Brutal Legend

The next game by brilliant (and socially maladjusted) game designer Tim Schaffer, creator of Day of the Tentacle and Psychonauts:

http://www.gametrailers.com/player/43624.html

I suspect this will be like most of Tim Schafer's games:

Great setting, characters, dialouge, and personality, with some well-intentioned but repetitive or otherwise broken gameplay.

I love the "Heavy Metal" theme, I'm adoring some of the character design, and I'll probably get the game for the hell of it, but for Tim to really impress me this time around, he'll have to do a few things:

a) some semblance of non-linear gameplay. Grim Fandango and Psychonauts were great games, but you really only ever want to play them once. No replay or exploration value due to high linearity.

b) non-repetitive combat. Schafer's last game, Psychonauts, really tried to work in combat, but it wasn't very interesting. This is more of a graphical quandry than a button mashing deal. Kingdom Hearts and Dynasty Warriors have proven that hitting a single button over and over can be fun if accompanied by a variety of interesting graphics.

c) better level design. Again looking at Psychonauts, where Tim tried to jump in on the platforming genre, and severely missed-judged the gap. Tim is a writer first and foremost, so his level design tends to be interesting in concept, but poor in execution.

In any case, I'll most likely pick it up. I never finished Psychonauts before discarding my Xbox, and my games at the moment are distinctly lacking in Schafferism. I still retain Grim Fandango, but that's about it. I want my Day of the Tentacle, or Full Throttle. Hopefully Brutal Legend provides.