Great controls, nicely varied (and genuinely challenging) goals, a good sense of humor and cartoonish physics make Joe Danger a real treat to play.

A whimsical, imaginative take on World War I that has you fighting for freedom and for fun. The missions get repetitive, and there are only three types of planes with different skins, but the combat itself is entertaining, the weapons are cool, the multiplayer is a ton of fun - and it's jam-packed with lovable charm.

A fresh, action-packed take on football that makes you feel like one of the players pounding the gridiron. A fantastic team creation mode, intense, urgent action and great-looking tackles are dragged down by a shallow single-player mode, sloppy interpretation of football rules, and characters that all look the same.

The RPG elements work well and are loads of fun to explore, but they only add up to half a game. What's left over is a brainless, broken mess.

A standard, competent kart racer hampered by frequent loading times and irritating writing, but bolstered by an intuitive and powerful editor that lets gamers make their karts, racetracks, and characters their own - or at least lets them make their characters into Spider-Man.

Super Mario Galaxy 2 doesn't tinker with the established formula very much, but we didn't really want it to. It's huge, brilliant, and gorgeous. It's why you started playing videogames in the first place.

A brilliantly told story, excellent voice acting, and an atmosphere so unnerving you'll sleep with the lights on for a month. If only it came with a bottle of instant amnesia so that you could play it for the first time more than once.

The Western genre has been won. Fans of the Western genre will feel as if they've died and gone to heaven and open-world gamers will be treated to an experience unlike any they've had before.

It's a kinder, gentler Trauma Team, and that's a good thing. It's also got the most variety, offering both twitch surgery and medical puzzles.

The guns and bugs make for some spectacular fireworks, but, after the sparks settle, you are left wishing you had played something a little more substantial.

Fans of the series will find more to love in the third installment. For newcomers, this is the most accessible and fun skateboarding game there is.

It's a funny and charming little game, but it plays the retro card a little bit too much. A lot of the gameplay feels very dated in a modern game, and you can't make the same allowances for age that you can with an actual retro title.

Competent. Functional. Other than the presence of your canine sidekick, there is absolutely nothing in Dead to Rights: Retribution that hasn't been done before (and probably better) in other games.

Nier delivers all of the facets that make up a successful action role-playing game: fun combat, diverse characters, good voice-acting, and addictive quest mechanics. It just doesn't do any of them excellently.

It's Street Fighter IV, but better. With the additional characters new and old alike, it's a glorious celebration of the classic fighting franchise - and even if it hasn't changed much, it's changed enough to be clearly head and shoulders above its predecessor.

For some reason, there is something uniquely satisfying about felling a great beast and wearing his skin in triumph.

You fight lots of pallet-swapped enemies over and over again, rinse and repeat. Fun to play with a friend and a huge nostalgia rush, but not much to hold your interest for long.

You fight lots of pallet-swapped enemies over and over again, rinse and repeat. Fun to play with a friend and a huge nostalgia rush, but not much to hold your interest for long.

Conviction is the best installment in the series. The developers took some major risks in design and presentation that paid off, resulting in a game that's at once approachable and complex, and arguably the current last word in stealth adventure.

Open letter to the designers of Just Cause 2: Thank you for making me drive 2 kilometers each time I die. It really makes me appreciate your big open world.

Over three years after the Wii hit store shelves, Red Steel 2 finally delivers the motion-controlled swordplay we expected from the original Red Steel, and it more than makes up for any niggling flaws in the level design.

Unless you're absolutely sick of Shin Megami Tensei's core mechanics or can't push past a few tutorial-heavy opening hours, Strange Journey's a fantastic RPG - portable or not.

Cave Story is fairly short, but provides a unique, somewhat emotional, action-based experience totally worth $15.

The missions are decent, but the multiplayer is the real reason to play this game.

Metro 2033 has a ton of really great ideas, but not only do they not fit together well, they actually compete with each other, sucking all the enjoyment out of the experience.

On a purely technical level, it's one of the most impressive games the PS3 has to offer: It shifts perspectives effortlessly across a number of highly detailed environments without so much as a hiccup and with almost nonexistent load times to interrupt the experience. But in a broader sense, God of War III serves as an example of how to deliver astonishingly varied gameplay in a cohesive package.

It admirably accomplishes what an expansion is supposed to do, and doesn't in any way diminish what made the great one of the best RPGs ever made.

The gameplay is refined and polished to a mirror shine, and traipsing through the lovingly rendered regions of Johto and Kanto brings with it a fond nostalgia that few other games manage to evoke.