It's been a busy year for shooters, but even as everyone else tries to hybridize the genre, Overdose cleverly and creatively embraces its purity.

If you like a little more meat to your basketball games, this is surely a great game with plenty to keep you occupied both online and off, but when pit head-to-head against a full field of competitors, what Phenom offers is different, but not quite in a league of its own.

Similarly, Airborne's standout feature -- land where you will and fight your way through objectives in whatever order you want -- is less about reliving history than saving a sagging series for which decision-making has meant "where to shoot" and "what to shoot with."

There's not enough variety to keep you playing through everything EA's set up for you. You'll be addicted to the game for a short while when you go through with your first character, but after that, the novelty of building up medieval superheroes starts to wear extremely thin.

Though it gets slightly tiresome by the conclusion, Jungle Climber makes the most of its peg mechanic and provides a fresh change of pace from the familiar Mario side-scrolling school of thought.

And the staggering amount of collectible Pokémon and items will preoccupy you for weeks, if not months.

For the moment, the single-player game is all we can base this review on. In that respect, SiN Episodes only flirts with greatness.

Two things I really dig about World Tour Soccer are that the matches feature generally realistic scoring (on a couple goals per match), and the game buffers your button presses a bit, which means jamming on the pass or shoot button will normally result in multiple, wild passes or shots fired off into the middle of nowhere. You have to remain calm and play the game correctly in order to be successful.

Are you one of those people who watches all of the extra features on your DVDs? If you answer "yes," if you're a fan of the film, if you love Grand Theft Auto, and you do not own the game on the current-gen platforms, there's a good chance you'll enjoy it. If you said "no," well...Don Vito Corleone finally gave you an offer you could refuse.

For any other legacy, this game would have been just fine. For the iconic Godfather series, it really could have been something with more of a Brando stature. But even though it ends up as more of a Tony Soprano, The Godfather still manages to deliver a solid gangster experience.

Unless you're simply determined to pay $30 for a painfully hard version of a game you've probably played countless times before in its previous incarnation, you can live without this one.

While the action can be uneven -- though never bad -- creativity and charm carry the game to a higher level. The humor will get you through the slow levels, the authentic voices and writing will satisfy your fanatcism, and the cameos... will keep you entertained.

Even without any significant upgrades, Riviera would still stand out as one of the worthier RPG entries on the PSP.

The real stars of the show are the planes. Fans of the Discovery Wings channel will be thrilled by the loving detail that went into the sixty some odd planes that come with the game.

One thing Champions League clearly has over Winning Eleven, though, is the ability to transfer your Treble campaign back and forth between the PS2 and PSP, so you never have to go without. The games are identical, and while the PSP has a tough time with everything, doing transfers on the PS2 will save you time.

Because of all the extra micromanagement you need to worry about in C&C3 -- the aforementioned problems were never issues in "BFME2" -- some campaign missions become aggravatingly difficult. The A.I. opponent doesn't let up on the accelerator even though you can't manage everything as quickly as you can on a PC.

At its worst, it's as curiously dysfunctional a "game" as the Harmon's are a "family," and at its best Killer 7 is one of the most artfully designed footnotes in gaming history.

If you're looking for a game that matches the quality of the previous games in the Ratchet franchise...well, keep looking.

There's absolutely no excuse for the GameCube version to offer only two-player action when it could so easily be expanded to include four and make full use of all those wonderful controller ports.

The real lesson here is that if you can take out one of her twin sisters for this Anniversary date on another platform, then that's the route to go. Otherwise, while it remains a grand adventure, traveling by Wii makes it a bumpier ride.

Despite the changes made to simplify Dust Strikers' core fighting engine, the combo system is surprisingly comprehensive.

It's difficult to dismiss the overlying cuteness and simple-but-solid gameplay, which continues to put the series on the top tier of portable RPGs.

Crosses the line that separates challenging from cheap. Charismatic and brazen to a fault, it is something of a return to form, but denies the gamer an honest challenge and the eye-opening lack of balance results in a sometimes-electrifying game that isn't especially fun to play.

The polish wears bit thin in the control department, but soccer fans will find plenty of meat to chew on here.

Like its namesake color, Black is bold in its simplicity, an elemental force that makes a strong, singular statement: It intends to be the most adrenaline-pumping, testosterone-infused shooter ever. And in that regard, it succeeds.

Graphical foibles aside, The Witcher demonstrates the growing creative energy of European game designers, who continue to take chances with ever more innovative games, even as American developers obsess over the next "Halo."

If anything, Sing and Dance is a good idea on paper, but absolutely flawed in its execution. Arrows are laid side-by-side, making the more difficult patterns a pain to read correctly, and having to focus on scrolling arrows while watching your singing pattern (to make sure the game is recognizing it correctly) is incredibly counter-intuitive.

It may not be the flashiest or most technically astute, but it's entertaining, well-suited for portable gaming -- something the competition still hasn't been able to figure out.