In fact, the majority of the people I’ve encountered discussing the game are people that I didn’t even know played games, mostly because they don’t anymore. But they did 12 years ago, and IT’S DIABLO BRO.

Anyways, so I’m supposed to write about something today, and at this point it would feel unnatural and forced to write about anything other than Diablo III. So I’m going to share my thoughts so far.

I played the beta extensively a few months ago, and did a few write-ups on the various playable classes. If anything, the beta, like most betas, served only to quell my enthusiasm for the game. The gameplay was not polished, the interface not quite as slick as it should have been, and the scope of the entire experience was just too limited to really hold my interest. I’m pleased to say that most of these issues have been resolved, and Diablo III seems to be an almost perfect action RPG.

The gameplay is fluid, polished, and compelling – and really, that’s what it’s all about. I actually can’t remember the last time I had this much fun playing a game, and I might even begrudgingly admit that I’m having more fun with Diablo III than I did with Diablo II, so far. In a weird way, Diablo III is remarkably minimalist, and I love that about it.  Having spent a shameful number of hours over the last few months exploring the world of Skyrim and battling to save Mass Effect 3’s inhabitants from the mighty Reaper invasion, I find myself now expecting slow, drawn-out gameplay and long, tedious conversation paths to dominate my game time. This is not the case with Diablo III, and it’s gloriously satisfying.

After a brief but straightforward introductory cinematic, you are thrown in the world, and within minutes you are hacking and slashing your way through zombie hordes. The narrative is worked into the gameplay seamlessly, and although you are given a healthy dose of story and background content to digest, it is served in a manner which does not distract from the gameplay. This slick integration of compelling dialogue which doesn’t detract from the fun is part of the genius that is Diablo III.

The pacing is also fantastic. Within the first hour of gameplay you can expect to start creeping up on level  10. In contrast, it can take well over 10 hours to get to the same point in Skyrim. This means that your character, at least early on, develops at a rate which is remarkably satisfying. You are never disengaged, and I think this is what will set Diablo III apart from other contemporary AAA RPGs.

I’m running out of words here, so I’ll jump to my chief complaint so far, and it’s an obvious one. I’ll give you a hint; I bitched about it on this website yesterday.  Diablo III’s obvious problem right now, is that it’s ostensibly a single-player game that requires you to be online at all times, and Blizzard’s servers have simply not been up to the task since launch. Hours of being unable to connect to the game at all are interspersed with laggy gameplay and frequent disconnects. This has led to an inordinate amount of Internet rage, which in all seriousness, I think has been blown out of proportion. I’m willing to assume that Blizzard will sort out these issues within the next few days, and we will be left to enjoy this long-awaited game, which from where I’m sitting, is promising to be something truly glorious.

Have you picked up Diablo III? How has your experience been so far?

For tips on how to potentially improve your Diablo III clicking ‘n’ looting by throwing out the minimalist new-school, here’s a handy link.

Diablo III is out and people are either loving it or hating it. Personally, I haven’t made up my mind, but one thing that strikes all of us at NAG as odd, is how much of the game’s good stuff is disabled by default. Diablo III is presented in its most simple form to those who don’t take the time to dig through the game’s options, and taken at face value it’s easy to feel disappointed in the simplicity of it all. Take a few moments to do so (or just read this handy guide), and you’ll discover that it’s a lot closer to what a veteran of the series would expect.

Enable elective mode

What it means: Instead of being forced to assign skills based on their category, elective mode allows you to assign any skill to any quickslot or mouse button. It’s a lot closer to what you’re used to from previous games.

Where to find it: Options* -> Gameplay -> Interface

Disable quick join

What it means: Your friends can no longer instantly join your game in progress. They’ll first have to request an invite to your party which can choose to ignore or accept.

Where to find it: Options -> Social -> Friends and chat

Enable zoom on inventory

What it means: Get a better view of your character while you’re swapping out equipment and armour. You can also press the “Z” key to zoom in and out on-the-fly.

Where to find it: Options -> Gameplay -> Interface

Enable advanced tooltips

What it means: Skill tooltips are actually useful now. They’ll show you exactly how much damage a skill does as well as specifics about any extra effects.

Where to find it: Options -> Gameplay -> Interface

Tweak HUD options

What it means: For the number-crunchers; get a better picture of damage dealt, healing performed and enemy life bars. You can also set these on-the-fly with hotkeys.

Where to find it: Options -> Gameplay -> HUD

Quickly access salvaging or crafting

What it means: Go directly to an artisan’s services without the extra dialogue click.

Where to find it: Each artisan will have their wares laid out on the ground around them, just click on the service you require.

Set social status

What it means: When set to “busy”, friends cannot join your game in progress or even request an invite. They can still whisper you directly.

Where to find it: Social menu (hotkey “O” or click on the icon)

Use slash commands

What it means: Communicate quickly with co-op players by issuing commands like “go”, “wait”, and “take this” with an accompanying character animation.

Where to find it: The chat menu (hotkey “Return”). Type “/?” for a list of commands. Those with gaming keyboards would do well to assign macros to a few of these options. Update: Reader @Chippitsaur has informed us that many of these commands are already bound to the num pad. Thanks Chippit!

Equip your CE wings (if you have them)

What it means: Stand out from the crowd with your collector’s edition wings.

Where to find it: When you first spawn there is an item in your inventory called Angelic Wings. Right click on it to activate/de-active the wings. You don’t need to have them in your inventory to maintain the wings, but you will have to re-activate it each time you log in.

*These options are only available to you once you’ve logged in, and can’t be accessed from the title screen menu.

Cloud places you in the role of a nameless, bedridden little boy who spends his time daydreaming of flying high up in the sky. The entire game takes place inside his imagination and focuses upon manipulating the clouds. The boy can gather clouds, absorb them, stack them and rearrange them into elaborate shapes and patterns.

Not all the clouds in the game’s world will bend to your whim immediately. Some need to “converted”, and this is accomplished by letting them touch clouds already under your control. Smog clouds cannot be converted and must be eliminated by crashing them into bright clouds, resulting in pretty rainstorms.

It’s impossible to die in the game, but various levels have objectives, be it forming clouds into specific shapes, using rainstorms to extinguish runaway fires on islands, clearing smog or converting all the clouds. The overall atmosphere is extremely tranquil and Cloud is quite possibly one of the few games that is almost entirely devoid of any stress or frustration. It’s all wrapped up in bright colours and mellow music, although one cannot escape the feeling of melancholy bubbling just below the game’s surface, however subtle it may be.

The game is sadly a bit too short and could definitely do with more missions. Nonetheless, if you’re looking for a different gaming experience with nary a shred of frustration to be found, give Cloud a try.

Get it here (for Windows only).

Which brings us to Risen 2: Dark Waters. In many ways, Risen marked the clear beginning of a move away from the dedicated, hardcore RPG market into something more amenable to those with less sharpened dungeon-crawling skills. Risen 2 pretty much completes this journey.

Going into the game I was dead-set on investing myself in the story, but after a few hours I literally lost the plot and stopped caring. The 17th-century Caribbean setting went from intriguing to tiring, and the tireless reverting to tried and tested Hollywood pirate tropes began to grate my nerves.

Right, I don’t feel like writing any more about the setting and story. Suffice to say they are both sadly lacking and disappointing, and I wasn’t even expecting all that much. Fortunately these things don’t necessarily make or break a game, and I can think of a few modern classics that were loved despite failing in these areas. Sadly, Risen 2 is not quite destined to join their ranks, although the gameplay is at least a step up from the aforementioned shortcomings.

The third-person combat is nothing new, but in its defence, it works and is moderately enjoyable. Sword fighting consists of slashing, blocking and parrying, while marksmanship requires you to keep your aiming reticule firmly on your designated target. What results is a combat system that, despite being ultimately inane, is somehow engaging. It’s a bit like getting caught in a stare, or drifting off in thought – before you know it, time has passed and you are somehow left with a vague sense of satisfaction.

One of Risen 2’s strong points is the character progression, which manages to be both compelling as well as surprisingly unique. There are some genuinely interesting character skills, with one of my personal favourites being throwing salt in your enemies’ eyes! There are various different gameplay styles, from weilding powerful rifles, to sword combat and of course magic; the spectrum is sufficiently broad.

Structurally, the game is similar to pretty much every action RPG you have played before. There are story quests and side quests, and they are there in abundance. As you progress through the game, you unlock new areas, with more difficult enemies, and, of course, greater rewards. While this method has its advantages, it also prevents you from feeling like you’re part of a larger, unified world.

The game’s tone is at face value quite light and almost cartoony, so it comes as a bit of a surprise when brightly rendered NPCs tell you to f*** off. There is a degree of humour injected for good measure, but it’s not done well enough to really count as one of the game’s strengths.

Risen 2: Dark Waters is available on PC right now. You can grab it on Steam right now if you’d rather not lift your ass off your chair to visit a nearby physical retailer. The Xbox 360 and PS3 versions of the game are presently due for release in August of this year.

The game is pretty simple. You get stuff, and you make stuff with it. Most of the time, the stuff you’re getting is to make stuff to help you get more stuff a bit easier, but that’s kind of how reality works too so there’s not much of a conceptual barrier to entry. Until the monsters come, anyway, and even then, I’m sure there’s a metaphor for the human condition in there somewhere.

So every night, there are monsters in the world. It’s not a big deal if you’ve got walls around you and some sort of roof over your head, but honestly, I’m also not convinced they really add anything to the game except a pointless, and sometimes very frustrating pretence at being like other games. You know what the exact opposite of fun is? Being killed by exploding Creepers, and dropping everything you’d spent the last two hours mining in lava.

Including a diamond pickaxe.

And only then discovering you can disable monsters altogether.

A moment of silence for Picky-Sparkles. ;_;

Picky-Sparkles (pictured far right) in happier times.

The transition to console and controller has happened perhaps unexpectedly without significant catastrophe or inscrutably obvious game-breaking UI decision, although it’s necessarily somewhat behind the PC version in terms of features – there’s plenty to do, of course, but not as much as you can right now on PC. To make up for this (ahead of actual game updates, which are apparently already in the works), the Xbox version includes four-way local multiplayer in addition to eight-way online multiplayer, but how much this actually matters depends more or less on how many  of your friends want to make holes with you.

The console version also includes a tutorial stage, and while PC veterans and purists will doubtless sneer at such blatant and blasphemous HOW TOing, it beats keeping a browser page open on the official Minecraft wiki to do exactly the same thing the “hard way”.

I can’t recommend this game to everybody, ever in good conscience. I’m not even sure I can call it a “game”. But if you’ve ever dreamed of owning the world’s biggest LEGO set, then Minecraft is definitely for you. If not, you have no soul.

The key to Fotonica is precision jumping; large chasms litter the tracks and surmounting them often requires accurate button-mashing at breakneck speeds. Gain enough momentum and the world takes on a yellow glow, with the game’s audio becoming muted as the velocity alters your perception.

Littered along each course are pink blobs which serve as point-fodder. There are multiple routes to take, and with some trial and error you’ll be able to determine which routes afford the most points. There are six courses; five available from the onset, one of which is randomly generated and one which is unlockable. There are three levels of difficulty which determine how fast you gain momentum, as well as a split-screen two-player mode. If you feel a need to brag, you may upload your high scores for all to behold your skills.

Adding to Fotonica’s otherwordly feel is an upbeat electronic soundtrack with chip influences. The other audio effects – your character’s grunts, the sounds of your feet landing on the ground and the wind in your ears – all accurately convey the feeling of speed and physics that the game pulls off so well.

Unfortunately, the experience is over entirely too soon. Nonetheless, the game is a pleasant reminder of the simple joys of sprinting really fast. The author affords players the chance to choose their price, à la The Humble Indie Bundle, but you may also download it for free.

Get it for Windows or Mac here.

On top of slicing through hordes of enemies and riding undead horses, I got to speak to the game’s director, Marvin Donald. In a balcony overlooking the church’s main area (which was packed with Xbox 360 consoles), I fired off a bunch of questions about the game’s scope, the reasons why Vigil left War behind, and the shift in genre focus.

NAG: How much of the original team from Darksiders I is working on Darksiders II? When did production start?

MD: I’d say roughly 65% of the original team. We just passed the three-year mark in January, so just a little over three years. But part of that 65% number is because we’ve expanded the staff significantly to compensate for putting together a larger title since the game world is quite a bit bigger.

NAG: How much bigger?

MD: Umm, in terms of real-estate or just raw space… about three times bigger. Yeah it’s quite a bit bigger.

NAG: Well, the first game itself was already pretty big and had a lot of trekking around. So a lot more open spaces this time?

MD: Yes, but we also give you the horse right away. Getting around a larger space isn’t too much of an issue. I mean, you’ve got to travel quite a way sometimes, but like I said you get the horse right away to deal with that. It’s a much bigger space!

NAG: You’re using the same engine; any tweaks under the hood that you’re particularly proud of?

MD: There have been some improvements to the lighting system, but in general we just tried to put some polish onto how the game feels and make it feel a little more responsive in general.

NAG: Was there any hesitation leaving War behind? As a character he resonated with gamers and everyone really seemed to like him; Death is very different in attitude and approach.

MD: Yeah there was – we had some concerns because when you’re developing a new IP, you want to build the audiences relationship with the main character. But we said, “You know what? Death is exciting!” So we think more people are going identify with Death and be excited about playing Death because he just has a non-conformist, “I have my own way” kind of way of dealing with things – like a Rockstar sort of attitude. We also wanted something to take advantage of how much smoother and responsive the gameplay was. So we figured going with that more agile character would really encompass the improvements we’ve made to the overall traversal system and combat as well.

NAG: Yes, we noticed combat is much faster this time.

MD: Yeah so rather than take someone who was slow, plotting, almost more strategic and methodic in their combat style and change it to fit with what we wanted to do gameplay-wise, we figured we would take advantage of the opportunity to introduce a new Horseman.

NAG: The title implies a direct sequel, but it isn’t really. Why a parallel story? Did you head into Darksiders I knowing that a direct sequel with War wasn’t planned?

MD: I don’t think we knew we were doing that until towards the end of the production cycle for Darksiders I – it was probably sometime around the last three or four months. Going into it and making Darksiders I from the get-go, I don’t think we had committed to anything. We were definitely in a position because we had a new studio, new technology and a lot of new people working together for the first time so we didn’t really know what was going to happen. There were a lot of things we had on the drawing board originally that we wanted to do in Darksiders I and that’s probably common in most studios; you know you kind of shoot for the moon, but you don’t always get everything you want because of time and budgetary constraints and unforeseen problems. That being said, once we understood what we were capable of as a team, we were in a much better position towards the end of Darksiders I to commit. Even story-wise, because you know we’ve got to back it up with the world that goes with it, we were more comfortable committing to what Darksiders II was going to be.

NAG: Were any of the new features in Darksiders II meant to originally appear in Darksiders I?

MD: Yes! Being able to run up walls vertically and bounce back and forth between them, is one that I can think of off the top of my head. Wall-running also.

NAG: So those were dropped to fit with War’s less agile approach?

MD: Well, that’s kind of a convenient reason but honestly we had enough going on with Dakrsiders I and we felt the suite was fairly complete. We’d played around with wall-run in particular but we hadn’t quite refined our ability to place it in levels and make sure that the players can see. Because you’ve got to use flat surfaces and in Darksiders I a lot of the dungones were hand-built maps, but in Darksiders II we use a lot of repeating assets so we have more flat surfaces to deal with. So we kind of piece things together like a system of LEGO essentially. We do our best to make sure the rooms look like they’re hand-built, but in all honesty the artists are making individual pieces and then they’re exporting and bringing them into the editor where they put them together so that the dungeons end up being the final product. I think because of that we have a way of controlling what the surfaces were going to be like and how often you were going to see them. When you’re in a situation and an artist and a designer are building a whole entire dungeon and exporting it all at once, you end up with a lot of unique, one-off areas that require some massaging and touching. Whereas when you’ve got a system that’s procedural, you only have to make your adjustment one time and it’s propagated all over the place. So it made things like that more flexible so wall-run was a little more possible.

NAG: Tell us more about the Crow that follows Death.

MD: He’s a guide system that we’re still working on, but essentially he’ll show you which way to go when you’re lost in a dungeon. When you have a quest, typically the mini-map will guide you to the location you need to go, but once you get to the door of a given dungeon that’s for that quest, the mini-map system won’t guide you and it’s up to you to figure out where to go. But we still wanted something relatively subtle to kind of guide the player along – so ambiently [the crow] will perch and land on things that you should take interest with. You can actively summon the crow and he’ll appear near you and fly in the direction you need to run. That way we feel that we’re not beating the player over the head with the answer so there’s still some exploration and figuring out what to do. In some cases he’ll land on top of a door that you can’t open yet and you have to figure out what you have to do in that room, but at least you know that’s the door you need to go through.

NAG: So the crow is a silent helper this time; was that a conscious decision because the Watcher was very vocal in his guidance in Darksiders I?

MD: We wanted something a little more subtle. Artistically and creatively we just thought Death looked really cool with a crow on his shoulder, so it worked out pretty well.

NAG: There’s a definite shift from an action-orientated adventure to almost an action RPG. When was that decision made? What sparked that change in direction?

MD: Right from the beginning. A lot of us are fans of those games and we wanted to take more of what we look for as consumers, and evolve the product so that it was all encompassing and more of a complete experience; something that grows and feels unique to each person. Players will have a lot more decisions to make about how they want to customise their character, and we think that’s a lot of fun. Choosing the gear that you’re going to have; choosing the stats that you want to elevate; which skills you want to use. In Darksiders II you can’t get everything. There’s quite a bit of randomness so you’re going to feel like you’re the only person that’s got that combination of gear.

NAG: In terms of item quantities, just in the half an hour of hands-on so far, the loot drops are coming thick and fast, so is it a constant trickle of new items?

MD: We’re going to have to do some fine tuning on how quickly you acquire things so that you feel there’s some value there. It’s just one of those things: fine-tuning and balancing will be happening right until the very end.

NAG: So are loot drops and items all randomly generated then?

MD: No, we do have some hand-designed items too that have unique abilities that won’t show up on the randomly generated gear. So whenever you get something we call a Legendary Item, it’s something that’s special. But that’s not to say that some of the randomly generated stuff isn’t awesome; we’ve got a tier system so depending on the colour of the name, what the description is and the level of the item, it’ll go up in power. So not knowing what you’re going to get when you kill someone, when you take out a boss or whenever you’ve got a chest and you open that up, there could be something cool in there too.

NAG: What are you most pleased about?

MD: That we have a ton of content! There are more NPCs, more characters that you’re going to meet; it’s a slightly more complex story that I think is a little bit more interesting this time. Our cinematics are all rendered in real-time, which we had to do because of the loot system so when you’ve got a pair of gloves on or boots or whatever, we wanted to make sure you’re seeing that version of your character. This time I think we’re doing a better job of storytelling in general. I like that we’ve expanded it to include another horseman so that the universe is bigger.

NAG: You mentioned the other Horsemen. We won’t meet any of them in this one, will we?

MD: Umm, no comment.

NAG: In terms of gameplay time, how long do you think an average playthrough would take?

MD: Twenty plus at least.

I’m going to be completely honest here: if this game did not have a half-naked heroine in it, it would have disappeared into obscurity, never to be played by ninety-five percent of the people who actually wound up playing it in the first place.

“But Miklós, surely it can’t be that bad, because bewbs?” I hear from the stalwart hack-’n'-slash junkies, so allow me to elaborate on my previous, canine excrement infused analogy – chocolate sauce, nut sprinkles and all.

In Blades of Time, you take on the role of Ayumi, “the ultimate female treasure hunter” who appeared in 2009’s X-Blades, making Blades of Time a spiritual successor of sorts. For reasons unexplained, Ayumi and her partner Zero attack the Treasure Hunter’s Guild (which Ayumi apparently belongs to anyway – go figure) to gain access to an orb that acts as a gateway to the Dragon Lands – an island crammed with loot and a veritable Mecca for treasure hunters. Naturally the Dragon Lands aren’t all rainbows and gold doubloons and in next to no time Ayumi is forced to start hacking things up with her swords.

Blades of Time was a frustrating playthrough largely because there was occasional evidence that some thought and love went into the development. The game’s “hook” is a Time Rewind mechanic which allows Ayumi to be in multiple places at once, as each rewind creates a copy of her doing whatever action it was before you hit the rewind button. This leads to some rather neat applications when taking down larger enemies such as Skyguards. It also allows you to “spawn” multiple copies of Ayumi to hack up enemies in unison, which is rather satisfying the first few times. However, the ability to rewind time is occasionally taken away from you for no apparent reason and normally when you’re forced to face large groups of enemies in confined places. This haphazard removal of the game’s main feature is never made clear, but I’m assuming it’s a means to (artificially) increase combat difficulty; it doesn’t work.

A hack-’n'-slash game is reliant on a decent combat mechanic, which is something Blades of Time cannot really boast about despite the game’s official website claiming a “deep combat system”. I consider Bayonetta to have a deep combat system; Blades of Time doesn’t come close.

As you land attacks you’ll fill a Rage Meter. As the meter reaches a third and then two-thirds of the way up, you’ll fill two separate Combo Seals at each point, which then allow you to execute one of the unlockable combo moves. Fill the meter all the way and you’ll earn a Health Recharge token to use whenever you need; you can keep a maximum of three Health Recharges.

As mentioned, you can unlock various combo attacks that result in fire, ice and other effects, but they generally yield identical results only with different colours and different particle effects. Combos are unlocked at altars found throughout the game and you use little glowing orbs as a currency – I think, because you’re never told what these orbs are. You’re also never told how to collect them, how many you have or how much each unlock costs – it’s really just a half-hearted attempt at staggering ability unlocks and adding pseudo depth to an already shallow combat system.

I played the entire game by spamming the same attack string: slash with swords repeatedly until Rage Meter fills up a Combo Seal; execute flame combo; hit Right Bumper to execute an enemy the moment one enters critical state; rinse and repeat… for about ten hours. Incidentally, that’s pretty much how you beat the handful of boss fights as well, give or take a few minor adjustments like substituting a flame combo with an ice combo.

What’s more, all too often combat dissolves into a flurry of blurry confusion as the game’s temperamental camera battles to keep up. Adding to the confusion is the fact that there’s no on-screen indication that you’re taking damage; there’s no flash of red in the direction of your damage’s source, which means you constantly have to shift your eyes from the actual fighting to check your health gauge at the top left of the screen. That, coupled with incredibly fast enemy attacks, means that combat can go either way, whether you’ve beaten the enemy type a hundred times or not.

On top of swords, Ayumi has space for a gun as well as a ring and medallion. There are numerous variations of each item to find, but while they claim to do things like “increase fire combo damage”, I never noticed a difference as a result of swapping any equipment type. This means that you’ll eventually stop bothering to loot hidden chests, because the equipment you find doesn’t really do anything – not even on a purely cosmetic level (weapons excluded).

In terms of the game’s presentation there are some positive elements: it’s nice and colourful and environments are varied, but often at the expense of narrative feasibility as you move from the Dragon Lands to a planet in outer space and then back to some islands. It’s all rather convoluted and confusing. The characters themselves are a mixed bag and it’s almost as if three separate artists had their own vision for the game. Steampunk human pirates, weird alien races (that look like a mix of Chaos Marines and Protoss), and primitive zombie islanders don’t really gel all that well. The result is a game world that has no identifiable artistic direction, and the title suffers for that.

Another negative point I have to raise is about the terrible voice acting. Ayumi does not shut up and she’ll keep you cringing from start to finish with her inane monologues. Enemies have equally terrible voice acting, and the main Skyguard characters are possibly the worst. For a start it’s impossible to understand them without subtitles because their voices have been distorted beyond audible comprehension. Dialogue gems such as: “time ist nothing thou dost not understand” as well as my personal favourite, “betwixt truth and falsery” will make you want to jam shards of glass into your ears.

Gaijin definitely skimped on the audio budget because the game has about two pieces of music that play for every level. It’s not until you hit the last few stages that you get treated to a new audio track. It’s all generic schlock that adds nothing to the already lacking atmosphere.

If shallow combat systems, questionable character design and God-awful dialogue aren’t all bad enough, the game has some dodgy bugs that forced me to restart checkpoints on occasion. On top of that the collision detection is appalling and at times the frame rate takes serious dips when particle effects become all too much.

I’m not entirely sure what Gaijin Entertainment was going for in Blades of Time. The game sits somewhere between budget rubbish and an honest (but failed) attempt at rebooting a forgettable IP. Unfortunately, it tends to lean more towards the budget rubbish side, and in the end it comes across as an utterly uninspired hack-’n'-slash that relies on the sexualisation of its main character in order to gain attention. The fact that Gaijin’s own website describes Blades of Time as having “charm, banter and mystery all tits [sic] own” pretty much says it all. Although I’m not entirely convinced by the “charm” part.

The player has limited interaction with the environment via the mouse, but much of the gameplay is focused upon typing out statements, questions and responses. What you tell the couple and how they respond will directly influence whether or not they’ll reconcile, break-up or literally throw you out of the apartment in disgust.

Each time you play, the conditions will be different. Your responses to events might be interpreted differently and Grace or Trip may or may not have had past affairs. At the very beginning, you are given a chance to choose your name and gender from a predefined list, and this too will have correlation towards the game’s outcome, particularly if your actions are construed as flirtatious.

Occasionally, a title will pop up that will make you question just exactly what constitutes a “game”, and Façade is one such example. It’s surprisingly interesting to try to influence this obnoxious, bickering couple, even if most of the time you’ll just be testing how far you can go before you become so offensive that you get the boot.

Get it here.

The creator, Hideki Kamiya, stated that they were originally working on a new Resident Evil game, but didn’t really feel like doing another one and experimented with different styles of gameplay. The result was Devil May Cry, a fast-paced action game with a heavy focus on stylish fighting. It was also very difficult compared to other action games of the era, but was popular enough to spawn two sequels on the PS2 and another on the PS3 and Xbox 360, with a fifth sequel – sorry, prequel – for our current consoles due out sometime soon.

This HD collection rounds up the first three games to tide us over until the release of the new DMC later this year. The original Devil May Cry is, as far as I’m concerned, the most brutal of the lot. The famous demon hunter, Dante, armed with his trademark sword and gun combination, heads to a castle on an abandoned island to stop the resurrection of the Demon King, Mundus. Along the way, there are thousands of enemies to fight, a few different weapons to collect, new attacks and abilities to learn, and big, tough bosses to defeat. Devil May Cry‘s style-focused gameplay is a bit less refined here than it is in later installments, but it’s still very challenging, especially since the enemies – even the standard ones – are downright merciless.

Devil May Cry 2 is kind of the black sheep of the collection. It was clear that Capcom had heeded the cries of the wimps and toned the difficulty down a bit – but many hardcore fans felt that it was entirely too easy. It was true, but it was clear that Capcom was starting to get the hang of creating stylish action games, and Dante now sported all kinds of cool attack animations and flashy abilities, like wall-running, firing in two directions at once, and being able to shoot in a full 360-degree arc while falling in a downward spiral. Very cool. We also had the option of playing as a female demon hunter called Lucia – but she just wasn’t as cool as Dante.

And last but not least is Devil May Cry 3. While still not quite as hard the original, it was a welcome challenge after DMC2, and the new ideas, weapons and fighting styles that Capcom introduced made this prequel to DMC1 immensely good fun. The over the top cut-scenes and young Dante’s dauntless attitude were also a hoot to watch

If you’re an action game fan and you haven’t ever played at least the original Devil May Cry, then this is a perfect opportunity to man up and take your rite of passage.

Players take on the role of Murphy Pendleton, a convict in transit who ends up stranded in Silent Hill after the bus carrying him crashes in the nearby woods. To make the most of his premature parole, he has to find a way out of town, which is easier said than done, since the place is completely cut off by huge chasms and creepy monsters are skulking about. The few civilised people he meets seem to be completely out of their minds and he’s not entirely sure about his own sanity.

The setup is classic Silent Hill, but the differences start to creep in pretty quickly after that. For starters, the game is rather open and unexplained. Once you get into the town proper, you can go pretty much anywhere and it’s hard to figure out what you’re supposed to be doing or whether you’re doing a side quest (there are optional side quests in this one) or something critical to the plot. This may have been intentional, to make players feel lost and confused, but it does lead to long stretches of nothing much happening as you wander around, trying to find something to do.

The enemies are different too. They’re generally a lot more human-looking and not as grotesque or bizarre as we’ve come to expect. They can be a bitch to fight too, and not because the combat system is bad (it actually makes sense this time, being able to block and all), but because the melee weapons break after a while – entirely too quickly, if you ask me. And why, oh why, does an iron crowbar break at all? How strong is Murphy exactly? And what are the monsters made of? Damn! The periodic trips to the “other world”, a Silent Hill trademark, are also quite different. They’re not as disgusting and disturbing as before – you can see they’re trying to be – but it comes across more  hallucinogenic, like something out of Alice in Wonderland, and on an artistic level, I kind of like it.

Among the bad points are that it’s hard to tell how badly injured Murphy is and when to use a health kit. He walks and runs entirely too damn slowly for the amount of exploring we have to do, and the game experiences micro loading pauses constantly at bizarre times (on the PS3 version, at least). The journal and map features are also fiddly as hell.

But as a whole, though, I kind of enjoyed Silent Hill: Downpour. It’s got some interesting new ideas to offer. They didn’t all work that well, but it’s nice to see a developer trying to deliver something fresh.

At the outset, players must create a four-character party from a ragtag group of prisoners. There are four races and three classes to choose from, and it takes maybe five minutes to mix and match stats before you venture off into the spooky, dank corridors of Mount Grimrock.

The first thing I noticed about Legend of Grimrock was the tile-based movement system, something I had not encountered in a ridiculously long time. This is an obvious tribute to the games which inspired it, and it’s not a design feature that will sit well with all gamers today. Your party is organized into a 2×2 grid formation, and you can interchange their positioning on the fly.

The second thing that stuck out for me is the way the story is told. There are no cut-scenes, nor are there any wall-of-text quest descriptions – two narrative devices which are seemingly a constant in RPGs. Instead, Legend of Grimrock tells its tale dynamically. You will find notes scattered around dungeons, seemingly left by some previous adventurer who was at some point stuck in the exact same predicament as you are. When you rest your character, you will hear a voice in his dreams. This voice and the notes you find are all you really have to go on in terms of figuring out exactly what is happening, and it works exceptionally well.

Legend of Grimrock’s gameplay primarily consists of puzzle solving and combat. The puzzle solving portion of the game was a strong point for me. Puzzles are challenging and varied, and most importantly, provide a deep sense of satisfaction upon completion. Combat is also enjoyable, and will be immediately familiar to anyone who has played the likes of Might & Magic. Battles are intense, and require a degree of tactical awareness, although later on it becomes apparent that the only way to succeed is to constantly kite enemies around pillars and corners, which becomes a little tedious.

The magic system is an interesting beast. It is never really explained, and you will have to refer to the digital manual that comes with the game if you want to use spells effectively. Basically, casting a specific spell involves dialling a corresponding combination of runes. As you level up you unlock new spells, but figuring out which spells require which combinations requires experimentation. It’s not the most streamlined or user-friendly system, but when you get it working it becomes incredibly satisfying.

Going into Legend of Grimrock, I was a little concerned that the locations would become tedious. It’s a dungeon crawler, so you can expect to see a lot the same scenery repeated over and over in mild variations. Unfortunately, this is probably a reality, and the mild tweaks to the tile sets as you progress through the game do little to make things look or feel interesting.

Fortunately, the combination of excellent puzzles, mostly enjoyable combat, a confusing but rewarding magic system, and an excellently told story ultimately make Legend of Grimrock a very enjoyable, rewarding and satisfying experience, especially for the $14.99 price tag.

Legend of Grimrock is available on Steam right now.

With that in mind then, I’ve compiled this and other super strategies for win-screening Mass Effect 3′s multiplayer mode in this conveniently relevant Mass Effect 3 multiplayer mode guide. Hit the jump for the win.

"Where's my microwavable ladybug beanbag thing? I have cramps."

Firstly, let’s look at this by the numbers:

• There are three difficulty levels, awarding 15,000 (Bronze), 30,000 (Silver), and 60,000 (Gold) XP for completion respectively.
• Each mission is 10 waves plus one bonus wave. Most of the XP is awarded at the end of wave 10, although there’s extra XP if you survive the bonus wave.
• Extra XP is also awarded for weapon- and ability-specific kills, headshots, revives, and whatnot.
• Character levels max out at 20. Characters under level 10 should not attempt Silver or Gold difficulty. More on that later.
• Completing a mission also boosts the game’s shared campaign Galaxy at War Galactic Readiness rating, meaning you need fewer War Assets to add to your Effective Military Strength number, which in turns has an impact on the game’s ending.

PLAYS WELL WITH OTHERS

Just like a real counter-offensive, Mass Effect 3′s multiplayer mode requires close cooperation and communication between players. Go with a headset or go home, and then you can tell your mother the entire universe is being overrun by angry sentient robots because you don’t know which vowels go in “team”.

Also, stay close to your teammates and use cover. Don’t be the guy who goes down on the other side of the map under a churning mass of Reaper Brutes and Cannibals, leading tragically but no less inevitably to what is now known as the Firebase Dagger Domino Death Effect.

The team that’s comprised of a mix of classes and weapon / ability loadouts is the team that doesn’t go home in N7-branded bodybags, so get this organised in the lobby. Basically, never deploy without big guns, biotics, and somebody who has Overload, Sabotage, or Energy Drain.

KNOW YOUR ENEMY

There’s an XP boost for letting the game decide where to put you, and what to put you up against when you get there, but if you’re going for Silver or Gold, it’s a better idea to choose so your team can prepare properly. The XP bonus isn’t worth anything if it’s all over at the end of wave 3.

Cerberus and the Geth are much, much easier enemies than the Reapers, mostly because between the Brutes, the Ravagers, and the Banshees, everything can end very instantly on harder difficulties, whatever the plans of mice, men, and the Human Systems Alliance – best laid or otherwise.

If you’re determined to take on the Reapers, though:

• The Brutes have a weak spot on their spinal columns, and their armour is easily damaged with Incinerate and Carnage.
• Ravagers are also very vulnerable to Incinerate and Carnage.
• The Banshee will pursue a single target at a time. Use this to your advantage, and have your teammates flank her while you avoid her charges, and/or move backwards, attacking her. Her biotic barrier is particularly weak against Overload, Energy Drain, and rapid-fire weapons, but be aware that, because she doesn’t have a health gauge, some abilities – including Pull and Stasis – do no damage to her whatsoever. Do not let her get too close, as she has a one-hit mêlée kill. As a last resort, a Cobra missile will send her to Banshee heaven.

For Cerberus:

• The one enemy you really have to worry about here is the Phantom. Have an Asari Vanguard or Adept spec’ed for Stasis to counter their speed, or even incapacitate them. A maxed  Overload or Energy Drain blast can knock out their barriers in one shot too.

And Geth:

• Winners spam Energy Drain. The Sabotage ability is also fantastic here, and saves on bullets.

Maps are a more personal preference thing, maybe, but I’ve won more games on Firebase Ghost than any other, and by a significant margin. The map’s abundance of corners make for a quick escape when things go wrong, the multiple elevations can be exploited to slow down enemy pursuit, and due to the layout and structures, objectives are rarely out in the open.

THE RIGHT TOOLS FOR THE JOB

When it comes to buying gear, you should divvy up most of your cash between Recruit and Veteran Packs, and only blow out on a Spectre (or special) Pack if you’ve got loads of extra buckazoids. The Recruit Pack almost always includes helpful stuff like Cobra missiles, Medi-gel, and ammo mods that can make a huge difference. A seventh Salarian Engineer, not so much.

That said, I’ve bought one Spectre Pack, and it had a Carnifex in it. Score. I don’t have a reason to buy another one.

Don’t waste ammo mods in Bronze difficulty – save them for Silver or Gold instead, when they actually matter.

If you’re feeling brave, taking only a single weapon massively increases your power recharge time, making you more versatile in combat if you rely on a mix of weapons and abilities. An Infiltrator who can recloak every few seconds is a much more useful Infiltrator than an Infiltrator who also packed an assault rifle.

KNOW YOUR LIMITS

If you’re starting a new character, bump it down to Bronze difficulty unless you want to spend most of the next four waves on your knees. Before the game ends. And everybody hates you. Forever.

MONEY MONEY MONEY

The faster you complete objectives, the more cash you’ll bank for it. The hacking objective is completed faster when everybody is in the target zone, so don’t break it unless it’s an emergency. Again, map choice is important here.

TIME IS (ALMOST) ALWAYS ON YOUR SIDE

Unless you have an objective to complete, there’s no time limit, so take things nice and slow. It’s always better to run away strategically withdraw and regroup somewhere else than die in a sad, soggy little heap just because somebody was in a big rush to impress everybody else.

If you go down, don’t use Medi-gel to revive yourself unless you’re about to get stomped by an enemy. It’s better to have Medi-gel and not need it then not have Medi-gel because you used it the moment you went down right next to three teammates. True story.

You are cast in the role of the titular girl who awakens six months after an alien invasion to discover that civilization has collapsed, most of her loved ones are dead and that her body has been cybernetically modified. Being trapped inside a complex that is infested with the aforementioned alien invaders, Iji receives instructions via intercom from her brother Dan – barricaded in a control room – who acts as a guide but nonetheless has an agenda which is not entirely clear at first. Acting upon Dan’s directions, Iji sets off to deal with the extraterrestrial menace, be it through reason or by force. We’ll get to the “reason” part shortly.

The game is, fundamentally, a Metroid-style RPG-platformer. Upgrading Iji’s cybernetic enhancements is a central theme and will greatly influence the game’s outcome. Points are earned which are spent in stations scattered around the complex. There are several fields available for upgrade, including the ability to “crack” doors and crates, use more complex alien weaponry, carry more health and even combine different weapons. It’s completely up to the player which category to focus his or her points on, but each level only affords a certain number of points to spend, thus forcing the player to carefully consider purchasing and upgrading decisions.

The abundance of choices mean that players can instead choose to go a passive route. With the exception of a few bosses, you can avoid killing most of the beings you encounter, and this will affect Iji’s mental state as well as how you are perceived by the aliens. However, opting for this particular style of play takes considerably more time and patience, as Iji gets caught in the middle of an intergalactic war between two rival species – the Tasen and the Komato – who are entirely too trigger-happy. Nonetheless, the option to face Iji as either a twitchy shooter or a stealth game provides enormous replay value, as does the abundance of secrets and character logs which fill in the backstory.

Iji‘s control is, for the most part, spot-on. You walk at a slow pace and are able to jump slightly, which is upgradeable. Iji can grab ledges and ride alien vehicles similar to the speeder bikes from Return of the Jedi. However, a major issue is that you are only able to shoot left or right. It doesn’t detract too much from the game’s overall enjoyment but it does feel a bit cheap and clunky not being able to fire shots upwards or while in midair.

The music is second-to-none, featuring a mixture of rock, industrial and ambient that truly sets the tone for the menacing and desolate atmosphere inside the game’s endless halls and rooms. The sound effects are a tad on the generic side, even with the synthesized alien voices, but they serve their purpose well.

Visually, the game has a look heavily reminiscent of early 90s titles such as Flashback and Another World; Iji employs a simple, lineless style and relies on contrast, fluid animation and colourful particles to bring the experience to life. Sadly, the locations are bland and one floor of the complex looks pretty much like the next. Some more variation would have gone a long way to making this title stand out even more.

Iji has a surprising amount of depth for a freeware title and will appeal to fans of Delphine Software’s games or anybody looking for a platform that raises the bar just a bit higher.

We had limited hands-on with an earlier version of Diablo III at BlizzCon in October last year. Thanks to the folks over at Megarom, we got some time with the current Diablo III beta. The full game (which started development in 2001), is already available for pre-order and launches on May 15. Hit the jump for some brief impressions of Diablo III‘s current state.

We tried all five character classes (Witch Doctor / Barbarian / Wizard / Monk / Demon Hunter) up to level 13, through the first Act up to its concluding fight with the Skeleton King. The Blacksmith, one of the two Artisans, was available for breaking down weapons for components and crafting new gear from it, and we could fiddle with the Auction House using “BetaBucks”as a stand-in for real money. Hosting and joining multiplayer games was enabled, as were some beta-specific achievements, mostly there to add flavour.

Two things stand out, being the largest departures from Diablo II: the skill progression system and weapon stats. Instead of a skill tree for spending points to unlock new abilities and their upgrades, you’re simply given a new skill every few levels. The World of Warcraft influence is clear. Occasionally, you’re given a Rune unlock for a skill that modifies how the skill works. You can change which skills you have equipped into one of six slots at any time, each slot having access to three or four abilities (unless you enable Elective Mode which allows any skill in any slot). All skills rely on weapon stats such as damage and speed, making weapons feel more like accessories to improve skills.

Even this close to launch, things change often. The order in which you gain skills, the difficulty, frequency and amount of monsters, and the values on random items.

Some may see the new skill system as a step backwards and too simplistic. The way weapons are devalued into trinkets needed to improve skills, perhaps to force trading them on the Auction House, is of mild monetary concern. The real issue is how playable Diablo III will be from South Africa, since even its single-player is played online via Blizzard’s servers. Some people have claimed the beta “unplayable” others that the lag is “barely tolerable”. Even when playing from the United States (as I was), there were times the lag made me “rubber-band” back and fourth across the screen, even when playing by myself.

No Player vs. Player

There will be no player versus player at launch. Blizzard claims they had difficulty balancing the system. It will be added back in later via a patch. We had some hands-on time with the PvP at Blizzcon 2011 and it was quite a bit of fun. It reminded us strongly of the multiplayer in Westwood Studio’s forgotten Nox (2000).

When PvP is finally added back in, players will duke it out in special arenas using their campaign characters, earning advancement points which unlock multiplayer achievements and titles. There will be ranked and unranked gametypes, both with automatic matchmaking.

But the man deserves your respect, because despite his recent antics, he is credited with creating some of the greatest and most important video games of all time, including Dungeon Keeper, Populous, Magic Carpet, Syndicate, Theme Park and Black & White. In more recent years, he has been absorbed by Microsoft and forced to make only Fable games, but that’s all about to change, because he’s just announced his imminent departure from Microsoft and Lionhead to found 22Cans in partnership with former Lionhead CTO Tim Rance.

Molyneux started working in the video games industry almost accidentally in 1982. He was distributing and selling floppy disks, and decided that as a value-add he would put Atari and Commodore 64 video games on them. At some point he realized that the games were actually the primary selling point of the disks.

The first game Molyneux actually created was called The Entrepreneur, which was a text-based business simulator which sold two copies – both of which are no doubt collector’s items today. The game’s failure hit the ‘Neux hard, and he retreated from game design to start Taurus Impex Limited – a company which exported baked beans to the Middle East.

Commodore International made a fateful error by mistaking Taurus Impex for TORUS – a network software development company. As a result, Commodore gave Molyneux ten free Amiga systems to help him port his network software. Molyneux kept the hardware and used it to develop Acquisition – The Ultimate Database for The Amiga, which went on to be fairly successful.

Using the money he made from Acquisition, Molyneux started Bullfrog Productions, which essentially marks the dawn of his legacy in game development. Under Bullfrog, Molyneux conceptualized Populous, which is credited with being the first god game for PC. Populous sold over four million copies, which was massive at the time, and it paved the way for the developer’s continued success, which involved classics such as Syndicate, Theme Park and Magic Carpet before Electronic Arts bought a substantial share of the company.

As a result of EA’s acquisition of Bullfrog, Molyneux became a vice-president and consultant for the publisher. Under EA, Bullfrog continued to release great games, all powered by Moyneux’s vision, including Dungeon Keeper, Theme Hospital, Populous: The Beginning and more.

Molyneux eventually left Bullfrog and EA in 1997 to found Lionhead Studios. His vision for Lionhead initially rested on the Black & White IP, which is considered yet another one of Molyneux’s classics. Microsoft Game Studios eventually acquired Lionhead in 2006, and the developer has since been churning out games in the Fable series for Xbox 360 and Windows.

During his time with Lionhead following its appropriation by Microsoft, Molyneux became famous for over-hyping games leading up to their release. He would describe new features and ideas that often did not show up in the final game, and would even go on to admit that he had a tendency with getting carried away with his ideas.

Sadly, in recent years the icon has done little to inspire the sort of devotion that he earned in his earlier days as a developer, but his plans to leave Microsoft and join 22Cans can be taken as a good sign. In various interviews he has admitted that he did not feel like he could do his best work with Microsoft, and he indicated that this was a primary reason for leaving the company.

Molyneux plans to leave Lionhead and Microsoft upon completing Fable: The Journey.

It would be so obvious to describe Draw Something as a Pictionary clone, but it isn’t. I mean, at some fundamental level – you draw a thing, and the other person guesses what it is – it’s the same, but there’s no board, no time limit, no penalty for guessing wrong, no desperate circling and re-circling of apparently incomprehensible details while the other person stares blankly at the paper, and basically no rules.

It's more like a show 'n' tell of your imagination. Or your childhood traumas.

When it’s your turn, you choose between three words of increasing complexity, tagged with one, two, and three coins respectively. That’s the prize for both players if you draw whatever it is and your partner manages to work out, and you can save them up and buy new colours or bombs that eliminate some of the possible letters. That’s pretty much it. It’s also pretty much meth – easy to get into, hard to get out of, and you’ll see a lot of terrifying, shameful, and completely inscrutable stuff on the way.

Like this.

The game is conspicuously lacking a number of otherwise obvious features, though, including some kind of option to save drawings or to put a turn on hold while you move onto another one. The interface design is also questionable, with the menu to buy more colours only actually appearing in your turn, and the letters covering up part of the image.

Gripes aside, Draw Something is a simple, fun time-waster for pocket change, and that’s really the whole point.

The game comes in a free (ad-supported) and a premium version, with the latter adding 400 coins to your piggybank and 2000 extra words for just $1, and lets iOS and Android owners play nicely with each other. There’s really no good reason not to get this instantly.

Still, those musings faded away pretty quickly when I started playing the game, and realised that it’s probably the best version of MGS3 to date. This is not because it’s in 3D, not at all. The 3D is nice, don’t get me wrong – occasionally I’ll turn it on to gawk at it and keep it turned on until I either don’t notice it any more or get tired of holding my 3DS at just the right angle – but no, the real charms lie elsewhere. For starters, Snake Eater 3D allows players to use the 3DS’s Circle Pad Pro add-on – and believe me, you don’t want to play it any other way. Not only do we get two analogue nubs to use, but the developers have taken full advantage of it.

For starters, we can aim and fire properly in either third-person or first-person mode, and Snake will actually point his gun where the camera is looking. Finally! Snake can also move while aiming and walk in a crouch, which is an unexpected but welcome inclusion from MGS4. I can’t even begin to describe how much of a difference that makes – I actually want to go through the entire game and collect all the unlockables again, and considering that I played MGS3 more than any other game in the series, that’s really saying something. I had hoped that the PS3 HD version would have included these kinds of enhancements, and I was disappointed when it didn’t.

Apart from that, though, it’s still the same game we all remember – which is no bad thing. Players must still guide Solid Snake’s predecessor on a covert, sneaking mission through the Russian jungle to rescue an asylum-seeking Soviet scientist who is being forced to work on a new doomsday weapon. To remain undetected, Snake must change his camouflage to suit the terrain (apparently he carries an entire laundry hamper with him). He must also hunt for food to sustain himself and perform field surgery on his injuries. Good fun. There are also a few Nintendo-centric easter eggs thrown in and a much more streamlined inventory and map interface using the 3DS’s touch screen.

There’s not much more to say. It’s a huge game on a small machine, with plenty of stealth and survival action to enjoy, dozens of secrets and jokes to discover and an entertaining, if ridiculously anime-like story to follow. Anyone looking for an in-depth 3DS title won’t be disappointed.

The latest is Birds of Steel from Russian indie developer, Gaijin Entertainment. Set during the Second World War, it allows players to take control of  over 100 authentic Allied and Axis aircraft and take part in some of the most intense air-to-air and air-to-ground skirmishes of the era. There are also tons of one-shot missions, custom missions and online events you can take part in once you’re done with the main campaign.

The main campaign has three parts, the pre-war era and the Pacific War from both the US and Japanese perspectives. The pre-war era has no combat at all, but contains several tutorials which – believe me – you want to go through. These tutorials explain not only the controls, but also the limitations of the planes you’ll be flying. Without that knowledge, you’ll stall and spin out of control constantly without knowing why or how to fix it. The flight phsysics, even on the easiest difficulty setting, are fairly realistic, and even simple things like a barrel roll or Immelman turn must be executed carefully under the right conditions. And as if that’s not enough, you have to take off and land your plane. Taking off is quite easy, but landing is a bitch – especially on an aircraft carrier. Most players will gnaw their controllers practising this.

Once you’re confident that you can at least take off, fly and land without dying, you can enter the last two parts of the campaign. They’re short, but action packed and allow players to engage in several historical battles on each side of the Pacific War. The objectives are about as varied as you can get with a flight sim, requiring you to dogfight enemy planes and make dive bombing or torpedo runs. Unfortunately, you don’t get to create a pilot with a career who can earn medals and such, which does leave us feeling slightly disconnected from it all – especially given how you can take control of any friendly plane in the sky if you’re shot down or run out of torpedoes. There’s also a selection of solo custom missions you can fly and 16-player online battles to engage in.

The atmosphere is great though, especially when flying through a sky full of enemy craft with flak explosions all around and planes dropping out of the air. The planes rattle and creak realistically and the cockpits are immensely detailed. The only real problem is that I don’t see a lot of console gamers having the patience to put up with the intense realism and harsh difficulty.

Note: XCOM is how we write the new game’s title and X-Com is how we write the original game’s title. Gaming journalism is more art than science really.

NAG: What was the most important thing you wanted to bring across from the original games?

PM: If you ask five X-Com fans what the ten most important things are in the game you get a list of about 600 items. A lot of the commonality you hear about is: it’s got to be turn-based combat, it’s got to have a strategy layer where you can reverse engineer the alien’s stuff so you can use it against them and you need to have soldiers you can rename after your friends so that they can die (laughs). After that the field opens up considerably. What we spent time focusing on was that feeling that you get from the original game, the dread of “I’m going into a situation where I don’t know whether I’ve got the gear, or the skills or the right people for this.” Or “oh my God this invasion is happening faster than I expected it to.” Remember that really great pace the original game had? You’d be in the Geosphere advancing time and a research project would finish so you go back to the lab and choose something else, then you move time forward and the engineer would come back; so for somebody who’s experienced X-Com it’s immediately going to have that familiarity… you know, “yes, I recognise this game.” So that’s a good way to answer not exactly what you asked (laughs). XCOM is a game about the feeling it evokes for you and how you respond to that and your ability to generate plans and force your will out there.

The original UFO: Enemy Unknown (called X-Com: UFO Defense in some territories).

NAG: Were you inspired by or did you research any wild theories about aliens at all?

PM: Yeah, Jake [Solomon, lead designer] has an extensive collection of ufology but it begins and to some degree ends around X-Com. People would be really upset if we didn’t put Sectoids in the game for example. But even those aliens in the original X-Com were to some extend based on existing alien tropes. The developers kind of made up their own little world and you could read tech reports on the aliens and a lot of that was a product of the popularity of The X-Files [at the time]. Some of that does change over time so maybe our aliens have a little bit more of a 2010 feel to them than a 1990 feel to them. I can’t give any specific examples because the Men in Black have a file about “that” thick on me and we’re not allowed to reference specific aliens.

We asked Pete to stand next to some ‘appropriate’ books for this photo.

NAG: Is the emphasis on your XCOM game fan service then?

PM: Yes and no. Jake is the biggest fan of the game I’ve ever met. I thought I was a pretty big fan of the game and then one day I had a discussion with him about [how] you don’t build fusion ball launchers for your fighters ever and the necessity of establishing laser cannon economy at the first opportunity and I realised I knew nothing and I realised I was in the presence of a master. So as a huge fan of it, Jake is putting a lot of things that were important to him in the game. I think people are fans of X-Com because of the unique experiences [they have] in that game. You know, you’ve got one soldier that’s useless and on one mission he panics and he shoots and hits the Imperial leader and that’s the moment you remember; that’s what people loved about the game is that all of these [random] things happen [good and bad]. Having a game that can do that, you know that people will go to each other and say this happened in my game last night. That’s what we’ve got lined up for people.

This was bleeding-edge gaming in 1993/4.

NAG: So, for someone who isn’t familiar with X-Com, character involvement would be one of the key hooks?

PM: Yeah, that was for me one of the coolest parts of the original X-Com games, you start with this group of soldiers and at the beginning of the game your casualties are horrific; you don’t have any armour; you have inferior weapons. You’re eating plasma at every possible opportunity and at some point in the game it occurs to you that you’re putting the same group of soldiers on the dropship for more and more missions and their names start to become familiar to you. Anatoly Yaakov [for example] has lived for four or five missions now, I’m actually beginning to get attached to her and at that point because of the experiences you’ve had with them those otherwise faceless soldiers take on personalities. Now with the skill system and the classes the longer you have these soldiers the more effective they become at their job [so] when someone dies it makes a huge difference. Somebody can be a key part of your entire strategy for how you go after missions and you lose them and suddenly you’re down a key piece of your arsenal. You get invested in them and talk about them as your heavy or your sniper. It’s a function of spending time with them and what [also] helps is seeing them in the base. [In the ant farm, for example] when you have somebody who for whatever reason is perpetually playing pool and then they die and they don’t show up playing pool anymore. It’s weird but it works and was one thing that really surprised me when looking at the ant farm (the base). Jake is a huge proponent of ironman mode, where you don’t reload saves, you just play the hand you were dealt with. Everyone on the team plays ironman as a point of honour and there are days where I’m like who cares about honour, I don’t share an office; nobody will know (laughs).

NAG: How does the ant farm work?

PM: As you build modules for your base they’ll appear in the ant farm view. There’s a bunch of stuff, there are some satellite uplinks, a couple of different power plants, and an alien containment unit. There is a base schematic where you can plan where you’re going to build things. There is actually a strategy to how you build in that view as well, so certain kinds of power plants are more effective when they’re built next to each other. The thermal power plant only works if you build it over a steam vent so there’s a whole art and science to how you build your base.

NAG: Can you tell us a little more about the researching of alien technology?

PM: It’s a huge part of the game and you need the stuff you collect from them, so when an alien dies its weapon falls apart into weapon fragments. You need those fragments not only for researching new classes of weapons but frequently for production for your own stuff as well. One of the elements from the original X-Com was salvaging as much as you could from the alien ships and the missions you went on because that was the raw material you turned into your own weapons and materials and things like that and that’s still there [and very important to the whole game].

NAG: Is the development team built from people who worked on the Civilization games or did you get new people in?

PM: Yeah, there are a lot of people who did work on the Civilization games and we also hired some people because we were looking at areas that were new to us and need people [who] had skill sets that fit really well with what we wanted for our team. Jake held weekly play sessions (beer Friday) where he’d bring people into a room and he’d watch them play the original X-Com and talk to them about what they were doing. One of our concept artists actually never played X-Com before and turned into a huge fan of the original game. That really helps because everybody is on the same page.

NAG: Could you tell us about the random nature of each game?

PM: The alien invasion proceeds on its own timetable so they’re going to be invading Earth as they do. The maps you’re going to experience are different as you play through; there are a ton of maps in the game, and they’re all hand-designed to be awesome. [For example] you’ll play through twice and not ever see the same map twice. All the different mission variants also increase the playability of those levels considerably. So the game will have a different feel every time you play, you can vary the continent where you start your base on too and that will give you different advantages or disadvantages. Again, because of the game design you’re never going to be able to explore the entire tech tree in a single game, so you can always go back and say “well last time I researched weapon fragments first maybe this time I’ll research alien materials or xenobiology first and see where that goes” and “do I get things that are more useful or affect my play style better or worse?”

NAG: Games are a much more intricate storytelling medium today than they were when X-Com was released. How much emphasis is there on storytelling?

PM: There’s a little more structure then there might have been back in 1994. It was very easy to be unaware in the original X-Com of whether or not you’re making good progress towards an end state in the game. With this [new game] we want to let players know that there are things they can do in order to progress. That said the alien invasion occurs on its own timetable and new forces are going to show up as and when they do and if you’re not ready for them you’re going to be completely screwed.

NAG: What is the key hook for players who don’t have any reference to X-Com at all and perhaps don’t play many strategy games but are keen on sci-fi?

PM: It’s a really cool game about saving the world and you’re saving the world not just because you’re in a base saying “research this, build that,” but you are going into the field with your troops and you are making a plan and you are imposing your will on the enemy. There are also some elements that will appeal to RPG fans, especially as you have soldiers who have skills that level up, and you must also think about how the different classes work together. The individual elements aren’t particularly complicated but they combine in a real cool way. The combat system starts out as a really simple thing but when you add abilities and equipment slots that give you different new abilities and the inventory system that then ties into that and that’s tied into your manufacturing and that’s tied into your research which is based on the things you bring back from missions, you get this really great meaty mix of things happening in the game in regular cycles.

So why should you care about Age of Empires Online? Well it’s free-to-play, and it’s in many ways a modern rebuild of the basic Age of Empires with a focus on being massively multiplayer. What’s not to like, right?

Don’t let the cartoony visuals fool you. Behind the array of over-exaggerated, primary coloured pixels lies a rather deep, complex and even “hardcore” combination of MMORPG and RTS gameplay. The levelling and crafting systems, along with the focus on gear will be immediately familiar to anyone who has played pretty much any MMORPG, ever. Then, the basic gameplay, which entails managing villagers,  building structures and amassing armies will resonate with veteran Age of Empires fans.

In many ways, this genre mash works very well. Your capital city serves a similar function to an MMORPG’s main character; it equips items which affect your combat capacity, and you can even decorate it to some extent – not that doing so makes any practical difference. Sadly, city layout bears little relation to the efficiency with which you accumulate resources, and it feels like Robot Entertainment missed a trick here.

Players engage in combat by taking on quests, which are obtained in cities. The quests are usually of the “build a base, amass an army, kill the other guy” variety, but there are also more interesting quests on offer, from camel racing to some which resemble a mini tower defence game.  You can invite other players to partake in quests cooperatively, which is a nice touch.

Completing quests rewards you with new gear and experience, both of which are used to customize your civilisation. This is one of Age of Empires Online’s strong points. Being able to tune your army to your liking and play with different strategies gives it welcome depth and makes for a wholly satisfying gameplay experience.

When the game launched there were reports of lacklustre AI, with poor basic pathfinding being a regular complaint.  This seems to have been fixed, and for the most part I was pretty happy with the way my units behaved. Having said that, the AI is nowhere near the likes of StarCraft II, but then Age of Empires Online is not trying to be a hardcore, refined, competitive strategy game.

One of the most promising aspects of Age of Empires Online is the PvP. Until now, there have been complaints of a lack of players, but with the game’s inclusion on Steam we can hope for a fresh influx of new blood. PvP games are fun, and the only gripe I currently have is that the outcome of most games is largely determined by which player has better gear. While this is core to the nature of the game, it’s something that should become less of a problem if and when more players get involved because it will be easier to find more evenly matched opponents.

Despite some flaws, I quite like Age of Empires Online, and I can easily see myself investing significant amounts of time in it. The mixture between RPG and RTS mechanics works well, and it’s more than just a little addictive if you give it a chance.

Just remember, while it masquerades as a free-to-play game, many of its best features are locked until you pay for the booster packs. So if anything, consider the free-to-play experience a very comprehensive demo.

Shinobido allowed players to choose which missions they’d undertake based on the risk, monetary reward and the pros and cons of remaining loyal to or double-crossing your employers – rather than presenting us with a linear set of stages to play through. Shinobido 2: Revenge of Zen for the PS Vita picks up shortly after this game, and the province of Utakata is once again war-ravaged and in need of a ninja’s touch to break the stalemate. This time, players take on the role of Zen, a ninja of the Fuka clan who is out for revenge against a traitor who murdered his lover – and thanks to the power of plot-convenience, working for the three feuding warlords is the quickest way to achieve this.

The game is almost exactly like its predecessor, with one or two minor changes. The hopeful warlords still fire arrows with letters attached into your hideout, telling you the specifics of the missions they’d like you to undertake and the rewards they’re offering. Choosing and working for a single warlord increases their military strength, provisions and their opinion of you. This is achieved by rescuing their captives, protecting their VIPs and safely transporting important items or provisions. Working against a warlord, by murdering their generals, stealing their provisions and capturing VIPs, will make them weaker and affect their opinion of you – if they find out, that is.

The beauty of it is that you can actually see the affects of your handiwork in the game. If you deliver a new weapon design to a warlord, his soldiers will be equipped with that weapon, giving them an edge when they fight their enemies – or you, if you ever need to go against them. If you steal a warlord’s provisions, eventually his soldiers starve and will be distracted from their duties –  and be more likely to eat poisoned sushi. This tangible validation of your efforts is one of the game’s biggest charms.

That is not to say the game is without a few gremlins. The combat still sucks. Your ninja may be a great assassin, but in a fight, he’s a complete pansy. If you don’t have any grenades or potions – run away. The camera can still be ill-behaved in close quarters and the grappling hook, one of your primary tools, must be handled with care.

And that’s Shinobido 2, folks. There are many more intricacies I could mention, had I the space, but hopefully I’ve intrigued just a few of you enough to give it a try because, really, there’s nothing else quite like it.

This could actually just be a free bacon stampede. It's kinda hard to tell.

You! Are! Runner 5! The new Runner 5, mind you, because the old Runner 5 ran into a bit of trouble back at the old hospital, and swapped running for shambling. Permanently.

Anyway, your mission is to, basically, run. Run, run, run. And pick up stuff and keep running, because there are zombies coming up on your six, and Abel Township really needs those sports bras you just put in your backpack. Think of those poor women with no adequate support! Just when the post-apocalypse couldn’t get any worse.

The game is dead simple. Using your iPhone’s GPS tracker, the game keeps tabs on you – including where you are, where you were, and where you’re headed – and from time to time, dispatches a zombie mob to make sure you’re not slacking off. When you hear the brain-eaters breathing down the back of your neck, run faster.

A story of sorts plays out in between the zombie mobs and your special customised zombie holocaust playlist, with a bunch of people talking to you and telling you what to do via radio transmissions. I assume some shocking conspiracy involving the government, the military, and an experimental bioweapon accidentally leaked from a subterranean silo somewhere will be uncovered during the course of the game, because it wouldn’t be a pretend zombie holocaust without one. Again, it’s just practice for the real thing.

Random items are collected automatically at intervals along the way, including medical and communications gear, weapons, food, and even undies. When you’ve completed a mission (or even if you’re taking a mid-mission break), you can divvy this loot up between Abel Township’s buildings, which eventually levels them up and presumably makes them more effective at… undies. There’s not really much point to this, but it’s nice to know you’re doing your bit for zombie resistance.

But does it work? Fitness games don’t exactly have the best track record when it comes to, you know, actually getting people fit. The thing about Zombies, Run!, though, is that it doesn’t take rearranging your entire lounge just for a 20-minute workout – you put on your joggers, jack into your phone, and go-go-go, even if it’s just a few laps around your flat. It’s brilliant. I had no idea I could even run, but it turns out zombies are a super incentive – and after less than two weeks, I’m already pushing 1.5km at a time. Look at me, mom! I’m all ready for the real thing.

Zombies, Run! is currently available on iOS, but will apparently see release on Android as well very soon.

It’s been almost nine years since Tribes: Vengeance (2004). The series started with Starsiege: Tribes in 1998, and gained modest popularity part in thanks to its unique (and initially unintentional) movement system.

While Vengeance was decent enough, a falling out between the developer and publisher denied it its first important patch, and the franchise fell by the wayside. Much to everyone’s surprised, Global Agenda developer Hi-Rez Studios picked up the license and now we have Tribes Ascend.

A science-fiction themed first-person shooter, Tribes pulled off a decent squad-based multiplayer game with customizable weapon loadouts. The “ski” mechanic that popularized Starsiege: Tribes evolved out of exploiting the game’s rudimentary physics. After flying high into the air using your jetpack, by tapping jump at just the right time when hitting down on an angled surface, you could build up serious forward momentum. Travelling at such high speeds dramatically changed the approach to Capture The Flag.

For Tribes 2, original series developer Dynamix took the “ski” idea and ran with it. Skiing was incorporated into the movement system, bringing with it new tactics and mobility options. A feat rarely rivaled even today, Tribes 2 also supported 128 player matches (64 vs. 64), and had full bot support to fill out teams.

“FREE” TO PLAY

Tribes Ascend is very much the distilled and quintessential Tribes experience, but with one major caveat. In the same way Hi-Rez Studios manages their free-to-play first-person shooter Global Agenda, so too is Tribes Ascend a “freemium” product. It’s an online-only game, so no LAN play unfortunately. The game client is free to download and you can play its main modes (Team Deathmatch, Capture The Flag, Arena) as much as you like. However, only a few classes are unlocked from the start. To earn the rest of the classes and unlock more weapons, items and perks, you need to earn enough experience points, gained by playing.

When selecting your class and loadout, you can see clearly how much experience or gold is required to unlock content.

And here’s the trick: the experience required to unlock things is artificially high. Not unreasonably high, but just high enough to make you consider paying real money to unlock them faster. Tribes Ascend follows the popular “pay to get stuff faster” model: you can purchase packs of Gold which let you unlock what you want, right now, without having to wait.

While this may offend some, it’s not an unfair business model, considering the game has no cover charge. If you pay $60 up front to purchase gold, you get just enough to unlock most if not all of the classes and some of their weapons and perks. The game is still in beta, so some things like vanity skin packs for the player models, and additional weapons and perks, are still in development.

If you’re patient, and content with playing the starter classes until you’ve collected enough experience to unlock the rest of what you want, it’s amazing what you get while paying absolutely nothing. It all boils down to how much you’re willing to pay for your impatience. Thankfully, Hi-Rez decided to be fair and everything  (except perhaps the upcoming vanity skins) can be bought with experience.

GOTTA GO FAST

The heart of Ascend is Capture The Flag. While Team Deathmatch and Arena (5 vs. 5) are indeed popular, the focused objective of capturing and returning with the enemy flag while defending your own is where the game’s mechanics come together.

Both sides start in their “base”, which contains the flag, a few automated defense turrets, a sensor array and a generator. The defense turrets can be upgraded using credits you earn during a match, which improves their tracking ability and damage. The sensor array can also be upgrade, improving how far out it will “ping” enemies, alerting you to their location. The generator powers the turrets, sensor array and player-deployed utilities like small turrets and scramblers. If the generator is destroyed, everything goes offline and your base is highly vulnerable. You can repair the generator, turrets and so on, either by being a Technician class which starts with an improved Repair Tool by default, or by using the Repair Tool found inside the base, which replaces whatever weapon your holding when you pick it up. You have to return to an Equipment Station to get your original weapon back. Equipment Stations also go offline when there is no power due to the generator being offline.

Powered by Unreal Engine 3, the visuals are lush and detailed, with a decent framerate on modern systems. You can adjust the graphical quality to suit your tastes.

While a base does have considerable defense, including a vehicle station for ordering Grav Bikes, the flying Shrike jet or a Beowulf tank, these defenses are no match for a high-velocity player intent on grabbing your flag. Even fully upgraded, the defense turrets have a hard time shooting down someone coming in at 200+ kph.

Players need to be proactive in their offense, diligent in defense and if you have someone capable of chasing down the high-speed enemy that just took your flag, even better. The various classes all have abilities that support these various issues, such as the heavy-armour Doombringer and its Force Field deployable.

When placed, the Force Field will block incoming weapon fire and damage any enemies that pass through it, proportional to their current speed. Placed at just the right spot, the Force Field can turn an incoming high-velocity enemy into a sudden flash of red mist before you even realize their were there. It’s hilarious to watch.

There are nine classes in total, three per armour class. Each one different enough to matter, but not overly complicated to master. Experience earned in one class can be used to unlock weapons for another, while perks are global when unlocked and upgraded. Perks are permanent passive bonuses when equipped, you can equip one Primary and one Secondary Perk. Some perk effects include increasing the range at which you can grab the flag, how quickly your shield regenerates, or getting extra credits or ammo from taking out enemies.

VGCA = AWESOME

The quickest and easiest way to communicate in Ascend, if you’re not using a voice-over-IP program like TeamSpeak or Mumble, is the “Voice Game System” or “VGS”. Hitting the “V” key brings up a main list of catergories and their appropriate shortcut keys, selecting one brings up a sub-menu where appropriate, and so on, until you find what you’re looking for. Unreal Tournament and Planetside have a similar system.

Infiltrators can become invisible, and often attack your generator. The Technician class can deploy Sensors that will temporarily de-cloak the invaders.

An example would be hitting VAC (Voice, Attack, Chase) quickly, which will result in “Chase the enemy flag carrier” being sent to your team, both as a text message and as a voice sample. The text message with also include the VGS short-hand in brackets, so other players can quickly learn what button combinations results in what text. The series “swearword”, Shazbot, will likely be the first command most people learn (VGS = Voice, Global, Shazbot).

You can still type regular text messages to the global chat and to your team, but when you’re busy running away from pursuers and need to focus on where you’re going without moving your hand off the movement keys, the VGS represents a very capable system for requesting assistance (VDM = “Cover Me!”), or when you need to offload the flag to someone else (VFT = “Take the flag from me!”).

If someone abuses this system, you can mute them from the TAB key scoreboard. There is also a Spot system for calling out targets. If you’re looking at an enemy, hitting the Alt key will mark their position in 3D space in the playfield, and alert your team to their type (Light, Medium, Heavy) and where they are (“Behind our base, inside our base, in the mid-field” and so fourth).

The maps vary in design and colour scheme, from the dusty dunes of Sunstar, the lava peaks of Temple Ruins and the cool blue ice valleys of Katabatic.

GETTING UP TO SPEED

For new players, Ascend has a basic tutorial that teaches you the fundamentals of ski movement, while context-dependent tooltips pop up to let you know about other elements. If you’re looking at a Defense Turret, the tooltip will let you know they can be upgraded, and “Press G to Upgrade Turret” will appear on your HUD. A more in-depth tutorial mode explaining the various classes would be useful, but it’s unclear if Hi-Rez plans to expand the tutorial system. You can free-roam on any of the maps to explore and find good ski routes, while a Ski Jump challenge map lets you practice getting some hang-time as you hit a giant vertical target that marks how high you hit it last time your passed through it.

Learning how to move around quickly, traversing the terrain in the most optimal way, is important in Ascend. Walking around is slow, and unless you’re a heavier class defending the base, you’re going to want to be skiing everywhere. Trying to take the enemy flag while walking on the ground is considered a “llama grab”, heavily mocked by the more veteran members of the community. Hi-Rez even released a Dead Island parody trailer called Llama Island, celebrating the “llama grab”.

Overall, Ascend isn’t a difficult game to learn. There are plenty of classes to cater to a wide variety of playstyles, and when the Ranked Battle system goes online when the game leaves beta, that will move some of the more caustic elements (overly-serious gotta-win-at-all-costs players) out of the general rotation, making it easier to experiment without feeling pressured. Possibly the most difficult thing to come to grips with is learning to lead your targets by a much larger margin than is conventional.

When you and your opponent are both travelling at high speed across rolling hills, Newtonian physics have more control over your projectile weapons than you might think. When shooting an exploding disc from the Disc Launcher, its lateral movement will be influenced by your own vector. It makes for some exciting jousting though, since your opponent has the same problem to content with. There are many tricks to learn, such as using the Disc Launcher to give yourself an added boost up slopes, provided you’ve equipped Perks that negate the splash damage from the Disc exploding.

ONWARDS AND UPWARDS

Ascend isn’t complete. The Ranking system isn’t active yet, Arenas only have two maps right now, and the overall class/weapon balance could do with a lot of fiddling. The Friend system constantly has issues, such as not letting you join a game in progress that your friend is already in, and you can’t manually select which servers to join (it’s entirely automated, you select what game-type you want and it puts you in a queue).

And yet, even in its incomplete form, Ascend shows a lot of promise. One example is your personal Player Overview section which houses all your match statistics, class usage, accolades earned and (eventually) your Match History. Hopefully Hi-Rez will take this information and provide players with a web-based version, much like Call of Duty Elite.

There is no replay function yet, and it’s unclear if High-Rez aims to add one. The ability to record matches and upload them to YouTube would be amazing functionality, and let’s face it, exporting to YouTube should be a standard in all multiplayer games by now.

Even so, Tribes fans can finally play a modern take on the franchise without having to spend any money on it, and a new generation of gamers can see what all the fuss is about. The high-speed action and weird mobility won’t suit everyone, that goes without saying, but what Tribes Ascend represents is something you won’t find anywhere else.

The Tribes Ascend client is at least a 4GB download, so be warned.

In this third and supposedly final chapter, the Reapers make their existence and intentions known to all sentient beings and it is up to you to rally all races in the universe to resist the impending genocide. Easier said than done as one would suspect, because despite the threat of complete annihilation, old hatreds and quarrels complicate what would otherwise be a straightforward task. The respective races somehow believe that divided and watching out for none but their own presents them with better odds of survival than banding together.

Within this simplistic setting, one finds themselves reacquainted with old friends, enemies and everything in between. The decisions made in the first game have weight and although diminished against the choices made in Mass Effect 2, it’s impressive that BioWare has managed to track all of that in your various save games and as such have presented the most seamless transitions between games I’ve ever seen.

Unlike in any other game I’ve played, the gravity and subsequent urgency of the Reaper threat in Mass Effect 3 is presented in a way that makes it almost palatable. This game is dark, much darker than one would expect especially after the pacing of the previous games. With every side mission you undertake that isn’t directly related to preparing the galaxy for the war, nations die while entire races are wiped out. The conversations and news reports you hear in passing serve as a constant reminder of how grim the situation you face really is. In previous games, you and your team’s arrival on any battlefield usually ended with you overcoming the enemy and saving the day. Shepard and co were pretty much the untouchables, able to better swarms of enemies, organic and synthetic alike.

This time, the game will have none of that. For the first time you truly grasp the limitations of you and your team facing a concerted effort to eradicate all life in the galaxy. Many times, you will find yourself fleeing the battle, only concerned with achieving the mission objective which very rarely has anything to do with you saving anyone. This is a war and the Reapers are winning. With immeasurably more and superior firepower, the effectiveness of the guns at your command is inconsequential. As Commander Shepard you must find courage in situations where you yourself are unsure if there is any hope. The galaxy looks to you to save them, against a threat you had repeatedly warned them about before, but fell on deaf ears despite your insistence and evidence.

Mass Effect 3 is well written, it’s brilliantly timed, it looks incredible and while the story is notably more linear than before, this title stands head and shoulders above the previous offerings. Shepard is faster, more agile, has more abilities at his disposal and has a sharper and more balanced team. For instance, you are no longer faced with a disproportionately high number of Biotics, but instead are offered fewer and more competent members that ensure you don’t miss any of the old squad in battle.

It is true that your squad members from Mass Effect 2 had more depth (as well as more lines), but then again one could argue the game could afford such character development as the galaxy was relatively peaceful. This is no longer the case and six months after the Collectors were destroyed, the galaxy is in turmoil and whatever psychological difficulties your team members had, they have to take a back seat to their survival instincts.

Without a doubt, Mass Effect 3 is a fantastic game, easily the best in the series by far. The only downside to what would otherwise be a flawless masterpiece is the ending sequences which are nothing if not peculiar. It’s not so much that all your choices are funnelled into a limited set of outcomes but more importantly, none of those choices really matter. The ending is the same for all choices, all equally incoherent, introducing plot holes where there were previously none. Imagine if you will, in The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, Frodo and Sam arrived at Mount Doom and they morphed into crime-fighting Transformers. It sounds absurd indeed and it is, but it’s the best way to describe how Mass Effect 3 is ended. It potentially undoes everything not only this game did right, but the previous titles as well.

It’s what prevents this game from being a 95/100 title. It only managed to score as high as it has because of the compelling and thoroughly engrossing narrative. Despite BioWare’s valiant attempt at diminishing the entire experience in the last mile, Mass Effect 3 is still the most gripping science fiction RPG experience in the last ten years. A bold statement certainly, but one that I do believe is justified. Play this game; even if you play it so you can reach the bitterly disappointing end, it’s still worth it, because the ride there is nothing short of brilliant.

Whether we’re talking psychedelic futuristic racers like F-Zero and Wipeout, drift-happy street racing like Ridge Racer, Midnight Club and certain Need for Speed titles, or the beautiful chaos of Motorstorm – as long as it’s not boring and realistic, I’ll give it a try. I also have a soft spot for those simple, quirky little racers we haven’t seen too many of over the last 15 years. Things like Iron Man Offroad, Micro Machines, Rock ‘n’ Roll Racing, Revolt and Superkarts, you know? Cute little titles where there’s not a lot more to them apart from accelerating and steering.

So, when I saw that there was a MotorStorm game on the PSV, I assumed it was another standard game in the series and didn’t pay too much attention. I like MotorStorm – don’t get me wrong – but I still have to get around to finishing the others. It wasn’t until I was browsing the PSV’s store that I saw that it costs only R55! Intrigued, I looked closer, and noticed that it was, in fact, one of those rare, quirky little mini-racers I enjoy. The RC clearly stands for “radio control” – clearly I’m the only one who didn’t figure that out the first time I heard the title.

So I bought it (hell, it was only R55) and gave it a decent play. It’s exactly what I though it would be, a simple little racer in which you race radio controlled replicas of the popular MotorStorm vehicles, like trucks, muscle cars, rally cars and buggies, around cute little tracks themed on the previous three games. Each type of vehicle has wildly different handling characterisitics that will affect how you approach each turn on each track and… that’s about it. Seriously, there is nothing more to this game than accelerator control and proper cornering. There’s no boosting, no destruction, no weapons, nothing. The only addition is a button to reset your little car to the track if you get stuck on scenery or end up on your roof.

General opinion seems to be kind of down on the game, and I’m not sure why. Maybe people expected more, or maybe they can’t get used to the idea of controlling an RC car from a fixed, floating camera. I didn’t have any trouble with it. I’m a child of the video game age, after all, and I find it to be a fiendishly addictive little gem.

There are enough races to enter to keep you busy, plenty of cars and tracks to unlock, and online leaderboards and ghost data to keep things competitive and interesting – and for R55, you could certainly do a lot worse.

It wasn’t long before Zipper Interactive obliged me with Unit 13, a standard  military shooter that offered everything I was looking for. Strangely enough, the fact that you can control the action with two analogue sticks on a handheld system seems to feature prominently in the marketing material for this game – almost as if they don’t want us to forget. And just to get it out of the way – yes, it works like a dream.

Anyway, the game proper is divided into four modes: Solo Missions, Online Cooperative, High Value Targets and Daily Challenge. The Solo Missions mode is probably where most players will spend the majority of their time. Their are 36 progressively more challenging missions players can unlock and play as they progress. The missions come in four varieties: Direct Action, Stealth, Deadline and Elite.

Direct Action plonks players in a mission with several objectives to complete, like killing targets, finding items and so on. Stealth missions simply require you to not raise any alarms. Deadline missions are tense affairs that require you to complete several objectives before the time runs out. And lastly, Elite missions are brutal assignments where your health doesn’t regenerate and dying puts you all the way back at the beginning.

Online Cooperative mode is self-explanatory, and it allows you to tackle the 36 missions with the help of a partner. It only works via Wi-Fi though, not 3G, obviously. However, if you have a 3G model, the game will automatically download the top scores and upload your ranking data to the PlayStation Network – so you are still connected and competitive, in a way. The High Value Targets mode contains nine tough, unlockable assassination missions. These are brutal missions with a strong enemy waiting at the end.

The last and most interesting feature is the Daily Challenge mode. One random mission is uploaded each day that players can download and tackle (on 3G too). Each player gets exactly one chance to play it, and their final scores are uploaded to the global leaderboard, giving it an awesome competitive edge.

The are six operatives players can use in each mission, each with their own starting equipment and skills. As you complete missions, they’ll level up and gain new skills and access to better weapons and gear.

About the only disappointing thing about Unit 13 is the lack of an ad-hoc multiplayer mode, which would have been awesome. That aside, however, it’s one of the PSV’s most entertaining and meaty titles currently available for action fans to tear into.

That might be because boarding games, be it skateboarding, snowboarding… wakeboarding… whatever – well, they generally have a lot in common with fighting games, requiring a similar amount of concentration, timing and co-ordination to excel at. I don’t play them all, but I generally pick up one or two in each generation to satisfy the occasional craving.

EA’s SSX series of snowboarding games has been one of the big contenders for the last decade or so, and it’s easy to see why. Who wouldn’t like the idea of screaming down massive, steep mountains, catching crazy amounts of air and pulling off as many tricks as your fingers can handle? Okay, nobody would call them realistic, there’s a lot of physics defying going on there. The sheer height you can get out of each well-executed jump is insane and nobody in reality would be able to land safely from some of those, even if they were landing in nice, soft snow – never mind landing on a rock-solid rail of some kind. And the unexplained boosting, where your character can surge forward at ridiculous speed, even on an uphill, as if they’ve got rockets strapped to their back? Yeah, we just have to kind of accept that it’s there – but who cares? It’s fun!

In keeping with current tradition, EA’s first instalment of their long-running franchise for our current consoles is simply called “SSX” – although it doesn’t seem to be a reboot or anything. I haven’t exactly played any of the previous games, but the small amount of story the game provides does seem like it’s following on from previous titles. Anyway, it turns out that some self-styled snowboarding daredevil named Griff is traveling around the world, conquering the most deadly mountains in each continent for fame and fortune. This gets up the nose of former SSX competitor and extreme sports-loving tough chick, Zoe, who decides to put the old SSX team back together, complete with a few new faces, to catch up to Griff and show him that he ain’t all that.

Really, the story just exists as a reason for players to go through the World Tour mode, which is essentially a glorified tutorial, introducing you to the various mountains in the different countries and the several different runs on each one. It also gives us a little bit of story insight into the lineup of drop-dead sexy, attitude-packing designer daredevils we can play as – and it’s hilariously over-glorified. I keep expecting to hear a narrator suddenly chime in, “This is the world of Peter Stuyvesant!” Or something. As players progress through World Tour mode, they’ll be able to unlock all of these characters one by one and also get a taste of the various event types and the conditions for winning them.

There are three main types of events. The first is the standard race events, where the goal is simply to be the first to cross the finish line. You’ll need to do a few tricks along the way to fill up your boost gauge so that you can go faster, and finding out how to do that while sticking to the fastest line is where the skill comes in. The second is the trick events, where your sole aim is to perform as many flashy, crazy tricks as possible in succession, all the way down the course, for the biggest possible score.

The new, third event type are the “Deadly Descents”. In these white knuckle runs, you get to race all the way from the top of each mountain down a hazard-filled course, and your only real goal is to survive it. If you can squeeze in a trick or two along the way, well, good for you. Each Deadly Descent has its own signature hazard that you’ll need to outfit your rider with the correct gear to survive, like ice axes to maintain control on ice, flying-squirrel suits to cross deadly chasms, and oxygen masks to breathe in certain areas.

Once you’re done with the World Tour mode, or if you’re confident that you don’t need any instructions, you can head to the meat of the game. Explore mode is where most of your single-player exploits will take place. You can choose any of the runs on any of the mountains in any country and race or trick your way down them to earn money to buy better gear and level up your characters. You can also upload your best scores to the online leaderboards.

Global Events mode is where the online multiplayer aspect comes in. There are always huge events with massive pots of money up for grabs that all players around the world can compete in. There have been some complaints about the lack of a true multiplayer mode – because in this case you’re actually competing against other players’ recorded ghost data or their scores – but I don’t mind so much. You can do it any time you want and you don’t need a lightning-fast, unshaped broadband connection to enjoy it. Going hand-in-hand with this mode is EA’s RiderNet, which allows you to keep track of other players you mark as “rivals” so you can constantly rub your achievements in each other’s faces. Cool.

That’s about it. There’s a huge amount of tracks on offer, a titanic amount of things to achieve in single player alone, and the almost unlimited appeal of online competition. The only reason you might not like this is the lack of a directly competitive online option, but apart from that, it’s the SSX we’ve been waiting for.

The game drops you in the American Southwest in the year 2156, among other remaining survivors of something called the Shiva virus. It combines first-person shooter style ranged combat with melee combat, and glues it all together with a familiar MMOPRPG questing system. As a whole, it actually works quite nicely, and I was surprised to discover that despite the FPS element, latency was seldom an issue.

In premise and concept, it is very similar to Fallout 3. Endless barren expanses, crumbling buildings and a hybrid shooter/RPG system also make it easily comparable to Bethesda’s AAA RPG behemoth, and whether or not that’s a bad thing is really up to you.

Having said that, various deliberate design choices create something quite unique, and it’s certainly not a game that will appeal to everyone. If I were to pigeonhole its target market, I’d say it’s looking at MMO fans looking for something a little different.

Players start the game in an instanced tutorial which provides a suitable introduction to the game world. I was tempted to skip it, but having heard about the free mount you receive at the end, I stuck it out. The tutorial does a good job of explaining the basics, but it’s only really after that does the learning curve get a little steep. For the most part, shortfalls in the interface are the culprit, and are likely to cause various annoying oversights, such as not knowing about mutant buffs at level 1 because they are contained in a hidden window that you are not likely to stumble upon unless directed to it.

So it took me a few hours to figure things out, and it was a little painful. However, once the ball started rolling, and I began to embrace the almost old-school “figure it out yourself” approach to game design, I really began enjoying myself.

The combat is for the most part a triumph, and is heavily influenced by stats and equipment. Headshots make a large difference in PvP, but are disappointingly less effective in PvE. The melee combat leaves a little to be desired, and mostly involves standing in range of the enemy and holding down the mouse button.

The game does not seem to require you to team up with other players to progress. Indeed, various traditional MMO caveats are missing, and having just gotten fed up of there being too many of those in Star Wars: The Old Republic, I welcomed the change.

Visually the game does nothing special, but is surprisingly quite beautiful at times, considering the scale of the project. Having said that, it’s pretty ugly at times too, and the animations are particularly awful, so it’s really a mixed bag.

What really won me over in Fallen Earth, is the survival element. Horses must be fed, motorcycles must be refuelled. This sense of realism is further enhanced by the fact that the game is not divided into instances, and is instead one large, connected open world. There is also a fantastic economy, and the crafting system is highly compelling.

Fallen Earth is a unique MMO that does not try to emulate any other franchise, and I can’t praise it enough for that. The fact that it doesn’t hold your hand is something that will appeal to certain gamers, and also something that will infuriate others, so it’s not for everyone, and that coupled with the fact that it’s free means you should really try it for yourself.

Now he’s just woken up inside the TV show Night Springs, in an episode he wrote about… oh no, not again.

Darkplace, Darkplace, D-Darkplace. But not this one, the other one.

The plot of Alan Wake’s American Nightmare is a bizarre one. I mean, from one chapter to the next, it makes a zany kind of sense, but if you stop to think about it all in context, it’s a big inconsistent, confusing, and clumsy mess. I can’t work out if it’s just bad writing or if the entire thing is a subtle, clever pastiche of old TV shows like The Twilight Zone and Tales from the Crypt. I’m going to pretend it’s the latter, because that way the dreadful dialogue and voice acting are just part of it. Sometimes, suspension of belief is important too.

Anyway, the game plays out as several iterations of the same scenario, each slightly different (well, shorter) than the previous one. I suppose it’s a neat way around the size limit of an Xbox LIVE Arcade title because it reuses assets, but it’s also repetitive and necessarily predictable.

The gameplay hasn’t changed much since the first time around – it’s still mostly you getting from one place to another and fighting a bunch of possessed firemen and lumberjacks and truck drivers in between. It’s somewhat easier, though, but perhaps that’s simply because you’re seldom up against more than four or five enemies at a time. On the other hand, ammo is put right up in front of you, around every corner, that there’s never any real sense of urgency or desperation.

The focus on narrative exposition over fragging baddies might’ve been a little more compelling if the narrative exposition were, you know, more compelling.

Of course, every game ever is fundamentally just a series of checkpoints in a conditional code block, but great games – including the original Alan Wake – manage to cover this up. Alan Wake’s American Nightmare, not so much. It’s not that it’s a horrible game by any means, it’s just rather disappointing given its precedent, and maybe all the more disappointing for it. By the time it finished up, I had more unanswered questions than Remedy’s design brief could possibly have accounted for, and for all the wrong reasons.

There’s also a wave-based survival mode included, and while I get that it’s Alan Wake versus The Army of Darkness and everything, I’m also not convinced that waved-based survival modes are that much fun with just one player.

Standing on its own as a cheap downloadable title, Alan Wake’s American Nightmare is actually pretty good, but as a (sort of) sequel, it falls conspicuously short of its predecessor.

I’ll start with the low point of the package, MGS 2. It’s the stealth action game we all remember –  which is no bad thing. It’s got action, depth, a compelling-if-ridiculous story and tons of secrets, nuances and Easter eggs. The biggest problem of all is that the control scheme hasn’t aged well: running around with a top-down camera; struggling with the fiddliest shooting system ever devised for a videogame; and suffering a jarring disconnect from the camera view to Snake/Raiden’s viewpoint every time you want to shoot in first person… Let’s just say that your love for MGS 2 had better be pretty strong if you want to see past this. If you can, it’s good fun.

Metal Gear Solid 3 is a bit more bearable, mostly because they gave us the Subsistence version, meaning that, at least, we get complete camera control while walking around instead of a locked, top-down camera. Unfortunately, the shooting is still retarded and there’s still a jarring disconnect every time you press the first-person view button, making the camera suddenly snap to where Snake is facing. That aside though, it’s a huge game with plenty of stealth-survival action and a ridiculous amount of depth and little things to discover. Again, the story is… pretty stupid, but it’s fun to follow.

The highlight of the package, however, is the excellent HD version of MGS: Peace Walker. Why is it so good? Well, first of all, you can transfer your save from your PSP version, so you don’t have to start from scratch – and you can play the PS3 version and transfer your save back to your PSP! How about that, eh? But that feature is small potatoes compared to the fact that the developers have, to my surprise, tweaked the control scheme to suit the PS3. Now it plays like a modern action shooter, with dual analogue camera controls and camera-directed aiming. Awesome. Again, there’s lots of depth and things to discover, which is par for the course for Metal Gear, and a gripping story to follow.

Even back on the PSP and PS2, these games were no slouch graphically, and the HD makeover just makes you realise that some developers don’t need the latest and greatest pixel shader models and highest-end graphic processing hardware to make a gorgeous game – they do it with sheer effort, determination and a bit of tender loving care. I think modern developers could learn a thing or two from Metal Gear.

It was great fun and it had that Starbreeze Studios je nais se quois – a distinctive feel in the gameplay that anyone who has played enough of their games will know. For this reason, I wonder how many fans of the game were worried when they learned that Digital Extremes would be handling development of the sequel, The Darkness II. Would it be the same? Would it be good?

The answer to the first question is no – it doesn’t feel like the Starbreeze game. There are some similarities in the controls and the idea of commanding demonic powers is similar, but that realistic, footstep-by-footstep style of moving and the floatiness in the aiming is gone, replaced by a trimmed, locked and buttery-smooth moving and aiming system much more like something out of a balls-out action shooter. Okay, but is it good?

To be honest, yes it is. The smoother aiming system makes shooting a joy, especially since there are plenty of awesome guns to use. Jackie’s Darkness powers are also tons of fun to sling around. This time, he can command each Darkness “arm” independently. The left one is used for picking up and throwing things – including enemies – and the right is used for delivering all kinds of nasty attacks. As Jackie kills enemies, devours hearts with his Darkness arms and finds hidden relics, he gains experience which he spends in several skill trees to learn all kinds of new Darkness abilities and attacks. He’ll also have a little Darkling minion that constantly follows him around, who is not only amusing, but useful. You can’t control him directly, but he’ll do his own thing, often pulling enemies out of cover so you can shoot them or jumping on their backs and covering their eyes.

Apart from that, it’s an entertaining story to go through, roughly five or six hours for most veteran shooter fans, with well-designed characters and excellent performances all round. The graphics are great; some people have complained about the illustrative style, but I don’t see why, it’s gorgeous. Oh, and once you’re done, you can play a set of side missions to the main story using four other characters who each have their own Darkness powers – cooperatively online, if you want.

So there you have it. If you enjoyed the first game, I can’t see why you wouldn’t like this one. It’s not going to change your life, but it’s a great way to spend a weekend with the side missions giving you incentive to pick it up afterwards.

This game takes place, as the title suggests, in the world of Amalur. The premise is actually quite multi-faceted, but to make a long story short: The mortal races, including humans, elves and gnomes, are at war with the immortal race, the Fae. To turn the tide of this clearly one-sided battle, the gnomes found a way to create an immortal of their own – and no prizes to anyone who guesses that you are that immortal.

After creating your character from one of four races and customising your looks, you go through a short, scene-setting, tutorial section before you’re left to your own devices. You’ll encounter one or two more small tutorials about things like creating potions, smithing items at a forge and making gems as you encounter them, but you’re pretty much equipped for the meat of the game. For the most part, you’ll be wandering around the world, either following the main quest or speaking to hundreds of people in the many, many towns, camps, castles, and cities, looking for something to do. There are hundreds and hundreds of people who need, say, their husband rescued, or an item found, or a big beastie slain.

Almost every single one of these quests is just an excuse to send you into the wilderness or a dungeon where you’ll encounter hordes of monsters, bandits, demons and so on. The combat actually makes up the largest part of the game and it’s great fun. It’s much more like an action game, like God of War or Devil May Cry than the usual type of downplayed combat we expect in this type of game. There are three main schools of combat: Might, Finesse and Sorcery – which translates into warrior, rogue and wizard. I know. How original, right? You can learn fighting skills from any one of these three “skill trees” or from any combination of the three.

You gain the bulk of your experience points in Kingdoms of Amalur from killing monsters, but there is a special ability you can use called a “fateshift” which makes them give you up to 100% more experience than you would normally get. You definitely want to save this for bigger monsters or groups of tough enemies to get the most out of it. Once you get enough experience, you level up and learn new skills. Nothing revolutionary there. The monsters you fight drop loot, which you can also find in dungeons, chests and frequently receive as rewards for completing quests. You keep what you want, sell the rest, buy potions, better gear, and so on – very standard RPG stuff. It’s fun, it works well, it’s easy and uncluttered. Great. Love it.

The problems with the game are… not huge ones, but I still think they need to be brought up. The first is the hundreds of quests. It’s a quantity over quality issue here. In KoA, you’ll always be going to get an item, find someone, talk to someone, kill a monster – and you’ll always kill a gajillion things along the way, always keeping an eye out for new loot. It’s incredibly basic and it very seldom gets any more creative than that. Well-travelled RPG fans might find themselves with a hankering for the variety and creativeness of the quests in The Elder Scrolls and Fallout after about 30+ hours.

The other is the dialogue. It’s fantastic dialogue, and the amount of recorded dialogue even for inconsequential characters is amazing. You can go around asking every character you meet, “So, what do you think of the war?” And every single one of them will tell you something different – you will not hear the same thing from two characters, and every character has 6 or 7 things to talk about. But… why? It serves no purpose apart from story fluff. It’s not like you have to go digging through conversation trees looking for a possible quest – if a character has something they want you to do, they’ll always tell you immediately, and talking about other things never, ever turns up any new quest options. You’re just shooting the breeze for no reason. It seems like a monumental wasted effort, to record all this dialogue for no practical purpose.

The last issue I wanted to bring up concerned a bit of the writing. They make a huge deal about “fate” in the main story arc and how you have the uncanny ability to change fate, blah, blah, blah. But you’re forced to take their word for it. For instance: “Wow! This monster would have destroyed the town if you hadn’t killed it. You changed fate!” Yeah, no s***, Sherlock. Maybe a bit more intelligent writing or some gameplay elements based around actually “changing fate” would have been nice – you know, to see it unfold fate’s way and then go back and change it your way. But instead, we just have to take the word of a bunch of hippie fortune tellers that we made some kind of difference. It’s kind of hard to believe in the existence of some divine plan that we’re meddling with when there’s absolutely no evidence of one, writers.

Anyway, those three issues in no way break the game for me. I’ve played it for ages and I’m still not done. I can see the lack of variety in the quests bothering some players, which is why I brought it up, but if that doesn’t bother you, then a whole world full of fun and gorgeous visuals awaits.

As it is, I’ve managed to maintain a total media blackout on the game since its original reveal at the Spike TV awards in 2010, a not inconsiderable accomplishment for somebody who works in the same media, but maybe inconsiderable because I simply refused whenever I was asked to write an article about it. When I make an important decision like that, I always totally mean it except when I don’t.

"I changed my mind. It's a female class skill."

So, obviously, within minutes of the demo launching on Xbox LIVE, I was already downloading it and then I bunked off work the rest of the afternoon to play it.

The single-player part of the demo includes the first stage and then skips forward to another much further on in the game. I won’t drop any spoiler-bombs, but the opener is… kind of spectacular. Also, three yays for death-rays.

By some not entirely random coincidence, I’ve actually been playing through my unfinished Mass Effect 2 DLC over the past week, so the sequel-sequel’s New! Improved! Now with 100% more sticky grenades! features were instantly apparent.

There’s a bunch of new mobility options, including combat rolls, contextual cover switching and breaking, and – YES! YES! YES!– a quick vault that’ll put you over an obstacle instead of glued up against it while the Geth Prime behind you rearranges your anatomy with a rocket launcher.

That said, however, some of that infuriating stickiness has stuck around, and I did find myself attaching to things instead of moving around them more than one time, like every surface is covered in Velcro, a problem seriously exacerbated by the same laggy camera featured in the last two games.

"Project Velcro is going according to plan."

The HUD now displays more information, most significantly hit markers on enemy targets so you know whether you’re plugging meat or chiselling the walls – very useful when Cerberus agents are lobbing smoke grenades around the place – as well as your shields and damage taken, and tactical manoeuvring prompts.

There’s also a quick weapon swap and a charged, heavy melee attack.

The levelling system is somewhat more complex this time around, with skills splitting into two specialist divisions after the third tier, and more meaningful upgrades at each level. I guess BioWare was serious about putting the Real RPG Experience™ back into the series, although it’s not like anybody’s actually going to play anything except the Infiltrator, right? Exactly.

"Planetary scans indicate Vanguards at 6%, Commander. I don't get it either."

Onto the multiplayer then, and it’s honestly not quite the dreary, cynical checkbox add-on I’d expected. Basically, it’s a standard, four-player  invasion mode, although timed objectives are included from the third wave. Oh, and it’s brutally difficult. I mean, it’s really, really, stupidly hard. I never made it through the third wave, and the majority of games I played were over in the first. Mind you, that’s partly because I was playing with random strangers who’d evidently decided that cooperation was lame or something, and because the map layout makes it easy to become quickly overwhelmed if the team isn’t working together, and because it’s really, really, stupidly hard.

March needs to get here fast, but in the meantime, I’d recommend playing Mass Effect 2’s Arrival DLC. Because. Because why? Because it’s important, okay.

Secondly, I rather liked the first game, and felt that with a little more development time to refine the core gameplay, it could have rivalled something from the Total War series. Which brings me to the third reason that I was excited: I’m a massive Total War fanboy, and King Arthur II more than just a little bit resembles a fantasy infused Total War release, at least superficially.

Sadly, King Arthur II disappointed me in pretty much every possible way.

While the first King Arthur was considered a “diamond in the rough,” the second simply fails to shine. The gameplay feels uninspired and bland, and players are desperately limited in terms of what they can do, and when they can do it. The AI is decidedly pedestrian, and rarely challenges you with anything remotely exciting. I have yet to lose a battle, and not once have any of my lands been invaded by a significantly threatening enemy army.

One of the best things about the Total War series, particularly Shogun 2, is the battles. Where The Creative Assembly’s battles are refined, controlled and satisfying, Neocore’s are messy, chaotic and unfulfilling. They usually start well, but after a few minutes things begin to resemble a recently shaken snow globe; with limited actual control, you simply have to wait for everything to settle and hope that your team came out on top.

The campaign map is a little bit less annoying, although this portion of the game also feels decidedly pedestrian and bland. You are guided down a narrow story arch, and it soon becomes clear that any illusion of freedom you have is purely aesthetic. You embark on quests, which are played out in a sort of choose-your-own adventure book format, where you are guided through static screens offering up various choices, and at the end presented with some sort of outcome, whether it be a new enemy, ally or perhaps new territory. Apart from being simply boring, it’s during these portions of the game that the dodgy voice acting is most noticeable, with mismatched accents and cheesy dialogue being standard fair.

The worst thing about King Arthur II is not the lacklustre gameplay, although this is a major problem. No, the real deal breaker is the fact that the game is broken. Load times are exceptionally long, bugs all too frequent, and crashes a common occurrence. Random actions will cause the game to crash to desktop, such as casting a spell or moving an army, and often the prospect of launching the game again feels like a chore, making for a game that is literally quite difficult to continue playing.

The only thing King Arthur II has going for it, is the fact that it presents a beautifully realized world. From the lighting and textures right through to the general art direction, it cannot be faulted on its looks. Battles are brilliantly detailed, and the campaign map has been crafted with love and care.

Of course, looks are not enough to keep players entertained, and the game simply is not much fun to play. On top of that, its regular bugs and crashes can make for a highly frustrating experience.

I actually did not manage to finish King Arthur II due to a bug which prevents me from progressing past a certain point. The fact that I consider this bug a small mercy tells you everything you need to know about the game.

A while back Valve ran a Defence of the Ancients  2 survey which, depending on mysterious factors, might or might not let you get access to the DotA 2 beta on Steam. I filled it out, answering as best I could or randomly when I had no idea what the hell they were talking about (which was frequent), and somehow that got me a beta key. These days a great many people play League of Legends, including myself, so perhaps a mild comparison between the two is in order.

Bonna Fiddlies

If you’re not interested in my previous experiences with this genre, you can skip to the next part.

The whole MOBA (Multiplayer Online Battle Arena) thing never really grabbed me, but I do have some middling experience with League of Legends and the more esoteric branches of the fledgling genre, like Monday Night Combat, Bloodline Champions and the game that started the whole thing, Future Cop:LAPD (1998). So here then are my impressions of Defense of the Ancients 2 (BETA), from the perspective of someone who’d be called a noob by most of the LoL community. Then again, the LoL community calls everyone noob, irrespective of experience or skill level. Except if they’re winning.

I will admit my bona fides for context:

Defense of the Ancients 1: I never really played it.

I poked at it when it first appeared as a custom map for Warcraft III in 2003, but didn’t think much of it, since there were plenty of other games to play. I peeked in on the various versions that followed, as it changed developers and went through several permutations, but the caustic and unfriendly culture that congealed around it made it very unappealing. So I left it alone.

League of Legends: I’m Level 19. I only play Alistar, and have only played Alistar. That’s just the kind of guy I am. I have 41 wins in Classic, and 12 wins in Dominion, according to the useless stats page on my profile.

I would love to tell you exactly when I started playing, or my match win/loss ratio, how many matches I’ve played, or anything beyond just my level and favorite character, but League of Legends gives me no access to that. I’m pretty sure they track it all, but there is no way for me to see any of the information I’d find useful to tell you right now. If I had hit 30 and started playing Ranked Matches, I’d apparently have stats (but only for Ranked).

If I had to guess when I started playing LoL, I’d place it around June in 2011. A friend was looking for someone he knew to play with, since he admitted the online culture in LoL was very poisonous, which didn’t surprise me. The MOBA/DOTA/Whatever genre seems to naturally create a highly competitive and unfriendly atmosphere, mostly because of the nature of the genre – matches last close to an hour, and one “noob” can ruin it for the entire 5-person team. If that team only cares about winning. Which seems to be the case most of the time.

I would continue to play with a select group of friends for most of the year, but by around December I had lost interest. Not because of the game, I think LoL is decent and I still play the odd game now and then. But getting all five friends together on a regular basis ended up being difficult with our schedules (I’m in a different timezone than them). Playing with randoms was rarely enjoyable, so I had no reason to keep playing. In that regard, LoL is very much like World of Warcraft, and not just because of the grinding and cribbed mastery tree. It may be obvious, but LoL is a social experience, defined by the people you play with.

Defense of the Ancients 2: I’ve had 15 hours with the beta. Some of it against humans, some of it against the very capable bots.

The main interface, with IRC window at the bottom and tabs to the various sections.

Vi sitter i Ventrilo och spelar DotA

On paper, here are the major differences between League of Legends and Defense of the Ancients 2.

While spectating or watching a replay, you can switch on various data windows like this gold graph.

The shop interface is very neatly organized and easy to read.

Shops

The in-match shop in DotA 2 is easier to grasp compared to LoL, but there are actually three types of shops on the map. The main shop (for basic items) by the spawn, a lane shop (for emergency items like Town Portal scrolls) in the top and bottom lanes in the corners of the map equidistant between both sides, and a Secret Shop (for the powerful items built up from recipes) midway into both sides’ jungles. The main shop can be accessed at any time via the shop button on the interface, but the other two require you to visit them physically.

Lanes and Heroes

While LoL does have a lot of heroes, they can start to feel very samey, like they’re more defined by their stats than their actual designs. In DotA 2 each hero feels very unique and powerful, with much stronger emphasis on how they control the space around them. While the common lane composition in LoL tends to be a 1-1-2 plus jungler or straightforward 2-1-2 and rarely anything else, in DotA 2 it’s not uncommon to see compositions like 1-1-1 with 2 roamers/junglers. Matches last about the same across both games, averaging between 30 to 40 minutes, sometimes hitting 50 if both sides are equally skilled.

Water shaders and cloth dynamics are just some of the advanced visuals.

Thoughts

The takeaway from this is that League of Legends was designed to be a bit more straightforward and simpler, to appeal to a broader audience. It has more immediacy in terms of controlling your character, you can see slightly further around your character compared to DotA 2. In comparison, DotA 2 is a more detailed system, with more to learn and master but provides a richer, deeper experience for those that want it.

What may draw newcomers to DotA 2 over LoL, game mechanics aside, is that DotA 2 benefits from being new. Its graphics are more modern and technical, character models are detailed and lively. As expected from Valve, the amount of voicework is staggering. One character in DotA 2 has more voice cues than 10 LoL champions combined. Voice cues are also highly context sensitive, like the stealthy Riki picking up an Invisibility Rune will complain about how “that was a waste”. There are event character-specific matchup voice cues, if two character spot each other on the field.

Community

As for the community, well…. No surprises there: people in random are generally quite insulting, will instantly ragequit the moment someone doesn’t follow their perceived “optimal actions”, and will often stop playing their characters entirely just so they can focus all their attention on hurling insults at someone who’s still learning. So just like League of Legends. In some respects, since DotA 2 attracts all the self-proclaimed “hardcore” from the original DotA, the level of intolerance is much higher. It goes without saying that DotA 2, like LoL, will be best enjoyed with a team of friends. The intelligent bots will also provide plenty of challenge if you’re not up for dealing with people.

Once DotA 2 has been officially released, things may settle a bit more as the automated ranking system moves all the serious people up, and lets the newcomers learn among themselves.

If you have any specific questions, feel free to ask in the comments below and I’ll try to answer as best I can.

Screenshots

The main reason for that is that Soul Calibur V is quite a departure from what the series had become in a lot of ways. Actually, that’s not entirely the best way to describe it – it’s more of a return to basics than anything else. The core idea is still the same: you select your favourite character and fight one-on-one against opponents in a variety of modes, but it seems that the developers have taken away of lot the superfluous moves many characters had. Some might call it “dumbing down,” I prefer to call it “streamlining.” In general, it seems to have been done to get rid of the finnicky, gimmicky, useless moves, stances and other weird stuff some of the characters had acquired over the years and shift the focus to their characteristic techniques.

Ivy is a good example. I was huge fan of her when she first showed up, but she got progressively more complicated and fiddly with each game, culminating in Soul Calibur IV where she was such a mess I couldn’t imagine how or why anyone would enjoy using her. Now, in Soul Calibur V, she’s gone back to basics – SC1 basics. All of her fiddly, clunky stances have been taken away, making her a complete joy to use. The same goes for Mitsurugi, Raphael, Yoshimitsu, Tira and Maxi – all characters with their excess, useless moves trimmed down.

What this does is force players to pay more attention to the moves they do have – to find out where and when each one is useful, what advantages/disadvantages each has, the best ways to land them and the best follow-ups and combos to use. You could say that this makes the game less accessible to the casual fighting fan, and it would be hard to argue – since pressing random button combinations and wiggling the D-pad doens’t produce nearly as many spectacular, random results as it used to. You have to know what you’re doing now.

To compensate for the reduced move lists, Project Soul have added in an interesting new feature: a super power meter similar to the ones in 2D fighting games like Street Fighter and The King of Fighters. This meter is divided into four segments and fills up as you dish out and receive damage. The meter can be completely stocked twice over, and allows you to do three things. First, you can blow an entire meter at once to perform a massively damaging, visually impressive attack similar to the Ultra Combos in SF4 or the X-Ray attacks in the new Mortal Kombat. Secondly, you can expend two segments at a time to enhace or change certain moves, just like EX moves in SF4, which makes for all kinds of nasty surprises and extended combos. And lastly, it allows you to expend two segments at a time to perform a Guard Impact. What? I hear some of you ask in horror.

That’s right, Guard Impacting can no longer be done at will, since it now costs you super meter stocks. This must be horrific news for you Guard Impact kings who deflect everything – now you have to choose your moment to Guard Impact and make sure you don’t waste the opportunity it gives you. But it’s not all bad, because another new feature called the Just Impact (I think) can be done at no cost. What it requires you to do is tap the guard button the very second an opponent’s move makes contact. If you get it right, your character will flash blue and all of the block stun or block stagger they would have taken is negated, leaving you free to attack immediately while your opponent is still finishing their attack. It’s tricky, but useful, and the applications must be obvious to any advanced players. It’s like parrying in Street Fighter or Just Defence in Mark of the Wolves – Hmmm. A lot of 2D fighting influence here.

Speaking about the package as a whole, I can see some players being disappointed at the character lineup. Many old favourites are gone, including Kilik, Sophitia, Rock, Cassandra, Talim, Zasalamel, Taki and Xianghua; and for some reason, Project Soul felt the need to give us three “random” characters – you know, characters who change move lists between each match. Why three? Who knows. The mandatory Story mode is also much, much shorter this time round. Personally, I don’t mind – I hated having to go through these tacked-on campaign modes anyway, but some players might think it’s “less value for money” or something. And the story mode this time only seems to focus on a handful of the characters, mostly Sophitia’s children, Patroklos and Pyrrah, and damn, the things that happen to these poor kids – it’s actually a pretty nasty story. The custom character creation mode is still in there, if anyone still does that.

The online mode looks quite interesting this time round – but my connection wouldn’t let me play it for some reason. It seems like you can watch the best replays of other players, and if you particularly enjoyed fighting someone, you can mark them as a rival, making it easier to find and fight them again and compare win/loss ratios.

I’m not sure if this whole streamlining and dispensing-with-the-fluff approach is going to go down well with the more casual Soul Calibur fans, since it seems more suited to hardcore players now, but it’s still slick, fast-paced and tons of fun to play.

“Gwydion, I have decided to take a journey,” said Manannan, for the seventh or eighth time in two hours. “Maybe this time, you might take the opportunity to go through my personal things – I’ve got heaps of cool stuff like a wand, and a magic map, and a secret subterranean alchemy workshop, you know, just saying.”

After what was basically a scavenger hunt with simple puzzles and a somewhat muddled sequel, King’s Quest III: To Heir is Human took the series into a more sophisticated, narrative-oriented direction, much like the first Space Quest game, also released around the same time, and was also significantly more difficult to solve than the others.

Like its predecessors, the third game used a pretty basic verb-plus-object text parser for interaction, although it was the first (ever, apparently) to use an auto-mapping and teleporting feature – something Sierra used as a major marketing hook, only to discover fans despised it because they felt it made the game too easy.

More than 25 years later, though, King’s Quest III remains not only my favourite in the series, but also a game I’ll still excavate from the cupboard and replay from time to time. Admittedly, I’m a big slut for old school EGA graphics but there’s something kind of enduring about such simplicity, that’s also saved it from the same retrospective OH-MY-EYES phantasm of early 3D games.

BONUS FACT! The game’s launch was initially met with some hostility from fans, who claimed it wasn’t a proper King’s Quest game because King Graham wasn’t in it. In the land before internet-time, games like this could take several weeks or even months to complete, and it wasn’t therefore until later than fans realised the connection the Gwydion and Graham. Epic fail, noobs.

BONUS FACT TWO! Indie devs AGDI and Infamous Adventures have released free VGA remakes of the game, in the point-and-click style of later games in the series.

Yesterday some XBLA code arrived in the office for Ubisoft’s survive ‘em up game, I Am Alive. It’s worth mentioning that this game is only going to be released on XBLA and PSN, so don’t expect to find it on a retail shelf in a shop. The game is officially described as an action game, but seeing that we only found 3 bullets during the hour of play time, we’ll rather stick with our genre description.

The game plays out in the fictional American city of Haventon, a year after some mysterious Armageddon-like event. Evidence of this includes destroyed city infrastructure, blackened human skeletons lying about in various poses and occasional dust storms. The character you play also narrates here and there, speaking about the event a year ago and how he ended up in where he is.

The game conveys a sense of hopelessness and despair with a hundred shades of grey (you’ll see what we mean with the screenshots) and paranoid people waving you along with guns drawn and nervous eyes. The world reminded us of the town of Silent Hill in some ways and initially had us double checking corners for crazed dogs, creepy nurses and otherworldly creatures.

Navigating the city is part of the challenge in the game and anything strenuous you do such as running or climbing eats away at your stamina bar. Once this is depleted you have no more energy to hang on and might drop to your death for example. Normally this wouldn’t be a problem – just reload and try again right? Well no, in I Am Alive you get a limited number of retries – once these are gone that’s it. You can earn more retires by helping any survivors you happen across or by chasing after side-quests. An example of this played out down one random street as we gave a valuable health pack to an injured man and his wife, thereby earning an additional retry and a few lines of thank you dialogue. The alternative would have been to ignore the injured man and keep the health kit for your character – it’s a dangerous world out there after all, full of sharp edges. It’s clear that I Am Alive is a game about choices and managing your resources carefully in a challenging environment.

Besides offering up some tricky climbing obstacles (such as a broken suspension bridge early on), the game also threw more than a few thugs our way – most of them armed. You begin with a firearm but no bullets. One initial encounter had our character faking it by pointing the unloaded gun at a machete welding punk, backing him down and eventually pushing him into a hole in the ground. Other encounters varied from being chased away at gunpoint to surprise attacking three bad guys and rescuing a little girl. We had to use a single bullet here and it felt like a real waste – paranoia regarding your resources is a major hook in this game.

Along the way and adding to the suspense are some smartly handled narrative scenes that show amateur footage from a video camera that your character carries around with him, this mechanism helps push the story along and portrays a convincing setting that drags you into the experience and gets you to care about what happens next. It’s all expertly handled and the initial hour of play only made us want to keep going to see what happens next. I Am Alive is looking smoking hot for what it is and should be out early March 2012 for download.

More on this game in the March issue of NAG plus (hopefully) a Q&A from the developers (if they get back to us before we go to print).

But if you stuck it out on faith that something worthwhile would eventually come your way – something not a rehash or remake of an old title, the likes of which seem to typify the 3DS library to this point – then you’ll be happy to know that Resident Evil: Revelations has finally arrived.

Built from the ground up exclusively for the 3DS, this new chapter in the RE saga lets players take control of Jill Valentine once again as she and her new partner, Parker, investigate a derelict ocean liner looking for their missing anti-bioterrorism comrade, Chris Redfield. Of course, it’s an RE game, so the ship turns out to be crawling with all kinds of nasty, genetically-engineered monstrosities on the hunt for tasty humans.

The graphics are probably the best the 3DS has ever seen – although the 3D does tend to lose its effect after a while for me, so that I have to keep asking myself, is it still on? The gameplay is pretty much what we’ve come to expect from the series, fighting tough enemies with limited ammo, grenades and well-placed melee attacks – but with a few new features. The first one I simply have to mention is that it’s the first in the series to have a sensible control scheme. RE: Revelations is the first game on the 3DS to use the new-fangled Circle Pad Pro, which gives players a second analogue pad and two extra triggers to use. The Circle Pad Pro unit makes the 3Ds significantly larger, but it also makes it more comfortable to hold with adult-sized hands, so we won’t get wanker’s cramp any more from bunching our fingers up.

But what that means for RE: Revelations is that we can play it just as easily as if we were playing RE 5 on a home console, with full camera control, dual-analogue aiming – and get this, you can move while aiming. That’s right, your feet are no longer rooted to the floor while shooting! Blimey, that’s a first. Some other first-time features include underwater swimming sections, a dodge system that actually works, a scanner that Jill can use to find hidden items, and weapon upgrades Jill can chop-and-change between weapons at will.

Apart from that, there’s the mandatory rating at the end of each chapter, and a whole bunch of criteria players can attempt to meet to unlock new weapons and upgrades. The game is also fairly long for a portable system. I don’t know if it’s enough to get people to start paying attention to the 3DS again on its own, but it’s a heck of a lot of fun.

I have said it before, but Nintendo really know how to induce bliss. Everything, and I mean everything in SM3DL simply sings with charm and delight. The menus, the characters, the items and levels. Even the flowers here are happy.

Although from the developers of Super Mario Galaxy, SM3DL has been built for a handheld experience and as such borrows from it along with its 2D brethren, resulting in what is really years of Mario excellence distilled into an exceedingly fun bite-sized package. Controls are fiercely tight, allowing you to deftly explore the treacherous and ingeniously designed levels so creative they will constantly surprise you with how clever they are. Added to this are various new items, including the Tanooki suit, affording you increased hang-time, a boomerang suit which allows you to throw them and the propeller box from Super Mario Bros. Wii amongst others. Each is implemented smartly and if used correctly, will allow you to 100% the game and find its secrets, including a certain green-clad brother.

It’s no surprise that Super Mario 3D Land sports a similar look to Galaxy, what is striking though is how much better it looks. From the colours to the animation to the incredibly well realised implementation of 3D, this game will impress you from start to finish. The 3D makes judging distances much more natural and has allowed the developers to come up with some incredibly crafty levels. An extended depth 3D mode is also available by tapping down on the d-Pad which through magic, makes the 3D more pronounced than before.

The game is divided into eight worlds consisting of five courses and a boss level each. Every course hides three Star Medals to collect and each boss stage requires a certain number to unlock, forcing you to return to courses with your honed skills. Because the levels are so stellar, they are a blast to explore numerous times. The boss battles however, lack much of the creativity found elsewhere, which is a shame. Completion unlocks tweaked versions of the worlds, items and suits, essentially giving you another adventure to play through. Online connectivity delivers in-game presents and times through StreetPass, which while welcome, could have been implemented better perhaps with SpotPass challenges giving players something more to chew on. [edited - 15/01/2012]

While brief, with one or two aspects less than superb stood next to the rest of the game, all in all this is, as far as I’m concerned, where the Mario games belong. It boasts everything you could want, in mouthwateringly small, blissful Italian kisses so charming and cleverly realised you are sure to be dazzled.

The original aim of this retro review was to cover all three of Thief games as they are presented in the Mastertronic published Complete Collection package. Sadly, despite numerous attempts, multiple patch downloads and endeavours to getting the games running on three different systems, the first two Thief games, Thief: The Dark Project and Thief II: The Metal Age, remained obstinate in their refusal to run. I blame Windows 7. The result is that I can only really apply the retro review to Thief: Deadly Shadows, which is the third game in the series. If you pick up this Mastertronic re-release then good luck getting the first two to run. Despite Deadly Shadows working and proving playable, I experienced multiple crashes to desktop and game minimising every time I hit a loading screen. At one stage the crash to desktop occurred while I was saving, which meant that I lost about an hour or so of sneaky gameplay. So be warned: save often.

Thief: Deadly Shadows is master thief (like Master Chief, only sneakier) Garrett’s third jaunt through the dark, twisty streets and castles of the series’ somewhat unique City. It’s still a bit of an odd setting to describe as it blends medieval with steampunk and a dollop of gothic horror. Bizarre to say the least, but it still has its charm.

Garrett, being the sticky-fingered bloke that he is, overhears about the existence of a large opal stone in the possession of a wealthy family. Unable to pass up the opportunity, Garrett slinks off to swipe the heirloom. Naturally there’s more to it than that and soon enough Garrett finds himself in for a lot more than he anticipated. The plot is, to be honest, convoluted as hell, which is either a sign of how streamlined contemporary narrative devices have become, or it highlights the gradual degradation of gamers’ attention spans. Be that as it may, Garrett’s activities in Deadly Shadows are unavoidably intertwined with the actions of various factions, all vying for control of The City. This leads to encounters with soldiers, assassins and ghosts as Garrett tries to figure out what the hell is going on. There’s some time travel thrown in for extra confusion as well.

It’s easy to see that developers Ion Storm wanted to make Deadly Shadows replayable as there are numerous ways to complete the missions. That’s one of the joys of the game: swiping what you were meant to, but then spying an alternate route as you escape the scene of the crime. The object is, of course, not to get caught so taking the route less likely to lead to an encounter with a guard is preferable. Fortunately Garrett has a bunch of tools at his disposal, like the series’ signature water-tipped arrows for extinguishing light sources, and moss arrows to muffle your footsteps across noisy materials like metal floors.

Between missions, you get access to the streets of The City, in which you’re free to roam around nicking anything of value or pickpocket the denizens. At this stage you’ll be able to sell your stolen goods to various fences, and then use the money to purchase more equipment to take into your next mission. You’re also able to pick up numerous little side quests between the main plot missions, and these in-between bits were new to the Thief franchise in this third instalment.

While many of the games we look at in this Retro Review section are able to stand up to today’s offerings, Thief: Deadly Shadows is definitely showing its age. It’s a more calculated and slow-paced game than I remember it being, and despite me having fond memories of being able to explore this “open world” cityscape in-between the missions, I’m left wondering what all the fuss was about.

Once upon this other time, the wizard, knight, and thief were brought together again by the Trine, and magicked off into another kingdom in desperate need of saving. Hero business, it’s always pretty much the same thing, just different sequels.

Trine 2 might well be the most beautiful game ever made, though. I mean, it’s quite simply amazing, and in the original, unadulterated by dreary pop culture “Omg, it’s, like, totally, like, amazing” sense of the word. This game is like a kind of narcotic reverie, its smudged and saturated pinks and greens and blues and pumpkins and fireflies the work of some eccentric alchemist tripped out on neon fantasy kitsch.

For those of you who – like me – missed the first game for one reason or another [being a terrible person is not a "reason", ed], the concept is fundamentally somewhat similar to The Lost Vikings. If you didn’t play that, then basically, you have three characters with different abilities, and you use these in combination (often variably) to navigate a series of implausibly complex environments.

Amadeus the wizard can conjure up boxes and planks, which he can also levitate; Pontius the knight has a shield and two melee weapons, one of which can break some obstacles; and Zoya the thief has a grapple and bow. Each character also has a bunch of upgrades, that you can unlock by snaffling glowy blue orbs and bottles liberally distributed around the stages. It’s all quite simple, elegant, and straightforward.

Not so much the game, though. It gets going easily enough, but quickly becomes immensely clever and increasingly devious, especially if you’re determined to collect all the upgrade thingums. Honestly, there was one that took us over an hour to work out, and two we had to reluctantly abandon after more or less recreating that scene with the monkeys and the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey several times over.

Speaking of “us” and “we”, this is a game that’s heaps better in co-op. Instead of having to constantly swap, one at a time, between characters to solve puzzles, you and up to two other players can interact with one another, which makes for a whole new category of zany ingenuity and a lot of giggling. With options for both online and local co-op, Trine 2 can finally replace Castle Crashers in your party list.

What’s perhaps most remarkable is the tremendous scope for creativity, particularly in co-op. I frequently had the impression that we’d solved a puzzle in a way unintended, maybe even entirely unimagined, by the developers – but it was still allowed. This sort of flexibility, you’ll suddenly realise, is really quite unusual in a gaming generation predominated by corridor-based shooters and superficial choices. So that’s nice too.

Or click here for Tarryn’s real bottom line, as divulged in a Google chat.

YOU ARE [NAME HERE]! And this is where I always got stuck for about two hours, randomly generating characters over and over until I had a dark elf thief vaguely resembling Per Gessle from Roxette. What can I say – I was way into my roguelike RPGs, but I was also a teenage girl, and even when it’s just ASCII graphics, looks matter.

That’s because – and this is the important bit, so pay attention – playing Ancient Domains of Mystery is about 50 percent code-based dice-rollin’, player hatin’, and conditional catastrophes, and about 50 percent imagination. Think Skyrim, but where a “T” represents a tree, a “#” is a wall, and death is totally, permanently, incontrovertibly final (more on that in the next paragraph). So, basically, pen and paper Dungeons & Dragons, only the Dungeon Master couldn’t be bothered to make proper coloured-in maps.

This game is very much the same sort of thing as Dungeons & Dragons, though. Go boldly forth, slay and rob many a thing, only to die of both starvation and disease, ignominious and instantly forgotten, among the windswept crags of whatever mountain range lay in the south, I’m not actually sure it had an official name, game over, haha, would you like to play again Y/N? Oh yes, this is where I explain that you can only save the game on exit, and the file is deleted on load.

Just between us and about eight months of daily playing, I never actually managed to finish the game, and this one time, I really did die of hunger and pestilence on some lonely Ancardian bluff.

I died a lot.

One of the game’s more notable features is a corruption statistic that increases over time, causing character mutations that are sometimes good, sometimes bad, and sometimes a bit of both. The trick is, good or bad, the corruption will eventually overwhelm your character entirely, transforming him or her into a “writhing mass of primal chaos”, and it’s game over, haha, would you like to play again Y/N?

The game is huge, perhaps even excessively complicated, and brutally difficult, but one of those games that everybody has to try once, just to say they did, and they died.

Ancient Domains of Mystery is free to download, and available for Windows (including a Java version), Linux, and Mac. Get it here.

Kirby’s Adventure Wii has more colour, vibrancy and happiness than you have seen in a while. Every themed level breathes with colour and subtle animation, providing great visual variety throughout this playful experience. Each world is crisp and clean, as is the animation, music and effects.

KAWii [nice - ed] is a side-scrolling platforming game where our pink friend, Kirby, can inhale anything around him, letting him either simply swallow, launch the item back out in a star attack, or in the case of certain enemies, transform into a pink version of them. The game uses this to grant Kirby different abilities. Swallow the knight for example, and you gain Sword attacks, the snowman gives you Ice. There is an incredible range of these different abilities and discovering them is a genuine delight. Some of them even have a ‘mega mode’ of sorts, where you can, for example, wield a hammer as large as the screen, destroying all in your path. Superb. The problem comes from the basic design flaw that none of them are necessary to complete the game. Because Kirby can float indefinitely, and inhale enemies to launch as attacks, you can quite often avoid these abilities altogether. Sure, that is not how you are meant to play the game, but at some points the way the game wanted me to play became so infuriating I simply floated to the end. The game has Energy Spheres to collect throughout each stage, which do require the abilities but again are unnecessary, and should have been used, like Mario’s Star Medals, as currency needed to progress.

With only five worlds ending in Boss stages, the game is a little on the short side. Those Energy Spheres I mentioned, along with Stars you collect throughout unlock challenge rooms, where you are tested in certain ‘hat’ abilities and game rooms, featuring a range of activities like a shooting gallery. While this in theory give players reason to collect each and every Sphere, I found none to be fun enough to play more than once.

One things KAWii does rather well is four-player co-op. At any time, a friend can lollop onto the couch beside you, press any button, and WHAM, help you get some of the trickier Spheres. When they get bored or hungry, they simply press ⊖ and WHAM, they are gone. As simple as that, which is exactly what you want.

I was really disappointed with Kirby’s Adventure Wii. It started out so brilliantly, full of charm and potential, but then revealed itself to not embrace any of that, instead offering a mediocre platforming experience neither clever nor fun enough to warrant playing above the plethora of other platformers on the system.

If you look only at the review scores the game is getting, it seems that The Lord of the Rings: War in the North is one of those titles that has mixed opinions ranging from rock bottom right up to the bell. Some reviewers find it bland and repetitive while others think it’s exciting and engaging. If you ask me, it probably has a lot to do with how far up your bum the stick is.

Anyway, War in the North is certainly no worse than some of the more recent LOTR games – there’s nowhere to go from there but up. In this case, players take on the role of a trio of warriors, Andriel the elf mage, Eradan the human ranger and Farin the dwarf champion, on a quest to stop the machinations of Agandaŭr, one of Sauron’s most trusted generals who has been tasked with conquering the Northern lands while Sauron attends to his business in the South. Along the way you’ll visit many prominent places from the LOTR universe and speak to many recogniseable characters.

The game proper is a respectable, action-packed, dungeon crawling fantasy hack ‘n’ slash fest where players constantly look out for better equipment and weapons, sell unwanted loot between missions and look forward to that next level up that lets them learn new abilities or bolster existing ones. The three characters feel more or less the same apart from their special abilities, which are usually typical action-RPG stuff like area magic spells or powerful melee attacks. There are also abilities that create auras that heal all the party members or war cries tha boost the party’s attack strength – you know, typical co-op stuff. It also has the mandatory-but-curious co-op mechanic by which you can save a downed companion from an open-chest wound or frontal evisceration by rubbing their shoulders for a few seconds.

If you play the game by yourself, the CPU will take control of your two allies, and they’re not too dumb or too smart – at least they keep the enemies busy while you take care of the important tasks. You can also play with a friend on the same console or two other players online or in a LAN (yes, on the consoles too).

On the whole, it’s a solid, fun fantasy action adventure. Among the few gripes I have, I would have liked a bit more freedom in the weapon choices for each character and maybe a few more diverse skills to learn – but with so much variety in enemies, so many awe-inspiring locales to visit and relentless waves of action, it’s not a deal breaker by any means.

I’ve arrived in Constantinople, and have decided to write you this letter as a clever means of narrative exposition without all the drag of pre-rendered cinematics because we kind of blew the whole budget on the intro sequence. I think it looked pretty magnifico, though.

Anyway, I am here to find a bunch of keys to open Altaïr’s secret library in the castle at Masyaf because all the answers are there (I’m sure!), but this might be a bit harder than I’d first thought. I mean, it doesn’t look like they’re anywhere on the docks, so I guess I’m going to have to get off this ship and actually go into the city and look for them.

Sigh. I just know what’s going to happen – I’m going to end up spending most of my time here running away from guards and falling off roofs and tripping over pedestrians who always seem to instantly double in number and cluster in the exact archway whenever I’m trying to make an escape from an ill-timed assassination.

And then it’s all going to end abruptly, inscrutably, and just inconclusively enough to rationalise doing something very much like this, but just a bit different all over again this time next year, and maybe not so much “revelations” as “minor clarifications and major prevarications”.

Aut vincere aut mori aut spaghetti cum globis caronis,
Ezio

Assassin’s Creed: Revelations gets off to a bad start. I’m putting that right up top here so anybody who reads this review and then buys the game remembers this bit during you’ll-see-what-I-mean (hhhnnnnnnggggrrrr), and boldly pushes on through, anyway. It gets better, pinky swear.

But perhaps not by very much, at least in context. Where Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood introduced loads of innovative concepts, gameplay improvements, and a generally more dense, varied, and interesting experience over Assassin’s Creed II, Assassin’s Creed: Revelations feels more like Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood Again, Now With a Hookblade, Ziplines, Bombs, and a Sort of Rubbishy Tower Defence Sort of Thing, RAZZLE DAZZLE!

Which is certainly not to say that the game isn’t much good, but rather that it simply doesn’t quite seem to be a game in its own right, and more like a 30-hour Brotherhood expansion instead. The Hookblade, ziplines, and bombs are seriously super cool, though.

The tower defence thing, not so much. Basically, when your activities around town have attracted significant Templar attention – and this could be anything from murdering fifteen people in broad daylight right outside the Hagia Sofia, to renovating the corner tailor shop, it all adds up – they’ll launch an assault on one of your assassin dens. This means swapping over to a clumsy, wave-based counteroffensive from the nearby rooftops that becomes mostly a matter of dreary bureaucratic procedure once you’ve unlocked the grenadiers.

Besides, since when is being an international superstar hitman all about standing next to a chimney and telling which guys to go where? Since never, that’s when. Totalmente detestibile.
Once you’ve worked an apprentice up to Master Assassin level, he or she can “lock” an assassin den, making it effectively immune to further Templar interference, but this takes quite a bit of time, and getting enough Master Assassins to cover all your dens takes most of the game. Honestly, I preferred it when the apprentice training mini-game was its own reward, instead of obligatory, tedious busywork.

You could also bribe heralds or murder Templar officials to bump down your current notoriety level, but again, it’s a chore on top of everything else you’re supposed to be doing.
It’s also the most inaccessible Assassin’s Creed game to somebody who’s not played any of the previous games – it simply won’t make any kind of sense whatsoever. I’m not convinced it’s a clever idea to expect players to have finished most of the other games in a series in order to understand what’s going on in the latest one, but then, maybe that’s the whole point from a business perspective.

Over to the multiplayer then, and it’s mostly a refinement of Brotherhood’s already excellent concept, with a bunch of new modes chucked in for variety. The subtle sneak ‘n’ stab gameplay might not appeal to the Call of Duty and Battlefield dudebros, but it remains a superb, exhilarating, and completely unique experience for everybody else.

It’s hard to evaluate a game like this on its own merits, especially given the lack of any real evolution from Brotherhood, and a somewhat muddled and unfocussed story that, while bringing some closure to much-loved protagassins Ezio and Altaïr, feels like just another stopgap in front of whatever Ubisoft is planning for the inevitable sequel. The multiplayer component could keep you occupied for months yet, but whether or not that’s worth the pricetag of what more or less amounts to Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood v1.5 is up to you.

As with many of Nintendo’s first party titles, you will be genuinely reminded over and again why you started playing video games. Through its animations, track design and characters, MK7 throws endless charm and colour at your grinning face.

I imagine a world where everyone plays Mario Kart. For those anomalies, you race your favourite Nintendo characters around 32 ingeniously designed tracks in delightfully little vehicles while launching devious items at opponents, causing them to swear vengeance. New in this entry are the Tanooki tail, allowing you a spin attack, the Lucky Seven, equipping 7 items simultaneously, and the Fire Flower, letting you launch fierce fire balls, each of which are welcome additions to the fray.

Controls are tight and responsive, proving yet again that the 3DS’s circle pad packs accurate punch and for those of you interested, the gyroscopic FP view works a treat. Three newly introduced mechanics are present in MK7. Hang-gliding allows for shorter cuts and has been implemented well into older tracks. Disappointingly, neither underwater racing nor customisation are done well enough to matter. Nintendo could have really gone to town fleshing out the customisation options given the wealth of content across the series, but only a handful of variations are available.

Trust Nintendo to do it, but I found myself struggling to judge distances properly without 3D, showing developers how it can really be used to augment an experience as beautiful as MK7 with its lush visuals. As with the presentation, the music, voices and effects will be familiar to fans and do a great job accentuating the charm the series delivers so very well.

MK7 makes full use of the 3DS’s online capabilities, offering players local multiplayer for up to eight players as well as decent online racing without lag, letting you play through the single player Grand Prix tracks as well as Coin and Balloon battles. Online even boasts communities along with StreetPass and SpotPass challenges.

While Mario Kart 7 does so much right, it also falters in obvious ways. Why the series does not employ the same approach as Super Smash Bros., allowing players to choose from a staggering array of Nintendo’s best characters rather than a mere 16 is a mystery. Imagine racing with Link or Samus? Were this route chosen, new character specific items could be created resulting in a more conscious choice of participant and fresh item ideas. A track editor community akin to ModNation Racers would also do wonders to the stagnating track selection, which while has some brilliant new additions, is made up predominantly of oldies.

For those who don’t care about such things, however, this is kart racing gold at its best.

But now, we can. Tekken Hybrid is an interesting little bundle made up of three very enticing parts. The main course is a glorious, full-speed, widescreen, high definition version of Tekken Tag Tournament. It’s clearly an upgraded port of the old PS2 version and it still contains the PS2 modes and options – including the Tekken Bowl mode, where you pick your favourite character and play a bowling mini-game which is more addictive than you’d allow yourself to believe.

Apart from that, it’s TTT as we know. You pick two characters to form a tag-team and tackle the game’s various modes to prove your skills. You might have to downgrade your expectations a bit, though. The game was released a decade ago and some of your favourite characters might have less than half the moves they currently do. But it’s kind of cool in a way, it forces you to use old moves and perhaps rediscover their virtues that you might have forgotten over time. If you’ve got enough controllers, you can play up to four players – two vs. two – which is one of the best times you can have with a console, I promise you. There are also some trophies to be collected, but no online modes, though. Sorry.

The second attraction is the Blu-ray feature film, Tekken: Blood Vengeance. This is a full-length movie that you can view in 3D if you have the required TV, which sets the stage for the upcoming Tekken Tag Tournament 2 game. If this is true, then the Tekken story has grown even more retarded than I remember. The fights are pretty good, but it’s full of cringe-inducing voice acting and doubly cringe-inducing anime clichés of the worst kind that will have any sane person rubbing their temples before long. It does look pretty, though, and the Japanese have gotten a lot better than I remember at CG animation. It makes for an entertaining diversion but I can’t see even the blindest Tekken fans calling it a good film.

The cherry on top is Tekken Tag Tournament 2: Prologue, a little teaser for the upcoming game that rabid fans can tear into while they wait for the full release. It has four characters available: Ling Xiaoyu, Alisa Bosconovich, Devil Jin and Devil Kazuya, complete with their new outfits and new moves. Unfortunately there is no Practice Mode and, sadly, no Command List (well, I couldn’t find one) in this little teaser game, so if you want to find out what’s new you’ll just have to experiment. I found two new moves for Ling Xiaoyu so far, and one move I’m relatively sure is new for Devil Jin – but it’s been so long since I used him in Tekken 6 I can’t be sure.

With all this, it’s quite a nice little bundle here, but I’m not sure how many people outside of the serious Tekken fan circles will be interested. Just know what you’re buying – a re-released, decade-old game, a small teaser of an upcoming game and a brainless but entertaining movie. Oh, and by the way, it may come on a Blu-ray disc, but it installs both games to your hard drive, so make sure you have at least 4GB free space if you want it.

-  From the Book of the Lands Part One: The Monkey and the Lightning-Struck Crèche

Even ten years later, there’s nothing else quite like the original Black & White. Peter Molyneux might’ve cultivated a bit of a reputation for talking up a big game that seldom actually turns out that way, but there’s simply no denying that Black & White was extraordinary, and still is.

The game’s premise is simple enough – there’s a series of islands, and you have to convert everybody on them to your holy cause, which is anywhere on a continuum ranging from “saintly” to “really, positively wicked”. To accomplish this, you have both your own divine powers (FOOD! FIREBALLS!) as well as a creature who responds to your commands, but has also a certain degree of autonomy based on your own previous positive and negative reinforcement. Basically, you train your creature to be as saintly or as really, positively wicked as you like, and leave him to get busy with whatever while you do things your own way.

The more you impress / terrify the people, the more they believe in you, and the more mighty you become, until, eventually, THE WORLD. Then the chapter ends, and you start all over again. There’s sort of a story, but I didn’t pay it much attention. It’s much more fun burning mom and dad in front of their kids (impress / terrify, belief, mighty, THE WORLD, etc.).

It’s the gap between you and the creature where some of the game’s most remarkable (technically, exploitable) mechanics are hard at work. For example, it’s possible – and, actually, perfectly sensible – to be entirely at moral odds with one another. As a tyrannical monster-god, you can rain fire over the heads of your grovelling disciples, and watch as your creature, an angelic paragon of every virtue on the rainbow, rushes in and douses the flames with miraculous water. MAXIMUM POWER.

The game got a sequel in 2005 that, while not altogether horrible, somehow managed to miss what it was that made the first one so special, focussing instead on city management and military conquest. It’s a tremendous shame, really, because the core concept – quite literally playing god – is an instantly compelling one, for all the obvious reasons. Most recently, Ubisoft’s From Dust tried something very similar, but inevitable comparisons with Black & White left it feeling a bit underwhelming. Maybe it’s time the ‘Neux binned the increasingly tedious Fable franchise, and went back to this one.