What Is 'Geek Chic'?

Hi there, whoever you are.

If you're still following this, you may've noticed that I've been a bit on the quiet side for best part of two years, that'll be because I'm at university (just about to go into my final year), so I've been busy.

I've also been too poor to track down a steady supply of games, so screw you massively. Whatever, the point of this was this:

I'm working on new stuff again on a different blog, partly because I feel it's too late to reanimate this one, but mostly because my new one has a snappier name. The new one is here, and will be focusing more on gaming as a culture and consumer advice from yours truly.

Killzone 2

I was going to write something about Killzone 2 this week.

I was going to, but some prick burgled me while I was out running, so now I don't have a PS3 or Killzone 2. Or a phone.

This week's lesson: Killzone 2 will get your stuff nicked.

Red Faction Guerrilla

You know how beige isn’t cool, and hasn’t been for about 30 years? Do you also remember how it’s so uncool that having anything monochrome would have you killed by firing squad should the Fashion Police ever come into force? Why, then, is pretty much every game and film that comes out these days is moody and brown? Hike the brightness up again and you’d swear we’d warped back three decades.

Red Faction Guerrilla is a breath of fresh air as far as gaming goes (meaning the air in your living room is still going to smell of sweat and farts) by taking this fad and sticking a few explosive charges up its arse. Orange is the new brown here. I know it’s set on Mars, but the story is so dull and generic that I can say with a high degree of certainty that they added the “Mars” bit of the story somewhere towards the end of development and thought it was decent justification for painting everything orange.

The story goes thus: it’s the future and someone decided to start mining on Mars, so it’s been terraformed (without any kind of flora or forna) in order for average Joe miner to go down t’pit in a fancy futuristic jacket and headset. Presumably because setting stuff in space with mechs isn’t cool anymore either. No wait, there are ruddy great mechs in Guerrilla too, but only when the game is in a good mood. Funny how a game centred around destruction only occasionally lets you use the biggest destructo-toy conceived outside the nuke in Fallout 3’s Megaton. No wait, not funny. Shit.

If you didn’t already know, the big gimmick in Red Faction Guerrilla is the ability to return every building to its Ikea origins. To do so, you’re given a choice of explosive charges, sledge hammers, rocket launchers, slightly different rocket launchers, the death-ray from 1940’s sci-fi movies and a variety of rugged manly SUVs. The latter being a delightful way to fail hostage rescue missions.

Anyway, the story (which I lost interest in after about 5 minutes) is about a miner whose miner brother has been killed by a French energy provider and it turns out they’re not very nice people, so they’ve been pissing off the other colonists for a bit too. As the new boy it’s your job to lead the revolution even though neither you nor the character can be arsed. So you’ll spend all your time finding buildings to destroy.

Almost immediately after I started playing Guerrilla about half a million people simultaneously asked me if it was worth buying, and I couldn’t answer them. Partly because I’d only been playing it for about 20 minutes, but mostly because I couldn’t decide whether the destruction was fun enough to make up for the crap story. Don’t get me wrong, I love sci-fi stuff (and still need to get around to watching the modern Battlestar Galactica) and sneaky bollocks revolution – even to the extent of being slightly interested in the Maquis in Star Trek. Although that’s probably just because most of their screen time involved the Defiant blowing shit up, but nevermind, I’m not talking about Star Trek here.

After realising the rocket launchers were completely useless, the charges were unpredictable, the hammer was awesome and the death-ray carried about as much ammo as I do, I spent a few hours tearing through any building in sight in an SUV, stopping occasionally to batter it with my hammer. As I did so I kept asking myself the question “would I buy this with my own money?”.

After various private eye/wedding planner ponderance clichés (such as pacing, drinking and curling up in a corner for a bit), I came up with nothing and played Prototype for a bit. At which point, I decided InFamous pulled off the superpower sandbox better than Prototype and I’d rather still be playing Red Faction Guerrilla. I guess that means that Guerrilla has my highly coveted and much respected seal of approval (which I refuse to make a logo for).

But.

I love sandbox games scattered with various creative challenges, and Guerrilla provides well with transport missions and a distinctly memorable game of explosive golf. Bounding across Martian dunes in a space buggy SUV thing is weirdly compelling too. The actual story missions are a load of balls though. The story itself is dull, and the missions are what you’d call hectic if you grew up in a trench during the early 20th century. And they rapidly get more hectic. With no word of a lie, the last mission I attempted had me facing off against at least 5 tanks during a time limit and no chance to restock on ammo. Or health. A few broken control pads later, I gave up, played a few cathartic demolition challenges and realised my time was up with Guerrilla.

My final word is that I recommend Red Faction Guerrilla, and if I can be arsed, I’ll probably buy it myself in order to beat that mission if nothing else. Bollocks to that, my final word is my own word. Ponderance.

(Edit: Apparently "ponderance" means "weight" or "gravity", but I prefer my own meaning derived from "pondering").

inFamous

Let’s keep the moaning about my punctuality to ourselves, shall we? I’m still not getting paid and seeing as you’re one of a maximum of maybe four people reading this, it’s not worth any of us getting worked up.

As anyone who’s walked into a games shop over the last year or two has noticed, the PS3 is really fucking expensive when you consider it’s direct rival does the same job for much cheaper. I mean, the exact same job, none of this Hyundai are cheaper than Volkswagen bollocks; if anything, the 360 does the same job to a higher standard (between asthma attacks, of course). Also, anyone who’s tried showing their friends Little Big Planet will know (at some point or another) that the PS3 does things at its own pace, and if you don’t like it, you’d better hope there’s something good on TV.

In the interests of fairness, I personally own both consoles and have only the HDDVD add-on between the two to stop them from fighting. Anyway! I decided to take a small break from beefing up my totally pointless Gamerscore – relying heavily on the thought that the bigger it gets, the less healthy my social life is – and give this year’s PS3 exclusive a try.

By all respects, inFamous should have me sold on the PS3 before I even take it out of the box. As I whinged about in my bit on Haze, I revel in games that allow me to be as evil as possible, and I think the stark contrast (i.e., leg humping) in my Crackdown piece, I love a super-powered sandbox game. And while it is fun leaping off the top of a building and hitting the ground like an electrified meteor, killing every living thing on screen, inFamous has its problems. Which I shall now whinge about.

I always assume that any game that gets delayed will be eventually released with any noticeable bugs well and truly snuffed out like bubbles in wallpaper, which is why I was – well, let’s save some space and say I was “disappointed” – with a particular bug in inFamous. It was just one little bug, and although it hardly seems worth mentioning, I feel that my dearest, loyal readership deserves to know. This bug MOTHERFUCKING KILLED ME FOUR TIMES for no particular reason, in the middle of rather difficult missions. Surely there are teams of people looking out for bugs that drop your character through the floor of the level and kill him. Even if it means the bug is “fixed” by having your character dropped back into the map near where you outwitted the processor. Don’t you dare think it’s just because I fell through a pier and drowned. It’s like that bug on GTA 3, only it kills you rather than drops you back into the map.

That’s not something I’m willing to forgive, let alone when the game focuses around some ugly twat firing lightning out of every orifice and only accepts water as a conductor. I lost count of the number of times I thought I could be a clever arse and murder a load of enemies by sending half a zillion volts through the metal staircase those smug fucks were hiding in. No, apparently not. Train tracks? No, although they do let you skate along them. Buses covered in scrap iron? No, somehow covering a metal box in other pieces of metal makes it more resistant to electricity. I guess it’s my own fault I’m disappointed. I was expecting a shiny, new, current generation exclusive to demonstrate some new and interesting features, rather that finding a new way to take guns out of players’ hands.

I thought I was angry at inFamous, but it turns out I’m just disappointed. Until further notice, Crackdown is my ultimate in a sandbox game because it keeps things simple. You have superpowers, they get better as you kick more arse and most cardinal sins of gaming are sidestepped by the fact that there are absolutely no cutscenes or “points of interest”, as the story goes simply thus:

”Kill anything that tries to kill you, however you can.”

InFamous falls short on this by locking the city until you run through a dangerously uninteresting story and ties you down to the two most unlikeable characters since… well Haze, probably. Although most cutscenes in inFamous are done in their own comicbook style, the bits that rely on people actually interacting are so shamefully crap, I actually wondered if I could personally do a better job. I’ve only ever done coding once and I was the only person who managed to suck enough to break the engine we were using. Even so, I probably could’ve made smoother and more realistic animations. I’ll just say the lip synching is terrible by the standards laid down by the original Thunderbirds and leave it at that.

In short, if you’re looking for an excuse to justify your fanboyish claims that the PS3 is not just equal to, but greater than the 360, then inFamous isn’t going to do you any favours. If you’re looking for innovation or variety, inFamous is going to go down about as well as a retired basketball player on an obese midget. However, if you are in fact the niche that wants to run around a ruined city firing lightning bolts at people’s faces for hours on end, then I honestly can’t think of a better way of doing so that doesn’t involve illegal hallucinogenics.

The sandbox fun continues within the next fortnight or so (when I can be arsed) after I’ve played Red Faction Guerrilla.

Ninja Blade

I’ve never been to Japan, and I’ve only briefly played Devil May Cry so I should be at a disadvantage reviewing Ninja Blade; but I’m still not an idiot. While I’ve never been there personally, I’m willing to bet that the Japanese government doesn’t have an elite squadron of ninjas, but even if they did I’m they wouldn’t be prepared to fire them out the back of a dropship several thousand feet in the air in the event of some bizarre natural disaster. Nor will they have such a group in the next few years. Think about it. Even if they did employ people with cat-like reflexes, agility that lets them run along walls and the ability to look at the world in bullet time, there are much better uses for them other than canon fodder:

- pilots
- decorators
- more dangerous pilots
- research subjects
- even more dangerous pilots
- pilots who can touch up the paintwork on Air Force One mid flight
- a funnier variant of a pilot

You see? That list took me about four seconds to think of. All I’m saying is that if I was in charge of dispatching people with such impressive abilities, my first idea wouldn’t be to drop them out of a plane into a room full of mutants armed with little more than a couple of sodding sticks. There’s a special breed of people for that job, Gene Roddenberry thought of it over 40 years ago. They’re called “redshirts”. All you need is some red tops, one person with a name worthy of appearing in a movie (such as “Jake Bullet”) who’ll survive and report back to you, and about eight people known only as something like “Hernandez” or “O’Reilly”. Yeah, they’ll certainly all die, but who cares? The mission will be successful. Eventually.

If there’s any kind of warning I need to give regarding Ninja Blade, it’s that if you already hate quick time events, don’t bother with it unless you want to develop a full-blown allergy, new found immunity and then another allergy all over again. Most of the game consists of random button presses as prompted on-screen and occasionally you get to walk around a bit. Oh yeah, avoid Ninja Blade if you don’t fancy spending most of you time stabbing giant penises. I have no idea what this problem is with giant penises, but pretty much all western interpretations of Japanese culture involves ninjas and penises. Great, throbbing, deformed penises capable of tearing down buildings. I’m not even doing justice to how predominant giant penises are in Ninja Blade. Seriously. I spent a while wondering if I’d get more of a kick out of it if I was a gay nymphomaniac.

I guess Ninja Blade is the game for people who don’t think they’ve played enough Devil May Cry (and really, they have) and also still enjoy cornering insects and pulling their legs off one by one. Unless you’re fighting a flying boss, all you do to anything bigger than yourself is quick time event it until it can’t run away anymore, then slowly cut its legs off with a couple of blunt swords. I know the story is about some weird insects infecting humans and turning them into horrific monstrosities, but considering the government is telling me to kill them one by one by cutting their legs off slowly and painfully, I was beginning to think I was the evil one.

Then I remembered that I wasn’t the one firing bolts of lighting resulting in another completely unnecessary quick time event, and dragging boss battles out for about an hour and repeating the same fucking routine over and over until eventually it worked properly. If you are fighting a flying boss, however, you’ll be delighted to know that the battle will be reminiscent of the boss hand thing in Super Smash Bros. on the highest difficulty setting. The only differences are that it’ll take longer because it’s just slightly higher off the ground and your ninja has a habit of occasionally getting caught up in his own awesomeness with a katana and as such will savage whatever direction you accidentally pointed him at for a few seconds while the boss comes up behind you and pulls your skull out through your colon.

I get a distinct impression that during the Ninja Blade design meetings, there was someone bouncing up and down in the corner repeatedly shouting “MAKE IT MORE AWESOME” without really giving any insight as to what they meant by “awesome”. As such, you’ll run along walls, plummet from the sky, fight along walls, fight in the sky and even (and I’m not joking):

- grab a freshly vomited motorbike out of the air at around 4000 feet
- ride it along a pair of coaches
- ram it down the throat of one of the giant asteroid worms from Star Wars: Episode IV and detonate it

I didn’t quite manage to finish it, but that’s not because it’s any measure of a long game, I was just a bit embarrassed about hacking giant penises during daylight and could only play it for a while during the small hours of the morning. I also have friends.

I think the tone they aimed for in Ninja Blade was “action thriller” but kind of missed the mark on account of deformed people stopped being scary some time before I Am Legend came out and made us question how they could be truly dangerous if they’re such big pussies that they can’t set foot in daylight. There’s also the fact that most of the action is so over the top that it goes right beyond corny and is just really funny. Speaking of which, what kind of city has “an emergency catapult” in it’s fucking sewage system?! It’s only possible use would be to make the Saint’s Row sanitation activity a lot less challenging, or conveniently enough, launching a giant insect into orbit. There’s also the ability to dress your uber graceful ninja/warrior/government agent up as the Queen of Hearts or a clown, which undermines pretty much every aspect of the game somewhat. I thought I could make the game more entertaining by dressing my ninja as a packet of gum, but that didn’t do the trick if I’m honest.

While not content with ripping off Devil May Cry and misrepresenting modern Japan completely, Ninja Blade spent and entire level missing the point of Snakes On A Plane; which is of course just to hear Samuel L. Jackson shouting “I’ve had enough of these motherfucking snakes on this motherfucking plane”. Instead it has you fighting some giant snake thing with god knows how many heads (maybe it was just three, but I’m sure I shot a few off on my way to the plane and cut a few more off while on the bloody thing) while on the wing of a cargo jet.

Personally, I feel a bit ripped off by Ninja Blade. It was on my incredibly short list of games I thought I’d be interested in this year only to turn out to be Devil May Cry via I Am Legend by way of quick time events. If you really want to run through some ruined corridors to twat a few colossal penises with a blunt stick for a few hours on end, I recommend Ninja Blade. I’ve just discovered that there is in fact a way to use stealth in Viking: Battle for Asgard, so I say “fuck that” to Ninja Blade.

Duke Nukem NEVER

As I said in at least one of my older posts, I've had my own theories about Duke Nukem Forever. And by theories, I mean doubts. Twelve years in development, initials of DNF (commonly used in motor racing, meaning "Did Not Finish") and I'm sure I had some other points that've escaped me at the minute.

Anyway, whether you're aware or not, 3D Realms (the Duke's parents), just went tits-up and have conveniently and officially launched Duke Nukem Forever into the same hole most people are throwing adventure games into. My sources indicate that this hole leads directly to the seventh layer of hell. Pity.

This, in turn, essentially means that Duke Nukem Forever doesn't have Doctor in a Soap Opera's chance of surviving. Bollocks to Take-Two saying they're holding onto the rights. The rights are probably all that exist of Duke Nukem Forever anyway. At least it made me giggle that they've said while they'll be holding the name, they wont be paying development costs anymore.

Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard (and me, I guess)

As I now have a maximum of about three people even aware that I do stuff on the internet, I feel obliged to keep them entertained and/or informed. Actually, those few people should be quite aware of what I’ve been up to anyway – which is frankly a bit scary. Anyway, my point is that I kind of gave up writing my reviews quite suddenly when I realised it was a stupid idea and I should just go back to university if I ever want to be successful. Or at least make enough money to live on my own. Fuck it, enough money to run a car.

Well, one of the reasons I stopped was because I was trying to get my life in order and shit, and the other, more important one was that every game making its way through production was either a pile of wank or ANOTHER third person shooter using the Unreal Engine, or both. So I tried making a statement along the lines of: “look, you clinically retarded developers, we’ve played Gears of War, now give us something else”.

No one listened, and we still ended up with shit like an Onechanbara remake, a racing game that looked exactly like Forza 2 but cost about four times as much, and Wheelman. Nuff said. As I said earlier, I was planning on playing Banjo Kazooie Nuts & Bolts, but realised that it wouldn’t stop the trickle of [shit] games coming out this year and could no longer be arsed to do anything short of breathing.

Eventually I got my hands on Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard and thought it a fitting game to bother showing my virtual face on the internet again (presumably for people to ignore me and just have sex on said virtual face). I’d already had both the people in my hometown who’d played it repeatedly jumping on my love spuds calling it just another third person shooter and about as long as a wank on a train (maybe that last bit is just me). Before getting the chance to unravel from the foetal position and ask if it was at least funny, the discussion had quickly dwindled towards Call of Duty’s online awesomeness. So, my beloved audience, I cried. I cried long and hard.

Right, enough of that bollocks, back to business.

Indeed, Eat Lead is another third person shooter that holds your hand as you hide behind a wall and occasionally pop out to clean the arena of a few retards before moving on. There’s also the odd quick time event. But hell, it’s a parody of gaming, so setting it up as a third person shooter like every other bastard game in the last year or so is the right starting point, isn’t it? Isn’t it?! You know, being painfully aware of what’s wrong with the gaming industry and using it as a platform for taking the piss out of it? All that shit? Yeah?

Fuck it, let’s be honest, it could’ve been a bit more experimental and edgy. Nevermind, at least it had some decent gags.

…

Dammit. Because of those decent gags, I can’t really take the piss out of them, they did it for me. And they ripped on Red Steel, which earned masses of respect in my opinion (worthless piece of shit left me spinning around like a dog that’d just swallowed it’s bodyweight in caffeine), then went on to taking the piss out of unnecessarily complicated mission objectives in games aimed at people who think opening a tin of beans is mentally challenging.

What can I say against it? Anything I can think of gets thrown back in my face along with a message wrapped around a brick saying “it was a joke, dipshit”. I wont dare say it was brilliantly designed, but at least they had the common sense to veil shit design with a self-degrading gag.

TRYING TO WRITE ABOUT THIS GAME IS LIKE HAVING A KNIFE FIGHT WITH A LEMMING.

Seriously, there’s a really shit checkpoint towards the end of the game that forces you to kill one of eight tentacles, then shows a pretty long cutscene telling you that you’re doing well and have seven left; and let’s face it, sod’s law says you’re going to die at some point between that cutscene and killing the last tentacle. So you’ll have to kill the first tentacle and watch the annoying cutscene again. Just as I think I’ve found something to get good and wound up about, it sticks some deja-vu into the repeated cutscene and makes me giggle. I also deliberately repeated "cutscene" for rhetoric effect or some cleverbollocks thing like that.

Let’s face it, Eat Lead knows it’s target audience annoyingly well and only dicks itself over on two things: it is shorter than something inappropriate on public transport, and no one thought to actually make the back catalogue of Matt Hazard games. All they had to do was leave some of the writers with some computing students for a few weeks and promise them free pizza while they worked. I know the point was that Matt Hazard isn’t an existing gaming franchise, but they could’ve at least re-skinned the games they were taking the piss out of.

Can’t really mock the controls for anything other than lack of imagination, but as we all know, third person shooters don’t need original controls. Too Human proved this quite well by taking away camera control and making melee combat about as vague as a mouse farting in a dark room flooded by a high powered fog machine. There’s also a complete lack of unlockable extras and fetch quests, but I don’t actually care because in my experience you need to have precisely no life to get all of a game’s unlockables. Key example; find me someone who unlocked the Spartan in Dead or Alive 4, then show me them doing something normal human beings do (like physically conversing with another human being or something). The same goes for all you freaks with the Security Helmet in Halo 3. Yeah, I went there.

Seeing as you’ll almost certainly finish Eat Lead over lunch, I can’t recommend you buy it, but seeing as the games industry is currently resembling the average American citizen (i.e., uninformed, retarded and slowly dying from a massive build up of shite in it’s veins), I definitely recommend you play through it in some way, shape or form. I mean, come on; it mellowed me out enough to remember that Star Trek Online is supposed to be out this year and got me to start writing again.

Well, kind of. If there’s still shit all worth playing, you wont hear much from me for a while.

Where I've Been

I was recently asked to post a review for a dear (and very odd) chum of mine, along with one or two people from the internet but I can't remember.

In response, I was planning on reviewing The Club. As such, I decided to give it a whack playing as the Jamaican guy purely for the reason that I could make lots of Commander Worf references. After playing through one arena I got really bored, acknowledged that it was definitely by the same group of people behind mindless shooty games like House of The Dead and decided I didn't really reed to play it any longer. It was also too shit for me to really write anything substantial or funny, aside from the fact that after the first arena the difficulty curve goes right up God's arse via your own, and abandonned the idea. It's also about a year old so no one gives a toss what I've got to say about it.

Then I decided I'd give HAWX a try, until I remembered there isn't a fat lot you can say about a flight sim. Yeah, it has guns, but it's still a fucking flight sim. It's the same reason I haven't reviewed any racing games (aside from Burnout Paradise, but that was a bit of a nostalgia trip for me). With that in mind I was going to play Banjo Kazooie Nuts & Bolts. But I couldn't get hold of a copy for some weird reason. Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard attracts my attention, but again, I can't get hold of a copy because no one is paying my gaming bill and I'm saving up for a car.

Gears of War 2? Still boycotting it, and everyone already has an opinion on it too. Resident Evil 5? Didn't play any of the others so I'd be a bit lost.

Basically, I'll post a new review when there's something I think is worth playing is out or when people start supplying the games and a fanbase.

WHY THE FUCK ARE THERE NO ORIGINAL GAMES THIS YEAR?!

Some housekeeping...

For both of you who care, and maybe even one of you will notice, I've been bloody quiet for the last 3 months. Well, I've been busy trying to either get a real job (failed, but I guess I impressed someone at ReadyUp.com seeing as I made it into the top 20 of over 700); I've also had to move my parents to and from Ireland, got my driving test nailed down now (I'm all grown up with a licence, fuck you Yahtzee Croshaw) and I've also decided to go back to university doing something I know something about.

Anyway, gaming news and stuff:

• the DSi will be out some time this year, for those of you with more money than sense and there are offers for knocking about already. I.e., for the 7 or 8 people who bought the PSP-3000: you can trade it in and get the DSi for £70
• 360's are still breaking uncontrollably but we still love our Gamerscores
• PS3's are still expensive but reliable - probably because no one can afford to play anything on them
• 360's play .avi files once you download the media update (for all you nasty media pirate types)
• I'm 90% sure that JJ Abram's Star Trek is an expansion on the TNG episode Reunification
• If you call that a spoiler, cry me a river. I figured it out myself
• Lego's awesome
• The Wii is not
• The new Prince of Persia is pretty good
• Far Cry 2 isn't technically bad, but it's boring as fuck
• GTA: The Lost and The Damned has a Road Rash-esque minigame which is work 1600 MS Points in my opinion
• I get RSI from playing Guitar Hero World Tour sat down
• The Fuzz minigame on Saint's Row 2 had me in stitches
• I mean it this time, I'm not going on /b/ anymore
• I'm not going to help you find it, even if you did a coca cola bottle and need help

That's about it. If anyone really cares, I'll start posting bitesize reviews for games, but I've essentially got three jobs now so bleh.

Fallout 3

(Brace yourselves, I've been playing a Bethesda game).

As of late, a lot of my entries have opened by immediately picking on a developer or publisher in order to adequately pad out my reviews and look slightly more intelligent and professional – or at the best get a cheap laugh or two. Whether it’s been working or not is entirely up to you, but nethertheless; puppies. Puppies are a perfect way to decide how much of a miserable bastard someone is by asking them if puppies are cute, adorable and generally some of the nicest things in the known universe (considering for a moment that caramel doesn’t exist), or if they realise that as cute as they may be, they’ll still piss and shit all over your favourite material possessions and inevitably grow up to be vicious figures of teeth and muscle.

Should you have read any of my previous work ever, you’ll know I’m the latter, which is why I know what Bethesda Games Studios is, and that getting my hopes up for anything they’ve ever played part in is about as wise as calling a grizzly bear a great big, lazy, two-bit puff. Take Star Trek Legacy; then place it carefully in the middle of a busy road and wait until someone eventually runs it over, because as pretty as everything looks, that’s all it’s really good for. Then there’s Oblivion, which you can use to test belt-sanders with in order to indulge in the delicious irony of teaching it how things really get damaged when you rub them together.

I’ll admit, I nearly did call a big furry killing machine gay in a manner of speaking by initially thinking that Fallout 3 could be one of the best games of the year, overlooking the fact that it was being made by people who don’t know what “fun” means. Eventually I saw the light before launch, spotting the Oblivion engine a mile off and decided Fallout 3 could disappear down a toilet somewhere along with Bethesda and go fuck itself. After a lot of badgering I decided the best thing I could do was play some games I was still actually looking forward to and then burn some money on an almost completely unnecessary RAM upgrade.

My world didn’t get turned completely on its head until I watched the Fallout 3 Zero Punctuation video. Surely Fallout 3 must be worth my attention if the only other person on Earth who knows what’s wrong with Oblivion likes it? I swallowed my pride, did a wee bit of research and decided to try justifying my shiny new computer.

Something I should say about the original Fallout is that it’s an idea that interests me immensely for some reason and also that anyone who complained about the difficulty curve of Dead Rising is a great big sissy and would literally die if they ever came into contact with a copy of Fallout 1. Sure, I was murdered time and time again and never actually got anywhere because I was continually stalked by giant scorpions and Lady Luck, but that’s ok because I fear I wouldn’t survive longer than 3 breaths in a post-nuclear apocalyptic wasteland before splitting into two separate and very physical personalities and redefining the words “killing oneself”.

From my understanding, Fallout 3 shouldn’t really have the “3” at all, considering I’m pretty certain it’s basically a remake of the original but apparently no one else gives a shit.

Research ends, review begins; God help me.

I give immediate credit to Fallout 3 for having probably one of the weirdest openings to a game ever (and I’ve played Rez) in which you start the game literally straight after you’ve been born. So instantaneously in fact, that no one’s actually managed to clean the afterbirth off you yet. And I must also say that for once I believe the NPCs who say I’m destined for great things on the basis that my character seems to have been born with a higher IQ then his father resulting in him picking his own gender, name and future physical appearance. Well, after dicking around with the appearance options for a while, I realised I was pretty limited to more or less the same very tired looking drifter with different styles of hair. And that’s about it, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing considering I’m sick of having to build my own character from scratch in every motherfucking game I’ve played for the last 2 years. You see, this is why I like Fable 2 so much: you can pick your wife and your clothes but you can’t pick your nose. Some divine force picks your nose for you depending on how much you eat, who you rob and who you kill, leaving you with just your hair and hair colour at your disposal.

Having decided that Oblivion was the most unforgiving, stuck up pile of wank I’ve ever wasted time on, I decided that with Fallout I was going to turn my back on the gallant hero for once and play my first playthrough of a game as the coldest and most badass bastard a possible. I was impressed at how often Fallout presented me with the opportunity to insult, threaten and swear at NPCs, then allow me to rip their faces off with a plank of wood full of rusty, irradiated nails. As such, I decided to do all of the aforementioned to anyone who met the following criteria:

- they weren’t going to fuck up the story if they died
- they didn’t have bigger weapons than me

Having run my character’s evil arse down to the point of exhaustion from all the murdering and bullying, I decided it was time to grow up and play the game properly. Or at least commit genocide properly. After wandering into the town of Megaton, I cocked an eyebrow to the thought that this being a post-apocalyptic nuclear wasteland, there was surely an obvious reason for it. Of course, I was right and did everything I could to rig the big bastard nuclear bomb to explode – completely ignoring the reasoning of the guy who gave me the tools to do it, instead following my own reason: I wanted to blow shit up. After much hard work and procrastination, I found my way to a safe distance, detonated the bomb and watched the most awesome explosion I’ve ever seen.

It was probably because I’d just annihilated one of the larger cities in Fallout that resulted in me spending the rest of my time with the game scrounging around for ammo and having my pure evil arse used as a gun rack for super mutants. Whatever the reason, I struggled to survive in the Fallout world yet again, but at least it was for a reason that allowed me to forget Bethesda had anything to do with it and it left me getting sucked in and appropriately neglect my friends who wanted me to join them in Team Fortress 2.

I guess what I’m trying to do is cause a quantum singularity that will destroy the universe by saying Fallout 3 is a good game and each line of the conversations was recorded in the same day, as opposed to in Oblivion, in which I’m pretty certain the voice actors had a habit of dying after each line. Laser guns are fun, and any game that allows me to fire a mini nuke deserves merit. Then there’s the fact that when you’re getting your arse handed to you, you can usually use the VATS system to pause time and drop a grenade directly under your aggressor’s testicles bouncing-betty style.

Left 4 Dead

Yes Valve, we see what you did with the name, very clever. Should you muster up the strength to see past lethal pun / text-speak jammed in the middle of the title, you’ll find that this is Valve’s latest game and pretty much designed to be played with four people so you can all gang up on helpless zombies and reduce waves of the flesh eating bastards to a cloud of blood and a splattered mass of rotting meat. Unless you ditch your friends, in which case you’ll get eaten.

Left 4 Dead has one massive hurdle to overcome before any zombies can be murdered and that is that gamers are amongst the most antisocial beings on the planet, second only to that particular branch of gamers that play first person shooters to an obsessive degree. Actually, that’s a blatant lie; the most antisocial beings on the planet are people who write about games. Anyway, as such, an FPS that forces players to stay together and co-operate is either so over-ambitious that it causes Peter Molyneux to go “pfft”, or completely fucked.

I decided to grit my teeth, shovel dangerous levels of Paracetamol down my throat and bare socialising with something other than a series of webcomics and bring you the review that no-one will ever actually read. It is possible to play Left 4 Dead on your own, leaving you with 3 bots to save your dopey arse and if the original Halo was anything to go by, it probably wouldn’t be long until one of those bastards decided that the best place to store their Molotov cocktails was up said dopey arse. Also, in the interests of science, I had to discover if Left 4 Dead could change real people, or just have them act uncomfortably similar to every other bot I’ve ever encountered.

I can report that while the majority of the time I wasn’t on fire, there are still a lot of people who can’t be arsed talking online anymore and there are also quite a lot of people who don’t quite understand that a long narrow corridor is probably the worst thing to ignite when you’re supposed to be co-operating. I may be one of these people, I’ll have you know.

After being burnt, shot and pillaged by my dear team-mates several million times, I eventually got matched in a party in which I was consistently the worst offender for friendly fire (a feat, by the way, I am equally proud and ashamed of) and things started to get awesome. I honestly can’t think of anything more awesome than standing in a corner, laughing with a team-mate while firing into a vast blinding blaze, full in the knowledge that lots of zombies are dying (again).

Having decided to take advantage of the “versus” option, I decided to see exactly how much fun the zombies were having. The answer is “not much”. It was an interesting idea, the likes of which I haven’t really seen since Turok 2 let you munch on your friends as a Raptor… or when they took the piss out of it on Conker’s Bad Fur Day, but shut up. Anyway, as a Zombie, you get to die a lot but that’s ok because you respawn every 20 seconds, but I can assure you that catching the bullet express to spectatorship gets very old after it happens a few hundred times in one game.

Screw it though, the main idea of you plus 3 people against a horde of easily killed zombies is so much fun you can easily gloss over the option to play as one of the unfortunate walking targets. The more nerdy of you will be dying to wondering how well “The Director” works. I honestly don’t know, all I can guess is that’s the reason why I could never find ammo when I went out looking for it while my team-mates were usually tripping over the stuff. What I can say is that the scripted dialogue is pretty good, should it not get completely and utterly on your tits after the unavoidable repetition and at least if you’re playing with more sociable people, you can have a laugh at it – a key example being the “Left 4 Bed” video.

There’s not really much else to be said; Left 4 Dead uses the Source engine which is both pretty and silky smooth, killing zombies is always fun and the story has been pretty much fired out of a canon into the centre of a very bright star with the only remnants are “get from A to B, kill everything in the way”. If you’ve played Portal, you’ll also be expecting some very clever hidden jokes and you wont be disappointed so long as you look hard enough, and if you haven’t played Portal then what the fuck do you think you’re doing reading my blog?

Call of Duty: World at War

All I've to go say is that I thought Call of Duty: Modern Warfare was really really good, even if every dickhead from here to the fucking moon with a current generation console has been mercilessly bumming it's online capabilities for a year straight. It was up to date, original and brilliantly executed. Then all those dickheads condemned World at War before it was even close to launch just because it was being developed by people who cocked up Call of Duty 3 by trying to make about 4 different games in a very limited time frame.

Personally, I think it was a stupid idea but I respect the fact that they still managed to finish those games even if they were shit, and I've been saying that World at War may very well live up to Modern Warfare because the developers were actually concentrating this time. I got shouted at and then these dickheads cheered and heckled me when World at War was actually launched. I don't understand either, but after all, these are dickheads, we're not supposed to pay any attention to them. Anyway, in order to convince my manager to buy a 360 after he'd agreed to sell his as a Christmas present, I had to buy myself a copy of World at War and all I've got to say is this:

FUCK OFF. I'm so sick and bored of playing WWII games that I could only just manage finishing the first level. Yes, I know. Bouncing Betties, flame-throwers, napalm etc etc, hernia. I've had enough. You can praise the bollocks off it all you want if your a fanboy or if you're being paid to review it; right now I'm neither so it can go fuck itself.

If I have to play a war game, it has to have guns that are modern. AT LEAST. War, like most things, is more interesting with lasers. Do you live with a black and white TV until you're bored of it, then upgrade to a modern TV that has a serial number for a name to watch Star Wars on it, praise it's bollocks off then screw with the settings to make it look really old?

NO YOU FUCKING DON'T. So don't make an awesome modern game, then follow your success by doing exactly what everyone else has been doing for the last 15 years. I've played, I've judged, I'm not going back to the 1940's.

Dead Space

I think EA hate me. Well maybe be not considering there doesn’t seem to be a death count on Dead Space which will make the biggest embarrassment to my friends and frankly the whole games industry. They may have killed me a lot, but at least they had the good grace to not keep count. I’ll admit that I’ve been looking forward to Dead Space because it’s a game by EA that isn’t a sports game nor does it have “Need For Speed” in the title, so that’s enough to forgive it for blatantly ripping off Event Horizon so much that I even recognised some rooms from it; and that’s impressive considering that I haven’t seen Event Horizon since it was new.

Due to a number of factors, I decided to play through Dead Space using only the Plasma Cutter – primarily because that sounds like the best item ever in a game that is dangerously obsessed with removing limbs, but also because one of my friends managed it and I’ll be damned if I’m going to be outdone (I mean on Saint’s Row 2 I launched my character through a plastic surgeon’s window on fire while my car exploded for fuck’s sake). I managed to get surprisingly far during my trial of Dead Space but I did discover more than enough to make a fair judgement; one of these judgements being that there really are a lot of severed limbs. I know I mentioned that already but fuck me, it’s like someone decided to cross-breed Goro with a millipede, make an army, then shove them through a woodchipper.

Something I can’t forgive Dead Space for is patronising me with a button that paints a big blue line to where it wants me to go and then telling me how to beat 90% of the puzzles. Not only did it patronise me to the point where my IQ dropped about 20 points, but it also decided to randomise all the items I came across which genuinely left me in a room with the biggest monster in the game and barely enough ammo to neuter a housecat. So I died. I took this onboard and spent all my money on an obscene amount of ammo, shot the bollocks off this thing and died again. And again, and again, and again. After I’d almost had my share of running out of ammo and seeing Isaac being torn into exactly the same few pieces over and over, I eventually decided to abandon traditional logic in favour of “fuck it, it still has limbs”, as this seems to work with everything else, and that big bastard was dead before you could make some toast.

Considering that particular battle was in zero gravity, I’ll give Dead Space a nice thumbs up and big cheesy grin in praise of the zero gravity moments because they are very cool, pretty original and brilliantly executed. If that statement could be applied to anything else then it’d be safe to assume that Dead Space is one of the all-time greatest games. Event Horizon did everything else a long time ago and it did it better and even I, who only played Resident Evil 4 for about 5 minutes, can say that it beat Dead Space to everything else a few years ago. And also, IT’S NOT FUCKING SCARY. Even if in I lived in an alternate reality where everyone who ever heard of Dead Space didn’t ask me about the dead bodies coming back to life, I would have picked it up damn quick from the name “NECROmorphs” – i.e., death, morphing? Seriously? Even if I was so brain-rattlingly stupid that I still hadn’t figured it out, I’ve played enough games in general to kill anything that moves immediately even if it’s supposed to be dead already.

There are some more pretty cool bit in Dead Space, like when occasionally a big tentacle will thrust out of the wall and drag you to your death leaving you with a few seconds to panic while you try shooting it in half from an awkward camera angle. Ok, that’s a lie, the camera angle does what it’s supposed to do but some arsehole decided to make my life even harder by having bits of the environment getting in the way of the only part of the tentacle you can hurt. The lie I was referring to was that the being dragged to your death while genuinely panicking is the only other cool bit, everything else is either clichéd of just outright shit. Like gravity gun puzzles. That’s Half-Life territory and besides, no one fucking told me I could fire items I was holding until about 2 hours after it would have been useful.

It’s not scary, but it is ridiculously gory.

And while I’m giving it a kicking, why did anyone think it was a good idea to have Isaac look and move like a robot and repeatedly try stapling messages from his wife to him? I don’t give a shit about him or his family – he’s my remote controlled one-man army and that’s the end of it. Although, the brilliance of the zero gravity environments comes back into play whenever I make Isaac run in it; while it should just irritate me, it strangely warms my heart to see him uncharacteristically jog like some form or retarded streaker when no-one’s watching.

I did however abandon Dead Space around the point where it gave shoved a deadly loop up my arse which caused me to keep respawning on the pointy end of a psychopathic alien’s, well, body. I suspect that after 20 minutes of me dying immediately that he was as bored as I was, so I gave up and here I am. After thinking about it for a while, most of Dead Space is incredibly repetitive and leaves you going to and from the same places a few times or sends you to different places that look exactly the same to do the same thing a few hundred times. Why the hell would you put grinding into a game that is undoubtedly action and marketed as horror? Maybe it’s to hide the fact that it’s like Resident Evil 4 but really predictable. Example: A big room has the only oxygen refill station on the ship, which immediately plants the idea that there’s going to be a hull breach there eventually and you’ll need it. Sweet Jesus, I couldn’t have been more accurate if I actually read the script beforehand.

What else can I say about Dead Space? If you haven’t already, watch Event Horizon, it’s pretty much the same but unlike Dead Space, it’s actually scary, even if it doesn’t have the same really cool zero gravity environments. Maybe EA were saving the really good stuff for Mirror’s Edge. I may as well safe you a few hours; it’s all because of a religious artefact in the cargo hold. It made people go mental, then they turned into the monsters on the ship and religion’s all to blame. I’m also willing to bet a substantial amount that the doctor you run into right in the middle of the game royally fucks you over in the last chapter.

It’s times like this that I really miss Star Trek; and don’t get me started on that think J.J. Abrams is working on because it isn’t Star Trek, it just uses the same names.

EDIT - 360 Dashboard

You'd think with the length of time they've been working on this bloody thing that they'd have ironed out all the bugs, and failing that at least have squished the big bastards. Mine keeps crashing when I try getting out of my friends list!

Although it's probably just my 360 slowly dying of asthma again.

The New Xbox Experience

Fuck off, it's a new dashboard, not something I'd call an "experience". If you have any idea what I'm talking about then you already know that Microsoft has stolen Nintendo's Mii avatar things, even though I'm not entirely sure why.

That's the most obvious change, along with completely changing the menu again which personally confused the shit out of me and it took me about 10 sodding minutes to figure out how to start the game already in my 360. Shut up, all the boxes look the same. While I'm talking about the games/box, I'd like to point out that Microsoft have set themselves up to be royally screwed up the arse by any half-decent hacker with a Blockbuster membership. If you fancy using up some more time and HDD space, you can now choose to install your games onto your 360.

As anyone who owns a PS3 will know, installing games is exactly what we all want because of the noticeably quicker loading times. Ow, it hurt so much to write that blatant lie.

Yes, it's nice and colourful now but the new avatars seem completely pointless - just like real Mii's. If you could take control of your virtual you and go fuck around in the deepest recesses of your 360, or even just mercilessly beat the shit out of your friends' avatars, I'd be much happier to have them but at the minute they're just animated gamer pictures. I also have an issue with the customisation: I made my virtual me without seeing any of my friends' and by taking quite a bit of care to make him actually look like me. Within two hours we all had pretty much the same avatar with slightly different hair colour.

Who knows, it could be interesting in the future (most likely when someone exploits it, see "Rules of the Internet" number 15), but at the minute it's just more colourful and otherwise point.

Fable 2

I very nearly posted this review as nothing short of what I suspect is the longest letter ever to finish off kissing Peter Molyneux’s arse, then I spent a while longer playing Fable 2 some more, and also cover the good and evil bases. And so, having spent another week or so going through the ins and outs of it, I’ve decided that the bit I can salvage from my original draft is the bit where I said,

“As I’ve said a number of times already, I’ve recently started a group on Facebook threatening Peter Molyneux’s dog should that great jabbering bastard make a hash of the sequel to my overall favourite Xbox game.”

That, and the fact the dog lives. BUT.

While I find something intoxicating about Fable and Fable 2, there are a number of issues, starting with the worrying fact of how similar – sorry, exactly the same – Fable 2 as the original in some areas. As is to be expected with sequels, the set pieces are becoming apparent, but the problem is that no one should be able to click onto this until the third or four iteration of a game, certainly not the fucking second.

Childhood – tragedy – Heroes’ Guild – arena – prison – antagonist dies.

That isn’t the entire quest, but worryingly, there isn’t actually that much more to it. Yeah, there are side quests and such, but for some reason there aren’t as many as in the Lost Chapters re-release. Fair enough, they’re probably going to release more quests as downloadable content (unless Peter Molyneux isn’t the genius I thought he was, and is in fact a blithering idiot), but someone decided that what we really wanted instead of side quests was a bunch of collectables. I’ll admit I liked the gargoyles, but FUCK ME; even if you buy the fact that the Heroes of old turned into a bunch of mercenaries that everyone happily ridded themselves of in favour of guns, you’d assume that there’d be more people looking for help off someone brandishing superpowers. Instead, the best anyone can offer is a job in pest control, bartending, blacksmithing, kidnapping or murdering. Considering you’re allowed to kill whoever or whatever you want, then if you have any brains you’ll either kill the guards too or agree to do the community service, then go shag some hookers instead, half of those jobs go out the window straight away.

There is a lot that is fun about Fable 2 – anyone who spotted the achievement “The Menace to Society” and didn’t immediately pursue it has no soul – and if you can be bothered to look, you can find some interesting Easter Eggs (ranging from The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy to Anchorman). Need an example of something fun? How about fucking with your family by doing everything you can to be good, then renting out the house across the road and shagging 8 hookers in someone else’s bed while they’re threatening you to leave. Or going on a killing spree dressed as an 80’s action hero.

To its credit, Fable 2 is impressive. There’s a massive sense of freedom in the fact that even after a few weeks of playing, I can still get lost sometimes, and believe it or not, the world does actually grow, change and expand while you play. If you want to complain about the customisation in Fable 2, can I advise that you kindly go outside and play hide and go fuck yourself. Oh, heaven forbid, an RPG game in which you don’t have 7 sliders for customising your character’s nose. FUCK OFF. No human being can play with those sliders and come out with what they actually wanted. “Bridge Depth”? WHAT THE FUCK? What I love about the Fable games is the fact that your character’s looks take care of themselves depending on what you do. My good hero looks like he – sorry, she, you’ll understand if you buy Castle Fairfax – ascended down from heaven then crushed a few rugby players into meat-scented cubes while occasionally stopping in order to tear a couple of phonebooks in half. My evil hero looks like Davey Jones from Pirates of the Caribbean with a normal beard instead of tentacles, and then someone ran him through a cheese grater face first.

The death system sucks something rotten, and I’ll never understand the new fad in the gaming world of having no noticeable consequence for being shit. The original idea of “having people surround your broken body, beat seven shades out of what was left while you get up while scarring the shit out you” to me personally was a good idea. It sounded like it had a good balance of “be shit, get punished”, but no, it seems some fuckwit found his way into the test groups and whinged someone to death. I suspect this was someone close to Peter Molyneux because this idea was immediately pulled as a mark of respect for the souls lost during the development of Fable 2.

The combat is piss-easy, but that’s ok because it a) works and b) flows brilliantly once you start thinking “timing”; but because the HUD has been raped almost completely out of existence you can’t make the amusing mistake of running out of manna after you use a slow time spell while staring an angry troll’s boulder hurtling to your face and instead of pressing the button to replenish you manna bar, pressing the button that makes your character say “shhhhhiiiit”. Instead you have to play around with a bunch of macros in order to stick up your middle finger. Foolproof, but not funny anymore. Speaking of which, some of the menus may be better organised, but are frankly a monumental pain in the arse – the kind best compared to being violated by a freight train.

Whatever, considering everything else coming out in the near future is some form of first person shooter, I’m inclined to enjoy Fable 2 and imagine fantastic things available for download in the future and as such Peter Molyneux’s dog may live.

If any of you even dare try telling me that Fallout 3 is out, then kindly meet up in a room then send me the address so I can destroy you all using explosives, because clearly you’re too immune to your dangerous levels of stupidity to be harmed by anything short of rapid expansion and fire. It’s made by Bethesda. It’s blatantly obvious that it’s made by Bethesda because it looks pretty, but like everything else they’ve ever made, I can guarantee that it’ll be too open for its own good and everything will move like it’s in Robot Wars. Yes, I’m still sore from the abomination that was Star Trek Legacy and Oblivion can simply fuck off.

Little Big Planet

Yes! I have news!

...

No, I haven't managed to secure myself a copy before the worldwide release, I'm not nearly important enough yet. Anyway, read on.

We've all been waiting for Little Big Planet for quite a fucking ridiculous time now, and now that the wait is almost over Sony realises that it might offend Muslims because they chose some music that takes some of its lyrics from the Qur'an. Just sit back and think about how stupid that is. I mean, fair enough, Muslim extremists are renowned for riots and call for blood when someone calls a teddy bear Mohammed (even though you probably know at least one Mohammed whose blood isn't being ordered for lunch).

Don't call me racist for even one second. I may not understand why they get so pissy about anything remotely to do with their religion but I do know that people get paid to choose the music for games and they also get paid to check it BEFORE IT GOES INTO PRODUCTION.

Oh yeah, the article is here; go read and spread ignorance and racism in the name of Sackboy.

Fracture

Just no. No. I'm not fucking playing it until someone starts paying me to do these.

It's a shooting game were you fuck around with the floor. Sorry, but that's not a USP, that's just lazy level design. If you ever want me to review Fracture, you better be brandishing a big juicy contract.

Star Wars: The Force Unleashed

Just to be clear before I start, I was intelligent enough to play the Xbox 360 and PS3 versions of Star Wars, full in the knowledge that the Wii version would at best be nothing short of gimmicky. And shit.

With that in mind, I got to play the game in all its Euphoria and DMM enhanced glory; I’m also now cynical enough about Star Wars that playing with the new physics was my main reason behind playing The Force Unleashed. So, as literally everyone now knows, you play as Darth Vader’s secret apprentice during the exact time that no one really cares about.

That’s a little too much story than is really necessary when you make a game that lets people fling storm troopers around “because they feel like it”. But it’s not just about flinging storm troopers around; you can also throw heavy things at storm troopers. Or launch storm troopers into orbit. Or smash them into the floor at astonishingly comical speeds. It’s so much fun that I decided to ignore the fact that all lightsabers act like little more than great big glowing bats (apart from when I cam across a purge trooper, in which case I began cursing this oversight with the intensity of a thousands women in labour).

I can’t think of much to say about The Force Unleashed, other than it’s generally very good for what it is. It’s a very linear action game with some basic RPG elements; cool physics and Jedi. I wouldn’t call it perfect, but it was good enough make me actually want to play through it rather than just try reaching the credits to write one of these in the hope that someone with a little too much money will read it and give me some of it.

That said, the auto-targeting system is just plain awful even by my low standards (considering I was frankly amazed by the auto-targeting in GTA IV and Crackdown). And when I mean it’s bad, I mean I think I may have seriously upset the person responsible for it, because in one particular part of level involving big explosive pieces of scrap and hostile tie-fighters, the obvious course of action was damn near impossible. While I could occasionally grab hold of one tie fighter and slam it into another, all my other attempts resulted in whatever I eventually manager to grab with the force either exploding instantly, or getting launched into the nearest wall no matter which direction I pointed. The only feeling this managed to provoke was that same feeling you get when grocery shopping; you know when you’re getting something out of a fridge that has mirrors and you don’t realise that they are in fact mirrors? Yeah, that same sense of eventually embarrassing futility.

Now that I’ve come to write about it, it has suddenly become painfully obvious exactly how simple the formula for The Force Unleashed really is: star level, have a fight, head somewhere else, occasionally pick up a couple of holocrons, have a bigger fight while you’re trying to do something else; then finish with a boss fight and do the whole thing again. Don’t get me wrong, there’s a certain something that means it never actually boring. Sometimes disheartening, like when you’ve had to repeat the same fight about 7 times because every time you clear some rooms, some bright spark decided it’d the game could be significantly improved by introducing more heavily armoured imperial forces while you’d rather be looking for mountainous piles of bandages and cotton wool.

So, ok, it drops the ball a couple of times and yeah, it does concentrate on all the action intensive crap from the prequels, but I’d still hold it as one of the best Star Wars ever games made. Although that may be because it takes turn-based combat and exiles it to the deepest, darkest depths of some long forgotten ditch on some moon somewhere. Hell, if they actually finished Knights of the Old Republic 2 and used some real combat without using any frankly bewildering babble about how the roll of a virtual dice you can’t see decides whether you die or do a little bit of damage, then I’d happily dub it my favourite game of all time. Holy crap, that really hurt my brain.

But someone at LucasArts decided that they really don’t like me, so it was never to be.

No!

This isn’t about the back catalogue of LucasArts and how they’ve made some brilliant games, some shit games and just occasionally missed the mark of perfection by a margin so slim it’s only worth mentioning to stop more intelligent people taking the piss out of you. This is supposed to be about one particular game, The Force Unleashed and so help me, the only tangents I’m willing to go off on are ones that are funny.

What we also have in The Force Unleashed is another problem with modern games that’s really starting to annoy me, and I’m certain I brought it up in Haze. You start the game as the evil Sith Lord’s equally evil S&M bitch who will quite happily maul legions of storm troopers if it involves tracking down and royally violating Jedi with your lightsaber and fists of force-imbued fury. Despite the number of times Darth Vader betrays your character, he remains oblivious that Vader is in fact the emperor’s S&M bitch and that’ll never change. The main problem I have with the story in The Force Unleashed is that it takes a perfectly evil Sith apprentice, and gradually turns him into another angsty Jedi teenager who decided to genuinely try overthrowing the empire. And yes, I do know that you can get an evil ending (heaven forbid someone makes a game with just one ending these days), but the whole story arc begs for a hero who’d rather shove his lightsaber up the emperor’s arse rather than taking Vader’s place as the biggest and baddest asthmatic S&M bitch.

If you can forgive the completely random auto-targeting, there’s a lot to like about The Force Unleashed and it really is worth getting; but I’m personally waiting for Fable 2 for some good old wholesome evil and corrupt gaming while I’m not too busy playing with my dog. If not, you’re an idiot.

Incidentally, if you’re on facebook, you could do worse than joining my group “Fable 2 will be good or Peter Molyneux’s dog will die”.

Too Human

After playing games for so many years, you’d think I’d have learned by now that it’s not actually worth looking forward to a game, especially one that’s been delayed for significantly longer than the train you were actually on time for. But, lo and behold, I made the newbie error of thinking that that Too Human looked totally awesome and that it could possibly be the most interesting and unique games I’ve played this year. And considering that the only significant interruption to the flow of almost dangerous level of mediocrity was Grand Theft Auto 4 (and everyone who disagrees can all go tape themselves to a Scud missile and learn what’s really “too serious”), it couldn’t be too hard for a game to grab that title.

Things started falling apart during the first cutscene, when I became quite aware as to why there had been such a public cat fight between Silicone Knights and Epic over the game engine. I seriously haven’t seen anything as inconsistent as the frame rate in Too Human since the first time I tried making ReadyBrek. Seeing as Too Human had been branded an action RPG, I forked over my hard-earned monies and gave it a wide birth on the understanding that everything would pick up later and I’d have weeks of fun while deciding to be a gallant and pure human knight, or load myself up on enough cybernetics to make the Borg queen say “Jesus Christ, mate, don’t you think that that’s a bit much?”.

But no.

Instead I got a sluggish, tiresome and repetitive Devil May Cry rip off that didn’t even have the healthy supply of hard rocking metal music thrashing away, accompanying images of a goliath, glowing hammer obliterating legions of evil robots. Somewhere towards the end a rather pitiful guitar solo showed up, but like I said in my Bully review, it’s like seeing a whale with a golfer’s glove glued to it. It doesn’t fit and all it does is make you wonder why anyone decided to put it there.

A big problem with Too Human is it makes my favourite genre sound like an excuse for schizophrenia and blatant laziness. You just know that someone tried justifying the slow pace of this “action RPG” by saying it’s an RPG and you have to sit back and take it in, but when asked about the lack of any kind of choice or penalty (for anything at all), someone very similar (but with a suspicious looking moustache and sweater) says that it’s an action game and no one who plays action games has the patience for that sort of malarkey.

So, with that in mind, Too Human managed to almost instantaneously label itself as completely fucking useless. Surely, such a long and complicated birth can have some kind of pay off; some kind of amazing physics engine that makes candyfloss melt realistically? Well maybe, but they made the massive mistake of making a game with absolutely no candyfloss, nor any opportunity to do so despite Norse Gods being renowned for their love of such a fabulously charming way of eating sugar. It’s the only explanation I can think of as to why it took so long to release the damn game, because even the combat (and it’s between 70% and 95% combat, depending on how much fannying around you do with different coloured armour and weapons) is nothing shy of painful; slow, sticky and with such a feeling of futility that makes you wonder if you’re actually in the middle of an MMO, furiously grinding away while your friends are all out kissing girls.

Call me a sucker for flashing colourful lights and other general shininess of sci-fi, because I was determined to see it through to the end; although it was also partly down to an overwhelming desire to not get beaten by such a shit game. Again.

Anyway, my advice is this: don’t bother. Yeah, it’s being marketed as the first in a planned trilogy, but on no circumstances does that give anyone the right to make a game with such a poor ending. Baldur sticks his sword through a table and goes off on a huff. There, that’s it, I’ve just saved you about 10 hours of your life. The whole idea seems drastically flawed… Norse Gods in shiny armour shooting and crushing robots is very cool; but how the bejesus do you classify someone as a Norse God? No one has any super powers, everyone can (and quite a lot do) die and in fact, one of them is blind. BLIND FOR GOD’S SAKE. Towards the end you get sent on a mission to assault hell. In theory, this should redefine “badass” but instead it’s just bland and dry, with the itching feeling that you’ve just figured out where all of Earth’s metal actually comes from.

I don’t profess to know much about Norse Gods or the logistics involved in fighting legions of robots, but I can guarantee you that when mixed with sci-fi and made into a game, the word “boring” should be lost in the deepest depths of the minds of anyone involved. Even if you can’t nail the action, The Lost Vikings proved years ago that you can make a brilliant game if you combine Viking mythology with sci-fi. Again, if you disagree, scud missile.

Whatever, it’s lame and takes a brilliant idea for a story, then gives it a vasectomy. Personally, I think they could have made a massive improvement if they had you play the game as Lt. Commander Worf and then threw in a bunch of driving sections from Burnout. Then bundle the game with a lighter and some sherbet.