It's a DS Metroidvania. Surprise!

The art style is supposedly different, replacing the last couple entries' "anime" aesthetic with a more western look, like the first two GBA titles - but really, who cares about this? And the weaponization system, Glyphs, is extremely similar to the Souls from Aria/Dawn of Sorrow (each kind of enemy can drop one, and you equip them to a face button). The world map, with play divided into discrete areas, is kind of new and gives the game a little sense of adventure, but is also an exacerbation of Portrait of Ruin's multitude of trivial sub-worlds.

What's getting me about Ecclesia is the difficulty. It started out super-easy, but within three or four levels, enemies were doing a ludicrous amount of damage to me. The second boss was a humongous pain in the ass, and probably took me a good 5-10 minutes to wear down (not counting deaths and retries). It seems like enemies are becoming stronger faster than I am... which is a bit concerning.

Progress: 14.6%

You'd be forgiven for mistaking Sin and Punishment 2 for the original game, and not just because they appear to play similarly - they appear similar, this guy not exactly pushing the boundaries of modern graphics. I was pretty unimpressed until I actually put hands to Wiimote and tried it out. Then I was impressed.

What makes this game feel unique is both a direct and indirect result of using the remote to aim and fire. It isn't just because Wiimote aiming can make almost anything more fun: because the analog stick has been freed from the shackles of aiming control, it now moves your character. The Nunchuk stick allows quite a bit more freedom of movement than a directional pad, and Sin and Punishment 2 uses it, having you quite frequently dodging swarms of enemies and enemy fire (often while flying). It brings the S&P formula quite a bit closer to a bullet hell shoot-em-up. Since this is Treasure we're talking about, excitement may be appropriate. Especially because you still have melee attacks, so striking the proper balance between avoidance and melee range is probably going to be a big gameplay element.

Also, I'm not really sure, but the start screen - in which you can select one of two characters - makes it look a little like there might be two-player co-op. I'm not getting my hopes up, but that would kick some pretty heavy ass.

Progress: Gave Up

I didn't get as much face-time with New SMB Wii as I wanted - because it was pretty much the star of the show, even at NOA's mini-E3 employee event. Comparisons are being drawn to Four Swords Adventures, and those are pretty apt, but there are two big differences.

The first one is obvious: this is a platform game. Where an adventure like Zelda can get by with new dungeon puzzles and enemy encounters that get mixed up by having more heroes, a Mario game lives or dies purely by its level design. (Although now that I think about it, multiplayer boss battles sound like a blast.) The good news is that based on the stage select screen in the demo, you can expect a ton of level variety from this game, from fields and deserts to haunted mansions and oversized clock interiors.

The second difference, and I could be off about this, is that while FSA filled in your missing players with dummy Links, there's no such thing going on here. I can't imagine how there could be - since keeping four dudes in "formation" in a Mario game would basically be impossible, as would be moving one at a time and switching control between them.

This is an important point because it means the single-player game will be fundamentally different than the multiplayer one in how it plays; and possibly in how challenging the game can be made. The people I watched playing New SMB Wii weren't exactly great at it, but it still looked to lean toward the tough side, as if it was assuming that not everyone would make it to the end of the level.

So will the game be no fun in single-player? Will the level of challenge be capped, making certain levels trivial with four people? Or maybe - and this is almost purely speculation - there could be some sort of auto-tuning difficulty...?

When a game controls this well, it doesn't really have to do a lot else to differentiate itself from the crowd. High Voltage's biggest bullet point is "It's a Wii Shooter," and on that, they certainly deliver.

What surprised me about the demo though is how bad it looked. Not all around, but inconsistently. The game perhaps overuses full-screen blur effects, when you're injured, when there are explosions, when you zoom your scope in and out. But when the game isn't blurry, it actually looks really bad. Enemies are jagged monstrosities, blending in with the jagged morass of the surrounding environment.

I don't think the final game is actually supposed to look like this, though. It's coming out this month, so it must be gold by now - but I guess it's possible that the demo was from an old build.

Progress: Gave Up

Yes, keep your expectations in line with what you thought of Phantom Hourglass. Near as I can tell, the only notable differences are the Phantom and the train.

The Phantom, which looks like a wounded enemy Link might have picked up off the side of the road in PH, is a fun addition to the dungeon play - you can order him around to do stuff, like kill enemies you can't attack, or walk through lava while you hitch a ride on his helmet. His large presence on the screen makes the touch control a little less convenient than it used to be, but not so much that you can't get used to it. "Control multiple guys" puzzles are not new to Zelda, but they always result in really clever dungeon designs, and this implementation looks to satisfy.

The train, on the other hand, seems like a miss. Train segments play out in basically the same way as the boating from Phantom Hourglass. Except it's on, well ... rails. You can speed up, slow down, stop, reverse, and pick directions to go at rail intersections, but you're still stuck to a literally golden path. I'm thinking that at some point you must gain the ability to ride anywhere, because otherwise the map doesn't make a whole lot of sense; and taking away the free-roaming aspect of sailing doesn't really seem right either.

I guess another thing to mention is that the item I got in the demo required me to blow into the microphone to spew out some wind power. Looks like Spirit Tracks may be taking more advantage of the DS's extra hardware features than its predecessor did.

Supposedly a handheld take on the GTA formula, Cop: The Recruit certainly has the bullet points: driving, shooting, a free-roaming city, and I guess the plot is about crooked cops or something. But I kept shooting at pedestrians' heads, and all they did is run away. Then I stole a bus and started running over things. At no point did anyone react at all.

Not a clue what the game's mission objectives are, but if they want it to feel like GTA, Ubisoft's got a lot of designing to do. Without a world that reacts to your hijinks, a sandbox game is really more of a dry pavement game.

Progress: Gave Up

Final boss battle: awesome.

By the credits-slash-hilarious-music-video, I had been challenged, but not put out. Even in the later levels, I was usually able to win on my first attempt, though sometimes by the skin of my teeth. But after beating the final level, a slew of new stuff unlocks to push you even further.

This stuff includes replaying the full "adventure" mode with some handicaps; survival challenges from each of the game's settings; and more puzzles and mini-games, most of which I tried and some of which are really hard. Some of the final puzzles actually do become puzzle-like, in requiring you to figure out an exact sequence of actions to complete the stage. And the mini-games are always a riot, many of them parodying PopCap titles (like "Beghouled" and "Zombiquarium") or other games ("Portal Combat"). It's really impressive how the game manages to wrap itself around so many disparate gameplay concepts, and trying a new one is always a blast. Except "Beghouled Twist" - that sucked.

And there's a "Zen Garden" mode, where you can actually grow plants, to earn money. Or just for fun. It's a little esoteric.

On top of being a damn fun game, Plants vs. Zombies is absolutely loaded with content, content that I'd love to revisit at some point. This game is a victory for anyone who wishes they'd make 'em like they used to. Being funny doesn't hurt, either.

Progress: Silver trophy

Most of the demo's text was missing (and the rest was in Spanish??), so I have no clue what the game is "about" or how more advanced stuff might control. But I still had no problem figuring out how to run, jump, attack, and rotate the camera. At least as far as I played, it's just like the PS2 Kingdom Hearts games, albeit with more shameful graphics. This one could be a winner.

It's definitely got the same old Mario and Luigi action-platform-RPG mechanics going. Other than that, I can't really say that I'm looking forward to this yet; the overall pacing of Partners in Time was what wore on me, in part because the battle system was the same old story, and the doors look wide open for this game to do the same thing. Or, it could be a huge improvement and totally awesome again. We'll see.

I shied away from the original Red Steel largely due to reports that the swordplay controlled like ass. So controls were my top concern when I tried Red Steel 2, and - granted I haven't tried anything near the game's full repertoire of items and events - I'm really, really pleased with them. Gun controls are a tough thing to screw up on the Wii, but the sword movement, thanks to the MotionPlus (and presumably some heavy software polish), is downright intuitive. It took me all of 15 seconds to jump into the middle of the demo and go to work.

Something I didn't expect was how nice the game looks, like XIII's comic book shading but without the comic book part. The game is just stylized enough to look gorgeous without itself with visual detail.