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I've done about an hour of Dragon's Crown and I have to say I'm loving it. Hopefully Vanillaware and Atlus bring this to PlayStation 4 in 1080p 60fps, with cross save and unified set of trophies, so you don't have to have the game twice on your profile – that would be quite nice. The animation on the PS Vita is amazing – simple the best I've seen on any console or hand held device. This was something I said about Rayman Origins, but Vanillaware out does that Ubiart power game by miles. Dragon's Crown plays like an updated version of Capcom's Dungeons & Dragons games, which is not surprising seeing that director George Kamitani worked on those games. The combat is similar Capcom's D&D games, buthas been slightly updates to make Dragon's Crown feel more fresh. There are six classes to pick from – Fighter, Archer, Dwarf, Wizard, Amazon and Sorceress. The character design is very stylized, but it's not as offensive as some western games journalists want you to think. I currently playing as the Archer with Japanese voice track. Went you set out on your quests you're accompanied by Rannie the Rouge. He will unlock doors and chest for you. He does not fight in combat and will run in hide when you go into combat. There are two way to give Rannie orders – One which is the best IMO uses the touch screen. Just tap a chest or door and Rannie will pick it for you. The other method is better suited for the Dualshock and uses the right analog stick to move a mouse-like cursor to tap on chest and doors. Due to the size of the PS Vita this second method felt awkward to me. On your quest you will find bone piles, which represents fallen adventurers. You can take those bone piles to the Chapel of Athena to resurrect them. You can then fill three slots and have them as AI partners on quests. Capcom two Dungeon & Dragons games are up there with Sega Bass Fishing as some of my all time favorite games. Dragon's Crown is now up there with them. I think they just updated the game with a new dungeon that has over 1000 floors plus all the content on the game card and a new level cap will keep me busy for months if not years to come. Like I said I love to see this on PS4 in the near future, so more gamers can experience this game.

so this is a fighting game based on the characters from persona 3/4, i don't play too many fighting games, although i enjoy the odd fight in the street, but i really like persona 4, so that's why i got it really. i know very little about the technical aspects of fighting games..i did all the tutorial, there are only 4 buttons but you can press them in a massive variety of different ways, along with guages and other stuff, which has me a bit bewildered, and on normal mode i was doing pretty badly. the story mode i was looking forward to for more persona based story action...there's massive amounts of text to read, which was half expected, a lot of it is probably to explain to people who haven't played a persona game before what the hell is going on, but its maybe a bit too much, and there's barely any fights - although i havent played much of it yet and i will stick at it. anyway, ditched story mode for a bit to actually do some fighting in arcade mode and (after changing the difficulty to beginner and finding out that you can do streetfighter style moves) am enjoying it. it's fitting in reasonably well with my button mashing style. the graphics are really good, the characters are very nicely animated sprites, and there's lots of crazy moves/effects which look cool, and as you'd expect the sound/music is great too. it really fits in well with the persona games too, with attacks/ailments/all out attacks/one more go/personas from the games all worked into the fighting. anyone else playing this - what think you? it'd be interesting to hear from people who know things about fighting games. i mean i probably couldn't tell a rubbish fighting game from a great one tbh.

Ive never played a Sly Cooper game before. And it nearly stayed that way as the tutorial level was so fucking bland and boring, I was thinking if this is how the rest of the game is I'm done already. Luckily once you get the tutorial out the way things start to look up. The hub of the first world was a nice surprise, littered with enemy's to tackle, landscape to climb on and stuff to collect. The individual levels or 'jobs' are accessed through spots around the hub , they again were surprise as they were quite varied in style. Sly as a character is ok but his companions are terrible, Bentley the disabled tortoise and Murry the fat cunt hippo can just fuck right off. The humour is contrived bullshit but I'm willing to look past it which is very big of me. One thing that really annoyed me for no real reason was the intro to each part of the game, it comes up with a sign that says "Sly Cooper and the gang in..." ....it's just so fucking cheesy it makes me want to gag. The story is ok, ive paid mild attention to end but you just travel around in time rescueing Sly's ancestors - that's all you need to know. I watched a big intro before the tutorial level and I get the impression it recapped the other games in the series in a cartoon like style, if so that's quite cool, it takes it's lineage seriously. If not whatever, it was a good intro. Ive finished the first world, the boss was actually a little challenging and quite cool. Just opened up the next world which is set in the Wild West, I'll start that tomorrow.

So it's like rock band pro guitar, except you can use any guitar, and the notes are displayed differently. There's a 2d representation of the guitar neck, with notes coming towards it from behind, so it's like a 3d note chart, so yeah it can be pretty confusing. Probably a bit less confusing than the rockband version for me though. You can flip the guitar neck upside down so it looks more like guitar tab. It starts off pretty easy with barely any notes to play, I have played guitar a bit before but not much in the last 10 years and even back then I was a noob. It has some dynamic difficulty thing going on so as I'm not a complete beginner it upped the difficulty, then when I started missing a load of stuff it drops it back down - this seeme to work pretty well at keeping it not too easy and not too hard, for me anyway. I've just been playing through the main career type mode where it gives you some songs to play one at a time, then when you've played them each to a reasonable standard it suggests you play the 3 or so songs in a set list all together and if you do wel enough you get to play an encore song. I think you can just ignore this and play whatever songs you want though as I played high and dry from a list of songs. There's a practice mode and arcade games that are supposed to help teach guitar technique, not tried those yet. The recognition works well for single notes but chords it seems to struggle sometimes, although I'm probably not playing it that cleanly. and it can be a bit slow giving you credit for hitting the chords as it has to work it out. It's very lax on hit windows, I don't really see that as a bad thing though. So yeah I've been enjoying it, and unsurprisingly my fingers hurt a bit now. Anyone else giving this a go?

I have had so many opportunities to play Team 17's Alien Breed throughout my twenty seven years of gaming, but always passed or got busy with other games. Last night I started playing the PlayStation Vita port of Alien Breed and wow it is fantastic. Alien Breed is up there with Dyson vacuums, The Business and Liverpool FC as one of the greatest thing given to mankind by the English. The Vita port includes the original 1991 Amiga game, the 1992 enhanced special edition and what looks like expansions packs (Convergence, Valiance and Synergy). Wi-Fi and Ad-Hoc co-op is included. Team Bloober did the VIta port and it looks fantastic on the Vita's screen. Not sure how the controls where set up on the Amiga, but the twin sticks and touch screen on the Vita work wonderfully. Great game. Highly enjoying it. Easy Trophies if that is your thing.

Deception IV: Blood Tie is a sadistic action/puzzle game from Tecmo Koei for the Vita. You play as the devils daughter Laegrinna who was sent into the human realm to find the twelve pieces of the Holy Versus to free her father. Joining you are three helper demons Caelea, Veruza and Lilia. The plot is razor thin and serves as a reason to fuck with others via traps and other devices. Before a round you can use Devil Eye to check out your targets weakness, immunities and backstory - They’re always assholes, which makes fucking with them a tad bit more fun. After the round you’re given a result card, which scores you on Combos, Single Combo Arc, Clear Time and how elaborate, sadistic and humiliating the traps you designed were. You are then given a final Battle Arc score. The audio and visuals are nothing to write home about, but that should not put you off Deception IV if it’s your thing. Besides a story mode you get a tutorial mode and a free battle mode. You can also upload your user made quest and download others quests to play. Like Earth Defense Force 2017, Deception IV will be a cult classic with a few vocal fans speaking of its glory. I don’t expect this to sell well, but I liked what I have played so far. I’ve had a few traps not work the way I thought they would work and a few time my target would not cross the trap I was luring them too, which resulted in frustration. But those moments are very limited. Overall Deception IV is a very is an enjoyable b-game experience on the PlayStation Vita.

It has been a bit of a breakout hit lately on the PC, or it has seemed like that to me. Games like this are sometimes teased for years but this one just turned up and is getting a lot of attention. This can go in the PC thread but I felt it deserved its own. It's deserved as it's a great return to the classic survival horror of old, mostly inspired by Silent Hill. Actually, it's better at being Silent Hill the recent Silent Hill games. Of course the game is in 2D and uses a very chunky pixel art style. Personally, I don't think it works that well. It's still atmospheric as it still uses quite an advanced lighting technique and the sound is top notch (in fact, the sound is amazing) but I think the chunky pixels do make everything look weirdly cute. But like I said before, the sound, lighting and subject matter does give a constant sense of uneasy-ness; it's just different art style would have added more, I think. I don't want to go into the the story and stuff because it's the mystery of it that is what's great. Apparently, Jasper Byrne, who made it, really went to town in researching mental illnesses and it's through trying to piece together why the game's nameless protagonist experiences these things. Is what's happening actually happening? if not, what's driving these apparitions? Or is it both? It's really rich in weirdness so it could go either or all ways. And it's definitely a survival horror, with emphasis on survival. Ammo for your handgun is rare, batteries need to be stocked up for your torch and you need to keep yourself nourished with food and sleep. I've only failed in keeping on top of a few of these things and it ends up with your man having a breakdown so keep things topped up. I'll give one bit of advice: for ammo, take a blue pill before you sleep. It's been pretty hard, too. You really don't have enough ammo to kill all the enemies so choose wisely if you are going to put one out of its misery. With it being in 2D it's also reminded me how much in common the classic survival horror has with adventure games. If it wasn't for all the scary stuff that's what it would be. Anyway, Lone Survivor is very good and you all should get it; it runs on anything. Go!

I'm starting this thread because I've been playing this game. Some of you will know that I have bought an arcade stick recently, even though I only had the HD version of Darkstalkers to use a stick on. So since this game was only released about a month ago I decided to get it, just so I had a fighting game that was kinda in vogue. But this meant earning a new fighting game. Now I'm not that familiar with this kinda game so it's weird for me. It's a game where pretty much any move combos into another. I hear the Vs. Capcom games are often like this but I don't know, I' only quasi-familiar with them. I dunno what to say about it. You can pretty much make a combo of anything as long as you start with light attacks and work your way up with standard, crouching and jumping variants. Linking in some special and Blockbuster attacks will also do damage and impress. BUt that's all fighting game bullshit. What I do like is you only have eight characters (well nine now thanks to some free DLC) but they are all very different. And even the bread and butter character, Filia, is pretty damn fun to use so there are no filler characters. I don't really know what else to say about a game like this. I think it's a fighting game fan's fighting game and the stories are really cool but I can't go any deeper than that. Even though this version of the game hasn't been out long there is no-one playing it online so that is annoying. I got it hoping there would be a community. So sorry for the shite impressions but if any PS3 Skullgirls owners are lurking lets hook up. I wanna try my button mashing against people.

S'alright this game. This is the game where you play as an invisible boy who you can only see when the rain covers him. It's mostly a stealth game where you have to avoid other invisible beasts and it's all about moving around in the sheltered areas without being spotted. So it's straight forward enough and I'm a third in and it hasn't done anything inventive but it has basically been pleasant... pleasant is the wrong word, I mean it is at times but it can get pretty scary. It's not Silent Hill or anything, it's just the game puts you in situations where you have no way of defending yourself. I think it's the tone of it I like, mostly. It is a bit fairy tale-y and I guess there is some whimsy but it's dark and tense as well, like one of those non-patronising family films. Or maybe ICO is a kind of okay comparison The game is linear and there is always just one way to progress but I'm actually not minding that since I'm fairly poor at stealth games. There is no grey areas where you're not sure if you can bee seen or heard. When you're invisible they leave you alone, when you're not they give chase; nice and simple. So It is an okay thing to interact with every-now-and-then.

got sent this to review, it's a Nippon Ichi game so I was worried it was going to be about 200 hours long, fortunately it's seemingly not that long although I'm still not at the end of it. It shares a lot of the same tone with Disgaea, it has the same art style, the same character types, probably the same voice actors, but it's not a SRPG. The Witch and the Hundred Knight has more in common with Diablo or Ys, it's an action rpg, with a stamina system tied to your attacks and dodging that should mean I can mention DARK SOULS and get a couple of people to read this sentence. It being a Nippon Ichi game there's a lot of systems going on. You can only stay in a level for as long as you have the calories to do so, if you're running low you need to consume enemies (although this is limited and takes up stomach space), use a recovery item, or head back to base to save and recover the items you've picked up during the level (which go in your stomach and can't be used until you leave a level). It's not your health though, you have a separate health bar, but any time you need to recover health, because you've taken a hit or been poisoned, you burn calories quicker. If you take too much damage you'll be downed and will be put back to a check point with a chunk of calories burnt, if you don't have enough calories you're done. there's armour and accessories to equip that boos defence and resistances. There's weapons to pick up that can be levelled up by using them. The weapons themselves have a few different systems attached to them. Weapons do different types of damage, the sword does slash attacks, hammers blunt attacks and magical staves magic attacks, enemies may be resistant or weak to any of these. You can equip 5 weapons at a time, they combo together and eat your stamina as they do so, but if you need a blunt attack and your hammer is the 3rd attack in the chain you need to keep hitting. There's also a system where all your weapons have a number, if you equip your weapons in ascending order you'll get damage bonuses. The gameplay can get a bit mashy and mindless, I've not got to the point where it isn't fun enough, but it's nothing too engaging. One of the problems with it is balance, it can occasionally get really hard (so far only twice really), which means you have to go and grind a bit, but then the enemies don't get any harder through a level, so if you back out, reclaim your new weapons and experience points you'll go back in more powerful. You'll then gain more levels and improve your weapons against a much easier task which means the next level is easier than it should be and so on. It has spiked again for me, nothing too bad just enough that I'll probably have to spend some time grinding to get to the next check point. I've done a gameplay video, it's only SD despite what youtube says, but it shows things better than text does

Couldn't see an existing first impressions thread for this, so thought I may as well copy across my post from NowLoading... I got the 360 version of this from LoveFilm yesterday, despite knowing pretty much zero about it, other than it's an id software FPS set in a post apocalyptic world and (going by the odd comment I'd picked up here & there) it supposedly looks fucking amazing... So after installing all three discs to the harddrive, I spent 2 or 3 hours with it, just to see what it is actually like. Yep, it does indeed look nice! Well the scenery / landscapey stuff does anyway (I'm not sure the same can be said about the NPC models. So far they haven't exactly been the most varied or imaginative NPCs.)... In glorious 1080p I swear you can pick out the individual grains of sand in some areas! However, despite installing the game there is still a bit of obvious delay with the textures, and really, there are only so many shades of post-apocalyptical brown that you can call pleasing to look at. The first hour or so of gameplay was not what I'd call "fun". Gifted with just a pistol and a bunch of "wingsticks" (bladed boomerangs), I was tasked with completing more than just a couple of annoying "fetch" quests before the game decided I was worthy of playing and spread its metaphorical legs wider. Since then, it's got a bit more interesting, but I'm still having trouble shaking that nagging feeling that this has all been done better elsewhere... I'm planning on giving it some more time before the weekend, so we'll see if things improve...

Any one else been playing this? I know a lot of people know all about it here because I heard about it from them. It looks like a NES game, it sounds like a NES game (super turtles like theme tune) but it doesnt really play like any NES game i ever played. Its like a spoof version of GTA in 8 bit. Its all about missions, going from A to B, then back to A. The humour is a million miles a minute, every time you do something its a piss take of something else and most of the time its pretty funny. You have your main story mission as well as lots of little side missions which are mostly about killing sprees. I have two problems with it, put simply: its hard to see sometimes just what the fucks going on due to the graphical style and colour and it can get a little samey. BUT, its only 800 points and its well worth the money for the amount of game on offer.

so it's like the last one, arcade racer with loads of sega characters. it's good - nice handling, varied and mostly fun single player events - time trials, boost events, drift events, dodging traffic and flying through loops are my favorites. the tracks are mostly ace, really bright and exciting, there's a few boring bits mind, they've got ones based on samba de amigo, jet set radio, golden axe, skies of arcadia. did some time trialling on the billy hatcher track, didn't beat the expert ghost but it was really good fun, i'm still crap at the last corner, and i managed to fall through the floor a few times. didn't like all the event types, the elimination ones are a bit boring because of lack of weapons, but that's good for the races so i won't complain too much. don't like the online but that's probably just me, i don't like most racing games with weapons, and prefer the non-racing events in single player. each race has 3 difficulty levels (giving you 1/2/3 stars) that also determine the speed like 50/100/150cc in mario kart. playing on normal it's pretty hard starting out, but as i've played more i'm finding it easier, maybe something to do with leveling your car up - although i'm not sure that has a big effect - just lets you tune it to your preferred style a bit (better speed/boost/handling etc). in campaign mode you need the stars to unlock new events and characters - seems you can unlock a good amount just playing on easy, but you'll need to play on medium or above to unlock have it on rental and was going to pick it up when it gets cheaper but it's only ~£25 from asda so i might just buy it... see from the chart thread other people have been playing - what think you?

i rented this to play some coop, not really an aliens fan, it's not great. anyway, had some bugs - first of all i had no main gun, the guy has his hands out like hes holding a gun but there's nothing there, so i had to use the shotgun and pistol only, rebooting the xbox didn't even fix that. another point my friend fell through the scenery in the game. we had trouble on a few sections with the difficulty despite being on the easiest mode, but it does look like the coop is supposed to be for 4 people.

Been itching to get into a military/paramilitary FPS lately and after talking to Sly I decided to pick up CS:GO. Played it for an hour tonight and I found myself enjoying it a lot more than I thought I would. I died about seven times due to running and gunning. Still get use to everything and playing a FPS with M/K is quite a weird feeling. I could have used a gamepad, but I would have mapped all the buttons myself and that way too much work for my lazy self. I love to get a bunch of people from MFG and have a match or two.

I quite liked the look of this at E3 but since then my interest has waned a bit, not through anything in particular but I'd just started to think of it as a standard platformer. It may well turn out to be a standard platformer, the demo only covers the first half hour or so, but fucking hell it's brilliant so far. It's unsurprisingly based around puppets, but the kind of elaborate puppet shows you used to have to go to theatres (or civic halls in my case), where the puppets were big and levers would be pulled to make sets disappear or new backgrounds drop down, it's not just Punch & Judy. The dialogue all sounds kind of echoey as though it's in a theatre, the backgrounds clank and bang as they change, and the unseen audience laugh and gasp at what's happening before them. The game in introduced slowly, you lose your head, but you can use a witches cat (it'll make sense when you play it) to interact with the environment, rattling loose other heads for you to use. These heads, be they skulls, spiders, burgers, all have special powers, so far this has really just meant triggering things that drop the games equivalent of coins, which will eventually reward you with an extra life, or possibly you'll be taken to a bonus area. There's platforming, which feels like a tighter, less floaty LittleBigPlanet, nothing especially challenging early on though. Eventually you unlock some magic scissors that let you cut fabric, initially this is used to cut open doors, but will later be used to climb things. The characters, particularly the evil characters, are brilliant, they sum up everything that's great about the game so far, they just ooze charm. It's only available to ps+ people until next week, and it's a whopping 5gig to download (so it might be the full game waiting to be activated), but it's superb and if the full game lives up to the demo it might end up being the best game on PS3 this year

So this is just like GT5, but with more cars/tracks, nicer menu's, and most of the cars don't seem to be using psp models, although i obviously haven't seen anywhere near the ~1200 so not sure if theres still some dodgy ones in there. it looks nice, especially the car models. you can't do all the license tests straight away and they seem a bit easy, and there dosen't seem to be that many of them - i like doing all the license tests straight away, but they need unlocking now. disapointing as i really like the license tests - but maybe they'll improve or more will unlock or something. the cart racing is fun. you can drive a moon buggy on the moon, which is pretty cool in theory but a bit boring in reality. there's some microtransaction/grindy stuff in this apparently, but just like for forza i've not really noticed it at all so far, maybe they get worse later on - wouldn't surprise me as they always require a lot of grinding - so not sure it's been done specifically to make money. also to be fair i got a 10 car pack and 1mil credits as preorder bonuses from amazon. the menus are much improved over gt5 which was a big mess, but still really odd in some respects, like you goto a race but don't have the right car, instead of letting you buy a valid one there and then (like in forza) you have to back right out and go to buy it separately, and considering the vast array of cars ist pretty easy to get the wrong one sometimes, even though they're specifically listed on the event info. and getting to the next race/event requires far too many button presses. still it loads pretty quick, well the tracks do, then it takes a while to start the race, which is also a bit odd. the enemy AI just seems the same as before - there barely is any. also noticed some rubber banding. so it's just more of the same, but the main things for me - the handling is great (as always), and there's lots of tracks and cool cars. and i think i'll end up liking it more than forza 5 (even though that might be the better game) because of reasons other than the games themselves - i have a force feedback wheel that works with this - it's just awesome fun anyone else?

I thought since I've done a run of it I'll give some impressions. It's just one crazy action game. Mostly its about combos, weaken the guy then cut him into tiny bits. It's actually fairly easy as an accurate strike cuts the guts out of your enemies and squeezing its juice all over yourself fills your health up so while it can get hectic you're never far away from health, and getting used to the manual slicing isn't that much of a problem. You don't even need to use combos, you can just mash your way through the rest of it. There are Ninja Gaiden style combos to learn but it's not necessary on Normal at least. I did most of the game with the sword though can apply secondary weapons to the triangle/Y button and all I did was keep the staff from the first boss as it is good at area attacks. I've started a hard run and I'm probably gonna dive into the combat system more to see what it's really made of. The only issues with it are the camera (just as bad as NG2's but with the addition of some of the environments being very narrow) and the story (yes, you can skip it but there is no attempt at telling it outside of long cutscenes and longer codec conversations).

I had to google the title, I've been playing this quite a bit, honest. Not single player mind. Bought for spies vs mercs mode. On some of the previous games this mode has been brilliant, really different take on multiplayer. This version I'm not convinced by, not that it's bad. The setup is a bit different to previous games, there's 5v5 teams for a start, well it's definitely more than in the past. And when you start a hack you have to stay within a zone till the hack ends, the zones are quite big, the other spies have to then help protect the hacker for the duration, if the person who started the hack dies you have to hack it again quick or all progress is lost. And only one point out of 3 can be hacked at the same time. There's a lot less places to hide as a spy, but spies now have guns and are capable of cloaking and punching/killing mercs from the front, which seems to turn it into a more of a deathmach than previous games. But really I haven't played it enough to fully comment, you really need to know the maps inside out to play this mode and I haven't learnt any of them yet. There is also a classic 2v2 mode too, so maybe that's better. Also played some coop which is good fun. And amazingly buggy for me, a missing clif face that I was climbing along, people walking in mid air, staying stood up when dead, objectives/actions not registering etc. and the person I was playing with could see none of this.

http://www.mfgamers.com/index.php?showtopic=28972&st=0&p=28972&hl=+burnout%20+paradise&fromsearch=1entry28972

No impressions thread on this, so lets rectify that. I'm sure everyone who is interested in MGS has already played 4 to death, but I only started it last night. I started the first act with the intention of playing for an hour to see what it was like. Two hours and fifty minutes later and the first act is done, and act two is installed and ready to go. It's amazing, production wise there's nothing that comes close, the graphics and sound are brilliant too. I've watched more than played so far, but I was expecting this, and it hasn't detracted from my opinion of the game at all. I'm immersed in the characters and I want to carry on to see what happens next. In the PS1 Metal Gear Solid, the only one I've actually completed, I was able to sneak like a mother, and only kill when absolutely necessary. In MGS4 though, it's a lot more lenient, and there's a huge focus on various weapons indicating that you don't need to be quite as stealthy as in previous games. This is good, because I keep getting spotted, and either end up taking out a bunch of enemies, or legging it. But yes, I'm glad I finally got round to playing MGS4, it definitely deserves all the praise it's received.

So we know about this yah? .So its basically a hardcore old school platformer that fucks you the better you get at it. I'm currently on level 121. This is a video of level 329 (penultimate level). You can spend the cyrstals you pick up in game on stuff, one such stuff is a video of the AI doing the level. On the websites I look at, only one person has beaten that. That dude bought the video for the last level: Fucksticks.

Another indie game that is a bit old now, if nearly a year is a bit old. I don't know what to think of this game, really. Those clever kids in cool jeans seem to like it so of course I felt I had to buy it (after I saw it on sale for just over £3). I think I was initially put off by it because looking at it shows it to be ones of those psychedelic tube games like Tempest and Space Giraffe or whatever else Jeff Minter makes, and I don't really like those games, especially Space Giraffe. I tried and tried with that game and it just remained a foreign entity the entire time. It's a game that made me feel dumb and was a complete jerk about it, too. But thankfully, Dyad isn't like that. It does teach... in a way. No, it does, but don't be surprised to still be staring blankly at the screen after you've been taught. So, you're an abstract thing like in Rez and you fly down a Minter Tube. You have to 'hook' onto 'glowy things' that makes you 'boost' when you hook a pair and you have to dodge stuff or 'lance' them after building up power from 'grazing' the 'glowy things'. I think that's the game, basically. But it's a lot harder than that paragraph makes it sound. The kind of dexterity it requires from you is beyond what a lot of people will be willing to offer (mainly me), and since the game is so abstract it's not always easy to see how you're meant to improve. You think it's going well then colour swirl, bbbvvvff vvffbbb, you lose. But it is an interesting game if you want to remember what it's like when you first played video games again it's good for that. If you really want to go through that confusion again before you knew how to play all the video games then buy it. Go on.

I'm not saying a great deal at the moment 'cos I did a review that was over 2000 words and I'm sick of thinking about it. It's here anyway. Shameful plug over. Since it's a bit TL;DR basically the campaign = 4/10, co-op (kind of interesting but tacked on and not enough of it) = 6/10, and multiplayer (great, just maybe not as well crafted as Bad Company 2) = 9/10. It had a really rocky first week. Servers where an absolute mess but the last two days they've certainly stabilised. No more getting kicked out randomly and the lag that crippled particular maps looks to have completely disappeared. Still some trouble with the HUD not displaying flag captures correctly but other than that it seems okay. What you's think?

so i got this to play while watching the GP, it's pretty good, looks like it might play like trials but really doesn't, there's lots more (and occasionally confusing) controls, and it's all about doing tricks and combos and collecting stuff, rather than just keeping your bike from crashing. each track has various objectives to win stars, such as finding hidden stars, collecting all the small stars, landing on all the targets, doing something in a time limit, comboing the whole level (not quite as hard as it sounds as wheeleing is easy and keeps the combo going, but still will require some heavy memorisation later on) etc. there are checkpoints which help for some of the objectives and for learning the tracks but will be usless for others where you'll just need to start again (like keeping the combo), and there's multiple routes on some levels, where you have to press up/down on the stick/dpad at specific lane change points. despite my moaning the controls are reasonably sensible its just you have to do a lot at the same time: L2/R2 - back/forwards L1/R1 - tricks x - boost square - duck/jump up/down - change lanes right/left - lean/spin forwards/backwards one race i was having trouble winning because while doing tricks and wheeleing as much as possible to get boosts to stay ahead and jumping over obstacles i'd keep forgetting which button was accelerate (i'd be pressing right on the dpad or x when i should be pressing r2) it's great fun boosting while wheeleing into a jump then spinning and doing tricks to charge the next boost while collecting stars and landing on a target then boosting off to the next ramp, but the stomp and spike obstacles have been annoying, especially the things that crush you just after a lane change where its hard to adjust your speed, and some targets it doesn't show you too well with the camera angle. so i've been quite enjoying it but i'm not completely sold yet, i need to get better at the controls. this was quite hyped - did anyone else get it?