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I traded a review copy of Orcs and Elves for Rune Factory: A Fantasy Harvest Moon. "Right after Harvest Moon: Boy & Girl?" My editor told me I was crazy. I probably was, but the combination of RPG dragon slaying and the object – time management aspect of Sim-Farming was too heady a lure. I wanted to see how well it would be achieved. The verdict? Very well, indeed. Natsume have done a bang-up job of delivering a fantasy Harvest Moon.

The late 90's were a particularly fruitful time for strategy games: The Command and Conquer series was in full swing, as was the hugely popular Age of Empires series. StarCraft and Total Annihilation were storming the charts, and myriad other games rode on these titles' coat-tails. The catch? They were all 2D and that brings us, rather neatly, to SunAge — the first 2D RTS title that I've seen in any prominence since, well, almost the turn of the millennium.

After attending the Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning developer conference call all I can say is that they live their motto, "WAAAGH!" The media participants had previously submitted questions; this was a moderated call where the developers talked and we listened. Once the floor was turned over to them hilarity ensued with frequent anecdotes of who got caught by whom playing the game instead of working. Among the laughter and ribbing, we did receive some information regarding how the game was progressing.

EA Playground harkens back to a less litigious time in our American history — when dodgeball and tetherball were played freely on our nation’s playgrounds. Well, you won’t find those games on a public playground anytime soon, so you may as well pop in the disk to EA Playground and enjoy these games and more — all without risk of lawsuit, lost teeth, bruising or road rash.

Have you ever had one of those days? You know, where you’re being transported to death row for your various crimes as a mercenary. There you are, resigned to your fate when suddenly the heavily medicated psychopath chained next to you tells you to get down. An explosion tears open the back of the van and tosses it on its side. As you stumble out into the glaring sun, you find yourself in the middle of a firefight. Your only option is to follow this psychopath in his escape. And it just gets worse from there.

No, not really.

Furu Furu Park is a collection of 30 Japanese-style mini-games. While there are Japanese movies I appreciate - such as the works of Hayao Miyazaki, this is not my typical gaming genre. Keep that in mind as you read my take on this collection.

The kitchen work surface is dripping with slime, the lights are going crazy, there's screaming coming from down the hallway and your landlady dropped another of her passive-aggressive little rent demands through the letterbox this morning.

Who ya gonna call?

I have to preface this preview with the following caveat: I don't find the "Gangsta" culture appealing in any way. This is not to say that I don't and haven't enjoyed Rap music since its inception, but just as I like Star Trek I cannot be called a Trekkie. You may want to consider this when you read my preview of 50 Cent's latest title, 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand.

I don't often play first person perspective games. Even though they seem to be "all the rage," I don't find any innovation in the game style over the years. However, when I saw the premise behind Penumbra: Black Plague, my head turned. Could it really be an innovative and unique first person game?

Agetec's Puzzle Guzzle tries to rejuvenate the familiar screen-based mind-bender that's been popular ever since Tetris invaded our screens, block-by-block, in the 1980's. The catch here is that instead of fitting blocks together, you use diagonal lines in angular shapes to create enclosed areas - which, when sealed off, disappear and are registered as points.

The only slime character I've ever been acquainted with is the hot dog eating ghost that repeatedly attacked Bill Murray in Ghostbusters. I think it had a Saturday morning cartoon at one point? With that in mind, I was skeptical of any game entitled, Mr. Slime.

To describe The Ship, we should start with this passage from the game manual: The Ship is a single- and multiplayer murder game with a unique set of game rules." Actually, multiplayer games are much the same one to the other. I don't really find anything unique about them.

I've been on a shooter streak, lately. First, there was Contra IV, and now Nanostray 2, and Ophelea has a few more waiting for me. When I hit a streak of similar-genre games like these, it often makes me stop and consider what the hook is for each. Why play THIS shooter and not the others? In this case, the hook isn't fancy: Nanostray 2 is really hard!

I've never been one for real-time strategy games on a console — I'm far too wedded to my keyboard and mouse. I'm sure that my occasional flirts with RTS demos and rentals on my 360 have been looked upon with disapproval by my faithful PC, monitor, keyboard and mouse, but the marriage has never been threatened in the least. Then Sierra took me into a little curtained-off cubicle in a hotel in San Francisco and let me play a little World in Conflict: Soviet Assault...

Conspiracy is the story of how Bourne became the man with no memory, why he snapped. Though we get to play some of the more iconic scenes from The Bourne Identity (including the Mini Cooper car chase through Paris) it is the flashbacks that tell the story of the man that comes to be. Deadly force is what this man was trained to use on any target any time. The Instinct exists - he simply knows what is destructible or explosive; the skills are intact - he can switch sides to aim more accurately, he uses his environment to solve problems; but the compunction to avoid deadly force has not appeared. It is what happens in the 48 hours prior to waking up near death in the ocean - why does he never have the right support? Or the correct intel? Where is the necessary extraction? These are the questions and answers that bring Jason Bourne to the point we know him in the film trilogy today.

The titles that are released on the Wii never cease to amaze me. The titles that are released on the Wii that are fun amaze me even more. When NamcoBandai announced We Cheer, a cheerleading simulation game at Gamer Day, I was one of several in the audience who sat silent and dumbfounded. Cheerleading?

Having lived in the Southwest my entire life, Las Vegas has simply always been. I don't remember the first time I visited. I do remember when the Excalibur was built - it was then the FAR south end of the Strip (now it is the middle). I remember playing quarter arcade machines and refilling my cup from my father's - he was playing quarter slots. But my memory of this repeats so often I could have been 8, 13 or 15. Like Los Angeles, Las Vegas is never what people imagine it to be - much to their delight and disappointment. This is Vegas allows you the chance to build the Vegas of your dreams (well, assuming you're a guy - I'd build a pretty raunchy Vegas, too but it wouldn't look quite like this.)

So much for those precious minutes of my life ...

Best of Tests is another member of the "exercise your brain with video games" club. It is, according to the game box, designed to test your logic, observation, memory, speed of perception and analysis. The box also claims that the little cartridge contained within will actually allow you to improve these areas of your intelligence.

Many of the defining moments of World War II in the Pacific arena were decided by fleet battles. These weren't conducted with battleships, but with carrier fleets. Control of the air was handed to these noble ships against a fanatical enemy determined to win at any cost. Battles were hard-fought campaigns by brave naval personnel and the pilots who manned the fighters and bombers and who gave their lives in defense to win territory and regain control of the islands of the Pacific, with the ultimate goal of the Japanese surrender and ending the war.

I was lucky enough to grow up at the time when arcades and video games were just hitting it big. This meant that I spent a lot of time in front of various games feeding the machines quarters like it was going out of style. Star Defender 4 by AWEM Studios reminds me a lot of a few of the old-school arcade games, and this is a good thing. The game looks like a fairly basic shooter, but it has some interesting features that set it apart. As the name suggests, this is the fourth one to be made, and I would eventually expect a fifth with the gameplay I experienced.

Sometimes it startles me how long ago I decided to give up a large portion of pop culture - most everything to do with television and a goodly portion of music. 10 years. There were 3 years where I went without it at all. This would be the period when Afro Samurai first ran on SpikeTV. While it certainly won't convince me to reverse my decision to forgo most of today's entertainment choices, it gives me hope that there are still glimmers of talent and originality left on television.

Due in the fall from a wholly-US based BandaiNamco development house, the console title of the same name looks to fill in the blanks of the story from the first season while keeping the same "carved from style" look and feel of the series. If what we were shown at Gamer Day last week is any indication of what is to come, Afro Samurai will be one of those rare licensed titles that not only lives up to the original source material, but becomes a necessary part of the lore.

I had a bit of a surprise the other day. When checking my mail, I found a package from Hudson Software. Opening it, I found a Wii game, plus some extra stuff such as a headband! What could this be for?

"Watching a bowling game is like watching fish [reproduce]," said a fellow reviewer. "It's the most boring thing on earth." I must be the most boring person on the face of this earth then. Have you ever seen the courting dance of a Siamese fighting fish? I find it totally fascinating! What does this have to do with Brunswick Pro Bowling? Well, you wouldn't believe the hoops I threw myself through to review this game. I previewed it at E3 last year and was very impressed by the simulation. In the short time I had, I threw a hook, a curve and regular straight deliveries. Then I waxed poetic over it to my brother — who was a 200 average amateur bowler and bowling coach for high school students in his glory days.

I'm going to come straight out and say it. I hate the title of this game - PowerUp Forever. It just screams mundane at me. But there's this test that simple titles should be able to pass: it's the "duh test?" Unlike a Mass Effect which requires explanation (and mystery) or a Call of Duty which at least tells you what the setting is, but not the gameplay, the simple title tells you everything you need to know about the game in the title. PowerUp Forever pretty much says it all... get those powerups and just keep going and going. The thing is, it was pretty cool.

While the time-honored tradition of plunking down the change in the once-thriving arcade scene has almost all but vanished (a moment of silence for the fallen), certain traditions carry on. Dance Dance Revolution provided what I might point to as the last stand of the arcade elite against their increasingly more powerful console brethren. It is the game that has endured in popularity well beyond the house that helped build it. Migration continues to occur as Dance Dance Revolution Universe 2 on the Xbox 360 tries to expand and secure the already well-established brand on the console scene, but how many times can a game make a misstep before it develops two left feet?

Spiderwick Chronicles is a video game based on the theatrical release by Paramount Pictures and Nickelodeon Films. The five books — “The Field Guide,” “The Seeing Stone,” “Lucinda's Secret,” “The Ironwood Tree” and “The Wrath of Mulgarath” — were written by Holly Black and Tony DiTerlizzi. Even though the books were for children, I found them an enjoyable fantasy diversion.

My second outing with Poirot was actually created prior to Peril at End House. Luckily, the stories stand independently of each other so there were no continuity issues in that way. Death on the Nile takes place on a luxury ship (think small, old-fashioned cruise ship) that is carrying the wealthy, their servants, their companions, and the crew, on a tour of the Nile. All of the action takes place on and around the ship. You won't be exploring any pyramids.

For us who can’t get enough of Persona 3, Atlus steps in to cure the craving with the FES edition. You could think of it as a director’s cut of the original game; both gameplay and storyline receive the gold treatment with many new bells and whistles. There’s also a brand-new epilogue chapter in which members of SEES attempt to come to terms with the past while facing a new, unexpected threat ... something that ultimately tests their bonds of friendship. For anyone who has yet to play Persona 3, grabbing FES should be a no-brainer. Those who already have it might ask, what’s in it for me? Well, read on.

I'm a big fan of action movies. Give me lots of gunfire, some explosions and long, nonstop action sequences, and I'm going to like the movie.

Army of Two is the videogame equivalent of the action movies I like so much. It's one of the few games I've played where it made me think "oh, they made this game just for me."

War is hell. With death and mass destruction the centerpiece for any real conflict, it's more or less an unspoken truth we can do without when possible. Though these confrontations in real life can produce less then desirable results for any and all parties, large bouts of aggression in video games can be, on occasion, hilarious. With the topsy-turvy nature of battle being entertaining in games, something like Commanders: Attack of the Genos goes a step further by substituting warfare's morbid nature with something a little cuter. In this way, Commanders builds itself on several conflicting principles, which make the entertainment slightly perplexing.