Sports

Game Description: From grinding to sliding to riding rails, you can do it all in Tony Hawk's Pro Skater. You can free-skate around a number of parks, malls, and high schools without any hassles from the cops. Get aggressive and grind like a pro without worrying about skinned knees, and jump off tall buildings and walk away to tell the tale. Now you can become a pro skater without even buying a board.

According to ESRB, this game contains: Mild Language

To watch any of the skateboarding commercials these days, you'd think that skateboarding was as illegal and immoral as highway drag racing. They all follow the same recipe—ending with skateboarders being chased away by the police or some sort of authority figure from wherever they were trying to indulge in their sport (with a few shots of disapproving elderly bystanders for that added touch).

Game Description: Whether you are a hard core or casual bowler, Brunswick Circuit Pro Bowling 2 has something for everyone. Features include enhanced graphics, accurate reproductions of the latest bowling equipment, an improved interface, multiplayer support for up to eight players, and a completely overhauled create-a-bowler mode. Additionally, there are new modes of play (including team and skills challenge), real ProStaff tutorials, enhanced bowler and crowd reactions, auto-replay functionality, and dual-shock and analog support.

While performing tricks and scoring in a free fashion was a total blast, I found trying to complete the various goals in the one-player mode to acquire tapes to be less thrilling. Like Dale previously mentioned, one of the major problems is repetition.

Brunswick Circuit Pro Bowling 2 (Brunswick 2) strives for that larger-than-life approach, but it can't get past the fact bowling just doesn't generate much excitement unless you're directly participating. Bowling is repetitious by nature, and there's little this game can do to change that.

I believe that one of the biggest problems that befall Brunswick 2 is that it's based on a sport that is essentially boring.

Having not played a hockey game seriously with the exceptions of NHL Hockey and Konami's Blades Of Steel for the NES and Wayne Gretzky Hockey 64 on the Nintendo 64, about all I can add is that even a relative novice like myself found the computer's "defense" to be a bit on the easy side. Admittedly, I wasn't having my way with the computer the way Ben seems to have, but I could see that there were times when the opposing team didn't want to even show up (kind of like the Buffalo Sabres in this year's playoffs).

There's no doubting the amazing audio and visual advancements that NHL 2K so eagerly showcases. Combine those with easy-to-handle controls and solid gameplay and you have a strong case for the most enjoyable hockey simulation ever. This game gets back to the basics, whereas the most recent hockey games on PlayStation and Nintendo 64 have been following an ugly trend of overly complicated gameplay. NHL 2K is the most fun I've had playing hockey since EA Sports' glory days on the Sega Genesis.