Long read: The beauty and drama of video games and their clouds

"It's a little bit hard to work out without knowing the altitude of that dragon..."

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New PAL Releases - 12th to 18th Jan

What's new?

The wind is picking up and dropping rain off on our heads as we tumble into work each morning, but the good news this week is that we can quickly dispatch the raindrops from our raincoated shoulders by flapping our arms about to a bundle of new Wii games.

What's more, you'd actually buy some of them. Geometry Wars: Galaxies and Zack & Wiki are must-haves - the former a smashing evolution of the Xbox Live Arcade Geometry Wars game with some very agreeable control options and tons of content, and the latter the closest thing we've had to an adventure game that isn't rubbish or hideously overrated since Fahrenheit, probably.

As for NiGHTS: Journey of Dreams, it's as happy to see you as you probably will be to play it. Which is fairly happy, as you will know if you've read today's review. You float through dreamy worlds going through hoops, collecting orbs and circling things to murderise them. Then you do it all again for a better rank.

Meanwhile, Ghost Squad isn't quite so exciting - at least according to our beloved former editor Kristan - although I rather enjoyed playing it at Games Convention, if only for the amazing characters who stand there at the end of each level staring into each other's eyes as the camera zooms away to reveal the scores.

Oh, and Wii Chess code is inbound in the next day or so, according to Nintendo, so presumably it's either cack or was late in from the duplicators.

Finally, we probably won't bother with the sixth, Balls of Fury, which has managed to pick up 10, 12, 15 and 27 out of 100 according to the eminently trustworthy Metacritic, which isn't even a very good score if you add all the numbers together (can't figure it out? Report back here on 8th Feb for Maths Training).

Oh, and John Walker always complains bitterly if this page isn't a mess of surreality and pointlessness, so here's a video someone sent me of a man's chin singing the Automatic song off SingStar PS3 (when it's working, anyway).

This week:

  • Balls of Fury (Wii)
  • Geometry Wars: Galaxies (Wii, DS)
  • Ghost Squad (Wii)
  • NiGHTS: Journey of Dreams (Wii)
  • Wii Chess (Wii)
  • Zack & Wiki: The Quest for Barbaros' Treasure (Wii)