WWE DAY OF RECKONING, THQ/Yuke's
A professional-wrestling game with a "story" mode seems somehow appropriate, but in Day of Reckoning, this option has nothing to do with staged fights. It's just another name for the usual career mode, in which you start out at the bottom and try to work your way up. This mode puts you on a fairly straightforward path from beginner to champ while offering a quick tutorial on wrestling that lets you add new moves to your repertoire.
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This lesson is essential to beginners who might otherwise be perplexed by Day of Reckoning's complicated system of grapple and counter moves, including reversals and counter-reversals. Seasoned wrestling fans, however, will have no problem diving into any of the game's six modes (we weren't exactly surprised to see that in one, female wrestlers can rip off some of each other's clothes in a match). It features 40 World Wrestling Entertainment stars animated in close-up detail -- you can see sweat fly off their bodies as they get hit -- but who sometimes move too stiffly.
The in-game camera automatically zooms in on the action and pans around to give players a TV-like presentation. Superb sound effects help you feel every punch and kick, and a great multiplayer option adds to the challenge. Yes, it's professional wrestling, but sometimes you just have to put on the cheesy costume and get into the ring. -- Tom Ham
GameCube, $50
DOG'S LIFE, Hip Games/Frontier Developments
Video games have featured such critters as hedgehogs, bandicoots and Tasmanian tigers, but this is the first one to have you play as a canine. You star as Jake, a farm dog on a quest to find recently dog-napped girlfriend Daisy.
Since everything takes place from a dog's-eye view, you hear Jake communicate in words instead of barks -- when a human asks if you want a bone, he'll reply with something like, "Does a dog poop in the woods?" (Speaking of which, the inclusion of that perennially popular dog pastime somehow earned this game a may-not-be-suitable-for-under-13 "Teen" rating, a profoundly silly notion.) Jake can run around a landscape filled with farms and country roads and fields, meeting an assortment of other breeds of dogs as well as those humans.
The developers paid a lot of attention to making dogs look and move realistically, but they seem to have spent less effort on people and scenery. The humans' lip-syncing is especially bad, and Jake's canned responses to their commands grow old quickly. The same goes for the game's basic challenges; Dog's Life's simple puzzles and uncomplicated action are unlikely to keep even young players occupied for long, and there's little to suggest replaying the game.
-- John Gaudiosi
