If It Was A Good Game...

If Gran Turismo 5 was a good game...

...it wouldn't toss so many incongruous songs together atop an overly cluttered, fragmented UI in a bizarre attempt to create the impression of being sophisticated.

...a collision between two cars wouldn't sound like the side of a plastic trash can being lightly tapped with a bongo.

...the model for every object on a track in this realistic racing sim would have more than three polygons, and the textures would have some sort of shader applied to them to give the impression of depth, instead of taking the Bad Day LA approach.

...you wouldn't get a bizarre warning that your driver's jumpsuit can NEVER BE CHANGED SO PROCEED WITH CAUTION for some arbitrary reason.

...message boards wouldn't be filled with posts like "what were you expecting, this is a driving simulator, not some flashy neon kart racer".

If Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows Part 1 was a good game...

...it would not feature a first-person stealth segment that makes you walk back and forth along a busy city sidewalk while hiding under a blanket, giving you a mission failure prompt every time an unseen pedestrian runs into your back.

...the artists would have pulled themselves away from Hermione to make everyone else look vaguely human.

...Harry wouldn't shout the name of his spell EVERY TIME he used his wand, and enemies wouldn't take several shots to go down.

...I would be very, very surprised.

...the Kinect-enabled bits wouldn't be an on-rails shooter, but would instead be re-enactments from every scene in the movie, with your sole input being restricted to adjusting Harry's glasses every time they shift.

If Deca Sports Freedom was a good game...

...your character's actions in tennis would resemble your actual movements, preferably within a minute of you making them.

...passing and throwing in dodgeball wouldn't be determined by looking for arm movement, then tossing a virtual coin to decide what you were trying to do.

...moving around a paintball field wouldn't be a lesson in what it must feel like to have muscular dystrophy.

...using the menus wouldn't be the biggest challenge in the game.

...people might actually remember that Hudson Soft is still a company.

Poker Night At The Inventory
Manages to be funny in spite of Strongbad, but for a game that has more dialog than any of Telltale's previous adventure games, the lines somehow manage to repeat more than my losses - and I lose every hand. 7/10

Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood
I don't even care about the multiplayer stuff and I think the AC series story is overbearing and delivered in a way that actually hurts the games, but I'll be damned if it isn't awesome to become a land baron, recruit assassins, send them on missions, level them up, and summon them to help you out in combat. 8/10

Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows Part 1
If you've always wanted a Harry Potter game that played like a second-rate Gears Of War with worse storytelling, you'll still feel like an asshole for buying this. 3/10

Deca Sports Freedom
At this point I don't think some companies even had access to a Kinect while developing their games. 0/10

Pac-Man Championship Edition DX
You will accumulate a train of a billion ghosts and this little area of your brain will have an orgasm when you eat all of those ghosts in a glowy, bleepy display of paranormal gluttony. 9/10

Apache Air Assault
First my people took their land, then they forced them into reservations, and now we're attacking their air with helicopters. 6/10

Dance Paradise
It's the other dance game you might confuse for the good one! 5/10

Gran Turismo 5
Worth the wait for fans of the exact same gameplay in GT4, hideous UI, baffling design decisions, and several glaring issues that should have been ironed out at some point in the six year leadup to release. 6/10

NBA Jam
Oddly enough, Big Head Mode has no effect on LeBron James, and the shame using of lazy jokes has no effect on my writing. 7/10

Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit
The unskippable trailer for Shift 2 Unleashed that appears when you initially start the game would be the most vile shit in recent memory if gaming wasn't already inundated with an increasing amount of vile shit with no signs of slowing. 6/10

Donkey Kong Country Returns
I have to question the ratio of floating bananas to banana trees, as my immersion has been completely ruined. 8/10

Sonic Colors
I've lost count of how many times Sega has attempted to return the Sonic series to its former glory, but this is the least vile of the bunch. 6/10

– Dennis "Corin Tucker's Stalker" Farrell (@DennisFarrell)