Monday Gamewatch

This week: Sink your pearly whites into a Gothic vampire adventure, a global domination strategy puzzler, or a souped-up retread of Capcom's grimly glacial bug-busting shooter. Dates listed are ship-to-store.

Tuesday

Dracula: Origin. A-vamping you will go in this Gothic reconsideration of everyone's second favorite vampire (you know, after Buffy, and yes I hope you're reading Season Eight). Credit the adventure genre for slinking along durably if invisibly since seeming swan songs like Ragnar Tornquist's The Longest Journey and Benoit Sokal's Syberia. And credit international development studio Frogwares for helping the genre maintain a pulse with games like Sherlock Holmes: The Silver Earring, Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened, and now Dracula: Origin. In Origin, you control Dracula as well as his nemesis Van Helsing in a tale that sprawls from London to Egypt, Austria to Transylvania (which, by the way, is still a word and a historical region even if it's no longer an autonomous principality, Dear Apple-Macbook-Pro-spell-checker). Sure, Origin's another 3D-characters-against-2D-backdrops point-and-clicker, but there's something about hand-drawn art that still looks better than the slickest 360-degree 3D renders.

Supreme Ruler 2020. The original Supreme Ruler was a text-based economic strategy game reaching back a quarter-centennial, i.e. my highfalutin check-your-mileage way of saying 1983. In 2005, developer Battlegoat Studios released Supreme Ruler 2010, a "military, economic, and diplomatic" hybrid real-time / turn-based strategy game most critics seemed to like with a few caveats about poor A.I. and piles of visual blah. Supreme Ruler 2020 updates the audio-visuals and tweaks the AI and interface, theoretically addressing the two biggest complaints about 2010.

Friday

Lost Planet Extreme Colonies Edition. Did you ever see the ads they ran for Lost Planet on TV at the tail end of 2006? Forbes reported that publisher Capcom spent $20 million to make this thing plus another $20 million to market it. Maybe that explains the company's attempt to foist a "gold" version of this middling shooter on the masses. The "Colonies Edition" adds new solo-play scoring modes, new multiplayer maps, a Human vs. Akrid (the bugs) multiplayer mode, new creatures and weapons, and the option to play as one of the original's secondary characters. The only reason I'd consider picking this one up, and it's actually a pretty good one: Cross-platform support, finally allowing Xbox 360 and PC owners to square off in glare-lit ice fields with grappling hooks and plasma grenades.