Lego Batman

Regular readers of The Dust Forms Words know that I've had a tumultuous relationship with the Lego games. The original Lego Star Wars was an upstanding gentleman of a game, but the sequels have done little more than steal beer from my fridge and pass out on my sofa. Lego Batman is the best and least stinky of those surly hoboes but it's still not the champion whom once I lionised.

The principle of the Lego videogame is simple; you walk into a world constructed of flimsy, breakable lego, and you start punching until your fists go numb. Repeat 30 times to complete the story mode, repeat 30 times more to finish the sidequests. It's a solid premise - who doesn't like punching stuff?

All these fisticuffs are, of course, dressed in the livery of a well-known franchise, and this time around it's Batman. This isn't the Batman of the recent movies, or even of the comics. It's instead a mash-up of the Tim Burton films and the animated series. It's a shallow exploration of the brand, and Batman devotees will be disappointed that the amount of fan-service on offer is approximately zero.

The place where Lego games go wrong is that the developers invariably feel that punching is somehow not enough, and throw some jumping into the mix. The jumping is the closest you will come in this life to feeling the tangible presence of Satan intruding into our mortal world. Apparently when a Lego minifig jumps it enters a kind of floaty demiplane where the rules of gravity warp and twist. Distance has no meaning and whether or not you land at your destination is dictated by variables understood only by MC Escher.

What's worse, platforms are possessed of a kind of malignant sentience and scorn the tread of your little Lego feet. Frequently you'll land squarely on a ledge only to watch your avatar drift inexplicably sideways as if compelled by magnets, before plummeting over the edge to its doom. For bonus laughs, occasionally you'll respawn only to immediately be victimised by the same deadly drift again.

The Lego games are built around the idea of co-operative play. At all times you have not one but two heroes on screen, and a friend with a second controller can drop in and out of the festivities at their whim. This worked well in the original Lego Star Wars but has been a cause of histrionics and grief ever since. Both players are bound to a single screen, despite some puzzles which really need you to split up. Attempting to move more than a screen away from your partner will drag them along behind you, usually to their death, or cause them to pop out of existence and respawn closer to you, sometimes in a location which is either fatal or inescapable.

There's no option to play two-player over XBox Live or the PlayStation Network, but that's okay because the co-op here is a friend-losing proposition anyway. Sadly, letting the computer control your buddy isn't much better, as the AI takes a cheerful pleasure in getting in your way, pushing you to your death, and refusing to help you with the co-operative puzzles.

The buggy AI may serve to distract you from the rest of the game, which is also riddled with glitches. Respawns occur in broken positions, secret canisters refuse to appear, characters get stuck in inappropriate animations, and Achievements inexplicably don't unlock. There's only so many times that you can write the woeful playtesting off as all part of the childlike joy of Lego before it becomes time to bring out the murderin' axe.

Just to round it all out, Lego Batman features some of the worst level design to every appear in a videogame. Distances can't be judged, threats can't be evaluated, and goals are seldom if ever clear. You can rarely tell what can be smashed up and what can't, and occasionally there are wierd hierachies at work (you can't destroy a street light until you first blow up its light bulb). Boss fights range from the repetitive to the obtuse, and key locations are obscured by horrible camera angles and unbreakable scenery.

That's the bad. There's some good, but none of it in any way compensates for the bad. I mention the good only to explain why Lego Batman is, while objectively awful, still a better game than Lego Indiana Jones.

First up, Batman is awesome. This has been proven by science. If you built a scale replica statue of Batman out of human crap, it would still be pretty awesome simply because it was Batman.

Secondly, there's a good roster of characters, and they're actually fun to use. You're shortchanged on the hero side, as you only get Batman, Robin, Nightwing and the Barbara Gordon Batgirl (and Nightwing looks like he fell into the mutant-vat). But for the villains you get no less than two costumes for the Joker, along with Poison Ivy, Bane, Mr Freeze, the Mad Hatter, Man-Bat, the Riddler, Catwoman, the Penguin, the Scarecrow, Hush, Ra's al-Ghul, Two-Face, Killer Croc, Clayface, Harley Quinn and, for some reason, Killer Moth. It would have been nice to see even more familiar faces such as Zsasz, Black Mask, Talia, Oracle, Azrael, Huntress, Spoiler, and the Cassandra Cain Batgirl, but it's nevertheless a solid list.

The music uses the Danny Elfman theme from the first Tim Burton Batman movie, which is a fine piece of music. Unfortunately, it uses it exclusively, again and again, until your ears are bleeding and you're begging for it to stop. Some variety might have been nice.

Combat has been tightened up from the previous games. The hard-to-target whip from Lego Indy is gone and some very satisfying fists and guns have replaced it. Getting into battle is no longer a chore. You might even enjoy it. Also, while there are still waves of endlessly-respawning enemies, there's notably less than in the last two Lego games, and they're less inclined to turn up while you're trying to do something fiddly.

That's pretty much all the good points. If you've enjoyed the prior Lego games you're in for a treat, because Lego Batman is very definitely an improvement, but if they frustrated you to tears then you'll find all the same mistakes on display in Lego Batman.

Kingdom Hearts: Birth By Sleep Trailer

This is the secret movie included at the end of Japan-only release Kingdom Hearts 2 Final Mix. It follows on from the Keyblade War teaser which appeared at the end of regular-style Kingdom Hearts 2.

Birth By Sleep is coming to the PSP only and is a prequel to the original games. My love for Kingdom Hearts as a franchise is at war with my dislike for the malformed little portable that I refer to as "the hand-mangler".

Parasite Eve - Good News / Bad News

Am I the only person in the world that thinks Parasite Eve 2 was an overlooked work of genius? Am I seriously the only Parasite Eve fanboi out there?

Specifically, why did no one mention to me Parasite Eve: The 3rd Birthday is on its way? This is the greatest news ever. We need a commemorative holiday.

This is the series that mixed classic Square-Enix roleplaying with a near future real-world setting and real-time gunplay. This is the series where the bad guys are your mitochondria. That's hard science.

Unfortunately, much like the upcoming Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep, 3rd Birthday is for the PSP. So I guess now we all have to wait around until Squeenix sees fit to announce they're porting it to a real system.

Silent Hill Origins

I come from the backwards world. I thought that Silent Hill 2 was easily the worst of the franchise, while Silent Hill 4: The Room was the series' creative peak. I realise I'm alone in this, but to be perfectly honest, I'm right and you're wrong, so you can all go to hell.

Which brings me to Silent Hill: Origins, which I'm going to have to describe as "the worst Silent Hill since the second one". It originally came out for the PSP, and then, because the PSP is crap, got ported to a real system, in this case the PlayStation 2.

The Silent Hill franchise is about ordinary people who, upon visiting (or living near) the titular town find themselves inexplicably transported to a hell dimension where everything is similar and yet horribly different. That, in fact, is exactly how I felt upon firing up Silent Hill Origins. This is definitely Silent Hill, but it's Silent Hill as performed by a really dodgy cover band.

It's developed by Climax, a western company whose previous track record consists almost entirely of bad ports. All the previous games had been by Konami's Nippon-based Team Silent. It's pretty clear that the distinctive Japanese sensibility for horror has gotten lost somewhere along the way, because Origins is less creepy than it is shocktackular. A rising sense of terror is replaced with the "suddenly, zombies" syndrome, where opening any given door leads to nasties immediately in your face, without explanation.

Origins is a direct prequel to the first Silent Hill. You play as Travis, a truck driver who has an encounter with series poster-girl Alessa and then decides to play explorer in the nearby abandoned town.

The "prequel" angle leads to a lot of opportunities for fan nostalgia. You'll encounter plenty of characters from previous games, often in a fairly forced fashion, and revisit key locations from the franchise including Alchemilla General Hospital. There are some great moments, like seeing the iconic "Welcome to Silent Hill" sign come looming out of the fog, but there are a fair helping of points that are just silly, too.

The silliest aspect of the game comes from the re-tooled weapon system. In previous games, firearms had limited ammunition, while melee weapons lasted forever, meaning that melee was often the best choice for most fights. Origins addresses this by making melee weapons incredibly plentiful, but having them break after a couple of hits. It's a system much like that employed in Dead Rising, where any number of regular objects can be picked up and used as weapons, including wooden planks, IV stands and toasters. Unfortunately, it looks stupid. Wandering around a creepy hospital carrying a toaster just makes Travis look like a particularly incompetent burglar.

Also, the combat is clunky and unresponsive, even by the standards of Silent Hill. To make matters worse, to see the game's "good ending" you'll need to down less than 70 foes over the course of the game, so in the end you'll almost entirely bypass the combat portion of the game and just run past most foes.

The developers apparently playtested this "running past things" strategy and found it too easy, so they've compensated by giving practically every enemy the ability to grab you from about half a screen away. There's no defence against these grabs, and escaping them involves an irritating button-mashing minigame. On the whole, the game's monsters seem not spooky but just annoyingly cheap.

The one redeeming feature to the game is the soundtrack, which is by franchise composer Akira Yamaoka and is some of his best work. The music is absolutely gorgeous and you'll sometimes want to stop playing just to make sure you've heard the entire music track before moving forwards.

Music can't save a tragically poor game, though. If you're a Silent Hill fan you might want to get this just for the sake of completeness, but if you've got a limited budget for survival horror then this is not the game you've been waiting for.

Great Gaming Music #11: Katamari On The Rocks

Naaaa-na-na-na-na-na-na-na, Katamari Damacy.

Yu Miyake's theme to Katamari Damacy is like a particularly tenacious brain weevil, in that you just can't get out of your head. Despite how intensely strange the game is, it's music that nevertheless captures the spirit of the franchise perfectly.

As far as I can tell, the Katamari games are Miyake's only work as a composer, although he has acted as sound director on the Tekken games for Namco.

If, like me, you just can't get enough of Katamari On The Rocks, then you'll probably get a kick out of this somewhat dodgy a capella version of it.

Dissidia: Final Fantasy

Not to bomb you with Square-Enix news, but have you noticed that they're working on a Final Fantasy themed game for the PSP called Dissidia: Final Fantasy? The gameplay sounds like a two-player fighting game but apparently it's got a script "double the length of Crisis Core".

This is actually last year's news but somehow I completely missed it, so it's not beyond possibility that you have too. The massive downside, of course, is that you'd have to fire up a PSP in order to play it, but I know some of you out there are masochistic enough to do that so presumably you'll be stoked when Dissidia hits stores.

Yes, Sephiroth is playable.

Flogging A Dead Horse

Sony's unabashed commitment to obsolete and sub-par technology continues. Gamasutra is reporting that Sony Japan are about to launch a new "cinnabar red" PS2, a "metallic blue" PSP, and an EyeToy peripheral for the PS3.

New skins for the PS2 isn't the greatest commitment to the ongoing success of the PS3. And admittedly the PSP is outselling the PS3 by a massive margin, but that thing needs a redesign a lot more than it needs a new SKU.

As for the EyeToy, unless they've improved on the PS2 version a lot, then I really can't see why anyone would possibly want one of these suckers.

By The Way: Echochrome

... is out, on PS3 and PSP. No, don't buy either of those systems, but if you've never heard of this game you should definitely watch the trailer.

New Silent Hill In September

If you're a Silent Hill fan like myself you'll be pleased to know that the upcoming Silent Hill 5 has been given the name Silent Hill: Homecoming and will be released in Australia as early as September on XBox 360 and PS3.

The development company involved is unfortunately a bit horrific; Konami has outsourced the creation to The Collective, the perpetrators of such titles as The Da Vinci Code and Mark Ecko's Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure. In my mind's eye I picture the franchise chained in their basement and only getting fed once a week. Sometimes when it cries they beat it with a stick.

We're also gettting the PlayStation 2 port of the underwhelming Silent Hill Origins in May, which removes one of the few remaining reasons to keep your PSP charged. It's entirely possible if you get Origins and Homecoming together they may add up to being almost a real Silent Hill game.

Next-Generation PSP On The Way?

I draw your attention to the fact that only one game came out for the PSP this month in Australia (UEFA Euro 2008) and there's only two more games after than until the end of August (Iron Man and FF7: Crisis Core). Over the same period, the PS2, an ostensibly superseded console, has five releases.

I don't think I'm being premature in saying that the PSP is thoroughly into its twilight; these are the sort of release schedules that you expect to see on a system once the next-generation model has been out for 6 months or so.

Sony, for all their vices, aren't terminally stupid. I'd be very surprised if Sony are not almost finished development on their next generation handheld. With rumours flying around about a new-model Nintendo DS, it's worth keeping your ear out for something much more interesting coming from Sony. I'd put money on something lighter, easier to hold, with improved battery life and a vastly streamlined connectivity profile. UMD will be out the door, possibly in favour of non-physical media.

It'll be interesting to see the plan for taking on the Nintendo DS giant.

EDIT: A better source puts the Europe-region PSP releases to August at 16, versus 19 on the PS2. (Compare to 47 on the DS.) It may be that the discrepancy is due to shorter announce-time on releases in Australia. Anyway, even with larger numbers, I'm happy to stand by the rest of my comments above.

Next Generation Is Portable

A lot of the time when I talk to game geeks these days, the debate is still whether the next-generation console of choice is the PlayStation 3 or the XBox 360. The answer, of course, is neither: it's the Nintendo DS. The debate has moved past them. The next generation is portable.
I refer you to the latest worldwide sales figures via VGChartz.

(EDIT: I originally for some reason put a dollar sign before these numbers; they should represent units sold and I have now correccted accordingly.)

Total units of console sold worldwide:
Microsoft XBox 360: 9.71 million
Nintendo Wii: 7.09 million
Sony PlayStation 3: 3.31 million

Nintendo DS: 42.50 million
Sony PSP: 21.33 million

Breaking that down in consoles first of all, the Wii has sold about two thirds as many units as the 360 in a third of the time, and outsold the PS3 better than two to one over the same period.

Looking at the portables, admittedly the DS has been out a year longer than even the 360, but if we assume growth for the 360 over the next year consistent with its showing to date, then the DS is outselling the 360 nearly four units to one. Bear in mind that the last generation winner (by sales if not profit), the PS2, has sold only 117 million worldwide over its entire lifespan. The DS is significantly outselling the PS2 over the same period since launch.

The real significance of this is attach rates. For those who aren't familiar with this term, it works like this. When a game is released for a system, the audience isn't an absolute figure, because not everyone who might potentially want to play the game owns the relevant console. Rather, it's expressed as a percentage of the total ownership of the console the game is released on. A good game might sell to 10% of owners of the relevant console; a bad game might only reach 1% or less.

It doesn't take a lot of maths to see that 1% of the 42.5 million DS owners (425,000) is a larger number than 10% of the 3.31 million PS3 owners (330,100). That is, it's more economically viable to release even a mediocre game for the DS than it is to produce a triple-A title for the PS3.

So why would anyone be developing for home consoles? When the leading attach rate goes to a portable system, where coincidentally development costs must also be significantly lower, you can expect to see more and more triple-A franchises jumping ship to portable waters. Dragon Quest IX is only the beginning. With so far only around 4% of PS2 owners making the jump to the PS3, sales figures for Final Fantasy XIII aren't going to be anywhere near as impressive as the staggering numbers for earlier titles, and it's my prediction that you're going to see DS iterations of the series taking the lead over next holiday season.

Lumbered with increasingly irrelevant and poorly supported hardware, console gamers are about to find out they have more in common with PC gamers than they think.

Upcoming Game Releases - Australia

More to remind myself than anything else, here's forthcoming game releases over the next few months in Australia that look interesting.

Dec 12 - Myst (PSP)
The frustrating, shallow, and visually attractive point-n-click puzzler finds a natural home on Sony's frustrating, shallow and visually attractive handheld.

Jan 12 - Lost Planet: Extreme Condition (X360)
The Halo-esque first person shooter I got to try out at TGS. I don't own a 360 but this game's come closer to persuading me than anything yet.

Jan 17 - World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade (PC)
Blizzard's MMOG expansion is probably going to sell considerably better than most full fledged games.

Feb 8 - Rule of Rose (PS2)
Despite all the mediocre reviews it's gotten, I still want to play this disturbing survival horror populated by evil 1930s teen and pre-teen girls. Can't believe that the OFLC let this one slip past, but I guess their loss is Australia's gain.

Feb 8 - Contact (DS)
It's what all the cool kids in the blogging circle seem to be playing, so I'm dying to try it to maintain my guru-like position at the top of the interweb's totem pole.

Feb 22 - EA Replay (PSP)
EA Replay is an anthology collection, but what an anthology collection! Ultima VII, Syndicate, all the Road Rash games, both Jungle and Desert Strike, Virtual Pinball, Mutant League Football, Budokan and the original Wing Commander. I'm almost willing to forgive EA their many sins just because of this collection. Almost.

To the best of my knowledge there's still no Australian release date for Final Fantasy XII (PS2), Metal Gear Solid Portable Ops (PSP), Elite Beat Agents (DS) or Elebits (Wii). Anyone care to tell me differently?

PSOne Games for PSP require PS3

That's a lot of uses of "PS" in the post-title. Huh.

Anyway, some time ago Sony promised us we'd be able to download and play original Playstation games on the PSP. The word is now in that (as I feared) the games can't be downloaded direct to the PSP - you have to obtain them through the Playstation 3 online service.

That's right, you have to own a Playstation 3 AND a PSP to download and play the games. Oh, and they could cost anywhere from $10 AUD to $30 AUD, depending on how much Sony feels like ripping us off. Plus, if you don't already have a memory stick for the PSP that holds at least 600 meg, you'll need to get one of those too.

If I wasn't enjoying the PSP port of Tales of Eternia so much right now I'd be tempted to call it a useless piece-of-#$!& doorstop. Dagnabbit.

Full story here via Gamespot.

Capcom Classics Collection Remixed Post-Mortem

I picked up the PSP Capcom Classics Collection Remixed for two reasons. One, because I understood that David Sirlin had had a hand in it and was curious to see the results, and two, because I was really hanging out for some portable shoot-em-up action. It turned out to be an almost perfect anthology title, ruined by two nearly unforgiveable flaws.

This is a collection of Capcom's 80s and early 90s arcade hits. Note "arcade" - these are all the cabinet versions, not the console ports. You get 1941, Avengers, Bionic Commando, Black Tiger, Block Block, Captain Commando, Final Fight, Forgotten Worlds, Last Duel, Legendary Wings, Magic Sword, Mega Twins, Quiz & Dragons, Section Z, Side Arms, The Speed Rumbler, Street Fighter, Strider, Three Wonders, and Varth.

As best I can tell, they're all fairly accurate ports of the originals. The exception is the boardgame-esque trivia title Quiz & Dragons, which has had its mid 80s list of questions replaced with a new set more appropriate to the 21st century. (It's an improvement, trust me.)

There's bound to be some nostalgia in there for just about anyone who's over 20. The personal favourite for me is the short but charming Three Wonders, or possibly top-scrolling shoot-em-up Varth. Old-school brawler Final Fight is also a gem (as is any game featuring Metro City mayor Mike Haggar).

Each game comes with a couple of pages of in-game text describing the game and its history. You can also unlock some very relevant tips, cabinet and concept art, and music for each game by achieving some fairly easy in-game goals. There's also the option to play each game in a variety of visual modes, including a widescreen version to fit the PSP screen, a 90-degree rotated mode where you turn the PSP sideways to replicate an original cabinet display, and a remix mode which presents the original game in its original aspect ratio in the center of the screen, except with the HUD info shuffled off to the right.

Theoretically, the game supports multiplayer, and supports it quite well. Anyone running the game near you can tag in mid-game, exactly like at an arcade cabinet, and tag out just as easily when their "credits" run out. (The games all feature unlimited continues, by the way.) This would be an absolutely fantastic way to play these games, except that there's no download play - each player needs their own copy of the game.

I don't know about you, but it's a very rare occasion when I find another person who owns a PSP and even one of the same A-list games that I do I think the only non-download play I've ever got up and running has been Liberty City Stories. The chances of encountering another player who owns this game outside of some kind of Capcom fan convention I'd have to rate at zero to none.

I don't know whether the lack of a download option was a technical constraint or not, but I can't imagine that these games are too big to download individually via wi-fi. It just seems like a horrible oversight to not let you serve the game out from a single PSP.

The other crippling flaw with Capcom Classics Collection Remixed is the lack of any form of save game. You can't save your progress inside any of the games, which means if you want to finish one, you have to do it in a single sitting, just like in ye olde-timey arcade. I can't even begin to talk about how hideously inappropriate that is in the age of prolific arcade emulators like MAME, let alone how out of place it is on a portable system. Games in this collection can take anywhere up to four or five hours to get through (I say after finally clocking Quiz & Dragons) and I absolutely cannot believe that no one thought that was a problem.

Anyway, if you absolutely must own these games in a legal portable format, then Capcom Classics Collection Remixed is definitely your best bet. It'll work even better if you can con a friend into doing the same thing. But if you're just as happy to play them at home, then stick with emulators, because you'll get a better experience out of it.

Metal Gear Acid 2 Post-Mortem

[Now Experiencing] [Computer Gaming]

The original Metal Gear Acid was an intriguing concept - a collectable card-gaming stealth espionage action game. Unfortunately it was plagued with a host of problems, including a laughably poor plot, glacially slow pacing, uninteresting enemies, horrible game balance, and a swarm of user interface inadequacies.

With the release of Metal Gear Acid 2, I'm pleased to announce that Kojima Studios has removed some of the interface inadequacies.

In Metal Gear Acid 2, you'll be taking control of the legendary hero Solid Snake on another of his patented stealth espionage missions into the heart of a terrorist-controlled military facility. Well, actually, it's not the Snake. It's a clone, or something. But close enough. The point is, you'll be sneaking your way through a good dozen or so enemy-packed levels on a quest to do away with yet another new giant-mech-like Metal Gear. And when I say "sneaking", I mean shooting holes in anything that moves, because it would take the patience of some kind of zen master to play this game the way it was meant to be played.

Like the first Metal Gear Acid, you won't be moving around in real time. Instead you'll be drawing cards from a deck and "playing" them to move around, equip and fire guns, and perform sundry other actions. All actions have a "cost", representing how much time they take to perform; if you use a lot of cost, your enemies will have a correspondingly greater number of actions before you get to act again.

You won't be going it alone, either. About a third of the way through the game you'll be joined by Venus, who's some sort of female assassin. From that point forward, you take on the game's missions as a pair, which makes for some theoretically interesting game mechanics. For instance, when both characters are able to target the same enemy, firing on that enemy will produce a bonus for "covering fire". With some weapons you can actually have both characters firing simultaneously, creating a kind of kill zone. If you were bothering to actually be stealthy, it also has some nice potentials in terms of one character creating a distraction so the other can sneak past a guard, and so forth. But you won't bother with stealth, so you're unlikely to actually use that potential.

As you progress through missions, you earn points, which can be spent at the intermission shop to buy "packs", which add new cards to your collection. You can use those cards to customise and improve the decks that Snake and Venus use during missions. You'll find that the power level of your cards hikes up dramatically as the game goes on, but the danger level of your opponents never significantly increases. As a result, the early missions where you have few cards can be a little tricky, while the later missions are laughably easy.

Of particular note as far as game balance goes are a set of cards which reduce your cost when played, effectively allowing you to act more often. Once you have enough of these cards in your deck, you'll find your able to string together many, many actions without letting your opponents respond. On some levels, you may reach the exit before the guards of the stage get to act. It breaks the immersion considerably. What's worse, this was a problem in the first game - but instead of being fixed, it's been made worse. There are now more cost reducing cards, and the new ones are even more powerful than the old ones.

As any fan of Metal Gear Solid knows, the most memorable parts of a good Metal Gear game are the boss fights, and sure enough Metal Gear Acid 2 features a good half dozen skirmishes with named individuals. But don't hope for enemies of the caliber of Psycho Mantis, or The Sorrow. Heck, you won't even find something as good as Vamp. Almost all of the bosses in Acid 2 are basically just big tanks of hit points. To defeat them you don't have to work out their pattern, or use a clever trick - you just have to pump them full of lots of bullets. Some of the early ones are actually less challenging than killing the regular guards. Even the final confrontation with Metal Gear itself is notably anticlimactic.

The plot itself is substantially better than the original Acid, but it's still more than a little lame. Like Acid, it takes place outside the Metal Gear Solid continuity, featuring a Snake who's clearly not the actual Snake we know and love from the Solid games. There's very little in the way of meaningful mystery or revelation going on, and you'll find yourself not really caring about what happens next.

As a side note, Acid 2 has an absolutely appalling treatment of its female characters. And I'm saying this as a person who has no real problem with playing the Smackdown vs Raw wrestling series. Acid features not just a fairly high level of innuendo and cheesecake, but it's completely contextually inappropriate. The character of Eva in Metal Gear Solid 3 may have gone around half-dressed most of the time, but it fit the whole James Bond ambience of that game. In Acid 2, the feeling is more of a gritty techno-thriller, and when the sharp professional Dr Takiyama happens to have a giant cleavage, a half open labcoat, and no bra or shirt underneath, it just looks grotesque. Likewise, the fact that Venus regularly bounces up and down on the balls of her feet and then looks down at the effect this has on her breasts just comes across as really bizarre.

The music in Acid 2 is passable if not special. It features a lot of musical motifs from the Solid games, along with some new music of its own. The mix works, but it's certainly not as memorable as Harry Gregson-Williams' scores for the PlayStation games. Sound effects are mostly passable footsteps, gun sounds, and the usual cast of alert and alarm noises that Metal Gear players are no doubt familiar with by now.

The graphics are a little better than the dark and muddy visuals that the first Acid demonstrated. Acid 2 goes for a comic-book cell-shaded look, which makes it easier to see what's going on, but doesn't really add much to the game as a whole. The graphics are technically strong but artistically uninteresting.

One of the gimmicks that Acid 2 made a big deal of during development was that the game would feature a 3D mode, and would ship with a 3D viewing apparatus called the "Solid Eye". It's important that you don't get excited by this. The Solid Eye is a cardboard box that you assemble yourself. The 3D effect is achieved by displaying a similar image on both the left and right of the PSP screen, and the box makes sure your left eye sees the left image and your right eye the right. Slight differences in the images produce the illusion of depth.

For the 3D effect to work correctly, you have to keep your face pressed to the cardboard box, eyes about six inches from the screen. Your eyes start to hurt after about five minutes. Needless to say, you won't be interested in playing the game like that, so after trying it once you'll probably leave the 3D mode switched off and never return to it. It's not tied into the game in any way - there's not any puzzles that require it or anything - so it's easy to forget the mode is even there.

The game also contains every cutscene from Metal Gear Solid 3 in a special theatre mode, and watching some of those in 3D is kind of cool, but if you've played Solid 3 you've seen them before, and if you haven't they'll spoil that vastly superior game for you, so again it's a bit of a pointless exercise. There's also some not-quite-soft-porn 3D, with some scantily clad Japanese women fondling replica guns and having waterfights and suchlike, which isn't even as interesting as it sounds.

The interface is significantly better than the original Acid. There's a lot of built in help features, which are handled well, in terms of being available without being annoying. Moving around is also relatively painless now. You can open doors and pick up items without sacrificing the rest of your move. A free look mode allows you to ascertain exactly what your enemies can and cannot see, making the stealth that you won't be doing that much easier. There's also a lot more information available in the deck construction area, although the fact that Acid 2 features more than twice as many cards as its predecessor means you'll still be spending an eye-gougingly long time scrolling through lists when it comes time to build your deck. And despite all the improvements, it's still an unnecessarily complex and unintuitive game.

If you're wondering whether to buy this game, the answer is no. Sadly, it's probably among the better PSP games available, but that's a comment on the PSP and shouldn't be seen as an endorsement of Acid 2. It's marginally better than the original Acid, so if you want to buy into the series you're better off with this one - there's no real plot continuity to worry about. But there are better Metal Gear games, there are better collectable card games, and there are better turn-based strategy games, so it's really hard to recommend Acid 2 to anyone for any reason. Give it a miss, and save your money for the forthcoming PSP Metal Gear Portable Ops.