But, hey, rules are rules. At an event in San Francisco in early October, 2K Games gave an extended look at BioShock 2, due out Feb. 9.

Jordan Thomas, the game's creative director, gave about a 20-minute demo that took place in the Siren Alley area of Rapture. Afterward, attendees were invited to play through one of the game's early portions, a level called Ryan Amusements, a theme park designed by Rapture creator Andrew Ryan that served as a "propaganda paradise to scare [children] out of going to the surface and spoiling the secret of Rapture to the world," Thomas said.

Story: The plot takes place 10 years after the fall of Rapture, the undersea paradise-turned-distopia inhabited by genetically mutated "splicers," ghoulish Little Sisters and their protectors, the Big Daddies. Sofia Lamb, a psychologist and political rival to Rapture's creator, the late Andrew Ryan, has taken over the city. Where Ryan believed one should act in one's own self-interest, Lamb espouses the idea that we have a "moral obligation to the world entire," Thomas explained during the demo. "We like to think of Rapture as the sort of the place where good ideas, when taken to the extreme, turn monstrous," he said.

Amid all of this, the player assumes the role of a prototype Big Daddy who has been awakened and given free will. His focus is to find the Little Sister to whom he was once bonded, but "as the player closes in on his former Little Sister, he realizes she's not just important to him, she's important to the entire city."
New enemies: Because much of Rapture is flooded, the goal in Siren Alley was to find a pumping station to rid the area of excess water. Standing in your way, however, was one of Lamb's lieutenants, a half-crazy (and in Rapture, who isn't?) cult leader.

Before getting to him, though, we were introduced to some new enemies. Since we needed Adam, we had to find a Little Sister. That meant defeating her Big Daddy protector. In BioShock 2, there's a new kind of Big Daddy, the defense-minded Rumbler. Again, as long as you don't attack him, he ignores you, which gives you the chance to properly arm yourself and prepare. Once provoked, the Rumbler will lay down a perimeter of mini-turrets and fire at you from behind a powerful bazooka. To combat this, the demo showed the player summoning Security Bots to help defeat the Rumbler.

Later in the demo, we came across a Brute splicer, who, Thomas explained, had been splicing himself stronger and stronger since the events of the first game. Because he's essentially at the "top of the Adam food chain," he's much more difficult to defeat than regular splicers, often throwing objects or charging you as a means of attack. To address criticism that splicers' behavior tended to be too predictable in the first BioShock, the enemies now will come at you with in a variety of ways, both offensively and defensively. (In the demo I played, a note popped up on screen that said, "Beware, a splicer is trying to heal at a health station." I got him good.)

Finally, there are the Big Sisters, as dangerous as Big Daddies but otherwise opposite in nearly every way. Lithe and quick, they come looking for you after you've rescued or harvested a Little Sister. In a way, their presence serves to address the complaint that going up against a Big Daddy just doesn't sound as daunting when your character has become one himself. It was a point the developer obviously wanted hammered home: Yes, the protagonist is much stronger, but, this time, Rapture is much meaner.

"We wanted the Big Sister to not be just like another Big Daddy," said JP Lebreton, the game's lead level designer. "We wanted her to be fast, to be agile, to be scary. She's darting around the environment, she's jumping off walls, she's jumping down off balconies or behind you. A lot of people are saying, 'Well, if you're a Big Daddy, what do you have to be scared of? You're the most powerful thing in the environment.' It's like, well, no, wait a minute. There's this other thing. You're a big, strong dude, but these Big Sisters are a whole different level of challenge for you. And they hunt you."

Weapons: In this respect, the biggest change to the game is being able to wield weapons and plasmids independently and simultaneously. As a Big Daddy, you come equipped with a drill, so if melee combat is your thing, do so Big Daddy-style: First freeze your enemy, then drill him to pieces.

Your other main weapon is a rivet gun. One type of rivet ammunition allows you to shoot rivets so they stick in the ground or on a wall; when an enemy approaches, they act as a sort of proximity mine. Other weapons include a machine gun and a spear gun, with which you can fire rocket spears, projectiles that embed themselves in enemies and cause them to fly around the room before exploding.

There are new uses for plasmids, too. In one instance, the demo showed the player setting some traps for enemies by using Cyclone and combining it with Winter Blast – unsuspecting splicers would wander into the mini tornadoes, freeze, get blown into a wall and shatter. Sure, afterward you can't collect anything off the bodies, but it's a small price to pay for iced splicers.

Combat and strategy: Once you capture a Little Sister, you can choose to harvest her on the spot or adopt her. If you pick the latter option, she hops on your shoulder and becomes a guide to bodies from which you can harvest Adam, the substance that's necessary to gain new plasmids and tonics. Clicking a button allows you to see a "pheromone scent," the path that leads you to Adam-filled corpses. Once there, she will tell you to put her down so she can begin her work. First, however, you must set up a perimeter, because as soon as she begins her harvest, splicers will relentlessly come after her for her Adam. This is where it's handy to have a mini-turret from the Rumbler and to set up Winter Blast-infused Cyclones. When you're done with a Little Sister, you can again choose to harvest her or free her.

A major change to how you progress through the game has to do with hacking. When you hack circuitry, no longer does the action pause for you to complete the associated mini-game (one that, by the 50th, 60th or thousandth time, became annoyingly tedious). There's still a mini-game, albeit a simpler one: A vertical needle moves horizontally across an area divided into colored sections (picture an analog voltmeter). Pressing the A button stops the needle from moving; the goal is to stop it in the green section. The difficulty varies with needle speed, the width of the green sections and how many times you have to repeat the process. Stopping the needle in blue sections gets you a bonus.

Moreover, as mentioned, the game no longer pauses during hacking, so that turret that politely stopped and waited for you to hack it before it started firing on you again? Yeah, now it'll keep firing. To help you out, though, you can now collect hacking darts, which allow you to hack from a distance. Just shoot a dart at a turret from across the room, hack it and you're good to go.

Multiplayer: Although I was unable to stick around to experience it first-hand, here's the overview. The setting of the game's multiplayer is before the events of the first BioShock, during the civil war that led to Rapture's demise. Players assume the roles of Rapture citizens, earning experience points to create unique Rapturians with whichever weapons, plasmids or tonics they want. Environments, such as the Kashmir Restaurant or Mercury Suites, are taken from key areas of the first game, only revised so they accurately depict that time in Rapture's history.

I admit that, although I did finish the first BioShock, it had been some two years since I last visited Rapture. The good thing is that, while playing the single-player demo, I was able to ease back in fairly effortlessly. From the little of the game I played – only about 45 minutes – BioShock 2 at least has the potential to satisfy those who enjoy running and gunning as well as players who prefer to plan their strategy of attack. Then there are those instances that combine those two tactics: When you plunk down a Little Sister so she can begin her harvest. The strategists should take satisfaction from setting up an effective perimeter; the mayhem-minded will appreciate the point when the perimeter fails and chaos ensues.

Other moments were equally satisfying, from accessing a locked door by firing a hacking dart through a broken window to the door controls on the other side, to going head-to-head against a Little Sister and ending up the last one standing. There's the potential for hacking to seem too rote (and that can only be answered after hours of gameplay), but having it occur amid the action, instead of during paused interludes, is a nice touch. In fact, my main complaint isn't really one at all: I wanted to play more.

This pattern has repeated itself for most of my life, so I can be reasonably sure that the Sony Computer Entertainment of American representatives demoing the game weren't intentionally losing to me so that I'd have a better opinion of Buzz! Quiz World for the PlayStation 3. However, they did go so far as to purchase pizza and a cooler full of beer for the appointment.

"Hey," they said, "this is how the game is supposed to be played."

But it was a morning appointment, so I abstained from the beverages as the lead SCEA rep gave me a rundown of all the things that are different or better about Quiz World from its other iterations. For one thing, everything is glossier and fancier for the benefit of PS3 graphics. The game show set looks like something straight out of Who Wants to be a Millionaire, plus some pretty nifty stage tricks that ABC probably couldn't provide insurance for in real life (like trapdoors and rising platforms).

For another, the gameplay modes have been expanded and loosened up a bit so that you can customize your own game (playing by time limit or quiz type, etc.) and have a more expansive multiplayer. The old sofa-to-sofa multiplayer mode has been expanded to eight players and as many as four people per "sofa" can participate on one PS3.

Also, all the old downloadable content and quiz packs you bought for Buzz! Quiz TV will work with Quiz show and naturally the controllers will work, too.

Post-rundown, the SCEA rep rounded up some third party PR types for a quick custom game. The character selection process sadly forces you to use a pre-generated name so that the announcer can call you out by name – but I managed to make the most of it by choosing a wacky-looking medieval character that resembled the Black Knight from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. The cartoony absurdity of my character combined with his taunt animations almost made up for the fact that I was completely sober.

Then we got down to the game. There are 5000 or more questions in the game total, but the categories in Quiz World have been broken down into even more specific types that change the difficulty of certain quizzes. For example, instead of there just being a catch-all "sports" category, there was a motorsports category that somebody picked – thereby beginning the ancient pattern of AJ starts out sucking.

Nineties music, Musicals and Film, 90s TV and Trends quizzes later, I was ranked completely last among all the PR types. (It's not my fault I couldn't remember anything Jamiroquai did except Virtual Insanity – I just watched a VH-1 special on it!) The announcer had even gone so far as to call me out three times during a round where I'd picked the category. Jerkface Kermit the Frog impersonator!

But then the Final Round – which uses questions from all categories – leveled everything out, literally. Contestant characters were placed on top of moving platforms and every wrong platform sunk you further toward the ground, while every right answer elevated you a little higher. Last one not touching the ground wins – and that happened to be me. Because suddenly, I remembered everything about the 90s. Also, I happened to hit the answer buttons a little faster than everyone else to get more of a boost on the platform.

Post-game, the amusing credits sequence scrolled on by and I was pleased to see myself on there like three times for player who'd answered the most questions wrong, player with the slowest button presses, and as Winner. Too bad they didn't have a credit listing for "Best comeback in the history of Buzz!"

Buzz! Quiz World goes for $40 without the special game show controllers and $60 with. You might think that's a little steep – but the average cost of an adult party game you could buy at Toys ‘R' Us is $30 and at least with Buzz! you can't lose any of the chance cards. Which totally unbalances Monopoly, by the way.

The game is out November 10.

During a presentation this week of Capcom's upcoming zombie-killing action game Dead Rising 2, game writers got to once more check out the game's four modes of multiplayer, robust mini-games that have gamers competing for cash as they work to kill the most zombies in creative ways.

But what is one to do without all of that cash earned in the games? Capcom wasn't saying yesterday, but they said there's more to those end-match cash totals than providing just a score.

In my time with the game I took on Stephen Totilo and two others in the game's four modes: Ramsterball, Headache, Pounds of Flesh and Slicecycles.

Of the four, my favorite was probably the first: Ramsterball. In this game your leather jacket and motorcycle helmet festooned player runs around in an over-sized metal ball, using it to crush hordes of zombies in an arena of sorts. Cash is earned based on how many zombies you kill.

The catch is that only one ball-runner can score at a time. While scoring the metal cage glows and if someone bumps into that metal ball they become the one able to rack up cash. Adding a bit more strategy to the game is the fact that you only keep the cash if you manage to slam the ball into one of the over-sized bumpers in the arena. So if you rack up a huge score and get tagged out before you hit a bumper you lose all of the cash.

Next up was Headache, which has you on foot grabbing buckets with drills mounted in them. You have to take these buckets and slam them on the heads of zombies. Again, you don't get points into you activate the buckets by hitting a big button on one side of the smallish play area. Once activated, all of those drills turn on and you bucket-headed zombies collapse in a shower of blood.

You can also use sticks of dynamite to blow off the buckets from nearby zombies, preventing competing players from scoring.

Kinda fun, but also kind of limited in scope.

My least favorite of the four challenges is Pound of Flesh, which has you using a Moose head's antlers to shovel or slam zombies onto a giant scale. Because this takes place on four separate platforms there's little direct interference from other players. And the mechanic is fairly simple.

At the beginning of the fourth and final stage the player with the most cash (in this case Totilo) gets a few second head start before the other players drop into the competition.

Slicecycles puts your character atop a motorcycle armed with blades in a huge arena. Gamers then drive through massive crowds of zombies racking up huge amounts of cash.

While the concept is neat, made more fun by the inclusion of "bonus" zombies, the motorcycle's handling wasn't as tight as I would have liked and the lack of a handbrake made pulling off quick turns a bit frustrating. I also wasn't happy with how the motorcycle behaved when it went up the curved walls of the arena. It didn't feel zippy enough to make it as fun as it could have been.

Once the game wrapped, and Totilo crowed over his success in soundly beating everyone present, the game showed the final score in cash. Cash that, Capcom seems to be hinting, will play a bigger role in the game.

Let's hope it's not just so you can buy new outfits and the mulitplayer experience fits more neatly in with what we've seen so far of the single-player campaign.

And, I'm still holding out for video capture in Dead Rising 2. Who's with me?

Tatsunoko Vs. Capcom, with its colorful cast of Capcom characters and throwbacks from Japanese animation company Tatsunoko productions, is almost more about over-the-top and fun fights than it is about skill and tactics. Almost.

While the game limits moves to three buttons, weak, medium and strong attacks, a skilled fighting player can still squeeze quite a bit out of the title.

Earlier this week I sat down with Capcom's Seth "S-Kill" Killian to chat about Super Street Fighter IV and play a bit of Tatsunoko Vs. Capcom: Ultimate All-Stars.

The event, held on the 48th floor of a downtown New York hotel, gave me a chance to check out a handful of new characters for the upcoming fighter including Joe the Condor, Tekkaman Blade and Zero. But I spent my time with the game playing an almost emaciated looking Frank West from Dead Rising.

West's main attacks include swinging a baseball attack into the mid-section of an opponent and slapping enemies with a golf club in a giant, low-to-high swing. When not engaged as the main character in the tag-team battles, he can also be called on to hop into quickly and stun an opponent with the flash on his camera.

But as we all know, Frank West's real skills involve zombies.

West can call out a zombie from either side of the screen or drop one from the sky into the middle of the battle. The twist is that once the zombie starts making its way across the screen, it will attack anything in its path, including you.

Fortunately, West has his bat and golf club, which he can use to smack the zombies across the screen at enemies. He can also call on a zombie to shoot from one side of the screen to the other in a shopping cart.

West is a fun character to play in the game and his unusual abilities add a nice change of pace to the title. The best part of playing Frank West, though, are some of his super attacks.

One involves him dressing up as Mega Man and blasting away at an opponent, but my favorite arms West with a Servbot helmet. It's hard to pull off, but if you land the attack, West slaps it on his opponents head and then pushes him through a massive crowd of zombies.

So fun.

Three levels were available in the demo that 8monkey had up and running at their PAX booth, which was festooned with period weapons and employees dressed up in historical garb, right up to publisher Phantom EFX's CEO and game designer Aaron Schurman wearing Roman hardened leather armor, complete with plumed helmet.

Schurman gave me a basic overview of the game as I played through the opening level as a member of General Custer's doom band during the Battle of Little Big Horn. Your character is an MIA - missing in action - a person who was unaccounted for at the end of a major battle or disaster. The concept behind the game is that a futuristic time agency warps in and recruits these MIA's to put them to work fixing errors in the time stream. He explained that one of your character's contacts is an MIA from 9/11, a policeman who was off-duty on the day of the tragedy, running to help but managing to (nearly) get killed in the process.

The concept made me a little sad, but Andrew made me look at things another way. "It is sad that they are gone, but it's good to imagine that these MIAs are actually still out there somewhere, making a difference for the rest of us."

Back at the Battle of Little Big Horn, I fired my primitive pistols as hordes of Native Americans swarmed about on horseback and on foot, charging the small hill we were trying to keep. Soon I found myself felled by an arrow, seeing it sticking out of my chest as I struggled to take as many of the enemy down with me as I could. Then a strange bubble appears and a man dressed in futuristic armor beckons me to join him, only to be shot dead as I enter the warp and the level ends. Interesting.

During the swarming of the Indians, I did notice a little bit of slowdown due to the sheer number of enemies on screen at once, but the effect was still rather impressive overall. Another thing I noticed was that the enemy NPCs didn't seem to be all that interested in me, a worry that carried over into the next level.

The second level saw me fighting Germans during World War II, only this time around I had a futuristic shotgun at my disposal. The Germans charged our trenches, and I hopped out, running through the enemy and taking them down in what I can only image was a very surprising way as far as they were concerned. I didn't spend too much time in this level, but again I noticed that the German soldiers didn't seem too concerned with me hanging about.

The third level cast me as a Union soldier during the Battle of Antietam, armed with a primitive musket with a rather long reload time. Luckily Darkest of Days has a quick reload function, with your character getting things done a bit quicker if a button is pressed at the correct time. The first pitched battle I fought was very, very period, with both armies facing off across a ditch, simply standing, firing, and then reloading as quickly as possible in order to fire again. Primitive, but entertaining nonetheless.

Soon our forces were on the move again, and I met up with a fellow time operative who hooked me up with an automatic machine gun. An automatic machine gun during the Battle of Antietam. Lovely.

Butternut-wearing members of the Confederacy fell in great numbers, but 8monkey was careful to make sure that you couldn't simply unload with your future ordinance all willy-nilly. Certain key soldiers are marked as survivors, and you cannot use your future weapons while they are awake and aware. In order to overcome this obstacle, you toss out a handful of these little balls, which will seek out survivors and put them to sleep, allowing you to go to town with your little friend.

Falling to put a survivor to sleep, however, will alert the rival time-travelers who are trying to alter history. Once they realized someone that was supposed to live has died, they get a fix on you and come to investigate. This is not a good thing.

So I played through most of the three levels available, finding Darkest of Days to be a solid little shooter with some great ideas behind it. As I was leaving, Aaron Schurman explained that while the demo gave players a great feel for the gameplay, there's a deep, enthralling story behind the game that the demo just doesn't communicate.

I suppose we'll find out if he's right soon enough. Darkest of Days hits the PC and Xbox 360 tomorrow.

I briefly got my hands on both the Goblins and the Worgen during BlizzCon 2009, and while I wasn't able to experience either area from start to finish, I played enough to realize that these two races are getting far better treatment than ten previous could ever dream of, all thanks to the bar set by Wrath of the Lich King's Death Knight starting area.

The Death Knight starting experience was unlike anything seen before in World of Warcraft. It introduced new gameplay elements such a zone phasing, which allowed for the area the player was playing in to change drastically during the course of their adventure, while adding in various mini-games to help the player feel that they were playing a larger role in the story. Blizzard takes these elements and applies them to the starting areas for the Goblins and the Worgen, The Lost Isles and Gilneas.

The demos for both races started off at level six. During my interview with lead developer Tom Chilton, he explained that this was simply because the 1-5 areas weren't quite finished, and they felt the 6 and up areas offered a more complete grasp of what they were trying to do.

Both races reach level 6 under dire circumstances. Your Goblin character winds up dead on the docks following a shipwreck, with an NPC desperately trying to revive him using everyone's favorite Goblin engineering item, the Goblin Jumper Cables. Once you've come to life, you set off on a series of quest to help your fellow greenskins recover from the traumatic wreck. The very first quest requires you blast open escape pods, with each freed NPC referring to you by name, hinting at a much more intimate story leading up to the beginning of the demo.

The Lost Isle takes a cue from Northrend in terms of design, presenting a much more vertical experience than standard World of Warcraft zones have in the past. You'll find yourself looking down on areas you've visited previously, in between run-ins with explosive-throwing monkeys, Alliance sailors, and the shadowy rogues of the SI:7.

Aiding in my explorations were the Goblin's two active racial abilities, Rocket Barrage and Rocket Jump. Barrage fires a barrage of missiles at a foe, while Rock Jump launches the Goblin forward for a tiny speed boost, perfect for escaping unsavory situations. The latter should make Goblin rogues absolutely insufferable.

While my time as a Goblin rogue was brief, I did come away with a strong feeling that Blizzard is intending on making Goblins serious Horde business, while maintaining the same lighthearted tone they have with Gnome society these past five years.

On the Alliance side of things, your Worgen wakes up in stocks, with NPCs arguing over whether or not you deserve to live or die. Can you control your curse, or will it consume you? Right from the start it is obvious that Blizzard is taking the werewolves quite seriously. Soon you find yourself freed, tasked with finding ingredients for a potion to help curb your more feral tendencies and helping defend the city from an undead invasion.

Where The Lost Isles are sunny and cheerful, Gilneas is dark and bleak. There's still the same sort of verticality to the playfield, with hills rolling a bit more than hills had rolled previously, but all in all it's a very familiar looking place. Think Darkshire and you're heading in the right direction.

Perhaps if I had tried the Worgen first I would have been a bit more impressed, but after the bright, humorous Goblin experience, the Worgen just felt like a bit of a letdown. It felt less like an exciting new race, and more like humans in furry outfits. In fact, one of their racial abilities lets you shift back and forth between human and Worgen, which means you essentially are a human in a furry outfit, albeit one that can run very fast for 10 seconds at a time on a 3-minute cooldown timer. Another new race that should give rogues even more ways to run away. It could just be that the excitement from levels 1-5 was more necessary to the Worgen experience than Blizzard expected. I suppose we will find out sometime next year.

Still, I can see the direction Blizzard is going in, making the starting areas for these two new races the same kind of epic experience as the Death Knight. My only worry is that rolling a Dwarf, Troll, or Gnome is going to be a great deal less appealing once Cataclysm comes out, unless Blizzard plans to share the innovation with every race.

To give you folks a little background information, the BlizzCon press room is a place of joy and wonder. They line two walls with kiosks playing the games available on the show floor, so the press can play without having to be complete jerks, butting into the front of hundreds of patiently waiting fans. They also have excellent Italian dinners, which I stopped eating the moment a Diablo III kiosk went free, leaping over rows to furiously-typing journalists for my chance to play the Monk.

The Monk demo started out in the Sundered Pass, an area of shifting desert sands. An NPC sporting the signature yellow exclamation point quest marker tasked me with travelling out into the wastes to find something or some such. Honestly? I wasn't paying all that much attention to what she was saying. I wanted to get out into the sands and kick some ass, Street Fighter style.

Yes, the Monk has been designed with Street Fighter in mind. As lead designer Jay Wilson told me during our interview, there are a lot of fighting game fans on the Diablo III team, and they wanted a character that added a bit of that feel to the game. Have they succeeded?

It was hard to tell at first. The initial enemies you encounter are wasps, which pretty much go down in 1-2 hits, so the massive destructive power isn't nearly as evident. If I was lucky I'd pull off the full Exploding Palm, a combo move that leaves the enemy with a damage-dealing dot, making them explode in an extremely satisfying manner if it drains their heath completely.

As mentioned previously, many of the Monk's moves are combination moves - moves with multiple stages. The Exploding Palm, for instance, delivers a couple of weak hits before the third step, which applies the explosive damage effect.

As I progressed through the desert, strong enemies began to appear, including members of the demonic Fallen, who took more than a few mouse clicks to dispatch. The Monk's damage was fine against these larger creatures, but the differences between the Monk and the more powerful Barbarian became readily apparent the first time I took a heavy hit. The Monk isn't all that good at going toe-to-toe with enemies. The best tactic seemed to be to jump in, hit the enemy with a quick barrage of strikes, and then move before you get hit.

This became even more clear once I started running into large groups of enemies. Running in, feet and staff swinging wildly, did not work. I was quaffing healing potions like they were going out of style, and I actually managed to die. The key to large groups is the Monk's Seven-Sided Strike ability. A semi-ranged attack, the Seven-Sided Strike has you tearing through groups of enemies in a flashing display of holy power, leaving song dead, and some weakened. Combine it with the explosive effect of the Palm, and you've got a very effective way of taking out large groups without dying in the process.

The key to playing the Monk would seem to be in combining his combination powers to create your own play style. I didn't get to explore this much, with the limited skills at my disposal and the limited time I had to play, but one can easily see how a skilled player can turn the Monk into a devastating engine of destruction. It's a character class that will take a little work to master, but the results should be quite satisfying.

At E3, the campaign "The Parish" played a touch too much like the original Left 4 Dead, just with sunlight and four new character skins. Sure, there was the new special infected, the Charger, and melee weapons, but fans of the first were somewhat justified in questioning what the sequel really added.

But our hands-on with "Swamp Fever," which features the newest addition to the infected side, the Spitter, gave us a better impression of the just how Left 4 Dead 2 is mixing up the formula.

First, there's that Spitter, the lanky, pig-tailed, pot-bellied special infected class that can spew forth a damaging orange liquid. Like the Charger, her splash damage attack, which damages Survivors over time, breaks up clustered Survivors. Her venom sounds like a swarm of bees, looks like a pile of boiling magma and burns like acid. It's napalm-like, so wading through the pools of water in Swamp Fever doesn't offer protection against the burning attack. It put me (actually, Coach) out of commission fairly easily.

I partly blame my lack of vision—and my teammates, of course, as is my tradition when anything goes wrong in Left 4 Dead—obscured by a few Mud Men attacks. The new "uncommon common infected" might have been the ones responsible for getting mud in my eye, making it even harder to see my zombie attackers. Those Mud Men are tough to fend off, bearing a smaller profile to shoot at as they crawl on all fours.

Also crawling on all fours is the Hunter, obviously, who can pounce from underwater, benefiting from extra camouflage during this campaign.

Actually, all infected benefit from the swamps, as Survivors move slower while in swamps. Tactically, you'll definitely want to stay on dry land or man made platforms as much as possible. But you're going to have to get wet at some point.

Swamp Fever features at least two of the improved gauntlet scenarios. Players must call a ferry from across a river, without the option of having comfortable corners to back into. Another takes place inside a downed plane, forcing players to squeeze through an emergency exit door. The environment is tough to navigate, with our fight spreading out across the plane wing, inside the cabin, and in and around the murky waters.

We got to try out the new AK-47, which feels a lot like the assault rifle from the first. We didn't pick up the grenade launcher or the cricket bat, but our teammates did. The new ammo packs and adrenaline shots weren't in the build we played, so there's still a lot more to see.

Overall, the game is starting to feel like a more unique experience thanks to these additions, something hesitant Left 4 Dead 2 fans will probably welcome. We're happy to see the game get more gameplay set during nighttime. Combined with the foggy, natural environments, Swamp Fever adds a very creepy atmosphere to the more brightly lit episode, The Parish.

We'll be playing more of Left 4 Dead 2 at Comic-Con, going hands-on with the rest of Swamp Fever at a Microsoft event later tonight.

The Beatles: Rock Band also adds to the series' established gameplay by letting up to three vocalists perform at once, assuming lead or harmony vocal duties in songs like "Paperback Writer." Players won't suffer score-wise for flubbing those harmony parts, but serious players will likely welcome the challenge of matching The Beatles harmonizing chops.

Oh, and the publisher added three more songs to the songs confirmed to appear in the game with "Do You Want To Know A Secret", "I Wanna Be Your Man" and "And Your Bird Can Sing." Read on for our latest impressions of the game.

What Is It?
Rock Band formula meets The Beatles. The latter is not simply slapped onto the former, however, as The Beatles music, career and personality is applied to tried and true Rock Band gameplay, adding support for up to three vocalists. In addition to the chance to quick play the band's classic tracks, players can also follow the group's musical career, from its hundreds of appearances at The Cavern Club in Liverpool to its American debut on the Ed Sullivan show to beyond.

What We Saw
Harmonix previewed, among other things that we can't talk about yet, the game's 'Vocal Trainer' mode. The Beatles' regular use of three-part harmonies—which can be incredibly complicated, particularly for those of us rarely have an opportunity to harmonize with two buddies—is going to require some getting used to, musically. Some of us can barely screech our way through a tune in Rock Band, let alone differentiate the lead from the complimentary harmonizing vocal tracks, so this brand new addition is more than welcome. We also got to play a handful of songs previously not shown to the public.

How Far Along Is It?
"Percent Complete: 90%" according to the preview. To our eager eyes and ears, everything else seemed to be in place, from the necessary training modes that will get new players and veteran Rock Band players up to speed, to a robust song listing. If there was anything still left to be buffed to a mirror shine, we sure didn't see it. The game hits retail in less than two months, so a near-final product didn't surprise us.

What Needs Improvement?
Not Enough Sitar! As revealed in the game's newest trailer, "Within You Without You" will give Beatles fans the opportunity to experience the thrill of playing sitar with a plastic guitar. Harmonix reps gave us the impression that this was the only song, so far, to let gamers unless their inner sitar hero. Let's pray that's remedied.

What Should Stay The Same?
Vocal Trainer: Even for the vocally handicapped, the finer points of harmonizing can be understood and maybe even executed, thanks to The Beatles: Rock Band's tutorial. Using the left trigger on an Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3 controller, budding harmonizers can cycle through a three part harmony's lead and harmony tracks, singling out notes that might be harder to hear. Better still, a guide note can be layered on top of the vocal track to offer the listener a clearer sound. It's perfect practice for finding that perfect pitch.

Advanced Vocal Scoring: And, once serious Rock Band players get a feel for the intricacies of singing those harmonized vocal tracks, they'll be able to aim for perfect scores. The guitar parts we played on "hard" difficulty really weren't that hard. Not that "Twist & Shout" is a technically complicated guitar song, but Rock Band fans nonplussed by the instrument difficulty will find something potentially difficult to master—especially if they play on playing an Expert guitar or bass note highway while harmonizing. A handy advanced vocal scoring chart can be reviewed after completing a song, showing the player just how many "Double Fabs" and "Triple Fabs" a trio of vocalists earned.

Beatlemania: It's been covered before, but there's a certain degree of enjoyment to be had from playing Beatles songs as they were meant to be played. "Beatlemania" scoring bonuses, known as Overdrive in other Rock Band games, does little to muck with the master tracks. No chaotic drums fills here to kick it off. No whammy and flange effects turning "Paperback Writer" into a sonic mess. And that's refreshing.

Love: Even as an extremely casual Beatles fan, seeing the attention to detail labored upon The Beatles: Rock Band is exciting for the medium. The "dreamscape" settings employed as backgrounds for songs like "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" and "Yellow Submarine," songs which wouldn't feel appropriate in concert or recording studio settings, add charming personality to the package. Some of the other additions—again, which we'll have to discuss later—exude extreme care on behalf of the developers and the creators.

Final Thoughts
It's hard not to get excited about The Beatles: Rock Band, even for those of us who don't categorize themselves as serious fans of the band. The game's new Vocal Trainer mode will be an education in itself, a genuine learning tool that teaches a skill even better than discovering to play drums—well, play "drums" on a custom game controller. The initial track list announced by Harmonix features a good blend of well-worn hits and deeper cuts, all of which are fun to play and experience in either the virtual settings Harmonix has either recreated based on real world landmarks or built from the ground up.

See some of those real world and otherworldly settings in new screens in the gallery below.

As you can see in this video, the biggest addition to the game is the ability for it to detect your wrists position and translate that into the angle you are holding the club. What that means is that if you twist your wrist or body during a swing you'll end up with unintentional fade or bank shots.

It didn't appear that the actual swing detection was any more precise than it is with just the remote, but that makes sense.

Playing through several rounds of golf both ways, I can say without hesitation that MotionPlus adds a whole new facet to the experience, making it much more precise and a bit more dependent on player skill.

A sequel to a Nintendo 64 game that wasn't offered stateside until the Virtual Console release of the original Sin And Punishment getting that much attention is a good thing. Because Sin And Punishment 2 feels right on the Wii. The on-rails shooter makes excellent use of the Wii Remote's pointer to queue up shots. Press B to fire your weapon, A to lock onto targets and charge up more powerful shots. Players familiar with on-rails shooters like Sega's Panzer Dragoon and Rez will likely be familiar with how Sin And Punishment 2's firing system works.

The only downside to the Wii Remote control implementation was for performing melee attacks, which must be done with a quick tap of the B button—a little harder to do, given the way one holds the Wii Remote.

On the Nunchuk side, players can use the C button to jump, double tapping C to hover. Z dodges. It's all pretty straightforward stuff. Fire and forget.

But the beauty of it all comes in with Treasure's multiplier system. That and the fact that Sin And Punishment 2 swarms you with enemies, filling the screen with things to queue up and destroy, dozens of bullets to dodge.

During our hands-on demo, we battled through a few of Sin And Punishment 2's "Commanders," one a massive heli-ship that spawned dozens of heavily armored soldiers. The other was a giant bird dubbed the Cock Keeper, which was supported by scores of seemingly indestructible enemies barrel-rolling towards us. In between these fights, our character hoverboarded through a futuristic city, the screen packed with flying creatures and mounted cannons. The action was intense, but nowhere near as challenging as some of Treasure's other shooters.

And like some of Treasure's other action oriented games, the depth of Sin And Punishment 2 may not fully illustrate itself until played more thoroughly. What we did glean from our E3 hands-on demo was that the game will most definitely appeal to fans of the original, with a clean, understated presentation that's unlike Nintendo's other published offerings.

The game won't be out until Q1 of 2010, so expect plenty of time to get acquainted with the title at upcoming events. For now, screen shots!

Kill some rank and file undead, ride harpy, kill scores more Chaos Blade fodder, fight the Centaur commander, kill the Chimera—described by God of War III director Stig Asmussen as "half-goat, half-lion, half-snake"—launched a massive bolt at Helios, all that. It was largely the same sequence we'd seen in February, when the newest God of War didn't look nearly as sharp as its E3 presence.

But this was the first time we'd had the chance to pilot a Cyclops, to rip Helios' head from his body, an act more gruesome and, dare I say it, visceral than I'd imagined. The God of War series is by no means reserved with its gore and violence, but the third console entry is ridiculously over the top.

Whether Kratos is being coated with Cyclops blood spurting forth from an empty socket or disemboweling a Centaur, players will be regularly reminded that this is an M-rated game. It's over the top, designed to shock, but still occasionally pretty—yes, those multi-layered blood spatters that splash across Kratos look good.

In other words, it's still very much the God of War you may remember from the first two PlayStation 2 entries, full of giant set pieces, marathon combos, and Greek deicide. The sometimes complex controls feel well-known, with light attacks, heavy attacks and grabs; Kratos' arm blades feel just as wispy as ever.

The new Cestus gauntlets, however, feel meaty. They're effective, but slow, at short and long range. When using L1 for the special attack modifier, Kratos will whip them around in a circle with his light attack, just like the Chaos Blades. His modded heavy attack is more satisfying, firing them out to his left and right, then quickly whipping them forward for a nasty crushing blow.

More satisfying it the battering ram attacks one can pull off, picking up an enemy and barreling through a crowd of rotting Centurions.

The hand-to-hand stuff feels great, if a little disconnected from the feeling that you're killing dozens of undead soldiers. Some stuff that doesn't feel so great are the harpy to harpy rides. Asmussen said the God of War III team is still tweaking the harpy-jacking, hopefully for something that's a little simpler than the L1-plus-circle grab that's currently in place.

Visually, though, God of War III continues to impress. There was no trace of load times during my 20-minute hands-on session, in which Kratos traveled from the Olympian outskirts, through caves, up a giant shaft and ultimately onto the giant fiery Titan seen in released screen shots. Considering the graphical upgrades the game has gotten over the past quarter, I can't wait to see what it looks like when it ships next year.

Ultimately, God of War III, despite its gargantuan presentation and now-gen upgrade, felt familiar. Whether that's going to feel like more of the same or a welcome return to the universe and its wildly successful style of play will be up to you.

That may be due to the game actually being the fifth entry in the Hercules no Eiko series, which originated on Nintendo's Famicom. This will be the first internationally released entry. So, Nintendo's E3 2009 demo for Glory of Heracles, developed by Paon, feels very much tuned to the new player, describing very clearly how to interact with townsfolk, the benefits of visiting shops to buy weapons and upgrades, and exactly how an epic role-playing game is supposed to be played.

Glory of Heracles follows JRPG conventions closely, offering up a familiar turn-based interaction complete with attacks, magic, skills, escape and more. There's also a running list of stats that fills the DS's bottom touchscreen, one filled with helpful explanations for the RPG noob.

Graphically, Glory of Heracles is... a little on the rough side. A blend of 3D environments with scaling 2D sprites, it looks good in battles, thanks to colorful characters, but less attractive when exploring towns.

The E3 demo was light on story, but official word from Nintendo notes that Glory of Heracles features a Greek motif. The standard hero "washes up on a beach with amnesia" convention leads into the unraveling of the "mysterious pasts" of the game's cast of characters. You know, the kind of story line that will train you on how RPG stories work.

Glory of Heracles uses the Nintendo DS's touchscreen for something a little more interesting, a quick mini-game one can play when spells are cast to increase their effectiveness.

You can see the DS game in action in our gallery below to see if you're looking forward to its 2010 release.

Left 4 Dead 2 is arriving almost a year to the day after the original of the first, partly because the team responsible went to work right away on the sequel, without taking the standard week off to recharge. Much of the core gameplay from Left 4 Dead will be intact in the sequel.

And at this point, when Valve still has yet to reveal—let alone tweak—the two remaining planned additions to the Special Infected. That's on top of the already revealed Charger class, the half-Tank that addresses on of the problems with the original Left 4 Dead's game design.

Yes, there are problems. Characters stacking themselves upon each other during crescendo events, for example, backing into closets and behind gurneys and rendering zombie horde rushes moot.

The Charger will fix some of that, Valve's Chet Faliszek says. Designed to break up tightly packed groups, then pounce upon one of the Survivors like a Hunter, the Charger is big and bulky, like a Tank, but doesn't take nearly the amount the amount of gunfire to take down.

My handful of run ins with the Charger weren't that dramatic. But the AI controlled Special Infected did take me down at least once, requiring my teammates to revive me. The Charger should be fun to play, as he'll be added to the regular rotation in Left 4 Dead 2's Versus mode.

Faliszek wouldn't say what the other two Special Infected types planned were, but teased that we'd get to hear more about one of them later this month, another later this year.

Also adding to the variety of Left 4 Dead 2 are the new melee weapons. Keep in mind it's melee or main weapon; if you have a shotgun, then pick up an axe, say goodbye to that shotgun. Your arsenal hasn't expanded beyond one main weapon and pistols. The melee weapons are definitely powerful though, so you'll still be a deadly zombie slaying force when wielding a frying pan. Those close range attacks may become a beneficial addition to your Survivor squad, especially with the new, very noticeable change to regular infected.

They're a little more challenging to kill. Shoot off an arm and they won't just lie down. They'll keep coming. Add to them the new regular Infected that wear haz-mat suits won't burn when you set them alight with a Molotov cocktail and the rank and file zombie becomes a more serious challenge.

Also new are the extended crescendo events. In the demo we played, set in the level "The Parish," that involved jumping out of a CEDA truck, then running a gauntlet of zombies while navigating a maze of chain link fences. The crescendo ended when we shut off a klaxon alarm at the top of some rickety looking scaffolding. It's a tension filled new addition to the plant and shoot crescendo events from the first Left 4 Dead.

While not present in the demo we played, there are additions to the grenade class of weapons used in the game. It's still strictly Molotov and pipe bomb for now, but Faliszek says those items will expand. The same for new ammo types. All that we played with were the new incendiary rounds—which thankfully set a Tank on fire with a little more reliability—but expect more.

Speaking of weapons, we played with all of them. The arsenal is similar in gun type to the original—sub machine gun, shotgun, semi-automatic rifle, sniper rifle, auto shotgun—but they feel different. I didn't verify this with Valve, admittedly, but the Left 4 Dead 2 auto shotgun felt a little slower in its rate of fire than its Left 4 Dead equivalent.

Finally, the biggest change in L4D2 was its daytime setting. It made infected a hell of a lot easier to spot, especially those chunky Boomers. Perhaps too easy to spot. It's not a change I'm all that excited about, really, because it takes away from some of the tension of the perennially dark original. But it will be, let's say, interesting to see how it effects Versus mode.

In theory, there are a few more changes coming. Faliszek said Valve may be exploring "variations" to already established classes like the Hunter and Smoker, but expects they'll retain their original visual design. And there may be other tweaks, including the option to double up on reviving incapacitated Survivors. All this is being playtested and iterated, but since Valve "adds very carefully," these changes may not make it to the final version.

We'll have more details from our Left 4 Dead 2 play session later. For now, enjoy some new screens.

Now, seven years later, the game seems to be coming into its own as more a game than a recruitment tool.

What It Is
America's Army 3 is the latest iteration of the video game marketing tool developed by the U.S. Army. This latest version of the first-person shooter was built using the Unreal Engine 3 and is packed with more graphic and audio fidelity as well as overhauled stat-tracking, customization and plenty of new bells and whistles. And it's free.

What We Saw
I played a couple of matches with three of the developers in a single level of the first-person shooter on The Bridge level. The matches were two versus two and consisted of me dying... lots. I did manage to bag one of them when they tried to sneak up behind me and punk me with a rifle butt to the head.

How Far Along Is it?
I played a beta build of the game, which is slated to come out sometime this year. The developers pointed out that they were still working on polish and things like collision detection.

What Needs Improvement?
Collision Detection: This build is still far from done. While the mechanics are all there, the graphics tend to jitter around too much and collision detection is still quite an issue, with soldiers jutting out a odd angles when crouching near or lying on cover or rubble.

Vaulting: You can only vault objects if you get a running start. Understandable for higher hindrances, but a knee-high fence or rubble shouldn't require backtracking to pick up the speed to get over something.

Ladders: Hopefully this is an issue with collision, because trying to latch onto and then climb up a ladder was a mess, often leading to you scampering against a wall before you could get started or falling from a few feet up.

Polish: The graphics don't pop as much as I'd like. There's still some work needed to make the game compare favorably to the likes of Gears of War 2 or the latest Call of Duty games.

What Needs to Stay the Same?
The Sound: The America Army 3's development team went to extraordinary levels to capture realistic sound. And not just gun shots, but far more importantly the accurate noise of a round passing near your head. You can tell, while playing the game, just how close someone is getting to hitting you just by the sound of the bullet passing by. From pops, to whizzes, the realistic sound effects adds another layer to tactics and makes suppressive fire all the more effective.

Healing: While you can go through training courses to improve your ability to heal other players on the battlefield, all players automatically have some ability to do so. But it's not an easy thing to do. To heal an incapacitated player you need to read check their injuries and select the correct treatment among the four listed to heal them. Once they are up and on their feet you need to heal them a second time to reduce the damage done by injuries. Shots to the chest or arms, for instance, slow reloading, while shots to the legs or lower body, slow a player down.

Realism: This is a shooter made by people who work for the Army, you can bet that they get the details, the minutia dead-on. Weapons are accurately modeled after the real thing. The movements are captured from real soldiers, the situations, while all taking place in a fictitious war in a fictitious country, are all based on real tactics. In that sense it doesn't get any more real.

Detailed Scoring System: In the original game you only had to worry about honor, building it to rank up. In this latest version the game tracks seven different Army values and uses all of them to award points which go toward ranking. When players stick together, those points are shared out between them. On top of the scoring and ranking system, the game now also supports achievements, badges and ribbons.

Damage Modeling: This latest Amercia's Army breaks the human body down into 16 sections, each of which can take damage and cause different harm to a player. Bullets are tracked in real time and can deflect as they go through different surfaces, they can also ricochet realistically causing injuries. Grenades, when they explode, not only spew ricocheting fragments, but also can kill or stun by sheer concussion.

Movement: Player movement is based on their load out, the more they carry the slower they move. Soldiers can slide into a dive from a run, slide to a crouch. They can lean standing, squatting or laying and, finally, they can melee attack with their rifle.

Pre-Battle Management: Before every encounter players are dropped into a top-down map where they can use markers and routes to discuss tactics and assign tactics, pushing gamers to think more about movement than about running and gunning.

Final Thoughts
Aside from some of the cosmetic issues, America's Army 3 is shaping up to be quite a solid shooter. The developers listened to their fans and tried to create a game that answered all of the issues of their first two outings. Add the amazing sound, the details of ricochet too the versatile Unreal Engine 3 graphics and you have a game with enormous potential.

OnLive is a new video games on demand service that may just change the way you play PC games. The brainchild of Rearden Studios founder Steve Perlman, formerly of Atari, Apple, WebTV and more, and Mike McGarvey, formerly of Eidos, the technology looks to revolutionize the way computer games are brought home. Instead of spending hundreds or thousands of dollars on the latest video game hardware that will make games like Crysis playable at nearly maxed settings, let OnLive's servers handle the processing. All that's required is a low cost "micro console" or a low end PC and a broadband internet connection.

Yes, even your sub $500 netbook or MacBook can play processor intensive, GPU demanding PC games. In fact, that's the whole point. How does it work?

The concept is simple. Your controller input isn't going from your hand to the controller to the machine in front of you, it's going from your hand to the controller through the internet to OnLive's machines then back again as streamed video. Whether you're using a USB gamepad, Bluetooth wireless controller, or tried and true keyboard and mouse, the processing and output happens on OnLive's side, then is fed back to your terminal, with the game "perceptually" played locally.

In other words, it's cloud computed gaming.

Using patented video compression in tandem with algorithms that compensate for lag, jitter and packet loss, OnLive delivers video at up to 720p resolution at frame rates up to 60 frames per second. Of course, the quality of the video feed relies on your connection.

For standard definition television quality, a broadband connection of at least 1.5 megabits per second is required. For HDTV resolution, a connection of at least 5 mbps is needed.

What about lag, you say? OnLive's technology "incubator" Rearden Studios claims that its servers will deliver video feeds that have a ping of less than one millisecond. Its patented video compression technique is also advertised as blazing fast, with video compression taking about one millisecond to process.

That speedy delivery of video game content means more than just video games on demand, it means no install times. It also means cross-platform compatibility, the ability to try demos instantly, and an opportunity to rent or play games almost instantaneously.

It also means real-time streaming of video feeds from players far and wide playing their own games at home via OnLive which could ultimately mean broadcast style feeds to observers. Up to a million, according to OnLive reps.

The best part? It already has serious buy-in from major publishers, including EA, THQ, Codemasters, Ubisoft, Atari, Warner Bros., Take-Two, and Epic Games. Oh, and 2D Boy.

The appeal on the publisher side is that it essentially means less opportunity for profit-whittling piracy. There's little modification on the developer side to make a game run with OnLive. There's even an SDK available. On the consumer side, the prospect of no cheating—or at least heavily reduced cheating—is also desirable.

OnLive is showing 16 of the games planned for the service this week at GDC, some of them playable on low-spec machines, the kind of Dell your grandmother might buy.

Of course, they'll also be playable on OnLive's micro console, a simple, low-cost device that's about the size of your hand. It's simple tech—there's not even a GPU in the device. It simply acts as a video decoding control hub, with two USB inputs and support for four Bluetooth devices, and outputs audio and video via optical and HDMI connections. The micro console is expected to be priced competitively, "significantly less" than any current generation console on the market and potentially "free" with an OnLive service contract.

Plans for a monthly subscription are in the works, said to be priced on par with Xbox Live fees, offering the same community and multiplayer features popularized by Microsoft's gaming service. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the unified OnLive community is the option to save and upload Brag Clips, a 15 second replay of, well, whatever just happened in-game.

We too were a little suspicious of OnLive's capability to deliver perceptually lag-free on-demand games. But then we played a hasty online game of Crysis Wars on the service today and became a little less suspicious. It seemed to work. Obviously, it was in a controlled environment with only a few hundred internal beta testers populating the system. But it worked.

Will it work in the wild? It might. OnLive is currently beta testing internally, with an external beta planned for Summer and a launch later this year. Expected to be deployed by launch will be five server centers hosting the latest and greatest games—OnLive isn't aiming to be GameTap, with no immediate plans to host archival PC games. Server clusters will be located in Santa Clara, Texas, Virginia and elsewhere, hoping to offer OnLive subscribers within 1,000 miles a seemingly lag-free experience.

We'll be testing the service later this week, letting you know what we thought.

At a recent hands-on demo, the game’s art director, Matt Corso, was dropping all kinds of techie jargon into my tape recorder. But I can’t blame him; the game looks great, sporting draw-distances, bump-mapping, lighting, shadowing and particle effects that wouldn’t look out of place on the Playstation 3 or Xbox 360.

All that graphical panache was in full force while I was playing through a portion of the aliens-invade-Washington, D.C. title earlier this week.

I found myself treading a crowded urban street as the mysterious Mr. Ford, who works for the equally shadowy Trust, effortlessly shooting insect-like enemy "Drudge" and blowing up vehicles, all while taking in the pretty visual presentation.

Most impressive, especially for the Wii, were the explosions, which filled the screen in fiery detail on more than one occasion. But even tiny touches, like the realistic glare off the front of a newspaper vending machine, stand-out on the Wii. Also, the cool reload animations—an important part of any shooter—had me restocking my arsenal just to check it out again and again.

Just as impressive as the art direction, were the solid controls; I haven’t felt this comfortable pointing the remote like a gun since strapping on Samus’ arm canon in Metroid Prime 3: Corruption. Character movement with the nunchuck also felt fluid, aiming was spot-on, and even the camera managed to keep up with the quick-paced action.

It will likely still feel awkward to the mouse-and-keyboard crowd and gamepad jockeys—this isn’t the end-all, be-all control scheme for shooters—but The Conduit has definitely hit the sweet spot for shooter gaming on the Wii.

If you don’t like the default controls, you can always customize to your alien-thwarting heart’s content.

One of the title’s more innovative features is its almost stubborn insistence on meeting every single player’s style and preference in terms of personalizing the controls.

You can map pretty much whatever action you want wherever you like; not just the obvious stuff like moving and firing, either, but even things like what motion you prefer to use when tossing grenades can be tuned.

This feature also extends to the HUD elements, which can be placed anywhere on the screen, and options such as look sensitivity and turning speed. Best of all, you needn’t kick out to the main menu to tweak—it can all be done in-game.

The Conduit’s bar-raising visuals, tight gameplay, conspiracy-riddled alien invasion yarn, and gamer-loving customization options make it a real stand-out on the Wii’s 2009 line-up.

Because of technical limitations, a Wii game will likely never match the jaw-dropping power of a PS3 or Xbox 360 shooter, but The Conduit comes as close as the hardware may ever get.

Official The Conduit Site

— Matt Cabral

While it, like much of the wares at the Consumer Electronics Show, answers a technology question that very few asked, the Falcon feels great, after becoming acclimated to its unusual control scheme, based on our quick hands on time with Valve's latest. That pistol grip similarly feels like a natural fit after a few minutes.

The Falcon's realistic kickback, however, is going to seriously limit how often you'd use this thing in a game like Left 4 Dead. The intense force feedback you'll feel when squeezing off a shotgun round or dropping from a ledge can be disorienting. Fortunately, these effects can be scaled back or turned off altogether.

If you think mice and trackballs just aren't giving you enough trigger squeezing feel, the Novint Falcon may make your zombie apocalypse feel that much more authentic.

Take for instance Gameloft's Guitar Rock Tour. The GameLoft-developed title leans heavily on the Guitar Hero franchise for its gameplay mechanics and aesthetic, but it manages to do enough different to make it work on the iPhone that I found it to be quite a bit of fun to play.

The game comes with two instruments to choose from and 17 songs, all of which I suspect are covers. To play through a game using the guitar you just tap your way through the notes on the four-fret guitar as they fall toward you down the neck of the virtual instrument. The songs drop sustained notes and lines of notes at you as well as a number of double notes. If you come across a line of notes you can slide your finger across them as they scroll down. Once you build up enough rock power you can activate the familiar power-up by sliding your finger up the gauge to go into a power-up mode that doubles your points.

While some songs can be a tad difficult to follow along on the tiny screen, in general I found it to be quite a bit of fun to play. I wasn’t as taken with the game’s drums.

The game has just two buttons for the drum mode. One on each side of the “musical highway” that drops down your iPhone. For some reason I had a lot more trouble keeping up with the song despite having half as many buttons to push as I did with the guitar.

The drum mode also highlighted an issue both instruments have. The game tends to chug occasionally when you miss your notes. These occasional slowdowns can throw a wrench in your timing as you play through a song, leading to more chugs. Fortunately it didn’t happen so often that it broke the game.

Guitar Rock Tour includes both a tour mode with unlockable achievements and a quickplay mode. What it doesn’t include, at least yet, is any form of multiplay or downloadable content.

While the ten dollar game is certainly limited with its short set list and lack of multiplayer gaming, I still think this is one of my favorite games currently on the iPhone. I just hope that they plan to expand the title with more, free or cheap songs and perhaps another mode.

Jenga Donkey Kong Collector’s Edition is essentially the wood stacking game painted black with a new set of rules. The version comes with a pile of rectangular blocks painted black with red girders painted on two sides of each block. There are also three holes drilled into each rectangle. The game also comes with four plastic Mario pieces, a plastic piece featuring Donkey Kong and Pauline and a little cardboard spinner.

You can play the game with normal Jenga rules, pulling out a piece of wood to replace at the top of the stack until someone knocks it over, or with the new DK rules. The Donkey Kong rules add enough of a twist to the classic game to make it bit more fun and of course, what with the neato pixel graphics, quite a bit more nostalgic.

The new rules have you place a peg-backed Mario piece into a hole of one of the bottom Jenga pieces. Once everyone has placed their Marios you take turns flicking the spinner. The spinner tells you how many girders to move as you make your way up and around the Jenga tower. It also tells you how many girders you have to slide out of the stack and place back on top. Removing and replacing the pieces is just like classic Jenga, except you have to remove and replace the Donkey Kong piece as well, making sure he and Pauline are always at the highest point of the tower. The spinner tells you to move zero to three spaces and to remove zero to three pieces.

To win you have to either move your Mario to the top of the tower, or be the highest Mario on the tower when someone else knocks the tower down. Fairly simple, but quite a bit of fun.

We played the game two or three times last night and really enjoyed it. The only problem we had with the game is that the plastic pieces were a bit wonky. The pegs on the backs of the Mario sometimes didn’t slide into the Jenga holes, which makes the game near impossible to play until you’ve worn the game in. Also the spinner didn’t really spin, but again that got better with use.

I’m a big fan of classic video games and I happen to love Jenga, so this would be a must by for me. With the holidays nearing I’d say it probably should make some wish lists if you’re a fan of either the video or table top game.