Well, I’ve got good news and bad news for you this week.  The good news is that I’ve got something to write about from the worlds of full-retail releases, Xbox Live Arcade, demos and DLC.  The bad news is that there is just one of each and the DLC is, predictably, from Rock Band.

Today’s full retail release is the enigmatic (read: probably absolutely dire) Asterix at the Olympics of which very little is known.  There is no US release planned which means the Internet is allowed to completely ignore it.  Tsk.

Here’s what I can tell you.  Firstly, it’s not a straight up Olympics game with Asterix characters.  The game revolves around a main adventure mode which might be fairly large judging by the achievements (things like ‘collect all the glue’ and ‘collect 10000 helmets’).  This mode is broken up by “more than ten” sporting mini-games.

It looks like the Xbox 360 won’t be getting a decent Olympics game this time around.  Let’s hope they start writing London 2012’s game now and get it playtested before they release it.

Oh well, next week is looking far more interesting for releases so let’s look at the fourth offering from the ‘Summer of Arcade’.

Galaga Legions, despite being at least the fourth sequel to the 1981 original, is being touted as the first true sequel to Namco’s famous old fixed shooter.  Despite me hating Namco beyond tablets, I was kind of looking forward to this.  Mainly because of Galaga ’88 being so utterly fantastic and because the team who made the awesome Pacman: Championship Edition are behind this title.

Whilst it’s not as good as either of those titles, Galaga Legions is still a very good game.  A full GV review is coming but the headlines are that the screen gets swarmed with enemies which you take out using your own rapidly firing lasers and two deployable satellites.  You can also capture a wave of enemy ships and turn them against the enemy (hence the ‘Legion’ bit of the title).

The game looks nice with the now standard neon makeover (thankfully you can still see what’s about to kill you) and is very playable.  The downsides are a horrible difficulty spike after level two and the fact that this relies heavily on memory rather than reactions.  It’s worth your 800M$P but I’d recommend Omega Five or Geometry Wars 2 first.

After last week’s duo of tedious EA sports demos, this week sees something a little more interesting.  Star Wars: The Force Unleashed.  Now I literally couldn’t give a toss about the movies but I did like the Jedi Knight games on the PC and so I definitely had hopes for this title.

The demo gives you a short level and one boss to mess about with and seems very promising.  The Force powers seem fairly badass and it’s always nice to Force Grip an enemy soldier and drop him off a platform.  The boss battle uses QTEs which is a bit of a shame but I liked what I saw so far.  Sure, it’s not shaping up to be as good as Jedi Outcast but, then again, few games reach that standard.

Finally we’ve got the DLC which I wouldn’t even mention except that it’s a slow news week.  Yep, more stuff from Rock Band.  Vaguely interesting selection of tunes though with tracks by Devo and Duran Duran including the rather excellent ‘Rio’ which will at least be interesting for you if you’re the bassist in your virtual band.

That’s it for this week.  Tune in next week for derogatory words about Too Human and a hastily cobbled together verdict on Castle Crashers. 

Richie Harkness – www.peoww.co.uk