Buster bowl me over with your bogus dance, shuffle me off my feet, even though I'll keep on runnin', I'll never get to Orange Street...

Thought I'd have a bit of a catch-up on what I've been playing recently, as with all of the changes and what have you I've barely had time to post about the awesome, average and absolutely arse games I've been playing. So, for old time's sake, here goes.

Firstly, for the sole benefit of Paul, Resident Evil: The Darkside Chronicles. A sequel to last year's Umbrella Chronicles, TDC is an on-rails shooter that follows the events of Resident Evil 2, Code: Veronica, and the mission that was alluded to in RE4, the first meeting between Leon and Krauser. Firstly, it seems that Leon has a very selective memory, as the story is told through Leon's flashbacks, and everything seems to revolve around him. Even the bits of RE2 where he wasn't even canonically there, are retold with him as some sort of action hero. And he does it all in his husky Batman voice, not the pre-pubescent whinge that he actually had back then. And while I'm on it, he had nothing to do with Code: Veronica at all, yet still recalls it.

Surely there are better ways to pierce your naval, Claire.

Okay then, good news first. The game is a far, far better play than it's predecessor. It's a lot more intense, and the fact that you can actually see your allies around you makes it feel far more cinematic. As a nostalgia trip it's unequaled. The graphics are absolutely astounding for a Wii game, and the Havok engine powering the physics makes the environment come alive in a way that the console isn't used to. But the visuals do have their faults: Both Leon and C:V sidekick Steve Burnside look identical (a lot like the tranny from Hollyoaks now you come to mention it), and probably shouldn't have been in the same game. But I suppose that's more down to poor character design than anything else.

But every silver-lined cloud is pissing on somebody somewhere, and none more than I. While the graphics are great, they push the Wii a bit too far, and as a result the shadows look awful. The dialogue is terrible, with characters repeatedly stating the obvious, spouting lines like 'I hate this' (no shit) and 'They won't let us through!'. They're Zombies, Leon, not fucking bouncers. The 'shakey cam' makes aiming a nightmare at times too, and the awful treatment of Robert Kendo, one of my series favourites, sent me into a rage. Lastly, for an on-rails shooter, the game is too long, a far cry from the throwaway 10-minute fun fests like House of the Dead and Ghost Squad.

Errrrrr... ModNation Racers! The PS3's premier kart racer is average at it's core, but saved thanks to it's user-friendly creation tools and fantastically creative and talented fanbase. I find myself spending more time downloading characters and karts than actually playing it, exactly how I was with M.U.G.E.N. on the PC. The create mode is easy and accessible too, which is great, because I never got to grips with LittleBigPlanet's tools at all. MNR had me creating like a pro within minutes.

That's right, creator, you stick it to the man!

So the game tries to be a perfect marriage of LittleBigPlanet and Mario Kart, yet fails to encompass the charm of either. It's relentless attempts at being 'street' alienate those who don't buy into that crap, and Mario's game engine is far simpler and accessible to a younger audience, with MNR confusing matters with drifting, stacking powerups and an accumulative boost meter. So for these reasons it stalls at the finishing line. Good, but not great.

Alpha Protocol then. Basically a merging of two of my favourite things, the gameplay of Mass Effect and the theme of 24, it stands apart from other games of the RPG genre by being set in a contemporary real-world setting, packed with espionage and action. Strapping on the shoes of Mike Thorton, you are the newest recruit of the titular government agency thrust into a world of combat and subterfuge when you are forced to go rogue.

Keep your gun on him, he's definitely a terrorist!

Below average graphics and stereotypical characters and dialogue are the only tarnishes on an otherwise brilliant western RPG, with a twisting plot that genuinely does revolve around your every action. The developer, Obsidian, has constantly bragged about the game's ability to channel the 'Three JBs'; James Bond, Jason Bourne and Jack Bauer, but truth be told, mine was more like a very Torchwood-esque John Barrowman: morally ambiguous and shagging anything he can get his hands on.

I'll not go much further with this one, because my colleague Trev and I are planning a joint review, but I'll just say, I was greatly saddened when I read that Sega have ruled out a sequel thanks to poor sales. The Man wins again. Sigh.

Finally, I've been hopping, skipping and wall-running through the Wii version of Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands. Far from a port, the Wii version is a completely different animal to it's HD cousins, with a whole new, unrelated storyline and different powers and a more strategic combat system more akin to that in The Sands of Time. And while it takes cues from the main TFS release and TSOT, it also has a few throwbacks to the 2008 PoP too, with the power plates helping you to traverse the environment, and a 'never die' mechanic replacing the time powers once more (although you can only be rescued a few times before being sent back to a checkpoint). It's great for fans of the genre like yours truly, but a lack of classic controller support harms it in a big way once your arm starts to ache.

And while I'm on the subject, I saw the Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time movie to last week. It's enjoyable, but not particularly close to the source material in any way, save for three scenes which are nearly identical to key moments in the game. Jake Gyllenhaal is truly awful, with his sad puppy looks and dialect-hopping English accent, but fantastic turns from Alfred Molina, Ben Kingsley and a surprise appearance from Richard Coyle (voice of Keats, the protagonist from PS3 RPG Folklore, and the infamous Jeff Murdoc in BBC sitcom Coupling) who absolutely steals the show, all is forgiven. And if it does anything right, it's the boy/girl chemistry thing that I loved about the TSOT game and the 2008 PoP. Good, disposable fun.

He may look like a dejected Labrador, but he's still more attractive than Maggie.

Right, back to my cave then. This Saturday 24HG hits it's first anniversary, so I'll see you then. Ta!

I got soul, but I'm not a soldier...

It's been a busy week boys and girls, but not in a good way. I've hardly had any gaming time at all this week, with the candle being burnt at both ends and all that, it's all caught up to me and as soon as the evening comes round I'm out like a light, when I would normally be gaming.

So I'm still knee deep in Darksiders, although now I'm more used to the gameplay and combat system It's gradually getting a bit easier. I'm not going to bore you with that though. I did however polish off Gay Tony (almost a double entendre, but not quite), so I moved onto another 360 title.

Soldier of Fortune: Payback is a 2007 FPS, and is perhaps most well-known for it's extreme violence. Hell, that's the only reason I bought it. It's a standard Modern Warfare style romp through various Middle Eastern and Chinese locales, the point of which is to rain down American one-man justice on everybody who doesn't fly the Stars and Stripes on their front lawn everyday, or 'terrorists' as they are commonly referred to.

I want to make it clear: This is a BAD GAME. Probably worse than Rogue Warrior. But, it is playable, due in no small part to the absolutely hilarious and over-the-top violence and piss-awful script and voice acting. Each level is just you plugging bullet after bullet into the natives of whichever country you happen to be in at the time, occasionally pausing for some banter with the female operator through your headset, usually dropping more one-liners than Arnold Schwarzenegger, and then back to the slaughter.

Nearly every shot fired severs a limb too. I was once outflanked by a marauding freedom hater, who hit me in the back with the butt of his (rather stereotypical) AK-47. In retaliation, I produced my trusty standard combat knife, and in one fell swoop, decapitated him! The comical level of violence makes carrying on worthwhile, although when I came up to a small escort section, the buddy AI resulted in more mission failures than I had patience for and I placed it back on the shelf. It had served it's purpose.

Sensing that I would have nothing else to write about this week, I hurriedly downloaded a few demos. The first of which was Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Conviction. As ashamed as I am to admit it, this is my first experience of Splinter Cell, despite owning Chaos Theory on the PS2 and never playing it. I don't know why.

The game, as far as the demo shows, is very similar the The Bourne Conspiracy, just with more refined shooting and less interesting takedowns. The interrogation at the start was fun, with a lot of detailed, if a little unbelievably OTT environmental damage, but the rest of the game failed to grab me. I might grab it a bit later on, but the fact that I have four games to catch up on first makes it a little daunting.

I also tried out Blur, which is a very old-school feeling arcade racer. It's pretty much WipEout or Rollcage, only in normal licenced cars. And CSI: Deadly Intent, which is a contender for the worst game I've ever played, with it's patronising tutorial voiceover and the graphical quality of a PSP game. It's the sort of thing you'd expect to find as a free download on the CSI website, a boring point-and-click evidence finder game, which is about as emotionally gripping as cleaning your kitchen floor. And if I was Laurence Fishburne I'd be pretty pissed about how overweight my character model looked.

Oh yeah, I won the NowGamer.com Podcast competition! At the end of each Podcast, they play a piece of music from a videogame (usually remixed or distorted in some way), and whoever identifies which game the music hails from, and is chosen from the other correct answers using the curiosity of a cat, of all things, wins a box of assorted junk from around the NG office. I answered correctly with Laura's Theme from Silent Hill 2, and was lucky enough to be drawn. I'll post over on VGSpace detailing my haul when the postie drags it to my door.

Well, short but sweet, eh? Next week I'll have a report Super Street Fighter IV, and I'll try and get Darksiders out of the way and make a start on InFamous. Tata for now.

Matt Day-Mahn!

You know what makes me awesome? The fact that I buy games that I know to be widely condemned as shit, unplayable smears of filth on a perfectly good BluRay or DVD, wastes of nonrenewable resources used to create the disk, just so I can attempt to entertainingly write about how shit they are for you, the 3 or 4 people who actually read this crap every week. But you know what makes life awesome? When they aren't actually that bad.
Take Hellboy: The Science of Evil as an example. The PS3 version, which is the one I've been playing, received a score of 47% on Metacritic, yet I fail to see what's so bad about it. It's not like Batman, where I'm a complete fanboy, I did love the first Hellboy movie but the second was garbage, the comics do very little to hold my attention and the animated films are a bit on the mundane side, so if I was to be biased I'd be joining them.
The game itself is an enjoyable God-of-War-em-up which places you in the hooves of the titular demonic anti-hero as you (for reasons yet unknown) chase a Witch through a surprisingly atmospheric forest graveyard, bashing the daylights out of everything in your way with your signature massive stone hand, or whatever you find yourself close enough to pick up at the time, from discarded weapons to chunks of a tree to severed parts of enemies departed. As well as the melee combat you also have Red's trusty sidearm, his oversized revolver which can be equipped with various different kinds of ammunition to serve different purposes, from freezing enemies to destroying enchanted doorways.
The game occasionally flashes back to one of Hellboy's previous missions too, the first of which being a trip to Japan which throws quite a few nods to the first of the animated films 'Blood and Iron', with enchanted swords and floating heads, and to bait the fans an encounter with Herman von Klempt and his kriegsaffe, Brutus.
It's good brainless fun, slightly average but not bad, and it will sate my appetite before I get my hands on God of War III, Dante's Inferno and Darksiders in a couple of months. Glad I played Hellboy first though, doubt it would receive such a positive review after the big three.
Also, given this weeks post's title (I couldn't resist even though it's not his likeness), I've hammered through The Bourne Conspiracy on the XBox360, and absolutely loved it.
The game borrows from a lot of others, but the most unlikely (but most apparent) influence comes in the form of Uncharted: Drake's Fortune. When Bourne first appeared onscreen I immediately thought, with his appearance being close to Nathan Drake, Shadow Complex's Jason Flemming and Dark Void's William Grey, that he should have been voiced by he-who-shall-not-be-named. But the way he runs, takes cover, flinches from near misses and to an extent fights (he uses Drake's familiar jump-punch move) also echo Naughty Dog's triumph.
The gunplay is what ultimately lets Bourne down, being uninspired copy-and-paste Gears of War style hide and shoot (although with the more realistic weaponry and destructible cover, it also harks back to Uncharted), and as well as being a bit mundane at times it also gets a little frustrating. But the melee combat really shines. Unlike Uncharted, where you could punch and shoot on the fly, when an enemy engages Bourne up close the game shifts into a Shenmue style fighting mechanic, in which combinations of heavy and light attacks can be used, and when an on-screen 'adrenaline meter' reaches the appropriate level, the B button can trigger 'takedown moves' which immediately incapacitate between one and three enemies in a true-to-the-film cinematic fashion, often making use of the environment in typically inventive ways.
Speaking of cinematics, some of the cutscenes are hauntingly close to the film, particularly the failed assassination attempt on the boat and the Paris apartment attack, which was without a doubt a highlight of the game for me. And taking to the streets of a very destructible Paris in a very indestructible Mini Cooper in a Burnout meets The Italian Job frenzy was an absolute thrill-ride. I had hoped the driving mechanic would pop up again somewhere, as it was fantastic fun, but it never did. Anyway, I whole-heartedly recommend this to fans of both the film and the genre, it's available at most preowned shops for around £7 and won't eat up a lot of time, but it's a very rewarding experience.
It's a rare game that challenges a player to question his or her own sexuality. Curiosity led me to Google Dragon Age: Origins' man-on-man sex scene, and I unwaveringly decided it wasn't for me. Yet Band Hero, which the wife brought home on Sunday, had me worried at times at just how much enjoyment I was having with it, not only was I fearing for my heterosexuality but at times, bopping along to No Doubt's 'Just a Girl', I even began to wonder about my actual gender.
I know I commented on the demo, saying it was arse, but the full game actually proves itself to be more fun and actually slightly more polished than Guitar Hero 5. The series' cast is back in full force, but they've been bastardized to fit the game's X-Factor aesthetic. Gone is Johnny Napalm's Mohican, tamed to blond spikes. Goodbye Judy Nail's piercings, she's resorted to the awful Avril Lavigne 'mosher' template. And what did they do to Axel Steel...
The band also play a more visible role this time, when a track features a female vocalist the game provides you with one, so you aren't watching a butch metalhead squeal out a girlish ballad. Also, in the case of Evanescence's angst-ridden abortion 'Bring Me To Life', the bits where the guy sings were performed by my avatar, the guitarist. "Ha ha, you're the fat one" the wife pointed out. Her words cut deeper than any knife. I did resent the fact that, when playing 'Wannabe' by the Spice Girls, the camera panned to me for the line 'Easy V doesn't come for free'. Not only does it insult my sexuality, now I'm a hooker too. And a real lady, apparently. It makes up for the insults in a very realistically obtainable achievement worth 490 points (seriously) though.
Okay, to wrap things up: Having a bit of a break from Sam and Max after a barmy (yet equally genius and hilarious) song and dance routine about war performed by a bunch of presidential aides just about melted my brain, and have decided that ACII Discovery isn't as good as it first seems, as it's all to easy to wind up stuck between two guards and with the blocking reversals from the other games somehow forgotten about this surely means certain death. And have decided to spend the XBox time between now and Mass Effect 2 hoovering up the last few achievements on Fallout 3, including collecting the Bobbleheads, which I epic failed at when I blew up Megaton without collecting the one from Lucas Simms' house and forgot to save beforehand. I had to go back to the previous save before that, which lost me about three hours' play. And a warning to anyone else starting afresh, don't try to do Operation Anchorage at level 5. It's unforgiving. Ciao.

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.