EA Sports' boxing franchise makes its handheld debut with Fight Night Round 3 on the PSP. Rather than attempting to cram a full port of the PlayStation 2 version of the game onto the smaller format, EA Chicago has built an entirely different game, specific to the PSP. The incorporation of some of the better elements of the console versions of Round 2 and Round 3, along with the addition of some all-new features, makes the PSP version a competent boxing game that doesn't make too many sacrifices for the sake of portability. Unfortunately, the sacrifices that are made will be sorely obvious to fans of the series, and the resulting experience is somewhat disappointing.

There are four control configurations to choose from, but they offer only slight variations on the same basic concept. You move with the analog stick, block with the R button, and lean with the L button. Each direction on the D pad also has a function. You can press up to clinch, left to taunt, right to throw an illegal blow, and down to throw a signature punch. The tricky part is throwing the four main punches in the game. As in the console versions of the game, you have a jab, hook, uppercut, and haymaker. The problem is that each of those punches can be thrown to either side, for a total of eight different punches, not including variations between head and body shots. That means that the four face buttons on the PSP have a lot of work to do. Many of the more powerful punches, like uppercuts and haymakers, require you to press two or three buttons, which just isn't intuitive enough to be effective.

While throwing punches one after the other can and often will win you a fight, you occasionally have to defend yourself as well. You can defend four areas of your body, upper and lower and left and right. The basic block is assigned to the R button, but if you want to parry punches or change the position of your guard, you have to hold R and use a combination of the face buttons on the PSP. The complex control scheme makes it difficult to respond quickly to incoming punches, and your defense suffers as a result. It's nice to have such a variety of punches and defensive moves at your disposal, but in practice it's much easier to just learn one or two punches and forget everything else. If you try to get fancy you'll just end up stumbling over the controls.

Limiting yourself to one or two punches isn't much of a handicap for most of the single-player game, though. The artificial intelligence-controlled fighters tend to throw the same two or three punches, in the same sequence, throughout an entire fight. Once you get the pattern down, you can simply parry each punch and throw a right hook again and again. In a career fight we were able to knock out our opponent early in the fourth round. The punch totals for the fight showed a 70 percent hit rate with 362 punches thrown--and 354 of those punches were right hooks. That wasn't even an irregular fight. You can pound an opponent with the same punch round after round, and he'll just keep throwing the same combos and forgetting to block. Later in the game the opponents do get tough, but the increased difficulty is a result of more-powerful punches and increased damage resistance, rather than improved fighting strategy.

However, if you manage to work through the initial awkwardness of the controls, you'll find that Round 3 on the PSP has a lot to offer in terms of play modes. There's the obligatory play-now mode, in which you pair up boxers like Oscar De La Hoya, Muhammad Ali, Bernard Hopkins, Jake LaMotta, and Joe Frazier and then jump right into a fight in one of several venues ranging from the Staples Center to the county fairgrounds.

Those little computer people known as The Sims have invaded nearly every video game platform there is since their debut in 1999 on the PC. Since then, the series has arguably been at its best on the PC, both in The Sims and The Sims 2, though the new PSP version does try new things and succeeds at several of them. Unfortunately, this new version of The Sims 2 has too many problems to be strongly recommended.

But even though the PSP game makes the wise decision to not try to cram in everything from the original game, it does feature a surprising amount of continuity from the previous games. For instance, one of the first characters you meet in the game had mysteriously disappeared in the PC version of The Sims 2. Also, the entire PSP game takes place in Strangetown, an arid suburb modeled after Roswell, Arizona, where aliens, zombies, and other supernatural creatures terrorize the populace and make the locals a little "strange." In fact, your entire neighborhood is "strange"--you'll run into an inventor with a robot wife, get your car repaired at a disappearing garage, and encounter other weird happenings. The setting and humorous text dialogue you'll have with your neighbors do a really good job of setting the mood, as do the game's new collectible items: secrets, which you can find lying on the ground or through conversation and sell for in-game money. There are even minigames that make perfect sense, like the surprisingly fast-paced "whack-a-zombie" game that requires you to pummel zombies that try to rise from their graves with a shovel.

Unfortunately, these great new ideas are compromised by a number of issues that really get in the way of enjoying the game. The worst and most obvious problem with the game is the constant loading. Performing just about any action--going indoors or outdoors, playing a minigame, beginning a conversation with someone, ending a conversation with someone--causes the game to load for a good second or two. It's extremely jarring and completely disrupts the flow of the game, and it makes tasks like developing your house by designing it and buying new furniture much more tiresome than it should have been.

The Sims 2 for the PSP also has other minor issues, like how it handles skill increases. Like in previous games, your character has various skills (logic, cooking, mechanical, and so on) that can be improved with practice to make him or her better at certain tasks. In the PSP game, the way you improve them is to find a skill-increasing object, interact with it (which makes the game load), hammer on the circle button repeatedly until you earn a skill point, and then quit (which makes the game load). However, unlike previous games in the series, the PSP game doesn't offer any way to slow or speed up time, so you'll find it more difficult to manage your sim's time among minigames that are available only at certain hours, constant load times, and showers that seem to take forever to get your sims clean.

It really is unfortunate that The Sims 2 for the PSP would end up with the technical issues it has, because aside from some other, minor issues, it really does have a lot of good gameplay ideas. Then again, it doesn't have any real multiplayer play (aside from letting you swap in-game secrets with your friends' PSPs), so once you're done with the single-player game, you'll be more or less done with the game, assuming the constant load times didn't cause you to quit first.

Rating: 3 out of 5

As one of the first commercially available video games, Pong seems to have an almost academic importance, but not enough credit is given to the simple elegance of its design--two bar-shaped "paddles," one square "ball"--something that was born largely out of technical limitations. There is an obvious correlation between Pong and the newly minted Rockstar's Table Tennis for the Xbox 360, in that Table Tennis is literally a ping-pong simulation. But it also follows the same philosophy of stripping the experience down to its essence, something focused and intense. Rockstar's Table Tennis treats the game like a serious sport, taking incredible care to present some of the most realistic player characters ever put in a game and delivering frenetic and nuanced action.

In the real world, it's easy to write off table tennis as a stunted summer-camp version of real tennis, even though table tennis is an Olympic sport. This isn't to say that there's not skill and technique involved in table tennis, but the barrier to entry and the physical exertion are much lower. As a video game, though, Table Tennis plays like a high-speed distillation of the gameplay offered by the likes of Virtua Tennis and Top Spin, and like the most addictive of games, the action is easy to pick up but still rich with the kind of subtlety that makes it a challenge to truly master. You have four different types of shots--topspin, backspin, left spin, and right spin--which correspond to the four face buttons on the controller. Alternately, you can use the right analog stick to trigger the different shot types, though this method is a lot more difficult to come to grips with. The longer you hold one of the shot buttons during the ball's approach, the more power you'll put behind your swing, and you can also lean the left analog stick during this charge-up period to influence the direction of your shot, though your table position and the incoming trajectory of the ball figure heavily into where your shot will end up, as well.

This will all seem like really familiar ground for anyone who's played any sort of modern tennis video game, but Table Tennis separates itself in several crafty ways, turning the gameplay into something unique. It all starts with the serve meter, which combines both a rising spin meter and an oscillating power meter, giving you more flexibility with how your serve gets delivered. You can choose to go full-bore with maximum spin and maximum shot power and hope to overpower your opponent, you can fake out your opponent with a weak, spin-heavy shot that will bounce twice before they even know what happened, and so on. Once the ball is in play, the game puts a faint color-coded halo around the ball that clues you in on which type of spin your opponent used, and you can take that momentum and throw it right back at them by countering with the same shot type. Color-blind players should take note that, while this is a really nice piece of visual shorthand for most people, they might find it difficult to differentiate between the colors.

As you get into the more-advanced techniques, your four standard spin shots can also be combined to create hybrid spin shots by holding multiple buttons at once, giving you access to shots that blend the speed of a topspin and the curve of a sidespin shot. You also have a focus meter that fills as you successfully return the ball, which you can tap into by holding the right bumper before you start charging up your swing, unleashing an even faster, more potent shot that can easily catch your opponent off guard. There are other small touches at work here, as well, which really help capture the specifics of table tennis, such as the way a ball will bounce off in an unpredictable direction when it hits an edge or how a player can, on rare occasion, recover a shot after it bounces off his or her body. One of the most subtle features, and arguably one of the best little details in Table Tennis, is the use of force feedback. As you charge up your return shot and use the left analog stick to aim it, the controller will start to rumble as your aim gets closer to the edge of the table, giving you a tactile sense for when you need to stop pushing toward the edge. It makes the aiming simultaneously more intuitive and more effective, and it's so simple and so brilliant that it will be disappointing if the next crop of regular tennis video games doesn't implement a similar feature.

For that matter, the game has a really well-balanced set of unlockable achievements to keep you going, which go from simplistic stuff like going through the game's basic tutorial, to genuine challenges like playing through an entire tournament in 14 minutes or less, to stuff like racking up 10-plus hours of gameplay time. Several of the achievements can also be had through different routes, though the game is purposely oblique about what, exactly, those alternate routes are. There's Xbox Live support, as well, with ranked matches, instant tournaments for up to eight players, and the ability to tweak a few match variables such as the number of rounds and the score needed to win. As much as it would have been nice to see a Virtua Tennis-style career mode, complete with a character creation system and crazy minigames, the gameplay in Table Tennis just feels so right that a short list of modes is easy to accept. A lower-than-average retail price helps.

The focused design of Table Tennis works to its advantage in other ways, though, specifically with regards to the presentation. There are 11 different prefab players for you to choose from, and you'd have a hard time finding player models in any other game that look and move more convincingly. Eyes gleam with life; shirts shift around as the players move; sweat beads up and glistens on the skin as the match progresses, eventually seeping through the fabric of the player's shirt. The animations themselves have a really natural, fluid look to them, as well, with different players holding their paddles in different ways and occasionally displaying unique little physical tics, though some of the transitions feel a little mechanical. They also manage to bypass the "uncanny valley"--that uncomfortable level of realism that's both too realistic, and not realistic enough--most of the time, though occasionally you'll catch an odd angle on a player during a replay that just looks…off.

Thanks in no small part to Rockstar's own Grand Theft Auto series, there is a trend in game design right now to constantly expand the scope of your game, a real "bigger is better" mentality. The idea of an open-ended game is fun, but there's also something to be said for focusing on a single task and executing it with incredible detail and precision, which is exactly what Table Tennis does. This is one of the most accessible and exciting pure action games to hit the Xbox 360 so far, and one that can be easily recommended to just about anyone.

Rating: 5 out of 5

The bald-headed contract killer known only as 47 is in good form, primed and ready for more work in the latest installment in the dark, stylish Hitman series. Though very similar to the last two games in the series, the open-ended stealth action gameplay offered by Hitman: Blood Money is still just about as tensely exciting as ever. A few new twists to the formula, an intriguing story, and a memorably diverse, cinematic sequence of missions further make Blood Money worth it.

There are more than a dozen missions in all, and most of them are set somewhere in the United States, such as a Mardi Gras celebration in New Orleans, an Egyptian-themed Las Vegas casino, a rehab clinic in Northern California, a stately riverboat traveling the Mississippi, a posh Los Angeles suburb, and more. The game does a great job of realizing each of these different settings, making them feel appropriately large, complex, and alive. Mardi Gras is particularly impressive, its streets jam-packed with people partying. All of these places tend to be filled with armed guards as well as civilians, so you'll need to exercise caution in order to take out your targets and escape undetected. However, if you slip up (or deliberately blow your cover), you can always try to shoot your way out. As in the previous games, Hitman: Blood Money rewards stealth and careful planning, but if you want to try to run and gun your way through the levels, you have that option. You can instantly switch from the default behind-the-back perspective to a first-person viewpoint if you prefer, and the game lets you use a whole bunch of different, realistically modeled real-world pistols, rifles, and submachine guns against your enemies. Of course, it's possible to finish most missions in Hitman: Blood Money without squeezing off a single round, if you're careful and observant.

As in the previous games, your enemies' artificial intelligence unfortunately doesn't hold up to close scrutiny, but at least it puts on a good show if you don't start messing around. When you're just observing, you'll find that the AI in Blood Money does a convincing job. You'll see characters chatting or lounging about, while guards casually patrol the premises. Someone might stop for a bathroom break or go outside for a smoke, not realizing the danger of splitting off from the crowd.

Rating:4 out of 5

A little over five weeks from now, the 2006 FIFA World Cup will kick off in Munich when the tournament's German hosts take on Costa Rica. Recent player injuries are already providing plenty of pre-tournament drama, but if you really want to get your experience under way a month ahead of time, you can claim the FIFA World Cup Trophy for your country in EA Sports' 2006 FIFA World Cup. EA Canada's latest football offering does a good job of re-creating the carnival atmosphere that surrounds every World Cup competition, and although the Xbox 360 game still lacks some of the best features from its PlayStation 2 and Xbox counterparts, it's a much easier game to recommend than last year's FIFA 06: Road to FIFA World Cup.

Gameplay options in 2006 FIFA World Cup include quick matches, online play, practice sessions, and penalty shoot-outs. In addition to those football game staples, you also get global challenge scenarios and, of course, a chance to guide your favorite international team through the World Cup competition. The World Cup mode will almost certainly be your first port of call, and although its default settings see you assuming control of one of the 32 teams that qualified for the finals, it's possible to play as any of around 125 different teams from all over the world. Furthermore, you have the option to take your chosen team through the relevant territory's qualification process or to jump straight to the last 32 teams using real or randomly generated group information.

The presentation throughout the World Cup mode, and throughout the entire game, is great. Before each match you'll see a camera, which is positioned somewhere in orbit around the Earth, zoom in on the appropriate German stadium, and then you'll be treated to flybys of the grounds where it looks like almost every supporter in the crowd came through the turnstiles armed with streamers, confetti, and balloons. You'll also get to listen to one of the game's many licensed songs, which come from an eclectic soundtrack spanning some 14 countries. Good pre-match commentary replete with World Cup trivia and anecdotes is the icing on the cake, and as your players line up on the pitch before kickoff, you feel both excited and nervous at the same time--exactly as you'd expect to before a real match.

Perhaps the easiest way to give you some idea of how much FIFA football on the Xbox 360 has improved since last year's game would be to state that 2006 FIFA World Cup plays more like FIFA 06 than the disappointment that was FIFA 06: Road to FIFA World Cup. 2006 FIFA World Cup for the Xbox 360 still doesn't feel quite as tight as the PS2 and Xbox games of the same name, but it's not far off, and it doesn't suffer from any of the awful slowdown issues that those two do. The Xbox 360 game plays the same fast-paced style of football that you'll find in other versions, but its ball physics are slightly less convincing, its players are less proactive off-the-ball (though you always have the option to send them on forward runs manually), and the match commentary, while very good for the most part, is more repetitive and less accurate.

It's not difficult to score often spectacular goals in FIFA, largely because the game's keepers aren't too clever, but they can still be very satisfying. And if you're playing on the correct difficulty level or against a suitable opponent, you'll inevitably still have goalless draws from time to time. The player animations are uniformly excellent, and although every player on the pitch has a handful of skill moves at his disposal, you'll find that good use of the excellent first-touch controls along with passes, through balls, and dummies are generally the best way to beat opponents. The controls on the Xbox 360 are largely unchanged since last year's game, and you still have the option to switch between a traditional FIFA control setup and one that will be more familiar to fans of Konami's Pro Evolution Soccer/Winning Eleven games.

You can also earn points to spend at the store by playing 2006 FIFA World Cup's global challenge mode, which basically tasks you with matching or bettering memorable team performances from World Cup history in 40 different scenarios. Your major objective might be to jump into a game with 30 minutes remaining and win by the same margin that the victors did in real life, for example. And bonus objectives might include keeping a clean sheet, not having any players booked, or winning by a larger margin. You'll be awarded a bronze, silver, or gold medal based on your performance in each scenario, along with a corresponding number of points. The global challenge mode is a great addition to the game, but it's unfortunate that none of the appropriate historical strips or players are present, and also that the post-scenario commentary invariably reflects upon the game as if it were a 2006 match. One of the scenarios, for example, tasks you with taking control of Scotland and beating the Netherlands by at least three goals in the group stage of the 1978 tournament in order to progress to the second round. Scotland came home from Argentina early after managing only a 3-2 win in real life, but if you achieve that same result in the scenario, the players, the crowd, and the commentary team will react as if you've just earned yourself a spot in the last 16, regardless of the fact that you failed to fulfill any of the challenge's objectives.

When you feel like pitting your 2006 FIFA World Cup skills against a human opponent instead of the CPU, you can either get some friends over or play online. The Xbox 360 game lacks the excellent FIFA lounge mode that other versions enjoy, unfortunately, and also doesn't support "quick tournament" play online. If you choose to play online, you'll find that 2006 FIFA World Cup uses an outdated lobby system, with rooms where you can, in theory, find players of similar ability or who are from your region. In reality, at least based on our own experiences thus far, there are rarely enough players online simultaneously for this system to work properly, and you're better off either going into the same room that every other player is in or simply hitting the quick-match option. You can also choose to create or search for matches with certain criteria if you want to play games of a certain length, for example.

With very little in the way of competition, 2006 FIFA World Cup is undoubtedly the best football game available for the Xbox 360 at this point. Since the PS2 and Xbox games suffer from obnoxious slowdown, this game doesn't feel like a poor relation alongside its namesakes, though opting for the Xbox 360 game does mean that you'll miss out on a few features and gameplay refinements. If you're in the market for a World Cup game or simply for an Xbox 360 football game that doesn't suck, 2006 FIFA World Cup is the way to go. If you can live without all of the excellent World Cup presentation and 480p HD visuals, though, then you're still better off with last year's FIFA 06 on the PS2 or Xbox.

Rating: 2 out of 5

When Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter was first announced for the Xbox 360, it looked like a pretty ambitious project. Ubisoft was asking a lot out of the engine to have the game set entirely within a sprawling metropolis, complete with advanced lighting and particle effects, as well as lots of picture-in-picture video screens on the heads-up display. The early video and screenshots looked fabulous, so it was disappointing when the game didn't quite make the release of the system late last year. The wait was definitely worth it, though, as Advanced Warfighter isn't just the best-looking game on the Xbox 360, but also, arguably, the best game in the series.

The first thing you'll notice about the game is how breathtakingly massive and believable the city looks. You take several helicopter rides throughout the campaign, and the city is literally sprawled out all the way to the horizon with buildings and streets. Fires and smoke curl up into the sky from patches of fighting or factories. As you land, you find yourself engulfed by the metropolis and plying your way through the maze of buildings, streets, and alleys. The graphic detail extends not only to the character models, which are some of the best we've seen in a modern shooter, but also to the unique lighting and shadows. The sunlight is so bright and intense that it's almost oppressive at times, with the way the glare affects your vision, particularly when you're squinting through a scope. Some people may find this annoying, as the high-contrast lighting makes certain areas very hard to see. But, presumably, this overbearing light is pretty realistic of how daylight can be in a near-equatorial area.

Our only major complaint about the graphics is that for a city that looks so believable, it's as empty as a ghost town. Apparently, all 9 million residents of Mexico City either vanished or are hiding indoors with all the unrest going on. Still, it's a little eerie to see no cars moving around the streets and highways or people trying to go about their daily business. To be fair, though, it's only the stark realism of the environment that gets you to notice a flaw like this in the first place. The good news for those playing on standard-definition televisions is that the graphic quality of the game is plainly obvious no matter what type of television you use. HDTVs make it all the better of course, but even using just an S-Video connection, it's clear that a game that looks this good couldn't be done on a regular Xbox or PlayStation 2.

To help you get through these massive battlefields, the game lets you control not only a three-man support team, but also support vehicles, as well. Robotic UAV recon units, for example, can scout ahead and detect enemies that may be lurking. The enemies, as well as your objectives and teammates, are marked digitally on your HUD, so you can track them even when they're not in your line of sight. You'll do a lot of fighting in this game from extreme distances by shooting with scoped weapons, so the plain markings on your HUD often come in handy. At various times throughout the game, you'll command tanks or armored vehicles, as well as helicopter gunships. You can only command the tanks to move forward or backward, as if they're on rails, but they make for a good source of movable cover. Gunships are great for support fire, as you can command them to take out distant targets without getting into danger yourself. These support vehicles aren't invincible, though, so if you run your tank into a rocket-propelled-grenade ambush or send your choppers into machine-gun fire, they can go down.(the controls are way to hard to learn at first!)

Rating:3 out of 5