The first mainline release in the beloved fighting series on the 360, KOF12 generated a lot of hype. I've never really got into the series as the yearly releases put me off, so this was my entry point. Unfortunately for me and those hyped about the game, KOF12 sucks. It's pretty apparent from the moment you put the disk in that the game lacks polish and care. There is a very simple menu, with few options to choose from. Story mode, training, arcade mode, that's about it. The story mode itself is only 5 fights long and there isn't really a story, there is a shockingly low number of stages to fight on too. Also lacking is the array of characters. For a game known for it's huge roster of fighters, 22 characters is extremely disappointing, especially when the fights are 3 vs 3, meaning there are 7 teams of fighters effectively. The graphics are also poor, not that its a huge deal, but when we see how beautiful other 2D fighting games like BlazBlue look, it's almost surprising to see how ugly these character models are. Another complaint at release, which is not so important now, was the netcode for the online play, which was criticised as being laggy and having huge button delay, yet I can't comment on that personally. So as an overall package it feels a bit lacking in terms of polish and features, all this can be forgiven with good play though right? Well KOF12 is lacking in that department too. I'm a bit of a novice in terms of fighting games and I often struggle to get to grips with complex fighting techniques and move lists that require hours of gameplay to master. KOF12 on the other hand felt so simplistic. You have the 4 face buttons for different attacks and that's about it. Each character does have some special moves but when you browse the move list it is again shocking how short it is. On top of this the fighting doesn't really flow. I found myself unable to string together useful combos, with the fighting style feeling slow, sluggish and disjointed. If you can get past all these things the game is playable. It's not intrinsically broken or a real drag to play. It's just not very good.

It's nice when a game has a clear simple concept, executed well. At it's heart, that's what bulletstorm is. A FPS which focuses on crazy kills and having fun. A bit like a first person gears of war that takes itself even less seriously, bulletstorm puts you through a while fairly short, pretty fun and action packed campaign. The story doesn't matter, it's all about killing enemies in the mos fun ways possible. You can kick enemies and they go flying. You have a leash to pull enemies towards you. Your guns all have a variety of firing modes, some of which are totally crazy too. Best of all, the environment is set up with a bunch of things to help you kill enemies. The main focus of the game is linking all these together to create ever more crazy kills as you work through the campaign or online multiplayer. In many ways it's a breath of fresh air, focusing 100% on fun, and it mostly succeeds. I really enjoy the challenges it gives you, a checklist almost, which encourages you to kill in different ways. At some points though, it does get a bit samey. It's perhaps because the levels all have the same focus. You are either fighting your way through a series or enemies, or holding a room from an enslaught of enemies. This is maybe a weak criticism, as many games are like that, but i did find myself bored at times. With that in mind, i still highly recommend bullet storm. I like to pull it out every now and again and blast through an hour or two in between playing other games. A nice one to have in the collection.

I love a good release title, and PGR 3 might just be the best of the bunch. Of course, to PGR fans this was absolutely no surprise, the previous two entries were both excellent too. But if you compare this with other early release racers on the console, it's really quite impressive. The game uses a Kudos system, which gives you points for finishing races with style. Racking up Kudos is difficult but fun. The most notable thing though about this game is the locations. The races take place in 4 major city hubs, London, Tokyo, Manhatten and Las Vegas, as well as the famous Nurburgring. These locataions look excellent and give the game a great atmosphere. Racing down the narrow streets of London in the twighlight or an early morning cruise down the Vegas strip, each race feels totally different, all the tracks are a joy to race on. The cars themselves handle well, as they straddle the line between the arcade and simulation racing. You quickly find that taking a corner too fast or smashing into an opponent will leave you at the back of the pack, and its difficult to catch up without some skills. However, you don't need to worry about changing the suspension or buying a new engine for your car. It's simple and it works well. The variety of the races is great too. There are standard races, one on ones, elimination races, hot laps, Kudos challenges, the list goes on. Additionally, each race has 5 different difficulties for you to attempt. There are a few things which could be improved. The career is a little short and a few more locations would be nice. Yet, its hard to not be impressed by this one, especially as we approach it's 20th birthday. A must play.

Paintball Championship 2009, a game which features slightly different branding in the PAL and NTSC markets, is one of 2 paintball games on the 360. I think it is also the first paintball game I have ever played. Upon inserting the disk you are greeted by some aggressive music, a montage of men shooting each other in the face with paintballs and the message "Just a game????". It reeks of an attempt to portray paintball as some hardcore sport, which is fine, but we are playing a game, so yes it's just a game. You are left with a few game modes, some exhibitions and a fairly difficult training mode, but the main focus of the game is the campaign and its team building. In the campaign, you enter into paintball tournaments, all of which are capture the flag style games, with some variety in terms of the number of players on each team. You can also buy better equipment and improve your players skills as you play. It all sounds fine, but its a bit of a train wreck. Firstly, every match is pretty much exactly the same and goes like this. You spawn in as your player, run to hide behind an obstacle before you get shot, wait a little while as your teammates try to shoot the enemy team, then try to rush to get their flag. There may be other tactics, but the controls are just so broken it's hard to do anything else. That's about it really, that's pretty much all there is to see in the game. They don't make games like this any more, but there's a reason for that.

Fuck the whip. If you have played this you will know what I mean. Call of Juarez is a very interesting and quite unique FPS with a Western setting. Originally released for the PC in 2006, we got a 360 release in 2007 and if you can handle a bit of jank it holds up pretty well. The story is really nice. You play as Ray, a former preacher, hunting Billy (some random kid IDK), who has been accused of killing his parents. You also Billy running away from Ray (Your Uncle) and trying to find out who really killed your parents. The way the story untangles as you alternate between the characters is surprisingly good and will keep you interested for sure. The setting is also very nice and you can tell the developers put a lot of effort into making you feel like you are in the wild west. Jumping between gold mining towns and lush forests, with a nice selection of weapons and even some fist fighting. It also has a concentration gauge, allowing you to slow down time to blast enemies. Best of all, at the end of some levels you have a one on one pistol duels, just like in the movies, excellent. Consensus is that Ray's levels are more fun. He can lob dynamite and use twin pistols. Billy on the other hand has a bow and a whip. The whip is really the downfall of the game. I would argue that the reason Billy's levels are worse is because of the use of the whip. There are a few platforming sections in the game where you need to use the whip to jump over gaps or traverse rocks and it just kinda doesn't work very well. In addition to that, there are a couple of sections where the game isn't super clear on what you need to do next, but nowadays there are loads of video guides online, so you should be fine. This is not a perfect game, it's janky as hell, sometimes unfair and often confusing. Yet, I can't help but appreciate COJ for trying to do something a bit different and succeeding. In 2023 the datedness of this thing only adds to it's charm, an interesting addition for any collection.

I'm weirdly nostalgic for movie tie in games. At the time, everyone hated them. Yet, I can't help but feel a bit of happiness when I see a random movie tie in game from previous consoles. Pirates of the Carribean, only one on the console thankfully, is a quite decent action adventure game. You play as Amber heard's ex husband on an adventure through parts of the movie? To be honest, I haven't seen the movie, BUT the game does look nice. The areas are all detailed, colourful and varied, and I really enjoyed exploring them. Gameplay is a mix between hack and slash, platforming and some elements of puzzle soliving, with a few collectables thrown in there. The gameplay is simple but varied and the levels do feel realistic. The game also has quite a nice plot with some great cutscenes. Did they get Legolas to do the voice lines? No idea. But the story was interesting and didn't feel tacked on. There is a quite unique duel system to the game, in which you sword fight one on one which was enjoyable and worked well. I also like the variety with different weapons and enemy types. Overall it's a game which appeals to both adults and chilren and will keep you entertained through it's short campaign. It's nothing incredible, but we rarely see games like this nowadays and I do miss them.

I probably wrote this one off before I had even started. Sega went on a spree of making crappy superhero video games in the mid to late 2000s and this is one of them. If you have played one before, you probably have an idea of what they entail. 3rd person action featuring mostly hand to hand combat with a mix of your favourite characters from the hulk series. Hell does the hulk series even have characters? I could name one except Hulk. What's interesting about this one is how much it feels like the Spiderman games. Flying between skyscrapers in a 3D open world New York while completing a series of missions and looking for collectables is basically exactly what you do in Spiderman 3. On the positive side it is fun smashing everything to bits. The best part is the buildings, all of which are destructible. Chucking cars around and watching them smashing into skyscrapers is awesome for a couple of hours. The negative side is that it is pretty repetative. Missions end up being very similar to each other, kill enemies, smash building, the end. Probably a good one for young marvel fans as it is so easy to pick up and play, but not for everyone.

Gen 7 seems to be the generation in which the trend of making a video game about every movie that was released died. I'm sure most gamers will have found memories of playing some form of movie tie in game when they were younger. I was particularly partial to the Toy story game on the snes and of course goldeneye. But over time these games seemed to get worse and worse, rushed out in time for a movie, hoping that parents will buy the game for their kids based on the title alone. For every knights of the old republic there is a chicken little, for every aladdin there is an ET. The early generation 360 game catalouge is full of horrible movie tie in games, and in some ways spiderman 3 is the worst offender of the bunch. After the excellent spiderman 2 on the ps2, we have the not so excellent spiderman 3, the first spidey release on the 360. It has everything you expect and know from spiderman games. Webslinging across Manhattan, all the characters you know and love and dumb one liners from spidey himself. The game is quite famous from its horrible cutscenes which almost rival the memes from the movie itself, and this is one of the highlights of the game. Its fun messing up button presses just to watch the frog eyed NPC look in horror as they get blown up. This is maybe only rivalled by Prison Break. Another fun aspect of the game is the boss fights. They are varied, often in 2 or 3 parts, and sometimes frustratingly hard, which I dig. Unfortunately, this is where the fun ends. Web-slinging through the city is fun for the first hour, until you realise there is nothing really going on in the game world. This is the most boring manhatten we have seen yet. Its all just gray, and there is nothing memorable about it. The combat system is another huge issue, its finicky and normally descends into button mashing or holding down the time slow button. Missions themselves give the impression of variety at the expense of fun. It's not the worst game in the world, but there are much better spidey games on the console.

Over the past 10 years, people have began to re-evaluate this game, and rightly so. There's the famous story about programmers of the game getting a bonus if it got a metacritic score of 85 or above, however it ended up with 84. To me this is wild. A score less than Soul Caliber 4 and Far Cry 2. Playing it in 2023 I fell in love with it yet again, and for me it's one of the best games on the console. For the unitiated, this is a first person role playing game mixed with an FPS. The game utilises the VATS system, which stops time and lets you target enemies, making it a lot more accessible to those who struggle with shooting on consoles. It plays very similarly to the fallout 3, walk around the incredible environment, complete quests given out by the people you meet, explore the unknown, shoot, stab, explode enemies. The gameplay is fun and varied and the world is just so fun to explore. You can walk around for hours meeting interesting people and weird funny situations. Where this game really excels, especially compared to fallout 3, is the story and dialogue. Fallout 3's main story line was very simple and to be honest a bit bland. New Vegas's on the other hand is a rollercoaster of excitement, filled with wacky characters and different routes you can take. The dialouge show improvement too. You care about the story behind side quests and actually want to know what is going on instead of blindly following waypoints. Who doesn't enjoy helping irradiated zombies leave earth to live in the stars? All of this harks back to the (imo) best fallout games, fallout 1 and 2. For that reason, New Vegas is better than 3 and one of the best games on the console period.

Nowadays, Fifa is basically known as the copy and paste of games. Add a different number on the front of a the box and hey presto. But looking back at these early 360 fifas really shows you how much they used to change every year. That doesn't mean Fifa 07 is a good game, it's shite. But its complete lack of features and teams compared to next year's title is astonishing. There's only about 7 leagues to choose from and very few game modes. The gameplay itself is also rubbish. The ball tends to bounce of players in an awkward way. If there's a player anywhere near the ball when you shoot, they will block it. It's not unplayable, and is an improvement over the previous two Fifas, but there's really no reason to play this version in 2023, especially when you people practically give away these sports titles for free.

One of the worst feelings is getting quite a few hours into a game before realising, I'm not having fun. Your left with the difficult choice of giving up or attempting to keep going. The best thing about NFL tour is that it is not like this. You can tell pretty much as soon as you but the disk into the console that it's going to be bad. From the gaudy loading menus and music to the complete lack of game modes or features, it's obviously junk. You can jump into the Tour mode, try exhibition or try some of the weird mini games. The thing is, all of them are fairly similar. You are stuck in this weird walled NFL pitch, given the option to run along the walls and press A to dodge tackles. One big problem is that it is really easy to duck out of tackles, so if you have the ball, you will score. The other issue is that once you have played one game you have seen it all, that's all there is to the game, it's that bad. But nothing compares to worst thing about these game. The horrible horrible commentary. I'm not sure if this made me like the game more or less, but the commentary is so bad it might have come back around and become good again. Horrible.

After loading up the game and being greeted by a bunch of random warning, yes it's ok to autosave no need to make a warning box about it, DOA5 informed me I needed a online pass. I loaded up the marketplace tab to enter the code on the back of my booklet and was greeted by a selection of purchase able costumes. Bikinis and bunny costumes galore. "You might find it hard to keep your head in the fight with this sexy cheerleading uniform", the marketplace proudly states. Errr right.... It was off putting to say the least. Luckily my code from my 2nd hand game worked ( I guess they don't expire), not that it mattered as the online was predictably dead. Ready to hate the game, I started off on the story mode. I was met with some really nice graphics and a very detailed story, which while extremely cheesy, was quite impressive, especially the voice acting. The fights themselves are interspersed among the story scenes and are directly related to the story. The fights themselves act as an excellent tutorial. Each fight teaches you a new move, from simple punches early on, to blocking, countering and combos later on. This is such a nice change from so many fighting games that fail to adequately explain the game mechanics and it really helped me understand and enjoy the fights. The fighting system itself is simple to use but difficult to master. Moves link together well so it is easy to pull of combos. Blocks are simple to execute and really give you a good chance to counter the enemy fighter. The system itself just feels great and is really nice to play. Perhaps I have acieved complete pervert status by enjoying a game famous for it's boob physics, but it's hard not to be impressed by DOA5. As with all fighting games, the death of the online community is a huge drawback nowadays, and there are definitely better fighting games out there, but DOA5 holds its own as a fun game for both perverts and non perverts alike.

When you think of the dreamcast's best games or most iconic games, what comes to mind? Shenmue? Chu Chu Rocket? Powerstone? Resident evil code veronica? The dreamcast had so many great games, and due to the ultimate failure of the console, many of us never got a chance to play them at the time. Even for those who did manage to play either at the time or on later ports, there are a lot of games from the console which are quite hard to find and play now. More obscure titles like D2, illbleed and blue stinger are difficult to find and haven't been ported else where. On top of this we have the wonderful genesis collection which had already been released, it seemed like the dreamcast collection was destined to be great. When you actually see what was released, it's hard not be a little disappointed. Sure, crazy taxi is a fun game, but who asked for pro bass fishing? However, when you delve into the collection, things get so much worse. No bonuses, extras or unlockables, this collection really is bare bones. There is a very basic menu screen and then that's it, just the 4 games. Sonic is basically unplayable nowadays, the camera is horrible, and worst of all they included the original version with none of the updated gamecube content (I suppose it is a dreamcast collection but still). Space channel 5 is the less well regarded sequel. Pro Bass fishing is well fishing. But surely they can't fuck up crazy taxi right? Wrong, the original music has been replaced with some generic rock music. An absolute disaster.