Publisher: Ubisoft
Developer: Magic Pockets
System: Nintendo DS
Genre: Sim
Release date: Available now
Review by: James Dolbeare

Every once in a while, I come across a game that seems designed for people too young to read the instruction manual, the characters’ dialogue, or my review of it. I don’t claim to be an expert on child development, but I think Imagine Teacher fits squarely into this category. The game is a cute and clever concept from Ubisoft that stands apart in a medium of entertainment dominated by violence. For that, Ubisoft should be commended. If you’re a parent who likes to play the DS with your child, Imagine Teacher provides a great opportunity to do so.

Imagine Teacher throws you into the shoes of a new teacher in a small elementary school. Your classroom starts out with four students, and your mission is to shape these young minds with great skill, prompting the school to send you more students to fill the empty seats. Your eccentric principal offers some loose guidance, but for the most part, you’re on your own.

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Publisher: Telltale Games
Developer: Telltale Games
System: PC
Minimum requirements: Windows XP/Vista
Genre: Adventure
Release date: Available now
Review by: Michael Smith

Episodic gaming is very similar to episodic television. Each new story has to build from or add onto what has come before, or the series eventually feels the mortal slice of the executives’ cancellation sword (ask the producers of CBS’ The Ex List how that feels). Into the fray leaps web comic hero Strong Bad and his oddly shaped cartoon compatriots in Episode 3 of developer Telltale’s Cool Game for Attractive People series, The Baddest of the Bands.

As the new story opens, a gray cloud of depression hangs over the House of Strong. The Fun Machine, Strong Bad’s ancient 8-bit game console, has gone up in smoke in a crackling imitation of the Xbox 360’s Red Ring of Death. This not only ruins our hero’s day, but it also endangers the safety of his home, since his monolithic, monosyllabic brother Strong Mad has threatened to “throw stuff, break stuff” if he can’t play his favorite game.

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Publisher: MTV Games
Developer: Harmonix
System: Xbox 360
Genre: Rhythm/Music
Release date: Available now
Review by: Christopher J. Troilo

We move further and further into an age when gaming has become a group activity in which we combine electronics with our favorite pastimes. From a hardware standpoint, Nintendo has learned how to take simple sports and games and make them interactive, and now Harmonix has done the same thing for music with its Rock Band series, and they’ve done it really, really well. With the release of Rock Band 2, it’s more than apparent that the developers have listened to their fans’ calls for improvements and have tried their best to address every one of them.

For those of you who might be new to the Guitar Hero/Rock Band experience, here’s a brief overview of how these games are played. In Rock Band, you choose between singing into a microphone and playing one of three instruments (guitar, bass or drums). While you listen to mainstream songs, you attempt to play along by using your voice or your instrument in synchronization with colored notes moving along the screen in time with the music. For guitar and bass, you “strum” a flat lever while pressing buttons on the guitar’s neck. For drums, you have four color-coded drum pads to hit, and a kick pedal to simulate the bass drum. Vocalists get lyrics and an oscillating line that indicates the pitches of the notes.

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Publisher: Genius Products
Developer: inXile Entertainment
System: PC
Minimum requirements: Windows XP; 2.0 GHz CPU; 2.0 GB hard drive space; Nvidia GeForce MX 4400 w/64 MB RAM; DirectX 9.0c
Genre: Puzzle
Release date: Available now
Review by: Andrew Clark

As many of us come to realize early in our childhood, sledding can go from a fun wintertime outing to a six-week stint in a cast in two seconds flat. A hill’s steepness can be misjudged halfway down, or in some cases our passenger sees fit to rock the boat and capsize the sled, turning it into an uncontrollable projectile that scatters bodies in its wake. Whether for fun or for injury, Line Rider 2: Unbound seeks to capture that feeling of a York Peppermint Patty and give us the sensation, over and over again.

LR2, like its Flash predecessor, is a physics-based puzzle game in which you must draw a series of lines with different properties for the sled-bound character, Bosh, to use as a track. While the original title was considered more of a “toy” and had no actual goals or conclusion, LR2’s story mode has both; tasking the player with designing a track that’s not only safe for Bosh, but also allows him to achieve a series of goals and collect coins on his way to the finish line. There’s a catch, though: each track can only be edited in certain spots called draw regions. This restriction forces you to combine different line types, tweak angles and play the track over and over again until a suitable solution can be found. It might sound tedious, but the thrill of success and the unlockables that accompany it are enough to keep you playing. I felt such accomplishment after my sledder finally hit an angle I drew just how I imagined he would when I drew it. Conversely, it was just as frustrating when I had worked my way through a level only to be stumped, forcing me into an intense trial-and-error session. I’ll give it to inXile, though; they did a fine job of incorporating the puzzle elements, and track designer TechDawg should be commended for the wonderfully devious designs.

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Publisher: Nintendo
Developer: Nintendo
System: Wii
Genre: Action
Release date: Available now
Review by: Ed Humphries

I grew up among the greatest generation of video gamers. In the era of the Atari 2600, Intellivision and Colecovision, the Nintendo Entertainment System solidified gaming as a hobby, and later as a mainstream entertainment choice. The NES gave birth to Super Mario Brothers; the 2D adventure that arguably fathered today’s billion-dollar gaming industry. Now we live the good life, with Wi-Fi-enabled super consoles linking battalions of virtual soldiers and adventurers across the globe. But those who stayed on the meandering path through the decades sometimes cast a wandering eye back to the great games of earlier years. This nostalgia has encouraged game companies to toss us a bone every now and again, rip an artifact from the past and apply a glossy new coat of paint, leading to the latest release from Nintendo, Wario Land: Shake It.

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Publisher: Ubisoft
Developer: From Software
System: PS3
Genre: Action
Release date: Available now
Review by: James Dolbeare

Ubisoft and From Software have had a giant robotic brainchild and named it Armored Core: For Answer. As it follows the previous game in the series, Armored Core 4, you might be tempted to call it Armored Core 5, but it’s actually the 13th game in the series. This newest addition returns you to the violent yet elegant world of mech-based combat.

For those of you new to the series, in the distant future the world has become so polluted that people have been forced to move into floating colonies far above the Earth’s surface, the only place where the air is fit to breathe. In the chaos caused by diminishing resources, the economic gap has widened and corporations have become all-powerful. They have turned their prosperity into military might and toppled all of the world’s governments. Their primary weapon is Armored Core technology, gargantuan robotic suits of armor, the most elite of which are called NEXTs. But the corporations have begun to fear the power of the NEXTs, so they have abandoned them on the poisonous surface, where the weapons have been salvaged by mercenaries of an organization called Collared.

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Publisher: THQ
Developer: Blue Tongue
System: Wii
Genre: 3D Platformer
Release date: Available now
Review by: Ed Humphries

At its big E3 press conference in July, Nintendo cancelled Christmas. At least, that’s the way it felt to the legions of fanboys (myself included) who looked to the Big N’s annual briefing for news of the game that would be keeping us warm once the leaves started to fall and the holidays arrived. With no new IPs or return engagements from the back catalog of marquee mascots announced, Wii owners looked with dismay at the cold days ahead. And then, an unlikely hero arrived to brighten this winter of our discontent. A true Cinderella man, de Blob is in de house, and he might just be de cure for what ails us.

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Publisher: Slitherine Software
Developer: Firepower, The Lordz Games Studios
System: PC
Minimum requirements: Windows 98/ME/2000/XP; Intel Pentium 4, 1.4 GHz or fully compatible; 512 MB RAM; 300 MB of free space on hard drive; Java
Genre: Strategy
Release date: Available now
Review by: Jason Pitruzzello

The Napoleonic Wars seem to be a never-ending source of gaming inspiration. Whether it’s tabletop war games with their cardboard counters or computer games with the latest graphics, it’s hard to go wrong by picking this turbulent period in European history as a basis for strategy gaming. It had been quite some time since I had played a game set in this specific era until Slitherine’s Commander: Napoleon at War came across my virtual desk, and I confess that I looked forward to correcting the historic mistakes made by famous generals.

From the moment the game is installed, Commander: Napoleon at War clearly shows its allegiance to old-school tabletop games. CNW is a turn-based strategy game played on a map of Europe, parts of North America, North Africa and the Ottoman Empire. The game ships with a variety of scenarios, some of which cover individual campaigns such as the invasion of Russia or the Peninsular War, and a mega-campaign that highlights the political situation in Europe from 1805 to 1814. The map is divided into hexes, each of which covers a sizeable amount of land (there are 6 hexes between Paris and Brussels), giving the game a grand scope. Armies feature the kinds of troops you might expect, from light cavalry scouts to siege guns that break down fortifications quickly. However, given the scale of the game, these different kinds of units appear in large divisions rather than in smaller groups. Thus, the Grande Armée that invades Russia in the 1812 campaign includes only 16 individual units. This style of organization keeps the game manageable while giving it the room to encompass so much territory.

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Publisher: Ubisoft
Developer: Ludia Inc.
System: Wii
Genre: Sim
Release date: Available now
Review by: Michael Moody

Since the Wii’s conception, developers and publishers have jumped on the bandwagon to push the casual gaming market to a new level. The dizzying array of titles has swamped the market faster than you can shake the Wiimote. Hell’s Kitchen, inspired by the hit Fox TV series, is a new game on the casual chopping block. Does Hell’s spark a flame or is it just another title in this marketing frenzy?

Hell’s Kitchen focuses on preparation, cooking and service. You must master these skills to avoid the juvenile tantrums of Chef Gordon Ramsay. Acting as Ramsay’s apprentice, you must quickly accommodate each customer in the dining hall by making sure that they are seated and their orders are taken. In the kitchen, you must prepare the food. Each meal has its meat, veggie and fruit ingredients and has an allocated time to cook. The quality of the prepared dishes is measured in stars. If the food is cooked and sits too long unserved, the star rating decreases. The goal is to get the food out of the kitchen as soon as possible by clicking and dragging the provided icons. Ramsay’s temperament (indicated by a flaming meter on the screen) fluctuates depending on how well these tasks are completed. If your pace is slow, the indicator increases, and vice versa if your pace is swift.

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Publisher: Encore
Developer: White Birds Productions
System: PC
Minimum requirements: Pentium III 1.5 Ghz; 512 MB RAM; Windows XP SP2/Vista; 3D Video Card
Genre: Adventure
Release date: Available now
Review by: Bob Mandel

Benoit Sokal is a renowned French game developer most famous for the Syberia franchise, an emotionally touching set of two games that stunned the adventure-gaming community with their stories, innovation, polish and intrigue. What followed was another PC release, Paradise, which did not match the success achieved by the Syberia series. Now, White Birds Productions has returned with Sinking Island, a new adventure that combines the traditional play dynamics of the adventure genre with those of a classic murder mystery. What with the popularity of “hidden object” games among casual gamers, on the surface it would seem that this combination could provide a winning formula.

The story of Sinking Island is not one of its stronger aspects. Police inspector Jack Norm is asked to investigate the death of powerful and ego-centric magnate Walter Jones, who has fallen off a steep cliff in his wheelchair. Norm flies by helicopter to the scene of the crime—the island of Sangorah in the Indian Ocean—and has three days to identify the killer before the island sinks beneath the waves. Jones was disliked by many people, so there is no shortage of suspects, but as the plot unfolds, there is nothing particularly distinctive or surprising about it, making the sequence of events somewhat predictable and uninvolving.

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