The DS was never going to be able to handle a huge database of players and clubs, but it seems pretty halfhearted. You can only manage english teams – fair enough I suppose, but players from teams you may face in the Champions League or European Cup seem severely underrated. Does this make said teams easy to beat?.. No. the match engine seems to be mostly random and all down to luck. the best example was when i was managing Arsenal with no available keepers, about to play Chelsea. I  put Fabregas in goals for the game, I won 3-0. I can possibly see a 3-2 victory perhaps, but, not conceding a single goal? What is wrong with this game?? My list of complaints doesn’t end here, this is just my biggest complaint I suppose, the rest I can cope with. If you are already bored of reading this and well and truly put off buying the game, then I suggest you just scroll down to the final score.

Now for a more in-depth look at the game, I’ll start with the interface.

Nothing to do here…

As I said earlier, a football management game with touchsreen controls should be pretty great, but then.. that is if they aren’t hidden behind bizarre menu’s that don’t really seem to fit the requirements for… menus. Simply tap something on the touchscreen and you should see some information on the top screen. Hold down L and tap, and you’ll go into a page especially for that team/player. Seems simple enough, turns out to be fiddly and on the whole, not worthwhile, after all, you don’t really need to look at who you’re signing, the chances are they’ll deteriorate wildly in a few days at the club. Tactics seem pretty useless as well, nothing in-depth, nothing that seems like it would make any difference in a match.

Now back to the ‘database’. Quite simply, it just isn’t good. It could be worse, but not much worse. Some players have been transferred from their old clubs to new, some just haven’t. Shaun Wright-Phillips is a good example. He remains at Chelsea, when in fact he had moved back to Manchester City. The game has an editor, but it only allows you to change player and team names. There is a ’stat’ for each player type, Handling for Keepers, Tackling for Defenders and so on. Then Pace and Overall are supposedly distributed in the same way to all players. Some defenders look like they’re just as good at ‘Passing’ and ‘Shooting’. Its all rather mixed up and confused, and the rate at which players can deteriorate is ridiculous. The overall rating just skips around.

The match engine is just broken, and purely text based which also appears to be randomised.

Overall, this is the sort of game I’d expect to find for the PC years ago.. on floppy disk.

Maybe someone will make a decent football management game for the DS at some point, but until then, make sure you DON’T buy this awful product.

Ratings:

Graphics: 5/10 – Nothing special, no graphical match engine, but they’ll do..
Controls: 2/10 – Far too fiddly to work well, pity.
Sounds: 1/10 – Not mentioned in the article, not worth it really, just a few crowd cheers during games. Very poor.
Accuracy: 4/10 – Sure this rating only applies to certain types of games, but here, its probably the most important.

Overall: 2/10 – A huge letdown. Bring on Imagine: Packed lunch making, can’t be worse than this.
16%

~Jackreyes

‘Project Natal’ – A motion sensing camera for the Xbox 360.

Halo 3: ODST

Halo Reach

Metal Gear Solid: Rising – Will now also be available on Xbox 360 when released.

Xbox 360 Games on Demand – The ability to download full games onto your hard drive.

Sony:

PSP Go! – Probably the one thing everyone knew about before E3. It will feature 16GB onboard memory and no UMD drive. This means all digital downloads for the PSP in the future.

PS3 Motion Controller – Yup, another motion controlling announcement.

Resident Evil Portable

God of War 3 – To be released… March 2010. just 9 months to go.

MAG (Massive Action Game) – Bad name, yes. True name, also yes. This (FPS) game will feature 256 players online at a time. Sounds… massive.

Nintendo:

Super Mario Galaxy 2 – Rather than Sony and Microsoft, Nintendo’s biggest announcement seemed to be software in the form of a sequel to the very sucessful game, Super Mario Galaxy.

New Super Mario Bros. Wii – Continuing the Mario theme (surprise, surprise), Nintendo also announced a new 2D Mario game for the Wii with multiplayer aspects.

Metroid: Other M – Not continuing the Prime series, a new Metroid game for the Wii from Nintendo.

Wii Vitality – This was the only peripheral/hardware announced by Nintendo. And they weren’t too keen on sharing the details. Seems strange to me, and they’ve said its targeted at the people who still refuse to become gamers…

Its not that I just haven’t included it, there really wasn’t much announced for the DS, other than Golden Sun.

Best of the rest:

EA:

FIFA 10 -  Whilst it was to be expected, the graphics seem to be sublime. I will definitely be looking into getting it.

Scribblenauts – DS – This was my highlight of the convention, it seems to be an almost perfect game from what I’ve seen. You need to watch videos to see the extent of the brilliance of this game!

Ubisoft:

Splinter Cell Conviction – Looking like it will be a great game.

Valve:

Left 4 Dead 2 - Who didn’t enjoy L4D? Well, its already causing quite a controversy because fans think that this should be released either as DLC for L4D, or an expansion.

Well, thats about it really. I might have to write an individual article for Scribblenauts soon, but for now, I think I’m done reading and writing about E3.

~Jackreyes

Check back for more news! (upcoming post: review of SOCOM: Confrontation)

-Svenn

This week:

• Svenn Reviewed Frets on Fire, the freeware PC Guitar Hero-like game. See here.
• I wrote an article about games to look forward to in the coming days (and months). See here.

Ok, so it really was a bad week, but next week will be better (I hope).

~Jackreyes

FoFix using the Rock Band 2 theme

Gameplay + controls: It’s a real guitar hero clone: You have 5 colored frets and one ‘pick’ or strum bar. You hold the frets (F1-5) and hit the’ strum bar’ (enter) at the rhythm of the music. Yes, just like in Guitar Hero. The original Frets On fire doesn’t have a career option, you can  play a song and try to beat your highscore and that’s pretty much it. However in FoFix (Frets On Fire X) you DO have a career option with different songs and objectives to unlock different tiers. The only downside is: you have to set up the career yourself by adding some code to certain files. It’s not hard, but the casual gamer wont be bothered to do this. The controls work very well except if you have a keyboard with certain key combo’s turned off. Some manufacturers do this, but I have really no idea why…

When  the Rock Band theme is used with FoFix you can also play the drums and bass. I’m not sure if you can sing, because I haven’t tested it myself.

FoF has 3 songs installed. On the frets on fire fan forum you have a HUGE database with songs, even the original guitar hero and rock band songs. You download them and copy them to your songs folder and you’re ready to rock! Note: These songs are all created by fans of the game, normal gamers like you and I, so these are not official. Yes, some are real crap.

The original Frets On Fire

Graphics: The graphics in FoF aren’t pretty good as you see above. In the mods however they’re awesome. The graphics look exactly the same as in the original games. There’s only one thing to mention: you can’t have movable backgrounds, so it’s just a picture. It doesn’t irritate me but it takes away a bit of the ‘Guitar hero atmosphere’.

Frets On Fire X with the Guitar Hero Theme

Music and sound: Can’t be better… It’s a music game after all.

My conclusion: don’t try FoF. Just immediatly download the modded version (FoFix) and install the guitar hero or rock band theme. Your expierence will be ten times better and you get better graphics and a career option. I know, there are still minor bugs in those versions but the coders update it once in a while. It’s all done by the community so they really care about what you think and what you like to have added.

Gameplay: 9/10 (depends on which song you play)

Controls: 7/10 (Drum is hard with a keyboard, some combo’s dont work, but that’s probably my keyboard)

Graphics: 9/10 (For the modded version, obviously)

Music and Sound: 10/10 (It’s a music game after all)

Overall: 90%

-Svenn

This week:

• The blog is up and running again. Great news, obviously.
• Svenn and I took a challenge, to write a review about a couple of old freeware games. This resulted in Svenn reviewing Beneath a Steel Sky and me reviewing The Lure of the Temptress. 
• New PS3 Rock Band Instruments.
• Stalin vs. Martians Interview.
• Assassin’s Creed 2 Information.
• Pandora Article.

Happy Easter all.

~Jackreyes

It should look a little like that, but I believe they’ve changed the design a bit through various stages of development.

This is the Pandora, in case you haven’t already heard about them. They are open source consoles running a Linux operating system. Although it probably won’t have any/many closed source games made specifically for it, it does have the possibility of porting a lot of games and applications that are designed for Linux computers. It can also emulate a lot of older consoles, including the PS1 (PSX) and SNES.

It has a Touch Screen,  Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, a USB port, a 43 button QWERTY keyboard, 2 SDHC slots and 10+ hours of battery life. It is supposedly more powerful than the PSP and DS and their site, say it is powerful enough to run Quake3.

Obviously though, it doesn’t sound hugely impressive so far due to the lack of console specific games, however, this is not just a game console, it is more of a netbook really. Due to its Linux OS, it can run many applications including Firefox, a Mail application and Spreadsheets. But it is still hugely portable, more-so than a netbook. It is actually roughly the size of the original DS.

Video:
 

I will hopefully make more posts about the Pandora when I get mine.

~Jack

• There will be a lot of new weapons: an axe, a hammer, a javelin, two types of swords and two types of small swords.
• You’ll be able to swim.
• The Da Vinci workshop will be in the game.
• The game will offer you different locations: Saint Marks Basilica, The Grand Canal, The Little Canal and the Rialto Bridge.
• The game will start in 1476.
• The Landscape of Tuscany will be one of the settings.
• You take control over Ezio Auditore de Firenze.
• The game will feature Machiavelli, Caterina Sofrza and Lorenzo de Medici.
• You’ll be able to steal enemies’ weapons and use them against them.
• There will be 16 types of missions, unlike in the first game where there were only five or six.
• Collecting special items like flags will now unlock special things in-game that are worth it. (so says Ubisoft)
• There will be a day and night cycle.
• There are 240 people working on this project.

Rumours are spreading on the internet saying you’ll be able to fly (some sort of gliding) but this is not yet confirmed by Ubisoft!

-Svenn

and after seeing that you can safely say… It also looks weird, whether that is a good thing or not, I’m not sure yet.
Well, Sven and I had the idea to ask the people behind it a few questions. Here is how it went:

1. What inspired you to make Stalin vs Martians?

Hundreds of identical World War II strategy games, pseudo-Russian stereotypical stuff popular in the “Western countries” (as we call them), like faux cyrillic and bear’n'vodka shit. And, most of all, the fact that we had the opportunity and resources to actually produce the game THAT weird. We just couldn’t miss the chance.

2. Is your game as humorous as the title would have us believe?

With a title like that, who really cares?

3. Would you compare your game to any other on the market?

I think that Stalin looks a little bit like Mario. So we can compare the game to Super Mario Galaxy.

By the way, our game sometimes plays almost like a platformer, so it makes some sense!

4. What sort of gameplay modes will there be? (i.e. Multiplayer? Skirmish? Campaign?)

Campaign only. No one needs multiplayer in a game named, well, Stalin vs. Martians. Just think for a moment. Stalin. Versus. Martians. Multiplayer? Boy, you must be kidding!

5. If it has a campaign mode, would it revolve around a storyline?

Sure. Very stupid storyline. Interrupted by insane music videos.

6. Are there any interesting or unique gameplay features you’d like to tell us about?

The last game to implement REALLY unique gameplay features was, i believe, killer7. We don’t want to play the usual bad PR games anymore, so the answer is no, nothing unique. You’ve seen it all before. Action-packed RTS? Not really unique. Power-ups, bright shiny coins? Check out any Mario/Sonic game. Same old shit.

7. And finally, when can we expect to see your game released?

April 20, digital download for North America and Europe. Available through the main digital distributors like Steam and GamersGate. Published by the Mezmer Games label of Paradox Interactive.

So, there you have it. It could be very good, or it could be not so good.

You can probably expect a review sometime after the 20th of April, assuming the price isn’t too high.

~ Jack and Svenn