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Most folks are familiar with Grimm’s Fairy Tales. Or, more accurately, they are familiar with the family-friendly, Disney-fied versions of Grimm’s Fairy Tales that have been made into popular movies over the years.

Yet the Brothers Grimm, who originally wrote their dark fairy tales in German in the 19th century, had far darker visions than the versions traditionally passed down by Walt Disney and Company. In fact, most of them would seem like appropriate bedtime tales for Jack the Ripper and Adolph Hitler, rather than visitors to Disney World.

American McGee’s Grimm plays off both the dark origins of these tales, and their popularized, less-frightening versions. The game, which is being distributed in three seasons of eight episodes each, via GameTap, allows players to take control of Grimm, a dwarf who has the ability to bring darkness to everything around him. He uses this ability to transform Disney-fied fairy tales into their darker German counterparts, to effects that are at once both amusing and scary.

At its heart, American McGee’s Grimm is more or less a platform-style of game delivered in brief, half-hour bursts that keep the action flowing and are not allowed to drag, which heightens the overall entertainment value. The gameplay emphasized keeping Grimm moving and converting objects in the game to their darker versions; he does this by means of a butt-stomp kind of move, and doing it enough increases his “Dark-O-Meter,” which allows him to convert more and bigger objects.

American McGee, by the way, is better known as American James McGee, and is one of the original designers of the first two versions of both Doom and Quake. He worked for Electronic Arts for a while before going independent, and now works through his development house, Spicy Horse, which is using the Unreal Engine 3 in the making of Grimm. Still, the system requirements are not very high and even most notebook computers should be able to handle the game.

Aside from the platforming genre, Grimm generally falls under the growing new category of so-called “casual” gaming, a trend sparked in part by the Katamari games, to which Grimm compares in mostly-favorable ways. That means that Grimm is not a hardcore-gamers paradise, full of complex moves and keyboard combinations; instead, it is a relatively easy game to play, and the focus is more on experiencing the story than conquering difficult levels.

So far, American McGee’s Grimm is well on its way through its first season; episodes already released include A Boy Learns What Fear Is, Little Red Riding Hood, The Fisherman and His Wife, Puss in Boots, and The Girl Without Hands. Still to come are Godfather Death, The Devil and His Three Golden Hairs and Beauty and the Beast, which concludes Season One, and will be released on Thursdays between September 4-18.

The distribution model for Grimm is unique; each episode is available to play for free on GameTap for 24 hours each Thursday; after that, they must be purchased for a small fee, or continue to be available to paid GameTap subscribers. American McGee has also confirmed he is considering releasing Grimm to the Xbox 360 platform via Xbox Live; no mention of PS3 or Wii releases have been made to date.

The graphics are stylistic and fun; the gameplay is easy to pick up and enjoy; and the episodes are brief enough to hold one’s attention from beginning to end, without a break, since they only average about 30 minutes per episode anyway.

As a unique idea in the market, well-executed, American McGee’s Grimm is an enjoyable, if somewhat disturbing at times, offering. Currently unrated, the content is likely to eventually fall somewhere between E10 for everyone ages 10 and up, to perhaps T for Teen. The graphical charm, clever tales and unique concept make American McGee’s Grimm worth a look for most gamers.

I’ve played demos of Total Extreme Wrestling long before I was asked to review this title, and I must say that with this latest version, the game has improved considerably. While there is still room for growth, with this version Total Extreme Wrestling 2008 officially becomes “playable” in my book.

What were the problems with previous versions? Well, for one thing, the series seemed dead-set on including a graphical wrestling match simulator that simply never worked very well at all. The graphics were barely up to eight-bit standards and the keyboard commands were simplistic, frustrating, and largely undocumented. Even walking down to the ring was a chore too ugly to contemplate, let alone do regularly. (Or am I thinking of Wrestling Spirit, Adam’s other wrestling title? I think both had that ugly match simulator at one point…)

Fortunately, the series has taken a turn in a markedly positive direction. TEW 2008 seems to have abandoned the graphical match simulator entirely (Yay!) and settled firmly into the PC text-based sports management sim category. And if anyone is thinking that such games went out of vogue with PC tape drives, think again. The interface for this game is quite good, and a marked improvement from previous outings; the level of art design is also a significant step forward.

For anyone who’s wondering what this type of game is and how it would compare to, say, Smackdown vs. Raw 2009, I would say this: think about that mode where you get to book Raw or Smackdown, making matches and filling out storylines and feuds… only imagine a version of that that actually works and is far, far deeper. Start going along those lines and you’ll have an idea of what kind of game TEW2008 is; and it does hold some addictive gameplay appeal for all the wannabe wrestling bookers out there.

Developer Adam Ryland, who has a clear love for pro wrestling (as well as mixed martial arts, but that’s another game…) has been perfecting his formula for several years now, and this time out, the result is a playable game, but not one without a rather steep learning curve.

One of the difficult aspects of TEW2008 is that there’s not an in-game, step-by-step tutorial as you’re getting started. The mysteries of the many and deep options within the game remain mysteries except by trial and error. Of course, there is some scant “getting started” information in a Word document, if you hit the right Help option; and it’s enough to get you through booking your first TV event.

But as for strategy on how to play the game well and earn good results? Well, there’s not much to go on within the game. Part of the challenge is that, for legal reasons, TEW2008 can’t emulate any real wrestling organizations or personalities. Therefore, there is no WWE, no TNA, no New Japan in the game. There are organizations reminiscent of them, but that’s all.

The game, in fact, is set in a fictional world called the “Cornell-verse,” and so unless you’re a longtime fan of the series and know what the heck is going on, it’s easy to get lost. For example, I started a freestyle career as head booker for the game’s WWE-like organization, SWF. With a roster clocking in at around 52 wrestlers, including a few who are “in development,” though most are active, it’s hard to know who’s who and how to book them.

Were the game licensed and able to offer up real-world figures, it would be easier to follow. After all, if I’m in WWE booking Raw, it’s easy to know that Randy Orton vs. John Cena is a main event-caliber match, and one you might want to save for a PPV. However, in the SWF, despite some helpful tools like the “creative meeting” to rank who’s hot, who’s not, who’s a main eventer, etc., it’s just a mammoth task to familiarize yourself enough with the cast at your disposal in order to properly book a show.

For example, the current SWF champ with the game starts is Jack Bruce, who’s slightly like Jeff Hardy. He’s a main event face, so I quickly involved him in a “challenger steals championship belt” storyline against Remo – who turned out, upon further inspection, to be more like MVP than Batista. So even though he’s a main eventer, he wasn’t a top one and my first couple shows and first PPV did poorly.

All the booking elements you might be familiar with from Smackdown vs. Raw’s GM mode are present here, but much deeper. You are expected to have some main storylines running through your broadcast, but it’s never made clear how many storylines are ideal to manage at one time. I chose four, and it seemed perhaps a bit much as I had to fit in a lot of angle elements into my programming grid, and average only about four or five matches per 90-minute broadcast.

OK, maybe that’s WWE-standard. Trouble is, as I looked at other CPU-controlled feds who are out-performing me, they have more matches, fewer angles, and fewer overall segments and obtain better results. I programmed my first two shows like a current Raw broadcast, with interviews, video segments, skits and hype segments as well as matches. My average grade was a C+ and my PPV result was lower, which “hurt” the SWF’s overall popularity. I ran an average of 18 segments with about five matches per broadcast, mimicking the Raw formula to a T, and I get a lot of “Yuck!” as a response from the game.

So either I’m really needing to put in a lot more hours learning my roster – a considerable time commitment considering I’ve already spent over five hours reading bios and the like – or the game has some sort of winning formula that I just haven’t mastered yet. And again, it’s not like there’s a tutorial for this stuff.

Booking is the heart of this game, and it can be a real hoot; but knowing your roster is a real key, as if you don’t, you’ll get feedback like, “You used Randy Bumfhole too much in this broadcast.” OK, he’s the tag title holder along with his brother; I put him in a match at the PPV to place the straps on more popular wrestlers, and then made him the victim of a post-match beat-down by Vengeance to advance a storyline I have going with him. That’s too much? Ugh! How am I supposed to know this?

Now, on the upside, there is a whole mod support community over at publisher Grey Dog Software, who are hard at work on a “real world mod” that will replace this confusing, overpopulated fictional universe with recognizable wrestling feds and personalities, much like Wolverine Studios attracts for their college and pro basketball games. At this point, I’d have to say that a real-world mod would make TEW 2008 about 500-percent more accessible.

That being said, I do get the sense that TEW 2008 is like a huge, hibernating bear. There are a lot of powerful tools in here, and once you learn how to use them properly, you can obtain a game experience that roars. But there is still room for refinement.

For example, while it’s great that there are a ton of storylines available to choose from, what is really frustrating is searching through all of them to find one of the small handful of appropriate elements you need to advance a storyline. In my belt-stealing storyline, for example, the storyline outline told me my next segment had to be an “Escapes with Belt – So Close” element. I searched high and low and couldn’t find a Narrow Escape segment that specified “with a belt.” So I booked what I could find and my storyline didn’t advance. Ugh.

One way to improve TEW 2008, and hopefully it can be handled in an update rather than having to wait for TEW 2009, would be to have storyline steps dynamically linked so that if you click on “5. Escapes with Belt,” a short list of acceptable options would appear, rather than having to search a massive list, even if you narrow it down by broad categories like “Confrontation.” Linking storyline steps to acceptable segments to fulfill those steps would be a huge help, especially to newcomers.

It would also be nice to receive booking tips within the game that give you the option to click a couple buttons and have some necessary elements auto-filled. For example, let’s say you’ve booked your main event, a couple title defenses, and some angle segments that satisfy the three or four storylines you’re currently running, but you have 40 minutes remaining to book and about a dozen key stars who deserve some kind of appearance on the broadcast. In that event, it’d be nice to be able to click some key stars, maybe one or two other elements, and then hit an “auto-book” button that would fill out the rest of the schedule.

Or, if you’re putting together a storyline, it’d be nice to have a storyline-checker to remind you of key considerations. For example, I did a “three challengers” storyline for my Shooting Star title, and got that storyline started on my Tuesday broadcast. Next day, my email told me one of my wrestlers had been caught by drug-testing doing ‘roids and I felt he deserved a one-month suspension.

Turns out, he was involved in the “three challengers” storyline and I had to kill the entire storyline. It would have been nice to have a warning pop up saying, “Wrestler X is involved in Storyline 4,” and then be offered the chance to replace him in that storyline with another wrestler, or to choose a lighter punishment so as not to kill the storyline.

It may sound like inattentiveness on my part, but remember, my roster is 52-wrestlers strong, and I added five key free agents recently to bring that count to 57. It’s hard to keep 52 fictional wrestlers straight in your head, so some idiot-proof warnings and tools would be a huge help.

In the end, Total Extreme Wrestling 2008 is a powerful, deep and addictive title that finally brings this storied franchise to a level I consider playable; there are still key elements that could help make the game more newbie-friendly and lessen the steep learning curve involved, however, and until more of those are addressed, the game simply cannot be considered top-notch.

That said, it’s come a long way since the last couple versions, and the improvements do make the game quite appealing. With the support of a mod-community – a modern-day essential for games of this type – a real-world mod pack might make the game a bit easier to navigate, though improvements to the storyline-database interface and some idiot-proof options would also help.

The core product is quite good; Total Extreme Wrestling 2008 is quite playable, even if it is still unrefined. The point here is that the potential long present in this series is finally rising to the top and soon – perhaps through some game updates, or maybe by TEW 2009 – the current algebraic complexity and steep learning curve will be addressed so that TEW can become everything it should be. Until then, the game is still very good, but falls just short of world-class status.

Text-based sports management sims have come into their own heyday recently, and one of the franchises that’s been around since before they became cool again is the Out of the Park Baseball series by Out of the Park Developments and published by PISD Software. The latest iteration, OOTP 9, is a game that had a generously-sized development team for a game of this type – seven people.

That team includes two lead developers, three team members who did extra coding, an art designer and a product manager. Considering most games in this genre are a one- or two-developer labor of love, that’s a huge staff. Of course, modern PS3/360 platform sports videogames like Madden NFL 09 or MLB 2K9 probably have PR departments, motion-capture staffs and memberships in the wine of the month clubs that are considerably larger than that – but that’s not the sort of game this is.

As a PC-centric text-based sports management sim, the emphasis of Out of the Park Baseball 9 is not on bleeding-edge 256-bit HD graphics, but on statistically-solid, realistic gameplay. If that’s your kind of thing – and L-RD knows, baseball stats fans like their games realistic – then OOTP 9 might be the baseball sim for you.

It’s been more than one iteration since the last time I checked out OOTP, and one of the first things that jumped out at me is the interface improvements since the last time I played a demo of the game, back around OOTP Baseball 6.

The menu is large, clear and self-explanatory, and includes friendly options for those who are upgrading from previous versions of the franchise, so that they can at least try to continue their dynasties in the new version. As I didn’t have any old save files from a previous version, I wasn’t able to test this feature, but word on the chat boards seems to indicate that it’s been a relatively smooth transition, though not without some rare and minor issues.

Once you actually get started selecting your team and such, OOTP’s “manager home page” system is laid out in three-columns and is organized and self-explanatory enough to be both appealing and not a huge hurdle to accessibility. You’ll always know where your team stands, thanks to this handy layout, and while you are offered a “play today” option for games where the game can unfold pitch-by-pitch, there are also four auto-sim options that will soon become the way most folks will eventually navigate their way through a season.

The menus are all clearly defined and easy to understand, the sim-screen adds a fun visual 2D element, and if you play through a single game pitch-by-pitch, the 2D display is serviceably but never forgets that it’s a 2D, text-based, sports management sim. (That’s intended as a compliment.)

Full of stats galore, powerful player search tools, and plenty of ways to use the game as a basis for a multiplayer league, OOTP 9 is a solid entry in the series and sets a standard others in the genre will have to meet or exceed to be considered “in the game.” OOTP 9 is already a step ahead of Baseball Mogul in that it features a more flexible financial model that scales to the era appropriately; and it’s interface is superior to PureSim Baseball 2007, though Shaun Sullivan is now hard at work relaunching his franchise for Wolverine Studios under the Draft Day Sports: Baseball moniker.

But until that competitor emerges for comparison, it can be clearly stated that Out of the Park Baseball 9 is the clear standard-setting this summer when it comes to PC-based baseball management sims. With a great feature set, a superior interface and top-notch organization and design, as well as realistic results, it would be hard to name a currently-available competitor that is even … in the ballpark.

It’s been four years (wow!) since I reviewed the last version of this PC game, and in that time, although the political landscape has changed quite a bit, Political Machine 2008 has changed hardly at all. Sure, there’s a roster update, but the game itself, as well as its art and design, have hardly changed at all.

Intended as a quick-play title that brushes over the details, Political Machine 2008 lets you choose to play as either a GOP or Dem candidate and they tosses you in against a series of increasingly difficult-to-defeat opponents from the other side of the aisle.

The strengths of the game four years ago are still strengths today; the game is sharp and fast-paced and even displays some wit at times. It keeps its politics fun and breezy, like an MTV campaign ad, rather than a PBS documentary on the political process.

Unfortunately, the game is simply too simple to appeal to the deeper political thinker; with the right strategy, in this game, Jimmy Carter can win over Ronald Reagan in a landslide, and we all know how he fared historically. (Yup, Carter got beat so bad, he ended up wearing personalized baby clothes for the next decade.)

The game also still limits the number of actions a candidate can perform each week by a stamina rating; each action has a stamina cost and once you’ve used it up, you simply have to finish your turn, as no more can be done that week. That wouldn’t be so bad if it didn’t seem like your opponent had twice as much stamina as you do, no matter what.

Many special events are still completely random, such as when you are given a chance to be on TV, on a popular show. Management of speeches and topics seems a bit more organizes this time out, but endorsements are still ill-thought-out. You see, in the game, there are various special interest groups you can win the approval of; parody versions of leftist and right-wing groups, such as the ACLU and the NRA.

Trouble is, the winning strategy is to win as many of these endorsements as possible, regardless of that group’s affiliation; there’s no negative penalty, for example, if a Democrat wins the NRA endorsement or a Republican wins the support of NOW. All you need to do is have enough points built up to buy that endorsement, and grab it before your opponent does.

Of course, we know reality doesn’t work this way; and that’s the main drawback of Political Machine 2008; just as it was four years ago, the game simply isn’t deep enough or realistic enough to satisfy real political junkies. I mean, heck, the game lets you run as Arnold Schwarzenegger, who isn’t even eligible, for crying out loud!

Folks who desire a more detailed political election sim may find what they’re looking for in TheorySpark’s President Forever; as for Political Machine 2008, it’s not a bad introductory title for the younger set, or as a party game, but there’s just not enough there to satisfy anyone looking for a deeper, more realistic political sim gaming experience.

I don’t like buying junk, but in the realm of computers, buying anything top-notch is usually beyond my budget. Whenever I get close to making a major purpose, I am careful to be certain that I search out the best buy I can find, whether at retail, online or through word-of-mouth.

This week, I was particularly blessed. I’ve been needing a new graphic card for my PC, one that will future-proof it a bit and make running games on it a viable option. My PC came with an ATI Radeon 2400 Pro with only 128MB RAM on it. Slow RAM. DDR1-slow.

I’ve always been more of an nVidia guy, and my underwhelming experience with the 2400 Pro hasn’t changed by opinion one iota. I’d been thinking of getting a half-decent 8600 card I found online at a discount. That was I’d only be spending between $99 to $149 on it. (Well, more than that, because I need a bigger power supply, too.)

Anyway, like anyone and everyone, I admired the PNY nVidia 8800 GT Performane Edition, but there was no way I was affording that, right? After all, it typially retails at $249 or so.

Well, I was at a retail outlet on Monday and found that very card for a mere $149, due to a weekly special! Talk about savings? As soon as I can buy the proper power supply and get both these things installed, my Acer Aspire will be flying for some time to come!

When some companies update their sports games, the changes from release to release are so minor, so cosmetic, it would make Jane Iredale jealous enough to look into IP infringement. That’s not the case with Wolverine Studios and developer Gary Gorski.

2007 has been a banner year for Gorski and Wolverine; they began the year updating their pro basketball game into the well-received Draft Day Sports: Pro Basketball, them releasing the second iteration of their pro golf sim, Total Pro Golf 2. Now, just before the Christmas holiday, the company has managed to release their version of college hoops, Draft Day Sports: College Basketball.

Actually, DDS:CB is an update of Gorski’s last take on college ball, Total College Basketball, which was originally released through Grey Dog Software before Gorski broke off on his own and formed his own publishing concern, Wolverine Sports. Since he was the sole developer working on TCB, he was able to take the game with him, but with the release of DDS:CB, the franchise is now back to being completely in his control.

Using a code base and design sense that debuted in DDS: Pro Basketball, College Basketball is functionally quite different from Gorski’s pro game. For one thing, instead of a pro draft and free agent period that predominantly takes place in the off-season, DDS:CB boasts one of the most detailed, advanced and in-depth college recruiting engines found in any college hoops title on any platform; yes, that even includes beating out the critically-acclaimed College Hoops 2K8 from 2K Sports, found on most console systems.

In Total College Basketball, recruiting involved only a slim selection of actions, including putting a player on a weekly call/watch list, as well as the occasional opportunity to schedule a campus visit, home visit, watch a game, or scout a game in-person. While that game stuck very closely to real-world recruiting limitations, the interaction between coach and player was limited but functional. With DDS: College Basketball, recruiting has grown into a complete game experience all its own, and can take place both in and out of season, still in strict accordance with current NCAA contact restrictions, as well as a realistic budgetary limitation on recruiting. (e.g., the larger the school you coach at, the higher the budget available for recruiting the best possible players.)

The main difference between TCB and DDS:CB is that the new game has amped up the sense of real contact between player and coach. One is able to interact directly with potential recruits via interactive phone calls, and the player’s responses are based on not only his general interest level in your program, but in your coach’s ratings as well. Also, recruiting success is highly dependant on coaching skills in DDS:CB; even the best coaches won’t necessarily see a player’s true ratings in basketball skills and abilities, but a less experienced coach with low ratings in the areas of scouting and recruiting, for example, could really vary quite a bit from their actual, hard-coded abilities.

For example, with low ratings, a less experienced coach might look at a Greg Oden-style player and see only an average center, while at the same time looking at a guy like Minnesota Gophers center Spencer Tollackson and seeing an all-Big 10 talent where only an average player exists. As one progresses through a coaching career and improves these abilities, perceptions will stray less and become more accurate, but will never be 100 percent true.

This is because that even among very talented coaches, opinions vary and DDS: College Basketball reflects that; current Gophers coach Tubby Smith, for example, valued Canadian point guard Devoe Joseph very highly and pursued him with intensity before signing him. Joseph actually plays shooting guard in Canadian high school ball, and so some equally-talented college coaches never pursued him has a point guard prospect. While Devoe was highly pursued by both Kansas and Minnesota, for example, Florida and Duke never seriously went after him.

Wolverine developed DDS: College Basketball by following a very public path of opening the beta testing of the game to anyone who purchased a pre-order of the game. This allowed the company a plethora of opinion from the people who play the game most: devoted fans. While no game releases without any flaws, this public beta has produced a relatively stable, clean version of the game in its initial release.

Also, developer Gorski has announced on his company’s message boards that the game as released will see new features introduced as time goes on, as he has added to the code base the capacity for several new features suggested by his public beta-testers, but that are, in release version 1.0, currently not utilized. Therefore, we can expect the game to get even more feature-rich as time goes on and successive patches are released.

Supported once again by a devoted and prolific mod community, Draft Day Sports: College Basketball’s official release is free of any trademark infringement, but for those who desire a more genuine, real-world experience with the game, there are unofficial mods available that can enable those daring enough to modify the game to make sure they are playing, for example, the Minnesota Golden Gophers, rather than the Minnesota Rodents. Since these mod designers are not employed by Wolverine and reap no profits from their freely-distributed efforts, it’s a no-harm, no-foul situation that can make the game feel perhaps a bit more authentic.

The real benefit of the game, however, is the way in enables multiplayer online leagues to be formed and supported through the game itself; a full-featured commissioner’s office is available so that online league administration is possible. In the 1.0 release, however, this is the least-changed feature of the game and although some much appreciated minor fixes have been implemented, such as making it possible for the game to track the money spent each week on recruiting functions by each team, the game still tasks the commissioner to enter many functions manually, rather than allowing each player to accomplish these tasks within the game and email their team file to the commissioner.

This is an unfortunate oversight that makes being the commissioner of an online league far more labor-intensive than it ought to be; hopefully some of the upgrades waiting in the code for future patches include automating some of these owner/commissioner tasks by expanding the actions the .tem file is able to capture.

Such minor oversights, however, do not make this game any less amazing an upgrade than it is. While many uses of Total College Basketball never thought the game could be improved, Wolverine and Gorski are, as always, incredibly open to user feedback and have implemented the best and most-often requested improvements into the new title already; as future patches promise only to add to the experience, the end result is a game that is at the top of its class. Whether compared to competing text management sims or the company’s own released in the past year, Draft Day Sports: College Basketball is the best game of its kind on the market today.

One of the best things Atari ever did with the Dungeons and Dragons license after splashing onto the PC scene with the Baldur’s Gate series was to create its spiritual successor, the original Neverwinter Nights, which not only offered epic storylines in the package, but a robust set of tools to encourage user-created adventures and mods so that, quite literally, there’d never be any real reason to stop playing the game.

It worked well, and last year’s upgrade of that PC classic, Neverwinter Nights 2, was long overdue and much welcomed, even though BioWare, creator of the original Neverwinter Nights, had sadly moved on to other ventures, including the recently released Xbox 360 blockbuster, Mass Effect.

The first expansion to Neverwinter Nights 2 continues Atari’s fine tradition of long-term support of the series. Mask of the Betrayer contains an all-new, full-length adventure that basically picks up where the previous adventure left off, with your party trapped in a underground cavern, sitting at around Level 18, and wondering what happens next.

The story, which is richly realized, especially by PC RPG standards, is an entertaining one, though I can’t say too much about it without giving up tons of spoilage and, well, we wouldn’t want that now, would we? So let’s just say that the fine storytelling standard of the first game does not go missing here.

While there are graphical tweaks and lots of new objects in the game, there’s no real graphic upgrade to speak of, which is done to ensure that mods created by anyone using the Neverwinter Nights 2 toolkit will be able to be played by anyone else playing the same game. So don’t expect a new leap forward in graphics until Neverwinter Nights 3 starts being a gleam in Atari’s eye, sometime around 2010 or beyond.

One aspect that is nice about this game is that you get to explore a completely different neck of the Forgotten Realms woods; the game takes place an entire continent away from good ol’ Neverwinter. That frees the developers up to add new monsters, new races, new classes and yet maintain an internal consistency to the Neverwinter Nights 2 universe.

The presence of more puzzles and mysteries to be solved helps diversify the game play a bit more this time out; sometimes in D&D games, combat is the first and primary option for resolving anything, which makes sense given that the franchise’s name is not Pleasant Conversation and Dragons. Even so, it’s nice to see some diversity brought to bear on how one spends their time in the game world.

Overall, Mask of the Betrayer is a fun adventure in and of itself and adds a lot to the arsenal of the “create it yourself” crowd that keep so many of the rest of us playing this game endlessly. Nearly every expansion pack for the Neverwinter Nights and Neverwinter Nights 2 series has been a must have. This is no exception.