The "Complete" List

Left 4 Dead 2 - (All Campaigns)
Mass Effect
Lego Rock Band - Story Mode
Darksiders - Easy
BAYONETTA - Easy Automatic
Lego Batman
Call of Duty: Classic - Normal
Fracture - Casual
Dragon Quest: The Hand of the Heavenly Bride
Heavy Rain - Medium
Battlefield: Bad Company 2 - Normal
Yakuza 3 - Easy
Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney: Justice for All
Professor Layton and Pandora's Box
Mass Effect 2 - Normal
Peggle: Dual Shot - DS
Splinter Cell: Conviction - Realistic & Co-op - Realistic
Dead Space - Easy - 360
Alan Wake - Normal
Split/Second - Career
Blur - Career/Level 50 Multiplayer
Red Dead Redemption
No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle - Sweet

Regular readers will probably remember how much I enjoyed the first No More Heroes game. In fact it's probably my favourite game on Wii. So I was very excited at the prospect of playing the sequel.

Normally in the world of video games it's easy to sum up sequels as "Bigger, Better, More". This being a Suda 51 game of course nothing is as straight forward.

Of course he's not turned it into a Kart racer. It's still similar. But things have changed in Santa Destroy. Not least of which being the nature of your friend Bishop's head's relationship with his shoulders. Out goes the open world nature, Out goes paying entry fees, Out goes the 3D side quests and jobs, Out go drunk russians, Out goes the adorable telephone conversations via the wii-motes speaker and in it's place?

Well that's the thing. In this case less is.. well less. I finished the entire game, including playing with my cat and enough side jobs to buy all the beam Katanas in just under 8 hours. Not a bad length in this day and age and there's certainly a degree of replayibility.. but not as much time as I spent enjoying all the side quests and bits and bobs in the first game.

So what is new? Well bizarre cut scenes with some woman in a booth behind glass on a telephone (a bit like in American Prison Films) and some extra playable characters. Shinobu who Travis spared in the first game. I liked her bits. She's fun to control and because she has a jump control the levels have a vertical element which adds some variety.

Basically the crux of the sequel is that it's been streamlined down. I wrote in my Blog last time that "It's basically ten boss fights in a row". Well this is 'X' boss fights in row. That's it. You can do the 2D side missions but there's a reason we don't play 8 bit games anymore. These seem to have been designed with rubbishness in mind too. The only one I liked was the steak cooking one and that has one button which you press once.

Still the game remains incredibly stylish. The cut scenes and dialogue are both gripping and hilarious in places. The combat, which again is fairly repetative throughout, never gets boring. So there's substance too.

In fact if they convert it to PS3 it'd probably make me buy Move just to play it all again in HD.