Dragon Ball Z: Ultimate Tenkaichi

Combat incorporates all of the moves you know and love from the Dragon Ball Z franchise. The game cleverly chains ranged and proximity actions together through combos, which you'll execute through timed command prompts. In no time at all both players can quickly pull off dazzling attacks so long as they carefully manage a couple on-screen meters. Similarly, counter attacks feel equally easy to pull off, giving players reasonable opportunities to reverse momentum. To say Spike's fighting mechanics capture the spirit and speed of DBZ is a massive understatement. It helps that this type of combat is rare within the fighting genre. You won't see Street Fighter doing anything like this.

Unfortunately Spike has yet to find flexibility within its mechanics. Whether you're playing as Goku or Kid Buu, by and large these characters function the same. Sure, your Chocolate Beam attack is going to look different than your Kamehameha, and it'll do different damage, but you pull off the same moves to get to that point.

The vast majority of fights operate within the same parameters, requiring you to charge your Ki and Spirit meters to certain levels for particular defensive and offensive maneuvers. Core strategy revolves around choosing outwitting your opponent on reversals, which boils down to a 50/50 chance. The first half dozen matches all feel fresh and bold until you realize you're the same thing you did 30 minutes ago with a completely different character. When that sinks in, Ultimate Tenkaichi loses a fair amount of its allure.

Sonic Riders Zero Gravity

Putting all story aspects aside, Zero Gravity is basically the same design as the original Sonic Riders experience. You'll sprint through courses, grab rings, power up your air board – why the fastest animal alive doesn't just run is beyond us…- and attempt to take first place in some of the craziest track design since Extreme G on the N64. Where the original fell short, however, Zero Gravity again fails, as the air board mechanic is a bit too slow for our liking (nowhere near the intensity of something like F-Zero GX), and the control is very clunky, using Wii tilt or PS2 analog stick to control a very slippery, floaty character at high speeds. For whatever reason, the steering isn't tight enough overall, so characters like Knuckles will often run into walls simply because they can't turn fast enough, and Wii tilt users will find that movement with the remote needs to be far more exaggerated than most games, yielding less turnout as well for their efforts. Even Sonic and the Secret Rings had tighter controls than Zero Gravity's end design.

In addition to the new story and tilt control on Wii, Zero Gravity also makes use of some new gameplay mechanics, specifically those dealing with the "Gravity" part of the game's title. Sonic's new gravity-changing bracelet allows him and his team the ability to stop time, launching into a bullet time effect that lets you reposition yourself for a quick turn, or latch onto a wall track for alternate routes. Replacing the classic turbo boost from the first game, players can now rocket at full speed into a huge turn, flip into Zero Gravity mode, reposition themselves, and then boost out of free space again in a new direction. The idea works, but without an overall boost ability the entire experience feels a bit slower now, as you won't be cashing in trick points for turbo, but instead use it to actually slow the game down as you make more precise movements.

Naruto Clash Of Ninja 2

For the Clash of Ninja franchise, Eighting decided to go all-out with the gameplay, offering the same speed and style of the battle anime in playable form. In the first Clash of Ninja, players could chose from just a handful of the series favorites, such as Naruto, Sasuke, Sakura, Zabuza, Rock Lee, and a few others primarily featured in the first season of the show. With Clash of Ninja 2, however, the character base is far deeper, allowing for over 20 fighters to be unlocked. We can't go into the specifics about the roster quite yet (as D3 wants to make you do the dirty work), but we have been featuring each of the fighters in our "Fighter Profile", which is finishing up next week with the final unlockable characters. We can tell you, however, that the amount of depth and complexity in the new characters is just awesome, featuring abstract weapons and very unorthodox fighting styles. If you're a fan of the anime, you most likely have an idea of who else you'll be fighting with. When/if you achieve 100% completion, you'll have a wide array of fighters at your disposal, featuring good guys, baddies, masters, students, and even alternate forms of pre-existing characters.

Even more important than the cast of characters in Clash of Ninja 2 is the amount of depth added to the actual battle system. With the first Clash of Ninja, battles were one-on-one only, and while there was still a fair amount of added modes, the mechanic eventually wore thin. With Clash of Ninja 2's ability to have up to four players battling at once, the depth of the fighter increases exponentially. The challenges in story mode now have Naruto going up against multiple enemies at once, and the two-on-two fights make four player multiplayer extremely entertaining. Combine that with an abundance of unlcokables (art gallery, voice tests, character profiles, the list goes on), and you've got a game that looks and plays like the original, but has a ton of added depth through the character roster and gameplay modes. 

Rayman Arena

The single player experience is pretty shallow. You work your way through a Beginner League, and a Pro League, going against computer controlled opponents. Winning these matches will eventually unlock four hidden characters, new maps, and also new player skins. Also, in the racing mode you can unlock variations of Time Attack mode, like Speed Stress, Extreme Slide, and Future. There is also another special race called Run, Run which has you outrunning a wave that kills at the slightest touch.

Playing through single player is not very exciting. There is never really a sense of competition, and everything just feels, for lack of a better word, blah. The game modes would make decent mini-games within a real Rayman game, but even then barely. There's nothing really to make you want to come back and play again. Maybe it's the fact that there seems to be no skill involved in any of the games. Or maybe it's the slow pace of the games, when in fact they should be frantic and intense. Or maybe it's the fault of the poor game design and need to cash in by making a party game with an otherwise excellent franchise like we've seen many times in past. Oh well...

Unfortunately, multiplayer mode suffers the same fate. Take everything that is wrong with the single player game and multiply it by 4. Now everyone gets to run around mindlessly racing/killing each other. Multiplayer may actually be worse due to the decreased screen size, and the fact that at least the computer opponents are supposed to know what's going on. The perfect way to end a party.

Ty The Tasmanian Tiger 2

Ty the Tasmanian Tiger 2: Bush Rescue is the second part of the Ty the Tasmanian Tiger trilogy, started with Ty the Tasmanian Tiger, and concluded with Ty the Tasmanian Tiger 3: Night of the Quinkan. The game has the same core elements as the original, but new features, like driving and Arena battles. The game also changes from a level based system like the first game to a more structured, mission based game similar to Jak II. The game features driving sectuions, and the main world is very large, and is acessed by driving around in a 4x4 Jeep. Indeed, driving elements make up a large part of the game, as some of the combat is fought in mechs. Some missions consist entirely of objective- based goals, like putting out a set number of fires with a helicopter. This game was recieved better than the first. It was produced by Krome Studios and published by EA Games. It was released on the 12 October 2004 in North America, and on the 5 Novemeber 2004 for PAL Regions.

Ty the Tasmanian Tiger 2: Bush Rescue is set in the Australian Outback, in a hub world called Burramudgee. Burramudgee is a significantly larger hub world than the original's Rainbow Cliffs, and features pedestrians who Ty can talk to, vehicles that are un-driveable, Bush rescue's base of operations, and a Driving garage where Sheila has parked the 4x4, and Ty can exit into the massive outside world. After Boss Cass breaks out of jail with the aid of Fluffy and her mech, he sets up his own community to grant himself 'Diplomatic Immunity', so Ty can't apprehend him without proof. Dennis sets up a rescue service called 'Bush rescue' to aid Ty in his attempt to bring Boss Cass to justice and help other civilians from Boss Cass's evil plans, which include making a race of Uber Lizards, taking control of Burramudgee, and absconding with the local population. Ty must race to save his family and friends once again.

LittleBigPlanet 2

LittleBigPlanet 2, commonly abbreviated LBP2, is a puzzle platformer video game centred around user-generated content, first announced on 8 May 2010 in the June 2010 issue of gaming magazine Game Informer. The game is developed by Media Molecule and published by Sony Computer Entertainment Europe for the PlayStation 3 console. Unlike the first game which was marketed as a platformer, LBP2 is being marketed as a "Platform for Games". The game is backwards compatible with all of the 3 million user created levels from the first game.^[1] It is a direct sequel to the critically acclaimed 2008 title, LittleBigPlanet, and the third game in the series. Recently released in the UK and Iceland, there has already been a huge success for LittleBigPlanet 2. The disc also features Sackboy's Prehistoric Moves, a Modnation Racers demo, as well as a Playstation Network tutorial video.

Mortal Kombat

Mortal Kombat has returned to a 2D plane, which I've always preferred for fighting games. Both one-on-one and tag team matches are available, so there's plenty of options when you're setting up a fight. When it comes to the basics, each character has a set of simple moves as well as a bunch of special attacks. I found combos and special attacks easy to execute, but stringing together attacks and keeping an opponent stunned/juggled will take some time to get.

The crux of Mortal Kombat's fighting engine is the super gauge, which fills as you give and receive damage. This is where a fair amount of Mortal Kombat's strategy comes into play. The gauge is divided into three segments, and those segments can be spent in different ways. Expending one segment will enhance any of your character's special moves. So instead of Nightwolf's single glowing green arrow, he fires three.
If you fill the gauge more and spend two segments, you can break out of an opponent's combo. This is a critical defensive option if you find yourself flailing through the air with a rapidly depleting health bar. Lastly, spending the whole shebang will unleash a devastating x-ray attack, which deals terrible, terrible damage to your victim. It can turn the tide of a fight, but missing it will put you in an awful spot with no super gauge to spend.