Salvation through Video Games

It was never going to be much of a surprise headline but Mario Kart Wii is quite fabulous and is so far my favourite Mario Kart ever. Why? Automatic slides. It's a REVELATION I tells thee!

This means that as well as being easier to control so letting you concentrate on bombing your opponents before leaving banana skins for them to slide on, it also means that your mum probably has a reasonable chance of actually beating you. To be fair, Mario Kart is the only motorsport game she'd probably ever want to play anyway. The wheel is a neat little incentive to people who aren't really keen on gamepads and adds to Mario's sweet, almost Disney-ish charm. It is very responsive and can take just a little time to get used to - I guarantee that most players will initially spend the first five minutes making swooping steers off to the left and right and cursing as they end up facing the wrong way.

There's a cute mixture of new and old in this game too. There is, as ever, a number of levels from the many previous Mario Karts for your racing pleasure (and there are a limited number of variations on a race track I suppose - Bowser has enough property to make Donald Trump look a bit skint).

On the new front there are motorbikes!!! These as well as allowing you to do tricks for speed bonuses also give you the giggles every time you see Mario's podgy arse on them. Another of my favourite new features is the ability to play, and be absolutely creamed by, players from all over the world. You can also create a Mario Kart channel to document all your ghost runs, best times and invite others to beat them.

All in all, this is an incredibly fun game to play which is showing no signs of getting boring. It's going to be difficult to get a copy of this in the immediate future but it really is worth it. We're already looking at a strong contender for game of the year.

Words can barely express my excitement. I am one very, VERY happy little girl right now.

http://community.livejournal.com/gyakuten_saiban/718290.html

Perfect Prosecutor is going to be the prosecutor version of Phoenix Wright, starring the delectable Miles Edgeworth, assisted by Detective Dick Gumshoe.

*wibbles with happiness*

Devil May Cry 4 is one of the most flawed games I have ever seen.

It is purdy. Real purdy. But, like Mariah Carey (well, maybe back in the heyday), Capcom knows it. I've never known a game with so many unnecessary, long and protracted cut scenes. Characters are so stylised and textbook "sexy" it's laughable, with most of the well considered and rounded personalities of somewhat peevish potatoes. Which is a shame because at heart this is a really fun, simple fighter puzzle game which struggles slightly to emerge from the unnecessary shiny add-ons.

It is also very short. It has only 20 missions, which I completed in 12 hours. What is really irritating is that you have the first 10 missions as Nero - so far, so good. You then take over as Dante - fine. You then run through the exact same missions again in reverse with a new character. Cheap bastards!!!!

Rent this or wait until it's a bit cheaper. It's fun but really not worth £40.

Where does one start with WoW?

The legends are already so immense with this game that despite approaching three years old it still holds the hearts and minds of followers. My choice of words there is deliberate - this really holds people in an almost cult-like fashion. It held me for one year, it held my Dear Beloved for two, four hours a night minimum. It REALLY gets under the skin.

So, after that introduction, how would one describe the game for those who live under rocks and haven't seen or had a go at this?

Well as things stand, if you have the current expansion pack you have a choice of five "good" races and five "baddie" races which you can customise to a reasonable degree. Each race has it's attributes, some handy (underwater breathing if you're undead), others less handy (gnomes and "escape artistry"). It's easy to get quite attached to your character and very defensive of it. Try me on female gnome warlocks. Just try it.

The game follows a well trodden path in that initially you'll be booted into the world as a wee level 1 and you'll battle your way through various quests that increase in difficulty, gaining experience and equipment as you progress. As you complete these quests you also naturally end up exploring the world and by god, there's a lot to explore. Simultaneously one of the most fanatstic and most irritating things of this game is the size of the world they've created. It's a marvel exploring and unlocking huge chunks of the map but an absolute ballache traipsing around from one end of the hellfire peninsula to the other to hand in a quest.

Quests range from the banal to the complex and multi-staged, from single player to the 40 man dungeons, and it is this complexity and level of cooperation and socialisation that keeps people coming back. There is also almost never any time when there isn't a quest that you need to complete at a higher level than you have or a piece of Tier whatever armour you don't have that only drops 1/100 times at the Black Temple. You can revisit the same temple and fight the same boss endless times looking for that piece and then have to do it again for someone in your guild.

Fortunately the quests tend to be well considered and it's very easy to while away a very long time just so that you can hand in this quest... but while I'm here I'll just do this.... It takes a real amount of willpower (exhaustion) to say enough is enough for tonight and very easy to pick straight up again the next day. There will never be a tidy point to end which is probably 80% of why it's very easy to get into a continual loop of playing.

The music is sweeping and epic and really adds so much atmosphere that it makes it even easier to be swept along into the world.

So, how does one "grade" a game like this. Well, I'm going to do a fair bit of ducking on this one. The experience is very different if you play Alliance or Horde and even within the two camps you can start in different places, have different quests and never the races meet until you're at least a level 10.

The fact that it's purely online can be a help and a problem. Many are the times I have thrown things at my PC when either my connection has been broken, a guildy's connection has been broken or the whole network has gone down altogether (typically when you're midway through a battle and you return to a ghost gnome warlock). Patches are frequent and slow to download and can sometimes stop WoW playing altogether.

This is overall, an excellent game. Even if you're not really into fantasy this may well change your mind. It is beautifully programmed, immense in vision and scale, fun and all enveloping.

You just need to make sure you're not going to miss having a life.

Nintendo seem to have plundered a rich vein in work related simulation games in recent times, what with the Ace Attorney series of lawyer sims, various vet/ animal hospital games for the NDS and various cookery based games (Cooking Mama? Diner Dash?). Now you too can perform heart surgery in your living room with your wii mote. Huzzah!

It would be a little unfair to this game to think this is going to be dull (work is!) but this is genuinely tremendous fun! Unlike the NDS version you can use the nunchuk to select your surgical implement whilst waving your nunchuk to disinfect, make incisions, remove tumours, stitch 'em up and bandage them. Each case is a contained mini game which feels just right in terms of length, and also in terms of the story to action ratio. The Wii mote is responsive and easy to use and pretty soon you'll be chopping away with wild abandon. The graphics are at the right level too, clean and of a level you'd expect from the Wii (as opposed to more basic consoles) but not ridiculously gory - you're not going to be paddling through lakes of blood.

The story is... special. It truly is like an episode of Garth Marenghi (an 80s medical drama/ horror piss take). It's cheesy, grand, set variously to reassuring piano intonations, German techno music and large faux- orchestral swooping soundtracks (at no point do you ever get into a German techno club incidently - just in case you were worried). It's got all the stupid appeal of the first Predator movie; a plot designed purely to allow as much gory action as possible.

So would I recommend this game? Despite spending about five nights in a row playing it... nope. For a start, I've nearly finished it after 9 hours on the saved time. If it takes 15 hours in the end (really unlikely), thats £3 an hour, which is ridiculous. It can also be incredibly, INCREDIBLY frustrating when you keep getting stuck at one level and even on easy you're getting wiped out.

Despite this, if you ever did harbour secret desires to open people up and start poking about, on your way to your local mental health hospital, pick up a copy of this.

Basics:

* 6 episodes plus a bonus side plot episode
* Approx 12 hours gameplay
* Use scalpel, ultrasound, forceps, lasers, sutures and suction on your patients as you perform approx 30 surgeries.

Graphics: 8 - Respectable - clean and non- gory.
Scripting: 4 - Well it was that or a 10. Hilariously poor!
Gameplay: 8.5 - This can definitely be too hard to the point of immense frustration even on easy level. This depends on the gamer - the persistent types will love it when they finally nail an operation but those with shorter attention spans are going to be annoyed.
Music: 4 - see Scripting!!

*spoilers included*

I might have been looking forward to this game for a while. I might have been threatening to import the Japanese version (and launch an attempt at the world Fastest 0 - Fluent Japanese record). There might also have been gnashing of teeth and beating of breasts when the release date was set back a week. As I say, I might have been anticipating this title a little.

For those unfamiliar with the first three titles in the Phoenix Wright/ Ace Attorney series, they really don't sound like blockbuster games. A strange combination of manga, law simulation and comedy, the best way to summarise these games are as interactive novels and accordingly if you're the sort of person who doesn't want to spend 80% of the game reading then these games aren't going to do a great deal for you. A "Sonic the Hedgehog" stylee adrenaline rush these games ain't. It also means that once the ganmes are complete there is next to no replay value at all. What they are, however, is fabulously entertaining with characters that really get under the skin. Rumour has it that the only reason Miles Edgeworth was included in all three Phoenix Wright games was due to the *ahem* admiration that Japanese ladies had for him. People get mighty attached to these characters.

This is onprevious ace of the first worries I had with this game. Although from the same stable and same "setting", only a select few characters make it into this game, of which the most significant is Phoenix Wright himself - and even he is very different to the Phoenix we've come to know and love. Do the new roster of characters compare? The answer is an emphatic yes. The characters are bold, colourful, funny, touching and dastardly and a huge part of this is achieved through what are ultimately pretty short and reasonably basic animations well done on fixed backgrounds. There are some small changes. As mentioned before, Phoenix has developed into a very different character and even the adorable Judgey has become more intelligent (albeit not that much more... but he's also much, much funnier. The number of laugh out loud moments I had to explain to my Dear Beloved was getting a little embarassing).

The scriptwriters have also managed to maintain the quality of the cases. Whilst initially I was unsure about this game, it quickly reaches full speed and by the final case your jaw will be dropping for the mother of all revelations. Lateral thinkers everywhere, and those who still hold a candle for Lucasart point and click adventures will have a field day with the cases, working out apparently impossible scenarios.

The music is a little bit of a let down in context. It never really reaches the heady heights of the previous games (Steel Samurai anyone?) and for those who loved those games, you should look into the orchestral versions. There are no classics to add to the roster but this still offers a better than most soundtrack regardless, that suits the tone of the game perfectly.

I think the best summary I can offer is that, like the previous three games before them, this game took up my every waking free moment for about three weeks until I had completed it. And I loved every minute of it.

Basics:

* 4 episodes
* Approx 20 hours gameplay
* New scientific tools for the investigation phase, including fingerprinting, foot print taking, luminol testing and a weird xray machine for reading the contents of letters within envelopes which noone seems to know what it's called.

Graphics: 7 - Basic, but imaginatively executed.
Scripting: 10 - Baby, why else do we play this? Laugh out loud moments, tears, shock s and revelations - it's like a Mexican soap opera.
Gameplay: 9.5 - It'd get a full 10 if only it wouldn't be so damn anal retentive about missing irrelevant evidence - but this is few and far between.
Music: 8.5 - Very good. Just not the previous games.