Let's talk about America. Specifically, America video games. No, not American video games, but America video games. Games that truly embrace the spirit of this country and how freaking awesome it is. Games that barf the 80's. Games that explode for no reason. Games that could have their entire soundtrack replace with the song "America (Fuck Yeah)." It's that kind of list.

Just Cause 2

Few things are more America than intelligence operatives messing around in Central/South America and South Asia. Just Cause 2 is less about doing the right thing for the Asian nation of Panau and more about setting up the area so the U.S. can reap all the strategic and resource benefits from it when the dust settles. Freedom isn't free. Sometimes you need to pay CIA spooks and mercenaries to mess up the joint before you can enjoy that tasty, tasty freedom. Don't worry, this is the only particularly depressing/divisive item on the list. Everything else is pure, mindless America.

Fallout 3

A game where America is destroyed by a nuclear war after China's invasion of Alaska might not seem very America... until you meet the Brotherhood of Steel in the Capitol Wastelands. They took the Pentagon as their base, and they rebuilt America's unused secret weapon, Liberty Prime. Liberty Prime is a 50 foot tall red white and blue robot that shouts communism-bashing catchphrases while throwing nuclear bombs like they're footballs. Liberty Prime is made of a special alloy, and that alloy is America.

Freedom Force Vs. The Third Reich

Freedom Force was already a pretty America game, with tons of silver age-style superheroes fighting threats to the country with ridiculous powers and car-throwing force. Freedom Force Vs. The Third Reich went further by having your team, including the tricorner-hat-wearing Minuteman, fight the Axis powers and the USSR. This is a game where Minuteman and Liberty Lad face off against Blitzkreig, Nuclear Winter, and Red Oktober. And all of it is for America.

Bad Dudes

Any game where you not only rescue the president, but he says you should go get burgers with him when you win is awesome. When that president is Ronald Reagan (In the arcade version; the NES version was George Bush)? Pure America. You can be a bad dude and rescue the president, as long as you beat the shit out of ninjas and something something American flag.

Metal Wolf Chaos

This is the most America game ever, and it was never released in America. No, this game, made by those mad geniuses at From Software and published by Microsoft (Microsoft decided not to release this game in America), only came out in Japan. Which is sad, because everything about this game is insane and awesome.

You play the president, who has to fight the vice president in his giant robot. Which starts the game by jumping out of the front of the White House as the entire facade of the building explodes. His robot has a ton of different guns, which are giant rifles his robot holds like he's Second Amendmentron, and everything blows up. It's like Japan wrote about the presidency of George W. Bush while watching G Gundam and only vaguely skimming newspaper headlines.

Anyone who grew up with an NES in their house knows that 99 out of 100 times, any game based on a movie is going to suck. Still, there are always the rare, wonderful occasions where the trend is broken and the movie game is actually well-made and fun to play. Sunsoft's NES adaptation of Batman is one of the first examples of those games.

Batman both closely follows the movie and has nothing to do with it. The levels are ostensibly based on settings in the film, and the game has several great-looking 8-bit cutscenes with images straight from the movie. It also has level designs, enemies, and weapons taken straight from Ninja Gaiden and Mega Man.

Even though you play Batman, you use several different guns ranging from a basic forward-firing pistol to a wavy spread shot. I don't remember Batman playing with guns in the movie, nor do I remember him fighting armies of evil robots and commandos while navigating conveyor belts and flame-throwers. It's not really true to the action of the movie, and that makes it way more awesome. If you took out everything Batman in the game, you'd still have an excellent side-scrolling action title with loads of variety and very tight controls.

And you need the tight controls, because Batman is Nintendo Hard. If you squint, you could easily pretend you're playing Ninja Gaiden. Limited life, aggressive enemies, and difficult jumps make Batman come perilously close to being controller-snappingly frustrating. It's not a cheap sort of frustrating, though; the excellent design and gameplay mechanics make every level you beat feel rewarding.

Unfortunately, like so many licensed games, the NES version of Batman isn't available on the Virtual Console. If you want to wear the Dark Knight's 8-bit cowl, you'll have to look for a used cartridge. Still, with Batman: Arkham Asylum and the upcoming Arkham City in the current generation, I think we'll make due.

I know Resident Evil 4 is only 5 years old. It still deserves its place as this week's Friday Flashback for a very simple fact: it would be a far, far better purchase than a ticket to see Resident Evil: Afterlife. Currently Amazon has Resident Evil 4 for the Wii for just $12, and the PS2 version for just $10. Depending on where you live, that's the cost of a movie ticket, or a movie ticket and some soda and popcorn. If you were planning to go see Resident Evil Afterlife this weekend, don't. Use that money to get this great game instead.

And yes, a review for that cinematic debacle I witnessed this evening will be coming, very soon.

That's right, I'm talking about Shadow Warrior.

Shadow Warrior it's basically a Duke Nukem 3D clone with so much Asian kung-fu/ninja flare it's borderline racist. You play master assassin Lo Wang, who must fight his former boss Master Zilla before he can summon demons to take over Japan. It's as ridiculous as it sounds, and it sounds only slightly more ridiculous than Duke Nukem 3D.

You get some pretty awesome weapons, including a katana, shuriken, double Uzis, a riot shotgun, and even a stickybomb launcher (which, according to Wikipedia, is the first instance of a stickybomb gun in an FPS). You can also use the head and heart of certain enemies as a flame thrower and bezerker-summoning-button, respectively. Since you're a ninja-type person, you can also use gas bombs, smoke bombs, and flash bombs to distract enemies, and even throw down caltrops to create painful hazards on the ground.

All those weapons prove useful as you fight different colored ninjas, assorted ghosts and demons, and even sumo wrestlers through the game's 22 levels (with 25 additional levels available through the free expansions Twin Dragon and Wonton Destruction). The levels range from a construction yard to a bath house to a floating fortress, and are full of as much variety as you can get with the Build engine.

There's also sort-of nudity in the game. Periodically, usually in bodies of water, you can find bathing anime girls. They don't show anything really naughty, but they're still naked and offer the same awesome-if-you're-14 titillation the strippers in Duke Nukem 3D offered.

Surprisingly, you can still buy Shadow Warrior direct from 3D Realms. The full game is $10, with another $4 if you want to back up the download and $10 if you want a physical disc. Fortunately, the game's shareware episode is still available for free, also direct from 3D Realms. It's not the whole game, but the 4 episodes will give you a taste of Shadow Warrior without you having to pay a dime.

Nintendo was notorious for censoring potentially offensive or graphic content in its games, especially in the 8-bit and 16-bit days. That's one of the reasons why ICOM Simulations' 1990 release Deja Vu is so impressive. This first-person adventure game, in the same vein as Shadowgate, brings some genuinely gritty and dark storytelling to the NES (the game was released before then on the Amiga, Commodore 64, PC, Apple, and Atari ST).

You're an amnesiac detective named "Ace" Harding, who wakes up in a sleazy bathroom to find a corpse upstairs, the police on his trail, and only a thin trail of clues between him and death. It's noir like Max Payne is noir; over-the-top, hammy, crazy, and thoroughly awesome because of it.

Like so many adventure games of the late 80's and early 90's, your screen is divided into view, inventory, and control panels. The view shows where you are, like an office or the street or a cab. The inventory gives you a list of all the items you've picked up. The commands let you "Use," "Talk," "Hit," and perform other actions to interact with objects in the world. Considering the limited technology available, this set-up let games create a large, interactive world with only a few dozen still images and some clever programming.

Because Deja Vu is an adventure game and it came out on the NES, it offers the insane difficulty that you can only find at the crossroads of Nintendo Hard and Guide Dang It. If you make one wrong move, you're dead. If you fail to pick up the right item, you're screwed. If you go to the wrong area and talk to the wrong person, you're dead and screwed. This arguably leads to a lot of replayability, if only because you'll be starting over many, many times just to see the ending once.

The dark, gritty story really makes Deja Vu stand out against nearly every other NES game. It was constrained by 8-bit graphics, but the constant threats of death from gun-slinging hooligans, crocodiles, and your own stupidity, combined with a willingness to actually show and describe dead bodies, makes it fairly unique.

Sadly, Deja Vu is not available on the Virtual Console, nor can a remake be readily found. You can pick up the DOS version as abandonware, but it's really, really ugly. Why did developers always use blue and purple when they were presented with a limited color palette?

Jazz Jackrabbit 2 is a surprisingly entertaining shooter/platformer that combines both high-speed adventuring and tons of gunslinging into one of the best side-scrolling experiences on the PC. The game plays like a cross between Sonic the Hedgehog and Earthworm Jim. You play the titular green alien hare, whose purpose in life is to fight the oppressive hordes of the space tortoises. To do this, you get to use tons of different guns like flamethrowers, freeze guns, and laser beams to blast enemies, all while running at near-hedgehog level speeds through conveniently curving and sloping levels.

Like the name implies, Jazz Jackrabbit 2 is a sequel to the original Jazz Jackrabbit, which Epic released 4 years earlier. Those 4 years made a huge difference, as the first game's chunky, pixelated graphics evolved into smooth and incredibly well-animated high-rez sprites. The second game also featured an included level editor, the Jazz Creation Station, which let players make their own levels. The first Jazz Jackrabbit had a few level editors, but they were all developed after the fact by fans, not by Epic.

Jazz Jackrabbit 2 is the swansong of shareware gaming. It was one of the last great games where you could play the first episode for free, then decide if you wanted to shell out the cash for the other 4 episodes. Sadly, it's not available for purchase from any of the usual online sources or from Epic, but the game is available at Abandonia. Of course, the legal status of "abandonware" is dubious, but it's your call. As long as Epic doesn't care.

While it never became particularly popular, Shatterhand was awesome from the moment it hit American stores, from its ridiculous box art of a chubby biker punching the logo with his cyborg hand to its Ninja Gaiden-meets-Bionic Commando graphics. The game was developed by Natsume, which also produced the NES non-classic-but-still-great Shadow of the Ninja, which itself played like Ninja Gaiden meets Bionic Commando.

It's pretty standard side-scrolling hack/slash/punch gameplay, not unlike Ninja Gaiden's core combat. Run, usually from left to right, punching everything you see with your badass cyborg hand. You can stick to the walls like in the first Ninja Gaiden, but it's not really necessary in most parts of the game. You can collect coins, but instead of giving you points or extra lives they fuel machines that can power up your punch or restore your life.

Besides the coins and power-up machines, robot-summoning Greek letters add a nice bit of variety to the game. By stringing together three alpha or beta symbols (or any combination thereof), you can summon a robot drone to follow you around and help you out. The pattern of symbols you put together determines how the robot acts and what weapons it uses. Alpha-beta-beta summons a robot that fires bouncing balls of electricity, while beta-beta-alpha summons a kamikaze flamethrower robot. If you repeat the same string twice in a row, you can join with your drone to get even more power.

After you beat the first level, you can choose the order in which you tackle the next 5. They all look like they belong in Sunsoft's Batman games, but since it was a good look to begin with that's not a bad thing. There's the weird sewer-lab, the factory with conveyor belts, and so on. Typical NES video game levels, but fun and relatively varied.

Shatterhand wasn't the most amazing NES game, but it was a solid side-scroller in the vein of Ninja Gaiden and Batman, and that's always a fun romp. Sadly, it's not available on the Virtual Console, so you'll have to dust off your NES and find a cart if you want to play it.

Starcraft 2 has been on a lot of gamers' minds lately. It's certainly been eating up my attention and time for a good part of the past week. To commemorate the game we've been waiting a decade for, this week we're going back to the origins of the game, and indeed the very genre itself. No, not Starcraft. No, not Warcraft, but that's a good guess. No, this week's flashback is the godfather of all RTS games: Dune 2: The Building of a Dynasty (or The Battle For Arrakis, depending on whether you're looking at the game's box or its title screen).

Dune 2 is vaguely based on Frank Herbert's Dune books, though besides two of the three house factions' names and the fact that you're gathering spice on a desert planet with giant worms, there aren't a whole lot of similarities. You choose between House Atriedes, House Harkonnen, or House Ordo, and try to crush the other two houses as you collect spice and build up your forces. It doesn't exactly have the complex political subterfuge or the bizarre religious themes of Herbert's books, but it works as an impetus for base-building and enemy-killing.

The game was developed by Westwood Studios, which went on to create the Command & Conquer series and its beloved Red Alert sub-series. Sadly, Dune 2 doesn't have any hilariously bad FMV cutscenes of Tim Curry or Michael Ironside chewing the scenery like they're teething.

Dune 2 pioneered a lot of the RTS conventions that we take for granted today. Building construction and base expansion, resource collection, technology trees, and multiple factions all got their start in this humble little game.

If you want to play Dune 2, you'll have to make due with remakes. Sadly, the game hasn't been re-released on Steam, GOG.com, or any of the other digital distribution sites. However, remakes like Dune 2: The Golden Path and Dune Legacy give you a free option to try a version of this historic game.

This week's flashback is a bit of a strange one, because it's not a game I've played a million times and have memorized perfectly. In fact, I'm not even sure if I ever played it on my own computer. However, it still holds a place in my heart because it helped while away the hours during my high school's programming class. After I finished my BASIC assignments (yes, BASIC was all my high school had), I played one of two games on the computer lab's systems: Virtual Pool and Commander Keen.

In a way, Commander Keen was just a Mario rip-off. However, it was an excellent Mario rip-off that Tom Hall and John freaking Carmack developed. In fact, according to Hardcore Gaming 101, Hall and Carmack originally developed a perfect port of the first level in Super Mario Bros. 3 in hoping to pitch a PC port of the game itself to Nintendo. Nintendo didn't bite, but Apogee looked at the concept and decided to run with it as an entirely new series. And so Commander Keen was born.

While it looks like a Mario rip-off on the surface, mechanically Commander Keen evolved into a strange blend of Mario, Mega Man, and Ducktales. Besides jumping, you had a laser gun with limited ammo, a pogo stick, and a variety of other items to get through the various levels. Between levels, you explored the world through an overhead map, like in Mario 3.

Since this was an Apogee-published PC game in the early 90's, it was shareware. It came on a disk with the first chapter, Marrooned on Mars, complete and free. If you wanted the other two chapters, The Earth Explodes and Keen Must Die!, you had to pay for it. Tons of games used this model in the 90's, including Doom and Quake.

The story is an amusing romp. You play 8-year-old Billy Blaze, a super-genius kid who builds his own space ship and flies to Mars where he meets the Vorticons, evil aliens who want to destroy Earth. It's silly, but it's meant to be silly. It's almost like playing a Spaceman Spiff video game.

While Commander Keen himself isn't particularly memorable as a character, his series paved the way for a much more iconic (and much more tardy) character, Duke Nukem. The first two Duke Nukem games were side-scrolling platformers structured very similarly to Commander Keen and published by Apogee.

If you want to go back to the days of yesteryear with Commander Keen, you can download the game for just $5 on Steam. It includes the first episode, the follow-up two episodes (that comprised the "Invasion of the Vorticons" story), and the 4th and 5th episodes released a year later as the sequel, "Goodbye Galaxy!").

Descent is a unique cross between an FPS and a space sim. Instead of moving around floors, bound by gravity, you fly a heavily armed exploratory craft over all three spacial axes. You can fly back, forward, left and right, plus up and down, literally giving the genre a new dimension of action and exploration. Of course, this did give rise to some issues with motion sickness. Over a decade before Mirror's Edge came out, Descent had weak-stomached gamers tossing their lunches in scores.

Like Quake would do the year after Descent's release, Descent renders both levels and enemies in full 3D, using polygons instead of sprites. Items are still sprite-based, but virtually everything else is modeled in 3D. While Quake might have a more advanced engine and a higher polygon count, Descent looks a bit more colorful and bright, with some more varied textures than Quake's brown palette.

For weapons, there are several types of weapons, including 4 levels of laser, a vulcan cannon, and a handful of missiles and cluster bombs. Most of the enemies you fight look like rejects from Tempest. They're supposedly different types of robot drones, but they all have strange, angular designs that look much more like old-school arcade enemies than any recognizable object.

Descent spawned two sequels and a sort-of spinoff series, Freespace. Descent: Freespace was connected to Descent in name only, though; it was a much more conventional space sim that Interplay branded with the Descent name only for legal reasons.

You can pick up Descent and Descent 2 for just $6 from GOG.com. It might be a very old game, but if you find yourself going back to Quake and Doom for a nostalgic ride through old-school PC gaming, it's a great deal. Nintendo is also planning to release a version of Descent onto the Wii through WiiWare this fall. That should be interesting.