New PAL Releases Roundup

FFXIII! Chaos Rising! Yakuza 3! Resi 5 Gold!

News by Tom Bramwell Former Editor-in-Chief

Updated on 11 Mar 2010

Did you stay up until 1am to find out about Kaz's magic wand? It doesn't really matter if you did or not, because you can read everything there is to know about it on the homepage anyway, including hands-on with all the games so far shown.

It sort of does matter for the purposes of this particular roundup of tomorrow's releases, however, because it means your trusty/hapless correspondent has only had four hours' sleep, which in turn means there's an even greater than usual chance that most of the games below aren't out this week/month/year/ever!

Only joking - we don't need sleep where we're going, which is to the land of meticulously researched lists of games you can buy. For example, you can definitely buy Final Fantasy XIII, which scored 8/10, although if you have the choice then Digital Foundry recommends the superior PS3 version to the shonky Xbox 360 port.

PS3 owners can also definitely buy the awesome Yakuza 3, which survives a number of content surgeries to make a solid impression on PAL gamers. We will miss hostess clubs but what can you do? Well, you can still do a lot.

Then there's the excellent Dawn of War II expansion Chaos Rising.

PC expansions used to be a bit pointless - diminishing sales for diminishing returns - but this is an example of the new breed, bolstered by great new content and capable of dragging the original game up a bit further by its imperious bootstraps, should you fancy buying the special edition bundle of DOWII and Chaos Rising together.

Also of note this week is the Resident Evil 5 Gold Edition, which unites the original perfectly respectable survival horror action game with its two excellent slices of recent DLC, the Lost in Nightmares and Desperate Escape packs, the former of which moved reviewer Kristan Reed so much that he said it's what Resi 5 should have done in the first place.

There's also a Hanabi Festival on Virtual Console this week, potentially giving lovers of the obscure access to Castlevania: Rondo of Blood, and hopefully the PlayStation Store update later today will yield further treats.

This week in shops: