So there was a Part 1, a Part 2 , and logically enough, Part 3, and now, rather a long time after I made it back to the States, it's time to present a final look at some of the odd and/or cool and/or fun European video games I encountered in the wilds of British (and Finnish!) retail. As follows:

The Atari-published PSP mini-game title Hot Pixel has been out in Europe for a while, and is coming to the States in September - but apparently with not nearly such a nice pixel-art cover as the Euro version, judging by the current Amazon.com box art. Eurogamer say that it's "...almost precisely Wario Ware, but without quite so much wit or charm" - but I'm still interested.

In my recent E3 round-up, I pointed out the two varieties of Buzz games finally coming to the States later this year, but as you can see, the UK already has four of them shelved very prominently in this GAME store. Actually, as the Wikipedia page explains, there's six been released already, and they're encompassing both quiz games (for the adults) and party games (for the kids). Awesome stuff, SCEE.

Nothing too out of the ordinary here, but for Magweasel fans and those wondering what game mags look like in the UK, they're still shelved prominently in many game stores, they're mainly distributed news-stand style (as opposed to the States, where more are done via often cheap subscriptions), and they've got ridiculous amounts of packed-in freebies up the wazoo. Of course, the economics are better if you can charge UKP10 ($20) for a special issue, like Edge recently did for their '100 Best Games' - but then, you have to compete with 8 zillion other puffed-up tree extracts which sell marginally decreasing amounts.

A, just a quick word on this Sega soccer sim, 'Let's Make A Soccer Team', which I think is cute because it's clearly never coming out in the States, and the title is, I believe, a literal-ish translation of the longstanding Japanese game's name. Of course, sports sims are much more popular in general in Europe, and especially soccer sims, thanks to Championship Manager, but they don't seem to have adapted too well to the rise of the console generation - diminishing returns, perhaps?

The absolute piece de resistance of the trip, I snapped this picture in Helsinki, where eating reindeer is common, it's awfully expensive for American travelers (damn you, dollar!), and a good time was had by all. This is Singstar Legendat, the Finnish-specific version of Singstar Legends, and the MobyGames profile for the game notes handily: "In Finland, this Singstar game has a different tracklisting than the regular one and half of the songs are Finnish ones, which have international hits amongst them as well, such as HIM, Rasmus and Lordi." Dude, Lordi - I even found Lordi vanilla cola on our Finnish jaunt, so you know they're 'big'. And hereby ends our European lesson.