Superstars V8 Next Challenge

A racing game based on the Italian Superstars Championship isn't exactly going to be able to go head to head with the likes of Forza and Gran Turismo in terms of brand awareness here in the UK, but it does allow for a few things that we don't see very often in racers. Superstars V8 Next Challenge features circuits you won't be used to racing in a car, and the TOCA-style suped up road cars will take you back to when the Codemasters series ruled the roost. Milestone's latest Superstars game might be a little too similar to last June's effort for some, but it's still a decent racing title.


Straight off the bat it's clear that V8 isn't the most content-packed title you'll play this year. The single-player modes are essentially a collection of what we've come to expect as the norm in every racing game. There's Quick Race, Time Attack, Race Weekend, Championship and Superstars Licences. Of these, it's Championship that is the meat and bones of the game, placing you in a Superstars championship season, competing in each event, complete with all the pre-race warm ups and qualifying you'd expect.

On the track cars handle pretty well, but just as in last year's game, they have a tendency to snake side to side once you slightly lose control of your backend. The 19-car races are well contested, although not nearly as rough and exciting as races in Forza 3 and GRID, and the 11 tracks all take time to master - they are real-life race tracks after all.Superstars V8 Next Challenge is so similar to its predecessor that it's hard to recommend to existing fans. For newcomers it's competent in key areas, offering a solid handling model and smart visuals, but compared to the best on the market it falls some way short of what's required.

Serious Sam HD

Serious Sam HD First Encounter is a remake of the 2001 PC original, therefore the Egypt setting of the original is back, as are the men that charge at you and explode in your face. The scorpions that fire gattling guns make a return, as do the sprinting boney beasts, floating heads and men with rotating blades for faces. The enormous beasties that serve as bosses are here too, along with plenty of weapons, pick-ups and secret areas. Serious Sam is an arcade shooter, the kind of which we haven't seen for some time. Playing this HD remake is like you've stepped out of a time machine into the past, and fans of the original will instantly find themselves back in 2001.

For those completely unaware of the series until now, at the time of its release Serious Sam was probably closest in feel and gameplay to the original Doom. There's more depth to the gameplay here, though, with enemies coming at you from all sides, in greater variety and at differing speeds. This is a devilishly difficult game. You're only going to see Serious Sam HD through to its conclusion if you've got great hand eye coordination and the reflexes of a ninja. It's easy to panic when hordes of enemies are bearing down on you, but doing so and wildly firing in all directions is a recipe for disaster.

Little on the market today can be compared to Serious Sam's crazy, relentless action, but the Left 4 Dead series is certainly carrying the torch. Valve's co-op zombie kill-em-up throws wave after wave of enemies at you, but it does so with more intelligence than Croteam's game. Having seen what can be done with swarms of enemies and pacing, Serious Sam HD's completely scripted encounters feel old in comparison, highlighting the game's true age a little more clearly than I'd imagined would be the case.For nostalgia alone, die-hard fans will get a lot out of this HD remake, but gamers who have been spoilt by current genre favourites may well find Serious Sam HD a bit too simple for its own good.

Perfect Dark

It seems like it's taken an eternity to happen, but classic Nintendo 64 FPS Perfect Dark is finally available on Xbox LIVE Arcade for the Xbox 360. With spruced up 1080p visuals, a slick frame rate and eight-player online multiplayer, this is without a doubt the best version of the game to date, but just how well has the shooter aged in the 10 years since its original release? While there are certainly some areas that modern gamers will find hard to tolerate, Perfect Dark offers considerable bang for your 800 Microsoft Points and a huge dose of nostalgia.

As in GoldenEye, missions can be tackled in three ways: agent, special agent and perfect agent. Each of these difficulty settings introduces new objectives that need to be achieved, so while agent might require you to do little more than flick a switch and get to the end of the level, the latter two options require much more roaming around in order to complete all the objectives. Playing on the most basic agent difficulty should be for beginners only as you end up missing out on more than half the game's objectives and the levels themselves end up feeling really small due to the lack of exploration.

What isn't so great is how the game design hasn't been touched. A problem for some gamers will be the complete lack of map and objective markers. Level designs were great back in the day, but now the samey corridors make navigation somewhat of a pain, and it's easy to get a bit lost. You'll frequently have to complete numerous tasks to achieve a single objective, but the game gives you no information on how close you are to doing this, nor does it give you any indication as to where you need to be heading. Combine this with instant mission failure if you accidentally kill or destroy an item key to an objective, and no mid-mission checkpoints, and some gamers will certainly feel more than a little annoyed during their time with the game.

Resident Evil 5: Lost in Nightmares

Resident Evil 5 has been on shop shelves for a full year now, and Capcom has decided it's about time to supply the game with some more DLC. Lost in Nightmares is the first of two playable expansions to the Resident Evil 5 story, filling in some of the gaps left in the main adventure. Not only this, the Lost in Nightmares pack also includes an updated Mercenaries Reunion mode, which is furnished with extra characters and costumes when purchasing the Desperate Escape DLC pack. For those wanting a reason to return to the zombie cleansing frolics of Resident Evil 5; this is most certainly it.

Whilst Resident Evil 5 took the survival horror genre into territory governed almost entirely by action mechanics, Lost in Nightmares returns to the slow paced puzzling the series was founded upon. As a result of this, the new chapter is a far more atmospheric experience, bringing back much of the tension that some fans felt was missing from the main game. Just like its parent game, Lost in Nightmares is designed around the co-operative experience, so if you happen to have a willing companion to hand, be sure to recruit their services.

The mansion itself is the perfect venue for the action; a refreshing departure from the arid African environments of the main game. The new (and yet very familiar) setting gives rise to numerous nods and references to Chris and Jill's original mansion exploring escapades in Resident Evil 1, which fans of the series will acknowledge with wide smiles. The first fifteen or so minutes are fairly devoid of action, with bullets only being fired to take out the 18 hidden Score Stars scattered throughout the chapter. During this zombie-free period, the game slips back into the familiar puzzle based exploration that shaped the first games in the series.


Unlike a lot of DLC, Capcom hasn't simply repackaged more of the same for a quick cash in. Lost in Nightmares is a shining example of what DLC should be; a short but sweet extension to the original story that offers something different from the main game whilst retaining its overall tone. It's ultimately a fan service; a gorgeous, tense and well designed 'thank you' to those willing to rescue the game from the shelf it's likely been sat on for a year now. Whilst there's nothing here for those who didn't enjoy Resident Evil 5, fans should consider Lost in Nightmares as nothing less than an essential purchase.

Supreme Commander 2

What a strange beast the console real-time strategy game is. Sometimes you wonder why developers even bother. 'Just stick to making it work on the PC', you think. Don't waste your time forcing round PC pegs into square console holes. It's never worked, and it never will.This well-worn argument suffered a severe dent on the release of Halo Wars, the Halo-themed Xbox 360-exclusive RTS; the intuitive radial menu and stripped down gameplay made controlling multiple units with the 360 pad feel less like holding a bunch of thorns than previous console RTS games did. SupCom 2's Xbox 360 incarnation doesn't quite match the excitement of Halo Wars, nor does it include anywhere near as comprehensive online functionality, but it does a great job of making real-time strategy on console intuitive.

The crux of developer Gas Powered Games' effort with its sequel is to make SupCom's huge mech-tacular scope and scale less complex - that much is obvious. There are fewer units, the levelling up system has been chucked out in favour of a tech tree in which you spend research points to upgrade your units and structures, and the user interface is more accessible and easier to manage. But SupCom 2 is still bloody huge as far as RTS games go. You still have to gather resources - in this case "mass" and "energy" - build bases, and make the most of the strengths and weaknesses of the three playable factions: UEF, Cybran, and Illuminate. Best of all, though, the brilliant Strategic Mode, which lets you zoom out - all the way out - and view the battlefield as if some kind of god looking down on little blobs shooting each other with smaller blobs, makes the cut. SupCom purists may baulk, but what made the first game great - loads of robots blowing the crap out of loads of other robots in huge battles - is faithfully reproduced here.


What's impressive about the Xbox 360 version is that it's pretty much exactly the same as the PC version. You can't have as many units at once, and the multiplayer is down from 4v4 to 2v2, but in pure gameplay terms it holds its own. Everything you can do in the PC version you can do here, from quickly building structures and units to sending them off to engage the enemy on multiple fronts. Setting engineer units on "patrol mode" makes the job of micro-management easier, leaving you to concentrate on the exciting job of reducing your enemy's base to rubble. Groups of the same kind of unit can be controlled in isolation, or you can select all of the units you've got with one button press and send them off to cause some havoc. There is a degree of automation in SupCom 2 that you're just going to have to accept. This, for some RTS fans, will give them the fear, but at a time when the likes of Relic are evolving the RTS into squad-based dungeon crawler territory, SupCom 2's detached perspective is a refreshing tonic.