It's imaginative, it controls well, and the puzzles are solid and challenging without being repetitive. It's simply that a basic weakness in the engine makes The Haunted Mansion a far more frustrating experience than it really needs to be.

MagnaCarta 2 is a game with potential that is regrettably marred by its cliché storyline and characters.

It's a solid basis for future 3D games, and the engine itself isn't flawed. This isn't a great fighting game, or even a great King of Fighters game, but I've had some fun with it. I just wish it had been tweaked some on its way to the Xbox.

It isn't an outright revolutionary game but it has a lot of charm. The vibrant graphics and animations really spruced up the presentation of the title. Younger players will find the quaint story attractive.

It's imaginative, it controls well, and the puzzles are solid and challenging without being repetitive. It's simply that a basic weakness in the engine makes The Haunted Mansion a far more frustrating experience than it really needs to be.

It actually felt more like a long DLC than an immersive game world.

So, if you've always wanted to try making a game for the PS2, or are just interested in design at all, then you should consider checking this out. Otherwise it's probably not for you. It all comes down to desire and imagination.

Getting Up is a solid game, but not spectacular in any way outside of the tagging interface. It also does a lot of things well, but features a disturbing amount of product placement that takes you right out of the adventure while also needing some fine-tuning with its controls and camera.

The newly added depth to not only your offensive attacks, but also your defensive options allows battles to feel fresh and rewarding.

The game is literally begging for a random scenario generator. Truth be told, creating one shouldn't be too hard either.

Purists of the comic should take heart, because the infamous sonic clap and ground smashing jump are included, along with a number of other moves that take advantage of his fury. In fact, attacking builds up a rage meter, which allows you to boost your damage or unleash a super-powerful attack towards your enemies.

A fun game, but fans of this type of game might be best to either break out their dusty Super NESes or N64s and play one of the Mario Kart titles ... or wait until Mario Kart: Double Dash!! comes out for GameCube.

A brand-new copy of Earth Defense Force runs you $50, which is one of the best entertainment values out there so far this year. As long as you can overcome your own biases and enjoy some old-fashioned plotless alien blasting, you’ll get hours of fun out of Earth Defense Force 2025.

It’s almost arcade-like, perhaps appealing more strongly to FPS players looking for a change of pace than the average RTS player.

The racing itself is reasonably good as are the graphics – despite them having a lot of little flaws. The sound design is solid, but the soundtrack lacks any soul and that holds true for the voice work. Still, it’s a fun time and fans of many kinds of racing will find something to enjoy.

Most of its challenge comes from scenarios that don't require you to have mastered its individual rules and quirks, but which exploit large and obvious holes in the controls.

There are some mentionable problems with the game, like the sometimes-annoying camera system and overly simplistic gameplay mechanics, but overall this is an entertaining platformer that doesn’t feel like it was rushed out the door in the hopes of making some quick cash.

The game is literally begging for a random scenario generator. Truth be told, creating one shouldn't be too hard either.

All said, Conan the game, like the titular barbarian himself, is very one dimensional. It’s great for getting in a little much needed smashing time, and maybe for checking out some computer generated boobage, but after a run through or three of the story mode it’s pretty much spent.

This is a surprisingly risky game, which deals with a lot of uncomfortable subject matter. It reminds me of a lot of the games that came out in the middle of the Dreamcast's lifespan, where you could go ahead and release whatever you liked and Sega would probably approve it, because why the hell not. It's exactly the kind of thing I like to see in the online marketplace, and I'm glad I finally got the chance to play it. It's dark, frightening, intense, and often very satisfying.

A large number of technical issues and some combat flaws, along with a number of less than stellar puzzle mechanics make this a game for hardcore Matrix fans or some martial arts action buffs instead of for everyone.

It's a pleasant enough adventure, and it'll take you somewhere around 20 hours to complete it, which makes it a nice value, but the writing is a little lazy, and the game isn't as funny as you might expect, and so it's nowhere near being in the ballpark of the Monkey Island games, which is where it wants to be.

And that, in a nutshell, can be used to sum up Alice: The Madness Returns. There are moments of brilliance; of clever design, fiendish platforming, loads of secrets, and intense combat. At others, though, Alice's adventure can be an unpolished, frustrating exercise in repetition. To say Alice is trippy would be more than a slight understatement. I have to say I enjoyed my journey into madness as I plunged further and further down the proverbial rabbit hole more than I thought I would initially. Still, I can't help but feel like it could, and probably should, have been better.

I'm torn by Touch My Katamari because I liked the game, I'm sure I'll get a lot of use out of it in the future, and yet I still feel disappointed by it due to the lack of content, relatively poor music given the series' usual high standard, and the comedy simply not being funny this time around. It gets the basic idea of a katamari game right and does deliver fun, but not as much as prior installments. I'd recommend it as a rental or a heavily-discounted purchase, but there's no way I can recommend it as a full-priced purchase for anyone.

Whether you're a Silent Hill aficionado or someone who's been patiently waiting for the opportunity to experience some of the best games the horror genre has to offer, this is a collection you really shouldn't miss.

I like the idea of affecting a story experienced by thousands. Problem is, not all of us can afford six hours a day to earn that right.

But even if the spell creation had been perfect and as pretty as much of the graphics are, the adventure is just too scripted and too predictably paced, and the combat is too backpeddally to recommend highly.

Tragically named, Freeblade proves the old adage that no iTunes or Google Play app is truly free. You’ll need the starter pack if you want to make serious head way into the campaign.

All said, Conan the game, like the titular barbarian himself, is very one dimensional. It’s great for getting in a little much needed smashing time, and maybe for checking out some computer generated boobage, but after a run through or three of the story mode it’s pretty much spent.

Both Top Spin 4 and Virtua Tennis 4 are good games that have a lot to offer tennis fans. Part of me wishes there could be an amalgamation of the two, but as it stands I'll end with this: Top Spin 4 is a better game overall, but Virtua Tennis 4 would definitely be more fun to play for the casual fan. It's almost as if it's striving not to be taken seriously, what with the over-the-top mini-games and fancy dress events. Is that necessarily a bad thing? Absolutely not. Depending on what sort of experience you want, the choice is really up to you.

What it offers in terms of gameplay has been done before, and done better by the likes of "Rainbow Six," "Ghost Recon" and, to a lesser extent, "Full Spectrum Warrior." To put it simply, Close Combat is a little rough around the edges.

Imperial Glory feels like a giant step forward for Pyro Studios. Its scope and complexity is far greater than any of the previous strategy titles I’ve seen from them.

I think it’s important that the developers allow players to drop the original vocal from the track. Not only does it make it difficult to hear yourself during playback, but it also counteracts the essence of the Freestyle Mode.

The game is pretty slow-paced and outside of the few mentioned action sequences, is almost devoid of any visceral attributes that seem so inherent with flesh-eating dinosaurs.

The concept and the creatures, not to mention the turn-based gameplay could’ve infused the strategy genre with a shot of adrenaline that it sorely needed.

Sea of Solitude tries to tackle some very serious topics about bullying, divorces and relationships depicting them quite nicely in its allegorical environment. What it’s missing though is any meaningful examination or resolutions in said issues. As it stands, it doesn’t offer anything more than acknowledging that these issues exist in our world without ever delving any deeper.

It'd be a little more worthwhile if an arcade-perfect Metal Slug 3 had been included in the collection, but this is still a must-have for those of us who fondly remember our local arcade.

The missions are challenging, you get lots of options for how to play through them, and the 10-mission campaign takes about 20-30 hours to complete, which, all-in-all makes Death to Spies a pretty worthwhile purchase at its $30 suggested retail price.

WWE 2K17 is an excellent wrestling game with a lot of superficial trappings to it that bog it down. The flow of matches is better than ever outside of triple threats and fatal four ways, which are now a stop and go affair. Career mode remains fairly aimless even with it being given something resembling goals now. Universe mode is improved, but a bit more time-consuming than ever before thanks to the presentation.

It may be the single cutest way possible to empty an Uzi into your friends' heads.

They’ve built a good RTS engine with several noteworthy features, and then ruined the single-player game with a lackluster control scheme, pathfinding issues, and a positively moronic enemy AI. But if you go multiplayer, get away from most of that, and find yourself a competent adversary, then I’m pretty happy with JTF.

In terms of gameplay, it truly doesn't get any simpler than this, nor the pace more frantic. It's a fragfest to be sure and if you can dig that, you might find Painkiller: Hell Wars to be a fitting end to the Xbox era.

It’s not too different from last year’s installment, a bit of a step down in my opinion, but still good.

Lost Sphear is an outstanding game, taking most of what made I Am Setsuna memorable and topping it. Lost Sphear doesn’t fare quite as well when it comes to the soundtrack, but its battle system is vastly superior and one of the most enjoyable battle systems I’ve played in a JRPG in years. It keeps the turn-based system that many have used before and puts new twists on it to keep it fresh – so while the plot itself goes with a lot of tried and true turns, the battles feel much newer. It isn’t a perfect game, but does a better job of merging the genre’s past tropes with modern-day gaming conventions than Tokyo RPG Factory’s debut effort and is a must for any fan of JRPGs.

If you can get past traveling the world map on rails, every location and quest chosen in order for you, the combat is rich enough to make Blackguards worthwhile, and I think comfortably places it near the upper end of that range.

It's what I like to call a concept game; Great ideas but the implementation is a little rough. With a little more polishing this could be an A-title.

If I found myself completely without a life, with hours and hours on my hands with nothing else to do, then the universe of BCM would be a great escape.

Rise To Honor has a pretty solid plot, good combat scheme, and impressive design. Unfortunately, one of its greatest flaws is its length.

Its engine works well and can easily support good adventures, but Tony Tough itself isn’t a good adventure. It’s not nearly funny enough, and its puzzles are perhaps just a bit too bizarre.

While it has good graphics, awesome sound and decent play, the brevity of gameplay winds up selling this title short in the end.

A decent foundation for a possible series. Unfortunately, lackluster navigation, combat maneuvers and repetitious sound effects, amongst other slights weaken this game significantly.

The overly simplistic gameplay, re-hashed visuals, unbalanced level design, and generic storyline all factor in to make this hybrid of yesteryears best selling, finest games, a low rent middle class knock off. Nevertheless, the sheer visceral excitement of blowing stuff up and witnessing ultra-violent, unapologetically brutal cut-scenes and road rage is hard to deny.

I wouldn’t recommend Nikopol to novice adventure game players, but veterans might find it worthwhile, and it’s certainly better than White Birds Productions’ other current offering, Sinking Island.

The first hour or so is pretty dull, as you fight uninspired enemies in an equally as uninteresting old mine. Once you get into the town of Silent Hill, things get far more engaging, and everything gets better from there on. Downpour isn't the strongest installment in the series, but it is a very good old school survival horror game. If anything, it'll make you nostalgic for the days when finding that evasive red key so you could unlock that mysterious red door to find the blue key for the other door was the most important thing on your to-do list.

Stoked doesn’t have all the pizzazz of other snowboarding games but it does a pretty decent job of recreating the mountain feel.

If you're like me and you've enjoyed other investigative games in the past, then you'll probably like this one, too, but if you're hoping for a true adventure, then you should probably look elsewhere.

If you are a die-hard puzzle fan you will definitely be able to enjoy Snood as a fun game, and not for a graphic technology demo as so many others have complained about.

In the time spent playing this, I really wanted to enjoy NIER as an intricate game but it suffers largely from an identity crisis.

It has a couple of problems here and there (like odd echoes to the dialogue), but it sports a couple dozen intriguing puzzles, it’s well made, and it’s well acted.

Basically, Sinking Island has nothing going for it. The mystery is boring, the puzzles don’t require any thought, the dialogue is astoundingly bad, and too many parts of the game seem like they were made on the cheap (for example, when you talk to people their lips don’t move).

In the end, Brink is another of those games that we see every so often; the games that have incredible potential and truly unique ideas but fail in their implementation. This could have been a great game, it could've been a hit and it could've given shooter fans a reason to return to a genre that has lost much of its originality over the last handful of years. Unfortunately for us and for its developer, the keyword here is "could've", because there's little here that makes Brink the genre redefining game some of us hoped it would be.

“Innovative” combat system? Check. Busty female with daggers? Check. Combines action and stealth? Check. Multiple playable characters? Check. Fun to play? Let’s just say that Rise of the Kasai falls flat on its keester.

Rising Sun begins in Pearl Harbor with a bang, but drags on to finish with a whimper.

Unfortunately its also plagued by some rather serious design flaws that could've been solved if Capcom had taken a look at what the competition was doing. If you can look past that than you'll enjoy this game, but you might have to deal with some frustration along the way.

If you're the kind of person who owns each of the books in both American and British editions and saw each movie at midnight (twice, even), then you'll look past its flaws and enjoy it greatly.

Unfortunately its also plagued by some rather serious design flaws that could've been solved if Capcom had taken a look at what the competition was doing. If you can look past that than you'll enjoy this game, but you might have to deal with some frustration along the way.

The problematic handling and lackluster nature of many of the game's features makes it impossible to recommend for most players. Unless you're a series die-hard, you're probably fine sticking with last year's entry, or just renting this one. The developers succeeded at delivering a rock-solid online experience, but the core racing gameplay still needs a lot of work before this can become a must-have series.

It's not fancy and it's not amazingly deep, but it does let you chop up an awful lot of zombies. It's entertaining for what it is.

While it might not have a lot that players will find in replay value, the story and in-game action, particularly those of the interrogations, makes The Punisher a title that a number of gamers will enjoy.

So ultimately I think I was happier with the idea of what the designers of Dead Money were trying to accomplish than what they actually created. They put a far above average plot and built a framework of gameplay that somehow managed to break away from the Fallout formula. In the end, however, it's just too much. Too much sneaking around, too many traps, too many reloads. And there are seven more of these things yet to come? God help us all.

For a game that promised so much, Viking really doesn't do much in the way of delivering.

The bottom line here is that Mothership Zeta is about as much of a miss as Bethesda has ever been responsible for. A few hours of linear romp through boring corridors fighting boring enemies is frankly a shocking disappointment from such a successful development group.

A patch is due out in early March to rectify many issues, and we'll take a look at the game after that to see just how many issues are fixed. However, in the state the game is presently in, I can't recommend a purchase. $60 is simply too much to pay for the game as it is now.

At best, Juiced is a mediocre ride. It's got a few shiny bits in the form of the team racing and gambling portions, but then the rough edges come roaring out of the gate and kill whatever joy you had at playing the game.

As I said initially, I'm not the biggest baseball fan in the world, but I definitely know enough about baseball to know why Major League Baseball 2K12 falls short. This game is passable at best, and for those on a Xbox 360, it's their only option.

There’s a lot of stuff built up around the actual racing—pictures of pretty girls, a frenetic soundtrack, and a whole Driver DNA mechanic that doesn’t really seem to do anything at all—but once you cut through all that to the content itself it actually ain’t half bad.

If what you're after is an action-packed, no-brain shooter than Bang! Gunship Elite's gorgeous, high-speed, intense battles will surely do the trick.

It has lots of style and substance.

Don't get me wrong, I love Bejeweled Blitz, but it's hard for me to recommend spending $10 on the Xbox Live Arcade version when there's a superior, free version available on Facebook.

You're not really going to find the arcade experience here, nor are you going to find the full presentation that you may remember putting quarters in so many years ago.

Although the game relies heavily on conventions and standards of an era long gone by, it’s still a load of fun. Experienced RPG gamers may view it as a short and easy way to pass the time until the next big thing comes along and takes up another eighty or so hours of their lives.

All that said, Trine 3 is a pretty short game – ten or so levels, maybe another dozen side quests. I cleared it all in less than five hours, and I don’t see myself playing it through again even though I didn’t successfully collect all of the Trine-angles (though I might load up Trine 2 and give that another go now that Trine 3 gameplay was so disappointing).

This isn’t quite as polished as something from Capcom or SNK Playmore, but it’s still a really fun fighter that fans of the genre will enjoy.

It’s an eminently skippable entry in the franchise, and in its own way, it paves the way for RE4 to blow everything up and start over.

Serious Sam 4 is another iteration on a successful formula of pedal-to-the-metal first-person shooters, and at its best, it’s a pure shot of adrenaline that can remind anyone from cynics to novices why the FPS took off in the first place. It needs some more time in the oven and a few coats of paint before it’s done, though. By the time it hits consoles in 2021, SS4 ought to be well worth anyone’s time, particularly as a co-op game.

The controls are functional, but they don’t nearly take full advantage of the Wii’s motion sensing technology, and without online multiplayer the shortcomings of the single player game are that much more evident.

Just a poorly made game. Almost nothing about it works, and there’s absolutely no reason why you should buy it when you could play UFO: Afterlight (or even Silent Storm) instead.

At $40, it’s worth buying if you loved the original release and just want to go through it again.

Throne of Darkness could have been a great game, but its convoluted controls and unappealing gameplay really tore down the fundamentals that make a good game.

Another few months in development or some more thorough testing could've saved Ninja Blade.

I can say that the decision to switch classes for specialists has met with a metric crapton of criticism on the interwebs, and in that I’m in agreement with the masses – thus far, about 20 hours in, all the specialists play the same to me, though I think most people will gravitate towards either the wingsuit or the grappling hook as being the most fun to play with. I suspect more content is coming – at least more maps, but hopefully more modes, and maybe some AI opponents for single player opportunities – in which case this game may grow into something good (but you’ll have to buy the year one pass to get it). But as it stands, at the price it stands at, I can’t recommend it.

This lack of depth pulls it away from becoming an exemplary title.

This title is not as groundbreaking as it is to other platforms simply because the audio-visuals haven’t taken a jump on Nintendo’s handheld.

Overall, I found Tesla Effect to be entertaining enough to recommend. It’s just good goofy fun, and the writing and the acting help to carry it along and make up for the so-so puzzles and environments.

It’s a top-notch game and one that furthers the Vita’s library of exclusives, while also making the PlayStation TV a good buy since it’s compatible with that device as well and SRPGs are generally a bit easier to play on a larger screen.

Need For Speed The Run is a good racing game that I was hoping would be great, and instead wound up being greatly hurt by its difficulty and lack of content. It's disappointing to see a Need For Speed game that isn't worth full-price and really is better as a rental, but that's the case here. The Run mode can be beaten in a day, and there simply isn't enough other content here to warrant a full-priced purchase. It's a short-lived, but incredibly exciting thrill ride that I'd recommend paying $30 or so for if you must own it, but not $60.

What is completely unforgivable are the sound bytes from Dante, or should I say lack thereof.

Though the FPS levels are solid in design, the game’s mediocre flying levels constantly get in the way of what is good about the game.