Fairytale Fights

Fairytales are just a little bit twisted. Whether we are talking about Snow White or Little Red Riding Hood, they are essentially high concept morality tales that inevitably end with someone either getting screwed over, killed or, despite some pretty nasty turn of events, living happily ever after. Fairytale Fights sends up these bizarre fictional scenarios with a premise as off center as the source material, situating the players in levels where denizens of these fictional universes get sliced up for the hell of it.

To exemplify the kind of context that Fairytale Fights takes place in, the game’s hub world, a seemingly nice, innocent place, has a man cutting up rabbits with no explanation. The game’s similarly horror skewed levels are themed around classic fairytales. Take the Hanzel and Gretel level, for example: as it progresses, players will notice fat children eating the surroundings. They can be decapitated with giant sharpened lollipops, which make us smile.

The gameplay is a slide scrolling platform based affair; think somewhere between Lego Star Wars and Castle Crashers, but with an emphasis on violence- but naturally, violence fulfils a major purpose, too. There’s a dynamic slicing attack where the analogue stick can be wiggled around to slash through enemies, causing them to fall apart.

Dead TO Rights: Retribution

The first three Dead To Rights titles were forgettable at best, so we weren’t exactly looking forward to the latest in the series, Retribution. It comes as a great relief, then, that on playing the game- which is a reboot, for want of a better description, we can see it has something going for it. It isn’t a world beater, but it could easily occupy the same territory as games like 50 cent: Blood On The Sand. A laugh. A muck about. A game. We went from not really caring to actually looking forward to this one, if only a bit, in a very short space of time.

Players control ‘cop on the edge’ Jack Slate as he travels through Grant City with his trusty K-9 hound Shadow and his pocket full of bullet-time, trying to unravel a web of corruption, deceit and other such naughtiness you’d expect from an action game/movie. While the game goes out of its way to show you it has noir influences on top of the standard bombastic action, it’s all still pretty much ignorable. The meat of the game comes through the combat, which is frantic, simple to control and over the top enough to be great fun.

Tony Hawk Ride

EA’s critically lauded, intuitive yet hardcore, Skate hasn’t yet published the faltering tony Hawk series back to drawing board, but into the Uncanny Valley, or rather, its plastic peripheral equivalent. This board controller feels like a skateboard, with impressively accurate responses, but for anyone with a modicum of skateboard experience, the controls are so almost, but not quite, similar to real life, that you brain initially knee-jerks into disgusted, self preserving rejection.

Want to Ollie? Lean back reasonably sharply n the tail i.e. a bit like real life, except without actual jumping, or physics, balancing forward motion. Kickfilps? Do an Ollie and (standing regular) nudge your front foot to the left? Again, notionally like real life, but contrary to everything your body wants to do to achieve the real-life motion. Grabs? Move your hand near the area you want, but don’t actually grab, it. The quasi-reality is dislocating and demands practice.

Hawk’s free roaming levels have been (largely) replaced by narrow corridors, played in timed bursts some focus on speed, others on tricks. The linear helps you nail the core controls, but we’re more intrigued by the more open and expressive free skate arenas. Visually, it’s bright, slightly childish and basic, like a posh TH: Downhill Jam on Wii.

NBA 2k10

What with EA upping their games with Live 10, the contest for king of the Hoops is much closer this year. For us, 2K10 just edges it, despite feeling a little rough and ready next to its rival. Why? It’s down to feel, this game is just better to play.

On court, the controls are less fiddly, and the animations seem to get together better than those in Live 10, giving a more responsive feel. Shooting seems natural, and regardless of whether you think the opposition should really be draining baskets with two of your men draped all over them, every time you shoot, the result is realistic. You can’t expect a little more man like Rondo to a sink a shot from outside the D with pretty much anyone man making him. Kevin Garnett, on the other hand….

Where 2k10 lets itself down, however, is in the Al decision making. It just isn’t that smart. We saw man desperately reaching for interceptions with two seconds left on the shot clock, leaving their man wide open for easy shots. We also watched as the opposition casually threw the ball in bounds and handed us a back court violation. Shouldn’t these issues have been sorted by now?

Crash of The Titans

You may notice that, in the hallowed pages of most games sites, we journos don’t often get a chance to review kid’s games before they are released. This isn’t due to a reticence on our part, as we are keen to tell you if anything’s crap. It’s more that the publishers think that the game won’t get a fair hearing, because, we bring grown-ups, won’t understand what appeals to kids.

Well, they are wrong. We understand what they like, as we’re big kids too, we just think that most games made for children are cheaply and badly made. A kid’s game needs a highly variable level of difficulty, bright distinct colors, and tremendous reply value (it helps if it’s non violent and non sexual as well). It doesn’t have to below-res, and it doesn’t have to crippled by cross platform development but it doesn’t have to be stupid and cheap either.

Crash Bandicoot is a kid’s game, but it’s not cheap. It’s bright, it has simple stupid plot and daft character design (Crash now has tattoos, because tattoos are Cool) plus the usual agglomeration of kid’s game elements, collectables, unlockables, mini games, that encourage replay. You control Crash through a platform landscape where he beats up a variety of increasingly large baddies to save his island. Yawn.

Naruto: Rise of A Ninja

Young Naruto is a trainee ninja. He’s got a Nine Tailed Fox (Japan’s mythological spirit) bound inside his body whether that contributes to his pathological exuberance or not is in question, but his raucous behavior has earned him enmity of every single person in his home village. Following the plot of the mage and the cartoon series, Naruto gradually wins over his teachers, classmates and fellow villagers by undertaking dangerous missions and solving town problems. Its classic RPG mixed with a beat’em up, and you don’t need to know anything about the plot to pick up the game.

What you will need noticed straight away, however, is the beautifully rendered cell-shaded world. Beneath it all inst the most powerful engine, but the style isn’t just perfectly thought through. The roaming world and gradually unlocking travel and special powers make the game feel like the classic Jet Set Radio Crackdown, as you gleefully leap from rooftop to rooftop.

Everything about the game is easy to learn and it never feels like the game is holding your hand, even if it’s a touch easy. When the plot requires combat, you drop into arenas, where you can use your combos to setup Justu (Super Special Move) opportunities; if you fail, Naruto can call on his good memories to help him recover. The rich plot and endearing world means that Naruto leaves you waiting to know more about the cartoons series.

Final Fantasy XIII

There have been games that have taken much longer than Final Fantasy XIII to come out, but rarely, if ever, has a game taken this long without some sort of period in development limbo caused by financial or political maneuvering. The Final fantasy XIII did, admittedly start life as a Playstation 2 game, but that was in 2002. It’s been nearly seven years! And during that time work hasn’t stopped. Square Enix has been working away, making what could be its most spectacularly decadent project yet. We suppose the fact that the end result is going to be incredible is some compensation for the wait, but we have been sitting here hoping and begging for morsels of new information on it for so long that it’s starting to get a little embarrassing. Still, it won’t be long now.

Oerba Yun Fang. No, we’re not just mashing random letters on the keyboard, that’s the name of the FFXIII’s newly revealed sexy lady character and by Final Fantasy standards; her name isn’t really all that silly. The most interesting thing about Fang is that she started off as a man. Not in the same way as Alexis Arquetta or Nadia from Big Brother 5. No more in the same way as Lara Croft. The original character design was male, but was changed because the character team at Square Enix wanted to make Fang a sexy character. Haven’t heard of sexy man? Guess not. Anyway, they made Fang so sexy that they ended up toning down lightning’s sex appeal to differentiate between the two more.