Overall, the entire endeavor is extremely costly and a good chunk of playtime is necessary to amass enough money to trick out the small mansion after blowing thousands on the initial structure. Yet this is perhaps the true quality of Hearthfire-the ability to simply get players back into the world of Skyrim after abandoning it after exhausting the main quest or slaying through the Dawnguard expansion.

As it stands, Pid is a misguided platformer that is set to quickly disappear from memory.

Simply put, F1 Race Stars is the kart racing equivalent of a self-help seminar, or of a powerpoint on learning real estate sales. Like those sorts of intellectual death marches, it frequently made me yawn while playing and the whole thing has a painful sense of inevitability to it-which at least draws a further comparison with the sport on which it places primary focus.

In a certain sense, Ni No Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch seems to be exactly as advertised. The quality of the artwork is unimpeachable, just as one might expect from the studio that created it. Unfortunately, the beauty of Ghibli has been painted onto the unimaginative and poorly-executed design of Level-5. As a result, Ni No Kuni turns out as blandly as its name suggests.

It looks sharp and it may be perfectly serviceable, but with all of the other interesting things happening in video games right now, something as surprisingly soulless and rote as Crysis 3 has absolutely nothing to recommend it.

Despite all these issues, Dead Space 3 isn't a bad game—but it's not a particularly good one, either. The focus on co-op, attempts to ditch the horror elements in favor of more mainstream sci-fi shooter aesthetics, and the disjointed, repetitive feeling of the project as a whole prevent it from ever becoming something that pops.

The Book of Unwritten Tales isn’t bad—it just feels like the developers weren't sure if they would rather homage LucasArts or ridicule Blizzard, so they tried to do both. Sadly, they succeeded only in making both aspects tepid and bland. That said, I would honestly recommend it to people who love adventure titles because beneath the fetch-questing is a solid game with quirky characters, decent puzzles, and some amusing self-aware humor.

An essentially generic nature is why Grandia Xtreme winds up being such an empty experience overall.

The repetitive hack-and-slash gameplay has nothing in common with the earlier incarnations of the series and will surely alienate the Fallout faithful. Meanwhile, the newcomers to the Fallout universe aren't likely to be sucked in by the uninteresting and flat characters nor the nonexistent story.

It's the perfect example of the sort of game that seems to poised to make its mark on the world and then inexplicably proceeds to hang out at the local mall for its entire adult life.

Dull, mediocre games… well these games are like a painter's palette filled with nine shades of gray. There isn't much to work with, so the end result is as lifeless and flat as a Midwest landscape study in wintertime.

It's not as pretty as "Splinter Cell", it's not as engaging as "SOCOM 2", and it features a frustration factor that's almost in the realm of "Ninja Gaiden"—without the rewards.

To see a series falter so badly after years of doing everything right is distressing.

A mildly diverting shooting gallery, a mediocre FPS, and a slap in the face to those of us who have been waiting for seven years for a decent western-themed shooter.

The characters are there—now someone just needs to figure out how to create some gameplay that makes the experience fun and not a chore.

I just can't imagine a filmmaker putting me in a situation where, once the movie stopped, I was forced to go onto a website to find out how it ended. I also can't imagine how anyone at Microids couldn't see just what a fatal misstep this lack of an ending was.

What is disappointing about Musashi is that I expect more from Square-Enix. The company seems to be mired in a bit of a rut as of late, and churning out average, if uninspired, games like this one doesn't seem to be a good way to get back on course.

All of the elements that make up a decent survival horror game are on display here. The monsters, the violence, the simplistic, action-oriented storytelling... They're just so shoddily rendered and assembled that all they add up to is a mediocre experience.

It's well presented and Brave's misshapen but personable face and tape-like hair make him an oddly likeable hero (that one wouldn't necessarily mind seeing again), but for the most part his showcase adventure ranks as an inescapably hollow and forgettable experience.

Humor and unusual storytelling can't save it from stiff controls and an awkward camera.

The Warrior's Code is a long slog that's guaranteed to kill some free time—and may even entertain newcomers to the genre—but there isn't anything rewarding or enjoyable about it.

Plunder-by-panic and slippery experience points are intriguing, but these innovations fall flat without solid, bug-free foundations to support them.

Given the subject matter, Kane & Lynch never had a chance of being a fun game, but it had every chance of being a good one. It's not.

After Burner may be spiritually true to Sega's seminal 1987 hit, but game design has progressed by leaps and bounds since then. Cleaving so closely to its dusty, outdated forefather hurt more than it helped, I'd say.

Even if I couldn't set my love for the series aside for this review, I'm sure that Def Jam Icon's problems are so clear and inarguable that even if I'd never played any of the previous titles I would have rated it exactly the same.

It's too bad that by over-complicating everything, Touch the Dead gets this simple formula so very wrong.

It's inherited all the original game's problems—a major feat, since it's developed by a whole new company—and lost some of its charm in the process.

In the end, Spectral Force 3 is more disappointing than bad.

Topatoi Episode 1 delays its payoff for too long, and in the end exists mostly as a suggestion of a game that might be good to play when (and if) it makes its way to the PSN store. Add the fact that the characters of Topatoi lack any of the charm or personality of your typical platformer cast—their in game models look a little revolting even—and it's a hard game to recommend.

Tron: Evolution has too much going for it to write it off as another inspiration-free paycheck game, but I can't help but feel that if the developers had had another six months and perhaps a little more freedom to stray from the film's narrative, the end result would have been much better.

Hardcore item-management fetishists might find some joy here, there’s simply not enough balance or content for Phantom Crash to stand on its own, much less measure up to the competition (I’m looking at you, "Armored Core 3").

Sadly, the latest incarnation of that landmark effort doesn't have the personality, lush animation or blisteringly fast pace that made the original such a hit. What it does have is...not much.

Without marrying any substantial content or meaningful context to the visuals, this is the type of depth-free cheap titillation that we need to move past if we're ever to break away from the stereotypical gutter that society at large perceives current videogames to be in.

The bland graphics, clunky controls, and atrocious load times (nearing 40 seconds in some instances) are nearly insurmountable shortcomings.

It's a shame that given such a potentially provocative issue as the premise of the game, Whiplash chooses to take it nowhere and instead falls back on ineffectual humor, cartoonish violence, and an unimaginative interface.

From Dust is an interesting, original and creative project... unfortunately, it never capitalizes on its promise thanks to too many technical problems and a feeling of unpolished awkwardness. More frustrating and tedious than uplifting and deific, I'd love to see a revamped installment with the kinks ironed out. As it stands, I was all too ready to leave the islands behind and head back to the mainland at the first opportunity.

Unfortunately, F.E.A.R. 3 is a prime example of a game that can't decide what it wants to be. In trying to be an intense horror campaign and an intricate co-op/multiplayer experience at the same time, it winds up being neither and pleasing no one. I see some good ideas in the story and multiplayer modes, but a distinct lack of focus brings it all down.

It's still worth it to see what it brings to the genre, but don't expect to finish it without significant financial investment.

With its relatively small menu of uninspired puzzles and cast of irritants, One Against All fails in its attempt to capture the Layton magic.

When all's said and done, Ragnarok Odyssey takes almost all of its major cues from the leader of its genre, and then flatly fails to deliver a commensurate level of depth in combat, quest design, and equipment tinkering.

Cognition fails not from a lack of execution, but from a lack of imagination.

Alluring pop divas…political rebels…musical party game...Unison spreads itself too thin trying to satisfy all of these criteria, and ultimately comes up short everywhere.

Far and away, Legacy of Kain: Defiance's most heinous offense is the way it shamelessly doles out its own sloppy seconds, thirds, and fourths in place of actually creating tasks and challenges that would be interesting or engaging.

The most monumental loss is style.

By the end of the first level, the player will have encountered every type of objective that the game has to offer, aside from the afore-mentioned "guard the thing" scenario. This depressing formula repeats itself throughout the game, with the "levels" distinguishing themselves solely through window-dressing and increasingly difficult enemies.

Seen through a kid’s eye this game is very cool with its full compliment of squishing sounds and gun blasts. For adults, I suggest you look elsewhere for your entertainment.

Rather from the bold, unique effort I hoped it would be, it's a weak, contrived bore that never gets off the ground. A four alarm blaze? More like a soggy day-old campfire.

But Van Helsing's missions are all means to an end, which is to rehash the film's plot in a videogame.

I honestly do think that Sir Daniel Fortesque is a good character with potential, but I would have much rather seen an all-new game with a nod towards current methodology than a rehash of something that honestly wasn't all that great in the first place.

Ultimate Spider-Man is nothing more than a bargain-bin effort that would be over and forgotten in an hour or two except for the pointless required side missions artificially extending playtime.

Even if the game falls apart fairly quickly, and has bugs and interface quirks that make the main story borderline unplayable, it still deserves a measure of attention and admiration.

In between the unsatisfying battles and the go-nowhere story, there's a lot of searching for the right area or person that will trigger the next cutscene, and a lot of wandering back and forth for the sake of extending the game's playtime.

The simple fact is that even with the elemental tweaks and team attacks, this game is sorely average in terms of the challenges and ideas presented to players.

There's nothing juicy about a boring hero on a boring quest walking around aimlessly searching for the next area to continue a story that I had a hard time caring about.

From its incongruous RPG-style leveling up to its endless recycling of levels to its utterly ridiculous Arabian Nights-themed story, Sonic and the Secret Rings feels horribly padded from top to bottom.

The potential is clearly here for another out-of-left-field cult hit, but the charm of sautéing, stewing, and sometimes scorching wears off too soon, and there's nothing to fall back on to bolster the experience.

I'm not exaggerating when I say that Jewel Summoner is at least half dialogue, if not three-quarters - a fatal mistake when the quality of such is so unappealing.

I was really hoping that Tiger 08 would satisfy my desire to have a polished and refined golfing experience that uses the Wii remote. With its frustrating and inconsistent gameplay, however, Tiger 08 is (much as I hate to say it) way under par.

Comic books are excessively violent. Mortal Kombat is excessively violent. Yet somehow the combination of the two has been watered-down to the point of irrelevance, all in the hopes of increasing the number of people who would play it.

But Clear Sky takes everything that I loved about Chernobyl—the mature storyline, the nerve-wracking underground laboratories and the rewarding combat—and muddies them with a litany of bugs and bad design to the point that it overwhelms its more redeeming qualities.

What little the game does add to the saga is forgotten by everyone at the end. Disney fans will be most disappointed of all: Disney's characters barely put in an appearance, and Disney's worlds are just window-dressing for a killzone.

The controls and interaction with the game world are suspect at best and downright awful at worst. And even looking past that I still come away disappointed. The script is weak, the characters' interactions/motivations are often left unexplained, and the voice acting is mediocre in some places and bad in others. The only thing Heavy Rain really has going for it is the composition of some of the individual scenes, and that's not nearly enough to carry the whole game on its own. So in the end we don't have much of anything except the spectre of what might have been.

It was pretty short, I forgot it had a story, and the interface needs some work. It wasn't bad, though. It was just Sudoku.

A larger budget might have saved the driving physics and improved the experience of the town, but no amount of money could repair the terrible writing and wrong-headed design that really sink Deadly Premonition.

Ragnarok DS's problem is that decisions that are forgivable in a free MMO are really grating in a single-player game that costs money.

Although the controls were solidly implemented, the graphics were some of the best I've seen on the Wii, and I do believe the developers' hearts were in the right place, Fragile Dreams: Farewell Ruins of the Moon is a tedious, trying experience that didn't offer enough reason for me to carry on in spite of its downsides.

A dating simulation combined with more traditional combat is certainly an interesting concept, but with Sakura Wars: So Long, My Love's inconsistent tone, exhausting battle system and poor story, it's trying to be too many things at once.

Quite honestly, I would recommend the first game over Crackdown 2 with no hesitation, and based on what's actually here, it seems to me that positioning the effort as a piece of $15 DLC would have been far more appropriate than trying to pass it off as a $60 retail release.

Singularity is the very definition of average, and the lack of subtitles knocks it just below. It is the gaming equivalent of white rice, the Ford Focus, and black coffee. Its taste is decidedly bland, but it'll do its job.

While Ivy the Kiwi? is an incredibly cute character and makes a valiant attempt to bring back a style of game that few developers have attempted in recent years, the core concept never quite finds happy coexistence with the player interface. For project as simple and straightforward as this one, that particular barrier proves too great to overcome.

For the most part the simplified controls work like a charm, allowing the player to zip around the map, easily locating their prey. It's the maps themselves that are the problem-they're far too small for the number of players that regularly compete on them.

In rudely flipping Gunblade NY & L.A. Machineguns onto store shelves for some quick cash, Sega has shown that they can't be bothered. If that's true, then why should anyone else?

As much as I may admire the concept, I really can't recommend Lost in Shadow to anyone except those who crave simplistic, repetitive gameplay and an unnecessarily bloated running time.

When it comes down to it, stripping away the gameplay, all GTA2 brings to the table is foul language, gratuitous violence, and aging 2D graphics. Once my bloodlust was quenched, GTA became a monotonous and painfully shallow game.

The game does offer a 4-way link for both singles and doubles matches, though finding four people with a copy of Davis Cup Tennis is likely to be the biggest challenge.

Strikes me as a good idea, but in its current state it falls obscenely short of the fun and playability that usually comes with a Mario game.

Mazes of Fate might have had a slim chance a few years ago, but arriving alongside infinitely more capable competition renders rough, mediocre and annoying content immediately, undesirably obsolete.

Opponents cannot be forced off balance, pressured, or intercepted. Kaktuo Chojin rarely forces players to think, react, or adapt to their opponents. Worse still is the absence of a deep grappling system.

For all its advertising about a virtual world governed by cause and effect, Fable is really just a terribly unambitious hack and slash game in a bad marriage with a personality simulator. The hack and slash works fairly well-everything else, not so much.

I'd much rather play as a horny male chauvinist in an engrossing game than as a strong woman in a bad one. Playing the part of a warrior queen should be fun, but my enthusiasm was gone by the time I beat the game's final boss. "I never have to play this again," I thought. "Thank God(dess)."

Everything from the graphics to the storyline feels half-baked.

For a piece of DLC that offers so little, $7.00 seems steep. Save some hard-earned money and watch the videos of it on YouTube instead… the most relevant bits can be seen in a minute or two, and those Microsoft points can instead be spent on something more substantial.

Though short, Swarm lasts a bit too long, if you ask me, being that it fails to expand upon its novel concept. It's a shame, too, because when you get back to what I brought up before, Hothead's marketing is enjoyably irreverent and funny. Take a look at the promotional videos on their website, and it's clear that they really love this concept, and that they're attempting to inject their products with a very particular sense of humor. If only the game matched their ads in its pizzazz and charm.

Brink works fine, yes, and can deliver a competent multiplayer game of shoot-shoot, but as a full-priced retail title it leaves a lot to be desired. A simple, story-less downloadable game would have made much more sense.

Red Faction: Armageddon is a perfectly functional third-person shooter, but there's nothing at all to recommend it. The design is incoherent on its own merits, even more so in the context of the series, and the narrative fares even worse.

In short, Dungeon Siege III is a morass of flat characters, a story as dull as dishwater, and combat that manages to be both frustrating and boring.

While girlfriend-friendly and action-ready, Crimson Alliance needs some beefing up to be a memorable experience. Booting up the similar Torchlight for just a few minutes is enough to show that while simple is good, elegant is better.

Even with all these problems, however, I found the plot interesting enough that I'm definitely hooked. If by some miracle there is a The Cursed Crusade 2, I'd be interested in seeing the story wrapped up as long as this title's wealth of problems are fixed.

I still count myself as a huge fan of Dead Island, but Ryder White takes too many wrong turns and strays from what made the original game what it was. Completists will surely want to see the twist ending, but more casual fans of the game don't have much reason to take this brutal, frustrating trip.

I might have had less aggravation if I had a dedicated group of other players to go through the game with from beginning to end, but I wouldn't ask any of my friends to pay full price for The Lord of the Rings: War in the North. Thankfully, since War in the North was released after Dark Souls, before Skyrim, and on the same day as Uncharted 3, there's a good chance the game is already in the bargain bin for a fraction of the MSRP.

The characters, the story, the controls, the difficulty, and even the central premise... all of it seems to be on the right track, but none of it hits the mark. I still think there's a lot of potential here, but like any other game, the basics have to be nailed before it can start reaching for greatness.

In closing, as said before, it's nice for a game to be simple and get right to it, but only the very few combo-obsessed high-score junkies will follow The Splatters all the way to the end.

It's been about a week since I finished Inversion, and I've already forgotten most of what happened in it. There were two plot twists that were mildly interesting and a couple of cool uses of the gravity powers, but as a whole the game is strangely lifeless. Most of the time, Inversion was boring me, and when it wasn't doing that, it was frustrating me.

Fractured Soul is not a bad game by any means, but its keen concept is played out again and again with a taskmaster's sternness, and little else.

On a mobile platform like this one, a title has to look good, feel good, and be comfortable to play. This one strikes out in all three areas.

Fans of the Giana Sisters likely Kickstarted this game, thus earning a copy of it in the process. However, for those who don't already own a copy, there's no way that I can recommend it without it weighing on my conscience. Giana Sisters: Twisted Dreams is simply not worth the time.

In the end, Arkedo has shown up to the party to share with us a huge ball of digital cotton candy; as soon as we get a taste of its ultra-sweetness, it's already evaporating. Fans of the game might counter that there's nothing automatically bad about a trifle of a game, but there's also nothing automatically good about one, either.

Rather than a game created to hook people with strong gameplay or a novel idea, Noble Nutlings feels like it's all about the Benjamins. Pass.

Although there are some interesting ideas here and the Vita could benefit from a title like Soul Sacrifice, everything rides on how good the core game is, and to me, it just doesn't hold up.

But what baffles me most about Manhunt is that I'm not exactly sure how I'm supposed to feel about those executions. What do the game's producers want me to feel? Should I feel...vindicated? Exhilarated? Vengeful? Empowered? I'll tell you how I did feel: I felt evil, and queasy, and numb. Eventually, a strange kind of self-loathing set in, followed by a low-level depression.

It's sad. It boggles the mind to think that this much time was spent on presentation and backstory when none of it resonates in the slightest.

If the game were less suffocating, then perhaps I would give it a chance. You'll just get too frustrated with this game waiting (read: reloading) at your next chance to drive through a frustrating trial.

To recap: imagine playing the most uninspired, atmosphere-free "Resident Evil" clone that could exist... Then instead of using a control pad, you must verbally tell your brain-free character exactly what to do every step of the way. This is what Lifeline is like.

This could have been a great original title, but instead it's a waste of shelf space with just one redeeming feature: it only takes around five hours to beat.

Just inexcusably bad. How can a sequel suffer from the exact same problems as the first title?

Too much effort was spent trying to force loveable, quirky characters down my throat with all the believability of The DaVinci Code's plotline.

My advice to Team Soho would be brief: raze the series to the ground and start anew. This engine is long past its better days.

Sony Online is really out of touch with what makes this kind of game good. It adds nothing to the genre that hasn't already been done before—and actually gets a lot of it wrong. I'm never leaving my copy of "Lumines" at home again.

One-on-one battles were a great way in the past to offer quick diversions in the middle of a longer AC campaign, but they are not enough to sustain a game all by themselves. Toss in the fact that the game's graphics are still as bare-bones as they were five years ago, and that there's virtually no new content with much of the material being recycled from previous games, and you've got something that would be a $20 add-on at best.

To put it bluntly, Ape Escape Academy is a textbook case of monkey-see, monkey-do; it goes through the motions and mimics the best it can, but lacks the intelligence and understanding required to imbue its efforts with any sort of elegance.

It's almost as though the developers focused everything they had on the art style and equippable items, but forgot to make sure the rest of the game worked as well. A tedious slog, this sort of project is a risky one to undertake since the potential for boredom to kill the experience is so high.

It's not like I need to be barraged by bells and whistles or the world's slickest design, but Rumble Roses XX comes off as cheap and patched-together. Konami should have put more work into making things (besides the women) appealing.

If the words "the death of Aeris" don't bring a tear to your eye, then dropping $40 on Crisis Core certainly will.

The sort of inspiration-deficient throwback that wore out its welcome long ago.

Without replayability, unlockables or any other motivation to continue playing, Point Blank DS shows how advances in game design since the mid-90s could have saved even superficial titles.

I will say that Sneak King was successful from the perspective that it provides an hour or two of incredibly offbeat play, not to mention the fact that it got me into a Burger King for the first time in years. If it wasn't for the stomachache and heartburn afterwards, I'd say it was a win-win situation.

The worst 360 game I think I've ever played with nothing to redeem it. Earth Defense Force 2017 can't even stack up against the recent Burger King games, and those were little better than minigames on a disc coming in at four dollars each. The only possible future I see for Earth Defense Force 2017 is gaining the notoriety as one of those "so bad it's good" games, but don't be fool yourself - it's just bad.

Yes, it's an incredibly, borderline obscenely, brutal game, but within its own context it tells an interesting story and provides some great thrills for the player—or at least it would if it weren't so busy trying to give its players seizures.

Heroes of Mana feels like Dawn of Mana, take two. It's gorgeous and somewhat interesting, but undermined by basic flaws in its ability to let players see what's going on. Here's hoping there's no take three in the works.

If the first game was a chillingly-black horror to be feared, Bloodshot's a pretender in a goofy rubber mask, making funny noises and stumbling over its own feet.

With nothing to recommend it, I say toss this disc into the cracks of Mount Doom and be done with it.

Line Rider 2: Unbound is a cute idea, but in my opinion it doesn't have the chops or the longevity to become a successful handheld title.

It's not a terrible effort, but there are dozens of missed opportunities over the course of the game that could enhance the entire experience, and the fact that practically none of them were taken left me scratching my head.

The gameplay lacks any redeeming qualities, and would have been behind the curve in the 16-bit era. Today, there's just no place for a game like this at all.

Instead of the friendlier, less-confusing version of Armored Core this UMD could have been, it's a bitterly disappointing also-ran that's in severe need of a tune-up.

If Mothership Zeta had been half as long and available at half the price, it might have been worthwhile simply for giving players a quick peek behind the origins of the main game's enigmatic alien wreckage. As it stands, this dog-leg jaunt into outer space ends up a giant could-have-been without any real reason to recommend it, save completion for completion's sake.

Unfortunately, Resonance of Fate gets almost everything wrong and even screws up what it got right.

Mafia II is every bit as soulless and dull as its bland sociopathic protagonist

The most serious problems in Star X lie with its controls. The ship's movements are limited due to poor button configuration.

Like a deflated football, 7 Trials doesn't encourage you to play, nor does it promise exciting play, it just makes play possible.

Seems like a battle system without a role-playing game. There is little variety or depth to the combat, and even in the presence of assorted power-ups it becomes painfully repetitive after only a short while.

For an Xbox game, Fellowship Of The Ring sure does take a long time to load.

It's an intriguing and ultimately fatally flawed entry in an already clogged genre, and a warning to other companies who would use games as a commercial vehicle: please be sure you can make a decent game, or it's worse than no advertising at all.

With flat, repetitive environments and uninspiring combat, Breakdown doesn't have much to recommend it.

Frustrating, boring, and poorly executed, this is a game that is destined for the dustbin.

I do admit that I gleaned more than a few moments of guilty enjoyment from the experience, it's really just a terrible, terrible game that wouldn't be able to justify its own existence without the gleefully gratuitous content.

This could have been a great original title, but instead it's a waste of shelf space with just one redeeming feature: it only takes around five hours to beat.

It's not especially big, but the tedium of the action makes it feel overlong. The lack of variety in enemies and gameplay make it feel almost like a budget title.

What starts out as an interesting idea for a strategy role-playing game (RPG) soon crumbles under the weight of poor design decisions, unintuitive gameplay, and an aesthetic presentation that would have been more at home on the Nintendo Entertainment System than the powerful GameCube.

Clearly, the guys at Access Games understand that games in the Monster Hunter vein are supposed to be punishingly difficult. What they didn't get was that the soul-crushing challenge should come from the gameplay and not poor design decisions. Throwing down your PSP in anger because a boss has outsmarted you is acceptable. Tossing it aside because a fight revolves more around beating the bad game design than the actual enemy is not.

NASCAR 2011: The Game feels like a slapdash effort, a rough draft of a game dressed up with a fancy cinematic and some licensed music and sent out to make a quick buck off the fans.

With a host of bugs, a fundamental lack of gameplay variety, and a key mechanic that doesn't serve the purpose it should, Ravaged is profoundly not the Mad Max game we've been waiting for.

While there are a few sequences that thrill the way a proper Hitman should, like stalking a dark cornfield or combing Chinatown without being dressed as a chef, these brief glimpses of 47's predatory roots are outnumbered three-to-one by kludgey segments more about duckwalking towards exits than they are about killing professionally. I would imagine that the goal of Hitman: Absolution was to take Agent 47's detailed, methodical gameplay and make it appeal to players more familiar with modern action/stealth hybrids, but all the devs have done is eviscerate their unique franchise with poorly-implemented mechanics and left him to die an awkward, humiliating death.

Were Clan of Champions a skeletal presentation piece designed to convince a publisher that these developers were worth investing in, I would give it extremely high marks. As a finished product that people are asked to pay money for, it's completely unacceptable.

While taking on legions of shambling undead with Morgan's fists was a genuine high point, it's not enough to make up for the fourth-class experience that Riptide is. I forgave many of the original Dead Island's problems since it had such a fresh, exciting vision, but Riptide lacks the same heart. Don't get me wrong, though—the developers don't need to reinvent the wheel every time (and more of a good thing is usually a good thing) but there's no excusing the slapdash production values and shortage of good ideas on display here.

As the subject of this review so deftly proves, a whipped-together concept by itself is not enough. I may spend a few minutes flipping through Lowrider magazine the next time I'm at the newsstand, but I'm not going to be spending any more time on the game.

Only a masochist would have the patience and stamina to finish it. I was on one of the game's final missions when, after what was at least my twenty-fifth re-start, I impulsively hit the OFF switch on my television. I'd had enough. I opened a beer, then sat in the darkness, enjoying the sudden silence and the fact that this game, which had been vexing me for days, was once and for all out of my life.

The spinning intensity of "FreQuency" and the glowing, surreal world of "Rez" are perfect examples of the synergy that can be achieved by blending traditional videogames with the energy and visceral response music can command. Arika's effort seems to want to carve itself a similar sort of alternative niche, but possesses only a fraction of the gameplay required for relevance. As a result, it fails vapidly.

A whole lot of hot air and buzz with nothing to back it up.

It's just not fun yet. Sure, playing against people is a mild diversion, and it has a small amount of nostalgic appeal, but if they want to come up with something that's sold entirely on the basis of the fun of destruction, destruction has to be more fun than this.

I see no reason to purchase and play a mediocre amalgamation with no exceptional qualities to recommend it, though I guess I shouldn't be surprised because nearly every game employing dragons as anything but enemies ends up stinking.

To make an embarrassing story short, Splinter Cell: Essentials is a mess. For a series that leads the stealth genre and has worked hard to make itself more accessible and more polished with each successive sequel, an entry like this—even on a portable— can only be seen as a miserable failure.

Reservoir Dogs the game takes a groundbreaking film and jams it into a formula it wasn’t meant to fit in the first place. Some heist movies don’t have heists, some stories are told out of order, and some movies aren’t meant to be games.

So Medal of Honor: Vanguard is just a waste of time and money. A tedious plodding waste suitable only for those absolutely desperate for another first-person shooter to play on their Wii.

So Transformers: The Game is just a complete mess, a game that succeeds in almost nothing that it sets out to do.

WarTech: Senko no Ronde is a trite piece of airy piffle with nothing meaty to recommend it.

Zoids Assault, while not a complete disaster, is something altogether worse. It's completely unnecessary.

In every way save the graphics, I found Muramasa: The Demon Blade to be a failure.

This minor disaster is a huge step down for the developers, Rebellion, after their fun-but-flawed Sniper Elite, and the "people-would-acknowledge-as-better-than-Gears-of-War-had-anyone-actually-played-it" Rogue Trooper.

Something like Infernal: Hell's Vengeance might have gained a minor following during the last generation (and that's a big might have) but it simply doesn't have any place in today's environment. It's technically weak and showcases no forward-thinking in terms of design, and the conceptual side is just as stale.

A miserable, frustrating, and graceless experience, I can't recommend this game to anyone but the most dedicated Samurai Shodown fans—and even those players should be well-warned to stay away

As a dungeon crawler, Strange Journey is abominable. As an SMT, it's unforgivable.

It leaves out the most crucial element: a compelling story. The story is predictable and unimaginative and little is done to move the story forward any faster than at a snail's pace.

I wish I could say that there was some charming, redeeming feature that made my time with Pocky & Rocky with Becky worthwhile, but there isn't. The box art sure was cute, though.

The characters are not only woefully generic, but poorly drawn and animated.

Nearly all progress in game design over the last fifteen years has been ignored, and it shows.

Myst III has so much going for it, in that clearly much effort was put into the plot, the acting, and the richly detailed pre-rendered graphics. But the whole experience never gels into an enjoyable game, and the world of Myst, while scenic, feels too static to be captivating.

Poor control, graphics, level and mission design. These are flaws, and major ones at that. Where the game really fails, though, is that not for one second while I was playing it did I ever feel like I was controlling Superman. Is there anything worse that you can say about a Superman game?

It's a bad game that needs to be reviewed so other gamers out there can avoid being sucked into the whirlpool of uninspired gameplay, bland graphics, and generalized mediocrity that colors the entirety of the title.

For a game that could have been that potential leap forward, it's a real shame that all Apex manages to do is present a mediocre-to-poor driving experience in a painfully threadbare setting.

This is the kind of thing that should be handed out by uniformed men in mall parking lots, not sold in stores.

This game is so weak and poorly constructed that I can't imagine playing it online with real people would make it any better.

The cover shooter genre has plenty of untapped potential. Vanquish hinted at this by kicking up the pace a few (hundred) notches, but Mindjack is perhaps the first to actively introduce truly new kinds of gameplay, and I had my fingers crossed for its success. Unfortunately, the finished product is about as botched as a game can get.

Games as an art form are ready for that next big step, I think. We're ready for that true war game that explores all of a conflict's facets and ramifications, but for now we're stuck with drivel like Homefront that's still about Buff McRockHard fighting evil foreigners. Homefront is the most insidious kind of bad game-it's the kind that masquerades as something more special.

With shoddy production values and multiple lapses in judgment with regard to the game's overall design, BloodRayne: Betrayal feels like an amateurish, half-baked XBLI title that should be begging for a buck instead of the ready-for-prime-time XBLA title it's pretending to be. No thanks.

There were interesting ideas-and a very pretty opening video-but everything about Solatorobo felt…flat.

I had high hopes for Zack Zero going in, but the game is too rough and unpolished to recommend it. The dodgy platforming, bland gameplay, and goofy main character are huge detriments to the experience, and the ridiculous ending is like one final slap in the face before gamers go about their life.

Those expecting a God of War type experience within Asura's Wrath are bound to be disappointed. Hell, those expecting a game are likely to feel some letdown because the bulk of Asura's Wrath is spent watching things instead of doing them. Hardcore anime fans will probably find something worthwhile here, but those looking for a solid action brawler would be well-advised to keep searching.

As is, it's a shallow, irredeemable miscalculation not worth anything close to the $20 asking price.

Almost nothing in Fable Heroes seems well-designed or carefully thought out. Its incoherent visual design is wrapped around a poorly-tuned beat 'em up with an obfuscated progression system, spiced with lousy mini-games. The total absence of story or even silly dialogue is likely to put off fans of the flagship Fable games, and without that draw it's difficult to see why anyone would bother. One or two interesting ideas poke through, but Fable Heroes is a failure.

If it wasn't for the load times, I would be far more likely to recommend Deadliest Warrior: Ancient Combat to anyone that liked the television show and wanted a cheap game that called back to Bushido Blade. The gameplay has merit and there's a good selection of weapons to unlock, but I wouldn't want anyone to suffer through thirty second loadtimes for those occasional flashes of depth.

I tried playing sober for the first few times, but I just couldn't get into it. It took a bottle of wine and a few shots of Southern Comfort to inspire me to play long enough to come to the conclusion I've come to with this game: Galerians: Ash feels like one bad hangover.

It's a stale, ugly revisiting of a genre that should be put deep in the ground, with no story or aesthetic styling to redeem it, a hollow exploration of ground that's already been trodden flat.

Between NanoBreaker and "Lament of Innocence," I remain absolutely unconvinced that there is any hope for the KCET studio to develop a playable, enjoyable 3-D action game.

Oh, and in a final note to developers: please don't put pictures of your children in the end credits of your video games. It's not like it kept me from giving Psychotoxic a bad review—I just feel kind of guilty about it.

It is a game that utterly fails to capture any of the elements that make its source material so enduring and beloved.

The concept of a game that joins dancing and karaoke sounds intriguing on paper, and if Boogie had managed to capitalize on its strange mix of gameplay ideas it might have been pretty enjoyable in practice.

If Treasure's name wasn't attached to this product, I seriously doubt that it would have ever found a publisher, let alone the warm reception most other review sites have given it.

If only the rest of the game had offered some fraction of this scene's inspiration, Eat Lead might have even been worth buying, rather than just taking up space in the budget bin.

Terminator Salvation is abject in its failures. I almost wish there was something I could give it credit for, but as it's impossibly short and incompetently made, there's just no reason to ever play Terminator Salvation.

Defying all expectations, BioWare managed to take one of the most memorable Western RPGs in recent history and completely destroyed everything that made it so good.

A bad game. In fact, it may well be the worst game of the year 2002. About the only redeeming quality it possesses is that it can be finished in well under five hours, making it so that the torture of playing the game itself is relatively short-lived.

For a game that offers nothing but brawler-style combat (along with the occasional jump across a ledge), it's simply not acceptable that the fighting itself is such a boring experience.

I'm not sure just why Activision was in such a rush to release the game that they didn't let Luxoflux actually finish it.

It's sad when a gaming icon known for eschewing cliches gets mired in so many of them that he becomes part of the me-tooism he originally tried to combat.

Amy should never have gotten off the drawing board and into production the way it is, and I genuinely regret that it didn't turn out better.

After sitting through the entire experience, I found Lollipop Chainsaw to be a failure on every level thanks to the rough, unsatisfying play and a script and characters that are the worst of what video games can be. I'm all for edgy, challenging pieces that push boundaries, but this thing isn't hip, sassy, smart or sarcastic-it's just a lot of absurd, awful nonsense with pedo-bait breasts slapped on top

I played Crimson Shroud for a total of 6.5 hours before I got frustrated and gave up because five hours of that playtime was spent fighting the same group of enemies over and over for the random drop which never appeared. Holding back rare weapons or magic items is one thing, but it's incredibly disrespectful of a player's time and a waste of a consumer's money to make forward progress reliant on pure luck.

I swear, I felt my IQ drop as I was playing the game, the sounds of brain cells popping melding nicely with the oh-so-bland cock-rock soundtrack that seems to be a requisite feature of sophomoric extreme sports tie-ins.

It portrays the killing of specific, theoretically real (in that they're virtual stand-ins for the actual soldiers that fought in the war) people as nothing more than a gruesome shooting gallery...At some point everyone has to decide when enough is enough. And now I have.

This is not the worst game ever made, but it's so inept at so many different points that it inspires more anger than a genuinely awful game.

If playing Jaws Unleashed has taught me one thing about game design, it's that if you're going to put a single fun thing in a game it's best to put it right up front where people can see it, and hopefully trick them into thinking that the entire game is fun.

In the end, gamers are all just a bunch of people sitting in front of a television holding a controller, so simulation games must be judged on their ability to make gamers feel like they're performing an action within the limitations of the technology. Cabela's African Safari's poor controls, design choices, and graphics keep this immersion from ever happening.

So once again, Traveler's Tales gets the Lego right, only this time they screw up everything but.

Fairytale Fights would have been starkly disappointing as an XBLA or PSN download-only title, but as a retail game taking up shelf space, it's absolute failure.

Like any scientific breakthrough or new invention, Hydrophobia does represent a significant achievement in its own right. We're just going to have to wait until someone does anything worthwhile with it.

It's so overflowing with contrived gimmicks to (presumably) add to the depth and longevity to the game that its weak core gameplay sticks out like a sore thumb.

I mean, the game's already five years past being relevant, it would have killed them to take another six months to make it decent?