You’ve got £30-40 set aside to get your shooter fix; which one of these recent releases should you shell out for? This is the conundrum we face.

Join me, if you will, in drawing a mental Venn diagram comparing overlapping aspects of both games, and the aspects which make each game stand out.

Comparisons

• Production value; both games run on rock-solid engines and have been honed doubtless many times over.
• Intense, sweaty, edge-of-seat action. In a good way. Honest.
• Longevity; CoD: WaW’s levelling and perk/weapon unlock system will be similar to that of CoD 4, so will keep players returning again and again. L4D’s “AI Director” does an admirable job of ensuring that, even though you’re essentially replaying the same levels over and over, no experience is ever exactly the same. Plus, it’s Valve. They fooking love providing extra content as the months go by.
• Bloody good… ness; both titles are in the upper echelon of shooter releases this year, hence why we’re trying to decide which one to buy.

CoD: WaW

• It has a single-player game! If it gets anywhere near the quality of CoD 1 or 4, they’re on to a win before we even get to multiplayer.
• WWII setting; some claim it’s been overdone but personally I still love it. Band of Brothers is still the greatest TV production ever, and as long as the experiences keep entertaining and storylines don’t start blatantly repeating, many will continue to lap it up.
• Online team-play isn’t completely necessary; it might help to talk to your teammates and strategise, but it isn’t essential to the experience.

L4D

• Zombies. They’re ace. And they’re everywhere. Think 28 Days Later, rather than Romero. LOTS of 28 Days Later, with super-baddies.
• Co-optastic; as opposed to CoD: WaW’s competitive player-against-player “matches”, L4D plays out as separate zombie movies where players cling together against hordes of zombies. Atmospheric, exhilirating and packed with genuinely heroic moments of sacrifice, the player feels like one of the gang rather than a one-man-army.

It would be foolish of us to try and sway you one way or the other. Both games are big successes in their own right, but the experience for the player depends more on preference of setting or team mechanics than one game being outright better than the other.

UPDATE: Yes, I realise there’s a zombie mode in CoD: WaW. Let’s not confuse matters any sodding more!

This week we have Call of Duty: World at War, Mirror’s Edge, Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts and more.

   
Call of Duty: World at War
In-store: £27.00 at ASDA
Online: £35.00

Mirror’s Edge
In-store: £32.97
Online: £32.97 (search for “Mirror’s Edge”)

Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts £34.73
Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3 £39.99 (use coupon “NW11GMEHW” for £3 off)
Scene It? Box Office Smash £19.99
Scene It? Box Office Smash (with controllers) £29.99
Shaun White Snowboarding £34.99

 
Call of Duty: World at War
In-store: £27.00 at ASDA
Online: £37.99 (use coupon “NW11GMEHW” for £3 off)

Mirror’s Edge £34.97
Alone In The Dark: Inferno £34.99
Shaun White Snowboarding £37.99
SingStar Vol. 3 £17.73
SingStar ABBA £17.99

  
Wii Music £29.99 (add gift wrap and use coupon “NW11GMEHW” for £2.01 off)
Call of Duty: World at War £29.00
Star Wars: The Clone Wars – Lightsaber Duels £29.00
Rayman Raving Rabbids TV £29.99 (add gift wrap and use coupon “NW11GMEHW” for £2.01 off)
Shaun White Snowboarding: Road Trip £24.97
NHL 2K9 £17.99
FaceBreaker K.O. Party £14.73
Kung Fu Panda – Legendary Warrior £24.71
High School Musical 3: Senior Year DANCE! £22.99

 
World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King £17.73
Call of Duty: World at War £27.99
The Lord of the Rings Online: Mines of Moria Expansion Pack £14.73
Everquest 2: The Shadow Odyssey £14.99
Football Manager 2009 £24.83

 
Call of Duty: World at War £24.73
Star Wars: The Clone Wars – Jedi Alliance £24.99
Guitar Hero: On Tour – Decades £23.91
Guitar Hero: On Tour - Decades Bundle £29.99 (add gift wrap and use coupon “NW11GMEHW” for £2.01 off)
Rayman Raving Rabbids TV £21.49
Shaun White Snowboarding £23.95
My Health Coach: Stop Smoking with Allen Carr £14.73
Deal or No Deal: The Banker is Back £12.73
Kung Fu Panda – Legendary Warrior £23.73
Flower, Sun and Rain £22.49
Disney Fairies: Tinker Bell £23.99

 
Football Manager 2009 £17.73
Shaun White Snowboarding £23.95

 
Call of Duty: World at War £23.73
SingStar ABBA £14.73

  
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Note: Instead of new releases this week, the following games were reduced in price
Feeding Frenzy £3.40 / 400 Points
Worms £3.40 / 400 Points
ULTIMATE Mortal Kombat 3 £3.40 / 400 Points

  
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Mega Man 3 £3.50 / 500 Points
Phantasy Star IV: The End of the Millennium £5.60 / 800 Points

Coupons – Details of coupons used in this post
GAME.co.uk - £3 off £30 - “NW11GMEHW”

Major UK video-game retailer, GAME have revealed a new, interesting take on competitions. They are currently hosting a flash game called Console Wars in which the player engages in Command & Conquer style RTS battles either defending for the Retro Alliance, or the invading NxtGn Elite.

In order to take part in the competition, you must hold an account on the website (free of course) and then you’ll have to click "Win Prizes" in the game. After submitting your email address, you should go and set up your wish list. Your wish list is what you’re playing for. Everything you put on it will become your prize later on so if you don’t set it up, you’ll get a measly nothing if you win. Just so you know, the maximum total value of your list is £1000, so don’t try putting 20 PS3s on there as it won’t work.

The game itself isn’t bad for a flash game, and it’ll hold your interest for as long as necessary to enter the competition. This is for UK residents only and the competition closes on the 31st of December. You must take part in the game to enter and have a chance of winning, and your chance of winning increases, the more levels of the game you complete. If you have a few minutes to spare in the office, and they don’t regulate your Internet usage with strict filters, then there are much worse ways to kill time than Console Wars. It’s reasonably fun, and winning stuff is always fun.

Source: Console Wars

Unshaven and forgetting the names of games, my lesson in professionalism left the Expo in true shock. Marvel as I even claim to be good at Far Cry 2.

Can’t really stop to chat, I have LittleBigPlanet to be playing. You may even get a review/playdiary out of me before Christmas!

Many thanks to Allan and eventually Myk for keeping the site alive!

Clickety click for ugliness.

Steam are running a fantastic deal for all of you money-savvy audiophiles out there. For this week only, you can pick up Audiosurf for just $2.49 (£1.60 in real money). It’s more than worth it in my opinion, even at $9.99 it’s a great deal and it’s without a doubt one of my favourite indie games that I have played ever (up there with the other five I’ve played).

You thrifty music fans need to head over to the Steam store (yep, you’ll need Steam installed, is that really such a bad thing?) to get your copy. If you’re really as cheap as I presume then you’ll already have hundreds of illegally downloaded tracks on your computer (yer thieving bastards!) so you’re only paying a cheap fare to enhance your music experience.

What I’m trying to say is, get this game. Get it while it’s cheap. Get it while it’s expensive. I don’t care, just get it. It’s great. Honest.

Audiosurf $2.49 this week only

Now  that I’ve recovered from whatever I got down in London, I can finally look at the screen without getting the urge to proclaim that the light burns. Nor do I hack a hernia-inducing hurricane when I’m trying to sleep. Now you’ve got that thought in your head, let me say that it was good.

Nay, it was great.

Pretty much every part of the gaming community was there. You had the gamers, the semi-pro’s (We wouldn’t really want Fatal1ty there. Nobody would know, or care, who he was), those both participating and interested in the industry, as well as the press and the representatives from both developers and publishers.

The biggest surprise of the show for me was Call of Duty: World at War, and I’ll explain why. When I heard that the fifth instalment of the CoD series was to be developed by Treyarch, I was dismayed. For those of you that don’t know why, Treyarch also made Call of Duty 3, best known for being the worst in the series (at least from the point of view of gamers). But as I said in the article, it’s tight and reeks of CoD4. Which is not a bad thing at all.

So. Onto the good stuff. Links to the games we tested.

• Tom Clancy’s HAWX
• Mirror’s Edge (And the demo-release follow up)
• Super Hind
• Tom Clancy’s EndWar
• Gears of War 2
• Call of Duty: World At War
• WWE Smackdown vs. Raw 2009
• Race PRO
• Prince of Persia

And now for a gallery of shots.

I’ve been a big fan of Prince of Persia since the beginning of the previous generation’s remake series (I’ve never completed a Prince of Persia game, but I am willing to live in blissful ignorance of that fact). Needless to say, I was excited at being able to try out the new game a few months before release, and also needless to say, it is a worthy successor to not only the previous series, but the originals to.

From that, I mean that the game holds features more common to the original Prince of Persia than the previous series, while still including the acrobatic thrill the last-gen games offered. In this, you might argue that it feels a bit like Assassin’s Creed (it does run on the same engine after all).

In the new Prince of Persia, the time-shifting TiVo system of old is replaced by a new gimmick. Her name is Elika. She is magic. That’s about it.

While you might expect Elika to be the star of the new game, she factors into the gameplay as little more than a weapon - being assigned to one of the buttons much the same as acrobatic attacks, or sword attacks are. This plays into combat interestingly as you jump around using deadly combinations to surprise and defeat your foes.

Talking of combat, in the new Prince of Persia you only fight one enemy at a time (an homage to the original? Or perhaps an example of the limitations of the Scimitar engine). This means that you need to think a lot more about every move you take, as you face death after one connecting strike to your vulnerable body and means that blocking is key to the game. Blocking is also key for the enemies, which is why the variety of attacks becomes so important to  surprise your enemy and get through his defence. It also makes for tactically engaging boss battles.

The premise of the new Prince of Persia fits in with the new, colourful artistic-direction as the big meanie - Ahriman (God of Darkness and all that) seeks to wreak havoc on the unsuspecting residents of Persia, draining light and colour from all things in the realm. Twilight Princess? What’s that when it’s at home?

The game begins with The Prince wandering through the lands searching for his money-laden donkey. On his search, he meets Elika (well it’s more of a desperate alliance while she’s on the run from her tyrannical father… rather than bumping into him in Tescos) who is a Princess in mortal trouble. It soon becomes evident that the storyline only compliments the art-style and the voice acting is more Looney-Toons rather than Mass Effect. This is made worse by the script, which reacts with the acting to culminate in a strange new version of the Prince which strongly resembles Brendan Fraser’s happy-go-lucky hero from The Mummy.

The gameplay is the real star of the game though, and it’s a lot of fun running on, climbing up and grinding down walls with the help of your clawed gauntlet, which helps as much in combat as it does acrobatics. Combat is well executed in the game, making it a joy to fight enemies - including more tension in fights, while avoiding the irritation which often resulted from the Sands of Time trilogy (falling off ledges and the like while fending off grizzlies and horribles). Elika provides an interesting twist on the video-game ally and often helps rather than hinder (also providing an excuse to prevent the player from dying interestingly).

There were a couple of small bugs found in the preview copy I played, but these could easily be ironed out by the time the final release hits our waters in early December, and apart from a place where I got completely lost as to where I should be going, I really enjoyed my gameplay experience.

Prince of Persia is a must-buy for fans of not only the series but the genre also. I would recommend that you pick this up, though I find it hard to recommend as a pre-order only due to the vast quantity of quality titles coming out around the time. While the storyline and voice acting are questionable, the gameplay and graphical style deliver exactly what you would expect from a Prince of Persia game (in all it’s forms), and do not disappoint.

It’d be a mistake to say that it was a good idea to cart upcoming 360 exclusive, RACE Pro along to Eurogamer for public viewing. Really, it would.

RACE Pro is developer SimBin’s (developer of many a GTR game) new project aimed at weaning Forza fans away from Microsoft’s own published effort get them feeding on Atari’s (sinister) bottle. I’s a game which looks promising, yes. It features pretty graphics and realistic in-car views for all vehicles featured (amounting to a decent 48 different types). Question is, will RACE Pro - without all of Forza’s bells and whistles of complex car customisation and realistic physics - be able to entice fans of racing simulators?

From what we saw at the Eurogamer Expo, it would be safe to say that - in its current state - the answer is a resounding “no”. The game itself appears to have great gameplay which has a brilliant physics system of its own, along with better-than-Forza visuals. The AI can be realistically irritating, as rival cars slither around you, and the locations boast more detail, as well as more interesting settings, than Forza. The comparisons to Forza don’t stop there though, as it even borrows the advice beam seen in Forza (which advises the player where best to drive on the track to maximise placement on the track and to prevent you from skidding into barriers, as well as at what speed you should be driving).

Now, for the bad points. RACE Pro is riddled with issues. I started the game from the main menu, where I chose my car and track in which I wanted to race. I next waited for a tedious 7 minutes for the track to load. 3, 2, 1, GO! Wait a minute… I attempted to go, but the excessive lag wouldn’t let me go without a fight. I raced for a further few minutes, trying out the controls and different camera angles before my patience snapped, then I stopped playing as my car ploughed into a wall. Ouch.

RACE Pro, in its seemingly premature state did not impress me very much at all. It feels very much like Forza when you get around the lag and load times (it took me two minutes for the pause menu to load) and the graphics impress (The first person in car view is great). As it is at the moment the game’s obvious problems prevent it from performing very much at all, let alone performing alongside legends; Forza and Gran Turismo.

Wait for the demo, or give it a rental before decidedly putting down cash on this seemingly stereotypical Atari “effort”.

What with all the good games around at the expo, we unfortunately didn’t have time to wait in line to play SVR 2009. We did, however, see some live gameplay for ourselves.

What can we say? It’s very much SVR 2008, but with a different UI. The HUD’s changed to a more gritty ink-splotch style design, and the character selection now boasts a larger quantity of wrestlers with ridiculous expressions on their faces as they strike pantomime-esque poses. Short sentence. Other differences, while meagre, include: an awesome sounding finisher-creator, “enhanced” tag team matches and finally the inferno match. Wrestling… with fire (apparently). None of the aforementioned new features were seen in our preview, but we can expect that they hardly warrant a new game.

Differences aside, what you have here is a minor update to a solid game. The feature list is almost identical to its predecessors (previous issues, such as dodgy collision detection and dated graphics remain) and the new features, as always, aren’t likely to be worth a new purchase if you own any of the previous games in the series.

Die-hard fans of the series should check it out, but it’s hard to recommend DLC quality additions at a forty pound price point, while the previous game in the series (SVR 2008) can now be picked up at a measly £24.99 new.

First off, if you haven’t downloaded it, get onto your 360 or PS3 and put it in the queue now. Done it? Good.

The demo came out yesterday for the PS3, and today for the Xbox 360. It features a tutorial level and a single level to play on. The level available is exactly the same level that was playable at the Eurogamer Expo (You can find the entry here), so it begs the question of why they didn’t use the demo that was obviously available at the time.

So, having played through it a few times, I stand by what I said before. The controls were the downfall. Not because they were bad, but because there wasn’t a tutorial or information sheet available for you to read and get the controls. This tutorial level is shipping with the finished product, and it solves that issue perfectly. The combat, whether due to the tutorial, or the development cycle moving along, is sorted. I was doing all sorts to those guards.

The key to the demo is momentum. Keep moving, and only come to a complete stop when you know that if you keep moving, you’re going to die. Hiding behind a crate until an enemy reloads is an excuse. Stopping to move back to take a jump is not. Roll after a jump to keep your momentum, by holding the ‘low’ button just before you hit the ground, to keep the momentum after jumping a fair distance  The beauty of the game is that you can seamlessly move from stance to stance, and place to place. You have no excuse after a few runs to stop moving. You missed the stairs? Fine, scale a building and jump onto the railing. You didn’t kill an enemy? Go around him and take the route that gives him the least time to see you and shoot you.

The graphics are awesome, as I said before, and the sound (now that I can hear it pretty well) is equally good, with the music matching the pace of the game perfectly. I hope in the full version there will be an opportunity to turn off the reticule, as it was slightly off-putting for me. Top notch game, and another published by Electronic Arts, made by the Battlefield folks (aka DICE).

So play it, and enjoy. The full product is out on the 14th of November. Two weeks today.