Final Fantasy XIII isn't your typical Final Fantasy, but what is? The series has always thrived on eviscerating its own mechanics (regardless of their success of failure) and then replacing them with polarizing new ones, and XIII is no different. Final Fantasy's tradition is its divergence, and when its execution is ever so clearly in line with its vision, there isn't much else quite like it.

Whereas Lost in Nightmares offered a delicious modern take on the Resident Evil's past, Desperate Escape is content to serve up increasingly stale leftovers. A five dollar price point helps render most criticism flippant or unnecessary, and there is plenty to like (particularly if you enjoy the combat), but Desperate Escape ultimately feels less like DLC a year in the making and more akin to a mode that, five years ago, would have been on the disc the first time around.

All Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing had to do was not be completely terrible, but Sumo Digital ignored Sonic's awful racing pedigree and produced a pretty darn good kart racer. Unapologetically cloning Mario Kart was a step in the right direction, and layering Sega's rich history through every twist and turn wasn't a bad move either. There's plenty of room for improvement (especially online), but younger audiences won't care, Sega fans might be too infatuated with nostalgia to notice, and everyone else - well I suppose they'll be waiting for Mod Nation Racers.

Heavy Rain is different. Different in the sense that it almost makes you wonder if David Cage and the rest of his team at Quantic Dream even bother with other videogames. Feelings of fear, anger, lust, desperation, vengeance, depression, tension, and absolute distress are seamlessly transferred from the character to the player, an accomplishment that allows the game to feel brilliantly dissimilar from its peers. Heavy Rain covers ground rarely treaded by modern games and, while it occasionally stumbles, it manages to creation tension in places few games dare to go. More risks have been taken here than in any other high budget, first party offering in recent memory, maybe ever - and it absolutely deserves to be played by anyone with a passing interest in the medium.

Lost in Nightmares was constructed specifically for the Resident Evil fan base. It's a brief run, but it has enough call backs, in-jokes, and references to satisfy the legion of fans clamoring for a return to the series roots. The AI is still garbage, but the way in which Resident Evil 5's mechanics function under the series older style of gameplay is quite impressive. In the end, I grinned more often than I shook my head, which is more than I could say for Resident Evil 5.

The Misadventures of Mr. P.B. Winterbottom is the perfect example of a game we weren't allowed to have five years ago. Quirkily, collected, and supremely confident - it's free of the taint of corporate research and marketing overload, and as close to purity as we're going to see on Live Arcade. Of course, if all you're interested in is actually playing the game, there's plenty to like there as well. The peculiar art direction never grows old, and does well to amuse anyone contending with Winterbottom's resilient challenge. Not for the faint of heart, but a great game never the less.

"Fully realized" is one of those game review clichés that gets kicked around without much thought, but no two words do a better job of describing my interpretation of Mass Effect 2. It's an astounding work of complete confidence. The folks at Bioware made the bold decisions to discard conventions or content that felt unnecessary, refine the aspects they considered essential, and add what they knew would create a genre advancing masterpiece. Few games take as many risks, and even less actually emerge for the better, but Mass Effect 2 pays off in an almost effortless fashion. Not one to be missed.

One has to be impressed with the versatility and quality behind Q-Games PixelJunk line, and PixelJunk Shooter follows the form of its predecessors with an otherworldly and atypical take on an otherwise familiar genre. Shooter's aesthetic is undeniably inviting, its mechanics are instantly accessible, and it's challenge right on the money. At the end of 2009, if you were of the mind that twin stick shooters had been done to death, please allow PixelJunk Shooter to quietly defy your expectations.

LittleBigPlanet's trip to the PSP was a faithful transition. While the entire project isn't as smooth or as fresh as Media Molecule's PS3 offering, Cambridge made the absolute best of it on less powerful hardware. Load times are a bummer (especially hampering the create mode) and the community levels are an unknown quantity, but the nearly 40 included level are solid and, with the exception of big brother, unlike much else the portable side of 2D platforming. Omissions aside, it still looks, feels, and plays like LittleBigPlanet - and now it's in your pocket, which is hardly something to complain about.

Nostalgia for Resident Evils past will power you through the overwhelming feelings of repetition, and the mechanics are solid, but Darkside Chronicles is still B Team material. Darkside Chronicles isn't a bad game; it's just a lazy one.

The Lost and the Damned drags you down to Liberty City's seedy underbelly and then The Ballad of Gay Tony recolors the world with flash and style. It's a great compilation, and the additions to both the narrative and the mechanics do well to compliment the aging Grand Theft Auto IV. The gameplay may not be as fresh as it was in 2008 and most of GTA IV's love it or hate it quirks are still firmly in place, but if you love the series (as many of you do), it’s hard to be dissatisfied with this package.

Critics of GTA IV argued that it was too firmly grounded in reality, a label which came at the cost of less outrageous missions. Gay Tony opts out of that restriction, featuring a wealth of insane stuff for you to do. Helicopters, parachutes, bodies falling out of the sky, whatever; Gay Tony throws GTA into overdrive and is perfectly comfortable with leaving it there for the whole ride. Unsurprisingly, the story does well to deliver outrageous personalities that never fail to entertain and, for once, presents a gay character who's more complex than his latent sexual preference. In the end, The Ballad of Gay Tony serves as a cork popping celebration for Grand Theft Auto IV, and I couldn't think of a better send off.

Fighting games may have diminished in popularity since their heyday, but Tekken still hits with the force of an Electric Wind God Fist. Excess takes priority over innovation, but when you pile a massive amount of content on top of the existing top notch Tekken framework, that isn't necessarily a bad thing. The lack of competent online play and the unusually long load times are disappointing for hardcore enthusiasts, but Tekken's heart and soul, the fighting engine and the joy of skill based competition against your friends, is delightfully intact.

Though far from a departure, A Crack in Time throws plenty of new stuff your way. Everything you love about Ratchet and Clank is still there (and in great quantity - most of your hours logged will be after you beat the game) and Ratchet's segments, despite their familiarity, are absolutely outstanding, but the sequences you'll remember all belong to Clank. It's fair to say A Crack in Time is still cranking out the same formula, but with Insomniac's amazing attention to detail and refusal to keep the pace at anything other than a neck-breaking speed, is that really a bad thing? For Ratchet, if "the usual" if going to go hand in hand with "stellar," I'll take it.

It's something of a miracle that Kenka Bancho is even coming out on this side of the planet. It's not unwieldy or inaccessible, it's just that particular flavor of crazy that you'd catch at the Tokyo Game Show and never, ever expect to see cross the ocean. It was supposed to be an import legend, but, like all cult hits, the fiction is often more intriguing than the myth. Kenka Bancho is a weird, good game for a few hours, but as it stretches on it’s undone by its flaws. It's a respectable game, and, by all means, it should be experienced in some capacity, but unfortunately little of it is memorable outside of the wild premise.