Hammer & Sickle is something of a strange case—it's by no means a perfect game, but it features a perfect game engine.

By removing the questionable focus-group aesthetics and getting back to what made the game so great in the first place, The Two Thrones succeeds in delivering a rock-solid adventure experience from start to finish.

It's a shame because the art style attractively breaks away from the typical anime-esque lines and also sports some gorgeous animated cutscenes more interesting than the game itself. Despite these meager positives, there's nothing to recommend it outside of the fact that it's an RPG on the PSP.

My complaints about the storytelling and button-pressing aside, it's impossible to deny that Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time is engaging from a tactile perspective—taking out evil toadstools by kicking a red shell back and forth between the mustache brothers just never gets old.

Between the fun I had playing it, the fitness boost I've gained from it (body fat now 13% and dropping if you want numbers), the awareness and discipline it's taught me and the sheer enthusiasm it's reawakened in me to turn on my PS2 for an hour almost every night, EyeToy: Kinetic distinguishes itself until it is, almost, virtually unassailable.

King Kong is short and still manages to be a flawed and redundant gaming experience. This isn't a bad game-just one that manages to underachieve in a lot of ways.

It has moments where it's genuinely fun, but these are too soon replaced by a sense of tedium as the "been there, done that" element comes to color later races.

There's nothing "next gen" about this title other than the graphics and sound. The gameplay would barely pass as mediocre on the last generation of consoles.

This is the kind of thing that should be handed out by uniformed men in mall parking lots, not sold in stores.

Although the animation and framerate aren't as optimized as they could be (one of the qualities common to Terminal Reality's other titles) and some of the combat sequences can occasionally be frustrating, looking past Charlize Theron's digitized face reveals Aeon Flux to be finely in tune with its animated soul-and a darker, more artistically challenging thrill ride than players are usually privy to.

It's sad when a gaming icon known for eschewing cliches gets mired in so many of them that he becomes part of the me-tooism he originally tried to combat.

Newcomers or devotees to the RPG genre may find some basic value in it, but my feeling is that most players who've been there and done that probably won't want another helping.

An adrenaline rush can be a very welcome thing, and playing something this fast and trigger-happy on the PSP made me feel glad that I had spent the money on the unit after so many months of boring, flawed games.

Dragon Quest VIII succeeds brilliantly by taking time-tested traditional-RPG gameplay and placing it in a uniquely vast and beautiful world that is a pure joy to explore and inhabit.

In between the unsatisfying battles and the go-nowhere story, there's a lot of searching for the right area or person that will trigger the next cutscene, and a lot of wandering back and forth for the sake of extending the game's playtime.

I'm not sure just why Activision was in such a rush to release the game that they didn't let Luxoflux actually finish it.

From Russia With Love is a great film. From Russia With Love is not a great adaptation of that film, as it seems to believe that what the source material really needed was a few more rocket launchers and gatling guns.

The simple fact is that even with the elemental tweaks and team attacks, this game is sorely average in terms of the challenges and ideas presented to players.

After the credits rolled I sat in my dim room feeling like a betrayed lover, staring at the title screen with empty eyes and worn down by exhaustion. Disbelieving and frustrated, I once again expressed a wish: blue pill, please.

All in all, it's just a game that works some of the time but doesn't have enough drive and ambition behind it to vault it to the upper echelon of must play experiences.

The game is what it is, and nothing I could say in this review will effectively capture the sensation of holding the guitar controller straight up in the air and slamming through an insane series of notes on reflex, not really understanding how I did it - and not really caring.

Sadly, anything good about the game gets bogged down in the mindless, repetitive blasting.

The story may be as dull as dirt and the graphics may lack a satisfying level of detail, but there's no denying that Trapt (and its three predecessors) provide a crazy sort of skewed gameplay that simply can't be had anywhere else. Very few projects actually make me laugh out loud with maniacal glee, but this was one.

It's a piece of satisfyingly decrepit eye candy. The gameplay carries on the Castlevania tradition of whipping bastions of undead into submission.

As it stands it's just a good game with a few very awkward parts.

I can accept but no longer appreciate the conventions of the past that Soul Calibur III upholds and I look forward to a game that embodies the newer and more reality-based ideals of competitive fighting.

In all fairness, Ratchet: Deadlocked should have been put out at a bargain price (around $20 sounds right) and labeled as an add-on or mission pack instead of positioned as a full-priced title.

It seems a shame that this inferior sequel makes us all take turns.