Treit and True:

Buried Treasures of 2007

Published January 22, 2008

The fall season is home to dozens of game releases, many of them high-profile games with countless dollars of TV, print, and online advertising that help bolster gamer awareness and properly hype the publisher's million-dollar wares. While these games—Halo® 3, BioShock, and Call of Duty® 4: Modern Warfare™ come to mind—deserve their glory, there remains as always a few wonderful titles that go overlooked during the holiday rush.

Master Chief casts quite a large shadow.

While the early months of the new year aren't quite as barren as they used to be, the January-to-March timeframe still remains a great opportunity to pick back through the glut of fall titles to find a few diamonds in the rough. I've pored over the release lists to make the job just a touch easier for you, and can heartily recommend these games.

Scene It? for the Whole Family
There are quite simply never enough games that bring the family together in the living room for a bit of togetherness and light entertainment. Scene It?® Lights, Camera, Action offers precisely this with its movie-based trivia and creative questions, puzzles, and challenges.

More importantly though, Scene It? comes with four simplified, easy-to-use Big Button controllers that the non-gamers in your family will take to instantly. It's difficult to "buzz in" when you're trying to find the A button. The Big Button controller puts these worries to rest.

Scene It? requires no prior gaming experience.

Animated Ninja Power

NARUTO™: Rise of a Ninja gives interactive life to the massively popular anime series. With gameplay that fuses adventure, platforming, and fighting mechanics, Rise of a Ninja is a remarkably polished fighter that frankly looks better when played (its Jutsu animations are worth the price of admission alone) than its animated TV counterpart.

What's more, the game covers the series' first eighty episodes, so if you're wondering what all the fuss is about or want to fill in the blanks on young Naruto's quest for Hokage status, Rise of a Ninja has got you covered from start to finish.

Check out our NARUTO: Rise of a Ninja tips and tricks piece for more details and winning strategy.

Smackdown Time

Much like the Madden series, you can't let the WWE Smackdown annual release status lull you into thinking the series has become complacent. Rather, with analog grapple mechanics, a brand new submission system, character classes that help redefine each wrestler's in-ring roles, and created belts that can be won and lost online, WWE® SmackDown® vs. RAW® 2008 combines classic gameplay with newfangled mechanics, and the results are outstanding.

Endless hours of brutal entertainment.

What may be Smackdown vs. RAW 2008's most outstanding asset is its replay value. Just creating and tweaking a wrestler can offer hours upon hours of in-depth entertainment, to say nothing of an expansive career mode and multiplayer matches that utilize countless variant match types to keep things fresh.

Check out our Notes from the Ring for more details and a few useful tips.

Time Traveling FPS

Every great first-person shooter needs to shake up the genre with a healthy dollop of originality, and Sierra's refreshingly creative TimeShift™ does just that. Whether you're freezing time to snatch a powerful weapon from the hands of your enemy, or rewinding the carnage to rebuild a recently shattered bridge, TimeShift oozes originality with its time-warping gameplay from start to finish. If you've had your fill of run-of-the-mill shooters, give this one a look.

Welcome to alternate realities.

And don't forget to check our preview for a more detailed examination of the game.

Lara Croft's Anniversary

Tomb Raider™ LEGEND gave Xbox 360® fans their first next-gen taste of gaming's most beloved heroine, but with the recently released Lara Croft Tomb Raider™ Anniversary, we've been given a rare opportunity to relive Lara Croft's origins without sacrificing any of the modern day bells and whistles. Yes, Anniversary recreates the original Tomb Raider, right down to those head-scratching puzzles and boss fights.

A classic encounter gets a makeover.

This is an especially remarkable treat for those of us with younger brothers and sisters or even older children who weren't gaming when Lara first burst on the scene. Nostalgia fills every crevice of Tomb Raider Anniversary, but better yet, so does outstanding gameplay and level design.

Every holiday season carries with it a few casualties, games that flew too far under the radar to receive their proper due. The post-holiday months give us our best chance to reach back into the catalog and pluck out a game or two to fill the void during the slower gaming season. So take a look at some of these titles and enjoy!

Article by Ryan Treit