Sid Meier’s Pirates
Take 2 Interactive
XBOX
Genre: Action Strategy

The burning question when playing this game isn’t how pretty are the graphics are or how slick the sound is. It’s just who the fuck is Sid Meier and how did he have the balls to put his name in the title? And a video game about pirates? The only reason you name something after yourself is to get laid in bars. What kind of bars do you score in with a pirate game named after you? The game is Grand Theft Auto in a boat but with worse mini-games and did I mention you’re a bloody pirate? The relentless mini-games in between the quests and endless sailing have you talking to barmen, sword fighting, stealth sneaking, going to painful dances. Much of which isn’t in keeping with the rest of the game. The thing is, it has the great open-endedness of GTA but without the fun of shooting a gun and acting like a gangster. So if you were the kid who wanted to be a pirate, wear your mum’s tights and a feather in your cap and imagined sailing around sinking ships and sword fighting, this could be the game for you. It’s not like you’ve got many options though, is it?




187 Ride Or Die
Ubisoft
PS2
Genre: Driving Shooter

Yo. They made a budge version of Midnight Run Two and got some Z-list hip-hop celebrities (Guerilla Black) to do the voiceovers. There’s guns, lights, flashing, smoke and mirrors and some hokey plot about becoming king of the g-riders. When you see past all that after about four minutes you realise that this is, yet again, just another version of “keep the dot in the middle of the screen” games that the video game industry uses as its backbone. The action in this is so stilted that it feels like one of those arcade games from the 1950s when you had to steer a racing car which was actually attached to your steering wheel by a piece of wire from left to right until your sixpence ran out. Even the soundtrack is a piece of shit. There’s not even any songs on it. Actually, there might be if you get past your first mission, but I couldn’t be fucked. Even if my life expectancy was 300-years-old, I wouldn’t have enough time to concentrate on this for more than 15 minutes.


Fantastic Four
Genre: Movie game
Developer: Activision
Platform: PS2, Xbox, Gamecube, PC

For once, a movie adaptation game that’s EVEN BETTER than the film they made it after. Sure, there’s the same crappy effects, boring gay storyline and repetitive, predictable action only the brain-damaged toddlers amongst you will get excited about, but with this one you don’t have to spend £26 on popcorn, nachos and M&Ms to go along with it. With the game version of the Fantastic Four you can turn it off whenever you want. Then you can smash it into a million pieces before putting it in an Aldi bag which you then piss and puke into. A couple of hours later, you can feed the whole stinking package to a big ugly rat with leprosy of the anus so it can be shat out two days later as poison in the depths of the foulest sewer in the city.


Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction
Genre: Movie Game
Developer: Vivendi
Platform: PS2, Xbox, Gamecube

This is better than the Fantastic Four game but it’s still not that good. There’s too many loading screens, the action is annoying and the “tasks” you have to complete had me hankering for the days when I was three seconds old, still covered in placenta and unable to form any thoughts apart from “it’s too bright”.

SYRUP DAVIES