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Here’s the thing about Tetris on any device or console: it’s kind of hard to screw up. If you have all the correct pieces, and manageable controls, then you’re in good shape. Tetris Party Live completes these very simple prerequisites by offering a Tetris game that is flawlessly functional. Pieces drop and animate well, and the controls feel right. That part is pretty easy. It’s all the additional stuff that will or will not make the purchase of this game worthwhile, and it’s a bit limited...

Farming doesn’t sound like an inherently interesting game concept, but it’s proven to be hugely profitable for publishers. Besides the massive Farmville juggernaut, there’s the long-running Harvest Moon series from Natsume, of which the Rune Factory series is a spin-off.

Rune Factory games can essentially be described as “Harvest Moon plus an Action/RPG”, and Rune Factory 3 is no different. The bulk of your time will be spent tending to your farm as the in-game days and seasons pass, raising crops and finding ways to prepare and sell them. You’ll also interact with the local townsfolk, running various errands to win their admiration. Combat is a lesser – though still essential – part of the game, as you’ll need to progress the primary narrative by taking down some big boss monsters...

Japanese text adventure games – often called “visual novels” in their native land – haven’t really found a huge audience in the US. Branching-path, almost completely text-based narratives don’t seem to hold much merit to a gaming crowd that predominantly prefers to shoot whatever moves on its screen. It seems odd, then, that Aksys would opt to bring 999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors out in North America – the mix of a novel’s worth of text exposition and “room escape” style puzzles doesn’t seem like a fit for our market. But when someone actually plays 999 with an open mind, they’ll be glad Aksys made the effort to localize this stellar title...

A worthy successor to the Golden Sun legacy (yes, two GBA games can equal a legacy, if they're beloved enough), Golden Sun: Dark Dawn takes everything we loved about the first two games and refines it, if predictably, into a polished RPG experience that, like the first two, is equal parts tradition and innovation. It looks gorgeous, and the djinn system is even better than before...

An important thing to learn as a reviewer is to review the game you have, not what you want it to be. Despite Mario vs Donkey Kong: Mini-Land Mayhem being the third game in the series to be on the DS, we still hoped it would be a spiritual sequel to the arcade classic Donkey Kong, with Mario jumping his way through devilish platforming puzzles. Instead we’re given more of the same puzzle adventures featuring Mario and his tiny doppelgangers, but when we got used to that idea, it wasn’t so bad after all...

Back in the day they built games that lasted. The standard 10 – 20 hour fare of today’s ‘triple A’ titles were Act 1 for games on the SNES. Lufia 2: Rise of the Sinistrals was exactly that sort of game, but it gets better: it’s been re-released for the DS. However, along with a slight name change, Lufia: Curse of the Sinistrals is not a straight remake like Chrono Trigger’s re-release on the DS. What’s changed, you ask? Lots...

The original Shantae for the Game Boy Color was remarkable for a number of reasons. For one, it was created almost entirely by a single man - Matt Bozon, and published by Wayforward. It looked great and played wonderfully, and created an engaging new mythos in which gamers could enjoy some tight platforming goodness. Some things never change...

Before we jump headfirst into this whole “Super Scribblenauts review” business, let us engage in a brief history lesson. Developer 5th Cell released their original Scribblenauts game in 2009 to Nintendo DS gamers with mammoth expectations due to the gigantic amounts of hype the developer garnered at E3 of that year. The reason for this is that the game featured an ambitious concept where players could summon any sort of object they could think of (animals, people, buildings, kitchen utensils, whatever) by simply typing its name and could then use said objects to solve various puzzles. The game had a fanbase before it was even released...

Final Fantasy: The 4 Heroes of Light isn’t really a Final Fantasy game. Don’t let the name fool you. Granted, the sizable series has had its share of evolutions and regressions over the last two decades, but 4 Heroes, more often than not, strikes out its own path in ways the main series never has before...