Though it was released quite a few months ago, Temple Run is the game dominating the App Store today – yes it’s free, but it’s also high up in the Top Grossing chart, thanks to the sheer volume of downloads and in-app purchases.

Tiny Tower developers NimbleBit rightly had a pop at Zynga this week, after Zynga shamelessly copied Tiny Towers to make a rip-off called Dream Heights. It’s nothing new for Zynga though, a company well known for copying, buying and sometimes stealing other company’s games – such as MyFarm and Mob Wars.

Now, how about some nice mobile game reviews.

Paper Monsters
version: iPhone

The monsters in the title might be a bit misleading, as they’re merely there for you to crush and jump on, as in Mario and countless other platformers. But regardless, Paper Monsters looks lovely. Really, quite pretty indeed.

It’s a fairly standard 2D platformer, as you run along at a fairly relaxing pace and jump to collect buttons and paper clips. The characters are all beautifully created, origami-style 3D creations, in a bright landscape full of flowers, mushrooms and rainbows. Ok, no points for originality, but it looks oh so very nice. Occasionally the frame rate struggles to keep up, and the controls can feel a little unresponsive at times, but… puurrrty!

iOS (£0.69)

Epic Astro Story
version: Android

Kairosoft can basically do no wrong, we all know this by now. As the name suggests, Epic Astro Story is possibly their most epic game to date – this time, you’re in space! (Well, a newly colonised planet, with space tourists and interplanetary expeditions.)

Fans of other Kairosoft games such as Pocket Academy and Hot Springs Story might know what to expect, although Epic Astro Story crams a bit more in. You basically need to develop your colony – in a manner similar to Sim City or perhaps Civilization. Whilst at the same time, you need to train and level-up your “away team” (full of appropriately named characters such as “James Turk” and “Jean Luc Vicard”), as you send them on missions to other planets and unexplored lands. This is where it all gets a little bit Final Fantasy, as you arrange your away team members, equip them with appropriate weapons and armour, and watch them scrap it out with alien monsters. It’s mildly strategic and exceedingly cute.

It’s hard to say anything negative about Epic Astro Story, as it really does its name proud. Perhaps a sequel could be a little more in-depth… maybe the phone battery could last a bit longer. Probably if it was 69p more people would buy it. It’s close to flawless though, and exceedingly adorable at the same time.

Android (£2.99)

Paper Glider vs. Gnomes
version: iPad

The latest Neon Play game. Those guys are great, huh, huh (wink, wink!). (Full disclosure – a Games Asylum writer may have worked on this game.)

What do you get if you cross Paper Glider, with one of those destructive, puzzly physics games (yeh, you’re all thinking it… Crush the Castle!). You get Paper Glider vs. Birds Gnomes, that’s what!

There’s a bit more to it than just flinging a rock at a tower though – you need to throw your glider, drop bombs, and use a little thought to deal with the various contraptions, switches and puzzles. Plus it looks quite nice, the gnomes sound funny, and it’s free (you can buy power-ups, but they’re really not necessary), so you can’t say fairer than that.

iOS (free) / Android (free)

Normally we’d be deeply sceptical of a new handheld, whatever niche it’s targeting. And it’s always ambitious – shall we say – of companies to invoke comparisons to Apple. But we like a bit of retro round these parts, so the idea of a retro handheld with an “iTunes style” download service is certainly intriguing. That’s the GameGadget.

Crucially, it’s not come from nowhere: the company behind it, Blaze, have been producing officially licensed retro games machines for some time. This is, to an extent, the logical extension of that.

The idea is that the emulators built in to the GameGadget do all the work, so there’s no effort required for publishers and developers to make their games available for the service. Blaze have signed up the likes of Sega and Atari for previous products, so again there is a track record.

Retro might be the headline, but it’s also being touting it as an accessible open source development platform in the vein of Net Yaroze.

Touch screen technology has been very intentionally shunned, opting for a more retro-friendly set of inputs: d-pad, four face buttons, two shoulder buttons. Some more specs: 3.5″ 320 x 240 pixel screen (that’s the same resolution as the lower 3DS screen), 433 MHz dual core processor, 64MB RAM, 2GB of flash memory, SD/SDHC card slot. I’m no tech head, but that sounds respectable.

Oh, and it’s British. The first piece of gaming hardware to come out of the UK for 20 years, apparently.

It’s hard to imagine Blaze particularly bothering the likes of Nintendo and Sony – or iOS, Android or Windows Phone 7, for that matter – but if they can sign up enough publishers, and make it easier than the less legal options, then the GameGadget might just carve a nice retro-sized niche in the market.

It’ll be available directly from gamegadget.net from 30th March for £99.99.

Ubisoft has chosen the Game Boy Color version of Prince of Persia as their first 3DS Virtual Console title. Our money would have been on the little known Game Boy Color version of Rayman being their first release, so if you ever see us outside Ladbrokes and fancy a flutter then it’s probably not a good idea to ask us for gambling advice.

The Prince caused a fuss when he arrived on the scene in 1989. The animation was very impressive at the time and it was celebrated for having clever level design and maze-levels large enough to get lost in.

Rather than start with three lives there’s an infinite amount, but there is a tight time limit to content with instead. Sixty minutes are all that’s on the clock. Fortunately the power of today’s technology makes things a little easier – as with any 3DS Virtual Console game you can save anywhere. There are passwords too so you don’t have to start at the beginning every time you play.

Just to illustrate how tough a game this is, even the tutorial took us several attempts to clear. There are lots of little nuances to learn, such as dropping down from ledges to minimise damage, and you’ll also need a good memory to memorise the locations of traps. Spikes pop out of the ground and floor tiles give way when you least expect them to.

This Game Boy Color version from 1999 is a good version of a good game, but there are a few little niggles such as collision detection when sword fighting. Controls can be a little fiddly too, but this was also the case in the original. That’s the problem with Virtual Console games – what you get is warts and all.

The Prince of Persia will no doubt make a full blown appearance on 3DS at some stage, but until then £4.50 is a small price to pay for some quality Egyptian escapades.

Can we have the Game Boy Advance version of Sands of Time next, please?

We have Capcom to thank for January’s biggest new release – Resident Evil: Revelations on 3DS. It’s also the only new game out this week. Good timing there, Capcom.

Reviews have been mixed – EDGE gave it 6/10 (“the levels are a mishmash of beauty and blandness”) while Nintendo Gamer magazine dished out 90% and said it sets the standard for all third-party 3DS games. Both agreed though that it’s a bit of a looker.

There’s a demo on the eShop which is available to download so you can make your own mind up. Just before the demo was released the game was knocking around the 30th position on Amazon’s pre-order chart but after the demo launched it was in the top ten.

Are you paying attention, Nintendo? Demos work wonders.

Zavvi is the only place to stock the bundle with the circle pad pro. The existence of the extra analogue stick caused a bit of an uproar, but after hearing that it costs very little and has a battery life of a colossal 480 hours people have calmed down a bit.

Next week: Soul Calibur V, Final Fantasy XIII-2, Metal Gear Solid HD Collection, NeverDead and Gabrielle’s Ghostly Groove 3D.

It has been said that during the winter, sales of retro games boom as a lot of people spend their evenings staying in the warm and thus need entertaining. We wouldn’t be surprised if a few people hope to recreate the magic of a Christmas long gone by purchasing a vintage console off eBay too.

This month’s eBay round-up backs this up with lots of things selling for silly prices. Money is hard to come by in January? Not if you’re a retro gamer it would seem.

Quite a few Sega Master System items have caught our attention. An Action Replay cheat cartridge sold for £109 on Buy It Now, a copy of Power Strike II went for £91 and a TecToy version of Road Rash shifted for £34.

A French seller has also been listing some reproduction carts containing the Game Gear versions of Sonic Triple Trouble and Sonic Drift Racing complete with authentic looking cases but only the former found a buyer.

On Game Gear meanwhile a factory sealed system sold for £225 on a US auction, a copy of The Itchy & Scratchy Game in its fetching bright yellow box went for £79.99 while a copy of the European-exclusive James Pond: Operation Starfi5h went for £50.

From Sega to Sony. A brand new PSone “bumdle” sold for £74 after 13 bids, containing a new joypad, memory card and a factory sealed copy of Spyro. A fully working PS2 development kit with manuals and software also went for £280. The seller wanted £50 postage. Is it made out of lead?

Onto Nintendo. The highest grossing auction this month was for a factory sealed copy of 10 Yard Fight on NES, which still had the plastic shelf hanger on it. It ended at $2,125 (£1,368) after 14 bids. Selling for a similar amount was this copy of Zelda II on Famicom, sealed and marked “Not for Resale”. It really is a curious looking little thing. A factory sealed Captain Commando on SNES also ended at $1,332.98 (£858.49) from 12 bids while a sealed copy of Konami’s Metal Warriors sold for slightly more – $1,350.00 (£869.45).

The seller of this Atari Lynx bundle undersold it a bit. Well, it sold at a decent price (£154) but you would have thought he would have made a bigger deal out of it including 47 games. That’s got to be half the entire Lynx catalogue.

In last month’s round-up we covered the fact that the Sonic Generations collector’s edition has been selling for large amounts. The prices have dropped at little – this one went for £86 (8 bids) and this one for £84 (27 bids) – but a few auctions have reached almost £200, like this one.

We’re ending our look at the world of achievements by rounding up the ones that are the hardest to unlock. Our source for these is the almighty True Achievements website. If you have an interest in Gamerscore boosting then registering for this site is recommended. Not only does it show you what your ‘true’ Gamerscore is by working out how rare the achievements you’ve unlocked are, but also a vast amount of other stats, facts and guides showing how to unlock achievements with minimum fuss.

My ‘best game’ in terms of achievement rarity is none other than Kinectimals – it turns out that statistically not many people stuck with it after the first couple of hours. The true achievement score is even higher than Fallout 3 – a game which I finished every piece of DLC for. Amazing, really.

Gears of War 3’s ‘Seriously 3.0’ leads the way for achievement rarity – 72,685 tracked gamers have the game but only 38 have unlocked it. This achievement is for unlocking every Onyx medal and reaching level 100, with Onyx medals handed out for things like performing 6,000 execution moves, reviving 1,200 teammates and playing 3,000 matches of each online mode. The achievement is worth 100G, but True Achievements rates it at 4,371G based on the ratio of those who own the game and those who have acquired it.

Next up is Fight Night Champion’s ‘Hamstring Blaster’ (reach boxer level 45) that only 6 gamers have unlocked, which is closely followed by an achievement for running 621 miles in EA Sports Active 2. Only 2 gamers have felt physical enough to unlock this one. Rival fitness game UFC Personal Trainer must be too much hard work for most as well – unlocking all videos is another rare achievement that only 2 gamers have gained. Burning 25,000 calories in The Biggest Loser is a tough one to chew too.

Kane & Lynch: Dead Men has two achievements that have caused a little bit of controversy in the world of achievements. They’re for unlocking both Kane and Lynch for use in the Fragile Alliance mode, which you need reach rank 1 and rank 2 respectively on world leader boards to unlock. However it would appear that a small group of gamers have dominated the top 50 rank with bogus alternative accounts and are constantly playing against one another, preventing anybody from unlocking them. It has been suggested that they’ll only let people play against them for monetary gains.

Yoostar 2 for Kinect – which puts your face in the starring role of a movie – is one of the hardest games to get all achievements on. The 50 achievements combined have a True Achievement score of 8,498G with five achievements in particular being bothersome to gain. The one of achieving 2,500,000 fame points is the one that most struggle with as the most mundane of tasks in the game, such as watching somebody else’s video online, only unlocks 10 fame points.

A lot of Japanese 2D shooters have hard achievements too, most of which entail finishing the game with just one credit. Deathsmiles, Raiden IV and Mushihime-sama Futari Ver 1.5, we’re looking at you here. Even fewer people have managed to get 300,000,000 points on Deathsmiles than those who have finished it without using a credit.

Some of the worst games on Xbox 360 have the hardest of achievements. The poorness of the subject matter no doubt makes them even more of a challenge to get. Say hello to reaching level 10 in Power Up Heroes (worth 200G but has a True Achievement (TA) score of 1,198G), finishing the world tournament career mode in Brunswick Pro Bowling (200G; TA 1,134G), win diamond medals for every challenge in Motion Sports (50G; TA 1,103G) and destroying 1 million blocks in the dire Bomberman: Act Zero (50G; TA 1,002G).

Good luck with all of the above – you’ll need it. That and very strong willpower. And coffee.

FIFA 12 remains at the top of the chart for the fifth week running but that’s not the most interesting thing to happen in the UK chart this week.

It would seem that word of Rayman Origin’s greatness has finally spread across the United Kingdom – after failing to even enter the top 40 on release, Ubisoft’s pretty platformer this week makes it into the top 10 at #9, up from #17.

Last week rumours were going around that THQ was in a spot of trouble. As if by magic, both WWE ’12 and Saints Row 3 have shot back up – WWE ’12 is at #18 (up from #32) while Saints Row 3 is at now #7 (up from #14). Fortunately the rumours turned out to be bogus, although they did point out that no decision has been made yet about their Games Workshop MMO.

Last week’s two releases – Winter Sports 2012 and Reel Fishing Paradise 3D – haven’t made the 3DS top 10 but it’s fair to say that the 3DS chart looks a whole lot rosier than it did 6 months ago.

It’s always pleasing to hear publishers announcing that they’re bundling a load of their Xbox Live Arcade and PSN games together for a retail release. More often than not these packages work out cheaper than downloading the contents individually and from a personal point of view I always find something that I didn’t think I would enjoy but end up getting glued to.

Ubisoft are the latest to reveal such a compilation. A triple pack featuring From Dust, OutLand and Beyond Good & Evil HD is due for release on 23rd March for both Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. It’s available online for a mere £14.99 on Play or £14.95 on TheHut.

Late last year Capcom confirmed the Capcom Digital Collection, containing a mixture of retro and modern games such as Final Fight: Double Impact, 1942, Super Street Fighter II, Puzzle Fighter and Flock!

It’s advertised as containing 8 games but it does in fact contain 9 – Final Fight: Double Impact also contains Magic Sword. Nothing like selling yourself short.

The problem with these collections is that they are few and far between. Early in the Xbox’s life there was Xbox Live Arcade Unplugged: Volume One but Microsoft never followed it up with any others, although we suppose the Arcade Compilation which was bundled with the Xbox 360 for a while counts. There was also the Limbo, Trials HD and Xplosion Man Triple Pack which sold very well.

It’s a shame that publishers don’t get into the habit of bundling their virtual goods as there are a lot of PSN and XBLA games that are forgotten about soon after release. We’d love to see a collection of Double Fine’s downloadable efforts and we’re sure Atari has released enough retro revamps to fill an entire disk. Konami and EA too, we’d wager.

Perhaps as the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 fade into their twilight years then we will see more compilations, similar to how publishers bundled older PlayStation 2 games together.

Everyone’s talking about The Artist – the awards-tipped nearly-silent movie starring Channel 5’s The Hotel Inspector and the bad psychic from Phoenix Nights. That’s partly because the film’s very good, but also in no small part because it uses technology no longer common in mainstream cinema – silent film, black and white, 4:3 aspect ratio.

That got me thinking about different it is in the world of games, where old fashioned has been borderline-trendy for some time. It helps that old for games isn’t actually that long ago; we have an established word for it – retro; and natural, relatively high profile places for it to reside – mobiles and downloads. On the App Store alone this week we’ve had the Tamagotchi faithfully resurrected as Hatchi, and Jeff Minter’s latest retro-tinged thing Caverns of Minos.

Anyway, onto some not-very-retro mobile games.

Run Roo Run
version: iPhone

Less is more, or more is more? 5TH Cell have both angles covered with this micro-platformer, their first new IP since Scribblenauts: levels typically last 3-5 seconds, but there are hundreds and hundreds of the things – and ten more added every week.

Standard levels come in groups of 15, each of which introduces a new element – fans, springs, double jump, etc. It gives the game a curious tempo, since each group of levels starts off simply to introduce the new element, then grows in complexity, bringing in combinations of earlier elements. So there’s a nice arc to follow even if you’re only playing for a couple of minutes.

The standard levels are, however, distinctly on the forgiving side. In an attempt to balance that, each group of levels successfully completed spawns a set of extreme levels, which demand an awful lot more precision. There’s probably a more satisfying solution somewhere, but it’s better than blocking progress with unreasonably tricky levels.

iOS (£0.69)

Woody Woodpecker
version: iPhone

A competitive version of Tiny Wings? Why not! Starring Woody Woodpecker? Er, okay!

The similarity to Apple’s game of the year is clear to see, but putting a racing game on top of the ‘tap to fall, release to fly’ mechanic is a fine idea. The addition of recharging power ups and various obstacles differentiates it further.

And for the most part, it works. It looks suitably smart, and the simple controls are eminently effective. It’s in the little details that it falls slightly short: your view of the level doesn’t always keep the ground in good sight, and given the importance of hitting a nice downward slope, that’s not ideal. The placing seems to go a bit wonky on the final sprint to the line too: places are often gaining without overtaking anyone, even after crossing the finish line.

iOS (£0.69)

Vanessa Saint-Pierre Delacroix and Her Nightmare
version: iPhone

Following success on Windows Phone, Replay Games have brought Vanessa and Her Elaborately Named Game to iOS. Bad Pilcrow’s platform-puzzler has an interesting conceit: its levels are mapped onto the sides of a cube, and to get to the exit you have to rotate the sides, changing the direction of gravity, and opening and closing passages between the sides.

Once block moving puzzles, keys to collect, and dangerous spikes are introduced, it hits a difficulty sweet spot, and it’s all rather enjoyable. Towards the end of the game, adding spiders to avoid and relying more on platforming elements takes it a step too far.

The problem with the platforming side is one of precision: the controls are bafflingly laid-out (see screenshot) and a tad unresponsive. It’s a lower resolution affair than one has come to expect, though the art style is quite nice. It’s also on the short side at just 36 levels, and an inconsistent star-rating system limits the attraction of replaying.

iOS (£0.69) / Windows Phone (£0.79)

This week pQube kindly remind us that it’s winter by releasing Winter Sports 2012: Feel the Spirit on Wii, 3DS and PC. The promotional video includes no in-game footage to speak of, which is a little worrying, but one of the events included is ‘ice speedway’ (read: motorbikes on ice) which sounds pleasingly barmy. It’s by 49Games who also worked on the multi-format Winter Stars which we reviewed in November. Wouldn’t be surprised if the developers have recycled more than a few assets, given that the two appear very similar.

pQube are also unleashing Ski-Doo Snowmobile Challenge on PlayStation 3 this week. It’s not a new game – it was released in the US back in 2009 – but reviews were above average including 6.7 from IGN. It has a 12 player online mode but given that currently only 100 people have viewed the video of it on YouTube we can’t imagine that the opponents are going to be easy to find online. Oddly, GAME lists an Xbox 360 version but Play and Amazon have no mention of it. The video only mentions the PlayStation 3 version too.

This week’s only other release is also a sports game. Fishing is classed as a sport, isn’t it? You can view a video of Reel Fishing Paradise 3D here. We quite like the idea of being able to catch fish and put them in customisable tanks but we think we’d rather wait for the next Animal Crossing for our fishing fix.

Next week: Resident Evil: Revelations and the Nintendo 3DS Circle Pad Pro accessory.

The Cabela games have been getting slowly better over the years. This is nothing for Activision to be proud of though – they’ve gone from being poor to passable. That’s at least providing you can get over the fact that they all involve shooting innocent animals in the face.

This isn’t Activision’s yearly Cabela update but rather a spin-off. It’s viewed from third-person instead of first-person and there’s a greater emphasis on storytelling, featuring a plot that sees an airplane carrying a precious virus vaccine crash land in the Antarctic. The voice acting isn’t too bad but the grainy cut-scenes look like something out of a PSone game.

The in-game visuals fair better – the rock faces which you spend around 50 percent of the game climbing are nicely rendered and the snow effects are sufficient. Animation of the main character is pretty terrible, but this isn’t the first thing that stands out – it’s how fiddly the targeting is. When pulling out a pistol the reticule never appears in the centre of the screen as you would expect but rather in one of the corners and all it takes to send it zooming from one side of the screen to the other is the smallest touch of the analogue stick.

When you’re not climbing cliffs the rest of the game is spent fighting off wolves and the occasional bear. Most enemies go down in one or two shots. You can also activate a ‘focus shot’ which lets you see inside an animal so you can target their vital organs. If only we were joking about this. New guns become available as the story progresses and later a grappling hook is added to your inventory.

The story flows nicely, with a sleigh ride section thrown in for variety, but this has to be one of the shortest games around – according to the online leaderboard we finished it in just over two hours. It’s possible that loading times and the time spent retrying sections isn’t included in that figure though – we’re pretty sure it took us nearer the three hour mark. Either way, it’s a very short game.

There are extra modes to try, thankfully. These modes are all on-rails shooters and have been designed with the optional light-gun that comes packaged with some of the recent Cabela games in mind. They’re fast paced and very arcade-like in design, complete with such power-ups as thermal vision and infinite ammo. One nice idea is the ability to set your own challenges – at the end of a level a list of stats are shown including accuracy and hit rate. You can then pick one of these to beat on your next attempt.

As much as we appreciate Activision for trying to do something new with the Cabela franchise it’s painfully evident that it was put together in a bit of a hurry. The fact that it’s surprisingly light-hearted is something we like, but that’s no reason to spend the best part of twenty quid on it.

The third part of our achievement feature involves the stupidest ever to be devised. Feel free to replace the word ‘stupidest’ with the word ‘easiest’ there as most are stupid because they’re so easy to gain.

Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard is a silly game, parodying dozens of videogames, so it does make sense that it has silly achievements. 15G for starting the game, 5G for pausing the game (‘You Took Five!’) and a ridiculous 60G for watching the credits which are available from the options screen. That’s a potential of 80G before you’ve even killed your first enemy.

Quite a few Japanese games give achievements for starting a game too including Shadows of the Damned, Virtual On: Force, Dodonpanchi Resurrection and Deathsmiles. Long before these games were released The Simpsons Game had a similar one – ‘Press Start to Play’ with the description of “The easiest achievement… ever”.

Going back to Japanese games, a few Japanese developers out there have an odd sense of humour. Finishing the mediocre Bullet Witch on Hell Mode unlocks an achievement worth 1G, and in Dead or Alive 4 if you lose a certain amount of online matches in a row then some achievements worth sweet FA are added to your score. Or not added, in this case.

Becoming ‘Prestige’ in Call of Duty: World at War – the highest rank for the online mode – also bagged 0G in return for people’s time and effort. In the words of the developer: “Time to go outside and find some things to do…”

Avatar: The Burning Earth is one that’s popular with achievement hunters. All five achievements can be unlocked within 2 minutes of starting the game simply by racking up a combo by attacking the first wave of enemies. It’s because of the ease to get 1000G in an instant that it still sells for between £10-£20 on the likes of eBay and Amazon despite being released way back in 2008. At the time of typing the PlayStation 2 version will set you back just 36p on Amazon.

Sega Mega Drive Collection, oddly known as Sonic’s Ultimate Genesis Collection in the US, is another one easy achievement hunters like. They’re for things like talking to another dolphin in Ecco and collecting 100 rings while playing Sonic 3 as Tails. The latter is even easier to do than playing as Sonic.

Both Duke Nukem 3D and Duke Nukem Forever have an obsession with poo. Duke Nukem 3D gives you an achievement for walking in poo while Duke Nukem Forever gives you one for throwing it about. Nice.

And we’ll leave you with what I think is the stupidest achievement ever – throwing yourself off the Golden Gate Bridge in Homefront. Committing suicide, basically. If it were a Lemmings game that would make sense but in a war game it makes none at all.

Last week wasn’t a great one for UK videogame sales. FIFA 12 holds onto the top of the chart for a fourth week running even though sales were down 54% from last week.

Just Dance 3 climbs to #2 with The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, Battlefield 3 and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 finishing off the top 5.

Fitness games are certainly in demand at the moment – Zumba Fitness and Zumba Fitness 2 are at #6 and #7 while Ubisoft’s Your Shape: Fitness Evolved makes a chart appearance at #12. It was first released way back in November.

There isn’t much going on elsewhere in chart land, expect for in the PlayStation 2 chart which this week contains no less than three different FIFA games. Last week Sensible Soccer 2006 of all things was riding high.

505 Games’ Blackwater is a little too old for us to review (plus we’ve already mentioned that it was one of Metacritic’s worst games of 2011) but after playing through this shoddy on-rails shooter there’s no way we couldn’t write a little something about it.

It’s one of those rare games that’s so bad it’s good. That’s providing you play it with a joypad at least – the Kinect controls are so sluggish that we gave up with them after dying several times on the first level.

The cut-scenes raised the most grins. During one a solider is trying to break down a door but to no avail. “We need to look for another way to get to the rooftop,” he says while retreating, even though the window next to the door is wide open. When the band of soldiers finally reach the roof they find that all four adjacent buildings have patrols on. The guys from Blackwater then stand around deliberating their next move while the enemy is no less than a hundred feet away, seemingly frozen on the spot and unable to attack.

In another cut-scene the main character’s voice couldn’t be heard. The next thing we did hear was a team-mate saying “Thanks, receiving you loud and clear.”

The dialogue itself is really is quite ’special’:

“Where to next, chief?”

“Well, the hotel downtown is giving off thermal readings that are off the chart.”

It’s a hotel. It’s a place where people gather. Of course there’s a high thermal reading.

The Blackwater brigade have exceptionally good manners for a gang of paid mercenaries as well. There are no swear words at all despite it being a 16+ rated game and just about every sentence ends with ‘please’ or ‘thanks’. An attempt to boost the company’s image, perhaps? We like good manners as much as the next person, but in a game of this ilk they make every conversation seem oddly formal:

“I’ve done my part, now it’s your turn.”

“Thank you! I appreciate it!”

It gets worse. The controls are inverted by default, so when the QTE event prompts appear on the screen you actually have to do the opposite of what’s shown. How did something like that mange to escape the play tester’s attention? Grenades more often than not fail to kill an enemy even if they’re right next to the blast and sometimes enemies charge at you running at least a hundred miles per hour. It’s like watching a DVD on fast forward.

The achievements have had the same amount of thought put into them as the rest of the game. Namely, none. A little trivial perhaps, but our Gamerscrore after spending four hours with the game stood at a mere 280G. To get the rest of the achievements we’d wager you’d have to play it for at least 15 hours, which is a figure that beggars belief given the tedious nature. There are also couple of achievements for playing the eight player mode. How many people regularly have eight friends in their presence? I don’t think I could even fit that amount of people into my gaming room.

When this one drops to a fiver, which probably won’t be too long seeing as it is £9.98 at GAME at the moment, buy it, get your mates round and prepare to titter. We haven’t found a person yet who doesn’t like having a laugh at how poor a game is, and this is one of the poorest this generation.

The App Store charts look quite familiar at the start of 2012, with Angry Birds, Fruit Ninja, Bejeweled and so on all taking the top spots in an effort to make all other mobile game developers feel a little hopeless. At least Catchphrase is high in the charts, which should please Roy Walker.

Nintendo might be slightly annoyed with Mole Kart (we’ll avoid the hyperlink), a game which not only copies Mario Kart, but directly rips off some of its tracks too. Almost as blatant as Angry Chickens.

In another piece of self promotion, Paper Glider vs. Gnomes has just been released on iOS and Android, with a dozen or so levels crafted by the dainty hands of our own Mr Philbin. It’s free, so get that to shut Adam up.

Now some games about augmented sound and art.

Dimensions. Adventures in the Multiverse

A game based on augmented sound is a fascinating idea, and the initial noodling around with Dimensions doesn’t disappoint: noises around you in the real world come at you pleasingly translated and distorted through your earphones, over and above the soundtrack which changes depending on what you’re up to. The idea is that you leave Dimensions running in the background as you go about your business, and every now and then you’re notified that there’s an Artifact to collect or a Nephilim to fend off.

There’s just one problem with this. Both activities use up Quantum Cells, which appear around you relatively frequently, and can be collected by scanning the environment occasionally. But this requires you to pay constant attention to the game, which is not really the point: as I said, the idea is to have it as a background; Artifacts and Nephilim are relatively infrequent. The solution is to buy Quantum Cells with actual money. When the app itself is already at the pricier end of the scale, this is a bit much.

The game is quite a demanding beast, too. The different dimensions are unlocked by being quiet and noisy (fine), playing between midnight and 1am (bit specific), and promoting the game to your friends (sod off). Notifications, too, are on the bothersome side – though developers RjDj have taken note of this in a recent update, and they can of course be turned off.

It all adds up to a game that, for my money, just asks a bit too much of the player, in return for relatively little beyond the initial joy of discovering what the game does with augmented sound. It’s an intriguing curiosity, and there’s definitely potential in this area, but that’s not quite fulfilled here.

iOS (£1.99)

Race Against Time

I enjoy a wander around Tate Modern as much as the next pleb, and developers Somethin’ Else – The Nightjar, Linkem – are a class act. Combine the two, and what’s not to like?

Not a lot, though initially it might not seem that way. You control a little chameleon guy, jumping through levels based around the art of each decade from the 20th and 21st centuries. For the first few levels, it’s all a bit pedestrian: the action is undemanding, and the background – inspired by the art styles of the time – doesn’t seem particularly varied to my idiot’s eye.

But the second half of the game is a different matter: the variation in scenery and music is far more noticeable, and all the better for it; the levels themselves become exacting sequences of jumping and power-up collecting, long enough to challenge but short enough not to irritate.

Not surprisingly, there’s a bit of education in there too: a nice modern art timeline, and explanations of the different art styles unlocked as achievements.

iOS (free)