Lair [PS3]

To snatch these bad guys, you have to lock-on to them. To lock-on to them, you have to wait for a white circle to appear around them and press L1 or R1. The catch: there's no way to rotate the white circle. The computer chooses who and what you can target.

So, these toros arrived and started crippling my universe. I swooped in with my dragon, saw a toro and pressed the lock-on button. However -- even though I was coming at the Toro straight on -- the computer was looking at a turret on a tower. That meant I ended up locking on to the tower, passing the rampaging toro and heading back into the sky.

Argh.

Worse? You can't corner or move with any precision in Lair. I missed the toro and thought that I could just turn around and go back to the beast, but my turn was so wide that by the time I was facing the right way, I was already over my foe. The only strategy was to go waaaaaaay out over the water, turn around and slowly come back to the bad guy so that the computer knew exactly who I wanted to take down. Even then, it wasn't unheard of to pick up a trooper by mistake. True, you can jerk the controller to pull off a 180-degree turn, but like all of the Sixaxis controls, I found it horribly unresponsive. Eventually, I just gave up on it -- even though the game refused to let me and had me doing 180s and speed bursts (another wrist-flick move) against my will.

Take too long to get all the bulls -- whether it's because the computer's screwing you or because you're taking too long to turn around -- and you'll lose the level and start the whole thing over again. Beat the toros, and your reward is doing the exact same tedious task with a group of rhinos. It's enough to leave you ready to punt the next lizard you see so that you can extract some level of retribution for the bubbling cauldron of hate this game has created inside you.

Please don't think that this one level is what I'm basing my opinion of Lair on; it's just the first time I understood how painful this game can be. These problems continue throughout the game, and that's a shame. Lair had so much potential -- the game will score your performance, award you medals and toss your scores on an online leaderboard -- and above all else, Lair has a great story.

Although Asylia and Mokai are at each other's throat now, they used to be one nation that worshiped one deity. Then, a volcano erupted and split the land in two. Over time, the factions grew to be enemies, and neither remembers the good times now. Rohn's journey from being a faithful servant of Asylia to seeing the treachery of the Diviner to realizing how similar the Mokai and his people are is impressive in scale, scope and emotion. Add the fact that Lair features a sweeping orchestral score with big pieces to match the big events of the game, an impressive vocal cast and some beautiful FMVs, and this could have been a benchmark for where this industry is going -- could have.