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Banging things into other things has been a major form of entertainment since the pilot episode of "Caveman Jackass" back in 20,000 B.C. There's just something endlessly appealing about controlled destruction. So, if you're stupefied by slaughter, dumbfounded by demolition, and enthralled by evisceration, you're sure to be tickled by Slick Entertainment's new XBLA title, Scrap Metal.

Sitting somewhere between a straight-up arcade action title and a lightweight racing sim, Scrap Metal has drawn comparisons to Rare's R.C. Pro-Am -- but the similarity to that old classic is mostly skin deep. Really, Scrap Metal's casual-game veneer hides a robust (if somewhat overly sensitive) physics engine, more levels than a Byzantine ziggurat, and a grip of imaginative set pieces. Both multiplayer (Scrap Metal offers local and online) and single-player are challenging without being too intense, offer plenty of tweaking without being overly detailed, and feature charmingly over-the-top graphics.

Debates over its final boss fight aside, God of War 2's ending made for good theater: Greek Kratos rode on the titan Gaia's back as she scaled Mount Olympus in pursuit of a gods vs. titans face-off with Zeus and friends. It served as a big cliffhanger -- literally or not, depending on your taste for puns -- which set up God of War 3 as the final game in the trilogy.

Looking back on that ending now, it seems clear that the developers knew what they had in mind for the third game all along, but at the time it left a lot open to interpretation. Would it be an entire game on the side of the mountain? Or might Kratos participate in some kind of War of the Monsters-style spin-off?

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Shoot 1UP is described by Mommy's Best Games as a shoot-em-up for "normal gamers," but "normal" is not a term I'd quickly associate with the developer's output. After all, its first Xbox Live Indie release was Weapon of Choice, an over-the-top, Contra-like shooter pumped full of gore, outlandish weaponry, and heavy metal music. And Shoot 1UP, with hand-drawn tapestries populated by pies, beached whales, and a large robotic woman with metallic, projectile breasts that fire waves of glowing bullets, strays just as far from the ordinary.

In a genre notoriously targeted at the hardest of hardcore, Shoot 1UP is an anomaly. Sure, you can recreate the traditional "bullet hell" experience -- just select Serious difficulty, kick the game speed up to 200%, and go hog wild. But for those of us without the patience or skill set to endure even relatively mild shmups, Shoot 1UP presents something fresh -- a more action-packed entry that scales wonderfully between casual observers and aficionados.

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Lunar: The Silver Star has seen several remakes over the years, but the last time the series went portable, in Lunar: Dragon Song, it flopped commercially and critically. Regardless, Game Arts had remade the original Lunar again, and this time for PSP, as Lunar: Silver Star Harmony; as it should, this version hews closely to the PlayStation's Silver Star Story Complete, with all of that game's excellent, animated cut-scenes. But other than that, from the overworld maps to the backgrounds, the game has been remade, effectively recapturing all the things that made the original so good (and also retaining a few of the things that made it so frustrating).

The writing is more subdued, though it still tries to be funny -- you'll read the occasional anachronistic line about a character using a phone or something else ridiculous to try and get a laugh. But the team at XSeed excised most of the pop-culture references for a more straightforward translation.

Final Fantasy XIII is a game at a crossroads. It's stranded at the intersection between the desires of an existing fanbase, the fading popularity of a genre, a legacy of cutting-edge visuals, and the rising cost of game development. It's a creation that displays the compromises of its development process at every turn, yet to its credit, it doesn't feel compromised. It's defined by creative tradeoffs, yet it embraces those potential shortcomings and transforms them into integral components of its design.

FFXIII is ambitious and daring, not to mention gorgeous and energetic. It approaches the concept of "role-playing games" with ruthless pragmatism, lopping off hunks of RPG tradition like a doctor operating on a terminally gangrenous patient. Traditional towns are too difficult to manage in light of the demands of current technology and art design? Whack -- they're gone. Free-roaming exploration too difficult to implement properly? Chop -- there goes the nonlinearity. Micromanaging turn-based combat bogs down the pacing of battles? Snip -- let the AI handle it.

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