YouTube Guitar Hero 5 review

So Guitar Hero 5 is available in the shops and the good news is this doesn’t feel like just some more songs to jam along to slightly repackaged. It is in fact quite a leap forward for the game both in terms of graphical style and the way the game plays.

First of all let’s cover the track list. There are 85 songs on this and as usual, some you’ll know, some you won’t, depending on your musical taste. Queen, Muse, Nirvana and Garbage all appear amongst others and you can even unlock guest characters such as Shirley Manson, Santana and Kurt Kobain and then add them to your customised band line-up.

It’s also never been easier to get into a game. Party Play mode lets anyone just drop in or out of a song at any difficulty without interrupting the song which really adds to the accessibility of the game.

The on-screen graphics have also been streamlined. Gone are the big meters which crowd the screen. They are now incorporated into the fret display and the whole look of the band and venues looks a lot more authentic. They’ve copied the grainy look of Rock Band and the character animation and lip synching is really a sight to behold. Another great touch is the ability to play Guitar Hero 5 as your Xbox 360 avatar. You look a little out of place as you’re a lot shorter than everyone else but you can also customise a completely new character to look like you in the character creation mode.

It’s also great that you can play any song from the off in quick play mode and in career, you unlock new venues and songs even though you haven’t played all the songs in the previous category. You can also get more stars by fulfilling criteria mid-song like finger tapping all the tap sections of whammying the sustain notes.

Apart from there not being enough modern tracks for my liking, Guitar Hero 5 really is the ultimate band experience so far. Neversoft have really pushed things forward this time around and it’s tricky to say how they’d better this.

Guitar Hero 5 gets and almost perfect 9 out of 10.

Get Guitar Hero 5 now
New: Buy Guitar Hero 5 from Amazon.com
Rental: Rent Guitar Hero 5 – free rental trial from Gamefly.com
Offers: Visit the Gamesweasel offers page for October 2009 Godaddy discount codes, use the CSS free shipping coupon code ‘AFGAMEFS’ for orders over $30 and ‘AFGAME15′ to get 15% off orders over $75, use the Squarespace coupon ‘WEASEL’ for 12% off the lifetime of your account.

Related: play Guitar Hero 5 as your Xbox 360 avatar, Using a Wii Guitar Hero controller with Rock Band, Youtube Guitar Hero 5 review

Tags: Guitar Hero 5, Xbox 360, PS3, Wii, PS2, Guitar Hero, Rock Band, Guitar Hero 5 review

You’d have to have been living on a desert island for the last few years (and one without an internet connection at that) not to have heard of Halo. The first game showed the world the real potential that lay ahead for console online multiplayer gaming (and for a while, at least, silenced the multitude of PC owners who’d been ranting on for years that you ‘couldn’t do proper multiplayer deathmatch on a console’) as well as introducing the gaming world to the Master Chief, one of the coolest and most instantly recognisable characters to hit the videogame console since the delectable Ms Lara Croft graced the PlayStation, many years before. I’ll admit, that like most of the gaming community, I was sucked into Halo’s world, its action and its storyline, and I loved every minute of it.

But to be honest, since then, each episode of Halo has left me feeling just a little less moved. Maybe it’s because each of them is hyped as the biggest event in gaming since… well, since the first Halo, but – for me at least – each then fails to quite live up to its promise. Oh don’t get me wrong, they all looked great and offered more deathmatch maps, new options, etc, but nothing quite matched the thrill of the first game, up to and including the recent Halo 3, which for me just couldn’t compare in either single-player campaign mode or the online deathmatch options to something like Call Of Duty 4.

All that aside though, I was still extremely keen to get my hands on the latest in the Halo series, Halo 3: ODST. Not so much a sequel as a spin-off, this game takes the focus away from the super-human, super-cool Master Chief, and revolves instead around the soldiers of the elite division of the United Nations Space Command Marine Corps, the Orbital Drop Shock Troopers – basically the USNC’s futuristic equivalent of the British SAS or the US Navy SEAL teams. If there’s a situation that’s too tough for the cannon-fodder UNSC grunts (who you’ll have seen massacred by the dropship-load in Halo 1, 2 & 3) to handle, then the ODST, or ‘Helljumpers’, are the guys you call.

Our story starts with the Helljumpers deploying from orbit aboard their USNC transport on a hush-hush mission via their signature single-person drop pods. Unfortunately, everything doesn’t quite go according to plan, and things get a little ‘lopsided’ just as the ODST deploy into action, when a massive energy burst close to the planet’s orbit sends their pods tumbling off course and out of control, with the result that the team winds up getting separated and crash-landing at a variety of locations. This means that you, the rookie of the squad (called, rather imaginatively, ‘Rookie’) have to spend a fair part of the game tracking down and locating the scattered squad members before the mission can continue.

What this basically amounts to, at least to begin with, is wandering through a very dark urban cityscape, battling hordes of the alien Covenant troops and trying to locate waypoints which trigger new instructions and various ‘cutaway-missions’ that let you play the landing from the perspective of each of the different squad members. Did I say ‘very dark urban cityscape’? Make that: very, very, very, VERY dark urban cityscape! Because in a lot of these urban levels, you really can’t see your hand in front of your face – it’s THAT dark. In fact the only way you can see anything at all is by making use of your helmet’s VISR, which is basically a low-light vision system coupled with a targeting aid that marks enemy targets in red and the ‘home team’ in green.

Now to begin with, these dark levels are quite atmospheric and eerie, as I’m sure they’re meant to be. As you wander through the shadowy world, with suitably tense incidental music to match the mood, it’s quite nerve-wracking… at least for the first 10 minutes or so. After that though, it starts to get annoying. You find yourself wishing for some decent lighting, as yet another shadowy Covenant soldier shoots at you from behind a shadowy obstacle in the shadow of a big shadowy building… you start thinking that it’d be nice if you could just have a gun with a big flashlight fitted on the end instead of the VISR, which gives about the level of illumination you get when you first turn on an energy-saving light bulb, before it warms up (ie: not much). This is particularly bad inside of buildings, where you often find yourself bouncing off the walls trying to find your way out, and the darkness gets to be so oppressive that when you eventually do get to a cutaway mission which is set outside in broad daylight, it’s such a relief that you almost don’t want to finish it for fear of then getting dumped back in the Rookie’s twilight world.

It’s not just the darkness of much of the game that left me feeling a little cold either, it’s the sense that everything in this game I’ve done before. I’m shooting the same aliens, using the same weapons, driving the same vehicles… to put it simply: it’s basically Halo, as I remember it, but nothing’s really new. Yes, it looks shinier (when it’s not pitch black that is) and yes there are new levels and new characters, but frankly, for me it’s just more of the same, and personally I’m starting to get a little bored with it.

So… am I gonna recommend giving this one a miss? Well… no, actually. And that’s for two reasons. For one, I know that while I might have reached my fill of samey Halo storylines and repetitive Covenant-blasting combat, there’s a massive section of the Xbox-owning public out there that hasn’t. They’re the ones who are buying the Halo books and toys, logging onto the fansites, even making their own Halo-themed TV shows, and for them, they’ll probably love every minute of this game. A game being very similar to something you’ve played previously isn’t a bad thing in everyone’s book – just look at the oodles of gamers who year on year buy each new EA Sports update, each of which is almost always essentially the same as last year’s instalment, just with slightly more polished graphics and some updated stats.

The second reason that Halo 3: ODST doesn’t get a negative review is that when it comes to Halo, the single-player (and indeed, two-player co-op) Campaign mode is only a small part of what everyone loves about the series. The other thing is the online multiplayer, and this is where Halo 3: ODST really delivers. A whole second disc comes in the box, and is packed with online features including 24 different multiplayer maps which takes in all the ones from Halo 3, the DIY Sandbox option and three brand new maps. In addition, up to four friends can play either online or via system link in a new co-op mode called Firefight, which is basically a cooperative ‘survival’ mode, similar to Call Of Duty: World At War’s zombie level which faces players with wave after wave of ever-more-demented Covenant troops.

And no matter how bored I might think I am with the single-player action and storyline of Halo, I simply can’t keep away from the online deathmatch mode, which is the reason that, while this game would probably get just an average 5 out of 10 on the single-player mode alone, it actually gets a deserving ‘very good’ 7 out of 10 rating for the overall package.

Get Halo 3 ODST now
New: Buy Halo 3 ODST from Amazon.com
Rental: Rent Halo 3 ODST – free rental trial from Gamefly.com
Offers: Use our Godaddy coupon codes for October 2009 to save money on hosting and web domains, use our October 2009 Square Space coupon code ‘WEASEL’ at the checkout to get 12% off the lifetime of your account.

Related: Halo 3 review, Halo Wars review

Tags: Halo 3 ODST, Halo, Halo O.D.S.T., Xbox 360

Square Enix have just released a new extra long trailer for the forthcoming Final Fantasy 13 game available at the official Final Fantasy XIII web site.

Buy Final Fantasy 13 now
New: Preorder Final Fantasy 13 from Amazon.com for the Playstation 3 and Xbox 360
Offers: Visit the Gamesweasel offers page for October 2009 Godaddy discount codes, use the Squarespace coupon ‘WEASEL’ for 12% off the lifetime of your account.

Related: official Final Fantasy XIII web site, Final Fantasy XIII PS3 and Xbox 360 versions compared

Tags: Final Fantasy, trailer, Xbox 360, PS3

I recently watched Charlie Brooker (of The Guardian’s Screenburn column and BBC’s Screenwipe) in his new show Gameswipe, in which basically his career came more-or-less full circle, he having started off as a games journalist, made it into TV, and then come back to reviewing videogames again. Mr Brooker managing to make the leap from games journo to TV ‘star’, despite having many of the traits of your average videogame journo – lack of film-star looks (when watching him on TV, you can’t help feeling that somewhere back in his family tree a Cabbage Patch doll had an affair with a trout), a wit best described as ‘acidic’ and a tendency towards borderline obsession – is an encouragement to other games journalists that one day we too might escape the world of late-into-the-night lonely reviewing sessions and perhaps scale the dizzy career heights to achieve that dream of our own late-night BBC3 show, or occasional celebrity panel show guest spot. Gameswipe, for me though, also highlighted an interesting fact about games genres: there are LOADS of them.

Where once you could pretty-much categorise any videogame under one of a handful of different types (such as the eight or so featured on Gameswipe), these days as the power of the machines, and the imagination of the game developer grows exponentially, we see game genres mix and meld, and whole new genres seemingly emerge on an almost weekly basis. One genre which has been around since almost the inception of the games console though, and which doesn’t seem to have changed a whole heck of a lot since it began, is the beat-’em-up.

The first beat-’em-up I can remember playing on a console (or ‘home computer’, as they used to be called) was ‘WOTEF’, or ‘Way Of The Exploding Fist’, which featured two small chaps in simplistic martial arts gear who could use but a handful of martial arts moves on one another. It was basic, and not much to look at, but still I was hooked. Of course, if you really wanted to play a PROPER beat-’em-up, then the place to be was the arcades, where a few big names were just starting out and the power of the dedicated graphics boards made for better graphics, sound and animation.

Now though, you’ve got to wonder why anyone ever goes to arcades (if indeed anyone still does) because we can have arcade-quality games in our own home, and that’s exactly what King Of Fighters XII is: an arcade-quality 2D beat-’em-up on your home console. Yes, if your every waking moment is taken up with thoughts of which button combination you need to master in order to perform that flying roundhouse kick, or overhead fireball attack, then this is the game for you. In terms of visuals, it proffers graphics exactly like you might expect a late-90s arcade cabinet to offer, with all the action taking place in one two-dimensional playing area, while the tried and tested ‘parallax scrolling’ technique is used on the backgrounds to give an illusion of depth.

There are 22 colourful characters on offer, each with their own range of different attacks, throws, special moves and ‘super special’ moves to master, and they get to duke it out across six different backdrops.

Control is simplicity itself to pick up – use the d-pad or analogue stick for directional control and the triangle, square, circle and X buttons for Heavy Punch, Light Punch, Heavy Kick and Light Kick – but a struggle to master, as each character has different moves and attacks specific to them, some of which require various lengthy sequences of pad and button combinations to pull them off. Combat consists of three-on-three ‘winner stays on’-style matches, where if you beat the first opponent, then your character gets a small energy boost and then stays in the arena to tackle the next guy. You can either compete against the CPU-controlled opponents, or go to head-to-head with a friend. And that, pretty-much, is all you really need to know.

For, unlike something like Resident Evil or Grand Theft Auto, there is not a huge amount to explain about this game – it’s about one thing: arcade-style, gratuitous one-on-one beat-’em-up action. Whereas some games try to draw you in with complex storylines and multiple twists and turns, with King Of Fighters XII, what you see is what you get.

So if you like colourful, detailed, zany characters, each with their own different skills set, bashing the hell out of one another, then you’ll like this. If not, then you won’t, simple as that. Where the longevity comes into it is with the special moves – with this game it’s not just about finishing the single-player (that can be done in about 20 minutes), no, you’ll find that hardcore gamers will spend hours trying to master the special moves. Why? Because they’re there. So like DS owners might find enjoyment in solving every clue in the latest Professor Layton adventure, hardcore KOF fans will get the same satisfaction in pulling off all the special moves for every character in this. Sound a little strange? Well if I tell you that back when I used to work on videogame magazines, I remember one memorable press lunch where the PR guy who’d taken us out, himself a confirmed Street Fighter addict, spent literally two whole hours discussing with two writers from GamesTM magazine the merits of just one particular Street Fighter special move, then maybe then you’ll understand just how seriously some beat-’em-up fans take their games.

For those ‘dedicated’ individuals (I resist the urge to say ‘sad’, because when you really think about it, it’s no more obsessive than your average football fan spending hours in the pub dissecting a particular tackle or goal attempt) this kind of game represents hour upon hour of top entertainment. For more normal… okay, let me rephrase that: for ‘less fanatical’ gamers, what you’ve basically got is a game which will be great fun to pick up and play with a mate for a few hours every so often, but which doesn’t really have the depth to keep you playing it for long periods – it’s more a ‘post pub’ activity that you’ll dust off every so often when you’ve got company. As a result, while it’s well recommended to the legions of King Of Fighters and Street Fighter 2D beat-’em-up fans out there, for your more casual gamer, I’d have to give it a fairly solid ‘good’ 6 out of 10.

Get The King Of Fighters XII now
New: Buy The King Of Fighters XII from Amazon.com
Rental: Rent The King Of Fighters XII – free rental trial from Gamefly.com
Offers: Use our Godaddy promo code for October 2009 to save money on web hosting and domains, use the Squarespace coupon ‘WEASEL’ for 12% off the lifetime of your account.

Related: Street Fighter, Professor Layton

Tags: The King Of Fighters XII, King Of Fighters, Gameswipe, Charlie Brooker, beat em up, Way Of The Exploding Fist, Xbox 360, Playstation 3

YouTube WET review

As soon as you load up WET you know exactly what you’re getting in terms of style. If you’ve seen Kill Bill, Grindhouse or any other exploitation movie, the style is instantly obvious. The game even has a flashy film grain effect over it throughout which you can thankfully turn off in the menu so it doesn’t give you a headache.

You play as Rubi Malone, a fixer who solves people’s problems. The pre-title action begins with you retrieving a heart in an ice box which is for some London geezer’s father. The afore-mentioned geezer then goes missing so you’re hired by “Mr New Heart” to go and find him. Of course, things aren’t that simple and you’re double-crossed, which leads to lots of shooting and stabbing people with your sword.

Bethesda make a big deal about you being able to shoot doing acrobatics and if you’re jumping, sliding or running up walls when you shoot, the game slows down so you can target more than one bad guy at a time. As you gain XP you can then buy more upgrades that let you shoot whilst hanging off ledges and swinging off poles too.

There are moments where you move through the levels and also arenas where you must destroy ‘spawn doors’ and collect multipliers whilst killing everyone in sight.

And to mix things up a bit there’s even a couple of sections on the highways as you jump from car to car and shoot enemies who are shooting back at you.

My problem is that I’ve just been spoiled by the intensely satisfying combat of the new Batman Arkham Asylum game. In comparison the combat here feels really clunky. It all goes a bit Max Payne as you jump around in slow-motion but for some reason the combat is rarely satisfying. Even slicing and dicing people at close range just doesn’t seem to feel like it ‘connects’. Even the platforming sections don’t seem to go that smoothly when you consider Rubi is a lithe young lady who should be able to string together her moves a bit more seamlessly.

Presentation, however, will please fans of pulp movie genres. There’s a great soundtrack, good voice acting and some genuinely well scripted moments. It’s a pity the gameplay doesn’t live up to more recent 3rd-person action adventures. WET gets an average 5 out of 10.

Get WET now
New: Buy WET from Amazon.com
Rental: Rent WET – free rental trial from Gamefly.com
Offers: Use our October 2009 Godaddy coupons to save money on hosting and web domains, use the Squarespace coupon code ‘WEASEL’ to get 12% off for the lifetime of your account.

Related: Madworld review, Batman Arkham Asylum, WET review

Tags: WET, Bethesda Softworks, W.E.T., Xbox 360, PS3

YouTube Mini Ninjas review

Just because a game’s for kids doesn’t mean it has to be hurriedly put together. Luckily, it seems that quite a bit of care and attention has gone into making Mini Ninjas which means kids are going to have a fair amount of fun with it. In the game, the land has been ravaged by violent storms and the leader of the town has sent his best ninjas one by one off to solve the problem. The problem is, they never came back so it’s up to Hiro, the youngest of the ninjas, to find his buddies and stop the terrible storms and the samurais from burning down the villages.

Combat’s a simple case of hitting, blocking and stunning enemies if they choose to block you. You also have Kuju magic available which can be used to find secret shrines or fight enemies with fireballs or tornadoes. You can even possess the little animals around the land to sneak past samurais or even attack them. Hiro also has a big white hat which can be used to guard against arrows or as a boat. It’s all very cute and colourful and running about the land feels very fresh if you know what I mean.

There’s also a fair amount of platform gaming as Hiro shimmies along ledges and balances on beams.

Once you find your fellow ninjas you can then hot-swap them into the battle and use their abilities. There’s a big chap with a hammer called Tofu or something and a little girl with a flute amongst others.

My problem with this game is, even though it’s for kids, it just feels a bit shallow and easy. Combat is rarely difficult unless you’re later in the game and haven’t levelled up enough so there’s no real sense of danger throughout the game. You sort of go through the motions albeit very slick ones with tight controls and smooth graphics.

It would also have been nice to have some extra 2 player game modes in there for more family fun. Still, it’s a good game and even though there’s swordplay, no-one dies. All the enemies you fight turn into frogs, rabbits and foxes etc when defeated. Mini Ninjas gets a good 6 out of 10.

Get Mini Ninjas now
New: Buy Mini Ninjas from Amazon.com
Rental: Rent Mini Ninjas – free rental trial from Gamefly.com
Offers: Use our October 2009 Godaddy coupons to save money on hosting and web domains, using the October 2009 Squarespace discount code ‘WEASEL’ at checkout will get you 12% off the lifetime of your account.

Related: Ninja Blade review, Ninja Gaiden Dragon Sword review, Youtube Mini Ninjas review

Tags: Mini Ninjas, Mini Ninja, Eidos, Xbox 360, PS3, Wii, PC, Mini Ninjas review