisoft PlayStation 4 Why should the NSA have all the fun? Watch Dogs plants you in a fictionalized version of Chicago, where all of your greatest voyeuristic dreams can come true. You can access anyone’s personal information or tap into any camera feed to secretly surveil

‘NES REMIX 2’    (E) *** Nintendo Wii U “NES Remix” games have a very specific target audience: Nostalgic Nintendo fans who are too lazy to dust off their old, eight-bit cartridges and — even if they weren’t — too riddled with ADHD to play a single game for more than

‘KINECT SPORTS RIVALS’    (E10+) *** Microsoft Game Studios Xbox One A showcase for the Xbox One’s newest version of Kinect, “Sports Rivals” is a hodgepodge of different motion-controlled activities. As always, Kinect is an impressive piece of technology when it works, but in every collection of mini-games built for it,

‘BIOSHOCK INFINITE: BURIAL AT SEA – EPISODE 2’    (M) ***** 2K Games PlayStation 3 The first episode of “Burial at Sea” felt like a piece of fan fiction — a farfetched “what if?” scenario created solely to justify placing the characters of “BioShock Infinite” in the dystopic setting of the