Fight Night Round 3 (16+)
Verdict: Floats and stings.
Platform: Xbox, PS2, 360.
Rating: 4/5
While enjoying Soulwax’s set at Rock City the other night it once again struck me how peculiar dancing is, the way we get great enjoyment from just shaking our body about - we’re a strange species aren’t we?
Fight Night may not be Virtua Celebrity Dancing but it’s certainly full of rhythm and groove. Just in this case it has purpose - to dance around your opponent, dodging shots and throwing well timed moves.
If you haven’t already guessed, Fight Night Round 3 is about boxing. Admittedly I don’t normally go for boxing games, I prefer the more acrobatic and fast paced Street Fighters and Soul Calibers of the world but I’ve found myself engrossed in EA’s latest iteration of the series, hooked by that ‘just one more fight’ urge to try and take my custom made fighter to the top.
It’s a comprehensive and polished game offering quick, pick up and play fights with famous boxers or the deeper career mode that allows you to create your own fighter (right down to the size of his lips) and tailor his fighting style and strengths to your own preferences in an RPG-lite kinda way. Just be warned if you give him an offensive last name - it appears on his shorts for all visiting parents to see.
Gameplay is mainly handled on the twin sticks - left for movement, right for punching - and it’s this set up that differentiates it from any other fighter I’ve played (IK+ being the closest I can think of). Using the right stick for throwing punches at first feels alien, it lacks the immediate satisfaction of button mashing but once you’ve been through the essential tutorials you’ll start to feel like you’re actually swinging those punches yourself - when they hit home it’s even more satisfying.
I’d love to talk in depth about how the graphics on the 360 version are nearing photo-realisim but I haven’t got one of those shiny new consoles yet (come on PR people send me a free one!) and had to suffice with a preview in a shop. The current gen machines handle the game well whilst the 360 version defaults without a HUD for total immersion, the high definition graphics, animation and audio conveying enough information to replace it - definitely a sign of things to come (dancing).

Spongebob Squarepants and Friends Unite!
Verdict: Spoon-fed fun for friends
Platform: GC, PS2.
Rating: 2½/5
From the moment I stepped into these blue suede reviewing shoes it was inevitable that I would review a ‘kids’ game (no, not all games are for kids Mr and Mrs Jones so don’t go buying little Jimmy that 18 rated GTA game and get upset about it’s unsuitable content). As a fan of the Spongebob Squarepants cartoon though it’s a lucky point to dive in and apply my FPS addled brain to something simpler and brighter.
Unite! brings together four popular Nickelodeon cartoons (Spongebob, The Fairly Odd Parents, Jimmy Nuetron and Danny Phantom) in a royal rumble between the heroes and villains. It’s a mixture of simple combat and puzzle solving in the 3rd person, allowing up to four people to play together co-operatively (or unco-operatively depending on your friends).
From the outset though I had my doubts - the stylisation didn’t seem quite right. It’s another 3D game based on a 2D cartoon and although the backgrounds and environment are successful in capturing that look, Spongebob and co just look odd - cell shading is there for a reason people!
Aesthetic preferences aside it’s a well made game with some genuinely inventive puzzles that utilise each characters powers - Jimmy Neutron can shrink things, Spongebob can soak up water etc. so you have to work with your friends to progress through the game and if you’re playing on your own you can easily switch between the characters.
Spongebob is fleetingly comical with his giant red hands waving around and bloating features - it’s amazing how much fun Lydia got from bouncing him on a trampoline - again and again and again - the other characters however don’t have enough personality to shine through and that’s one of the problems with the game as a whole - it doesn’t shine.
For a kids (or anyone’s) game it seems woefully dull, there’s none of the excitement or attitude of any of the characters’ cartoons, let alone much of the humour. I expected something with a little more life than this clinical adventure - trampolining shouldn’t be the best bit.
Ancient Chinese proverb say ‘sponge that is not funny is just sponge’.

Black (16+)
Verdict: Fuel-injected gun fest
Platform: Xbox, PS2.
Rating: 4/5
Not content with putting a rocket up the backside of the racing genre with the Burnout series, Criterion have shifted their gaze to the tiring first person shooter and attempted to turn it up to 11.
Like a shiny new amp, Black is one of the best looking current-gen console shooters - from stunningly realised level design to tiny visual flourishes it’s a game brimming with confidence and an almost unhealthy obsessive level of detail.
Featuring levels littered with destructible objects and some of the most satisfying guns rendered in gaming history, Black gives you the opportunity to use your environment to great affect and greater enjoyment. Instead of waiting for an enemy to pop up from behind a car or wall you can just destroy the wall or blow up the car and deal with him at the same time.
The same applies to you as well with seemingly safe places to hide slowly being obliterated, leading to an emergent style of gameplay as the environment randomly changes round you forcing you to adapt, improvise and play with your surroundings.
The game is a constant barrage of dust and smoke, gunfire and explosions - blowing things up never looked so good with particle effects and blurring put to good use and it never sounded so good either with audio design proving just as powerful as the visuals - the use of filters when you’re dying is as original as it is stylised genius.
The level design has some nice variation and genuinely interesting set pieces but along with debris from explosions some of the areas really show up the criminal lack of a jump button. In a game centred round high octane action, being able to jump is crucial to keeping up the flow - having to stop and circle round a tiny piece of debris just shatters any suspension of disbelief. It’s also really frustrating!
The sluggish controls also impact on the action - when you’re swinging a shotgun around in close quarters, taking on multiple foes, the treacle like sensitivity doesn’t help at all. The exclusion of a sensitivity option is a sore point but I suspect it’s down to hardware limitations than a design fault - if the PS2 was asked to move any quicker it’d probably explode.
Coupled with some annoying checkpoint placements, transparently scripted environments, lazy squad AI and unskippable cut scenes that traverse the fine line between cheese and stylised cool, Black doesn’t quite hit the sweet spot - it just comes very close.
The dial only goes up to 10 you know.

Mark Ecko’s Getting Up: Contents Under pressure (16+)
Verdict: Like watching paint dry
Platform: Xbox, PS2.
Rating: 2/5
Once upon a time ago I was a painter and took some of my inspiration from graffiti and artists such as Basquiat. These days the nearest I get to real paint is when decorating the house so I always jump at the chance to get creative when games allow me - I’ve probably spent just as much time designing graffiti in Jet Set Radio as skating.
Imagine my disappointment and confusion when I loaded Mark Ecko’s first foray into video games (and contender for silliest title of the year) - a game about graffiti - to find that you can’t actually design any!
From this unfortunate start point you embark on the story of Trane, a young graffiti artist willing to make his aerosol mark on the world and take on a distopian government.
Broken up into seperate areas that require graffiti to progress, you spend your time between clumsy fights, frustrating platforming and repetitious tagging - a typical palette of poor game design.
The graffiti mechanic - ‘press button, move stick and repeat’ is shockingly basic considering it’s the central part of the game and the ironically named ‘free-form challenges’ are so utterly devoid of challenge or freedom that they seem like a bad joke or filler content.
The story isn’t enough of a driving force to keep you going either and the repetitive and rewardless gameplay means every time you have to tag to progress you feel the desire to do so ebb away.
The game as a whole is held together by some great stylisation and music though and works as a piece of edutainment on real world graffiti artists - perhaps a sequel would be better suited as an interactive DVD than a game.
The ability to customize and create in games allows you to have a tangible connection with them and if they’d allowed you to create and use your own graffiti in Getting Up you might actually have an inclination to leave your mark on the landscape and achieve some satisfaction from the uninspiring gameplay.
You’ll have more fun painting your house.