You want to play now? Too bad

Why do game updates on PS3 take so long?

We're having some friends over on New year's day, so I popped in Buzz and Singstar to make sure they were updated and could just be played straight away if the mood takes us.

There have been two updates for Buzz, weighing in at 345MB and 51MB. What the hell, almost 400MB of updates to a quiz game? On my 2Mb broadband connection (not the broadest for sure, but we take what we can get out in the country) this takes half an hour, during which the PS3 is out of action (no background downloading of title updates, unlike the iPhone).

When a game update is available for the 360 it generally takes 30 seconds or so to download and patch, before launching me back in to the game.

Come on Sony, sort it out.

And can any readers tell me what on earth is in these enormous updates? It can't all be code, so what other stuff am I getting?

Oh well, DJ Hero has arrived now so we might just play that instead.

Bored-er Lands?

Ok, that may be an over exaggeration, but after an hour or so of play it's really not grabbed me like I expected.

I liked:

The HUD elements being introduced by name and moving in to place as they are "installed" was a very neat way of telling you what was what in a fairly seamless manner.

The graphic style is very nice in motion.

The intro and character introductions are nicely done.

I don't like:

The robot with the annoying voice saying "I'm over here" all the time.

Not having the shop and RPG elements explained to me properly. Surely you don't expect me to read a manual in this day and age? Eurgh.

The early quests all being really boring "run here and shoot five of these" type things, followed by backtracking to the start.

I will keep pressing on though. Enough people I trust have told me it's great that I feel it'll grab me eventually. I just wonder if it will be one of those games like Fallout 3 that I end up ploughing hours in to and get a bit OCD with, but still never really feels like it clicks.

Wikki wikki wi wild

Fuck you, Tom Nook.

So, having recently finished Professor Layton's Diabolical Box, I had an urge to buy another DS game, and start getting some serious time out of that DSi I bought and then never used.

Browsing the isles of the (curiously Atlantis themed) Fry's near where I'm staying, I came across Animal Crossing, which had two things going for it. First, I'd been meaning to pick up a copy for ages, since I'd only heard good things about it. And second, it was meant to contain hours and hours of gameplay, which is good if you live by yourself in a hotel room.

First impressions (and that's all I can give since I've actually only played a couple of hours on it) were disappointing.

I'd heard this was a great "casual" game, but to me the tutorial was pretty half-arsed and confusing. It started with a really long conversation where you get to enter all kind of details about what sort of village I wanted to live in. Once I actually got control found it didn't really tell me what to do in a lot of places.

I was soon introduced to the criminal Tom Nook. He seems to make his living from forcing mortgages upon new residents, and then enslaving them until they pay the money back.

That's right, the game begins with me having a mortgage, and having to run deliveries back and forward across the town in a minimal wage job. Anyone who says games are about living a fantasy has obviously not played Animal Crossing.

In general though the graphic style is nice, and I like the way the world rotates away behind you. Everything looks a bit ropey in movement, though. It feels like it's not entirely comfortable in its 3d shoes, and would be better suited to some more detailed sprites instead.

The whole thing also feels a little bit flakey in a way I wasn't expecting: Missing animation frames for example (movement using the stylus is analogue, but using the direction pad reveals it has no tweening on direction changes); The cursor pops around the place a lot of the time; the UI is a horrible clash of colours and thrown together icons, and feels half finsihed (possible even worse than the one in Viva Pinata), which is saying something.

Anyway, two hours in and I still haven't hit the "game" of the game. Which I guess shows that my second reason for buying it is probably true. But the opening has been so bad it's put me off a little bit.

I also probably doesn't help that my DSi is set to UK time when I am living eight hours behind that. I did notice the post-tutorial flow seems to fall on its arse if Tom's shop is shut due to the game thinking it's 3am.

Maybe more Animal Crossing-ery later...

Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box

One benefit I've found to living in the US (as I currently do) is that when companies decide to be all weird about release dates, and encourage people to pirate their games by releasing them months later in the UK, I can get them at the earlier date.

And so it came to be that I have already played through and finished Professor Layton's Diabolical Box, before it's hit the shelves of the UK (oh, and Ghostbusters on the Xbox as well).

Although of course, UK buyers will never see this on the shelves of Game, they'll get "Pandora's Box" instead. In a rare case for name changery, it turns out the US name makes more sense, since the box in question is the Elyssian Box, and is indeed quite diabolical by reputation. This Pandora lady doesn't figure in to it at all.

I do wonder if they're deliberately giving these things slightly suggestive names, though. I bet the Prof loves Pandora's Box (or maybe not, given that he spends all of his time in the company of a young boy. And at least this game makes some jokes around that, with some characters questioning the motives of such a pairing).

Anyway, on to the game. Like the first, it's a point and click adventure, only with bizarre logic puzzles shoehorned in, rather than inventory manipulation and conversation choices. It has far less reliance of repeated puzzles than the first (which I seem to remember had a massive number of sliding block, chess, and matchstick puzzles, of which this only has a few), which makes it feel much more fresh throughout.

It does retain most of the other downsides of the previous game, though. In particular I noticed a couple of puzzles with trick answers that could be very annoying if you didn't realise, and also some puzzles that could have had "trick" answers but thegame expects the straight ones. The combination of the two together in the same game makes for some haphzard guessing, as does the slightly ambiguous wording of some puzzles (they really should have the top screen puzzle explanations scrollable, so they can fit in more than a page of text).

There was also one puzzle that, even after seeing what the game thought the answer was, I couldn't work out for the life of me. It's the one with the twelve portraits where you have to remove all of the women (the Prof and Luke don't like having women around, I think). If you're able to give me a proper explanation of how it works me email address is just on the right, there.

The side collectibles are interesting: collecting camera parts and slotting them into the right places to fix the camera unlocks a "spot the difference" mode on some scenes, which in turn unlocks further puzzles; Hamster toys are used for creating a good exercise course for a fat hamster, who eventually points out hints for you; finally tea making is the weakest side activity (though thematically the strongest link to the good Prof) as it was never really that clear what sort of tea to brew for a character, and you couldn't just try again straight away like in most of the game.

Story-wise there was a lot of intrigue, but in the end just didn't hang together as well as the Bi-Curious Village. Once again they managed to come up with a way of explaining the puzzle-fascination of the people in the game, though this time their cleverness only covers two thirds of the population. Basically there's a small village somewhere north of London entirely populated by mentally ill Riddler types.

As far as characters go it was a mixed bag. A few returning characters, one of whom had a pretty funny introduction, though there were some that I had honestly forgotten the significance of (I guess that's what comes of releasing the games two or three years apart in the west). A few very memorable new characters, and a whole boat load of forgettables (including almost everyone in the game's main location). Though I did like the inclusion of a show girl who keeps inviting Luke in for an eyeful.

Design wise another thing that annoyed me quite a lot was the massive long ending sequence (which included credits, and then a post-credits scene) where I couldn't save. Since my DSi was showing red battery, I was quite nervous to try and get through this, but bizarrely you can't skip or fast forward the credits at all. Let me save during this shit, it's a portable system.

So overall - if you're a fan of the first, this is not quite as good, but still very enjoyable, and stands out against most of the stuff on the DS. And if you#ve never played the first, get that one instead.

Bitch stole ma skull

Look, it's not dead! I've just been very busy, as usual. It turns out working in America for months really gets in the way of writing stupid things about videogames.

Anyway, I have found some time to play a few things, so here are some short reviews.

X-Men Origins: Wolverine is a fairly decent hack n slash that could really have done with more variation in environments and enemies. And fewer puzzles. Who buys a Wolverine game for puzzles about teleporters and power cells? And why does the futuristic weapon X facility only have enough power cells to power half of the things in it at once?

I started off thinking that Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena was as good as I remembered, but then quickly realised it wasn't. If you were a fan of Butcher Bay a few years back, I don't recommend picking this up unless you want Vin Diesel to stomp on your rose tinted glasses.

The level design is patchy, the action sections are trudging and monotonous (with some horrible repeating sound effects), and the generic badass dialogue and delivery gets annoying after about 5 minutes. The Dark Athena bit is not nearly as well put together as Butcher Bay, either.

Prototype is pretty much the definition of a 7/10 game for me. It's sort of pretty, with sort of good presentation, sort of fun combat, and sort of fun movement.

But the more I play it, the more it annoys me: every mission seems to go on long past the point where it is fun, and generally seem to end up with repeating the same action over and over, waiting for a bar to fill up or an arbitrary number of enemies to die; the protagonist is a complete emo arse; the enemy AI is stupid to the point of making a nonsense of the stealth mechanics; there are some very odd control mappings; selecting which of your powers to use doesn't pause or slow down the game, so you really need to have chosen which power to use before an encounter starts; the "hold one button to traverse anything" system felt nice at first, but then I realised it had removed any sense of achievement for scaling a tall building, or getting across the city; and the map is often quite useless, with targets being shown somewhere inside a block, but with no alleyways being visible, so you can't tell where the way in is.

I like the web of intrigue and the upgrade progression though.

50 Cent: Blood on the Sand surprised me by genuinely being a very good arcade shooter. Okay, so you have to either a) look past the gangsta rubbish, b) enjoy it in a tongue in cheek fashion, or c) enjoy it in a genuine "they know how we roll, but still they frontin' on us" way.

It doesn't do anything terribly original, but every feature that is in there (and there are quite a lot of elements to the game) is well implemented and nothing feels horribly out of place or useless.

It's surprisingly long as well - I thought I'd reached the end (I reached a boss fight with a helicopter, after about 6 hours of play and killing everyone who had been involved in the stealing of ma(sic) skull), but looking on the internet it turns out that I'm only half way through, and more skull stealers are about to come out of the wood work in their helicopters (every boss fight in this game involves a helicopter, oddly).

Probably the game I have enjoyed most out of the four in this post (I am halfway between b and c, if you were wondering).

Obviously the question on everyone's minds right now, though, is whether I will remember to update my blog again in the future. Tune in next week to find out the answer (most probably no).

Games and games and games and games

I've got nothing specific to write about this week, so I've gone for the tried and tested route of rambling half-coherently about a bunch of games that I have been playing.

First up is Viva Pinata: Trouble in Paradise. Two years and three days ago I wrote about the interface to Viva Pinata. I played the first game a lot (980 points, gamerscore fans!) and though I'd got used to the annoyances (the loading delays, the odd pauses, the haphazard layout) I couldn't understand how they had made it into the finished game.

I also thought it was fairly obvious where the weaknesses were, so for a sequel it should have been quite an easy job to fix. It's not like there's a lot else different, so some staff could spend the full development time making it, if not a joy to use, at least not a chore.

Unfortunately, for whatever reason, the crap interface is back. There are some minor improvements (some shortcutting to the seed menu, for example), but they are far outweighed by the sheer stupidity of one addition.

Question: how do you take the horribly unintuitive, complicated, slow interface from Viva Pinata, and make it worse?

Answer: by adding randomly flashing elements that serve no purpose but to confuse people.

I'm not even kidding. Watch this Youtube video, and skip to around the 30 second mark. Can you see the little coloured tabs with symbols on that are flipping in and out around the dialogue box? That happens all over the place, and it's horribly distracting and confusing. Especially during the tutorials, where the game is trying to bring your attention to something else, and there are randomly blinking elements animating all over the place.

Speaking of the tutorial, they've got that wrong again too. It's entirely overwhelming (keep in mind I played the first game a huge amount two years ago, and I was lost following it) because the game runs normally in the background. So while it's slowly trying to take you through things step by step, it's constantly being interrupted by cutscenes to show new Pinata arriving, or messages about you levelling up, or something else that doesn't matter at all at the time, but that the game can't help itself but pop in your face.

Not only is it distracting, but it's a lesson in false cause and effect. Did the new Pinata arrive because of what I was just doing, or because of some other random occurrence? You end up battling to work out what elements are a direct consequence of your most recent action, and which just coincidentally fired off at the exact time you did what the tutorial was telling you.

And then once the fairly short tutorial has finished, you're just left on your own. No gentle diminishing of the hand holding. It's just there, leading you through each step, then suddenly not there at all.

I feel slightly ashamed that I'm this baffled by a game that's aimed at a younger audience. Are my synapses really past it?

Anyway, that's enough Pinata bashing. I doubt I'll bother to fire it up again.


The other game that's been getting a lot of play time is Viking: Battle for Asgard. It's a you-vs-insurmountable-odds hack n slash, where you spend the majority of the time wandering around the huge open maps hunting out trapped vikings.

The demon forces of Hel have captured them all you see (most are in cages, but some are just tied to sticks), so you need to free them in order to build an army big enough to trigger the level's climactic assault on a demon stronghold.

Though it's mostly a button basher, there's some strategy to be had - you can pick off some enemies with stealth attacks, if you hide along their patrol route, and most enemy camps have multiple ways in. Though you can always just Rambo it through the front door if you're a double hard viking bastard. Throwing axes and molotov-style fire pots add another level of options as you progress, too.

Not many people I know have picked this up, but I'd definitely recommend it. It's pretty, it's gory, it's fairly non-strenuous. How Eurogamer thought it only justified a 5/10 I'll never work out.


Some other quick thoughts on some demos I've played:

Killzone 2 - Doesn't set the world on fire with ingenuity, but it's a solid shooter. Annoyingly short demo. Will pick up the full game.

FEAR 2 - Predictable "scares", fuzzy controls, doesn't seem to be much different from the original that I found painfully dull. Pass.

HAWX - I'm pretty sure being able to see what direction I'm flying in is quite important when you're in control of a jet plane. The cinematic mode camera is very far out too, giving you boring shots of two very small planes against a big blue background.

Halo Wars - Eventually someone's bound to stumble upon the magic control set that makes RTS games work on consoles. I'm sure this will be good if you're one of the odd people who think Halo has a gripping and interesting back story.


PS - This is the first post I've written entirely on my new laptop (a Dell Studio 17). I like it a lot. Their courier company (Walsh Western) leaves a lot to be desired though, as do the Dell customer support who blatantly lied to me on the phone.

PPS - Also starting to see "the point" in Twitter. It turns out a version of Facebook that just has status updates is what I wanted. Starting to filter out the people who I'd initially followed but who I don't really want to read about, and adding more people who are interesting.

PPPS - It's good to see a lot of positive press about our last game when it hit the NY Comic Con too. People saying nice things about 25 months of your hard work is very gratifying.

Avast!

I forgot to put an update in my last post about how I got on with wading through the mass of things I wanted to consume while on holiday. I know it's not terribly interesting for most people, but what is a blog good for if not me writing about things that I like? And if you're not that bothered you probably wouldn't be reading my half-arsed ramblings anyway.

I got through most of the books in was intending to read: Bye Bye Balham, which is a collection of a few months' worth of Richard Herring's Warming Up, and is very funny, and also strangely reassuring (the book contains notes made during its compilation, so with five years' worth of hindsight); The Dunwich Horror and Other Stories. The works of Lovecraft are one of those things that I've heard referenced a lot in design circles, but never got around to dipping in to, and I'm glad that I have now, because it was very good; Instructions for Living Someone Else's Life, which is probably now my second favourite Mil Millington book, and though it was funny it also made me think about people's perspectives on life.

I also re-started Design of Everything Things. I find the book very dry, and combined with the dated nature of a number of examples, it becomes a slog. In the end I think I have given up, again. At around the same point I did the first time, judging by the overturned corners. I guess a beachy paradise island just isn't the place to read about how doors are stupidly designed.

What I did find funny was that afterwards I was playing PicPic on the DS (sorry, I've just noticed that this simple puzzle game is selling for £47 on Play.com's marketplace. Professor Layton - the first one, for any inter-continental readers, since someone's dragging their feet at releasing them over here - was in a similar situation just before Christmas, are companies vastly under-rating now many carts they need to burn?) and it's clear the designers haven't thought about the interface much at all.

For example, in the Magipix game (sort of like Minesweeper in that you mark squares one of two colours depending on the value of an adjacent tile), there is no way of telling which face button will turn a tile each colour, you have to use trial and error. This is down to the colours being laid out horizontally on the touch screen (when using the stylus controls, you tap the colour you want to change your pen to), which don't map to the control pad at all. Would it really have been hard to find the space to lay out the colours in a cross formation? Probably not, it just wasn't thought about. Even after a few hours of playing, I was still finding that I had to pause and think about which button mapped to which colour, due entirely to this poor design.

Another interface problem that struck me was that the three games contained in PicPic use different controls for similar features - to delete a placed link in one game you have to place the cursor over the number, and hold the 'paint' button down. Whereas in another game to empty a square you press a 'clear' face button. And the controls for moving your cursor to a different point in the maze game seem entirely random.

Oh yes, it uses a horrible font for the numbers in the games, too.


Since getting back from holiday I've been thoroughly immersing myself in the grey bleakness of the non-tropical world by watching Saw and Saw 2. I am truly ahead of the curve when it comes to movies (though, and sorry to keep banging on about my holiday, but ... actually I'm not, on the plane home the Jason Statham "Death Race" remake was on the in flight entertainment. I was going to atch it, but it was preceded by a message saying that it had been edited for content, and I figured that in a movie called Death Race, the only bits I would really be interested in watching are going to be the ones that would be cut. So I almost watched a fairly recent movie).

Back to Saw... I'd seen the 3rd one which made very little sense to me, and thought I should catch up on the first two, which were meant to be better. The first one was, but the second has a bit too much of the psychic serial killer thing going on, where the actions of half a dozen unstable individuals would have to have been predicated accuractely for the outcome to turn out how Jigsaw wanted.

Anyway, after watching them I was thinking that the series would fit pretty well into a video game. A torture porn version of Professor Layton, where you have to solve puzzles and work out solutions to traps within a time limit or people die. I think it would have legs (unlike probably half of the people in the game by the time it was over). And they're clearly willing to bend and whore the IP a little bit - I mean, who doesn't watch a horror movie and think "wow, what I'd really like to do is ride a roller coaster based entirely around this?".

PS - I just saw the trailer video for Section 8, which looks incredibly generic, but this line did make me laugh "Section 8 are elite shock troops, top-grade insertion specialists". I mean, if you're going to specialise in insertion, I guess focussing on top-grade makes sense.

PPS - It was my birthday recently and amongst the presents, I got pretty much the entire new Lego Pirate range. That's where the banner picture comes from. Lego is ace, and anyone who says a grown man shouldn't be playing with it is just a stinkyface who should bum right off. Sorry if the post title and picture led you to think this was going to be another fascinating industry rant about piracy.

Fallout over Battlefront

Bah, why is it so cold and grey and miserable in the UK, when it is so warm and sunny and happy in other bits of the world?


Just before I went on holiday I completed Fallout 3, I just didn't have time to scrawl down some of my thoughts about it. Be aware that the next three paragraphs have some fairly major spoilers, if you've not got that far yourself...

I felt that the story had and ending that was pretty much a cop out, which tried hard to be dramatic and meaningful but didn't really turn out that way. The build up in the Citadel was good, and watching the robot being activated felt like something big was happening. The problem with the next section was that, although following the robot as it effortlessly carved its way towards the water purifier was cool, it gave me nothing to do but tag along. I had spent the game amassing a collection of decent guns, including fully repairing a nuclear missile launcher, but the robot had it all covered, leaving me to use my arsenal only when I got inside, and had to take on a handful of grunts, of the type I had obliterated many times before. It felt kind of pointless.

I also think the game let itself down once I reached the final dialogue section, and had to make "the choice". Stood there, I had a companion with me who could survive major levels of radiation radiation (in fact, this had been a major point in a quest earlier), but who suddenly got all philosophical about destinies - to the point that they were willing to force one of two people to die. Given that the companion had gone to great lengths to help me, and also prove how human they still were inside, this didn't fit right at all. And also made them come across as a completely petty arsehole.

Anyway, my character didn't die in the end. Which sort of highlights another problem with forcing life or death choices on a player in big sandbox story games - trying to force the player to interact with one specific character for enough play time proportionally so that the character feels important enough to save. My choice was either I die (me, who I had spent 80 hours in the company of at this point), or some woman who I had barely ever spoken to (I had maybe scraped an hour's interaction with her, since I found her to be a bit aloof) died. Which is no choice at all in the dog-eat-dog world of Fallout. I would have had more internal conflict if I'd been forced to pick between myself and the chirpy supply woman from Megaton (though I guess depending on your choices she could have been immune to radiation too). So it was quite nnoying that I couldn't keep playing. I guess they would have needed too much extra dialogue - pretty much everyone in the game world would have been affected by the change brought about by the end of the story. Though I seem to remember reading somewhere that one of the downloadable content packs will change the end of game story, to allow players to continue.

End of major story spoilers, if you've bothered to scan over them.

Overall, my favourite bits of Fallout were the non-story scenarios I stumbled on. For example, finding a village with three houses. The first two had very chipper families living there. Their chirpiness was suspicious, as was the nagging feeling that in a world of mutants, raiders and other beasties, these wholesome guys shouldn't have survived so long. An old man resided in the third house, who warned me to get out of town as fast as I could, and to look in the shed behind one of the other houses if I wanted more information. It turns out the town is populated by inbred cannibals who kill and eat everyone who ever visits. I managed to talk them out of killing me by pretending to have the same tastes as they did, but accidentally let slip that the old man had warned me. The families say they're going to have to stop him from meddling, and then start to walk towards his house. I spring into action and at point blank range pump shotgun shells into the backs of their heads. It seemed like the right thing to do to save the old man.

Though thinking back, I've now left two children and a defenseless old man living out there in the wilderness, so they're probably pretty fucked anyway.


The situation at Free Radical has led to some footage being leaked of their version of Star Wars Battlefront 3 (which has now been moved by Lucasarts to Rebellion, who did the PSP versions of the previous Battlefront titles). I'm not going to link to the footage here for fear of upsetting someone, but a Google search should probably do you right, it seems to have been posted in a few places now.

I found it interesting, not because it showed anything spectacular, but because it looked exactly how I would expect a next-gen (current gen? I get so confused) version of the Battlefront games to look. Which makes me wonder how it has taken so long to develop? Now, I have no idea how long FRD were working on it, maybe Lucasarts dragged their heels in commissioning the game, but this would seem strange to me too. The previous Battlefront games were hugely popular titles on Live (looking at the most recent figures posted by Major Nelson, it's the second most played original Xbox title, even now), so I would have expected the third version to be green lit pretty much as soon as 360 and PS3 kits were available, to give a couple of years development, and have the sure-fire hit title on shelves just as the consoles are maturing a little.

But apparently not. Anyway, if a decent Battlefront game gets released at some point, I'll buy it. I did love the first two on my Xbox.

Little Big Planet

Sorry, I mean LittleBigPlanet of course. A game that Sony wants to be cool, so it isn't allowed to have a normal name.

I haven't spent a huge amount of time with LBP. Unfortunately for it, or me, it came out when I was still very much obsessed with Fable 2. And like that game, I think "charming" is the key djective - I really can't imagine describing LBP without using that word. Everything about the game drips character, and the whole thing is incredibly well polished.

My short time with it was not long after release, and the user created levels were still a little ropey for the most part, with a few gems. I'm hoping that by the time I get around to spending more time with it the community will have had enough experience with the tool set to have created more worlds that match the pre-packaged ones.

Still, any game where you can stick a horse's tail to your friend's forehead can't be all bad, right?

On holiday

I'll make no attempt to hide that this post has been written in advance and then scheduled to publish today. The reason for this pre-record (as I'm told they call it in radio and TV circles, and I figured that if I start comparing the games industry to radio - instead of movies - I might be at the forefront of some exciting new stupid internet arguments this year) is because I'm on holiday.

Which means that as you're reading this I should be spending some proper time with the DS games I've bought but haven't got around to looking at beyond the tutorial levels - in particular PicPic and Soul Bubbles. Though it all kind of depends on whether my DS manages to survive the beach, since about six months go the little plastic ratchet things that keep the lid open at certain angles snapped off. Now I have a floppy DS.

So I might not be playing much DS. Being away from the gaming comforts of home (if you imagine that I won't have my iPod Touch with me either, though I'm not sure what the score is with chargers where we're going, and playing games on that eats the battery faster than a PSP) will be good in other ways though. I will hopefully get around to reading some books I've had on a pile next to my bed for ages (the Design of Everyday Things, Richard Herrin's Bye Bye Balham, and Charlie Brooker's Dawn of the Dumb).

And finally I can try out a new gadget, which is always good. I bought myself a waterproof digital camera. So hopefully I should come back with some ace pictures of fish from my snorkelling.

Non-holiday stuff I have been up to recently...

I finished Gears of War 2. Even at the end it left me with the feeling that yes, it was all very exciting, but it was still very bitty, with each section having its own special new rule or element that you have to pay attention to. It also seemed to focus quite a bit on vehicle sections that I thought were rubbish for the most part, and downright confusing in sections. It wouldn't surprise me if, even though it feels like a longer game than the first Gears, it turned out that measured section for section, there is less time spent doing the core "in cover, shooting enemies" gameplay that I bought it for. Really nice blood effects at the end of the second act, though.

And finally, for this update, I watched the Hitman movie (based off the IO Interactive game series, if you didn't know). Timothy Olyphant wasn't vey good at all in the lead role, he looked far too young and his voice was just odd - for half of his "menacing" lines he sounded like his voice would crack and he was about to cry. The love interest angle seemed very out of place too.

47's bodycount in the movie is also surprisingly high, which doesn't really fit with the intention of the games that you should be able to finish each level by only killing the target and leaving other people with a headache at worst. But after thinking about it I realised that the film matched what tends to happen when I play Hitman - a disguise eventually fails, and from that point on I have to shoot my way in and out. Usually about five minutes into a level.

Falling out

(To give a bit of background, this is a post I made to a message board when I was asked how I was finding Fallout 3. For something that's been pretty much roundly given the game of the year award, I thought it was interesting to look back on my early game experience - I think at this point I was around level 8, had just found Rivet City in the main quest, and had done a couple of side quests with my character, who was generally leaning towards good karma and small guns for combat. I've edited it to add more detail where I thought I was being too brief.)

I seem to spend a lot of time not managing to shoot things even in VATS (in fact, that seems to make my accuracy even worse a lot of the time, and I can't move while I'm shooting, so I often get mauled if there's more than one enemy), and running low on ammo and health (though I just got a perk that gives me more ammo, and I've started getting better weapons more reliably).

Having to carry around 5 of the same weapon so you can repair yours when it turns to dust in your hands is great fun. (At this stage I wasn't finding assault rifles regularly, so my hoarding instinct was kicking in.)

It's incredibly brown and grey. The entire main city bit is build like a fucking maze linked together by dull subways, so you can't just look at the map at a place you want to go, fast travel to the nearest place, and head straight there, because chances are the place you're heading to is in some stupid isolated pocket surrounded by unclimbable wrecked road.

Super mutants are shit. I wish it would fuck off with them. If you wanted to put orcs in your sci-fi game, just call them space orcs and be done with it. Same point can be made with the zombies, I'm feeling very let down by their reliance on staple fantasy enemies.

That perky bitch in Megaton who's writing a book is the only funny thing I've encountered so far. Megaton itself is a horrible maze of a place that I can get lost in, which might be atmospheric, but I find deeply annoying when I just want to find a specific person or building.

When VATS does let me make a good shot and I take a raider's head off with one bullet, that feels ace. Some of the dynamic camera stuff the targetting thing does is nice too.

The core of the whole thing is a very outdated RPG with pages of numbers that it never really explains to you (and I know I should expect to have to read the manual for a role playing game, but urgh I just, like, can't be bothered, you know?), and daft experience / levelling up that has no relation to what you've done in the game. I need "lockpicking" 50 before I can even attempt to pick some locks, and "science" 50 before I can attempt to crack the code of some computers (even though they both use the same mechanics as lower versions). Oblivion wasn't nearly as backwards thinking as this - I can only guess they did it to stop Fallout fans from killing them for making it more FPSish.

The main inventory / HUD thing uses a horrible font and colour and cramps everything into the middle of the screen for no good reason other than to fit with their explanation of the gadet in the game world. Although it doesn't fit because it makes no sense that a thing on my arm knows how many assault rifles I'm carrying, what "perks" I have, or how many luck points I have. So it would have just been nicer to use well designed and laid out menus that I could read more easily.

It will let you give things away to shop keepers for free without properly warning you that they can't afford to pay. When you do that, the shopkeeper doesn't even call you a sucker or make any comment afterwards.

So yeah, basically I'm not entirely sure how much fun I'm having with it, despite having logged around 13 hours (at least, since that doesn't count the reloaded save from when I started doing a side question then halfway through realised I was nowhere near leveled up enough for it, but was too low on health and ammo to fight my way back out past the giant scorpions again). I keep expecting for it to break into its stride and really wow me with something cool.

iTouch myself

If you own an iPhone or an iPod Touch, you might be fooled into thinking there aren't many good games for it. The decent to crap ratio of games on the app store is frightenly low, and when adverts are heavily pushing the frame-rate impaired Crash Bandicoot Kart Racing (or whatever it's called, research has never been high on my list of editing priorities), it would be easy to think everything is rubbish.

To help you out, here are some that I like (with the store links, if I can work out how on earth to make that work).

TanZen (link is to the free Lite version). A simple puzzle game based around placing geometric shapes to fill in an outline. I had a non-computer version of this as a kid, which is probably why it appeals to me. The author keep spublishing updates with new puzzles in too, which is nice.

Enigmo Another puzzle game, in this one you have to direct the flow of liquids using a limited set of pieces.

Solebon (link is to the free version). Solitaire.Not a lot else to say really, though the presentation and controls are nice and slick. It would have been easy to go a bit mad and royally cock this up.

SPiN A fast paced puzzle game. You're given a 3d object, and an outline of that shape in a certain rotation. By using the intuitive touch screen controls, you have to rotate the shape to fit the outline before the timer runs out. Another game with really excellent presentation.

Hero of Sparta The simplest way of describing this is "God of War lite, on the iPhone". A great example of how the gadget is capable of more than just quick hit casual games.

Snail Mail Like the bonus stages from Sonic 2, only with tilt controls that actually work.

It's not a time for kids really, Christmas

I do like Christmas. Lots of lovely holiday to catch up on games, punctuated at regular intervals by stuffing myself silly with food and booze, and meeting up with family. And the weather's so bloody cold nobody thinks bad of you for staying inside all day. I've had a couple of weeks off so far, mostly dominated by Fallout 3 which I'm enjoying more now than when I started (due to the incredibly amateur way I have ordered things for publishing I think the post about that won't have gone up yet. I am great at this, me), but still feels oddly hollow, like I'm just ticking off quests so that I can say that I've done them. Still, do them I will. And every now and then something happens that I enjoy a lot, such as killing everyone in the Republic of Dave for not letting me vote.

I have also managed to get a few hours on co-op Gears of War 2. I really enjoyed playing through the first one's story campaign because I did the whole thing with a friend. So far (just on the second main level at the moment) it's good, though doesn't feel as focussed to me - each encounter feels engineered to provide a different combat experience, or introduce a new weapon or element. Which is an odd complaint, I know - they would have been mauled by critics if they'd just left it as 5 levels of the same run and gun action as the first. But nevertheless it feels slightly "bitty".

While visiting family my Lego mad nephew found out that his uncle worked on a game based around Bionicle. At the time I hated the stuff, but looking at the sets he's been given by Santa, it seems that they've started to make some real effort with them. Anyway, the bits and pieces of information I could remember from five years ago paid off, and I was able to wow him with my knowledge of Toa names and elements. Then I got told there is a Bionicle game on the Lego website which is much better than the one I worked on, which might have been an innocent but cutting remark, if I didn't view our game as the worst thing I've ever done. So I just laughed along and later added another five seconds to my internal "how long have I spent feeling bitter about those six months" timer. Seven hours so far. You could play Bionicle from start to finish seven times in that!

Just before Christmas Free Radical Design went into administration, which must be a blow to their hard working staff. There are interesting stories coming out now, though, which often happens in these situations - people who kept quiet before for fear of losing their jobs are telling all now that they have nothing left. I'm sure the good guys will have no trouble finding new employment.

Right, I'm off to hunt through online sales and see if there are any bargains. I was expecting Left 4 Dead to be cheap by now, so I could add it to my pile of as-yet-unplayed stuff. But it doesn't look like it.

PS - Game of the year (since every website and blog is contractually obliged to provide such a thing) was Fable 2. Everything I was expecting it to be and more.

PPS - The banner image is from Kristmas Kombat, which is about the true meaning of the holiday season. No idea if it's any good, I just liked the picture.

Mediocre-At-Best Company, More Like

Hello chums (the seven of you that StatCounter informs me reliably visit every day). I've been a bad blogger again. I know. I had the best intentions, but work and home life still conspired against me. Whatever time I got to jot down thoughts on games I had been playing and news I had been reading, resulted in bullet point lists. I put the lists into blogger for editing into proper posts at a later date, but I never really found that editing time, and when I did, the posts were so out of date it started to feel a little pointless. So, in the New Year I'm going to try again. Honestly. But before then (and probably during then, since there are a few of them) I'm going to do a quick editing job on the handful of posts I'd already written, and publish those (unless the editing job consists of "what the hell was I thinking?" and I delete it). Just keep in mind that some of these are quite old. And now on to your scheduled content...

I had been playing Battlefield Bad Company on the Xbox, borrowed off a colleague. It was something that I'd been interested in, but had always thought might not be worth shelling out for myself (what with me not really being into playing endless hours of zero sum competative multiplayer). I was right. When your first bullet point issue with a game is "not sure if I'm enjoying it" you shouldn't be too surprised when you stop being bothered to play as soon as something else comes along (I think it may have been a Lego game that stole my interest).

The player can die in the single player, but if you do you just respawn slightly back from the combat with full ammo again. Given that I spent a lot of my time in firefights running low on ammo, it ended up with the very odd situation of dying being a blessing, since I'd get restocked in both health and weaponry, and any enemies I'd killed would stay dead. I'm sure there's a good game to be made around the high concept of killing yourself to progress, but this isn't it -  the resulting missions became a monotonous slog of taking out a few enemies, dyinging, walking back to the combat, and repeating.

The open levels are probably great for multiplayer, but were bad for single player. They are pretty but sparse, and the levels drag on for ages. Each one is a series of combat set pieces in a small area of the map, linked together by a boring journey to the next rendezvous point.

The guns and explosions are very nice. Great sound effects. Cutting down trees with explosions & gunfire is ace, especially in the rare occasions when a falling piece of foliage lands on and kills an enemy.

The USP of blowing up buildings is cool, but limited. You can't totally flatten a building, and buildings that will be needed later in the mission are impervious to damage. Buildings have pretty much no furniture in them so by midway through the second level I was getting confused and a bit lost going between identical looking shells of buildings, trying to remember which one had the heavy weapon I needed to pick up in it.

A major game crime in my opinion - No subtitle option. So late at night with the sound turned down to avoid waking up my wife, and the jet engine in my 360 blaring, I can't follow what the characters are talking about in the cutscenes.

And in a similar vein, there's also no brightness setting. Seriously, fuck off with "adjust your TVs settings for this one game", I'm very clearly not going to do that and screw up the settings for every other game I play am I?

Fable 2

Fable 2 is a wonderful game. Absolutely riddled with minor glitches & bugs*, but still everything I was expecting, and it is brilliant.

I will say at this point that I was a fan of the first Fable (possibly because I never listened to the hype before it came out, and then pushed through the fairly boring first chapter at the hero school). Fable 2 is a classic sequel - it includes everything from the original, and expands and improves on it in every way.

One of the main things that I love so much about the game is how focussed it is on leading the player by carrot instead of stick. It's literally impossible to die in - the worst that happens is you get "knocked out", respawn back on the spot, lose some experience, and any experience still lying around is lost too - so the consequences of getting in above your head are pretty much non-existant. Another great touch is that after spending experience to improve your character you have to option to sell the upgrades back, and reclaim some of the points. This gets around one thing I always hate with RPGs - that they expect you to pick skills and attributes for your character at the start of the game, when you don't know what might be useful. To take Fallout 3 as a recent example, "Heavy Weapons" sounds like it could be a good skill, but before playing the game for some time you have no idea how prolific the ammunition you need to make use of it actually is.

But back to Fable 2 - it's very charming, with interesting and funny characters throughout and a massive amount of great lines for the villagers and enemies. Hearing foes lament their comrade's death because he owed them a pint, or walking past a house at night an overhearing a child's nightmare really help to draw you in to the world and make you smile. The cutscene dialogue is also good, though often let down horribly by what I can only assume is a limitation of their scripting system that has resulted in some terrible pacing that leaves huge gaps between sentences.

The only bit that annoyed me was the obligatory arena quest, and that wasn't hard, it was more of a "oh fuck's sake, why does every fantasy game need some osrt of arena where you battle increasingly difficult waves of monsters for the entertainment of the general population?" frustration.

Finally, the online implementation of seeing "orbs" that show where your friends (or any number of other players, if you want) are in game is cooler than I thought it would be. Someone gave me a huge warhammer, which was nice, and to "pass it on" I gave a friend a very good sword that I had no need for. You could probably break the game's balancing very easily in this way, but it really doesn't seem to care since it gives you enough other ways that you could break it yourself if you wanted to (the economy and sales seem almost deliberately designed for this). As I said before, I've never seen an RPG be this free and easy with its boundaries, and carrot not stick before.

The worst thing about Fable 2 by far has been that I have Fallout 3 to play, and it feels so stuck in its RPG ways, and so dour, and brown, and humourless, that I've been put off playing much of it at all.

* I know there are a lot of people out there who had much more than minor bugs, and with the game's limited save files I can see that being deeply annoying. But I never experienced anything outside of the minor visual category in over 30 hours of play. I guess Fable loves me too.

And it Burns, Burns, Burns

Well, it's happened. My second Xbox 360 has died. Something in the end of level sequence for Lego Batman stressed it an inch too far, and it gave up (though if it took my 60% complete save file with it I won't be happy). Just in time for the game release silly season. What a pain in the arse.

This one has lasted pretty much a month shy of two years, having been delivered as a replacement for the actual 360 I bought, which lasted around six months. So, their lifetimes are improving.

Also improved is Microsoft's support phone line. Whereas two years ago I had to jump through a few hoops before they would take in my console, now they are very quick to believe your tale and get the relacement process started.

The plus side of having been through this before is that I had a perfect cardboard box ready for shipping the dead console off in - the one it arrived in.

Oh well, time to give the PS3 a bit more attention. It's a shame Little Big Planet has just been delayed though.

Holy Great Game, Batman

Being able to admit when I'm wrong is one of my many virtues. And since it's one that people don't often get to see in action, this is a great opportunity.

Lego Batman is, contrary to my previous worries, the best Lego game Traveller's Tales have made.

Unconstrained by following the plot of a movie series, they have really let themselves go, and have come up with some brilliant and inventive level design. Playing as Batman is good, but when you get the the villain versions of the stages, the game really shines.

Fans of slapstick and visual gags will also be very happy about the cutscenes - again, a world away from Indy's relatively straight interpretations. The scene at the start of the Joker strand in particular is a treat, as Batman and Robin prepare to patrol, while Mr J sets out his plan to his fellow supervillains.

Still the same crappy front end menu though, how long has that work experience guy been on his probation? At least he changed the font this time.

We Named the Dog Indiana

So, I've been going back over some notes for things that I had played over the last few months. I found some stuff about Lego Indiana Jones, which is interesting again, since Lego Batman comes out in the UK at the end of the week.

The bullet pointed list, then...

• Feels like it's had a lot less love & effort put into it than the Lego Star Wars games. In particular there are things that were added to the Complete Saga that are missing here (such as online co-op, surely it's in their game engine now?)
  
• Not helped by having a lot fewer cool characters than Star Wars. For most of the game I didn't want to be anyone but Indy.
  
• Looks nice, but when you turn on vsync the framerate goes to shit. How unoptimsed is their engine? I realise "the kids" don't care about this sort of thing, but it's something else that makes it feel a bit half-hearted.
  
• They've worked out how to make good achievement lists. (Since writing this note I've also played Complete Saga, and that has good achievements too.)
  
• The front end looks and feels like it took someone 5 minutes. What's up with this rubbish flashing text in a debug-looking font? And why is "new game" always the default selected option? How many times do I want to start a new game?
  
• Has quite a lot of annoying instant deaths for a kids' game. And in partcular some enemies with one-hit-kill rocket launchers.
  

I seem to be unable to stop myself buying Travellers Tales' Lego games, so my copy of Batman will be on its way soon enough. I wonder if they will have returned to the series' high water mark of Complete Saga? I doubt it.

Ratchet & Clank Rundown

As pretty much anyone who knows my gaming habits already knows, I'm a huge fan of the Ratchet & Clank series by Insomniac. I was a huge fan of their Spyro games before that (only theirs, mind), and I find their platform games to be generally very well put together.

Since I've recently finished Quest for Booty, I thought I'd put together a run-down of my thoughts on every R&C game. Why? Hasn't 4 dead months taught you anything? I need content!

• Ratchet & Clank - A very good game. Lots of variety, though the non-standard sections (jet bike racing etc) were very annoying.
  
• Going Commando - The best in the series, expanding and improving everything from the first. A wide variety of levels and gameplay, with the extra bits not being too hard. Excellent level design gave a lot of replayability to individual levels, searching for hidden bonuses and skill points. A great selection of weapons, and the experience & upgrading system is nice.
  
• Up Your Arsenal - A slight downturn here, it definitely felt a bit weaker. The level design wasn't quite as good, and the game was shorter and had more focus on multiplayer and providing replayability through arenas.
  
• Deadlocked - I never played this one, due to every review pointing out the very heavy multiplayer focus. Apparently the single player was essentially reduced to arenas and challenge courses.
  
• Size Matters - The first PSP game in the series. I had high hopes for this after seeing what had been done on the handheld with the Jak & Daxter series. Even ignoring the controls and camera, it was a weak title - poor level design (very linear, and with a focus on instant death traps and falls), and a heavy focus on space hover board races which were rubbish.
  
• Secret Agent Clank - The second PSP game. I've only played the demo, but it seems a bit better than the first, by slowing the game down and downplaying the action.
  
• Tools of Destruction - The first PS3 title, and second best in series overall. A return to having a great variety of levels and gameplay, though not as much as at the PS2 heyday. The weapon selection is fairly boring though (you get some interesting stuff early on, but later it's all generic flamethrowers, shotguns, etc.), but it introduces single-use gadgets that have more imagination. Surprisingly, given previous titles, the arena section wasn't as well fleshed out, and had a very limted number of stages.
  
• Quest for Booty - A downloadable budget titles on the PS3. It continues the story from Tools of Destruction, and features only Ratchet. For around a third of the game you only have your wrench, though eventually you are given a handful of other weapons from ToD. The level design is incredibly linear, and the usual hidden skill points and platinum bolts are missing. Generally I found it very disappointing, even given the price.
  

So, what does all of that mean? By my scientific calculations, the next PS3 game in the series should be the best ever Ratchet & Clank adventure. Unless they release more of the sorry downloadable episodes.

Force Unleashed

First, a cautionary tale about pre-orders. The previews and whatnot for Force Unleashed looked ok so being the spend-happy chap that I am, I decided to pre-order it. Then a demo was released (or unleashed? No, let's go with released), and I got about halfway through before getting very bored with it. But it had been a while, so I'd forgotten my pre-order existed. The reviews started  coming out saying that the game was average at best, "I might get that when it's cheap" I thought. Then I received an email saying my pre-order copy had been shipped. Balls.

Though it's turned out better than I expected. I'm not entirely sure why, but I'm finding the full game to be entertaining enough. Still not £40 entertaining, but definitely better than I was expecting from the demo.

A quick run down of the pros and cons, specifically for Dave, who asked for one:

Pros

• The force powers are nicely done, and the physics engine is very good. The two combine to ensure that when it's going well you feel like a true ultimate badass.
  
• The graphics are detailed and colourful, and the game can throw a lot of enemies at you, which is also useful for the ultimate badass factor.
  
• The story fits in very nicely (if you didn't know, this bridges the gap between Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope), and the acting is better than in the three Starwars prequels. Admittedly not a high bar to have to hurdle, but still.
• The sound is all you would expect. Stormtrooper radio chatter, appropriate character themes & scores, blasters and lightsabers make all the right pewing and swooshing noises.
• The lightsaber and force power upgrades and customisation are nice, allowing you to tailor your saber from the situation you're in. Also any experience you earnt from killing enemies is kept even if you die, so levelling up will gradually improve you even if you're in a difficult section.

Cons

• The planets and locations that haven't featured in a big-screen tale are a bit lacking, and don't feel as good as rampaging through locations you recognise. One particular mushroom planet is rubbish, has annoying and ugly enemies, and you go there more than once.
• The controls and camera are utterly hateful. Lock on is based on the direction your character is facing, rather than the camera, and small tweaks to your facing to change the focus of your lock on are pretty much impossible. The targetting is as likely to lock on to an inoffensive metal bin as it is to select the giant metal laser-spitting foe stodd next to it, which causes no end of swearing. Jumping feels floaty and imprecise, which makes the very occasional platforming section (thankfully mostly just used to reach bonus pickups) frustrating.
• In order to keep the combat varied, they have been forced to create a range of enemies who are able to effectively fight at close quarters with a lightsaber-wileding sith. Usually this means that enemies take several hits to kill, and are usually able to block your attacks. Some enemies are completely immune to force powers, which plays against the title's strengths.
• You can fairly easily get into situations where an enemy attack will stun you or knock you to the ground, and then other enemies will continue firing rockets at you, which do the same as son as you're on your feet. You can quickly go from full to no health.
• Load times to access the options menu. No, I'm not kidding. The menus are ugly too, with some weird scan-line effects that can make some heading text more difficult to read, despite being on a HD screen.

The other stuff

• There are mid-level save points, and they're fairly regular. Though every now and then you'll hit a section where you're forced to fight a few tough battles in a row without a save.
• It has quick time events. They don't actually bother me that much in this game, since you get a lot of time to react, and except for a couple of situations, they're entirely avoidable (ie, the mid-level bosses and large enemies can be killed using a QTE, but equally you can just fry them to death with your force lightning).