I'm a 21st Century Digital Boy, I don't know how to read but I got a lot of toys

You know how sometimes life hands you a lemon and you make lemonade? Well, gaming-wise anyway, this last week life handed me a bottle of lemonade. Not that cheap shit either, I'm talking 7-Up. With Vodka in it.

Firstly, there's my new friend Dead Space. HMV, in it's infinite quest to make no profit whatsoever, had the Limited Edition of Dead Space 2 (The one with Dead Space: Extraction) on the PS3 marked at £24.99. I've not really had much time on it just yet, so more on that next time.

Secondly, I've upgraded from The Sims 2 to The Sims 3 on the PC. I played it on the PS3 at the tail-end of last year and was very impressed in the open-endedness of what was essentially finally a true Sims game on a console, but as far as it burns me to say it, the PC version is still far superior. Initially there's the mouse controls, instantly accessible to a long time Sims gamer where the Joypad controls seemed overcomplicated and baffling at times.

Then there's the memory limit, restricting how many items you can place in your digital self's home. It's plagued console Sims games since day one, but was always honest about what it was. It the console version of The Sims 3 it was disguised as a fire-hazard meter, a name which made me wonder if it was prevalent in the PC version too. I was very relieved to find it isn't. Then there's the seamless transition between the neighbourhood and house views, eliminating the need for a loading screen, and finally the already copious amount of free user-made costumes and hairstyles available for download, compared with the EA-sanctioned £7.99-price tagged packs on the PSN store, and I kind of wonder why I even bothered with the console version at all.

The only gripe I have with the game itself (other than that obvious things, such as pets and weather effects, have been intentionally left out to make way for expansion packs later on) is that the aesthetics of the characters themselves are a lot more serious looking, away from the over-emotive, hyper-expressive look of The Sims 2's titular heroes, and in turn make them less endearing to me. Plus, every male Sim I try to make ends up looking like Jack Black, and all the women look like Down's Syndrome sufferers, but aside from that it's great. The Sims 2 isn't quite obsolete yet, one of the big thrills of The Sims for me is having multiple households going, and in The Sims 3 you can only have one playable family in each neighbourhood.

The console version isn't different enough from it's PC sibling to warrant owning both, so my second HMV trip saw me re-homing it for £23 of store credit (they were selling the game new for £27 too, it's as if they don't actually want to make a profit), which I put towards Split/Second Velocity on the XBox 360 and BlazBlue: Continuum Shift on the PS3, both of which were on a '2 for £30' offer. Split/Second is excellent, I find myself actually really looking forward to playing it, and by trait I'm not a fan of racing games. It's not as good as Burnout really, but it's still got that same level of over-the-top mayhem, and the adrenaline rush of beating your opponent by two hundredths of a second is incomparable to any other feeling.
 

I haven't tried BlazBlue yet, but I've heard great things and I was a big fan of it's spiritual predecessor Guilty Gear. I've mainly got it to bridge the gap between the upcoming Mortal Kombat and Marvel vs. Capcom 3: Fate of Two Worlds, which I bought last Friday. I'm not going to say much about MVC3, as I'm building to a video review that I'm hoping to have ready for next week's post. In true fashion though, me and Raz7el had a showdown over PSN, and just like Dead or Alive 4 before it, I tanned him pretty soundly. I'm just trolling you man, we were pretty evenly matched. At least we both looked like we knew how to play, unlike when we stunk at Street Fighter IV over XBox Live.

Deadpool, as well as being a useful character, also provides genuine comedy to the game

And to bring it all to an end this week, I finally finished God of War: Ghost of Sparta on PSP. Without giving away too much, the moral of the story is that nobody gets to kill a member of Kratos' family but Kratos. Otherwise, he just gets angry. Well, angrier.

This is what it sounds like... when doves cry...

Ah, medieval Persia. A place of great beauty. A place of technological wonder. A place where villains are grandiose and theatrical, and heroes are gallant, chivalrous and Caucasian.

So Friday saw me perhaps foolishly overlook Red Dead Redemption in favour of Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands, the 10th game in the PoP series and not a sequel to 2008's un-subtitled Prince of Persia, but an 'interquel' set in between The Sands of Time (which I played last week) and Warrior Within. And it is definitely NOT a movie tie-in.

I did have the game preordered at GAME, along with a limited edition pack of PoP playing cards, but after seeing the queue for Rockstar's Wild West opus, I ducked into HMV instead, whom I discovered were giving away the 1981 version of The Clash of the Titans on BluRay with every purchase of The Forgotten Sands on the PS3. Sold.

So anyway. The prince (unofficially named Dastan in the upcoming Disney film) has been sent by his father (who you had to slay in the first game, having become a sand monster, although that never happened due to the prince rewinding time to before the event, stay with me) to the kingdom of his elder brother, Malik, to learn how to be a successful ruler. Upon his arrival, he finds Malik's palace under siege from unknown invaders, and Malik himself fighting a losing battle. As a last resort Malik unleashes the fabled army of King Solomon, which happens to be an unlimited swarm of sand creatures led by a huge demon named Ratash. With the help of Razia, Ratash's benevolent female counterpart, and the powers she bestows upon him (conveniently including the ability to rewind time a few seconds) the prince has to find a way to defeat the demon and banish the army before the world is overrun and all is lost.

The ice power makes for some very tense moments.

Initially I felt like the game was holding my hand a little bit compared to the prequel, all of the moves and actions seem a lot easier to pull off, and everything moves a lot slower giving you more time to pull them off. The combat has also been noticeably simplified, sacrificing strategic thinking and positioning for waves and waves of easily killed but overwhelmingly numerous enemies for the player to wade through, which sounds like a negative point but in all actuality is extremely satisfying. The major new point is the prince's ability to flash-freeze water, allowing himself access to previously unreachable locations.

Aside from that, the game is pretty much what you'd expect from the series: puzzle-solving, acrobatics and a healthy dose of swordplay. The graphics are spot-on, highly detailed, and the only two visual qualms I had are with the prince himself: his face is distinctly simian looking and his arms have a plastic look about them, similar to Dead or Alive's Ryu Hayabusa. But the detail in his armour is spectacular in HD.

Well, it's an enjoyable game. I'll confess I've only played The Sands of Time and the 2008 PoP up until now, and this game lacks the boy/girl partnership that was done so well in the others. Razia pops up every so often, but it just isn't the same. But that's made up for in the game's cinematic and epic closure, set in the epicenter of a huge sandstorm. Verdict? Not going to win any awards, but fantastic fun and great for any fan of the genre.

So, Metro 2033 then? I haven't got this linking thing worked out. Metro 2033 is a post-apocalyptic First-Person Shooter based on a Russian novel of the same name. The game puts you in the shoes of Artyom, a man born in 2013, the final days of Moscow before the world was devastated by nuclear war and forced to live his first twenty years (2013 + 20 = 2033) in an underground settlement in the city's subway system (hence 'Metro') before leaving for the mutant-infested surface on a mission to save the world. As gamers, I'd forgive you if you think you've heard all this before.

But unlike Fallout 3, the game it shares it's back story with, Metro is a very linear experience, and Moscow is a lot darker and a much more depressing setting than the Capital Wasteland. The scenes set in the subterranean towns are very reminiscent of the flashback/forward scenes in The Terminator, with survivors living woefully in overcrowded squalor. Heading outside is also very different, with the game being set a lot sooner after the nuclear disaster than Fallout 3, making for a more hostile world. The air is still polluted, necessitating the use of a gas mask which requires frequent filter changes. Water is irradiated as you'd expect, and hurts you on contact as opposed to the accumulative nature of the radiation in F3.

Unable to find a Metro 2033 screenshot, I'll have to make do with this stock photo of Birmingham.

Okay, no more Fallout comparisons I promise. The game, as I've mentioned, is very dark and depressing, and mostly (so far, I've only played a couple of hours) spent skulking around in dark tunnels with hideously underpowered weaponry. Ammunition, as you can imagine, is a commodity, and is actually used as currency, with pre-war ammo worth more than the low quality bullets created after the bombs. Things begin to get a bit weird when ghosts start appearing in subway cars, and Artyom is plagued with visions of tall, lank creatures in the darkness, taking you up to just about right where I'm at.

Okay, I can't decide whether this game is really good but hard going, or really, really shit. But it definitely is one or the other. The graphics and atmosphere are both phenomenal, and the fact that the cutscenes play out in first person brings a feel of Half-Life 2 into the mix. Voice acting is hit and miss, with some of the frankly strangest accents I've ever heard flying around, and the characters are all grizzled Russian men, without fail, to the point of not being able to tell them apart. I'll reserve judgment for now, as I'm firmly on the fence with this one.

And that's about it. I finished Alan Wake, and the game seemed to lose it's way a bit. After the first half being genuinely scary, reminiscent of Jame's Herbert's fantastic novel 'The Dark', but not actually that good, the second half brings the gameplay up to scratch, with the story descending into a camp buddy comedy. The whole thing is capped off with a baffling ending that answers no questions and leaves no room for the planned sequels or DLC to follow on from. So the game, while decent, is not a patch on what it could have been.

James Herbert is about the only author this guy doesn't name-drop.

So that's that then. I'll try to be on time next week, with Dante's Inferno, hopefully a verdict on Metro 2033 and I just might possibly get my hands on the original Lost Planet. Time will tell.

A long time ago, in a galaxy far far away...

There's been a decidedly Sci-Fi feel to my gaming this week. As reported, I was attempting to gather up the remaining Achievements on Fallout 3, so it occured to me that I should download and play the 5th and final expansion pack Mothership Zeta. I'd not heard good things about it to be honest, but for the sake of my Gamerscore (which, as any self-respecting Xbox gamer will tell you, is a virtual extension to one's penis), I thought I'd give it a shot.

The add-on is triggered when you find Fallout 3's fabled UFO crash site, previously infamous for the ridiculously powerful Alien Blaster you find there, and are 'beamed up' so to speak, to the titular alien mothership where you are experimented on and placed in an induced coma. When you awaken, you are greeted in a cell by a lady named Somah. She throws the idea out there that if you stage a fist fight the guards will unlock the door, and then the two of you can fuck them up and escape, and surprisingly it works (although she neglected to mention that she's bricks hard and very good at unarmed combat, and that resulted in a crippled head for me). So begins a tale of survival and escapism, involving a cowboy, a samurai, about a million aliens and a 200 year old little girl, but I'll not ruin any of that for you.

I actually enjoyed it, not as much as Point Lookout but definitely as much as The Pitt and more than Broken Steel and Operation Anchorage. It appeased the latent Sci-Fi geek in me, and kept me occupied for pretty much a full day. There are a bunch of new weapons available, my favourite of which was the Alien Disintegrator, a sort of Laser Rifle with a clip capacity of 100 shots and a reload time of under a second. At the end of the story I came away with upwards of 1600 rounds for it, and that's after heavy usage throughout too, so it will most likely see me through the last four Cheevos that I haven't acquired yet. Also to note is the fact that all of the alien equipment is extremely light, most of it doesn't weigh a thing, so you can virtually bankrupt the Capital Wasteland when you get back with your loot, which oddly enough none of the merchants bat an eyelid at. Much recommended anyway.

Fallout 3 has pretty much taken up the bulk of my week, but the big story is today's release of Mass Effect 2, the collector's edition of which saw me £60 poorer this morning. First things first, the collector's content is actually really good. The double-thick cardboard sleeve houses both a steelbook and a cardboard case (a mere mortal collector's edition only offers one of either). The steelbook holds both game disks and a bonus disk (the contents of which are still a mystery to me), plus the instructions, obviously, and a download code for some GAME-exclusive armour, and the fold-out cardboard case contains a plastic wallet-size Cerberus Network membership card (Mass Effect 2's platform for downloading DLC, which costs a completely unreasonable 1200 MS Points for anyone who buys the game preowned), which then grants you access to a downloadable squad member and side-quest, as well as a hardback artbook and the first issue of the Mass Effect: Redemption comic series. It doesn't look like much, but it seems worth it when it's in your hands. It's safe to say that, apart from the Guitar Hero bundles, this is the most expensive game I've ever bought though.

On to the game. I can't say too much, mainly because I haven't had time to form a proper opinion on it just yet. I will say that it doesn't seem quite as good as the first one, it just doesn't feel as deep. The game is more of a shooter it seems, and less of an RPG. Your squadmates, for example, have a default look, which isn't changeable. And the guns have technologically regressed, and now need reloading, like every other FPS. They tried to explain it, something about the advanced weaponry needing extra coolant that needs to be changed, but any way you look at it it's still reloading, and you need to collect the coolant, which is still ammo. The graphics, which were my only gripe with the first one, have been improved tenfold, there's none of the scruffy shadows and the texture pop up is entirely gone. It makes my pasty, deformed Shepard look a lot, ahem, more noticeable. Another plus-point is the fact that you can sprint outside of combat now, and for a lot longer, so you don't have to dad-run around the Citadel anymore.

The new characters (who I won't go into in detail for risk of spoilers) don't seem as likable as the ones in the first game though. I've seen a few returning faces, Seth Green's abhorrent Joker is still around and even more hateful, and Dr Chakwas (an anagram of 'hacksaw', fact fans) is knocking about on the ship. There's also been brief appearances from everyone's favourite bigots Ashley and Navigator Pressley, Cpt. Arbiter (sorry, Anderson) and Udina, Tali and even that Asari I let escape from Saren's lab on Virmire the first time round. There are a few new races too, the only ones I've seen so far are called the Vorcha, who are very theatrical enemies with the way they bare their fangs and growl as they talk. They are basically the monster equivalent of Dick Dastardly.

I'll report more next week, after I've had a bit more time with it. In other news this week, I earned my first ever Platinum Trophy on the PS3, for Assassin's Creed II. For the XBox fanboys out there, a Platinum Trophy is awarded when you collect all of the other Trophies, which usually mirror the Achievements on a 360 game. So in effect, I 1000ed it. And on a similar note, I got that 490 point Cheevo on Band Hero. I'm not addicted to Gamerscore, I promise. I was very proud of myself for not buying Tatsunoko vs. Capcom today, opting to be the bigger man and actually get my nephew a birthday present. Mario Kart Wii, if you were wondering. Oh, and ask Raz7el what happened when we played Dead or Alive 4 today. Laters...

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.