The sun is shining, the sky is blue, what better than to crack open a can of beer, forget about the football, and kick back in a lazy chair in the garden with this week's line-up of downloadable games. It's not a vintage collection this week, though, with a few dead-certs turning out to be rather limp, and interesting curiosities turning out to be little more than that.
But if you've got a PC or Mac, then one game you absolutely must not miss out on is the excellent Puzzle Dimension, developed by the brilliantly named Doctor Entertainment. Formed by a small team of veterans culled from the likes of IO, Starbreeze and DICE, these Scandinavians have come up with one of the most brain-bending 3D puzzle games you've ever seen. Save yourself the pain and misery of the World Cup and pick sunflowers while training your brain in the art of spatial visualisation instead.
Guitar Hero
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It seems to be the law that if you review Guitar Hero, you have to begin by talking about your own connection to the world of music. This is unfortunate.
See, my "rock history" begins, aged 10, with me standing in an auditorium with my Mum and my sister. On the stage in front of us, a walking mole. Singing "I Am The One And Only".
Yes, I have seen Chesney Hawkes live in concert. This pretty much set the tone.
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One thing you might not know about my PE days (that's Pre-Eurogamer, as opposed to physical education, just to stave off any potential lawsuits/general confusion) was my pretensions to be a guitar hero. Ok, fair enough, Macbreth never made the cover of NME, but our manager (aka my dad) did once get savaged by John Peel's hounds and told to 'piss off' when he turned up at the late DJ-legend's Suffolk farmhouse one cold day in 1992. Frankly, his valiant efforts to get our EP played were good enough for me. I was always a bass man myself, but that was only because all my mates had been playing lead or rhythm since they were about ten. I wasn't bitter or anything. Ok, maybe just a little miffed that I was arguably in the least sexy position in our indiepop band of champions, but it was still great to chunga-chunga through the set and pogo around during end of our set stomper 'Take Me Up'.
So, imagine my surprise/delight when I opened up a huge package on Christmas Day and found that Tom had bought me a copy of Guitar Hero. A present of ultimate justice that not only enabled me to relive past axe-wielding glories, but amuse/wow onlookers for the entire festive season as I threw shapes, wobbled the whammy bar and indulged in fret-busting, finger-killing action in an attempt to become the ultimate videogaming rock god. Albeit 14 years too late.
Coming complete with a scaled down replica guitar peripheral (surely the best add-on videogaming has ever witnessed) Guitar Hero is essentially another rhythm-action game that tasks you with matching the five fret buttons with the coloured shapes scrolling rapidly down the fret on the lower portion of the screen (while the band do their thing on the upper half). Much like Harmonix's previous lauded efforts Amplitude and Frequency, your role is to embellish the backing track - only this time it's all about adding the guitar licks, as opposed to building virtually the entire song like before.
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