Yes it’s flawed, but there’s something satisfying about this chaotic 3-D beat ‘em up all the same.

Back in the day, sports games were different. Most of them were realistic to a point, but also took a lot of liberties with the game to make it, well, fun. There were no marathon season-long campaigns, name-brand players or realistic physics, just arcade-style action sometimes only very loosely based on the sport it was meant to represent.

There are different types of horror. There’s the kind that goes for the obvious and cheap shock-scare, like Jason in a mask with a chainsaw, or the leering zombie who jumps out from behind the table accompanied by a scream and a stab of high-pitched violins. Then there’s horror of a more subtle nature -- the kind that taps into psychology to create a terror that lingers long after the actual experience is over, as the events stay in the mind, are turned over, examined, and expanded by the power ...

Despite the attractive environment that the game immersed me in, what dawned on me quite early on into the adventure was that Golden Sun actually seems to purposefully conspire to make the process of playing it as mundane and drawn out as possible.

The sheer size of The Two Towers, the number of levels and the fact that there are five different characters make this an extremely impressive title for a portable system. Yet at the same time, the levels often seem empty and needlessly long.

While it makes sense to port the flagship games of the Nintendo, Super Nintendo and Genesis, which featured gaming icons like Mario, Sonic the Hedgehog and Earthworm Jim, one has to wonder what sort of logic was behind the decision to port The Three Stooges, an obscure NES game based on characters from a fifty year old black & white television show.

Pieces is a videogame about jigsaw puzzles. Puzzles – the things that are used to keep small children quiet for a few hours, or to provide a contemplative, scholarly challenge to older folks. The potential is there for an incredibly boring gaming experience.

From mediocre graphics and sound to a camera that behaves like it has just drank 10 shots of gin, this is by all accounts a bad game. What saves me from tossing it aside as another flawed and forgettable action title is that Xena: Warrior Princess is…well…Xena. By that I don’t mean *foaming at the mouth like a crazed fangirl* “ooh Xena’s so cool and whatever has Xena in it is also cool.” No. What I mean is that despite questionable gameplay, the developers were able to faithfully recreate the TV...

Cheesy B-quality science fiction movies apparently have their occasional videogame equivalents. Case in point: Zombie Nation, a game in which you play a leering severed head and battle American citizens who have been turned into zombies by a malevolent alien named Darc Seed.

Perhaps not since E.V.O. has there been another game that lets you play as an elephant. (Or to be specific, since Ice Age takes place in the prehistoric era, a mammoth.) Ice Age is based on the computer-animated movie of the same name, in which a mammoth, sloth and sabre-tooth tiger make a long journey to return a lost human baby to its family.