Dungeon Defenders is really a simple, enjoyable game. It's tower defense. Enemies spawn at a few points, walk a set path, and attack a crystal at the end of the path. The heroes in the game summon towers and fight back the orcs, goblins, and trolls, defending the crystals from destruction. It's a standard idea with up to four simultaneous players all working together to defend the crystals from all attacks.

I'm almost unsure as to why I'm even bothering to review this particular downloadable expansion to Portal 2. For one, it's totally free, and two, it's more Portal 2. How could anyone complain about that? After playing through the entirely new set of test chambers, I know I can't. Fact of the matter is Peer Review is more of a good thing.

Open up a toy chest, and inside you'll find a G.I. Joe, a water gun, a yo-yo. You'll see Ninja Turtles. Perhaps at the bottom there's a baseball. No matter how you look at it, there are dozens of toys and dozens of ways to play games. And so it is with Kirby's Return to Dream Land.

There has been this perception that Festival of Blood was DLC; that it was some kind of small addition to inFAMOUS 2 which was released earlier this year.  It's an easy assumption to make since FoB takes place in New Marais, the New Orleans of InFAMOUS’ fictional world and the setting of Cole’s second adventure.  It would only make sense that you would need to have a copy of the game in order to enjoy this expansion, but the lovely folks at Sucker Punch Productions wanted to gift the entire PlayStation 3 community with this gem and as such released it as a stand-alone title.

Good news, everyone! PixlBit has already reviewed both Chains of Olympus and Ghost of Sparta. Both received a rating of 4 stars on the PSP, and if you're a fan of the series, surely the same will hold true here. Sony has lovingly ported these games to the PlayStation 3 with great results. Both games look strikingly good for PSP remasters and both control as you'd expect with the de facto PlayStation controller, as opposed to the often awkward PSP nub.

One of the focal points, and a large source of fun, in Deus Ex: Human Revolution was the ability to radically customize your cybernetic enhancements to specialize yourself into being anything from a hacking wunderkind to a walking tank that spits out death. Unfortunately, once you had set yourself on your chosen path, it was really hard to experiment without another 60+ hour playthrough. Until the Missing Link DLC was released, that is.

At face value, you might think Disney is crazy for releasing their four player co-operative title, Disney Universe, just one week after Ratchet & Clank: All 4 One. The thing is, Disney Universe is actually the better of the two games. While both suffer from a lackluster co-operative play, the core gameplay of Disney Universe is more layered in its design, giving players more than endless enemies to grind through.

Seldom is there a licensed game as good as Batman: Arkham City. It succeeds in all of the areas that Arkham Asylum failed, while also keeping the fantastic ambiance, gameplay, and loyalty to the Batman franchise that we came to expect from the original. Pretty much every time I picked it up I easily ended up dropping at least three hours into the game and had no desire to put it down. I will go as far to say that Batman: Arkham City is not only the best comic based game ever, but a contender for game of the year.

You would think that by my thousandth dead orc I would have stopped grinning when a horde of them walked into my carefully constructed labyrinth, setting off a chain of traps that resulted in their own glorious deaths by piercing, dismemberment, crushing, burning or all of the above. But then you haven’t played Orcs Must Die! yet. Created by Robot Entertainment, Orcs Must Die! is a light hearted third-person take on the classic tower defense genre that in addition to placing various traps and obstacles against an overwhelming orc horde you can also engage them with melee, ranged, and magical attacks.

If Modern Warfare was a rock star, Ace Combat: Assault Horizon would be its psycho groupie stalker.  Assault Horizon doesn’t just love Modern Warfare, it wants to be Modern Warfare.  Like Buffalo Bill pretending to be a woman by wearing a suit made of skins in Silence of the Lambs, the latest Ace Combat is unsettling in its desire to be something it’s not, which is a real shame because underneath that hand-stitched COD suit is a solid game just begging to be recognized.

The end of a video game system’s life is always an interesting one. While game developers, publishers, and fans are looking ahead to the new, shiny machine on the block, the older hardware has the benefit of years of development lessons learned. Consider that Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy IX, and God of War all came out as their respective systems were waning, and each of those games are considered classics in their own right. Enter Aliens: Infestation, a game developed by WayForward for the aging Nintendo DS system. Is this a game that will go down in history as one of the best additions to the DS library, or is it a case of too little, too late?

I was one of the very few people I know who did not grow up watching Sesame Street. As such, I never fully understood the dedication and nostalgia that people who did grow up watching it had for the not-for-profit, educational television show. Never fully understood, until having my own child, I should say. Although my son, Nicholas, is only ten months old, his smile widens and his eyes brighten every morning at 10AM when Sesame Street comes on the air. As I've watched and enjoyed the program for the last few months, I've come to understand why it has been loved by generations. Armed with my new found love for, and expertise on the series, I was genuinely excited to try out Double Fine's newest game based on the beloved TV show, Once Upon a Monster. From beginning to end, the game is a joyous experience full of color and endearing characters that was clearly not just created to be a fun game, but one that is designed to encourage families to play together.

Hard Boiled Chicken sure is badass.  He’s the kind of bird that walks quietly and carries a big stick, stoically raining deadly lead down upon his flightless penguin oppressors.  He has a jetpack and has sent more of our winged friends to the great bird bath in the sky than Colonel Sanders.  Did I mention that he has a freakin’ jetpack?!  Yeah, he’s a pretty awesome chicken, which is why it’s a shame that his game never quite gets him to the levels that his sweet jet pack does.

When the 32 bit wars began, I was firmly entrenched in the Sony PlayStation camp. I believed then, as I do now, that the overall library of games on the PSX was far superior to that of the Sega Saturn. That shouldn’t imply, however, that there weren’t games on the Saturn that could make even the staunchest PlayStation supporter green with envy. The Saturn was capable of pumping out impressive sets of 2D sprites, and in this the PlayStation was a distant second. Games like Astal, X-Men vs. Street Fighter, and Albert Odyssey made me desperately want the beefy Sega console, and as soon as I was able to, I plunked down my hard-earned cash for a Saturn. The main reason for this purchase was, of course, Guardian Heroes. I had missed out on many of Treasure’s other games, since I had also sided against Sega in the 16 bit days. Even so, I knew just what kinds of incredible things the quirky Japanese developer was doing with animation and sprite work, and for me, Guardian Heroes was a system seller. Now, 15 years later, Guardian Heroes returns for XBLA with an HD upgrade. Does the game hold up after all these years, and is it worth the 800 MS point asking price? Read on, brave warriors, read on.

It's been a long nine days since we started running our Ratchet & Clank recap feature, but it has served as a great refresher on all of the games in the series. Having played them all individually over a number of years, it was easy to miss many of the trends the series has exhibited over time. For one, roughly half of the games in the series are actually side quests that only exhibit some of the traits of the core titles. Two, Insomniac is and has always been willing to utilize the series as a testing ground for all sorts of different ideas. All 4 One, being a co-operative four player title, is their latest test. The title sacrifices much of what makes the core series great in an effort to appeal to those looking for a co-op experience with friends. Like Ratchet: Deadlocked (Insomniac's other testing ground), All 4 One both succeeds and fails in different ways, but doesn't even begin to approach the bar set by A Crack in Time.

What is Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker 2? Is it Pokémon? Is it Dragon Quest? Is it Monster Hunter? Is it Monster Rancher? As I'd never played a Dragon Quest Monsters game before, I began to discover it has elements of all the monster-related games above, believe it or not. The variety of Pokémon, the skill-set making and monsters of Dragon Quest, the attempts to defeat giants who can maul a team of hunters, and the careful balance and planning of crafting and synthesizing a quality monster.

At this point in time, Ratchet & Clank Future: Quest for Booty serves little purpose. The PSN release is an extremely short 2-3 hour experience that served only as a holdover for the (at the time) upcoming release of A Crack in Time. The entire quest is focused around contacting Clank, given the events that concluded Tools of Destruction. As such, he's not available for use and Ratchet is provided with a few nifty tools to get the job done.

Driver: San Francisco has no business being as fun as it is.  It has one of the most ridiculous premises I have ever come across a video game, it oozes of 70’s car movie clichés and has enough cheesy dialogue to throw an epic fondue party.  Yet somehow all of these components meld together in a strangely fantastic way that makes for the most pleasantly surprising video game experience I have had the pleasure of playing all year.

Secret Agent Clank is the second PSP spin-off title in the Ratchet & Clank series, and like its counterpart, Size Matters, was also developed by High Impact Games. Released originally for the PSP in 2008, Secret Agent Clank was eventually ported to the PS2 in 2009 by Sanzaru games. Since I'm not a big fan of the analog nub on the PSP, I opted for the PS2 version instead, and it seems as though I chose poorly. While I can't vouch firsthand on the improved quality of the PSP version, the difference in review scores paints a pretty clear picture. What I can say is the PS2 version of Secret Agent Clank is a sloppy experience full of issues that sadly ruins the unique gameplay and overshadows the quirky character of the title.

In the world of video games there are very few intellectual properties that will let you print money as easily as the X-Men line. The game only has to be the least bit decent to get a flock of mutie lovers to come running with cold hard cash in hand. Unfortunately the latest X-Men game was given to developer Silicon Knights which is keeping very much to current form in making games no one wants to play.

Ratchet & Clank's HD debut brings some mixed successes. On one hand, the series has translated beautifully to a higher resolution thanks to its rich worlds full of color and detail. On the other, despite the improved look, the game's mechanics haven't managed to improve significantly enough to handle the often increased on-screen havoc. The resulting experience still proves enjoyable, if only due to the already solid footing of the series and the improved graphics.

Jak and Daxter, Ratchet & Clank, Sly Cooper. These are probably the platformers you think of when talking about the PS2. In an era that saw the genre lose its footing to first person shooters like Halo and Killzone, Sony’s second console still had a stable of successful platformers. However, some were cast aside, left to wallow in the abyss of subpar imitators. Ty the Tasmanian Tiger is one of those copycats. The series was never taken seriously despite its modest success with critics. This is mostly because the series does skew to a younger audience and truth be told, the aforementioned titles had more to offer. That’s not to say that this game has nothing to offer but only fans of the genre will want to get Ty the Tasmanian Tiger 2: Bush Rescue.

It was clear pretty early on that Ratchet & Clank: Size Matters was not created by the usual developers, Insomniac Games. When I touched my first exploding box, and heard a foreign countdown sound, rather than the one I was familiar with, I knew something was different. After learning that Size Matters was developed by High Impact Games, some of the tweaks and deviations from the norm made a bit more sense. It's like the Minish Cap of Ratchet & Clank; it fits in pretty well with the rest of the series, but definitely has its own character and set of drawbacks.

I'm not quite certain what Insomniac Games was going for when they created Ratchet: Deadlocked. It's clear that it wasn't meant to be a traditional Ratchet & Clank game, as the experience is something similar, but quite different at the same time. Rather than the typical action-platformer gameplay, Ratchet: Deadlocked is a third person shooter, through and through.

Sideway: New York is the kind of game that you really want to be good.  Its visual charm and unique take on the platform genre make a great first impression, but a few technical issues and a repetitive soundtrack deliver a one-two punch from which it never fully recovers.