I can’t speak for the first two PS2 games, or about their Japanese PS1 predecessors, but I think Atelier Iris: Grand Phantasm is pretty charming… even if, for the most part, a lot of the charm has charmed us before. For all its many separate systems, Atelier Iris 3 is fun to learn and play, but understand that the greatest enjoyment of this game is had in completely exploiting the systems on an individual basis. Ignore any aspirations you have for a high-spun yarn and great technical merits, and be freed to mess around in a story vacuum and still accomplish something, as through the very addictive item mixing. With no random encounters and rarely any cutscenes to jar the flow, you’re free to take quests as you please or not; free to care, or just enjoy the challenge of the dungeons till your time is up.

Atelier Iris 3 combines the best of past innovations in quest-based dungeon-crawlers in a non-threatening, pleasant balance–not too tedious, and not too pushy towards your advancement. The RPG elements feel hand-picked with replayability foremost in mind, so although it really won’t win awards for originality, Atelier Iris 3 is a familiar sort of good.

That nonsensical headline notwithstanding, there was once a cute game with a Chibi Robo; it came out as one of the earlier Gamecube titles in Japan, and after repeated setbacks (possibly due to clash-of-cultures reasoning), as one of the last games in North America. In it, a hapless little AI in the employ of a messy suburban household had to fight grime, not crime, and so spread happiness between the members of the rather dysfunctional family and catalyzing great social reforms.

It is kinda messed up, but it’s fun all the same. The ‘Honey I shrunk the cleaning robot from The Jetsons’ theme comes replete with cartoony sound effects for every action, rendering the mute protagonist very likeable and someone whom you really want to protect from the things that go bump in the night–even if they scare you too.Chibi Robo may not be the best-looking game of its generation (I’ll end the suspense–it isn’t), but I’d still recommend it for reasons numbering an all-important one: being small, nay, tiny makes the mundane your playgroud. That must be why Nintendo released Park Patrol, its DS sequel, with less hesitation.

So Mario Kart Wii came out today, packed with an official Nintendo Wii Wheel (and a poster for the foreward-thinking pre-orderer.) In conjunction with the release, which is one of those strange, social games, they’re offering Wii wheels separately and in seemingly endless supply–for now. If you haven’t gotten one by the time you read this message, chances are pretty good that next time you look, they’ll have vanished like they never existed. Let’s not forget the same thing happened with the Nintendo-brand component cables, the Wii Remote, and oh, the official Nintendo Wii, too.

Hmm… also, having to combat gravity for the countless hours one may spend holding the wheel-remote pair suspended at arms’ length may result in making one’s arms leaden and unusable the next morning. So, one could opt for a stand with removable wheel. One Dreamgear Wii Nitro Racing Wheel should do the trick nicely: it can sit on a table, your lap, and most likely your stomach if necessary. From the looks of it, it’s a durable solid-plastic construct that will not fly out of your hands and hit your TV as you gesticulate wildly for the tricks in Mario Kart. There’s a $5 bonus for buying and reviewing the thing here, too.

As the Wii makes ready to celebrate a very successful first quarter with a deluge of titles for the summer blockbuster season, let’s turn our inward eye to a launch game that deserves much more honorable mention than it first received. I’ve definitely got motor vehicles on the mind when choosing games for this blog, yet even I have foregone but the slightest mention of this off-roading, rafters-rocking riot. This was the first Wii game I played, it became the only one I cared about acquiring upon release, and it still remains one of the unsung greats on the system. What is it?

There you have it. Yes, its title may be a nod to the NES’ first motorcycle- (and possibly first-ever) racing game, but that is about where the old-timey love-ins end in Excite Truck. This monster truck-running madness, possessed of a shredding rock soundtrack, wild stunt opportunities and all the world’s most undriveable terrain, does not vaguely recall the jaunty chiptunes and pyramidally-pixelated hills of 1985’s Excite Bike. Fijian atolls, Finland ice floes, the Great Wall of China, desert Mexico flats and canyons… Excite Truck is made of these and more for one player or two.

It is my sincerest recommendation that you consider this hard-to-find lovely before you lose all your waking hours to Mario Kart Wii.

Racing games are a hot commodity this season, with Mario Kart Wii set to launch Sunday, and… oh, I suppose that’s the only one. There was WipeOut Pulse, but as a PSP release for the harder-core set who’ve stayed the course since the PS1 days, it didn’t cause any mile-long line-ups, or a step-over-living-relations-to-get-it style stir. But upon spying it from its premature resting place in the deals bin, I was reminded how I so enjoyed WipeOut Pure in earlier days on Sony’s portable.

WipeOut Pure has all the mien of the quality, high-octane flying machines that you race in the game. It’s got a techno-infused, well-designed aesthetic that offers something a little more serious than F-Zero’s comic bookishness. Serious, like vehicle-mounted weaponry and deeply-biographied fictional companies, but all that is still offset by a speedy, surreal dash through impossible locales where you can even do a barrel roll, and Nintendo can’t sue. Like F-Zero, Pure doesn’t skimp on the difficulty, It all leads to a big splash on a small screen, and a game that will well initiate new fans into a cult series.

If you’ve ever seen a captive marine mammal who reflected a small galaxy in its bulging brow, you had better go back to Sea World and Free Ecco. There have been several examples of the star-speckled-dolphin-turned-world-savior phenomenon, mostly dating from the Genesis era, when Ecco would do battle against the enigmatic Vortex in the world’s present and future oceans. These games held their appeal in casting the player as an acrobatic, lively, and decidedly free cetacean in a loosely-motivated, largely-undirected, but very daunting quest. A mystical, unnervingly-realistic entry into a scene full of anthropomorphic avatars, Ecco stood somewhat aloof and not fully understood for many years after the Genesis bowed out.

Like its predecessors, the latest (if now not-so-recent) Ecco the Dolphin game, subtitle: Defender of the Future, features endless blue skies and labyrinthine blue depths, where a lot of aquatic folk hang out but only a lone hero dares fight evil. That’s because evil consists of sharks as big as an oceanliner and eels that look like brontosaurus necks. It’s OK to muck around in Ecco’s first few levels and even later to take a moment and smell the sea lilies, but to linger unprotected in the open waters is essentially to become giganticized-sea-creature bait. But an empty air gauge and utter disorientation will kill you more than anything.

As you can see, this game is fun beyond compare disguised in an unexpected survival-horror nightmare It is very important you play it.

So over the past 10 years, you’ve somehow avoided owning the three Metal Gear Solid games and their respective expansions (that’s VR Missions, Substance and Subsistence). That’s understandable–they’re pretty content-heavy, psychologically-demanding affairs, and full of those lovable, unpausable cutscenes the length of a short feature film. But have you considered that your act of evasion might have been your way of fulfilling the need for Tactical Stealth Action we all have in our lives? …cause that’s what it is.

So maybe you wisened up, got the ones you could find, and you just have some holes in this lineup of admittedly rare games. Well, as beloved as they are for their intelligent, slightly-futuristic-but-still-believable stories of covert missions, interpersonal drama, and philosophizing on the fundamental nature of humanity, it’s not hard to believe that people don’t resell ‘em. So what’s one to do?

It’s all in Metal Gear Solid: The Essential Collection now. You already know it and love it, or you just have yet to discover you do. This release is serious, fan-respecting business befitting the nature of the games–it even bears a PS1 reprint of the original game for full authenticity.

I’d talk more, but I’ve got a date with Solid Snake, now.

The weather’s getting finer, and you’re commuting to and from work or your final exams faster than the frozen snail’s pace of winter. You know you’re not going to be on the road long, not long enough to study… but it’s so hard to procrastinate when you’re just sitting there. You can’t get involved in an epic story, a deep study of item statistics, or even finish a long stage. You want something that is engaging to play, but that you can pick back up right where you left off the next time you’re caught in your busy bind.

You want Chu Chu Rocket. If you were any kind of conscious in the early Dreamcast days, you know about the cat-and-mouse chase game that actually starred bipedal cats and mutant blue-eared mice. The object is to guide said mice to the goal, a giant rocket that will ostensibly blast them off to their cat-free home planet, but ah! That is easier said than done.

The only communication at your disposal comes in the form of arrow panels that, when placed, guide the hapless rodents in roughly the right direction–or, if you so choose, the direction of their utter annihilation. It’s all up to you to steer the Chu Chus clear of the bottomless vortices and yawing cat maws that imperil their course in this play-god puzzler. In 4-player matches, it becomes critical that the murdered mice not be yours; in Puzzle Mode, not even a single one may perish. Again, this is a thinker, and again, you can count on doing it right within the allotted 30 seconds, or not doing it at all and facing your day with the shame of having murdered many cute things.

They may be called Red, Blue, and Yellow, their enemies with names to match, but they’re pretty great names in my book. So great, that I’m giving them double-billing in a double-feature here. The reason dates back to 1993, when Treasure produced its first-ever chef d’oeuvre (a video game) on the Sega Genesis console. It became a much-rehashed legend for twelve years until the longed-for sequel was finally granted: and the Gunstar Heroes graduated to Gunstar Super Heroes. Today, the original rock ‘em/sock ‘em, shoot ‘em up/run ‘n gun is available on the Wii Virtual Console, the sequel on the Game Boy Advance.

I don’t know why anyone wouldn’t like the premise of these games. You blow stuff up. You have insane acrobatic manouvers to make your body as good a weapon as your very versatile gun. You can throw people, including a second player, and grenades right back at your enemies in the original game; in Super Heroes, you can pull out a big frakin’ bazooka to fire huge blasts of your regular weapon energy, and turn several levels around in full 360-degree motion. It’s frenetic, flashy, loopy, Empire-fighting fun.

Gunstar is an instant classic in a long-quiet genre, one you owe it to yourself to try at least 10,000 times, and then some more until you beat these on Expert difficulty. You can get it on the cheap here, but sometimes, you get more than what you pay for.

Have you ever taken an IQ test and wondered: how does this pertain to ANYthing? And how can the questions, and hence your IQ, change the next go round? The grade is always insulting too, I don’t care who you are. Two questions in one area of cognitive function seem to be all it takes for those particular testers to decree their verdict on you, and you don’t get another chance with them, but some other measuring stick.

Well, if you’re interested in a challenge with results you can actually track and see (and call it a game at the same time), try Practical Intelligence Quotient 2 for PSP. For someone so keen on the idea, it’s admittedly odd that I haven’t played the first, but as far as I know it’s the same deal, just with a camera angle fixed behind your avatar. In PQ2, each stage plays out in a slide-block puzzle on a 3-D grid, and it’s your duty to guide a non-descript avatar through to the goal. Some interactions with the environment are afforded your digital self, such as climbing, pushing, lifting, and pressing switches on the blocks, but it’s always your brain commanding your hands to victory. All manner of modes, including a puzzle editor, whose products you can share via the PSP’s internet, give this game nearly endless replay value. And man.. it’s HARD.

Take the last ‘Initial-plus-Q’ test you’ll ever need: PQ2.