Wii games I am looking forward to

So when I first got my Wii, I loved it. It was like nothing I'd ever played before. Boxing? Awesome. Tennis? Fab. Driving games? Fucking great.

Sadly, for about the last nine months we have had absolutely nothing out that actually interested me. Sure, Madworld looks okay but I'm sure the novelty would ware off after half an hour or so.

The good news is there are some real games coming up that look fantastic. I'm going to list them.

By the way, this isn't a list of good games... for the Wii. It's a list of good games. The difference between them is...

Well. Super Mario Galaxy, Super Smash Brothers, Wii Sports, Zack & Wiki, Trauma Centre: Second Opinion, Wario Ware: Smooth Moves - these were all good games.

Bully, No More Heroes, Red Steel - they were more like games you'd completely ignore if they were on any other system but as they were on the Wii and fuck all else was out, they were given more credence. Zelda games get this treatment all the time.

Anyway, here are games that will (hopefully) be genuinely good in 2009/2010:



1) Feel

Or whatever it's called these days.

Feel is a "haunted house simulator" done by the guys who made the film The Grudge. Feel appears to follow the films atmosphere quite closely - which, for those who don't know, is typical J-Horror fare. Shit scary, lots of girls with long black hair.

Good points:
Well, for a start, look at the trailer - it looks absolutely fucking terrifying.
The motion controls also look like they make sense.

Bad points:
It'll have next to no replay value - not that you'd want to replay it. Too scary.


2) Red Steel 2

Red steel was the game that made me decide to get a Wii in the first place, or rather this trailer was.

Red Steel 1 wasn't exactly a bad game but the sword controls really weren't very good. Hopefully with Motion Plus we'll be able to have some proper ones.


Good points:
Well, the atmosphere has completely changed. They're going for a cell shaded Trigun like atmosphere this time round, which looks fucking cool.
The sword play should be... better. I'm still sure it won't be like real swordfighting (I used to do Kendo. Which, to be honest, is nothing like real sword fighting either) but as long as it's fun...

Bad points:
Nothing that I can see... but we haven't had any actual gameplay footage so it's hard to tell. Best to wait for the reviews really.



3) Super Mario Galaxy 2

Super Mario Galaxy is still one of the most awesome games for the Wii... it's astonishing how Nintendo have taken a platform game and made it... fun.

This second version looks like more of the same but more awesome experimental bits.

Good Points:
Lots of great concepts all ready on show.
The music still thrills
Yoshi


Bad Points:
Honestly? None. This game is going to be fantastic and only the needlessly cynical will deny this.

4) The Conduit

I've been pretty excited about this one for a while - mainly because unlike EVERY other console shooter, they let you properly adjust the way the game lets you aim... they said during the developer vids that they were hoping to attract some PC shooter fans and... well, that's me.

Good Points:
The weapons look good
The levels look pretty interesting
Overall, it looks pretty damn original.

Bad Points:
We still know very little about the plot or... you know. The actual game.
Shooters on the Wii have a history of being disappointing. Hopefully this will change that but we shall see.


5) No More Heroes 2

I feel a little odd saying I'm looking forward to No More Heroes 2 given that I really didn't like the first one. Look at that damn trailer, though, just look at it. The game looks fucking hilarious.

Good Points:
Funny
Original

Bad Points:
It may keep the really shit open world lite feel of the original
It may be another fucking grind machine



So there you go, five games on the Wii that I am genuinely looking forward to.

It may not seem like much, by my current list of PC games I'm looking forward to consists of...

of...

Well, Left 4 Dead 2 should be good.

Er...

Left 4 Dead 2 Boycott

So, at E3, Valve announced Left 4 Dead 2.

A lot of people are really, really fucking unhappy.

I'm not, I have to say. I'm not one of those people who thought Left 4 Dead was an incomplete game. As far as time spent playing it goes, I've spent over 57 hours playing Left 4 Dead so far. That's considerably more time than I've spent playing Call of Duty 4, Crysis, Dark Athena or any of the other excellent games I've paid full price for. So there's really no question over whether I've gotten my moneys worth out of this game.

Moreover, I think the sequel has some really awesome stuff in it. The melee weapons are okay and the new characters are interesting enough - I'm more excited by the changing levels, AI Director 2 and the new gauntlet runs though.

The big difference is- Left 4 Dead 2 looks like a different game. They appear to have dropped the horror atmosphere entirely which is... a questionable decision but it separates the games fairly nicely. But whatever, I thought I'd go through the criticisms one by one, see if I can come round to the detractors point of view.

I'll use the bullet points as set out by the users on the steam forum.

• Significant content for L4D1 was promised, and never delivered

Well I'm not sure about the word "promised". I bet Valve didn't sign anything. I think people were expecting Valve to support L4D in the way they were supporting TF2... I'm slightly disappointed that this isn't the case myself but on the other hand, supporting TF2 to this extent means I still play both games.

Plus, I think Left 4 Dead had enough content to justify the £25 asking price so this one's down to opinion, I suppose.

• Valve put little faith in L4D1 since they almost certainly started working on L4D2 right after release

That's how games work, guys. You finish one, you start the next one. Even if you think that Valve released Left 4 Dead and thought "you know what, we can do better than that, let's make another game" I'd certainly rather have Left 4 Dead for a year and then have a sequel. It's preferable to having it delayed.

I think this particular complaint assumes that everyone has been playing Left 4 Dead going: "you know what, this is shit. I can't enjoy it until we have two more campaigns."

• The fact that L4D2 is nearly identical to L4D1 will decimate the community for both games

Left 4 Dead has a community? I'm not being facetious, I genuinely have no idea what these people are talking about. You join the game, you play the game, you leave the game. It's not Facebook.

• The announced date is not nearly enough time to polish content or make significant gameplay changes

So when they delay Episode 2 by a year, everyone screams about how Valve need to hire more staff. Now they're releasing a game in a timely manner, and everyone moans about how they're not changing the gameplay. Valve can't win, can they.

• The new character designs seem bland and unappealing so far

I did think this as well when I first saw them but two things struck me.

1) No-one actually knows anything about the characters yet, so let's hold off on judgement there for a while.
2) I thought Francis was going to be the most boring character of all the L4D guys (because he was the most stereotypical), and then he turned out to be one of my favourites. So lets see what Valve do with them before we yell too much, eh?

• L4D2 is too colourful to fit in with L4D1's visual aesthetic

It's a different game, guys, they're allowed to look different. This would be a valid complaint if the levels were DLC but no, they're a completely new product. Hm. Maybe Valve had a reason for releasing it as a different game after all...

• The fiddle-based horde music is extremely disliked, though the differently orchestrated music is otherwise welcome

You know what? This is right on the fucking money, I hate the new music too. What little I've heard of it.

• L4D2's release will result in a drop in quality and frequency for L4D1 content, even compared to before

Right. There are two points there.

1) Drop in quality
Fuck off, this is Valve we're talking about.

2) Drop in frequency
Hm. Hm hm hm hm hm. If you were absolutely set on DLC, I can see how this would be annoying. I take the view that we're getting a completely new game and meh, it'll be £25. Fuck it, I've had my fun playing with L4D. Anything extra we get is a bonus.

• The community has lost faith in Valve's former reputation for commitment to their games post-release

Well, yes, but the "community" are a mob of trolls.

The thing about that is...

What is the function of DLC?

Well, to people like Ubisoft and the guys who make Rock Band, it's a way to make money. This is fine.

For Valve, it seems to be a way to keep people playing games they would otherwise have stopped. This is why they've been releasing stuff for TF2, people started to stop playing it so they were brought back in with unlocks & other fun stuff.

Left 4 Dead, as far as I can tell, is still being rampantly played by loads of people. Shit loads. It's hard to get a handle on how many servers there are but I've never had trouble finding a decent server to play on. From that point of view, it's far more important for us to have DLC in TF2 than it is in L4D.

Getting back to the point, though, the "community" are fickle bastards. They had a hissy fit when the 360 got the survival pack eight hours before the PC did. The community will get the fuck over themselves when L4D 2 is released and it turns out to be great fun.

So yeah, that's what I think. I would like to think this will chivvy Valve along into making some extra content for L4D 1, just to shut people up cos I like extra content as much as the next guy. I won't join in the crucifixion if they don't, though.



EDIT:

I've been having a little run around on the forums and if you know where to look, the sensible users are bitch slapping the moaners in no short order. Doesn't stop the 6k users who signed up to this idiotic boycott making a lot of noise though.

I did find one really good comment, which I shall post here. In a response to a threat blaming the consoles' memory space for the sequel (where the trolls thought it should be free DLC) he said:

"Umm, actually its because the L4D team had so many ideas for L4D, that when it got down to it, it was enough new content to warrant making it a new game. 4 new characters and all of their speech, back stories, interactions, ect, 5 new campaigns, each longer than the ones in L4D, with accompanying versus and survival maps, a new game mode, 3 new SI, and at least one new UCI, 20 new items, including at least 4 melee weapons and incendiary ammo, as well as an updated director which can affect weather and map layout. If you think about it, a lot of this would be unbalanced, awkward, or impossible to put into the original game without a lot of work, and probably causing a lot of issues. Also, its a lot of time and resources spent by Valve, and while they do enjoy giving us stuff for free, they do have families and need to eat as well. Also, this provides even more of a chance to pull more people into the game. That's the real reason, but sure, this could have been a factor as well."


Since you put it like that...

:)

Taken

I've been meaning to watch this one for a while, mainly because the director is a young man called Pierre Morel who is responsible for one of the best action films of the last ten years.

So what's Taken like?

Well the fight scenes are good. To someone who's studied Ju Jitsu for two and a half years, they're a little showy at points but it's a film, that's what they're there for.

The espionage bits are also quite nice. Liam Neeson makes quite a good spy.

So if you're just after a film that kicks a fair bit of arse, go nuts, this film is for you.

For the rest of us, things aren't quite right, sadly.

Things go wrong from day one where Liam Neeson's Daughter has a birthday party at her step father's house. I say house, it's a mansion. She gets given a horse. A cunting horse. If the script writer thought this would make her a sympathetic character, they were wrong. When this girl gets kidnapped, it's more amusing than anything else. Imagine the headline:

"Spoiled bitch gets kidnapped. Everyone else in the world finds this faintly amusing."

Liam Neeson is hard to sympathise with as well. He's an ex-CIA spook who doesn't want his daughter to go to France, because it's dangerous. It's France. It's a hell of a lot less dangerous than America, for Bob's sake... No handguns, for a start.

Well, I say there are no handguns. Paris in this film appears to be playing Paris as seen through the eyes of an American. Every security officer that Liam encounters has a pistol at least, some have MP5's... I'm sure some French security have fire arms but I know they're not exactly fond of them over there.

The problem with the film, from a purely racial point of view, is that when Liam won't let his daughter go to France, because it's dangerous, and she does, and she does get kidnapped, the film is basically saying "Don't go to Europe, there be dragons".

I know this is kind of symptomatic of Bush era America but I expected more from a film directed by a french man and part written by Luc Besson.

Having said that, the other writer of Taken also wrote Kiss Of The Dragon, which is a considerably more sensible take on the City Of Culture. Maybe he had been watching Top Gun or something when he wrote this.

I feel like I'm taking the mild xenophobia a little too seriously, here. The problem is, that was the main feeling I got left behind with at the end of the film. Probably because there's not really much else there... The plot is... okay, the acting is... okay but there's no real suspense. Things just happen one after the other, a bit like in the first and second Harry Potter films.

It's not a bad film, by the way, it's just no-where near as good as War or Kiss Of The Dragon or any of the dozen other films that follow a very similar structure.

Gone Baby Gone & Yes Man

Gone Baby Gone

This, in the UK, has a special resonance for me as it appears to follow a very similar path to the Madeline Mccan story. For those unfamiliar with this particular drama - an extremely irresponsible parent leaves their child alone for ages and is very surprised when the sprog gets kidnapped.

Gone Baby Gone proves that films are better than real life, though. The film isn't afraid to raise the important question of whether or not the kid is better off with her massively irresponsible mother or with a parent who actually gives a shit.

It starts off really, really well. Casey Afflek (who is definitely one of the most innately likable actors currently working) plays a detective hired by the kids grandmother to track her down.

It's a good film, it's tense, it's well directed... the only real problem is the script. Whilst things start off simply enough, there are so many plot twists, the damn thing just gets too complicated for its own good. There is such a thing as plot twist apathy where any given film has twisted itself into a knot and yet keeps twisting. Gone Baby Gone suffers from this in spades.

It's still quite good and it's better than a poke in the eye if you have nothing better to do. It's certainly not as emotionally draining as films like this normally are so it should be praised for that at least.



Yes Man

I still like Jim Carey. Yes, I only like three of his films - The Mask, The Truman Show & Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind but in all of those films he mixes being entertaining with soul and that has to count for something.

Yes Man starts off really, really badly. It's the standard Carey wackiness that we've seen in a dozen movies before. Things do settle down when Carey takes his pledge to say "Yes" to everything - so if you wanted to actually like this film, i heartily recommend skipping the first 15 minutes.

From then on... well it's still not a very good film. The plot isn't really there, there's still a bit too much standard issue silliness but it's held together by... well- the heart of the script writer.

The film isn't really a story, so much as the question: "wouldn't it be great to live your life like this" and I, for one, wanted to say "yes" to more things after the credits rolled. It's a film that makes you feel good about life and the opportunities it offers you - so it's practically unique in that respect.

It also helps that I have read the book this film is based on and really, really didn't like it. Anyone who has any great love of the book will probably hate the extreme liberties Yes Man takes with the plot. Although Danny Wallace does have a cameo, I'm told.

I'd actually recommend Yes Man over Gone Baby Gone. It's a worse film but at the end of the day, Yes Man might inspire people to change their lives for the better, Gone Baby Gone serves only to make people cynical about parents and their children.

Actually, that makes them both good.

Hooray, watch both of them.

The Killing Floor

The Killing Floor, for those who don't know is a Zombie Shooter that, the creators say, is definitely not Left 4 Dead.

So, with that in mind, let's compare it to Left 4 Dead.

Well, Killing Floor is a hell of a lot cheaper than it's zombie filled brother. Here in the UK, you get about twelve quid off.

That's where the positivity ends, annoyingly. The Killing Floors graphics are... okay and whilst I'd like to think we're all mature enough to look past a few graphical flaws, they're symptomatic of a larger problem.

The problem is the Unreal 2004 Engine. This was never the best game engine in the world and time really hasn't been kind to it. The developers have worked some impressive wonders with it but it still feels remarkably imprecise and wooden compared to any game from the last three years you care to mention.

It's not terrible, by the way, it feels quite good fun for the first half hour or so. Blasting the heads off zombies with a well placed shotgun blast feels remarkably satisfying, particularly as there isn't a cross hair so the aiming is mainly down to your instinct as you rarely have time to use the iron sights.

Sadly, the gameplay would feel much better if the weapons were more interesting. There are a couple of shotguns, which are okay, there are two pistols which are okay, there is an assault rifle which is... okay. None of the weapons have really been crafted the way you'd expect them to be. In Crysis or Left 4 Dead, the weapons all have personality, here they're just generic boom sticks.

There are a couple of interesting weapons like a completely useless bolt action rifle and a flame thrower that has so much recoil it's rendered completely useless.

As far as the enemies go, there are an impressive number of types but the best word for them is generic. There's little you haven't seen before in some other game. Left 4 Dead, House of the Dead, Resident Evil... Killing Floor borrows from all of them and not in a good way.

The only original zombie, as far as I can tell, is the patriach who is the games final boss. He has a chain gun, a rocket launcher, a sword and can turn invisible. When he comes along, it won't be long before you see the “your squad was wiped out” screen.

Yes, Killing Floor is an absolute sod when it comes to difficulty. A lot of the enemies have far too many hit points, considering your limited ammo supplies and the limited team play aspects don't really help.

You're encouraged to compete against your team mates as you earn money by killing zombies. This means it's more advantageous to go off on your own and look for things to kill rather than stick with your mates.

There are other annoyances like the fact that you're always left running around at the end of each level looking for the one zombie you have to kill in order to move on, but I'm beginning to feel like I'm punching a disabled kid for not being able to run a marathon. Killing Floor isn't bad, if it had come out five years ago it would have been absolutely brilliant but time has moved on.

Star Trek

So literally everyone I know, including all the film reviewers have been going on and on about how great Star Trek is. I saw it yesterday and they are absolutely 100% wrong. I should point out that this isn't me being mindlessly contrarian, The Dark Knight and Wall-E got much the same reaction from critics and my friends and I loved both films. Star Trek is awful though, and here is why, in order of importance:

1. Kirk is a dick

So they introduce this character by having him drive a high powered supercar through the desert at 80 miles an hour. Whilst this kid is around 10 years old. This was a really fucking bad idea when Episode 1 did it, and it's a bad idea here. The kid is being a petulant prick and the film seems to think this will make us warm to him, rather than pray for him to go over a cliff in the ensuing car chase.

Things only get worse when Kirk grows up. He is an arrogant narcissist who never actually demonstrates all the skills he claims to have. The one time he demonstrates any insight is when he realises they are warping into a trap – which they then do nothing about as Sulu has all ready saved them there, by making them late. Literally all they do is raise shields and go to red alert, which I'm pretty sure they would have done anyway, after seeing the hulks of a dozen space ships when they materialise.

2. All the other characterisation is terrible

The characters are either really, really two dimensional (Uhura, Sulu, Bones) or a racist cliché (Chekov & the other aliens in the film – ever notice how there's only ever one representation of every race? That's the Star Trek equivalent of having a token black person. At least they had the good presence of mind to maintain their token black person in the form of Uhura.) Other than possibly the main villain, I can't think of a single character who was more than a string of cliches.

3. The plot makes no fucking sense

I actually quite liked the story of the aliens coming back and re doing time from their perspective. Yes, it's a story that Star Trek has done many, many, many times but the motivation for the villain was probably the strongest here, if a little two dimensional. HOWEVER, explain to me how no-one on the federation flag ship is more qualified than all these people they have just brought on to the ship (who are fucking CADETS). Kirk is the least qualified person available to be captain and he gets made Captain. Despite being a mutineer. No-one even makes him captain, he just says he is. This is the fucking flag ship of the federation, I'm pretty sure they take a dim view of that sort of stuff.

4. I hated the special effects

Now, the effects looked quite good, but they had two big problems. Firstly, there was too much CGI. It's really hard to take something seriously when it looks like a computer game. Secondly, the camera work was far, far, far too modern. And by modern, I mean constantly moving, jiggling all over the place, switching focus, maintaining a kinetic pace, not staying on anything in case people noticed that what's happening on screen is not actually that interesting. I tend to switch off when things are trying too hard to impress me and Star Trek tried way, way too hard. I know it has years of low budget stodge to blast through but the solution to that should not have been to shake the camera to the point where the audience gets motion sickness.

4. The film seemed to be convinced that it was really, really funny.

And it just fucking wasn't.

There were several other small reasons but when your list so far has covered Characterisation, plot, directing and special effects, there's not much more you can do to put a nail in this particular coffin.

Franklyn

So I saw this trailer a while ago and it really intrigued me. I've been burnt by trailers like that before, however. For example, the trailer for The Fountain promised an epic love story across two centuries and whilst this was technically true, the film came across as extremely asinine.

It was with a healthy degree of cynicism, therefore, that I approached Franklyn and....

Wow.

I now have a new favorite Clever Film. I'm wary of giving too much away as the way the film portrays events and the drip feed of information it gives you is part of the brilliance surrounding it.

For example, the film constantly withholds information from you. One character, for instance, is looking for his son. You never see the picture he shows people of the boy. In a normal film, you'd think "ah, there's some sort of twist there, then" but the film also carefully withholds so many other bits of information (with a considerably amount of skill, it must be said) that you're never sure what's relevant and what's not.

The visual style is superb - one of the stories has a Gothic feeling which perfectly captured the Victorian fascination with the macabre (which is what I've always loved about gothism). The acting is brilliant as well. I had literally no idea that one of the main characters was played by Vesper Lynd from Casino Royale until I saw the credits - she gives an astonishingly good performance - she's disconnected, heart broken and rebellious but has a playful side.

I really can't recommend this film enough. It's not particularly action packed - despite how the trailer represents it... if the trailer intrigues you, I'd definitely recommend checking it out, it's out on DVD in this country in late June.

Left 4 Dead SDK

The SDK is out, which hopefully means many awesome user generated maps. Or, more likely, three decent ones, several dozen shit ones.

I've tried using the SDK myself but, as with every single other level editor I've tried to use, I got about half way through building my first room before I ran away screaming. I used to love building levels in my youth but that was in the days of Duke Nukem 3d when developers were still using sprites. I feel old.

I have, however, tried a few of the user levels out.

There are some really nice ideas out there - I played a map called Back To School (which is an appropriately B-Movie ish title) which...

Well, I was fighting through the woods in standard Blood Harvest But Not Quite As Good territory when I came across a house. It was fairly bland until I got to the roof, where I found a sniper nest, with - get this- just the sniper rifle there. No M4, No auto shotgun. You then had to blow up a barricade to proceed, which alerted the horde.

I chose to load my bots up with sniper rifles and shoot from the roof. It went really well, the zombies swarmed up the house, inside and outside. We fended them off as best we could in some really tense gameplay.

Then I heard the tank music. I turned around and found myself face to face with a tank. I didn't have time to react, I only had time to think "oh fu-" before he had hit me full in the face. I went flying off the roof and landed several hundreds of feet away in a crumpled heap on the floor.

It was great fun :D

Most of the levels I've played are far from complete - there are loads of purple placeholder textures but most of the ones I've tried have had at least one very good idea in them. Give it a month and we should have some good levels to play with.

Fast & Furious

When I read reviews of the The Fast & The Furious franchise, and then watch the films myself, I'm always struck by how completely the reviewers have missed the point.

Okay, so The Fast And The Furious was nothing but Point Break with Vin Deisel instead of Patrick Swazie and Tokyo Drift was alternately awful and extremely racist BUT 2 Fast 2 Furious was a good film. It wasn't great but it was a silly action film. It was a B movie, like War, Cradle 2 The Grave, Eagle Eye etc. etc. etc.

Fast & Furious continues in this vein. It's not Shakespere, it's fun. It's not entirely a car film, either. In fact, I've seen better car chases in several films but the acting is solid, the plot is above average for a film of this type and the number of times CGI is over used is minimal.

There's not really much more to say about it - it's a good, solid film. The reviewers say that it uses its strongest weapon first and then just trails off.

Now, this may or may not be true. I don't think it is but I can see how people would think that. The opening sequence is very, very good. Up until some CGI nonsense. However, it doesn't slip into X-Men 2 territory, where everything after the opening sequence is a pale imitation of those first few minutes. Fast & Furious mixes it up. There are interesting character dynamics, a fun mystery to unfurl and Jill from Chuck pops up a few times.

So yeah. If you were going to go and see Fast & Furious, expecting some B-Movie fun but were put off by the reviews... just go. Reviewers have always had problems identifying the good B-Movies from the bad ones. This is one of the good ones. Not great, but good.

Wallace & Gromit - The Last Resort

The second Wallace & Gromit adventure flopped onto the tubes a couple of weeks ago and I finally gathered the wherewithal to play it. I wasn't exactly enthralled by episode 1. Episode 2 is... better. It's still not really that good though.

This time around, things proceed in a much more game friendly format for the plasticine canine and buffoon. There are three separate acts and a coda, all with separate objectives and tones to them. Episode 1 did have this but the acts were all fairly tenuously linked - I got the impression that I was playing a day in the life of Wallace & Gromit which made the plot fairly hard to swallow.

Here, you have an act where you set up a hotel, an act where you run it and an act where you deal with a situation that has arisen due to the antagonists.

That's right, there are actual antagonists this time around. This is extremely fecking welcome as, bar a squirrel and a giant bee at the end, there were no malicious forces in episode 1, which made the whole thing seem a little too twee.

So. Episode 2 is better. Did I like it?

Well. Sort of.

I don't resent the time I spent playing it but I never really laughed out loud or found myself making real leaps of intuitive logic. The puzzles & game mechanics are a little too simple - meaning that the puzzles are either easy or obscure. Neither of those make for very interesting puzzles. And, unlike Sam & Max, the game doesn't really have humour to fall back on when the puzzles fail.

So, all in all, not as funny as Sam & Max, not as clever as Sam & Max, not as good as Sam & Max.

I am being a little harsh, perhaps. With the exception of the Ace Attorney games, the Sam & Max episodes are the only decent adventure games to appear on our screens for some considerable time. The Wallace & Gromit adventures are certainly far superior to the Strong Bad ones and A Vampire Story.

Velvet Assassin - First Impressions

I've championed Daniel Floyd's video gaming lectures on here before, especially with regard to non-writers writing for games. I originally thought that Fear 2 would be the ultimate argument for this. No, it turns out. Velvet Assassin is.

Things start off badly in Velvet Assassin. In the PC version, at least, you can't adjust any visual settings. At all. This almost certainly means I'm not running it on my native resolution which goes some way to explaining why the graphics look to rubbish.

I'm then treated to an intro sequence which breaks every rule of writing in the book. It feels like it was written by a teenager for a creative writing course at school who has heard about themes, motifs, imaginary and so on but hasn't worked out how to use them yet. It falls into the old trap of expressing something faintly poetic in the hope that it will sound profound rather than pretentious and shitty.

It also used two similes in a sentence once. That sort of thing makes me cry.

Anyway, the game.

The game loses big points in the first few minutes by having a huge (and I do mean huge) sign that flashes up whenever it autosaves that says "CONTENT SAVING DO NOT TURN OFF YOUR SYSTEM". I'm playing this on a PC, guys, we don't need to worry about shit like that. I am kind of resigned to messages like this but it's the first time where I've encountered one which flashes up in the middle of the damn screen which makes it impossible to ignore.

The controls are also fairly rubbish. They're not especially bad but they're imprecise knock offs of the Splinter Cell system.

So what about the gameplay? Well, it's unfortunate that this game has emerged a few weeks after Riddick. Riddick demonstrated that stealth gameplay could be intense, brutal and thrilling all at the same time. Velvet Assassin demonstrates that it can also be fairly dull.

Honestly, though, I didn't get very far into the game. I sneaked around under a bridge where the game explained that a purple line around my character indicated that I was concealed (if you think that would break any sense of immersion, you'd be right). I climbed up a bridge where I was amused to find the developers had been too cheap to animate the character climbing off the ladder onto the bridge. Instead, the screen faded to black when I was at the top of the ladder and faded up again with me on the bridge.

That bit was quite nostalgic, actually, I haven't seen a game do that since 2002.

I then sneaked up behind a drunk guard, stabbed him from behind then sneaked up behind another guard who wasn't drunk and stabbed him from behind. Yes, yes, I thought, this is all very well. What else can I do?

I let the next guard spot me as I ran up to him. Maybe I can disarm him in a cool way or something, I thought. No, no I can't. I can't do anything in fact. I couldn't even stab him. I had to just stand there and get shot.

It was at that point where I thought - Oh, that's the way it's going to be, is it? Fuck you - and turned the game off.

Velvet Assassin doesn't have a demo for reasons that should now be evident so if you're really determined to play it, for gods sake pirate it first.



In other news, there's a demo for Zeno Clash out so I suggest having a look. I didn't like it but I'm sure a lot of people will.

Zeno Clash - first impressions

I've been zipping through Zeno Clash for a couple of hours and have a few thoughts.

For those who don't know what it is, there's a trailer here which sums it up quite nicely.

So, observations:


1) It's really fucking weird.

The design is excellent, the setting is pretty unique and the story is... interesting. To be honest, the primary reason to play it is because it's so odd and if that doesn't appeal, you may as well stop reading now.


2) The combat is... a bit shit

You know how the combat in the trailer looked stilted and rubbish? Well, the game is exactly like that. The shooting is extremely unsatisfying & The hand to hand combat pales in comparison to Assassins Creed, The Chronicles of Riddick... even Crysis.

They've falling into the age old trap of assuming that punching people in the head becomes infinitely more fun the more you do it. This may well be the case in real life but it's really not in the game.

3) The voice acting aint up to much.

I feel bad criticising an indie game for having bad voice acting... but it's valid. Indie games are becoming more and more important in the industry right now and if they want to be taken seriously, they need to show that they can do what big budget titles can do in different ways. They do this with the story quite well- you're not eased into the world, all you know is you've killed your father-mother. I don't know what this is yet but I'm rather intrigued. If they'd spent a little extra on the voice actors, the story could have been the main selling point of the game.


4) The source engine is REALLY fucking showing its age.

Now, most of the time this isn't an issue but occasionally, you find yourself wandering through a desert and there will be a two foot high fence on your left and right and you can't pass it. Somehow, they've managed to make a game set in a desert / wilderness a corridor shooter.

About half of the time you're not actually fighting in these corridors but even when the game does open out, it feels small and restrictive. I get that these guys are working on a small budget, I really do, but could they not have picked a better engine? Maybe the Unreal 3 engine or... I don't know, the Cry Engine? Fuck, Merchants of Brooklyn felt more open than this.


5) This is another one of those games where most things about it are good... it's just the gameplay is shit.


It falls into the same category of Fallout 3 and, hopefully, like Fallout 3, many people will be able to look past how shit the fighting and gunplay are but I don't think I'll be able to. It's a game, it's an interactive experience. If the interactive bits are terrible, I'm wondering why the hell they didn't make an animated film instead... I can't help thinking that would have been better for everyone concerned.


6) Despite all of this, I'm going to continue playing it tomorrow.

If I'm honest, I'll admit that I'm not really enjoying playing it. And not even in a The Path way, where I'm not especially enjoying it but I'm so immersed in the game world I don't care. I'm going to continue, even though I have no idea why.



I really don't think it's worth buying anyway. I'd recommend trying it before you buy it but guess what, there's no demo (for reasons that are becoming apparent) so if you want to try before you buy, I suggest torrenting. Don't pretend you don't know how to do that. Hopefully you'll get more out of it than I did.

Dark Athena & Time Travel

So the new Chronicles of Riddick game just got released and I've been playing it through for the last couple of days.

Fuck me, it's a masterpiece.

I started with Escape from Butcher Bay, which is as good as I remember it... the acting & plot are superb, the atmosphere is stunning and the action is wonderfully brutal. It's also a fantastic counterpoint to games like Crysis and Left 4 Dead - the action in Crysis and Left 4 Dead is ultra smooth, ultra kinetic. You're rarely in the same place for long. In Butcher Bay, everything feels much slower, much more ponderous - in a good way.

I've said this before, and I stick by it- the Riddick games are the only ones ever created where I feel like I have a real body in the game world. It's a remarkable feet that adds some serious realism to what is otherwise quite a silly Sci Fi game.

So- Dark Athena. Well, the plot and voice acting is as fantastic as ever. Admiral Cain from BSG voices the main antagonist, which is fantastic :D

If anything, from what I've played, the action is even more ponderous, even more brutal and even more stealthy than it was in Butcher Bay. One bit in particular had you hunting around 10 drones on an otherwise deserted cargo deck. The deck was pitch black, the only light coming from the drones' flashlights. I was sneaking round crates, executing them one by one... It was so good I actually got goose pimples from the excitement of pulling off flawless silent kills one after the other.

Stealth gameplay is very hard to get right but they've done it here, and don't they know it.

Dark Athena isn't quite as focused as Butcher Bay, though. There is a lot more game convenient faffing around this time. Nipping to get components for a Vent Tool, a PDA and so on. This would be an issue were they not giving you a constant feed of awe inspiring set pieces. I won't talk too much about them here as experiencing them yourself is half the fun. So yeah. Two good games, definitely worth getting in my opinion.



In other news, I saw a British film at the cinema today. No, I haven't gone mad. It was Frequently Asked Questions About Time Travel.

If you haven't seen the trailer, watch it now and get back to me.

Done? Good. If you liked the look of that trailer, the film is basically that but 83 minutes long instead of two. It's stunningly un ambitious. There are no scenes where any characters have to sacrifice their soul to save humanity, no car chases, no epic love stories across two centuries... Three people in a pub and a time agent are all you get.

I really, really liked it. It was very focused, which helps. It's also one of those odd films where nothing really happens but you're hooked anyway. It's like a shorter version of Gosford Park but with fewer posh people.

I know it's not really saying much, given how crap this year has been for films so far, but it was one of the best things I've seen so far. I think Push was at about the same level of quality but there were fewer things wrong with FAQ...

Put it this way: FAQ is one of those films which is flawless because it doesn't try to do too much. It doesn't over stretch its plot in the way most time travel films do, it doesn't have twelve endings... This can be seen as a bad thing but I say it's always better for a film to be too short rather than too long.

It's definitely worth seeing, if you're a cinema junkie or if you've got 83 minutes to spare and feel like a bit of silly British comedy.

And it's got Roy from the IT crowd in it, which is always a good thing.

TV shows I would kill to be on

Some shows are great to watch because they're entertaining, thrilling, moving, whatever. Some shows are great to watch because you think: "wow, I'd love to be doing that right now..." For me, these shows are:


Mythbusters
Mythbusters is a fantastic show. They take a myth or a piece of received wisdom and, in the most direct and down to earth way possible, test it. They're not perfect but they are brilliant at creating scenarios that test hypotheses that are understandable by Joe Average.

Pros:
I would get to blow things up.
I would get to be all sciency.
I would get to hang around with Kari Byron, who is hot.
I would get to build things.
I would get to be very silly on camera.

Cons:
I have no robotics/engineering/electronics skills at all - partly because of my dyslexia but mostly because I'm extremely lazy. This may be a problem in a show where they build all their own test rigs. I don't think I could actually contribute anything.


Overall Awesomeness:
9/10
You get to build stuff and then break it whilst educating people. It's fun and has a point. Brilliant, I just don't have the skills to do it.



Top Gear
Top Gear was one of my absolute favourite shows for a long time - mainly because they road tested cars I could actually buy like the Ford Focus, the Smart Roadster & the Skoda Octavia. It's gone a bit down hill in recent years but it'd still be brilliant fun to be on.


Pros:
I would get to drive loads of cars.
I would get to powerslide & four wheel drift in a safe environment
That would be my entire job.


Cons:
I would have to talk to Jeremy Clarkson.
I'd have to put up with the producers pathetic attempts at humour.
I'd be terrified I'd break all the 200k supercars.

Overall Awesomeness:
5/10

Whilst driving cars in a variety of silly ways all day would be awesome, I think Clarkson and the idiot producers would make it get very old very quickly.

Battlestar Galactica:
Battlestar Galactica is the single best show I've ever seen. It's action packed, complex and hugely intelligent. I would love to be in it, not as one of the main characters - they're all sewn up perfectly by the actors they all ready have but as a Marine or a random Viper Pilot.


Pros:
I would be a part of the most important television show ever created
I'd get to play with props
I'd get to hang around with Grace Park, Katee Sackhoff & Tricia Helfer.
I'm actually fairly good at physical stuff - I'm a blue belt in Ju Jitsu, I'm in shape and climb at weekends. I could wrestle with centurions and get killed in a heroic manner or something.


Cons:
The series has ended so there's not really much anyone can do about getting on it.
You'd probably get cock blocked by Helo, who is awesome in every way and probably has all the girls fawning after him constantly.

Overall Awesomeness:
10/10

Come on, it's Battlestar. As fun as the other shows are, they've got nothing on Battlestar. And you'd get to shoot blanks out of a plastic gun. WIN!

Updates

A series of short things:

1) Continued musings on the Left 4 Dead Survival mode

It's very good - I love the lighthouse level although, oddly, I prefer the normal levels, mainly because they're more open and therefore easier.

However, the most fun I've had with it was with a really good team - the three other people I was playing with were in a clan and it really fucking showed. They gelled perfectly and it was all I could do to keep up. We were in the No Mercy Hospital - the lift section. It was pretty fecking spectacular :D

This mode, more than anything else, has made me pine for the SDK. For the first time since I was at school, I was to try and make some levels. I want to make my flat, my old office, my parents house, Shunt... it'd be awesome :D


2) Let The Right One In

What a very, very strange film. I wouldn't recomend it to anyone unless you're quite sentimental... It's a very strange love story between two twelve year olds, one of which happens to be a vampire. It's sweet, fantastical, horrific and creepy in equal measure. It's basically Twighlight but with plot, characterisation, acting & depth. And there's no emo. Or 17 year olds scowling at the camera thinking they're cool because someone put a 20% grey filter on the lens.

It was quite long - that's not really a criticism though as it's a film very much in the Gosford Park mould where nothing really happens but you're enthralled anyway.


3) Crank 2

Very, very silly action film. I've been looking forward to this for a while as the original Crank is one of my favourite silly action films... My overall favourite is, of course, Shoot Em Up. This one wasn't quite as good as the first one. It's a masterpiece of hyper kinetic cinematography but it felt a little too surreal for its own good. Stuff like interrogating a gangster by lubing up a shotgun and inserting it into said gangsters anus is all fantastic but things devolve slightly at the end where you've got mock godzilla sequences and reanimated heads in jars.

Still very good fun though.


4) TSLRP

The Sith Lords Restoration Project bug count is still at 84.

Sigh.

Left 4 Dead Survival Mode

The Left 4 Dead DLC dropped onto the tubes yesterday after an almighty internet shitstorm caused by the PC version being released after the 360 version. News stories can tell us PC gaming is dead all they want, you haven't seen it alive until you've seen something like that. The last time I saw such a great show of PC gaming solidarity was the massive 2k fuck up that was the Bioshock online activation.

One commenter on the CVG forums said:

"WHAT THE f**k! VALVE f**ked US!!!!! VALVE f**king f**ked US!!!!! ONE BETRAYAL BY VALVE IS A BETRAYAL TOO FAR!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

I like to portray console owners as immature preening dick heads but the PC has more than its fair share of them as evidenced by that comment and anyone who's played more than thirty seconds of counterstrike.

Anyway, I got an hours play with it last night and about half an hour this morning, before work. I have the following observations:

1) Fuck me, it's intense. In my second round, I killed 300 zombies in five minutes. In 45 minute campaigns, I normally only kill about 700...

2) Playing with people is awesome, as you'd expect, and when you get a good team it can feel like the old Aliens Vs Predator matches I used to play... I had one round in the finale of Dead Air where four of us were perched on top of a truck, each with the M4, mowing down zombies row by row by row. It was fantastic :D

3) You won't last long.

The hype about you only lasting a couple of minutes may well be true for the console tards. I've found the shit really starts hitting the fan at about 5 minutes in... that's when you start getting multiple smokers, boomers and hunters. At one point, we got attacked by two smokers, vomed on by a boomer and had a hunter pouncing around at the same time. Hee.

4) Two tanks is fucking insane

In all the game modes previously, as soon as a tank shows up, you ignore everything else and concentrate fire on it. When two turn up at once, you suddenly have no idea what to do... you can't run as the chances are you'll run into the path of the other one. You can't stay where you are because the tank can kill you far faster than you can kill it and you can't work together as a team because you're all panicking about there being two tanks in the room.

I've only had two tanks once, so far. I was the only survivor of that particular event and I didn't last long after that. Great fun though.


5) The new map is really good

It's well thought out, there are loads of places you can camp or run to, many varied weapons stashes etc. etc.


6) They only give you tier 2 weapons

Now. I love the tier 2 weapons but the survival mode is about desperation and fighting the horde off with whatever weapons you have available. It would be nice if there were occasional stashes of the Tier 1 weapons for you to grab and be angry at.


7) It's really good fun :D

It provides what Left 4 Dead was missing - 5/10 minute bursts of gameplay. A very welcome addition. Now give us the SDK.

Game achievements

Because I'm basically a masochist, I often read threads at the end of gaming news articles. On Kotaku, there are often some nice insights by the more intelligent posters. On the CVG site, however, there are trolls trolls trolls galore.

Anyhoo, one thing that always (ALWAYS) gets brought up is this:

Achievements.

For example, the new Left 4 Dead DLC came out today.. I haven't had a chance to play it yet, am at work, but of the criticisms so far levelled at it by 360 owners (PC owners don't have it yet) are:

1) The rounds are too short
Which is kind of missing the point but never mind

and

2) There aren't any new achievements.

I'm sorry, what?


I should just say that I do quite like achievements - they're quite nice little additions to games and it can make you play things through in new ways - like the achievement packs in TF2 or the Akimbo Assassin one in Left 4 dead.

I really don't like what Microsoft have done with them, though. On the 360 (and on the ultimate satan of PC gaming that is Games For Windows, LIVE!!!) your achievements contribute to something called a Gamerscore.

There's no benefit to this score as far as I can tell - all it seems to do is rank players according to how "good" they are. This does play into the needle twitch 14 year old Halo playing: "I AM THE UBERMASTER LULZ FAG" mentality that the stereotypical Halo audience falls into... It's just a little bit sad that people out there care about this number... as if an arbitrary number can even attempt to represent how good a gamer you are.

Anyway, so this is why, overall, I don't like achievements. If people chased them for the sake of chasing them, fine, good for them, I do that myself. What I find utterly pathetic is when people do it to increase their gamerscore, which is the only reason I can think of to moan when games don't introduce new achievements with DLC.

It's also a criticism aimed at the Wii, occasionally, which is a bit odd. It's a bit like complaining that a Mac doesn't come with MS paint.


I did originally have a point to make. I've lost it.

The Wii, Hardcore Gamers & Yahtzee

I've been meaning to write a piece about the Wii for a while but have always avoided it so far because it's such a fucking mire of a topic. This all changed yesterday, though, when this review was released onto the tubes. Okay, I thought, I'm actually going to have to respond to that. Even if it is on my personal blog, which I pray to someone no-one actually reads.

Before I respond to specific criticisms people have for the Wii, it's important to say what I like about it:

1) The motion controls enhance most games - enabling you to interact with them in a whole new way. This makes some games infinitely more immersive than they would have been otherwise. Anyone who's played Need For Speed Carbon on the Wii knows what I'm talking about.

2) It has a surprisingly high number of games that I've bought and then completed: Super Mario Galaxy, Trauma Center, NFS Carbon, Red Steel, Resi 4, Wario Ware, Zack and Wiki & several others. Compare that to my xbox 360 where I have completed precisely two games: Braid & Star Wars: The Force Unleashed.

I've bought several others, including Rez, Gears of War, Condemned, Rainbow 6 Vegas, Kane & Lynch etc. etc. Most of these games, though, just aren't enough fun to want to continue. Condemned was fun for a while - I got to the last level before I gave up in frustration (specifically with the level design) but the other games on this list seem to have spent so much time worrying about the demographic they're aiming for than making the game fun to play.


3) It's the only console this generation where most of the games available feel original.

Now, I know the 360 had Braid as an exclusive, before the PC got it as well and I know the PS3 has Little Big Planet and that M.C. Escher game (which I want on the PC really, really badly) but the Wii is the most original of the consoles by far. Looking at games like Wario Ware, Super Mario Galaxy, Trauma Center etc... None of those games are FPS's which helps, I suppose, but one is a goddamn surgery simulator - look me in the eye and tell me you expected a game like that this console generation.




Anyway, that's enough. I don't want to labour the point: I think the Wii is original and fun to interact with. So, why am I writing this article?

Well, as a dog returns to it's vomit, so do I return to reviews of Ben "Yahtzee" Crowshaw. Honestly, though, you can't call them reviews. They're editorials - the difference being that reviews present facts and then the reviewers opinion, editorials present the reviewers opinion and then certain cherry picked facts to back this opinion up.

I should really have stopped watching Yahtzee's reviews some time ago but every once in a while, there's one which is quite good - the recent Halo Wars one, for example. These good ones keep me going, through the really bad ones (of which there are many).

Of all his faults, though, his hatred of the Wii is the one that angers me the most. In his recent review of Mad World, he said that he hates the wii mote controls and doesn't like any Wii control methods because the Wiimote is completely broken. He's wrong.

Completely.

This is not an opinion thing, this can't be put down to personal preference, he's just wrong. The Wii controls work fine in games there implemented properly in. There are plenty of games where they're not, fine, but in many games, including most of the ones he's criticised, they're fine.

I know Yahtzee usually prizes impact over accuracy (see his reviews of Assassins Creed & Clive Barker's Jericho for great examples of where he's exaggerated his point so much it's completely at odds with the content of the game) but his attitude to the Wii is symptomatic of a larger problem.

This problem is an attitude held by what seems like the majority of 360 & PS3 owners. That attitude can be summed up by the following sentence:

"The Wii is shit because it's only for casual gamers."

The extended version of this is:

"The Wii is shit because it's only for casual gamers, so why bother releasing PROPER games for it? Mm?"

Now, it's easy to just discount this as snobbery on the part of people who consider themselves the gaming elite. People who've spent £300 on a PS3 so they think they're the ultimate in hard core gamers. As someone who recently spent that much on a new monitor for my gaming PC, I tend to view this as one would view a toddler who thinks he's incredibly talented because he can play Baa Baa Black Sheep on the recorder.

There is something much more unpleasant at work, though. I don't think it's any grand conspiracy by Microsoft or Sony, I don't think they're clever enough to engineer this sort of thing. What I think is happening is a systematic troll war that polarises opinion between those who think it's a kids toy and those that think it's a legitimate games machine.

I'm quite clearly in the latter camp but I'm surprised to see many other people are as well. Yahtzee's Madworld review which sparked this piece of verbal diarrhoea had several responses saying what I'm saying here but in about a tenth of the number of words. One quite eloquent one said:


"Okay, I know the Wii isn't perfect, and I know there is a ton of shovelware crap on it nowadays...I am a Wii owner and I hate going into a store and going bad...bad...bad...bad...bad...Could be good...Bad...Good...Bad...You get the picture

But I have a few questions...
1. Why is a game getting ripped on because of other games on the system? Each game is its own. It doesn't matter if the other games are bad. What matters is this game.
2. Do people want hardcore games on the Wii or not? When shovelware comes out, I see on the boards statements like this. "Har Har, the Wii has no good games. It abandoned the hardcore audience. It sucks! Har Har." Then a good game comes out and I see this. "Why are they releasing this on the Wii! This is clearly for a hardcore audience."

I know this is getting long, but Basically my point is to look at a game based on the game. And then finally decide if you will actually let the Wii have hardcore titles, or you just want to assume that all it gets is shovelware."

But what about the accusation of it only containing casual games? Well, if you ignore the list I spouted earlier, that seems a much more valid argument. The Wii has a load of minigame collections on there, as well as various games like Mario Kart that are more socially geared than most.

But does that make them casual games?

Well, I have no idea. I also have no idea what the hell a casual game is.

Wikipedia's article on the subject is so vague it's practically non existent. Urban Dictionary's definition is the same except it's rather badly syntaxed.

There appear to be two things everyone agrees on that forms a casual game:

1) It requires very little "skill" to play

2) It's very simple

So where does that leave us with Wii games? Well, it's not particularly helpful. Most of the games I've played on the wii have neither of those features. A lot of them have been family friendly, a lot of them have been social in nature rather than solo but with the exception of Rayman Raving Rabbids (which I love) no games I have played on the wii have both of those characteristics.

I'm being overly clinical about this, though. The other feature of a casual game is: It's not a game I, the person who is saying this sentence, would ever play.

I red a fantastic diatribe on a Kotaku forum once. I've lost it now but the verbatim was: Barring stuff like Peggle and Flash games, there's no such thing as casual gaming. What people mean when they say: Oh, that's just a casual game is: That's not Halo. Or Gears of War. Or any of the other really MANLY games that I play. How dare you enjoy Super Mario Galaxy with it's flawless, intuitive and highly original gameplay. It's got giant penguins in it! What are you, a fag?

I said earlier that this attitude 360 & PS3 owners have isn't just snobbery... It's taken me a while to work out what it is but I think I have a handle on it. It's bullying. These people are attacking Wii owners again and again and again with no justification or provocation. I'd care more but Wii owners are very good at telling these twats to fuck off in very loud voices, hence the flame wars that inevitably arise whenever anyone goes down this road on a mainstream forum.

To return to Yahtzee, he is definitely the most mainstream voice of this attitude that I know of. Him saying he wants to run around the streets grabbing people and shouting: THE WII IS MADE OF POO, WHAT'S WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE what does that say about him and the people who hold that attitude?

Two things:

1) They're an idiot who hasn't worked out that it doesn't matter what a console itself is like, it's what the games on it that should be judged.

2) They're intolerant, snobbish & convinced that their style of gaming is the superior one. Anything in that camp is just for children and the mentally ill.

I don't really have an end to this article. I've set out my points and am fairly sure I've proved how moronic the phrase "casual gaming" is but how to end? Well, calling for people who use the phrase to be kicked in the balls is a good start. Calling them on their bullshit is another way of doing it.

However you approach it, though, the point of this is tolerance. Accept that there are styles of gaming that appeal to other people and not you.

I do need to practice what I preach, by the way. Halo, Gears of War et all are worth dog shit in my book but they have sold massively massively well, clearly a lot of people like them, which makes them perfectly valid games.

Mind you, I don't go round screaming about how the 360 is a pile of shit because I don't like some of the games on it.

Leverage

I actually promised myself I'd stop watching American TV recently... this isn't due to some latent racism on my part, it's just that Battlestar is now over, Supernatural is perilously close to jumping the shark and the 44 minute format of American TV shows is antithetical to one of my other passions: Anime.

The problem with anime is: When you're used to 44 minute programmes like Battlestar, it feels really, really odd to go back to 22 minute episodes. My plan was to purge my system of 44 minute shows, reset and sink myself into the delicious pool of anime for a bit.

This plan has to be put on hold for a bit, though, as I've discovered another show that is really worth watching.

Leverage is basically Oceans 11: The TV Show but in stead of stealing entirely for the money, they're moral thieves. In one episode, for example, they steal money for a veterans hospital whilst at the same time exposing the independent contractor that caused a bunch of veterans to be injured in the first place.

It's all handled very well- there's a good amount of humour but there is some gravity to the situations as well.

What impresses me, though, is how they've kept things feeling new. In one episode, a horse trainer has gone into business with an investor. The horses don't do as well as they should have done so the investor has the stable burned down, with the horses in it, to recoup the insurance and start again. The team are brought in by the trainer who wants to make sure the investor never, ever works with horses again.

It also has a pretty good cast. One of the cast members (I'm told) was in Angel, there's also a guy who was in 2 eps of Supernatural. Badger is in it (HOORAY FOR BADGER!) and Jane from Coupling is one of the main characters. The cast gels really well and the acting is always pretty damn solid.

Overall, it's pretty damn good. It's kind of like House - it's very solid, very well done but it's not going to change the world.

Red Dwarf: Back To Earth

It's about two thirty in the morning and I should really be in bed but fuck it, I've just finished watching the new Red Dwarf three prater and I want to have a little online ponder about it.


Firstly, where do I stand on the rest of the Red Dwarf Legacy?

Well, I think it's Sci Fi first and comedy second. Yes, there are brilliant comedy episodes (Legion, for one) but for me, the strength of the show has always been in the incredibly imaginative situations they dream up for the characters.

I even quite like Series 8 - easily the weakest in the run, ignoring series 1 & 2 which I don't like at all. It wasn't funny in the least but it had some quite interesting ideas, such as the Cassandra episode.

Anyway, the rest of this is going to contain some pretty severe spoilers for Back To Earth so don't read if you care about that sort of thing.



Episode 1:

Things start fairly oddly - there's no laugh track for one. I find this a bit of a welcome relief - I don't like laugh tracks in comedy as it tends to unsubtly highlight jokes the creators thought we may miss.

Also, Kochanski is dead & Lister is in mourning. That's quite a good way to start, and sets the tone for the rest of the show...

If I had to use one word to describe these three episodes it would be Mature... The cast look considerably older than they did previously (it's set nine years after series 8) and the whole thing feels much more grounded in reality than it did previously.

There are still jokes - and some good ones at that. I laughed out loud several times in each episode, which is cool.

So anyway. Episode 1 is the funny episode. It's all set up, set up, set up. At the end, they create a dimensional portal and end up back on earth.


Episode 2:

Episode 2 reveals that they have been transported to an earth where they are characters in a TV show.

Now.

No matter what you think of this particular device (I happen to rather like it, as it's much better than several of the available alternatives) it is something that Stranger Than Fiction and Supernatural have all ready covered.

Far, far too much of this episode is spent making quite lazy self referential jokes about red dwarf fanboys. I was getting ready to write the whole thing off (despite a particularly good scene on a bus and the best joke in the series - the final destination joke) but then I saw episode 3.



Episode 3:

Episode 3 is where things start getting weird. They meet the real life Craig Charles, which is all in the vein of episode 2 but then they meet, and kill, their creator. They are free of the show, they can do what they want.

Then, they realise (I forget how) that it must be a fantasy- the squid they hunted in episode 1 must have been a despair squid. But how? I thought it would have been really cool if this squid caused bliss instead of despair and it turned out I was right.

They return to Red Dwarf and Lister has quite a touching moment with an imaginary Kochanski.





So. Where does that leave us?

Of the three episodes, the first one was funny, the second one was half worth watching (specifically the last half) and the third episode is pretty good.

Let me just clarify, though, when I say "good" I mean Chuck good, not Battlestar Galactica good. It's perfectly watchable tv. If you go in expecting the best thing since whatever, you'll be very, very fucking disappointed. I was fully expecting it to be shite and was pleasantly surprised.

I think the main reason why I ended up liking it is- it's very different to the old Dwarf series. It feels more mature, as I said earlier. It feels like they're doing worthwhile things with the characters.

Most importantly, I hope they make more. I think with the show in its current format, they could do some really fun and interesting stuff with it. It looked also pretty damn cheap to make so hopefully they can do it.

All in all, thank you Dave. The Channel Dave. You've provided us with a worthy resurrection of a classic TV show and proven that small companies can provide decent entertainment for the masses. Good on you.

Doctor Who: The Planet of the Dead

I approached this Doctor Who special with appropriate caution. Russel T Davies has never, ever done a good Doctor Who special. He's done good single episodes, of course, but he usually lets the sense of occasion go to his head and ends up with giant transformers stomping Victorian London.

This time round, though, the special is not just written by Davies, it's also written by Gareth Roberts who wrote The Unicorn & The Wasp and The Shakespeare Code. These weren't good episodes but they were witty and quite well thought out.

Roberts' writing clearly compliments Russels because this special is... quite good.

It opens with a very exciting sequence which blows away the stodge of usual doctor who openings. We're not forced to sit through five minutes of a companion squabbling with their family, we're straight in with the action. The doctor appears and he offers Michelle Ryan (who is very good, as usual) an easter egg - the one nod to the festival this special marks.

Then the plot kicks in, a london bus gets dumped on another planet and things carry on as they normally do in Doctor Who.

What's quite nice about this special is - a lot of time has clearly been devoted to Michell Ryan's character. She's not a tiresome everyman (thankfully) and she brings up a lot of questions that an attentive watcher will be asking - as well as several that they wouldn't have thought of. This is fantastic - it keeps the writing ahead of the audience and means that when the plot holes start opening (as they usually do with Davies' scripts) we don't really mind because they have successfully missed so many on the way.

It is an episode with a fair few problems though. The main one is the traditional Russel T. Davies camp factor. The ending is packed full of cheese - applauding soldiers, a badly written classical score marking the triumphant return, and more than a few corny lines of dialogue.

The creature design is half brilliant, half terrible. Thankfully, the terrible bits don't intrude much.

The main problem, though, is the length. This episode is 60 minutes, rather than the more traditional 45 and boy does the ending drag because of it. Up until the finale, everything moves at a real pace. So much gets done - there's action, jokes, fun bits of characterisation... but then everything slows down to a crawl for no real reason.

So yes. As far as Doctor Who episodes go, it's definitely ahead of stuff like The Impossible Planet - mainly because there are precisely no Deus Ex Machina's... It's not as good as the stellar episodes like Blink, Gridlock etc. etc. but it's as good as episodes like 42, Father's Day etc.

Resi 5 woes continued

In my previous post I moaned about how Capcom shouldn't be charging for an extra multiplayer mode less than a month after they've released their latest game.

Well, it turns out that the mode that's supposedly DLC, is all ready there on the disc. When you buy the DLC, you download a 2 megabyte unlock file.

I'd suggest a boycott of Capcom if I thought the needletwitch fools who buy resident evil games would stick to it.

Resi 5 DLC

I saw a news story today that said Resident Evil 5 will be selling a versus mode as downloadable content for 400 microsoft fun bucks. And it's going to be released tomorrow.

Whilst this isn't quite horse armor it still seems like a major rip off. Not least the fact that Resi 5 was released under a month ago. Is there all ready DLC available for it? Seriously? The whole fucking point of DLC is that it's stuff you added later, not stuff you clearly could have added into the original release.

This more amuses me than anything else, if I'm honest, because I think Resident Evil 5 is a terrible game and anyone who actually buys this shit deserves to be separated from their money but once I stop guffawing into my pasta/tuna/olives lunch, it began to sting a bit.

Firstly, I'm worried that this trend will spread.

Capcom's defenders on the intertubes want to know what the nay sayers are complaining about. Someone calling themselves Tonixz said: "I don't see how Capcom isn't short changing anyone here. I'm pretty certain most RE games to date were single player and they were retail priced."

The problem is, by that logic, developers should just put out a game that is identical in every way to the last game and release everything new as DLC.

As part of the PC gaming master race, I'm used to my DLC being free, with the exception of shit I don't mind paying for such as the Far Cry 2 stuff. What does worry me slightly is that developers may put an incomplete game out (as they have clearly done here) and then charge extra for the bits they should have included in the first place.

This may well drive console game prices up from the £40 they're currently at to closer to £50.

Considering £40 is all ready far too much to pay for most of these games, that's something to be legitimately worried by.



In other news the Sith Lords Restoration Bug Count is still at 84.

At least it hasn't gone up.

Films what I did watch this week

1) Casshern

So this used to be one of my favourite films when I was at university. It was beautiful, the soundtrack was lovely and the plot was heart breaking, if extremely silly. Silly does sum up the film quite well actually, to actually like it you have to have quite a high silly tolerance. You have to be able to roll with the fact that a group of escaping prisoners can find in the mountains a giant factory for making killer robots. Just like that.

Anyway, rewatching it here, now in 2009, its appeal has gone. This isn't because I can't put up with the plot, it's because it takes so fucking long to get to the point. I watched 40 minutes of the damn thing and the plot was only just getting started. There were another two hours to go. I said fuck that shit and watched something else.

In a way, this is a massive shame. Casshern is one of those films that really doesn't need to be that slow. Sure, long lingering shots are nice occasionally - the opening to the Moonlight Sonata is still fantastic but the rest of the film is just fucking glacial.

All in all, I must have been a much more patient person at university.


2) Das Experiment

Das Experiment was also one of my favouite films at university and, after the massive disappointment that was Casshern, I re watched it, hoping against hope that it would stand up to the rewatch.

It does. Thankfully.

It's not quite as good as I remember it - the plot all makes sense, I'm just not hugely convinced it would all move that quickly. However, the characters are all fantastic, the film moves at a very nice pace and it has quite a nice ending.

Part of the reason I love Das Experiment is how it's managed to capture human temperaments so realistically. Some of the characters may seem awfully convenient (having a repressed obsessive who believes only in pleasing authority figures for example) but that's what The Experiment was all about...

What I find especially interesting this time around is something I didn't notice on my previous viewings - The first guard to emerge as slightly over authoritarian is the executive - he sows the seeds of authoritarianism in the others and they run with it whilst he tries to hold them back and maintain order.

Very good film.




3) Monsters Vs Aliens

I'll keep this one short - Monsters Vs Aliens is a really good film. Mostly because it's short. It has three main plot elements and moves between them very quickly. This means that the audience never has time to get bored but more importantly - the characters never debate their actions or have moments of angsty self doubt like they usually do in these damn films.

It's very funny, is extremely cynical and its' gender politics are excellent. It represents both male and female characters without being overly patronising to either one. That's a rare feat in any film, let alone a kids one.

So yes, it's 90 minutes of frothy fun. It's not as good as Wall-E but that's a bit like saying Nightwish aren't as good as Mozart - it's unfair to compare something that's very good to a bona fide masterpiece.