March 17, 2009 - Most people -- particularly the crowd that would gravitate toward something like Pipe Mania -- have played games like this before. The explosion in popularity of casual games and portal web sites has meant that the familiar Pipe Dream-esque gameplay idea of laying pipe (hey, quit snickering) to guide the flow of stuff from one end of the level to the other isn't new. The way Pipe Mania does it, though, is new -- at least in the sense that they wanted to wrap a story and some side modes around the familiar gameplay.

Call of Duty: Finest Hour has the difficult task of living under the shadow of a successful PC franchise. It's impossible not to compare Finest Hour to its PC counterpart and see what's been lost in the translation. Not a port of the PC COD, but a brand new game made just for the consoles, Finest Hour is a serviceable first-person World War II shooter, but it lacks the character and intensity of its big brother. In a console world overrun with first-person shooters, this latest call to duty falls on deaf ears.

It's fair to say that I am a massive G.I. Joe geek. As a kid, I owned more than a hundred G.I. Joe figures, including a create-your-own-Joe figure. So you know that when it comes to anything Joe-related, I'm going to be pretty friggin' tough on it. After all, I don't want anyone to crush my childhood love. Considering EA's G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra is licensed from a movie (which in turn is based on a series of action figures) and is aimed at a mass audience rather than hardcore Joe fans, things are definitely stacked against it.