Best New Games This Week: 7/14

Wondering why this week looks a little light? It's because it's also the week when the entire video games industry gathers in Los Angeles for an annual preview of the year's upcoming games. So if this selection doesn't appeal, and if you're keen to find out what you'll be playing for the rest of the year, check out our coverage of this vital event.

Top Three:

NCAA Football 09

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College football season is nearly upon us, and how could you kick it off without a new release of EA's hti NCAA game? This year, EA has added the ability to share rosters, which should please series fans no end - previously, NCAA regs could make full named rosters hard to find. The controls are overhauled, the field and sideline characters are more realistic, and you can even customize the music played in your stadium.

We Love Golf

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Did you like Wii Sports Golf? Us too - for the thirty minutes it took us to get bored with its one-course, one-dimensional gameplay. We Love Golf promises to take that idea - a simple-to-control, cutesy golf game - and expand it into a title that's worthy of a full-priced retail release. Check it out.

Elf Bowling Hawaiian Vacation

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Very little could make Elf Bowling even more surreal. Setting it amid the beaches, volcanoes, and lush forests of Hawaii, however, might just do exactly that. If you're not familiar with the plot, you play Santa Claus as he takes revenge on his elves by using them as bowling balls. As if that wasn't enough to contend with, you also have to deal with the elves shouting insults in an attempt to distract you, and use enlarged gutters and magnets to stymie your foes' attempts to beat you. You can't make this stuff up. Elf Bowling Hawaiian Vacation is either a masterpiece or the product of a horribly diseased mind, or perhaps both. Try it out and make up your own mind.

Best of the Rest

• Money Tree
  Help William the gardener grow magical fruit in this friendly, fast-paced download.
• Baseball Mogul 2009
  Updated, revamped, and souped-up for 2009, this baseball management sim is a must for ball fans.
• Nancy Drew: Phantom of Venice
  The popular sleuth tackles a Venetian crime syndicate in her latest adventure.
• Space Chimps
  The computer-game version of this computer-animated movie launches this week.