Oh my God, they killed Kenny!

This week, as I said I would, I finally got back on track with my backlog of unplayed Christmas games. Hellboy: The Science of Evil was first on my pile, after I briefly touched upon it a few weeks ago, before Mass Effect 2 barged in and ate up my whole life for a week.

As I had said previously, Hellboy was perhaps under appreciated, below average review scores all-round. But it found a fan in me. Where it admittedly lacks in areas such as next-gen visuals (the polygon count is quite low and the size of the on-screen text shows that it wasn't meant for HD gaming) and the story is fairly hard to follow with the slightly below-par scripting, the gameplay is brainless fun, and it offers plenty of fan service in the form of more gas mask wearing Nazis and frog demons than you could ever ask for. And the final boss fight is genuinely a good fight, unlike a few very highly praised games, Uncharted 2 springs to mind. And plus, it's got Ron Perlman in it, which generally adds a few points to the overall score.

With Hellboy finished I moved on to the often ignored PS2 high-school horror game ObsCure, a 2004 release from french developers Hydravision Entertainment. The premise of a possible Canis Canem Edit plus Resident Evil with a pinch of the school section of Silent Hill made the game very enticing to me, and while that wasn't exactly what was delivered, I'm still enjoying it.

The game opens with panning shots of an ordinary American high-school, accompanied by the dulcet tones of Canadian pop-punk jerks Sum 41 (music that sets the tone about as well as Slayer would for Mary Poppins). The camera comes to a halt in the school gym, as a mismatched group of youth stereotypes play a game of basketball. Here we are introduced to our five 'heroes': Kenny; a 'roid monkey, Stan (I think somebody was watching South Park); an underachiever who seems to fail, as so many white American teens do, to understand that he isn't a black gangster rapper, Josh; school newspaper geek and Shannon; all round genius who dresses slutty to downplay her intellect (she's got her priorities right). After everyone leaves Kenny to work off his steroids, he gets a phone call from our last player character, his girlfriend Ashley; a laitina cheerleader with bizarre fighting skills. While he's distracted by the phone, his bag is taken by a mystery evildoer, and he naturally chases them into an underground lab filled with monsters, where he is captured. The rest of the group, upon realising he's missing the next day, neglect to call the police the next day, and instead hide in the school (where all of the teachers appear to actually live) until the evening and go looking for him.

And so begins our tale. I want to point out here, that for a game approaching six years of age, the graphics are spot-on. All of the backgrounds are fully 3D and the characters look great. And the real time physics are among the best I've seen on the console, things move realistically when you brush past them, in a generation of consoles where most objects are super glued in place. The music is great too, Canadian arseholes aside, it goes from an eery choir one minute to the next being quite reminiscent of the Shinra Mansion section of Final Fantasy VII. There was a dodgy bit during a puzzle involving acid, a paper cup and a padlock (ripped straight from Monkey Island), which sounded like a German Oom-Pah band, but it was over quickly.

The game is a bit Resident Evil Zero, in that you control two characters at a time, with the ability to swap between them at will and the AI taking over the rejected character. However, ObsCure does this better than RE0 in a few respects. Firstly, the game features drop in/drop out multiplayer, like a bastardized Lego game, although I haven't actually tried that yet. Secondly, if the AI decides the best course of action is to drop the secondary character in the shit, so to speak(And it does in both games), and they wind up dead, this doesn't spell Game Over in ObsCure, the rest of the gang go on without them (or even shedding a tear, it seems). So in effect, you have five lives, and each life has a unique ability, be it Stan's 'master of unlocking' (worrying that a school lists this as a plus point on his report card), Ashley's worrying level of fighting prowess, Josh's journalistic ability to know whenever anything is interesting in the room, Shannon's precognitive ability to know what to do next or Kenny's ability to erm... Run quite fast.

Not that you'll get to use many of these skills though, because the game's infuriating difficulty level means that your teen heroes will drop like flies within seconds of a monster making itself known. You have to collect discs to save, and the limited nature of these makes it difficult to judge when to use them. Couple that with the even more limited health items and the fact that your characters are more fragile than Samuel L. Jackson in Unbreakable and it spells disaster. When you find a pistol and subsequently a shotgun (always lying about in an American high-school), the game gets a bit easier, but the first half hour or so is very tense.

I have played (and replayed after dying without saving) for about an hour and a half now, and am actually really enjoying it, despite difficulty being a bit of a phobia of mine. I have read in reviews that it only takes 3 hours to finish though, which is a bit of a downer. But I do have ObsCure 2 in the pile too, this time on the Wii. In the words of our racially confused hero Stan, ObsCure is Hype, yo. I don't know what that means either.

Here's where I would normally put a lid on things, but no! I got an early demo of Heavy Rain through an online promotion this week. The demo puts you in the shoes of an elderly and overweight police detective named Scott Shelby at first, and makes you question a prostitute over a serial killer who happened to target her son. It's a bit odd at first controlling your character like a racing car, pressing the R2 button to control the speed at which you walk and steering with the left analogue stick, but you get used to it.

As with Fahrenheit before it, most of the scenes are played out in the form of Quick Time Events. Before you all groan and switch off, they are done really well in this, particularly in the demo's fight scene, once an unwanted guest of the prostitute gets a bit shirty and you have to sort him out. It's a lengthy scene, and the commands come thick and fast, and missing one doesn't fail you instantly, instead the fight takes a different course. And watching the fight is a treat too, the cinematics are fantastic.

The second scene puts you behind the wheel of FBI agent Norman Jayden, and you are charged with investigating a murder scene. At your disposal are a pair of high tech glasses and a glove (to be honest, they were the only thing that seemed to put a damper on the experience, it subtracted from the realism greatly) which help you find clues and evidence. A quick sniff round and you find out that the killer escaped in a car, and that's where the demo ends. I hope the next two weeks are short ones, because I can't wait to get my hands on that game.

Now I'll wrap it up. Tried the beta of Modnation Racers and the demo of Sonic and Sega Allstars Racing this week, and controversially I prefer Sonic in terms of actual gameplay. But truth be told, neither really have the charm of Mario Kart anyway. And placing Sonic in a car and Tails in an aeroplane is redundant. Bit like giving Luke Skywalker a baseball bat. Bye for now!