With the exaggerated architecture, fantastic backgrounds, the rival Scythemore Academy, and the tale of a young boy learning the lessons of friendship, I can’t shake these comparisons to Harry Potter. Trade quidditch for soccer and Dumbledore for Pele, and you get the gist of Academy of Champions.

It is a light mixture of Mario Strikers and Persona, or even The Sims. Like any school, Brightfield Academy is as much a place to make friends and navigate the maze of cliques as it is an institute of education. The bonds you make on campus have everything to do with your performance on the field. Perhaps you are on the lookout for a new striker. One candidate will only join a fashionable team, while another will only join if you have enough girls to see him in action.

Academy of Champions version of soccer doesn’t delve into the burdens of boundaries and fouls, so don’t expect a Fifa RPG. Matches are breezy affairs, reduced to the basics of passing, shooting, tackling, and some fancy special moves. Gameplay is too simplistic for my taste, especially after shutting out my first two opponents, but Academy of Champions isn’t meant for gamers seeking a hardcore experience.

Academy of Champions is light-hearted, family-friendly entertainment. I envision a few of you wincing at those words, but the plethora of choices and role-playing elements that go into building a team will surely keep Academy of Champions from plumbing the depths of insulting simplicity seen in most kid-tailored sports games.

The DS is the last platform I expected to see a 3D, open-world game debut on. Ports and spin-offs of console titles at least have the fame of their bigger brothers to mask the obvious limitations of Nintendo’s handheld. C.O.P. is forging ahead with pure bravado and impressive feats of technical prowess.

In this tale of an ex-street-racer recruited into the police force, the streets of NYC are wide open and the cars are fast. 60 frames-per-second fast, with almost none of the motion-blur that has plagued other forays into 3D. All the trappings of metropolitan, open-world games are accounted for, including hijacking (oops… commandeering) cars and cruising the streets between 60 mission, plus many more randomly generated missions. With your title, you also have privileges to organize roadblocks and S.W.A.T. strikes in the name of justice.