I only speak-a, how you say, "Fractured English". Is how my parents used to speak-a back home.

As planned, last Saturday I braved the Meadowhall shopping centre for a copy of the Assassin's Creed II White Edition, and found solace in the upstairs GAME store, and a quite needy-seeming sales assistant with a ginger beard who assured me that he had the White Edition on the 360 (As I had opted for the PS3 version) and it was a great game. If I'm quite willing to shell out £54.99 of my (wife's) hard-earned cash on a videogame, I don't really need the extra persuasion.

Firstly, the Ezio plastic statuette (as I'm going to call it, action figures have articulation) is of a really good quality. It's quite big at a reported 20cm (I haven't checked), Sacred 2's ended up being about 5 or 6cm tall, even though on the promotional pictures it was taller than the PS3 game case and judging by the size of the Collector's Edition casing I had felt a little cheated when it tumbled out of the box and into my lap, it's sword and wings bent out of shape. She's about the size of the Ryu and C. Viper models in the Street Fighter IV set, but then again there were two of those in the pack. Anyway.

As well as being a fair size, it feels substantial and is very well painted (I first thought his eyes looked a bit dodgy, but in all fairness they do in the game too). Every little detail is captured in a quality that you wouldn't expect from a GAME exclusive pack, way better than the Edward Carnby figure in their Alone in the Dark set. But saying that, I caught sight of the Soap MacTavish model from the GAME exclusive edition of Modern Warfare 2 while I was in the shop, and that was even bigger and just as well made too.

So on to the game. At first, I can't say I was impressed. You begin as Desmond Miles, behind-the-scenes hero of the series, and have to go through a lengthy intro sequence as you escape from your captors from the first game with assassin double-agent Lucy. Now Desmond happens to be voiced by one Nolan North, and it appears that since the first Assassin's Creed (hereby referred to as AC), the good folk at Ubisoft have played both Uncharted games and realised his potential, and have decided to basically make Desmond into a carbon copy of Drake. He quips and wisecracks in his Whedon-esque way, and I'm sure he never used to do that in the original. While (without the proper direction) that is slightly annoying, the real mind-melting irritant comes in the form of Danny Wallace, the jerk who made a career out of being Dave Gorman's mate and copying his brand of doing-something-stupid-for-money comedy, while not carrying it off as well as the other. Whatever he is anyway, he's not an actor, voice or otherwise. That's why they didn't let him play himself in Yes Man, because Jim Carey is both an actor and actually funny. So whenever he pipes up in ACII (luckily you don't see him often, his character is modelled after him and the graphics of ACII aren't great in close-up shots), with his sarcastic prickness, it makes me want to beat him to death with a copy of 'Are You Dave Gorman?'. I still might.

Well, after you finally get in the Animus again, the game goes from strength to strength. It's hard to say what makes ACII better than it's predecessor, but it just is. Everything, from the charismatic hero to the more fluid assassinations just feels 'right'. One thing I have noticed is that AC was very businesslike in structure, you're given a list of people to kill and you have to systematically find and kill each of them. That's it. ACII isn't all about assassinating people (although given the title, it's still the core theme), there are plenty of other things to do, and not just in sidequests too. The main story has you doing a range of things from beating up your Sister's cheating boyfriend to taking part in carnival games in a scene that actually reminded me of Bully in it's atmosphere, the city is decorated in banners and flags and such, quite like the Halloween segment of Rockstar's overlooked classic. There are also assassin's tombs to find, and while you're in them the game becomes more like a traditional platformer, a bit of a homage to games like Tomb Raider, or indeed Ubisoft's own Prince of Persia series. That brand of game has fast become one of my favourite genres.

It's a fantastic game. It's had me playing for just about a solid week, and that includes a pretty much all-day session on Tuesday while I was snowed in without my laptop for comfort (the power pack has died, and I've been forced to borrow a top of the range £630 Sony VAIO monstrosity on Windows 7 to blog for the last couple of weeks), and I'm yet to get bored with it. It's rare that that happens nowadays. I wish I'd played it before I'd written my 2009 top ten, because it deserves a place in there.

In other news, I actually was at the end of Butcher Bay last week, but the game had glitched and not given me a minigun when it was supposed to have, rendering me unable to get past the two walking tanks in the next room. I have tried reading guide after guide on the internet, and each one tells me I'm supposed to have a minigun so I'm just going to YouTube the ending before I start Dark Athena when I get around to playing it. Matt Hazard: Blood Bath and Beyond appeared on the PSN store last night and as I was actually quite excited to play it, I downloaded the trial version and was severely underwhelmed. If the developers had just copied Shadow Complex's right stick aiming and auto-aiming into the background it would work, but using the same stick to aim and move is just awful, and having to press a button to aim at background enemies is very inconvenient. Plus, the game is fucking hard too. And with three weeks to go to the sequel, I've started yet another playthrough of Mass Effect, but since the blog's conception this is the second time I've played it, so I won't go on about that too much. Forgot how awesome it is though, in gameplay and art direction, so it's boosted my excitement tenfold. Wonder if GAME are doing a midnight opening?

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.

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.

When all soldiers lay their weapons down, and all kings and all queens relinquish their crowns...

This week has been an eventful week for me where gaming's concerned.
On Friday, after blogging I went to work, and was asked if my locker could play host to a friend's copy of Modern Warfare 2, to which I obliged. He then went home without it, and seeing as Saturday was my day off he let me take it home and have a go.
Over the course of Saturday I played through the campaign, choosing to ignore the multiplayer as it really isn't my cup of tea. At first I wondered what I'd let myself in for, listening to gung-ho American troops whoop with delight every time one of them drops an ethnic minority of their choosing, but once I got to the covert ops, with CoD4's protagonists Cpt. Soap McTavish and later (spoiler) Cpt. Price, the game actually got quite good.
Yeah, as with CoD4 the game is split up into two teams' different perspectives. On one side you have the US Army Rangers, lead by The Arbiter from Halo and struggling to understand why they're killing people but happy to do so anyway, and on the other there's the Special Air Service, going behind the scenes and rescuing hostages and whatnot.
Oh yeah, and then there's 'the' airport bit. It's not as bad as you think, you aren't forced to kill any innocents (although I did) and the game even gives you the option to skip the section in case any of you can't tell the difference between games and reality and decide to take up arms in Gatwick or something. Another case of the Daily Mail panicking.
And in related news, I heard this week that EA are planning to rejuvenate their Medal of Honor franchise with Medal of Honor: Modern Combat. No doubt it follows central protagonist Cpt. Radox McTaggart as he trawls through Iraqistan looking for people to suppress. I look forward to it.
And yes, Dragon Age Origins is finally over! The last boss is the single hardest thing I've had to do all year, gaming wise. I thought it would be a great idea to take my Rogue and two Mages with me, to attack from long range and heal me as I did the heroic work. Well, my healer, Wynne, ran out of mana about 12 seconds into the fight from healing everyone who so much as stubbed their toe, and 15 seconds in all three of them were dead. Not a problem, I thought as I hacked away at the ArchDemon (who happens to be a fuck-off Dragon), it seemed really easy at first. Then the bastard flew out of reach and send his army after me, and I had to ballista him, while fighting off the Darkspawn, until he came back into the fight. I finally remembered I could call an army to my aid too, so I did, and while they held back the Darkspawn I took on the Dragon. But he had decided to fight back this time, and before long I was down to my last few Healing Poultices. In a last ditch effort to win, I ran back to the ballista and spammed it until he dropped. I'm really not an RPG gamer though, so maybe it won't be as hard for others. And to clarify, as I said last week, DAO is most definitely my game of the year.
And the day after I finished Prototype. It's possibly a little bit too long, clocking up at 11 hours (but put at least three of those down to aimlessly slaughtering civilians), but it was fun none the less. Hoping to get InFamous soon too, as Prototype gave me a taste for that kind of thing.
One thing I did notice about Prototype though, is that Alex Mercer isn't exactly that original a character. If you watch the movie about how he becomes what he is, and then watch William Birkin's origin in Resident Evil 2, there are some very coincidental similarities.
Rounding things up, Oddworld: Munch's Oddysey does not work properly on XBox360, which pissed me off as I can't be arsed to get the old XBox out. The speech is virtually inaudible, and the FMVs bounce around so much that you can't even see what's happening. So I scratched that off my list along with Ninja Gaiden II, which I simply couldn't be arsed to play after the stress of the ArchDemon. So now I've decided to reacquaint myself with lady Lara Croft and play through Tomb Raiders Legend, Anniversary and Underworld again. And, gaming event of the century, I bought Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard on PS3 for £5.99 on Play.com, which is all lined up for after the Tomb Raiders. As bad as it's supposed to be, it looks like it might be appealing to me.