Roger Ebert has famously said that video games may have the potential to be beautiful, well crafted, and technically competent … but they are not art. In a later column, he asked what video game made to date could possibly stand up against the greatest movies ever made?

Admittedly, I find his premise faulty; I don't think a movie has to rival Casablanca or The Godfather in its brilliance to be considered art, nor do I think that a video game has to clear that hurdle. But I think eventually they will … and BioShock is the proof of that.

Halo saved the Xbox. Prior to its arrival, the gaming console was an also-ran; afterwards it was the definitive reason to buy Microsoft’s PlayStation competitor. Gears of War may be the Xbox 360’s Halo.

Like Halo, Gears of War features humanity fighting a desperate, last-ditch war against alien destroyers. As the game opens, the far-off human colony world of Sera has been decimated by the Locust, bipedal horrors that emerged from deep underground 15 years ago and sacked most of mankind’s cities and nations. As humanity’s last city teeters near collapse, an elite group of soldiers known as “Gears of War” show up at a maximum security prison to break out one Marcus Fenix, a former soldier imprisoned years earlier for going against orders and attempting to save his father from the Locust. Now it turns out that his father may have had the key to defeating the alien menace … and Fenix has to help find it.

My review of LEGO Star Wars II is up on SCIFI.com. I enjoyed the game alot; it's perhaps the first game for the Xbox 360 that I really love, though that's not saying much for the 360 since the game's available on, well, every other freaking platform out there.

The game has also inspired a sort of Star Wars awakening in my three-year-old daughter Jordan, who was previously terrified of the series thanks to the Darth Vader trailers for Episode III. Watching my play LEGO Star Wars, she's really gotten into the story (which I have to explain to her, since there's no dialouge). It helps that LEGOs are innately harmless (even Vader is cute rather than menacing) and it has a Princess (and Jordie is all about the princesses).

A few months ago I reviewed Futurama: The Game, and I was disappointed. Where Futrama the series was funny and entertaining, the game was repetitive, frustrating and boring, with none of the wit that made Futurama so damn good. It had the look, but it just didn't have the feel.

Now I've got The Simpsons: Hit and Run in my PS2, and I'm pleased to say that this Matt Groening game succeeds where its scif-fi cousin failed.

In Hit and Run you control one of five playable characters -- Homer, Marge, Bart, Marge and Apu (why Apu? Well, why not?) -- as you drive crazily through Springfield on a variety of missions. Each character is given their own portion of the game -- Homer kicks things off, ditching work so he can investigate mysterious black vans that have shown up all over town. Then it's Bart's turn, as he attempts to get a copy of a highly-coveted (and thus banned) video game. He goes missing at the end of his story arc, and then it's Lisa's turn, with her quest revolving around finding her brother. And so forth and so on.