Speaking of parting people from their cash, the eagerly awaited Castle Crashers arrived this week on XBLA.  The fifth, and final, title in the ‘Summer of Arcade’ series is yours for the bumped-up price of 1200M$P.  Quite where those extra pennies might be going is a mystery as this seems like a fairly generic scrolling beat ‘em up with cute, funny graphics.  The online is broken and the game has a habit of resetting your stats (there are RPG-lite leveling up elements to the game) so it might be worth hanging on for a patch.  Or you could just buy Streets of Rage II and Golden Axe instead.

Just one demo for you this week and that’s the button-mash-tastic Soul Calibur IV which is just another cash cow from the greedy folks at Namco.  By supporting this title you are supporting gamers getting ripped off so if you absolutely must play it, buy it pre-owned or, even better, just ignore it as it’s really just a watered-down version of Soul Calibur II.

No DLC this week (yep, not even from Rock Band), just the announcement that Burnout Paradise’s bike pack will be out soon and it’ll be free which makes me a very happy camper indeed. 

This is, of course, entirely academic as next week sees the release of Mercenaries 2 which will put right everything GTA4 got wrong.  It’s going to be amazing.  Aside from that we’ll have words on Facebreaker, Infinite Undiscovery and probably a duo of trashy XBLA puzzlers. 

If you need me, I’ll be planting C4 on a bridge somewhere.  Hooo-yah!

Richie Harkness - www.peoww.co.uk