Download Games Roundup
Balls! Pinballs! Fluid! Glow! GTi!
Glow Artisan
- DSiWare/ 500 DSiWare points (£4.50)
Another absolute puzzle gem tossed casually onto the growing pile of essential DSiWare releases, Glow Artisan tasks you with replicating patterns onto your touch screen grid 'canvas' by painting and mixing the three primary colours.
What starts out as a thoroughly simple, relaxing affair, though, soon turns into more of a stormy, petulant divorce as Powerhead Games puts your powers of colour mixing firmly through the wringer.
Rather than simply allow you to colour in each square individually, you're forced to first paint an entire horizontal or vertical line from either the top or the left side of the grid. After that, you can then either start mixing up colours, or erase individual rows or columns in order to replicate the desired shape.
Matching the target illustration in the shortest number of moves becomes the game's central hook, with oh-so tempting medals on offer. If you just can't get your poor addled head around the problem, though, the game's handy autosolve facility takes away the inevitable temptation to punch nearby inanimate objects out of the equation, which is nice. No-one likes a savaged cushion.
And once you've worked your way diligently through all 100 puzzles on offer, you can even construct your own, using the DSi's camera, and the raw power of its digitising abilities. You can also import your own rude pictures, if that sort of thing gets you off. With Time Trial and Randomiser modes to unlock, there is possibly no end to your fun. Or frustration, take your pick.
Download it now, then shout at all your apathetic friends for not doing the same.
8/10
GTi Club Supermini Festa
- PSP/ £23.99
Released to justifiably minimal fanfare on the Wii back in March (and therefore wholly ignored by pretty much everyone), this latest version of the once-beloved Konami arcade racing series sees the venerable GTi Club franchise still firmly stuck back where it started in 1996.
What was once a crisp, breezy racing gem with hilarious handbrake turns now just looks and feels horribly amateurish in every department. Released (on the PSN store only) at a crazily expensive price, it tries to justify its existence with a plethora of gameplay styles and a drawn-out campaign mode, but ends up backfiring embarrassingly at every turn.
By forcing you to start at the insultingly easy beginner level, you're forced to flatline your way through pointless race after race, punctuated only by the odd nonsense mini-game. With all the fun of chucking tomatoes at one another and driving a football into a net, there's a numbing sense of 'will-this-do?' about the whole affair.
And the less said about the ludicrous slippery handling the better. It felt fun in its arcade context back in the day, but now just feels like they couldn't be bothered to adapt. Screeching around corners with the minimum of fuss, it's devoid of challenge, and made worse by a visual style rooted firmly in the late 1990s, complete with clipping issues.
Even if GTi Club Supermini Festa was a tenth of the price you'd be hard pressed to justify buying it. Its existence in 2010 is entirely redundant.
2/10