Back in the beginning days of video games, a little Italian plumber stole the hearts and imaginations of millions of people across the world. The concept was simple: Jump on bad guys, collect coins, run and leap on platforms to get to end of the level, and finally defeat a huge turtle/dinosaur/fire-breathing bad guy who has captured the princess. Nowadays, Mario isn’t content to be the video game superstar of the world -- he's going for the entire galaxy.

It's obvious that Super Mario Galaxy is shooting for "the Greatest Mario Game Ever Made" -- not to mention "the Supreme Platformer Game of All Time." Does it surpass every one of Mario's wacky adventures that went before? Does it take the somehow insanely fun concept of jumping from one platform to another and tune it to perfection?

Yeah, it does.

For many years, the air guitar was the only way most people could actually dream of being on stage and rocking to a sold out crowd. Harmonix and Red Octane took that dream one step closer with the invention of the Guitar Hero series, enabling those less talented to play some of the greatest rock songs of all time. For crooners, the only way to showcase some chops was to go to a local bar and belt out tunes. Konami introduced Karaoke Revolution Presents: American Idol to satisfy those dreams of telling off Simon Cowell and get the dawg pound "Yeah" from Randy Jackson.

For me, I always wondered if it was possible to release an all encompassing game to include another favorite of mine, the air drums. After Guitar Hero II, Harmonix took their already successful ideas and joined with EA and MTV to create Rock Band, which combines all of these ideas and more.

At first look, there's a lot more to the creation of your band than anything Guitar Hero ever offered. After coming up with your band name, a total avatar can be created to represent any one of the four positions within the game: lead vocals, lead guitar, bass, and drums. The accessories are small to start with, mainly concentrating on your face rather than clothes, but as you proceed through the game more outfits can be bought at the store.

"Brilliant." "Incredible." "Gorgeous." "Like nothing you've ever played."

I'm trying to think of new ways to describe Ubisoft Montreal's groundbreaking game, Assassin's Creed, because it deserves it. It's all of those things, but those words are used so often to describe new games that break the mold, they feel wholly inadequate to suit title that shifts the paradigm at this magnitude.

Assassin's Creed is the first next-generation title by the same team that crafted the Prince of Persia games, and they've brought all of the major lessons they learned with that series along to their newest franchise. Ubisoft Montreal has made no secret of the fact that this is the first title in a planned trilogy (and if you didn't know that before you play, you'll figure it out when you reach the cliffhanger ending).

There's a shrewd twist at the very beginning of the game that sets the context for the story in Assassin's Creed. Most fans of the game already know that there's a modern day component of the game, even though the main storyline and gameplay are set in the 12th Century A.D. I won't be giving away that added part of the game, but it's a genius idea that gives a huge, bonus layer to the story.

You've probably heard of Guitar Hero, even if you've never played it. In a nutshell: it's essentially a glorified puzzle game, where you must keep time with a popular rock song in order to win. The game's aim is not to turn you into a musician, but to make you feel like a real musician. There's something winning about the combination of classic rock songs that everybody knows with nonstop "musical action" to make you feel like you're making the music happen yourself... that just works.

Guitar Hero's stroke of genius is its signature guitar controller, which makes the whole thing come together. Oh, you can play it with the standard video game controller, but using a controller shaped like a real guitar while hitting buttons or making motions that look like you're playing a real guitar -- it helps you feel the music like you're really rocking out. Activision even included a set of realistic stickers that you can apply to your "Gibson Les Paul" guitar. A new touch for the third entry in the series is that the guitar is now wireless, letting you shred all over your house, if you like. The model I used for this review demonstrated an impressive range.

When you first start up Guitar Hero III, you'll be treated to the first in a series of anime-style cartoons that breathe a teensy bit of story into the game's Campaign Mode. Choose from eight avatars to play as, though this number grows as the game progresses, and customize their look and on-screen guitar. An in-game Store provides the ability to purchase upgrades and additional guitars, outfits, characters, songs, and more. Perhaps best of all is the inclusion of a long-awaited Co-op Mode, so you can play through the campaign with a friend.

The Call of Duty series is known for authentic wartime settings, a variety of gameplay mechanics, and non-stop thrills. But entries 1 through 3 were World War II games. Now, the developer that created the series and produced the first two games, returns with an entry that brings the games into the 21st Century.

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare takes everything you loved about the first three games and frees it from the confines of World War II. Instead, CoD4 is set in the world we live in, where the enemies of freedom aren't Communists but terrorists. Modern covert military operations are the name of the game, and you'll be outfitted with contemporary weapons, ammo, and tech equipment.

The single-player mission is written smart enough to out-Clancy Clancy, playing out as a political thriller that spans the globe, setting out to take down a dangerous arms dealer who could trigger a global war. The game shifts the player's point of view back and forth between numerous characters; most of your time is spent as "Soap" McTavish, a grunt in a special ground unit of the British S.A.S., though other notable turns find you in the shoes of a deposed third-world nation president on his way to an execution or an American soldier in a downed helicopter at the site of a nuclear bomb blast, crawling outside just long enough to take in the wind-blown effects of the blast.

Looney Tunes: Acme Arsenal finds you stepping into the shoes of many of WB's most popular cartoon characters, and using a typically wacky array of weaponry to "blam!" and "fwap!" against enemies.

According to the story, a mysterious evil genius scientist is using time travel to try and take out the ancestors of the Looney Tunes. So Bugs and company load up with their zaniest and best hardware, and venture back in time to stop said evil genius in his tracks. Playable characters include favorites like Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Marvin the Martian, Foghorn Leghorn, Tasmanian Devil, Gossamer, and a surprise I won't spoil here.

The ingredients sound like a recipe for madcap success, right? If only. While it offers a few hours of hairbrained fun, Acme Arsenal turns out to be far less than the sum of its parts.

Much of the game is filled with typical console button-mashing, without any real need for putting thought into what you're doing. Jump, double-jump, smash, whack, fire. There are some enemy classes that that only respond to one specific type of attack, but for the most part, tactics aren't a priority for the player. The usual jumping games are also included, and while some of them have some real ingenuity, forcing you to think about what you're doing before you do it, others seem to have little if any thought behind them at all.

With the exception of maybe Batman, no superhero boasts the wide array of recognizable wack-jobs in their rogue's gallery like Spiderman, and finally there is a video game that allows the player to experience these villains in a way never before allowed.

Possibly the best feature of the new Spiderman: Friend or Foe is that once Spiderman defeats a villain -- and there are many to choose from like Doctor Octopus, Scorpion, Rhino, Green Goblin, and (of course, after the third movie) Venom, to name a few -- the villain decides to tag along for the ride, in name and effect becoming Spidey's "sidekick."  And the sidekick role is not only reserved for the temporarily-reformed, either.  Other miscellaneous Marvel characters make cameos in the game and join our hero in his quest: Prowler (who?), Black Cat, the completely random Iron Fist, and Blade.

Shortly after -- and loosely tied to -- the events of the third movie, the story follows Spiderman and friends as they team with Nick Fury and SHIELD's computer to track and eliminate a global onslaught of holographic symbiote creatures.  Apparently, the same meteor that crashed into earth bearing the Venom symbiote was not alone. A second meteor, broken apart into five shards in the atmosphere, crashed to five separate locations and began to spout "Phantoms," as the game refers to them.  Even stranger, somehow the Phantoms are being led and controlled by third-string Spidey foe Mysterio.  The jury's still out on how he came to be the final boss.  Presumably because nobody wanted to play as him.

Raven Software has created a true masterpiece with Marvel Ultimate Alliance, a sprawling top-down action adventure that puts you in the unique position of creating any team you want with dozens of heroes from the Marvel Universe. Best of all, you can change up the roster of your team throughout the game, pretty much whenever you want.

The locations have fans salivating: fabled and hallowed halls of some of Marvel's most coveted and mysterious places appear throughout the game, including Asgard, Doctor Strange's Sanctum Sanctorum, Atlantis, Avengers Tower, the S.H.I.E.L.D. Helicarrier, Latveria, the Skrull homeworld, and many more. The environments are unquestionably one of the game's greatest strengths, giving you plenty of eye candy and tons of nooks and crannies of the Marvel Universe to explore.

Most impressive are the levels that showcase the characters' size and scale in comparison to their environments, such as the S.H.I.E.L.D. Helicarrier, which flies high above the ground while you run across its bow; and the Skrull homeworld, where the gargantuan planet-eater Galactus chases you, chewing up the platforms you're walking on as you flee. These levels really show off just what next-gen console graphics can deliver, and they look spectacular.

John Woo's Stranglehold casts you as Inspector Tequila, one of Woo's most well-known film characters. And the whole idea behind the game is to put you in the shoes of one of Woo's gunplay-happy movie roles and let you go at it with all of the tools that give Woo's films their unique look and feel.

The gameplay has one single motivation: to take all of John Woo's stylish, signature gunfight techniques and place them at your disposal. The game makers wisely put these techniques to good use -- you can play through much of the game by simple shooting, but at times the game forces you to use the "cool" techniques in order to complete a level. Likewise, the more stylishly you take down your enemies, the more points you score, and those points come in very handy.

Most of these stylish moves are programmed into Tequila's basic movements. Run into a table or a counter-top, and Tequila will slide across it. Pull the left trigger and you'll take a slow-mo dive in whatever direction you're moving. Slide down banisters and hand rails, run across fallen support beams, or dive onto a rolling hand cart and ride it through a crowded arena full of enemies, all while shooting to your heart's content.

If you've been living under a rock like that guy and his family in that TV commercial, Halo 3 is the equivalent of the Holy Grail to many modern gamers. Sure, there are those who lean more towards the Zelda end of the spectrum, or the Madden games, but for a large portion of an entire generation, Halo represents the Rosetta Stone of gaming.

Something about its finely-tuned blend of non-stop, futuristic combat action and its compelling science fiction storyline, add up to one of the highest-grossing video games of all time, and the primary way the original Xbox justified its existence. And creator Bungie came up with a brand new iconic hero, the enigmatic Master Chief, whose face is never seen. A super-soldier leftover from a past war who was cryogenically frozen and then thawed out when needed, he is also called "Spartan 117," and he's accompanied at all times by the female artificial intelligence named Cortana.

When last we left our hero, he was about to crash-land on Earth to famously "finish this fight." And Halo 3 is indeed the conclusion of the trilogy, not to mention the first game in the series to make the jump to the next-gen Xbox 360 console. To say that Microsoft has a lot riding on this game... well, you can fill in the rest.