Turn off the lights, puts some headphones on, and get ready to wake up in the world of Stasis. The trailers had us biting our nails off.

You wake up, covered in a green slimy liquid. There's nothing to indicate what time of day or year it is. You don't know where you are or what you're doing lying face-up in a dirty abandoned research facility. Yet, three defining thoughts enter your brain: Where's your wife? Where's your daughter? What are you going to do to get your family back? Stasis is an adventure horror game told in an isometric perspective, which is a viewpoint that is rotated slightly to reveal other facets of the game environment than are visible from a top-down perspective or side view, thereby producing a three-dimensional effect.

You play as John Maracheck, a man in search of his family within the confinements of an abandoned research facility. There is no beta or demo to try out, but there are two trailers that seem to capture the eerie horror of being clueless and alone in a facility reminiscent of one found in Dead Space or BioShock. The sound design in the gameplay trailer offers a bit of what to expect in the final product; eruptive sounds had us jumping out of our seats and creepy computer voices had us biting our nails. The game has no release date, but we'll be eagerly awaiting this one. Check out the trailers below and see for yourself.

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Image Epoch's latest action RPG aims to blend the best of anime and games with a twist of monogamy.

As we have seen time and time again in PlayStation-era role-playing games, mixing 2D sprite animation with 3D graphics can have mixed results. Developer Image Epoch knew that such an experiment would be risky, but the company that made Arc Rise Fantasia and the Luminous Arc series decided to say "screw it" and go for gold with Tokitowa, a game that claims to be an anime in video game motion.

As was evident from the Image Epoch webcast hosted by CEO Ryoei Mikage and producer Kei Hirano, Tokitowa is an action RPG for the PlayStation 3 centered on a blue-haired protagonist (which we would control) and his pink-haired wife, Toki. The key themes of the game's narrative are time and the bonds of marriage.

From the tiny clips of gameplay shown during the teaser, we can assume that Toki is a ranged character who uses her flying dragon pet as a combat assist. We didn't see any sign of the main protagonist in action, so we can't gauge whether players will have a two-person party or just tag in the other during combat.

What was also apparent was that every character and enemy will be in motion via traditional hand-drawn animation. Animation studio Satelight (Macross Frontier) and illustrator Vofan (Bakemonogatari) are handling the entire game's 2D art and look, while Yuzo Koshiro is responsible for the game's music. Speaking of characters, the teaser also showed other female members of the cast, ranging from a bespectacled brunette who may be an outdoor alchemist, to a blonde doppelganger of Toki.

What was interesting was that Mikage joked that players can cheat on the main character's wife and instead find another person to marry and date. Whether the extra glimpse of the cast means they're potential party members or spouses is still open to interpretation, but the possibilities make for something akin to a faithfulness meta-test (like Catherine did last year).

While we aren't fully convinced that what we saw would translate into a smooth gameplay experience, Mikage did state that the game is only 20 percent done and will be ready for display in time for this year's Tokyo Game Show. That said, the brief clips demonstrated the high-quality animation blending in very well with its background.

If all goes to plan, gamers can check out what could be a pleasing marriage between traditional animation and gameplay when Tokitowa is out on Japan shelves this year.

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Rhythm Heaven Fever looks to end the Wii's life cycle on a high note.

The popular handheld series Rhythm Heaven is finally making its debut on the Wii, and rather than requiring you to use motion controls to complete minigames, the new entry goes back to basics, incorporating properly timed button presses as its main mechanic.

For the unfamiliar, the Rhythm Heaven series has always been about using musical and onscreen cues to complete objectives. The series has been known for its fantastic use of music, its quirky art style, and its bone-crushingly difficult objectives. And that hasn't changed with Fever. You are still going to have a tough time mastering the 50-plus challenges that come your way. But unlike in the DS version, which incorporated the stylus to complete puzzles, you only have to worry about pressing the corresponding button at the correct times.

We sat down with the game and took a little rhythm test to get things started. The first test simply had us watch the screen, and when the A button appeared, we followed suit by pressing the A button on the controller. This was done to give us an idea of how to keep with the rhythm. The second test also incorporated pressing the A button, but we had to do so at certain intervals. In this test, we were required to hit the button every eight seconds. Early rounds of the test gave us a full countdown to help, but the last few rounds not only stopped the countdown, but also obscured the screen so we didn't have any idea how accurate we were in hitting the right rhythm

After the test, we moved on to some of the six games available. The first game was a golfing minigame where a chimp and a mandrill threw golf balls that we had to hit. While the chimp had an obvious pattern and lead-up to his throw, the mandrill was very fast, and we had to react quickly to avoid getting hit by his ball.

The second puzzle was a toy assembly line where we had to fasten the heads of robots. Not only did we have to place the head on the body in time, but we had to hold it there for the right amount of time for the head to fit properly. If you hold it too long, the robot will break, but if you let go too early, the head will more than likely fall out before reaching the toy store.

Our performances varied from getting a superb rating in a board meeting game (which required us to perform an action on par with the other people in the office), to downright awful in a game where we had to repeat the pattern of a tambourine-playing monkey.

Getting the timing right in most challenges will take a few tries.

Rhythm Heaven games are known for their difficulty, and although we made our fair share of mistakes as we played, it was still a lot of fun, and the songs accompanying the challenges were quite delightful. We sampled only six of the games available, but there will be more than 50 in the final game, including some two-player ones, which we didn't have a chance to try out. On top of that, there will be bonus content to unlock, including an endless mode that contains challenges designed to see how long you can perform them before failing.

Rhythm Heaven Fever hits stores shelves on February 13, only for the Nintendo Wii.

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Mass Effect 3 will be a renegade punch in the neck of its predecessor. Here's why.

If you've been paying attention to Mass Effect 3, you'll be au fait with a handful of headline features. The new cooperative multiplayer. Kinect voice commands. Freddie Prinze Jr.

You'll know this is the third and final act in a galaxy-wide fight for survival. The implacable Reapers are preparing to purge the Milky Way of organic life, for real this time, setting the stage for an epic, space-operatic endgame.

You'll have noticed how pretty it all is, from the scuffing on Shepard's N7 battle gear, to the sleek squidbots descending on Vancouver harbour. In our recent hands-on with the upcoming demo, we watched red storm clouds roll in over the Mars horizon, flickering with otherworldly lightning, and they looked spiffy too.

But beyond the all-new co-op, celebrity cameos, and ever shinier visuals, Mass Effect 3 is about to hand Mass Effect 2, masterful though it was, a beating on a galactic scale. Here's why.

[Warning: may contain traces of spoiler. If story hints bring you out in a rash, click away.]

Don't fear the Reapers.

1. More customisation

Mass Effect's weapon and character customisation is richer and more meaningful than that of its forerunner, which cut a bit too deep when trimming the customisation fat. Options are still on the streamlined side, but this time your Shepard (and his or her crew and gear) will be a creation all of your own.

Biotic, tech, and combat powers are at the heart of customisation again. You can level up each of a character's powers through six ranks, with a branching choice after rank three, offering a couple of tempting specialisation options. Compare that to the four ranks per power in Mass Effect 2, with the option to finally evolve it into one of two more-powerful versions right at the end, in rank four. Evolving a power much earlier makes the choice more significant, not least because you'll spend much more time using it before (probably) nipping through a Mass Relay for a heroic final rumble with the Reapers.

Weapons also hit a sweet spot of streamlined customisation. Take scavenged upgrades to a weapons bench, and you can add a couple of mods to each gun, boosting damage, range, and the like. And your choices are reflected in the weapon models as well as the all-important stats so, hey, your gun will look different to how your gun looked before.

2. Shepard's got moves

Shepard is scrappier and more agile this time around. In addition to that flashy omni-blade melee kill, Shepard can sneak in, grab an enemy from behind cover, and give it a surprise helping of holographic stabbing. Other abilities include tossing grenades, sliding into cover, and vaulting up onto obstacles without pause.

Getting in, out, and around cover is smoother in general, and there's more up-and-down action, too; the levels we saw were generously populated with ladders to showcase Shep's all-new ladder-climbing power and designated points for hopping down onto lower levels.

And those early concerns that some shooter extremists at BioWare were turning Mass Effect 3 into a balls-out gun game and nothing else have resolved into something much more agreeable: shooting stuff is just plain more fun in 3 than it was in 2, whether you're sniping a riot-shielded enemy right in the eye slot or peppering a Reaper minion with space bullets from up close.

Omni-blade action.

3. The old gang is back

So what has Liara been up to? Is Miranda still genetically perfect? Did Garrus ever fix that gaping hole in his armour? This we need to know. Tighter gunplay and fuller character customisation are grand, but it could all go hang if this last game in the trilogy weren't a big old Mass Effect reunion party. Luckily, it's a little bit of just that: all the squad members from the first two games make a return in Mass Effect 3. If you didn't get them killed, obviously.

They won't all be coming back as playable squad members; we're told there are fewer characters to team up with than in the expansive Normandy roster of the second game, with its crowded character select screen. But everyone's back in some form, with "a lot more of an organic feeling to the relationships," says associate producer Mike Gamble.

The first mission, in which Shepard swings by Mars on the way to the Citadel to investigate a Prothean technology archive, reunites her with two Mass Effect old-timers: Liara and either Kaidan or Ashley, according to which one you sacrificed all the way back in the first game. With Liara conjuring biotic singularities over clusters of bad guys, Kaidan snap-freezing them with cryo blast, and you gunning down the lot, it feels just like old times. Aw.

4. Cerberus are baddies, for real this time

We spent Mass Effect 2 uneasily cooperating with Cerberus because they had the resources and the intel we needed, but they were always shifty pro-human militants named after a triple-headed hellbeast; it's well past time those guys showed their true colours. Look for that in Mass Effect 3.

As the game begins, Shepard has severed ties with the Illusive Man and his posse, though Kaidan (or Ashley, presumably) is still giving you trouble for having done their dirty work. And up on the red planet, Cerberus soldiers are getting their hands bloody, executing the staff of the Mars base housing the Prothean archive.

They may have spared no expense bringing Shepard back from the dead in game two, rebuilding him or her around a charred scrap of corpse, but like holographic Martin Sheen says: he needed you once and now "your time is over." We predict plenty of Cerberus thugs mixing it up in the enemy ranks, alongside all the multiracial Husk variants. As a pitiless, genocidal machine-race, the Reapers are officially the Big Bad, but we're looking forward to being back on the right (wrong) side of Cerberus.

He's back as well.

5. Earth, at last

Though we had a tantalising peek at Earth from the moon, Mass Effect never let us set foot on the blue planet. Through all of Shepard's planet-hopping, there has been no trip back to the cradle of humanity--until now.

Mass Effect 3 kicks off in future Vancouver, home of humanity's Defence Council, and with respect to that city, we can't imagine that's the only Earth location in the cards. Though the early trailer depicting a Reaper attack on London may have been just for flavour, not a promise we'd be omni-stabbing Husks in Hyde Park, we'd bet on Earth turning up more than just once.

"Earth in general has some significance," says associate producer Mike Gamble, and that's all the encouragement we need to be daydreaming of epic ground battles across semi-familiar territory. Because there's no place like home(world).

The Mass Effect 3 demo launches on February 14.

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