If you're into action adventure games Prince of Persia is your game, but if that's not for you there's a new Kingdom Hearts title, and a whole slew of Wii and DS games that might spark your interest.

She called you a what?
Video game journalists receive games in the mail all the time, but this week a number of publications received not new, but modified versions of Animal Crossing to show off the game's training feature that allows users to train their characters to say something. The big surprise here was when Barbara began calling the journalists an offensive racial slur. Nintendo has has released an apology statement since the story broke.

Let's get this out of the way right here: The Wrath of the Lich King expansion for World of Warcraft is not for new players. Buying this game will do literally nothing for you unless -- or shall we say until -- you have a character that's at least level 55. This is especially unfortunate considering the fact that this add-on contains some of the best content the developers at Blizzard have produced in years.

Anomalous! That's the word I've been racking my brain for over the last hour. It's the word that best describes this week's downloadable music offerings as we move past Thanksgiving and Black Friday and Cyber Monday and Tepid Tuesday and whatever other new and clever dates local newscasters are whipping up to reflect this year's uncharted economic territory.

Millions of people all around the world put down nearly $100 earlier this year to use their Wiis for something other than games. Wii Fit, which is still in short supply at many retailers, introduced a new peripheral known at the Balance Board. If you have one of these or you’re thinking about buying one, you may wonder if it’s actually worth the cost for basically one game, especially if you’ve fallen out of the Wii Fit habit. But never fear, because this holiday season is brining a number of releases that take advantage of the peripheral. Here are some of your best bets.

To an inexperienced gamer, controlling a modern snowboarding game must seem about as difficult as manning an actual snowboard down an epic slope -- for some, maybe even more so. Simultaneous use of analogue sticks, trigger-mapped jumps; hell, even the game SSX Blur for Wii, system of choice for accessible gaming experiences, mapped movement to both the Nunchuk motion controls and its analog stick. What's a newcomer or uncoordinated person to do?

Despite immense popularity on the PlayStation 2 and original Xbox, snowboarding games have been curiously MIA on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. Case in point: Shaun White Snowboarding, named after and starring the Olympic gold medal-winning pro boarder, is merely the second such genre entry on the Xbox 360 (following 2005's Amped 3), and the first for the PlayStation 3. Expectations are naturally high, but Shaun White Snowboarding is not quite the revolutionary and all-encompassing snowboarding title that some shred-heads were anticipating, though that doesn't mean you can't have some fun with it.

Jennifer Palmer and her boyfriend David Rosowski were playing Viva Pinata online when he asked her an important question. Spending time in the quirky gardening game wasn't anything out of the ordinary for this gaming couple, but the question was. It involved a diamond, and a ring, and the decision of a lifetime -- and she thought it was a joke.

Parkour. You may not know it by name, but you'll know it when you see it. It's a discipline where you use the quickest, most efficient movements possible to traverse obstacles in seemingly impossible ways, and it ranks among human beatboxing, the Manualist, and this break dancer as a YouTube video you watch once, and immediately wish you could do. It was only a matter of time until someone made a video game out of it, and with Mirror's Edge they made a pretty damn good one.

Summary: A grind is a sequence of actions that is repeated (over and over) with the expectation of receiving some eventual reward as compensation.

As a rule, grinding sequences are mind-numbing endurance contests fought between your blistering eyeballs and the unearthly cramp in your right thumb. Grind sessions are often unstimulating and offensively repetitive -- endurable only because of the promise of an eventual reward, whether that be enough experience to level up, a shiny new helmet, or even just one more achievement on your 360.