New PAL Releases Roundup News

They're dropping like flies. Cowardly flies, who suddenly need a few more months buzzing around in order to "ensure quality". And so 2009 empties.

Or so the theory goes. The truth is a bit less extreme: there have been plenty of exciting games released in September. DiRT 2, Beatles, Section 8, Guitar Hero 5, Scribblenauts, Need for Speed: Shift, Halo 3: ODST and Aion, to name a few. Cast your minds and your eyes back 12 months and if anything it was slower getting started, and then look what happened.

The same pattern not be true for October 2009, but it's not off to a bad start either, with the superlative FIFA 10 arriving and seemingly delivering EA Sports boss Peter Moore's dream of a football game Metascore in the 90s.

If that's not surprising, then perhaps the extremely positive reaction to Dead Space: Extraction is. After all, it's a Wii rail shooter based on a survival horror game renowned for its atmospheric turn on graphics-heavy formats. Yet if anything it thrives in its new home, and the on-rails movement proves a useful way of managing pace and scares.

PS3 owners can also dive into Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2, a landing cushioned somewhat by Tecmo's usual extreme attitude to the female form, which is neither here nor there considering the raft of improvements over the equivalent Ninja Gaiden 2 release on Xbox 360 last May.

There are dark horses, too, in Space Invaders Extreme 2 for DS, the inevitable follow-up to the original's unlikely revival job; and in Beaterator, Rockstar's music-mixing package co-produced by Timbaland. Both will be reviewed soon. As will RPG Risen, although that's less of a dark horse and more of a dead one.

Those are all in the shops tomorrow, and meanwhile PSPgo is in the shops today. Are you buying one? We'll round up the PSP Minis - bite-sized downloadable games due on the store today, including a port of iPhone tower defence champion Fieldrunners - as soon as we can.

This week in shops:

• Amazing Adventures (DS)
• Beaterator (PSP)
• Clever Kids: Creepy Crawlies (Wii)
• Combat of Giants: Dragons (DS)
• Dead Space: Extraction (Wii)
• FIFA 10 (PC, PS2, PS3, PSP, Wii, Xbox 360)
• Groovy Chick: My Fashion World (DS)
• Imagine Party Planner (DS)
• Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2 (PS3)
• Puzzler World (DS)
• Risen (PC, Xbox 360)
• Sacred 2: Ice and Blood (PC)
• Space Invaders Extreme 2 (DS)
• Stoked (Xbox 360)
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Smash-Up (Wii)
• Up (DS, PS2, PS3, PSP, Wii, Xbox 360)