GAME ON

Video game legend Will Wright, the mad genius behind SimCity and The Sims, has concocted his most ambitious project yet. In Spore, you create a new species in the creature creator (the early favorite: penis hands) and guide it through life. Your creature starts as a cellular organism then experiences the phases of evolution, including the formation of tribes, the birth of a civilization, and space travel. Make the wrong decisions, and your race of penis-handed creatures will face extinction. It sounds like science class, but Spore plays like gaming's greatest hits, including the Pac-Man vibe of the cellular stage and the Diablo feel of the creature phase. It doesn't take a genius to understand this is amazing.

It's amazing how well a bullet to the ass motivates a man. After a drug lord refuses to pay for your mercenary work and shoots you in the ass on his way to becoming a Venezuelan dictator, you vow to rid the world of this fascist. Mercenaries 2 picks up right where its predecessor left off—in a hail of gunfire, vehicular mayhem, and crumbling buildings. As you pit rival political factions against one another in pursuit of revenge, your lucrative merc work will fund a military contracting business, allowing you to hire mercenaries to handle some of the dirty work. With dozens of heavily armed vehicles at your disposal, a massive arsenal, and the new co-op game-play mode, Mercenaries 2 is nothing short of explosive.

Sorry, NASCAR, the thrill is gone. Illegal street racing is where it's at. After all, who wants to drive in circles when you can weave a Lamborghini through traffic at 200 miles per hour and use on-ramps to jump over warehouses to the finish line? The latest in the Midnight Club series includes a dizzying array of customization options, including tires, rims, spoilers, and lighting effects. And, for the first time in the series, you can modify interiors, right down to the dashboard lighting. The rest of this open-world racer is packed to the rims with features, including day-to-night cycles and weather effects. And forget drilling through menus to start a race: Simply pull up alongside a car, flash your lights, and step on the gas.

Tiger may be taking it easy on a recovering knee, but the world's best golfer is still hitting the video game links. This year, Tiger brings his coach, Hank Haney, to help clean up your abysmal swing. As you make your way through the PGA Tour, he'll critique your performance, guide you through slumps, and recommend training for improving your weaknesses. Golf's true glory lies in competing with friends, and for the first time the game includes a simultaneous-play-mode. You and three friends can hit Pebble Beach online together to play the course at the same time. By ditching the turn-taking format of old, the game preserves all the fun of golf without the bore-inducing wait for your friend to shank his shot.

Here's a game geek cocktail: Mix Norse mythology with futuristic technology and create one hell of a mash-up game. The first installment in a planned trilogy, Too Human follows the plight of Baldur, the Norse god responsible for protecting humanity against robots gone wild. To stop the bloodthirsty machines you'll choose between relying on humanistic traits or piling on the technology. The game play blends the hack-and-slash combat of action games with the depth of a role-playing game to create a hybrid that is equal parts Devil May Cry and Diablo. Overrun with robots? Play Too Human's special blend of Rock 'Em Sock 'Em robots with three other people simultaneously online. —Matt Bertz