This week also saw two 800 point Xbox Live Arcade titles, both based on fairly original-ish (feel the lack of commitment to this statement) premises. First up was Sealife Safari, an on-rails photography game that involves you photographing fish and coaxing reactions out of them by shooting things at them. I’m informed it plays like Pokemon Snap but as I’ve never felt the urge to play that, I’ll leave it to you to find out. £6.80 for this straight-to-delisting-fish-paparazzi-extravaganza does seem a little like seven quid too much.
Sealife Safari: Like Finding Nemo, but with less guns.
Slightly more interestingly, Elements of Destruction puts you in the shoes of an insane scientist with a vendetta towards his previous employers. The game sees you controlling the weather in order to destroy structures with earthquakes, tornados and various other natural disaster-inducing techniques. The idea is an interesting one, but the destruction feels a little flat and the disappointing visuals soon make this feel like just another bit of shovelware.
Elements of Destruction: Looks like Blast Corps, but with no trucks. Gutted.
On the demo front, NCAA 09 promises “all the excitement and pageantry of a storied college bowl game”. I couldn’t possibly comment on the game or let alone what that sentence means, as my understanding of American Football is roughly equal to my understanding of Robbie Williams’ popularity.
Robbie Williams: No.
The refreshingly overpriced Xbox Originals service received two new entrants this week in the form of Spyro: A New Beginning, a respected but rather childish sprawling action-adventure game that plays much like every platformer released after Mario 64, and Guilty Gear X2 Reload, a particularly nice-looking 2D fighting game that tends to be well-respected amongst the genre’s more obsessive fans.
Guilty Gear X2 Reload: Doesn’t purely consist of witches whipping nuns. Sorry.
Weighing in at 1200 points (roughly ten pounds in real money) and a fair chunk of hard drive space each, you may be better off seeking out the originals on disk, especially as these versions offer no extra content or even bug-fixing.
To round off this fairly disappointing week, Activision have finally killed off their long-running Guitar Hero series with a 500 point (four quid) song-pack from serial ear-botherers Coldplay. Quite how one is meant to finish one of their songs without falling asleep is a mystery to me, but any fools wishing to be parted from their money can find this on Xbox Marketplace, filed under C for cack.
More 360-based news next week. Same bat time, same bat channel.
