SpecialEffect's accessible GameBase

Developed by FreeStyle Games and published by Activision

Available on Xbox360, Wii and PlayStation 3

It’s a shame that the DJ hero series didn’t sell better than it did, a real shame, as they’re fantastic games! And no-one will know precisely why, but personally, I think it was a combination of factors; the downturn in the economic climate coupled with the fact that people needed to buy a new controller to play (that they probably envisioned just ending up sitting on top of all the kit they already owned for the guitar based games). The fact that a-lot of people just don’t understand the culture, most people know what a guitar does and how it would be played, but do as many people know how two turntables are joined together, and what to do with them when they are? Also, and most importantly of all, I think that the DJ Hero games simply came too late. As by DJ Hero’s 2009 release people had started to tire of peripheral based rhythm action games, after having been fed a new one every few months since Guitar Hero’s release in 2005.

However, even though the DJ Hero games are very much “Hero” games, with you tapping buttons to hit notes (called ‘taps’ in these games) that scroll down the screen, a-lot of new mechanics were introduced; you needed to push cross faders left and right, twist effect knobs and scratch records; and as a result the games were sufficiently different and actually felt fresh. I’m of the honest opinion that if these games were released earlier, they would have sold hugely better, staved off the fatigue of the genre, and inspired the “Hero” and “Band” games to venture out of their comfort zones and try different things.

Fruit Ninja can be downloaded to play on Xbox Kinect via Xbox Live.  In our experience, it also needs a good Internet connection to be able to play, otherwise it is constantly looking for a connection.  We haven’t found a way round this so any advice would be gratefully received!

Fruit Ninja needs players to have a good range of arm movement.  Very accurate control is necessary to find and load the game from the Xbox menu and an accurate swiping movement (in all directions) is needed to navigate the Fruit Ninja menus.   However, once loaded and running, Fruit Ninja can be successfully played without accurate or controlled movement.   

Developed and published by Namco Bandai Games- Versions also available on Xbox360, Playstation 3, iPad, iPod Touch, iPhone, PSP and Playstation 2

If you haven’t played a Katamari game before, they’re a bit odd. You play as a tiny, green pointy headed prince and you roll a ‘Katamari’ (a big sticky ball) over and into things to collect them, in the hope that, once the time limit has expired, you’ve collected enough junk for the King of All Cosmos ( a planet sized, all-in-one yellow leather jump-suit wearing giant, who has what looks like a rolled up carpet pushed through the side of his head) to eat and spit out to form a planet. I remember my first time playing a Katamari game, it blew my mind; the sights and sounds, it was all so wonderfully Japanese; the environments were bright and delightfully twee, and if it wasn’t for the constant threat of being engulfed into a giant ball of rolling junk, the world of Katamari would be a lovely place to live.

 

Developed by Capcom – Versions also available on Xbox360 and Playstation 3

After some 11 years, reported legal wrangling and a huge amount of pleading from fans, Capcom released the third chapter of its Marvel Vs Capcom series in February 2011, and now in tried and true Capcom fashion every few months we’re provided with a new piece of MVC related content. MVC3 was released in February, the ultimate version came out in November, December saw the release of the Heroes and Heralds downloadable content, and now we have a PS Vita conversion.

Content-wise there’s nothing missing or stripped back from this port and it’s simply gorgeous to look at; with almost all the graphical fidelity of its console cousins, UMVC3 proves what a beast Sony’s shiny new portable really is. If you want to convince someone that the quite healthy amount of money you just shelled on a brand new Vita was really worth it, showing them this game should do the trick.

Xbox 360 & PS3 – Backbone Entertainment published by Konami

Friday, 3 February 2012 was an epic day for Gavin Tan of Southend on Sea, Essex (me that is), as The Simpsons Arcade Game was released on Xbox Live. It doesn’t sound like a momentous event, but I have been waiting a very long time to own a legitimate port of this game, and now I’m able to.

Back when Konami first released The Simpsons Arcade Game in 1991, Simpsons mania was rampant and luckily/lazily enough it was very similar to The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Arcade Game (that Konami released a couple of years before). I say luckily, as being similar to one of the best four player side-scrolling beat ’em ups of all time isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

Back in those days we were all crazy about The Simpsons, and seeing our hunger for anything Simpsons related, developers and publishers churned out Simpsons themed video games at an unbelievable pace, 10 of them being released from 1991 to 1993. However, none of them even came close to matching the quality of the original arcade game with a-lot of them being down-right terrible. But what could we do? We were all nuts for this cartoon family so we bought them. I was so infatuated with the cartoon, that I sank dozens of hours into the Amiga 500 version of Bart Vs the Space Mutants, even though it was truly, truly awful. All we really wanted was to own the original arcade game, but it just wasn’t released, not until some 21 years later.

The people at Apple Industrial Design are a clever bunch. Through the thin, shiny, clean-lined design of their devices, year on year they have people clamouring to buy, at a premium, an incremental improvement over what they released just a few short months before. What’s even more remarkable is how they convince the masses to buy what is essentially a larger version of an iPod, instead of more practical and powerful laptops or notebooks. [editor: read on... all will become clear]

Xbox 360 – SpiderMonk Entertainment/ SouthPeak Interactive

This is a falling block game that can be played comfortably with one hand. Apart from navigating the menus, you don’t need use of the anolog sticks or d-pad (it is worth noting however, that there’s only one configuration of buttons and no option to re-map).

The game-play essentially consists of guiding different coloured shapes through a series of platforms, by using the left and right bumper buttons to rotate the platforms so the shapes can fit through their corresponding holes. A star won’t fit through a circle hole just like a circle won’t fit through a star shaped hole.