New PAL Releases Roundup

Delete your shame, buy new fun.

News by Tom Bramwell Former Editor-in-Chief

Updated on 21 Nov 2008

New Xbox Experience is out! And not since friend of Eurogamer Gemma Atkinson performed her physical upgrades have we been so excited about a change of interface. Whatever you make of the avatars, there's bound to be something in NXE for you, whether it's the party system, the internet Xbox Live Marketplace for setting off downloads remotely, or the banshee-wail toggle that is the hard disk install option. There's even some stuff in there we hadn't spotted, like the option to delete games from your played list if you didn't earn any gamerpoints from them, thus reducing your gamerscore from 15950 out of 179000 or whatever it is to something less humiliating. No actual gamerscores were parodied in the making of that sentence, incidentally.

But of course NXE isn't the only thing going on this week. There's also a new Lara Croft adventure to jump around in and stickybomb tigers, and if you prefer your jumping side to side rather than into a spike pit, there's LocoRoco 2 on the PSP, which has bounced quietly out the door with its more rewarding and refined level designs. Or you can shout along to other people's poetry in Lips or Rock Band 2 (there's also some plastic instrument bits in that, but there's more honour in singing), or get some friends together on the internet and play Left 4 Dead, whose many variables have been so ingeniously combined to turn every session into a catalogue of zombie and incompetence-related anecdotes.

Also worth a mention is Square Enix's Last Remnant, which launches worldwide today rather than tomorrow, which would have been more traditional. It's a bold move from Squenix (the global release, that is - Thursday isn't protected by guards or anything), as is the Xbox 360 exclusivity period, and it's a shame we weren't able to bring you a review today to acknowledge this. However, we're grinding one out at the moment and hope to have it online at the weekend. We'll let you draw your own conclusions about the absence of reviews anywhere on the internet.

Finally (glossing over Need for Speed Undercover), there's the prospect of the BioShock Challenge Rooms later today, which we're quite excited about, even if it is a bit silly asking us to pay for the bonus content designed to sell the PS3 port in the first place. Give us back the sweat of our brow!

This week in shops: