Say what you will about twin-stick shooters, but their popularity doesn't seem to be waning anytime soon. From arcade classics like Smash TV to more current fare such as Geometry Wars, people seem to like shooting at things is any direction, and the shmups that spawn from that desire are as popular as ever.

At least, that's what indie developer Cold Beam Games is hoping. Manned by a single programmer in his bedroom, the maker of Beat Hazard Ultra wants to give the familiar ground laid by Geometry Wars and its ilk a unique spin by way of allowing players to use their own music collection.

We're not talking mere customizable soundtracks, though. With Beat Hazard Ultra, the music also dictates how the game unfolds.

Beat Hazard Ultra (Mac, PC, PlayStation Network [reviewed])
Developer: Cold Beam Games
Publisher: Cold Beams Games
Released: October 19, 2011 (PSN), June 16, 2011 (Steam)
MSRP: $9.99 (PSN), $4.99 (Steam, after purchase of original Beat Hazard for $9.99)

Beat Hazard Ultra owes a lot to Geometry Wars. Gameplay is similar, with one analog stick for movement and the other for directional shooting, except that the geometric shapes are replaced by actual enemy ships. There's the same kind of frenetic spray of bullets and enemies on screen, only now, the chaos is controlled by the music. The game acts like a visualizer of your favorite PC music program, jumping and shining brightly as the music thumps and pulsates. Here, bullets and enemies are generated by the natural ebb and flow of the music you've chosen.

The original Beat Hazard was available on Xbox Live Indie Games for 400 MSP almost a year ago, and this title serves as an expansion on Steam and also as a brand new, standalone title on PSN. The game comes with a standard selection of indie rock and pseudo-techno tracks, all beat-heavy and bass-tastic. As the music builds, more ships are generated, and your tiny craft pumps out an amazing array of firepower. As enemies are destroyed, they often leave behind power-ups which increase your multiplier (which increase your firepower output), raise the volume of the song, and so on.

You collect monetary icons to purchase perks that grant you new weapons, lives, and more. Every time you pass a milestone in your cumulative score, you get to unlock another perk, which can then be purchased (and occasionally upgraded) from the Manage Perks screen. In addition to your stock shooter and smart bombs (mapped to the right trigger), you will unlock weapons such as the Ultra beam -- a quick, powerful blast that can decimate anything in its path -- or a shield to reflect enemy fire. The mini missiles are also formidable weapons, each mapped to one of the shoulder buttons or triggers.

All this may sound like standard fare, but what really makes Beat Hazard Ultra unique is how it is affected by your collection of tunes. Popping in a track by the Beatles is just as satisfying as a track by the Ramones, and dance-heavy garbage like Ke$ha and the Black Eyed Peas can generate a huge amount of enemies and fire power, making for frenetic and catchy gameplay.

The way the music rises and builds is taken into account -- enemies and even boss ships are generated based on how the music flows. This means that replaying the same song will generate the same ships, though the direction they fly in from might change. So if you see a giant snake boss when playing a track, chances are you'll see it again when you replay that track. You'll want a wide variety of tunes to mix up the action.

Visually, the game is decently detailed, though not necessarily spectacular. The ships vary in size and all look like some sort of of HD Galaga wannabes. However, this game is an epileptic's nightmare -- if ever a strobe warning were necessary for a game, Beat Hazard Ultra would be the one. Still, I guess it comes with the territory for a game that thrives on the rhythm of user-supplied audio.

There are four gameplay modes. There's Standard mode, where one song equals one game. Next is Survival mode, where a track list loops endlessly and you try to see how many waves of foes you can clear before falling. Boss Rush and Chill Out round out the set, the latter being a mode where you have unlimited lives and weapons to battle through an endless list of tunes (or at least as many as you have on your hard drive). Then there are selectable difficulty levels (for adding even more to the seizure-inducing visuals) as well as online multiplayer and leaderboards.

For a game made by one guy in his bedroom over the summer, Beat Hazard Ultra is an interesting treat. The controls are tight, the weapons are unique and varied, and the novelty of using your own songs gives you an endless library of levels and enemy variety. For shooter fans, it's a fun and unique entry in the catalog, perfect for quick sessions (one song length!) and marathon survival runs alike.

While we're all waiting for that hotly anticipated Saints Row: The Third review, it's easy to forget that Volition Inc. has something else coming to market -- the official Saints Row: The Third Dildo Baseball Bat. 

Fortunately, Destructoid got its hands on what may be the biggest consumer product this holiday season. We took it for a test drive and are proud to reveal this exclusive review! If you're buying any other combination of sports club and external arousal implement, you're definitely getting shafted!

Saints Row: The Third Dildo Baseball Bat 
Manufacturer: Volition Inc.
Publisher: THQ
Released: TBD 
MSRP: $624.99

Whether your trusty old baseball bat is ready for retirement or your tired and clammy dildo needs replacing, Volition Inc. has you covered with the Saints Row: The Third Dildo Baseball Bat. Built with durability and long-term use in mind, you'll be laughing at the savings whether you're smashing balls in the park with your son or smashing your vagina to pieces while watching The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn: Part 1!

Thanks to the smooth ergonomic design and carefully regulated coating of Polymer Rubber Substitute, the Saints Row Dildo Bat provides a level of comfort and flexibility hitherto unseen in any other baseball bat/artificial penis. I was impressed by just how good this feels to use. It's been intuitively designed so that even a novice can get to grips with it in seconds, featuring a very simple handle-based interface that should be familiar to most users. 

The handle itself has a particularly satisfying level of friction and comfort, thanks to the Scientific Flexi-Wrap applied to a rigid base of luxury wood. The contours improve grip ratio while the tactile-oriented neo matte finish keeps even the sweatiest of palms from slipping. 

Having a good handle on any baseball dick is paramount, as experts in the field will tell you 67% of the time. Unfortunately, most manufacturers focus only on the glamour portions of their devices and neglect this mundane-yet-crucial part of the experience. Volition went the extra mile on its piece and deserves applause in an industry that's far too quick to stampede toward the penis without taking care of the fundamentals.

Make no mistake, however -- Volition has not skimped on the detail.

Putting its legendary creative sensibilities to fantastic use with an artisan level of design. The testicles feature hand-crafted creases to create that "just-like-real-sac" feeling that consumers have come to demand over the years, with a central groove to neatly define each individual bollock. These medically accurate representations of authentic gonads will delight even the most discerning of fans, making this a perfect gift for those who believe that the devil is in the details. 

The elegant detailing continues up through the device's premium shaft, featuring a prominent central vein that many fans will recognize from seeing pictures of actual penises in their day-to-day lives. The entire package is complimented by a sleek and aerodynamic glans situated at the distal end of the corpora cavernosa. While it is unfortunate that a complimentary meatus has been excluded from the final product, the Dildo Bat nonetheless features a beautifully designed crown, shaped to please and providing a significant amount of heft in the finished article, so you can really hit those home runs!

All told, it's given me a great amount of pleasure to be able to review the Dildo Bat for you. However, there are of course a few negative aspects that must be addressed. Firstly, the smell -- it stinks like Laffy Taffy. While this won't be a problem for customers exclusively utilizing the item as a sporting implement, those who wish to make full use of its features may feel put off by the overwhelming aroma of goof-themed boiled sugar in something they intend to place within one of several personal openings. 

The color is also a boner of contention. While I personally appreciate the purple tone, one does occasionally think of Grimace's throbbing plonker while studying it for too long. I don't need to tell you that overt sexual thoughts concerning a McDonald's villain-turned-mascot have been a bit of a controversial issue in North America -- especially lately -- and this could be a huge dealbreaker for some users. 

Despite these setbacks, the Saints Row: The Third Dildo Baseball Bat is still one of the most flexible and worthwhile investments a family could make. Thanks to its versatile application at work and home, the Dildo Bat is a brilliant investment that finally puts an end to the need to replace ordinary baseball bats and sex toys -- often considered one of the greatest causes of financial strain in the West. 

In short, this is a highly recommended piece, and one that you should definitely pass up on. It should be available in Walmart, Target and Toys R Us in the near future, so keep a look out!

For all its faults, Dungeon Siege III was something that I immensely enjoyed to button-mash my way through on my own. The camera annoyances found in co-op were not really an issue while playing solo, although the AI's tendency to just leave you for dead more than made up for it.

Treasures of the Sun, the first big DLC expansion, doesn't just add a good amount of new content to the hack & slash-a-ton, but also gives players a number of new tools to make their lives a lot easier on the whole.

Dungeon Siege III: Treasure of the Sun (PC, Xbox 360 [Reviewed], PS3)
Developer: Obsidian Entertainment
Publisher: Square Enix
Released: October 26, 2011
MSRP: $9.99, 800 Microsoft Points

Given that Dungeon Siege III more or less made you run a linear line from locale to locale, Treasures of the Sun fits right in with its new Aranoi Desert environment. If you have already finished the game before, you can just load up the Endgame autosave and get to Aranoi from a new path on the Causeway Hub that would normally lead you to the Chapterhouse and the final battle. If you haven't finished it, you'll be able to access it via the same Causeway Hub after you regain control of the Grand Chapterhouse and complete the Spire levels.

You won't be able to just jump into the DLC from the start of the game and for good reason; it can be damn hard! The last time I played Dungeon Siege III was sometime in July and of course I had completely forgotten Reinhart's (my main) 3x3 array of abilities. Since the game was also still set on Hardcore from the campaign playthrough, suffice it to say that I died horrible at the hands of the most meager of skeletons that you first encounter on the Aranoi wasteland. After familiarizing yourself with the controls and remembering how to play Dungeon Siege III, though, it quickly becomes second nature again.

As DLC goes, Treasures of the Sun will give you plenty of meat to dive into. There's a good five hours or more worth of sieging dungeons in here -- at least if you listen to the conversations -- and as Dungeon Siege III goes it's actually rather good. The Aranoi Desert environment itself can be compared to one of the larger campaign areas in terms of scope, with plenty of sidequests, cave systems, temples and dungeons to crawl through.

The main game may not be one that is remembered fondly because of its story, but Treasures of the Sun offers a surprisingly much better story than you'd expect. Now that the goal is no longer to just go through the motions to gather allies against Jeyne Kassinder, there's somewhat of a lull in the storyline to allow you to explore other parts of the Dungeon Siege universe. In this case, it sheds some more light on the background of the Azunai religion and a lost temple where former Azunites have turned to heresy.

Some twists should offer some good fun for Dungeon Siege fans and there is plenty of lore to go around and to help you delve into the wider universe. Compared to the regular game with its snippets of unrelated information here and there, I found it refreshing to read so much lore focused on the single topic of the Agallan giants' adoption of the Azunite religion, what happened to Ehb's patron saint Hiram, and the subsequent heresy that has tainted Aranoi. Of course, if you ignore all of that there's still some plenty of the regular hack & slash experience to go around.

In Aranoi you'll come across three shrines that will each unlock a new ultimate ability. These powers will consume all your power orbs and the more orbs you have the stronger the effect will be. Hathra'unok's Embrace gives you an instant super heal, Xeria's Wrath gives you a large area-of-effect damage explosion, and Elisheva's Shield offers a very nice barrier for those harder fights. The caveat is that you can only wield one of these super powers at the same time, although you can swap them around at the Aranoi shrines as long as you have unlocked them.

However, these powers are activated by clicking and holding the thumbsticks, which can lead to some frustration. Since clicking the right thumbstick also changes the camera perspective on the controller, you'll find yourself changing the camera to its useless up-close position instead of giving you an instant heal when you are down to double digits of health. Because you can already heal yourself with every character anyway and most characters have some sort of protection ability as well, the area-of-attack ultimate is the one you'll want. Once fully powered by the five power orbs you can now wield, it can even wipe the floor with the majority of a boss form's health.

By the time you're in Aranoi, your character should be powerful enough to fill these power orbs quickly enough, so as long as you remember to use the ultimate ability it will make playing through the game on Hardcore a lot less frustrating in the later stages. Aranoi also provides you with a special shrine to respec all of your character's abilities and talents for 20,000 gold -- easily gathered within an hour -- which is an option that should've been in the main game in the first place, but it's still nice to have.

The final big addition Treasures of the Sun offers is Essences. An Essence is an item (it doesn't take up a slot in the inventory) that you can use to enchant any piece of equipment with one of five statistics; Chaos: Vampire (drain life), Doom (extra damage with critical hits), Retribution (counter damage), Stagger (stun on attack), and Warding (stun on being attacked). Larger foes will sometimes drop an Essence, but you can also randomly gain one by transmuting an expensive piece of equipment that contains one of these five statistics.

You can't overpower an item too much, as you can't enchant an item with a new Essence if that item already has six different kinds of other stats, but your main weapon will still benefit a lot from consistently adding the same types of Essences. However, adding an Essence will bankrupt you in no time due to the high cost of enchanting, so it's not likely to break the game in the areas before the DLC. I did encounter Essence drops in the final stage of the regular game, so it seems this system permeates all of Dungeon Siege III as long as you own the DLC.

This new Essence system makes it a bit more interesting to go through the entire game with a new character, and the option to respec when you reach Aranoi means you no longer have to be afraid you'll mess up your build for the end of the game. If you had trouble with the final boss, a side trip to Aranoi will provide you with enough XP to gain a few levels, with Level 35 now being the new level cap. Some new and super powerful legendary weapons you can find for each of your four characters are also certain to help you out in the late game -- especially if you enchant them with all your Essences.

If you didn't care much for Dungeon Siege III in the first place, Treasures of the Sun is not going to change your mind. It doesn't offer anything mind-blowing that magically turns Dungeon Siege III into a masterpiece. But if you thought it was great or even just alright game, this DLC offers a pretty neat package with additional features and some new powers to toy with. The story is far more interesting than anything Dungeon Siege III had to offer, even if most of it is easily overlooked in favor of just mashing those buttons. One choice at the end of the game hints at a larger impact beyond the storyline of Dungeon Siege III, which makes you wonder if Obsidian has plans for a future title that will be affected by this choice.

Treasures of the Sun is definitely one for the fans and it offers plenty of new content with its new locale, while simultaneously giving you a new reason to play through the full game again. If Dungeon Siege III was not quite Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance but similar enough for you to enjoy, then Treasures of the Sun is best compared to Baldur's Gate: Tales of the Sword Coast; it's a well-shaped and mostly unrelated side-story that offers more of the same fun in a slightly tighter jacket.

After the drop in quality between 2009's CSI: Deadly Intent with its crazy cases and the plain mediocre CSI: Fatal Conspiracy in 2010, it appears Ubisoft has moved development of the similar and new NCIS game from Telltale Games to its in-house Ubisoft Shanghai studio.

These games are meant for two audiences only -- fans of the show and achievement hunters -- and NCIS shouldn't disappoint either of them. In fact, it's much better than the current generation's CSI games.

NCIS (Xbox 360 [Reviewed], PS3, PC, Wii)
Developer: Ubisoft Shanghai
Publisher: Ubisoft
Released: November 1, 2011
MSRP: $39.99

The NCIS game is set during season 9, or just after season 8. It's been one year since Ziva David has passed her U.S. citizenship exam and even Anthony DiNozzo Sr. (voiced by Robert Wagner who plays him in the TV series) makes an appearance.

During four seemingly unrelated episodes the NCIS team has to solve cases ranging from a casino robbery, a bank robbery masking an Arab country's embassy break-in, the murder of an officer in an Iraq military compound, and finally some circumspect deaths surrounding the arrest of DiNozzo's father in Dubai. As a mini-arc of sorts, all cases come together in the end to unravel some TV-logic terrorist plot. If you watch NCIS, you know what to expect.

The structure of NCIS is pretty similar to the CSI games and so is the gameplay. Instead of only moving your cursor around to select points of interest, you now move a character with a cursor. It gives you a bit more of an emotional connection to the characters of the show than a mere cursor does, although you'll still just move a cursor around crime scenes to select stuff, or point Abby to a lab machine to work her magic.

While the crime scenes feel a bit like CSI-lite, due to all evidence being gathered by simply taking photographs and nobody wearing gloves, there is still some occasional pixel hunting to find that last piece of evidence. Contrary to the CSI games, you'll always have an on-screen indicator of your progress as a percentage and it's impossible to miss anything before moving on.

Back at the NCIS office, Abby and McGee will do their respective things. That means they will do the kind of mini-games the CSI games had, but this time around they are a lot easier and a lot clearer. It's impossible to mess anything up; although you can run out of tries -- indicated by Caf-POW drinks -- you can always restart these sections without losing anything.

Playing as McGee you'll perform some simple memorization and reaction mini-games to "hack a database" that you'd think NCIS would have access to (like conference logs from Naval Command), or keep a reticule over a moving vehicle as he tracks it with his satellite. Abby's job involves grabbing fingerprints from evidence and doing analyses. Chemical analysis simply involves matching shapes to a spectrometer output, while bullet casing and fingerprint analyses are a matter of matching the evidence to the correct image.

Everything is like the CSI games at heart, but there are a couple of differences that set NCIS apart. For one, everything is much, much easier. As in: it's impossible to fail throughout the entire game. Anyone can play and complete it; the only reason not to complete it is if you get too bored or frustrated with not being able to find that last bullet in a crime scene. The interrogations now only require the press of one button in a QTE (it's the same button every time) to keep the pressure on and sometimes confront subjects with evidence that conflicts with their statement.

This evidence is no longer just one piece of evidence out of dozens, as was the case in CSI: Fatal Conspiracy for instance, but now it is complete and clear proof of something. Whenever Dr. Donald "Ducky" Mallard (the only other person to be voiced by the TV show character's actor), McGee or Abby has run through all the evidence with their analyses, Gibbs will tell them to "DEDUCTION BOARD!" and combine evidence they've analyzed on the Deduction Board -- that big screen they always use in the show when they are explaining how things are connected to the case.

This prompts a matching of evidence that usually makes sense to match, sometimes restricting the player to combine obvious matches until you have made other prerequisite matches first. After you match two connected pieces of evidence, you have to select the right answer as to why they are connected. The other answers are always ridiculous, like "<Terrorist guy's name> just loves America," so again this is hard to mess up. When you've connected enough evidence on the Deduction Board, it becomes proof you can use to confront people during interrogation.

Besides the CSI mini-games receiving some simplification, the NCIS universe treatment and a visual make-over, the game on the whole feels more like an NCIS game than CSI: Fatal Conspiracy felt like a CSI game. Characters will interact more during and outside of gameplay, giving you the impression you are watching the NCIS team doing their job at your command instead of being a nameless CSI employee, and sometimes there is some hilarity between DiNozzo and Ziva. The series' comedy flair makes an appearance here and there, but the game is a bit more serious than a random episode of the current season of NCIS. Apart from the occasional jokes and banter, the characters don't act like complete clowns and the only reference to Bert the farting hippo is in the loading screen logo. Ziva is really, really dumb in the game, though, and not funny or charming at all.

Of more inadvertent comedy value is the act of moving objects around on crime scenes. You'll be prompted to press a button and move the thumbstick to one location in order to move a box, slide a door open, or have DiNozzo push Ziva upwards so she can make a picture. But if you don't move all the way to the indicated direction, the characters will move back into their original position. You guessed it: you can move back and forth for some inappropriate and sometimes hilariously juvenile non-canon character animations.

Silliness aside, the added interaction between characters and the increased clarity of mini-games throughout the game gives NCIS what it needs to be better than the past CSI games. That doesn't mean it's a great title or an example of what this type of game should be like -- L.A. Noire is still the best example of the detective adventure genre -- but it's better than you'd expect it to be, even though any veteran player will scoff at the further reduction in difficulty and the game's 4-5 hour playtime with no replayability to speak of. Achievement and trophy whores can be pleased, though, as there's now no way to mess up getting that 1000/1000 or Platinum trophy in this game.

Graphically it is a marked improvement over previous CSI games, even if it still only looks "okay" at best. For what it sets out to do NCIS does the job with its virtual counterparts of the team, although Abby looks even creepier than in the show. Some might find the lack of blinking eyes disturbing, too. There is also one satellite tracking mini-game in the third case that is ridiculously hard due to the default controller sensitivity; a strange oversight given that the entirety of the game feels tailored for a casual player. Likewise, this default sensitivity can sometimes make it a bit hard to find evidence on the crime scenes with a controller.

It might sound like this is just some stupid game that you can't believe anyone would play, let alone buy. But you know what? There's an incomprehensible addictive quality to NCIS. It's all too easy to keep playing it until an episode is over and even then it's easy to immediately jump into the next episode. Sure, it won't astound anyone but the game does provide a very solid NCIS experience for fans of the show that don't play a lot of games -- if any.

NCIS is the best of Ubisoft's series of licensed forensic adventure games, which admittedly may not mean that much depending on your gaming preferences; you just have to accept that it was made for a very specific audience. If you don't care about NCIS or virtual points, there's really no reason at all why you should ever play this. Just like there is little reason to play any Naruto game if you hate Naruto, or Dark Souls if you can't stand dying.

This is the kind of game you can easily give to an elder family member if they are a fan of the show, without ever having to explain how it works. It offers a couple of casual evenings worth of extra NCIS entertainment with your favorite characters, and for some fans that might be just what they want.

Okay, so it doesn't last forever, but it lasts a really long time. Nyko says that its new Power Grip for 3DS gives you three times the playtime of the standard battery, but that number on the box means nothing to me. I recently put it through my own tests to get a feel for how this accessory would work for me on the road.

I'll probably never take this off my 3DS now.

Power Grip for Nintendo 3DS
Manufacturer: Nyko
MSRP: $29.99

Let's put it straight: the 3DS battery sucks. I travel frequently, and I don't like taking my 3DS with me because I know I'll have to always be mindful of the battery life. Nyko's Power Grip looked like it could be the answer to my problems, but I needed to put it through its paces first. 

Installation is easy, as you simply snap the grip onto the bottom of your 3DS. It latches into place easily, connecting with the 3DS' battery contacts. To charge, simply plug in the 3DS charger to the Power Grip. An indicator light lets you know if you're good on power. It seemed to take a few hours to charge, but nothing too excessive. 

The hand feel of the Power Grip is pretty good. It's kind of rubberized, so you won't need to worry about slippage. There's indentions for your fingers on the back, and the corners are a nice place to keep your fingers when they're not on the L and R buttons. Not bad, though your fingers might not fit in the grooves if they're of the sausage variety. Overall, I was expecting something really thick and bulky, but the 3DS takes to the Power Grip really well. 

The battery life with this thing on is fantastic. I spent an entire day playing Cave Story 3D and never had to worry about needing to charge up. This was the first time I could ever say that! I started playing around 9:00am off and on through my work day, and I never suspended or shut off the system. I'd pick the game up every 30 minutes or so to play a bit more. The Power Grip's battery did not start to trail off until about 4:00pm. When it finally gave up, the 3DS battery was still charged. It's safe to say that you could play an entire day without suspending with the Power Grip on.

Yes, the grip does detract from the sexy gloss of the 3DS, but I'm sure it'll make up for that in battery life.

Nyko's Power Grip is available now for $29.99.

Outside of Tropico 3 and 4, NinjaBee's Keflings games are perhaps the best examples of how to bring strategy to the console's control schemes. There are plenty of PC games that allow you to build a sprawling economy with little guys running to and fro, but sometimes you just want to do that from a lazy couch with your paws clutching a controller.

The new 'It Came From Outer Space' DLC for A World of Keflings adds a mini-campaign that offers a new world somewhat like the other three that featured in the main game. Except this time you manage a group of alien workers with some far out buildings. Alien Keflings? Why the hell not?

A World of Keflings: It Came From Outer Space (Xbox Live Arcade)
Developer: NinjaBee
Publisher: NinjaBee
Released: October 26, 2011
MSRP: 320 Microsoft Points ($4)

Three zany aliens from the planet Yurbut have crashed on the Kefling world inhabited by your Avatar and they are in need of help. You know what that means: pick up tiny workers and drop them on resources, then pick them up and drop them where you want the resource to go, and finally use those resources to create tile-shaped units to shape into buildings.

It's the A World of Keflings gameplay that you know and love, with a few twists. The Alien workers' heads get a different shape depending on the resource they harvest or transport, which makes it a lot easier to keep track of who is doing what. You can now build a different type of house that require a special "Robo Love" heart, which give you a fast-travelling and hard-working robot that goes "beep beep" and "beep beep boop." It's amazing.

The new buildings are a visual variation on the buildings you are used to, for the most part, so you'll still have that one building that creates basic construction units and an advanced building for the more advanced units you need for buildings further down the tech tree. Some of the refinery buildings are now giant alien lobsters, birds, and pandas caged in weird alien contraptions. These buildings can be altered by dropping a Metamorph Carrot on top of them -- created in yet another building, of course -- which makes them process harvestable resources into different resources than before.

However, it would have been nice if you would know what kind of resources this mutated version of the building requires and what it will produce if you mutate it. The first two of these buildings you'll construct require the same resources for both the regular and metamorphed versions, so you expect the last one of its kind do to the same. Except it doesn't, which may make you construct it where it won't have quick access to the resources it needs. While it's a bit annoying to not have that information, it isn't a deal-breaker either as by that time you'll inevitably have some building somewhere that has a bunch of excess resources you can use.

Contrary to NinjaBee's last Kefling-esque game Akimi Village, the DLC sticks to the resource management system of A World of Keflings. That means resources are not magically shared between all production buildings and you still have to manually move resources around if you don't adjust your transport lines to match your progress. It also means you'll still have access to Doug and Scoops from the main game, who will pick up building units and follow you around, even constructing buildings themselves provided you've built it once before and placed the first unit where you want it. A new helper, Blorg the clayman, fits right into the cute '50s scifi vibe that permeated the expansion.

It Comes From Outer Space is a fun little diversion for the Keflings addict. It doesn't add the largest of worlds you've seen, but it's more Kefling fun with some bizarre new building aesthetics and the trademark humoristic dialogue. If you're a veteran of A World of Keflings, A Kingdom for Keflings and Akimi Village, you can finish it in about two hours in full-efficiency mode. Playing it more casually and messing around a bit -- or if you've forgotten how to play Keflings -- will easily make you get some more playtime out of it. The new world is not very large, though, and the lack of something like a giant sandbox mode where you incorporate all of World's races into one giant kingdom feels like a missed opportunity to let players keep playing it forever.

NinjaBee has been messing around with ways to improve on the formula in Akimi Village, which omitted some of the features that were so useful in A World of Keflings, and this latest way of visually indicating the types of workers with different heads in the DLC seems like the best solution to the problem of worker clarity to date.

It Comes From Outer Space is not going to blow your mind with Kefling innovation. It's simply more Keflings action and as such gives you what you expect; although it's more enjoyable than the simple and lazy type of DLC NinjaBee could have given us. Like the original games, you will start it and then you will ignore whatever other task you were planning to do until you finish it -- the essence of Keflings. It's fun and cheap, but it's still really only meant for those Kefling fans who want just a little more of A World of Keflings.

Sonic the Hedgehog has not had the most celebrated of careers. While his early games are regarded as iconic and influential, an amazing run of mostly bad games in latter years reduced SEGA's mascot to little more than an irrelevant joke. At that point, there's only one thing to do -- release a "best of" compilation!

Sonic Generations takes a number of the very best stages from across Sonic's 20-year history, as well as a few of the not-so-good, and completely remakes them with new content. Furthermore, a second hedgehog is along for the ride, but it's not some horrible silver one from the future!

What could go wrong with any of that?

Sonic Generations (PC, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 [reviewed])
Developer: Sonic Team
Publisher: SEGA
Released: November 1, 2011
MSRP: $49.99

Sonic Generations teams Sonic the Hedgehog up with none other than Sonic the Hedgehog -- the long-legged Sonic of recent years comes face to face with his pot-bellied past self. When a grinning monster called the Time Eater starts ripping through reality, elements of Sonic's past become erased and the two hedgehogs cross paths. Naturally, it's up to our furry duo to save the day. By racing through famous Sonic stages at top speed, "Modern" and "Classic" Sonic are able to put time back on track and end the Time Eater's mysterious plans. It's not exactly the most sensible of stories, but it's certainly no worse than what we've seen in recent Sonic titles. Packing plenty of self-referential jokes and a glorious "twist" at the end, it's at least an entertaining little adventure. 

There are nine main chapters, each based on well-known stages in Sonic history. From Green Hill Zone all the way to Planet Wisp, every console era has been represented quite nicely. Every chapter has a "Classic" and "Modern" variant, with Classic Sonic dashing across sidescrolling platform levels and Modern Sonic racing through 3D-oriented stages. To progress through the game, you'll need to play each stage with both Sonics, making for 18 stages in total. 

Classic Sonic is presented almost exactly as he was in his Genesis heyday. The spin dash is back as well as Sonic's inability to home in on enemies -- he'll need to manually bounce on their heads. His stages, slower-paced than the Modern levels, focus on intricate, old-school platforming. The only modern concession is the ability to automatically spin dash with the press of a button, something the purists may hate but that I find aids the flow of the game. If it's a big deal, one can easily spin dash the old-fashioned way by ducking and hammering the jump button.

For nostalgic fans, Classic Sonic is a pleasant return to form. However, there seems to be a problem with his jumping as many of the platforms are far-flung, making crossing wider gaps feel unnecessarily tricky. Either Sonic Team needed to make him able to jump further or these platforms should have been brought closer together. It's not like any of the jumps are completely impossible, but they can get exasperating if one doesn't nail a running leap absolutely perfectly.

It also doesn't help that the game has a habit of placing enemies just far enough across from gaps that Sonic will land on the ground and uncurl a split-second before he touches them, consequently taking damage. These instances feel like real cheap shots that, while not severely damaging to progress, grow increasingly annoying, especially in the latter stages where this issue becomes more rampant. 

In truth, I have to admit that the Modern Sonic levels are actually more fun. While there are some truly enjoyable 2D stages, the contemporary variants are almost always more exhilarating thanks to their sheer intensity. Such highlights include an explosive new take on the Chemical Plant Zone and an utterly gorgeous Speed Highway level. All told, there are surprisingly few duds compared to the overwhelming majority of bad levels seen in most of the recent titles. 

That isn't to say that duds aren't there, of course. Seaside Hill is a sloppy mess of awfully designed platforming and Planet Wisp is repetitive and slow. As for Crisis City? The fact that it was allegedly a highly demanded level only seems to prove just how demented the Sonic fanbase has become, since it's still the same sprawling mass of ill-placed chasms and confused homing targets that it always was. Still, I remain shocked by the fact that the ratio of good to bad stages is stacked in favor of the positive, marking a revolutionary step forward for Sonic's retail outings. 

As well as the main stages, our two heroes will need to undertake "Rival" battles against some famous Sonic characters -- Metal Sonic, Shadow the Hedgehog, and Silver the Hedgehog. These are part-combat, part-racing engagements, with a designated Sonic running to avoid the enemy's attacks before hitting him when he's vulnerable. Each Rival challenge is surprisingly intense and represents some of the more gratifying moments in the game -- especially when giving Silver his well-deserved beatdown. 

Every main stage also has a series of challenge courses to complete, and while most of them are optional, Sonic Team couldn't resist making the completion of at least a few of them compulsory. Fortunately, players will only ever need to complete one challenge from each stage in order to progress through the game, and they can choose whatever one they want using whichever Sonic they're most comfortable with.

Challenges come in many flavors. Some of them are races against doppelgangers, others require a certain amount of rings to be collected, and others make use of Sonic's furry friends to complete obstacle courses. Although based on the main stages, many of these challenges are fully realized levels in their own right, some managing to be exceedingly inventive. There's even a stage where you can summon Tails and use him to fly around a 2D Chemical Plant, just like in the Genesis days!

Skill Points are earned via successful completion of a stage or challenge, then they can be spent on minor enhancements to the hedgehogs. These include increased speed, improved ability to collect lost rings, and even power-ups based on classic Sonic abilities, such as the bubble shield seen in Sonic the Hedgehog 3. A wide variety of music can be unlocked and used in any stage -- you've not truly experienced the game until you've played a level with "Sonic Boom" blasting in the background!

Rounding out the package, there are four bosses, each positioned after three levels and pertinent to a certain "era" of the franchise -- Death Egg Robot for Genesis, Perfect Chaos for Dreamcast, and Egg Dragoon for this generation. They feature new twists on famous fights and can be pretty damn epic in scale, though sometimes vague on what you're actually supposed to do. 

As a cohesive package, fans tired of bad Sonic games can't help but be impressed by what's on offer. The only consistent issue is that it can be hard to recalibrate one's brain when switching between Sonics, as the two distinct gameplay styles can become a little jarring. It's not uncommon to wonder why Classic Sonic isn't homing onto anything, or why Modern Sonic's jumps feel so unusual. After a few stages, the confusion abates, but instances of crossed wires may crop up now and then.

Sonic Generations isn't a very long game -- it can be beaten in around five hours or so. Still, there's significant replay value not just in the optional challenges but also in simply replaying the main chapters. Quite a few of the levels are so much fun that they're worth multiple revisits, and I've found myself spending up to an hour at a time just beating stuff I've already played. Finding hidden stars to unlock music and artwork and attempting to gain an "S" rank in each stage provide lots of extra incentive as well.

Nevertheless, it would have been nice to have had less optional challenges and more real chapters. Only having one chapter for each game is a bit of a letdown, especially with titles like Sonic the Hedgehog 2, which had so many brilliant levels to choose from. I can't shake the feeling that so much more could have been done with the game and that we're only getting a slice of history rather than a full celebration of it. I just don't think one level from each game does significant justice to Sonic's library. 

With the Hedgehog Engine still packing beautifully colorful visuals, Generations is a visually stunning game. Seeing the classic levels redesigned in HD provokes huge grins, and even the more recent stages look better than ever. There are a few glitchy moments, most notably in Modern levels when Sonic clips through platforms, but they're fairly uncommon. Of particular note are the endearing animations, especially for Classic Sonic. Just watching him celebrate during the end-stage results screen is utterly adorable, as is hearing his little feet padding along the grass when he runs. Speaking of sound, the music is gorgeous, with each chapter having two great versions of some incredibly memorable tunes. 

When Sonic Generations fails, it fails pretty horrendously. It's frustrating to see that, even when faced with some fantastic examples of Sonic done right, Sonic Team still can't resist doing things wrong. However, as far as recent retail titles go, this is one of the most consistently enjoyable ones released in a while. The moments of failure are significantly outweighed by genuinely fun levels and a handful of borderline thrilling sequences. Only two or three of the main stages are bad while the rest range from solid to downright glorious. They are some damn fine innings for any title. 

While it's not quite the stunning triumph that many had hoped for, Sonic Generations is a truly great game that provides some of the best Sonic action ever seen and pays fitting tribute to Sonic the Hedgehog -- highlighting both his successes and his failures. If Sonic Team can keep this up, then the blue blur will most definitely be back on top.

2001's Stronghold was a very good, and very European game. Finally you could build up an entire castle from the ground up, man the walls with your units, and manage the feudal economy to support all of it. It was the kind of game they go nuts over in countries like Germany, but thankfully it became pretty popular all over the world.

Other than Stronghold: Crusader the spin-offs and direct sequel were not very well-received, and Firefly's games in general weren't particularly great for the past 8 years or so. Now, ten years after the first game, Firefly is back with Stronghold 3.

Stronghold 3 (PC)
Developer: Firefly Studios
Publisher: SouthPeak Interactive, 7Sixty
Released: October 25, 2011
MSRP: $49.99/€49.99

Once again the Stronghold campaign mode is split into a military and an economic (peace) campaign. Although the same economy and resource gathering system is present in both campaigns, the former focuses a bit more on building troops while the latter is a bit more centered around tinkering with the most efficient economy.

The Stronghold 3 economy itself should be familiar to fans of Stronghold. Food production buildings deliver food to a granary, other resource buildings deliver resources to a stockpile, and some buildings take resources from the stockpile to process them into things like bread, weapons, and ale. To support the economy you need peasants that appear as long as there is sufficient housing and provided your popularity is a net positive.

Your popularity or peasant mood is affected by the tax rate, food rations, provisions of ale for the inn and candles for the church, spare housing, and certain ornamental buildings. These ornamental types of buildings offer a modest increase in popularity at the cost of productivity (gardens), or increase productivity at the cost of popularity (gibbets). If you do everything right, you should be on your way to create the castle of your dreams. That is, in theory.

The systems behind Stronghold 3 are of the kind that should keep your playing for hours on end, watching your initially small hamlet turn into a well-oiled castle economy that you can look back on contently. Unfortunately, Stronghold 3 is riddled with so many issues and weird design choices that contentness is the last emotion you will feel while playing it.

On the economy side, the balance between food and resource production is vastly skewed towards food production. Peasants eat a ridiculous amount of food, forcing you to be a bit of a douche lord and cutting their rations almost continuously, until you have the vast majority of peasants working in farms; it's almost as if instead of a feudal lord you are actually a Maoist governor.

If you don't take care of the high demand of the food cycle quickly, you'll eventually run out of food and reach a very punishing stalemate where you lose population due to the negative effects the lack of food has on your popularity, even though you need more workers to increase your food supply. Managing this would be doable, if you didn't also need workers to gather the wood necessary to construct buildings and housing to support your economy and population growth.

To make matters worse, you'll occasionally be struck by random events that can give you a positive or negative boost to popularity. Mostly, these are negative effects like a plague, fire, or wild bear attack. Some of these can be countered if you built the right buildings, to douse a fire or clean puffs of plague mist, but the game will often take a minute or two to realize you took care of it. Meanwhile the negative effect on popularity means you'll keep losing important peasants that you are almost always in short supply of, and these events tend to occur just when you were thinking things were going relatively smoothly for a change.

The balancing act between food and the rest of your economy makes it hard to enjoy Stronghold 3, especially because the campaigns will throw requirements in your face that can take multiple tries to even get a grasp of what exactly you're supposed to be doing to fulfill them -- or in what order. After many hours, you'll start to get the hang of how to start and manage the Stronghold 3 economy in any mission, but the game will still troll you with random events to make your life utterly miserable. It's fine to offer a good challenge to the player in a game like this, but it's another thing altogether to make you feel like you have to work around the game to be able to complete a seemingly simple mission.

Controls are plagued with another issue where Stronghold 3 makes you wonder if it has received any testing at all. Depending on how far you zoom out, the cursor may require you to move anywhere up to an inch from a unit in order to select its few clickable pixels. This becomes a nightmare when you want to make some units attack incoming enemies, especially if they happen to walk below some trees where it becomes a random click fest. If you don't zoom in and click exactly on that part of the enemy where your cursor turns into a sword, your units will often just walk straight past them as if there is nothing to worry about.

The AI doesn't adjust to ongoing fights either; a group of units may kill a carefully clicked enemy, only for the majority to completely ignore a bunch of incoming enemies. When you have precious ranged units, you're better off moving them to a spot far away from the enemy followed by a sliver of hope they will automatically shoot at any enemy that comes within range, rather than trying to make them attack single targets from any camera viewpoint that provides a good overview of the battle.

The AI problems -- or the lack of an AI that works -- sometimes make their way to the economy side as well. An apothecary can't be controlled directly so he'll usually clean the wrong building of plague mists, even though you want him to take care of a more important one first. Sometimes he'll just stand there and do nothing as you watch your popularity plummet due to a plague and raise your hands in frustration as your precious peasants leave your lands.

In a lot of these city building games, the AI can do some crazy stuff and often veterans of the genre can work around them. But even this is hard to do in Stronghold 3. For instance, oxen can be used to transport iron and stone, but you can't direct them in any way. Stone is created faster than iron and often the oxen will transport the one resource you don't need, unless you build a ton of them so one is always available at the source. Military units offer no feedback on strength or hit points either, so it's up to you to guess and experiment to see which unit is good at what. That is, if you can even select them.

Because of the control issues with selecting and directing military units, the military campaign is best ignored altogether until Firefly fixes the controls. Alas, if you just want to kick back and enjoy a stress-free economic campaign you are far too often confronted with harsh mission objectives, time limits, or enemy raider units to get rid of in a timely fashion that take the leisurely enjoyment out of it. It doesn't help either that the game looks rather drab, with some laughable grass and crop textures that look like they came out of a mediocre mobile game.

Although the graphics are never the most important part, they are being touted as having great lighting and day and night cycles. These are alright, if unspectacular, but the graphics also obstruct placement of buildings. Groups of trees and buildings have a rectangular shape around them where you can't build, but this is indicated by a very thin black line that can be very hard to spot unless you zoom in far enough. It's another small issue that you'd think is hard to miss during development, especially when there are so many examples from other games of how to do it right -- making the obstruction's borders light up for greater clarity or something similar.

Yet another issue lies with the pacing, which is well below an acceptable one even for a city building game like this. The Settlers 7 may have had some stressfully quick pacing near the end of the game with all its objectives, but even the Sunday afternoon pace of the first The Settlers goes at the speed of CERN neutrinos compared to the pacing seen in Stronghold 3. There's no fast-forward option, so for most of the game you'll be impatiently waiting for peasants to work and walk -- slower than it takes for a dinosaur to turn into oil -- and trying to raise your population enough to support the economy required to fulfill the mission objectives, only to fail an arbitrary time limit at the last moment; one that only provides you with the actual time when there is a mere two minutes left on the clock.

Fans have not been blind to the myriad of bugs and issues and there is quite a bit of fan backlash after the long wait for the next Stronghold. Firefly has stated it is listening to the fans and trying to fix things as they go, but the issues that plague Stronghold 3 should never have been in a finished product in the first place. Even with an extra year in development, one has to wonder if it would've helped the title to achieve the lofty goal of a return to form after all these years of disappointment.

The Stronghold I knew and loved was not about being frustrated with control issues and glacial economic development. It was about creating a smart economy to build an awesome castle the way you wanted, with walls of your own design and archers defending them from the battlements. There wasn't anything outside of Stronghold that gave you that experience at the time -- or at any time afterwards -- and somehow Stronghold 3 has removed the fun and joy of that core experience.

What could have breathed new life into the Stronghold franchise has become a rushed, buggy, and ultimately extremely disappointing new entry in the series. It might be a niche franchise, but the Stronghold series still has its fans and they deserve better. The most hardcore of fans can only hope Firefly will fix some of the issues that plague this game, but it's hard to imagine that it will become more than halfway playable even with dozens of patches. Whatever the rationale behind the decision to release Stronghold 3 in its current state may have been, it can't have been a good enough reason for fans to have to deal with the final product.

Buried beneath bugs, control issues, harsh mission design and even harsher economic balancing, there seems to be a shadow of the old Stronghold as we remember it; sometimes you'll even have a minute of fun here and there. Perhaps we remember the original through rose-colored glasses, but that memory is infinitely better than the wild disappointment that is Stronghold 3. Even if you do stick with the campaigns (and you need to be the most forgiving of souls for that), the few extra modes, and the multiplayer, there is just nothing here that is actually better than the 10 year old game it was once based on. It makes you wonder why it was even made, which is the one thing no game should ever make you do.

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