Legend took a floundering franchise and made it respectable again by taking the gameplay back to its roots and giving fans exactly what they want. With the right balance of puzzles and platforming, Tomb Raider Legend made Lara Croft relevant again in the world of video games.

If you want to get technical, you can say that this game is the sequel to Final Fantasy XI, which was an interesting experiment but certainly didn't live up to its pedigree. Final Fantasy XII took the series back to its console role-playing roots while reinventing the combat system and wrapping it all up in a lengthy, engaging story.

It's been painfully apparent for the past few years that the Madden series of football games have been stuck in a rut. Madden 07 for the Wii completely reworked the game to take advantage of the unique features of the Wii Remote, giving the game a fresh new perspective that's been sorely missing from the series for years now.

Go ahead--try to remember the last good Test Drive game. You'll have to go way back to the Dreamcast days or beyond to find anything remotely worth playing. But even though it may be easy to improve on mediocre games, Test Drive Unlimited still stands on it's own as a fun, unique take on racing.

The Super Monkey Ball games are known for simple, yet often fiendishly difficult, gameplay and a charming sense of style. The series suffered a setback with Super Monkey Ball Adventure, a poorly realized action adventure game, but Sega's franchise later returned to glory with the fun and fresh Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz for the Wii.