The month of July took the GameSpy editorial staff to Santa Monica to check out the biggest games of the holiday and 2008. While there were plenty of games to get excited about for the future, we still had to make time to check out some of this month's releases to give you the scoop on what's worth playing. We had the pleasure of playing through some great games in the strategy and action genres, as well as an interesting utility for expressing your creativity. Read on to find out what we thought were the best games of July.



July 2007 Second Runner-up
Traxxpad: Portable Studio (PSP)

Don' t let the steep learning curve of Traxxpad: Portable Studio throw you; if you have any interest in making music or seeing what a "video game" can be, try this game out. This is, in fact, a portable studio. The game includes 1,000+ samples, but you can make your own in-game if you want. A channel editor lets you change the pitch, volume and balance of notes one at a time, a channel at a time. And you can either go into the full "Studio Through A Console," or STAC, and sequence out your song, or use the light version of STAC, MyXxer, if you just want to fool around.

What really kicks Traxxpad into high gear is how it really is built around the idea that you will be making songs that you want people to listen to. So while you can share tracks with other PSP users over local wireless, you can also export your songs as MP3 files to anything that can read a Memory Stick Duo. So while the so-so documentation makes it tough to dig into Traxxpad, you're getting an amazing music-creation and sharing tool for a meager forty bucks.

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July 2007 First Runner-up
Civilization IV: Beyond the Sword (PC)

July's first runner-up for our Game of the Month is an expansion pack so huge that it practically qualifies as a sequel. Civilization IV: Beyond the Sword offers three major new mechanics that completely alter the way the game is played. Espionage has been re-designed to be available much earlier in history and now has a dedicated Spy unit that can be used to pull all sorts of dirty tricks on opponents ranging from stealing technology to poisoning a city's water supply.

The Apostolic Palace is a sort of medieval United Nations that significantly affects diplomacy and international politics and offers a brand-new religious victory condition. Finally Corporations are a bit like latter-day religions that offer significant benefits and a hefty maintenance cost to the civilization that controls them. There's also a laundry list of smaller features including hundreds of new units, buildings, civilizations and Wonders.

What makes Beyond the Sword so compelling, though, isn't all the new items that players can monkey about with, it's the way that these items fundamentally change the basic gameplay of Civilization IV, mostly for the better. The Apostolic Palace, for example, completely reshapes the role of religion in the game, making it now the key factor in determining strategy. Smaller improvements like revised rules for forts have big impacts as well, reworking the late game when it comes to using air units. Peaceful players will wonder how they ever survived without the Statue of Zeus, too.

Even better, should the basic game start to wear, Beyond the Sword comes with some amazing scenarios and mods that completely rewrite the game. In short, if you're a Civilization fan at all, you've got a new entry on your "must-buy" list.

Essential Links And the winner is...