If Boktai accomplishes just one thing, it succeeds in forcing cave-dwelling, sunlight-fearing geeks into the great outdoors, into a world of fresh air and swarms of girls. Perhaps it's just my own dead-sexiness at work, but there's something noticeably attractive to strangers about a geek standing in a ray of sunlight. I'll angle my Game Boy to get Boktai's built-in light sensor . . . more

I couldn't help but suffer a sense of culture shock from developer Team Soho's The Getaway. Thick cockney accents further mystify English phrases like beer and cockles and spilt claret—and subtitles don't help. Such consummate British essence serves only to underscore the sweet harmony of unique game design and production that—to put it plainly—make The Getaway . . . more

Halo is a love of mine. The affair started innocently enough, but after two years of weekly Halo nights, things turned pretty serious. Unique balances between weapons, weaknesses and strengths of vehicles, and map intricacies all made ardor for the game pretty easy to conjure. It was then pretty shocking when I realized just how horribly unbalanced Halo 2—a sequel three . . . more

It's not often that a game as technically flawed as Killzone turns out to actually be worth a damn. By means of an amazing feat in design and artistic brilliance, Killzone manages to not only overcome its shortcomings, but happily stomps them into a realm of insignificance.

In true argumentative form, it's best to start with concession of . . . more

Games as art, a catchphrase of this gaming generation, describes no more than a handful of existing video games. Labeling a game art sounds complimentary, but the phrase often implies an effort of style over substance, where a game's art is its only redeeming quality. Without question, director Gouichi Suda's Killer 7 deserves the rank of art. But while unadventurous . . . more

First person shooters and unapologetic audacity are both remarkably American in heritage. It's surprising then that a group of British game developers were the first to unite the two. BLACK's ferocious aversion to everything nonexplosive speaks personally to my American instincts, yet the game possesses an elegance in execution that is decisively European. Following the . . . more