Age rating: 3+ (PEGI)

What is it?

An asteroids clone (high-def update of the Amiga classic Super Stardust)

Is it fun?

Yes.

Is it worth the money? £4.99 (from the UK Playstation Store)

Yes.

Why?

Ok, so I was amazed to find something I actually wanted to buy from the UK Playstation Store a few days ago. That something was Super Stardust HD. I’ve actually played the original Super Stardust AGA* on my Amiga A1200 back in 1996. I can say that I’ve had just as much fun with this updated version 11 years later (oooh, I feel old now).

Apart from the visuals and the music it’s still pretty much the same game. But then again, it’s asteroids so it’s a fairly one dimensional game in the first place. Blow-up asteroids, collect weapon power-ups, blow-up more asteroids and then battle the end of world boss. Repetitive, yes, but entertaining as well.

The fun in Super Stardust HD comes from all the wanton destruction. It is total and utter carnage right from the word go. You really have to concentrate - like an badger on red bull - the whole time in order to stay alive. The continual onslaught of asteroids and aliens is quite staggering and also mind numbing. All this in 1080p and without a hit of slow down. Yay. Bring it on!

Housemarque - Super Stardust HD’s developer - have also added a co-op mode into the mix which only suffices to double the carnage during the game. Hehe, fantastic. So grab a mate and give this mode a bash.

My only quibble with this HD version is that sometimes the eye candy (of which there is a lot) can make seeing the tiny, tiny asteroid shards a bit of pain. This frequently leads to you losing a very precious life. Irritating, but you learn to live with it. Oh, and it’s a tough little bugger of a game, so don’t expect to whiz through the 5 worlds on your first go.

In summary: It’s a cheapy-cheap, high-def, super pretty version of asteroids that contains a seriously intense gameplay experience.

Screenshots:

* You can download an mp4 of someone completing the whole game (57m 27s) from Recorded Amiga Games.

Update 4th Jul 07: Forgot to mention that the gameplay in Super Stardust takes place around a planet (i.e. curved play area), unlike Asteroids which has a flat play area. Oh, and I’d suggest changing the camera setting to “far” so you can see what the hell is going on, as the initial camera is set just too close to the action. Yep, that covers everything.

Assault Heroes a fun little single/co-op player top-down shooter. You have a couple of vehicles and nice assortment of weapons: a flamethrower for infantry, a flak cannon for armoured objects and the mini-gun for pretty much everything. There are weapon and shield power-ups but a notable lack of new lives. I found that very strange. Anyway, it’s a simple run-around-and-shoot-everything-that-moves kind of game. There are a couple of truly inspired levels. There’s also one really annoying design “feature”.

Battling a boss is not much of a strategic exercise. It’s more like a war of attrition, with all the morale-dropping tedium that it implies. Sure, there are weak spots but mostly it’s very dull and quite frustrating.

No matter. In co-op mode it’s done with the minimum of fuss and you’re away to the next level. The main game only lasted us two evening sittings and we were rather drunk on at least one of them. We were playing medium mode as well. You couldn’t describe Assault Heroes as a complex game. I suspect it would have been much better had it come after the recent announcement that Xbox Live Arcade games could be triple their current size.

There’s some replay value - we haven’t finished the underground levels and I still need five of the twelve achievements. All but one of them look quite feasible, so it’s worth trying. I have no illusions over my accuracy in this type of game, so I’ll probably never get the sharpshooter requirement of 70%. I’m hovering more around the 22% mark at the moment.

In short, Assault Heroes is fun and mindless. Very good pick-up-and-play entertainment for the usual 800 Microsoft points, or about £6.80.

Related Links
Assault Heroes Achievements List
Assault Heroes Official Site. It’s Flash-based and noisy.

More Screenshots:

“Lets go bowling, as I know this interesting alley in Bloomsbury” says Tikipod. “Ok, sounds good” I replied. A few days later (Sunday) I go along expecting some top quality bowling entertainment and what did I get? Top quality free arcading that’s what, oh, and some fun bowling.

Quite what the Galaxian machine is doing sitting outside the girls toilet I don’t know, but since it was all alone it was time for a quick play to see if the old fella still works. After some extensive paytesting we found the joystick was a bit ropey making it very tricky to move left (just be forceful and whack it left instead, that works), otherwise the machine worked like a dream. And then there’s the cost…

FREE PLAY. Oh yes, those magic words that I’m only ever used to seeing on MAME sitting there, blinking at me on a arcade machine in London. Yay. Yes, this machine really does cost nothing to play. Nada, zip, zero.
Also Will (one of our friends) spent ages racking up the damn high score on the machine before I could take some pictures. Tisk, how inconsiderate.

What is it?
Multi-directional shoot-em-up (a 1990 arcade classic!).

Is it fun?
Yes.

Is it worth the money?
Yes - Only 500 Microsoft points or £3.40.

Why?
In two words - “Total carnage!”

The entire game involves running around killing everything that moves and collecting money and “fabulous” prizes. Your killing power can be enhanced, albeit temporarily, by collecting the various weapon power-ups that randomly appear in the game arena (a Running Man-like TV studio). These power-ups are essential to your survival in Smash TV as you fight off wave after wave of unrelenting men/robots/snakes/tanks and snakemen.

As you progress though each arena the difficulty level really gets jacked up, along with the body count. Oh yes, death on an unprecedented scale. Add a little soupçon of despair to all this carnage and eh voila, the perfect arcade game. Mmm, actually come to think of it, I was experiencing mostly despair towards the very end as the enemies just would not stop coming!

There are a total of 3 levels available, each one composed of a varying number of arenas with the whole game taking about 30-40 mins to complete and using about 5 squillion Continues!

The graphics and sound are basic at best, so don’t judge Smash TV on its looks. Simply try out the trial game on Xbox Live and you’ll soon find out how much fun this game is.

You can also get hold of Smash TV on Gamecube, Xbox, PSOne and PS2 by way of Midway’s Arcade Treasures 1 here.

Screenshots:

Links:
Smash TV page on Wikipedia

Update 19th Aug 06: Check out the upcoming PSP game Cash Money Chaos. Look familiar? It’s Smash TV in the 1970s!

http://www.shadowgroundsgame.com/new/

It’s a top down shooter with a very derivative plot (people colonise planet, people go drilling, uh-oh killer aliens unleashed… etc) but that shouldn’t really be a concern as long as the game stands up.

I tried the demo version that you can download for free (via Steam) that offers two of the early levels and one of the later ones. There is a nice progression where you start with just a torch light (that scares the smaller aliens - very neat feature), and slowly progress to pistol, shotgun etc. Weapons are upgraded via the currency of green blobs that some of the aliens drop after death, where you can add secondary fire functions or improve firepower. Levels are big and pretty varied in layout, it will be interesting to see if the final ones go more organic (alien hive) as the ones in the demo are all human facility buildings.

All in all this game is good old fashioned fun, and via the demo you get a great chance to try before you buy!

How much is it? - via Steam US$20 + tax or via play.com £18 and you get it in a box.

ps - I haven’t yet tried the coop mode, but really want to as it sounds like lots of fun (sadly it’s not over LAN, you all need to play on the same PC). And the only negative was that sometimes the graphic for my torchlight corrupted dramatically, which I’m hoping was caused by my drivers being a bit out of date.

What is it?
A bunch of mini-games based around the touch-screen and microphone inputs. Old for a DS game.

Is it fun?
Very briefly.

Is it worth the money? Around £8-£10 preowned.
Noooooooo. Not at all. Not even the £7.97 I paid for it.

Maybe if you can find it for £2 at a garage sale.

Why not?

There’s no thinking involved. Every mini-game really is just a case of poke the dots on the screen, trace the line or blow/shout down the microphone but with none of that pesky stuff like tactics. Their idea of making it more challenging later on was to give you three of the levels you’ve already done, but change the colour scheme, make you tap the screen more times to achieve the same end and make you do them back to back so if you fail on the third, you have to play through the previous two segments again. Yawn.

Finding the hidden rabbits is also pretty dull as it pretty much involves randomly tapping bits of the cut-scenes (goldfish) and hitting the back button to watch them again if you missed. And what do you get if you find enough rabbits? A new pair of shoes for the girl silhouette. W00t Crap!

Rubbish game. I returned it after 2 days and bought Tetris DS. Much more worthwhile investment :)

Screenshot (wasn’t worth the effort looking for more then one):

Played it this afternoon with TheFluffyFist in an arcade coz it looked really great. It’s your standard wander-through-the-building-shooting-zombies arcade shooter. This time around you get uzi-style machine guns with grenade launchers and you get attacked by absolutely fricking LOADS of zombies at once! Fantastic stuff! And then during every other intense battle a zombie clings to the screen (apparently it’s supposed to be clinging to your gun) and you have to spend the next 5 seconds shaking it off by literally shaking your machine gun to fill a progress bar while other zombies attack you.

WTF??

This makes no sense. Why can’t I just shoot it? Or at least have some buttons or a pedal to kick it in the crotch or headbutt it or something that makes sense. Extreme Zombie Wobbling? Lame.

Full review may be coming but the only place I’ve seen it was £2 per credit and I am not spending that much money to shake a plastic machine gun in public. Have you guys played it? What did you think?

What is it?

An unconventional fantasy-based BOSS-ATTACK game, with a huge sombre and barren landscape to traverse by horse. Set in the same game universe as ICO (also PS2 only) you have to climb big hairy monsters and stab ‘em where it hurts!

Is it fun?

Yes but not in the instant-adrenaline-hit way of GTA, the world may be a comparable size, but this isn’t Vice City by horse. The Colossus look fantastic and battling them are fun puzzles in themselves, yet a deeper enjoyment requires the player to let the whole game experience slowly wash over them.

Is it worth the money? £29.99

Yes but £25 would be preferable. Most of the pleasure of fighting the Colossi resides in trying to work out how to kill them and after that, replaying the normal game has little point. However once the game is completed there is a HARD mode to tackle and two timed boss-attack modes which are a tough challenge.

Why?

Well, my first impression of the Shadow of the Colossus is that it isn’t really all that pretty. Watching the game intro, each shot is well composed but many textures shimmer and seem to have no more than 4 colours in some of them. Both the bridge crossing scene and the initial entering of the temple are clear examples of very nasty looking textures.

This is a shame because the game has a subtle underlying beauty (which takes time to fully appreciate), and the majority of the game art is fantastic, especially the Colossi themselves, their design and animation is excellent. I’ll talk more about the art later, first a simple explanation about the game itself.

A lifeless girl is being carried by a boy on the back of a horse to a temple in a barren land. There a deal is struck with the temples mysterious voice. The sixteen Colossi that roam the land must be destroyed in exchange for her revival.

You start the game with your horse (name sounds like Ah-go, or Aggo) and three weapons. These are your hands, a sword and a bow with infinite arrows. They are easily switched between using the L/R on the Dpad. Hands are used for climbing walls or big hairy Colossi. The sword is needed for both navigation and causing critical damage to the Colossi. Holding the sword up in the air whilst in direct sunlight, you must rotate to focus the beam emitted from the sword, which will lead you to your prey. Finally the bow and arrow are used for causing light damage at a distance.

As you first ride out you can appreciate the vastness of the game world, its huge and very open. But hang on; there isn’t much to do there, so at first it seems a bit of a missed opportunity, all this space but nothing going on! Onwards to the first Colossus and you are given a brief gameplay tutorial of how to jump and climb, essential for when you have to tackle the Colossus.

These huge beasts have one or more critical wounding points which show up as glowing symbols on the body when you are holding the sword, they must be stabbed deeply and repeatedly. Some have other weak points that must be attacked to help you gain access to the critical ones. There are other Colossi subtleties that I won’t explain, as much of the enjoyment of tackling them is how you personally work it out; what might seem obvious to one person won’t to another.

Now that’s the basic nuts and bolts of the game, seek out the enemy and then kill them. The lack of something else to do in the world feels odd at first, it exposes the games simplicity. For example I could go and explore that high cliff ridge, but I know there is nothing there to do… so why bother? A lot of the game seems initially empty and a wasted opportunity in that way, as you are traditionally more used to games that fill the world-space with as much interactivity as possible. The game is not consistently good looking enough to treat it like an interactive postcard; it’s more like a wonderful hand drawn sketch that has been painted into in certain parts (area locations), and given enough time (about four or five battles into the game) you do get slowly drawn in to the landscape’s subtle beauty and calmness, as you race along to the next frenetic Colossus encounter. You see, as you begin to get your bearings in the world, then you stop looking too closely at every detail and just let it wash over you, and you appreciate the bigger picture.

When you complete the game there are some fun modes that get unlocked which increase value for money. Hard mode is the same game again, but harder of course. Boss time attack is most fun. Pray in the temple in front of the statues and you enter this mode, every couple that you manage to complete and you get extra weapons (a different set can be unlocked when trying hard time attack). Also there is a way to climb up the outside of the temple tower; keep your eyes peeled for vines and kill a few Colossi first to get your grab strength high enough.

So in summary this is a great game, which tries to do something a little different and increases in enjoyment more and more overtime.

The only real negatives are as follows:

• Mounting Aggo can sometimes seem a bit hit and miss.
• Those occasional shimmering environment textures.
• The US box cover and its terrible font.

Now if only they could bring out the PAL version with the Japanese box cover please (and the NICO free dvd).

What is it?

It’s a car racing game where you get speed boost in exchange for driving into oncoming traffic.

Is it fun?

Yes but not as much as Burnout 3, you spend more time skipping though the reward movies/menus sometimes than actually driving. At least that’s how it feels at times.

Is it worth the money? £34.99

No, unless the online mode has something fantastic going for it, save yourself a wad of cash and get Burnout 3 instead.

Why?

Burnout 3 was the first in the series that I played, and it was really good fun. It wasn’t without fault, but I was looking forward to the next instalment. I quickly found myself disappointed.

GOOD - The ingame art is much more gritty and detailed looking, which makes learning tracks take longer, but that’s not so bad once you played the game a while.

BAD - The music is as awful as ever, no worse than B3, but sadly no better either – why they couldn’t put a mix of styles on is beyond me, some pop, some rock etc.

BUMMEDOUT - The main menus look pretty good, but become ridiculous when you start playing the game and discover its `reward` system. Drive in a race, get a medal (not hard) and, oh, you’ve unlocked a new car and track! Oh and then you have won some points then get entered into some big thermometer of how crazy a driver you are. And then there are a million and one reward movies that get played for things like `crashing someone into a boat`, `dropping onto an opponent from above` and `turning a corner whilst picking your nose`! Ok well I made up the last one, but it may as well be true, there are just so many ways to get a slap on the back and two thumbs up from the game that you just give up caring. More game time and less reward menus to chew though next time please!

GIMMICKY - The new traffic checking seems like a good idea at first, but I think it actually weakens the game. Traffic checking means you can ram small and medium sized vehicles (if travelling in the same direction as you) from behind, if they then hit other vehicles (like bowling pins) you can earn boost. They can also be used to hit and takeout race opponents. It’s good fun but removes some of the skill of negotiating the traffic, and also means to earn boost you can avoid driving into traffic moving in the opposite direction to yourself, so you do it less often. I much preferred Burnout 3, when you had to dip into the oncoming traffic to catch up with other racers else you’d have no chance of catching up. It made the risk-reward process much more pleasurable.

SPACIOUS - The new tracks are generally good, sometimes feeling a bit cluttered but much more open. In fact the games’ one true saving grace is the alternate track routes, the night time city road course being the best example:

Powersliding round a corner with 3 opponents on your tail, you realise that
you are going too fast, slide off the track and… POW – it’s
ok! You haven’t fallen off the course and crashed, but have instead plopped
onto the road beneath! Yay, you can keep on moving with no pauses.

Moments like this are great fun and remind me of one of the later tracks on Destruction Derby 2 (Playstation1) where the tracks would criss-cross over. I wish they had made more multilayer courses in Wipeout Pure (PSP).

BOO HOO – The crash mode is similar to before, but the pickups have been removed (both a good and a bad thing) and there is now a childishly annoying golf swing style starter meter to get you car moving. Oh and the game laughs at you if you muck it up, erm great - more time wasting!

GRRR - One final dumb thing is that if you race, and end with no medals you are given the option to race again, cool. If you end with say, bronze, you aren’t allowed to retry immediately, you have to go through all those `reward` menus AGAIN! Why EA, oh why?

(not actual game cover)

What is it?

An old-fashioned shooter with explosions-a-plenty from cult Japanese developers Treasure.

Is it fun?

You bet.

Is it worth the money? £24.99

Not for 25 quid, but for £17.99 from play.com, yes indeedy.

Why?

It’s not the best Treasure game but it is lots and lots of fun. Basically an arcade style shooter, it has a lot of variety. Most levels are side-on with your character jumping about platforms, but others see you standing on the back of a high speed jet craft, afterburner-style/collecting cute chicks/piloting an attack craft vertically through a city.

Sadly there is no difference between the two playable characters you can choose, which seems a bit of a waste.

Although not a huge game, it looks superb, has some great cutscene characters and some amazing multi-segmented bosses. If you like retro shooters, then this is definitely worth a look.

Game art

Links

Developer’s website
Japanese game website