In response to the runaway success of the original MotoGP for the Xbox, THQ decided to bring the next game in the series to both the PC and the Xbox. The original game featured accurate and accessible controls, stunning visuals, and a dynamic racing experience, and the Xbox version of the sequel managed to improve on the outstanding original in every way. The PC version of MotoGP 2, on the other hand, shows signs of being perhaps a little too closely related to its cousin, and in the end, the developer should have spent more time making the PC version as cohesive as its console counterpart. Fortunately, the game is at least available at retail at a budget price of $20.

Icewind Dale is self-consciously similar to Baldur's Gate: Both games take place in the Forgotten Realms, and Icewind Dale recycles not only Baldur's Gate's engine but also a good deal of the older game's graphics. Specifically, your six player characters are represented with the same small, animated sprites from BioWare's older game, and you might quickly recognize a lot of the equipment that was carried over. The highly anticipated sequel to BioWare's hit role-playing game Baldur's Gate is just a few months away, and its publisher, Interplay, released Icewind Dale to tide over role-playing game fans while they wait. But Icewind Dale isn't just a pastime; it's an excellent game in its own right. Though it's based on the Baldur's Gate engine and is also set in the same Advanced Dungeons & Dragons universe, Icewind Dale's originality and fast pacing make the game uniquely satisfying.

The puzzles in Shivers II engage on different levels. Many are of the classic puzzle mold: rearrange mixed-up balls into a proper order, solve a tangram, reorder sliding tiles to complete a symbol, etc. Clues to these individual puzzles are always close at hand, but they do require concentration, and objects from the inventory won't assist you. These puzzles are also altered for each new game, a nice tip of the hat toward replayability (you can also design your own puzzles to confound your friends who may join in over the Internet).

RHEM is a first-person, point and click adventure that can be compared to Riven. You ride into the large, unusual world of Rhem in a mining cart and soon you discover that you are unable to leave. Your major objective is to find a way to leave Rhem. To do this you must find and reconstruct a letter which has been divided into four parts and hidden. You will do this totally alone without interaction with any other characters.Many of the areas are closed to you at first and the way to open them is by solving a multitude of adventure-type puzzles. There are mechanically based puzzles involving levers and switches, but you will also find codes to decipher and strange symbols, maps, color patterns and switchboxes.

In the first of many clever references to its predecessors in the Zork series, Grand Inquisitor opens with a bald foppish dictator banning the use of magic throughout the Great Underground Empire. For gamers who plodded through the rather tedious Return to Zork and oddly humorless Zork Nemesis, the plot device is an obvious metaphor for what has happened to the longest-running series (20 years!) in computer gaming. Zork's signature wit and absurdity seemed to have been lost in the jump from text to graphic adventuring. Well, the magic may be gone from the land, but it has not vanished from the game. Grand Inquisitor is the best graphical Zork yet, and one of the most consistently entertaining adventures of the year.

Return to Krondor, like Betrayal at Krondor, is set in author Raymond E. Feist's swords-and-sorcery world of Midkemia. Both games provide strongly story-driven experiences, as evidenced by the fact that they are divided into "chapters," during which the plot is advanced in a very linear, predetermined fashion. Similarly, both games require you to use preset characters, each possessing a fully developed, distinctive personality, and determine party membership solely in response to plot developments over which you have no control. But while Betrayal at Krondor allowed you to develop your character in a variety of ways while exploring a vast gaming world and undertaking numerous subquests, Return to Krondor offers much more restrictive gameplay. Each chapter in Return to Krondor is set in a very discrete, confining geographic area (one room, in the case of two of the chapters), and most chapters have no subquests at all, forcing you to focus solely on your primary quest objectives.

Alone in the Dark's attempts to break hardened video gaming cliches are obvious from the start. There are no inventory menus, ammo indicators, or health bars in either first- or third-person views–which you are free to switch between throughout. Your inventory is limited to what you can store in your rather capacious leather jacket, and it's accessed by looking down into it and seeing what you have stashed the various pockets and pouches sewn into the lining. Here you can not only see what items you have, but also work out how to combine them; if you've got a bottle of booze and a rag, you can make an instant Molotov cocktail, but add some tape and a box of ammo and you've got a much more powerful flying bomb.

The line between games and movies is sort of blurred in the structure of the game. While the play style holds tight to the point-and-click adventure template, the game is constructed solely with still photos that give your jaunt the vibe of an indie film. So even though you play a stereotypical sleuth looking to solve the mystery of the ancient Obsidian Disk on the island of Capri, the atmosphere is quite different from the sorts of adventures you might be accustomed to. Thousands of photos depicting everything from seaside vistas to cobblestone roads, to the many quaint shops lining the narrow streets of the titular town of Anacapri, give you the impression that you've embarked on a real trip to the exotic Mediterranean locale. The gameworld is absolutely massive, so it frequently feels as if you're really exploring all of the crooks and crannies of the island.

Gameplay offers some similarly unwelcome surprises, at least after you get past all of the "Brand X" stuff. Dracula 3 is dry, traditional, and stilted. Nevertheless, there is one big changeup here in regard to puzzles. The designers chose to move away from cliched vampire plot devices and play up a more modern "It's the 20th century–there are no such things as vampires!" vibe that apparently seeks to explain bloodsucker fear as mere peasant legend. This is a nice switcheroo from the standard stake-the-fanged-guy credulity that usually accompanies any game about Dracula. But it's also pretty disingenuous in that you know from the very beginning that Father Arno won't be discovering that vampires are just make-believe after all.

Dracula Resurrection, a point-and-click adventure game from DreamCatcher Interactive, begins seven years after the primary events of the book. Mina has begun acting strangely, and some force is drawing her back to Transylvania. Harker follows his wife in hopes of saving her and finds that, indeed, Dracula is undead and well. But exactly how he returns from being a few handfuls of dust is never made clear. Perhaps the designers thought sunlight was an insufficient way to kill a vampire, even though it's been a staple of the vampire mythos. Whatever the reason, Dracula's titular revival is never explained or even discussed. He's just back, and the game begins from this shaky foundation.

Mass Effect 2 is the sequel to BioWare’s hit space-based role-playing game (RPG), Mass Effect. A single player adventure, Mass Effect 2 allows players to continue the adventures of the fully customizable series hero Commander Shepard, as you take on a whole new adventure and a new cast of supporting characters. Additional new features include the ability to import game save files from the original Mass Effect game to continue the adventure in an unbroken fashion, a new damage system, a new, more flexible dialogue game mechanic and more. mankind has ever faced.

In Highland Warriors, you play as various factions that guided the history of the nation through several centuries. You unite the country's clans under a single king, play as the English in their conquest of Scotland, rebel against the English as William Wallace, and finally reunite the clans and claim independence with Robert the Bruce. Highland Warriors offers plenty of single-player gameplay to keep you occupied for some time. The game has four campaigns that consist of 10 missions each, and it has a skirmish mode against the computer AI. Highland Warriors also has a multiplayer mode that lets you take your highlanders online against a human opponent.

The game's story puts you in the role of Jacob Angelus, a captain in the Northern Star Alliance. Your home planet, Morningstar Prime, is currently under siege by Imperial Terran forces led by the ruthless Imperator Vlaana. As you make your way through the campaign, an alien race, known as the Virons, will eventually get involved in both sides of the conflict. The game includes a pair of linear, 12-mission campaigns where you'll control the NSA forces and then the Virons. Though the storyline behooves you to play the campaigns in that order, you may choose to start on either campaign at the outset of the game.

Knight Rider has two types of missions: those that require you to race, and those that require you to explore. In this respect, it is similar to SCi's violent car-combat game Carmageddon 3. It is also similar to Carmageddon 3 in that the racing sections are fun, but the exploration sections are tedious. Unfortunately, you often have to do both in any given mission. Knight Rider isn't a bad game–it's just too short and too repetitive. Most missions will require you to chase a helicopter or another car, drive around a compound and scan buildings, or both. The game is full of time limits, requiring you to "Stop that helicopter!" or "Get to the transmission station!" in some short period of time. It's usually not very difficult–in fact, for some reason, the time limits are really only a factor in the training missions. The "hard" difficulty setting makes things a little more challenging, but on the easy or normal settings, you can finish all the game's missions in one or two tries.

Riven's two major puzzles require solving several miniproblems that in turn require close observation of Riven's denizens, colors, and unique numbering system. Gathering those elements becomes routine but just as you get comfortable with the concept there is a clever extra challenge tossed in - a missing color, a broken device, an obtusely revealed animal. Much of Riven's prerelease PR emphasized the environment as a source of clues and puzzle solutions. It is, but not to the large extent and subtle degree you may expect.