Harry Potter seems to be loved by everyone and it’s easy to see why. The story of a young wizard in training who takes on enemies well above his status, only to get in trouble over and over again is something kids can relate to and parents can read/sit through without too much pain. You’d think video games of Harry would be a no brainer then. Boy with magic takes on evil doers with the help of his friends - sounds simple enough.

The problem with the Potter games is that they come paired with the movies, with this year’s game based on the forthcoming Order of the Phoenix. Movies pack everything into a few hours, whereas games need to last a lot longer. This means that all the boring stuff that didn’t make it into the movie is what you’ll be doing in the game. So, in Harry’s latest you spend most of your time at Hogwarts, recruiting school mates for Dumbledore’s army (D.A. Members).

Read more

Michael Bay’s upcoming Transformers movie is earning rave early reviews and looks set to be one of the year’s biggest movies, but what of the video game? Due out on just about every format going, the Traveller’s Tales developed action title is expected to do big business. Activision stopped by to demo the Xbox 360 version and it looks like fans of the movie aren’t going to be disappointed.

Being a movie licensed title the game follows the story of the film, but also adds plenty of new content to flesh out the story. Each level is based in a free-roaming area, with the players free to go where they like, but an entire free-roaming world simply wasn’t possible due to the worldwide spread of locations in which the film is set. Although I was only able to play an early level with Bumblebee, set in a typical US town, later levels vary substantially.

Read more

PC gamers can be a hardcore bunch at times. Years of upgrading, tweaking, more upgrading, reinstalls, more upgrading and general maintenance has meant they are rather picky when it comes to games. Ask any veteran PC gamer about console games and you’ll probably be met with something about the lack of keyboard and mouse, and how consoles become outdated too quickly. Ports over from consoles often insult these guys, unhappy by the treatment their beloved gaming platform has received. So when Ghost Recon became a console franchise, the news wasn’t met with much love.

But PC gamers needn’t have worried too much. While Xbox 360 owners got a tactical but still fairly arcadey third-person shooter, Ubisoft and Grin Software developed the PC version separately, building it to the strengths of the platform. GRAW on the PC is an altogether more hardcore experience, where the difficulty is punishing, the view is first-person and that arcade feel is nowhere to be seen. Fans are in luck, as Grin has gone it alone once again with GRAW 2 for PC.

Read more

Last year the legend returned, but now Lara Croft is going back to her roots. Tomb Raider: Anniversary is a remake of the original game that made such a splash ten years ago, meaning Lara’s oldest and newest adventure is very different to the action-packed title more recent fans might be expecting. This is tomb raiding in its purest form, and clinging to perilous ledges has never been so much fun.

Anyone who’s played the original game obsessively might be wondering what a remake has to offer, but in truth this isn’t simply a case of adding a bit of spit and polish. If you imagine the 1996 game as a student film, this PS2 and PC modernisation is a big budget spectacular; it stays true to its origins but everything is bigger, more beautiful and more complicated. Whereas the 32-Bit classic struggled to convey the size of the tombs, Anniversary has no such problem, with rooms so large you’ll wonder where to start.

Read more

Lara Croft has not only transcended the game that created her, but the entire medium. She is as much a cultural icon as Pac-Man and Mario, starring in everything from films to fashion shoots. She has turned a Topshop worker into an international model, and a collection of pixels into the world’s first true virtual sex symbol.

With all of that going on, it’s easy to forget her roots. Most of her games have met with commercial and critical success, but none made more of an impact than her first outing; Lara Croft Tomb Raider. Her infamous bosom and slender figure made her the unofficial mascot for the PlayStation generation, and her athletic ability and well-spoken English accent lent her the status of a new Indiana Jones.

Read more

Mario might get Nintendo fans into a mouth frothing frenzy at a mere mention of his name and Master Chief might have single handily made the Xbox a viable gaming platform, but Lara Croft is undeniably the video game character that thrust gaming into the mainstream. Her original adventure wowed gamers ten years ago and to this day remains a fan favourite, but times have changed and going back reveals a rather clunky experience. Thankfully, Eidos and Tomb Raider Legend developers Crystal Dynamics are bringing the original bang up to date.

Before a demo of the Peru level the Eidos rep was keen to point a few things out. Firstly, Tomb Raider Anniversary isn’t a room for room remake of the original game. While it’ll feature the same environments and story as the original, a simple graphical update wouldn’t have been good enough. So, expect much larger areas, updated puzzles and a modern control scheme - Anniversary is using the Tomb Raider Legend engine, and features nigh-on identical controls.

Read more

Freak Out - Extreme Freeride is the latest downhill skiing title to have a bash at taking on the mighty SSX series. Up until now it’s only really been Amped (Microsoft and then 2K Sports) that’s offered any real alternative to EA’s long-running series, but developer Coldwood Interactive and publisher JoWooD think their title has what it takes. Due out later this year on PC, PS2 and PSP, I hit the slopes with a work in progress PC build to see if it’s as extreme as the title suggests.

Straight into the game then, and things seem pretty good. While the visuals aren’t a patch on what we’ve seen in Amped 2 for the Xbox 360, the mountains look large and the snow glistens as you scream down to the plateau finish. It’s effectively nothing more than a high-res PlayStation 2 game, but it does the job. While we’re on the subject of presentation, the soundtrack is certainly going to be an acquired taste, with lyrics informing you that it’s a good day to commit suicide not really putting a happy spin on proceedings.

Read more

TMNT, the game based on the recently released Ninja Turtles movie, falls strictly under the ‘made for under 10s’ heading. While some of us twenty-somethings have fond memories of the Turtles, the new movie wasn’t made for us and neither was the game. Judged alongside great action platformers like Prince of Persia, TMNT comes up short, but as a game made strictly for kids, it’s not a bad effort.

The game follows the four shelled ninjas as they battle through various locations, with the actual story being told as a recap, with each turtle taking a turn to tell his own story. It’s all rather confusing, especially considering Raphael has become some kind of disguised solo superhero and the turtles rarely seem to fight together - they’re never all together on screen at once.

Read more

In the summer of 2005 Brian Lara made a triumphant return to video games, with Codemasters’ game being addictive and highly enjoyable. It wasn’t perfect, but it was the best option cricket fans had. Now we’ve moved into the next-gen era and the legendary series has arrived on the Xbox 360 (as well as PS2 and PC). Some spit and polish has certainly helped, but things are largely the same as they were - except England have become worse.

The big news this time around is the official licence for the Cricket World Cup, and this means that while playing in the official tournament mode you get all the correct player names and stats. Of course, this makes playing in any of the non-official game modes rather strange as your sporting heroes lose their proper names, only to be replaced with rather blatant but not license-breaking titles. Still, the World Cup is where the excitement is at the moment, so the official licence can’t be sniffed at.

Read more

Test Drive Unlimited somehow managed to sneak up on me when it arrived on the Xbox 360. Now it’s arrived on the PC and is every bit as impressive as its 360 debut. Eden Games’ ambitious sounding racing game isn’t the easiest to understand. It’s not that the concept of racing is something new; it’s that this is more than a racing sim - it’s a racing, lifestyle sim. You won’t truly get a sense of what the game is all about until you start playing, arriving in Oahu with $200,000 in your back pocket, ready to spend on a swanky pad and new car. Of course, you’ll need something to potter about in before hand, so you hire a car from a rental place, giving you the chance to cruise around in some impressive rides right from the start.

Once you’re in Oahu that’s it; other than a New game/Load game option when you boot up, everything else is handled entirely as if you’re a real person living the high life on a tropical island (albeit a person that can’t walk). Everything is seamless, and the sim aspect really shines through in all areas of the game. You need to buy a house for somewhere to live, but also so you can store more cars, so the obvious thing is to drive to the real estate agent - and that’s what you do. If you want a new Ferrari in real life you wouldn’t buy from a menu, you’d head over to the show room and have a look for yourself, and the same is true in TDU - complete with the option to inspect each car and go for a test drive.

Read more

Resident Evil 4 for the GameCube is, without doubt, one of the finest games ever made and its existence alone made purchasing a GameCube worthwhile. The PlayStation 2 version lacked some of the visual brilliance of the GameCube original, but the core game remained intact and was in many ways improved upon by the addition of the Ada mini-campaign. Two years after UK gamers first got their hands on the game it’s time for the PC hardcore to get their turn. Is Resident Evil 4 on the PC the ultimate version or another lazy port?

Before you go on to read about how great the game is, I better break it to you: Resident Evil 4 on the PC isn’t the ultimate version. In fact, it’s far from it, with the port being one of the laziest I’ve seen in some time. Almost no effort has gone into tailoring the controls to the PC, and the only visual options you can tweak are display resolution and if you want to run in widescreen or not. Lighting also seems to be rather subdued and lacks the subtleness of the console games. To make matters worse, there isn’t even support to use a mouse, so unless you plug in a controller (360 wired pad works very nicely) you’re stuck playing the whole game with just the keyboard.

Read more

Can an action game be released these days without using some kind of ‘cover’ system? Just as bullet-time appeared in every other action game for a while, it seems that your game is nothing these days without the ability to put your character’s back to a wall. Rainbow Six Vegas is the latest game to use such a system, but unlike GRAW for the PC which was more or less a version created specifically for the PC audience, Vegas sticks very much to its console roots, for better or worse.

I’ll get the boring stuff out of the way first. Ubisoft has once again attempted to build a story into the action, and some effort has gone into creating team-mates that you care about. As with previous games, it doesn’t really work as well as Ubisoft would have hoped, but you’ll easily follow the basic terrorist attack storyline, complete with kidnapping, bluffing, a load of casinos and plenty of news coverage. It’s typical Tom Clancy stuff, and the lack of great storytelling doesn’t really hurt the game as a whole.

Read more

The similarities are startling. Five years ago I had my life slowly devoured by the Dreamcast’s seminal Phantasy Star Online, easily clocking up 500-plus hours on the game in six months. My only break in all that time? The few weeks I spent ploughing through Zelda: Majora’s Mask on N64. Fast forward five years and my obsession with Phantasy Star Universe - PSO’s fully-fledged successor - is developing to alarming degrees, but Nintendo’s Wii is out in under a week, with Twilight Princess looking too tempting to ignore. History definitely has a habit of repeating itself.

My first stint in the Gurhal System may end up being short, but it’s already proven memorable. Having said that, my first experience of PSU was far from positive; Sega’s decision not to offer UK 360 users the chance to pay for the monthly Guardian’s Licence subscription with Live Points (something that isn’t a consideration with the PC and PS2 versions) seems frankly stupid - especially when American users can do just that. Get those Visa accounts in credit, folks, or you, like me, will find yourself unable to play online until you do.

Read more

With the 2006 Ashes series now underway, EA’s Cricket 07 will probably seem like a very tempting purchase for the legions of cricket fans staggering around like zombies while trying to maintain a new nocturnal lifestyle. With Brian Lara staying in the pavilion until next year it would have been great if EA had delivered some well-timed cricketing greatness, but that sadly isn’t the case.

New this year is the Century Stick, which, as you might have worked out, is responsible for all your batsmen’s shots while at the crease. The right analogue stick simply needs to be pressed in the direction you want to play the ball - kind of like you’re playing the shot yourself. If you see a space through extra cover, flick the stick in that direction, and assuming the ball is there to be played and you time the shot correctly, you’ll hit a boundary or take a few runs. The harder the difficulty setting the harder it is to time shots, and tail-enders can do little more than prod the ball about.

Read more