Jam Sessions

If you’re the sort of person who’s inclined to buy Jam Sessions for the DS, you probably think you already know what you’re getting yourself in for. You think you’re buying a freeform guitar simulator, clearly less cerebral than the act of actually playing a guitar and yet a good tier more creative than yet another iteration of Guitar Hero. What you’re actually buying is, effectively, an empty box.

See, where you went wrong was that you saw that the developer was Ubisoft, and went ahead and spent money anyway. You poor, misguided fool. I paid $15 for this thing out of a bargain bin, sold it to a friend a week later for $10, and still feel like my wallet has been intimately violated. Owning this thing is a stain that won’t ever wash off, no matter how long I leave my DS to soak in the kitchen sink.

What’s in Jam Sessions feels like something that never made it out of beta. It may not have even made it into beta. It’s not a game, it’s not an application, it barely even qualifies as a screensaver.

Basically, Jam Sessions lets you map a handful of guitar chords to the face buttons, and then play them by holding the appropriate button while “strumming” the stylus across the DS touchscreen. Strumming up or down produces different effects. If that sounds awkward and unappealing, it’s because it is.

This is normally where I’d go on to tell you how this core concept is then used in a variety of game modes, challenges, freestyle options, and possibly multiplayer. Unfortunately Jam Sessions doesn’t have any of those things. You can map the chords, and then play them. That’s it.

To be fair, the game comes with a bunch of songs of varying quality. More accurately, it comes with the Jam Sessions equivalent of sheet music for a bunch of songs of varying quality, which you can play along to – or not, as the game can’t tell whether or not you’re playing them correctly. You can get the game to play the chords for each song to show you how they go; sometimes these renditions are even recognisable as the songs they claim to be.

The game also provides the lyrics, but if you don’t already know how the vocal track to the song goes then there’s no guidance here. You’ll have to get the song off the internet and listen to it or something if you have aspirations to sing along.

There’s also no band backing – you get lead guitar, and that’s it. No drums, no bass or rhythm, just strumming until you weep bitter tears of hatred into the barren cartridge slot of your DS. You can record a certain amount of your misshapen efforts to the cartridge, including any vocal stylings you may have directed at the microphone, but really the only reason you’ll want to do this is to engage in some sort of weird Pavlovian conditioning when you play them back later, in the unlikely event that the name “Ubisoft” doesn’t already make you flinch and cower.

Don’t think that this is nevertheless something you will enjoy; it is not. Don’t think that you have the patience to extract enjoyment from this unfinished waste of code; you do not. If you absolutely must generate freestyle electronic music, I strongly suggest that you take advantage of a large variety of freeware available at your local internet, and leave Jam Sessions sprawled unappealingly across your game retailer’s half-price table like the drunken smelly hobo that it is.

SoulCalibur IV Bonus Characters

The entire internet has been lining up in single file to tell you this, so if you haven’t heard it by now you’re either a very poor listener or you’re frighteningly skilled with a high calibre rifle. Either way, you need to know that the SoulCalibur franchise has returned to those golden days where each platform got its own unique character. When SoulCalibur IV rolls around, we’re apparently to be treated to Darth Vader on the PS3 and Yoda on the Xbox 360.

Man, sticking the Soulblade through that little green goblin is going to be the sweetest moment in gaming history. I’m going to have to take pictures, and maybe commission some sort of gilt-edged commemorative plate. It’s really the little things like this that allow me to continue my slavish devotion to an ageing franchise in the face of insultingly mediocre spin-offs like SoulCalibur Legends. Take notes, Koei.

Scene It? Lights, Camera, Action

There’s nothing quite like pulping your friends into a crying mush with the sheer force of your intellect, and when a game claims to deliver that heady thrill it’s something that should be investigated posthaste. Scene It? Lights, Camera, Action delivers exactly that sort of academic emasculation of loved ones.

The computer trivia game is a feisty and often ill-conceived beast. For every You Don’t Know Jack that marches proudly forth from the primordial soup, there are a dozen hideous mutants that choke to death on a fetid mix of their bilious internal fluids. Sometimes the gaming public is served tasty trivia cuisine, and sometimes the development chefs just vomit forth their own stomach lining and call it "Buzz!”.

Indeed, the purchase of an electronic quiz game is something that should not be undertaken lightly; potential consumers should go to gaming stores equipped with a razor-sharp machete, impassive native guides, and a fearsome proficiency with a high-end bullwhip. The unwary could find themselves going home with a perfect arcade emulation of Quiz & Dragons; upon such potent cautionary tales are the foundations of gaming society set.

This is all by way of explaining that when I discovered that Scene It? Lights, Camera, Action was able to run without crashing, had answers that more or less matched its questions, and showed no obvious intention of molesting small children, I immediately acclaimed it a runaway success and asked it to have my babies. Brutally low expectations infinitely simplifies the process of making lifelong friends.

If you haven’t guessed by now, Scene It? LCA is a movie trivia game. It’s for the Xbox 360 and it’s the natural extension of the DVD-based trivia game of the same name. For about the price of a regular top-shelf game you’ll take home the game itself plus its four unique trivia buzzers. The buzzers won’t work with your regular 360 wireless – they instead communicate with a dedicated infrared port (included) which plugs into the 360’s USB hub. It’s a cheap way of dodging Microsoft’s absurd wireless licensing policy, but the winner in the end is the consumer, so rolling with it is not a hassle. You’ll be pleased to know that they’re more or less completely functional 360 controllers, so you can probably use them to do bizarre things like play Dead or Alive if you’re masochistically inclined.

The game lets you and up to three friends engage in your standard film trivia nonsense. All questions are multiple choice; some let everyone have a go, awarding more points for faster answers, while others will require you to buzz in and then face the challenge alone. A standard game, which lasts about half an hour, will move you around a fictional film lot, where each randomly chosen location is the home to a certain type of question.

The screening room, for example, challenges you to answer questions after watching an iconic scene from a movie, or asks you to identify a movie based on certain of its more unique film credits. The art department demands that you name a movie based on children’s drawings of its contents (seeing Freddy Krueger rendered in ham-handed Crayola is enough to warm the cockles of your icy, icy heart). Other question types see you identifying movie posters, sourcing famous quotes, or playing “before they were famous” with A-list celebrities. There’s an absolute buttload of these things, regardless of whether you measure your buttloads in imperial or metric, and the number of questions in each category is sufficient to last the number of games you’d expect of something like this.

The questions themselves are clever, and have enough depth to please a film buff without being so obscure as to frustrate newcomers. Over the eight or so games I’ve played I’ve never felt the need to argue with the questions or dispute the answers, which is good, because ultimately the game is only an inanimate disc and it would likely sneer in my face while haughtily ignoring my complaints.

At the end of each “round” (of which there are three per game), there is a wrap-up of the scores so far, and then a bunch of arbitrary awards are handed out for accomplishments like “slowest correct answer” or “answering correctly after three other players have been wrong”. These things are surprisingly good for numbing the pain of being in last place, and act as a thin and tasty jam smeared liberally over the game’s trivia-related bread and butter. It’s worth saying again, though, that the questions are really the star of the show here, and are well balanced and excellently conceived.

In fact, Scene It? LCA would be well on its way to being a king among trivia games, were it not for the game’s announcer, who, much like a terrorist, appears to have unexpectedly grabbed the yoke of this otherwise high-flying game and steered it straight for the nearest iconic monument. His grating voice introduces every set of questions, and recaps the scores at the end of each round, repeating the same lame jokes in a horrible affectedly nasal Californian accent until you’re just begging to take him to Guantanamo and beat him with a wet newspaper until he tells you where he bought the fertiliser.

It’s really a shame that the top-class work that’s gone into researching and writing the questions is wrapped in such unappealingly soggy vocal packaging. Still, it’s not the worst abomination in the history of gaming audio, and providing that you’re not intending to play this thing in epic 72-hour stretches you’ll likely be able to tolerate the mouldy crust in order to get to the sweet, sweet fruit-flavoured innards.

If you’re the sort who likes trivia games, and you’re also the sort who has friends, you’re first of all a lucky and rare breed, and secondly you’re absolutely the sort of person who should pick up a copy of Scene It? LCA for immediate deployment to your living room or entertainment area. This game is exactly what you’ve been looking for, and in the name of all that is holy, buy it quickly, before someone makes you play Buzz!.

Tokyo Game Show 2008?

Does anyone know of firm dates for the 2008 Tokyo Game Show? “Second week in October” just isn’t good enough to plan an international trip around.

Some acquaintances and I are thinking of possibly maybe going, providing that the dollar signs are in alignment. 2006 TGS was a blast and the only thing that could make that sweaty melange of gaming magic more entertaining is sharing it with friends. Plus that sort of thing gets cheaper when you have people to split accommodation costs with. If I can get a lock on a specific calendar window I’ll try and post some prices up here in case you want to join our oriental electrosafari.

I’ll likely do the same thing I did last time I went, which is to say totally scam my way into the business day and avoid the horrible tourist crowds. Also, in case anyone asks, this is a professional game news site, I’m an accredited journalist, and my requirement for free samples and press kits in order to properly prosecute my Pullitzer-winning brand of hard-hitting prose is so powerful as to have inspired no less than three strikingly emotional human interest documentaries. Try practicing that sentence a few times right now; it’ll make it easier to say with a straight face later.

Battlestar Galactica (360 Live Arcade)

I should warn you about the 360 Live Arcade Battlestar Galactica game. This thing has taken a beating in the gaming press, and for the most part deservedly so. It goes to all the trouble of letting you get behind the joystick of a Raptor and go hunting some Cylons, and then ruins it all by giving the whole thing a fixed overhead perspective and filling the difficulty bucket all the way to the top.

The developers seem to be aiming for that small niche market known as “casual gamers with godlike twitch reflexes”. If you’ve never encountered this demographic before, feel free to attempt to fire up a multiplayer game of this and go head to head against all three of them. It’s all in the context of Battlestar’s more recent incarnation, of course, and while the original score, art assets, cast, plot, scriptwriting and direction of the new series are all missing in action, at least all those other things you loved about it are intact.

Aliens vs Predator Requiem

It seems that everyone wants to be Johnny Depp these days, so it’s no surprise that in Aliens vs Predator Requiem the titular Predator is doing its bow-legged finger-wiggling best impression of Captain Jack Sparrow through scene after tedious scene. It matches up firmly with the movie’s Aliens, who don’t quite seem to have gotten the hang of the “killing humans” idea, and instead interact with their victims largely by looming over them, running around them in circles, licking them, and stroking their pretty, pretty hair. The concept of Aliens vs Predator is inherently a fine one, but the “versus” part really implies that the competition in question is going to be the combative sort, rather than some kind of all-comers no-holds-barred parade of camp.

For the most part AVP Requiem is pretty much interchangeable with Michael Bay’s recent Transformers-esque movie, where you can swap the characters, action, and dialogue back and forth with no significant loss of quality. It feels very much like the AVP licence was obtained at a late stage and the off-world lifeforms in question were shoehorned into what was originally intended to be a run-of-the-mill zombie outing. Shotguns, sheriffs and cheerleaders are the go, and it’s the sort of movie that has an unhealthy obsession with town squares and truck-stop diners.

This time around it appears that those dastardly Predators were getting up to what might be referred to as “science” with everyone’s favourite aliens, creating one of those Predator-Alien hybrids that franchise fans lovingly refer to as a “Predalien”. Naturally, things go awry, and the science vessel on which all this malarkey is taking place crash-lands on Earth, discharging face-huggers and Predalien alike into the Colorado wilderness. Soon the wee beasties come across a townful of unsuspecting humans, and hilarity ensues. One lone Predator from what I choose to refer to as “Predator Planet” somehow is informed of the goings-on and travels to Earth with the never-quite-explicitly-explained motive of hunting him down some Aliens.

It’s all just an excuse for a chest-bursting acid-flinging head-biting gorefest, and not in the good way. The movie repeatedly dives into some internal ocean of tedium and comes up dripping wet; it’s one of those flicks that’ll leave you consulting your watch and wondering how much longer it can possibly take for them to get around to nuking the site from orbit.

On the plus side, the Predator himself is mostly handled well. You’ll see the full array of Predator weaponry used to passably good effect, and for those who’ve played the wonderful and deeply underappreciated Aliens vs Predator 2 game, you’ll likely be wanting to dig up a copy and reimmerse yourself in that classic title. It certainly beats sitting through the quasi-cinematic nonsense on offer here.

There’s the usual gallery of awful directorial decisions, ranging from shaky camerawork to sub-par lighting and plot points that repeatedly insult the intelligence of five-year-olds, but really the movie’s greatest sin is that it completely fails to hit any of what make the AVP franchise such a wonderful piece of fanwank. Marines, people. Marines. It needs jarheads with guns, on a desolate world, falling in love with the mythos of both Aliens and Predators for the first time all over again.

If you’re wondering what the “Requiem” bit of the title was all about, you’ll be happy to know that it’s just an effort to make the film sound more pretentious than it otherwise might. The movie trudges the length of its narrative wasteland without ever once sighting what might possibly be a requiem in the extreme distance. It’s like the antithesis of the school of movie-naming which produced Snakes On A Plane.

Really, it doesn’t matter whether or not you’re a fan of Alien, or Predator, or the Alien vs Predator franchise. You may have enjoyed the AVP books, or comics, or videogames, or you may or may not have some particular opinion about the last AVP movie. It doesn’t matter – this is a mind-numbingly dull movie that won’t be of interest even to fans who stay up late at night salivating over mind-numbingly dull movies. Let us never speak of it again.

Starcraft: The Board Game

With your desire for steamy Zerg/Protoss slash fiction whetted to a keen edge by the forthcoming release of StarCraft 2, you may have found yourself in your local game retailer, face to face with one of the cyclopean boxed sets of the associated board game and quietly exclaiming, "My God, it's full of stars."

A mere $160 AUD will make you the proud possessor of StarCraft: The Board Game, and in the interests of the enlightenment of my fellow man I've made the necessary sacrifice to acquire myself this oversized item of merchandising.

Carrying the thing is a bit of an enterprise in itself. I’ve seen ten year old children that are smaller than the box this thing comes in. By the time you lug it back your domicile or place of abode you’ll be wheezing so hard that you'll barely be able to make humerous references to spawning more Overlords. It’s entirely possible that your last words before keeling over from a massive coronary will be “Left heart ventricle... requires more... vespene gas!”

The perpetrators of the boardgame, by the way, are Fantasy Flight Games, who by and large have an excellent history with licensed boardgames. Their War of the Ring remains one of the finest strategy games I have ever played and comes highly recommended. So it’s a bit odd that Starcraft: The Board Game comes across more or less as a mish-mash of reasonably original ideas with no clear focus or genius. It’s deeply hit and miss, and while fortunately the hits outstrip the misses, the sheer quantity of glaringly obvious game design errors it makes is sufficient to induce epilepsy in small children.

It’s got a lot of pieces. It’s got a LOT of pieces. If you’ve dealt with one of FFG’s previous licensed efforts you might have an idea of what you’re in for, but Starcraft still completely outstrips even the massively epic War of the Ring for quantum of ridiculous minutiae. Each of six players will get a double handful of plastic miniatures, a deck of 40 odd cards, 15 cardboard worker tokens, a score marker, cardboard bases, cardboard buildings, cardboard modules, cardboard dropships, and cardboard order markers, and that’s before we get into the shared card decks, giant cardboard planets, space connectors, z-axis markers, first player tokens, score tracks, rulebooks and other detritus that FFG have shoved into the box.

There’s actually too much in the box. Literally. Some of my plastic pieces came pre-broken, because they’re quite delicate pieces, and to fit them in the box they needed to be jammed in there by (I presume) some kind of piston-driven robot. The flying pieces in particular have ridiculously fragile stands that they sit on, and a great number of them were snapped like the flimsy mass-produced pap that they are.

The surviving pieces look pretty great, though. Hydralisks and Dragoons look notably wonderful, and the Ultralisk model is almost worth having all by itself. Pushing them around the board is exactly the sort of fun that makes you want to pay $160 in order to have it.

The game gets off to a promising start by not attempting to perfectly recreate its computer-powered parent. Instead of fighting intricate battles planetside, you’ll instead be looking at things from a galactic perspective, and attempting to take territory on a variety of different colonies.

The board is created dynamically by linking together planets to form a map in a manner reminiscent of something like Settlers of Catan. There are six different factions to choose from; as Terrans you can play Jim Raynor or Arcturus Mengsk. The Zerg get Kerrigan or the Overmind. Protoss are stuck with choosing between Tassadar or Aldaris. Each race gets a couple of reasonably interesting special rules, and each faction of each race gets a slightly different starting setup.

You win by achieving either a normal victory or a special victory. A normal victory is achieved by reaching a certain number of conquest points, which are gained by holding key territories at the end of a turn. Special victories are different for each faction, and this is probably the biggest problem with the game, in that some factions have special victory conditions which are just flat-out better than others. Tassadar in particular is incredibly cheap, requiring him merely to be in the lead at any time during the endgame in order to win. We’ve played about five games now and we’re talking next time about removing special victories entirely before we’re forced into fisticuffs over who gets to be Tassadar.

The best aspect of the game is probably how orders work. You have three types of orders, being build, research, and move, and in one round you’ll lay down a combination of four of these orders around the board. Where it gets tricky is that each order has to be assigned to a planet. Orders on a planet stack, so that when you place an order it sits on top of all orders already assigned to a planet. Also, orders are executed in a last-in-first-out manner, so that you have to plan backwards by placing the things that you want to do last down before the things you want to do first. What’s more, players take turns placing orders, so that your orders can get buried beneath someone else’s, so that the build order you desperately need won’t get executed until the jerk to the left has used his move order to attack you. It’s a wonderfully deep tactical exercise that’s responsible for the majority of the game’s success.

The game does reasonably well at stopping itself from focusing exclusively on an optimal first economic turn. Very tight unit limits and a reasonably flexible build system mean that a subpar opening does not necessarily lose you the game.

The game’s second major weakness, after victory conditions, comes from the way it handles technology. To research a technology, you have to spend a research action. You then must pay the cost of the technology. Technologies come in the form of cards that are placed into a deck of combat cards which you use to resolve battles. As technologies are only effective on at most a couple of types of unit, you’ll only want to research technologies for units you’re actually using, or risk diluting the power of your combat deck. What’s more, a large number of the technologies are just bad, requiring very specific scenarios in order to be effective or providing little advantage.

Some units (notably detectors and support units) are completely unable to do anything until you’ve bought them technologies. This doesn’t mean you’ll by them technologies – it means you’ll ignore the units. I’ve yet to build a Zerg Defiler or Zerg Queen, and I haven’t seen anyone bust loose a Templar or a Science Vessel yet either. The game seems to contemplate an ongoing cloaking vs detection metagame that never really emerges, largely because cloaking is not really useful even when there’s no detectors about.

Still, if you’re prepared to slice off large sections of the game as not worth your time, what remains is pretty decent. The three races seem reasonably balanced once you discard the special victory conditions, and there’s no doubt that what you’re playing is recognisably Starcraft.

One thing that seems a bit cheap is that there’s none of the characters or units from Brood War present; it’s a move that seems calculated entirely for the purpose of selling an expansion, and it’s just coldly commercial enough to feel annoying. Still, you’ll forgive the game’s makers each and every time you build an Ultralisk; deploying your top end units is just that satisfying.

The game works best with about four players, although the two player variant is not entirely without charm. Games go for about two hours at the four player size (once you’ve already sorted the pieces and learned the rules) and the rules are clear and require little interpretation. The game looks and feels gorgeous and it’s not hard to see where your money went once you examine the cornucopia of full-colour crap inside the box. It’s just a shame that the tech cards and the special victory conditions are so obviously and deeply rubbish.

Is the game worth $160? Probably not, unless you have a lot of friends who are going to want to play a lot of this game. If you’ve got the crowd, however, Starcraft: The Board Game might well be worth the investment.

Edit 14 January 2008: It turns out we've been playing one of the rules a little wrong, so in light of us now understanding it, I should say that Special Victory Conditions are not quite so extremely unbalanced as depicted above. They're still unbalanced, and the tech tree is still broken, but it's just a little bit better than we had thought.

Ron Gilbert Developing Deathspank

Via PalGN:

Ron Gilbert is finally returning to the forefront of comedic game development with his brand new project, DeathSpank. Described via amusingly-written press release in a peculiar nutshell as "Monkey Island meets Diablo", DeathSpank will be the first game Gilbert will develop as a new Creative Director at Hothead Games, who in turn will be handling the publishing of the title.

It's like speaking of the man summons his unspeakable spectre. You can never tell when the brilliant old coot is creating real-honest-to-God games and when he's just violentlly pulling the gaming community's collective leg. I wait with totally unabated breath.

Blue Wizard Needs Sleep Badly

Sweet jeebers I need sleep. Red Bull is not the answer. Or rather it is the answer to a point, and then after that point you will find me in the lounge room at 3 am playing Bioshock on the hardest difficulty and attempting to finish the whole thing within ninety minutes “because angels don’t wait for slowpokes”. There will be uncontrolled twitching.

If anyone sees that parasite who invented daylight saving and then forcibly applied it to the Australian Capital Territory, would you kindly beat him to death with a golfclub for me?

The Golden Compass

The Golden Compass is interminable. “Oh,” you will cry, while attempting to slit your wrists with the frayed edges of a popcorn box, “why in the name of sweet zombie Jesus will it not end?”

It’s like someone with a short attention span had read a copy of Phillip Pullman’s novel The Northern Lights and then attempted to explain the plot to an intellectually-challenged friend. It rambles from scene to scene without direction or purpose, omitting important plot points and jumbling others together with a total lack of regard for narrative continuity. Some scenes are rendered in lovingly gratuitous detail, while others futz around like small brain-damaged children trying to find a wedding dress in a blizzard.

The film follows the adventures of Lyra, a girl with a mysterious but unexciting past and a mysterious but vague destiny who sets out to find a friend who isn’t very interesting and an uncle that she never actually ends up locating. Along the way she hooks up with a variety of poorly-explained characters on an epic quest to stop a possibly-maybe war between some as yet-unidentified factions, which threatens to destroy an infinite number of parallel worlds that you never actually get to see any of. The whole thing comes to a jerking halt some several chapters short of where the novel ended with a kind of bashful “sorry folks, we’ve run out of time” air pervading the finale.

There’s quality to be found here, to be sure, but the process of looking for it is like an unrewarding cinematic Where’s Wally? The Ice Bears, which the film’s posters have made much of, look absolutely fantastic, and the two set-piece scenes starring the CG-animated Iorek Byrnison are far and away the strongest parts of the movie. The Ice Bears are essentially what you’d get if a civilization of Tolkien dwarves grew fur and paws, but that doesn’t stop Iorek from being the best armour-smithing orc-smiting gold-mining Gimli ever.

Daniel Craig and Nicole Kidman put in plucky performances as Lord Asriel and Mrs Coulter respectively, but Craig’s total time on screen can be counted on the fingers of both hands, and despite a strong attempt in the role by Kidman she is brutally miscast as the aging authoritarian Coulter. Child actress Dakota Blue Richards is more or less competent as Lyra but you’re unlikely to be starting fan tributes to her any time soon.

The pacing is appalling; Lyra spends much of the time floating dispassionately from one scenario to the next with no clear mission or motivation. It’s not clear what she’s ultimately trying to achieve and most of her allies seem to just be killing time rather than pursuing any vital objective of their own. In my imagination, entire scenes of the script simply read, “Lyra languishes. Those around her look pensive.” In the session I saw, small children were asking their parents if the movie was over yet, and then crying when told that it wasn’t.

The film is not so generically bowel-threatening as to be without charm for all audiences. Those with a lot of patience and a deep-seated love for talking animals may well wring a couple of hours of entertainment out of the thing. It’s reasonably visually accomplished and looks quite good when no one in it is moving or talking, and the whole thing is set to one of those simperingly inoffensive epic fantasy scores that we’ve come to expect in post-Lord of the Rings Hollywood. Also, while the movie totally failed to justify its own existence, it quite successfully sold me on the idea that I might want to read the book it was based on.

I can’t say that you should avoid this movie like a crossdressing vampire, no matter how much I’d like to, and if you think you might enjoy it you should probably pony up the dosh necessary to be disabused of that opinion. But if you were already unconvinced of The Golden Compass’ alleged eloquent charm then this is almost certainly not the movie for you, and you probably haven’t seen the really rather good Stardust more times than you can stand yet, so you should go and rewatch that instead. Right now.

Sam & Max - Season One

It’s widely held that the last great point-and-click adventure was Grim Fandango, the final game to be produced by LucasArts using their famous SCUMM engine. Oh, sure, there were some more Monkey Island games of varying degrees of quality, and it took the Myst franchise a bit longer to die than it probably should have, and occasionally you’d see some backwoods European developer getting up to mouse-driven malarkey in the bargain bin, but really Grim Fandango was unarguably the arbitrarily designated nail in the coffin.

When LucasArts stopped making original games and went back to lame franchise cash-ins, and when the Tim Schaeffers and Ron Gilberts of the world had moved on to greener and ultimately less profitable pastures, the fans of the genre were left to make their own way in the world, much like the surviving members of a doomsday cult following the mass suicide of all their friends. Some moved on to “mainstream gaming”, some left the hobby entirely, and others banded together like junkies in a crack den to mainline obscure Russian detective games and slurringly reminisce over the good old days while cockroaches crawled unnoticed over their babies.

It’s with that pleasant image in mind that Telltale Games enters our story. They exploded onto the gaming scene with the devastating force of a poorly-made Christmas cracker, promising all and sundry that they were going to bring back the golden age with a mix of episodic PC gaming, oddball humour, and a development team that were maybe possibly related to friends of the people who lived with the cousins of the people who made the LucasArts classics.

That was a fine ambition, one not to be instantly sneered at, and it was met with some anticipation and wary optimism by the gaming public. A slow drumroll began in the collective subconscious, building in power, momentum and intensity over the months, which finally culminated in Bone: Out from Boneville, an adaptation of Jeff Smith’s comic masterpiece which completely failed to capture the spirit of either “comic” or “masterpiece”. It was, not to put too fine a point on it, very, very bad. Very, very, very bad.

So when Telltale announced that it had obtained the licence to Sam & Max and was going to make a game of it, most people interpreted “make a game of” to mean “dig up and have sex with the corpse of”. I know I did.

And that’s basically what they did. But where it became surprising was that the corpse wasn’t exactly struggling, if you know what I mean. It turned out Telltale was one fine romancer of corpses. When their first episodic Sam & Max instalment hit the streets, not only did it not smell of the grave and shamble insistently in the general direction of our brains, but it was actually injected with the life and mayhem that we expect – nay, demand – from our Freelance Police-related antics.

Over the following months, Telltale did six of these things, which they loosely referred to as Sam & Max: Season One, and you can now buy all of those episodes together on one disc as what amounts to a single full-length point and click odyssey. I’m happy to tell you it’s well worth buying.

Sam & Max, for those who don’t know, are a pair of unlicensed crimestoppers created by Steve Purcell. Sam’s a dog in a suit and fedora, and Max is a naked white rabbity-thing with a lust for mayhem. They fight crime! They’re tasked with protecting the values, decency, and collected kitsch of America from the rabid forces of unreason by using a combination of suave dialogue, improbable physics, and extreme violence.

Over the course of the six episodes contained in Season One, you’ll lock horns with embittered child stars, cheat at poker, elect Max as President, set the disembodied stone head of Abraham Lincoln up on a date, and destroy the internet, among many other unlikely acts of mayhem. The jokes are fresh and delivered in the instantly recognisable verbose style of Sam & Max, the set-ups are inherently amusing, and the puzzles generally combine just the right amount of logical cause-and-effect with ridiculously exaggerated off-the-wall consequences.

The first few episodes, it must be said, are a little slow, and the puzzles are so easy as to put small children to sleep. In addition, the first four episodes re-use a lot of the same dialogue and art assets to the point of frustration, presumably to reduce Telltale’s development costs. But both the quality and quantity picks up sharply in the back end of the season, and as a result hilarity quickly ensues.

As far as I’m concerned Telltale are so far the only developers to have really wrapped their heads around episodic gaming in a successful fashion. They’re bringing out new games very regularly, at reasonable prices, and delivering exactly the sort of results that gamers expect at that pricepoint. Upon finishing Sam & Max Season One I immediately went looking for the first episode of Season Two, and am pleased to find that they’re following up their initial success with games that are bigger, better, and more fun – and you don’t even need to stuff around with all that Gametap snake oil they were trying to sell you before.

Ultimately Sam & Max Season One shows very clearly the fingerprints of a developer finding its feet in a new marketplace with a non-standard delivery model, but if you’re one of the dispossessed generation deprived of their point-and-click satisfaction lo these long years then you’ll be absolutely tickled pink by how accurately Telltale has hit the target in this effort, and you’re likely going to come out eager for lots, lots more.

Midway / Eidos Merger

Is anyone else laughing themselves silly at the rumoured Midway / Eidos merger? I can’t help but feel we’re well served as a gaming public by consolidating all of our mediocre under a single corporate hat.

Well, actually, I’m a little confused as to the current state of Eidos. On the one hand, they produced the original Tomb Raider, but most of the people associated with that have now left. On the other hand they created the appalling game adaptation of Deathtrap Dungeon, but most of the people associated with that have now left. There’s been some saga of buyouts and management changes and for all I know the company could now consist entirely of Ian Livingstone sitting alone in a warehouse in Montreal single-handedly coding the much anticipated new Deus Ex game.

There’s a good chance that there’s a sad little demographic of people out there shaking with quiet fear at this gaming news. I imagine them to be the shy diminutive clan who dutifully forked out their money for those iterations of Tomb Raider which could charitably be described as “somewhat disappointing”, and who thought that the Hitman franchise was “really rather good”. In my mind I see them clustered together in a poorly-lit basement somewhere giving each other group hugs and reminiscing over their Eidos memories; in the background a lone bugler nobly executes The Last Post.

There’s also probably another group who are still busily ripping Liu Kang’s spine from his body again and again and think that a high-pitched voice yelling “Toasty!” is the height of gaming humour. They have a little shrine to Gauntlet: Dark Legacy in their bedrooms and they keep their copy of BlackSite: Area 51 in its original shrinkwrap so as not to spoil its value over years to come. They can’t understand why a top-class publisher like Midway would NEED to merge with anyone, and they’re blissfully unaware that they’re about to be catapulted headfirst into the basement of that Eidos group and forced to make ugly, deformed babies with them.

In any case I call dibs on naming rights for the new merged company. I was bitterly disappointed that I was unable to sell people on the concepts of “Namdai” or “Blactivision” and therefore wish to get my foot in the door early this time by welcoming “Meidwos” into the gaming world.

Osu! Tatake! Ouendan! 2

It’s worth mentioning also that I recently picked up a copy of Osu! Tatake! Ouendan! 2 for the DS (full title: Moero! Nekketsu Rhythm Damashii: Osu! Tatake! Ouendan! 2), which I’ve now had the privilege of playing a little of. I still can’t read Japanese, so there’s not really a lot to say except that it’s largely identical to the first time around, with the gameplay, setlist and stories being pretty much identical in quantity and quality to the original.

If you haven’t played the first Ouendan, then you need to know that this is the series that was adapted to the English-speaking world as Elite Beat Agents. You play three male cheerleaders who are drawn into a variety of off-the-wall situations by downtrodden citizens of Japan and must use your magical powers of coordinated dance to save the day. This consists of tapping circles on the DS screen in time to a song. It’s a heapin’ helpin’ o’ fun.

Ouendan 2 sees the original cheerleaders going up against a new blue-clad bunch in what is apparently the Japanese equivalent of Bring It On. It would have benefited hugely from the inclusion of Kirsten Dunst and Eliza Dushku, but whatever works. You play, at various points, both teams, but as far as I can see all this rivalry only amounts to a cosmetic difference, with the basic circle-tapping action playing out in exactly the same fashion as always. The difficulty is once again set firmly to “crippling”, with the developers sneering at the pitiful gaijin whose brutish fingers are not worthy even to hold this gameplay masterpiece. Despite me having reached the highest difficulty in Elite Beat Agents, Ouendan 2 has me struggling manfully to even complete the “tutorial” difficulty. Oh, those wacky Japanese.

Anyway, if you’re a fan of male dance posses and nun-punchingly difficult gameplay then Ouendan 2 is absolutely up your alley and you should acquire yourself an import copy posthaste. Posthaste, I say.

Mass Effect - Dust Forms Words Game of the Year 2007

It’s inevitable at this time of year that people ask me what I thought was the 2007 Game of the Year, and when I’m asked that question I answer honestly. It’s similarly inevitable that I then have to defend myself for some hours with my trusty shotgun, because my answer to the question isn’t Portal.

In the late part of 2007 when everyone was busily patting themselves on the back about how clever they were with a portal gun and informing random passers-by that the cake was not entirely truthful, a little outfit that you may not have heard of by the name of BioWare were engaged in sneaking a new product into retailers via the back door. They did it stealthily, with the acumen of ninjas, depositing little green boxes of mysterious happiness onto store shelves like a team of catburgling Santas. Shoppers worldwide were exposed overnight to a strange indy XBox 360 release by the name of Mass Effect, and a select few of them warily wagered their cash by purchasing a copy of this intriguing new title.

That’s exactly how it happened, I swear.

Well, okay, it’s possible that every man and their dog were salivating over the impending release of BioWare’s new game, and that I was indeed the only living human who had not heard of it until immediately prior to its release. But if you compare my gaming record to that of BioWare I think you’ll cut me some slack. They’re the company that made Baldur’s Gate, which despite revitalising AD&D as a computer gaming franchise completely failed to thrill me. They did Knights of the Old Republic, which was allegedly some sort of gaming tour de force, and Jade Empire, which by saying nothing about I can imply was in some way substandard. They did Neverwinter Nights. Neverwinter frikkin’ Nights.

I played and loved the Ultima series. The collected works of Lord British more or less completely fill the mental space I have available for tediously long bug-riddled western RPGs. Besides, only by occasionally casting veiled and unsubstantiated aspersions upon the works of a much loved developer can I maintain my longstanding gaming cred.

Anyway, I’m about to do an abrupt about-face on all that BioWare-hatin’, because Mass Effect is a game so amazing in it both its ambition and execution that I must instantly fall to my knees and worship the divine beings who presumably created it.

If you’ve played Star Control II, or Fallout, or Wing Commander: Privateer, you may have some idea of what I’m talking about. Of course, Mass Effect is in no way similar to any of those classics, and yet at every turn it’ll have you remembering the fun you used to have back in the days when you made a boot disk for each new game and could reasonably enjoy an epic sci-fi odyssey without reference to a walkthrough. Make no mistake; this is the finest western RPG produced in a very long time, and it is very easily the best game of 2007.

You’ll begin by creating a character, which is refreshingly free of stat-tweaking and revolves largely around picking a character backstory and then creating a physical appearance. My experience creating Captain Abigail Shepherd, earthborn infiltrator, suggests that the character generator has a disturbing obsession with making your character resemble Clea Duvall. That’s not a bad thing; it’s just a little odd. Then again, maybe it’s just me.

Once you’ve tooled yourself up an avatar you’ll be plunged into a gripping military-political space opera in which Earth is the red-headed stepchild of a galactic federation run by a Council of alien races. Not only is humanity not the leader of this council, but they don’t even have a voice on the damn thing, and try as you might you can’t find a single alien mystic who’ll suggest that humans have some kind of unique destiny among the stars. Naturally, this has human nationalism running on the high side, backed by a related wave of xenoracial tension, but before you can really get to grips with Mass Effect’s stunningly well-realised backstory you’ll be flung headfirst into the path of the Geth, a sentient machine race on a mission of conquest. Becoming the first human inductee into the Council’s elite police force, the Spectres, you’ll be pitted directly against the Geth and made the focus of human/alien relations at a turning point in history.

Mass Effect hits all the right notes for classic space opera: devastating alien invaders, interplanetary manhunts, dramatic galactic politics, psychic powers, ancient secrets left by extinct civilisations, space piracy, and romance with improbable non-human females. It does it all while putting you at the helm of a battleship and giving you command over a crew of not-uninteresting personnel. You’ll be bombarded with crucial decisions at every step of the plot, most of which have significant consequences and all of which are inherently interesting. What’s more, it handles these well.

If you’ve played a game that purports to offer you significant moral choices before, you’ve probably been frustrated that:
a) You’re not given enough information to make a choice based on the principles that matter to you;
b) That one choice is rewarded by the game significantly more than another;
c) That none of the outcomes feel appropriate for your character; and/or
d) That picking certain choices will prevent you from seeing some parts of the game later.

Mass Effect sees all these problems coming, and deals with them with an efficiency and charm that makes you wonder why no one was able to get it right before. For the first time in a computer game you’ll genuinely feel like you’re roleplaying, and not just guiding an avatar through a series of opportunities for power gain. It’s a thrilling experience and one that justifies the game all by itself. You’ll probably want to tell your friends about who your character is and what they’ve done, and that’s one of the keenest signs there is that a game is doing something right.

But the fun doesn’t stop there. When you’re not butting heads with alien politicians or negotiating the release of hostages, you’ll be schlepping around the galaxy in your aforementioned battleship and exploring a surprisingly staggering amount of distant planets. Both your primary questline and the large number of sidequests will require you to land on planets, which is where you get to try out the Mako. The Mako is a lunar-lander type buggy with a large gun and some questionable physics, and by using it you can cover a massive amount of ground quickly and take down some of the game’s larger and better armed enemies. You employ it in an exploration-style game mechanic wherein you’ll be uncovering such things as buried artefacts, lost data probes, and hidden space pirate bases. The Mako handles like a balloon, has jump jets, and can fall an infinite distance without suffering, even if you “get air” off the top of the planet’s highest mountain. Driving it is a blast.

You’ll of course regularly have to go toe to toe with enemies, usually on foot, and this is where the game breaks out another can of awesome. In your basic combat you’ll control a squad of three (yourself and two buddies chosen from a party of up to six). Combat is largely in real time and works a lot like a first person shooter with dice rolled behind the scenes to reflect accuracy and damage. It requires more hand-eye coordination and tactics to land a shot than games like Tabula Rasa or Auto Assault but it’s more loose than your average FPS. You can also pause combat at any time by bringing up the heads-up-display menu, and you can reaim your weapon while paused. You can also use your “biotic abilities” and issue commands to your teammates while paused. Using this pause menu to full effect is absolutely key to engaging the game at its intended difficulty, and this fact isn’t well explained, so casual gamers could easily get frustrated while learning.

Biotic abilities, by the way, are also a little confusing, as they’re all based on manipulating mass (hence the game’s name). You’re limited to making things lighter, heavier, more or less solid, pushing things around, and creating singularities. That may not sound like much but once you realise how it all works it’s pretty awesome. The game heavily emphasises cover (to the extent of having a Gears of War-style “snap to cover” mechanic), and there’s nothing quite like making the crate your enemy is hiding behind float off into space to give you an instant edge. Pulling baddies out from behind cover with a singularity is great too. However, the game does a poor job of explaining all this, so if you’re like me you may not even realise what all this biotic tomfoolery is about until the final third of the game.

Oddball learning curve aside, once you know what you’re doing combat is more fun than sticky-taping kittens to each other. It rarely feels tedious, and you’ll often be spoiling to get into a fight just for the fun of shooting things. This is great, as a lot of the sidequests are of the “go to Planet X and kill Target Y” variety, and the fact that killing Target Y is inherently fun really makes the game pacing run very smoothly. Besides, Target Y is a jerk. I hate that guy.

The game looks great, although it’s not necessarily an artistic tour-de-force. Character costuming is ripped straight from genre classics like Star Trek and Babylon 5, and environments are functional more often than eye-pleasing. I want to say, though, that the bog-standard planet surfaces you’ll explore look amazing. Considering that there’s really only two textures at work, being a ground texture and a skybox, they will nevertheless absolutely blow you away. On some planets you’ll just want to stop playing and take it in for a while.

The music is absolutely appropriate for an epic space-opera, and while not quite falling into gaming’s greatest soundtracks it remains a worthy accomplishment that adds a lot to the game. Sound effects are generally great, and the voice acting is wonderful. Much has been made of the presence of Seth Green and Marina Sirtis in the game, so I should say that their roles effectively amount to mere cameos, but the other actors who you probably haven’t heard of who do the bulk of the voice acting rise amply to the occasion.

Probably the worst flaw in Mass Effect is that, like pretty much every western computer RPG ever, it has some unfortunate bugs. Notably, you’ll regularly get stuck on the level geometry, occasionally to the point of needing to save and reload. It’s not crippling, but it’s disappointing.

The game clocks in at about 30 to 40 hours of play, which, by the way, is how long games of this sort SHOULD go for. 120 hours is not a good length. I’m looking at you, Square-Enix. That 30-something hours is also completely grind-free. Every last minute is relevant and inherently fun. You’re not going to feel obliged to do something dull in the expectation of a reward later. And, if you absolutely must use up two non-stop weeks of your waking life on a single game, there’s enough replay value in Mass Effect to sustain a couple of repeat playthroughs, seeing as you’ll probably want to see what happens if you make different choices, and try out another backstory, career speciality, gender, or squad makeup (all of which have significant impacts on the course of the game). The game unfortunately makes you choose between keeping your levels and progress for a second playthrough OR playing a character that looks different and has a different backstory, but it's a reasonably minor fault in the scheme of things.

A lot of RPGs, by the way, drop the ball when it comes to pacing the ending, sticking the majority of the game’s grind immediately prior to the climax. Sometimes that results in an ending that isn’t properly reflective of the pacing and scale of the remainder of the game. Mass Effect, so that you know, has an absolutely fantastic ending, with sublime pacing, and alternate resolutions based on your actions which all feel rewarding and appropriate. It’s absolutely true that Mass Effect has great gameplay, but I need to say a number of times that it’s the story and character that are what make this game excellent.

In 2007, Portal aimed at a relatively easy to achieve target, and absolutely nailed it. If Mass Effect is slightly less perfect in its implementation, that needs to be seen in the context of the exponentially more ambitious goal it has aimed for. This is the game that western RPGs have wanted to be for nearly thirty years, and if you own an Xbox 360 you have absolutely no excuse not to get a copy.

Bioshock

When Bioshock was released, it promised three things: a mixture of RPG and FPS elements, the ability for players to solve situations in a variety of different ways, and meaningful moral choices which influence the story.

They were probably getting confused and talking about Mass Effect, because Bioshock doesn't so much fail to deliver those promises as it does lock them in a cupboard for 14 years and beat them occasionally with a shovel. Nevertheless, it's still a hell of a game.

For those of you who've had your fingers in your ears for going on six months now, Bioshock tells the story of Rapture - an Ayn Rand-inspired objectivist dystopia located, of all places, at the bottom of the sea. The player takes the role of an interloper who is drawn into Rapture's madness when his plane crashes in the nearby ocean.

Admittedly underwater objectivist dystopias aren't exactly a concept that's been run into the ground, but philosophical speculation aside you'll find that the game plays like pretty much every other FPS since the dawn of time. You'll basically be running through a variety of corridors and large rooms, collecting power-ups, and pumping ammo into everything that moves.

The game's biggest gameplay weaknesses are where it strays from the normal FPS formula. For instance, you can "hack" most anything electrical in the game to make it work for you, including vending machines, security cameras, and killer attack robots. This basically involves playing an irritating version of Pipe Dream, where you're rerouting a device's internal plumbing (!) while nearby enemies patiently wait for news of your success or otherwise. It's pretty stupid and it badly breaks up the game pacing, especially as you're going to feel compelled by the nature of the game to hack most everything you see. Later you'll be purchasing expensive autohack tools just to avoid interacting with the silly timewaster.

The game also includes a mechanism where you can take photographs of enemies for "research" purposes - take enough photos of a given type of enemy and you'll get a (often totally unrelated) power-up. You have to put away your normal weapon to get out your camera, so you'll regularly be sitting there fiddling with the shutter while crazed mutants are bearing down on you with murderous intent. The interface is a little less awkward than the photographic bits of Dead Rising, but the minigame as a whole is correspondingly shallower and mostly just irritating.

As a result of the above two distractions, you're likely to take a lot of totally unnecessary damage from enemies, which will bring into sharp focus another of the game's flaws - the enemies aren't actually very scary. Even on the hardest setting most foes don't have a lot of grunt to them. Moreover, if you die, you'll be reconstituted at a nearby "Vita-Chamber" free of charge with a full health bar and all the kit you were carrying when you kicked the bucket. Nearby enemies retain damage you did to them, so you can just charge back out and pick up where you left off, ad nauseum. This at first seems like a progressive approach to making a game that players of all skills can enjoy, but in practice it does nearly terminal damage to your suspension of disbelief. It's no coincidence that the recently released patch for Bioshock includes an option allowing you to disable Vita-Chambers.

One of the game's most memorable features is its use of plasmids and tonics. Plasmids are special genetic enhancements which work like magic spells, allowing you to throw lightning or fire from your hands or use telekinesis or, for some reason, summon a swarm of bees. They sound great but the majority of them are either useless or redundant so you'll probably complete about 90% of the game using only 10% of the plasmids. For example, being able to freeze someone solid sounds great in principle, but the lightning power stuns enemies for about the same duration and is extra effective against machines, so there's really no good reason to ever pull out the freeze effect. That's all compounded by the fact that you can only equip a handful of these plasmids at once, so there's little incentive to experiment with new tactics.

You also get tonics, which are your standard passive power ups. Again, you can only equip a limited number but in practice the list of things you have equipped will be longer than what's on the sidelines, and as with the plasmids, there's a fairly high ratio of things you just won't get any benefit from.

Bioshock originally promised that you could solve situations in a number of ways. You could use overwhelming firepower, stealth, creative use of plasmids, hacked electrical appliances, or the nearby environment to overcome any particular situation. That's great, but in practice you'll actually just use all of the above at once, all the time. Except stealth, which, as with most every game ever, is boring, poorly implemented, and unhelpful.

You may have heard about the "moral choices" in Bioshock. This boils down to what you do about the Little Sisters. These are little girls, brainwashed and mutated to become ghoulish revenants who collect ADAM, the genetic lifeblood of Rapture. Each Little Sister is defended by a Big Daddy (the pressure-suit wearing monstrosities that appear on the game's promotional material) and after a reasonably tough fight you'll get the chance to "deal with" the Little Sister. You can "harvest" her, which kills her but gives you a huge dose of ADAM (which you can use later to buy plasmids and tonics), or you can "rescue her", which removes the genetic damage to her and leaves her alive, but gives you less ADAM.

It ultimately doesn't really matter which you choose. If you rescue Little Sisters, they'll occasionally give you presents of tonics and plasmids, which mostly offset the lost ADAM. The game plays out exactly the same way, and at the end of the game you get one of two brutally short and highly lame "endings" which depend on whether you rescued the Sisters or harvested them. In this regard YouTube, as always, is your friend.

The above criticisms aside, Bioshock is still an amazing game. The graphics are both artistically and technically excellent. Voice acting is generally outstanding, and the characters usually have something to say that's worth listening to. The world of Rapture is deeply atmospheric, and well realised through a large amount of backstory. Plus there's a lot of bonus points to be awarded just for trying to intelligently criticise Atlas Shrugged in the context of a first-person shooter. The core gameplay is well implemented, satisfying, and rarely repetitive, and the story is engaging, well told, and of a high quality all round.

It's worth mentioning that I've played both the PC and 360 versions of Bioshock and I have to say that if you have the choice you should probably go with the 360 one. On any but the highest end machines, PC performance is spotty, and on two separate systems I've seen it repeatedly crash at inconvenient times. By contrast, the 360 has absolutely no stability issues, loses little in the way of graphical fidelity, provides easy and intuitive control via the gamepad, and as a bonus you can earn Achievements while playing.

If you have any sort of liking for first-person shooters then Bioshock should be on your must-play list. It's almost certainly about to garner all sorts of Game of the Year awards and come out in some kind of cheap "platinum" edition so keep your eyes peeled because this is an experience you absolutely shouldn't miss.

Huzzah for Python

Once again xkcd proves entirely topical to my life, as I just started coding Python this week.



Coding in Python really is that simple, and that fun. Although it would be nice if it had a built in getchar() function.

Beowulf (The Movie)

Beowulf is a computer animated 3D movie, which itself is presented in 3D. That makes the movie, by my maths, nine dimensional, which is at least four more dimensions than the human mind is equipped to cope with.

I spent the first quarter-hour or so of the movie unable to process the 3D effect; then something clicked, and I rather enjoyed the rest. It gets full credit for actually staying true to the format of a 1500-year old Danish epic; it's unapologetic about its narrative asides, over-the-top embellishment, and carnal focus. By the same token, as a modern audience you'll likely feel a little odd about its utter unwillingness to see the majority of its characters develop, grow, overcome obstacles, of find narrative closure.

Plus there's a lot of nudity. A LOT of nudity. You have to remember that back in those days clothes were nests for ticks and other parasites and it was actually more convenient to take them off prior to ruling your kingdom, going to war, fighting a troll, or humiliating enemy prisoners. Historical fact, honest.

All round, it's worth seeing. Director Robert Zemeckis is generally a purveyor of cinema which falls short of art but easily delivers fun, and Beowulf is no exception. Don't expect the world, and you'll be pleasantly surprised by what you get instead.

Gaming In 60 Seconds, Again

There's a whole bunch of games I've played over the last few months that I haven't had a chance to do detailed reviews for, so here's the short versions:

Mario Strikers Charged Football (Wii): Some absolutely crazy four-player multiplayer makes up a for a plethora of sins in this Nintendo-themed extreme soccer game. The single player game is high on repetition and low on quality opponent AI, but the ability to body-check Princess Peach into an electric fence adequately compensates. There's an online mode, but the general shoddiness of the Wii matchmaking support will likely dissuade you from getting a lot of use out of it. Best enjoyed with three friends and some beer.

Phoenix Wright: Justice For All (DS): Phoenix Wright's second courtroom adventure in the English-speaking world serves up more of the same as the first time around, but once again the quality of writing, zany humour, and tight pacing make for a satisfying and memorable experience recommendable to all DS owners.

Drawn to Life (DS): Not only is this game apparently raking in a fair wad of cash down here in Australia, but it's also actually worth playing, which is unusual in such a heavily kid-oriented title. A backbone of lackluster generic platforming is made highly entertaining by a central mechanic whereby you draw the key graphics in the game yourself. The fun of designing your avatar to be an evil skeleton or a killer robot is only enhanced by the way the game saturates you with an endearingly innocent sense of charm.

Dead Rising (XBox 360): I'll probably be coming back to this one, but my initial verdict is that no matter how much fun mutilating hordes of zombies with a blunt object may be, it can't compensate for the bloodyminded awfulness of the save system, or the fact that most of the boss battles are built around the game's distinctly subpar gunplay mechanics instead of the core zombie-mashing action. The gamers likely to get the most mileage out of Dead Rising are the ones with a high tolerance for frustration.

Halo 3 (XBox 360): Master Chief's third serving of first-person-shooter antics may have sold a bucketload of copies but it's still better suited to series fans than virgin punters. It's brutally short, it's incredibly derivative, and once again the narrative is disjointed and unsatisfying, but if you've ever enjoyed anything about Halo this one is undoubtedly the finest in the trilogy. The fantastic musical score and high production values will help alleviate a lot of the downsides. Furthermore, if you're the sort of person who's likely to spend time with the online multiplayer components it becomes an exponentially more attractive proposition. Unlikely to win over new players, though.

Geometry Wars (XBox 360 Live Arcade): A game that probably could have been easily delivered on a Commodore 64, Bizarre Creations' Geometry Wars is nevertheless definitely the best game that Live Arcade has to offer, and could be considered to be the game that reinvigorated the top-down duel stick shooter genre. Featuring simple gameplay which is endlessly addictive and brutally challenging, the game combines aspects of classic games such as Asteroids and Robotron to produce something significantly greater than the sum of its parts. This should be the first game downloaded by any new 360 owner.

Paper Mario (Wii Virtual Console / N64): There is nothing about Paper Mario that fails to please. Mario and friends make their (second?) RPG outing, which features gameplay, pacing and controls tuned to near-perfection. Brilliant level design and consistently entertaining game mechanics provide a solid foundation for a game filled with charm, humour, and a surprisingly large amount of solid characterisation, all within the context of a storybook where all the characters are represented as 2D paper cut-outs exploring a 3D paper world. The only weak spots are some extended fetch-quests, and Princess Peach, who once again proves unable to escape from the equivalent of a wet paper bag.

Everyone Hates Space Giraffe

Jeff Minter, indy creator of games such as Llamatron, recently went a little crazy over on his LiveJournal, regarding the success (or lack thereof) of his latest game Space Giraffe, released exclusively on XBox Live Arcade last August.

"[N]ot seeing a lot of reason to continue even trying to make games, at this point, when a remake of Frogger, one of the worst games in the history of old arcade games, can outsell Space Giraffe that we put so much love and effort into, by more than ten to one, in one week. OK, we get the message. All you want on that channel is remakes of old, shite arcade games and crap you vaguely remember playing on your Amiga. We'll shut up trying to do anything new then. Sorry for even trying."

The internet reaction to this has been fairly unanimous and unsurprising in its lack of care factor.

As someone who loved Llamatron and paid to download the full version of Space Giraffe, can I say only that when you deliberately go out of your way to make a old school shooter, pack it with seizure-inducing graphics that mostly obscure the action, give it an offbeat non-descriptive name, fill it with in-jokes and obscure references, and release it solely by digital download, you can't then go on to complain about it not becoming a mainstream hit. Take your cult status and enjoy it, dude.

Plush Heartless

By the way, I saw this little fellow at Swancon 2007 but didn't have a usable photo until now. Unfortunately its talented creator could not be persuaded by love or money to make me one; I guess that's what I get for not being the chosen bearer of a keyblade. Dagnabbit.

Thanks to Julia for the photo.

The Simpsons Game

The Simpsons Game is funny. Sometimes it's even ha-ha funny. But to enjoy those good-time laffs you're going to have to wade through a whole heapin' helpin' of awful, awful game design.

I played the XBox 360 version, and it's fair to say that The Simpsons Game is a good looking game. It looks, more or less, just like the series, making smart use of cell shading to produce artwork that would fit perfectly in the TV show. The game's take on Springfield may not be quite as large as in the excellent Simpsons Hit & Run but it's still entirely convincing.

The sound quality is likewise excellent. All voices are provided by the TV show's voice cast - and there's a lot of voice work in the game, including level and location specific comments for each character and a hefty swag of cutscenes. The music is exactly what you'd expect from something bearing the Simpsons label.

The game alleges that it features work by "the writers of the TV show". That's a writing credit so vague as to possibly denote any combination of up to several dozen different individuals, but there's no denying that it does feel like something recent seasons of the TV show might come up with. Which is to say, a contrived and awkward plot that stumbles through a succession of comedic misses in order to occasionally achieve some brilliant laugh-out-loud hits.

You'll be so convinced that this is the authentic Simpsons experience that you'll be absolutely unable to avoid realising how stupid it is to waste such a great licence on a lame platforming game.

Which, in case subtext is not your thing, is what this game is. If you've ever run, double jumped, and collected your way through a brightly coloured mascot game before, then you'll feel right at home with the Simpsons. Presuming, of course, that your home makes you regularly scream with homicidal rage. The Simpsons are in fact so-ill fitted to this type of game that some kind of monster shoehorn must have been used in its creation.

The game sees Bart discovering a manual to "The Simpsons Game" in an alleyway, which informs him that he and his family members in fact have a range of super powers. Bart can turn into Bartman in order to glide, grappel, and use a slingshot. Homer can turn into a giant ball capable of obtaining some pretty high velocities. Lisa can interact with statues at key points in each level to use the "Hand of Buddha", effectively turning the game temporarily into a god-sim and letting you pick up and move around nearby objects from above. Marge can use a loudspeaker to recruit nearby locals Pikmin-style, as well as deploy Maggie to infiltrate all manner of ventilation ducts.

Marge's set of powers are actually rather cool and could easily have formed the basis for a complete game; they also fit in nicely with her existing character without coming across as silly. The voice acting for her command-issuing function is some of the best in the game; she starts out as her usual conservative self but gets more and more involved as the game goes on. Hearing her incite Ralph Wiggum and Rod and Todd Flanders to "drink the enemies' blood!" is priceless (Todd: "Just like Cain killed Abel!" Ralph: "Murder makes me level up!").

The other "unique upgradeable powers" the characters get are, for lack of better words, just plain stupid. They're one of the grossest concessions to gameplay over atmosphere you're likely to see in a game, and it's all the more grating for the fact that the resulting gameplay is still rather poor. While suspension of disbelief has never exactly been a driving goal of The Simpsons, Homer's transformations into a rolling ball of lard are nothing but weird, and "Bartman" looks out of place every time you use him.

The basic gameplay is generic platforming - fight some enemies, do some jumps, solve some puzzles, find some collectibles. Fighting enemies mostly just involves mashing the same buttons repeatedly until the enemies fall down. Sometimes the enemies have hilarious banter while you're fighting. (Orc-Moe, during the "Neverquest" level: "Help me out - am I chaotic neutral or neutral evil? Anybody?"). Sometimes, however, their scripted lines are so inane or uninspired as to make you want to avoid enemies so as to not have to listen to them.

Jumps are often tricky, but not because of good level design or challenging gameplay. Mostly it's just the awful camera perspectives, which rarely let you line up the camera either behind or directly above your character, and quite often lock off the perspective to some horrible three-quarter view. You've got infinite lives and fairly frequent checkpoints, but still, falling to your death because a fixed camera doesn't let you accurately estimate distance isn't a challenge, it's a bug, which should have been ironed out in playtesting.

In fact, you'll get the strong impression that there actually wasn't much playtesting of the game, period. For example, the final boss fight on the XBox 360 features a sequence that forces you to use the controller's d-pad instead of the analog sticks, to input a series of "left, right, up"-style keypresses. The 360 d-pad unfortunately isn't designed for that level of accuracy, and if you're like me you'll regularly fail what should be a droolingly easy scene just because the game thinks you're pressing "up-left" when you're only pressing "left". There's nothing like a poorly playtested and artificially hard final level to take the fun out of finishing a game. (*cough* Halo *cough*).

Speaking of which, the ending of the game is rubbish.

So with all this hideous gameplay, why would you play the game? Well, because it's The Simpsons. Because it features a cameo by game designer Will Wright, who gets to say the line "I'm Will Wright, bitch." Because you can take on Matt Groening in a boss fight, where he's defended by Futurama's Bender and Zoidberg. Because it features Milhouse dressed as The King of All Cosmos from Katamari Damacy. Because it'll throw a reference to LonelyGirl 13 at you when you're least expecting it. Because you can kick the crap out of "those guys from Madden", and rescue Sonic the Hedgehog and Mario from being enslaved by evil game developers.

Because the game is absolutely packed to the brim with gaming humour, and getting to see The Simpsons turn their trademark wit at your favourite hobby with the highest level of their clever dialogue, spot-on timing, and pop-culture savvy is a thing worth sitting through a few hours of sub-par level design in order to see.

I don't regret buying it. But I do regret that The Simpsons as a video game property has yet to really reach above the sub-par genre clones that it's been dragged through to date, and it's left me wishing for just that little bit more.

Viva Pinata

Viva Pinata is an absolute must-have game for anyone who's ever experienced the guilty thrill of beating their pets to death with a shovel. And really, isn't that all of us?

There's an animated series that goes with this game. I haven't seen the series. I don't intend to see the series. I have the definite suspicion that the series does not focus on breeding adorable animals, dressing them up in a variety of accessories, giving them lovable names, and then beating them savagely with shovels until their sweet candy-flavoured brains spew forth onto the soil.

Which, really, is a shame, because the whole shovel-beating thing is gameplay gold.

I think Viva Pinata was conceived as something for kids. I don't mean baby goats, but instead those little mewly human-things that come out of pregnant women. Some executive somewhere saw a wiggly dirt-child playing with a pinata and decided that this should be the basis for a cheap Pokemon knock-off.

This executive, who we shall call "Winston", went out and got some art assets drawn up, and recruited what he laughingly referred to as "voice talent", and had some hideously grating music prepared, and then turned the whole thing over to a game developer.

It is to the good fortune of shovel-wielding pet-lovers everywhere that the developer in question was Rare.

In my imagination, which is a wonderful place filled with leprechauns, Rare sat down with Winston's material, and tried to fashion it into the saccharine money-pig that had been intended. Oh, how they tried. Their brain meats strained mightily. But they failed. These kings among developers, these hallowed perpetrators of Conker's Bad Fur Day, just couldn't find it in themselves to make the pastel monstrosity they had been tasked with.

And so they made a different game. And that game is Viva Pinata.

Sit your kids down with Viva Pinata. They'll love it. You can test whether they love it by buying them a kitten. Kids who have learned the correct lessons from Viva Pinata will give their kitten a name, a humorous hat, and a house, and then make it mercilessly breed non-stop with other kittens in order to produce kitten-babies that can be fed to other, more valuable animals, such as magpies or crocodiles, so as to invite these crocodiles and suchlike to live in your garden. That's experience that you just can't learn in schools, people.

Also, baby animals should occasionally be randomly beaten with a shovel. Just in case it makes them "evolve". You have to check for that; it'd be criminal not to, really.

In Viva Pinata I find myself regularly naming my baby kittens "Winston".

Doom and the 360

Doom is a game about shooting demons in the face with a shotgun. When it first came out in the early 90s, that premise was every bit as fun as it sounds.

Last month, straight off the back of finishing Half-Life: Episode 2, I downloaded Doom through XBox Live Arcade to find out exactly how the classic action had aged. It turns out shooting demons in the face with a shotgun never gets old.

Right in the face. With a shotgun. It's like the demon AI has been scripted to present you with maximum shotgun-to-face coverage at every stage of the game. You can't even look up or down; your view is locked with neck-brace-intensity at demon face level for the entire head-pulping experience.

Oh, man, if only they made 'em like this today.

With a shotgun.

You'll be looking for keycards. Looking for keycards is always gaming gold. What do the keycards unlock? Demons. And/or shotguns. Pure gold.

This is what is called in the industry "laser-like focus on core gameplay". I think John Romero tripped over it in a stairwell somewhere and accidentally installed it in his latest software project; thus Doom was born. Later, to the sound of much laughter, he attempted to make us his bitch.

The 360's Live Arcade adaptation is a fairly faithful port, although it features "upscaled music" (which translates to "incentive to use your own MP3s instead"). Pulling the right trigger to fire feels a whole lot more natural than stabbing a key on the keyboard. And it has Achievements, which are like sweet, sweet gaming candy. Can you believe it? You get to shoot demons in the face with a shotgun and earn achievements for it. This is why we said no to communism, people. Under communism the State would have shot the demons for us and then shared the achievement points with our unskilled younger siblings.

So in short, every game that has been made since Doom is a waste of time and you should return to playing this classic shooter immediately.

Man. Right in the face.

Updates

Haven't posted in a while, but I'm still alive. I will be in Perth from Xmas through New Year's. Some gaming related updates:

* I have an XBox 360. I now understand that when it's said that this console is a next-gen console, that's not a reference to its graphics, processing power, or controls, but rather a statement about its online implementation, which is so evolutionary as to bring tears to my eyes. You can incidentally find me on Live under the gamertag "GregT 314".

* Guitar Hero III is probably the best iteration of the franchise so far; unfortunately it's blisteringly difficult even compared to the already quite eye-watering GH2. I play the previous games on Expert without the need for too many tears; I'm going to be quite significantly challenged to finish this one on Hard, though. For those who've taken the time to learn hammer-ons and pull-offs you'll be happy to discover songs that you can play for upwards of thirty seconds without strumming thanks to stupidly extended shredding sections.

* The Wii is currently not much in use. I'm waiting for Super Smash Bros Brawl. Wake me when I can use Solid Snake to exterminate Pikachu. I read a report recently that it's not that there's a shortage of games for the system, it's that the massive glut of games that are being made can't get pressed at the factory quickly enough. It's Nintendo; they wouldn't lie to me about something like that. I wait hopefully for the forthcoming Candy Mountain of games.

* Portal is the greatest game ever. But then you have been exposed to the internet in some way during the last month, so you already know this. If you haven't played Portal yet, shoot your grandmother, and then play Portal. Or just play Portal, whichever. Anyone who gets me a plush Companion Cube for Xmas wins bonus points.

* Much to my surprise, you can find me on Facebook. Along with, apparently, the entire cast and crew of my primary school, who appear to be largely alive and not face down in gutters.

That's all for now. Keep doing those things that you do, in that place. You know what I'm talking about.

In Perth

I'm in Perth from today (4 October) to about noon on Monday (8 October). If you want to catch up and you haven't already got in touch with me, you can attempt to cut into my busy schedule by ringing or SMSing me. If you don't have those numbers, I'm staying with Wuffie and you can probably contact me through her. I won't be checking this blog or my email. See you soon!

Checkers Solved

If you've played Tic-Tac-Toe for any length of time you've probably reached the stage where you can win or draw any game simply because you can envisage every possible combination of moves, and pick the move which is best not in a subjective sense, but in an absolute sense.

Now with the aid of brute force computing the same situation has been reached for Checkers. An electronic solution has been found which can win or tie any game.

It's good to know that modern technology has successfully trivialised a rather banal game that I've never really liked. If you ever play it and win again, just remember it's not because you played well, it's because your opponent played sub-optimally.

Full story here, courtesty of BBC News.

Assorted Stuff

Yes, it's time for assorted stuff. Everyone likes stuff, right?

* In case you've missed it in the last two weeks, for all you Dynasty Warriors fans who aren't already over the moon about Dynasty Warriors Gundam, there's also word of Warriors Orochi, which is basically just a new Dynasty Warriors game featuring the entire cast of the Dynasty Warriors franchise plus the crew from Samurai Warriors, united at last. Plus if you read this article in the right way you can interpret it as meaning there'll be three-player co-op. Awesome.

* My favourite developer that nobody loves, Quantic Dream, are not only following up their fantastic PS2 title Fahrenheit (aka Indigo Prophecy) with a PS3 release called Heavy Rain (old news), but they're also for some reason doing a PS3-exclusive sequel to their unanimously reviled Dreamcast relic Omikron: The Nomad Soul. That's great; while they're at it maybe they can get the rights to Phantasmagoria off Sierra and release a few more redundant iterations of that franchise too.

* I'm working my way through F.E.A.R (again at least a good year behind the hype), and I absolutely can't believe how you can pour as much raw talent and technical genius into a game as has obviously made its way into F.E.A.R. and still produce such a charmless and unmemorable end product. I'd be writing it off completely, if only it weren't so darned fun unloading my shotgun into those Replicas. The completely-tacked-on attempts at scariness just make me wish I had a new Silent Hill game to play.

* And in case you weren't excited about Rock Band yet, here's another big helping of huzzah.

Transformers

Having seen the trailers, it seemed to me that Transformers was likely to be much like the recent butchering of War of the Worlds with the added attraction of it molesting my childhood. (The chances of Autobots coming from Mars / were a million to one, they said.)

Now that I've seen the film, I'm happy to say it's nothing at all like War of the Worlds, and is instead an awful lot like Pearl Harbour.

The Transformers themselves make it through the movie with a surprising amount of dignity left intact. I got the strong impression that these were the real, actual Transformers of my early years, torn from their animated universe and deposited whole and intact in a kind of Michael Bay-themed cinematic wasteland. They spend the majority of the movie struggling gamely to continue their noble mission in the face of hideous dialogue, horrible plot, and a complete contempt for the most basic attention to scientific detail.

Optimus Prime in particular carries a kind of beleaguered, puzzled air about him that suggests he's wondering where all the energon cubes went and why he's suddenly surrounded by lens flares, poorly scripted teenagers and an unfeasibly large portion of the United States military. It's definitely Optimus Prime, though - that voice acting goes a long way.

Incidentally, never has there been so much product placement in a movie, but given the history of the Transformers franchise it's a little difficult to complain.

Anyway, all said, this is an apallingly unapologetic fiasco of a movie that should be avoided at all costs. But it doesn't retroactively go back and ruin the 80s animated Transformers, and in that category at least it's a step above Beast Wars and Armada, so if you look at it with squinty eyes you can almost imagine that there's something in it to be grateful for.