Rating: *** ½ (out of ****)

*** ½ (out of ****)

ProStreet is a game with an identity crisis, and I think a lot of people who buy it are going to be either confused or irritated by this. It's also riddled with annoying bugs, though it is largely playable.

While ProStreet gives the initial impression that it's something to do with street racing, it's not. In fact, ProStreet is all about track racing, albeit production cars. In fact, the name sould probably have been ProTrack, suggesting production track racing. The closest equivalent product, and seemingly the inspiration for much of the content of the actual game is Gran Turismo A-Spec. The 'street' element of this game is almost entirely window dressing. The badly designed, and difficult to use menu system attempts to affect a bit of the US ricer/street-racer culture style, and there is an extremely annoying commentator who attempts to inject a little bit of street colour into proceedings, but make no mistake, this game is substantially different from its aging predecessor "Need For Speed: Underground 2", which was about actual street racing. The 'Pro' part, whether it's supposed to mean professional or production, is suitable enough I suppose, but you can forget the street - many of the tracks are not even substantially urban.

"How can you possible review GTA?" Is probably the first question that occurs to people, and the second is "Why would you possibly review GTA?"

I don't think there's any point in discussing whether this game (series) is successful (it is), whether it's what people want (obviously, they do want it), or making any attempt to "bring it to people's notice", because now, everyone, absolutely everyone knows what GTA is. Most console gamers have probably played a GTA game, and some may even have finished one.

I look at the gap between what people perceive GTA to be, and what it actually is. The gap tells us something about the phenomena of successful games; not just the game of GTA, but the way it has evolved, the machine that made it a massive success, and also how these events relate to game-development and game-design.

Superficially, Heavenly Sword looks a lot like an evolution of the God of War (GoW) series of games, though there is apparently no connection between the Cambridge based developers Ninja Theory (previous Just Add Monsters), the Sony Cambridge site and the Sony Santa Monica site responsible for the GoW series; nevertheless, the resemblance is striking. It would seem that Heavenly Sword started out as a PC based development looking forward to a next gen console, which was originally going to be Xbox 360. Apart from substituting the angst-ridden, suicidal-homicidal Nariko - with all her Freudian baggage - for the equally angst-ridden suicidal-homicidal Kratos, the rest remains the same: lots of bad guys are on the screen. You kill them and move on to the next one. Sometimes you have to do something to hit a switch, hit buttons as they flash up on the screen, fight a boss or fire a gun, but that's about it. Unlike GoW, despite a fair range of game-play options, somehow the game comes up feeling very limited and flat - possibly because the game is based on a combo system that serves surprisingly little purpose. While the game seems to be based around the combo system, it tends to feel a bit redundant, and instead comes down to timing on the counter button more than anything else.

Assassin's Creed (AC) is in many ways a successor to the Prince of Persia (PoP) series. It brings a sci-fi twist to the story, and perhaps a hint of modern politics, but I wouldn't say that it's more adult than PoP because of this, as in many ways, despite it's fairytale setting, PoP was quite an adult product. I mean by this that it never felt as if the developers of PoP were talking down to their audience, and reassuringly, the same is true of AC.

The basic experience of playing AC is one that tends to initial interest and excitement as the game introduces itself, followed by a period where repeating various tasks in the game begins to become tedious. However, persistence rewards the player with the skill to trivially execute the more repetitive tasks quite quickly, and they cease to represent a chore. It is only in the latter stage that the game begins to show its true form, and remains satisfyingly engaging until the end.

www.game-review.org has been moved to new web hosting hardware so I can maintain it more easily. The new server is much faster than the old one, but the old one was more than fast enough anyway, so you are unlikely to notice any difference.

Uber developers Valve have announced that while Half Life 2 - Episode 1 - Aftermath isn't ready to release yet, they have already started work on its successor.

Sales figures for the last quarter of 2005 show Sony outselling Sharp and Philips in the LCD TV market. This is obviously good news for Sony, but good news for Samsung too: the new Bravia line is the result of a joint venture between the two companies. The pair have combined to leverage Sony's powerful brand name and Samsung's winning technology. Of course, it was mainly fear of a prolonged patent battle that turned the two into partners, but it seems to be working out well for them.

Reports that it costs Microsoft only $11 to manufacture an Xbox 360 wireless controller that sells for $50 put another nail in the coffin of the crazy theories that Microsoft currently makes a massive loss on their console business - software revenues not withstanding.

World of Warcraft topped the sales charts in January with the assistance of its new expansion announcement. EA dominates the chart overall, with Microsoft making a fair showing. The Sims 2 continues to demonstrate the legendary Sims longevity, outselling its Nightlife expansion pack.

Sony have boldly claimed that the eagerly awaited Playstation 3 will ship in spring 2006. Meanwhile business analysts suggest that even a limited Japanese launch would likely not happen until summer 2006, but will be in time for the Christmas trade. Apparently, some analysts are unaware of how the Japanese seasons work: summer 2006 would mean the PS3 is available now.

Continuing in a Digital Millenium vein: hardware giant Samsung is being sued by a collection of big movie studios: 20th Century Fox, Paramount Pictures, Time Warner, Walt Disney, and Universal. The movie moguls seem to think they have a shot to gouge a mountain of cash from the Korean giant to 'compensate' them for revenues lost due to copied DVDs played on a Samsung device, that by some train of dubious logic they translate into lost sales.

Despite admitting that ripping your own CDs to your iPod or computer was fair use to the supreme court last year, the RIAA is now claiming that the copyright owner can decide not to let you do so at any time it chooses. The EFF tells the whole story. Nope, we couldn't make this stuff up if we tried.