Only, Wii Fit Plus isn’t a sequel. As the title would suggest, this is the Wii Fit that we knew and loved for two weeks before never loading it again, with a few new extras. New Yoga poses and muscle routines are included, as are a wave of new games. On top of this, the ability to string combinations of these together – which frankly, was a ridiculous oversight first time round – and have the console suggest workout plans is also new.

Of the new games, Island Cycling is a fun variation on the original’s Jogging. Here, you march on the Balance Board as if you’re pedalling, whilst holding the Wiimote in front of you like the handlebars of an admittedly tiny bike. Juggling is also top drawer fun, as you’re tasked with balancing on a ball whilst using the Wiimote and nunchuk to juggle balls that are thrown to you from either side. This is fiendishly difficult but superbly fun. Another sets you the task of flying from one location to another by flapping your arms, and this works surprisingly well. The board works out exactly when you’re flapping your arms and replicates the action on screen with aplomb and this makes for an enjoyable – if suitably very tiring – game. Some other additions are not so fun though. One sees you stood inside a circle of numerical mushrooms (yes) and requests that you shake your hips to the left, right, front and back in order to activate the ones that add up to ten. If anyone was looking through your window, it would look like a sex simulator as you thrust forward and back like a madman, but there you go. Another puts you on the driving range and throws so much information at you about the mechanics of a golf swing and how shifting your weight will improve your shots that by the time you actually get a club in your hand and get to take a shot, you’ll have either cooled down, gotten bored, or died waiting.

And this is Wii Fit’s problem. The entire package is far too fiddly to be of any actual use as a fitness product. Let’s say that I want to record my weight every seven days. The best time to do this is in the morning, before you’ve had your breakfast – so they say. After powering up the console and skipping the health and safety screen, I select my Mii, then select “Body Test” and skip through the animated Balance Board, who greets me and then wants to offer me a fitness tip. I wait for the board to calibrate. I jump on; wait for a few seconds and get asked how heavy my clothes are. Another ten seconds passes and the weigh-in is complete, or so I’d think. No, the game now insists on telling you how your balance was during the actual period in which you were being weighed, and then runs through an animation in order to show me my absolutely useless (according to practically everyone with any knowledge of the subject) BMI. Then, the game actually records your weight and tells you about your progress.

Put simply, Wii Fit Plus (as Wii Fit was) is far too fiddly to be of any long-term appeal. You seem to be messing about with menus for far more time than you actually end up spending on the Balance Board and the amount of times that one of the in-game “characters” talks to you and says absolutely nothing of any actual use just beggar’s belief. This is painfully obvious when it comes to using the new workout routines system that Nintendo have included. You can pick a routine that is scheduled to take thirty minutes, and then check your watch when you’re done to see that whilst you have indeed exercised for half an hour, you’ve also spent an extra quarter of an hour faffing about with menus, instructions or listening to the trainer who’s decided – for the tenth time this session – that your balance is perfect and that you should keep it that way because of the health benefits.

When I say that the characters don’t say anything of use, that’s exactly what I mean. Of COURSE having good posture is good for your back. This is obvious to anyone with a brain. What isn’t obvious is that the next exercise will require me to turn my Balance Board through ninety degrees in order for me to be able to see the screen and follow the prompts whilst I carry out the exercise. However, the game is under the impression that this is obvious, so doesn’t mention it – unless you’re playing a mini-game.

When you compare it to EA Sports Active, which is easy to use, has a decent routine planner that will plan out an entire month of exercise for you (instead of the “tell me what routine you want to do today” approach of Nintendo’s effort), Wii Fit Plus looks like a very average product. Sure, it’s better than the likes of Jillian Michaels’ Fitness Ultimatum or the second entry of Ubisoft’s My Fitness Coach series (which is a renamed version of the US-only Gold’s Gym Cardio Workout), but that isn’t saying a great deal when those titles have been rushed together in order to take advantage of a craze. Is it harsh to say that when the product costs half the price of a standard new-release game? I think so, especially when EA’s effort can be picked up for the same money now, complete with the extra bits that are needed to play it.

As a multiplayer party game, Wii Fit Plus has no equal. Everyone loves getting on the board and trying to pull off the longest Ski Jump, or trying to become the best fish-catching Penguin. This new version is even better for this situation, thanks to the new offering of games. However, as a serious fitness tool – which is presumably what everyone assumes that it is, thanks to the name – Wii Fit Plus leaves a lot to be desired. The ridiculous amounts of hand-holding need to be kicked out for a start, better routine planning options are needed, and someone could also do with informing Nintendo what a “warm up” should consist of, since I’ll bet a fair few folks will end up doing themselves an injury as they step on to the board cold and are asked to take on one of the more strenuous games in order to get the blood pumping.

Some would say that given the lack of any real improvements to the underlying fabric of the product, that this is nothing more than a way of making a quick buck. During my time with Wii Fit Plus, I can’t say that I’ve seen anything that allows me to provide a solid argument against that point.

Firstly, the development team have implemented Balance Board support that works very, very nicely indeed. Then, they’ve decided to limit Balance Board usage to single events only, meaning that if you want to play the game’s full Olympic mode (or “Festival”) you’ll have to deal with “standard” controls only. Fortunately, those standard controls are much more refined that in the first title, with much more emphasis being placed on skill, rather than the rampant flailing that was required previously. That isn’t to say that things are as accurate as they might be – far from it – since the game doesn’t employ MotionPlus support. Usually, this wouldn’t be mentioned, but there will be times when playing MSOWG (yeah, MSOWG) that you’ll be cursing the developers for not including it.

Unlike other multi-event games, there aren’t really any events included here that you could single out as being particularly weak. A strong roster featuring skiing, skating, curling, hockey and more is included, with some of the control systems coming across as strange, but yet surprisingly fun. Jumping into a bobsled for example, requires the player to hold the Wiimote and nunchuk vertically in front of their chest, and lean their body left and right in order to steer the sled. It doesn’t sound like much, but this is superb fun that – when used in multiplayer mode – will have everyone in stitches. Even events such as ice hockey – which sound as if they’ll be terrible to control with the available peripherals – manage to be engaging and fun.

Being successful in any of the game modes rewards you with in-game currency to use in the Olympic Village, which will “sell” you relatively worthless unlockables such as new music and paint-jobs for your skis and such. Completists will have a field day, but most players will be non-plussed, especially when they’re being asked to pony up virtual currency for books that explain seemingly everything you never wanted to know about the Olympic movement.

However, some unlockables are genuinely worth the hassle, and those come in the form of the returning Dream Events. Here, new spins are taken on the Olympic sports, with the standard activities being shifted to new arenas. Dream Alpine takes you back to the Green Hill Zone from the original Sonic the Hedgehog game, whilst Dream Ski Cross has a distinctly Mario-esque feel about it. Another highlight includes taking larger characters such as Eggman (Dr. Robotnik to you and I) to the figure skating rink and tasking them with prancing about to Ave Maria, which is just too funny for words.

The problem with Mario and Sonic at The Olympic Winter Games is that – despite an improved control system – it’s far, far too similar to the first game. Sure, you have new events and yes, when you get four friends huddled around the Wii it truly is friendly enough to give everyone a real chance at winning. But, it feels all too much like a case of the Emperor’s New Clothes to truly be considered as a vast improvement over the original title. MotionPlus support and the accuracy that it brings would have done wonders – especially since the relatively expansive Festival mode is so much fun – in making sure that this was a title that would be trotted out time and again for a quick go. As it stands though, the package suffers from being just another collection of mini-games. Of course, with the big licences involved, it stands far, far above the millions of other mini-game collections that are available for the Wii but ultimately, Mario and Sonic at the Olympic Winter Games doesn’t fulfil the potential that those licences afford it.

However, when I had laid out the required £100 for the turntable and game and played for a few hours, I was left wondering why that’s the case. Put simply, it feels to me that either the game is being rated highly simply because it’s a game in the “Hero” range and a decent score will lead to much love and many band kits from Activision, or that I’m just not “getting it.” Having played pretty much every music game released over the course of the last decade, I’m hoping that my ability to see quality has not deserted me and that DJ Hero is indeed, the substandard experience that I’ve found it to be. Oh, and I won’t be mentioning the fact that you can get a friend to come in and play on certain tracks with a Guitar Hero controller either, as the execution is so half-arsed that you’ll probably do it once and then never try it again.

The turntable controller looks – and generally is – quite natty. The turntable itself is of a decent size and contains three coloured buttons so that you can control three separate tracks at a time. A crossfader sits to your left (or your right, if you decide to remove the mixing board and attach it to the other side – which is a nice touch for lefties) as does a dial for sample selection and for “freestyle” control in certain sections, and a button with which you can set off “Euphoria” – the equivalent of Guitar Hero’s “Star Power.”

And, when Grandmaster Flash (with a really strong voiceover – one of the best I’ve heard, in fact) introduces the game and takes you through the individual actions required to dazzle a crowd, you can SEE how it would all work and provide a compelling game experience. The Original DJ teaches you the basics of controlling tracks, scratching, playing samples, activating Euphoria and doing everything else that the game will ask of you. This is all as easy as pie and makes a great deal of sense.

Unfortunately, whilst DJ Hero does show some occasional flashes of absolute brilliance once you start to play the game proper, there are so many little, niggly things wrong with it that the whole experience feels average. Your task is much as it was with Guitar Hero. You’re given a song (or in this case, a mix of two songs) and are asked to follow the on-screen commands in order to get through to the end of the track with the crowd still…well…present. There’s no failure to be had here, so even if you absolutely and totally suck, you’ll always manage to complete the track – and this is the first issue. With other music games, even if you hated a song to begin with, you could end up loving it by having to really practice in order to get through certain sections, or from having to play it twenty times as you kept failing on the first chorus. Here, you don’t need to practice the more difficult tracks, as there are generally stacks of easier ones that you can play through in order to make up the required points that unlock further sets and venues. On top of that, the lack of any real atmosphere from the crowd means that you’re missing any feeling of accomplishment when you nail that quick crossfade switch or when you hit the beat as it kicks back in after a less frantic section.

The gameplay itself is actually well planned and does the job for the majority of the time. Those who are hooked by the game will be coming back to no-fail their way through the higher difficulty levels – which really are supremely challenging – well, as challenging as something that doesn’t allow you to fail can be, anyway. However, you’ll need to make some modifications to the controller if you get to those upper echelons though, since the crossfader – which is relied on super-heavily on most tracks – is incredibly fiddly. You’ll find that you’re often coming back from the left channel to the centre, only to find that you’ve gone too far and ended up activating the right channel. This is simply because the controller as it stands doesn’t provide enough of a “click” or any resistance when you hit that centre point, where a real crossfader on a real mixing deck actually does. On top of this, minor issues such as scratches being pre-recorded, and not actually having anything to do with the way in which you move the turntable, mean that there’s very little freedom to be had. That isn’t helped by the way in which the “freestyle” sections work. With these, you’re allowed to tweak the dial on the controller to alter the amount of base and treble for a short while. You’re never given enough time to make anything sound remotely decent, and there’s little warning as to when the freestyle section will end, meaning you often end up running from zero bass to regular bass in one beat – which sounds awful.

The final nail in the coffin for me though, was the selection of tracks. Yes, there are absolutely stacks of songs here and yes, some tracks by lesser known club-friendly acts have surprisingly been included but, being honest, the majority of the mixes are dire. I mean seriously, The Jackson 5’s “I Want You Back” being mixed with Third Eye Blind’s “Semi-Charmed Life” wasn’t ever going to work JUST because the two songs are good as separate entities. A lot of mixes are weighted incredibly badly, with one half of the brace of songs being very, very, very sparingly used, whilst the other track dominates proceedings. There ARE some good mixes here, but you’ll find that they are towards the back end of the game and to be fair, a good percentage of players will have given up by then after realising that they’ve spent between £80 and £170 on something that they aren’t really having fun with.

With all of this said, DJ Hero is not a terrible game. The minor niggles that I’ve mentioned are exactly that – minor niggles. At times, I really got into it and found myself saluting the virtual crowd as I completed a perfect section, and was desperate for the next track to be a real floor-shaker but, more often than not, that wasn’t the case. If you dream of being a DJ and are absolutely oblivious to the skill and practice involved in accomplishing that goal, then this will be a fair purchase for you, since basically, it allows you to pretend to be a DJ with as many of the mixing deck controls as could feasibly have been fit onto the controller without pushing the price up past the £200 mark. As a gaming experience for those of us who don’t fall asleep at night dreaming of opening our own Superclub though, I would suggest that DJ Hero shows an awful lot of potential and does a heck of a lot of things right, but ultimately falls foul of the old rule that suggests that tiny little issues can turn into game-killers if left unchecked. The Guitar Hero series generally represented value for money when you were spending £80 on a controller and the game. DJ Hero doesn’t really provide that same feeling of money well spent, especially when you consider other titles that are on the shelves right now for less than half the price.

I remember Christmas Day 1991 most clearly. At what was probably about 5am, I scurried downstairs to confirm what I had known for ages (thanks to my covert “just tear the corner a little so it looks like it’s been dropped” method of scoping my gifts to come) and tore that wrapping paper off with much gusto to reveal the goodies inside. A brand-spanking-new Sega Master System II, complete with Sonic the Hedgehog and the built-in Alex Kidd in Miracle World. I was set for the day. It wasn’t the newest console on the market (the Megadrive/Genesis had been out for a year or so), but I was ridiculously happy with my gift. Sonic ruled the day, of course, until I became bored and decided to give “that other game” a try.

I was hooked. Alex Kidd was a supremely solid platformer with super-bright visuals and a challenge that seemed just about right for me at the time. I played it, and played it, and played it until I reached the point where every game seemed to take a lifetime. In reality, it was only taking an hour or so, but I was getting to the same level and subsequently watching little Alex expire time and again until the “Game Over” screen was presented. Frustrating? Yes. A game-killer? Not on your life. If anything, it extended the life of the game as I was absolutely determined that this time, I’d get past that level and beat the game. For all of the years that I owned that Master System, I kept on trying.

And you know what? I still can’t beat it! Every now and again, I trot out the old Master System emulator and have a quick blast at the game to see if my now-superior skills will get the job done but – damn it all to hell! – that same level still gets me every time. Does this make me a failure? No. Does this mean that I hate the game? No. Does this mean that I need to practice a little more or refine my skills a tad in order to complete it successfully? Indeed it does.

With the modern era of gaming, that side of the addiction has been utterly lost. First came password saves, where you’d jot down a string of letters and input them later on in order to pick up where you left off. Then came the memory card, which allowed you to select an on-screen option and load up your last position as if you’d never been away. Now, we’ve got the built-in hard drive, which acts like a giant memory card and – seemingly – means that whatever game you play will autosave your progress every three and a half seconds. That’s fine and dandy, since it effectively unlocks the ability to make longer and more expansive games. After all, not many people would see the final acts of Grand Theft Auto 4 if they weren’t allowed to save, would they?

No, what’s killed the addictiveness, is the games themselves. In an increasing number of cases, you’re no longer able to fail. I believe that the Codemasters started the trend of being able to “rewind” races with the excellent Race Driver: GRID a couple of years ago. The idea was that if you hit a corner with a bit too much pace and span out, you could hit a button and be taken back to the point before you reached the turn, in order for you to try it again successfully. You could only do it a few times in a race, and if you decided to turn the option off, you were rewarded with a bigger purse when you won. This made sense. Newer players could learn the limitations of the game without being punished too harshly, gradually getting to the point that they could take the training wheels off, so to speak, and evolve into the sort of hardcore player that would laugh at the insinuation that they would need something so demeaning to be included.

Then came Forza Motorsport 3, which “evolved” the feature somewhat. Here, the game allows the player to rewind a seemingly infinite amount of times, for no penalty whatsoever. Obviously, you have the option to not do so, but even though the game would be richer as the “one more go at beating this race” factor kicked in, the action on offer isn’t addicting enough to prevent that rewind button from being far too tempting when you’ve managed to overcook it on a corner whilst attempting to overtake the leader on the last lap. In essence, you can’t fail. If you’re aiming to win a race, there’s absolutely no reason why you’re not able to – no matter what your level of skill – provided you have a car that is of a similar ability to the field. If you crash, you rewind and try it again. If the toughest opponent looks to be getting the better of you on the final straight, you rewind to see if you can get away from the corner faster. If you blow the start by over revving, a quick tap of the button takes the starter back to his rostrum and the cars back to the grid to have another go. The complete lack of risk will cause some players to drive like absolute maniacs – completely going against the game’s sim-like nature – and will cause others to look elsewhere for their thrills. After all, where’s the fun in really pushing it on the last bend to take a podium position, when you’re not ever really “pushing it” at all?

It’s happening in other titles too. DJ Hero doesn’t even ask you to rewind (unless you think it’ll sound good) and never lets you fail anyway. You begin a track, do really badly, and the game just continues on playing – occasionally trying to “help” you pick up the now-flailing threads of the mix – until the end of the cut. Sure, you aren’t rewarded with a perfect score for being awful at the game, but there’s very little to make you want to go back and play through a song that you suck at. Just ask any Guitar Hero player who’s tried to graduate through the difficulty levels (from easy, to medium, to hard and then to expert) exactly how good they’d be at the game now if they were never forced to repeatedly play songs that they were terrible at, just to unlock the next set of tracks. There are some calls for a “no-fail” mode in these types of games, especially when playing with two or more players where not everyone is particularly au fait with the controls or aren’t as good as the rest of the group. But, in single player mode, there’s no call for it at all.

Elsewhere, EA have pioneered the ability to purchase upgrades for your character, vehicle of professional sportsman with real money. Don’t want to play through a few hockey seasons to improve your player? Just throw a few shekels Microsoft’s way and they’ll give you a booster pack that turns your created character into Jaromir Jagr’s more talented brother. Don’t fancy spending time playing Skate 2? For another four quid, EA will unlock the whole game for you, without you even having to have stepped on the skateboard.

Do players want these options, or do developers just think that they do? Or, are these “features” the result of a namby-pamby society where failure is not allowed and everybody has to be told that they’re doing brilliantly at everything they do, every second of every day, lest they fall into a heap of despair on the floor? Are we going to get to the point where we can put a disc in the console, press a single button and watch the game play itself? Who knows? Personally, I have to say that without the ability to fail, success doesn’t taste anything like as sweet.

A quick check online tells you that the battle rages on. Some sites are reviewing Forza 3 as if the forthcoming (one day) Gran Turismo 5 already has it licked, whilst a large amount of gamers seem to be happy to wait for Sony’s title, lest they…I don’t know…somehow damage themselves by playing a game from a genre that they love for a few months. I digress.

Let’s get the bad out of the way first, shall we? Forza 3 suffers from a little disease that I like to call “GT-itis.” This infection manifests itself through some distinctly dull and weary AI that provides little to no interactive challenge to the player. Sure, on the highest difficulty level, the opposition racers are difficult to beat, but that’s simply because of their cornering skill. They brake superbly, get a decent line and they’re away, getting a better exit speed due to their advanced skills. When you do catch them though, they seem to completely ignore the fact that you’re there. You can pressure them, bump them and outbrake them, but they never flinch and will only deviate from the racing line when it is absolutely imperative that they do so. You’ll never turn a corner to see an AI driver flipping end-over-end after a horrid collision, or even to see one spinning his vehicle through 180 degrees due to overcooking it on a double apex – simply because they’re not racing each other. The only time that the opposition make mistakes is when you’re literally pushing them off their racing line, and that leads to some relatively thrill-less gameplay at times, especially when you’re driving in the slower cars early on. Some will say the thrill comes from obtaining and driving ever-faster cars, but the game gives you access to them far too early for this to be any sort of reward. It’s also quite bizarre to have to install the contents of the second disc (1.9Gb worth) before you play, and then still experience long, long, long loading times between races.

There. That’s the bad stuff done away with.

The sheer number of licenced cars and fictional championships on offer means that if Forza 3 gets its hooks into you, you’ll be playing for a long, long time. Vehicles feel sufficiently weighty at the bottom end to be believable and at the top end of the spectrum, feel as twitchy as you’d expect a supercar to feel when tuned up to the max and being pushed to breaking point around a corner. If you’re connected to Xbox Live, a busy auction house (for cars) and “Storefront” system (for designs and graphics for those cars) exists to allow you to spend some of your hard-earned credits on items from other users. Or, if you fancy yourself as a bit of a designer, you can paint your own pieces of artwork or full car designs and then sell them in the same manner in order to make a few extra dubloons to spend on that new air filtration system. Little touches, such as being able to view how many owners a second-hand car has had (not that it makes any difference to the performance, unfortunately) are what sets Forza 3 ahead of the rest, and are what will keep it there for the time being.

Graphically, Forza 3 runs at a super slick 60fps that when compared to other titles claiming the same thing, isn’t in the same league. Put simply, the game ALWAYS runs at that speed, with no slowdown and a distinct lack of anything as amateurish as draw-in. Not that you’ll have a chance to notice, given that you’ll be too busy trying to make sure that you’re clipping your corners properly and trying to knock a half-of-a-half-of-a-second off your laptime.

And that is where the elusive thrill finally comes from. You see, Forza 3 is essentially giving you a sandbox in which to beat laptimes. The offline competitions are little more than a tasty morsel to get you acclimatised to the game and to point you in the right direction, but the real fun comes from tuning and upgrading your favourite car as you want to, and attempting to beat your own best. Once you’ve done that, the post-race online leaderboards will instantly show your standing in the world of Forza 3 drivers.

As any hardcore racing fan knows, this is where the game is at. It doesn’t matter how good the AI opponents are, or how the single-player career progression works. It doesn’t matter that the superb damage modelling will leave your mouth agape after the shards of metal and fibreglass have finally finished falling. It doesn’t matter that casual players won’t understanding “get it.”

Ah. Therein lies the problem. You see, for hardcore racing fans, Forza 3 is a must-have purchase that ticks all of the boxes. The online community is strong, the physics are accurate and the combinations of cars, tracks, upgrades and tuning options is beyond being realistically countable. For the more casual player that wants a realistic racing game, the experience can appear to be somewhat lacking at first glance, though. All there is to do is play a few online races, or play through a career mode that consists of a stack of individual championships that are only distinguishable by the limitations on the types of cars that you can use to enter them. If you’re like me, you’ll find that with the default settings, you’ll grow tired of the actual racing action within a few laps. But, then you’ll tweak those difficulty settings and finally hit upon a combination that is challenging enough for you, and you soon find yourself sitting down for four or five hour sessions of play.

And this is another reason why Forza Motorsport 3 is such a sneaky title. You sit down to play it and are impressed by the aesthetics. Then, you play some more and slowly become bored, before realising that you really should look under the hood and see if anything can be done to remedy the situation. You turn off the ABS, Traction Control and push the difficulty level up to the top. Halfway through your next race, you realise that you’re having trouble keeping your car on the track and that you’re in the middle of the pack, and everything clicks in to place. It’s far from perfect, could do with differing event types in single-player mode and can take a while to really grab you, but Forza Motorsport 3 really is a solid prospect. Petrolheads should have been in the queue on day one.

As it turns out, they’ve created a decent representation of GT’s solid graphics engine that easily stands up to scrutiny. This is classic Gran Turismo from the outset and whilst that’s a good thing, there doesn’t seem to be an awful lot of game to be had from it in this form.

As I say, the on-track action is much as you’d expect from a title in this series. Driving “properly” is the key to obtaining fast times and winning races, and the AI drivers simply refuse to budge from the racing line, lashing around the track with the same gritty determination to absolutely ignore all of the drivers around (or directly behind and directly in front of) them as they have done since their first outing on the PSOne. You would have thought that someone would have worked on this a bit by now, but there you go. Graphically, the game runs at a relatively smooth 60 FPS, which can be incredibly impressive once you get into a faster car, and there are stacks of tracks to take on.

The problem though, is that there are no championships, no career mode of any sort (although I suppose you could call the whole thing a career mode, if you like) and very little reason to keep on playing once you’ve gotten over the initial novelty of seeing Gran Turismo running on a handheld console. Sure, you can take on the licence tests (which are as frustrating and unfair as in other titles in the series) and if you fancy, you can play in ad-hoc multiplayer mode against your friends. But, when you’re on your own, the only thing you can do is set up a single race against those lifeless, uninterested and unchallenging AI drivers, with the reward being cash to spend at the various car dealerships in order to enable you to do the same thing over and over again, but faster.

Speaking of the dealerships, it is practically impossible to complete your car collection, simply due to the fact that at any given juncture in the game, only a handful of them are available to you. Dealerships open and close when they feel like it, and the vehicles that they offer are undoubtedly selected at random. I declined the opportunity to buy a DeLorean in the style of Marty McFly on day one of my game, but then never saw the car again for as long as I played. This means that completists will feel somewhat frustrated by the time they’ve only got 20 or so cars to collect, and that takes away some of the game’s appeal, especially when a car that you “need” appears for purchase, and you can’t afford it. And no, you aren’t allowed to sell your cars in Gran Turismo PSP, so you can’t raise the money that way.

Another thing that reduces that appeal is the generosity of the game from the outset. You start with enough money to feasibly go into the dealership and buy the fastest car on sale that day. So, that feeling of achievement of getting a car that whips around the track at hundreds of miles an hour is completely missing, because you can be driving one in your first race.

Gran Turismo for PSP is not a terrible game. It just feels as if that whilst prizing a terribly good graphical performance from the little console, the developers have completely forgotten to give players a reason to keep coming back to play time and again. The full-sized versions of the game never suffered from that problem, so it may be that even the most hardcore of Gran Turismo fans will feel a little bit short-changed here.

The idea behind Fairytale Fights is – as mentioned – a cracking one. Take good and wholesome fairytale characters such as Red Riding Hood, Snow White, Jack (from Jack and The Beanstalk) and the strangely Naked Emperor (from the tale of the Emperor’s New Clothes) and set them down in a world where they get to hack, slash, chop and headbutt their way to solving a mystery or defeating a Fairytale overlord. Pour pints and pints of blood into the mix to ensure a suitably “alternative” sounding age rating, and you’re done.

But, all is not well in the land of fairytales, since the developers have worked hand-over-fist on creating an incredibly violent game and, in terms of the amount of blood spilt and the way in which the story presented, have done a good job. They haven’t, however, seemingly spent any time on polishing the gameplay, the majority of which runs through like a modern take on the old-school 2D platformer. Your character leaps to high ledges, bounds over spinning buzzsaws and dodges underneath swishing swords, dispatching of stacks of drone enemies along the way, before reaching the boss and working out how to dodge which of the limited number of attacks he or she is about to use.

It’s all very formulaic, and becomes even more so when you realise that there are only a handful of different enemies to take on and that if your weapon has the ability to slice them in two, you’re practically unbeatable. Stacks and stacks of different weapon types are available, from branches to chainsaws, but you’ll very, very rarely want to experiment with the effects of anything other than the most powerful melee tools. These – being saws or knives – will bring about a “picture-in-picture” view of your slicing action that gets old incredibly quickly. Sure, it’s funny to see a fairytale drone toddle around in two separate parts…but it’s only funny once or twice. When you’ve seen the animation thirty times before you’re halfway through the first part of the first level, well, you’ll be glad they’ve given you the option to turn it off.

This is far from the worst of the game’s problems, though. The main issue that I found was that of judgement. Due to some very, very squishy-feeling controls and a camera that seems to work well one minute, and hideously the next, you’ll often find yourself unable to negotiate even the most simple of stereotypical platform game obstacles. Fortunately, there’s no limit to the amount of times that you can die, but you do lose some of the (seemingly pointless) riches that you acquire each time you do so.  The only thing I found that was worth doing with the money I’d accrued was to spend it on new weapons when I stumbled across a location that enabled me to do so. Unfortunately, this led to me being given things such as three branches and a rolled-up newspaper – items which commonly appear throughout the game for free. So, collecting things isn’t just seemingly pointless, after all.

But the killer for Fairytale Fights, is the control system. For some reason, the development team decided that it would be a grand idea to map your main attacks to the right analogue stick, and to do so in a way that doesn’t make any sense. When facing a character attacking from the front, you’ll flick the stick right in order to hit it, and land a successful blow. Then, you flick the stick left and…land the same type of attack. It makes little sense, and there’s absolutely no reason why attacks couldn’t have been mapped to one of the several unused “standard” buttons. Flicking the stick multiple times breaks out a combo, whilst holding it in one direction will charge up a super attack – when the game decides to realise that you’ve been holding the stick, that is. More often than not when attempting this manoeuvre, you’ll end up being attacked yourself before anything happens.

Fairytale Fights is a missed opportunity, and no mistake. The concept is superb, and even with some slightly above-average platforming action, it could have been a must-have title. In actuality, that platforming action is more often than not filled with problems, and that’s before I even think about discussing the amount of times that the game decides to slow to a crawl when there’s too much of it going on. At times, the game feels as if it’s getting the job done really well and there are some genuine moments of comedy to be had but at no point does Fairytale Fights manage to get ahead of its own technical issues, general gameplay complaints and bizarre developmental decisions. In a packed winter schedule, this would have to have been something special to get any sort of recognition but – I’m sorry to say – it’s probably going to end up getting the recognition that it actually deserves.

The goal is – obviously – to get past the waves and waves of enemy fighters, tanks, bombers and missiles, and reach the boss on each level. On occasion, friendly helicopters will hover past and drop a power-up to enable you to fight more effectively.

This sort of setup has been the basis for many, many superb games dating all the way back to the digital primordial soup. It doesn’t seem to work that well here. The main problem is the ridiculously random difficulty spikes that Heavy Weapon throws your way. I blasted through the first five levels – which are completely devoid of challenge – without losing a single life. Then, I hit the sixth level and proceeded to use four continues before reaching the seventh. All of a sudden, helicopters dropping nuclear missiles – which kill you if they hit ANY PART of the ground – start flying in, and your only option is to shoot down their payload before taking the vehicle down itself. Bearing in mind that you’re also being attacked on all fronts by the standard opposition, this becomes quite a task in itself. Once you do get past these troublesome fellows, you find that you’re back to the heat of the normal battle which – whilst now slightly more challenging due to the sheer amount of enemy fighters coming your way – now has the additional problem of those nuke-droppers turning up from time to time. There’s very little in gaming that’s more frustrating than being blown to smithereens by a nuclear missile that you can’t even attempt to take down because you’re penned in by gunfire from drone ships.

But, death comes with no penalty – other than losing your nukes and having to restart the level. Losing all of your lives brings up the option to try again, which you do – complete with your score and collected power-ups intact. This means that you have very little to lose, and therefore there’s never any feeling of pressure here. You complete a level or two, die, restart the level, complete it, die, restart the level and so on and so forth until you’ve beaten the game.

Bosses are another point of contention. With any 2D shoot-em-up, the bosses are the eventual target and generally bring out an impressive display of gunfire. I can safely say that not a single one of Heavy Weapon’s bosses show any sort of creativity or challenge. For the most part, you can collect your maximum load of three nukes during the level itself, and pretty much just unleash them all on the boss to defeat it. Every now and again, a boss will require about five seconds of concentrated gunfire on top of this but in general, if reducing thrilling passages of gaming to three button-presses was the goal, then Heavy Weapon succeeds.

So, Heavy Weapon isn’t what you’d call a superb game. The graphics look to have been ripped directly from the Flash-based version that debuted a few years ago – which kind of negates the point of playing it on a PlayStation 3 – and there isn’t any real reason for extended play once you’ve completed the mission-based section of the game. That’s if you haven’t given up and decided to play a good 2D shooter by the time that happens.

With NBA 2k10 being a bit of a disappointment in terms of stability, I thought I’d give EA’s game a proper workout this year, and I have to say that I’m glad that I did as I really enjoyed – and will continue to enjoy – the experience. Everything you’d expect from a game that forms one of the current-generation of EA Sports titles is here, from the sponsored sections (the “Sprite Dunk of The Night” for example) to relatively accurate visual portrayals of every NBA player, with some seeing a nice set of signature animations – if their status demands it. Dynasty Mode is here, with some sweet features such as the ability to take a look at potential draft picks on the court before the draft itself, and a semi-realistic player signing game that challenges you to put a non-monetary proposal together in terms of what someone actually wants from the move in order to convince a player to sign for your club –as well as offering him a ludicrous salary, too, of course.

The Adidas Live Run mode, which puts you in pick-up games featuring up to 9 other online players, and the ability to take advantage of the game’s Dynamic DNA system, which allows you to download daily-updated player and team “DNA” reflecting the player and team’s tendencies on the real life court, are here too. With Dynamic DNA, if Bargnani (the first of many references to my failing, but beloved, Toronto Raptors) has the hot hand from outside the arc in real life, then you’ll do better if you replicate a long-range style of play when you have control of him as his in-game ratings will be more indicative of the way he is playing in real life. The ability to replay any of the season’s actual NBA matches and build them in to your own version of the NBA season is also on hand, although as with FIFA’s “Live Season” mode, I can’t really see the point. If the Raptors win in real life (it’s rare, but shush), why would I want to replay that match in order to get them to…win?

What is really notable by its absence though, is any sort of individual player career mode. FIFA 10 has one, as does NHL 10 and, unfortunately for NBA Live 10, NBA2k10 has a relatively in-depth one. I’d expect to see it make an appearance in next year’s title, but the lack of the mode this time around feels like a missed opportunity, especially given that the only other notable game mode allows you to play as national teams (even England, although they’re awful) in the FIBA World Championship tournament.

On the court, players look great, albeit a tad too “shiny” for my liking, although they all have accurate equipment (wristbands, leg supports and the like) and tattoos that are replicated in ridiculous detail. The arena itself is nicely detailed, with all manner of cheerleaders and staff lining up in the off-court areas until they’re needed. This, along with the absolutely superb crowd looks and sounds cause NBA Live 2010 to come across as probably the most atmospheric sports title of the current crop. Just to alert you to the detail on offer here, Vince Carter moved from the Raptors to the Nets in 2004 under somewhat pressured circumstances, and in NBA Live 2010 – just as in every real life match that the Nets have played at the Air Canada Center since  – when the Nets visit the Raptors, Carter gets booed every time he has the ball in his hands. Impressive stuff. Indeed, there’s nothing quite like getting that last-second basket to win the match in your home arena to bring the hairs up on the back of your neck as the crowd erupt in support. They don’t recognise every potential game-turning play every time, but they do a general good job.

What isn’t so impressive, is the way in which the in-game commentators lack any sort of personality. They don’t joke, they’re incredibly repetitive and in some cases, downright dumb. I mean really, do I need a commentator to tell me that Yao Ming of the Rockets, the tallest player in the NBA at SEVEN FEET SIX INCHES is “an imposing figure in the paint” and then to do it over and over and over and over again? I think not. Also, they’re fairly inaccurate, especially when playing through the aforementioned FIBA World Championship. Despite me playing as England, my team were constantly referred to as the Lakers, and the shouts of “IVERSON WITH THE BUZZER BEATER!” were a little strange, considering it was Julius Joseph taking the shot. I know England aren’t the World’s most foremost basketballing nation, but I had hoped that EA hadn’t forgotten about us. As it turns out, they hadn’t – most of the national teams have incorrect colour commentary for large portions of play.

As far as game stability goes, there’s no evidence of anything massively game-breaking on the court, although sometimes NBA Live 2010 gets very, very close. Leading by two with 15 seconds to play, the last thing I needed against the Rockets was for them to pick up a foul, hit both free throws, and then be given ANOTHER foul for my player stepping out of bounds as he retrieved the ball to restart play. This has happened a few times, I’m sad to say, and there’s nothing I can do about it as a player. The ball goes through the net, my player catches it under the basket automatically and is ruled out of bounds despite the ball being technically dead. Possession obviously goes to the other team, who run the clock down a tad and then score a game-winner. This is most infuriating, but there are other annoyances when it comes to the gameplay. On occasion, the game will read your “pass to the left hand side of the basket” command as a “turn around and pass to the player who is in the backcourt” which obviously, draws a foul for your opposition. You can pull a trigger and employ icon passing to get around this, but sometimes you just want a reliable and quick short play that at least goes in the general direction requested. Atop of that, the game sometimes seems to misjudge three-point shots, with the odd successful bucket being counted for two as you head into the replay and see that you were a good foot behind the line.

But, all of these minor issues can’t take away from what is a genuinely fun and challenging game to play. Defences seem to be a little easier to break down than in 2k10, although AI players do generally tend to cover the space well. The problem is that shooting seems to be somewhat sporadic in terms of its consistency. One minute, you’ll not be able to hit a thing as the opposition defence stops you getting a decent look, and the next, a decent look won’t matter and you’ll be draining the bucket from everywhere.  You get the feeling that the game has some sort of catch-up logic going on in terms of the AI and whilst that makes games more exciting and closer on the scoreboard, it isn’t massively realistic and can be infuriating when you’ve built up a 21-point lead, only to see it stripped away in a period and a half.

But, when it does shooting fairly, NBA Live 10 does shooting right. Defenders jumping to block or get in the face of the shooter actually seem to have a real influence on the outcome of a shot, and I have to say that this is the first time that I’ve noticed it so clearly in a basketball game. If you get up and over a shorter shooter, he has to modify his body position in order to get any shot off at all and this, of course, means that he’s less likely to sink it. This leads to some thrilling action on both sides, with multiple rejections and reasonable hard-nosed defence really being rewarded. Just wailing on a defender or hammering your block button isn’t going to pay you any dividend at all. You still have to use skill, it’s just that you feel as if you aren’t just getting lucky when you do make that block, is all.

And all of this leads to some thrilling matches which may not be the most believable events in the world, but which are incredibly fun and addictive. The lack of a “Be A Pro” style mode is something that may well keep NBA2k10 fans from even considering making the switch – which is a fair shout, given that both games are as good as each other (when running at full speed) – but as I’ve said, I’d hope to see that make an appearance next year. I’m sure that a few Americans will come and point out obvious things that I’ve missed regarding the way players move in the paint or the way in which the pick and roll or board crashing is portrayed. But, to this simple Englishman, NBA Live 2010 is a incredibly atmospheric and fun game that whilst being a little bit too flaky to be one of the all-time greats – provides a really playable experience. It really could do with a few more modes, though.

So, it’s about time that we had another to heat up the competition somewhat. However, this initial release of Stoked most certainly isn’t it.

From the outset, Stoked looks like a game lacking in features. Whilst rider design isn’t a massive priority when it comes to snowboarding, it would have been nice to have been able to select from more than the limited selection of relatively generic clothing that are available – especially since a large portion of the in-game sponsors (who appear EVERYWHERE – sometimes with little reason) actually make snowboarding clothes. As I say, this isn’t a huge gripe – so we’ll move on.

You begin on a Chilean mountain, with snowboarding star Wolle Nylen guiding you through the control system with about as much charisma as a dead dog. Now I’m sure that Wolle is a great guy, but he sounds as if he wants to kill himself when doing the vocals here, and I don’t think I’d be exaggerating if I said that this is one of the worst voiceover performances I’ve heard. Ever. But, with the basics down, you head out on to the mountain itself (after choosing your dropoff point) and are away.

Initially, you’ll be impressed by Stoked’s graphics. There are times when some very, very average effects and terrible texture blurring come into play, but for each one of those occasions, there’s a cool feature or two that makes up for it. Your snowtrails hanging around for what seems like forever would be one, with the superb lighting and snowstorm effects being others. These – and other nice little touches – push the atmosphere to the max and give you a really good feeling about the game, and make you want to unlock the other mountains and try every possible dropoff point just to see what you can see.

However, the game options available to you will knock that idea on the head pretty swiftly. You see, there’s only so many times that the atmosphere can make up for the fact that the gameplay can be extremely, extremely dull and repetitive. Just to clarify, there’s NO RACING here. At all. There isn’t even a time trial to be found. The challenges that exist consist of points targets and trick-mimicking events only, although there’s a checklist of targets to beat for each pro in order to unlock more professional advice. The main issue with this is that the game never tells you when you’ve completed an entry on the list – so you constantly have to check back to make sure that Stoked has recognised that your boardslide with 720 Indy into a Method Air actually qualifies. The reason you’re checking, is that the game tends to fail to notice that you’ve completed an entry on the checklist – pretty much when it feels like it.

Due to the lack of varying challenges, Stoked gets old – fast. Yes, you can play on and unlock your helicopter licence, which allows you to fly around the mountain and drop your rider anywhere at all. But, that doesn’t mean that the game is actually any the better once you’re on the boarsd. You land, ride down the mountain, bust a few tricks on the way, do a challenge (mimick a trick or beat a set trick score) if you run into one and then…stop and go back to the helicopter to do it again. It may be realistic to an extent, but that doesn’t mean that its fun. You’re sitting there in a warm room in your house, with a controller in hand, which takes 90% of the fun out of leisure snowboarding. The fun of snowboarding comes from the feeling you get when you’re rushing down a mountain with nothing but your skills to save you and nothing between you and the ground but a thin slice of wood. Stoked – as the snowboarding games before it did – therefore needs those unrealistic events that maybe don’t make any realistic sense, or some mountains with ridiculously sharp drops and over-the-top sections. In short, Stoked needs to learn how to be a GAME, rather than trying to be an out-and-out simulation with some game-style menus stuck in front of it.

This is a bit of a shame, especially when you consider that Stoked’s trick system actually works really well, with the controls from EA’s SKATE series being liberally used. Flicking your right stick up performs an Ollie, whilst pulling the stick back and then flicking forward performs a higher one. Grabs are controlled by your triggers (and right stick to modify), with spins being passed on to your left analogue stick. It all works fluidly and does the business. Also, the effects that the weather, time of day and snow depth have on the speed and control that you have is impressive to say the least, although many won’t bother hanging around to experience anything more than the initial state of the mountain.

What really galls is that the publisher is releasing the game’s sequel – Stoked: Big Air – in the US in November. Given that this review is being written in October, that seems a little harsh from any paying customer’s point of view. The new game will feature racing, new mountains, a new lighting engine and faster gameplay. Make of that what you will – but I say that it only gives everyone even less of a reason to buy Stoked than they already had. The sequel’s promised new features SOUND like they’ll turn the game into a worthwhile proposition as even if you don’t get bored with the repetition, there aren’t a massive amount of things to do in this original title. So, new mountains will be a boost, and racing will be something of a required addition. I’d advise you to wait and see if that’s the case because as it stands, Stoked doesn’t really cut the mustard.

At first glance, everything seems to be ship-shape. Characters look almost as smooth as they did on the big screen, and the game world is relatively well realised. Gameplay itself consists of you, playing as Flint (or with a second player in the handy drop-in/drop-out co-op mode) as he attempts to correct the problems that his machine – which causes giant food to rain from the sky – has caused. Levels generally revolve around the use of one of Flint’s wacky inventions, such as a heat gun that melts colder food such as ice-cream and lollies, or a mechanical fork that eats its way through Ravioli. Initially, there’s some confusion due to the lack of any sort of tutorial. Sure, the controls are simple – left stick to move, triggers to activate the currently selected gadget, bumpers to change the active gadget (when carrying more than one) – but there’s very, very little indication as to what you have to actually DO. It doesn’t take more than a few seconds to work out that firing the heat gun at the lollies will melt them and open up a new pathway, but – bearing in mind that you can’t actually move the camera to look at anything – some things can be hard to see. Take one of the other levels in the first act, where you have to locate eight pieces of giant broccoli, and destroy them in order to clean up the Jelly Castle. Yes, the Jelly Castle. You find the first five without trouble, but with no indication as to where the others are, and no way of looking around other than to wander aimlessly until you hit upon something, you’re left doing exactly that for far longer than you’d like.

Some levels require a little traditional thought though, and this is to the game’s credit. Sucking up that coffee (I think it’s coffee, the game doesn’t say and it just looks like a brown puddle of liquid) with your vacuum-style gadget and spraying it at the giant sugar cubes will melt them for example, whereas sucking up honey and firing it at a wall makes the wall sticky enough for you to climb. None of these puzzles are particularly taxing but if you have smaller children, some of them may require a little adult assistance via that drop-in/drop-out co-op mode. Some of the puzzles do seem to be kind of innovative and interesting when you see them for the first time. There’s a sense of “oh, I CAN actually do that!” when you come up with a solution to a problem where the game’s general restrictiveness hints that you’ll not be able to get away with it. But, that innovation and interest lasts for approximately three seconds. After that, the game takes that good idea and slaps you around the face with it, making you carry out the same task twenty or thirty times in a row in order to progress. There’s flogging a dead horse, and there’s inventing the horse, killing it and THEN flogging it. This game does the latter.

Ultimately, Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs isn’t what you’d call anything groundbreaking. In fact, you could say that we’re taking a step back to when movie tie-ins actually were all just rubbish. The game as a whole is very, very short and restrictive, and the throwaway one-liners that the characters fire out are repetitive to the point of making you want to turn the console off. Even when you’re given the choice of which gadgets to use to beat the levels that are thrown your way, nothing really draws you in and makes you want to play. This is one for the kids who really, really enjoyed the movie and who aren’t fussy about what they play.

Almost everyone knows as much as there is to know about the history of the game, but to put it into one sentence: – “Activision made one of the worst decisions in gaming history when they dropped Brütal Legend – a Tim Schaffer (Psychonauts, Grim Fandango) project starring Hollywood actor and arguable musical genius Jack Black – for apparently no reason other than they felt like it, and the game was in limbo until EA picked up the publishing deal.” There. It was a long sentence, but a single sentence nonetheless.

Brütal Legend is a third-person action-adventure/driving/RTS title that encompasses all that is and was good about proper heavy metal and rock. ‘Proper’ in this sense, means not Limp Bizkit. Jack Black stars as Eddie Riggs, the world’s greatest roadie who is – as we join him – lugging kit around for a terrible teen-metal band by the name of Kabbage Boy. By means of the events that unfold within the first few minutes of play (see!), Eddie is transported to an alternate world which draws heavily on heavy metal styles and sounds, and which the habitants of are being oppressed by a vicious leader.

An uprising is on the cards, and Eddie initially has a few nice weapons and attacks at his disposal to dispatch of the hordes. For melee combat, you can drag an axe off your back and start swinging and putting together combos as you’d expect to be able to but primarily, you’ll be using a different kind of axe to deal out the destruction – your ‘Flying V’ guitar, named ‘Clementine.’ With this, you can hit a few free-standing moves, such as blasting out a quick chord to shock your enemy, but with a quick pull on the right trigger, you can invoke some pretty serious solos to influence things. You have to unlock various different types of solos (there are 12 in total) by locating tablature stones that teach Eddie how to play them. You start off with things such as a solo to summon your car, or a face-melter that actually does melt the faces of your foes. Later on, you’ll be able to give your armies a power boost, command your squads or indeed do a little building work, as the game demands, all by playing a solo. To play one, you simply point the analogue stick at whichever one you want to hit, and then press the buttons (displayed on screen in pseudo-tab format) at the right time. None of them are particularly difficult to pull off, and having to do it every single time you want to locate your car is a bit of a pain, but I lived with it well enough.

Your car (which is an absolute beast, in true heavy metal style) seems a little bit over-the-top in terms of how much use you’ll get from it at first. But, you soon realise that Brütal Legend contains a fair amount of secondary challenges and the like that must be driven to. Before each level begins, you’re given the option of starting the next primary challenge now, or waiting until later and going off to explore the game world, sandbox-style. Anyway, if your vehicle – aptly named the “Druid Plow” – wasn’t there, Ozzy Osbourne wouldn’t have been able to put in a decent guest appearance as the Guardian of Metal (otherwise known as the guy who supplies upgrades.)

So, you start off thinking that this is nothing other than a nicely-presented third-person action title with a decent setting, and after a level or so, you’ll still feel the same way. Then, the concept of Stage Battles is explained to you, and you’re thrown into one. Here, the game takes on a distinct RTS flavour, with Eddie being tasked with replenishing his army and giving orders so that the enemy can be defeated. This style of play also makes for a cracking multiplayer experience over Xbox Live for up to eight players – and could well become a surprising multiplayer hit, mainly because the classes are nicely balanced and the power cap (that prevents one team from dominating simply due to the weight of numbers) is wisely implemented.

The RTS portion of the game (which accounts for ever-increasing amounts of the game as you play through) in single-player mode can be somewhat confusing until you’ve failed a number of battles. For one, the game frequently tells you to create new merchandise booths from available fan geysers (which provide you with fans, with which you “buy” new army units), when there aren’t any available fan geysers. This leads to you wandering about, searching for new merch booth locations that don’t exist. Secondly, the beacon that you use to order your troops about the battlefield is incredibly picky about what it wants to target. You want to send everyone to attack a vehicle that’s launching rockets at your guys, but the game refuses to allow you to target it directly on the first five attempts. Go away, come back, try it again…and you can aim everybody at it first time. This is infuriating in the heat of battle, but there are ways around the problem – such as sending your men and women in that general direction, and then telling them to attack everything in that area. One issue that has the potential to cause problems, is that later on in the game, you’re going to NEED to have found all of the solos – or at least the stronger ones. You can beat the game without a full compliment of tabs, but it becomes so unbelievably difficult if you don’t have the heavier strikes that you’ll be tearing your hair out. Quite why you aren’t say, rewarded with new tabs for completing earlier missions, I don’t know – as it is highly unlikely that players will stop to search around for all twelve before heading out into the story proper.

But, the game still manages to overcome these problems in stellar fashion. The storyline that I desperately want to go into detail about, but won’t, twists like a cat on ice-skates (hang on, maybe I can do this metaphor thing) and the missions are fun and challenging enough to keep you hanging on for just one more level, like a…monkey…with…with…no, I’m done.

In terms of aesthetics, there’s only one thing that Brütal Legend had to get right, and that was the soundtrack. The graphics – luckily – weren’t ever going to be the focus of a heavy metal-based title and although they aren’t terrible, they aren’t anything to write home about either, and feature more-than-healthy doses of slowdown at times. Back to the soundtrack though, and you quickly realise that this is the real deal. You know you’ve hit paydirt when you’re playing through a chase sequence, avoiding the firey objects that are raining down from above, whilst the manic energy of Dragonforce’s “Through the Fire and the Flames” is belting out through the speakers. When you note that the game features some 108 different tracks from 75 different bands, that paydirt quickly becomes pure gold.

Guest appearances from the as-mentioned Osbourne, Rob Halford, Lemmy, Lita Ford, Black’s Tenacious D bandmate Kyle Gass and others all help to make Brütal Legend really stand out amongst the crowd. If you’d asked me at this point last year, whether or not I’d be raving about a third-person action title other than Uncharted 2 right now, I’d have laughed in your face. With some obvious exceptions, they’re all generally so unbelievably interchangeable that they fade into insignificance when you’re reeling down your list of the greatest games of all time. Brütal Legend however, manages to break out of that stereotype and draw you in to its world. I’d say that you’ll gasp multiple times as the plot unfolds, and that you’ll crack out more than a few bolts of laughter as Black rolls in some really quite solid lines – love him or hate him (since apparently there’s no in-between when it comes to him, so I’m told by…seemingly everyone on the Internet.) What you’re practically guaranteed to do though, is enjoy the world that Schaffer and co. have created, see right past some very slight technical issues, and immediately declare Brütal Legend to be one of the best and purest videogame experiences of the year. I really can’t recommend this highly enough.

You’ll also feel sad because – in my opinion – if you’ve spent £40 on PES2010 this year in the hopes that the development team have decided to wake up and stop relying on former glories to see their game through, you’re going to be disappointed.

Yes, Pro Evolution Soccer 2010 is yet another version where the development team have assumed that minor graphical tweaks, slightly more widespread off-pitch changes and one or two new methods of control will propel them back to the head of the footballing queue. Most players could tell that was going to be the case from the demo that was released a while ago, but there was always the chance that more things could change.

The better changes have taken place in the Master League, where the new “Stadium Walk” area – from which you control your transfers, lineups and perform all of your other managerial tasks – is really nicely done. In addition to this, picking your lineup is now easier than ever thanks to the inclusion of clear overall ratings for players and handy position indicators which show exactly which positions the player can play in, without you having to head to a different screen. Konami have taken a leaf from FIFA’s book when it comes to selecting your team’s playing preferences, with defensive pressure, build up speed and the like all controlled by sliders. The presentation of the Master League and other competitions is nice, but – as usual – the content is not. You’re still playing in the “D2” whilst trying to win the “England Cup” and watching as The Potteries play against Lancashire Clarets, with Carlsmental and Childfingem  being the scorers of the winning goals. Yes. Carlsmental and Childfingem. Some leagues have official licences and some official teams, with these fictional representations making up the numbers. Other leagues consist of pure fantasy – and a badly done fantasy at that. FIFA has its bugs – some very serious – in the Manager Mode, but the fact that I’m controlling an actual soccer team that I know and love more than makes up for it.

On the pitch, both FIFA and PES have introduced the ability to control your player through 360 degrees this year and to be brutally honest, only one game actually feels like it has anything more than 8-way control. That game – sadly – isn’t PES 2010. Occasionally, you will feel as if you’re in total control of the ball and can do absolutely anything you please with it, but it happens so rarely that you’d do well to notice it. The in-game action may look half-decent due to a fair few new graphical touches that do the job well, but things are still starting to feel more than a little dated. I don’t want to be comparing PES to FIFA over and over again, but if you’ve played EA’s game this year and experienced exactly how organic each match feels, playing Pro Evo 2010 will feel like you’ve taken a big, big step backwards. Players feel incredibly heavy, the ball feels heavier and you get the feeling that you know exactly what’s going to happen before it actually does. That’s a talent, in most cases, but the problem here is simply that you’re generally going to be right. If a defender runs towards my striker, who’s sprinting forward on goal, the ball will either be in my control once the block tackle comes in, or it’ll be in the control of the defender. It won’t bounce away and create any mania in the penalty area, and even if it did, the deflection physics throw up a fair few “strange” moments so it could well end up in row Z without either player taking a crack at it.

If you’re fouled in the penalty area, the referee – who is always better than the one in FIFA in terms of decisions by a long, long way – will obviously grant you a penalty. This is generally cause for much celebration, as there’s about an 80% chance of you scoring a goal. Not in PES. When you’re given a penalty here, the camera doesn’t swing to the “behind-the-striker” view that every game in the last ten years has used and used well, oh no. The side-view camera is used – much as you’d expect from an Amiga game from 1994 – and you are going to miss. No, you don’t have an option. You’ll put the slightest pressure – and I mean “slightest pressure” – on the analogue stick to guide the ball to the left or right (or top or bottom, in this case, due to the view) of the keeper, and it’ll go screaming wide. You get the feeling that if you held the analogue stick all the way up, you could hit the corner flag.

For PES fans looking to rag on me for giving their favourite game a below-par score, “HAHAHA You can’t score penalties! You suck!” is a good place to start, although I genuinely don’t think that it’s my fault. If you can do it, I doff my cap to you.

But, the main problem on the pitch is that nothing feels very fluid. Sure, you can press the pass button several times to play a quick set of diagonal passes through the opposition’s midfield and get into a decent position, but rather than it feel like your team working together, it feels as if the motions have been broken down into mini-games themselves. Pass. Trap. Turn. Pass. Trap. Pass. Trap. Turn. Shoot. Repeat until you score.  At times, the whole thing comes across as somewhat pinball-like. This isn’t to say that things are worse or somehow inferior to last year’s effort – far from it – rather, other titles – naming no names – have moved the standard along a considerable way, and Konami seem to be taking their time in attempting to catch up.

Strangely, PES2010 presents a genuine case of graphics causing problems with gameplay. You pass the ball to a teammate, and he has to fire one animation to trap the ball, another to push it to the side in order to turn, then another to turn, followed by another to push it in front of him and another to run forward with it. You can almost see the breaks, at times. Given that every pass is supported by an audible thud, and every shot sounds like a door being slammed, it all feels overly heavy and not anything like the smooth, challenging, high-quality soccer title that earlier games in the series were. The CPU AI is strong when on the hardest difficulty level, so the game remains challenging to those who are hooked by it, and fans of the series won’t have any complaints about the way in which the opposition shuts them down and tries to cut off runs that have been successful earlier on. However, the improvements to your own team’s AI are tough to see, with players making decent choices (as they did last year) as to where to run, but relatively frequently deciding to head straight for the defence and make themselves a relatively easy rule-out when it comes to deciding who to pass to. When you’re a goal down with three minutes to play and you’re willing your striker to head into a wide open space that’s only a few short steps away from him, whilst he meanders slowly into the penalty area, directly next to two defenders, you’ll be tearing your hair out.

When the on-pitch action isn’t anything particularly new, the off-pitch action has to make up for it seriously and unfortunately, it doesn’t. The changes to the Master League that I have noted are nice, but other modes don’t seem to have had much improvement, and are few in number. You can still play an officially licensed UEFA Champions League, alongside a new UEFA Europa League (the European equivalent of the Steve’s DIY Store Devon and Exeter Challenge Trophy) and you can still attempt to “Become A Legend” as you could last year. The downside is that the Europa Cup offering is just another competition, and attempting to Become A Legend is as bad as it was first time around – although there is now slightly better manager feedback now. If you’re like me, you’ll grow bored of playing training games with absolutely no atmosphere and watching as your teammates decide to turn around and pass back to the defence when you’re clean through….again.

You can probably tell that I’m not a fan of PES 2010. My opinion is that if you loved the last one, then you’ll love this – as it is essentially more of the same with such slight tweaks that last year’s game experience is neither ruined nor improved. My objection is that you can only really get away with that as a game developer if your title is at the top of the genre’s tree. Pro Evolution Soccer was second in a two –horse race last year and – in my opinion – is even further behind this time around, a situation not helped by the fact that the on-pitch action lacks any atmosphere, with Mark Lawrenson sounding as if he’d be more interested in watching the cricket than being at the match, and Jon Champion quite often getting things utterly, utterly wrong.

Were FIFA not around, this would be a solid enough title that was far and away the winner, but there isn’t really a great deal of other competition, is there? The only calculable difference with Pro Evolution Soccer 2010 is that for the first time, I’m having difficulty in working out why the game’s fanbase puts up with the lack of anything that you could call a game-changing improvement or a new mode that is actually worth playing or that adds value to the package. A year or two ago, FIFA was rebuilt, seemingly from the ground up, and was transformed from an arcade-style goal-fest into a very solid and truly next-gen simulation of the beautiful game and if we didn’t judge games against the current flagship bearer, Combat on the Atari 2600 would still be the de facto standard for simulations of war, and even the worst current-gen titles would all get the maximum score in comparison to it. Pro Evolution Soccer needs to go through the same process – whilst acknowledging the things that EA’s development teams have done well – in order to truly get back to its stunning best, simply because “Well, its good old PES, isn’t it? It has to be great!” just doesn’t cut it in an era where a new breed of fans actually (for the first time) have good reason to say the same about the game’s biggest rival. I’ll gladly take any bet that the required rebuilding won’t happen next year either, and we’ll be looking at new graphics, an extra division on the Master League and “TeamVision 3.0″ come October 2010.

This year is no different.

The frontend has had a slight bit of brushing up – with the instantly-available “Training Arena” being a nice touch akin to FIFA 10’s “Arena” – but you’re still dealing with something that has to stop to load for ten seconds after every other button-press, and that still uses that ridiculously large font, as it has since the days of the PSOne. Installing to the HDD does improve the loading times this year though, which is…well…expected, really.

In terms of game modes, there’s plenty to look at. Aspiring Vince McMahons can step into the “Story Designer” to plan, write and play through up to TEN YEARS of WWE programming and this mode alone is going to be worth the asking price for some players. You can script each show’s intro, make matches with predefined settings (so if your storyline involves say Chris Jericho attacking Triple H in a cutscene pre-match, Triple H can start a match with half his health or a damaged leg) and create cutscenes. The beauty of this is that whilst I – and a good percentage of the fanbase – will have absolutely no interest in this mode at all, those who do have an interest can create a storyline or two and then upload them for everyone to grab and play through. This means that there’s something in it for everyone. The best user-generated content will extend the life of the game, although whether that good stuff will sink under the weight of the absolute tosh that most people will come up with remains to be seen.

Elsewhere, the Road to Wrestlemania returns and whilst it is generally strong, there are some bizarre oddities and you really can’t help feeling that the ability for the story to deviate from the pre-set path would have been a nice one. Take Shawn Michaels’ route as an example. In your second proper match with HBK, you’re fighting against JBL in a singles bout. Randy Orton is the guest commentator, and he breaks off to help your opponent win by handing him a chair and distracting the ref. Should you avoid JBL’s chair shot (which is very, very easy to do, as he seems to have no idea that he’s supposed to smack you with it), Orton joins in and can pull off move after move – even hitting you with the chair – without JBL being disqualified. When you pick up the chair and hit JBL with it though, the bell rings and you’ve lost. Not only that, but your only choice is to either quit, or play through the match again – repeating it until you win. In this case, surely JBL should be disqualified the second Orton lays a finger on me and, should I somehow manage to lose (which is very, very likely) against the two opponents, surely my path to Wrestlemania 25 should alter somehow, so I can gain vengeance in a later match? Nope. What happens is that you fall into a repeating loop of lose, rematch, lose, rematch until you give up or somehow get very, very lucky. The same happens with the second match of the story for your created wrestler. The only difference there is that you have to actually knock out one of the two opponents, rather than simply pin them. You’ll be playing on the ‘Hard’ difficulty setting at least – since the AI for the default setting is practically non-existent – and this creates a bizarre roadblock, since against one fighter, ‘Hard’ is actually fun and challenging. Against two, it’s practically impossible to beat. You get up and knock one guy down; his partner kicks you in the back. You reverse a grapple whilst you’re on the deck, only to get up and…get kicked in the back. You pick up a weapon and…get kicked in the back. This also exposes another of the flaws in the fighting engine since – unless you’ve pulled off a finisher – your opponent very rarely stays down for any significant amount of time. If you pull off a chair shot when fighting two guys, you’ll barely have time to grapple the second fellow before the first has gotten up and performed a one-handed bulldog on you. This wouldn’t be as much of an issue, if the game didn’t require that you win every single match in Road to Wrestlemania mode – which is easily the game’s highlight. Hell, even the N64 WWE titles supported limited story branching, so I’m sure it wouldn’t be too hard to do it now. With that said, the storylines presented are generally interesting and fun to play – it’s just that the slightly stranger and more infuriating moments do take the polish off, somewhat.

The game’s career mode – formerly a highlight in years gone by – is poor once again too. You fight, with each match being rated out of 5 stars. Obtaining enough stars unlocks the “Number 1 Contender” match. When you win this, you fight for the belt. Storylines are non-existent, and you’re simply playing match after match after match until you’ve done enough for the game to call you the champion. During the Intercontinental Belt Path (the first you’ll face as a male fighter), my third match against CM Punk was interrupted by Kofi Kingston. Kingston wandered to ringside – the announcers didn’t say a word – and just…stood there. Punk threw me out of the ring, and Kingston tried to Irish Whip me into the barricade, which I reversed. I got back into the ring, and no more was said about it. Kofi did grab the ref’s attention when I went for the pin, but all I had to do was simply attempt it again to get the win. On completion of that match, I unlocked the Number 1 Contender bout, and was thrown into a steel cage with John Morrison. No build up. No storyline. No reasoning, other than that Number 1 Contender matches always have a gimmick.

In the ring, not a massive amount has changed. Gone is the HUD of last year’s version, replaced with a simple circle around your wrestler’s feet, representing his or her momentum. Building up momentum by taunting, pulling off strings of moves and generally laying the smacketh down will cause a little “S” to appear at your feet, indicating that you can pull off one of your character’s “Signature” moves. Do this successfully, or keep boosting that momentum in other ways, and your finisher will become available. This works really well and the lack of the HUD is a bigger deal than you’d think.

What isn’t such a great step forward however, is what happens when your character steps out of the ring. You run to the rope, press your A button to slide out of the ring and – BAM! – now you’re looking at things from a completely different angle as the game decides to cut away to a camera that is practically unusable. The amount of times that you’ll go to slide out of the ring to chase someone down, only to find that you start running in the wrong direction thanks to the ridiculous change in perspective (down becomes left, left becomes up, etc.) is crazy. You get used to it, but initially the switch in camera is incredibly galling and somewhat unnecessary.

As far as the actual fighting engine goes, you’d be hard pressed to notice any significant changes to the way that the characters interact with each other. A lot of reversals look (and are) completely unnatural – as has been the case for years – thanks to the speed that the defending character has to move at in order to successfully turn the tide. On the upside, the way in which the fighters’ body parts go a colour that I’m going to call “Sore Nipples Red” when they’ve been chest-chopped or axe-handled across the back is pretty cool, as is the way in which blood is depicted. Once you bust someone open, the claret spills everywhere, including on your own combatant’s hands as he tries to inflict more damage. On the whole, the game puts in a solid general performance, despite some nasty clipping in places.

Despite the downsides, WWE Smackdown vs. Raw 2010 is still a fun game to play. Yes, the “Create-A-Superstar” options are now completely devoid of sense due to a “points” system being put into play that allows me to put a hoodie and t-shirt on my character, whilst leaving me unable to “afford” a pair of jeans. Yes, the fighting engine still has the same problems as it did six years ago. Yes, you’ll still be waiting for the game to load more than you’d like. But, the fact of the matter is that whilst other fighting games set you the task of going into battle and defeating your opponent by any means possible without any care about how the match is panning out, SvR2010 brings you the feel of “Sports Entertainment” by really utilising its momentum system well. If you turn the “Stamina System” on – which is bizarrely off by default – then you get an even more believable game. There’s nothing quite like the feeling of getting kicked and thrown all over the ring in a Tag Team match as your under-powered CAW, before getting in a few shots and being prompted to press a pair of buttons in order to instigate a “Hot” tag. You press, and the game instantly skips to a cutscene of your created wrestler crawling towards his more experienced partner. SLAP! The tag is made! Here comes the Undertaker! BANG! Down goes one…BANG! And the other! You’re back in the match as momentum has swung your way – and the crowd and commentators (who are used more sparingly and cleverly this year, thankfully) love it. If you’re lucky, that momentum might be enough to allow Taker to pull off a signature move and give you a real chance for the win. Even if that isn’t the case, you’ve still had your adrenaline rush.

The fighting engine is flawed – and probably will be flawed in the same way next year, too – and the menu system is tired when compared to pretty much any EA or Codemasters title – again, as it will be next year – but there’s something truly amazing about the way that the game makes you feel at times, just as watching the WWE in real life does. We all know that the matches are scripted but if we like a character, we’ll still be cheering his name and imploring him to kick out when his shoulders are down for the 1-2-3. Smackdown vs. Raw 2010 is a million miles away from perfect, but generally does a good enough job of drawing you in that you’ll be able to get past most of the game’s bigger issues. If it doesn’t hook you within your first few matches though, it’s unlikely that it ever will.

The core gameplay is as good as it ever was. Defences get up in your face when you’re trying to create an opening or take a badly-advised shot, and when you’re the one on the back foot, getting that perfectly-timed block in is absolutely sublime – mainly due to the reaction of the crowd when it happens. Minor AI tweaks have been made which shift the offense’s dominance a little this year, and you’re generally much less likely to be able to grab the ball at half-court, dribble around all five defenders and sink a highlight-reel dunk. This makes for a more challenging game that requires a decent amount of planning when taking it to the hole. Graphical changes have been made too, as is the standard. However, to play them down as just one of the standard yearly tweaks would be something of an injustice to the game, since I would say that NBA 2k10 is the finest looking sports simulation I’ve ever played – by a fair distance.

That is, when it’s running at full speed.

You see, whilst there are stacks of crowd animations, photographers sitting at the baseline, cheerleaders waiting to come on and get the crowd behind the home team, floor-polishers waiting to sprint on and mop up the sweat in the paint and generally, everything you’d expect to see at an real-life NBA game – NBA2k10 has a real problem with performance. We’re not talking half-second blasts of slowdown here; we’re talking about the game slowing down to half-speed and doing so for ten seconds at a time. And when a game requires such precision timing as this one does, that’s no good. You’ll be taking the ball to the perimeter, and the game will suddenly turn into a choppy mess. Needless to say, that rebound you leapt for half a second too late is rarely your fault when this occurs.

With some camera angles and at some stadiums, the effect is lessened because there isn’t so much of the crowd in view, but the height and zoom required on the camera to get things running even close to smoothly means that you’ll feel somewhat short-changed as you’ll be undoubtedly playing from an angle that isn’t anything like the one you’d usually use – and expected to be able to use.

Off the court, the new NBA Today and Living Rosters features show the likes of FIFA exactly how things are done. NBA Today fires up as you start the game, providing you last night’s real-life NBA scores (complete with every kind of statistical breakdown you could want) and showing you tonight’s matchups. And, if you fancy playing one of them in NBA 2k10, you can. Living Rosters essentially allows users to keep their game up-to-date with all of the changes in the NBA. Trades, injuries, suspensions and the like are represented, and this – quite unbelievably – affects the in-game commentary. I was blown away when I realised that this was happening, as it truly is a first for the world of sports gaming, and helps to give the game that presentational edge.

Also new this year, is “My Player.” Here, you’re tasked with creating a player and earning a place in the NBA. You start out with absolutely diabolical ratings for almost every part of your game, and have to perform well in matches and take part in drills to earn skill points, which can be used to level up your character, so to speak. During matches, you’re assessed on the things that you do well. Boxing out your assignment will get you a plus point for example, as will making an assist, scoring points, pulling down rebounds and all manner of other things. However, the game is far, far too harsh in what it penalises you on. You’ll call for a pass when wide open, and inexplicably be marked down for calling for the pass too frequently. You’ll be gifted the ball in the paint, play a nice layup that just misses, and be chastised for poor shot selection. The mode as a whole, gives a real insight into the tactics utilised by big-league ballplayers and will be a real eye-opener for those who maybe play basketball games, but don’t actually follow basketball. Another downer though, is the constant nit-picking that the “2k Insider” gives you after each match. A player who scores an average of 16 points a night is restricted to 4 points by me, and I get sternly reprimanded for him “burning” me “time after time.”

With those points made, “My Player” is still a superb addition that is a great deal of fun to play. I can’t wait to see what they do with it next year.

What I can’t get away from, is the slowdown. I’m sorry, but the amount of times that I’ve lost the ball unfairly or been stopped from shining the glass due to my timing being thrown by the fact that I’m playing a stop-motion cartoon just beggars belief. Add that to the fact that online games are a non-starter due to copious amounts of issues with them – generally causing the game to throw you back to the menus, and you have a very, very buggy product. I – and most of the 2k Sports community, it seems – want a patch. With other games, we’d not be all that bothered, putting them to one side or returning them to the store. NBA 2k10 is so close to being a truly amazing and addictive piece of software, that those just aren’t even options.

With the technical hitches, some NBA 2k10 matches are practically unplayable and therefore, the game scores what it has scored here. Without the slowdown and another minor annoyances, you could add two more stars to that score and be left wanting space to add two more.

In Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising, however, death is more than just a slight kink in the road. Here, you shuffle nervously through the dim light of pre-dawn across a few hundred meters of greenery, watching for snipers and other classes of enemy that are out to end your mission. Ten minutes later, you reach a hillside and spot an enemy encampment. “Rifleman spotted 100 metres north” you whisper to your squad-mates, and wait for everyone to get into position. You look through the scope of your rifle, and spot another enemy as he wanders out of the building, completely unaware of your presence. You point at the encampment and order the team to open fire. Then, the electric crack of a gunshot pierces the silence and a bullet whizzes past your nose. Damn! You must have missed that sniper when you were scanning for trouble just now. “RIFLEMAN SPOTTED – 50 METERS WEST!” comes the cry, and you know what’s about to happen. The screen fades to black. You’re done.

Restarting at your last checkpoint in this situation, would see you having to play through a fair amount of game in order to get to where you came a cropper, and this means that Operation Flashpoint does a superb job of making you feel like you have something to lose. Sure, you can plough headlong into an enemy base, but the game’s tilt towards heavy realism makes damned sure that you’ll regret it sooner, rather than later. No, you truly do have to think about your next move, and cover all of the angles and those of your squad. I’m not a soldier, nor have I ever had any desire to be, but I’m relatively sure that this is closer to the real thing than the majority of games out there right now that use war as a setting in which to play out their cinematic set-pieces.

Whether or not that makes for a truly entertaining game is solely up to the player. Some will pick up Dragon Rising and dismiss it by the time they’ve been killed with a single bullet for the tenth time in twenty minutes. Others will relish the challenge, and it will quickly become one of their favourite games of all time. I very much doubt that there will be many players that straddle the two lines, simply due to the bundled nature of the product. The sparse checkpoints go hand-in-hand with dying if you don’t think things through, and thinking things through goes hand-in-hand with the realism and slow-paced nature of the game.

Graphically, Codemasters have presented a nice package that looks solid enough on the gameplay front and superb at the front end. Then again, a Codemasters game without presentational style is like salt without vinegar on your fish without chips. Audio is taken care of nicely, with the very, very sparse use of music in general making for a refreshing change – and also helping to raise that tension level even further.

For me, Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising is truly a superb game in terms of how it generally plays. However, there are times when the game stacks the deck against you and provides you with a task that is difficult to the point of throwing the controller down and giving up – even on the more relaxed difficulty settings. The game’s second mission is an early indicator of this sort of task. You’re asked to take out a missile launcher within a certain time limit, since you can’t get air support in with it still posing a threat. If the air support sees that the missile launcher is active when they get there, they understandably turn back and you fail the mission. After fighting some pretty fierce infantry battles (and having to restart three times) and setting the charges on the launcher just in time, you’re told that you have another time limit in order to take out a radar array. You head off and face the same problems. Enemies that are difficult to find pick you off and stage a mean defence as you make your way to the attack site, and when you finally get there with less than a minute to go, you get shot in the head by a rifleman that you’ve failed to take care of. At that point, you’ll swear that you’ll never play again. If it isn’t at that point, it’s at the point where you have no option other than to leave yourself open to attack from the rear (oo-er!) because a door that you’ve opened in order to hole up in a building for a bit, refuses to close again once you’ve opened it. Fun.

But, the beauty of the game is that you will – many times – come back to see if you can’t get through a few more missions. Maybe you’ll come back with friends and save yourself the trouble of navigating through the command screens. Maybe you’ll come back and try to take a different route through to the target location. Maybe you’ll try using your night-vision goggles to see if you can’t get a few seconds head-start on your enemies. Or, maybe you’ll not bother.

The simple fact of the matter is that Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising is a very good game that on the whole, gets things right. There are some questions over whether the missions really are varied and engaging enough, but I suppose that if military simulation is what you’re after, military simulation is what you get. I imagine that the Armed Forces very rarely zip-slide into populated hot war-zones in order to blow up a tank with their bare hands, or sail through an enemy harbour on a canoe whilst using a rail gun to take out the opposition, who were playing dice on explosive barrels before you arrived. If you need that kind of action, then maybe this isn’t for you. You do get the feeling that the developers have gone too far the other way with it at times, but your mileage will vary. If you’re happy to take things very, very slowly and can deal with some truly heart-stoppingly atmospheric moments, you’re in for a treat.

And I’m as surprised as you are. Especially after playing the likes of Ratatouille, Cars, Toy Story at the Olympic Games and Wall-E Fitness Challenge. OK, maybe I made the last two up.

No, UP is a relatively solid little game that will suit the kids down to the ground. The story revolves around Carl – an Octogenarian ex-balloon maker with the dream of flying his house to Paradise Falls, using balloons – and Russell – the chubby Boy Scout that was on his porch when the house took off. It sounds absolutely mental and it is, but it’s the kind of “Pixar mental” that does so brilliantly well and that we all love.

The game itself sees the less-than-dynamic duo land in the forest near Paradise Falls and tasks the player (or players, using well-executed drop-in/drop-out co-operative play) with achieving Carl’s goal. To do this, they must navigate through the treacherous forest, dodging or fighting rabid animals and negotiating the many obstacles that land in their way. Of the obstacles, the majority of them require some co-operation. Carl can use his walking cane to lift Russell up to high ledges, and can pry rocks with it, whilst Russell can shimmy along ledges, throw ropes down to help Carl up and generally perform slightly more acrobatic moves than the old-timer. All of this works well enough, and you’ll notice that whilst the difficulty level is never anything more than very tame, the pseudo-puzzles do begin to require more thought as the game progresses. Pulling Carl up with the rope on a clear wall is easy of course, but a level or two later, you’re pulling him up whilst trying to avoid thorns growing from the cliffside and a man-eating plant that sits directly behind you.

As I say, this does mean that a slight element of thought is required, but the only things that will cause you to lose lives (or “fail”, since no main character ever dies in the world of Disney – apart from Bambi’s mum) are minor bugs that make things perform slightly differently than you’d expect. For example, Russell can use his bugle to play a tune that will stun dangerous wasps and when facing a pack of three of them, two will drop to the ground. The other one though, will sometimes remain completely unaffected, and will get an easy attack in to lower your health bar. This is annoying, but the sheer number of health pickups available means that any real problem is avoided. The characters’ voices are the main source of any audible flair and whilst some lines are genuinely funny to begin with, they begin to grate somewhat very, very early on. They frequently make comments that just don’t make any sense (“Throw that rope down here, so I can climb up!” says Carl, as he’s halfway up the rope already) and that gives things a slightly unfinished feel at times.

UP is as repetitive as it gets and the obvious reason for this is that it’s a game aimed solely at the younger player. There are millions of coins to collect (practically everything can be smashed with Carl’s cane or Russell’s backpack to reveal more coins), facts about animals and the jungle are presented during loading screens – and during gameplay via vocal calls – and the achievements flow from the very first press of a button. This is a good thing. A lot of the problems that I’ve mentioned will go unnoticed by the kids who’ll be playing it, and the heavy reliance on co-operative play means that your little rugrats may well get something out of it other than fun. The players need to work together as a team in order to get anywhere and whilst the CPU can take control of the non-player character and do a good job, the game is much more fun when two controllers are in play. There’s also enough going on and enough laughs being provided for an adult player to play along without getting overly bored.

All in all, UP looks like it’ll be a good movie and this videogame adaptation is a perfect example of how to design a product for a target audience. There are issues present that would be unforgivable in a game designed for adults, but this is easily one of the best kids’ titles we’ve seen this year.

When that day finally came, I wasn’t disappointed. Call me a FIFA fanboy if you like, but I will defend by saying that I was an avid fan of Konami’s Pro Evolution Soccer through a couple of generations of console hardware, and that the development team’s laurel-resting meant that the series genuinely stopped progressing a few versions ago. With a somewhat sketchy demo of Pro Evo 2010 already available, I have to say that I see nothing to reverse last year’s result.  FIFA’s tightened defensive AI and the new ability to allow you to dribble the ball thru every one of the 360 degrees means that you’ll be constantly fighting to pull off stunning new plays and put a couple in the net, and the way in which the ball is no longer stuck to the controlling player’s foot means that keeping the ball is a darned sight more tough than it was before. The defences in general, are a lot stronger too – meaning lots of lost chances due to being hustled fairly off the ball. These new features work immensely well and can provide real satisfaction when you get everything just right. The new crossing engine also does the business, with the way that crosses bend into the box being more of a test of skill than in previous editions. The ball can – and does – fire off and over the crossbar if you judge it incorrectly, and this makes those headed goals taste all the more sweet.

That is, of course, if you manage to get a head on the ball. The defensive AI is much stronger when dealing with crosses and the like, so corners will more often than not be dealt with by the defence (which is true to real life football if you check the percentages) and that superb play down the wing won’t always result in a goal. Players now make genuine unforced mistakes too, with lower-quality players occasionally misjudging soft passes and allowing them to roll on by or stumbling as they attempt a sliding tackle. These errors can change the outcome of a match, but are infrequent enough to be a great addition rather than an annoyance.

The result of all this is more balanced football that requires time and – in most cases – an intelligent bit of build-up play in order to get through and get a shot on goal. With that said, your shot is less likely to go in unless you display some sort of control over the power and angle – since the new tweaks to the shooting engine mean that you can’t just burst through and hit the top corner with every pop. This irons out the frustrations of multiplayer play somewhat, since FIFA 09 seemed to sometimes become a battle as to who could use the through ball play first and get a striker clean through the defence on the halfway line. This sort of play can still occur – as it can in real life – but it’s much, much less frequent. Players seem to be complaining that they don’t get as much time on the ball as before, and that this is a problem. To them, I’d advise them to watch an actual football match and see exactly what happens. Berbatov doesn’t get four hours to decide whether to pass or shoot. Defoe doesn’t have time to stop with the ball, do fourteen tricks and then lob it into the box. Cristiano Ronaldo is a talented guy, but it isn’t the norm for him to be able to run past nine players and end up one-on-one with the goalkeeper. Welcome to the beautiful game as it actually is.

FIFA is football and to be honest, you’d better get used to it. I’d suggest that a lot of the online players who dominated the game last year will have a bit of trouble getting to grips with things this time around. This time, they’re being tasked with controlling an actual football team, instead of carrying out the same sequence of button presses four times in order to win 4-0.

New animations (especially some impressive goalkeeping and defensive ones) and other minor additions – such as the ability to take a quick free kick – mean that FIFA 10 is far and away the finest football simulation ever made when it comes to the actual playing of the game.

There are problems on the park, though. On Legendary difficulty, the opposition seem very, very reluctant to give away free kicks and penalties. In two entire seasons, I’ve been given one penalty and seen one red card to the opposition. Generally, if you’re a clean player, a match is likely to end with no bookings for either team. When the CPU AI gets a free kick within 35yds of the goal, there’s a 95% chance that they’ll score, even if the keeper gets a hand to it. This is far from realistic and needs a patch. The cycloptic referees in general still need a bit of work. At times, they’ll ignore blatant penalties; decide to leave a player unbooked after calling a clear professional. The advantage rule has been changed so the advantage is available for less time, but now it’s far, far too short. You can get hacked, stay on your feet, take three strides and get tackled, only for the referee to wave play on. The men in yellow do get out of the way of the ball when they can this time around, though, which is nice.

Off the pitch, you’re looking at a bit of a mixed bag, really. The new “Virtual Pro” feature allows you create a player (as you did with “Be A Pro” mode last year) and build up his skills by completing an in-game set of achievements. Scoring a chipped penalty in the practice arena will boost your shooting for example, whilst successfully heading back to your own keeper when defending an in-match corner will boost your defensive skills. This created player can be used in the majority of the game’s modes, or taken online. You can even use him as your Be A Pro character this year – although you won’t be able to build up his skills in the same way as you did in that mode last year, since improvement comes solely from the achievements book. The whole thing works really nicely and saves a heck of a lot of time in certain places.

Talking of Be A Pro mode, I have to say that I’m disappointed. This year’s edition is practically identical to last year’s, meaning that you only have four seasons to play through and in which your challenge is to get called up and win the one international tournament. As a new feature last year, it was fun, but it really needs fleshing out. Some very, very minor tweaks have been made, but it certainly isn’t enough to justify playing through again. I want the manager to set me specific play-related tasks (“support the front men” or “prevent Sinclair from scoring” rather than “get a rating of 7.0” or “win the match”) for the season and to actively provide feedback on my player, rather than being a faceless number-cruncher that occasionally promotes you to captain. Also, why can I control my team’s on-pitch tactics? As a player, I’m just a pawn in the manager’s grand plan for victory, so being able to change the attacking and defensive bias, as well as amend my team’s playing style seems a bit strange. I’m either a player or a manager in this mode, and I shouldn’t be able to be both. I shouldn’t be picking the team when I’m made captain.

Manager Mode has seen some worthwhile changes though, especially in terms of the transfer market. No longer can my Exeter City rack up £20million in win bonuses in their second season and then sign Torres without objection from Liverpool. No, this year, you have to make sure that the player wants to join your club, is happy with the salary, that the fee is correct, the goal/clean sheet bonus is agreeable, that the player will be guaranteed a place in the first team, that the player wants to work with you as a manager et cetera. After making blunderbuss offers to 12 players at the start of my first season, I eventually (after five weeks of negotiations and re-negotiations) managed to sign two of them. During the January transfer window, I couldn’t sign a single player as my 23^rd-placed team were being scoffed at by the whole league. This makes things much, much tougher and is an incredibly welcome change. Above and beyond this, is the introduction of actual form to the management mode. If a player plays poorly, his form will take a beating and his overall player rating will drop by a few points. Similarly, an overachieving player will suddenly go up by a point or three, meaning that matches are no longer just individual battles, rather being more of a part of a flowing season of play. The whole management mode feels fresh and new due to these (and other) changes and playing as a lower-league club is one of the most rewarding experiences in gaming.

But, there are problems. The January Transfer Window seems to be a bit of a free-for-all, as a bug means that you can loan a player to a club and watch as they then sell him! Even worse than that, you can buy a player before the season begins, and then lose him back to his original club in the transfer window when he wasn’t even for sale. This is a massive, massive problem that needs to be fixed very, very quickly. The variable form also has its issues, with players who play really well in a game being left with a “negative,” whilst players who play an average match will sometimes get a massive positive boost. On one screen I’ll see that my center forward is rated 72 with positive form, and on another it shows him as being rated 68 with positive form. It all seems a little random – no doubt the majority of the problems are caused by yet another bug.

One addition that is a bit of a head scratcher is Live Season 2.0. Last year, you could download player stats based on their real life form. That happens here too, but you’re also given the chance to (once you’ve paid 400 Microsoft Points per league for a Live Season 2.0 subscription) try and improve on your club’s real life performance by playing rematches of the games that they’ve already played. Spurs beat Liverpool 2-1 on the opening day this year, so I took my one attempt (that’s all you get) at replaying the match and turned it into a 1-0 victory for the Reds with a messy goal from Kuyt after ten minutes. I then get a comparison of my Live Season 2.0 league position and the club’s real-life position and….that seems to be it. It may seem that I’m turning my nose up at a new feature that has been provided in the name of fun, but it doesn’t seem like it offers a great deal for an extra £4 or so (per league!) and kind of replicates what I could do in practically any other game mode with a bit of work.

There are a few on-pitch bugs that should have been sorted out in QA, too. However, I’ve seen a couple of players disappear completely (apparently now fixed), an opposition team starting with a player about 20 yards into my half on every kick-off, some very shoddy frame rates on replays and cutscenes and a couple of concerning goalkeeper errors that make no sense. On one occasion, my keeper rushed out to the edge of the box to chase down a lobbed pass, stopped the ball with his foot, and promptly turned around to run back to the goal without doing anything else. The result? 1-0 to the opposition as their striker picked up the now loose ball and chipped the now out-of-position goalkeeper. These problems are rare and – to be perfectly fair – the quality of the gameplay always makes up for them. They’re notable as I saw a fair few of them within a few short matches – which you’d expect the QA team to be able to pick up with even minimal testing.

The new features could have been thought out a little more, and the Be A Pro mode needs an overhaul for next year’s edition. But to put it simply, the on-field improvements – even though they seem relatively small – mean that if FIFA 10 came with Team A and Team B and told you that you could only play single matches over and over again, you’d still play and have a riot doing so. In spite of its off-pitch flaws, FIFA 10 is a game that will draw you in and keep you hooked simply due to the quality of the action on the pitch. Whether you’re playing as my beloved Exeter City against Torquay United at a snowy Plainmoor on F.A. Cup Round 2 day in manager mode, or playing as Manchester United against Inter Milan on a balmy evening at a rocking Old Trafford, everything feels right. Did I mention that this is the best simulation of football that you can buy?

I sincerely hope that EA release a patch to fix some of the more serious bugs, as they do become annoying after a while – especially the ones that crop up in Manager Mode. With that said, it would take a demo-to-retail transformation of biblical proportions for Pro Evo 2010 to usurp FIFA as the football game to buy this year. This is far and away one of – if not the – finest sports simulations of all time, and when you consider the bugs that crop up, the on-pitch play must be damned good to gain that acclaim.

Fast forward 15 years, and SNK is celebrating the series’ anniversary with yet another rehash of the same old formula – The King of Fighters XII. This time around, the focus appears to have been on the characters themselves with the old sprites – finally – being kicked into touch. The old makes way for a somewhat unnerving new, though, and whilst the animation is definitely much better than in previous versions, some of the characters just look plain strange. Joe manages to look like he weighs 4 stones, rather than the 14 of earlier editions, for example. Add that to the fact that the characters are incredibly pixellated to the point that they generally look like they’ve been sketched on the head of a pin and then blown up to full size and you have a package that is far from looking like the “rebirth” that SNK claims that it is. The word “rebirth” suggests something new, but KoF is definitely looking very, very old.

But – it isn’t all about looks when it comes to 2D fighting games, is it? The thrill is in the fight itself, the storylines, the massive boss characters and the epic battles that they deliver. It’s about the versus mode, and completing the game with every character in order to see every ending. It’s about unlocking all of the stages, seeing all that there is to see and then finally mastering that 15-button combo that turns the controller into a crown and sets it down on your head as you start to levitate.

Unfortunately, The King of Fighters XII seems to have lost sight of that. Boss battles? Nope. Storylines? Nada. Varying character endings? Not happening. Thousands of stages? No, just six if you count the one that has day and night versions as two separate ones. If the buckets of moves and barely passable online play weren’t there to be mastered, then there would be very little replay value at all.

I say “buckets of moves” but what I really mean is “SOME moves.” There are a lot of attacks missing from earlier editions of the game, and there appears to be no real reason for it. Some characters seem to have lost at least a third of the moves that were available to them in other iterations, with most of them being replaced by pathetic jabs or weak kicks. That just isn’t going to sit well with the fans of the series – and neither should it, especially when a fair few entire characters are missing too, blatantly being held back as yet-to-be-released-DLC for die-hard fans to spend their money on.

As far as additions to the gameplay go, the new “guard attack,” which automatically defends and then counters with a knockdown attack is somewhat out of place. The reason being that whilst the guard attack is very powerful – it can stop every single move in the game, bar a few supreme manoeuvres – it is also very easy to pull off for anybody who’s ever played a fighting game. Whether this is intentional by the developers, in order to draw players out and get them to try and get a little creative to get around the opponent’s defence, I don’t know – but I do know that it can be damned annoying when playing against someone who uses it constantly. The other major addition is the critical counter. When you fire your critical counter, the opponent is knocked into a daze and you can chain moves that aren’t normally chainable, in order to cause some massive damage. This is fun to use for a while, but it does feel somewhat cheap when you’ve only fired a few weak shots to load up your critical counter before hitting it and taking away over half of their energy.

At the end of the day, The King of Fighters XII just doesn’t cut it. Previous versions have had their die-hard fans in the West and that’s because they’ve been following the series for years, but this new version may well be a bridge too far. The game needs to be redesigned, reinvented and THEN reborn, rather than just being put through the same old process, being given a new version number, a new logo and then being sold as a new product. There are certainly better 2D fighters out there, with notables being – bizarrely – most of the earlier KoF games, and the XBLA/PSN editions of Street Fighter II Turbo – which cost less than half the price of KoFXII. The choice is yours, of course, but this really doesn’t cut the mustard.

I received Risen on the 17^th September. The review was embargoed until the 2^nd of October which – coincidentally – is the European release date. Indeed, that was the first clue that all was not well.

Risen is an out-and-out RPG. You quest, you gain experience, you kill stacks and stacks of drone enemies, you collect gold and herbs, you cook meat and you talk to a LOT of NPCs. Standard fare, so far – and those things will be enough to get a lot of RPG fans interested to the point of handing over their money right away – which wouldn’t be their best move. Your story begins when you’re washed up on a seemingly deserted island after your attempt to stowaway on an Inquisition ship ends in tragedy. Alongside you is a woman (complete with improbably large and angular breasts – I must have missed that day of school when we learnt that boobies could indeed be used for measuring right angles) and this is where the first of the game’s issues rear their ugly head. The two of you find a cabin, and the good lady is hungry for a bit of fried meat. Not bacon, sausages, or even a nice chop – just fried meat. So, you obediently run off and find some meat and a frying pan. The empty pan goes over the fire for a few seconds, and the meat is cooked. Spot the deliberate mistake. You turn to your fellow survivor and hold your empty hands out. She takes the meat – apparently she can do this without actually moving an inch – and eats it – again, motionlessly. “That was great.” she says.

Further exploration finds more irregularities. You stumble across Jan next, a friendly local who suggests that for your own good, you should find a better weapon than the club you nabbed from the wreckage on the beach. He makes a good point, so when he moves two feet away from the door and sits down on a bench outside his house, you wander in and take all of his food, drink, herbs and gold. Oh, and a fine sword which you find by picking up his keys and unlocking the chest in his bedroom. He – of course – does nothing other than congratulate you on your find. Just like real life!

It’s safe to say that NPC interaction is not Risen’s strong point. The hackneyed accents and secondary school play quality voice acting do seem fitting with the generally grammatically erroneous subtitling though, it has to be said.

As far as looks go, Risen does have its moments but they are terribly, terribly rare. Make no mistake, this game looks very, very dated. During my time with the game, more than one friend bandied the phrase “It looks like a PS2 game!” about. I wouldn’t necessarily go that far, but frequent – and very close – pop-up is the worst of the offenders, closely followed by poor textures and some mannequin-like characters. There are moments further down the line that almost achieve their desired effect, but that’s only if you haven’t given up by the time you reach them – and unfortunately, there’s more than enough opportunity for that to happen.

Risen’s combat is very simple and unfortunately, again, not particularly well realised. Combat against “major” characters is actually fairly good, but it’s the standard drone enemies that cause the problem. The majority of them have one fighting style, and that’s to rear up unconvincingly (we’re talking sliding back a good ten foot without moving their legs), charge/bite/smack you (delete as applicable), and then step back to allow you to attack before repeating the process. Some enemies can be taken down in the first round of this dance with a block, followed by a few swift blows from your primary weapon – and that’s dull, but OK. But when they get together and you’re fighting a pair (or more) of them, the real trouble starts. You’ll find that the type of wolf that you killed with three blows earlier on becomes a killing machine when matched with another foe. One will attack, then the other, then the first, then the other…and so it goes on until you try a different angle of attack or have died and are waiting whilst nothing happens for what feels like an eternity – until you’re presented with the reload options.

Even if you happen upon some fortune and see one of the two opponents facing away – giving you the perfect opportunity to take an undefendable shot – it matters not. The problem here is going to be one of two things. You’ll likely either swing your field of vision right past the enemy with the overly-twitchy controls, or, you’ll not do any damage because Risen’s collision detection is quite poor – to the point that you’ll often clearly land a blow, only to see no change in your enemy’s energy bar. If neither of those find you out, the animation is so stodgy that your own character is generally always open to a cheap shot for far longer than should be the case.

It sounds like I hate Risen, doesn’t it? Funnily enough, I actually don’t. I can clearly see what the development team were trying to do here and that, combined with the depth that shines through at times, is admirable. If you somehow manage to slog through the first couple of hours of gameplay, the storyline becomes quite interesting and there is the potential to get hooked. The issue is that there are massive, glaring holes in almost every aspect of the game and they’re not the kind of thing that you can simply glaze over when you’re trying to get “into” something that’s trying to take up hours upon hours of your life. If I have to defeat 300 enemies over the course of a game, then I want that combat to feel fair and fresh for the first ten battles at the very least. Risen’s combat feels very old hat by the time you take on your second foe, unfortunately doesn’t improve for the better weapons and equipment that come your way through extended play, and can be downright unfair from a relatively early mark.

Some people will – and do, looking at other reviews – absolutely adore Risen, and will no doubt slate me at every given opportunity from here on in. Those people are – as I am – entitled to their opinion and I’m glad they enjoyed the game more than I did. I can only say what I feel about a game though and in my eyes, Risen has to be classified as a poor attempt at challenging the likes of Oblivion (sorry, Gothic fans!) which, even if you aren’t a fan, undeniably did the job well. Even if that game wasn’t around, there would still be many, many titles available for the Xbox 360 that get the basics done better than this. I really wanted another high-quality RPG to draw me in, and Risen most certainly doesn’t fit that description.