Beach Bowling 3D is a solid bowling game for the iphone or ipod touch, with another version for the ipad being released next month. It has great physics and is fairly realistic in the way the ball and pins interact with each other. You find yourself sometimes leaning in your chair in an attempt to will a pin into falling over for a strike or picking up an important spare.

STRIKE!!!

There isn’t a lot of variety in the game though. It’s just straight bowling, get your score and move on. I thought the addition of a competitive A.I. would have been nice but there wasn’t any. There aren’t any real difficulty settings either. There are five different trophies you can select to go for, each one requiring a higher score to achieve, with the most difficult one requiring you to score 180, which isn’t that difficult. It is fairly easy to pick and learn how to roll just the right way to get a strike almost every single time. On my third game I rolled over a 200 and I really doubt anybody would have difficulty doing the same thing.

One thing that really annoyed me in this game was that it only has a random starting position system set in place. Before each roll you are placed into a random position on the boards with no way of selecting where you would like to stand. I don’t know what the developer was thinking when they did this, but beyond this being a feature on an easy difficulty setting it really has no place in the game.

The graphics are what to be expected from an iphone bowling game. There is some pixilation around the edges of objects and the best looking part of the game is the wooden boards. There is also a pair of lovely ladies on the sidelines cheering you on every time you succeed with a spare or strike. The game also features a real time day/night cycle. The majority of the sound you will hear in the game is the same exact background music over and over again.

Overall Beach Bowling 3D is a mediocre experience at best. I played about three games and got bored with it. Though I suppose I could see myself coming back to it in the future if was really bored or sitting on the toilet.

There is basically no story at all to keep you intrigued or even care about what happens to your character. Its simple. You are a mindless and often overpowered clone working for a corporation to rid the city of a grassroots rebellion known only as Cell and to clean the streets of zombie-like mutant freaks.

You start out your mission only slightly overpowered. You can level up 5 skills – agility, strength, guns, explosives, and driving. You mostly level up your agility by finding green orbs on the rooftops. In all the other categories, you get skills for kills, meaning if you kill a Freak with a kick to the face, you will receive leveling orbs in the strength category. If you run over a Cell rebel with your car, you will receive leveling orbs for the driving skill. It’s pretty much impossible to completely level all the way up in one play though so it encourages replay.

I was not a fan of the first Crackdown and when I began playing this I couldn’t believe I was actually enjoying myself. But then after an hour reality set in and I began to become extremely frustrated with the game. For starters and by far the most frustrating thing is that there is no waypoint system for traversing the city! In my opinion in this day and age of gaming if you make an open world game it is your responsibility to put in a waypoint/GPS system for getting around. The missions in this game are mundane enough, I shouldn’t have to be frustrated on top of that when traveling between meaningless objectives. Another thing that pissed me off was the targeting system. I could have an enemy standing right in my face and the game would auto target a vehicle like a hundred meters away. And then there is the camera. I don’t know why I should be forced to push a camera along in the way I must in this game. It’s not exactly free moving, when you want to spin it all the way around it feels like you are hitting an imaginary wall and you just have to wait for the camera to push through the barrier, meanwhile you are being shot from fifty different directions.

The mission objectives are basically the same thing over and over again. Go there, clear area, call helicopter, rinse and repeat. I consider myself to be a bonafide achievement whore but even this game couldn’t keep me engaged enough to stick around for the achievements or avatar awards I often do so desire in my games. One of the few fun parts of the game was driving around in a buggy at night with a mounted machine gun turret and running over zombies by the dozen. During the day for similar activities the often entertaining game narrator would reprimand you for such activities against normal healthy citizens, but the freaks come out at night and you can let out all your frustrations out on them.

Crackdown 2 also supports up to 4-player co-op. This is the only time the game actually shined for me as I was actually able to navigate the city with one friend constantly having a map up and giving me directions. Whether or not this was the developers intended reason for not including the waypoint system we will never know. Co-op is also important if you are planning on collecting all the orbs because there are specific orbs that can only be collected if you are playing in a party of two or more people.

I did find the graphics and sound to be rather pleasant. I expected the campy comic book art style to be visually offensive like in other games that have attempted to pull it off, but flying over the city at night made me feel like I was in a Marvel comic book come to life in the best possible way. The sounds of the city are very atmospheric. I enjoyed rolling up to enemies with my car speakers banging out heavy metal tracks and jumping out to kill everything while still being able to hear the car radio as you would in real life if you had shut all the doors and windows.

Multiplayer is not great in Crackdown 2, but it’s ok. Rocket Tag, where one player has the orb and the rest chase him down with infinite rocket launchers, sounds better in theory than it is in practice, mostly because the maps seem poorly designed for this purpose. In one match, a player scaled a nearly-inaccessible point and camped for two minutes. Not fun. The other options are deathmatch and team deathmatch, though the winner of each mode is “whoever found the rocket launcher first,” followed by “whoever found the sniper rifle first.” There are vehicles available, and you can even fly a helicopter around the map and spam the ground with rockets. This is more fun than it is actually a useful strategy as you will more than likely shot down by a rocket launching d-bag on the ground.

Crackdown 2 is a fun game with a lot of flaws. Just as you are playing as a clone as the main character this game feels too much like a clone of the original with all of the original problems making a comeback. If you liked the first one you will like the second one. However if you weren’t a fan of the first I am afraid to say there isn’t really anything here in the sequel to change your mind.

Unfortunately this title is not among the great games Playrix is known to put out. Fishdom 2 is, for all intents and purposes, FishVille meets Bejeweled. If you don’t know, FishVille is a game on Facebook where you literally just decorate a fish tank. The Bejeweled part of the game is how you earn money to afford such luxuries, and in my opinion the only enjoyable part of the game.

You have two modes to chose from when starting off your first match; Relaxed and Against the Clock. These are pretty straight forward and for review purposes, I chose relaxed.

So basically as I’ve said, you’ll need money to improve your fish tank and continue on with the game. This is where the Bejeweled clone kicks off.
You’re presented with a board, each board will differ with every level to keep things from becoming mundane. Different tile themes are also recycled but there’s not enough to feel like there’s much randomness to the whole thing.

Each board has yellow blocks which you’ll need to remove to complete that particular level. In order to gain any sort of points, including removing the yellow blocks, you need to make a match. Matches can be made with three or more of the same tile either vertically or horizontally. Match three or more over a yellow block and it will clear it from the board and adding $1 to your funds. There are, however, explosives you’ll acquire during these levels to make things a bit more fun.

The explosive I saw the most was the Depth Bomb.

You’ll gain this baby after making a match of five or more tiles and packs a punch of destroying within a two block radius.

The next explosive, and the most useless, is aptly named Firecracker.

This little bitch comes when you achieve a cascade match of five or more falling tiles. They’re annoying and weak, only a one block radius.

One of the better explosives is a Dynamite Charge.

They’re a bit harder to get since they require a match of six or more tiles at once but pack quite a punch destroying within a three block radius.

The final, and easily the best explosive, is simply named Lightning.

Once you’ve used seven explosives in a single match, this baby will appear. Simply switch it with one of the surrounding tiles and it will destroy every single of that one on the board. This is incredibly useful if you’re having trouble with a match and it just so happens to be next to a Lightning.

To keep the game from becoming too easy, different types of tiles will make it onto the board adding a pebble in your shoe. Some times yellow blocks will be chained, the way around this is to make a match and the chain will snap, make another match as you normally would and this will remove the yellow block. When there’s two chains, simply make a match twice to bring the block to normal.

As you can also see, stones will come into play. Any tile inside the stone cannot be moved, you must make a match of whichever tile is stuck inside to break the stone, then it will turn into a yellow tile and just repeat the process you’ve been doing. Why? To decorate your fish tank of course!

Your fish will want stupid crap like a lawnmower, frogs chillin’ in lounge chairs, lights, other fish and purple hippos.. all of which cost money. Each item has a level to it, the higher the level, the more it will fill up the corresponding bar on the type right corner. Once you’ve filled all three bars to 100%, you’ll gain a bronze cup for that tank, the bar resets and you start all over. Basically this works past the Silver Cup right up to Gold and that’s when you realize you’re wasting your time with this game. What can you do once you get a Gold Cup? BUY ANOTHER TANK AND DO THE WHOLE DAMN THING ALL OVER AGAIN! FUCK YEAH!

There’s no sense of satisfaction to the game, once you get a Gold Cup on a tank you kind of feel like you just wasted a lot of time doing nothing but playing an overly exaggerated Facebook game that you PAID FOR. Yes, it looks pretty but that’s not enough to sell it. There’s only a short amount of songs, I think I heard like four different tracks and only one of them was tolerable enough for me not to rip my ears off and shove nails into my eardrums.

Even the beautiful colors couldn’t save this incredibly repetitive game. I lost interest once I finished my first fish tank, horrible replay value. 2/5

Matt Fitzgerald
US Correspondent

Where’s my cross game voice chat? 44%
Greast waste of money 38%
Great value for money 16%

Dark, gritty and an art style that could only be described as the end product if Tim Burton and a 1920’s film maker were to copulate, Playdead’s Limbo XBLA puzzle plat former is one heck of a game. Clocking in at around 3-5 hours completion time, this game has so much charm and unique character that it’s worth every penny of your 1200 Microsoft points. Limbo is one of the most unique looking games on Microsoft’s downloadable platform since Braid, some are describing it as the 2010 Braid, I’d like to think of it as better than Braid myself.

Limbo’s game play doesn’t use any special fandangle concept. It’s game play is simple by design. You can jump, push and pull objects and move your character. Where the games challenge lies is that there are no screen prompts, no hints on how to progress but instead the game relies on you dying to figure out the best method to get past all manner of Spiders, flaming bows and crumbling chasms. Constantly dying is rewarded with painful deaths that aren’t as gore ridden as everything is in black and white. Where the game doesn’t frustrate is the fact that when you do die a painful death you are taken back within yards of where you actually died, no punishment for the learning the error in your ways.

Everything in Limbo is grey and black and the artist has used some blurring to create partial foreground and backgrounds to create a sense of entrapment. The puzzle elements are rather clever, in the opening stages to the game you’ll have to experiment with bear traps to chop the spiders legs or use them to propel you to a higher platform by setting a trap under a bending branch. These elements are very clever to say the least. The game also uses your dexterity by testing your reflexes and quick reaction skills to falling objects, set traps and breaking platforms.

Concept for the Sewer

One of the most impressive elements in the game is the sound. It creates an atmospheric experience using a minimal amount of score. The spiders sharp feet crashing down on you is a jumpy moment, but these subtle touches will be wasted on you if you don’t wear some form of headset or surround sound system. Independent developers never cease to amaze me, without them we would have some very dull experiences indeed. Limbo has given the XBLA platform a real fresh vibe this year and hopefully with any luck we’ll return to Limbo or another world in some fashion by the developers Playdead. If the game lacks anything, it’s a sense of story. Your character wakes up from the ground nursing its head in wonderment of where he is, your job is to find your sister upon the Limbo world but that never seems apparent throughout. Is it that big of a deal? Definitely not! I’d be happy to play this game and not have a single clue about my character. Just to play in this dark and sordid world is a pleasure in itself. Cliché as it sounds your money will not be in ‘Limbo’ by buying this title!

The Signal has been priced at 560 msp or roughly $7 US. But not to worry if you purchased the game new you should have your insert that provides a redeemable code to download the content free of charge. If by some chance you were one of the knuckle heads who tried to redeem this DLC before it was released not to worry Microsoft is working on the issue and will soon be e mailing all afflicted gamers new DLC codes to replace their now useless ones.

Car-nado

If you enjoyed the main story of Alan Wake there is no doubt you will enjoy this add on. Plus its free so get it anyway. The first thing I noticed when playing was that the enemies are much tougher, smarter, and there are a lot more of them. In some areas they even seem to infinitely respawn no matter what you do. This makes it extremely difficult to look for the always annoying collectibles. There are two new forms of the collectible, six cardboard cut outs and ten alarm clocks. Both have achievements to go with the collecting of them.

The DLC ran about two hours long for me on normal. This should be pretty standard for most players I think as I have beaten the game on nightmare mode and still had a bit of difficulty with this on normal. During these two hours there a lot of different scenery changes going from a town to the woods and also spending lots of time outside as well as in. One example of one of the more terrifying sequences take place in a basement that can be described as nothing short of Freddy Krueger’s boiler room. With exploding furnaces abound and unrelenting enemies attacking from all directions.

There are eight new achievements for the Signal. The achievements add up to 250 gamerscore bringing Alan Wake’s overall achievable score up to 1250 which I will get because believe me I will go back and get that last fucking coffee thermos! The most difficult new achievement has to be Run-On Sentence which for 50 gamerscore requires you to complete the episode without reloading the game or restarting a checkpoint. So basically you have to do the whole thing in one sitting without dying. Going to be a tough one fore sure.

If you haven’t started downloading this amazing add on already what are you waiting for its probably free for you and if not it is definitely worth the 560 msp. Pick it up now exclusively on Xbox Live.

Hydro Thunder Hurricane is very arcade in its very nature to say the least. It tells realism to go fuck itself and that’s an extremely good thing. One of the most immediate things about this title is that you’ll notice that every one of the courses in the game have individual charm and have clearly crafted with the biggest of imaginations. Lake Powell is a real location but to throw things into hyper drive, you’ll have police boats chasing you, old steam trains running by in bridges above you and a dam power failure whereby you’ll have to boost past the closing dam gates to avoid being crushed. Furthermore big jumps are no stranger to this game. Just in Lake Powell and the Asgard courses alone there are huge jumps that are greeted with extreme lens blur and the adrenaline rush of the driver.

Hurricane’s courses are a real joy to play. For instance in the third lap of the third course in the game, a big dragon serpent rushes out of the water and tries to attack you. Something that we never expected but enjoy each and every race we play on that level. The game also boasts multiple paths, they can aid you to the front of the pack but mostly it’s all about discovering the Hydro tokens which you can collect throughout the campaign mode to work towards an achievement. Such are these hidden areas so entertaining is because they are not all obvious, some require you to destruct an environment, collect a ramp button before it’ll activate the hidden area, or some are simply hidden away and not found unless you purposely go looking for it. It’s a great touch that is executed with real aplomb. Playing this game on my X10 Turtle Beaches are a real joy!

In terms of bang for your buck, you’ll have different vehicle classes, just under 10 tracks, multiplayer which is online and split-screen plus the addition of several game modes which include Gauntlet (where you have to avoid explosive barrels) and Ring Master (where you have to slalom through certain rings, something akin towards the Wave Race games). Whilst Hydro appears to lack allot more choice of things to do than other XBLA titles, it’s the quality and craft of the level designs that make this game a real winner.

Graphically the game is very polished, visuals are very good for a downloadable platform game, sound is nicely executed too. If there was anything to critique it would have to be the slight texture glitches that can happen throughout the different races that you play. Is this anything to mark the game down for? Not at all, although it takes away from the thrill of the race for a split second, it doesn’t ruin the race at all.

Hydro Thunder Hurricane feels like a meld of mother earth’s natural forces. From its awesomely brutal weather effects and wave patterns straight through to the inventive levels on display, Hurricane is a game that should be owned by anyone who has an Xbox 360. Vector Unit have done a fantastic job of reinvigorating a legendary arcade racer.

Suddenly there comes Astragon. Why sugar-coat the demolition-side of a game with stories, characters, and…well…gaminess? Here’s a developer that gets right to the core. Demolition Simulator does exactly what it says on the box. Here’s a building. Here’s some machines and explosives. Bring it down.

‘Great!’ You think, ‘that sounds like hours of fun! What could go wrong?’. This was my naiveté too, when I was itching my palms, waiting eagerly for the game to install. Even running through the tutorials kept my hopes up. Though it becomes apparent very early that Astragon are not English, nor are any of their main team very good at English, and nor did they  ask anyone English to proof-read the game, this falls away from mind the moment you are let loose with TNT and/or a wrecking ball. Though the graphics leave a lot to be desired and, as stated, the English sounds like it was written in Spanish by a German, then translated into English by a Japanese man living in France, the general feel is still one of sure optimism.

Unfortunately, once entering the game for real, it became apparent very fast that realism in a simulator can easily be taken too far. Your first mission? Destroy a church. Your available tools…a pile driver. And annoyingly realistic physics to boot. Basically, imagine trying to bring down an entire stone building with a pneumatic drill. The entire thing consists of sitting down and patiently drilling around 100 holes around the base of the building. Not very thrilling work, I probably need not say. Add to this the phasing problems, resulting in getting your drill stuck part-way through the solid wall, and having to jiggle back and forth, up and down to pull it free, and the lack of manoeuvring room when driving round the building, and frustration mounts very fast.

But trust me, before the day’s out, you’ll be begging for more of that, if only to replace the next stage…cleaning up! So, after spending around 15 minutes drilling hole after hole, finally the building is down. Now, with the help of your trusty bulldozer and a truck, you have to sweep together, move, and bin every brick, scrap of mortar, and misplaced speck of dust. After an hour of this, I had cleared 60% of the debris, and my brain was causing some itself on the floor next to me. This would not be as bad as it was, were it possible, in mission OR free mode, to play any other levels – demolish any other buildings – without completing this one. Unfortunately this was not to be. Until you have taken down every brick, and cleared away every sliver of tile-grouting from that church, this is the limit of what you can access in this game.

While I do not doubt at all that ne need for all of this is a very integral part of real life demolition, I feel that as a game, the designers should have taken into account that if people really wished to bore themselves that much with the non-boomy parts of the trade, they would have taken it up for real and be getting paid for it. Sadly, despite such a promising premise, Demolition Simulator…well…to be frank, what we have here is a game for post-lobotomy masochists. Between the highly disappointing graphics, freakishly low resolution, bad phasing, realism taken too far, and, to be blunt, horrific monotony, I feel myself unable to even force myself to give this game any more than a very generous score of 1.5/5.

Just switching back to Soul, it’s unfortunate that they updated the game recently to get rid of the shrieking girl so much. This is apparently due to complaints, but I personally loved shitting my pants every 5 minutes. You knew the scream was coming but at the same time it still scared you half to death. Lumi on the other hand is serene visually and audibly so it’s a massive change for the developers from the rather freaky Soul. The premise of the game is to guide your creature around stages plunged in darkness and find firefly’s. By feeding the fire fly’s to the light tree’s you’ll be able to bring the world back into light. A nice concept. Where the games unique control system comes along is that your creature is magnetised and must travel around magnetised rings which can attract and repel off of each other.

Controls take place on the trigger buttons for the most part and initially the red and blue ring combination can be a little fiddly. As soon as you know the concepts of magnetism you’ll be able to use repelling techniques to travel between the rings dotted around the level with ease. It feels fresh, we certainly cannot think of any other game to apply the same concept. You are not expected to light all of the tree’s in each level to progress within the level, however to get 100% completion, you’ll need to light them all. The game gradually increases in difficulty, more traversing and some obstacles and traps will make you carefully navigate the stages but there is nothing here that will frustrate you, but at the same time still offer a decent challenge.

Lumi has illuminated the Xbox Indie games arena, which for the last month or so has become stale with some very shit games. Kydos have once again produced another gem and it’s little wonder that this game won the Build, Dream, Play contest recently. Another fantastic effort and at a steal price too!

The game play in Deadliest Warrior is not only fast but absolutely brutal. The single player mode contains an arcade mode where you fight your way through all the games fighters including a mirror of yourself. There is also a practice mode where you can hone your skills and combos. And the last single player mode is challenge mode, which is not unlocked until you have completed arcade mode with every single fighter. In challenge mode there is four game types to choose from. Survival, which is a type of horde mode where you battle against never ending waves of unforgiving fighters. Then there is Slice which is a like a regular match except every hit you land will cause your opponents limbs to go flying. After that there is a hybrid of the two modes called Survival Slice which is fairly self explanatory. Finally there is the pointless Target mini game where you are forced to hack down butchered pig carcasses before a thirty second timer runs out.

On the multiplayer side of things you can choose from either ranked or unranked player matches where you can earn battle rating points which determine your place on the online leaderboards. There is also a Tournament mode that isn’t quite set up the way I had expected with eight people playing and trying to get to the finals. In stead you start off in a first round match and if you are successful you move on to the semi-finals where you fight a random person who has also won a first round match at some other point in time. So basically to win a online tournament you are required to win three matches in a row. There is also a local battle option so when your drinking buddies come over you can put away your decorative samurai swords and battle it out in a much safer way.

The graphics in The Deadliest Warrior are surprisingly quite good and could best be compared to something like Mortal Kombat: Deception. When fighters are decapitated or their limbs are severed it may not look very realistic or behave the way one might expect but it still looks really cool. There are certain inconsistencies in the game though, for example if you are hit with an enemy projectile it will remain sticking out of your body but sometimes it will disappear in the middle of the fight. Also during some of the finishing maneuvers the frame rate can drop and at times specifically during the Spartans finisher when he goes to stab the enemy his sword appears to just graze their shoulder instead of penetrating into the neck.

The sound of the game is terrible and sounds like it was recorded through an Xbox headset microphone. The soundtrack of the game is basically the same three boring tracks repeated over and over again and are quite forgettable. Some of the voices sound very distant and for some reason the knight talks like Darth Vader.

As far as achievements go there are twelve in total adding up to 200 gamerscore. Most of the achievements can be obtained by luck just from playing the arcade mode or with buddies. The most difficult of the achievements would have to be Against All Odds which requires you to defeat 25 warriors in Survival mode and Tournament to Kill could be quite hard if you aren’t that good at the game as this requires you to win a total of ten online tournaments. The game also has two avatar awards. The first is an exact replica of the in game Samurai outfit minus the head piece. This is earned by competing the Arcade mode with any fighter on any difficulty. The other is the mask that goes with the Samurai costume which is earned once you have competed the Arcade mode with every single fighter on Deadliest difficulty.

If you are a fan of the television show or fighting games in general this game should appeal to you. I myself am not a big fan of fighting games but I did enjoy this game. In the end it could have been a little more realistic but for 800 msp or $10 you are getting what you pay for and then some.

Craig Baker

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Singularity is a fun game that doesn’t take itself too seriously. The campaign is a decent length lasting about 8-10 hours on normal difficulty and just around 12 on hard. There is a lot of fast paced action, excellent gun play and some interesting puzzles along the way that range from the laughably simple to the mind bending what the fuck moments where you could spend several minutes with the answer staring you right in the face. Your primary tool for solving most of the puzzles is your Time Manipulation Device or TMD. The TMD is a glove you get early on in the game that can be used to age or renew certain objects in the world either from their present dilapidated state or fix it up brand new like it was in 1955.

The games graphics are extremely solid but at the same time they aren’t mind blowing either. The textures of the TMD glove do look really good though and parts of the game where you use the device to age really large objects is quite impressive. Audio is atmospheric with some creepy sound effects of creatures crawling around giving you just the right amount of scare. The guns didn’t really sound amazing when compared to say Battlefield: Bad Company 2 but it was what could be expected from a standard FPS.

Game play is fun and quite satisfying. The soldier enemies are slightly stupid at times running out into the open and just hiding behind the same bit of cover and popping their heads out in a certain rhythm that is easy to pick up. The creatures on the other hand at times can be terrifying in certain settings and if they get on you will really rip you a new one if you’re not careful. There are a few different types of creatures in the campaign. Some just run at you and melee while others have more advanced abilities like teleporting quickly requiring you to change tactics.

The multiplayer seemed a bit boring at first but once you get into it and figure out the objectives and basic strategy it is quite enjoyable. And if you like achievements there are plenty for the multiplayer which really require you to use all the different characters and abilities. This is what I found to be the best part of the multiplayer.

There are two different game modes in the multiplayer, Creatures vs. Humans which is basically a team deathmatch mode pitting you guessed it creatures vs. humans which could best be compared to the multiplayer from Left 4 Dead 2 in the way its set up but I would give the edge to singularity as there is a level up system which makes you want to keep playing. The other mode is Extermination which is an objective based game. As the humans you are attempting to activate 3 beacons using your TMD devices with each beacon unlocking another area. As the creatures it is your job to defend these beacons and shut them down if activated before the 20 second timer runs out by attacking said beacon.

In multiplayer whether playing as creatures or humans there are 4 different character models you get to choose from each with his own set of specific skills and perks. Each character gets two types of perks each of which lets you choose which ones you want to use. Some examples are increased melee or weapon damage, abilities to see through walls and faster regenerating special abilities.

As far as achievements go they basically sum up to be about half coming from the campaign and the other half from multiplayer. Getting full gamerscore is definitely doable without having to really kill yourself. Thankfully there are no collectibles achievements despite that there are lots of notes and audio recordings scattered throughout the campaign. Multiplayer achievements are fairly standard and fun to get. Mostly coming from getting X amount of kills with a certain class of creature or soldier type and there are a few for winning 25 matches of each game type and playing 100 extermination matches which is probably the last achievement you will in this game as it is fairly slow going with each extermination match containing two rounds each of which could last anywhere from five to fifteen minutes depending on how successful the soldiers are at advancing.

Overall I think Singularity is a good game with a decent storyline that isn’t fully understood until you have completed one of the three possible endings, all of which will make you want to play the game again. On the second play through you really will notice a lot of things that during the first one may not have made sense nor had much explanation. The multiplayer is solid and enjoyable although it is unlikely to steal you away on a permanent basis from such games as Modern Warfare 2 or Battlefield: Bad Company 2 there is still a lot of fun to be had here. So if you’ve got some extra cash and are looking for a good shooter to fill up your summer go ahead and pick up Singularity.

Craig Baker

What Phosphor Say:

An oversized time display and graphical calendar ensuring you always know the time and date with this watch.

An elegant curved watch case houses a distinctive digital display that fits comfortably on your wrist. The bright, high contrast E Ink electronic paper display insures readability day or night and allows you to select between differing watch dial modes to match whatever style fits your mood.

• Case width: 38.0mm
• Edge thickness: 8.0mm
• Overall case thickness: 12.5mm
• Water resistance: 5 ATM – 50m
• Display: 12 hour only

How E ink Works:

Electronic ink is a proprietary material that is processed into a film for integration into electronic displays. Revolutionary in concept, electronic ink is a fusion of chemistry, physics and electronics to create this new material. The principal components of electronic ink are millions of tiny microcapsules, about the diameter of a human hair. In one incarnation, each microcapsule contains positively charged white particles and negatively charged black particles suspended in a clear fluid. When a positive electric field is applied, the white particles move to the top of the microcapsule where they become visible to the user. This makes the surface appear white at that spot. At the same time, an opposite electric field pulls the black particles to the bottom of the microcapsules where they are hidden. By reversing this process, the black particles appear at the top of the capsule, which now makes the surface appear dark at that spot.

 To form an E Ink electronic display, the ink is printed onto a sheet of plastic film that is laminated to a layer of circuitry. The circuitry forms a pattern of pixels that can then be controlled by a display driver. These microcapsules are suspended in a liquid “carrier medium” allowing them to be printed using existing screen printing processes onto virtually any surface, including glass, plastic, fabric and even paper. Ultimately electronic ink will permit most any surface to become a display, bringing information out of the confines of traditional devices and into the world around us.

Visit E Ink’s homepage (www.eink.com) to learn more about this exciting technology.

What WeDoTech Say:

The Phosphor calendar watch is my new best friend. It’s an eye catcher and if you are someone like me who loves to grab the attention of those passers by this is definately a watch for you. Yes, its got a big display and yes its a heavy mofo but believe you me its a stylish brand with a lot to boast about.

Setting up the time and date was easy, simply following the instructions I was able to set the watch up within a couple of minutes and bammm away I went to show off my newest piece of technology.

Simply pressing the bottom right button you can switch between the Calander and Time. You can also have a positive or negative display with this what I mean is you can have a black screen with white writing or a white screen with black writing.

I have only 1 criticism, this is when it is 12 o’clock the 1 in the number 12 becomes really small as though the watch finds it difficult to allow 2 full sized characters on one line. 

There are 3 different styles of this watch. 1 with a leather strap, 1 with a Polyuethane strap and another with a stainless steel band. These range in price from £125 to £170 depending on the style with the stainless steel band being the most expensive.

I love this watch, you can show it off at any occasion, in the pub, at work or even in bed with a potential partner. its stylish, eye catching and a watch that gives the impression that you have alot of money.

I give this watch an 4.2 out of 5.  What do you think?

The game will be developed by Bizarre Creations, which could be a strange choice seeing they’re most famous for the Project Gotham Racing series and recent Blur, although they did develop the third-person arcade style shooter “The Club” and therefore they have a small amount of experience in creating exciting and intense shooting games.

The award winning artist Joss Stone will take lead as the latest Bond girl and will also create the soundtrack for the game; I’m personally not sure if this is a good or bad thing… Only time will tell. Until then, check out the adrenaline fuelled trailer below:

Apple holds an emergency press conference and theres all of us thinking they might have fixed the stupid signal problem within there new iphone unit. NOT!

Most of us would have brought the new iphone for its slick slim looks and ultra fast capabilities but if you were told that you now had to conseal the phone in a stupid bumber case you just wouldn’t believe it, would you?

Well, it’s time to start believing because Apple have done just this by saying to purchasers of its unit “You’ll be able to order a free case from Apple’s website soon, and if you have already bought one of the £25 bumpers, you can apply for a full refund. However, if you bought a third party case not made by Apple, no refund for you”.

The Bumper case comes in 6 different colours but warning stocks are running low!

The Icecrypt T2200 is an adequate looking box, it’ll hardly blow your bollocks off with it’s blocky design so in terms of aesthetics it doesn’t win many marks. However, just like a fat bird, if you look past the flab you can sometimes see some endearing qualities. Firstly, the biggest selling feature of this Freeview box is the fact it has two card insert bays. This is wonderful for those of you who are willing to piss their money up the wall paying to watch overpaid pansies kicking a pigs bladder across a football pitch each year.

Another great feature is the USB stick support. Formats the T2200 can handle are; DivX, DivX HD, MKV and AVI/Xvid files. This will be fantastic for those whom like their viewing experience with a slice of the underground, or a slice of the visual poontang.  Unfortunately the guys at the designing department didn’t realize that when using the USB device, the channel changing buttons are obstructed. However, if you are one of those people that have a habit of loosing things then don’t buy this. The T2200 retails at around £140, not exactly spare change, then again if you do have a habit of loosing things then you may find enough pound coins behind the sofa.

What impressed us the most with this hardware is the menu system! It’s easy to navigate, looks clean and has a nice two-tone grey colour scheme. After our testing it’s also one of the fastest boxes to automatically tune in to channels. Where the Icecrypt T2200 lacks punch is the fact that it isn’t bundled with a hard drive. When you consider the price you are paying, it does seem all a little steep. The two CI slots aren’t enough and will only coax a small amount of people, people who you could argue maybe better off with a satellite subscription. It’s the equivalent of going to a top quality massage parlor but then getting a toothy blowjob.

With that painful mental image aside, the Icecrypt T2200 does have promise and that comes from future development. It’s confirmed to have iPlayer support and there could even be Sky Player support in the future. The box is certainly capable with its ethernet port and there is no add-ons to buy like HDMI cables, they are all bundled with the box. Overall the Icecrypt is a Freeview box that does the job, but at a cost and with the distinct lack of hard drive it may leave you thinking twice about the purchase. If it delivers in adding the ethernet features it’ll be well worth its value, but until that time we’d only recommend it if you aren’t on a shoestring budget.

As an aside from this review, if you are thinking of picking up a Freeview HD box, check your area. The coverage for Freeview HD isn’t great at the moment and you could well be waiting until 2012 like those in our city. Be sure to check out Freeview’s official website at freeview.co.uk/hd. For more information on IceCrypt products visit icecrypt.com

Osfoora is a twitter client very similar in style to Tweetie / Twitter for iPhone. For this weekend only the iPhone app is free and the iPad’s ‘Osfoora HD‘ has dropped to £0.99. The App is very nicely presented and has several nice features including the ability to post a song from your library or the song that is ‘#NowPlaying’ complete with hashtag. Hop onto the App store and download it for free… it’s worth a try, surely?

The tweet your music function.

An example of the slick menus.

The tweet composer.

The timeline layout.