Most of the points came from Virtua Tennis 3. As I mentioned before, I’ve really been enjoying playing this game. Sports titles aren’t a genre I usually stick with but the learning curve in Virtua Tennis is set just right. Getting a win feels challenging but always achievable. At no time do you feel that you’ve been completely trounced by the computer. I was very pleased to reach #1 rank in the world tour mode during the past week.

I’ve finished off as much as I’m going to do of Beautiful Katamari and Iron Man. Neither title turned out to be very good value but they filled a couple of gaming hours.

I quickly revisited Guitar Hero III as well last week. I’d downloaded the Muse track pack, to get some practise in before Rock Band arrives, and was really pleased when I unlocked an achievement especially as my overall score is still very low in this game. In typical Guitar Hero III style the achievement was only worth a miserly 5 points! I hope the GH: Aerosmith ones are a little easier to get. From what I’ve seen on the Internet, they don’t look quite as bad.

The last game on my list was Cars. Yeah, I know it’s a bit kiddy but my one year old likes seeing the characters on the screen and it’s nice to have a game that I can play when she’s around. I’m really finding the game world awkward to navigate, though, and it’s a pretty frustrating experience all round. Although the achievements come pretty easily I don’t know if I’ll continue playing this title. You’d think a game aimed at the younger market would have a more streamlined control scheme and just be a little more fun.

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?

I finally managed to stay long enough in an online co-op level of Lego Star Wars (TCS) to get the related achievement. To completely finish off that game I need to collect all the blue canisters. That’s a pretty big task so I’m going to put it off until I really don’t have anything else to play. If the release schedule, for the next few months, is anything to go by then I can see several windows of opportunity appearing.

I loaded up Scene It? LCA to see how many achievements I could pick up in a single player runthrough (5 in total). My wife and I played Scene It every evening for over a fortnight when it came out. It’s a great casual game (if you have even a passing interest in films), the controller works well, but we found that we exhausted the questions after about seventeen playthroughs. Now there are too many repeats for us to get any multiplayer enjoyment out of the title. I hope a sequel (or even downloadable content) will come out soon.

I finished the last level of the Raising Hell expansion to Overlord and finally got past Neptune in Beautiful Katamari (been stuck there for ages). Every level after that was easy to complete and I quickly made it to the “end” of the game. Despite my new found prowess (ha!) there’s still no way that I’m ever going to score enough points on a level to unlock it in free play mode. It’s also about time that Namco enabled the downloadble content for all us Europeans, as well.

I’ve been making progress with Sega Superstars Tennis. I’m still liking it a lot but I’ve decided that I’m going to kill Alex Kidd. I have no idea who the stumpy. bobble-headed inane-grinning chimp-freak is (I’m not a Sega fanboy) but he’s stopping me from progressing further in Superstars mode.

Beautiful Katamari has been out in the States since “Fall 2007″. A fact that the recent demo on Xbox Live rather lazily reminded us of. I’ve been waiting since then for a publisher to show some signs of releasing the game over here.

I’ve always been intrigued by the Katamari games, you see. Like many of the unique titles that come out of Japan (Space Channel 5, Pikmin etc.) the gameplay in Katamari reminded me of some of the bizarre, experimental wacky ideas that you used to get in games from the 8-bit computer era.

So, I’ve been playing it for a couple of days now, what do I think? It’s probably too early to say. I’ve completed the first handful of levels but I keep coming up against the same problem…

The problem seems to be that I’m pretty rubbish at the game. I’m perfectly used to not being good at games, of course, but I am really struggling to get to grips with moving my dratted Katamari around the screen with anything approaching style and elegance.

I suppose that pushing around a random collection of debris should feel a bit awkward but surely I should be fairing better than I am? At the end of a play session I am absolutely exhausted. My whole body feels tense, my arms are aching. It’s as though I’m having to physically push the thing around the game world. Very strange. “King of Cosmos” knows what it would be like if I was playing the rumoured Wii version!

The main attraction of Katamari, for me, is the idea that you begin by picking up little items in a shop and eventually you end up rolling up that very same shop you started in. Unfortunately, I’m unable to get to that stage because I run out of time. A “timer free” mode only unlocks when you score 100 points in a level, I believe, and (at the moment) I’m just not good enough to do that.

We’ll see how it goes. I really need to learn how to relax while playing the game, though!