Impressions of 'Mirror's Edge' and 'Spider-man: Web of Shadows'

Well, I spent the last nine hours playing my Xbox, namely two games:

1) I finally downloaded the demo of "Mirror's Edge," and I was floored. If you haven't seen the game yet, this is a one-of-a-kind experience, a first-person adventure game in which you're basically a free runner (in fact, your character is called a "Runner" in the game). Anyway, the world is your monkey bars in this game, kinda like buildings and stairwells are one big "Ninja Warrior" course. And while, yes, there were several many kinks here, and while there were a couple of instances of oblivious frustration in the demo alone, the game was so exciting and unique that I would say everyone should at least download the demo and give it a try.

(In case you're wondering, yes, I did immediately contact Electronic Arts in hopes of getting myself a press review copy).

2) The better part of that nine hours was spent with "Spider-man: Web of Shadows." A full review on this one will be posted to the Gaming Web site in a few days, but for now, I'll give some impressions on what I have played so far, the first two acts. Spider-man fans are going to love this game, pretty much just because of the fluidity of the web-slinging and wall-crawling. The storyline is also, at heart, pretty good... the only problem is that it's non-existent for the entire first act. For the most part, all you do in the first two acts is swing around beating up generic henchmen to meet quotas and earn XP. Not the most exciting stuff, especially after the unexpected thrill that was "Mirror's Edge." Still, the game has some humor, and a lot of promise, so don't take this as a full judgement by any means. I'm hoping the second half of this tale is the stronger of the two.