PSP

More than Just Eye Candy

HIGH Gorgeous illustrations and plenty of heartthrobs for all persuasions.

LOW A little lacking in the romance department for an otome game.

WTF Since when did Hijikata of the Shinsengumi swear like a sailor?

What if the Prince of Persia left an 8-Bit Iran and landed in present day Israel? Could he cope in this new land? As you might expect, things didn't go so well.

Dynasty Warriors wouldn't generally be considered broken, but it has been negatively seen by a large portion of critics out there. This series saw its best ratings early on, but as time passed, the ratings continued to drop. Warriors (as a whole) isn't safe from the ire of the gaming masses, but it's still a game that I love to call my guilty pleasure.

If you play games with any regularity, it's inevitable that you'll eventually come across a roughly-made, unbalanced, unpopular, or straight-up broken title that you grow attached to regardless of how low the score on Metacritic drops. Whatever the reason, I'm betting that every gamer out there has at least one of these awkward, ugly ducklings that they hold dear—and I've invited a group of guest writers to kiss and tell.

Call of Duty has arguably been the biggest and most successful IP that this console generation has seen. Yearly releases have set sales records and the first-person shooter genre reached heights never before seen. Activision has had a great run, and the publisher has become dependent on the success of Call of Duty to carry it to success.

I talked about the Xbox 360 last night in my preliminary analysis, and the unit sales number had already been made public. There's not really much to add to what I said. I expected a Year-over-year (YOY) decline, but a 29% drop was sobering to see.

At first glance, the preliminary NPD sales data that has been shared with the public for January 2012 incite fear and panic. Sales fell from $1.14 billion in January 2011 to $750.6 million in January 2012. That's a stunning 34% Year-over-year (YOY) drop and is the lowest number since 2004.

Nintendo will be looking to the 3DS remain strong in January. Expected residual interest in Mario Kart 7 and Super Mario 3D Land can be cited as factors, and there's a certainly a chance that the 3DS can stay close to Xbox 360 numbers.

How will this week's releases fare? Kingdoms of Amalur headlines this week's slate of new releases, which is solid for a second consecutive week after a mostly dormant month of January. Early reviews have been quite positive for the game, which would be a boon to Electronic Arts. The Darkness II hits this week as well, although it seems to be flying under the radar a bit.

So, used versus new... It's a huge topic to begin with, and it's only gotten more complicated due to the various tricks made possible by online connections. Thanks to these "innovations", something that has never been black-and-white to start with is now more grey than it's ever been. That said, let me try to pick apart the various strands of the problem as I see them, one by one.