Disneyland Adventures review

Disneyland Adventures is the latest Kinect title for Microsoft’s Xbox 360 accessory aimed squarely at the kids, but can get you to fall in love with the magical kingdom all over again?

We doubt there are many kids who don't love the magic of Disney, and while it no doubt drives many parents mad with its merchandising. We have to ask, is this game more Toy Story, or Cars 2. We got the kids out to help us review the game.

Meeting new friends

Core to the game is the ability to walk around the Disneyland park in Anaheim and all it has to offer. Aside from a good smattering of other visitors who are just there to get in your way, you’ll find a perfect replica of the Californian park; complete with rides, and more importantly the Disney characters - there are 40 of them.
When you aren’t going on the rides you can chase down your favourites, wave hello, dance with them, get their autograph and give them hugs. It's rather charming, and younger children will love it.

Without a storyline - you don’t have to save Cinderella for example - it is here you get the interaction element to Disneyland Adventures rather than it just being a series of mini-games.
From the start Mickey has you on errands that he is too lazy to do himself. While they soon get boring for us older folk, you just know that to the target audience, your 7 year old, the thought that they are really helping Mickey is the best honour in the known universe.
This being a Kinect game, walking around the park isn’t a mere button press or moving a joystick. Thankfully it isn’t all on rails either. Instead you have to hold your arm out in front of you to run forward. Other controls include waving to talk to characters, giving the hug gesture to do just that, or holding your hand up high to access your inventory, be it a camera or magic wand.
Once you tire of the walking; there really is only so much you can take from the eternally happy Mickey, you can go off in search of the rides. To distract you along the way is the chance to collect coins. These coins can then be spent in any of the eight shops to buy more autograph books, clothes and other virtual memorabilia.

Cutting out the time wasting

If the walking around the park is the exploring element to the game, the 20 rides are the fun bit.
As with the real Disneyland, the rides are dotted around the map in areas like Tomorrowland and Frontierland, and you can either walk to them or as we found, simply talk to the game and tell them what you want to do next, thanks to voice support from Kinect.

Get to the ride of your choice and you are transported to a parallel universe where you get to do the ride, but in the characters actual environment. That makes it a lot more fun, a lot more engaging, and certainly better than a beaten-up, paint chipped ride and the 45-year-old man next to you screaming with joy.
The games themselves vary widely, although all are great fun. Big Thunder Mountain Railroad involves you riding an out-of-control mine cart through a mineshaft and is similar in gameplay to some of the levels on Kinect Adventure.
The Finding Nemo levels see you swimming up and down underwater with Nemo and Squirt the turtle. Winnie the Pooh’s levels are based in the 100 Acre Wood. And the Princess level is all about dancing with your favourite Disney Princess.

It is not just fun for one

Yep there is multiplayer as well, with the chance for anyone to jump in and play at the same time co-op style. There are no battle modes, this is family fun remember.

That means that if you’ve got two kids they can play together rather than having to sit there all glum faced. And what’s really nice, is that while the games have challenges there is never a real sense that you need to complete them to progress. You don’t collect all the coins, so be it.

Verdict

Developed by the same guys behind Kinectimals, Disneyland Adventures really leverages the characters and worlds from the Disney universe. This isn’t just a chance to go to Disneyland without the cost of expensive flights.
If you’ve got young kids and they love Disney, then this is clearly the game you need to be buying to side-step the conversation with your other half as to why you’ve just spent this month's slush-fund on COD:MW3, Need For Speed Run, and Skyrim.
The Kinect controls are easy and responsive, the graphics charming and the mini games compelling enough to make you come back for more, time and time again.
We have to admit, we even found ourselves taking a breath on the rollercoaster. Just don’t tell our kids.

Saints Row

There’s a TV advert doing the rounds at the moment that helpfully points out that Saints Row: The Third is available at Argos. As well as nudging you towards an impulse purchase, while treating that special person in your life to some Elizabeth Duke jewellery, the advert also acts as a - presumably unwitting - reminder that Saints Row is of course the Argos Grand Theft Auto.

Cut and paste gaming at its most cynical, the series thus far has practically been a photocopy of GTA, albeit a bit smudged and ratty around the edges. We’re not sure about the legal issues, but surely if you did this sort of thing in any other medium there would be court cases involved.

Purple Head

Rant over, let’s judge this game purely on its merits, particularly as we didn’t have to venture into Argos to buy it. It’s great, albeit utterly preposterous and wholly over-the-top to the point where you almost become un-shockable, reduced to simply shaking your head in resigned acceptance at every increasing level of wrongness.

First you get the money, then you get the power, then you get the sex toy. SR3’s signature weapon of course is a massive purple rubber phallus that is actually a reasonably effective addition to your melee arsenal.
Ludicrous though it is, it’s the thin end of a sexually-obsessed wedge that threatens to set gaming and gamers back several decades. It’s difficult to defend the medium when great swathes of the enemies are scantily-clad women and there’s a level called Trojan Whores, along with the additional Whored Mode, which is of course a hilarious play on Gears Of War’s Horde Mode. The game certainly knows it audience though, as in our first stab at co-op play we were aided by a topless woman, which never happened in Modern Warfare 3.

Desperate But Not Serious

You may have ascertained that Saints Row: The Third doesn’t take itself wholly seriously, and how much you enjoy it probably depends on whether you do the same. It’s actually hard to take offence when something is so relentlessly puerile, and you ultimately find yourself glibly going along with it (or penning an angry letter to The Daily Mail).

What helps to win you over is the fact that it is sometimes genuinely funny. There’s a pimp character whose only form of communication is singing into one of those Cher vo-coder things, a curious affectation that had us actively seeking out his missions so we could hear more of it. The fact that he was introduced in a gimp mask and ball gag as the ‘horse’ in a BDSM chariot race to the strains of The William Tell Overture only makes us love him even more.
Music plays a big part, via in-car radio stations, and there are plenty of ‘angry gamer’ tunes from the like of Marilyn Manson, as well as the obligatory urban channels. There are also a few pleasers for the Dads, with a bit of Adam and The Ants and Frankie Goes To Hollywood, with a special mention for oft-overlooked Scouse crooners, The Icicle Works. And while we’re ashamed to admit it, there was a very strong moment when we were in the midst of a murderous spree and Bonnie Tyler’s Holding Out For A Hero kicked in, elevating it from mere gaming into something approaching high art.

Character building

But how does it all work, you’re probably crying. It works absolutely fine, taking the GTA template and making it a solid, playable, ludicrous experience. The driving is up there with any titles in the open world genre, as indeed is the on-foot mechanics, with both competent shooting and decent melee. The level of character customisation is almost infinite - nostril width anyone? And your absurd creation manages to look picture-perfect in the cut scenes.

The missions are varied and silly, and at one point we had to assassinate a DJ for playing too much trance - not the worst idea. As for the core story, such as it is, there are shocks for series enthusiasts, but the whole thing is merely an excuse to throw increasingly ridiculous action at you, with the opening stages alone featuring more exploding helicopters than Bruce Willis’ entire career.

Verdict

Not one for the chin-strokers, Saints Row: The Third is, on paper, an absolute disgrace, a morally reprehensible ultra-violent orgy of destruction and sexual depravity that should never have seen the light of day. It’s also immensely entertaining, and a timely reminder of when games used to be fun.

Sony PS4 launch aims to keep pace with next-gen Xbox

Sony is aiming for the launch of the PlayStation 4 to keep up with rivals after Jim Ryan, PlayStation Europe big cheese, said that it would be "undesirable" for the PS4 launch to lag too far behind the competition (next-gen Xbox, Wii U).

In the interview with Eurogamer, Ryan spoke of how Sony would want to launch its successor to the PS3 closer to its competitors, clearly referring to the year gap between current consoles.

"I think we would consider it undesirable to be significantly later than the competition [with the next-gen PS4]," he said.

And it's not only a possible Xbox launch that Sony has to worry about, as the Wii U should also be launching in 2012. And despite this urgency, it seems that Sony still may not be ready as, in the company's eyes at least, the PS3 has a fair few miles in it yet.

Ryan continued: "If you look at PlayStation 2, now in excess of 150m units installed globally, a huge majority of that was done at price points of £120 or lower. We've only just hit £199 in the UK [with PS3], so clearly there's a considerable untapped part of the market there."

There's also Sony' slightly dodgy finances to think about and whether this has led to cutbacks in departments like research and development - something that Sony would want to be fully focused on if it's to go up against some pretty stiff console opposition.

Whatever the situation the message is clear from Ryan: Sony is going to do its best to launch the PS4 within spitting distance of the next-gen Xbox, and if that means 2012 it'll be quite a turn up.

Assassin Creed: Revelations

The Assassin’s Creed games always look like they might be quite enjoyable, all backstabbing and historical intrigue, like a Dan Brown novel for the hard of thinking.

In reality though, despite the lush settings, dramatic music and variety of hooded garments, they always come across as a bit, what’s the word... boring? Go there, endure some earnest exposition, kill somebody for reasons you’re not entirely clear about, repeat to fade. And when you’re not doing that, you’re bowling around pushing people out of the way like in some medieval Verve video, or prancing around on rooftops and leaping into conveniently placed haystacks.
Revelation is the fourth Assassin’s Creed game in five years, and the strain is arguably beginning to show, with a Splinter Cell level of franchise milking. All of the above features are present and correct, but there’s also a "shark-jumping" attempt to liven things up early doors, in the form of a Ben Hur style chariot race. Which doesn’t comfortably fit into what is traditionally perceived as a stealth game.

We need to talk about Desmond

For those who care about the story, it’s mainly set in Constantinople, and you play Ezio Auditore, who is now knocking on a bit, since he appeared - as a baby - in Assassin’s Creed II. Except of course you don’t really play Ezio; you play a bartender called Desmond Miles, one of gaming’s most contentious characters. As anyone who has ever picked up an Assassin’s Creed game will confirm - possibly through gritted teeth - all of the action takes place in the head of Desmond, who is strapped into something called an Animus machine, reliving so-called genetic memories, while in the ‘real’ world an improbable war rages between modern day Templars and Assassins.

It is of course poppycock of the highest order. There’s always a lot of talk about immersion in gaming, and it’s one thing to believe that you’re sat on your sofa controlling a renaissance assassin, another to make the leap that it’s all going on inside someone else’s fevered mind. If anything, Desmond has an even bigger role than usual in Revelations, able to access a place called Animus Island where he has his own collection of sub-Portal platform-oriented levels, accompanied by an unconvincing voiceover where he reveals his origins as a proto-hippie. The man is a tool.

Doctor Hook

Ignore him. Back to the "real" action, it’s familiar fare, with the core mechanics honed if not quite to perfection, then at least to a level of resigned functionality. The big hook is that Ezio has a big hook, which he slips out of his right sleeve in order to make clambering up buildings some 30 per cent quicker.

It can also be used to slide down conveniently placed - and slightly anachronistic - telegraph cables, as well as garrotte passers-by. It doesn’t stop him occasionally throwing himself to his death in a fit of pique however, something that almost makes you yearn for the "press X to continue" simplicity of Uncharted 3. With that game and the new Batman, we’ve spent a lot of time on rooftops of late, but Revelations arguably trumps them both, with the cities seemingly consisting of more roof than street.

Missions are doled-out in an open world fashion and generally involve walking somewhere to be told what to do and then going there and doing that thing. It might be killing someone, spying on someone, retrieving some kind of artefact, or buying a carpet. By and large, it’s massively po-faced, although there is a brief moment of levity when you disguise yourself as a bard in order to gatecrash a party, and tear someone’s throat out with a lute.
The whole thing hinges around finding some lost keys, which unfortunately aren’t in your other jacket. Those keys enable you to play flashback (or flashforward?) missions as the series’ other big cheese, Altair, otherwise known as a man in a hood. Something of a running theme, even the berk Desmond wears a hoodie.

Bombs Away

Beyond the action, there’s an entire meta-game going on involving buying properties, recruiting Assassins, and even sending them away to foreign shores to perform missions. There’s also an incongruous attempt at strategy involving an irksome tower defence mode that requires you to place soldiers on rooftops and build barricades to protect your den.
And the game is all but obsessed with bombs, inviting you to craft bombs, buy bombs, throw bombs at people, carry bombs around in a variety of pouches for a rainy day, none of which appears entirely essential. As for the combat, it’s so easy as to be pointless, and even if you do get into bother you can call in a few assassins to help you out. In fact, there’s no great challenge in the game at all - you either do something or don’t do it.
Weirdly, nobody really talks about the multiplayer in Assassin’s Creed but it’s actually highly original, involving pursuers and targets playing cat-and-mouse over a series of tight maps. A neat idea, identifying yourself as different to the AI characters gives away your position, hence it’s one of the few games where walking around casually minding your own business is a viable tactic.

Verdict

As an exercise in tying up loose ends for those who have managed to follow the story, Revelations does its job in sold but unspectacular style. We’ve seen it all before, and we certainly don’t want to see any more of Desmond. If they do make another game, they should make it Assassin’s Creed Unplugged, free of DNA sequences, memory fragments, and the rest of the preposterous twaddle that blights the series. Just say no to Desmond.

Halo Combat Evolved Anniversary

When I first played and completed Halo I was about to get married. Tony Blair was the UK Prime Minster, George Bush was in the White House and the Apple iPod had just been announced. The Xbox 360 wasn’t even a twinkle in Microsoft’s eye not coming for another four years.

So it is a strange nostalgia trip 10 years later to be playing the same levels once again, albeit on a new console, a much bigger TV, married, with the kids tucked up in bed. Gosh, a lot has happened since then.
That lot has seen a number of changes to the Halo game, and a number of features remain the same. Think of this as a Redux version if you will.

For all intents and purposes the game is identical. The storyline, the voices, the poor game physics and the rather stupid Covenant are all still present. What’s different is that you can play it on the Xbox 360 for the first time, it has had a massive graphics overhaul, and that you even get a 3D mode thrown in even though the Xbox 360 still isn’t officially supporting 3D - we suppose it is now.

Nostaliga time

10 minutes in and we are already feeling a sense of déjà vu. We’ve been here before, on the same sofa sitting next to the same Mrs Pocket-lint dodging through dark service corridors to flank the invading aliens, on a spaceship that is in trouble. The only difference is that our trouser size is beer belly has grown.
The new graphics, it has to be said are a vast improvement. The walls have texture, the explosions and fire more explosive.
The controls are the same though, and it is fascinating how the moves come flooding back. X to reload, hold down the fire to get the secondary fire on the alien weapons. We love it.

Halo - Before and After

15 minutes in and we’ve started to mess around with the Nostalgia button as we are calling it.
So keen to show you how the developers, 343 Industries, have worked to improve the graphics to 2011 levels (it’s more 2009 to be honest) you can switch between what it looked like on the Xbox and the remastered version today all at the press of a button.
You can dash between the two modes at any time by pressing the select button and waiting a couple of seconds for the code to switch over.
Yep it’s something that you are unlikely to use in the thick of battle (you’ll end up dead), but at the same time it’s going to be incredibly handy justifying to Mrs Pocket-lint - that’s exactly what we did - why you’ve just spent another £35 ($39.99) on a game you’ve previously owned and previously completed.

An hour in and you’re racing around a now far more impressive looking beach on the Warthog sliding as you do as if you are half eaten hamburger being slid across an ice rink. Yes the warthog is still a dog to drive.
Two hours in, and the boring repetitiveness of the game that was so cutting edge starts to take sink in. The nostalgia, like thinking it is a good idea to download the original Sonic on your phone, sets in and you realise that videogames have moved on, moved on a lot. Unless you really have the horn for Master Chief there are better things to be doing with your life and your cash.

Kinect support

Trying to deviate from that notion that it is all a waste of time Microsoft have added Kinect support into the mix. Those who own the Xbox 360 accessory will be able to use the sensor to throw grenades, switch between classic and modern graphics, activate Analyze Mode (for the final scenes inside the Halo), and more.
Sadly we’ve as yet been able to try out Kinect integration, as the feature isn’t being added by Microsoft until after launch, but Microsoft tell us that gamers will be able to reload weapons or throw grenades using their voice. We will update this part of the review shortly.
Single player done and dusted – you’ll know all the shortcuts so it won’t take you long you get to venture into new ground – you’ll move on to Multiplayer maps.

Multiplayer

While the succeeding Halo titles added multiplayer support, the 2001 original on the Xbox didn’t (it was pre-Xbox Live). That’s all changed however with multiplayer support added.
For starters you can relive the nostalgia with a mate via Co-op mode fighting against the Covenant as if it was Halo 2.

But thankfully that’s not all. You also get six detailed remakes of the most loved Halo multiplayer maps, plus a new map thrown in for good measure.
The maps are remastered in the Halo: Reach engine and inspired by maps from Halo and Halo 2.
For those foaming at the mouth, the maps are Damination, Beaver Creek, Prisoner, Timerbland, Headlong, Hang ‘Em High, and Installation 04.
If you’ve played Halo: Reach and wee suspect you will have, you’ll know what to expect.

Verdict

10 years is a long time, especially for the world of gaming and Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary shows that.
Re-releasing a Hollywood classic is okay because the basic premise of making movies hasn’t changed. Blade Runner in the cinema today is still as good as Blade runner in the cinema almost 30 years ago.
However with games, the industry is so fast paced, the technology so fast moving, that Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary comes across as a nostalgia trip and not much more.
The addition of the new graphics and multiplayer support go some way to glossing over that fact that this a 10 year old game coming back for seconds. The storyline is still strong. Halo fans will will still see this as the most exciting thing to hit the console this Christmas, however for the rest of us, fond memories are meant, sometimes, to be just that.