MLB 2K12 is set for release on March 6th, 2012 from 2K Sports for PC, Xbox 360, PS3, PSP and Wii.

There are still a lot of fitness titles hanging around at the end of January: Zumba Fitness (seventh), Zumba Fitness 2 (tenth), Your Shape: Fitness Evolved 2012 (seventeenth) and Kinect Sports: Season Two (eighteenth). If you’re one of those still keeping up with your new year’s health drive, we salute you.

So once again, no real changes, not so surprising for this time of year. Can FIFA 12 hold off its rivals for another week? We’ll soon find out.

As always brackets denote the previous week’s position.

1. (1) FIFA 12
2. (4) Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3
3. (2) The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
4. (3) Just Dance 3
5. (5) Battlefield 3
6. (-) Resident Evil: Revelations
7. (6) Zumba Fitness
8. (7) Saints Row: The Third
9. (12) Assassin’s Creed: Revelations
10. (8) Zumba Fitness 2
11. (10) Rage
12. (9) Rayman Origins
13. (11) Mario Kart 7
14. (16) Football Manager 2012
15. (24) Sonic Generations
16. (13) Super Mario 3D Land
17. (29) Your Shape: Fitness Evolved 2012
18. (25) Kinect Sports: Season Two
19. (20) Cars 2
20. (18) WWE ’12

Charts provided by Gfk Chart-Track.

Rounding out the Top 20 are Battlefield 3 and a massive comeback from Kingdom Hearts Re:coded, which was nowhere to be seen up until last week. Zumba Fitness 2 and Dance Central 2 continue to make their presence be known, although they’ve finally fallen from the Top 10 into the #12 and #14 spots.

With the coming blockbuster releases set to launch starting this week, you can be sure that there will be many a shift to come.

Brackets denote the previous week’s position.

1. (2) Just Dance 3 (Wii)
2. (1) Kinect Adventures! (X360)
3. (4) Zumba Fitness (Wii)
4. (3) Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 (X360)
5. (5) Mario Kart 7 (3DS)
6. (7) The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (X360)
7. (6) Super Mario 3D Land (3DS)
8. (8) NBA 2K12 (X360)
9. (9) Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 (PS3)
10. (11) UFC Personal Trainer: The Ultimate Fitness System (X360)
11. (14) Kinect Sports: Season Two (X360)
12. (10) Zumba Fitness 2 (Wii)
13. (16) Your Shape featuring Jenny McCarthy (Wii)
14. (17) Dance Central 2 (X360)
15. (12) Your Shape: Fitness Evolved 2012 (X360)
16. (-) The Biggest Loser: Ultimate Workout (X360)
17. (13) NBA 2K12 (PS3)
18. (-) Kingdom Hearts Re:coded (DS)
19. (22) Battlefield 3 (X360)
20. (15) Just Dance 3 (X360)

Charts are provided by VG Chartz.

Yes, I sprung the twenty bucks American for Origins and I will throw my kudos into the largely-ignored kudos ring. This game addresses just about every issue that made me hate Nintendo’s 2009 darling New Super Mario Bros Wii. Join me for the exegesis, won’t you?

On first glance, the similarities between the two games are enough to make one think Michel Ancel ran New Super down to his secret dungeon of coders for advanced reverse engineering. Both games are 2D platformers set in bright, happy, wacky worlds. Both support four players, with a playable roster consisting of two characters you like and two you could give a crap about (Mario/Luigi/two toads vs Rayman/Globox/two teensies). Both allow less-skilled players to tag along inside floating bubbles. But where Shigeru Miyamoto allowed New Super to flail in the morass of twenty five year old gaming foibles, Rayman Origins offers a more modern take on the platforming concept.

LIVES AND CONTINUES – When, oh when, is Miyamoto going to back away from this crippling, archaic design concept? In New Super Mario Bros Wii, you collect extra lives. When you run out of lives, you can use a continue. However, when you do, the game will reset your current progress if you have not reached one of the game’s specific auto-save points. This turns New Super into a game where you must constantly worry about your life stockpile… resulting in players having to pull off bizarre stunts to generate 1UPs.

Yes, this is classic Mario in action, just like it’s 1985 all over again. Except that it’s not 1985, and gamers – particularly the casual audience that Nintendo has corralled – deserve better than being forced to unexpectedly replay levels or perform pro-level 1UP grinding. NSMBWii is a game slavishly devoted to its own legacy.

To add insult to injury, the option to save anywhere is unlocked after you beat the game. Exactly when you don’t need it.

Rayman Origins puts the fun in the playing. No lives, no continues, no lost levels. When all players die, the level rewinds to the last checkpoint. When a level is finished, it stays finished. You can focus on enjoying the levels, taking exploratory risks without fear of wasting a life, and replaying levels because you want to, not because you have to.

PLAYER INTERACTION – There’s a strange physicality in New Super Mario Bros that echos the very first time Mario and Luigi shared the screen: 1983′s Mario Bros. In that arcade classic, players could bounce off of each other’s heads for higher jumps. That concept continues in New Super but the stakes are exponentially higher thanks to unforgiving level design. In Mario Bros, you might get accidently (or purposefully) bounced onto an enemy turtle, big whoop. In NSMBWii, the openly dangerous environment means players are continually bouncing each other off to their deaths. Serious players are almost forced to take turns so as not to get in each other’s way.

Rayman Origins makes the players intangible to each other, so there’s no uncontrolled bouncing. The chief interaction between players is the attack button, which creates silly slap fights and cartoony chaos. While that does shove players around, the key difference is that you get to choose when you do it. This keeps the mayhem down to a controllable level. The idea that players are in charge of deciding when this interaction happens erases all the frustration found in New Super.

CHARM – Now here’s one area where Origins pales under Nintendo’s nostalgia-pandering light. Rayman just doesn’t tickle the triggers that Mario does. Mario, his music, his visuals… this is the language of gaming legend. Rayman, not so much. The settings and characters of Origins are predictably wacky, even tiresomely wacky. It lacks the warm charm of the Mushroom Kingdom, which generates good feelings for lapsed gamers, new gamers and pro gamers.

Where Origins shines is the level of animation, a high-res affair that is considerably more exciting and detailed than the staid, traditional mechanics of Mario’s animation. In any given screen, there’s a ton of action, both in the background and from the characters.

None of this is intended to label New Super Mario Bros Wii as a bad game. (Well, that ancient saving system completely pisses me off!) I’m sure the devoted 2D Mario fans will point to my criticism and explain those elements are precisely what make the game tense and challenging. However, I’m here to evangelize Rayman Origins… and after playing both, even though I pretty much have zero interest in Rayman as a franchise, I have simply had a hell of a lot more fun with Origins. And as a Nintendo fan, I still feel the frustration over Mario’s huge-scale return to 2D platforming being, for me, a non-starter. Rayman Origins combines the classic platforming experience with bows to modern design, and it manages to keep multiplayer fun and frantic without being an unplayable pain.

Captain Morgane and the Golden Turtle is the newest graphical adventure from Reef Entertainment, and it compiles together a good point and click adventure game with high quality hand painted environments and characters. It is a gorgeous looking adventure game, and we have some new screens and a trailer for you to check out.

Captain Morgane and the Golden Turtle is set to release on Wii, PC, 3DS and PS3 in early 2012 from Reef Entertainment.

Zumba Fitness 2 climbed its way up from the #21 spot to #10, and Your Shape Featuring Jenny McCarthy made a surprise resurgence, moving from #34 all the way up to #16.

Brackets denote the previous week’s position.

1. (1) Kinect Adventures! (X360)
2. (2) Just Dance 3 (Wii)
3. (3) Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 (X360)
4. (6) Zumba Fitness (Wii)
5. (4) Mario Kart 7 (3DS)
6. (5) Super Mario 3D Land (3DS)
7. (9) The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (X360)
8. (8) NBA 2K12 (X360)
9. (7) Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 (PS3)
10. (21) Zumba Fitness 2 (Wii)
11. (16) UFC Personal Trainer: The Ultimate Fitness System (X360)
12. (19) Your Shape: Fitness Evolved 2012 (X360)
13. (11) NBA 2K12 (PS3)
14. (10) Kinect Sports: Season Two (X360)
15. (20) Just Dance 3 (X360)
16. (34) Your Shape Featuring Jenny McCarthy (Wii)
17. (17) Dance Central 2 (X360)
18. (22) Just Dance (Wii)
19. (12) Star Wars: The Old Republic (PC)
20. (27) The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (PS3)

Charts are provided by VG Chartz.

Highly popular fitness games Zumba Fitness and Zumba Fitness 2 are in sixth and eighth, and Rayman Origins has leaped into ninth thanks to some clever sales tactics. WWE ’12 has also seen a big jump, from thirty-one to eighteen, as has Cars 2 (from twenty-seven to twenty).

As always brackets denote the previous week’s position.

1. (1) FIFA 12
2. (3) The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
3. (2) Just Dance 3
4. (5) Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3
5. (4) Battlefield 3
6. (6) Zumba Fitness
7. (14) Saints Row: The Third
8. (7) Zumba Fitness 2
9. (17) Rayman Origins
10. (8) Rage
11. (11) Mario Kart 7
12. (9) Assassin’s Creed: Revelations
13. (15) Super Mario 3D Land
14. (10) Need for Speed: The Run
15. (20) Wii Fit Plus
16. (16) Football Manager 2012
17. (18) Mario & Sonic London 2012 Olympic Games
18. (31) WWE ’12
19. (22) Skylanders: Spryo’s Adventure
20. (27) Cars 2

Charts provided by Gfk Chart-Track.

Well, my wish came true. Published by Nintendo, The Last Story will be released in the UK on 24 February 2012.

The game’s creator, Hironobu Sakaguchi, will be at Midlands Comic Con to talk about the game, although most people will recgonise him as the father of the Final Fantasy series and producer of other great titles such as Vagrant Story, Xenogears, Chrono Trigger and Kingdom Hearts.

To buy tickets to the MCM Midlands Comic Con at Telford International Centre on 18 February 2012 visit: https://www.mcmexpostore.com/store/ – and you can submit questions to Hironobu Sakaguchi in advance to david@mcmexpo.net.

That scaly, fire-breathing rascal Bowser is up to his old tricks and has stolen all the Mini Stars from the sky. Choosing from an array of your favourite Mario characters from the Mushroom Kingdom, including a few characters which are completely new to the Mario Party series, you have to achieve the ultimate goal of winning them all back in order to become the SuperStar and light up the sky again.

This latest instalment promises all new game modes including Party Adventure which will allow four people to move across the board in one vehicle. Players take turns, punching dice blocks as before with the aim of finding the best routes leading to lucky spaces when you’re in the driving seat whilst at the same time trying to push your opponents into trickier spots – well there has to be winner somehow but this idea might help to keep all players involved in the board game action. With 80 brand new Minigames where you might be making pizzas, escaping haunted mansions or racing snowmobiles, the challenge of working with or against your rivals as you all try and collect the most Mini Stars and defeat Bowser will as always, drive the fun.

The new Boss Battle Minigame does exactly what it says on the tin. Up to four players must work together to defeat a series of classic Mario boss characters to collect Mini Stars, facing Mario’s ultimate nemesis, Bowser in the final showdown. Of course, it wouldn’t be Mario Party without a little competition so although you may be working together to defeat the bosses, you can also beat your friends by earning the most Mini Stars depending on your ranking and the amount of damage you have dealt to each boss. There might not be an ‘i’ in ‘team’ but there is one in ‘Mario’ and it’s always every player for themselves.

Thankfully, in Mario Party 9, you don’t have to have completed a board in order to access Minigames thanks to the new Minigame Modes, meaning you can get in some sneaky extra practice before your friends come round to play or you can just enjoy the action, as and when, you like plus there’s Extras Mode that includes Goomba Bowling and the puzzle-based Castle Clearout.

Mario Party 9 launches across Europe on 2nd March and has a US release date of 11th March, only on Wii (drinks and nibbles not included).
When will you be holding your party?

Climbing to number two in the UK gaming charts this week, Just Dance 3 has already encouraged dancers up and down the country to get up off the sofa and start moving/waggling/jumping etc. There’s a greater complexity to the choreography than seen in previous Just Dance titles but the focus still remains on making dancing fun and accessible with an eclectic mix of over 50 tunes from classical to bollywood to pop presented on an unashamedly neon stage! Now you and up to three of your workout buddies can make your January workout even more effective with two new Just Sweat DLC packs.

You can already choose to sweat for fun or create a schedule to sweat once a day, which not only helps you get fit but also goes towards earning stars that unlock secret tracks and mini-games. To keep you motivated, the new DLC packs will include all new dance tracks by the Sweat Invaders: Touch Me Want Me, Dun N Dusted, Cardiac Caress, Merengue and Boomsday plus the curiously titled Beat Match Until I’m Blue.

There are also extra routines waiting to be perfected via the Just Dance stores. Tracks on the Wii include Anja’s Baby Don’t Stop Now, Studio Allstars’ Jump, Olé Orquesta’s Jambo Mambo, The Girly Team’s Twist And Shake It, U Can’t Touch This and Soul Searchin by Groove Century and In the Style of Irene Cara Fame!, each priced at 250 Wii Points. Meanwhile, Xbox360 Kinect owners can boogie on down to 19 other DLC tracks, including Cosmic Girl by Jamiroquai, Satisfaction (Isak Original Extended) by Benny Benassi and Baby Girl by Reaggaton.

With the option of creating your own playlist, the fitness-focused dance routines should give gamers looking to tone up their indulgent holiday figures, even more incentive to get sweaty!

The two new Just Sweat DLC packs will be downloadable through the in-game Just Dance stores on on January 17th on Xbox360 Kinect for 480 Microsoft Points and on January 18th on Wii for 600 Wii points. Let us know your favourite tracks in the comments below!