First off, let's be clear about what you're getting in Dead Rising 2: Case Zero. This five-dollar download is no paid demo. None of the content is lifted out of Dead Rising 2. It's a unique location, with characters and places you won't encounter in the full game. In fact, I've seen much of the full game, and I'm pretty sure a key piece of information about the main characters is only available in Case Zero. It's a small detail, but it's a detail I would have hated to miss.

Case Zero's premise is simple and effective. Manly protagonist Chuck is stranded in a small town and needs to find five parts to build the motorcycle that will carry him into Dead Rising 2. But there's a catch. The military will arrive in 24 hours, at which point his adorable but infected daughter will be locked away in quarantine, effectively dooming her to zombiehood. Unfortunately, while Dead Rising 2 is happy to imply child zombies, it shies away from actually showing them. Too bad. Child zombies are a mean-spirited staple of the genre. I guess even Dead Rising has its limits.

Scott Pilgrim: The Game is made to appeal to your sense of nostalgia. A beat-em-up in the vein of old 8- and 16-bit classics with a purposefully pixelated art style, your mission is simply to get from one end of the map to the other while beating the crap out of everyone who gets in your way. And, for a game that celebrates the simple pleasure of button-mashing, it's highly effective.

The game effortlessly weaves together nerd-culture references (from Super Mario Bros. to Akira) with levels and playstyle created to remind you of games like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and River City Ransom. Miniscule background animations and character details ensure that, even when you're just wailing away on clones of enemies you've seen in every other level, they all look distinct. And like RCR (or more recently, Castle Crashers) you also level up your character -- earning new powers, greater strength, and more incentive to keep going, the further along you go.

We've all long since stopped bemoaning the death of the side-scrolling beat-em-up, I think. The torch was passed to 3D spiritual successors like Devil May Cry and God of War, and outside of oddities like Castle Crashers and a crapload of flash games, the genre hasn't really shown its head in a while (and barely moved forward when it did). Then Shank comes along and reminds us all that hey, these things could have continued evolving down a completely different branch of the great cladistic tree of videogames, to become something completely new and every bit as kickass.

Shank is bloody, violent, adolescently indulgent, and absolutely beautiful in execution (and in its executions.) Two things absolutely need to be understood if you're even a little bit on the fence about the game: It's gorgeously, fluidly animated, in both its cut-scenes and within the actual gameplay, and the game's controls are split-second responsive even with the absurd amount of lovingly rendered action happening on screen. Even better, all these obsessively detailed eviscerations are animated in a style almost indistinguishable from Genndy Tartakovsky (Samurai Jack, Star Wars: Clone Wars) against a backdrop that's pure Robert Rodriguez (El Mariachi, Desperado, and the upcoming, and remarkably similarly titled Machete). All that makes for one stratospherically anticipated game.

Mafia stories are about the pursuit of the American dream. Typically, they're tales of a character who tries to claim a share of the world's wealth and riches. And, as is true with all mafia tales, these rewards come at a great cost. In the case of Mafia II, our hero doesn't want to be the Don, nor is he power hungry. He is in this life because this is (what he believes) to be the only thing he's good at. He simply wishes to exist and make as much money as possible. If he happens to meet a dire end as a result of these actions, so be it. Instead of giving players a character who will rise through the ranks to achieve the rank of Best-Mobster-Ever -- like EA's approach to the Godfather videogames -- we're given one who is content with being the middleman. But in the process of trying to create a serious narrative, Mafia II falls into the trend of other sandbox games: it reminds you time and time again with "you're playing a videogame" moments that break the hard work put into crafting this narrative in the first place.

It's a common problem: in these fully realized worlds, you're often given the ability to create moments that don't fit into the world you're playing in. Games like Grand Theft Auto 4 or Saints Row 2 get away with this because their created fiction is full of puns and tongue-in-cheek humor. Mafia II on the other hand, a game that tries to create a serious narrative and a world full of colorful characters, instantly falls apart as soon as you're allowed to toss random pedestrians off a boat pier. Or when you comically pick up a Playboy magazine and are forced to view the centerfold in the midst of a heated gun battle.

It's telling that the first thing you see when you hit "new game" in Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days is a camcorder on a tripod; more than just about any other videogame in recent memory, Dog Days looks and feels like a movie. The in medias res opening, where the titular characters get tortured by an nonchalant fellow wielding a box cutter before flashing back to "two days before," looks as though it's been shot and cut by a young Joe Carnahan (I'm thinking Blood, Guts, Bullets, and Octane or Narc -- not the Carnahan behind A-Team). I've seen plenty of "cinematic" openings in videogames, but not many that use film editing and visual techniques to evoke the feel of specific directors.

This overall aesthetic gives Dog Days an utterly distinct feel from other modern, urban crime shooters and even from other videogames. I wouldn't be surprised if the developers at IO Interactive simply pitched Dog Days' style as: "Michael Mann by way of YouTube." The scenario, story beats, sense of place, and dialogue evoke Mann's penchant for tough and terse crime professionals making their way through a real, defined setting. Yet these tropes are visually portrayed through the same sort of handheld camera work as the average YouTube video or, at most, a faux-mentary such as The Blair Witch Project, Cloverfield, or Paranormal Activity.

One of the greatest gaming experiences of my life involved two friends, three Game Boy Advances, and a slow afternoon burning through The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords Adventures. Even though co-op has become en vogue since Nintendo's strange experiment with connectivity, a follow-up to Link's quirky multiplayer adventure has been woefully absent from the world -- even though the number of DSes and Wiis in the wild would make a sequel much more feasible than its predecessor. After years of wishing and hoping, little did I know I'd be able to scratch my multiplayer-puzzle-dungeon-itch with Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light -- a downloadable Tomb Raider game of all things.

Lara Croft tends to have some of the most predictable adventures in gaming, but Guardian of Light adds some much-needed innovation to the series without changing its fundamental mechanics. Just like in any Tomb Raider title, you'll play around with a number of powerful weapons and a grappling hook while leaping over dangerous pitfalls, though this time around the game is viewed from an isometric perspective zoomed atypically far from Lara herself. And while Guardian of Light doesn't make multiplayer mandatory, the levels are specifically designed to take advantage of Lara and co-star Totec's unique array of abilities. The single-player mode simply gives your chosen character all of the skills necessary to complete the game (and tailors some levels to make single-player success possible), but it lacks the fun of piecing together the solutions to puzzles with a friend.

Recipe for an entertaining multiplayer romp:

Ingredients:

• One part Team Fortress 2
• One part Blood Bowl
• One part Smash T.V.

Directions

The Madden NFL series is in a tough spot. When developer EA Tiburon changes a small detail here or a gameplay mechanic there, it inevitably enrages one set of diehard fans and gets the other half to hop back on the wagon so to speak. This year's iteration in the more than a decade old series has brought me back into the "drinking the Madden Kool-Aid" fold, because it's improved the things that matter to me. That said, Madden NFL 11 still needs some improvement.

The thing that first struck me when I booted up a game was the revamped broadcast presentation. Madden NFL 11 embraces the TV broadcast presentation in a way I haven't seen in years. Since Madden made the jump to Xbox 360 in Madden NFL 2006, the focus on how the game was supposed to be viewed shifted from a clear, Sunday TV perspective to listening to a radio broadcast from the bleachers in the stadium. Since that entry in the series I've felt that Madden's presentation has been lackluster and it under-utilizes the ESPN exclusivity license EA has held for years now. (I've said it once and I'll say it again, NFL 2K5's ESPN broadcast integration is the benchmark I hold all football videogame broadcast presentations up to.)

Castlevania: Harmony of Despair baffles me. Is it a cheap, hacked-together work of desperation, or is it a bold and innovative masterstroke of creativity?

Ultimately, I think it's a little of both. These concepts aren't mutually exclusive, after all. Besides, as they say, necessity is the mother of invention. In this case, I'm pretty sure "necessity" took the form of Konami giving producer Koji Igarashi the mandate to create a downloadable, high-definition Castlevania game with a budget equivalent to the loose change we fished from between the cushions of our office couch last week. And what Igarashi came up with -- Harmony of Despair -- can only be described as "weird."

BlazBlue: Continuum Shift is ARC System Works much needed revision of last year's title, BlazBlue: Calamity Trigger. While Calamity Trigger was a fast-paced, unique, and easy-to-pick-up fighting game, the unbalanced roster resulted in only a few of the characters being viable on a competitive (or even casual) level, which led to many players dropping the game after only a short while. Continuum Shift not only addresses the balance issues of the previous game, but adds new characters and tweaks to the overall gameplay system, resulting in a far more complete package.

If you're new to the BlazBlue universe, you'll find the game has a small cast compared to other fighting games on the market, but makes up for it with a diverse roster. The four main attack buttons -- A, B, C and D -- chain together easily to form combos with each character's Drive attack, which makes each feel immediately distinct. For instance, Arakune's Drive Attack lets him curse his opponents, while Ragna's can absorb his opponent's life with each attack.