UK Chart

The sales have had an impact on the top 40 chart this week, with the likes of Sonic Unleashed, Far Cry 2, Mirror’s Edge – which is a nice £14.71 at Tesco – and Shaun White Snowboarding all rising up a fair few places. Gears of War 2 and GTA IV have also shot upwards, while New Super Mario Bros is back at #36.

The Xbox 360 budget chart is full with new entries due to the slew of games reduced in the January sales. It’s a bit odd, though, that NFL Tour is outselling Condemned 2.

Ghost Squad – which is £7.99 in Zavvi – is back in the Wii chart along with Rayman Raving Rabbids 2 and Lego Indiana Jones. My best bargain so far? That has to be Zack & Wiki for £9.75 in PC World.

There was only one new release last week – Nintendo’s 100 Classic Book Collection on DS. That one makes a mark at #39 in the DS chart. Bookmark, see?

I’ve mentioned TrueAchievements before, but since then the site has had a clean and tidy up and had new bits added. If you haven’t been there, the site works out your true Xbox 360 Gamerscore based on how rare your acquired achievements are and how hard they actually are to obtain.

You can also see your best achievements – mine are for finishing Lost and Ninja Gaiden II. Going by the stats on the site only 30 percent of people who own Ninja Gaiden II managed to get this achievement. So in other words, not many people bothered to finish it.

The rarest and hardest achievement of all time might surprise you – it’s currently for completing all the championships in Sega’s World Snooker Championship, which only two people have managed to do so far. Rayman Raving Rabbids also has a rare one, although it doesn’t sound all that hard – you just have to unlock all of the movies. Again, only two people have achieved this. It’s worth 100 Gamerpoints but the site rates it at a whooping 1914 due to its rarity. Other high rankers include Tiger Woods 06 and RPG The Last Remnant.

Unsurprisingly, the ‘easiest achievement ever’ – gained by simply pressing the start button on The Simpsons Game – isn’t worth a jot.

Back when my PC wasn’t so elderly and I could be bothered to mess around with video drivers and all that guff, Bullfrog’s Dungeon Keeper was a game that I clocked up plenty of hours on. You had to build a dungeon to attract monsters, who would then fight for you when the pesky humans came knocking. There was resource management to deal with and also a wicked black sense of humour – whoever knew that vampires enjoyed smearing faecal matter on people’s door handles? Sadly, Dungeon Maker – or Master of the Monster Lair, as it’s known in the US – is nowhere near as amusing.

Mr. Potato Head’s career is a long and illustrious one. He’s been around since the early ’50s, was the first toy to be advertised on TV, appeared in Toy Story and recently came out in Star Wars and Spider-Man variants. Will this family friendly collection from EA be something to mark up on his CV, or something to hide? Like when the original Mr. Potato Head was criticised for being a waste of a good potato.

UK Chart

So here it is, merry Christmas, everybody is kicking a piece of virtual spherical leather around. Yes, FIFA 09 is the Christmas number one. It’s EA’s sixth in eight years, so well done them. I’m just glad it wasn’t Need for Speed: Undercover.

Call of Duty: World of War, which was tipped for the top, settles for #2, followed by Mario Kart Wii, Need for Speed: Undercover, Dr. Kawasima’s Brain Training, Wii Play, Quantum of Solace, Professor Layton, Tomb Raider Underworld and Wii Fit.

Nintendo’s big Christmas games Wii Music and Animal Crossing: Let’s Buy It Again have to do with #31 and #32. Sony’s big hopes LittleBigPlanet and Resistance 2 are at #15 and #30. Then there are the Xbox 360 big guns: Gears of War 2 at #21, and Lips at #38.

The sales should shake things up a bit. Hopefully Mirror’s Edge will be on the rise seeing it’s been cut to £20 in a lot of places. We might see Prince of Persia and Fallout 3 rising back up into the top ten too.

Gears of War 2 is a typically decent sequel, improving on the original in every way possible. It looks and sounds amazing, while the new weapons – including a flamethrower and mortar cannon – have their shortcomings as well as strengths. Which is good. The new multi-player team-based horde mode is stupidly addictive, and the story expands on why the locusts are attacking the humans, which evokes an imposing sense of humanity’s desperation.

One new feature that’s bound to get ignored, though, is this: once you’ve popped your clogs in multi-player you can turn into a ‘ghost camera’ and float around taking photos. These can be uploaded and are rated depending on what’s going on in the shot.

These are a quartet of the better snaps I’ve taken. Clockwise from top left: one of the button bashing chainsaw duels; a pretty explosion; Cole sky diving without a parachute; and the new boom shield being used wisely.

I think I’m probably a better war photographer than I am solider – I’m currently struggling to get any further than wave 16 on horde mode.

If this review was for a printed magazine, it would probably end up in the round-up section along with half a dozen others spread over a couple of pages. Not because Colour Cross is a bad game, but because there isn’t much to say about it. It isn’t the first Picross game to arrive on DS either – Nintendo released their own effort, known simply as Picross, back in May 2007, while the apparently pretty addictive Pic Pic came out early this year via 505 Games.

But I digress. Picross puzzles (also known as nonograms) were very big in Japan in the ’90s, and involve marking cells in a grid to form a picture.

Here, the puzzles are multi-layered with different colours, so effectively you have to fill in three grids to make a complete picture. The grids start off small and gradually get bigger, but symmetry always features heavily.

The presentation is passable, and as you’d probably expect the graphics are functional at best. The scrolling backdrops are a bit annoying though, seeing as some of them are the same colour as the grid you’re meant to be painting. At the start only a few picture categories are available, including candy, magic and baby, with more like medieval and horror being unlocked. It’s a mildly addictive package that’s more involving than Sudoku, but it’s still not as addictive as Tetris. Or eating Haribo sweets.

It’s the festive season, so rubbish features are a requirement. Hence this Twelve Games of Christmas. We’ll skip to the end, shall we?

On the twelfth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me:

The King of Fighters XII, »
Winning Eleven, »
Final Fantasy X,
FIFA 09,
Mario Party 8, »
Ridge Racer 7,
Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six, »
Space Channel 5! »

Grand Theft Auto IV, »
PlayStation 3, »
Master System II, »
and Tobal No 1! »

Writer’s Commentary
It almost works, doesn’t it? It took some effort to get the higher numbers to scan to any degree whatsoever. Final Fantasy was the key, as that could go anywhere, so it was a case trying to find titles with enough syllables, then bunging Final Fantasy in the most desperate position. I’d have liked to use Killer 7, but it’s just too short. I’m sure the list could be improved though – particularly 6 – so your suggestions for alternatives are welcome!

In a recent spate of tidying, I had cause to go through a box of old console paraphernalia, which I’d left without a lid on. It reminded me how much we’ve moved on.

Controller cables, for one thing. From the last generation of cabled consoles, PlayStation 2 definitely wins: even though my blue pad has stopped working entirely, the cables have best maintained their integrity. I’d forgotten just how short GameCube cables are, and how long their Xbox equivalents. The Xbox cables have become really badly creased, and it’s for that reason that they are rubbish. But it’s the effort involved in cleaning the cables – and how well they collected dirt – that really makes me glad that controller cables have been done away with.

The other anachronism is memory cards. Apart from the expense of having to buy the things, I’m glad they’re a thing of the past because I think I’ve managed to throw away my GameCube memory cards. Which is a very stupid thing to do, I’ll admit. But then, I am a very stupid thing.

This Week’s Games

It’s always the way – October and November see a slew of new releases but December is utterly barren. Last week you could count the new games on one hand; this week you could use just two two fingers. How rude!

Sonic Unleashed make a belated appearance on PlayStation 3, while EA’s AC/DC Live: Rock Band Song Pack is out for both PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. There is a new PSP UMD movie out too – The Dark Knight.

It looks like 100 Classic Book Collection for DS, due out on Boxing Day, will be the last game to be released this year. Please, try and contain your excitement.

The title explains it all, really, here are five things that annoy me about my 360. Firstly…

…The inconsistent stupidness of it all. The 360 can play DivX when I share my media through the cumbersome Windows Media Player, but the nice Windows Media Centre interface won’t play DivX at all. This is stupid. I like WMC, it updates everything and displays it all very nicely. Mind you, I mainly use my PS3 for media sharing because…

…It’s louder then Brian Blessed. Seriously, Microsoft, sort it out.  When a disc isn’t in the drive the fans are already loud enough, but put a disc in and the 360 sounds like it’s about to take off. Mind you, sometimes I like hearing that noise because…

…My console is broken. I didn’t do it. It’s been broken from day one. I’ve not had the dreaded three red rings, but my console is broken in much stupider ways.  Sometimes it forgets that it’s a 360 at all and displays a message asking me to put my disc in an Xbox 360 console. Which is stupid. This is what happens when you drive down costs, your product becomes about as reliable as women. Or maybe the problem is simply…

…A lack of thought. Even after the new update navigating the marketplace is much harder than it should be. A simple example is the bad categorisation. If something is a shooter and an arcade game, put it in both categories. Because of the way things are categorised it can be hard to find things. Surely this can’t be too hard to implement and just shows a lack of planning. Why is Geometry Wars in the Action/Adventure category and not the shooter one? WHY? I downloaded Ikaruga the other day and it took me forever to find. I only wanted to play online co-op. Which leads into my last complaint…

…Make Live free. I know Live is one of the only profitable bits of Xbox, but it needs to be free. I don’t play online a lot, only a couple of games of Team Fortress and a few games of FIFA a month, and yet I have to pay to play. It doesn’t make a lot of sense, and ends up skewing the online demographic into the hardcore/obsessive gamer territory. If Live was free, everyone would be able to participate. Then again, maybe I’m wrong. Maybe the fact that people have to pay for Live is a barrier that stops people messing up the system. If people have to pay, maybe they’ll be more fearful of being banned.

So, in conclusion, I love my Xbox and I’m off to play Eternal Sonata which is literally the most beautiful thing ever.

You can’t beat a bit of cake, and this Nintendo DS cake from Asda tastes sweeter than most. Well, it probably does. Maybe. The main image features artwork (note: not a screenshot) from New Super Mario Bros. while the top screen is made from cardboard with a blank ‘screen’ to write a birthday message on. I suppose if you were a chubby bloater you could always buy two cakes and stick them together with jam or something.

The price? A very bizarre £8.06. That’s Asda price!