THE LATEST NEWS FROM OCTOBER 2006

Sony and Nintendo might have been preparing to unleash shiny new hardware, but the Xbox 360 was retaining player attention with games like Capcom’s Dead Rising, which offered a journalistic mystery to uncover and a mall full of zombies to slaughter.

In a 9/10 review, games™ called it “one of the most ambitious, shocking and hilarious games to have ever been created”, while Official Xbox 360 Magazine gave the same score, saying that, “If George Romero ever decided to make a game of Dawn Of The Dead, this would be it.” Edge felt it was, “Thematically eccentric, mechanically shambolic and technically stunning,” giving it 8/10, and it also scored 4/5 in 360 and 9/10 in X-360.

Also on the Xbox 360, open-world racer Test Drive Unlimited scored 7/10 in games™, 8/10 in Edge, 4/5 in 360 and 9/10 in Official 360. The official magazine praised it for having “1,000 miles of fantastic, wide, twisty roads to race along in the world’s hottest supercars”, while games™ felt that it was “occasionally excellent when racing against humans” but that the developers “forgot to inject enjoyment into the single-player experience”. Open-world crime-’em-up Saints Row scored 8/10 from X-360, 4/5 from 360, 7/10 from games™ and 6/10 from Edge, which described it perfectly as “a stopgap between two GTA generations”.