Quick Impressions: Tiger Woods Motion Plus, Split Second, Army of Two PSP

Some quick thoughts before our High Voltage appointment. Hit the jump, dear reader, if you are at all curious about crazy racing game Split Second, Tiger Woods Motion Plus, or Army of Two for the PSP. Expect longer pieces on The Conduit’s multiplayer, Wii Sports Resort, and New Super Mario Bros. Wii later this evening. Split Second (360, PS3)

This racing game from “Pure” developer Black Rock Studio is like Burnout 3 and Stuntman had beautiful, beautiful babies. It a basic closed circuit racer with an interesting twist – doing stunts to fill a meter that lets you trigger various environment based events. In its most extreme, you could press A to make a plane crash just behind you, forming quite a cinematic obstacle for your pursuers. It plays really well and is quite intense. I am not sure how it would play for an extended period of time, but first impressions are extremely positive.

Tiger Woods PGA Tour 10 (Wii Motion Plus)

A very effective demo of Wii Motion Plus, and I expect it would play a lot better off the hectic show floor. Hold down A to grab the club, swing as you’d expect to. It’s quite easy to get down the fairway, but putting was extremely difficult. To be fair, it did offer to switch to a “classic putting” mode, but being a glutton for punishment I kept using the advanced default mode.

Army of Two: The 40th Day (PSP)

This is basically a co-op enabled Smash TV ripoff with some elements ripped from its console brethren. You steer with the analog stick and shoot in eight directions with the four face buttons. I am writing about it solely because it seems to be designed as a handheld game, instead of a gimped port of a real console game, which is one of the real problems the PSP faces. It still has all the lame aesthetic issues the console games had, but it seemed to be moving in the right direction.

If anyone has any questions about any of these games, hit up my Twitter or e-mail and I’ll reply and update this piece.