Teenage Zombies: Invasion of the Alien Brain Thingys!

Platform: Nintendo DS
Verdict: A lively afterlife.
Rating: 7/10
Zombies eh? Can't live with em, can't live without em. One minute they're lurching from beyond the grave to munch through our cranium for tasty think-jelly, the next they're mankind's last hope against big brained invaders from planet Mars.
At least, that's the simple premise for the b-movie loving, comic strip aping Teenage Zombies: Invasion of the Alien Brain Thingys! Instead of the typically popular zombie infatuated slaughterfests that pitch your shotgun against their vacuous head, this time around you play as the undead.
Teenage Zombies is like a Cartoon Network animation adaptation, even if it hasn't yet or ever will grace the idiot box. With three zombie kids to hot-swap between at the press of the touchscreen, Ignition Entertainment's side scrolling platformer attempts to inject afterlife into the under nourished genre.
Looking ever so slightly like Earthworm Jim's mutant offspring, Teenage Zombies has a lovely hand drawn style with the three brain hungry teenagers each exhibiting wildly varying characteristics and undead abilities.
With earth invaded by technologically superior floating brains, the Teenage Zombies are in culinary heaven, just so long as they can get through the seemingly intraversable levels.
Thankfully these young rotting pals can work together to get on. Lefty can extend her arms to reach higher platforms, Halfpipe can jump off ramps and crawl through narrow gaps while Fins has a tentacled appendage that allows him to walk up walls and monkey-bar across certain terrain.
Each level thus presents itself as a light-weight puzzle, asking you to pick the right zombie for the right task. And in this it gets things pretty right.
Unfortunately such potential is often left wanting with picky collision detection requiring some pixel perfect platforming where others would forgive and some rather rote and stilted one button combat sitting alongside overly slow character movement.
Still, it's a fun new IP that sticks its dismembered tongue out at all the bland brand games on the DS, and for that I salute it with one hand raised and the other on some disinfectant spray.

Lost Odyssey

Platform: Xbox 360
Verdict: 4 discs of epic.
Rating: 4/5
Retro gaming is enjoying quite a renaissance at the moment with the Wii's Virtual Arcade and Xbox Live Arcade jointly offering glimpses into cherished pasts and shattering rose tints while swimming in nostalgia. They rarely are as good as you remember, spoilt by the heady modernities of adaptive difficulty, quick saves and the removal of pixels from perfect jumps.
Lost Odyssey is somewhat of a retro title too. Despite its super HD sheen and now-gen residence on Microsoft's box of tricks, it's a game that could easily hark from the PS1 era (or beyond to the distant ages of Dragon Quest on the NES), namely mimicking such titles as Final Fantasy VII. Coming from Hironobu Sakaguchi, creator of the Final Fantasy series that's hardly surprising.
From the traditional turn-based combat and amnesiac hero to the victory fanfare motif, Lost Odyssey screams Final Fantasy, and for many that's a great thing – with few Japanese style RPGs on the 360 it's a welcome addition to a catalogue obsessed with shooters and racers.
Compared to the West's forward looking titles like Oblivion and Mass Effect though, it's a game that seems lost in time. Even the Final Fantasy series has moved on from the staid and static turn-taking (as seen in its 12th iteration on the PS2) and while that may be a bugbear to many, the epic, emotionally charged and superbly translated story about immortals and a world at war (penned by award winning novelist Kiyoshi Shigematsu) will be enough to satiate any misgivings.
Despite such a traditional template, Lost Odyssey does bring new variants to the genre such as larger combat parties. The Ring System is also one such mechanic which introduces a rhythmic requirement to timing for otherwise predetermined attacks. With random battles rearing their ugly head though it may not be enough to compensate.
While Lost Odyssey may tread old gameplay with only a few pleasing additions, it's a game that prides itself on story telling, stunning graphics and cinematic direction that reward only the determined and time rich profusely – almost enough to make me want to be a student again.

Professor Layton and The Curious Village

Platform: Nintendo DS, out soon.
Verdict: Curiously, infuriatingly, entertaining.
Rating:4/5
Upon the discovery that maths can be fun (and also make a lot of money), the scientists in Japan have concocted yet another game that massages the cerebral cortex to extrapolate emotions of smug satisfaction upon the successful completion of brain tingling puzzles. In the case of brain-freeze puzzle frustration, the egg heads use quality animation, rustic graphics and a plot full of mystery and intrigue to keep the curiosity brimming.
Having found the Brain Training series to be at once a mathematically entertaining revelation (maths is fun?!) then a creeping disappointment (no it isn't), I struggled to raise the enthusiasm to match my brain age to that of a spring chicken (or at least appear to be younger than my parents).
Professor Layton though is a canny fellow. He takes us on adventures in a country that looks straight out of the French animation Belleville Rendezvous, disguising what is essentially a giant compendium of classic brain teasers as an intriguing mystery, spawned from the will of a recently deceased Lord.
As a rudimentary point and click adventure, the emphasis is on gentle exploration and constant puzzling to solve the mysteries of St Mystere. With almost every conversation with its colourful inhabitants comes a puzzle, varying in styles between maths challenges, riddles, mazes, sliding blocks and optical illusions. Such variety is certainly thankful considering their frequency and while some will be familiar and easy to solve, some will involve much wailing and gnashing of teeth.
Thankfully those scientists have a handy hint system setup to keep the weak of mind going. With up to three hints per puzzle the answer can become easier to obtain but to keep the balance, hint coins are required. With a limited supply (that can be replenished with rigorous searches through the village) it's certainly no fast track to the climax of a story full of twists, turns and runaway cats.
Full of brain teasers that are genuinely fun and carried by an engaging plot and beautiful animation, Professor Layton also manages to solve the puzzle of how to make educational gaming fun and that takes more than just an equation.

Neves

Platform: Nintendo DS, also blocks of wood.
Verdict: Pure and simple puzzler.
Rating: 3.5/5
Ever the multidisciplined toy, the Nintendo DS' tendrils are reaching far into the world, pulling in anything that will work with a touch screen and please the broadening selection of gamers under its thrall. Neves (seven spelt backwards) is one such title that updates an ancient puzzle game (the Tangram) to a more portable format.
With similarities to the Pentomino puzzles that Tetris adapted, the Tangram is a dissection puzzle dating hundreds of years old, originating in China and numbering fans of the likes of Lewis Carol and Napoleon. You're probably more familiar with it as being one of those stocking filler presents your grandparents got you for Christmas that involve fitting seven different shaped wooden blocks into a predetermined space.
Instead of lumbering around a box full of wood you can now carry your DS with the extra added bonus of having 500 different shapes of complexity to fit those blocks into. Using the touch screen you can move, rotate and flip pieces with great ease and speed while the bare bones presentation keeps things simple and intuitive at the minor sacrifice of eye candy.
While the standard mode allows you to take your time over the puzzles, extra modes including timed games and stricter rules help spice things up, with 2 player games a possibility too. Other than that and the option to download speed runs to compete against, Neves is a game that takes one pure and simple concept and does little else with it.
Tetris converted a traditional puzzle into an addictive, global phenomenon. Neves' strict adherence to its source however means it certainly won't do the same. If you like the gentle brain exercise of Tangrams though you certainly can't go wrong, unless you really like to keep things old-school and made of wood.

Kingdom Under Fire: Circle of Doom

Platform: Xbox 360
Verdict: Infinitely boring.
Rating: 2.5/5
The circle is many things to many people – a special ellipse in which the two foci are coincident, a symbol of divinity through the halo, of infinity in the serpent Jörmungandr who could encircle the world and grasp its tail in its teeth and, according to Plato, an immortal, self-eating being of perfection that existed at the dawn of the universe. Unfortunately there's nothing as profound or perfect about the Circle of Doom, apart from an unwanted lesson in mediocrity.
Spin-off sequel to the popular yet niche original Xbox series, Circle of Doom is a Lord of the Rings wannabe full of swords and sorcery. Debuting as an interesting and fun pseudo RTS, Kingdom Under Fire cut itself a path between button mashing combat and the strategic deployment of troops in massive battles.
Eschewing the tactics and mass-battle mayhem for a traditional dungeon crawling template, Circle of Doom's bid to appeal to a wider audience comes at the sacrifice of depth. But then again, when all you want is to rend and sunder with a massive sword perhaps that's ok. Well it would be if the game actually delivered on its promise of satisfying barbarism.
Circle of Doom isn't a game that requires curious exploration or puzzle solving, it's about fighting monsters with an ever expanding arsenal of enchanted pants and big choppers. Choosing from a selection of warriors with predictable stats (fast but weak katana wielder, slow but strong hammer slammer etc), it allows for plenty of stat heavy customisability and weapon crafting.
Unfortunately such self-made variety is nulled by the painfully stilted combat. Relying on a slowly recharging meter to merely swing your sword means button mashing is impotent early on, while the lack of a block move or deep combos means titles like God of War are way above where it needs to hit.
From the obscure opening cinematic to the easily broken tutorial, Circle of Doom does little to convince of its immediate merits and problems unfortunately persist throughout the game – graphical pop-in and glitching shadows disapoint while the audio is generic and repetitive with abruptly reactive music framing each encounter with little subtlety.
There's little positive to say about Circle of Doom other than the fact that it includes online play if you want to share the adventure with a far away friend. Perhaps it was rushed out before Ninja Gaiden 2's inevitable domination of the genre once again. Whatever the cause, it can't be desirable to desire the Game Over screen which is more confounding than the nature of 3.14159.