Magic the Gathering: Battlegrounds
XBox,Strategy Combat,7/10 – April 2005 Think pokemon meets street fighter. This is strategy combat where it’s tactics and planning that win a battle rather than button mashing. Collect mana orbs, cast creature spells, magic spells, enhancement spells; try to do all of this and still evade your opponent’s attacks. I got to the pen-ultimate level […]
Fable
XBox,Adventure,9/10 – January 2005 This game has the most flexibility and scope that I’ve ever come across. To give you a clue about how varied the objects in the game are, you can buy “tofu”. Have you ever seen tofu in a game before? You can get married and divorced, dig, fish, get haircuts, tatoos, […]
Halo 2
XBox,First Person Shooter,7/10 – September 2004 Friends ask me what’s the difference between Halo 1 and 2. Halo 2 has more vehicles and the marines can now drive them, you can hold 2 weapons, you get to be a Covernent soldier and thats about it. Except that the multiplayer mode has been boasted with XBox […]
Burnout 3
XBox,Battle Racing,9/10 – July 2004 Go Fast and Hit Stuff. This game introduced a great form of driving combat which I first saw in “destruction derby”. You get to knock opponent cars off the track! The levels manage to vary greatly and the game gives the best impression of speed that I’ve seen so far. […]
Advance Wars 2
GBA,Turn-based strategy,9/10 – March 2004 This is a tweeked version of Advanced Wars 1 with the introduction of interesting defensive buildings such as canons, missles and lasers. There is also the new NeoTank which expains why the strong tanks of AW1 were only called “Medium” Tanks. The game is set at a perfect level of […]
Colin Mcrae Rally 4
XBox,Rally Driving,7/10 – January 2004 I’m into racing games like burnout and as a consequence I initially found Colin Mcrae impossibly slow and difficult due to it’s realism – It simulates the driving of a real rally car so well that you have to be an expert rally driver. The reason I stuck at it […]
Panzer Dragoon – Orta
XBox,Flight shoot-em-up,4/10 – December 2003 This game reminded me of “star fox” on the N64 but with considerably more complex controls and hugely stunning visuals. The graphics are why I got this game, I wanted to see what an XBox was capable of and the weird alien landscapes provide a good jaw dropping demonstration. The […]
Jet Set Radio Future
XBox,Adventure,7/10 – November 2003 This is an excellent game but I nearly didn’t complete it because it’s often really unclear what the-next-thing-to-do is. It’s not so much the doing, it’s more the figuring out how to do it in the first place (which really cheeses me off). You need to learn levels to get around […]
The Lord of the Rings – The Two Towers
XBox,Hack&Slash,5/10 – September 2003 This game takes scenes from the 1st two LOTR’s films and turns them into interactive battles. Each scene blends with DVD film footage smoothly and impressively. I think they did a great job of doing what they intended i.e. creating a film/video game couple however I didn’t like it at all. […]
The House Of The Dead III
XBox,,5/10 – July 2003 You have to get a piece of the arcade game action now that it’s possible on a console, I mean it’s a way of saving money isn’t it? This was the first game on the XBox to come packaged with a light-gun (a MadCatz Blaster) which is the only way to […]
Enter the Matrix
XBox,TPS,9/10 – June 2003 This game taught me the lesson that one shouldn’t take magazine reviews as gospel. My most respected mags, namely Edge and Games rated this game 3/10 and 4/10 respectively but I loved it. The great thing about is that the story line fits perfectly between “The final flight of the osiris” […]
Baldur’s Gate : Dark Alliance
XBox,RPG,5/10 – June 2003 I got this because it was the first 2-player co-operative RPG for the XBOX that I’d seen. It’s not a deep game, it’s a simple hack and slash with very little inventory management or character progression and a shallow dis-joined storyline. The graphics are state-of-the-art with vegetation blowing in the wind, […]
Advance Wars
GBA,Turn-based strategy,9/10 – June 2003 Nintendo does chess. This is a game of tactics and like chess things aren’t left to chance, you can get to know the exact outcome of a clash between 2 units. Unfortunately it seems to be geared towards kids but you wont be able to win by force-in-numbers rather than […]
Halo
XBOX,FPS,9/10 – August 2002 There’s so many good things about Halo but if I was to name the best I would say it was the vehicles. When you get in a vehicle the view moves from 1st person to 3rd person and the feel of the game totally changes increasing variety and pace. Other AI […]
Tony Hawks 4
XBOX,sport,9/10 – August 2002 When you break these games down it is really just a exercise to memorize sequences of buttons. But with todays zillion-buttoned controllers, this is made difficult. There’s something about Tony Hawks games that gets you addicted so that you feel you have to complete all the tasks (but your’ll never be […]
