But ever since the Wii was released last year, Nintendo’s presence on Media Create’s weekly chart has risen steadily. This week, the Mario Factory achieved total dominance, occupying the top 21 slots on the chart. Four of those were Wii titles–Super Paper Mario (2nd), Wii Sports (3rd), Wii Play (5th), and Big Brain Academy: Wii Degree (7th). The rest, including top title Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings, were all for the DS.

RANK – TITLE – PLATFORM
1. Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings (DS)
2. Super Paper Mario (WII)
3. Wii Sports (WII)
4. Yoshi’s Island DS (DS)
5. Wii Play (WII)
6. Mario vs. Donkey Kong 2: March of the Minis (DS)
7. Big Brain Academy: Wii Degree (WII)
8.  New Super Mario Bros. (DS)
9. Momotarou Dentetsu DS (DS)
10. Kahashima Ryuuta Kyouju Kanshuu: Motto Nou o Kitaeru Otona DS Training (DS)
11. Gyakuten Saiban 4 (DS)
12. Mario Kart DS (DS)
13. Eigo ga Nigate na Otona no DS Training: Motto Eigo (DS) Duke
14. Planet Puzzle League (DS)
15. Brain Age: Train Your Brain in Minutes a Day (DS)
16. Animal Crossing: Wild World (DS)
17. Layton Kyouju no Fushigi na Machi (DS)
18. Otona no Joushikiryoku Training DS (DS)
19. Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker (DS)
20. English Training: Have Fun Improving Your Skills (DS)
21. Kotoba no Puzzle: Mojipittan DS (DS)

The top-rated non-Nintendo game was Monster Hunter Freedom 2 for the PSP, which tracked its prey down in the 22nd slot.

Bon Voyage is a worthwhile expansion that makes plenty of neat little additions to The Sims 2.

The Sims series’ unique formula of simulating the lives of little computer people as they live, love, and go to the bathroom has been successful more or less from the start. Both the original game and the solid sequel, The Sims 2, have consistently stayed interesting, thanks to a never-ending stream of expansion packs. And Bon Voyage, the latest expansion for The Sims 2, adds a good amount of variety and some handy new options that make managing your computerized families’ lives even easier.

The focus of this expansion is vacations–specifically, moving your family of “sims” out of the house and checking them into a fabulous resort hotel, then hitting one of three different vacation spots: sunny beaches, tea gardens, or ancient ruins. At these vacation spots, your sims try out leisure activities, collect souvenirs, and interact with the locals, who may teach your sims new “social” gestures specific to the area.

Even though three vacation venues may not sound like much, each setting offers multiple hotels with different price ranges, but all of them have enough in the way of basic services to help your sims survive their off-time. The better resort hotels have swimming pools, hot tubs, and other relaxing activities, but they all have handy, round-the-clock room service to feed your hungry sims; beds, showers, and TV sets to take care of their fatigue, hygiene, and entertainment needs; as well as plenty of other guests to socialize with. Since going on vacation suspends the regular flow of time from their home and professional lives (so they don’t have to worry about missing a day of work), staying in a hotel makes life much easier for your in-game family.

Once you’re settled in a hotel, you can take a cab (or hoof it) to a nearby tourist lot. There’s a decent variety of tourist areas for each venue, including shopping and recreation areas where your characters can collect many different items, such as fresh fruit from the local market, or hidden treasure from rummaging through the cabin of an abandoned pirate ship. There are plenty of new social interactions and new activities to try at these venues as well, such as building sand castles or swimming in the oceans, which make excellent group activities. This helps shift the game’s focus away from always worrying about your sims’ needs (making sure they aren’t hungry, tired, or bored) and makes it easier to focus on getting your virtual family into a fun-filled group activity quicker. And the ample population of other sims at both resorts and tourist areas provide plenty of opportunities for characters to network, make new friends, and learn new social gestures (such as bowing, which the kimono-wearing locals at the tea garden can teach you).

When your vacation is over, your sims check out of the hotel and can return home with plenty of mementos. Aside from purchased or scrounged souvenirs, which may appeal to pack rat players who simply must collect everything, your sims may have photos taken with the game’s new photo camera, which lets you snap family photos (or ask a kind passerby to get a group shot for you). In addition, if your sims had a great time on their vacation, they’ll be able to choose useful bonuses to their abilities on returning home, such as increased productivity at work, faster skill learning, and, perhaps most useful, an additional slot for their immediate “wants”–the short-term personal goals each sim carries around that, when fulfilled, can lead them to true happiness.

The expansion looks and sounds about as good as you might expect from the consistently high-quality expansion packs we’ve seen for The Sims 2. The tourism lots and the resorts are all very colorful and look very different from the standard neighborhood lot, though some of the higher-end, amenity-packed resorts and some of the tourist areas, like the winding, mazelike temple ruins, are sometimes a bit too crowded with objects and people, so sometimes you’ll have to play with the camera a bit more to keep tabs on your family. Since the game still lacks much in the way of further optimization, the sometimes-sluggish Sims 2 camera still has a tendency to slow down when there are lots of objects onscreen, especially at crowded locations. Fortunately, you can edit any of these vacation lots to your liking if you care to. The expansion’s music is as upbeat as ever, and some festive holiday tunes have been added that fit seamlessly into the game, along with the new nonsensical “simlish” voice samples your characters will make as they try out new activities like playing pirate or meditating.

Most of Bon Voyage’s additional content comes in the form of lighthearted and handy extras that don’t seem to fundamentally change the way The Sims 2 is played. Still, the expansion adds enough variety and ease of use to be worth playing. Obsessive Sims 2 fans will probably want the expansion for the collection-based gameplay and the prospect of bonus want slots; casual Sims 2 fans should enjoy just getting out of the house and taking a holiday.

Rating: 4.5/5

It goes without saying that it’s a good thing World War III didn’t erupt between the United States and the now-defunct Soviet Union. For many of us who were children during the Cold War, the fear of being annihilated in a nuclear conflict was very real. So it’s a bit strange now that we can look back at that era and have the luxury of imagining what could have been. Or we can play World in Conflict, Sierra and Massive Entertainment’s incredible new real-time strategy game. This isn’t your standard RTS game, as World in Conflict doesn’t follow the familiar model of resource gathering, base building, and swarming armies. Instead, it feels almost like an action game masquerading as a strategy game, and it offers up a relentlessly fun and amazing new approach to the genre, one that works in single-player and even more so in multiplayer.

World in Conflict is set in an alternate-history version of 1989. Instead of the Berlin Wall falling and communism collapsing, the Soviet Union launches an assault on Western Europe, and the United States rushes its forces in to aid its Western allies. Four months into the conflict, after the US Navy has been attrited down, the USSR launches a surprise invasion in Seattle and pushes inland. In the 14-mission single-player campaign, you play as a company commander who is part of the meager US defense; there is no campaign from the Soviet perspective, though you can play as the Red Army in multiplayer. However, the campaign twists and weaves, letting you experience a sample of the European conflict, battle in remote areas of the Soviet Union, and bring the fight to New York City.

Yes, the story is a bit far-fetched, but World in Conflict does a great job of making the implausible seem believable. That’s partly due to the excellent storytelling, which is spearheaded by pitch-perfect narrator Alec Baldwin. He’s backed up by a great voice acting cast that brings the principle and secondary characters to life, along with a story that offers up emotional and sometimes humorous vignettes from a world at war. For instance, you’ll hear a soldier’s futile battle against Army bureaucracy, the phone conversation of a husband and wife, and the deliberations of the president and his top military advisors. While there’s a small misstep or two, such as a gospel song in the weirdest of places, the game effectively tugs at your heartstrings, which is rare for a strategy game, especially when it concerns the fate of one character whom you presume to be entirely one-dimensional but isn’t. Some of these vignettes are conveyed through in-game cutscenes, while others are delivered through graphic-novel-style drawings. World in Conflict also features some incredible prerendered cutscenes that are so good you actually wish there were more of them.

This isn’t a hardcore wargame or simulation. There are far too many gameplay abstractions for that, from being able to air-drop reinforcements on the battlefield within seconds to repairing equipment almost instantly. Instead, World in Conflict is thrilling game about destruction. You get to unleash all the firepower of modern military units on an open battlefield, but you also get to experience the challenges of combined arms warfare. That’s because the game has a great rock-paper-scissors combat system that captures the vicious circle of war. Tanks can kill tanks and other vehicles well, but aren’t so good against infantry. Artillery can kill infantry easily, but aren’t so good against tanks. Helicopters can knock out vehicles well, but are vulnerable to infantry and antiaircraft units. It’s a constant chess match about what you need to bring to battle and how you use it. The game is also smart enough to limit the number of units you can control. Instead of commanding the entire battlefield, you’ll have only a relative handful of units. This makes managing your units a lot easier, like when employing their secondary abilities such as popping smoke grenades to create cover when under attack.

Then there’s the game’s excellent resource system. You’re given a pool of reinforcement points that you can use to purchase units. Naturally, the powerful units cost a lot more than weaker ones, so you’ve got to choose quantity over quality. But it goes a bit deeper than that, as different classes of units have different abilities. For instance, light helicopters are some of the best scouts in the game, able to locate enemies from a distance, but they’re extremely vulnerable. Medium helicopters are able to shoot down other helicopters with their air-to-air missiles, but they don’t do a lot of damage to armor. Heavy helicopters can eat tanks for breakfast, but aren’t effective against other helicopters. So while your initial inclination might be to load up on heavy choppers and go after enemy armor, a wise player recognizes that there are many roles to play on the battlefield. If your units are destroyed, their cost is slowly refunded back into your reinforcement pool, so you can order up replacements, although veteran units are more effective, giving you an incentive to keep your experienced units alive as long as possible.

The nice thing about this system is that it effectively gives you an unlimited number or resources and units to work with, so it’s fairly forgiving to nontraditional strategy gamers. If that seems a bit easy, don’t worry, because World in Conflict can also ratchet up the pressure by tossing in time limits. For instance, you might have to seize a town in less than 45 minutes, or achieve another objective in far less time. The margins for error are much smaller when you’re working under a deadline.

Aside from reinforcement points, the only other resource in the game is tactical aid points, which are accumulated whenever you perform a vital role on the battlefield. You earn points by killing the enemy, but you also earn points by seizing and fortifying objectives, repairing friendly vehicles, transporting infantry around the battlefield, and so on. Tactical aid is like the icing on the cake, because you can use these points to purchase all sorts of powerful and utterly cool things. You can call in air strikes, napalm strikes, cluster bombers, mortar barrages, artillery barrages, chemical warfare, airborne reinforcements, precision artillery, fighter cover, and much more. The ultimate tactical aid is also the most awesome one: tactical nuclear weapons. World in Conflict features the best-looking mushroom clouds in gaming, and when they go off the screen flashes white and you hear the high-pitched sound of electronics frying. It’s essentially the chilling sound of death.

All of this takes place on large, dynamic battlefields that come alive with the symphony of destruction. Thankfully, there’s barely any worry about collateral damage in the game, so if you have to destroy a city to save it, then don’t worry about the insurance bill. The destruction isn’t just cosmetic, either. There can be all sorts of tactical implications. Take out a bridge and you force the enemy to go the long way around, or, in a multiplayer game, to call in a tactical aid to erect a new one. If the enemy is hiding infantry in woods and buildings, making them hard to root out, call in napalm and just burn down the trees or use artillery or smart bombs to blow up the structures. Everything blows up so beautifully that there’s no such thing as overkill anymore. The game looks spectacular in DirectX 9, and it’s noticeably better in DirectX 10 thanks to more atmospheric lighting. If you only have a DX9 card, though, don’t worry–you aren’t missing out on any gameplay enhancements aside from the ability to use dual-monitor support in multiplayer games.

Pretty much everything in the game looks good, even up close. Move the camera low to the ground and you can make out all the gear on your individual soldiers. Pull the camera back and you can soak in vast landscapes. One thing the game does especially well is smoke. Drop a smart bomb on a building and it will not only explode in thousands of pieces, but it will send convincing pillars of black smoke skyward. After a heavy battle, the sky will turn black because there’s so much smoke in the air. That’s the incredible level of detail in this game.

As good as the single-player campaign is, though, it pales in comparison to the multiplayer game, which is fast-paced and wonderfully balanced. Imagine the first-person multiplayer action game Battlefield 2 reborn as a real-time strategy game, and you have an inkling of how World in Conflict unfolds online. This is an insanely fun multiplayer game that lets you be part of a team of eight as you attempt to destroy the enemy using teamwork and every tactical weapon in the book.

Everything about multiplayer is designed to get you in a game quickly and keep you there for hours on end. First, when you join a server there’s no wait for the current game to wrap up before you can get into the fight. If there’s a spot open on the server, you’re deposited into the middle of the current battle when you join. Second, there’s no downtime at all. In most RTS games, you spend the first several minutes hurriedly trying to gather resources and build a base and units. In World in Conflict, you order up your first set of troops and watch them parachute or airdrop in seconds later. Fighting unfolds within the first minute of each game, and it doesn’t stop until the very end. Third, thanks to the resource system, if your units are wiped out you can order up some more and be back fighting within seconds.

This is the best PC game of the year, so far.

Team coordination can be handled through a built-in menu system or, even better, the built-in voice-over-IP chat system that lets you communicate vocally with your teammates. All you need is a microphone. Playing in a relatively uncoordinated manner is still a blast, but if you play on a good team against another coordinated team, the gameplay elevates to a whole new level. Victory can be snatched from the jaws of defeat (or vice versa) in intense matches where both teams are hurling all on the battlefield, from air strikes, artillery, multiple tactical nukes, and more. There’s nothing quite more urgent than a team desperately trying to cobble together enough tactical aid points for a last-ditch nuke.

Developer Massive Entertainment has been making real-time strategy games for almost a decade now, but World in Conflict is undoubtedly the studio’s masterwork. Everything about this game is top-notch, from the addicting gameplay to the amazing visuals. More importantly, World in Conflict offers up a refreshingly new approach to strategy gaming. So if you’re a strategy fan, you should definitely try World in Conflict. And even if you’re turned off by standard real-time strategy games, you owe it to yourself to try out what Massive has come up with in this exquisite package.

Review by: GameSpot

Rating: 4.5/5

Regardless of how you felt about its cliffhanger ending, there’s no denying that Halo 2 was a gigantic success that raised the bar for what we, as a game-playing society, expect out of a good console-based first-person shooter. In the years that followed, plenty of games attempted to duplicate the Halo formula, with varying degrees of success. But there’s still nothing quite like the genuine item. Luckily for all involved, Halo 3 is a positively amazing package that offers extreme satisfaction across all of its different parts. Maybe now you can finally retire your Halo 2 disc and really move into the next generation of games.

Halo 3 is an interesting mix of established protocol and intriguing new stuff. For example, the gameplay doesn’t stray too far from Halo 2, which, in turn, didn’t exactly reinvent the original Halo. Don’t take that as a negative, because it means that Halo 3 plays extremely well, with the same types of light tactical considerations that have made the series stand apart from other, faster-paced shooters. The balance between your guns, your grenades, and your melee attack has always given Halo a unique feel in the genre, and those same considerations apply today, both in the campaign mode and in multiplayer. You’ll also have new weapons and items to consider, such as a host of Brute weapons. One example is the spiker, which is an exciting automatic pistol that fires quickly and decimates opponents, especially if you’re holding a pair of them. Another is the mauler, which is a one-handed shotgun that can level enemies up close. You’ll even find weapons so huge that your movement speed slows when you carry them. When you use these weapons, the camera pulls out to a third-person perspective so you can see your missile pod, plasma cannon, or flamethrower as it fires. And then there’s the gravity hammer. Originally shown in Halo 2 (where it wasn’t usable by the player), the gravity hammer is a large melee weapon that will wipe out most regular enemies in one swipe. Needless to say, it can be especially fun in multiplayer settings. The end result is gameplay that feels wholly familiar without retreading the same ground too heavily.

The campaign is structured in much the same way as past Halo games, with multiple chapters and effective streaming that ensures you’ll see load times only between chapters. There are also lengthy vehicle sequences to break up the on-foot action. You’ll pilot the classic Halo vehicles, such as the Ghost, a hovering one-person craft that’s fast and deadly, and the Warthog, a dune buggy with a turret mounted in the back. You’ll also see new vehicles, such as the Brute Prowler, which is a two-person vehicle with turrets. Like in previous games, the vehicles are fun to use. Also similar to previous games, the artificial intelligence can’t drive very well, so if you’re playing alone, you’ll usually want to grab the steering wheel rather than the weapons.

The concept of “equipment” is new to the series. These deployable special items have a variety of effects. The most obvious example is the bubble shield: You (and your enemies) can walk through it, but bullets and explosions bounce right off. It’s especially entertaining when your enemies use it, given that you can just walk through and bash them with the butt of your gun. You’ll also find items that make your shields regenerate more quickly, and others that drain enemy shields and stop their vehicles dead in their tracks. These items also show up in multiplayer, where they’re a little more interesting.

Halo 2′s ending was widely criticized for being too much of a cliffhanger and leaving you with no sense of progress or resolution whatsoever. It’s good news, then, that Halo 3′s story doesn’t suffer from that problem at all. It opens immediately following the events of Halo 2: The Covenant is on its way to Earth, continuing its religious zealotry and attempting to activate the floating space weapons known as Halos, which could destroy civilization as we know it. The Master Chief and the other Earth forces of the UNSC are in hot pursuit to stop them, with newfound allies such as the Arbiter coming along for the ride. We’ll spare you the specifics because they’re quite compelling and should be seen firsthand. All you really need to know if you’re on the fence about Halo 3′s campaign is that it’s a delicate balancing act that manages to provide satisfying closure for the trilogy, make perfect sense of all the cryptic events in Halo 2, and leave you filled with anticipation for more adventures set in the Halo universe. Not bad for a game that will take most players between 10 and 15 hours to finish on one of four difficulty settings.

But you’ll probably go through the campaign more than once, thanks to the inclusion of a strong co-op mode. Previous Halo games have let two players go through the campaign; Halo 3 ups that number to four players and lets you do the whole thing over Xbox Live, if you so choose. This is a really fun way to experience the campaign’s nine chapters, and you can choose to go through them in any order, provided you’ve already played through it alone. Furthermore, this method of play (which you can also do alone) lets you turn on scoring in campaign mode, in which you earn points for kills and lose them for dying. This adds a sense of competition to the co-op, and there are also achievements associated with finishing chapters with high point totals. You can also customize the experience a bit by turning on a series of unlockable modifiers that open up as you collect hidden skulls. The skulls are stashed around the game, and some of them do things such as increase the amount of damage you’ll need to deal to take an enemy down, remove the heads-up display and make your weapon invisible, and so on. This gives the story-driven section of the game some more replay value, although it doesn’t get significantly more difficult as you scale up the number of players. Consequently, finishing the game on legendary difficulty is a breeze if you’re rolling through with three experienced fellow triggermen.

In addition to the four-player co-op action, you can also play competitive solo and team-based multiplayer matches with up to 16 players on 11 different maps. There’s a lot of depth to the multiplayer modes, ranging from simple stuff such as deathmatch and team deathmatch (still referred to as slayer and team slayer here), to more objective-based gameplay such as capture the flag. Another similar mode is called territories, in which the two teams fight to defend or attack various control points around the map. You’ll also find a mode called infection, where a percentage of the players start as sword-wielding zombies and must convert the members of the other team by killing them, until only one non-zombie remains. Each of the maps can handle any of these game modes.

Like in Halo 2, you can customize these game types, and there’s more to customize this time around. You can change things like starting weapons, the weapons that appear on the map, whether the motion sensor is active, the force of gravity, the game speed, whether the players all have active camouflage or not, and much, much more. The multiplayer is as strong as it has ever been thanks to the addition of new weapons and tweaks to old ones. Swords have been made much more interesting this time around: If two players run at one another with energy swords and attack at the same time, the swords clash and the players bounce off one another. This makes all-swords matches totally wild. The gravity hammer is also big fun in multiplayer matches, both because it crushes enemies that are foolish enough to get too close, and because you can smack incoming rockets to bat them away, which makes for an interesting game of baseball.

The weird thing about this last concept is that, with the addition of the Forge, you’ll actually be able to build some sort of crude baseball variant if you want. Forge mode is a map editor, but not in the 3D modeling sense that you’re used to seeing in PC shooters. You can’t edit level geometry with Forge, but you can spawn, remove, and move objects and items around the level. All of the editing is done in real time, and you can pop in and out of edit mode by pushing up on the D pad. You can also play this mode with other players, letting everyone run around in edit mode to spawn Warthogs, rocket launchers, and whatever else is already on the map. On the surface, that doesn’t sound so exciting. But in practice, it’s a weird and potential-rich addition to the game because there are a ton of little secrets and tricks you can use to manipulate the objects in ways the developers may not have intended.

For example, take the fusion core. It’s Halo’s version of the exploding barrel, and by default, it blows up when you shoot it or drop it from a significant height. It also takes 30 seconds to respawn. You can modify it to respawn every 10 seconds and, with help from another player’s rifle fire, you can coax it into respawning in midair, where it tumbles to the ground and explodes every 10 seconds. Naturally, if you surround that spot with more stuff that explodes, you’ll have a fun little physics-based bomb that respawns and explodes every 10 seconds. If you’ve ever messed around with Garry’s Mod, a similar physics-based toolbox for Half-Life 2, then you’ll recognize this as a simplified take on that idea when you start using it for more than simply adding a few weapons to a map or moving spawn points around. Though many players probably won’t get hooked on Forge tinkering, it’s an extremely powerful addition that may just take over your life.

You’ll be able to easily share your Forge creations with other players via a handy file-sharing system that lets you quickly send map configurations and gameplay types to your friends. You can also set a certain number of items as publicly shared, and users can go to Bungie’s Web site to browse and rate the shared items. Additionally, you can flag items for download on that Web page, and the next time you fire up Halo 3, it’ll download the items you’ve marked. It’s a very slick interface that makes moving stuff around very easy.

You can also use the file-sharing options to send screenshots and saved films. Saved films are replays of action from any of the modes in the game, from campaign to multiplayer to Forge sessions. The game automatically stores the last 25 or so sessions, and you can choose to save them more permanently from there. Once you’ve got them, you can edit them down to key kills, weird single-player behavior, or the strangest Forge stuff you can come up with, and then save them for sharing, just as you would with a map or game mode. Much like Forge, the saved-films feature doesn’t really sound like much, but Halo 3 is a very replay-worthy game, and you’ll probably run into plenty of little moments that you’ll want to save for posterity. Another nice touch is that the films aren’t locked to one perspective. You can detach the camera from your player and fly anywhere on the map, or change it to any other player’s view, as well. The only real issue is that rewinding and fast-forwarding are a little clunky. So if you’ve got something you want to save that’s at the end of a 45-minute session, you’ll have to hold down the fast-forward button for a long time to get to that moment, and if you miss it, rewinding can be a real pain, too. Once you’ve figured out the little idiosyncrasies of footage manipulation, it’s not so bad.

Halo has always had a very strong artistic vision, and the graphics have always been just good enough to convey the necessary imagery without becoming huge technical powerhouses. That’s not to say that the game isn’t technically impressive, because it maintains a smooth frame rate throughout, and looks very sharp overall with plenty of great lighting and other nice effects. But the visual design overpowers its technical side and really stands out. Given that the game takes place in a wider range of locales than the previous two games, you’ll see a lot of different, colorful environments, including deserts, snow, jungle settings, great-looking building interiors, and more. The enemies, many of which are returning from past games, also look great.

The sound in Halo 3 is a good mix of old and new, much like the rest of the game. You’ll hear the familiar Halo theme music and variants thereof. You’ll also hear plenty of great new music, including one suspenseful track with a heartbeat-like sound that manages to get your heart pounding as well. Most of the voice cast from Halo 2 returns to voice their respective characters, and they again turn in terrific and believable performances. You’ll also hear a ton of combat dialogue, both from the marines that fight by your side as well as the enemies you’re fighting, who don’t seem to appreciate it when you kill one of their comrades. Our favorite line from the Covenant was probably “You’ve killed my brother for the last time,” which is pretty hilarious.

As games start to consider user-generated content, it’s becoming clear that more and more games will be ready to give you back just as much as you’re willing to put into them. On the surface, Halo 3 is every bit the sequel you would expect it to be, in that it delivers meaningful upgrades to both the story-driven and competitive sides of the package. However, it’s the addition of the Forge level editor and the saved films that give the game an even longer set of legs, legs that will probably keep you running at full speed until Bungie figures out where, exactly, to go from here.

Review by: Gamespot

I’ve confirmed this with our EA Community Rep. This will help to provide us all with one of the best racing games on the market.