I’m sure many will agree with me who watched the GDC Sony conference last night that I couldn’t help but feel slightly underwhelmed. In fact some of the tech that was shown off at E3 2009 got me more excited but since the Wii Motion Plus is now in full circulation, it kind of took the hype off of Move a little bit. As for Sony’s decision to call it Move, it won’t bring any prizes for originality however at least it makes sense, unlike Wii. Anyway, what I wanted to talk to you about today was where Sony need to ‘Move’ to make it a success and that is online.

To suggest that Sony will capture a core casual audience with this device is a little optimistic. Those already allured by the world of motion would now have already taken the plunge with the Nintendo Wii. Allot of that catchment will also feel slightly disillusioned by the experience as Nintendo’s machine has been swamped with rubbish shovel ware and a novelty that has gone cold. Whilst what we saw from Sony last night was very much a living room affair, where they can be successful with their existing loyal customer base is by offering something that Nintendo just can’t get right. The online aspect of motion based game devices.

Imagine competing online in a motion controlled Olympics game. Competitors will compete across the world in tournaments and leader boards for supremacy. Now, we know that Deca Sports 2 was an online enabled game for the Wii but that game wasn’t very good, had the wrong choice of sports and had a poor online infrastructure, let alone poor sales figures. Sony have the opportunity in filling the void in gaming, the opportunity for casual gamers to cross the divide online and play against others, whether it be by themselves or team based. How many times do you play Wii Sports? Only when friends are round, I’m guessing? If you implement an online competition arena you are opening yourselves up from being more than just a novelty, you are making your peripheral become a more every day usable addition to your Playstation experience. Sony are in a much stronger position in terms of online infrastructure than what Nintendo are and if it plays it’s cards right it could be on to a major successful killer app. If they fail to utilise on the online components I’m afraid this peripheral is very much destined to fail.

From what we’ve seen of Playstation Move thus far is interesting, Sony Sports Champions is shaping up to be a good rival to Wii Sports Resort and already the Table Tennis looks more accurate, obviously more realistic and hopefully will have a structure that keeps you playing, trophies anyone? What Sony are doing isn’t original and nor should they try and fabricate what they are doing is, they should build upon the phenomenal success of the Wii and trounce it with games that have substance and interactivity. Whether Sony will choose to do this is up to them. As we’ve seen we’ve been shouting out for in game voice chat and that still hasn’t materialised, let’s hope Sony don’t make the same mistake with Playstation Move. Someone call up THQ to make a bowling game with an online league system!

Many a journalist has been sceptical with Bizarre Creation’s Blur. Mainly because their teaser trailers have been a tad underwhelming and that there was a little stigma over Activision last year over some of their business practices. I had heard nothing personally remotely exciting about Blur. I just had it down for being nothing more than Wipeout but with cars. However, today I am glad to report that there is nothing remotely blurry or forgetful about Blur. Now, we haven’t had a chance to play the single player as it wasn’t bundled with the beta but the online is superb.

The premise of the racer is to win races, you can collect power-ups to take out other cars and relinquish first place. There are two main reasons why Blur will do well. The power-ups aren’t a gimmick. They are very well thought out and work extremely well to mould the whole experience together. The second reason why Blur will be extremely successful is that the power-ups are incredibly easy to use. You use the A button to deploy the power-up and use the X button to cycle between them. You couldn’t get much simpler. All other controls are easily recognisable. Right trigger, accelerate, left trigger to brake and then the B button to e-brake. It’s essentially the same control scheme as PGR but with added ferocity.

The levels we got to play in the beta were set at dock, barren wastelands and Tokyo. Each level had extremely satisfying jumps, great drifting points and an atmosphere that excites and stays fresh. I’m astounded by how good this game is and I think some of it plays part because of the fact that you don’t need an amazing racing line to stay within the pack, use your weapons wisely and even your average racing player can win a race or two. Power-ups are vicious, some will have you flying into barriers, spinning through the air, or losing control of your vehicle. Where this works is down to how long Bizarre decided to keep these animations going for. One of the biggest disadvantages of kart racers for instance are that being hit with a big weapon can render you out of the race, or at least the top three positions. In Blur animations last long enough for you to lose a position, two at most and for that reason it’s literally impossible to get annoyed at being hit with weapons all the time. It’s a lovely balance that compliments racing and combat perfectly.

Many racers have an age old problem of finding a sticking point, finding something to work for, not in Blur. Blur rewards you for racing by opening up new vehicles and a car modification feature, through playing races. The better your rank, the more options there are available to you and this ultimately will be a big draw for those that like their games online and not off. Although locked in the game there is also split screen multiplayer and there is also a challenge list to work through to give you more incentive to play. There are two race lobbies that we had access to, 2-10 player racing and a second lobby which connected 20 racers together, now that is intense. I have a sneaky feeling that Blur will emerge from the dust and rubble and actually be a more successful game than Split Second. The car handling is better than Split Second and whilst I could scream about Blackrock Studios apocalyptic masterpiece, I am finding myself addicted more so to Activision’s answer for Need For Speed on crack.

Mario Bros. is a simple arcade style game in which you play as Mario, a plumber, who has to deal with a pest problem within the sewers below New York. Mario is joined by his newly debuting brother, Luigi. Player 1 takes control of Mario while Player 2 controls Luigi.

Play as Mario or Luigi and help get rid of the pests that infest the sewers.

The controls of the game are rather simple. You move your character with the d-pad and jump with the A button. While the controls themselves are simple, controlling the character himself is not quite as simple. Mario and Luigi have rather slippery controls when it comes to their movement. It takes a bit of playing to really get used to how the two move around. The slipperiness of the controls is nothing that will make you turn the game off in a fit of rage, but it does have a bit of a learning curve.

Hit enemies from below to knock them on their back. If you don't hit them while they're down they'll get back up and become more aggressive.

There are various pests in the game to deal with, but the primary three are turtles, crabs, and flies. You can’t run into them head on or else you’ll simply kill yourself. What you need to do is hit them from underneath to knock them on their back. Turtles and flies take one hit to knock them down, but crabs take two. When you knock an enemy down, you then have to run into it to defeat it, however if you take too long, the enemy will change color and become faster and slightly more difficult to deal with. When you only have one pest left to deal with, it will also change colors and become faster and more aggressive.

When there is only one enemy left, it also changes colors and becomes slightly more troublesome.

After every few levels, you will get to play a bonus stage in which you have to collect all the coins on screen before the time expires. If you can collect all the coins, you will be rewarded with an extra life. Of course the first time around it will be rather simple, however the game will increase the difficulty of these bonus stages the further into the game you get. The second time around they’ll cover the platforms in ice, making the game even slipperier than it already is. After that, they’ll simply make the platforms invisible, meaning you need to learn where each opening is and what kind of jumps you need to make in order to collect the coins. It should also be noted that you can earn extra lives by obtaining a certain amount of points.

Collect the coins within the time limit and earn an extra life.

Of course, much like any early arcade game, the difficulty increases the further into the game you get. The pests increase in number and speed as well as other various traps get introduced all to make your game that much more pain inducing. Some of these traps include fireballs as well as bits of ice that freeze platforms. Luckily, even though you have to deal with these nuisances, you’re not necessarily helpless. At the bottom of the screen you have a block called a POW block. When you hit it, it knocks all the enemies back once. This is great for turtles and flies because they only take one hit to knock down, however crabs will still be standing. You can hit the POW block up to 3 times before it goes away. Unfortunately, the POW block does not come back or give back the number of uses as you progress through each level, so you need to use it sparingly.

Hit POW blocks to knock those pests down. You only get three uses of it though, so use it wisely.

Be careful of various traps while playing. Fireballs and ice covered platforms can really be annoying.

Graphically speaking, for an early NES game, it looks good. Mario and Luigi are easily recognizable, the pests are easy to distinguish, and it looks fine. Not a lot of real detail as far as what’s going on in the background or anything of that nature, but you can’t really blame the game for that simply due to when it was created. The soundtrack to this game isn’t very large. You have the song that plays during the title and a little tune that plays to introduce each stage, but no overall song during actual game-play.

All in all, it’s a solid little game for an early arcade port on the NES. Yeah, the controls are slightly slippery, but it’s not slippery to the point of rage. It’s a fun game that’s designed for short bursts of fun. Of course, since the game is based purely on points that adds an immense replay value just to try and beat your own score, let alone when you have friends to play with you. You can purchase this version of the game off of the Wii Virtual Console, but chances are you may have played other versions of this game through the Super Mario Advanced titles on the GBA as well through other means, such as the bonus 2 player game in Super Mario Bros. 3. I’m going to give this game a 4 star rating. It’s an arcade classic ported on the NES, what more could you possibly ask?

-

D

When I was a child I didn’t play with army figures and I didn’t re-act famous war battles. I didn’t play with Barbie either but that didn’t stop me turning out batting for the other side and wearing a dress or two. In fact, my childhood was actually all about Wacky Races, Tom & Jerry and the Atari ST. I grew up on the likes of Stunt Car Racer and Impossible Mission. I never found Action Man at all interesting either. I feel a lot of this boils down to the fact that the interaction was never immersive enough, you needed the ability to make believe and as far as I got with that was pretending to be a pro BMX rider, pedalling to the metal through woodlands with my mates. However, Signal Studios has brought the toy chest to life and in some way’s I’m kind of gutted that I never got to forge battles on my living room floor, because I never knew it could be this much fun.

Yes, you can control this too

Toy Soldiers is set around WWI and the premise is the game is similar to that of tower defence games. Build weapon units and kill your enemies before they enter your base. For every enemy you kill or infrastructure you destroy, you get cash. The cash can then be re-invested into upgrading or adding to your defence in form of mortars, machine guns, mustard gas, flamethrowers, the list goes on. Each weapon has the ability to be upgraded and this will become essential as you face waves of Krauts with better armour or armoured steel tanks. You can also lay down barbwire to slow your enemies down. This is a clever move as it’ll also move your foes into different directions making the tactical element even more absorbing. As the single player campaign progresses you’ll have to sell units and be clever with tooling up the right weapons for the job, this increment on skill really starts to take place from Level 3 onwards. Fortunately each level has its own themed battle grounds, from war torn trenches to battles taking place in forests, the variety is both visually appealing and much welcomed. So, this sounds like a standard tower defence styled game but you would be wrong to think that. Signal Studios have thrown in a USP to this game like no other, every unit in this game you can step in and remotely control and this is just an act of pure brilliance. Whether it’s lining up your trajectory for mortars, flying a Red Baron to bomb the enemy or acting as a sniper on your lookout tower the game has an unbelievable charm that works incredibly well.

Being a console game you may be slightly sceptical about how they’ve mapped the controls, but even that is easy. Pressing A on each character or weapon unit will enable you to jump in and take control of your men with ease with the sub-options of upgrading and selling your units tiered into a circular selection system. Just firing blistering rounds of ammunition from an artillery gun is particularly satisfying. One of our favourite moments in the game were taking down the Zeppelin blimps and having dog-fights in Red Barons. Having the freedom to switch between all of these different combat options means that the game never gets stale and because everything takes place on a small based arena, there is no chance of ever getting lost, which is something that can happen so easily on the Battle Station series.

Control the infantry too!

The visuals in the game are satisfying, Signal have added in quirky visual effects such as film grain to introduce levels and the muddy and painted styled landscapes give the feeling that you are playing directly from a vintage battle ground. All soldiers are faithfully re-created in wood apparel, so there is no nasty green Army Men tackiness to be seen. Damage effects are nice, but don’t expect any physics based explosion effects. It would have been nice to have something like the PhysX engine used, but we can understand why it hasn’t, after all it’s not exactly needed, the game doesn’t try to be super realistic. You’ll really find yourself immersed in the battle in Toy Soldiers and that is partly because of the fantastic sound effects and also down to the music that features in the game, licensed tracks such as Goodbye, Dolly Gray and She has seen better days create nostalgic ambience. Someone pass me a back of senior service. Couple this with the early century graphics and typography and you have yourself a very authentic looking defence game that quite simply floors any competition on the system, all of a sudden games like Defence Grid and South Park Tower Defence rub off distinctly average.

The fun doesn’t end on the single player campaign, if you ever needed any more reasonable argument to justify the 1200 Microsoft point investment then look no further than the multiplayer. Not only do you get split-screen support where you can play the same modes as the online, you obviously get to play over Live too. Toy Soldiers multiplayer works on an attack and defend game type. Protect your base and attack your opponents, you’re rewarded for infiltrating their base as much as possible. Whilst online doesn’t offer variety in game modes, there is simply no need for it too. There is no learning process involved and with the single player maps, converted to the multiplayer you’ll have plenty of battle grounds to give you more wood splinters than you can shake a stick at. In addition to the multiplayer there are ration packs that can be collected by completing a goal within a level, such as performing 10x multipliers on a particular weapon. You’ll also be able to browse through all the weapon sets you have unlocked in a gallery mode.

Toy Soldiers is a piece of accomplished work, it’s gone above and beyond it’s remit and created a game that will sit on XBLA as one of the best games it has ever churned out. If we were to make a really anal criticism then we’d have like to have seen the hit detection be a little crisper, but with that aside it’s an absolute diamond, a bobby dazzler and should stand on your purchase list as tall as the Empire State building. Microsoft were not joking about their Block Party line up, Toy Soldiers opens the four week megaton with a game with original relish and fun in its droves.

By the way, if you’re wondering what the catchy song in the trailer is, it’s K’naan – Wavin’ Flag.

PS3 owners can get excited about the news that the upcoming motion controller sensor will be available to use with Tiger Woods 11, and therefore we can be virtually swinging our way to a hole-in-one come June 8th instead of using the wearingly-thin analogue system. No word on whether we’ll be able to use Natal yet though for the 360, so the PS3 might be a better choice of console if you’re lucky enough to own both.

I’m for one excited to see Tiger again this year; even if it is only his pearly white virtual smile instead of the real one!

The Games Developer Conference starts shortly and we expect to hear more news there. Rumours have already started flying around the internet stating there will be two new maps and two maps featured from the original Modern Warfare! If this is the case, what maps would you like to see released again?

No-one makes a monkey out of Hank Chien.

Chien’s interest became aroused after first seeing the popular documentary The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters which portrayed the struggle between Billy Mitchell and another former record holder Steven Wiebe. “I remember the exact day I knew I could get the world record: September 13, 2009,” Chien said in an interview with record keeping organisation Twin Galaxies. “That was the day I first broke a million on Donkey Kong to reach 1,037, 700. I didn’t even realise how close I was to the world record. I was going on a business trip that day and had a flight to catch, but I had about two hours to kill and figured I had enough time for one game. So I fired up my Donkey Kong machine, and on my first game, boom! Too bad getting 1,000,000 takes about 2 1/2 hours.”

What I love best about this story is the fact that Chien is actually a plastic surgeon which generally means being a very busy and very wealthy individual. I like it that he took time out of his schedule to beat the world record on Donkey Kong. Well fair play, congratulations to Hank Chien! My advice would be to celebrate this achievement and go absolutely ape. Sorry.

When Michael Tonge suffered a long standing injury years ago, he was tipped has being one of England’s next greatest starlets in International Football. Instead, he came back and dropped down to be a sub-par Championship footballer. I have a feeling I know why, he must have done his physiotherapy on Striker Pro Soccer Simulator.

Chunky ass cabinet

SPSS (for short) is an arcade cabinet that has featured in many amusement centres around the UK. It contains a real football that is attached to the back of the cabinet with a sensor board at the back to sense where the ball was hit and the power of the punt. It’s not at all original, a cabinet called Kick It was out quite some time ago doing the same thing, except it did it better and somehow recognised the spin of the ball better, unlike SPSS which has a spin button that doesn’t work properly. The game has three different modes with varying difficulties and the premise of the game is to score goals and get through matches against teams from dead ball situations. Graphics are that of Sega Saturn quality and the unit stands tall with a 39” screen. The cabinet is beefy and definitely dominates the room, the cabinet design is aesthetically pleasing, but the pleasure stops there.

Easy mode is extremely easy, until you start using the bend function. The bend function is too over complicated, instead of adding the amount of whip that you want on the ball, you instead have to time your kick to ensure you get the amount of curl you require. That’s bullshit and it should have kept it simple, it really was the maker and breaker of the game being worth a play or not. Secondly, depending on the vendor you’ll be charged £1.00 per go and that £1.00 is over extremely quickly. If you want to buy this cabinet you can get it for £5100 but to do that you would need to be clinically insane, or own an arcade. Would you get your money back on the investment? Probably but you could be waiting a few years for the return.

I'm a fucking blur baby!

When players play SPSS they can choose their own country to represent and also view replays of their goals, but that’s as far as it goes. There are no world leader boards like many cabinets offer today and the kicking square feels too small to get a good whack. According to the manufacturer it’s the closest game you can get to the world cup. What world cup are they going on about, the clinically insane Olympics? Games like SPSS are proof that arcade games are a dying breed, people have moved on and so have I, what a dreadful machine.