I'm playing Killzone 3, and man is it ridiculous. I mean, clearly all FPS games have ridiculous plots and ideas, but this game made me laugh openly while playing. Perhaps they're doing it on purpose so as not to take themselves so seriously? That's gotta be it. The main character, Zev, and his loud mouthed buddy Rico are gunners on some sort of high altitude craft and where do they sit to operate the guns? ON TOP OF THE CRAFT. Like, right on top. No oxygen mask. There's no canopy, no nothing. They're not even strapped in. They stay on because they each have one foot hooked around a metal rail.

Just before the sequence with them riding on the open concept craft, Zev is flying a jetpack. It malfunctions and is doomed to crash. He extricates himself, and falls some twenty feet directly onto his left shoulder. Hard. He sits up to recover, and a huge wave caused by an explosion in the water nearly drowns him. His response is priceless: he calmly gets up, LITERALLY BRUSHES HIS SHOULDER OFF, and radios for a pick up from his indestructible hands-free device which is still attached to his ear and still functioning.

Someone is having a lot of fun with this.

Judging from this and the abysmal storytelling in Black Ops, I expect wonderful things from Modern Warfare 3.

Tragically, though the poor presentation is the first thing you’ll notice, it’s not the worst. Not by a long shot. In fact, an argument could be made that the presentation is the best thing the game has going for it.

Alone 3 tries to blend the first game’s unparalleled approach to otherworldly detective work, with the second game’s more lighthearted but equally smart MacGyver-esque sleuthing (and jacked-up combat), in order to arrive at a happy medium. To the credit of the developers, the mixture does reach a medium, but it’s not happy.

WotW isn't exactly unplayable; the tense narrative and bleak, nearly monochromatic presentation does much to convey the hopelessness of the human plight in London in the face of merciless invaders.

All PopCap could do to evolve the experience was to polish the presentation, and tack on enough variations of the main game to entice us to dive in. Fortunately, they’ve done both fairly well here. The results aren’t spectacular, as they were with EA’s exquisitely refined Tetris, but it’s about as good a job as can be expected.

Daytona USA was an experience. And it’s the sort of experience that can never be brought home. Sure, we can search online for seven like-minded old school players to have a go, but that doesn’t come close. What might have come close, would be local multiplayer, so that at least you could invite friends over and split-screen race to your hearts’ content. Guess what? Local multiplayer is not available. Oops.

Attention puzzle game gurus! Tired of taking apart videogame conundrums like so much Lego? IGS has your game. You won’t beat it any time soon. In fact, Tricky Kick’s box should wear a disclaimer: If you think you’re at all good at games, don’t play this. Your ego and sense of self worth may be smashed irreparably.

Kyotokei tries to be the horizontal Ikaruga and it does what it sets out to do in a perfunctory fashion, lacking distinction or panache. That being said, if you loved Ikaruga, you’ll like Kyotokei, because how many other colour based shoot-em-ups are there really?

The GameBoy iteration of R-Type II managed to take the already flawed and decidedly obnoxious arcade experience, and made it loathsome and near-unplayable.

The car won’t drive anymore -- you'll have to ditch it. You strain your eyes to seek her out, but the snow makes it hard to see. Cheryl is out there, somewhere in the whiteness. She’s a little girl lost, drowning in a sea of powder: The lonely resort town of Silent Hill has claimed her.

Lovecraft always waxed poetic about dangers “not to be met or dealt with, but only to be fled from as precipitately as possible.” None of his scholarly protagonists ever kicked Dagon's ass, or put buckshot into any of the Deep Ones. But that is what this game expects of us.