Go on, hum the tune for Bioshock. No? What about Crash Bandicoot? No? Me either. Now what about Sonic the Hedgehog or Outrun, yup every note, every chord change. Why is this? Well for a start in the days of yor, music was a focal point in gaming, it wasn’t really used as much to set a scene but to compliment the game. I believe that in a life or death situation I could whistle the entire soundtrack to Sonic, note perfect. If it was Bioshock I would be dead.

I realise that thousands are spent these days on soundtracks but they just aren’t memorable, licensed tunes also sounded a bit of a death knoll for original music. Don’t get me wrong I actually don’t mind DJ Atomica, and some licensed tracks are good, but 75% are dross. I mean, jings! For some reason Burnout Paradise will always be reminding me of Avril Lavigne….Avril bloody Lavigne! In defense I did get into some good bands through the Tony Hawk games, Goldfinger are amazing, I’ve seen them five times now. The Guitar Hero games are utterly sublime, but how good would it be to have Guitar Hero the classic Sega edition? Absolute Nirvana!

Do you remember the Mega Drive had an earphone socket and volume control? For a good reason indeed, the music in the games was worth listening to. Go and download yourselves some classic game music, bang it on the MP3 player and enjoy. Anyway this has got me all hot and sweaty so I’m off to wash my “marble zone” in the “magical sound shower”.

Green Hill Zone Theme

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Splash Wave

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Poker Smash by Void Star Creations is to be next weeks XBLA release. I got the chance to play a preview of this awesome new game a few weeks ago. The closest thing I could compare it to would be Tetris Attack or Planet Puzzle League on the DS – but with playing cards. You are presented with a rising tower of cards of the four suits your aim is to move the cards horizontally to form the basic Poker hands that can be made with the included cards (10, Jack, Queen, King & Ace). At a basic level you can play the game like a matching game by pulling off 3, 4 and 5 or a kind moves. Yes, yes, I know you can’t get 5 of a kind in poker but we’ll let that slide. The real points come from making the big hands like a Full House or Royal Flush. Start racking up combos of by chaining these hands and you’ll be hitting the leaderboards. If it all gets a bit too much you can slow time to get your head together. You also have bombs to knock out cards that are in your way or to set off another monster combo.

They have included a bunch of community based options. The leaderboards are on rolling tickers on the main screen and you can upload and share your best runs with the world although watching the masters at work can be depressing when compared to your own skills.

So maybe you are reading this and thinking that it sound alright. If that’s the case then I’m not explaining it well enough or you arn’t listening, it’s not alright. It’s freakin’ great. Check out their website and download it next week. No price announced as yet but if it’s less than 10,000 MS points then it’s a bargain.

I’m sure I’m not the only person that gets a tad frustrated with games sometimes. Simes has already waxed lyrical on the ruination of many a gamepad due to his occasional gaming rage The element that causes me the most grief is the difficulty curve. Most games have a reasonable level of challenge throughout, some are stupidly easy and can get a bit boring because of it. I must admit though I’d prefer a game to be as boringly easy as Prey was than to introduce a massive difficulty spike right at the end.

The sudden looming curve that Call of Duty 4 threw at me in the last few levels left me incoherent with rage. I threw a strop at the complete change in tactics Assassin’s Creed introduced at the close of the game. You’ll here me scream “CHEATING BASTARD!!!” quite often as I come towards the last few bosses in the otherwise generally relaxing Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords. For me there’s nothing worse than than a wobbly difficulty curve in a game. I’ll put up with rubbish graphics, a terrible script even a poor camera but when the difficulty increase wavers from it’s uniformity a game stops being a game for me and becomes an insulting task.

Of course my huffs and tantrums could always just be the result of a bad temper and dodgy gaming skills but I’ll wager there’s thousands like me who find themselves choosing ‘easy’ difficulty and refusing to play a game after the twentieth attempt at a boss fight. For some beating a ridiculously hard boss fight gives a great sense of achievement but for others it’s simply a sign of poor gameplay balance… well that’s my excuse anyway.