NeoDS
I'm not a fan of emulation. I much prefer to own a legitimate copy of the game, regardless of what medium the game is on. Part of this is because I want the developers to see that their creation is appreciated; another part is that games are generally created with a specific controller feel in mind. This is neither of those cases. I have a love/hate relationship with SNKP. I love most of their fighters, especially KoF EX2: Neoblood on GBA. What sucks is that they scrapped their plans for bringing the KoF series to the DS. Since the DS has four face buttons and is online enabled, I'd pay $30 for a port of KoF EX2 on the DS if they added in online play and allowed the player the use of the four face buttons. Hell, I'd be perfectly happy if there were some way to map the four face buttons for use on the GBA cart. But they refuse to give us any fighters on the DS.



Enter NeoDS. It's a NeoGeo emulator for DS that can run most NeoGeo games at 40-60 frames per second. The author has recently added support for Garou: Mark of the Wolves and some of the other larger games. NeoDS acts as a NeoGeo arcade machine: the R button is insert credit;The four face buttons are user defined and the bios even has dip switches for the truest arcade nerds. Most of the games play very, very close to arcade speed, if not exactly at arcade speed. Roms must be converted to a .neo format and must be MAME-compatible. I have run this on the Datel Games n Music card, the slowest flash card available on the DS, and it played very well. I plan on buying a better card so that I can enjoy near-perfect SNK emulation on the go. I am one of those saps that only emulates games that I own or that were never released in the U.S. Luckily, I own every SNK fighter on the GBA, SNES, Dreamcast and PS2. That gives me a very deep library.

Heavenly Sword



I'm late to the PS3 party but I finally played Heavenly Sword. Despite all of the negativity surrounding the title, I was utterly blown away. I loved the manner in which the story was told. I loved that the story was not told in chronological order. It was great to see the relationships between characters explained through conversation and context rather than spoon-fed to the viewer. And the fighting engine was fantastic. I loved being able to mix heavy, speed or distance attacks in with counterattack moves and cinematic kills. The QTEs were well-done and failure was often losing some health rather than game over, as in some games. The cinematic qualities used throughout the game, such as aftertouch and special kills, were very entertaining and rewarding. The evil characters were perfectly presented and a few characters really brought out feelings of compassion. The gameplay was very lean and to the point, which I love. I'm playing this game for a very specific experience; please don't add in stupid mini-games, useless side quests or other means of artificially lengthening the experience. Boil it down to its purest form and keep it entertaining.

Pixel Junk Monsters
Never before have I loved a game that hated me so much. My wife and I have spent many hours trying to get perfect scores on every stage. It's a cruel mistress, that PJM.