Reviews

Predictably poor licensed pap aside (hello WALL-E, Iron Man and Lost!) there haven’t been many truly awful Xbox 360 games released this year. That was until EA’s Facebreaker came along; a game that’s akin to a five year old child telling you the same joke over and over again. And then you throw the child in the nearest dustbin.

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In Growlanser every character seems to be an orphan; quiet types, who say things like “…” and “umm”. You see, most of the characters’ parents where killed in the war, because war is bad. The characters are out to stop war, because war is bad. Did I mention that war is bad? Well it is. The game told me. Every five seconds. The previous generations of orphans had a great idea to stop the war. They pointed a big gun at everyone and asked them to be quiet. However, now there’s a new enemy. The earth is being attacked by the mysterious screapers, who live in the sea but occasionally come inland to chow down on some human flesh. The story is in equal parts uninspiring, clichéd and stupid.

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EA’s latest version of ball-o-stick-o can be compared to the much underrated Xbox 360 shooter Shadowrun. No, Shadowrun doesn’t feature a hidden golf mini-game (although Viva Piñata: Trouble in Paradise does – try knocking sweets into holes with the spade). But like Shadowrun, if you don’t have your console connected to Xbox Live then you’re going to miss out on the best bits.

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The bad news is that Trouble in Paradise feels more like a special edition of the first Viva Piñata than a fully fledged sequel. The good news is that it’s still as addictive as ever, and the new refinements make for a better game. It’s a lot harder to unlock the achievements this time round too, but whether that’s a good thing or not is up to you. There’s nothing wrong with a bit of back breaking labour – apart from the whole back breaking thing.

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Imagine if every time you wanted to boil the kettle you had to push six or seven buttons, set a timer and then choose a temperature instead of just flicking a switch to set the water boiling. That would be pretty annoying, right? This quirky Pikmin-alike RTS also suffers from being too convolved for its own good.

As the title suggests, Ecolis has an anti-pollution vibe, with idea being to save a forest from destruction by ordering around armies of squirrels and beavers. But whereas Pikmin and Command & Conquer were blessed with simple and effective control systems, Ecolis has been lumbered with a painfully cumbersome way of doing things.

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Xbox Live Arcade is brilliant. Ikugara, Rez, Worms and Uno have sucked up hours of my time, even though I’m unable to reach level three of Ikugara. However, what the Live Arcade has missed so far is quality original games, instead relying on old classics to prop up the service. Braid has come along in a gallant attempt to buck that trend.

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The Wii version of this turn-based strategy game was canned, as the developers thought they wouldn’t be able to get a decent version of the game running on the system. So why they thought that the DS could is a bit of a mystery.

The DS isn’t renowned for being a 3D powerhouse, but it can still produce some nice 2D graphics – take a look at the recent Soul Bubbles for proof. Visuals must have been the last thing on the agenda here though – it looks like an ugly Game Boy Advance game, with dull maps and no flair to speak of. There isn’t any music in game either, which hardly helps the atmosphere side of things. The controls work well though; so much so that there isn’t even the need for a tutorial at the beginning.

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There’s a Wikipedia article dedicated to Breakout clones – of which Arkanoid is the most notable. It’s hard to say what the first such game I played was. I definitely remember playing it on some sort of PC or Mac thing at a friend’s house when I was quite young, and I’ve still got Alleyway for the Game Boy somewhere. In any case, I’ve always loved it, to the point that I wanted – and probably still want, for that matter – a Quickshot Supervision, purely for Crystball. In fact, it’s the only properly ‘retro’ game I can really tolerate. But I can’t quite articulate why. Which is going to make this a super-excellent review, isn’t it?

Attempting to be remotely subjective though, Arknoid DS has at best niche appeal. If you’ve played a Breakout clone before, then effectively you’ve played this. There are some bells and whistles, but they’re not very loud. Little pixie bells and whistles, if you will.

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“Nice video / Shame about the song.” That’s probably the only thing I can remember from Not the Nine O’Clock News, which isn’t bad considering it was first broadcast when I was between the ages of -2 and 0 years old. It rather sums up echochrome though, which looked simply divine when it was shown in video form last year. A black and white puzzle game where changing perspective changes reality – it looked interesting, new, mature.

But I should have seen it coming. The black and white, the all lowercase title – it’s massively poncy, and that’s not often a good sign. What should have been a minimalist, mind-bending, but perversely intuitive puzzler, is actually just a fiddly little bugger.

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The original Ninja Gaiden (on Xbox, not the NES one) was a tough game. So much so that FHM infamously gave it a scathing review because they couldn’t get past the first boss. For this sequel an ‘Acolyte ninja’ easy mode is available from the start, but the strange thing is that the game keeps on getting easier and easier – the weapons get more powerful but you’re still fighting the same old enemies. To put this into perspective: the predecessor took me 32 hours to finish; this took just over 13. So yes, the easy mode does exactly what it says on the tin. But does this sequel provide the same slick joyride?

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