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.

Wheelman: First Impressions

I've been having a little run around Tigon Studio's latest game for a while now. For those who don't know what it's about, there's a brief gameplay trailer here:


It's supposedly an open world game but, rather like Far Cry 2, it focuses on one aspect of that world. In this case, the driving. There are sections where you shoot people but the game tends to stumble at those points, only picking up speed again when you get back on 2 or 4 wheels.

Here are my observations.

1) The graphics really aren't very good.

I do quite like this, it means that people who like the game won't be doing so because it looks pretty ala Call of Duty 5 (which is honestly the only reason I can think of to like that particular piece of shit)

2) The Engine is a little dodgy

The car physics and so on are pretty good - it feels rather like the Burnout games... very arcadey, not realistic at all. On foot, things feel less well put together.

3) It's good fun.

The cars and bikes are great to drive and there are more than a few bells and whistles to make car chases interesting. You can ram sideways with the left and right cursors and, if you build up enough focus, you can pull a 180 in your car and shoot people whilst driving backwards, which is awesome.


4) There's a fair amount of variety.

This is a tricky one - as with Far Cry 2, the gameplay of Wheelman is basically the same excellent 30 seconds of play time repeated over and over and over and over again. Like far cry 2, though, there's variety in the side missions. Some will see you evading the cops whilst getting to a special location, some will see you playing courier, some will see you causing as much damage as possible.

It all boils down to driving from here to here whilst avoiding these people but that's pretty much what every driving game is anyway.


So what's actually wrong with it?

Well the shooting sections are rubbish, as I said earlier. They're like the shooting sections in GTA 4 or Saints Row 2 - IE totally generic third person shooter. They're not worse than those two games, by any means, but they're as basic and generic as you can get really. There are more than a few AI holes in the shooting sections, as well.

There aren't too many shooting sections though, which is nice.

Should you buy it though? That's a tricky one. I do like the driving sections - they feel quite fresh in spite of the limitations of the engine. The plot is quite good, I just wish it would get to the point a bit more rather than having you run around doing errands.

Should you buy it.... Well.... it depends how much it ends up being. It gets released on Steam tomorrow and if it's £20 then I'll be getting it. If it's over that, probably not.

It's a solid game and there should be a fair bit of replay value but it's not a stellar title by any means. Worth checking out though, especially if you think (like I do) GTA 4 & Saints Row 2 were mutton dressed as lamb.

Wallace and Gromit: Fright of the Bumblebees

Anyone paying attention will notice I'm playing absolutely every game I can get my hands on at the moment in order to stave off depression. It hasn't been a roaring success- until now.

WaG: FOTB is an adventure game from Telltale, the geniuses who gave us the new Sam & Max Games. In it, Wallace and Gromit have built a new thing and it's causing problems.

I'd describe the plot further but every time I've tried, I've either spoiled things or i've inadvertently spoiled things so I'm not going to. Just trust me that it's a very good W&G plot that could fit nicely into the canon if Nick Park deems it to be so.

The graphics are also very nice - it looks and feels very similar to Sam & Max but they've made the surroundings, characters etc. LOOK like clay, which is pretty remarkable for a computer game. Characters have authentic hand moulded scratches and fingerprints on them, everything has that stylised look caused by being fashioned out of putty...

I wouldn't say that you feel like you're actually moving little clay people around your screen but it comes nicely close.


So what else? There is quite a nice level of humour - it's not as funny as Sam & Max but it's not trying to be. The puzzles are very much in the telltale mould - IE intuitive and well thought out. You're never trying to work out what you should be doing, just how to do it.

This is partly down to Telltale's excellent hint system which makes a welcome return and partly because you are given a little plot summary and objectives list in the menu screen. That's a nice touch and I'm quite surprised no-one's tried it before.

It's also quite a long game, by episodic adventure standards. It also doesn't fall into the:

Single Objective,
Three pronged Objective,
Single Objective,
Coda,
END

Structure that many Sam & Max games used to. It comes perilously close at one point but then swerves and goes off at a new tangent.

So what's wrong with it?

Not much, to be honest. The voice acting is... okay. They got the stand ins for guys who voiced the cartoons, so at first the voice acting will feel very slightly wrong. As is the way with these things, though, this feeling vanishes as you go through the game.

That's the only criticism I've got, thinking about it...

So yes, it's very good value (£20 gets you all four episodes in the series) and it's all we're likely to get as far as decent adventure games go for a while...

Get it.

Turning to ash in my mouth

So I've had two pretty severe disappointments in about half an hour and what is the Internet if not a place to vent so here we go.

Disappointment #1: Chuck

So Chuck has never exactly been BSG but at it's best it was a fun show with an appealing sense of humor and more knowledge about the genre it fit into than I am accustomed to from TV shows.

Things haven't been quite right recently, though. The show has been more concerned about its over arching plot than ever before. This would be okay were it not for the fact that it stolidly refuses to change the setting.

Having an over arching plot would be great if I believed for a second the story might actually move on as a result of it but no. Chuck will always work at the Buy More, he will never actually go out with Sarah and he will never get rid of Morgan. I know this because the makers of the show own that Buy More location so it doesn't make financial sense to move the show on so they don't need it any more. Never mind that that fucking location is slowly draining the life blood from the show, please, that only affects people who watch the fucking thing.

Things came to a head when watching the latest episode where Chuck tries to track down Orion and gets attacked by a predator drone. There are three things badly wrong with this episode (or at least the 20 minutes I watched before I couldn't take any more)

A) They've got a budget now. Oh dear. They can make CGI planes fly over whatever town this is set in now. That's never a good thing. Only once can I equate an increase in budget to an increase in quality and that was with Battlestar Galactica and anyone who's watched it knows that show follows very special rules.

B) The constant moaning of the CIA and NSA that Chuck isn't doing what they told him to do or is doing stuff they didn't know about is getting very annoying. This ties into what I was saying earlier about the series never moving on. The CIA doesn't employ Chuck. As far as I know they never even pay him for constantly putting his life in danger. It was okay to never address this question when the series was a bit of breezy fun but now they're trying to get all Story Arc on us, they can't get away with it any more.

They'd also have much more of a right to complain if it wasn't really obvious that they don't give a shit about Chuck or his situation.

C) The chemistry between the characters is just gone. Jeff and Lester are no longer charming, they're just dicks. Morgan isn't fun, he's annoying and Sarah isn't sweet, she's a mindless tool working for idiots.




Disappointment #2: Call of Duty 5: World at War

I'm unemployed at the moment so I badly need stuff to do. I've completed CoD 4, played more Left 4 Dead and Far Cry 2 than can be good for me and so on. I acquired CoD 5, though, because I've heard that it's a tolerable if uninspired shooter.

It's not, it's fucking awful.

It's like a really bad mod for CoD 4. The weapons are meh, the levels feel much more linear than they ever did in CoD 4, it's derivative, the story feels more racist than anything else and the whole thing just feels cynical.

There's not a whole lot more I can say about this. If anyone told you it was good, they were lying. Either because they work for Activision or they feel stupid after spending £30 on the same Medal of Honour/Call of Duty stuff that's been being released for the last eight years.

The Path: updated impressions

If you look for information about The Path on the net, you'll find a lot of blogs saying two things:

1) I have no idea if I'm playing this game right, it's really fucking confusing.
2) I'm not exactly sure I enjoyed playing it, but I'm glad I have.

The annoying thing is that these are the only two things you can really say about this game. So much of the experience comes from discovery of strange events in the woods that to describe any of them would be a disservice to anyone considering playing it.

What I can do, though, is describe the visual style so that people can get a better impression on what the game is.

Most of the game is experienced at a walking pace, as you walk through the woods, bits of your vision distort - stylised images appear for fleeting moments. A wolf's paw, a leaf, the face of a girl, a black miasma...

You can run through the woods, as you do the camera pulls pack, your vision darkens, the music takes on a more sinister tone...

Whilst I'm on the music, incidentally, they've taken more than a few pointers from the Silent Hill soundtrack, which is always a good thing. The style is quite similar to this.

I can't say a whole lot more about The Path without spoiling bits of it. Also, it would be kind of pointless because it's one of those games where you can pretty much grantee that no two people will have the same experience playing it...

It's not perfect, I don't like the interface at all and the graphics aren't what you'd call stunning but for £7, it's excellent value. Even if you don't end up liking it, I'd recommend buying it because you won't have experienced anything like it and originality needs to be rewarded if it is to flourish.

The Path

So I downloaded the indie game The Path because I read about it and decided I couldn't not have it in my life.

So you pick one of six girls of varying age and gothy dress sense and are then told to go to grandmothers house and to stay on the path.

And if you do this, you fail the game.

It's that sort of game.

Describing it is almost impossible because it all relies on atmosphere, extremely bizarre visuals and so on.

If I had to argue that games are a legitimate art form, my first example would be Portal. My second would be Braid. My third, would be The Path.

It's such a bizarre game, I've played it through twice and seems to genuinely change whenever you do. You're also left with no clear idea of what's happened or whether you were supposed to do whatever it was that you did.

And I rather like that.

If a film or a book did it, I'd find it immeasurably pretentious but there's something about performing all these actions yourself with the sense that if you were just a little bit more clever, you'd be able to work out what the hell is going on to drive away the cynic in me.

So yes. It's cheap, it's pretty, it's astonishingly confusing and it's unlike anything else you've ever played before. Get it.

Merchants of Brooklyn

Chris Livingston, one of the best bloggers on the net, recently wrote a piece about an indie PC game called Merchants of Broklyn. Read it here.

So pretty much entirely on his recommendation, I downloaded it. I did consider buying it, briefly, but then I looked at a trailer and thought... let's try it out first.

First the good stuff: It uses the Cry Engine 2, which is one of the best engines currently around.

Bad stuff: Pretty much everything else.

It's an extremely generic FPS which doesn't use any of the potential given to it by the fantastic setting. The worst thing about it is - your guns have infinite ammunition and don't over heat. This means there can be no subtlety to the gunfights...

So yes. If you read Chris's post and were thinking of getting the game, don't.

The All Seeing Eye

On the advice of Rocket Boom, one of my favorite Internet news/commentary sites (see here if you haven't heard of them) I downloaded a firefox plugin called Add-Art.

What this plug in does is takes Internet ads and replaces them with works of art. Nice, I thought. I do run addblock plus, though, so I don't think I'll notice. I installed it about a month ago then promptly forgot about it.

Time passes. About two weeks. I have completely forgotten about the plug in at this point.

Suddenly, I start noticing a trend. I, as do most people of my age, tend to just not see advertising any more as there's so damn much of it but I saw this one add that I was sure I'd seen before. It was a really, really, really creepy eye. There was no branding, no link attached to it. There was no name. Nothing. Just an eye.

This eye followed me from Cracked to Cheggit (which is a torrent site devoted exclusively to somewhat adult material.) which I found very, very fucking creepy.

To illustrate just how creepy it is, imagine seeing this everywhere you go on the web:




There's no real end to this story, I eventually worked out that the plug in I'd installed x weeks ago was spawning the eye everywhere in place of advertising but...

Could they not have picked some LESS CREEPY art? The art is supposed to rotate every two weeks and I'm counting the days. Having said that, if it's a choice between staring at a scary eye and having another of those bloody ad's look at me, it's creepy eye all the way.

Far Cry 2 DLC

By rights, I should be asleep but I'm not for reasons too long and complicated to go into here. To pass the time, I downloaded Far Cry 2's DLC.

First things first, the DLC cost £4. I'm not entirely sure if this is worth it or not... On the one hand, it's a rip off. Three new weapons? Is that it? On the other hand, I've spent that much on Wispa bars in the last week so maybe I should re-analyse the way I spend my money.

Anyway, I'm glad I bought it.

And it's not because the weapons that come with the game are especially fantastic. They're not. They're okay. What's nice about them is....


Okay, I have to go off on a slight tangent but bear with me.

Why I love Far Cry 2 almost as much as I love Crysis Warhead is- There's so much variety in the play styles. Both the aforementioned games are masters of varying gameplay. Crysis does it through unparalleled (for an FPS) levels of user interaction with the environments. Far Cry 2 does it by providing you with a huge arsenal but limiting you to three of the superb weapons at a time. There are no perfect combinations, you always have to make sacrifices.

From that point of view, you aren't buying individual things for Far Cry 2, you're expanding one section of the game, the section that makes it truly great - the weapons. You're adding another chunk of variety to an all ready very varied game.

What's quite nice about all these weapons is, once you've bought the DLC, that's it. You have them - they're in a box in all your weapons warehouses. I was kind of expecting to have to buy them in game, which would have been a bit cheeky. As a result, I can see these being really useful early in the game before you've unlocked the serious gear like the automatic grenade launcher and the sniper rifles.

So, what are they like?

1) The Sawn Off Shotgun

This fills the small weapon slot and is therefore competing against the Uzi, the .50 cal and so on. From that point of view, it's quite good. Both barrels are wired to fire at once, which is nice. The re-load time is quite long so if you miss you're pretty screwed but it's quite a nice alternative to the other weapons on offer.

Especially as if I want a gun for the small guns thing, I always take the UZI, never the .50 cal. I never see the point. So it's nice to see more guns on offer for a relatively gun-lite area.


2) The silenced shotgun.

Now, as someone who knows practically nothing about guns, I think the idea of SILENCING a shotgun is utterly ridiculous. The silencer would have to be the size of a house. But if I'm wrong about this, I'm wrong. Screw it.

This is probably the weakest of the new weapons - it's another shotgun, woo. That makes four available for the medium weapon slot alone. I don't think I'll be using it much but what I do like about it is- it expands the game's quite scant stealthy weapons selection. It's a welcome addition for that at least.


3) The Crossbow.

A crossbow. Woo. Talk about bringing a knife to a gun fight.

That's what I thought when I read the word "crossbow" in the same sentence as "far cry 2". Then I played with it and discovered that the cross bow bolts EXPLODE. How? I don't know. Maybe they're magic but they fucking EXPLODE. That's awesome.

This gives you a precious addition to your arsenal - a silent blowing things up weapon that's not the remote mines....

It carries 5 exploding bolts which is quite a fair number. The reload time is also considerably less than for either of the RPG's so I can see it taking the place of those for some missions. It isn't heat seeking like the big arse RPG but that's what this game is about - balancing pro's and cons.


There are new vehicles as well in this pack and they're quite nice I suppose. I'm extremely apathetic about them. If they're around, I use them. If they're not, I don't. I also don't give two shits about the extra multiplayer maps as the multiplayer in FC2 really isn't very good.

So what conclusions can I take from this?

Well, I quite like the DLC. It does wrankle slightly to be paying for stuff like this when I'm used to Valve providing it for free but screw it, it's Ubisoft. Ubisoft have been very good to us over the years and are one of the only games companies out there still producing games that could be called in any way original...

Can I recommend it to other people....

Well that's a tough one. It depends how much of the game you've played. If, like me, you're on your third play through and things are feeling a little stale, definitely. It doesn't breathe new life into the game but the new weapons definitely make you approach missions differently to how you'd otherwise be doing them.

To people on their first or second play through... I probably wouldn't recommend it. There's more than enough kit in the game to entertain you. From a practical point of view, there's almost certainly more of this kit incoming and if you wait to get hold of it (as is quite sensible as none of it is jaw-droppingly awesome) it'll be cheaper when the new lot comes out.

Trailers

So a red band trailer for Crank 2 got released today which made me happy, view it here...

Another one was released though.

Cloudy with a chance of meatballs

Other than the fact that it has Anna Farris in it, I know this:

It is about a magnificent inventor who finds a way to convert water into food. Naturally, he uses this power to make it rain hamburgers, create a house out of Jelly and crush a school with a giant pancake.

I'm increasingly of the opinion that the only sector of the film industry that shows any real originality is the kids bit. Look at Wall+E. That'd never have gotten made if it was for adults, the suits would be too concerned about demographics.

In a way, that's the magic of kids films, they have to be out there, they have to be interesting or they just won't get watched.

There's also this trailer for FAQ about Time Travel. Which looks... inventive.

Empire: Total War - One more nail in the coffin

Okay, so I know I'm not going to get on with this game but I'm unemployed at the moment and a bit starved for stuff to do. As a result of this, I loaded up Empire again last night and gave it another go.

Things went very slightly better this time - I was the Russians again so I wouldn't have to deal with the naval stuff until I was well settled in. However, I couldn't get the building/research automanager to work. Which left me frantically checking every single building in my empire every turn to see if there was anything I should be doing to it. I'm pretty sure Tsar Nicholas II never did that. Mind you, that could have been why he ended up being executed in a basement.

Anyhoo, I have been able to put my finger on what's wrong with the diplomacy:

In Empire, research is very important. You have to research the three field system (look it up) before being able to use it in your farms, thereby increasing the amount of food and money your empire gets. Same thing with armies, mining, philosophies etc. etc. etc.

Now, I conquered a couple of countries again because I'm Russia, that's what they do. I then tried to trade these countries for a couple of bits of farming know how. Whoever I went to, I got turned down.

I want to re-iterate that. I was trying to GIVE a country to some nation I'd never heard of who I was all ready allied with in exchange for information about crop rotation and they said no.

Now, I get that information is important. But I was offering these people a fucking COUNTRY.

This shouldn't reeeally matter - Empire just works on a different value system than the real world does... but it really does matter. When small pieces of info are more important than countries, all pretence to realism has been abandoned.

Ah well.

American TV Scheduling

I do like to gripe about American Television. This is partly because there is so much of it out there so there's ample material but mostly because despite having many gems, a lot of it is the worst bullshit ever considered legitimate by the mass populace this side of Star Wars.

I should point out at this point that one of my two FAVOURITE SHOWS EVARR is the new Battlestar Galactica which is very firmly American, despite having more than a few Brits and Canadians on the cast.

Anyway, there are two things that really annoy me about all American Television and both of those are to do with their scheduling.

1) Their insistence on calling their runs "seasons"

Now, in Britain, we call things "series" which makes a kind of sense. Americans call theirs Seasons, though, and that bugs the hell out of my inner English student. Pointing your gaze at this page:

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/season

will reveal that the word season is defined as being a period or time of year. This is all very well for some American shows, specifically the short ones like Dexter but for Battlestar, Chuck & the other ones worth watching, their 22 episodes are nearly always spread out over about six months. That is not a fucking season, that's half a year.

I do get the reason for this, by the way, it's so they can gather feedback on the first half of their... whatever you want to call it and finish filming their second half based on this.

But if that's the case, why the hell not just call them two separate series. That's what they essentially are anyway.

This shouldn't really bother me because when Battlestar breaks in October to come back in March the next year, it's still annoying whether it's being advertised as a Christmas Break or a gap between series... my point is merely that calling them different series would add some basic honesty to the process.


2) Their shows don't run week by week

Now here, In Britain, we usually have six episodes of a TV show. You may think this is short. Whatever, that's not what I'm worried about. The point is that we get one episode per week. Right? Now, In America, for some reason best explained by someone who knows whatever fucking sporting event or national holiday is happening on that day, will occasionally not air an episode for up to four weeks at a time. Mid series. I was getting in to that, you bastards.

Occasionally, a show like Chuck will have a week off. Why? Well... because.

Probably the most ridiculous example of this is Supernatural that had it's mid series break, aired five episodes and then had another month's break for "sweeps". I don't know much about whatever Sweeps is but I do know it's where a show frantically tries to be popular to avoid cancellation. If you'll forgive the extremely tasteless analogy, it's like in the concentration camps where the guards would come through and execute the workers who weren't healthy enough to continue - all the people who didn't want to die would cut themselves and smear a small amount of blood on their faces to give themselves more colour.

I've forgotten where I was going with that, I'm just a bit depressed by how horrible concentration camps were.

As bad as things are in the world now, we don't have concentration camps.

In Europe.

Elsewhere, they do.

I should really become a proper political activist. Is there anyone out there who can teach me how to make bombs? Comments below, please.

Empire: Total War

In general, I blame the consoles for a lot of the stagnation that can be found in gaming. If the resident evil franchise had developed on the PC, you could bet your arse that you'd be able to MOVE and SHOOT at the same time. I hate to generalise console owners as teenagers who can easily be placated with the latest whatever in the Halo/Gears of War series but the sad truth is: Whilst the majority of console owners are well out of their teens, the ones with all the disposable income are school kids and students who wouldn't know a good game if it sat on their head.

Having said all that, the most stagnant genre currently in existence is the RTS, a genre almost exclusive to the PC despite a few misguided attempts to bring it to consoles. Halo Wars anyone?

Anyway, if I was to pick a word to describe Empire: Total War it'd be just that. Stagnant.

I loved Shogun: Total War back in the day. It was a revolution in RTS games. No real time base building so you could focus on the tactics of war. High Ground and choke points actually meant something (unlike in, say, Total Annihilation, where such features served only to look pretty).

As the games went on, though, it became less about the strategy and more about diplomacy. I can kind of roll with that- I even completed Medieval. I would have completed Rome but I was a student myself at that point and didn't want to dedicate the couple of hundred hours the game seemed to be asking for in the pursuit of a "well done" screen with a Centurion wearing something fetching in red and white.

There's nothing wrong with diplomacy sims, though. Especially not ones where you have to fight as well. The problem comes when all subsequent games to is expand the battle map. Rome, Medieval 2 and Empire are all essentially Medieval: Total War with larger maps, better graphics and various bells and whistles added.

This wouldn't be too much of a problem were it not released in the same month as Dawn Of War 2, which has taken the RTS genre by its geriatric shoulders and shaken it until the bones have cracked and broken to the point where the pointless pensioner is now in the shape of a cheetah and would you believe it, there's life in the old girl yet. Girl Cheetah. That last sentence was far too long.

Anyhoo, I did quite enjoy Empire for the first hour or so that I played it. Yes, it was the same game I've played twice before but I kind of enjoyed it then as well.

Problems started arising when I entered the second hour of play. Suddenly I wasn't doing as well any more. I discovered that this was because, as well as upgrading my cities, I needed to be upgrading my towns, villages, settlements, farms, mines, fur markets etc. etc. etc. as well. After I had discovered this, the amount of time I had to take for each round increased massively.

I should point out in the games defense that you can automate all this upgrading farms stuff but I got this damn game so I could play it, not have the computer play it for me.

So that annoyed me.

The combat seems to have taken a beating as well.

I was trying to wipe Sweden off the map so I could divide up the spoils between my Russian empire and my mates in Denmark, who were having a bit of a rough time of it. This was all well and good for the first few battles - I got St Petersberg no trouble, Ker-Ching. But taking Stockholm... fuck me that took ages.

The battle itself was over in about five minutes because the only people defending it were peasants with flintlocks but getting my troops there - oooh that was another matter.

I don't know if there are troop transport ships I could have used - the tutorial didn't say - but I had to walk my guys all the way round the north end of Scandinavia. For those without a map, that's a very fucking long way. It took about ten turns.

Now, I know that this is all quite realistic and you shouldn't be able to destroy civilisations easily but the fact remains that by the time my first army had gotten to Stockholm, I'd built another two of equal size. Something's not right there.

So yes. The micromanagement gets annoying, the area of play is huge so the game becomes a massive time sink, the AI is sporadic, the diplomacy feels broken and the battles just don't feel fun any more.

Back when I used to play these games regularly, height gave you a massive advantage and you couldn't fire muskets in the rain, that sort of thing. I don't know if these features are still present, they may be, but I saw no evidence of them at all. The one nod to realistic battles was that my canon troops couldn't see very far when the weather was foggy, which was a very nice touch. Although I could have liked it if they could have just fired... somewhere over there and kind of hoped they hit something.

There are naval battles, as well, but I didn't really experience them. I started off as the Russians, who have far too much to be worrying about even without going to war on the oceans. I became impoverished, though, due to my destruction of Sweden and the fact that I hadn't upgraded anything so I started again as the British.

Aaaaaaaand I took one fucking look at the map with its ultra complicated trade routes, colonies off in America, my advisor telling me to invade India before the french did and prevent the Spanish forming an alliance with anyone and I couldn't hit the ESC key fast enough.

I like that there are games out there that are this complicated and this in depth because it weens the MMO crowd off their bullshit "Pay £10 a month to throw coloured light at AI sprites" games but for me... no. No, no, no. My life is far too complicated as it is without giving any thought to this kind of crap.

I really enjoy games that challenge me mentally - especially adventure & puzzle games but this sort of thing? Nah, I'm good. Thanks.

Fallout 3 & Me

So I'm on my third attempt at playing Fallout 3 and for the first time, I've managed to get more than an hour into the game without giving up in disgust.

I've made it further this time for two reasons. Firstly, I've turned down the difficulty so I don't have to plug every single creature with an unreasonable number of bullets before they hit the floor. Secondly, I found a way to modify the game so you move above a crawl.

With these two modifications, I thought the game would be much improved. And it is... It's still a cavalcade of small frustrations and scant rewards though.

Let's start with what I like about it.

1) The characters are... quite good.

I've had a run around Megaton & Rivet City so far and whilst some of the characters were quite fun to talk to... they all seemed fairly generic. I've certainly not come across any characters to rival Vampire Bloodlines ones' which is my current character benchmark for RPG's.

2) I like the way you gradually acquire radiation, often without really noticing.

3) There are plenty of things to do

Okay, I'm scraping the barrel now.



What annoys me?

Well:

1) The layout of the game world seems designed to annoy the player.

The wasteland is filled with arbitrary barriers, forcing you to take long and highly annoying detours. And if you think this is essential to the pacing of the game, you're wrong. Oblivion managed to create a massive open world without this sort of bullshit.

Each settlement is also laid out in the most annoying way possible. Megaton especially. Bethesda seem to think it's fun to wander around on identical looking catwalks for ten minutes every time you want to find the bar.


2) The combat system is terrible.

Now, as much as I hate the combat in Fallout 3, it's still miles better than it was in Oblivion. Having said that, the combat in fallout 3 makes me ask questions. Questions such as:

Why is hitting someone with a baseball bat more effective than shooting them?
What sort of raiders are these that can take five shots to the head without dying?
Why does the condition of my weapon affect how much damage it does rather than affect the rate at which it jams?

Fallout 3 doesn't seem to grasp what litterally every other game with guns has for the last 5 years (ignoring Deus Ex 2) that shooting does not become more fun the more you do it. Arbitarilly increasing the number of headshots it takes to drop a Rad Scorpion increases frustration, not fun. It breaks immersion.

My first rad scorpion soaked up an entire clip of assault rifle ammunition. Or, to be more technical about this, it absorbed over thirty pieces of metal traveling through its head at over two hundred miles per hour.

That's just fucking stupid.


3) There's still far too much mindless trekking around.

This wasn't as painful as it was before I hacked my running speed but even so... I get that the game is largely about exploration but guess what- so was Oblivion. In Oblivion, you could fast travel between all the major cities from the word go. Did this break immersion? No. It just meant you didn't have to spend 90% of your time "finding" places. Exploration is only fun if you chose to do it. If you're forced to, it's a chore.


4) The world is far too monotonous and dull.

Yes, I know it's supposed to be post apocalyptic but a nuclear war doesn't remove every colour from the game world other than grey and brown, does it?


5) Story? What story?

Now. There are nice bits of story. Very small nice bits of story. I like the guy that pops up in Megaton that asks you to blow up the city. I quite like the family of blood sub plot. But the other sub quests I've come across in the game fill me with nothing but apathy. They all seem fairly lifeless... not least because the characters themselves are falling over themselves to get you involved in side quests.

I know RPG's are based around the idea that you're the only competent individual in the game world and it's therefore up to you to sort absolutely everything out but this has been handled much more subtly in most other games. Case in point, I went to Rivet City on a quest for some woman who was writing a book. I came across this guy who wanted to do some drugs with me. After that, literally every conversation I had with anyone there had a question about this guy and how terrible it was that he was addicted to drugs.

Seriously? Is it that hard to get people to engage in the side quests that you have to take one that sounds really rather dull and force it into every conversation in a square mile radius?

Compare this to Oblivion where the Dark Brotherhood sub plot was only accessible after you'd murdered a civilian. And it was perfectly possible to go through the entire game without doing that.

RPG's live and die on their sub quests - that's where the character of the game world can really show itself. In Fallout 3, it's confused. It's desperate for your attention and will do anything to get you involved in what are supposed to be the voluntary aspects of the game.


So that's basically it. I hate the graphics & gameplay and I'm less than impressed by the story. I'm going to go and play something else.