Aliens: Infestation is much like the xenomorph creatures that populate the game's world: fast, unnerving, and utterly ruthless. It is not a game for the faint of heart. This 2D side-scroller harks back to the golden age of 16-bit games like Metroid and Castlevania, in which there was no hand to guide you, no forgiving checkpoint system, and no regenerating health. It's just you and the aliens, locked in battle through tight corridors and unlit rooms where only one can emerge the victor; the other becomes a pile of blood and guts strewn across the bulkhead. It's a game that demands great patience and skill, but rewards you with exciting combat, intelligently designed levels, and a reverent use of the Aliens licence that fills every moment with nail-biting terror.

The setting for your terror-filled journey is the Sulaco--the same ship whose fateful journey is chronicled in the film Aliens--as well as some short stints on the alien homeworld of LV-426. You take control of a team of four marines who must investigate disturbances aboard the Sulaco, initially thought to be the work of an enemy faction armed with combat droids. Of course, the droids are just the tip of the iceberg. As you delve deeper into the ship, it soon becomes clear there's something more sinister at work. Hints about what might be happening, your objectives, and references to "The Company" are dropped via messages from your commanding officer, while the dark, moody corridors you explore spring surprises on you, such as falling debris and cats that drop from vents. They might be cheap jump scares, but they do a great job of keeping you just enough on edge to find the inevitable Alien reveal and its tasty human snack a shock.

Once you discover the first alien, things get challenging quickly. The creatures move fast, clinging onto walls and ceilings and springing from underneath the floor. While your trusty pulse rifle can take them down, it takes quite a few rounds to do so, meaning that you spend a lot of time running for your life in the early stages of the game. This isn't always easy. Your marine has a stamina bar, which controls how much he or she can run or use other dodging moves such as jumping and rolling, making for some extremely tense situations. Lifts and doorways become lifelines to safety, and there's a huge feeling of relief as you make it to one with just a whisper of stamina left.

You gain more-powerful weapons such as shotguns and flamethrowers as you progress, and an upgrade system lets you power up your weapons to make fights easier. However, finding them requires a lot of legwork. They're located in hidden vents and rooms, many of which are inaccessible to you until you find an access card, gain new abilities, or find a new weapon that lets you blast your way through. As in the Metroid series, there's a lot of backtracking required to open up areas that were previously inaccessible, and this makes up the vast majority of your objectives. A map on the bottom screen allows you to keep track of your progress through the maze of corridors, with different colours marking out places you've already visited, as well as the location of your current objective.

That's it man, game over man, game over!

As your weapons become more powerful, so too do the aliens, ensuring that battles are always challenging. Larger aliens present the greatest threat, but even smaller facehuggers prove difficult to deal with when they're unleashed upon you en masse. Upgrades, ammo, and health packs are constantly in short supply, adding an edge of survival horror to the proceedings. But the tight controls and the splashes of green gore that erupt from aliens make slaying them exciting and fun. Keeping an eye on your health during these encounters is important too, because although you have four marines in your command, you control only one at a time--the rest act as extra lives. (If a marine dies, he or she is dead, permanently.) can runThere are extra marines dotted around the map, but they're usually hidden away in the extremities of the ship. Each of them has a unique personality and tongue-in-cheek text dialogue that's often self-referential. They drop film quotes with aplomb, which will raise a smile with fans of the movies.

Aside from the shortage of supplies, challenging enemies, and lack of regenerating health, you have to manage without a modern checkpoint system. Instead, there are rooms in each level where you can resupply and save your game. These, too, are in short supply. It can be frustrating to have gotten so far, only to be killed and sent back to a much earlier save point, but the fact that they're scattered so sparingly only adds to the tension. Fortunately, there's always a save point nearby before you engage in one of the game's many boss battles--a merciful inclusion given how difficult they are. There's a technique to winning each of them, but it's never spelled out for you, meaning you've got to engage your brain as well as your reflexes with a rifle.

I knew I shouldn't have had that burrito for lunch.

The game's challenging nature means it takes a few attempts to make it through the campaign, but even then you can finish it in around four hours, which is disappointingly short. There's little reason to play through it again either, with no new-game-plus mode or unlockables, save for a knife minigame that's fun for all of five minutes. Still, what's crammed into the short campaign is an impressive nod to yesteryear, with its intelligent level design, thrilling enemy encounters, and mysterious narrative keeping you on the edge of your seat right through to the end. The references to the films are also impressive: the sound of your pulse rifle, the wail of an alien, and the constant blip on your motion detector create a claustrophobic atmosphere that immediately conjures up memories from the films. Even the stylised 16-bit-era graphics do a great job of capturing the look of the movies. Yes, it's hard, and yes, it's unforgiving, but Aliens: Infestation is so well put together, so exciting, that mostly anyone with a DS will enjoy it…mostly.

UK REVIEW--The concept of a football role-playing game isn't as outlandish as it might seem. Games like FIFA and Football Manager have been doing it to a smaller extent for years. The sport itself isn't dissimilar to a role-playing game either. Players train to raise their stats, managers recruit new members into the "party," and statistics fly fast and furious. The footballing world doesn't feature giant burning dragons or ludicrous conspiracy plots like Inazuma Eleven does--well, not the giant dragons anyway--but the marriage of football and role-playing game is definitely a logical one. The problem with Inazuma Eleven isn't that it combines two unexpected genres, but rather that it does very little to play to the strengths of either genre. It's pleasant, with an endearing plot, but it doesn't capture the thrill of football. There are a host of issues, ranging from fiddly controls to an erratic difficulty curve, compounded by the feel of repetition throughout. It may be charming, but that charm alone isn't enough to win you over.

Inazuma Eleven finally combines football with a Japanese Role Playing Game.

Originally released in Japan three years ago, Inazuma Eleven is the first game in the series to make its way to English-speaking shores. It centers on the tale of one Mark Evans, a plucky goalkeeper and the leader of the Raimon Junior High football club. Mark really loves football. Sporting a look which falls somewhere between Chris Waddle and the Karate Kid, and with the voice of Luke Triton, Mark serves as a refreshingly upbeat protagonist surrounded by characters who just can't be bothered. It's a typical underdog story--lazy, apathetic footballers whipped into shape by circumstance and Mark's own determination. And the story plays out much as you'd expect from a Japanese role-playing game. Characters with names like Axel Blaze and Kevin Dragonfly find themselves caught up in a tale of conspiracy, intrigue, and suspicious maids. It's suitably silly, and from the outset it's clear this is not a realistic take on football.

The primary hook of Inazuma Eleven is building your team, recruiting new players, training them up, and then facing off against a variety of teams in both a national and a regional tournament. The collection aspect is reminiscent of games like Pokemon, but also of the Panini football sticker books, and Inazuma attempts to play on the compulsion to collect. The desire to fill your team roster (100 slots out of a possible 1,000-plus players in the game) is forced to stand alone here, though. There's little incentive to recruit more than a handful of players in regard to actually improving your team. Good players are either with you from the beginning or recruited as part of the story, so whether you make an effort to recruit a lot more depends on how interested you are in simply collecting things. Later on, recruitable players have more to offer, but again, it's not mandatory that you acquire them.

Actually playing football is initially a complex affair. There are numerous stats to consider for each player, such as guard ability, kick power, speed, and guts. They also have FP (stamina) and TP (mana) gauges. FP depletes the more a player performs basic actions, such as sprinting. TP is consumed by using one of the game's special moves. Each player also has an elemental label; air, wood, fire, or earth. This provides an additional strength or weakness against players of a different element and can also serve to power up special moves if the corresponding player element matches the move's element. Unfortunately, the complexity of the system appears to make little difference when playing through the story. You could spend hours tailoring your lineup to suit each individual adversary, but when you can quite comfortably win 5-0 with almost no thought, there's little point.

Raimon Junior High is a fun place to explore.

On the field, the action is controlled entirely with the stylus. You can direct players where to go, or they'll approximate the best path to take, although if you choose the latter option, they often run wildly away from the ball or stand still for no apparent reason. When engaging a player for a tackle or block, you're presented with one of two options; the first has a low success rate but often results in you retaining control of the ball when it does work, while the second has a higher change of success but generally puts some distance between you and the ball. There are also special moves which can be learned or acquired over the course of the game, with categories for guard, defense, tackling, and shooting. You can also tap a player to sprint, but making a mad dash for the goal never works. One-touch is the order of the day, passing the ball around the pitch until your striker is in a suitable position. In that sense, it's realistic and feels natural, but the lack of any more precise control leads to a strange feeling of disempowerment. Occasionally, especially early on, it feels as if you have little control over the outcome of the match. Particularly annoying is the fouling, as you often seem to get called out for a foul based on the whim of the game rather than any logical statistical calculation.

Many Western players are aware that Dragon Quest is the 800-pound reptilian overlord of Japan's game industry, but might not be aware that the series has spawned numerous spin-offs. Among them are the Dragon Quest Monsters games, which takes the Dragon Quest series' roster of crazy, cartoony beasties and puts them at your beck and call. Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker 2 is the latest in the series to be brought to Western shores, and it offers what the DQ franchise is best known for--whimsical fantasy settings and characters, fun dialogue, and traditional turn-based role-playing game combat--while putting its own distinct twist on the familiar formula.

Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker 2 is full of adventure, combat, and gooey royalty.

You assume the role of the game's nameless protagonist, a young ruffian and would-be monster scout (a person with the ability to subdue and command monsters) who stows away on a flying vessel headed toward a major monster-scout tournament. As fate would have it, the ship encounters a patch of turbulence and crash-lands on an uncharted island seemingly devoid of human life. It's up to you to develop your monster-scouting skills to command the beasts that rule this island and find the ship's missing passengers. But there's more to this strange island than meets the eye, and you soon discover secret tomes and treasures of legendary monster scouts of yore. Perhaps you were sent to this place for a reason. It's not a particularly interesting or original story, but Joker 2's saga still manages to charm thanks to superb localization. Dialogue is consistently amusing, laden with silly puns and odd little speech tics that make the various characters and critters you meet during your quest a memorable bunch. The visual element of the game is also strong, with surprisingly detailed environments and amusing character and enemy animations that help bring the island and its denizens to life.

Dragon Quest is known for its staunch adherence to traditional RPG elements, and while Joker 2 maintains the old-school feel of its forefathers, it also takes the formula in some different directions. Instead of progressing on an overworld map from hub town to dungeon to point of interest, you move from one monster-riddled area to another via a simplified map menu, with new places to explore opening as you complete various story goals. You won't find much in the way of towns, either. Instead, the wrecked ship acts as a hub, with functions like a vending machine, an automated bank, and a monster holding pen becoming available as the game progresses and more shipwrecked non-player characters are rescued.

Combat in Joker 2, as in its sibling games, is old-fashioned. Commands are given to your party through text menu selections, and your crew and the enemy take turns bashing each other until someone emerges victorious. The big difference this time is that instead of a crew of armored warriors, you're commanding a monster squad that you have personally recruited and trained. Your party consists of up to six monsters at a time: three in combat, three in reserve (though bigger beasties require multiple spaces in your roster). You can switch your monsters in and out of combat at any time, even replacing fallen fauna with a full-health unit from your reserve crew if need be. Each monster breed has numerous distinct characteristics, and as they gain levels from fighting, you earn skill points that you can use to give them new attack skills and stat boosts from a species-specific selection. You also have the ability to attempt to scout almost any foe you encounter, which involves having your on-field team show its strength by attacking a monster as a group (but not dealing any damage). If you hit hard enough, you might get a new teammate, but if you fail, you could lose a turn--or worse, make your foe even more aggressive.

Monster mashing: it's not just for mad scientists anymore!

Capturing and building your monster posse is a lot of fun, but what makes things even more interesting is the monster synthesis feature, which opens a few hours into the game. You can fuse two monsters of a high-enough level into a brand-new beast, complete with otherwise unobtainable skills inherited from its "parents." Not only do these fused monsters have access to a wider skillset, but they also gain levels more quickly and have better stat sets than creatures captured on the field. While synthesis itself is great fun, the preparation and aftermath are considerably less exciting. You often need to build up one or both of the monsters for your desired fusion to a certain level--and possibly well beyond that if you want their offspring to come into the world with a huge pool of skill points off the bat. Fused monsters also start at a very low level, requiring you to fight and grind for experience points to make them as strong as the rest of your crew. Since combat can be a bit slow, this can become a source of some irritation. At least you have the option to let the monsters in your party use their own AI instead of giving them direct commands, but even so, you still have to watch combat animations and dialogue play out every single turn. Making things worse is that several nuances to combat and fusion aren't explained well in-game--you need to consult your easy-to-overlook Scout Guide to figure out that maybe you need to run away from that giant flying lynx that can kill you instantly instead of trying to fight it.

It may not be an all-time classic like some of the other Dragon Quest installments, but Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker 2 is still a solid entry in one of the most storied RPG franchises around. It's challenging, endearing, not overly complicated, and plenty of fun, and and a good bet for RPG fans looking for a new beast to tame.