WipeOut - PSone

This is the game that made me believe that the PSone really was a new generation beyond the Mega Drive and SNES. Neither of those consoles could have produced the amazingly smooth and blisteringly fast graphics and then coupled that together with a fantastic soundtrack. Along with Worms, Wipeout is probably the game that I played the most on my PSone. After getting over the steep learning curve the game really opens up. I just think of it as a more mature version of Mario Kart and like that game I have played most incarnations on a variety of systems.

I would be interested to play this now on the PS3 to see how it has held up. But it is probably best to leave it as a memory and when I want to play it, just stick on Wipeout HD instead.

Mario Kart Double Dash

I picked this game up on eBay to add to my list of must play GameCube (GC) games. I'd read mixed opinions of Double Dash online but the consensus seems to be that it is one of the top rated GC games. It must have been back in May, perhaps June when it arrived but I only got around to playing it a week ago. One of the reasons is that I had to get another GC controller first.

Myself and my wife (a huge Mario Kart fan) sat down and played it for a while and were less than impressed. It is probably a bit unfair on the game to judge it after playing Mario Kart Wii so much. Even though there is little difference in the graphical quality, we missed some of the Wii gameplay mechanics. Another problem is that we had played nearly all of the tracks in Double Dash either in Mario Kart Wii or the DS version. I think Nintendo is just being lazy now with having the same tracks in so many Mario Kart games. That isn't a direct criticism of Double Dash but of Nintendo themselves. I'm hoping that when it arrives on the 3DS it will be full of new tracks. I doubt it though.

I haven't played enough of Double Dash to get to know the ins and outs of the main new addition to the game, two characters to a vehicle. It appears to add a little element of strategy to the gameplay and it is nice to see something new in Mario Kart after all these years. With so many games in my growing collection that I've yet to play or games like Zelda: The Wind Waker that I want to return to I won't be promising to play Double Dash much more. 

Blur

Blur is a game that took me by surprise. I had no real intention of getting it until I saw the positive feedback it was getting and checked out some footage online. It looked liked it had some frantic car combat, in similar vein to Mario Kart but with HD graphics. As soon as I brought it home it stayed in the PS3 for a solid three weeks, getting constant play online. 

It had been quite some time since I'd found a game that I enjoyed playing online so much. Blur has that instant pick up and play quality that all good arcade racers should have. The cars handle easily and the weapons are all instantly familiar as they all correspond to weapons from Mario Kart. Three weeks might seem like a short time give a game but as they say the light that shines twice as bright, burns twice as fast. In this case it grew a little tired after a while but for those few weeks it was an absolute blast.

I'd recommend this game to anyone and I wish more people had bought it so those online lobbies would have been full.

Paradise or not...

The game Burnout Paradise was released on the Xbox 360 last week and I am very tempted to pick it up. I find this quite strange because usually I am not a fan of racing games. In fact the last racer that I really enjoyed was Mario Kart on the N64 and before that on the SNES. Actually, I tell a lie as the DS version of Mario Kart is pretty nifty too. So what is it about this racer that has me thinking I should buy it?

It is the new style of play that it offers. An open world city with over 250 miles of road to drive around, coupled with multiple game modes. The best of which is a mode where you will be chased by a number of cars and the longer you survive the more points you score. That to me sounds like it would be an amazing game to take online on Live. I have played the demo but was left slightly disappointed as the demo only offered a tiny portion of the city with most of the events locked. It was a good taster but not enough to say whether the game would be worth it or not. In the end I doubt I will get it as I still have COD4 and Pro Evo to occupy my gaming time. If I get too tempted I'll try to remember that someone pointed out that many of the fun features in this game are likely to be present in some for in GTA IV, a game that I will purchase.