GF! Weekly Wrap-Up #8

Hello Game Boys and Game Girls. It’s time for another installment of the GamesFirst! Weekly Wrap-Up for the week ending Friday, October 14, 2005. I’m Val Townsend, the Atomic Goddess, and this week we’ve got a review of Burnout Revenge and a preview of th e Chronicles of Narnia for Xbox. But first, the news:

News

Recently, a program was released that allows users to downgrade the firmware on their PSPs. That means that people who have purchased PSPs with firmware version 2.0 installed can downgrade their system, and then they can run homebrew applications and game s. Now, a malicious programmer has released a Trojan Horse program that masquerades as the PSP downgrade utility, but will actually ruin your PSP, rendering it useless. The program is now known as PSPbrick as the useless PSP is about as much fun as a bri ck. The chaos caused by this program is a blow to the vibrant PSP homebrew community. This is also another vivid warning that users of all systems should be cautious about installing any software. Reputable PSP homebrew groups are now working on methods o f fixing the problem.

And before you Nintendorks out there get all riled up, word has quickly come of a Nintendo DS Trojan that will similarly brick your DS. The program pretends to be either a ROM Loader or a HENTAI viewer, and if you know what those two things are, then yo u should know enough to be careful about trying to download shady software packages.

It happened last week in Amsterdam, but we still have to mention that Microsoft has announced that Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh would assume the role of executive producers on the upcoming Halo movie. Jackson made an appearance at the X05 press conference to affirm that he is a big Halo fan, having completed Halo 2 while in production on his upcoming remake of King Kong. Best known for their work on the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Jackson and Walsh have been a longtime writing and producing team, and their involvement brings the substantial resources of Weta Digital and Weta Workshop to the film. And all of a sudden, we’re just a bit more excited about the Halo movie.

In massive multinational megaconglomerate news this week, GameStop has completed their buyout of EB Games. The merger makes GameStop the largest retail games outlet, with 4200 locations worldwide. The merger also has analysts guessing about some far-reach ing effects, including lower value given for game trades an increasingly expensive hardware bundles for future next-generation game console releases. With Sony’s PlayStation 3 already rumored to be a very expensive device, we can only imagine how much the bundled preorder packages might cost in 2006. Shed a tear for your local game shop. If you still have one, that is.

The Governator, California’s Arnold Schwarzenegger, has signed into law an Anti-Violent Videogame law that has the games industry hopping mad. And you would have thought people had learned about pissing off gamers’ Nevertheless, the law requires games to be rated and labelled so retailers can know not to sell or rent violent games to kids. That’s not a problem: The Entertainment Software Ratings Board does that for us already, and all games bear ratings for recommended age groups as well as descriptions of any questionable game content. The system has been praised by anti-game activists such as Joseph Lieberman and Hillary Clinton. However, the ESRB is not good enough for California. Publishers will be required to place a very descriptive 18 tag on any ga me that qualifies as violent. Which games are those" Any game in which a reasonable person, considering the game as a whole, would find appeals to a deviant or morbid interest of minors. The vague language of the bill, in addition to the fact that it du plicates an existing, voluntary ratings system, means the law will most likely be determined unconstitutional in lawsuits brought by the Entertainment Software Association, which has called the law a blatant act of partisan lawmaking. We just wish they’d q uit messing with our game collections and let us get back to our morbid interests…

Reviews

In reviews this week, Tristan took on Burnout Revenge for PS2 and Xbox. The latest in EA’s popular Burnout series, Revenge focuses the action on pure crash-up derby destruction. In Burnout Revenge, players choose a vehicle and start a race. The difference between this and a typical racing game is that part of the goal is to cause as much destruction as possible with your vehicle: In fact, Burnout Revenge moves even further than its predecessors from the conventions of a typical driving game. The decision to amp up the importance of causing as much damage as possible to every vehicle around you changes the game in subtle ways. Fans of previous installments might not like this shift in emphasis. But if you’re in the mood for twisted metal (of the highway pi le-up variety), then Burnout Revenge is still really the only game in town.

Players will explore more complex race courses with many more shortcuts than in previous installments of the Burnout series. These design changes make the races more strategic, and cause players to think harder about the best methods of causing utter mayh em. The graphics are gorgeous, and the enhanced physics modelling means that theses wrecks are sometimes so vivid that you can feel your stomach turning as metal scrapes metal and innocent drivers are caught up in the onslaught of your vehicular carnage. B urnout Revenge is just the thing for when you don’t feel like downshifting for turns and just feel like breaking shit. But some of the new features feel a bit brutish to us, so we have to give Burnout Revenge a three out of five stars.

Previews

Moving from the brute to the cute, Aaron Stanton got some hands-on time with The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, for Xbox. Developed by Traveller’s Tales for Buena Vista Games, who published the well-received Tron 2.0 titl es, Chronicles of Narnia is shaping up to be a very good title for fans of the classic children’s series. The game is based on the film version of the book, and the gameplay is a cool blend of platform/adventure and action-RPG. Set in 1940s Great Britain, the children are living in a mansion after their homes have been destroyed in an air raid over London. The game divides its levels between the real-world and the fantastic world of Narnia. In the real-world, the kids explore the mansion, finding secret pas sages and reaching hard-to-get places. These levels play out like a 3D platformer, and the children have complimentary abiliites that make the puzzling levels fun to work through. When they enter Narnia, gameplay shifts to a more action-RPG style, very muc h like we’ve seen in games like Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance or X-Men Legends.

Throughout the course of the game, players will develop the various characters, which leads to the usual RPG increases in abiliites, strength, and powers. The character development, paired with the alternating gameplay styles and levels, keeps The Chroni cles of Narnia fresh, and helps draw the player along. The preview build we saw lacked much in the way of background story or cutscenes, so what remains to be seen is just how the game treats its source material. Will it weave in the religious symbolism of the books’ Or will it be true to the film’s plot over the larger backstory of the series'

We’ll answer these questions in November, when The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe releases for Xbox, Gamecube and PlayStation 2.

Conclusion

And that’s your Wrap-Up for the week ending Friday, October 14, 2005.. I’m Val Townsend, the Atomic Goddess, and I’ll be back next week with all the best stuff wrapped up in a bundle of Podcast-y goodness. But don’t wait until then to get your gaming fix: Remember these stories and more are posted fresh daily on GamesFirst.com.