Most gamers may not want to pay full retail price for only a handful of light features, despite how pretty the game is, but if you love your fighters old-school and 2D, The King of Fighters XII is probably worth checking out.

Those intrigued by the esoteric nonsense of this year's DVD release, Final Fantasy: Advent Children, will likely relish the incoherent sci-fi narrative.

Oh yeah, if you can motivate yourself enough to finish both characters' stories, a secret, you unlock a chess game and secret character. Whoop-dee-doo.

The problem here is that the actual racing isn’t that much fun.

Excellent car models, lighting, and reflection effects help the smooth visuals create a sense of blazing speed, and the beautifully detailed tracks are punctuated by vicious turns and loops that require you to master braking and powersliding without losing too much velocity.

This isn't a game that's going to make you want to abandon your big-screen basketball games by any means, but it can be enough to temporarily satisfy a serious basketball jones.

Ultimately, Naval Warfare is a decent arcade shooter. Unfortunately, the storyline is confusing and the levels are inconsistent in difficulty--many levels are maddeningly easy, while others are suddenly extremely difficult. This makes for a frustratingly uneven campaign experience, and because upgrades are level-specific, there's little reason to want to replay this title. Multiplayer isn't much better, as it's limited by the fact that you're unable to make custom maps or play online.

Still, BaBC is a solid brain-training title that packs a fascinating concept -- one that I hope Namco-Bandai will develop a bit more robustly in later iterations of the title.

The dialogue and plot are more clumsily written than the lyrics to a Christian rap song, which makes it hard to get involved in the tasks at hand. When you don't care, you don't care, ya know?

Continually trying to properly center the cam, however, frequently places you in harm's way. Until you put some serious time into the game, you'll be blown away more often than you like from unseen foes off-screen.

Although there is still work to be done, Showdown: Legends of Wrestling's new look and play style is a big step in the right direction. Fans looking for a walk down memory lane aren't going to be disappointed.

While not as deep or fine-tuned as it could have been, Endgame is quite fun in a low-budget action movie kind of way.

The gameplay itself is unchanged from 18 Wheeler, with your lumbering truck falling out of control at the drop of a feather and the graphics looking just a shade above Dreamcast quality.

Pros: Easy, accessible fun. Song list is varied and interesting. Cons: You can't sing and dance at the same time, there's no online play and the replay value is low.

After playing this game, it would be a real stretch for me to recommend Invincible Tiger at any XBLA price level.

Although Armageddon’s selection of slick, diabolical hardware is great, using it turns into a fumbling experience. Between multiple foes attacking in every direction and the unintuitive button setup, switching between your weapons is a chore.

Explosively paced and tougher than Chuck Bronson, the game is also a suffocatingly linear one whose difficulty hinges upon repetitious trial and error, requiring you to play through levels repeatedly to memorize layouts and enemy patterns.

Even with all the unchanged flaws, Mobile Suit Gundam vs. Zeta Gundam is still the best Gundam game to ever come out, and is highly recommended to fans of the series.

The game gives you too many handicaps and leaves an unsavory taste of an unbalanced fighter. Even with these minor faults, Battle Assault is an excellent handheld fighter and still recommended.

The "Rocky III" of video games: There isn't much suspense, the acting's cheesy, and the production values could be better, but you can't help but get sucked in. [June 2004, p.70]

With horrible graphics that look like something an owl regurgitated, broken controls that must be wrestled with at every turn, and level designs that could turn the undead, Robotech: Invasion is an utter waste of money.

Behind the sharper graphics and the bigger kit of options, though, there's still an unfortunately shallow, repetitive game.

That's pretty much Breach's biggest issue: Even if it's a cheaper XBLA alternative, everything it does has been done better elsewhere. If it had contributed something new to the FPS landscape, I'd forgive its attempt at imitation, but most folks interested in it already have immediate access to great games such as Halo, Black Ops and Battlefield.

It's not a gold medal winner, but it finishes the PlayStation invitational with a bronze.

If nothing else, The First Templar is an interesting look at what happens when an established developer moves beyond its comfort zone. Unsurprisingly, the results are mixed: a few glimmering moments of innovation diluted by hours of decade-old design.

Ultimately, Lost Souls will reward masochists and scare off anyone intimidated by the slightest bit of a learning curve. There's a great challenge in store, but it doesn't pull any punches or make any apologies. Know that going in and don't say you weren't warned.

If this is where the series is going, Neverland Card Battles is going to be a tough sell in the future. I'd really like to find something nice to say about it, but the game is so boring, cliche (there's that word again) and badly designed I'd be lying through my teeth.

Don't skip this new Spider-Man game, but just be aware that it's a few strands short of a full web.