I’m not going to write about this at great length about this since I’m not a huge fan of the Harry Potter universe – I’m one of the few for whom the books hold very little appeal, but I’ve enjoyed the previous movies as a way to kill a lazy afternoon when they’re on Sky. This one marks the first time that I’ve bothered to see one theatrically after the great reviews that it’s been getting and, overall, I was impressed.

It’s definitely the best yet, and it seems that each film gets better than the last. Even if the Prisoner of Azkaban is apparently the best book, this one seems much more geared towards making an enjoyable film no matter how faithful to the source it is (or isn’t). I heard some obvious Potter fans talking about how they were disappointed that certain things had been cut out, but it already runs at a portly 157 minutes, and thankfully didn’t overstay its welcome. It stayed pretty streamlined, focusing on the Tri-Wizard Tournament and the Yule Ball, so someone deserves credit for making a cohesive movie out of what is patently a monster of a book.

The effects, like the films themselves, get better each time (loved the dragons which follow the Reign of Fire realism angle); I wasn’t annoyed by any of the actors this time which suggests that they’re getting better; and I enjoyed the tone which was surprisingly dark for a 12A. I can’t be the only one who only has to hear someone say that their latest sequel is darker (Prince of Persia wall-runs and swings immediately to mind) to want to scratch my eyes out, but this one was all the better for it. I was very surprised at how far some moments actually went, and knowing what I know about the future books it doesn’t look like they’ll be any different.

In short, highly recommended.

I had a chance to play around with a US copy of Mario Kart DS today which was absolutely excellent, and seems to be one of the best handheld games of this generation. My time was spent thrashing around the tracks in various multiplayer modes which impressed me a lot – you get a lot of options for single cart multiplayer and the battle mode is as much fun as I remember it from the N64 version. With the full complement of eight human players I’d imagine that it’s even better, but I still had fun with two people and AI racers making up the numbers. Amusingly, one of the tracks was a giant Nintendo DS that you could tear around on.

Graphically the game is very nice and smooth, and somewhere between the full 3D of the GameCube game and the sprite characters on 3D environments of the N64 game. It’s not incredibly detailed but shows that the DS really does have some graphical horsepower behind it and is more than capable of making a game like this run well. I can’t imagine anyone being disappointed with how it looks.

All that’s fine, but what has most people interested is the online play, and it works great. Setting it up is a cakewalk (annoyingly it only supports WEP encryption so I won’t be playing in my WPA2-encrypted home) and although it took a few minutes to match me up with someone – I assume that would be better at a time when there’s more Americans on as it’s not out anywhere else – when I was actually racing it worked almost completely lag free and brought me right back to the old 4-player MK64 sessions. It was especially impressive that it was running on a system which has kind of added online play as an after-market extra. Hopefully all online DS games keep the same interface.

I’m definitely going to be getting a copy of this on the UK release, and it’s another reason why the DS is starting to leave the PSP in the dust as a games system.

There was a little game from Ubisoft’s Montpellier team back in 2003 called Beyond Good & Evil. It was excellent but thanks to no marketing and an avalanche of new games, only a few people bought it. Luckily one of those few was a guy called Peter Jackson, who just happened to be working on a little trilogy of films called Lord of the Rings at the time, and had also had his fingers burnt by EA on the adaptations of those movies. This perfect storm of events has led here, with Jackson personally selecting the BG&E team to develop the game version of his upcoming King Kong remake, and what a game it is. I played the Xbox version for a good while today, and I’ll probably be grabbing the Xbox 360 version when that comes out.

Taking inspiration from the likes of the Half-Life series and Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay, the game is essentially a first-person shooter that never leaves the perspective of your character, in this case Jack Driscoll (Adrien Brody’s character), but takes it further by having absolutely no HUD. That means no aiming reticule, no health bar, no ammo meter, no interaction icons, no nothing. You get some prompts to tell you the controls at the beginning, but that’s it. You need to judge aim yourself, you know you’re near death when the screen starts turning red, and you can make Driscoll say how many clips or shells of ammo he has whenever you need to know. Not that you’ll have a lot of ammo, as most of the time you’ll want to rely on spears and bones that you find laying around, saving your guns for the big enemies that you’ll find occasionally. A flaming spear is usually just as good as a few bullets anyway.

Graphically King Kong is stunning, even on the vanilla Xbox. It’s atmospheric and sharp, and everything is detailed yet still manages to run at a very solid framerate. All of the previews are saying that the 360 version looks a lot better, so logic dictates that it should be something gorgeous to look at. I was impressed with the Xbox version’s graphics and certainly had no complaints about it, so this one will be worth admiring.

Overall from what I played this could go up there with the likes of GoldenEye as one of the great movie-to-game adaptations, and should hopefully give Ubisoft Montpellier some much deserved exposure and money. They should only sell King Kong in a bundle with BG&E or something.

It seems like an age ago that I booked it and, looking at the receipt, it was in December 2004, but I just got back from Little Britain Live at the BIC in Bournemouth. Good show overall and very funny – the live version of the Dennis Waterman sketch was very creative and well done, and the finale was excellent – marred slightly by the fact that what seemed like half the audience seemed to forget that it’s generally common courtesy not to use flash photography in a dark auditorium whenever anything even remotely interesting happened. Not even mentioning the fact that you don’t need a flash when you’re taking photos of a well-lit stage.

There were a couple of moments of audience participation which were among the funniest parts: washed up children’s TV presenter Des Kaye bringing two men on stage to play “hide the sausage” (I’ll leave it to your imagination), and when the man plucked from the audience for the Fat Fighters sketch turned out to be blind drunk and barely able to stand up.

The format was quite clever, as most of the background with the exception of key props were projected onto the cinema screen at the back of the stage, which provided new clips in between on-stage sketches and also some pretty elaborate scene changes, all to the usual surreal Tom Baker commentary. All allowing some impressively quick costume changes which were all the more impressive when you see some of the stuff that Matt Lucas had to squeeze into.

Overall worth seeing if you’re a fan of the show (which I am), but if you don’t like it you probably won’t be converted.

I’m sure every UK PSP owner has heard the news that although the game was due today, it’s not hitting shops a week later on 7th November, so I won’t dawdle on it beyond to say that MCV is reporting that it might not even meet that date, being used as a spoiler for the Game Boy Micro and possibly even the Xbox 360 launches. Apparently the debacle over import PSPs didn’t teach them anything, because most import shops in the UK have them already and I know of one that sold twelve copies today and has several orders for tomorrow’s batch. Region free games, FTW!

Anyway, I have the game in my hands right now. I’ve only had the chance to play for an hour or so but although it’s not a completely faithful conversion that suffers from the technical limitations of the PSP in some ways (the controls aren’t ideal, for example, and the audio sounds very compressed) it’s still a phenomenal achievement to have crammed it so well into a handheld. Liberty City has always been my favourite so a return to it with an all-new storyline and missions, as well as the minor changes that occured between 1998 and 2001 in the game world, means that it’s worth returning to. There are even little graphical effects that weren’t in GTA3 on the PS2, like how your lights reflect on wet asphalt.

I had a quick blast on multiplayer which seemed quite cool, but the game doesn’t seem designed for that style of play. I’d imagine it could be much better with a bigger group of players and would certainly make a great game if it were put online on a home console that could handle much bigger numbers of simultaneous players. The series has always been fun to just thrash around in so one would think that it would transfer well to a multiplayer environment.

Overall, definitely worth buying. If you’re in the UK and not inclined to wait, ordering from the excellent Video Games Plus with priority shipping should get it to you early for about the same as the UK price (£39.99).