Games

GANGS OF LONDON

Sony

Platform:

PSP /

Genre:

Gang shootings

This is worth getting if only for the way you can drive around London for more than five minutes without being stuck in a traffic jam. Ever since Ken Livingstone installed his amazing anti-traffic congestion policies, the congestion in the city has increased. One reason for the rise is the introduction of those ten mile-long bendy buses that you never have to pay to travel on. They block the streets and take about twice as long to get from A to B as the old, dangerous Routemaster ones that you could fall out of the back of if you were drunk at night.

So, yeah, being able to drive along the street without having your foot on and off the clutch every minute is pretty good, as is the way you can get out of the car and shoot people you don’t like the look of. Our office and bar is in the in EC2A area of London so I played this as a member of the EC2 Crew, who are all Yardies. I dunno if all the black gangs around here who sell heroin (see p.42) are actually from Jamaica but I do know that none of the ones I know actually talk like they do on this game, which is an extreme patois I haven’t heard since Lenny Henry played the Rasta character on

Tiswas

. This was back in the day when he still made his living by being even more deprecating towards black people than Bernard Manning.

Aside from that, this game isn’t bad at all. It’s another variation on

The Getaway

and

GTA

so all the millions of people who like those will snap it up. Some of the “on-foot” missions can be a bit tough, especially with the size of the screen, but that’s only going to be a problem for the big babies amongst us who are scared of challenges.

SYRUP DAVIES

DEAD RISING

Capcom

Platform:

Xbox 360 /

Genre:

Kill the zombies

Wow. These computer game versions of classic horror movies are about ten million times more fun than any of these crappy remakes Hollywood is churning out like Chicken McNuggets. Did anybody see the remakes of

The Omen

or

The Wicker Man

? Fuck my eyes, they are horrible. With

The Omen

, the director cast a guy who wouldn’t even get a walk-on part in

Casualty

to play the Gregory Peck role. He also changes the dog who makes the nanny kill herself from a Rottweiller to an Alsatian, THEN they change it back to a Rottweiller two scenes later. The rest of the movie is full of gay music video tricks.

The Wicker Man

is even worse. How about changing the plot of the film so that it becomes a remake of

The Worm That Turned

by the Two Ronnies and then having 99 per cent of the movie made up of Nic Cage running around an island, punching women and telling them, “I’m from the fucking LAPD and I gotta murder to solve!”? Good idea, no?

Anyway,

Dead Rising

is essentially a computer game version of

Dawn of the Dead

, which they remade with some success, and it’s one of the funnest games we’ve played all year. It’s next to

Resident Evil 4

in terms of a scariness and gore.

Unlike a lot of the “creepy” games out there these days (mainly the Japanese ones), there’s hardly any of that pointless wandering about in blackness trying to find a gate or a key. Instead, there’s a lot of all-out war and killing and brains flying everywhere. Sony better hurry up getting the PS3 out, because at the moment Xbox 360 is kicking its ass with games like this.

NUTS STRADDLER

TEKKEN DARK RESURRECTION

Nordisk Film

Platform:

PSP

Genre:

Guido-styled Fighting Game

Things are looking bright for the PSP. I had almost given up on the console a few months ago, but then along came

LocoRoco

, which got my hopes up (at least for a little while), and now here’s

Tekken

!

I have to admit, I’m a sucker for fighting games. You can pick them up without having a clue as to what you are meant to be doing and still have fun. On the other hand you can get really serious about it and actually train and get skills. And that’s exactly what games on a handheld should be about. They should be perfect to pick up for just three minutes, and at the same time they should be able to keep you entertained for two hours when you’re stuck on the tube. And the PSP needed a good fighting game. And this is an incredibly fucking brilliant fighting game.

It might be just me, but I’m not sure

Tekken

has EVER been this good. It suits the PSP perfectly, and PSP suits

Tekken

perfectly. Everything is fucking fantastic, except for two things.

1. The D-Pad doesn’t work that smoothly. Hitting diagonals is tricky at first. But I picked it up after a while.

2. And this goes for almost all fighting games. Who in the name of everything ugly designs the outfits for the characters? Just tell me, who the fuck does their outfits? Why do the fighters have to look like idiots? I guess this is what happens when the Japanese are trying to imitate cool Western clothes. But really, is this what we look like to them?

I think a couple of Japanese spies have been sleeping on the job, because their style pitch must have sounded something like, “Greetings fine gentlemen! Hottest style in the America and the Europe is the New Jersey Guido!”

Dear God, no. Everybody but the Guidos themselves will agree they are the dumbest looking gang in the world today. Probably ever.

Jocks with tight Italia-shirts and gel soaked spikes and jeans so ugly you couldn’t even make them up. What’s wrong with these people? Didn’t Italian stand for style once upon a time? Just visit njguido.com to find out what I’m talking about.

Maybe I’m the only one who cares about the fashion in a fighting game, but what the fuck, they ARE designed to look cool. Or if it’s a girl she’s designed to look sexy. Obviously someone has tried real hard, so of course it matters.

There are eight female characters. And each one has four outfits. Almost every outfit is supposed to look sexy. And they all fail miserably.

How is that even possible? With all that skin, at least a few should be sexy in a weird, slutty robot kind of way or something. But no, nothing. They just look stupid (except for the Japanese schoolgirl uniform but that one’s such a no-brainer it doesn’t even count).

Luckily,

Tekken

also has great characters, like the kangaroo with boxing gloves with a kid in its pouch. To conclude, when a game’s biggest flaw is the outfits you know it’s a great game.

OLLE HEMMENDORFF