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On September 8, Crave Entertainment will launch Pinball Hall of Fame: The Williams Collection for the Playstion 3 and Xbox 360. While the game will retail for only $40, two of our lucky Married Gamers readers will get the game for free! We are giving away a copy of Pinball Hall of Fame: The Williams Collection on the PS3 and the Xbox 360.

To enter, head over to the Crave Entertainment website and read up on what pinball tables are included in the Wii version of the game. Next simply post on this entry with the name of just one of the pinball tables and which version of the game do you want, the Xbox 360 or the PS3 copy.   On Saturday, September 12th we will randomly pick a winner for each copy of the game.  Contest is limited to the United States & Canada.

Pinball Hall of Fame: The Williams Collection for the PS3 and Xbox 360 is HD compatible, and features pinball table from the past three decades. The game features online leaderboards and has a four player in-room multiplayer option. Pinball Hall of Fame: The Williams Collection is rated E10+.

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Intro Song is Three Minute Marriage Proposal by The Gentlemen

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A touchstone of my childhood has now stormed my console as G.I. JOE: The Rise of COBRA is the latest movie turned video game to reach store shelves. G.I. JOE continues the relationship between Electronic Arts and Hasbro that has so far brought gamers board games such as Monopoly, Trivial Pursuit, and Hasbro’s Family Game Night. In this latest EA-Hasbro collaboration, the elite team of soldiers called G.I. JOE must uncover and stop a new cadre of evil from rising to power. While G.I. JOE has been around for the past 45 years, much of The Rise of COBRA centers around the eighties cartoon and Hollywood relaunch of the property.

G.I. JOE The Rise of COBRA offers a single or two player co-op campaign over three major maps which are split up into several sites on each map. The game begins in the Tundra and the players must begin the game as Duke and Scarlett, but fret not, as one plays the game the player unlocks and is able to purchase other G.I. JOE characters including fan-favorite Snake Eyes. Each JOE has different abilities and classes which play into how one approaches the frequent battles and is able to gain entrance into a few secure locations. Players can play as their favorite characters over three sections of the world, each with several areas and stages of their own from the frozen Tundra to a steaming jungle. Each stage has objectives that mostly consist of blowing things up, which overall isn’t bad work if you can get it.

The gameplay is easy to pick up. The controls work overall very well with one exception, controlling vehicles. The video game gives the player several chances to pilot vehicles during the battle, but this reviewer found the driving mechanics to be confusing and difficult to control. As for actual game battles, most of the battles are very repetitive with a plethora of generic enemy soldiers that are thrown at you to increase the challenge. There are a few boss battles in G.I. JOE: The Rise of COBRA which does shuffle things up a bit, and in true boss battle fashion once the player learns the Boss’s ‘tell’ they are easy to defeat.

The graphics in G.I. JOE serve the game well. The cut scenes are a bit elementary but it’s made glaring by the script and voice acting. The dialog in the video game is very corny and at times over-the-top. Granted this is a video game about a toy line made into a movie, but the storyline features an obvious twist and a somewhat confusing ending. There is a lot of “Rinse. Lather. Repeat.” in G.I. JOE: The Rise of COBRA, but being able to choose different teammates does change up this tedious grind. It should also be mentioned the the co-op play is for in-room gameplay only. Sorry but your online Xbox Live friends won’t be playing Snake Eyes to your Storm Shadow.

There are quite a few achievements in the game to be unlocked, several of them require the player to play as various pairs of characters. There are some achievements that require some collecting, and several secret achievements. There are also a couple achievements that can only be attained through co-op play.

There are some very nice nostalgic extras in the video game. During game play the player can unlock these extras which include the classic G.I. JOE cartoon Public Service Announcements, a Behind the Scenes look at the making of the video game, and also rosters of several of the JOES and COBRA pantheon. All in all while I respect a sort of retro-feel of G.I. JOE: The Rise of COBRA, the video game offers a limited amount of fun but doesn’t offer a compelling reason to run out and buy.

G.I. JOE: The Rise of COBRA is rated T for Teen and is available in stores now. A copy of this game was provided by EA for the purpose of this review.

Married Gamers Report Card: C

With a new movie installment of your favorite boy wizard comes another video game to keep gamers reliving the movie.  Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince the video game was designed from the ground up for the Nintendo Wii.  So how does the game rate?

When I got the game home I dove right in.  I didn’t open the booklet or review the controls; just popped the disc in and started a new game.  There isn’t much too it and the learning curve is quite shallow.  As well, there doesn’t seem to be any way to change the difficulty settings.  So, everyone plays the same difficulty level and that’s that.  I finished the story mode in around 7 hours overall.  That is to say that if you have a free Saturday and the determination to avoid sunlight and fresh air, this is easily a one day game.  Of course, there are extras and if you want to unlock everything and all the mini games and such, you’ll probably log another 24 hours of game time, but overall, you’re not looking at a huge investment of time in a game that you’ll probably only play through once and never come back to.

The game play is fairly smooth as you control Harry Potter through a third-person viewpoint.  The map of Hogwarts is extensive and covers everything from the main gate to the boathouse to the owlery to Hagrid’s hut and of course the main castle.  The graphics aren’t superb but they get the job done and I certainly didn’t find them distracting.  The game can basically be boiled down to the story with lots of cut scenes that cover the basic plotline of book 6 using the scenes from the 6th movie as the visual base.  Mixed in on top of that you’ll find three mini-games/tasks; among them, making potions, dueling, and Quidditch.  Potions consists of manipulating the controls to add and mix ingredients within a time limit.  Dueling consists of learning and using about six different spells.  And Quidditch consists of the age old flying through rings mini game with a time limit.  None of them were particularly difficult and I managed to achieve top scores (which are based around a 1-5 star rating system) on most of my first or second tries.

If you’re a Harry Potter fan and you enjoy competing against yourself to better your score until you unlock awards and high scores you’ll enjoy this game on the first run through.  If you’re not a Harry Potter fan, you’ll probably get frustrated with some lengthy cut scenes that you can’t speed through or bypass and be bored with the game fairly quickly.  There is a multiplayer duel mode but nothing about dueling in the game leads me to believe that it would be anything I would want to do with my friends more than a couple of times before realizing that essentially it’s a button mashing operation that would see a lot of arms flailing Wii remotes around.  There’s nothing about the game that is particularly technically difficult, but I would think it would play well in the 8- to 14-year-old demographic where coordination (or lack thereof) would make the game a bit more of a challenge.

For the target demographic I mentioned above, I rate this game a B, but I’d probably wait until it dropped out of the $50 price range unless I or my kids were absolutely bonkers about Harry Potter paraphernalia.

Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince is rated E for Everyone and available now.  A copy of this game was provided by EA for the purpose of this review.

Married Gamers Report Card: B