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!

My name is Michael Ford. I'm probably the only one left who knows the truth. I know because I was there.

You know when you read a bit of information for an upcoming game, and you instantly know that it's garbage? When they say that, for example, Two Worlds is "Oblivion on Steroids", or when the guy on GAME Radio tells you how revolutionary Women's Murder Club is? Well, I've decided to christen that 'The Molyneux Factor', after the charismatic leader of Lionhead Studios' blunder with the original Fable.
There is a point to this, and that point is that I've been playing The Conduit this week, and I distinctly remember reading that the developers High Voltage Software, who aren't exactly renowned for the quality of their games let's face it, had claimed to have created an engine on the Wii that allowed graphics an visual effects that are "comparable" the those on PS3 and XBox 360 games. Well, they lied. It's about on a graphical par with Halo 2.
And the silly thing is, as with Fable before it, they didn't need to lie about the game because it honestly is fantastic.
For anyone who isn't in the know (and with the game's zero media presence, who'd blame them), The Conduit is a Sci-Fi FPS set in Washington DC shortly before and during an invasion by an insectoid race known as The Drudge. You play as a government agent named Michael Ford sent to recover a device known as the All-Seeing Eye (basically a spherical Sonic Screwdriver) and disrupt terrorist activity in an airport, until you are quickly double-crossed by your admittedly shady looking employer and end up working with said terrorists (who are actually pretty stand up guys) when aliens start popping up everywhere.
I initially had worries with this game, as the Wii isn't exactly well equipped for First Person Shooters with the lack of a second analogue stick. Turning is done by pointing the remote at the side of the screen, thus disrupting your aim which isn't exactly ideal. It is possible to use the Nunchuck stick to turn the player, but that gets rid of the strafe function and after virtually a decade of twin analogue FPSes it makes the game surprisingly difficult to play. It was this control method that ultimately made me stop playing Red Steel, but somehow it seems more manageable on The Conduit.
And another thing that struck me right away was how much the game felt like the original Perfect Dark, far more so than Perfect Dark Zero ever did. The visual style is so much more reminiscent of it, and the way the gun moves depending on where you're aiming is exactly the same. I even found an experimental handgun that looked just like the Mag-Sec 4. If they just changed the name of the aliens from Drudge to Skedar and upped the human technology a bit, it could definitely pass as part of that series.
And as I finished Tomb Raider Legend shortly after posting last week, I've moved on to Tomb Raider Anniversary. That game is fucking hard! Not in a keep dying kind of way, it's just that every room you enter is a huge puzzle, and most of the time the only way to solve the puzzle is by doing about three other smaller ones. It's so mentally taxing compared to Legend, which really is mainly jumping and shooting. I suppose I never noticed before because I hadn't played them side by side. It's obviously not out of my capacity to finish the game, as I have done before, but god, you just lose the will to live when you've spent ages solving a certain puzzle, you strut out of the room feeling great about yourself and you're immediately presented with another. More than a few times I've favoured sleep over carrying on because of this, and that hardly ever happens.
I finished Matt Hazard last Saturday too. After you 'complete' the game, the enemy then forces you into a deathmatch with his IRL henchmen, and all the enemies have stupid names above their heads and stuff. I laughed at that, but the funniest thing was when you finally see the person behind the sexy female avatar who's been helping you through the game and she turns out to be a geeky man! Anyone who's ever used PS3's Home should find that funny. If not, you're dead inside. If Matt Hazard: Bloodbath and Beyond is as much like Shadow Complex as I've heard, then I am very much looking forward to it.

This is a tomb, I'll make them feel right at home.

What makes a game 'bad'?
This week I've been playing, and enjoying, a game widely percieved as bad: the ironically titled Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard (ironic as it's his first ever IRL videogame).
The game revolves around a premise that videogame characters are played by actors, much the same as in motion pictures, who are then uploaded digitally into games. One such actor, the titular Mr. Hazard, enjoyed huge success in the 1980s with a series of self-titled side-scrolling shooters, but his career faded out when he started expanding into other genres such as Kart Racing. Now, twenty-odd years later his studio, 'Marathon Games' has been taken over and the new CEO approaches Matt offering him a starring role in a new next-gen shooter. Unbeknownst to our hero (but knownst to us), the plan was to kill him off in the first act in a twist of M. Knight Shyamalan proportions and replace him with Sting Sniperscope, an Austrian space marine sharpshooter.
Thankfully, Matt has a guardian angel in the form of a mysterious woman known only as 'QA', who hacks into the game just as Matt is about to be executed and provides him with the means to live on. But somebody else is hacking all of Matt's previous enemies into the game to help finish him off...
The game for me sits in the same boat as Dark Sector and Fracture, third person shooters that aren't inherently bad, they just lack the polish and shine of certain other franchises (coughgearscough) that seem to have set the bar for the competition, in the eyes of the general gaming populace at any rate. So I believe at any rate, that the game may have been given a slightly better score if four foul-mouthed rhoid monkeys hadn't curb-stomped onto the scene back in 2006.
Another thing that came with Gears of War is a reliance on a cover system, and Eat Lead's is actually really well done. While in cover, as well as the given option to poke out and shoot and the optional extras of blindfire and vaulting over, you can also point the reticule at another barrier and hit the triangle button and Matt will automatically move up to it fairly quickly, particularly good for when you are under sniper-fire. It's so well implemented, Hazard himself even comments on how good it is.
Of course, the main drawing point of the game is the parodying/paying homages to other franchises. Matt Hazard, as a name, is an obvious reference to Duke Nukem, and this is further evidenced in the game's intro when he mentions his debut FPS: Matt Hazard 3D. Enemies so far have included cowboys, russian soldiers and zombies, not particularly symbolic of any series but all staple enemies, but one has stood out in particular.
There are female enemies, known as Dexter's Darlings as a homage to Charlie's Angels, and one of them is a twin gunned lady in shorts with a ponytail...
Tomb Raider Legend has seen a bit of action this week too. It's hard to believe it's been nearly a year since I last sat down with Ms. Croft for a bit of adventuring, as I snapped up Tomb Raider Underworld on boxing day and finished it in the following week. I tell a lie actually, I found the original Tomb Raider in Gamestation for a quid and played through the first level about 5 months ago, but that doesn't count.
But I had an upset, in that after a couple of hours play and doing about half of the game, my save corrupted and I had to redo the flashback scene in Peru, all of Japan, Africa and Kazahkstan. I'm even surprised at myself for doing it. Anyway, I replayed the entire game and it still holds up well today, if a little ropey as a follow-up to Uncharted 2.
The only real problem I had is that it was the first time I'd played the game on a High Defenition screen, and it is in all fairness a last generation game. The square edges of the scenery were a little too noticeable. There are no straight lines in nature.
And the only other game I played this week was a quick finish of Monkey Island SE. It's amazing in games like that how different you percieve things to what was intended by the developers when you haven't got optimal graphics and sound effects. For example, I hadn't noticed that you can see the food inside the ghost pig's belly as it ate, and I had never really had the Monkey Island Cannibals down as homosexuals in my naive youngster's mind. It just goes to show how much we used to rely on our imaginations to fill in the blanks.
And finally, there was upset this week when Tesco Entertainment listed Left 4 Dead 2 at £15 on their website, and a bunch of the guys from the forum I frequent and I all ordered it, only to be shot down in flames with a nicely worded email explaining their mistake. We did all recieve £2 vouchers for our mental anguish though, and as Monkey Island layed the groundwork for a Point and Click renaissance in 24HG towers, I think I'm going to put mine towards Sam and Max Season 1 on Wii. I'll let you know how that goes.

When all soldiers lay their weapons down, and all kings and all queens relinquish their crowns...

This week has been an eventful week for me where gaming's concerned.
On Friday, after blogging I went to work, and was asked if my locker could play host to a friend's copy of Modern Warfare 2, to which I obliged. He then went home without it, and seeing as Saturday was my day off he let me take it home and have a go.
Over the course of Saturday I played through the campaign, choosing to ignore the multiplayer as it really isn't my cup of tea. At first I wondered what I'd let myself in for, listening to gung-ho American troops whoop with delight every time one of them drops an ethnic minority of their choosing, but once I got to the covert ops, with CoD4's protagonists Cpt. Soap McTavish and later (spoiler) Cpt. Price, the game actually got quite good.
Yeah, as with CoD4 the game is split up into two teams' different perspectives. On one side you have the US Army Rangers, lead by The Arbiter from Halo and struggling to understand why they're killing people but happy to do so anyway, and on the other there's the Special Air Service, going behind the scenes and rescuing hostages and whatnot.
Oh yeah, and then there's 'the' airport bit. It's not as bad as you think, you aren't forced to kill any innocents (although I did) and the game even gives you the option to skip the section in case any of you can't tell the difference between games and reality and decide to take up arms in Gatwick or something. Another case of the Daily Mail panicking.
And in related news, I heard this week that EA are planning to rejuvenate their Medal of Honor franchise with Medal of Honor: Modern Combat. No doubt it follows central protagonist Cpt. Radox McTaggart as he trawls through Iraqistan looking for people to suppress. I look forward to it.
And yes, Dragon Age Origins is finally over! The last boss is the single hardest thing I've had to do all year, gaming wise. I thought it would be a great idea to take my Rogue and two Mages with me, to attack from long range and heal me as I did the heroic work. Well, my healer, Wynne, ran out of mana about 12 seconds into the fight from healing everyone who so much as stubbed their toe, and 15 seconds in all three of them were dead. Not a problem, I thought as I hacked away at the ArchDemon (who happens to be a fuck-off Dragon), it seemed really easy at first. Then the bastard flew out of reach and send his army after me, and I had to ballista him, while fighting off the Darkspawn, until he came back into the fight. I finally remembered I could call an army to my aid too, so I did, and while they held back the Darkspawn I took on the Dragon. But he had decided to fight back this time, and before long I was down to my last few Healing Poultices. In a last ditch effort to win, I ran back to the ballista and spammed it until he dropped. I'm really not an RPG gamer though, so maybe it won't be as hard for others. And to clarify, as I said last week, DAO is most definitely my game of the year.
And the day after I finished Prototype. It's possibly a little bit too long, clocking up at 11 hours (but put at least three of those down to aimlessly slaughtering civilians), but it was fun none the less. Hoping to get InFamous soon too, as Prototype gave me a taste for that kind of thing.
One thing I did notice about Prototype though, is that Alex Mercer isn't exactly that original a character. If you watch the movie about how he becomes what he is, and then watch William Birkin's origin in Resident Evil 2, there are some very coincidental similarities.
Rounding things up, Oddworld: Munch's Oddysey does not work properly on XBox360, which pissed me off as I can't be arsed to get the old XBox out. The speech is virtually inaudible, and the FMVs bounce around so much that you can't even see what's happening. So I scratched that off my list along with Ninja Gaiden II, which I simply couldn't be arsed to play after the stress of the ArchDemon. So now I've decided to reacquaint myself with lady Lara Croft and play through Tomb Raiders Legend, Anniversary and Underworld again. And, gaming event of the century, I bought Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard on PS3 for £5.99 on Play.com, which is all lined up for after the Tomb Raiders. As bad as it's supposed to be, it looks like it might be appealing to me.

Today must be my lucky day, baby, you are the Prototype...

My name is 24 Hour Gamer, and my wife is addicted to Dragon Age Origins.
She decided to give it a try last Friday, and subsequently spent eight hours straight playing it. Like me, she's struggled with the complexity of the game but as an Oblivion veteran the setting appeals to her.
I'm not going to go too much into Dragon Age this week, I've been on about it for the last two weeks, but without spoiling too much, I had a 'Wrex moment' last night, that I wasn't very happy about. I'm getting the feeling that by this time next week I'll have finished the game and be able to give a final verdict on it, and I'm tempted to name it my game of the year. No other game this year has kept me going for 29 hours without me getting bored, Borderlands took me 27 hours to finish but is nowhere near as deep and rewarding. And there's still probably a few hours left to do on Dragon Age.
I decided that leaving the 360 version of Alone in the Dark alone was probably the best idea, before it destroys my interest in a buggy mass of glitches, and the PS3's Inferno has now established itself on my Christmas list. Instead, I've opted to play Prototype as my secondary game this week.
Prototype does nothing new, instead it's like a 'best of' collection of aspects of other superhero games. It has the jumping of Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction, the climbing of Spider-Man 2 and it's sequels, the combat of Wolverine, the gliding from Arkham Asylum (if you want to get anal about release dates, Batman Begins then), Car Throwing from Crackdown, and (I may be clutching at straws here) Venom's absorbing people for health from Ultimate Spider-Man. But it does all of that very well indeed.
The game places you under the omnipresent hood of Alex Mercer, who begins the game on a morgue slab, about to have an autopsy. He wakes up from his apparent death, and after the initial panic of narrowly avoiding dissection realises he has complete amnesia, and the ability to do, well, whatever the fuck he wants to thanks to a virus he's contracted. With the help of his sister, Dana, he finds another infected person, and sets out to free her from her prison, only to discover she's completely mental and wants to infect the entire city. So it's your job to stop her.
Alex, while being very much a hero in this story, is not a very nice man. There's none of the "don't hurt the civilians" from other superhero games, Mercer can and does indiscriminately murder anyone he feels, to the point that it's actually physically difficult not to kill any innocents (as I've already mentioned, you need to consume them for health). They always see to fly into a panic, and instead of running away from you, they just scatter in all directions and quite often end up between your claws and an enemy's throat.
And aside from that, killing them is actually really entertaining. It's great fun sprinting into a crowd and grabbing a passer by before they've even seen you coming, running up the side of a building without even breaking stride and tossing them to their doom, or picking up a car and, again, sprinting through a crowd watching the bodies fly. Strangely enough though, every time I do grab a random New Yorker, they always seem to be female, and there's no safe way to let them go. All you can do is throw them and hope they don't decapitate themselves on a lamp post during their flight.
I tried out the demo for Band Hero. Although a rocker at heart, I thought playing songs like Walking on Sunshine would be great fun to play, but said song is on the demo and it really wasn't that great. Guitar games have gotten so stale that it doesn't even matter what you're playing, it's all just pressing buttons and strumming in rhythm. So DJ Hero must breathe new life into the series, right? No, I played it in Gamestation this week, it's shit. Also had a bit of a go with Mini Ninjas, which is forgettable (and I couldn't help but notice that they stole the enemy death effect from Zelda: Wind Waker) and Galaga Legions, which very nearly sent me into an epileptic seizure. I don't recommend it.
Finally, everyone sign up to Playfire. I have a profile on there, and it's a great networking site for gamers with an addictive award scheme which is like a cross between Achievements and Trophies. Check it out.

We feel the pain of a lifetime lost in a thousand days, through the fire and the flames we carry on!

My name is 24 Hour Gamer, and I am addicted to Dragon Age Origins.
It's always daunting for a non-RPGer to take his or her first tentative steps into a Role-Playing Game, they blind you with stats and classes and items with all kinds of different names (why can't a healing potion be called a healing potion in every game?) until before you know it you find yourself curled up in a foetal position fully clothed in the shower, sobbing, with the names of various plants and what kind of healing properties they have Sharpied all over the walls. Just me?
I've been playing light RPGs for the last couple of years, games like Oblivion, Fallout 3, Borderlands, Fable 2, Mass Effect and (cough) Two Worlds, all of which I can still play like an Action/Adventure or FPS if the mood takes me, and foolishly I thought I would be ready for Bioware's latest epic. "It can't have the combat system that made me cry like KOTOR, surely" I thought. "Bioware has learned with Mass Effect that real-time combat is the way to go, it'll be like Fable" I thought.
"Oh, fuck." I realised as I played it. But I'd spent £45 of my hard earned cash on this, I wasn't going to just give up like I did with Star Wars, so I persevered, and now, a week later I am beginning to obsess over Dragon Age, like I did with Oblivion before it.
I'd like to talk about the party members. I picked up my last one last night, a Dwarf called Oghren with the best moustache I've ever seen. They don't just chip in every now and then with conflicting emotions regarding choices to be made like in Mass Effect, everything you do influences what they think of you, whether they like you or not. It's like a violent version of The Sims. But I've not really noticed anything interesting about the characters, there isn't a single Garrus or Wrex among them, nobody I find interesting enough as a person to keep them with me. Shale, the stone Golem was okay, but he was that strong he was getting all of the kills and thus all of the experience points, so I had to drop him from the team. So I opted to just go with all the characters that wanted to nail me, because it made the dialogue between them interesting; Morrigan, the witch from the swamp, Leliana, the redhead assassin and Zevran, the male elf. Yes, there are gay sex scenes, nipple sucking intact. I'd love to see what the Daily Mail has to say about that one.
I've had another dip into my shame pile this week and dipped my toes into Alone in the Dark, expecting to retract them straight away as a wayward turd floats up to me. But as it happens, my expectations were so low that I was pleasantly surprised. The visuals especially are noteworthy, quite reminiscent of The Darkness, and the cinematic effect of being in a crumbling building almost rivals Uncharted 2. Almost. The main problem I had was with the controls and camera view, and apparently there's a driving section that reduces grown men to tears. But I've read that all of these issues were resolved in the PS3 version, subtitled Inferno, so I may just throw the 360 copy back on the shelf and try and find the PS3 one cheap.
And that about wraps it up. Had a quick go on Aliens vs. Predator 2 on the PC in the week, and it's hard to imagine ever being scared by the sub-PS2 graphics, but once upon a time it terrified me. But saying that, so did Silent Hill and Dino Crisis on the PS1 so what can I say? And had a quick go on Guitar Hero World Tour on drums with my Wife and my friend Paul over XBox Live, and half an hour of it nigh on killed me. I am so out of shape. Maybe I ought to try that Wii Fit that's collecting dust in the corner.

I am Dungeon Master, your guide in the realm of Dungeons and Dragons!

Three Hours. That's the time it took me to complete Halo 3: ODST.
Fair enough, it's not a real game, just a glorified expansion pack. But three hours? Going by the recommended retail price (according to Play.com) of £39.99, that's £13.33 an hour, nearly twice what I earn. I happened to get my copy free with my Elite, but that's not the point.
And it's not even a full game. Just when you find this bizarre squid-cow thing with the potential to end the war, just when the romance subplot seems to be going somewhere, the game abruptly stops. It's not so much making way for a sequel, it's just cutting half of the game off so they can sell us the second half in a year or so.
Aside from that though, ODST is in my eyes the best Halo so far. You get more of a feeling of war, not just racial extermination in a Motocross helmet like the main trilogy, and as with games like Gears of War or Killzone, you start to get to know your team-mates and genuinely give a shit about their back-stories. Just wish it was a bit longer. But there's the multiplayer disk, which includes all the Halo 3 DLC, which I suppose gives it a bit more longevity. I can't be arsed with multiplayer though.
I've not had a good time with game-endings this week, as Borderlands' ending was, in the words of fellow blogger Raz7el, "a sack of horse shit". All of Borderlands' storyline seems to take place in the last hour, as if Gearbox realised they were having too much fun and needed to wrap things up. But I digress, the game is great, I'm just in a complaining mood. I'd be inclined to carry on playing it and mop up the remaining side quests if it wasn't for the fact that today is the day that Dragon Age Origins was finally released.
I've had two hours with the game, and it seems to be shaping up quite well. It seems to me like a healthy marriage between Mass Effect and Guild Wars, taking the movement and conversational style from the former, and, well, everything else from the latter.
I opted to play as the Human Noble, the good all-rounder, and so far it has been a typical tale of betrayal and family deaths, and I've been scooped up by the Grey Wardens, to Dragon Age what Spectres are to Mass Effect, to save the world from evil things and claim revenge on my Judas.
The most obvious comparison to Guild Wars, in my eyes, is the combat. Clicking an enemy will start your character attacking, and he/she will carry on until the enemy is dead or you tell them otherwise. Potions can be used on-the-fly and will queue until your character has finished any current action and so on, and you can flick to any party member and issue them orders too, like Knights of the Old Republic in fact. Or you can command the whole party at once, although I haven't tried that. I must confess I was hoping for the combat to be a bit more Fable to be honest.
And that's as far as I've gotten with it. No doubt I'll have more to say next week, hopefully more positive than negative, and it's looking that way. Is it a good game? So far, yes. Is it better than Oblivion? No. But then again, I don't think anything short of The Elder Scrolls V will be.
And that's that. Before I go, check out 30-Something Gamer, a great blog, and he's been playing all sorts of things that I haven't at the Eurogamer Expo. Oh, and try out Trine on the PSN store, it's really good. More on that when/if I buy the full version.
UPDATE: You can probably tell by my hasty scrawlings that my Dragon Age time ate a little bit into my 'going to work' time, and I had to rush the blog a bit. In the rush, I forgot to mention a couple of things. Firstly, after finishing Borderlands and ODST with a couple of days to spare before Dragon Age came out, I decided to casually play a bit of The Secret of Monkey Island: SE on the XBox Live Arcade. Apart from possibly the original Silent Hill, I don't think I've ever completed a game as many times as Monkey Island, so this had me wanting to play it just to see the graphics rather than discover the story. The graphics, while good, suffered from the same troubles as Street Fighter II HD Remix, they've updated the sprites but not added any extra frames, it makes the jerkiness in animation very noticeable. It's an excellent winding down game at the end of the night though.
And finally, I tried the Left 4 Dead 2 demo the other night, and while it is good, I want someone to explain to me how it's in any way different to the first one? I didn't buy the first one (although someone gave me a copy for my PC, which can barely run it) because I didn't want to shell out £40 on a game made for multiplayer when I'm essentially a single player gamer, and just when the price starts to drop, the second one's out and nobody will be playing it anymore. Anyway, it was a very fun game, but unless it depreciates in value faster than the first, It's not for me. Right, NOW I'm done.

Just try to understand, I've given all I can, 'cause you got the best of me...

Borderlands is like Marmite. You either love it or hate it, there's no middle ground. I know quite a few people who bought it, and all had the same experience: mild disappointment at first because it isn't as much like Fallout 3 as they'd wanted, and then a few hours in either adoring it for what it is, or abhorring it for what it isn't. That's aside from my brother-in-law Trev, who has verbally masturbated at me at every opportunity he's had regarding the game since well before it's release, I'm not sure he was capable of the initial upset.
I'm of the former. My first day with it was a difficult one, physically as well as mentally because the game is very unforgiving at first and I very nearly met my demise in the first unavoidable encounter with the game's ever-present bandits. I carried on making frequent visits to the game's spawn points (poles with lights on, I was so upset they didn't make the checkpoint noise from Sonic) until I was about level 11, and then I had half an hour or so of plain sailing before there was a level hike in the enemies too, then it was back to the spawn points every 5 minutes again. Now my level is around the mid twenties, and I'm starting to cruise once more. For now.
As always, the mulitiplayer had me feeling a little underwhelmed, my first go was with the aforementioned Trev and his younger brother Ross, and they'd played about 24 hours of it solid and were around level 25, compared to my 13 and I basically sat and watched while they did stuff. They took me to the arena and we had a bit of a deathmatch, but with 3 players in a very small venue, even if I was strong enough to slightly upset the other two, it just felt like we were playing Quake II on the PS1, not a part of my life I want to go back to. But I'm still yet to find a multiplayer shooter that's better than Perfect Dark on the N64. CoD fanboys attack.
The second time I tried MP was with Raz7el, who was in the 'hate' camp, and it was much the opposite experience. I was level 23 I think, and he was level 7. Too easy for me, and he didn't see any action.
Borderlands is also like Marmite, in that it looks like shit. No, it's not a pretty game, and looking at old pre-cell-shading screenshots makes me wish they hadn't bothered. Although it makes a change from all of the other Unreal Engine 3 powered games where all the characters look like action figures. Thing is, the cell-shading isn't actually done properly. A lot of the black lines on the scenery are actually drawn on. A bit cheating, isn't it?
Last night, after realising that all I'd done all week was eat, sleep and play Borderlands I thought I'd reach into my shame pile to add a bit of variety to this week's post, and as I'd finished Wolverine quickly last friday to make way for Borderlands, the next game was Halo 3 ODST. Groan.
Guess what: I like it.
The squad thing going on makes it feel a lot more like Killzone, and I'm not being forced to blow off the Master Chief every few minutes like in the previous three. In fact, in the Hour-and-a-half-ish that I spent on it the big green twat didn't even get a mention. And the romance sub-plot in ODST involves a woman who is actually real, which is a bonus. I'd have preferred there to not be one though, they always seem out of place in this sort of game, see Gears of War 2 for example. I meant Marcus and Anya, not Marcus and Dom. Speaking of romance subplots, who should show up in ODST but Nolan North?
And that's about it. Preordered my copy of Dragon Age Origins this week, and I'm planning on hitting GAME at opening time to get it so I've got a couple of hours with it before writing. And to sign out on a laugh, while cataloging my game collection I came across the German cover for Tomb Raider Chronicles. Dr Dre would be so proud.

And now I'm the best at whatever it is Wolverine does!

I'm just gonna touch on Uncharted 2 this week, because everyone with a PS3 has been banging on about it relentlessly and nothing I can say will be new and fresh.
I finished it, and all is well with the world. There was literally only one part of the game I didn't enjoy, and that was 'The' train bit. Drake kept doing a Lara and jumping in the entirely wrong direction, wrapping himself around the wheels or something, and It got a bit tedious doing the same thing over and over. All in all though, great game, great ending, worth a second playthrough. And, much like the prequel, a third and fourth.
After that I blasted through Halo 3, picking up a paltry one Achievement all the way through it because I played it on easy. So that's it, three games down and I still don't get it. They are all just average games, the multiplayer must really be special to generate this much interest. I might give it a go, although watching myself respawn for half an hour isn't my idea of entertainment. Halo 3 was my favourite of the series so far though, I still have ODST to play through, which is next on my list actually.
Then later in the week, I transferred all my data to my 120GB Elite hard drive. Everything survived the transfer apart from my Halo 3 save data, so now all I have to show for finishing it is my mere 5 Gamer Points. Shit.
After that was over I moved on to X-Men Origins: Wolverine (Uncaged Edition), again on the XBox 360. Now, I neglected to watch the film, I made it through X-Men and half way through X-Men 2 before wanting to kill myself. But in these celluloid abortions, the one saving grace was everyone's favourite pointy Canadian bad ass, so I was initially interested in a film based solely around him, even more so when I learned Deadpool was supposed to be in it. Then they cast Ryan Reynolds, the highest echelon of annoying douchebags as Deadpool and turned him into Baraka from Mortal Kombat, and my interest promptly blew it's metaphorical brains out.
I tried the demo of this by chance though, as surprise surprise there wasn't anything great on the PSN store that week, and the mix of God of War and Tomb Raider combined with the frankly surprising level of blood and dismemberment were a breath of fresh air, seeing as I was expecting yet another forgettable kiddy-friendly mass-produced movie tie-in.
The game offers very little in the way of variety, it's mainly just ripping people to shreds, a little bit of platforming then ripping more people to shreds, occasionally throwing a spot of "press X to not die" into the mix, but I'm yet to get bored. Actually between typing right now I'm having quite an epic boss-fight with a huge Sentinel in midair. Wait, "press B to not die".
One of the main things to note is the character damage. About half way through the game you meet these robot things with spinning blades on their hands, and the cuts they leave on your body look great, and watching them heal in real time is genuinely impressive. Some bits are silly though, like on a brief moment of losing my healing powers I was still able to explode myself and carry on going with half of my torso gone. And at one point poor old Logan got blood all down the back of his jeans, and had to go through a cutscene looking like he'd shat himself. And his magical vest that grows back after being shredded is plain lack of attention to detail.
And that's about that. I'm off to get a copy of Borderlands in a bit, which I'm looking forward to, paid for with money I don't have. Those game journo types who get games for free don't even know they're born. I think next week's blog will be very much centred around that. For now though, back to Wolverine.

Oh Crap!

If the title of this post didn't give it away, I have been lucky enough to have a few early hours with Uncharted 2: Among Thieves this week, as my preorder with GAME paid off and Mr. Drake plopped gently onto my doormat on Wednesday, a whole 2 days before release. Well, not that gently, it looks like the fucking postman tried to get it through the keyhole first; there's a dint in my shiny Collector's Edition tin. Either way, I got it early and that makes me feel like a proper journalist, even though I still had to pay for the fucking thing.
Now, I could go on all day gushing about it, believe me I could, and I've only had a few hours with Nate and co. The only thing I can think of that's bad about it is that the snow looks like marshmallow and the explosions aren't as pretty as those in Drake's Fortune. The graphics are phenomenal, and so is the animation and voice acting, but then again they were in the original so it goes without saying.
What some people would perceive as a negative point, but it really isn't, is that not much has changed since our hero set off to steal El Dorado from Nazi zombies. Nate's gained a few new moves in classic Lara Croft fashion, including monkey bars and the free-climbing thing ripped straight from Tomb Raider Underworld, and the cinematics have been turned up to eleven with the charismatic protagonist being forced to clamber through a train wreck hanging off a cliff with his intestines hanging out, or leaping through a window of a hotel block that's collapsing (A bit of a change of pace from causing the destruction last week).
Drake's picked up a couple of new friends and foes too, the most obvious of which being Chloe Frazer, Drakes new bit of fluff and all round 'can we trust her?' kind of girl. She's tanned, has dark hair in a ponytail and speaks with a very upper class Australian accent that's not too far removed from southern English. If you squint, it's Lara. Elena has made an appearance though, and it's very much hinted that there's still a spark. Do the right thing, Nate.
And the other main game I've been playing this week, with me virtually stalking Nolan North, is Shadow Complex. In a nutshell, the game is about a guy named Jason, who looks like Drake, moves and dresses like Drake, Can punch harder than bullets like Drake, has the same voice actor and if you say his name in a mock retard voice it sounds like Nathan. His last name is probably Nrake. It isn't actually, it's Flemming.
Anyway, Na... Jason is out potholing with his girlfriend who he's known for about 4 hours and they come across a secret military base full of people who all stole the guy from Dead Space's pyjamas and want to invade America with lots of ATST walkers and stuff. Now Jason's surname must be Bourne actually, because he happens to be an unstoppable killing machine and goes about destroying everything and wiping out about a third of the population.
The game, ridiculous story aside, is an absolutely thrilling homage to Metroid games of old; a 2D side-scroller with 360 degree aiming thanks to the second analogue stick. As you progress through the game you find power ups in the form of new pieces of armour that give you the ability to run faster, jump higher, hit harder etc, and each new area you explore or each life you snuff out gives you EXP to level up, giving the game an RPG element too.
I can't think of much else to write about here, but the game is better than most retail games. The Unreal Engine 3 is showing it's age a bit now though, maybe it's time to think about a new one Epic. But yeah, who cares if the story was written by a homophobic jerk, the story is balls anyway. Get it for the gameplay.
In other news, I went and traded my copy of Street Fighter IV for the collector's edition this week. Raz7el from The Chronicles of Ridiculous convinced me to get it on the 360 so I could destroy him on it, so I did. We are both upsettingly bad at that game. And I downloaded the Demos of Brutal Legend and Star Wars: Republic Heroes, but Mr. Drake stopped me from playing them. He is more important. Now I think I'm gonna go play Prince of Persia, watch Hulk vs. Wolverine and hide in Nolan North's garden.

Just when you thought it was safe to switch the PS2 back on...

Firstly, and it occurs to me that I haven't actually mentioned this so far in this blog, I have spent months scouring every videogame shop I've seen for Jaws Unleashed on either the PS2 or XBox, and finally the other day I saw it sat in plain view on a shelf in the newly reopened Playtime in Sheffield for £14.99. And today I sat down with it for the first time, and there's half an hour I'm not getting back.
The game involves eating things, which is what I expected, and fair enough is fun as hell. When you can actually see what's happening that is. The camera spends most of it's time either looking at the side, front or top of the shark, and it pretty much breaks the game. So to say I'm disappointed is an understatement.
I've had quite a bit of spare time this week, and have got a fair bit of gaming done. The first game I played through was Halo 2, as I said last week I wanted to see what all of the fuss was about. Now, I know I played neither Halo nor Halo 2 on their releases, or even in the right generation, so they are bound to feel a bit dated, but neither have really grabbed me. I spent most of Halo 2 slogging through the endless waves of respawning enemies just wishing the game would end so I could stick it back on the shelf and never lay eyes on it again. In fact, by the end of the game I was just running past all the enemies as they fought each other, because it was quicker than having to take down each enemy's shield and then killing them in turn, not to mention scrabbling round on the floor for new weapons all the time because you can't collect ammo for the best ones. And then there was the bug...
Every so often (well, every 10 minutes or so), the background of the level would emboss itself on the screen, obscuring my view sometimes so badly that I just couldn't play it and forcing me to quit out of the game and restart it. I don't know if this was a problem with playing the game on the XBox 360 or not, but I was led to believe that before Gears of War reared it's steroid-filled head Halo 2 was still the most-played game on XBox Live, and I can't imagine that Microsoft would allow such an awful bug in a game that's still being played so much without patching it.
On a more positive note, I had an hour on Halo 3 after I finished it, and that was much better.
The other game I was mainly playing this week was Red Faction Guerrilla. Now, this game is an odd one, because it starts off a blast, genuinely fun to play, but quickly gets repetitive in the middle before regaining the spark at the end. But the middle really is so boring that very few people will actually see the end, and that really is a shame.
The game centres around a bunch of people who go to a recently terraformed Mars looking for a mining job, and when their employers start shooting them, they decide that instead of contacting the Union or simply quitting, they'll hole themselves up in hidden camp sites and emerge every so often to bother them, usually by fucking up a building or something, with the hope of eventually liberating Mars. Not that they'll be anything left of Mars after they've driven a truck through every building on it.
Yes, the story is bullshit. But the gameplay itself is great, every game needs this level of destruction in it. There is no greater feeling than the one you get when you Hijack a JCB and plough through a tower block, or when you steal one of those Power Loaders from Aliens and... plough through a tower block. The only problem is that sometimes the gravity doesn't seem to work, and buildings can be held up by toilet roll tubes and blu-tack, but that's random physics for you.
Also there's the throwbacks to Red Faction, and to a lesser extent Red Faction 2, that suitably send me into a fanboy delight. You even revisit the ruins of the Ultor corporation, although it doesn't have the same feel as returning to Shadow Moses in Metal Gear Solid 4. And it's a bit morbid when you find out that Parker, the hero from the first RF is now a mental hobo and Alias from RF2 managed to die in the martian wastes. You don't expect such things from hero characters.
To finish off, I tried out Shadow Complex finally and today bought some Microsoft Points to buy the full version. I got a 2100 Point card, so I'm torn between either Monkey Island SE or Fallout 3: Mothership Zeta for the rest of the points. Either way, I need Shadow Complex, and I think I have a man crush on Nolan North. The wife also bought me a year of XBox Live today, and I intend to get into online gaming a bit more now. Hopefully ODST will be a good introduction for me. I managed to resist buying Left 4 Dead today.

No gun shooting, for Rudy tonight... No retributing, everything is alright...

I'm back!
Spent the last week in Scarborough, having been married and stuff. It was a great ceremony, and aside from a stupidly parked van and some obnoxious wankers in a pub, a great week. But oh, this blog is about videogames, and two weeks have passed!
The first week at home I spent mainly playing through Uncharted: Drake's Fortune, trying to get it fresh in my mind before Uncharted 2 plops through my letter box in a couple of weeks. I don't care what anyone says, in my opinion it's probably the best current-gen game so far, speaking from a single-player perspective. In fact, only the XBox fanboys who are content to do the exact same things over and over again on multiplayer Gears or Left 4 Dead seem to have anything bad to say about it, and that's mainly about a lack of multiplayer, which will change in a few weeks. They seem to overlook the absolutely gorgeous graphics and animation, brilliant voice-acting and the fact that the gameplay, while doing nothing new, is among the best in it's field.
Anyway, ranting aside, I went to Scarborough armed with my PSP, and while I was there I got very much acquainted with Resistance: Retribution. At first I was unsure, with the frankly unconventional controls and Razzy-worthy dialogue and voice-acting, but it ended up dragging me in, and is actually more entertaining than Resistance 2. The main character, James Grayson, is a far cry from the solemn, heroic Nathan Hale: He's foul mouthed, racist and sounds like a mixture of Ray Winstone and Kano from Mortal Kombat. In the opening scenes of the game he stumbles upon his brother, Johnny, half way through being converted into a Chimera, and is forced to kill him for his own good. He then clicks his heels, tips his hat and sets off to kill all of the Chimera by himself, like a Cockney Punisher.
Well, a Cockney Punisher who occasionally slips into an Australian accent anyway. The accents are inconsistent throughout, at one point a soldier went from being Scottish to English and back again in one cutscene like an Oblivion hobo. The game was obviously acted out by a non-British cast. But the one-liners in the game did keep me entertained and had me struggling for a title to this post. My favourite was 'I will rape your skull'. God bless.
It also keeps the feel from the first Resistance, more of a wartime aesthetic, as opposed to the futuristic and very American feel of R2, which in my opinion was one of the things that lost the series' appeal. The other main things that R2 changed were the limited weapon capacity and regenerating health as seen in, well, every other shooter around at the minute, losing the series' uniqueness, and both are back to the retro styles in Retribution too, which is nice.
The game looks gorgeous too. In fact, if you have a PSP just buy it for fuck's sake. Unless you're french, that is; it's really quite racist in places. It's definitely one of the stronger titles on the handheld though.
One of the first things that my new wife did after the day was hand me my ass on Guitar Hero Arcade. Granted, she was playing on easy to my hard, but it was very one-sided. Realising afterwards that it is really just a port of Guitar Hero III, where the hard setting is slightly out of my comfort zone, we had two rematches with me on medium, both victories for me, and another on hard, hers again. Great fun. Afterwards we cooled down with a game on House of the Dead 4, which is strongly in need of a console port.
Also in the arcades we had a go on Outrun 2, which was great fun and reminded me that I still need to get Outrun Arcade on the PS3 or 360. Then we stumbled upon something else...
Paradise Lost is an arcade game from Ubisoft, sporting the artwork and environments from FarCry. You basically sit on gun emplacements and hold the trigger down while knobheads in Crocodile Dundee hats run into your line of fire and collapse into frankly weird shapes thanks to the sub-par ragdoll physics. The best part of the game, in fact, was the fact that in the continue screen you can alter the speed of the countdown by pressing the triggers and grenade buttons. And that is saying a lot. A bit of a read on Wikipedia tells me it is actually supposed to be an arcade version of FarCry. I suppose so. And Susie requests that I tell everyone that, for what it's worth, she had a higher kill count than me, and therefore won.
To wrap this up, my old XBox 360 came back, but the wife bought me an Elite anyway, along with Guitar Hero 5, Halo 3, Halo 3 ODST, Ninja Gaiden II, Prototype, Red Faction Guerrilla and X-Men Origins: Wolverine, which should keep me occupied for a while. Also got Halo 2 on standby too, as I have only played the first one up until now, and I'm quite looking forward to hopefully making a late discovery as to what the fuss is all about. Verdict next week.

What's that saying? Fortune Favours the bold? Yeah, right. Lucky me.

Another week, another blog post.
I've actually got very little to write about this week. After finishing Arkham I went on to start Grand Theft Auto IV from scratch, in anticipation of Episodes from Liberty City, as I haven't actually gotten around to playing The Lost and The Damned yet due to me buying GTAIV on the PS3. Got as far as the second major island now, and have a choice between doing Brucie's infuriatingly hard street race mission, or Elizabeta's infuriatingly hard grabbing-coke-from-old-hospital mission.
And that's my major gaming for the week covered. Downloading a multiplayer beta of Uncharted 2 as we speak, at 89%, which I'm very interested in. Should it reach 100% before the blog is through, I'll break off and try it. Also saw the Uncharted 2 GamesCom 09 trailer that was put on the PSN store last night, and it looks very special. In fact, after this blog is over I'm gonna update my PS3 to 3.01 and play through Drake's Fortune for a third time. 94%.
And that's about it. I managed to acquire a copy of Metroid Prime 3 for nothing the other day from a friend who no longer owns a Wii, I should think about playing the first 2 really. And I saw an old lady who looked like Udnaut Wrex from Mass Effect the other day, which was hilarious. Oh, and I got the other two Dynamic Themes on the PS3. The MotorStorm one is just some douchebag walking around his buggy, but the Little Big Planet one is fantastic. And I've seen the Afrika one that is only available on the Japanese PSN store, and it's great too, if you like Zebras, which I do. They are like horses but with built in Magic Eye. Until someone invents a cow with an Etch-a-Sketch built in, that's the best were getting. Or a Game Boy Advance Pig. Ooh, my Uncharted 2 beta's finished. BRB.
Well, it was entertaining. We were playing a match which was limited to pistols and sniper rifles, so just sniper rifles really, I was on the losing side, achieving the second lowest kill count and I wasn't playing with anyone I know, but I still enjoyed it. Might persuade a few of my friends to preorder with Play.com and cancel their order once the code comes through.
And on that I'm out. No blog post next week as I'll be on holiday, looking at sharks and gracing the slot machines of our beloved coast. Think something else is happening too, can't quite remember ;). See you in two weeks.

What are you dense? Are you retarded or something? Who the hell do you think I am? I'm the goddamn Batman.

A couple of factors have seen me disband my Shame Pile this week; The first being my XBox 360 rudely flashing three scarlet beacons of hate at me on Monday morning, and most of the games left on it were 360 games, the other being that I finally gave up holding out and went out and got Batman: Arkham Asylum, thankfully on the PS3.
After blagging some free Dissidia promotional postcards from the nice man behind the counter at GAME, I gleefully skipped home to open the box up (Got the Collector's Edition), and was actually really disappointed. Not only was the Batarang made of cheap plastic, as opposed to the metal one I was told I would get (although in retrospect people would die if it was metal), but it doesn't come off the stand either. The second disappointment came with the 'digipack' cardboard sleeve. If I'd got it on the 360 I wouldn't have been bothered, because the sleeve is DVD case sized, but on the shelf with my PS3 games it looked retarded. One click on eBay later and all was rectified, a PS3 game case was winging it's way across the country to me and plopped into my hand yesterday.
The game is actually really good, the demo does it no justice, and when I got it home I spent about 8 hours straight on it, nearly completing it, which I did a couple of days later, the second time I played it. I have no regrets though, the game was fantastic, with the only exceptions being Poison Ivy's Dual Shock 3 throwingly annoying boss fight and the samey enemies. They sorted out the problem with Batman taking up two thirds of the screen too, it zooms out nicely when you're running or fighting, and The Riddler's... erm... riddles are a nice touch, which will definitely see me returning to it to clear them up.
I also got SoulCalibur: Broken Destiny on PSP, which at first seemed disappointing but with perseverance I got into it heavily. Made a surprisingly good Kain (from Legacy of Kain) on the Character Creator feature (which is a bit watered down from SoulCalibur IV's, but impressive on a handheld none the less), using the move set of Siegfried, and am slowly but surely starting to kick ass on it. The difficulty level is harder than the other SCs though, without the option to lower it.
My initial disappointment was mainly with the long-awaited cameo from God of War's Kratos. He isn't actually that good, his moves aren't as fluid as they are in his home turf, although if they were he'd be unbeatable. And I guess that, because he's in that, we won't see him in a 'proper' SoulCalibur game.
And Burnout Paradise, the third and final game I acquired this week. When I initially tried the demo I hated the game, I have a bit of a stigma with sandbox racing games as one wrong turn can prove costly, but I'm having great fun with it. It's possibly to do with the fact that the Ghostbusters Ecto-1 style car I purchased from the PSN store in Fanboy-fuelled delight has better stats than I should have at that point in the game, it might be due to the fact that Burnout Dominator's soundtrack has made it through pretty much unscathed, including annoying-as-fuck anthem 'Girlfriend' by flappy headed mess Avril Lavigne, which is ironically perfect music to smash up a car to. Either way, it's great.
And the rest of the week briefly: Spent a lot of Tuesday night playing Lego Batman, Burnout Paradise and Wii Sports with my 3 year old nephew, which is always fun. He's really starting to get the hang of games now, it would bring a tear to my eye if I wasn't such a hardened perfect male specimen. TESTOSTERONE!
During the week I watched Street Fighter Alpha: The Animation, which was pretty good. I loved the fact that out of his two fights, Dan Hibiki got cut to ribbons by Vega (That's 'Claw' if you're a pretentious fucktard), and failed to Gadouken Birdie and was pulverised for his troubles. Oh, how I laughed.
And the 'dynamic themes' hit the PSN Store last night. I tried the WipEout one, because it was free, and was indifferent. It was completely overshadowed by the two Arkham standard themes, of which the Batman one is gracing my Home screen as we speak.

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.

When I need to sate, I just accelerate, into Oblivion...

Well, it's not been a full week since I last posted so not much has gone on.
I finished Killzone, it was entertaining to the end and a surprisingly long game too. Suddenly realised while playing that the Helghast were actually an entire army of cloned Alan Partridges, which made the game infinitely more fun. Although now I have an unsettling urge to kill Steve Coogan.
Killzone 2 was the order of the day straight after that, and it's fucking fantastic. People complain about the clunky feel, but I like it. And the cover system is great too. Beats the shit out of Gears of War's.
One problem I had with the first Killzone is that the enemies didn't really feel evil. Seemed to me that they had been oppressed a bit, and very British. And they never swore either. Compared to the ISA, who were kill-crazy arseholes bickering amongst themselves, who gave the impression that they couldn't out-think a jam sandwich, they didn't seem that bad.
In Killzone 2, they're foul-mouthed violent bastards though, and tougher than a Boxing Day turd. Killing them doesn't seem so bad. The ISA are still D-Bags though.
I tweeted about a problem my girlfriend had with Oblivion earlier in the week, allow me to explain, with possible spoilers. In the quest "Lost Histories", you have to get a job in a prison to give you access to a prisoner, Amusei, as the guard won't let you see him. You can't pick the lock and sneak in undetected, as the guard is looking right at the door. After that you find him gone and have to follow a trail of blood through a secret doorway. Anyway, the guy who gives you the job decided to throw himself from a bridge and die, which stopped her in her tracks. At a loss, she handed me the Dual Shock 3 and went in the bath.
After a bit of pondering, inspiration struck. I spoke to the guard, gave him some (of her) cash until his disposition was maxed at 83, and then went and picked the lock with the Skeleton Key. Before he got me, I dropped all of my armour and weapons outside the cell, then picked the lock of the cell and ran inside, dropping the Skeleton Key on the floor. The guard followed me into the cell, and I yielded, which worked as he liked me so much. He then tried to arrest me again, and I chose to go to jail.
Now because the guard was in the cell with me, he just unlocked the door and walked out, leaving it open for me to collect all my gear and escape through the secret door! Hurrah! I got Amusei, killed the Pale Woman and made like Maiq the Liar and got the fuck out of there. When Amusei was safely outside of the prison, I turned myself back in to the guards and did my time, to avoid their wrath the next time I was in town. And it's the way that you can do things like that that makes Oblivion and Fallout 3 awesome.
Bethesda aren't all good though, I tried the demo for Wet the other day and it's fucking disgustingly awful. And I can't quite explain why, it's just ugly, boring and repetitive. Stranglehold or Max Payne please. Also tried the demo for Colin McRae DiRT 2, and it is actually dirt. It's more like a Tony Hawk game in presentation, and gameplay wise Motorstorm does it much better. It's definately not the homage to Colin McRae that was promised. In fact, if I was related to Colin, I'd be pretty pissed. Downloaded the Dissidia demo today, but not had time to try it yet. Will Tweet with the verdict.
In other news, seeing as my PS2 has been re-promoted to the house's main gaming set up (with all the current gen consoles and the, ahem, Megadrive), I decided that wired pads had to go. I bought a Mad Catz Wireless Micro-Con from Play.com. Or at least that was the plan, I opted to go for the slightly cheaper one from a Play Trade seller, and when it turned up today it turned out to be a full size Mad Catz controller, and instead of being black like in the picture it was transparent blue. Blue is my favourite colour, so it's not a major problem, but black would have matched the aesthetic better. At least it's wireless, that's the main thing. Haven't tried it yet due to no AAA batteries, but I had a wired Mad Catz controller on my XBox which I actually preferred to the official S pad, and it uses 2.4 ghz radio waves as opposed to the shitty infra red wireless pad I had before, so I know I'll be impressed anyway. Wow, this actually turned out to be a pretty long post.

What the fuck is a Shakespeare?

OMG. late post, sorry.
First things first, I finished No More Heroes. The game got very tedious later on, even more so than when it started. There were a few shining moments when it ended though, like the reference to Duke Nukem Forever.
There's a section near the end where a cutscene is played in fast forward, to avoid it's rather adult nature, and as I went on YouTube to watch it slowed down I discovered the glorious violence that was featured in the NTSC release. So I re-watched the whole game's cutscenes. Taking away the violence from the game, as over the top as it was, actually took away the Tarantino-esque style of it, and I'm confident that the game would be more enjoyable for me had it been left in.
After that, I moved on Viking: Battle for Asgard, and after an hour and a half of running around in circles and not achieving anything, I gave up. It had the same problems for me as Morrowind and Two Worlds, not explaining my tasks enough and just dropping me in the dark. And when I did venture out into the harsh world, I was faced with literally armies of enemies, not standing a chance on my own. Sensing that I was looking at another Overlord, where I was dependant on my colleagues, I stopped right there.
God of War II was next on my list, and I quickly polished it off. It was enjoyable from start to finish, but I'm going to have a hard time parting with 40 beans for GoWIII if it takes three days to finish like it's three prequels. Three three three.
And so it's on to Killzone. For those of you who missed it, it's about a war between the earth's forces: The ISA (one letter away from USA), who are made up by the biggest D-Bags that America has to offer, and the Helghast (quite similar to Helmand, a province in Afghanistan), who are English. And MONSTERS. They are also pretty much the Nazi Party.
The game is great, all annoyances aside. There are problems, like the one-dimensional characters and repetitive speech ("COOOOOOME OOOOOOON!"), but all things considered it's a good game. The characters, not unlike Gears of War, are taken straight from that paint-by-numbers buddy war game/film hand book. There's all round great guy, token woman who may have a thing with great guy, angry wise-cracking and foul mouthed black guy and member of the opposition working for you as a spy and who's trustworthiness is questionable. His name is Hakha, by the way, and he's also a hacker. And all of them are able to use a variety of weaponry expertly, yet can't jump or open doors. Standard. But I am enjoying the game immensely. Take comfort, Sony, in knowing that at least I prefer Killzone to Halo.

Gonna take you for a ride...

Since I last posted I had a bit of a sit down with Dark Sector. While my previous complaints stand, something within me just popped and I started to really enjoy it. Might have been helped by the fact that I switched to my wired pad, thus removing the aforementioned problems involved, might have been that my expectations had descended so much that even the slightest positive event seemed monumental in comparison, who knows? Either way, I played it to completion, surprising even myself.
Another thing to note is that I didn't install it to my XBox 360's HDD, and the game didn't crash once. I think it's the only 360 game I've ever played not to do so without install.
As cash flow is tight right now, I've erected a 'Pile of Shame', games that I've had and never completed or in some cases even played. Dark Sector was at the top, followed by No More Heroes, Viking: Battle for Asgard, God of War II, Killzone, Killzone 2, SoulCalibur Legends, Alone in the Dark, Bully: Scholarship Edition on the Wii and Beowulf: The Game. Some Grade-A shit there, I know.
So after Dark Sector's fairly anticlimactic conclusion (I won't ruin the ending, not that there's anything to ruin), I moved on to No More Heroes. The absolute level of bewilderment I experience while playing this game is unfathomable. I'm at the 8th rank, having defeated three other assassins, so about 25% through the story, and I still don't get it. The garbled mistranslated dialog really doesn't help matters either, and I'm still trying to work out why having a shit enables you to save your game. Madness.
As for the gameplay, the combat sequences are really fun and energetic, but it's the bits in between that kind of ruin it. The game forces you into doing mini games and side quests to raise money to take part in assassinations, in a similar way to Saints Row's respect meter. That's right, you have to pay a fee to do your job. And when you complete the assassination, you get paid less than what you started with. I'd consider a career change. So between assassinations, the game is a bit of a chore. And the sandbox area is redundant too, the town is about as big as your average country village, with hardly any traffic or pedestrians wandering round. You can't hurt the pedestrians, steal cars or anything fun, so what's the point? Anyway, it's £6.99 new at Morrison's right now, and it's probably worth that. Maybe my opinions will change again.
After what seemed like an eternity, Marvel vs. Capcom 2 is finally available on the PSN store. Seeing as my PS2 version crashes all the time and the Dreamcast's D-Pad is spastic, I stretched to the 12 quid price tag. Either I got shit at it, or it got harder, because even on the second fight I got my ass handed to me by Rogue, on easy at that. I found Street Fighter II HD Remix a lot harder than Hyper Street Fighter II though, so it might just be that they've made the downloadable games harder to keep the arcade feel.
And to finish off, a mate of mine picked up Tomb Raider: Underworld on the Wii, and informed me of a horrific game breaking glitch where a swinging pole actually disappears from the level, and thee only way to get it back is to restart the level, assuming you have a save from the previous level. He didn't, and thus had to restart the game entirely. Oh dear.