Mortal Kombat vs DC Universe

Not a joke.

Whatever Happened To Alan Wake?

I bumped into my MP3 of the theme from Max Payne this morning, and was reminded that talented Max Payne developer Remedy Entertainment had been working on another game a while back.

Called Alan Wake, it was to tell the tale of a writer haunted by his past who finds his writings are being reflected in the small town he is staying in. Influenced by the likes of Stephen King and David Lynch, it promised to be more than a little different from your average top-shelf game.

Unfortunately, after some impressive trailers at E3 2006, Alan Wake fell off the radar. There's really been no showing of the game since, and while apparently it's still being worked on, the official release date is "when it's done". A projected release of 2008 seems to be slipping, which is a shame as this is one of the few upcoming games I'm really looking forward to.

At least it's not alone; Heavy Rain, the new game from Quantic Dream (Fahrenheit) has also vanished from scopes since 2006, with no word on whether it will reach shelves in 2008.

Soul Calibur Coming to XBLA

Here's one for all you Soul Calibur fans out there - Namco-Bandai have announced a port of the Dreamcast Soul Calibur is coming to XBox Live Arcade, to be available prior to Soul Calibur IV's US release of July 29.

Local multiplayer is included, but no online support beyond leaderboards, which is fine by me as I don't hugely enjoy getting pwned at these things by a worldwide roster of 14-year-olds.

As the Dreamcast Soul Calibur is still considered by many to be the finest entry in the series, this is a great chance to come to grips with the franchise if you've never picked it up before.

Story via Gamasutra.

UPDATE: While we're on the topic, Soul Calibur IV will be reaching Australia on July 31, Gamespot reports.

Grindhouse

Finally Dendy got around to showing Grindhouse as a back-to-back feature in Australia, and I was lucky enough to get in to see this incredibly fun experience.

Grindhouse is a joint effort from directors Robert Rodriguez (El Mariachi, Desperado) and Quentin Tarantino (Pulp Fiction, Kill Bill). It's a homage to the exploitation films of the 60s and 70s, and features an outrageous B-movie by each director put back to back and surrounded by some fake film trailers from the likes of Edgar Wright, Eli Wroth and Rob Zombie. The experience comes complete with added film grain, stuttering audio, and "missing reels".

For Rodriguez, Grindhouse is an excuse to make the sort of movies he's been making his entire career, and his contribution (Planet Terror) is a machismo-fuelled zombie flick loaded with hilariously outrageous characters and stand-up-and-applaud over-the-top action. His fetish for hot women, charming outlaws, and guns-instead-of-body-parts is out on display and dancing a flamenco, but where this is occasionally cringeworthy in his other films, in Grindhouse it's right at home.

Tarantino, on the other hand, initially flirts with the exploitation theme in his film Death Proof, but shortly abandons it in favour of making a grrl-power Australian-style road movie. It's not as well-paced as Planet Terror, but it's easily the cleverer film and features a great upbeat ending that left the audience at the cinema I was in cheering. (It also, strangely, features Uma Thurman's stunt double Zoe Bell in a major role, playing of all things Uma Thurman's stunt double Zoe Bell.)

The women are the star of the show in both films. Rosario Dawson (Sin City, Clerks II) is predictably wonderful in Death Proof; co-star Tracey Thoms (Wonderfalls, Cold Case) seems like she's been told to "black it up a notch", and comes across as a little one-dimensional. Zoe Bell is great but seems as if she's in a different type of movie to Dawson and Thoms. Rose McGowan (Scream, Charmed) and Marley Shelton (Sin City, Pleasantville) appear in both segments, and are a perfect fit to the content.

On the male side, Freddy Rodriguez leads Planet Terror as likeable drifter El Wray, and Kurt Russell is the villainous Stuntman Mike in Death Proof - Rodriguez is competent in an undemanding role, but Russell really shines and seems to be having fun in the process.

Many actors appear across both films in roles which are similar or the same. Death Proof and Planet Terror have unfortunately been distributed seperately in Australia, but if you get the chance to see them as they were intended, back to back with trailers included, you should absolutely take it. There's an extra spark that comes from putting these movies together that you won't get from splitting them up.

Grindhouse turned out to be one of the most fun films I've seen this year, and leaves me with almost nothing to complain about. Don't miss out on the enjoyment, and don't let the dodgy Australian distribution cheat you out of the experience.

Aussie Game Charts

These come out every week, of course, but people I talk to always seem surprised to find that what's selling in Australia isn't matching up with what they expect to be selling.

So for the week ending April 6, as reported by Gamespot:

Top 10 Full-Priced Games (Australia)
1. Gran Turismo 5 Prologue, PlayStation 3
2. Brain Training from Dr Kawashima: How Old Is Your Brain?, Nintendo DS
3. More Brain Training from Dr Kawashima: How Old Is Your Brain?, Nintendo DS
4. Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock double pack, Wii
5. Transformers: Decepticons, Nintendo DS
6. Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games, Wii
7. Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games, Nintendo DS
8. The Sims 2: Castaway, Nintendo DS
9. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, PlayStation 3
10. Sight Training: Enjoy Exercising and Relaxing Your Eyes, Nintendo DS

So - what's selling? Mainstream. What's selling? Casual. What's selling? Licensed. And, speaking broadly, for Nintendo systems. To the best of my knowledge, the only reason GT5 is at the top is it just came out late last week - the rest of those games you'll note have been on shelves for a while now. In the case of Brain Training, for more than a year.

If you look back over Aussie game charts for the last - oh, three years - it's pretty much the same story. What Australia wants to buy is Guitar Hero, World of Warcraft, The Sims, and anything reasonably casual-friendly released for the Nintendo DS. Driving games typically do well, and Aussie sport games make a showing, as do the WWE franchise wrestling games.

Just a little reminder that almost the entirety of what we think of as gaming is better characterised as "niche or fringe gaming".

Strong Bad's Cool Game For Attractive People

Those talented people at Telltale Games have apparently decided that frolicking in the small bathtubs of cash that their Sam & Max games have made them is not enough, and they need to give the community a little something back. That "something" is a new game, and you'll need to pay money for it.

The game in question is Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People ("but you can play too!"), and it seems to be a point-n-clicky sort of thing which will be delivered in "five adventure-packed action-sodes", starting June 2008. If the trailer's any indication (and the FAQ says it is), it looks like it'll feature writing and voicework by the Homestar Runner crew.

I'm told there's PC versions coming, but what's interesting is that the main delivery platform for the game is going to be Wiiware - the episodes will be 100% downloadable through your Nintendo Wii, and playable with the Wiimote. That's five kinds of awesome.

More On Movies

While we're talking movies anyway, I somehow had missed the following films in development:

Terminator Salvation, aka Terminator 4, starring Christian Bale (Batman Begins) and directed by the producer of Supernatural and The O.C, coming late next year.

G.I. Joe, starring Dennis Quaid (Vantage Point) and directed by Stephen Sommers (The Mummy, The Mummy Returns). Also for late next year. Set your derision-guns to "kill".

Watchmen, based on the Alan Moore comic, and finally emerging from one of Hollywood's most epic decade-spanning development hells. Directed by Zack Snyder (300), and apparently far enough along to have production stills available. Still no release date though.

And, finally, no joke, Where The Wild Things Are, directed by Spike Jonze (Being John Malkovic, Adaptation). Yes, it's the movie of the Maurice Sendak book. Which fills me with all kinds of squee. I really don't care whether Jonze does it straight or takes it into crazytown, it'll all be good. December this year.

Sorry if the above is old news; I just don't know how I could have possibly missed that these films were happening. The important thing is that I know about them now.

Crazy, Crazy Movie Scheduling

Check out the Australian cinema releases for June 12 (the Thursday following the Greg's Birthday Long Weekend):

The Incredible Hulk, starring Edward Norton, written by Edward Norton, hopefully setting right the appalling wrongs done to the Emerald Avenger by Ang Lee.

Speed Racer, directed by the Wachowski brothers, their first venture behind the camera since Matrix Revolutions, bringing the anime classic to hyperreal life.

The Happening, a story of plague-themed apocalypse in which M. Knight Shyamalan attempts to make up for the appallingness of Lady In The Water.

WTF? Who runs three genre movies against each other? Three of the - what, maybe seven movies left this year I actually want to see at the cinema, and they're all coming out in the same window? What kind of God would allow that? Serbian mothers demand justice.

Controller Family Tree

Sockmaster has put together a controller family tree attempting to chart the evolution of modern videogame controllers. Oddly, it includes the Nintendo Game & Watch but completely misses the DS. Worth a look for console geeks.

Thanks to Julia for the heads-up.

Rock Band Dated For Europe

Rock Band is finally making its way to Europe, with an XBox 360 version coming out May 23 complete with bonus tracks that include Blur, Oasis, Muse and Die Toten Hosen.

There's no word on whether this is one of those "Europe includes Australia" kind of deals, or whether Down Under is still in rock-related limbo. If we've been shafted again I think some UK importing action is going to be the go.

Full story via Gamespot.

A Very Quiet Nerdgasm

It's like all my geeky Xmases have come at once. Or, like, maybe, two or three of them. I should save some Xmases for later, probably.

For example, Doctor Who: Season Four (or *sigh* Thirty) is out, and it's reasonably entertaining, even if Russell T Davies has managed to design yet another monster based on bodily contents and fart sounds. Spoilers under this link.

Also, Buffy is apparently sleeping with women now. Or a woman. The good news is it's not Kennedy, and the bad news is it's not Willow. Predictable fan uproar is already well underway. It's hilarious that if you type "Buffy" and "Satsu" into the Google toolbar it will predict you might also want the word "bed".

Author Stephen King has stepped into the videogame politics ring and started punching. He's blasted Massachusetts legislation which would criminalise purchases of games by minors. Is this a prelude to a raft of King-related survival horror? I can only hope!

And much-derided games-to-films director Uwe Boll has promised to hang up his saucy directing beret if presented with a one-million-signature petition. Attention whore that he is, he's probably just trying to get us to go see his latest film Postal. PS - DO NOT SEE HIS LATEST FILM POSTAL.

Sam & Max Coming To The Wii

I've spent so much time pimping the new Sam & Max games at friends recently that I just don't have the mental energy left to develop an extended pimp-themed analogy. In short, they're rather good.

So all you sad sods who can't be bothered to download the damn things for your PC will be happy to hear that it's coming to the Nintendo Wii. Which is a console so ideally suited to puzzle-based point and click antics that it's a shame so few of the blighters have surfaced for it to date.

Mario & Luigi: Partners In Time

That Mario is one charming son of a bitch. He's so damned charming that he can beat you with a hammer for 16 hours worth of Mario & Luigi: Partners In Time (for the Nintendo DS) and then convince you that you had fun at the end. You'll walk away thinking how much you love him, and when people ask you what happened to your face you'll tell them you walked into a door.

Because Partners In Time isn't a good game. It's repetitive, it's unoriginal, and the controls are intensely annoying. But there's just something about it that will keep you grinnning stupidly to yourself as it starts to viciously work your kidneys.

Mario's never been long on story, but Partners In Time makes an effort. When a local boffin invents a time-travel machine, Princess Peach is the first to test it, and soon she's predictably lost in the Mushroom Kingdom's past and squealing like the whiny child she is. Enter Mario and Luigi, who promptly hop back into history to save her. They soon find that the past is under attack by evil mushroom aliens called Shroobs, and in order to combat this threat they enter an unlikely team-up with their 3-year-old baby selves.

The game essentially plays as a platformer/RPG hybrid, in the style of the Mario RPG and Paper Mario games. You'll wander through isometric platform-stewn levels, bopping blocks and pushing switches and the like, but when you make contact with an enemy it's all turn-based, and you and your foe take turns bouncing on each others' heads.

The RPG elements are thinner than Mary Kate Olsen. You gain experience and level up in a fairly linear fashion. You can change your pants (the only form of armour or gear in the game), and you can equip badges to gain situation-based advantages. You can only have one badge per character, though, and there's not really much depth or strategy in deciding what to wear.

In combat the focus is less on your stats and more on your reaction times. Each attack requires some variety of button-pressing minigame to maximise your damage, and incoming enemy blows can be minimised or dodged by jumping or swinging your hammer at the right moment. You'll need to escape roughly two out of every three enemy attacks, so mastering the (incredibly annoying) timing is key.

Outside of combat, each of the four brothers (two adults and two babies) is assigned to one of the four DS face butttons. You select a set of actions with the shoulder buttons, and then perform the action by pressing the relevant brother's button. You can move all four brothers together by piggybacking the babies on the adults, or you can split them into teams of babies and brothers, who can move separately.

Games where you need to independently control two different teams have a long and convoluted history of punching nuns, and Partners In Time is no exception. No one likes cutting their combat effectiveness in half, not least because brothers not present in combat don't gain XP. "Teamwork puzzles" is a phrase game developers use as code for "I have a shrine to Hitler in my basement." It won't take you long to realise that this would have been a vastly better game if the "adults and babies" gimmick were missing completely.

Speaking of which, the "time travelling" scenario really only extends as far as introducing baby characters. You're only going to one time period (the past), and it's not like anything you do there changes or affects the future. You'll want to kick Luigi in the face for having apparently solved all the puzzles as a baby, and then forgotten the solution by the time it comes to do it as an adult.

The game's not long by videogame standards (the 16 hours mentioned above), but that's still about eight hours of padding. Each level is about twice as long as feels right, stretched out with extra switch puzzles and jumping sequences (which are, incidentally, incredibly easy). The pacing just feels completely wrong, and there's a good chance that if the game had been shorter and tighter I wouldn't have had time to be annoyed with its many flaws.

For all the above criticisms, Partners In Time is a game with a lot of soul. The story sequences wring a lot of value out of a small number of animations for the brothers, and both the visuals and the limited snippets of Mario-style speech really bring the Mushroom Kingdom to life. There are even a few laugh-out-loud moments to be found.

If you want a Mario RPG, you'd be better served by almost any other Mario RPG ever made. But if you somehow end up with this one, you probably won't regret it too much. After all, Mario is really a great guy - he just has trouble controlling his temper sometimes.

April Fool *sigh*

Blizzard's April Fool's offerings are uncharacteristically weird this year.

If you want to really fool people with April Fool's, you can't release these things on April 1. You have to do it, like, September 18 or something. People will never be expecting that.

Movies In Brief

Still in Perth, with intermittent internet access; back next Wednesday night. In the mean time, some brief comments on films I can't be bothered describing in more detail.

Run Fatboy Run: Simon Pegg (Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz) writes and stars in a comedy about a loser who signs up for a marathon to win back the woman he left pregnant at the altar. Pegg's genius for timing and genuine humanity makes for a heartwarming and mostly hilarious film. David Schwimmer (Friends) directs, with mixed results. A second act heavy with physical humour and a miscast Thandie Newton (Crash) in the romantic lead are the only things keeping this film from being a comedic masterpiece. Still highly recommendable.

Across The Universe: A film musical in the finest tradition of its genre, Across The Universe tells the story of a group of misfits struggling their way through the 1960s to a soundtrack of first-class Beatles covers. Music, choreography and cinematography all combine perfectly to produce visually and aurallly stunning theatre. The plot is unfortunately not as cohesive but it in any case takes a back seat to a procession of fantastic musical sequences. A must-see for fans of the Beatles or musicals generally.

Black Sheep: Deeply and intentionally silly, this New Zealand film about an outbreak of zombie sheep manages regular laughs if you have an exceptionally high tolerance for bad puns, horrible acting and wince-inducing dialogue. An original concept and creature effects by the Weta Workshop are its strongest selling points; some audiences will have a lot of fun but those with a low pain tolerance may want to leave early.

Jumper

Jumper is a superhero action movie that expertly achieves what it sets out to do. A dopey story and flatulent characterisation won't stop you from having a heap of fun while watching.

Hayden Christensen (Star Wars prequels) plays, effectively, Hayden Christensen, a meatheaded thug who thinks he's significantly more entertaining than he actually is. Discovering that he has unlikely powers of teleportation, he immediately robs a bank and starts living off the stolen money.

Hot on his heels is Samuel L Motherfucking Jackson (Snakes On A Plane), agent of a hidden secret order of mystical hidden secrecy. His apparently sworn purpose is to hunt down and exterminate "jumpers", which he does with what insiders often refer to as "extreme prejudice".

Given that the director is Doug Liman (The O.C.) and Christensen's girlfriend is played by Rachel Bilson (The O.C.) it feels very much like Jumper is a superhero-themed extension of a certain popular TV soap. The film distinguishes itself by its absolutely first-class visual effects. The core gimmick of "jumping" looks fantastic and is deeply convincing, and it's used to great effect to pit Christensen and Jackson against each other in a fairly non-stop procession of superpowered action.

The plot is really pretty stupid, and has more loose ends than a primary school craft project, but it's clear that's not really what the film's about, and you can safely switch off your brain and sit back while the entertainment seeps in.

Jumper is Hollywood doing what Hollywood does best and is a highly recommendable way to trade $15 for 90 minutes of unthreatening fun.

Garfield Minus Garfield

For those who haven't seen it yet, Garfield Minus Garfield. Hilarity ensues. Thanks to Arkem for the nod.

Swancon 2008

Swancon 2008 was a great steaming rancid sack full of fun. Oh such fun. The convention went down to the Fun River and hauled up some giant buckets full of win, and then made from them a crude soup flavoured generously with awesome.

A heapin' helpin' of masquerade photos are up at www.lympago.com; Craig also has a gallery on Facebook.

Regular flow of news-n-reviews will resume shortly; stand by for violent abuse of the phrase "nun-punching".

Go Camel Photography

To veer sharply off topic for a moment, and advertise for a friend, can I recommend Go Camel Photography, who are putting all sorts of cool images on pretty much every sort of surface you can think of, specifically in order to fulfill your consumerist fantasies?

Check out the site and if you like it drop a link to it somewhere for Google to notice.

RIP Arthur C Clarke

Prolific science-fiction author Arthur C Clarke passed away 19 March 2008 in Sri Lanka at the age of 90. Clarke will be remembered as the author of novels such as 2001: A Space Odyssey, Rendevous With Rama, The City And The Stars, and Childhood's End.

Sins Of A Solar Empire

I don't really know what to say about Sins Of A Solar Empire other than that I've been enjoying it. It's one of the few shining lights in the vast emptiness of contemporary PC gaming.

It's a multiplayer space real-time strategy. I say multiplayer because the single player options are limited to customisable skirmishes against AI opponents. Shipping without any significant single-player campaign is an option that worked for Rise of Nations and it works again here.

The game's biggest claim to fame is its epic scope. You can zoom right in to see the details on your smallest ships as they fire lasers and dogfight, which makes the game look a lot like genre classic Homeworld, or you can zoom out to see the entire gravity well in which you're fighting, the neighbouring planets, the solar system, the local cluster, or in extreme cases the galaxy and neighbouring galaxies.

The game also borrows heavily from Warcraft III for some of its gameplay elements. Your capital ships are effectively hero-class units. They're worth entire fleets of smaller ships, and they gain experience through combat, which allows them to purchase new abilities or level up existing ones.

The third interesting innovation is the bounty system. Each solar system features a "pirate planet", guarded by a fleet of pirates so immense as to make defeating them generally not worthwhile. Every ten minutes or so the pirates will dispatch a fleet to attack a player. Players can pay credits to set bounties on other players; the player with the highest bounty when the pirate timer runs down will be the target of the attack, and the size of the fleet that attacks is based on the size of the bounty.

Players can collect bounty on other players too. Each time a player loses an asset, the person who destroyed that asset claims some of the bounty on the asset's owner. In this way bounties can run all the way down to zero. In multiplayer games it can serve as a way of motivating opponents to fight amongst themselves.

The game doesn't look particularly wonderful when you zoom right in. Ship textures are clean and crisp, but dull, and most of the ship designs are variations on the idea of a flying rectangle. Thankfully the gameplay is the real star, and matches can be customised in a huge variety of ways for maximum fun.

If you're a PC gamer who attends LAN parties or plays online, Sins of a Solar Empire is an easily recommendable purchase. The solo gamer might not get as much out of it, but it remains a fun experience even against AIs.

Vantage Point

Vantage Point attempts to be Rashomon For Dummies, but even dummies are likely to be personally offended by the nun-punching awfulness of this cinematic diarrhoea.

While attending a terror summit in Spain, the US President is the target of an assassination attempt. We see what may be generously referred to as "the story" from the point of view of a bunch of different characters, including a TV crew, the president's bodyguard, a Spanish police officer, and a tourist. The film attempts to weave a suspenseful mystery out of these competing narratives but the real mystery is whether Dennis Quaid thinks he's acting or whether his face is just twisted up like that all the time.

The film can't even hold to its sole gimmick. About two thirds of the way through the movie the director (Pete Travis, on his first big screen outing) does away with the whole multiple viewpoints nonsense and puts the rest of the filmic offal in sequential order. This allows him the opportunity for a reasonably good car chase but leaves the viewer wondering if Travis just got bored of the gimmick or realised that making a watchable film was completely beyond him, let alone a watchable clever film.

Veteran actors Sigourney Weaver (Alien, Gorillas in the Mist) and William Hurt (The Good Shepherd, Broadcast News) struggly bravely in poorly-written roles but their time on screen is all too brief and their dialogue is ear-gratingly annoying. You'll instead be seeing a lot of Matthew Fox (Lost, Party of Five) leading a cadre of terrorists so generically evil that they may as well be twirling their moustaches and tieing the president to a train track. Their motives don't seem to stretch far past a general dislike for the United States, and while step 1 of the plan seems to be to kidnap the president, and step 3 is probably profit, step 2 is never even mentioned.

I don't often think about walking out of the cinema, but Vantage Point was definitely touch and go. The rubbish on offer here would look bad coming from something made-for-TV; paying $15 to see it with strangers is a con of epic proportions. Avoid as though it were Robo-Hitler.

Little Birdy / Sugar Army @ The Corner in Melbourne

Saw the Little Birdy gig at The Corner in Melbourne last night. Lead singer / guitarist Katy Steele did an opening set showcasing some promising stuff from their upcoming album, and the actual Little Birdy set was as awesome as expected, but check out the warm-up act:

Sugar Army doing their single Jigsaw. These guys were worth admission all by themselves; 100% of notes hit. Picked up their EP and look forward to seeing more of them.

WoW Horde Banner

I never realised before that the Horde banner from World of Warcraft is a kind of Union Jack.

That's an Orc shield in the middle (the red) bearing the traditional Horde crest, with three purple Troll paragons above it, all fixed onto a Tauren standard. Not sure exactly where the Undead are represented there, but they're only barely in the Horde anyway.

Perth Travel Dates

For those who are interested:

I leave Canberra 9.15 am, Friday 14 March 2008.
I arrive Melbourne 10.20 am, Friday 14 March 2008.

I am in Melbourne 14-16 March to see Little Birdy.

I leave Melbourne 7.40 pm, Sunday 16 March 2008.
I arrive Perth 9.40 pm, Sunday 16 March 2008.

I am in Perth 16 March - 2 April for Swancon and general holiday.

I leave Perth 3.25 pm, Wednesday 2 April 2008.
I arrive Canberra 10.25 pm, Wednesday 2 April 2008.

South Australian Attorney-General vs Game Classification

As you all know, Australia doesn't have a Federal R18+ classification for videogames. Games that exceed the M15+ classification are denied classification, which under state law prohibits them from being imported, advertised or sold. This has two important effects: (1) that many games, roughly one high-profile game a year, are effectively banned in Australia, and (2) that publishers engage to varying degrees in self-censorship to fall within the classification system and therefore do not produce games on certain topics and themes.

The Australian Federal ratings body is the Office of Film and Literature Classification. Their mandate is not to act per se as a censorship body but rather to allow the Australian people to make informed decisions about media content prior to exposing themselves or their children to that content. Note that they can issue an X rating to film media even though X rated material is banned in the majority of Australian states and territories.

The appropriate Federal position should be to allow games to be classified R18+, and then leave individual states to decide what ratings can be sold. (The appropriate State position is to then allow R18+ games to be sold.)

With the recent change in the Australian Federal Government, a change to the classification system may now be in the works, albeit as a depressingly low government priority. However, a major opponent to any change is South Australian Attorney-General Michael Atkinson. In a recent speech in the SA Parliament, he said:

I have consistently opposed an R18+ classification for computer games. I am concerned about the harm of high-impact (particularly violent) computer games to children. [...] I do not want children to be able to get their hands on R18+ games easily. I understand that the lack of an R18+ classification denies some adults the chance to play some games, however, the need to keep potentially harmful material away from children is far more important.

This is an inconsistent position for a number of reasons. Firstly, R18+ games would not be worse than R18+ movies. Yes, they are interactive, but the OFLC already takes interactivity into account when issuing a rating. Identical content is given a higher rating where it is interactive, so a M15+ film could received a R18+ rating in an identical but interactive context. This is despite the fact that there is no clear evidence showing any harmful effects on children from exposure to violent or mature gaming content, or evidence showing that interactivity increases the impact of media.

Secondly, he makes two assumptions: (1) that if R18+ games are in Australia, children will play them, and (2) that if they are not, less children will play them. Yes, children will play them, in the same way that children will watch R18+ movies and get access to porn. That's the magic of the internet. It's also the magic of informed parenting, where parents make their own decisions about how worrying they think these things are, and impose various levels of either enforcement or supervision to control and educate their children's access to content. People will see mature content if they want to see mature content; that's a given. With an appropriate classification system parents can be informed about this content and better understand what their children are being exposed to.

On this topic Mr Atkinson goes on to say:

Proponents for the classification say the latest technology allows gaming platforms and computers to be programmed to allow parental locks. Today’s children are far more technologically savvy than their parents. It’s laughable to suggest that they couldn’t find ways around parental locks if R18+ games were in the home.

Of course dedicated kids could find their way around parental locks on games. But is Mr Atkinson really saying that kids getting access to their parents' R18+ games is a greater worry than them accessing their parents' pharmaceuticals, firearms or fireworks, all of which are legal in Australia, often without a licence?

The law is a blunt instrument. It should not be used to legislate responsible parenting. If Mr Atkinson is worried about the effects of high-impact games on minors then he should be the foremost supporter of a system that provides parents with high-quality information about game content, and encourages parents to share games with children and discuss their content openly and maturely.

Thanks to The Angriest for linking me to Mr Atkinson's speech. The full text of that speech can be found here.

Def Jam: Icon

Def Jam: Icon looks fantastic, sounds fantastic, and is packed with innovation and originality. Unfortunately, it's just not fun to play.

This is the follow-up to Def Jam: Fight for NY, which was excellent and well worth your time if you ever see a copy. Made by EA Games under licence from music label Def Jam Records, the franchise involves taking real life Def Jam artists such as Redman, Sean Paul or Ludacris, and beating the snot out of them with your fists or the nearby environment.

Where Fight for NY was a solid grassroots brawler with some interesting environmental twists, Icon is a more ambitious game and attempts to draw more heavily on the Def Jam name and musical theme. Winning fights is now less about landing solid grapples than it is about controlling the background music; each fighter has a theme song, and when your song is playing you have more momentum and stopping power.

Changing the song involves working the virtual "deck" - making circling motions on both analog sticks causes your fighter to spin his hands in the air as if changing discs on a turntable, and if you're not interrupted the music will change to your theme.

The background of each arena thumps in time to the beats of the current song. First of all, this looks amazing and is the core of the game's visual style. Secondly, on the big beats parts of the environment become interactive: lights arc with electricity, speakers send out waves of pure sound, cars blow up and doors slam open and shut. The key to victory involves forcing your opponent into these hazards at the relevant point in the music. If you're finding the timing difficult, you can always "scratch", which involves circling a single analogue stick to jump the music and make the background pop (your fighter also makes the appropriate DJ hand-gestures).

All of the above is a blast. It's an original and clever attempt to tie the game to a musical theme. Unfortunately, the core fighting mechanics are just dull. The controls feel sluggish, the moves are generic, and the scissor-paper-stone background of the punch-block-grapple system is insultingly shallow. The clever music mechanics just aren't enough to make you keep dunking your head in the turgid gameplay once you've already been down two or three times.

The character roster is a bit weak, too. Whereas Fight for NY featured guest appearances by the likes of Henry Rollins, Carmen Electra, and Stargate SG-1's Christopher Judge, Icon's lineup is much more bland. You'll have to be a solid hip-hop enthusiast to realliy appreciate fighters like Young Jeezy, EB-40 or Big Boi.

The single-player career mode sees you building your own record label. The fighting is generally in the context of impressing or representing artists so they'll sign to your label, and in between matches you'll have to buy your create-a-fighter clothes and bling, as well as budgeting and managing your artists' music releases. The window dressing is even more dreary than the fighting, and if you're playing the game you'll probably want to skip the nonsense to get right to the battling.

There are multiplayer options for 2-player local versus matches, or online head-to-head. Playing against a real person is better than the predictable computer, but it still gets old after about an hour of play. The XBox 360 version also allows you to import your own music to fight to, which can be very awesome, but the implementation is a little awkward and is only available outside the main career mode.

Fight for NY remains an unsung classic, but ultimately Icon doesn't live up to its pedigree. The people involved in making it are to be commended on trying something different, and on making a game that looks and sounds great, but as gamers we'll probably to better off waiting to see what they do next than signing up for the disappointment of Icon.

RIP Gary Gygax

Gary Gygax, founder of seminal RPG publisher TSR and co-creator of Dungeons & Dragons and its successors, died 4 March 2008 aged 69 at his Lake Geneva home. It appears at this stage that his death was as a result of a heart attack.

His contributions to roleplaying and to gaming are indisputable and his presence will be sorely missed.

Postcard from Egypt

Today I got in the mail an awesome postcard from Egypt postmarked 20 Feb 08. It's addressed to "GregT" and describes someone's trip to the Great Pyramid.

I have no idea who it's from. I can't read the signature. Anyone want to own up to it, because you rock?

EDIT: Mystery is now solved, see comments.

PC Gaming (*sigh*)

Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened: I was absolutely looking forward to playing a game based on the concept of Sherlock Holmes vs Cthulhu. Unfortunately the sound is buggy (choppy and occasionally cutting out altogether) and the interface is annoying so this one's going back on the shelf.

Pirates of the Burning Sea: If the latest pirate-themed MMOG had had a free trial, or even a download-purchase option, I would have ended up playing it and probably subscribing. It didn't, so I haven't. Seriously, who in this day and age launches a MMOG without a try-before-you-buy option?

Sam & Max Season Two: is awesome. Way better than Season One, which was pretty darn good. It's no longer just a good imitation of the old LucasArts classics - it's way better. You should be playing this. And, once again, you don't have to futz around with all that GameTap rubbish to buy - it's a regular normal-style online store.

Devil May Cry 4

The last generation of game consoles has a lot to answer for. They brought us the guitar sim, the open-world sandbox, and, relevantly, the "stylish action game".

Putting aside that "stylish action" is a crap name for a genre, I've still never really been a fan of Prince of Persia or God of War. All those parkour performances and ancient Greek orgies were just shiny cover for my sworn nemesis, the platform game.

But I've got a soft spot for Devil May Cry. With the exception of the universally reviled Devil May Cry 2, this is a franchise that knows that nothing should ever, ever get in the way of killing demons.

Devil May Cry 4 is a sequel in the finest traditions of "more of the same". If you enjoyed DMC 1 or 3, you're going to feel right at home here, as everything you liked before is back and looking to pick a fight. It's a game about going from A to B, and killing every ill-tempered hell-loving fiend that gets in your way in the most implausible, frenetic, and cinematic way possible.

This time around you'll be playing the first half of the game as Nero, who is essentially what you'd get if you made series protagonist Dante a little less macho and gave him a giant "devil arm" that acts as a kind of magical grappling gun. You'll take Nero through to the halfway mark, after which you get control of Dante, who doesn't have the grappling gun but does have access to a bewildering array of of diffferent fighting styles and weapons.

You may be the kind of person who'll feel offended that you don't get Dante right from the outset, but here at The Dust Forms Words we have a name for that kind of person, and it is "nutjob". My experience was that Nero is significantly more fun to play than Dante, partly because the devil arm is surprisingly well integrated and partly because Dante's weapon-changing stance-shifting style is annoying complex and ill-suited to the XBox 360 controller. However, even if that's not your take on the situation, you'll still likely find that both characters are fun to play and equally worthy of the franchise.

The franchise's last outing was known for a range of frustrating difficulty issues, with initial Japanese and US releases being, apparently, eye-gougingly hard. Australia got the kiddy version, which later saw store shelves in the US as well. Thankfully, this time around the difficulty is just right, with a stupefyingly easy "Human" difficulty for the talentless and prepubescent, and an appropriately challenging "Devil Hunter" mode for those experienced with the series. Finishing Devil Hunter naturally unlocks further levels of difficulty which go right through to the insane "Heaven or Hell" mode.

The game theoretically features a plot, wherein a mad cult intends to use the Yamato blade to open a hell gate and create some kind of living god, but it's not really terribly interesting and mostly just serves as framing for the excellent cutscenes and fantastic boss fights.

Speaking of the boss fights, you'll be fighting each boss three times. The first time is as Nero, where the tactics focus on the clever use of Nero's grappling maneuver; the second time is as Dante, where you're deprived of the grapple and have to come up with new strategies that integrate Dante's strengths. These first two fights with each boss are fun, and really bring the differences in the characters to the forefront. However, you then have to fight all the bosses again, back to back, in the second last level of the game, for no particular plot reason whatsoever, which is probably the only moment in the game that'll have you hating the developers. It's one time too many and it feels like a frustrating and unnecessary level of padding added to the game's length.

That gripe aside, I can heartily recommend Devil May Cry 4. It features combat that feels fun, looks great, and has a surprising level of depth, and better yet the game knows its strengths and plays to them, serving up endless action without plunging you through platforming or minigaming tedium. The whole package utilises the XBox 360's graphical capabilities well, and it's the sort of game you're probably going to want to come back to when you're finished to attempt the harder difficulties.

Basically, if jamming buttons and killing demons sounds like the sort of thing you'll enjoy, then you're unlikely to find a better execution of it that Devil May Cry 4.

Raining Cats And Blogs

Arkem has pointed me in the direction of Ian McKellar's auto-lolcat feeds, which combine cat photos from Flickr with post headlines from various RSS feeds. Hilarity ensues.

The main page is here.

CNN news lolcats are hilarious.

Craigslist cats are also funny but NSFW.

No Country For Old Men

I was going to do a whole post about No Country For Old Men but it just doesn't seem to be in me. Short version: well worth seeing even if you know in advance that the ending rides the short bus.

Josh Brolin (Grindhouse, American Gangster) plays a Texan labourer who comes into possession of $2 million after stumbling across the aftermath of a drug deal gone wrong. Sending his wife into hiding, he goes on the lam with the money, followed by terrifying hitman Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem). Tommy Lee Jones plays a sheriff looking into the case.

It's directed by the Coen Brothers (Fargo, O Brother Where Art Thou?), so if you're familiar with their work you won't be surprised to find that this is a protracted shaggy dog tale with an ending that spams hard on the epic fail button. The main plot abruptly ends at the 100 minute mark, leaving the movie to shamble aimlessly onward while the audience fidgets uncomfortably.

Despite a conclusion that metaphorically salutes Hitler this is still a hell of a well made movie. With excellent performances all round, great directing and cinematography, and more outrageous Texan accents than you can poke a stick at, No Country For Old Men largely succeeds by keeping each scene independently entertaining.

See the film, enjoy it, and then beat the Coen Brothers savagely around the head until they learn the meaning of the word "resolution".

Babylon 5: The Lost Tales - Voices In The Dark

There's a reason these tales were lost.

Babylon 5: The Lost Tales is Joe Michael Straczynski's direct-to-DVD continuation of his well-loved B5 universe. Intended to be an ongoing series, of which Voices In The Dark is the first and so far only, each disc in the series features two or more short telenovellas featuring original members of the Babylon 5 and Crusade casts.

The first half of Voices In The Dark opens 10 years after the final season of B5 and showcases Commander Lochley, now promoted to the rank of Colonel. Actress Tracy Scoggins has clearly seen better days, but stumbling around like a drunk on a bender and going to bed wearing ridiculous prostitute makeup are the least of her worries when she finds herself dealing with a traveller exhibiting a raging case of demonic possession.

No stranger to The Exorcist, Lochley promptly whistles up a deeply generic old priest with a shaky belief system, who endlessly pontificates about the nature of God and the Devil until you're begging Lochley to flush him out the nearest airlock. The next half hour drones by in a procession of tedious monologues; Lochley asks herself some hard and deeply uninteresting questions about the nature of faith, and then somehow it all resolves itself, ending the first half of the disc in an uninspiring drizzle of mediocrity.

For the second Tale, we find Sheridan looking rather dapper as President of the Interstellar Alliance and being interviewed by an unconvincingly trampy ISN reporter. Some winceworthy attempts at humour are made, until the real story kicks into gear when technomage Galen visits Sheridan in a dream to tell him that Sheridan must kill a young Centauri to prevent a forthcoming apocalypse.

Of course, Sheridan is going to do no such thing, no matter how much the show attempts to convince you over the next 30 minutes that he might. Bruce Boxleitner is a vastly better actor than Tracy Scoggins and is sober to boot, so this expedition is by and large more successful than its predecessor, but it's still a tiring farce that avoids B5's traditional strengths as though they were made of killer bees.

Neither of the two stories are well written or well directed. JMS is responsible for both the script and the direction, so the blame falls squarely at his feet. The short story format sits poorly with his traditional flair for the epic, and his penchant for the monologue finds neither the dramatic timing nor the acting talent to be effective. The special effects and digital compositing fail to convince and the small set and cast budgets make the environments feel claustrophobic and provincial.

Ultimately The Lost Tales adds nothing of consequence to the Babylon 5 universe, completely fails to stand on its own merits, and is a depressing embarassment to all concerned in its creation. No amount of obsessive fandom can justify supporting this rubbish with money and you're best to leave it alone and wait for B5 to resurface in the fullness of time with some genuine inspiration and enthusiasm behind it.

3:10 To Yuma

If you took everything about Westerns that was ever dramatic, exciting, powerful or stylish, and distilled it down into 122 minutes, you'd probably end up with something that looked a lot like 3:10 To Yuma. Which, by the way, is one hell of a good movie.

It's the story of Dan Evans (Christian Bale), a crippled civil war veteran who is battling to save his unprofitable land and gain the respect of his rebellious son. The opportunity to solve both his problems appears when he is offered a high-paying prisoner escort job, taking murderous bandit Ben Wade (Russell Crowe) to the 3:10 train to Yuma Prison.

Unfortunately for Evans, Wade's gang (led by an entertainingly villainous Ben Foster) aim to break their boss free. Joined by his runaway son, and aligned with a steadily depleting pool of allies, Evans finds himself up against nearly insurmountable odds as the arrival of the 3:10 train draws near, and must come to understand why he is doing what he is doing and what really matters to him in life.

3:10 To Yuma is filled with all those themes that Westerns have always handled so well: duty, justice, honour, revenge, manhood, and the relationships between fathers and sons. In less talented hands that could all add up to a macho gun-fest with nothing much to say, but here they're handled sensitively and stirringly.

There's regular violence throughout the film, and it's always shocking. Not shocking in the dinsoaurs-burst-through-windows horror sense, but shocking in a way that conveys that violence is never something anyone is really prepared for. Shoot-outs start with deafeningly loud and brutally startling gunshots, and murders happen suddenly and before anyone can react. Characters are well fleshed-out throughout, and even minor roles are invested with a suprising degree of humanity.

This version is a remake of the 1957 film of the same name. It's directed by James Mangold, whose previous offerings include the critically successful Girl, Interrupted and Walk the Line, as well as the much less wonderful horror flick Identity. Mangold is at the top of his game here; he absolutely nails the essence of the Western genre, and balances action and violence skillfully against characterisation and psychological suspense.

Both Crowe and Bale are perfectly cast and deliver excellent performances. Ben Foster (most recently memorable as Angel in X-Men 3) is also a stand-out appearance as Wade's second in command. Sci-fi fans may also appreciate Alan Tudyk (Wash from Firefly) in a minor part as a doctor-slash-veterinarian.

The musical score is absolutely perfect, evoking all the best themes of the genre while remaining original and attention-grabbing. That's surprising, as it's by Marco Beltrami, best known as a composer for B-grade horror and action flicks (Mimic, xXx: State of the Union, Blade 2, Resident Evil). Beltrami distinguishes himself here with music that stands comparison with the works of Ennio Morricone or Elmer Bernstein.

Ultimately, 3:10 to Yuma is not just a good Western - it's a very, very good movie. It's the sort of movie that will make you want to watch more Westerns, and will remind you of why this genre was so popular for such a very long time. It's absolutely not surprising that it's garnered critical acclaim wherever it's gone, yet it simultaneously holds a lot of entertainment value for less demanding audiences. This is cinema done well, and if Hollywood makes more films like this we'll be well served this year as a viewing pubic.

Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street

I always assumed that my cinematic blood feud with that hack Tim Burton would be settled with fire and death, but as it turns out he's defused the situation by making a rather stunningly good movie instead.

Sweeney Todd, for those not in the know, is a movie based on Stephen Sondheim's Broadway musical about a certain Mr Benjamin Barker (played here by Johnny Depp). Brought low by the cruel mischiefs of fate, Barker is shipped off to the colonies as a convict while his wife is meanwhile molested by an unsavoury judicial official (Alan Rickman). In short order Barker escapes, returns to England, and, finding his wife apparently dead, swears murderous vengeance upon all and sundry, which is where the story begins. Before long Barker is calling himself Sweeney Todd and has resumed his previous trade as a barber, which largely consists of murdering his customers and giving the corpses to obliging neighbour Mrs Lovett (Helena Bonham-Carter), who cooks them up into pies for the consumption of the masses.

That may all be gruesome fare for a musical but it's perfect subject matter for director Tim Burton (Edward Scissorhands, Sleepy Hollow, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory). For years now I've been waging an uphill battle to convince the public at large that this man's life work has been shameless tripe; specifically, that he couldn't find plot, pacing, or characterisation if someone stapled his tongue to them on a carefully illustrated diagram. In Sweeney Todd, though, Burton manages to sidestep his regular directorial Chernobyls by letting the magic of the musical do his storytelling busywork for him.

Sweeney Todd is filled with actors at the top of their professional careers. Johnny Depp is predictably outrageous in the title role, continuing his Pirates of the Caribbean accented drawl. Also it turns out that Alan Rickman has a passable singing voice, though it's nothing to write home about. The real treat, though, is Bonham-Carter (Fight Club, Til Human Voices Wake Us), who after slumming her way through a plethora of sub-par roles and appalling performances over the last decade finally gets a chance to steal the show as Barker's slightly loopy pie-cooking foil.

The story is driven largely by the music, which is excellent and well framed by both the directing and the performances. The songs regularly carry the acting and pacing above the typical Tim Burton doldrums, and the movie almost entirely retains the magnificence of Sondheim's original score. It's over-the-top and full of ridiculous conceits, but that's less the music itself and more the nature of musicals as a medium. The bombastic melodrama is perfectly suited both to Johnny Depp's talents and to Tim Burton's exaggerated sense of gothic style, and if you're not hating it then you'll likely be loving its grandeur and unapologetic self-involvement.

This is a gory movie. Not gory to the extent of your average slasher flick, but still with far more blood and guts flowing than seems right in a movie that has people singing. It is essentially a film about a very deranged man who kills people and then feeds them to other people in pies, and that's not dodged or bowdlerised at any point. Don't take the children.

For all the death and drama, though, this is a fundamentally fun movie. It's something you can really get behind. The lead actors are a delight to watch, the script is witty and understated, and there's a sense of finely tuned comedic timing that follows the story the entire way through. Those pitiful creatures who consider themselves Tim Burton fans should love it, and for everyone else it's quite capable of sustaining a passionate independent cult following, should you be looking for something like that.

Don't miss out on the entertainment here just because you've been put off by Tim Burton or by musicals in the past. Sweeney Todd is a high quality movie. It's worlds above most of the rubbish that hit theatres last year, and if it's unlikely to outshine its contemporaries that's only a testament to the excellence of 2008 cinema so far.

Phoenix Wright, Ace Attorney: Justice For All

For those who still haven't discovered the magic of Phoenix Wright, you'll be glad to know that your entire life to date has been shallow and without meaning. For everyone else, Justice For All provides four more well-told courtroom whodunnits while leaving the basic Phoenix Wright formula completely unchanged.

Justice For All is Wright's second Nintendo DS adventure, and like its predecessor it's really only an English-language port of a Japanese GameBoy title. This release has most of the extra quirks that the last DS game did, such as the ability to use the microphone to shout "Objection!", and basic touchscreen control, but unlike the last Phoenix Wright this time there are no bonus cases or touchscreen-based forensics to engage in.

At their heart the Ace Attorney games are really just murder mysteries, set in a courtroom. You're the defence attorney for someone accused of murder, and thanks to the highly unlikely mechanics of the world's legal system the only way for you to exonerate your client is to collar and prosecute the real criminal within the statutory deadline of three days. Each case is made up of a series of chapters, which alternate between "investigation", where you interview bystanders and search areas for clues, and the courtroom, where you cross-examine witnesses and present evidence.

As in the last game, the courtroom sections are more fun than the investigations, but it's a closer race this time, partly due to the quality of the writing, and partly due to the game's sole new mechanic, the "psyche-lock". Occasionally when you meet characters you'll discern that they're carrying a secret, represented by a lock-and-chain motif, and if you can guess the majority of their secret by presenting them with relevant evidence they'll crack and tell you the rest. It's really not all that different from just regular questioning, but it ably serves to spice up the proceedings by the small amount that the game needed.

The graphics are mostly recycled from the last game and consist of cartoony animations and still frames. The music too is a rehash from the original, but that's really a good thing because it means the series' iconic courtroom music survives intact.

Those frustrated by the last game's poorly-written final case will be pleased to know that everything on offer here is logical and well-constructed; although you'll occasionally feel stuck, it will rarely be as a result of poor puzzle design or a confusing input system.

Justice For All is really little more than an interactive story, so naturally the game stands or falls on the quality of its writing, which thankfully is of a generally high standard here. The quality of the individual cases does vary, though. The first two are rather weak, the third is better but kind of out there, and the fourth and final case is blow-your-mind fantastic. I mean that - it's excellent. The game is worth buying just for that last case.

If you haven't played the original game yet, you'll probably want to play that first as the sequel has a fair amount of story continuity. However, if you've already played and enjoyed Phoenix Wright, Ace Attorney then there's really no good reason not to pick up Justice For All.

Half-Life: Full Life Consequences

If you're too proud to repost other people's material wholesale then the terrorists have already won.

So, via Shrydar:

Half-Life: Full Life Consequences - DJY1991's hilarious machinima adaptation of squirrelking's epic Half-Life fanfic of epic proportions.

Eternal Sonata

Eternal Sonata's gorgeous graphics and intriguing story can't cover up its apocalyptically tedious and irrelevant gameplay.

I say this now not because I have finished the game, but because I'm about to start Devil May Cry 4, and I'm pretty sure that Dante won't approve of me playing a dull, dull XBox 360 JRPG during his demon-killing time. I may in fact never come back to Eternal Sonata, which probably means I'll have to find a new way to reliably fall asleep in the middle of the day.

The game is the story of Frederic Chopin. Yes, the real-life Polish composer. Confined to his deathbed, watching the last minutes of his life tick away, his only regrets are that he didn't spend enough time levelling up and finding epic loot. Apparently. Before you can say "Mary Sue", Chopin is deposited wholesale into a nun-punchingly generic fantasy world and teamed up with an assortment of flat-chestedly androgynous five-year olds on a quest to defeat some sort of an evil.

If that sounds like every RPG you've ever played before, that's because it is. But with Chopin. Who, to the best of my knowledge, has not previouisly been a playable character in an RPG. Which is a shame, because apparently he wields awesome magic powers and wears a stylish top hat.

Eternal Sonata is beautiful. Let's get that out of the way right now. This is probably one of the best looking games you have ever seen. It's got great art design, top-notch character models, and the whole thing is a fantastic example of how eye-gougeingly impressive cel-shading can be when done right.

It looks so good that you're going to really wish it's a good game. You're going to scrunch your eyes tightly shut and clench your fists and quietly whisper to yourself, "I do believe in Namco-Bandai! I do, I do!" But all that wishing is going to go to waste, because behind the graphics is one of the most appallingly horrible Japanese-style RPGs in years.

Character progression is linear. You get XP, you go up a level, your stats increase. The only decisions you get to make are what weapons to equip your characters with, and seeing as weapon progression is also linear that's not a big deal.

You can get up to 10 characters in your party, but you can only use three at a time, so in practice you're going to always take the best three and ignore everyone else. And there are very definitely a "best three".

You'll spend most of your time in typical JRPG fashion going from Location X to Location Y in order to fight Boss Z. The path from Location X to Location Y can be either a forest, a cave, a sewer, or, if you're lucky, some kind of cave-forest or sewer-cave. Boss Z is typically large, slow, and completely irrelevant to the story. Along the way you open chests to find useless items that you could have bought at the village store.

Monsters are displayed on the travel screen, so theoretically you can avoid them in order to pace the amount of mindless grinding you have to do. In practice, however, every second monster completely blocks the path, so you'll still be fighting every two steps. Also, the number of unique monster types is so small you can practically count them on one hand. It seems every nook and cranny of Eternal Sonata's world is populated by the same bats, scorpions and killer sheep.

Further cheapening the whole endeavour is the shockingly incompetent level design, which turns the process of travel into a kind of foreign-language Where's Wally? You'll regularly travel around the same three screens for hours while waiting for the necessary spark of genius that tells you the single yellow pixel in the extreme distance is the end of a rope that you can climb down to continue. Every location is unnecessarily mazelike, and picking one of the endless dead-ends results in having to fight another half-dozen totally unnecessary battles against the local sewer-cave's bat-scorpion-du-jour.

The battles themselves could have been good. They take place in real time, letting you freely move characters into appropriate tactical configurations and ranges. Some of the characters have unique attack mechanics, such as the archer Viola who requires you to actually aim at enemies with a crosshair and does more damage the farther she is from her target.

Also, the game uses an interesting light and dark mechanic, where characters and monsters have different abilities and stats depending on whether they're standing in light or darkness. Some monsters even change form depending on whether they're in shadow or illumination. That becomes better still when you realise that characters and monsters cast shadows, which other characters can stand in, and some monsters are phosphorescent and thereby carry their own pool of light around. Unfortunately, the potential of all this is never really explored and it ultimately comes across as more gimmick than mechanic.

What with Chopin in the game, you'd think there'd be some focus on music, and you'd be right. The musical score is wonderful, combining Chopin's music with some great original piano compositions, and it's all yet another reason that you'll be wishing all this artistic quality had been lavished on something with gameplay that didn't quite so obviously feed puppies to hoboes.

The XBox 360 has had a bad run in the JRPG stakes, what with Blue Dragon being such an appalling punch in the goolies, and now Eternal Sonata going commando under its pretty, pretty dresses, but unfortunately you'll just have to hold out a little longer. Unless your tolerance for pointless grinding is at near-godlike levels, this isn't the game you've been waiting for, and you'd be much better served by going and having another go-round with the amazingly, amazingly good Mass Effect.

Did I mention Mass Effect is rather good?

Colosseum

As far as European boardgames go, one of my best recent finds would have to be Colosseum. Designed by Wolfgang Kramer (El Grande, Tikal) and Markus Lubke, and published by Days of Wonder, Colosseum charges players with running an ancient Roman Colosseum over five rounds, or "days", and attempting to put on the best show possible during that period.

Each player starts with a colosseum. On each turn, players have the opportunity to buy one and only one investment, which range from colosseum size upgrades to new performance blueprints through to a loge for the Emperor. Then players bid on groups of tiles in the "marketplace" which represent assets for use during performances, such as gladiators, boats, lions or scenery. Finally players put on a performance, which scores points based on how ambitious the performance is, how many of the required asset tiles the player possesses, whether any consuls or senators came to see the performance, and a variety of other factors.

The first interesting part of the gameplay is that performance scores aren't cumulative - only your highest scoring performance over the five days counts. However, when you put on a new performance, each previous unique performance you've done counts for five spectators. Also, the investment system means you'll only be able to put on the epic productions in the final game turns.

Successful performances pay the money you'll need to expand and perform well during marketplace bidding. Being in first place also scores you free "podium" upgrades which provide additional spectators at your shows. However, each round the player in last place gets to take an asset of their choice from the leading player, which can be crippling. Deliberately setting your pace over the five turns is a critical component of optimum play.

The asset tiles themselves have interesting connections and assymetries. For example, every performance that requires "lions" also requires "cages", so investing in one without the other is a losing strategy. When you have "boats" you don't need a lot more to put on a performance, but they're an all-or-nothing gambit as they're not used in many programs and are needed in high numbers to be effective. Some asset tiles reward you with a "star performer" token when you have the most of that sort of tile in play, which guarantees you extra spectators when those assets are used.

The driving force behind the game, though, is the five turn structure, which forces you to be brutally efficient if you want to put on five shows in five turns. You start with only two shows you can perform, so you'll need all five turns to buy the three programs and two arena expansions necessary for optimum endgame. A system of "Emperor's medals" means that lucky players may get an additional expansion, providing they have the cash to pay for it.

The contents of the game's box are gorgeous, with a vibrant board, colourful cardboard components, and some painted wooden pieces depicting the Emperor, senators and consuls which are absolutely some of the cutest markers ever seen in gaming.

Games run for about an hour. The gameplay is very easy to teach to new players, and the included rulebook is easy to understand and well illustrated. Becoming competitive will probably take most people a couple of games, though, as despite some included reference sheets the relative merits of different investment strategies are not immediately intuitive.

The game supports three to five players, remaining equally enjoyable at all group sizes, and retails for $50 USD, or $60-85 AUD depending on where you buy. If you're tired of endless games of Settlers of Catan and are looking for something new and exciting in Euro-boardgaming, Colosseum is well worth your time and money.