Alien Spidy has a personality disorder. Enigma Software Productions has built a world of colorful forests and crystalline caves, filling it with giant insects. Alien Spidy's cartoon-spider premise matches its funky aesthetic. It's cute. It's quirky. And it's a real bastard. Alien Spidy presents players with a deceptive package. Underneath the friendly exterior is a score chase in the form of a 2D physics-based platformer, with a difficulty level that often sits on the wrong side of punishing and slippery controls. It looks innocent, but it might bite you. Mechanically, Alien Spidy is simple. You run, jump and shoot webbing, which you use to swing from objects in the environment. There’s also a limited set of power-ups (super speed, a super jump, etc.) that come in handy in...

SimCity has largely overcome the crippling server instability that plagued the game (and players) at launch, but not without some tradeoffs. Maxis and EA have added multiple new servers in all geographical areas (and some new areas) as well as an open "test" server where players can explore revisions still in the "flirting with" stage. Combined with what appear to be strenuous recombinations of how the servers handle overload, SimCity is approaching the playability we experienced during our initial review process. Players with existing cities on a server can generally access that server rapidly and consistently on a first attempt, regardless of server load. Players looking to start new cities on popular servers, however, may have to wait. The status of various servers is also now...

Even if you've tried to maintain a total media blackout on BioShock Infinite, it would have been difficult to remain ignorant of the extended, torturous development cycle it's been through, or the number of major creative personnel who have come and gone during that time. You'd almost think it was hard to follow up the original game, which has been lauded and held up as one of the few conscious, authorial pieces of mainstream art that the video game industry has produced this millennium. BioShock's mechanics and general game design were often more inspired than they were functional. The last third of the game and its climactic final boss battle have seen indifference and derision. Still, BioShock has held up as a game that capitalized on the strengths of the medium that had something...

The Walking Dead: Survival Instinct begins perfectly. There's the surprise death, the heartless brutality and the familiar, pensive strains of Bear McCreary's theme. It's precisely in line with the opening of the hit TV show the game is based on and promises all the heart-wrenching drama and desperate action the series delivers. It is The Walking Dead: Survival Instinct's last brush with competence. Did I mention that these unscheduled stops are often the same maps, over and over? In this crass, cynical piece of exploitation, players take on the role of Daryl Dixon, one half of the backwoods-dwelling Dixon brothers. A prequel, Survival Instinct follows Daryl as he tries to reunite with his elder sibling Merle and escape the zombie apocalypse sweeping through the South. As Daryl...

Etrian Odyssey 4: Legends of the Titan captures the essence of exploration: fear, doubt and finally victory. As the latest addition to a franchise known for its difficulty and complex, sprawling mazes, Legends of the Titan is nothing new. It employs some of the most basic elements of role-playing: design your party, grapple with fearsome beasts, find your way to glory. That path to fame isn't always easy. The game's difficulty leaps from bearable to punishing with no warning, and level grinding is often the only viable strategy to continue. But Legends of the Titan surpasses the expectations of a generic dungeon crawler with its absorbing map-making mechanics. It's a bumpy journey, but one that rewards patience and willpower. Legends of the Titan has no intention of telling a...