For the most part, the Spider-Man games based on Sony Pictures’ film series haven’t been all that bad. With Spider-Man 1 they perfected the excellent level-based formula from Neversoft’s original game of the 64-bit era, and with Spider-Man 2 they introduced the free-roaming New York City to Spidey games. With so much practice, you’d think that Activision and its army of development houses would only improve the formula for the third game. With Spider-Man 3 coming to all consoles, some amount of confusion is expected however, and all versions of the game suffer considerably. The Wii version doesn’t escape this confusion by a long shot.

Spider-Man 3 starts out promising. The opening sequence has the web-headed hero rescuing civilians from a bombed out office building, while Bruce Campbell offers his typical witty advice. This opening serves as the obligatory tutorial, which is more necessary than ever because of the new Wii controls. The full scope of the Wii functionality isn’t revealed, here because of the constraints of the cramped building environment. Some basic combat and movement skills are demonstrated, but they aren’t very interesting. Only when you get out into the city does the game get very exciting.

Once free to travel amid the skyscrapers, the one defining aspect of Spider-Man on the Wii becomes clear: web swinging. By pressing the B or Z trigger, and then flicking the Wii remote or Nunchuk, you literally cast webs like Spider-Man. This method takes about five minutes to get used to, but after a quick warm-up period it feels more natural than squeezing a trigger button. Some button combos grant speed boosts while swinging, which are accompanied by a nice blur effect. It is fortunate that the brutal villain chases from Ultimate Spider Man aren’t in 3, because cornering with this new control scheme is somewhat clumsy. Aside from that, however, I think Vicarious Visions has nailed the new way to web sling.

The other controls aren’t exactly intuitive but they work. A regular jump is accomplished with the Z trigger, dodging enemy attacks requires a quick flick of the Nunchuk, weak attacks are performed by a remote jab and strong attacks are assigned to the A button. At the beginning this is how most of the game plays out—not quite solid or polished, but enjoyable. Starting out, Spider-Man 3 feels deceptively promising.

For a few solid hours the game is good honest fun, and because it is sporadically entertaining you are able to ignore the numerous but subtle flaws. The first thing that will slowly grow tiresome is the combat. After the fast-paced acrobatics of Ultimate, 3 reverts to the tedious combo system from the other movie games. Spidey starts out with a pathetic 3-hit combo and can only purchase significant upgrades after completing a number of missions.

Upgrading Spider-Man doesn’t make much sense in the first place—he’s a freaking super hero, after all—but it’s necessary if you want to make the combat at all playable. The rest of the upgrades offer some advantages, but are mostly filler. Much like in 2, you’ll use two or three of the attacks and nothing more, which compounds the stale, repetitive feeling that plagues the combat. What’s worse, it looks like the cool web powers from the first games are gone forever, replaced with a few lame lasso combos and impotent little “web splats.”

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Article Courtsey: Gamingnexus.com

It might be fun to giggle at American games journos howling and hollering at unveilings like a pack of drugged monkeys but personally I think they've got the right idea. The dignified professionalism of the European games press is cute but sometimes I want to whoop at that screen, damnit. Keeping that excitement bottled up is frustrating. I'm sick of having to hide any little gasps I make by following them up with thoughtfully chewing on my biro. So I'd like to thank Activision for showing Spider-Man 3, a game seemingly based entirely around the concept of "awesome", in a darkened auditorium. The notes I took are totally illegible but I was able to safely grin like a loon the entire time.

Spider-Man 3: The Game is made by Treyarch, the same studio behind the last two Spider-Man games, so it should be getting pretty good at the whole process by now. It's very much an evolution of the second game's concept - free-form webslinging around New York with side quests and story missions available when you want them. GTA, but with stringy wrist ejaculate instead of cars. It was a pretty bold idea that was pretty flawed in execution, but this sequel's looking solid for three big reasons.

First of all, they've taken onboard a lot of feedback about the second game. That means no more racing to deliver pizzas hot and intact for an employee of the month award, and no more rescuing floating balloons. You're a superhero and you're going to feel like one. When you decide you're up for a bit of city-saving you can progress through one of the ten storylines that have you facing off against lots of villains that both appear in the third film (Sandman) and don't (Scorpion).
Alternatively you can go to work on one of the three big gangs in the city, the thuggish and stereotypical Apocalypse Punks, the kung-fu wall-running Dragon Tail or the sinister Goth girls of Arsenic Candy. Street crime is rampant. If you're easily distracted or do your good deeds with a dash of obsessive compulsiveness, you'll have your hands not so much full but overflowing.


With this more action-heavy direction, it makes sense that Treyarch has done some thinking as to how to spice up the slightly limp-wristed combat. Rather than aim for a polished and intelligent fighting system (which could potentially flop, after all) with Spider-Man 3 it's going for something more superficial but just as fun. You'll have a huge range of entertaining abilities, a lot of which involve some cool aerial acrobatics using your web. At one point we watched Spidey punch a man off a roof, leap off the roof, shoot web straight down to snag the falling man, yank him back up and then punch him vertically downwards towards the pavement again. We also watched Spidey tie a man up between a pair of streetlights and leave him dangling there like a pinata, delivering a few punches for good measure and sending him swinging to and fro. We were informed that a player who hangs around (pun intended) would eventually see police arrive to arrest him. And during the parts of the game where you play as the vengeful black-suit Spidey (you'll find out all about that side of Peter in the film) you get a whole new range of more aggressive moves and animations, as well as a hilariously vicious rage mode that has you snapping from enemy to enemy and pummelling them to jelly in an instant.


Another way Treyarch is giving the combat a shot in the arm is with quick time events, which brings us neatly onto the second reason this game seems a safe bet. In addition to just refining the last game Treyarch is building, too. Twenty miles of subways and sewers are getting added to the city, and you now have spider sense in the form of an alternate vision mode that shows up hostiles and friendlies in luminous colours against a dark blue backdrop.

But the quick time events are the biggest addition. To avoid monotony in a game where the whole city's your playground from the moment you pick up your pad, these "movie moments" act as little interactive cutscenes of the same kind we've seen in Shenmue and Resi 4 with the distinction that they're sometimes put right in the middle of the action. A fight against Sandman we saw in a subway tunnel had Spider-Man grinding Sandman's head to dust on passing trains, and later a chase through city streets was punctuated by him doing some trademark slo-mo flips out of the way of thrown cars. Some of these sequences are repeated until you get them right, some have the game carry on after failure and some appear as little context-sensitive moves like God of War's fatalities, but they all feature kinda gorgeous motion captured animation.


And the third reason Spider-Man 3 is grin inducing is all this is happening on next-gen hardware, something Treyarch has experience of working with from Call of Duty 3. Looking out across the city from the tip of the Empire State Building was fun on Xbox. Doing the same thing on the 360 at sunset then launching into a graceful, gently curving dive to the streets and traffic below is quite the thing.

We asked how the Wii release would cope and, put frankly, it won't. Treyarch told us the Wii version will be stripped down in some way although the rep didn't mention specifics. Wiimoteophiles should start crossing their fingers for a straight loss in graphical quality and not, say, a smaller world or less incidental everymen and traffic on the street. People who want to control web with a wobble and for it to look stellar too aren't entirely out of luck though- Spider-Man 3 will make use of the PS3's sixaxis, though again Treyarch is being tight lipped. We'll have to wait and see.


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Article Courtsey: Euro Gamer.net

HiT Entertainment and 20th Century-Fox have released Bob the Builder: Ultimate Adventure Collection, a three-disc boxed set containing 12 episodes from the popular stop-motion animated children's series. With only a few very minor extras included (two of the episodes have never aired before), you'll have to be a big Bob the Builder fan to purchase this somewhat pricey collection.

Developed back in mid-90s by Keith Chapman, Bob the Builder is one of those children's shows that, backed by a comprehensive marketing and manufacturing effort, becomes an instant "reality," permeating your kid's consciousness because the character is suddenly everywhere. The TV show is on all the time, and no matter what store you go into, there's some kind of tie-in merchandize to further burn the brand into your child's brain.

As for that process, although it's crass and calculating, on a basic level I don't have a problem with it at all. In numerous reviews about such fare, I've always come down on the side of, "if the property is entertaining, who cares if it's created solely to make money?" Unfortunately, I can't get too worked up about the Bob the Builder: Ultimate Adventure Collection precisely for that reason: it didn't entertain me (and quite frankly, my youngest boy found it a non-event, as well).

Telling the story of Bob the Builder, the series focuses on this local handyman and his efforts to get various building projects done, with the help of his anthropomorphized equipment. And that's pretty much all there is to Bob the Builder. Of course, since the show originates from the post-"entertainment for entertainment's sake" period of childhood programming, Bob the Builder puts educating its viewer first, before entertaining them. So the messages of socialization and problem-solving are front and center the concerns of the show - anything "fun" is left for catch-as-catch can.

Unfortunately, there's not much "fun" in Bob the Builder. Perhaps part of the flavor of the original Bob the Builder (it originates from England) is gone, because it's dubbed with American actors. But I doubt a change in accent and slang would prop up Bob the Builder's fairly mediocre stories and rather chintzy production. I'm pretty sure I never saw the show before (although I've seen some of the toys around the house), so watching this collection was my first real exposure to the series. And quite honestly, I wasn't impressed. The stop-motion animation was fairly limited (with cheap surroundings - perhaps intentionally - not adding any visual bonus), and the stories were repetitive and quite dull. The various mechanized friends of Bob, such as Dizzy the concrete mixer, Lofty the crane, and Roley the steamroller, never made much of an impact character-wise, and seemed designed strictly to expand the toy selection at your local department stores.

But as I've written before, for these kinds of specialized children's programming (because it's the rare new children's program that appeals equally to adults and the intended target audience), you have to get a kid's perspective to accurately gauge the material. My three-year-old boy seemed like the perfect viewer for this kind of show; as far as I know he's not a regular viewer of the series. Putting in the first disc, he showed a lot of initial enthusiasm, but after only two short episodes (which run a little under nine minutes), he was done with it. Granted, attention spans are pretty short at that age, but he can get through an hour of SpongeBob without moving.
Waiting a few days, I tried again, but when I asked if he wanted to watch the show, he said no. I showed him the hardcase, and asked him if he remembered the show, and he said yes, but he wasn't interested. I watched a disc myself, hoping that he'd sit and watch it, too, but he passed through my office several times, glancing at the TV, and kept right on walking. Now obviously, there are a lot of kids out there who like the show (or at least we assume they do - maybe it's just "on" and there's a certain percentage of kids who'll watch "anything" if it's on). But combined with my own middling response to Bob the Builder, his decided disinterest sealed the deal for me.


Here are three titles and their episodes included in the Bob the Builder: Ultimate Adventure Collection, as described on their hardcases:

DIZZY'S FAVORITE ADVENTURES
Scarecrow Dizzy
Bob's crew is running in circles building a shed for Farmer Pickles and whitewashing his farmhouse. Dizzy is busy keeping the farm animals off the wet cement and mixing paint. But shouldn't the farmhouse be white instead of pink?
Bob the Photographer (unaired episode)
Bob plans to enter a photography contest until he loses his camera. Unknown to him, Spud has been taking pictures with the missing camera. But guess who wins first and second prizes when the photos turn up at the competition!

Dizzy's Statues
Dizzy and Muck learn new skills when they help Bob and Mrs. Potts by erecting statues in her garden and putting bollards around Town Hall. When the statues and bollards get mixed up, can Bob sort things out?

Dizzy Goes Camping
Dizzy is thrilled about camping out at Farmer Pickles' new campsite, as Muck and Spud join her singing around the campfire. But when they accidentally leave the sheep gate open, the camping trip turns into a sheep round-up instead.

LOFTY'S FAVORITE ADVENTURES
Lofty to the Rescue
Lofty's fear of heights and crossing the new bridge makes him the object of Spud's teasing. But when Spud falls off the bridge, can Lofty conquer his fear and rescue him? Or will he leave Spud hanging?

Lofty's Jungle Fun (unaired episode)
Lofty and Skip are excited about the jungle scene being painted on the playground. But when it looks like a real elephant is making tracks in the paint, they chase after the elephant and discover things aren't what they seem.

Bob's Big Surprise
While Wendy is out of the office for the day, Bob and the crew plan to surprise her by working in her garden. But keeping the office running and working in the garden is not as easy as it seems!

Magnetic Lofty
Lofty's magnet comes in handy when clearing an old railway track to make a bike path. Will it come in just as handy when Mr. Bentley loses his favorite pen at Bob's construction site?

ROLEY'S FAVORITE ADVENTURES
Roley to the Rescue
A stormy night leaves Bob, Roley and the team with lots of work to do. But they're not too busy to help some baby birds whose nest was blown away by the wind. Nothing can stop Roley and his friends from coming to the rescue!

Mr. Beasley's Noisy Pipes
Things get pretty noisy when Bob and his crew are called in to replace Mr. Beasley's banging pipes and boiler. With Bob working on the boiler upstairs and Mr. Beasley working downstairs, they finally manage to sort through the confusion and noise to get the job done!

Roley's Tortoise
Roley is excited about his new friend, Timmy the tortoise, and the building yard seems to be the safest place to keep Timmy while they search for his owner. But when Timmy turns up missing, it's Farmer Pickles who finds him in an unlikely place.

Runaway Roley
Roley, the hardworking steamroller, becomes a runaway "sleep roller" when he rolls out of the building yard while still asleep! Fortunately, his best friend, Bird, flies in search of help. Can Bob and the crew find a way to rescue Roley before he flattens the town?

The DVD:
The Video:
I was surprised at the amount of jagging in the full frame, 1.33:1 video image for Bob the Builder: Ultimate Adventure Collection, considering it's only about 35 minutes worth of material per disc (could PAL transfer issues be the cause?). Colors are fine, but the picture is soft.

The Audio:
There are English and Spanish mono tracks available for all the episodes in the Bob the Builder: Ultimate Adventure Collection. All dialogue is clear.

The Extras:
On Dizzy's Favorite Adventures, two music videos are included: I Can't Get Down and Where's That Cat?. On Lofty's Favorite Adventures, two additional music videos are included: Bob's Brass Band and An Apple a Day. And on Roley's Favorite Adventures, Bob's Birthday Read-Along is included.

Final Thoughts:
I can't say I was too impressed with the dull, chintzy Bob the Builder: Ultimate Adventure Collection - and neither was my young son. Repetitive stories and a limited concept didn't help, nor did the sub-par stop-motion animation and cheap backgrounds. But a lot of people out there like the show, so.... If you're a huge fan of Bob the Builder, I would imagine the Bob the Builder: Ultimate Adventure Collection would be a perfect gift idea this coming Christmas. But if you're only a casual viewer, or new to the series, I'd question that high retail price (working out to about $2.50 per 8-minute episode), especially when you can see the show for free on TV every day. A rental is as high as I go with Bob the Builder: Ultimate Adventure Collection.

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Article Courtsey: DVD Talk.com

What's better than snagging a cool, classic flick for your DVD collection? How about snagging a cool, classic flick with tons of cool extras and a never before heard song! Disney has released a special edition DVD of their amazing animated movie The Lion King. Check it out!

The Lion King DVD Goodness
The Lion King Special Edition DVD is like no other DVD in your collection. First off, it's got two versions of this hit movie. There's The Lion King that was in theaters and available on VHS, and then there's the special edition version of The Lion King which features an amazing new song, Morning Report, and a whole new animated sequence to go along with it! But you know what? Disney's Lion King DVD goodness doesn't stop there! There's so many special features you'll be as giddy as a hyena.

The Lion King DVD Special Features
You can check out deleted scenes, like Bug Football and Warthog Rhapsody or you can watch an exclusive interview with Sir Elton John (the piano playing dude who wrote all the cool songs). Then there is the really cool Animal Journey where you get to see how real animals inspired the animated ones. For more hands-on fun check out the Virtual Safari featuring your two fave goofballs, Timon and Pumba.

The Lion King Special Edition DVD Bottom Line
This DVD will have you singing Hakuna Matata at the top of your lungs. It's a great score for Disney collectors, animated movie lovers, and people who just want something fun and cool to throw into the DVD player on a rainy day.

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Article Courtsey: Kidz World.com