Publisher: Electronic Arts
Developer: EA Tiburon
Genre: Sports
ESRB rating: Everyone
Release date: Available now

Spring is in the air and March Madness is reaching its end, but before the first pitch can be thrown on opening day, there’s one more epic sporting event to undertake: The Masters (“A tradition unlike any other,” I believe the tagline goes). It’s fitting, then, that EA has chosen this timeframe to release (as it does every year) its newest Tiger Woods golf game, aptly named PGA Tour 12: The Masters.

As the name might suggest, the bulk of the golfing action revolves around The Masters, the major PGA tournament held at the Augusta National Golf Club. For the first time in the series, Augusta has been completely re-created, so you can get a fairly realistic sense of what playing those 18 holes feels like. There are 16 courses included in the game (including such fan favorites as Pebble Beach), with at least 20 others slated to be available for download. Throughout the game, you hone your golfing skills to win the ultimate prize—the illustrious green jacket.

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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: Microsoft Game Studios
Developer: Good Science Studio
Genre: Action
ESRB rating: Everyone
Release date: Available now

Years after the Nintendo Wii proved that there was a large market for motion-controlled games, Microsoft decided to throw its hat into the ring with the Kinect. Unlike other motion-controlled devices, the Kinect requires no controller, and is instead controlled by the user’s body. It comes bundled with Kinect Adventures, which is a series of mini-games that showcase what the system is capable of.

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Publisher: Paramount Digital Interactive
Developer: Behaviour Interactive
Genre: Action-Adventure
ESRB rating: Everyone 10+
Release date: Available now

Who would’ve thought that a movie was going to have a video game based on it? Today it just seems like the norm that a game will be developed because a film is made. Problems seem to spawn because the film industry and the video-game industry use two different media to entertain. Sometimes you get a great movie and a terrible game that follows. Let us take a look at a video game based on the animated film Rango, and see if it falls in the category of forgettable.

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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: Capcom
Developer: Capcom
Genre: Fighting
ERSB Rating: Teen
Release date: Available now

It has been a whopping 11 years since the world last saw the heroes and villains from Marvel and Capcom battle it out in MvC2: New Age of Heroes. Since that time, the highly successful game has been ported to various systems, most recently in 2009 where it made a popular comeback on the PS3 and Xbox Live Arcade. Now, Capcom has rolled out the 3rd game in the franchise, Fate of Two Worlds, incorporating both new and old characters in an attempt to revitalize the series for a whole new audience.

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Publisher: Microsoft
Developer: CNG Studios
Genre: Puzzle
ESRB rating: Not rated
Release date: Available now

In the past, tying a string around your finger has been a great way to remember something. That’s what I’m told, at least. Honestly, I have no idea how that works, unless the thing you are supposed to remember is written on the string itself. Immunogen, by CNG Studios, looks to take that string off your finger by sharpening your mind through memorizing and matching.

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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: EA
Developer: Visceral Games
Genre: Survival Horror
Rating: Mature
Release Date: Available now

Two years ago, I charted my review through Dead Space by calling out the various gaming archetypes that the developers pulled from in building a better deathtrap. That game borrowed from the best, drawing inspiration from genre giants like Resident Evil 4 and BioShock. Then, like a great musician steeped in the movements of those who came before him, they churned out a killer symphony that immediately made Visceral Games a developer to watch. As I slowly made my trek through that game’s nightmare, I stopped taking stock of its influences and found myself swept up in the ride. Dead Space was a big, brawny adventure that made its mark on my psyche and left me wanting to know where fate would fling Isaac Clarke next. In Dead Space 2, we catch up with our intrepid engineer and find that his journey through the doomed Ishimura was merely one ring in a rapidly spiraling Hell.

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Publisher: Square Enix
Developer: Feel Plus
Genre: Third-person shooter
ESRB rating: Mature
Release Date: Available now

If they’re not working on the next Halo or Call of Duty, why are game developers focusing their valuable time and attention on building a multiplayer suite? That’s the question I’ve asked myself for years as I’ve played through “Me Too” iterations of online frag-fest appetizers that might catch gamers’ attention spans for a moment or two before the masses return to their beloved comfort food. If you can’t innovate, then it makes no sense to toss in multiplayer simply to etch one more bullet point on the back of the box, unless you can bring something new to the table. It’s to this end that developer Feel Plus chases in developing their innovative third-person shooter, Mindjack.

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Publisher: Capcom
Developer: Capcom
Genre: Survival Horror
ESRB rating: Mature
Release date: Available now

It’s been 11 years since the T-virus outbreak destroyed Raccoon City, and once again Chris Redfield finds himself caught in the throes of a biotech nightmare. The Resident Evil franchise has been held in high regard by fans of the survival horror genre, but it has taken some heat for hit-or-miss quality in previous releases (e.g. Code Veronica, Outbreak File #2). Does this fifth installment offer redemption for the franchise’s past sins? Is the Gold Edition worth the weightier price tag?

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Publisher: Bethesda Softworks
Developer: Obsidian Entertainment
Genre: First-person shooter/ RPG
ERSB Rating: Mature
Release date: Available now

Even though the Fallout games for the Xbox 360 have shown tremendous replay value and depth, they have also been defined by exceptional downloadable content. Fallout 3 offered several new missions and quests which opened up the world in novel directions, allowed for expansions to the player’s created character, and even helped resolve some questions left over from the game’s conclusion. Needless to say, many have been excited about New Vegas’ first bundle of downloadable content, Dead Money.

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Publisher: 2K Games
Developer: 2K Czech
Genre: Action
ESRB rating: Mature
Release date: Available Now

Anyone who’s played through Mafia II’s main adventure knows what happens at the end. I won’t give the secret away, just in case there are any late adopters out there, but let me impart that it left me both agape and a little bit ticked off. Despite the rather blunt end, though, DLC for Mafia II has been pretty regular. PS3 owners got The Betrayal of Jimmy; its follow up, Jimmy’s Vendetta, was released only a couple months back. Let’s see how the latest installment, Joe’s Adventures, stacks up in the grand Mafioso scheme of things.

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Publisher: Deep Silver
Developer: Techland Development
Genre: Racing
ESRB rating: Everyone 10+
Release date: Available now

Racing games will always be a dime-a-dozen in Videogame Land. It’s one of the simplest, yet still most enjoyable concepts for couch competition. However, as the industry has grown, racing games must continually reinvent themselves, finding new ways to stand apart when compared to similar and often times antiquated titles. Some franchises, like Need for Speed have gone down the road of realism, trying to offer games which feature physics-based handling and detailed car mechanics. Other racing games, like nail’d, are trying a different strategy – being completely insane.

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