I picked up Iron Man at the start of the week as it was on special offer (already!). Being a movie tie-in I knew that it wasn’t going to be brilliant. I usually like comic book games so I thought I’d probably get a fair amount of enjoyment from it. And, to be honest, I have. I’ll probably write an extended review blog entry about the game in a couple of days. For now I’ll just say that the demo is a pretty accurate representation of the game as a whole so it’s one to rent rather than buy. You are certainly going to feel cheated if you pay full price for it.

The extra content for Beautiful Katamari was finally released in the UK this week so I was able to download it and pick up a few more achievements. Although the bonus levels were fun, some of them more than the main content, it seems a bit rich to charge 1200 MS points for stuff that apparently shipped on the disk.

I also made a start on a new RPG last week. I initially popped Enchanted Arms into my machine but the first twenty minutes or so didn’t really interest me so I switched over to Blue Dragon. As I’ve just come from playing Lost Odyssey, the menu system and presentation style was immediately familiar but there are lots of nice differences in the combat system. So far I’m still on disk 1 and, although it’s a little slow, I’m liking some of the differences from the usual JRPGs like the lack of random monster encounters. It’s a game I’m going to work through in small chunks, I think.

This week’s XBLA release was Wits and Wagers. I don’t think I’ve seen any board game translated to console in quite as boring a fashion as this particular title. Dancing figures aside, this title is complete devoid of any polish or panache. It’s literally just a collection of bog-standard quiz questions and every round is exactly the same as the last. It’s a game that needs to be played with other people to be fun so what’s with the multiplayer mode? It seems that you can only play against people on your friends list as there are no random live match-ups. I suppose that stops random vision cam abuse but how many of your friends will have actually bought this one? There is no way that this particular title is worth 800 MS Points. 400 would have been more appropriate.

I picked up the retro title Scramble for a quick blast around last week. The obligatory “updated” graphics really aren’t necessary as it’s one of those games that has actually aged quite well. There’s nothing quite like a good dose of nostalgia. I’m still as rubbish at playing Scramble now as I was when I popped 10ps in the cabinet at my local swimming baths in the early 80s.

I wrote about my experiences with Top Spin 2 a couple of weeks ago. Despite the fact that it was far too complicated for me I still wanted to give another tennis game a go. I picked up the latest in the rival series, Virtua Tennis 3 as a swap from Game Share. It’s a lot better game for me as it’s arcadey rather than a simulation. I was also familiar with the basics after playing Sega Superstars Tennis. Virtua Tennis 3 is a really enjoyable game and I’ve been making good progress thanks to the great learning curve. It’s a perfect example of how a non-licensed game (well, it has the players rather than the tour license Top Spin has) can be much better than the official title.

So that’s what my last thousand came from. I wonder if I can hit 25K before the end of the month as that marks my first year of playing on Live?