Demon possession is the gift that keeps on giving!

Cursed Mountain. We don't talk about Cursed Mountain in my house.
It's not really that bad a game, it's just so fucking frustrating that I was in danger of putting my Wii remote through the TV, so I had to stop playing it about half way through and move on. It's mainly one factor, the healing process. You see, to heal yourself you have to visit a shrine-type-thing and light incense. There's always a shrine there during a particularly difficult fight, but it takes around 6 seconds to do the deed and by that time you've been assaulted by three or four angry spooks and your health is lower than when you started. Couple that with unskippable cutscenes which you have to watch countless times when you inevitably die just after they've played and it's enough to make you want to garrote yourself with the Nunchuck cable.
So Cursed Mountain went the way of Sacred 2, banished to the shelf with it's tail between it's legs, and before the Wii was able to recover from actually being used, I had slammed Sam and Max Season One in the drive and was eagerly awaiting "The Wii's first Sitcom".
Sam and Max is a collection of six bite-size episodic Point-and-Click adventure games featuring two "Freelance Police Officers"; Sam is an anthropomorphic dog in a trilby hat who talks like a 1930s movie detective, and Max is a sociopathic rabbit with a penchant for violence.
The game is absolutely baffling in how random some of your tasks are, I am through but two of the six episodes and have had to consult a guide on more than a few occasions. This is obviously a conscious decision though, as the game is very self-parodying of the genre. When a conveniently needed item is given to you by a completely unrelated NPC, Sam will comment on how convenient that is, etc.
The humour is pretty good too, I applaud any game that uses the word 'bollocks', especially an American one. As far as the genre goes, S&M isn't the best but it's still great and very original. A bit more polish for the Wii conversion would have been great, there are times when the speech skips itself and the framerate drops sporadically but it's nothing game-killing. I think I'll be able to get through it without smashing a controller.
Had a bit of a go with the demo of Dark Void, the latest offering from Capcom this week. Wait, what's that I hear? Is it, yes it is! Nolan North ladies and gentlemen! Well, even I'm starting to get a bit bored of him, and that's saying something. Great voice-actors should be a once every-so-often treat, like Simon Templeman (The voice of Kain, of the Legacy of, for those who don't know). If you hear their voice every time you fire up a console, it kind of dulls the pleasure. Like eating Steak every day. Anyway, Dark Void at least does Nolan North well, giving him a very natural role not too dissimilar to Uncharted's Drake, and for the first few seconds while you're on foot, the game feels decent. Then you employ Dark Void's gimmick, the Jetpack, and it all goes tits up. The controls are all wrong, it's boring, it's silly, no, this won't be getting a purchase this side of 2 for £20. Had a quick go on Assassin's Creed II Discovery on the DS the other day and was pleasantly surprised. Way better and more polished that Altair's Chronicles was. I'll definitely give it a proper go if I can tear myself away from Tetris DS for long enough.
I got Rogue Warrior the other day. Yes, I know, I've seen the reviews, I know it only got an aggregate of 27 on Metacritic, but fuck it. It was £14 in Cash Converters and it's only been out a month and a half. If it's so bad (Manhunt 2 bad) that I have to get rid of it, I should make my money back in Gamestation. For now, it's nestled in my Shame Pile, so time will tell. It's gotta be worth it to hear Mickey Rourke rap.

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?

What's hell... Without a little fire?"

Grasping Friday by the skin of the teeth once more (I'm getting sloppy ladies and gentlemen), it's that time again.

I started the week off with Sacred 2: Fallen Angel, as I touched upon last week, as I'd slid all of my Christmas games into strategically placed spots in my shame pile, streamlining it by taking out games like Metal Gear Solid IV that I'd already finished at least once (I do desperately want to play it again sometime but there's so many unplayed games in my pile right now). Anyway, it was all going very well at first, seemed a solid enough RPG (from the perspective of an RPG rookie at any rate), but about ten hours into it all of the horrific voice-acting and repetitive gameplay just built itself up into a twitching tumour in my left-frontal lobe (or slightly shit game in my PS3, for those who read things too literally), and I slammed my Dual Shock 3 down in disgust. Well, I placed it down gently anyway, I had sat on my SixAxis a few weeks beforehand and the L2 trigger had come off, and after a botched repair job during which a spring and a screw went AWOL and the poor little thing hasn't been the same since (although I might add, it still works). I'm almost in danger of having to buy a new controller, and buying things that aren't Games or DVDs goes against my moral code. But I digress.

The worst thing about Sacred 2, besides the soul-crushing dialogue and delivery, is the fact that the difficulty spikes are dizzying. When I left it, I was swatting regular enemies aside with one or two hits at a time, but then getting all but literally fucked by the bosses who could pretty much heal faster than you could attack them. The last boss I fought before I banished the game to the shelf was (that which has haunted my dreams since Dragon Age) a Fuck Off Dragon (copyright 24 Hour Gamer), and in case a Fuck Off Dragon wasn't hard enough, he is surrounded by what I have come to refer to as 'respawning bastards'. Without a shit-load of level grinding, which I am not prepared to do, it's impossible. And look, it's made me swear too much already and I'm only 21 hours and 37 minutes into the year.

Moving on, I've spent a few more hours with Tekken 6. It has become very apparent to me that it's pretty much Tekken 5.5, or Super Tekken 5 if you will, because there's not much different aesthetically and nothing seems to have moved forward gameplay wise. They've just changed everyone's moves to throw us all off and tossed in a few new characters. There's Lars; a man with ridiculous hair (no surprising he's yet another Mishima), Bob; a fat bastard who moves pretty quickly (See Street Fighter IV's Rufus), Zafina; a girl who moves a bit strangely (A bit like SoulCalibur's Voldo, but less uncomfortable to look at), Miguel; some kind of stereotypical Spanish bull-fighter guy (who happens to be quite fair-haired and Caucasian, as is the norm in Japanese videogames), and the two who actually seem to be pretty good fighters, Leo; Either a very tall male child or a pretty butch lesbian who is pretty fast and has some awesome easy-to-do combos and Alisa, robot daughter of Tekken 3's Doctor B. who looks like she's been ripped straight from a dodgy Japanese H-Cartoon and is packed with more hidden weapons than North Korea. "It is not my fault if you get hurt", she quips sweetly as we prepare to fight. That's easy for you to say love, you've got chainsaws for arms, I'm just a prick in a Leopard mask. It's still a good game though, it's still Tekken.

And the last major story of the week, I had been waiting until I had all of the Riddick films on DVD before getting the games so I could receive the story in chronological order, only to find out last night (having achieving my goal) that not one but both of the fucking games are prequels to the films! So I spent about two hours last night and a large part of today flying through the PS3 remastered version of Escape From Butcher Bay, and enjoying it greatly. The lighting in the game is nothing short of amazing, and Starbreeze have managed to get around the whole detached feeling that most FPSes give me by making your 'hands' react to your surroundings and interact with NPCs in the game world, which I initially noticed when I played the also fantastic The Darkness a year or so back. I reckon I'm pretty close to the end of it actually, but at the same time I don't think I am, because it's just around this point that the plot twists usually set in and snatch victory from my grasp. As much as I'm enjoying the game, I'm hoping to finally bag me a copy of Assassin's Creed II tomorrow so I'd like Riddick to say what he has to say and move on if he wouldn't mind. After all, he has a whole 'nother game and three films for me to watch, whereas Ezio can only express himself using one medium. Actually that's not true, he made a bit of an appearance in the ACII short movies on the PSN store, which I watched the other day while off work with the winter vomiting, and which were pretty damn good.

Last off, I got Virtua Fighter V today, and priced up King Of Fighters XII, as Tekken made me realise that all of the major fighting game franchises have a Seventh Generation title out and I ought to do a round-up piece or something. Made the 15000 GamerScore mark this week with a Fable II achievement called The Swinger, which I received by having a lesbian foursome. Also fed the PSN store some cash and came away with Vagrant Story, Trine and Hero of Sparta, the latter of which is absolutely godawful. It's not hard to copy God of War, just look at Dante's Inferno. Byeeee!

Woah, we're half way there, whoah-oh, livin' on a prayer!

Firstly, sorry about missing the post yesterday. I sat down to post and fell asleep, the day of food and drink and too much Wii caught up with me, such are the effects of a family Christmas.
Okay, onto the gaming. On the run up to Christmas I immersed myself in Tomb Raider: Underworld and Fable II mostly. Both games just happened to crop up on my shame pile, but coincidentally both were games I was playing this time last year (as it happens, it's a year ago to the day that I bought TRU), and coincidentally for Christmas both games feature quite a bit of snow.
I'll start with Tomb Raider. As I said with Tomb Raider: Anniversary, I have never actually played any of the recent Tomb Raiders in quick succession before, and thus never noticed the differences. And in comparison to Legend, both Anniversary and Underworld pale in comparison in terms of quality. In Underworld, for example, Lara moves like a frightened cat, skittish and unpredictable. On more than one occasion I plummeted to my death due to Lara not catching ledges or just simply spazzing out and throwing herself from a cliff. Part of the fun of playing the Tomb Raider games is how many times you find yourself in a crumpled heap 600 feet below where you should be standing though, and if anything it adds longevity to what is probably the shortest 'Raider so far.
But playing the 'trilogy' again actually provided me with a bit of closure. The ending to Underworld doesn't set the game up for a sequel, there are no loose ends to be resolved, and because of this I'm not quite so bothered about the strongly hinted Tomb Raider reboot lurking over the horizon (I say strongly hinted because I also heard it was to be a prequel). Now all that's bothering me is the fact that the concept art for said reboot looks a bit Siren Blood Curse. We'll see.
My quest for redemption for my Fable II lady (renamed from Blade to Lionheart to try and sound more people-friendly) was going well until I reached the Crucible (a multi-tiered arena in which you fight waves of enemies, which is necessary for story progression), and a pair of knobs jeered at me and my companion Hammer and called us lesbians. Now Hammer, well, she does give off that vibe, but I have a husband and son thank you very much! Long story short, they're dead and buried and for some reason I keep getting called a murderer.
Carrying on the snow theme, I had a quick go on below-the-radar Wii Survival-Horror title Cursed Mountain on Christmas Eve, as Lara and I had parted ways for a while. I say Survival-Horror, but the scares didn't really flow thick and fast. Well, they didn't really flow at all.
You play as a man named Eric something-or-other who's decided to look for his missing brother, Frank something-or-other in the outlying villages of a mountain covered in ghosts, as you do. Unfortunately, Eric brought neither a Proton Pack nor a magical camera or even a miniature vacuum cleaner, so has to make do with a pick-axe and a bunch of prayer rituals. And, not unlike Silent Hill's Harry Mason, Eric runs like he's shat himself. Although given his situation, not unlike Harry Mason, he probably has. I left him having being tricked into falling off a cliff by some batty old coot called Mojo Jojo or something.
Christmas Day came and brought with it my gaming for the next few weeks. My wife bestowed upon me Sacred 2: Fallen Angel on the PS3, ObsCure on the PS2, and ObsCure 2 and Sam & Max Season 1 on the Wii, while my mum provided me with Tekken 6 on the PS3 and my, ahem, cat got me Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena and The Bourne Conspiracy on PS3 and 360 respectively. I gave Sacred 2 an hour or so last night and despite the awful voice-acting it seems pretty good really. Real-time combat is definitely a bonus. But like with Dragon Age, I'm always shy at first with a new RPG. Tekken 6 has had a few hours play today and is great, and offers me pretty much exactly what I want from a Tekken game, nothing more nothing less. Really glad it has the arcade mode from Tekken: Dark Resurrection though (now called Ghost Mode), I can play that for hours.
To wrap things up, I played the Demo for Dante's Inferno today. God of War plus lots of boobs and minus the shouting really. It's okay but boy did they pick a bad time to be making a GoW clone. Christmas Day saw family Wii time as my 3-year-old nephew got one for Christmas, so the day was filled with Wii Sports and Mario Kart Wii, which are always excellent multiplayer games. I was hoping to finally secure myself a go on the Motion Plus, but my dreams were dashed. I guess I'll just have to go out and buy one. Oh yeah, preordered the Mass Effect 2 collector's edition today too, five weeks yesterday until it's released. To say I'm looking forward to it is a vast, vast understatement. See you next week.

Oh we can beat them forever and ever, then we can be heroes just for one day...

Well well well!
This week the Los Angeles LA Live Complex and the TV channel 'Fiver' played host to the Spike VideoGame Awards, which I eagerly set the V+ box to record and watched like a kid at Christmas the following day (as opposed to a big kid a week before Christmas, which is how I'm doing everything else at the moment). What a fucking travesty.
The very first award was for best voice acting, and over Uncharted 2's Nolan North and Claudia Black, and the legendary Arleen Sorkin and Mark Hamill for Batman: Arkham Asylum, the winner was Jack Black. Jack. Fucking. Black.
While I can acknowledge that Brutal Legend was a widely praised game (although from what I saw the demo did nothing to back that up), and my love of metal culture does will me to play it (There have been a couple of times I've been standing in Blockbuster looking at the £25 pricetag and wondering if the wife would leave me if I brought home yet another game), Black definitely had the least noteworthy performance on the list. I guess they thought they owed him something after he presented it last year.
Another highlight was that all of the nominations for the best team sports game were EA Sports published games. It couldn't have hurt to slide Pro Evo 10 in there could it?
The rest of the show was just a bunch of celebrities awkwardly trying to be funny (I actually felt bad for Tony Hawk, especially as Ride didn't even receive a single nomination), and poorly soundchecked musical performances by Snoop Dogg (who seemed as confused as I was when they asked him to present the award for best RPG) and The Bravery, who are now my least favourite band after I had to sit and watch that prick 'play' his guitar with a violin bow. It doesn't make the music sound better, it just makes you look like a douchebag.
And, one last thing about the VGAs, how can Uncharted 2 get Game of the Year, and Assassin's Creed II get best Action/Adventure? With Uncharted 2 BEING an Action/Adventure game, surely the former cancels the latter out?
Enough VGA anger and on to the gaming.
The Conduit was great. Fuck hard in places and with a shitty ending, but great no less. Of course, had it been a PS3 or XBox 360 release it would have been mediocre, but as a Wii release it looks and plays better than just about anything else on the console.
And I finally finished Tomb Raider Anniversary too. A number of times throughout the game TRA had me wondering if I actually liked it. For every awesome platforming section there was a huge underwater puzzle or something (I've hated them since Ocarina of Time's water temple), Just there to make sure I wasn't getting too much fun out of it. Underworld is next on my agenda, but I just don't know if I want to go back into it so soon.
So I busted out Fable 2, as it's becoming tradition for me to play a Fable game over Christmas, having done so the last two years now. I'm playing as a woman, and started off doing everything the evil way but had a flash of conscience when I returned to my home in Bowerstone to find that the whole village hated me. It actually hurt. So I've decided, in seasonal Scrooge fashion, to change my ways, which is taking a fair bit of work considering I've been doing things like raiding a bandit camp, killing the bandits, finding the key to unlock their prisoners, selling the key to a slaver, killing the slaver and reclaiming the key, freeing the prisoners and then killing them as they walked home.
During my stay in Albion this year, I've been focusing a lot more on the Virtual-Life aspect of Fable 2, buying and renting out properties and making my home, raising my family, that sort of thing. I seem to have spent hours at the Blacksmith's raising money to keep my husband (I resisted the urge to be a lesbian) happy, and only really began the game proper after about four hours play. I may knock it on the head and blast through the game though, I do want to get another Mass Effect playthrough done before the end of January, and this time next week I'll have Sacred 2 to keep me occupied too. I'll be all RPGed out by February at this rate, and might finally find time to get to grips with Assassin's Creed II.
Demo preview time! Bayonetta is pretty crappy. Picture Devil May Cry, replace the albino homosexual with a leather-clad woman who likes to get naked and exchange all of the music for generic Sega awfulness and you've got it. It's not a really bad game, I just wouldn't shell out £40 for it. But then again, I'm not a fan of Devil May Cry. If you want an example of a really bad game, try out Dragonball Raging Blast. Fairytale Fights seems pretty fun, the demo is just you and a bunch of enemies but if the action is as much fun in the real game I'll be picking it up a bit later in it's shelf-life. I would love to write about LittleBigPlanet PSP and Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker too, but my battery is too low to update the firmware on my PSP, even though it's plugged in. Maybe next week.
But oh! Next week is Christmas Day! I will endeavour to post next week, but I might be too drunk/asleep/busy playing Tekken 6. Such is the rock'n'roll lifestyle of a sales assistant stroke freelance games journalist (so I tell the ladies, blogger to the rest of you). Have a great Christmas regardless.
And one last thing, check out my Top 10 Games of 2009 over at VideoGameSpace, and show this up and coming little site some love. Bye!

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.