The beauty of the digital distribution services available on the current crop of games consoles is the ability to revisit some classic titles from yesteryear without scouring eBay for the original console and the game you wish to play. The Wii’s Virtual Console, the Xbox Live Arcade, and the PlayStation Network store all have many classic games to check out, and every Sunday I’ll be downloading one of them in order to bring you a retro review. To kick this section off, this week I downloaded the side scrolling shooter Gunstar Heroes, originally released for the Sega Megadrive back in 1993.

I plumped for the PSN version, but Treasure’s run-and-gunner is also available for the Virtual Console and XBLA. I never owned Sega’s 16-bit machine back when Gunstar Heroes was released (I proudly displayed my Nintendo colours with unswerving loyalty whilst growing up) but my closest friend did, and one game that I insisted on playing on each of my visits was this one, as well as Flashback, but that’s another story…

Gunstar Heroes’ best mechanic, but also its most flawed, is the weapon system. There are four initial variants – Force, Lightning, Chaser and Flame, but these can be combined with each other, or even doubled up, producing 14 combinations. The game doles out the second power-up randomly, so you only have control over your initial flavour, but it became quite clear within a few minutes which combination was the clear choice. Force and Chaser go together perfectly, producing an endless stream of fiery death that homes in on any targets on-screen, meaning the player only has to worry about jumping, melee attacks and avoiding the dozens of enemy projectiles flying towards him. Sadly, this clear preference unbalances the game, often proving the difference between success and failure for the very tricky later levels.

Still, it is this difficulty that gives the game any sense of longevity. Between download and 100% completion, Gunstar Heroes lasted a mere 3 hours, and even that included a break for lunch. For £3.99, this was acceptable, but at the time of release I’m sure a few people were miffed at shelling out full price for a game that only lasted an afternoon, no matter how great its action.

And make no mistake, Gunstar Heroes delivers action in spades. Whilst rank-and-file enemies are plentiful, producing levels that are absolutely chaotic with sprites (but no flicker, to the developer’s credit); this game is really, really fond of bosses. In the very first level I was awarded 3 trophies for a trio of the blighters, culminating in the destruction of Pink, one of the game’s colour-inspired characters, who counts Grey, Orange, Black and Green (our heroes’ turncoat brother) amongst her evil cohorts. It turns out Green is no slouch in the boss department either; the spiky-haired villain commandeers Seven Force, a machine that morphs into, you guessed it, seven different forms. The game lives and dies by these encounters, as without them, you don’t really have anything left. Fortunately they are amongst the best the side scrolling shooter generation had to offer, made up of multiple coloured sprites and often engineered to feel 3D in nature, particularly in the latter levels. Also, watch out for Smash Daisaku – if he wasn’t directly inspired by M. Bison from the Street Fighter series, I’ll eat my red military hat.

Short but ultimately pretty sweet, Gunstar Heroes is a splash of vintage fun that still provides some tricky twitch-gaming challenges some 16 years after its initial release. Just don’t expect the completion of those challenges to take you very long. But for an afternoon of nostalgia that manages to bear up admirably under those rose-tinted spectacles gamers are fond of wearing, Gunstar Heroes is a very good choice.

I’ve been playing a lot of ‘heavy’ videogames recently. I’ve been asked to eliminate terrorists in Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, shoot hundreds and hundreds of people in order to recover lost treasures in Uncharted 2, blow up planes in GTA: The Ballad Of Gay Tony and slip hidden blades into the ribs of Templars in Assassin’s Creed 2. That’s a whole lotta killing. Critter Crunch, then, is the perfect tonic for my frayed nerves and battered psyche.

Boasting visuals straight out of Hayao Miyazaki’s sketchbook and sparkling sound effects to match, Critter Crunch is a perfect ‘just-one-quick-go’ game, which soon devolves into a two hour session. The premise is simple – feed a critter with two smaller critters; but the game offers surprising depth. The permutations soon become complex, especially when you throw in The Blocker, a critter that refuses to be fed or snaffled up, and is bizarrely referred to as ‘the monkey’ by my girlfriend.

Character design and animation is almost unbearably cute, and as mentioned above, would not look out of place in the Studio Ghibli pantheon. There is a real Japanese vibe about some of the power-ups obtainable as well, not least the trippy barage of squirly graphics that you can use to disorient your opponent. Surprising, considering the Canadian origins of its developer, Capy.

There is also a lot of game within this digital download; your £4.49 gets you a lengthy Adventure mode, Puzzle and Challenge modes and also a Survival mode, which I have yet to unlock. Throw in local and online co-op and competitive mulitplayer modes and you have a very impressive, well-rounded package. Not only does Critter Crunch offer up a snack-sized game session as a welcome change of pace, it also delivers a lengthy and absorbing experience should you crave an extended play. You can’t ask for much more from a PSN release, can you? Heartily recommended.

“Are you marvellous or moronic?” intones the Narrator, all rolling Rs and bombastic pomp. More often than not, judged by this yardstick at least, you’ll be marvellous. The 12 puzzles that make up each episode of Blue Toad Murder Files are not likely to cause most people too many problems; you’ll find yourself more often than not breezing through with a gold medal for your efforts too. But its simplicity is not the key point here; Relentless aren’t trying to tax gamers here, rather to bring the whole household together in front of the TV to solve the whodunnit. As creators of Buzz!, they have plenty of experience of doing just that.

At £6.29 for a little over an hour’s co-operative play, the episodic nature of this murder mystery tale is a little on the pricey side, but Relentless have obviously spent a lot of time on the polish of their title. Character models are beautiflly stylised, often humorous to look at even before they open their mouths and the fantastic voice acting gets heard. The accents have the rural genteel English-ness that you would expect from the locals of a quaint village called Little Riddle, and there are star turns from the Basil Fawlty-inspired hotelier and the absurb yes/no-isms of the barmaid of the village’s only public house. Underpinning it all, and tasked with moving along the story, is the Narrator. Prone to a bout of alliteration and a comedic touch of overblown drama every time the word ‘murder’ is mentioned, the Narrator does a fine job of weaving together the disparate strands of the story into one cohesive whole, especially when you consider that some puzzles don’t really have any bearing on the murder mystery plot at all.

The puzzles are the real meat of the offering here, and its surprising how keen your fellow players are to help solve them when it is your turn to crack one. I played through the episode with my girlfriend and we were constantly helping each other out with little clues, sometimes offering up the wrong answer, to the chagrin of the other party. Such friendly cooperation is rare in gaming, and the gentle nature of the game’s challenges and its friendly visuals are more than enough to entice non-gamers into the fold, putting a comforting arm around their shoulders in a way that Nintendo has been cajoling all members of the family into its Wii collective for several years now.

So, whilst Blue Toad Murder Files: The Mystery Of Little Riddle (breathe) won’t win any awards for deep challenge, longevity or gameplay, Relentless should be applauded for providing PS3 owners, traditionally classed as a hardcore breed, a title with which to entice more reticent friends and family members to pick up the controller and get involved.

It can be explained by one of two things. Its either rose-tinted spectacles or a bungled attempt at a remake; either way, a playthrough of TMNT: Turtles In Time Re-shelled, a high-def update to the original 1991 arcade game, gnawed away at my patience so much that finishing it became more a war of attrition than an fun exercise, even despite its short length.

Its a shame that this remake, by Ubisoft Singapore, failed to reignite my love for this title. Bizarrely, playing the original is one of my fondest videogaming memories – I encountered it in an arcade in a fast food joint while holidaying with my parents in Florida at the ripe old age of 10, and I sank quarter after quarter (of my Dad’s money) into it. The central premise of fighting through various stages in time captured my imagination, so much so that when I read that it was to be released for the SNES, I could hardly contain my excitement.

The remake (cutely titled Re-shelled) does look the part. The graphics are clean and bright, and animations are fluid and now cater for full 3D movement to allow play with an analogue stick; but there is a nagging feeling that everything feels like it is made out of playdoh, as if textures and shadows are missing.

With the pros out of the way, we can now turn our attention to the cons. TMNT: Turtles In Time Re-shelled is a pointed reminder of why the side-scrolling beat-’em-up genre is now defunct; a relic of videogaming history which counted Golden Axe and Streets Of Rage as its crowning achievements. In an age of increasingly sophisticated gameplay, an hour-long mashing of two buttons doesn’t cut it anymore, remastered or no. Perhaps if the original had been preserved and presented as is, then it could possibly work, but the contrast between the gameplay mechanics and the visuals is too jarring to be pulled off.

The game also feels cheap. Some attacks seem impossible to avoid, and the boss battles – skirmishes with well-known characters from the Turtles’ universe such as Krang, Tokka and Rahzar (from the second instalment of the original films) and Shredder – are long-winded affairs, where their health bars decrease at an agonising rate, whereas one hit from them decimates your own. Most enemies are different coloured versions of the Foot Soldiers from the cartoon series, sometimes carrying special weapons, and only occasionally augmented by different enemy types when the Turtles are transported to extreme time eras, such as the prehistoric stage or the one set on a ’starbase’ in the distant future. Throw in an over-abundance of rage-inducing traps strewn across the floor of most levels, and you have a recipe for frustration; a wearisome tug of war between hitting and being hit that only ends when the final credits roll.

Whether the original game feels so poor after all these years is another argument, but due to the experience presented here, it will be a long time before I can muster up the enthusiasm to find out. Avoid.

ModNation Racers, the upcoming PS3-exclusive racing game from United Front Games, hasn’t been on my radar at all. I’ve seen it mentioned in a few thread comments on gaming sites, on blog posts about the games that people are most looking forward to in 2010, but with racing being my least favourite genre, I hadn’t looked into any details of this at all. That all changed when I noticed this post on the EU PlayStation blog, detailing the beta for ModNation Racers and its 100,000 download limit. Caught up in the hype, I promptly booted up the PSN and commenced with the 2GB download. Several hours later, I was ready to race.

Straight off the bat, let’s get the comparisons with LittleBigPlanet out the way. The similarity is clearly obvious from the get-go, but with LittleBigPlanet getting it so right, it’s inevitable that other titles with user-generated-content as its beating heart will follow the trail that Media Molecule have so successfully blazed. Whereas Sackboy embodies textured cloth and stuffing, the Mod is pure shiny vinyl toy, hard black outlines and crisp vector artwork. Oh, to be the 2D graphic artist on this project; the guy must have had a blast.

The customisation options are staggering. My creation – a confusing hybrid of hi-vis jacket (straight out of the YMCA music video) and horned Viking helmet – went through many iterations before I got bored of all the choice and clicked Accept. The combinations are pretty close to endless, and just a cursory glance at the Mods that more creative minds had conjured up were enough to bring forth a chuckle – a quick spot-check threw up parodies of Spiderman, a Helghast Soldier, and even Winnie the Pooh.

Mods aren’t the only element of the game that can be customised. You can also create your own kart to race him/her in, which adds yet another layer of customisation to the mix. On top of that, there is the option to create your own tracks, a feature that is likely to provide longevity for ModNation Racers long after the developer-created tracks are mastered. Whether the title can top the 1m+ user-created levels of LBP remains to be seen, and it all depends on the breadth of the creation tools to be released in the full game whether United Front Games can top this lofty figure.

Of course the collaborative, community aspect of ModNation Racers wouldn’t be worth a damn if the gameplay underpinning it all is not up to scratch. My few races, waged competitively online, instantly evoked Mario Kart (which isn’t a surprise really) with its liberal sprinkling of power-ups strewn across the track. It was a little unclear what was being picked up though, and without the rich history and imagery of the Mario universe to draw upon, weapons fell the wrong side of ‘generic’, with staples such as a rocket and speed boost being the order of the day. Hopefully clearer signposting in the final code will make it instantly obvious what weapon is currently in your arsenal, and I’d be surprised if United Front Games didn’t have a few aces up their sleeves, in terms of weaponry, for the full release of the game.

XP is earned in those races that are designated as XP games, adding another string to the longevity bow. I expect XP to earn special skills, kart upgrades or skin unlocks and perhaps even titles/emblems as seen recently in Modern Warfare 2 and Street Fighter IV. Leaderboards will be a shoe-in, of that there is little doubt.

I’ve only had time to spend an hour or two with ModNation Racers, and I wouldn’t be surprised if I’m missing some huge sections of the beta that haven’t become immediately obvious to me. Judged on the handful of races I’ve competed in however, the game shows a lot of promise, and fans of user-generated-content will likely squeal with delight at the sheer scope of options available here. Those amongst us whose apathy or impatience for lengthy creation sessions will effectively strip that layer of gloss away may have to look harder for reasons to keep ModNation Racers in their disc drives, but it’s far too early to make that call when such a small selection of tracks and features are available to test.

As a big fan of alliteration, there was only ever going to one title to pick for the inaugural minis review on infinitecontinues, wasn’t there? The unashamedly silly-named Manic Monkey Mayhem is the winner of this dubious honour. Launched on the 1st October 2009 and intended as easily downloadable content for the newly-launched and much-maligned PSPgo, the minis range was thrown open to PS3 users with a firmware update just before Christmas. I’ve hitherto avoided them for one simple, shallow reason – I’m a trophy whore and minis will not furnish me with any! In a bid to throw open the breadth of gaming content on infinitecontinues, we decided to check out minis too, to cater for those that enjoy snack-sized gaming on the go or on the sofa.

It’s quite unfortunate, then, that easily the best thing about Manic Monkey Mayhem is its name. Combine graphics that are sub-par to the original PlayStation’s first tentative stabs at 3D modelling, laughable animation and a gameplay mechanic that tries its hardest to produce a modicum of fun and only succeeds for a few seconds every couple of hours, and you have a package that will make you resent every penny spent on its comparatively steep £3.49 price tag.

Its basic premise is the control of your chosen monkey (from a selection of eight, with wacky names like ‘Professor Z’ and ‘Furious George’) and its ability to hurl bananas at a series of objectives by holding down ‘X’ to power up the strength of your throw based on how far away it is from your own platform. In the majority of Manic Monkey Mayhem’s ragtag collection of game modes, these objectives will be fellow simians, although you will swear that each said ape is just an angular collection of garish polygons prancing around over there. These monkeys populate a number of floating platforms in a basic arena. The lengthy and, sadly mandatory, tutorial mode guides you through the art of jumping between these platforms, the ability to dodge incoming bananas, and also how to apply ‘aftertouch’ to your thrown projectiles in order to hit any monkey that has the gall to dodge your speeding fruit missile. The major flaw in the game’s design however, sees both the dodge and ‘aftertouch’ mechanics mapped to the D-pad. So, in a faceoff with your furry adversary, a quick stab of the D-pad to the right in order to bend your banana onto his bonce could also very well result in you ‘dodging’ right into a return missile that otherwise would have been sailing aimlessly wide of its intended mark. It’s a major misstep, but curiously it still doesn’t make the game difficult. I tackled two of the three Campaign sections, with 10 challenges in each, before I could no longer stomach what was being offered to me – and only on one of these challenges did I fail.

The deathmatches and survival modes against other CPU-controlled monkeys are the most numerous modes, and the most dull. But the developers of Manic Monkey Mayhem, The Code Monkeys Ltd. (no, seriously), clearly had the ethos of throwing plenty of shit at the wall, and see how much (if any) of it sticks. So, step forward game modes such as Target Practice, where the aim is to hit crates floating magically above the platforms within the time limit; Golden Banana, a deathmatch mode where a successful hit instantly ‘kills’ your opponent but they still get three lives (wtf?) and Bazookanana (see what they did there), where your fruit is loaded into the most insipid rocket launcher ever created in videogames, providing little to no feedback that you are supposed to be holding a high-powered bazooka in your simian grip.

It’s not all rotten though; Pass The Parcel tasks you with flinging an explosive package to each of your opponents across the void. An invisible timer counts down, and the unfortunate primate clutching the package when it explodes is eliminated. When the field is whittled down to just two of you slinging the package between each other, with no idea when it’s going to explode, the result is literally minutes of fun.

Manic Monkey Mayhem has other game modes, but they were locked when I first fired up the game. I presume that they are still locked because I couldn’t bring myself to go through the exact same game types another ten times in the final Campaign mode in order to check. I appreciate that minis have a size limit of 100 MB to enable them to be stored easily on the PSPgo (which this feels optimised for, considering its many jagged edges on an HDTV) but Game Boy Color games looked better than this. Manic Monkey Mayhem is a very poor game by anyone’s standards, and a videogaming experience I wouldn’t even wish on my worst enemy. If this review feels incomplete because it doesn’t cover everything on offer, apportion the blame to the developer’s decision to lock down all the game modes and then build a turgid and lank gaming experience to grind through in order to unlock them. Time is precious commodity these days, with so many excellent games out on the market this year. Two hours of mine have been wasted, never to be seen again. Hopefully this will save yours.

Take your £3.49 and spend it on something more useful, and more entertaining; like buying stamps, and avoid Manic Monkey Mayhem like the plague.

According to the developers of games for consoles such as the Philips CD-i and the Panasonic 3DO, FMV was the future of gaming. In the PS1 era, FMV was the medium of choice to explain narrative in the form of filmed cutscenes. Fast forward to 2010, and FMV is used as the chief game mechanic for this minis game, Hysteria Project.

Hysteria Project opens in a room with the camera focusing on what the main character sees through his own point of view. Your legs and hands are bound by duck tape and your first task is to get yourself free and escape the room you have awoken in. Hysteria Project handles the camera much like the shaky handi-cam aesthetic you would find in low budget horror films like the Blair Witch Project or cult hit Cloverfield. The video compression is poor, and the shaking effects, rapid cutting, and occasional inversion of the colours all feel cliched, and a scratchy audio track does little to alleviate these impressions.

Hysteria Project’s greatest flaw, however, is its stubborn refusal to allow the player to be immersed in its scenario. The FMV sequences would be far more powerful if their juxtaposition with the gameplay elements wasn’t so crude. Choices made in the game are presented to the player by cutting away from the footage completely, presenting decisions in huge blocks in what has to be one of the most hideous user interfaces designed for modern devices. Any creepy soundtrack that was playing, however primitive, is silenced while the player makes a decision. Choices are often confined to very basic options, such as Turn Left or Turn Right, or Hide and Run – Hysteria Project rarely tries to expand on this throwback experiment. Most of the hour-long gameplay takes place in a foggy forest, where one path through the dead leaves and dried twigs looks identical to the others. It does punctuate the banality with the odd puzzle, but these are primitive at best.

If the filmic part of Hysteria Project feels substandard, with its solitary aesthetic and pixellated execution, then the ‘game’ part of the experience fares little better. Sections which require the character to negotiate through a series of tripwires, or search a pile of leaves, or fend off the shadowy attacker that pursues him throughout the game, are navigated by alternately pressing the Cross and Circle buttons to the on-screen prompts. A missed button press results in a brutal switch to the dog-ugly Game Over screen. Never have QTE’s felt so uninspired, or so divorced with what is happening on screen. Heavy Rain, this ain’t. And just when you’re coming to terms with what Hysteria Project is, and accept its many limitations, it ends; barraging the player with a lot of spliced footage and vague answers before flashing up a dreaded phrase: “To be continued.” Yep, developers BulkyPix seem to be planning even more Hysteria Project…

Whilst the premise is mildly intriguing and the execution is, in places, unsettling, Hysteria Project is an budget experiment that tries to revive a concept long since consigned to the scrapheap of videogaming history. For £1.19, it’s an experiment that I don’t begrudge taking, but the conclusion is still painfully clear; FMV games are as much of a non-starter now as they were 15 years ago.