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.