Last week I was fortunate enough to visit Codemasters Head Office in Warwickshire on behalf of Wonderwallweb.com to have a tour of the studios and to get some hands on time with thier forthcoming games "Clive Barkers Jericho" and "Sensible World of Soccer".

After being shown around the stunning studios we got to the action, with the first game I tried being Clive Barker’s Jericho, in which you are part of a seven-man strike force from the U.S. Department of Occult Warfare, sent into the Middle Eastern city of Al-Khali to investigate an intense level of paranormal activity. Throughout Clive Barker’s Jericho, gamers will play as, and be able to switch between the different members of the Jericho squad - each of them skilled in their own modern warfare tactics and weapons, as well as individual Para-psychological disciplines, including telekinesis, blood magic, exorcism and more. You play through various different time zones, you start off in present times and then go back to the 2nd World War, then the Crusades, then the Roman Era and another further time zone which were not shown.

The game looks and plays very well, although I didn’t feel that there was anything that hasn’t been seen before, unfortunately there will also be no Multiplayer mode, as Clive Barker felt that this would distract from his original story for the game, so all resources were put into the single player game.

There should be a demo out in about 2 weeks time, so maybe it is best to make up your own mind on this one before it’s launch on Haloween.

The next game on the agenda was Sensible World Of Soccer on the 360 and I can tell you now that this is going to be very popular when launched on Xbox Live Arcade.

Sensible World of Soccer has been ported from the Commodore Amiga version, and plays exactly the same, in single player mode you have various leagues and tournaments you can play, as well as training sessions etc, but you can also play a new updated version which plays in widescreen with updated graphics, this will definitley be the more popular version to play as it looks great.

When playing over Xbox Live you are limited to 1 vs 1 when but this will not take away from what promises to be one of the Arcade releases to ever hit the service. Sensible World of Soccer was originally scheduled for launch in August, but due to there being few glitches that needed ironing out it was unfirtunately delayed, however don’t despair as the launch day now should now only be a few weeks away.

Thanks to Codemasters for having us.