This week's new releases! January 24th-30th

Little Big Planet 2 might have had it easy last week, but it’s sure as hell got nothing on Dead Space 2′s utter dominance this time around. Seriously, the closest thing it even has to a rival is a Wii/DS title based on a very poorly received kids film. Even if it did have some kind of real competition it’d  still stand to do pretty well in the charts; riding off the success of the 2008 multiple million seller Dead Space, it’s already seen some extremely positive write-ups by popular publications. Not bad considering review embargoes were only lifted a few hours ago! Hopefully we’ll have our own review up in the coming weeks, so stay tuned.

Right now all I can say is that if returning to the space hulk style horror of the Dead Space universe wasn’t good enough already, PS3 owners are in for a special bonus: the previously Wii exclusive on-the-rails shooter (or “guided experience” as the rather pretentious developers insist it be known as) Dead Space: Extraction bundled in for free*! The PS3 version promises updated graphics as well as support for the highly accurate PlayStation Move controller, good news for those of us who bought the damm things last year before realising there’s only a minuscule number of decent titles available for it.

Hopefully Extraction’s PS3 re-release will be a little more popular than the original Wii version, it sold pretty miserably despite the lack of decent Wii shooters to contend with. Not that it’s failure was a surprise or anything; I strongly question the marketing strategy behind releasing a tie-in game exclusively on the one console that didn’t see a release of the game it’s actually based on.

The rest of this week’s line up is the standard mix of shovelware and casual stuff for the usual platforms, although there’s one non-retail Xbox Live release worth mentioning: the launch of Atomic Game’s Breach, which is supposedly going to bring Call of Duty style combat of triple A quality to the Live Arcade service. It’s not an impossible task by any stretch, but bringing retail quality product to a digital platform is a promise I hear way to often from cocky game developers, most of whom very rarely live up to their much exaggerated sales pitches. There’s not been any major official reviews yet, but if Atomic Games really have managed to crack the Call of Duty formula then I’m sure we’ll be hearing at lot about it within the next few days.

Multiplatform
Yogi Bear (WII,DS)
Dead Space 2 (Xbox 360,PS3,PC)

PC
18 Wheels Of Steel: Triple Pack
Match 3 Mayhem Compilation

Xbox Live Arcade
Breach

DS
Alpha And Omega

Wii
Family Quiz

*I should probably point out that technically it’s only bundled with the “Limited Edition” of the PS3 version, but as far as I can tell there’s no NOT limited edition on the PS3. It’s a common marketing ploy to make games seem a lot more valuable than they actually are, similar to what Sega did last year with Yakuza 3’s “premium edition”.