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

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!