Japan Gaming Guide

The demos just don’t stop coming – and we don’t stop playing them:

Tony Hawk’s Proving Ground

Project 8 is one of our favourite 360 games. However, I was all ready to say how if I bought a new skating game tomorrow it would be Skate, just to try something a little different. Then I loaded it up a second time, and I’m not so sure now, I might just be tempted to get this. There’s an all new gritty in ya’ face attitude to the game which you will like or loathe according to your preference. The skating is a bit pacier than in the last game. The balance meter is gone when you grind, now there’s an organic looking swoosh across the screen. Nail the trick mode seems a little slower, but you can still pull off jaw dropping tricks with a little practice. Skating around and tricking off the cunningly well designed environments is as much of a rush as ever. This looks like it will be another fantastic Tony Hawk game and well worth a purchase if you don’t already own Project 8.

Call of Juarez

One of the cool things about gaming is that you get to learn about different historical setting without having to do any studying. We’ve learned loads about the wild west from playing this demo. Who’d have thought that back in those days, people could absorb multiple bullets without flinching, doors couldn’t be passed through, and the only way to get around town was to ignore the doors completely and spend hours hunting around for obscurely positioned planks of wood.

Call us mean, but this completely sucked. There are loads of really good shooters out there – it doesn’t look like this will be one of them.

Juiced 2 – Hot Import Nights

We waited a long time to play the multiplayer, and then quit after it didn’t load. The solo player mode is trying to load now, if it finishes before I finish writing, I’ll change the post. UPDATE: It still hasn’t loaded. Reminds us of the spectrum days..

Spider Man – Friend or Foe

The cutscene at the start is pretty entertaining, but too long. Everyone’s used to Tobey Maguire as the voice of Spiderman these days – it’s a credit to whoever voiced this game that it’s not too jarring a transition. Now, onto the game; this is one of those fixed perspective 2d game design with 3d graphics type things that never seem to work quite as well as they should. You jump around using your 3 attacks on the endless stream of enemies, very occasionally jumping over a gap (because it’s in 3d and you can) The gameplay is reasonably fun, although the demo’s boss battle with Dr. Octopus is pretty disastrous as a piece of entertainment. It’s also one of those weird games where sometimes you’ll want to jump over a very simple gap, and the controls will have you jumping in a completely different direction to the one you intended and plunging to your doom. First impressions? This is a rental, and only if you like Spiderman a lot.

Sega Rally

The long awaited return of Sega’s classic rally title is upon us. Can it deliver in a very crowded market?

The big new thing here is that the track deforms as you drive on it. Cars leave tracks in the softer road surfaces which have a noticeable effect on the way your car handles on subsequent laps. If there’s someone in front of you, you may be able to get a little more grip by following his tracks. It’s a neat feature and nice to see something new in a racing game which isn’t just cosmetic.

There’s a choice of two tracks and two cars in the demo. You can also pick off-road or road versions of the cars. We picked off-road first time around and found the handling a little frustrating. Things are much friendlier with the road versions, we won both raced without too much difficulty here. Switching the viewpoint to camera and the music to off ups the feel good factor even more.

We enjoyed playing this and reckon it will be will definitely be worth a rental and maybe a purchase, depending on the game’s longevity and how the multiplayer shapes up. While it was a fun demo, it’s worth noting that the two tracks, which are rated 3 and 4 stars for difficulty, are pretty easy to win (with the Mitsubishi road version anyway).

Fifa ’08

Great atmosphere, fantastic sound that pulls you into the game. The stadium noise is terrific. The sound of a ball rebounding off the woodwork is agonisingly authentic. Strangely, the crowd seem to start cheering about half a second after a goal is scored, which tends not to happen in real games, although we did witness a similar effect in strange Uncle Frank after he’d been drinking on a Sunday. We’re Winning Eleven/Pro Evo fans here at JGG, but this seemed pretty fun, if Fifa’s your thang, go for it.

NBA ’08

It’s another ‘slightly different’ version of last years basketball game. Interestingly, the coaches in the game have no visible tongues. This makes it look very strange when they keep waving their arms about and speaking.

Also, we don’t know if anyone’s noticed this before, but if you run into the ball holding the drop button, you sort of roll the ball along the floor a bit. If you get tired of the 127 gameplay modes that are probably in the full version, you could have some kind of rolling contest in multiplayer, which would actually be like inventing a whole new sport. Worth thinking about.

Buy it if you want, but remember, naughty old EA will switch the servers off someday, meaning you’ll have to buy it all over again if you want to keep playing online.

Tiger ’08

We really enjoyed Tiger ’07, and suspect Tiger ’08 will be ever so slightly better. Definitely worth getting if you don’t own another golf game. If you already have a Tiger game, you don’t really need another one. What’s that? EA just switched off the servers? To the shops with you!

MOH Airborne

Fairly good. Decent set pieces, a degree of freedom. We’d prefer it if you could go through doors and if the enemies couldn’t absorb masses of bullets before dying, but pretty good all the same. Worth a rental, maybe more.

by ThreeHeadedMonkey

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