Call me a purist, but I like my traditional racers on consoles -- not my DS -- where I can sit on my couch, marvel at the crisp graphics, and feel the feedback coming into my racing wheel as I drive along the road. But if you really want to race on the DS -- and it's your only viable option -- GRID works as intended...mostly.

Really the only thing Ace Combat has to offer that its predecessors don't is a couple of new flight modes and real world locations. This would be enough to recommend the game to die-hard fans, but the camera cut aways make the game a worse experience than its predecessors. If you want a good Ace Combat experience, you should play an earlier game in the series.

The GameCube version, on the other hand, slows down horribly with too many cars on the screen (at the start of a four-car race, for instance) or in certain areas of town with a lot of background architecture. It's bad enough that the absence of online multiplayer is just a little extra salt in the wound.

Really the only thing Ace Combat has to offer that its predecessors don't is a couple of new flight modes and real world locations. This would be enough to recommend the game to die-hard fans, but the camera cut aways make the game a worse experience than its predecessors. If you want a good Ace Combat experience, you should play an earlier game in the series.

In the end, there's absolutely no reason to choose this one over these other versions: Xbox 360, PS3, PS2, Xbox, or even PSP. If you're a Madden beginner, just play an easy level on a different console.

Kingdom shelves any cleverness, attaching training wheels to your creativity for the first two-thirds of the game. It's not until the last few islands that you're given an invitation to be creative.

Save for a tedious gimmick level in the Hundred-Acre Wood, each stage follows the same basic structure: work towards the first cutscene, which provides the key to the second cutscene, which provides the key to the boss. There are no puzzles or complex paths to work through -- once you've solved one, you've solved them all.

Edited down to a tight package this could probably make a pretty good machinima feature (or Sci-Fi original motion picture for that matter). But as a game, it fails.

It attempts to emulate the spirit of its bigger cousin, but it falls short.

If you're masochistic and don't mind awkwardly paced gameplay, you may actually enjoy Uprising. For everyone else, playing this game feels like paying someone $15 to punch you in the face over and over again.

Perhaps worst of all, the sense of place is gone.

A disappointing compilation of ambition without practical delivery. It's a game broken into several fundamental components that never work on their own and never contribute to a whole that can be appreciated.

DDR Universe is the gaming equivalent of an alien fetus belching out "The Star-Spangled Banner" -- a disaster of a title that digests any good DDR has given us into one of its many stomachs, producing something so foul that it could power Earth for centuries.

At almost $16 on the PlayStation Store it's hard to justify this pack of frustrating challenge levels when you can get a far superior and more balanced game in LocoRoco 2 for just $20. This masochistic traipse through nightmarish levels will probably appeal to some hardcore gamers, but if you've enjoyed LocoRoco in the past, you'll want to hold on to your good memories and just wait for the next chapter.

Edited down to a tight package this could probably make a pretty good machinima feature (or Sci-Fi original motion picture for that matter). But as a game, it fails.

Too many corners were cut to ensure the timely shipping of this PS2 release, and Rockstar Vienna's lack of care shines through.

Impressive a feat as creating a 3D shooter with cinematic aspirations for the DS may be, it doesn't mean much when it's not fundamentally fun to play.

It's shame that this port has been borked so badly; I don't think No More Heroes found the audience it needed on the Wii, and Heroes' paradise isn't going to do this franchise any favors.

Bully's biggest problem is that it's a shoddy port job, rife with technical missteps that wouldn't warrant comment if they weren't so profoundly damaging to the game.

Omega Five isn't anything special -- a blessing in some respects, but ultimately its curse. It's a side-scrolling shooter, highly reminiscent of the 16-bit era (even the music is in line with the best shooters of the late '90s), and while it's a short game on the whole, its challenge is nearly insurmountable and definitely not for the mass market.

UGnG gets the superficial bits right, yet the fundamental elements that have always made the series so compelling despite its esteem-crushing difficulty are either missing, compromised or broken in this sequel. And without those crucial underpinnings of quality in place, the entire affair collapses in a morass of mediocrity.

But whether you're playing online or off, you just can't shake the feeling that the PC version of Blazing Angels 2 is a messy afterthought, made all the more disappointing for wasted potential.

It's quickly clear that Dark Messiah is a "Half-Life 2"-style rail ride, but with "Deus Ex"-style character development.

It might be a worthwhile purchase to someone who needs an object lesson in how not to take advantage of the platform, but for anyone else this is just a more expensive version of a game that's been cluttering bargain bins for a while now.

The days of Jedi Knight, Rogue Squadron, and TIE Fighter are quickly becoming distant memories of what it was like to sit down and feel like we really were in a galaxy far, far away -- The Force Unleashed on the Wii can't hold a candle to those classics.

As it is, it feels like a one-night brainstorming session came up with a whole bunch of random ideas thrown in a pot and clumsily stirred. There might be a good game in here somewhere, but it needs to cook a lot longer.

From 2K8's tricky new controls to the number of gameplay hiccups, we simply can't recommend this skater over EA's for this hockey season.

Underneath the frustrating instability, behind the graceless chat window, and beyond the procession of NPC dialog boxes, you tickled that deep primordial need to gather more stuff and get stronger. Loot and leveling are the essence of any RPG, and you're equipped to satisfy that jones.