NFSU 2 DS and Stuff!

Been really busy the last few weeks which is the reson for the lack of updates, this week me and a friend have decorated my flat then I helped him move in to his new house. This week I got the GBA media player and have been giving it a good testing, more of that in the next update.

Do your Boobs Hang Low? A cassic flash.
Barb Wire Skipping Game A lot of Fun.

Need For Speed Underground 2- Nintendo DS
A few weeks back I looked at my handheld collection and noticed that I was missing a car racing game, racing games are not my favourite types of games but Sometimes I do feel like playing one. As I have a DS, I choose DS as the format, I purchased Ridge Racer DS, it was fun for a while but the bugs in this conversion from the N64 showed in the collision detection and in the handling as DS uses a D-pad, so next on the my list to try was NFSU 2 on DS.
The developers are Pocketeers who are famous for making many impressive GBA graphic engines and they made NFSU 2 on GBA which I have played and it is pretty darn good.
I've had the game for over a week now and its pretty impressive, graphics are decent cars look good, scenery looks good and it's moving at 60 fps! Not even Rivals on the PSP ran at that frame rate, the only let down graphics wise is that the road textures are low res.
Handling has been fine tuned for the DS D-Pad and responsive enough.
Gameplay consits of a Quick Race mode and Go Underground Mode. In the go underground mode you have four options. First is circuit which has three levels of difficulty, circuit has three race types Time Trial where you have to complete the track before the timer runs out, Lap KO where you race against three other players and the last place will get knocked out in the end of each lap and Finally normal race where you race against three other players. Second Underground option is Drag race which is like dray in the other NFSU games. Third is Own the Zone where the course is split up into four parts and you have to get the best time in three off the zones to win. Fourth underground mode is Bonus Event which are sub games. The game is good length, there are 12 Circuits and 16 drag courses, the game is very rewarding and in most races you will get a new engine part of decoration for your car. The touch screen is used as a map, in own the zone it shows who own which zone and what time to beat.
The music is decent and quality is good but the soundtrack in the console versions is not here, in fact they are remixed better quality tunes that were in the GBA version, this is a shame considering Star Wars Ep III had the full on Star Wars soundtrack, they could have at least put a few tracks in. The free roaming city is not here which I suppose is a bit too much to ask as it’s a first gen game for the DS but the game has the same structure as the GBA version. Pocketeers did not even attempt to change the structure, they could have had the map on the touch screen and you could select where you wanted to go, in fact the rather enjoyable Drift mode from the GBA version is left out, this all does let the game down a bit.
If you want a decent car racing game for your DS then get this, it’ll do you good until something else comes out. Its fun, challenging and fast.
Rating- 7 out of 10

Star Wars Episode III

A Special Star Wars themed post today as I went to see it on friday. This is the first time I have ever reviewed a movie so it might not be to good but I'll give it a try. There are a few small spoilers in the review :D.

Star Wars Episode III Revenge of the Sith- Movie
Finally the one we have all been waiting for is here and it does not dissapoint like Episode I did.
The Movie starts with Anakin and Obi Won on a mission to save the kidnapped Chanceller Papaltine from Count Doku, this scene shows how good friends Anakin and Obi Wan has become, this first sequence has some funny moments in it as well. The movie starts off well and fast and it maintains quality throughout the entire movie. Action is constant and fights include Anakin and Obi Won Vs Count Doku, Mace Windo Vs Palpatine, Obi Won Vs General Devious who is the droid General and wields FOUR! lightsabers, Yoda Vs Palpatine and inevieatable Obi Won Vs Anakin. Anakins journey to the dark side is very well done and the movie gets very emotional at times, sound track is awsome as usual. Most of the loose end have been tied up but some have not and Star Wars fans will notice a few things do not make sense like for example Lea says she remember here mother but she dies during child birth.
All in all a fantastic movie. Go see it now!
Rating 9 out of 10

Star Wars TV? and of course the classic Star Wars Gangsta Rap .
What about Sonic in a Star Wars Setting in another classic flash animation.

Darth Maul Advertising milk.

Yes after reading a few reviews and seeing it got much better ratings then the XBox and PS2 versions I decided to buy the game for DS.

Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith- Nintendo DS
*Gasp* A decent Star Wars handheld game? What next? Fifa being a good game? Na thats just stupid. The game has two gameplay types on foot and ship fighting.
The on-foot style takes the style of Streets of Rage where you can move your character up and down the screen and fight the on-coming enemies, you can either choose Anakins path or Obi Wons path, each path has 13 missions, the action on foot is pretty good and lots of fun as well as providing a decent challenge, you have different light saber combos depending on what charater you have and which direction you are pressing when you are slashing, you can also block either high or low, time it right and you can reflect any laser blasts right back at the enemy. You have the force which has a gauge, you can either push the enmies back, lift them up for a short second or throw a fallen part of a droid at enmeies. Finally you have special moves which you can use by doing a simple combo or touching the touch screen, at the end of each level you can power up your character. The downside is that this bit is a port of the GBA game and there has been no graphical improvement or addition to gameplay what so ever, this fact lets the game down as the DS is obviously a superior system in power.
The second bit is ship fighting which is exclusive to the DS version, the developers Ubi Soft Montreal have managed to get a very smooth running 3D battle engine going here which might be improved and used in future Star Wars game, these section are thrown into certain parts of the game, controls are easy but the missions are very basic and involve you to destroy a few ships and thats it! A few missions like destroy a building would have been great.
In the multiplayer menu there is a Skirmish option where you can play CPU controlled oppenents in dog fights, you have a great selection of ships like Darth Vader Tie Fighter, X-Wing, Millenium Falcon, Jedi Starfighter I & II and so on. You can also select a pilot which are of course charcters from Star Wars, each pilot have their own level of difficulty. Skirmish is a great time waster.
Their is a Special Mission option which I haven't unlocked yet, that will add to the length as well as the two diffulty settings. The Star Wars style of music is present in this game at brilliant quality, in fact I believe that this game has the highest quality of music seen in a DS game so far, it really is that good and sets a good atmosphere to the game.
This is a fun game which Star Wars fans should buy if they want a decent Star Wars game but I can't forgive the on-foot section being a direct GBA port with nothing improved.
Rating- 7 out of 10.

Nintendo @ E3

Two updates in a day, your guys are lucky.
Oh boy do Nintendo like to keep people waiting. Revolution was kept low profile during Nintendo's E3 press conference, Reason? with all the hype surrounding the other two consoles the revolution might have been forgotten. Revolution will be fully unveiled soon though, perhaps Nintendo will hold Spaceworld this year. Details of the revolution were present as well as a screen shot of the unit.

Yep no controller which is supposed to be the revolutionary part, the only thing certain about the controller is that it will be wireless. Apart from the known info that the Revolution will play DVD's and Gamecube games, the revolution will have online games from the go with Smash Brothers a possible launch game, speaking of online the DS will have 25 online ready games before the year is out including Mario Kart. Nintendo Online is a very pleasing thought. The Revolution will have 512 megabytes of on-board flash memory. A bay for an SD memory card will let players expand the internal flash memory. Now the next bit is exciting, the console also will have downloadable access to 20 years of fan-favorite titles originally released for Nintendo® 64, the Super Nintendo Entertainment System® (SNES) and even the Nintendo Entertainment System® (NES). WOW! lets hope there is a way to be able to play some of these games online like current PC emulaters do. Just like XBox did the Revolution will be able to download new content for games.
Also on the press release, one other thing caught my attention and got me thinking "Nintendo's rich stable of star franchises. A new development architecture will accommodate both big-budget games as well as artistic, indie offerings designed to make sure that everyone from video game experts to newcomers find ways to share and enjoy the gaming experience"
The bit in bold sounds interresting. Does this mean that Nintendo will provide development tools with the system so the revolution can have a homebrew scene just like Dreamcast and GP32? I certainly hope so!.

Also unveiled was a new version of the GBA.

The GBA Micro will boast the finest color screen Nintendo has yet put in a portable, will play all GBA games and it will be backlit. Look at the size of that thing! However it does not look liley that it will support MP3 or MPEG 4 as previously rumoured.

More about E3 soonish.

PS3 @ E3

It was unveiled yesterday at Sony's Press Conferrence. It comes with a PowerPC-base Core @3.2GHz, 256MB XDR Main RAM @3.2GHz 256MB GDDR3 VRAM @700MHz and lot more technical guff which means it is very powerful. It is also compatible with PS1 and PS2 games as well as the various DVD and CD-Rom Formats. Its prime format for PS3 games will be Blu Ray Disc which is capable of 25GB per a disc, it will also talk to PSP and go online via a Wi-Fi. At this point there seems to be no hard drive or memory card Slots?
All you need to know about games and stuff is here

The console its self is very slick and smart, not ugly like the first PS2 model. The controller has the same amount of buttons and layout like the previous Dual Shock controllers, its just a different shape and completly wireless. So the change in the controller is small, I want differences in these new consoles that will eventually lead to Innotive gameplay experiences all this will have over the previus consoles is better graphics and sound, the games unveiled for PS3 are mostly sequals at the moment. I must say I'm a bit more impressed with XBox 360 at the moment as at least it has some new game franchises coming to it. PS3 will sell on brand name alone, people will buy it because its called "Playstation". Below are some links to some movies.
Devil May Cry 4
Killzone 2
Tekken
FF7 Tech Demo
Nintendo are set to unveil their Revolution console later today, lets hope they can give me the difference I'm after, they did it with DS (I'm still playing Pac Pix) so I'm confident Nintendo will not dissapoint.

So True.

Star Wars Ep 3 is out in cinemas on Thursday, I'm gonna see it on friday as well as pick up the DS game as it has been getting good reviews and looks like it could be have some decent retro style action. I also get 2MB broadband on Thursday :D.

X-Box 360. PSO Stuff

On Thursday M$ unveiled the X-box 360 on MTV. It has Three symmetrical cores running at 3.2 GHz each, 512 MB of GDDR3 RAM, Removable 20GB Harddrive, Wireless controllers. All the information can be found here. There was also a lot of games unveiled, I haven't looked at them all yet so I'll pick out a few in the next update they can be found here.
Picture below is the final Design, it looks a lot better then the original X-box and the front can be flipped off so make way for custom designs. Lots of design pics here

The Design of the controller is similer to that of the controller S, the controller is completly wireless and can be charged using a docking station and you can charge whilst playing, hats off to M$ for that great idea.
The medium for this is not HD-DVD as rumours suggested but its a normal DVD-Drive, the drive will be compatible with Dual Layer DVDs meaning over 9GB of data on a single disc, HD- DVD was not used due to the expense of the technology which is a wise move but it could come back to haunt if Nintendo use a much bigger medium and of course Sony is using the much larger Blu Ray, using a smaller disc size then the competition really effected Nintendo with the Gamecube. The removable hard drive is in meaning that you can all your data to your friends off, a good feature to have. Again the prime focus of X-Box 360 is to create a large community via X-Box live this can be seen in this video.
XBox 360 has a few nice features, many decent looking games coming to it but when you get over the graphics and sound you could just end playing games that are very similer to ones we play now, there is nothing in this console that will inovate gameplay at the moment but you never know I could be proved wrong by the time the console launches.

Don't Slip

PSO:BB has gone into Beta, it can be downloaded from File Planet and is free for six weeks, a few thing have changed as well. Pic of me is below

IGN have also got a new trailer of PSU take a look. there are also two gameplay movies floating around the net Number 1 & Number 2. This game is looking awesome and is the true sequal to PSO. I can't wait.

Gunstar Heroes, Pac Pix, Sonic, Mario, dogs, Kittens and Spam

One of the best games ever created is getting a sequal, yes finally Gunstar Heroes is getting its long awaited sequal called Gunstar Super Heroes. It is coming to GBA which is the correct console so it can keep its 100% 2D gameplay as a PSP version would have to use 3D backgrounds which could affect the gameplay just like Contra on the PS2 and the abilities of the DS would go unused.

Check out this flash game called Kitten Cannon. I managed to get 671 feet.
A classic Flash Game, a flash based on Sonic Advance 2, Take a look.
This guy really does not like Spam and Can Mario get his Cake?
An interesting arcticle below.

Pac Pix- Nintendo DS
This is the first of two Pac Man games that has given the yellow dot munching circle a new lease of life on the DS due to its innotive abilities.
Pac Pix Started life as a tech demo at last years E3, concept is simple you draw Pac Man then he comes to life, you draw lines and then he will munch off in the direction you draw the line. The aim is to gobble all the ghosts up before the time runs out, if you draw a big pac Man, he will cover a bigger area but draw a smaller Pac Man and he will munch faster and you can also draw more then one Pac Man at a time. But you can only draw Pac Man a certain number oftimes so don't keep on letting Pac Man go off the screen.
One of my fears about this game was that it would get boring REAL quick but to my surprise it does NOT. There are different types of ghost, one ghost will suddenly move to the other side of the screen, one has a sheild covering his face and sides so you have to get him from the rear. Some ghosts are on the top screen which means that sometimes Pac Man has to go over a key Pannel and then you must direct him to the top screen, fruit and extra lives are held there as well. On some levels there are pannels on the floor that if pac man hits he will bounce off in the opposite direction so this menas that you must draw a smaller Pac Man, also there are ghosts that you gotto much in a certain order (1 to 3). There are also boss fights, in one boss fight I had to draw Pac Man bigger then the Boss. To keep the game fresh as you progress through the game you will learn two gestures Arrow and Bomb. the Arrow is used to get ghosts stuck in a bubble on the top screen. I'm not sure what the bomb is for as I have not got that far yet.
The game has Tutorials on how to draw Pack Man and the Gestures, this will take you a while to get the hang off, there is also a blank canvas where you practice drawing.
However just like Feel the Magic, Wario Ware Touched and Yoshi Touch and Go the game is not a big game, There are 12 chapters each has five levels with every other chapter having a boss stage, you get a rank for every chapter and depending on the rank you unlock a card which are pretty useless but puts a little more depth into the game, the main game is the only play mode you got, a few more modes would have been nice but this game is a hell of lot longer then Yoshi Touch and go.
There is one bug which can be annoying, sometimes when you draw Pac Man he will not mucnch the way you have drawn him, say you draw him to munch right, sometimes he'll munch down? however this is not a killer bug as you get used to it after a while.
You will only see this game on Nintendo DS, not PSP or GBA. It is an Innotive, awsome and a very enjoyable concept but is little short in length but you will play this for ages as it is just so much fun.
Rating- 8 out of 10

Phantoms Stuff, Review and the usual

Sorry for the lack of updates recently, bee rather busy with assignments.
Phantom has yet again copied me again, first it was the similer name and now he has moved his blog to blogger.com but it ain't got no stuff but take a look at Phantms Stuff.
Selling a load of stuff on ebay check it out. It All ends on sunday

Will someone please think of the cockroaches!

At last! a Legend of Zelda Music Video, it's a classic

and now its mini review time. Hopefully I should have Pac Pix in the next week.

Super Mario 64 DS- Nintendo DS
One of the all time classics can now be played on the go. Its one hell of an update. You can play as Yshi, Luigi and Wario as well as Mario, the game has been changed so certain characters do certain stars. You start off as Yoshi and must get 8 stars before you can save Mario, there are several new levels as well as 30 new stars. During the game yoy are required to catch rabbits, these will unlock mini games which all use the sylus and are great fun, games such as finding a chracter in wheres waldo style, during lines to match a head to the right body, catipulting bombs and many more things.
When this was released there was a big stir about the lack of anolgue stick on DS, some people find it hard to control but I find it easy and got used to it no problem, you've all been spoilt with anlogue controlers :D. Using the thumb strap on the touch screen works well but I prefer the D-Pad.
Graphics are literaly a perfect port from the N64 but due to the smaller screen the graphics actually look better on DS, its a cheap trick but it works. All the sound is there as well.
Game can get frustrating at times but you'll come back for more.
This game makes a perfect handheld game and is an absolute must for DS if you owned the original or not
Rating- 9 out of 10