Game Rental

Ever since Nintendo unveiled their wireless white wonder to the world (the Wii), practically everybody who saw the infra-red WiiMote control in action at some point thought the same thing: ‘Wouldn’t it be totally sweet if someone made a Star Wars game which allowed you to use the controller as a lightsabre?’

Well, turns out that someone did. The Star Wars ‘Expanded Universe’ – that is, stories set before, beyond and in between the narratives of the six films – is huge. There are hundreds of ancillary novels, comic books and video games set in the Star Wars universe, some of them great (see the Battlefront and the Knights of the Old Republic series’) some of them not so great (Empire at War). The Force Unleashed looks set to neatly slot into the former category.

The action takes place between Episodes III and IV, (so it’s technically Episode 3.241407 or something like that) and see players assuming the mantle of one Galen Marek, the secret apprentice of Darth Vader who is charged with hunting down the remaining Jedi after the Emperor orders their extermination.

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Those of us who have fond gaming memories of the original PlayStation will certainly remember Metal Gear Solid, the title which arguably kick started the so-called ’stealth ‘em up’ genre.  Hiding in cardboard boxes, snapping the necks of enemy soldiers, smoking, a labyrinthine plot, this game had it all.  Although the PlayStation 2 sequel, Sons of Liberty, is widely thought to be inferior, the series returned to form with Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, with its emphasis on camouflage, laying traps in the jungle and hunting for food.  Now in glorious next generation, high definition graphics we have Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots and it’s definitely been worth the wait.

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This morning, I’ve mown down three pedestrians, stolen a car, torched it, beaten a policeman to death and nicked his gun. Then, I got into a taxi and rode halfway across town before getting out and refusing to pay the fare. The violent exchange which ensued ended with the driver sitting in a slowly growing pool of his own blood. As the feds closed in, I managed to accidentally explode and scatter myself across the pavement with my own rocket launcher, aimed as it was a hair too close to the car I was crouching behind for cover.

Then I jumped in the shower and got ready for work. The above paragraph is not some Patrick Bateman-esque flight of fancy, but a description of a ten-minute early morning blast on Rockstar North’s seminal Grand Theft Auto IV…
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Whilst its title appears to allude to an almighty bust-up between some tin-skinned aliens over instant mashed potato, Super Smash Bros. Brawl is, of course, the latest instalment in the massively popular Smash Bros. series that first appeared back on the N64 in 1999.

Smash Bros, essentially a light-hearted beat-em-up affair, is something of an exercise in nostalgia; characters from across the Nintendo canon, including A-listers such as Mario, Pikachu and Link, rub shoulders with less well-known heroes and heroines including Ness from Earthbound (a title which never saw the light of day in Europe) and Samus Aran from the Metroid series.
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