The Jack Bauer Award for Moral Conflict: Splinter Cell: Double Agent

We’ve played tons of video games that promised to force us to make tough decisions, but most of them presented nothing more than straightforward choices between right and wrong. Double Agent thrusts multiple moral quandaries upon you—Jack Bauer-style—and forces you to discern different shades of gray. Should you kill an innocent man to save thousands of lives? Only you can decide.

www.splintercell.com, ESRB: M

Best. Comic Book. Game. Ever.: Marvel: Ultimate Alliance

Stroll into The Android’s Dungeon & Baseball Card Shop on any given day and you’ll find Jeffrey Albertson laying down authoritative verdicts on pop-culture happenings. But even the Comic Book Guy would have to agree with us that Marvel: Ultimate Alliance is the holy grail of comicbook games. Not only can you control 20 of the greatest superheroes from the Marvel universe, but more than 100 familiar Marvel faces make cameos throughout the game. It’s another reason for geeks to stay indoors—sunlight is overrated anyway.

www.marvelultimatealliance.com, ESRB: T

Fabulous, but Shorter than the Movie: King Kong

The eponymous movie was an amazing spectacle of grandiose cinema, and its game counterpart performs admirably as a complement to the man vs.beast epic. Gameplay is split between playing as Jack Driscoll leading the daring film crew through Skull Island and Kong gracefully swinging through the jungle and besting ferocious dinosaurs. For those of you who enjoyed the movie (us included), King Kong clued us in to what was happening behind the silver-screen story, filling in some plot holes along the way. The brief adventure is capped off with an alternate ending to the movie, “revising” the Kong canon for fans who couldn’t stand to see the big guy die.

www.kingkonggame.com, ESRB: T

Game of the Year: Company of Heroes

OK, we admit it: We thought the WWII gaming horse had been beaten well beyond bloody pulp and was now best reserved or glue production. Company of Heroes proved us wrong, dead wrong. Extremely clever “attack from anywhere” mission design (read: no choke points) and over-the-top sound and pyrotechnics had us zapping Nazis with unbridled joy all over again. Heck, Company of Heroes even had nongamer editors playing. We can’t wait for the add-ons.

www.companyofheroesgame.com, ESRB: M