LordAlu

Most universities in the UK seem to use a different scale - below 40% is considered a fail (F), 41%-48% is an E, 49%-55% a D, 56%-61% a C, 62%-69% a B, and 70% above an A... so an average game should be between 5.2 and 6.1... if the average review score is 7 or above, that means they're all A-grade games!

I don't know how they're looking at it, but to me that means there's a bucket load of great games out there I may be missing!

Shining Force, Shining Force II, Shining Force CD and Shining Force III were all wonderful turn based RPGs, and I would recommend them to anyone... it's just a shame SEGA only released Shining Force III: Scenario One outside of Japan, and not Scenario Two/Three or the Premium Disc.

Another noteworthy Shining game was Shining The Holy Ark on the SEGA Saturn, which was a first person RPG with some wonderful quirks (for example it still had the square movement of the first game so you could only move to the next square rather than wherever you wanted).

As for other Shining games, I remember Shining Wisdom being pretty poor, and the GBA remake of Shining Force being excellent (although it is pretty much a carbon copy). All SEGA need to do is make another turn-based Shining Force game and i'll be happy. Unfortunately this one looks like a hack-n-slash to me... damn you SEGA!

I must admit, having spent some time playing this, the d-pad is absolutely terrible. As soon as someone creates a proper Saturn->360 joypad adapter i'm buying one just for this.

I could have sword the arcade cabinet wasn't this difficult either... although it could just be my Streetfighter skills have dwindeled somewhat since the last iteration I played two years ago :p

Still, it's more than worth the 800 points... getting that "Complete the game on the maximum (7 stars) difficulty" achievement is gonna be a doozy!

Can you imagine that Saturn classic, Nights Into Dreams, using this control method?

The game itself was one of SEGA's shining lights in the era of the Saturn, and made excellent use of the then new analog controller, but it would be a whole new level of excellence with this system.

In the case of We Love Katamari, GAME pretty much didn't support it; in fact, it's distribution was marked as "Extremely Limited", meaning it would only go to stores where people had pre-ordered it.

I know it's a quirky and original title, but if it doesn't get supported by the major retailers that means I have to buy it from the independant down the road, who is so behind the times he writes receipts out by hand and only accepts cash!

The PS1 version was rubbish. It was slower than the arcade version, lacked a lot of the animation, had awful loading times between selecting your character and playing the match, and was just generally a poor conversion.

If you were to go for a home console version, I would suggest a JAP Saturn copy with the 4MB RAM Cart. That included all the animation, the load time was _just_ on par with the arcade version, and the Saturn's joypad was the ultimate design for 2D fighting games!

As for this PSP version, I am looking forward to it, although I think i'll give it a try first before buying, as the D-Pad on the PSP is just pathetic. What is it with Sony controllers and this rubbish separated D-Pad?

EA don't seem to realise the reason they haven't sold many of their 360 games not because there is a "low number" of 360 users, but because all their 360 games were frankly pathetic. They released cut-down, feature-stripped versions of their best games and expect to sell them for £50 apiece! FIFA 06 (Road to World Cup) was the most rubbish attempt at a football game i've seen, Tiger Woods had an astonishing six courses (compared to the Xbox version's fourteen), Madden just didn't work properly, and Need for Speed was identical to its XBox counterpart, with a little bit of extra shine to it! Come on EA, if you're gonna make next-gen games, actually MAKE next-gen games, rather than putting our poor rehashes and then blaming Microsoft for your ineptitude!