I wanna be the very best, like no-one ever was, to catch them is my real test, to train them is my cause!

We're currently in the throes of a midlife crisis here at 24HG-UK towers ladies and gents. It all started with my acquisition of the X-Men Animated Series on DVD, then my rekindling a fondness for the soothing tones of Limp Bizkit. And now, to cap it all off, I've been playing Pokemon.

Not the old versions mind, although I do have both the Yellow and Gold editions and a working Game Boy Colour to hand, but this year's Black version on the DS (the standard DS, puzzlingly enough, as it was released about two weeks before the 3DS arrived, which strikes me as a bit of a missed opportunity), and it is absolutely brilliant. Not that it's any different to the old colours of course, thanks to Nintendo's policy of never changing anything, but that doesn't matter, it's not broken so it need not be fixed, as it were.

I had forgotten how much of an asshole the Pokemon AI can be at times though, upon facing my first Gym Leader's Lillipup, which pumped up it's attack power to astonishing levels right up until it's health was in a critical state, then wiped out all six of my Pokemon in six moves without me getting a turn, the bastard. Not phased though. I just need to train mine some more before I sink further into my youth. Ooh look, Comix Zone is on the PSN store...

More on Nintendo and their unwavering opposition to risk-taking, I've also put a few hours into The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D. I do acknowledge that when the game first arrived on the N64 all those years ago it did radically alter the former Zelda template, but having recently finished Twilight Princess it's glaringly obvious that nothing has changed since then. Once again, however, it's not really that much of a problem because Ocarina is still an incredible game.

One thing though, that really could and should have been altered, is the map in the HUD. Twilight Princess' map switched between floors as you did, making multi-tiered dungeons for more manageable. Ocarina's didn't, and still doesn't, annoyingly.

That's just one minor complaint though, in an otherwise great game, still as impressive now as it ever was, and thanks to a 21st century makeover, it's looking beautiful too. The only thing missing is a touch screen mini game where you catch Link's annoying fairy sidekick Navi in a jam jar and burn the little fucker with a magnifying glass, but no game is perfect, right? Well, not until November anyway.

Hunted has outstayed it's welcome, and as such I've moved on to Red Faction: Armageddon, which ditches the open-world sandbox of it's predecessor Guerrilla for a more traditional underground corridor shooter style that the series was built on. You play as Darius Mason, descendant of Guerrilla's protagonist Alec Mason (Not to be confused with Call of Duty's Alex Mason), a bald man with goggles seemingly surrounded by fellow bald men with goggles (seriously, the game looks like a Chronicles of Riddick convention) who inadvertently condemns the whole of the human population of Mars to life underground by destroying the planet's seemingly solitary terraformer, and then in a completely unrelated event, awakens an ancient race of large surly insects a few weeks later. What is he like?

While the ability to raze buildings to the ground with a lump hammer still... erm... stands, the game seems to have more of a focus on rebuilding and repairing, both of the shattered remains of society that seem to be left every time Darius decides to joke about organizing a riot on Facebook or put a cat in a wheelie bin, and of the environment which inevitably suffers after each hefty firefight, and this concept is seemingly symbolically the franchise as a whole, Armageddon being the closest in tone and concept to the original out of all three sequels. Darius keeps a magic machine on his wrist that unleashes Red Dwarf-style nano-machines to reconstruct anything in it's path, which works as fast as you can run, allowing for some genuinely impressive escapes when things get tough.

Armageddon functions well as a shooter, it's decent. There's no cover system, which would have worked a treat with the rebuild mechanic, and each weapon only has a single function, but everything else is present and correct, if a little old school. The only major problem I have with it is the same thing that bugged me about Halo 2, that you're faced with room after room full of hundreds of bad guys at times, and plugging away at identical aliens for hours on end gets very, very monotonous. And as such, as with Halo 2, I often find myself just legging it past my marauders. Also, as good as Armageddon is (and it is), it fails to live up to Guerrilla's standards. There's still no greater thrill than bombing a 120mph garbage truck into a high-rise building and seeing it collapse on top of you.

Can't help but think though, why didn't he just rebuild the terraformer at the beginning of the game, and avoid all of this hassle? What is he like?

I've been ten thousand miles in the mouth of graveyard, and it's a hard rain's a-gonna fall

Another month, another candidate for Game of 2010. After Mass Effect 2 a month ago, I recall expressing concern and doubt about playing a game that I would consider it's equal in the preceding eleven months. Yet here I am, four mere weeks later with a game in my clammy paws that I possibly like even more.

The game in question is Quantic Dream's PS3 exclusive epic Heavy Rain, spiritual successor to the fantastic (if a little flawed narratively) Fahrenheit (known as Indigo Prophecy stateside thanks to the combined efforts of Micheal Moore and Osama Bin Laden). When I first played Fahrenheit, it was completely new to me. The only games I could even begin to compare it to were Shenmue, Dreamfall: The Longest Journey and Broken Sword: The Sleeping Dragon, but even then the comparisons were vague and incomplete.

Heavy Rain goes down the same path in terms of delivery, but throws away the fantasy elements of Dreamfall and (to a lesser extent) Broken Sword and, taking the spiritual guidance of Shenmue, throws you into a very serious, very mature murder mystery. The story begins with a ridiculously perfect family living a ridiculously perfect life together, until one family day outing spells disaster for the father, Ethan Mars, when his eldest son of two, Jason, wanders off. Ethan eventually finds him, but their reunion is cut dramatically short when they are both struck by an oncoming car, sending Ethan into a coma and Jason into an early grave.

Two years later we rejoin Ethan a bit worse for wear. His marriage has ended and he's just picking up his remaining son Shaun from his ex wife's house. Instead of moving to Malibu with Charlie Sheen as some people do in these situations, he's got himself a shitty little house in the most depressing part of town. Shaun is quite understandably a bit pissed off at Ethan, obviously he never knows when he's going to get led into traffic by his dear old dad, and to make it up to him Ethan takes Shaun to a playground. Right about now seems a good place to mention that Ethan's coma rendered him a bit of a Schizo with a penchant for blacking out, and after placing Shaun on a merry-go-round (don't all playgrounds have them?), he promptly does just that. He wakes up later on to find his son missing, and a small origami figure in his hand, the calling card of a mass child murderer known as (wait for it) 'The Origami Killer'. So Ethan goes on a quest to find his son, along with FBI agent Fox M... sorry, Norman Jayden, lovable private dick Scott Shelby, his prostitute sidekick Lauren Winter and Madison Paige, a journalist who's clothes keep falling off.

Heavy Rain places itself in a very unique position in that it's not only one of my favourite games (I will go that far, I absolutely loved it), but also one of my favourite films too. A lot of the time I almost forgot I was playing at all, robotically hammering the quick time events in without even really noticing them even appearing onscreen. Another fairly unique thing about the game is that when a character dies, the game carries on without them instead of ending and letting you continue. Ironically, I can only think of one other game that does this and that's ObsCure, a game I only played a couple of weeks earlier.

Heavy Rain, like most PS3 exclusives, really excels in the graphical department. To say it looks beautiful is a criminal understatement. Even the graphical might of Uncharted 2 and Killzone 2 doesn't seem to hold up against Heavy Rain. The only thing I don't like about it really is the creepy facial expressions from Fahrenheit occasionally crop up, as if the motion capture artists didn't smile when they should have and one was thrown in at the last minute, a shining example of this is during the nightclub scene where Madison dances on the podium. I am just nitpicking for the sake of it though.

Before Heavy Rain I returned to the macho, closely shaven world of Richard B. Riddick once more, with The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena. Not so much a sequel to Butcher Bay, Dark Athena is more of an expansion pack. It plays exactly the same, which was quite disappointing to be honest. Even the main story seems completely plagiarised, with the prison planet that Riddick must escape from in Butcher Bay replaced with a mercenary ship filled with prisoners, that Riddick must escape from. It's considerably longer than Butcher Bay, but that's the only thing I can really say about it. If it wasn't for the first game being included on Dark Athena's disk, it really wouldn't be worth buying.

Thursday's PSN Store update saw the releases of demos for Darksiders and God of War III, both of which are bloody fantastic hack-and-slash kill-em-ups and like the earlier Dante's Inferno are both based on religious mythology, and have thus been locked in a friendly battle. There's no contest really, Kratos has made sure of that, but so far Darksiders seems to be superior to Dante's by a gnat's wing, mainly helped along by the bold imagery, great voice work (thanks Mark Hamill) and the fact that it's not shamelessly ripping off God of War in every way. But God of War III seems to be shaping up very nicely, losing none of what made it's three prequels brilliant. And it's just about the most violent game I've ever played: the demo sees you disemboweling a Centaur (raising questions about how their innards are arranged), yanking the eye from the head of a Cyclops (the stalk doesn't snap immediately like the previous games, it has to be pulled to it's elastic limit and then snapped off) and ripping the head from sun god Helios' shoulders with your bare hands, seeing the flesh tear bit by bit before it gives. Absolutely brutal, yet I would expect nothing less.

Finally, I finished my second play through of Mass Effect 2 this week. I didn't mention it so as not to give anything away, but the ending of my first attempt saw three of my crew in their graves: The Salarian scientist Mordin, Asari law enforcer Samara and Human/Llama hybrid Miranda. This time I was 100% successful, seeing all of my crew through the mission. I also went down the renegade route this time, essentially becoming a space Jack Bauer, and it made the game a lot more entertaining. Yes, there was a scene where I punched a woman news reporter completely without provocation, and I will admit I laughed out loud when it happened. It was her own fault, she was making disingenuous assertions, and Shepard had had enough of them. And for lack of anything to play on my 360 last night, I fired up Saint's Row. Big mistake. It hasn't stood the test of time well, with it's awful graphics and awkward humour. Don't think I'll play much more of that one. Anyway, I'm off to play Oblivion now, buh-bye.

Lethargy and Gaming - every TUESDAY.

Just a small announcement, due to time constraints I'm moving the deadline for each post to Tuesdays. It makes sense, I don't have to go and do my real job on a Tuesday, so it gives me more time to write, and more time to play any new releases that come out on the Friday before I write about them.

So please, check back on Tuesday for a look at The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena, Heavy Rain and first impressions of God of War III and Darksiders, and probably a short bit about Mass Effect 2 cheekily squeezed in there. Hope to see you then.

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!

Woah, we're half way there, whoah-oh, livin' on a prayer!

Firstly, sorry about missing the post yesterday. I sat down to post and fell asleep, the day of food and drink and too much Wii caught up with me, such are the effects of a family Christmas.
Okay, onto the gaming. On the run up to Christmas I immersed myself in Tomb Raider: Underworld and Fable II mostly. Both games just happened to crop up on my shame pile, but coincidentally both were games I was playing this time last year (as it happens, it's a year ago to the day that I bought TRU), and coincidentally for Christmas both games feature quite a bit of snow.
I'll start with Tomb Raider. As I said with Tomb Raider: Anniversary, I have never actually played any of the recent Tomb Raiders in quick succession before, and thus never noticed the differences. And in comparison to Legend, both Anniversary and Underworld pale in comparison in terms of quality. In Underworld, for example, Lara moves like a frightened cat, skittish and unpredictable. On more than one occasion I plummeted to my death due to Lara not catching ledges or just simply spazzing out and throwing herself from a cliff. Part of the fun of playing the Tomb Raider games is how many times you find yourself in a crumpled heap 600 feet below where you should be standing though, and if anything it adds longevity to what is probably the shortest 'Raider so far.
But playing the 'trilogy' again actually provided me with a bit of closure. The ending to Underworld doesn't set the game up for a sequel, there are no loose ends to be resolved, and because of this I'm not quite so bothered about the strongly hinted Tomb Raider reboot lurking over the horizon (I say strongly hinted because I also heard it was to be a prequel). Now all that's bothering me is the fact that the concept art for said reboot looks a bit Siren Blood Curse. We'll see.
My quest for redemption for my Fable II lady (renamed from Blade to Lionheart to try and sound more people-friendly) was going well until I reached the Crucible (a multi-tiered arena in which you fight waves of enemies, which is necessary for story progression), and a pair of knobs jeered at me and my companion Hammer and called us lesbians. Now Hammer, well, she does give off that vibe, but I have a husband and son thank you very much! Long story short, they're dead and buried and for some reason I keep getting called a murderer.
Carrying on the snow theme, I had a quick go on below-the-radar Wii Survival-Horror title Cursed Mountain on Christmas Eve, as Lara and I had parted ways for a while. I say Survival-Horror, but the scares didn't really flow thick and fast. Well, they didn't really flow at all.
You play as a man named Eric something-or-other who's decided to look for his missing brother, Frank something-or-other in the outlying villages of a mountain covered in ghosts, as you do. Unfortunately, Eric brought neither a Proton Pack nor a magical camera or even a miniature vacuum cleaner, so has to make do with a pick-axe and a bunch of prayer rituals. And, not unlike Silent Hill's Harry Mason, Eric runs like he's shat himself. Although given his situation, not unlike Harry Mason, he probably has. I left him having being tricked into falling off a cliff by some batty old coot called Mojo Jojo or something.
Christmas Day came and brought with it my gaming for the next few weeks. My wife bestowed upon me Sacred 2: Fallen Angel on the PS3, ObsCure on the PS2, and ObsCure 2 and Sam & Max Season 1 on the Wii, while my mum provided me with Tekken 6 on the PS3 and my, ahem, cat got me Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena and The Bourne Conspiracy on PS3 and 360 respectively. I gave Sacred 2 an hour or so last night and despite the awful voice-acting it seems pretty good really. Real-time combat is definitely a bonus. But like with Dragon Age, I'm always shy at first with a new RPG. Tekken 6 has had a few hours play today and is great, and offers me pretty much exactly what I want from a Tekken game, nothing more nothing less. Really glad it has the arcade mode from Tekken: Dark Resurrection though (now called Ghost Mode), I can play that for hours.
To wrap things up, I played the Demo for Dante's Inferno today. God of War plus lots of boobs and minus the shouting really. It's okay but boy did they pick a bad time to be making a GoW clone. Christmas Day saw family Wii time as my 3-year-old nephew got one for Christmas, so the day was filled with Wii Sports and Mario Kart Wii, which are always excellent multiplayer games. I was hoping to finally secure myself a go on the Motion Plus, but my dreams were dashed. I guess I'll just have to go out and buy one. Oh yeah, preordered the Mass Effect 2 collector's edition today too, five weeks yesterday until it's released. To say I'm looking forward to it is a vast, vast understatement. See you next week.