It’s been a while since we’ve done one of these and now that we’ve added the Nidzumian to the front page it would make sense to make use of this section, right?

Well a lot of stuff has happened since the last one. We found out that our last skin was a bit limited for what we really wanted to do so for the final time (we promise) we re-designed. The front page is now full of content that hopefully you’ll enjoy. Last night we put a lot of work in so the header looked as good as the rest of the site. Although we’ll always be making tweaks to the site, not much will change in terms of layout. Although we are thinking of making a white version of the skin but black is more environmentally friendly, apparently.

We’ll be running a series of features next year and that’s what the banner in the top right is for. At the moment due to the large amount of games we’ve just got links to the reviews page.

Talking of features we will be running series in the true sense. We are talking weekly editions of a certain series. We’ve got a load of ideas floating around and we’ll be releasing information about them soon. Obviously I’d love to share these ideas but nothing is concrete yet so instead of promising series and not deliver on them, we’ll go back to just not delivering on them in our own time.

One feature I can confirm will be our first annual Games of the Year awards. We’ve got 25 different awards to hand out to this years greatest and worst games. Hopefully it will be worth the wait as we are putting a lot of effort into this years awards. It will be one of few articles we actually put out over the christmas break as like a lot of sites we will be slowing down the content to recover and play this years great line up of games.

If past attempts are anything to go by, when a developer decides to put freerunning or parkour in a game it tends to outshine the rest of the experience. Last year we saw Assassin’s Creed and that was a good freerunning simulation but everything else didn’t really live up to the hype. This year EA are taking a crack at this relatively new sport of freerunning with Mirror’s Edge. With a heavy heart, it has the same problems that Assassin’s Creed had, with the freerunning segments by far out weighing the rest of the game.

You play as Faith in an unnamed totalitarian futuristic city as a courier of information for those who refuse to conform. After a quick prologue you soon get framed along with your sister for a murder you didn’t commit. For all intents and purposes the story is interesting but starts to feel a bit rushed towards the end. The truth is that story kind of takes a backfoot to the real action.

The core gameplay of Mirror’s Edge has you running, jumping and climbing over the rooftops of the city at tremendous speeds. The simply great controls of one button for jumping and climbing over and another for crouching and sliding under, work great if a bit fiddly. The game then throws all kinds of obstacles at you and it’s your job to traverse these to get to your next objective. It’s pretty simple stuff but the complex parkour motions you take along the way are really exhilarating. If you’ve been stringing together wallruns, jump turns and all the other advanced moves the game allows you to chain up, you really feel out of breath.

The game does have multiple paths for you to take but it indicates the main route with a thing called runner vision which simply turns certain obstacles that can help you on your way, a strong red colour. In a world filled with overbearing HUDS and directional arrows it’s really refreshing to see different and original ways of indicating directional objectives. The game has a very original feel that carries on through the graphics.

Most games today are moody, grungy and dark but Mirror’s Edge is bright, refreshing and colourful. The main colour in this game is white and that is normally next to a bright and vibrant green or blue. The games uniqueness is then followed through with the brilliant first person perspective the game uses. Instead of being a traditional action adventure, Mirror’s Edge is played from a first person point of view that works surprisingly well. Granted sometimes you get disoriented when your scaling walls but mainly the camera is solid and gives a great sense of speed.

The game then gets broken up with some platforming puzzles that at sometimes can be frustrating when the simple controls let it down but mainly these are solid. The other area’s the game uses to break up the freerunning segments are combat scenes and unfortunately this is where the game starts to fall apart. The combat is also simple with one attack button and one disarm button which you can combine with speed and freerunning techniques for more effect. The thing is that the simple controls sometimes don’t work so well and you’ll die a lot due to the two hits and your dead rule. It means that you’ll have to take out one guy, hide for 15 seconds, try to take out someone else, die then repeat until you seemingly get lucky.

Mirror’s Edge does feature gun combat but you are encouraged not to use the guns at all but if you don’t you’ll be stuck in the loading screen for reasons unknown to you, all too often. The idea of Mirror’s Edge is that you don’t use weapons and kill people because for once you aren’t a space marine or a solider in a war. It’s just a shame that one of the most interesting aspects of the game also becomes the games biggest flaw.

You will spend a lot of time getting frustrated at these and a few platform areas throughout the game. Nevertheless the freerunning areas of the game are such a high that the fairly major and irritating flaws the game suffers from don’t really matter so much. Sure the game would be brilliant if it didn’t have these elements holding it back. Especially when it simply seems like a lack of playtesting but if you’re willing to triumph over these elements, it’s indefinitely worth it.

When it’s great it’s brilliantly exhilarating and refreshing but when it’s bad it’s terribly frustrating and repetitive. But I guess you have to take the good with the bad when it comes to original IPs.

Need for Speed is one of the unchanging constants of the universe. EA can always be relied upon to release a game that will at least provide a solid fix of high octane racing. It is one of their titles that tends to polarise opinion though. In racing game spheres most players are either Midnight Club fans or Need for Speed fans and there is usually little that can be done to sway these loyalties.

Last outing EA made a huge blunder which could have been enough to tempt Need for Speed fans to switch over to Rockstar’s street racing competitor. Need for Speed Pro Street ditched the free roaming aspect and returned to a more rigid racing dynamic seemingly due to the surprising and indeed resonating success of Codemaster’s RaceDriver: Grid. Grid came out of left field and spooked EA into making what turned out to be one of arcade racing’s greatest lemons of recent times.

Fast forward to today and Need for Speed returns to the free roaming rogue street racing format with Undercover - an attempt to regain the glory days of NFS: Underground 2, the undoubted pinnacle of the series. Since NFS: Underground 2, each successive release in the franchise (Pro Street excluded) can be likened to a clone of the original with some odd genetic defects. The frustratingly irritating canyon races of NFS: Carbon are an excellent example of this. Each defect was borne from an attempt to improve on Underground 2. Unfortunately, such ‘improvements’ were ultimately the downfall of each game.

With Undercover it seems that EA have tried valiantly to escape these past mistakes. Sadly it has still retained many of the flaws which limit the game’s potential to shine. We’ll get to those in a minute though.

Undercover casts you as a cop using his driving skills to infiltrate a ring of extremely skilled car thieves. In order to gain favour with the gang you will need to gain a reputation for mean driving and also give the state police a fair hassle into the bargain. Proving your worth also requires indulging in some Gone in 60 Second’s style car thievery which provides a pleasant distraction to the disappointingly repetitive slog of checkpoints, sprints and circuits. The annoying canyon races also make a return in the form of outrun races which pit you against a fast moving opponent on the freeway. Unsurprisingly the badly-acted full motion video cutscenes are back with a vengeance, with Maggie Q and Christina Milian providing the distractions this time around.

The core of Undercover remains the same as has been with all Need for Speed games. There is a solid, well balanced driving dynamic and all the tracks are well thought out and different enough to provide a interesting enough challenge. There is also an excellent array of cars ranging from classics like the Chevrolet Camaro SS, through the impressive Nissan GT-R to exotic European cars like the Pagani Zonda. All the usual customisation options are there too although there are far less body kits available than there have been previously. The ones that are there can be autosculpted but this time around it seems to do very little to change how the parts look.

The handling is good and suitably arcadey. The American muscle cars slide and drift effortlessly and the European and Japanese entries provide a wide variety of good handlers and blindingly fast beauties.

Try and say what is remarkable about Need for Speed: Undercover and you might be left lost for words. It is missing to more fun aspects like the drag racing and drift competitions that brought a nice balance to the gameplay of the previous titles. There is not really much in the game that sets the world on fire. This may have sounded like a laundry list of complaints but at the bare bones of it all there is a competent racing game. There are plenty of thrills and spills to be had and you do get a taste of the brand new Nissan 370Z. It’s not enough though to make up for all the lack of inventiveness that has seen the series grow stale.

Need for Speed Undercover is a vast improvement on Pro Street but sadly now it feels more like a reliable old Volkswagen Polo instead of the Porsche GT-3 that it aspires to be.

As far as the snowboarding genre has gone this generation we’ve only really had Amped 3 and SSX Blur for the Wii. Both were fairly competent but didn’t really deliver on the full rush that snowboarding provides. It might have been down to them being fairly early in the development cycle but since those I really can’t recall any snowboarding games that have stood out. Shaun White Snowboarding looks interesting enough to come in and take away any kind of buzz from an SSX or an Amped and automatically become top dog. Unfortunately there are way too many things wrong with the game.

Now it’s understandable that there are some problems with the first game in a series. A similar game, Skate had teething problems and looks like it will be ready to go a second time around better off for it. Shaun White Snowboarding actually borrows a few elements from Skate by giving you every trick in the game at the beginning. It also uses a similar unorthodox control scheme that was seen in Skate with the analog controls that take use of simple mechanics that plays into what should work incredibly well. That’s why it’s puzzling that the game plays horribly primarily due to the controls.

The animation is so twitchy and un-fluid that you don’t even think your in control of the character most of the time. When you do finally hit tricks it feels great but it’s just the directional work that is where the game stumbles into an avalanche. You don’t feel like your in control but you do feel like your tricking the game into doing what you want to do. Surprisingly this isn’t the only major control flaw the game has because holding forward is the only way to get any real speed but it’s also how you do front flips meaning that you’ll inadvertently fall flat on your face all to often.

The core of the game is made up of various scored, timed and event based challenges which all work very well. When your in a challenge you normally know what your doing and how to do it, it makes perfect sense. It’s the mindless segments in between when you are free-boarding around the mountains trying to find the challenges. It’s not the fact that they are open areas because you can actually have quite a lot of fun just bombing down hills and hitting crazy tricks, it’s the fact that you can’t jump to a challenge. Combine that with the aforementioned horrible controls and you’ve got a brutal combination that takes the fun out of any game.

It’s a shame because if you watched a video of Shaun White Snowboarding you would see what is a perfectly good game. Great graphics combined with a stellar soundtrack look like a great experience. As we all know looks aren’t everything and although it looks promising you really won’t find much to enjoy here. Sure it’s the only snowboarding game we’ve seen for years but with the large number of titles out this year this is one that you should pass on.

Despite saying this, since the team that made Amped went under and the fact that SSX hasn’t seen a core game for years shows that there is a place for snowboarding within games. If you make the challenges more physically accessible, revamp the controls and generally make the game more intriguing during the first few hours then you would have a decent game. Instead Shaun White unfortunately feels unfinished in a major way.

Last year EA released the Tony Hawk’s killer simply called Skate. The game was well received and while it had a lot of minor issues that had to be dealt with, the core of the mechanics worked well enough for it to be interesting. Obviously when EA release a new franchise and it goes well, it’s not surprising to start seeing it show up on every console under the sun. Here’s what they came up with for the Wii version of the game.

Skate It is actually surprisingly similar to the original. The innovative controls are copied over from the analog stick to the wii-mote and you would expect this to work a lot better than the original. That same original was mainly panned by critics because of the controls that required you to be incredibly precise. Now you use a Wii-Mote without limitations so it should be a lot easier right? Wrong, Skate It’s controls seem to be even more sketchy than said original. You could do the same action x amount of times and get x amount of different tricks. It’s a shame because broken controls really put a downer on the rest of the game.

Not so luckily the game also features a few alternative control methods. It has a Wii-Mote only option that has all of the controls crammed onto one Wii-Mote which is simply disappointing. You can also use your Balance Board as a natural fit for the game. It takes a lot of getting used to but feels a bit too twitchy for my liking. It makes sense that the game can be controlled through this device but feels like it needed a bit more work in terms of sensitivity.

The rest of the game is surprisingly good. You play out similar scenarios to the original across different areas of San Vanelona which has recently been hit by some disaster. It’s not really talked about that much and seems to be a way of taking out all the pedestrians and cars. It’s slightly cheesy but it isn’t trying to fool you for a second. You’ll also go outside of San Van for the first time but apparently there have been disasters that get rid of the pedestrians their as well although that’s never mentioned.

Despite the major critisims you could have of the game it should be able to keep your attention for a while. There is a brilliant various of challenges even if some don’t lend themself well to the controls. The soundtrack is average if only saved for the brilliant use of ‘Lowrider’ by WAR and the graphics actually look pretty decent for the Wii. Skate It as a package is overall great but the twitchy controls simply don’t work and although that’s the only flaw the game has, it has a tendancy to ruin the experience. Although Skate It does present a few decent ideas but overall it’s not worth your time in a busy holiday schedule.