Vanquish is a complete action package and like any other spectacle on this scale -- movies, books, TV shows -- it's crazy fun, even if it doesn't stay with you beyond turning off your 360.

As a Dead Rising fan I appreciate the basics of exploring and messing around with different weapons and just having fun. And while the conclusion isn't really satisfying the enjoyment getting there lets me give Case West a recommendation.

Donkey Kong Country Returns starts strong and offers a great gaming experience to players of any age. That's no small feat but it seems Nintendo has been doing it a lot lately.

Unequivocally, the world would be a better place if there were more games like Wario Land Shake It!

It’s a short game, clocking in at 14 hours tops for most gamers the first time through, with at least a quarter of that time padded with “light seed” collection tasks that require you to re-explore levels after defeating bosses.

Offering much more action-heavy gameplay and battling with weapons and magic than Skyrim, but lacking some of Skyrim's RPG complexity, Kingdoms of Amalur is still a long-lasting, adventurous game that will provide plenty of fantasy-infused dungeon-crawling fun.

Three tables, all with different aspects of gameplay and a variety of characters from the Star Wars universe, will delight the army of Star Wars fans. But as always, regardless of the subject matter, the real supernova star of any FX 2 pinball game is the stellar ball physics and authentic pinball sounds.

I'll readily admit that I think Brutal Legend's style outweighs the substance of the game, but dammit, why should apologize for liking it more than I probably should?

A great game that seems to be missing something, all of the great characters that we love to use.

Visually and audibly, The Sims Life Stories has exactly the same presence of The Sims 2 series.

And it’s with good reason: Osmos is a great game (and is a great bargain, at only $10US) that will challenge the puzzle-solving skills of even the best gamers, as ambient gaming enters a new cosmos with Osmos.

But despite that brevity of gameplay, DuckTales: Remastered is a fun flashback with modern flair for both those that quack-attacked in its 8-bit incarnation or those totally new to the duck tales of Scrooge McDuck.

If you’re a WarioWare fan, Smooth Moves ramps up very slowly but when it’s firing on all pistons... great fun.

The basics are covered early on; there are more than two dozen courses to play on and a continual stream of new challenges to tackle.

Overall, for a game that was supposed to be more about the arcade experience of hockey it feels like a more complete solution than the “other product” and impressed me at every turn.

Spinning a new tune for the franchise, Def Jam ICON’s incredible graphics, a really fresh gameplay innovation, great hip-hop soundtrack, the ability to play to your own “beats” and solid online fighting come together in (Bone, Thugs-N) harmony.

While the Tony Hawk franchise soars once again, it certainly hasn’t flown into the same stratosphere of excellence reached by earlier Tony Hawk games.

While the tacked-on combat portions bring a blemish to the game’s identity, and the overall length is a bit on the short side (although there are plenty of speed runs and time trials to encourage multiple playthroughs to master each area for the best online time), Mirror’s Edge is still a breathtaking adventure that has brought a new immersive experience to players along with the thrill of the hunt(ed).

For hard-core auto racing gamers, especially those that are fans of Formula 1, Codemasters revs up an immersive, realistic racing simulation in F1 2011 with all the official drivers and tracks of the F1 circuit and a nice selection of gaming modes, including a engrossingly robust career mode.

It's a fitting end to the series (well, at least Kratos) but it remains extremely close to the lines laid down by the previous two games in both form and content so as not to upset long-time fans.

In long stretches, Painkiller can become repetitive. (By long stretches, I mean two or more hours.)

It certainly isn’t a hole-in-one for the Tiger Woods PGA Tour series gone portable, but with the career mode and enhanced online play more than making up for lackluster graphics and a dearth of mini-games (although there’s still a plethora of other golf-game modes), Tiger Woods PGA Tour 07 still makes the cut as the best PSP golfing game around.

Geometry Wars Galaxies is good for long and short play sessions, but it’s the latter of these that make it perfect for times when you don’t really want an extended play session.

In the end, this iteration of Bangai-O is a fast, intense shooter that retains the unique feel that the game has had both on the N64 and Dreamcast, with the difficulty significantly ramped up

What we have here is a game that follows the norm in basic premise as to what we’ve come to expect from console strategy RPGs, but twists it just enough to play a little different and still be very fun.

If you liked the original, it’s hard to imagine why you wouldn’t like this expansion. It is the same mix of RPG action and puzzle-solving and even has a story that is more compelling than the original game.

I'm not going to sit here and tell you that Gatling Gears is some sort of transcendent gaming experience. What it does is remind us why we started playing games in the first place: to have fun. No pretense of artistic or literary value. No outlandish attempt to make your GPU melt down from the number of polygons being thrown at you. Just pure and unadulterated fun.

For hard-core auto racing gamers, especially those that love Formula 1, Codemasters once again has a fuel-charged and totally immersive, realistic racing simulation in F1 2012 that has everything a F1 fanatic could want.