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.

Insane Bomberman reboot which is a really interesting relic of the era. In an attempt to woo western consumers, Hudson transformed their cute loveable Bomberman character into a "realistic" post apocalyptic style disgusting brown robot thing. A lot has been said about this dumb change and the jiggly boob physics that the game has, and yeah it's weird but I don't hate it. It's a nice window to a time when this was the style of games and everything was brown and grim, gritty and cool. That's not really the issue with the game though, there are many more, far worse issues with this horrible game. The first noticeable offense is the weird camera angle. Instead of showing the whole battlefield from above, it gives a slightly angled view around your character. You can zoom in and out a bit, but you can never see the whole map. It's infuriating as you can't see what you are running into and can't plan your moves ahead. Weirdly, the free play mode gives you the standard camera, so this is only an issue in the campaign. However, this leads on to the second issue, the lack of couch coop. Another incredibly dumb decision, especially seeing as how dead the online servers were even at release. Like the main reason most people play Bomberman is to play with friends. So, you don't need to bother with free play, but at least it has a nice 100 level campaign right? Well, not really. Yes, it has 100 levels, but all the maps are the same. This seems particularly lazy, even the game boy game from 1994 had some map variety. Now if you can see past all these flaws and enjoy the campaign then great, but you have to complete all 100 levels in one sitting as there are no save points. Die on level 99, start again. No coop, shitty camera, 1 map, no saves. Ignore the graphics, this one has far worse problem.

No one likes this one. The 3rd release in the NFS series on the 360, 2008's undercover feels like a product of the yearly release franchise that NFS became. Taking notes from the popular most wanted series, the game tells the story of some cool underground racing scene, featuring stylised real life actors in the cutscenes. This was actually my favourite part of the game. It's so painfully 2008 that it hurts and masochists like me will feel right at home in this classic cringe fest. On to the racing itself, well it's not good. We have a very bland open world map. It looks very low res and ugly and doesn't feel like it was designed with racing in mind. These type of maps work in games when there are lots of nooks and crannies to explore, secrets to find and jumps to try out. Undercover's map isn't like this. It is empty. Racing around the same lifeless map is extremely tedious and made worse by the cop chases. How can I hide from the cops if there is no where to hide? The game also introduces some destructible elements to the map, which while nice, are heavily underutilised. The game is also 100% an arcade racer, so keep that in mind. Really can't recommend this one.

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.

Another Dragon Ball game and another not very good one. This one was even hated by most Dragon Ball game fans, so It's probably not so controversial that I think this one sucks. It's another 3d Fighter with very similar mechanics to the other games. It feels like a much simplified version of Raging Blast and is even worse for it. Fights are basically a mash x combo followed by a pointless rock paper scissor style mini game. It really removes much of the player input and as such, the game feels like it is playing itself. There's less characters and the make your own hero mode just flat out sucks. There's a major lack of depth with the character creation and it's just very forgettable. To be honest, most people will either find the game itself super forgettable overall or remember it as rock paper scissors from hell. In a sea of Dragon Ball games on the console, this is one of them. Even the most diehard of Dragon Ball fans don't need this. Go pick up Raging Blast if you really must play.

Very weird FPS and 3rd person brawler hybrid movie tie-in game. King Kong was one of the release titles for the console and as such probably got more playtime and accolades that it deserved. It's the type of game that looks decent in videos but is actually a chore to play. You play mostly as Jack (Adrian Brody in the movie) running around shooting stuff on an island full of giant bugs and dinosaurs. These parts of the game feel like they should be survival horror style. You have a very limited number of weapons and ammo and frequently rely on picking up sticks and bones to fend off the various creatures that attack you. The lack of a hud or aiming reticle gives the game quite a cool atmosphere and a unique feeling which make these sections somewhat interesting but still often a bit of a slog. The problems are numerous. Linear levels, dumb NPCs that follow you around, poor controls and repetitive puzzle sections which normally require setting bushes on fire. Worse still are the King Kong missions. Playing as King Kong, these missions feel like continuous quick time events mixed with some very basic brawling. The controls also are annoying, making the boss fights much more frustrating than they should be and I found myself dreading playing as Kong, which should really be the highlight of the game. If you stick the weapons and unlimited ammo cheats on, the game becomes much more playable. Still, it's no where near as much fun as it looks and even King Kong fans will struggle.

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.

The first of 2 Monster truck games released on disk for the console, Monster Jam puts in you the shoes of a Monster Truck driver taking part in a variety of competitions. It's officially licensed so it is packed with all the famous trucks such as Grave Digger and in what I assume are real life locations and competitions from around the globe. I was pretty new to Monster Trucks before playing this, so let me try to run down how it works. A section of the game is some fairly standard racing competitions. You race against other trucks and smash through obstacles, smash into each other and smash through different routes and shortcuts. These are probably the most interesting part of the game. It's quite difficult at first. The trucks skate around as if they are on ice and crashes can send you flying off the track. This is probably fairly realistic as I can't image these trucks are easy to drive in real life. However, once you get used to the controls it is pretty fun. The physics are nice and it's great smashing through the environment. You get a real feel of the track and going over jumps is a lot of fun. The other modes are an elimination mode which is quite similar to racing, a trick based mode which is a bit like tony hawks in a monster truck and a head to head mode which is a time trial. These other modes add some variety but are not as good as the racing. The main issue with the game is how quickly I got bored with it. There's no real progression to the game. Each level just feels like more of the same and is in reality quite simplistic, which detracts from the fun and the longevity of the game. I wouldn't bother with this one but I didn't hate it.

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.