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.

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.

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.