There’s two new demos to try out on Xbox Live if you’re short of pennies in the run up to the Christmas season. They’re not the full games, of course, but you can try them out to possibly put them on your Christmas wish list. This way you can stop wishing that you could actually afford all the games coming out around now and just get someone else to buy them for you instead.  Are the two demos any good? I haven’t tried them yet so I can’t possibly comment, but I’d just like to inform you that they are now available.

Our favourite female video game character Lara Croft returns in Tomb Raider: Underworld. The reason for the ‘Underworld’ part is because the game is all about water this time around, and you’ll also be swimming through old ruins as well as doing the old fashioned Lara way of climbing all over the walls. After you’ve sat through the 1.3GB download you’ll get the chance to find out if this new take on Lara’s adventures is actually worth parting with your hard-earned cash. Hopefully it will be latter, but that’s totally up to you.

The full game arrives for Playstation 2, Playstation 3, Mobile, Nintendo DS, PC, Wii, Xbox 360 on November 21st.

Don’t laugh, but this is one game I’m actually looking forward to. Despite never touching a Banjo-Kazooie game in my life (apart from one in a McDonalds on a holiday to Florida, which didn’t really work) I’m loving the look of  Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts and what you can actually do with the game. The idea is that you’re taking part in a contest against a witch named Gruntilda for control of Spiral Mountain.  She’ll be constantly trying to stop you while you undertake challenges to preserve your home (as Gruntilda wants to build malls everywhere). Anyway, the point is that you can build things, and that’s the big pull (as with many games these days). There’s over 1,600 components that you can build vehicles with, so you can pretty much build a vehicle in any style you want.

The demo will take up 1.07GB of space and will allow you to try and the building and take on ‘Jiggy challenges’, whatever they may be.

The full game will be out for Xbox 360 on November 14th.

Try them out and tell me what you think!

For those of you anxiously waiting for the release of LittleBigPlanet - a game that may force me to buy a Playstation 3 - you’ll be highly disappointed to know that the game has been delayed for an unspecified period of time.

The delay is due to two references to the Qu’ran which were discovered in a piece of licensed background music. Not wanting to cause any offense to religious groups (especially since the two references aren’t exactly the friendliest of quotes) Sony has recalled their entire shipments of the game so they can remove the offending material. You may wonder why they can’t just remove it in a patch, but you have to realise that not everyone connects their PS3 to the Internet so this problem will affect those people.

The game was originally due to hit stores on 24th October, but Sony said that a new date will be announced shortly. Retailers are speculating that the new date will be 14th November, but the date may be earlier than that yet.

UPDATE: There’s still no concrete release date but Sony are saying it will be ‘no later’ than the week of November 3rd.

Although ex-ButtonSmasher writer Konstantinos has written about MySims Kingdom in the past I thought I’d give my own take on the game while giving you a little more information as we near its release date. As you may have realised by some of my posts here I’m a big fan of any game that allows you to express your creativity and The Sims franchise has always slotted neatly into that category. Also, although it pains me to admit it, I’m partial to a cute looking cartoony game every now and again (and how can that be wrong when some ‘cute’ looking games allow you to slice heads off their shoulders?).

Anyway, MySims Kingdom is the follow-up to the hugely successful MySims - which just goes to show that anything with the word ‘Sims‘ attached sells like hotcakes. Ok, so in itself it wasn’t a bad game but it was far more geared towards the casual crowd than the normal Sims games, if that’s even possible.  EA know that casual games sell and fill their neat little pockets with shiny gold so they aren’t about to add too much depth and difficulty on systems owned by everyone and their mum (although the Wii and DS could do with some more decent hardcore games). However, this sequel does somewhat expand on what MySims had to offer, as the promises of unleashing your creativity didn’t exactly live up to their name. Now you may say that unparalleled creativity is too much depth for a casual game but Spore managed it and, from my current experience, that game sacrificed a lot of gameplay-wise depth to remain attractive to the casual crowd.

The aim of MySims Kingdom seems to be a lot like Animal Crossing, and by this I mean give you plenty to do everytime you switch the game on. The aim is to help the king rebuild his kingdom, but unlike The Sims there’s also a storyline so you won’t really be making up your own. While you’ll be able to build your own things like in the previous installment the creativity controls largelly extend to solving puzzles around the kingdom, such as making a windmill work again by connecting gears and pipes. To do any building you’ll need something called ‘esscence’ so, in a way, this is the games limitation as it won’t allow you to grow crazy like The Sims would. Thankfully, the kingdom is big enough to add some much needed depth to the game and you’ll most likely never be stuck with something to do across its various islands, until you’ve completed the game of course. The storyline is actually a more structured approach to the franchise, and what we’re actually seeing is the opposite of a game like Spore or The Sims - the dumbing down of the creativity but, hopefully, providing more structered and enjoyable gameplay (just read some of the reviews of Spore saying that the tools in the game are excellent but the gameplay doesn’t quite match them).

I see myself as a hardcore gamer - which obviously should be the case if I take the time to write two blogs about games - so, in the end, maybe I’m not really the target audience for this game However, Nintendo continues to insist that Animal Crossing is for both hardcore and casual gamers so maybe MySims Kingdom can also appeal to both audiences, even if it’s just a slimmed down ‘cute’ version of its big brother.

Or maybe I’m just talking crap, but I’ll put that down to not feeling too well today. Let’s face it though, I do harp on about the casual/hardcore divide a bit too much don’t I? Maybe I’ll try to limit that in the future…

…maybe!

Anyway, you can find out if I’m talking rubbish sometime this autumn on the Wii and Nintendo DS.

Although I said I wouldn’t be able to get hold of Spore for a few more weeks luckily I was wrong and I got hold of it the other day. Since then I’ve been losing a lot of my life to the game, although it’s initially hard to discover why. The problem I have with Spore is that it’s an absolutely excellent idea but the gameplay built around it can become pretty repetitive and, foremost, it lacks a lot of depth. However, the wonderment of it all overrides this extremely basic gameplay.

It’s an absolute joy to explore the universe of Spore, and it makes it even more of an amazing experience when you know that each and every creation that populates your very own galaxy is created by other players. For example, once I’d jumped out of the cell stage of Spore and made it on to land I came across a nest inhabited by a herd of creatures that looked remarkably like elephants, except they all sported nice little mustaches. It’s really unlike any game as you know that each and every time you load Spore up you’ll discover something new, and that’s why Spore is - by far - one of my best gaming experiences of the last few years. To get this experience though you really have to immerse yourself in the game, you have to begin to love your creations and get past the linear gameplay.

Spore is also a big experiment in new technology and I think that everything that goes on in the background while you play will pave the way for games that will use this technology in new and exciting ways. Spore isn’t perfect, and if you’re not a creative person that you may hate it. I do believe that expansions are absolutely needed this time around though, as there’s so much more that can be done with the Spore technology.

I’ll have a full review of the game up sometime in the next few days (or you can check my review round-up here). I also be doing some Spore diary posts over on my other blog if you want to check those out. Feel free to share your stories in the comments section as I look forward to hearing them.

Since it’s an extremely lazy Sunday (and a very rainy one) here I figured I should post something a little different from the norm. The above picture is a papercraft of Dog, Alyx Vance’s lovable robot pet from Half-Life 2. It was created by chamoo232 over on 4chan (yes, amazingly enough 4chan does sometimes produce some decent stuff) and took around 50 hours to complete. It’s not actually as big as this photo suggests and that seems to be some sort of cupboard behind it, but never the less it’s still pretty damn cool and has amazing attention to detail.

I wish I was creative enough to come up with something like this. Then again I already do enough time wasting so maybe it’s for the best. I think the rest of today will be spent catching up on a few games, since although I write a video game blog I’ve been pretty lacking on actually playing them lately.

Papercraft Half Life D0g is Amazle - Kotaku