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Race Driver: Grid is Codemasters latest installment in the Race Driver series of games which began with TOCA touring car championship back in 1997 on the PC and original PlayStation.

The game sees you play as yourself carrying out various racing jobs in order to build up enough money to buy your own car and so start your own racing team. This effectively acts as the tutorial to the game, introducing you to a few of the different racing types on offer and some of the games original features. Once you have your own team, the main portion of the game begins. This sees races split up into 3 sections, USA, Europe and Japan. USA plays host to street race style enclosed circuits as well as a couple of drift events thrown in for good measure around locations such as San Francisco and Washington DC. The European section is where the classic European racing circuits can be found such as Donington Park. Finally Japan features variations on the drift style of event around Yokohama Docks amongst others. Each region also features different car styles with USA having mostly heavy muscle cars, Europe featuring touring cars and open wheel, with Japan featuring modded street style cars. Continue Reading »

After much deliberation the all new buttonBandits.com review scoring system is now ready to be announced. In the end we decided to stick with the industry standard 10/10 system but with a new slant. First off, all games will be reviewed out of three in three different categories.  1 star is poor, 2 stars is good and three stars mean excellent. The end result is that most games will receive lower review scores than you would normally expect from other sites. The three categories are: 

Presentation:

The presentation score encompasses Graphics, sound and story. The general atmosphere of the game and the way this is put across to the player is also considered. Story is grouped into here rather than having its own category as not all games actually have a story. e.g a game like Geometry Wars looks good but doesn’t have a  story as it’s not needed for that type of game so not having a story does not harm it’s presentation score. Similarly, a game like Bioshock where the story is central to the presentation of the game, having a bad storyline or bad acting harms it’s presentation and so if the story or voice acting was not up to scratch then it’s score would suffer because of this. Continue Reading »

This title has been hotly anticipated by the ButtonBandits crew, so when it finally got arrived after it’s long journey from the US of A everyone was hyped to play it straight away. Putting together the drums was straight forward taking only a few minutes so we were straight into the game and playing in no time. Unfortunately the problems started occurring pretty much straight away. 

Put simply the Rock Band guitar is not as good as any of the previous guitar hero controllers. The primary reason being the strum bar does not click and is instead “mushy”. This causes problems when trying play the same note over and over again in very quick succession as the bar doesn’t centre quick enough. This has the effect in sections requiring very quick strums of the same note over and over again of the guitar rather than the player causing notes to be missed. Even our best guitar player had problems getting a perfect score because of this “feature”. That said you do eventually get used to it but there’s always the thought that had you been using the Guitar Hero 3 guitar you wouldn’t have missed as many notes.

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I’ll be honest, ever since the nice man on the Sega booth at Play.com Live hinted to me that Alex Kidd may be playable in Sega Superstars Tennis, I’ve been obsessed with the game. As soon as the package arrived here at Button Bandits HQ, myself and GiantHaystax couldn’t wait to get stuck in (luckily I got to review it though). However, my expectations may have tinted my experience of the game some what. Let me explain…

Sega Superstars Tennis is the next-gen answer to Mario Tennis. It’s tennis but with all Sega characters over the numerous Sega consoles spawning as far back as the beloved Master System. There’s a single player mode where you can select a Sega game themed stage from a main central hub and each stage has a set number of missions to be completed. It has a multiplayer mode where you can tinker with all the settings and variations you’d expect any standard tennis game as well as being able to set up a tournament. There are mini-games for when you want a break from the main game which can also be done in multiplayer, as well as being able to play over X-Box Live.

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Wow, excellence has truly been matched if not succeeded. Super Smash Bros. Melee on the Gamecube has been one of the most replayed multiplayer games of I’ve ever owned and if there was ever a game to take it’s place, it’s this one

Super Smash Bros. Brawl is a beat-em-up with a difference. You hit your enemy and this knocks up their percentage at the bottom of the screen. The higher the percentage, the further they fly when you hit them. The idea is to knock them out of the stage and score a point for doing so. There are many variations of the mode such using time limits and lives but that’s those are the basics. It has a single player story mode which has been vastly improved from Melee as well as a classic go-from-round-to-round mode where you fight through 10 stages. As well as this there is the fantastic multi-player. You can have a quick fight, a lengthy fight, set up a tournament or simply mess about with some of the effects you can add on (such as everyone starts with 300% damage of everyone’s really tiny, etc). As well as this there is a level editor and online mode which is a first for the series.

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First off let me stress that I’m not a big RTS fan by any stretch of the imagination. I much prefer my strategy games to be of the turn based variety. The only RTS games I’ve really enjoyed over the years are K240 on the Amiga, and the original command and conquer. I always have a hard time getting to grips with most modern RTS’s. With this in mind here’s how I found Universe at War: Earth Assault.

The single player game begins with you playing as the Novus getting ready to be beamed to Earth to stop the Hierarchy invasion taking place. This is basically the tutorial teaching you the controls and the unique features of the Novus force. RTS games on consoles are a touchy subject with few games managing to pull of a decent easy to use control method. Thankfully Petroglyph have managed to come up with a very competent and accessible system which is explained during the tutorial. Basically what would be the mouse cursor is effectively a target stuck to the centre of the screen, so to move the cursor you move the screen. The main 4 buttons are set to select an individual unit, select all units and cancel selection. The areas where the control method comes into it’s own though is the simple use of the trigger and bumper buttons to quickly access special abilities and unit groups. If you have all units selected when using the right trigger button, all the units special abilities are brought up in a circular menu. The unit that has that ability will then perform this while everyone else will carry on with what they were doing with all units still selected. Groups are formed automatically and accessible with the right bumper button. Here you can select your specific groups of units. Holding down the Right Trigger brings the radar into view from the upper right of the screen and allows you to quickly direct units over large areas.

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Before we get onto the reviews, news is circulating the interweb of show stopping bugs in the 360 version of Bully: Scholarship Edition. The issue apparently only affects “older” 360 hardware although it’s not clear what is classed as “old”. Reports claim the game locks up randomly during play requiring a reboot, as well as audio glitches and a poor frame rate. Kotaku obtained a statement from Rockstar Games who are said to be “horrified”. Sam houser then said “You have our word that we never experienced any of this in QA - in any of our offices or at Microsoft. I am horrified, and we are now working around the clock to rectify this situation”. “We love our games and put a huge amount of energy and care into making them all that they can be. We would never shove anything out the door - we never have and never will. We apologise to everyone affected for the inconvenience.”. Click below to read more…..

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