Civilisation IV: Colonisation

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A conversation about naming a production company

J: thinking of registering a new business name and domain name
Magnetic Paradox
a Magnetic Paradox film
B: i'd call my company "fried on the cross"
you wanted me to google magnetic paradoxes didn't you
J: like Colonel Jesus Home Fried Chicken
B: im just full o' catholick lurv today
bouncing off thick necked pilgrims like a ball in a pachinko machine
J: not really
i guess i should check it out
oh man
it's a real phenomena
i guess i have to read up on it now
sheesh
thanks a lot
cunty
B: isn't it something like the magnetic behaviour of water molecules?
J: i don't know
i was trying to describe the paradoxical nature of reality like tai chi and wu chi. tai chi or yin yang being the polar opposites of the magnet and wu chi being the fact that the universe is one, whole complete and connected. the paradox being that while these perspectives are seemingly contradictory, both actually are tru at the same time.
i started with magnetic unity
but doesn't sound as good
so i changed it to magnetic paradox
coz it sounds better
the other option is...
One Big Magnet
a One Big Magnet film
B: or, Axis: Bold as love
DUN DUN DUUN DUN DUN DUUN FOXY!
J: Bord as Rub
B: [grin]
J: xD
B: ive got it! Magnet II: Electric Boogaloo
or the possibly over wordy: when two tribes go to war, they have a stalemate and discover themselves spiritually
J: Magnet IV: The Reckoning
B: Magnet Balboa
J: Liquid Hot Magma
on yo momma's back
B: Magnet: Dragnet
J:Debbie Does Magnet
B: Magnet Redux
Magnet Boxset
J: oooh i like that
good band name
B: Ah! I've got it!
Lost in lamagnet
J: almost as good as MoFaux
B: how's that for meta
J: Lost in LaMagnet
wow, that's profound
B: or coming back around to the start: Eastern bloc G-spots: The space between two poles
"Hitler? Meh" when Poles become neutral
Warsaw moresore
sigh
J: ha ha ha ha ha hahahaha

Guitar Hero: On Tour DS

The good:
Extremely cheap way to play Guitar Hero
Duel mode extends play
Expert level remains a complete bastard

The bad:
Peripheral falls out: Restart
Hand cramps
Not realistically playable in public

7/10

At first, a portable version of the Guitar Hero series seems a far more legitimate way for Activision to bang out more SKUs than its cash-in “Rocks the 80s” and “Aerosmith” titles. Just imagine, rocking out on a train full of grey-faced commuters, shining brightly from your cramped little corner with the flaming glow of rock!

However, the grim reality is that playing this game in close quarters with strangers is beyond the confidence of most. In fact I’d even call it freakish. Plain embarrassing. It’s not just the handicam-like “Guitar Grip,” the loud tapping of your pick-stylus or even the cumbersome wrist angles that make the game so embarrassing. It’s the fact that even a handheld Guitar Hero has the ability to make you head bang and foot stomp like a club punter. There’s a good reason Activision didn’t include a proper guitar controller. You’d back-hand some old lady in the face pulling windmills.

It’s true: activating star power is something that should only be done in shelter of one’s own home, where any company is familiar and hopefully dosed with social venom. So it follows that the only types of people who should feel the need to take Guitar Hero around with them are those who have no console of their own, or those who are in fact children. What’s more, I’m yet to encounter an adult who, when publicly reaching an unskippable portion of their DS game that requires speaking, blowing or clapping into the mic, doesn’t simply close the lid and stare shamefully out the window. Whereas kids can run around shopping malls with their willies out and a face full of ice cream.

Anyway, let’s hope that this game was designed for kids, because for anyone with decent sized hands, Guitar Hero: On Tour will cause some serious cramps. And I don’t mean a mildly uncomfortable burn that can be relieved with a quick shake of the wrists. After a decent session, you’ll feel like you’ve done 200 reps on one of those grip-trainer devices that metal-heads keep in their bedside drawer next to their skull rings and string lubricant. I’ve read various remedies for the cramping, like lying down with the DS on your chest. My personal solution is to cradle the DS partly with your picking hand, but I digress. Advice like this shouldn’t really need to be given.



Also, maybe I’m being too harsh. After all, the “Guitar Grip” only costs a $15-$20 premium on your average DS game. The pack includes an adjustable grip, a pick stylus and a game case. It even includes those cute little stickers for customising the faceplate, as well as an extender to make the peripheral fit better into the DS Phat.

Sadly Activision have chose to omit one essential accessory: a folded up blue post-it note, much like the one I have shoved into my DS’s GBA slot to stop the stupid thing falling out at the slightest touch.

I’m not exaggerating to say that the pressure required to depress a piano key will dislodge this thing from its slot. Even worse, when this happens it’s not a simple matter of pushing the grip back in and continuing to rock. No, it’s a power-off and restart situation that will no doubt have the more excitable fake-guitarists amongst us throwing emo-wobblies. To be fair, the DS Phat attachment fits nice and snugly, so there’s one more thing the original design does better besides scratching easier and looking crappier.

Wow, all that and I haven’t mentioned the gameplay itself. Well, it’s pretty much Guitar Hero with four buttons. That may sound like it makes things easier, and you’d be right in thinking so: I got through Hard mode from start to finish without failing, cramps and all. But anyone that says that Expert mode is too easy is a liar and probably cruel to animals. It’s a jarring jump in difficulty.

The major differences in the play mechanics are all touch screen based. To play notes, you now strum an on-screen guitar with the pick stylus. The whammy bar is activated by holding down the stylus and moving it on the screen, while star power can be activated by blowing on the mic or pushing any face button. I also happily discovered that during faster passages it’s possible to simply scratch the stylus up and down without lifting to simulate tremolo picking. It’s definitely easier on the hands.

The 28 songs will certainly seem limited to those used to downloadable content, but obviously we’re dealing with issues of cartridge space here. Signs of space saving abound, from the compression of the songs themselves to the fact your fictional band has become a three piece with a singing bass player. They’ve also taken a poppier edge, choosing to pepper their set with tracks by Maroon 5 and Smashmouth. But stay your misguided accusations of selling out, friends: the vast majority of tracks are the same fret-abuse you’ve become accustomed to.

Activision also managed fit in a guitar duel mode, which most Guitar III players will be familiar with. The big additions for the handheld come in the form of mini-game “attacks” which can be earned by playing sequences of notes. When performed, sometimes your hapless opponent won’t be able to see their guitar until they sign a teeshirt, blow out a fire, or repair a string. It can be more annoying than fun, but at least it earns the game another play through.

Further extending the life of the game are of course the practice modes, which again include guitar and bass, as well as multiplayer, which lets you play face-off, co-op and the aforementioned guitar duel.

It’s hard to argue that this isn’t a startlingly complete package for the price. If you’re under 14, or some unfortunate pituitary disorder has rendered your hands miniscule, you can’t really go wrong with Guitar Hero: On Tour. Just make sure that when you’re touring, it’s somewhere devoid of other people and their pitiless, judging eyes.

Universe at War: Earth Assault Xbox 360

4/10

The good:
Aliens as main characters
Three distinctive campaigns
Overly large walking robots

The bad:
Clearly ported to console for scale rather than demand
No pinpoint control
Terrible menus and displays
Flatlining live community


Just think about it for a second: the number of person-hours that Petroglyph must have put in to make a tightly controlled RTS for the console world. Crucial hours, for a company that is still a mere shadow of the all Command-and-Conquering Westwood that birthed it. All that belly aching over the replacement of hot keys, unit selection, map movement. Optimising engines, streaming off disk. Integration into Xbox Live. When it comes to playing the console port of Universe at War, two things come to mind: how well those controls work, and what a colossal waste of time it is.

It’s been said many times before, and probably far more eloquently, but PC gamers are just different to console gamers. It’s perfectly normal to be into both, but trying to breed the two together is plain bonkers.

My personal theory on why it will never work is this: PC gamers like to see themselves as a little bit like God. They also tend towards a little idiosyncrasy we like to call “being a control freak.”

After all, what other disorder could force a mind to eschew the time honoured system of one player controls one character, and instead opt for controlling thirty or forty players at the same time, plus all the factories that pump them out. Then, instead of enjoying the thrill of combat, life, death and overly complicated combos, make the gameplay about the management of said units. Then give these units budgets, deadlines, acquisition goals and pastel pink neckties. Your average console gamer is thinking at this point: “Why not brief them on bloody Powerpoint then make them file a report at the end, for Christ’s sake?”

But all you need to do is observe PC gamers, constantly rearranging their RAID arrays, overclocking their graphics cards, bloating their system with more RAM than a Himalayan goat herder, and the truth becomes clear: It’s not that PC gamers don’t like gaming, it’s just that, where possible, PC gamers like their games to be just a little bit more like work.

To be fair, most PC owners see console gamers as a bunch of guffawing thigh slappers but that’s besides the point. Regardless of intelligence, the average console gamer is going to liken the Universe at War experience to playing an FPS via email.

There’s several reasons why: The commands, though neatly shoehorned into the XBox controller through a series of rotating menus, need to be effectively learned by heart to be used quickly. Making this extra difficult is the fact that each command description takes a few seconds to appear. When it does, it’s in text that makes the menus in Dead Rising look like twenty foot billboards. So for most of the game you’re going to be choosing commands using icons that resemble their function about as accurately as a wavy line represents the Pacific ocean.

Other hot key replacement devices include the ability to access your building queues, construction and research trees without selecting a unit, which work well and expand depending on what units you’ve built.

Navigation is equal parts joy and misery. There’s a speedy expandable mini map that will scroll your view in real time using the right stick, but there’s also a jump to hotspots button that becomes less than useless during multiple skirmishes. When the crap hits the fan, as it invariably does, you’ll be rocketing around the map, trying to select five grey ant men who are several counties apart, all the while wishing for just half a keyboard and a zoom function that could move somewhere beyond, “really really close,” and, “really close.”


“Forget all that, tell me how Petroglyph has managed to once again assemble three unique and astoundingly balanced classes, but this time in an entirely fresh and creative intellectual property,” I hear you demand. Well, they have done that, but why should it be applauded? Reviewers have laid games like Tomb Raider onto the rack and pulled its arms off like a trapped spider for adding three new features to the same game six times. RTS developers do it and we weep with joy like they’ve resurrected Jesus from fossilised DNA.

Universe at War makes no attempts to move away from the old RTS three balanced army approach. In Command and Conquer: Generals you had the Americans, the Chinese and the GLA. This time, you’ve got Novus, the Hierarchy and the Masari. The Novus have the swarming abilities of the Chinese and the “tunnelling” (except this time it’s teleporting) abilities of the GLA. The Hierarchy have the big eff-off Walkers that are in all the marketing and the other large but powerful units like the USA. Ok, the Masari have an interesting Light-mode for defense and Dark-mode for offence thing going on, which is certainly new outside of shooters.



Of course, RTS stalwarts all know that defence mode is just shorthand for, “getting annihilated, but slower” and will discover that this fact is no less true when playing as the Masari. I’m in no way saying that any race kicks more or less arse than the other, but applauding an RTS developer for making its races balanced is like applauding a seagull for stealing chips. It’s just what they do.

It would be great to be able to talk about the multiplayer at this point, as there is a cool looking “Conquer the World” mode where you can challenge for different territories, as well as traditional skirmish matches. But the fact is, your average console gamer could curse their way through eight games of COD 4 by the time your first match is ready to begin. We’re already a few weeks into general release and no one’s out there, folks, which is a pretty good indicator of how it’s going to be in future.

The only thing that’s left to describe is the story, which is the usual hammy mix of war and sci fi movie references pushing along an admittedly interesting and novel plot. The Masari certainly suffer from a bit of underdevelopment, but the forgiving learning curve and relatively short campaigns mean that things rarely get boring.

So here’s the rub: If you are a PC gamer who opted to drop your tax rebate on a console instead of upgrading for the umpteenth time, there’s enough to like here. It’s another predictable RTS from a likeable bunch who do this stuff pretty well. If you’re a console gamer, however, you probably stopped reading after the first paragraph anyway.

Viking: Battle for Asgard Xbox 360

The good:
Huge battles
Dragons
Copious gore
Visible entrails

The bad
Sound clearly done by interns
Shallow combat

5/10

Someone needs to start knocking a few points off those God of War scores. Not because they’re bad games. They’re awesome; the flying entrails, the huge baddies, the interactive boobs… But by succeeding with such a simple formula, now everyone is coming along to take a piece of the tripey pie. Take Viking: Battle for Asgard.

Sega clearly decided that first quarter 2008 was some sort of gore porn sweet spot and pushed Viking out the door just a couple of months after Nihilistic’s Conan, like an embarrassing kid brother. But when Viking inevitably runs home in tears, you’ll wish it had stayed indoors until it was less of a girly spazz. After all, we’re in the limb hacking brute category here folks. Things can be tough.

Your overactive pituitary monster of choice is named Skarin, who you’ll be pleased as punch to know is once again a shirtless tattooed hulk with a penchant for torso deconstruction and timed button pushes. He has a Link-like disdain for vocalising anything more sophisticated than grunts, but actually goes one better than Link in this respect by also refusing to concern himself with any weapons that couldn’t be repurposed to chop firewood.

When we meet Skarin, he’s done himself a mischief and is bleeding to death in a field. Luckily, a goddess named Freya happens to be in the neighbourhood and decides to recruit Skarin to build an army against this monstrous horde of undead that have been giving her no end of grief. There wouldn’t be much of a game if Skarin didn’t then set off to build said army.

Speaking of Armies, surely there isn’t a gamer among us who didn’t watch one of the battles in Lord of the Rings and think: “Man it would be freaking sweet if there were video games like this.” And shut up, I know they churned out two of those special feature bloated buggers, which even featured tens, yes TENS of characters on screen at a time.

What developers Creative Assembly have done with Viking, is take those tens of onscreen characters, and multiplied them by as much as TEN. This means that, screen size allowing, all you’ll see of Skarin is a bobbing ponytail and a little blue x icon indicating that someone is at the front of the appendage removal queue. Everything else is a sea of blue skinned undead and rather similar looking soldiers. Plus maybe some smoke and fences.

So, Viking is built around these massive onscreen battles, with the screaming and the swords and those massive horns that sound like God’s own flatulence. Who isn’t beating their own battle drum by now? But before you go lacing up your volleys and scootering off to Big W to slap down four twenties, a ten and two fives, there’s one thing I should tell you: The big battles are only about 10% of the actual gameplay time. Or even 9% if you don’t count the slowdown.



Most of the time, you’ll be watching Skarin gambol happily across the countryside like Julie Andrews on horse pills, occasionally stopping to cleave off a head or bodily tear open the door off a ribcage shaped prison until the rain stops and the birds can sing again. No, really.

Still, why can’t this be fun too? Getting around the impressively sized maps is easy using numerous “leystones,” which transport you to your desired location without a loading screen in sight. Most of what you’re fetching only amounts to keys, troops and gold, but there is a definite sense of progress as you turn your two button combos into threes and fours.

The stealth parts of the gameplay are also well handled, at least in terms of gameplay. Sure, on the surface it seems ridiculous: Skarin unsheathes his sword and axe about as quietly as a box of cymbals being kicked down a flight of stairs and carries a glowing amulet that might as well be a big blue searchlight, but the first time you charge five metres and subdivide an enemy hornblower, you’ll be grinning like the sick puppy you are, guaranteed.

There are more of those grins: when you first cast some magic in a large battle and notice it affects all your allies. When your armies square up and the camera sweeps across the battlefield, allied dragons circling slowly overhead. When you power up your lightning all the way and zap a giant.

But then, probably about mid way through the second map, you’ll be fighting off about five shielded zombies and think, “Dude, this is more like battle of Ass-guard, am I right?” You’ll realise that for all the gore, the combat is just plain unsophisticated. When you’re squaring off against multiple foes, it’s just quick attack forward, block, quick attack back. Repeat. Hell, Mark of Kri did this sort of thing a hundred times better, and that game is six years old now.

Then you’ll really start to notice just how god awful the sound is. The complete lack of ambient town noise. Or soldier chatter. You’ll barely hear celebrations, or cries, or even murmers above the scripted voices. The raging sea has three metre swell but is practically silent. Your parries sound damn near to placeholders. Then sometimes, you’ll kick open a door and there will be no sound at all.

What it all amounts to is the very definition of a rental. You’ll have seen all the good bits by the second map, and the final battle isn’t even worth the slog to reach it. The central idea of a beat em up in which you build up an army for a huge battle is worth a look to just about anyone, but don’t bother staying past the main act. There aren’t even any boobs.

Mario Party DS

The good
An excellent conversion of the Mario Party Experience to handheld
Complete multiplayer experience with only one game card
Less crazy game-changing pickups
A plethora of modes and options

The bad
The Mario Party Juggernaut has now spread to handheld
Stars are as frustratingly fickle as ever
Solo experience manages to be depressing AND frustrating
If you are lucky enough to have friends around you, there are probably better things to do

7/10


Well, another year has rolled around, which means on average another 1.5 Mario Party titles have been released. The Wii already has the distinction of bearing the weakest ever Mario Party, so from a review perspective the only way is up, right?

This latest version for the DS doesn’t have the distinction of being the first hand held Mario Party, which came out on the GBA a few years back. Technology and time have ensured that this version bears more relation to its big brother console versions. Still, no one will be shocked to discover that you’ll still be playing as your choice of Mario Mascot in a chance-heavy board game peppered with mini games of varying quality.

Nevertheless, Mario Party DS does distinguish itself from its brethren for one important reason: It contains arguably the most important innovation in handheld multiplayer history.

No, that innovation is not Wi-Fi. After all, unless you’re within a distance that could easily be covered by a cable, the true freedom of wireless play needs to piggyback off a desktop or other hardlined connection, so it doesn’t count.

Nor is the innovation in question 3D graphics, touchscreen play or anything involving microphones. The innovation in question isn’t even a new one, come to think of it. But it is something that should have been standard in every shred of handheld multiplayer gaming since the day Nintendo introduced the gamelink cable for the first ever Gameboy.

The innovation is called single cart multiplayer, and Mario Party DS stands as one of the cleverest examples of its use. While it’s true that many DS games feature downloadable play, up until now single cart play has always meant “stripped down”:
Palette swap characters, smaller levels, reduced gameplay options and a nice fat download time to kick off. Not so here.

Upon booting their first partay session (woooo), most will notice that the single player menu features a rich list of options, including a mini game mode, puzzle mode, the standard party mode and the now obligatory story mode. Therein players may discover a completely bonkers take on the standard “Bowser steals/transforms/kidnaps something, turns out stars/shines/crystals are the only solution, go get them stars/shines/crystals” story. This time it involves shrinking. Hopefully only children of rural Australia will find themselves isolated enough to find out how it all ends.

Luckily all of the single player modes are fully functional in multiplayer using just one card. Kudos has to go to the developers for pulling this one off, as aside from at the start of each mini game, loading is almost entirely masked during the mini game introduction screens. Unless everyone in the party has gone through the game enough times to know all the mini game controls, that’s hardly an issue.

So what’s it like to have a freakin’ Mario party? (woooo) Well, you'll be floored to learn that not much has changed in this respect. Long term fans of the series (There’s got to be at least a few left) will note that there’s a shift of focus away from Mario Party’s shopping and item heavy past, with the focus generally staying to the board. They will probably be happy about this.

Others will note that the switch between touch and D-Pad controls in various mini games mean that you’re doing a lot of stylus stowing and retrieving at times. They will probably not be so happy about this, but then someone will pipe up that this only happens during the mini game loading scenes so it’s barely a problem.

The mini games have the same issues with repetition and quality as before, but porta-party fans are sure to be pleased by the graphical variation in the new DS games. The coathanger flying fox through a giant garden is just one example of a standout.

Of course it goes without saying that the graphics are extremely clean and bright, that’s virtually guaranteed by the word “Mario” in the title. The soundtrack and voice samples are also very clean and detailed, with the music shifting appropriately for each stage but remaining within the signature Nintendo bouncy-midi genre.

As you’ve probably realised by now, it’s a console standard Mario Party experience pared down expertly for the DS. If the score was purely based on the conversion then I’d definitely be considering five stars.

So if you’re after the consummate handheld party game experience this title is a no brainer. Just be sure to stay away from that solo mode. If you find yourself getting pissed when a mate steals your four star lead on the last turn of an hour long game, imagine how you’ll feel when the computer does it.

Moto GP 07

The Good bits
All the riders
All the tracks
Achievements up the wazoo
Nice handling mechanics

The Bad stuff
Graphics that make an English winter seem bright and interesting
Pointless arcade mode
A wind-blasted skeleton of a championship mode
Very little appeal outside of existing fans


The first big surprise of picking up the MotoGP box is the publisher's logo in the corner. Wait, Capcom? Isn’t it EA’s job to flog franchises into horse flavoured burger? ...Oh wait.

Moving on. The '07 season of MotoGP is now over and Capcom is probably hoping that a few more Australians are looking at picking up some sweet gaming merch. After all, 22 year old Kurri Kurri boy Casey Stoner secured this year's winning trophy with three whole races to spare.

The problem is, racing bike simulations don't exactly have a history of being pick up and play titles. Cars are easy, they only have the steering, brake and throttle to worry about. But on a motorbike it's not so simple. You also have to worry about weight distribution. See, you can throw your body around like a straight edger on red cordial when you're strapped behind the wheel of a souped up WRX and the worst thing you'll do is bump a piercing. But try the same thing on an 800cc Ducati and you'll quickly find yourself injected into a tyre wall on a cartwheeling slab of hot steel.

Out of kindness to the first time racers, MotoGP offers a tutorial race upon start up. After "monitoring" your racing style for a lap or two, the game will suggest a handling mode that suits your skill level. In short, if your rider spends most of his time nipple grinding in the gravel pits, the game will helpfully suggest "arcade mode". If you manage to find the brakes at some point, it will suggest "Advanced". Differentiate between the front and rear brakes (oddly defaulted to square and R2 respectively) and the game will suggest "Simulation mode".

The biggest difference in Arcade mode is in the weight distribution. The bike feels heavy and sticky, with very little variation when you lean your rider back and forward. A little like a two wheeled car, strangely enough. This is in stark contrast to the other two modes, where accelerating without leaning forward can quickly turn a wheelie into a back flip, counter pointing on your head. Or in reverse, braking hard without leaning back can result in an uncontrollable "endo" or nose stand, which inevitably throws your rider face first into the tarmac.

But all this simplicity means that Arcade mode comes across as exceedingly dull. The very word "Arcade" should conjure images of powersliding around hairpins in an impossible drift, or snaking dangerously over boost markers. Instead, Capcom has taken the more traditional meaning of "Arcade," which is to say, "two buttons, one joystick, the nagging feeling you're wasting your money, crap graphics."

Did I mention that before? The whole ugly thing? MotoGP 07 features some of the most uninteresting patches of green and tan ever before seen in a racing game, a fact compounded by the fact most of us have driven the Laguna Seca in Gran Turismo 4, yet have no recollection of it being covered in beige crepe paper.

None of this makes the gameplay bad, of course. In spite of the steep learning curve, once you get the hang of the mechanics there is some fun to be had. It's just that the visual blandness of MotoGP seems to highlight all the other parts of the game where there's an absence of fun.

For starters, the sensation of speed is not great. As usual, a low framerate is the culprit. This can be excusable when there's lots of detail, but there isn't. What's more, the championship mode simply consists of a points table and 18 races, with cheesy tourist videos as your only segue. That's right, no podium videos, no money earned, no damage and no upgrades.

I even found myself wishing there was some commentary. After all, it's one of the best way to make a dull sport seem more interesting: "holds it...holds it...HOLDS IT!"

Unfortunately, there's none to be found.

Luckily, for the diehards who already have this game on pre order, things get a little better. Every single track and rider from the '07 season is present, and they perform similarly to their real life counterparts. In addition to the arcade mode, there's also an Xbox-style 100 point achievement list, which extends the longevity of the no frills championship mode considerably.

But for the rest of us, it's not going to be enough. Perhaps the best way to sum up this game is the sole portrait of '06 champion Valentino Rossi that appears constantly while the game loads. Frozen into an unrecognisable grin, he seems to say, "Yeah, I'm here. But I'm not sure if I want to be."

Jenga: World Tour DS

The good
- The main points of Jenga are all there
- The physics programmers did their job well
- You can now play Jenga on the bus…

The bad
- It’s otherwise pointless
- The designers were also the physics programmers
- …so long as the bus has stopped.


It can’t be an easy task, porting a game that requires deft, delicate touch and complex physics onto a gaming console. It’s not too hard to imagine some die hard fan of the block stacking game witnessing the release of the Nintendo DS and its touch screen and proclaiming: “Yes! Finally, with this incredible new ‘touch screen,’ my dream can become digital reality!” Possibly while frothing at the mouth slightly.

The rest of us are going to see Jenga: World Tour sitting on the shelf at your game store of choice and simply wonder, “why?”

Perhaps, when pinholing at the smaller details, there is some justification as to why this project has gained release. After all, what better than a stylus to convey that finest of touches that determines whether your Jenga stack topples or stands tall? What better than the world’s most popular portable console to ensure that one may never go without a chance to go mano a mano in a gripping Jenga clash? The Jenga fun is no longer confined to lounge rooms, holiday homes and desks of the terminally alone! Now you can get your Jenga action in a car, on a train, even on a plane!

The concept is pretty simple as well. Hold the DS on its side, so that the screen can display the block tower at its maximum height. Holding the DS this way also has the effect of making some DS owners feel like they are doing something more intelligent than playing a game, which is either a bonus or a complete irrelevance depending on your viewpoint.

Next, all players have to do is choose from a collection of the world’s most unnappealing avatars this side of an RSL pokie and the game begins.

In game, the stylus is used to select a block, with the player motioning a straight line forward, backwards or sideways to remove the brick from the stack. The physics model is pretty accurate, with each brick reacting to those around it with a real sense of friction. If those cues aren’t enough to determine whether you’re about to cause a game ending collapse, there’s also a colour coded system and a “heat” meter. The colours are fairly basic: green for easy, yellow for medium and red for hard to impossible. The heat meter reacts while you are teasing out each block. When it’s swinging into the red, you’re courting not only a game over screen but also an obnoxious voice yelling something along the lines of, “Tiiimbeeerr!”

All sounds pretty on the level, right? But here’s the problem. After a game is released, the chance to pinhole on gaming mechanics is over. Certain things get cast in a harsher light. Aspects that at first seemed trivial, well now they seem kinda like vast oversights.

Let’s take what is ostensibly the whole point of the game: the ability to play on a bus or in a car. Okay, while it’s true that your virtual stack of blocks no longer require the services of a table in order to stay upright, Jenga is still a game that requires a steady, measured hand in order to win. Your stylus is just as prone to wobbles, shakes and checks. Bumps and shakes are detrimental to your block manouvering ability. In other words, if you try to play Jenga: World Tour on a city bus, you may as well be on horseback.

That isn’t to say there aren’t other advantages of having a digital version of Jenga. Some tables feature some interesting new advantages, such as having extra heavy “concrete” bricks that have more friction and weight, “ice” bricks that have less friction than normal and even levels where aliens or catapaults are firing at your bricks to try and cause a mistake.

In the end, what you get out of Jenga comes to this. Are you prepared to pay more than double what a Jenga set costs for a couple of extra game modes and not having to manually stack the blocks? Do you not care about bad menu design? Even if the buttons look like they were pinched from a website coded in 1993? Do you still trust a game that starts you on level 2, bizzarely locking the beginner stage until you’ve completed the game? Then you’re set to have a great, intense game of digital Jenga with your mates.

So long as they have a copy too.

Ace Combat 6: Fires of liberation.

Sims are a curious beast. They’re perhaps the only form of gaming where the player willingly takes proven game elements like pace, learning curves, intuitive controls and storyline to the pawn shop and trades them for things that most of us play games to avoid. Things like rows of statistics, keyboard overlays, ten million dials and a strict budget.

To Namco’s credit, the Ace Combat series has steadily increased its simulation factor over the years, but still managed to keep its gameplay intact. Sure, there’s real world plane models (though somewhat less than Ace Combat 5) that will make you check your disk tray to make sure you didn’t accidentally put in a Top Gun DVD. It uses every single button on the controller; even the select button that most people forget exists. It has realistic physics and draw distance, so that most of the time you’re furiously chasing nothing but black specs with a green square around them instead of plugging hordes of perfectly speed matched foes from about twenty metres a la Afterburner. You have to manually extend your landing gear. You have to manage things like weapon loadouts. But make no mistake, you won’t even have to think about the controls after the first ten minutes.

As mentioned before, the programmers haven’t taken Ridge Racer-sized liberties with the laws of physics. Still, there’s those little arcadey touches everywhere. Most players will notice after a glance at their HUD that their fighter is equipped with nearly 200 heat seeking missiles, which in some missions still aren’t enough to finish without reloading.

Players will also notice that while it’s still possible to stall your jet, your virtual pilot will never exhibit any ill effects, no matter how many consecutive high G turns he pulls off at speeds that in the real world would vacuum pack your intestines into your ankles.

In other words, clearly the developers didn’t want too many pesky realities creeping into your fun. This leaves more time to pursue the main game mechanic, namely the Bruckheimer-like pursuit of larger and louder explosions. It goes like this: See a red blip on your radar. Follow that blip until you see his green square in your HUD. Keep the green square in your crosshairs until it turns red. Press the missile button about six times. Wait for your co pilot to tell you how awesome you are. Repeat.

In between these sessions of unadulterated hot death, Ace Combat introduces us to its “story” aspect. It’s important to note that, as in earlier instalments, Namco has made an interesting break from gaming tradition by making the story not about your own character. Instead, it’s the epic overdubbed journey of a pilot’s wife, from her picket fenced home in war torn Emmeria to the slate and granite of Estovakia, in search of her daughter. There’s even tears and slow motion pans of innocent children at play.

The surprising thing is that it’s arguably for the best, because any story that involved the pilots directly would no doubt become an onslaught of backslapping, patriotics and machismo. Instead, the story is like a counter balance to all the killing, giving your opponents a real sense of character and humanity that is only somewhat diluted by the fact you’ll kill almost a thousand of them in your first two hours of play.

As far as first impressions go, Ace Combat doesn’t quite hit all the right notes. Namco’s menu design and presentation once again looks like it could have been ripped from an SNES role player. The first few missions offer little in the way of variety, and most will be somewhat under whelmed by the sense of speed, which is unfortunately realistic.

But then, finally, it all comes together. The radar and objectives start to make sense. You get enough consecutive kills to earn an allied attack. You pull off a multiple kill using your special weapons. The weather effects and clouds start conveying that sense of speed. You realise that you’re getting excited.

You might even then decide to stray into a multiplayer game, only to be instantly shot down by the hordes of diehard Japanese fans who love the game so much they gave the 360 its biggest ever month in Japan. But you’ll persevere and finally manage to take a few down. By then, you’re converted.

Like many sims, Ace Combat requires a bit more commitment before it starts to give something back, but when it does you’ll be immersed in a deep, beautiful game with a dedicated online community and masses of replayability.

The good:
Amazing Graphics
Slick Controls

The bad
Dodgy story
Slow start

8/10