This Week’s Games

Ping! Ping! Ping! That’s the sound of Microsoft and Sony flicking elastic bands at each another. It’ll be genuinely interesting to see what does better in next week’s chart – Halo Wars or Killzone 2. There are more 360s out there than PlayStation 3s, but a Halo-themed RTS isn’t going to be everybody’s cup of tea. The fairest review of Killzone 2 that I’ve seen has been in PSM3 – they gave it 88%, branding it a technical showcase but a bit short. Just nobody mention the fact that EDGE rated House of the Dead: Overkill higher than Killzone 2 in the latest issue.

So while Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 owners pretend to be space marines, Wii owners can this week “enjoy” a heavily butchered conversion of Dead Rising. There are less zombies, the photography has been taken out and Frank can no longer jump. Suffice to say, reviews haven’t been glowing.

Spectrobes: Beyond the Portals will no doubt do well on DS – it’s a sequel that’s been a long time coming – while the fact that EA ditched Populous on DS and let Rising Star publish it instead is a bit worrying.

Next Week: Tom Clancy’s HAWX (with a free Xbox 360 faceplate at Play.com), Patapon 2, Mario Power Tennis, Big Bang Mini and Away: Shuffle Dungeon.

I am not a snake but, unlike our delightful friends across the pond, I shorten mathematics to maths, not math. I had a number of American lecturers in my now distant mathematical past, so it doesn’t really bother me, but I like to make the distinction nonetheless.

Getting to the point, Nintendo is going to select four US schools with a MATHCOUNTS Club and at least 12 participating students, and give each one 20 copies of Personal Trainer: Math and 20 Nintendo DS systems.

A couple of thoughts on this. Firstly, if there are as few as 12 pupils in one of the winning clubs, but they get 20 bits of hardware and software, then because 20 > 12, there’s going to be hardware and software not getting used. What a waste. Someone hasn’t thought this through.

Also, this whole thing is to get kids excited about maths. But Personal Trainer: Math contains games of addition and subtraction, and – apparently most excitingly – “multiplication tables and calculation ladders”. But that’s all quite boring.

If they want to show how great maths is, what they should have included is hyperbolic geometry, topology, the Mandelbrot set, cryptography – that sort of stuff. Much more fun. Or is that just me?

Well that’s a relief: LittleBigPlanet is coming to PSP in 2009. A relief because it’s still the only thing really tempting me to buy a PlayStation 3, so I don’t need to now.

It makes sense though. With neither PSP nor PlayStation 3 exactly flying off the shelves, the best tactic is to throw every successful franchise at every format, and hope that someone notices.

That’s presumably why MotorStorm is also coming to PSP – and indeed PlayStation 2 of all things – in the form of the new MotorStorm Arctic Edge.

If Sony isn’t going to convince someone to buy a PlayStation 3, then selling them a new PlayStation 2 game must be better than nothing.

Noby Noby Boy is said to be both good and cheap. The same goes for the new Noby Noby Boy T-shirts that Panic are selling. They’re $24.95 a pop, and yes, they do ship to the UK. They’ve still got some Katamari Damacy shirts in stock too, including a fetching fuzzy orange one.

UK Charts

I bet Capcom wishes it had released Street Fighter IV sooner – it has taken the top spot of the top 40 chart. There are two other new entries in the top 10 also – PC thing Warhammer 40K: Dawn of War II at #3 and the lovely Sega Mega Drive Ultimate Collection at #7.

Race Pro goes in at #13 and 50 Cent: Blood in the Sand – which THQ took off Activision – arrives at #22. Left 4 Dead has dropped like a headless zombie down from #11 to #25 but that’s not a patch on Mystery Case Files which has gone from #3 to #26. On the upside, Disney’s Bolt is bounding high this week bolting up from #40 to #12.

The end of the DS chart is almost completely made up of re-entries, which is something that doesn’t happen too often. That doesn’t mean it’s particularly interesting though.

This Week’s Games

There’s bound to be something out this week to tickle your fancy. Street Fighter IV has been getting excellent reviews and it’s also surprisingly cheap online – £27.99 at HMV seems a sensible buy. 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand is also said to be jolly good fun (as 50 Cent himself probably wouldn’t say) while RPG Disgaea 3 is about as good as turn-based titles get.

There are also couple of curios for Wii – a tardy conversion of Rogue Trooper (the blue chap from the 2000 AD comics) and Nerf N-Strike, which comes with a Nerf gun you can clip a Wii Remote into. Awesome. Konami’s Eledees get another outing, this time on DS, while on Xbox 360 there’s Race Pro and X-Blades – a Heavenly Sword lookalike from an unknown Russian developer.

And if none of those float your boat, then there’s bound to be something on the Sega Mega Drive Ultimate Collection. You can’t beat a bit of Streets of Rage 2.

Next week: Killzone 2, Halo Wars, Dead Rising: Chop Till You Drop and Silent Hill: Homecoming.

Sega has slipped up! Next to the caption for Sonic 2 on the back of the new Sega Mega Drive Ultimate Collection (known as Sonic’s Ultimate Genesis Collection in the US, for some bizarre reason) somebody has used an image of Sonic 3 by mistake.

It’s an easy blunder to make in all fairness – the first levels in Sonic 2 and Sonic 3 look pretty similar with their palm trees and all. Still, you’d think that Sega would know their blue hedgehog’s history at bit better.

Brash Entertainment must be the worst thing to happen to videogames for a long time. After pumping out tat like Jumper, Space Chimps and Alvin and the Chipmunks they went bankrupt, leaving a handful of independent developers up poo creek and ditching several games in the process.

These apparently included Saw, Prison Break, Clash of the Titans and a Superman game by Factor 5. It has since emerged that they were also going to be publishing a game based on The Flash, with screens of the canned title appearing on the internet recently (more here and here).

It looks ok, if a bit sterile. But the real casualty is the Superman game, as not only did Factor 5 work on the PlayStation 3-exclusive Lair, but also the decent Star Wars: Rogue Squadron games for the GameCube.

It’s all well and good using videogame artwork as desktop wallpaper, but a chap named Orioto has gone one better and drawn his own based on retro videogames. They’re available at Deviant ART to download and look dazzling.

Shame Sega can’t make a 2D Sonic game that looks as good as this.

UK Charts

Lily Allen’s The Fear is #1 in the music single chart; F.E.A.R 2: Project Origin is #1 in both Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 charts. Conspiracy? I think so.

It can’t knock Wii Fit off the top of the Top 40 UK chart though, having to make do with #2. There are also plenty of other new entries to dazzle your eyes – Ben 10: Alien Force at #13, The House of the Dead: Overkill at #15, Burnout Paradise: The Ultimate Box at #36 and Disney’s Bolt at #40.

Skate 2 has dropped from #8 to #21 while The Lord of the Rings: Crapquest is on the way out too going from #14 to #27.

The apparently rubbish Destroy All Humans: Path of the Furon and Shellshock 2: Blood Trails fail to enter the top 40 but go in at #12 and #17 in the Xbox 360 chart and #19 and #23 in the PlayStation 3 chart. Deadly Creatures crawls into #31 in the Wii chart. I’m betting it’ll be a slow seller but steady seller, much like THQ’s own De Blob was.

Pop-Up Pirate! ranks below even Buckaroo on the scale of incredibly basic childhood games. You insert small plastic swords into slots in a barrel until, by pure chance, you hit the slot that makes the pirate pop out of the barrel this time.

The infant entertainment comes from the pirate popping out of the barrel, not the process of random blade insertion. So a video game version strikes me as remarkably pointless.

But that’s what Tomy Europe has done to launch itself as a video game publisher, and you’ll find it on WiiWare now.

Perhaps it’s genuinely improved in its digital form, but the press release fails to convince me with its talk of a multiplayer mode, a single player challenge against the clock, and the option to play it as your Mii.

But I bet it still isn’t the weakest excuse for a game you can get for the Wii.

New Scientist – as proper a scientific website as you could ask for – brings news of a European emulation project called KEEP (Keeping Emulation Environments Portable). It’s going to cost over €4 million, and last 36 months. Our own University of Portsmouth is one of the participants.

It’s aim is wide: to safeguard access to all things digital – “text, sound, and image files; multimedia documents, websites, databases, videogames etc” – by developing a Emulation Access Platform which can do anything ever, probably.

But the real motivation is surely to ensure that future generations can continue to achieve enlightenment through Rolo to the Rescue.