I'm all for unusual games and uniquely appropriate control schemes, but it would be nice if said games didn't try to kill you.

Although I enjoyed the first half of Jungle Beat (read: the easy half), I never mustered the internal fortitude to finish the game. Eventually, the complicated bongo-banging necessary to maneuver DK through the trickier bits just outpaced me. And it doesn't take too many failed attempts before you completely lose interest in abusing your arms any further.

I think Nintendo learned some lessons on the nature of the human body with Jungle Beat, lessons that were applied directly to Wii development. IE, repeated violent movements are superbad. If you can play Jungle Beat for more than an hour, you're either a superhuman or a subhuman, I don't know which.

Maybe there's the big problem... Nintendo combined intense physical activity with long, unforgiving level design. Jungle Beat was really nothing more than a Thank You to all the fans who bought the bongos and were (rightfully) tired of Donkey Konga. Plus, geez, if they hadn't released this, what would they have done in 2005?

Beautiful game, though. And most of the boss fights make really clever use of the bongo controls. I'm just not sure that full-length platforming challenges were the right venue for the bongo control scheme.

Memory Score: And why the duplicate DK closeup in the bottom corner?

There's always a Wild West game in development. Yet they never sell.

Gun was definitely ambitious... so ambitious that it was referred to as "GTA in the Old West." Which is more or less true, just it's a GTA without much to do. I guess that's in theme. You definitely get the impression that the American West was vast and empty.

Not a bad effort, but the linear storyline is not well-suited for a sandbox game. You finish a mission, you watch a perilously important cutscene... and then you are dropped back into the game world with no direction. And like Red Dead Revolver before it (which was better), Gun lifts characters and plot points from movie after movie without shame. (Gun even stirred up some minor flack over the game's portrayal of "savage" Native Americans during the first portion of the storyline.)

The controls had some weird bits, like using the same button for "holster" and "scope zoom," WTF.

More unforgivable is the pointless Texas Hold 'Em competitions where you're allowed to enter and win dough without wagering any of your in-game cash.

Someday somebody will do a compelling Western game. I hear there's a new one in dev.

Memory Score: She's dead! Guess I'll go play poker for an hour...

Metroid Prime 2 went head-to-head with San Andreas and Halo 2... and lost. Then, to make matters worse, even the Nintendo fans didn't buy it.

I liked the original Prime. It was different. It was dramatic. I probably would have been there for MP2 had I not been really busy with San Andreas at the time.

So I waited a year and picked it up on the cheap, and now I see why it floundered.

Back when Mystery Science Theater was this garage band thing that nobody but me liked, they did a zeroxed fan newsletter and one of those had the then-unknown Mike Nelson reviewing Doom 2 (of all things.) He described Doom 2 has being "more of Doom 1." And that's exactly what Metroid Prime 2 is... more of Metroid Prime 1.

Generally speaking, I think we all expected more than that. I have read that the game takes a major switch-up deep into it, but the first part was very tedious, lots of backtracking, with the usual no-help mapping system. So I never finished it. It sat in my "will get to" pile for years. I think it's still there, actually. On the bottom.

Memory Score: Just give me a map with goal points cleanly and clearly marked.

Next time: the GameCube blowout for 2006! Two new releases, two missed classics! The penultimate farewell!