Review Rewind: Psychonauts for XBOX

You are Raz(putin), a highly trained and sought after secret operative under the great Ford Cruller, the greatest Psychonaut that ever lived-at least in your head. Sadly, you're just a kid, a circus kid, in a kid's psychonaut summer camp and just your luck, you don't have a parental permission slip! But, hey, at least you get to stick around until the teachers try to get a hold of your pappy. Time to enjoy yourself.

As expected, strange things start to happen. Kids started disappearing and brains mis...s -- teee....veee... teee... veee.

The Brains of It

The game has your basic controls, further augmented by the use of items and special Psi merit badges that you gain to add to your powerful arsenal. If you haven't gotten it by now, all your powers come from the psyche, so expect pyrokinetic, telekinetic hoopla. There's more to name but why spoil it? As your powers grow you will take use of menus to easily map three of your powers to the buttons X, Y, B. A is reserved for jump.

Psychonauts provide direct objectives which you can commit yourself to in order to complete the game, but you can also deviate and do extra objectives to add to the strength of your powers, brain bar(life), etc. They're all highlighted in the menu, easily accessible and given the scope of the adventure, you can see precisely how having a lil in game notepad can be beneficial.

Most every stage aside for the campground(s) involve lurid visuals taken from inside the brains of those around you. You mostly go around violating people's privacy's by jumping right into their heads and trying to play their head games.

It's not as boring as I make it sound. I swear...

Every stage is a unique representation of the character you're about to touch, intimately(eheh). Some of them will make your head spin while others will have you slack-jawed, even if the graphics don't exactly push the current gen(xbox - the game's also available for PS2 and PC). Every stage is a masterpiece on its own, with exceptional detail placed on the way certain puzzles are solved, the way things are colored and so on. Not a single stage/world/brain looks alike and the way the guy's at Double Fine productions implemented them is something I've yet to see done in any other game(at least not so well).

Complete your objectives, save your day-old acquaintan--friends, find a girl friend, save the world... Woo! And you do this behind the curtain of fully voiced characters with their own quirks and phobias which add to their overall personality and propel the story. By the end of the game you're likely to remember precisely who was who, and maybe pick up a grab bag of phobia's yourself(Ka-ching!).

Think adventure game, without the point and click, just as long, with a twisted humor, and more control. Surprisingly, the third person camera isn't bad. Get's a little awkward if you try to jump too high in a cramped room-it's not like you're claustrophobic, right?

Requirements

• Close to 25 hours of your time

• A brain

• The ability to self supervise

• A sense of humor

History 101

A long, long, long time ago... in a galaxy far... far... not far... in your living room... away... there was a man named Tim Schafer who made a game called "Full Throttle", featuring the voice of Mark Hamill. Yea, the sinister voice of The Joker in a cartoon series featuring a certain dark knight. Wow, you say? Well, back then, Schafer worked for LucasArts(LucasFilms), who had this game engine out called the Scumm-v(#). It made for some of the best animated adventure games, some or most of which included fully spoken dialogue, like Secrets of Monkey Island, Sam & Max, Day of the Tentacle, etc...

He broke off, made a studio, and their first announced game was this strange one named "Psychonauts". There was a great deal of hype circulating the game for a good portion of a year or so, and then we heard nothing. When the game actually came out, it didn't receive as much attention as it should have and so became the underdog of the year, The Adventure Game of the Year (2005, 1UP), Best XBOX Game of the Year nominee(2005, 1UP), and went under most everyone's radar.

Feel like you missed out? Well, the game can be found in down-loadable format on XBOX Live for your XBOX 360.