Sonic Team

Game Description: Sonic Heroes takes you blazing through a world of great adventure! Use multiple teams and formations to conquer the ultimate hero, once and for all.

That torturous, fickle experience I just alluded to combines with a lack of engaging play mechanics to create Billy Hatcher And The Giant Egg. A simplistic, by-the-numbers 3D platformer with inspiration taken from Sonic The Hedgehog, Billy Hatcher ends up lagging behind the genre's top games by a wide margin despite its novel concept.

Game Description: Billy Hatcher and the Giant Egg is a 3D game centering around a young boy on a mission to save his kingdom from an evil ruler.Billy is no ordinary boy, however. The lad, through the use of a special suit, has the power to control the worlds magical eggs. These eggs can be rolled along the ground to solve puzzles, fight enemies, and uncover secrets.

According to the ESRB, this game contains: Mild Cartoon Violence

Jon is right in saying that Sonic Advance brings the series back to its 2D roots, but something seems different this time around. All the familiar elements are there: the loops, the speed, Dr. Robotnik. Yet all these elements don't seem to click as well they used to.

You can't tell by the cutesy cartoon characters, colorful blobs with big eyes and little squeaking Japanese girls, but the basis behind Sega's Puyo Pop came from Russia.

I first fell in love with Puyo Pop when it was known as Kirby's Avalanche way back on the SNES, and it's been a favorite ever since. (This game has been around for years and years under one title or another, though it's more well-known in Japan.) One reason behind my affection for the little colored blobs is that I see Puyo Pop as a flawless example of the correct way to design puzzlers.

In theory, a game like PSO is every gamer's dream—join up with three other players from other parts of the country (or the world, once the Japanese servers get linked up) and go on an adventure to kill enemies, level up, and maybe find ultra rare weapons and items. However, like most utopias, the world of PSO sounds much better in theory than it does in reality. Unlike games with computer-controlled allies, every other character on PSO (aside from the monsters, of course) is controlled by another human being—complete with all the flaws and foibles most people seem to possess in abundance. These character flaws come into play regularly for some reason, leading those of us who are older, kinder, or just simply polite to wonder just what's wrong with people.

According to ESRB, this game contains: Blood, Violence

To the new generation of young gamers, playing a Sonic The Hedgehog title on a Nintendo platform might not seem like anything that extraordinary, for it just represents another side-scrolling title. Yet, for anyone having owned a Super Nintendo or Sega Genesis and still retaining a bit of knowledge of the early nineties’ console war, such a thing would have been unthinkable even two years ago.