Right now, playing FFXIV is like playing with a toy stuck in a plastic bag: it can be fun for a while and you can get the general idea, but you can't appreciate the full experience. Future updates will no doubt open the bag, but for now, it's sealed frustratingly tight.

The game's main hook is that it's entirely played with the stylus. If only said stylus mechanic was actually responsive.

An example of just how much the little details matter in game design. They're what make Gears of War work so well, and where Quantum Theory stumbles just too often to be worth much of anyone's time. The experience of playing it is something like watching a student copy off of an answer sheet for a test...and somehow getting the answers wrong, anyway.

An example of just how much the little details matter in game design. They're what make Gears of War work so well, and where Quantum Theory stumbles just too often to be worth much of anyone's time. The experience of playing it is something like watching a student copy off of an answer sheet for a test...and somehow getting the answers wrong, anyway.

The only challenge comes from the occasionally imprecise controls.

And the core game is familiar territory these days -- familiar to the point of contempt.

But decent two-player co-op's just ketchup on a crap sandwich. The game's buggy as hell, with severe slowdown, characters getting hung up in the level geometry, and stuttering audio. Those problems are amplified in the PS3 version, whose only other major differences are unneeded Sixaxis flight control and a noticeable lack of Trophy support versus the Xbox 360's Achievements.

Assuming you have dipped your feet in the pool of endless Dynasty Warriors content, it's almost absurd at this point to have to pay 30 bucks for either the PS2 or Xbox 360 flavor of what is barely more than preconceived, half-assed, tacked-on downloadable content.

Assuming you have dipped your feet in the pool of endless Dynasty Warriors content, it's almost absurd at this point to have to pay 30 bucks for either the PS2 or Xbox 360 flavor of what is barely more than preconceived, half-assed, tacked-on downloadable content.

The game looked promising, as it employs the Assassin's Creed engine and offers an expansive world to explore. But the intimidating controls and lack of direction will scare away anyone hoping for some quick and easy fun, and sports-game enthusiasts looking for the next SSX or a snow-themed Skate won't find it here.

It's a shame that the actual boxing is so bad; with a little more time in development, Prizefighter could've been far more enjoyable. As it is, you'll need to take quite a few blows to the head to have much fun with this one.

On the whole, Haze isn't outright terrible or broken -- it's just unsatisfying and misguided and would have been merely average on the Xbox and PS2.

It seems to be perfectly suited for a casual audience who just wants to push buttons and watch things happen. But those looking for anything more had best look elsewhere.

It seems to be perfectly suited for a casual audience who just wants to push buttons and watch things happen. But those looking for anything more had best look elsewhere.

Viking: Battle for Asgard falls far short of its potential.

My advice: If you ever want this series to evolve into something better, stop buying every iteration that comes out -- you're just encouraging Koei to crap out another.

Casual players will have a hard time jumping in and having some quick fun due to the game's rigid combo system, unforgiving CPU, and lackluster training mode, and the competitive fighting community has expressed no interest in this game at all.

The more leisurely Wii version is designed to the hardware's constraints, condensed into small, manageable lands, but the DS version's spread thin. Traversing the kingdom on foot causes hours of aimless wandering, and with the surprising lack of direction, I quickly became dismayed that I'd never rebuild the Sims' land.

It's the wide-ranging lack of polish that really damns Emergency Heroes to a forgettable existence, as the player vehicles have all the floaty steering and shaky physics of a shovelware budget title (but with twice the price tag), and I even managed to crash the game by falling through the ground during one mission.

Axing every bit of multiplayer content -- not just the online modes -- from the original games is a baffling move on the part of the developers, considering that other Wii shooters have included both local and online multiplayer options.

"Ultimate Destruction" was on the PS2 as well, but it still had a beautifully rendered, detailed city that was fully visible from any rooftop -- and a blast to wreak havoc on. Instead of building on that better game, though, Incredible Hulk is a weak attempt at mimicking it.

The real shock is that, nearly 14 months later, Chosen One doesn't live up to the tech, the style, or the ambition of EA's "Homecourt." The game has far too many flaws -- and far too little polish and juice to make it worth playing.

Bodycount feels like something a developer would hand to a publisher as a proof-of- concept, not an actual game that should be on store shelves. Its brief moments of fun are overshadowed by poor controls, laughable story, and limited environments.

Bodycount feels like something a developer would hand to a publisher as a proof-of- concept, not an actual game that should be on store shelves. Its brief moments of fun are overshadowed by poor controls, laughable story, and limited environments.

I'm taking Blue Dragon Plus for what it essentially is: a flat, RPG-like outing, which is mostly the fault of a design platform that needs revising.

The Rise of Cobra's biggest problems aren't in the way it uses the license -- the problems are that, on anything but the lowest difficulty setting, the game is unnecessarily unforgiving and uses a completely counter-intuitive health regeneration system.

Viking: Battle for Asgard falls far short of its potential.

Domino Master's a bit like going to Baskin-Robbins and noticing the employees refilling the containers with generic grocery-store-brand ice cream.

After finishing the disappointingly anticlimactic game, I felt like I just read through a graphic novel side-story, but one that doesn't reveal anything new or interesting. From a technical standpoint, the game is passing, but its narrative, structure, and inattention to detail reveal this game for what it is: Yet another lazy cash-in on a "blockbuster" film.

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.

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 real shock is that, nearly 14 months later, Chosen One doesn't live up to the tech, the style, or the ambition of EA's "Homecourt." The game has far too many flaws -- and far too little polish and juice to make it worth playing.

Pandering to every college student and aspiring rap artist's deep-seated "Scarface" fantasies, 25 to Life is a 3D action-shooter that not only fails to innovate on any level, but rolls back design and technological advancements to the early PSone era.

Budget buyers, beware: This half-assed rebranding and rethinking of the NFL Street series is one of the limpest sports experiences I've played in years. NFL Tour is shockingly inorganic, severely underdeveloped, and thoroughly limited.

The game offers painfully little in the way of options. Most annoying is the complete lack of straight-up deathmatch -- Predator-vs.-Predator -- or an option to play as an alien. Instead, you choose from a handful of environments where two Predators compete to kill the most aliens under a time limit. Yawn.

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.

Lights Out more resembles a student project for a gaming college than a finished retail product (and not necessarily a passing one either).

One of the most standard, bland, monotonous, poorly done, and "easy money on paper" titles I've seen in quite some time.

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.

With its drab backgrounds, poor animations, one-note gameplay, and clunky control, it would have fit right in with games like "7 Blades" or "X Squad."

For a fighting game to work the action on screen must be in sync with each tap of the controller. In Fight Club, the response is so sluggish pressing the attack buttons feels more like pushing M&M's into a bowl of pudding.

How do you get "Diablo" wrong? It's like screwing up tic-tac-toe or something. But that's just what Monte Cristo's done with Silverfall, an epically crummy action-RPG with gimpy controls and bugs that'd make a flophouse mattress blush.

Budget buyers, beware: This half-assed rebranding and rethinking of the NFL Street series is one of the limpest sports experiences I've played in years. NFL Tour is shockingly inorganic, severely underdeveloped, and thoroughly limited.

But given the quality of the game, the title could also denote a certain level of unpleasant surprise. (Example: "Please avoid this horrible wreck of a game that Ubisoft has Sprung upon unsuspecting DS owners.")

Wing Island's missions -- set on serene-but-sterile-looking islands -- are often as boring as they are bizarre. Dumping water on fires? Eh, kinda fun. Delivering fruit crates to hard-to-hit drop zones? Sure. I'll try that. Bombing blah-looking rock formations? Uh, someone wake me up when we land.

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.

The amount of recycling involved in the level design here is abominable -- some areas repeat the same pair of linked rooms as many as three times in rapid succession, and the problem gets distinctly worse as the game progresses into its later levels. There's rarely an organic, realistic feel to most of the interior stages.

The A.I. will almost never actually honor deals and will backstab potential allies willy-nilly. This means that A.I. nations can never actually cooperate effectively. The A.I. also has no real tactical or strategic sense.

The amount of recycling involved in the level design here is abominable -- some areas repeat the same pair of linked rooms as many as three times in rapid succession, and the problem gets distinctly worse as the game progresses into its later levels.

The problem is that it plays like Tony Hawk's 1999 debut. Worse yet, it's not even on par with that.

But the worst part? Beowulf features a minigame that rewards players for not having sex with Grendel's mother, played by a near-nude Angelina Jolie in the movie, for as long as humanly possible. That's just wrong.

A game that desperately needed another six months of beta-testing.

In short, the Brain Boost games are curt, emotionless, audacious, and as a tool for self-improvement, a little bit pointless.

Even without the technical issues, Shrek would have been average at best. But when an already mediocre game comes complete with the types of problems plaguing this product, it's impossible to recommend it at all.

Just add impenetrably obtuse missions, ugly models, low visibility, a sluggish camera, and a fish that steers like a truck full of fat kids. Congratulations, Jaws Unleashed, you just killed our (sadistic) inner child.

Online play -- including both co-op and the deathmatches that made Doom such a phenomenon in the first place -- can hardly even be considered "play." The lag is unbearable, the framerate excruciating. Aiming is nearly impossible.

Playing as Robert Langdon and Sophie Neveu, unraveling the mysteries that mirror and expand upon the book and movie's stories, you'll be forced to solve a mystery called "find the fun."

It earns disdain on its own merits. The videogame of the movie of the book -- it's not a surprise that this ended badly, it's just disappointing.

Unlike the previous expansion, "Endangered Species," African Adventure serves up no new gameplay options and no new mission types -- not even a new hut to build.

As I painfully maneuvered my Charlie from room to room, I grew more and more desperate in my attempt to find redeeming qualities in the game.

The game's short levels are made longer by the lack of a save feature. There's only one checkpoint per level and no health pickups anywhere; this kind of artificial difficulty gives nothing to the player but more frustration.

In the end, it turns out Dungeon Lords wasn't so much released before its time, as it was given up on in an admission that time had already long since passed it by.

Uneven production values have wound up creating one of the cleanest and quietest "gritty" games ever. While the fighting environments are rich with lots of detail and natural lighting, they also appear to have janitors on duty 24/7.

Just play the old NES game. We don't remember the Jaws movie where they had to collect seashells and bomb jellyfish with airplanes, but it was more fun than this.

The amount of recycling involved in the level design here is abominable -- some areas repeat the same pair of linked rooms as many as three times in rapid succession, and the problem gets distinctly worse as the game progresses into its later levels.

Pandering to every college student and aspiring rap artist's deep-seated Scarface fantasies, 25 to Life is a 3D action-shooter that not only fails to innovate on any level, but rolls back design and technological advancements to the early PSone era.

Chief among Time Ace's tripping points: an autoengaging autopilot with a knack for tossing you into buildings if you wander too far from the preset flight path. Add spotty hit detection into the mix, and you end up dying more from crashing into obstacles than from taking enemy fire.

It's easy to spend an hour watching these nifty starships float around a two-dimensional plane, but as soon as you start mousing, you'll want to quit.

The core problem with Napoleon Dynamite: The Game is that it totally disregards the humor of the film (and, as such, of the audience it's attempting to reach). The whole joke of Napoleon Dynamite was that Jon Heder's titular character constantly claims to have more skill than he actually possesses. In the game, you have all that skill and more.

The looseness of Conflict: Vietnam, from the lack of comfortable and immediate controls to the boring progression of the game, just doesn't cut it. While the idea of squad-driven combat set in the tense, emotionally-charged setting of Vietnam has potential, Conflict: Vietnam falls short in execution.

Also worthy of note: the stupid, unforgiving, scripted button-tapping events (think God of War, only terrible). The only reason these do not throw me into a fit of vein-bursting rage is that you can retry them infinitely.

The entire multiplayer aspect of Academy is so poorly implemented that it begs the question as to why they even bothered.

The core problem with Napoleon Dynamite: The Game is that it totally disregards the humor of the film (and, as such, of the audience it's attempting to reach). The whole joke of Napoleon Dynamite was that Jon Heder's titular character constantly claims to have more skill than he actually possesses. In the game, you have all that skill and more.

Considering the basic concept the series is built on, Full Auto 2: Battlelines has perhaps the most needlessly confusing plot ever put to disc.

Except for true masochists who believe that hair-pulling frustration equals enjoyable realism, Hammer & Sickle offers nothing worth paying for -- except maybe time to catch up on your reading while waiting for your turn to load.

As I painfully maneuvered my Charlie from room to room, I grew more and more desperate in my attempt to find redeeming qualities in the game.

The thread holding Jericho above that pit of legendary awfulness is thin and fraying. Mr. Barker, you're better than this.

Fails for a few different reasons, but the big one is a simple lack of consistency. A good fighting game is governed by clear, well-defined rules and directed through precise, responsive commands. Chaos doesn't have either.

When a game about giant robots flying, shooting, and fighting with each other makes it this hard and unpleasant to actually do any of those things, it's time for change.

A disaster in far too many ways to count.

It's never a good sign when I nearly fall asleep while playing a game...multiple times.

The looseness of Conflict: Vietnam, from the lack of comfortable and immediate controls to the boring progression of the game, just doesn't cut it. While the idea of squad-driven combat set in the tense, emotionally-charged setting of Vietnam has potential, Conflict: Vietnam falls short in execution.

Locking on to a specific enemy is a crapshoot. The character faces are bad enough that we were actually shocked to find that they had the rights to use the actors' likenesses. We could write a book about everything wrong with Superman Returns.

A system this young doesn't need any more titles like this potentially damaging its rep. The only thing keeping the game from absolute worthlessness is the fact that a competent SRPG can still be found within.

If the theory of natural selection holds true, The Adventures of Darwin will find its way into the bargain bins of the world in no time flat. And if you have any intelligence in your design, you'll stay far, far away.

The fact that this game is fun for exactly 20 minutes, and only in a group of two or more, should keep you from buying this game. In the end, Boogie is light on dancing, light on karaoke -- a jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none moment of fluff.

As I painfully maneuvered my Charlie from room to room, I grew more and more desperate in my attempt to find redeeming qualities in the game.

A not particularly attractive game that provides neither the twitch-based thrills of an arcadey flight game nor the intricate controls and challenge of flying a realistic virtual aircraft.

The looseness of Conflict: Vietnam, from the lack of comfortable and immediate controls to the boring progression of the game, just doesn't cut it. While the idea of squad-driven combat set in the tense, emotionally-charged setting of Vietnam has potential, Conflict: Vietnam falls short in execution.

The survivor mode is like the game itself in a microcosm. It's rote and uninspired, a desultory thoughtless collage of bits and pieces surgically removed from the movies and dropped lifelessly into a dated engine.

Mindjack's execution is just ludicrously poor at times.

Mindjack's execution is just ludicrously poor at times.

Playing the same boring minigames over and over again in each stage (sometimes five or six times, without deviation), coupled with simple driving tasks and a lack of significant variation between missions make this a joyless grind with little reward.

This sort of do-nothing port is only going to alienate players and further reinforce the stereotype that the genre simply doesn't work on console systems.

The only real laugh in this game comes in the opening introduction (which you can watch in its almost-entirety here). The rest of the game is a plodding, boring mess that that forces you to play through the worst shooter genre clichés, and then asks you to laugh simply because the game's creators self-referentially point out how annoying those tropes are.

But decent tech is all for naught when paired with a bland and embarrassingly brief experience like Tony Hawk's Motion, which contains just four settings (two each for skate and snow), each with five total objectives.

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

Save the money, go outside, and just fight with the air. You'll get the same experience and look just as intelligent.