The Space Game

The Casual Collective have released their latest online game. The Space Game. It's a single player strategy game where you have to build structures in space, mine rocks and defend your base from pirates. 

Quite a lot of fun! 

LazyViews: World Snooker Championship Real 08

Intro

Play snooker on your Wii!

Good

• A really great well modeled snooker game, as much fun as Jimmy White's snooker on the Amiga
• Highly addictive, I've been playing for hours at a time.
• It has all the real snooker players modeled into the game. 
• Lots of other cue sports to try, shame you can only play most of them in practice mode.
• The cue attachment really makes it feel like real snooker.

Bad

• It sometimes feels very hard, it can be crushing when one of the top players demolishes you in one visit to the table.
• Limited play modes, the only one with any real depth is the snooker season mode. 
• No online multiplay (this is criminal!)
• If you don't like snooker it'll be of absolutely no interest to you.
• The cue attachment feels a bit flimsy. I'm sure I'm going to snap it every time I whack it on my head in frustration at another bad/frame losing shot.

Summary

A really, really great snooker game and one of the best sports games on the Wii, or on any console. The cue really does make a difference. It's just a shame it's not a bit more sturdy! You could probably gaffer tape a wiimote to a real snooker cue for the same affect though. What it lacks in breadth in gameplay it makes up for in depth. Would have scored a 9 if you could play multiplayer online. 

Score

8/10 Read the Eurogamer scoring policy

LazyViews: Rock Band

Intro
Just in time for the sequel to be released I bring to you....Guitar Hero with drums and a microphone! Or Rockband, as others may know it.

Pros

• Fun to take the drums for a spin


• Always hilarious to hear people sing off key


• Still kinda fun to feel like a rock star

Cons

• Takes up an entire room with peripherals


• Drums make annoying tapping sound


• Questionable peripheral quality


• If you’re like me and have no friends, or people brave enough to play with you, it’s really kinda boring and just like any of the other dozens of rhythm and music games out there.

Summary
I get tired of shit really fast, and this seems like a genre that has set phasers to “repetitive”. Add on the slow, pocket draining hell of downloadable content and I think we’ll remember this as the high water point in the “overpriced buy extra peripherals rhythm game”. Though I imagine it will survive for some time as the tards out there continue to shell out money just so they can say they know how to play some random rock song. I was gonna list some example songs there, but then I realized just how many damn songs people want to rock to that don't come with the game.

Score
8.5

Does excessive DRM actually encourage piracy?

So, Spore is on it's way to becoming the most pirated game ever. 

If you've missed the online shitstorm I'll summarise, the game only allows you to install it 3 times. Now, I'm not one of those gamers uninstall games once they have played them for a bit and then re-installs them at some later date when they fancy playing again. I'm too lazy for that, I'd just buy a bigger disk. If I was I expect that'd be annoying. Even so, I do have games like Civilisation 2 and Doom II that I've installed multiple times on multiple computers way more than 3. And I've had 3 installs of XP on my current computer, all of which have required all my games to be re-installed. 

Apparently you can phone those evil bastards at EA, tell them your tale of woe and they will give you more installs. 

On the other hand, all this has just been seen as a fun challenge to game crackers and pirates. People used to download cracked versions of games that they'd bought legitimately to get around "must have CD in drive" type protection because they were too lazy to keep swapping disks and it sounds like lots of people are downloading cracked versions of Spore, even though they own it, just to get around the DRM. 

On the opposite end of the scale was this piece from Positech Games talking about being inspired by pirates to make better cheaper games that people wanted to pay for.

So, I think DRM encourages pirates. What do you think?

ps. I'm hoping to get a (legitimate) free copy of Spore at some point soon so I'll endeavour to write one of our excellent LazyViews about it. You should really read the one Danny's had in draft for 2 months about Rock Band.

LazyViews: Mario Kart Wii

Intro

The latest instalment of Mario Kart comes to the Wii with a brand new wheelshaped controller to stick your Wiimote in.

Good

• It's Mario Kart!
• The wheel controller works well. It's a bit weird pointing a wheel at the screen when you are using the mouse pointer, but as a wheel it's good.
  
• You can ride motorbikes as well as driving karts, and the bikes are a lot of fun.
  
• You can unlock the ability to drive as Miis so you can take on Mario et al. If not then look out for yourself in the crowd.
  
• The new tracks are really interesting and show off the new gameplay like tricks when you are jumping and the new drifting system
  
• You can engage in Wi-Fi play with your friends around the world or randoms
• You can download ghost images from top experts at the game from around the world, or from people who are just a bit better than you and find out how they do it and try and beat their times.
  

Bad

• Some of the items you pick up or get hit by feel a bit unfair or unbalanced. If you've been battling hard to get up to 5th place with Bowzer continuously knocking you off the track and someone picks up a Billy Bullet and shoots past you and off into the distance you're likely to be hurling your controller in rage faster than a stupid Canadian who failed to plug his laptop in properly would throw his laptop at the wall.
  
• Leading has never been great in Mario Kart but now it's easily the worst place to be, you can get hit by all kinds of nasty shit and your defensive items basically suck. I've even read a strategy guide entry that says on the tougher 150cc races the best tactic is to sit near the back and have a big push towards the end of the race.
  
• Some of the courses they've imported from old systems are a bit shit compared to the new courses and don't work so well with the new gameplay.

Summary

As always the real strength of Mario Kart lies in multi-player. They've possibly taken the concept that "anyone can play against anyone" a bit too far, but a better racer will win more often than a novice it just evens the odds a bit. And it's still just as fun as Mario Kart ever was with just about enough fresh ideas to make it interesting even for people who've played the previous games in the series to death.

Score

8/10 Read the Eurogamer scoring policy

LazyViews

Hello readers!

Both Danny and I are occasional game reviewers and I've been known to knock out the odd music review from time to time but neither of us have done too much of that recently. Why not? It's actually quite hard work and generally takes time away that you could be playing whatever game it is you enjoyed so much you felt like writing about it.

So we came up with the concept of LazyViews, a series of very short reviews that we can write very quickly but can get our recommendations across to you. They'll probably mostly be on games but they could be on anything. Music, TV shows, films, books, just depends what kind of a mood we are in.

It's a simple model we'll have 5 sections to each review with a couple of sentences in each and a bulleted list of good and bad points.

Intro
Good Points
Bad Points
Summary
Score

The score will be out of 10, and as we're too lazy to make up our own scoring policy we'll just steal Eurogamer's, as they are one of my favourite online review sites.

I expect that I'll be kicking things off with a few reviews of the new Wii games I've got. Mario Kart and Super Smash Bros: Brawl are probably the top candidates.

If you want to send us in any reviews then please do. E-mail your reviews to letmedoyourworkforyou at lazyview.com with your review split into the sections above. Include a web link if you want us to link to your blog or site!

Games for you.

Bored? Well here are a couple of games to keep you occupied.

For the nerds: Protector is another tower defence type variant. This one has a big long campaign, lots of maps and some strategy. Takes ages to complete but it strangely satisfying. It saves your campaign on your browser so you can close down and come back later.

For the cool kids: Sitar Star is like a flash guitar hero where you play a sitar. What more needs saying?

New Years Resolution - Get fit

This year, as I'm sure many millions of people did, I decided that the new year would be a good time to get myself fit. With that in mind, I think taking up a sport would be a really good idea. I wasn't sure what, but then inspiration came to me.

LETS PLAY DARTS!

I was watching the BDO World Darts championship from the Lakeside and it occurred to me that darts would be the perfect sport to take up. We're having a pretty wet and miserable winter (unusual for the UK) and with Darts you don't need to leave the house, it's cheap and sociable, you don't get tired or sore, and you can get drunk whilst you're playing. The only thing better would be if you could get a pool table in the house. And whilst I did find some that stack vertically, they are a bit pricy.

So, whilst we're in the shop getting the Sky+ remote I talked about yesterday, we're going to pick up a dart board. I'll be fit in no time.

I will have to do a small amount of drilling in the basement to put the board up, but I think it's a small price to pay. My girlfriend also said that if we got a dart board then her mother came to visit she'd spend all her time in the basement playing darts whenever she came to visit. I just want to go on the record and say that didn't contribute to my keenness to get a board, not in the slightest.

Procrastination Aid - Hamster Flight

The latest Counterglow Free Game of the Week is absolute genius. It's called Hamster Flight, but I have to warn you, it's the kind of simple but addictive game you could waste hours on.