If you turned on your PS3 today, you would be encouraged to download the latest firmware 3.61. This new software has been released in preparation for the rebirth of PSN, which has just gone back online in the UK, after the US went online earlier yesterday. Other European countries are expected to follow shortly, as Sony rolls the service out across the world.

When users turn on their consoles, they are encouraged to create a new password on the machine they created their ID on. If you’ve swapped your old PS3 for the slim edition then you need to change your password via a Sony website. More details are available via the PlayStation Blog. Finally PS3 users will get to scratch that COD itch that has been plaguing them for over three weeks now.

As many millions of gamers will be aware – Sony’s troubles have yet to come to an end and the Playstation Network remains offline. After making the mistake of giving an estimated time frame of last week for the return of at least some of the functionality of PSN and Qriocity, the passing of that deadline has resulted in a new estimation of ‘as soon as possible’.

While players may be feeling like the worst hit by this extended outage of all online capabilities of the PS3 and no access to any MMORPG which runs through the SoE service, it is in fact publishers who are fearing the worst.

The senior vice president of Capcom has spoken out against the attacks on Sony’s systems (source: Kotaku) and stated that it has already caused a revenue deficit that may be in the millions of dollars for the company. Meanwhile, SOCOM: Special Forces remains trapped in purgatory having been released the day before the attacks.

Perhaps worst of all is the long term effects this will have both on Sony’s credibility and position in the market. With the likes of Brink being released around the world this week having such a heavy slant on online play, it is very clear that customers may drift to a different format rather than wait an unspecified amount of time.

The All Conquering Network!

• Format: PSN
  
• Unleashed: Out Now
• Publisher: various
• Developer: various
• Players: 1
• Site: http://uk.playstation.com/ps3/games/

For those of you who still have a PSP, still use it and regularly connect to the PSN, we thought it might be nice to a do a general roundup of some of the Mini titles which have been released since the service began.

For the uninitiated the Minis are small games which are normally singleplayer only, lacking in network play, and are ‘cheap’. If we lived in a world where only Nintendo or Sony existed then they would be cheap against their £7-£23 AAA cousins; but in a world of Android and Apple, cheap is really a word which would be best left out of any description relating to PSN Minis. Prices range from around £1 up to £4-£5. Most hover around the £2-£3 mark and those games which are also on Ios or Android are almost always at least £1-£2 more on the Sony PSN store. Additionally, as previously mentioned, they also lack network play. This despite only being available to people who are able to access the PSN, the PlayStation Network. Go figure….

Incidentally all Minis can also be played on your PS3. We are yet to work out why you might want to do this. The graphics look awful on a large HD television, and if you do have a PS3, you must have a game or two which is better. Still, at least this ability allows us to feel that we can get more value from the purchase. Somehow.

A Space Shooter for 2 Bucks

Interestingly, in the UK this game is not 2 bucks, but £1.74 which is almost great value. On the iphone though it would probably be 79p. It’s a top down scrolling game with great production values – full speech, a range of music, great artwork and some old fashioned top down shooter action. It plays reasonably well, but the ‘drift’ on your craft might take getting used to for some. The only real criticism is that the space background, which is lovely to look at sometimes, makes it hard to see the enemy bullets coming towards you. If you love space shooters, this is not a bad purchase; but if you were never into the genre there is no need to look here.

7/10

Looks VERY pretty for a Mini, even for a full blown PSN title. But if they had released it NOT as a Mini, but as a cheap PSN title (£4 is more than most or all minis) then they could have included network play!

NOVA, Near Orbital Vanguard Alliance

This one costs around £4 and is an FPS. At first you think, ‘wow an FPS for £4!’. That is, until you find the same game on Ios for less money, and with network play. Still, what is the PSN version like? Well it’s a clear Halo clone, without the AI. To be honest it is not all that bad, and at £2 we would have no problem recommending it. However it’s not £2. It looks pretty and the control scheme is not bad considering the problem is with the PSP design and not the game. For sure the gameplay is repetitive and the AI stinks, but the game has regular save points – so if you want a ‘stop-start’ FPS this is a good game to get if you can stomach being ripped off from a value for money perspective.

6/10

Echo, Echo, echo, e-c-h-o......

Echos

Echos is a great game. It’s designed for the PSP through and through. Imagine a maze like Pac Man, but far more organic, and also imagine you are a small circle/blob and you have to move and collect coloured crystals. As you collect them other blobs start moving around the maze in a random manner and you have to avoid them, whilst trying to get ‘x’ number of crystals. There is an arcade mode, time mode and other modes where the game adds neat little gimmicks (slowing down time, the ability to destroy other blobs etc). This is a great time waster and we think it’s one of the better Minis out there.

8/10

Aero Racer

Its a top down, Super Sprint version of Wipeout with a cool gameplay dynamic. You control a type of hovercraft and you fly by aiming your engine at an angle to the course wall. The craft, an anti grav concept, pushes away from the wall and hence accelerates. In effect this makes the game a drift racer!

If that sounds complicated, then we can confirm it’s very complicated to play in that it requires real concentration whilst racing! It is a good game, with good replay value, but its one you need to be prepared to spend time on, otherwise it’ll be a wasted purchase. It’s certainly not a pick up and play, ‘throw away’ game.

7/10

Beam Me Up

This is another great Mini, in that it plays well with the PSP controls, being what they are. You control a spaceship and you have to capture a number of different species of alien creature. On each level you have a quota of how many you need to ‘beam up’ and quite literally you need to move the ship above the aliens and ‘beam’ them into your ship. All of this has to be done whilst avoiding the oncoming missiles and bullets. Its great pick up and play action, well suited to the format (and hence the controls) and worth downloading.

7/10

Field Runners: A game that allows you to pause and pick up where you left off. Ideal for portable play - should be mandatory in all Minis. Strangely enough, it's not and there are other great tower defence games on the system lacking this crucial feature!

Field Runners

A superb tower defence game. This works perfectly on the PSP, and you can stop and save the game at any point. It’s perfect except that it’s much cheaper on the Ios Platform, which makes you feel like you’re being ripped off as a PSP user. The game itself has a good range of enemies and defence mechanisms, the graphics are clear and bright, and it is perfect ‘Mini’ fodder. An example, though, of how ‘off’ the Mini pricing regime has been from day one of the service’s launch.

7/10

Pure carnage - this is such a blast! No pun intended. I think.

Age of Zombies

We like this, in fact we like this a lot! A top down cartoon shooter where you shoot tons of zombies in 360 degree scrolling maps. The zombies are themed based upon the setting (you move throughout time), but the actual zombie ‘classes’ themselves are generally the same. The game has proper end of level bosses and some superb weapon upgrades. Once you have completed the game, you can replay the levels for high scores. Recently launched on Ios, this plays better on the PSP due to the physical analogue nub.

9/10

Blast Off

Take puzzle games and Asteroid and the result will be Blast Off. It’s so simple, yet at times so complicated. You control a tiny spaceship and you have to collect wee spacemen stuck in outer space. Often they are floating near planets and other objects, each with their own gravity ‘sphere of influence’. Hence the aim of the game is to pick up the astronauts without being pulled into a plant, black hole or moon. Very addictive, but with each level being a small concern in itself – hence, as with some of the other games here, a good ‘Mini’ gaming experience.

8/10

Freekscape looks very nice on the wee PSP screen. Not so much on an HD tv.

Freekscape:Escape from Hell

A great looking, inventive platform game where you play a demon escaping hell. The game is a pure platformer with a clever game mechanic, in that you use the enemies themselves to help you get from one platform to another. In some cases you have to goad creatures on to ram your butt with their horns to propel you over large gaps, for example.

The production values for this game are quite high and it feels like a quality, meaty production. The Mini platform, along with the PSP controls, seem ideal for platform games and this is confirmed when playing Freekscape. Certainly worth a download, if you want a mixture of platforming and puzzling combined.

8/10

Sony have a good base with the Minis, and we predict that with their soon to be released Sony Ericsson PS phone and the eventual release of the high powered PSP2 they will take the Mini platform further, making them work on both devices (leaving AAA titles to the PSP2 only). If they are to do this, they need to the following though:

• Change the pricing
• Perhaps offer bulk buy deals (something they literally just started doing as we wrote this)
• Off network support, at the very least online leaderboards, with the games supporting PSN IDs and trophies etc.

We don’t mind if there are less Minis than Ios apps, as in some ways it will mean the Minis are the best of the indie apps; but they need to release more per week, not just 2-4. If you have a PSP, still use it, indulge yourself in a few titles, it’s a cheap way of breathing life back into the machine at a relatively cheap price.

The PSN Network, free functional and with lots of unfulfilled potential

The PSN network is great because it’s free. It doesn’t matter how much you criticise it compared to Xbox Live, because at the end of the day it’s given away free and no charge is made to the end user. However that’s like saying that going to work on a donkey can’t be bad, when compared to a train or car, because a Donkey is possibly free too, except for food needed to feed the donkey, and the inevitable poo bags that you would have to carry to clean up after yourself (or after your donkey’s self) when in public. The point is, many of us commute by train or car and are happy to pay. It’s a given.

Hence it’s with that in mind that we find people are constantly criticising the PSN network for what it fails to deliver, often comparing it to Xbox Live. In all honesty PSN does now do most of what Xbox Live does (with some major omissions such as cross game chat, playing your own music, and some other features). It more than makes up for these though in terms of offering HOME which is possibly the ultimate social experience on a console, albeit one which needs to be tied into the overall PSN experience in a much more coordinated way. It also has an integrated Web Browser (which allows video on demand services access to the platform) and pretty good media server functionality. You can even edit videos on it now, with the latest firmware update.

However, for me, paying for Xbox Live delivers two major services. Firstly, it allows me to play games online. This, of course, is not a good thing, as I can do that for free on the PSN network. Secondly, though, Xbox Live seems more robust. Game updates are pushed to my console much faster and downloading any content seems quicker. Additionally online servers for games are more responsive and matchmaking quicker. I would suggest that some of my £40 a year to Microsoft helps to maintain that infrastructure.

Playstation Plus, it has stars, fireworks and everything! Just not things many people want. Yet.

Consequently I was excited when I heard about PlayStation Plus. Indeed I had already written about how I felt PSN needed a subscription tier offering a range of services from the cloud storage of saved games, to media services like Sky being included in the price. When Sony announced PlayStation Plus they even teased us by saying that following the initial feature set, more services would be launched.

Well Gamescom is coming up and I’m really hoping they use this to launch these new services for PlayStation Plus users, as right now I’m not exactly excited by the current offering. Has buying a Plus membership (for the year) solved the issues I raised above? Nope. Game updates are not quicker but they are overnight, sometimes, in some cases, possibly. I’m not too sure how the system works but I have still had some games which, once loaded, require an update that took close to an hour before the game would start. Perhaps this will decrease with time and Ill notice a difference over a longer period of being a member but at present this benefit is not apparent.

So what has Plus offered? Or to put it another, cringeworthy way, what ‘Pluses’ are to be gained by joining?!

We get demos for games 24 hours earlier, except that I’m at work, so I don’t know about it till at least 24 hours after the 24 hour exclusivity started. I get emails from Sony all the time about the PSN store, so how about notifying me of these demos? Even better, if you want to make me feel good, give them to me me a month before everyone else, not a pesky 24 hours. I also get time-limited trials of games, which I can then purchase online at a special price. Except that, we have had hardly any of these and in the case of Infamous, the ‘special price’ isn’t special when compared to the price of the ‘not so new’ Infamous I can get at Game or Amazon.

We get some games free though. That’s good! For signing up I got LittleBigPlanet free. Ok, I already had it, but now it’s on the hard drive, which for my liking is a better place for a game, which is as much a utility and alternative HOME as it is a platformer. I also got WipEout HD and have downloaded a couple of free PS1 games and some Minis. We also get wallpapers and themes for free if you are into that kind of stuff. The idea of ‘free’ stuff’ is not bad, it’s good and I’m fan of anything free, or which appears to be free. However what is bad is that I already owned a lot of the Minis and now just feel annoyed that I didn’t get a full or part rebate on them having signed up to Playstation Plus. I’m not saying I should have got one, I appreciate that wouldn’t work from a business perspective, but I’m still a bit annoyed. The end result is I have stopped buying Minis in case it is included in my Plus account in the future. That can’t be what Sony wanted, surely?

Value for money or an overheating box which eats up your money? Wait, wasn't that the first and second generation Xbox consoles?

It would make far more sense to give Plus users a discount on content all the time. It could vary from download to download, with every game, theme or film listing two prices; the Plus user price and the non Plus user price. This would make much more sense to me. Additionally, you’ll notice that I threw in the word film (movie for our US readers) there too. Why not give us a discount on the films or at least one rental free a month or similar?

There is far more that Plus could and should be offering. It should be the gateway to a better performing, cloud computing supporting infrastructure, which makes the PS3 experience more reliable and charming. Additionally if Sony want to use Plus as a way of encouraging us to download and use content, then they need to do it in a way which is cleverer than their current strategy which is far to ‘bitty’.

Do I feel stupid for having purchased PlayStation Plus as an early adopter? Not really, as it didn’t cost the world and I have got some great, free games. I have already come near to mading my money back in terms of what it would have cost me to buy all of them. Of course, I accept that in reality I might never have bought all of them, and it certainly hasn’t cost Sony as much as their retail value to give them to me for free.

America has offered its Plus user access to Hulu Plus! What can SCEE bring to the UK or Europe as a whole?

Deep down though, I feel I’m being used by Sony to test whether there is a demand for an extra ‘paid’ service on the PSN. Even though Sony has carried out many questionnaires on what users want or would be prepared to pay for, it seems they were worried that not enough users would actually cough up the dough and spend the money. After all, they have had a pretty competent online service, which was free, for all this time. So, it seems that I’m being given a few handouts until there are enough subscribers to justify adding the other services Sony have hinted at, whether they be free or heavily discounted films and TV shows or extra online services which add to the PS3’s capabilities.

Of course, the problem Sony have built for themselves is that to convince enough users to join they need those of us who are early adopters to sing from the rooftops about how good PlayStation Plus is. I’ve yet to see an article or listen to a podcast where anyone is doing that. Everyone is playing the ‘lets wait and see game’ and based on my friends list on my PS3 I’m yet to see another Playstation Plus user on my rosta. Come on Sony, if treated correctly, PSN has the ability to become the future of the PlayStation and even of Sony. The PS4 might be more about the cloud than the hardware and now is the time to leapfrog Xbox Live and take the overall experience and value proposition to a new level. This is no time to be taking ‘baby steps’.

Limit the PLUS screen to items only for Plus users. All other items should just have two prices, come on Sony, it's obvious!

PSN has seen a rise in games trying to make comebacks. Here we have a digital download re-release of the 2008 RPG Dungeon Explorer.

Isn’t it fun when a game’s title describes what you can expect from it? It’s like an FPS called Shoot People. A world which has seen its fair share of wars against monsters decides to trap them with magical doors. As the player you can choose from three races and numerous classes and then you are let loose in the world to undertake quests and…explore dungeons.

The gameplay is incredibly simple and easy to get the hang of. You move your character around hacking and slashing or casting at every enemy that decides that it’s a good idea to slither into the eye line of a well armed individual. Using Arts (special attacks) and Big Bang Arts (special, special attacks) are about as complex as it gets and all that means is either pressing a different button to the basic attack or holding down a shoulder button first.

Ease of play might be a plus point, but pressing a single button over and over again (which is all you really need to do in order to survive) wears thin very quickly. Perhaps what confounds this further is how totally uninspiring everything else is. Locations and music are dull and the story drags its heels from the very start, never picking up or getting interesting no matter how much you might persist.

Earlier on, did we say dungeons? That is a little misleading. You’ll be in a dungeon for the first few hours, but it’s the same dungeon over and over. We took our Fighter out and got questing, and came to a point where there were two quests available. The first was to go to an area and destroy all generators (these constantly spawn enemies until destroyed). The second was to destroy all generators in the exactly same place, but also to use a certain number of special attacks. Both had to be completed to further the story but both could not be undertaken at the same time. The worst part is that there’s no effort to even disguise the similarity between one quest and the next.

Where the game redeems itself slightly is in the ability for friends to join you as their characters so that you can quest and level together. However, since there is no real rare drop system or challenging varied quests or anything else you would find in the bigger named games like Monster Hunter and Phantasy Star, we can’t see why people would choose this instead.

This is as complex as the menus get.

Dungeon Explorer is as bland an experience as you will ever play. Yes, you can play with friends – but why would you want to? No variety, stale quests, boring environments, and everything else previously mentioned all add up to the gaming equivalent of lukewarm porridge.

We suspect that as a DS game this would be far more passable and it can be argued that it does slightly improve more as you go on as you learn more Arts; but dangling a metaphorical steak in the distance doesn’t make that trudge to get there through all that porridge any easier (apologies if you like porridge).

Dungeon Explorer is available now on PSN for £8.69 (PSP compatible only).

2/5

The growth in digital app stores can’t have passed by the average Critical Gamer (see what I did there?). Every device has one, from the DSi to the Playstation 3, and they have opened up new distribution channels for existing developers and publishers, as well as enabling new, much smaller creators to be able to reach out to the consumer and sell them new, less commercially attractive products.

Downloading games is not the ‘new promised land’ which platform holders are telling us it is. Firstly it’s not even that new. I’ve been downloading games to my mobile phone since around 2003 on what was, I believe, a Nokia 3650. Back then it was left to the networks themselves to provide the content as the hardware companies didn’t yet have the coordination or even leverage over the consumer (and with the networks) allowing them to provide these products themselves.

The ‘app stores’ in place then were far from being the seamless and enjoyable experience that today’s stores offer (well most of them), however they were hardly difficult to navigate either. All one had to do was go through a few WAP pages and then after spending £1.50 or whatever the cost was, you had your application in your games or download folder on the phone. Indeed I remember getting a rather good platform version of Splinter Cell! The trade press at the time often had articles on how this was the future (well, actually it was the present) and how traditional videogame companies would have to take this market seriously.

Downloading games to PC is also something which is not new. Valve’s Steam service has been selling games since around 2004/5 but it’s been possible to buy games directly from developers since before that. Steam was a milestone as it brought the idea of a games marketplace embedded into a gaming virtual ‘space’ where people can compete, collaborate and share gaming news and content together into a well run and branded experience. In many ways, Steam and Xbox Live’s developments were in parallel and have clearly influenced each other.

So since about 2002 we have been downloading games in a big way, and along the way there have been some failed to attempts to ‘wrap’ it together into a seamless user experience. Examples include an online component of the failed Dreamcast console to ongoing attempts by the mobile phone networks to somehow convert their phoning and texting customers to downloading and surfing customers. The mobile networks even started installing their own software on certain handsets to try to ‘lock’ the user into their experience.

What has stopped these efforts being successful differ but common themes include not having any interesting content or games consumers want to download. Additionally, the slow speed of the connection or the clumsy way in which the apps are downloaded have helped in putting off the consumer. Price, of course, is a major barrier to getting consumers to try something new as well. In recent years a number of these issues have been overcome, most importantly the price of storage and the speed at which data can be downloaded to a device at home or one which is mobile.

On the console and PC front, Xbox and Steam (and to a lesser degree Metaboli and Direct 2 Drive type platforms) have become the de facto standard for downloading content to living room or desktop machines. Sony’s PSN and even Nintendo with its Wiiware and Virtual console have followed suit with less success. In the mobile space success, although always predicted to be around the corner, remained allusive. Traditional consoles such as the DS and PSP still used physical media and mobile phone companies and the hardware makers were failing to provide a suitable solution which was being adopted by the mainstream.

Then along came Apple. Famous for having made buying music online something everyone could do, they brought along the same business approach to applications for their handheld phone – the Iphone, and subsequently their Itouch product. Their store was simple for everyone involved in it to operate, supply and purchase from. Developers only had to pay $99 and they could develop for it which was a first as other platform holders required developers to purchase expensive SDKs needed to code and produce content for their services. Consumers liked the service as it was easy to see what was available, fast to browse and very fast to download. Additionally the prices for applications were very cheap with many of them offering free trial versions. The other major plus point for Apple was that their hardware was easy to use, and of course, a phone – something people want anyway.

Now what’s been great about Apple’s app store is that it demonstrated the viability of small, cheap to produce apps. Small indie developers could come up with a game design, which would never see the light of day in a boxed game, self publish it and have an income derived from their efforts. The result of this success has been copycat initiatives. Xbox Live has welcomed more independents even going as far as having a secondary store for smaller, even more indie games. These are not vetted by Microsoft but instead quality control is given to the developer and community audience. Nintendo released Wiiware, which includes new indie games, and Sony have encouraged similar projects onto their PSN network.

It’s the handheld market though, quite rightly, which has been shaken up most by Apple’s move into digital distribution and portable computing. Nintendo’s Dsi is clearly a stop gap before the DS2 which allows it to offer some of the same features the ‘Iphone generation’ have already become used to and now expect. Hence it has (for Nintendo) some basic social community features (upload your photos to facebook from the device) and most importantly it has the DSiware store. This is is Nintendo’s digital app store! Similar to Wiiware, this is clumsy and uses some kind of cut down browser (with no cache from what I can see). Purchasing points which can then be traded for applications works (but seems dated) and accessing the content once it’s downloaded is well implemented.

Sony have released their PSPGo, but the hardware aside, they have used this as an opportunity to launch the Minis, a range of small apps. These are so similar to Iphone apps, that many of them are Iphone apps! Also, all ‘triple A’ PSP titles are being released on the PSN store and much of the back catalogue too.

So where does all this digital activity leave us? Well, clearly there is still lots of opportunity and it’s still really great for consumers and developers as a whole. However, it’s not all great. We now have a new tussle between Apple’s agenda and Sony and Nintendo’s. Apple, as with music, does not really care about how much it sells the software for, and so far, it hasn’t really shown much interest in maintaining the standard, rather just the quantity. This makes sense as they are in the business of selling hardware, and they are really good at it! However both Sony and Nintendo need to have their platforms seen as different from the Iphone (and the many Iphone lookalikes being released on a weekly basis). Additionally they make much more money from the software than Apple.

Hence both Sony and Nintendo are at present putting significantly less content on their stores with limited weekly updates, with the hope of helping developers to maintain the value of their content for as long as possible. Indeed games on the PSN store and Dsiware are on average £1-£2 more expensive than on the Iphone, and rarely do you get a free trial version in advance. Nintendo have not helped their cause by putting clocks and calenders on the store which should already be installed on the device or which should be allowed to be downloaded for free – it would be a good way of having people regularly come back to and engage in the store. Whilst there, they then might buy a high quality app.

The problem traditional videogame companies may find is that it’s too late. Just as the music industry allowed Apple to change the pricing model overnight it would seem that the videogame companies have allowed Apple to do the same thing in their marketplace.

The upshot is clear; more people can find a market to distribute their goods. The bad news is that many of them will have to distribute them for free or near to free, or find that in the huge marketplace that is the Appstore no one can find your app. Even companies such as EA are struggling, not quite sure what kind of content to produce, and then how much to invest marketing it, when the return is potentially small.

“Apple has achieved over two billion downloads since the launch of its App Store on to a device base of over 50million iPhone and iPod touch devices, this suggest an average of 40 apps per device. The volume of apps being downloaded per user suggests that the user’s behaviour is mimicking that on browsers, with users viewing lots of different sites; however, there are only a few which users visit repeatedly.” said Adam Leach, Principal Analyst, Ovum.

“Although Apple’s download figures are impressive and act as a harbinger for the industry, it is important to consider that the typical high-end iPhone users are not representative of mobile users as a whole”

“Apple has demonstrated for the first time that demand for third party applications can drive demand for devices”

Ironically it would seem that Apple have learnt a lot from their gaming competitors. Just as with Nintendo’s own Pokemon franchise (which is a license to print money), Apple have realised that the application and game consumers like playing most is the App Store itself. They can’t help themselves and they just have to ‘catch em all’!

• Format: XBLA (version reviewed), PSN
• Unleashed: Out Now
• Publisher: Konami
• Developer: Nihilistic Software
• Players: 1-4 (Offline), 1-4 (Online)
• Price: 800 points (£6.80), $9.99
• Site: www.konami.com/games/zombie

Many of us wonder how we will fare should the zombie apocalypse overrun the world. There are many fictional places where we can take inspiration from, but most of them assume you can get your hands on a gun or chainsaw. Thankfully, Zombie Apocalypse gives you both, and teddy bear zombie bait stuffed with explosives.

The best way to describe this game is Robotron meets Left 4 Dead. It is a relatively mindless and brutal arcade shooter that puts you in the middle of a zombie horde as one of four similar survivors, and tells you to kill everything with a below room temperature IQ in the name of survival and point scoring.

Four times the zombie mutilating fun

The controls are delightfully simple, left stick moves your character around, and the right stick shoots in whatever direction you point it. This means that cutting through the zombie hordes feels incredibly fluent, where doing a 360 degree arc of fire is just a thumb twitch away and can be very handy for getting you out of dodge.

If you want to get a bit more creative, the trigger buttons are assigned to your chainsaw, meaning if things get too close for a gun to handle effectively, you can chew through everything with your handy lumberjack tool and be paddling in a pool of blood in no time.

It feels like a classic arcade game with the brilliant dual stick control system and the rather manic reactions that are sometimes needed to keep your brain intact. Graphically however, it looks brilliant for a downloaded game. The visual style seems reminiscent of Left 4 Dead, with zombies falling apart, dark corners illuminated by fire, and even very familiar environments to Valve’s zombie romp including an airport and petrol station forecourt.

As far as the flavour of zombie is concerned, they seem to be halfway between the George Romero shuffling brain bandits and L4D’s sprinting psychopaths. They are not unbearably fast, but you still need to stay on your toes, especially in later levels where you have many different types of zombie, such as the knife throwing granny, shotgun toting sheriff and hard to stop big boy. As the game playfully mentions on one level, at times it can feel like you are being chased by a horde of hungry bulldozers.

Two submachine guns work wonders with crowd control

Whilst playing the game by yourself is quite fun, it does get a bit old very quickly, which is where the great four player co-op mode comes in. Playable online or with mates crowded on the sofa, you can go on point scoring zombie slaying sprees in a team which works brilliantly. Even though you work together, you still get ample gloating rights as it tells you who killed the most and who removed the majority of limbs, as well as other ranked statistics.

Zombie Apocalypse is a fantastic arcade shooter which encourages high score chasing with a brilliant array of weapons, from flamethrowers to dual submachine guns, and it looks good doing it. The only down side is that by yourself, the appeal wears off quickly and is only really a ‘dip in and out’ kind of game, as most arcade inspired titles would be. We recommend playing with your mates to get the most out of this game and relive that old arcade feeling that Robotron: 2084 gave us, but with a lovely new lick of paint.

3/5

Hudson wasn’t ready to tell us about last week’s unintentionally revealed games, opting instead to toss us a somewhat less tasty bone. We chased it anyway, and obediently ran it back to you, dear readers. Here’s some info on three other Hudson games coming your way this month:

Bomberman Ultra (Playstation Network)

Hudson Says:

“Because you demanded it! Bomberman makes his debut on the PLAYSTATION 3 computer entertainment system. Compete in 8-person online multiplayer battles in 14 exotic arenas with all your favorite powerups! Customize your very own Bomberman from over 50 character costumes, with over 150,000 possible combinations! Stat-tracking leaderboards will show just how good you are!”

Miami Crisis (Nintendo DS)

Hudson Says:

“MIAMI CRISIS is an action-adventure game worthy of its own prime-time TV show. A mix of crime-scene detection and action elements, MIAMI CRISIS offers the player to guide one of two characters – Law Martin from the Miami PD or FBI Agent Sara Starling – as they are charged with solving a series of linked crimes in the US city. Martin is an intense officer who will use any means necessary to make a bust, while Sterling is an intelligent agent with an eye for detail, and both will face different challenges as the game unfolds.

Playing as Law Martin, players will experience a more action-orientated game, wherein the Miami PD officer becomes embroiled in the hard-edged side of law enforcement, with MIAMI CRISIS throwing up car chases, intense shoot-outs and face-offs. Alternatively, playing as Sterling presents a more puzzle-solving side to the game, with the FBI agent using forensics and detailed examination techniques to search for clues. Both are working to uncover a shadowy terrorist conspiracy, but their successes and failures along the way will have an ongoing effect on the plot.

With its evolving gameplay and varied content, MIAMI CRISIS is a unique Nintendo DS title that will continually surprise and enthrall. With additional unlockable sub-games located as a game progress award, and a unique control interface, Hudson Soft has delivered the ultimate cop show for the Nintendo handheld.”

My Zoo (WiiWare)

Hudson says:

“My Zoo is the follow-up to the hit ‘My Aquarium‘. In My Zoo, you can raise 8 of the most popular animals seen in zoos, including lions, panda bears, zebras, and elephants. As you feed and play with them, the animals may grow attached to you. They may even have babies that you can raise to adulthood. In addition to the animals that come with the game, you’ll be able to download more later!”

All of these titles are set for September releases, with Miami Crisis touting a more specific September 24^th release date. Yeeeeaaaah!