Still Alive! Laptop took a bit longer than I would have liked to get repaired, I touched on the late collection by the courier last time I posted. Well, after it was collected a week late, another 10 days later they sent the fucker back untouched, claiming that the damage wasn't covered by the warranty (I did have a look in the warranty booklet, and indeed accidental damage is not covered, which gave them a small point in their favour until I realised that they'd given my a Hewlett Packard warranty booklet when my laptop is a Packard Bell machine, derp), despite the fact that they knew what was wrong with it before it even left my house. And to top it all off, some pikeys got hold of our details from the Curry's system and called us twice trying to rob us.

So I ended up getting an independent repair company to do it for me at my own expense, although I won't divulge how much here because they guy was really helpful and did a great job, and, let's be fair, gave me my life back after about 5 weeks of being bored and having to use the Internet browser on my Nokia N97. Moral of the story: don't buy anything from Curry's, they're arseholes.

So, with the gap in posting, where do I start? I've got Dead Space 2, Dragon Age II, Diabolik: The Original Sin, Bionic Commando and Killzone 3 behind me with Red Steel 2, Wii Sports Resort and Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit in progress. I also wanted to talk about the fantastic Mortal Kombat demo and the not-so-fantastic Motorstorm: Apocalypse demo, a small anecdote about BlazBlue and maybe a mini unboxing of the Killzone 3 Helghast Edition. Thanks to a bonus from work I've also got Two Worlds II, Doctor Who: Return to Earth, Dead Space: Extraction (both versions in fact), Prince of Persia Trilogy, LittleBigPlanet 2, Bulletstorm, Arcania: Gothic 4 and Motorstorm: Arctic Edge all lined up for the coming weeks.

It's also been my 26th birthday in the last week, which has allowed me to upgrade my personal gadgetry with the Samsung Galaxy Player MP3 player and the HTC HD7 mobile phone, powered respectively by Android OS and Windows Phone 7, and both respectable gaming platforms in their own right, especially the phone, which is XBox Live compatible and plays a bunch of XBLA games, achievements and all. That's still on it's way to me though, but watching gameplay videos of Need for Speed: Undercover, Assassin's Creed: Altair's Chronicles HD and Earthworm Jim HD have me very much excited. So it's all go at 24HG towers at the moment.

I suppose I'll start with the games that haven't left enough of an impression with me, less to write about, so I can get more in. Diabolik: The Original Sin wins the prize for the most aptly titled game ever, as playing the point-and-click crapfest was like spending a short time in hell. The graphics are piss-poor, like a high-end PS1 game, the voice acting is primary-school-nativity standard and the logic of some of the puzzles is frankly baffling, and this is from a man who finished Secret Files: Tunguska. Finally, the inventory system is terrible, especially with the copious arsenal of gadgets that your protagonist is equipped with before you even start. Diabolik? 'Dire bollocks'.

Bionic Commando wasn't much better, combining a bog-standard shooter with a rubbish version of the PS1 Spider-Man games. The visuals are nice, a bit Metal Gear Solid 4 reminiscent, but that's the only redeeming feature about the dull, uninvolving game. If you want to fly about on a grappling hook, Just Cause 2 does it better. Come to think of it, it does shooting and melee combat better too, and a ton of other things that Bionic Commando doesn't even attempt. What was I talking about again?

I'm going to leave it there for now, but I'll probably post again before the end of the week with a more in-depth look at some of the bigger games I've played. I think Trev's working on a new video too, so it's business as usual again here at 24HG. See you soon.

Carry on camping! - 24 Hour Gamer hits the fields...

Yes, this last weekend has seen Me, Trev and our respective other 'alves Susie and Katie took to the North Yorkshire Moors with nothing but a few canvas sheets and grim determination on our side. As usual, gaming was involved, but the weekend wasn't limited to that alone. So without further ado, our weekend.

SATURDAY, 25/9/10: Here I am, Rock you like a Hurricane...

The ride over to Whitby went without fault, aside from the customary return to Sheffield 10 minutes into the journey to lock the front door, but that's a given. It wasn't until we were around three quarters of the way there that the sky turned a threatening shade of grey, and by the time we'd got there our moorland home for the weekend had seen a fair amount of rain and the wind was blowing at over 30 miles per hour, making tent-pitching a bit of a nightmare to say the least. We picked a spot behind a group with a large trailer-tent, hoping that it might provide a bit of shelter from the elements, and after three hours of wrestling with tents and a quick change out of our mud-soaked clothes, we headed into Scarborough, only to hit a fresh disaster when Katie's car dropped dead as we were looking for a parking spot.

Mechanic called and dinner eaten in a local pub (in which a guy at the bar was knee-deep in Just Cause 2 on his laptop), the four of us headed down to the sea front, where Trev and I quickly ducked into the amusements. Unable to coax Trev into a game on Guitar Hero Arcade, we ended up taking up arms against a bunch of not-extinct-enough dinosaurs in Primeval Hunt, a light gun shooter from experts in the field (if ever there were) Sega. The game is centered around hunting certain species of dinosaur in the way a big game hunter would hunt an animal nowadays, stalking them through the undergrowth and taking them down. Of course this comes with an element of danger, one example of which was when a boisterous Triceratops took offense to being shot up the arsehole and charged, and in the later hunts a few unwanted guests arrive in the form of the ever-present Spielbergian T Rexes and Velociraptors, the former of which arrived twice and were taken out with a rocket to the head from each of us.

The weapon in the players' hands in Primeval Hunt is a pump-action shotgun, which can also double up as a rifle and a crossbow in-game, and the guns feature speakers in the barrels to give realism. And to give the game a free-roaming quality, the arcade cab featured a touch-screen map near the shotgun holsters which we could use to pinpoint and travel to our prey. Overall it was an excellent shooter, really fun and the guns were as accurate as they come, especially for shotties. The game is screaming out for a Wii conversion, and the Shotgun layout is perfectly suited to the Wii Zapper, the front trigger of which could double up as the reload pump and the Nunchuck's Z button could be used to fire. Throw in DS connectivity for the touch-screen and they'd be on to a winner. I'd get it on release anyway.

After a quick stint on the 2p pusher machines bore fruit by dropping me a Mario plush and some creepy racist-looking Voodoo Doll, we headed off to get a taxi back too our blustery haven, where we were delighted to find that our tents were mostly still there, and after a brief bonding session with a lovely bloke in a camper van who pulled in next to us for the night (of who's luxury we were definitely not jealous), we spent a few hours drinking in Trev's tent before retiring to our beds, where Trev found that playing Half-Minute Hero in a monsoon isn't particularly possible, and Susie and I were kept awake all night by the drunk Geordie bastards in the trailer-tent.

SUNDAY, 26/9/10: Come with me if you want to live...

We awoke to find that the wind had died down quite a lot overnight, although it had had it's toll on our tents, both of which had suffered pole damage and ours was starting to come apart at the seams. Unfazed, we headed into Whitby early for breakfast, where we made a hasty retreat from the cafe we settled on after they undercharged us by about a fiver. The more astute among you will notice that on this day last year I was actually getting married in Whitby, so the wife and I had planned to have our dinner at the Magpie cafe, our favourite eatery in the town. But unfortunately, it's everyone else's favourite too, for good reason, and neither of us really felt like queueing to get in. So we carried on along the seafront, and Trev and myself once again found ourselves in the amusements as the girls had a walk down to the beach.

We found a dusty old Time Crisis 2 cab in the back of one arcade, and had a couple of goes on that, where Trev got his own back after my domination on Primeval Hunt by handling the game like a pro, after I waited ages at the start of the game for my 'turn', forgetting about the foot pedal that pops you out from behind cover, and then spent the rest of the game catching bullets and missiles with my face. We pondered the other machines, and looked for another Primeval Hunt machine unsuccessfully. When Susie and Katie returned, The ladies had a go on Ford Racing: Full Blown (which, once again, I've been instructed to mention that Susie won), while I once again donned my hunting cap for the more conventional Big Buck Hunter. The game has more or less the same premise as PH, just with more likely prey and a lack of touch screen. I chose to hunt the moose, and did pretty well, again sparking a stampede after shooting a buck up the arsehole. After passing all of the trials, I was treated to a bonus round shooting turkeys, of which only four out of the whole 25 escaped my pump-action retribution. The shotgun really is my weapon of choice.

Following that, my wife and I celebrated our first anniversary by taking up arms against the machine army in the excellent Terminator Salvation: The Arcade Game. The game is a standard lightgun shooter, but the weapon in your hand is where the game shines. A full-sized assault rifle with real recoil, it is weighty and effective, and during the game I picked up a chaingun, which actually altered the speed and intensity of the recoil. To reload, instead of shooting off-screen, you tap the bottom of the rifle's 'clip', as if you were actually slamming in another magazine. And under the barrel is a grenade button, where an attachable grenade launcher would be found. We didn't last long, but what we did see of the game was amazing fun, and the visuals were great, with so much happening on-screen at once. And the cabs were readily available all over Whitby and Scarborough, so if anyone chances across it, give it a go. Trev tried to gamble for a knock-off Wii-style console for a bit, but ended up settling for the minor prize he could have had from each go, and walked away with a Machop Pokemon toy.

A cream tea and a walk around later, and we headed up to the whalebone arch to have our photo taken, as we had done the year before following the wedding. The weather, cold, blustery and wet, was a stark contrast to the gorgeous sunshine of last year, so we quickly boarded a taxi back to the site. The wind was now manageable, so we built our kites and spent an absolutely amazing afternoon flying them on the field, before a storm I'd been watching in the valley below swept around and we had to dash inside. Once it had passed, we fired up a barbecue and before long we headed into our beds, where I finished off Def Jam: Fight for NY - The Takeover, then slept a little while before another storm beating against our tent put an end to my rest.

MONDAY, 27/9/10: Country road, take me home...

We awoke to good news, Katie's car was going to live and a new clutch could be affixed before the day was through. Both Tents had to be thrown away, the elements had been unkind once more and Trev and Katie's tent had let in a fair bit of rain. We packed our things and waved goodbye as Trev and Katie headed into Scarborough to get the car, and set off home ourselves through the thickest fog I have ever seen. Upon our return, we split the unspent holiday cash, which amounted to £100 each, and I spend my lot on Halo: Reach, Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker and a preorder was placed for Enslaved: Odyssey to the West, which if the demo is anything to go by is both beautiful and brilliant, a perfect marriage of God of War and Uncharted, with the same kind of decayed beauty as Gears of War. So that gives us something to look forward to over the coming weeks. Hasta luego, fellas.

I'm Super, thanks for asking!

It's amazing, that in this day and age, if a linear game takes more than six hours to complete it outlives it's welcome. GTA IV, Fallout 3, that's fine. They've got plenty of things tucked away for the ADHD generation to stumble across, and it's easy to poddle off and play something else for a few weeks and drop back into it if needs be. Yep, £40 is perfectly acceptable for six hours of disposable entertainment.

Take Darksiders for example. One of the finest games so far this generation, capturing the feel of absolutely classic games like Soul Reaver and Primal, and throwing a gripping and engaging storyline and at times jaw-dropping visuals to boot, but after 16 hours of game time, spread over the course of two weeks, it had dragged on a little bit too long.

So when I finally dropped the last enemy last night (enemy is the only word I could use which is still accurate and doesn't give anything away) and laid my pad down, I breathed a sigh of relief. Don't get me wrong, it is a fantastic game, but I was aching for something new.

"I'm a fuckin' Demon!"

But I will at least remember it fondly, and shit, I'm going to recommend it to anyone that will listen (I started that last night by passing the word on to my Elder Scrolls freak sister). As I said, the graphics are stunning in places, with vibrancy in colours on a par with Uncharted and Just Cause 2. And the voice acting is absolutely fantastic, with Mark Hamill and Moon Bloodgood leading the D-list way and Liam O'brien (me neither) doing his best Simon Templeman impersonation as the lead character. The boss fights mostly play out like N64 Zelda bosses, but it does have a go at the 'Epic Boss' style of God of War, without quite pulling it off. I also noticed that, when dismembering an enemy, the wounds are just hollow and red, no meat or bones, which is a bit of a letdown, but doesn't mar the experience and is only really noticeable in some of the larger enemies. Speaking of larger enemies, the end boss is a Fuck Off Dragon. But it's considerably easier to kill than the one in Dragon Age.

The preceding game on my shame pile turned out to be InFamous. For those who don't know, InFamous is a PS3 exclusive free-roaming Superhero game. You play as Cole McGrath, one of those annoying Parkour messengers who was unknowingly delivering a bomb to somebody when it went off, levelling half the city. Being at the epicenter of the blast, Cole naturally develops super lightning powers instead of getting vaporized. But when a plague breaks out, the city is locked off, and gang crime becomes rife. So Cole decides to become the people's protector. Or a public menace. yeah, the game has a karma system.

If you take the evil route, you actually become a Sith Lord.

Well, I've only played for like half an hour so far. Honest first impressions? well, it's a bit... shit really. Surprisingly ugly for a PS3 exclusive, and the fiddly climbing and jumping and hand to hand combat without any kind of lock-on function make it seem no better than Spider-Man 3. The only moral choice I had to make was when I found a food drop, and I could either let the citizens share it amongst themselves or take it all for myself, and sit atop my tower feasting, laughing at the starving peasants below and zapping anybody that comes near. Very black and white. So far, it's not a patch on Prototype, which I can't help but compare it to.

Moving on, Super Street Fighter IV arrived last week, much to my joy. This update to SFIV boasts ten extra characters, a new ultra combo for each character, the return of the car/barrel smashing bonus rounds, redone intros and endings and a bunch of extra multiplayer modes including 8-player team battle and a winner-stays-on type of affair, again for up to 8 players. So the fact that it wasn't just DLC is kind of justified.

Ibuki is a force to be reckoned with.

The characters are a mixed bunch. There's Adon from Street Fighter, and Cody and Guy from Final Fight (or all three of those from Street Fighter Alpha if you prefer), T. Hawk and Dee Jay from Super Street Fighter II, and Makoto, Dudley and the awesome Ibuki from Street Fighter III making a return, along with two all-new fighters. Firstly, Juri is an agent for the evil S.I.N. organization, using Taekwondo and drawing power from a 'Feng Shui device' in her prosthetic eye. Rather than give her the power to arrange furniture, it actually lets her kick fireballs at people, go figure. The second is Hakan, a Turkish oil wrestler who lubes himself up before each fight. I'm telling you, you can't make this stuff up.

Played a few rounds against Raz7el online too, and aside from quite a bit of lag, the game remains pretty tight. I also don't like to brag, but I handed his ass to him on more than a few occasions. Dan Hibiki is awesome.

Well, that's about that. Expect more of an opinion on InFamous next week, and a look at Borderlands: The Zombie Island of Dr. Ned. See ya!

Dear Wanker. Sorry about the bang, send the bill to me arse.

Ever since I'd decided to get The Saboteur, I'd been planning on using Beastie Boys lyrics as that week's blog title. "Oh my, it's a mirage. I'm tellin' y'all it's sabotage" it would say. Not too original probably, but it's so obvious that I couldn't not do it.

That was until I actually played the game, and heard the absolutely magical script. Delivered in his deadpan way, protagonist Sean Devlin spouts dialogue worthy of Shakespeare. Among my favourite lines were "You mean the guy smiling like a cat with a cream-flavoured arsehole?" or "In that case, fuck you arseways", but I decided to go with that one.

On to the game itself. You play as Sean Devlin, hard drinking, foul mouthed Irishman who hangs out in strip clubs and loves getting into fights with Germans, while staying in Paris. No, this isn't the 1998 World Cup, why it's World War II of course! But before you all groan at the prospect of yet another WWII videogame, give it chance. It's a bit different you see.

I don't think I've ever shot down a Zeppelin in a videogame before.

For a start, this isn't an FPS. It's not even a Real-Time Strategy game. And it isn't set on the front line, with you playing as Default Soldier #6 who manages to single handedly take down the Nazi regime all in a day's work. No, The Saboteur is a third person sandbox game, in very similar vein to Grand Theft Auto, and puts you in the role of an ex racing driver turned reluctant Resistance member when a prank on a German rival goes awry on the night that the Nazis invaded France, resulting in the death of his best friend. And so a tale of romance and revenge unfolds.

As well as aping Grand Theft Auto, The Saboteur also takes unlikely inspiration from Assassin's Creed, with nearly every building in Gay Paris being scalable. Although the climbing is more similar to that in Uncharted or the later Tomb Raider games, the sandbox environment brings AC to the front of your mind (helped along by the fact that there's a car called 'Altair'), and The Saboteur even has a go at viewpoints (although finding one serves no purpose other than ticking another box on your statistics counter), along with a Trophy/Achievement for Leap-of-Faith-ing from the top of the Eiffel Tower.

It also inherits Assassin's Creed's penchant for bending the truth historically. Every car in the Paris of 1939 comes as standard with Power Steering, a GPS device and not only a radio, but a radio that plays Nina Simone's 'Feeling Good' every ten minutes, despite the song being recorded 26 years after the events of the game. A TIME RADIO.

In summation, The Saboteur is a silly, above average but forgettable game. It does nothing new, but does what it does do well, and is well worth playing if you fancy something new from the WWII template, or just a laugh-out-loud, not too serious gaming experience. Perhaps I shouldn't have gone into it straight after Just Cause 2, as I kept wanting to hijack Zeppelins and couldn't, but I enjoyed it anyway. Nolan North's french accent is hilarious.

Also this week, I finally got around to playing GTA IV: The Lost & Damned. I was waiting for the Episodes from Liberty City disk to be released on the PS3 (GTA always will be a PlayStation game for me), but now it's here the 360 version is selling for half the price, so for the sake of £15 I swallowed my pride and got it.

I'll get it over with shall I? TLAD has full frontal MALE nudity in it. An OLD MAN'S PENIS. I've seen it. It's even got veins on it. I wonder who got the job of rendering that one? It's really not that big a (stop laughing) deal, especially as every game I've played recently has been full of women who can't keep their clothes on, but I understand it was very controversial at the time. People, eh?

There, you've seen it. No reason to play it now.

TLAD is actually a bit disappointing. The story is so far predictable and the characters uninteresting. I'm going to predict, nay, I pretty much KNOW that Billy, the leader of your Biker Gang, is going to end up being the main antagonist. And Johnny Klebitz, your hero, is just a Biker version of San Andreas' Carl Johnson, the voice of reason during cutscenes and a thoroughly nice guy, who then goes around committing atrocities with reckless abandon as soon as the missions kick in. Doesn't really make him a believable character.

The new gameplay mechanics aren't really welcome either. By riding in formation with your gang, you automatically fix your bike and heal yourself, even to the point of actually growing body armour out of your skin. Then there's things like arm wrestling mini games and stuff, along with the standard racing and vehicle collecting side quests. I'll be honest, I haven't tried any of these, and don't feel the urge to, ever.

All being said, It's still GTA though, and GTA will always be great. I think I'm ready for a new city though, and after The Saboteur I'm hoping for some countryside (albeit minus the exploding cows) on Rockstar's next car-jacking epic, like they did with San Andreas. Everyone I've spoken to says Gay Tony is a 100% improvement though, so lets wait and see.

And that brings me onto my final (not a pun) game of the week, PSP fighting game Dissidia: Final Fantasy. The prospect of a fighter featuring the main hero and villain from each of the first ten Final Fantasy games (plus, bafflingly, a random guy from FFXII and a little... 'thing' from FFXI) is enough to send many an RPG geek into a coma. The whole game is fan service, with the intro sequence littered with gratuitous 'what if' shots of Squall fighting Sephiroth and loads of other fights that would probably be monumental if I knew who the fuck half of the characters were.

I dove into the story mode, and, like 95% of all Square Enix games it was overly complicated and so, so boring it made me want to cry. It slammed me into the boots of one of the nameless assholes from Final Fantasy 1 and made me fight a 'false warrior' (that's a pallet-swap of yourself, in layman's terms), then repeated with other filler enemies before sticking me against the respective foe of my character. Then it was the same again with the FFII character. Sensing I was in for a long trawl before I got to see any characters I actually gave a shit about (especially since they didn't include Luneth from the DS remake of FFIII, in favour of an unnamed 'Onion Knight'), I headed into the Arcade Mode.

Probably won't be though.

Arcade Mode was an improvement, simpler and more accessible. I naturally jumped straight into Cloud Strife's shoes, and I won't lie, performing an Omni Slash on Squall Leonheart was the most satisfying thing I've done in a game since slamming Sean Paul's head in a car door in Def Jam: Fight for NY. But it still failed to grab me. I suppose it's an okay substitute for Tekken or SoulCalibur, but I actually have Tekken and SoulCalibur, so it's pointless. But it is the closest thing we have to a sequel to Ehrgeiz, so I have to be somewhat grateful. Oh well, they tried. I'll just go back to hoping Ehrgeiz is released on the PSN, so I can play that on my PSP instead.

It's Perfect Dark here, where the angels scream...

The more awake of you out there may (probably not) remember me briefly slamming the DS version of Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars last July. I basically said that the top-down GTA template is long since deceased and the step backwards was an ill-informed one. Well, I couldn't be more wrong, it seems.

I picked up the PSP version a few weeks ago (or rather my wife did, as a birthday present for me from the cat, don't ask) during a brief blunder on Play.com where some bright spark deleted the '2' from the £24.99 price tag. It wasn't a game that I particularly wanted, but at the right side of a fiver I couldn't say no.

First thing I noticed while firing it up on the train is that the cell-shading that the DS used to disguise the awful graphics has completely gone, and the visuals have been tidied up a hell of a lot. Purely aesthetic I know, but I'd rather not have to stare at what looks like a very old Sega Saturn game if I can help it. I also blasted the DS screen, for being too small to tell what was happening in games like this (although in their credit, Nintendo have also realised that now with the DSiXL), and the PSP's larger screen really does benefit the game, allowing the camera to zoom out more and give you a better warning when you're about to wrap yourself around a lamp post. So there, the two major gripes with the earlier version are sorted.

The game accomplishes the feel of a true GTA game quite well actually (I hadn't had enough time with the DS version to notice, due to my instant dislike). Playing it had me wondering, how much actual effort would it be to take the storyline from CTW and recreate it as a 3rd person expansion pack for GTAIV? If we take away the side quests and mini games that is. Speaking of mini games, I wasn't all too comfortable with the drug dealing aspect of the game, and a quick scout around the Internet shows that I'm not alone in that feeling. Says a lot about people, that mowing down a line of Hare Krishnas is thoroughly acceptable, but selling crack to a deadbeat is pushing it a bit.

Moving on now. Perfect Dark, in my teenage years, was not so much a game than a religion to me and my friends. Late into the lives of the PS2, XBox and Gamecube, we would still fire up the N64 and crowd around the TV for a few hours of multiplayer action, trying desperately to achieve that fabled 'Perfect: 1' rank (I managed to get as high as 8, but I think one of my friends was at 3).

The game's prequel, Perfect Dark Zero was also a deciding factor in the XBox360 being my first seventh generation games console, and when I got my hands on it I was severely disappointed. It just wasn't the same, and it also made the crime of giving protagonist Joanna Dark an American accent when in the previous game she was English, which always bugs me (it was one of the reasons I didn't like Prince of Persia: Warrior Within, but I do plan on trying that again fairly soon, for obvious reasons). I did however discover Oblivion a week later, which I'm still playing now, so my 360 purchase wasn't a complete loss. But needless to say I was delighted when Perfect Dark saw the light of day on the XBLA a couple of weeks ago.

The game remains wholly unchanged, save for the character models and on-screen weapons having an overhaul and the game being given an HD makeover. And that is most definitely a good thing. I must admit I did worry about the controls, as Perfect Dark and it's predecessor GoldenEye 007 were the definitive games for the N64's unconventional joypad, but it still retains the awesome feel of the original game. Clutching at straws, the only negative thing I can say is that all of the character heads have changed, and I can no longer use the character that looked a bit like Timothy Dalton in multiplayer. But Perfect Dark is still the only FPS where the multiplayer even slightly interests me, and the single player experience is probably only surpassed by Half-Life 2 in my eyes. A must have for any 360 owner.

And now, the main event. Just Cause was a game I picked up by chance for a few quid from CEX during a summer gaming drought a couple of years ago, and it ended up being a surprisingly enjoyable game, if a little shallow. After the main storyline's climax though, I quickly lost interest in the side missions, and the main character Rico Rodriguez's mullet and the way he ran like he'd shat himself became a little too noticeable and it ended up back on the shelf, quickly forgotten about.

Then the demo for JC2 resparked my interest a few weeks ago, and on the morning of the 26th of March I skipped off to GAME and picked up a copy of the Limited Edition, bizarrely the same price as the standard one.

Where games like Grand Theft Auto and Saints Row offer a free-roaming open world, Just Cause 2 throws an absolute playground of... well, for need of a better phrase, a playground of destruction (sorry EA) at you. Your grappling hook, which is one part Spider-Man's web shooter, one part Scorpion of Mortal Kombat's spear and one part the slime tether from Ghostbusters, is just licence to play around. Not only can you fly around the environment, jumping from vehicle to vehicle, pulling pilots from their helicopters' cockpits and causing general chaos, you can also attach things, or people, to each other. Hooking a luckless soldier to a gas canister and shooting the cap off to watch him shoot off into the distance and explode against a rock, or tearing a statue down by roping it to the back of your car, before dragging the head at full pelt towards a foe and pulling a handbrake turn, swinging the detached concrete skull at them like a huge mace and chain.

For those who haven't played the original, Just Cause and it's sequel are easiest compared to the Mercenaries series. Unlike Mercenaries though, the sequel is a huge improvement. That's not to say it's without disappointment though. A few hours in I tried the PS3 exclusive video capture feature, and after it had reached it's capture limit, all of the sound apart from the music had muted, and the right analogue stick had no movement. Luckily, before I deleted my last save file as a last ditch attempt to remedy the problem, I tried deleting my settings file instead, which worked. But the other day, after a mammoth session, the game decided to not save my game (even though I observed the on screen 'saving' message and didn't switch off until it had gone), losing me about five hours of game time. The final straw having been crossed, I cast the game from my PS3 and onto the bottom of my shame pile. But I will say this, Just Cause 2 is the only game I've ever played that features hijackable crashable Boeing 747s and a set of identical adjacent skyscrapers. Ssh, the Daily Mail hasn't noticed yet...

I have started The Saboteur, but haven't had much time with it yet, so check back next week for that, Dissidia: Final Fantasy and possibly (but not definitely) Silent Hill: Shattered Memories. And as a parting gift, check this out, 2100 Microsoft Points for £4, thanks to MarkySharky of VideoGameSpace. That should get you those Modern Warfare 2 maps for the price that they are actually worth. Or Perfect Dark, if you're more intelligent. Au revoir.

This! Is! SPARTA!

Last week I hit a milestone in my life. I turned a quarter of a century old. Officially, by mathematical terms, I'm pushing 30. So, I decided the best course of action was to have a midlife crisis and blow about £200 on videogames to drown my sorrows, and resurrecting my Shame Pile.

First things first though. For my birthday, which was actually last Thursday for anyone interested, my wife bestowed upon me God of War III and The Saboteur, both on PS3, and Assassin's Creed: Bloodlines, and the cat (allegedly) bought me Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars on the PSP. I dove straight into God of War III, naturally.

The game starts immediately where we left off, with Kratos leading the Titans in an assault on Mount Olympus. A few betrayals and a lot of blood later and Kratos finds himself back in Hades, and his quest for vengeance truly begins.

I can't really go into things any deeper, as the story hurtles along at an alarming pace and the spoilers flow thick and fast. The gameplay though, is the usual God of War affair, solid fighting, over the top gore and intermittent puzzles and platforming sections. Kratos has picked up a few new moves this time, like the ability to mount and ride larger enemies and lasso flying enemies to cross gaps. He also picks up a few new weapons along the way, most of which are variations of the sharp things on chains theme, but the most effective of all being two huge metal gauntlets, a lot like the ones he used in Chains of Olympus.

I recall a while ago reading a post on Twitter by Mortal Kombat's co-creator Ed Boon, saying he was motion capturing new finishing moves for Mortal Kombat 9, and that he was worried that he was 'going too far'. Seeing what God of War gets away with, I highly doubt it. I've mentioned before the head-ripping and disemboweling, but that's only the icing on the cake. Again, I don't want to spoil too much, but it's the first time I think I've seen eye-gouging in a videogame. And I even felt like looking away as Kratos dispatched with dear old brother Hercules...

The last thing I really want to talk about is the visuals. Graphically, GoWIII is a triumph, pretty much the most beautiful game I've ever seen. After playing Heavy Rain a month ago, and Uncharted 2 just before Christmas, that compliment is given far more weight too.

Assassin's Creed: Bloodlines was my back-up title this week, for when the wife was on Oblivion. The PSP-only game serves as a true sequel to the first Assassin's Creed, following what Altair did next, namely stalking the Templars to Cyprus. Not much really happens, apart from our hero repeatedly bumping into Maria Thorpe, the Templar that got away (and evidently from a flashback in ACII, future Mrs. Ibn-La'Ahad, if she can pronounce it).

It's strongest point is that, unlike the two AC games on the DS, Bloodlines looks and plays like a proper AC, more specifically the first one. Being set in the same time period, and in a similar locale, the architecture is more or less the same. The gameplay has been somewhat simplified, shaving a few of Altair's moves off to cram it all into a UMD, including, bafflingly, his diving assassination move, which is one of the most useful moves in the other game. The free climbing though, one of the series' major positive points for me, remains unchanged.

Another good aspect of the game is that the boss characters are unique, not just reskinned guards like in the other games. They fight with signiature weapons, like a ball-and-chain, or sharpened fingernails, and also trigger different counter moves.

I suppose the worst thing about Bloodlines is the fact that the city streets aren't as bustling as the ones in it's parent games, but that is fully understandable given that the game is running on a machine with a fraction of the power of a PS3 or an XBox 360. Overall, it's a very good game for the system, harshly received because it can't live up to it's expectations.

Okay, I'll keep it brief for the remainder. Next on the newly formed Pile of Shame was a game I missed out on but have always been interested in: Velvet Assassin. Oh good god, it's bad. The game is a 'True Story' about an MI6 spy behind enemy lines in World War II. She conveniently loses her equipment at the start of the game, and quips about how it won't hold her back, even though it does. It really fucking does. A quick look on Wikipedia shows that this World War II game about a British agent was actually developed by a German company, Replay Studios, which might explain why she's armed with a toothpick and a nasty look, and the Germans are all superhuman cyborgs or something. Either way, sporadic checkpoints and trial-and-error gameplay make this game completely not worth playing.

And I've spent a bit of time getting to grips with The King of Fighters XII on PS3 this week. A look at some YouTube videos shows just how impressive this game can look in the right hands, but I was brought up on the simpler Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat 2D games, so it was distinctly more boring while I was playing. Admittedly though, the hand drawn two dimensional graphics were absolutely beautiful, although a bit pixelated compared to Super Street Fighter II HD Remix. A highlight for my immature mind was being told to 'choose my member' at the character select screen. I can't give the game a bad write up due to my own inadequacy though, and I'm sure that in the capable paws of a seasoned fighting game fan it's fantastic. But it's not exactly going to get in between me and Super Street Fighter IV in a month's time.

Check back next week for Just Cause 2, GTA Chinatown Wars and The Saboteur!

Oh Mickey, you're so fine, you're so fine, you blow my mind.

Where to start? Well, if I said that the last week had been a good gaming week for me, I'd be lying through my teeth. It started off well, with my re-discovery of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, which has eaten up about 12 hours of time that I should have spent sleeping this week. I have played Oblivion before, about three times from start to finish actually, so I thought I'd mix things up a little this time. Playing as a Khajiit, an anthropomorphic cat for those who haven't played the game yet (although you really should, it's a very likely candidate for the best game ever made), I've taken it upon myself to make it my goal to hunt and kill every Argonian (lizard people, and historical enemies of the Khajiit) in the game world, after they've served any purpose they might have that is.

Aside from that, this is the first time I've tried playing the game with Light Armour, and only the second time using swords, as I usually go for heavy armour and axes or (my favourite) warhammers. And it's my first time out of the dungeon that I wasn't in the shoes of an Elf too, so a lot of the game is fresh to me this time. But that's the high point of the week over right there.

After the surprisingly great ObsCure, I was eager to fire up ObsCure II on the Wii, and was appalled. None of the atmosphere had survived, the creepy post-Gothic feeling of the original's high school setting had been replaced by a college frat house full of asshole stereotype douchebags with absolutely disgusting voice actors that they must have scraped up off the street. I commented on how Sum 41's 'Still Waiting' failed to set the scene in the first one, but the opening music to ObsCure II (god knows what it was) was comically inappropriate, actually cheerful sounding.

Then you get thrown into the gameplay, and the erratic animation combined with the standard sketchy-at-best Wii controls that make any attempt at a serious game (bar Resident Evil 4) a chore make the game virtually unplayable. The writers seem to have forgotten that our heroes found a cure for their infection at the end of the first game, because now they are having to take medicines to stop it spreading. Also, none of the returning characters look, sound or behave as they did before (our hero Stan has even stopped talking like Vanilla Ice), showing yet more lack of attention by the developers. And after a bad nightmare sequence that shamelessly ripped off Silent Hill and a run-in with the game's very first enemies who can tear about a third of your health away with one hit, it wasn't long before I switched it off. If I ever find it for a decent price on the PS2, I might be tempted to have a go at it with a normal controller, but as it stands I'm just not interested enough to put myself through it.

So I moved on to this week's main event, the infamous Rogue Warrior on the PS3. Rogue Warrior is a supposed true story based on the autobiography of former Navy Seal commander (and tourette's sufferer, if the game is anything to go by) Dick Marcinko. I'm not going to skirt around things here, this game is BAD. But it's not insultingly bad, like Haze, it's laugh-out-loud, piss-hilarious bad. I suppose, if you'd spend £40 on it, then it would be a bit of a kick in the balls, but I only spent £14.99 (I can only imagine how bad the person who sold it to Cash Converters felt, he can't have gotten more than a tenner for it less than a month after it was released. I hope for his sake he stole it).

I'm going to start with the script. Dick, voiced by muscular pensioner Mickey Rourke, must have said about 4 or 5 words before his first 'fuck' broke through, and then never looked back. Apart from the D-grade military action movie jargon I think I heard one line of F-bomb free dialogue in the whole game, and that was a reference to cunnilingus. At one point, close to death, Dick descended into one long, uninterrupted swear word, which went something like "fucknshitbastardcommiemotherfuckinfuck". That's quality writing right there. From his voice, you get the feeling that Mickey's heart wasn't really in it. But you also get the feeling that half of the expletives weren't actually on the script too.

Right, gameplay time. Rogue Warrior is a standard FPS, one man versus the whole of North Korea and the Soviet Union type of affair. It's cover system is like a happy marriage between Killzone 2 and Gears of War, and it feels great until you reload. If you leave cover half way through reloading, the action is cancelled. It's okay though, there's no reason to leave cover, because the enemies will just stroll over and stand at the other side of whatever you're hiding behind, happily firing round after round into the bulletproof barrier, allowing you to use blindfire and just poke your gun over the top and kill him without even aiming.

The enemies take cover too though, and I actually saw one throw a grenade at the cover he was hiding behind, resulting in the explosive bouncing right back and landing in his lap. So it's no surprise that Kim Jong Il's finest pose very little threat to you throughout the game. The only problem comes with the Shotgun carriers, who defy the laws of the world by being able to shoot the hairs off a flea's back at 200 yards. Attention to detail, nothing is spared.

Like with The Punisher on the PS2, I tended to favour the melee kills, which are triggered by moving close to an enemy and pressing the X button. This sends the camera out to a third person view so you can admire you suitably brutal finisher, ranging from turning an enemy's gun on himself to slitting his throat, to the frankly worrying move involving sticking your knife up a poor communist's arsehole. The mind boggles.

It's hard to imagine, that with the publisher of Fallout 3 and the developer of Rogue Trooper and Aliens vs. Predator, that an FPS with such a rich upbringing could go so wrong. Whoever thought it would be a great idea to let people play as a demolitions expert (the game's main aim is to plant explosives on missiles) was sorely mistaken. And who decided that 2 and a half hours was an adequate lifespan of a game was frankly insane. But at least it made me laugh.

And that's about it. I had a quick go on Madworld the other day, and it didn't really grab me. The visuals are headache inducing (reminding me of pictures I used to draw as a child, where I would only colour in the blood), and it seems to me that they had tried to come up with a valid storyline involving terrorists at the start of the game, but then abandoning it and leaving the cutscene in. One minute the president is addressing the nation over a terrorist attack and promising to send in a special agent, the next you're in a violent Running Man style game show. Then it's just hitting people until the game over screen. I'll have another go, but I don't predict I'll fall for it. Speaking of falling for things, I tried the Just Cause 2 demo last night, and I think I'll be bringing the full game home on the 26th. Even though I loved the original, for some reason I wasn't expecting much from the sequel, but was very pleasantly surprised. Gives me something to look forward to.

Check back next week for the DLC special!