MLB 13: The Show can be tailored to emphasize whatever you like most about baseball. If you're a statistician, there are countless graphs and plenty of data to mine. Sluggers can swing to their hearts' content, laying the burden of pitching entirely on the CPU – or vice versa. However you want to play, whatever you want to play – it's all been accounted for with exceptional care.

One of the two best RPGs on the Nintendo 3DS (the other being Fire Emblem). It's big, it's deep, and for once, it's accessible. That's more than enough reason to go and discover what has been, to this point, one of Atlus' best kept secrets.

Ascension is a car riding in the spectacle slipstream of its predecessors, never quite able to surpass them.

The combat is the best it's ever been, puzzles are short but satisfying, and Yamatai is a veritable platforming playground. For the series fanatic, there are loads of secrets to find and a new legend to digest. More importantly, it just may convince a new generation to like Tomb Raider again.

Runner 2 is absolutely worth playing, so long as you can deal with its unforgiving and occasionally frustrating nature.

Crysis 3 is a marked improvement over its predecessors, both from a narrative and gameplay standpoint. It features a simpler, cohesive story with fewer of the constrained corridor crawls and Ceph turkey shoots found in Crysis 2. Even within the confines of its linear level design, Crysis 3 offers a great deal of freedom.

The crux of combat holds Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance together despite its structural problems. The game's priorities are right, and cutting through cruft and seizing the core of the experience is a better result than the opposite end of the spectrum – a cluttered game that buries its heart in busywork.

Even compared to the original Brain Age, Concentration Training is much more demanding, and players shouldn't expect to breeze through exercises and watch their training grade skyrocket.

The marriage of a first-person shooter and the Alien franchise should be a perfect fit, especially from Gearbox, a team rooted in the genre. And yet, the pairing eludes a happy ending once again. Aliens: Colonial Marines isn't disappointing because it couldn't live up to lofty expectations, it's disappointing because it turned out to be such an unfettered disaster.

An exciting, shocking and mammoth adventure through the ghostly, unvarnished segments of space – and you do, thankfully, get to spend some more time flying. There aren't many games that can match the elegiac, liberating movements of Isaac Clarke in nullified gravity, or his vengeful, squishy stomps of victory...Huh, maybe I enjoyed more of Dead Space 3 than I thought.

Skulls of the Shogun encapsulates whatever essence puts Castle Crashers at the top of the XBLA charts year after year, and does so without infringing on that game's intellectual property or overall vibe.

Most importantly, though, Fire Emblem: Awakening resembles a soap opera in how thoroughly addictive it can be. Once you get hooked on the combat and these characters and their stories, you'll feel the overpowering need to keep checking in on them. Instead of an hour a day, though, you can visit Fire Emblem at any time, pulling out your 3DS on the bus or on your lunch break or before dozing off at night.

Ron Gilbert and Chris Remo miss on the explicit narration, but their underlying story is perfectly pitched through puzzles and your own wicked participation.

Maybe all that beauty would be undermined by the low-key narrative if the combat wasn't as deep. It's why this collaboration between Level-5 and Studio Ghibli works. One without the other might have been good, but together they've created a superb role-playing game for this generation to savor.

DMC does action extraordinarily well and manages to make Dante look like the epitome of cool with every move, and it's wonderful to see this feat in motion. Over and over and over again.

The characters are well-designed and the story well-performed, but actually playing through the campaign is a chore. The multiplayer can be great, especially in the team or Death Ball modes, but the limited combat is bound to wear thin before too long, and matchmaking troubles are irritating.

There's the potential for a great competitive puzzler here, but the missing features, along with the iffy odds of actually connecting to an online game without something getting mucked up, make Magical Drop 5 impossible to recommend.

Had the actual gameplay been less clunky, more well balanced, more challenging and less aggressively abusive, Black Knight Sword's sense of style and unique presentation would have been healthy bonuses on top of an already stable foundation. As is stands though, the game's artistic atmosphere and sense of self are all it has going for it, and sadly that's not quite enough.

I think it's fair to say that it's an acquired taste. Most people will know whether or not like they like it from the first moment that they get a good look at the art, which is extremely rough. Crimson Shroud really isn't interested in fancy pyrotechnics or other frills. Its storytelling, combat, and exploration are about as raw as it gets.

DJMax Technika Tune is in some ways mindbendingly new, but simultaneously comfortingly nostalgic. The look and feel of Pentavision's Vita music game recall my high school Dance Dance Revolution obsession pleasantly.

The game's not perfect, and if the genre doesn't already appeal to you, this probably won't be the entry to convince you otherwise. But it is a neat experiment in translating a very PC-centric experience over to the console space, and a fun throwdown featuring some of fantasy's finest.

With its simple mechanics and unforgiving difficulty, Crashmo is the new standard bearer for Nintendo's legacy of excellent handheld puzzle games.

It has excellent, explicit design layered on top of system-based chaos – which is a fancy way of saying that just about everything in Far Cry 3 feels like a reward.

Book of Spells is a children's game that retains the magical appeal that makes Harry Potter's world so intriguing, even for older players. The games are easy, true, but if you, as a grown-up, can read a young adult novel on a packed bus without shame, you can probably enjoy Book of Spells in the comfort of your own home.

Is it an easy game for kids, or a tough game for seasoned players? It offers some great level design, top notch fan service, and a decent challenge, but that challenge arrives a little too late.

Transformed should not be missed by anyone who truly values a fun, exceptionally well crafted racing game.

The overall game doesn't get the polish on Wii U that it needed on other platforms back in August, but it remains a majestic blend of melee combat, puzzle solving and exploration. And if you squint, it's the best Steven Tyler game since Revolution X!

If Mass Effect 3 Special Edition is your only shot at dipping into BioWare's universe, you may as well take it. If you've already experienced the previous games, and you don't mind missing out on importing your character, you'll find a competent port with a few novel extras.