So Don't Give Them Alone in the Dark: Apparently Little Timmy wants to be scared, but he's not willing to wait until next spring for Resident Evil 5. Your job is simple, go to the local game store and get that little guy a truly scary experience. But you have a lot on your mind these days and completely forget what game little Timmy wanted, so what do you do? You look for the scariest sounding game title you can find. You see a lot of terrible names (Wario Land: Shake It!, Skate It, N+, Too Human, etc.), but there's only one scary name that stands out to you: Alone in the Dark. While Silent Hill: Homecoming sounds a little creepy, the prospect of being alone in the dark is just about the scariest thing you can think of right now ... well, standing in the middle of the pee-drenched mall chain buying a video game is the scariest thing you can think of, but Alone in the Dark is a close second.

See, to you being alone in the dark IS scary. It forces you to sit there, all by yourself, thinking about all of the terrible things you've done in your life. How you can never forgive yourself for cheating on little Timmy's dad. Or how you have this secret addiction to pain pills that nobody knows about. Or how much better life would be if little Timmy wasn't always bugging you for gifts. These are the things that keep you up at night, the things that scare you when you're alone in the dark. Unfortunately little Timmy is going to be scared for a much different reason, and chances are he's also going to be a little pissed off that you bought him Alone in the Dark and not Dead Space. Seriously, mom, being dead in space is way scarier than being alone in the dark. Duh!

The Logical Conclusion: Despite his initial misgivings, little Timmy will reluctantly open up the game and try to get scared. Unfortunately Timmy won't find the New York City setting to be very scary, nor will he be frightened by the silly looking enemies. What will stick with him, much to your chagrin, is a life-long fear of fire. Arsonphobia is what the doctors call it, but to it's just your son always carrying around a fire extinguisher and making sure there's never anything flammable close to fire place. At first it makes sense, after all you can never be too careful when you're talking about fire. But soon enough he's opening doors with his fire extinguisher and having a hard time sleeping knowing that the house could go up in flames at any time. If you had just bought little Timmy Dead Space then he would be afraid of going into outer space, something he would never do anyway. But no, you had to buy him Alone in the Dark. Way to go, I hope you have enough room for all those fire extinguishers.

So Don't Give Them Golden Axe: Beast Rider: When talking about all of the reasons why he should get Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood, little Timmy tells you that it's a brilliant reimagining of a Sega franchise, that it stars one of his favorite Sega characters and that it's finally going to show us the gritty side of one of his all time favorite games. He said a few other things, but you've found that it's better to just tune him out and shake your head in agreement every few seconds. By the time you get to the game store all you remember is "Sega", "reimagining" and "gritty". So, when you explain that information to the game store clerk he has no choice but to show you Golden Axe: Beast Rider.

Despite having nothing to do with Sonic and his animal pals, Golden Axe: Beast Rider is a re-imagined Sega game that is a lot grittier than its predecessors. Little Timmy's mistake was not drilling into your head that it's "Sonic" and he's "blue". How are you expected to know who Sonic the Hedgehog is? You can barely tell the difference between Pong and Grand Theft Auto IV, to you they are all Godless killing simulators that are going to destroy our youth's innocence. Still, you know buying him Golden Axe: Beast Rider is going to shut him up, so you pay the $60 and wrap it up in that novelty Jeff Foxworthy wrapping paper you've been using for five years. You're an awesome mom, and you know it.

The Logical Conclusion: Expecting cute, adorable Sonic the Hedgehog critters, little Timmy is scared out of his boxer briefs when he sees that dragon thing on the cover. He'll be even more mortified when he discovers that Golden Axe: Beast Rider is a fundamentally flawed resurrection that fails to get even the basics right. His world will be shattered and it's all because you didn't get him Sonic Chronicles. After suffering through Golden Axe little Timmy will start to wonder why he ever loved Sega in the first place, disillusioned by their terrible quality control. He'll start to wonder if maybe Sega has been bad all this time, but he was too blind to see it. He'll start to see his love for what it is, not the lust that it once was. He'll forsake Sonic, NiGHTS and all of the other Sega characters he once loved. Instead he'll get strung out on the harder stuff, like Nintendo games and those movies adapted to Lego. Oh the horror!

So Don't Give Them American McGee's Grimm: You thought you were off the hook for this one, since little Timmy insisted that you could buy both episodes of Penny Arcade Adventures: On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness online without taking a trip to the game store in the mall. After getting John Scherer (the CEO & founder of Video Professor) to help you get your computer online, you're off to the races to figure out how to buy and download the games he wants. And that's when you see the price is $30, lot more than you were expecting to pay for a pair of downloadable games. But that's when you see GameTap's advertisement for American McGee's Grimm. For around the same price you'll get a dozen episodes of Grimm, as opposed to the two you'll get from Penny Arcade. It sounds like a good deal to me.

But wait a second. You stop and think to yourself that this year you would really like to get little Timmy something he wants. You want him to be happy when he wakes up on Christmas morning. You don't want a repeat of last year when instead of getting him Call of Duty 4, you got him Hour of Victory. So you go back to Steam and get your credit card information ready. But just as you're about to click to purchase, you start to think about each of the two games. On one hand you have a game about fairy tales, while the other game is about a web comic? How lame is that? Those Grimm episodes include Beauty and the Beast, Little Red Riding Hood and Puss in Boots. What does Penny Arcade have? Robots? Hey, what is that robot doing to that orange?? Yeah, American McGee's Grimm is definitely the way to go.

The Logical Conclusion: I hope you're happy, mom. Because all of those fairy tales you tell little Timmy as you tuck him into bed are about to scare the bejesus out of him. Think that Cinderella is an innocent story? Just wait until he's done playing through the freakishly twisted version of it in American McGee's Grimm. He's never going to trust any of those stories you tell him, not The Girl Without Hands, The Fisherman and His Wife, The Golden Goose or even A Christmas Carol. Then again, he should have known something was up with The Devil and His Three Golden Hairs. I mean, seriously, it has the Devil right in the title.