Game Reviews

Some of GTA4's problems can be attributed to the developers' desire to hold features over from previous incarnations, and the rest seem to be caused by the understandable lack of focus that results from attempting to create a truly epic game world. All of these problems are outweighed by what the game gets right, both in the superlative story it tells and the unprecedented freedom the multiplayer mode offers.

The ultimate laid-back, chill-out experience, Arika's is another in a series of entries into the tiny, nicher-than-niche undersea exploration genre. The difference between this game and the abortive efforts that came before? It's actually good.

After picking up a favorable critical reception at the International Games Festival, Audiosurf has been the indie flavor of the month on Steam, and rightly so. Ostensibly it is about veering a hovercraft left and right along a race track that undulates to the beat of your chosen song and collecting colored blocks for points, but the grid that those color blocks fall into turns the game into a kind of two-tiered puzzler. Keen racing reactions are needed to collect and correctly position high-scoring blocks of the same color into groups of 3 or more (after which, as you may have guessed, they will disappear).

Created by Masaya Matsuura, the man who pioneered music-generated gaming in Vib Ribbon, Musika is certainly the most baffling game of the four. Not because of any exciting Japanese weirdness or ultra-tough difficulty (both staples of old school rhythm action), but simply because there appears to be no game here.

As polished and colourful as Phase is, playing Beats on PSP afterwards feels like being sat next to a giant subwoofer in the trendiest, spaciest club in town. This is very much rhythm action seen through a Tetsuya Mizuguchi kaleidoscope.

Made by Rock Band and Guitar Hero pioneers Harmonix, Phase harks back most closely to the developer's outstanding debut titles Frequency and Amplitude. A now very familiar vertical track scrolls toward the screen, while the player attempts to hit the notes dotted along each of the track's 3 lines with the use of the 3 central iPod buttons (left, centre, right).

Experiments are a necessary part of the development of game design. If some industrious soul hadn't invented the life bar and health pack, we'd be stuck with one-hit death. And if another, even more industrious soul hadn't invented progressive health, we'd still be stuck with the life bar and health pack. Of course, not every experiment is a positive one, and not every change is for the better. The Club is a perfect demonstration of that concept.

Virtua Fighter 5 is a fighting game stripped down to the most basic elements. It's almost as if the developers don't have the slightest interest in attracting new players. I'm sure they're turning a profit; according to the credits, the game is made by a shockingly small number of people, and it has a long life in the remaining arcades, but I can't help but wonder how long a series can last with a static user base.

Watching the balletic violence, the cinematic camera angles, and the endless transformations of characters into monsters, the fact became inescapable that as crazed and borderline incoherent as the story was, the developers cared far more about it then they did the sections of gameplay that happen in between the movies.

If there were a heaven for cars, then Burnout Paradise would be it. In Paradise City, there are no drivers in the cars and no people on the streets. Traffic laws are nonexistent, and the laws of physics apply only loosely. Not only that, but cars seemingly drop right out of the sky over at the junkyard, as if deposited there by some automotive deity.