Games Toaster

UPDATED: Ireland and Northern Ireland teams named for Xbox Cup Finals

The Ireland team, Patrick Keating, Rathmines; Craig Duffy, Tyrrelstown, Dublin 15; and Derek Mulhern, Co Kildare (pictured above), will travel to Berlin to play in the Xbox Cup Finals.

UPDATE: Microsoft have informed us of a Northern Ireland team also being sent to the Xbox Cup, they are Thomas Dodds (15) from Lisburn, Daniel Rocks (16) from Belfast, and Stephen Hegarty (24) from Craigavon. All secured a place at a qualifying event in Belfast.

While the real Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland teams aren’t at World Cup this year, soccer computer games Fifa World Cup 2006 and Pro Evolution Soccer 5 have remained at the top of the Irish Games Charts in the last few weeks, while Sensible Soccer 2006, Football Manager 2006, and Championship Manager 2006 have featured in the top 20.

REVIEW: LocoRoco

Developer: SCEJ | Publisher: SCEE | Format: PSP

Reviewer: Cian Ginty LocoRoco follows in the zany vain of Katamari Damacy and We Love Katamari, although not in their shadows. It’s the old ‘save the world’, just with ‘loco roco’ blobs as inhabitants and hairy black blobs as attackers.

The control method alone sets the game apart, the PSP’s top buttons, L1 and R1, are nearly the only ones used, navigation is dependent on them. Each tilts the in-game worlds one way or another; pressed together they make the main loco roco jump.

300-person LAN games event for Dublin?

Last week a “date holder” for a 24 hour LAN was placed on Ireland’s main website for listings of multiplayer computer games events.

The “date holder” on Room101.org, marked as September 23 of this year, has a maximum amount of attendees set at 300, it will “be announced soon”.

We reported late last year that Room 101 were looking at setting up a large-scale LAN – although, of course, this could be totally unrelated.

New Irish games site to launch soon

The launch of a new Irish computer games website, Irishgamer.ie, has been delayed until this Wednesday, June 21.

As well as the normal news and reviews, the site is to feature price watches monitoring the Irish retail sector.

The site is to be headed by Noel Brady, he currently writes games reviews for Campus.ie, and has previously written for Dreamcast Monthly magazine, The Player (an Irish games magazine), and RTE’s Gamezone.

In a post on Boards.ie’s games section Brady explains, “This is a newspiece that was due to go up on Irishgamer today. Sadly, we've been delayed until next week (ironing out glitches etc.) as we don't want to launch the site until its 100% functional”.

For the record: Irishgamer.ie is no relation to Games Toaster’s previous moniker ‘the Irish Gamer’ that used a dot com address. Separately we have provided some content for the new site.

WIN: Blazing Angeles on Xbox 360

Thanks to Ubisoft we have two copies of the ‘arcade flight combat’ game Blazing Angels: Squadrons of WWII on Xbox 360 to give away.

To have a chance of winning all you have to do is tell us what war is featured in the game, answers to win@gamestoaster.com. If you win, we’ll email you back asking for a delivery address (rules below).