You haven’t really seen my name linked to a sports title before. There’s a very good reason for that. I don’t watch sports (OK — I watch the Olympic, gymnastics and figure skating), and I don’t play traditional sports. I do enjoy Wii Fit and Wii Sports, but that’s about as far as it goes. I chose to review Major League Baseball 2K9 because my daughter likes playing baseball (sometimes) and my nephew (I’ll call him “C”) loves baseball. For the record, both kids are 9.

Congratulations! You are the proud owner of a brand spankin’ new shop in Clover Town, set in the Harvest Moon universe. The town is filled with many familiar Harvest Moon faces from the series, and you can interact with them. Decide what you’re going to sell and build you business to help the town grow and prosper. Will you make fruit juice? How about ice cream? Maybe decorating eggs is more your style.

It was inevitable that when customizable content became the norm in video games, the public would indulge in humorous creations appealing primarily to the mischievous teenage boy in all of us. I’ll admit my eyes grew wide when I set my eyes on Spore Hero for Wii. My mind began to race as I realized the creatures I had created in the original Spore that nearly got me banned from online play could be pitted against those of my friends’ creations in battle. Awesome.

The great thing about this current generation of consoles is the availability of indie gaming. Each platform has its own pros and cons of the indie game scene. As such, each platform offers a unique perspective. Currently, the most prominent is the Xbox 360 and Xbox Live Arcade (or so it seems to me). And Braid caught the eyes of many players about a year ago. And it’s about time we PC gamers got a chance to play it. So how does it hold up? It holds its own rather darn well on the PC and is a pitch perfect port of the XBLA game.

By all accounts, Bayonetta will, as director Hideki Kamiya put it, “blow the doors off the action genre.” As the Sarah Palin-esque bespectacled eponymous heroine, players slice, dice, shoot and blast their way through beautifully rendered gothic environments with an extremely high frame-rate with no trace of slow-down.