Features// SPOnG's Review of the Year 2010: December

After toying with Polyphony Digital’s latest instalment of the racing series for a few weeks, we felt ready to give you all the review you deserved. Nick covered every aspect of Gran Turismo 5 so that if you were put off by the hype (and anti-hype) you could get a reasoned verdict right here at SPOnG. It was awarded a respectable 72% (remember kids, that’s a good score).

Despite the BBC’s earlier attempts at tabloid reportage, Blizzard’s World of Warcraft: Cataclysm was launched to a feverous UK public and saw sizeable midnight queues at retailers across the country. Its first-week sales wasn’t quite enough to topple FIFA 11 or Call of Duty: Black Ops but nonetheless an expansion pack to the world’s biggest MMO to reach #3 on the UK Chart is pretty astonishing stuff (13th December).

Michael gave some pretty positive first impressions - you can read just why he wants to come back to Azeroth here.

SPOnG rounded off 2010 in style with more features than you could shake a sleigh at. Chris O’Regan had a good look at Sim City Deluxe HD for the iPad, and considered its entertainment value against some irritating bugs. Shoehorning Sim City 3000 on a touch device is going to get you 73%, really. Gareth previewed Killzone 3 and was cautiously optimistic of what Guerrilla Games might bring in the full game come February.

Lauren had some more-than-interesting discussions with Bulletstorm’s creative director, Adrian Chmielarz, along with Dragon Age II’s product manager Randall Bishop. Xbox Live Indie games got some love from SPOnG as well in December, with Chris Schilling kicking off a fortnightly series of columns introducing the best in bedroom coding. Try the games listed and see what you think - my personal faves are Text Zedventure and Breath of Death VII: The Beginning.

But alas, with 2010 over and done with, all eyes were turning to the new year and what 2011 might bring. Sadly, we know that one of them won’t be 3D support in LittleBigPlanet 2, after Media Molecule revealed it was not to be (Gutted: LittleBigPlanet 2 3Dies, 3rd December). Final Fantasy artist Yoshitaka Amano has been linked to a brand new RPG project called Deva Zan (17th December) and analyst Michael Pachter does his Mystic Meg thing and says the next Nintendo machine will be able to compete graphically with PS3 and Xbox 360 (15th December). No doubt that, whatever happens, 2011 is going to be one hell of a ride.

Finally...

You can’t leave a year of video games without a mainstream media scandal worthy of ultimate loliness. And indeed, Fox News couldn’t let 2010 slide by - on the very last day of the year, El Paso’s local Fox outlet scandalised Microsoft’s Kinect for having a “sex game” in development for it.

Except, it wasn’t. XXXLab, a rather cheesy grope-a-riffic tech demo, is an unofficial project by Thrixx that needs to be ported from a PC to a modded Xbox to even run. Microsoft hasn’t given Thrixx permission to produce games for the device, and the demo itself is banned for sale to under-18s. So quite how “five-year-old Edwin Valverde” got his hands on it is something his shocked mother should probably be asking her tech-savvy relative.

Fox News Starts ‘Kinect Sex Game’ Kid Scaremongering, on the 31st December 2010. There’s a video included in the article. There are no words for this, really. Have a Happy New Year, SPOnG readers, and we’ll see you in 2011!

Missed out on the rest of 2010? Check these out:

January
February
March
April
May
June
July
August
September
October
November

Enjoy!