You begin the game as many chefs begin their careers–by jumping out of a plane, landing in a dumpster, then strolling into the local fast food joint to take a job as a short-order cook. Yes, Order Up is a bit goofy, but it works to great effect. The rotund, bean-shaped customers and cartoony locations are amusing caricatures, and the food looks quite good, if not exactly mouthwatering. Starting out at Burger Face under the tutelage of a pimply teenager who aspires to fast food management, you learn how to prepare that most American of dishes: a burger and fries. Your preparation of each ingredient will be judged as poor, OK, good, or perfect depending on how well you perform the action required. Slicing tomatoes requires you to time your cuts precisely, while prepping lettuce requires that you rip four leaves off as quickly as you can. Dicing, carving, grating, and mashing each demands its own motions, and each (with the exception of tricky tortilla folding and vexing lettuce grabbing) is easy to master and pleasingly responsive.

Cooking items is less a matter of mastering motion controls and more a challenge of timing. As each ingredient cooks, you’ll see a colorful cooking meter pop up that tells you the food’s temperature on a scale of frozen to flaming. The indicator arrow will slowly progress from one end to the other, and snatching the food off the heat when the arrow is in the green zone will earn you a perfect rating. Using the fryer is that simple, but the stove top and grill have another indicator icon that moves faster than the arrow. To keep these vittles from burning, you’ll have to stir, toss, and flip accordingly. Fail to do so, and you’ll have to bust out the extinguisher and put out grease fires–one of a handful of inoffensively frivolous minigames. The stove and grill can accommodate two items each; so, along with the cutting board, fryer, oven, and food processor, you could conceivably be preparing eight ingredients at once, though this will rarely happen. On top of that, you can hire up to two sous chefs, who will prepare one ingredient at a time in their own space with varying degrees of precision depending on their unique proficiencies.

All this would be for naught without customers to order the food, and you have a steady stream of folks coming in as you progress through your day. A day generally consists of four to six tables made up of one to four orders each. Handling one or two orders at a time is pretty easy, but when you start preparing three or four meals at a time, the game becomes a frantic juggling act. You won′t ever really fail, barring total neglect, but it is tricky to deliver all your dishes in good or perfect order within a tight time window. Dishes left too long will cool, and the customer won′t be happy. Your reward for a meal well cooked is bigger tips that you can use to upgrade your restaurant, hire new help, buy new recipes, or purchase spices. Spices are used to make special dishes that will earn you more coin, and are also handy for catering to your customers’ preferences. For example, you’ll get a big tip for overcooking all the food for the gruff, Clint Eastwood look-alike, or adding a particularly aromatic spice to a dish for the farmer who got his nose kicked in by a burro.

As you earn stars for your restaurant by earning money, buying recipes, and impressing the food critic, you’ll get the opportunity to purchase another restaurant. You’ll work your way up from diner grub to Mexican fare to Italian food to haute cuisine, earning new recipes, new spices, and new assistants. Once you get accustomed to preparing perfect dishes every time, you’ll find yourself trashing good food in your quest for the satisfaction of perfection. That drive will take you to the Fortified Chef Competition, an amusing, though not so challenging, parody of the Iron Chef series. Unfortunately, your journey is only about six hours long. Playing through the game again on hard difficulty is a good way to satisfy your craving for more, since the cooking meters are removed and you are forced to rely on more subtle visual cues, as well as your own sense of timing. Still, a few more restaurants would have filled this game out nicely.

Order Up is most engaging when you get into the rhythm of striving to cook perfect dishes, earning big money, spending it to improve your operation, and trying to cook more perfect dishes. It’s simple enough that it’s accessible to all, and its charming visual style and sense of humor make it an attractive package. Unfortunately, it feels a bit light on content, even at a less than full retail price point, and it would have benefitted nicely from a two-player mode in the vein of the final cook-off. Nonetheless, it’s an entertaining, well-balanced game that provides a good deal of fun while it lasts.

When Soul Calibur was released for the Dreamcast in 1999, it set a new standard for fighting games on home consoles. Subsequent entries in the series have changed very little as far as the weapon-based fighting mechanics are concerned, and have introduced new features and gameplay modes with varying success. Soulcalibur IV is no different in that respect; the series-first online play is a great addition, but though the visuals have improved and the gameplay has undoubtedly evolved, it still feels very familiar. And that’s no bad thing.

The majority of the characters on Soulcalibur IV’s roster will also be familiar if you’re a fan of the series, though only around half of the 30-plus combatants are available at the outset, including Yoda on the Xbox 360 and Darth Vader on the PlayStation 3. Others are unlocked by defeating them in the single-player Story and Arcade modes, and by purchasing them with the gold that you’re awarded for winning fights. There’s more than enough variety on the roster to ensure that you can enjoy playing as at least a handful of different characters, and a robust customization system gives you the freedom both to edit their appearances and to create your own fighters from scratch.

Regardless of who you play as, Soulcalibur IV is accessible enough that even first-time players will have no trouble performing some powerful and great-looking moves. Rather than memorizing lengthy combo attacks and knowing how to attack your opponent, the challenge here comes from knowing when to attack, when to block, and when to sidestep around the arena. That’s not to say that the combatants in Soulcalibur IV don’t have impressively large repertoires of moves, because they do, it’s just that very few of them are tough to pull off.

Your goal in Soulcalibur IV, of course, is to defeat your opponent by depleting his or her health bar. Alternately, you can win by knocking your opponent out of the “ring,” which is possible in almost all of the game’s beautifully realized arenas. New to the series–though reminiscent of a feature in 1997′s Soul Blade–is the soul-gauge system, which appears alongside the health bar and changes color if you spend too much of your time blocking attacks and not retaliating with your own. When the gauge turns red and your health bar starts flashing, you′re just an attack or two away from entering a defenseless “soul crush” state, at which point your opponent can perform a one-hit-kill critical-finish move. It takes a long time for that to happen, so the soul gauge isn’t always an effective deterrent as far as overly defensive players are concerned, but it at least discourages online players from trying to score cheap victories simply by landing a couple of blows and then blocking until the time runs out.

Online play is where Soulcalibur IV really shines, though there aren’t many different modes of play available. The action is fast-paced and free of lag for the most part, though if you have a slow Internet connection, you might find that your character takes a split-second longer to respond to your inputs than you’re used to, which can prove fatal against a skilled opponent. You can choose to play ranked battles online against random opponents or join up to three other players in an unranked lobby, in which the winner of each round gets to stay in the fight as spectators get their turn in the ring. Both Arcade and Special modes of play are available online, the difference being that in Special mode all of the characters′ move lists are augmented by special skills bestowed on them in part by weapon and clothing choices. Disappointingly absent from Soulcalibur IV, both online and offline, is an option to pit teams of fighters against one another. Team battles have appeared in the series previously, and given that the tagging mechanic is present in the single-player Tower of Lost Souls mode, its omission is baffling.

Considering that Arcade mode does nothing new and Story mode is really short and text-heavy, the new Tower of Lost Souls mode is where you’ll find the majority of Soulcalibur IV’s compelling single-player content. Taking control of one to three fighters, you must ascend (and later descend) the tower one floor at a time by defeating multiple groups of enemies without ever having your health replenished. Variety comes courtesy of opponents with carefully tailored skill sets, as well as battle-specific challenges that can be completed to unlock treasure chests containing new armor and weapons. For example, you might have to defeat three fighters who all have the ability to leech health from you, or who are impossible to force out of the ring. Optional challenges during these fights can be completed by meeting very specific conditions, such as landing the final blow as the timer ticks down to zero, performing four or more counter hits, or for defeating all opponents by knocking them out of the ring. As you ascend the tower, the difficulty level can ramp up pretty quickly, and you might find that you have to revisit the character-customization mode to prepare your chosen combatant for certain challenges.

Secret Agent Clank’s storyline gets underway with an unlikely scenario in which Clank witnesses Ratchet stealing the largest pristine gem in the universe from a museum. Convinced that Ratchet would never knowingly do such a thing, Clank sets out to prove his partner’s innocence and, predictably, learns that the jewel heist was part of a much larger and more elaborate scheme straight out of a James Bond movie. Clank’s arsenal of weapons and gadgets also wouldn’t look out of place in a 007 flick, and you’ll realize very quickly that his tuxedo isn’t just for show. His bow tie doubles as a razor-edged boomerang, his cuff links are bombs, the carnation on his lapel is a man-eating tanglevine flower, and his pen uses an ink made of dark matter that can be used to disable security systems. Even more gadgets can be purchased from vendors as you progress through the game, along with The Matrix-style Clank-Fu upgrades that augment Clank’s melee combos when you acquire them. It’s up to you to decide what you want to spend your bolts on, as well as whether you want to employ stealth or force as your primary means of getting through each level. Stealth is rarely mandatory in Secret Agent Clank, but bonuses are awarded anytime you dodge a patrol, beat a security system, or perform a stealth takedown by sneaking up behind an enemy and then quickly entering the button prompts that appear on the screen.

Stealth takedowns are one of several minigames that you need to master while playing as Clank. Others include a block-dropping game used to pick locks, a rhythm game that replaces the regular controls for specific action sequences, and the aforementioned vehicular chases. All of these are good enough that they don’t detract from the regular gameplay, but they crop up often enough that if, for example, you’re not very good at the rhythm game, they can halt your progress for a time. On the other hand, if you’re especially good at or particularly enjoy the vehicle levels (or any of Ratchet’s arena battles), then you can opt to undertake challenges based on those sequences after you beat them to earn extra bolts before progressing with the story.

Assisting Clank with some of his story missions are the Gadgebots: three diminutive droids whose abilities include basic combat, pulling levers, conducting electricity, and stacking three-high atop each other. Assuming control of one of the three, you’re able to issue simple commands to the others, including wait, follow, attack, and repair. Gadgebot sequences mostly task you with solving logic puzzles that, though they can initially appear to be quite challenging, rarely require anything more than trial and error to figure out. Gadgebots are often required to swing across gaps to get to where they need to be in later puzzles but, inexplicably, doing so requires no skill or timing on your part whatsoever. You just push a button and then sit back and watch as your Gadgebot executes a flawless jump, grab, and swing maneuver–begging the question of why the gaps are even in the game. Similarly, anytime you need to get creative with Clank’s gadgets–for example, by using a tanglevine to stop machinery, or by placing a cuff-link bomb on a conveyor belt–onscreen icons tell you exactly what to do. This makes some levels significantly less challenging than they might otherwise have been, given that you’re really doing nothing more than pushing the buttons you’re told to push without having to figure anything out for yourself.

With only a couple of exceptions, the most challenging levels in Secret Agent Clank are undoubtedly those in which you play as Ratchet and, to a lesser extent, Captain Qwark. Ratchet does battle with wave after wave of angry prison inmates in his levels, armed with various weapons that, as Clank, you have the option to purchase and mail to him hidden inside cakes. There’s plenty of variety in Ratchet’s arsenal, including a number of weapons and upgrades that you’ll recognize if you’ve played previous games. Unfortunately, the same can′t be said for the level designs, which are just big, open rooms with different textures and items to make them look like a gym, a cafeteria, and other prison locales. On the other hand, Captain Qwark’s levels could hardly be more varied. Accompanied by a biographer droid, Qwark recounts some of his most memorable (and entirely made-up) missions as you play through them. As Qwark’s narration becomes increasingly exaggerated, the levels get harder. For example, while doing battle with a mechanical Godzilla lookalike, Qwark remembers that there were also ninjas in the mix: giant ninjas, giant robot ninjas, giant exploding robot ninjas, and so on. Not all of Qwark’s levels are as amusing as that one, but they’re definitely high points as far as the humor is concerned, and one level that’s presented as a musical is hilarious.

Regardless of which of the many different levels you’re playing, Secret Agent Clank’s controls are both intuitive and responsive, which is no small achievement given the sheer variety of guns, gadgets, and gameplay types on offer. The camera also performs admirably for the most part, though in levels where Clank is required to move vertically between various platforms, it’s unfortunate that the shoulder buttons can only rotate your view left or right, which means that there’s no way to look up or down. Environments in the game look noticeably better than those in Ratchet and Clank’s previous PSP outing, and if you’re a fan of the series, it’ll come as no surprise that the voice acting and other audio is of a consistently high standard.

Playing through Secret Agent Clank for the first time isn’t very difficult and will likely take you around 10 hours. Beating the game unlocks Challenge mode for your second play-through, which not only makes all of the enemies in the game tougher, but also lets you start with all of the gadgets that you finished with the first time (and unlocks new ones). The game’s 65 skill points are another good reason to keep playing, considering that unlocking them with exceptional performances in the game (for example, killing 20 enemies with a single lawnmower, or completing a vehicle level without crashing) rewards you with some amusing cheat options. Similarly, finding hidden titanium bolts unlocks new costumes and skins for playable characters.

Secret Agent Clank is a great game that’s hampered only by its occasionally repetitive level design and the overuse of certain minigames. The mostly optional stealth mechanics are a good addition to the tried-and-tested Ratchet and Clank formula, and after beating the memorable endgame boss the first time, you’ll almost certainly want to play through the whole game again.

The single-player campaign, The Mugenjo, takes place in the Phantom Fortress. This floating palace of doom is 99 stories tall, and each story contains several rooms and stairs. For instance, when you take the stairs up from the third floor, you′ll find that there are two or three rooms between you and the stairs up to the fifth floor. In all likelihood, the two or three rooms in front of you will be blank. This means you need to “summon” a room through which to travel. To do this, you need to use a room-summoning scroll. At any given time, you have four of these, and when you use one, it’s replaced by another at random.

Here are the types of rooms you will be able to summon: battle (a single match against a CPU opponent), pop quiz (a three-question quiz on Naruto lore), clone room (three-card monte), shadow possession (button-press mimicking), tree climbing (branch-dodging test of speed), and amusement room (slot machines). It’s not exactly what you would hope for in a floating palace of wonder and excitement. Here’s the worst part: The castle has 99 floors, and you generally have to play through two or three summoned rooms on each one. Even worse, winning or losing in a summoned room has no bearing on the plot. The only thing your performance in a summoned room affects is the number of ninja points you get, and these are used to buy screenshots, audio tracks and the like from the bonus area. This makes the mini-games seem frustratingly pointless.

The only rooms you need to make sure you complete successfully are battle rooms. You aren’t playing as just one person; you’re a whole four-person team of ninjas. So if you lose a match, the next ninja steps in and resumes the fight. If you intentionally lose four fights in a row, the game asks you if you want to choose a new difficulty and then restarts you at the beginning of the match you just lost, with all of your ninjas completely recovered.

There are three types of rooms in the floating castle that you don’t summon. These are healing rooms, treasure rooms, and drama rooms. Healing rooms heal all your ninjas and refresh your ninja skills; treasure rooms contain items you can use in battle; and drama rooms are where the plot happens. Most treasure rooms are behind some kind of barrier, like a pile of rocks, and you can use a special technique to clear the way and get your treasure. But wait! You have a limited number of these techniques (until you find a healing room and refresh them), and they can also be used to open up shortcuts. This creates a dilemma: Do you want to go straight to the next floor or play a game of three-card monte and take a pop quiz to get your hands on two healing medicines in the treasure room? Unless you’re a huge three-card monte fan, the choice should be pretty simple.

The only remotely interesting rooms are the drama rooms. You’ll find one of these every several floors, and each relays a small tidbit of the overarching plot. There is one big problem here: It’s a 15-minute story stretched over a six-hour trek up 99 floors of pop quizzes and repetitive fights. You’ll get to the point where you don’t care what the deal is with the Princess of Dusk if it means fighting Gaara again or, even worse, taking another quiz.

The Mugenjo fails as a single-player campaign in that it’s simply not worth finishing. That leaves Heroes mode, where you pick a team of ninjas and fight against other teams. But by the time you’ve given up on The Mugenjo, you will probably be too tired of the game’s ultrasimple combat to care. This is the same fighting system found in Naruto: Ultimate Ninja 3, which pretty much makes it the same one found in the other three Ultimate Ninja games as well. This fighting system is barely deep enough to last one game, much less an entire series.

There is one attack button, and it does different things depending on the direction you press on the D pad. You can also teleport toward your opponent by pressing jump twice. You can activate a special attack by hitting a button and then successfully executing a normal attack. This leads to a brief cinematic that shows you executing the special attack, which then hits for considerable damage. Fights go like this: You teleport up, beat the crap out of your opponent until your special attack meter is full, and then try to execute a special attack. If your opponent blocks it or smacks you, you repeat the process. If you successfully land the special attack and your opponent doesn’t die, you also repeat the process. It’s very boring. On the bright side, it’s also very accessible. If you wirelessly play matches against friends who don’t own the game, they’ll pick up the controls in no time.

The rest of the game is much less cool. For instance, Ninja Road. This feature lets you spend points on bonus content. Every 100 points buys you one bonus. For some reason, the whole thing is displayed as a 2D Naruto walking down a road, picking up bonuses every 10 meters. Ten meters, by the way, translates into 100 ninja points.

Phantom Fortress looks good, especially during combat. The animation is fluid and the frame rate is stable. The story parts also look pretty good, except that they aren’t fully animated. Fortunately, no corners were cut with the sound production. The music is straight from the show and and there is a ton of authentic voice-over work in both English and Japanese.

Naruto: Ultimate Ninja Heroes 2: The Phantom Fortress is a boring game. Even if it didn’t try to convince you to take so many quizzes, the weak plot and completely recycled combat would fail to inspire an “Ooh,” much less an “Aah.” Rather, the bevy of bad minigames and the uninspired bonus acquisition system are sure to elicit some yawns. After only a few hours, you will probably be ready for this Phantom Fortress to disappear.

Now that Traveller’s Tales has conquered a galaxy far, far away, it has set its sights on giving a Lego makeover to a more terrestrial franchise. Lego Indiana Jones: The Complete Trilogy lets you reenact the key scenes from the first three Indiana Jones movies, with a blocky twist only Lego can provide. The idea of children’s building toys pasted atop action-packed adventures may seem strange–and seeing a Lego monkey is rather unnerving–but the enduring charm of the movies is the perfect foundation for some small-scale tomb robbing. The surprise is, even without a nostalgic-powered handcuff fastening you to these stories, the seamless co-op and clever puzzles should be enough to draw even the Indy ignorant into the experience.

Like the Lego Star Wars games, Lego Indiana Jones is primarily a puzzle-solving game with light combat and platforming elements. While the core experience remains largely unchanged from the previous games, the puzzles are constructed in a much more intelligent and logical manner this time around. Previous Lego games had bewildering sections that would stump even seasoned puzzle-solving veterans, not to mention frustrate casual fans who were just looking for a Star Wars fix. Those tricky sections still exist in Lego Indiana Jones, but now they have been relegated to the bonus missions. Though you’ll still spend the majority of your time trying to figure out how to open locked doors or cross perilous pits, the pacing is never halted by overly complex solutions.

Even though the adventuring is more streamlined this time, the obstacles you’ll encounter are quite diverse. Every level seems to throw a new trick your way that will continually keep you on your toes. The most amusing puzzles involve the severe phobias with which certain characters are cursed. Indiana has no fear swinging across molten lava with his whip or leaping over spikes while being run down by a giant boulder, but if you put a snake in front of him, he’ll become nearly catatonic. The boss battles also provide a unique twist in every encounter. From having to figure out how to hurt a man who can regenerate his health to fighting against someone who won’t stop jumping, these encounters serve as a fun diversion you’ll have to solve quickly, lest you find your Lego head popped clean off. Other sections have you using elephants to cross mud, driving a motorcycle while being chased by a group of bikers, and trying to get a monkey to part with some dynamite. There is also a nauseatingly awesome mine cart ride in The Temple of Doom section that, though brief, is quite exhilarating.

Though the puzzle aspects alone are enough to make Lego Indy worthwhile, the humor makes it enjoyable even for people just watching the action. The silent cutscenes take you through the journey in a much sillier manner than Steven Spielberg originally envisioned. No, you won’t see the Lost Ark melt some unfortunate Lego person’s face, but you will see Indy’s father fall asleep (because he’s old!) and even the Harrison Ford look-alike donning a blonde wig to deceive a foolish guard. The humorous touches go beyond just the cutscenes; there are funny nods all around you. If you have time to marvel at the decor when trying to escape from a burning castle, you might see a painting of the Sphinx with a Lego head. Traveller’s Tales also included a few references to its previous Lego games. You can see soldiers wearing Darth Vader masks, Belloq mocking C-3PO, and a clever homage to Hoth hidden away in one level.

It’s worth playing the levels a few times just to pick up on all the references, but there is a much more tangible reason than that: They are jam packed with hidden goodies. It’s actually impossible to get all the bonus items your first time. There are a number of different character-specific traits, so you’ll have to unlock Free mode to see all that every level has to offer. The different traits help keep the tasks varied throughout the game. Indiana has his trusty whip, which can not only help him swing across gaps and grab objects from far away, but can also bring the ladies closer (and steal a quick kiss). There are also scholars who can decrypt hieroglyphics, smaller-sized characters who can squeeze through tiny spaces, craftsmen equipped with a wrench or a shovel, and bad guys who can enter secret Thuggie doors. You’ll be lucky to finish 50 percent of this game your first time through, so it’s overflowing with replay value.

Not everything is perfect in Legoland, though. The artificial intelligence is particularly awful. You’ll need your AI-controlled pal to help you solve puzzles sometimes, but you’ll find your pal less than willing in a few cases. This can be solved either by inviting a friend to play through the game with you (the best option) or plugging in a second controller to move both characters yourself. Trying to coax the AI to do your bidding can be an exercise in frustration, though. The fighting can also get repetitive, especially when a swarm of enemies continually runs at you while you’re trying to solve a particularly complex puzzle. Bosses are usually protected by a troop of soldiers, making them more difficult to defeat. Finally, the jumping portions can be very inconsistent. It’s not always possible to judge how far away you are from a platform, which leads to many untimely deaths and arduous retries. None of the flaws destroy the enjoyment, but it’s disappointing to see the same problems from the previous Lego games rear their head once again.

The three versions of Lego Indy are nearly identical. The game looks best on the PS3 and 360, but the simple aesthetic works quite well on the Wii. The Wii version does let you use motion controls, but you’ll probably ignore that option after it takes you five minutes to dig up a buried treasure. Though it can be fun to snap the controller like a whip if you’re feeling feisty. You really can’t go wrong no matter which Indy you choose.

Lego Indiana Jones serves as the expected progression from the Lego Star Wars games. The great pacing, humorous cutscenes, and challenging-but-not-cheap puzzles make this the most enjoyable Lego game yet. It’s not the hardest game, but it has enough hidden goodies to make you play through more than once. Both newcomers and diehard fans of Traveller’s Tales′ previous Lego offerings will find plenty to enjoy here.

Chocobo’s Dungeon opens with treasure hunter Cid and his feathery sidekick, Chocobo, searching for an ancient trinket known as Timeless Power. A familiar foe beats them to it, however, and then uses the bobble to send our heroes to the town of Lostime in an alternate world. The citizens of Lostime harbor a dark secret that has been sealed inside their lost memories, and only Chocobo, with the aid of a boy who fell from the sky, can unlock them by braving the dungeons of their minds.

The bulk of the gameplay occurs in randomly generated, grid-based dungeons that you explore in a turn-based manner. Moving a single panel, or performing any action qualifies as a move, which prompts every monster on the floor to receive a turn. The beauty of Chocobo′s Dungeon is that some strategy is required to keep Chocobo in tip-top shape, because it’s far better to ambush enemies in hallways or lure foes to you than to go on a rampage and find that you’re quickly surrounded and overwhelmed. You’ll also have to keep an eye on the constantly draining food gauge because starvation saps Chocobo′s health points. If you run out of health points, your bruised, broken chocobo is immediately kicked from the dungeon. A welcome addition that’ll help tip the scale in your favor, however, is the ability to upgrade your weapons and armor at the local blacksmith’s forge. There, you can even transfer seals that imbue equipment with special effects, which enable you to customize your gear for the trials ahead.

Differentiating Chocobo′s Dungeon from the slew of other dungeon crawlers is the inclusion of the job-changing system made famous in Final Fantasy Tactics and recent games in the series. Chocobo can now embrace the ways of the black mage, dragoon, or ninja at will and use numerous spells or abilities that are faithful to the franchise, as well as don adorable class-specific gear. You’re free to level your favorite jobs by defeating enemies for the occasional job point, though there are times when playing a particular job has its benefits curing yourself as a white mage is a definite boon during boss fights and casting elemental spells as a black mage is an effective strategy against a monster with a specific weakness. The addition of popular monsters from the franchise–from tonberries and cactuars to powerful summons like Ifrit and Leviathan–is another treat that successfully blends Final Fantasy with dungeon-crawling gameplay.

Despite the game’s cutesy Final Fantasy theme and its simple gameplay mechanics, surviving Chocobo′s Dungeon can be an arduous journey involving a lot of luck, which cheapens the experience. In some instances, the game will seem too easy, like when you enter a dungeon right next to a staircase that moves you on to the next floor or when the majority of your enemies can die with a single attack. At other times, the game’s heavy reliance on random, invisible traps can ruin a dungeon run from the onset because it’s hardly feasible for you to walk around kicking empty air to check it for traps before each move. This makes it much more likely that you’ll be pummeled by washtubs, flare spells, and rock falls. You’re also more likely to summon monster traps that’ll finish you off before you’ve even begun exploring, and each dungeon loss costs you all of the gil, as well as unequipped items, you have on hand.

The special dungeons, which are optional exercises that reward you with new jobs and other abilities, can feature very restrictive, annoying rules. In one, you and all monsters are limited to one health point, so just a single hit or unlucky trap can send you reeling back to the start. To worsen matters, you’re not allowed to bring any items or gear into special dungeons. And to add to the frustration, it becomes increasingly difficult to level each job because you’re unable to earn experience or job points from special dungeons, which is a pity because you’ll be attempting those a lot. This means that you’re forced to reexplore shrines, where the guardian beasts rest, to level up your weaker jobs if you’re getting bested by a primary dungeon, which is a dull and tedious process.

What’s even more boring is the game’s lack of variety, with most dungeons relying on the same generic design shrouded in a different color. Shrine dungeons, however, are highly varied and well-detailed. These have vivid colors and unique aesthetic elements that add to their atmosphere, like the intricate coral reef that serves as Leviathan’s shrine. You’ll encounter some visually impressive sequences at key moments and when summoning guardians and, on the whole, exploring the quaint little town of Lostime is a pleasant treat complemented by a strong Final Fantasy flair and familiar, soothing music. The cutscenes are less pleasing since they’re plagued by poor dialogue and are highly melodramatic, with ridiculously exaggerated voice acting and no Japanese voice-over option to replace it.

Completing all of the primary dungeons should take about 40 hours, though you can easily spend almost twice as long playing through special dungeons, planting flowers, catching fish, leveling jobs, or visiting the local arcade for minigames. The cute pop-up card game from Chocobo Tales makes a triumphant return and allows you to summon monsters to fight for you in a manner reminiscent of Pokemon. Creating the perfect deck can be a fun task, and even more enjoyable is the option to play online via the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection.

Final Fantasy Fables: Chocobo’s Dungeon offers challenging dungeon-crawling gameplay mixed with attractive Final Fantasy lore, but its high difficulty level may prove a little intimidating for some.

1942 is a top-down shooter set in an alternate reality where the outcome of World War II is dependent on two fighter planes. Rather than a pixel perfect re-creation, Joint Strike is more like a reimagining of the classic arcade game. It feels like the old 1942, but it has elements of some other games in the franchise, such as the charge shot. The biggest gimmick comes from the subtitle. When playing a co-op game, you and your partner each choose one of three planes, as well as one of three joint strike attacks: an electric chain, a bomb, or a large charge shot. Each joint strike works a little differently, but all of them require good communication to be used effectively. When playing a single-player game, you forfeit the joint strike attack in favor of a missile shot. Other than that, it’s the same game in both single-player and multiplayer, online or locally.

Another thing that sets this new version apart from the original is the widescreen display. The game still scrolls vertically, but by spreading the screen out, there is more room for two people to maneuver and more room for enemies to attack. Later levels flood the screen with enemies and bullets, forcing you to the very edges of the screen to avoid death. It’s a welcome improvement to an old formula, which is why it’s too bad it doesn’t last very long. With only five levels, 1942: Joint Strike can be beaten in a single sitting; less than an hour if you’re playing co-op. It would have been nice to see some unlockable secrets, like a port of the original or some extra planes, but you won’t find any of that here.

At least the short time you spend with the game will be pleasing to your eyes. The 3D visuals look great and add a layer of depth not possible in the old 2D game. You’ll fly over oceans, volcanoes, forests, cities under siege, a shipyard, and a few other colorful areas. You’ll do so while your planes pitch and roll, with the camera zooming in and out. The planes and enemies also animate well, sporting quasi-realistic designs. Damage shows on planes in the form of fired or smoky engines, and enemies break apart, crumbling in balls of flame. Enemy attacks are brightly colored and easy to spot despite all of the graphical flourish. The sound takes a backseat to the visuals. Understated, heroic WWII music plays in the menus and levels, but the sound of gunfire and explosions is disappointingly soft.

For 800 Microsoft points, you′re not getting a lot of bang for your buck. The short length and lack of extras hurt what is otherwise a refreshing take on a classic game. Some of you might enjoy playing the game over in search of high scores, but most will find little reason to come back after beating it in the first sitting.

If the answer is no, then Ferrari Challenge has little to offer you. This is a game that opens with a sensual car close-up soundtracked by soaring choral music. Created and designed to indulge System 3 boss Mark Cale’s hot burning for all things Ferrari, the game itself ultimately does little to explain where this passion comes from. If you′re not already besotted with the brand, and don′t get off on deeply technical racing games, then it doesn′t want to know. As far as the Church of Ferrarism is concerned, we’re preaching to the converted rather than knocking on your door and trying to change your life with a fistful of evangelical leaflets.

The approach is hardcore simulation rather than arcade thrills which already places this in a niche within a niche. The handling model is robust and convincing, but also ferociously tough and unforgiving. Brake hard and brake early, or every corner becomes a trap, draining precious seconds through wasted momentum and forced penalties. It has more in common with a Formula 1 or Superbike game than most of its four-wheeled peers. It’s certainly an impressive work of simulation, especially since it comes from Eutechnyx.

The Newcastle-based developer has specialised in driving games for over ten years, yet has been mostly stuck churning out the uninspired likes of 007 Racing, Big Mutha Truckers, The Fast and the Furious, Hot Wheels and the ghastly Pimp My Ride. Not a track record that quite matches the prestige of the Ferrari name, but the team’s risen to the occasion and produced a thoroughbred racing physics engine that can almost hold its own against the Bizarre Creations and Polyphony Digitals of this world.

Given its technical nature, the game is thankfully generous with the assists, to the extent that the relative strength of everything from traction control to ABS can be tweaked. Tweaked within fairly narrow parameters, and there’s very little explanation as to what the jargon means, but it’s tweaked nonetheless. Tiff Needell is also on-hand to talk you around the Ferrari test track, and while his sarky tone can grate, his advice and post practice breakdown are extremely useful in identifying and tackling your weak spots.

Yet for all the realistic visual and sensory feedback (the game supports DualShock 3) the gameplay balance feels somewhat askew. The AI is not exactly razor-sharp, and rival racers often seem more concerned with preserving the finish on their car than with making aggressive decisions. For less experienced players, the challenge comes simply from mastering the demanding control and keeping the car on the track.

Once you’ve grasped the skills required, or if you’re already adept at this sort of technical driving game, you’ll find that beating the pack actually isn’t that hard. The assists therefore provide some element of scaleable difficulty, but only as far as the driving goes. The game really needs a way of ramping up the game itself, even via something as old fashioned as an Easy - Medium - Hard selection.

The visuals are impressive, though its clear attention has been focused on the cars rather than the scenery. These are lovingly recreated vehicles, and the frame-rate holds steady - if not particularly high, at 30fps - regardless of what’s occurring on-screen. As with all licensed racers, it’s the damage model that lets the side down.

Statisticphobes shouldn’t be scared off, though. While you need an affinity for baseball stats to really appreciate the game, the core of the game is all about indulging your inner Steinbrenner and taking total control over the operations of a big-league baseball franchise. You oversee everything from the top down: signing free agents, trading clubhouse troublemakers out of town, inking stars to contract extensions, setting the daily lineups, organizing the starting pitching rotation/bullpen assignments, promoting/demoting players in the minors, and even deciding on an average ticket price. Seasons progress in a turn-based manner, and you can manually sim each game as the dugout bench boss, auto-sim one day at a time, or go for a big-picture approach by simming through whole weeks and months in big chunks. Leagues are just about unlimited in scope. You can play solo running one team, take over all the teams in Commissioner mode, or get into an online league to take on other Branch Rickey wannabes (the multiplayer support is outstanding). Historical database support and downloadable mods that add the entire major leagues from any point in their history let you start a baseball universe at any time from the formation of the National League in 1871 to present day. You can then continue for unlimited decades, moving through authentic league expansion, team movement, and whatever else baseball has grown through over the years.

Attention to detail is incredible, which results in an authentic major league baseball feel. Although the game is mostly text-based, with little visual pizzazz aside from player photos and the big-league ballpark depicted on the simulation screen, the atmosphere is so lifelike that you can almost hear the hotdog vendors. Dozens of stat categories are tracked for each player. So you better have a good idea what ERA, OPS, and WHIP stand for before making a challenge for the pennant. However, there is also a strong human element. Players are given role-playing-game-like ratings that involve such personality traits as mood, loyalty, leadership, greed, desire to play for a winner, and so on that affect on-field performance, as well as come into play whenever you talk contracts. Negotiations are about more than number-crunching because you often wind up with pouting wannabes demanding trades if they’re riding the pine too often, happy superstars taking hometown discounts on contract extensions, and free agents who simply won’t listen to your offers because they don’t want to play for your organization. All of these preferences are communicated in plain old English, too, which makes it seem like you’re dealing with real people–not just names and numbers. It might not seem like a big deal, but having A-Rod comment on your smooth negotiation skills while giving him a $120 million extension makes all the difference between playing virtual accounting with baseball stats and feeling like you’re actually running a big-league franchise.

But with all that said, there isn’t a whole lot in OOTP9 that is completely new. Although this is a more refined, more complete version of the game than its OOTP 2007 predecessor, it doesn’t bring any showstopping new features to the table. Streamlining is really the big focus of the design. Gone is the cumbersome Sports Interactive scouting system with scouts all over the world, replaced by a single head scout who does everything. There’s also an animated baseball on the game-sim screen so you can watch plays develop. The biggest improvement is probably the simulation speed, which has been dramatically ramped up across the board without any loss in realism. You can now rip through a full season in under half an hour of straight simming and even zip through a year in no more than a couple of hours as a more hands-on manager simming one week at a time. This is a huge plus when compared to the last two OOTP games and arguably worth the price of the new game all by itself. Only an occasional stutter remains to slow you down, such as the near eternity it takes to load up the player award voting screen at the end of a season.

Built-in major league rosters are the other top selling point because previous OOTP games only came with fictional players. Being able to send real contemporary MLB stars, such as Magglio Ordonez, Roy Halladay, and Derek Jeter, onto the diamond is a much more attractive option than having to deal with a bunch of anonymous Joe Sixpacks. But these rosters do need to be tweaked somewhat. Bizarrely poor performances from some of the best in the game are too common. In a year as the Yankees, for example, A-Rod hit just .243 and counted a measly 30 homers (his lowest since 1997), while 2007 19-game winner Chien-Ming Wang finished 6-10 with a 5.51 ERA. Most players are pretty much dead-on, although this quirkiness is pronounced enough to apparently produce some weird contracts. Bona fide big-money superstars sometimes settle for ridiculously low deals, while average Joes wind up making huge bucks. So the Yankees can cheap out when re-upping Hall of Fame closer Mariano Rivera for $3 million a year on a three-year pact (although maybe this was just a huge hometown discount for a longtime Yankee who didn’t want to leave town), yet a light-hitting infielder like Chone Figgins somehow gets the Anaheim Angels to give him $10 million a season for three years.

Computer GMs will also lay down big money on past-it stars like Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens. In the first season we simmed, Bonds somehow got a three-year-deal worth $7.7 million a year from the Cincinnati Reds. Priorities seem to be skewed toward these established diamond dogs as well. While teams are making outrageous deals for washed-up old guys in their 40s, they′re also dropping five-star prospects in their early 20s for no reason whatsoever. If you keep an eye on the waiver wire, you’ll eventually scoop up enough talent to fill out a pitching staff. In our first season, the Yankees managed to put together the best middle relief in baseball due solely to a pair of killer young waiver pick-ups and score a 21-year-old four-and-a-half star starting pitcher who tore up AA ball.

At least the fictional and historical leagues aren’t burdened with this sort of baggage. Starting with completely made-up rosters or going back to a past season seems to result in remarkably accurate player performances based on their skills and stats–whether you’re playing on your own or in an online league. This is particularly noticeable if you go back to the 19th century–or the dead ball era–or even the offensively challenged years before the DH was introduced and the mound lowered. Now you can really see how different the game was back then, in terms of such key factors as greater pitcher endurance and fewer runs scored.

In a lot of ways, the above criticisms can be set aside as nitpicky. OOTP9 is a superb game–the closest thing we’ve got to major league baseball in a box. A few wrinkles need to be ironed out and owners of the previous game in the series might be a bit disappointed by the absence of prominent new features, but there is no doubt that this is the best baseball management sim out there for serious followers of the national pastime.

Review: Out of the Park Baseball 9 (PC) | VideogameVagabond.com

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