Fine, Star Trek Online Looks A Little Bit Awesome

Okay. Everyone being the captain of their own ship - that's bollocks. Playing a small part of something big is what brings out the very best in MMOs, in my book. I was really looking forward to working in engingeering and saying "She just canna take it" a lot.

But - play any race in Star Trek canon or create your own? Brilliance. It embraces the idea of the Star Trek universe as this vast and infinitely diverse place, it pokes subtle but loving fun at a franchise where a million alien races are differentiated only by skin colour, forehead design and nose architecture, and in the unlikely event that two players make characters who look identical it's not immersion-breaking - it's cultural solidarity.

STO is coming from the guys behind City of Heroes so it's probably no surprise that a robust character creator is front and centre, but still, bravo.

Loose Morals And Go Fish

In case you're not yet sold on the videogames-and-violence controversy being largely a case of selective reporting, boardgaming blog Purple Pawn has taken the effort to round up no less than nine stories in the last week linking violence to traditional family boardgaming. Go check it out.

These probably came about because people bought playing cards whose contents were not adequately classified. The inherent difficulty in keeping unclassified boardgames out of the hands of children is a real and ongoing issue in our modern society.

Excerpts:

State College, PA: Man plays board games with a few guys, and then one of them later breaks into his apartment and wakes him up by molesting him.

Winona, MI: Sex offender charged with molesting a 6 year old girl during a game of Go Fish.

Chicago, IL: Four women beat and stab a man to death after he breaks one of their cigarettes at a card game.

Alameda, CA: Man stabs to death his friend over a game of chess.

The Genius of Tails

These days I don't play many platformers, but there was a time when I did. And in that time, the undisputed king of the genre was Sonic the Hedgehog 2.

I love this game. It keeps the speed, the simplicity and the gorgeous graphics from the original, notches down the difficulty so that everyone can enjoy, and makes the whole thing work as a two-player co-operative experience.

One of the ways that Sonic 2 works is that it doesn't try and make the two characters equal and separate. Sonic is the same hedgehog we know from the first game, with a couple of new moves aimed at helping him retain momentum. He's powerful, he's vulnerable, and he has to tackle the levels in the way intended.

Tails, by contrast, is cheerfully broken. He is a fox who flies. He can helicopter around wherever he likes, completely oblivious to the jumping sequences and the avoidance of enemies. The only catch is that the screen is locked on Sonic, so if Tails gets too far ahead or behind, the player will lose control and Tails will magically come flying back to wherever Sonic is.

Sonic 2 is a game built for its demographic. When it imagines two players, it does not see two trash-talking 15-year-olds exchanging yo momma jokes over XBox Live. It sees parents playing with children and older siblings playing with younger siblings. It envisages a skilled player, and their friend.

Only one player is challenged; only one player is called on to perform. The other player merely has to join in; they can be useful, but never a liability. They can interact without detracting from the fun. It is a roadmap for bringing together the hardcore and the casual and for facilitating intergenerational play that will create lasting memories for the participants.

This is a lesson that Sega had learned in 1992 which most developers (including Sega) have forgotten today. It is perhaps ironic that Nintendo, once Sega's chief competitor, has wholeheartedly embraced this strategy while Sega struggles to find even a single audience, let alone two to bring together.

The Valedictorian's Death

Speaking of excellent tabletop RPG design (we were, weren't we?), I just noticed The Valedictorian's Death.

This is by Paul Czege, the guy who did My Life With Master, and it is both stomach-churningly creepy and awe-inspiringly brilliant. It is a game about looking through the real-life yearbooks of people you don't know, roleplaying the graduating class, and working out who is the culprit in the fictionalised murder of the year's valedictorian.

It's co-operative storytelling, where player stats are entirely about influencing narrative rather than resolving conflict. These rules are actually solid and gamelike, rather than vague and wishy-washy, and at the end a winner is determined in a way that promotes both competition and storytelling. Also, it is 100% free to the public.

You have to check it out right now. Right now, dammit. I am five kinds of envious.

Straight Outta Compton

"Straight Outta Compton" by N.W.A, rendered as an introspective acoustic femme-rock ballad by Nina Gordon. Unmissable.

UPDATES: While we're talking covers, and while I'm ripping content from Copy Cats, who's heard Sean Connery doing a cover of The Beatles' "In My Life"? Hilarious! Very much in the style of the musical outings of William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy, but Scottish.

Also, Greg Laswell does "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun" as a depressing Eternal Nightcap-esque suicide ballad.

Bars of Black and White

I'm not typically a fan of room escape games, considering them point-n-click's vapid cousin, but this here's a good 'un.

Bars of Black and White comes from Gregory Weir, the talented fellow behind Majesty of Colours, and it's less of a full fledged challenge than it is a really entertaining proof of concept. You start off, as is typical of these things, trapped in a room with no memory of how you got there, but soon you get your hands on a barcode scanner and you'll start scanning every barcode you can find.

There's really only a couple of puzzles and most of the game consists of some clever jokes about the conventions and limitations of the genre. There's also plenty of shout-outs to other games including the greatest room escape of all time, Silent Hill 4.

As you're probably expecting, it's a browser game, it's undemanding, and it's on Kongregate, among other places. Go have a play, you'll smile.

Monopoly

Monopoly is a bad game. Monopoly is a bad game that people play. Monopoly is a bad game that prints money as if it had secretly shackled an army of gold-summoning leprechauns to its factory floor.

Monopoly, as a study in game design, is all about the difference between quality and the perception of quality.

We've all played Monopoly, right? I'm talking about the Parker Brothers game on the square board where you're buying property and charging people rent. The one with the fistfuls of paper cash and the little plastic dog.

Yep. It's a bad game.

What does Monopoly do wrong?

Accounting
The game uses an unfeasibly large amount of paper money that players are forever having to pass around the table. You spend as much time adding, subtracting, and making change as you do actually playing the game. To make matters worse the game regularly uses the concept of "ten percent" just to make things that little bit more complex. Admittedly, to some extent the accounting is the game, but I can't help but feel that the satisfying feeling of passing cash around the table could have been retained without turning every player into a mathematician-slash-retail-clerk.

One way to do this would be to standardise the denominations. Remove the $1, $2 and $5 notes and have everything come in denominations of $10. You'd have less change-making over trivial amounts, less game components to sort through, and the maths would be simpler throughout. (You could just as easily deflate the currency and remove the $500 note but (a) humans find big numbers and multiples of 10 satisfying and (b) the big numbers are part of the flavour of the game.)

Slow resolution / exclusive victory condition
A game of Monopoly is decided in the first three passes around the board (often even sooner). After that point the relevant property has been bought, and, barring some truly unlikely dice rolling, the rich are only going to get richer and the poor poorer.

Despite this, it can take hours to actually meet the victory condition in the game. The victory condition is, specifically, to be the last man standing on the board, so you're not winning so much as being the last to lose. Losing is based on running out of assets, and there are relatively few ways for wealth to leave the table, so with each player bowing out everyone else tends to become comparitively better armoured, making it take even longer until the next elimination.

The game should instead declare a victory condition of a player accruing a total of X cash, or being the first to build X hotels. The rulebook does include two alternative victory conditions; one finishes the game after two player bankruptcies, while the other sets a real-world time limit. These are both sloppy solutions to an easy problem. Victory conditions should be based on specific criteria, they should be individual (ie contingent on the success of one player rather than the failure of others), and they should be easily and quickly achievable as soon as any player displays a clear and sustained edge over their competition.

Jail
Jail is just not fun. It might be an icon of the game, but there is nothing exciting about being arbitrarily removed from play for one to three turns. If the element was going to be included in the game, it should have been tactical - contingent in some way upon deliberate player actions.

Mortgage and bankruptcy
First up, mortgage and bankruptcy are just not fun words. Playing a game about mortgages and bankruptcy is not inherently entertaining. Secondly, the rules for both of these parts of the game are complicated, slow, and heavy on accounting. No surprise, then, that these are the two most heavily house-ruled aspects of Monopoly, at least in my experience. It seems everyone I've played with has their own custom way of handling these situations, and almost all of them are better than the game as printed.

An example of the problems with these rules: you can avoid bankruptcy by selling swathes of your property. This is a losing move - you don't recover from selling property in Monopoly. The rich will get richer faster, and you, without a source of income, will get poorer faster. You're still losing, but not straight away, so the game has been unnecessarily prolonged while you continue not having fun. The rules for bankruptcy use, in one paragraph, the terms "one-half", "10 percent", and "principal", which really makes the whole thing sound more like tax law than a family boardgame.

Few meaningful choices
It is always the correct choice to buy property when given the opportunity. It is always the correct choice to build houses once you can. The only meaningful choices come in trades with other players, and trades are easy enough to assess that two good players won't enter into one as both will only offer deals that advantage themselves over the opponent. A lack of hidden information makes for poor trading gameplay.

What does Monopoly do right?

It's tactile
It's fun to play with the Monopoly pieces. Bundles of fake money, tiny little houses, title deeds to property and so on make your accrual of assets feel very real and immediate. You can see and hold your successes.

Expressive avatars
Monopoly wouldn't be the same if you couldn't be a dog, a cannon or a top hat. These icons have little to nothing to do with the gameplay, but they give players a way to express themselves. Everyone has a favourite marker (I like the top hat), and if you've played with young children the idea of "being the doggy" is disproportionately likely to lure them to a game that otherwise has "grown-up banking game" written all over it.

Primary colours
The Monopoly board is bright, clean and distinctive. It's full of primary colours, thick black lines, and iconic cartoons. The board suggests that things in this game are easily understandable and clearly delineated.

The "if only" moment
Humans assess long odds poorly. The hotel on Mayfair happens late in the game, rarely gets landed on, costs a lot to set up, and by the time it gets triggered is unlikely to really upset the apple cart. But the penalty for landing on the Mayfair hotel is so big that rookie players will quite happily descend into bankruptcy while claiming that if only someone had landed on the hotel, everything would be different. The "jackpot" is akin to the "shoot the moon" scenario - the highly unlikely situation that, if achieved, would turn defeat into victory. It doesn't need to ever actually happen - it just needs to be clear that it could. People love these things.

Fast turns, interactive turns
Turns go by quickly. You need to pay attention on other players's turns as you can only collect rent on your properties if you notice someone landing on them. This keeps everyone at the table engaged in the proceedings.

Summary

None of Monopoly's successes make it a good game. The gameplay is, objectively, broken. What it does do is make the process of experiencing that broken gameplay as enjoyable as possible. This makes it an attractive game for casual players, who will be able to enjoy the novelty of the setup for at least a couple of games before they realise its deficiencies. It also makes it a good game for young players, who aren't able to interact with a game on its competitive level but are able to use it as a tool for imaginative and social play, particularly in conjunction with older players. (Monopoly is also pretty good for kids who are at the right age for learning addition/subtraction math.)

Monopoly is not a good game. But it is a good product. It sells, and to some extent it sells deservedly (although it continues to float on brand recognition far more than on its inherent worth). If you have created a game which is, genuinely, a good game, you should probably spend some time looking at Monopoly to work out how to make it a good game that sells.

BONUS POINTS: If you made a list of why Monopoly works (which I just have), and then made a list of why World of Warcraft works, they would be, largely, the same list. Not coincidence.

Wrath of the Lich King

The other night I finally got around to rolling a Death Knight in World of Warcraft and playing through the starting areas. It was good, I guess - a huge step foward for World of Warcraft, anyway - but it wasn't the Second Coming of Blizzard that I'd been promised.

The more bells and whistles Blizzard hangs on the DikuMUD formula, the more it reminds me that the entirety of WoW is built on the bones of an 18-year-old text adventure. It's like if Namco were still devoting the totality of their corporate effort to getting Pac-Man just right.

In a way it even feels like a step back. The much-lauded "phasing" content, whereby your perception of the world changes as you complete quests, is only a short step from instancing, and the knowledge that other players aren't seeing the same world as me brutally grates on my suspension of disbelief. When I'm taken to the Death Knight assault on Light Hope Chapel I'm unable to forget that this isn't the real Light Hope Chapel but rather an ersatz copy spawned entirely for my benefit, and that elsewhere, in the real Plaguelands, people are interacting with these NPCs entirely oblivious to the devastation I'm wreaking.

I'm hopeful that in as little as five years we'll be looking back on this as the unbelievably primitive scratchings of neanderthals on cave walls, but in the mean time it's perhaps appropriate in an expansion about undeath that the bleached skull of Azeroth should show through so clearly. It feels like in the attempt to hear the story of Warcraft I've lost that sense of it being the world of Warcraft.

Scriball

Time for a browser game, and today it's Scriball.

I was indifferent to this one at first, but I'm finding I keep coming back to it. You have a yellow ball, which you have to move to the green dot on each level, and the way in which you achieve this is by drawing a line on the screen with your mouse. Make a slanting line, and the ball rolls down. Make a cup, and you catch the ball. Your line can only be so long so you can also pull it out from under the ball to send it plummeting. If you need to get more height, the mouse button tosses your ball into the air.

Simple concept, and familiar to anyone who's played Canvas Curse or Crayon Physics, but still compelling and challenging. Scriball's also got significantly more content than your average Flash game, with 40+ levels, three difficulty settings and a create-your-own-level mode.

Check it out on Kongregate.

Mondayitis

Not feeling particularly gifted with the eloquent tongue of language this morning so instead of substantive comment I leave you random observations.

- I've turned off the 360 for a while in order to go back and play Beyond Good & Evil on the PS2. I was exactly in the mood for Metal Gear Solid meets Prince of Persia, which is, largely, this game, so I'm feeling a little silly for having had it sit on my shelf for two years without being played.

- Saw Slumdog Millionaire the other week, which is truly as good as everyone says. Danny Boyle's made some fine films in his career but to some extent I've sat through them all just wishing he'd make another Trainspotting. Now he has.

- Some boardgames that are good: Battlestar Galactica and the expansion to Race For The Galaxy. Some boardgames that are really not very good at all: Last Night On Earth, which is officially the worst of the five zombie-themed boardgames that I have played.

Goonswarm Take Down BoB

Goonswarm took down Band of Brothers on 4 February, bringing an end to the most epic battle in MMO history.

I don't play EVE Online, but man, I love hearing its news. Originating on the Something Awful forums, the Goonswarm guys are notable for their superficially irreverant approach to the game and their propaganda videos. For years they have been at war with Band of Brothers (BoB), who have a reputation as the corporation that the game developers are members of.

On the 4th, Goonswarm subverted a BoB director, used them to dismantle BoB by kicking out the members, stripped the assets, and scrambled the political directives. The alliance is dead and Goonswarm is holding on to the name to stop it reforming. Some estimates value the lost assets at upwards of $5,000 US, possibly significantly more.

Destructoid has a more complete report. Congratulations to the Goons, you've made gaming history.

Star Strike Television and Print Ads

1982 saw the release of the "exciting new Intellivision space game" Star Strike for Mattel's Intellivision console. The game was heavily influenced by the Death Star trench run sequence from Star Wars and saw the player flying down a scrolling trench and firing missiles at targets. Failure could result in the on-screen destruction of the Earth. The print ad promises "special effects so realistic they appear three-dimensional".

The television ad below features American journalist George Plimpton comparing Star Strike to the Atari VCS port of Asteroids, a game which at that time had already been on the market for three years. Star Strike may have had the prettier graphics, but history has shown Asteroids as the game with infinitely longer-lasting appeal.

Diana, Warrior Princess

Sorry to be roughly five years behind the times, but my attention has just been drawn to Diana, Warrior Princess, an indy RPG put out by Marcus Rowland and Heliograph Publications.

From the Wikipedia entry:

The game is a parody of Xena: Warrior Princess, and its setting tries to portray the present day with the same level of accuracy that Xena portrays Ancient Greece – i.e. not much. Historical figures are distorted and confused with each other. Diana, Princess of Wales rides around in shining white motorcycle leathers on a semi-sentient motorbike, doing battle with the war-god, Landmines, and Bonnie Prince Charlie, from whom she took her mystic powers of Royalty. She is aided by Fergie, the Barbarian Red Ken and Wild Bill Gates, while Tony the Vampire Slayer battles the sorceress Thatcher and her masked assassin Archer. The milieu also includes figures such as Emperor Norton, Queen Victoria and the "disease" lepus.

Steve Jackson's download service e23 sells copies so I might have to pick one up and give it a spin.

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)

Equivocation / Meaningful Choice

Hey, if you're not reading my D&D 4th Edition blog, Eleven Foot Pole, it's probably because you're one of the many people with absolutely no interest in D&D 4th Edition.

But I put up a pair of posts yesterday that you might be interested in if you're enthused by game design generally. I rate them as "worth checking out". On a scale of one to five they score a resounding "Probably!".

In Equivocation I talk about offering players an illusory choice while still running them headlong down the story you have laid out for them. Sometimes treating your players like stooges results in good times had by all.

In Meaningful Choices I shoot down exactly that sort of fake decision, and go on to suggest that there's really only three reasons to give the players a choice at all, being the test of skill, the self-expression, and the player feedback.

Go feast your eyeballs; I'll wait.

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.

These Balls Are Made For Hiding

These Balls Are Made For Hiding is your browser game for today.

You're presented with a black field, which conceals invisible circles. You can fire a straight line into the field, which will bounce whenever it hits a ball, or when it hits certain walls. You can take as many shots as you like; once you're happy with one, you click to remove all the balls touched by that shot. Every time you remove balls, all the remaining balls in the field move downwards. If any balls touch the bottom of the field you lose.

So very simple, so very addictive. It doesn't seem to be on any of the good game portals but you can play it at the rather ugly page I'm linking to here.

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?

Kingdom Hearts: Birth By Sleep Trailer

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

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

The Haunting (1963)

I finally got a chance to see Robert Wise's original 1963 version of The Haunting the other night, thanks to Dalekboy.

I am a huge fan of William Castle's 1959 House on Haunted Hill, in which an unapologetically B-grade spookfest is elevated to greatness by one of Vincent Price's signature performances. My highest hope for The Haunting was that it would be like House on Haunted Hill only moreso, and that hope was both met and exceeded.

The Haunting and House on Haunted Hill share some superficial similarities. They are both "spend the night in a haunted house" tales; they both feature groups of strangers drawn together by a charismatic gentleman; both stories have a creepy caretaker couple, an emphasis on the layouts of bedrooms and hallways, and a plot largely driven by a hysterical ingenue who may well be hallucinating more ghostly activity than is actually occurring. House on Haunted Hill, though, is strictly confined to the realm of cliche, despite some wonderfully ghoulish dialogue by screenwriter Robb White, whereas The Haunting is a full-fledged adaptation of Shirley Jackson's novel The Haunting of Hill House, complete with gorgeous narration of that book's opening paragraph:

"No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone."

The Haunting is unusual for a haunted house story in that it consistently underplays its hand. Eschewing ghosts and gore, it instead builds a pervasive horror through nothing more than sound effects, rattling doorknobs, and the continuous internal monologue of lead character Eleanor (played by Julie Harris). The monologue, which in other films would have been a crutch for bad storytelling, here is the star of the movie, and the growing discrepancy between Eleanor's narration and the objective reality on screen is the source of much of the movie's power.

Harris gives a fantastic performance as Eleanor, although Claire Bloom's understated and sympathetic portrayal of lesbian sidekick Theo steals the show. (Compare Bloom with Catherine Zeta-Jones' one-note rendition of the role in the 1999 remake.) The only weak point is Richard Johnson as gentleman host Dr John Markway; Johnson plays the role as a genial, wholesome father figure, while the reactions of the other characters suggest his intentions are considerably more dubious than the acting supports.

This is horror done to perfection; it's easily one of the great creepshows of film history and ranks with The Shining and The Exorcist as a movie that exceeds its genre. If, like me, you'd been slack on seeing this piece of our cinematic heritage, take the time to catch up at your earliest opportunity. And if you see this on DVD at a physical storefront in Canberra, let me know so I can go grab a copy for my own shelf!

E3 2009 Sign-Up Open

Hey, E3 2009 has started pre-registration. After two years of limpness, the show's apparently going back to the giant mix of tacky-meets-awesome that we all loved.

So if anyone is going to be in Los Angeles over June 2 to June 4 and wants to try for an all-access press pass, let me know and I'll endorse you as a Dust Forms Words official reporter. In return you will owe me at least five exclusive photos and a selection of your show-floor loot.

That is not a deal to be scorned! I think I still have some of the business cards I used to get my industry pass to Tokyo Game Show around somewhere. Let me know.

Dreams

Here's your browser game for today: Dreams. This provided me not much more than some quick entertainment, but the art style and simple gameplay seem to really appeal to people with less exacting tastes than myself. It's racked up a lot of attention and won some awards so I'd expect there'd be more than a few readers of The Dust Forms Words who'd enjoy it.

It's basically a spot-the-difference game but the clean interface and attractive storybook art make it stand out of the crowd. If you'd like ten minutes or so of quality picture-sleuthing, head on over to Kongregate and check it out.

A Kingdom For Keflings

A Kingdom For Keflings, available through XBox Live Marketplace, is the game I've been hearing people ask for for years, and now it's finally here.

If you're a gamer who's played Age of Empires or Rise of Nations and wished you could just design your city in peace without worrying about fighting your neighbours, then this game is for you. If you're someone who's played Sim City and felt that managing budgets and approval ratings was taking away from the fun of just building, then this is your game.

In A Kingdom For Keflings you play a benevolent giant who's come to the aid of a tribe of tiny Keflings. The Keflings need to get a town built, and you're just the giant for the job. You'll chop wood, mine stone, and commission construction to get houses, schools and suchlike built. You can also put the little Keflings to work doing the grunt work for you - they're not very good at following orders but they're still faster than doing things yourself.

You make buildings out of components - a house, for example, might require a furnace, a bedroom, and a platform. As you finish buildings, you gain access to new blueprints requiring more complicated combinations of components. Your eventual goal is to complete the blueprint for the massive Castle.

There's no obstacles in A Kingdom for Keflings - nothing takes cleverness or skill. It's just a matter of time. With enough perserverance, you will get things built. You're free to arrange your town as you see fit, look for optimal configurations of Kefling workers, and generally wander around the place getting things done.

You can play as one of a couple of pre-made characters, but you'll probably want to ignore them and instead import your XBox Live avatar, which this game was specifically made to use. It's a great use of the avatar system, and the graphical styles of game and avatar mesh well.

You can also co-operate over XBox Live with one or more friends to build a town together. This is a vast improvement over the single-player game, but unfortunately there's no local co-op (online only), and most of the Achievements won't unlock in multiplayer.

A Kingdom For Keflings is a surprisingly fun game aimed at filling a largely unexplored niche, and as a social platform it's exponentially better. If it remotely sounds like something you'd enjoy, you're probably right in the target market, so download the free demo from XBox Live and check it out for yourself.

Aether

After I talked about Edmund McMillen's intruiging-but-flawed game Coil last month, I promised I'd say a few words about Aether, which I liked a lot more. JayIsGames have just gone and named it their Casual Adventure Game of the Year 2008 so I suppose now is a good time to ride the Media-Train to Consensus City.

Aether is really, really beautiful. Edmund teams up with the equally talented Tyler Glaiel to deliver a game about loneliness, introversion, exploration and adventure, all of which runs in your standard browser window. You control a boy and his squid-balloon on a mission to the depths of space to help out some emotionally-challenged anthropomorphised planets. Edmund's art is in fine form, understated but effective, and Tyler's piano soundtrack gets the emotional tone flowing from the first screen through to the end.

Unusually for one of Edmund's games, Aether features neither gory violence nor extensive body-horror. In Aether no one is getting raped or murdered, but people are discovering important lessons about life and experiencing simple coming-of-age fables. If you liked things like Gish and Meat Boy you might find Aether a little different, but it's all the better for that difference.

The whole game really feels like a single extended piece of mood-art, like I Wish I Were The Moon or Night Raveler. Its success is less about the story it tells and more to do with how you feel as you experience it. It's gamey enough to avoid alienating the very people most likely to play it, but arty enough to leave an impression long after you've forgotten every other Flash game you played that month.

You can play Aether at Armor Games or Kongregate, and as it will only take you about ten minutes to enjoy there's really no excuse to not.

Strange Chinese MMO Advertising

I've gotten used to seeing some amusing Engrish on game-related banner ads. Those Chinese MMOs really want us to play, God bless their little hearts.

Tales of Pirates is currently depicting itself as a "FREE! Adventure online game!" with "Dozens of Professions to Develop!" which is pretty much par for the course.

The bit that has me puzzled is its exhortation to "Make Friends to Against Finance Crisis Here!" I don't even know what that means. Pirates have not typically been known for their firm stance against the evil of financial crisis.

Any clue?

Prince of Persia

Prince of Persia is one of those rare games that is recommendable to absolutely any gamer. Regardless of who you are, it's simply a great experience.

This game, as I have mentioned previously, has a confusing title. It features neither Princes nor Persia in any explicit fashion, it's not a remake of Jordan Mechner's original game, and it has nothing to do with the recent Sands of Time trilogy.

You play as a nameless adventurer who gets lost in a sandstorm while escorting a donkey laden with gold. This "Prince", as the game seems to imply he should be named, soon finds himself caught up with a rogue princess named Elika and involved in a battle to save an abandoned kingdom from the ancient evil of Ahriman.

Prince of Persia is an athletic platforming game in the style of Tomb Raider and ... well, Prince of Persia. You'll be leaping across bottomless chasms, scuttling up and down cliff faces, wall-running along vertical surfaces, and generally clinging in a painful fashion to poles, wall-brackets, and improbable tangles of vines.

The athletic platformer is generally at the mercy of four key design elements. Known collectively, these are the Four "C"s: controls, checkpoints, camera and cartography. By cartography, what I really mean is level design, but Three "C"s And An "L" is not quite so memorable.

The controls are sharp and forgiving. Press a button to jump, and the Prince immediately jumps. When you hit a wall, you cling to it. You can press a button from that position, or more usually as you're approaching the wall, to turn the cling into a horizontal run along the wall or a vertical climb upwards. Wallruns and climbs can be extended at places denoted by a special brass ring; again, you need only press a button as you approach the ring. Timing windows are extremely generous; in my entire journey through the game, I never failed any obstacle by missing the timing.

This is part of a new game philosophy - that the fun is not to be had from overcoming punishingly hard jumps, but merely from experiencing them. The player is encouraged to explore their world rather than fight against it. This is not, inherently, a better or worse way of producing fun than other methods, but it's certainly a much more accessible one. And that ties into the checkpoints, which are plentiful; the game effectively remembers the last time that you had your feet on level ground, and if you fall that's where you'll be taken back to, with no further punishment. That's normally only one or two jumps backwards, although towards the end of the game there are a couple of annoyingly long sections without checks.

The camera is not so excellent. There are two styles of gameplay in Prince of Persia, and only one features a useful camera. Each level is initially linear, asking you to travel a fixed path towards a boss fight. The camera is excellent at presenting this action in a dramatic and understandable manner. Afterwards, though, you need to explore the level to find "light seeds", which are usually tucked away in the level's most remote corners. There's no free-look mode for the camera, so really you can only see the seeds if you're right on top of them, or if you happen to get a lucky glance from a distance. For a lot of the game, you'll have your face pressed right up against a wall or pillar, so spying out these concealed objectives is frustratingly difficult.

Luckily, the level design compensates. The layouts are beautiful, and it's almost always clear which jumps you can achieve. This allows for frequently thrilling action sequences where you're calculating your next move on the fly. Traversing these environments is always entertaining, and it doesn't hurt that they're nice to look at, too.

The only complaint is that the levels are supposed to be representative of a genuine city that people lived in, but the designs don't bear this idea out. Your companion Elika describes how it was all once a bustling metropolis; however, the actual levels are highly abstracted and nothing about them is remotely evocative of real architecture or daily life.

Elika herself is one of the most important elements of Prince of Persia's success. She's an interesting ally; she often has things to say whether you want to hear them or not, but to supplement that you can press a button to start a conversation with her, even in mid-jump. These conversations reveal additional information about the area, about your enemies, and, most importantly, about Elika's relationship with the Prince.

She's worked into the gameplay, too, and her magic provides the explanation for the Prince's ability to double jump and to survive fatal falls. When you miss a jump, Elika, imbued with unreliable and life-draining magic, dives after you and flies you back to safety. There's a great deal of hand-waving as to exactly why she doesn't just fly you to your destination, but the game isn't so much concerned with power and magic as it is with relationships and sacrifice, so these mechanical conveniences prop up the game's tone rather than undermine it.

Each of the 24 levels culminates in a boss fight; with a few exceptions, these are the only real combat situations in the game. The same four bosses are repeated across all the levels, although with different twists, and the game relies on the strength of its fighting system to keep you entertained rather than a variety of opponents. The fighting system is strong, although not THAT strong, but the side benefit of this design decision is that it builds these four bosses as villains who you develop a relationship with through repeated conflict.

The thing I love most about Prince of Persia is that it knows that every good story is about its protagonists. Almost every level, every challenge, and every character in the game is a reflection of that philosophy. When you're solving puzzles in The Windmills, you're not just turning cranks, you're exploring the Prince and Elika's different approach to relationships. When you're fighting The Warrior, you're not just slogging it out with an invincible behemoth, you're looking at Elika's feelings towards her father. This is an example of using game mechanics to tell stories rather than telling stories that happen in between the game mechanics.

By contrast, the worst element of the game is clearly the coloured plates. In order to gate content and attempt to keep the gameplay fresh, the game lets you start making use of magical coloured plates once you've collected certain totals of light seeds. The developers probably saw this as necessary, given that the Prince unlocks his full range of athletic abilities before finishing the first level, but it was still, with hindsight, a horrible mistake.

These plates come in four colours, and you can unlock them in any order. The red and blue plates are fairly unobjectionable, merely flinging you through the air to a new destination. The green plates warp gravity to make you run headlong up vertical walls, and these are mostly fun, although not as much fun as not using them.

The yellow plates, though, send you on a kind of magic carpet ride along a fixed-rail sequence where you have swerve to avoid obstacles. A sparkly camera effect during these segments makes it almost impossible to see what you're doing, and the gameplay's fundamentally misconceived in any case - you'll constantly swerve left to avoid a pillar only to have the fixed-movement drag you right into the very obstacle you were trying to dodge. The yellow plates are so bad that they almost ruin the entire game. It's not hard to imagine someone who accidentally unlocked the yellows before the other colours giving up in disgust, thinking that the rest of the game was going to be just as stupid.

Thankfully, though, the plates stand alone; the rest of the game comes together to produce a genuinely engaging and memorable story. It's capped by an ending which not only brings the game to a satisfying conclusion, but sets up a story worth telling for the second and third games in this inevitable trilogy.

There's little genuine innovation in Prince of Persia; we've seen all this done before, in Sands of Time, in Shadow of the Colossus, in Ico and in Okami. But Prince of Persia brings it all together into a solid, accessible package which anyone can enjoy without requiring legacy skills or being shut out by uneven difficulty. It's not a niche market, it's not an acquired taste, it's just a resoundingly good game.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Undead

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Undead. Starring Jake Hoffman, Devon Aoki, and "Karate Kid" Ralph Macchio. Because Hamlet is a play in which everyone dies. Or comes back as a vampire.

How did no one tell me this was coming? HOW?

2009 - The Year In Advance

Prince of Persia, Fable 2, GTA 4, Fallout 3 - how is 2009 possibly going to top the games of last year? Surely we've reached the pinnacled of gaming - what is there left to hope for?

To help y'all out, I've compiled a list of some stuff coming up in 2009 in the hopes of reawakening your lust to game.

Q1 2009

Mirror's Edge DLC - Originally slated for January, these abstract new time trial maps are now coming February. Me and the other guy who cares will have ourselves a quiet party, and all you haters can enjoy a very special one-fingered salute.

House of the Dead: Overkill - House of the Dead does grindhouse. I wasn't entirely sure what it would take to get me excited about House of the Dead again, but this is apparently it. Besides, there's only so far you can go wrong with rail shooters about blasting zombies.

F.E.A.R 2: Project Origin - I wasn't crazy about the original, but Monolith has a strong enough record that I'm willing to give them another try. Maybe this time the spooky and the shooty will happen at the same time, rather than taking awkwardly paced turns.

Mario & Luigi RPG 3 - I didn't like Partners In Time, but on their next adventure Mario and Luigi have gotten themselves swallowed by a giant-sized Bowser! You have to co-ordinate Bowser in the real world with the brothers' adventures through his intestines. That sounds like a joke, but I'm serious. What's not to love?

The Sims 3 - Functionally identical to The Sims 2 but using up more of your CPU power! What manner of monster can say no to that deal?

Dawn of War 2 - I never really played the original Dawn of War but I hear people loved it. Presumably they'll also love the sequel.

50 Cent: Blood On The Sand - Hip-hop star 50 Cent and the street-savvy crew of the G-unit take it to the war-torn streets of the Middle East in order to hunt down a valuable golden skull. For serious. Voted "Most Probably Hilarious Train Wreck of 2009" by The Dust Forms Words.

Halo Wars - The people who made Age of Empires bring Microsoft's golden goose to the world of console-based real-time strategy. I'm cautiously optimistic about both the control scheme and the game itself. Even if it's bollocks, you can bet it will be bigger than Jesus.

Q2 2009

Resident Evil 5 - Hands up if you are ready to shoot some undead black men right in the face. Capcom have correctly identified that what the zombie genre was missing was a sense of niggling fear that exterminating the undead caused you to be a gun-toting racist.

Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars - Rockstar has realised that the DS, the best-selling console of this generation, doesn't have a single Rockstar game in its library, and they're busily fixing that with some yawn-seen-it-all-before GTA action. If you've played a GTA game this decade, don't hold your breath. Otherwise, you're in for a treat!

MadWorld - Best described as Sin City meets The Running Man, stylised black-and-white schlockfest MadWorld has been getting a lot of interest, and in March we get to see if it lives up to the hype.

Hydrophobia - Flood-based disaster survival. I'm really behind the idea of disaster survival as a genre, I think it could be the next big thing, so I've quietly got my fingers crossed for Hydrophobia.

Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2: Fusion - Actually there's no release date on this yet but given where its press is up to and how it's looking in pre-release press I'd say Q2 2009 is a good bet.

Ghostbusters: The Video Game - Bill Murray should be an unlockable character in every game.

Blood Bowl - Can you believe someone's doing an adaptation of Games Workshop's fantasy football game Blood Bowl? Don't get too excited - it's by "creators of nothing you've ever heard of" Paris-based outfit Cyanide.

Batman: Arkham Asylum - Mark Hamill reprising his role as the Joker. There's a lot of quiet hope that this will be the definitive Batman videogame. I wait to be convinced.

Q3 2009

Brutal Legend - Jack Black, Tim Schaeffer and the eternal spirit of heavy metal combine to give us this totally extreme metal-themed brawler. It's been a battle for this thing to actually reach publication but it's in the home stretch now.

Halo: ODST - The stand-alone Halo 3 expansion is sure taking a bunch of time to come out. Frankly, I'm a bit Halo-saturated right now and it's a little difficult to get excited but maybe I'll change my mind by August.

I Am Alive - Another entry in the growing list of disaster-survival games. Again, I'm cautiously hopeful, but it's by one of Ubisoft's less accomplished studies so it's more likely to be shovelware.

Hitman 5 - Some of you out there will be excited about this. Yeah, you know who you are.

InFamous - Looks like a cross between Jumper and The Force Unleashed. Big, showy, destruction based super-powers are the go. Might be excellent.

The Conduit - It's a shooter, it's on the Wii, and it looks half decent. That's really all it needs to stand out as a unique and quirky title.

Q4 2009

Bioshock 2: Sea of Dreams - Stop getting excited, people! This is being developed by a different team to the first one, being California based 2K Marin, and that very rarely spells good news for a franchise.

Dante's Inferno - The team behind Dead Space adapt middle-ages Italian religious allegory into a survival horror title. I'm frankly amazed this doesn't happen more often.

Dragon Age - Bioware's business strategy has been to move away from reliance on other people's IP and develop their own unique franchises. In that light, you can see generic-but-probably-brilliant fantasty title Dragon Age as them doing Neverwinter Nights minus the D&D name.

God of War 3 - If you've played any of the previous two-and-a-half God of War games you've got a fair idea of what you're in store for with the new one. That's right - quick time events and horribly broken platforming! (And, I guess, some pretty awesome hacking-things-up-with-swords.)

Mass Effect 2 - Apparently we should hang onto our save files because all those universe shaping choices we made in the original are going to keep having consequences into the sequel. Now that's what I'm talking about.

Overlord 2 - I ended up liking the first Overlord game, and with the same team involved the sequel can only be an improvement, right?

Bayonetta - The guy who created Devil May Cry is doing Devil May Cry again, only with a chick. What's not to like?

This Year If We're Lucky

Aliens: Colonial Marines - Gearbox and Sega do their take on the classic film franchise. It's had a troubled development history but maybe 2009 is the year for it to finally reach store shelves.

Alan Wake - Developers Remedy (creators of Max Payne) had better damn well release this thing in 2009 or it's going to be declared vaporware. It's already two years overdue, and if it weren't such a bold idea I would have given up on it long ago.

Heavy Rain - Speaking of chronically overdue story-driven innovative platform exclusives, where the hell is Heavy Rain? Still no official release date from developer Quantic Dream, although a steady trickle of publicity images suggests it's still under construction.

Half-Life 2 Episode 3 - The conclusion to Valve's epic saga has been in the works since 2007; with no showing at E3 2008 and no announcement of a release date it's anyone's guess as to when we'll actually see the thing. I'm putting my money on it being bundled with Portal 2 or Left 4 Dead 2 in the same way that they released Episode 2 in The Orange Box.

Portal 2 - They cast voice actors in June last year, so the odds of a 2009 release are good. On the other hand, Valve has never come within spitting distance of releasing a game on time, so don't be surprised to see this delayed another year.

Rock Band: Beatles - Okay, it's not actually called Rock Band: Beatles, but it's a game using the Rock Band engine developed by the Rock Band guys that will showcase the Beatles. Harmonix have said no new Rock Band in 2009, but then this isn't a Rock Band title, is it?

Kingdom Hearts: 358/2 Days & Birth By Sleep - The new DS and PSP Kingdom Hearts games will almost certainly be out in Japan by year's end, but translation delays mean we'll only have them in English by Christmas if we're very, very lucky.

LA Noire - The title really says it all; it's by Rockstar, and it's due some time this year. Personally I'm betting on the thing being further delayed or vaporware, but I guess we'll find out.

Pikmin 3 - I love how with Nintendo games you don't really need to see anything more than the title to know what will be going on inside. It's Pikmin, people. Pikmin 3.

StarCraft 2: Wings of Liberty - Look - it's got a subtitle! So that we won't get it confused with all those other StarCraft 2 games, I guess.

Parasite Eve: The 3rd Birthday - Actually we probably won't ever see this in the West, let alone this year, but I just love reminding everyone that Squeenix are making a new Parasite Eve game. In your face, everyone who never played the first two.

Final Fantasy XIII - Japan are probably getting it at Christmastime, which means the West will see it some time in, oh... 2013? Epic localisation delays are a constant source of frustration for these sort of things but if you have a modded PS3 and a fluency in Japanese you could beat the curve by importing, I guess. Hey, did you hear that Shiva is now a pair of sexy summonable sisters that transform into a motorcycle? And who says Final Fantasy doesn't innovate any more?

I've deliberately left the MMOs off the list; I don't expect many of them to actually make it onto shelves, and even fewer of those that do to survive six months. You'd have to be crazy developing a new MMO in this market. Anyway, what are you excited about for gaming in 2009?

House of the Dead: Overkill - New Trailer

House of the Dead: Overkill trailer. All new, all hilarious. Once again, there is no possible way that the game can be better than its marketing. Although this footage does look as if some of the ad campaign humour has made its way to the actual game, which is a good start.

No Zack & Wiki Sequel

It's come to my attention that Wii point-n-click title Zack & Wiki was totally unprofitable for publisher Capcom. In fact, according to the seldom-reliable VGChartz, it has to date sold just over half a million copies (0.54 million). That makes it the 84th best-selling game for the console, but still not a money-spinner according to Capcom marketing dude Colin Ferris in a recent interview.

To put that in perspective, it beat the pants off the combined sales of Okami across all platforms (0.34 million) and kicked No More Heroes right in the nuts (0.19 million) but when even the abominable Red Steel can muster an even million in sales and the reissue of House of the Dead 2 & 3 squeaks in at 0.95, you have to consider Zack & Wiki as something of a commercial failure. (Link's Crossbow Training - not even a real game - is listed at nearly three million units. I guess they just sold that many Wii Zappers, for some reason.)

Seriously - you idiots bought more copies of Guitar Hero Aerosmith than you did of Zack & Wiki? What kind of cretins are you?

The half million isn't impressive, but probably more important to Capcom was that it almost completely failed to shift units in the month following its release - four weeks after landing at retailers it still hadn't cracked 100,000. Also, it probably wasn't helped by a complete absence of press buzz and bizarre statements by producer Hironobu Takeshita that gamers who were having difficulty with the game's puzzles were just "not paying enough attention".

Anyway, the long and the short of it is, don't go expecting a sequel any time soon. Which is a sadness no real words can explain.

Hey, here's some silver lining - other games that haven't sold so well on the Wii include Alone in the Dark, SoulCalibur Legends and Pimp My Ride, so I guess there's some justice in the world.

NOTE: I am aware of the irony in this post, given that I gave an effusive although tongue-in-cheek review for the House of the Dead reprint while simultaneously savaging Zack & Wiki. It should be clear from this that you should not actually listen to me. You should buy every game I talk about, and then join me in hating on the ones that are actually quite loveable.

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.

Action Button Does Gears of War 2

I don't point out other people's reviews often, but Action Button has something great to say about Gears of War 2. It starts out with Penny Arcade-style hyperbole and ridiculousness, and then, without letting up the gonzo tone, segues smoothly into intelligent critique of the game design. I link it as evidence that, Zero Punctuation to the contrary, you can be funny, intelligent and positive at the same time.

Go check it out.

NOTE: You should be aware that these guys did not like most of the recent DS/GBA Castlevania games, so their judgement is suspect at best. Just saying, is all.

The World Ends With You - Dust Forms Words Game Of The Year 2008

The World Ends With You is the game that everyone should have played last year, and for what it's worth I'm giving it my Game of the Year.

I've already said a lot about TWEWY, so before I talk about why it gets the trophy, I'll say a little about why the other contenders don't.

Braid was a hell of a game. It was this year's undisputed poster-child for "games as art", and despite my unfortunate discovery of its misguided "alternate ending" it remains a very special and enduring experience. It excels musically, visually, narratively, and through its plethora of fascinating time-based mechanics. But it's limited in scope. Last year, when I described why I gave Mass Effect the thumbs up over Portal, I talked about ambition and how an "almost" on the grand scale could be greater than perfection in miniature. Without in any way criticising Braid, I'm passing it over simply because TWEWY does something bigger and more expansive.

Prince of Persia I haven't reviewed yet, but I have finished, and I am a huge fan. I love the punishment-free gameplay, I love the art style, I love the character interaction, and I love the controversial ending. This is how I want my games to be. And it's tempting to slam it for the epically misconceived coloured plate sections, which in the context of an otherwise perfect game are like drawing a penis on the Mona Lisa, but really I'm passing it over because it's not actually innovative. Everything in PoP is something we've seen before, and while there's an artistry in arranging the familiar to new and excellent effect, it's less an evolution of gaming than it is merely a refinement.

I loved Mirror's Edge, although the world seems to be against me on this, and I seriously considered it for Game of the Year. I think it's a deeper and more clever game than people have realised yet (although obviously not in its storytelling, which blows goats) and given time people are going to start coming back to this with new and more appreciative eyes. But, you know, it wasn't that good, and loud complaints about its combat, plotline, and uneven difficulty are not entirely without foundation.

Smash Bros Brawl and Rock Band were only 2008 releases because they took so damned long to get to Australia, and, while I enjoyed them both, neither was a revelation. Brawl was merely iterative upon the excellent Melee, and Rock Band let an uneven song selection and a host of peripheral and user interface issues stop it from being the definitive rhythmn game that it wanted to be.

No More Heroes got a golf clap and an A for effort. Keep doing what you're doing, Goichi Suda, I love that you're out there doing it, and feel free to wake me up when you get it right.

Left 4 Dead was a fantastic experience while it lasted but in the absence of more content it's not really in my Game of the Year contemplation.

You all apparently loved Fable 2; I hated it, as I do all Peter Molyneux's misbegotten works. Enough said on that topic.

Far Cry 2, Grand Theft Auto IV, Saints Row 2, Dead Space, Metal Gear Solid 4, LittleBigPlanet and Fallout 3 are all contenders that I just didn't get around to playing this year. I had a brief experience with Dead Space that satisfies me it was unlikely to take the crown, and while I look forward to enjoying Saints Row 2 I'm pretty sure that a game that so happily wallows in its own juvenilia was probably not going to be my pick for the year. Likewise, my past apathy towards user content suggests that LittleBigPlanet was probably not going to change my world.

Far Cry 2 and GTA 4 are more problematic; both showed promise of being the open-world game "all growed up". Although experiences with the PSP Grand Theft Auto games left me feeling weary about the entire genre, there's every chance that one or both of these titles would have won me back. I can only say that one person simply can't play every top-shelf title released during the year, and if I'm doing these titles a disservice then I can at least be comfortable that they certainly haven't been overlooked or under-recognised by the world at large.

Metal Gear Solid 4 and Fallout 3 are the two missed titles that trouble me most. They are both new and epic iterations of franchises that I love, made by developers that I trust. It is highly likely either game could have found a place on my list of the greatest games of all time. But again, it's simply impossible to play games as fast as they're released, and both games have been adequately covered in other venues.

So that brings me back to The World Ends With You, which is, I feel, a title as underappreciated as it is wholeheartedly excellent. On its face it is a full-length JRPG, a genre famous for its staidness and adherence to formula, and yet it innovates in every single game mechanic. It's hard to find any aspect of the TWEWY experience which has been done before.

The game difficulty is not only fully customisable along multiple axes, but is also seamlessly integrated into the overall gameplay. Equippable items tie into a "fashion" system, which is influenced by player activity and deliberately underlines and supports the key themes of the story. The entire game operates simultaneously on a literal level and several metaphorical levels, from the "noise" enemies through to the player being invisible to the teeming crowds around him. The game accurately and interestingly uses the real-world location of Shibuya as its backdrop, to non-trivial narrative effect, and when you finally finish the main plotline the game offers significant replayability that goes above and beyond the traditional "new game plus" option.

Any one of the points above would have made The World Ends With You a special and noteworthy release; finding them in combination is breathtaking. Add to that an art style which is unquestionably perfect for the subject matter and an urban-groove soundtrack that you can listen to all day long and you end up with a game that feels years ahead of its time.

There is more genius in The World Ends With You than in every other game I have played this year put together. I have no qualms about naming it the Dust Forms Words Game of the Year 2008, and if you haven't yet played it, grab your DS and find a copy immediately.

Michael Atkinson to Gamespot

South Australian Attorney-General Michael Atkinson, foremost Australian proponent of videogame censorship, has delivered an exclusive statement to Gamespot, which you can read here.

Before we get into ripping it to shreds, it should be acknowledged that this is progress. Atkinson has provided, for the first time, a detailed, reasoned statement on his position on censorship. He is still, of course, deeply wrong, but the first step in creating change is bringing the relevant parties to the debate.

Atkinson's position is founded on four fundamental misapprehensions, none of which are supported by research. The first is that there exist such a thing as "damaging images and messages". The second is that these images and messages are found in videogames to a greater extent than they are in government public service announcements and the nightly news. The third is that the interactive nature of video games makes content more inherently mature or threatening. And the fourth is that parents are unable or dangerously unwilling to monitor the media use of their children, to a greater extent than is true for DVD content.

It's also a bit worrying that the South Australian Attorney-General, in a statement presumably parsed by his advisors, is unable to get the name of our classification authority right. He refers to the Office of Film and Literature Classification, which has been officially known as the Classification Board for close to a year now.

Also, Atkinson's reference to his children suggests that this is his only direct experience of videogames. Surely we deserve better than a stance dictated largely by the man's relationship with his sons?

It's telling that Atkinson delivers a statement rather than an interview; it's suggestive that the fine detail comes not from Atkinson but from his advisors. It reveals that, even briefed in advance, the South Australian Attorney-General would not be able to intelligently discuss the key issues in the area he's legislating.

Anyway - check out the statement for yourself.