After nearly a decade of waiting, fans of the Aliens versus Predator games were beginning to wonder if they’d ever get another acid-spraying, head-biting, marine-disemboweling fright fest. Sure, we’ve had the movies to turn to in the meantime, but let’s face it, those atrocities were more like a kick in the pants than a decent piece of driftwood to cling to.

Well, the wait is finally over, and the latest game in the franchise, aptly titled Aliens versus Predator, has been recently released. It’s an entirely new story, I guess we could call it a “reboot” of the franchise – but the previous two games had no sequential links, so it might not be an entirely appropriate term. Anyway, in a nutshell, the Weyland Yutani Corporation, the greedy conglomerate from the movies that never learns that breeding Xenomorphs always ends in disaster, has found the ruins of a Predator temple on a remote planet. This temple was used a breeding ground for Xenomorphs, which young Predators would then fight as a rite of passage into adulthood. With both a Xenomorph breeding ground and a temple full of Predator technology at their disposal, the greedy corporation decided to establish a research facility and bring in a crew of workers. As you probably already know, this is where things go horribly wrong.

As in the previous games, players get to play through three separate campaigns: The Marine, the Alien (Xenomorph) and the Predator. Each campaign offers a unique experience and tells a different part of the story. The Marine will probably be the first one most players engage in, since it’s the most familiar in terms of feel. Players take on the role of a nameless rookie member of a squad sent in to investigate a distress signal from the Weyland Yutani research base at the temple.  His gameplay is comprised almost entirely of completing objectives like restarting generators, finding keycodes, investigating distress beacons and trying to escape through the obligatory “only remaining route”. These are all very typical sci-fi-horror reasons to venture down dimly lit corridors, checking every shadow with a flashlight or sprinting balls-out along narrow corridors while being chased by hordes of nasties before a critical door slams shut – and the developers were gracious enough to make fun of it in the game from time to time. It’s clichéd, but it works. As one could expect, there are some collectibles to be found in each area, audio diaries in this case, which paint a picture of what went wrong.

With the Predator, Rebellion has gone down a completely different route than in the previous two games. The Predator’s main task is to investigate the disappearance of some “young bloods” – Predators who were in the process of completing their rite of passage into adulthood. To do this, he must battle the newest wave of Xenomorphs at the temple and get rid of the human invaders while he’s at it. Rather than the very typical weapon-switching FPS style of the previous games, this time the Predator’s arsenal remains localized. He has his claws available at all times, enabling him to lash out at will or block attacks. Doing this allows him to engage in fisticuffs with the Xenos (I kid you not), and it feels not entirely unlike Condemned 2 and other games that use a dual trigger system for delivering punches. In addition to this, he has a few Predator gadgets at his disposal, including his shoulder cannon, disc and spear gun. He can turn himself invisible and also use a special distraction technique, which projects a sound that humans will then investigate. What’s also really cool is that, for the first time, the Predator can actually jump as high as he can in the movies, enabling him to leap to higher ground while stalking his prey.

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I often wonder what it must be like to work for a games studio, creating the sequel to a game that was highly acclaimed and won its fair share of Game of the Year Awards. Sure, you might surprise gamers and reviewers the first time round, but next time everyone will be watching closely. Well, I wondered about it again recently, when all eyes were on 2K Games for the release of Bioshock 2, the sequel to the critically-acclaimed 2007 shooter.

Once again the story takes place in the city of Rapture: a secret underwater utopia where people seeking respite from government, religion and other forms of oppression could go to seek their fortunes freely. Well, that was the idea, but an internal civil war fueled by a genetic tonic called Adam soon reduced this utopia to ruins. This time, players assume the role of a Big Daddy, a genetically-altered man confined to an armoured diving suit whose sole purpose is to protect the city’s iconic Little Sisters — small girls who wander the city harvesting the coveted substance, Adam.

This particular Big Daddy, named Subject Delta, is an early model, which means that he has a few differences to the others, the most important being that he is exclusively bound to a particular Little Sister. In Delta’s case, the Little Sister is a girl named Eleanor Lamb, the daughter of a prominent Rapture psychiatrist who now serves as the leader of a cult in the crumbling, leaking halls of the city a decade after the events of the first game. In the hope to be reunited with Eleanor, Subject Delta follows the guidance of Dr Tenenbaum (remember her?), who has returned to Rapture to put an end to the project she started once and for all. Bioshock 2’s complex story is also full of jarring opinions and commentary on human nature.

The story is interesting and compelling, but what makes Bioshock 2 even more engrossing is the in-depth gameplay. On the surface, the game plays like a standard first-person shooter, but a good hour or two of play will start to reveal the true depth of play it truly possesses. Subject Delta has two main offensive options at his disposal: weapons and plasmids. The weapons seem fairly standard at first. Delta starts out with the huge drill attached to his arm. He can smack enemies with it or rev it up to deliver a high-damage drilling attack. He can also find plenty of other weapons, including the standard-issue Big Daddy rivet gun, a Gatling cannon, a shotgun, and rocket launcher, among others. Each of these weapons can be upgraded up to three times, with each upgrade offering an interesting new benefit, like increased damage, larger ammo clips or ricocheting bullets. Each weapon can also use three different types of ammo, each of which is useful in a particular situation.

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I’m not an avid Bioware fan, but I must admit, I was waiting with bated breath among the Bioware fanatics for the release of Mass Effect 2 – the sequel to one of the most critically acclaimed RPGs of 2008 with exciting shooting elements and in-depth character interaction.

Mass Effect 2, like its predecessor, is a sci-fi role-paying game where players take on the role of Shepard, the first human Specter in a galaxy filled with different alien races. A Specter, in case you don’t know, is a galactic Alliance operative with the freedom to do whatever is necessary, legal or otherwise, to defend the galaxy. After dealing with Saren and the Reaper threat in the previous game, Shepard and the crew of the Normandy are attacked by a secretive alien race known as the Collectors. It’s no secret by now that Shepard doesn’t survive the attack, but is resurrected by a shady organization known as Cerberus and recruited to help solve the mystery of Collectors and their attacks on human colonies.

In typical Bioware fashion, Mass Effect 2 has an entire crew of potential allies Shepard can interact with and recruit as the mission goes on. Shepard’s interaction with them determine the nature of her relationship, whether they’ll be on good terms or bad terms, friends or enemies, or even lovers. It’s not simple either. Each character has a wildly different personality and set of values — so it’s easy to accidentally offend them with a careless dialogue choice when trying to make friends. A nice touch is that each character also has a personal mission or side-story that Shepard can choose to help them with. Successfully completing this mission will usually make the character in question very loyal to Shepard, which unlocks more special abilities for them to use in combat. This highly believable social aspect is one of the things which makes Bioware’s games so great.

This in-depth social interaction spills over into Mass Effect 2’s missions. Shepard can engage in long conversations with just about every important character in the game – digging for info or alternative solutions to missions. Just like last time, Shepard gains Paragon or Renegade points depending on how the player chooses to react to certain events. Paragon points are usually gained by choosing diplomatic, non-violent solutions, whereas Renegade points come from brash, abrasive or intimidating options. The more points Shepard accrues in each area, the more Paragon or Renegade-related conversation options the player will have access to, to the point where they’ll start to affect the flow of the entire game.

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I’m sure I’m not the only one who feels this way, but I love it when a fledgling games studio offers up their first big work for gamers to enjoy. I always hope to see the beginning of another big player’s career in the industry. Recently, we had the opportunity to enjoy that kind of speculation with Darksiders, the first offering from Vigil Games: a new studio founded by comic artist Joe Madureira and game designer David Adams.

I recently had a chance to interview Joe Madureira, and I learned that, apart from being a nice guy and a superb artist, he’s also as thoroughbred a gamer as you get — he actually owns more obscure consoles and games than I do. So, what happens when you have someone with this degree of enthusiasm as one of the creative leads behind a big-budget action adventure game? Darksiders, that’s what. Having sunk many, many hours into the game, I can safely say that it’s one of the most polished and engaging adventure games I’ve played since The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker.

The premise is quite interesting: War, as one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, is bound by law to answer The Call — the signal to him and his brothers that it’s time to travel to Earth and punish the wicked. And this is exactly what he does — the only problem is that it turns out that there was no Call, and he ends up stuck in the middle of a battle between Heaven and Hell. To make matters worse, his bosses, the Charred Council, suspect him of treason and of aiding the forces of Hell in disrupting the balance. They sentence him to death. Adamant that he did hear the Call, and determined to prove his innocence, War convinces the Charred Council to let him return to Earth to seek evidence of foul play. If he succeeds, he will regain his place among the Horsemen. If he doesn’t… well, the minions of Hell will have carried out the Council’s sentence anyway.

The player’s goal is to guide War through his various trials and tribulations as he tries to find out what happened. At first, he wants to take the fight straight to the lord of Hell, The Destroyer, but is convinced that, in his weakened state, he’ll never even complete the journey. Following the Council’s advice, he strikes a bargain with a demon named Vulgrim, who has his own agenda and serves as the obligatory shopkeeper of the game, selling War new weapons, abilities and items. Vulgrim’s tip-offs lead War on a lengthy campaign to defeat key power-holders and strike bargains with other minions of Heaven and Hell, bringing him ever closer to finding out exactly what the Destroyer is up to.

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I didn’t want to admit it, I really didn’t. As a loyal follower and advocate of the Devil May Cry series, I didn’t want to think that another extreme action game could come close to Devil May Cry’s sheer style and purity, let alone surpass it. But after thoroughly testing every aspect of Bayonetta, I have to admit that we may have a new champion in our midst.

Every action game needs a story, even if it’s little more than bubblegum and string to hold the violence together. In this case, Bayonetta is the last witch in the world, following a great war between her clan, the Umbra Witches, and their enemies, the Lumen Sages. She has no memories of her past beyond the fact that she is a witch and must kill a quota of angels every so often to earn the right to stay out of Hell [Seriously? - ed]. Seriously. While on Earth, she employs the services of a shifty criminal named Enzo to help her track down items which will allow her to regain her memories, and she doesn’t care how many souls she has to harvest along the way. Yeah. A Pretty demonic-sounding premise right there, but it’s not the only reason the game bears an 18 age-restriction, I can promise you.

While the story isn’t brilliant, it serves its purpose: setting Bayonetta up to fight hordes and hordes of angels and she pursues her lost past. At first, the control scheme and Bayonetta’s arsenal of moves seems rather typical of the genre. She can throw out punches and kicks, or string together various combinations of the two, shoot with her guns, dodge, lock on to single enemy to direct her attacks more accurately, and use healing items when her health becomes low. This is just the tip of the iceberg, however, as Bayonetta turns out to be one of those games that reveals itself to the player little by little as they go along. Before you know it, you’ll have a veritable wealth of crazy combat moves and magical attacks at your disposal, with a whole bunch more waiting to be earned.

Bayonetta starts out with a pretty capable set of combat moves, including the ability to fire the guns attached to her hands and feet while punching and kicking; the option to use a magical torture attack, which allows players to mash a button to increase the damage this visually impressive (and disturbing) technique deals; and the ability to enter a slow-motion Witch Time mode by dodging an attack at the last second. As players progress, however, they’ll find and buy new weapons and accessories which give Bayonetta new attacks and powers – up to the point where they completely change the way game plays. Don’t fancy the Witch Time ability? Equip the right accessory and Bayonetta will be able to parry attacks instead, or deliver an automatic counter-attack by dodging instead of entering Witch Time mode. Don’t like the guns too much? Not to worry, Bayonetta can temporarily pick up and wield an entire arsenal of angel weapons, including swords, spears, flails and bows, and later on she’ll be able to wield other primary weapons, including a katana and a whip. She can also buy other magic spells to use in place of the torture attack, and when you consider that you can combine all of these crazy abilities to create wildly-varied combos, the player’s skill and imagination are truly the only limits.

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If I could narrow my videogame concept wish list down to only a handful of ideas that I’ve always hoped would be turned into a videogame, one of the remaining items would be a game which allows us to engage in frantic ground-based combat and swooping, barrel-rolling air combat, with seamless transitions in between. Some developers have tried this before in the past, with varying degrees of success, but none of them have ever truly pulled it off.

Until now, that is. Dark Void, the first project by fledgling studio Airtight Games, seemed like little more than another third-person shooter with a gimmicky hook, the likes of which have been so prevalent over the last two years – but in reality it’s the first game to successfully integrate fast-paced action and free flight without any cumbersome restrictions on either.

The game is set in a post-World War II setting, and smacks a little of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow in some respects. The hero, Will, is a decidedly un-heroic courier pilot who finds himself suddenly reunited with his ex-fiance, Ava, on a routine delivery. Their awkward reunion is cut short when they decide to take a route directly through the infamous Bermuda Triangle and end up crashing into an uncharted island that is crawling with strange, hostile metallic creatures. After a bit of frantic rushing about, they eventually manage to hook up with a community of humans that is drawn into a centuries-old conflict between humanity and a reptilian alien race known as the Watchers, who have been secretly manipulating events on Earth since the beginning of recorded history.

The premise and delivery of the story is in the style of classic sci-fi, but the gameplay ideas are fresh. Before Will gains the ability to scream around the skies at will, he must first become acquainted with the combat mechanics of the game. The shooting is fast, smooth, and easy to control. The closest thing I can liken it to is the Uncharted series on the PS3. There aren’t all that many weapons to choose from: six different guns, some grenades, and the guns and missiles on Will’s rocket pack, are pretty much all we’have at our disposal, but at least they’re interesting, and can each be upgraded three times to offer higher damage, increased accuracy, and some other effects, like explosive rounds. The Survivor machine gun will probably be the mainstay weapon of most experienced shooting game players, but everyone is sure to find another favourite among the alien machine gun, big blaster, sniper rifle or, of course, the famous Tesla directed energy weapon.

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For the most part, “games of the movie” tend to be pretty crap. You know the type: rushed out the door to coincide with the film release, lacking in everything but licensed voice actors, and filled with pitiful attempts to rake in the film-loving crowd with gratuitous recreations of “that cool part in the movie when ….” They’re a generally horrible breed of game, but every now and then, a tie-in title will come along that’s actually pleasant to play, or even, dare I say,  good on its own.

James Cameron’s Avatar: The Game (ugh) is almost that title. It goes far enough out on that limb to get to the bit that’s not too crowded, but it could have gone further. It even manages to have a standalone story — one that you don’t need to watch the film to understand, thanks to the tons of extra info the developers have packed into this game. As expected, however, you’ll have a fuller experience if you’ve played the game after watching the film — a mistake I only rectified between my first and second play-through.

In case you’ve somehow missed this holiday’s biggest box office ball-buster, here’s the Who and the Why behind Avatar: In the year 2100-something, humans ruined Earth and sought out a new place to wreck. They came across Pandora — an Earth-like moon, five years’ travel away, that’s packed with a rare and precious metal called Unobtainium. The big, scary corporate giant, RDA, lands on Pandora, begins mining the crap out of it, and soon discovers a native race of humanoids called the Na’vi. The RDA then tries to come to terms (mining terms, to be specific) with the Na’vi through a program called AVTR, which allows humans to temporarily jump inside their own lab-grown, artificial Na’vi bodies. Once accomplished, these Avatar drivers can gain the trust of the Na’vi, so they can all sit around together, having a great time while the RDA turns their entire planet into one giant strip-mine. The game’s hero enters the scene a few years after the AVTR program has begun. He (or she — you’ve got the choice) is a signals specialist who’s just dying to jump into the brain of an Avatar and specialise in some Na’vi signals.

The beginning part of the game is the typical tutorial stuff. You’re shown around the human control centre called Hell’s Gate and a nearby region called Blue Lagoon, and told to do various stupid grunt work that a ten year-old could probably manage. This is a bit alarming because your character is apparently only one out of every five million people who are genetically compatible with the program. Why they’d risk sending you off into the carnivorous jungles to rescue some whimpering jarhead is anyone’s guess, but anyway. During this time, you’ll also be chucked into the control of an Avatar, meet up with a native or two, and learn a few neat tricks like controlling various vehicles and riding a six-legged horse thing. About an hour later, you’ll be given a choice between the Na’vi and RDA. But, and this is a little weird — considering the game is called Avatar – if you choose RDA, you never again get to control one. Now, you might consider that a spoiler, but this divides the game into two distinct pieces: so think of the rest of this review in that context, and stop crying that I’ve ruined the game for you forever.

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2009 has been a huge year for gaming. We’ve seen the release of some highly anticipated sequels, big movements in the rhythm scene, truly modern approaches to some classic RPG elements and a zombie around almost every corner. As the year draws to a close, we look back at some of the highlights of the year, and present you with the NAG Online Game of the Year, the runners-up, and a special mention or two — as voted for by our very own forum members.

The contenders

Batman: Arkham Asylum

Everyone wants to be a super-hero, and what better hero than the dark knight himself? Batman: Arkham Asylum took the gaming market by surprise by turning out to actually be pretty good, and not just a shameless licence cash-in. That licence has certainly seen its share of video games, but it seems that developer Rocksteady Studios had a few new plans for the bat in black.

Borderlands

“Diablo with Guns” is a phrase often used to describe Borderlands. This first-person RPG/shooter began its development life as just another brown-on-brown FPS with a few interesting bits thrown in, but over its course of development turned into one of the most interesting, different and just-plain-cool titles to grace our shooter shelf.

Dragon Age: Origins

Dubbed by many as the spiritual successor to Baldur’s Gate, Dragon Age: Origins is the transition of the classic RPG into the modern times. The result is a game that not only packs in the game time (with many players experiencing 80+ hours in a single campaign), but does so with a careful blend of safe familiarity and polish that can only come from over a decade of developing in the genre.

Modern Warfare 2

Despite its rocky start, especially on the PC, Infinity Ward’s latest in the Call of Duty series has proven that a solid storyline will win people’s hearts no matter the length of the campaign. Thankfully, once the single player campaign is over (in a few hours), there’s plenty to keep the multiplayer gamers occupied, if you can handle a few dropped games every now and then

Street Fighter IV

The return to form: Street Fighter IV has once again convinced the fighting crowd that 2D is still well-suited to the genre. While it’s been out in Japan for over a year now, this is still very much a 2009 title for us poor Westerners.

Tekken 6

The other side of the coin: Tekken 6 continues to tighten its 15 year-old 3D fighting mechanics and throws eight new combatants into the mix for good measure. With Jin Kazama now in charge of the Mishima Zaibatsu, he’s declared war against  the nations of the world. Someone needs to stop him and, apparently, the only way to accomplish that is through a series of fist-fights.

Uncharted 2: Among Thieves

PS3 owners knew that it would take a lot to trump the success that was Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune, but Among Thieves managed to do so with ease. Scoring full marks from dozens of publications (and not doing too badly in our own magazine), this game has shown that the third-person shooter/platformer still has a lot of room left for innovation, a fantastic story and unbelievable visuals.

Click on to see which titles came out on top…

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This is the story of the world’s most honest rhythm game. The popularity that music games have enjoyed in the last few years rests upon their central conceit, a contract established with the player that is simultaneously sublime and silly: that by picking up a downscaled plastic (toy) instrument, you too can live the dream. You can stand in your living room, in your undies, if that’s how you roll, and pretend you’re a rock star while virtual crowds cheer you on. It’s the lie inherent in that which even people who love these games have to laugh at; that pressing buttons on a specially-shaped controller is supposed to in any way really equate to the act of performing music.

With the exception of the simulated drumkits in Rock Band and Guitar Hero World Tour, music games have remained relatively dishonest about how much like the real thing their play mechanics are. It’s all artfully orchestrated to make you feel real; and that’s not a criticism. That’s what all video games do, in their own way, each to its own degree. Sometimes, simulated hyper-reality can feel better than the real thing, and let you do things you couldn’t do in real life if you tried. Then there’s DJ Hero.

Take These Broken Wings

What a traditional DJ does is to take someone else’s content and make a unique performance out of presenting it in a new way. And God said “let there be mash-ups and scratch”. The mechanics of DJ Hero are, by providence and design, far closer to what a real DJ uses in his art, from a pure play mechanic point of view. But metaphorically, the process of mixing and mashing is also much closer to what a player does in a game world simulation than something like Guitar Hero is to actually being Van Halen.

What FreeStyleGames has done is to design a very good, though not flawless, experience around the fateful similarity of the DJ to the gamer. Perhaps because it’s more honest about, and closer to, the activity it represents, the gameplay concepts feel more relevant; less fake, less arbitrary. There’s an intensity in playing DJ Hero that arguably goes beyond the Plastic Guitar games in terms of the euphoria and sense of “being there”. Will Townsend, DJ Hero producer, said that he wanted to capture the rush that a DJ feels on stage and at the center of the party; it’s an experience unique from any other kind of musical performance. See more about how the hardware in DJ Hero accomplishes this in the controller section. It’s really not business as usual.

Hear The Voices Sing

But that’s the thing about music games: ultimately, they’re only as good as the music they offer. That’s where DJ Hero’s other shoe drops and the second half of what makes it a unique experience falls into place. Understand that in DJ Hero you’re not playing along to a collection of popular and classic music that you already know and love: here you are presented with a whopping 93 new, original works that you’ve never heard before this game came into existence. That’s what the “mash-up” has brought to the game – the 102 licensed music tracks in DJ Hero are remixed into new works, and the fundamental nature of what a mash-up is gives DJ Hero much of its flavor. Compared to the stately, cautious reverence that rock-oriented games display towards their meticulously converted and presented songs, mash-ups throw dignity to the wind. They’re sarcastic. Playful. Satirical. Wildly inventive. They were what people got their jollies from pop culture with before there was YouTube.

DJ Hero shamelessly wallows in that playful irreverence. Coming directly out of recent music games such as The Beatles: Rock Band, that turns out to be a stunning breath of fresh air. The wild CG intro to the game reflects this, depicting a gigantic alien record player’s boom arm destroying a hip-hop flavoured city as teams of brave DJs fight to stop it with the power of scratching and feedback loops. DJ Hero has a permanent smirk on its face, but it’s not shallow and calorie-free satire. There’s still an appreciation for the source material here – just no worship at the altar. (Unless you’re referring to the Daft Punk appearances in the game, who practically oversee the festivities as bio-mechanical patron saints of the mix-board.)

And after all that, yes: the soundtrack rocks in a massive way. The source track selections are virtually perfect, and the mixes between them are pristine and creative, full of originality and energy. Some combinations will drop your jaw with the insanity of what songs are combined, only to result in the best mash-up beats you’ve ever heard. It really is the finest rhythm game soundtrack of the year, hands down – even the Beatles must step to the side, even if only slightly. And just to confirm, yes: there are 11 Daft Punk songs, a Daft Punk arena, and the electronic duo are actual characters you can select for yourself. The very fact that all this still doesn’t make DJ Hero feel like Daft Punk Hero is a testament to the gobs of music that’s here.

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Back in 2007, when the term “next-gen” was still being used liberally to describe the kinds of games that gamers wanted and weren’t getting (apparently) Assassin’s Creed was one of the first to show us what our current machines are truly capable of, and what kind of new games can be made with a little creative thinking. You can argue about some of the game’s faults: its repetitive nature and limited scope – but you simply cannot dispute its merits: a great control scheme, a new take on the stealth genre, and one of the most compelling and twisted sci-fi stories ever seen in a videogame.

That’s why, despite the first game’s drawbacks, fans have been eagerly awaiting the release of Assassin’s Creed 2. The game picks up right where the first game ended – and it starts off with a bang. Players are thrust into the role of Desmond Miles: the protagonist from the first game in whose mind we took on the role of Altair. He’s still imprisoned in the Abstergo building, but is busted out by Lucy and taken to a secret base – the lair of the modern-day descendants of the Assassins. There he is, strapped into their version of the Animus (the machine which lets him relive his genetic memories) and told that he must learn the skills of another one of his ancestors, an Italian man named Ezio, in order to help his current Assassin brethren stop the modern-day Knights Templar organisation from executing their schemes.

This is achieved via the “bleeding effect”, a complicated phenomenon in which users of the Animus can acquire the skills and traits possessed by their ancestors while viewing their genetic memories. This time, rather than being placed in the role of an experienced and skilled Assassin like Altair, Desmond starts in Ezio’s youth. Ezio is a lusty young man with quick fists and a love for adventure and trouble, but he’s no killer – not at first. Ezio’s days of making deliveries for his father, picking fights with other young noblemen, and climbing into young ladies’ bedroom windows for steamy encounters, come to an abrupt end when his father and brother are falsely accused of conspiring against the government of their home city, Florence, and are executed. Determined to prove his father’s innocence and take revenge, Ezio follows clues which eventually lead him to uncover his father’s secret life as an Assassin and to take up his father’s mantle in his quest to thwart the Knights Templar’s devious machinations.

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While Call of Duty: World at War turned out to be a excellent game in its own right, fans still couldn’t contain their cries for another game set in the CoD4: Modern Warfare world. Why? Well, apart from the fact that it was a nice change from the World War II setting the series had always used, unlike other slow-paced realistic FPS games, CoD:MW was a fast-paced, balls-out, action shooter with great graphics, smooth performance, varied game-play, responsive controls, and excellent multiplayer.

It’s hard to see how Infinity Ward could top what they offered in Modern Warfare. They set a pretty high bar for themselves with that game, and believe it or not, they’ve not only cleared it, but raised it again. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 has finally arrived, and it’s everything fans expected and more. Better graphics, better action, better performance, and the next compelling chapter in the story.

The story follows a few years after the end of the first game. But instead of controlling the previous protagonist, Soap, players are put in command of a handful of new characters, each of whom experiences the events of the story in different places at different times. This time round, the mercenary crew from the last game is tricked by a particularly nasty and unscrupulous mercenary named Makarov, whose devious plan unleashes an all-out war between America and Russia. It’s up to you to hunt down and expose Makarov before this conflict gets any more out of hand than it already is. Developer Infinity Ward was obviously aware that the pen is mightier than the sword these days, and that some people might take offense to the fictional events portrayed here. There are some scenes and missions in the game that they thought some people would find so objectionable that they included the option of a warning system, that, if enabled, warns players when the [potentially] offensive content is coming up, outlines what is in it, and gives them the option to skip it. You know, for those people who expected to find bunnies and rainbows in a realistic war game with an 18+ age rating. Let’s hope this helps Infinity Ward to dodge that censorship bullet – and maybe other developers can start using this system too, letting us avoid having things cut out of games in the future.

The action in CoD:MW2 is intense, fast-paced, and varied. Players can be trading bullets with waves of enemy soldiers one minute, commanding remote missiles from a UAV the next, and strategically placing automated turrets the next. It might be a bit overwhelming at first, but the uncluttered HUD and the simple map and objective markers make keeping track of the mission objectives the least of your worries. It helps to get comfortable with clock directions too, since your in-game allies will often warn you about enemies you aren’t aware of, “Two enemies on your three o’clock!”

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I remember seeing teaser footage of Borderlands nearly two years back, and it looked very different then: realistic visuals heading in a direction to compete with Far Cry 2 and some of the other sexiest shooters out there. But, somewhere along the line, the folks over at Gearbox and 2K Games decided that the world didn’t need another shooter with bleeding-edge visuals, and changed their approach. The result is an open-ended, single- and multiplayer first-person shooter with attitude-packed, stylised illustrative visuals. From the moment you see the stylish intro with No Rest for the Wicked by Cage the Elephant playing over the credits, you’ll know what kind of world you’re about to enter.

After this intro, you are given the chance to choose which of the four characters you’d like to play: The Assassin, the Siren, the Soldier, or Brick (a muscle-bound berserker). Each character favours a particular weapon and has a unique set of skills it can upgrade as it progresses through the game. The Assassin has Bloodwing, a hawk, which he can send out to kill enemies and bring him the items they drop, and he’s got the steadiest hand when it comes to using sniper rifles. The Siren learns the ability to Phasewalk, which increases her movement speed and makes her temporarily immune to damage. She’s most at home using SMG type weapons. The Soldier can learn the ability to construct a turret which will automatically attack enemies, and he’s highly proficient with high-damage, rapid-fire machine guns. Brick is the hard-hitting berserker of the crew. He’s at his best when using shotguns and explosives – anything that doesn’t require too much accuracy – and he can learn the ability to enter a Berserker Rage mode, which makes him temporarily resistant to damage and powers up his fists immensely.

Once you’ve chosen your character, you’re dumped into the world of Pandora: a planet filled with scattered settlements, dangerous creatures, and bandit gangs. Tales have persisted of a hidden vault on Pandora, filled with riches and advanced alien technology that will bring anyone who finds it fame and fortune beyond their wildest dreams – that’s what you’re after. The game uses a mix of pre-made quests and random content generation. The best way to describe it – and this description fits loosely – is like Diablo masquerading as a first-person shooter. Players progress through the game by accepting and completing quests for the characters they’ll meet. Each quest rewards them with experience, items, and money, which they can use to power up their characters to take on even tougher quests and come ever closer to finding the vault.

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Dun-dun-dun, dun-dun-du-...Smoooooke on the ... wa ... ter ... dun-dun. Man, I'm just way better doing this in Guitar Hero.

Eddie Riggs is a roadie, and a pretty luckless one at that. He spends most of his time smoking cheap cigarettes and lugging heavy things around for the worst metal band on the planet. What serendipitous fate, then, that the whole not-but-actually-really-Linkin Park dies totally gruesomely right at the start of the game when Eddie accidentally awakens Ormagöden, “The Fire Beast, Cremator of the Sky, and Destroyer of the Ancient World”, ridding this world of a great and terrible evil and packing Eddie off to another one that needs some saving. Hey, it’s what roadies do. Also, this new world is much, much cooler than grotty old planet Earth because it’s every heavy metal album cover from 1978 to 2009 rocked and rolled into one gigantic landscape stuffed with massive swords, skulls, tombstones, panthers that shoot lasers out their eye sockets, and everything else totally ****ing metal and therefore totally ****ing awesome. If Frank Frazetta, Andreas Marshall, and Christian Wåhlin contrived somehow to subvert the very mechanisms of nature itself and somehow have a baby that’s also somehow an entire continent, this would be it. That would also be totally ****ing metal.

Brütal Legend is metal fan service, through and through. If you don’t get metal, you’re probably not going to get much out of Brütal Legend either. Me, I’m into my metal, and playing Brütal Legend is kinda like flipping through my CD collection and killing a bunch of stuff with a possessed guitar at the same time, which is also totally ****ing metal.

So anyway, the game’s a mashup of brawling, Guitar Hero, hotrod road hogging, and real-time strategy stage battles. That’s not only totally ****ing metal, it’s also totally ****ing unprecedented, and just like any progressive metal album trying to break new ground, it’s tripping up here and there (except for Iron Maiden’s Seventh Son of a Seventh Son album, of course, which rules, and rules hard).

The brawling works out. It feels something like Overlord/Fable/Viking/that sort of game, so there’s a lot of running around in circles and chopping stuff up. As you explore the land, you’ll find new solos to play on your guitar, that are really just quick time events pretending to be a really innovative and ingenious approach to ultimate combos. Of course, the Facemelter is endlessly hilarious, so that’s okay. Eddie can also double-team with nearby allies, pulling an assortment of special manoeuvres that can be all the difference between epic win, epic fail, and totally ***ing metal.

The road hogging works out mostly. At the start of the game, the Druid Plow hotrod handles like a greased pig on the run from Mayhem’s stage crew, although a few performance upgrades in the Motor Forge goes some way to mitigating this later on. This doesn’t much make up for at least one early escort mission being exceedingly – and quite needlessly – frustrating, however.

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It was truly wonderful to have guys visiting from international game developers Ubisoft and 2K. It’s easy to anonymise the hard-working folks behind the games we play – but seeing them speak about their products with endless passion and enthusiasm really drives home how much time and effort they put in. Next time you’re sitting in the afterglow of a freshly-completed title, give a thought to the team of men and women who were responsible. Thank you to Brent George and Dave Halse for travelling the “1000 hour flight” to our fair country! (PS, don’t feed the lions.) It will be hard to forget the enormous 103” television at the NAG stand – every person who played on it no doubt has a new item at the top of Santa’s list (or possibly a scar where their kidney used to be). At the very least, many will be considering a second mortgage to finance one of the damn things. The Quake 3 tournament was fascinating to witness – seeing those guys play was inspiring, and one can take comfort from the fact that it is actually possible to make a living playing games despite what your teachers said.

rAge set an unofficial record for LAN attendees in SA – a total of 2162 players plugged in to 30km of cable for 54 hours of non-stop multiplayer madness. The tickets sold out in a matter of days, no doubt leaving a lot of disappointed people, but those who were able to nab one had an excellent (if hand-cramping, butt-numbing) time.

Thanks go out to all the suppliers (especially MSI and Incredible Connection) who provided the awesome prizes that were awarded throughout the weekend. Because of you, there are a lot of happy gamers out there with fresh hardware to cuddle up to at night!

What about next year? More of the same please! All tournaments should be local entry only though – sure, it would be great to have international players on hand for exhibition matches, but actual competition should be kept to homegrown players to keep things on a level field. And maybe open up the main stage to more speakers – the local game dev guys would no doubt be happy to share their experiences, and the cosplay competition should be visible to all.

To those who couldn’t make it this year – bribe, threaten, whine or cajole* your way here next year! You really missed out. To those who travelled from far and wide to be with us, a special thank you for your effort. And to everyone who attended (be they from Earth, Middle Earth or Mars) thank you for your support!

*Neither NAG nor its employees condone or recommend the use of violence to obtain gaming satisfaction, no matter how righteously awesome it is.

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There are two sorts of contract killer. There’s the shady, scarred sort of guy with an eye patch and Eastern European accent who’s only ever glimpsed through a pall of cigarette smoke, hangs out in underworld bars with lighting problems, and has a nickname prefixed with Little or Lucky or The. He’d be prosecuted and sentenced to forever in prison if ever apprehended by the authorities, but that’ll never happen – guys like this guy don’t get nabbed by the rozzers, they go out in a dramatic and usually subtly ironic way that probably involves a helicopter or an empty dam or a grotty, abandoned tenement on the Lower East Side. Then there’s the other sort of of contract killer – that’s the rakish, gum-chewing sort of guy with shaggy blonde hair and perfectly straight teeth, who looks like the sort of guy who has lots of sex with lots of hot women because that’s what he does. Although both sorts kill people for hard cash, only one of these guys works for a Private Military Contractor. That’s all the difference between rotting forgotten in a hole and being totally awesome, boys and girls. If you’re going to kill people for hard cash, always make sure you’re a card-carrying member of a proper killing enterprise – a proper killing enterprise like the Association of International Mercenaries or, conveniently, AIM.

Cut scene to Arulco, a not-Central America now fallen on desperate times. Previously ruled by a democratic monarchy, the country’s former election candidate Enrico Chivaldori has been betrayed by his scheming wife Deidranna (who, perhaps not insignificantly, has an Eastern European accent) and abandoned the country, having faked his own death somehow. Left to her own nefarious devices, Dee Dee has set herself up as resident Queen of Everything and is generally being a huge bitch to everyone. Enrico hires a bunch of people to kill other people for hard cash, so his country can be a nice place again. Paragraphs one and two are, obviously, closely related to one another. ¡Y arriba!

“They don’t make them like they used to,” goes the aphorism, and it’s only too apparent with games like Jagged Alliance 2 over here. This is the kind of game that, if you don’t read the manual, you’ll simply never be able to play it – and nobody makes games like that anymore. No, now it’s all about condescending tutorials and infuriating helpy-helpers who won’t let you doing anything without asking if you’re absolutely sure you want to do what you’re doing, then reminding you that you’re doing what you’re doing before you actually can. But this isn’t SimCity Creator on DS, it’s Jagged Alliance 2 – a sort of X-Com mashed with Fallout Tactics mashed with Risk, and it’s all that sort of massively complicated you haven’t seen around since 2001. Sure, kids today won’t get it at all – but they weren’t there, man. They weren’t there.

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I’ll come clean right here, at the start here: I’m not a Batman fan, and I’ve never been a Batman fan. Something about the way he refuses to kill even those villains who are just begging for it made him seems less, I don’t know…  “hardcore” than the general Marvel Comics crew. However, after playing through Batman: Arkham Asylum and hunting down every secret and character profile, I’m considering heading over to my local comic shop to see what works they have featuring Gotham’s caped crusader.

Yes, the game really is that good. I’d go so far as to say that it’s a work of art in every way. If you’ve ever had reason to be sceptical of superhero games – and nobody would blame you if you did – then put them aside and give this game a go. Whether you’re a comic-book junkie looking for a decent videogame incarnation of one of your favourite comics, or just someone looking for a decent action game, you’ll find that Batman: Arkham Asylum fulfils both needs with surprising style.

The story for the game, written by award-winning Batman writer Paul Dini, is a simple yet ingenious reason to set Batman up against a handful of old foes: The Joker had escaped from his imprisonment in Arkham Asylum, but allowed himself to be recaptured by Batman with seemingly no resistance at all. Having a sixth sense for danger, Batman sensed that the Joker was up to something, and decided to accompany the wardens as they wheeled the Joker back to his cell – just in case he tried something. As you might have guessed, the Joker does manage to give them the slip and escapes into the Asylum, taking control of the security systems and releasing some of his fellow super-criminals, along with an army of violent, half-crazy convicts. With the lives of the Arkham staff, and eventually the people of Gotham City at stake, Batman has to sort this mess out, and fast.

To recapture the Joker and regain control of the facility, players control Batman as he fights armies of foes, follows clues, and solves a variety of puzzles. One of the reasons this game is so good is because it isn’t all mindless action; the player is actually given a role in the story by taking an active part in sleuthing out the Joker’s plan.

If that’s not enough for you, there are also tons of secrets to discover in the form of Riddler Challenges. That pesky criminal mastermind has left a bunch of riddles for Batman to solve and trophies for him to find. Solving these riddles and finding all of his hidden items unlocks character profiles for the player to read and challenges to play. With all this and more to look for, there’s certainly plenty to do in the game.

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It’s not often that we receive such a wide variety of cases from a single manufacturer; however, this scenario is rather different. Lian Li is synonymous with excellent build quality and innovative features in the international market, and yet locally they seem somewhat underrepresented. This is due in part to two reasons, the first of which is cost. High quality PC cases carry a heavy premium in today’s market, and often just the sight of the price tag is enough to scare optimistic buyers away. The second reason is simple: Lian Li cases aren’t quite as striking as, say, their Raidmax or Aerocool competitors. The absence of side panel windows, fake chrome finishes, and lights everywhere from the from grill to the case fans, means that most would assume that these cases are for dull office work environments. Not so, not so at all.

What we have here is a roundup highlighting two cases from each of Lian Li’s target segments. We will start off at the low end with the smaller and often cheaper cases, and work our way upwards to enthusiast level. A point to take note of before starting the review: price does not scale with case segment in every example, but more on this a bit later.

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The long-awaited continuation of American super-agent William “B.J.” Blazkowicz’s foray deep into enemy territory has finally arrived, and it’s dripping with old-school throwbacks and occult investigations. Can it stand its ground in the heavily entrenched frontlines of first person shooters? Let’s have a look…

It’s 1943; the fictional German town of Isenstadt is under SS rule. The locals have had enough and a rebellion has broken out, but there’s a deeper darkness lurking here. SS occupation brings with it a plethora of occult experimentation and, with that, the perfect cue for B.J. to kick some Third Reich ass before they get too ahead of themselves.

Thankfully, he’s not alone. A number of rebel cells have bloomed out of the chaos, each with their own speciality and approach to the war. Some will ensure that the black market is sufficiently well-stocked, others are fighting the Nazis on the meta-physical frontlines, and others are splintered across the town, hoping they’ll survive long enough to see the next dawn. The result is the open-ended town of Isenstadt, around which you’ll travel in search of your next mission giver, secret cache of ammunition, or sneaky back-entrance to your mission waypoint. It’s a great system that lends itself to exploration; you’ll be surprised at just how much time you spend searching the alleyways for hidden secrets or Nazi hangouts.

To accomplish his objectives, B.J. has no qualms about fighting fire with fire; or, in this case, freaky occult magic with more freaky occult magic, and big weapons… and probably uncomfortably large testicles. You’ll employ the use of The Veil, a nearby alternate reality that allows B.J. to move faster, deflect incoming projectiles, walk through walls, pierce armour, slow down time, and much more. In this regard, Wolfenstein feels a little like a combination of Prey and Crysis. As you discover additional abilities (all of which are customisable with unlockable upgrades), you’ll find yourself mixing your powers to suit each situation, quickly changing between them and developing some potentially deep strategies.

This is Wolfenstein, however, a series synonymous with lots of indiscriminate shooting of bad guys, and there’s plenty here for those who instead prefer the “run in guns-blazing while screaming obscenities” kind of strategy. Your first few hours of gameplay will see you using standard weapons like the trusty MP40, MP43, and KAR 98K, but soon enough you’ll get a chance to use more exotic tools of destruction, like the Particle Cannon and (my personal favourite) the Tesla Cannon. Like the Veil powers, each weapon is customisable. Most upgrades are visible on the weapon (hello Bioshock) and they allow you to further tailor your experience to your style of play. Fancy yourself a covert sniper? Pimp out your KAR with a scope, silencer and rifling for improved accuracy. Enjoy shooting explosive projectiles at people? Of course you do – who wouldn’t? Fit your Panzerfaust with heat-seeking missiles and a magazine loader for semi-automatic killing sprees.

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Since then, I’ve been an avid player of 2D fighters, from the mainstream stuff like Street Fighter, The King of Fighters, Mortal Kombat (the early ones), Samurai Shodown and Darkstalkers, to the less mainstream stuff, like Waku Waku 7, Breakers and World Heroes. So you can imagine my disdain from watching these games slip further and further from the mainstream and ever more into the niche market from the mid 90s onwards. While 2D fighters remained relatively popular in Japan, in the West, gamers in general dropped them like a hot potato, especially with the advent of the PlayStation and the dawn of 3D gaming.

As luck would have it, that wasn’t quite the end of 2D fighters, but they really were shunted into a corner and largely forgotten about by the masses. I’ve personally seen many, many, many gamers walk into videogame stores (I tend to hang around in game stores a lot) and look up at the 2D fighting games running on the TVs there without so much as the faintest glimmer of interest – and instead ask the shop attendant about some upcoming or current game with impressive 3D graphics and big review scores. Hey, don’t get me wrong, people are entitled to buy whatever they want, but with every passing year, 2D fighting fans like myself constantly wondered whether the next King of Fighters or Street Fighter game would be the last – because of their decreasing marketability.

So  you can imagine my surprise when the whole world went Street Fighter crazy after the announcement and release of Street Fighter IV – jumping up and down and shaking their pom-poms in support of it – even people who I knew had probably never played a Street Fighter game in their life. I strongly suspect – and I’ll raise this point again before this article is over, you can be sure – that the surge of interest in Street Fighter IV was largely due to the fact that it was one of only three big games released in March this year. Three game releases in one month at the beginning of a year is actually quite a lot these days, but there were still only three games for every gamer in the world to choose from for a whole month. In this situation, how could gamers not notice Street Fighter IV, and how could it not tempt a few curious consumers to buy it to satisfy their craving for new software?

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In this article, we’re going to show you how to create a basic room, an event encounter, and your very first battle with some baddies in a classic JRPG world. This may sound horribly complicated, but don’t worry: the standard package of characters, enemies, animations, and tilesets means that you actually have to do very little work to get yourself started. You can take advantage of this to see how things tick without figuring everything out from scratch.

First of all, grab the trial version of RPG Maker XP from this download page. It’s free for a trial period of 30 days, after which you’ll need to fork out some dosh to continue using it. That should be more than enough time to decide whether or not you want to stick with it.

After downloading, you’ll want to open the ZIP folder and run the setup. There are two components that you need to install: the support files for the software (your clue here is a hideously long acronym: don’t ask us what it stands for) and the toolkit itself. Once you’re done, fire that bad boy up.

You’ll be confronted with a rather blank screen. Let’s change that by going to File > New Project. Here, you’ll be presented with your greatest challenge: setting up the game properties. Don’t worry, you can get through it.

Once that’s sorted out, you should be presented with this:

You are the artist, and this is your canvas.

RPG Maker conveniently sets you up with not only a nice, friendly map canvas, but a few default tilesets as well! Have fun and place a few tiles by clicking on them in the left window and putting doodads onto the right-side map. To make your life easier, take note of two things:

(1) You can select multiple tiles at once by clicking and dragging in the left window. This spares you the pain of building a large structure block by block.

(2) Tiles are laid down in three layers. You can flip between these layers by checking the diamond-shaped icons at the top of the window. Use this to put a tree onto grass, for example.

Once you’ve built something you like, try it out by clicking on the playtest icon at the top. You’ll see that the game provides a menu system and characters for you already! Fiddle about with the sample. You’ll see that you can’t do much just yet, so exit once you’re satisfied and get ready to check out the database.

The default in-game menu. Characters, stats and a whole lotta blue.

Once you’re back in the editor, press F9. Whoa! That’s a lotta stuff to take in. What you’re seeing right now is a summary of every object, graphic, character, enemy, and just-about-everything-else-thing that will appear in your game. Have a look at some of the tabs and mess around if you feel like it. RPG Maker kindly provides a lot of default entities to populate your game with so that you don’t have to create your own.

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First – the numbers: This year we’ll be running the same format as last year, with a total of 1800 gamers sprawled between the mezzanine level and the animal cage on the main floor, but with a twist. AGASA and Telkom have taken control over a secret basement level of the dome and reserved 500 additional seats for their own nefarious purposes. There they will run a series of tournaments and competitions for SA’s gaming l33t.

Right, so you want in but keep asking yourself “But Geoff, how do I get in?” What you need is a ticket. These mystical pieces of paper go on sale this Saturday (August the 1^st) at Computicket for the price of R250 – which includes entrance to the main expo event. I won’t harp on too much about what you need to bring, or all the rules and regulations, but please make sure that your power cables have a red plug attached to them. No red plug means no power, and a powerless PC is about as exciting as dry toast. Just to be safe, don’t bank on there being any cables for sale at the venue: make sure you’ve sorted yourself out first by grabbing one from any decent hardware or department store. If you’ve got any other concerns, please read the FAQ on our forums. Last year, the tickets sold out in the first two weeks, so make sure you’re on the ball this year. If you somehow manage to miss out, however, you might still be able to snag a spot in the AGASA LAN if you or your clan are deemed worthy enough.

“Thanks Geoff, you’re so handsome and clever, but what can I expect to find at the LAN?” I hear you ask. As always, Vaalhooligan Crew (VC) will be in charge of the whole process, with hardware sponsored by D-Link and Intel, but that’s not what you’re asking, is it? No, you’re interested in the hundreds, if not thousands, of games that will be played during this 54 hour marathon, and that’s perfectly reasonable. The short answer is, we don’t know exactly what will be played, but you can expect pretty much every mainstream title to at least make an appearance. Call of Duty 4 and 5, Crysis, Team Fortress 2, Unreal Tournament 3, Quake 3, Counter-Strike and Half-Life 2, Demigod, Warcraft III and DotA, Red Alert 3, Command and Conquer 3, Starcraft and tons more. There will also be chill areas, food available for purchase and, of course, 1799 other gamers to chat to. Servers will be a mix of official, VC-hosted machines and private games between players, to ensure there’s a game to play even deep into the wee morning hours. There will also be a number of semi-official competitions running during the event. Keep an eye on the rAge section of the NAG forums, or look out for further information at the event.

Even if you’ve never been to rAge, there’s no better way to enjoy the show than from within a pile of like-minded individuals who want nothing more from their weekend than to play computer games.

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It’s not every day that a sports title makes me sit up and take notice, but when I first encountered 2006′s Fight Night Round 3, I was blown away by just how fun it actually was. That was then, and three years later, the title has changed hands within EA’s circle of development studios and emerged refreshed, streamlined, and as entertaining as ever before.

To provide some insight into EA’s apparent mess of development studios: EA Canada is the group in charge of Black Box – the team behind the Need for Speed series (not including the upcoming Shift, however). What you might deduce, then, is that Fight Night Round 4 follows very closely in its predecessor’s footsteps, fine tunes a few niggles here and there and, for the most part, doesn’t get too out of hand at Christmas parties.

The main feature of Round 4 is the new career mode, called Legacy mode. You’ll be able to either select a pre-built boxer (from the 48 of the official roster) or create your own from scratch. You can even import your own face into the game with a webcam, but the facility doesn’t work terribly well, only managing to get the rough shape right. From there you can choose your fighter’s styles, stances, and special moves from a huge selection, and take that a step further by kitting them out with custom gloves, shoes, robes, and even entrance music. There is no shortage of options here, but the menu system is horribly sluggish, so set aside some time if you plan on creating a fully custom character.

In the Legacy mode, you’ll move up the ranks of boxing’s greatest (you can even import your own custom characters who will be AI controlled), schedule fights, train, and unlock a bit of new gear every now and then. There’s no cash reward system, however; winning serves only to move you up the ranks, and there’s a disappointing lack of unlockables. The training has been expanded to include six events, each targeting a few specific statistics. If you find yourself struggling with the training events (some of them are brutally tough), you can skip through and receive half of the stat rewards for each session. When you’re not fighting or training, there are plenty of statistics and charts to keep you occupied. For the most part, however, your progress through the Legacy mode will be pretty linear: schedule a fight or accept a challenge, train for the fight, win/lose the fight. Wash, rinse, and repeat until you’re the champ. If you’re feeling particularly lazy, you can even simulate the fights, which means the entire game can actually be played automatically. Yay?

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It seems that mixing fantasy, black humour, and the chance to be the commander of an evil horde of destructive minions asserting dominance over a peaceful community, is an irresistible prospect for gamers. The first game that really did it well was Dungeon Keeper, a PC strategy game released in 1998. It wasn’t until 2007 that we’d see another game resonate with gamers in the same way, and that game was Overlord.

Unlike Dungeon Keeper, Overlord is more of an action game, but the spirit is the same. It lets gamers indulge their fantasies of being an armour-clad, imposing Sauron clone and command an army of critters to tear down settlements and beat the snot out of anyone who dared to challenge their might as they took control of their lands. It was well received, and soon saw an expansion allowing every would-be evil lord could to continue their campaign of corruption.

Overlord II was released just a short while ago, and fans of the first game have been rubbing their hands together greedily in anticipation of more corruption, carnage, and general all-round nastiness. If you’re keen to see just how much more evil Triumph Studios has managed to make the sequel, then read on to see how it fares.

The premise of the game becomes apparent as you play through the tutorial, but to sum it up, the previous Overlord (from the first game) mysteriously vanished, eventually forcing his minions to abandon his glorious tower (the mandatory bastion of evil) and go into hiding in the netherworld, where they patiently awaited the arrival of a new candidate to lead them to the surface world, where they will once more rain terror and destruction down upon the innocent. That candidate is you, a young orphan boy with magical powers who is shunned by everyone who meets him. Turns out that the people of the land have something against magic. Why? Well, it turns out that the new ruling power in the land, the Empire (a parody of the Holy Roman Empire), has condemned the use of all magic as heresy, and executes anyone who practices it. It’s up to you to take on the role of the new Overlord and end the tyranny of the Empire – or more appropriately, to replace it with your own brand of tyranny.

The approach to this is quite similar to that of the first game. You have your base of operations, a fortress in the netherworld this time, as opposed to the Dark Tower of the first game. From this base of operations, you launch your assault on the world by completing missions. As you wander the land, completing missions, more will become available. A nice touch is that, from time to time, a subject from one of your conquered lands might show up demanding an audience with you. They’ll usually tell you something or ask for a favour. Your response usually determines whether you are a corrupt Overlord, or a destructive overlord, which determines your path through the game. Either way, it’s fun to sit on the throne, looking down at the insignificant peon groveling before you, knowing all the time that, at the press of a button, you can retract the floor and send them on a one-way trip to Hell. Your netherworld fortress also allows you access to various amenities, such as the Forge, where you can make new armour and weapons; the minion barracks, where you can resurrect your fallen, higher-level minions; and your private quarters, where you can consort with your mistresses and power up your various magic spells.

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When Dan Akroyd and Harold Ramis wrote the script for the original 1984 Ghostbusters movie, they weren’t quite sure how it would be received. As it turned out, moviegoers loved it and, for a short while, Ghostbusters and everything about it became something of a phenomenon. It’s been a long time since then, but the Ghostbusters franchise managed to live on in its cult following.

After the initial sense of elation among Ghostbusters fans once they heard that yes, a game is coming, that niggling sense of dread and doubt began to creep in. You know? “God, I hope it doesn’t suck…” Well, I’ve just spent the last week playing the game and, as both a gamer and a Ghostbusters follower, I can tell you that it’s actually pretty damn good. The premise is quite simple: it’s been a few years since the events in the second film, and you are a nameless rookie joining the Ghostbusters team for the first time. It’s also refreshing to see that they’ve kept the spirit of the Ghostbusters intact by not making you some hot, young pretty-boy. In fact, the character you play is actually quite comical-looking. He doesn’t talk at all, but his comedic facial expressions betray his every shocked emotion.

At the start of the game, you are eased into the action by a tutorial. Slimer has escaped, and since he’s not all that dangerous, Ray thinks it’s an ideal case for you to warm up with. You are taught the basics of using your proton pack to drain a ghost’s PK energy (its life source) which slows and weakens it, allowing you to drag them over your trap. Just like the movies, the trap projects a cone-like entrapment field, and once you drag the ghost over this cone, you can be damn sure they’ll struggle to get out. You have to fight to keep them in there until they are sucked down into the trap’s containment field. If a ghost is really putting up a fight, you can slam them into walls, the floor, or anything solid, to daze them before dragging them over to the trap – they’ll struggle less that way. After that, you are booted straight into the action, and there’s plenty of it to be had all the way to the end. Along the way, you’ll also encounter ghosts that have to be dispatched by methods other than simple trapping. If you can get online, you can have tons of fun blasting and trapping ghosts with friends to see who can score the most cash. It’s rather limited, but it does have a great sense of teamwork behind it.

It’s nice to be able to use the classic Ghostbusters’ proton packs and traps to dispatch ghosts, but if that were all the game included, it would get boring pretty quickly, right? Right. [Right - Ed.] Luckily, as you progress through the game, Egon constantly invents new toys for you to play with, including a Stasis Beam, which slows down fast moving spirits, and an Ectoplasm ray, which allows you to use the same drippy goo that ghosts leave behind against them. You also have access to a PKE meter, that iconic tool that Egon always uses to track down supernatural phenomena. It works just like in the movies too: when the antennae are fully raised, you’re right in front of something otherworldly. The colour depicted on the screen indicates what your PKE meter is picking up: red for a hidden ghost, green for some kind of spectral anomaly, and blue for a cursed artifact.

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My question is: where have all the games gone? Why is it usually weeks or sometimes even months between the release dates of games for our modern consoles, when we used to see games hitting the shelves en-masse every month, six years ago? Well, I’ve been looking closely at the games we’ve been getting lately, and I’ve got some ideas of my own as to how this may have come about. This is purely speculation, of course, and I might be talking completely out of my ass, and there are probably more reasons for it than this alone.

Anyway, as far as I can see, the videogame industry is not what it once was. Fifteen years ago, small teams of as little as ten people, including programmers, sound designers, and artists, could easily produce games which pushed the limits of the hardware available at the time. The core team who developed the original Mortal Kombat (excluding the pen-pushers and everyone else on the publishing side of things) was only five people strong – and Mortal Kombat was considered ground-breaking for its time. In this environment, any small team of amateurs could pool together a little venture capital and start their own game studio, and many of them did just that. With so many small studios around trying to outdo one another, we were blessed with more games than even the big, international games magazines could keep up with.

However, as the years went by, advances in technology gifted us with ever more powerful and capable machines on which to play games. Suddenly, a team of two or three programmers just wasn’t enough any more, and the teams grew in size to more than ten programmers, each one specializing in a certain area. For example, they might have had one lot of programmers who handled the coding for the OpenGL side of their game, while another lot handled the Direct 3D side. Sound and music became much more complex, what with the rise of Surround Sound and so on, and suddenly it demanded programmers who specialized only in that.

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I know it’s a clichéd question to ask, but if you could have any superpower, what superpower would you want? I’d want the ability to turn paperclips into doughnuts, because not only is it a cool party trick, but also, you know… doughnuts are awesome. A man by the name of Cole (just Cole) lives in the fictional Empire City. He’s a bike messenger with a flair for pissing off the city’s cops. He dabbles in urban exploration, and when he’s not clambering around in the city’s sewer network, he hangs out with his girlfriend Trish and his best friend Zeke. After receiving word that someone needs an inconspicuous package delivered pronto and that Cole’s the only courier for the job, he collects the package and sets off on the errand. One thing leads to another and Cole ends up destroying part of the city and killing thousands of its citizens. It’s a long story that’s filled with potential spoilers, but that’s the gist of it. Cole is incapacitated following his life-altering excursion and when he eventually comes to, he realises that, aside from feeling like he was just tackled by a Boeing, he has his very own superpower: he can turn paperclips into doughnuts. I’m just kidding – Cole’s not that lucky. Instead, he becomes a living electrical conduit, able to wield and manipulate electricity at will. Thus begins the tale that inFamous so brilliantly tells.

inFamous is an open-world adventure game at heart. Players take on the role of Cole as he learns all about his newfound abilities and tries to either keep the city safe from further harm or strike fear into the hearts of the people left living there. Speaking of newfound abilities, Cole’s are awesome: Cole has a few travel-related powers (such as Static Thrusters, which essentially lets Cole glide around the city), some defensive ones (Polarity Shield is awesome for staying alive in troublesome situations) and a slew of offensive abilities such as lightning bolts and shock grenades. One of the most striking things about inFamous is the game’s atmosphere. I truly felt like a fledgling superhero/super-villain, trying to come to terms with my new abilities while dealing with the trials and tribulations of a world filled with super-powered individuals. This is further emphasized by the way that the city and its inhabitants are constantly reacting to the actions that you choose to take. For example, at the start of the game, when your fellow citizens first discover that you were the one who started this mess in the first place, they don’t react too kindly. They even go so far as to throw cans, rocks and bottles at you while you’re trying to make your way up the sides of buildings, which is just rude. Depending on the decisions that you make (thanks to the karma system that the game employs) further on in the game, the folks of Empire City will either learn to put aside their hatred and shower you with admiration (they’ll even take photos of you while you roam around the city if they love you enough), or their hatred will transform into fear of your awe-inspiring evilness.

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If you’re a retro game lover, then you’ll be pleased to hear that three of the finest examples of retro gaming have been released recently on the PlayStation Network.

Wolfenstein 3D

Wolfenstein 3D is more what you’d call a historic game than a retro game. It is credited with kick-starting the entire First Person Shooter genre. A lot of people credit Doom with that achievement, but Doom only started the craze – Wolfenstein 3D started it all.

In Wolfenstein 3D, players assume the role of B.J. Blazkowicz, an Allied soldier imprisoned by the Nazis in Castle Wolfenstein. After knifing a guard in the back and stealing his pistol, players are left to shoot their way to freedom. There are six episodes in total, with nine levels and one secret level per episode – all of which are included in the PlayStation Network version. The lineup of enemies is interesting, and players will face Nazi foot soldiers, dogs, SS troopers, and various colourful bosses, including a mad surgeon, and even Hitler himself.

I’m sure there was probably a first person shooter or two around before Wolfenstein 3D that somebody will bring up, so rather than saying it was the first of its kind, we’ll say that it was the first of its kind that was done right. The speed and smoothness of the game as you wandered around the large, maze-like levels, shooting enemies and looking for the exit, was unlike anything gamers had ever seen before.

If you want to add a truly historic game to your collection, then look no further than Wolfenstein 3D. But if you need another incentive, then earning trophies in Wolfenstein 3D unlocks special secrets in the upcoming Wolfenstein game for the PS3 (and PC and 360). How about that, eh?

Gunstar Heroes

If you were ever a fan of platform shooters and you haven’t at least heard of Gunstar Heroes, then you should be ashamed of yourself. Still, that feeling of shame will fade if you hit the PSN and download the version of it available there.

Gunstar Heroes was developed by Treasure, the geniuses responsible for Ikaruga, Guardian Heroes, Radiant Silvergun, Light Crusader, and Alien Soldier, among other hit titles. Like everything they made, Gunstar Heroes fitted neatly into a specific genre, but rose above it in so many ways.

Gunstar Heroes is possibly one of the craziest shooting games available. At the start, you choose whether you’d like to play with Fixed Shot (where your character stands still while shooting) or Free Shot (where your character can move while shooting.) You then select one of the four different weapon types, Force (rapid fire), Lighting (straight line through multiple enemies), Chaser (homing shot), and Fire (big damage, limited range). During the game, you can combine two of these different weapon types to make all kinds of new, hybrid weapons to suit your tastes.

From the word “go” you are assaulted by an unending stream of enemies who just won’t quit. Your only hope to see the end of each stage is to keep moving and shooting. Don’t stop, don’t think, just shoot and run. It’s this intense, unrelenting action element that made the game so popular when it was released, and it’s still damn good fun to play now – even more so if you play it in two player mode.

Download it right now. You won’t regret it.

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We’re used to game developers making big promises with regards to their upcoming titles, and we’re just as used to being somewhat disappointed by the final product. But every so often, a game comes along that delivers exactly what the developers promised.

Red Faction: Guerrilla is just such a game. I can remember being blown away last year in a presentation by THQ showing their new Geo Mod 2.0 engine, which would allow for the most realistic architectural destruction ever in a videogame – and I’m glad to say that the resulting game didn’t disappoint. In RF: G, you can literally tear an entire building apart, right down to its foundations. But what makes it more impressive is that the game calculates the tensile strength and weight of every brick, girder, and other material in real time. So if you don’t want to waste precious explosives to destroy a large building, all you need to do is find and destroy those key structural points, then sit back and watch as the entire building collapses under its own weight. It’s quite amazing.

To justify all this wanton destruction, you are cast in the role of Alec Mason, a miner on Mars who suffers under the heel of the oppressive Earth Defense Force. After your brother is killed, you decide to join the Red Faction, an underground resistance movement, and fight to free the Martian miners from the oppression of Earth. As the story progresses, it gets more and more interesting, even going beyond the Red Faction/EDF conflict, and providing a few good references to the previous two games, which fans will no doubt enjoy.

The problem is that you are heavily outnumbered, so that leaves you with only one option: guerrilla warfare. The game world is comprised of six huge sectors, through which you can travel freely (think Far Cry 2). To liberate each sector, you must reduce the EDF control rating in the sector to zero and complete all the story missions. In addition to the story missions, there are tons of Red Faction side missions. Completing these missions increases morale in each sector and further weakens the EDF. These missions objectives vary, but most often involve some form of EDF property destruction. There are also some interesting mini-games, like destruction challenges which require you to destroy a structure as quickly as possible using a specific tool. These challenges really strain your brain, but if you complete them, you’ll learn some of the best methods for efficient demolition.

And don’t think you can gun down every enemy you see and then take your time blowing up a building. No, in RF: G enemy reinforcements will continue to swarm you, and eventually overwhelm you. You have to get in, eliminate any immediate threats, do the job, and get out – that’s what guerrilla warfare is all about, and the developers got the feel of it just right. Luckily, if you’ve been helping out the Red Faction and completing all the side missions, morale will be high, and every time you decide to start some trouble, truckloads of guerrillas will show up to help.

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In the old days before the Internet, piracy was perpetrated via the ever-reliable sneakernet. If you wanted to pirate a game, you had to obtain a physical copy. There were various countermeasures to this – user-manual word locations, decoder rings, map co-ordinates, even hardware dongles. And for a while this worked.

With the rise of gaming to a multi-billion-dollar industry, things today are vastly different from the time of huge stacks of 3.5″ discs in a box. The number of game players and titles has increased massively, the availability of entertainment software is extensive, and the amount of money involved as a whole is orders of magnitude greater. Add to this the ubiquity of the Internet, easy access to copyrighted software, and the anonymity of online activity. The result? Spiralling piracy.

The theft rate of some games can exceed 90%, and it’s not unusual for a popular game to be pirated well over a million times. This is a colossal figure, given that few titles can hope to sell a million copies.

Let’s take a brief look at a very small sample of torrent stats. This yields the following number of times Assault on Dark Athena has been illegally downloaded so far

PC: 74 000

Xbox 360: 950

PlayStation 3: 0 (no torrents found)

The PC is by far the leader in piracy. Why is this? By virtue of its very nature, gaming on the PC implies a certain level of technical savvy – anyone able to upgrade the graphics card in their computer will know how to use BitTorrent or Rapidshare. This makes a whole plethora of illegal software available with a minimum of effort. Download a game, install a crack, and you’re set. You risk being unable to play the game online, but that is a small price to pay. Piracy on consoles also occurs, but with a crucial caveat – it requires altering the hardware of the device itself, voiding your warranty in the process. Online gaming is also affected. And with the PS3′s Blu-Ray discs, the sheer size of the data often makes downloading impractical. Consequently, casual piracy is not likely to occur with console titles.

So why pay for something if you can obtain it free with little or no risk? Let’s look at some of the ways the industry is adjusting to the rampant rise of PC game piracy.

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Love it or hate it, the popular Warcraft III map (or mod, as some like to call it) Defense of the Ancients (DotA), is a classy game. It combines tactical strategy with elements of RPG and arena-style team-based gameplay to deliver what’s ultimately a very good game. It should come as no surprise, then, that a game like Demigod would come along, borrowing liberally from gameplay mechanics found in DotA, adding in a few twists here and there, and putting it all together in a new standalone package with modern visuals.

Whether or not Demigod can hold up against DotA at this stage in its life is arguably moot. DotA has had years of updates and a massive userbase to make it the complex and flexible game it is today, but the comparisons are largely unavoidable. However, for this review, I’ll avoid the play-by-play comparisons as best as possible to save newcomers the confusion and veterans the nitpicking.

The game takes place across a number of diverse arenas in which opposing teams comprised of up to five players must do battle to accomplish one of four possible goals: destroy the enemy citadel, be the first team to X demigod kills, capture and hold a number of strategic points on the map, or destroy all enemy fortresses. To aid in this, each team has a number of automatically-spawned soldiers (or grunts) that will blindly charge forward in waves. It’s up to the players to make the best use of these grunts to accomplish their goals, all while tackling the enemy demigods and a number of defensive towers.

The eight demigods available are evenly divided into two groups: Assassins and Generals. Assassins, like the The Rook and Regulus, are powerful ‘one-man-armies’ with a variety of skills designed to dish out big damage to opposing demigods and their reinforcements alike. Generals like Sedna and Lord Erebus, on the other hand, focus on summoning their own small personal armies (in addition to the regular grunts) to play the game more like a combination RTS/RPG – their skills range from disruption to de-buffing, but aren’t lacking in direct damage either. As players progress through the game, they’ll level up to unlock more powerful skills, spells and summons, purchase new items from the shops (no item combinations here, though, folks) and even unlock persistent achievement items that provide additional bonuses and abilities.

With eight characters to choose from, DotA Allstars players might be left feeling a little short-changed coming from their massive pool of 93 heroes. Where Demigod goes off the beaten track, however, is its broad skill system that allows for loads of customisability and demigod builds that take the paltry eight to a whole new level. Each demigod is also highly unique in every aspect, from available skills to sheer size, and putting together your perfect build will require careful consideration, and experience.

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>READ NOTE

The note explains your current situation: a few weeks ago, there was a feature on NAG Online detailing the early history of adventure games, focusing on the ever-so-classic text adventure genre and the emergence of graphics in the mid-80s. Your quest is to finish this history by examining the emergence of point-n-click gameplay, the adventure gaming recession and the modern adventure renaissance.

>CHECK INVENTORY

You have the following items in your inventory:

Text adventure

Graphics

No tea

>LOOK

You notice a mouse scuttling around nearby.

>GET MOUSE

You try to grab the mouse. It bites you and scuttles into the undergrowth, taking the text adventure with it. After hunting about in the long grass, you manage to recover the mouse, but the text adventure is nowhere to be found.

The first part of this series detailed how Sierra rose to prominence in the adventure gaming world with its revolutionary idea of creating fully-interactive graphical worlds where the player actually controlled a visible avatar instead of passively viewing the scenery. Series such as King’s Quest enjoyed podium positions from as early as 1984, standing head and shoulders above the rest of the swollen market.

It was only in 1987 that somebody finally emerged with a title that could give the adventure giant a run for its money. His name was Ron Gilbert, he worked for LucasArts, and his offering to the world was a point-and-click adventure game called Maniac Mansion. It used a scripting system known as SCUMM (Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion – how delightfully creative!) that had players clicking on verb commands to combine them with inventory items or areas on the screen.

The inclusion of a mouse interface turned the entire adventure gaming world on its head: suddenly the good old text parser was discarded in favour of verb wheels and simplified, icon-based interaction. LucasArts quickly rose to prominence and went on to develop a whole whack of other awesome adventure games including the Monkey Island series, several Indiana Jones games and a Maniac Mansion sequel called Day of the Tentacle.

Some games eventually took the new mouse-and-graphics idea to the extreme, abandoning text entirely in favour of visually-driven stories without verbs or dialogue. Examples of this are games such as Myst, which was praised for its unbelievable visual quality and immersive world. It used pre-rendered 3D scenery to create a sense of realism that was unmatched by its oh-so-crude rivals – it also happened to be an incredibly cerebral experience, requiring players to think about puzzles that were a lot deeper and often based on environmental clues rather than inventory and verbs.

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It’s no secret that avid gamers are somewhat sceptical of games created around licensed properties, particularly big Hollywood movies, and there’s good reason for that. However, it’s starting to become the norm to assume that when developer Starbreeze Studios is at the helm, licensed games tend to turn out pretty damn good.

This might be because, rather than attempting to make a game that follows the script of a movie or comic, Starbreeze takes the characters and the universe and comes up with something new. Their first success was with The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay on the Xbox and PC, a title based on the Vin Diesel movie, and which was actually set well before the film, telling the story of Riddick’s incarceration in a particularly tough prison and, more importantly, how he got his ability to see in the dark. It was incredibly absorbing and it played well, which was unusual for a licensed game. Three years later, Starbreeze did it again with The Darkness for the 360 and PS3, a game bearing the license of Top Cow Comics’ dark action series about a young mob hitman who becomes able to wield demonic powers. Again, the game was incredibly polished and damn good fun to play, and by now gamers were starting to say, “Hey, these guys are pretty good at this…”

Now Starbreeze’s latest title, The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena, has just been released, and I’m glad to say that Starbreeze’s reputation for producing quality licensed titles is still solid. Assault on Dark Athena is a sequel to their Xbox and PC hit, the aforementioned Escape from Butcher Bay, and just like the first game, it truly immerses the player in the role of one of the most badass anti-heroes in recent film, Riddick. But as if that weren’t enough, included on the disc is a remake of TCoR: EfBB, which is essentially the same game all over again, but using the same updated engine and play mechanics as Assault on Dark Athena. This adds incredible value to an already impressive title, and is great for people like me, who never owned an Xbox or a decent PC and so never got to play it the first time round.

In AoDA, Riddick, having escaped from Butcher Bay, has feverish dreams aboard a transport ship headed for the ass-end of the galaxy, but wakes up just in time to hide before his ship is hijacked by a massive pirate cruiser known as the Dark Athena. After avoiding detection, Riddick follows his would-be captors onto the Dark Athena to teach them a lesson for trying to abduct him.

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>MOVE SOUTH

You are currently on the second paragraph. Various other paragraphs branch out from here: these are probably responsible for explaining the long, winding path that the adventure game genre has taken through its existence, from humble text adventures mired in the primordial goo of the late 70s to 3D epics that tempt and trap unwary adventurers today.

There is a text adventure here.

>EXAMINE TEXT ADVENTURE

There’s an inscription on the back of the text adventure. It reads, “Quite possibly the first adventure game ever was a humble text-based idea known simply as Adventure, later renamed to Colossal Cave Adventure because folks back then didn’t really know much about creative naming. People went absolutely nuts for it when it came out. It featured an ultra-advanced green on black text interface, and a fully-immersive text-based world which astounded players with the ability to type LOOK on their prompt and be treated to a verbal description of an alternate reality. For something that rocked up on the gaming scene in 1975, it was a pretty big deal.

Lookit all them pretty text effects!

“Many programmers who played the original Adventure were soon inspired to write adventure gaming systems of their own. Groups such as Infocom sprung up and released classics like The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (complete with Adams-esque humor and a fiendish Babel Fish puzzle) and the Zork series (complete with, well, pitch black rooms and grues).

“For a while, Infocom dominated the adventure gaming market, rivalled only by the occasional offering from smaller companies. Its identity became synonomous with that of an entire genre of videogames, and it treated its customers to ‘feelie packs’ with the purchase of every game: a collection of odds and ends boxed with the title that’s effectively the hallmark of today’s collector’s editions.

Today's players know better than to sniff anything that comes out of a game box.

“Some of them were gags and silly trinkets, like Hitchhiker’s pocket fluff and ‘Peril Sensitive Sunglasses’ made out of cardboard. Others, however, were devious forms of copy protection, such as the scratch and sniff cards in Infocom’s later title, Leather Goddesses of Phobos. LGOP was famous not only for being really, really naughty (as the walkthrough description goes: “LGOP is a sci-fi sex comedy adventure. This means there’s a fair amount of ravishing going on.”), but its scratch and sniff cards actually won an award for their innovative way of getting players to buy the game: at certain points in the adventure, players would be requested to scratch off a section of the scratch and sniff cards and – lo and behold – sniff it to determine a flavour which they’d then type into the text prompt.”

You leave the text adventure alone, puzzling over its curious message.

You also notice some graphics lying next to the text adventure.

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Jagged Alliance 2
Genre: Tactical strategy | Released: 1999 | Developer: Sir-Tech Software

Jagged Alliance 2 is a squad-based tactical strategy game with more than its fair share of RPG elements. Think Commandos meets Dawn of War 2‘s single-player campaign. You’ll get to create your own custom character, team up with dozens of highly-individual (and sometimes completely bonkers) mercenaries and fight your way through a huge game world in your well-paid quest to free Arulco from the clutches of an evil dictator. It’s packed full of realistic weaponry, a good dose of inappropriate humour, and bucketloads of deep, tactical combat situations. Do you assault the military weapons plant at night, under the cover of dark, but risk the loss of long-range effectiveness? Or do you go in at the crack of dawn; guns blazing, grenades flying, and civilian casualties a minor inconvenience? JA2 gives you loads of choice, not just in how you choose to handle the combat, but in your preparation as well: mercenaries can undergo training, locals can be hired to guard key locations, and even a few silver mines can be commandeered for the greater good.

Fallout 2
Genre: Role-playing game | Released: 1998 | Developer: Black Isle Studios

Touted by many as the best RPG of our times, Fallout 2 takes players into the dark future of post-apocalyptic USA. If you’re a fan of deep, intricate RPGs that offer players real choice between good and evil, as well as the thick grey line between, and can handle a generous helping of dark humour, Fallout 2 is the game for you. Its combat system might not quite be everyone’s cup of tea, being turn-based, but the level of control the system offers is almost unparalleled. Dialogue and story is a major focus of the game, seeing players thrust in the middle of conflicts between numerous factions, or secretively playing both sides. Political intrigue, weapons dealing, slavery, crude language, drug addiction, and loads of violence are the order of the day. Definitely not one for the faint of heart, but guaranteed to please anyone with half a brain in their head and a love for true role-playing games.

Duke Nukem 3D
Genre: FPS | Released: 1996 | Developer: 3D Realms Entertainment

Let’s face it, every FPS fan needs to play Duke Nukem 3D at some point in their lives. Quite simply, because it only costs $5.99 and is a mere 27MB download. If that’s not good enough for you, fine – here’s a little something to whet your appetite: Duke gets to shoot up alien pig cops with twin rocket launchers, rip the head off and shit down the throat of a massive alien, miniaturise bad guys with a shrink ray and step on them, pay strippers money to flash him, and travel to an alien spaceship to shoot up some extra-terrestrial fools with a freeze-ray. There’s also a jetpack. Sure, it’s not the most cerebral of games, but it doesn’t matter because it’s damn funny and a mindless thrill ride from beginning to end. When you’re done with the vanilla game, multiplayer madness and a ton of mods to spruce things up (including a rather snazzy high-res pack (pictured right)) should keep you killing long into the night.

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Since releasing Baldur’s Gate way back in 1998, Canadian developer BioWare has – wait. Wait, we can’t just rush blithely past Baldur’s Gate like that. Sure, Black Isle’s 1997 post-apocalyptic wasteland romper Fallout might have precipitated it all, but it was Baldur’s Gate that really dredged RPGs out of the muck and mire of two decades of SSI‘s genre abuse, and reinvested high fantasy with some much-needed credibility.

They just couldn't keep them out of the second game, though. Stupid dragons.

Diligently side-stepping any cliché-rotted narrative deadfall involving stupid dragons, stupid dragon’s treasure, other stupid dragon stuff, or any conceivable combination of these, Baldur’s Gate offered players a starring part in an authentically grand adventure brimming with intrigue, murder, and more literary stuffing than you could shake a miniature giant space hamster at.

The game was phenomenally successful, promptly spawning an expansion, a sequel, a bunch of sequel expansions, several spin-off series including Dark Alliance and Neverwinter Nights, and a grudging retrospective tolerance for those dice-toting nerds everyone used to tease at school. Perhaps most importantly, without Baldur’s Gate’s daring combination of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons and cool, there’d likely never have been Black Isle’s magnificent Planescape: Torment – a truly wretched vision of the world that might have been.

No dragons here. They're really just improbably proportioned lizards, after all.

Having staked a pretty imperious claim of genre authority, BioWare subsequently chucked all that running-about-in-forests-with-swords stuff for running-about-in-the-Orient/galaxy far far away/future-with-swords-and-guns stuff in Jade Empire, Star Wars: Knight of the Old Republic, and Mass Effect. Now, over a decade on from its first mighty foray into the Forgotten Realms, the company is finally taking the forests and swords out of mothballs and buffing them up for a bit of what Baldur’s Gate lead designer and BioWare CEO Ray Muzyka is calling, “dark, heroic fantasy”.

“We are trying to establish a landmark fantasy event. To aspire to anything as massive as The Lord of the Rings is pretty presumptuous. But maybe it’s the game version of that. It’s our reappearance on the fantasy role-playing game scene,” elaborates BioWare and Origins co-executive producer Greg Zeschuk, in a recent interview. “Also, we want to establish a different genre within fantasy. We describe what we’re doing as dark heroic fantasy. It’s not the high fantasy of Tolkien or the low-fantasy of George R.R. Martin’s works that are brutal and gritty. We are in the middle of those things. We are creating a world that turns the usual assumptions of fantasy on its head. It will use all of the great technology that we have, and have great characters and storylines. We want to create something that any fantasy fan anywhere wants to play.”

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Let’s start with the new multiplayer maps. Nightfire is set in Berlin, which has been ravaged by the evils of war. The map takes place at night and the only light is provided by the fires burning throughout. The map has many buildings to hide (read: camp) in, but the streets of the city provide plenty of room for close-quarter skirmishes and thrilling firefights. Beware of campers hiding in their hidey-holes: the limited light sources in Nightfire make it a haven for those who like to hide in the darkest recesses to get their kills. The second map, Knee Deep, takes place in the Pacific Theatre. Expect to see more of the jungle that is so prominent in the other Japanese maps featured in the game. This map also offers numerous places to hide, but at the same time there is limited visibility thanks to copious amounts of foliage, so sniping is nerfed. The final multiplayer map is Station, which (who would’ve guessed) takes place in a bombed-out subway station. This map is essentially one long firing lane that snipers will appreciate (although the debris can hurt visibility), but it has a lot of potential for some heated CTF matches.

Right, let’s get down to what you’re all here for: Verrückt. Simply put – it’s amazing and greatly expands on what made the original zombie map, Nacht der Untoten, so popular and exciting. For those of you who don’t know, the Nazi Zombie mode in CoD: WaW sees players locked in a building which is being assaulted by horrendous numbers of Undead. Players have to keep the barricades on the windows repaired (along with some walls that the buggers can break through) while taking down the zombies. Players earn cash (or points) for rebuilding barricades that have been torn down, and for killing zombies. The money can be used to buy new weapons, open up new areas of the building, or to play the “magic box”, which essentially randomly picks a weapon that players can either take or leave in the box. The objective is to survive as many waves of zombies as possible, and the game is divided into rounds, with breaks in between during which players can restock their supplies. Players also have the ability to revive fallen teammates, but it takes time, leaving the person performing the heroics at risk. Occasionally, the zombies that are killed will drop power-ups in the form of a nuke (which obliterates any nearby zombies when it goes off), Double Points (players earn twice as much cash), Insta-Kill and Max Ammo (both of which are self-explanatory).

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The evening started off much like any other, with Mr Viljoen giving us some background info and impressive figures that serve as a testament to the Need for Speed franchise. As it stands, Shift will be the 13th game in the core Need for Speed series, which has currently sold over half a million copies in South Africa alone. A proven track record, but of late the recent Need for Speed games have felt a bit bland, boring, and were overall really dissapointing. So EA decided a ‘shift’ in focus (mind the pun) was necessary in order to make the world’s best selling racing series into the world’s best racing series, a title it hasn’t worn for many years.

With this shift in focus, EA will release three different NFS titles to satisfy three different markets. There will be an online title, an arcade style title, and the premium title, which is where Shift fits into things. In keeping with the new attitude, EA has also moved the franchise away from Black Box (although they still have some input in various areas) and into the hands of Slightly Mad Studios. This company, which gave us games such as GT Legends and GTR2, has a name in the business for impressive attention to detail, so it seems only fitting that they should be given the premium title’s development, as the presented graphics attested. The game is aimed at high-end hardware, so you won’t be playing this game on a 3 year-old machine, not the way it’s meant to be played at least; and while the engine is scalable, after seeing the game on its maximum detail setting you won’t want to settle for anything less.

What EA wanted to do, according to Viljoen, is move the game back to its roots, away from the whole street racing theme, and the resulting changes are substantial. The game is focussed on driving and racing only; gone are the days of bouncing off walls when going around corners as if you were a ping pong ball. No, now we’re real drivers, and we have cars to meet our needs. Crashes will result in blurred vision (as one would expect after smashing into a wall at over 200km/h), and your car will start to show signs of damage. Pretty run-of-the-mill stuff really, until we see that continual damage will lead to a degradation in the car’s performance. The game will never fully disable the car, nor will wheels fly off while drivers are launched through the windscreen, but that was never the focus of Shift to begin with. The game is for racers, and as such keeps things competitive. Other changes include a difficulty level system, aimed at giving each user base a fun challenge. The way the difficulty levels were explained is as follows: Easy is somewhere between the old NFS games and racing games like Gran Turismo; Medium will play like Gran Turismo; and Pro will give the hardcore enthusiasts what they want, as close as it gets to life-like racing. Further features include three separate engines for the three different target platforms, PS3, Xbox 360, and PC. While they all look identical, each engine is optimised to take full advantage of the hardware it runs on. Last of the major changes is the visual style, which has shifted from artistic to photo-realistic, which is probably the most noticeable feature of the game.

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Over the years, there have been several Batman games on various platforms; while some are better than others, they’ve mostly been average. So far most of them have eschewed the darker side of the Caped Crusader’s mythology. However, since the success of the last two Nolan movies and their characteristic tenebrous feel, it is apparent that the public is not just after safe, comic-styled interpretations. Rocksteady Studios is bringing us a deeper, more visceral game based on the 70-year-strong Batman storyline with a new third-person action title. Many significant industry names are associated with the project, hopefully ensuring that Batman: Arkham Asylum will be innovative yet faithful to the franchise. Those familiar with the animated series will recognise plenty of voices – Mark Hamill, Kevin Conroy and others lend their talents to the game characters.

The game takes place in the infamous Arkham Asylum – Batman has captured the Joker at last, and is in the process of ensuring his incarceration.  However, things go awry and the green-haired maniac escapes while you watch on helplessly. You find yourself trapped in the building with no choice but to hunt the Joker down once more. This won’t be easy, as he has an army of freed psychotic inmates at his disposal, and the assistance of Harley Quinn. Other antagonists include Killer Croc and the nihilistic Victor Zazsz, both long-time residents. Other regular “guests” of the Asylum will no doubt make appearances, but you’ll have to play the game to find out who. All of the villains have undergone minor cosmetic changes to make them better suited to the game’s gloomy and visceral character, but the developers have worked closely with DC to ensure that they are all in keeping with the comics.

Arkham Asylum itself is not quite as intimidating and twisted as some of the comics have portrayed, but is nevertheless presented as a dismal and foreboding structure. The Joker and his underlings have scrawled their marks all over the establishment, and as you make your way through he will constantly taunt you over the asylum’s PA system. This is not confined to just Batman – the Joker happily mocks his underlings whenever they find themselves at your mercy.

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As time moves on, expect content from all forms of entertainment: film and DVD reviews, graphic novels and comic books, anime and manga, trading card and board games, news updates, and even a few sneak peeks inside the sanctity of Castle NAG.

If you follow the ‘Links’ button on the navigation bar above this article, you’ll be able to access additional content such as the NAG cover gallery – a collection of our prized covers, salvaged and scanned from a time long past, from the very first issue in April 1998 to the present day, with new covers added as they hit the shelves. If you’ve not yet had the pleasure, why not pay our forums a visit? For the Facebook users out there, click through to join the official NAG Facebook group and start chatting with other members of the community, as well as writers from our magazine.

Be sure to visit the site often; we’ll have new content on a regular basis, a massive feature article once a week, and plenty of competitions and hidden surprises to keep things interesting. We’ll also be providing a special preview of each new issue of NAG magazine before it’s available in stores. Feel free to sign up to the site so you can keep track of articles, post comments and take advantage of special offers coming at a later date. Please note that even if you have a forum account, you’ll need to re-register on the website in order to post comments.

We hope that you have a fantastic time and always find something of interest here at NAG Online. Building a website has certainly been an interesting experience for us, and is apparently not the exact science all those professional web designers claim it to be. Regardless, this marks the start of an exciting new journey for all of us at the magazine, and we’re proud to have you along for the ride.

-Geoff Burrows
Editor, NAG Online

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