Akiba's Trip can easily be mistaken for what it's satirizing, but beneath that façade is an intelligent game with a surprisingly noble purpose.
Ultra Street Fighter IV is, for a casual player, the best Street Fighter IV, thanks to a large roster of well-balanced fighters.
Rogue Legacy hooks you immediately with speedy action, and keeps you hooked with deep character building and exploration.
Mario Kart 8 is a sterling example of Nintendo at their best as craftsmen, a game whose attention to detail and joy is mostly unsullied by some unfortunate misunderstandings about how people communicate online.
Abstracted through pixels, text, and the lens of science fiction, God Will Be Watching is a fantasy that captures a very real, disturbing hint of apocalyptic reality.
The game also sings because it's never a slave to the perceived merits of tradition. It would have been all too easy to, say, shove in some little floating Shovel Knight heads, making you collect pointless extra lives for no reason other than that's how things were done back in the good old days. Yacht Club Games is smarter than that, and their game is, too.
EA Sports UFC has failed to create something as immediately entertaining as it is rewardingly complex.
Murdered: Soul Suspect takes the clever premise of a ghost detective, and sabotages it with a protagonist as thin and dull as his ethereal specter.
Beyond its mechanical parts, The New Order is a relief because it's a reminder that profundity doesn't necessarily need to be linked to big, universe-shattering ideas.
Kirby Triple Deluxe is an approachably frivolous game on the outside, but it's hiding an expertly engineered, hilariously weird game within.
Most of the time, the game works, and some of it can be amusing if not nourishing. It's just stupid. Very, very stupid.
Trials Fusion gracefully sidesteps the same-old treatment with new flavors and added complexity that build on RedLynx's well-established foundation.
Yaiba succeeds admirably because it does what so few intentionally "so bad it's good" games do: It makes everything work.
Yoshi's New Island isn't the creative masterclass in platforming the original was, but it is the best platformer Nintendo's released for the Nintendo 3DS to date.
The game is as confused as its protagonist, and it's hard not to wish that the studio could have conquered its inner conflict and found its wings.
Double Helix turns in the best playing Strider ever made, but its game lacks the vital visual panache of its predecessors.
Super Mario 3D World isn't some perfect fix for the aging game maker, but it is Nintendo's tomorrow.
The chapters are so long, they become tedious, even on the surprisingly vicious "Normal" difficulty setting. The challenge of the game could be a draw, but when coupled with the nonsensical morass of Knack's fantasy, there's no good reason to keep pushing forward. Without a clear center, Cerny's game feels as hollow and vulnerable as its hero, a pile of disparate parts all too ready to crumble at a moment's notice.