The reviews are in today with Zack and Wiki - I've just named my son Zack, was I subliminally influenced? - NFL Tour and Castlevania: Dracula X Chronicles getting the once over. Z&W is on my gaming to-do list. I played the first few sections, got stuck and haven't been back yet. But I will - decent games are few and far between on the Wii and this is definitely one of them. My review was NFL Tour. Short straw? Nope, I'm a big American Football fan and certainly enjoyed mucking around with this for a few hours. It's no Madden but certainly makes the obtuse sport more approachable to a non-US audience. Don't expect it to help you learn the subtleties of the game though. Last up was the Castlevania compilation on PSP. The inclusion of Symphony of Night makes this worth a punt, but how many more retro compilations can the PSP take?
Looking forward and a pile of new games have recently arrived. Lost Odyssey - the mammoth new Japanese role playing game for the 360 - is tempting me, but reports of 40min to 1 hour gaps between savepoints are putting me off starting. I appreciate time-starved 30-somethings with young families are not the target audience for epic RPG's but surely the ability to save anywhere should be included in every game?
Lost - the game of the TV show - arrived yesterday too. And, erm, my initial impressions are mixed. I'm quite enjoying the relatively cryptic puzzling but sudden death - in this case as you walk too close to a piece of wreckage on the beach - is a bit of a worry. Old school adventure games like Monkey Island rarely punished or killed the player and so encouraged players to experiment with location and items. Fingers crossed the sudden death is not a sign of things to come in the rest of the Lost game.
