Publisher: Square Enix
Developer: Square Enix
Genre: RPG
ESRB rating: Teen
Release date: Available now

Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together has long been considered one of the best tactical RPGs ever made. Originally released in Japan on the Super Famicom in 1995 and North America on the Playstation in 1998, Tactics Ogre was long overdue and more than deserving of a remake. Square Enix has provided one, bringing it to the PSP.

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Publisher: Wadjet Eye Games
Developer: Joshua Nuernberger
System requirements: Not available
Genre: Adventure
ESRB rating: Not rated
Release date: Available now

Hello folks! Alaric here, with another report on my ongoing love affair with indie PC games. This year promises to be quite fruitful as high-profile releases go, and I must admit that I’m really eager to get my hands on some of the upcoming goodness. However, out of nowhere comes an amazing indie offering, which, come December, will be a very serious contender for my 2011 Game of the Year. I’m talking, of course, about the recently released Gemini Rue. Much like Auralux, Gemini Rue was developed by a student. One notable difference is that it was created using Adventure Game Studio, a free tool available to everyone. Despite being this developer’s first-ever commercial offering, it won the Student Showcase award during the Independent Game Festival 2010. When I first got my hands on it, I wondered whether it could live up to the honors it received. I didn’t wonder for long.

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Publisher: Sega
Developer: Creative Assembly
System requirements: 2 GHz Intel dual-core/2.6 GHz Intel single-core or equivalent CPU, 1 GB RAM (2 GB for Vista/Win 7), 256 MB DirectX 9.0c-compatible graphics card with Shader Model 3.0 support, 20 GB hard-drive space
Genre: Strategy
ESRB rating: Teen
Release date: Available now

Coming away from the successful release of Napoleon: Total War with good sales, The Creative Assembly has decided to go back to where it all began. Total War: Shogun 2 is a remake of their classic first release, and gamer expectations could not be higher. Competing not only against a market full of strategy games, but also against their own earlier success, the designers have undertaken a task that is almost as difficult as the historical politics covered by the game, which is set in the Warring States period of 16th-century Japan. Your goal is to become Shogun. And since every other clan is also trying to become Shogun, there’s a lot of fighting and diplomacy along the path to victory.

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Publisher: Electronic Arts
Developer: EA Canada
Genre: Sports
ESRB rating: Mature
Release date: Available now

In all the wide world of sports, boxing is arguably the most cinematic. Its punchy pugilists, our modern-day gladiators, battle in the ring before screaming masses, shedding their blood and working their opponents to the bone, all for our entertainment. In the end, there can be only one, and it’s that sentiment that provides a compelling narrative hook each time out. From Rocky to Raging Bull and the recent Mickey Ward tale, The Fighter, Hollywood has continually served up a series of Cinderella men ready for their close-ups on the canvas. It’s this same approach that EA uses with Fight Night Champion.

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Publisher: MTV Games
Developer: Harmonix
Genre: Music
ESRB rating: Teen
Release date: Available now

Until recently, gamers could only satisfy their love of dancing in games such as Dance Dance Revolution. While DDR made us perform some pretty fancy footwork, everything above the waist remained largely unused. The Nintendo Wii brought in a new wave of arm-friendly dancing games, but it still felt like there were parts of our bodies that weren’t getting down as much as we wanted. Dance Central, developed for the Kinect by Harmonix Music Systems, gets your whole body involved. Is it worth it, or should you sit this one out?

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Publisher: Alawar Entertainment
Developer: Alawar Entertainment
System requirements: Windows XP/Vista/Win 7, 1.7 GHz CPU, 256 MB RAM, DirectX 9.0-compatible graphics card, DirectX 9.0-compatible sound
Genre: Horror Adventure
ESRB rating: Not rated at press time
Release date: Available now

I’ve never been a huge fan of point-and-click adventures, preferring a more active style of game, but I know they’re extremely popular as mystery or horror games. Stray Souls: Dollhouse Story is a new horror puzzle adventure from Alawar, and I found myself a lot more engaged by it than I expected to be.

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Publisher: Trion Worlds
Developer: Trion Worlds
System requirements: Windows XP/Vista/Win 7; 2.0 GHz Dual Core or better CPU; 2 GB RAM; 15 GB hard-drive space; Nvidia GeForce FX 5900, ATI/AMD Radeon X300, Intel GMA X4500 or better graphics card; DirectX 8.1-compatible sound card; DirectX 9.0c with June 2010 update; broadband Internet connection
Genre: MMORPG
ESRB rating: Teen
Release date: Available now

I have a long-time love of the MMO genre as a whole. When I get the opportunity to review an MMO, I often find myself wondering if the game I’m looking at is going to be the one that ends up sapping all my willpower to engage in a social life. Often times I get pretty lucky and I get a nice time sink for a week or two; other times I find myself immersed in the world set before me. I can count on one hand how many times the latter has ever happened to me, and now I’m proud to say I can no longer use that reference in my gaming career. While following Rift during its development, I found myself intrigued by the art and the idea behind it all. After 10 days of playing, I found myself wondering if maybe this game was just a shiny new change from my usual haunts, but with every login I find some new quirk I enjoy that keeps me interested. For 19 days I’ve been wrapped up in Rift, the new MMORPG from developer Trion Worlds, exploring the world before me as a spoony Bard, finding something exciting every day.

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Publisher: Electronic Arts
Developer: BioWare
Genre: RPG
ESRB rating: Mature
Release date: Available now

Life isn’t easy in Ferelden. Civil war, the Blight, and Landsmeet politics have nearly torn it apart, and while we were formerly privy to the palace drama and inner workings of the highest echelons of the country’s seats of power, there are other stories to be told. In Dragon Age: Origins there was a small village that players passed through during their first steps on the road to becoming the Hero. The village itself was little more than a rest stop on the road, but there were people there, the everyday kind that could care less about whose butt warmed the throne. After the would-be Hero left the village, the people there were all but forgotten, and mentioned only briefly later on as a footnote, when it was announced that the village of Lothering had been razed by the Darkspawn. It is toward these people that the BioWare writers have turned their attention when crafting their story for Dragon Age II.

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Publisher: Activision
Developer: Beenox
System requirements: Windows XP/Vista/Win 7, Intel Core 2 Duo 2.6 GHz or AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ or better CPU, GeForce 7800 or Radeon X1800 (w/256 MB of video RAM) or better graphics card, 1 GB of RAM, 14 GB of uncompressed hard-drive space
Genre: Action
ESRB rating: Teen
Release date: Available now

“Four parallel worlds, one unparalleled adventure.” The blurb on a box cover has never been so accurate. Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions is one of the best, if not the best, Spider-Man games ever. Of course, for those who’ve read my other reviews, “Beenox strikes again” is equally apt; these are the same developers responsible for Transformers: War for Cybertron. This time, however, they’re bringing us a tale involving not one, but four different versions of an iconic character that recently celebrated his 50th anniversary.

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Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment
Developer: Guerrilla Games
Genre: Shooter
ESRB rating: Mature
Release date: Available now

In a year when seemingly every new release is a sequel, it’s tough to get excited about some upcoming games. Some sequels fail to capture the magic of their predecessors, while others outshine them. Killzone 3, by Guerrilla Games, is a first-person shooter sequel to the smash 2009 hit Killzone 2. Does it rise to meet the challenge? Or does it belong on the bottom of your already towering sequel pile?

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Publisher: Paradox Interactive
Developer: Arrowhead Game Studios
System requirements: Windows XP/Vista/Win 7, 2.4 GHz Pentium IV or AMD 3500+ or better CPU, 2 GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce 8800/ATI Radeon X1900 or better graphics card, DirectX-compatible sound card, DirectX 9, 2 GB hard-drive space
Genre: RPG
ESRB rating: Teen
Release date: Available now

Every once in awhile, a game comes along that combines creative mechanics with solid storytelling and excellent programming (Morrowind comes to mind). They are games that we, as gamers, take seriously. However, occasionally a game gives us creative gameplay and uses it as a platform for humor. Dungeon Keeper and its sequel are the best examples of this. It is in this tradition of good gaming and humor that Arrowhead Game Studios has created Magicka, a game that incorporates numerous pop-culture references. Magicka strives to provide an absurd, and yet heroic, RPG-lite narrative, and couples it with a detailed system for using magic.

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Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment
Developer: Media Molecule
Genre: Platformer
ESRB rating: Everyone
Release date: Available now

Let’s face it—cuteness is not a selling point for most adult gamers. Especially male gamers, who spend most of their time saving the universe from an alien scourge or cleansing the planet of the zombie infestation. But even the most jaded gaming veteran is bound to find something in developer Media Molecule’s platformer sequel, Little Big Planet 2, that’ll make them smile and give Gordon Freeman or Nathan Drake a break for a few hours.

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Publisher: BulkyPix
Developer: BulkyPix
Genre: Strategy/Tower Defense
iTunes Rating: 9+
Release date: Available now

In the mid-nineties I played my first computer game, Dune. It was the game that motivated me to push my parents to buy our own PC. It wouldn’t be until 1999-2000 that I would finally get a computer in my home, but once I got one, I immediately fell in love with the RTS and Sci Fi genres. When I received my code to review Battlestar Commander, I was both apprehensive and anxious to find out if it could recapture some of that magic I felt over a decade ago. But before some of you knuckleheads go off on a PC-fanboy tangent, just hear me out. While Battlestar Commander might not be the whole enchilada, it may be the fix you need when you’re sans-PC.

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Publisher: Activision
Developer: Treyarch
Genre: First-person shooter
ESRB rating: Mature
Release date: Available now

It seems like every game today comes with downloadable content one way or another. It can be something to personalize your avatar, themes to customize your layout, or content to expand your gameplay experience. Why would Call of Duty: Black Ops, arguably one of the greatest games of all time, be any different? Now, try not to do cartwheels in excitement just yet, because you might just cartwheel into a room with an untold number of claymores and camped enemies.

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Publisher: Broken Rules
Developer: Broken Rules
Genre: Puzzle-Platformer
ESRB rating: Everyone
Release Date: Available now

Nintendo’s WiiWare service has been a strange experiment. Sure, many people have taken swipes at Nintendo’s “two GameCubes wrapped in duct tape” approach to the online experience that nowadays even the most vanilla of mainstream consumers expect. But when they launched this digital distribution service shortly after the Virtual Console, expectations were high that this would be a venue on par with Xbox Live’s Arcade; granting smaller, independently financed titles a showcase in which to peddle their wares. And while there have been a handful of console exclusives that made a splash and really leveraged the unique control mechanics intrinsic to the Wii, such as World of Goo, too many weeks go by with middling shovelware pushed our way. With the release of the platform-puzzler And Yet it Moves hopes are high that this title will make its mark and compel publishers to push for further exposure on WiiWare.

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