TUROK
Touchstone
The world used to be ruled by dinosaurs. Max Boyce used to be funny. Wales
used to have a mining industry. Turok used to be a decent game. But that was
years ago. Times have changed and the latest version of Turok now appears prehistoric.
Something which should never have been dug up. It’s a first-person-shooter
in which you play an utterly generic, gravelly voiced American marine. His
only distinctive feature is a daft mo-hawk hairstyle - similar to the one sported
by Bruno the camp Austrian fashion TV presenter. You run around forest type
environments and kill loads of dinosaurs with an assortment of weapons. It
looks decent enough but the problems are with the way it plays. There are so
many niggly things which make this game annoying. But the T-Rex of them all
is the terrible placement of save points. So you will have to repeat sections
of the game again and again. Until you are praying for an asteroid to hit earth
and put an end to the misery.
REZ HD
Sega
So many games take place in the same kinds of dreary worlds. It’s either
Lord of the Rings forests, blood soaked space corridors or World War II battlefields.
They all start to look the same after a bit. Which makes it refreshing when
a game like Rez HD comes along. It blows the cobwebs out and reminds you how
fantastic games can be. This is a remake of a game originally released in 2001
for the Dreamcast but still feels new and innovative. It is a difficult game
to describe but you basically glide through this weird landscape created using
retro-style wireframe graphics. You shoot these alien things, which trigger
percussion sounds which become part of a really chilled out ambient soundtrack.
It’s only a short game but a really memorable experience. It’s
available for download via XboxLive.
Tom Law gets totally off his X-Box