Fizzball is Breakout with an eco-friendly, robot accepting, alien sympathizing theme. You are Professor Fizzwizzle, because, with a name like that, no one else wants to be. The Professor has built some sort of rail system across a series of islands, and he ends up using it in a very unique way when the island becomes deserted of human life, leaving the animals behind to fend for themselves. I was always under the impression that animals on islands generally saw humans as a bit of a nuisance, but these animals depend upon human life, so it's up to the good Professor to keep them fed. He does this with a bubble. And his train.

Imperial Glory is the Ginsu knife set of turn-based world-conquest gaming: an expansive and ponderous computerized world conquest simulation designed for the enthusiastic turn-based gamer. If six knives are not enough for you, you buy 36. If one game is not enough, you buy Imperial Glory. Suddenly, you have a range of games that meets your needs, and are free to use or ignore them as you desire. Feature-packed and detailed, but complex beyond the interest of the average gamer, Imperial Glory has a depth and scope that exceeds other turn-based role playing games, and can not only be played but also enjoyed as games within a game.

Why make a game where you have to decide how much to charge for hot dogs? Who wants to play that? Who rushes home from school, panting with excitement of checking your daily gate receipts? What sad, miserable idiot is more concerned with making a profit at his imaginary theme park than with building a totally badass supercoaster?

Computers have joined education with fun since well before we all explored the Oregon Trail or traveled the world searching for Carmen Sandiego. Puzzle games are continually big sellers, and Freeverse Software has taken six of the more popular and/or useful titles and brought them together in Big Bang Brain Games. Of course, they put their own spin on the games in the process. Would we have it any other way?

The good news with Prey is that pretty much everything that's wrong with it is wrong within the first five minutes. This is important to point out, because there's plenty wrong with those five minutes. Seriously, this is the some of the dumbest writing in video game history that doesn't have the name "Phantasmagoria" attached to it. But when this game finally kicks into gear...whoa boy, what a ride!

There's something pure about a video game in which your only weapon is your head. It's like the old days of Pac Man and Pitfall in which games were violent, sure, but in a pillow-fight sort of way. Pac Man ate the bad guys, after all, Pitfall Harry was mauled by alligators and killed by scorpions. What a charming way to go! BlockHeads Clash is along those lines. You're a guy armed with nothing more than the inability to suffer a concussion. This is good, as you won't just be using your head to hit enemies, but to hit the floor, boxes...anything standing in your way as you navigate a labyrinth of enemies and puzzles.

A smashing success of a follow-up game, Age of Empires III (AoE III) gets almost everything right in this incarnation. It is an improvement on itself that appeals beyond its original base and should draw in a wider audience than the original. Improvements in graphics, gameplay, replayability, and basic features of the game make it almost deserving of a second title rather than being packaged as merely a follow-up or an upgrade to the original.

There's a bit of a story in Atlantis Sky Patrol, which places you neither in Atlantis nor in the sky, making the ironic title a double misnomer. How's that for fun! See, there are 100 doomsday devices scattered about the Earth (because when planning doomsday, the Atlantians understood the importance of redundancy). So, you move across a map of the Earth in a predetermined route to disable these devices.

Widening the scope of games in the "combine things so they blow up" category, Pirate Poppers gets some things right, and confounds the gamer with its minor quirks and strategy-killers. Each screen opens with a blank "pathway" that twists around the screen, ultimately ending at a barrel. From the far end comes a series of cannonballs of various colors. Able to scroll across the bottom of the screen, you are tasked with blasting a colored cannonball into the procession, in an effort to combine three or more like-colored cannonballs. When this happens, they explode.

I enjoyed Mystery Case Files: Prime Suspects. It isn't about solving crimes, it's about finding things. It's like those old Where's Waldo? books, only you're looking for multiple items, not just a dorky looking guy in a red and white hat. The items can be hidden in impossible places, there's often more than one of each item, and the items aren't always what you're looking for.

Cult of Mithras offers to build upon the historically weighty story line of Legion Arena by adding fantastic creatures in battle, new imaginative weaponry, and a new game icon in your menu, featuring a helmeted skull. Where history runs out, because, as we know, Rome fell, Cult's designers took on the challenge at hand. Could they expand the game by inventing new countries to conquer, with the Roman armies extending into SimCity or across the sea to continents not yet known? No. Extend the game into the distant history with the London Times headline "Rome's armies topple Hitler!" or the Washington Post headline "Rome's armies take out Schwartzkopf!" No.

Impressive performance from these moderately priced headsets; well worth checking out even if you’re not a gamer