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.
Happy Credit Crunchmas everybody!
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 …
Gears of War 2 in words and pictures
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 …
Colour Cross
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 …
The Twelve Games of Christmas
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 …
Why we’re better off now
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 …
For those about to rock, we salute you
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 …
Five things that annoy me about the Xbox 360
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 …
Cake, cake, cake, I love the cake!
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. …
Cradle of Rome
I maintain that Zoo Keeper is the best Nintendo DS game. I know that, by any objective measure, it isn’t. But I don’t care. So I approached Cradle of Rome with little short of hostility – I thought it was a stupid title for a stupid game. Hostility because it is, essentially, the same game: …
All rise
UK Chart The top ten is largely the same as last week, apart from Lara’s latest dropping from #6 to #10. What is notable though is that a few titles have risen up significantly due to being reduced on the high street. Sonic Unleashed has gone from #33 to #12 while Quantum of Solace leaps …
It’s Christmas? You wouldn’t know it around here
This Week’s Games Without a hint of exaggeration, there are 101 games out this week. 101 in 1 Explosive Megamix for DS to be precise. It’s £17.99 on Play.com and by clicking on the link you can see a little video of it. The puzzle games seem all right, but the action games appear to …
WWE Smackdown Vs Raw 2009
There aren’t many fighting games for the DS (Ultimate Mortal Kombat is about as good as it gets at the moment) and although this effort isn’t awful, it’s too middling to recommend to anybody but WWE fans. Which makes this review kind of pointless – if I’ve learned anything over the years, it’s that WWE fans are the type of people that would buy anything with WWE stamped over it, not to mention defend the ‘sport’ to their very graves. But that’s a rant for another time.
Scene It? Box Office Smash!
I love a quiz game. I’ve played most of the Buzz games and I can’t enter a pub without having a go on it’s Itbox, so I was really looking forward to Scene It. Was I disappointed? Well, yes and no.
First, the good. The presentation is – apart from the annoying voice overs with their awful, over-written banter – good. There’s a great use of cutely-animated avatars, however there are no pre-built characters to select, so a game can sometimes take an age to start as people try and randomise an avatar to suit them. Each individual round is presented in it’s own style, with enough nice flourishes of animation to give the game a good bit of character. The questions themselves are well presented, too, with the video clips round a particular highlight.
Tom Nooks and crannies
UK Chart Expecting Animal Crossing: Let’s Go to the City to be riding high in the chart this week? Think again – it goes in at a less-than-great #26. Ubisoft’s Persian Prince arrives at #30, and in its second week of release Sonic Unleashed enters at #33. It’s half price at Gamestation this week, so …
