Aspiring hotel moguls or fans of The Sims might want to give Hotel Giant 2 a look. Developed by Nobilis and published by Southpeak Interactive, Hotel Giant 2 will let you build and manage the hotel of your dreams with a plethora of options and an intense amount of micro management. The subject matter is niche enough, but the tedium of constant management made this one tough to enjoy. I'm not a fan of The Sims either though, so if you are into games like this, your mileage may vary. Nobilis certainly gives you a lot to tinker around with anyway; let's take a closer look at Hotel Giant 2...  

With Need For Speed taking a decidedly more sim based approach earlier this year with SHIFT, and Sony's Gran Turismo 5 still some months away from release, Microsoft and Turn 10 have just made the new Forza Motorsport available to race fans everywhere. Not to be outdone by any racing title available now and even perhaps in the future, Forza 3 is a remarkably complete and fully competent package that deserves your attention whether you're in the niche target audience or not.  

I've had the good fortune to be able to check out all three NBA titles this year. First, SCEA's NBA 10: The Inside, then 2K Sports' NBA 2K10, and now, the winner of the most improved NBA game of the year, NBA Live 10 from EA Sports. In recent years, the gap between 2K and Live has been considerable, but this year the choice isn't nearly so obvious with a tremendous effort from the Live team. For those of us that remember the glory days of NBA Live in the 90s and early 2000s, I have two words to say in regards to Live 10: "I'm Back."

The NBA season is nearly upon us and with it inevitably comes the newest version of a trio of NBA video games. Last week, I reviewed SCEA's newest NBA title for a spin, and in the meantime I've been keeping busy with NBA 2K10 from 2K Sports, and NBA Live 10 from EA Sports. In the last few years, 2K Sports has had a firm grip on the annual NBA titles, but EA has definitely made some strong progress this year. Despite that, between the two, 2K10 gets my recommendation, but it has room to improve. Let's take a closer look at this year's offering.

As a long time Need For Speed fan, I had my concerns when I heard the newest iteration of Need For Speed was going sim, rather than sticking with the familiar arcade racing I had come to know and love from the series. To date my favorite NFS is Most Wanted; the thrill of the police chases and the memories I have of working my way through the Black List are still fond today. There are no police chases in SHIFT, but what you do get is a great racer in the vein of Forza and Gran Turismo. No, it doesn't have hundreds of licensed cars and it's not as hardcore of a sim as those, but can SHIFT, in its first year, compete with these two juggernauts? Well, I'm no expert on the other two nor in technical sim racing, but I can tell you that SHIFT is a hell of a lot of fun and very addictive.

Game Overview East India Company is best described as a ship RTS economic game. As the name suggests you get to be at the helm of your own "company" from various locations across Europe as they make their way to Africa and India to acquire and trade exotic goods and even fighting rival companies and pirates along the way. EIC is the flagship game of small Finnish company Nitro games.

UFC 2009 Undisputed isn't the first UFC game, but it's the first one in several years. Yuke's Media Creations, the makers of Legends of Wrestlemania, have teamed up with THQ once again to bring the deepest and most well rounded UFC game yet, and an overall fine first entry into what will surely become a new gaming franchise.

…though personally, I just ski.

The Wii original migrates to PC with sharper visuals and a wider variety of content.

Warning: This Review Spares No One in its Use of Terrible Puns PIKAWHO?! On September 30, 1998 Pokémon Red & Blue spread across the states like the plague spread in the middle ages. Since, Pokémon has left its mark on a variety of systems including every handheld (Game Boy, Game Boy Color, Game Boy Advance, and DS), as well as Nintendo 64, GameCube, and now Wii. Second only to Mario as the top selling series of all time, Pokémon has truly become a household name nowadays. So whether you’ve tried it or not, chances are you’ve probably heard of it (unless you live in a cave, in which case I wonder how you’re even accessing the internet at this point in time).

Dating sims are to American gamers as Xbox is to Japanese gamers; niche market doesn't quite begin to describe the simultaneous incomprehension with these respective genres. A fundamental difference exists within our two increasingly diverging cultures, for whatever reason the Japanese cannot produce a significant reason to own an Xbox just as my fellow Americans are similarly apathetic to dating sims.  Oh, we can certainly enjoy dating elements in our mainstream titles (hello Sims, San Andreas, and Persona 3), but focusing an entire game toward trying to score with the opposite sex is relatively untested in our market.  Everyone needs a guinea pig and, whether it was intended to be or not, Brooktown High is here to try and crack the genre open.