'Test Drive Unlimited' - Game review

7 out of 10

This is a strange game. It's trying to do something new for driving games while also reviving a much-loved brand from yesteryear. Accolade's original series was a 16-bit classic but quickly lost ground to the all-consuming Need For Speed series. Similar in conception (i.e. NFS is pretty much a rip-off of TD), these games focus on driving expensive cars as fast as possible while avoiding the attentions of the police.

EA have taken NFS in one direction, retaining the key elements but adding a whole lot more nonsense for the PlayStation generation. With Test Drive Unlimited, Atari and Eden Studios took a different direction. They coined the rather awkward acronym MOOR - Massively Open Online Racing. It might be clumsy but it's a reasonable summary of this game.

You arrive on the Hawaiian island of Oahu with a limited budget and have to work your way through lots of races and missions to earn more money to buy more cars. So far so standard. But this Oahu is online and while driving around you will see other players going about their business. If you choose not to play online the game gives you AI rivals instead. You can do preset single- or multi-player races, make your own custom challenges or attempt other people's, form a club with your mates and challenge other clubs... There's a lot of game in here and for the most part it works pretty well.

You'll spend a lot of time just driving around, since you need to have driven down each road before the game will present the missions it contains. There is an overall island map but you can only teleport to events after you've driven past their location once. The island is a pretty realistic model of Oahu (based on satellite data and built at full scale) and so it naturally contains a mix of good driving roads and bad. I think a custom-designed playground would have been more fun but almost certainly impractical to build on this scale.

There's a large variety of cars and even some motorbikes. The only major brand that is notably absent is Porsche. Collecting different cars is really the meat of this game.

Graphically the game is okay but not amazing. There's a lot of visible LOD popping, the world is pretty empty and the game often stutters while it loads stuff from disc. A game like this is a huge technical challenge but it's basically the same as a Driver game, so I have a pretty good understanding of the issues they faced. The game is totally screwed if the player can travel faster than the game can load data, so I could understand some glitches when driving the fastest vehicles, but in TDU you get a lot of glitches even when you're driving slowly. It just seems like the game was probably far too ambitious and despite great work from Eden to get it into shops, the cracks still show through.

A number of other aspects feel under-developed. The AI of civilian traffic is very unpredictable. It's probably realistic that some dithering fool would pull out in front of your rapidly-incoming Ferrari but in a game it's just not fun. The cops are a Test Drive tradition but they're just an annoyance here, really just paying lip service to the old games - they never feel like challenging opponents the way they used to. You can change your avatar's clothes but there's absolutely no point to it - it's just an excuse for some events to give you clothes tokens instead of money for new cars, artificially extending a game that's already very big.

Finally, the handling of the vehicles will leave some players cold. I enjoyed it but I was happy to play it as an arcade game. I'm not sure that more serious players will find anything here to get their teeth into, despite the option to turn off all the assistance and a wheel-supporting downloadable "hardcore" mode. Like Eden's old V-Rally games, I just don't think it's very deep.

And that hardcore mode reveals another aspect of this game - a strong reliance on downloadable content. Some of it is free but if you want to get some of the best cars (including a RUF to slightly fill the Porsche gap) then you'll need to pay for it. Atari released this game in the US at a budget price, which makes it more acceptable to pay for these extras, but at full price in the UK it is harder to justify.

So, on balance, this is an impressive game in many ways. If you like beautiful cars then you'll probably get a lot out of it. It just falls short of real greatness due to some over-ambition, some questionable design decisions and a handling model that might not thrill everybody. Overall though, there's a lot of game here and it's good value for money, as long as you stay away from some of those downloadable extras.

Shameless self promotion

The web site for Driver 76 has recently gone live on Ubisoft's site. It's the first bit of Driver-related action since we became part of the Ubisoft family. It's quite exciting really. It's also very orange.

This was a really interesting project, with Sumo Digital doing most of the development work and us producing it and helping them out in some areas.

And please don't ask whether this is the 76th entry in the Driver series. It really ought to be called Driver '76, with an apostrophe, for the same reason that Interstate '76 had one. I don't know why we haven't got one but I will ask about it when I'm back in the office.

Are some lives more important?

I listened to President Bush's speech regarding the awful Virginia Tech shootings and I was appalled but, unfortunately, not really surprised. Some choice quotes:

It's impossible to make sense of such violence and suffering. Those whose lives were taken did nothing to deserve their fate. They were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Sound like Iraq to you? Mr. Bush didn't seem to notice the irony.

'Castlevania: Symphony of the Night' - Game review

10 out of 10

There are plenty of games you come back to after 10 years that aren't quite as good as you remember them. Usually you've built them up in your head and have an unrealistic view of how great they were. Symphony of the Night is not one of those games. Exploring Dracula's castle as the slightly-mysterious Alucard really is superb, possibly even better than I remembered.

Why better? Well, even 10 years later it still feels like one of the best action/adventure games you've ever played. The graphics technology might be a bit dated but the artistic quality is without question and still stands up today. It's an absolutely beautiful 2D game and finally on Xbox 360 it can be played without any slowdown. Apart from some slightly dodgy voice acting, the sound is awesome and there is some of the best music you'll ever hear in a game.

Basically, nearly every aspect of this game can still hold its own against any modern rival. It's the only game ever to take on Metroid at its own game and match it. It also has a great surprise in store for anyone thorough enough to explore the castle properly rather than just rush to the end. It's maybe not a surprise these days (partly because the Achievements on this version actually give it away) but 10 years ago it really stunned me like no other plot twist in any game I'd played.

It's not perfect. Playing through a second time with the unlockable extra character is very tiresome because the game wasn't designed for him. There's a 'bug' that results in a couple of places where the map doesn't register that you have visited a location unless you turn into wolf form. However, these are minor gripes and without them I would be tempted to give this game 11 out of 10 anyway - it's that good.

That this was the 13th game in the Castlevania series is even more impressive. It was a complete and brave transformation for the series at a time when it was actually doing rather well anyway and could probably have been left alone. The extent of the redesign is thrown right in your face at the start, with an opening sequence that actually has you playing the end of the previous game. Every subsequent game has lived in its shadow but also been inspired by its genius.

And it really is a work of genius. One of those very rare games where everything seems right, clearly the work of a singular visionary on one of his best days.

This would be good value as a proper boxed release but at 800 points (about £6.80) it's an unbelievable bargain and clearly the best Xbox Live Arcade game so far. It's also one of the best games of any kind anywhere.

'TMNT' - Game review

3 out of 10

It's rare that I link to somebody else's review instead of writing my own but sometimes it feels right. It's even more rare that I agree with Eurogamer. However, their review of TMNT is very close to what I would say (except they're a little bit too generous with their score) and I really can't be bothered to spend any time writing about this game.

I really can't understand how this has had any half-way decent reviews. I doubt whether even the kids this is clearly aimed at would get much enjoyment out of it. Apparently kids tend to blame themselves when they fail in a game but this is one game where they really ought not to. I regularly died due to the shortcomings of the game rather than myself. The game provides infinite lives as a means of balancing the random, unforeseen deaths.

It's clearly a game that has been developed for every hardware platform in the world on an incredibly short timescale. The Xbox 360 version is a joke, with mostly terrible graphics and a new low bar for achievements.

I'm sure that making any sort of game in the time they were given would be an impressive achievement but this barely qualifies as a game. I feel sorry for the team because I can imagine the pressure they were under.

However, the truth of the matter is that I'm wondering if even 3 out of 10 is generous.