Hydrophobia developers Dark Energy Digital have just announced the launch of the Hydrophobia Listening Post, which is a website where the community can give the developers feedback on Hydrophobia Pure – the latest update to the title. Player feedback has already shaped this latest update, and Dark Energy Digital are keen on giving players the opportunity to help shape the Hydrophobia universe. The website lets users rate every feature in Hydrophobia Pure, add suggestions and comments, and even suggest aspects of the game they would like to see rated by the community.

The results of these polls will directly influence the priorities of the developer for future games in the Hydrophobia universe, and they are committed to delivering on the ideas raised via the Listening Post as fully as possible. The Hydrophobia Listening Post can be found here.

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!

• Format: XBLA (version reviewed), WiiWare, PC, DS, PSP, PSN
• Unleashed: Out Now
• Publisher: PlayFirst
• Developer: Gamelab
• Players: 1
• Site: http://www.playfirst.com/game/dinerdash

Casual gaming is one of those industry terms that self-appointed game industry besserwissers love to hate. These days it almost has a derogatory ring to it, thanks to mile after mile of bile and more bile spilled in comment boxes internet-wide about how there are too few “hardcore titles” released these days. This is, of course, poppycock, but that’s a discussion for another day. The point is that while the phrase “casual gaming” might not have been part of the collective vocabulary for very long, it should come as no surprise that the phenomenon itself has been around for much longer. Take Diner Dash for instance.

Red vs. Blue as directed by Jim Jarmusch

It’s been seven years since the original was released for the PC and since then PlayFirst has churned out more sequels and spin-offs than Capcom could have wet dreams about. The concept is simple; you play as Flo who owns a restaurant. Your job is to, well, run the restaurant. You seat the guests, take orders, bring them the food and drinks, hand out the cheques and clear tables. Beautiful in its simplicity, really.

As the game starts it feels insultingly easy but for every level you clear, one more element of work is added to the mix. This includes colour-coding guests to specific chairs, adding up combos for the tasks you perform and giving out free drinks to waiting customers. As you are the only employee, bar the chef, this soon becomes a flaming nightmare where multi-tasking is essential. Halfway into the game and you find yourself juggling half a dozen different guests, as many different colours, different types of seating, drinks, free snacks and combos. At times it’s hellishly difficult, while on some levels you’ll breeze through, hardly breaking a sweat.

Is it just me, or is this the Black Lodge?

There are certainly challenges to be had here, but the repetition will become almost unbearable after a few dozen levels. You are rarely given any items that actually help you, it’s just more tedious aspects to constantly keep an eye on. The fact that while you upgrade your restaurant, you never really get any actual rewards for it makes the progression feel unsatisfying. After a while you will begin to question why you are playing a game where you perform huge amounts of stressful and frustrating menial labour, right after you got home from your job where you performed huge amounts of stressful and frustrating menial labour. You know, the job where you earned the money you spent on the game you’re playing.

There is little inherently wrong with Diner Dash; the graphics are charming and the gameplay is addictive enough. It’s just hard to see the point of buying a game that has dated so much, when you can spend your Microsoft points on much more stimulating pastimes. We have yet to play any of the many, many sequels, but we imagine that at this point they must have reached a stage where “playing” every day, all day is mandatory, just like an actual job. If you don’t boot up the game on time, perform badly or turn it off too early, a shady man from PlayFirst will come to your house, growl “You’re fired” and proceed to smash your 360 to pieces using one of your pets.

3/5

• 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

• Unleashed: Out Now (XBLA)

• Publisher: Microsoft

• Developer: Canalside Studios

• Players: 1-4 (Offline), 2-4 (Online)

• Price: 800 points (£6 .80)

Yo-Ho Kablammo is not a good game, but that’s not entirely its fault. It certainly has its share of issues, but discussing the pros and cons of a multiplayer game with an anemic community seems like a futile exercise. Alas, this is a review, and such things must be discussed. But before we go on, know that Yo-Ho Kablammo’s online component is nearly dead on arrival.

Kablammo was the 2007 runner-up for Microsoft’s Dream.Build.Play. competition, which rewards Xbox Live Indie developers with a contract deal to upgrade to an XBLA release. The winner, the spectacular Dishwasher: Dead Samurai, set expectations for what indie games could become. It’s this precedent that makes Yo-Ho Kablammo’s release all the more questionable, as its level of quality and polish still seems more at home on the Indie Games channel.

Multiplayer madness you may never see.

The issues crop up almost immediately – a glitchy tutorial has your AI opponent wandering off the map, leaving you to wander aimlessly until either you quit or kill yourself. From there, the single-player mode seems to continually insist that you’re not online and that leaderboard data won’t be recorded. Not the best start, especially for a game that has supposedly gone through Microsoft’s rigorous certification process.

Yo-Ho Kablammo is a pirate-ship combat game in which you fight from an overhead perspective, aligning your starboard and port sides towards enemies to unleash a stream of cannon fire. Using the left stick to move your ship and the triggers to fire, the control scheme couldn’t be simpler. That is, until you put it into practice. From an overhead perspective, your ship’s sides are constantly realigning – this leaves you pressing the wrong trigger and firing from the wrong side all too often. This isn’t something that’s easy to get used to either, even after hours of playtime you’ll still screw it up occasionally.

These confusing combat controls aren’t so bad online, where everyone is screwing up, but single-player is a different story. The AI isn’t exactly a crackshot, but they’ll still hit you more often than not. This becomes especially frustrating in the later levels, where two or three AI opponents gang up on you. Even if you kill two of them, the third one will inevitably take you down and collect all the dropped gold, scoring from you as well as their own dead teammates.

Fun: it's hidden in here somewhere.

That kind of maddening gameplay isn’t worth the heart problems and broken controllers it’ll likely cause. This leaves you with the game’s multiplayer, which can be played locally or online. The one shining beacon of hope for Yo-Ho Kablammo is that it’s actually a decent multiplayer game. A variety of modes spice things up for an experience reminiscent of classic party games like Bomberman. But unless you play locally, this turns out to be yet another slap in the face from a game that seems insistent on causing you harm.

Yo-Ho Kablammo’s true fate was sealed within its first week, where players could spend upwards of 20-30 minutes searching for a match. Occasionally you’d get lucky and find another player, but daring to wait for a third or fourth player is a great way to lose the first guy and return to square one. And even then, one-on-one matches manage to stir up a bit of lag, and aren’t very fun to begin with.

If you can get some friends together who are willing to look past the head-spinning controls, Yo-Ho Kablammo could be downright exciting. It has all the makings for close matches, comebacks, and moments that will have a group laughing and screaming all at once. Then again, any number of party games offer an identical experience without all the other terribly painful baggage.

1/5

The 800 point (£6.80) Xbox Live Arcade game is becoming a rarity, but this week Xbox Live Director of Programming Larry Hyrb (a.k.a. Major Nelson) announced not one, but two new titles that will be hitting at that price point tomorrow.

Defense Grid: The Awakening is a tower defence game by Hidden Path Entertainment. Originally released on PC in December of last year, the XBLA version offers over 100 challenges, online leaderboards, achievements, and a new mission pack called Borderlands.

Yo Ho Koblammo is a multiplayer-focused, pirate-ship combat game. You take control of your vessel, fire cannons, and collect power-ups with up to three other players. The game features customizable rules for multiplayer as well as 15 single-player challenges.

Via: Hidden Path, Xbox.com, & Major Nelson