I enjoy a healthy dose of military shooters in this gaming day and age. It's hard not to when every FPS maker is figuring out how to get in on the runaway success that Call of Duty enjoys these days. I'm a fan, I do enjoy shooting thousands of digital insurgents and I'm the rare exception that actually chooses the single player campaign when I first start up a new game.

I'm like others, though, who believe a war game can tell an intellectual story without being bogged down by commanders throwing around four-letter words and telling me who to kill next. I was expecting a Call of Duty game to attempt this feat, not the newest in a franchise that has traditionally been a poor man's military shooter at best.

In this day and age every developer is seeking to be the next Call of Duty, Mass Effect or Elder Scrolls.  With their gritty visuals, raging biceps of masculinity, speech trees and pulsating synth dominated soundtracks they tend to take the player on a testosterone-laden joy ride.  There is nothing wrong with these and I rather enjoy the Mass Effect series and Deus Ex: Human Revolution.  This is because they get something that's key right and that’s the element of world building.  They fully succeed in transporting you to a different world taking you away from your depressing job, bills and other things.

Somewhere down the line games like these became a benchmark, but at the expense of these games something weird happened: Japanese games started to get a lot of stick for what they did. In all honesty they did nothing that was different from the Mass Effects or Elder Scrolls.  They built worlds with quirky whimsical characters, with vibrant personalities.  Sure the color palettes are different, but at the end of the day they achieve the same goal of providing the player with an entertaining world to occupy for at least six hours a day.  Opening up a review with social commentary isn’t the best thing to do, but Tales of Graces F makes me want to briefly discuss it, because despite some of it’s flaws it was actually the most fun I’ve had within the last couple of years.

I initially warmed to the Max Payne series in a post-Matrix world where bullet time was still a new thing. I finally got to play a game that let me slow the world down and see the bullets whiz on by while I flew through the air with two machine guns blazing. It's easy to see why Max Payne has been a successful and popular series. It was the only shooter at its time to capture that feeling of a John Woo action film. What surprised me, however, is the same thing that has kept me glued to the series: the writing that Sam Lake provided was undoubtedly some of the best I had ever seen in a video game. The way he had Max wax morbid poetry was mesmerizing to me. I never understood why people didn't flock to Max Payne's style of storytelling. To this day, I still constantly quote lines from the series.

I consider myself a fair man when it comes to games.  I am always willing to try to see what the developer has to offer before I shuffle them off as a great game or a bad game.  I have been known to stick with a terrible game long after any sane person would've given up on.  My biggest claim to that is the abysmal “Too Human” where I fully understood how terrible the game was, but couldn't put it down because of loot and the setting.  Supremacy is a game that makes me want to reconsider giving a game a fair shake.  It's rare when I throw up my hands in defeat, but I think Supremacy MMA managed to make me do that

I've been a long time fan of the Ace Combat series, but it has been showing weakness of late.  Ace Combat 6: Fires of Liberation felt to me like the finale of the current form of business this arcade flight combat simulator had to offer.  Time has definitely come for something new to liven up the formula, to appeal to the new breed of military gamers.  Tom Clancy has been trying to steal the crown of air combat away with their HawX series.  If there was a time for Project Aces, the developer, to really pull out the stops to reinvent Ace Combat and give it new life.  Ace Combat: Assault Horizon is bringing a slew of new aircraft and new combat changes, but is it enough to maintain its status as top gun?

As I played through Lord of the Rings: War in the North, it made me realize how much I've missed the hack and slash adventure titles of the past. Being done by Snowblind studios who are single handily responsible for putting me in this position with their addicting Baldur Gates: Dark Alliance series, Champions of Norrath, and (to a lesser degree) Justice League Heroes. There's a strange trigger in me that craves loot, that must always see the next level of armor or weapons that I can obtain. It's the reason why I fall so hard in love with games like Pokemon and World of Warcraft and even managed to forgive something as truly terrible as Too Human just because it kept giving me shiny new boots when I shouldn't even be playing! That's the player War in the North wants; the one that wants just one more trinket before leaving.

Dual Pen Sports is another game in a long list capitalizing on the limited library currently out for your 3DS by throwing some mini games onto a card and hoping you will buy it because you don’t have many other options. Truth be told this game is not worth the full forty dollar price tag of a new 3DS game because its entertainment value will get old pretty fast once you realize it’s the same formula copy and pasted over and over with a different name on it each time.

The problem with Dynasty Warrior games is their refusal to ever evolve. Rarely is there anything that shows progress in these titles, and the Gundam versions really take this to the extreme. It doesn't seem like the developer really even spent time on this game. That they’re asking for a full price on this title would only make sense if it was revealed to be some elaborate joke. There is, at best, about an hour’s worth of content here. Not only that, Dynasty Warriors: Gundam 3 is shameless in how it reuses everything that's come before it while adding nothing at all to the experience. Sure, there are more mobile suits to drive, but does that really matter overall? Is that all this series has become, Madden with large robots?

I had high hopes for the Transformers: Dark of the Moon game tie-in.  On one hand, it's the Transformers, and while I don't think highly of the Bay films, I still love giant robots punching each other in the face while they turn into cars. You tack on that it's been developed by High Moon studios, which was responsible for last year’s phenomenal Transformers: War for Cybertron, and I'm anxious to get my hands on it. Now the question comes up, is this game designed more for the traditional fan, like the previous game, or is this just a quick cash grab meant to dazzle fans who just walked out of the movie hungry for more explosions?  For me, the even better question is if this is a quality follow-up to one of my favorite games from last year.

Namco is tearing up Nintendo’s new 3DS handheld with Ridge Racer 3D which boasts great visuals and tons of races. When you get right down to it Ridge Racer is a solid racing series that has spanned generation after generation of game consoles and it keeps true to what has made it famous in this latest handheld iteration.

Since this is a racing game for a handheld the story isn't very important. In actuality there is no story to follow, and the game focuses solely on the races.