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.

It's interesting to see nostalgia bring back genres of games that were forgotten about. Boomer shooters, Roguelikes, 2d Metroidvanias, the list goes on. One genre that is yet to receive a revival is the 3d person lock on shooter genre. Perhaps it died with Resi 4 or with better aiming controls but even in the 360 generation we didn't see many games like Jet Force Gemini any more. So, when I booted up G.I.Joe and saw it was a coop 3rd person lock-on shooter, I was pleasantly surprised. The game has a fixed camera and when you encounter enemies you just lock on and fire, using the right stick to switch between enemies. This enjoyment lasted all of about 10 minutes until I remembered that these type of games kinda suck and are extremely repetitive. G.I.Joe is basically that, a crappy repetitive shooter than isn't even really much fun with a friend. There are collectables, there are different character classes, there's a half-baked story and voice acting lines but none of this can save the bad gameplay. The most frustrating part is that it is pretty easy to die and then you need to start the whole level all over again. I don't mind this difficulty, but there is not much you can do about getting killed. There is very little cover and any cover you do find explodes 3 seconds after you hide behind it leaving you feeling frustrated. Let's not bring back the lock-on shooters, they are not good. If you want proof of how much they suck, play this.

NFSHP is another NFS racer, this time giving the player the chance to play as illegal street racers evading the persistent police force or playing as the police force themselves. I'm very much in two minds about this game. The first time I played it I had quite a bit of fun with it, but the second time I didn't. That's not to say the game hasn't aged well. It still looks nice and is pretty fun to play. The cops in this game are relentless and a thorn in your side during street races. It creates a lot of fun moments, weaving between road blocks and sending the cops crashing into traffic. It also adds to the tension of races, especially with the countdown timer informing you how close the end of the race is. When you play as a cop it's a bit less exciting. You have to catch up to and wreck the street-racers before the race ends. You have some gadgets such as spike strips to use, most of which are useful. I did get a little bored of just ramming into the side of vehicles again and again though. The flaws of the game became more apparent on a second playthrough. I think with the influence of games like Forza Horizon, the series has very much lost its way in trying to capture what is popular, and I think this game is the start of this series' downfall. While games like Most Wanted 05 and Pro Street were not really my cup of tea, they at least felt unique. Hot Pursuit's cops and racers theme gives it the appearance of uniqueness, but under this thin veneer there are clear signs of the classic vapid and souless modern racer. The online connectivity is thrown at you as soon as you boot up the disk, encouraging you to shell out for an online pass and upload clips to whatever dumb service it is. The tracks also feel boring. While they haven't gone open world, the tracks are all road tracks and part of a bigger map. As such, there is a real lack of variety. Big long straights, a few corners, some useless shortcuts, it isn't conductive to fun races and feels like it's been done a million times. While the controls are decent in most situations, at high speeds (especially when using boost) it is near impossible to avoid collisions. This feels like a deliberate choice and is accentuated by the overly long crash sequences. This leaves the game feeling like an attempt to merge parts of the Forza and Burnout series, resulting in a insipid, but still enjoyable, racing game.

The year is 1995, it's Saturday morning and you are playing Sega Rally on your Saturn. You have the whole weekend ahead of you. No homework to do. Pure bliss. These were the heydays of the arcade racer, but at some point we lost our way. By the time the Xbox 360 had been released, driving games focused more on realism, car customisation, story and real life locations. Sure there are a lot of great and revolutionary racing games on the console. Grid brought the excellent rewind feature, Test Drive unlimited brought a beautiful open world Hawaiian island, Forza 2 created an almost perfect racing package, all of these changed the way we view racing games. In this regard, Sega Rally Revo stood out like a sore thumb. A pure arcade rally game, with no damage, no customisation, no real life tracks. It didn't go down well with reviewers and in my opinion has been severely misjudged. SRR is an excellent classic arcade racer and a must play for all retro arcade racing fans. For a start the racing is smooth and competitive. You take part in a selection of championships, 3 races for each event, against 5 AI opponents. The difficulty of these opponents cannot be changed and it does get really tough. The AI will attack you aggressively at corners and jump at you if you make even the smallest mistake. It's a hard but fair style of racing. There are times when you have managed to pick up speed and are ready to overtake the pack but the car in front of you swerves right into your path causing you to lose all momentum. At the same time, sometimes when you make a mistake the AI will come crashing into the back of you sending you flying forward and able to hold onto your position. It's both frustrating and incredibly satisfying at the same time. You have 6 sets of tracks, based of different locations and track types. Arctic has snow and volcano ash on the track, and the icy roads will have you skidding. Safari tracks are dusty which affects your vision. The Canyon tracks get very muddy with huge water puddles that slow you right down. Every track feels different in terms of the feedback from the road and it's a real nice feature which I much prefer to having a huge number of tracks that feel the same. Similarly, while there are not a huge number of cars in the game, each one handles differently and you will have favourites based on how they handle the terrain. As mentioned earlier, you are not bogged down by car customisation or autobraking. You have 2 options, auto or manual gears and a road or off-road set up. It keeps things simple and focuses the game on the fun part, racing. What makes the game really standout is the graphics and the deformable terrain. This game looks incredible. It's not something that I really pay attention to in games but even for a 2007 release, it's one of the best looking games on the console. The car models are nice and the lighting works well, but it's the tracks and the environment which really standout. This is probably due to the aforementioned deformable terrain. As you race around the circuits, the tracks themselves are affected by your racing lines. This could be simple like cutting lines in the snow to make it more compact and creating a harder more grippy surface for racers behind you, or more impressively changing the formation and area of puddles of water in the road as you carve through the mud. It really changes the tracks every single race and keeps things fresh and exciting. It looks beautiful too. I love getting my car all caked up in mud before driving through a puddle and washing it all off. Every time I play this game I enjoy it a bit more and I can't sing it's praises enough. So is it perfect? Well no. I can understand people being frustrated by its difficulty. A big crash can really mess you up for a whole race and the AI is brutal. The small number of tracks may be a turn off for some, but each race plays out differently each time so I have never found it an issue. One minor issue I have with the game is that you always start off at the back of the pack, no matter where you finished in the previous race, but this is mere nitpicking. I'm an official SRR fan boy now. There is nothing like it on the console and it is a must have for any 360 collector.

It's 9am, I've got the house to myself for a couple of hours. I hastily close all the curtains and slip the Just Dance 4 disk into my console. I pray that no one walks in on me dancing to Umbrella by Rihanna 3 times in a row on my own just to unlock some dumb video game points. As the song goes on, I start to get into the rhythm of the song and put a bit more effort into my moves. Maybe I am having fun, I think to myself. I start to build up a slight sweat and really get into it, running my hand up my leg and shaking my hip, the best Rihanna impression I can muster. As the song comes to a close, I manage a 5 star rating, sick! Following the song the game decides to share with me lots of images of me dancing and I realise how stupid I look. I hang my head in shame, shut down the console and remind myself to never embarrass myself like that again.

This game has a target audience and I'm sure you know if you are part of that target audience or not, and I am not. However, for the sake of reviews, I wanted to give all the Just Dance games on the 360 a try. JD4 was the second of the mainline games on the console, after 3, and it is actually really good. Getting the basics out of the way, unlike a lot of kinect games, the game actually works. The motion sensor can track your movements really well and I never really felt hard done by missing moves, it was normally my fault. The songs can be attacked on your own or with a group of up to 4 players and you follow a on screen chracter to perform moves to match the songs. Unlike some other version which use the controllers, the 360 has the kinect to track your whole body and it uses this tracking images to give you scores from perfect to miss. The song list is very subjective, so I won't go too much into that, but it's some basic pop stuff ranging from recent to classics. The songs work well from this type of game and it's just fairly solid all round, with all the songs being fun to dance to and enough content to keep you entertained for a long time. There are some negatives though. The game has a work out mode which measures how many calories you have burned. As far as I can tell though, this is just more dancing, it doesn't change up the game in any drastic way and isn't really competition to any of the kinect fitness games on the console. The other, and more frustrating thing, is the menu navigation. It's a little difficult to explain, but instead of the standard hold your hand over an item to select it method of most kinect games, JD4 goes for a push the button to select it input method. If you have every played a kinect game, you will know how bad at depth perception the kinect is and how frustrating this will become. Still, if you can get past this, you will enjoy this one. It's one of the better kinect games on the console.

What a dumb name for a game. So here we are with another Dragon Ball game with another confusing title. How do we remember this one? Well it was the first Dragon Ball games on the console, released in 2008 and it looked great at time. Partly because it was the first released on the console, Burst Limit really sets the standard for the Dragon Ball games to come. This is not because it's an amazing game, but because like most DB games on the console, it is very average. In fact, it feels way more stripped back of features than the 3rd Budokai game found on the HD collection which came out a few years before. BL and most DB games have a simple formula. One on one fighting games with a short campaign covering a large story based on the famous anime. They all have loads of characters, lots of combos to remember, and a Ki system to charge up special attacks. Burst Limit doesn't do a lot to stand out from the crowd and offers little in terms of innovation or distance from this tired old formula. Fights all basically take place a similar area, each level offering little more than some dialogue and the fight itself. Of course, the fighting is what you have come here for, yet the fight system in Burst Limit doesn't really offer enough depth to compete with the traditional fighting games like Tekken and Street Fighter. I was expecting a bit more in terms of world building, tasks, challenges or even something like the 3D open world environments found in the Naruto games. Spam punches and kicks, build up Ki, unleash your special. So is there anything to like about the game. Well, the tutorial is nice and does a good job at explaining the game mechanics. They have also added some in-fight events which add a bit of story and variety to the fights. I found these interesting at first, but quickly it felt like they were only added to make the fights last longer. The campaign itself is also very short and quite stale. It's a real shame that most of the DB games on the console are fairly average, but in that way BL is a nice place to start. If you dig this, you will probably enjoy these others and vice versa. Disappointing, but a taste of what was to come.

A lot of people don't know this exists. A collection of only 3 arcade games, this might seems like a rather lean offering on disk, but let me tell you these are some of the best arcade games on the console and this disk is more than worth owning. Of course, with the other arcade game disks offering 5 games, it was a strange decision to only stick 3 on here. Perhaps because of this, this is the only arcade compilation disk that I can think of which doesn't have any filler. Luminees is a puzzle game, a combination of puyo puyo and tetris, which I would say is even more fun than those two. It's the classic simple mechanics that are easy to get started with but hard to master and very addictive. Secondly, we have Geometry Wars 2, a twin stick shooter which is one of the best games on the console. Behind the very simple graphics there is a highly complex and fun shooter with excellent music and 6 fun games modes. If you have GW1 or 3 already, you might not need this, but 2 is my favourite of the 3 and is a blast to play. Finally, we have bomberman. This is a really interesting one. We actually got a full price bomberman on the console early on in the consoles life cycle and it got terrible reviews. It was a very basic version of the bomberman game and really should have been a $5 arcade game. This included version of bomberman is much better. It includes a larger variety of game modes, multiplayer online and couch coop and also the classic visuals that you love. It doesn't quite reach the heights of the SNES games, but is still the desk physical release of bomberman on the console. For me, these are 3 excellent games that are well worth playing. If you don't have them already, pick it 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.

NCAA Football 10 is the 4th NCAA football game on the console, and I'm kinda running out of things to say about this series. This entry plays similarly to the previous game 09 and is aimed at fans of the college game. I'm sure if you played this growing up and have nostalgia for it then it's your favourite. But it's difficult to differentiate for the average player who hasn't tried any of them. If you are just want a football game and don't really care whether it is college or NFL then it boils down to two things. Madden has the better gameplay and NCAA is more feature and game mode rich. A standard exhibition game of Madden is more enjoyable, especially for rookies, and is less likely to have any bugs. NCAA on the other hand has a nice selection of game modes which will keep you playing the game in the long term. Whichever fits your needs is the better choice. As for NCAA, it's a fine football game. Yet, with subsequent games improving the formula, this again is a bit of a waste of space on your shelf.

I'm probably a little harsh on a lot of sports titles on the console for a number of reasons. First of all, there's millions of them. If you want an NCAA football title, you have 7 to choose from and you don't need them all. Secondly, they are fairly niche. If you don't like cricket, you probably don't want to play any of the cricket games. So for a series like NCAA football, you probably only need to have one of them in your collection and it's not NCAA 08. Now does that make NCAA 08 a bad game? No, it's still pretty decent. I like the NCAA series because of the interesting game modes they have. It's fun playing as a high school student and trying to make it into the NFL. It's fun taking control of a college programme for a few years and recruiting players. The thing about the NCAA football series is that they get better each time. While 08 is still a decent game, (07 is the only bad one in my opinion), aside from it being cheaper, there is no real reason to pick this up.

With all the more recent excellent battlefield campaigns like Battlefield 1 and Bad Company 2, it's easy to forget that the first few battlefield games didn't even include a campaign. For whatever reason, they decided to change that with the release of Battlefield 2 Modern Combat, the first battlefield release on the 360. Based on the PC game battlefield 2, which was multipalyer only, the console version offers a fairly decent single player mode which is very similar to the multiplayer mode. This was a great decision as the multiplayer mode is what battlefield excels at. You are a nameless soldier in wave upon wave of others working together to capture bases and advance further behind enemy lines. It does feel clunky and a bit basic, but it's a real nice throwback to shooters of old and plays to the series strengths. Similarly to the excellent Call of Duty 2, your AI teammates are vital to your survival, and the war off attrition feeling to the game keeps your pushing to make it a little further each run. One of the best aspects of the campaign is the Hot-Swapping feature, which lets your warp between different soldiers at will and pick who you respawn as. This keeps the action constantly going and you can be tactical about who you pick to face the different challenges of each mission. Another funny quirk of the game is how much damage you take is related to how many enemies you can see on the screen. This means that in some cases the best tactic is to look at the floor and just run forward. It's stupid stuff like this that makes the game more enjoyable and it really works as a dumb fun throwback FPS. Surprisngly good and a definitely worth picking up for cheap.

This is the type of game that probably divides people into 2 groups. People who played the game or enjoyed Bakugan as a kid and people who have no idea what it is. I was in the latter group, but having played around half the game, I'm pleasantly surprised. Let's get the obvious out the way, Bakugan is a dated childrens game, which is very simple to play, a little repetative and has horrible graphics. Yet hiding under all of that is a fairly fun animated game. Bakugan is a pokemon style creature brawler. You have different Bakugans, think pokeball and pokemon combined, with different elements (water fire etc) and their own attacks and abilities. The game tells a, as far as i can tell, original story of a boy who is dropped into the bakugan universe. You have to help all the "famous" Bakugan characters to save their world. The story is cheesy as hell, but fun for kids and surprisingly well fleshed out with nice simple cutscenes. The gameplay is split into two different sections, which adds a bit of variety. A simple 3d roaming collection and sneaking section, where you need to get to the end zone without being spotted. This is followed by a battle section where your Bakugan of choice will fight against of bakugans to defend your base and destroy the enemies base. There's a little more to the gameplay, but its fairly simple and easy to pick up. It's not mind-blowing, but It's a pretty interesting game, and I would say a worthy addition to a collection, especially if you have kids.

Madden 09 is a pretty decent entry to the Madden franchise. It has a few updates on previous games, most of them positive. For a start, they removed the stupid vision cone. Additionally there are new animations and an excellent new mode called madden moments where you can play in famous NFL moments from history. This mode is great, but as it's included in future games, it isn't that special. What I would say makes Madden 09 stand out is how beginner friendly it is. You start of with a Madden IQ test to see how good you are at the game. Then you have the training modes to help you improve. The final new addition is the rewind button. Mess up a play and press x to go back and try again. Yes, this is basically cheating and I found myself accidently using it more than meaning to use it, but it's a nice feature to have for new players. Aside from these new features it's a fairly standard early madden affair. The gameplay is decent, if a bit arcadey and simple. It has a nice franchise mode and more game modes than the later online focused Maddens. Now, for these reasons, 09 doesn't really stand out from the next few games in the series. I can recommend it however if you want a nice entry point to the series.

One of the rarer disk releases on the console, Kick Ass 2 is a movie tie in game released exclusively in the EU on the console. This one slipped though the cracks and luckily most people are unaware this game even exists. For those with the misfortune of stumbling across a copy, which is unlikely as this thing is rare and expensive, a common theme appears, boredom and repetition. So what happened with this? Well, despite Kick Ass being a fairly popular movie, the EU only release late in the consoles cycle, paired with the publishers being UIG entertainment (makers of the woeful Young Justace and Bloodbath), it was doomed to fail. This should be no surprise to anyone who has played UIG entertainments games, my console still has nightmare about the equally horrible Young Justace Legacy, but i'll try to do a quick run down as to why it sucks so much. The biggest issue is the extremely repetitive gameplay. Levels consist of you fighting groups of the same enemies, mashing the same buttons again and again. Think Dynasty Warriors but with even worse graphics played with an unresponsive Madcatz n64 controller. It's one of the more frustrating games in terms of controls and it's unresponsiveness is a real test of patience. That is really all there is to the game. There's no powerups, no progression or levelling and no new moves or upgrades. There are a few basically unmissable collectables to "find" but they hardly make any impact on huge number of areas fighting those 4 dudes of all dress the same. The story and dialogue might keep you entertained in a so bad it's good sort of way. For whatever reason they have chosen someone with a heavy eastern European accent to do the voice for Kick Ass. It really adds to the lackluster story and horrible dialogue in the game. It's not worth buying it to hear that though, just look it up online, but it's still very weird. It's genuinely one of the worst games on the console and that is the only reason I could see someone wanting to pick this up.

I've played a couple of Transformers games before this one and haven't been very impressed. It came as a bit of a surprise then that this game is pretty good. Part of the Cybertron series, along with War for Cybertron released a few years earlier, Fall of Cybertron tell the story of.... Well actually I'm not really sure. I'm not a Transformers fan and basically had no idea what was going on in the story. It seemed cool though. The game is a 3rd person shooter, a bit Gears of War esque, with some fun driving sections. It's a fairly short campaign, but its done really well. It has that Micheal Bay action movie style feel, with each section feeling like a really nicely set up action sequence. There are some great set pieces, explosions and effects. It's just the type of silly action fun that you would want from a transformers game. What I enjoyed most was the enemy and weapon variety. Even thought the levels were fairly linear, this variety kept me interested with each weapon feeling unique and useful. It also has a decent level of polish that I didn't expect. Of course it's no Halo or Gears, but it's really well made and feels like a AAA title. The music and sound effects, the great visuals, solid controls and nicely set up tutorial and campaign. Apparently the multiplayer was also excellent back in the day too. A nice little surprise package and a short campaign which I enjoyed quite a bit, a great one to have in the collection.