THE LATEST NEWS FROM MARCH 2006
With the gaming world gearing up for the release of major home consoles, this month contained a small surprise in the form of a handheld debut, with the new Nintendo DS Lite going on sale in Japan. The new model was both smaller and lighter than the original DS, with improved screens that offered additional backlight brightness levels, and a new look inspired by Apple’s ipod designs. It might seem a strange move with the original model still under 18 months old, but Nintendo was keen to capitalise on the success of the format, with Edge noting that “the handheld accounted for nearly 45 percent of all software sold in Japan last year”. The magazine also reported that “the most common response to Lite so far is from keen gamers who are happy to contemplate passing on their old DS to a girlfriend or sibling in order to make the switch”.
Speaking of new machines, there wasn’t much out for the Xbox 360 this month but the quality of Dead Or Alive 4 made up for the lack of quantity. According to the Official Xbox
360 Magazine, Tecmo’s fighting sequel “shows off just how much detail it’s possible to cram into impossibly elaborate stages” and was an “enjoyable, solid, beautiful game” worth 9/10. Gamesmaster gave it 85% and 360 gave it 4/5, but the latter cautioned that some players “will simply be put off by the sheer difficulty”. The other
360 game of the month was Sega’s Full Auto, a combat racing game that earned 7/10 from the Official Xbox 360 Magazine, 67% from Gamesmaster, 3/5 from
360 and 6/10 from Edge, which criticised the emphasis on racing over combat.
Back on the Xbox and PS2, the big game of the month was Criterion’s first-person
shooter Black. Edge scored the game 8/10, calling the game “a focused sandbox of gas and gunpowder in which natural law has been supplanted by action movie lore”. It also scored 90% in Gamesmaster and 8.4/10 in
Official Xbox Magazine, which described it as “the most crazy, fantastical shooter you’ll ever experience” but complained of its lack of multiplayer and “short, yet spectacularly sweet” length. More divisive was Marc Ecko’s Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure, a genre-blending graffiti adventure.
Official Xbox Magazine scored the game 8.0/10 and praised its “quirkiness and unpredictability” and Gamesmaster scored it 85%.
Edge scored the game 4/10, criticising its simplistic graffiti mechanics and combat.
PC Gamer’s cover game, strategy title Star Wars: Empire At War, earned 79%. The review claimed that it was “hard not to think” that it would get 10% less without the licence, as space battles were judged to be initially exciting but eventually unchallenging, while land battles were considered “uninspiring”.
PC Gamer did like Commandos: Strike Force, a “slow paced” and “sneaky” first-person reinvention of the classic 2D series, scoring it 85%. Official Xbox Magazine
gave it 8.6/10, as it delivered “on the promise of giving you multiple ways to complete each mission” and Official Playstation 2 Magazine
gave it 7/10, feeling it inferior to
Call Of Duty 2 and Black.
In a cruel reminder that the Gamecube was already starting to be considered part of gaming’s past, its UK releases were
Namco Museum (70% NGC) and Pac-man World 3 (64% NGC).
Nintendo fans could at least enjoy Metroid Prime Pinball on the DS, which NGC declared “perfect bite-sized entertainment” in an 82% review. The long-delayed European release of Warioware: Twisted! for the Game Boy Advance was also praised by
NGC, but its 87% score wasn’t enough to actually make the tiltsensitive cartridge actually appear on shop shelves.
If you picked the PSP instead, the best new game of the month was the puzzle platformer Exit, which tasks you with rescuing people from buildings during disasters. Gamesmaster awarded it 83% and Official Playstation 2 Magazine 7/10, with the former calling it “one of the most stylish games available on PSP” and the latter criticising “inevitable repetition and occasionally heavy controls”. It was also a month for old favourites. You could enjoy Sony’s modernised version of Lemmings (8/10 Official PS2, 6/10
Edge) or Capcom’s updated port of
Street Fighter Alpha 3 Max (85% Gamesmaster, 8/10 Official PS2).
Join us again next month, when we’ll be hoping for an April shower of new games to play.