UK Charts

The top 40 chart is pretty dull this week. The top three titles remain the same – Modern Warfare 2, Assassin’s Creed 2 and New Super Mario Bros. Wii – while Invizimals on PSP is the only new entry at #29.

Lego Rock Band hasn’t managed to get into the top 40 at all, which is very odd seeing reviews have been mostly positive. There’s lots of Lego love still going on though, with no less than four games based on the bricks in the chart.

In the single formats things are a little more interesting – Naruto: Ultimate Ninja 5 sneaks in at #15 in the PlayStation 2 chart, Assassin’s Creed: Bloodlines at #4 in the PSP chart and Rogue Warrior at #33 and Blood Bowl at #38 in the Xbox 360 chart. The I’m a Celebrity …Get Me Out of Here! game is loitering at #31 in the DS chart. If you see anybody buying it then take the copy out of their hand and throw it against the nearest wall. You’ll be doing them a massive favour.

Where This Week’s Game Are

It’s the Wii that has the most interesting games out this week – the lovely 2D adventure game Muramasa: The Demon Blade and Resident Evil: The Darkside Chronicles, which is apparently a lot better than the first one. You can also get it in a pack with a Wii Zapper for an extra tenner. Or you could go down to Poundland and get a third-party gun holster for a quid. Then there’s futuristic racer Wheelspin from legendary developer Archer Maclean. Despite lots of potential, US reviews weren’t very good.

On Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC there’s Rogue Warrior, which has nothing to do with 2000 AD’s blue chap. There are no reviews on Gamerankings yet, which tells you everything you need to know. Also: some online retailers are selling it for under £20 already.

This week’s movie tie-in is Where The Wild Things Are: The Videogame, featuring plenty of horrible looking trolls. It looks like your standard movie tie-in stuff, with reviews being around the 5/10 mark. Next week’s Avatar game is looking much better.

Next Week: James Cameron’s Avatar: The Game, Tony Hawk: Ride, Summon Night: Twin Age and The Saboteur (RIP Pandemic).

I don’t care what other people think – graffiti is art. If you see yourself as the next Banksy or have an artistic streak then you might like to know that Ruffian Games are looking for images to decorate the walls of Crackdown 2 with. You also get your name in the game’s credits.

Full details are here, but the basic rules are that it must be clean, it can’t be somebody else’s work, and has to be 1024 x 1024.

In the world of celebrities every now and then some incredibly random story about somebody’s past appears in the papers and I find myself thinking “how the hell did that story come to light?”

Today I found myself asking this yet again – according to The Sun, X-Factor hopefuls John & Edward (or Jedward) worked for Microsoft in Ireland testing videogames for £50 a day. They described the work as “deadly”.

Maybe they were forced to play Fuzion Frenzy 2?

Praising a company for trying to sue another company isn’t something I do regularly, but I’m quite pleased that Datel have filed a lawsuit against Microsoft for blocking all third-party Xbox 360 memory cards.

Mircosoft’s intention was to stop people from using the type of memory cards in which an SD card can be inserted to fiddle around with the console’s firmware and stuff. That’s all well and good and perfectly understandable. What’s less than understandable is that the software update even blocks just plain old memory cards, of which Datel claims they have sold old over 50,000 units.

The courts may rule in Datel’s favour – it’s basically monopolising, forcing all competitors to remove their somewhat cheaper products from the market and leaving the consumer with nothing but Microsoft’s expensive options. We shall see.

UK Charts

Even with radiant reviews Assassin’s Creed 2 hasn’t been able to knock Modern Warfare 2 off the top of the chart instead having to do with #2, which is respectable enough. New Super Mario Bros. Wii jumps in at #3; Left 4 Dead 2 at #7. It looks like it’s going to do better than its processor did, although having said that I do believe that the original was something of a slow but steady seller. It held its price for a long time at least.

F1 2009 just misses out on a top 10 entry by arriving at #11. For a game released only on Wii and PSP though that’s still pretty good going. Another game charting higher than I expected is Lego Indiana Jones 2, which hasn’t had much publicity in the press. I don’t think Lucasarts even bothered sent review copies out in advance to the game’s release.

Jak & Daxter: The Lost Frontier and Saw haven’t made it into the top 40 but Jak & Daxter goes in at #6 in the PlayStation 2 chart while Saw goes in at #13 in the and #15 respectively in the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 charts. I reckon it would have sold a whole lot more copies if it were released a month ago. Not that it particularly deserves to do so.

This Week’s Games

We’re starting to get to the last of the big Christmas releases now. There’s definitely been less games released this winter, but that’s not such a bad thing. Assassin’s Creed 2 certainly isn’t a rushed out sequel, and reviews suggest that it’s a massive improvement over the first one. Left 4 Dead 2 on the other hand is being released only a year after its processor – which has angered many fans – but reviews have been solid including a 9 from Eurogamer.

F1 2009 skids onto Wii and PSP this week. If you’re thinking that that’s an odd combination of host consoles then you’re right. It’s because Codemasters only acquired the license earlier this year, and the Wii and PSP are the quickest and easiest to develop for. Our resident motor sport aficionado Jake has been playing the Wii version, and says it’s really good.

New Super Mario Bros. Wii is Nintendo’s big Christmas Wii release. It seems like they’ve designed it for both the casuals and hardcore – it’s a new 2D adventure, but if you get stuck you can skip levels and move on. LEGO Indiana Jones 2: The Adventure Continues is out on everything but PlayStation 2. PlayStation 2 owners – if there’s any left – shouldn’t feel left out though because Jak & Daxter: The Lost Frontier is out on their console this week, as well as PSP.

Then there’s Konami’s Saw game. Reviews have been mediocre, suggesting that’s its good if you’re a fan but not so good if you’ve been weaned on the likes of Resident Evil and Silent Hill. The achievements look really easy to get though – most are for attacking enemies with certain weapons. Whack! Whack! Whack!

Next week: Lego Rock Band, Planet 51: The Game, Blood Bowl, Resident Evil: The Darkside Chronicles and the lovely looking Muramasa: The Demon Blade.

There’s a genre seriously lacking in the Xbox 360’s software catalogue and that’s naked alligator mud wresting. I’m joking of course – it’s topless glamour model stairlift racing. But seriously, it’s the simulation genre, with the little-known A Train HX and Civilization Revolution being the best of a small bunch. We can now add Tropico 3 – the first console version in a series of previously PC-only sims – to that list too. I think publishers Kalypso should have dropped the ‘3’ at the end though – it might alienate people, which would be a bad thing considering this is jolly good stuff.

Instead of seeing “Press Any Button to Play” on the title screen you’re presented with the words “Press Any Button to Rule” which sums up the idea behind Tropico 3 perfectly. This is your chance to become an El Presidente of a chain of “banana republic” islands and it’s your choice as to how you rule them. You can be a tyrant, forcing your people to live in shacks and work in farms and then sit back and reap in the cash or turn the island into a tourist resort with hotels, sandy beaches and tacky gift shops. There are different factions to keep happy and also the chance to form relations with the US and the USSR. Doing so opens up more options, like being able to let the Russians test nuclear missiles on your shores in return for a hefty cash injection into your Swiss bank account.

More good Wii news: the BBC iPlayer is back, and on its own dedicated channel.

Actually, it was announced on the BBC’s Internet Blog last week, but I missed that. Never mind, this morning it’s available to download.

I’ve had a quick look around: browsing is quick and effective, and the search feature is speedy and efficient. I did manage to get an error page when exiting a programme I’d searched for, but nothing fatal.

As for quality, it’s certainly no worse than standard streaming in the main browser version of the iPlayer.

So: it’s all good.

Somebody has coded the infamous Konami cheat code – the button sequence that was used in many of their 8-bit games to access cheats – into Facebook.

Log in and then press: up, up ,down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A, the enter key and then right click. Then press up then down and, well, go see for yourself…

Finally, Nintendo has caught up and started offering demos of a few WiiWare games. Hooray! It’s very limited though, and only until the end of January.

But Nintendo has a habit of coming to a party late, starting small, then doing it less half-arsed. So hopefully WiiWare will end up more like Xbox Live Arcade in terms of demos in the fullness of time.

The first news of the demos I saw was from North America, and I feared that we’d get no such treats. I was half wrong: my Wii was glowing with impending news, but we’ve only get three of the five demos they’ve got across the pond.

What is there then? The laboriously titled Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life as a Darklord, whose floor-building tactical combat stuff is more fun than I expected; NyxQuest: Kindred Spirits, which is sort of nice floaty platform stuff; and BIT.TRIP BEAT, which is a hell of a lot of fun, with its bleepy retro bouncy goodness.

For the record, we’re missing Pokémon Rumble and World of Goo, which is a damned shame on both counts – the former because I’ve no idea what it is, and the latter because it’s supposed to be ruddy superb and I’d appreciate a chance to try it.

As it is, I’m almost convinced to invest in BIT.TRIP BEAT. Only almost, because so far I’ve died before the demo has run out. Regarding the other two, I lost interest before the demo ended. But I do have a very short attention span these days.

UK Charts

Yes, that game is #1. And yes, that game sold an army boat full of copies – a staggering 1.78 million units in the UK over 5 days, generating £67.4m. The Xbox 360 version alone shifted 1 million copies. Rumours of the DS version selling more than 12 copies are unconfirmed.

Wii Fit Plus drops from #1 to #4 and Lego Batman and Pure are both back in the top 10 due to being included in new Xbox 360 bundles. Good to see Pure riding high – it’s an awesome game. In its second week in the chart Dragon Age: Origins has fallen all the way from #5 to #13. Tekken 6 has also gone from #10 to #20.

New releases Cooking Mama 3, Dragon Ball: Raging Blast and Shaun White Snowboarding: World Stage all fail to make the chart but Hasbro Family Game Night Vol 2 and Rabbids Go Home make the cut at #32 and #38 respectively. Rah!