SEE: Artistic vision forgotten since the silent film era.
HEAR: The extraordinary soundtrack.
KNEAD: The inimitable P.B. Winterbottom’s pastry obsession into something nobler.
ENDURE: Unflattering couplets that hurt your feelings.
MARVEL: As P.B. bends time to eat pie!

ALL THIS AND MORE inside this PIXELSOCKS EXCLUSIVE review of THE MISADVENTURES OF P.B. WINTERBOTTOM.

The iPhone port of Plants vs. Zombies isn’t quite as feature rich as its counterparts, but it’s also a tenth of the price. The smart tower defense gameplay and adorable aesthetic remain intact, and the touch interface is actually superior to other ports. It’s only a pity that the reduced content will cut down on the time you’ll spend with such an excellent game.

Overlord II is an improvement over the first game in every way. Gameplay is more varied, the writing is consistently funny, and decorating your dark Fortress has never been manlier. The improvements diminish the challenge somewhat, but who subjugates the strong, anyway?

It’s a tired fact that licensed games try to span two entertainment media and so fail at both. The license does little justice to the source material, and the source constrains player agency. So instead of a good license or a good game, you get half of each. However, now and again, the source material dovetails with established genres. Lucky for Batman, he already lives in an action adventure game.

There’s a reason you don’t mix exploration gameplay with sandbox gameplay, and Assassin’s Creed is a good test case. You just end up with aimless repetition, even when each task is technically novel. On the other hand, as a game of carefully plotted murder, Assassin’s Creed recaptures something lost since the days of Deus Ex: freedom. Whether or not you’ll enjoy it depends on your willingness to skip half the game.

Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood looked like it could have been Sonic’s salvation. However, a distinguished new developer and a new genre just weren’t enough to snap the hedgehog out of his deep blue funk.

Left 4 Dead 2 does the sequel thing right. It takes the pseudo-random design that made the first game so replayable, expands it, and does so without sacrificing the original game’s feel. Add that to the franchise’s multiplayer excellence and a new narrative emphasis, and the only thing deeper than the smart FPS gameplay is the pool of zombie gore.

There’s been a gradual upsurge in oldschool 2D gaming recently, albeit on the sly. The burgeoning casual and portable markets have converged with increasing visibility for indie developers and digital distribution. Set it all against the recession as a backdrop, and suddenly the cheap simple games of yesteryear start looking pretty good. Nintendo can smell these things coming like sharks smell blood in water, and so we have New Super Mario Bros. Wii, the first AAA 2D console platformer in ages.

Torchlight looks so much like Diablo II that you might worry it will feel derivative, but only if you have no idea who designed it. Developer Runic Games is populated by veterans of the Diablo series, Fate, and the nearly released Mythos. So instead of a knockoff, Torchlight turns out to be more of a successor. It’s a refined example of the Roguelike action RPG.

It’s easy to pick on numerical review scores. In fact, the internet is positively stuffed with examples. Reviewers call them irrelevant, and developers call them arbitrary and meaningless. Both scoff at Metacritic, and developers in particular have damn good reasons to undermine numerical scoring. Even I take the odd potshot and insist on using my own scoring system.

You’ve probably already spotted the disconnect. Everyone seems to hate numerical scores, but nobody stops using them (well, I did, but you can bet that my principles end where a publisher’s paycheck begins). So one of two things must be true: either everyone in the world is now and always has been stupid, or there is some legitimate merit to numerical review scores that nobody bothers to talk about. This looks like a job for sophistry.