Preorder Call of Duty: Black Ops and get $20 off your next purchase!

Amazon has a deal going on right now if you order Call of Duty: Black ops on the PS3 or 360 you'll get a $20 discount on your next video game purchase. You can see all of the details on the amazon site.

P.S. I have a friend that's currently playtesting it and he says it's better than Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 and that's saying a LOT since I thought MW2 was amazing.

Xbox Indie Games Review - Star Crisis

I guess you could label this as a side-scrolling retro shooter but there's an added feature of gravity which makes it really fun. You're either sitting at the bottom of the screen or using your thruster to move towards the top of the screen. The only controls are left trigger to use the thruster and right trigger to shoot. It's easy to pick up and play and I think I'll find myself coming back to this one every once in a while to play. There's global leaderboards so you can fight for those top spots and multiple difficulties so there's always something challenging based on your skill level. The retro style art and sprite explosions are pretty cool but the music reminds me more of an adventure game than a shooter.

Rating - 8/10

Xbox Indie Games Review - Towers

I'm a huge tower defense fan and man is this game hard!

This is your basic tower defense game and if you're reading this and are a fan of the genre you should probably just buy it now. Towers does an awesome job on incorporating new and old ideas to the mix. Build towers, kill baddies, all the stuff you expect in the game is there but the way you place towers is pretty cool. There are trees placed around the level and you can only place a tower where a tree is (or has previously been) so this adds a bit more strategy to the game. Hardcore tower defense fans will enjoy the difficulty of this game but it will scare newcomers off who don't completely understand everything. There's a variety of towers (6+ or so) that all do your basic tower defense stuff. Slow, poision, splash and air are all present so you'll catch on pretty quickly if you know your stuff.

The difficulty of the game is something that I felt challenged me and made me try strategy after strategy until something worked. I never felt like anything was frustrating but having to find the 'perfect strategy' in order to beat a level can get tedious after 10+ attempts. The game was updated and the ability to change the difficulty level was added but I haven't played it since the update so I can't give my opinion on the different difficulties.

If you like the genre, buy it. If you like a challenge, buy it. If you've never played a tower defense game before, you should probably start with something more forgiving.

Rating - 8.5/10

Xbox Indie Games Review - Leximo

The general premise of this game is to make words (either randomly or specifically if that's one of your objectives) with single letters falling from the top of the screen.

When you first start out you'll actually try to spell things because you get points by making words. Eventually you'll find out that there's no benefit to taking your time (unless you need to spell a specific word) so you start button mashing moving from left to right in order to just fill the board nearly full then hit the button that finds words for you. You'll get a larger combo bonus when more words are found so my game plan was to fill the board as full as I could, while I was still safe from losing, and then let the game search for words as I watched the points rack up. Watching the game sort through all of the words it finds is enjoyable because it's presented very well and the 5 or so most recent words are shown on the side of the screen so you can see what's being found. The game has a lot of polish into it but don't expect to play it like a word game.

The general idea of the game is cool but I'm not sure there's any hype or want for this type of game. If you have a dollar to burn and want to try something completely new then this might be a game worth trying.

Rating - 7/10