The real attraction here is the game's "Sticky Fingers"-like bulge of music. With 84 tunes on the disc (all are original recordings) and 20 free downloads form the online store, Rock Band 2 is simply the cheapest way to beef up your library.

Playing through these games again made me thoroughly jealous of anyone who has yet to experience either title. The Ico and Shadow of the Colossus collection is a disc that deserves to be played, replayed, and displayed with pride.

The multiplayer game in Echoes isn't anywhere near half the fun. It's a noble attempt to translate the single-player control scheme to a head-to-head game, but that attempt fails in a mess of cheap deaths and constant struggles to wrench the view in the right direction.

FFVIA is a mostly great port of a mostly great game, and that makes it entirely worth having. If this has to be the end of the GBA's lifespan, we can't think of a better way to go.

It's not the best-looking of the football titles out there, but it's the most fun to play and compete with.

SSF4's new characters feel strong, detailed, and more importantly, convincingly robust.

The real attraction here is the game's Sticky Fingers-like bulge of music.

LBP2 has the tools to be fantastic; time will tell us whether it lives up to its potential.

Truth be told, 1UP recently held a group "review" session that lasted late into the night. After a few beers, some leaps off the couch, about 8 renditions of Boston, countless moments of faux-rockstar posturing, and actually stomping so hard that we broke the disc during the thundering finale of "Take Me Out," everyone seemed to agree on a score for Guitar Hero... But our scale only goes up to 10.

Wrath features more than enough content to keep me busy for a while yet. And if WOW's current track record maintains, things can only get better with time.

While not every one of Retro's experimental ideas panned out (I'll never quite forgive Corruption for its embarrassing final battle), Trilogy is a welcome reminder that all three episodes are worth experiencing. Or, as the case may be, experiencing again.

The game's tutorial is excellent, and it slowly introduces you to some otherwise difficult concepts, but unless you have a lot of chords under your fingers beforehand, it takes actual practice to play on Pro Guitar.

The online multiplayer would be worth the purchase by itself. It's a perfect hybrid between platforming and first-person deathmatch -- in fact, you have the option to play both the single-player and multiplayer using a first-person view -- and works perfectly online.

In a way, the main reason I'm somewhat disappointed is that developer EA Canada has the tough part down: the gameplay and controls. But soccer is about so much more than that -- it's about patriotism, atmosphere, and passion. For the inevitable World Cup follow-up, I'd really like to see those elements shine through -- and it wouldn't hurt to not ship with so many bugs, either.

AC2 is everything a sequel ought to be: An improvement on the original in nearly every way. Perhaps more impressively, it actually has me interested to see where the series goes from here -- something I wouldn't have expected after I slogged my way through the original. Anyone who enjoyed the first game will definitely like AC2, but the real accomplishment is that people who didn't enjoy it will likely have a good time, too.

If Kojima had you and lost you with 2, then all will be forgiven here; if you don't yet know the joy of the best-executed stealth game in town, then put on your facepaint and get set for a mission that's truly unstinting in its virtues.

If you've never played this game before, you should first ask yourself, "Why not?" But if you haven't, there are better and cheaper options than this still-good-but-not-as-good-as-the-others version for Wii.

It's a game that dares you to exhilarate while hammering you with consequence. In short, Shadow of the Colossus breaks storytelling barriers none of us knew existed. It's the rare game for which the often overused words "ground-breaking" were truly reserved for, and it's enough to make you regret every stupid coin you ever collected.

Fast forward through scraps of miserable story and melodramatic dialogue, along with a "boss battle" inherited from the coin-op class of '88 (see: "Contra"), and the ordeal is done -- beautiful throughout, mostly amazing, but vegetative by the end.

It's just unfortunate, though, that the camera mars a game that is so brilliant and tops everything else in the action/beat 'em up genre in so many ways. Ninja Gaiden is a landmark title that's better than anything similar you'll find, but it also serves as a reminder that even the best isn't necessarily perfect.

As a God of War game, Chains of Olympus is slightly lacking, but as a PSP game it's fantastic, and as a technological achievement it's off-the-charts phenomenal. If this game had shipped a couple of years ago, I think people would perceive the PSP a lot differently today.

The Burning Crusade is more of a resurrection than an expansion, a vast and munificent span of content that both refines and totally invalidates what came before it.

Sony still offers the superior baseball experience, but I actually enjoyed certain aspects of 2K10 a little bit more; unlike last year, this is no Yankees-Royals mismatch.

With its unparalleled graphics, incredibly well-paced single-player campaign and in-depth multiplayer offerings, Killzone 2 has established its place among top-tier console shooters. Expectations on Killzone 2 had reached ridiculous proportions; here's one of those cases where the game actually lived up to them.

But after seeing the perfect last shot of the campaign (in fact, it's so spot-on, that Bungie community director Brian Jarrard confirms that, unlike previous titles, there's no additional cinematic or end-scene for finishing on Legendary difficulty -- everyone sees the same last scene), and playing round after round of multiplayer, I can say that while I admire and respect every previous Halo title, Reach is the Halo that I absolutely love.

Dark Avatar does what a good expansion pack should -- it makes it tough to imagine ever playing the base game without it. It makes a great game greater, even if its achievements are measured in pinky widths instead of leaps and bounds.

I suppose the brilliance is that, however many times I watched a scene or fought a battle, Mass Effect never truly lost its magic.

The game succeeds at bringing the bar down so everyone can feel a sense of accomplishment. And that level of accessibility is something more hardcore simulators should aspire to be.