Game Downloads

At the start of Shaun White Snowboarding, the game asks if you want to go through a tutorial. Choose the path of the uninitiated and blocks of text describing the controls pop-up onscreen as you speed down the mountain. That's all the help that you get. Throughout the game, you receive more sporadic text hints...but if you don't understand the short description of each move, the game just assumes that you'll figure it out on your own.

In January 2008, EA struck an exclusivity deal with the NCAA, which means their annual college hoops title, NCAA Basketball 09, is all alone at center court this season. That's doubly disappointing for hardcore fans, as 2K's College Hoops has outdone EA's efforts since the jump to HD gen (two Bs for 2K versus two C+s for EA), particularly now that NCAA Basketball 09 proves little more than mediocre.

In many ways, Need for Speed: Undercover is like a "greatest hits" package of ideas and conceptsthat we've seen the franchise play around with since Need for Speed: Underground turned the series on its head five years ago. Undercover revels in street culture, much like both of the Underground games, while putting a greater emphasis on cops and car chases like Need for Speed: Most Wanted. And like Need for Speed: Carbon, it leans heavily on a narrative that's plays out in occasional cut-scenes while building on some of the impressive graphics and driving-physics technology built for Need for Speed: ProStreet. On paper it seems like a slam-dunk, but it sadly falls just a little flat in practice.

It's hard to find much fault in Gears of War 2's deliriously fun online multiplayer -- not if you can get into it, anyway. It seems complaints have been flooding in from gamers experiencing unusually long matchmaking wait times, and now Epic Games has acknowledged the problems on the official Gears of War forum (via Shacknews), and promised they're hard at work to develop a solution.

Japan may officially be in a recession, but we have a feeling Nintendo is doing just fine. Using data from the NPD Group, as well as Take-Two's own sales figures for Grand Theft Auto 4, Gamasutra has put together a fairly reliable estimate of the year's top-five best selling games in the U.S. so far. Not surprisingly -- but still astoundingly -- four of them belong to Nintendo.