Sure, the game is infinitely more impressive when each piece is broken down, but with an experience that begs to be played ad infinitum, yet quickly screams to be over long before it finally ends, the whole experience can feel a little flat.

Perhaps it’s the flaky difficulty or weak story plot, but something is definitely holding Devil May Cry 2 back from upping the ante of the series’ first comer. In the end, DMC2 boils down to a simple result: a solid sequel, but a failed attempt in revolutionizing action gaming.

As good as the Getaway is, it needs more powerful hardware to really deliver the kind of punch the game has the potential to administer.

As dee-lish as all the camp and nostalgia is, it's also very reminiscent of the source material; pretty, stylish, but ultimately rather vapid when it comes to depth.

The perfect example of what a game should be. With its rich cast of characters, deep gameplay, gorgeous graphics and wonderful soundtrack, R&C packs the ingredients to a perfect platformer and combines them perfectly.

The sound design is frickin' phenomenal... [and] this is easily the best soundtrack I've heard in a game.

With an intriguing Story mode, addicting Arcade battles, and a Challenge mode that truly puts you to the test, it’s no secret that the key features that made "GoldenEye" such a hit leaked its way into the TimeSplitters world.

A really, really solid, gorgeous, blisteringly fast racing game that just wants you to have fun.

The core gameplay is just too tiresome and frustrating to be entertaining for any extended length of time, but the story and cinematic presentation is a nice bright spot.

An unequivocal blast. The framerate chokes, I wish to God it was about twice as long (I unlocked everything in just over eight hours), but everything else about the game is quite literally perfect.

The combat system is leaps and bounds above the first game’s, but things like pausing for spell animations and disjointed, eye-watering lighting and texture palettes keep the interest level down.

It’s funny, but I swear Aerial Assault looks better than Tribes 2 PC. The levels aren’t as big because of memory limitations, but the game looks just as good everywhere else.

Not as groundbreaking as it should have been. It may be hard to admit, but "Virtua Fighter 4" has taken a giant leap compared to Tekken 4’s bunny hop. But now that Namco has hit the nail on the head when it comes to fighting depth and detail, it is time for change.

I really don’t think anyone else could have woven as complex and enthralling a story into such enjoyable gameplay and kept it as true to both Square and especially Disney fans.

Thanks to an interesting trading system and the promise of literally hours and hours of extra gameplay-unlocked goodies, an improved system for absorbing and applying souls and perfectly executed graphical and aural treats as so few developers in this industry can really deliver, the game is simply too good to miss.

What are you waiting for, grab yourself a stamp, a pen (and if you don’t have one, a network adaptor) and get to mailing!

The real area where SOCOM shines is in the player models and animations -- where everything from a simple reload to the way a seal crawls across a muddy riverbank to the way a freshly-capped enemy lurches forward and back, then topples over silently -- drips with an astonishing amount of detail.

If it weren’t for a poor combo or random and scripted transformations by your squad mates into Things all the time, the whole team dynamic would have felt a little more personal.

The problem is, while they were spending all this time building up the game off the court, throwing in pawn shops and underground side bets on games, they forgot to concentrate on the actual game of street ball itself...Fun is something that Street Hoops just seems to be lacking.

The combat system, storyline, music and effects are too good to be ruined by one bad level. It is a shame, however, to see a game that spends 90% of the whole experience building up stealth and a kick ass combat system only to watch it all fall apart in very basic, repetitive final confrontations.

I don’t imagine myself as a gaming whiz by any stretch, but I’m good enough to stay in the running most of the time, and when I started to crack the 20 retries, then 30… then 40… then 50… I stopped having fun and started hating the experience I was being subjected to.

Slugfest’s crowning achievement is the audio. It is absolutely, positively stunning, and I’d be hard pressed to find a better example of not only quality writing but a mix of subtle and flat our humor in a game.

An oddly intriguing little chunk of code that, while rather on the short side (we finished it up in about two whole days’ worth of play time), can still entertain.

Perhaps appropriately, the ending was neither flashy nor particularly rewarding, but the sense of accomplishment I got once I’d trudged through a good 15-20 or so hours of tiresome combat, eye-wateringly low framerates, and a nonexistent storyline was enough.

The most accessible, fastest, most potent version of the series. It’s arguably the best of the four games that make up the series, but nobody can deny that’s easily the prettiest.

I still find Fireblade to be oddly mixed in delivery, throwing some slickly designed, easy to navigate menus at you, then spitting out redundant mission briefings before and during the levels.

You’ll pay the price for the presentation in, on average, about 30 second load times the first time you get to a level, but you get to play Pong while you wait, so who’s counting?

The game is probably about 5 hours of gameplay, and another half hour of extras. Once you’ve unlocked it all, the game will probably collect dust. For that reason, it’s hard to recommend it to anyone but the most ardent Britney fan.

Thanks to a fantastic combo system, good music, and solid graphics, TWS manages to pull you in very, very slowly.

Make no mistake, Red Card 20-03 is NOT a soccer sim, though it does a good job of recreating a surface representation of the game. It IS an incredibly fun, addictive and enjoyable experience.

The combat, mission objectives, controls and camera are often working in tandem against you, which is obviously frustrating to the point where it’s eventually not worth playing to get the heaps of extras you can unlock after beating the game.

It'll require a Herculean effort to control your rage as you watch 20 minutes of sneaking around evaporate into nothing with just a single misfired shot, but that doesn’t mean the game shouldn’t be tried.

Good, but is targeted at a very, very specific type of gamer, and you could be left wanting more if you don’t fall into that niche.

If you’re looking for a story that will hook you, play with your head, and leave you questioning exactly how far our pursuit of technology should go, and exactly how some world events and so-called tales of conspiracies really fit together, you should drop everything and go buy this game.

Sure, plenty of elements are executed well, but some things, like the ENDLESS switch flipping is just needlessly tedious.

The fact that you can run through levels that slightly resemble key points in the movie is nice, but this doesn’t feel like PS2 game so much as a port of a PlayStation title, with a better resolution.

The Kumite and AI modes are ridiculously fun, and should you be one of the poor, unwitting souls that actually hooks up with a friend that’s purchased a copy, you can kiss at least a couple weekends (and likely a few weekdays) goodbye.

I’ve never really seen a game that so obviously and yet so hilariously heaps on the innuendo. Sucking blood is such a thinly veiled euphemism that you can’t help but laugh at the fact that someone actually made a game like this.

The whole MIDI-ish feel to the audio does server to cheapen the greater aural experience.

There’s only so much Hot Shots you can take before you start craving something new and innovative about the whole experience.

A blast to play, even in extended sessions thanks to a good story baseline, plenty of simple pick-up-and-play gameplay elements, and a control scheme that’s as intuitive as it is fluid.

A good game, a different game, a game that rewards those that stick with it with something plenty entertaining, but you’re going to have to strap on a pair of blinders to get there without cringing a couple times.

Simple core design decisions sabotaged any redeeming value and eventually just left the game a shell of what it could have been.

A game that could've been so much more has turned into a pile of... well, crap.

Don’t be mistaken into thinking this is a ridiculously deep racer, but for a pure arcade experience, you’ll find little else that offers this type of racing fun, and actually uses the oft-wasted Star Wars license in a compelling way.

If (or more likely when) the price on this game drops to Greatest Hits level, it should be a perfect impulse buy.

A fantastic break from the Final Fantasy-dominated RPG genre.

The dialogue is intelligent, the side quests actually help thicken up the feel of a fantasy world, and the graphics and sound have a subtle way of reeling you in without knowing.

PaRappa may not be the most worthwhile purchase for some due to the fact that it’s ridiculously short, and the replay value doesn’t really add any new gameplay elements, but it is PaRappa, and if that floats your boat, the short bit of fun you’ll glean from the game may be enough.

The delivery is head and shoulders above any other console RPG, and the overall experience leaves you with such a feeling of satisfaction that it's easy to dive right back into the game once you beaten it just to experience all the big moments again.

From the way the game renders an entire world that you can explore from one end to the next without a single loading screen, to animation that literally trounces anything ever seen in any videogame, to game design that keeps things interesting despite being what some would call “just a fetch quest,” this is a perfect example of the next generation in videogames.

Let me put it another way: this game has four racing levels. Four. With a couple of tries, you can beat the game in under an hour. I’m not kidding. An hour.

It's literally almost perfect.

If you can live with drop dead gorgeous tracks and great physics, you'll find a lot to love in Splashdown.

The best flight game ever made.

More than good, really, more situated in the whole “amazing/incredibly addictive/cleverly balanced” extreme.

It's blatantly obvious that the guys at Neversoft know exactly what they're doing.

This game is the absolute personification of what free-roaming means. You can do damn near anything you want, and more often than not you'll be rewarded for it. Sounds fun, doesn't it?

The environments, the bosses, the combat, everything gels and meshes so perfectly, there isn't an action gamer out there that could call their library complete without this game. Not one.

If you are a helicopter sim fan and like games that are frustratingly difficult then pick up this game. Otherwise, either stay away or at your own discretion rent it because there are way better games out there.

As far as sound effects go, they are some of the best ever found in a videogame.

I can't find a single gripe with the game. The control is absolutely perfect (wait till you feel the transition from road to water, it's awesome), the sound is great, the interface is clean and gorgeous.

It's an instant classic that will become a benchmark for originality, fun and old fashioned substance over style.

I don't want to beat a dead horse here; just avoid Arctic Thunder, and maybe Midway's next port won't fare so badly.

It’s not a masterpiece, but Z-Axis’ BMX combo-fest is a blast and a half.

Until we see what "WipEout Fusion" can offer, it’s the best futuristic racing game available on the PS2.

A masterpiece.

Motor Mayhem isn’t a bad game, but it’s hampered by a combination of small, annoying slights that keep it from being the game it could be.

A game that on every level, takes the previous conventions of an arcade basketball game and obliterates them, throwing innovation into places that didn’t seem like they needed it.

The difference is that TMB just does it all better. Level design, graphics, weapons, vehicles, players… they’re all pulled off to such a perfect degree that it almost seems like the other games didn’t even exist.

What it does well, however is mixes them into a delicious stew of action, RPG and strategy elements that end up tasting better than if they were eaten by themselves.

With TXR Zero, gamers not only get a PlayStation 2 version of the game, but they get the best one, hands down.

One of the best first-person-shooters of the summer, if not ever for the PlayStation 2.

The graphics are not jaw dropping, but as is the case with most strategy games, this really doesn't matter. In the end, it's the quality of the gameplay that counts.

Incredibly solid, full of humor, and packed with enough variety in gameplay to keep you coming back for a long while, it made it worth sitting through 50 games mired in crappy control or graphics.

Amazingly fun!

Quite possibly the prettiest game I’ve ever seen...But presentation isn’t really the problem here. It’s the gameplay.

Suffers from a very bland, mediocre play structure.

An addicting and enjoyable simulation.

The gameplay speaks for itself.

This game looks just as well as it feels, with breathtaking views and intricate details throughout the different circuits.

Is Tekken Tag Tournament a new game? No, that’s what Tekken 4 will be. TTT is an improvement and refinement of the old games.

The gameplay is solid, the graphics are on par with the upper echelon of current games, and sound is very respectable.

If you are just purchasing a PlayStation2, and are considering an investment in a good strategy/fighting game, look no further.

It’s a good, solid shooter, but even with the 4-player deathmatch (which I’m not really a fan of), there’s not a lot of substance here.