A long time ago, in a galaxy far far away...

There's been a decidedly Sci-Fi feel to my gaming this week. As reported, I was attempting to gather up the remaining Achievements on Fallout 3, so it occured to me that I should download and play the 5th and final expansion pack Mothership Zeta. I'd not heard good things about it to be honest, but for the sake of my Gamerscore (which, as any self-respecting Xbox gamer will tell you, is a virtual extension to one's penis), I thought I'd give it a shot.

The add-on is triggered when you find Fallout 3's fabled UFO crash site, previously infamous for the ridiculously powerful Alien Blaster you find there, and are 'beamed up' so to speak, to the titular alien mothership where you are experimented on and placed in an induced coma. When you awaken, you are greeted in a cell by a lady named Somah. She throws the idea out there that if you stage a fist fight the guards will unlock the door, and then the two of you can fuck them up and escape, and surprisingly it works (although she neglected to mention that she's bricks hard and very good at unarmed combat, and that resulted in a crippled head for me). So begins a tale of survival and escapism, involving a cowboy, a samurai, about a million aliens and a 200 year old little girl, but I'll not ruin any of that for you.

I actually enjoyed it, not as much as Point Lookout but definitely as much as The Pitt and more than Broken Steel and Operation Anchorage. It appeased the latent Sci-Fi geek in me, and kept me occupied for pretty much a full day. There are a bunch of new weapons available, my favourite of which was the Alien Disintegrator, a sort of Laser Rifle with a clip capacity of 100 shots and a reload time of under a second. At the end of the story I came away with upwards of 1600 rounds for it, and that's after heavy usage throughout too, so it will most likely see me through the last four Cheevos that I haven't acquired yet. Also to note is the fact that all of the alien equipment is extremely light, most of it doesn't weigh a thing, so you can virtually bankrupt the Capital Wasteland when you get back with your loot, which oddly enough none of the merchants bat an eyelid at. Much recommended anyway.

Fallout 3 has pretty much taken up the bulk of my week, but the big story is today's release of Mass Effect 2, the collector's edition of which saw me £60 poorer this morning. First things first, the collector's content is actually really good. The double-thick cardboard sleeve houses both a steelbook and a cardboard case (a mere mortal collector's edition only offers one of either). The steelbook holds both game disks and a bonus disk (the contents of which are still a mystery to me), plus the instructions, obviously, and a download code for some GAME-exclusive armour, and the fold-out cardboard case contains a plastic wallet-size Cerberus Network membership card (Mass Effect 2's platform for downloading DLC, which costs a completely unreasonable 1200 MS Points for anyone who buys the game preowned), which then grants you access to a downloadable squad member and side-quest, as well as a hardback artbook and the first issue of the Mass Effect: Redemption comic series. It doesn't look like much, but it seems worth it when it's in your hands. It's safe to say that, apart from the Guitar Hero bundles, this is the most expensive game I've ever bought though.

On to the game. I can't say too much, mainly because I haven't had time to form a proper opinion on it just yet. I will say that it doesn't seem quite as good as the first one, it just doesn't feel as deep. The game is more of a shooter it seems, and less of an RPG. Your squadmates, for example, have a default look, which isn't changeable. And the guns have technologically regressed, and now need reloading, like every other FPS. They tried to explain it, something about the advanced weaponry needing extra coolant that needs to be changed, but any way you look at it it's still reloading, and you need to collect the coolant, which is still ammo. The graphics, which were my only gripe with the first one, have been improved tenfold, there's none of the scruffy shadows and the texture pop up is entirely gone. It makes my pasty, deformed Shepard look a lot, ahem, more noticeable. Another plus-point is the fact that you can sprint outside of combat now, and for a lot longer, so you don't have to dad-run around the Citadel anymore.

The new characters (who I won't go into in detail for risk of spoilers) don't seem as likable as the ones in the first game though. I've seen a few returning faces, Seth Green's abhorrent Joker is still around and even more hateful, and Dr Chakwas (an anagram of 'hacksaw', fact fans) is knocking about on the ship. There's also been brief appearances from everyone's favourite bigots Ashley and Navigator Pressley, Cpt. Arbiter (sorry, Anderson) and Udina, Tali and even that Asari I let escape from Saren's lab on Virmire the first time round. There are a few new races too, the only ones I've seen so far are called the Vorcha, who are very theatrical enemies with the way they bare their fangs and growl as they talk. They are basically the monster equivalent of Dick Dastardly.

I'll report more next week, after I've had a bit more time with it. In other news this week, I earned my first ever Platinum Trophy on the PS3, for Assassin's Creed II. For the XBox fanboys out there, a Platinum Trophy is awarded when you collect all of the other Trophies, which usually mirror the Achievements on a 360 game. So in effect, I 1000ed it. And on a similar note, I got that 490 point Cheevo on Band Hero. I'm not addicted to Gamerscore, I promise. I was very proud of myself for not buying Tatsunoko vs. Capcom today, opting to be the bigger man and actually get my nephew a birthday present. Mario Kart Wii, if you were wondering. Oh, and ask Raz7el what happened when we played Dead or Alive 4 today. Laters...

Matt Day-Mahn!

You know what makes me awesome? The fact that I buy games that I know to be widely condemned as shit, unplayable smears of filth on a perfectly good BluRay or DVD, wastes of nonrenewable resources used to create the disk, just so I can attempt to entertainingly write about how shit they are for you, the 3 or 4 people who actually read this crap every week. But you know what makes life awesome? When they aren't actually that bad.
Take Hellboy: The Science of Evil as an example. The PS3 version, which is the one I've been playing, received a score of 47% on Metacritic, yet I fail to see what's so bad about it. It's not like Batman, where I'm a complete fanboy, I did love the first Hellboy movie but the second was garbage, the comics do very little to hold my attention and the animated films are a bit on the mundane side, so if I was to be biased I'd be joining them.
The game itself is an enjoyable God-of-War-em-up which places you in the hooves of the titular demonic anti-hero as you (for reasons yet unknown) chase a Witch through a surprisingly atmospheric forest graveyard, bashing the daylights out of everything in your way with your signature massive stone hand, or whatever you find yourself close enough to pick up at the time, from discarded weapons to chunks of a tree to severed parts of enemies departed. As well as the melee combat you also have Red's trusty sidearm, his oversized revolver which can be equipped with various different kinds of ammunition to serve different purposes, from freezing enemies to destroying enchanted doorways.
The game occasionally flashes back to one of Hellboy's previous missions too, the first of which being a trip to Japan which throws quite a few nods to the first of the animated films 'Blood and Iron', with enchanted swords and floating heads, and to bait the fans an encounter with Herman von Klempt and his kriegsaffe, Brutus.
It's good brainless fun, slightly average but not bad, and it will sate my appetite before I get my hands on God of War III, Dante's Inferno and Darksiders in a couple of months. Glad I played Hellboy first though, doubt it would receive such a positive review after the big three.
Also, given this weeks post's title (I couldn't resist even though it's not his likeness), I've hammered through The Bourne Conspiracy on the XBox360, and absolutely loved it.
The game borrows from a lot of others, but the most unlikely (but most apparent) influence comes in the form of Uncharted: Drake's Fortune. When Bourne first appeared onscreen I immediately thought, with his appearance being close to Nathan Drake, Shadow Complex's Jason Flemming and Dark Void's William Grey, that he should have been voiced by he-who-shall-not-be-named. But the way he runs, takes cover, flinches from near misses and to an extent fights (he uses Drake's familiar jump-punch move) also echo Naughty Dog's triumph.
The gunplay is what ultimately lets Bourne down, being uninspired copy-and-paste Gears of War style hide and shoot (although with the more realistic weaponry and destructible cover, it also harks back to Uncharted), and as well as being a bit mundane at times it also gets a little frustrating. But the melee combat really shines. Unlike Uncharted, where you could punch and shoot on the fly, when an enemy engages Bourne up close the game shifts into a Shenmue style fighting mechanic, in which combinations of heavy and light attacks can be used, and when an on-screen 'adrenaline meter' reaches the appropriate level, the B button can trigger 'takedown moves' which immediately incapacitate between one and three enemies in a true-to-the-film cinematic fashion, often making use of the environment in typically inventive ways.
Speaking of cinematics, some of the cutscenes are hauntingly close to the film, particularly the failed assassination attempt on the boat and the Paris apartment attack, which was without a doubt a highlight of the game for me. And taking to the streets of a very destructible Paris in a very indestructible Mini Cooper in a Burnout meets The Italian Job frenzy was an absolute thrill-ride. I had hoped the driving mechanic would pop up again somewhere, as it was fantastic fun, but it never did. Anyway, I whole-heartedly recommend this to fans of both the film and the genre, it's available at most preowned shops for around £7 and won't eat up a lot of time, but it's a very rewarding experience.
It's a rare game that challenges a player to question his or her own sexuality. Curiosity led me to Google Dragon Age: Origins' man-on-man sex scene, and I unwaveringly decided it wasn't for me. Yet Band Hero, which the wife brought home on Sunday, had me worried at times at just how much enjoyment I was having with it, not only was I fearing for my heterosexuality but at times, bopping along to No Doubt's 'Just a Girl', I even began to wonder about my actual gender.
I know I commented on the demo, saying it was arse, but the full game actually proves itself to be more fun and actually slightly more polished than Guitar Hero 5. The series' cast is back in full force, but they've been bastardized to fit the game's X-Factor aesthetic. Gone is Johnny Napalm's Mohican, tamed to blond spikes. Goodbye Judy Nail's piercings, she's resorted to the awful Avril Lavigne 'mosher' template. And what did they do to Axel Steel...
The band also play a more visible role this time, when a track features a female vocalist the game provides you with one, so you aren't watching a butch metalhead squeal out a girlish ballad. Also, in the case of Evanescence's angst-ridden abortion 'Bring Me To Life', the bits where the guy sings were performed by my avatar, the guitarist. "Ha ha, you're the fat one" the wife pointed out. Her words cut deeper than any knife. I did resent the fact that, when playing 'Wannabe' by the Spice Girls, the camera panned to me for the line 'Easy V doesn't come for free'. Not only does it insult my sexuality, now I'm a hooker too. And a real lady, apparently. It makes up for the insults in a very realistically obtainable achievement worth 490 points (seriously) though.
Okay, to wrap things up: Having a bit of a break from Sam and Max after a barmy (yet equally genius and hilarious) song and dance routine about war performed by a bunch of presidential aides just about melted my brain, and have decided that ACII Discovery isn't as good as it first seems, as it's all to easy to wind up stuck between two guards and with the blocking reversals from the other games somehow forgotten about this surely means certain death. And have decided to spend the XBox time between now and Mass Effect 2 hoovering up the last few achievements on Fallout 3, including collecting the Bobbleheads, which I epic failed at when I blew up Megaton without collecting the one from Lucas Simms' house and forgot to save beforehand. I had to go back to the previous save before that, which lost me about three hours' play. And a warning to anyone else starting afresh, don't try to do Operation Anchorage at level 5. It's unforgiving. Ciao.

Demon possession is the gift that keeps on giving!

Cursed Mountain. We don't talk about Cursed Mountain in my house.
It's not really that bad a game, it's just so fucking frustrating that I was in danger of putting my Wii remote through the TV, so I had to stop playing it about half way through and move on. It's mainly one factor, the healing process. You see, to heal yourself you have to visit a shrine-type-thing and light incense. There's always a shrine there during a particularly difficult fight, but it takes around 6 seconds to do the deed and by that time you've been assaulted by three or four angry spooks and your health is lower than when you started. Couple that with unskippable cutscenes which you have to watch countless times when you inevitably die just after they've played and it's enough to make you want to garrote yourself with the Nunchuck cable.
So Cursed Mountain went the way of Sacred 2, banished to the shelf with it's tail between it's legs, and before the Wii was able to recover from actually being used, I had slammed Sam and Max Season One in the drive and was eagerly awaiting "The Wii's first Sitcom".
Sam and Max is a collection of six bite-size episodic Point-and-Click adventure games featuring two "Freelance Police Officers"; Sam is an anthropomorphic dog in a trilby hat who talks like a 1930s movie detective, and Max is a sociopathic rabbit with a penchant for violence.
The game is absolutely baffling in how random some of your tasks are, I am through but two of the six episodes and have had to consult a guide on more than a few occasions. This is obviously a conscious decision though, as the game is very self-parodying of the genre. When a conveniently needed item is given to you by a completely unrelated NPC, Sam will comment on how convenient that is, etc.
The humour is pretty good too, I applaud any game that uses the word 'bollocks', especially an American one. As far as the genre goes, S&M isn't the best but it's still great and very original. A bit more polish for the Wii conversion would have been great, there are times when the speech skips itself and the framerate drops sporadically but it's nothing game-killing. I think I'll be able to get through it without smashing a controller.
Had a bit of a go with the demo of Dark Void, the latest offering from Capcom this week. Wait, what's that I hear? Is it, yes it is! Nolan North ladies and gentlemen! Well, even I'm starting to get a bit bored of him, and that's saying something. Great voice-actors should be a once every-so-often treat, like Simon Templeman (The voice of Kain, of the Legacy of, for those who don't know). If you hear their voice every time you fire up a console, it kind of dulls the pleasure. Like eating Steak every day. Anyway, Dark Void at least does Nolan North well, giving him a very natural role not too dissimilar to Uncharted's Drake, and for the first few seconds while you're on foot, the game feels decent. Then you employ Dark Void's gimmick, the Jetpack, and it all goes tits up. The controls are all wrong, it's boring, it's silly, no, this won't be getting a purchase this side of 2 for £20. Had a quick go on Assassin's Creed II Discovery on the DS the other day and was pleasantly surprised. Way better and more polished that Altair's Chronicles was. I'll definitely give it a proper go if I can tear myself away from Tetris DS for long enough.
I got Rogue Warrior the other day. Yes, I know, I've seen the reviews, I know it only got an aggregate of 27 on Metacritic, but fuck it. It was £14 in Cash Converters and it's only been out a month and a half. If it's so bad (Manhunt 2 bad) that I have to get rid of it, I should make my money back in Gamestation. For now, it's nestled in my Shame Pile, so time will tell. It's gotta be worth it to hear Mickey Rourke rap.

I only speak-a, how you say, "Fractured English". Is how my parents used to speak-a back home.

As planned, last Saturday I braved the Meadowhall shopping centre for a copy of the Assassin's Creed II White Edition, and found solace in the upstairs GAME store, and a quite needy-seeming sales assistant with a ginger beard who assured me that he had the White Edition on the 360 (As I had opted for the PS3 version) and it was a great game. If I'm quite willing to shell out £54.99 of my (wife's) hard-earned cash on a videogame, I don't really need the extra persuasion.

Firstly, the Ezio plastic statuette (as I'm going to call it, action figures have articulation) is of a really good quality. It's quite big at a reported 20cm (I haven't checked), Sacred 2's ended up being about 5 or 6cm tall, even though on the promotional pictures it was taller than the PS3 game case and judging by the size of the Collector's Edition casing I had felt a little cheated when it tumbled out of the box and into my lap, it's sword and wings bent out of shape. She's about the size of the Ryu and C. Viper models in the Street Fighter IV set, but then again there were two of those in the pack. Anyway.

As well as being a fair size, it feels substantial and is very well painted (I first thought his eyes looked a bit dodgy, but in all fairness they do in the game too). Every little detail is captured in a quality that you wouldn't expect from a GAME exclusive pack, way better than the Edward Carnby figure in their Alone in the Dark set. But saying that, I caught sight of the Soap MacTavish model from the GAME exclusive edition of Modern Warfare 2 while I was in the shop, and that was even bigger and just as well made too.

So on to the game. At first, I can't say I was impressed. You begin as Desmond Miles, behind-the-scenes hero of the series, and have to go through a lengthy intro sequence as you escape from your captors from the first game with assassin double-agent Lucy. Now Desmond happens to be voiced by one Nolan North, and it appears that since the first Assassin's Creed (hereby referred to as AC), the good folk at Ubisoft have played both Uncharted games and realised his potential, and have decided to basically make Desmond into a carbon copy of Drake. He quips and wisecracks in his Whedon-esque way, and I'm sure he never used to do that in the original. While (without the proper direction) that is slightly annoying, the real mind-melting irritant comes in the form of Danny Wallace, the jerk who made a career out of being Dave Gorman's mate and copying his brand of doing-something-stupid-for-money comedy, while not carrying it off as well as the other. Whatever he is anyway, he's not an actor, voice or otherwise. That's why they didn't let him play himself in Yes Man, because Jim Carey is both an actor and actually funny. So whenever he pipes up in ACII (luckily you don't see him often, his character is modelled after him and the graphics of ACII aren't great in close-up shots), with his sarcastic prickness, it makes me want to beat him to death with a copy of 'Are You Dave Gorman?'. I still might.

Well, after you finally get in the Animus again, the game goes from strength to strength. It's hard to say what makes ACII better than it's predecessor, but it just is. Everything, from the charismatic hero to the more fluid assassinations just feels 'right'. One thing I have noticed is that AC was very businesslike in structure, you're given a list of people to kill and you have to systematically find and kill each of them. That's it. ACII isn't all about assassinating people (although given the title, it's still the core theme), there are plenty of other things to do, and not just in sidequests too. The main story has you doing a range of things from beating up your Sister's cheating boyfriend to taking part in carnival games in a scene that actually reminded me of Bully in it's atmosphere, the city is decorated in banners and flags and such, quite like the Halloween segment of Rockstar's overlooked classic. There are also assassin's tombs to find, and while you're in them the game becomes more like a traditional platformer, a bit of a homage to games like Tomb Raider, or indeed Ubisoft's own Prince of Persia series. That brand of game has fast become one of my favourite genres.

It's a fantastic game. It's had me playing for just about a solid week, and that includes a pretty much all-day session on Tuesday while I was snowed in without my laptop for comfort (the power pack has died, and I've been forced to borrow a top of the range £630 Sony VAIO monstrosity on Windows 7 to blog for the last couple of weeks), and I'm yet to get bored with it. It's rare that that happens nowadays. I wish I'd played it before I'd written my 2009 top ten, because it deserves a place in there.

In other news, I actually was at the end of Butcher Bay last week, but the game had glitched and not given me a minigun when it was supposed to have, rendering me unable to get past the two walking tanks in the next room. I have tried reading guide after guide on the internet, and each one tells me I'm supposed to have a minigun so I'm just going to YouTube the ending before I start Dark Athena when I get around to playing it. Matt Hazard: Blood Bath and Beyond appeared on the PSN store last night and as I was actually quite excited to play it, I downloaded the trial version and was severely underwhelmed. If the developers had just copied Shadow Complex's right stick aiming and auto-aiming into the background it would work, but using the same stick to aim and move is just awful, and having to press a button to aim at background enemies is very inconvenient. Plus, the game is fucking hard too. And with three weeks to go to the sequel, I've started yet another playthrough of Mass Effect, but since the blog's conception this is the second time I've played it, so I won't go on about that too much. Forgot how awesome it is though, in gameplay and art direction, so it's boosted my excitement tenfold. Wonder if GAME are doing a midnight opening?

What's hell... Without a little fire?"

Grasping Friday by the skin of the teeth once more (I'm getting sloppy ladies and gentlemen), it's that time again.

I started the week off with Sacred 2: Fallen Angel, as I touched upon last week, as I'd slid all of my Christmas games into strategically placed spots in my shame pile, streamlining it by taking out games like Metal Gear Solid IV that I'd already finished at least once (I do desperately want to play it again sometime but there's so many unplayed games in my pile right now). Anyway, it was all going very well at first, seemed a solid enough RPG (from the perspective of an RPG rookie at any rate), but about ten hours into it all of the horrific voice-acting and repetitive gameplay just built itself up into a twitching tumour in my left-frontal lobe (or slightly shit game in my PS3, for those who read things too literally), and I slammed my Dual Shock 3 down in disgust. Well, I placed it down gently anyway, I had sat on my SixAxis a few weeks beforehand and the L2 trigger had come off, and after a botched repair job during which a spring and a screw went AWOL and the poor little thing hasn't been the same since (although I might add, it still works). I'm almost in danger of having to buy a new controller, and buying things that aren't Games or DVDs goes against my moral code. But I digress.

The worst thing about Sacred 2, besides the soul-crushing dialogue and delivery, is the fact that the difficulty spikes are dizzying. When I left it, I was swatting regular enemies aside with one or two hits at a time, but then getting all but literally fucked by the bosses who could pretty much heal faster than you could attack them. The last boss I fought before I banished the game to the shelf was (that which has haunted my dreams since Dragon Age) a Fuck Off Dragon (copyright 24 Hour Gamer), and in case a Fuck Off Dragon wasn't hard enough, he is surrounded by what I have come to refer to as 'respawning bastards'. Without a shit-load of level grinding, which I am not prepared to do, it's impossible. And look, it's made me swear too much already and I'm only 21 hours and 37 minutes into the year.

Moving on, I've spent a few more hours with Tekken 6. It has become very apparent to me that it's pretty much Tekken 5.5, or Super Tekken 5 if you will, because there's not much different aesthetically and nothing seems to have moved forward gameplay wise. They've just changed everyone's moves to throw us all off and tossed in a few new characters. There's Lars; a man with ridiculous hair (no surprising he's yet another Mishima), Bob; a fat bastard who moves pretty quickly (See Street Fighter IV's Rufus), Zafina; a girl who moves a bit strangely (A bit like SoulCalibur's Voldo, but less uncomfortable to look at), Miguel; some kind of stereotypical Spanish bull-fighter guy (who happens to be quite fair-haired and Caucasian, as is the norm in Japanese videogames), and the two who actually seem to be pretty good fighters, Leo; Either a very tall male child or a pretty butch lesbian who is pretty fast and has some awesome easy-to-do combos and Alisa, robot daughter of Tekken 3's Doctor B. who looks like she's been ripped straight from a dodgy Japanese H-Cartoon and is packed with more hidden weapons than North Korea. "It is not my fault if you get hurt", she quips sweetly as we prepare to fight. That's easy for you to say love, you've got chainsaws for arms, I'm just a prick in a Leopard mask. It's still a good game though, it's still Tekken.

And the last major story of the week, I had been waiting until I had all of the Riddick films on DVD before getting the games so I could receive the story in chronological order, only to find out last night (having achieving my goal) that not one but both of the fucking games are prequels to the films! So I spent about two hours last night and a large part of today flying through the PS3 remastered version of Escape From Butcher Bay, and enjoying it greatly. The lighting in the game is nothing short of amazing, and Starbreeze have managed to get around the whole detached feeling that most FPSes give me by making your 'hands' react to your surroundings and interact with NPCs in the game world, which I initially noticed when I played the also fantastic The Darkness a year or so back. I reckon I'm pretty close to the end of it actually, but at the same time I don't think I am, because it's just around this point that the plot twists usually set in and snatch victory from my grasp. As much as I'm enjoying the game, I'm hoping to finally bag me a copy of Assassin's Creed II tomorrow so I'd like Riddick to say what he has to say and move on if he wouldn't mind. After all, he has a whole 'nother game and three films for me to watch, whereas Ezio can only express himself using one medium. Actually that's not true, he made a bit of an appearance in the ACII short movies on the PSN store, which I watched the other day while off work with the winter vomiting, and which were pretty damn good.

Last off, I got Virtua Fighter V today, and priced up King Of Fighters XII, as Tekken made me realise that all of the major fighting game franchises have a Seventh Generation title out and I ought to do a round-up piece or something. Made the 15000 GamerScore mark this week with a Fable II achievement called The Swinger, which I received by having a lesbian foursome. Also fed the PSN store some cash and came away with Vagrant Story, Trine and Hero of Sparta, the latter of which is absolutely godawful. It's not hard to copy God of War, just look at Dante's Inferno. Byeeee!