When two tribes go to war! - 10 Crossover fighting games to keep you occupied!

With the newly announced Street Fighter X Tekken, the strongly hinted Tekken X Street Fighter and the upcoming Marvel vs. Capcom 3 on the horizon, and the relatively recent and hugely playable Tatsunoko vs. Capcom and Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe still on the shelves, it would appear that the Crossover Fighting Game genre is making a bit of a comeback. So if, like me, you're just counting down the minutes until you can bray Thor as Chris Redfield, or shatter the jaw of Kazuya Mishima with Chun Li's unfeasibly huge thighs, here's ten games in no particular order that might help pass the time.

 This is simply the greatest screenshot. Ever.

Capcom vs. SNK 2: Mark of the Millennium 2001 (2001 - Capcom - DC, PS2, GCN, XB)

If you were to ask a fighting game fan what the best 2D fighter was pre-2009, it's a 50/50 chance you'd be told without hesitation to seek out this absolute gem of a game. Featuring 49 characters from across the board of Capcom and industry rivals SNK's respective catalogues and an accessible Street Fighter style fighting system, it's virtually unbeaten even now, nearly a decade after it's release. And it provided me, at least, with a means to get to know SNK's cast with a familiar control method, instead of admiring them from afar in the past.

Marvel vs. Capcom 2: New Age of Heroes (2000 - Capcom - DC, PS2, XB, PS3, 360)

The other half of those fighting game fans would direct you to this stroke of genius from a year prior. MVC2 featured an even larger roster of 56 fighters including three original Capcom creations and 28 of Marvel Comics' expansive roster of heroes and villains, and an over-the-top fighting system featuring screen-filling special moves, strikers and tag fighting and a higher y-axis for super-fast midair combat. It's a little bit rare and pricey to find on disk now, but was re-released on XBox Live Arcade and PSN last year with a shiny HD filter, so it's readily available without even leaving the house. Nope, you have no excuse.

Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe (2008 - Midway - PS3, 360)

I was convinced my home was bugged for a while after this was announced, as Mortal Kombat and DC Comics are too of my favourite things. Almost a polar opposite to the last game, and 8 years too late really, this 3D fighter pits the furious, visceral Scorpion, Sub-Zero and co against the heroes and villains of DC comics, led by the iconic trinity of Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman. The game was derided by players for the unlikely setting (because MVC2 was far more believable) and toned down gore, but was actually a very solid fighter, the best in the Mortal Kombat series in years in fact. It featured a cinematic story-driven single player mode, a solid multiplayer only flawed by a certain Superman move, and some fantastic universe-bending artwork in the endings. And most of the people who sneer haven't even played it, so give it a chance.

 And before that, this was the greatest screenshot ever.

Tatsunoko vs. Capcom: Ultimate All-Stars (2009 - Capcom - Wii)

The latest in Capcom's versus series features a smaller cast of 26, but is the first to make the transition into 3D visuals. At first it seemed there was little chance of seeing this game released in the west due to licensing issues, but when it finally arrived we got an updated game with extra characters and a more refined system. Capcom draw on characters from games new to the Capom vs. series, such as Lost Planet, Dead Rising and Viewtiful Joe, And the Tatsunoko side is filled with legendary characters from classic 70's anime like Hurricane Polymar and Science Ninja Team Gatchaman (Battle of the Planets to us). The gameplay harks back to the MVC2 system, so if you're a Nintendo purist it's unmissable. But you really need a classic controller to get the most out of it, so things could prove pricey.


SNK vs. Capcom: SVC Chaos (2003 - SNK - PS2, XB)

Much like Namco is threatening to do, SNK released this retaliation to CVS2 using their own system and mechanics. Although it featured a drop in the roster count and was less in-your-face presentation-wise, SNK showed a willingness that Capcom hadn't by redrawing all of the characters' sprites, and drawing from a more fantastical cast including Metal Slug's Mars People, Red Earth's Tessa and Darkstalkers' Dimitri. I'll admit, I still haven't gotten my head around the SNK system, and they don't seem to have gotten the Capcom characters' personalities right in the conversation scenes, but it's still enjoyable, especially if you appreciate the art style.

Super Smash Bros. Brawl (2008 - Ad hoc - Wii)

Still one of the best Wii exclusives, SSBB pits characters from all of Nintendo's franchises against each other, from major players like Mario and Zelda, to lesser known games such as Mother and Fire Emblem, and even some from 3rd party games like Sonic the Hedgehog and Metal Gear. The game offers a unique fighting experience, focusing on ring-outs instead of KOs, the chance of which happening is displayed as a percentage instead of a health bar. Characters can also pick up and use powerups and weapons in the field, and the action is broken up by some absolutely beautiful FMV sequences. And it's another good reason to own that classic controller too.

 But before that one, this was the best. Ever.

SoulCalibur II (2003 - Namco - PS2, XB, GCN)

Though not technically a crossover game, SCII has one exclusive character for each system, all from other franchises. The PS2 version has Tekken's Heihachi Mishima, the XBox homes Image Comics' Spawn and the Gamecube version naturally features Link from The Legend of Zelda. Most of you have played a SoulCalibur game, so you'll know all about it's weapon-based combat and genre-crossing story modes, but for those who haven't, think Tekken with swords and ring-outs. If you're looking for something more recent, check out SoulCalibur IV on the PS3 and 360, which features Darth Vader, Yoda and Galen Marek from Star Wars, and SoulCalibur: Broken Destiny on the PSP, which plays host to God of War's Kratos.

Marvel Nemesis: Rise of the Imperfects (2005 - EA - PS2, XB, GCN, PSP, DS)

Basically Marvel vs. EA, this game was largely forgettable on all versions except for the PSP, which dropped the scrolling fighter levels in favour of an experience similar to Power Stone and Ehrgeiz, and gave the Marvel Characters more of an iconic look. The EA side of things, the titular Imperfects, weren't classic EA characters, but rather a team of superhumans created by EA specifically for the game. Possibly not an essential purchase, but it is still the only fighting game that features Marvel characters such as The Thing, Elektra and (in the home console version at least) Daredevil, unless any of them make it into MVC3.

Jump Ultimate Stars (2006 - Ganbarion - DS)

A Japan-only release due to similar licencing hell to TVC, JUS would have fallen through the 24HG net had it not been for the absolutely monstrous character count; 305 (56 fully playable, the rest as strikers and support characters) of the protagonists and antagonists of the insanely popular (in the west also) Shonen Manga label, including Dragonball, Naruto, Bleach and One Piece, are crammed onto a single DS cart. The game plays similarly to Super Smash Bros., only with a completely baffling (especially so considering the Japanese text) card-based system. Even thinking about it makes my head hurt, but this is a grade-A fanboy wet dream.

MUGEN (1999 - Elecbyte - PC)

Apparently, to those pedantic competitive fighting game purists (read: wankers), MUGEN is an unbalanced abortion. But to the rest of us, it's a wonderful bit of freeware. Out of the box, so to speak, it's a basic 2D fighter with only one character, the generic Ryu-alike Kung Fu Man, but MUGEN offers those with a little bit of know-how to download and import a plethora of user created characters, some ripped from other games, some edited to become new characters, some created from scratch, and all with AI and a quality only limited by their creator's expertise. This is, however you look at it, the only place where you can see Sub-Zero decapitate Knuckles the Echidna, or Lobo stove in Thundercats' Lion-O's face. And that should be enough to sell it to anyone interested in the genre.

So, there are ten games to keep you occupied until Spring rolls around once more. There are more if you look for them too, like Capcom Fighting Jam (Capcom vs. Capcom), NeoGeo Battle Coliseum (SNK vs. SNK) and Spectral vs. Generation (Spectral Force vs. Generations of Chaos, me neither) all worth a play. So go forth, fight fans, and collide some worlds. Excelsior!

The power you're supplying, it's electrifying!

Once again I step up to the mantle with very little to write about. Who's stupid idea was it to make this a weekly thing?

Well, I had a bit more of a go with InFamous, and it still seems pretty shocking (pun intended). I noticed a very annoying game mechanic, where the main character, Cole, would automatically attach himself to the nearest ledge whenever I would jump. Yeah, this is standard in any vertical platforming game nowadays, but most usually just apply it to the ledges you're aiming at, not just any that happen to be near you. I was chasing some kind of visual memory of a target who'd been there previously, to find his current whereabouts, and when I jumped over a dumpster I ended up dangling from an adjacent bus stop and losing my quarry.

You'll survive that fall. Stub your toe and you're fucked.

Cole also has a bit of a Superfriends-era Superman thing going on, in that he seems to develop a convenient new power every time a scenario demands it. Upon finding a dead woman on the ground, Cole exclaims that he's going to try something completely off-the-wall, and touches her head. Hey fucking presto, he can read her memories, despite the fact that the brain is actually dead, holds no impulses and is effectively cat food now. Who would have known?

He also gets an ability where he is able to heal dying civilians by jolting them with his lightning powers. All well and good, if these victims are suffering from a massive cardiac arrest and need defibrillating, but they are mostly dying from a plague, and would probably actually not benefit at all from several thousand volts directly to the heart.

You know what, the more I write about it, the more I hate it. Fuck it, I'm shelving it. It's a ridiculous game, even for one of the Superhero genre. Cole, for all I care, can develop a hunch, and jump off a building, to see if he has a 'nosedive-into-concrete-and-survive' power. Oh wait, he did. AND IT WORKED. But about 3 bullets still kill him.

I also finally got around to trying my hand at the Borderlands expansion pack The Zombie Island of Dr. Ned. Guess what? That's pretty dick too. I don't know if I've just tired of Borderlands or what, but the game that made it into my Top 10 of last year doesn't seem to hold the same charm any more. My main problem with Zombie Island is that it just seems like they've simply bogged you down with thousands of respawning enemies to add longevity to the game, as it seems to take hours to travel a few hundred yards.

This screenshot tells you all you need to know about Zombie Island

But the thing is, I can't remember exactly what I liked so much about Borders anyway. From what I remember it was simply just walking through boring, samey landscapes and shooting things, and that's exactly what's on show with Zombie Island too. Surely there must have been something more, but if there was, it's evaded me. Anyway, I think I'm done with Borders now, the rest of the DLC will probably go untouched.

Finally, I downloaded Tekken 5: Dark Resurrection Online on the PS3. It plays pretty much exactly the same as the PSP version, which is no bad thing as said version is just about the best Tekken in the series. Haven't tried it online yet, but I have had countless hours of multiplayer on the PSP version so I know to expect more of the same, just probably with more people who actually know what they're doing, and consequently more ass-kickings for me.

Speaking of PSP, I finally let go of my frankensteined PSP 1000 (Casing and inner components of a JP white console, screen and face buttons of a UK Black one) and upgraded to an absolutely gorgeous Radiant Red PSP 3000 (I'm boycotting the PSP Go, because it's shit). The console is taking some getting used to, with the tighter analogue nub and the smooth, handgrip-less back, and obviously it's a lot lighter and quieter than the Phat, but playing LittleBigPlanet on my TV was great last night, and the UMD movies are near DVD quality even on the 21" inch screen in my bedroom.

Isn't she lovely, isn't she wonderful...

So now, with the ability to play the games without squinting at a tiny screen and being able to hold the console in my lap like a controller, instead of enduring arm-fatigue from holding it in front of my face, some of my unfinished games like Resistance: Retribution, GTA CTW and Tales of Eternia might get some more play. And upcoming games like God of War: Ghost of Sparta and Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker will seem all the more special too. Bravo Sony.

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.

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.

Oh we can beat them forever and ever, then we can be heroes just for one day...

Well well well!
This week the Los Angeles LA Live Complex and the TV channel 'Fiver' played host to the Spike VideoGame Awards, which I eagerly set the V+ box to record and watched like a kid at Christmas the following day (as opposed to a big kid a week before Christmas, which is how I'm doing everything else at the moment). What a fucking travesty.
The very first award was for best voice acting, and over Uncharted 2's Nolan North and Claudia Black, and the legendary Arleen Sorkin and Mark Hamill for Batman: Arkham Asylum, the winner was Jack Black. Jack. Fucking. Black.
While I can acknowledge that Brutal Legend was a widely praised game (although from what I saw the demo did nothing to back that up), and my love of metal culture does will me to play it (There have been a couple of times I've been standing in Blockbuster looking at the £25 pricetag and wondering if the wife would leave me if I brought home yet another game), Black definitely had the least noteworthy performance on the list. I guess they thought they owed him something after he presented it last year.
Another highlight was that all of the nominations for the best team sports game were EA Sports published games. It couldn't have hurt to slide Pro Evo 10 in there could it?
The rest of the show was just a bunch of celebrities awkwardly trying to be funny (I actually felt bad for Tony Hawk, especially as Ride didn't even receive a single nomination), and poorly soundchecked musical performances by Snoop Dogg (who seemed as confused as I was when they asked him to present the award for best RPG) and The Bravery, who are now my least favourite band after I had to sit and watch that prick 'play' his guitar with a violin bow. It doesn't make the music sound better, it just makes you look like a douchebag.
And, one last thing about the VGAs, how can Uncharted 2 get Game of the Year, and Assassin's Creed II get best Action/Adventure? With Uncharted 2 BEING an Action/Adventure game, surely the former cancels the latter out?
Enough VGA anger and on to the gaming.
The Conduit was great. Fuck hard in places and with a shitty ending, but great no less. Of course, had it been a PS3 or XBox 360 release it would have been mediocre, but as a Wii release it looks and plays better than just about anything else on the console.
And I finally finished Tomb Raider Anniversary too. A number of times throughout the game TRA had me wondering if I actually liked it. For every awesome platforming section there was a huge underwater puzzle or something (I've hated them since Ocarina of Time's water temple), Just there to make sure I wasn't getting too much fun out of it. Underworld is next on my agenda, but I just don't know if I want to go back into it so soon.
So I busted out Fable 2, as it's becoming tradition for me to play a Fable game over Christmas, having done so the last two years now. I'm playing as a woman, and started off doing everything the evil way but had a flash of conscience when I returned to my home in Bowerstone to find that the whole village hated me. It actually hurt. So I've decided, in seasonal Scrooge fashion, to change my ways, which is taking a fair bit of work considering I've been doing things like raiding a bandit camp, killing the bandits, finding the key to unlock their prisoners, selling the key to a slaver, killing the slaver and reclaiming the key, freeing the prisoners and then killing them as they walked home.
During my stay in Albion this year, I've been focusing a lot more on the Virtual-Life aspect of Fable 2, buying and renting out properties and making my home, raising my family, that sort of thing. I seem to have spent hours at the Blacksmith's raising money to keep my husband (I resisted the urge to be a lesbian) happy, and only really began the game proper after about four hours play. I may knock it on the head and blast through the game though, I do want to get another Mass Effect playthrough done before the end of January, and this time next week I'll have Sacred 2 to keep me occupied too. I'll be all RPGed out by February at this rate, and might finally find time to get to grips with Assassin's Creed II.
Demo preview time! Bayonetta is pretty crappy. Picture Devil May Cry, replace the albino homosexual with a leather-clad woman who likes to get naked and exchange all of the music for generic Sega awfulness and you've got it. It's not a really bad game, I just wouldn't shell out £40 for it. But then again, I'm not a fan of Devil May Cry. If you want an example of a really bad game, try out Dragonball Raging Blast. Fairytale Fights seems pretty fun, the demo is just you and a bunch of enemies but if the action is as much fun in the real game I'll be picking it up a bit later in it's shelf-life. I would love to write about LittleBigPlanet PSP and Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker too, but my battery is too low to update the firmware on my PSP, even though it's plugged in. Maybe next week.
But oh! Next week is Christmas Day! I will endeavour to post next week, but I might be too drunk/asleep/busy playing Tekken 6. Such is the rock'n'roll lifestyle of a sales assistant stroke freelance games journalist (so I tell the ladies, blogger to the rest of you). Have a great Christmas regardless.
And one last thing, check out my Top 10 Games of 2009 over at VideoGameSpace, and show this up and coming little site some love. Bye!

Transcending history and the world, a tale of souls and swords eternally retold...

How did I get so far in life without the Killzone franchise?
Yes, Killzone 2 is now over, and I loved every minute. Even the bits that were so brutal it hurt, like fighting the ATAC on the roof, or the final assault on the palace, were both great set pieces.
I really don't know what to say about the game, other than it was awesome. The sheer chaos that was experienced during gunfights is unmatched, Gears of War's skirmishes seemed really tame in comparison. To quote a friend of mine; "Killzone 2 really depicts well what happens when the shit hits the fan", and I think that about sums it up.
Since Killzone was over, I've been playing SoulCalibur Legends, which I picked up a while back for a fiver from Blockbusters. After all the negativity, I was expecting the game to be virtually unplayable. Now, while it is shit, it's not offensively so. It's like a PS1 game that you remember fondly, or a mini game tacked on to a 1-on-1 fighter like Tekken Force, or indeed SoulCalibur's own Edgemaster Mode. And part of me is certain that it was originally conceived as the latter.
The game starts you off as Siegfried, and as you progress you pick up stragglers and other Soul Series mainstays. So far I've been latched on to by Sophitia, Astaroth and Dead or Alive reject Ivy Valentine, the latter two I have always perceived as being bad guys. I could have been wrong. Just seem to be strange choices when there's awesome people like Mitsurugi in the wings. Oh, and I decked Cervantes, but he wasn't up for joining me.
The voice acting is hilarious as expected, and every battle can be won pretty much by sellotaping the Wii Remote to an epilepsy sufferer and making him watch anime, but it's fun, and that's what counts. Whether it will still be fun later in the game, time will tell.
Of course if I'd parted with £40 for it, I'd be mortified, but for a fiver it's really not that bad. Could be worse, could be Golden Axe: Beast Rider.
When I tried my wireless PS2 pad finally, it didn't work. Turns out my PS2 had blown a fuse, typically the fuse that supplies power to the Dual Shock 2's motors and any wireless joypad's receiver, so I had to get myself a new PS2, and get rid of the old one. Well, I didn't have to, but y'know. Long story short, if you're going to trade a console in at CEX, be prepared to wait half an hour for them to test it, and bring some ID. And if you get served by the same girl that I did, smack her in the eye, the surly cow.
What else, what else... Oh yeah, tried Guitar Hero III on hard the other day, seeing as I can cruise through World Tour at that difficulty. Failed the first encore. That game is so much harder. And had a go at Motorstorm on multiplayer last night for the first time in ages to christen my mate's new PS3 Slim. There was a guy teleporting. If you have to cheat to enjoy a game, what's the point? Oh yeah, and I'm indifferent to Dissidia. The Final Fantasy VII freak in me will no doubt buy it though.