Consider Legend of Heroes a satisfying snack that will tide you over until a must-have PSP RPG main course is served.

Even if linking up with friends is a toss, hitting the single-player with Sonic or Blaze is more than enough pandemonium for one person.

It’s pretty clear this is a test lap for Nintendo, and once the kinks are worked out you'll see more gamers gearing up for a race through the Mushroom Kingdom.

All of this together makes for a wrestling game that could easily pin any other grappling contest released in the past few years.

Thankfully, these soldiers move with much of the fluidity of their PS2 counterparts.

If there's a nit to pick with Gun, it's that it's short. Depending on how much you poke around, you can beat it in anywhere from six to ten hours. To us, that's no problem; we'll take a short amazing game over a long lackluster one any day.

You might breeze through it, but it'll be a cool breeze.

Funny, instantly accessible, tightly programmed, and undeniably enjoyable, Guitar Hero earns several encores. Grab your lighter and get ready to rock.

Don't get us wrong: the latest Castlevania isn't a bad game, if you can swallow the endless combat repetition. It just falls well short of this series' legendary heritage, and can't hold a candle to the handheld Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow for the Nintendo DS.

Plays more like a kind of arcade light-gun shooter with legs, and feels like it needed a better script and about six more months of development time.

A fun romp that stays interesting no matter how you play it.

There are a few issues with Big Red One (particularly a slow trudge through the Africa campaign and spots of truly artificial intelligence), but fans of the series will find it enjoyable, intense, and an improvement over earlier chapters.

The big selling promise was that you could be a villain, but the worst we could manage was to kidnap ... villains from other gangs. That's not a dark side, that's a shade of gray.

A fun romp that stays interesting no matter how you play it. It has its share of flaws, but for fans, this is the first Star Wars game to have it all.

Play this along with "Shadow Of The Colossus" and you'll remember how bloody lovely life can be.

The Hustle might aim to be an affordable budget diversion, but even a bargain price can't make this deeply flawed game worth buying.

Simply put, Resident Evil 4 is the tightest, most accessible game in the series and one of the best games out there.

At least the second best 3D fighting game on PS2, and possibly the best. If you like graphics, fighting, or even just dressing up paper dolls, buy it.

This multiplayer component caps an already stunning single-player campaign and extends the value greatly.

A streamlined interface, a non-linear tech tree, impressive AI with 18 personalities, a new combat system (no more spearmen defeating tanks), amazing multiplayer features and narration by Star Trek's Leonard Nimoy all give the new Civ plenty of both flash and substance.

Fans expecting something as expansive as San Andreas will be disappointed, but anyone looking for portable craziness at impossible speeds should pick this up.

Consider our fingers well and truly crossed, and let's hope that Metroid Prime Hunters is even better.

There's no question that Age of Empires III is enjoyable, and the strong multiplayer modes make it worth owning. It's just that it doesn’t strive hard enough to truly usher in a new age of the genre.

But if you really want something different and meaningful, you must play this. You will remember some of these battles for the rest of your gaming life, and you may never play another game that blends art and action this seamlessly.

It certainly isn't the first case of a game holding its player's hand too tightly, but thankfully it's a difficult one to dismiss or, indeed, to adjourn.

Beautiful graphics make lording over an entire civilization a treat.

Buy this immediately, and witness why a billion polygons a nanosecond will always take a backseat to rock solid craftsmanship.

It's not that the story is bad; it's just that the surgeries are so addictive that you’ll be anxious to scrub back in to the O.R. and pick up your scalpel/stylus.