Crouching Roundhouse

Making full use of the upload to YouTube option, here's my first online ranked match on Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike Online Edition. I'm the grey gi Ryu with the yellow bandanna. Don't expect much, still gotta shake out the cobwebs. Far too much jump-in, and slow pokes. That said, I'm having a time with this game. Sat up close with the music blaring stereo, it's like I'm back playing my Dreamcast in 2001, avoiding going to uni.

Undead Hero

After frying my Japanese Saturn in a cable swapping mishap, I'd more or less given up on ever getting to play Treasure's sax-scored, scrolling beater classic Guardian Heroes. Sega and Xbox Live Arcade to the rescue! Can we get HD remasters of Burning Rangers and Radiant Silvergun next please?

Co-Op

Bravo Capcom! The Osaka based video game company is whipping up a PR hurricane around inbound sequel Dead Rising 2. First, we had the bite-size snack Case Zero, a 360 DLC exclusive that managed to turn your standard pre-release demo into a cash concept, without alienating buyers. Sold as a Live Arcade title, Case Zero took core mechanic introduction - the building blocks of any teaser - and wove them into a short bulletin point game experience. Case Zero had achievements, super-play concepts, and a whole shitkicker neighbourhood to play around with. It was a brief scramble, but with multiple outcomes based on player diligence; the entire Dead Rising time management experience, but in an easy-to-swallow afternoon supplement.

Now, ahead of this month's release of the main Dead Rising 2 we get word that there's to be a download only epilogue featuring first title survivor Frank West. Disappointed this game revolves around the untested Chuck Greene? Worry not! Frank's in the fan service aftercare! Dead Rising 2: Case West is set to be another Xbox 360 exclusive, but I wouldn't bet against a special re-issue for PlayStation 3 in the near future, uniting all these batty odds and ends.

"There's always a guy on top of the crane."

With no further goodies announced, at least we know where our 1200 MSP is going. That's right, glossy advertising! At least for me, my fork out can convert back into a few bare updates. I'm'a get my money's worth! If you have time, check out the Inside Xbox shill (accessible from the 360 dash menu), it makes Modern Warfare 2 look like a chuggy last-gen no-hoper. Who signed off on that footage? It's got Alpha written all over it. For extra kicks, compare the US and European versions of the vid: both have the exact same script, each purporting to be the previewer's personal experience. Wince at the regulated comedic element! If you've got even more time to kill, the Mapathy site now has a quiz up where you can gauge your indifference to the current crop of maps. Disaster Year is 85% Mapathetic.

Yars' Revenge

Bundled somewhere in Microsoft's interactive hawker Game Room (released today) is Yars' Revenge, an 80s vintage Atari shooter by Howard Scott Warshaw. Players assume the role of a buzzing insect ship tasked with vanquishing a shielded floating face. A thick line of graphical corruption intentionally runs down the length of the screen, and the soundscape seethes with throbbing jeopardy. Divorced of any mechanic explanation, Yars' Revenge is an exercise in the nightmarishly abstract.

Shooting the face's shield only ever seems to make it angry, a state that eventually causes your enemy to fling itself wildly about the screen, hoping for a collision. Chugging bullets are infrequently launched that track and follow your fly, remorselessly zeroing in on your twitchy wandering. Moving into the corruption prompts the white noise soundtrack to sharpen, suggesting decay for anyone caught lingering. Die, and you get a brief readout of context free numbers. Eventually you work out that to damage the face you must cross the screen and begin nibbling at it, this feasting cues up a calamity cannon. Shots must be carefully lined up, firing where you expect the cornered face to be. Hit, and the screen explodes, before instantly dumping you back into an assault. Yars' Revenge wants to induce stress; nothing about the game encourages any sense of comfort or safety. It's all shrill noises, and relentless hysteria tasks.

Smash TV

It's difficult to imagine an enemy type more lowly and worthless than Smash TV's basic grunt mobbers. Armed with what looks like a 2x4, these witless drones excitedly froth about interminable studio sets, just asking to be annihilated. Utterly useless in the singular, these bullet soakers only really pose something like a threat when you're knee-deep in a clipping, overlapped mess of them. The crypto-fascist media outlet that shills Smash TV's central, lethal, gameshow must have got a job lot on knuckle dragger clones. Bald headed, stocky, and wearing ill-fitting lime t-shirts, these chaps are only fit for clogging up your personal space. As Smash TV trundles on, you'll begin to miss these fragile nobody men. Later Boss enemies demand a satirical amount of shooting before they vacate the premises. Endlessly blasting away at an undamagable two-headed mecha-cobra deep in stage 3, vague memories of Takeshi Kitano's NES prank title Takeshi no Chosenjo began to bubble up. Was I really going to have to hit this monstrosity 20,000 times?

Smash TV is sheer repetition. In order to pass a screen you'll have to blow apart thousands upon thousands of enemies. The game isn't a reward miser either, prizes pop up with staggering regularity, as do swaying wads of screen-filling currency. Post stage totaliser screens take forever to log your spoils, the ascending whistle note accompanying your increasing bank balance strays into the kind of pitch that gets dogs excitable. Smash TV is excess. The player is constantly bombarded with feedback. More enemies. More prizes. More everything. This Xbox Live iteration even allows the player infinite continues to finish the show. You'll need them. The game is mercilessly hard; space-clog tank-men aren't encumbered by their grotesque size, they can rapidly glide to all corners of the screen, better to smother you with their caterpillar tracks. For this player, Boss battles became psychotically resourced wars of attrition. My sweaty little gladiator man, endlessly reinforced by lookalikes, facing blubbering mockeries of flesh and metal. An unseen audience cheers the carnage. That experience was easily worth the 400 point asking price.

Pixel Man

Another Xbox Indie 80 MSP gem. Approximately 68p gets you 30 save-free, iron-man abstract platforming stages. Title screen asks if you're playing? Decline, and you're booted out to the browser. Silly you. Players are granted infinite retries to traverse ever complicating chasm environments. Grey blocks are safe, red blocks lethal, and yellow whisks you off to your next playground. Sound effects are sparse leap-blips, that tickle that 8-Bit recall gland. Early stages are wander warm-ups, that teach you about spatial geography and objective placement. Before long you're juggling pixel-perfect jumps and moving through several fixed screens, with no apparent route in sight. Progress in Pixel Man is a sublime tension: every leap takes you closer to your goal, but further away from an anti-restart safe landing.

I MAED A GAM3 W1TH ZOMBIES 1N IT!!!1

That title. A sub-pound price point. How can you resist? I MAED A GAM3 W1TH ZOMBIES 1N IT!!!1 is a top-down twin-stick shooter by James Silva, whose priors include The Dishwasher: Dead Samurai for Indie Xbox Live, and Survival Crisis Z for Windows. Players take control of a lonely lethal-man tasked with vanquishing legions of rapid-assault undead. Front end is epilepsy shimmer, block pixel text on pitch backgrounds. Simultaneous four player. You play yourself. This is an experience. In game: skinny zombie grunts are soon joined by lumbering tanks, and enormous word stamps throb and inform the landscape. Dopey grindcore wails along the soundscape, all price alerts and boast chants, the text feedback making a karaoke of the grinding screech theme. Then spotlights appear, and the game shifts psychedelic, introducing abstract enemy types to match the music's tempo shift.

I MAED A GAME3 W1TH ZOMBIES 1N IT!!!1 nicely straddles the twin disciplines of yuk-yuk retro-by-design blasters, and art installation pieces. It jogs quick enough to please maths-minded bullet hell vets, whilst demonstrating a distinct one-think authoring. Control set-up is instinct accessible, and the title doesn't seek to hide its eccentricities behind mammoth progress. A wonderful introduction to community developed gaming, unfortunately marginalised out-the-box by Microsoft: rather than sell it upfront in the Live boot-up crawl, they'd prefer you to go hunting in sub-sections of sub-sections. The lack of Achievements, yet another bitter slight this title doesn't deserve.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Turtles in Time Re-Shelled

It's not often you get to bemoan arcade fidelity. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Turtles in Time Re-Shelled is a visuals led re-cast of a 1991 Konami coin-op. Ubisoft Singapore's remake leaves gameplay largely unaltered, instead electing to rebuild the game as a widescreen lensed 3D rumble. New character drafts resemble smoothed contemporary merchandise, rather than the animation models of the 90s token gobble iteration. The brand has moved on. Ubisoft's sole interact tweak comes in the elimination of separate plain brackets, these Turtles now have fluid three dimensional movement on a locked side-scrolling frame. As adjusts go, this is a curiously self-defeating one. The ability to attack in eight directions is mitigated by the free-flow movement of enemies. No longer are you able to move off their attack line to a brief safety, enemies will twist and turn to follow, eliminating much of the player's ability to corral. This shallows an already simplistic game, matches rapidly degenerating into a maddening thump of multi-directional fury.

It's a shame Ubisoft didn't look to Konami's own adaptation blueprint. When Turtles in Time was ported to the SNES as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles IV: Turtles in Time in 1992, a conscious effort was made to optimise the game for its new home system. Although audio visual finesse was dialled down to better match 16-bit capabilities, much was added by way of compensation. Randomised visual flourishes were integrated into the moveset; entire levels were added, including Mode 7 racing bonus stages; and the arcade's rather dull boss cast was greatly expanded to include more in-universe personalities. Who'd rather fight a puny mud man when you have a psychotic shadow Turtle available? There was even an option to palette shift your Turtle avatar's skin tone to better match comic, rather than cartoon, colours. Electing to adapt the arcade, rather than SNES, version feels reductive. Factor in a generous helping of audience nostalgia for that home system serving, and Ubisoft Singapore's reissue can't help but look meagre. Couldn't they have at least included an unmolested arcade port?

TMNT 1989 Classic Arcade

Dreary scroll-slog, dressed up with shameless menu eye-grabs from Imagi's 2007 feature film. TMNT 1989 Classic Arcade (previously known as the much simpler Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles) is a mystifying well regarded coin-op effort by Konami. Specially prepared for Xbox Live Arcade by Digital Eclipse, TMNT only really excels as gaudy nostalgia artifact. Motivation: Turtle pal April O'Neil has been kidnapped by the dastardly Shredder. Players select a colour code reptile, and battle their way across several mundane urban landscapes. Movement is limited to brisk strolling and default thumps. There's barely any report when you strike your enemies, and foes barely evolving beyond palette swap robo-shinobi. A crime considering the franchise's richly grotesque supporting cast kept children in action figures for nearly a decade.

TMNT displays a chronic lack of imagination compared to other licenced Konami side-scrollers of the period. TMNT is the poor cousin to the totem-twist bestiary of 1990's gonzo Aliens or the exhaustively manned The Simpsons: The Arcade Game. All effort has been focused on making the limited amount of figure sprites move as fluidly as possible, a reasonable brief for what essentially amounts to another marketing campaign adjunct. Doesn't mean it's fun to play though. Still, there's a simultaneous four player mode to ease the pain. Proof that enabling external camaraderie to paper over glaring interactive short-comings wasn't invented this generation.

Seven Force!

From Mega Drive masterpiece Gunstar Heroes, released today on Xbox Live Arcade.

Fallout 3: Operation Anchorage

Bethesda Game Studios' first expansion pack release for Fallout 3 is a contrary addition to the rad-blast landscape. Operation Anchorage junks the scavenge root dynamic of the main game, instead focusing on bread crumb action adventuring. Drawn to a lethal military simulator by a strangled distress call, players enter an impression construct of a decisive pre-nuclear exchange battle. Inside the total immersion video game, players are treated to a wilfully limited culture clash sortie: weapons are distributed and maintained by red blinking vending machines, enemies digitally crumble after defeat, and invisible walls prevent off-mission exploration. Is Operation Anchorage an interactive critique? An attempt to expose action game survival furniture as spell-breaking distraction? Or just a series of easily identifiable signposts to mark the game-within-a-game structure?

The contrast between Anchorage's assistance sign-posting, and The Capital Wasteland's desperate scrounging couldn't be blunter. Bethesda have pared their explore engine down to a tight Black Ops jaunt, players emboldened by a generous difficulty nose-dive and access to overwhelming force. Coupling time-freeze VATS aiming with low-yield Chinese armour makes Anchorage a lubricated jaunt, full of head-popping anti-resistance. This is the problem: by presenting Operation Anchorage as a separate sale expansion item, Bethesda have asked the user to judge the title on its own, limited, merits. Anchorage would have been best served as an on-disc side-quest. There, this brisk homage to tactical espionage would have shone as a welcome narrative diversion.

It's 2006 in my house, in my house.

Wireless broadband soaking my house in invisible, deadly wi-fi rays, I found myself finally making full use of my sputtering, neglected Xbox 360. We had a fraught little affair over Christmas, I muddled through Fallout 3's investigate rad-lands, the 360 breathlessly expelling delighted wheezes. Following that I tried to spice things up with some of EA's sci-fi magpie dress-up Dead Space. It didn't last. The tryst unravelled when I found something toothy in the garden. I hadn't prepared myself for that. Sad little 360. All alone with DVDs and Blu-Rays piled high on top. Why ever should I play you? Wireless broadband! That's why. Finally I am able to steal gameplay from thin air! This was just too good an opportunity to pass up. Besides, if my testicles were to rendered inert and useless by all the invisible information floating around, I might as well have fun. From the comfort of my own bedroom, I can finally reach out and touch anyone else in this big wide world! And by touch, I mean 'murder a high resolution avatar of, with bullets'. Exciting, heady times!

Obviously Microsoft is not in the least bit inclined to make this service free. Quite apart from the annual subscription fee, there's the small matter of coaxing your system into receiving signal. PC and router three feet away? Wicked! Just run a cable. Stuck at home leaching off a family set-up, rooms away? You'll find yourself investing in £60 worth of wireless adaptor. There are other options, but in the end I decided I valued ease of use at a premium. Unpacking the limp dongle, I was struck by how little effort had been made to make it seem worth the investment - this is in non-connect isolation of course, otherwise it's a window into a world of uninventive slander - vacuum packed into Microsoft's regulation lethal plastic death-trap, once liberated all you're getting is the clip-on plastic chip, and two brief black and white booklets. Value for money!

Installation's easy enough, but zoot alores! The updates! In theory my 360 is about three years old. It's the second actual machine, but the hard-drive is vintage 2006. Having took the off-line route for so long, minor updates issued sparingly with brand new titles, I wasn't privy to Microsoft's Mii copycat Experience. What wonders awaited me! Like the 360's functional blade slip and slide? Up yours bud! Here's acres of little video windows that lead to dead-end coin shills. It's maddening. Fool that I was I expected a years old xbox.com tutorial on keeping offline achievements to get me somewhere. It didn't. It seemed to be working up to the point where I was presented with a screen that in no way corroborated my step-by-step printout. Options I required were nowhere to be seen. Curses! Luckily, the tutorial did steer me away from simply overwriting years of gameplaying, leaving me with a brand new online account, seperate from my offline one. User friendly! Time sink weathered, I was ready to go!

If, for some bizarre reason, you want to be my phoney Xbox Live friend, feel free to spam friend requests to TheManFrowns. If I like your gamer name, you're in! Be warned though, my online tastes haven't quite evolved past Call of Duty 4 yet. Left 4 Dead's lying about, so that'll get thrown on eventually, but right now I'm all about running headlong into eighteen months worth of practiced children, each and every one screaming frenzied racial epithets into their headset mic.

Web 2.0!