Small disagreement here. Much of the storyline mode is atrocious and unforgiving. Each successive level is worse than the one before. The train scene is nice, and the Lost Vikings style stuff is OK... but the Buzz space level is a mess, and the rising coffee level epitomizes the typical half-assed licensed platformer. Where you're constantly missing jumps and getting shoved off ledges to instant deaths. You're being way too generous here. You can tell that the developers walked away from the storyline mode themselves because it never even ends. It just stops. No big story finish. Doesn't even roll credits. Now, Toy Box mode is certainly the star of the show, but I think they completely oversold it. It's a nice, light GTA populated with the cast of a friendly Disney license. The early claims of being able to "build your town" became "place specific town buildings in mandated locations." You can't change characters outside of Buzz/Woody/Jessie (and Zurg if you're on PS3, but he is awful to control). Bo Peep stands here, Hamm stands there, everybody serves as cute immovable mission points. Doesn't sound like a kids' toy box to me. Don't even talk to me about the loose, uncontrollable cars! We like it well enough (my son is five), and, yes, the free-roaming co-op is great (although certain locations to force the players to stop what they're doing and warp together). But we found LEGO Harry Potter (a nearby release) to be far better constructed.

Dude. You guys just lived up to the brainy gamer name. This is officially the first time I've read people actually thoughtfully examine the perception problems of RE5 (that first trailer still makes me cringe, even after knowing that Capcom woke up and started tweaking stuff). Try and combine the words "racism" and "resident evil 5" in a post on Kotaku and see how far you get.

Hurm. That book's interior may be great (I'll check out the review shortly.) But that cover communicates nothing about the broad range of art in video games, instead showing a bunch of samey war/combat/monster/guns/violence junk that could feed directly into mainstream mass media views on video games.