I think Eidos had a really hard task here of taking traditional jigsaw puzzles and trying to implement them into an exciting and colorful Xbox game, I suppose there’s only so much they can do with that kind of scope and the end product is rather lacking.

There are plenty of features available from changing the shape of the pieces to having thousands of pieces in a single puzzle (if you have the patience for that, I certainly don’t).  Luckily though you can save your puzzles if you are half way through and finish them off later. There are options such as turbo mode that automatically flips over the pieces for you and challenges where another player keeps moving the pieces around or flipping them back over making it a tad more difficult.

The puzzle designs and graphics that come with the game are pretty dull but one option that I thought was pretty neat was that you can snap a picture with your Xbox camera and then set that as the puzzle’s image, ok not that amazing but and interesting idea and it’s not often you see the camera integrated into games.

For those of you thinking about purchasing this game I strongly recommend that you try the demo first because not matter who hard Eidos have tried to jazz this up it’s still jigsaw puzzles.

A great free game!

The first thing I need to say here is that a LOT of Live Arcade developers and advertisers need to sit up and take notice of this game. Here is a game that did not cost me a single penny, is very easy to pick up and play, has reasonable graphics and fun gamplay and also it wipes the floor with a lot of other arcade games out there that would cost you 800 points or more!

Before I played this game I was expecting it to be just some opportunity for Doritos to splatter their brand name all over a game that had been thrown together in a few weeks by a team of low level programmers and designers, I have been pleasantly surprised. Firstly there is very little mention of the product in the game and you hardly ever see the logo or it’s images anywhere. Secondly it’s actually not a bad game to play, there are 2 modes to choose from, each with 6 levels and there’s also local multiplayer. You can either choose to be a huge T-Rex and your task is simply to charge around the map chomping up the little delivery vans that are scooting around trying to deliver the Doritos. You can smash through buildings and vehicles and people run screaming in all directions when you do, it’s great fun. I personally prefer the second mode where you are the delivery truck and you are frantically trying to escape the stampeding T-Rex. In comparison to the pursuing Dinosaur your vehicle is tiny, but what I liked was the way it moved very fast and you can skid around the map, it all reminded me of the Micro-Machines games back on the Sega Genesis/Megadrive and was a hoot tom play.

This is  GREAT little game to play, ok the life span might not be that long but it’s FREE. As I said at the start of this review, devlopers need to take note here of what can be done for free and I would love to see other advertisers creating more free arcade games.

Happy New Year everyone and welcome to 2009, here’s a quick update of the happenings on Live in the past week or so….

Skate 2 Demo out now!

I was browsing through the demo marketplace just last night when I saw this, I loved the first Skate game and have been waiting for the sequel ever since but I wasn’t expecting a demo. I can’t give any impressions right now as it’s stuck on about 70% in the download so keep watching this space for a hands on demo review soon!

More info on Burnout Paradise DLC cars

If you remember last year I mentioned here on LAR that Criterion games would be bringing some cool new cars in DLC very soon. One of those cars will be the Back to the Future car (though no word on whether that is an official yet) and now they have released images of the Manhattan Spirit which is quite obviously paying homage to the Ecto-1 from the Ghostbusters movies and also a Carson Nighthawk just like KITT from Knight Rider. I really like this trend of retro cars from the classic pop-teen culture movies of the 80’s being added for the DLC I wonder what other cars they could pay homage to?

I love city-building simulations, and was excited when Outpost Kaloki X was announced for XBLA. OKX appeared to have everything that makes a good sim in place, and they bolstered that fact, in my opinion, by putting git in space. Everyone knows that things are better in space.

Even with space our it’s side, a number of things can make a sim game suck. These barriers are usually due to poor controls or wonky cameras. Thankfully for XBLA players, NinjaBee shipped a product that doesn’t suck. The game controls are simple to pick up, and the camera and UI are equally balanced.

Outpost Kaloki X drops players into one of two story modes, with additional stories available for download. In both stories, players must build a successful space outpost why simultaneously trying to meet varying victory conditions. These conditions vary from scenario to scenario and we found the default difficulty level just right. The last two scenarios of each story were rough, causing me to jig a happy dance when the achievement finally unlocked.

If your a fan of city-building and simulation/strategy games, Outpost Kaloki X is just the quirky, alien filled title you’ve been waiting for.