So, it turns out, I’m Batman. I know, I’m as surprised as you are. I didn’t realise until playing Arkham Asylum, but there’s no other logical explanation. I don’t see how I could possibly feel this much like Batman without actually being him.

I’m not sure exactly when I realised about the Batman thing. It might have been when I first strung up one of Joker’s minions by his legs under a gargoyle, or perhaps when I swooped down from on high to knock down an enemy without him seeing me. It might even have been when I realised I had truly gathered a gadget for every occasion, without feeling completely ridiculous (i.e. No bat-shark-repellent).¹

Batman: Arkham Asylum is, against the odds, an awesome super-hero game. There’s several factors that make this happen, but key amongst them is that it isn’t actually tying into any particular Batman mythology, but just taking the bits that work for the game from whichever comic or movie it likes, and not fussing about the rest. The game happens entirely at Arkham Asylum, where the Joker’s up to some considerable mischief, and the story pulls Batman about through various locations. Balancing a plot which changes the world around you, yet retaining the sandbox nature of the game seems tricky, but Arkham Asylum makes it feel effortless.

Like any game you care to mention these days, there’s also collectibles hidden about the map which lead you down the hideously alluring path of achievement points. However, most of these ones elevate themselves from the usual pointless fare by unlocking histories of various Batman characters. Suddenly the pointless drudgery of wading through the map in search of blips becomes a lot like clicking randomly through Wikipedia. In essence, Eidos have managed to pick two of the biggest time wasters in the world today and marry them for a surprisingly satisfying effect.

The story is comic-book style ridiculous, but quite involving. Despite some pretty ropey dialogue, Mark Hamill’s deliciously over-the-top Joker keeps everything exciting, and even the more unexpected plot developments are still enjoyable — even if one in particular does find a way to recreate my least favourite video game cliche, the jungle level.² My favourite dramatic moments of all, however, fell somewhat outside the plot with the impressive and ingeniously reality-bending Scarecrow encounters. Letting the game down somewhat is the generally cheesy dialogue, though in some instances the cheese at least feels appropriate, if not entertaining.

The actual mechanics of the game are generally pretty well realised too. I love a game with hang-gliding — a love that’s swelled in my heart ever since MDK — and Batman’s cape doesn’t disappoint, though as Yahtzee pointed out, it is awfully difficult to actually see where you’re going when said cape takes up almost half the screen. Diving about, swinging, and simple combat all works flawlessly. When combat becomes more involved, to the tune of ten or more henchmen, I did find myself sucking rather uncontrollably, but I’m almost certain that this is a failing on my part.

I used to scorn super-hero games. Suddenly, I’m desperate for more. I can only imagine what these people could do with Superman.

1. Nasty buggers, bat-sharks.
2. Not because I find them unoriginal, but because giant scary plants give me the heebie-jeebies.

Fallout 3 is… how best to describe this sprawling behemoth? Fallout 3 is a bit like GTA IV, but with fewer prostitutes and more radiation poisoning. Or like Mad Max, but with no road races and more buildings. Doesn’t sound a very appealing description? To be honest I’m having trouble being enthusiastic about the game.

The game starts¹ in Vault 101 in 2277, 200 years after a brief nuclear war. You and your father, Liam Neeson, live a relatively normal life until one day your father leaves the vault with no explanation. You leave the vault to find him. This is where the game starts to go wrong. I’d known my father for all of two minutes and couldn’t give a crap about him. I decided to go find some loot.

I’ve been trying to like Fallout 3 but it’s difficult. Mostly because Fallout 3 isn’t difficult. When you initially emerge from the safety of the vault in your pyjamas, with the vast wasteland before you to explore and only with only a pistol and three points of health for company, some caution is required. Once you’ve acquired some sweet perks, a companion and a decent weapon, the difficulty drops off sharply. I turned it up to maximum, and fired my companions² in order to find a challenge but even soloing packs of suped-up super mutants or deathclaws lacked danger. I should give Bethesda some credit for having an adjustable difficulty in-game, but the potency of your skills combined with VATS, quicksaves and the ability to pause the game mid-combat to heal or change weapons means that there is always an easy out to any situation.

I guess I’d been hoping for a game more about struggling to survive in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. The NPCs are constantly complaining about how hard their life is but I’ve found the wasteland to be so jam-packed with drugs, ammo, food and caps that I quickly stockpiled enough gear to take over a small African nation. Perhaps I’m too diligent an explorer. Given such a large detailed open world, my initial reaction is to pick up everything that’s fused to the ground by an atmoic blast and sell it, quickly earning enough money to buy the entire wasteland. Fortunately the merchants’ lack of cash and my limited inventory size prevented me wasting time picking up every single bent tin can out there and selling it for half a cap,³ but as it was I always had too much money and nothing to spend it on.

I like the size of the world, but it can take a long long time to walk across, especially at the start when you’re forced to take detours through the subway. I really wanted to be able to buy a motorbike or a vertibird, not only for a quick way to travel but to use up my mountain of cash. It wasn’t a big deal, as you can automatically travel to any location already discovered and there’s an autowalk button to save your fingers but everytime I saw a broken car or bike, I though how nice it would be to use my repair skill on a form of transport. While the game generally rewarded exploration, invisible walls prevented scaling the piles of rubble and when I managed to climb onto certain balconies, I found heavily locked doors with a brick wall behind them. Also I understand the need for some doors and containers to be unable to be unlocked for game reasons but it frustrates me when the game has a skill for unpicking locks and a mini-game that’s both realistic and fun to play.⁴

I could go on like this for many more paragraphs. There’s much I like about the game, but I keep wishing it were slightly different. I enjoyed getting new perks every level, until I hit the level cap. The trip wire and bear traps are hard to find and satisfying when spotted but land mines have big fat flashing lights on top.⁵ I like scavenging parts and collecting schematics for new weapons but the weapons themselves are underwhelming. I was initially disappointed that children can’t be killed, but being able to steal from them, lie to them and enslave them makes up for that. I like the use of radio stations but can’t work out why the pointless ham radios exist. The awareness of the NPCs is very good and they will react to anything within their line of sight, so I have to loiter suspiciously until their back is turned before looting their shop, but when they turn around and find all their stuff gone they don’t react. Or I can walk up to someone at the back of a crowd and plant a live grenade in their pocket. After the explosion, everyone turns around, see me heavily armed next to the exploded body and do nothing. Self-explosion must be common in the wasteland.

Radiation could have been an interesting game mechanic but as it can be prevented or completely removed with drugs, (with which I am amply supplied) I can stroll through the mostly highly radiated areas with no concern. I was told to avoid the entrance to one vault due to the radiation caused by an atomic blast. Rather than take the long route through the caves into the vault, I donned an anti-radiation suit, put Rad-Away on hotkey and walked up to the front door. The radiation level peaked about 3000 rads, requiring 4 rad-aways per second, at the door which was marked ‘inaccessible’. Fuck, I thought. Lazy level designers stopping me skipping quests. Then the gulping sound effect of consuming my anti-radiation medicine changed to a clicking sound. Fuck, I’ve run out of Rad-Away, I thought, as I succumbed to the radiation. I’ll have to go the long way round.

The quests, as a whole were interesting and I actually felt bad when I goaded a small boy into running away from his mother, so I found him and brought him back, even though I knew that as a child he was unable to be killed. The NPCs went about their daily lives convincingly but were let down by their limited amount of dialogue and conversation options. The first time two NPCs hold a conversation about a poisoned traveller is convincing. The fiftieth time you see it is disillusioning. Still, when you’re in a dingy bar in Rivet City chatting getting a girl drunk to find out her secret, watching the priest burst in, berate everyone for partaking in the devil’s drink, and get kicked out by security is cool.

VATS, which stands for Violent Automated Trajectories in Slowmotion, reminds me of the slow motion in FEAR. It makes combat far too easy but the slow motion and physics makes it compelling viewing. When I got the perk Grim Reaper’s Sprint which recharges all action points when you kill someone in VATS, the challenge became to sneak into the middle of a group of raiders and headshot them all with my sniper rifle before they could draw their weapons. Since you don’t need to aim in VATS, sniper rifles are excellent at close range. I regretted taking the Bloody Mess perk, because when I shot people in the head, their legs and arms would fly off, as if they had acute osteoporosis in their knees and elbows. It detracted from the enjoyment of slow motion killing.

So with all these small constant annoyances, I’d been finding it difficult to get into Fallout 3 and enjoy myself. And then I found vault 106. Ugh, I thought to myself, another extensive building to search for minimal gain.

I stroll disinterestedly into a ransacked room. There are three guys loitering here. Are they friendly? Mousing over them reveals them to be insane survivors, so probably not. They see me and turn, yelling. Old Trusty, my combat shotgun, hits one from long range, and then breaks. I switch to my inventory to find a spare shotgun to repair it with but I’ve run out. Two and a half metres is a little close for tactical nuke, and I’ve got no sniper bullets left, so I guess I’ll try out Vampire’s Edge, a sword given to me by my cannibal friends. I haven’t used it yet because a firearm is always easier in the wasteland. I repair it with the other less expensive swords I’ve got in my backpack, brush aside the thought of how unrealistic repairing weaponry mid-battle is, and trigger VATS. I swing my sword at the first guy and, in slow motion, I chop off his arm. A shiver of excitement goes down my spine as, blood spurting, he drops to the floor. The second guy panics and flees down the corridor; the third guy runs down the stairwell. I whip out a pistol and shoot the second guy in the back of the head. As his body falls, I draw my sword and I jump down the stairs after the last guy.

On the floor below, I see him head left at the end of a short corridor, right at the next corner, left again, across a small room and down more stairs. There’s no time for a shot even with VATS. There are two guys in this small room. Possibly startled by the fleeing survivor, they haven’t drawn their weapons and are dismembered on my way past. Down the stairs, one flight, two flights, slice up another insane survivor, jump down the third flight and see my man at the end of a caved-in tunnel, crouching in fear. I stride towards him; someone jumps at me from the right and I lash out with my sword. My vision blurs — it’s either an hallucination or I need to get off the drugs. I slash at my enemies, real and imaginary, and they disappear. The air to my left shimmers and in one motion I decapitate the invisible soldier and hit my cowering enemy on his head with such force that it explodes, spraying parts of his brain and his eyeballs across the room. As the blood lust fades, I turn and look at the trail of bodies and severed limbs leading across the floor and up the stairs. I’m covered in blood, alone, lost deep underground surrounded by corpses. I do like this game.

1. After a brief tuturial / backstory.
2. In a kiln.
3. I was reminded of Harvest Moon in which I forced my farmer to work 22 hour days gathering wheat to sell. Within the first year, I had filled the barn with cows and bought all the best farm equipment and had nothing to do for the next nineteen years.
4. The hacking game is also good but I’m disappointed by the lack of a fishing mini-game.
5. Though it is funny when you fail to diffuse a mine and a picture comes up showing that your arms have been crippled by the explosion.

What is it about Star Wars? I just don’t know. Despite the disappointing prequels, despite the time passing, despite Kevin J. Anderson, there’s still something very comfortable about hanging around the Star Wars universe. People get a little down on the video games that George Lucas’s own personal empire has spawned, but inamongst the massive quantity, there has been quality. Dark Forces. Knights of the Old Republic. If I were even more old school I’d list TIE Fighter, most likely, but I’m not.

And now we have The Force Unleashed — billed as an opportunity to really go to town with all those awesome force powers that you never quite got to exploit in any of the other games. And exploit you will. You’ll crush AT-STs, you’ll blast Rancors with enough electricity to solve the energy crisis. You’ll do some awesome stuff. However, you’ll do it through the equivalent of a very, very slow game of Guitar Hero. Or to put it another way, I hope you like quick time events.

I have lived in houses where the very mention of such things will start intense argument. They’re divisive mechanics; some have seen them done well (Resident Evil 4, I’m reliably informed), and some have only ever seen their dark side. I have a problem with them — at least in their form in The Force Unleashed — and it is the following:

• Normally, if you see a progress bar, you’d assume that you need to get it from one side to the other in order to complete the task. However when fighting an AT-ST or somesuch, you’ll find that you actually only have to drop their health by about four fifths, and the rest is miraculously taken care of in the quick time event. This means you can spend precious, precious moments desperately trying to smash some horrible beastie, when if you just let yourself fall to the ground, you’d be able to start the quick time event and kill them. At least, the bar could be a different colour for the bit which you don’t have to do yourself.
• Any monkey can press random buttons when asked to. There’s no reference between the game and which button you press until after you press it — when the effect is related to that button. But it’s not like you see a Rancor staggering and think “I have to use lightning here, but for the love of god, I don’t want to push him, for that would miraculously heal him and make me repeat all my steps.”
• I like mini-games. Who doesn’t enjoy the occasional game of Pazaak? But quick time events are mini games that developers couldn’t be bothered making. I can imagine the first time someone came up with them. “Jeez, we want a knife fight here. Who’ll make a knife-fighting mini game? No, wait, hang on, what if we just told them to press the A button to win?” “We can’t do that. That’s lazy.” “OK, what if we told them to press A, then B, then Z?” “That’s ridiculous.” “Alright, I’ve got it. We’ll tell them to press A, B and Z — but in a different order every time!!!!” “You are a genius. I take my hat off to you. Let’s leave early today.”

I’ve got another problem with the game, but before I go into it, let me first provide a disclaimer along the lines of I might just suck. That said — in much of The Force Unleashed, it just takes too damn long for Mr Apprentice to respond to things you do. I realise that its arguably more realistic to not always be able to change what you’re doing mid-action, but for heaven’s sake, I’m supposed to be an awesome Jedi/Sith with lightning coming from my fingertips. It’s… unseemly to be getting knocked to the ground, waiting several seconds to get back up, only to have homing missiles knock me over again. Not to mention, tremendously irritating. Towards the end of the game, there are moments where you’re surrounded by snipers and other associated bastards with homing bullets, so that no matter how nimble and jedi-quick you’re being, no matter what angle you’re running relative to your attackers, you’ll still keep getting knocked over, and most likely immediately killed due to your subsequent prolonged bout of immobility.

But let us not get sidetracked with irritating quibbles. There are two things worth playing this game for, assuming they sound appealing to you. One, is a decent and involving story set before the original Star Wars trilogy which fits in reasonably neatly with the movies.¹ It’s surprisingly compelling, though the central relationship feels a bit cliched. Luckily, it’s underplayed as well, so it doesn’t really get up your nose. It might be because I wasn’t expecting much, but the few twists sprinkled throughout the story genuinely surprised me.

The second virtue of The Force Unleashed is, perhaps unsurprisingly, being allowed to unleash the force. Cleverly, the game gives you a good taste of it in the prequel level when you play as Darth Vader with every power known to Sith-kind.² You can throw people, you can push them, you can zap them, or even a combination of all three. It’s tremendously enjoyable when it works, but unfortunately for me, I found lifting people less and less practical as the game went on, as there were more and more people shooting at me while I did so. The game does provide an incentive for you to endeavour to kill people amusingly though — you’re rewarded for amassing force points at the end of each level.

The game contains your obligatory collectables — in this case holocrons which as well as satisfying your inner obsessive compulsive, also occasionally grant stat boosts and lightsaber crystals. Thus, they’re slightly more exciting and fulfilling than pigeons. The levelling up system works well, though the ‘pick anything you like’ system is ultimately less interesting than the choices one has to make in a skill tree. Close combat is more interesting than you might expect, especially against baddies who parry your lightsaber strikes and force you both to retreat a few metres to regroup; an elegant way to make a dedicated button-basher like yours truly stop and think about what the hell he’s doing.

So: if the idea of wrapping yourself up in a big Star Wars blanket and using the force to decimate your enemies sounds pleasant, you don’t mind a few imperfections and flaws, and you can stand to hear someone who isn’t James Earl Jones trying to recreate Darth Vader’s voice,³ then this game is for you.

1. I’m not saying it’s seamless, but it’s an improvement on certain prominent recent efforts in that no one dies before meeting characters who will later claim to know them.
2. Reviews have complained that the come-down to knowing none of them afterwards is no fun. I can’t say I understand this viewpoint and so have no rebuttal to it.
3. This, for me, is the biggest flaw in the game. I don’t care how much Mr Jones was asking for — if there’s one voice in the world which is utterly inimitable, it’s that one.

Sometimes I wonder what might have happened if game developers hadn’t been so eager to embrace the third dimension in games. While 2D platformers ruled the eighties, by the nineties 3D was all the rage. So instead of focusing on games with better artwork, music and gameplay, developers struggled to deal with things like movement and the camera — problems which still around today.¹ I wonder what the world would have been like if all that effort had been focused on making brilliant 2D games.  One of the stars in this imaginary world would be Braid.

You might not have heard of Braid. If you don’t read an indie game blog, or check xbox live for the latest arcade games, or live in a house with obsessed gamers, then you probably haven’t. It’s a 2D platformer, loosely modelled on Mario,² in which you can rewind time. Being able to rewind time is such a liberating experience. No more worrying about precise jumps — if you miss, just rewind back before you jumped and have another go. This means that it is almost impossible to screw anything up. You can always rewind back past the mistake.

This ability isn’t just to make the platforming easier. There are plenty of puzzles which need solving in order to collect all the puzzle pieces. Most of these are excellent puzzles and I found great satisfaction in solving. I liked that the puzzles showed how your powers are used rather than using a tutorial, although there were a couple of puzzles that relied on a game mechanic that you didn’t know existed and didn’t follow logically from the rest of the game. In a game about rewinding time where there is no real life example to follow, this seems unvoidable, but annoying.

The detailed backgrounds are fantastic, as is the beautiful music, although when you’ve been looking at the same puzzle for half an hour, it gets on your nerves.  Having the music keyed to the speed of the game is a nice touch,³ and adds to the poignant story.  I won’t give any details about it for fear of spoiling it.

While I wouldn’t give up the third dimension because of games like Resident Evil IV, I do like to imagine a world in which everything is flat.

1. I’m looking at you Sonic Team.
2. I’m trying not to hold that against the game.
3. I was disappointed that there was no secret message when hearing the music in reverse.

(Under the Freedom of Information Act of 40931, a selection of reports on one of the recent wars has now been made available to the public.)

Mission Report Five, by the Leader of the Ultramarines Squad ‘DS’, during the War against the Word-Bearers of Chaos, on the Planet of Rhur III in the Forty First Millennium.

Commander, The most recent mission has been completed successfully, although there were a few minor incidents marring this otherwise enjoyable campaign.

The squad I command, five space marines and a vehicle, has been enough to complete the assigned missions so far against the chaos army, even with the unfortunate incidents today when several issues combined to almost cause the mission to fail.

The overhead view of the battlefield I use to command my squad has been the biggest issue in every mission so far, but it is only now that I have suffered casualties because of it. I understand that there are limited resources available, but being able to see the battlefield from another angle would avoid these problems. A camera mounted on my marines’ helmets would be extremely useful. The view is also very grainy and it can be difficult to make out some details, especially the brown chaos cultists standing on the brown dirt. The other map, showing where the units are on the battlefield, mitigates these problems, but it would be better if it was not a problem at all.

The first incident was early in the mission as the first wave of enemies approached my squad. Being short of time, I ordered the soldier with the plasma gun to shoot a chaos cultist from a distance without moving to a better position. I prefer my marines use more time to take a precise shot but I didn’t have the time for that. I was told that he had a line of sight to the enemy so I ordered him to shoot. Unfortunately, because I was directing which enemy to fire at, I could not see that the shot would pass close to another of my marines. The rushed shot was off target and the ball of plasma hit the other marine in the back, killing him. His sacrifice shall not be forgotten.

The second incident happened while hunting down some chaos marines in a maze of ruins. The squad had been moving slowly, so that they would have overwatch enabled and be ready to fire first if the chaos marines tried to ambush my squad. The cowards would not come out to fight, so I sent my chainsword marine to flank them and force them out, as he was more lightly equipped than the others and could move faster.

Unfortunately, one of them also had a chainsword and was able to run to my marine and attack him. I knew that chainswords were deadly in close combat and that it is safer to shoot from a distance than to risk charging the enemy with them, as it uses all their time just to get the one kill, and they are then not able to find cover before being shot by the enemy. However, I didn’t know that our marines were not trained to use them in overwatch, so when the chaos marine, armed with a chainsword, charged my marine, armed with a chainsword, my marine did not attempt to fight back, and was hacked to pieces. We shall mourn his loss.

Another marine was lost during the middle of the mission. I do not know who shot him or where his body lies. The map of the area only shows where my marines are and where the enemy is, but not what is happening. I can only watch a small area of the battlefield at a time and don’t know what is happening elsewhere. I heard a gunshot and my marine was dead. I couldn’t remember where he was, and was given no clue as to who shot him. Our force would be much more potent if the map could show who was on overwatch, who was shooting and where the shots were going. Rest in peace brave soldier, as the scavengers eat your rotting body.

Late in the mission, there were no enemies on the scanner, so I thought I’d try the new touch screen controls to practice giving the dreadnaught orders, instead of using the regular controls. I was attempting to find a suitable place for the dreadnaught to move to, when the dreadnaught walked out of cover and stopped in the middle of the open battlefield. It turns out that the new controls are very sensitive and misinterpreted my look command as a move command for the dreadnaught. This in itself wasn’t a problem. The dreadnaught is tough enough to survive an attack from a chaos marine and while the dreadnaught has a small sight range, there were no enemies in sight. Then, from beyond my range of sight, came two twin-linked lascannon shots, destroying the dreadnaught. Shocked, I moved up a marine to see what had destroyed my dreadnaught. It was a chaos tank, a Land Raider I believe. The marine hit it with his lascannon twice and hid in cover to act as a spotter for my plasma gun marine, who was a long way off. He hit it with his plasma gun several times and took cover. The tank responded by destroying the wall my lascannon marine was crouching behind and due the large size of the tank, was able to shoot over the pile of rubble and killed the marine.

This left me with just the plasma gun marine, who’s involvement in the mission had been so far was best described as poor. It’s clear now he just needed the right motivation to inspire the hero in him. He cleared the battlefield and demonstrated just how powerful the plasma gun was. It is explosive and was able to take out three cultist in one shot, by destroying the wall they were hiding behind, and then them. It was also strong enough to destroy the enemy tank, although it took some time, and my marine made sure to keep at least two walls between himself and the tank. He was also lucky that I had learnt my lesson from the previous mission, and had sufficient ammunition. I had been skimping on ammunition, so that the marines would not weighed down and be able to move faster. Last mission they ran out of ammunition for their heavy weapons and I was forced to rely on their weak bolters to finish the job. They were able to move faster when they dropped their ammo-less heavy weapons though.

My last marine survived and destroyed the last chaos marine. I know it is Ultramarine policy that all marines are the same and that it is following orders, not experience which wins wars, so no one gets individual recognition. That’s why the battle report only lists how many enemies were killed and not who killed them. Still I think we should give him a medal or an award to recognise his bravery. At least we could ask him what his name is.

Mission Report Ten, by the Leader of the Ultramarines Squad ‘DS’, during the War against the Word-Bearers of Chaos, on the Planet of Rhur III in the Forty First Millennium.

Commander, I’m pleased to report that the campaign is going to plan. All the missions I have been assigned have been completed and I’m told the heretic and all associated with him shall soon be cleansed with fire. Achieving our aims is of course our top priority — I have no qualms with that — but I have some concerns about my squad’s role here. It’s just that my squad were called upon because we were told our skills would be essential in bringing the traitor to justice. All we’ve done is fight small skirmishes in ruined towns. I’ve only seen several dozen cultists and some chaos marines. I’m sure it has aided the war effort, but my men are disappointed in not being allowed to aid in a more pivotal role. Surely you don’t need a decorated veteran like myself for these routine clean up missions. I hope when the final battle comes, my men and I will be allowed to the opportunity to win the glory we desire.

When that happens, we would like to call bagsies on the Land Raider. When we were assigned Land Raider as our support vehicle, we had no trouble blasting our way through the battlefield to victory. As the final battle should be the most difficult, we request the use of that tank for that mission. No doubt it is a popular vehicle, so we have to share the few that we have, instead of using it every mission like we want.

The Land Raider is ideal for this battlefield. Its twin linked lascannons can fire quick enough and are powerful enough that the easiest way to kill the enemy is to destroy the buildings they are hiding in. The lack of civilians means no collateral damage, and most of the buildings are already in ruins, so they are easily and satisfyingly removed.

Once the buildings are cleared from the battlefield, it is easy to spot the enemy and exterminate them. This does have the disadvantage of leaving us with no cover as we advance and we had some trouble when the chaos forces received unexpected reinforcements, but chaos does not seem to be intelligent enough to take advantage of that fact. They prefer to hide in buildings until we flush them out.

Their preferred tactic is to guard the entrance to their building and use overwatch, so that if we were to walk into their range of fire they would fire at us before we could fire at them. This is negated by our levelling-the-battlefield tactic. Conversely, they will walk right into our overwatch fire and die, or loiter just out of range until we flank them. This rarely happened though, as in most cases the enemy was killed as soon as they appeared on our radar

My other concern is the repetitive nature of our missions. War fatigue is an important issue in today’s army and variety is important to keep the troops alert. We’ve fought on many battlefields, each on a new and exciting shade of brown, and even one with snow. That’s enough variation for me. My problem is with the mission goals. It is always to kill all the enemy. Once we had to get a strategic point, or kill all the enemy. The enemy were all standing between us the our destination so we had to kill them all anyway. There was one other mission in which we had to survive until we were evacuated, or kill all the enemy. As there were not many chaos forces nearby, we killed all the enemy because it was faster than waiting.

This campaign has been an enjojable skirmish so far but it is more routine and straightforward than I was expecting. I hope to experience more dynamic and interesting combat before the end of the war.

Mission Report Fifteen, by the Leader of the Ultramarines Squad ‘DS’, during the War against the Word-Bearers of Chaos, on the Planet of Rhur III in the Forty First Millennium.

Commander, The campaign has been successfully concluded. We killed the heretic before he could summon a Greater Daemon from the warp. I personally would have like to fight the Greater Daemon, but I was told that it would be against our Health and Safety in the Workplace policy. That’s not the only problem I’ve had with this campaign.

The final battle was anti-climatic. I did lose a marine to the two large spider robots guarding the traitor during his summoning, but they were no match for my all-purpose tactic of sitting back and shelling the entire area with explosive weapons to remove cover and kill the chaos forces. Destroying the buildings means my units can shoot anywhere on the battlefield, provided there is a marine up ahead to act as a spotter. By not moving, they can get at least two accurate shots off before the enemy can do anything. An entire squad is easily able to take out a giant spider robot before it can do anything, especially if they are all armed with plasma guns. They are slightly weaker than the missile launchers and lascannon, but are much faster firing than the former and are explosive, unlike the latter.

All of those are safer than using the short-range weapons. The chainsword and powerfist, while they have a visceral appeal, are only good for hunting down the last hiding enemy. The shotgun can take out a group of enemies close together, but because of its wide range and the explosive barrels littering the battlefield, it is difficult to use without killing the marine.

The choice of primary weapons assigned to each soldier puzzles me. Why give them the weak and inaccurate bolter? I only used the more powerful secondary weapons, and despite the variety of options, usually just the plasma gun. Perhaps the marines could be equipped with plasma guns by as their primary weapon, as this would make them more effective.

I was frankly disappointed with the performance of the much vaunted terminators. Their only advantage over regular marines was that their increased toughness allowed them withstand an attack from the small daemons, but they weren’t allowed to use plasma guns.

There’s also disappointment about the mission briefings. We were promised state of the art, “cinematically-linked” mission briefings yet all we get are two sentences about the mission and a small irrelevant picture. I’ve heard that Squad ‘PSP’ were shown videos with voice overs before each mission. And perhaps a little more information into how our mission fits into the scheme of things. For most of the war, we were sent on missions with no idea of how critical our missions were or how the rest of the war was going.

Your running of this campaign has been adequate. However, I expected a lot more of you. This was basic straightforward set of missions. With your background, I hope that the next war we fight is more inventive and interesting. What’s the point of living the forty-first millennium if all we do is fight boring wars?

Oh, and thanks for not letting me use the Land Raider in the final mission. Was there something more important for it to be doing than preventing the emergence of a Greater Daemon?

It wasn’t the triumphant return I imagined. There was no confetti.¹ The fascist bastards down at administration had cleared out my desk. Which wasn’t strictly true. I probably never had a desk. It’s hard to burst in shouting “Well, I’m back!” with any sort of conviction when you secretly habour doubts you were ever really there in the first place.

You guys remember me don’t you? I wrote a review for you once. I also have a blog here, maybe. No? How about those movies we all did years ago, you have to remember those right?

So here I am. Andy still won’t talk to me, and Tom said I can’t have a computer or a desk so I’m stuck with some butcher’s paper and a crayon on the floor. Neither of them will tell me where they hide the Tim Tams. I hates them.

I know what you’re thinking. You are wondering when the fuck I’m going to start reviewing something. This is a review isn’t it?

Well, yes. Yes it is. And the review is NO. You don’t want to buy this game. You don’t want to rent this game. You don’t want to waste valuable minutes of your life reading about this game. It’s easily the worst game I’ve ever played. It’s a fucking piece of shit.

Have I made myself clear enough? Good. In that case I would like to take this opportunity to announce my retirement. It’s been one hell of a ride and we’ve been through lots together but it’s time I moved on.

Well as you can see I’m still here. Tom has since informed me that my review is lacking in several key areas and that I will need to finish it before he lets me go home.² Bastard. I don’t really want to do this, but here it goes.

Lunar: __D_ragon __S__ong_³ is a “traditional japanese RPG” apparently — and by that I can only assume it means, among other things, the story progression is totally linear, the battle system is turn based and you don’t really get to decide anything when you level up. Fine. So essentially we run from town A to town B and fight monsters in between.

This would be okay if just one of the following statements were true.

1. The story characters were compelling / interesting / not fucking cliched.
2. The battle system was deep / fun / involved any kind of strategy.

Sadly for the $69 I spent on this game neither of them are. For some unknown reason the designers thought it would be a good idea if you can’t select your target in battle. I want you to think about this. It’s your turn. You have a choice of actions. You can either a) attack, or b) use an item. Look I don’t really want to go into it, but it’s fucking boring okay? I’m sure there are people out there who didn’t mind it but the fact is that for just about every battle I could look away and just mash ‘a’ until the battle was over. I say “mostly” because for the boss fights I sometimes had to heal myself. Oooooh.

To be fair there are almost some interesting ideas here. Combat has two modes you can choose from, a ‘combat’ mode and a ‘virtue’ mode. In the latter you earn experience and have a certain time limit to defeat every monster in a region and after doing so the game unlocks a chest for you. In the former, you do not earn experience but instead you receive items. Items which are neccessary to complete various delivery missions⁴ which is the only way to earn money needed to buy better items. Which you need in order to fight the invariably tougher baddies further down the line. This had the potential to be interesting until you realised the game is effectively doubling the amount of time you spend button mashing on the train.⁵

In another awesome masterstroke of gaming design, running damages your health⁶ — even in towns where there are no monsters. So you walk everywhere. It takes longer. I’ve always wanted to make a totally unenjoyable experience longer. The whole idea has “padding” screamed all over it.

Yes, and the story is cliched and uninvolving and not in the least bit compelling. Sorry but I can’t go on. I hate this game. I hate reviewing it. Just don’t buy it okay?⁷ I can’t bring this review up to standard. It looks like I’m stuck here for a while.

1. Traditional, I feel.
2. Andy has also started kicking me on a regular basis and demanding coffee. At least we are communicating now, albeit on a very basic level.
3. Or Lunar: Genesis locally. I was unfortunate enough to import my copy. I feel if I use the incorrect name in the main text people might get confused.
4. So you are a courier that has to deliver items to people, okay? Exciting thrilling items. Once I had to find and deliver 8 acorns to somebody. It took me dozens of battles before enough monsters collectively dropped enough acorns. And all the while I’m not actually earning any experience. For the love of God, Why???!
5. I’ve come a long way.
6. They should put it on a packet somewhere.
7. Given what I know of our readership, I think I’m pretty safe.

Sequels are tricky things. Warrior Within‘s predecessor, The Sands of Time, was near-perfect. But it didn’t sell too well, presumably because the Prince wasn’t driving a car or shooting anyone, or even playing professional sport. So, as well as trying to improve upon perfection, Ubisoft also had to try and make the game more marketable without losing what made the first game so special. In order to do this, they tried to make the game more ‘adult’ and less ‘fairy-tale’. Clever readers will probably see that this isn’t likely to mesh well with keeping what made the first game so special. But even if you were deliberately moving away from The Sands of Time‘s mythic quality, you could still find a cool new place to go.

Or, you could add boobs, butts, rock music and random swearing. Sure. Whatever.

It’s not as bad as it sounds, really.¹ Yes, the Prince bears almost no resemblance to the charming but foolish hero of the previous game. Yes, he’s started swearing at the villains.² Yes, the music is about as Indian as a Quarter Pounder. But, the gameplay has only gotten more slick, the combat awesome, and the game has lost that slightly niggling feeling of linearity without gaining the even more annoying feeling of excessive backtracking.

So — what’s the Prince’s problem anyhow? He sorted things out neatly at the end of the last game, didn’t he? Well, yes and no. Yes it was sorted out, no, it wasn’t neat. There’s a few paradoxes hanging around the place, and it turns out there’s a huge monster who likes to eat people who cause paradoxes. And so, the Prince travels to the Island of Time™ — the place that the Sands of Time™ came from in the first place — to see if he can’t find a way to put things right. Once there he finds a series of time-travelling portals that transport him to the ancient past, and back again. This, it must be said, is an awesome idea, and it’s handled well. In fact, it all even manages to make sense for a considerably large chunk of the game.

In the previous game, you had a few moves. In Warrior Within, you have scores. Not only are there a boodle of new combos that look awesome and aren’t too much of a hassle to pull off, but you can also pick yourself up extra weapons along the way. There’s one particularly cool move where you can flip over a near-death opponent, spin around, grab his weapon, and then twist your body about, slicing the poor sucker’s head off. In slow motion, with an awesome camera angle. Or, you could kill him normally and pick the weapon up afterwards — but it’s not nearly as much fun. You can even throw the things — a very nice way to deal with the sneaky little bastards who’ll attempt to ambush you in the middle of highly complicated acrobatic manoeuvres.³

All the special time manipulating powers are back this time too — you can roll time back, blast sandy goodness from your person, slow down time… the usual. Well, not quite; when you slow down time, you don’t slow down yourself, thus making it considerably more useful than the Sands of Time incarnation of the power. How are you doing this without that handy dagger? Well, you’ve got Farah’s Amulet of Time™ which you picked up after the last game.⁴ No, she’s not in it (sniff) but at least her legacy is felt. So where’s the romance, you ask? Well, there’s this priestess called Kaileena, you see. You can tell she’s the love interest because she’s wearing three strips of red cloth and has breasts like bowling balls. What’s that? That’s not enough to build a romance on? Tell that to the Prince; despite her showing him little attention, or even seeming particularly nice, he’s continually wondering if maybe they could have something.⁵ The game’s peurile, high-school level attempts at being sexy don’t end there, but I shan’t go into more detail because, frankly, you wouldn’t believe it anyway.

Did I mention that when you’re near pillars with enemies about, you can swing around them and slice the baddies up real good? Because you can. Awesome.

The unhurried style of The Sands of Time is broken up in this game by the thrilling Dahaka segments. The Dahaka is basically some kind of time creature that wanders the world removing paradoxical elements from the timeline.⁶ This is a problem for the Prince, who is — let’s face it — the biggest problem the timeline has had in some time.⁷ And so, when the Dahaka turns up, the world turns all sepia and blurry, and you’ve got to run for your life. These segments are handled really well — there’s enough clarity so that you almost always can see the path you should take, but at the same time the music and camera angles are pretty scary. They’re also a clever way for the game to force you to go a certain direction. Even cuter is when the destruction wrought by the Dahaka in the past affects you in the future.

Oh, and there’s this move where you jump on your hand and spin a few kicks about before slashing back into combat again. Awesome.

The hidden health upgrades are back as well — and because of the more exploratory nature of the game, you can go around searching for them at almost any point in the game. And you really should, because you get a much cooler ending if you find all of them.⁸ I’m not sure about this sort of crap though. Giving a completely different ending seems less like rewarding the expert gamer and more like penalising the novice gamer to me. But I would say that, falling more into the latter category.

This game is a mixture of fantastic and lame. In terms of the actual gameplay, it’s probably superior to The Sands of Time — though the extra options do sacrifice some of the impressive elegance of it’s predecessor’s controls. But in terms of style, it’s lost out considerably. I don’t really mind the rock music — though a mixture of old fashioned Indian and modern rock would have been truly cool. But you just don’t feel for the Prince, or anyone, as much as you did in the first game. Tonally, Warrior Within is more action movie than legend, and it loses a lot as a result. But it’s still tremendously playable and great fun. It’s times like this I’m really glad that we don’t do star ratings on this site.

1. Of course, you might not even think that it does sound bad.
2. Yes, he’s voiced by that pansy Byron from Babylon 5‘s excreable fifth season.
3. Those pricks. They’re just jealous of my incredible athletic prowess.
4. Collect the whole set!
5. I’d like to think that, in a life-threatening situation, a semi-naked woman with humongous boobies wouldn’t be enough to distract me from my purpose. I really would like to think that.
6. A distant relative of the Reapers one assumes.
7. Time presumably is a meaningless concept for the timeline and thus this sentence makes no sense.
8. Just make sure that you’re not playing the Xbox version if you missed the one behind the throne near the start, because there’s a bug in the game and you can’t get back if you go for it. BASTARDS! Not that I’m bitter. Luckily Jackson was playing it at the same time and was able to show me the ‘proper’ ending.

Platformers used to be my favouritest sort of game in the whole world. Commander Keen, Mario, Sonic. But then the world changed. Two dimensions just weren’t good enough any more and everyone was trying to recreate the same fun in the big three. This had a few main effects; boredom, one dimensionality masquerading as three, and swearing at horrid camera angles that don’t make clear exactly where the damn platform is. Things looked bleak.¹

Then, Prince of Persia, one of the greatest of the primitive platformers, is reborn as a three-dimensional platformer.² This was a while back, but it takes me a while to get round to playing most games. Over the last month I’ve played both it and its resulting sequels, Warrior Within and The Two Thrones — I’ll be reviewing all of these, and so there’ll be a bit of comparison back and forth. But The Sands of Time is a good place to start, because not only is it the first, but it’s the best. Well, overall. Allow me to justify myself over the rest of the review.

I’m a sucker for a neat, elegant, heroic plot, and a touch of romance. This game has that. You’re a Prince (of Persia, even) who’s father has been tricked into stealing a great big whopping hourglass (and a bunch of other stuff) from some other Sultan by a sneaky looking Vizier. As with every Vizier in every story ever told, this gentlemen is treacherous and evil³ and has a cunning plan to get his own hands on the sands within the hourglass. However, the hourglass gets broken, and the resulting special effect turns everyone in the Maharaja’s palace into scary monsters. The only people left untouched seem to be yourself and the previous owner of the Sands’ daughter, Farah.

The plot of the game mostly consists in fighting your way through the now treacherous, trap-filled, monster-ridden palace. This might sound a bit boring on paper but in games (and unlike film) having one solid quest that you’re continuously plodding towards is actually pretty satisfying. Especially if the company’s good. And it is — you quickly enter a slightly suspicious alliance with the lovely Farah and journey together. As one might expect, a budding romance results, with delightful dialogue and some cute plot twists. Of course the deal-breaker with such things is the voice acting — fortunately both Yuri Lowenthal and Joanna Wasick are fantastic, delivering the funny lines brilliantly and the cheesier ones believably.

Look at this. I’m on my fifth paragraph and I haven’t even mentioned the gameplay. You can see what an unreliable game reviewer I am. But in fact, the gameplay is perhaps the most important aspect of the game, in that it’s absolutely seamless. Elegant and predictable, every action is pretty much what you’d expect. The only fiddle is that the jump button doubles as the roll button which causes some problems when you’re trying to jump over an enemy’s head and instead roll into their feet.⁴ But other than that, things are fantastic. Jumping, swinging, climbing, running along walls — after playing Sands of Time for a while you feel like an athlete, but your fingers don’t have to jump through hoops to do it. You will however need all these skills to operate some of the amusing puzzles you find on the way. The mirrors in the library are particularly cute.

You do have to fight the evil sand monsters, though. Invulnerable to normal weapons, luckily these bastards can be stabbed by the Dagger of Time™ when they’re down — and then they stay down. This makes the combat quite interesting, balancing the need to not get hit with the need to get over to that guy on the floor and stab him good. Of course, when you do, often another one will respawn. Most of the combat in The Sands of Time is like running a gauntlet; you find a room with monsters, and then you kill, and kill, and kill, until they finally stop for no apparent reason.⁵ This wears you down a bit but it only gets truly irritating when you’re also stuck fighting your evil-magic-perverted father at the same time, quite early in the game.⁶ You also have to make sure that bow-wielding Farah is safe from harm, but she’s quite capable for a secondary character.

What with death-defying leaps across yawning chasms, insane acrobatics, and violent meanies with big swords and worse tempers, things can get nasty. Luckily, your Dagger of Time™ comes with a very handy power — the ability to rewind time. This cute little idea makes a good game great and allows the game a lot more freedom to make crazier levels, safe in the knowledge that you’ve probably got enough rewindable time up your sleeve to try a few different leaps of faith. Later on you find yourself some other powers — slowing time, blasting a wave of magical sand goodness out around yourself, etc. You also get the ability to rewind time more and more. Other Prince self-help includes the mystical journeys you occasionally make down hidden passages that result in your total health being upgraded.

Have I missed anything? If you don’t want to play this game right now then it’s possible I have. Elegant story. Cute romance.⁷ Spectacular views. Interesting puzzles. Tremendous acrobatics. Highly enjoyable, if a little simple, fight system. Underwhelming final boss. Oh alright, that last bit isn’t so good. But the rest is awesome. The Sands of Time is a near-perfect, lovingly crafted game.

1. I don’t actually know much about gaming history. This is just my impression having been near a few N64s, Dreamcasts and Playstations over the years.
2. Apparently there was a previous three dimensional experiment but no one wants to talk about it.
3. Are Viziers so important that everyone feels compelled to keep hiring them?
4. This button duality is common to all three games in the series and thus I cannot guarantee that this particular upset actually occurred to me in this specific chapter. These are the dangers of reviewing games after playing three similar ones in a row.
5. Well, I think someone mentioned something about that area being exhausted of its magic or somesuch.
6. Oddly, the most difficult part of the game as well.
7. As Farah actually follows you around, you can stare at her if you should choose. But she’ll notice you and warn you to stop. At least, at first.