Baja Edge of Control is hard as nails. Now, I am a fan of simulation racing games and I totally understand why some of them can be so difficult. This one was too much for me though. It's an off-road racing game based on the Baja 100 race. You take part in off road events like racing and hill climbing, battling through a bunch of different tournaments and, if you are like me, failing miserably. You need to master the use of the clutch, break, e-break, when to use the accelerator, how much to cut corners and the racing lines. There's a lot going on here and I think there's too much for it to be enjoyable, at least for me. The main issue is, even if you do git gud, the AI is so OP and aggressive. I was constantly getting fucked up whenever I got near the other racers, which wasn't very often as they were normally much faster than me. It isn't by definition a bad game, but this is one for the racing simulation purist masochists only and not worth it if you are not interested in hours of grinding.

As humans, we all have an innate bias, preferences which differentiate us from others. This holds true for games and Perfect Dark Zero ticks so many boxes of dumb shit in games that I enjoy. Horribly cheesy dialogue and voice acting. Futuristic space city setting. Dated FPS game design. It's all here in its 2005 glory. The rise of boomer shooters and the throw back to early and mid 90s FPS games has got me hoping there is a mid 00s shooter revival at some point and PDZ is an absolute classic of that genre - whatever we want to call it? A sequel to the N64 classic, PDZ was actually a launch title for the console and was pretty hyped up. Unfortunately, it didn't really live up to the lofty expectations set by how good the first Perfect Dark game was. Everyone enjoyed the multiplayer, which was a blast. The campaign itself wasn't as well recieved though. It's easy to see why. With it's cycle of development hell, by the time the game released it looked bad and felt dated. People were expected some incredible next gen FPS masterpiece, and what they got was a pretty decent short FPS campaign which felt like an original xbox game. Yet, playing this game in 2024 I had so much fun with it. The short campaign is a total blast. The first thing I really dig about this game is the replayability. Like the original game, each mission gives you different objectives depending on the level of difficulty. These add a lot of variety to the levels and make some of them quite challenging. I particularly remember a mission which involved stealing an enemy radio and convincing the enemy to turn off communications and open a door. Every time you make a mistake a flood of enemies attack you, which at higher difficulties is really rough. There's also coop throughout the campaign which works pretty well. The excellent selection of weapons is also back with loads of cool stuff like the laptop turret gun. Each gun has a secondary fire mode which normally does something pretty cool and means it's really exciting finding a new weapon. Yes, all the weapons sound totally shit and the enemies react in a comical Goldeneye style way. Yet,, but this adds to the charm more than anything. It's an ugly and extremely dumb game, but the 2005 vibe is very charming. If you like clunky dated FPS games (just me?), you will love this.

As a huge fan of the SNES classic Zombies Ate My Neighbours, I was pretty excited for this spiritual successor. Zombies was a top down coop zombie killer which had a lot of character. With it's cute graphic, funny enemies and vibrant well thought out levels. From a first glance, Monster Madness Battle for Suburbia appears to match the feel of the SNES classic. In some ways it does. You can really tell the developers have taken most of the ideas from that game and tried to modernise it. There's a nice selection of varied levels, from your house to the streets of the suburbs and even hell. There's a decent selection of silly weapons and a nice variety of enemies. Yet, something is off about it. First thing I noticed was the way the game looks. It's really ugly. The style attempts to match the cutesy and silly visuals of ZAMN, but it's a lot more brown, bland and in general less appealing. The generic high-school stereotype characters are annoying and offensive and the enemies are just weird. Then we have the camera and controls issue. The top down camera straight up doesn't work. With this game being more focused on 3rd person shooting than hand to hand combat, the camera angle means you can't really aim properly or even see where enemies are. IF you play alone, you can set a different camera angle (by pressing y - thank me later), which makes it slightly more playable but with the game itself being pretty boring to play alone, this isn't a great option. The difficulty is also problematic. There are 4 difficulty levels, but unless you pick easy, it's just way too hard. After playing a few hours of the game, I realised that no matter how much I wanted to like it, I wasn't having fun. Don't bother with this one.

Rugby League Live 3, is a decent rugby league experience. It's a polished and well-made game, not far off the likes of madden and FIFA in terms of quality.it has a nice variety of game modes, be a player, be a manager, season modes, decent menus and all without the micro transaction BS that comes with these kind of games. It is easy to pick up and the controls work well. Even as a novice, I was able to pick the game up and quickly figure out what to do without resorting to tutorials. It's also a lot smoother and easier to control than the older games, with a very modern feel and a nice flow. Now, this is also coming from me, someone who doesn't really know much about Rugby League. In fact, being honest, I find the game of Rugby League not that interesting and not really worth being made into a game. This may sound a bit harsh, but the 6 tackle only rule means you spend a lot of the time kicking the ball back to the other team. It makes it difficult to build momentum and ruins the flow of the game. Now, this doesn't really matter, as it's unlikely that you would pick this up if you didn't like Rugby League. So with that in mind, I can recommend this one. It's a nice Rugby League package with nothing I really dislike except the sport itself.

I was pretty excited to try this one. There are so many military shooters and boring brown open world games on the console. A bright colourful fairy-tale themed hack and slash where you spill the blood of your enemies with 3 friends, sign me up! It's a great idea that we don't really see much on the console, harking back to the good old days of streets of rage and games with some humor. The problem is, this fun lasts for about 5 minutes and then you start to realise how painful this game really is. The levels are colourful, but extremely bland and linear. Most levels have you walking right. That's it. The combat is terrible. It could be due to the awkward controls, which make it difficult, but even if it controlled well, its very basic stuff. You flick the right stick around to slash and link some combos up. This doesn't make for fun gameplay. The coop gameplay doesn't make the game much better. It's difficult to see whats going on with 1 player on the screen, let alone 2 or even 3. One of the most shallow games on the console, don't be fooled by the cute graphics or unique concept.

Video game royalty in terms of movie tie-in games, the 007 films have spawned a surprising amount of great shooters, with Night-fire, Secret Agent and Goldeneye being some of my favourites. Unfortunately, after the 360 generation, the fairly constant stream of 007 game releases seems to have dried up, so these 360 releases are some of the most recent games for Bond fans. This one is based on the movie of the same name, which I barely remember, featuring the likenesses of Bond and I presume all the other characters. I have to admit I wasn't really interested in the story, I was mainly looking for a nice short FPS campaign, and that is exactly what I got. QoS is not going to blow you away, but it is a very decent shooter. It has a nice variety of detailed levels and a story to move the action along and explain what you are doing in each location. The gameplay itself is really fun. It blends first person shooting with some third person cover action and the good level of difficulty and decent AI make it work well. There are some collectables here and there but it isn't too complicated. It gives off a nice and simple Night-fire style feel and is a nice change from modern games without feeling dated or archaic. My only major complaint is the controls, which were unresponsive and a little frustrating but didn't ruin the fun. This one is a great shout for FPS fans, bond fans and in general people who enjoy a nice short linear campaign with a decent story. Grab it.

Another Dragon Ball game, another one I didn't really enjoy. The weird lack of story and very poor voice work was off-putting, so if that is what you enjoy from these games look elsewhere. The camera is even worse. That being said, compared to other DB games, this one is a bit more complex and has a bit more substance in terms of tactical fighting. You can't just button mash in this one (well at least not to the same extent), it requires some blocking and dodging to get through the missions. It's all well explained in the tutorial and if you are looking for something to sink your teeth into, this is definitely an improvement over most DB titles. While this game isn't really for me, I can see it being enjoyable for DB fans willing to invest a bit of time.

2005 saw the release of one of the most beloved games in the NFS franchise, Most wanted. The game mixed street racing with an open world environment, police chases and street racing gangs. Unfortunately, it has been fairly downhill since then. The series has gone a bit off the rails with no real direction. While there has been some decent games, the street racing feeling has really gone missing. Most Wanted is EAs attempt to cash in on people's love for the original game, without really addressing what people loved about the original game and it's not massively successful. It does has some similarities with the original mixed with some parts of hot pursuit. Like most NFS games, the game handles well and the racing is pretty nice. It is the standard arcade style racing you would expect from the series and when you are actually in a normal race, it is pretty fun. The problem is that the game is bogged down by a lot of rubbish that you don't really want in the game. Now, I'm really not a fan of open world racing games. I think most of the time tracks are more suited for close contested racing battles. This one is no different, it looks great but doesn't really work in terms of racing. That's if you actually get into the racing. There is time wasted driving around the city, time spent avoiding the police and time spent on non-racing events. Another huge time waste is the long crash animations, every time you crash you get a shitty 5 second cut scene. It totally ruins the flow of the races. Overall, the game feels vapid. From its' lack of racing to its' horrible music, it's another case of NFS not really working out. The basic mechanics of the game work but all the silly extras just bring it down.

CSI Hard Evidence is the first of 3 CSI games on the console and it is actually quite well known. Mostly known for how easy it is to get achievement points (if you care about that), CSI HE should probably should be know for its horrible acting, graphics and facial animations, which are comical and a real highlight. So how does a game like this work? Well, it's surprisingly quite interesting and a bit of a unique experience. You play through 5 episodes of point and click detective style gameplay. You investigate crime-scenes, find evidence, process it in the lab, and question suspects. This gameplay style is certainly different, but it's not that great in practice. It's nearly impossible to miss clues and you can't really fail a mission, so the game basically plays itself. That being said, if treated as an interactive TV show, it is quite nice. The episodes are detailed, with interesting stories which feel like they were real TV episodes. There is some fun to be had in the lab, where analysing evidence is turned into small fun mini games like matching pictures. It's nothing special but it works. I'm sure there's a lot of people who hate this game but for me it was moderately enjoyable. It's not too long and doesn't overstay its welcome. The bitesize chunks were a nice break from other epic games and campaigns on the console. Worth picking up just to experience and see if you like it.

Another quite random NTSC release, Little League is a kid-friendly baseball game, not dissimilar to the Mario sports series. Based on the sport of baseball, LL is full of all the cute colourful graphics and chibi syle characters that you would expect from one of these kids sports ventures. Now, as far as sports games go, one issue I normally have with them is that if you are not into the sport, it can be very difficult to pick up and get the hang of. I suppose for most people, if you don't like sport X, you wont be interested in playing sport X games. With this in mind, LL is refreshing in the same way the Mario sports games can be. It does a great job at explaining baseball to a novice like me, and the tutorials make the game understandable. It's easy to pick up and play. The downside is that that's all I can really say in terms of positives. LL is an extremely shallow game with few redeeming features, which really should have been a cheap arcade title. There is a severe lack of features in the game, and while I am not expecting a detailed baseball game, I was looking forward to some cool powerups or mini games, like the Mario kart series. These were few and far between. There are barely any game modes and the gameplay itself seems almost random. Through my short time with the game, it didn't seem to make much difference how I played and I wasn't able to get much better as I practiced. My final complaint is the poor camera, which leaves it impossible to see the action at times. What is boils down to is this. LL is a cheap arcade game that never really should have got a full retail release. It may seem novel at first, but this shine wears off very quickly.

With the birth of the arcade downloadable titles on consoles, we saw the death of budget titles released on disk. By budget titles, I'm talking of the games which didn't cost a lot to make, often were made by a small team and more often than not used less that half of the 8.3 GB of the space on the disk. This is a shame as often these games were fun, if slightly flawed titles. The Club is a great example of this. This 3rd person shooter focuses on in-your-face action and points scoring combos. You choose one of 6 characters, 50 Cent unfortunately not included, and take part in competitions in different locations. Each competition or tournament features a selection of events, either killing enemies to get points combos, holding off enemies for as long as you can or running through stages as quickly as possible. These events all take place on the same stage and you compete against enemy bots to see who can get the highest score. There are around 8 maps in the game, none of which are particularly exciting, but the tournament style events and the combo hunting gameplay is pretty decent. I enjoyed racking up some big scores and getting a run just right and there is a nice addictive feeling to the short levels. You string together combos by killing enemies in quick succession and getting special kills like headshots or multi-kills, all of which add to a point multiplier which will start to drop if you stop killing. This creates a fast and frantic style of gameplay, and while I found the camera a little lacking, the controls were decent and the gameplay was quite smooth. My main issue with the game is that this is all there is to it. Sure you can replay levels to get higher scores if you like that kinda thing, but that's about it. There's not really a lot here and it does become repetitive fairly quickly. Overall it's a fine game, but I doubt many people will invest much time with this one.

From the people that brought you the Final Fantasy series, we have another JRPG on the console, and it's a fairly unheralded one at that. IU puts you in the shoes of Capell, working with a group of heroes tasked with destroying the chains attaching the moon to the earth. It's a bit of a weird story and very JRPG, but it lends itself to some nice visuals and cutscenes. The gameplay is one of the more unique elements of the game. If plays like a simple but quite decent hack and slash game, where you control Capell and can offer orders to the AI controlled party members. It's not the most complex combat, but works fine and I didn't get that bored with it. The game starts pretty slow, but the difficulty ramps up and the enemy variety and bosses keep the gameplay fairly interesting. The adventuring itself isn't particularly detailed. It is a small game so there aren't any huge maps or sprawling sub-quests. You follow a linear route to achieve your goals and that is totally fine. We don't all have 100 hours to stick into an RPG, particularly not one which doesn't really shine in any way. For my criticisms of the game, I don't really have a whole lot, but at the same time there not much that I loved about the game. The menu is a bit frustrating as you can't pause the game and I didn't enjoy messing around with items and equipment, but it wasn't any worse than any other RPG. With that in mind, it's a fine game, but only really worth it for huge JRPG fans. I also don't hate the name as much as everyone else.

High Moon Studios have a knack for making decent 3rd person licensed games on the console, with the fun Transformers games and the silly Deadpool game. This was their first effort on the 360 and it really feels like a clunky younger brother to the Cybertron duo. The game follows the story of the movie, presenting it over around 12 levels with some nice cutscenes throughout. Game play wise it is a nice mix of 3rd person cover shooting and first person hand to hand combat. You also have an adrenaline meter which, when full, lets you pull of a finishing move, either shooting or hand to hand combat, which leads to an instant kill. I enjoyed my time with the game, but the experience was dragged down by some flaws and poor design choices. For example, the game is predominantly a cover based 3rd person shooter, but it struggles to implement the movement into or out of cover, which is really down to the controls. The gunplay itself is good and aiming works fine. The levels are designed with this cover in mind, full of things to hide behind. The issue is that you don't really know which you can use as cover. I found myself running up to objects and then awkwardly standing around getting shot as my characters refused to hide behind whatever it was. It's little issues like this that feel a bit amateur and really highlights that this was one of HMS's first games. The reliance on quick time events was another frustration. When you are not headshotting bad guys, you are punching them in the face in a 1 on 1 fighting game style combat section. This was a nice change of pace from the many third person brawlers on the console, but it can get a bit stale as you basically mash x and y in between blocking. Because of this, the inclusion of random QTEs during these fights was a very weird design choice as you really don't have time to react in the middle of a mash X combo. These issues don't ruin the game, it is still a lot of fun to play and the short campaign doesn't overstay its welcome. I really enjoyed jumping around the globe visiting a variety of different areas, and the few driving sections were a nice distraction. However, it must definitely is a flawed game, clunky and full of strange issues and design choices. If you can get past these, you will have fun with it, but don't expect a polished experience.

Everything I have said about Fall of Cybertron holds true for this one. It's a surprisingly fun 3rd person action adventure romp. It has 3rd person shooting sections and some driving too. Even as a non-transformers fan, I was drawn into this one and feel that with all the characters and story cutscenes, it would be even more appealing to fans of the series. It's difficult to separate the two games in terms of how enjoyable they are. They both have nice short and simple levels with some great action sequences which add a bit of variety to the gameplay. The voice acting and story is great and you can tell a lot of effort has been put into both games. I'd put this one slightly behind Fall of Cybertron as, while it is a very similar game, I found the environment in this game slightly blander and more gray. That being said, it's a great game in its own right and well worth picking up.

Carrier Command: Gaea Missions, a reboot of a series that you have probably never heard of. With a very weird title, CCGM was destined to fail. Of course, poor selling games can sometimes be fun or offer something new, but Carrier Command is just a mess. The game is an odd mixture of very bland FPS gameplay with some vehicular combat and some very limited strategy elements. It's the same old story of developers dumbing down games and turning them into first person shooters for the console release, but it leaves a extremely unenjoyable experience. Starting off on a warship, you will deploy vehicular combat units onto a map and then control one of them while issuing orders to the others. The areas are quite vast but extremely bland and the simple enemies and repeated gray bases provide little in the way of visual stimulus. Controlling your vehicles can be an issue, especially in water, which creates lots of frustrating sections of gameplay. The FPS sections are not any better, with some of the weakest feeling guns I can remember on the console. I spent a few hours fumbling around the campaign, most of the time getting frustrated by the lack of guidance and my own lack of progression. Definitely one of the least enjoyable games in terms of gameplay on the console. Don't say I didn't warn you.