What little tactical challenge commanding these brain-dead battles presents still manages to overwhelm the game's signature whip select system.

I love the idea of plotting out my draft board, targeting free agents, cutting dead weight, and juggling the salary cap. But Head Coach 09 just left me frustrated and angry.

Reviving Dreamcast games for the HD generation should involve a little more effort than putting out a slapdash port of the original.

With the exclusion of co-op -- what people really want to play -- and the constant hint that a sequel's already on the way, Beast Rider feels like a difficult, drawn-out, $60 tutorial. Why bother?

The miserable camera system often zooms in too close to see what you're doing, or makes it impossible to see a necessary location without moving.

The miserable camera system often zooms in too close to see what you're doing, or makes it impossible to see a necessary location without moving.

All of the game's step-by-step recipes are available in the game, but instead of buying it, I'd recommended taking your money and picking up the actual source, the aforementioned How to Boil Water. It'll has the game's 12 dishes, plus a couple hundred more. Not to mention that you'll be able to appreciate the smell of real bacon coming from your kitchen as opposed to seeing it sizzle on your TV and waiting two minutes to virtually flip it with a remote.

The difficulty quickly jumps from simple to insane, before you're equipped to tackle the tougher challenges.

Ultimate Band embodies what I call the Grinch Effect -- unwitting parents buying terrible games that mimic popular ones, stealing Christmas away their children in the process. Kids, don't let the back of the box fool your parents -- make sure they know that you do, in fact, need instruments to rock.

Its eminently forgettable title notwithstanding, the significant flaws lie in core mechanics and not the story framework.

Brink is unfinished. And that doesn't mean it's full of technical problems. Well, it's got those too. But mostly, it's just an unpolished, poorly executed mess of ideas.

Despite all of Wonder World's menu problems, generally terrible visuals, and inane writing (which at times seems pulled directly from some obscure Bulgarian translation), the actual minigames themselves are surprisingly intuitive. If you can take the punishment to unlock them, a few of the minigames are actually fun.

Its basic design philosophy is one of laziness and glossing over problems rather than really putting out the effort to make a decent game. That's a bitter pill to swallow for a kid who just shelled out 50 bucks of lunch money.

Despite the years of work Realtime Worlds poured into their latest creation, APB still comes off as being woefully underdeveloped, and ultimately unfinished.

The difficulty ramps up so much by the game's finale that I'm not convinced it's even possible for a solo player to finish this thing. And even if you could, I'm not sure why you'd want to; Sanctum of Slime has little to offer the die-hard Ghostbusters fan, and even less for the twin-stick shooter crowd.

The difficulty ramps up so much by the game's finale that I'm not convinced it's even possible for a solo player to finish this thing. And even if you could, I'm not sure why you'd want to; Sanctum of Slime has little to offer the die-hard Ghostbusters fan, and even less for the twin-stick shooter crowd.

By the time I'd defeated my 10th werewolf, I was already tired of needing to cut or shoot its head off so it didn't regenerate. By the time I defeated my 200th, I just wanted to turn the game off.

But the inadequate drum peripheral and minimal extra content expose the fact that development's been problematic since day one. Konami's always been synonymous with awesome rhythm games, but with Rock Revolution, the rock crown and scepter have officially been passed to a new generation of games.

DBC's trouble goes deeper than simple poor design; there's no vision here, no sense of what the "point" of the game is.

Rogue Warrior isn't simply dumbed-down in its final incarnation -- it's just plain dumb.

I was initially excited about the prospect of a top-down shooter to play on the go, but my excitement quickly turned to disappointment and frustration. EA tries to stuff too many peripheral gameplay components into The 40th Day, which loses focus of the point of the shoot-em-up genre. Coupled with the extremely poor AI, there just really isn't much to recommend about this game.

Söldner-X tries to mimic Japanese shooter sensibilities, but in execution, it takes on the trappings of the worst so-called "Euroshmups": stages that don't seem to have had a lot of thought (or maybe too much thought) put into their design, and an art style that's mostly, well, art rather than eye candy to compliment the action.

Its basic design philosophy is one of laziness and glossing over problems rather than really putting out the effort to make a decent game. That's a bitter pill to swallow for a kid who just shelled out 50 bucks of lunch money.

It's hard to shake the feeling that Mercenaries 3D is the slimy result of a Capcom executive meeting titled "What can we get away with this time?"

By the time I'd defeated my 10th werewolf, I was already tired of needing to cut or shoot its head off so it didn't regenerate. By the time I defeated my 200th, I just wanted to turn the game off.

Some will likely fight the flaws for another chance to terrorize their '70s-era brethren, but if the name "Crypto" doesn't bring to mind a litany of past quips, Furon will simply seem like an out-of-touch, thoroughly unpolished romp through mediocrity.

Rogue Warrior isn't simply dumbed-down in its final incarnation -- it's just plain dumb.

Its basic design philosophy is one of laziness and glossing over problems rather than really putting out the effort to make a decent game. That's a bitter pill to swallow for a kid who just shelled out 50 bucks of lunch money.