Spontaneous Monotony

Despite being (for the moment) an inferior choice as a games console compared to the Xbox 360, the PS3 looks like making a name for itself as a media hub. Not only the Blu-ray player (the PS3 is currently about £400 cheaper than Play.com’s cheapest standalone player), but now it will also have a digital tv addon and Tivo/Sky+-like recording functions. I think this is actually quite a good idea on Sony’s part - they’ve realised that the Xbox 360 probably has too much of a head start for them to compete on a games-vs-games basis (as with the previous generation, the Xbox was a better console than the PS2 but had poorer games and no momentum), so they now plan to get people to buy them for their media functions. I suspect there are probably more people looking for a Bluray-playing PVR than there are looking for a games console with a lacklustre software library.

Well this morning I put on my 360 in the now-ritualised XBLA Wednesday check. Unfortunately today’s games were Marathon (wow, I didn’t think anything could be more overrated than Halo) and some piss-poor board games. Luckily it seems that we may be only a week away from what will probably be the best XBLA game yet. Speedball 2, in its original form, was a fantastic game. Think a cross between five-a-side football, pinball, and levels of violence that would make Rockstar North blush. Assuming that nothing has gone wrong in the conversion process (as happened with Goldenaxe) this should be a good one.

GoldenAxe has been released on Xbox Live Arcade. It was one of my favourite games when I was a kid, which is why it’s upsetting to write this. The XBLA version is a dull, uninspiring shadow. What Sega seem to have done is taken a very basic version of the game, which I have never seen (I played the Atari version - about 12 years ago), and stuck it on Xbox 360.

You read that right; they have managed to use a three-core, 7th-generation console to produce a game with poorer graphics and sound than I got on an Atari 520ST in the early 90s. Some of the enemies seem to be made of one colour (which they were NOT in the original I played). Whether this is a bug or deliberate, it certainly isn’t good. Worse still, the truly excellent music has become bleepy and hard to hear. I don’t know who at Sega is responsible for this travesty, I can only hope that they are sent to the same salt mine as the Dreamcast division. GoldenAxe didn’t deserve this