Jake – Page 14 – Games Asylum

Worms Battle Islands

Like many gamers of a certain age, I remember multiplayer games of the original Worms with great fondness. But since then, I have played some awful Worms games in the name of this website. So I wasn’t exactly expecting much from this budget Wii release. But praise Team 17: it’s not messed up at all! …

Hot Wheels: Track Attack

Reviews

Hot Wheels: Track Attack teaches children a valuable lesson: that having fun gets you nowhere; it’s a methodical, cautious, mundane approach that yields results. That’s especially true of about two-fifths of the game: the Checkpoint and Token Grab events, which tend to be unreasonably difficult to complete in any manner involving fun. In the former, …

Wheel of Fortune

Reviews

The mind boggles at the opportunities a Wheel of Fortune video game might present: imagine Carole Smilie turning the letters for John Leslie. Their tenures on the show never overlapped, but in the virtual world, anything could have been possible. But no: here you can play Wheel of Fortune, or you can not play Wheel …

Demonstrably a good thing

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It always makes me double-take when I notice that North America is getting something after Europe. Especially when that something is from Nintendo. But that’s what’s happened with the return of WiiWare demos. Hooray! They arrived in Europe earlier this month, and North America gets the goodness from Monday. It was a year ago that …

Obviously wrong survey says 80 percent of gamers aren’t put off by 3D glasses

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When I read that a survey has found that 80 percent of gamers wouldn’t be put off 3D gaming by having to wear special glasses, I was deeply suspicious. Not so VideoGamer.com, which happily reported the findings unchallenged. Industry Gamer did a little better, at least pointing out that the survey was carried out by …

Is the PSP is getting old?

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Sony Worldwide Studios boss Shuhei Yoshida has been speaking to GamesIndustry.biz. Amongst other things, as relayed by Edge, he said that the PSP is “getting a bit old”. Funnily enough, I unearthed my PSP only last week. It’s the original, chunkiest model. A Japanese version, if you really must know. But I still thought: you …

Fun with hardware sales figures

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Those helpful folks at Famitsu (via andriasang.com and Edge) have shared with the world some Japanese lifetime hardware sales figures: DS – 31,039,215 PSP – 15,009,120 Wii – 10,655,962 PlayStation 3 – 5,501,923 Xbox 360 – 1,354,685 Fascinating, I’m sure you’ll agree. But it gets so much more pleasing when you start to look at …

When games invade music

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“I will gain an extra life / When I get the high score.” That lyric – from ‘Photoshop Handsome’ by Everything Everything – has been stuck in my head since I got their debut album the best part of a fortnight ago. If not since last year when I first saw them live. It’s been …

You can’t make me wear stupid glasses

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3D. It’s stupid, isn’t it? The glasses certainly are. God bless Nintendo for being sensible with the 3DS – no glasses there! But some people are really keen on 3D. Mentally keen. Ubisoft are among that number, it seems, from what Murray Pannel has been telling Eurogamer. “I wouldn’t rule out the fact that this …

Learning is fun

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I’m sure, like me, you love maths. And if not, you’d at least be interested in an event called MEGABOWL. Sounds good, doesn’t it? So, Broward County’s 2nd Annual MEGABOWL Educational Video Game Tournament, which came to my attention here. “Quick: Solve for x in the equation 5x-6=3x-8! Can’t? You probably aren’t alone, unless you …

Littlebigplanet 2: daunting or exciting?

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I find Littlebigplanet daunting. Admittedly I only have the PSP version, but I’m scared to death of attempting to build my own level. It just seems like an awful lot of work, and I’ll only make an utter mess of it. So the concept of Littlebigplanet 2 – build your own entire game of pretty …

I want to play on an oversized foam hand

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Back in the day, it would have been E3 time about now. Having taken in a bit of July in recent history, it’s in June this year. Getting to the point: it looks like there could be quite a lot of new hardware. PlayStation Move and Natal will both be looking for a bit of …

If Sidney Perkowitz thinks films are bad…

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Physicist Sidney ÂPerkowitz has been in the news over the last week, suggesting that science fiction films require too much suspension of belief. His solution: they should only be allowed one major breach of the laws of physics, and everything else must follow logically from there. Now, he’s not a young man, so games might …

Bureaucracy as a game

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Did you know that Flickr began as an online game? Maybe it’s common knowledge, but I had no idea. The BBC has a piece today about the new project from the man behind it – Stewart Butterfield – and it’s a game. A game rewarding “animal kinship, gardening, alchemy and bureaucratic arts” according to the …

F1 2009

Reviews

I am a simple man. Give me a decent circuit, a good sense of speed, a believable enough simulation of a Formula 1 car, and a grand prix weekend’s complement of practice sessions, and I’m happy. F1 2009 does just that, so in terms of their first game with the license, it’s job done for Codemasters.

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