It’s strange to think that, as of this writing, Grand Theft Auto IV is more than a year and a half old. It’s even stranger to think that the story it began is finally complete, with the two downloadable episodes – The Lost and Damned and The Ballad of Gay Tony – filling in plot holes and offering up inventive new ways to explore the city that most GTA fans probably thought they’d exhausted of possibilities by ...

There’s one good thing about Fairytale Fights – the combat doesn’t suck. Well, not immediately anyway. Sadly, everything else that surrounds this average hack and slash gameplay pretty much does. The story, the platform bits, right down to the character design – which reminds us of the annoying Rabbids – all of it makes for a huge drag. The worst bit? It costs as much as a top-brand game. ...

Balance is a delicate thing, so easily lost. Tekken is a series that thrives on it – on striking a balance between fulfilling its remit as the ‘accessible’ 3D fighting game (button-mashing will get you further here than in most fighters) and offering a system substantial and even enough to allow the hardcore fans to battle at a competitive level. ...

DJ Hero is a game that really needs to be played to be truly appreciated. On paper it seems to be yet another ill-conceived concept bundled with a money-spinning peripheral to give it a novelty value – the kind of thing you fiddle with at Christmas and chuck into the spare room for the rest of the year. But when you actually place your fingers on the turntable and scratch out your first mix, you’ll lose all those nagging doubts or cynical thoughts, and – toilet breaks notwithstanding – you won’t stop until you’re wrestling with the wrist-snapping final tunes of the game. ...

For years now, EA has strived to bring FIFA up to the same standard as PES, often mimicking Konami’s masterpiece or (ahem) ‘borrowing’ gameplay elements in the process. PES, meanwhile, has procrastinated, barely changing for each iteration until – finally – it finds the boot’s on the other foot; FIFA’s the champ and Konami is looking to EA for inspiration. ...

Borderlands lacks the charm of Fallout 3, Mass Effect, or Half-Life 2, but it does offer a crap-ton of ‘roided-out bandits, effed-up dog things, giant spider demons, and screeching pterodactyl beasts to shoot with a crap-ton of guns. And that’s really what it’s about – finding weapons and shooting things with them. You have to assign a skill point now and then, and there’s kind of a story, but those things ...

Professional wrestling gets a lot of crap thrown at it. To its detractors, it's too violent, sexist, immature and – above all – fake. And while there are grown fans who still think the predetermined results are "real," the smart fans of the sport (yes, we called it a sport) appreciate it for the amazing stunts, the colorful characters, and the rare times when two wrestlers in one ring tell such an engrossing story that you ...

Bust a Move (Puzzle Bobble in the UK) is so simple you’d have to be a monumentally cretinous imbecile to get it wrong. Stick to the formula established on day one, and it’s practically bulletproof. Still, it’s gone off the rails plenty of times – drowned by unnecessary features, or bolted on to justify a disc’s asking price. None of that on Live Arcade, though. ...

If Dreamworks are the low-rent Pixar, then surely Sony Pictures Animation, the makers of Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, are a low-rent Dreamworks. They’ve crafted a charmless kid’s movie out of an obscure kid’s book, and inspired Ubisoft to belch out a game version some degrees further into the depths of low quality. ...

There are games that try to follow in the footsteps of other successful games, and there are games that try to carve their own path. It’s hard not to root for the games that try to do something new, but the danger with innovation is that what’s new isn’t always good. Often original games are admired more for their intent than their execution. ...