On a day like today, what on earth could be more British than Henry Hatsworth? Putting aside that it’s developed by a Florida based studio, Mr Hatsworth is the epitome of Victorian adventurers. A gentleman, if you will. With a bowler hat firmly on his head a fine moustache flowing from the upper lip, he’s ready to set off into the deepest darkest jungles to recover lost treasures from the savages and give Johnny Foreigner a damn good hiding, what, what!

Just as with the last DS eccentric, Professor Layton, the character style is the first thing to set this cartridge apart from the competition. Opening cutscenes will present Hatsworth, his younger friend Cole and their nemesis Weasleby as clichés of a by gone Britain. Cole, in particular, is only a hair’s breadth from uttering the word “Guv’nor” whilst offering to shine your shoes. Playing up to this, their speech, whilst presented in the form of text boxes, is accompanied by samples that match their character with Hatsworth continually huffing and making pompous noises whereas Cole’s sounds seem to be snippets of cockney charm.

The game itself, however, is a platformer. You’ll take control of Hatworth and run and jump him through jungles in search of a mysterious golden suit that is rumoured to have the power to control the world. The locals aren’t too keen on giving up their shiny attire and so their resistence must be put down with swings from your machete and shots from your hunting rifle.

The early levels are very straight forward and the only time that you should see your life counter go down is either through misadventure or experimentation from seeing if that pit in front of you is actually as bottomless as it seems. I’m told that later levels do gain in complexity with the addition of a walljump, allowing access to higher areas, but so far it’s quite a standard affair. Enemies are easy enough to dispatch given enough blows from either weapon, although the odd boss fight crops up, too, to test your resolve.

Where Hatsworth differs from traditional platformers is the delightful inclusion of a Tetris Attack style “parallel world”. Some how your hunt for the suit has opened up a rift between your world and the Puzzle Realm. Any enemies killed in your world are transported to this alternate plane and transformed into blocks. If they are not also disposed of in the Puzzle Realm then they will only return to try and thwart you again.

An interesting narrative but an even more interesting gameplay angle as also hidden within the puzzler are powerups and health boosts for you, too. A tap of a button will see you switch screens and then its a classic “match 3” puzzle setup. Link three of more coloured blocks together and they will be removed along with any monsters they contained and granting you any powerups that they held. Obviously the more that you can remove in a single go the better and so you can always find your eye drifting down from the platforming screen to the grid of squares seeing if there’s an opportunity to setup a devastating combo.

I think it’s fair to say that neither component is exceptional; I’ve played far better platformers and there are many addictive puzzlers out for the DS but both are good and what’s more important is that work exceedingly well together. Much like the Grand Theft Auto, it is more than the sum of its parts.

I believe that it’s only worth investing in a console if it does something different to the one that you have already. The success of the Wii possibly proves this as many have it a second console to complement a 360 or PS3. Having a PS3 to complement a 360, however, is slightly harder to justify; a quick glance from Joe Public and he could be forgiven in thinking that they’re just different coloured boxes offering marginally different flavours of cars, guns and guts.

On the whole it’s reasonably true, too. I never wanted a PlayStation solely for Killzone, Uncharted and Gran Tourismo as I already have Halo, Tomb Raider and Forza, thank you very much. Under closer examination they may be completely different games but ultimately they do did not offer the massive shift in experience that would have been required to make me rush out on launch day to secure a PS3. In my opinion, the strength of the PlayStation comes from the more art-house games that I never could have envisaged being launched on a Microsoft console. As previously mentioned, this is lead by Little Big Planet and reinforced by a great number of PlayStation Network games (Sony’s equivalent to Xbox Live Marketplace).

Favourite of those that I have tried so far is Pixel Junk Eden, a game that places you as a tiny shrimp-like creature in a very stylised, 2D garden. In a very similar way to firing a rocket in Worms, you launch yourself around the level, clinging to the plants that grow all around you and aiming to reach the higher points that hide your goal. You can only be launched so far, though, and further plants must be pollinated and grown to give you a framework to climb.

Like so many downloadable games, it’s a very simple concept - climb high, collect pollen, grow plants, climb higher – and tied in with a very distinguished art style. Pollinate a seed and as you move away the shoots with rise and loop skywards, swaying in the breeze. Clean, flourishing strokes paint the garden and it’s impossible to mistake its screenshots as being from anything else.

Despite the world’s simplicity, exploration is still your prime motivation as your goal is not reaveal to you. You know it’s somewhere “up there” and half the fun is swinging in between stems, grabbing pollen and putting further distance between you and terra firma in your bid to reach it. Thought is required, though, as with only a certain snapshot of the garden visible to you at any one time a misplaced jump could see you crashing unceremoniously back down to earth.

I’m still only a couple of gardens (read: “worlds”) in but I believe I already have Eden pigeon holed. It is a game that I could boot up and lose hours to or just to fill a ten minutes gap, but ultimately Eden will be put on when I just want to chill out. In the same way I can relax with Piñata, the more considered Mr Driller modes and Animal Crossing, it is there for when I want to crash on the couch and not get wound up by steroid enhanced space marines. Rez without the beat, if you will.

The original Far Cry’s name has all but been run into the mud. From the well received PC original the formula has been diluted to within an inch of its life on the home consoles, with the final Wii version being barely recognisable compared to its forerunners. True, it was still somewhere sunny, but little that had made the series an initial success was visible in its tale of mutant powers and waggling.

Removing themselves away from the tropical island setting, Ubisoft have attempted to reboot the series by placing you in the shoes of an international agent tasked with tracking down an arms dealer known as The Jackal. Based in Africa, The Jackal has been supplying both sides in a bloody civil war and has left a trail of destruction across the whole continent.

An early run in with him leaves you running for your life, eventually being dragged to safety by one of the local militia. After recovering, they give you a gun, a car and a mission and you are set on the way for revenge somewhere on the other side of the map. And that is Far Cry 2 in a nutshell: a series of missions, setup by dubious characters, with mostly suspect aims, that require you to drive great distance to shoot someone for someone else.

Whilst the plot may not win awards for originality, it does offer an excuse to take the adventure through various African inspired environments. The scope of your world is huge, taking almost twenty minutes to drive from one edge to the other, and the trail leads through lush forests, grassy plains and harsh ravines, each offering more than a change of scenery. Combat in a forest offers the ability to sneak through the undergrowth, applying Rombo-like skills to take down mercenaries, whereas the dry, grassy plains are far more susceptible to bush fires, meaning a well placed Molotov can make short work of adversaries.

You need to be adept, too, as if ever there was a game that would, if it could, make you eat worms, it is Far Cry 2. Nobody in this game likes you, in fact everybody pretty much hates you. If the person you meet is not behind a shop’s counter then it’s a sure fire bet they will either try and ram you off the road or draw a gun in your general direction. Roads have checkpoints at regular intervals stocked with resistance and even on long, empty stretches a jeep with a mounted gun is a common sight.

Gunplay is good, although a little floaty, and is let down by weapons developing the tendency to jam at crucial points the more you use them. As amusing as this sound, when I burst around a corner to take down a man who has been waving a shotgun at me then I expect to hear more than a “click” followed by him releasing both barrels into my chest. I do believe it is an interesting mechanic and one that could be explored but there is no indication as to how likely any individual weapon is likely to exhibit this frustrating habit. Supposedly it is how battered and weather beaten a gun is but as they all seemingly start out as default shade of brown its not entirely clear.

Second on my list of annoyances is the onset of malaria episodes. Again, at random, you can succumb to a bout of dizziness where you vision is blurred and defending yourself is out of the question. It’s place in the game seems only to serve as a conversation starter for NPCs who generally tell you that you don’t look well.

Overall, though, the game does produce a proper African adventure. At times you can travel for miles through the country’s criss-crossing road system and although you may wish for a fast transport system ala Fallout, I can think of a lot worse ways to get around. The scenery is interesting and the chance that you could stumble upon a stash of diamonds means you have as much attention focused on your GPS as you do the road.

Like so many sandbox games, Far Cry is more than the sum of its parts. The missions may be simple, the handling average and the random quirks irritating, but the ability to jump into a jeep and drive around the Serengeti in search of riches and bad guys is a powerful counterpoint.

Flight combat games are very much a Marmite of the gaming world. For as many people as I know willing to don a jumpsuit, nestle into a cockpit and start shouting “Gooooooose!”, there are an equal number quite happy to walk on by and wait for something that doesn’t involve quite as many aerofoils.

Tom Clancy’s “High Altitude Warfare – Experimental Squadron”, aka HAWX, is Ubisoft’s new addition to this skies. Quite how it fits into the Tom Clancy branding is anyone’s guess, but there is something reassuring about the possibility that you could swoop in and provide air support for the Ghost Recon or Rainbow Six team at some point during your mission.

The core of the game seems a standard affair with your squadron has been tasked with repelling an enemy invasion. There are enemy fighters to dogfight with, bombers to dispatch before they lay waste to the population and ground bound tanks that allow you to skim low over the landscape’s geometry. It’s fair to say that if you’ve played any flight combat game before you won’t be surprised with the scenario presented in the demo, but I suppose its hard for fighter jets to do anything else.

One of the major issues cited by those who dislike aerial combat is that it always end up in the same routine where you and your target merely end circling each other in a hopeless bid to get a lock on. Thankfully, the most welcome feature in HAWX gives you in game help on how to avoid this situation. In the right situation, a dab of a button will bring up a series of markers that indicate where you should fly to get the upper hand. Their presence doesn’t mean that a lock on is a formality, you still have to have the skill to fly through a jinking set of waypoints and paying attention to the motions can prove far more beneficial than any scripted tutorial. The planes do handle nicely, though, so controls shouldn’t hamper you here.

The same applies when an enemy’s missile is speeding towards you. The same waypoints can be pulled up to show you the best way to evade your pursuers and stay in the air.

There is one very, very bad point about HAWX, however. Something that I cannot believe got past any point of the design or testing process, and that is the way you are forced to fly the tutorial in a distant, third-person camera that suffers from attention deficit disorder. I cannot stress enough how bad this camera is as it is placed 500m behind your plane and never stays still. There are times when I have been flying towards it unable to see where I a heading; there are times when you are unable to tell the proximity of enemies to you; there are times when it swings wildly as you make a sharp turn, altering the relativity of your sticks at the same time and turning your loop the loop into a banked turn. It is just plain awful and if anything it has to be seen to be believed.

It astounds me how it is forced upon you in the tutorial of all things. I wouldn’t be surprised that if presented with a camera of that quality that players are unwilling to complete the demo, let alone buy the full game. The constant thought in my head was “what if I am forced to do a full mission like this?” It’s enough to put you off entirely.

That aside, as thankfully in the demo mission you can choose your cockpit view, HAWX is a competent game. It’s not going to change anyone’s opinions on the genre for the better, but it does add a couple of interesting features in an attempt to trump last year’s Ace Combat.

Back at university I used to play a reasonable amount of Real Time Strategy (RTS) games. Take five boys in one house, a few copies of Command & Conquer and a network held together by duct-tape and you’d keep me quiet for hours. Since then, unfortunately, I’ve moved further and further away from PC gaming. Consoles are now my platform of choice and the RTS genre doesn’t have a reputation of porting to them well.

Several have tried to rectify this by building a console version from the ground up rather than trying to shoehorn PC controls onto a joypad. Lord of the Rings: Battle for Middle Earth did a reasonable job but still everything seemed overly complex and fiddly within its menu structure. Where Halo Wars works for me is the simplicity at which its build and actions menu operate with. There are no multiple depths, whenever you select a menu you a present with a single circular layout where all options are visible. There is no drilling down to unlock super secret powers, everything is a stick push and button press away.

Obviously the amount of units and options available have been kept lean to fit within this structure, but as the UNSC and Covenant forces are already well established I don’t believe this is too its detriment. Adding too many outlandish crafts would have scuppered Wars’ connection with the greater Halo universe. What this aids is a rock-paper-scissor style battle where certain troops/vehicles/aircraft are better suited to taking down other troops/vehicles/aircraft than others. Should you pick the wrong one you won’t have to go through a giant tech tree to rectify your mistake as there are only three or four unit types in each bracket.

Some may have misgivings about being limited to a certain number of buildings, which in turn limits your resource gathering and unit production. Each base only has a certain number of slots and players must choose how to fill them wisely as they only way to get more is to take over another base. It can seem that at times your army does seem dramatically small compared to what you need for the task in hand but at the moment I’m putting that down to my inexperience.

My main issue with Halo Wars was with the actual movement around the battlefield. The default settings seem far to twitchy and aiming to select a single unit can be troublesome. The solution seems to have been to tone down the sensitivity in the menus but compared to the spot on handling of the original Halo that experience was disappointing.

In the time I’ve spent in the alpha and with the now released demo I’ve enjoyed myself and as a self-confessed Halo fanboy I’ve been surprised at the new units. They’ve managed to make up the numbers but without breaking the conventions of either faction; Covenant Locusts are hybrid between Scarabs and Wraiths whilst the UNSC heavy airsupport look as though Pelicans have been on the Weight Gain 3000. I do get the feeling this isn’t going to set the RTS world alight and that the Koreans won’t be discarding their Starcraft discs just yet, but Halo Wars does seems a solid if not exceptional RTS that should be worthy of most 360 owner’s time. Even if they can’t tell you Master Chief’s first name.

I believe the initial barrier to any game is its control scheme. Wii Sports is a positive example of this where the controls are intuitive and accessible. Even if you don’t play tennis down the park you know the motions involved and a few experimental swings will see you competing on screen.

A bad example is Alone in the Dark. Leafing through the manual there are no less than five separate pages bullet pointing what each button does in each context. Drop into an adventure game, Tomb Raider, Uncharted, Resident Evil, anything, and within the first few minutes most people will have figured out the main controls and be up and running, but even after more than two hours with Alone in the Dark there is no fluidity about anything.

The game opens with the high rise building you find yourself in being destroyed by an unknown demoic power. Rifts open up along the walls, swallowing people whole and turning them into possessed monsters. Your first task is to simply get the hell out of there.

In the first fifteen minutes you’ll experience platforming, abseiling, combat and some simple puzzles, but all are disjointed and never flow. Your character moves sluggishly, combat involves waving the right-stick around more in hope than expectation and equipping objects is an awkward affair. Even the brief driving section I have just encountered serves no respite as it feels as though you are steering a brick around on a bed of mushy peas.

The most frustrating thing for me, though, is the way that it will constantly switch you from first- to third-person. Given the camera angles of the game I feel far more comfortable exploring through the eyes of the protagonist, but after almost every cutscene or load I am dumped to a point somewhere floating behind his head simply because the controls are so convoluted you can hardly achieve anything in first-person.

However, I am going to percevere with it. I never like to give up on games so early and there are many things that attracted me to the game in the first place. The importance that fire plays in the game and the puzzles and interactions that will work around it; the ability to later on roam around central park; the general horror story and how it plays out. My only worry is that if I cannot best the controls then I may not reach these points.

I’ve held off of my rant against the god-awful pre-budget report and decided to focus on shiny things instead. Like my new Guitar Hero World Tour drum kit! Coming in a box large enough to house a full family of wombats, it surely is a thing of plastic beauty.

First thing to report is that the Guitar Hero World Tour drum kit is a marked improvement on the original Rock Band equivalent. The RB kit, although a fresh idea at the time, always felt a little flat and awkward with its four pads. My main issue being the spacing and that when I was staring fixedly at the note stream if my hands wavered it wasn’t always easy to differentiate between the middle pair. GHWT has solved this by stripping down the basic drums to three and adding a pair of raised symbols. It may not be much of a refinement but the definite placing of all five pads just lifts the whole experience for me – you know exactly where you need to bring the stick down, no matter where you are mid-flail.

It feels more satisfying, too. The simple aesthetic addition of the symbols still can’t separate you away from the fact that you are playing an oversized Fisher Price toy but the actions played out on it are just far more satisfying. You know exactly when a symbol smash is coming and bashing those elevated quarter circles of black rubber feels amazing, far better than the flat equivalent in Rock Band.

The moveable and more sturdy foot pedal is also a welcome upgrade as I no longer feel my foot is cramped underneath the tiny frame.

And so to the Rock Band 2 v Guitar Hero World Tour software battle. In summary Rock Band 2 is by far the better game. It has oodles of downloadable tracks already, its difficulty curve is friendly to newcomers, it has a varied but lengthy career mode to plough through and it has the all important “no fail” mode for when you get a drunken band together. In contrast, Guitar Hero is much harder for novices, its career mode’s progression is extremely strict and DLC are currently scarce.

What World Tour can offer, though, is drum arrangements that are more involving. Throughout the game there is are strict definition of what pad means what. For instance, the left symbol is always high hat, the right being crash. Rock Band may do similar but not to the same level and it is the consistency in GHWT that makes it a better drumming experience. What makes the comparison fairer is that both games share a lot of songs and having played Bon Jovi’s Living on a Prayer and others on both, I much prefer the style in which World Tour lets me hit things with sticks.

So it’s six of one, half a dozen of the other. I’d heartily recommend GHWT’s drum kit for all the little things like the spacing of the inputs, the foot pedal and the build quality as a whole, but I’ll be playing it on Rock Band 2. Now Ali’s taken up the bass I can’t see our band, The Secret Society of Buzzlegums, ever moving back to GHWT… although I may sneak over for the odd solo.

After Peter Molyneux started rating his own game before it had been launched, I began having a few worries that we were going down the route that Dennis Dyack took with Too Human. Both developers have been known to occassionally talk a little too much but the difference here is that Fable II actually seems to be worthy of your attention.

Lionhead’s new title really has its hooks in me and I’m currently running around Albion raising a family, setting up a thriving business portfolio and occassionally even finding the time to go and bash some fat goblins over the head. If you’re looking for a box quote: it’s like Oblivion but with character.

That’s true, too. As great a feat as Oblivion was, I always felt it was always a little flat. Fable may be smaller in terms of scale but the game’s softer, caricatured style can be equally both more friendly and much darker, leading to a more engaging world.

If you’ve played the first game then the feel is very similar but with one big positive in that the combat has been reworked and streamlined. Very much like Force Unleashed, you have three different weapons linked to three different buttons allowing you to easily swap to a fighting style that is suitable to your situation without having to learn countless combos. Although effectively one-button combat, it never feels overly limited as you have the option to pull many magical spells from your bag to liven things up should you so wish - making a horde of zombies rise and do your bidding is always useful.

For me, the sign of a good game is one where you keep getting distracted from what you originally intended to be doing. Older GTAs have had that and so does Fable as my march towards the next quests gets put on the “to do” list as an interesting path takes my attention, which then leads to a new village to explore, which leads to new jobs, and the job to a different quest, and is that an attractive maiden over there….where was I?

The one utter disappointment, though, is co-op as it is fundamentally broken. At any point you can jump into a friend’s game. This may sound cracking but when you do jump in you are playing a nameless henchmen and not your hero, you are constrained to their camera view making for extremely restrictive movement and you cannot interact with any of the characters or shops. It is frustrating and utterly unproductive as you cannot do anything without coordinating movements with the main player. Any one of those on their own would prove annoying but the mere fact you cannot move around freely means that I am never touching co-op again, usually a feature that elevates a title in my eyes.

That aside, Molynuex’s score may be right, it’s probably why he marked himself down.

So I’m a few days into FIFA 09 now and I’ve had a chance to - excuse the pun - tackle a lot of what it has to offer and so far I am not regretting my switch from Pro Evo one bit.

From the traditional season through to the Be a Pro mode and on to Live multiplayer I can’t say I really have any complaints. Players are responsive, play is fluid and the game is another step in the series’ movement away from the high-scoring pinball football of its past.

There are moment when I forget myself and think I’m in a FIFA from a decade ago, trying to charge my way through defences or shoot from 30 yards on certain angle but never to any joy.

The biggest challenge I’ve found myself facing so far is that of the Be a Pro mode. I’ve chosen to be a midfielder in the current Spurs team and it’s proving to be a bit of a slog. Whilst I can track back and help out on the defensive side, the rest of my team seem unable to score or even willing to pull the trigger in front of goal. With my limited forays upfront and my lack of skill when faced with the onion bag I don’t think we’re going to push for the league title this season as so far out of seven games we’ve drawn six, won one with a debious penalty and only scored another solitary goal from open play.

My traditional season is fairing better with my team in a European spot. I still struggle in front of goal but this version of FIFA brings out what I loved about the Pro Evos of the past: it allows you to string together some swift, cutting play that you’ll want to watch again and again and again, or it’ll sit you back and let you lump the ball forward all day long for a lofty centre forward. What it won’t do is make it easy when under pressure so you do really need some space to make a difference, just like in the real game.

Of course, if you do have a moment of magic you can always capture it, upload it and then replay it again and again and again.

Pretty sweet finish, eh?

A demo can sell or break a game in the eyes of the undecided masses. The original Viva Pinata demo was awful: too bogged down with pop-ups and explanations to give anyone a true idea of the open nature of the final game. Compare this to the Force Unleashed demo, which so swiftly grabbed my interest in a universe I usually ignore that I actually bought the game day one, and you couldn’t have two more polar opposites in my eyes.

There are touches of the Devil May Cry and Too Human about Force Unleashed; you play Darth Vader’s secret apprentice and hack and slash your way through the Star Wars universe, ridding it of any Jedi you may find and wielding lightsabres and force powers as you go.

What this game does have over the other hack-and-slash games I have played recently is the ability to challenge you. After the first level that beds you in, the enemies are no walk over and you need to employ your arsenal of combos mix things up and get around their defences. This is opposed to the two games I’ve mentioned where I felt I could get through them in their entirety by just hammering a single button, their combos only being for show.

I have already had some immensely satisfying tussles. Ignoring the fact that some enemies can resist your force powers at times, you can find yourself blocking enemy swords strokes, countering with a force push to give yourself some space and then finishing them off with a crushing courtesy of a lightning coated droid that you sent spinning across the room. With the variety of attacks and combinations with which you can string them together available, the longevity of Force Unleashed’s combat system may be proven to be a winner. Of course I’m sure I’ve said that before, so we’ll see.

There are elements of platforming to keep level traversal interesting and boss battles that you’ll want to just swear (that are also really satisfying when you see them through), but overall things are looking good.