A great game based on a licensed franchise comes out so rarely that when it does happen it can be easily overlooked or misunderstood. Snoopy vs. the Red Baron does so many things right but will never get the attention it deserves because only a small niche of the market will give it a chance.

Rampage has always been a unique and classic arcade game so when the latest outting ‘Rampage Total Destruction’ arrived I was curious to see what updates and improvements were made to the namesake.

From the website: Juno Remix is a 3D shooter in the style of Tempest and Gyruss with modern 3D graphics. Set inside the cyberspace of a huge and powerful computer called Juno, the player must defend the machine from a program designed to destroy the system. Six levels or constructs must be saved by destroying 30 waves of the attacking bugs.

You know, I seem to start of a lot of my reviews with a "true confession." Well, here's my true confession for this review: I'm not a big breakout fan. Actually, that's not quite true — I like breakout games, but they frustrate me very quickly, especially when you get down to just one block on the screen and you're forced to sit there and watch your ball ricochet twenty times around the screen en route to missing that solitary block by mere pixels, forcing you to repeat over and over this tedious and mind-numbing attempt to end a level.

The holidays are here — I hadn't planned on cranking out any more reviews this year, but a little gem of a game (with a Christmas theme no less), reached out and asked, no, demanded to be reviewed.

Sinistar meets Starcraft at the Robotech Café

Grab your gear and tell your Momma you won’t be home for dinner, Space Cadet. A high-level test mission on the deep space vessel the Aegis is about to go horribly wrong and you probably won’t live to tell about it.

Did You Hear Something?

Ever since the original invasion of Space Invaders in 1978, the good planet Earth has been plagued by the monotonous heartbeat of the approaching horde and the inevitable “Game Over” signaling yet another defeat for humankind. In the years soon after the first sightings, many more waves approached our vulnerable planet and conquered us repeatedly, leaving empty pockets and arthritic digits in their wake.

Update 8/04: Added a note that the game only supports 1024x768 resolution.

“Sic Itur Ad Astra” or “Thus do we reach the stars” is the phrase discretely displayed in the credits of the Guardian software. While to some that may seem a lofty and fitting expression of homage to man’s exploration of space, I suspect, after playing this side-scrolling Defender tribute, that the phrase denotes a pessimistic and chilling vision of the conflict that awaits when we ascend into the outer heavens.

If there ever was an arcade game that screamed for a 3D-remake, Marble Madness has to be it. That time has come with the arrival of Hamster Ball by Raptisoft, a modern take on Marble Madness that both honors its arcade inspiration and also builds and improves on it. The result is a slick, arcade-ready game that really does provide Marble Madness-style gameplay that is “exactly the same, only totally different.”