It’s all about the Spring Sale this week as Matt explained in the first part of this week’s Roundup. The obvious PSP deals to go for there would be the excellent God of War: Chains of Olympus which is a prequel to the first PS2 game. Go on; go through all four games in a long, blood-soaked weekend. The three GTA reductions are pretty good looking too. The rest of them can be found cheaper on UMD though to be honest, not necessarily second hand either.
There are some permanent reductions too. There’s only one PSN game in there, Inferno Pool which might be worth a gamble at the price. The PSP title reductions are typically a waste of time for anyone happy to buy UMDs still. Continue reading PSN Roundup Part II→
Old news for PC and 360 gamers, but Peggle has finally made its way to PS3 via the PSN service. If you enjoyed PopCap’s other games like Bejeweled 2 and Zuma then there’s every chance you’ll love this too.
The aim is to rid the screen of all the orange Pegs. You do this by shooting a ball at an angle from the top the screen, then simply sitting back and letting gravity take care of the rest as the ball bounces of walls and blue and orange Pegs. Pegs light up when touched and disappear a few seconds later, longer if the ball is still pinging around lots. Eventually the ball falls to the bottom of the screen, either into a hole or into a moving bucket which lets you use the ball again. You get ten balls to clear all the orange Pegs out, but more balls can be earned by saving them at the bottom or racking up a large combo by bouncing off lots of pegs. Once the last orange Peg has been hit the ball lands in one of five pits for an extra score bonus. Continue reading Peggle (Review)→
This is another retro-style 2D shooter for the PSN and probably the harshest one yet. Your space-ship handles similarly to games of yesteryear like Thrust and Gravitar. If this means nothing to you, it’s like a hockey puck slowly sliding across the ice, with little thrusts to control changes in direction. The game’s enjoyable to look at in a minimalist way, with its simple yet striking visualstyle of solid lines making up the maps and lighting them up with a neon glow. Continue reading Gravity Crash (Review)→
There are already a large number of 2D shooters on the PSN Store, but the genre hopping PixelJunk series from Q-Games has beaten them all with their first shot at the title. PixelJunk Shooter is a compelling game designed with a distinctive, simple, full-coloured style and perfectly balanced gameplay.
There are 100,000 public Betas for ModNation Racers available on the European PSN Store now. It’s a first come, first served limited download for European users to get an early taste of Sony’s Mario Kart-style racer where players can build their own tracks then share them online.
The download is just over 2GB and includes the track editor for Alpine levels. You’re going to have to be fast to snap up a code, so do it now!
All your votes are in and counted. So who were the winners of the Game Hub Games of the Year Awards 2009? There are a few surprises amongst the obvious ones. Fortunately for all the nominees, nobody got zero votes (somebody got one though). So here are the Top 3 for each of the 13 categories:*
*I wrote this article for game-hub.co.uk after I arranged the voting categories a few weeks earlier.
Follow this link to be taken to the article at Game Hub.
Ok, so the new Video Delivery Service has been online in the UK for a couple of weeks now and the collection of titles is fattening up nicely so it’s about time we got stuck in.
First up I tested an SD version of Escape from LA (101 mins) starring Kurt Russell. The file size was 1570MB and my ‘20 Mbps’ broadband was running at its typically poor Friday night rate of around 10 Mbps. Wanting to test how good the film would play while it was downloading, I gave it a few minutes head-start, during which time it got up to 5%. Continue reading Testing the PSN VideoStore on PS3→
Well, it took more than a while but UK PS3 owners can now rent and buy films over the PlayStation Store by downloading them straight to their hard-drives.
After over 120 hours of play, this is the end of Fallout 3. The vault dweller isn’t rummaging around post-nuclear war America anymore though. Or post-nuclear war earth for that matter.
After being foolish enough to investigate yet another troubling radio signal he’s beamed up to an alien spaceship poised above the planet. He wakes up on a table surrounded by little green men with imminent laser probes getting too close to comfort. Continue reading Fallout 3: Mothership Zeta (Review)→
It’s about time you got to go on holiday in Fallout 3 after all you’ve been through. The new setting of Point Lookout feels like a lost Silent Hill waterside boardwalk, complete with deserted buildings and an eerie fog smothering everything. Sure, it’s no Hawaii, but choice is quite limited in a post-apocalyptic world.
The majority of this substantial map is made up of swamps populated with rednecks, mirelurks, tribesmen, ghouls, toxic bogs and enough radiated water to wade through to guarantee the vault dweller will never have (normal) children. Continue reading Fallout 3: Point Lookout (Review)→
This is more like it. The first of the Fallout 3 expansion packs that feels truly worthy of the Fallout name. The Vault Dweller is off to Pittsburgh, or what’s left of it. Now aptly renamed as The Pitt, slavers have taken over the city and its still working steel foundry.
You have answered the call for help from one of the escaped slaves who wants to start a rebellion against their masters. As if the misery of working in the Pitt isn’t bad enough, they face the prospect of becoming a Trog, the equivalent of the Capitol Wastelands ghouls, due to a radiation related disease. There’s a cure for this condition but their masters aren’t exactly sharing. Continue reading Fallout 3: The Pitt (Review)→
After Broken Steel raised level caps to 30, PS3 players are totally ready to get their teeth stuck into some more missions. This time you’ll get to interact with a bit of Fallout history that you may be familiar with from scraps of info picked up along your travels.
Using a virtual reality pod you can get involved with the famous battle at Anchorage, Alaska where the US forces had to repel the Chinese invaders. It’s not just a game though. Some members of the Brotherhood of Steel Outcasts need you to beat it so they can gain access to a sealed vault in a bunker, promising you a share of the spoils. Free stuff? Plug me in kiddo. Continue reading Fallout 3: Operation: Anchorage (Review)→
It’s been a long wait, made all the worse by 360 gamers having these DLC downloads months before the PS3, but the expansion packages for Fallout 3 have finally started to arrive.
The first of which is Broken Steel. It’s more of a taster and a foundation for the new adventures of Fallout’s post-apocalyptic hell (that we love so much). The new chapter starts two weeks after the final events of the original game. No spoilers here for those of you who aren’t there yet, but you WILL have to finish the main game before the extra missions and plot are made available to you. So I hope you’ve kept a save near the end of the game. Continue reading Fallout 3: Broken Steel (Review)→
After becoming something of a cult classic on the PlayStation Network it was only a matter of time before somebody realised this would work even better on PSP. For those of you who haven’t played the PS3 version this is a tower defence game. You build defence towers out of trees, using a limited supply of money in order to defend your village’s twenty inhabitants from multiple waves of invaders.
The towers are designed to be effective for ground or air attacks with some of them spreading themselves thin to do both. There’s plenty to choose from if you can afford them. There are canons, freeze guns, Telsa (electricity spewing towers), mortars, flamethrowers, crossbows, anti-air guns, lasers and electric barriers. Continue reading PixelJunk Monsters Deluxe (Review)→
This is the third map pack released for Killzone 2. It features two new multiplayer maps and two new weapons. All of which you should be familiar with to some extent as they appear in the single player campaign.
The first map is Suljeva Cliffside, which is from one of K2’s dustier browner levels. This is from a very brief section of the single player game that you will have passed though in a matter of minutes.
It is a fairly straight map with a couple of underground tunnels with sentry guns guarding the passages. Outside there are twisted remains of metal huts which make for handy hiding spaces. The level itself is on a hill with one team at the top and the other at the bottom, it’s almost like a valley with a high verge on one side and buildings on the other meaning you’ll be wide open in this gauntlet like section. Continue reading Killzone 2: Napalm and Cordite Map Pack (Review)→
It cheers me up every time I explain this game to anyone. It’s a 32 player, medieval era game of capture the flag, except the flag is a Princess. And to make it extra difficult to get away with her, the other team stuff her with cake making her a Fat Princess meaning it takes much longer to carry her back to your castle. If you don’t laugh every time you hear her scream “CAKE!” you probably never will.
The maps are symmetrically designed so no team has an obvious upper hand. As you can see by the pictures, the game’s gone for a cartoonish, cell-shaded style that belies all the blood and gore plastered all over the battlefield. It’s a treat to look at and is razor sharp on a HD set. The locations include forests, volcanoes, tropical islands and mountains. Continue reading Fat Princess (Review)→
If you missed our launch party article for the game here’s a quick reminder. Downloadable only, team-based World War II first person shooter based on three (soon to be four) beautifully designed Pacific island maps. It’s like Bad Company has gone on a sunny holiday. Continue reading Battlefield 1943 (Review)→
PopCap Games and Sony Online Entertainment have done it again and brought another fiendishly addictive puzzle game to the PSN Store following on from the success of Bejeweled 2.
Zuma has you controlling a rotating stone frog in an Aztec temple firing different coloured balls out of its mouth. So yeah, it’s a little strange. Bear with me.
The aim of the game is to get rid of all the coloured balls before they move through the course and get sucked down a hole at the end (if one goes, they all go). You do this by shooting out coloured balls to make sets of three or more of the same colour to make them disappear. This is aided by a line that shows where the ball will land. You’ll have to be extra precise when aiming from distance or at awkward angles. It’s a bit reminiscent of Puzzle Bobble in a “Not there you shit!” sorta way. It’ll make you angry sometimes but you won’t be able to put it down. Continue reading Zuma (Review)→
Gaming reviews, previews and features by Brendan Griffiths
It’s all about the Spring Sale this week as Matt explained in the first part of this week’s Roundup. The obvious PSP deals to go for there would be the excellent God of War: Chains of Olympus which is a prequel to the first PS2 game. Go on; go through all four games in a long, blood-soaked weekend. The three GTA reductions are pretty good looking too. The rest of them can be found cheaper on UMD though to be honest, not necessarily second hand either.
Fury is the first expansion pack to the leading futuristic racer, WipEout HD. Saying it’s an expansion is underselling it to say the least though.
If you missed our 
Zuma has you controlling a rotating stone frog in an Aztec temple firing different coloured balls out of its mouth. So yeah, it’s a little strange. Bear with me.
The No Sleep Gamer 
