The coming of summer brought with it a surprising wealth of excellent games, and we awarded no less than six Editors' Choice awards throughout the month of June. The games in question were diverse as well as numerous. Solid Snake sneaked his final mission. A revamped version of the 30 years-old Space Invaders surprised on the portables. Ryu Hayabusa slashed up a new army of demons. Sony's cute virtual golfers teed off once more. And then there were Final Fantasy Tactics A2 and Battlefield: Bad Company. Yet there are only three Game of the Month awards to go around. Our choices? Read on.



June 2008 First Runner-up
Final Fantasy Tactics A2: Grimoire of the Rift (DS)

The appeal of the original Final Fantasy Tactics Advance and Final Fantasy Tactics (recently re-released on the PSP) are nearly legendary among console and handheld strategy gamers. Doing little to change the established Tactics experience, it succeeds in providing all the tactical joy found in the previous games while stripping away a few annoyances and adding a smattering of new and meaningful features.


The addition of the Bazaar for building new weapons may seem a bit frustrating at first, because it limits your characters' advancement (you have to find loot won off of defeated creatures in order to craft new weapons), but ultimately it's just one more thing for you to obsess over in your continual push to grow your army. New jobs and new races also deliver new character-progression paths that provide the long-term rewards necessary to keep the game lodged snugly in your DS for months to come. Tactics A2 is a perfect example of how not fixing what isn't broken can result in another superbly tuned and hopelessly addictive DS game.