Tiger Woods has returned. Nothing much has happened in the real life of Tiger Woods since the release of Tiger Woods 10, honest. Last year’s outing was a solid experience and little has changed apart from a few additions which I’ll focus on. The biggest change from Tiger Woods 10 to Tiger Woods 11 is the True-Aim feature. True-Aim is supposed to make the experience more realistic and it achieves this, sort of. It’s more realistic in that the camera no longer follows your ball as it flies through the air. It’s also more realistic in that pressing the B button for the overhead view no longer shows an aiming circle.

However, the GPS view, which replaces the aiming circle, is not more realistic at all. Pressing B for the overhead view will now display distance and elevation markers on the course. I hardly call this realistic unless your golfer happens to be The Terminator or Robocop and can see mathematical representations of the world around. The GPS view becomes all the more strange when you’re close to the green and instead of seeing the pin one of the distance markers is yellow, not white like the rest, which indicates where the pin is situated.

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To the best of my knowledge the Nintendo Wii isn’t blessed with many fighting games. Off the top of my head I can think of Smash Bros and a couple of boxing games. There may be a few others but the genre certainly isn’t overflowing on the system. For that reason I was looking forward to this title. Before reviewing a game I tend to steer clear of other people’s views and this was no exception. I went into this with an open mind but after playing the game for a while I sort of wished I’d been better prepared.

The characters range from one obnoxious idiot, Marcus who comments on how beautiful he is, to another obnoxious idiot, Bast who comments on how rich she is, with a variety of obnoxious idiots between the two. Each battle is split into Acts, you know, like one of those theatre play things. This is a nice idea and it would work well apart from the fact this is a fighting game. I’m not aware of any plays, or books for that matter, which solely consist of two opponents beating the crap out of each other for the entire duration, with a lame put-down thrown in at the end.

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Yep, you heard me right. The R4 flashcart, that seemingly-innocent little bit of plastic and metal you see above, is now well and truly against the law in the UK. That’s according to the High Court in London, who apparently decide these things.

Say what you will about the cartridges (they do make the DS a lot more useful as a media device and ebook reader), but it can’t be denied that these things get used for piracy by a lot of people.

Defendant Wai Dat Chan, of Playables Limited, argued that the cartridges should be legal as they enable the use of homebrew applications. Unfortunately the court ruled that, as the carts must circumvent the DS’s piracy protection to do so, they should be well and truly on the wrong side of the law.

A statement had this to say:

“Nintendo promotes and fosters game development and creativity, and strongly supports the game developers who legitimately create new and innovative applications. In the UK alone, there have been over 100,000 game copying devices seized since 2009.”

“Nintendo initiates these actions not only on its own behalf, but also on behalf of over 1,400 video game development companies that depend on legitimate sales of games for their survival.”

The ruling follows similar action across much of Europe and Japan in recent times. Read more about the case here.

Not a lot of people know this, but in Japan you can actually buy a vitual girlfriend simulator for your DS. It’s made by Konami, it’s called Love Plus, and it’s a huge hit.

If you think that’s weird (and you’re not alone), it gets stranger – Love Plus now has an arcade version, as you can see in the video above, where players get 5 minutes of lovin’ for their Yen. At the end of the date, players get a printout detailing how successful their attempts at courtship really were. They also get to go home and cry themselves to sleep.

Well, that part’s optional.

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Today is the 24th of July 2010, and that can only mean one thing – the 25th birthday of the Commodore Amiga. Launched on this day in 1985, this Motorola 68000 powered beast helped popularise home computing in the 80s and early 90s, and like its predecessor the C64, helped bring affordable computing power to the masses.

The machine even had its own set of fanboys back in its day, constantly at war with owners of the far superior Atari ST line of computers. But let’s put all that aside today and celebrate the Amiga for what it is – an important piece of computing history in those exciting early days, before everything became just Mac vs. PC.

Here’s some retro gaming gold – a very early trailer for the original Half-Life. This trailer shows what the game could have been if it had released on time, in November ’97. Thanks to the greatness that is Valve Time, the game actually hit a whole year later as the groundbreaking epic we know and love, and thankfully had a layer of polish so thick that it made this old trailer look nothing better than yet-another-Doom-clone.

Of course, even in the goofy, jagged, jerky early build shown above, we could tell that Valve’s baby was destined for greatness. Fast forward 13 years, and perhaps we’ll be seeing Episode 3 some time soon.

Maybe.

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Crackdown provided one of the biggest surprises in this generation of consoles. Going on the screenshots and videos prior to release the game looked like it would be fun but that wasn’t the reason behind the huge number of pre-orders it garnered. In a stroke of genius the Crackdown disc included the beta for one of the most anticipated titles in gaming history, Halo 3. It wasn’t surprising how many copies of the game were sold on its release, the Halo 3 beta explains that. The real surprise was in how great that little title from Realtime Worlds turned out to be. Crackdown continued to sell long after the Halo 3 beta novelty wore off and is still regarded by many as one of the most entertaining games on the Xbox 360. This sequel from Ruffian Games, headed by a couple of guys who worked on the original title, has a great deal to live up to.

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This is quite unlike any game I have ever played. I have played many action RPGs. I have also played many games with a fantasy setting. But I can say without a shadow of a doubt that I have never played a game which frustrated me so much yet had me going back for more. Demon’s Souls is one of the most rewarding games I have played but this could so easily have been a very different review.

I like to think I have quite a few good qualities but unfortunately patience has never been one of them. As I started the game one of the first things I noticed is a nice selection of character classes to choose from which goes a little beyond the usual Warrior, Ranger, and Mage format. The ten available classes are Knight, Priest, Thief, Magician, Temple Knight, Soldier, Wanderer, Barbarian, Royalty, and Hunter.

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During my teenage years Green Day were one of my favourite bands, Dookie was one of my favourite albums, and Tre Cool was one of my favourite drummers. It pains me to admit those teenage years were quite a while ago. On the plus side, Green Day: Rock Band may be the perfect excuse to sing and drum along to their songs once more, and of course play air-guitar, except with a plastic guitar instead of air.

Green Day: Rock Band follows the successful release of The Beatles: Rock Band. Even the most hardcore fans of Green Day would have to admit this seems like an odd choice. I wouldn’t describe Green Day as a small band but they’re a great distance from The Beatles who were one of the biggest and most successful bands the world has ever seen. It would have been more suitable to follow The Beatles with bands who could sell-out a tour of major stadiums around the globe. Bands such as The Rolling Stones, U2, Queen, Guns N Roses, and Metallica. I see Green Day in the same category as bands with a few solid tracks on Rock Band and Guitar Hero, such as Jimmy Eat World and All American Rejects, who would also seem an odd choice for this type of celebratory special edition.

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I really like the Sherlock Holmes character. Forget Poirot, Columbo, and the chimney sweep who goes about on skates when he should be tending to patients, Holmes is the ultimate detective. It may seem a little odd, considering how much I like the character, that I’m not a big fan of the movies. I enjoyed watching The Hound of the Baskervilles as a kid but I was fascinated more by the idea than the move itself. There are apparently 24 movie versions of Hound of the Baskervilles so perhaps the couple I remember watching weren’t the best examples. There have been over 200 Sherlock Holmes movies and easily my favourite is Young Sherlock Holmes.

That Spielberg produced action adventure was much more to my liking than the more common dialogue heavy examples. Young Sherlock Holmes is worth mentioning as while watching this version from Guy Ritchie I noticed a few similarities between the two. The team of three people consisting of Sherlock Holmes, his best friend Watson, and a love interest of Holmes. The supernatural black magic theme. The clever and timely reveal of a well-known adversary to Holmes. Most important similarity of all is a focus on fun.

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