Kotaku

The business of rhythm and music games is sort of like the real music industry. Classy little cult hits like PaRappa The Rapper, Vib Ribbon and Ouendan were once the sole territory of the especially hip. You could boast about your Taiko No Tatsujin skills to your rhythm-less pals, or quirk a brow at your uncool peers as you casually hit "play" on your obscure DDR songs during a house party.

Then Guitar Hero and Rock Band happened. Music games are officially big business now, and everyone and their mother (literally) wants in. Next thing you know, you're boycotting the Grammys and defiantly tattooing the word "sellout" on your forehead. Battle of the Bands for Wii is THQ's entry into the rock music arms race—but is it a worthy innovator on the scene, or just a trendwhore leaping onto the bandwagon?

Boom Blox is an odd creation. It's a casual game created with the help of a director known for the stories his movies tell. So what happens when Stephen Spielberg teams up with Electronic Arts to make a game for the Wii? Lots of explosions of course. The game has you throw, grab, shoot and explode "blox" in such a myriad of mind-bending puzzles that you might actually forget you're playing a "casual" game. Boom Blox includes ways to play with friends or on your own, through a story or just for fun.

But is it all of that enough to shake off the stink of Wii shovelware and live up to the expectations of a game created by the man behind E.T., Jaws and Raiders of the Lost Ark?

Target: Terror was always a game behind its time. The light gun game featuring a terrorism theme and digitized bad guys came out in 2004, well after the blending of faux guns and digital graphics created a mini-light gun renaissance in arcades. Even the fact that Eugene Jarvis, the man behind Defender, was behind the game couldn't get it off the ground. I was a more than a little surprised to see that Konami had decided to lift this game, of all of the light gun titles, out of the arcade graveyard and try to give it new life on the Wii.

Light gun games on the Wii, though, are a match made in heaven, or at least they could be if someone ever finds the right match. Could Target: Terror be it?

In the jungle, the quiet jungle, the lion sleeps tonight... He also roars, scratches, paws the ground, stalks prey, and kills other members of the animal kingdom, and you can snap pictures of it all with Wild Earth: African Safari for the Nintendo Wii. Released in 2006 as Safari Photo Africa: Wild Earth for the PC, the family-friendly nature and innovative controls of the Wii made the edutainment title a prime candidate for a port. You step into the shoes of a photojournalist taking pictures for a nature magazine in Africa's Serengeti National Park, getting up close and personal with all sorts of exotic plants, animals, and their feces.

Yes, within the first few minutes of the game you'll find yourself tasked with taking a photo of a giant pile of elephant dung. Does it get better from there? Read on, brave adventurer.

Fun fact: I'm a total Mario Kart fanboy. For the record: Double Dash is my favourite (I know, I know). So I'm used to watching the Mario Kart series take small, baby-steps forward with each new version. In this case, I was expecting just that. Small steps forward. Mario Kart Wii, however, feels more like a step forward, a shuffle to the side then, after a brief pause, a tentative step back.

Grand Theft Auto needs no introduction to anyone remotely familiar with video games. But for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 entry in the series, Rockstar has upped the ante, creating a startlingly realistic reinterpretation of New York City as backdrop to a violent crime epic. In it, damaged goods Serbian war vet Niko Bellic ventures to Liberty City in search of closure, all the while coming to terms with the harsh realities of The American Dream. People die, others find happiness, the dream fails to deliver on its promise, and players join Niko on a journey through a world where everyone is flawed, where it seems everyone is consumed by their own obsessions.

It's a brutal ride for almost everyone in Niko's journey from off the boat yokel to mass murderer, but what is the Grand Theft Auto IV experience like for the player?

It wasn't the game mechanics or story that first piqued my interest in Teenage Zombies: Invasion of the Alien Brain Thingys, it was that really neat art style, the art style epitomized by the game's box cover. I loved the way it looked, something about its blend of comic style and malevolent silhouettes intrigued me. I figured that if nothing else, the game would be fun to look at, if not play. Heck, it's a Zombie side-scroller for the DS and there are brains. What could go wrong?

Hit the jump to find out.

For the uninitiated, Treasure's Ikaruga is a vertically scrolling shoot 'em up originally released for arcades, with ports for the Dreamcast and GameCube released in 2002 and 2003 respectively. It uses a simple mechanic of polarity—your ship, the Ikaruga, can switch between black and white states; there are no traditional shooter power ups, black and white beams are your only weapon. It's a system that belies its complexity. When white, the ship can absorb all white-colored incoming enemy fire. When black, the ship can absorb all black-colored incoming enemy fire. However, when firing on ships of the opposite color, the Ikaruga does double the damage. Oh, but there's more to it than that, a layer of depth that makes Ikaruga one part shooter, one part puzzler, with a dash of rhythm and strategy tossed in. How does the Xbox Live Arcade port hold up, with Ikaruga now seven years old?

Warning. The big list of love and hate is approaching at full throttle. No refuge.

All-female 2D fighters are nothing new. Back in the days of the original PlayStation and the Sega Saturn, games like Asuka 120% and the Variable Geo series were a common sight in Japanese game stores, offering up hot girl-on-girl fighting action, but generally just that. The games lacked depth, relying on the gimmick of their fully female roster rather than crafting compelling gameplay. Now Atlus brings Examu's PlayStation 2 girl fighter Arcana Heart to North America, featuring 11 classic moe girl archetypes fighting to save the world from a power-hungry nun seeking to merge our realm with that of the elemental Arcana that fight by their side. The game is full of promising elements, but it all comes down to one thing—is Arcana Heart a mediocre game trying to get by on sex appeal alone, or a solid fighting game whose characters just happen to lack Y chromosomes?

Style versus substance, red versus blue...

Gran Turismo 5 Prologue is a demo. A big one, yes, but a demo it remains, one that gives us but a taste of what we can expect from the full, final Gran Turismo 5 when it ships on the PS3 sometime next year. Serious fans of the series will no doubt already know what they're getting themselves into with this whole "Prologue" business, then, and won't give a monkey's brass balls what I say from here on in.

But if you're still on the fence over whether it's worth shelling out 60% of the full game's asking price for what's probably less than 10% of its content, read on, dear readers, read on.

Square Enix's attempt to capitalize on the popularity of Final Fantasy VII with their Compilation of Final Fantasy VII series of games hasn't been going too well so far, especially in North America. The Vincent Valentine vehicle Dirge of Cerberus for the PlayStation 2 was mediocre at best, and the mobile game Before Crisis featuring the Turks still hasn't made it to North American shores. Basically we have a slipshod shooter and Advent Children, a well-crafted yet ultimately shallow CGI movie. Now, Square Enix has released Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII for the PSP, a true prequel to the PlayStation original, which follows the career of Cloud's inspiration, soldier Zack Fair. Has the rebirth of FFVII finally delivered compelling gameplay, or are we better off just replaying the original?

Loved or Loveless? Activating combat mode...

Digital Extreme's Dark Sector is meant, it feels, to be the beginning of something, a game that serves as an origin tale and set piece for what could become a franchise. In the game you play as Hayden Tenno, a black-ops agent sent into Eastern Europe to assassinate someone. Things go astray, as these things often do, and Tenno is infected with a virus that gives him evolving and deadly powers; chief among them the ability to boomerang an organic three-bladed knife at people, lopping off appendages.

Digital Extreme probably had a no-brainer hit when the decided to let people lop off body parts with a deadly Frisbee, but in their pursuit for something more they may have missed the mark this time around.

Ninja Gaiden: Dragon Sword Review: Tap That Assassin

Team Ninja's stab at bad-ass ninja action on the Nintendo DS has arrived, with Ryu Hayabusa and the demon ninja hordes he must defeat looking tinier than ever in Ninja Gaiden: Dragon Sword. The game is almost entirely controlled by simple stylus motions, using techniques that may already be familiar to DS gamers who have played The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass. While the scope may be smaller, the team at Tecmo doesn't appear to have skimped on the production values.

The question is, however, can the white knuckle action of Team Ninja's Ninja Gaiden work on a handheld? We'll tell you what we loved and hated in the review.

Wealthy men walking with sticks. This is what I see every day when driving past the exclusive country club down the street from where I live, and about my only real exposure to the real world of golf. The closest I get to playing golf these days is the Hot Shots Golf series, which features cutesy characters with sticks, sans walking. Now Sony and developer Clap Hanz bring the franchise to the PlayStation 3 with Hot Shots Golf: Out Of Bounds, and I've gone several rounds with the title to see how the series fares on Sony's latest console.

The handicap differential in red and blue, after the jump.

Bandai Namco's Duel Love takes players into the underbelly of prep school fighting. That doesn't mean the game is only about fighting. At its core, Duel Love is a Japanese "renai game" ("romantic game") where the goal is to get the game's exceedingly male metrosexuals to fall head over heels in love with you. This is standard dating sim stuff, but Bandai Namco tries to spruce up the formula with touch pen touching.

Duel Love, like most renai games, is more reading and less playing. (Thus, that doesn't exactly make it import-friendly!) Onward the "Loved" and the "Hated"!

Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Vegas 2 brings gamers back to Sin City to rescue it from the clutches of another group of terrorist who've decided to start blowing stuff up. This time around, the game spends more time developing the characters and gives players a chance to shoot through the campaign with a friend in co-op mode. Ubisoft Montreal doesn't try to tinker with the formula, instead looking to add to what was an already popular title.

Vegas 2 can, at times, dip into the monotonous and the AI is spotty, but overall the game delivers a fun experience.

Sega and Monolith bring first-person serial killer hunting fun back to consoles in Condemned 2: Bloodshot. Anti-hero cop Ethan Thomas is back on the streets—literally, he's pretty much a homeless drunk—and ready to punch out droves of insane bums, vagrants and derelicts. The star of Condemned: Criminal Origins returns filthier and boozier than before, this time as an overly grizzled ex-member of the Special Crimes Unit. He's on the hunt for another killer, one who has ties to his previous prey. Monolith looks to have paid close attention to the criticisms heaped upon the first Condemned, tightening up level design, adding online multiplayer and addressing the original's monotonous combat.

How successful were they? Very. Here's what we loved and hated.

While I am a huge fan of ninja and ninja accessories, I'm not all that fond of mini-game collections, so when EA announced Ninja Reflex for the Nintendo Wii I was understandably conflicted. On one hand, the game offered many traditional ninja-friendly activities - throwing shuriken, twirling nunchaku, swinging your sword about, and catching flies with chopsticks. On the other, mini-game collections aren't exactly known for offering the sort of deep experience I crave in my ninja games. It was the sort of internal conflict that could only be sorted out via heated battle.

Blue Ninja versus Red Ninja - Ready, fight!