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.

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.

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.

Instant Brain is a Japan only release from Cave, the makers of many of the best shmups ever released. A departure from their usual format, Instant Brain goes down the other route most Japan only 360 games go for and is a visual novel. Now these are pretty difficult to review. I'm not opposed to visual novels, video games as a media are made better with variety and I have enjoyed some translated versions myself such as coffee talk on the Xbox one. Yet, without being able to speak Japanese this one is a tough sell. If you are not familiar with this type of game, it's basically an interactive story where you read what the characters have to say and can respond by choosing dialogue options which affect how the game plays out and if this doesn't sound appealing I can see why. In most cases these games are also a bit creepy and pervy, featuring lots of boobs basically. Instant Brain is no exception on this regard, the majority of the characters are big booby women and you also unlock some particularly creepy pictures of them. I'm not sure if this is common in other forms of media, but it's really off-putting and I really wish they didn't go for this smutty vibe. Now with all these issues, I will say IB seems like one of the better visual novels on the console. The story, while I didn't fully understand, seems more interesting. It is split up into chapters, each of which being a murder investigation. You need to use your camera to take photos and find clues within the photos to find out who killed the victim. It's not too difficult to follow and there are some interesting characters along the way. IF you understand Japanese, I actually think this would be a lot of fun despite being a bit word heavy. Now hears the thing, this disk includes one of the greatest shmups of all time, Dodonpachi. You do have to unlock it, but its really worth the price of admission alone and is basically the main reason I recommend this.

Development cycle hell game with horrible reviews on release, Aliens Colonial Marines is a mess. It's a real shame as it could have been really decent, especially seeing as how good Alien Isolation was. Instead of an interesting horror game, we have a fairly generic FPS which isn't quite as bad as most people say. With a fairly standard story of a fire-team being sent into a space ship with unknown problems, ACM takes you along a very short campaign with some standard multiplayer features that we don't need to think about in 2024. Perhaps it was my really low expectation, but I did find myself enjoying my time with the game. I didn't notice many glitches which are frequently complained about and did quite enjoy the atmosphere of the game which looks and feels like the movie. The dark abandoned space ship, the Xenomorphs which constantly hunt you and the motion tracker. Now this doesn't hide the poor enemy AI and bog-standard FPS combat, but it does go some way to make the game more enjoyable. Aliens Colonial Marines is kinda bad, but not as bad as everyone thinks. As a huge FPS and Aliens fan, I enjoyed my time with ACM. If you see it cheap, give it a try.

If you remove all the exercise and dance related game, you are left with about 3 games. This isn't that surprising as while the kinect was a great idea, despite Microsoft's best efforts, most of the games were frustrating to play. I'm not sure if they had a gun to their head, but somehow Microsoft convinced famed indie game developer Twisted Pixel to develop a full kinect release. Twisted Pixel's The Gunstringer then is a bit of an anomaly in that it is a rail shooter game which controls fine and is fun to play. Levels are mostly run and gun style. Your character is constantly moving forward. You use your left hand to control your characters movement, avoiding obstacles and popping out of cover to shoot enemies. Your right had is used to aim at enemies and fire. The controls work fairly well and while it can be tiring, it's way less frustrating than most kinect games that I have tried. There are some slight variations, some platforming sections and light gun style sections, plus the boss fights at the end of most levels add to the enjoyment. The wild west theme and humour that Twisted Pixel are known for really shine through and best of all you can play it sat down. It's refreshing to see a developer put effort into a kinect title so if you are looking to play one, this is one of the best.

A fairly crappy dance game with very few features. Hip Hop Dance Experience is saved by being full of bangers. There's a real lack of game modes, a seriously terrible training section and the body detection is basically broken. I mean you can stand still and the game still seems to think you are dancing. I also felt like the game did a pretty poor job at telling you if you are doing a well or not. You feel like you have done great in a level, every move you do is getting positive feedback but then at the end of the level you end up with a 58% rating. Really not sure what I am doing playing this. It's saved by the track list though. Bangers. Love me some 00s hip hop. Just get the song list and stick it on Spotify.

The Forza Horizon games get a lot of love, and I can see why. It's a game series that really combined all of the racing game trends of the time into a well polished and fun package. You have a big detailed open world map, beautiful graphics, lots of cars and upgrade options and interesting online modes. It's really like an updated version of the Test Drive games for the mass market. There is so much to do in this game. Now this may be great for some people, but it felt a bit bloated for me. There are the collectables, finding new vehicles and smashing through boards. You have skill tasks and jumps. There are the speed traps that you need to drive through as quickly as you can. These all add to the bulk of the game and can make free-roaming around the beautiful map fun if you are into that type of thing. The races themselves are fine, they do their job, but one major issue I have is that the game wants you to complete each race multiple times with different car types. Of course, these are optional, it is just one of the ways that game goes down the "more is better" route. Now, I'm not a huge fan of open world racing, as I think specifically designed tracks and more fun to race on. This issue persists in this game a little, but the decent controls and other racers AI did keep it enjoyable. In this regard it is one of the better open world racing games in terms of the actual racing. It's probably a case of a good game, which is just not for me. I don't care about a clustered map full with collectables, we get enough of that from Ubisoft games. I also am not a fan of the Mid 2010s edgy banter and festival design. I don't love a lot of the features of modern racers with its open world races, rewinds and style points. However, if you do like these things, this is a great game and a pretty decent sequel to the first one on the console, without really changing much. In terms of pure racing, it's pretty fun and better than a lot of racers on the console, and I can recommend it based on that. I do still think its a bit vapid though.

In the mid to late 2000s there was a bunch of 3rd person, over the top action games which I would call dumb fun. Games like Saints Row 1, Just Cause and Crackdown were not particularly graceful games, but they were fun to play. They often had dumb enemy AI, ugly graphics, horrible dialogue and a style of gameplay that focused on action but wasn't very refined. Mercenaries 2 is another one of those game. It gives me a certain style of nostalgia going back to play these games because they are really a window to video games at the time, when having a cool concept and a trailer with some nice explosions would sell a game. Looking back, these games kinda suck but they are fun which is the most important factor.

Mercs 2 puts you in the middle of a fairly insensitive for the time fictional Venezuelan civil war. You and your group of mercenaries start off trying to kill the president, but you end up in a big free-for-all with a bunch of different factions trying to blow everything up. The gameplay is peak PS2 style GTA loving open world 3rd person shooting. The enemy AI is horrible and the gameplay is pretty glitchy, plus it has some very tough missions that can be very frustrating.

Aside from the main story, you also have the constant battle for resources and turf with the rival gangs throughout the map. You can attack these bases on foot or by vehicle, with a huge number of weapons and some nice destructible buildings. They throw in a lot of random mechanics also. You can call in air strikers and air support from your home base. These require you to spend certain resources such as oil and money, which also need to be collected (via helicopter pick up which you call in) and are normally guarded by a bunch of enemies. It's a very time consuming ebb and flow, with enemies and bases respawning and various groups controlling different areas.

It reminds me of a mix of different mechanics from games of a similar era such as Far Cry 2, The Godfather and Just Cause. It's a classic case of dumb fun, these extra elements of open world gameplay are a nice distraction when you get stuck on some difficult campaign mission, yet you could find yourself totally engrossed in them. A dated buggy and ugly mess, Mercs 2 is a classic mid 2000s copycat game with its dated humour and gameplay design. Still enjoyable though.

Take everything you know and love about the highly underrated Conflict series of games and deflate it into a bland FPS game, that is really all there is to say about Conflict Denied Ops. A game so bad that even me, someone who loves crappy FPS games, hates it. You are put in control of one of two characters, a sniper or a heavy machine gunner, and run through levels blasting stuff. They seem to be aiming for the same character design as Kane and Lynch, but gameplay wise it doesn't really matter which you choose and you can switch between the two whenever you like. The coop mode is a nice inclusion in this fairly short and bland campaign, but playing alone with the AI is extremely frustrating. It has some fairly bog standard N64 Goldeneye style missions, like protecting the scientist while he hacks the mainframe or survive waves of enemies for 3 minutes, which are alright but not enough to make it worth playing. It really is a fairly bland game. If anything stands out, it is the horrible controls. While not unresponsive, the button layout is quite unique and perhaps counterintuitive. Even worse, you can't change the aim sensitivity. The other thing that stood out was how terrible the enemy AI was. Either they will pop out of nowhere right next to you and kill you in seconds or they will be running from place to place like a headless chicken. It makes the game difficult and frustrating, especially with the sparse checkpoints and missions which require protecting NPCs. The Conflict series died for the sins of this game, and there are many many sins in it. At least the Japanese market had the decency to call it Double Clutch, which is much cooler. If you see a copy for sale, hide it behind other games so no one buys it.

Nintendo makes such incredible, iconic games that they become the cornerstones of genres. Instead of searching for platformers, people will google "what is the best Mario game on the Xbox 360" or "what games are like Mario Kart on the xbox 360". Darksiders then would be considered the best Zelda clone on the console and perhaps the only one really. Darksiders is a hack and slash adventure game released in 2010 by Virgil games set in a fictional future earth which is in the middle of some kind of war between the factions of heaven and hell. You play as War, one of the 4 horsemen of the apocalypse, trying to figure out what actually went wrong. Now for a start, the game looks great. The abandoned modern earth setting, with it's destroyed cities, beautiful libraries and gloomy cemeteries is juxtaposed with the dark and menacing factions of hell all black and red and the bright forces of heaven with their white and orange glow. It's a really nice comic book style design which feels both unique and interesting as you play through it. The gameplay is a mix of Metrovania style adventure and puzzles, mixed with some hack and slash combat with combos and special moves. The combat is decent, its responsive and there are a nice variety of combos and upgrades to keep you happy, especially during some of the boss fights that the game throws at you. The puzzles and Zelda style adventuring is really the star of the show though. As you venture through the interconnected world, you enter different dungeons, complete puzzles and boss fights and find new tools and weapons, which in turn open new areas. It's a tried and tested gameplay style and it works great. These dungeons are the real highlight of the game and the puzzles and collectibles make it a lot of fun to explore. The caveat to this is that there really isn't enough of them. The combat and map exploring are nice, but I really would have liked more dungeons and more upgrades and perhaps more areas to revisit with the new tools that you unlock. The tools are another of the highlights of the game. A mixture of weapons and items used to explore, each one has it's own unique usage and most can be used in combat to varying effect depending on the enemy. You have a glove which helps you break ice and can stun enemies. A hookshot which helps you traverse big gaps and even an ability to slow down time. I do have a bit of an issue here though. While some of these upgrades are useful, others are basically pointless. In the mid game you unlock an item which lets you build shadow bridges. Ok cool, but you use this one during the game and it has no other use. Also, most of the best upgrades are at the end of the game so you don't have a lot of chances to use them. There's a cool portal gun and a shadow vision mode which are both great to use in the final dungeon but would have been nice earlier on. The biggest issue is really how boring the first hour is. You are basically in a poor man's god of war clone for the first hour and it's really off-putting. I tried this game about 3 times before it finally clicked and I managed to make it to a dungeon. I had a great time with Darksiders. It is basically a Zelda clone and I am ok with that. It's just a shame that with some slight tweaks it could have been even better.

A FPS game which involves time travelling between the civil war, WW2 and the future. The story winds through time zones and involves attempts to correct the mistakes of the past. You can mow through enemy soldiers in the civil war with modern assault weapons and you even get an achievement for punching a horse. On paper, this game sounds fucking awesome. It's not. Now this game is a failure, but not for the usual reasons. As mentioned earlier the game has an interesting concept and the story is quite engaging. The game itself actually plays fairly well too. The controls work, it is easy to aim and hit the target. The weapons are pretty fun to use and it's nice jumping between different times keeping the gameplay fresh. The sections where you use automatic weapons in the civil war were so much fun. The issues mostly arise from the maps themselves. Now most levels are quite open often forested area. This is quite a change from the more linear sections we see in FPS campaigns like Call of Duty. The problem is, these open maps mean you are never forced into areas which are set up for fun battles. Most of the time you have no cover and enemies are coming from all sides leaving you running around in circles trying to shoot them. You do have some teammates to help you but it's pretty hard to distinguish them from the enemy, especially in low light areas. It feels more like a hunting game than an FPS and it really removes a lot of the fun and tactical elements of great shooters. They also really messed up some of the most basic elements of the game. The sound is really poor. I was unable to hear most voices and had to resort to subtitles. However, these subtitles were pretty useless as they were difficult to read on the light backgrounds. This is an issue with all the texts in the game and even the game map. It's basic errors like this that are really hard to accept. Now, I'm normally a fan of these games but I really could not get into this. Cool concept done very poorly.

Looking back at this game in 2024, we will probably see it in a different light. Nowadays, the name Resident Evil has a different meaning. We have first person games in the mainline series, we have lame spin offs like raccoon city, even the remakes have changed the way the games play. I think people were perhaps too harsh on the game when it came out. The criticisms of it being too action orientated and not a real Resi game were never really thrown at Resi 4, so I was kinda surprised how angry people were about the action oriented approach of Resi 5. Plus the coop play and AI character was really not that bad. Yes Sheva was a greedy bitch and would use all the ammo and eat any egg as soon as she saw it, but she was pretty effective in combat. Don't get me started on the boulder scene. Cheesy dialogue and lame cute scenes are peak Resi, so the more the better for me, Jill Sandwich anyone? Resi 5 does have a different feel when we compare it to the original resident evil, but so do 3 and 4 and I have enjoyed them all. Now, I'm not going to run through what Resi 5 is, as most people probably know by now. I really would encourage you to play it. The issues with the game have been overblown and most importantly it's fun to play. Popping zombies with headshots. Hacking snakes with your dagger. Sheva going ape-shit on a group of enemies with her shotgun. I had so many memorable moments playing through this. A great game, particularly if you have a friend to play through it with. Stupid fun and one that should not be taken too seriously.

I don't have much to add about this entry in the series. It is definitely better than 2k6 and feels more polished. What I enjoyed about the game most was how customisable the game mechanics are. There are in-game options menus that let you fiddle with all the different mechanics of the game from the chance of 3 point shots going in or how successful steals will be. This is super helpful as it gives you opportunities to hone aspects of your gameplay that you need to work on. It definitely helped me improve as a player, I still suck though. It's NBA 2k7, there are so many of these games on the console so I don't really see the point of owning this one. It's a decent game though and I'm sure people are pretty nostalgic about it.

Is it just me or are the naming conventions of fighting games pretty weird? There are some cool ass names like Mortal Kombat, Soul Calibur and Power Stone. Some names which sound quite erotic like Tech Romancer and Smash Bros. Then others are just boring like Street Fighter and Virtua Fighter. Virtua Fighter 5 is the fifth in the long standing Sega fighting series which we rarely hear about nowadays. The problem is that this game series doesn't really stand out from the crowd of flashier counterparts. Street Fighter has the big market appeal, MK the gore, Dead or Alive has the boobs. What does VF5 do differently? Now there is nothing inherently wrong with VF5. It is a competent 3d fighter. The combat is based on the ebb and flow of the timing of your blocks and attacks, with the additional use of the 3rd plane to avoid strikes and counter attack. I find it a little tricky but it does definitely play in a different way than 2D fighting games and is pretty smooth. The game offers a nice roster of characters and the graphics are clean and colourful. That being said, it doesn't really stand out as a particularly interesting or unique game for people who are not already fans of the series. One issue that I often have with fighting games is that they seem a little threadbare in terms of content and game modes. This is also partially true from VF5. You don't really have a story mode and the tutorial is pretty lackluster. That being said I did really enjoy the arcade battle mode which was quite unique. This isn't to say that VF5 is a complete disaster. I think the beauty of it lies in its simplicity with its solid but not flashy mechanics that work just as intended. A highly refined and simple pure fighting game which probably appeals more to fighting purists, which I am most definitely not.