It’s that time again, when we get the slightly remixed transcript of the latest episode submitted to Ciao. It’s the Kinect Sports text review and it includes some fresh remarks, such as the one you may find after the break:

It’s a little known, but well spread, disease in games journalism that launch titles get artificially inflated scores. This has inevitably happened with the Kinect‘s first crop of games, but it’s thankfully nowhere near as pronounced as say, the Xbox 360‘s. I’m not about to start analyzing this right now, I just want to point out and marvel at the fact that Perfect Dark Zero, one of the worst and most disappointing games of all time, currently has a Metacritic score of 81.

Fantastic.

We continue our analysis of Kinect launch titles and get on location to check the enjoyability, as well as the authenticity, of Rare’s Kinect Sports.

Featuring strikes, spikes & shocking swerves.

Just under 20 minutes, this review might seem needlessly lengthy, especially for a casual game, but there is a lot to be said about the Kinect, Rare and sports simulations in general. I hope we’ve managed to keep a refreshing pace throughout.

Taking a cue from Red Letter Media, I’ve also added background music pretty much everywhere and I think it worked out great. The narration sounds remarkably clean too, so, as far as the audio department is concerned, this just might be the best episode yet.

It is definitely the official season finalé, since we shot it in early December only to post-it mid-January, and I figure it kinda fits the erratic scheduling we had for season 1. Stay tuned for season 2, featuring a more traditional timetable, but starting with a more fourth dimensional episode!

Find out if “Punch-Out!!” is worth picking out by checking out the video review! I promise it doesn’t rhyme nearly as much as this teaser.

But it does have horrible puns!

Even though I had much less time to map it out, I was convinced that things would go much smoother than in the saga of the MGS4 playthrough. My optimism was duly greeted by a barrage of malfunctions and misunderstandings that delayed the review considerably, but, hey, better late than never.

There are a couple of gags that reference the MGS4 episodes, but they are quick enough not to bother anyone who hasn’t seen those. Think of the gags as a special treat for anyone who heroically sat through that viewing marathon.

Trailer:

Little Mac’s polygonal update with the Punch-Out!! remake coincides with a fresh approach to my reviews; this is the first one written in conjunction with the storyboard for the video review.

It also pretty much served as the script for the video so, even though they still are quite different, the two versions are as close as they’re likely to get. It would certainly be very interesting to know which format you thought was best and I’ll investigate with polls, as soon as I get the rest of the site in working order.

During the research for this review, I couldn’t resist popping in the old Super Punch Out!! for the SNES. I remembered playing it of course, but I was shocked to find out that not only had I finished it, I had two separate save game profiles, both with some insanely fast time records!

I really hope some time traveling was involved because that was fifteen years ago and I am way too young to start feeling old!

My, dare I say, all-encompassing early review of the silliest-named console in the history of ever: Nintendo‘s Wii.

With parents all around the world wondering on which toy they they spend their hard-earned money, there was little doubt in my mind that this should be the most well-researched review I had ever done. I really sank my teeth into it and even attended preview events, something quite above and beyond the call of duty for someone who isn’t a journalist or a fanboy.

I tried to be as informative and unbiased as I could, presenting the facts clearly and finally putting a lifetime of video-game expertise to some good use: making educated guesses on the future. Apparently the effort showed, the review was received extremely well and was featured prominently.

Forgive me if I appear pompous; I don’t think the review is a special piece of literature, but it is a big deal to me. It helped me make the transition to hobbyist reviewer to part-time journalist, so I have fond memories of it.

Anyway, the Wii went on to be a huge success and still remains the “it” gadget to have for yet another holiday season, to the utmost surprise of most analysts that found it lacking and wrote it off as a novelty. What was my position? Read the review to find out!

Determined to keep using my time in the limelight to review obscure products, I took the field with the Swedish browser-based football management game, hattrick.

Much like a lot of web-based applications, hattrick was originally a pet-project for a small group of friends that wanted an easy way to have fun together on the net. If it’s something cool or unique, word of mouth rapidly expands the userbase and, at that point, most of these projects utterly collapse by being unable to handle the increased responsibilities, while a select few of them play their cards right and become Facebook.

Hattrick lies somewhere in the middle. For a lengthy period of time their servers just couldn’t handle the surge in traffic and, with their resources devoted to site management, development for the actual game remained stale. This led to a lot of the users abandoning the game, but enough stuck around for the site to remain viable and still entertain thousands of people, for free.

I had a point about critical paths, but I’ve decided to leave the math/coder-based humour to xcdk.

Sticking with football after the FM2007 review, we hit the field with the last great Pro Evolution Soccer.

PES6 was the last of the series with a development focus was on the “last” gen of consoles, the Playstation 2 era. Konami still hasn’t figured out the current gen, allowing EA to not only close the gaping chasm that existed between the rival teams, but to pass clearly ahead with FIFA 09.

But when this review was released, PES was king. I liked Konami football games better than the FIFA series from way back in the days of International Superstar Soccer and, while a lot of people think PES5 was best, I think that PES6 was the true peak of the Winning Eleven franchise.

The sequels were shamelessly disappointing, while FIFA got their act together, “borrowed” a lot of features from Winning Eleven, expanded, innovated and now offer a vastly improved football experience. Unlike most fanboys, I don’t mind really; I just want to play some good football!

But the crowd always loves the underdog and the question remains whether Seabass’ team, having much more limited resources than EA Montreal’s, can ever hope to catch up and retain the crown.

My launch-day breakout tryout of Football Manager 2007 and the most memorable review I’ve written for Ciao!.

It absolutely destroyed the viewership records and still remains my most viewed article. Incidentally, it was the first to feature screenshots, so maybe most readers came just to look at the pretty pictures.

In truth, the popularity is more likely connected to the fact this was also the first review to air right on the product’s official launch day. I was involved in the game’s beta testing and got the retail version from a store that released it a few days before the planned street-date, so I was more than ready for a zero-day analysis.

Both football and management games get far fewer coverage than most other titles, so the combined genre of football management is relatively neglected, making this review one of the first available. I guess eventually someone in a giant forum linked to it and nonchalantly changed my career in writing.

It was a pretty good piece too, if I do say so myself! As far as I am concerned, this is the ideal way to review Football Manager. Ironically, this has kept me for reviewing any of the sequels. Keeping the same style would be too much of a rehash, but changing what I consider ideal doesn’t sound too smart.

I suppose I’ll give it a go once I concede I can’t possibly top this.

Taking on Fight Night Round 3, then an Xbox 360 exclusive.

This is more like the contemporary Johnny!

Over 50% longer than my Kameo review, a remarkable stat considering an action-RPG game usually warrants deeper analysis than a brawler. Apparently, I am more passionate about boxing than Zelda clones.

Extrapolating from the word count difference between the two reviews, my review for Fight Night Round 4 should be about four gazillion words.

Obviously the title should read “Goes for Knock-Out, Pulls Punches“, but I felt uncomfortable going full-out on a newspaper-styled heading, for some weird reason.