Viva Piñata: Party Animals

Like all games based around TV shows, Viva Piñata: Party Animals is sure to attract a dedicated fan base who want little more than to play as their favourite characters. Which is good, as there really isn’t much to recommend this game apart from the fan joy of playing as Hudson Horstachio.

A cynical person might comment that this game is basically the format of PlayStation’s Buzz Junior games (colourful characters play simple mini-games by pressing one of four buttons) combined with the marketable presence of a Nickelodeon cartoon show. That’s not to say Viva Piñata: Party Animals isn’t fun, just that you can’t help feeling you’ve been here before. It’s not high art, but then it’s not trying to be — it’s a tried and tested formula of simple, kiddie-friendly challenges with familiar faces, and if you are a Franklin Fizzlybear fan, what more do you need?

The Daily Telegraph

Sega Rally

Sometimes, you want your driving games to be pixel-perfect simulations of the real experience, with dazzling graphics and finely calibrated racing lines. And sometimes you just want to roar through the scenery in a motor that never gets a scratch as it wrestles its rivals off the roads in a 100mph game of bumper cars.

In case you can’t tell, Sega Rally is very much the latter kind of game, a rip-roaring arcade racer in which (contrary to the normal definition of “rally”) you speed through the mud and bounce over the bumps in the company of five other cars. The main innovation is that tyre tracks are left on the surface as you go, which can be followed on subsequent laps for greater traction. This adds a certain spice to the courses, although the one criticism to make of this otherwise solid title is that there really aren’t enough of them.