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.

Now we’ve mentioned this on the site before but why didn’t Sports Interactive take this year as a gap year due to the impending release of the MMO, Football Manager Live? It would be the perfect excuse to sit back and make a few changes to the core game and people would understand why it wasn’t as good as it could have been. Despite that 2009 sees some of the biggest upgrades the series has experienced in years.

Football Manager 2009 follows on from previous years renditions but adds a ton of minuscule tweaks that just makes the game run a whole lot smoother. Stuff like transfers are slightly more in-depth, player interaction is a whole lot better as well but on a whole the game just plays better. It would really be a massive task to list every little tweak and improvement that in the grand scheme of things don’t change much but experienced fans of the series will notice and enjoy.

Well that’s enough sidestepping before mentioning the 3D match engine. Football Manager has often been seen under disparagement from gamers outside of the franchise. The truth is that at first reading text or looking at dots run around a pitch isn’t appealing to people who aren’t hardcore into the game. Now you get a bigger sense of what’s going on with the 3D match engine. Great goals actually look great, tackles and offside offences are now easier to comment on and the whole match day experience is just bought up another level.

The only criticisms you could have of the engine is that the stadiums are just a solid colour and the graphics aren’t brilliant but you have to remember that the barrier for entry has to be low. It’s easy to understand why the game doesn’t look like FIFA but this is definitely a step towards that. Maybe more camera angles for replays, better animations for player collisions and more of a tv presentation would be a great step forward for next years title. Otherwise see this as a 3D representation of the old match engine.

They’ve also added press conferences which features you answering a bunch of questions about your players, the match and transfer rumours before or after a match. They work well at first and can have a good effect on your teams morale. The only problem is that once you’ve played through a season you’ll hardly ever get any new questions and nearly every week you’ll get asked what type of football your going to play even if you always give the same answer. Also the press conferences feature a rather entertaining ’storm out’ button that would make sense if there were any offensive questions in the game. It doesn’t make sense when you storm out of a conference over a perfectly legitimate question.

Finally the other major improvement is the assistant manager feedback throughout a game. He’ll tell you how your tactics aren’t working and what you could do to improve them. Last year you got the option to tell your players what to do to other players. For example you could mark them more, go harder into tackles or show them onto their weaker foot. Your assistant manager tells you what to-do-what-to-who but there isn’t just an ask assistant button on the menu for this. So you have to jump between the feedback menu and the opposition tactics menu over and over again before every match. If he’s going to tell you what to do at least let me have an ‘I agree and implement these tactics’ button.

Unfortunately I have been sucked into the world of Football Manager yet again and although it has a few flaws here and there they aren’t impeding ones. Deploying the recommended tactics isn’t a massive chore, press events can be covered by your assistant and the 3D match engine is such an improvement on what a Football Manager game has ever had before you don’t even notice the minor flaws.

Last years rendition was such a flawless one that you had to think hard on how they could improve it. Surprisingly they have in nearly every way you could think of and it becomes a must buy for fans of the series. Although if your on the fence on whether you should pick this up, this year is a great year to do it. The 3D engine makes the game more accessible from a game stand point although from a tech stand point you’ll need a fairly decent system to play the game at reasonable speed.

Today I had the chance to sit down with the upcoming Nintendo DS title ‘Moon’, an title being developed by Renegade Kid. Moon is a Sci-Fi First Person Shooter, similar to titles like Quake and Doom, that has some elements of action-adventure within it. The game has roughly about 18 episodes and is said to offer at least 10 hours of gameplay.

Having not paid attention to the story itself during my play, due to mostly concentrating on playing the game itself, what I did pick up however from the little tidbits I listened about the story were somewhat interesting. The game is set in the year 2058 and ever since that fortunate event known as Roswell we have come to the understanding that we are not alone in the universe. However we never did have proof of course that reinforced this fact until a structure is discovered on the surface of the Moon, which confirms this.

You the player are then sent off to investigate the hatch and before you know it you are walking around a strange building being shot at meaning you have to survive while something has happened to everyone else.

When I first started playing Moon was under the impression that I would just be playing a simple first person shooter on the DS, well it was kinda wrong. Having similar elements found in great FPS titles, such as Quake and Doom, I found my way around the area shooting at everything I could. There are times however when I was stumped in what I was going to do next within a level are there are some certain things you have to do to open the door, which usually means you have to pull out your little robot thing and find a switch to open the door.

The control layout has also been well thought out using the stylus on the bottom screen, which also contains the map, to actual move which you look and whether your left or right handed you will either use the D-Pad or the X,Y,B,A buttons for movement.

The developers have also put in a number of different weapons you can use which does make it more fun to actually kill the enemies with the big guns for some explosions. The game’s difficulty however is more towards the easy side but does have it moments where you will need to really try hard to survive.

The game’s graphics are similar to those early FPS titles you would find on the computer but the environments seem somewhat similar throughout the whole game and probably do need a bit more polishing up on them. Sometimes I have found it actually difficult to tell an enemy apart from the background as they sometimes blend in well but it does add excitement to the game as you could be attacked at any moment. Cutscenes are also included that are pretty well detailed but aren’t in the great form due to the actual limitations that the developers would have had to face when placing the cutscenes in the game.

Overall with the time I spent with the game it did remind me of those early titles like Quake which I did actually enjoy quite a bit meaning that I found some great enjoyment with my limited time playing this game. Fans of FPS titles who own the DS should also consider giving this game ago.

Developer of Call of Duty 3, Treyarch have had tough time in the last couple of years. Call of Duty 3 wasn’t a particularly bad game but it it didn’t come close to Infinity Ward’s effort in the original two games. Now Treyarch have a brilliant chance to re-coup some reputation by having better tools with the CoD 4 engine and longer time to work on the game. Unfortunately there is something about World At War that feels slightly off.

World At War is another World War 2 game that this time, mainly takes place in the Pacific Theatre. You’ll play a part pushing back the Japanese back to a final battle at Shuri Castle. This side of the story is interesting after key people get killed and the fact that your Sergeant is voiced by Kiefer Sutherland (24). Despite that the more engaging side is the story of Private Peterenko of the Red Russian Army. After a brilliant scene in which you are nearly dead you are soon introduced to Sergeant Reznov who teaches you how to snipe and guides you through the city of Stalingrad during the Nazi invasion. It’s a real shame that the story then jumps forward a few years to you invading Russia although nothing is really mentioned you feel like your missing out on some of the story.

The story mode is pretty solid albeit relentless and although it does feature a few sniper missions they fail in comparison to the one featured in last years rendition. You can play the full story out in co-op but again you feel like your missing out as opposed to singleplayer. World At War also has a weird way of splitting the screen, instead of a straight vertical spilt they have what can only be described as two boxes jauntily put next to each other. It results in you not really seeing what’s going on. Also the scripted events that happen to your character feel awkward and happen to both players at the same time. Co-Op is a good addition to the game but don’t expect you to be engrossed in the story through this mode.

Call of Duty has always had a great variation of weapons of offer and World At War isn’t different. You have your standard rifles, machine-guns, heavy machine-guns and so on and so forth but this time you can unleash seemingly this years favourite weapon the flamethrower. It might be slightly over-powered but it’s surprisingly good fun to set alight to everything. Everything from trees to bushes will set alight the way you would expect. You can really let your inner-pyro out.

The fire effects also look very nice when your shooting fire but not so much when foes are alight. Meanwhile the game graphically holds up well. The reflection of the moon on the water is stunning along with the water itself. Explosions looks especially nice and the game does a good job of a few scripted events that on first viewing look brilliant. Although your slightly taken out of it when the same tower falls over and over again in the exact same way. The presentation is similar to MW but the loading screens also look a lot better with some interesting typography and video effects.

The game also features the same solid online portion that you played last year. A few new modes are tweaked or added but it’s pretty similar to last years and that’s actually good. Although it’s always nice to see developers try new things, last years multiplayer was so good that Treyarch have deployed a ‘if it ain’t broke don’t fix it’ ethos. Well almost, at times the extra player limits seem a bit overbearing and the levels with tanks aren’t particularly fun unless your in the tank. Otherwise the maps are brilliantly designed as usual and matchmaking is quick and painless. The only thing bringing it down is the less dynamic guns of the era.

To be honest that’s the only way you can describe the game. The story is good, the graphics are smart and the multiplayer is as solid as ever but the setting lets it down. World War 2 has been done to death and the reason why last years Modern Warfare was so well received was because it was exactly that, Modern. Although what you have here is one of the best World War 2 First Person Shooters you can only help but feel that you’ve been there and done that.

Otherwise World At War is a competent game that does a decent enough job of what it set out to achieve. The combat is decent, the story is good if a bit disjointed at times and the multiplayer is slightly flawed but otherwise brilliant. The only real thing that is stopping the game from really excelling is the fact that the setting was tiresome a couple of years ago. So now the game comes off as feeling dated and seen before. If you don’t mind the unoriginal setting then by all means you should pick this up but otherwise you might be better off sticking to Modern Warfare.

Anyone else remember when a game was just a game? It would look pretty much same on any display and through any type of cable. Composite or Aerial were your options and the chances are it would look alright on either of them. Nowadays we’ve got HDMI, DVI, VGA, Composite and Component and they can run in a number of different resolutions, especially if your using VGA or DVI outputs.

You’ve also got frame rates that tend to range from 30 to 60 and publishers make a big deal about their game if it’s running in a smooth 60fps. How much of this do we actually notice? Well if a game had a really low resolution the chances are we would but could you really tell the difference between different inputs, resolutions and frame rates?

Well if you can then prepare to get excited for what the next generation of consoles could natively be offering. Developers of Gran Turismo, Polyphony Digital have managed to get the most recent release of Gran Turismo to run at a whopping 240 frames per second. It would be really interesting to see how much the eye could absorb and take in, compared to the regular 60.

GT5: Prologue was also running at an eye bleedingly massive 3840×2160 which is giant compared to the 1920×1080 that Playstation 3’s can currently reach. That’s roughly the size of an average photo on a digital camera but there are 240 of them per second. That’s crazy when you think about it.

More interestingly is the way they’ve got the game to output at this high level. It uses four Playstation 3’s that each power a quarter of the screen. The 8.3million pixels being outputted were running on Sony’s SRX-S110 Projector that can actually achieve a higher resolution than reached here

Polyphony are building this up as what looked like real life in front of your eyes. Although the chances are this won’t actually be available for general use. Anyone who could afford the $120,000 projector probably couldn’t afford a copy of the game never mind the four Playstation 3’s. Still it’s a good test for a resolution and frame rate that in a few generations we’ll all be experiencing.

The relaunch of the Xbox is finally upon us and is definitely one worth booting up your console for. Stuff looks slicker and your information loads a hell of a lot faster. It makes the clunky blades look really dated and does a great job of refreshing the system. Although there are a lot of new features hidden deep within the menus, here is quick run down of the most obvious ones.

The avatar system is great but not perfect due to a lack of customization in terms of clothes. They have standard shirts but your limited to the colours they come in. Surely you should be able to change the colour of a plain tee, I guess that will be charged for at a later date. Nevertheless it’s weird going through your friends list when you have what normally looks like a good representation of them in avatar form next their name.

Inside Xbox is still on the system but the new look streamlines the content really nicely. Instead of being all like ‘this game is out you should check out this trailer for it’, it’s now showing you demos along with information on games. There is also a Eurogamer.tv show on there which as far as I know is new although it could have been on there the whole time hidden within the small link on the now horrible old dashboard. Spotlight is very similar to Inside Xbox but it’s mainly just marketplace stuff and new releases. This seems dumb as you’ve got two channels that are very similar and there is actually some content that is featured in both.

The My Xbox channel is what you’ll be using the most. It’s pretty much a few features taken from different blades put onto one easy to access channel. The last dashboard update added the ‘Game Library’ feature which made it kind of awkward to get to your XBLA games and demos. Now that is incredibly easy to get to and it’s also a whole lot faster. There is also loads of easy to access information on a game you select. Like DLC that is available, Leaderboards and a few others along with a background image similar to the XMB on the Playstation 3.

The Marketplace channels are decent but also have a few featured items. It doesn’t really make sense to have loads of channels that essentially do the same thing. You’ll notice on the Game Marketplace you can download Community Games from Microsoft’s XNA coding software. The link to Community Games only shows you two featured games instead of the hundreds that are available. Luckily when you browse the Community Games there is a top 20 that hopefully should help you sort though what’s worth getting. The games range from 200 points to 800 and unfortunately there are no free ones. A couple of free games would be a great for getting people into these cheap made-in-a-basement games.

Other features like party systems and new resolutions work great although the new 1680×1050 monitor display outputs at 16:9 instead of the standard monitor display of 16:10. Nevertheless it works great. As far as installing games we really can’t notice much of a difference and we tried Skate, Project Gotham Racing 4 and DiRT. The latter two seem to be slightly faster and Skate’s initial load seemed just as long but the session markers are a lot faster to jump to. We’ll probably do an in-depth loading test next week.

So there you have it, Microsoft have launched their refresh and it looks pretty nice. Everyone was underwhelmed when they showed it off originally but it’s a massive improvement over the last dash. The only problem is that the server has been overloaded with people downloading so Live seems a bit slow. That and there 4 channels that all do the same thing. It should just be Game Marketplace, Movie Marketplace, then a features channel. Still the whole system seems a lot faster and slicker and was definitely worth the wait.