Barbelith Underground > Games & Gameplay > What (video) games are you playing at the moment

There's trouble a-brewing over at Edge (read: resignation of the entire editorial team, swiftly followed by all but one of their regular staff writers), which I suspect might mean that the magazine's reviews are all over the shop for a good few months.

I've yet to read the review, but from what I've been told it sounds like they've spent an hour or so on 50cc and based their review around that. It is, apparently, "too slow," which anyone who's devoted time to the 150cc mode will know is utter balls.

But hey, the boards are absolutely loving it, even (especially) those posters who've tended to be the ones slagging MK64 as "not *true* Mario Kart" in the past.

You want to try out the co-operative mode, Johnny. It sounds like a fairly dump idea when you first hear it, but works brilliantly in practice. There's serious potential there for Halo-beating LAN parties - I need to play this with eight linked consoles and sixteen people before I die.

Battle mode's still in there, Baz, but it's new and improved battle mode. Comes in three flavours: the standard balloon-bursting one; 'Shine Thief', a kind of 'pass the parcel', where you've got to try and be the last person holding the star when the timer runs out (while everyone else is trying to steal it off you); and a mini-deathmatch mode which sees you firing bombs at each other. Shine Thief is absurdly entertaining.

Paleface> I wasn't too keen on Splinter Cell for a long time, and left it in disgust after I ended up stuck on a section which had the checkpoints spaced too far apart - the constant hassle of having to go through the same five minutes worth of motions over and over again, simply because I couldn't get past this one, tiny bit of the game to reach then next save point, was the final straw. Went back to it last week, managed to nail that part and the game suddenly gets a lot better. The turning point is the mission in the CIA headquarters - the level design is a lot more open and allows real player experimentation, you start getting (and making proper use of) some of the more interesting gadgets in the game and the mission requirements are just more... fun. Like kidnapping a CIA mole by knocking him out, sneaking around the security guards and chucking him into the back of a black van, for example.

Other Xbox stuff I'd have to recommend you try includes Gunvalkyrie, Panzer Dragoon Saga, Otogi and Burnout 2. Definitely have a crack at Jet Set Radio Future and take the risk and spend a bit of time with Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball. Along with Halo, KotOR, etc., those are the titles that have made me glad that I ended up getting the machine.