Sony PS2 games: Singing, buzzing and shooting

By on 02 November 2005, 11:56am

"Karma karma karma karma karma chameleon, You come and go, You come and gooooooo!" Is there any song more profound than Culture Club's 1984 classic Karma Chameleon? Probably not? Is any musical period more suited to karaoke sensation SingStar than the 80s? Definitely not.

We love SingStar here on Crave. By consequence, anyone unlucky enough to live in our vicinity hates it. With Singstar 80s, it's not uncommon for us to scream "Wake me up before you go-go" long into the night. And we find that a bit of Eye of the Tiger psyches us up before we head into work. Even though it's essentially just more of the same, SingStar 80s offers the best track list so far. Each SingStar is slightly better than the last, but where will the series go after the 80s? The 60s perhaps -- Twist and Shout, anyone? Or maybe the 70s and I Will Survive? Either way, SingStar could accurately be described as the most potent party catalyst in the world. Throw any SingStar into a room of slightly drunken people and it cannot fail to go down well.

You've got to applaud Sony for constantly pumping out these polished, novel party games, especially when they relentlessly send them into an office of overworked tech journalists. The crunch time of our recent site redesign would probably have caused our design team to axe each other's faces off had we not had Buzz! The Music Quiz. Presented like a real quiz show, the package contains four buzzers and a music-oriented question set. There's a cheesy presenter, a glamorous assistant and a selection of 5,000 questions, all with sampled music. The selection is pitched perfectly on the specialist side of pop knowledge (so you might hear a Robbie Williams song and then be asked where he was born), plus you can choose 'Old Music', 'New Music' or both. Whatever you do at Christmas, make sure you have one of these games available for when you're all bursting with turkey and boozed up on brandy.

Now's also the time the videogames release schedules go into overdrive, building up to an orgasmic crescendo at Christmas. And this can mean only one thing -- plenty of Grand Theft Auto rip-offs. You've probably seen Total Overdose advertised on TV, making it look like a Mexican version of GTA on mescaline. It should have a lot going for it -- sly movie references, guns and explosions, and a big fat '18' certificate on the cover. However, it shamelessly steals from much better games -- the bullet time comes from Max Payne, the time rewind from Prince of Persia -- but if you're into action games you'll enjoy being able to dive around, firing a bazooka into someone's face in slow motion. If only the driving sections were as much fun, but some dodgy collision detection spoils it. One Crave member thinks that it's about as much cop as GTA: San Andreas played on a PSOne, but if you're in need of a mindless shooter to keep you occupied until Christmas, you'll find some fun in this stylish blaster. -GC