Mega Derived

I’m an honest guy. People who meet me often take a few precious seconds to reflect on how authentic I am. This is, of course, not true. Which is why I’m such a bitter critic, shamefully deciding the fate of games long before they’ve actually been released. I’ve come into a bit of money lately, so I booted up my 360 and shopped around the demos on Marketplace to see what wonderful summer games I could waste my earnings on. Overall, I think I’m going to save the money, maybe use it to ply unsuspecting women with alcohol so I can lure them back into my sweaty, nerdy basement and cry to them about how nobody loves me and why it’s so hard to get a girlfriend.

Here’s what I found:

Stuntman: Ignition

It’s like they took those “Hot Laps” - where you had to memorise each corner and the entire track layout to get gold - from Burnout and made it into an entire racing game about performing stunts over fields of lava and stuff. That’s pretty cool!

Will buy second-hand in three months when it’s really cheap.

Juiced 2: Hot Import Nights

The title is clearly a product of crossing pornography with a lousy racing game. Hell, if it had more titties in it might be a little better. Car customisation is tedious, having you choose which set of neon lights you want beaming out from the underside of your car doesn’t make it any more fun.

Will never buy.

Flatout 2: Ultimate Carnage

You know, I imagine the fans of this series will say that comparisons with Burnout aren’t really fair and that Flatout deserves to be seen as a quality racing game in its own right. When the developers of Flatout are even ripping off their menu interface straight out of Burnout, however, I find it a little hard to be impressed.

It might be worth a tenner.