Consoles, Games and Emulators.

Sonic the Hedgehog may share its name with the Genesis original, but this game is even more broken than most of the other recent Sonic games have been.

In what might be seen as a move to reset and reinvent the series, the latest game to feature Sonic the Hedgehog is merely called Sonic the Hedgehog. Sega’s blue critter has been around since the 16-bit days, when his side-scrolling platformers were strong enough to take on Mario, the then-undisputed kingpin of the platforming genre. Sonic’s fall from grace has been slow, starting with a promising first stab at 3D with Sonic Adventure, but it’s all been downhill since those far-gone days, and games like this new Sonic the Hedgehog are the culprit. With plenty of bad glitches, poor controls, and totally lame gameplay on all fronts, this one’s not going to restore any part of the Hedgehog’s name to glory.

While Sonic’s name is on the box, you’ll actually spend most of your time playing as other characters. The game is broken up into three different stories: one starring Sonic, one starring Shadow, and one starring a new hedgehog called Silver. Each of the stories play differently because of the way each hedgehog controls. Sonic is meant to be the fast-moving one, and he mainly attacks via a homing jump attack that makes most basic fights as simple as timing presses of the A button to bounce from foe to foe. Silver has telekinesis powers that let him pick up large objects and use his mind to fling them at enemies. He’s not as fast as Sonic, but he has the ability to float in the air for brief periods of time, letting him cross larger gaps. Shadow the Hedgehog gets his own version of the homing attack, but the big difference is that he can drive around in different armed vehicles. Further watering the game down is a heavy supporting cast, so even when you pick the Sonic episode, you’ll still occasionally play as Tails and Knuckles. Other Sonic collaborators, like Amy, Blaze, Rouge, and E-123 Omega also put in guest appearances. While the character variety might initially seem like a good idea, most of them aren’t too interesting. Tails moves almost painfully slowly, and his fake ring bombs aren’t any fun to use, so when Sonic levels occasionally switch over to him, it’s immediately boring. In addition to the single-player levels, you can play the game in a two-player, split-screen tag mode that attempts to force players to cooperate as you progress through the story. In addition, you can go back and play levels you’ve completed in a battle mode.

While you play as many different characters throughout the main game, the same structure applies across the board. The game’s action stages are separated by town portions, where you’ll be able to take on dopey side missions to help out the locals or figure out puzzles to proceed. Each of these side missions are bookended by two sets of loading screens, where it first loads up the exact same scene, just with different text dialogue, then it loads up the actual mission. After that, it has to load up some ending text and then load up the out-of-mission version of that part of town. Each load time is fairly long, and when they stack up in this way, it almost makes the game feel broken.

But since the frequent and lengthy load times don’t quite do it, it’s up to the action stages to make the game actually feel broken. The camera is the most immediate problem, as it doesn’t bother to give you a good view of the action on its own, and your control over it is inverted, with no option to change it. In some cases, the game changes angles at the worst possible time and the controls don’t automatically compensate for the new angle. In one Sonic level, you’re snowboarding down a mountain and must stay pointed in the right direction. When the camera flips around to give you a new view of the action, you immediately grind to a halt, because you’re no longer pushing in the proper direction. This makes some sequences of the game a frustrating exercise in trial and error while you attempt to compensate for this mess. This is but one of several cases where the camera causes often-severe gameplay problems, and it gets frustrating to the point of being nearly unplayable. Since none of the hedgehogs can swim and there’s plenty of water and endless, life-ending cliffs nearby, jumping or trying to do a homing attack when you’re near a ledge is often scary, since you’re rarely able to get a good look at the world around you. Death can also be a bit scary, because you have a limited number of lives and you’re kicked all the way out to the main menu when you run out. The game doesn’t save automatically, and you can’t save in the middle of a mission, so special care must be taken to save immediately before you enter a new area, just to make sure you aren’t later forced to repeat lengthy sections of the game.

Graphically, Sonic the Hedgehog is a glitchy mess that usually looks extremely bland. The town that Sonic spends most of his time saving looks like someone dug up some old Dreamcast-era artwork, brushed it up a little bit, and released it onto current consoles. While his animation for running and jumping usually looks OK, there are plenty of awkward moments, too, like spots in the level that cause the camera to freak out or the way Sonic occasionally launches from platform to platform with his head pointed directly at the ground. There are some better-looking levels in the game, though, and Silver’s first level at least starts off with a bang, complete with a nice-looking devastated future city and a big fiery boss fight. Unfortunately, the very next level drops the psychic hedgehog into a nondescript forest setting that doesn’t look any better than Sonic’s ugly town, and it goes on from there. Compounding the issue is a very sketchy frame rate that slows the entire game down at seemingly random intervals. Considering the main appeal of Sonic is that he’s supposed to be able to run fast, all the sluggishness really takes away from the game’s already ugly presentation. The characters are voiced in cutscenes with plenty of bad anime enthusiasm, but it’s neither good enough to work on its own or bad enough to be funny. The rest of the game’s dialogue is delivered through text. The music varies from fast-moving action themes to random ska-influenced tunes. It’s passable, but aside from the main screen’s title theme, none of it really stands out at all.

Only the most blindly reverent Sonic the Hedgehog fan could possibly squeeze any enjoyment out of Sega’s latest adventure. This platformer is a mess from top to bottom, and any of the occasional moments that don’t feel somehow broken only serve to make the game’s other flaws appear that much bigger.

Virtua Fighter 5 builds upon VF4 with new moves and characters, making for a great sequel.

With 14 years of history behind it, the Virtua Fighter series offers a mature fighting system with plenty of characters that have been around since the beginning. Though the mode selection hasn’t evolved much over that of Virtua Fighter 4, this fifth installment builds upon its predecessor’s fighting system and is a better overall fighting game. If you’re already on board with Virtua Fighter and you own a PlayStation 3, that statement should be enough for you to know that you probably need this game in your library. It’s a fantastic fighting game with terrific characters, including some solid additions to the cast. If you haven’t been following the series, it’s likely that this game will feel arcane. It’s not very beginner friendly, which may be a big deal to you if, for example, you’re the average PlayStation 3 owner who’s just desperate for something–anything–new. Either way, your enjoyment of VF5 is going to be a factor of your skill level as well as the number of people you have nearby to play with.

Competitive gameplay is what this style of game is all about, so let’s start right at the top. Virtua Fighter 5 has the standard array of modes you’ve probably come to expect from a fighting game. There’s an arcade mode, which gives you a score and puts you up against a boss character–Dural specifically, the same boss that the series has used all along. There’s a versus mode for playing against a friend. There’s also a dojo section that is meant to provide training in the game’s various moves. However, since a fair amount of the timing in VF5 is different than its predecessors, it’s almost criminal that this mode doesn’t have any sort of “demo this move” button that shows how the move is done. The game doesn’t really go out of its way to describe the different moves and stances, though the manual does feature a decent moves list, where you’ll see what an “offensive move” is, which you’ll need to know if you want to perform all of the moves in the dojo mode. There’s also a mode marked VF.TV, which is where you can pit any fighter against any other fighter and watch the PS3 play against itself.

The deepest single-player mode is the quest mode, which returns from VF4 largely unchanged. You’re given a basic map of a few different arcades, and you can travel to any one of them and fight against various artificial-intelligence-controlled players. These players are done up to resemble real people, in that the fighters are ranked, have a win/loss record, and wear various customized clothes, as if you’re playing against an actual person who has spent time on his or her fighter. But the illusion quickly breaks down, as the fighters you’re up against here never feel like actual human opponents. While the higher-ranked fighters are certainly less susceptible to basic moves and traps than the lower-ranked players, everything still feels very robotic. Also, there’s no way to create your own AI profile. The ability to create your own profiles and acquire new ones online (which some other recent fighting games have done) would have given this feature a lot more meaning in Virtua Fighter 5. VF.TV ends up feeling like a throwaway mode, though it could have been saved if you were able to upload and download replays online.

Of course, once you start talking about online functionality, it’s hard to ignore that Virtua Fighter 5 doesn’t have any online play. Given the game’s frame-specific nature, any amount of latency would probably be unacceptable, so there’s probably a technical reason why it’s not present. But without online play, you’re limited to playing single-player, which doesn’t put up an interesting, lasting fight for very long, or playing against your friends, locally. If you happen to live in a hotbed of Virtua Fighter activity, where you’re persistently surrounded by Akira experts and your days are spent rabidly discussing frame data, that’s most definitely not a problem. But if you’re the only Virtua Fighter fan on your block, it’s going to be a pretty lonely experience, especially once you start customizing characters that no one else will ever see and, well, crying yourself to sleep at night because your uncultured “friends” don’t care that you unlocked Sarah’s D costume last night and immediately purchased the pink leather shorts for her to wear with it. Don’t worry, they’re the ones with the problem, not you.

The gameplay in VF5 is still based around three buttons: guard, punch, and kick. Considering that there are plenty of cases where you’ll have to hit multiple buttons, a joystick would be the best possible control option. But unless you’re willing to start importing controllers, you’re probably going to be stuck with the default Sixaxis controller. It’s certainly functional, but hitting guard and kick at the same time can be tricky when you’re trying some of the more timing-intensive moves, forcing you to rely on shortcut commands on the shoulder buttons.

The entire cast of Virtua Fighter 4 returns in VF5, and that includes professional karate man, Akira, who has served as the main face of the series over the years. But there’s also Lau, who’s looking older than ever, the constantly annoying Lion, the occasionally annoying Jacky, and so on. There are two new characters in VF5, as well. El Blaze is a Mexican wrestler who looks a lot like Rey Mysterio Jr. and uses a lot of great-looking wrestling moves. Eileen uses the martial art of kou-ken, which is just a fancy way of saying she sort of fights like a monkey. Her backstory paints her as a fan of Pai’s who decides to get onto the fighting circuit after seeing Pai in action. Most of the existing characters play very similarly to how they’ve played in the past, though you will find a handful of new moves in there. Also, VF5 has a much more defined sense of scale to it. Huge fighters like Jeffry and Wolf look gigantic compared to someone like El Blaze or Lion. You can attach data profiles to characters, which lets you track your win/loss percentage and also gives you gold that can be used to purchase new costume parts for each fighter. There are plenty of choices, though most of them are fairly standard variations on the existing four costumes.

Virtua Fighter 5 is a great-looking game from top to bottom. The characters look great and animate well, with the lone exception of their mouths, and teeth, which just look a little off when characters speak at the end of a fight. There are plenty of different backgrounds in the game, and they all look great while also figuring into the fights. Some of them are walled off, giving you a surface to juggle fighters up against, while others are open, letting you win by pushing your opponent out of the ring if you can. The game runs at 720p on the PlayStation 3, which gives you a nice, high definition to work with, though some of the characters and stages can look a little pixelated in spots. Still, this looks like a perfect port of the arcade version, and it looks really nice. Those graphics seem to come at a bit of a price, though, as the load times between fights can be lengthy, which really slows down the action. It’s a little puzzling, considering the game installs more than 2GB of data to the PS3’s hard drive.

The sound effects in Virtua Fighter 5 haven’t really changed much. You’ll hear the same sort of jetlike sweeping noises when you execute specific types of kicks, the same slam noise when you jump on top of a fallen opponent, and the same treble-heavy crunches and slashes when you punch. Contentwise, that’s fine, though most of the game’s sound, even the speech, sounds a little low fidelity. The music is good across the board, with the same sorts of electronic-tinged rock that you’d expect to hear from the series.

Virtua Fighter 5 is a great fighting game that’s specifically geared toward players who have experience with the series. If you’ve been playing Virtua Fighter for any length of time, this game is worth adding to your library, especially if you have other like-minded players in your immediate vicinity. But if you’re a fan of other fighting games and aren’t already familiar with Virtua Fighter, it’s likely that you’re just going to keep on wondering what all the fuss is about.

Skate’s analog trick system is revolutionary for the genre, but the game surrounding those mechanics isn’t quite as good.

Plenty of skateboarding games have come and gone in the years since the long-running Tony Hawk franchise reinvented the genre. Most failed because they simply attempted to duplicate the arcadelike, fast-moving gameplay of Activision’s series. After running unopposed for years, Activision’s got some new competition in the form of Skate from Electronic Arts. At times, this simulation-style skating game feels as though it was built from the ground up to be the anti-Tony Hawk, and aside from both games taking place on skateboards, the two don’t have a whole lot in common. This is largely thanks to Skate’s very cool control system, which puts all of the meaningful controls on the controller’s two analog sticks and triggers. It’s an awesome system that makes tricks feel more involved and entertaining. Unfortunately, you’ll be applying this control scheme to a series of challenges and goals that aren’t quite as good, and an extremely unstable frame rate certainly doesn’t help, either.

Skate puts your skater movement onto the left analog stick. The right analog stick controls how you move and flip your skateboard to do tricks. For a simple ollie, you hold down on the stick to crouch then snap it up to jump into the air. Kickflips and heelflips are accomplished if you come up slightly left or right of center. Shuvits happen when you hit down to crouch, then roll the stick around to the side and up to the top. These are the basic tricks, but they get significantly more complicated. The triggers are used for your left and right hands, so when you’re in the air, you can use these buttons to perform grabs. Once you’ve grabbed onto the board, you can tweak it around with the right stick for different types of grabs. It’s an instantly intuitive system with the depth to keep you going for some time, but it isn’t perfect. A lot of the tricks are done in extremely similar ways. So when some goals call for specific tricks, like a nollie 360 flip, you might find yourself attempting the trick again and again, only to have some other trick come out. This gets totally frustrating in spots, especially in S.K.A.T.E. competitions, where you have to duplicate someone else’s trick exactly to stay in the game.

Grinding in Skate is as simple as lining yourself up with a rail or curb, getting airborne, and landing on the grindable edge. Well, it sounds simple on paper, anyway. In practice, you’ll have to really work to line yourself up because the default camera is a low, off-to-the-side angle meant to duplicate the look of a dude following you on his own board, holding a video camera the whole time. Your skater is large on the screen, meaning he’ll block a lot of your view–he doesn’t seem to become transparent often enough to let you get a clear view of the action at all times. Also, Skate is very big on timing. The height of your ollies or other tricks is dependent on how long you crouch and how fast you snap the stick up. It’ll take some time before you’re hitting every rail, flipping in and out, or landing in manuals all over the place. The whole system is also purely skill-based. You don’t receive skater statistic boosts, unlock new tricks, or the like. Everything is available right off the bat. The only stat that increases is your own personal skill with the sticks.

There’s a loose story to Skate’s career mode. It opens with you getting slammed by a bus and going in for surgery. This justifies the way you can reconfigure your skater’s face and body type in the typical EA style of analog sliders. Once you’re back on your feet, you’re out to get noticed, so it’s time to start recording footage and winning events. The different goals in the game give you some variety, but you’ll have to get good at all of them if you want to get to the top. Because you’re trying to get covered by two different skateboarding magazines, you’ll have to complete a lot of photo goals, which ask you to perform specific tasks on specific objects. Some of the tasks are simple, like reaching certain point scores, while others will demand that you pull off longer grinds, flip specific tricks into grinds, or land in manuals. You’ll also encounter multiskater competitions, such as timed battles for the most points, best trick contests, or slalomlike downhill races. There are also free-form footage goals, where you’re given a set of tasks that must be performed within 30 seconds. The catch is that you can do these anywhere, so half of the process is figuring out which part of the city is conducive to your task. Some of them require you to skate in no-skate zones, which are patrolled by security guards who will push you over if they catch you. Some require you to do huge grinds, do a lot of spins, remain in the air for 10 seconds, and so on. The film goals are probably the trickiest ones in the entire game.

As you make your way through the game, you’ll open up additional skate spots within the city, including such indoor locations as the Plan B Warehouse and the X Games Stadium. Aside from entering these indoor locations, you can skate around the city without seeing a loading screen. But if you decide to warp right to a location, you’ll see some lengthy load screens. The distance that you can warp without loading also seems a little random. Some goals have you skate long rails or cover what doesn’t seem like that much ground, but if you try to warp back to the other side of the goal, it’ll stop and load. When you’re stuck on a goal and trying it again and again, the loading becomes really grating, as do the unskippable menu animations that pop up when you fail a film goal. This all sounds like small stuff, but it really gets magnified when you’re stuck trying the same thing over and over.

In addition to the career mode, you can play several multiplayer events, such as jam, which is a timed session that is won by the highest scorer. For these events, the city gets broken down into smaller areas. A couple of jam locations are in fairly small areas, like residential-sized pools. When the game sticks you into these spots and there are four players in the game, it just becomes chaos. This is because there isn’t enough room to skate and you’re left constantly bumping into other skaters, which isn’t much fun at all. You can also play S.K.A.T.E., get into best trick contests, races, and so on. The online performance can be a little spotty and seems to really depend on the connection speeds of the other players, as well as your own. This means that one player with a slow connection speed can bring the whole game down. In a game that’s so focused on accurate timing, it’s pretty lame to randomly drop into slow motion. But when it’s all working, it’s decent.

The differences between the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 versions of Skate are a bit of give and take. The PS3 version has slightly better control, solely because its looser analog sticks are more conducive to fast trick snapping. The game has motion control support, which lets you steer by tilting the controller instead of using the left analog stick. It’s disabled by default for a reason, as the huge dead zone and imprecise motion makes playing the game practically impossible with it turned on. Skate is also limited to four players online, as opposed to six on the Xbox 360, which can be a bummer in some spots; but considering how crowded some of the areas can get with six skaters, this can be a blessing in disguise. But any points the PS3 version earns are totally negated by its awful frame rate. Whether you’re playing alone or online, the game drops frames all over the place when anything starts moving quickly. This is a very timing-oriented game, and having a frame rate this bad really hurts the gameplay.

There is also a community aspect to Skate. You can use a replay editor to capture video footage of your performances or snap screenshots at any point and share them publicly. These can then be viewed through a menu in the game or through the game’s Web site, which is nice because the person you want to show your skating exploits to doesn’t need a copy of the game to see them. These items can be rated and commented on, which is a sharp idea that expands on the sorts of things that EA has done in the past with Burnout or some of its sports games. The only catch is that, as of this writing, the Web site is sluggish and pretty buggy, making it hard to navigate, as well as see the best footage.

Visually, Skate has a realistic look to it that fits with the overall atmosphere of the game. The skaters look good and the animation is great when it’s running smoothly, though a few of the up-close talking segments that show polygonal versions of real-life skaters look a little weird.

Like other sports games, Skate is filled with plenty of sponsored equipment and other product placement. For the most part, it feels fine; getting sponsored by board and shoe companies is an integral part of the game’s career mode, and that part never feels too aggressive. But it crosses the line in a few spots, like whenever you meet a pro skater. It shows that skater skating a line and doing some nice tricks, but then it zooms up to give you a very deliberate view of his skateboard, trucks, wheels, and shoes, flashing the sponsor logos on the screen all the while. Also, there’s a weird bit of reverse product placement in the game because EA and Adidas teamed up to produce some limited-edition shoes. These are introduced and advertised in the game, complete with promotion codes that get you $50 off them when you beat the skaters who endorse them. It’s awfully blatant, but it’s actually pretty unique. It helps that the shoes are sort of rad. The game also downloads new ads for billboards and other surfaces as you play, though there aren’t enough ads, resulting in some cases where you’ll see the same stupid billboard 10 times as you skate up a single street.

The soundtrack is a really weird mix of music that doesn’t actually play through most of the game. On the default settings, music is ambient. This means that whenever you get close to a skate-friendly spot where skaters might gather and actually have a radio, you’ll start to faintly hear music coming from the direction of the spot. If you like, you can set it to directly play the music, but most of the soundtrack is a little sketchy, and the way the game opens with Booker T & The MG’s “Green Onions” every single time you load it up makes you feel like you’re turning on some awful Jim Belushi movie rather than getting ready to play a realistic skateboarding game.

Aside from the weird soundtrack, the in-game audio is really great. There are lots of great skateboarding noises, especially the way the wheels skid when you do powerslides or land hard and turn. The game also has something like color commentary, which comes from the invisible kid who’s “holding” the in-game camera. He’ll call out to other pros as you pass by, congratulate you on good trick lines, comment when you stack and break some bones, or impatiently whine when you set the controller down then walk away. His presence is pretty good and gives the game some personality.

While Skate has a handful of issues that hold it back, it has a ton of potential. It’s a solid first start for what hopefully will become a regular franchise. With some more refinement and a few more things to do, this could probably be the best skateboarding game around. It’s definitely worth playing, if only to get your hands on the trick system; but if you’re stingy with your money, you could probably get enough out of it with a rental.

PixelJunk Racers’ virtual slot cars are fun in groups of people, but without online multiplayer, you’ll get tired quickly if you’re playing alone.

PixelJunk Racers is a neat little game that takes the basic concepts of slot car racing and applies them to a multitude of minigame-like events that you can play alone or against friends. There are a good number of different events, though the addition of a few more tracks and online multiplayer would have made it a much longer-lasting collection.

The controls in Racers are simple. You can use either the D pad or the analog stick to change lanes, and the L2 or R2 triggers can be used to control how fast you’re moving. You don’t have direct steering control, and so you can swap between lanes only one at a time. This control scheme is applied across 10 different tracks and 32 different game types, which gives you a lot of different potential combinations. But that doesn’t prevent the game’s solo tournament mode, which gradually unlocks tracks and game types as you play, from feeling monotonous for sticking to the same handful of tracks early on.

Some events are basic races to the finish line. Others include stuff like “the munchies,” which is accompanied by this helpful life lesson: “Eat cars to stay alive for as long as possible!” Still others have you blowing up your car like a balloon to charge it with forward movement; dodging cars until you pass enough to turn into a fireball, at which point you have the power to ram right through the opposing vehicles; and so on. Most of the cars you see on the track with you are simple drones that are there for you to dodge, blow up, or eat.

In addition to the solo tournament, you can set up custom groupings of the events for local multiplayer matches. These can get nicely hectic, and that’s why it’s a shame that there isn’t any online support. However, a score-attack option lets you compete against other players via leaderboards, which is decent.

Visually, PixelJunk Racers is a very simple-looking game, and that’s by design. It moves quickly when it needs to and looks just fine, overall. The audio is similarly basic, with a few different music tracks, an announcer with a handful of phrases, and the sounds of actual racing, explosions, and such. Overall, it comes across as minimalist and nice, as opposed to lazy and plain.

PixelJunk Racers is a game for PlayStation 3 owners who have a bunch of controllers and friends that are willing to race with them. If you’re a one-man race crew, you’ll probably get bored fast, but if you have a team of players that are into the whole “party game” thing, you’ll probably have plenty of fun with PixelJunk Racers.

It’s better than last year’s game, but it’s still not worth playing.

NBA 07 for the PlayStation 3 was a mess, clearly rushed out the door to make it to stores in time for the PlayStation 3’s launch. SCEA has had 10 months to straighten things out for NBA 08–not a lot of time in the world of game development. There’s no question that this year’s game is better than last year’s, but its gameplay is so laden with problems that it’s still not worth your time.

For starters, there’s not a whole lot to do. There’s no franchise mode, only a bare-bones single-season mode. You can’t manage a salary cap, draft players, sign contracts, manage team finances, or pretty much anything else basketball games have been doing for the last several years. You can trade players, but the CPU doesn’t bother to veto trades, so you can trade the worst player in the league for the best player whenever you want. There are a few minigames to choose from, though they’re nothing new. Own the court is a timed head-to-head shooting challenge that’s pretty fun; the three-point contest is entertaining against friends for a few rounds; and skills challenge, where you dribble, pass, and shoot on an obstacle course, is rather lame…again. If you fancy an online game you can go online, but if your experience is anything like ours, you won’t be able to find anyone to play unless you get a second copy of the game and trick a friend into playing. Once we did get someone to play against, the game ran fairly smoothly and the lag didn’t affect the timing of the shot meter much at all.

NBA 08’s only unique gameplay mode is NBA replay. The developer took the best performances from last year’s NBA season and added them into the game for you to try to replicate. You don’t have to match all of the 57 points that Michael Redd scored on November 11, but you will be given just a few minutes to score eight points, six of which will need to come in the form of three-pointers from specific spots on the floor. Sony will be updating these challenges with new performances as the real NBA season progresses. These challenges are fun for a while, but after a few weeks they start to all feel the same; so it’s hard to imagine finishing the 68 scenarios that shipped with the game and still find yourself wanting more.

You earn credits for playing minigames and from challenges. They can also be earned by accomplishing in-game feats such as dishing an assist with a certain player, getting a double-double, hitting a shot, and more. These credits can be used to unlock new gear or boost a created player’s stats. It’s an interesting way of getting you to care about leveling up your player, but it’s hampered by the game’s paltry create-a-player options and the fact that you can score 50 points with your player in his first game even though he’s rated a 50.

Repetitive challenges and the lack of a franchise mode are really moot points, though, because the gameplay is so poor you won’t care that there aren’t many ways to experience it. A few of the problems from last year’s version have been fixed, but many remain. It’s near impossible to run a fast break for the following reasons: There’s no lead pass button; players will stop in their tracks to receive the ball; and defensive players can pick off any pass longer than 15 feet with ease. You can call plays with the D pad and, this year, even call them for a specific player, but everyone gets so bunched up that most passes in traffic get stolen. Offensive players make little effort to get open, and when they do try, they don’t succeed because defensive players are stuck to them like glue. Speaking of defense, how, exactly, are you supposed to guard people when they can a) dribble the ball right through your body, and b) get bailed out on foul calls when you don’t even hit a button or come into contact with them? More Sixaxis controls have been added, and like most every other game out there, they add nothing to the experience. They work OK when you’re just trying to perform a spin move, but why anyone would want to tilt the controller to raise or lower their hands on defense when they could just do it with the right stick is a mystery.

But the game does a few things well. The tricolored shot meter that gives you a visual representation of how difficult a shot is as well as the timing required to hit it works as good as ever. It’s the game’s best feature by far. Low post controls are easy to learn, responsive, and effective, even with defenders magically glued to your hips. Rebounding also works well thanks to icons on the floor that show where the ball is going to land. This was in the game last year but didn’t work very well. This time around you actually feel like you’ve got some say over who is going to end up with a rebound. The game’s pacing is also pretty good. The CPU doesn’t waste a lot of time with unproductive passes and is pretty aggressive, so there’s very little downtime.

NBA 08’s visuals are all over the place. The game does run at a speedy frame rate, even in 1080p. The courts look nice, too. There are nice reflections on the hardwood, and the crowds and arenas are detailed. Player models are generally good–at least if you look at them while they’re not moving. Once they get in motion things get ugly. Their heads follow the ball, but their eyes don’t; their transitions from one move to the next are awful; and there’s an egregious amount of clipping. That might explain why the presentation is so dull. The only time you’ll see a replay is after a dunk, since they look pretty good. The rest of the time it’s as if the game is trying to hide its problems from you by not letting you get too close to the action.

Astonishingly enough, last year’s game didn’t have any commentary other than a PA announcer. NBA 08 fixes this with the addition of Kevin Calabro and Mark Jackson as announcers. They’re passable, but they don’t have a lot to say and they frequently ignore big plays. This is mostly an issue on unexpected plays, like when a player misses a free throw but a teammate comes flying in for a dunk–Calabro won’t even mention the dunk, and will instead talk about the miss. The arenas are pretty quiet; the crowds are subdued and there’s not a lot of music during the games.

Sure, the game’s better than it was last year, but this series is far from being good. So baby steps–even if they’re in the right direction–just won’t cut it. The bottom line is NBA 08 is not a good game, and there’s no reason to play it.

There’s not an awful lot of game here, but flOw still makes for an attractive and soothing showpiece.

FlOw has more in common with something like a lava lamp than an actual game. It’s something to be watched. You’ll find yourself infinitely more intrigued by the shapes and colors that evolve throughout its experience than its relatively scarce gameplay mechanics. It’s basically a piece of computer art that happens to be controllable via the Sixaxis controller. And the really crazy thing? Despite its incredible simplicity and heavy emphasis on aesthetics over gameplay, it is still something you could designate as actual, honest-to-god fun.

FlOw’s dedication to austerity is immediate from the moment you boot up the game, where you’re presented with a simple screen dictating the core controls and nothing else that even resembles a real menu. From there, it’s off to the races. The race, in this case, is anything but, of course. You’re presented initially with a small, eel-like creature that’s built from a number of peculiar shapes. Using the Sixaxis tilt controls, you steer the creature around a fluidic environment that’s teeming with other forms of life, all made from the same types of goofy shapes that you are. Your job is to eat that other life. That’s it. Swimming up to smaller creatures causes you to immediately devour them. Larger creatures often require you to eat multiple chunks before they finally break down into the smaller pieces you want. But by the same token, larger creatures can also try and eat you, so it’s best to stick to the proper food chain of command and attack the littler guys first.

When you clear an area of all available life, you simply move downward to the next section of the environment, until eventually you reach the bottom and unlock a new creature. There are six creatures in all, each with a unique form and ability. Any time you press one of the buttons on the controller, you’ll perform that creature’s ability. One circular creature can do a sort of spin attack, while another has the ability to stun other life forms with a green poison. These abilities are neat, although they also make an already undemanding game even easier. There’s no real death to speak of in flOw. If you’re mostly devoured by other creatures, the game just moves you to a safe plane where a few harmless creatures hang out for you to eat and replenish your health. All you really need to do to avoid being eaten is to keep mashing on your special ability, especially if you have any of the attacks that aren’t the poison one. The poison requires a bit more timing and precision, but anything else can be hammered on endlessly to provide quick success. The trickiest thing about the game is getting the tilt controls to a point where you feel comfortable with them. The steering doesn’t have the most natural feel to it at the outset, as you have to tilt the controller downward to move up and back to move down, all while rotating the controller left or right to go in either direction. Initially, the scheme is likely to throw people off, but after a short while, the movements become natural and effortless.

The fun inherent to flOw’s design doesn’t go beyond creating the most elaborate creatures possible. The more you engulf, the bigger and gaudier your creature gets. That first creature you get goes from being a simple little piece of insignificant life to this incredible snake dragon…thing, full of different colors and movements. It’s interesting to watch your creature slowly evolve, though once you reach the end of an environment, you have to start all over again with a new creature. There’s no saving what you end up with, but considering that each time you play through, you tend to end up with the same basic evolution, maybe that’s not such a big deal.

Still, while the aesthetics clearly take precedence over all else in flOw, it’s hard to argue with those aesthetics. The game makes great use of color, giving each creature’s environment a palette that feels unique, even if you are just swimming through liquid over and over again. The collections of abstract shapes that make up the creature designs give the game the vibe of an art-school project, but not in an annoying or pretentious way. They’re pleasing to look at, and there’s something beautiful about the way they grow and mutate as the game goes on. Of course, all that beauty belies the relative simplicity of the graphics. You’re basically working on a plane similar in scope and design to something like Geometry Wars, but zoomed in and with much slower pacing. The game also has some weird frame-rate hiccups, mostly when you’re moving from one level of an environment to another, and especially if there’s a lot of smaller life swimming about. Still, it’s a game that’s pleasing to watch unfold, even if there isn’t a lot of visual fluff going on. The audio is similarly fluff free. The ambient soundtrack takes up pretty much all of the aural space–even the sound effects are directly tied to the music, with small, dynamic notes replacing the normal sorts of sounds you’d hear from creatures in a game. It’s quality work that further adds to the game’s trippy nature.

It won’t take you more than a couple of hours to unlock and play through all of the creatures’ “campaigns,” and though the game does offer two-player multiplayer, it doesn’t add a lick of depth to the experience to play with two people instead of one. At an asking price of $7.99 on the PlayStation Network, flOw is ultimately geared toward those that are looking for something ornamental, as opposed to a lasting gameplay experience. It’s basically like buying art. You buy it as something to look at and appreciate from time to time. It’s a way to cool out–not something to compete at. Not everyone is going to have interest in spending money on a game that’s equivalent to an attractive screen saver you can steer, but those with a penchant for arty pieces of gaming ought to enjoy flOw for what it is.

The updated graphics and tilt control support aren’t enough to make Q*bert appeal to anyone other than extreme fans, and even those people will be disappointed.

Originally released to arcades in 1982, Q*bert was one of the rare arcade successes that led to larger licensing efforts. The fuzzy ball with two feet and a gigantic hose for a nose went on to star in his own Saturday morning cartoon, a pinball machine, a sequel, and plenty of other crazy licensed goods. In 2007, Q*bert has gained another distinction as the first arcade classic to appear as a downloadable game for the PlayStation 3. Available for $4.99, Q*bert is probably a must-own if you’re a superfan of the original game, but this is a very bare-bones version of the game that could have used a few more features and options.

The point of Q*bert is to hop around on an M.C. Escher-like pyramid of cubes. When you hop, you change the color of the cube tops, and your goal is to change all of the tops to a specific color. You’ll have to dodge balls that continually tumble down the pyramid, as well as more artificially intelligent creatures, like Coily the snake and the mixed-up duo of Ugg and Wrong-Way, who hop around on the sides of the cubes as if gravity applied totally differently to them. Aside from having a slightly faster movement speed, your only weapon in the fight against the bad guys is two discs that hover on the sides of the pyramid. Coily chases you wherever you go, and if you hop onto a disc before he can change direction, he’ll hop off the side of the pyramid to his death while the disc carries you back up to the top of the pyramid safely. Later levels move more quickly, and the colors change on the cubes in a different way. Sometimes you’ll need to hop on them more than once, and in later levels, the final target color doesn’t lock in, so subsequent hops will change the cubes back to the wrong color.

This PlayStation 3 version of Q*bert is faithful to the original game with some minor changes. The original game had a joystick that was mounted diagonally, and you had to push in diagonal directions to hop. You can do that with the PlayStation 3’s D pad or analog stick by default, or you can turn on the motion sensor and play by tilting the controller around–which isn’t much fun. The sound in the PS3 version of the game is true to the original, though the pinball part that lived inside Q*bert cabinets–a loud thwacker that made a big thumping noise whenever you jumped off the pyramid and fell to your death, isn’t a part of the package. Also, the graphics maintain the same style as the original game, but everything has been polished up a bit. The cube edges are smooth instead of jagged and pixelated, and the game’s characters have been given similar treatment. There isn’t any option to enable the original graphics, which is sort of a bummer if you’re a purist.

You can play one-player or two-player alternating games locally. The only online functionality is a scoreboard, but the scoreboard holds only the top 100 scores–even though you can scroll down through hundreds of empty spots below the top 100 mark. There’s no option to filter the scores to view your friends’ scores, either, which is unfortunate.

If you just want to play Q*bert again, here you go. This is Q*bert. But without all of the bells and whistles that have become the standard for rereleased classics on modern consoles, this arcade classic feels a little flat. So on its own, setting aside whatever personal feelings you may have for the original game, it’s difficult to recommend.

Dry presentation aside, Formula One Championship Edition is a good racer that is just accessible enough to newcomers while still being deep enough for longtime fans.

Given how long it had been since the last Formula One game was released in the United States, many felt that Formula One Championship Edition would never see the light of day in North America. Perhaps it’s just here because the PlayStation 3 needed some original content, but regardless of the reason, Formula One CE has now been released in the US, and the PlayStation 3 is better for it. The touted rearview-mirror feature didn’t make it into the final game, but the visuals look great and the gameplay is quite good.

Rather than focusing on the upcoming season, Formula One CE lets you relive the 2006 FIA Formula One Championship. All of the official tracks and teams are included, as are the drivers that started the season. That means that retired great Michael Schumacher is still winning races for Ferrari. It also means that even though he left midseason to drive for NASCAR, Juan Montoya is behind the wheel for McLaren, and though he actually had his license revoked by the FIA, Yuji Ide drives for Super Aguri. People that don’t follow Formula One may not mind the dated roster, but with the game being released so close to the start of the 2007 season, fans hoping for the latest rosters will be let down.

Knowing that it had been a long time since an F1 game was released stateside, developer Liverpool Studios did a nice job ensuring the game would be accessible to someone with little or no knowledge of Formula One racing. The game defaults to the easy setting with the full complement of driving assists turned on. Stability control, braking and steering assistance, spin recovery, and even a virtual racing line that shows the ideal path around the track are all available to ease you into the world of F1. Should you prefer to focus solely on getting around the track, you can turn off pit stops and car damage. As you get more comfortable with the controls, you can turn off individual assists, which makes the game more realistic and challenging. The controls are simple and responsive, which is a must in a game that demands precision at all times. If you like, you can use the Sixaxis tilt controls to steer by turning the controller in the direction of your turn. This method works OK, but it isn’t always as responsive as the analog control. Several Logitech racing wheels are supported, as well, and they work fine, though none of them offer any sort of force feedback.

Basic game modes include quick race, time trial, grand-prix weekend, online, world championship, and career. Online play lets up to 11 people race at once; you can even round out the field with computer-controlled drivers. It would have been nice if online leagues were supported, but the online play that is here runs great and is easy to use and set up. If you’re looking for a little more depth, you can take an established driver through a year on the circuit in world-championship mode.

You can also embark on a five-year career with a created driver. Like many aspects of the game, career mode is simple enough that beginners can figure it out while still offering enough options to satisfy series veterans. You’ll start as a driver without a team, and your agent books trials with lower-tier teams in need of a driver. If you perform well enough, you’ll be offered a position as either a primary driver or a test driver. You can accept the team’s offer or try your luck with any other team that may be interested in your services. Gearheads may enjoy being a test driver, but running solo laps against the clock isn’t very exciting and the lap requirements are often pretty tough to meet. Once you’ve come to an agreement with a team to be the primary driver, you’re given a series of goals for the season, such as average starting and finishing position, as well as where the team would like to finish in the Constructor’s Championship. Your team and agent will keep you informed of your standing by e-mail, while series news is distributed via fake, but well-written, news articles. You can find out who is the favorite coming into a race, read about the race results, and keep an eye on what other drivers are up to.

Once you’ve gotten the business aspect of racing out of the way, it’s time to head to the track. When you select the start grand prix option from the career mode’s main screen, you’re given the option of participating in “race car evolution.” Here, you drive around the track, the CPU makes adjustments to your car, and then you drive another lap to see how the changes affect your car. You can still make changes on your own, and you don’t have to do test laps, but this is a great way for beginners to get to know how different settings can change a car’s performance. Once your car is set up how you like it, it’s time to qualify for the race. Qualifying is broken into three sessions. Every car must complete one lap during a 15-minute session, and at the end of the session the slowest six cars are placed at the back of the field. The next session fills the next six spots, with the final session completing the field and deciding pole position. In theory, you only have to complete one lap for each session, but because starting position is so vital, you’ll want to complete as many laps as it takes to earn a position near the front of the grid. Qualifying this way is fun, but between testing your car and qualifying, it often feels as if you’re doing more practicing than racing. That may be how it is in real life, but real life isn’t always fun, and neither is practicing all the time.

Finally it’s time to hit the track for a real race. The races are fast, incredibly intense, and always challenging. Even on the medium difficulty setting, the game demands precision driving if you’re to challenge for a top position. Passing is difficult, so you’ll need to know the track, be patient, and then be ready to execute a pass the moment an opening presents itself. It’s extremely satisfying when you’re able to pass another driver. The relative lack of passing opportunities presents a problem when you’re racing just a fraction of the real race distance, which you’ll probably be doing unless you’ve got a few hours to kill. When you’re racing a five or even a 10-lap race, there simply aren’t enough passing opportunities, especially if you qualified near the back of the field. This isn’t Burnout, so weaving in and out of traffic like a madman isn’t an option. Thanks to a penalty system that forces you to drive at low speeds if you’re caught cutting corners, you’ll need to stay on the pavement at all times. You’ll also need to take care not to damage your ride, as the slightest impact with a wall or vehicle can send one of your tires rolling down the track without the rest of the car…which is bad. If you’ve taken a bit of damage, or you just need some fuel, you can head to the pits. Rather than just watching your crew work, you’ll need to watch for button sequences that pop up onscreen and then press the proper button as quickly as possible to get out of pit row as fast as you can.

One thing Formula One CE has in spades is speed. The sense of speed is almost overwhelming at times. The screen will blur, the camera shakes, and you constantly feel as if you’re on the verge of a horrific accident, particularly when you’re racing in a pack. The frame rate is fast and rock solid, even when multiple cars are onscreen. As much as you’d like for the frame rate to slow down a bit when it’s raining, even the amazing rain effects don’t cause so much as a stutter. This means you’re forced to rocket around the course blinded by the mist from the cars in front of you and the droplets of rain running across the screen. It’s awful because it’s so hard to see, but at the same time it’s awesome because it looks so realistic.

The cars look nice and are detailed enough that you can tell who’s in front of you, even at breakneck speeds. There aren’t a whole lot of major crashes, but when there is an accident, cars display damage in a realistic, if not a bit understated, manner. In fact, the crashes are just one example of the game’s somewhat dull presentation. For the most part, everything is very clinical. The menus are easy enough to navigate, but they present information in a very matter-of-fact way. Outside of some horribly lame podium celebrations, the actual presentation of the races is very sterile, too. Each of the game’s 18 courses is accurately re-created, but after a while, many of them start to look the same. There are some standouts, though, such as Circuit de Monaco that winds through the beautiful streets of Monaco or the Melbourne track, which has the city’s skyline as a backdrop.

Formula One CE nails the one audio component that it needed to–engine noise. The high-pitched whine of the cars sounds fantastic, especially when you’re surrounded by speakers listening to the game in Dolby Digital. Unfortunately, the rest of the game’s audio isn’t as enthralling. A somewhat bored announcer calls the action, but he repeats himself quite often and only offers the most basic commentary. Having music to listen to while you race certainly wouldn’t add to the game’s realism, but with all of the practice laps you’ll be doing, it would have been nice to at least listen to a custom soundtrack.

If you’re an F1 fan and you own a PlayStation 3, picking up Formula One Championship Edition is a no-brainer. The racing action is intense, the controls are solid, and while the rosters are quite dated, it’s an overall good representation of the sport. If you haven’t enjoyed F1 games in the past, you probably won’t find much here to change your mind, but if a steep learning curve is what has kept you from previously taking the plunge, the game is friendly enough to beginners to make it worth a look.

The pure charisma of LocoRoco Cocorrecho will win you over, though the game itself is over before you know it.

The bulbous, bouncy blobs known as LocoRoco are back, though things are a bit different this time. The tilting mechanics of the original PSP title have been replaced with an interesting new control scheme, and the minimalist gameplay is even simpler this time around. But really, it’s all about the agreeably goopy globules that spread charm across your screen, and it’s hard not to be taken with them. At $6.99, this PlayStation Network download feels a bit overpriced for a single (albeit large) level, but the few hours of gaming you’ll get out of it are rewarding and strangely compelling.

If you played the original LocoRoco, you’ll immediately notice the changes in mechanics. Rather than tilting the playfield to move your LocoRocos, you move a cursor in the form of a butterfly around the screen. When you press the circle button, you call any Locos in range in your direction, and if you tap the button, they will jump toward your cursor. You begin the game with a single LocoRoco, and your goal is to awaken the remaining 199 blobs by getting other Locos to bump into them. The level itself is set up like a huge, complex Rube Goldberg contraption, complete with trampolines, moving platforms, water bubbles, wind gusts, and all sorts of other elements that send your screwy spheres careening across the screen. Once you wake enough of them, you move them to a collection area to unlock the next section of the level.

The game makes decent use of the Sixaxis controller. You can tip the controller to tilt platforms, wiggle it to fling flowers off the screen, or shake it to perform other contextual actions. You’ll need to experiment to see just what items on the screen can be manipulated, but it’s fun to discover new tricks that reveal new LocoRocos. You’ll also encounter a few minigames that let you release even more LocoRocos, like one where you bounce a Loco into the air to collect flies. There is also a minigame/boss fight you’ll need to complete a few times to unlock new areas. There are some occasional frustrations, especially when you try to stack LocoRocos to reach higher areas but they don’t wish to cooperate. Yet the stubborn obtuseness of the Locos is a part of the game’s appeal.

It doesn’t sound like much on its own, but the real saving grace is the personality of the LocoRocos. They cheerfully follow your butterfly around, singing along with the kooky theme song. You can see and hear each Loco croon its own part of the tune, the way all the animatronic children do on the Small World ride at Disney World. Except this music is actually good, and the repeated jingle never gets old. Too bad it’s the same music featured in LocoRoco on the PSP. The visual design is outstanding as well, featuring a simple pastel color scheme and a clever level layout. Watching the LocoRocos fly and roll around is a hoot, especially in the chaotic late stages. Like flOw, another downloadable PSN game, this is as much an entertainment experience as it is a game. LocoRoco Cocorrecho is more interactive and decidedly less soothing, yet it’s just as fun to tool around with, in spite of its relative simplicity. In fact, its weird frenetic charm makes it a perfect companion piece to flOw’s hallucinogenic psychedelia.

You can see all the game has to offer in just a few short hours, and if you’re a fan of LocoRoco on the PSP, you may be disappointed that the game veers so much from the original formula. But if you can shed your misgivings about the new gameplay elements and added simplicity, you will find yourself singing along with the LocoRocos as you guide them on their zany journey. LocoRoco Cocorrecho will make you grin and giggle, guaranteed.

You’d be hard pressed to find a better modern fighting game for such an affordable price.

How does $20 sound for a practically arcade-perfect version of Tekken 5: Dark Ressurection? It’s a pretty good deal, and it’s going on now on the PlayStation 3. The game is now available as a downloadable product, which makes a good deal even better. While the arcade-port-like nature of it means that you won’t get any of the weird extra modes you’d expect from Tekken on a home console, you will get a rock-solid fighting game that also looks great.

This is a port of Dark Resurrection, which is the same Tekken 5 expansion that appeared on the PSP last year. That means you’ll get Lili and Dragunov, the two all-new characters that made their first appearance in DR, as well as the returning Armor King. As a bonus, you can unlock Jinpachi, the game’s final boss, as a playable character in the PS3 version. He’s an interesting addition but not the most exciting character to play with. Of course, you also get the rest of the game’s large roster, including Paul, Kazuya, Heihachi, Nina, Law, and so on.

While you won’t get bowling, volleyball, or a Tekken Force minigame, you will get ghost mode in Dark Resurrection. Unlike the arcade mode, which puts you up against a handful of fighters and then sends you to the boss fight, ghost mode is meant to replicate the experience of taking on multiple challengers in arcades. You’ll continually fight different characters that are governed by different artificial intelligence profiles. So you’ll encounter beginning-level Baeks that are easy to beat, but the higher-level Baek fighters know how to use his combos properly and even know a few key juggles. This goes a long way to making them feel more like real human beings, since they all fight differently. This variety keeps the game interesting as a single-player game, which many fighting games have trouble with. Of course, it’s still no substitute for actually fighting a real person, which you can do locally. Unfortunately, the game doesn’t have any online support, but given the budget price tag, that makes sense.

As you play, you’ll earn currency that you can spend customizing the characters’ different costumes, much like you can in Virtua Fighter 5 and in the last couple of Tekken games. You can purchase new colors for their outfits, new hair styles, or additional little trinkets, like eye patches. You can also spend your money to purchase the ending movies for the new characters or concept art. Interestingly, Namco has kept the file size of the download a little lower than it would be otherwise by not offering these videos and images as part of the main download. When you go into the gallery menu, the game hits a server and returns a list of downloadable items. You pay a chunk of your in-game money, and it downloads the appropriate file. It’s a slick idea, though at 500MB-plus, it’s hard to call this a “small” download by any metric.

Graphically, the game follows the look of the arcade game, but it’s been outfitted to run in 1080p. If you’ve got a TV capable of that resolution and are running over an HDMI cable, the game looks incredibly sharp–almost too sharp, in spots, as it’ll reveal an ugly texture here and there. It’s a great-looking game, overall, especially for a downloadable product, but as it’s meant to look like the arcade version, you do get the impression that a Tekken game built from the ground up for the PS3 could look quite a bit better. The game also contains all the same sound effects and music from the arcade game. Tekken has always had hard-hitting sound effects, and they still work just fine here.

Tekken 5: Dark Resurrection makes a great case for digital distribution. Here’s a game that might not be the newest game in town, but by clocking in at a budget price and not coming on a Blu-ray disc, it stands out and delivers on the potential of this sort of game-delivery platform. But forget all that nonsense. The bottom line is that Dark Resurrection is a fantastic fighting game, and it’s especially sweet if you have one or more Tekken players nearby that’ll get into the versus mode with you.