Bangai-O Spirits is one of, if not the most, fully-featured and expansive shmups ever created, but it’s absolutely unmerciful in its brutality.

For years Madden has been improving visually and adding features, but to what end? What you're left with every year is a game with a split personality: An awesome football game that's great to play with your friends or even online, but makes you want to smash your machine if you ever play against the computer.

Whether Braid is art or just an extremely well-designed game, it is one of the best games of the year.

A fantastic way to spend your time and money. It takes everything that made the first game work upon it in every conceivable way and is a prime example of the right way to make a sequel.

SCIV certainly doesn’t break any new ground, but it continues to do what it does best by providing us with some of the best weapons-based fighting action in town. The character customization is worth the price of admission, and the online game will keep you coming back for more.

SCIV certainly doesn’t break any new ground, but it continues to do what it does best by providing us with some of the best weapons-based fighting action in town. The character customization is worth the price of admission, and the online game will keep you coming back for more.

Pretty or not, no JRPG on the 360 has the edge on Spectral Force 3 in terms of gameplay. In other words, it has a great personality.

MLB Power Pros 2008 sits and stares you down from the television like a catcher who gives his pitcher bad signals.

While 1942: Joint Strike brings nothing new to its series, it’s just good nostalgic fun when you’ve got a wingman with you.

I applaud Zoo Games and SuperVillian Studios for packing a great deal of charm and humor into Order Up!, from the edgy style to the free chef hat.

While FFIV has a geriatric story and presentation - the 3D graphics and enhanced soundtrack are impressive for the DS but they still look old - its challenging battles and nerve-wracking bosses make up for it.

Fortunately, the 360 version is blessedly free of the slowdown and Civilopedia bugs that mar the PS3 version, leading to a much more relaxing experience.

Whatever the notable flaws in the PS3 version, they obviously weren’t enough to keep us from playing several times on each of the difficulty levels (although some of those brutal ‘Deity’-level solo games ended pretty damned quickly).

It’s sketched, voiced and painted for innocent little cherubs, and yet seemingly designed by little cackling, puppy-kidnapping demons.

UT3 would have been a stroke of genius ten years ago, but now is just a passable entry into a genre that has exploded since the series was first introduced. Is it good? Sure, but if your multiplayer diet is already given over to consuming much better games, there’s no reason to make the switch.

Dungeons Runners is a solid MMORPG that doesn't try to be more than it is and that anyone with a sense of humor can enjoy.

Its track list is slightly shorter, its difficulty is slightly easier, and its unlockable goodies are slightly less thrilling, but if you loved everything about Guitar Hero III despite its flaws, then there’s little reason not to grab this one as well. Just don’t expect your finger train to be rolling over the guitar as all-night-long as it did before.

Look, if you’re the type that needs to download every song for Guitar Hero, nab a godly Top 1000 slot on yet another Guitar Hero leaderboard, or fawn over the Aerosmith poster double-sided-taped onto your wall, then you’re probably not going to listen to what anyone says about picking up a copy.

You can get an exciting, if not sparse on features, shooter with Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved for half the price. You can get many more exciting, albeit more expensive, shooters on the Xbox 360 like Gears of War or BioShock. Nevertheless, if you play Commando 3, you'll probably enjoy yourself, even if it's been done many, many times before.

And I never thought another game could make "DMC"'s plot actually look less confusing. All attitude and little substance, Hellboy has his charms, but I can't recommend you do more than rent it.

It’s just a bit of, well, a waste. It begs for something more, some more substance to the charm that’s already here in spades—more under-the-hood play for those precocious kiddies, more behind-the-scenes goodies for those older kiddies-at-heart who, let’s face it, probably bought WALL-E for their own kids to play.

I guess the unkindest kick in the, uh, waste cubes is the lack of extras.

It’s a simple but elegant little package, just low-key and clever enough for regular gamers, with puzzle challenges that aren’t out of the ‘bot-claw grasp of younger fans of the movie.

It’s got some fresh, entertaining details, and though the game experience is shallow and a little frustrating, you can hop into a mortar cannon and knock down an enemy entrenchment to make you feel better.

Top Spin 3 latches onto back-to-basics tennis, focusing its full attention on the play, power, and flow of the sport. The result is fairly straightforward but strong enough for anyone to pick up and appreciate the sport for what it is.

Perpetually frustrating.

For newbies, the controls are too unwieldy, and for veterans, though they’ll get a short burst of fret-shredding (for $49.99…), stylus scraping just doesn’t compare to a life-sized Gibson controller. With all the fumbling it takes to hold the DS comfortably, you’ll wonder why you’re playing this in public.

Overall, I can easily recommend Crazy Machines 2 to parents, physics geeks, folks who enjoy intellectual challenges, and my fellow asylum refugees.