The James Logan Courier

By Farah Ali, Courier Book Reviewer
The four years a girl is in high school can seem like the most important thing to her. For Winter, and her best friend Sloane, making it into the "popular crowd" is everything to them. Since their freshmen year at Ocean High, they have been unnoticed and invisible, tired of standing on the sidelines while the rest of the popular kids are taking advantage of their high social status. But as their freshmen year comes to an end, Winter and Sloane promise each other that they will do everything in their power to become popular as their sophomore year rolls around, including joining the cheerleading team. Will they stick together as best friends, and follow through will their high-status aspirations?

By Nataniel Lazaga, Courier Staff Writer

In this reboot, NetherRealms Studios breaks away from Midway after the awkward rendition of Mortal Kombat Vs. DC to give players a reboot of the Mortal Kombat franchise. In the newest Mortal Kombat installment, combatants fight in order to save earth from Emperor Shao Khan.

The story mode takes place between Mortal Kombat 1, 2 and 3, which gives old players great memories of each of the fighter games' classic stories but also lets newcomers understand the Mortal Kombat story so beloved by older generations. The story gets to the point of understanding the classic Mortal Kombat but does not go too deep for newer players.

By Milto Ungashe, Courier Staff Writer

Catching Fire is the second book in the Hunger Games Trilogy by Suzanne Collins and it picks up where the first book left off, continuing Katniss Everdeen’s extraordinary story in the post-apocalyptic nation of Panem.

Talks of a revolution are spread all through the twelve districts of Pand, and whether she realizes it or not, Katniss’s failure to play by the rules in the Hunger Games helped spark the rebellion.

By Billy O'Keefe
McClatchy-Tribune (MCT)

It's been a long time — 10 years — since we last saw Aya Brea in "Parasite Eve II," and for those who cared about the games she was in rather than Aya herself, this likely isn't the homecoming you had in mind.

Officially, "The 3rd Birthday" marks the continuation of the "Eve" storyline, an opera of mutated monkeys, genetic engineering and spontaneous combustion that's entirely too bizarre to explain succinctly. Unofficially, it doesn't much matter: Only a few other characters make the crossover from "Eve" to "Birthday," and while there are definite ties to the past — Manhattan and Christmas Eve really do not mix in Aya's world — the new storyline feels more like a fresh crisis for a familiar face than something reliant on events whose explanations exist in a decade-old game.

By Billy O'Keefe
McClatchy-Tribune (MCT)

Though a rousingly successful experiment, "Portal" was still an experiment — so much so that Valve snuck it into players' hands as the wild card in a five-game suite that also included "Team Fortress 2" and "Half-Life 2" and its two expansions.

As such, while it was a wonderfully original game, it also felt like a project with nothing to lose — short, a little barren in the user-friendliness department, and flashing a hilariously, dryly insulting sense of humor that made the user-unfriendliness its soulmate.