Er, so chewing mixes have been a little thin on the site for like, well, a year now. That doesn’t mean there’s been no sweet music though!

So, as it’s Top 100 time on every review site/ magazine for the next two weeks, I thought I’d give you 10 of my favourite tracks of the year in one mix to enjoy/ hate/ delete/ spread. They’re not in any particular order because that would be a little silly.

Favourite album of 2006 is probably M. Ward’s Post-War (hence the two tracks in here) although I love the Colours are Brighter kid’s’ album too (in fact, Mrs Chewing Pixels uses The Barcelona Pavilion’s ‘Tidy Up Tidy Up’ song for her nursery kids to, y’know, tidy up to. Sheesh – they are so freaking brilliantly-educted and they don’t even know it).

Anyway, here’s the .mp3.

Here’s the track list:

Young Folks – Peter, Bjorn And John

The Sun’s Gone Dim and the Sky’s Turned Black – Jóhann Jóhannsson

Also: have the most amazing Christmas and a brilliant New Year. I totally have that feeling this will be the best one yet.

There was a time when reviewing the latest Star Wars videogame was largely straightforward. As each game built upon a near-universally recognised and understood mythology but displayed a near-universally poor quality of gameplay it was mostly a case of listing the genre, the faults and then making a droll ‘This is not the game you are looking for’ closing remark. Then Knights of the Old Republic, Lego Star Wars and, to a lesser extent, the Battlefront and Rogue Squadron series broke the write-by-numbers template either by featuring characters and scenarios far outside the films’ timeline or providing gameplay that was reasonably exciting, interesting or well-executed. Stars Wars Lethal Alliance certainly fulfils the first criteria, focusing on an unknown pair of protagonists: Rianna Saren, a Twi’lek mercenary and her security droid Zeeo.

As a billboard duo of leading names they’re hardly a Luke and Leia or C3PO and R2D2 but nevertheless, they form an interesting slave-girl/robot partnership that serves the game (and budding fan-fic writers) reasonably well. Rianna is best understood as a female Han Solo – a rogue mercenary lending her battle expertise to the Rebellion cause. Her Swiss Army knife of a robot, Zeeo (or Z-58-0 to note-taking droid watchers) provides back-up in the form of computer hacking, narrow tunnel navigation or impromptu transport as the couple undertake an overarching mission to steal plans for the Empire’s least-imaginatively titled weapon: the Death Star.

Set between Episodes III and IV the plot does little to flesh out the narrative black hole between the last and first films choosing instead to concentrate on the microcosm of the mission in hand. Nevertheless, Star Wars fans will be pleased to take in the neon-soaked/dusty sights of Mos Eisley, Mustafar and Tatooine as well as enjoying brief encounters with A-list characters such as Boba Fett, Princess Leia, and Darth Vader – even if the plot here is more spin-off soap opera than crowning Christmas special.

You can read the rest here

Gah – the sub deleted a paragraph – perhaps wrongly, perhaps rightly – but I still prefer the original so here it is. You can read EG’s slightly more concise version at the link at the bottom.

Excuse the unpleasant analogy but Final Fantasy 3 DS is your grandmother post miracle TV-makeover. She’s had her face sculpted back to 18-year-old porcelain perfection, skin-ironed so as to wipe away the wrinkled scrawl of merciless, advancing years. Her tweed, sensible trousers have been tailored down to rude mini-skirt; granny stockings swapped for provocative fishnets and that blue rinse bob repainted blonde, flowing and coyly curled. The transformation is terribly impressive for the cameras and, y’know, you kinda fancy her for it, but still…something is definitely Not. Quite. Right.

Let’s be clear right from the off: Eurogamer has no problems with praising brilliant but elderly videogames. Read the introduction to our Gradius Collection review, (noting and adopting our favourite and irrefutable pub argument that good gameplay remains good gameplay no matter how old it is) and come back assured that we’re not in any way pixel ageist. Indeed, recently we sang Final Fantasy V’s praises in a GBA conversion, which enjoys none of the multi-million dollar graphical makeover that this earlier Famicom-birthed game has so obviously enjoyed.

And, actually, while you’re at the background reading, why not take a look over our Final Fantasy historical review where you’ll read in more depth why this Final Fantasy 3 – which has never before been released outside of 1990 Japan – is different to the Final Fantasy 3 you might have played on your SNES in 1994. Now that you’re up to date on FF3’s historical origins and context and secure in your reviewer’s appreciation of great videogames of yesteryear, prepare yourself for something of a rollercoaster of a critical exercise. You see, Final Fantasy 3 DS might always be pretty but it’s rarely beautiful and, if we’re honest, boys like us always have a tough time distinguishing the two at first.

You can read the rest here

What on earth are the Express going to report on now?

It’s not too difficult to understand why people like to ride rollercoasters. An illusion of danger is always addicting, as is the thrill of being thrown from axis to axis, brain sloshing as it bats away fight/flight conundrums from a spitting adrenal gland. Indeed, blurrily glimpsing your own high-speed death with nothing but a taut plastic harness and the promise of a flimsy hotdog bought from a man in a chicken suit on the ground for comfort, helps sharpen life’s focus.

Likewise, it’s not too difficult to understand why people like to design rollercoasters. We’ve all known the sadistic glee of burning ants with a magnifying glass and hot sun. Rollercoaster designers must be the same – albeit adults with architectural degrees and now the ants are holidaying children and the hot sun is steel girders, physics and fearsome 125kph maths.

But understanding people who design games that allow people to design rollercoasters for virtual people to ride on is getting beyond us. As, it turns out, are their games. Despite the easy-going origins in Bullfrog’s Theme Park, the genre has lately become bound up in microscopic management of dry business stats, the balancing of virtual profit margins and keen demographic profiling rather than the innocent fun of burning children. Er… Ants. It’s become a niche within a niche and so, it’s a pleasant surprise to find this game from Frontier, the developer behind Rollercoaster Tycoon 3, is more concerned with the funfair candyfloss and mini-games than making you do an approximation of your real life job at home.

You can read the rest of the article here

It’s hard to imagine just what it is exactly that comics have to do in order to become culturally esteemed.

Despite a Pulitzer Prize for Art Spiegleman’s Maus, the story of his father’s survival of Auschwitz that brims with tears and sad importance; despite the consistently back-breaking and astonishing prose of Alan Moore’s twenty years of output From Hell to Watchmen; despite the tender, broken honesty of Steven Seagal’s wrestle with Superman in It’s a Bird, or the sub cultural incisiveness of our own Kieron Gillen’s Phonogram (we have to be nice about that one else, if the opening chapters are anything to go by, he’d rape us with magic) they’re still ranked lower than blue cheese on the leaderboard of humanity’s creative output. Being several places higher than videogames probably isn’t much comfort.

But then, in Justice League Heroes, a comic book made videogame, as you flick a buckling dumper truck onto your upturned palm and launch it into the facial circuitry of a rebellious robot lunging not three metres away without even laddering your lycra, you have to ask: who gives a flying hulk. It’s quickly clear that superhero comics, fired in the crucible of boyhood dreams of catching speeding bullets, fearlessly fighting crime, panning X-ray vision across crowds of girls and enjoying super human strength and simpering fans can still etch excitement across the highest of brow. Indeed, it’s this visceral joy that Justice League Heroes so successfully marries with the similarly basic but instinctive gameplay of the arcade hack and slasher.

Developer Snowblind Studios became famous for Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance and it’s this experience creating mostly mindless-but-enjoyable hack and slash dungeon crawlers that underpins this game. The mash-up works fantastically; the superhero repapering lending the formula a freshness and urgency missing from its cloak and dagger dressed orc cousins. The Justice League, for the uninitiated, is DC’s superhero supergroup (made up of Superman, Batman, Green Lantern, Wonder Woman, Martian Manhunter, Zatanna and The Flash). Formed in the 1960s but recently made popular through Cartoon Network’s reimagining, this game shares the same scriptwriter, Dwayne McDuffle, as the animated series, and the look of Superman and Batrman et al has been retained even if the voice actors have been changed.

For comic book nerds the developer has worked hard to chisel a coherent and pleasing universe that will satisfy those who are eager to see whether they RUINED EVERYTHING by giving Killer Frost underpants one shade too light or INEXPLICABLY misspelling the Green Lantern’s mother’s maiden name. For everybody else, the DC locales of Metropolis, Gorilla City and the Justice League’s Watchtower are pleasing, if unremarkable, backgrounds about which you can sock some criminals in the face.

You can read the article here

For a while, at least, Phantasy Star Online was perfect. Stylistically it was Dungeons and Dragons made over with neon-pink harajuku dyed hair, eyes twice underscored with black pen and a lipsticked mouth blowing cherry gum bubbles in outer space. Ideologically it was an avalanche of firsts: The first console-based MMORPG; the first major genre departure for an ancient and venerable Sega franchise; the first Dreamcast title to show what was really possible with its emergent online service; the first international software to successfully implement a bilingual text mechanism that allowed Americans, Europeans and Japanese to communicate near indistinguishably with one another.
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But, above all of this, for those first few months at least, it offered an arresting glimpse of that unique redemptive jewel hidden somewhere deep within the murky definition of online gaming: people working together and helping each other for fun. It was zeros and ones threaded into a warm blanket of community through a winking 56k loom. PSO, that big bang from which this newest Universe has grown, taught console gamers for the first time to think about somebody else; it kept us up to the small hours tending a digital Petri dish in which comradeship, camaraderie and companionship multiplied and evolved with each shared adventure.

Experts helped newbies; items and knowledge were freely shared; Ragol was conquered time after time after exquisite time; Naka-san smiled down from the watching stars as we played in his unfurling dream. It was hard to imagine how the future of gaming lay anywhere else other than in the warm co-operation of millions gaming strangers made inpixellate.

But then, so quickly, Phantasy Star Online taught console gamers another new first: distrust. Player kills, hacks, forged items, a ruined economy, the ‘white screen of death’, remotely erased character files and so many text-based, shouty children tore the world apart cheat by childish cheat. The dream became a nightmare and its Sonic Team visionaries realised that, while they had created a place of beauty and potential and wonder, they forgot to make fences high enough to contain man’s selfishness and crime. And so, having seen what online gaming was really about, we retreated into private rooms, played private quests with private conversations amongst private friends; the jewel of cooperative adventure was sullied, spoiled and sunk to unsalvageable depths. For many, it’s never been seen again.

You can read the article here