Like a deflated football, 7 Trials doesn't encourage you to play, nor does it promise exciting play, it just makes play possible.

It doesn't try to accomplish very much, and it succeeds at almost all of its very modest targets.

Yes, it feels thin compared to fifty-hour role-playing games and branching platformers that let players choose their own paths. But it's fast and furious; we even get to fly our own spaceships and yell "Ka-pow!" at no one in particular. What more could a ten-year-old boy want?

Playing Shadow of Rome has made me more sympathetic to people who argue that killing fake people can lead to killing real ones. I came to accept Shadow of Rome's violence fully.

It adds a much-needed dose of the kind of quality that is not often seen in these days of safe sequels and formulaic products.

The characters are there—now someone just needs to figure out how to create some gameplay that makes the experience fun and not a chore.

There's no shame at all in putting out a solid effort like this. The only "bad" thing that could be said about it is that it's not revolutionary.

To see a series falter so badly after years of doing everything right is distressing.

Just inexcusably bad. How can a sequel suffer from the exact same problems as the first title?

The game for the first time ever actually has a counterpoint to these [hopeless] moments; the ying to that helpless-and-hopeless yang. That ying is an exhilarating sense of heroic empowerment.

For me, The Minish Cap has marked a point at which I seem to have become blasé to the brilliance of the series, at least in terms of its largely unchanging design foundations.

I wonder if we haven't reached the point where games like this can start leaving out the plot entirely. It's a game about giving the player a gun and telling them to go nuts.

And as a videogame, there's not much in Chain of Memories that I haven't seen before…except card breaks and room synthesis.

If the gameplay was incredibly fun, or the graphics fantastic, then perhaps playing basically the same mission over and over again for ten hours could have been bearable, or even mildly entertaining. Torrente, by comparison, was more like pulling teeth.

Carrying on the same kind of rough, unpolished quality into a sequel without any innovation is completely unacceptable to me, Star Wars or otherwise.

If nothing else, Prince of Persia: Warrior Within proves that good gameplay always trumps bad style choices.

Kojima is both retro and eccentric, and unless you're willing to accept that, his work won't fly for you. But if you are, if you are on his wave-length and able to appreciate all the witty touches that make his games sing, his work becomes rewarding in ways almost no other games are.

This is not the worst game ever made, but it's so inept at so many different points that it inspires more anger than a genuinely awful game.

A game about toy-car-racing with a unique although not spectacular racing system that chooses to imbed this racing, like an egg, inside a pretty bland and lifeless RPG that features toy cars that yell at you for coming into their house. It's not for everybody.

More than anything else, I suppose, Half-Life 2 is the story of a group of developers in love with their physics engine.

The ideas and situations in Bloodlines are so rich they deserve more than just being abstracted into an unwieldy numerical system that can only roughly approximate the nuance of a world so vivid.

Finest Hour is a heavily-scripted experience, almost to the point of being completely on rails. Things happen because they're scripted to happen, not because they're an organic outgrowth of the gameplay.

This is one of those rare experiences where the follow-up actually surpasses the original in terms of playability.

I mean, the game's already five years past being relevant, it would have killed them to take another six months to make it decent?

True, nearly everything in Echoes was also in its predecessor, but the merit in maintaining that game's superb balance whilst still making careful additions (Echoes bears the burden of flawlessly updating the screw attack into 3D with great élan), giving nearly every interface a new lick of paint (dig the sleek new menu design) and imbuing the game with its own uniquely foreboding atmosphere (with a moody synth score that's equal parts John Williams, Kraftwerk and Joy Division) cannot be understated.

I was just plain happy with Terrorist Takedown, and given the cost, and I think there are plenty of action game fans people who'll feel the same way.

Perhaps this is just a pitiful attempt to justify my horn dog instincts and guilty pleasure in playing Rumble Roses behind some twisted logic. But who could blame me? After all, I'm only a man. My wife, while rolling her eyes, sympathizes.

AntiGrav is a superb idea and a very innovative use of a new technology, but the jumping and grinding action of the game wouldn't really be that interesting apart from the interface, and it doesn't do anything that you couldn't do better with a controller.