Doom has evolved into its very own software platform, and because of that, all of its straightforward console versions would be useless even if most of them weren't wretched. Most of iD's original maps are great, sure, but I'd have stopped playing years ago if that's all there was. It only takes one or two trips through each before you're wise to the tricks and sleepwalking through the traps. No, Doom owes its absurd longevity to all of the user-made maps that are still being churned out even in...

It's no secret that Castlevania: Symphony of the Night was absurdly easy, but I've always found a certain beauty in that. While I wouldn't want every game to be like it, there's something satisfying about seeing enormous boss monsters strut their stuff and then slaughtering them before they have the chance to pull off a single attack. Turning Alucard into an unstoppable machine was half the fun, and it was no accident; in the final battle, Dracula summoned earlier bosses and crushed them in the ...

Almost every Doom II mod out there, good or bad, takes the same approach: endless sprawl, insane enemy counts, and the subtlety of whichever metaphor cliché you prefer. I'll go with a sledgehammer. Play one and it's fresh, play two and it's still exciting. Once you've barreled through enough of them, though, you come dangerously close to thinking it's time to give up on Doom.

If nothing else, Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty is interesting. The games-as-art movement hadn't even gotten off the ground in 2001, and doing what director Hideo Kojima did with this one takes balls so huge that I expect to see him on a Paris runway now that the drop-crotch pants trend has taken off.

Lots of words come to mind when I think about SNK's Metal Slug games, and one of the very last is “competent”. Riding an elephant, turning into a zombie—I didn't love this shit because of how well it complemented the gameplay. I loved it because it was fucking insane. An elephant eating chili and incinerating the enemy army with his breath would be the highlight of any other game, but in just one level of Metal Slug 3 it's a distant second to seeing your undead hero melt the flesh off their bone...

Ambivalent as I am about Metroid Fusion, Nintendo deserves credit for putting in something fresh. Designing the same old confusing labyrinths filled with hostile wildlife without changing a thing would have been a mistake, and even as the first new entry in the series for almost a decade, the game would have been an enjoyable letdown if it was just a retread. If all you want to do is emulate the Super Nintendo game, there are programs for that.

Nero's no Raiden. Folks who were somehow dumbfounded by Metal Gear Solid 2's ending may have groaned the last time a popular series ditched its popular hero, but it's tough to argue that starting fresh for Devil May Cry 4 wasn't a great idea. The third game did everything there is to do with Dante. Six different fighting styles and ten different weapons, one of which was a fucking electric guitar that shoots lightning and bats—how do you top that? You don't. Not that Devil May Cry 3 was perfect,...

Fun story. My e-chum EmP and I spent an afternoon looking at some dumb old PlayStation games, trying to pick one to lie about and build up as a lost classic. We ended up choosing PO'ed, though the fact that I'm the only one actually writing a review of it shows how reliable the man is. We'd go on eBay, the plan was, since the game only sells for a penny (even when the auction says that it's in GREAT SHAPE L@@K LIKE NEW and promises overnight shipping). We wanted to build PO'ed up as a cult hit D...

15 minutes of FEAR is the most fun you can have with an FPS. Put it on the hardest difficulty you can handle and it's easy to forget about Half-Life and Halo after even just a few firefights.

I'm not normally one for videogame stories, but BioShock's impressed me. Ken Levine and his team at Irrational, if you've managed to miss the sweeping praise, wisely sidestepped the usual Philosophy 101 nonsense while still grasping at a bigger meaning than “aliens are bad”. It's an interactive Xbox 360 condemnation of unfettered capitalism and greed that goes far beyond Metal Gear's soliloquies on cardboard boxes and the meaning of life. Every now-ironic banner lining the city of Rapture procla...