One of the things I like to do with these little roundups is to highlight the smaller, independent or little publicised releases that you may well not have heard about and this week is absolutely chock full of them. There are plenty of more significant releases too, but there are a million other blogs banging on about them in great detail. There’s nothing I can add here. With that in mind, I won’t say any more about Operation Flashpoint 2, UP, Kingdom Hearts: 358/2 Days and Mario & Luigi: Bowser’s Inside Story, other than they all look very spiffing indeeed.
Scribblenauts is the third DS game from the team behind ‘Drawn to Life’. The concept behind the game is very simple. It’s a puzzle game in which you can summon objects into the world by writing their name using the touch screen. It’s easy to be sceptical about the idea. Surely there’s no way they can cater for every single object a player could imagine? Well, their database of over 20,000 recognised items is, at the least, a very good start. From people who have played it, I’ve heard mixed opinions ranging from jaw droppingly amazed to ‘How can they not know what a Delco Alternator Pulley is?!?’. It’s very interesting from a theoretical perspective, and I really hope it’s a fun game too.
Cities XL on the PC is a MMO city building game. Although it has a single player mode, players can also build cities in a persistent ‘world’, trade resources with each other and work together to build larger structures and monuments. The city building genre hasn’t really found it’s way back to the shores of mainstream appeal since the original ‘Sim City’ and I personally doubt that fusing it with an MMO will help that in any way. Sure looks pretty though.
Holy Invasion of Privacy, Badman!: What Did I Do to Deserve This? is easily taking home the ‘oddball’ award this week. It sounds like a mix between ‘Dungeon Keeper’ and ‘Mr. Driller’, but actually looks more like an original spin on the ‘Desktop Defence’ genre. Dig a big tunnel, plant a load of monsters in it, then hide your overlord ‘boss’ character somewhere inside. Then when heroes come and try to capture him, you better hope your army of creatures can fend them off. As you’d expect, it’s a cult hit in Japan!
-Stew (@chicknstu)