Am I following all of the right leads, or am I about to get lost in space?

I've decided on a self-imposed gaming hiatus, in a bid to free up some time to get this site up to date, so I'll hopefully be posting quite a bit in the coming week or so. There's so much shit I want to write about, and it seems that every time I fire up a console something is added to the list, so there comes a time when one just has to sit back, catch a breath and put pen to paper, so to speak.

I'll start with Dead Space 2 I guess, it was the first game I played during the 2011 annual laptop disaster so it's only fair. I was extremely late to the party with the first Dead Space, not only picking it up late but developing an irrational hatred of it about a third of the way in (I think I was intimidated by the apparent difficulty of the game at first, it seemed like ammo was very short in supply and the enemies just keep on coming, but things loosened off a bit later on) and shelving it. I corrected myself a few months ago and discovered what an absolute joy the game was to play.

Dead Space 2 then, is more of the same in terms of gameplay. I opted for the PS3 version for the perks of Dragon Age II DLC, Free Dead Space Extraction and not having to swap the disks, and I kinda regret this choice. Firstly, the controls are far better suited to the 360 pad, the chunkiness seems to fit with the way Isaac moves on screen. Playing the game in daylight (I only have a 360 in the boudoir) subtracted from the horror of the experience, Extraction is virtually unplayable without a Move controller, and to top it all off the DAII DLC is non-console specific, linking to your EA account and not through the PSN store or XBL Marketplace.

I suppose the biggest difference to the prequel is that Isaac, the main series' alien-zombie stomping protagonist, now has a voice, and consequentially refuses to shut the hell up. And suddenly this silent sentinel, this extension of your own psyche stuck in a deep-space hell filled with terrifying (albeit overly brittle) perversions of nature, suddenly has his own personality. And boy oh boy, is he a cock. He's informal, macho and at times bratty, totally the opposite of the Gordon Freeman archetype silent scientist, and what that conjures in the imagination.

But it's still a great game though, these aspects only lightly tarnish the refined Resident Evil 4 style engine, and the incomplex but engaging narrative. Being set in a colonial space-station set out like a city, as opposed to the Space Hulk/Nostromo/Discovery One/Red Dwarf hybrid of the first, the Bioshock similarities of the first (the uninterrupted gameplay and Isaac's aesthetic reminded me of 2K's opus the first time around) seem all the more apparent: echoes of Rapture are everywhere. There's also a bit of Silent Hill thrown in with cliched trips through a hospital and school, the latter throwing some relatively unmutated child-like monsters that could have been ripped right from the foggy ghost town itself if I didn't know better.

So original Dead Space 2 isn't. Visceral aren't really known for their originality though, Dante's Inferno anyone? There are a few new enemies and a couple of new mechanics, such as hacking minigames and being able to blow out a window to suck enemies into space, before closing it again before the vacuum consumes you (A bit like on Star Wars: The Force Unleashed actually), but it's mostly just a refined version of the original, gameplay wise anyway. I read somewhere that the game reminds the writer of Resident Evil 2, in that it's just like the original but bigger and better in every way, and I think that just about sums it up. Although as far as I'm concerned, Dead Space is still superior to it's sequel. Same goes for Resident Evil actually.

Mortal Kombat then. I've absolutely caned the demo since it became available to the masses the other week and to say I'm excited is like saying Hitler was a bit of an arsehole. The thing that is immediately apparent, once you've taken in the unrivalled violence and brutality anyway, is just how unique the game is; since the 2D fighting game revival we've seen Street Fighter IV, Marvel vs. Capcom 3 and BlazBlue as the most dominant in the genre, and as far as first impressions count, all three of those are very similar experiences. Mortal Kombat still retains the feel of the series since Deadly Alliance, matching speed and fluidity with character-specific combos and signiature moves. The new X-Ray moves are wince-inducing too (Johnny Cage's actually made me want to go and have a little cry), and although easy to pull off, they require some expert timing; performing such a move consumes (sorry, konsumes) a full special bar, and they are very easy to evade it seems.

Finally, we've got the fatalities. It's been 5 years since we've had a real, true Mortal Kombat game (Mortal Kombat: Armageddon), and even that didn't have true fatality moves. 2008's Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe was toned down to achieve a teen rating at the request of Warner Interactive, so said moves were far less grotesque, and as a result we've been starved of the privilege of a satisfying way to murder our aggressors since Mortal Kombat: Deception in 2004, seven whole years ago. The sheer brutality of the finishers on offer here makes it worth the wait. If the whole game maintains this level of intense violence and joyous gameplay, then the Mortal Kombat series is back where it belongs, as the second-best fighting game franchise on the market. Flawless Victory.

Nobody touches Oghren's junk and lives!

Apologies for the quiet spell, my Laptop's gone the way of Old Yeller, and while I'm waiting for the good people of Curry's to repair it for me under warranty (postponed by a week thanks to the efforts of the workshy courier who was supposed to pick it up last week and claims I wasn't home and that he left a card, despite not seeming to have noticed that I live in a flat and not a house), I'm left without the benefit of the Internet. So I'm just checking in using the missuss' Vaio again, mainly to explain why I've already broken my weekly post promise, but also so I haven't got too much to write about when I do get my machine back in a couple of weeks.

Firstly, Dragon Age: Origins - Awakening. Thanks to the lack of the Internet's temptations to while away hours staring at Memebase or YouTube, I was able to polish this off in under two days. It's a hell of a lot more fast-paced and a damn-sight easier than the base game, and if anything the story is a lot more gripping, and the characters (of which only the Dwarf Oghren returns) are definitely more interesting and charismatic, from the dry wit of an apostate Mage on the run from Templar oppressors to a benevolent spirit trapped in the body of a fallen Grey Warden (for those out of the loop, the Grey Wardens are an elite band of warriors, like Spectres are to Mass Effect, or the Blades to Oblivion). Every party member you recruit becomes a Grey Warden this time around, but that only makes me ask myself why nobody took the oath in the base game, when Wardens were at their most needed and in very short supply?

My main problem with it is that the story is a little too similar to the Legion/Geth side-story in Mass Effect 2, just as the Origins story is very reminiscent of the main story in the first Mass Effect. I hope Dragon Age 2 shows a bit more originality and individuality. Speaking of which, I've played the demo on the PS3, and am glad to report that the combat system, as well as being a lot more fast-paced, is completely real-time in the console versions, which is excellent. The graphics have also seen a major improvement, so that's both of my least-favourite aspects of the original addressed. By the time I next post, I'll have had some time with the full game, so I'll hold my tongue until then.

Split/Second has reached the inevitable point in all racing games (apart from R4, which I was genuinely good at) where it becomes too difficult for me (other racers were using Burnout tactics and ramming me off the road, as well as blowing me up at every opportunity), so I returned to Divinity II, and came to the conclusion that the game is complete, undiluted shite. The gameplay, graphics, voice-acting and everything, top notch. But about 8 hours in, three quarters of the map become covered in toxic gas, rendering them off-limits for the duration of the rest of the game, which in an open-world RPG is absolute bollocks. Not even Two Worlds pulled that one on me, so I'm back onto trying to 1000gp Bully: Scholarship Edition on the 360.

Finally, this setback has kinda dashed my chances of doing a video review for MVC3, so I'll give a very brief account of how I feel about it. Well, it's a Capcom fighter, so it's obviously technically sound, it is what Capcom does best after all. But the simplified controls, the poor character roster and the ruinous cell-shaded graphics (of which I have never been a fan, they can be used to good effect, like in The Wind Waker, but a lot of the time, as seen here in No More Heroes, they only serve to dilute genuinely great visuals) just push it down in my esteem, and as a result I still see Super Street Fighter IV as it's superior in virtually every way. I also got a feeling that the controls were quite unresponsive, I was failing to pull off moves that I could perform every time in SSFIV or Tatsunoko vs. Capcom, but I don't know if anyone else has noticed this. I do like how some characters interact with each other though, such as Chris Redfield and Wesker, or Magneto and Wolverine.

And to sign off, I've been very quiet about The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim so far. I think this video sums up my feelings on the matter. See you in a couple of weeks.

In your bedroom at night with the lights off and your headphones on... everyone can hear you scream...

Like I said last week, I've grown tired of Fantasy RPGs of late, and felt that the well-above-average Divinity II: The Dragon Knight Saga deserved my attention at a time when I can bestow it fully upon the game. I even tried the simple, accessible Fable II (not a typo, I've just played Fable: The Lost Chapters and intended to play the three of them in sequence), but just couldn't muster the enthusiasm. The heroic adventures of Nobhead (descendant of Arseface) will have to wait.

All the while, the soundtrack to my RPG lethargy came in the form of The Smashing Pumpkins' whingey teen anthem 'Bullet with Butterfly Wings', a song (and band) I absolutely abhor, yet one that worms it's way into your subconscious like the T-Virus. The vessel for this song? The TV advert for Dead Space 2, a game that was so far off my radar it might as well have been Women's Murder Club or something. I've had the original Dead Space for so long, and it must be said I have never liked it, I just haven't ever gotten rid of it because of it's poor monetary value (I bought it for a tenner a couple of years ago, I'd be lucky to get £3 back on a trade-in). The reason for my disdain was the lack of positive reinforcement for your actions as a player, every little thing you did had a negative impact on the story, and every cutscene was just one of your companions telling you to go somewhere and do something, and the other, a bratty annoying bint of a woman, telling you it won't work. Then you do it, and it doesn't work.

But the TV spot for DS2 made me want the game so badly, for no reason other than that I couldn't get Billy Corgan and his group of misfitted pricks out of my head. And I felt like, as it is such a major player in the still fairly niche Survival Horror genre, I should really like it. So Divinity II took a temporary bow and my trusty 360 Elite became the subject of nightmares for a few days. And I thoroughly enjoyed every minute of it.

Bulbasaur used Vine-Whip! It's not very effective...

Actually, that's a lie. There's this bit where you have to shoot asteroids out of the sky before they hit you, and that had me on the verge of snapping my controller in two through sheer rage. But apart from that, it was excellent. None too original (Think Half-Life's Gordon Freeman complete with Gravity Gun, fused with Silent Hill 2's James Sunderland, on board Red Dwarf, fighting Zombies, directed by Ridley Scott and you're pretty much there), but that hardly matters when you are so preoccupied with being terrified that you daren't take your finger off the aim button to press a switch. Later in the game, the developers seemed to have forgotten that the game was supposed to be scary, with the whole endgame taking place in broad daylight, but that's just cleverly there to lure you into a false sense of security before chucking the ending at you, which had everyone I've spoken to who's finished the game collectively shit their pants.

So I'm on board for DS2 now. I'll no doubt pick it up in a month or so, I was planning on getting the 360 version to continue my night terrors, but the prospect of a single disk, a free copy of Dead Space Extraction and some armour for Dragon Age II (which my wife is to purchase on the PS3), I'm being swayed to the PS3 version, but I'll see. Speaking of Dragon Age, the Archdemon finally fell last night. I've got Awakening, Witch Hunt and The Golems of Amgarrak to do before DAII, but for the minute I'm enjoying the light-hearted and simple Batman: The Brave and the Bold.

Here at 24HG, if you ask us what the manliest game in the world is, chances are you'd be told Ghost Squad. Sega's Wii Shooter does have you high-five the President after rescuing him from the clutches of an evil homosexual terrorist after all. but this week it's been surpassed by... EA's girl-friendly casual gaming champion The Sims 2?

Now, Ghost Squad may be manly. But it will never be Pyramid Head, Kratos, Barry Burton and The Punisher in a Hot Tub talking about Baseball manly.

Finally, I was asked over Formspring what I have against Bayonetta. Good question. One that I will answer the next time I don't have anything better to do, like oh, go and buy Marvel vs. Capcom 3, which is what I'm going to do right now. Bye for now.

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!

Turn and face the strain, ch-ch-changes... Just gonna have to be a different man...

As most of you probably don't know, 24 Hour Gamer is fast approaching it's first birthday, and as such, there's gonna be a few changes around here.

First and foremost, the weekly schedule is GONE. Trying to keep things fresh on a weekly basis is a huge strain, on both my bank account, tasked with giving me at least two new games to play every week, and my free time, on actually playing these games to completion in time to write about them. As a result of the latter, I'm passing on games too quickly and not getting the most out of them.

Also, there have been times when I've not been particularly inspired, and the week's post hasn't been a very interesting read as a result. More flexibility will give me the freedom to write as inspiration strikes, keeping things more interesting. So this, right here, is the last Tuesday blog. Well, not necessarily the last blog ever to fall on a Tuesday, but, you know what I mean.

Secondly, I'm ditching my other blog, Gaming Overtime. All of the content usually found on there, as sporadic as it was, will now be posted over here. With my time-limits being more relaxed from the first change, there'll likely be more of such content too.

Thirdly, and finally, the more astute among you will have noticed my user-name change from '24 Hour Gamer' to 'Pete 24HG'. Reason is, I'm thinking of taking on a second writer. This will keep things moving quicker, and inform about games that I wouldn't ordinarily play. I've got a couple of people in mind, but if anyone else would like to join me, then please, get in contact.

So that's that! I still hope to inform and entertain like I always have, but on a more casual, informal basis. When E3 is over, I'll likely post a roundup of highlights, and I'm knee-deep in the very noteworthy Resident Evil: The Darkside Chronicles on Wii at the moment, so expect a post about that soon. Just not in a week.

Alice in Wonderland

Hype is a cruel mistress. She waltzes in to a game's life and promises to spread the word, gets prospective fans excited, sends the media into a frenzy, and the ultimately undoes the game by building up a pre-reputation that it can't possibly ever live up to. Haze fell prey to this, with all the 'Halo on PS3' comments, when in reality it couldn't even hold a candle to the first Red Faction, or the PS2 port of Half-Life (Coincidentally two of the first four games I got for the console). Another casualty of hype was Fable, with verbal-diarrhea sufferer Peter Molyneux making all sorts of wild claims about features of the game that the XBox hardware couldn't even handle, and the otherwise fantastic RPG was stricken with a stigma that outlived the game's own lifespan.

I am going somewhere with all of this, I promise you. Alan Wake (a game that not even I had seen coming in this week's blog) has been in development for nine years, and was formally announced five years ago, and in that time, particularly in the last year or so, has fallen for lady hype hard.

I think the stupidest thing I'd heard was "It's like Heavy Rain on the 360", because the game is everything but that. If anything, it's more like Siren Blood Curse. Before I go on, I want to make it clear that I don't dislike Alan Wake, it's just decidedly average. A storyline that is genuinely gripping and involving (at least after a few hours anyway) is buried under a torrent of disgusting voice-acting, one-dimensional characters and graphics and animation that are just not up to the standard of the rest of this year's releases - Alan himself looks like he's having a stroke, and he seems to bare his teeth at people all the time, like a territorial dog. But hey, at least the 'Energizer' logo is clearly readable on the batteries you find lying around everywhere, and that's the important thing, right? In-game advertising? Anyway.

I see your schwartz is as big as mine...

The story goes: Alan Wake is a successful author, leather elbow pads and all, but has suffered epic writer's block since his last novel three years prior to the events of the game. His wife, Alice, attention seeking jerk and scared-of-the-dark woman-child, decides to lure him to some backwater hick town (which has somehow become a tourist trap despite looking like a bad northern council estate) under false pretense of having a quiet holiday, when really she was just trying to muse him into churning out another pay cheque.

The holiday is cut short however, when Alice is taken by dark forces and Wake looses two weeks of his life, only coming back to consciousness when he is involved in a car crash to find that he's written a book that's slowly coming true. And to top it all off, a dark entity is sweeping over the town and possessing the locals. Shit.

Alan Wake plays like a 'best of' from other franchises. Combat, for instance, is played out with a torch, that you must use to burn the 'dark energy' from your foes, before finishing them off with a couple of bullets, almost exactly like ObsCure. Then there's the bit where swarms of birds are attacking you, and you have to burn them by boosting your torch at them, like the driving section in Gears. Not enough? The enemies are all axe-wielding lumberjacks, who approach you slowly and throw their infinite reserves of hatchets at you, literally exactly like Resident Evil 4 (there are even Chainsaw bad guys that take more damage), even the animations could be ripped directly from Capcom's opus. The car crash scene is near frame-for-frame exactly like the first Silent Hill, and the use of flares as weapons is taken straight from the last. And the episodic formula is ripped from Alone in the Dark and Siren Blood Curse. I could go on all day.

But I won't. because Wake has a saving grace in it's story, which seemed pretty by the book until a plot twist turned everything upside down at the end of the third episode, which was where I last switched off, and I'm looking forward to going back to it tonight. Oh yeah, the collector's edition is fantastic too, and only the same price as the game itself at most places.

I've also gone back to the first of last generation's Prince of Persia games, The Sands of Time, in anticipation of the series' 'interquel', being released on friday. Regrettably, the game has aged horrifically, but it's interesting to see now how revolutionary it must have been at the time, and how that just passed me by when the game was released. You can really see how it helped shape games like Assassin's Creed, Uncharted and the last three Tomb Raiders, and other games of their ilk, and it makes you wonder where they would be if PoP never saw the light of day.

Realising you can rewind time: priceless.

As dated as it is I'm loving it, and can't believe that I've never finished it or even played the rest of the trilogy (sorry, quadrilogy now isn't it), because as a rule I love this type of game. Needless to say, I'm going to go out of my way to complete the story in the near future.

And after getting a lump in my throat over braining Sean Paul in Def Jam: Fight for NY the other week, I grabbed a copy of it's PSP port The Takeover last week. It's a little disappointing that the cutscenes are absent and the fighting is limited to one-on-one, but the core gameplay is still there. The great thing about Def Jam is that losing is just as fun as winning. You can always laugh when you realise you just got stoved in by Flava Flav, who happens to be sporting a rather nice tux.

Don't worry about the car, Xzibit was just gonna pimp it anyway.

However, the game employs one of my greatest pet peeves ever. What's the point in being able to customize your character if their skills and stats depend on what they're wearing? It's like 'yeah, you can look however you want, but if you actually want to win fights, you better wear what we tell you to'. It fucked me off in SoulCalibur IV, It's fucking me off now.

On that note I'll put a lid on it. Check back next week for Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands and possibly, just possibly, Metro 2033. Ciao.

Wow, what a mansion! (AKA the 24 Hour Gamer DLC edition)

Okay, doing something a bit different this week. With the recent trend of affordable DLC hitting the PSN store, I thought I'd grab a bit and give it a write-up, especially seeing as my Shame Pile has dried up. So here I go.

I started off with the two pieces of episodic DLC for Ubisoft's masterpiece (and clear winner of most improved sequel of the last decade) Assassin's Creed II, entitled The Battle of Forli and Bonfire of the Vanities. The two pieces fit nicely into the conveniently skipped chapters of the main game's storyline, so it's possible to play them both as part of a complete playthrough as well as going back to them after the game's conclusion. At £3.19 a piece, they don't exactly break the bank either.

The Battle of Forli takes place right after Ezio officially earns his Assassin's stripes, when the fight with Rodrigo Borgia, the would-be Pope, went a bit wrong. It involves a siege on the palatial home of briefly seen countess of Forli (and, lets face it, a bit of a slapper) Catarina Sforza, during which two of her seemingly countless children are kidnapped, along with the Apple of Eden, an artifact of limitless power.

The chapter starts with an escort mission, where you need to get Catarina and fellow Assassin Niccolo Machiavelli safely to the castle's keep, and is frustratingly annoying. Both of your charges would much rather dance around catching enemy axes with their faces than do anything useful, so it takes a lot of patience and perseverance to get through the very first bit. Once you get past that small annoyance though, it's back to the usual standard of the game though, fun, stylish combat and satisfying kills. The last kill, which took place atop a tower in the centre of a restricted area was extremely gratifying for me, as my assault on the monolith went flawlessly, with me stealing around the grounds surreptitiously picking off guards when their backs were turned, before leaping up the bastion, taking my target's mace out of his hands and deftly planting it, with the greatest of care, into his arsehole.

While The Battle of Forli wasn't to the standards of the main game, The Bonfire of the Vanities was a disgusting disappointment. It sees you, with freshly cultivated facial hair, tracking down the captor of the aforementioned Apple of Eden, exiled friar Girolamo Savonarola, who has taken over Florence. He has stationed 9 lieutenants around the city, who must each have their day ruined before the big man himself.

One of these future corpses is stationed on a boat, and for some reason if any of his guards see you the mission is over, despite the fact that he really isn't going anywhere quickly on a moored sail barge. The single assassination alone took me over an hour of swearing and pillow punching to (pun intended) execute, as it appears that 15th century guards can see through walls. I came so close once, after a flurry of smoke bombs and throwing knives, only for my prey to see me standing BEHIND him. And this, this single insignificant murder, made me go from loving Assassin's Creed II, to never wanting to play it again.

I was much happier with the two extra chapters for Resident Evil 5, a game I wasn't too thrilled with to begin with. Both are available now for a measly £3.99 each, and offer about an hour and a half of genuinely great gameplay.

The first, titled Lost in Nightmares tells the story of how series staple Jill Valentine met her apparent demise at the hands of superhuman baddie Albert Wesker during the assault on Ozwell Spencer's stately mansion, as told through a flashback in RE5's main story. The plot though, is a thin disguise for a basic summation of the first Resident Evil, and feels like a big 'thank you' to the fans from Capcom. It has all of the favourites, from the 'Jill Sandwich' spiked ceiling, to the secret door opened by playing 'Moonlight Sonata' on a Piano, to the different shaped cranks used to progress. There are even a few stray Zombies dotted around too. The only real let down of the piece is a slightly sketchy boss fight with Mr. Wesker, but that's only a small complaint and doesn't mar the experience one iota.

The second part, titled Desperate Escape, tells the events of RE5's climax from the point of view of Miss Valentine, and her new acquaintance Josh Stone (not Joss Stone), of the West-African branch of the Bioterrorism Security Assessment Alliance, or BSAA. Where the first pack was mainly puzzle based, this is all about action and does not disappoint, throwing all kinds of enemies at you. There are plenty of Executioners, Chainsaw Majini and Gatling Gun Majini to keep the action flowing, with mannable grenade-launcher emplacements dotted around sporadically, and ammo everywhere to keep the carnage up. The chapter climaxes with what is basically the game's mercenaries mode, with you holding position while waiting seemingly hours for an evac, which gets genuinely tense. Both expansion packs breathe life into a game that frankly got stale before it's own ending.

Finally, I finished off with the first chapter of the episodic Heavy Rain Chronicles, ominously named The Taxidermist. Way back during Heavy Rain's early development, Quantic Dream showed a technical demo of the game's heroine Madison Paige being chased around a house by a crazed killer, and that eventually became what I was playing. Currently unavailable commercially, I downloaded it freely with the game's collector's edition.

It starts off with Ms. Paige investigating a potential Origami Killer, an ex Taxidermist (hence the title) who turns out to be away from home when she arrives. Naturally, she breaks into his home and starts to snoop around. Upstairs she makes a grizzly discovery in the bathroom; the body of a woman in a bath filled with more blood than water, then in a large open plan room at the end of the corridor, more dead women, this time stuffed and placed in provocative clothing and positions, including, sickeningly, a nude one in a double bed.

The look of shock on Madison's face and how she reacts to everything she sees is fantastic, it really shows emotion that isn't usually conveyed in games outside of cutscenes. And it's mirrored in the player when the killer returns home, I've honestly never felt so tense as I tried, and ultimately failed to sneak out of his house, I could actually hear my own heartbeat. Long story short, things ended badly for poor Madison, but that was only one of a potential six conclusions, so it has replay value too. I'll definitely go back to it, and await future episodes eagerly.

Back to normal next week, and I'll try and dig up something to play and comment on before then. I might finally have time to give Little Big Planet a proper go. Until then.

Oh Mickey, you're so fine, you're so fine, you blow my mind.

Where to start? Well, if I said that the last week had been a good gaming week for me, I'd be lying through my teeth. It started off well, with my re-discovery of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, which has eaten up about 12 hours of time that I should have spent sleeping this week. I have played Oblivion before, about three times from start to finish actually, so I thought I'd mix things up a little this time. Playing as a Khajiit, an anthropomorphic cat for those who haven't played the game yet (although you really should, it's a very likely candidate for the best game ever made), I've taken it upon myself to make it my goal to hunt and kill every Argonian (lizard people, and historical enemies of the Khajiit) in the game world, after they've served any purpose they might have that is.

Aside from that, this is the first time I've tried playing the game with Light Armour, and only the second time using swords, as I usually go for heavy armour and axes or (my favourite) warhammers. And it's my first time out of the dungeon that I wasn't in the shoes of an Elf too, so a lot of the game is fresh to me this time. But that's the high point of the week over right there.

After the surprisingly great ObsCure, I was eager to fire up ObsCure II on the Wii, and was appalled. None of the atmosphere had survived, the creepy post-Gothic feeling of the original's high school setting had been replaced by a college frat house full of asshole stereotype douchebags with absolutely disgusting voice actors that they must have scraped up off the street. I commented on how Sum 41's 'Still Waiting' failed to set the scene in the first one, but the opening music to ObsCure II (god knows what it was) was comically inappropriate, actually cheerful sounding.

Then you get thrown into the gameplay, and the erratic animation combined with the standard sketchy-at-best Wii controls that make any attempt at a serious game (bar Resident Evil 4) a chore make the game virtually unplayable. The writers seem to have forgotten that our heroes found a cure for their infection at the end of the first game, because now they are having to take medicines to stop it spreading. Also, none of the returning characters look, sound or behave as they did before (our hero Stan has even stopped talking like Vanilla Ice), showing yet more lack of attention by the developers. And after a bad nightmare sequence that shamelessly ripped off Silent Hill and a run-in with the game's very first enemies who can tear about a third of your health away with one hit, it wasn't long before I switched it off. If I ever find it for a decent price on the PS2, I might be tempted to have a go at it with a normal controller, but as it stands I'm just not interested enough to put myself through it.

So I moved on to this week's main event, the infamous Rogue Warrior on the PS3. Rogue Warrior is a supposed true story based on the autobiography of former Navy Seal commander (and tourette's sufferer, if the game is anything to go by) Dick Marcinko. I'm not going to skirt around things here, this game is BAD. But it's not insultingly bad, like Haze, it's laugh-out-loud, piss-hilarious bad. I suppose, if you'd spend £40 on it, then it would be a bit of a kick in the balls, but I only spent £14.99 (I can only imagine how bad the person who sold it to Cash Converters felt, he can't have gotten more than a tenner for it less than a month after it was released. I hope for his sake he stole it).

I'm going to start with the script. Dick, voiced by muscular pensioner Mickey Rourke, must have said about 4 or 5 words before his first 'fuck' broke through, and then never looked back. Apart from the D-grade military action movie jargon I think I heard one line of F-bomb free dialogue in the whole game, and that was a reference to cunnilingus. At one point, close to death, Dick descended into one long, uninterrupted swear word, which went something like "fucknshitbastardcommiemotherfuckinfuck". That's quality writing right there. From his voice, you get the feeling that Mickey's heart wasn't really in it. But you also get the feeling that half of the expletives weren't actually on the script too.

Right, gameplay time. Rogue Warrior is a standard FPS, one man versus the whole of North Korea and the Soviet Union type of affair. It's cover system is like a happy marriage between Killzone 2 and Gears of War, and it feels great until you reload. If you leave cover half way through reloading, the action is cancelled. It's okay though, there's no reason to leave cover, because the enemies will just stroll over and stand at the other side of whatever you're hiding behind, happily firing round after round into the bulletproof barrier, allowing you to use blindfire and just poke your gun over the top and kill him without even aiming.

The enemies take cover too though, and I actually saw one throw a grenade at the cover he was hiding behind, resulting in the explosive bouncing right back and landing in his lap. So it's no surprise that Kim Jong Il's finest pose very little threat to you throughout the game. The only problem comes with the Shotgun carriers, who defy the laws of the world by being able to shoot the hairs off a flea's back at 200 yards. Attention to detail, nothing is spared.

Like with The Punisher on the PS2, I tended to favour the melee kills, which are triggered by moving close to an enemy and pressing the X button. This sends the camera out to a third person view so you can admire you suitably brutal finisher, ranging from turning an enemy's gun on himself to slitting his throat, to the frankly worrying move involving sticking your knife up a poor communist's arsehole. The mind boggles.

It's hard to imagine, that with the publisher of Fallout 3 and the developer of Rogue Trooper and Aliens vs. Predator, that an FPS with such a rich upbringing could go so wrong. Whoever thought it would be a great idea to let people play as a demolitions expert (the game's main aim is to plant explosives on missiles) was sorely mistaken. And who decided that 2 and a half hours was an adequate lifespan of a game was frankly insane. But at least it made me laugh.

And that's about it. I had a quick go on Madworld the other day, and it didn't really grab me. The visuals are headache inducing (reminding me of pictures I used to draw as a child, where I would only colour in the blood), and it seems to me that they had tried to come up with a valid storyline involving terrorists at the start of the game, but then abandoning it and leaving the cutscene in. One minute the president is addressing the nation over a terrorist attack and promising to send in a special agent, the next you're in a violent Running Man style game show. Then it's just hitting people until the game over screen. I'll have another go, but I don't predict I'll fall for it. Speaking of falling for things, I tried the Just Cause 2 demo last night, and I think I'll be bringing the full game home on the 26th. Even though I loved the original, for some reason I wasn't expecting much from the sequel, but was very pleasantly surprised. Gives me something to look forward to.

Check back next week for the DLC special!

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!

I'm Commander Shepard, and this is my favourite store on the Citadel!

Ladies and gentlemen, if you don't want to read about Mass Effect 2, then don't bother going any further. It's just about all I've done this week, literally.

When I reported in last week, I had played for maybe two hours, and truth be told wasn't too impressed, but was putting on a brave face in hope that things can only get better. The RPG elements that I'd become accustomed to in my four play throughs of the first one had been neutered within an inch of their life, everything had got a bit sweary (which I've noticed has happened with a lot of sequels, Assassin's Creed II, Metal Gear Solid 4 and Resident Evil 5 spring to mind), and the shooting mechanic has gone for the old copy-and-paste Gears of War method. Couple that with the still ridiculous reloading mechanic, and well, my first impressions were a bit testing, as much as I didn't want to admit it.

Things, however, did get better. 34 hours of gameplay better in fact. And I never once, in all of that time, actually wanted to set the controller down out of boredom. I actually scanned every planet, did every side-mission on said planets, all of the loyalty missions, everything.

For a bit of a story breakdown, after Shepard and his multicultural band of brothers saved the universe from a giant metal squid in 2007, they spent their days flying around the galaxy wiping out stragglers from the ranks of their enemies, the Geth. That is until their ship got ripped in two pieces by a mysterious new antagonist, and thanks to annoying pilot Jeff 'Joker' Moreau (who shows no sign of remorse throughout the game), things ended pretty badly for Shepard.

Then his body was recovered by Martin Sheen, who could rebuild him, He had the technology. He had the capability to build the world's first bionic man. Commander Shepard would be that man. Better than he was before. Better, stronger, faster. Sorry, lost myself a bit there. Anyway, after two years of being rebuilt, Shep wakes up to find out that humans everywhere are being abducted by crazy bug people, and naturally sets out to round up a bunch of hardasses and do some damage.

At first, as I was secretly not enjoying the game as much as I wanted to, I jumped headlong into the main story with little regard for anything else. I recruited the squaddies, of course, and when I first met Garrus, my joint favourite character (with Wrex) from the last game, and unlike all the other returning faces he actually wanted to join me, I could barely conceal a smile. But it wasn't until about half way through the story, when I was deep in enemy territory and the plot was beginning to unfold, that I got that familiar feeling in the pit of my stomach, the feeling that I was in for something special.

And something special it was. I know there's a lot of people out there who are still knee deep in this, so I will go no further, but a special mention has to go out to my new hero, ME2's krogan, Grunt. He's bloodthirsty, wreckless and at times laugh-out-loud funny. And he's the only squaddie I used in the game that never once needed a medi-gel. I have a new Wrex.

I was a little annoyed that such a good game was out in January though, as I had very little hope of playing another game quite as good as that all year. That was until last night's teaser trailer of Fallout: New Vegas though, and it's ambitious predicted release date of Autumn 2010. The trailer opens with some bizarre TV-headed robot sifting through a mass grave in the Nevada desert, with a surprisingly well preserved Las Vegas in the background. As the camera pans out, a mysterious long-coated character with a New Californian Republic flag looks on. He then turns to the camera, revealing a mask that resembles that of one of Killzone's bad guys, the Helghast. It's going to be a long 7 months or so for me now. Well, I still have three achievements yet to get on Fallout 3 anyway, so I still have a bit of Fallout to keep me going. If they fire out a new Elder Scrolls this year too, I'll be happy as a pig in shit.

I'll try and have more to talk about next week, I'm in the process of trying to get my grubby hands on a Heavy Rain demo, and I'll hopefully get motivated enough to finish Hellboy and start on something else, more than likely PS2 survival horror ObsCure. Bye for now.

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.

Where does he get those wonderful toys?

I didn't go on to play any of those games right away, instead opting to play Resident Evil: The Umbrella Chronicles. I know, I know, more Resi. Well believe me, this has put me off for now. When I play a Lightgun Shooter, I expect to be able to shoot as fast as I can pull the trigger. On Umbrella, you fire one bullet for every four or five pulls, it shoots at the same speed as a pistol would in one of the old Resi games. If I can pull a trigger that fast, then so can a trained member of a Special Forces team. And this is a game-killing problem, believe me.
The game also had me struggling with whether it's canon or not. The bits based on older games most definitely aren't. It was cool seeing what Wesker was up to though, and playing as him too. And the end of Umbrella Section was okay-ish, even if all of the monsters created exclusively for the game looked arse.
Imagine a world where the slightest tap of the left analogue stick sends you legging it into a wall. Imagine a world where enemies are hit square in the head with a giant spinning shuriken, and just shrug it off. Imagine a world where you can still hear the rain falling after it's stopped. This is no ordinary world. This is Dark Sector's world.
What an absolute shambles. I only started playing last night, so I'm still in the 'benefit of the doubt' phase, although in the hour or so that I played it I got through three chapters, and if the Achievements are anything to go by there are only 9 or 10. My wireless 360 pad has a small fault, in that if the left stick is slightly to the left, it sticks. Normally this isn't a problem, because when it happens your character just slowly shifts across. But Dark Sector only has two speeds; walk fast and leg it. So if I'm behind a wall reloading or something, and accidentally knock the stick, the floppy haired prick just strolls out into a hail of bullets. And respawning enemies in this day and age?
Which brings me to another thing. The cover spots are so obviously placed for a reason, that after you've shot an enemy using one, a new one will appear and run over to the exact same spot. In a gunfight you might as well just line up your crosshairs, sellotape down the right trigger and go read a book or something.
The game is basically the outcome of Gears of War having a drunken one night stand with Resi 4, who then went on to do a lot of crack throughout the pregnancy. Whilst on holiday in Corby. But I'm reserving judgement.
I tried out the Trial version of TMNT Re-Shelled on XBox Live Arcade last night, and it's actually really good. The game still has a very old-school feel, and captures the essence of the old cartoons perfectly, Pizza obsessions and Cowabungas intact. during the trial I had run-ins with a super-size General Krang and Baxter Stockman, and the memories came flooding back. I will be purchasing at some point.
Also, I've just finished the Arkham Asylum demo on PS3, and it's good. Not excellent, but good. The camera view is a bit too close, and Bruce's pointy head always takes up about a quarter of the screen. And, while Mark Hamill is amazing as always as The Joker (ZOMG it's not Heath Ledger he was definitive!!!!!1), Kevin Conroy's heart doesn't seem to be in it fully. Also, the inmates make the Genome Soldiers from Metal Gear seem like they have perfect 20/20 vision, as I was able to sneak up on one virtually from right in front of him. Let's hope Eidos sort this things out before release, but I'm sure they won't this close to the day. Two weeks today boys and girls.

You were almost a Jill sandwich!

Let me begin this week's post by welcoming and thanking 30 Something, my first follower. I don't like to use the word 'follower', it sounds like I'm some sort of cult-leader or something. Anyway, thanks.
After my positive first impressions of Resi 5, I realised that about half way through it descends into a distinctly average game, not offering scares or anything mentally taxing at all. And it makes you wonder when a game stops being a Survival-Horror and just becomes a 3rd Person Shooter. So I put my pad down and, eager to remember what a truly good Resident Evil feels like, fired up my Wii for a bit of Resident Evil 4: Wii Edition. And I'm currently fending off Regenerators with fuck-all ammo.
Also this week I've been toying with GTA: Chinatown Wars on the DS, and I honestly don't like it. Everything is so tiny it's hard to even tell what's going on, and the top down view means you can't see more than a few feet in front of you, which isn't ideal for high speed chases. I know, it started off like this but the old ones seemed to do it so much better. I hope the PSP version ends up better. And while I was tinkering with my DS, I noticed Giana Sisters DS. How ironic, that a game that Nintendo got cancelled and discontinued is now available for a Nintendo console. Anyway, if you liked New Super Mario Bros., Snap it up. It's great and will appeal to your young daughters/sisters, which will give you an excuse when confronted by the geek at the counter. Fuck Mario. If I wanted to play with a moustached man in dungarees, I'd go to a Gay Bar. Too low brow?
Back on to my current Resi obsession, and my DS getting it's annual playing on, I've been messing around with Action Replay codes on Resident Evil Deadly Silence. I think I've come up with the ultimate way of playing it: As Barry Burton, with unlimited health and infinite ammo for the Magnum. I wonder if I can play through Resi 2 on the Gamecube as Robert Kendo? Next on the agenda.
I've become re-obsessed with Mega64, for those of you who don't know it's three guys who dress up and act like videogame characters in public, and videotape it. I've been constantly laughing at their videos for Elite Beat Agents, PaRappa the Rapper and Shadow of the Colossus for about a week now. Tried showing it to my girlfriend, she doesn't get it at all. Check them out, Mega64.com.
I think after Resi 4 is done, I'm gonna try out Dark Sector. It's been sitting on my shelf for a while now, and I've not gotten around to playing it. Or Maybe No More Heroes, or Viking: Battle for Asgard. How does one decide?

Shoot yourself. Save me a bullet.

Well, here we are again.
Started the week by finishing Mass Effect a second time, and a really cool thing happened. I actually convinced Saren to shoot himself! Sure, I still had to fight his Husk after, but it was awesome none the less.
After posting last friday I headed out and re-bought The Punisher, this time on the XBox, and finished it last night. What a game. Most multi-platform games that I've tried on both the XB and PS2 have been identical in appearance, but TP actually looks loads better, from the contours on his face to the bump mapping on walls. It was the first time ever that I looked at the 'Box lovingly and pushed my PS2 aside, knowing that beneath the cheap feeling plastic and spazzy joypad there is something wonderful in that big black box.
Some of the dialogue in The Punisher is great too; "Who would win in a fight between The Punisher and DareDevil?" "Don't be stupid, DareDevil is a comic book character!", and the violence is top notch. Forcing a grenade into a guy's mouth and letting him run towards his friends? I don't know of another game where that happens.
I also picked up Resident Evil 5 last Friday, finally, and on Wednesday me and my friend Paul spent the day playing co-op over PSN. It's very good, very tactical. But I can't ever see myself playing it on my own. I tried the XBox Live demo on my own and it was arse. Sheva kept getting in my way.
I also read online that Capcom are thinking about a Wii conversion, which I'll probably grab. The Wii RE4 was probably the best version.
Looks like my PSP will be getting a lot of love in the coming months, with games like MGS: Peace Walker, SoulCalibur, Dissidia, Resident Evil Portable and Cannon Fodder on the Horizon. I hope none of them are only on this PSP Go travesty though. I still don't properly trust digital downloads, and I don't think games companies should abandon those of us without the disposeable income to upgrade their current consoles. I'm still on my first generation PSP, and while it still lives have no reason to buy another one. Plus, the Go's analogue stick is in entirely the wrong place. No thanks.
I'll sign out on a positive note, I got the Special Monster Edition of Crash of the Titans from Morrisons the other day for £4. Not a game I'll ever play, but the special edition lover in me wanted it, and as of then I hadn't ever owned a game in a fluffy orange case before. I still say it was worth it.

By my balls, Girl, I thought you were dead!

I know I said I'd have a look at Golden Axe: Beast Rider, and I did. And it was OK at first, I really wanted to like it, just to voice the silent minority or something. Imagine playing God of War, and it's awesome. Somebody takes it away and gives you Conan, and it's still good but not as good. Same thing happens, you get Heavenly Sword, a bit poo really. Then there's Golden Axe.
The graphics are like a mid-range original XBox game, it has the same washed-out look as Dreamfall: The Longest Journey, and the blood effect is lifted straight from Mortal Kombat: Shaolin Monks, for those who haven't played it it looks like whole tomatoes are falling out of your enemies. The music is great, proper epic, Conan-style score, but with absolutely unforgivable voice acting it doesn't really help the overall sound much. And the difficulty curve is so steep you need climbing gear - the game doesn't believe in checkpoints. Enemies do this thing where if their weopon glows orange, the blow in unblockable and you need to dodge buy hitting L1, and if it glows blue it's undodgeable and you need to block with R1. Or is it the other way round? You forget because the colours have no significance to the buttons at all. And when 15 enemies are attacking, half doing one, half doing the other, what do you do?
Sega have been destroying a lot of their beloved franchises lately, this and House of the Dead springing to mind. I loved Golden Axe when I was younger, and while I do get nostalgic when *that* music comes on and the gnomes appear, and I have to deck some potions out of them, it still upsets me that a childhood friend has lost it's way so much. It'd be like seeing Carrie Fisher do a low budget Porno.
Aside from that, and I'll keep things brief, I tried Little Big Planet, and I can't do it. Although someone has recreated the whole of Resident Evil 4 on there, which was awesome. I've been back on Mass Effect again, and that will always be great, especially as this time I've talked Wrex down on 'the' bit, which greatly upset me the first time around.
And, after finishing 24: The Game last week I started watching season 3, and there's a bit where Jack says that he moved Kim (his daughter) into CTU (his office) because he wants her to be safe. Now Kim was taken hostage in series 1, had a run-in with a Cougar and kidnapped by a crazy guy in the woods in series 2 and taken hostage again in the game. CTU on the other hand, was compromised twice in series 1, blown up in series 2, and invaded by terrorists in the game. Putting the most unsafe person in America in the most unsafe place in America, where she is now working hand in hand with Sylar from Heroes. Good Going, Jack.