Transformers: The War for Cybertron

From what I understand, the overall story of the videogame differs from the canon of the Transformers origin story. As a fan of both Star Trek and Star Warsfranchises, I've run into many canonical issues time and time again (how does one explain Star Tours anyway?), so I can understand the frustration of Transformer purists out there. But if you decide to pass this game up because you can't get over the fact that Megatron turns into a tank instead of a gun, you're doing yourself a disservice -- War for Cybertron really is a lot of fun to play.

Lego Harry Potter: Years 1-4

Lego Harry Potter is difficult. It's simultaneously the best and the buggiest Lego console game for various reasons. To the game's credit, Harry's magical world fits superbly with the series and grants the Lego formula some very welcome refreshment. But it's also a dishearteningly frequent perpetrator of bugs, glitches, and, shockingly, what seems like sloppiness; though expertly polished over all, in specific instances, the game just seems like a downright rush job.

LHP takes one of the best additions to Lego Indiana Jones 2 -- the seamless co-op splitscreen feature, which smoothly splits the screen into two parts when the players separate and joins the screen again when the players reunite -- and puts it to good use in terms of level design. But this is where things get sloppy: The game's camera angles don't always seem calibrated properly for co-op play, an arguably integral part of the Lego console games' appeal. Oftentimes, I found my co-op partner and myself either at opposite edges of the level, or at opposite edges of the screen, while still being close enough to one another that the splitscreen effect hasn't activated. And in those cases, I frequently encountered difficulty seeing my own character, or the in-game object my character was trying to manipulate. At times, key items can be obscured from view or, frustratingly, be put out of reach, depending on where both characters are standing at the time.

Singularity

Raven Software's newest first-person shooter, Singularity, absolutely overflows with that sort of atmospheric junk. And that's just one of the many, many ways Raven's game gives off a serious BioShock vibe. For starters, Singularity opens with a helicopter crash over the Pacific Ocean -- BioShock, a plane crash in the Atlantic. Both games drop their silent protagonists into strange and perilous ruined cities where mysterious, flesh-mutating substances have been unearthed. They also both allow you to collect and trade the aforementioned gene-altering materials to customize and upgrade your abilities. I could go on for days, honestly, but all that's really missing here are guys in retro-looking diving suits, a soundtrack loaded with Bing Crosby songs, and the ability to unleash swarms of bees from your hands.

Crackdown 2

To my knowledge, there's only one game in the world that lets you team up online with three friends playing as super-powered SWAT agents, make a rendezvous by leaping over skyscrapers, pile everyone into (and onto) one car, tear down the street at 100 mph (rendering a road-clogging zombie horde into a messy green spray), then crash that car into a terrorist hideout in an explosion that rips through most of the bad guys inside. That game is Crackdown 2, and for that reason Crackdown 2 is ridiculously fun.

The problem is, four-player co-op is really all the game brings to the table over its predecessor. Doubling the number of Agents capable of teaming up over the previous game was a great move and makes Live play exponentially more entertaining than before. But everything else about Crackdown 2 is a letdown: The best parts are those lifted straight from the first game, while all the new additions are annoying at best, infuriating at worst. Crackdown 2 is ridiculously fun, but it owes that success entirely to the first game.

Alpha Protocol

Sega melds espionage action and role playing elements into a spy game that's absolutely worth revisiting at least once after the credits roll.

Shadowy government agencies, mysterious paramilitary organizations, elaborate schemes that threaten to tip the world into Armageddon, and maybe some gunfights with sexy women with Eurotrash accents... yeah, I like me some spy stuff. More than that, though, I like the chance to really get into a character's shoes and stomp around a bit, almost as though I were "playing" a "role" or something like that. Weird that spy games don't often give us a chance to insert ourselves into the fantasy in the way Alpha Protocol does. In fact, I can't think of any that have even tried, outside of Deus Ex. Certainly not any that pull it off so well.

The Box

The Box is a 2009 American science fiction–thriller/horror based on the 1970 short story "Button, Button" by Richard Matheson, which was previously adapted into an episode of the 1980s incarnation of The Twilight Zone. The film is written and directed by Richard Kelly and stars Cameron Diaz and James Marsden as a couple who receive a box from a mysterious man who offers them one million dollars if they press the button sealed within the dome on top of the box. Production for the film began in November 2007 and concluded in February 2008.
Coming Soon on DVD.

Serious Sam HD:The First Encounter Xbox

Serious Sam caused something of a murmur when it burst upon the FPS scene back in the early 2000's. Even back then, the FPS genre had backed away, bit by bit, from the balls-to-the-wall insanity of early genre heavyweights like Doom and Duke Nukem 3D and was easing its way into the sophisticated world of Half-Life and System Shock 2. Serious Sam, with its brightly colored, mow-'em-down ethos unexpectedly evoked the zeitgeist of an era long past, and tapped into an undercurrent of adrenaline-fueled gameplay that had been lying dormant in gamers' twitchy index fingers.
So developer Croteam must hope it will go, again, with the series' latest release: Serious Sam HD: The First Encounter. This budget-priced update of the original Serious Sam title features revamped graphics, a new co-op online mode, and a whole lot of old-school ass-kickin' for the greater glory of mankind. And while the new visuals go a long way in toward moving the series into today's world of bells and whistles, at its core, Sam HD is very much from the "old school."