Since SavyGamer is a one (and several bits) man show, whenever I am out of action things get pretty quiet pretty quickly. I think it would be nice to have more people contributing things.

I can’t offer you any money, but I will be able to offer you some games for review purposes. I’m looking for people who can write interesting articles about video games. Be it reviews, editorial, rants, poetry, or whatever. Surprise me, be creative.

If you are interested, email me here with the subject “I want to write some words for SavyGamer”. Include in the email:
1. Who the hell you are.
2. Why the hell you want to write words about video games.
3. What areas of gaming are your speciality.
4. An original article about video games, of your own creation. This is a blank slate. Show me what you can come up with. No word length, but don’t write anything more than 1,000 unless you are convinced it needs to be that long. If you can make me laugh, make me think, or change my opinion on something then you will probably be successful. This should be something specifically written for this application, and if you’re successful will be your first thing published on SavyGamer.
5. If you have ever written for another site/publication then please also include some samples. I won’t hold it against you if you haven’t though.
6. How much you think you would want/be able to write. I’m just looking for a vague idea of what kind of commitment you’re thinking of, I won’t hold you to it.
7. Anything else that is interesting.

I’ll try to respond to all emails, but I have no idea how many people will be interested, so if I get super inundated I might not.

XxX
Lewie

Develop Interview: Sean Murray

We snuck into the bar on Tuesday after his presentation at Evolve, which is transcribed here.

He talks about the Joe Danger demo and patch that are on the way, Hello Games expansion plans (Jobs page here) and their ambitions for their next game.

Hello Games went on to win the Best New Studio and Micro Studio awards at the Develop awards. Well done lads, wish you all the best in the future.

Review by Lewie Procter

Limbo is a story.

The story is a tale of a fragile hero. His powers are the abilities to run, to jump, and to interact with environmental objects. He uses these powers to try and accomplish a goal. Along the way he encounters some haunting images, some fierce opponents, and every inch of his mental and physical endurance is tested. His adventure, your adventure, is a series of menacing ordeals. There is a constant oppressive atmosphere, and you’re always driven onwards, deeper into a surreal realm of existence.

Limbo’s biggest success, the foundation that the entirety of the game is built on, is the nearly perfect animation of the player character. The one moment that a sliding block and a ladder confuse the animation is irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. Once you feel that connection to “boy on the screen that you are in control of”, you can’t really let go. He needs to complete his quest, and you need to help him; a strong sense of empathy is developed as the game draws you into it’s world.

There is an underlying tone of symbolism; it feels like throughout the game, something much bigger than what we are witnessing is going on, everything is left mysterious. The story leaves more questions than answers, allowing for multiple interpretations. It’s interesting territory for a platformer.

It’s littered with all too brief narrative events viewed from afar. I don’t know what the BBFC would have to say about it. You aren’t particularity violent, but it’s a bit dark. At certain points you might find yourself horrified at what you’re experiencing.

It helps that a lot of video game conceits have been successfully eschewed. Like the best of the games in it’s heritage (Éric Chahi’s works mostly, ICO too), death is both a learning tool and a motivation to do better next time. There are no levels or load screens. You learn all of the controls in the first 30 seconds. It’s pretty much always fair.

Pretty quickly it gets quite hard, and it remains challenging throughout. Almost as if it already assumes you know how to play a platformer. It captivated my interest from beginning to end. It is short, I didn’t time it, and neither should you, but I was surprised it finished so quickly. I have been very ill and on lots of drugs, so maybe I just lost track of time. I’m sure it has more secrets for me though.

Limbo is a beautiful thing, a beautiful game. It’s clever, it’s very pretty to look at. But more than that, it’s got soul. It stays with you after you’ve completed it, and I’m certainly going to come back to it.

Each of the speakers had a wealth of interesting things to say, and all gave a different perspective on the topic of discussion.

Sean talked a lot about why being self published is so important for them, and their plans post Joe Danger. Mark discussed how Introversion nurture their community, and how selling direct is a big part of Introversion’s DNA. Robin told Beatnik’s origin story, and the challenges for an indie releasing a multiplayer centric game. Cliffski explained that games are amazing value because he paid £75 for some jeans.

Whilst discussing the topic of web advertising, which only Cliffski does, someone in the front row interrupted the discussion to tell him that he was wasting his time, because having just one person working on advertising a game is pointless when big publishers have much much more than that. He told them that if they wanted to be successful that they had to expand and hire some marketing staff. It turned out that it was Mark Rein Founder/VP of Epic Games, aka the bloke that had been rude to me in the bar at 2am the night before. Everyone on the panel was completely taken aback. Throughout the conference there was often banter between speakers and the audience, but always initiated by the speakers. This was just impolite and unprofessional.

After the panel, Mark was eager to show off his ipad/android tablet Unreal engine tech demo. It is a boring as fuck looking first person shooter thingy, that looks like it controls horribly. Almost as if it is entirely unsuitable for the platform it is on. He also said that he predicts it is not long before indies are going to get entirely pushed out of the ios app store, because big publishers with (the most important thing in the world) large marketing departments are getting their act together on the platform.

Cliffski very obviously loves being an indie. He loves being in complete charge of his games. From the first line of code to the font used in the logo, he decides everything. He is making exactly the game he wants to make. He does not have a boss, he offers industry leading customer service, he is well respected by his peers and his customers, he is critically and commercially successful, and he owns a kick ass pair of jeans.

Mark Rein, I ask you this: What might you have achieved with Epic if you hadn’t sold out quite so much? What wonderful creative and intelligent works could you have made if the dollar bills and ambition for a very narrow definition of success weren’t making all the decisions. You’ve obviously got a lot of money at Epic Games, but don’t for a second think you are better than the little guys. These guys, the ones you turned up just so you could look down upon, are at the creative forefront of the video games industry. These Micro Studio’s, and the hundreds like them across the globe are highly responsive to changing market conditions in ways that a company like your’s can never be.

In the two years that the iphone has been out, you’ve still not released a single game for it. Why not? How come all those people wasting their time without marketing departments have sold lots of games on the iphone before you’ve sold any?

You’ve made lots of games about a guy with a gun that uses the gun to shoot the baddies. Well done.

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Review by Bobby Foster

Seriously? You want to read about Super Mario Galaxy 2 instead of play Super Mario Galaxy 2? You are, quite simply, wasting precious moments of your life that could otherwise be spent enjoying the greatest videogame ever made. Really. Honestly. I promise I’m not just saying that to catch your attention.

The history here is well-worn but important. Shigeru Miyamoto gave us Donkey Kong a little under thirty years ago. You got to jump over barrels and occasionally smash the barrels up with a hammer, as you set about trying to save the kidnapped Pauline from the giant ape at the top of the screen.

Despite that the technology driving Miyamoto’s Mario games has gotten ever more powerful, none of these essential details have changed much in the past thirty years. Pauline might have been edged out in favour of Daisy or Peach or Rosalind (or whatever the bland token female might be called next), but the damsel in distress motif endures. The slightly too cuddly Donkey Kong was quickly replaced by a meaner, spikier and ever-growing Bowser, but his role was the same: irrational and unyielding tyrant. Even now that the action has evolved from taking place across a single screen to multiple planets, the game can still be boiled down to one core principle: “time jump well to get girl”.

It’s no coincidence that the biggest misstep Mario ever made was when Nintendo forgot these crucial tenets. The generously reviewed but massively disappointing Super Mario Sunshine changed the formula to “hose graffiti down to clean town”. It didn’t have the same ring to it and the game bored away all but the most devout of Mario fans before it had a chance to get interesting. Even Mario 64, in spite of the assuredness with which it first put Mario into three dimensions, suffered from a similar problem. It wasn’t a game that boiled down to just jumping. You had to explore. Retrace your steps. Play the same level six times over. Most notably, it was happy to throw you into situations where you didn’t know exactly what you were supposed to do next.

Okay it was a great game, but it wasn’t a proper Mario game.

Real Mario games are about obstacles courses- usually the most beautifully designed obstacle courses it’s possible for their host hardware to generate. They’re about getting from point A to point B without coming to harm. In Donkey Kong, it was obvious that “point B” was up there where the barrels were coming from. And in the original Super Mario Brothers, the screen was only capable of moving from left to right, so it was pretty clear which way you had to go. But in three dimensions? Who knew which way was forward? Even with the greatest level design in the world (and at the time it pretty much was), Mario 64 couldn’t communicate so effectively or consistently which way to go next.

The real triumph of the first Super Mario Galaxy was solving the conundrum of how to do a proper Mario game in 3D. By basing the action on small planets and firing the player between them in quick succession, it reinjected the pace of the 2D games, and was much better at compelling you to keep moving in the right direction. It also featured some of the greatest architecture ever featured in a game. (Yes, I’m calling the level design “architecture”- because I simply don’t believe it’s possible to be pretentious when you’re talking about something so exquisitely fit for purpose.) Unsurprisingly, nearly everybody loved it and – unlike Super Mario Sunshine – it truly deserved the universal acclaim.

What was left for the sequel to do? “More of the same” would have satisfied all of us who spent large amounts of time since the first game’s release wanting to rip out the tongue and tear off the fingers of anyone regurgitating that lazy unthinking nonsense that “the Wii doesn’t have any games for proper hardcore gamers”. And in some ways that’s what we’ve got: riotously inventive levels, a huge variety of challenges, and a generosity of ideas that most developers would spread across ten games and try to sell for £40 a pop.

Yet this isn’t just more of the same: it is by a long stretch a superior game to the original. The levels – in particular those that mess around with gravity and perspective – are braver and more ambitious, and ultimately more rewarding to play. Across the board it’s bigger and tougher, and whilst getting the 70 stars required to defeat Bowser should be within almost any player’s reach, collecting the additional 172 that lie beyond that point will be a severe test for even the most dexterous and patient. Happily, the unnecessarily convoluted hub system from the first game has been stripped back so there’s less pointless wandering about. The new power-ups open up entirely new ways of thinking about levels. Yoshi has been implemented superbly. The hairs on Mario’s moustache flap in the wind more convincingly than ever before…

Yep, it’s the greatest videogame ever made. Sure, you might want to deduct points because it wastes time at the start telling you nonsense like “ shimmering stardust falls on the Mushroom Kingdom only once a century”. Or you might think that the “daredevil” comet challenges (where you have to replay a level without taking a single hit) are just a little too frequent and unforgiving. You might even be disappointed that the camera, although pretty much perfect 99.9% of the time, isn’t quite as capable of psychically predicting where you want it to be as it would be in your geekiest dreams.

But that’s not the point.

The point is that in Super Mario Galaxy 2 we have a game that compels you to keep playing without the need for a cheap cliffhanger story. It doesn’t have to bother with the illusion of character development and a tedious slow-drip of upgrades, because in its unashamedly old skool way, it asks that the player, rather than the avatar, improves their skill level in order to progress. It’s got the confidence to frustrate you with challenging objectives, because it has enough faith in the sheer joyousness of what it’s presenting to you that it knows you’ll keep trying at it.

But really. Words words words… you’re still wasting time. This is simply the best a videogame has ever been. Go play it.

Super Mario Galaxy 2 – £29.74 delivered

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<3

Review by Lewie Procter

I’ve been playing this same level over and over. I’ve learnt every single obstacle. I know where they are, and I know how to get past them all. The controller has become an extension of my body, the buttons are mapped to my muscle memory in extreme detail.

I can do it. I know I have got a perfect run in me. Just one more try.

Of course, something always gets me. I smash my bike into a hurdle, I miss time my jump and land in a pit of spikes, or just can’t quite go fast enough. I’m kind of hazy as to exactly how long I’ve been repeating the same level, but the counter tells me that I have had over 500 attempts, and not one of them has been good enough.

Joe Danger really comes into a league of it’s own in the endgame. After the credits roll, the “Directors Cut” tour opens up, and it’s here where the level design has been completely let off the leash. It demands near perfection. I’m just not good enough yet.

It starts off as a much more friendly game. Before delving into the insanity of the last chapter, the premise is as simple as it gets. You are a bloke on the bike, and you need to go from left to right. You have to get the things that you have to get, and you have to avoid the things that you have to avoid. The controls are precise, but the physics are forgiving. You’re always in direct control of the bike, but you’re not going to get screwed over because you don’t quite land at the correct angle. Don’t let the motorbike trick you, this isn’t a racing game. Or, it is, but it’s not just a racing game. It’s much much more of a platformer than I expected it to be. In fact, I’d say Joe Danger is probably the closest we’re had to a decent Sonic platformer since the 90s.

Each level has several objectives, like “collect all the ministars”, “beat it in a certain time” or “combo the whole level”. This achieves several things. Firstly, it adds to the variety between the levels. Secondly, it adds to the replayabilty a lot, as you repeat levels to complete the objectives you missed first time round (it is often impossible to complete all objectives in just one go) and finally, it reminds me more than a little bit of Tony Hawk. It’s good that if and when you mess up by not quite beating a level on time, it wasn’t all wasted effort if you did combo the whole level.

The levels themselves are super duper fun. There are big silly cacti, massive jumps, and funny billboards. Bright colours are everywhere. A real nice touch that might go unnoticed are little flourishes some of the traps have. There are bombs and mouse traps that kill you instantly, but if you land them just right you can trigger them with the very bottom of your rear tire, and get a clean getaway. You don’t get any extra points or rewards, but that’s the life of the stuntman, sometimes just knowing you pulled it off is enough. I’ve not touched the level editor, because bollocks to that, but I bet more creative folk than I will make some amazing levels with it

The menu is all swish. Sometimes you don’t know quite where to look, but it’s pretty anyway.

Now the bad.

The leaderboards integration isn’t really up to the standard that you might expect from a modern high score orientated game. Information about which levels your friends are beating you at is hidden away under several button presses, and you can’t ever see all the information at once. I think that the competitive nature of the leaderboards is sadly probably going to suffer. Games like Trials HD and Retro Evolved 2, take every chance they can to pit you against your friends, and it’s a shame Joe Danger doesn’t.

The scoring system is a little bit bullshit too. The combo system is fantastic for normal use, but score is really only one component of how well you did on a level. The leaderboards only track “Score”, not “Time” or any of the other objectives. Since score is the only thing that leaderboards track, they don’t really represent who is best at a level, just who did more tricks on it. Did they not play Sonic 2 multiplayer?

There are also a few invisible walls, but whatever.

Honestly, I love Joe Danger. I love his cheeky grin, I love the sound his bike makes, and I love how he hopelessly flails his limbs as he careers head first towards a brick wall, and then gets right back on his bike for more. I probably wouldn’t have cared enough to moan about the small problems it does have if I hadn’t enjoyed it so much. You can’t miss out on Joe Danger.

I’ll be adding much more stuff gradually too. At the minute there is a few 360/PS3 games, an N64, and a bunch of Mega Drive games.

Review by Will Templeton

I’ve been trying to write a review for the Iron Man 2 game since it launched. I’ve been writing and scrapping paragraphs for weeks, unsatisfied with every single one of them in the end, and I realised why – I was trying to see something that wasn’t there. I was wrestling with myself, trying to convince myself that it wasn’t all bad, that surely it had some redeeming qualities, and then maybe somewhere – God knows where, but somewhere – there was someone that this game was designed for and who would get some enjoyment from it.

Really, though, there isn’t. Even the most die-hard Iron Man fan has another reason to hate the product as a whole – the team that developed this just had no love for the franchise at all, and I’d struggle to even recommend it to a kid who loved the film but didn’t know any better. It’s sloppy from start to finish – while some of the voices from the film are present and welcome, the key part of Robert Downey Jr’s Stark is played by an only passable soundalike, and the models and animations are amateur and wooden.

The key part, though, is that none of the missions give enough feedback as to how you’re affecting the outcome. The fifth time I was flying around with as much purpose as possible trying to defend a poor representation of Scarlett Johansson and failing without and feedback as to why, I lost any and all interest I may have had.

It’s not as if the developers haven’t tried. They’ve at least paid some attention to what the game could have been, by setting it after the movie rather than simply following it to the letter, actually cobbling together a decent story within the world revolving around JARVIS being cloned, and providing a whole slew of fanservice such as battles with the Crimson Dynamo and Ultimo, but in every other respect, the game fails. It controls poorly. The collision detection is wonky, causing you to clip through walls and stumble on doorways. The timing windows to perform certain actions are unforgivably short and unreliable, and the prevalence of quick-time events just serves to underline the lack of any sort of design other than ‘fly around and shoot’. Tony Stark’s technological expertise should never be reduced to hammering the B button for five seconds.

Every single attempt the game has to provide depth is deeply flawed. Each level can be played as Iron Man or War Machine, with a variety of suit and weapon combinations available to suit any particular mission, unlockable through points earned while playing the game. This sounds fantastic on paper, allowing you to tailor a loadout to meet a specific set of enemies. I’d have loved to streak out into the sky with a chaingun and an arsenal of explosives ready to tear my enemies apart. In practice, though, the guns are weak and largely ineffective, and each battle boils down to firing repulsors while waiting for your missile supply to regenerate and hoping that you can dodge the seemingly random barrage of attacks that are sent your way.

To boil it down, Iron Man 2 is frustrating. It fights you every step of the way through everything it has you do, and the most frustrating thing is that it shouldn’t have to be. We’ve seen in the last year by way of several different studios that superhero games tied to movie licences can work, and while they range from the average to the fantastic there’s no need for them to be poor. Iron Man is a character with a unique skillset, Tony Stark is a fascinating and nuanced character, and there’s a great game begging to be made there – but this is so far from it it’s almost impossible to see the light at the end of the tunnel. All I want to do is suit up and jet effortlessly across the desert, but the best I can do is a string of poorly-engineered escort missions that prevent me from unleashing the power in the suit.

Iron Man is about being empowered and taking control, and in this game I feel underpowered and fighting for understanding. It’s not enjoyable in any sense of the word. I can’t recommend it to anyone, at any price.

[DEAL GOES HERE]

That’s what Sony does, it’s their DNA. They did it with the Compact Disc with the Playstation, DVD with the PS2, HD and just about managed Blu Ray with the PS3.

A tiny number of people will benefit from the 3DTV stuff. There will always be early adopters, and this is no exception, but I certainly don’t think 3DTV will be as popular as fast as Sony seem to want it to be.

The problem here is that they haven’t even finished servicing the technology they sold on the back of their games division before moving on to the next one. I can count the number of 1080p capable PS3 games that I own on one hand. They took a lot of money from their customers in return for HDTVs, but their console barely manages to use them to their full extent. Yet they have the cheek to tell you that you should buy a new 3DTV now, and a pair of their, proprietary, googles to experience the best experience of their gaming experience.

I bet they are terrified of the 3DS.

I say 3D is bollocks, for the time being at least. I think Sony are impatient, and they should wait until they can put out a console that is powerful enough to support 3D and 1080p resolutions without hampering game performance, because the PS3 certainly isn’t.

This leads to us getting frustrated at each other. He skips cutscenes, and I don’t. I talk to every NPC in a world, and he seeks out the next mission trigger. And when I lent him my copy of Red Dead Redemption, I urged him to watch the opening scenes that really lay down for the foundation for the world. I told him that it was a really smart exploration of American attitudes at the turn of the century. He told me that it was a bunch of talking on a train. And hit Skip.

It’s this fundamental difference that I think underlines why we disagree on a lot games, and why, ultimately, I think he’ll find the ending of Red Dead Redemption both boring and unsatisfying, whereas I thought it brilliant and interesting. Neither of us are wrong, of course – but I’m going to try my damnedest to prove that I’m right.

Fair warning – the rest of this post after the break contains spoilers for the end of Red Dead Redemption. If you haven’t seen the credits roll, then you haven’t seen some of the stuff I’ll be talking about.

In any other game, the idea of John’s wife and son being kidnapped would add nothing more than a layer of intrigue and a motivator to progress through the story. I don’t think I’m too far off the mark by saying that the majority of players, after the death of Dutch, expected the credits to roll after a brief cutscene with Abigail and Jack at the ranch. But, as a rather welcome surprise, you’re placed in exactly the position John’s been working toward for weeks. It’s sedate, it’s peaceful, and above all – it’s a vast difference from the guns-blazing assault on Cochinay just a few minutes before.

Beecher’s Hope is something to be treasured. John has been working throughout the entirety of the game for this moment, and allowing the player to experience it is a masterstroke – it allows both the feeling of the titular redemption to be played out, the slightly displaced nature of John in this setting to become readily apparent and allows an identification with the character that arguably wasn’t present throughout the earlier parts of the game. The player’s nature is to kill, kill and kill again, with the character’s motivations as firm afterthoughts. When presented with a town of fifty people, all of whom need to be slain before progress can be made, the player values that progress more than whether or not the character of John Marston would be comfortable with it. It’s a disconnect that we see in many game, but it’s thrown ever so sharply into light with the final scenes in Beecher’s Hope, where we realise that John, by our hand, has killed so many people just to be close to his family. It’s an emotional punch rather than a physical one, and it charges an even bigger emotional pot to spill over in just a few missions’ time.

Like any good tragedy – and make no mistake about it, Red Dead Redemption is a tragedy in the vein of so many Westerns – it can’t last. However, in order for John’s inevitable death to have any impact, we need to identify with what he’s leaving behind and understand why his death is tragic. It’s a problem that so many games face. How a player’s character dying be meaningful when they have died so many times previously and simply been able to restart?

Heavy Rain handled this rather well by ascribing death a meaning. Once a character died, there was no ability to restart and no arbitrary reason – the narrative continued along its way and every death was the fault of the player, meaning that there was a clear emotional tie between the player and the character. A death had more impact because it meant that you had failed as a player and could not recoup those losses. Red Dead doesn’t have that liberty – a player-controlled death is simply a stumbling block rather than a key event, and so to make that emotional tie, especially from a scripted event that can’t be controlled, the designer must create a strong tie between the player and the other characters that are so visibly affected.

Giving the player a second or two of Dead Eye in John’s final moments definitely feeds into this. The tiny sliver of hope when combined with the obvious fact that John is hopefully outnumbered just serves to finalise the impact – the player’s feelings mirror Jack’s when he comes across his father’s body in a way that they perhaps never did with John’s. While John seems to want to get away from his life while the player wants excitement (note that it’s possible to finish the game not having actively killed any of your three former gang members), Jack’s priorities are much clearer – simply to get revenge. The player and Jack both feel the same tie to John and while they may want it for different reasons, the character’s and player’s motivations match for perhaps the first time in Red Dead Redemption.

It allows a disconnect to happen between the player and John. No matter how you’ve been playing him, it allows John to remain John – another character in the scripted universe with his own motivations and ideals, with a full story that plays and concludes exactly how it was intended. As Jack, you can go onto a murderous rampage and be out for bloody revenge, opening up a new side to the game that as John may not have been considered. It allows for the sociopathic tendencies of Rockstar’s characters to be appropriately pigeonholed – while GTA IV’s Niko was slated for being written one way and – under the player’s control – acting another, those disparate tendencies are attached to John and Jack, and underline the final tragedy of them all; that Jack became just like – if not worse than – his father, and that in fact reflects exactly what the player wants to be.

In related news, issue 216 of PC Gamer is out on Thursday, subscribers should already have it. Some of my words have found their way into it. I wrote an article called “Gaming on a budget”, so I’ve not strayed far from my area of expertise. It has WOW: Cataclysm on the cover, and can be ordered online here (on Thursday), or found in petrol stations, super markets and corner shops across the land.

Load up Steam and buy yourself Mirror’s Edge.

Set about playing all the games that you have bought for cheap.

You can follow my festival antics on twitter.

I’m not quite sure how to respond to this. I’m reluctant to stop linking to their deals, particularly when they do have genuine discounts. I think I will just keep an extra close eye on them, and add a disclaimer to any posts for them that uses coupons.

I’m going away tomorrow (more on that later), but I’ll try to speak to trading standards to see what they have to say about it when I get back.

As an affiliate of lots of retailers, I get frequent emails from them telling me about their amazing offers. Sometimes they aren’t particularly good, sometimes they are, and I have to sort through them to find the best deals.

I got an email from The Hut telling me this:

Come celebrate your bank holiday weekend with www.thehut.com/home as we have gone voucher code crazy! These codes are available on EVERYTHING so don’t miss out this weekend! Massive savings and commissions are to be made!

So then I spent ages sorting through the games that they sell, and finding which ones were already a good price, so that they could be made even better by using the coupons. My policy with SavyGamer is that I never ever want to link to somewhere that isn’t the cheapest place to get a game from.

I found a bunch of great deals on games that they were already selling for cheap. Posted them up on SavyGamer along with the instructions of how to use the coupons. These offers were available for a short amount of time when I first posted them. Then, because they are dishonest, The Hut increased the prices of most of the games that were actually good deals when using those coupons. Here’s what they did:
Halo: Reach, Xbox 360 – was £37.93, £35.93 with coupon. Increased to £39.93, £37.93 with coupon.
Halo: Reach [Limited Edition], Xbox 360 – was £55.93, £51.93 with coupon. Increased to £59.93, £55.93 with coupon.
Brink, PC – was £24.93, £22.93 with coupon. Increased to £26.93, £24.93 with coupon.
Nier, Xbox 360 – was £17.93, £16.93 with coupon. Increased to £29.93, £27.93 with coupon.
Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, Wii – was £17.93, £16.93 with coupon. Increased to £23.93, £21.93 with coupon.
Battlefield: Bad Company 2, Xbox 360 – was £23.93, £21.93 with coupon. Increased to £39.93, £37.93 with coupon.
Battlefield: Bad Company 2, PS3 – was £23.93, £21.93 with coupon. Increased to £39.93, £37.93 with coupon.
Battlefield: Bad Company 2, PC – was £14.93, was £13.93. Increased to £29.93, £27.93 with coupon.
Batman: Arkham Asylum [GOTY], Xbox 360 – was £16.93, £15.93 with coupon. Increased to £17.93, £16.93 with coupon.
Napoleon: Total War [Imperial Edition], PC – was £12.93, £11.93 with coupon. Increased to £17.93, £16.93 with coupon.
Legend Of Zelda: Spirit Tracks, DS – was £17.93, £16.93 with coupon. Increased to £24.93, £22.93 with coupon.
GTA: Episodes From Liberty City, Xbox 360 – was £13.93, £12.93 with coupon. Increased to £29.93, £27.93 with coupon.
Forza Motorsport 3, Xbox 360 – was £12.93, £11.93 with coupon. Increased to £14.93, £13.93 with coupon.

As you can see, for the most part their prices were far better before the ‘discount’ coupon was made available. If I were cynical, which I definitely am, I’d say that this was a deliberate deception to increase traffic to their site without actually offering any discount at all. Some of these are preorders, so it’s hardly like they would have been issues with them running out of stock forcing them to increase the price.

I’m going to speak to them on Monday and see what they have to say for themselves. But from now on I am definitely going to keep an eye on how they fiddle with their prices whenever they do have discount coupons.

Looking pretty great, no?

I caught up with Edmund and Tommy from Team Meat to check up on how the game’s going. This is what ensued:
Team Meat on Super Meat Boy

Super Meat Boy is coming to PC, Mac, XBLA and Wiiware this summer. Follow the game’s development on the Team Meat blog here.

After getting caught having pirate code in the Steam release of Max Payne 2, it looks like they didn’t want to get caught with their pants down twice, and have tried to stealthily update some of their other games.

The problem is, they are breaking them in the process. Users on the Steam forums have reported issues like “no in-game sound” in GTA3 and “Vice City does not load at all“.

If you have these games, or any other Rockstar games on Steam, I suggest you turn off autoupdating:
1. Go to your games library.
2. Right click, then properties.
3. Updates tab, then select “Do not automatically update this game”.
4. Hit close.

This game has not been submitted to our pre-publication peer review process, and it has not been approved for distribution on Xbox Live Indie Games. We have guidelines in place that closely track requirements of content ratings boards worldwide and, among other things, prohibit the publication of strong sexual content. While we haven’t seen this game, we can confirm that if it is consistent with the description we have seen on the Internet, this game would not pass peer review and would not be permitted to be distributed on Xbox Live.

I spoke to Dan from Zombie Cow to see what he had to say for himself.

What exactly are you trying to do with privates? Are you just perverts?
Not particularly, no. Channel 4 wanted a game about sex education, so that’s what we made. It’s a little anarchic and unusual, but it’s all very abstract and cellular. The idea is to make a fun-and-funny little game that’ll drip-feed you a few things about safe sex while you’re there.

A Microsoft representative who has not seen the final game yet has speculated that privates won’t be allowed on Xbox live, does that come as a surprise?
Not massively, no. We always knew the Xbox version would be touch-and-go, you never know how people are going to react when it’s in review. Privates pokes the boundaries of the guidelines, but I’m pretty sure we fall on the right side of it – when you add in the valuable educational aspect I hope most people will err on the side of passing it.

Would you consider releasing an edited version of the game to comply with MS’s guidelines if that was the only way to get it on the Xbox?
We were discussing last night the idea of doing a badly-dubbed aeroplane movie cut, with all the risqué bits voiced over by different actors. I’d love that, it’d be brilliant. We’ll see. The core themes and messages would be the same no matter how we dressed it up, so probably not. But it’d be fun.

It seems a little strange to me that games like GTA4 and Fallout 3 are considered fine for the Xbox, but not an educational game like privates. What do you think this says about Microsoft’s outlook on sexual content?
As far as I’m concerned it’s their console, they’re completely entitled to do whatever they like with it. They’ve obviously got to be pretty careful about what goes up there, and they’re absolutely right to be cautious about Privates. It’s still very early days. I’m sure once everyone actually plays it, they’ll realise what a force for good the game is, and realise it’s in no way graphic.
The argument that sexual themes are intrinsically less harmful than fake violence feels a little flawed to me- life isn’t as black-and-white as all that.

Some idiots on the internet have already described Privates as pornography, what do you think to that?
It’s exponentially less ‘pornographic’ than the biology textbook I was given at age 11, put it that way.

Keep track of the game here, and Zombie Cow are on Twitter here. It’s still going to be coming to PC, but we’ll have to wait and see if it is made available for the Xbox.

Review by Laura Michet

A friend of mine sidled over and took a peek at my laptop screen. “Wo-oah,” he said. “That’s pretty.”

During the twenty minutes he spent watching me play Trine, this friend of mine came up with a number of bite-sized summaries of the game. According to him, Trine is “Lost Vikings with a chick in it,” “Lost Vikings: Bloom Effects Edition,” “Better than Lost Vikings because the guy who kills dudes with the sword is also the guy with the shield,” “Better at puzzles and platforming than Lost Vikings,” and plain-old “Better than Lost Vikings.” As he explained it, Lost Vikings was a critical part of his childhood. “Are you sure you don’t want to have a go at this yourself?” I asked. I wasn’t so sure that Trine really did trump Lost Vikings. “You know, to make sure it isn’t destroying your childhood memories completely?”

He declined. “It’s awesome just to watch,” he said.

And I suppose it is: Trine is gorgeous. It’s one of those games that go heavy on the bloom effects, yeah, but its setting is the kind of charming fantasy world that seems to require bloom. The environments are colorful, complex, and filled with careful detail. Moving from area to area within a level will sometimes trigger dramatic lighting changes that shift the whole mood of the game in an instant. Passing from a squalid and grey-green underground cave onto a sunny hilltop, or into a twilight forest of cool blues and crisp white moonlight, is absolutely beautiful. Graphically, Trine is a standout.

I disagree with my friend, however, about the ways in which it’s comparable to Lost Vikings, and I’m pretty sure that he would have disagreed, too, if he’d played it when I offered him the mouse. Single-player Trine doesn’t actually feel much at all like Lost Vikings. Lost Vikings, as you may recall, had all three characters onscreen at once, and each depended on the presence and positioning of the others. Single-player Trine, rather, has only one character in the game-world at a time: they replace one another with a keystroke and a flash of light. In Lost Vikings, none of the characters were self-sufficient; on the other hand, the neatest part about Trine is that each character can solve practically every puzzle in a different way. Though Trine is clearly indebted to the earlier game, particularly in its multiplayer, it’s impossible to not appreciate the quality of Frozenbyte’s fresh creative flourishes. The game feels unique and masterful.

At any rate, you’ve got three characters with three separate ability-sets. The Knight has a shield, lifts and throws heavy objects, and melees enemies; the Thief grapple-swings like Spiderman and shoots foes with her bow; the Wizard can levitate things and build his own physics objects. Most puzzles can be solved in three completely different ways, depending on which characters you use. Sometimes a deadly error forced me to solve a puzzle with the exact characters who seemed least-suited to handle it. The moments of victory which follow these challenges are among most satisfying in the game. As the set-piece puzzles grow in size and difficulty, they begin to involve hilarious combinations of swinging, spinning, and sliding environmental objects. Using the Wizard to transform a giant cog into a catapult to fling your knight across a pit filled with spikes, then switching to the thief at the last moment to claw to safety, hand over hand up your grappling rope, is incredibly satisfying, not to mention charmingly absurd.

The combat, on the other hand, is much less entertaining. There are about five different kinds of basic enemies, mostly variations on the “evil skeleton” formula. The first you meet is a skeleton with a sword. Then a skeleton with a bow. The next has a shield and a sword. The next has armor and a bow. There’s a firebreathing skeleton. There’s one with a stronger shield and a bigger sword. Blah, blah, blah. By the time you acquire weapon upgrades, defeating them becomes busywork. Also infuriating are the bats—for some reason, a cloud of bats can kill any character in about five seconds unless they run like hell in the opposite direction. Even if you’ve got the Knight out, with his increased health, you can’t target them very easily. Sometimes, you’ll just vault up into a cloud of the furry little jerks as if you’ve come to say hello, and while you swipe ineffectually with your sword they’ll devour you like midair piranhas. Which seems, frankly, stupid. Nevertheless, this bland and sometimes frustrating combat isn’t game-ruining. In fact, it’s actually rather fun in multiplayer, because you can kill everything twice as fast. It’s the sheer excellence of the rest package that makes me so conscious of the occasional ultra-lameness of the fighting.

Why are we fighting these skeletons anyway, you might ask? Well, Trine has a plot to explain that, but it’s paper-thin: it seems more like mood-setting or atmosphere than actual plot. You’re saving the world from some, uh, evil guy. He shows up in the last level. You’re able to control three characters at once because they all touched this one glowy thing while it was being magic and stuff. The wizard is a smooth-talking ladies’ man. The knight is brave and stupid. The Thief is secretive. The narrator sounds like a version of your grandfather who smokes a pipe and wears velvet. It’s exactly what people mean when they say ‘fairy-tale’—I felt like drinking a glass of warm cocoa while I played this, but I couldn’t figure out how to do that while also using the mouse and keyboard. This plot is brilliant in that it manages to set the exact right tone for the game without wasting any of your brain-power! Trine is a mood, ladies and gentlemen. Trine is both a physics puzzle-platformer and a feeling, simultaneously. Does this make sense to you? It makes sense to me.

As for the co-op multiplayer: it is marvelous. You are certainly cheating yourself out of at least fifty percent of the fun of the game if you don’t play multiplayer at least once. After beating it in single-player I completed about three-quarters of the game through in multiplayer, at first with only one partner, then with two others. The game feels quite a bit like Lost Vikings when you can’t switch at will between the characters. Puzzles which were once simple can become quite complicated when you’ve got two other people to worry about, while puzzles which took me fifteen minutes to figure out in single-player sometimes took less than a single minute with someone else onscreen to help. Though it’s disorienting, this keeps the puzzles fresh: playing through in co-op is just as exciting even after you’ve finished the single-player game once already.

Once, however, while caught as the thief at the bottom of a pit filled with skeletons, watching the wizard gleefully drop physics objects and spiked balls on my head while the knight hopped away offscreen like an armed mental ward escapee, I realized that this game is incredibly entertaining when you play like a dangerous maniac. It becomes a physics playground draped in bloom-effects, and there’s no reason not to take advantage of that, even if it means dropping skeletons on your friends until they shout at you. We saw no reason to always play the multiplayer ‘straight’. The characters are all a little bit self-sufficient—your friends can stand having a crate kicked in their face once or twice a level. Or three times. Or every other second. At any rate, the multiplayer is hands-down excellent, no matter what attitude you bring to it.

However: the camera control in multiplayer is pretty terrible, particularly in three-person co-op. Occasionally, characters will run off of opposite sides of the screen and die invisibly because the camera can only zoom out a very, very limited distance. Every level had a few problems related to this, and it eventually became frustrating, particularly since some of the levels seem to give good strategic reasons for the characters to split up.

Overall, however, I had an incredibly positive experience with Trine. It gets so much right that its few faults are pretty easy to ignore. Its single-player can be brain-wrenchingly challenging, and its multiplayer adds solid replay. Particularly if you plan on playing with friends, Trine is a brilliant way to take a break from the sometimes-tiresome rigmarole of gunplay-based co-op games. It’s like ‘Splosion Man in that way, I think: interesting already in single-player, but rewardingly fresh in multiplayer, too. You and your friends will probably finish it in only a few play sessions, and then maybe decide to take on the free, mind-bogglingly-difficult, so-far-PC-only DLC, Path to a New Dawn, together. I haven’t even beaten that in solo play yet—it’s crazy-tough. Whether or not it will also be coming to PSN is unclear at this point, but even if it doesn’t, it’s still a game I would energetically recommend.

Trine, PC – £4.99 delivered

Part of why trade-ins work in the real world is that there is free market economies going on. If I buy a game from HMV, and then want to trade it in at Gamestation, I am free to do so (so long as Gamestation stay in business that is).

Green Man Gaming is broken because in their fictitious economy you cannot trade in games bought elsewhere, you can only trade in their games back to them, and you don’t get money back, you get credit. Whether that credit is any good to you is largely determined by how much money you want to spend there. I’d be pretty annoyed if I had a shedload of money invested in Green Man Gaming and then they stopped having decent special offers, whilst I look at the other DD outlets with their frequent excellent promotions. Unless they promise to have a library as broad as the other outlets, and match them on price, there will be situations where you are worse off having chosen to give Green Man Gaming your money. There’s also no information available about how they calculate trade in values. Is it going to be 90% of sale price? 50% 2%?

Still, there is no reason not to capitalise on their crazy low introductory offers. A bunch of games for 1p.

Uplink
Darwinia
NecroVisioN: Lost Company
World of Goo
High School Dreams

However, this is a pretty great example of how it won’t work in the long run. In a few months time, what is the trade in price of these games going to be? The sale price will be back up to RRP, so surely I should get a trade-in price that reflects that?

It is pretty insulting to ask people to invest into a system when they can’t even fully explain it to customers. Hit “support” button, and you’ll simply be told “No topics found”.

I’d avoid it to be honest, but I will keep an eye on it for good offers too.

I certainly wouldn’t still be doing it today if it wasn’t for you lot. Thanks to all of you for support.

As a special reward, listen to our third Birthday Podcast Special (it’s just a normal podcast, but birthdayier) to be in with a chance of winning Red Dead Redemption on your console of choice. It’ll be up at some point today.

I’ve had a few people express an interest in making donations to SavyGamer, as a thank you for the hard work I put in. I’ll be frank, SavyGamer isn’t going to disappear if no one makes any donations, I make more than enough from running the site to pay for hosting and make a profit at the end of each month. If you’d like to buy me a pint, but aren’t near enough to go to the pub with me here is a paypal donation button.

If you want to help me out in a different way, spreading SavyGamer to anyone you think might find it useful is a big help to me. I don’t really do much marketing, and word of mouth is probably the best way for the number of people using this site to grow.

Extra special thanks to:
Will, for always being near a computer when I am not, always agreeing with me when I am right and disagreeing with me in the right way when I am wrong.
Everyone who has ever contributed any articles to SavyGamer, particularly Rob who will no doubt soon be snapped up by a publication that will offer him money for his nice words.
Alec, Jim, John and Kieron, for letting me put my words on their web site every week.
All the nice PR people who have given me free games.
All the lovely developers who have talked to me as if I was a proper journalist.
All the retailers that have some semblance of competition, and sometimes have good deals.
Anyone who has ever linked to, RT’d or read anything on SavyGamer.

Hugs, kisses and hi5s all round.
Lewie

It’s like Goozex would be, if they actually operated in our economy and not in some imaginary points economy that they can’t balance properly. Or maybe CEX if they ran a competent business.

You can buy and sell games in a similar way to Amazon Marketplace, and they have a lot of good introductory offers at the minute.

Using this sign up link, you get a free £5 spend (as will I). They are also giving a £10 voucher to anyone that sells 10 items or more before the end of July.

I’m probably going to buy something on it tonight. Let me know what you guys think of it too – it might be worth keeping a close eye on.

We realised just now that it didn’t actually exist. Until now.

Remember this Friday is SavyGamer game night, we’re playing L4D2′s new mutation mode, which is going to be Bleed Out. Join the steam group to play the PC version, and add We R SavyGamers to play the 360 version.

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Review by Lewie Procter

I’m not sure exactly how to approach distilling my opinion on the new Tom Clancy’s™ Splinter Cell™ game down into text. Unlike the game itself there is more than one way I could accomplish that goal. Tom Clancy’s™ Splinter Cell™ has had a complete overhaul. Remember how in the old Tom Clancy’s™ Splinter Cell™ games you had to think? Not any more. In the place of intelligent stealth action is flashy whiz bang punchy shooty nonsense, where the most complex challenge you’ll ever have to solve is “how do I press the button that the game tells me to”.

Part of me wishes I could forget that it exists, or at least it didn’t have “Tom Clancy’s™ Splinter Cell™” in the name. But undeniably it is the next chapter in the continuing adventures of Mr Cell, so I’ll start by comparing it to it’s predecessors.

Chaos Theory was bloody brilliant. If you’ve not played it, it’s cheap on Steam and the oxbox version is 360 compatible. I didn’t particularly like either of the first games, but Chaos Theory was just incredible.

It got all the big details right. The levels were intelligently designed to give the player lots of smaller objectives which could often be tackled in different orders. There was always more than one way to solve any given scenario. Guns blazing worked, but you’d be better off sneaking in the shadows, taking out the baddies when no one looked.

New to Chaos Theory was that you never got game over for being spotted. There was a system in the first Tom Clancy’s™ Splinter Cell™ where if you got seen 3 times it was game over, and they got rid of that. This was a good thing. See, in Chaos Theory, if you were ever seen, you could manage get away from the baddies and hide. After taking someone out, be it lethally or non-lethally, you could hide their body out of line of sight from other guards patrolling the area. You could mess with the guards by whistling to get their attention. The ammo was very limited so it forced you to think about every single shot fired.

It also got all the small details right too. The phenomenal soundtrack by Amon Tobin was brilliantly used, always triggering crescendos at appropriate times. The interrogation system made some guards have useful nuggets of non-essential information. So if you could get up to a guard alone, you might find out exactly how many cameras a building has, or a keycode to a door which lets you avoid confrontation later.

Conviction is a very different game.

Is it actually even a game? It’s definitely a cinematic experience, but all of the best bits about it are either non-interactive or pseudo-interactive.

Mark and execute is the big new mechanic. It lets you tag guys at your leisure for “automatic kill at the press of a button”. To be able to pull off an execution, you need to have recently melee killed a baddie, and then you can kill several baddies automatically at once. It’s a bit of a broken mechanic. For starters, when they’ve removed most of the elements of the game that aren’t shooting, it’s kind of patronising game design to let the game seize control of the shooting too. But also, once you have marked an enemy, you get a HUD icon showing you exactly where they are, and if you have line of sight with them. This means that you could see an enemy in a doorway, tag them, and then they could walk away from you, out of your line of sight, and the player would still know exactly where the enemy was. This is information that Sam Fisher wouldn’t have any way of possibly knowing. When executing a, uh, execution, you do get a bad ass slow mo camera effect that looks a bit cool. Closeups of baddies receiving bullets to the face are flashy and brutal, but I’d happily trade them for just a slither of substance.

The interrogation system is now a violence porn cut-scene punctuating the missions, where you press a button to make Sam do lots of hurting at the people he is interrogating. Then you wait a bit. Then you press the button again. It’s not too far removed from a DVD menu, except you get to move the camera and walk around too. You don’t ever have to worry if anyone else is around because the game locks you in a small area as soon as the interrogation starts, even if you were in a big wide open space only moment ago. Laughably, when there is a crowd of guards and the game has decided that you need to interrogate one of them, it becomes impossible to kill the last one. I thought this was a glitch at first, but after killing six out of seven of a group of guards, my crosshair turned into a big “X” when I tried to target the last one. Instead of letting me kill the last one and miss out on the information like I might have done in previous games, Conviction grabs the player by the arm, and says “no, you have to do this the way that I have planned for you to do it, stop trying to have any control over your actions.”

The same refusal to let the player decide what they want to do applies to the mission structure. The mission are all linear. They are A to B to C to D. There’s no room for the player to decide which objective to complete first, and only occasional superficial decisions about which path to take. This door or that door, which both lead to the same room. By default there is an arrow that always appears on the HUD telling you which direction to go. Because there is only ever one direction to go. Previous Splinter Cells directly encouraged and rewarded experimentation. They were about pushing the player to think of new ways to use your equipment and environment to achieve a range of goals, with freedom to bring your own personality into how you played it. Conviction is about doing what the game tells you to do, when it tells you to do it.

In a startling display of backward thinking, there are multiple missions where if you get spotted just once, it is game over. Restart mission. Watch cutscene again. Retry. This is a game design convention that is so dated that the very same series even parodied it back in 2005, yet here it is back in full force.

Even when you don’t fail a mission, the check point save system isn’t particularly well designed. There are a whole load of times when it feels like the checkpoints make you repeat way more than you need to, and even more occasions where they place you before a cut scene or conversation.

I do have to begrudgingly give props to certain aspects of Conviction. There is a fair amount of variety in where the missions take place, and they are universally good looking. It is definitely a good looking game, the animation, lighting, and particularly the mission information HUD are all visually pleasing.

It does at one point use a brilliant song by DJ Shadow.

It manages to integrate the mechanics of the game into the story at a few points too (notably one whilst that song is playing). Where something happens in the story, and then there is a minor change to how the game plays to reflect that, although the choice at the very end of the game is a pretty feeble cop out.

So what’s left at the end of all that? An acceptable cover shooter with some superficial trappings of a stealth game. To what end? Accessibility? Well congratulations Ubisoft, you’re at the top of the charts. I hope you’re proud of yourselves.

Splinter Cell: Conviction, Xbox 360 – £27.95 delivered

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Review by Bobby Foster

Routine is important. I get that. Like most people, I learnt young that failing to brush your teeth every morning has disastrous consequences both hygienically and socially. And although I’ve always kinda felt that the alarm clock is the cruellest machine mankind ever made, I’ve come to accept that you have to use one to be successful in the modern world.

Yet it’s still true that the darkest and most powerful depression that ever took hold of any of us stemmed from the realisation that we’re dancing to the beat of someone else’s drum. With worrying ease, routine has the power to take us prisoner, and its capacity to rob us of our freedom and creativity is the reason every blues song you ever heard was about the same thing. We all want control of our own destiny.

As it is in life, so it is in videogames. The most pointless and facile titles are those that one person plays in exactly the same way as the next. A game with a linear plot and one-solution puzzles never lets me feel like I’m playing. I want to experiment, take risks and work out my own way of doing things. In fact, my ability to do that within the safe context of videogames is one of the key reasons I continue to tolerate the humdrumity of the rest of my existence.

So if I say Japanese Role Playing Games aren’t usually for me, it shouldn’t come as a surprise. They mostly seem like an attempt to tell the most long-winded story possible in the most roundabout way imaginable. Despite their elaborate battle systems they’re often pathetically formulaic, and thanks to their needless complexity they end up rewarding conservative play over experimentation. Remembering to equip all my party members with fire-based weapons when I enter a dungeon made of ice won’t ever make me feel creative or resourceful. In fact, I’d probably feel more fulfilled stepping away from the game and flossing between my teeth.

Persona 3 is a roleplaying game that was developed in Japan. Most of the male characters have stupid-looking spiky hair while your female party members are the usual collection of highly sexualised teenagers. It asks you to spend a lot of time comparing stats and collecting items. And the battle system involves everyone taking it in turns to hit each other. It goes without saying that it’s just as boring, creepy and pointless as the rest of its Far-Eastern genre-mates, right?

Wrong. This is among the most inventive, unpredictable, funny, engaging, well written and charmingly constructed games it’s possible to play on the PS2. Really. It’s blown my usual “modern JRPGs are all the same” shtick completely out of the water.

It probably helps that it’s not set in the kind of fantasy-cum-futuristic universe that’s become so over-familiar since Final Fantasy VII first popularised it. Here we’re based in the present (a setting still bizarrely underused in the genre), and the game starts with you arriving at a new school for the start of an academic year. Half of the game is based around the routine of school life: attending lessons, hanging out with your classmates, and deciding what extra-curricular activities you want to take part in. The other half, which follows from the early discovery that you’re no ordinary school boy, is about battling through Cerberus, the demonic tower that appears on the school grounds each day at midnight.

I don’t want to waste too much time on the details of the story, as the game’s anime sequences do a more impressive and stylish job of explaining the supernatural aspects of the plot than I ever could. What’s important is the way the paranormal and mundane elements of the story blend together. To be as powerful as possible when you go out dungeon-crawling, you need to have developed your relationships with your class mates and other people living in town, because as acquaintances become close friends, your ability to channel stronger magic increases. This allows these two very distinct parts of the game to provide variety without ever feeling pointless.

One interesting consequence of this “chat-up to level-up” mechanic is the possibility it raises that your character is a total sociopath. You might for instance ask yourself: am I befriending the boorish fat kid with no mates because I have an interest in him and his well-being, or because I need to get him to like me in order to max out the abilities I want? You’re certainly not likely to waste any time with him once you know he’s unlocked all the power that he has to give, because by far the most effective strategy is to keep moving from one emotionally needy person to the next to increase your powers as quickly as possible.

Happily it’s an issue that’s never fully resolved, giving the game a shade-of-grey moral atmosphere that’s almost unheard of in Japanese RPGs.

Yet more important than the ambiguous motivation of the leading man is the amount of control you have over how to play the game. Although the main story arc is about as linear as they come, you have plenty of freedom to choose which characters you engage with and therefore which powers you develop. It’s down to you who you speak to or ignore, and what order you deal with people. Crucially, there isn’t time to develop all the available friendships to their fullest, which adds weight to your decisions. Regardless of how efficiently your try to play the game, you will be left with loose ends by the time the school year ends, so you’re forced to prioritise.

Of course, none of this would have much significance if the game’s dozens of supporting characters were underdeveloped or uninteresting, but thankfully they’re among the most memorable you’re likely to encounter in a game. Some are charming, others funny, and a couple out-right twisted- and the writers and translators should be congratulated on the job they’ve done in making all of them worth caring about. Admittedly some of the romantic elements can feel pretty hackneyed, and you’re not going to gain any great insight into the nature of human relationships, but you could say the same about a TV series like Buffy the Vampire Slayer. You’ll still likely come away heavily invested in a well put-together ensemble of characters.

The dungeon-crawling is where there’s probably the biggest cause for complaint. Aside from the turn-based combat (which some will surely find an immediate turn-off) the layout of the tower is randomly generated, with very little variety in the types of rooms and corridors you’re walking through. In what is otherwise a very good-looking game, it’s disappointing that the sections you spend so much time exploring are really very repetitive and unattractively designed.

That said, it’s sufficiently redeemed by the fact you’re never allowed to switch onto autopilot. Almost every battle requires at least a little thought about which attacks you use, and the game demands that you’re willing and able to adjust your set up on the fly. Most fights work out so that if you get it right, and you can wipe out your enemies while scarcely taking a hit, but if you get it a bit wrong, the situation can turn precarious very quickly. It’s the proverbial glass cannon approach, and it’s very effective at keeping the player on their toes and preventing complacency.

What’s less successful is the decision to only give the player direct control over the lead character. Your team-mates can be given vague tactical instructions each turn, but you can’t specify exactly what action they take. In principle it’s an idea that could work, but it relies on having AI companions who are capable of consistently making smart –or at least rational- decisions. Unfortunately here your party members act foolishly a little too frequently, and when that happens in the crucial phase of a boss battle it’s hard not to feel like you’ve been stitched up.

Yet despite these occasional moments of frustration, Persona 3 still stands head and shoulders above other Japanese RPGs. There’s an element of genuine craft involved when fashioning a character that works for you, both through choosing which relationships your pursue, and in the constant evolution of your abilities. You often have to sacrifice powers you’d previously relied on to create the new and more powerful “Persona” that grant you your power, and this keeps the game feeling fresh and interesting from beginning to end. Or at least, I never felt like an idle spectator at a 100-hundred hour long CGI fireworks display, in the way some games might have made me feel in the past.

That’s the irony here. A game that’s based around the rigid timetable of school life, uses a very limited range of locations, and involves returning to the same dungeon again and again is in fact more inventive and varied than hundreds of others that try to create vast worlds for you to explore. I’ve barely scratched the surface of all the things Persona 3 has to offer – in particular the 30 hours of epilogue content that comes with FES Edition – but I don’t think I need to. It’s a game best explored for yourself, full of opportunities to develop your own tactics, and packed full of wonderful little surprises. I’m trying to think on an RPG on the PS2 that I’ve enjoyed more, and am coming up empty. Really. Go get it.

Persona 3 FES – £14.95 delivered

It is a big deal.

This is what the House of Commons looked like as it was being debated:

Via fscked.co.uk

Both parties that are trying to push this bill seem to be happy to break the rules it outlays too.

Evil/Oblivious, you decide, but they are certainly hypocrites. Are they trying to make me vote lib dem?

I’ve decided to assemble an elite team of hot chicks who can show those boys that girls can kick ass at reading too! It is going to be awesome. Go super-feminism! You can dominate those boys if you try hard enough!

Phase 1: A competition. I need to find girls that can read the most words in a day, to prove that they have the most attitude and mad literary skillz. Being able to read lots of words proves that potential Book Bitchez have got what it takes to be supreme literacy aspiration figures, and just have lots of fun

Phase 2: Then we get all the successful Book Bitchez candidates from phase 1, and have a photoshoot of them reading books, to see who has got the real spirit within to spread the power of feminine reading to the world, and show once and for all that girls can read too!

Phase 3: Once we have picked our team of extra-awesome Book Bitchez, we set up blogs where the world can see the real side to our hot girls. We photoblog, videoblog, and most importantly wordblog about what it takes to fight the power, and promote reading for girls around the world! Go lady literacy!

Phase 4: Then we send our team of Book Bitchez to book events to push whatever the publishers that give us financial backing ask us to whore out, and spread the word about how girls can read just as well as boys. That way everyone can hear our message of female word power!

If you think you have got what it takes to be a figurehead for gals who like reading, email us at pleaseobjectifyme@formoneyandattention.com

Notes:
No fatties

It’s just beautiful.

Games need more that just good looks. We all know that prettiness only goes so far, but Limbo is probably the closest I have ever seen to a game that could get by on it’s visual merits alone.

It literally stopped people in their tracks. There was always a crowd of people just stood starring at whoever was having their turn at the time.

It was a fairly long demo. When I put the headphones on and fixed my eyes to the screen, the people in line, the rest of the convention, and the rest of the world just disappeared. I was playing limbo.

Let’s go back a bit though.

Lets go back to when I first saw that teaser trailer. I’ll admit it, I was sceptical. I saw that and said to myself “What a fantastic looking animation. It’s a shame no game could ever look that good in motion, or at least it would have to sacrifice having tight controls to do so”.

They only went and did it.

Limbo controls fantastically. The boy with those piercing white eyes does what he is told. He responds to the environmental, slowly extending his hand, ready to grab things as he approaches them. He walks, sprints, jumps, falls and dies with incredible realness. This is what Jordan Mechner was looking for in the footage of his brother in white pyjamas. One animator spent 3 years working on the animation of the boy, and it really shows.

From what I have played so far, you only die if you are doing something wrong. You will die a bunch of times, and are rewarded by some tragic death animations.

It is a puzzle platformer. You move from left to right, and solve puzzles along the way. Puzzles are clever, and rely on interacting with the environment in intelligent ways.

I’m sold.

I’m going to shut up about it and let Producer Mads Wibroe talk about it.
Interview with Limbo producer Mads Wibroe

Limbo is out on XBLA between June and August.

There was a huge hustle and bustle at the Aksys booth at PAX. A teeming crowd of geeks were crowded around their screens. All clamouring to take part in a BlazBlue tournament to win a T-Shirt or something. There was a screen with a Wii controller balanced next to it, and no one playing. I wormed my way to the front to see that it was playing Bit.Trip.Runner. I asked “Can I play this please”, and the nice PR man said “sure!” and gave me a badge.

I was a happy Lewie.

I didn’t really understand why no one wanted to play Bit.Trip.Runner, but it was their loss. It could possibly be the best of the Bit.Trip series yet. The previous three Bit.Trip games have been fairly abstract rhythm action games, with moving blocks and neo-retro graphic loveliness. Runner is essentially a platformer. The obvious comparison to make is Canabalt. Both constantly scroll from left to right, and have minimalist controls, but runner is much more like a proper game™. It uses three buttons to jump, slide and kick, which you use to get over obstacles, get under obstacles and to kick things. It has baddies and bosses and lives and things like that.

Commander Video has been the mascot and guy flying around in the background in the past, but he’s jumping to centre stage in runner, as you take direct control of him. He leaves a happy rainbow trail in his wake, and the graphics are just an explosive celebration of the beauty of pixels. The sweet sweet chiptune music that the series is famous for is back, although I couldn’t hear it anyway near as much as I would have liked to over the PAX crowds. Anamanaguchi is doing the menu and credits theme.

There is a cameo from Meatboy, and I bet there will be lots of other similar things to look for as the world scrolls by.

If you can watch this whole trailer without cracking a smile, there’s probably something wrong with you.

I walked over to the Ubisoft stand at PAX, grabbed a controller and stuck on the pair of headphones. Then a pretty lady in a skin tight Ubisoft shirt walked over to me, and started talking at me. I couldn’t hear, because I had put the headphones on. I took off the headphones purely out of politeness.

She said “Hi there. So this is the new Prince of Persia”. Which I already knew because of the huge 20 foot Prince of Persia banner, and the title screen.

I replied “Yeah, I am interested to see how it plays. I didn’t like the previous one at all”.

She said “Oh….OK. I don’t really know about that one. I’ve only played Warriors Within….The third one….That was the one where the girl followed you around, and you let the demon out of the tree right?”

I told her that I thought she was thinking of “Prince of Persia 2008″. Then she said “Yeah…sure. All I remember is that it was super awesome.”

I carried on playing the game, and I did an attack that was one I first remember seeing in the Sands of Time (you leap over a guy and stab him mid air). She then said “Now tell me that isn’t super badass!”

I didn’t think it was super badass.

I carried on for a bit, pretty much attempting to tune her out at this point. Then someone who was playing next to me got stuck somewhere. It turned out it was their first time playing a Prince of Persia game. I glanced over, and it looked like a bit that you had to do a walljump. In fact, it was obviously a bit where you had to do a walljump. Anyone who had played any of the previous four Prince of Persia games would have instinctively know that straight away. I heard the girl in the Ubisoft shirt say “Um…I think maybe you have to jump?”. Jumping didn’t work at all, so I leant over and suggested trying to do a walljump instead.

It worked straight away.

Then the girl in the Ubisoft shirt said to me “Wow! You should be doing this job!”

I’m probably far to jaded to do an effective job working for Ubisoft PR, but by her own admission I probably would have been better at her job that she was.

She turned around, and the back of her shirt said “Frag Dolls” on it, and it all made sense.

Fuck you Ubisoft. Fuck you for not sending over any of your hundred strong development staff to show off your new game. If indie devs like Hello, Play Dead and Mommy’s Best Games can be developers on the show floor so can you. If other big studios like Realtime Worlds, Ruffian, and Turbine can have large numbers of development staff on the floor, so can you. If I was looking at Lord of the Rings online, and I wanted to ask something about their audio, Turbine would have had a member of their sound team on the floor for me to talk to. If I wanted to ask Jason how Grapple Buggy was going, he was right there for me to ask. Why are you so terrified of letting your customers speak to the people that actually make your products?

Fuck you Ubisoft. Fuck you for not having PR staff that know their stuff. I went to see a presentation on Civ5, and it was a PR/Marketing guy giving the presentation. He knew his stuff. He spoke in detail about the intricacies of the Civilisation games, and answered questions in a coherent and knowledgeable fashion. If 90% of gamers who are playing your games at events like PAX know more about your games than the PRs responsible for showing them off, you are hiring the wrong PRs.

Fuck you Ubisoft. Fuck you for making me feel ashamed to be a gamer. PAX of all places is a hugely inclusive event, and I would have been embarrassed to have taken a female friend to your booth there. You have obviously not got the quality games to stand on their own, but promoting them to my penis instead of my brain is insulting to me, demeaning to women, and shows you up as the old boys club you are.

You’re an embarrassment to the industry. You are acting like pre-pubescent teenagers that have just discovered page 3, and the lack of respect you have for your customers will be your undoing.

Update: Follow the discussion on this post on the official Ubisoft forums, with their corporate mouthpieces giving their opinions on what I have said here.