You’ve got to hand it to Capybara: they released two of the best “smaller” videogames of 2009 within a few months of each other, and both happen to belong to a genre that I for one had been totally through with. You know a game type has officially reached saturation when Kotex makes their own clone, but Capybara proves that match-3 still has some life left in it. Critter Crunch combined the descending action of Space Invaders with a novel "food chain" matching mechanic to great effect. Clash of Heroes, on the other hand, tries its hand at providing an alternative to the Puzzle Quest-style match-3 RPG. This is a game created for everyone who, like me, devoured Gyromancer and Galactrix last year but were left feeling cold.

To boldly go… Those words may be the slogan of Star Trek, but they’re also perfectly suited to the world of MMORPGs. After all, once you strip away the crafting, killing, friend-making, and leveling, MMOs are really all about seeing new things and going new places. A boring world can break an otherwise interesting MMORPG (see my review of Fallen Earth for exactly how this happens), while an exciting, beautiful world can keep players playing long after the game’s bad mechanics have grown old (City of Heroes, for one).

Starcraft 2 approaches. Even a third of that product, however peculiarly released, must cow and alarm Blizzard’s competitors. While SC 2’s release date is doubtlessly a no-fly zone for RTS’s, the genre of RTS practiced by Blizzard must also be dangerous territory. Traditional RTS’s will always have to stand up to SC 2, and chances are, they’ll be found wanting (as the most recent Red Alert game was found wanting). What better way to escape the approaching storm than to proclaim loudly that one’s franchise is now not just an RTS?

There are far too many MMORPGs to count and none of them take a post-apocalyptic world as their setting, not to the degree that Fallen Earth does. The other game that people hoped would do justice to some Wasteland was Fallout Online, which is still under construction at Interplay. Fallen Earth steps into the void left by this oft-delayed Fallout game with a distinct lack elegance. This is a rough, drab game, one that struggles for every second of fun it produces.