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.

Here’s something for anyone who was grossed out by that pit of writhing snakes in the Indiana Jones movie. Wild Snake is a game that vaguely follows the falling-block puzzle-game format, but a more accurate label would be slithering-reptile format. You see, these snakes are incredibly realistic. They don’t just drop from the top of the screen like boring blocks. Their twisty bodies wriggle down head-first, struggling against you and the controller all the way. The idea is to wrangle the snake o...

Peter Jackson’s film adaptations of The Lord of the Rings have earned well-deserved praise and respect from just about everyone except nit-picking Tolkien purists. However, some of us may remember the other LotR film, made in 1978 by Ralph Bakshi. This version was pretty much universally derided and despised by both critics and Tolkien fans alike. The Lord of the Rings: Volume 1 for the Super Nintendo is the videogame equivalent of the Bakshi movie. The other Lord of the Rings videogame.

The thing about Tarot cards is that someone who actually believes that they are a gifted reader will offer their services for free, while the quacks are the ones jumping to charge you large sums of money to reveal your fortune and the meaning of life. Yay to Nintendo for being the quack.

The idea behind Top Player Tennis was that it featured the top male and female tennis pros of the time, Chris Everet and Ivan Lendl (shows how old the game is), who would give you tips and lessons on how to play the game of tennis as you progressed through various tournaments. However due to poor gameplay, mediocre graphics and the lack of a high fun factor, Top Player Tennis turned out to be one huge lesson in frustration. Oh, and they pronounce Ivan Lendl’s name wrong.

Fish Dude is a simple game of “eat or be eaten.” The game takes place in the ocean, and you control a fish who is somewhere around the middle of the food chain. He’s pretty small and has to look out for bigger fish who will eat him, but he can also snack on the fish he finds that are smaller than he is.

At first glance, Super Monkey Ball Jr. brought horrible flashbacks of Marble Madness and the 3-D wooden board game Labyrinth—both of which I hated and sucked at. The resemblance was just too uncanny: navigate a little monkey in a plastic ball around a course to the finish gate by angling the terrain to make him roll a certain way. After playing a few rounds of it and continuously losing control of the monkey and watching him plummet off the edge with a heart-wrenching little shriek, I was read...

Into the midst of all the shooters, macho beat-‘em-ups and blood-spurting fatalities galloped Crystal the pony, and showed everyone that little girls wanted things to play too. The fact that this title is now an obscurity doesn’t say much about the state of girl-games, and it’s truly a shame that girls today are tossed Barbie, Mary Kate & Ashley and Britney Spears games to “enjoy” when there were at one time innovative and intelligent games like this being made for them.

Lady Sia is a visually stunning, solid hack n’ slash platformer that has everything going for it except marketability. Perhaps if Sia had looked more like Lara Croft and had been dating a guy with spikey hair named Cloud this game would have gotten more attention, however it seems destined to remain one of those underdogs that not many people know about but those who do feel very lucky to have played.

As a He-Man fan, I really tried to like this title. I watched the original cartoon as a kid, and had all the trinkets: the playsets, action figures, and even a He-Man sticker book. Yet I’m not so much of a fangirl as to stick up for a game like this, which is obviously a rushed and poorly designed cash-grab.

Though it took a while, the wonderful, challenging, quirky and oh-so-Japanese music game genre has finally been infiltrated and butchered by the unstoppable steam-roller of mainstream America. And what better mascot to usher in this new age than Britney Spears, whose pretty voice and midriff sure can sell CDs, and now, it seems, videogames as well.