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

No word on a release window for either game yet, but Codemasters will keep us busy with F1 which is due out in September and Bodycount which is set to be released at the end of the year.

In single player mode, which has also been completely re-designed, players are chasing down a criminal syndicate, whose members are trying to stop the police and gain control over the scenic city of Cologne. Based on the German TV series “Alarm für Cobra 11” (known as “Cobra 11” or “Autobahn Cop” in several countries), players slip into the roles of the two highway cops Semir and Ben, the TV series’ main characters. Thus, players go through various missions based on the events of the TV series.

While patrolling the breathtaking German city of Cologne, Semir and Ben are called to various action-packed police operations. While responding to these calls, players also need to neatly monitor the streets. Criminal subjects and members of the syndicate are scattered all over the street. Semir and Ben need to force them to reveal hints that will lead the cops to their hideouts – in order to bring the syndicates’ organized criminal activities to an end.

Developer Synetic virtually rebuilt more than 100 kilometres of Cologne’s streets, highways and beautiful sceneries, including world famous sightseeing spots such as the Cologne cathedral and the Rhine river bridges. Crash Time 4 offers more than eight square kilometres of gameplay world and more than 40 different cars.

dtp entertainment is going to publish Crash Time 4 in Q4 2010 for PC and Xbox 360®, the video game and entertainment system from Microsoft.

Ninja Theory co-founder Tameem Antoniades has been speaking about the comparison with Uncharted 2 and said “It’s never good to be compared with something that’s already the pinnacle of its genre. It makes you slightly uneasy.”

“I’m okay with people comparing it to Uncharted [2] because it’s in the same genre. But, bloody hell, that’s a lot to live up to.”

“I’m not going to single out Uncharted [2], but the best games out there in storytelling still fall short of the nuances of films,” he declared.

“When we’re doing Enslaved and the story and the character and everything we’re not looking at other games, we’re looking at movies and achieving that level of cinematic performance.

“We’ve got a good shot at delivering a strong story where the talent behind it actually matters,” he added.

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:

“[Blur] came out at the same time as ModNation Racers and Split/Second. It rates incredibly highly and it’s a very popular game, and I think it’s going to be a slow-burner,” said Nick Davies, the games design manager.

“I think the multiplayer will stay for a long time and I think people will come back to that time and time again, long after some of the other games have gone back to the second-hand shelf.”

He added: “Blur’s a fantastic game, and it’s the start of a big franchise for Bizarre.”

When asked about a possible Blur 2, Davies replied: “That’s the plan, yeah.”

“I don’t work on the Blur team specifically so I can’t speak for them, but it’s always been the plan to make the number one racing franchise. That’s as much as I can say!”

Available to all Virgin and Sky TV subscribers for no extra monthly fee, and sitting alongside HD channels from the BBC, ITV and Channel 4, Five HD is a simulcast of Five’s schedule, which includes a whole bunch of shows shot in high definition.

Those not recieving Five HD any time soon are Freeview HD and Freesat customers, with Virgin and Sky HD being the only services to broadcast the high def channel for the foreseeable future. Five writes on its FAQ page: “We are exploring options to launch Five HD on Freeview and Freesat in the future, but we do not have a timescale for when this might happen at this time.”

Five has been in the news recently as the channel pulled out of online video on demand platform Project Canvass, stating that it no longer considers the project as a “priority investment”. The channel is also gearing up to finally release iPhone and iPad apps of its Demand Five service.

What decent programs do you watch on channel 5?
I can’t think of any decent programs, can you?

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