Game of the Month: May 2006

With all the videogames that are released each and every month, it can be quite a difficult task to decide which title to spend your hard-earned money on. Granted you could go by our review scores alone and weed through the long list of names to find something that scored high or low, but what if you had somewhere else to turn?

Rather than wait until the end of the year like for our big award blowout, your incredibly masculine friends at IGN.com have decided to employ a monthly tribute to the weeks that were. We're resolved to illustrate to our readers what we thought was the very best game for each system over the past month, and tell you the reason why.

While some of us often chime in with our comments at the end of reviews, for the most part, the reviews on IGN are primarily written by one editor; in this feature we get all of the editors on a particular channel to vote for our Game of the Month. What better way to represent your channel than to speak your mind all at once?

How does it work? Simple. Any game released in the past month is eligible for the award and is taken through a battery of tests by every editor on that particular channel. After we've finished evaluating each game that comes down the pipeline, we put our heads together and decide on a single "best of" winner that's worthy of the title "IGN Game of the Month". Pretty straightforward, don't you think?

Now that we have the guidelines out of the way, let's move on and congratulate this month's winner...

Why We Picked It::

The competition for Game of the Month may not be too steep these days on the GCN, but this month did prove to have three potential victors nonetheless. Activision brought two of the three titles to the shelves with Over the Hedge and the official game for X-Men: The Movie. Majesco also had a release for fans of the Teen Titans franchise which also scored relatively well for a children's licensed product.

When it came to pure gameplay, however, Over the Hedge came out on top. Combining the age-old entertainment of the beat-em-up genre with some great character animations and environments, Over the Hedge proved to be a solid title to pick up if you have younger gamers that enjoyed the movie. The drop-in/drop-out gameplay was also included, adapted from the largely popular LEGO Star Wars franchise, and the ability to tag in and out at any time between a computer controlled teammate and human player is a huge high point in the game's design. Throw in some great special features for fans of both the film and the original comic strip and you have our Game of the Month for May. Not exactly what we would call a top-tier selection, but nevertheless a fun little action offering for younger gamers.

Runner-up: None.

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