Portal 2: A Wider Aperture

Here is a truth: that less, quite often, is more.

I mean, how do you write about a pretty darn okay game? How do you do that?

It's easy to write about good games. You set the relevant knobs to "effusive", dig out your box of superlatives, and try and pretend that the entirety of human existence was nary but a prelude to this moment.

And bad games write themselves. You anthropomorphise them, so that one cloven foot is brutally kicking puppies and one malformed paw is enthusiastically saluting Hitler and everything in between is modelled after the style of a particularly unintelligent professional footballer. This is called journalism, and I have heard that in some uncultured backwaters they pay you for it.

But what about the also-rans? Where in the dark night of hyperbole is there room for a star to shine only dimly?

So the critical consensus was that Portal - the original, this is - was frikkin' awesome. I think we are agreed on that. We took a census, or something. And I think we are also agreed that we love it so much that if creators Valve were to come along and leave something on our doorstep - some orphaned and unloved child - that they had chosen to call Portal 2, we would take that child into our home and try to pretend we loved it as much as our other progeny. I think we are on common ground here.

But is Portal 2 really any good? Can it measure up to its older sibling? Do we lovingly hug it each night and sit with it as it falls asleep, or do we just kind of wave at it from the doorway while waiting for this week's episode of Community to download? These are the questions that occupy sentient minds in the lonely hours, and they are questions that demand answers.

Well, Portal 2 is an awkward child. For one thing it's fatter than the original, and for another thing it's lazier. Thirdly, I'm running out of steam on this whole kid-based metaphor so let's abandon it and cut straight to the chase. Portal 2 is a good game, but it's not a great game, and the reason why is that we already played the original Portal, and we didn't need more.

Portal had three killer ideas. One: the portal gun. Two: GLADOS. Three: the design aesthetic. That's what we're here for. Geometric white rooms that we can portal across to give GLADOS the finger.

Portal 2 has two great additions: Stephen Merchant as the voice of a dimwitted AI, and a thing called Conversion Gel. Oh, there are other newcomers, but they're not great. They're just there. They're window dressing to distract you from the central truth that 70% of Portal 2 consists of repetitive busywork to keep you occupied while the voice actors regurgitate their dialogue.

It is, to be fair, good dialogue. GLADOS and her turrets are now supported by a whole range of new characters, both major and minor, and pretty much everything they utter is gold. That's the game, right there, and it's the chief reason that the thing is easily recommendable to just about anyone. You're going to love both the script and the delivery.

But the gameplay falls into two categories: repetitive, and iterative. Either you're doing something you've done before, or you're doing something that's similar to something you've done before. You can combine these two words into one new word called "repetetiterative" but there's no good reason to do so. Repetetiteration is great if you're training someone to learn a task, but when you're following a title as revolutionary as Portal it's disappointing that nobody thunk up anything as clever as the actual portals themselves. The bridges, tunnels and gels that the game dispenses are all variations on puzzle-genre staples, and the portal-enabled twists on them are either trivial or under-explored.

The standout is the Conversion Gel. It's a sticky white paint that gets pumped out of big Mario-style plumbing tubes. Anything it touches becomes a surface which supports portals. This would have been redundant in the first game, but what's new in Portal 2 is that it hoards portalable surfaces like a conservative politician hoards public school funding, only dispensing the goodies when compelled by the combination of absolute necessity and outraged parents demanding to know why their children are getting IT training on a BBC Acorn. Normally in Portal 2 the rooms are made of rusting brown portal-averse metal, with only the occasional frosting of white portal-friendly wallpaper. And yes, often this makes the solutions blindingly obvious - just put the portals on the only place they can possibly go.

So when you get access to the Conversion Gel, it feels great. It feels empowering. Yes, you're still running a fairly linear puzzle, but you're offered the illusion that suddenly you're making the rules. The very first time you get the gel, you're offered the chance to completely paint a large and complex room with it, and it feels great.

And then, of course, you hardly ever see the damn stuff again. So that was nice while it was there, I guess.

This is the dark side of Valve's famous iterative playtesting process. When they get every build of the game played again and again under controlled conditions, yes, it it lets them polish the experience until it shines. But at the same time it can feel like the player has been koshed in a dark alley and had all their "agency" and "free will" stolen by thieves and blaggards. Portal 2 feels very much like one of its new innovations - the "edgeless safety cube" (a ball).

Here is the thing: Valve already made a perfect game about portals. It was called Portal. There was not a single thing in that game to fault. It was flawless. How do you improve on that? How do you expand on that? You can't. A delicious chicken carbonara doesn't look any tastier when you wallpaper your entire house with it.

Portal 2 is good. Portal 2 is very good. But given its antecedents, very good isn't enough to stop it being disappointing.

Less, quite often, is more.

Trailers, Trailers, Trailers

- Capcom have announced Lost Planet 2. I'm not sure who, exactly, was clamouring for Lost Planet 2, as the original was pretty dire. Its biggest problems were its clunky controls, horrible scripting and terrible voice acting, so it's pretty funny that to "fix" the franchise they've given it to the Resident Evil 5 producer.

- Bioware have announced Mass Effect 2. You'll recall that the original was my Game of the Year 2007, so I'm pretty hyped about a sequel. I understand you'll be able to port your save game from the first game and continue the same character, so that's pretty awesome. I'm not sure how that squares up with this trailer, though.

- I've been quietly enjoying the rise of "disaster survival" as a new genre of game, and while none of the entries in it have so far been particularly great, I figure it's only a matter of time. Ubisoft's I Am Alive will probably not break the mold, but you never know. (This is actually an old trailer but I figure you probably missed it in the E3 buzz so it's worth digging up now.)

Left 4 Dead DLC, Battlefield 1943 Live, Lego Battles

Tidbits for those of you who don't obsessively trawl the gaming news:

- Left 4 Dead downloadable content on its way in the form of a "Survival" pack, featuring one new game mode (Survival) and two new Versus campaigns. I assume these are less "new" campaigns than they are adaptations of Blood Harvest Death Toll and Dead Air, the two single player campaigns that didn't make the jump to Versus first time around. (link)

- Battlefield 1943 (a sequel to Battlfield 1942, which I like to refer to as "the one that didn't suck" - take that, internet!) is getting a release on XBox Live Arcade and PlayStation Network, which makes me all happy inside. (link)

- The next Traveler's Tales Lego game will not, apparently, be the rumoured Lego Harry Potter or Lego Lord of the Rings but instead the much less exciting Lego Battles, which features no licensed properties but does have plenty of action from classic Lego lines such as "Castles" and "Pirates". Yay? (link)

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.

Icons of Gaming #1: No Gods Or Kings

This is the screenshot that sold me on BioShock.

BioShock has a lot of memorable imagery - the Big Daddy, the player's hand dispensing lightning, the art deco interiors, and the excellent sound scheme that pervades the entire game. But "no gods or kings" is what made me sit up and pay attention.

This banner hangs over an early entrance hall in the game - above the main elevator, from memory - and in addition to establishing the game's visual style, lighting scheme and dark tone, it tells you that this will be a game about something. BioShock might not be the deepest philosophical exploration in gaming history but it's not for lack of genuine effort, and the objectivist foundations of the city of Rapture are a big part of what elevates BioShock above the pack.

Long before I played the game I saw this screenshot, and once I'd seen it, I knew I had to find out who had hung that banner and what it meant.

What are the images that have attracted you to games - for better or for worse?

Some Of The Finer Points Of Lego Batman

There will be a full review of Lego Batman in time; the short version will be that it's better than Lego Indy without being actually good. Some of its high points:

* You can play as the Joker, you can get his costume from the cover of The Killing Joke, and you can shoot Barbara Gordon in the spine.

* You can play as Bane and break Batman's back across your knee. (There is an Achievement for this.)

* You can punch Dick Grayson in the face until his head falls off.

That's a good start, but I was disappointed to find that Jason Todd is not present to recreate his fateful encounter with the Joker, and neither Black Mask nor Spoiler are available to continue the theme. I would also have liked, for comic effect, Thomas and Martha Wayne - when Martha Wayne breaks into her lego pieces she should spill little pearl-coloured studs.

I guess some dreams are not meant to be.

PixelJunk Eden

PixelJunk Eden is available now on the PlayStation Network; not yet being a PS3 guy, that puts it outside the ambit of games that I can sample.

So instead, for the purposes of giving it as fair a hearing as I can, can I direct your attention to the trailer above, and encourage anyone who's had some time with it to talk about their experiences in the comments section of this post?

PixelJunk Eden is a 2009 Independent Games Festival finalist in two categories, and I have to hand it to PixelJunk, putting the developer's name right there in the title is a great way to build brand recognition.

Mirror's Edge

Screw you all. Mirror's Edge was excellent.

I say this despite my criticisms of its character design, despite years of dissatisfaction with publisher EA, and despite a general antipathy towards platform games stretching back over several decades. I'm sorry, but it was excellent.

Mirror's Edge is a first person parkour (free-running) game. The creation of a parkour game was more or less inevitable after Casino Royale popularised the sport for film and Prince of Persia and Assassin's Creed did it in bastardised form for games. The majority of Mirror's Edge involves traversing an urban rooftop environment from various points A to points B using improbable but physically-possible acrobatics, all at an absolutely breakneck pace. It's unique, it's fun, and it's thrilling from beginning to end.

The excellence in Mirror's Edge stems from two areas. The first is the visual style, which is full of primary colours and sharp vertices. It evokes a highly realistic urban environment while at the same time being easy to read for players moving through it at high speeds. The game looks great, and it does it in a way that enables rather than obstructs play.

The second excellence is in the control scheme, at least as it applies to the XBox 360 version that I played. Almost all of the interactivity is mapped to the two left shoulder buttons of the controller. Left bumper (the upper shoulder) is "go high", while left trigger (lower shoulder) is "go low". You jump, climb, and run up walls by "going high", and you slide, break-roll and leg-tuck by "going low". Actions are context sensitive and always predictable - you very rarely slide, for example, when trying to break-roll, or jump when you want to climb.

Those are the basic controls. Right bumper does a 180 turn, most often used in a wall-run/flip/jump maneuver, and right trigger is "strike", used equally for punching out enemies, booting open closed doors, and crashing through panes of glass in mid-air. The "Y" button allows you to execute time-sensitive disarm maneuvers on enemies.

My main complaint with the controls is that you're always moving forward, so holding the analog stick up to move feels redundant (and starts to hurt the thumb). Given the racing flavour of the game, it would feel more natural and less hand-breaking to have an "accelerate" button mapped to the face-pad. But that's a small complaint. Generally the controls are visceral, intuitive, and achieve the goal of any good control scheme by allowing you to reliably execute the amazing without feeling like you're being babied or talked down to.

Like any platform game, you'll regularly make mistakes, and the cost of a mistake is usually plummeting to your death. Like any good platform game, there's no long term cost for these mistakes. Respawn points are placed intelligently, generally immediately before the start of any significant challenge, and a flubbed jump never costs you more than about 90 seconds of play. Also, you're never required to learn by trial and error - the learning process isn't about how to do things, but how to do things better.

One of the major complaints levelled against Mirror's Edge is its overuse of combat. Combat is definitely its weakest spot. It takes about three bullets or two pistol-whippings to knock you out on the default difficulty, which is a pretty thin margin of error. Using your character's library of martial arts moves feels clunky and unsatisfying, with the exception of the rather cool strikes she can do if she has a running start. Disarms are much more effective, but late game enemies give you absolutey tiny timing windows to do these, which can be frustrating.

However, a lot of the complaints about combat are misconceived. Mirror's Edge is a game about running, not fighting, and each and every combat encounter in the game can actually be solved more easily by finding the right parkour route than it can with your fists. Late encounters with squads of enemies which initially frustrated me suddenly became laughably easy once I discovered the optimal paths through the area. The infamous "sniper roof" and "server room" encounters on the game's final level have been designed to allow you to sprint through without downing a single opponent, if you're clever.

I love also that although the game lets you get your hands on your opponent's guns, it really encourages you not to use them. When you find yourself holding a firearm, throwing it away feels right, and it's very satisfying to get from start to end without shooting anyone regardless of whether the game awards you its rather finicky achievement for that task. This is how I want games to treat firearms - as a reality, but always in the context of there being a better way.

Anyway, combat may not be the roadblock that some claim, but running towards enemies in Mirror's Edge is not really fun, and these sections should have been brutally pared down. The best parts of the game are the chase scenes, where you're pursuing a fleeing enemy or being hunted yourself. These are the moments when you're genuinely aware of just how amazing your move set is, and there should have been more sections like this. The game doesn't stop often enough to give you time to reflect on its strengths.

The last highlight of the game is its music. The soundtrack is truly excellent, particularly the various remixes of the main theme, "Still Alive". It's one of those tunes that you'll be humming long after you've finished the last level, and I'm pretty sure that hearing it over coming months is going to get me excited about a sequel each and every time.

So - on to the bad stuff, which starts with the narrative. To say that the story of Mirror's Edge has a raging case of the sucks would be an extreme understatement. This is one of the worst stories I've encountered in a very long time. Tetris had a more engaging plot. From the beginning to the end it's badly told, horribly acted, appallingly scripted, schizophrenically paced, and does little to highlight the world, its characters, or any of the themes of freedom and movement inherent in the gameplay. The characters are unengaging and your long-term goals are vague or absent, and in a final kick to the face the game's ending fails to feature its major villain and leaves you stranded on a rooftop while most everyone you know and love is being hunted down like dogs. Plus all of the cutscenes are done in absolutely butt-ugly style of animation that has nothing in common with the clean, precise look of the in-game visuals.

Mirror's Edge is short. The story mode clocks in at maybe seven hours, with a lot of that made up of missing jumps and restarting from checkpoints. You can speedrun each level in less than ten minutes (often significantly less) so theoretically a godlike player could finish the whole thing in an hour and a half. From the way that important story points go missing it feels like maybe some levels were cut in order to get the game out the door on time, although given the overall incompetence of the plotting it may have just been intended that way.

Story mode is half of the game; the other half consists of time trials, which let you play specially arranged sections of the main levels as a timed obstacle course. Given the excellence of the basic gameplay, that's more fun than it sounds. The difficulty here is that the qualifying times for each course can be a little demanding until you find the optimum route, and your finishing time isn't recorded unless you beat the qualifier, meaning that a lot of attempts at a course can result in no visible recognition of succes. It would be nice if times were recorded no matter what, so even when you're sucking you can see whether you're sucking less. Also, you can download "ghosts" of other people's attempts to run against to find better routes and improve your time, but you can only access your friends' attempts, or the attempts of the top 50 or so players in the world, so as far as ghosts go you're limited to "unhelpfully poor" or "unhelpfully good". Ultimately YouTube, as always, is the solution.

The time trials, as I said, are better than you'd think, but it would be nice if they had more structure. The game tracks how many "stars" you've earned across all trials, and gives you some achievements for them (although even the first requires some pretty hefty practice), but there should have been some unlockables keyed to these stars, or some sort of reason to keep shooting for higher levels of excellence beyond the inherent satisfaction of success.

Still, Mirror's Edge attempts to create an entirely new style of gameplay and does a better job of it than 90% of those who try. Very few of its failures are to do with its core mechanics, which means it's created a strong conceptual base for future titles to build on. It's not going to be a game for everyone - the focus on precision and the short tolerance of error means this is a game for a hardcore audience, not casual players - but it's a solid continuation of a type of play which embraces well-loved franchises such as Mega Man and Sonic the Hedgehog and I see no reason why those who enjoyed games like those shouldn't thrill and revel in the realism and freedom that Mirror's Edge brings to that classic tradition.

Left 4 Dead Rebuttal

In response to my own previous post regarding Left 4 Dead, I'd just briefly like to draw your attention to this post on Graffiti Gamer, which argues that it's the necessity of playing with digital sociopaths which makes Left 4 Dead so compelling.

"Half of the challenge playing Left 4 Dead is getting players to coordinate, understand each other’s playing style, and finding a groove that works. Left 4 Dead is, in fact, a social learning environment and its procedurally generated narrative structure is most exciting when the other players are unknown quantities before play, as opposed to friends whose play-style you’re already familiar with." (read the full post)

It makes an excellent point which in no way diminishes the frustration of listening to a 14-year-old kid giggling hysterically and refusing to use any weapon other than pistols while a Hunter rips out your intestines.

Left 4 Dead

Stinking, slouching, shambling, forward forever, faces frozen, fixed in a repulsive rictus of rage. Their pallid flesh droops grotesquely from their bones, damp with strange moistures, and their skin is mere meat, obscenely exposed through torn and malmatched garments. There is almost humanity in their faces, but it is far, and gone away, and in going it has left a vacant wasteland of slackened lips and eyes locked with idiot intensity on an unseen and terrible horizon.

The sun has gone out on their world; what is left is waste and scrap. Out through the streets and on the rooftops and in the ruined basements their demented cries span the darkening cities, and in the forums and down the wires and through the invisible frequencies all of civilisation has gone dead but for their steadily rising brainless tide. Their bodies move and it is not reason that drives them but an insatiable and irrational hunger, a need, an urge to destroy no longer limited by emotion and logic but bounded only by the vastness of eternity's compass.

These are the people who make up 90% of the XBox Live player base. You'll want to get to know them, because Left 4 Dead is a wholly multiplayer game.

This is the dilemma of Left 4 Dead - is it worth playing a truly excellent game if the only way you can play it is by associating with utter douchebags? The answer to that question depends on exactly how many fourteen-year-olds have shotgunned you in the back in the last 24 hours.

The premise of Left 4 Dead is simple. It's the zombie apocalypse, and four survivors stranded deep in zombie-town have to make their way to an evacuation point. In most games, that would be an abridged summary of the story, but in Left 4 Dead that's really all there is to it. The game doesn't futz around with backstory and narration and plot - it gets right down to the business of killing zombies.

Four scenarios come packed into the box, each one retelling the "get to the evac point" setup in the context of a different environment. "No Mercy" features city streets, a sewer, a hospital, and a rooftop last stand, whereas "Dead Air" involves some greenhouses, a hotel, and eventually an airport. Playing through a scenario start-to-finish takes roughly an hour - this is a deliberate design decision and they're pretty tightly timed to ensure you finish within the hour no matter what.

Each scenario is broken down into five maps. The first four are a simple journey from point A to point B, where point B is a "safe room". Getting everyone into a safe room and locking the door ends the level, and moves you on to the next map. The fifth map on each scenario is a "last stand" setup, where you have to summon your evacuation and then hold off the zombie tide for a set period until your lift shows up.

Left 4 Dead is designed to be experienced with four players, each player taking one of the four survivors. If you can hook this up with the right number of friends, it's a blast. Much like Halo, the 360 version of L4D lets you guest a friend in your living room onto Live and play in split-screen, so you can get four players happening with as little as two consoles, two discs and two Live Gold accounts. The PC version, I assume, will require four whole computers and four copies of the game.

In the very likely event that you can't swing the equipment or people to play with an all-friends team, you've got two choices. By default, characters who aren't controlled by players will be piloted by the game's artificial intelligence. The computer is pretty competent, and is particularly good at concepts like not shooting you by accident. However, it can also be pretty useless and will accidentally alert zombies, fail to keep up with you, and not restock health packs and upgrade weapons even when the relevant items are right there. During early play sessions you'll be quite happy with the AI but as your skills improve its deficiencies will become more and more obvious.

Your other option is to fill out your team's ranks with random people from the internet. This is where the aforementioned "douchebags" become involved. If you're lucky, you'll end up with a laid back but competent IT professional from Manchester who is playing a quick round to break up the monotony of being a human being, but by and large your internet player comes in two flavours. The first are players of godlike skill who can complete each level flawlessly and will scream and swear at you non-stop for each and every second of non-perfect play that you wring out of your controller. The second are barely pubescent retards who will constantly blather into the microphone about things they think are pretty cool while relentlessly emptying round after round of ammunition into your back and refusing to make any effort to reach the safe room.

Left 4 Dead emphasises teamwork. You will need a full team of four to make it through a level. The various sorts of zombie have special attacks which can instantly incapacitate a player; even basic zombies have a "dragging you down" effect which makes it practically impossible to move while in melee. This means that if you come under attack and don't have a buddy to help you out you can go from full health to dead without a chance to fight back. Covering your teammates is core gameplay. It makes for great co-op gameplay, and intense frustration when you're lumbered with one or more immense tools on your team.

Provided you can solve the player problem, Left 4 Dead is excellent. The game benefits from the iterative playtesting that developer Valve is famous for, with every aspect of the experience feeling extremely fine-tuned. The zombies are well-animated and genuinely shocking - they're modelled on the fast undead from 28 Days Later rather than their slower moving brethren and you'll see them sprint at you, leaning into their turns to create a really visceral sense of menace.

There's not a lot of music, but what there is makes for a highlight of the game. Some "special" zombie types have a theme tune that lets you know when they're nearby - the unsettling composition for the Witch is a standout - plus there's several tracks used to represent how well the team is doing, including a depressing "all hope is lost" motif that plays when one of your group is killed.

A major feature of Left 4 Dead is the so-called "Director AI". Enemy and item placements throughout the levels are not predetermined - instead they are created procedurally based on how the team is faring, with the AI generating unique lulls and crescendoes for each playthrough. This theoretically means that no two runs of a campaign are the same, and mostly this is true, but after your third play of a map the randomness becomes routine, so I'm not really sure if the AI creates as much replayability as Valve suggests.

If you tire of the basic campaigns (and I have) there's also the option of Versus mode. Versus mode is the same as Campaign, except that the "special infected" (boss zombies) are controlled by opposing players. One group plays the survivors and are scored on how far they get before being gutted by the zombie team, and then the sides switch and the former zombies have to beat the high score. Like most online multiplayer, this is no place for beginners - you'll need a savant-like familiarity with the maps to avoid accidentally crippling your team. As both survivor and zombie, the only path to success lies in planning and co-ordination, which can be a frustrating experience for new players but a rewarding one for veterans.

The biggest complaint to be made about Left 4 Dead (other than the lobotomy-heavy player base) is the lack of content. The four included campaigns take four hours to finish, total. You can replay them but you might start tiring of that after three or four plays, so that swells the play time out to 12 to 16 hours, much of it recycled. Versus mode is good but you can only play two of the four campaigns competitively, and in practice the Quick Match option seems to return the hospital scenario for every game. Considering there's really no single-player component, you can feel justified in thinking there's a disappointly small amount of stuff in your Left 4 Dead box.

Left 4 Dead is an excellent game. There's no arguing with that. But whether you get your money's worth out of it is directly proportionate to how many of your friends own it, and how tolerant you are of society's internet-using dregs. If you're the sort of individual who got more than 30 hours out of Gears of War or Halo online, and are looking for something with a little more thinking and a little less teabagging, then this is the game you were waiting for. Alternatively, if you're the sort who enjoys co-op gaming in your living room and has at least one online friend who also owns a copy you'll have a blast. If you're the rest of the world, though, this is maybe better as a rental.

Two Faiths

This is Faith, protagonist of Mirror's Edge. On the left is the original character design, as she appears in promotional artwork and in the game itself. On the right is a fan-created edit.

I've got a lot to say about Mirror's Edge, but I want to take a moment to talk about Faith. And about why the fan-created edit is better.

The key changes in the edit are that Faith has wider eyes, rounder cheeks, a larger bustline, more textured hair, a cleaner face, and the makeup is gone. The edit is better.

It's easy to misinterpret here. It's easy to think the question is, which Faith is more attractive to a male audience? The answer to that question is also the edit, but that's not what I'm talking about here. The edit is better.

It is excellent that the developers made Faith female. I've played through Mirror's Edge, and female was the right choice, on any number of levels. It is also excellent that they saw her as a strong female protagonist, and they carry this through inasmuch as is possible during the appallingly bad storyline.

Another thing that is awesome: they gave her a realistic body shape. That bustline on the edit isn't exactly fantasy, but it's unnecessary and not really ideal for someone who's going to be doing as much jumping as Faith. The original design for Faith includes some good calls, and they are to be commended.

Where they went wrong is the face. And the reason they went wrong is this: Faith's face is closed.

She's the protagonist of the game; more than that, she is the player's avatar. The player needs to be able to instantly identify with her, be welcomed into her world, and feel in tune with her motivations. Instead she's got this... face. In the picture above she's sneering; in game you only see her face a couple of times but it's got an almost robotic detachment to it. Either way, her face is closed - her squinty eyes and dirty skin and ludicrous make-up all come together to make a character who doesn't want you to get to know her.

Faces are icons. Humans, it turns out, are ridiculously good at idenitfying a human face.

We take our cues from the layout of the eyes and mouth. We've got a whole bunch of subconscious stuff going on when it comes to these parts of the body. Eyes which are large in proportion to the head evoke concepts of children, stimulating our urges of affection and protection. Eyes which are open and interested provoke engagement in the viewer (we tend to copy the expressions of people we want to engage with). Eyes with clearly defined edges are more iconic - they more loudly say "human" and therefore allow us to better project on a face; lines which break the outline of the eye make faces look more "alien".

This is basic psychology. It is the sad truth that when it comes to designing faces, there are ways that are better. The edited Faith has a sharper, cleaner face and is therefore measurably more effective at drawing the player into her world.

So, yes. Make realistic characters. Give us achievable female role models. Give us strong women doing awesome things who don't care whether or not they're impressing men. But, seriously, badly designed is not the same thing as interesting, and well designed is not the same thing as pandering to the masses.

Mirror's Edge, Dead Space Sequels

Mirror's Edge may not have performed quite as well as publisher EA were hoping, but that doesn't mean it won't be getting sequels. Probably once a year, if EA holds true to form. Same goes for their sci fi horror title Dead Space.

Joystiq reports on a conference call between EA CEO John Riccitiello and investors:

EA CEO, John Riccitiello, began the call by pointing out that 17 of the company's '08 titles earned aggregate Metacritic scores above 80, versus only seven the year before. New IPs – specifically Dead Space and Mirror's Edge – were praised, but Riccitiello pointed out during the Q&A portion of the call that these franchises will perform better once established. "Dead Space looks like a long-term big winner for us," he said, later confirming, "[Mirror's Edge] is going to go forward."

That's great as far as I'm concerned. Mirror's Edge is excellent, and possessed no real flaws that another six months in development couldn't have fixed. A sequel will give developer DICE a chance to smooth out the rough edges and show us what they were intending all along.

And yes, I've still got a review of Mirror's Edge coming, but I'm doing 14 hour days this week so it might have to wait till the weekend.

New Ghostbusters Trailer

I challenge you to watch the new Ghostbusters trailer without smiling. I just... I challenge you.

It's so authentically actually the Ghostbusters. Original actors and everything. Recognisable faces, recognisable animations, recognisable cheesy ghosts. I'm not even sure I want to play the game - I just want to sit back and watch a spookily-young-again Bill Murray delivering line after line of dialogue.

This is probably one of those cases where the trailer is infinitely better than the game, but we can live in hope.

Penny Arcade Episode 2

Regular readers will recall my review of the first installment of Penny Arcade Adventures was mixed; although the game was generally funny, the user interface was godawful and some bass-ackwards achievement implementation made finishing the game a tedious chore.

Penny Arcade Episode 2 fixes pretty much all of those problems, leaving the competent and genuinely entertaining core of the game to shine through.

First up, Penny Arcade is about murdering things. Last time around it was mimes and hoboes; in Episode 2 you'll get to go at it with crazy people and the obscenely wealthy. You wander from place to place and proceed to get your murder on with pretty much everyone you come across; in between all the good-times-killin' you can go searching for funny in the nearby scenery, and have hilarious dialogues with those few NPCs you come across who are non-murderable.

Being, theoretically, an RPG, levelling up is an important part of the mixture. If you've played Episode 1 you can import your level 15 character from that game, or if you're a newbie you can start afresh with a two-level penalty. Episode 2 takes you through to level 30, and replaces your boring old Episode 1 weapons with a new set of slaughtering tools, which are again fully upgradeable.

Surprisingly, the story actually begins to gather some steam in this episode. Two of the major villains are tied quite personally to your party members. This simple bit of character development does a lot to make things more immediate and relevant, and gives you a good reason to want to come back for the next round of goon-murdering.

Penny Arcade's real-time combat system is its biggest (read: only) innovation, and it's also its biggest problem. Once combat begins, it continues non-stop; while you're searching item menus for healing goodies, the bad guys are stabbing you. Minimising damage, and for that matter not getting killed by even the wimpiest of villains, requires blocking, which is done via button presses timed to your enemies' attacks. Your attacks also activate reaction-based minigames for maximising your kidney-punching. All that reactioneering makes combat stressful, attention-demanding, and occasionally frustrating. It's probably for the best, though, as without this gimmick it would be painfully dull.

The battling is better in Episode 2 than it was before, though. You now get an on-screen indication of when you'll need to block. Your attack minigames are more entertaining as well. There's adjustable difficulty settings; "normal" difficulty seemed to me a little more forgiving than last time around, as I was able to make it from start to finish without seeing any of my characters knocked out.

Episode 2 is a lot more colourful than last time around. And I mean that as a metaphor for "foul-mouthed". The language in Episode 1 may have been reasonably restrained, but the dialogue here goes off the hook, starting with your basic healing item, which "fucks pain up the ass", and continuing uphill. This is a great thing as it makes the proceedings feel a lot more like genuine Penny Arcade but if you're of a sensitive disposition you should probably avert your eyes for the entire length of the game.

For XBox 360 owners, the gamerpoint system is much better. Last time around the achievements asked you to play the game against the grain and do things contrary to the way they were intended. That's all out the door this time, and instead the achievements encourage you to build skill and finesse, with focus on things such as timing perfect blocks. It's fairly easy to pick up all 12 in a single playthrough. This is a great example of using achievements to enrich the core gaming experience.

The weakest point of this episode is the final boss battle; in the grand tradition of other really bad boss battles over time, developer Hothead has opted for a final fight which features unique and poorly-explained game mechanics. This was the only point in the game where I had to go looking for hints, and it was exactly the point where I least wanted the game flow to be broken. Once again, developers, unique mechanics on the last level is a stupid idea.

All told, Episode 2 is a vast improvement over Episode 1. If you tried the first offering and were undecided, Episode 2 offers a great reason to come back for a second taste. However, there's nothing here that makes the series more accessible than it was before, so if you're not a Penny Arcade fan or you really hated the Episode 1 then this is still not the game the for you.

Prince of Persia Trailer

The world owes Valve and Jonathon Coulter a debt. Ever since the runaway success of Portal and its excellent closing music "Still Alive", it's like the game industry woke up and realised that a killer theme song is worth a year of development.

Here we have the Tokyo Game Show trailer for the new Prince of Persia, and by golly it's a thing to see. There is no possible way that playing this game can be more enjoyable than watching the trailers for it. A quick search has failed to turn up the artist / track info for the music but if anyone knows it drop me a comment and I'll update.

Also - and I've had some experience with the previous games - this still feels less like Prince of Persia than it does a free-running version of Ico. I'm intrigued. Intensely intrigued.

UPDATE: The artist is Sia, the track is "Breathe Me", and you can hear it in full on YouTube (link). Thanks Chris!

Mirror's Edge Theme

Anyone want to hear the theme from upcoming EA/DICE free-running title Mirror's Edge? Here it is: "Still Alive" by Lisa Miskovsky, set to a fan footage compilation. Nothing to do with the similarly titled, and somewhat more awesome, theme from Portal.

Hey - how weird is it that EA are making original intellectual property that I actually want to play?

Fallout 3: Australia Censors The World

It turns out that the rest of the world will get to "enjoy" the work of Australia's Classification Board. Rather than create different versions of Fallout 3 for different territories, developer Bethesda has decided to just release the single edition, that edition being the one which was edited to keep Australian censors happy.

Doubleplusgood.

Full story at Kotaku.

E3 - What Looks Good

This year's Electronics Entertainment Expo (E3) has come and gone, and I understand that I have to make at least a passing reference to it in order to maintain my status as a gaming blog, so here's a round-up of some of the more interesting titles that have caught my attention.

New Pikmin Game: Presumably Pikmin 3, presumably for the Wii although a DS title isn't out of the question. Nintendo didn't have a lot to announce at E3 so Shigeru Miyamoto's vague comment that "We're making Pikmin" was really the most interesting thing coming out of The House That Mario Built.

Animal Crossing: City Folk: Definitely for the Wii. Lots of WiiConnect 24 usage for exploring other cities and receiving special holiday gifts. Those without the internet can download their town onto a DS to take it travelling to Wiis owned by their friends. No retro games to collect this time (which is sad but unsurprising) and for those who care you'll now be able to design shirts which have a front which is different to their sleeves and back. I still don't know why I love these games so much but I'm nevertheless looking forward to once again clashing swords with that no-goodnik raccoon Tom Nook. Oh yes, vengeance will be mine.

Left 4 Dead: I've mentioned this one before. Valve (Half-Life) is involved in the development, it has zombies, and it's got four-player co-op. The playable version at E3 looked reasonably good although I have to admit it's really only Valve's participation that has me trusting the game will make the jump from "average" to "awesome". Coming to PC and 360, I understand.

Portal: Still Alive: While we're on the subject of Valve, there's no Portal sequel until next year at the earliest, but XBox 360 users can tide themselves over with Portal: Still Alive, coming to Live Arcade. It's the original Portal as a standalone game, plus some extra non-plot-related puzzle levels based on the 2D Flash version of the game that did the rounds a few months ago.

Final Fantasy XIII: Did I mention it's coming to the XBox 360? And how I totally called it? I did? Excellent.

New Prince of Persia: I was initially not optimistic about Ubisoft Montreal's new Prince title, but the latest gameplay trailer has sold me on it. It's got storybook-style visuals reminiscent of Okami, it features a new Prince and a new storyline, and it looks like it's got everything you expect from Prince of Persia, with the possible exception of the last trilogy's time-related powers. Coming to XBox 360 and probably some other platforms.

Lego Batman: The fourth of Traveler's Tales' Lego games is based on the Caped Crusader and seems to draw more from the comics and the 90s movies than it does from the recent Christopher Nolan interpretations. I know we all love Lego and we all love Batman but based on the downward trend of this franchise to date I'm going to disappoint you by calling this one in advance as bollocks.

Brothers In Arms: Hell's Highway / Call of Duty: World At War: I don't care what you say: as far as I can tell these are the same frikkin' game. Admittedly there's only so many ways you can portray the nightmarish devastation of the Second World War, and also bits of World at War are set in the Pacific theatre and voiced by Kiefer Sutherland, but to all practical purposes they look interchangeable. Interchangeable, but really, really, good. Both coming to practically every next-gen platform under the sun. (Maybe not the Wii.)

Guitar Hero: World Tour: Big track list, includes drums and vocals.... *yawn* I mean, it'll be great and all, but it still looks kind of like Rock Band Lite. Although there's a good chance that Australians will be seeing it on shelves before the original Rock Band finally gets here. Real versions coming to 360 and PS3; crappy ports heading to Wii and PS2, more than likely.

Rock Band 2: Which looks more awesome than words can describe, but will probably suffer the same fate as it's predecessor and get lost somewhere in the Pacific Ocean on its way Down Under. Again, real versions for 360 and PS3 and cheap knockoffs on other platforms.

Dead Rising Wii: You can't say that Capcom doesn't listen to its fans. Dead Rising is coming to the Wii but it's a completely different game. You've still got the same open world but the time-limit nonsense is done away with in favour of structured missions. Also the rubbishy photography minigame is gone and the save system is fixed. This could well end up being the definitive version of the game.

Braid: It's a platformer based on time-control that's heading to XBox Live Arcade. The achievements are apparently already on the network so it should be out any day now. The visuals look nice enough but the brilliance is apparently in the puzzle design. Somehow the thing's won awards before it's even released, so there's got to be something worthwhile under its hood. I reserve judgement, though, as platformers and I have a long and contentious history and this may end up being another supposedly "clever" timed jumping nightmare a la N+.

Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2: Fusion: I loved Ultimate Alliance; it's one of the most thoroughly worthwhile four-player co-op titles I've experienced. It might not have made you feel quite as heroic as Justice League Heroes but it did a pretty excellent job of having each of its 30+ licensed Marvel characters play differently. If the sequel delivers more of the same I'll be a happy man. I'm a little worried, though, about this "fusion" concept which apparently involves giving powers from one character to another. It feels like a watering down of the pure Marvel-ness of the title. I want to play Spider-Man or The Hulk, not some kind of Spider-Hulk. ... actually, that sounds kind of awesome. I have the distinct feeling that we wouldn't like Spider-Hulk when he's angry.

Rune Factory 2: Given how poorly reviewed the first installment of this franchise was I'm surprised they're making a second. Apparently someone out there has an appetite for dungeon-crawling Harvest Moon clones. *shrug*

Bayonetta: Oh man, this has Bullet Witch written all over it and is likely to be just as appalling, but you can't help but be impressed by its moxy. It's from Devil May Cry creator Hideki Kamiya and he's worked out how to go one-up from his own two-guns-and-a-sword DMC formula. How can Devil May Cry possibly be any cooler? Well, what if the protagonist was a hot chick and instead of having guns in her hands she has guns in her hands AND feet and instead of killing things with a sword she instead uses her magical teleporting hair. That's a recipe for awesome right there. Presumably coming to 360 and PS3.

Halo Wars: Yes, it's a Halo real-time strategy, but did you know it has a three-player co-op campaign? No? Well, it's got a three-player co-op campaign. Alright, Bungie, fine, you win, I'm interested in Halo Wars now. Serve me another helping of your derivative and frustrating franchise like the rabid fanboy that I am.

Afro Samurai: The Afro Samurai anime was a tremendous victory of style over substance, and the game appears to be more of the same. It looks gorgeous, with a fantastic cel-shaded aesthetic that you can't help but be enthused by. Plus it's got Samuel L. Jackson reprising his voice acting. But the actual combat, while not awful, seems a little short of what we expect from the games that it's clearly imitating, such as God of War and Devil May Cry. Still, they've got time to improve it, right? Coming, I think, to all next-gen consoles.

Madworld: I want this game to be good so much. It's this ultraviolent black-and-white thing for the Wii which crosses the look of Sin City with the plot of The Running Man. I'm a sucker for anything that stands out of the crowd a little, and this game looks like nothing else out there, but my hopes were dashed to the ground and stomped on when I saw that the developer was Sega. *sigh* Oh well.
UPDATE: According to commenter Matthew, Sega are the publisher, not the developer, and it's instead being created by former Clover Studios staff, now calling themselves Platinum Games. I loved their work on Okami but I was less thrilled with Viewtiful Joe so although I'm doing a happy little jig right now, I'm doing it cautiously.

Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood: Speaking of Sega, it seems like the only way to get a decent Sonic game out of them is to have someone else develop it. The Dark Brotherhood is Mass Effect developer Bioware attempting to do for the World's Fastest Hedgehog what Squaresoft did for Mario with Mario RPG. The Dark Brotherhood is a western-style RPG for the Nintendo DS - featuring blue hedgehogs - and by all accounts it hasn't yet been tempted into a one-way trip down Awful Lane. I'm cautiously optimistic.

That's my off-the-cuff list out of E3. PS3 owners will probably be glad to get another Resistance title too, although I can't quite get excited by it. Plus obviously there's a new Gears of War, but I'd had about enough of that franchise by the time I finished the first one, which was only a month ago, so it'll probably take a while before my enthusiasm for more Gears builds.

What about you? Have you spotted anything coming out of E3 or the surrounding events that got you interested? Leave a comment, let me know.

FF XIII Coming To 360

News out of E3: Square-Enix flagship title Final Fantasy XIII is coming to the XBox 360, for simultaneous Western-market release with the PlayStation 3 version.

I'd like to point out that I TOTALLY CALLED IT. And not just in an "I own a 360 and not a PS3" kind of way, but with reason and logic. That muffled choking noise you can hear is a forum full of doubters and dissenters eating their collective hats. I hope they remember the bitter taste of headware next time they suggest that my industry analysis may be less than stunningly on-point.

Now, while you all recalibrate your internal calendars to deliver daily reminders that my prescience borders on the paranormal, I'll be quietly basking in the warming glow of my own self-satisfaction. Would anyone care to fetch me a refreshing cocktail?

On The Way: Hell's Kitchen

TV-to-game translations are notoriously bad, mainstream ones even more so, but I still can't help but be a little enthused by the forthcoming Hell's Kitchen game starring everyone's favourite foulmouthed cookmeister Gordon Ramsay.

Cooking Mama and Cooking Guide completely failed to please as far as digital cookery goes; I think having the living crap abused out of me by an ill-tempered Brit is probably the ingredient that both those games were missing.

In all seriousness, though, this is almost certainly going to be a piece of bargain-bin shovelware, so don't raise your hopes. It makes me wonder, though, why we can't get some decent Iron Chef shenanigans happening on XBLA or WiiWare?