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.

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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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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.

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]

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

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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

by Will Templeton

There’s something about PixelJunk games that distils the absolute best mechanics of a genre down to a seemingly simple experience. It’s a pattern and an ethos that Q-Games have followed for each of the series – take a base mechanic, stretch it to the best of its ability without straying too far from it, build a game around the abilities that are produced and release it, all within the span of an extremely short development cycle.

There’s also something about PixelJunk games which embodies some of the most frustrating gaming experiences possible. Because the games are so tightly constructed, there is often a very fine line between complete success and total failure, and it’s a line that all the Pixeljunk games dance on.

PixelJunk Shooter exemplifies these opposites in a game that forces the perfectionist in you to strive for just one more run at the level, and the designer in you to cry out in frustration at some of the choices that were made. It’s not that Shooter is badly-made, it just doesn’t seem polished enough.

The base mechanic is, as always, sound, a seamless blend of the dual-stick controls present in games like Geometry Wars and a gravity-based approach that hearkens back to Thrust. There are several manoeuvres that your ship can perform, but rather unfortunately some are never explained, and all fast become necessary to proceed. It’s indicative of a slight lack of finesse in PixelJunk Shooter – while the game is quick to detect when a player is stuck and provide hints, these can be insufficient more often than not and can require a little too much experimentation on the player’s part to proceed.

As the game progresses, and the player slowly figures out more and more of the abilities at their disposal, PixelJunk Shooter opens up to quite a sophisticated and crafted experience. Once comfortable with the suite of abilities available, attention can be focused more on each individual level, which operates like very much like a self-contained puzzle. The elements work almost exactly as you’d expect – cooled lava becomes rock, melted ice leaves water behind, and so forth. With these very limited set of tools, it becomes a challenge to use each of them to not only progress through the level but also to save your allies trapped within – kill too many of them by any means and the level has to be repeated. Soon, the caves start requiring much more pre-planning and less obvious a path to success, meting out reward very satisfactorily.

It’s unfortunate, then, that as soon as Shooter begins to pick up steam that it throws up a roadblock. At the end of each cave is a large boss fight, which while in itself is a rather welcome break from the standard game, requires a certain amount of gems found in earlier levels to unlock – and they’re easy to miss. The hunt through each of the previous levels for just a few extra gems can be very tedious, and takes a lot of the momentum out before allowing the player to re-engage in the experience.

PixelJunk Shooter’s biggest problem, though, is that it’s over before it gets a chance to begin. By the time the player has become fully comfortable with everything it has to offer, it’s already reaching its crescendo. While it might be the most accessible of the PixelJunk games to date, there’s also not enough of it to access, and ultimately leaves the player wanting more bang for their buck. It’s a missed opportunity more than anything else – while there’s obviously a very sound game underneath, it’s wrapped in a shroud of awkwardness and lacklustre signposting. For anyone willing to work at it, the rewards are there, but they’re buried very well.

£20 PSN card, £17.95 (Game cost: £6.29)

Review by Bobby Foster

The first thing you’ll notice about Mass Effect 2 is the quality of the Brylcreem all the characters use. Every haircut in this universe stays perfectly shaped at all times, even when the hair is really long. It’s a truly exciting vision of what the future of hair care holds.

That’s a lie. It’s probably more likely the 112th thing you’ll notice. (At the start of the game nearly everyone is wearing a space helmet, so you don’t get to experience the amazing static hair thing until later.) Yet this game has the power to brainwash. You’ll find that when you do pick up on the slightly weird looking hair, your mind will have become so used to thinking “wow this is great!” that it won’t be able to accept that the game you’re playing could have any flaws.

“There’s no way the programmers could have run out of memory for proper hair physics. It’s just part of the fiction. In this universe they’ve mastered faster-than-light travel so they probably have pretty awesome hair gel. Makes sense. Probably referenced in the books somewhere.”

In fact, Mass Effect 2 is such a tremendous game that you’ll still be thinking “wow this is great!” when you’ve accidentally popped out from cover in the middle of a gunfight for the fifth time and have been left staring at the reload screen. (In other titles they call it the “game over” screen, but here you’re always so eager to carry on playing that it would be a totally inappropriate thing to name it.)

The part of you that hasn’t utterly succumbed to Mass Effect 2′s engaging story, believable characters, and enjoyable dialogue (and which is probably the same part of you that exists to make sure you don’t forget other important things in your life such as sleeping and eating) might nag at you that there’s no way the game should have interpreted your controller inputs as a command to spring out from cover. It might even ask the perfectly valid question, “if that doesn’t happen to me in Gears of War, why does it have to happen here?”

Mass Effect 2 doesn’t allow such questions to linger for long. The combat is so vastly improved over its predecessor that it guilt-trips you for nitpicking. While the cover system is certainly still not perfect, it’s a helluva lot more responsive and dynamic than it used to be, and at least a match for how it’s been done in games like Grand Theft Auto 4. Weapons now feel like they’ve actually got some weight and clout, and firing them feels satisfying in a way that the previous game never really managed. There’s also a greater variety of weapons to choose from, even for those playing a class that isn’t a weapons specialist, while they’ve gotten rid of all the faffing around in clumsy menus that plagued the first title.

Of course, beyond just shooting at people, your team also has various ‘biotic’ and ‘tech’ powers (which are basically the futuristic equivalent of magic). These too have been improved from the first game, so that you can now satisfyingly curl shots around or over cover. Additionally, the decision to put all these powers on the same recharge timer (i.e. each character can only use one at a time) makes deciding how to use them a lot more tactical than before. In the first Mass Effect, the majority of players will have spammed all their powers as soon as there were several enemies in the room. Now you’re forced to give a little more thought to how to use them and in what order.

It’s probably important to point out that this game isn’t just about trying to kill enemies though. There’s a lot of talking. And although in most videogames the bits where the characters talk to each other are rubbish, in Mass Effect 2 they’re really good. This is a videogame script that successfully combines suspense, intrigue and comedy, and that’s a pretty rare thing. The voice-acting, although occasionally a little too earnest from the supporting cast, is for the most part utterly convincing- especially if your Commander Shepard is female and voiced by Jennifer Hale instead of Mark Meer. There were times when I laughed out loud, not because of wooden delivery or dodgy lines, but because the game had tried to be funny and succeeded. That really doesn’t happen very often in videogames.

Yet what you, I and the world are probably going to remember as Mass Effect 2′s crowning achievement is the way it continues the story from the first game. In the first Mass Effect you had a lot of decisions to make, some in seemingly inconsequential conversations with bit-part characters, to other life-or-death dilemmas about the fate of an entire alien species. These all carry over when you import your saved game, and it gives the player a sense of ownership over the story in a way that no other game has managed. Perhaps more significantly, it also adds extra weight to all the new decisions you make, as Mass Effect 3 is guaranteed to make you feel the repercussions of choices made in both Mass Effect 2 and the first game.

The videogame press has always been pretty eager to throw hyperbole around, but this truly does feel like a landmark in interactive story telling. The pacing, which was quite severely misjudged in the first title, is now spot on, and special mention should probably go to an opening section that exhilarates instead of testing the player’s patience. Although some might object to the transparently formulaic way you go about recruiting your team and making them loyal to you, they’re all interesting enough characters with sufficiently varied back-stories that you’re never left feeling like you’re going through the motions.

So probably the worst thing about Mass Effect 2 is that you have to play the first Mass Effect to get the most out of it. Which is a bit like saying that the worst thing about going out to a restaurant for dinner is that the starter’s not as satisfying as the main meal. What’s for certain is that your mouth will be watering at the prospect of dessert.

Review by Bobby Foster

Games in the early 90s mostly didn’t bother with narrative. The titles that sold best recreated the kind of experiences people were having in arcades, and you’d probably only catch a glimpse of a “plot” in the opening couple of screens. Even there, the aim was mostly to explain what the player needed to do and what was meant to be represented by the crude in-game graphics. Games that aimed to build a meaningful relationship between player and avatar were almost non-existent.

This made the original Secret of Monkey Island stand out: it not only had a story, but it was funny. The protagonist, Guybrush Threepwood, had enough personality that you could even call him lovable. Helped by the fact that the game looked stunning for its time, players the world over were charmed, and it set a precedent for the long line of LucusArts SCUMM games that would eventually peak with the masterful Full Throttle.

Almost twenty years have passed since that first Monkey Island game, during which time the scale, ambition and scope of videogames have all grown exponentially. In the years between 1991 and 2009 we moved from playing the simplistic Catacomb 3D to the bombastic Modern Warfare 2, and progressed from managing the lives of insects in Sim Ant to letting narratives emerge in the Sims 3. This sense of progress and improvement is a major part of what keeps us all coming back to these clever electronic toys, and so I can’t help feeling a little disappointed that Tales of Monkey Island has turned its back on twenty years of progress and improvement.

Aside from the graphical overhaul, there’s nothing here that pushes the envelope any further than it got pushed a couple of decades ago. Developers Telltale, understandably worried about meeting the expectations of long-time fans of the series, have played it safe; and the result is a game that feels beholden to the past and never manages to carve out a strong identity of its own.

The titular Tales mostly involve visiting all the locations available to you and making sure you’ve picked up or interacted with every object you can. This becomes super-jaw-gratingly frustrating when you discover that, for no sensible narrative or logical reason, some events and objects can only be triggered after you’ve done an unrelated ‘something else’ first. Even twenty years ago this kind of design separated the crap point-n-click games from the great, and circuiting through a number of locations trying to discover the arbitrary order the developer wants you to do things is just as horribly unsatisfying now as it was back then.

What of the dialogue though? A few good laughs can go a long way to redeeming an otherwise mediocre game, and this is perhaps where Tales of Monkey Island is strongest. The voice-acting is credible and some of the gags, if not laugh-out-loud funny, at least have the power to bring a smile to your face.

Yet it’s all done with so little flair. Nine out of ten conversations involve nothing more than patiently trotting through all the available dialogue options until you hit the right one. Worse still, people’s responses flip between the angry, the light-hearted and the sad so quickly that it regularly feels disjointed and contrived, lacking the weight and drama needed to keep your interest through what often end up being quite long discussions.

I can believe that people with fonder memories of the early Monkey Island games than me might get more out of these games than I did. The feel of the originals has been captured very successfully, and some of the puzzles are quite ingeniously crafted. New characters like Morgan Le Flay compare well to the old guard, and you always just about care enough about the ensemble to keep you playing (although the particularly tedious second chapter, The Siege of Spinner Cay, might test that to the very limit).

Yet aren’t we entitled to more? Is it really okay for Telltale to rely on fans’ nostalgia to compensate for their own lack of ambition?

For me at least, telling a sort-of-funny story is no longer enough. Working through Tales of Monkey Island (and it did sometimes feel like work) only ever made me want to play other smarter, faster and funnier games. Something like Dreamfall: the Longest Journey, which in fact contains more genuine hilarity than Tales of Monkey Island despite being a much darker and more serious game. (It also has much greater variety to it and a superior system for handling dialogue, but I should probably try to remember which game it is I’m supposed to be reviewing here.)

Three words sum up all five episodes of Tales of Monkey Island: competent fan service. Should you demand more?

I know I’ll be taking a pass on Series Two.

Review by – Mr Chris

Blood Bowl was a Games Workshop board game first released some time back in the, oooh, 80s or 90s or something. A while ago, anyway. Basically (for those of you who don’t know) it’s an American football style sports game played by the various denizens of the Warhammer fantasy universe. Your little plastic or lead team of Orcs, Goblins, Humans, Undead or whatever played a turn-based game of Extreme Rugby against each other on a big gridded board. Many dice would be thrown. People would get injured, or killed (and that’s just the argumentative teenagers disputing a dice roll). Touchdowns might be scored. Girls would likely be absent.

Blood Bowl is one of the few GW games I have never owned or played so I was quite looking forward to this game, not least as I’d be able to have a bash at it without going to the mortgage-stretching expense of buying the GW miniatures.

The first thing you notice when loading the game up is that the menu graphics are a little, well, shoddy. The second thing you notice is that navigating the menus is an exercise in random frustration – it’s never obvious which way you have to press the D-pad to get the correct menu button to highlight. For instance, to move right it can be either down, right, or up depending on the menu and, presumably, how the coding goblins felt at the time. But hey, that’s just the menus, what matters is the actual game.

The classic mode is basically a direct port of the Blood Bowl boardgame, using the current version 5 of the rules published by Games Workshop. I didn’t receive a manual with the review copy, so I’ll give the publishers the benefit of the doubt and assume that they attempt to explain the rather lengthy rules in full in it. However, playing without the manual I had no chuffing clue what was going on or why, and I nearly chucked the game in the bin within the first two games (both lost by my Orcish team, the Particular Thistles, by a large margin in both touchdowns and fatalities).

I tried the tutorial (and no real man resorts to that first, do they?) but not only is it entirely uninformative, it also puts a huge greyed-out box explaining each move over the top of the screen! The box has to be there because you have to read it because the tutorial’s not explained in speech, so you can’t see what you’re trying to do due to this bloody great greyed out section of screen. If you turn it off, you can see what you’re trying to do but you don’t actually, in fact, know what it is you’re supposed to be doing. It’s the dullest illustration of Catch-22 ever. It is, in summary, teeth-gnashingly irritating and hateful. So, the tutorial completed, I duly learned nothing and again nearly chucked the game in the bin. Good start so far, eh?

However, I really did want to play the thing (and more importantly I promised Lewie I’d review it) so I downloaded the boardgame rules. Yes, to play this game on even the most basic level you need to download a 63 page boardgame rulebook. Even if this is all set out in the manual, you’re still having to learn the rules to a flipping boardgame to play a game on the 360. Intuitive this is not.

I don’t think that this is something that is a necessary evil for all boardgame or RPG ports, either. For instance, the Baldur’s Gate games managed to run the pretty colossally spoddy 3rd Edition AD&D rules in a very accessible and understandable way (and in a way that didn’t make you feel like you were breaking out in spots and social maladjustment just by looking at it), and THQ have singularly failed to manage the same here with what is in comparison a very basic game. Soo boo-urns, THQ, boo-urns.

So, once I’d read the rules, I had another crack at it. In single player, you have the option of a campaign or a one off competition. The campaign mode is basically a string of competitions, each competition being like a qualifying group in the World Cup, only with more crying and less diving.

Your first job is to pick your race from the 8 you have to choose from (apparently more are promised as DLC. Oh joy), and then buy players. You can choose between various player classes, each having particular skillsets (e.g. bogstandard linemen, throwers, catchers, “blitzers”, Big Chuffing Trolls, Psycho Goblins With Chainsaws etc). You can then buy team goodies such as cheerleaders (they affect something or other. Try page 17 of the rulebook), apothecaries (they can patch up injured players during the game, or prevent deaths) and team rerolls (the ability to choose to reroll a diceroll that doesn’t go your way). You can buy more of all of these later when you earn more money through either winning, drawing or, as it happens, losing. How money is awarded post-match isn’t entirely clear, as with many things in this game.

Over the course of the campaign your players earn “star player points” which lead to them levelling up and then earning new skills. These skills are fairly vital to your progress – the initial competition with your vanilla team is quite disheartening as you’ll probably be continually stomped on by everyone else. However, some of this will be down to the matchup between your race and the opponents – some races are geared towards bowling through the opposition and jumping on them (dwarfs) and others for prancing around like a ballet dancer and falling over in a stiff breeze (wood elves). It’s just the luck of the draw, and you do have to modify your tactics to not only play to your own strengths, but to bear in mind the enemy’s strengths and capitalise on their weaknesses. But it does have shades of “rock paper scissors”, but costing £40 more and with a bit of interactivity.

However, more importantly, that word “luck” there epitomises to me what’s most wrong with this game. Every action (tackles, passing, running a bit further than your normal movement allowance, even picking up the ball. Off the ground. A stationary ball.) relies on dicerolls. This almost entire reliance on chance is fairly aggravating. I’ve had a thrower (who you would have thought would have some reasonable if basic ball skills) failed to pick the ball up on several consecutive attempts, leading to him chasing the ball around my half, while my defensive line desperately tried to prevent the fast moving goblins running through, picking it up, blowing a raspberry at my hapless thrower and legging it down the pitch and scoring. Which they duly did. The game may as well have had Yakkaty Sax playing as the in-game music.

To make matters worse, every failed action results in your turn ending, and you only get 8 turns per half. So my thrower’s English fielder level skills ran me through to half time with just enough time for the other side to score.

This is all partially mitigated by being able to buy rerolls for your team, and you can plan your more “risky” moves for the end of the turn, but the fact you can go for a fair stretch of a game with every single roll going against you (and everything requires a roll of some sort other than moving a short distance) is frustrating in the extreme. Yes, I know it’s a port of a boardgame, but for goodness’ sake.

All that said – once I did finally score my first touchdown, I was beaming. I had defeated the evil Dice Gods. So I kept going and have taken the Particular Thistles on to bigger and better things. Well, some of them. A number are corpses or invalids. I’ve had a few other teams of other races on the go as well, for variety, and the same pattern of having a rough first competition and then improving has repeated itself – so hang in there after the first round and you’ll start to actually achieve things, and enjoy playing the game.

On the nuts and bolts of things, I’ve already mentioned the fairly poor interface graphics, and the in-game graphics are only marginally better. It’s bright, colourful and a bit cartoony, which is nice, and the character models are detailed. However, the “miniatures” are all identical for each player class. They’re not even given different numbers, and they don’t change to reflect upgrades and mutations – so it’s impossible to tell at a glance who’s who. Given that the original boardgame placed a huge amount of emphasis (or so it seems from the rules) on customising your players, leaving out such a minor thing seems either criminal or lazy.

Also, the in-game graphics only look good when you’re zoomed right in on the action. To actually play the game you need to be zoomed well out and above the pitch, and from there the graphics look like something from the PS2.

Sound-wise the music and the effects are fine but the commentary, although partially amusing, repeats itself quite quickly, and you’ll soon want them to shut up. Much like watching football on ITV.

I tried to play the multiplayer mode, but there have been no available games any time I’ve tried to play. I can imagine, as with most games, the PC version may work for this better with clans and leagues and things. The lucky chaps.

A chum was round the other day and we thought we’d give the versus mode a go – however that was immediately scuppered because despite this being a turn-based game you need two controllers. Gah, and indeed bah.

So. It’s ok. I’ll play it for a little while longer, but I can’t see me picking this up too many times again in the future. The multiplayer version may open up wonderful horizons of fun, but that door has been closed to me, for some reason. All in all, though, this is a game that will only be loved, or even really liked, by fans of the original boardgame.

ReVVVVVView by Lewie Procter

VVVVVV is the story of a little bloke with a big smile. He’s Captain Veridian. He has to save the day via puzzle platforming.

There’s a story about a space ship, and lost crew members. The little pieces of dialogue that punctuate the game are full of heart and wit, and really endear you to the pixels on screen. Not that there are many pixels, VVVVVV achieves visual beauty with as few pixels as necessary.

This efficiency shown in the visual design can be seen in all aspects of VVVVVV. My first complete playthrough took me 1 hour 55 to complete, and I died 1072 times (that’s one death every 6 and a half seconds, fact fans), although I had played a few of the harder levels before, so knew the solutions already. Under two hours might seem short, but there are more ideas here than most 10 hour+ games. VVVVVV throws new and interesting platforming challenges at you hard and fast from beginning to end. All just using three buttons.

You press left to make the little bloke go left, right to make the little bloke go right, and up to flip gravity.

The gravity flip function replaces what might normally be jump. If you see some spikes, you might have to flip gravity, then walk across the ceiling to get past them. Terry Cavanagh get’s a hell of a lot of mileage out of this fairly tiny moveset, and his keen eye for level design means that you never feel like there’s anything missing.

VVVVVV takes a novel approach to death, and frankly that’s it’s single strongest asset. Where most platformers treat death as a failure, VVVVV treats it as part of a learning experience. Death is about trial and improvement.

Mechanically, deaths aren’t too different from basically every platformer since super mario brothers. You die, then respawn at some point before you died. The key differences are that there is no life counter (other than the invisible one which serves mainly to embarrass you at the end of the game), respawning is near instant, and the check points are everywhere. Apart from a few small (and annoying) exceptions, VVVVVV never forces you to repeat any of the platforming puzzles, it’s far too busy pushing you on to the next platforming brain teaser.

The ‘puzzles’ are always simple. Work out where B is, then get from A to B. Standing between A and B are some hilarious abstract enemies, spikes, moving platforms, disappearing platforms and more.

Structurally, it’s a little odd. There is a big hub area, which feels a little like a more open metroid-esque world, and hidden around it are linear platforming sections. The world successfully balances feeling natural, almost as if it hasn’t been designed, whilst also providing an interesting place to explore, and platforming challenges. There are little bits of story spread around, in the form of (if you like, completely ignorable) terminals, that tell you a little bit about the world you are in.

There’s a bunch of neat post-game things to keep you busy too. A “Super Gravitron” unlockable arcade game, time trials, a “no death mode” for those of you who are insane. Plus a really funny bonus mode that I has thought of suggesting to Terry part way through playing it, then it was already there.

Add into the mix some rather hilarious room names, and a wonderful chiptunes soundtrack by SoulEye, and VVVVVV is an excellent complete package.

The biggest compliment I can give this game is that had it come out 20 years ago, there would probably be a mediocre spin off RPG called VVVVVV: Battle network, and you’d probably see a hi-res reimagination of that happy little spaceship captain on lunchboxes across the globe.

Terry Cavanagh has made a bunch of smaller games in the past, Don’t look back being my personal favourite, but VVVVVV is by far his biggest yet.

VVVVVV is the first excellent indie game of a new decade, whichever way up you look at it.

Review by – TychoCelchuuu

Do you like clicking? Do you like loot? Do you like putting skill points into skills? If you’ve answered yes to these three questions, you’re either pining for Diablo III or you’ve done the sensible thing and purchased Torchlight to tide you over. The brazenness with which Torchlight rips off the Diablo series would be criminal if it wasn’t so cute. This game plays like a refinement and a distillation of the classic hack and slash, and the only thing that hasn’t been pinched from Diablo is its violent, gothic tone. Instead, Torchlight has wholly appropriated World of Warcraft’s cheery stylized visuals, which means you will spend hours clicking on and picking up town portal scrolls from skeletons with endearingly large heads that you’ve smashed with bright, glowing swords.

Torchlight has few aspirations, but for the price and for its goals, it succeeds wildly. Diablo is about three things: clicking on a monster until it is time to click on the next monster, picking up increasingly ridiculous things like giant axes from increasingly deadly things like dragon men, and watching your level tick inexorably towards the point where you can rough up Zeus. If you thought Diablo was anything other than this Torchlight has proven you wrong, because that is all there is to Torchlight. And brother, let me tell you, Torchlight is good.

A Diablo clone stands or falls on the strength behind the clicks. Swing a mace into a monster for a kill, and you’d better feel it, if not deep within your chest then at least at the tip of your index finger. Torchlight delivers in spades, with meaty sounding hits, a screen that rumbles when you roll a critical, and waves of enemies to slaughter in what would be a completely horrifying manner if the enemies showed even the slightest ability to do anything other than run directly at you in a murderous rage. A hack and slash can have as many tricks up its sleeve or flaws in its façade as it wants, but if the clicking doesn’t fly, the rest is just empty.

Torchlight manages to coast for a long distance on the strength of its clicks. The game is appallingly primitive in some aspects. Missing are the ragdoll physics that make it so enjoyable to smash a skeleton in Titan Quest, or the multiplayer that allows you to duel a friend or swap items in Diablo. Torchlight doesn’t even get its stupendously simple formula down pat. Item statistics quickly become confusing, making it hard to tell which sword one ought to wield; identifying items must be done one scroll at a time; to heal up in town you need to purchase your own potions, and so on. It’s not so much a case of rough edges as it is rough insides. The game feels as smooth as a baby seal, but as you run your hands over it, it twists and turns in ways you thought would be fixed by now, almost a decade after Diablo II. It does, of course, make up for it by letting you club pretty much everything except a baby seal, but it’s inexcusable that something as simple as reassigning skill points if you’ve made a mistake needs to be handled by a mod.

Mods, though, are Torchlight’s chief strength beyond its almost preternatural ability to imitate Diablo well. Torchlight is stupendously modifiable, and already there are worthwhile changes to the game that can be applied through the simple process of unzipping a folder into another folder hidden in a third folder that is buried in your Windows installation. And they sometimes break your game. But not very often! These modifications go a long way towards curing many of the niggling details that ought to have been fixed in the first place, and there will only be more as time goes on.

Torchlight is an easy choice. Diablo good? Torchlight good. Diablo bad? Get off my Internet. That verdict could have saved you the trouble of reading this review, but if you’ve made it this far, you are perhaps worried about the lack of multiplayer. How fun is it, really, to spend hours alone, clicking on things in a quest to be able to click on more difficult things? I say, plenty fun, but you could always stick a podcast on to fill the lack of chatter.

A final note: the last boss? Complete bullshit. He has more hitpoints than the sky has stars, and it will take you the better part of a month spent holding down your mouse button to even make a dent in his health pool. You have been forewarned.

Seizuredome is about shooting things before they collide into you. In that sense, it’s a direct descendant of the 30 year-old Asteroids. What Seizuredome adds to the mix is sumo wrestling, nudity and amazing music. I think I’ve fallen in love.

Where Asteroids was tense, minimalist and eerie, Seizuredome is bright, lunatic and breezy. In many ways it’s a much easier game, because there are usually fewer obstacles on screen at any given moment, and you’re always kitted up with a machine gun, rocket launcher or laser beam. Not only that, because of the keyboard and mouse controls (WASD for movement, point-and-click to shoot) you can react and aim much quicker and easier.

Then again, the obstacles you’re shooting are naked women, babies and sumo wrestlers, and so move a lot less predictably than floating bits of rock in space. They also take several more hits than an asteroid before they explode, which is a little odd when you consider that they’re nearly all completely naked, and certainly not concealing any armour.

But why am I boring you with game mechanics? Yeah, there’s a neat little combo system, but it’s Seizuredome’s surrealism and style that impresses, and even puts the Warioware series a little to shame. Those games might seem like gritty documentaries on drug addiction and self-harm after your fifth or sixth round of this. Although indie games (and those who write about them) often get mocked for taking themselves too seriously, Seizuredome stays too busy screaming “YOU’LL NEVER FORGET ME!” to ever trouble itself with artistic pretensions. It’s not big, it’s not clever, it’s just a simple game with silly sprites that wants you to enjoy yourself from the second you start playing.

Technically, there’s not a lot to it, which should come as no surprise when you realise that it was made in just two days. Yet  I don’t want to give the impression that I’m going easy because it’s free to download, or because it got made quickly, or because I cling to some misguided belief that indie games somehow benefit from receiving overgenerous reviews. No, what makes Seizuredome stand out is that unlike so many of Jonathan Söderström’s other games, it feels unrushed and complete. It is, like most things that are a little bit special, a collection of simple parts that come together perfectly to make a greater whole. The colour, the sound and the play: they all gel.

There doesn’t seem much point in me going on and on at you about giving this a go. The download is less than 6mb, meaning you could probably have downloaded it and be playing it in less time than it’s already taken to read this review. And I feel confident enough to say that playing Seizuredome is more fun than reading about Seizuredome. So yeah, I’m done here, ready to go back for just one more quick go. Go look at it for yourselves already.

Review by Bobby Foster

I’ve become a willing participant in the rape and murder of seven young women. I say “young women”, but five of them you’d definitely call girls. What worries me is that I’m not sure I even regret it.

It needn’t have worked out like this. I’d happily have taken each of them safely to Grandma’s house and let them live there happily ever after. To begin with that’s what I did, and young sweet Robin looked so peaceful cuddled up next to Grandma. But the game wasn’t about that. It told me I hadn’t found any of the secret rooms, picked up any of the collectibles, nor met “the wolf”. I had failed. It was clear that next time, I would have to walk off the path.

Things then started to get strange. I headed off into those woods determined to keep sight of where I’d come from, but along the way I must have let myself get turned around. Pretty quickly I’d lost all my bearings and couldn’t find my way back even though I’d wanted to. Knowing I’d gone off course and uncertain of how to proceed, I had no choice but to wander aimlessly for a while. Then in the distance I caught a glimpse of another young girl, dressed in white, running between the trees. Was she a ghost? I didn’t know. But by now I had no idea where I was and felt the only thing I could do was run after her.

She led me to an abandoned theatre. We got up on the stage and danced and played together, and then she lent in to give me a hug. Before I had any chance of finding out who she might be, she ran off.

Lost and alone again, I kept walking. I came across an abandoned wheel chair, and sat on it.

“Wolves are just dogs. But werewolves are like people.”

What did that mean? I couldn’t be sure. But it certainly seemed I was getting closer to encountering the wolf. I knew now that it was only the wolf that could lead me to “Success”.

…

This is the Path. Incredibly bold in its choice of subject matter and for its narrative ambiguity, but sufficiently flawed that I have to break out of telling you the story of my game to explain some of the stuff that’s likely to test your patience.

For starters, the pacing. Everything is designed to make you take your time. If you run for too long, your view pans down, and collectable items and interactive objects fade out of view. There are some moments when you can only move in a straight line, crawling forward at a painfully slow pace with no interaction required aside from holding down the forward key. At others, you’ll be forced to move along a fixed path regardless of what key you press, taking in the scenes like you’re riding a demented Tunnel-o-Love. You often end up with the sense that you’re bumbling (slowly) through what the game wants to show you, rather than being in control of what’s happening.

It gets repetitive too. Despite sublime sound design, the woods themselves are flat and often uninteresting. Aside from the collection of slightly-interactive objects through which the abstract narrative unfolds, you spend most of your time collecting the 144 flowers there are in the game. What’s the point of collecting these flowers? I don’t know. I finished with 142 of them, and it was never made clear to me what benefit they were giving me or what I might gain from painstakingly trying to find the last couple.

And while the game isn’t very long, it would surely benefit from being even shorter. I love the subversive way the player is given an instruction that they need to wilfully disobey (“GO TO GRANDMA’S HOUSE AND STAY ON THE PATH”), but after the fifth or sixth time it loses all of its power. Similarly, during the first hour or two of playing it makes sense that you’re encouraged to play slowly, as you need a bit of time and space to think and work out what’s going on. But by the fifth or sixth hour you feel like you’ve seen enough, and the game’s slow and uncooperative controls become frustrating instead of perhaps, err, “making a provocative statement about about mankind’s desire to manipulate other people”.

Yet I want to give Tale of Tales the benefit of the doubt. It’s hugely refreshing to play something that isn’t just about goodies fighting baddies, where the imagery is full of symbolic ambiguities, and the story is implied rather than made explicit. It’s still pretty rare that game-makers trust players enough to fill in any narrative blanks for themselves, and the Path gives me hope that it will one day be possible for me to play a game and feel like an adult instead of an over-grown child.

So much of modern game design has become an exercise in bombarding the player with fun, and providing an unrelenting stream of stuff intended to stop the player getting bored or from making them want to take a break. The Path becomes boring, as well as genuinely horrific at times. I played it in forty minute chunks across the space of a week, and would be amazed if anyone could stand much longer sittings with it. Yet every day I found myself wanting to go back to it, because so much of my time not playing it I’d spent thinking about it.

The Path is atmospheric. It’s thought-provoking. And I took away as much from playing it as I have from any art gallery I’ve been to. Does that make it a good game? I hope so.

Review by Bobby Foster

Single-player, fantasy-based roleplaying videogames are often a lonely, tedious experience. You spend hundreds of hours developing your character, trudging through predictable environments, and repeating the same attacks over and over again. Japanese developers in particular have a track record of making games where the core mechanic consists of battling against wave after wave of easily defeatable enemy, who exist solely to dispense the Experience Points you need to beat the more challenging and interesting boss encounters. Any time spent in combat with enemies who never realistically pose a threat is no fun, because a fight without some sense of peril is inevitably dull. Yet it’s become so commonplace in modern RPGs that fans of the genre have learnt to accept it and even name it: ‘grind’.

Secret of Mana is one of too few Japanese RPGs that avoid grind completely. This is partly as battles occur in real time rather than the oh-so-polite turn-based line-dance system favoured in the majority of other JRPGs, but also because easy fights are few and far between. Sure, the boss battles remain a good chunk harder than fighting against regular enemies, but it’s also quite possible for your entire team to get slaughtered just wandering the game world if you let your concentration slip and fail to look out for each other.

This “looking out for each other” is key. The game is hugely flawed as a single player experience, as your computer controlled companions have an annoying habit of getting stuck behind scenery and behaving suicidally in battle. Although you’re given some control over their tactics through a matrix of battle stances (containing “Guard”, “Stay Away”, “Attack” and “Approach”), putting them on anything much above the most defensive setting is usually only going to guarantee their premature death.

There are other problems. Having told your AI buddies to “guard” and “stay away” in an attempt to keep them alive long enough to reach the boss of the dungeon you’re in, you may find yourself fighting monsters whose attacks knock you to the ground. Infuriatingly, the time it takes to get to your feet is exactly the same amount of time it takes them to make another attack, and you’re left defenceless as you get hit again and again while great chunks are taken out of your Hit Points. The friendly AI can only be counted on to stand by and nervously twitch from side-to-side as they watch you die.

“How horribly broken!” you might cry, but what made (and still makes) Secret of Mana revolutionary is that three people can play at once, with each player controlling one of the three main characters. Suddenly the frustration of being stuck on the floor defenceless while you get hit repeatedly floats away, as you can hold out at least some hope that one of your human companions might come to rescue you. Valve’s Left4Dead has more recently demonstrated that putting players in a position where they are helpless to defend themselves is a great way to encourage teamwork, and Secret of Mana did the same thing over a decade earlier. The only difference here is that it’s not quite so obviously an intentional design choice, and the quality of the AI is nowhere near high enough to make it work when you’re playing the game by yourself (an area which even Left4Dead fifteen years later still couldn’t quite get perfect).

Yet assuming you can persuade one or two of your real-life friends to play with you, then you’re ready to enjoy what remains one of the best roleplaying games ever made. I returned to Secret of Mana with a sense of trepidation: I’d fallen in love with the game as a teenager and had concerns that years of nostalgia and changes in my tastes might make it an “Event Horizon” moment in my life. In other words, it would prove to be one of those beloved cultural artifacts from my youth that fell apart under older, more mature scrutiny.

In fact, it’s aged marvellously. The world looks vibrant and distinct. The combination of timing, sensible strategy and flexibility of approach required to succeed in combat makes it a game you easily end up playing compulsively. And oh, shall we talk about the sound track?

Secret of Mana continues to feature in those “Best Game Music Ever!!!!” lists for a very good reason: Hiroki Kikuta does amazing things within the constraints of the SNES’s sound module. The opening theme alone outshines pretty much every recent release I can think of, and really helps to convince you that you’re about to play something special. For the rest of the game, the musical landscape shifts between the kitsch and the profound, from the playful to the sinister and the sombre, with a quite uncommon confidence. In fact, the greatest testament I can make to the quality and variety of the in-game music is that hearing it again has left me in despair at the pathetic way modern games are satisfied with (and even aspire to) simply imitating Hollywood movie scores.

This is a game with its own identity, where the visuals and sound aren’t showy distractions but an integral part of the charm and sophistication of what you’re playing. It’s a 16-bit cartridge that embarrasses modern JRPGs for their lack of ambition, both artistically and technically.

Why don’t more narrative-driven epics like this let you play with friends? Probably because it’s a damn hard thing to do well, and Secret of Mana has cast an intimidatingly long shadow. But now we find ourselves in 2009, and few developers are even trying to match it, yet alone go one better. Borderlands and Star Wars: The Old Republic offer some hope for a bolder and braver future, but why has Japan given the West so long to catch up? Perhaps more importantly, how could there be more innovation in a 16 year-old download from the Virtual Console than all of Square Enix’s output from the past five years?

I’m baffled. But what I do know is that if you decide to buy Secret of Mana, you’ll also be getting a ton of troubling questions about the creative decline of Japanese RPGs for FREE.

Secret of Mana – 800 Wii points

Review by Amitai Winehouse (twitter.com/amitaiwinehouse)

If you’ve logged onto the internet (who really “logs on” to the internet anymore?) over the last two weeks, you’ll probably have realised that quite a lot of people like Uncharted 2. Not just like, like, but like, like like. Are they correct to do so? I suppose it’s my job to find out.

From the minute you boot up Uncharted 2, you are almost assaulted by visual beauty. One of my major complaints about video games these days is the focus on “realistic” colours (apparently most video game designers live in some sort of wasteland devoid of vegetation (London)). In Uncharted 2 however, there is a larger variety of colours than on a Dulux chart. The main menu, something I have touched upon in prior reviews, is similarly well designed and colourful. The same can be said for the user interface, which provides you with the information you require and is mildly more refined than the original Uncharted.

There is a stunning level of visual quality and detail to every facet of this game, from the way the water looks to the impressive half-tuck of Nathan Drake’s shirt, and occasionally you can feel almost overwhelmed by how close to reality this game really is. There are a couple of disappointingly glassy eyed characters, which almost puts you off some of the cutscenes. However considering this game is apparently using most of the potential of the Playstation 3, I would not be surprised to see this as the most visually impressive game of the generation. I am happy to say that I have not, thus far, seen anything as pretty as this in my short time as a fan of video games.

For a game that essentially has taken the Indiana Jones formula and provided a new mythical artifact, the story doesn’t seem particularly hackneyed and whilst the ground has already been trodden before, the fact that you get to be the cool, suave treasure hunter is quite nice. That said, the game doesn’t do anything particularly daring with the narrative, and you could be forgiven for expecting something slightly better.

There is a reason why the narrative works so well, and that is a combination of the quality of the cutscenes and the acting within. Nolan North (who plays Nathan Drake) brings a level of confidence but yet likability to a character who is as far from an average man as can be, but is still someone you can identify with. Those surrounding him are similarly agreeable, and you do feel a connection to the characters, to the extent that when there is a threat that one may be taken away from you, I personally found myself hoping and praying that a relationship would go a certain way or a certain character would avoid life-ending peril which I find to be impressive when this narrative is part of a media form where the representation of you dies repeatedly in every play session without a bat of the eye.

It is here that a direct comparison can be made to what Will experienced when writing his “Wet” review (read it here). Whilst both games draw heavily from cinema and the characters in both are intended to be archetypal characters for films of their particular genres, Uncharted 2 does not lazily copy and paste Henry Jones Jr., give him a new name and ask Nolan North to read lines that kind of sound like things he would say, but really aren’t things that sound natural or “correct”. Naughty Dog have created new characters, written movie standard scripts for them and sent them out on a Blu-Ray to enthrall the player. Most of the written work is genuinely witty, to the extent that I don’t want to spoil any of the one-liners for you. Not even video game funny either, properly funny.

“Style” is one of the very few ways in which several positives of the game can be described, and there is a palpable sense of style in the cutscenes. A side-effect of the fact that all of the acting in this game was mo-capp’d means that the cutscenes play like a movie, with little touches adding whole new levels to the various characters and making them seem almost like fully formed human beings.

I’ve not even mentioned the gameplay yet, and despite a few niggles, there is very little here that should significantly cause you to consider not purchasing the game literally right now. If you’ve played the first Uncharted, something which I feel should be a standard game for anyone who owns a Playstation 3, you will understand the basic mechanics of the game. It’s a third person shooty-puzzle-climby thingy, in which you generally move from gunfight to gunfight, broken up with climbing sections and puzzles, with story interspersed throughout.

However, if you have played the first Uncharted, you would be mistaken for thinking that Naughty Dog have been resting on their laurels and not improving. Everything, and I do mean everything has been tightened to a ridiculous degree, with the shooting particularly more agreeable. Grenades are now useable at the same time as guns, and Sixaxis has not been shoehorned in, meaning that occasionally you actually hit people with grenades.

The pacing has also been vastly improved. Whilst previously there would often be periods where you’d have shootout after shootout, to the extent that they almost became second nature, chapters play very differently in Uncharted 2. Below is a summary of my thought process during an average chapter:

“Oh god oh god I am being chased by a truck with a machine gun on it oh god I am going to die help me please god help aaahhh phew escaped, hmm, how do I get up there? Pole climbing time, now swing like a monkey for me Drake. Wheeeeeeeeee! Uh-oh, there are enemies down there, should I sneak around and snap necks, or do I want to shoot some fools? Neck snapping time, oh now there’s some story, yay.”

The stealth gameplay adds a considerable amount, and when the basics are down, I personally found myself using it more often than not, choosing to conserve ammo for when it was required. That said, there is no longer the apparent worldwide shortage of bullets that was seen in Uncharted 1, and it makes the gunplay far more satisfying when you no longer have to question whether you can really afford to shoot certain people.

The only real complaint I can have about the gameplay is the difficulty of the puzzles, but I do not believe the intention of these is really to challenge the mind in any significant way. To once again go back to the pacing matter, they are to break up the more stressful situations. Another minor complaint that some have had is that the final boss battle seems almost anti-climatic, but I did vastly prefer it to other final boss fights in recent memory for being slightly less frustrating.

For a primarily single player game, the multiplayer component is also rather good. I will admit here, confession time, that I am not a very good at video games, but the various ways in which you can approach people who are far better at this stuff than you are is astounding. For people who twitch a bit out of fear when playing online, it’s really nice to have modes like the RPG Deathmatch, in which 1-hit kill is essentially the name of the game (my twitchiness has probably killed a handful of former team-mates by mistake, to whom I apologise to here and now). That said, I don’t really play multiplayer often, so I can’t compare to other games, so my opinion might be slightly ill-informed here.

Really, it boils down to whether I believe this game is value for money, and to that extent I think it is. Seriously, if you don’t already own this game and you own a PS3, go and buy it. If you don’t own a PS3, there are a load of bundles out there with this game included, which I am sure Lewie could find far better than I could, and it’s nearly Christmas, so why not treat yourself? There are plenty of other good PS3 games out there, so it’s not like this one game has to justify your entire purchase.

As a game, I would consider this to be my game of the year thus far. I am almost sad that to the average consumer it may be lost in the Modern Warfare 2 shuffle, because I personally believe this could end up being a far better game. The way in which this transitions between story and gameplay is incredible, and as an all-round package, I would be surprised if anything equals Uncharted 2 this year. Go and buy it.

For the purposes of this review I played and completed the single-player campaign at Normal difficulty, which took around 14 hours. I have since then played around 6-8 hours of competitive multiplayer modes. If you are interested in playing some multiplayer online with me on ye olde PSN, my username is winehouselufc.

Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, PS3 – £29.99 delivered

In movies, the best characters are those with which the viewer can sympathise; a character that, while flawed, can be enjoyed and identified with by the viewer. Considering that Wet draws so heavily from cinema, to the extent of running it as a motif throughout the game, it seems somewhat out of place that the protagonist is as blank a slate as she is. Rubi is a humourless, callous bitch, an outcast with only the pursuit of money on her mind and nothing interesting to say, and I simply do not identify with her, nor do I want to.

It seems that the characters in Wet are torn directly from a film-makers’ archetype handbook, with a broad smattering of accents and each one firmly in the roles you’d expect from a movie of its type – the old crime syndicate boss struggling to keep up with today’s business, the wisecracking but streetsmart contact with his ear to the ground, or the slightly crazed henchmen who specialises in one particular brand of combat to the point of excellence. It’s all here, and it brings to mind the thought that Wet perhaps wants to be a film more than it does a game.

A case in point – the idea of quicktime events is to allow a cinematic sequence to be interacted with in some way, to allow the player to have some element of control over something that ordinarily they would not be able to do. The car chase sequence, present early on in the game and in the demo, is a great example of how QTEs can work in this context, with free aiming and combat around a core mechanic that is nothing more than the game being on rails with the odd button prompt. It’s exciting, cinematic, and skill requires concentration and skill in order to pass the sequence. Later in the game, however, there’s a transitional cutscene in which Rubi shoots a window in order to jump through, with no controller input at all. It’s not as if the action is even far out of reach of the usual mechanics in the game, either – it appears perfectly possible for the player to be able to shoot the glass and leap through on their own, but one many occasions Artificial Mind and Movement have opted for the non-interactive, film-like approach.

This motif of film and of traditional cinema underscores every aspect of Wet, from the film grain running over the visuals at every point to loading screens ripped straight from pre-screening lobby advertisements – after one particularly bloody sequence, the player may be invited to hop to the concession stand and grab a Chilly Dilly: “No muss, no fuss; the ideal snack for all of us!” – a constant reminder that Wet is aware of its own ridiculousness, that it’s intended to be tongue-in-cheek and that some of its more elementary missteps should be forgiven. It’s hard, however, to write off certain aspects of the game as intentional missteps. The fact that the voice acting, while excellently performed, never quite matches up with the animation of the characters on screen is distracting, and that the combat system and collision allows for an unexpected fall from a ledge during combat more often than can be blamed on the player.

It’s unfortunate, because otherwise, Wet’s combat system is its crowning jewel. In many ways, the game seems to be constructed to allow bridging points between combat arenas, locked-off warehouses or courtyards where enemies stream at Rubi continuously until their entrance doorways are blocked. At all points in Wet, killing enemies provides a points multiplier, but in these areas, managing this multiplier is critical to survival – the higher the multiplier, the faster Rubi’s health will regenerate, and therefore the most efficient way to ensure survival is through flamboyant, acrobatic and consistently violent play. As the game progresses, and the player comes across more complicated and challenging combat arenas, unlocks for both Rubi’s weapons and abilities become available, which slowly moves the bar from simple jumping and firing in slow-motion into (for example) a slide, to wall-running, strafing along the wall, leaping off to a horizontal pole and chaining two swings together, constantly firing the whole time and landing gracefully on a platform with destruction behind you.

Nothing is quite so satisfying in Wet as these perfectly-executed moments of fluidity, especially when using the incredibly well-chosen soundtrack as a backdrop, but they’re infuriatingly hard to accomplish due to the aforementioned unforgiving control – there are far too many moments in which a planned run through a room will fail multiple times through no apparent fault of the player. One particularly consistent frustration is Rubi wall-running horizontally because the wall was approached at anything less than a 90-degree angle, ruining any route that was planned and invariably dropping the character into the middle of three enemies she was trying to shoot. It’s a problem that could be overcome with any other mechanic than the aforementioned kills-to-multipliers-to-health scenario – without the perfect run, Rubi dies almost immediately due to the lack of opportunity to learn multipliers in slow motion acrobatics, but with a well-executed performance throughout a run the player loses very little health and as a consequence the room seems far too easy. There’s very little middle ground, which leads to an odd set of difficulty spikes, in which any given area’s difficulty relates directly to whether or not the game interprets the player’s actions as expected or not, which ultimately leads to irritation.

Every now and again, these combat arenas are altered slightly, providing a cel-shaded, viscerally themed stage for Rubi to rip apart enemy after enemy in a blood-fuelled rage. These moments could easily become tedious were they over-used, but they’re placed in such a way that they are a relief and a pleasure to unwind with after a particularly lengthy platforming section or gunfight. The simplicity of the environment and colour scheme lends itself very well to enabling the fluidity and constant motion that Wet relies on, to such an extent that every rage-triggered scene rides that edge of difficulty and cinema almost perfectly. It’s unfortunate, then, that there doesn’t seem to be any way of replaying these sections after completing the game, because they seem ideally suited to speed runs.

That’s not to say that the game’s difficulty is entirely scattershot, however. As the game progresses, Rubi is introduced to various different archetypes of enemies to fight, such as the swordsman who can block bullets, or the bullet sponge with a minigun, and in order to combat each of these, the player has access to an upgrade system. The points that are earned for stylish kills and kill chains can be spent on new acrobatic moves and health for Rubi, or for upgrades to damage and clip size for each of the four weapons available – unlimited pistol, SMG, shotgun and crossbow. While leaping through the air and landing on an enemy sword-first is visceral and appealing, the practicality of it is that once Rubi has the ability to shoot from anything she’s moving across, the combination of acrobatics and pistol is adequate for most situations, even without augmenting the damage or capacity of the gun. It’s just another thing in Wet that seems like a nice idea, but not quite well-rounded enough to be of any use.

That’s Wet in a nutshell – a game that seems to have missed its potential due to good ideas implemented without enough thought about the whole experience. At its best, it can be a game that just works, a rhapsody of violence and acrobatics, and at worst, its clunky controls and inconsistencies in plot and difficulty will drive you to frustration or confusion. At its core, Wet wants you to enjoy it, and it’s clear that there is something there to enjoy, but struggling through the interface to get to one of those rare moments of bliss almost isn’t worth the effort.

Review by Lewie Procter

Dual Stick shooters have seen a bit of a wonderful resurgence in the last few years, and you can very easily track it back to the release of Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved on the Xbox Live Arcade. This indie endeavour has a bit of an interesting history to it though.

A guy called Marco Incitti decided to make a clone of Retro Evolved for the PC, and make a freely downloadable title on his web site. I played it, and it was pretty damn good. Whilst at a cursory glance it did look feel and play in a very similar fashion to Retro Evolved, there was actually a lot more to it, with new and different mechanics that massively change how you play the game.

Then, quite possibly since there was a PC port of Retro Evolved in the pipeline, Bizarre contacted him saying:

“We’re beginning to feel the effects of the Geometry Wars clones on our sales via Microsoft now and are beginning a process to begin to more robustly protect our copyright and intellectual property.

Therefore, I’d like to ask you in an amicable fashion to stop infringing our IP and pull the game ‘Grid Wars’ from the internet for download.

I hope you understand and are able to do this without us having to take further steps.”

Which was a pretty big mistake in my opinion. They were right to defend their IP, but they missed an opportunity by not offering him a job.

Marco did the right thing and took Grid Wars down (but if you interested, I bet you can find it somewhere in the internet’s shadier corners), and set to work making his own completely original game. Atomhex is the end product.

It is a pretty crowded market place, and to stand out you need to have a least one major unique selling point. Atomhex has several, but quite possibly it being only 80 MS Points is the biggest. Frankly I think Atomhex is largely under priced. 240 would still be an excellent price for it.

It’s a thinking persons dual stick shooter, which is essentially code for meaning “Shooting everything is not the best route to success”.

The gameplay is about as complicated to describe as it is to play. There are several types of “enemies” all with very specific behaviour.

Firstly, there are atoms, these are innocuous floating things that if you touch, bounce off you. You get a few points for shooting one of these. If two of them touch, they will transform into a nasty enemy which will (temporarily) remove your ability to shoot if it gets you, then set a trap.

Then there are Hex. These are coloured dots with a small force field. If you shoot its force field, you can then absorb it for points, and it will also change your bullets to be the same colour as it. If a Hex absorbs an atom, it will then emit enemies.

The more atoms a hex absorbs, the nastier the enemies is shoots out. A hex that has absorbed at least one atom is only vulnerable to bullets the same colour as it.

Also – when a hex absorbs 6 atoms, the whole screen is cleared, and you zoom in to it for sort of a boss battle, called going “subatomic”.

That lot all sounds fairly convoluted, because it is. I’ve not even touched on the powerups, chaining, or multipliers.

Don’t take that as a complaint though. It’s a solidly made shooter that does take time to learn how to play, but the important thing is that it is still fun to play even as a dumb shooter. You could switch off the mathsy high score calculating part of your brain and still have a lot of fun with Atomhex.

It is pretty, sounds great and costs 80ms points. I swear if I see anyone with Avatar clothing they have paid for who has not bought this I’ll probably cry.

It’s everything the Xbox indie games should be. Original ideas, well executed, and lots of personality. Give the demo a go at least I think.

When Epic’s Gears of War was released in 2006, it made a splash on the console shooter scene by bringing the controllability of a first person shooter to the third-person perspective, while retaining a certain cinematic flair. Of course, its over-the-shoulder view was used in Resident Evil 4 a year earlier, and even cited as an influence on the game; but it brought more clones to the market than RE4 ever did. GRIN’s Terminator Salvation can be considered one of those clones, taking Gears’ perspective, cover system and even gameplay segues straight from its Great Uncle Marcus. Only this time, there’s a film license, and as such, a lack of creativity behind its production.

Playing as John Connor (who looks or sounds nothing like Christian Bale’s portrayal from the film), the player has to work from set piece to set piece defeating the namesake androids, and completing a few objectives. The gameplay isn’t varied at all, and when I make the comparison to Gears of War you know exactly what you’ll be getting into; the environments are extremely linear, filled with cover and weapons/ammo, and the enemies usually flow from one or two spots until the area is cleared. The one real break in all this mediocrity is given in the form of on-rails shooter levels, almost entirely from the back of vehicles that lets you destroy some flying SkyNet ships, and just wreak havoc upon the landscape (with no destructibility) while you make your move out of enemy territory. These stages are pretty fun, but aren’t enough to pull the game up a notch in replayability or overall fun rating.

The controls are straightforward enough, with the usual control stick usage, A is strictly for cover, B switches weapons, Y takes control of the camera to show off points of interest, and RB throws your grenades, while LB goes completely untouched. I felt like this scheme worked fine, except that everything felt slowed down; even on the highest sensitivity setting, the movements felt sluggish and unnatural. No real problem with the camera, as it stays its constant two feet behind, eliminating the chance to hang on any of the objects. The only thing I feel missing is a sprint button, which is needed to flank some of the bigger enemies, but regenerating health combined with a ridiculous amount of cover makes up for this.

The enemies and weapons, what I consider to be the two biggest chunks of a shooter’s playability, are the biggest complaint I have about the game. The franchise is best known for the T-800, a huge, silver-bodied skeletal robot, with glowing red eyes and a clinched, metal jaw; and they’re here in a slightly older T-600 form. There are also smaller, flying drones called “Aerostats” and four-legged walking ones called “T7-T Spiders” – but they are so easy to take out that it just adds to the game’s blandness. Every enemy in the game, with a bit of movement and distance, can be defeated just by strafing in one big circle (or taking cover) and shooting weak points. The weapons don’t help either, consisting of your basic shotgun, assault rifle, a single machine gun, rockets, and grenades – I know the series strives for some realism (at least at this point in the timeline), but where are the awesome laser rifles from the intro to Terminator 2: Judgment Day? The game would’ve benefited from a shift away from the “movie prequel” angle, and more into the future war we’ve only seen in a few key moments from the films.

I guess that’s what sequels are for, huh?

Basically, when it gets down to it, Terminator Salvation is a rental, at best. The overall length of the game only spans nine chapters, taking about four hours to complete it, with three difficulty levels (which can deceive you, as even on easy there are one-hit kills; damage taken and given seem to be the only differences) and co-op that might extend the game’s life by another playthrough with a buddy. The visuals are acceptable, but it’s not gonna do anything to push your console to its graphical limits, and the voice over work is simply okay, lacking 95% of the cast from the film. I finished it once on single player, and played it a little bit with a friend of mine, and found myself dragging to complete it, simply because it is so very cookie cutter. If you want a shooter, the market is so saturated that there is no reason to try this one short of a sale bin at the local shop or getting it for free.

In order to make some sense of this review, I would like to summarize my feelings on Assault on Dark Athena first and qualify them afterwards: I would very much like to recommend Assault on Dark Athena to you but I find that I am largely unable to do so. I wanted to like it myself. Having loved Pitch Black, been annoyed with but understanding of Chronicles of Riddick, and having not played Escape from Butcher Bay, I came to Assault on Dark Athena expecting (or at least hoping) to find a game wherein I play as the morally ambiguous, very unsettling, sneaky, stabby badass Richard B. Riddick – and at certain points throughout the game, this is exactly what I got. But those points are far too infrequent for me to have felt satisfied by the overall experience or to have felt that Assault properly seizes what makes Riddick such an appealing character.

During his introduction as a character in Pitch Black, Riddick seemed like an actual human being. He quite clearly had his ethical gray areas, he had motivations that didn’t feel like cardboard cut outs (partially because those motivations were consistently kept from us as audience), and he was a very powerful anti-hero. Assault on Dark Athena entirely misses the point of these shortcomings and turns Riddick into a brooding ‘loner’ (the bad kind) that reeks of pretentious self-righteousness. Riddick says things like “The Dark protects her” and “I could [help you]. But when I help people, they end up dead.” – how are we supposed to take him seriously at this point? And it’s not even that he’s mistaken when he says these things – they are actually quite accurate in a literal sense. But they obviously point at a more artistic, metaphorical meaning that suggests that the reason Riddick is wearing those goggles is to hide all the eye-liner he must be wearing.

But immature characterization doesn’t end (or even reach its peak) with Riddick. The supporting characters are the worst in this regard. In particular, there is a conversation with a prison inmate named Jaylor that left a horrible taste in my mouth. Jaylor makes mention of a female prisoner with whom Riddick was previously conversing, making note of all the unsightly things he’s going to do to her when he escapes. During this particular exchange, I’m reasonably certain he uses the word ‘fuck’ at least every other word and concludes by claiming that, “first I’m gonna kill her, and then I’m gonna fuck her.” Throughout the entire conversation, every time he uses any sort of expletive, he emphasizes the word like he’s thirteen and has just discovered the pre-pubescent allure of cursing like a sailor. Now I certainly realize that the mercenaries are supposed to be portrayed as tough and gritty but this sort of dialogue doesn’t sound natural. I am entirely convinced that the writer had the explicit goal of putting as many expletives into this particular conversation as he could – and it shows. And to make the conversation even more unnerving, Riddick makes virtually no response to this rant by Jaylor – and what response could he make? It’s no surprise that Riddick has no acknowledgement of this exchange when this sort of dialogue doesn’t fit in the Riddick universe to begin with.

I realize that I’ve just spent a good five hundred words bitching about characterization and not mentioned gameplay once, but to be honest, that’s what I wanted out of this game: characterization. Stealth action/shooters are not in terribly short supply these days, so I can get that sort of gameplay from a number of a different sources. What I wanted here was a game in which I felt like I was inhabiting the role of Richard B. Riddick in his own universe and I was largely let down. But still, the gameplay itself could have redeemed that shortcoming and made the game worth playing again – and it made a semi-decent attempt at this, but ultimately fell short.

I realize this particular horse has been beaten to death by now, but the biggest gameplay issue I found is that the game can’t make up its mind about what sort of game it wishes to be. The opening sections are sufficiently stealthy and stabby (even if there are certain flaws in both these elements) to make the player hopeful that this sort of work will continue. Even if characterization falls short, the gameplay in the early parts of the game is very much Riddick-esque. But soon you start becoming absolutely overwhelmed with bullets, guns, and more bullets to the point that the game becomes much more about (poorly designed) shooting rather than (wholesome fun) stabbing. To be fair, it’s not as if your stabbing instruments are taken away and you absolutely cannot use stealth – but it is sure to become an increasingly frustrating experience as the game goes on. Enemies become more densely populated, their guns get bigger (as does their ability to absorb bullets to any body part except the head), and then of course the infamous spider turret makes an appearance. So you certainly can stealth and stab your way through the game, but you might as well crowbar your way through Half-Life 2, as the gameplay (at least in terms of player-enemy interaction) won’t be much different.

This unfortunate shift really is quite a shame because the melee combat in the game is great. It’s visceral, the killing blow animations are excellent, and the stealth kills always feel rewarding. And then the gunplay feels approximately like flashing a strobe light at a mannequin until someone tips it over for you. But my absolute biggest peeve with the gameplay is the horrific eyeshine. The Dark Athena is sufficiently dark to warrant the name. Oftentimes you will be creeping along a corridor or an air vent with only a single light source off in the distance, making navigation rather cumbersome. Your eye shine, however, while semi-functional in absolute darkness, is blindingly headache-inducing when there is any source of light in the vicinity. I found myself switching back and forth constantly in order to even walk down an empty hallway. Many of the rooms you must navigate have light sources abundantly placed in one section with total darkness everywhere else, so you must switch your eyes on and off just for turning around. I am not exaggerating when I say that it quite frequently gave me headaches over longer playing sessions. Weird, glowy vision was fine in the movies for one reason: we weren’t the ones controlling it. In game, it is cumbersome and unnecessary. More traditional forms of night vision would have been just fine. But the worst part of Riddick’s eye shine is that it actually hampers your ability to hide from enemies in shadows. Quite frequently you find yourself slinking about in a dark section of a room with enemies just on the other side of whatever crates you’re hiding behind, and you have two options: leave eyeshine off and be unable to make out the environment in which you’re hiding, or turn it on and be unable to see when you’re about to stick the end of your nose into the light, resulting in it being blown off your face. The only way to make sense of the situation is to switch eyeshine on and off repeatedly, which, as I’ve suggested, is rather frustrating.

I could go on about other complaints I had such as frequent backtracking, long loading, or a boring story (and how could the story be any good with such lackluster characterization?), but I feel that would be largely unnecessary. The game had two fronts on which it could have succeeded. It could have been an engaging portrayal of the Riddick universe but it turned out to be immature and insipid. It could have been entertaining, well-executed stealth gameplay but it turned out to be a weak shooter. Even still, I have heard that Escape from Butcher Bay is better in both these regards and I was not so turned off by Assault that I won’t play Escape. I want to reiterate that I really enjoyed stealthing around and picking off guards in the early sections of the game. I still hold out hope that the Riddick character can be revitalized and that more of the engrossing stealth-stabbity fun is in there somewhere. There are some promising aspects of Assault on Dark Athena’s gameplay that, if they were refined and focused on more fully, could make an excellent game and I am hoping that Escape from Butcher Bay will fit that bill.

And last but not least, there’s the multiplayer. Seeing as multiplayer was not originally planned to be included, I expected it to feel tacked on and unnecessary – and largely it did. But the Pitch Black game mode in which one player plays as Riddick and the rest as the mercs hunting him was surprisingly engaging. Playing as Riddick is a fun hide and seek, cat and mouse chase, whereas playing as a merc brings out the fear that should be associated with hunting and being hunted by Riddick. The environments are claustrophobic and dark, forcing the mercs to choose between a relatively weak weapon with a stronger flash light or a strong weapon that offers little in the way of visibility. It promotes coordination among the mercs and allows Riddick, when that coordination is lacking, to pick them all off one by one, exactly as he should. I don’t know if that experience is worth the price of admission all on its own, but it’s an enjoyable diversion nonetheless.

So ultimately, if you enjoyed Butcher Bay (as many people did) and would like to play it on a current-generation console, pick it up. You’ll get the game you know and love, some entertaining multiplayer, and if you must lengthen (and reduce the quality of) the Riddick experience, you have the single player portion of Assault on Dark Athena. But for anyone looking for a new, exciting entry into the Riddick universe or the stealth/action genre, I must suggest you look elsewhere.

Figuring out whether or not you’ll enjoy Street Fighter IV is a fairly simple process:

Did you play Street Fighter II?
Did you like it?

Now, just about every game enthusiast born before 1990 will answer “yes” to the first question, but the real question is whether or not you enjoyed it. Did you throw a large portion of your pocket money into a dingy machine peppered with chewed gum and cigarette burns? Did you rent the game for your SNES or Mega Drive and lose an entire weekend beating up your childhood friends? If “yes” then you’ll probably get a kick out of Street Fighter IV.

Street Fighter IV definitely appeals primarily to the old Street Fighter II fans. The kind of guys that aren’t necessarily a part of the competitive scene, but know their hadokens from their shoryukens. Everything familiar to fans of Street Fighter II is here. The characters, the moves, the music, everything. Old school Street Fighter fans will be happy to hear that the entire cast of Super Street Fighter II is here, as well as a few Turbo and Alpha veterans and new additions Abel, C. Viper, Rufus, El Fuerte, Seth and the in-game debut of Ryu and Ken’s master, Gouken. All the characters perform just like you remember from SFII, with the addition of Super Moves and EX Moves from Street Fighter Alpha and III respectively, and the new characters are solid additions to the cast. If you and your buddies haven’t played a fighting game since SFII then you can hop right in and play it like it’s 1992. In this respect I’d say that the game is “casual friendly,” but there is a lot of depth hidden underneath the Street Fighter 2.5 exterior.

New to Street Fighter IV are the Ultra Moves. As opposed to your Super Meter, which fills up as you perform attacks, the Revenge Meter fills as you are struck by your opponent. Once the Revenge Meter is half full your character can perform a dazzling Ultra Move in which the camera zooms around to get the best view of the action as you deliver a series of punishing blows to your unlucky foe. Most Ultra Moves are basically flashier versions of a character’s Super Move, but they’re all a ton of fun to watch and can really turn the tide of an otherwise one-sided fight.

One of the biggest additions to the game is the Focus Attack system. By holding down the medium punch and medium kicks buttons your character will start an animation in which they gain a black, brushstroke-like outline. This move can be charged by holding the buttons down longer until it results in an unblockable attack that crumples your opponent. While charging this move your character can absorb one hit from his or her opponent, but will be completely vulnerable to throws and special Focus Attack breaking moves. The attack that’s absorbed will still do damage, but this damage will be recovered after a couple seconds unless the damage would normally KO you or if you are hit by another attack that you fail you block or absorb. You can cancel the Focus Attack at any time during its charge by dashing forward or backward (quickly tapping forward or back twice). The Focus Attack opens up a variety of options to keep your opponent guessing and gives you some good defensive tools. However, the Focus Attack is not just a defensive mechanism. By using half of your character’s super meter you can use the Focus Attack to “Focus Cancel” another move. This is tricky at first, and not all attacks can be focus canceled, but this technique can lead to some very damaging combos.

On the subject of combos, we encounter an aspect of the game that is definitely NOT “casual friendly.” I am referring to what the game calls “links.” The idea of canceling one attack into another is second nature in Street Fighter. Crouching medium kick into hadoken, for example. You press down followed by the medium kick button and then as the animation for the kick is coming out you do the command for the hadoken (fireball). The hadoken will cancel the end of the kick’s animation and the two attacks will combo into each other. Timing is important, but not all that strict. Links on the other hand involve attacking at the exact moment the animation for the previous attack ends. A moment too early and the linked attack won’t come out. A moment too late and the linked attack won’t combo. Many of these links have an input window as small as one frame. Street Fighter IV runs at 60 frames per second folks, so that’s 1/60 of a second. Its not impossible. In fact, if you take the time and effort then you can train yourself to perform these links on command, but most won’t bother.

The single player offering in Street Fighter IV isn’t bad, but this sort of game wasn’t made for the single player experience. The presentation is good and the gameplay is as solid as it is in any other mode but the story is absolutely atrocious, the voices are cringe worthy, the anime intro and outro sequences are subpar and the AI ranges from dumb-as-rocks to Skynet levels of synthetic evil. Extras are about what you would expect from a high profile title such as this one: training mode, gallery, movie viewer, time trials (which unlock titles, colors, and taunts), survival mode (which also unlock titles, colors, and taunts) and “Challenge Mode” in which you are presented with a series of combos that increase in difficulty as you go along (which unlock character specific titles). Alternate costumes are also available as extras, but must be purchased from Xbox LIVE or the PSN Store.

The game’s stand out feature is its online play and its where you’re going to be spending most of your time. The game is very well balanced. In Street Fighter III the competitive aspect of the game eventually boiled down to using 2 or 3 characters. Capcom took note and made sure that no matter who your favorite character is, you’ve got a fighting chance. There are some stand outs, such as Sagat and Ryu, but overall it is a much more balanced title than their previous effort. The net code used by SFIV is good, but not up to the standard set by Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix. Don’t even think about taking those link combos I discussed earlier online. A five bar connection is almost perfect, with a spot of input lag here and there. Four bar connections will definitely be afflicted by some amount of input lag, but most fans won’t notice and the game remains smooth. Three bar connections can get choppy, while two and one bar connections are basically unplayable. Unfortunately, multiplayer lobbies, a core feature in HD Remix, are not included in SFIV. The recently released “Power Up Pack” has added Championship Mode to the online component of the game, offering tournament-style game play with double blind character selection and the ability to view your opponent’s disconnect percentage (a problem that plagued the game’s standard ranked online matches), but for some reason lobbies remain absent. This free DLC is definitely a step in the right direction and will hopefully be a sign of things to come.

Gripes and nit-picks aside, Street Fighter IV is a marvelous return to form for the 2D fighting genre. The gameplay is rock solid, the character balance is well done, the graphics are easy on the eyes, the character animation is smooth, the presentation is top notch and most of all, it’s fun.

Peggle, in all it’s guises, is a bit of an oddball. Dual Shot in particular.

It is a game where you are only actually doing anything a small proportion of the time. There is a 2D board with cleverly arranged ‘pegs’ dotted around on it, and you shoot balls from a centre point at the top of the board. Pretty much the only input you have is what angle to fire the ball at, and when to fire it.

There are 25 orange pegs, and you have 10 balls, and you have to get all the orange pegs to complete a level. There are several ways to get additional balls, like a high scoring shot. Each orange peg you hit contributes to a multiplier too.

The cleverest aspect of the Peggle design is mystery. At any given time it is very difficult to tell what proportion of how successful you are is down to skill, and what proportion is down to luck. I suspect that this dichotomy is what makes the game both incredibly accessible, and incredibly addictive.

Peggle on the DS should be the definitive version of Peggle. It has the touchscreen controls, which are at least as good as mouse controls. It has, in theory, good enough hardware to do a good job of the audio/visual rewards that Peggle likes to drip feed players, and it can be played in bed, on the loo, at work or collapsed in a gutter somewhere, telling yourself “just one more hit”.

Sadly, I’m going to say that the PC version is still the one to play.

The most obvious problem with Dual Shot is the graphics. Peggle DS is kind of ugly. Like bad 90s spritework ugly.

This wouldn’t be such a crime, but the iPod nano has a better looking version of Peggle. There is no excuse for the DS version (a dedicated gaming platform) looking worse than a version of Peggle made for an MP3 player. When the game zooms in, you can actually see that the ‘ball’ is in fact a square. It’s a shame, because Peggle really depends on the flashy neon player feedback to work, and on this front, Dual Shot kind of falls flat.

I am also unconvinced by the physics engine. It every now and again behaves in a way that doesn’t look quite right, and this has lead to me missing shots that I think I should have made.

A new mechanic to Peggle was introduced into Dual Shot, and I have mixed feelings about it. In previous games, there was purple pegs which would move about the level each turn, and if you hit them, you got a bunch of points. In Dual Shot, in addition to the points boost, when you hit 5 of them, you get teleported to a bonus level. In this bonus level, you can get an extra ball, and a shed load of points. It is certainly an interesting idea.

The problem?

The bonus stages suck.

It always seems to boil down to “try to decipher when you should and shouldn’t randomly jab the screen.” The luck/skill dichotomy that the main game balances so well isn’t present at all.

It creates the odd scenario where I want to collect the purple pegs, because they can give you a lot of points, but I want to avoid them, because the bonus game is horrible to play.

All in all, I can see past most of these flaws. It is a workable version of Peggle, and it contains both the original Peggle levels, and the Peggle Nights levels.

It’s just a shame that the DS version (which is also the most expensive version) lacks most of the polish of every other version.

The closest I can come to flat out recommending Space Giraffe is saying “I would feel like an idiot if I didn’t flat out recommend Space Giraffe”.

I could break it down it to its component parts and say which bits are nice, and which bits aren’t nice, but that would probably be missing the point. It, like pretty much any other game, is just a collection of graphics, sounds, and gameplay mechanics. It’s hard for me to give any kind of definitive answer as to whether it works well or not, but it certainly works for me, and at the very least you should be open minded towards it.

Space Giraffe is a psychedelic, light-synth looking game about moving and shooting.

On the surface, it might as well be called Tempest 4000. The controls are similar to the tempest games, and the levels are presented in a very similar fashion, and the graphics are exactly what you would expect from a Llamasoft game.

However, if you are willing to look beyond these superficial similarities to previous games, you’ll find a deep, rewarding, utter bastard of a game.

Stuart Campbell did a far better job of dissecting the gameplay mechanics and scoring system of Space Giraffe than I could ever do, as does Jeff himself. The most important new mechanic present in the game for me is the bull attack. There is a horizontal line visible on the level, and it’s distance into the screen represents how full your “Power Zone” is. As long as it is not empty, you can bash enemies that have reached the top of the level. You will also get a massive multiplier for doing this. Your Power Zone is constantly draining, but it gets topped up by shooting enemies.

What this does, for me, is remove a lot of the feeling of fragility that was present in Tempest 2000. Now, when enemies reach the top of the level, I don’t feel helpless, I see opportunity. It is risk/reward gameplay at it’s finest.

There are a bunch of similar interesting mechanics all going on at once.

It is a great looking game. Yes, lots of people say “I can’t even see what’s happening”, but you just need to look with better eyes. There is a lot of visual information you have to decipher, and there will be some doubt as to what exactly is going on at any given time, but that is simply part of the fun.

Fun.

Yes fun. Fun is one of the things that happens whilst playing Space Giraffe. You will have fun.

Unlike many other games though, it will make you work bloody hard for it. You basically have to concentrate all of the time. You will have deaths that you don’t even feel are your fault. You might get angry with it, uninstall it and vow to never play it again. Then you will redownload it, and get a new high score.

It tells you that you are rubbish, it tell you that you are not really good enough to be playing it, and it is probably right at first.

But then you, even if just for a few moments, you’ll do well. The brilliant (free download) soundtrack will step up a notch, lots of bright lights will go off, and you will be king of the world.

Jeff Minter has been making games for a long time, and has gotten pretty damn good at it. What he is not as good as, it seems, is marketing. Space Giraffe was not a commercial success, which really doesn’t surprise me.

There is a demo, but I am going to suggest you don’t play the demo. I downloaded the 360 demo, played it, didn’t quite get it, then deleted it. Then downloaded it again, didn’t quite get it, then deleted it. I went through this process several times before I got the full version on the PC. It’s not an expensive game, the XBLA version is 400 MS Points (or two horse armours) you can get it on the PC for £13.45. If you are at all interested in it, get it, and play it for an hour before formulating any opinion on it.

I’m sorry for wasting your money if you buy it on my recommendation and don’t like it at all. Hopefully you will.

Peggle on PC, for the uninitiated, is the poster child for the casual game that can break through to the hardcore (or vice versa). It’s Positive Reinforcement: The Game, essentially a mash-up of Breakout and Pachinko wrapped up in pretty colours, classical music and characters based entirely on puns.

Each level has a certain amount of pegs, twenty of which are orange. Clearing all of the orange pegs completes the level. Levels progress in difficulty, achieved with placement of pegs, obstacles and restrictions. And to be honest, I’m probably over-explaining it.

Unfortunately, now you know that, there’s not much new to say about Peggle on Xbox Live Arcade; It’s Peggle, and it’s on Xbox Live Arcade. For eight hundred moon pounds you’ll get the same adventure mode and challenges as the PC version, with the added bonuses that you’d expect from a Live Arcade title – leaderboards and online multiplayer.

As well as the local hotseat multiplayer of the PC version, Peggle XBLA now has an online ‘Peg Party’ mode, where four people play simultaneously to achieve the best score. This is essentially the same thing as single-player mode, just with a real-time competitive element – nothing you do affects other people’s boards. While it’s a nice addition, I would have enjoyed a mode similar to that available in most versions of Tetris, that allow you to mess with your opponent’s screen or whatever.

There’s also the suspicious absence of Peggle Nights, an expansion that is entirely included on the DS version of the game. Yes, it’s an expansion of equivalent size to the main game, and it would perhaps be unreasonable to expect it, but the reason it’s so stark an omission is that there’s really nothing new about Peggle on XBLA. The single-player and challenge modes are exactly the same, the online mode is essentially single-player again, and there isn’t even a score comparison to your closest friend on each board in the style of Geometry Wars 2, which is a glaring oversight.

For some people, Peggle again will be enough. It is and always was an incredibly addictive game. But if you own neither and are deciding between which to pick up, I would have trouble recommending one over the other.

(Apologies for the lateness of this review. I was distracted by Peggle.)

Very cool.

Very very cool.

Fuck Mediawatch-UK, Fuck Anne Diamond, and fuck the Daily Mail. MadWorld is fun fun fun fun fun.

MadWorld makes an incredible first impression. It sucks you in and demands to be played. At it’s heart beats an unrelenting combat engine that is as challenging to play as it is badass to watch. It manages to make QTEs feel fresh, which is an astounding achievement. The scoring system is hilarious, and if you want, there is a decent amount of depth to be found.

You only need to see the game for a few seconds to understand the visual appeal. Yes it looks like Sin City, and yes it works very well as a game. Not since Jet Set Radio have I played a game and had to just sit and stare thinking “what the hell is this? How have they made this?”.

The Jet Set Radio comparison applies to the music too. It has similar, fantastic contemporary hip hop, although maybe a bit grittier. Some of the songs have lyrics about what is going on in the game too, which is cool.

At all times, you feel very very powerful. Jack can simply kick a lot of ass. You never feel completely overwhelmed, and you have always got the tools you need to put a violent end to anyone who gets in your way.

The genius of the game comes from the fact that you do not get points for just killing, but the way in which you kill. Throw someone in a fire, get a few points. Shove a signpost into someone’s head, then throw them in a fire, get a few more points. Shove 3 signposts into someone’s head, set them on fire, hold them up against a giant circular saw, head butt them a few times, and then throw them into a fire, and you get a hell of a lot of points.

I know, it is not big, it is not clever, and it certainly shouldn’t be played by children, but they are very solid game mechanics. It is a violent game, but it never feels like it is just going for the cheap shocks for easy controversy marketing, unlike, say, the Manhunt games. More stylised than gore.

Some levels are small, some are big, but they are always interesting, and always have a huge variety of ways to use the environment to your advantage. It is a lot of fun experimenting ways to get the highest score, or just do badass things.

Controls are almost convoluted. To be honest, they took me quite a long time to get used to it, but it is worth it. It uses pretty much every function of the Wiimote + Nunchuck, but once you have gotten used to the set up, you have a lot of freedom over what Jack is doing. Simplifying the controls would have certainly been detrimental to the game.

The story starts off simple enough to completely avoid getting in the way of the rest of the game, and cut scenes provide just enough of a framework to hook the events of the game onto. As the game progresses however, the conspiracy storyline gets increasingly interesting, and the ending is pretty great.

It is not a game you are going to play solely for the story, but it is at worst inoffensive, and at best interesting. The in game announcers can be annoying, but only because they start to repeat pretty quickly, which is inexcusable in such a short game. It’s a shame, because they can be pretty damn funny. They also respond to what you are doing in game, which can work really really well.

The whole package is presented phenomenally. Everything just works well as a game, there are some very funny, subtle references to other games. The cut scenes are wonderful, and from the moment you insert the disc, to the end credits, it feels like a game made by people who love video games as much as you do.

I am not going to lie, it has problems. The time limits seem like a bit of a lazy design crutch, and I’ve spotted a few graphical glitches that you might see too if you look hard. If I was forced to, I could come up with a few more flaws, but you can’t force me to, so I am not going to. There are a few minor, inconsequential problems with the game, but nothing that is detrimental to the game overall.

Whatever the hell “Hardcore” even means, you will struggle to find a game that is more hardcore on any platform. MadWorld is like the best bits of several good games crammed into to one disgusting bloody orgy of fun, and that is more than enough for me. MadWorld is not just a standout title in the Wii’s library, but a must play in every sense of the word.

If you liked God Hand, you will love Mad World. If you didn’t like God Hand, piss off to IGN.

So, wrestling eh? You either love it or you hate it. Me, I think it’s ok, as long as you accept the fact that it’s just a soap opera for boys. The acting is terrible and the plots are weak, but for some inexplicable reason it still manages to draw me in with its implausible story lines and over-the-top circus theatre. This game takes us to the so-called ‘Golden Age’ of the World Wrestling Federation Entertainment of the 1980s and 90s, back when the fights were real and the best man really did win (sub please check).

Let’s get it straight from the onset; this is a niche title. I know it sounds strange to say it, due to the global outreach of the WWE brand, but it’s not going to entice anyone in who doesn’t already have an interest in this particular division of ‘sports entertainment’. However, for those fans out there who have slowly lost interest in the over-complex Smackdown vs Raw offerings that require you to have the brainpower of Stephen Hawking in order to remember combos, you’ll be pleased to know that WWE Legends has been pared back and is a lot simpler to get to grips with. This doesn’t mean it is simplistic, however. You can still perform a variety of strikes, grapples, irish whips, clotheslines etc, but it all seems a lot less bewildering when you first pick it up. You’ll soon be suplexing like Mr Perfect and chest-chopping like Ric Flair himself.

The basic game works in a similar fashion to other wrestling games; the more successful moves you perform, the more your opponent’s energy bar will deplete. When it’s been depleted far enough, you will be able to pin or make them submit. Where this game differs is that it introduces a levelling system. You start on Level 1 and can progress up to Level 3, where you can then perform your finishing move with a couple of button presses. As you level up, your attacks become stronger, and you become more resilient. When initiating special moves and and certain grapples, you are presented with a quicktime event, where you have to press two or three face buttons during the move in order to complete it. Yes, yes, I can hear you groaning already about the QTEs, but for this type of game it doesn’t seem to break the flow of the action. When you complete your special move (or fail it), you then drop back down to Level 2, and have to work your way back up again. There’s the obligatory button-mashing when it comes to getting yourself back up after a fall, or trying to escape from a pin, but thankfully it’s not too frequent.

From what I’ve described so far, it sounds like this is a decidedly average fighting game, and that’s mainly because no matter which way you dress it up, it is. Compared to something like Street Fighter IV, it really doesn’t cut the mustard, but wrestling games (much like its real-life counterpart) have never only been about what happens inside the ring. Where this game really begins to shine is in the presentation. Each venue from the original WrestleMania right up to XV have been painstakingly recreated to the very last detail; even down to the miniature rings that combatants entered in at WrestleMania III.

Much has been made of the ‘Relive, Rewrite, Redefine’ modes. They are set out in chronological tiers, where you unlock a match once you have won the previous one (attaining a gold medal if you manage to fulfill a number of objectives. ‘Relive’ is in some ways the most restrictive mode, where you have to re-enact moments that actually happened in the match. For example, in Hulk Hogan’s cage match with King Kong Bundy from WrestleMania 2, you earn extra points for irish whipping Bundy into the cage wall and busting him open. Additional points are gained from preventing him from exiting the cage through the door (twice, as in the real match), and then escaping over the top. However, it must be stated that performing these feats are optional, only if you’re interested in collecting the gold medals. You can unlock the next match by simply winning the bout.

‘Rewrite’ (or ‘Totally Changing Time’) pits you against a winner of a particular match from history, instructing you to change the course of history. Again, it gives you objectives to complete, but they tend to be more general, such as performing a move off the top turnbuckle or getting your opponent into a strong grapple. The ‘Redefine’ mode is very similar to ‘Rewrite’, but match rules are changed (changing a ladder match to a Hell in a Cell, for example).

The character creation mode from SvRi is still prevalent, and you can enter your lycra-clad goon into the ‘Legend Killer’ mode, where you face off against six tiers of WWE superstars to become—you guessed it—a legend killer. For those of you with SvR2009, you can even import characters from there. So if you’ve always wanted to pit Cody Rhodes against his dad, then you can finally fill your boots.

With regards to the roster, almost everyone is there: from Greg ‘The Hammer’ Valentine to ‘Stone Cold’ Steve Austin; Andre the Giant to Jake ‘The Snake’ Roberts—even younger versions of The Undertaker and Triple H. The only notable exceptions I can think of are Chris Benoit and Owen Hart, but that’s kind of understandable, really. The likenesses are generally very good (even though some of them have been made far musclier than in real life). The only strange one is Shawn Michaels—his face just doesn’t look anything like him.

Manager interference is new to the series. Before you’d have to go outside the ring to hit them, but now they interject just when you want them to (or not, depending on whether they’re on your side). This can get a little frustrating when you think you’re nailed on for a pin and Bobby Heenan grabs his guy’s leg and sticks it on the rope, but it’s all part of the show, so it’s hard to grumble. You can even go over to your manager when you’re low on energy, and he’ll refill it for you (losing a level in the process).

So in summary, should this game pique your curiosity if you’ve never held any interest in watching men in their pants pretending to hit each other before? No, but to those who are still reading this, dare I say it; this could be the best wrestling game I’ve ever played. Whoops, I’ve just damned it with faint praise.

The S8ek AV8R is a pretty good flightstick.

It is billed as being designed for both 360 and PC. The buttons are all the buttons from a 360 pad, but it has a standard USB connector, so you can just plug it str8 into your PC, and it will work gr8. It will require a bit of fiddling to get the controls just right, even in the game that it is billed as being designed for (HAWX).

It costs around £40, and it doesn’t quite feel like there is £40 worth of material in the stick. It is a little lightw8 (OK, I will stop now, I think I made my point), and a little plasticy. The click of the trigger button (mapped to A) is just the right type of feedback you want from a firing button.

The cover for the X button is a pretty cool touch too. There is a cover to protect you from accidentally pressing the X button, like in real military aircraft. In practice I left it open, but depending on how much you role play your games, it is a good option to have.

The throttle lever is solid, it is mapped to the right trigger, it gives you really precise control over throttle, and makes coming out of stalls in HAWX not only easier, but a lot more fun too.

The stick is a real strong point of the Aviator. It has a solid action, and is also a twiststick, giving 15 degrees of rudder control by twisting the stick.

In addition to the main stick, there is two additional sticks, one on top, and one silly little “nub” on the base. Good for text entry on the 360.

Oddly enough there is a headphone port. I can’t actually imagine what it would be used for, since a 360 headset won’t work with it, and last time I checked, most PCs already have a headphone port. It is also a real shame to loose out on rumble.

All in all, I prefer playing flight sims with this stick over a standard 360 controller, so in that regard it is a success. It feels a little cheap, and the name is stupid, but as an all in one Console/PC flightstick, it does the job.

The Magic Toy Chest is one of those games that if it were a flash based web game would be the talk of the internet. One of those meme like popular games posted on message boards the world over. Because it is one of those games. This game however costs $19.95, the question is, is it worth it?

Developed by Graduate Games, MTC is a physics based puzzle game similar to the Incredible Machine, which if you haven’t played, you should. The aim of each level is to get a certain amount of a toy into the eponymous chest, in an attempt to tidy the various rooms of your house, and boy do I wish I had been able to get away with tidying my room like this, because this is fun.

Most levels start with the relatively simple task of locating all the keys to open your Magic Toy Chest, from here though things get a little tougher. The aim is to relocate a certain toy from where it currently reside to the MTC. Easier said than done. The idea is to set up the toys you have access to and use them to move the desired toy into the chest. There is a good number of different toys to choose from, each with individual actions to help you with your chores, the rocket can be set up and shot into the air, the ball, err, rolls, and the jumping dog, well, jumps. A clever aspect of this is if you happen to get any of the extra toys in the level into the box, not only do you get bonus points, but you get to use these to solve the puzzle.

One area where MTC varies from similar games is the real time set up, a lot of these games require you to set everything and then press go and see if it works, MTC does not, so you can see if you reactions are faster than gravity. Fortunately, so this doesn’t get frustrating, a simple tap of the space bar pauses the game time so you can set up and then un-pause, if required. This aspect makes for a bit more variation in the solving of puzzles.

Sadly there are few rather obvious bugs. Some levels start and pieces of the puzzles simply fall away as they aren’t attached properly. Other times objects pass straight through others, or the object shape doesn’t match the collision edge. Frustrating as these are, they aren’t really gamebreakers, but possibly the most fundamental issue with this game is that a number of the laws of physics simply aren’t obeyed. Friction has no place in this game, gravity is only loosely adhered to, and momentum ignored in place of an objects preset placement ability.

Even better than this though is when the toy truck causes a warp in the space time continuum and makes gravity fluctuate. Fun as this is, it is a pretty large flaw in a game billing itself as a physics based game.

Unfortunately, it is this which leaves the lasting impression not the puzzles, the frustration which comes with a puzzle not working because a piece floats through another, or won’t stop moving is greater than the fun aspect of the game, and this is a shame, as MTC is actually fun, but so are a lot of free games out there.

The fact there is a skip function shows that a lot of thought has been put into the game, it is the output which is flawed, not the concept, I look forward to seeing more from Graduate Games in the future.

MTC is a fun but flawed physics based game which is wholly suitable for children and may appeal to parents who want to limit children’s access to the internet for similar games.

Deadly Creatures, a third person action game in which you take control of a tarantula and a scorpion in the American desert, has been a difficult game to play through for review. Not because it’s particularly hard. Not because it’s a terrible game I couldn’t face playing. No, it was hard to play because it completely terrified my wife, so I couldn’t play it while she was awake. She’s fine with zombies, monsters and aliens trying to eat my face off while she sits beside me knitting and tweeting, but put me in control of a tarantula and she can’t even look at the screen.

You could make a strong case, then, for Deadly Creatures being the scariest game of all time, given that there are more people around terrified of spiders than there are terrified of zombies. Which doesn’t seem right to me, but there you go. I’m not a huge fan of spiders, but I’m not especially scared of them, so I was able to play through the game without any trouble on that front.

So, if you’re an arachnophobe, you should steer clear of this game. If you’re not? Should you pick up this game? Well, the answer to that is slightly complicated, but the short version is “no”. It’s not that Deadly Creatures is an especially bad game. It’s a pretty average game, really, enlivened somewhat by the unusual setting and the presence of Billy Bob Thornton and Dennis Hopper, who pop up now and again during the game as a pair of treasure hunters and who are by far the best thing about the game.

For the most of the time I spent with the game, I was thinking of giving it a very cautious recommendation as a rental. There aren’t really any problems with the game, for the most part, apart from the camera, which is usually fine, but prone to the odd spasm in tight areas. The motion controls work and, with the exception of the scorpion’s grass-slashing strike, aren’t overused or annoying. The game just works and, if it doesn’t set its sights too high, at least it doesn’t overreach itself.

However… this all changed at the end of the game. The final boss is a terrible piece of work showing off all the problems with the camera and control system. It’s glitchy, relies far too much on luck, the boss can hit you multiple times without you being able to recover and at the very end of the fight the instructions lie to you.

If you finally persevere through this to win the fight – and I only did because I thought I should finish the game before reviewing it – the game ends rather abruptly, after only about four and a half hours, shows you some jerky, unskippable credits and then unceremoniously dumps you back to the level select menu.

You can play through the game again, you can view some concept art galleries (which, incidentally, are far nicer and more colourful than the game’s actual graphics) and that’s your lot. It’s definitely not worth buying and is barely worth a rental. An unfortunate disappointment.

Some games are the worst kind of supermodel, beautiful but empty. Some are aging drunken actors, full of charisma, but stumbling and incoherent. Some are great scientists, brilliant, peerless but impossible to understand. Some are snake-oil salesmen, promising the world but delivering nothing.

Age of Empires: Mythologies for the Nintendo DS is your friend James. He works in IT, is in a long-term relationship with a plain, unremarkable girl and is pleasant company down the pub. He’s just not going to stumble in with a bottle of red wine in one hand, a pair of handcuffs in another and regale you with tales of amazing adventure in Eastern Europe.

This is because James, despite being a nice enough chap, is fundamentally quite dull. He does what he does well – he works hard, always buys his round and treats his girlfriend well – but he’s not very exciting.

Crucially, however, this isn’t actually a bad thing. If all your friends were half-crazed thrill-seekers then you’d never get any sleep, would catch some horrible disease and then you’d die in the passenger seat of an Italian sports car after failing to make an awesome jump over the Danube.

No, you need James. You need someone calm, orderly and trustworthy. And in amongst your quick arcade racing thrills, epic RPGs and super-detailed kill-o-thons you need something like Age of Empires: Mythologies.

I say “something like” Age of Empires: Mythologies, because it fits neatly next to Advance Wars on the shelf, but isn’t quite as good. Which, in itself, is high praise indeed. Being nearly as good as Advance Wars is like being nearly as cute as a box of kittens, or nearly as big as the universe. It’s an impressive achievement, but the fact remains – Advance Wars is better. Advance Wars is also less complicated, so Age of Empires isn’t even a good introduction to the turn-based strategy genre. (Age of Empires has a very interesting double-layer to its traditional rock-paper-scissors mechanics, which soon becomes second nature, but always keeps things interesting.) Its target market is people who have finished Advance Wars and want more, or people who aren’t interested in modern warfare and want a game based on old mythologies. Or, indeed, people who think Advance Wars is too cute-looking and want something that looks more like an old PC game.

Which is where Age of Empires first problem lies. The graphics do an excellent job of evoking the feeling of old PC strategy games, back in the days when graphics were 2D and you could play them without investing in a platinum-plated, champagne-cooled graphics card. It’s a nice look, designed to be familiar to players of the real-time PC games on which this turn-based spinoff is based. Unfortunately, the graphics aren’t quite clear enough. They’re fine alone, but get a few units bunched up together and it can be hard to see what’s going on. It’s not a major problem, as you can get all the information you need simply by moving the cursor around and glancing up at the wonderfully-informative top screen, but it does make it difficult to tell what’s going on at a glance.

Age of Empires has another annoying problem, too. The AI isn’t great, making strange moves and having to cheat to put up a fight. That’s pretty standard for this type of game, though, and not a major failing in my eyes. The really annoying thing is that the AI doesn’t concede. In some of the longer campaign missions, you can spend over half an hour slogging through the enemy’s base to kill everything. It’s clear you’ve won the mission, that you’re too strong to be stopped and the enemy is too weak to fight back, but it’ll keep trying to fight you, anyway. When you finally beat one of those missions, you slump your shoulders, wait for the auto save message and then turn off the DS in relief.

Then, five minutes later, you turn the DS back on. Fundamentally, you see, Age of Empires is a very good game. Sure, it’s not glamorous, sure it’s a bit dull at times, but it’s a fundamentally good game – and there’s an awful lot of it. Multiple civilizations with multiple gods to choose from (all of which effect your strategy and play style more than you’d think), a long series of campaigns, extra missions in the Scenario mode, a Skirmish mode, lots of extra maps, gods and trinkets to unlock by gaining special “achievements” while playing and, of course multiplayer, which can be played with one DS, two DSs with one cart, two DSs with multiple carts and online. Phew. (Though, it should be noted, I didn’t actually find anyone online when I tried to play.) It’s a packed little cart, that’s for sure.

This isn’t a game that will change your life. It’s not a game that you’ll evangelize about to friends and strangers. It’s probably not even a game you’ll remember in ten years time when you’re getting all nostalgic for the days of the DS.

It’s a good, solid, interesting game, great value for money and recommended to anyone interested in a turn-based strategy game for their DS – if they’ve already tried Advance Wars.

When the Rock Band Portable Drum Kit arrived at my door, I was pleasantly surprised at the build quality of the contents – the four pads are exactly the same size as the full Rock Band drum set, and made of good-quality rubber. The drumsticks unscrew for easy transport, and have rubberised ends to dampen sounds. The pedal looks flimsy but feels sturdy, and is mounted with a couple of removable carpet grips to keep it from slipping. It’s clear that MadCatz have put a lot of thought into the failings of the original drum kit and piped those into the design of this portable version – the pedal especially is much upgraded from the rubberised one they initially announced.

DAY 1 – SOLO PLAY

After booting up my 360 and connecting the main body of the controller (essentially a hub with ports for each input), it occurs to me that this little thing is just a controller with a d-pad and four buttons. I can load up and play N+ no problem. After wasting an hour or so on that I remembered what I was originally going to do, and hooked up the pads and pedal. Shifting my keyboard to one side, I placed the pads on my desk and popped the pedal under it.

As I quickly found out, my desk is a little too high for drumming. I paused, dragged a table in from the lounge and set myself up, a little lower than I would have liked, and resumed. While it was a slight adjustment in play, I found that I was able to play through and beat the set with little difficulty.

There were a few occasions where I missed some notes I felt I should have hit. Most notably, the pedal works in a vastly different manner to the stock Rock Band pedal.

At this early stage I’m having trouble deciding whether these little issues are the set itself or just me playing it incorrectly. I seem to remember having issues like this with the pack-in Rock Band drum set when I first started playing, and now I have no problems at all as my play style fits that set.

DAY 2 – BAND

Today I brought my 360 and my Rock Band gear around to a friend’s, as we do every now and again on a weekend. Granted, it’s only the house next door, but the portability of this kit made it a single trip instead of an unwieldy two-trip exercise. After a test few songs we adjusted the coffee table and swapped out the couch for a straight-backed chair, and proceeded to play for a few hours. I tried out a few songs which I knew very well and sight-read a couple of new downloads, and I really got a feel for the new pads. There’s a little more bounce than usual, and so I’m finding it impossible to pull off rolls with any kind of regularity. Double kicks are also very difficult without the springy pedal from the original kit, but I can already see myself adjusting to the shallower pedal.

One thing I did notice after prolonged play is that the sticks vibrate more than regular wooden drumsticks. As the sticks screw together, they can sometimes loosen slightly during prolonged play.While this can be fixed with a quick tightening between songs, it’s very hard to do in the middle of a song and if it’s left unchecked it could at possibly damage the sticks and at worst damage your hands. My wrists were aching a lot more than after extended drumming with the regular kit.

DAY 3 – BAND

I left the gear at my friend’s overnight and popped back today for a full day of Rock Band. Somehow, after returning, I found a really good placement for the pads – I was even pulling off rolls and double-kicks easier than with the regular kit, with no no pain at all. It now feels like the ability to place the individual pads wherever you like is a great advantage for the Portable Drum Kit, whereas yesterday it felt like a frustrating hindrance.
I downloaded Hey Baby. Drumming without ever seeing the note chart or knowing anything except the chorus was fun times.

Tomorrow I’m taking a short train journey to go home. Hopefully we’ll see how portable these drums really are.

DAY 4 – TRAVEL

I travelled by train for roughly an hour today with the Portable Drum Kit. There’s not much to say except that it definitely lives up to its name. The drumsticks, as mentioned earlier, unscrew for easier portability but I really don’t see why this is necessary except to keep the size of the original package down – it’s not as if drumsticks are not portable enough to begin with. I actually had more trouble trying not to stab people with the end of my Xplorer than transporting the kit, which is definitely not something I could have said of my original drums, which took up an entire rucksack when I bought them.

Today’s outcome is definitely positive.

DAY 5 – BAND

My nephew got Guitar Hero: World Tour for Christmas, so I brought my Xplorer and the portable drums to his house to give it a go, only to find out that he had the entire instrument set, including a second guitar. After a few rounds on the drums, I decided that the pedal on the GHWT drums wasn’t for me, and swapped it out for the pedal in the portable kit. Bad idea – the pedal didn’t work and we almost failed the song as a result. The next song we swapped out the whole set for the entire portable set, and again, the pedal was not compatible, although World Tour recognised it as a four-pad set. Worried that it had been damaged in transit, I set up Rock Band to test it. It worked perfectly.

This, in my eyes, is a serious black mark against the Portable Drum Kit – if you are carrying your kit around with you to other people’s setups then it’s quite likely that they have a different game. Playing at my nephew’s also brought up the issue of placement once more – the only table that was accessible for the drums was a table tennis table in the same room as the console. I had to stand to play them and my nephew had to stand on a chair.

DAY 6 – BAND

Today the whole family came round to our house. We set up the 360 and the Rock Band equipment, my nephew bringing a guitar and mic so we could have a full set. The great new experience of playing Rock Band with my extended family (my grandma singing was a particular high point) was slightly marred by the fact that, again, we didn’t have an ideal place to set up the Portable Drum Kit.

Initially I grabbed a cardboard box of about the right size, but this left no place for a pedal and kept wobbling. After some discussion about whether or not there was a suitable board in the garage to lay over some chairs (and finding there wasn’t), we settled on placing the pads over two chairs. After playing one song the pads were drifting away from me due to the slightly curved cushions on the chairs, and the pedal was skittering all over the place – this was solved by removing the carpet grips from the pedal, which allows rubberised feet to grip a hardwood floor. We did continue to play Rock Band until the end of the night, but after each song the drums had to be readjusted. Rather ironically, with the chair set-up in the lounge, they took up rather more space than the standard kit, and were a little unwieldy to walk around when one of the four people not playing wanted to get a drink or whatever.

The key thing about these drums is compromise. If you have a conveniently-sized table then they will no doubt work very well for you, and they stack away neatly in a box a fraction of the size of the original Rock Band drums. They are also vastly easier to take round to a friend’s house for band play, as I’ve experienced. When you get there, the experience you have could vary wildly. The ability to place the pads wherever you like is both excellent and frustrating depending on where you’re able to place them, and while being quieter, the sticks aren’t the most ideal (and regular drum sticks are actually louder when used with the Portable Drum Kit).

It’s fifteen quid cheaper than the regular kit. I’m not entirely convinced it’s worth the savings, but that of course depends on your circumstances and whether or not you play Rock Band away from home a lot. If you plan on buying this just for the ability to store it neatly, I can’t recommend it. This kit thrives on its portability. But would I consider the extra hassle of setting up a few chairs a reasonable sacrifice for not having to lug the full set on the train? Absolutely.

And if you have a Les Paul or other detachable guitar the whole set will fit into a satchel.

Meteos Wars is the latest puzzle game to be released on XBLA from Q? Entertainment – publisher of such gems as Lumines Live and Rez HD. As a big fan of Q? Entertainment’s previous games, I went into Meteos Wars with high expectations.

In Meteos Wars, the player is tasked with the defense of a planet from the meteor-like meteos (meteor, meteos, get it?). In typical puzzle game fashion, this is accomplished by matching up colored blocks (the meteos) in lines. In not so typical fashion, matching up colors doesn’t instantly remove those meteos from play, but instead creates rockets that launch your meteos up into the air. The bulk of the gameplay consists of trying to juggle stacks of meteos in the air, matching enough colors to keep them aloft, but not enough to leave the planet, allowing the stacks to get bigger and bigger from the falling meteos, before finally creating enough propulsion to launch the entire stack off the playing field for a ton of points (and a lot of extra meteos on your opponent’s screen in multiplayer and versus modes).

I was a little worried that Meteos Wars wouldn’t control well with a traditional controller (Meteos was originally a stylus-based DS game), but I’m pleased to report that the game works reasonably well with the 360 controller, using one analog stick to move the cursor and the other stick to move meteos up and down. Switching from one side of the screen to the other can be a little slow, but even this problem can be alleviated by adjusting the cursor speed in the option menu.

Meteos Wars contains a respectable amount of content for an 800 point puzzle game. There’s a story mode where you fight against the computer across a number of different planets, finally fighting on planet Meteos itself. There’s a vs. mode where you can play against another player or the computer in a single match. There’s a Marathon mode where you don’t have to worry about an opponent and you just try to get as many points as possible. Finally, there’s are a few challenge modes available like trying to get as many points as possible in a minute. With multiple difficulty levels, unlockable planets (each with their own visual scheme & music), unlockable accessories for your alien avatars, achievements, and leaderboards, there are plenty of reasons to come back for one more game.

The game is not without its flaws. Online multiplayer is a joke with game-ruining lag being a frequent problem, assuming of course, that you can even find an opponent to play against in the game’s barren online community. The color schemes for some of the planets can make it difficult to distinguish between colors which can be frustrating. Finally, if you have played a good deal of Meteos on the DS, you may find it difficult to adjust to the different controls.

Problems aside, I have enjoyed the time I’ve spent playing Meteos Wars and plan to spend much more time on it in the future. It looks and sounds great (the audio in particular seems to be much better than the DS game) and the game’s frantic gameplay is a nice change of pace from the other puzzle games I tend to play. It’s not the best puzzle experience I’ve had on Xbox Live Arcade (that being Lumines Live with the Rockin’ Holiday pack add-on), but it’s still a lot of fun. I highly recommend it to fans of fast paced puzzle games, especially if you haven’t already played the DS version.

It’s a testament to how simple and yet compelling the crayon physics core mechanic is that a bunch of clones have sprung up between the initial release of the Crayon Physics tech demo and the release of the proper game, Crayon Physics Deluxe. There have been homebrew clones on the Wii, DS, an iPhone clone, and several PC clones, and those are just the ones I’ve encountered. When I say clone, I don’t even mean that in a derogatory sense, I’m pretty sure they would all happily cite Petri Purho’s IGF winner as their inspiration.

It taps into an idea I know I’ve had since watching Penny Crayon as a kid, drawing something, which then comes to life.

But does it work as a game? For the most part, yes, very much so.

The game is structured in a fairly traditional manner. You start off on island no. 1, which has a X number of levels (puzzles is probably more appropriate), and you have to get Y number of stars from the puzzles to move onto the next island and there’s always some margin of error between X and Y for those individual puzzles you can’t solve.

Each puzzle has stars for you to collect, initially just one star per puzzle, but a few have two. You collect stars by creating stuff with a magical crayon, that takes on the physical form of it’s appearance. Draw a box, it will bounce, slide, and have weight, momentum and friction appropriate to it’s shape. Same for a circle, or ropes and pulleys. You then have to use that stuff to move a red ball around the puzzle towards a star.

If it sounds complicated, it’s not, and there are nice on screen tutorials that offer just the right amount of guidance without feeling invasive whenever a new technique is required. At it’s most basic, Crayon Physics Deluxe is a game of cause and effect, action and reaction.

The difficulty curve is pretty shallow at first. It is a very forgiving game. Even if you mess up completely on a puzzle, a quick press of the space bar resets it all. Since the puzzles are only short, you generally don’t mind experimenting, since you won’t really lose much progress if the experimentation is unsuccessful. I also like that once you have gotten the star(s), nothing else matters, your construction can all fall apart, the ball can fly off the screen, anything can happen, and long as the red ball touches the star, you have succeeded.

Now I would say that the biggest missed opportunity in Crayon Physics Deluxe is in the puzzle design. A lot of the puzzles are solvable in more than one way. In fact, pretty much all of them are.

There’s the ‘correct’ way, which will often be elegant and simple once you know how, and it can be really rewarding working these solutions out.

The other way is to brute force it. Hash your way through it and you’ll probably get the ball to the star without too much difficulty. Either using what I guess are limitations in the physics engine, or just dumb trial and error.

The problem is, you often don’t know which of these you are doing until you’ve practically solved the puzzle. I wish there was more clues as to whether or not I was on the right track to finding the more elegant solution. Maybe if there was some kind of reward for having achieved the more intelligent solution, even just a little feedback to say “you have mastered this level, you can now move on” would be great, but as it is, the player is left guessing whether or not the have mastered a given puzzle, and for me, that really detracted from me wanting to perfect the levels.

Problems aside, the puzzles is more than enough to put a smile on your face. It can really make you feel clever.

It’s technically impressive. It looks, feels and sounds like something a 5 year old digipen graduate might come up with, and that is entirely meant as a compliment. I’ve got plenty of time for games that look like no other games on the market (excluding direct clones of it of course).

The creative commons sources soundtrack is a highlight. It’s downloadable free right here, and _ghost’s Lullaby has been helping me get to sleep since I first heard it. My only complaint is that there is just over 11 minutes of music, and you will spend much longer playing the game, so each track will repeat lots of times, but if it bothers you (it didn’t really bother me) you can always mute it and stick something else on in the background.

Then there is the level editor. To be honest, that’s not really my thing, but it looks pretty robust, so I reckon if you are the type of gamer that likes creating levels, then this is a big plus for you.

What definitely is my thing is the downloadable levels other people will make for me. Already, from just the beta there are a bunch of great looking levels been made by users, so I bet in a few months there will be mountains of levels made by users. And here lies the rub, who knows what the communities quality control will be. Thousands of levels to download is useless if 99% of them are terrible and there is no way to tell the gold from the turd.

A minor technical downer, I seem to be unable to get it to run at 1280×1024, the highest resolution it will run at is 1024×768. It’s only a slight annoyance really, barely worth mentioning. It is still beautiful.

In all honesty, I am pretty sure most gamers will get plenty of enjoyment out of Crayon Physics Deluxe, and if even if the more jaded amount you feel a little short changed, just head to his web site and try one of the plethora of games he has made publicly available for completely free.

Check out my custom level.

Review by Lewie Procter

(as of Home v1.03)

Booting up home, the first thing I got to do was create a character.

No matter what you do, the character will not look like you, they will look like someone from an awful lifestyle photoshoot.

I was unable to give my guy a beard, maybe I have to pay for that.

Miis are fun, Soniis (I think I invented that) are simply not. No matter what combination of ‘dead inside’ eyes, focus group fashion and overdone hairstyle you give them, they still end up looking very punchable.

One you make your character, you are transported to your coastal apartment. I must say, the game is quite pretty in a very inoffensive, clinical, way.

Here you can move things about, and sit down if you like.

I guess, you could throw some money at Sony for a new sofa…

The problem with it all, there is some great views, huge areas are visible from your balcony, but unless I am much mistaken, it is all superficial. There is no exploration, and nothing to do. Beyond your balcony, it is just eye candy.

I chose to venture out of my apartment, and see some other people. I went to my door (the only exit for the apartment), and it said “Press X to download this area”, then I had to wait whilst it downloaded the area.

I don’t know why it didn’t just do this from when I arrived. It was the only obvious place I could go, and that would have saved me the wait.

When it does finally load, I am in the main area. It is filled with interactive adverts for Sony products. Sorry, I mean content.

There were people around, so I did the only thing the clunky broken communication interface was conducive to, making a prat of myself. I was asking “A/S/L?”, asking people if they want to play chequers, then running away, and I spent a lot of time telling people I have no keyboard and dancing at them. I got quite a crowd at one point.

The minigames are beyond pointless. I have had more fun gaming on my phone, and Wii Sports nailed how to do a casual bowling game at launch, how can Sony balls up something that simple with all the time they have had.

I’ll admit, I really wanted to dislike Home from the start, and it did absolutely nothing to convince me it is anything other than a waste of time, energy, and money for everyone involved.

Sony have very successfully replicated all of the tedium of everyday life, without any of the fun that could be had in a virtual world. All wrapped around a vacuous, hollow shell of a game filled with barriers, both to your time, freedom, and wallet.

lolsony.

What on earth are DICE doing wasting their time with the Battlefield series?

They have just created a stunning, incredibly forward thinking platformer that pushes the boundaries of what a first person game was thought to be.

DICE’s single greatest success is having made a game where you actually feel like you are in control of a human being. The rules are all firmly based on reality, no superhuman athleticism here. The controls are tight and responsive, and you are always directly in control, and always fast. Very quickly you understand your characters limitations, and how to push them.

You can see, hear and feel Faith’s every breath.

The pacing of the story mode is spot on. The action constantly moves at an utterly relentless speed, with brilliant set pieces strung together in a way that would make Valve jealous. But it almost never deviates from the core gameplay mechanic, just builds on it. It may not be long, but it wastes very little of your time, is a joy to be in control of, and always challenging.

Now, Mirror’s Edge is a very intelligent platformer, but you will have to work for it. You will die many times in Mirror’s Edge, and it’s easy to find it frustrating. Some of the checkpoints seem a bit on the sparse side, and the level design can often punish you for being curious. I don’t know to what degree this is by design, but for me, if any game would benefit from ripping off the Prince of Persia rewind, it would be Mirror’s Edge.

That said, when you do finally overcome those moments of frustration, you really do feel like you have achieved something.

The combat is a downside.

It is not a game about the combat.

My biggest problem with the combat is that it detracts from the game somewhat. It is good to have the option to kill/KO all the enemies. It is also good that it is often the best option to avoid combat at all. It is bad that there are points at which you are forced to use the combat, or ‘break’ the AI to avoid combat.

It is also bad that there’s a point where you are forced to use a gun. It killed the mood of the game for me, and is almost unforgivable.

I applaud DICE for making combat ancillary to the core gameplay, a very brave move, but I still think they slightly mishandled it.

That said, once I realised that I could pick up dropped weapons whilst sliding, I slung together some incredibly badass combat sequences.

I am completely sucked into the time trials. Once I have worked out how to 3 Star (A ‘perfect’ run) a level, I spend ages trying to actually do it. Mastering a level, and earning the 3 Star ranking is one of the single most rewarding moments of gaming I have ever had.

Mirror’s Edge has a classy, bright and beautiful visual design that gives it an identity entirely of it’s own. You could not mistake it for any other game on the market, which is always nice. It manages to turn fairly mundane locations like “office block” into gorgeous urban playgrounds bursting with colour and charm. Blue skies present and correct.

Also, smashing open the doors feels incredible. There should be a level that is just a long straight corridor filled with red door after red door, for a mile or so (maybe in the DLC).

There are a few annoyances that I wish they had worked on. Having a check point immediately before a cut-scene, or a door with a very slowly turning wheel to open it is poor form (although I suspect it is to mask loading times in some cases).

The quirks of the Unreal 3.0 engine are out in full force. Texture pop up, and lifts from the same supplier used for Mass Effect. There is also an odd glitch where when you respawn, world objects like dropped weapons that were stationary appear to drop vertically into the level. Hardly detracts from the game, but it’s a bit sloppy, and worth mentioning. I also noticed a typo error in the Subtitles, what’s with that?

The time trials are fantastic, but it would have benefited from at the very least a screenshot (video would be even better) preview of each level on the selection screen. As it is, you have to remember them by name, and if you can’t remember the name of a particular level, you have to guess, and load each one up until you find it. It’s sloppy, and some of the names are really not that distinctive.

Also – a weird glitch that is present on the 360 version, not sure about other platforms. In the time trials, if you are on a level with glass windows, when you start a run, they are all intact. If you go and smash them all, then restart, they will remain smashed. Abusing this can save time too.

The story is not all that great. The dialogue is not quite mature enough to do the setting justice, and it is the first game I have played where the animated cut scenes look markedly worse than in game footage. I really don’t know why they decided to ever take the player out of Faith’s perspective. The game’s insistance on using uber-cool slang like “Blues” (police officers) and “Bird” (Helicopter) gets pretty annoying. Just ignore the story and play the damn game.

Mirror’s Edge is a very important game. DICE have raised the bar for First-Person games as a whole. I want to see all games have this level of physical immersion. No excuses now.

A triumph of interface, immersion and level design. Incredibly human. A must play.

CODWAW (Cod·Wah) is in an odd position, sandwiched between the ‘proper’ call of duty games.

The previous entry in the Call of Duty series was a big franchise reboot. It left behind the World War 2 backdrop of the previous entries in favour of a modern setting, It also brought a whole load of new ideas to the table for the multiplayer, adding an almost MMO style meta-game to the multiplayer really added to the game, and it was also hugely successful. It was also developed by Infinity Ward.

This entry to the series is seemingly undeserving of a number. It goes back to the relatively safe territory of World War 2, and instead of telling a new story, tells the story of (fictional) characters taking part in the (real) World War 2. It is developed by Treyarch, whose previous output can generously be described as ‘mixed’.

A lot of people thinking of picking up CODWAW will be thinking a lot about the Multiplayer. Sorry, I have not played the Multiplayer. I am not a big fan of online FPSs anyway, so consider this a review of the single player aspect of CODWAW.

I jumped straight into the single player. Before each mission you are given a bit of historical background to the mission you are about to undertake. These are in the format that can best be described as halfway between a BBC2 WW2 documentary and a White Stripes video, voiced over by Jack “Corporal Roebuck” Bauer. Honestly, I don’t know how I feel about these. Generally, I think history is fair game for making books/films/games about, and world war 2 is just a part of history. I just think using archive footage of real soldiers in real battles, likely real soldiers who died fighting, in the same game that features a “Nazi Zombies” mode is a little crass. More on that later.

The first mission opens with a cut scene, only it’s a “you can move your head so it’s not actually a cut-scene, honest” type of cut-scene, you’ll be seeing a few of them. The game has you switching roles between a rescued American POW, Miller, fighting The Japanese, and a (believe it or not) Russian, Dimitri Petrenko, from the 3rd Shock Army, fighting in Stalingrad, and later across Germany.

The core gameplay is pretty much what I’ve come to expect from COD. Set pieces strung together with shooting bad guys, taking cover, and using a range of weapons (all of which are pretty fun to use, and sound great) to follow a very linear set of objectives.

A few things did bother me. There are more invisible walls in CODWAW than any game I have played in a while. Far too often you are stopped by an invisible force, for seemingly no reason. I’m not expecting some kind of open-world game, but it’s really disappointing when sloppy level design breaks your immersion. Similarly, there are lots of times when there are ledges or walls that you should be able to climb over, and you can’t. Sometimes you can easily hop a 3ft wall, other times a 1ft step is insurmountable. This is pretty basic stuff, and I don’t remember it being a problem in COD4. There are often a bunch of conveniently placed explosive barrels too. In 2008.

I can’t help but feel I am alone on the battlefield. There are times when I know I would not have been a good target, it would have made more sense for the enemies to target one of my squadmates, but still I am target number one. Conversely, you have to single-handedly achieve all of the objectives, you can forget about expecting your buddies to kill any of the enemies, and left to their own devices they would never get anything done.

The environments, whilst generally pretty, are very un-interactive. A lot of stuff doesn’t react to being shot. There are loads of doors that can’t be opened. The fire burning effect is not all that good. The animation is sometimes excellent, like when you see your buddies slide behind cover beside you, but they will also often clip through corpses, and the really seem to struggle with steps and stairs, I have more than once seen people floating/clipping through the ground.

There are lots of constantly spawning enemies. Times when it is simply impossible to just kill all the guys, you have to kill a few, then run through an invisible gate, which will trigger the command to stop spawning more guys.

There are also QTE-esque “press this button to not die” thrown at you every now and again to keep you on you toes. Because everybody loves them.

You have the same health/death/respawn system from COD4, although I must say, it is not implemented as well here. Sometimes check points feels far too spread out, and sometimes too close together. I have also often respawned at the end of a series of corridors, or at the bottom of a flight of stairs, just to have to walk a long time each time it reloads. Kinda frustrating. I also had to quit once because I was being respawned over a grenade and hadn’t got enough time to move out of its way, or throw it away.

That said, the ‘return the grenade’ manoeuvre feels a lot tighter. I can’t put my finger on what has changed, but I am much more often successful at it than I was in COD4.

Other good stuff -

The Flame-thrower is a hell of a lot of fun, if a bit over used.

When a grenade goes off, you know about it. Lots of nice sound and visual effects really put you right there in the battlefield.

There is probably one of the better “on rails” sections of any FPS in a while, shame it was so short, and is skipped when playing co-op.

The soundtrack is actually a real surprise, mostly subdued electronic stuff. I wouldn’t have thought it would work on paper, but it makes a great change from sweeping orchestral themes we are so used to in WW2 games.

Split Screen Co-op is a much welcome addition, you’ll have to sit pretty close to the screen, or have a big telly, but I can see myself replaying it many a time on co-op.

The Nazi Zombie mode is as fun as you would hope. It reminds me of one of the best bits from RE4. You get points for killing zombies, and you can use these points to get more ammo, better weapons, and other stuff. Great fun, and very frantic.

Overall, it is a bit hard to get too excited about CODWAW. The narrative, characters, and set pieces are all a notch lower than those of COD4. That said, it certainly has some great moments, and some of the new stuff is a lot of fun.

As great as COD4 was, it certainly wasn’t forward thinking enough that the design won’t get stale pretty fast. This is a sequel which brings very little new stuff to the table, and it really shows that Treyarch are simply not as good at making Call of Duty games as Infinity Ward are. There is fun to be had here, for sure, but if you wait another year, you will get the real sequel to COD4.

As a sidenote, props to Treyarch/Activision for making the Wii version the same game as the other versions just with less pretties. More of that please.

This review is basically spoiler free.

Fallout 3 is a horrific, buggy, glitchy mess of a game. Large aspects of the design are dated and sometimes even archaic. There are some issues that were problems in Morrowind, then in Oblivion, and are still causing trouble in Fallout 3.

I’ve got stuck in the floor, and stuck to doorways. I’ve had broken quests. I’ve had AI do things which just don’t make sense. I’ve shot an enemy, and instead of sustaining damage, it’s just shot up into the sky in a perfectly vertical line, never to be seen again.

I’ve spoke to a few people who’ve also played it, and some have experienced similar bugs, and some people have not, I guess your mileage may vary.

I don’t really care about these bugs.

Some of the voice acting is pretty annoying, and the in game radio repeats itself quiet a lot. The game would benefit from a better inventory system. Not being able to sort items by weight/value/amount is kind of annoying. It would be nice to have my weapons split up into the different classes, not just sorted alphabetically. There are also times when you are given an item, told what it does, but if you don’t remember there is no way of finding out again. I would also prefer it if there was an easier way of telling which ammo goes with which gun when you are buying/scavenging, as is, you have to remember, and there are quiet a few types.

I don’t really care about any of these flaws.

I wish Fallout 3 wasn’t quite so much like Oblivion. So many things from Fallout 3 are basically recycled from Oblivion, and I really wish Fallout 3 had more of it’s own identity. It’s just a lot of low end stuff. The sneaking/pickpocketing system, the general interface (basic movement and interaction with items), the save system, the camera and the terrible, terrible player animation (please play it in first person). It’s also astounding how rough around the edges it can be at times, there are occasionally bits of terrain that don’t even look like anything, and the random bits of dialogue people shout as you walk past them doesn’t always make sense. After playing Mass Effect, I would love it if Fallout 3 had a similar dialogue system, but it is a pretty basic list of options to pick from. I have decided that I am no longer going to be tolerant of First person games where my players feet/body are invisible, and so I have to call Fallout 3 on it. You feel very much like a floating gun, and the jumping is kind of off.

I don’t really care about these technical shortcomings, or derivative elements of the game design.

Now that I have got those problems out of the way, let me talk about how much I love Fallout 3. Fallout 3 is the most enjoyable role playing experience I can remember ever having had.

Fallout 3 has made me a bad person.

Very few games have this effect on me. Assassin’s Creed made me a bit of a prick, but Fallout 3 has made me flat out evil. First thing I think when I see a new person is “Could I kill them if I wanted too?”, second is “Have they got any good stuff?”, and third is “What can I do to get their stuff?”. If I have to quest to do it, I will do, but if I can just kill them/steal it, I will. To me, someone’s life is only worth the value of their stuff (in caps). It’s not my fault, that’s just the law of the wastelands.

Lots of games would punish you for exercising this level of dickery, but not Fallout 3. Sure, there are direct consequences for being evil (negative karma), but these consequences don’t have to be punishment, they are just a part of the role-playing experience. There are a bunch of ways that negative karma can be advantageous (such as perks that require you to be a bastard before you can get them).

I feel a real ownership of my character. The levelling system is excellent. It allows a huge deal of customisation, but, for me anyway, I never felt like I was too far down one branch to stop and change my mind and be a different style of character. The process of learning the game, deciding what type of character I wanted to be, and actually levelling up and picking stats was perfectly synchronised, which is something I have never felt in the Elder Scrolls games.

I think one of the things that really makes Fallout 3 work is the rules. It is incredibly open ended, but everything makes sense. I don’t really think there is a ‘bad’ type of character to play as. Whatever type of character you create, you will have strengths and weaknesses, but always something that makes you think “I am glad I chose to have that stat quite high”.

There is always a multitude of ways of dealing with any scenario, and it forces you to think “What would my character do?”, and for the first time in a long while in an RPG, over time, that changed to “What would I do?”. In the past I’ve really struggled with the Role Playing part of RPGs, often I’ve just played them for the mechanical gameplay, or the story, but Fallout 3 has been an incredible role playing experience.

The game world is really stunning too. It is as huge as you would expect, but in every nook and cranny there is something interesting to do, see, loot or stab. The backdrop to the game is an immense, bleak, burnt out, wasteland, and it really feels like it. Just getting by in the game is a challenge, and sometimes it feels like everything is out to kill you.

Despite this though, the wasteland will always provide exactly what you need, and if you are resourceful enough, you can always get by. Just. At it’s most intense, there have been moments when I have had low health, been surrounded by super mutants, but had no recovery items left. I managed to find a toilet full of irradiated water, which would give me just enough health to get past them. Obviously, drinking this water gave me radiation poisoning, but that was a problem for the future. Fallout 3 is at it’s best when you are just getting by, living in the moment, and taking from the wastelands whatever you can.

The wastelands may be brutal, but there are plenty of friendly characters, and tonnes of sidequests to do. Some of them are a little pedestrian, but more often than not, they are fun. Some of them are downright genius too. There are some set pieces which are fantastic, and the game makes it pretty easy to just wander off, exploring, and come back to the main quest whenever you feel like it. The ending of the main quest was a little weak, but this really is a game where the ending doesn’t matter too much.

It’s really believable too, Fallout 3 has one of the most convincing post-apocalyptic settings I’ve played in, and it’s got a great, cynical, sense of humour that adds a lot to the game.

The combat is great. It’s a really intelligent blend of realtime FPS and turn based RPG combat. The turn based combat is called “VATS”, essentially when you trigger the VATS, it pauses the game, and lets you decide which enemy, and where on that enemy you want to attack. Each attack uses up “Attack points”, which constantly recharge. Once you have selected where you want to attack, it cuts to a cinematic 3rd person camera angle, and your character carries out the attacks, then you jump straight back into the realtime combat.

It’s a great idea, for the most part used well, but there are some flaws. Sometimes the FPS aspect of it suffers from it being an RPG, the enemy AI doesn’t hold up that well for an FPS. They seem to only ever employ one of two strategies: “stand still at a distance” or “Run at him!”. The RPG elements sometimes suffer from it being an FPS too. The VATS sometimes tells you that you have a 95% chance of hitting someone, but then when it cuts to the 3rd person camera, you gun is actually just behind cover, and you unload into a wall, even though you had line of sight before starting the VATS. The VATS sometimes takes a little too long too, and the over the top gore is probably not entirely necessary, although it is kind of satisfying to blow someones head clean off with a well placed rifle shot.

I love this game. Love, love, love it to bits. It is very flawed, but I guess that’s Fallout. The flaws (to me) really don’t matter, and sort of add to the charm. I have sunk a huge amount of time into it, and pretty much enjoyed every second of it. If you liked Oblivion, it has enough in common with it that you will probably like this too. If you didn’t like Oblivion that much (like me), don’t let the similarities put you off. It certainly is “Oblivion with guns”, but it is also a whole lot more.

If Spider-Man: Web of Shadows was a singer, it’d be Britney Spears. Filled with hope and joy at the beginning, and backing it up with stimulus. But then, as you spend more time focusing on it, you realise the small faults. Eventually, it vomits and passes out every once in a while and despite trying to ignore it, it keeps embarrassing itself more and more.

From the very off, the game is presented in a bad way. Personally, graphical aesthetic can be a massive deal for myself. I’m looking forward to the NXE, purely due to the updated graphical look which is slightly more modern. I quite like PES 2009, in part due to the menus and user interface. However, in Web of Shadows we are presented with a grey menu. The image of Spider-Man fills maybe an eighth of the screen. Are we playing a game set in the colourful Spider-world, or Grey homogeneous blob’s adventures in Greyscale? From the menu, I can barely tell.

That’s only a small niggle in an otherwise fairly good looking game. Yes, the graphics are not stunning but certain little things are. The way the Spider-suit goes from red to black and back again is beautiful. The characters are designed in a larger than life Comic fashion set in a slightly more realistic world. The water effects are great, but that’s quite useless as if you go to near the water you’re probably playing the game slightly wrong.

The graphics are slightly last generation however. Maybe it was to assist better downscaling to the Wii and Ps2 ports but really the graphics are sub-par. The buildings are very under-detailed. Going back to the Britney Spears idea, the new ideas brought in graphically are in essence alright. Too much pop however. Yes, the pop does cause a massive problem when you are swinging through the city fancy free and notice an empty street. Letting go, you fall directly into the path of 40 symbiotes and their depraved orifices, ready to kill you and send you right back to Stark Tower.

Yes, sorry for the spoiler but Stark Tower is in the game! The man who built it isn’t however. The only superhero who really could not be effected by the symbiotes because of his suit is nowhere to be seen, having cavorted off and deciding to leave it to the superhero with the Spider-vulnerable regular cloth suit. Captain America, you know, the one with the power to destroy all of these symbiotes and sing “America The Beautiful” all before a sharp bedtime of 9pm, before the Hitler Yo…Peace Rally in the morning, is nowhere to be seen. In fact, Spider-Man has a laugh at the lack of these people, and his predicament, chortling at the idea of having Moon Knight as a partner whilst the rest of the Marvel Heroes have a we hate Spider-Man and Wolverine party.

Wolverine is also in the game, dropped off in Manhattan out of a fast plane by The X-Men presumably. But, as the only real other A-Lister, you’d assume he’d be introduced at the beginning or near enough. Nope, you get to hang out with LUKE CAGE for a while. Then once Wolverine is introduced, he buggers off quickly enough, more than likely to get it on with Black Cat. The poor use of characters can really become astounding. Why is Wolverine, arguably the best acted character, ignored for most of the game?

The acting itself is quite bad for most of the people. Spider-Man is horrible, with you wanting to garrotte his Spider-Voice Actor with a Spider-Fiber Wire. It doesn’t help that most of the lines could have been written by 5 year olds who have seen one episode of Spider-Man – The New Animated Series on JETIX. The Spider-One Liners are none existent and this is without a doubt a huge disappointment.

The story is spotty at best, and this poor writing doesn’t really help matters. The story is as generic as an autobiography written by Frank Lampard. Nothing huge and shocking happens and the story never gets truly out of first gear. It’s solid however and is never below average. It is not game breaking and does not damage the experience too much. Doesn’t improve it however. Venom is a formidable opponent and the reasoning behind most of the actions in the game are Spider-explainable.

However, the Spider-Plot Device of the symbiote being used to lengthen the game, allowing the makers to repeat boss battles is fairly obvious. The boss battles are not even that difficult the first time around, and on repeat they are easy as Spider-cake. This is a problem the whole game faces. The mission designs are fairly basic and mostly uninspired. They are not repeated, but this has the dual disadvantage of when you figure out what to do it is never repeated and also the game is itself shortened. In fact, even with the repeated boss battles, the game clocks in at around 8 to 10 hours, probably a bit too little for an average game at today’s prices.

It is for this Spider-reason that I cannot Spider-recommend this Spider. Personally, I believe you should give this game a Spider-rent unless you are a huge Spider-fan, in which case you will have already Spider-bought, Spider-played and Spider-beat this Spider-game. Spider.