Metroid: Other M
For: Wii
From: Team Ninja/Nintendo
ESRB Rating: Teen (animated blood, violence)

Nintendo took a risk with “Metroid” in 2002 by turning a sidescrolling, exploration-heavy platformer into a trilogy of first-person shooters, so it’s kind of funny that “Metroid: Other M” feels significantly riskier despite at least partially fulfilling what fans expected a 3D “Metroid” game to look like in the first place.

Generally speaking, “M” is a third-person action game that’s heavy on shooting but presented through a semi-fixed camera perspective typically reserved for “God of War” and other action games that lean on melee combat. The shooting is assisted to the point where it feels like an old “Metroid” game: Samus fires in whatever general direction she’s facing, and instead of testing players’ aiming proficiency, the game challenges by loading areas with enemies and forcing players to dash, jump, dodge and otherwise change direction quickly. It works, and in terms of combat intensity, it’s a huge leap forward.

In another nod to “Metroid’s” formative years, players control “M” solely with the Wii remote, holding it sideways and moving Samus with the D-pad instead of the more natural nunchuck joystick. It’s an odd fit given the game’s 3D disposition, but the controls are responsive enough to make it work when in third-person mode.

Where the nunchuck is missed is during “M’s” most clever trick, which lets players enter first-person shooter mode at any point by turning the remote and pointing it at the screen like a blaster. The additional viewpoint is an ingenious use of the Wii’s capabilities, and “M” capitalizes on it by giving players free reign to mix both viewpoints during exploration as well as combat. Problem is, the lack of joystick support means players are sitting ducks in first-person mode. Switching between the two perspectives is a bit jarring, and when you have to do so quickly and in the company of enemies whose movements are never restricted, cheap attacks are inevitable.

That occasional problem aside, though, the gutsy use of two disparate viewpoints and schemes makes “M” a special game instead of simply what everyone expected “Metroid” to become, and it doesn’t come at the expense of anything for which the series is known. “M’s” lush landscapes are rife with secret passageways, hidden upgrades and non-linear terrain that only becomes traversable once Samus finds some of those upgrades. Classic enemies accompany numerous new faces, and the boss fights that have long been the franchise’s hallmark are consistently inventive and, thanks to “M’s” new ideas, very intense. This is a wonderfully tough and intelligent game.

Perhaps “M’s” biggest risk of all is its outfitting of Samus with a full backstory, that she narrates, after 24 years of games in which she rarely uttered a single word. “M’s” stab at Samus’ origins is drippy and clumsy, and those who have enjoyed her silent stoicism might wish to avert their eyes and ears from her newfound ability to pour her feelings everywhere. But any attempt to color the past of an iconic Nintendo character is a valiant one, and even if “M” doesn’t take the history where some would like it to go, it still beats driving down the same tired avenues we already know by heart.

And if you absolutely hate the story? Sorry, you can’t skip the cutscenes. But they’re brief, and they don’t dictate the mood of the gameplay, which is as perfectly “Metroid” in this incarnation as in any other.

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Mafia II
Reviewed for: Playstation 3 and Xbox 360
Also available for: Windows PC, OnLive
From: 2K Czech/2K Games
ESRB Rating: Mature (blood, intense violence, nudity, sexual content, strong language, use of drugs and alcohol)

Because “Grand Theft Auto” popularized it and because most other games have simply fallen in line, conventional wisdom suggests that any game with an open world must fill that world with umpteen pointless activities to justify its worth.

“Mafia II” doesn’t do this. Empire Bay, the fictionalized but very recognizable riff on 1940s New York City, is wide open for discovery, and players can steal cars and visit shops between missions until their thumbs are sore. But outside of some collectibles and a small smattering of elective activities, there really isn’t much of anything for players to accomplish off the storyline’s main roads.

But is that really a terrible thing when those main roads include a storyline that spans 12-15 hours and takes players from World War II, through prison and up the ladders of multiple families? “Mafia II” prioritizes its characters and the finer details of their world over obligatory busywork, and the choice pays off at little expense to the game’s value.

It certainly helps that 2K Czech gets the core mechanics right, even if the game falls into the open world mission design trap of having players repeatedly assume the role of virtual errand boy. Story dictation aside, the bulk of “Mafia II’s” missions consist of some combination of driving to a destination, shooting or brawling with enemies, and driving back.

But while the shooting is standard cover-based third-person fare — and is saddled with a radar system that occasionally misleads players about the proximity of enemies — the action is considerably more polished than the sloppy gunplay that was excused in the “Grand Theft Auto” and “Godfather” games as a byproduct of their open-world design. “Mafia II’s” hand-to-hand combat portions lose steam due to how easy it is to dodge punches, but the one-on-one nature of the fistfights far outclasses the meandering brawling found in those other games.

“Mafia II’s” driving controls, while no more exemplary than the norm, are similarly dependable, and the game strikes a nice chord by both increasing and decreasing the realism at the same time. Empire Bay’s cops try to pull players over for speeding and running red lights in addition to the usual violations, and cars flagged as wanted remain that way until they’re modified at a body shop. At the same time, the game doesn’t make it a hassle to lose the police — especially when a mission is in progress — unless the chase is part of the mission’s design.

Small considerations like those continually enhance the experience. Stealing cars means physically picking the lock instead of just tapping a button, and because it’s easier to just keep the car you already have, it’s also easier to form bonds with (and pay to upgrade) certain cars instead of steal any ride in sight. Hiding from cops while wanted is fun because the cover controls double as stealth controls, and while injuries heal themselves and cars always run, players who stop for food and gas will outperform those who don’t.

It’s also easy to develop a true sense of place when the game coats the streets with ice and plays Christmas music during one stretch and presents the same environments later on with the effects of changing seasons and passing years both accounted for. “Mafia II’s” storyline borrows liberally from the big box of Mafia movie tropes, but between the scope, the details and how good everything looks and sounds, the excessive reverence is easily forgiven.

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Shank
For: Playstation 3 via Playstation Network and Xbox 360 Live Arcade
From: Klei Entertainment/EA
ESRB Rating: Mature (blood and gore, sexual themes, strong language, violence)
Price: $15

Everything about “Shank” has been done before and will be done again, but maybe no game has put it all together and made it look this easy to do so. Like “Metal Slug,” “Shank” is a cartoony sidescroller that outfits players with some guns, a few grenades and a jump button. But “Shank” also borrows the melee combat of a “Devil May Cry” and, like that game, lets players mix the two styles on the ground, in the air and in whatever combination they please. A handful of hand-to-hand attacks — including the magnificent pounce ability last seen in the “Wolverine” game — further expands the arsenal, and the ability to scale ledges and run along walls lets players perform stunts normally reserved for the Prince of Persia. “Shank” is by no means an easy game, and some of the tougher enemies and bosses have some pretty cheap attacks in their bag. But the game’s rich arsenal of abilities is outclassed only by its ability to tuck everything into a dead-simple control scheme that turns even middling players into supermen, and a generous checkpoint system allows players to play dangerously without worrying excessively about the consequences. “Shank” sports a single-player storyline as well as a separate suite of co-op (local or online) missions, and it bakes both inside an outstanding graphic novel presentation that’s refreshingly minimalist, beautiful to look at and bursting with awesome character designs.

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World: The Game
Reviewed for: Playstation 3 via Playstation Network
Coming soon for: Xbox 360 via Xbox Live Arcade
From: Ubisoft
ESRB Rating: Teen (animated blood, cartoon violence, language, mild suggestive themes)
Price: $10

Were “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World” simply an awesome stab at capitalizing on a comic book and movie that itself lovingly rides the wave of 1980s video gaming nostalgia, it’d be a perfectly easy game to recommend.

But “Pilgrim” humbles simple nostalgia by taking those old games down avenues that either weren’t imagined or weren’t technologically possible back in their day. And it even does contemporary gaming a few better with a level of stylish abandon few games have the appetite to match.

This isn’t to suggest “Pilgrim” reinvents what it fundamentally is — a sidescrolling beat-em-up in the vein of “Double Dragon,” and especially “River City Ransom” — or that those who couldn’t get into those games 20 years ago will somehow get into this now. The objective remains the same, and while “Pilgrim” uses slightly more of the controller than its forebears could, it inevitably and regularly devolves into pounding the same couple of buttons when things get hairy.

But for those who still love the mindless reactionary action this genre provides, the contributions “Pilgrim” makes are wonderful. The game regularly crowds any given screen with enemies — as in up to a dozen or more — without slowing down even a trickle, and it’s just as generous with the variety and amount of items in the environment that players (and enemies) can use in lieu of fists and feet. A weird but enjoyably generous physics system allows quick-thinking players to use these objects in myriad creative ways — throwing a ball at an enemy, for instance, and then kicking the ball at another enemy after it bounces off the first guy’s face.

“Pilgrim’s” fighting controls are versatile and plenty responsive enough to offset the imposing imbalance of manpower, and a persistent leveling system adds new moves whenever players level up one of the game’s five playable characters. “Pilgrim” measures player and enemy attributes with a points system normally reserved for role-playing games, and acquired attributes carry over to new games, tempting completists to replay the game multiple times to fully max each character out. In a nice concession, acquired experience carries over even when players lose all lives and have to otherwise restart a level. Like its influences, “Pilgrim” is a tough game even on its default setting, but it’s savvy enough to give players some sense of progress even when all else fails.

While “Pilgrim” truly succeeds on the strength of its gameplay, it likely will be best remembered for its audiovisual style, which combines garishly pixelated graphics and high-definition polish to marvelous effect and slaps on a magnificent chiptunes soundtrack that would be iconic today if it had originally debuted 20 years ago. Thematically, “Pilgrim’s” levels run the gamut — a rock concert here, a dojo there — and it mines those themes while piling on numerous callbacks to gaming’s past for a presentation that is nothing short of blissful.

While “Pilgrim” supports four-player local co-op to frantically fun effect, the only place the game feels dated in all the wrong ways is in its failure to deliver an online equivalent. The sheer insanity of the action is miles more fun with three friends in the same room, but for those who lack that option, the omission of any kind of conciliatory prize is a major blemish in what otherwise is a work of art.

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Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light
Reviewed for: Xbox 360 via Xbox Live Arcade
Coming soon for: Playstation 3 via Playstation Network, Windows PC
From: Crystal Dynamics/Square Enix
ESRB Rating: Teen (animated blood, violence)
Price: $15

Given the lack of “Tomb Raider” in the name, to say nothing of the budget price and downloadable state of the game, one might mistakenly assume “Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light” is a lark for player and creator alike while everybody waits for the next proper “Raider” game to appear and get Lara back to doing what she does best.

But that isn’t necessarily so — and actually, it may be those who don’t normally take to “Raider” who might enjoy “Light” most of all.

Though “Light’s” storyline and environments very obviously exist in “Raider’s” universe, the actual game generally eschews the epic environmental platforming challenges that are the series’ typical centerpiece. Instead, “Light” takes place from an overheard isometric perspective, and like “Diablo” and other games that share that viewpoint, its primary ingredient is combat.

Lara has never excelled at combat from close range, but from high above, she’s a natural. “Light’s” controls — left stick to move, right stick to aim, trigger to fire — are a natural convergence of twin-stick and traditional third-person shooters, and outside of providing players a nice variety of weapons to discover and use, the game doesn’t muck with time-tested conventions. In a nice touch, “Light” scores players based on their ability to dispatch enemies and discover hidden treasure, and each level has optional score challenges on top of other bonus objectives that, upon completion, reward players with special weapons and upgrades.

The combat and scoring systems make no bones about “Light” being a more arcadey experience than traditional “Raider” games, so it’s all the more pleasantly surprising when it becomes apparent just how much the game still offers to those with a penchant for exploration. Platforming challenges are significantly less ambitious than in the proper games, but they’re here, and “Light’s” control scheme allows Lara to jump, climb, and swing around environments and puzzles that provide a satisfying challenge without overshadowing the combat.

Additionally, while “Light” doesn’t stop players from beelining through the primary objectives, the slew of optional challenges that lie off the beaten path — including self-contained challenge rooms that dangle additional rewards at the end of the puzzle — also provide many of the game’s most gratifying and fun challenges.

As the story explains, “Light” supports two-player co-op throughout the campaign, and a crop of bonus speed-run challenges are clearly designed with two players in mind. At the same time, dueling scores encourage players to get the kills and gems and one-up each other. “Light’s” execution of co-op play is as no-nonsense and functional as one expects it to be, and the loose treatment lets players be as ancillary or antagonizing as they wish.

Unfortunately, until late September, it’s also local only. Crystal Dynamics plans to patch online co-op into the Xbox Live version and include it out of the gate when “Light” comes to Windows and Playstation 3, and the patch will naturally be free. Still, if you’re downloading “Light” specifically for the online co-op experience, you still have six weeks of waiting to do.

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Quake Live
For: Various Web browsers (Windows PC/Macintosh/Linux)
From: id Software/Bethesda Softworks
ESRB Rating: Teen (language, suggestive themes, violence)
Price: Free for basic account, $24/year for premium account, $48/year for pro account

Stunning though today’s games are, there may be no better demonstration of gaming’s rapid technological growth than the ability to open up a browser window and play something that brought computers to their knees barely 10 years ago. But that’s what “Quake Live” does: It takes the underpinnings of “Quake III: Arena,” builds a persistent community and modern interface around it, and, at its base level, gives the thing away to anybody willing to set up an account and download the plug-in needed to make it run. The game looks predictably dated, but it hardly matters given how smoothly and quickly it runs, and the essence that drove “Arena” in 1999 — fast, trigger-happy action and lots of weapons, maps and customizable modes to keep players engaged — still burns bright today. “Live’s” out-of-game particulars all take place via a Web portal that makes it easy to manage friends, build clans, customize characters and keep track of leaderboards, achievements, rewards and character experience. Perhaps most pleasantly surprising, though, is a suite of tutorials and practice arenas that allow nervous newbies to practice against A.I. opponents, making “Live” as inviting to try out as it is easy to set up. “Live’s” release from beta status keeps it free to play on its base level, but for those who plan on digging in, the premium (20 additional maps, one extra mode, additional awards and clan/stat-tracking support) and pro (self-hosted server support, limited premium content sharing with friends, yet more additional awards and clan/stat-tracking support) subscription plans are available as well.

Snoopy Flying Ace
For: Xbox 360 via Xbox Live Arcade
From: Smart Bomb Interactive
ESRB Rating: Everyone 10+ (violence)
Price: $10

With respect to the procession of big-ticket downloadable games currently releasing during Xbox Live’s Summer of Arcade event, the game that released just in front of that wave might be better than just about all of them.

Fans of the “Peanuts” comic strip should find nothing surprising about “Snoopy Flying Ace’s” single-player campaign, which finds Snoopy living out his dream as a World War I flying ace in pursuit of the devious Red Baron.

What might be surprising is just how deep that campaign goes. “Ace’s” compromise between arcade- and simulation-flavored controls feels perfectly right — not so loose as to make flying the planes a mindless cakewalk, but neither stiff nor needlessly complicated enough to keep casual dogfighting game fans from enjoying themselves just as much. The selection of weapons, both authentic and nowhere near, grows considerably as the campaign progresses, and the variety of mission types is remarkable. “Ace” rarely repeats itself in the mission objectives department, and some of the missions are spacious and ambitious enough that players can land their plane, commandeer a turret and take back to the sky as they please to finish things off. The game even supports local and online co-op (two players).

“Ace” flashes similarly remarkable skill with its capacity to blend “Peanuts” characters and imagery into a world that otherwise resembles ours. Nobody dies here — pilots always parachute to safety before their planes crash — and the allowance of cartoonish special weaponry means this won’t ever be confused with a “Battlefield” game. But the basic weaponry operates and sounds like the real thing, and when a plane crashes, it most certainly looks like the real thing. “Ace’s” presentation wants it both ways, and thanks to some careful compromise on both sides, it actually gets its wish.

The variety and ease of play translate nicely to the online multiplayer arena (16 players), which finds “Ace” boasting the most frantically fun competitive arcade dogfighting since “Crimson Skies” succeeded way back in 2002 by observing the same principles. “Ace’s” six modes cover the usual gamut — from individual/team deathmatch to more objective-based battles — and the aircraft and playable character options complement the weapon variety from the single-player campaign to provide players a generous array of options. “Ace” even includes the ability to play as your Xbox Live avatar.

All that gameplay adds up to perhaps the best console gaming value $10 can buy this summer, and as result, “Ace’s” online community remains deservedly lively a few weeks after it first released. Given how infrequently a game comes along to fill this niche, and given how well this one goes about doing it, “Ace’s” longevity might dwarf that of a typical game in this price range.

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Clash of the Titans
For: Playstation 3 and Xbox 360
From: Game Republic/Namco Bandai
ESRB Rating: Teen (blood and gore, mild suggestive themes, violence)

“Clash of the Titans’” dual multimedia failure began with Warner Bros.’s astounding ability to airball a dunk by failing, despite possessing all the technology money could buy, to remake a movie that actually made complete sense to remake.

With the video game, which fails to hold any candle whatsoever to the “God of War” games that took that original movie’s premise and lifted it wholesale, the failure is now complete.

In fairness to game, it doesn’t appear to have nearly the same budgetary freedom as the film. Most of “Titans’” storytelling takes place through the kind of static dialogue exchanges we expected from games 10 years ago, and most of those exchanges are bland even by those dated standards — more akin to receiving mission instructions in a “World of Warcraft” knockoff than playing out what’s supposed to be mimicking a sweeping epic that “God of War” started retelling five years ago to exponentially more dazzling effect.

But the cheap feel hurts far more during the act of actually playing the game. Dated graphics and absolutely pulseless environmental design team up with a patchy level structure that requires players to constantly backtrack into static hub towns to accept new missions that rarely show any more imagination than the dull lands that host them.

As should be expected from any game built around hack-and-slash swordplay, most of “Titans’” missions boil down to some form of killing lots of enemies.

Unfortunately, on top of everything else, the combat feels entirely insufficient for being the centerpiece of the experience.
“Titans” flashes some nice enemy design variety over the course of the game, but individual missions regularly toss out the same enemies en masse, and most of them sport absurdly simple attack patterns and intelligence. The controls are responsive enough, but there’s no tangible impact at all with even the strongest attacks, which makes hacking away at the same enemies ad nauseam completely unsatisfying. Enemies regularly require far too many hits to defeat, which might be fine if they put up an exciting fight. But they don’t, so it’s just a matter of mashing buttons for entirely too long just to get through battles that endear no gratification whatsoever.

One thing “Titans” attempts with some success is to give players the ability to steal and, unlike most games, actually permanently keep enemy weapons. The number of takable weapons is pretty high at more than 80, and “Titans” lets players upgrade any of them as they progress.

But all these weapons and upgrades have to play nice with all that unsatisfying combat, and all that variety isn’t nearly interesting enough to counter how dull the action overwhelmingly is. “Titans” is, at roughly 12-15 hours in length, at least twice as long as it should be even if it had better mechanics. Even the supremely polished “God of War” gets a bit old after eight hours or so, and “Titans” wears out its welcome roughly 10 times over by operating at such a low level by comparison.

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Fragger
For: iPhone/iPod Touch
From: Miniclip SA
iTunes Store Rating: 9+ (infrequent/mild cartoon or fantasy violence)
Price: $1 (free lite version also available)

While “Fragger” doesn’t match up with the immensely popular “Angry Birds” in terms of depth and destructibility, it comes surprisingly close in terms of personality — no small feat, considering this is a game about throwing grenades at soldiers instead of launching deranged cartoon birds at mischievous pigs. “Fragger’s” gameplay operates on similar principles: Players have a limited amount of projectiles, and they must circumvent angles, obstacles, and the laws of physics to take out all enemy targets before ammo runs dry. The less ammo it takes, the higher the score, and the more medals players receive for their trouble. “Fragger’s” puzzles are a bit more clinical, often challenging players to trigger cause-and-effect puzzles instead of simply letting pure physics and destruction take over like they do in “Birds.” But the general premise is the same, and “Fragger” delivers both quality and quantity with 70 (and rising) levels that grow satisfyingly intricate as players advance. “Fragger” nullifies the obvious brutality of grenade warfare with an amusingly cartoony presentation that, in addition to looking really slick, makes the task considerably more charming than it otherwise would have been. The look and sound, combined with the brainy nature of the challenges, makes this a war game even people who hate war might have a great time playing.

Sin and Punishment: Star Successor
For: Wii
From: Treasure/Nintendo
ESRB Rating: Teen (fantasy violence)

The genius of “Sin and Punishment: Star Successor” is not simply how skillfully it creates order out of what initially looks like sheer insane nonsense, but how easy it continually makes that skill look during the five or so hours it takes to experience it for the first time.

Dismissively, “Successor” can be classified as an on-rails shooter, which has become a term synonymous for all the Wii lacks in terms of traditional control schemes. The tag technically applies, because outside of when it pauses to swarm players with enemies or a boss fight, “Successor” is constantly in some form of forward motion, and it’s the duty of players to clear enemies away and keep up with it. Think of “Successor” as an old-fashioned space shooter that moves forward in three dimensions instead of sideways in two, and you can start to picture what’s going on here.

Like most on-rails shooters on the Wii, “Successor” also employs a cursor-based control scheme for shooting purposes. Aim the Wii remote around the screen to pick targets, press B to fire. No surprises there.

But “Successor” enhances these core elements by mixing in more extensive character control than the genre traditionally allows. Isa Jo and Achi, the game’s playable protagonists, can freely run and jump on the ground as well as hover to any corner of the screen, and outside of the on-rails forward and backward movement, “Successor” leaves all character movements in players’ hands.

Even the cursor controls, which complement the often frantic pace by incorporating a perfect dose of aiming assistance that’s effective but so subtle as to potentially go unnoticed, puts most similar control schemes to surprising shame. (An optional control scheme, supporting both the Classic and Gamecube controllers, allows players to go all the way traditional and control the targeting with the right stick.)

All that freedom is crucial, because “Successor” inspires more thrills from mastering and avoiding enemy attack patterns than from putting on a good offensive show. Like a great sidescrolling shooter, “Successor” swarms players with such a high variety of frantic enemy attacks that at first, it looks nothing short of (a) completely random and (b) impossible to circumvent. But everything in the game has a pattern, and players who put in the time to figure “Successor” out will gradually start to see it in a completely different (and far more appreciative) light once those patterns start to emerge.

The quest to master the insane variety of patterns “Successor” devises gives the game considerably more value than initial impressions might imply. The game has a story, and it’s sufficient if you absolutely need some narrative purpose, but seeing how it ends is nowhere near as interesting as playing and replaying stretches of the game to push your high scores up the online leaderboards.

“Successor” scores players like a classic arcade shooter, rewarding the ability to stay alive while also dangling a score multiplier that’s continually in flux and dependent on players’ ability to shoot quickly and just a little recklessly. The system lends itself perfectly to score chasers and perfectionists, and “Successor’s” complete understanding of that art — along with hours of great game design to back it up — makes this a must-play for anyone who identifies with either demographic.

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The Cages: Pro Style Batting Practice
For: Wii
From: Alpha Unit/Konami
ESRB Rating: Everyone

At no point does this review know whether “The Cages: Pro Style Batting Practice” is a smart option for would-be baseball stars who, for all baseball science can tell us, might screw up their swing technique by swinging a Wii remote at a television instead of a real baseball bat at a real baseball. Considering the discrepancies in bat weight, among other obvious factors, it’s entirely likely this is more harmful than helpful for serious baseball players.

But taken simply as a video game simulation of a trip to the batting cages — and taking into account the limitations of the Wii even with the MotionPlus attachment in tow — “Cages” does a surprisingly good job at recreating this particular aspect of baseball practice.

With that said, first things first: Though “Cages” is playable without the MotionPlus attachment, the loss of precision that little attachment provides makes this a useless practice tool at best and completely unplayable at worst. If you’re at all serious about enjoying “Cages,” owning or purchasing a MotionPlus attachment should be viewed as mandatory in order for anything that follows to apply to your experience.

“Cages’” primary interface is as spartan as you might imagine: There’s a baseball field, a pitching machine, your bat (which, in the recommended first-person view, you barely even see) and very little else. The machine throws pitches, and players swing the Wii remote like a bat to try and hit the ball.

What makes it work, in addition to a refreshingly unforgiving demand on swing precision, are the options and interface touches the game lays atop the threadbare gameplay. Every pitch is followed by a skippable but very useful swing analyzer that shows players how early, late, high, low, inside or outside their swings are in relation to the ball’s trajectory. Players also can customize and save presets for the pitching machine, selecting what pitches it can throw and the range of speeds at which it can throw them. A stat-tracking feature logs your batting average and other numbers, and a calorie counter provides a morale boost for those days when your swing completely fails you.

“Cages” pads its value with a couple competitive multiplayer modes (one for two players, another for four), but nothing in the game’s feature set will satisfy players looking for anything resembling a game of organized baseball. The game, along its budget price tag, make no bones about its acute focus, and buyers who expect more from it will do so at their own peril.

What it does though — and taking into account the disclaimers from paragraphs one and three above — it does rather satisfactorily. By no stretch of any imagination is “Cages” a better experience than hitting real baseballs with a real bat, and its value as a training tool is pretty dubious. But for those who go to the cages purely for enjoyment’s sake but wouldn’t mind an alternative in a pinch when the time or means isn’t there, this isn’t a bad investment to make.

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DeathSpank
For: Playstation 3 via Playstation Network and Xbox 360 Live Arcade
From: Hothead Games/EA
ESRB Rating: Teen (blood, cartoon violence, crude humor, mild language, mild sexual themes)
Price: $15

Considering the enduring popularity of the two things — “Diablo”-style dungeon crawling and comedy — “DeathSpank” attempts to merge as one, it’s rather amazing it’s taken this long for the two to come together as naturally as they have here. “DeathSpank” starts off a little slow, and there are a handful of things it does adequately but never expertly. The sensation of combat “Diablo” absolutely nails never feels quite so satisfying here, and between the simplicity of the quest designs and the modest ambitions of the game’s comedic writing and voice acting, this likely will be neither the best-playing dungeon crawler nor the funniest game you play this year. Fortunately, what “DeathSpank” doesn’t do amazingly well, it does more than well enough — so much so that the experience actually improves rather than degrades once the novelty of comedic dungeon crawling wears off. The quests, while not terribly ambitious in terms of variety or design, are at least numerous, as is the bounty of armor, weapons and items waiting to be discovered. The depth of the combat improves with the ability to cast new spells and even combine special attacks. And the world’s fleeting resemblance to an illustrated pop-up book (without the actual pop-up animation) works in tandem with the amusing overall tone to create a universe that, imperfections or not, is a whole lot of fun to explore.

Singularity
Reviewed for: Playstation 3 and Xbox 360
Also available for: Windows PC
From: Raven Software/Activision
ESRB Rating: Mature (blood and gore, intense violence, strong language)

There’s something a little bittersweet about the moment “Singularity” transforms, very early on, from a scary fight between your humble pistol and some fierce monsters to a solid but considerably less tense first-person shooter with typical weapons and typical human enemies.

Fortunately, the bland latter scenario doesn’t last. And even the former scenario doesn’t hold a candle to what happens once “Singularity” lifts the veil and shows what it can really do.

Set both in the 1950s as well as 2010, “Singularity” tells the story of how technology in the wrong hands in the past led to a dramatically different global climate in the present. We’ve all heard that one before, but what “Singularity” lacks in originality, it redeems in thoroughness, combining environmental designs, supporting characters, audio recordings, journal entries and even filmstrips to tell one engrossing story.

Most importantly, following those two early segments, it allows players to harness that technology.

“Singularity’s” TMD device will draw comparisons to the plasmids in “Bioshock,” and some of its powers — telekinesis and a devastating force push, to name two — are straight out of “Bioshock’s” playbook.

But the TMD also gives players the power to age and revert objects in the environment. Technology that lies in ruin in 2010 can, for instance, be restored to its 1955 shape without traveling back to 1955. The trick also works in combat: Players can age enemies and quickly undo the aging to mutate them into enemies of their former allies.

Though it occasionally shifts players between time periods — a pretty cool trick when it offers insights into an environment’s past versus its present — “Singularity” mostly reserves the time control for combat and puzzle solving. You might, for instance, age a bridge to grab an unattainable object beneath it before placing the object atop the rubble, restoring the bridge and carrying the object across the bridge.

Unfortunately, the puzzles rarely require this much imagination, and the vast majority are too similar to be mentally taxing at all. Most involve using the same type of crate one of two ways, and after a while, the only head-scratcher comes from evaluating just how much potential has gone to waste as time passes.

The stunted puzzle growth is part of “Singularity’s” unfortunate campaign to undermine itself with brief but bizarre forays into bad design. An early mini-boss encounter drags too long without ever being remotely tense, while a few areas spawn enemies out of nowhere to deliver cheap, unavoidable attacks from behind. There’s a puzzle that’s tricky only because of the poor layout of a window, there’s a very boring swimming segment, and there’s the occasional frustration of not being able to hear dialogue because the music’s too loud and the game lacks optional subtitles.

With all that said, though, “Singularity” remains a perfectly fun shooter, combining excellent combat with a story that goes all out and delivers a great finish. The flaws are annoying and the unrealized potential of the TMD device is enormous, but too much of the game remains too rewarding for “Singularity” to be completely undermined by all it doesn’t do.

“Singularity’s” multiplayer (12 players), by contrast, is rather ordinary. But because it’s there to supplement the lengthy main course, and because the same solid mechanics still apply, it serves its purpose as a summertime diversion before the fall heavyweights appear. If nothing else, it gives players an opportunity to use the game’s unique weapons and technology to punish their friends instead of just the A.I.

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N3II: Ninety-Nine Nights
For: Xbox 360
From: Konami
ESRB Rating: Mature (blood and gore, partial nudity, violence)

Even bad games generally tend to have some redeeming quality — however faint or fleeting or even ironic — that makes the experience of playing them at least tolerable or understandable, if not fun.

Unfortunately for “N3II: Ninety-Nine Nights,” the only instance of this lies in a rather pretty title screen, which disappears after pressing the start button and gives way to a game that has nothing else going for it on any level.

Like the first “Ninety-Nine Nights” game — and like all those “Dynasty Warriors” games it mimics — “N3II” sounds like a can’t-miss on paper. The story is a dull mishmash of fantasy cliches, but the gist of the game has players singlehandedly taking on hundreds of enemy soldiers at a time and using weapons and spells to thoroughly decimate them at a rate of dozens at a time. Any given mission finds players racking up a kill count in the thousands, and with “N3II” unafraid to show its bloody side, this should add up to a walk through heaven for the truly bloodthirsty.

In actuality, it never comes close. “N3II’s” enemies almost all look the same, and most of them display no artificial intelligence whatsoever. That makes the fights mindlessly dull, and because the game’s battle animations completely fail to convey the impact of a sword swipe capable of knocking 20 soldiers over at once, it lacks any kind of satisfying look or feel even on the “dumb fun” level. You might as well be chopping down stalks of virtual corn instead of enemy armies.

“N3II” injects some challenge in similarly artless fashion by being absurdly stingy with health pickups and giving certain enemies the ability to knock players down repeatedly without giving them any chance to get up or even counter the attack. No one really fights intelligently, but a swarm of enemies and enough cheap hits can be fatal — which, thanks to a lousy checkpoint system, can mean repeating long stretches of the game that weren’t fun the first time.

Nor are they fun the second, fifth, or 300th time. But because “N3II” essentially repeats itself ad nauseam over 20-plus hours, that’s what lies in store. The story goes places — nowhere interesting, but it advances — and that advancement allows players to unlock four additional characters and carry out their concurrent campaigns. But while each character has his or her own weapons, attributes and fighting style, the act of controlling them is identical down the line, and the nature of the fights in hour one is indistinguishable from that of hour 20. “N3II’s” action feels tired before the very first mission is even a fraction of the way finished, and repeating that exercise for the entirety of the game is an exercise in tedium so torturously dull as to turn someone off video games for good.

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Limbo
For: Xbox 360 via Xbox Live Arcade
From: Playdead
ESRB Rating: Teen (animated blood, mild violence)

With respect to the entirely welcome revival of point-and-click adventure games, none of them come close to realizing the awesome possibilities of merging adventuring and puzzle-solving the way “Limbo” does. Played like a sidescroller and presented via a monochrome visual style straight out of the silent films era, “Limbo” begins almost completely free of storytelling and instruction, and it’s up to players to figure out what to do next. Like most sidescrollers, it assumes players know that the joystick is for running and the A button for jumping. But unlike most games of any kind, “Limbo” also assumes players can rely solely on their own intuition to solve the succession of riddles that stand in the way of forward progress. And this is where “Limbo” absolutely beams: The puzzles are legitimately challenging, but because everything needed for the solution exists within the environment and in the general vicinity, the solution never lies out of reach no matter how elaborate the problem may be. “Limbo” achieves a perfect difficulty balance — not so difficult as to devolve into a guessing game, but rarely so easy that the solution immediately leaps out. And because it’s a sidescroller instead of a point-and-click game, it can challenge players to move quickly and jump precisely while also deciphering the puzzles that block the progress. The net result is one of the most intellectually gratifying games to surface this year, and players craving a true mental workout (that, as a bonus, looks absolutely magnificent) must check this one out.

Dragon Quest IX: Sentinels of the Starry Skies
For: Nintendo DS
From: Square-Enix/Nintendo
ESRB Rating: Everyone 10+ (alcohol reference, animated blood, comic mischief, fantasy violence, mild suggestive themes, mild language)

If you have a soft spot for the founding fathers of turn-based role-playing games but loathed everything “Final Fantasy XIII” stood for when it released in March, there could scarcely be a more different game than “Dragon Quest IX: Sentinels of the Starry Skies,” which takes a few superficially backward steps but cherishes the things that, in 2010 just as in 1986, ultimately matter most.

The contrasts are immediate. “FFXIII” is eye candy overload, but an arguably toxic appetite for storytelling overloads the game with cutscenes over which players have no effect. “Skies,” meanwhile, takes a visual dive from its predecessor by migrating from the Playstation 2 to the Nintendo DS, and beyond its introduction, the storyline heads down a path that’s practically boilerplate by genre standards.

But that open-ended sparseness allows “Skies” to give players more control from the start than “FFXIII” arguably provides in its lifetime.

“Skies” lets players not only name the characters in their party, but also design them using a surprisingly thorough character editor. The story that follows may be one that RPGs have been telling since their inception, but it stars whomever players want it to star. And while cutscenes that use the DS’ real-time 3D capabilities aren’t in the same league as “FFXIII’s” pre-rendered scenes, they’re innumerably more personalized and, by extension, far more rewarding over the game’s very long haul.

The customization bent also complements “Skies’s” most impressive innovation: co-op play. Up to four players can team up wirelessly (local only, and everyone needs a copy of the game), and the game is surprisingly liberal with regard to what happens from there. Players can adventure separately in the same world, summon one another for immediate help in battle, and basically treat the experience like a small-scale MMO. “Skies” allows players to join and part as they please, regardless of experience levels and in-game progress, and it doesn’t force anyone to choose between leaning on the feature or completely missing out on its benefits.

That’s about the only way it can work, because for most, the 25 (main quest) to 100-plus (everything) hours needed to turn “Skies” inside out would be almost impossible to invest under inflexible conditions. In this respect, the decision to take the game down the portable route looks like genius. A considerable time investment is needed before everything the game offers is freely available, but “Skies’” world opens up relatively quickly, and it’s exponentially more freely explorable than “FFXIII’s” depressing straight line. Being able to continually chip away at it, regardless of time investment or other conditions, more than compensates for whatever fidelity the graphics would have gained on flashier hardware.

With that said, if you don’t love “Dragon Quest” already, “Skies” won’t be the gust of wind that turns that boat around. Impressively large and intelligently innovative though it may be, this ultimately is the same general pattern of turned-based battling gameplay and storytelling that has subsisted for nearly 25 years. Like its predecessors, “Skies” excels at doing those things by balancing challenge, elegance and depth in ways few turned-based RPGs can, but not so much that it changes the game for anyone who doesn’t love it already.

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Naughty Bear
For: Playstation 3 and Xbox 360
From: Artificial Mind & Movement/505 Games
ESRB Rating: Teen (violence)

Every year, a few games surface that belie the prerequisite that a game must be good in order to be any fun.

This year, the leader of that pack has to be “Naughty Bear,” a thoroughly bizarre, poorly-coded and very arguably reprehensible game that might, because of how easy it is to exploit as well as how strange it is in the first place, be something you might wish to see anyway.

“Bear” stars players as the titular Naughty Bear, who, after getting ostracized by the other bears in his village, decides to turn his hurt feelings into a murderous rampage. The bears look and sound like your prototypical stuffed bears, and the village in which they live is similarly saccharine. The only difference is that players can use a range of weaponry and nearby objects — from toilets to grills — to turn the village into a crime scene. The truly skilled can even traumatize the other bears into turning on themselves.

If it sounds kind of terrible, it’s because it is. Killing isn’t exactly a foreign concept in games, but you’ll need some kind of stone heart to wreak havoc on a sweet-sounding stuffed bear and emerge feeling terrible or at least somewhat disturbed. This, obviously, is what “Bear” is going after by blending cuteness and murder to this degree, but it might be a little too good at it to make this playable beyond the morbid curiosity stage.

What “Bear” isn’t good at is most everything else. The game’s missions are variations of the same few things over and over, and the chapters continually take place in the same tiny environments. The camera is jerky to a motion sickness-inducing degree, the animation and controls lack polish, and the lack of mid-mission checkpoints — even though every mission is divided into very clear parts — makes some of the levels with stricter objectives a needless pain (especially when the camera causes a mission failure).

Last but not least, the game crashes in myriad ways — sometimes hanging on a load screen, sometimes freezing completely, and occasionally just suspending all character animation while parts of the game keep chugging away in some bizarre fashion or another.

On the other hand, some of “Bear’s” shortcomings — chiefly, its sorry excuse for A.I. and stealth — accidentally make the game more fun than it might otherwise have been.

For whatever reason, hiding in shallow patches of grass and bushes makes Naughty Bear completely invisible to the other bears. It doesn’t matter if he’s three inches away from two bears and hidden by a single leaf. It doesn’t matter if he just hit a bear in the face, took one step sideways and is screaming “boo” from the bushes. They can’t see him, and players are free to exploit this absurd reality to terrorize the other bears in ways a competent game wouldn’t allow. It basically allows players who are awful at stealth games to see why players who are good at them love them so much.

But once these novelties wear off, nothing remains but an empty game that plays poorly and makes players feel worse. That makes “Bear” a great rental, if only to satisfy any lingering curiosity about one of the year’s strangest games before realizing that any investment beyond a few bucks and a few hours is money and time poorly spent.

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Blacklight: Tango Down
Reviewed for: Xbox 360 via Xbox Live Arcade
Also available for: Windows PC, Playstation 3 via Playstation Network (later this summer)
From: Zombie Studios/Ignition Entertainment
ESRB Rating: Teen (blood, violence)
Price: $15

Were “Blacklight: Tango Down” a full-priced first-person shooter, its combination of generic atmosphere and tacked-on single-player offerings would make it almost superlatively insignificant. At $15, though, it’s another story. “Blacklight” takes place in environments that look like areas you’ve seen before, and it’s populated by soldiers engaging in battle for reasons that aren’t necessarily important. The single-player (or, with three friends, online co-op) component explains little, but it’s for the best, because the entirely unrefined A.I. — enemies mindlessly spray bullets like walking turrets — makes it entirely skippable anyway. “Blacklight’s” real purpose is as a multiplayer shooter (16 players), and like last summer’s “Battlefield 1943,” it provides a healthy return on investment without reinventing anything. All the usual multiplayer modes are here, the map count is surprisingly high at 12, and “Blacklight” looks, controls and sounds like a $60 game in a $15 game’s body. Better still, it provides a reason to keep coming back, flaunting an experience system that rewards players a massive unlockable cache of weapons, accessories and character improvements. The climb to the top of the rewards pile is steep, and an unimpressive matchmaking system makes it tough on new players who have to overcome experienced players with better gear, but the stream of perks is so constant that it’s easy to find the motivation to beat those odds. (For those who’d rather just play with friends, no worries: Private match support also is available.)

Crackdown 2
For: Xbox 360
From: Ruffian Games/Microsoft
ESRB Rating: Mature (blood and gore, strong language, violence)

Conventional wisdom would suggest that while “Crackdown’s” combination of open-world freedom and superhuman powers made it a deserving cult sensation in 2007, enough has happened since for more of the same to not be enough. “Infamous” and “Prototype” trotted out similar ideas with deeper storylines, “Assassin’s Creed” sped up rooftop bounding with its parkour controls, “Just Cause 2″ blew the roof off the limits of verticality, and “Red Faction: Guerrilla” raised the environmental destruction bar considerably.

But in all that time, and with respect to all those games, none of them really went head-on with the little things that made “Crackdown” so uniquely awesome. “Crackdown 2″ is more of the same with sprinkles on top, but it so perfectly nails everything the first game — and only that game — did right.

It’d better, too, because a lot of it might as well be the first game. “Crackdown’s” nearly non-existent storyline has been upgraded to threadbare here, but the objective — kill the evildoers — is identical. The last game’s ending carries over, and the mutants that began populating Pacific City in “Crackdown” are now overflowing the geographically-altered city during “Crackdown 2′s” nighttime hours. A single, monstrous gang patrols the streets during the day, and players once again take orders from a bloodthirsty and completely hilarious narrator at The Agency. (Yes, it’s called The Agency. Threadbare, see.)

Just as they did last time, players gradually increase their abilities — from jumping distance to ammo expertise to driving acumen — by utilizing those abilities in the game, and players who max out those abilities will outrun cars, jump (or, new to the sequel, glide via a wingsuit) clean over buildings, equip grenades capable of detonating block-wide chain reactions and gain access to some amazing modes of transportation.

In other words, everything practically is as it was three years ago. The enemy A.I. hasn’t evolved, with the gangs still fighting like meatheads and the freaks just plowing forward in extreme numbers. The upgrade system feels mostly the same. The optional pursuit of collectable orbs (500 perched atop structures, 300 hidden away, and a few that actually run away or only activate during co-op sessions) feels mostly the same. Even the highly imperfect targeting system from “Crackdown” returns with no significant improvements made.

But while the amazing level of disinterest Ruffian Games shows in evolving the “Crackdown” formula almost certainly should reflect poorly on “Crackdown 2,” a typical game session often delivers more than enough arguments in favor of not breaking what no other game since has outdone. “Crackdown 2′s” control schemes for running, jumping and driving feel magnificently responsive, and while the weapon targeting definitely could be better, the system in place offers enough upside to justify its presence. The game offers tremendous freedom almost from the start, and the sum total of all the firepower, horsepower, geography and Agency-given talent adds up to an experience that’s shallow but explosively, tremendously fun.

Like its predecessor, “Crackdown 2″ allows players to carry on with or without other players in their world, and the customizable four-player dynamic co-op emphatically improves on “Crackdown’s” barebones two-player support. “Crackdown 2″ also offers 16-player competitive multiplayer for maximum chaos, but while it’s fun in small does, the element of open-world teamwork and anything-goes ingenuity falls away when everyone’s sole focus is on killing everyone else.

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Lego Harry Potter: Years 1-4
Reviewed for: Playstation 3, Xbox 360, Wii
Also available for: Sony PSP, Nintendo DS and Windows PC
From: TT Games/Warner Bros. Interactive
ESRB Rating: Everyone 10+ (cartoon violence, crude humor)

Anyone who was charmed by 2005′s “Lego Star Wars” and gradually less impressed with the franchise’s takes on Indiana Jones and Batman will likely be downright annoyed to discover “Lego Harry Potter: Years 1-4″ continues the Lego games’ unfortunate tradition of not evolving in ways they really, really should.

But this wouldn’t really be a problem if “Potter” didn’t continue the series’ other tradition of continually turning out surprises within the constraints of its formula. It does — perhaps to a greater degree than any game since that “Star Wars” game — and so we’re faced yet again with taking the bad in order to take the good as well.

As the name implies, “Potter” covers the first four years of Harry’s seven-year saga, and you either don’t want the plot details spoiled for you or already know them like you know your own last name. As per series tradition, the game reenacts each year’s biggest moments using pantomiming Lego characters and recreating the scenes with a mix of authenticity and genuinely amusing creative license.

But “Potter” also covers a surprising number of lesser moments in each chapter, and the game allows players to take control of practically everyone — Dumbledore, Sirius Black, Dobby, even Scabbers the rat, among more than 150 others — in addition to Harry, Ron and Hermione. The amount of learnable spells is impressively high, and by using two cavernous hub levels (Diagon Alley/Hogsmeade and Hogwarts) instead of one, there’s a ton of fan service to discover off the stories’ main roads.

Per usual, passing a story level opens it up to free play, allowing players even more freedom in terms of the “Potter” characters they wish to control. Between all the possibilities that allows and the aforementioned main and optional content, “Potter” is a massive playground that offers 20-plus hours’ worth of stuff to do.

Unfortunately, those hours are also chock full of the same annoyances that have persisted since “Star Wars.” For a game that features fixed camera angles and lots of running and jumping, the jumping controls are still too squirrelly. Ditto for the targeting system, which occasionally makes casting certain spells with precision a case of trial and error if too many possible targets are clustered together.

The control imperfections are harder to understand because, for the most part and regardless of story scenario or characters used, “Potter” generally plays the same way. Some nice broom controls and the occasional vehicular objective are both welcome, but neither makes enough of an impact to give the game a strong sense of variety. Similarly, while “Potter” is loaded with cause-and-effect puzzles, most of them are too straightforward to count as puzzles so much as steps to take in order to make X happen and clear the path to get to Y.

Finally, while “Potter” supports two-player local co-op play, TT Games inexplicably continues to omit online co-op play. Sharing a couch with the other player is the best way to play, yes, but how hard can it be at this point to throw a bone to players who may not have the luxury of a willing second player nearby?

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Puzzle Quest 2
Reviewed for: Xbox 360 Live Arcade
Also available for: Nintendo DS
From: Infinite Interactive/D3Publisher of America
ESRB Rating: Everyone 10+ (mild fantasy violence, mild language, mild suggestive themes)
Price: $15

After 2007′s “Puzzle Quest” surprised just about everybody by taking “Bejeweled” and using it as a means of battle in a story-driven role-playing game, a handful of weird offshoots tried and mostly failed to take the idea to new avenues. So it’s no surprise to finally see “Puzzle Quest 2,” which brings the idea back to its roots and simply gets to tweaking from there. The net worth of those tweaks will certainly vary to players of different disciplines. The story is thin to the point of being boilerplate, and instead of capturing cities and managing armies, players rarely do more than move from fight to fight. But while “PQ2′s” outer shell feels dumbed down, the battles themselves are improved. Standard fights feel considerably more balanced than “PQ1′s” fights, which frequently approached untenably difficult levels, and the new item system aids an increase in gem types to let players win with skilled, creative play instead of waiting for the same old gems to appear. “PQ2″ mixes in the occasional mini-game for variety’s sake, but the fight system evolves enough to carry the surprisingly lengthy single-player campaign. Naturally, players who want some human competition can find it via the game’s two-player local and online (360 only) multiplayer, which function exactly as one hopes and expects they would.

Skate 3
For: Playstation 3 and Xbox 360
From: Black Box/EA
ESRB Rating: Teen (crude humor, drug reference, language, mild violence, suggestive themes)

“Skate 3″ arrives a mere 16 months after its monstrous predecessor, and there’s no sane point in pretending that doesn’t factor. Everything that was great about the first two games — the awesome control and open-world freedom the first game introduced, the bonanza of features the sequel brought along — is here, and some nice new features and a brand-new city make this one a no-brainer for fans of the series, but the roster of changes isn’t as dramatic this time as it was last time.

That isn’t to say what’s new isn’t welcome, though — particularly if, as “Skate 3″ clearly encourages, you plan on enjoying the experience with friends.

Black Box has done a surprisingly thoughtful job of injecting the right amount of storytelling continuity into the “Skate” games, with callbacks and inside jokes for seasoned players that new players starting fresh need not even recognize. This time, the story shifts to team play, both in terms of winning team competitions and developing a profitable new skate brand.

“Skate” has never shied away from making online play a big part of its appeal, and “Skate 3″ takes it further by essentially allowing players to engage the entire game online. Antisocial types can enroll computer-controlled teammates during the story mode’s team challenges, but calling on up to five friends to assist and/or antagonize — players can slip between cooperative and competitive play dynamically — is so much more fun with the right crowd. Along with the new city to explore, the dynamic multiplayer also presents the biggest fundamental shift to the story mode, which otherwise leans upon familiar challenges and the same general structure (the “don’t fix what ain’t broke” rule) to move things along.

The socialization extends to “Skate 3′s” creation tools, which function like they did previously but now present themselves within a social networking interface that makes it easier for friends to find each other’s clips, graphics and photos. The bigger addition here is the skate park creator, which functions just as any fan of the old “Tony Hawk” series’ park editors might wish it to. “Skate 3″ also increases players’ ability to modify their environment as they wish by allowing them, a la “Tony Hawk’s Proving Ground,” to place common skate park objects in any part of the city at any time with few button clicks.

Elsewhere, it’s a series of little things that some will appreciate and others won’t even notice. A new Skate School feature (starring a very funny Jason Lee, who upholds the series’ terrific voice and character acting standards) helps initiate new players, who might also appreciate an optional new camera angle that’s straight out of classic “Hawk” games. Players who wish to perfect their technique on their own time can employ the optional trick analyzer, which charts joystick movements and breaks down why attempted tricks don’t go as planned. The Hall of Meat, which scores players based on their ability to maim themselves, is a little more flexible and, for those who prefer, able to score all bails automatically without being activated first. The off-board controls are no longer absurdly stiff, and while the trick bag is pretty full by now, a few new ones, including advanced underflips and darkslides, make welcome debuts.

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Iron Man 2
Reviewed for: Playstation 3 and Xbox 360
Also available for: Wii, PSP and Nintendo DS
From: Sega
ESRB Rating: Teen (mild language, violence)

If you’re bound and determined to enjoy “Iron Man 2″ in video game form, here’s a tip even the most skilled of you may wish to follow: Play the game on its easiest difficulty setting.

That isn’t a testament to the steely challenge “IM2″ poses to players so much as — as was the case in the first “Iron Man” game — its aggravating propensity to let some truly sloppy execution get in the way of what otherwise could be an ideal action gaming playground.

Like its predecessor, “IM2″ kinda sorta keeps in step with the movie throughout a series a linear missions in which Iron Man (or War Machine; outside of one mission, “IM2″ lets players select whichever character and corresponding weapons loadout they prefer) performs some occasional bodyguard duty but mostly just shoots and blows stuff up.

When it’s done well, the results are perfectly, mindlessly fun. Both characters can dash, hover, fly, engage in airborne hand-to-hand combat and fire short-burst and explosive weapons, and “IM2′s” flexible controls allow players to mix and match those abilities as they see fit.

But any time the action enters a tight space or finds our heroes surrounded by a barrage of enemies — which, by the way, is often — things just fall apart.

Nine times out of 10, it’s the fault of a spastic camera and auto-targeting system, which finds the former spinning around wildly while umpteen targets fire liberally from all angles and play tricks on the latter. On the easiest difficulty setting, it isn’t terribly difficult to just dash away and rebuild the deck, but those who engage the higher difficulty settings should expect to die repeatedly and cheaply at the hands of these technical failings.

The headaches come to a head during a final boss fight against an absolutely gargantuan Ultimo. The scope of the showdown is visually fantastic, but it’s entirely beyond the camera’s capabilities, and the hysterical fit that ensues will leave some players dizzy and others just scrambling for the off switch. What should have been “IM2′s” shining moment instead becomes its lowest low.

The co-op applications for “IM2″ are pretty obvious given its two-protagonist cast, but in another sign that the game was probably rushed to stores in concert with the movie’s release, the relatively short single-player story is all there is. An interface for upgrading and unlocking customizable weapons and suits is nice (if a bit user-unfriendly), but once the end credits roll, there’s nothing to do beyond replaying old missions.

Hopefully, some developer will one day get a chance to do with Iron Man what Activision is doing this year with Spider-Man: create a proper game that isn’t tied to the creative direction and release date of a film. The ingredients for gaming greatness are there, and a proper development cycle and all it entails (polish, a stable camera, a storyline written specifically for the game and some value on the features side) would probably produce something pretty special.

Beyond “IM2′s” startling inability to improve on the well-publicized failings of the troubled first game, no such significance exists here.

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Tecmo Bowl Throwback
For: Xbox 360 via Xbox Live Arcade and Playstation 3 via Playstation Network
From: Southend Interactive/Tecmo
ESRB Rating: Everyone (mild suggestive themes)
Price: $10

How faithful is “Tecmo Bowl Throwback” to 1991′s “Tecmo Super Bowl?” One button press holds the answer. “Throwback’s” biggest shortcoming — the missing NFL license — is a big one, and while it makes concessions by allowing players to rename the fictional team and player names, the loss still stings. Had Southend Interactive gone a little farther and allowed players not only to customize team colors but also create entire online leagues with friends and their customized teams, “Throwback” might have the legs to be a full-blown sleeper sensation. As unsensational callbacks go, though, this one’s still got it. The modernized audiovisual presentation is a surprisingly good fit, but it changes nothing about the series’ celebrated two-button gameplay and dead-simple playbook. “Throwback” is so faithful, in fact, that players can switch between the new look and the old 16-bit graphics and sound instantaneously — even mid-play — with one button press. The gameplay has aged just fine despite all that’s happened to football games since its heyday, and those discouraged by the increased complexity of EA’s football simulations might find such pleasurable simplicity to be the chief selling point here. While “Throwback” doesn’t go as far as it should in terms of features, it also isn’t threadbare: Along with local and online multiplayer (two players), there’s a very simple (no general manager tools) but sufficient (if some continuity and stat tracking is enough) season mode for solo players.

Blue Toad Murder Files: The Mysteries of Little Riddle
For: Playstation 3 via Playstation Network
From: Relentless Software
ESRB Rating: Everyone 10+ (alcohol reference, cartoon violence)
Price: $7.50 per episode, $15 for a bundle that includes episodes 1-3

As is always the case with a Playstation 3 game, “Blue Toad Murder Files: The Mysteries of Little Riddle” requires a Playstation 3 controller.

Not required, but arguably equally valuable to those who wish to maximize their immersion and success, is a pen and some paper.

Superficially, “Riddle” is, like the recent “Sam & Max” and “Tales of Monkey Island” reboots, part of the pleasantly surprising revival of point-and-click adventure games, which have found new life as downloadable games served in episodic installments. In this case, the three available episodes center around the murderous developments taking place in the quaint English town of Little Riddle, and players are tasked with solving each crime before the killer gets away.

But where most point-and-click adventure games employ a system of cause-and-effect in which players figure out how to use various objects in the environment to trigger story advancement, “Riddle” takes the murder mystery motif to heart.

The storytelling in each episode comes punctuated by 16 challenges that unlock clues and paint a clearer picture of the killer. But while some of the challenges are self-contained brainteasers in the traditional sense, “Riddle” just as often tests players’ memory of events that have transpired up to that point. That includes information about the environments of Little Riddle, the answers its residents give during questioning, and pretty much any other cue that might be construed as a clue. Some of these challenges are straightforward quizzes, but others are packaged within something more clever, and “Riddle” doesn’t necessarily focus on the obvious in either format. So don’t feel bad about using the aforementioned pen and paper: Real detectives don’t commit every last detail to memory, and “Riddle” seems to prefer challenging players to pick their observations carefully rather than simply memorize and regurgitate the obvious stuff.

The nature of the action, or lack thereof, seems an odd fit for a Playstation 3 library better known for the likes of “God of War” and “Uncharted,” and it’s an understatement to note a game that’s niche even by adventure game standards isn’t for everyone.

But “Riddle’s” presence on the Playstation Network makes more sense when you realize the same folks who created Sony’s phenomenal “Buzz!” quiz games are behind this series as well, and many of the same things that make “Buzz” special also are present here. The same cartoony character design that makes Buzz such a distinctive character does similar favor to the people of Little Riddle, and the writing and voice acting that give life to the narrator and characters are more polished (and spirited) here than in most $60 games.

The addition of four-player multiplayer support (local only) is another nice touch in a genre where lack of multiplayer functionality is practically a foregone conclusion. “Riddle” doesn’t do anything fancy with the multiplayer component, but the ability for players to work together on clues or compete to outsmart each other is all it needs to turn itself into a surprisingly successful party game.

“Riddle’s” first three episodes are available now, and the fourth, fifth and sixth episodes will be available at the end of April.

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Supreme Commander 2
Reviewed for: Xbox 360
Also available for: Windows PC
From: Gas Powered Games/Square Enix
ESRB Rating: Everyone 10+ (fantasy violence)

The bad news about “Supreme Commander 2″ is the same bad news that’s held true for every real-time strategy game developers have attempted to migrate from PCs to consoles: If you’re playing it this way, you’re settling.

The good news? You’re settling a lot less this time around.

Contrary to the buggy volcano that erupted when Hellbent Games ported the first “Supreme Commander” to the Xbox 360, “SC2″ generally functions as it should. It isn’t as pretty as on a top-shelf PC, but it’s pretty enough, and outside of the occasional framerate dip, it keeps up on the performance side as well.

A handful of interface changes also makes “SC2″ more accessible to consoles without neutering the depth that has made the series what it is. The number of unit types in each faction has decreased in favor of fewer unit types with higher upgrade ceilings, and the new tech tree and research points system make upgrading these units notably less laborious than it was in the first game. That adds up to a less imposing learning curve than what “SC1″ threw at players, which allows the game to get off to a faster start and drop players into battles that neither overwhelm nor insult them.

Most important, “SC2″ does not — as happened in “Halo Wars,” for instance — nullify players’ ability to build units and structures how and where they want. “SC2″ softens the curve without flattening it, meeting players halfway for an experience that’s approachable but free of the lingering suspicion that the kid gloves are on.

This isn’t to suggest “SC2″ completely closes the gap between a controller and the keyboard and mouse. The game maps all major commands to buttons in ways that make sense, and the one-button shortcuts that allow players to select multiple units certainly help. Even better is the ability to zoom so far out that the map turns into a virtual game of Risk, with units represented by easily-identifiable icons that are just as easily dispersed as needed.

But when the battle is in full rage, it’s still easy to get rattled when there’s no keyboard and mouse to provide the flexibility and speed a controller simply cannot replicate. Even with the action zoomed out and the whole map visible at once, the analog stick’s cursor control is too loose to replicate the more natural sensation a mouse allows. That isn’t the game’s fault, but it also can’t not be mentioned.

Fortunately — arguably — “SC2″ is designed in a way that encourages players to face off against equally disadvantaged human competition. There are three campaigns (one for each faction) and a so-so story accompanying each, and the Skirmish mode allows solo players to set up custom matches with computer-controlled opponents and allies. But online play is the real heart of “SC2,” which supports any combination of four human and A.I.-controlled players one can devise using the three factions. The large maps and lack of unit construction restrictions become enormous assets when combined with customizable victory conditions, and the shortcomings imposed by the controller become less of an issue when they apply to everyone equally.

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Final Fight: Double Impact
For: Playstation 3 via Playstation Network and Xbox 360 via Xbox Live Arcade
From: Capcom
ESRB Rating: Teen (animated blood, mild violence, suggestive themes)
Price: $10

Most longstanding game publishers are savvy enough nowadays to tap into players’ nostalgic nerves. But nobody has as much fun doing it as Capcom does, and if the PSP compilations, “Mega Man” revival and brilliant “Dark Void Zero” weren’t proof enough, “Final Fight: Double Impact” should do it. “Impact’s” main attraction is, naturally, the arcade-perfect translation of 1989′s “Final Fight,” which endures remarkably well as one of the best 2D brawlers ever made. The port is spotless, and Capcom does it modern justice with online leaderboards and two-player local/online co-op support. That alone would comprise a job well done for most publishers, but Capcom showers its source material with additional love by way of a superbly remixed soundtrack, an awesome optional visual presentation that filters the graphics through a mock arcade cabinet screen, and a large assortment of in-game achievements that unlock various “Final Fight” multimedia and give longtime fans of the game entirely new challenges to overcome. Additionally, and because Capcom can, “Impact” also includes an arcade-perfect port of another game, “Magic Sword,” that’s too obscure to sell on its own but a fantastically fun sidescroller in its own right. The same care that goes into “Fight” — co-op support and achievements included — graces “Sword” as well, giving fans of arcade gaming’s most golden years something to discover as well as something to treasure.

WarioWare D.I.Y.
For: Nintendo DS
From: Nintendo
ESRB Rating: Everyone (comic mischief, mild cartoon violence)

An important warning for those who like “WarioWare” games but despise the idea of creating their own fun: This one may not be for you — at least, not yet.

Also, a word of warning for anyone who enjoys a creative challenge or has aspirations to enter the world of animation, character and/or game design: If you don’t at least check this out, you’re doing yourself a disservice.

Like every “WarioWare” game before it, “WarioWare D.I.Y.” sports a collection of microgames, which are like minigames but generally toss out one vaguely-worded objective, allow five seconds or fewer for players to figure out and complete the challenge, and then whisk away before another microgame pops up and repeats the cycle until players simply cannot keep up.

But the “D.I.Y.” in the title isn’t kidding. Where previous games came bundled with more than 200 microgames each, “D.I.Y.” has a few north of 90, and not all of them are even new. If you want more than that, guess what? Make them yourself.

Fortunately, that’s not a concession of laziness on Nintendo’s behalf, but instead the real reason “D.I.Y.” even exists at all. And in spite of the obvious limitations on hand with regard to the hardware and the microgame format, Nintendo has put together a game design tool that’s shockingly robust.

The full might of the tool isn’t apparent at first glance, when “D.I.Y.” asks players simply to draw a character that the game inserts into a pre-scripted microgame. Initially, this appears to be all “D.I.Y.” is — players performing fill-in duty while the game does all the creative, complicated stuff.

But a trip through the 65-page manual and absolutely staggering collection of thoroughly thorough in-game tutorials changes the picture completely. “D.I.Y.” obviously doesn’t allow for the creation of the next “Legend of Zelda” game, and the limitations of the microgame format are in place, but the tools do not skimp on control. Players can create objects separately using a pretty capable paint editor and, in similar fashion to basic Adobe Flash design, can script those objects to move and react according to input triggers and other conditions. Ambitious creators can stack win conditions for extra challenge, and there’s even a little music composition tool for soundtrack creation purposes.

Nintendo goes a little crazy with the tutorials — Photoshop pros who don’t need basic paint program instruction will be dismayed to discover they can’t just skip ahead — but the lessons are brisk, effective and, with Wario’s help, pretty funny. The tools’ respective interfaces benefit from similar attention to detail, and “D.I.Y.” toes the line between whimsy and efficiency to resonate equally with designers-to-be and Nintendo fans.

Happily, all your hard work need not be for your eyes only. “D.I.Y.’s” content sharing suite allows players to share microgames with friends (locally or online), including anyone who downloads the $8 microgame player for the Wii. But the centerpiece of the suite is the Design Challenge, which offers up themed contests for anyone to enter and will feature the winners in the in-game Nintendo channel, which also will house a stream of new downloadable games from Nintendo and other well-known game designers.

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Just Cause 2
Reviewed for: Playstation 3 and Xbox 360
Also available for: Windows PC
From: Avalanche Studios/Eidos/Square Enix
ESRB Rating: Mature (blood, drug reference, language, sexual themes, violence)

The original “Just Cause” was sensationally fun despite having more issues than a panophobia convention, so how much better is “Just Cause 2″ by touching the same fun-at-all-costs nerve and doing it without all those aforementioned issues?

No one really knows, because “JC2″ brings back several of those issues en route to a sloppy opening hour that, thankfully, isn’t a complete indication of things to come.

Most glaringly, “JC2″ shoots like a third-person shooter from 2003. Auto-aim runs rampant, manual targeting is unwieldy, and players looking for a way to seek cover will be dismayed to discover even the basic crouch mechanic is completely useless.

The old shooting controls work in tandem with a scripted opening suite of missions that mostly penalizes players for using the barrelful of cool action-movie stunts — jumping between vehicle rooftops, shooting while hanging from a bumper, zip-lining between any two objects bolted to the ground — it taught them only moments earlier. “JC2″ embraces playground physics and open-world cause-and-effect like no game before it, but that embrace backfires until players are past the toe-dipping stage and left to their own devices.

The good news is that once that happens, “JC2″ does things its predecessor couldn’t even fathom doing four years ago.

Rico’s semi-magical grappling hook returns, but as alluded to earlier, it’s significantly more versatile this time, and that alone is a game-changer. Anything bolted down and within range can be zipped to instantly, and anything (or anyone) not bolted down can be launched into the air, fished out of the air or tethered to anything else using the absurd but wonderful dual-hook capability. The exaggerated physics that initially betray players become their best friend when it becomes clear how much havoc one can cause using just the hook.

There’s no shortage of mischief-making opportunities, either. “JC2′s” controls may be from another era, but the game’s scope is from another galaxy: The fictional Panau Island encompasses some 400 sq. miles, and it’s wide open for perusal once those opening missions conclude. Rico can scale enormous mountains using the hook, and per genre custom, all vehicles are operable.

But “JC2″ truly amazes when viewed from an airplane or helicopter. Panau’s scope is as vertical as it is horizontal, and watching the island’s scale change while ascending and descending is a magnificent sight. That it happens almost completely free of load times is a feat of programming.

“JC2′s” story isn’t quite as ambitious, though the voice cast’s use of deliriously bad accents at least makes it fun to experience.

Regardless, it provides occasion for Rico to unleash untold dollars’ worth of damage over anywhere from 20 to 80 hours’ worth of mainline and optional missions. Some missions are more fun than others, some have the capability to aggravate the same way those early missions do, and it’s a bummer there’s no way to share the fun via co-op play. But when it becomes clear just how big “JC2″ is and how well it understands the value of creative, explosive, dumb fun, those dud missions and other deficiencies become surprisingly easy to accept.

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Game Room
For: Xbox 360 via Xbox Live Arcade and Windows PC via Games for Windows Live
From: Microsoft/various publishers
ESRB Rating: Everyone 10+ (mild violence)
Price: Free for client, $3 per game (360 or PC only), $5 per game (both platforms)

Superficially, “Game Room” is enticing. Eventually, it could be pretty special. Out of the gate, though, Microsoft’s new retro games client, —which refashions a menu of downloadable arcade classics as a virtual arcade for players’ Xbox and/or Windows Live avatars — is too compromised to be either. For starters, the virtual arcade is little more than an additional menu layer: Players can decorate their arcades and customize the arrangement of purchased virtual cabinets, but because there’s no way to roam the arcade in avatar form and interact with friends controlling their avatars, the interface is little more than busywork with limited novelty. More problematic is the excessive pricing for a selection of games that, so far, aren’t very good. “Room’s” initial library of 30 games hails from the Intellivison and early Atari era, and while the addition of client-wide achievements and online leaderboards is excellent, the $3-$5 price to own each game (and 50 cents to demo a game beyond the single free demo play) is too high when newer, better games are available everywhere for similar prices. Should “Room’s” selection exponentially improve, and should Microsoft introduce a sensible subscription pricing model that affords players access to the whole library, “Room” could be pretty awesome. Right now, though, it’s just a prettied-up menu of downloadable games that aren’t nearly worth what they cost.