Platform: PS3, Xbox 360, Wii
Price: R400 – R600
Verdict: The best official FIFA title to date.

I’m  not big on sports games, but a good football title is a must for any gamer’s collection and 2010 FIFA World Cup South Africa by EA is the one to own right now. The world cup is in South Africa for the first time and this game introduces some firsts too.

One of the new features is the Virtual Pro that allows you to customise a virtual player and then insert him into any team you want. This opens up a sort of career mode for you and there is a set of achievements linked to your Virtual Pro.

The game is also rich with features. For example, you can map out your own set-pieces for games and then have these played out by your team. There is also a Manager Mode for team and player management.

The amount of game modes and options is overwhelming, but it’s easy to ignore these and get on with things.

As for graphics and animation this is the best looking FIFA game ever and player movement has reached a new degree of realism.

But as good as this game is it’s hard to find much to say about it without boringly listing features. It’s a soccer game, after all, even if it is one of the best I’ve seen. And it’s fun, especially in multiplayer mode.

If you’re looking for a game to satisfy the soccer fever that currently grips the globe then you won’t be disappointed with this title, which is also reasonably priced.

Making the announcement at the massive E3 gaming conference and expo currently underway in Los Angeles, Mirosoft said that the service is set to launch in Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Czech Republic, Greece,  Hungary, Poland, Russia and South Africa.

Said Marc Whitten, general manager of Xbox Live for Microsoft,“This expansion is another step toward our vision for Live – to deliver the entertainment you want, shared with the people you care about, wherever you are in the world.”

The service will be available in the USA summer, which means it should come online in South Africa within the next three months, and definitely by the end of September.

Microsoft said that Xbox Live in South Africa will focus first on delivering core gaming and community features including matchmaking, friends list, achievements, Gamerscore, a tailored Games Marketplace and other features, with content like movies and music being excluded at launch, but on the cards for addition later on.

Yvette van Rooyen, product and marketing manager for Xbox 360 in South Africa added that, “Xbox fans in South Africa will now be able play the best games in the industry with 23 million other Xbox Live users across the world who have made this their online gaming destination of choice. “

Given the long wait for Xbox Live it is likely that most South African Xbox users will have already created international accounts by lying about their location and will be loathe to switch to a South African account because they will lose all their stored information in the service. This will keep numbers down, I predict, while making it look like regions such as the USA and UK have unrealistically high numbers, as is the case with, for example, the Apple iPad which claims 2 million sales in the USA in under 60 days while I’m willing to bet that half those sales ended up elsewhere in the world (heck, I bought two).

I have been an Xbox Live Gold subscriber for some time and have compared the service to Sony Playstation Network (PSN). In my opinion there is no competition really, Microsoft’s service is streets ahead of Sony’s – but the latter gets all the credit for betting on South Africa first.

Microsoft had a slew of announcements at E3 2010, including unveiling its Project Natal accessory which will go to market as Microsoft Kinect and a new version of the Xbox 360 called the ‘Slim’ that will retail in the USA for $299.

Red Dead Redemption is easily the best game I’ve played this year. It features cowboys, guns, horses and hot chicks – the ingredients of a good time.  The title was developed by Rockstar Games, makers of the Grand Theft Auto series and features the same sandbox-style, go-anywhere-do-anything gameplay of its stable partner.

The game is the nearest thing to perfect I’ve experienced on a console. Your character is former outlaw John Marston. You can ride horses and carriages, hunt animals, pick herbs, have gun battles, lasso and tame wild stallions, hogtie bandits and shoot people in the face.

The storyline is captivating and engrossing, but you can put it on hold at any time to roam the wild west, help or rob characters in-game and cause general mayhem.

The game environment features rich, beautiful graphics and no end of mini-quests, enemies and other encounters to keep you busy with. As with Grand Theft Auto, Red Dead Redemption is one of those titles you can kill hours with, just running around and causing kak. It also features a similar ‘wanted’ system whereby you can get on the wrong side of the law, forcing you to evade arrest, and a system for saving your game at specific safe areas where your character can ‘sleep’. In RDR, however, you can also set up camp while in the wilderness and use this to save your game or teleport to parts of the map you have already visited, saving time otherwise spent traveling.

The game did seem a bit buggy in parts and some of the quests feature clumsy combinations of actions that can be frustrating. These are few and far between, however.

The gameplay is rich with everything from being able to whistle for your horse to having choices between killing wanted bandits or tying them up, participating with the law or getting on the wrong side of it and dozens of mini-games including poker, horseshoe-toss and others. You can also hunt and skin animals to earn currency.

If you’re looking for a console game there is no other new title more worthy of your money. Red Dead Redemption offers a perfect balance of fun and challenge and won’t leave you short-changed as it features hours and hours of endless gameplay that is highly re-playable. Rockstar has delivered another winner and its hard to imagine any of its competitors coming up with anything better this year.

I have become a highly demanding gamer. New titles have five minutes in which to grab me. If the intro montage is too long or the gameplay anything less than spectacular, they’ve lost me. Gone are the days where I had hours to spend in front of a console after school or between classes. What I need now is short, potent doses of escapism, delivered without prelude, so I can get back to work.

Alan Wake is one of the few titles in the last year that gripped me from the get-go and kept me glued for longer than the gameplay tutorial. And that isn’t because it delivered on premise, but rather because it didn’t. What I was promised was an action thriller from the creators of Max Payne with a clever gameplay gimmick involving light. With bad memories of the flashlight in Doom 3, I was immediately skeptical of the light-bit. The title also seemed a bit lame, tying the lead character to the storyline a bit too literally.

What I got was an intriguing storyline with robust gameplay and gorgeous graphics. Elements that, on their own, would not hold up – but combined to keep me interested and wanting more after the first play.

Alan Wake is not “scary”. The zombie-like foes one faces in the game are about as frightening as a stumble in the dark. There is little suspense or believable danger – but the psychological element that underpins the story is compelling and this is part of why I like this game so much.

You are Alan Wake, a famous writer who is escaping to an island on a lake in the country with your partner Alice for a much needed break. But everything goes pear-shaped when your dream-states start merging with the real world. People and objects referred to as ‘The taken’ are after you. Some of them are characters from your books, others are people from the local community of Bright Falls.

It’s not the most ingenious of story-lines but in the world of video games is about as intelligent as they get. There are also absorbing little additions to the story – such as references to old-school scuba diving in the murky waters around the island – that keep the intrigue going.

Alan Wake also breaks the mold of immersive storytelling in games that all too often happens at the expense of gameplay – which was one of the reasons I didn’t like Heavy Rain much.

Then there’s the gameplay. This is a third-person shooter, with a twist. The Taken are pretty unstoppable in the dark, but shed some light on the matter (sorry, couldn’t resist) and it impedes them allowing you more time to take them down with a gun. You can use a torch to slow down or knock back your enemies and a flare gun can be used to spectacularly blow away groups of Taken.

Whereas this approach to gameplay could’ve turned out to be more annoying than anything else, in practice it just works. The only improvement I would’ve added is some form of targetting system, ala GTA.

Another effective gameplay element is that you can dodge axe-swings and the like which leads to a brief, slow-motion cinematic sequence that is highly satisfying.

This is undoubtedly one of the most intelligent video games I’ve played and a coup for Microsoft in that it is exclusive to the Xbox 360.  It remains to be seen how long it will manage to keep me intrigued, but for now Bright Falls will be a preferred destination for my brief spurts of escapism.

The title is one of the latest from Konami and was titled Zephyr: Rise of the Elementals in development, before being renamed. It is available for Wii, Playstation 3 and Xbox 360.

The storyline has something to do with intergalactic elemental beings trying to save earth while collecting stuff for their giant overlord – I skipped past all the storyline guff in favour of the destruction bits.

The gameplay in Tornado Outbreak is pretty original. It’s unusual for modern games to offer something outside of the usual genre range and still be appealing – like Dungeon Keeper managed to do in the 90s – but Tornado Outbreak delivers.

So you direct a tornado around a variety of terrains and destroy everything in site while looking for these little fiery dudes that are hiding in some of the things you’re tasked with destroying. There is a time limit in which you have to find a specified amount of the fiery buggers, and collecting them adds more time to the clock. Later on in the game you can also free a variety of elementals that are hiding in each area.

The zones on offer for destruction in Tornado Outbreak are awesome. They include an army base, dinosaur theme park, a town that the designers couldn’t call London, but resembles the British capital in every other way, and a variety of other areas that I have fondly dreamed of destroying.

Once you’ve obliterated all the areas in a zone you need to create a storm by flying through a series of gates and then you do battle with things called ‘totems’ that surround a building, statue or other large structure that needs to be demolished.

Tornado Outbreak is good, clean fun and a great example of a game designed for consoles. It has awesome cartoony graphics, fun characters and rocking gameplay. If you’re looking for a console title to keep your thumbs busy with these holidays, look no further. My experience with the title is limited to the Xbox 360, however, so I can’t vouch for gameplay on the PS3 or Wii.

I use my own country, South Africa, as an example of Microsoft’s misguided strategy. The South African gaming market is the fastest growing in the world, according to sales recorded during 2007 and 2008. South Africans have flocked to the Xbox 360 and rewarded Microsoft for launching the product in their country at a great price – it is cheaper than the Playstation 3 and Nintendo Wii, making the 360 the most affordable console available in SA.

However, Microsoft has not launched Xbox Live here, and avoids journalist enquiries as to when it will be launched, if ever. We are constantly told that South Africa is “on the list” for scheduled launch, but Microsoft can not give any indication of when and will not disclose more details.

Meanwhile, Playstation Network is up and running in South Africa and has been for some time, allowing South Africans to play games with each other online and purchase digital content.

Worst of all, Microsoft unethically sells its Xbox 360 games in South Africa at full price – even though the online components of the games, including simple multiplayer online gaming, can not be accessed without an Xbox Live account.

Take Gears of War 2 for example. This is one of the most popular titles available for the Xbox and has been a huge success. It is an expensive game too. However, in South Africa we can only play the campaign mode of the game, which is a small portion of what is included on disk as GoW2 was designed primarily for multiplayer. We can not play against other players online, or access extended content for the title.

We pay the same price for the game as Xbox 360 owners in other countries do, but get less than one third of the content for the price. This is simply dishonest on the part of Microsoft.

In the past South Africans have found a way around the situation by setting up Xbox Live accounts and lying about their location – telling the service they were based in the United Kingdom, for example. They could then set up Xbox Live Gold Accounts using their South African credit cards and play against each other online, amongst other things.

This solution was far from ideal, mainly because it is against the terms of use for the service. It also no longer works as Microsoft has stopped accepting credit cards from countries other than what was specified during account set-up.

And it is impossible to change your country setting, so if the service ever does launch locally, South Africans will lose their gamer points and purchased content by setting up new accounts – which is the only way to change the location setting.

The country-setting lock is ridiculous. If you live in New Zealand, for example, and then immigrate to Australia, or if someone from one central European country moves to another, they cannot take their Xbox Live account with them.

South African bandwidth is also good enough for multiplayer gaming. I know this because I lied about my location and set up a gold account which I used to play games with friends, both internationally and back home. Bandwidth is definitely not a good reason to keep the service from us and I can’t think of any other reason why Microsoft would ignore the fastest growing gaming market in the world where there are more Xbox 360 owners than in some European countries.

I can only assume that Microsoft has little to no understanding of the local market, which suggests the company has not done its homework, or is ignoring its local staff about realities in South Africa.

The strategy is misguided. Plain and simple.

I can only hope someone from the Microsoft Xbox team reads this. The product is great and we would love to be able to use it in South Africa. Playstation Network has proven that it can be done – and Sony gets a lot of local support for this, even though the Playstation 3 is overpriced.

If Microsoft does not bring the service to SA, then it must stop selling its titles at full price.

Ignoring fans is a big no-no for any company and Microsoft should know this. I hope it changes its tune soon and either gives us official access to Xbox Live or a decent answer as to why it won’t.

Edit: Since writing this post I have received a response from Major Nelson of the Xbox team via Twitter. Great to hear from him and hopefully this will lead to something positive in terms of Xbox Live in SA and other countries.