There are times when it plays like a dream; conversely there are times that it plays more like the Arena League rather than the NFL.

The animations are superb, despite the great quantity of creatures and heroes that appear during the campaign. The sound effects augment the animations perfectly. [Jan 2004, p.73]

The action is short, intense, and punctuated by time spent studying track conditions and tuning your car.

While it's impossible to overlook the game's unforgiving level of difficulty, it is often very entertaining.

It's not quite in the same league as "Out of the Park Baseball" and "PureSim Baseball", but Baseball Mogul is no longer an after-thought. [July 2006, p.67]

Even if Titan Quest doesn't deliver on its promise to hang out with Homer, this is a cut above the average "Diablo" clone. [Sept. 2006, p.69]

A solid bit of urban planning in an interesting new setting. Period. [Nov 2002, p.88]

It remains hampered by somewhat soft physics, outdated season information, and the absence of an online multiplayer mode. [Jan 2003, p.77]

Dark Corners weaves a spellbindingly scary vibe. [Feb 2006, p.89]

All told, it's no big loss if you decided to give Tony Hawk a rest for a year. [Jan 2006, p.91]

Unfortunately, in the few sad stabs it takes at being its own thing, Field Commander misses the point. [Sept. 2006, p.81]

A light but oddly entertaining gaming hors d'oeuvre... And the price is right. [Oct 2002, p.75]

The campaigns are exceedingly difficult—so difficult they diminish the attraction of the game's solid mechanics.

New passing and tackling models are nice, but soccer fans deserve the same features—career mode, AI sliders, computer trade AI, detailed stat tracking, and so on—that nearly every other EA Sports game possesses.

Thanks to your dumb teammates, you'll be on the new island forever. [Oct 2002, p.74]

A solid game, but it isn't terribly original.

Soldiers is Hitchcockian: the real payoff's the setup, making it a guilty, grueling pleasure in the time-honored vein of belovedly frustrating isometric classics. [Nov 2004, p.82]

The generous slathering of nostalgia for the locations and characters of the old arcade games is a treat. [Dec p.93]

This is the best and most spirited of the Ape Escapes, which is faint praise if you're only familiar with the recent half-assed PSP version. [Apr 2006, p.91]

Multiple endings, strategy behind weapons, smooth gameplay, and a terrifying experience make The Suffering one of the biggest surprises of the year. [Apr 2004, p.9]

All told, it's big loss if you decided to give Tony Hawk a rest for a year. [Jan 2006, p.91]

All of the changes make Railroads! less of a strategy game than a toy with extra challenges. [Jan. 2007, p.50]

an arcade game masquerading as a simulation. [Dec p.63]

From its training mode (which teaches players all the ins and outs of racing a bike) to its responsiveness and intuitive nature, the gameplay is incredibly fluid. [May 2004, p.12]

While Heroes V might be a hard game to hate, it's also a hard game to love. [Sept. 2006, p.61]

Black may not be terrible, but it's repetitive and mundane. [May 2006, p.89]

The gameplay is just monotonous, which slams the nail in its coffin. [Dec p.57]

A good, if slow, game. [July 2005, p.62]

Brief moments of brilliance speak of the fantastic game that Anachronox could have been, but it never quite makes it up to anything more than slightly above average.

For now this feels like a course at the naval academy while you wait to get out to sea. [Aug 2003, p.87]

With its jazzy score and terrific art design, it's a sublime bit of style over substance. With most games seemingly afraid of not being generic, that goes a long way. [May 2006, p.93]

The worst thing any game can be is predictable, and FIFA Soccer 2004 is one of the most predictable sports game in recent memory. [Feb 2004, p.72]

Clearly not ready for prime time. Abundant bugs, unbalanced campaign prestige, and a non-functional multiplayer campaign all mar an otherwise classic game.

Multiple endings, strategy behind weapons, smooth gameplay, and a terrifying experience make The Suffering one of the biggest surprises of the year. [Apr 2004, p.9]

CRC 2005 is that rare racing game that perfectly straddles the stark reality of pure simulations like "Grand Prix Legends" and the more relaxed arcade gameplay of games like "Rally Fusion" [Apr 2006, p.65]

The combat is frequently challenging, especially by the time you get to the second disk, and it certainly sets the game apart from the party-based monotony found in most games of the genre. [Apr 2006, p.90]

Just as solid a race game on the PC as it was on the Xbox, and definitely one of the better Rally-based arcade racers out there. [Feb 2003, p.77]

The main game is still a victim of its own atrocious pacing and doesn't hold up well alongside offerings like "Splinter Cell" and "No One Lives Forever 2." [July 2003, p.72]

The potential is there for something much greater. The magic just doesn't quite happen. [Oct 2004, p.86]

It's all just another example of how well Nippon Ichi's strategy role-playing games are continuing to evolve. [Sept 2005, p.87]

The detective work is a blast. [Jan 2005, p.79]

It's too easy, and over too soon, but for $30 it's nearly a comlete childhood on a CD. [Aug 2005, p.70]

One of the most compulsively playable titles to hit stores this summer. It’s arguably the best traditional RTS released in over a year, and indisputably one of the most attractive.

The team that developed Soul Reaver 2 took an intriguing saga and weighed it down with so much dialogue and so many confusing plot points that even David Lynch would be hard-pressed to wade through it.

A series of fantastic moments dragged down by a lot of incredibly dull, repetitive, and contrived ones. [Feb 2006, p.68]

What Special Forces lacks in innovation, it more than makes up for in new maps. [Mar 2006, p.50]

Don't be fooled: Your score is not an accurate measurement of intelligence. But whether you buy this game is. [July 2006, p.91]

Most of the new scenarios are both challenging and interesting, the additional monuments are all superb, and the new features are welcome additions.

But for every warm fuzzy old-school feeling it invokes, there's an annoying old-school counterbalance, including a litany of bugs (some of whihch have been patched) and a tired, predictable plot. [Jan 2003, p.70]

The biggest issue is that it runs amazingly slow... [but] for a first edition game, it shows an enormous amount of potential. [Oct 2002, p.80]

Everything awful about the modern football player is showcased in Blitz: the League. [Dec p.87]

The uninitiated will find the game monstrously intimidating, and it takes a bit of playing before you really start to engage. In order to get the most out of it, you need to sit down, learn its ins and outs, and suffer a lot of early setbacks while you get familiar with the game's complex mechanics.

If you're new to immensely detailed simulation games, Restaurant Empire might be frustrating, but it's very accessible, since you can lower the difficulty until you get the hang of it. [July 2003, p.80]

All told, it's no big loss if you decided to give Tony Hawk a rest for a year. [Jan 2006, p.91]

Since we are talking about a game that's more about crashing than flash, it could use more grit and dirt. And better physics. [Nov. 2006, p.80]

The game does a great job at recognizing tones. [Oct 2004, p.9]

Although the extremely steep learning curve and unforgiving penalty for any "ooop" moment make this an exercise in frustration from time to time, the sheer volume of things to do, the amazingly detailed construction aspect, and the solid economy base make this a really good bet for hard-core sime fans. [July 2004, p.66]

A dark, thrilling, and ultimately satisfying wargame, so long as you don't think too hard about the carnage and terror that accompanied the real-world event. [July 2003, p.76]

Enjoy Battlefront's quick, heady, affectionate rush while it lasts and pray they don't dumb it down any further. [Dec 2004, p.82]

Don't let its budget price fool you, MoonBase Commander is an incredibly entertaining game regardless of its price tag and quirky online support. [Nov 2002, p.86]

Pets makes it easier to keep the fun and social scores up, but they can be very demanding of your all-too precious time. [Dec. 2006, p.71]

If you can stomach the difficulty and the middle-of-the-road graphics, Dark Corners of the Earth offers a lot of suspense-filled gameplay in the 10 or so hours it takes to complete the adventure. [Sept. 2006, p.70]

Friendly AI, on the other hand, can be frustratingly idiotic and suicidal. [March 2005, p.76]

Take Heroes seriously and it fizzles. But as a loosey-goosey melodrama, it's not half bad. [Apr 2006, p.64]

Even though the overall experience is filled with cheesiness, clichés, and dumbed-down antics, that's what makes it fun. Those in favor of quick thrills and instant gratification can't go wrong with this title's campy, supernatural shenanigans.

Despite the bugs, this is a great baseball game boasting more than enough improvements to keep you from going back to High Heat 2001.

One of the most user-unfriendly sims ever committed to ones and zeros. [Apr 2004, p.67]

Gun isn't an entirely unpleasant game, just a mediocre one. [Feb 2006, p.56]

What really sinks the game is an overly arcane interface that sacrifices accessibility for tactical depth. [June 2003, p.84]

Enjoying Dominions II involves marshalling the power of your imagination to breathe life into all the detail, which is what gaming is all about when it was played on tabletops. If you accept this basic premise, there's no fantasy game more epic, varied, and vivid than Dominions II. [Feb 2004, p.82]

It's got the same staying power as a keychain, a stuffed doll, or some other memento from this year's tournament in Portugal. [Aug 2004, p.57]

Rush for Berlin also puts a time limit on your missions, so you can't just wait around while your soldiers heal or your tanks are repaired. [Oct. 2006, p.76]

Instead, it's a competent but ultimately trivial experience that's only memorable as the weird RPG with Al Capone in it. [Jun 2006, p.92]

The only addition is Online Everywhere, which lets you check out the live ESPN ticker while still in the game, and it's hardly essential. [Apr 2006, p.93]

A moderately entertaining, if staid, entry that, at least in its PC incarnation, will probably be left out in the cold. [Aug 2005, p.76]

No real surprises; this is a fine expansion if you have a higher level character, but, beyond the Alternate Advancement system, there's little to entice you if your entire stable of Everquest II characters tops out at level 23. [Jun 2006, p.82]

City Life is all about creating a provocative and challenging social model, then giving you the tools to play with it and the 3D engine to admire it. [Sept. 2006, p.66]

All these great features are thrown out the window due to a suspect simulation engine that simply doesn't make a lot of sense. [June 2003, p.85]

Too long and uninspiring to hold your attention. The game would have been far more entertaining with half as many levels. More can be better...but only if it's good.

This game mostly adds more of the same… unless you count the bugs, broken features, and unpolished gameplay. Those are all new to the series.

The game is shockingly deep; in fact, it rivals the sheer volume of "stuff" found in most sports text games. [Aug 2004, p.71]

Geared toward hardcore baseball fans, but it fails to relay some of the information that many serious fans want.

Unfortunately, unless Crypto's race is looking to harvest tedium and repetition from our earthly minds, he's better off just harassing than destroying them. [Sept 2005, p.90]

this isn't likely to be a disk you'll have in your GameCube for more then a few days. [Dec p.89]

Nightlife merely gives you new places to do the same old thing. [Dec p.62]

The result is a fast, flashy exercise in steering, shooting, and squinting. [Dec p.93]

The missions are challenging, with a nice, even learning curve spicing things up with some dynamic victory conditions and other such swerves along the way to keep things interesting. [Jan 2004, p.71]

Doesn't come through with enough swashbuckling, ship-boarding flair. For all the many improvements in this sequel, it still has many of the same fundamental problems of the first game. [July 2003, p.74]

Top Spin 2 is the most complete tennis experience on any platform to date. [July 2006, p.93]

But Forces of Corruption is a great expansion. And once you've splattered a few Ewoks into hellish party streamers and done a few doughnuts in the Executer, you'll admit it could be much, much worse. [Feb. 2007, p.66]

Mixing down and dirty hack-and-slash action with some light puzzle solving; Blade of Darkness makes a simple concept work. With enough blood spurting and gib spraying to send Joe Lieberman and his cohorts running for cover, this is slicing and dicing at its finest.

It has all the tools: a slick presentation, ample features, multiplayer support, lots of stats, and loads of personality. But it stumbles where most first-generation text games falter - the AI and statistical engine isn't up to par. [May 2004, p.65]

Dreamfall is the adventure-game equivalent of a page-turner, one that doesn't make it a hassle to turn the pages. [July 2006, p.54]

Quotation forthcoming. [Jan 2005]

The only addition is Online Everywhere, which lets you check out the live ESPN ticker while still in the game, and it's hardly essential. [Apr 2006, p.93]

Teetering on the edge of greatness. [Jan 2006, p.52]

Surprisingly entertaining. [March 2005, p.88]

In spite of its missing sandbox mode and the crappy economic meta-game, Evil Genius has a groovy conceit, bright and unique art direction, and a rewarding and well-conceived base-building component. [Dec 2004, p.87]