Yuletide game review grabbag

Shopping for presents? There's a lot of great second-hand and discount XBox 360 games out there, including ones I've played over the last year or so and have sort of meant to review on this blog but never got around to doing, so here they are. Pictures provided by the cast of Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3, or as I still maintain it should be known as, Dune 2 2 2 3.

Blood Bowl: Playing Cyanide's Blood Bowl is the most fun I've ever had with such a hideously badly made game. It's ugly, the interface is clunky, there are bugs galore and the overall quality is just appalling. While PC users got the "Legendary Edition" featuring all the teams from LRB5 except Chaos Dwarves (?!!), XBox players have to make do with only eight teams, but can download Dark Elves for Microsoft points. The AI, of course, is mind-bogglingly stupid, and you can't compensate for that by playing online as apparently that just doesn't work.

Even though the game is basically rubbish, and in places insultingly badly made, it's still damn good fun. There's some kind of real-time mode that I've never tried, because the basic game simply is Blood Bowl, and it delivers. Somehow the game is enjoyable enough that despite all its flaws, I like playing it. I'd say it's definitely worth picking up on the cheap.

Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3: Around here, you can get this for something like 10e or less. Do, because although the single player campaigns are fairly short, they're great fun. For the ridiculously low price this is retailing for, it's great value for money.

F1 2010: Be clever and pick up the previous edition for cheap instead of dishing out an obscene 70e or whatever new games are being sold for these days. This is an awesome game. There are realism and difficulty settings that let you customize the driving experience, and you get to work on the car set-ups just enough to keep an F1 fan happy. When you turn everything up to as high a level of realism as you can handle, driving even a half-length Grand Prix is an awesome experience. I highly recommend it. The game makes you feel like you're driving an F1 car, and really, that's all you need.

Batman: Arkham Asylum: Now that Batman: Arkham City is out, do yourself a favor and pick up its excellent predecessor. The best superhero game by miles since that one decent Spider-Man game for the old XBox.

Space Marine: I may do a proper review of this yet, but for now, I'll just say that it apparently did poorly, like all GW games tend to, and is available on the cheap. It's definitely worth getting at a reduced price: if Gears of War was fun, it would be Space Marine. I'm thoroughly enjoying it.

I think that's about it. If you want more game reviews, read Arcadian Rhythms.