Overclocked On Caffeine v.1.1

Head of Square-Enix: "Quit doin it rong u guise!"

2010-02-17T20:55:00.002Z

Here's an interesting story on Square's response to the reviews for Final Fantasy Ex-Eye-Eye-Eye

The tl;dr version is this: Western reviews of the game have been unfair because we're looking at it from a Western perspective. We don't 'get' it. Which is hilarious, really. I mean, practically every other game in the series has received glowing reviews, despite being looked at from the exact same perspective. And if you look at Metacritic, it's still right up there with an average of 86 - 14 points shy of perfection. Which, by anyone's standard (assuming you're not using the 'anything less than 7/10 = absolute garbage' method of grading) is pretty damn good. But because this isn't being hailed as the greatest thing since mouth first met genitalia, we're doing it wrong.

Can't help but think that this is what happens when you get complacent, Mr. Toriyama. Not that this hasn't been a while coming. I mean, while critical acclaim has been generally as high as ever, the fanbase has been grumbling for a while. FFX was probably the start of it, with frequent complaints about the voice acting. Then X-2, which had many of the same bad voice actors (looking right at you, Hedy Burress), but with the bonus of extra cringeworthy scenes and dialogue. Arguably its biggest sin (aside from, y'know, that Sin) was that it wasn't the sequel to FF7 everyone wanted, and that was unforgivable.

Then Advent Children came out and it proved itself to be a pile of wank.

I could go in-depth on what made it so bad (and may well do so at a later date), but the short version was that it was shallow, heartless and didn't tell an engaging story. There was nothing here that couldn't have been told in a spin-off manga or drama CD. And while it certainly looked nice, it was all spectacle and no substance. It went from 'Only through friends can you overcome life's hardships' (FF7) to 'No one could wipe themselves if Cloud wasn't around, also did we mention Vincent, the only character with an extended cameo is starring in a new game? Buy Dirge of Cerberus, kids!' (FF:AC).

Then came FFXII. Oh dear. Oh dear, oh dear. The scores in the press were still almost universally above 90%, but the fans were definitely not pleased. In attempting to reinvent the wheel for the 7th or 8th time, Square seemed to forget what made the games fun in the first place. It's all very well and good being revolutionary and making waves, but if you're not using them to, I dunno, make things more fun, who cares? FFXII was an MMO without the MM part (or the 'O') but with all the stupidity. Just you, wandering the landscape looking for rare lewt with robot buddies that you had to pre-program down from 'Huurrrr Duuurrr' to simple 'hurp de durp'. It was like those robots you got in school where you had to program the directions to make it go in a square in advance, only you weren't doing it for 120 hours at a time.

The point that I'm trying to make, in between taking none-too-subtle digs at the series, is this: Square-Enix have developed a sense of entitlement that, of late, hasn't been well-deserved at all. And I say that as someone who has been with the series since Final Fantasy Mystic Quest on the SNES. I can say with no doubt in my heart that FF6 is one of the best games on that machine. Similarly, I can say with as much certainty that FFXII is one of the most boring RPGs I've ever played, and has two of the most worthless characters it's ever been my misfortune to encounter. You two fuckers made me miss Tidus. Tidus, for fuck's sake! The scores are still high, but they're not high enough, and it's not because the game's not good enough, it's because we don't appreciate it right.

Y'know, I think there's a couple of guys from Activision you might get along with. Ask them about Tony Hawk, they'll set you right.

As I said before, this has been a long time coming. The backlash, if you can even call it that, isn't as severe as it probably should be, but it's starting. Whether they take this as an opportunity to marshal themselves and return to the greatness the series was once known for, we'll have to wait and see. Once upon a time, the release of a Final Fantasy title was an Event. You marked it down on your calender, you counted down the days, and you waited for it. Now? It just means it's Wednesday.

2009-12-31T13:16:00.001Z

Persona 4

PS2

Welcome to Inaba
Proudly Twinned With Silent Hill

Let's be honest, Persona 3 is a hell of a hard act to follow. Great gameplay, a fantastic story, and an ending that could make a sufferer of Bell's Balsy weep like a Japanophile being told their Holy Land ain't all its cracked up to be. To those unfamiliar with the series it belonged to (which was just about everyone at the time) it came out of nowhere, grabbed everyone's attention and became everyone's new favourite series. Critical acclaim, the endless appreciation of fans everywhere... yeah, a hard act to follow by anyone's estimation.

Persona 4 opens in much the same way the last game did: new student transfers to a new town and school, wackiness occurs. Yeah, it's a cliche, but it's a classic, and it works, so we'll let it slide. Our hero (who, for the sake of this review, we'll refer to as Jotaro Tenryu) quickly makes new friends, who tell him about a local urban legend. It's said that if you try watching a TV that's been switched off on a rainy night, you can see something: another reality, your true love, whatever, the reports vary depending on who you ask. So, bored one night, Jotaro tries it out. And finds that he can not only see something, but he can also physically enter the TV itself. The group, disbelieving at first, start to wonder if it has anything to do with the recent spate of murders in the formerly quiet town. And then, one of them goes missing, soon appearing on the Midnight Channel.

Persona 3, while a fantastic game, was not a game without its problems, primarily in the realm of combat. Having your teammates act for themselves, while a nice idea, often proved more trouble than it was worth. While you still have the option of letting them do their own thing, most people will head straight for direct control and never look back. The damage types have been pared down as well, presumably to make things less confusing: now, there's only one type of physical damage, as opposed to three, and the main character can only equip swords, rather than whatever the hell he wants.

Outside of battle, the music has been given a major overhaul. Fans of the original will be pleased to find that themes no longer restart from scratch every time you enter a new area, praise be to Philemon. The world map theme also changes depending on the weather, so you're not stuck listening to the same piece of music for months on end, another welcome change. The main battle theme, Reach Out To The Truth, isn't quite as catchy as Mass Destruction, but it does the job well.

The dungeons have been given a major overhaul as well. Now, every dungeon not only has a distinct look, it has its own music too! Each area ties in to the person lying at the heart of it. So a shut-in game-freak's dungeon is styled after an 8-bit RPG, the girl missing her deceased mother has hers looking like a storybook version of Heaven, the guy struggling with his sexuality has a very suggestive screamingly gay bathhouse, and so on. An infinite upgrade from the atrociously bland dungeon(s) of the last game.

So then, The Big Question: is it a better game than Persona 3? In sheer gameplay terms, yes. Developers, take note: when designing a sequel, this is how things should be done. All the rough edges have been smoothed off, virtually every problem I had has been fixed or improved, and the whole thing has been tuned to perfection. This is everything I had hoped for in the last game, and it's a testament to Atlus that they've delivered in spades. Outside of the gameplay, however...

It's ironic in a way. P3 had a great story, but the gameplay was lacking. And now, here comes its sequel with the exact opposite problems. They've managed to avoid the trap of having identical characters, thankfully. Yosuke is kinda similar to Junpei, in that they're both your buddy and co-pilot for the game, but in terms of personality, they're fairly different. Same goes for Yukiko, who outwardly resembles Mitsuru from the last game, though she's a lot friendlier than Mitsuru ever was. The problem comes with their social links. Every party member has them, and raising them gives them extra abilities in combat, such as being able to knock you out of harm's way when low on health, or being able to stand up again after taking a fatal wound in battle. Fair enough, except this is the only way to unlock their ultimate Persona. Honestly, I preferred it when it was part of the story. Seeing Akihiko's determination to live up to his friend's memory, or Junpei laying the smackdown on Strega with his upgrade gave you a real feeling of pride in your characters. Here, it feels more arbitrary. "Oh, well done, you've maxed me out, have a cookie and a Suzuka Gongen."

Then there's the music. It starts off strong, sunny day theme Your Affection quickly becoming one of my favourite pieces of music in the game. The first couple of dungeon themes are also good, the music for Yukiko's Castle being a standout piece. But as it progresses, the music becomes more and more lackluster. The last couple of dungeons are quiet, sedate pieces when you should be gearing up for a major no-holds barred fight. The final boss theme aims for symphonic fierceness and falls waaay shy of the mark, landing squarely in hum-drum mediocrity. The call back to the battle theme is nice, but not what I was looking for. Honestly, this is probably the first final boss theme I've encountered in a Megaten game that's outright sucked. 'Disappointing' is not the word.

On a related note, the cast has fewer duds in it than P3 did. The voice actresses for Fuuka and Ken were almost universally derided, but here, even the worst voice is tolerable. Kanji is probably the best on offer here, never once dipping below good, and his actor's delivery of lines is, on occasion, perfect, turning mere funny lines into outright hilarious ones. On the other hand, Naoto's is a poor choice. Massive spoilers that really aren't: Naoto's bag is that she's a girl pretending to be a boy. It works perfectly in the Japanese version, since her VA is known for playing gruff teenage boys like Edward Elric in Fullmetal Alchemist with the twist being that, for once, she's playing a girl. In the Western version, the second she opens her mouth, the illusion is shattered and you spend the next 20 hours wondering if your team is functionally retarded for not noticing that she's quite clearly a girl. The battle quotes are hilariously poor as well. They must've been recorded at the start, before most of the cast grew into their roles, because they're badly delivered ("Let us attack with all our strength" and "It's quite tenacious" being primary offenders) or just plain hilarious - Chie, dear, I love you to bits, but your wimpy little battlecry is abysmal. Seriously, stop it. And maybe it's more of a problem of translation, but they leave in all the honorifics like '-san' or 'senpai', and use them liberally, then have your cousin call you 'big bro' instead of 'onii-chan'. It's baffling why they'd do that, and it's jarring to boot.

And finally, we have the story. For the first 8/10ths of the story, it's fairly good. Great in places. Seeing your character actually get involved with events, rather than just standing there as things unfold around him is much more satisfying. You really feel like you have a part to play beyond pressing the X button to make the conversation move on. Some of the shenanigans you get up to are outright hilarious, such as the disastrous school festival and the camping trip, and draw you in more than the events in the last game. However, it's when you get to the end that things start to unravel.

Persona 3 was an epic story in the old sense of the word. You started out fighting monsters with friends and, before you knew it, you were locked in battle with an eldrich force that existed solely to obliterate all of mankind. You were rarely in any doubt as to what was at stake, and when the time came at the end, you knew damn well what would happen if you failed and were ready to give all as a result. Brilliant. Here, things start small with a serial killer offing people in the town when the fog rolls in. But Persona 4 never ups the ante much. When the fog covers the town permanently towards the end, you're expecting something big to come out of it, but it never really does. You're told there will be dire consequences, but, crucially, you're never shown what they are. And when you go to uncover the true mastermind at the end, it feels like an afterthought. One of the party outright states that you're doing this to give your character a good sendoff. Never mind that you've got a literal god taunting you (who's barely mentioned throughout the game, by the way), forget that a whole bunch of people have died as a result of all this, as long as Senpai gets a glorious final battle, everything else is just gravy. Tell me, did someone replace the cast with Klingons while I wasn't looking? What the hell, guys?! And the final bosses themselves are just so boring! Sure the final final boss looks great, but come on, we went through a fight last time where we battled our way through the Major Arcana of the tarot, then fought the god of death and her harbinger to a standstill! "Big spiky disco ball" and "Silent Hill reject" is a major step back by anyone's standards.

It's frustrating, really. For everything Persona 4 fixes or polishes, it creates another gaping flaw. When it should be increasing the pressure, it steps back and eases off on you. And when it should be telling you to gear up for a titanic struggle, it idly tosses a boss with no real difficulty behind it and tells you to busy yourself. I can understand why they'd want to scale things down after the last game - after all, when you've tangled with the embodiment of mankind's despair, how exactly do you top that - but that doesn't mean they can't make the current threat appear every bit as real as the last one. Just because the scope is reduced, that doesn't mean the danger should be too. Ironically, Persona 4 falls into exactly the same category as Devil May Cry 4: both are games that are great in their own right, both have the bad luck of being follow-ups to leaders in their field, both are kept from greatness by major problems. If we could meld Persona 3's storyline with Persona 4's gameplay, (and maybe DDS' or Maken Shao's OSTs, since I'm bored with the J-Pop by now) I have little doubt you'd have one of the single finest RPGs of all time. I still haven't lost faith in the series, not by a long shot, and it'll take more than a lousy final 5th of a game to do that. Still, here's hoping the inevitable Persona 5 will finally bring to fruition everything the games have promised thus far.

Project Antivent - Day Twenty Five

2009-12-25T13:45:00.002Z

And so, we come to the last day of Antivent. I'll keep this brief, since you've all probably got food that needs eating and whatnot.

Our last theme comes from The World Ends With You. I won't lie, this is not only my favourite game on the DS, it's also one of the best games I've played in the last decade. The gameplay is fantastic, the soundtrack, sublime and the story compelling as all hell. I was addicted to the game for about a week solid and the final boss battle was the crowning moment for me.

Today's final theme, Twister Remix, comes from that battle. In a game with an exemplary OST, it takes something special to stand out from the crowd. If you ask me, Twister Remix has that in spades. Enjoy.

And finally, because it wouldn't be Christmas without gifts, we present you with everything we've covered here (minus Breaking The Girl because that could land me in a buttload of trouble. Don't worry though, you'll like the alternative). Download merrily and have fun, people.

Antivent Pack 1
Antivent Pack 2

Project Antivent - Day Twenty Four

2009-12-24T12:21:00.000Z

Time for something very different today. I know I said at the start I said I was keeping this to one series/one song, and yes, this is from a Final Fantasy game, but bear with me, my reasoning is just.

Dancing Mad was originally the final boss theme from Final Fantasy VI, probably my favourite of the series. In its original form, the track was great, but sadly it hasn't quite aged as well as others. You should probably listen to it before we go any further. Go ahead, I'll be waiting here.

Heard it? Great.

Hellion Sounds is a group that covers game music. Yes, another one. But rather than doing a straight up cover, they take the general spirit of the music and embellish it til it doesn't just shine, it radiates with the brightness of a sun. They take the original music and turn a good song into something beyond special. Words honestly can't do this one justice. Just click for yourself and see what I mean.

Project Antivent - Day Twenty Three

2009-12-23T19:30:00.001Z

Dynasty Warriors! A game that is to hystorical accuracy what orbital bombardment with nuclear weapons is to subtlety. They never had electric guitars back in feudal China. Their loss, since heavy guitars, as we've proven oh so many times this month, makes anything that little bit cooler. Today's offering is from the 5th game in the series, and probably my favourite piece of music from any of them: Great Red Spirit.

Project Antivent - Day Twenty Two

2009-12-22T20:15:00.003Z

Okay, bear with me, because this one's a little weird. The Guilty Gear games have always been known for their hard-rocking soundtracks. Unsurprising, considering the number of musical references in the game. These soundtracks have always been highly acclaimed and are generally seen as some of the better fighting game OSTs. However, when Guilty Gear XX #Reload was released in Korea, they saw fit to give it a completely new soundtrack, the music being provided by a band called N.EX.T. The end result? A selection of music every bit the equal of the originals, arguably surpassing them on many points, and the single greatest character select theme in the form of today's track, Redemption. Crank this one up: if the walls aren't shaking, you're doing it wrong!

Project Antivent - Day Twenty One

2009-12-21T19:34:00.001Z

Baroque was yet another game I reviewed earlier this year, and it holds the distinction of being one of the darkest non-Shin Megami Tensei-related RPGs I've ever played. Not that the intro doesn't clue you in to that: it starts with a Rorschach test turned cancerous, ends with a bloodstain turning becoming an portentous geometric symbol, and in-between, takes every opportunity to flash ominous text and worrying smiles at the viewer. Meanwhile, the title theme is the charmingly named Sinful Eyes. No, this isn't a cheerful game at all, is it.

It also gives away at least one major plot twist if you know what you're looking for, but, like every character here, in a way, that's neither here nor there.

Project Antivent - Day Twenty

2009-12-20T21:09:00.003Z

There's a thin line between challenge and frustration. Knowing that you died because you fucked up, as opposed to a cheap shot is, simultaneously irritating and gratifying - yeah, you died, but at least you can improve. If any game personified this line, it would be God Hand, hated and adored in equal measure for its almost crushing difficulty. If you 'got' it, it was a stupidly fun OTT beat-em-up, a modern-day relic of a simpler era. If you didn't, it was too hard, the graphics were shit and too stupid to bother with (see: the feckless idiots at IGN.)

Aside from it's difficulty, the other thing it's famed for is its sense of humour. Almost nothing is taken seriously, and in an age of generic bald space marines who take everything super serial, that's only a good thing. Its developers, Clover, died after releasing a scant four games, each and every one a burst of colour and life in a brown and grey world.

Today's offering is the closing theme from God Hand. If you've never played it, this is a great example of what to expect. If you have, you'll probably know the words by heart.

Project Antivent - Day Nineteen

2009-12-19T10:01:00.006Z

If I could say any single game changed my life, it would be Secret of Mana. This was the game that kickstarted my love of RPGs in general, and probably the single best game on the SNES for my money. I still remember the day I got it, taking it home, switching it on and hearing this, the opening theme. At the time, aged 13, it was the most amazing piece of music I had ever heard in my life. Now... even now, it's still a front-runner.

Honestly, I don't have the words. See for yourself.

Project Antivent - Day Eighteen

2009-12-18T12:23:00.005Z

The Dark Spire was a DS game released this year aimed almost solely at the old school market. And by 'old school' I mean 'so old, they refer to single-celled lifeforms as newbies'. Probably the most harder-than-hardcore dungeon crawler I've played since Nethack, The Dark Spire, unsurprisingly, failed to catch on almost anywhere. Which is a shame, since it has an absolutely fantastic soundtrack that demands a wider audience. That the game itself is fun (if obtuse as all hell) is a bonus, really. This is the more sedate Shop theme, a counterpoint of sorts to the standard battle theme, and probably the single most relaxing piece of music in this list.

Project Antivent - Day Seventeen

2009-12-17T16:19:00.003Z

Doing things slightly different again today. The Protomen are a Canadian group currently working on a three-part rock opera based on... Megaman. The first part, Hope Rides Alone came out in 2005, with the second, The Father Of Death following this year. You'd think it'd be difficult to adapt the story of the original Megaman games, what with them being so complex and sprawling, and damn near impossible to make it worth listening to on its own merits, but in my opinion, they've succeeded admirably.

This is the title track and opening song off their first album, chronicling the rise and fall of 'the first son of Doctor Light': Protoman. Trust me on this one: it just gets better from here.

Project Antivent - Day Sixteen

2009-12-16T15:40:00.001Z

I'm one of those weird folks who plays old games as often as they play new ones. You've probably heard of us. Maybe even crossed the street to avoid us. Castlevania 4 (A.K.A. Super Castlevania) is one I get regular mileage out of, arguably the best of the classic Castlevanias (and in my opinion, one of the best in the series, even if you include the Metroidvania games). Today's track is the game's update of Simon's Theme, a mainstay of the early games. It's hard to see it now, but its 16-bit upgrade was a major deal back then, offering the programmers an opportunity to push their soundtracks to heights they hadn't been able to reach til then. Coincidentally enough, that was also the point game soundtracks started to be regularly released on CD. Funny that.

Project Antivent - Day Fifteen

2009-12-15T14:36:00.003Z

Okay, not strictly in keeping with the theme of these videos, but it's my list so shut up.

Everyone has at least one song on Guitar Hero or Rock Band that they like to play simply to show off: that one song that you can 100% with ease. This one would be mine.

(I do vocals in case you're wondering)

This video doesn't involve me, before anyone asks, but it's surprisingly hard to find decent quality vids of this song which are also worth watching, so much kudos to the folks involved.

Project Antivent - Day Fourteen

2009-12-14T16:24:00.001Z

Bionic Commando: Rearmed was really more of an extended advert for the reboot game that came a few months after its release. However, irony of ironies, it not only proved to be more popular than its big brother, it was also a hell of a lot more fun. A remake of the 2D classic, it was a real labour of love, from the references to the original, to the music, which was largely updates of music from the earlier version. There's very little on the soundtrack that isn't worth listening to, but this, the theme to the last couple of stages, sits head and shoulders above the rest.

Project Antivent - Day Thirteen

2009-12-13T13:32:00.000Z

Earthbound has a reputation that precedes it by several light years or more. It's funny, it's subversive, it's creepy and twisted in a way that you can't quite pin down. If you know anything about the game at all, it'll no doubt be about how the final boss, Giygas, is the very personification of mind rape. Literally, since it was based on a traumatic experience the writer/director had as a young boy when he walked into the wrong cinema.

Today's track, as you've probably guessed, is the final boss theme from the game, and it's... well, it's probably a little different from what you'd expect from such a game. Then again, Earthbound's a little different from what you'd expect for an RPG, let alone a SNES game.

What's that you say? Still not traumatized enough? Made of sterner stuff than that, huh? Well then. Look upon the true face of madness, and know suffering, mortal! You cannot comprehend the true form of... Ronald McDonald?!

Project Antivent - Day Twelve

2009-12-12T12:05:00.002Z

Something a little different today. Bands covering game music are nothing new anymore, let's be honest. It's getting to be a played out formula: grab some random game from the NES (because it's always the NES, no one ever had a Master System back then), throw in some guitars and let nostalgia take care of the rest. Simple.

Okay, that's perhaps a little too cynical, but there's very few bands who actually bother to do anything more than a straight cover. In Japan, they cheerfully fold, spindle and mutilate the originals til they bear only a passing resemblance to their parents. Over here in the West... not so much. The Adventures of Duane and BrandO, however, were something of an exception. If you know anything about them, it'll probably be their version of the various Mega Man 2 tracks. Rather than the typical cover shenanigans we're used to, they would rap over the music, telling the story of the game they were covering in a roundabout sort of way. I use the past tense, because they split messily earlier this year. They're both continuing to do their own thing but it's pretty much agreed that it just won't be the same.

This here's their version of Duck Hunt. And yes, the dog gets it. You're welcome.

Project Antivent - Day Eleven

2009-12-11T08:52:00.002Z

I know I give Final Fantasy a hard time: the games, the endless remakes, the character designs in recent years, the fact that Square Enix are physically incapable of going more than 3 months without releasing or announcing a new game in the series, it's all fair game as far as I'm concerned. It used to be that a new Final Fantasy game was an Event, something to get excited over. Now, you'd be as well getting excited over it being Tuesday.

That said, the one department Square has never once dropped the ball in, is the music. Say what you will about the legions of androgynous girlymen, When it comes to the music, Square has never once lost its teeth. Crisis Core, while exemplifying many of the problems I have with current-day Square Enix, also had a solid OST, featuring a mix of redone themes from FFVII and Advent Children, as well as a variety of original work. This track, The Summoned, is a redux of the classic FFVII boss theme, arguably as it should always have been. If this doesn't get the blood fired up, nothing will.

Project Antivent - Day Ten

2009-12-10T11:19:00.004Z

Rez is another game I reviewed this year, which proved itself to be more than the sum of its samples. While the in-game music basically consists of various samples that are eventually combined to make the full song, the alum, Gamer's Guide To, takes all the samples and mixes them properly to create a fully-finished song. It's different from what you get in-game, but no less listenable for it.

This time around, we've got the first stage music, Buggie Running Beeps. As I said back then, even if you don't dig dance music, give it a shot, it's still fantastic stuff.

Project Antivent - Day Nine

2009-12-09T09:05:00.002Z

No More Heroes was very much like Devil May Cry 3 in that a lot of the soundtrack was variations or remixes of a central theme. Here, however, it was taken a step further, where it seems like virtually every track in the game features the same central section, heard here at the 'chorus'. The soundtrack was composed by Masafumi Takada, who's best known for his work with Suda51 on killer7, and while it arguably lacks the variation of the previous game, due to the insistence of adhering to the same themes, that doesn't make it any less listenable.

Again, we avoid going for the obvious shot, everyone and their grandmother having heard Pleather For Breakfast a billion times by now. Instead, we bring Ten Tons of Titanium to the table. And no, it's not just you, yes, it does sound familiar, and yes, it is deliberate.

Project Antivent - Day Eight

2009-12-08T18:48:00.002Z

System Shock 2 was one of those games no one really liked until everyone decided they did. Upon its original release, it received rave reviews, then promptly sunk without a trace. Then Bioshock came out, was a big hit and everyone decided to see what they'd been missing in the meanwhile (and promptly questioned why Bioshock wasn't as detailed or in-depth as its ancestor). Still, better late than never, unless you're a former member of developers Looking Glass Studios who, sadly, folded soon after.

Despite being, essentially, a survival horror game, albeit one played from a first-person perspective, Looking Glass decided not to go for the standard 'soundtrack made of creepy noises' approach, and instead went with something a little different. The OST consists primarily of a mix of dance, drum and bass and electronica, and this difference makes it stand out in a field of me-toos in the wake of Silent Hill, a game that showed everyone how grinding metal and chugging noises should be done - lessons that pretty much everyone ignored or didn't quite get thereafter. Ops 2 is a great example of this approach - in game it accentuates the feelings of loneliness and isolation you'll experience. Out of the game, it becomes a stand-out track from a stand-out OST.

Project Antivent - Day Seven

2009-12-07T17:16:00.001Z

Something a little different now, since this list isn't all loud and angry combat themes (just most of it). Hometown is the ending theme from Silent Hill 3. It's basically a re-imagining of the opening theme from the original Silent Hill as sung by Joe Romsera. I could've gone the easy route and thrown up You're Not Here, or any one of a thousand pieces of music from SH2, but that would've been obvious, and in case it's escaped yout attention, obvious is not how we do things around here! In any case, I found Hometown hideously cheesy at first, and frankly, still do. But it's grown on me over the years, and even though I cheerfully take the piss out of it while singing along, its still one of my favourite songs from the game, and the series as a whole.

2009-12-06T23:12:00.001Z

Moon

93 minutes

Winner of the 2009 award for Best Use of Chesney Hawkes in a Movie

I've said before that some of the best films, games, whatever, are the ones that come out of nowhere. The ones that have no real hype or build-up about them. Unsurprisingly, I've always had a fondness for them, since, as we all know, I'm one of those freaks who likes to (and occasionally has to) wander off the beaten track for his entertainment. I hadn't actually heard of this film until I read a glowing review of it in Bizarre (still the only major review of the movie I've personally encountered), and while the magazine's gone downhill of late, it's entertainment reviews are still usually on the money, so I decided to check it out for myself.

Sam Rockwell plays Sam Bell, a miner on the far side of the moon. Sam lives and works alone with GERTY, a robot programmed to observe him and keep an eye on his general well-being. Sam starts having weird lapses, seeing things on monitors, having visions of other people. While out investigating a problem with one of the mining harvesters, he suffers a crash. He awakens some time later back on the base, but is under strict instructions not to leave again. Faking a malfunction in the base, he manages to escape anyway and returns back to the site of the crash. His old lunar rover is still there. More to the point, so is he.

At first, you'd be forgiven for expecting a movie in the vein of Fight Club or The Machinist. You begin thinking it's going to be the tale of a space miner dealing with cabin fever or something like that, before pulling a bait and switch with the second Sam. It's a sneaky move that keeps you guessing past your original conceptions of what the movie is going to be about. To talk any more about the plot would be giving the game away completely, but trust me on this, it's a good one.

Similarly, Sam Rockwell is nothing short of amazing here. Yes, the film is basically Sam Rockwell talking to himself for an hour and a half, but if he wasn't any good, the film wouldn't be anywhere near worth watching. The two Sams manage to have differing personalities, despite being fundamentally the same person. By the same token, Kevin Spacey manages to be weirdly sympathetic as GERTY, despite never raising his voice above a monotone.

Moon is a hard film to talk about, hence this spartan (for me, at least) review. That's mainly because discussing the really stand-out parts, or anything beyond the basic premise, for that matter, means spoiling it, and trust me, this is not a film you want spoiled for you. The other problem with movies like this is that they tend to be slow and ponderous, outstaying their welcome by a good 40 minutes in an attempt at making some vague statement about the nature of humanity. At a mere 90 minutes, however, this is a film that comes in, says its peace, then leaves without incident, and that's probably its greatest strength. It's exactly the right length, and no more, and doesn't try and milk all the emotion it can out of things. And probably for that single reason alone, it stands head and shoulders above all others in its class. Definitely keep an eye out for this film if you get the chance

Project Antivent - Day six

2009-12-06T16:16:00.003Z

If you remember the worryingly glowing review of Prototype I did back in June, you'll recall me gushing over the tutorial stage, of all things. Set right at the end of the game, it gave you an opportunity to dick around with some of the powers you'd later get to play around with right off the bat as the world goes to hell around you. I described it as one of the best intros I'd ever played, and the music that accompanied your carnage added immensely to the overall feeling that this, as I said back then, was Armageddon in hi-def.

Six months on, and my feelings haven't changed a bit. This is still one of the best games of 2009 and this track, Memory In Death, is one of the best pieces of music in the game. If you still haven't played this yet, rectify that ASAP.

Project Antivent - Day Five

2009-12-05T14:49:00.002Z

Time for something a wee bit older now. To anyone raised in the 16-bit era, the name Yuzo Koshiro is one that will likely cause a twang of nostalgia, the man being responsible for some of the best soundtracks on the Megadrive (or 'Genesis' if you prefer) and the SNES. Streets of Rage is probably his best known work, and while the second game is usually seen as the best of the series, I'll always prefer the original above all. For my money, the soundtrack to this one represents some of his finest work, and the boss theme, Attack of the Barbarian, stands head and shoulders above them all.

Project Antivent - Day Four

2009-12-04T14:43:00.002Z

If truth be told, I could probably fill this entire list with the various remixes of Devils Never Cry from the DMC3 soundtrack – there's enough of them after all, and they're all pretty damn excellent. I decided to go for the Motion Capture Demo version, however, simply because there's something worth watching along with it. As you can probably guess, this features footage of the motion capture taken for the game, and it's well worth a look. Watching the acrobatics involved - much of it done by the game's voice cast, no less - is simply fascinating.

That the song's a great take on the main theme is only a bonus.

Project Antivent - Day Three

2009-12-03T13:30:00.002Z

One of the challenges I set myself for this list was to limit myself to one piece of music from each game series – one piece of music from, say, Final Fantasy, one from Silent Hill and so on – to ensure a good mix of things. Otherwise I would probably wind up clogging the list up with music from the Shin Megami Tensei series and The World Ends With You and just call it a day. So, representing the entire MegaTen series is Hunting – Comrades from Digital Devil Saga. One of the best pieces of music in a game filled with them, DDS 1&2 have probably the best overall soundtracks in a series renown for its outstanding music. Shouji Meguro, you outdid yourself with this one.

Project Antivent - Day Two

2009-12-02T08:54:00.000Z

Day two, and this time we have the main battle theme from Shadow Hearts: From The New World. The third game in the Shadow Hearts series has taken a lot of stick for being more slapstick and outright dumb compared to it's previous two incarnations. And, in fairness, they're absolutely right. But one thing that's harder to deny is the quality of its soundtrack, exemplified by Dead Fingers Talk, the main battle theme for the game. Say what you will about the rest of the game, but I will not hear a bad word said against this track.

Project Antivent - Day One

2009-12-01T13:06:00.004Z

The Christmas season has just officially started (if you ignore the two or three month lead-up to it) and chances are, you're already sick of the deluge of carols and songs committing aggravated assault on your eardrums. Well, wouldn't you know it, I've got just the remedy for you! Probably.

Yes, from now until Xmas Day, we here at Overclocked on Caffeine are going to be listing an alternative to the usual crap piped endlessly, in the form of 25 of the best tracks from various games. Sort of a combination advent calender/antidote (hence: Antivent - s'good, innit?) to the Xmas Virus, but with a little extra at the end for those ~~dumb~~ brave enough to follow me all the way to the end.

We get off to a storming start with METHOD_REPLEKIA/ from the criminally unknown and under-appreciated Ar Tonelico 2. The game features characters who use songs to trigger and power their magic attacks, and the track in question is played whenever one of the main characters triggers their most powerful special attack. If ever a song stated clearly and explicitly “You are fucked” then it kicks in, it would be this one. And if that's not un-Chistmassy, I don't know what is.

Play it loud, folks!

2009-11-20T13:38:00.001Z

The Suffering: The Ties That Bind

PS2

I'm stuck in Folsom prison, and time keeps draggin' on...

When the first game in the Suffering series was released, it was to critical indifference. It was seen as trying too hard to be dark and edgy, throwing in lots of blood, gore and random swearing simply because it could. This was a Mature game for Mature gamers - read: impressionable teenagers who still think saying 'fuck' is the epitome of cool. First impressions, however, are never anything short of deceptive. Actually play it, and you'll discover that, behind the swearing and the violence and the unrelenting darkness of it all, there's actually a good game behind it. Surprising considering the lengths it goes to to prove it's got a pair, but The Suffering actually had something to back up its posturing. The plot concerned Torque, prison for the murder of his wife and kids. He was being transferred to the brutal Abbot State Prison on Carnate Island, before an earthquake released all manner of evil monsters and freaks. Barely escaping, Torque made it to Baltimore, and is now hunting his old stomping grounds for a man known only as Blackmore.

One of the interesting things about plot of the original game was there were three different endings depending on how you played it. Along the way, there were people you could save or outright kill depending on your actions. Save people, and the story would reveal that you'd been framed for the murder of your family. Kill anyone and everyone and you'd be shown as an irredeemable monster. In the first game, all this would do is affect your ending. Here, it also acts as a sort of experience meter for your Insanity Mode, a sort of berserker mode in which you turn into a giant rampaging demon and rip everything around you a thousand new ones. It was somewhat gimped in the last game, since if you over-relied on it, you'd eventually trigger the third ending of the game, the Beast ending, which pretty much sucked if you were aiming for one of the other two. Here, it's been fleshed out properly. Depending on your alignment, you'll not only get a different form, but different attacks as well. And considering a whole class of enemies requires you to use it, it's probably a good thing.

Outside of that, the game does a lot of other things right. The voice acting is a cut above, with Michael Clarke Duncan doing his best Scary Black Man voice as Blackwood, the main antagonist, and Rachel Griffiths (Brenda from Six Feet Under) as Jordan. There's one or two bad spots, but by and large, the talent on show here is great. Unrelated, but also worthy of note, is the fact that you can switch out of first-person mode and into third person, something a lot more FPSes could stand to do. Considering the speed some enemies attack with, being able to see more around you will save your rear more than once.

Aside from that, the story is, once again, all over the place. You start off arriving in Baltimore, trying to find Blackmore. Then you're attacked by a group trying to capture you to work out how you do that transformation thing of yours (despite it being hinted at in the last game as a mental, rather than physical thing). Then you escape only to find that the entire city has been taken over by the monsters from Carnate, as well as the spirits of a pair of notorious murderers. Then you wind up in another prison, then sewers, then a mining complex, then everything gets a bit Twilight Zone and by that point, you've either stopped playing or caring. Dr. Killjoy, the mad 'experimental' psychiatrist from the first game also makes a return which I'm somewhat split over. On the one hand, his appearance in the first game added a sort of House On Haunted Hill vibe to the proceedings. Utterly out of place, but not necessarily in a bad way, since he was arguably about the only person in the game you could say had any kind of character to him. Here, on the other hand, its harder to argue that, since he barely has any impact on the story, unlike in the last game. He shows up on a TV screen, does a kind of summing up/trial of the player at the end then... well, doesn't do much else. Even worse, it's not until you get to the very end and you look back on both games that you realise that not a damn thing in the story makes a blind bit of sense, even for an action game, such is the scattershot application of the events and plot. Impressive in a perverse sort of way.

Of course, any and all goodwill the game's built up by this point will evaporate swiftly in the face of one small detail. The game glitches like you would not believe. No joke, this game is horribly programmed: I've had CPU-controlled characters refuse to move, blocking my path, falling through floors or failing to trigger the next section. I've had enemies refuse to activate at all, just standing there, seemingly taking no damage or even noticing me. I even had the game crash outright on me, twice! I honestly can't remember the last time I played a console game with such glaring bugs. On a PC, sure, you almost expect it, but on a console... And they all happened at more or less the exact same places with worrying regularity, which, frankly begs the question: did anyone even bother to playtest this game before release?

The original Suffering was a great game, far better than it had any real right to be. Not a classic by any measure, but not a game you'd regret spending time or money on either. The sequel, on the other hand, takes all of that and squanders it, somehow winding up with a worse game in the process. If the game had actually been coded properly, it would've merely been below average, but with the glitches and bugs present (including one which makes the game impossible to finish, should it kick in) there's no way to recommend this. And the ending is non-existent as well, but that should come as no surprise to absolutely anyone. Get the original, but woe betide anyone who goes looking for the sequel: all that awaits you is a litany of disappointment and NPCs glitching up to their knees in the floor.

The Best Game Ever (Pt.3)

2009-11-07T21:34:00.002Z

Shin Megami Tensei

Super Nintendo - 1992

'Der Wille zur Macht' as a lifestyle choice

WARNING: The following review contains spoilers. Big ones. Continue at your own risk.

In case its escaped anyone's attention (there may be a few of you not really listening at the back there) I am a huge fan of the Shin Megami Tensei series ('Megaten' to those in the know) and all its various spinoffs, from Persona, to Digital Devil Saga and all the little forgotten ones along the way. Yes, even Maken X, a hideously flawed attempt at doing something different, both in the series and in the realm of the FPS. There are a few games I'll admit didn't grab me as much as others - Raidou Kuzunoha Vs. The Soulless Army just rubs me the wrong way for some reason, and the original Persona has some very questionable gameplay mechanics that were bizarrely kept for the PSP remake/update - but it's hard to say the franchise has ever had an outright bad game, something that I'd be hard-pressed to say about any of my other favourites.

The game opens with a dream. In it, our hero rescues two relative strangers, one from crucifixion, one from a demon, then meets a girl bathing in a pond, who says she's been waiting for you. Unfortunately, it's not that kind of a dream, and before sexytime can begin, you're awoken by your mother, telling you you've overslept.

It's the far-off, but indeterminate year of 199X, and the world is in a bad place. A general by the name of Goto has launched a coup d'etat and effectively taken over Japan, putting the country in a state of martial law. Meanwhile, the rest of the world, and in particular, America, is attempting to put an end to his game by any means necessary - even if it requires extreme measures. And as if that wasn't bad enough, there are increasing reports of demonic creatures running rampant and attacking anyone and everyone. The hero receives a program via email sent by someone called 'STEVEN' (yes, all in caps). He explains that he's afraid of the threat posed by these demons, and in response, has developed a program to control and summon them. He's sent this program to as many people as he can, in the hope that someone, anyone, can do something to stop the outright anarchy that's about to break loose on mankind. Of course, no one can possibly guess what's about to happen next...

Okay, let's get the bad stuff out the way first. Graphically, this game sucks. Everything is played from a first-person view, which, in theory, is great. However, the SNES doesn't really have the grunt to pull it off, the screen lazily flicking from one map tile to the next. The endless hallways that make up the game have little to distinguish them from each other, so getting lost is stupidly easy, even in the simplest of areas. There is an automap, but it's buried deep in several layers of menu, and the only way to get it onscreen while moving is to cast a spell only found on certain demons. And since this is one of the first incarnations of the demon fusion system, there's none of that fancy 'offspring gets the skills of the two parents' skill mixing seen in the later games. So, your choice is to either keep one demon on hand solely for that one skill (it runs out fairly swiftly as well, requiring constant recasting for extra giggles), or to just wing it, checking the map every so often to make sure you haven't taken that fatal left turn at Albuquerque.

Of course, that's not where the only problems lie. As mentioned, the controls are hideously clunky. If you want to do anything, you have to navigate through several menus. You're never told what difference armour will have on your character before you equip it. In demon negotiation, there's no clear indication that you're saying the right thing, and what works right one time may not work at all the next. And the only way to find out what a particular spell does is to use it, all of them carrying names like 'Bufula' or 'Dia' with no indication of what does what. Much, if not almost all of this was fixed in later updates (most recently the GBA port) but wouldn't you know it, it's only the SNES version that's available in English, thanks to those wonderful people over at Aeon Genesis. In short, this is a game created long before most of the RPG conventions we all now take for granted, and for the vast majority of you, that alone is likely to put you off. And that's before we get to the legendary difficulty.

Okay then, graphics are very early SNES standard, controls suck, and the game's harder than a punch with a granite boxing glove. Why bother playing it? Well, the short answer is that it's awesome. But you probably guessed as much by the fact that I'm discussing it under the 'Best Game Ever' tag. The more direct answer... now, that's a tricky one.

Back in the day all RPGs were exactly the same: there were castles and knights and you ran around with a sword and beat up evil wizards. Actually, when you boil it down, that still applies to a lot of RPGs even now - for all the innovation in gameplay and combat we still run through the same familiar stories. But back then, there was even less variation than we have now. Everything was, without exception, exactly the same. The exceptions were the two Megami Tensei games on the NES. Set in the modern day, it revolved around a high school student tinkering around with a computer program that accidentally opens a breach to the demonic realm, letting all manner of nastiness in. The sequel went a step further and was set in a world devastated by nuclear war. Utterly unheard of at the time, and while it didn't exactly set the world on fire, it did set the scene for its SNES-based older brother, and the series as a whole.

The game starts off in a recognisable modern-day metropolis - the Kichijoji area of Tokyo to be exact. Wandering around, you'll quickly come to the conclusion that something is very wrong here. People are disappearing, some turning up dead, torn to pieces, some not turning up at all. The Yakuza are operating openly, attacking anyone they feel like. And more and more people are talking about the oncoming threat of nuclear war. No, not a good place to be at all. It's while out doing errands for his mother that the player character eventually encounters a demon, as it rips the throat out of a poor bastard at the local shopping mall. Things only get weirder as he has another dream, saving a girl from a strange occult ritual, before meeting with one of the people from dream in real life. He soon discovers the bigger picture: Goto, the general, is in a secret war of sorts with the US ambassador, Thorman. Thorman represents a group trying to build the Thousand Year Kingdom in the name of God. They believe that mankind has gone astray, and that the slate needs to be wiped clean, Old Testament-style. Of course, if you talk to Thorman, he'll let you know that the demon attacks have actually been started by Goto himself, a side effect of him making bargains with dark forces in exchange for power. That, and he's also been kidnapping anyone who might be involved with the resistance and authorising inhumane experiments on innocent civilians. And it's here that you realise that the story is a lot darker than you ever suspected.

SMT has three possible paths to play through the game as: Law, Chaos and Neutrality. Law is under the purview of the Mesians, generally characterised as a church militant. They believe in order, following rules. At its extreme end, it's 'do what we say and follow our laws or we'll break you'. Directly opposite them is Chaos. Chaos is represented by the Gaians. Chaos believes in free will, taking whatever path you feel is the right one in the name of self-improvement. Its extreme is the survival of the fittest mantra, that the strong should be able to take and do whatever they want because no one can or has the right to stop them. And in the middle, there's the Neutral path. They're not directly represented by anyone ingame, unless the player actively chooses to do so. Being neutral, obviously, requires you to maintain a balance between the two, as going too far down one path or the other results in suffering. Of course, you're being pitted against both extremes on a regular basis, so that requires bloodshed on an even more regular basis.

One of the most fascinating things about the options, as you can see above, is that, when you boil it down, there are no straight-out "good guys" or "bad guys" in the game. Everyone is equally wrong or equally right in one way or another. Goto's responsible for locking down Japan and unleashing demons on the unsuspecting populace, but he's doing it in the name of freeing the world from the tyranny of the Mesians. Thorman's holding the threat of nuclear war over everyone's head, but it's to stop a dangerous general from dragging the world into disaster, as well as to bring everyone together under the same banner. And if you walk the path of Neutrality, trying to keep everything on the same even keel, well, that involves slaughtering anyone who even dares rock the boat one way or another.

Perhaps one of the biggest shocks in the game (and this is your last chance to back away: skip this next couple of paragraphs if you don't want it spoiled, and believe me, it's more effective if you've never played it) comes at the end of the first act. This is about 10 or so hours in on an average playthrough. You've finally listened to both Goto and Thorman, and, one way or the other, you've decided to make your choice: your mission now is to kill one or both of them. At this point, you might be expecting that after this, you're going to be sent out on missions to destabilize the various factions present. You could not be more wrong. Lets say you choose to side with Thorman. You go to Goto's headquarters and assassinate him. Upon your return, he thanks you for your loyal devotion to his cause... unfortunately, this world is too sinful to be kept as is. A new age must be ushered in on the ashes of the old. He reveals himself to be the Norse god Thor, and brings down his hammer in judgement of mankind - he launches his nuclear ICBMs on Tokyo. You're then presented with a hige red 30-second countdown on-screen as you desperately attempt to escape somewhere, anywhere, as you try and outrun nuclear destruction. You fail, but somehow find yourself transported to a realm outside of time and space.

Of course, even if you choose not to side with him, mankind is screwed, and he launches the missiles as a kind of last-minute 'fuck you' upon his defeat anyway. But, far from being an annoying 'But Thou Must' lack-of-choice, this is where the game really shows its teeth. One brief detour in limbo later, you arrive back on Earth. But it's a different world to the one you just left. Thirty years have passed since Thorman launched his missiles, and the destruction of the world has been near total. Mankind is only just starting to crawl out the wreckage, and now, somehow, you have to help it. Yup, not content with bringing the world to near-obliteration, the game now has you attempting to bring it back from the brink. You failed to save it in the past, but maybe you can do something here. To my mind, there's only one other game that has ever had the successful destruction of the world midway through, and that's Final Fantasy VI. Two games that actually have the balls to pull the rug out from under you and drop the hammer - literally, in this case - on the very thing you're striving to protect. It's a hell of a way of punching the player, and a sadly underused tactic in games. Of course, things can always get worse: remember that two of your party members - who are more than willing to give up their humanity for more power in one form or another - are known as the Law Hero and the Chaos Hero and that, one way or another, you're destined to fight at least one of them. All of this gives the game an unparalelled atmosphere. Suddenly, the graphics only add to the bleakness of the setting. The music too, gives you the feeling that you're walking through a dead world, just trying to survive long enough to avoid the next demon attack. Not an easy prospect considering the crushing difficulty here.

(it's okay, by the way, you can come back now)

Ever wonder why the Megaten series has a reputation for being the hardest RPG series around? Wonder no more! Yes, this is a game from the early days of RPGs, when concepts like 'balance' and 'fairness' were just seen as silly friviolities, so the challenge is to be expected. Somehow, the game actually manages to go beyond that, however, and winds up being outright sadistic. There's no instant game over if the main character dies, so that's one saving grace, but beyond that, everything is an uphill struggle. If you're even slightly underlevelled, you will be punished at great length, and opportunities to heal, or even save for that matter, are limited. Depending on your perspective, that's either a plus or a minus: you can't scrimp on the level grinding, but on the other hand, lots of people enjoy that. Same with the difficulty - it's generally agreed that games are getting easier all the time, so going back in time and playing something that bends you over, slaps you in the face and demands you call it 'Daddy' makes for a welcome change.

Believe me when I say that this really is a fantastic game. If you're new to the series, having gotten in through the anime-stylings of Persona 3&4, this is a huge step backwards. Tremendously so, since we're talking going back three or four console generations and 18 years here. This is not an easy game to get into, even for someone determined to crack its shell. I've made numerous attempts and replays across different PCs and machines. I'm now currently replaying it - again - on my PSP. I don't even want to think about what number attempt this is. But that alone should tell you something about the game: It's tough and it'll kick your ass hard, but you will come back to it. You need to play this, not just because this is where it all began - many of the basic ideas, such as contacting, summoning and fusing demons, the Law/Chaos alignment system and even most of the demon designs are still in use in some form today - but because even now, it's unique. The third game in the series, Nocturne (or Lucifer's Call if you prefer) shares some of the same feel, but the tone is arguably more hopeful,as you're looking to rebuild a shattered land. Here, there's no real hope. At best, there's survival, at worst... Shin Megami Tensei is a game with problems, and a couple of outright bugs that can stop you from finishing the game if you're extremely unlucky. But look past that and you'll find one of the darkest RPGs ever, as well as one of the best on the SNES. It's a tremendous work, overshadowed by its descendants, and one that needs to be appreciated as more than a piece of history.

2009-10-31T17:08:00.002Z

Friday The 13th

1 hour 45 minutes

If you go down to the woods today, you're sure of a big surprise...

As cheesy as they are, the big horror movies of the 80s have a certain charm to them. Cheesy as hell, outright stupid in places, but still always watchable. The Friday the 13th series, one of the biggest of the time, was arguably more serious than the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise - well, to begin with, at least - but it still had some moments of dumb fun before becoming outright silly in its final instalment, the downright hilarious Jason X. It's probably worth mentioning that that was also my favourite entry in the series, a film comparable to Army of Darkness in terms of genre switch and sheer excellence. Since 'reboots' are the marketing buzzword of the week, it was only a matter of time before someone decided to do a more serious remake. The results are, predictably, less than great.

You all know the story: Jason Voorhees goes ballistic against a bunch of retarded horny teenagers. The film opens with a replay of the end of the first original film in the series, before skipping forward some years later. A group of teenagers are looking for the ultimate weed patch while on a camping trip. Within the space of the first 20 minutes, they're all butchered mercilessly. We're then introduced to a new bunch of teens, going to a plush woodland cabin for the weekend. Unfortunately, these guys last slightly longer, everyone resisting the temptation to off a new conveyor belt of idiots every 20 minutes.

(Incidentally, why hasn't anyone done this in a movie yet? It'd be hilarious!)

This being a remake, there's a slightly different take on the original concept: the idea of Jason going apeshit at a summer camp has been dropped, in favour of a more typical 'house siege/running around the woods'-style story. Rather than the slaughter being spaced out evenly throughout the film, there's one big blood orgy at the start, then pretty much nothing for about the next hour before the murders begin again in earnest. That wouldn't be such a bad thing if the rest of the cast were even remotely likeable, but I haven't wanted to see a bunch of idiot teens get ripped apart so badly since high school. There's one guy, a stoner, who's halfway cool, but, of course, he dies horribly. Jared Padalecki is probably the only person you're likely to recognise, playing Clay, a guy looking for his sister, who was part of the group killed at the start. He's also the only remotely sympathetic guy in the bunch, only emphasized by the fact that he's pitted opposite Travis Van Winkle, playing, as Sir Laurence Olivier would put it, 'a gigantic douche of no singular redeeming value'. Kudos to the guy for playing such an utterly convincing dick, but he doesn't even get an interesting death, which highlights the other major problem of the film.

Let's face it, you all watch these films for the same reasons: you want to see idiot people dying in fun and interesting ways. There's no shame in it, that's the primary draw of them, after all. But no, this is a Serious Reboot for Serious People. Can't be having any of those wacky shenanigans here! So everyone gets offed in a variety of incredibly samey ways, every last one involving impalement or stabbing in some way or another. If you were one of those boring types who has to write a lengthy thesis or two on phallic imagery in modern cinematic blah de blah, you'd probably have a field day with this one. Me? I'll be sitting over here, bored out my mind. And I still won't be finding the film much more entertaining.

If there's one thing the movie does right, it's that there's none of those knowing winks to camera. There's a couple of musical cues that you might recognise, but other than that, it's entirely fanservice free (if you don't count the mandatory boobs, of course - this is the Extended Edition, after all). But really, I can't remember the last time I saw a more boring movie, and that's the last thing you want to say about any horror film. It counts double when you take into account that it's based on a series that's still popular nearly 30 years on. I don't ask for much in my horror movies: I don't mind if they don't scare me, I don't care if the effects look atrocious, but if they're not entertaining, that's an immediate fail right there, and Friday the 13th falls hard at that hurdle. Stick with the originals, kids, this isn't worth your time.

2009-10-25T18:26:00.001Z

Armour Hunter Mellowlink

12 30-minute episodes

Every so often, you encounter one of those forgotten series. An old show that's good, but for some reason, never caught on as well as others. You say the name 'Dragonball' or 'Sailor Moon' or 'Doraemon' and there's a good chance that even non-anime fans will at least be familiar with it. Then you have the Guyvers, the Mazinger Zs, the shows that have a decent-sized fanbase, but no recognition outside. And then you get to the Moldivers and the Gal Forces and the Sol Biancas and for all their quality, you might as well just give up there and then. Ain't no way anyone other than you has heard of those ones. Filed alongside these unremembered shows is Armor Hunter Mellowlink, and if there was any justice in this world, it too would be considered one of the greats.

The story centres on Mellowlink Aliti, last surviving member of his platoon. His unit sacrificed for unknown reasons, sold out by corrupt officials and blamed for their deaths, as well as a whole bunch of other miscellanious crimes they had kicking around the office, Mellowlink is out for revenge on his former superior officers. Armed only with the outdated anti-mech rifle he was issued for that disastrous last mission, a weapon easily as tall as he is, Mellowlink is determined to make every last one pay for his comrade's deaths, starting from the bottom of the pile up.

The show's a spin-off of Armoured Trooper Votoms, a much larger series that, admittedly, I've yet to see. But while the larger details, like who the players are in the frequently-mentioned war are, are probably meaningless to anyone unfamiliar with the parent show, the story itself is easy to follow. Its your typical revenge story, but with giant robots, which makes it that much more interesting (giant robots make everything better, just try and deny it). Okay. slight exaggeration, but the giant robots are surprisingly more than a way of spinning money through toy and model kit sales. One of the interesting things about the show is that, for all the mechs - Armoured Troopers, or ATs - running around, Mellowlink never once uses one. It's suggested that he's part of an anti-AT squad, hence the gigantic gun and title. So, here you have a regular human, running around capping mecha 4-5 times his size. It's amazing that it's an ideat not utilized more often, since the fight scenes are nothing short of gripping. Seeing a single unarmed squishy human making sport of a squad of heavily armed and armoured combat suits is a sight to behold. It's a shame that most shows tend to lean more toward the 'unstoppable behemoth' end of things, since it's also a sight I'd love to see more often.

The other great thing about the show: the entire thing remains almost 98% bullshit deus ex machina-free. Okay, there's one or two moments where Mellowlink gets exceedingly lucky, but the entire rest of the time it's due solely to planning and skill. See your opponent dodge a certain way to avoid a booby trap? Set up another to catch him off-guard mid-dodge. Your opponent has a certain victory pose before killing an unarmoured opponent? Counter the pose and strike while he's defenceless. Potential love interest demanding to join you in a fight where she'll almost certainly be a liability? Wait for the obligatory 'staring into each other's eyes' moment, then slug her in the gut, rendering her unconscious - and therefore safe - the entire fight. It's a refreshing change to see a character win by fighting smart, rather than overpowering their opponent and just plowing through them. And the fact that, with hindsight, you can see how he's planned all this in advance - a throwaway comment about a car jack is responsible for one of the most satisfying reveals in the show - makes it that much sweeter. Something I'd argue we need to see more of these days.

Mellowlink is a gem of a series. The show was made in the late-90s, so for anyone more familiar with the more polished animation of recent years, it'll come as a complete culture shock. But the roughness of the art and animation just gives it a real charm you don't see too often these days. Mellowlink is an excellent series, and a welcome change for anyone sick of power levels or giant robots designed as toys first and foremost.

2009-10-23T15:15:00.000+01:00

Hideaki Sena - Parasite Eve

320 pages

I want to be your parasite god, so I can show you what you really are

Okay, time to make everyone really paranoid for a second. In an average day, out of all the actions you take, how many can you say for certain are actually yours? That sudden urge to get something to eat, to go into a shop, to call someone. Are you entirely sure it's all you? Can you say with absolute certainty that everything you say and do is all your own decision? Or is there something urging you to take certain decisions on occasion? A little voice, a tug, an instinct making you think that this idea would be better?

Are you sure that you are really you?

If you're familiar with Parasite Eve, it'll more than likely be with the PS1 game series. Released in 1998, it was described as the first 'survival horror RPG', and while fun, it was a seriously flawed game. I've actually been playing it myself recently, and finding myself getting frustrated with the awkward pre-rendered environments, a kink that would be worked out in its spiritual successor, Vagrant Story. But this is a review of the original book, not the games, so let's forget about them for a moment.

If you've played the first game, you'll already have some idea of how it all begins. The story focusses on Toshiaki Nagashima, a scientist working in the field of biological research. After his wife is rendered braindead in a car accident, Toshiaki arranges for her organs to be donated. However, he feels compelled to harvest some of her liver cells for experimentation. However, it's soon revealed that the accident was no accident, and what caused it is looking to expand its empire.

Okay, I'll be the first to admit that the central concept is a goofy one - "Oh noes, my cells are evil and have turned against me" is, at first glance, kinda dumb. But think about it: an unseen enemy, forcing you to do its bidding and you won't be aware of it until it's too late? terrifying if done right. And here, a few translation flubs aside, it's done remarkably so. The first half is very dry. The writer, Hideaki Sena, has a background in medicine, and it shows, large swathes of text being used to discuss medical procedures or experiments in mind-numbing detail. It's medical porn, plain and simple. More than once you'll find your eyes sliding down the page as the steps of an experiment are run through in depth. It's authentic, sure, but doesn't make for the most exciting reading. Once the primary villain makes Her presence felt, things start getting much better, with the final third being a desperate race to stop Eve, as she has now named herself, from evolving to the next stage. Again, there's a tendency to go indepth into the the genetics and biology, when you want the writer to concentrate on the big gloopy superbeing that can set people on fire, but when it does, it's worth it.

If you're a fan of the games, you'll probably be wondering where all the hideously mutated monsters are. Well, bad news is, there aren't any. This is closer to the Ring/u school of horror - slowly building up til it drops everything on the reader in one big clusterfuck of fire and mutilation. It's hard going at times, and the translation has a number of glaring flaws - upon hearing his wife has been in an accident, Toshiaki groans like he's been asked to do the dishes, for example, and the onomatopoeia chosen for Eve's movements is the none-more-chilling sound 'flap'. Know fear and despair. But still, it's well worth a read, especially if you're familiar with the games. Finding out exactly what that 'incident' in Japan was all about adds a few things to the original, even if it does introduce a plothole to the narrative. Apparently the second printings of the bookfix a lot of the errors, so a first edition, while a nice thing to have, may not be the best thing to get. Either way, worth a look for the curious and the fans.

2009-10-21T13:51:00.000+01:00

Silent Hill 0rigins

PSP

Mirrors are more fun than television

Prequels have a very bad reputation. Oh, the intent is fine enough: showing what the world was like in the Before Time, letting us see familiar faces and the events that shaped them, that kind of thing. But all too often, they devolve into brainless fanservice, burying you in an avalanche of knowing winks and sly glances. You can hear them pissing themselves with sheer glee as one character tells another that their brother will never betray them/will be the death of them/could be the greatest of us all, or some other ironic comment, rather than trying to get some actual tragedy or pathos out of the events. And woe betide if you don't have any working knowledge of the original, since you're going to be left wondering every few minutes if you just saw something important. So yes, to your average viewer, prequels are never a good idea.

Silent Hill 0rigins is a prequel to the original Silent Hill. It's also, not very good, though in its defence, that's not entirely the fault of its status as a prequel. Give it its due, it sucks on its own merits.

Okay, fair word of warning here: I love the SH series. It redefined the then-burgeoning survival horror genre beyond all recognition upon its release ten years ago. The other main front-runner in the genre, Resident Evil went for traditional shocks, showing you things you were more than likely already scared of, but bigger (a spider the size of your thumbnail is not scary - a spider the size of a van, on the other hand...). It was classic Hollywood jumpscares, and looking back, frankly, they're laughable. I played the first game again recently: even with the most infamous scares, like the dog window (you know the one I mean) there was barely even a twitch. Going back to the first Silent Hill, on the other hand, you realise that, regardless of the fact that the graphics have aged badly over the last decade, it's still scary. Play it on a PSP with the lights out and headphones on and watch your complacent smugness fly out the window as you're scared shitless by a so-called 'old' game. The second set the benchmark for storytelling, not just for survival horror games, but arguably for gaming in general, knowing exactly how much to say and how much to merely hint at, leaving many of the finer details for the player to work out for themselves. The third simply had the unfortunate luck to come after the second, being an underrated but still good sequel to the first, and the fourth tried to do something new, but failed in the attempt.

There was no fifth Silent Hill game. This isn't the flauros you're looking for, move along.

The deck was stacked against 0rigins from the start really. Of the original Team Silent, only Akira Yamaoka, was to be involved, and, outside of the music department, he had been relegated to 'creative consultant' or something equally vague. The game itself was being handled by Climax Studios, better know for such games as Battlezone: Rise of the Black Dogs and Disney's Lilo & Stitch 2: Hamsterveil Havoc. But fear not, they claimed they were big fans of the series and wanted to do it justice. They knew their shit, and they were itching to prove all the naysayers wrong. All they needed was a chance to prove themselves.

SH0 is set about seven or so years before the original. While on a job near the town of Silent Hill, Travis Grady, a trucker, nearly hits a figure on a quiet road. Trying to find out where the person went, he goes for a wander in the countryside and eventually stumbles across a burning house. He rescues a girl from being burned to a crisp (well, more of a crisp by this point) and gets back outside. And that's the point where the story pretty much collapses on itself.

Don't get me wrong, there is a story here, and it's an okay one, except for two details. First off, it's a prequel, yet Grady's involvement with the larger plot is almost non-existent. He runs into most of the major cast, but doesn't have any real impact on them or their goals. He unwittingly assembles an important McGuffin one Harry Mason would later find somewhat helpful, but you can hardly say he plays any major role, or makes any amazing revelations about anything we already know. Well, that's not true, the game clarifies one minor fan theory about the relationship between Lisa Garland and Dr. Kauffman. SWEET SAMAEL IN THE OTHERWORLD, EVERYTHING YOU KNOW IS WRONG!!! Is your mind shattered? I know mine is.

Trav's story, on the other hand, involves a trip he took as a lad with his parents, when his mother got herself committed to an insane asylum after she tried to kill him. Yup, turns out he has a Dark and Twisted Past with the town, and it's keeping him here because... well, see, that's the other problem with the game. It all falls apart when you realise there's literally nothing keeping him in this town. His primary reason at the start is to find out what happened to the girl he rescued. Fair enough, I can respect that after saving someone, you'd want to at least know if they're dead or not, right? But once he confirms that, and the town's started doing its spooky shit (more on that in a bit) he's determined to stick around for no goddamn reason.

Let's take a moment and compare the motivations of the heroes of the games, shall we?

Silent Hill: "I'm not leaving this town until I find out what happened to my daughter."
Silent Hill 2: "I'm not leaving this town until I find out who sent me that letter and what happened to my dead (?) wife."
Silent Hill 3: "Stay in this town? Me?! Fuck that, yo, I'm getting the hell out of here!"
Silent Hill 4: "I'm only here so I can get out of my fucking flat, I don't even want to be here!"
Silent Hill 0: "I'm not leaving because someone keeps leaving me vague clues about where to go next and it really annoys me when people do that!"

Clearly, Travis is a man driven by an OCD urge to punish people who mildly annoy him. That, or he has a fetish for being led about by the nose everywhere. Worthy and admirable traits for any hero to possess. Sorry, did I say 'hero'? Darn, I meant to say 'easily manipulated fuckwit'. I always get those two confused.

Okay, okay, we've played games with flimsier plots and dumber heroes. None that can top this are springing to might right this very second, but I'm sure there was at least one. Besides, it doesn't matter as long as the gameplay's up to snuff, right? Resident Evil's storyline had dozens of incidents and plot details carved from finest whatthefuckium, and people still enjoyed them.

Would it surprise anyone to learn the gameplay's not up to scratch? Didn't think so.

Take a look at this map here:

Big, innit. That's the second major stage. Not the last, the second. Actually that's one floor of the second major stage. There's another floor above that, and a basement as well. And, thanks to the game's reality-shifting mechanic (you can move into the famed Otherworld at will simply by going up to a mirror), there's two versions of it, so that's a grand total of six floors you have to wander about! Okay, yes, most of the rooms suffer from the classic "The door is stuck/locked/actually painted onto the wall itself" thing, but seriously, look how many of the fucking things there are! And it's not like things logically lead from A to B with a small sidetrip to C, D and E, oh no, everything is placed at opposite ends of the map from each other, resulting in lengthy journeys all over the place. There's a costume to be unlocked if you complete the game in under two hours, and another for looking at the map less than 25 times. Frankly, both of those are bullshit: the asylum takes about two hours by itself, and it's stupidly easy to get lost or forget where you're going without outside help. I don't mind backtracking as much as others, but done to this degree, it's padding, plain and simple.

One of the biggest bugbears I have with this game is with the combat. Okay, Climax, buddy, I know you probably thought it was a good idea, but on behalf of everyone who played this game, DESTRUCTIBLE WEAPONS ARE NEVER A FUN GAMEPLAY MECHANIC! Lowering the durability/effectiveness of a weapon? Well, that's just about forgiveable, as long as you're not reduced to poking away at a tumorous mass the size of Godzilla with a wet teabag. But weapons that break outright is not on. Really, it didn't work in the last game, and it sure as hell didn't work here. And when that's coupled with a weapon quick-select that's anything but, you're looking at a lot of very unhappy gamers, especially since, when they break, you're automatically forced to go back to the basic 1-2 punch combo, that does bugger all damage. It's a horrible idea, and a terrible design choice that makes you wonder what the fuck they were thinking. And don't think gunplay's going to be much better, because that's just as fucked up. Shooting foes is all well and good, but then you've got to finish them off when you drop them. And shooting them again while they're down is spotty at best, so you run up to finish them. Except, you've got about three seconds to do that before they get back up again, and the game's mighty picky about letting you finish a downed enemy. So they get back up again, and you take a whole lot of damage from them and you vow never to fight another foe again. But that's not that difficult, really, since the moment you put the lights off, you're amazingly invisible to all! And since the stages are reasonably bright, you almost never need to have your flashlight on at all. Y'see, this is another thing you should be aware of, Climax: we avoid combat in survival horror games because we;re scared of it, afraid of going into battle unprepared, lest we get our shit royally fucked up. We do not avoid combat because it's badly done and because, overall, it's infinitely easier to just sidestep anything that confused its insides with its outsides.

And another thing, Mr. Climax (why does that sound like a pornstar name?): your choices of weaponry. My suspension of disbelief is a mighty thing to behold. If you could hook it up and use it as a power source, mankind could travel to the stars. You tell me something works in a show because it does, I'll buy it. Tell me those vials over there contain a virus that transforms some people into plain old zombies, but others into freakishly deformed abominations? Fair enough. Walk over first aid kits or magical glowy things to be cured of all that ails you? Not a problem. People can survive any number of explosive magical or physical attacks in battle, but the second we move to a cutscene, a simple prison shiv can end the live of even the biggest badass? Sucks because he was my favourite, but yeah, alright. So while I can get behind Generic Effeminate RPG Hero #712 being able to carry several million tonnes of equipment and supplies on his girlish form (but only ever up to a stack of 99 per item), something about its usage here pisses me right off. I mean, giving you tons of weapons like straight razors, screwdrivers, okay, they're small and easily concealable. Sledgehammers, meathooks and pointy bits of wood? Bigger, but still well within acceptable limits. How about IV drip stands and lamps taller than the character himself? How about large gallon jugs of medicinal alcohol? How about filing cabinets, typewriters and portible TVs - often a dozen or so at a time? That's the point where you start calling bullshit on the whole endeavour. You can get away with it in an RPG, because, by and large, you can say they've got advanced/ancient technology, or an airship or, fuck, magic or something. But this gets to the point of stupidity, then decides, "screw that, we can go further!" with a rousing 'hurp, durp, fight the power!' as its battlecry. The only reason I can think of for any of this is to make some of their other ideas, like the QTE attacks, for example, look like glorious successes by comparison.

Perhaps the biggest sin committed, however, is to the series itself. Climax claim they know their shit. I claim otherwise. Now, I'll admit, I'm one of those freakish people who reads and studies things I'm interested in at great length. You ask me about any of the symbolism or plot elements in the first few games, there's a better than average chance I can give you a fairly good explanation of why X = Y. And I'm not the only one. Even the most casual Silent Hill fan knows that the series is heavy in symbolism and meaning. It's one of the cornerstones of the games, and probably one of the best things about it. And yet here, Climax have managed to do something amazing: they've managed to take all this symbolism and allegory... and miss the point entirely. One of the main references for the game is most obviously, Silent Hill 2. The opening - a character walking through a long, lonely stretch of deserted road - is taken almost verbatim from the earlier game. Travis is also a poor man's James Sunderland, a self-deluding type with some vaguely sexual hangups if you squint a bit and tilt your head to the side, kinda. But you can't force genius, and while everything came together right for SH2, they're trying too hard to force it here, and it just rings hollow and artificial instead. They're aping things with seemingly no understanding of why they're doing it. Why is there a long walk through the fog from the start of the game? Because it was in SH2. Why are there holes that you have to jump into to progress towards the end? Because they were in SH2. Why is there a big scary man in an apron with a big sharp slicey thing that looks like everyone's 1d4-headed monster violator? Why the hell do you think? There are, in fairness, a few big nods to the movie, but SH0 wants to be the second game so badly, it's almost hilarious.

Are there any redeeming points to this game? Well, the music's good, but coming from Akira Yamaoka, you'd expect that. But even here it seems half-hearted. There's nothing on a par with You're Not Here, Theme of Laura or even Room of Angel or Hometown. There's a couple of nice ambient pieces, but otherwise, the soundtrack's mostly forgettable. But the fact that 'forgettable soundtrack' is probably the thing the game does ~~best~~ least wrong alone should give you some idea of the thing as a whole.

Silent Hill 0rigins is a game that somehow manages to annoy me on three levels: as a Silent Hill fan; as a survival horror fan; and lastly, as a gamer in general. If it seems like I'm being a horribly nitpicky retard fanboy just because it's not done by my beloved Team Silent, trust me, I'm not. Frankly, I wouldn't really care who was responsible for it if the end result was any good. This is a bad game, plain and simple. The combat is terrible, the enemy designs amount to big chunks of meat with no real defining characteristics (and they have the cheek to reuse some of them - only bigger!), the final boss is Diablo, from the games of the same name and the whole premise the game hinges on - that it's a prequel to the first game - is borderline false advertising. The game's a gigantic con: you think you're about to uncover something interesting, only to find that there's nothing here you didn't already know. It's like two slices of prime Kobe beef steak glued onto either end of a cut of discount meat from a cheap butchers - literally, since the majority of the non-Travis related plot occurs at the start and the end of the game. Silent Hill 0rigins is a hideously misaimed game with none of the atmosphere or dread we've come to expect from the series, and an outright insult to anyone with any love for the series, or the genre in general. Avoid.

2009-09-22T18:11:00.000+01:00

Hulk: Ultimate Destruction

PS2

Normally, I avoid licensed games like burning death. You can hold on to your memories of Goldeneye and the like all you want, they are the few pearls buried deep amongst the suck. For the overwhelming majority, the best you can hope for is that they're less than terrible, and even that's possibly raising your expectations high. Hulk: Ultimate Destruction, on the other hand, is a slightly different beast. For one thing, I actually went out of my way to track this puppy down. Why? Well, two reasons. First and foremost, it was the last game by Radical, a little-known group who you might recall were responsible for a fun game by the name of Prototype. Second, this is, in all but name, a prequel to that game. But with the Hulk instead of Carnage/Venom.

The plot is even more bare-bones than its successor: Bruce Banner, in yet another attempt to rid himself of the Hulk, teams up with Dr. Leonard 'Doc' Sampson to try and create a machine to purge the Hulk from his system. However, long-term arch-nemesis, General Thunderbolt Ross, is determined to stop him. On this occasion, he's being aided by the shadowy security agent Emil Blonsky, who seems to be remarkably well connected for someone in his position. And after coming into contact with gamma radiation at the remains of Banner's lab, Blonsky seems to be going through a few... changes of his own.

Okay, anyone familiar with Prototype? Then you know exactly everything you need to know about this game. Seriously, I'm not joking, for all the violence, carnage and other neat stuff, Prototype is, at its heart, little more than a refinement of the H:UD engine and gameplay. You can pick up cars and charge your way through the streets, you can charge attacks, jumps, you run vertically up the sides of buildings, health comes in the form of little glowing balls - green for Hulk, orange for Mercer - and you can buy upgrades and new moves with experience earned by destroying enemies and completing missions. There's even an extra bit on the end of your health bar for 'critical mass' attacks

Of course, there are a few fundamental differences. For one thing, the Hulk being the Hulk, there's no different forms or weapons to switch to. However, you can 'weaponise' certain objects around the map, like turning a van into a shield that doubles up as a boomerang, or, my personal favourite, turning a car into a pair of giant gauntlets to help you further punch the crap out your foes. Second, and least surprising, the various areas you can visit are nowhere near as crowded as the streets of New York. You can still tear down the streets knocking folks and cars out your way, but you won't be as fast, and there won't be anywhere near as many folks or cars. That's a limitation of the hardware and the engine, however, so we'll let that slide. Hulk isn't anywhere near as acrobatic as our man Mercer, but in fairness, that's in keeping with the comics: Hulk hits hard, not fast. Perhaps the most important thing is the stealth elements - namely that there aren't any. I mean, come on, the Hulk's a ten-foot tall green behemoth! It's going to take more than a cardboard box and a crocodile mask to hide this bastard anywhere. If the police or the army see you, they fire on site. However, they won't call out the big guns at first. The game features a GTA-style threat level meter: the more destruction you cause, the higher it gets until they eventually call out a Strike Team on you. Stay out of sight and the meter eventually drops Maybe it's just me, but the Strike Team attack choppers in this seem more vicious, swarming over you like angry wasps, one thing that you'll quickly wish was different no matter which game you're playing.

The one thing this does have, that Prototype doesn't, however, is a sense of humour. For as good as it was, Prototype was frequently accused of being more than a little po-faced about everything, being as deathly serious as it could possibly be. Here? Well, you can collect comic covers to unlock art galleries, art and the like. Some of the first things you'll unlock are different coloured pants for the Hulk, the first few being various flags of the world. I spent most of the game running around in the Canadian flag for no other reason than I found it utterly hilarious. And then there's the Cow Missile cheat. Surprisingly does exactly what you'd expect, replacing every missile in the game with cows. Call it revenge for the way you can punt cows over the horizon in the second major area of the game, another little touch that never gets old.

Hulk: Ultimate Destruction is, well, a prototype Prototype. Not quite as refined or polished, but still worth a shot for those like me who blazed through the original and want more. On its own merits, however, it's still a darn good game. It's difficult to get across the power of someone like the Hulk in a game. After all, the Hulk is easily one of, if not the single strongest character in the Marvel Comics universe. Putting him at full power would completely kill any and all challenge in a game. H:UD strikes a good balance between the two poles, even if Radical's love for missile spams on a par with the best of Macross do result in you pinballing across the map. For anyone looking for more Prototype-style hijinks, or a younger sibling who'd love the game, but is too young to be messing about with that much blood, gore and other cool stuff we grown-ups get to play with, this is a fine choice.

And the inevitable "Who'd win in a fight between the Hulk and Alex Mercer" question?

Hulk strongest one there is. Hulk Smash.

2009-09-21T11:30:00.000+01:00

Clive Barker's Jericho

PC

A tale of gods, monsters, and telekinetic lesbian snipers

Of all the most frustrating things in the world, one of the greatest must be when something is so close to greatness, only to fall short. The film with solid actors and ideas, but no spark. The book that doesn't quite gel together, despite some fantastic moments. In short, The Little Engine That Could, If Only It'd Had Another Six Months In Development. If you were to take this concept, wrap it up into a whole and ship it off for sale, that concept would be shipped in a box labelled 'Clive Barker's Jericho'.

The story opens with the titular Jericho squad being shipped out to the ruined city of Al Khali. The team are a supernatural special ops unit sent out to deal with possible demonic incursions into our reality, and Al Khali is potentially the biggest, as the ruins sit on top of The Box. The Box is a prison, of sorts, containing The Firstborn, God's pet science project before Mankind. Arnold Leach, a former member of the Department of Occult Warfare is trying to break open the prison and release the Firstborn, and the Jericho squad is sent out to stop him. Of course, when they finally encounter him, they discover that not only has he gone through a few... modifications, becoming a huge demonic entity, he's also been able to open a breech in The Box. Before they can do anything about that, however, Leach grabs hold of Devin Ross, the player's character, and rips him to shreds in front of everyone. Of course, The Box is outside the normal realms of the world, and death is very rarely anything more than a minor setback...

Ross' death opens up the major selling-point of the game. As a spirit without a body, he is now capable of hopping in and out of his teammates' bodies. Obvious oo-err-missus jokes aside, this is where the majority of the gameplay comes in. Each character is equipped with a main and sub-weapon, ranging from a minigun, an assault rifle/shotgun combo, to a sniper rifle or machine pistol and katana, and you're free to hop from one to another at will. The team is split up on occasion, but by and large, you're free to choose whoever you want, whatever the situation. One of the characters, a 'reality hacker' with a wrist-mounted supercomputer, also has the ability to 'rewind' the team's ammo reserves, so you never have to worry about running out of ammo for very long. Good thing too, because it's here that we encounter one of the game's biggest problems.

What do action games and your characters have in common? Answer: they both live and die by their enemies. Even a bad game is looked upon a little more fondly if the foes are interesting, and with Clive Barker involved, you'd expect something special. Sadly, you'd be disappointed. The enemies start off as blade-handed gimps ripped right out of The Suffering or Soul Calibur. Get used to these guys, as you'll be seeing them at least once or twice a stage from now until the end of the game, and there's going to be next to no graphical changes to them the entire time. Ditto the exploding cultists, huge warped blobs of flesh that, funnily enough, explode when they get to close to a character. They have painfully obvious glowing blobs on their bodies that you need to shoot in order to kill them, and, wouldn't you know it, that's never an easy thing to do. Anyone who has the patience to do that repeatedly, rather than switching to a character with an explosive weapons and wiping them out in a single shot is destined to reincarnate as the Buddha in their next life. Beyond those two, you'll be lucky to see more than one or two unique enemies per chapter, and given that this is a game sprawling over five different time periods, that's a really poor offering, especially when said enemies really aren't remarkable in the least.

Of course, it's not made any easier when you're facing endless waves of foes without respite. The way the game works is like this: you enter a room, enemies spawn, you kill those enemies. Then more enemies spawn. Then you kill them. Then yet more enemies spawn and you kill them and eventually, the game is merciful enough to let you out of the room and into the next one where you repeat the whole thing again from the start. Now, if all this were played at the breakneck pace of, say, Painkiller, Serious Sam or, hell, even Doom, it'd be great, frantically dodging wave upon wave of charging monsters, it'd be fantastic fun. But it's nothing like that. The monsters come at you one or two at a time, take way too many shots to kill (unless you're using Abby Black, the sniper, who kills anything headshottable in a single hit) then, once they're dead, another couple who have been waiting patiently at the side wander in and it all repeats itself again. If I wanted to spend time grinding enemies, I'd be playing an RPG. At least then there'd be some kind of reward for standing somewhere, repeatedly wailing on the same enemies over and over again.

The team themselves are an interesting bunch. Essentially, everyone plays pretty much the same, barring their weapons and special powers, so you don't have to worry about the typical fast-but-weak/strong-but-slow shenanigans. Some, like the TK Push and fire shield are situational and used solely to progress, the latter being used in all of one section. Others, like Cole's Temporal Loop (bullet time effecting everyone but her) and Ghost Bullet (a guided sniper round) are infinitely more useful, and will probably mean you spend most of the game using those characters more than anyone. Most powers take a while to recharge after usage, to keep you from spamming them at every opportunity, and the computer has the foresight to actually use most of them to a decent degree. That's where the AI pretty much begins and ends, sadly, as the computer will derp its way through every encounter in every other way possible.

Here's an example for you. In the squad, there are two characters who can resurrect the rest of the team: you (i.e. Ross in the body of whoever you're controlling) and Father Rawlings, a Texan preacher who dual wields a pair of big-ass handguns. Now, common sense would suggest that you should keep a fair bit of distance between yourself and Rawlings, assuming you're not controlling him, in case of explosive death, something that happens all too often in the game. But no, both he and everyone else in your group will cluster together at every opportunity, no matter what's going on, forcing you to drop whatever you're doing and revive their dumb asses, if only to get them to shut up about how someone or another is hurt. Likewise, they they never, ever think about positioning or actually aiming. Take the cultists and their 'shoot here to kill' weak spots. If any of your team actually hits one, it's nothing more than a fluke. Sure, they'll unload bullet after bullet into them, but never at the painfully obvious squishy bits, oh no. Enemy is heavily armoured everywhere but a suspiciously large space at the back? Sounds like a perfect opportunity to - you guessed it - fire randomly into its front, then shout at you for letting everyone die, while you're desperately trying to hack away at its arse. Then complain that they're running out of ammo because none of them have learned yet that aiming is not necessarily the same as hitting a target. I know it's there to keep the game from becoming too easy, and to make the player feel like they're the single most important person on the team, but it feels less like you're the centre of the universe, and more like you're the only one in the universe capable of eating anything more complex and dangerous than mashed banana.

As for the script and the story, if Michael Bay were to direct a horror movie, this would be the result: tough-talking macho men who don't give a fuck, sexy kick-ass chicks who don't take no shit and explosions technically measured in kilotons. It'd be interesting to see how much input Clive Barker had with the game beyond the storyline, because if he had any, it sure as hell wasn't with the script itself, filled wall to wall with with every action movie cliché you can imagine. Try searching for any more depth than that, and you're going to be left very disappointed indeed. Try incorporating it into the game as a kind of buzzword bingo, ticking off a list of one-liners as you go, on the other hand and you'll have a lot more fun.

If you've gotten this far, you'll probably be wondering why I played this game at all, since I haven't had much nice to say about it. Well, here's the thing, for all the stupid mistakes it makes - and it makes those in spades - you're left with the impression that somewhere, deep inside, there's a far better game waiting to get out. The combat is genuinely great fun, but it's slowed down to a laborious crawl because of the constantly spawning enemies. The few times you're allowed to maintain a kill-and-move rhythm, the gameplay improves no end. The cast are a bunch of one-note assholes, but some of them are surprisingly likeable, indulging in banter and the like. The idea of seeing the same area from different time periods is an absolutely fantastic one and woefully underused. Last game I can remember playing that trick was Eternal Darkness back on the Gamecube. Just a crushing pity that the graphics exemplify everything wrong with the current generation: very pretty, very shiny, physically incapable of displaying any colours other than brown, grey and bloom.

And as for the ending, what ending? There's a brief 10 second uncontrollable cutscene after the complete non-entity of a final boss ("Oh no! It's immune to our weapons! Let's all fire wildly in the hope that will change!"), and then the credits roll. That's it, so long, thanks for all the fish. A lack of an ending is a complete kick in the balls after spending any decent length of time of a game. I know studies have shown that only one or two in ten people will ever reach the ending of any given game, but getting a decent ending should be a reward for our diligence and appreciation, rather than an afterthought, the equivalent of the dev team walking in and saying 'what, you're still here?!' then doing some half-assed shadow puppetry until we get bored and go home.

There really is a good game in here, and there are occasional flashes of that greatness to keep you playing. Whether these flashes are actually a sign of something special, an idiot savant showing off their smarts, or heartless cockteasing is up to the player to decide. In my mind, this could've been a superior game if they'd been able to fully realise what they have on offer here. But, for whatever reasons, they couldn't and all we're left with is a basic shooter with some great ideas and occasional glimpses of something better. Clive Barker himself has spoken of a possible sequel, though whether that will appear as a game, a book or even possibly as a movie, is something we'll have to wait and see.

2009-08-30T20:37:00.001+01:00

The Boondock Saints

110 minutes

Two Irishmen, a Scotsman and six guns walk into a barfight...

Sometimes, it's hard to know how serious a movie's actually being. Was that cheesy one-liner a knowing wink in your direction, or was that the actor 'emoting'? It's an important thing to judge, since it can make the difference between a terrible movie and a hilarious one. Look at Shoot Em Up: everyone thought that was Serious Business and called it accordingly. Those of us who were actually in on the joke thought it was the most hilarious film ever and had a blast. So that puts The Boondock Saints in an awkward position. Shoot Em Up aims for audacity from the word go, while Boondock Saints...

Our heroes are twin brothers, Conner and Murphey MacManus who, if you couldn't guess from the name, are as Oirish as Irish can be. Every time they appear at the beginning, there's cheesy stereotypical Riverdance-style music, just to hammer the point home. After celebrating St. Patrick's Day (of course) with a good old, home cooked barfight, the losers, a group of Russian mafiosos, track them down to their stylish hovel and get revenge on them. They're forced to kill the mobsters in self-defence and hand themselves in to the police, where someone leaks their names for... some reason, and they quickly become minor celebrities, being dubbed the Saints. The pair have an epiphany of some description (again, not really described well) and decide that if killing two mobsters makes people like them lots, killing tons of mobsters will make people like them even more! And with this kind of excellent logic, the film proper begins.

At first, it's hard to know where the film is going. With the constant background presence of the various mafia groups, you'd be forgiven for thinking you're in for another grim and gritty crime drama, something with the moral 'vengeance for its own sake never works'. But as you watch, things don't quite pan out the way you expect. Ron Jeremy appears as a minion, with a... memorable scene in a porn shop. The action sequences get progressively more and more silly. And then Willem Defoe comes along and completely blows any and all pretences of this being a serious work out the water.

Y'see, Dafoe is easily the single best thing in this entire movie. Mainly because he's the only one who seems to have grasped how entirely ludicrous the whole exercise is, and is intent on having as much fun with it as possible. So while everyone else is taking the film fairly seriously, he's busy chewing up the scenery as a gay FBI agent, cheerfully sending it up left and right. By the time he starts describing (and enacting) the gunfight between the brothers and Billy Connelly, here playing a mob hitman by the name of Il Duche, a cigar the size of a small canoe wedged in his mouth the entire time, you've either turned the film off or you're on the floor in stitches. The man makes the movie, and if it weren't for him, it really wouldn't be anything more than a bland, somewhat confused action movie. Even seeing him in painfully unconvincing drag doesn't kill the movie, and that's definitely something.

The ending loses all momentum, being a boring statement of intent that opens the door for a sequel (tl;dr "We're gonna shoot this guy in the head now and you're the lucky folks who get to see it! Tell the kids!"), Irish accents breaking badly every few seconds, which is a shame (and a little painful). If it had more courage of its convictions, it could've powered through and turned even that into something good. Even still, if you're able to get the joke, this is a surprisingly good film once you get past the beginning. Just... someone tell Dafoe he shouldn't have his legs apart when lying down wearing a skirt? Please?

2009-08-30T20:36:00.001+01:00

Gilgamesh

26 30-minute episodes

Gilgamesh/Enkidu OTP?

Fifteen years after a terrorist attack that has wiped out electronic equipment worldwide and turned the sky into an electromagnetic mirror, a brother and sister are on the run. They run into a group of teens who offer to help them escape their pursuers if they agree to join them. Their cause? A war to cleanse the earth of humanity and usher in a new age. And the teens, a group known as Gilgamesh, have psychic powers, are capable of transforming into monstrous beasts, and are just the ones to step into the gap left over. Needless to say, the siblings are somewhat reluctant to join. Not just because they're not interested in the whole genocide business, but because their father is the leader of Gilgamesh. And the one who unleashed the catastrophe on the world to begin with. So when they're rescued by a second group of psychic teens, these ones lead by the harshly authoritative Countess of Werdenberg, it's hard to know which side to take, and the pair are forced to decide where they belong.

Okay, first things first, this is a hard show to watch. I'm a man who likes his stylized character designs and artwork, but even I had a hard time warming to this one. The palette is muted and washed out for the overwhelming majority of the series, the main flashes of colour coming from the red stripes on one character's jacket and the red dresses worn by the female members of Gilgamesh. When we finally see the blue sky it carries with it some measure of impact. According to at least one character, who has never known anything but a mirrored sky, it's 'creepy'. Given the events that transpire soon after, she's not entirely wrong in her unease.

The character designs are what takes the most getting used to though. Frankly, everyone in it looks like a strung-out heroin addict. Doesn't help that one of the psychics is constantly pestering the others for a quick boost every ten minutes. Once you get used to them, they make a refreshing change to the standard saucer-eyed moeblobs infesting the majority of modern output, but it's going to put a hell of a lot of people off within the first few episodes, I can assure you of that much.

It's not just the artwork though, everything about this show is weird. There's an unsettling atmosphere throughout. Background music is used sparingly, though Beethoven's Emperor Concerto, a strangely melancholy piece, is referenced frequently. Characters act... well, they act. It's not like the voice actors are wooden or anything, but I was left with the odd impression that the characters themselves were just playing roles, acting as the plot dictates. Like I say, it's a weird feeling, but I'll be damned if I can tell you what it means.

In the end, there are no happy endings. How could there be in a show such as this. But the very end takes it just that little step further and all but says that, when you get down to it, none of it really meant much anyway. It's yet another attempt at an Evangelion-style metaphysical ending (man, I've really been watching a lot of shows like that, huh?), and while not as hamfisted as, say, Blue Gender's, which came right the fuck out of nowhere, it renders the last 25 episodes moot. Nothing is accomplished, except a whole lot of people are now dead. And in the final frames, it all but outright states that it wasn't worth it anyway.

As I said earlier, Gilgamesh is a tricky one to get into. If the drab colour scheme doesn't put you off, then the character designs will, and if the character designs don't, then some element of the story probably will. Don't get me wrong, it's a good show, and despite what I said about the ending, it does work, though that's more than likely to piss a few of you off. It's the story of a broken world slowly winding down, but refusing to admit it.

Perfect Autumn fare if you ask me.

2009-08-30T20:34:00.001+01:00

Rez

PS2

Big fish, little fish, cardboard box

It's one of those accepted conventions of media, that if your premise is suitably weird or OTT in some way, it is [reference point] On Drugs. Gives you something to base your expectations and tells you that this is the next manic step forward from that. It's Father Ted On Drugs, Angel on Speed, Tron mainlining Jack Daniel's while getting into a chainsaw fight with Evangelion and Fullmetal Alchemist as Babylon 5 watches and takes notes, grabbing handfulls of impressively-coloured pills 'purely for medicinal purposes'. Be impressed by the man whose life's work is described as, say, "what FLCL takes to get high", that's a man who knows where it's at.

So, following on from that logical progression, Rez is Panzer Dragoon at a 72-hour rave doing lots and lots of E with a few hits of acid for good measure. That's it, review's over, you can all go home now.

What, you're still here? That wasn't enough?!

*sigh* Fine.

Rez is an on-rails shooter that's remarkably difficult to describe to someone who hasn't played it before. Which kinda defeats the purpose, since reviews are generally there to aid people who haven't played, read or watched something before. The plot, for what it's worth, is that a supercomputer AI called Eden has become overwhelmed with knowledge, making her doubt her own existance. As a result, she's shutting herself down, with an impending catastrophe on the way. The player takes on the role of a hacker, flying through her subsystems in an attempt to get Eden to pull herself together. This is acheived with the powers of wireframe graphics and techno, apparently. So it turns out Hackers was actually spot on. Who knew?

A stage goes like this. Your avatar flies along. Enemies pop up. You lock on, they explode. Eventually, a password cube comes along. You shoot it enough times, it opens, you go to the next layer of the stage where the music is more intricate and the graphics are slightly more detailed. Repeat until you get to a boss, kill the boss and that's it, on to the next stage we go!

To give you some kind of reference for the next part, here's how the game looks in action, since that's the only way to actually get a feel for it. The Video's of the 360 HD version, but it is, to all intents and purposes, the exact same game:

So, let's take each element at a time. Gameplay is lifted directly from the Panzer Dragoon series. You can't change your direction at all, and while you can move the camera around, it's almost always facing in the right direction for you to deal with any oncoming threats. You hold down the fire button to lock on to enemies (up to 8 at a time) or you hammer the button to fire rapidly. You occasionally encounter items that give you Overdrive attacks, smart bomb-like items that target everything onscreen, which can be useful if you're going for that all-important 100% shot down ratio. You also find health items, but rather than directly increasing the amount of damage you can take, they go into a bar. Fill the bar and your avatar evolves. Take a hit, and no matter how full your health bar is, you'll go down to the previous form. Take too many hits and you're booted out the system.

Rez, however, is one of the few games where I can say gameplay really doesn't matter, since that's not where the main draw is. This is a game all about the visuals and sound, though not in the obnoxious way most other games are. The word for tosay is "synesthesia" which, depending on its use, is either a neurological condition where senses become slightly skewed, most commonly perceiving sound as having shape or substance, or an artistic attempt to get several senses working in tandum, in this case, sight, hearing and touch. Everything that happens is synced up to the soundtrack. The graphics pulse in time with the beat, your shots basically hit when it'd sound best (but never interfering with your hit percentage or making you take damage). The soundtracks start off bare-bones, only a few skeletal beeps and notes to give you the impression that there is something there. As you progress, more effects are added, filling out the music slowly. It's a great effect and gives an interesting feeling of progression, far different from almost any other game out there.

The graphics follow a similar path of gradual enhancement. If you're someone who always demands the absolute finest from your machine at every turn, you're probably going to be put off here. The visuals rarely ever progress further than basic textured polygons, so anyone seeking fancy shaders or lighting effects, this is not the droid you're looking for. For everyone else though, the graphics work with everything else. When you actually start seeing something other than flat angles and pretty lights in the final stage, it's oddly impressive, and gives you the feeling that this is going to be something different.

Downsides? Well, it's hard to say really. It's difficult to tell what's actually a threat and what isn't until it's too late. And since you can only ever take, at absolute most, about 4 or 5 hits before dying, that not only results in you being blindsided more often than neccessary, it also makes boss battles more frustrating than hard, since when they attack, there's usually a ton of missiles onscreen and working out which ones are actually going to hit you is guesswork at best. The boss battles themselves are arguably too long as well, some of the later ones being complete brick walls when it comes to taking damage, one having the added bonus of being super-fast, making hitting him trickier,and also having a shield of rapidly-shifting cubes! The whole thing hinges almost entirely on your enjoyment of the provided music as well, a problem common to every music game on the market, so if dance and techno cause you to erupt in a painful rash, you may want to steer clear. For my money, I actually like it, and I can't stand most dance music, so take that as a recommendation if you will.

Rez is utterly unique, and for that reason alone, it's worth a look. There's a few similar games on the market - Synaesthete probably being one of the best-known, Darwinia sharing a similar visual style, but little else - but Rez stands virtually alone, I couldn't tell you if it's art, since I find the whole 'games as art' argument laughable at best. But I can tell you that it's a solid game, short, but definitely worth your time, and that's really the only thing that needs to be said.

2009-08-10T21:37:00.001+01:00

Robert Rankin - Raiders of the Lost Car Park

350 pages

What is this I don't even

Writing a review is, despite what some of you might think, bloody hard work. Yes, it's mostly 'this is why X sucks/does not suck' when you get down to it, but it's also about making sense of what you've seen/read/played in your own head. Hard enough at the best of times, and that's when the thing actually makes sense to begin with. Take Raiders of the Lost Car Park, for example. It's the second in the Corenlius Murphy trilogy, but don't let that put you off, it's not like it'll make the book any easier to understand. In the last book, he discovered that mankind is actually being secretly oppressed by the Hidden King of the World, that the world itself is a hell of a lot bigger than any of us have been lead to believe, and that his father is actually the legendary Hugo Rune, a guru of Absolute Wisdom, a ladies man enough to put Errol Flynn to shame, and the arch nemesis of Bud Abbot. Involved in this adventure were a clan of mad Scotsmen, an electric blue Cadillac Eldorado, his loyal circus midget friend, Tuppe, and a train named after a Greek god that went 'Yabba Dabba Doo' instead of more conventional train sounds.

Cant say you weren't warned.

Your enjoyment factor for this book will directly proportional to your tolerance for the absurd. It's fair to say that if you have no time for pointless asides, running jokes or meandering stories that may or may not have anything to do with the plot, you're going to hate it. The plot, such as it is, is little more than a framework to hang said jokes and stories on. It involves a quest to open the Forbidden Zones, where the hidden wealth of the world is kept, with a reinvented ocarina, Prince Charles, Santa Claus and a gigantic rock concert held in Brentford.

Again: you can't say you weren't warned.

Like I said, it's hard to state definitively whether this is a good book or not. I mean, I enjoyed it, it's a good quick read, the funny bits are actually funny and there's a fair number of references that brought a knowing smile to my face. But this is definitely not a book everyone will enjoy. The reliance on asides and running gags in lieu of actual plot borders on the self-indulgent at times, and there's a definite feeling of 'repetition = funniness, right?' more often than I'd like. This is easily the most love it/hate it thing I've encountered in quite some time. Definitely give it a try, especially if you want something different, just...

...oh bollocks, it's become a running joke, hasn't it.

2009-07-29T08:52:00.003+01:00

Tokyo Gore Police

110 minutes

Blood, blood, gallons of the stuff, give them all that they can drink and it will never be enough

Stop me if you've heard this one: in the far-off year of 20XX, the police force has been privatized, and they now run around with tactical samurai armour and Steyr Augs. At the same time, a new threat to mankind has arisen: the Engineers. Engineers are modified humans who can form weapons out of any wounds they suffer. As the film opens, our heroine, Ruka, hacks at her arm with a blade, before being called out to deal with the latest Engineer, a man swinging around a chainsaw. After the police shoot the weapon out of his hand (and the hand still holding it for that matter), it swiftly sprouts a new chainsaw, covered in gore and muscle, that's also attached to another chain, allowing him to swing it around and launch it. Ten seconds later, he's the only one left standing. That's when Ruka shows up, and after a short battle, slices the Engineer in two, vertically, blood spraying from the wounds like a fire hose.

Now, did you, at any point, stop me there? No, of course you didn't. That's because Tokyo Gore Police isn't like anything you've seen before.

In terms of themes and style, this is pretty close to the Tetsuo movies (Tetsuo: The Iron Man and its sequel, Bodyhammer). But while those were very dark, the cinematic equivalent of a panic attack in a car crusher, this is... well, calling it 'light-hearted' or saying its 'played for laughs' doesn't work so well. It's not a film that takes itself seriously, by any measure, which is probably why it can even remotely get away with anything it does. The Tetsuo movies were good, but way too hard going, grinding the viewer down as they watched. This is a film with its tongue so far in its cheek, it bursts out the other side and becomes a shotgun, maiming a family of three.

How weird does it get? Well, let's see, remember Robocop or Starship Troopers? The fake TV ads? They're in here, ranging from ads encouraging people to join the police, to the stylish and cute 'Wrist Cutter G' ('makes the blood taste sweeter', apparently), to the most violent Wiimote attachment ever, to... It's difficult to tell if they're trying to make some statement on Japanese culture and law enforcement, or if they just sat around drinking one afternoon going "You know what'd be cool?" Then again, even in Robocop, half the ads seemed more like one-shot gags, so if you're going to steal, steal from the best.

Then there's the mutations. Remember, this is a film where wounds = weapons. The guy with the chainsaw at the beginning? He's smalltime. During one fight between Ruka and the big bad, she scores him across the face with her sword. So, he does what you'd expect anyone to do in this film and... no, I'm not spoiling that one for you, but the resulting weapon is definitely going to linger in your mind for a while. The body modification club/brothel, on the other hand, contains a dancer with a line of carpet staples across her breasts, another who's become a snail woman, and a third who has altered her body so much, she's become a chair. You read that right. It's impressive in a way that, after all the tactical weirdness strikes assaulting you every other minute, seeing someone lactating acid barely even raises an eyebrow.

And then we have the violence. Hands up who's seen Fist of the North Star? Any version will do. Or Bokusatsu Tenshi Dokuro-Chan? Or Kill Bill, or Brain-Dead or anything like that? You know those moments where someone suffers a papercut, then, 5 seconds later (because there's always a delayed reaction) the streets are running red and the wound's spewing blood about a hundred feet in the air? That's this film in a nutshell. If there's even the slightest injury, it'll bleed like a broken dam, to the point where Ruka's actually pushed down a corridor by the force of one character's injuries. Such high-pressure bleeding is even taken to its logical extreme in the final and oddly impressive moments of the film. As for the gore, well, imagine if the Power Rangers decided to go for an 18 cert with about half the budget. If papier mache and latex sprayed red gets your stomach churning, you might want to give this a miss. Otherwise, you're probably going to be too busy laughing or rolling your eyes to notice.

In the end, Tokyo Gore Police is definitely a movie that lives up to its name. While other movies run on the Rule of Cool to get away with their more ludicrous stunts, TGP runs on the Rule of Sure Why Not. The police chief walks around everywhere with a pet gimp? Sure, why not. Random fight between a policewoman with a naginata and a schoolgirl with a boxcutter for an arm, neither of whom have had any significant screentime til now? Sure, why not. Woman turns herself into a chair? Sure, why not. After a while, it's easier to just throw your hands up and say 'y'know what, fine' in an exasperated manner than call bullshit on anything. Tokyo Gore Police isn't a film you watch for plot or story or anything mundane like that: you watch it, people explode, you go away wondering what the hell you just saw. Everyone needs to see something like that once in a while, and for that reason alone, this is probably mandatory viewing for most.

2009-07-20T18:33:00.001+01:00

Clive Barker - Cabal

268 Pages

He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man

Clive Barker's had some terrible luck when it comes to movie adaptations. Sure, he's got Hellraiser 1&2 under his belt, two of the finest horror movies of all time, and Candyman was fairly decent, but aside from that, by and large, he's gotten the shaft each and every time. The Hellraiser sequels have ranged from 'surprisingly good' to 'oh sweet lord, no', Lord of Illusions was either hilarious or pitiful, depending on who you asked, and the most recent adaptation, Midnight Meat Train, was, in a word, abysmal, being related to the original short story in name and basic concept alone. Which would've been perfectly acceptable if the movie hadn't committed the cardinal sin of being terrible. Of all the adaptations, however, Nightbreed holds a special place for many. Helraiser aside, it demonstrates arguably the greatest breadth of Barker's vision, the freaks and monsters that populate his mind. The quality of the film itself is debatable, but for sheer visual impact, it's definitely a keeper.

Cabal is the book it was based on, and with a few deviations, the two are remarkably close to each other. Our main character is Boone, a man with some serious mental issues, to put it mildly. While being treated by his doctor, Deckard, he comes to realise that he may be a serial killer, responsible for the deaths of dozens. One unsuccessful suicide attempt later, he has a purpose: he heads to Midian, a necropolis of the lost and damned, where monsters like him can find respite and absolution. But upon arrival, he's attacked and told that, despite his beliefs, he's actually innocent. Running from his assailants, he's discovered by the police and shot down on the spot.

Of course, the story doesn't end there.

Cabal is arguably Clive Barker by numbers. All his typical themes and obsessions are here: transformation, both overt and otherwise, the sacred and the profane, the thin line between the mundane and the magical and, of course, his obsession with the flesh. Midian is filled with the Nightbreed, monsters of all shapes and sizes that have banded together for mutual protection. The breed are a true phantasmagoria of the weird, grotesque and bizarre, from the dog-headed painter to the man made of a flock of birds. Most of them are just mentioned in passing, but it gives a fascinating view of the larger world.

Less impressive is the main central theme. So let me get this straight: the Breed are the ones who look all scary and weird, but the ignorant hicks that want to stomp them out immediately upon discovery are the real monsters here, you don't say, do go on. It's a tired, hackneyed theme and, unfortunately, it's not one that's particularly dealt with well. The only character from the town that comes across as having any real decency is the priest, held over a barrel by the arrogant sherrif for being a transvestite, and even he's unfairly treated throughout the story, his only real role being to show how not everyone is a complete bastard while simultaniously having the literal and metaphorical crap kicked out of him. He also seems to be setting up a plot hook for a sequel, which would explain a lot more, but it's been over 20 years and we've not seen much more since, so who knows.

Worse are the two sex scenes which... well, Barker came out as being gay some years after this book was published, and in retrospect, it's not entirely surprising. You ever seen that episode of South Park where Mr. Garrison tries to write a book, and everything ends up having a fixation with wangs? It's like that. Each scene basically boils down to "Penis penis penis, penis is awesome, penis penis, did I put enough detail into describing the penis? Alsonakedgirlmasturbatingonabed, okay, back to the freaks!" Without that knowledge, it seems a little suspect, and with, comes across as outright hilarious. More so especially if that South Park episode happens to pop in your head at the time.

If you're looking to get into some Clive Barker, this, along with the Books of Blood collections, is a great place to start. Yes, as I said, it's somewhat formulaic, but it covers everything you'd probably want to know about the man's work, and it's easier to get into than something like, say, Weaveworld or Imajica. It's short, reasonably to the point and filled wth some nice moments of action and horror, with some occasional moments and lines that shine wonderfully. Consider it the literary equivilent of a 'Best Of' album and be done with it.

The story of the Nightbreed was continued in a series of comics, published in the early 90s by Marvel's Epic Comics imprint, alongside a Hellraiser anthology. The comics primarily take the canon of the film with elements of the book added to fill out the gaps. The Hellraiser comics have been reprinted recently, so there's every chance the Breed will rise again. For now, we, like the characters at the end of the tale, will need to wait and see.

The Best Game Ever (Pt.2)

2009-07-18T21:04:00.000+01:00

Persona 3

PS2, 2008

And I swear that I don't have a gun...

WARNING: This review contains spoilers. Proceed at your own risk

Persona 3, for many, is a game of mixed blessings. On the one hand, it arguably revitalised the Shin Megami Tensei franchise in a way nothing else had. After its release, the level of interest in the series simply exploded, resulting in more games being announced and localised in the space of 12 months than we'd seen in the last few years. Of course, this was not without its drawbacks, according to some. Upon first look at the game's revamped artstyle, people were quick to react, largely with horror. The designs were being handled by Shigenori Soejima, who did some minor work on Persona 2 and Trauma Centre, rather than series mainstay Kazuma Kaneko. The game would be set primarily around a school, and deal with day to day life to a strict time limit, rather than cheerfully allowing you to set your own pace. And, as people were so very quick to point out, you just know that where there's a fandom, there's people ready to write really messed up fanfics where they grab the characters and smoosh them together like dolls, making kissy noises as they do so (you know exactly who you are, don't try to deny it!). But this article is called "The Best Game Ever" and not "Reasons Why People On Both Sides Of Fandoms Suck", so we'll move on for the moment.

Behold the main character, saviour of us all! He has an official name in the canon, but I can't remember it right now, so for the purposes of this article, his name is Kazuma. Kazuma Tenryu. Kazuma's transferring to a new school this year, and is moving to the local student boarding house. On his way there, however, things get kinda... weird. Weird as in the sky turning a queasy green colour, all liquid turning to blood and, oh yeah, everyone around him spontaneously transmogrifying into coffins. And as he arrives, he's immediately confronted by a creepy kid who has him sign a contract of some sort. And then he has a gun pointed at him. It turns out the girl on the other end of the gun, Yukari, is one of his classmates in his new school, and the event is waived off as part of the school club she's a part of. Of course, that doesn't entirely explain the massive control room in the upper part of the dorms. Or the fact that they seem to be spying on him as he sleeps. Or the weird visions that he's having as he sleeps. Or the fact that everyone turns into a goddamn coffin on the stroke of midnight every night!

His suspicions that something is amiss are proved a few days later when the boarding house is attacked by a gelatinous blob monster wielding a mask and too many hands. Yukari drags him out of bed, hands him a sword and tells him to follow her. Unfortunately, they make it as far as the roof before the monster catches up to them. As a last-ditch effort, Yukari pulls out her gun... and turns it on herself? The monster, known as a Shadow, knocks the gun out of her hand, the weapon landing at Kazuma's feet. Instinctively, he picks it up, puts it to his own head, and pulls the trigger...

"Per... so... na..."

And thus, the game begins.

Persona 3 takes place over the course of a year, and can be neatly split into two parts: day time and night time. During the day, you'll go to school. This is far more important than you'd believe, since this is where you'll build up your Social Links. In gameplay terms, Links are required for the enhancement and evolution of your Personas. As its explained in-game, a Persona is a facet of your inner self that can only be released with an Evoker - the gun-like item Yukari tried to use at the start. Everyone has it within themselves to be, at turns, a wise mentor or a cruel bully, a crusader for justice or a vicious destroyer. These take the form of beings of myth and legend, gods and monsters and everything in between. The Social Links themselves all correspond loosely to cards of the tarot, as do the Personas themselves, and the stories that unfold are oddly compelling. There's the friendly rivalry you encounter with a fellow athlete (The Star), the girl you meet in the online RPG (The Hermit), the shady businessman who offers to take you under his wing (The Devil) the shy treasurer of the student council (Justice)... all of these stories are woven into the bigger picture, and as the Links develop, you find yourself warming to them. You find yourself making time for them, not just because it has a practical effect on the game, but because you actually like these people, and seeing them work out their problems and dilemmas gives you a small sense of pride at having helped them. Your influence, as they point out, has changed them, and your friendship has made them stronger. Of course, as each rank of each Link grants bonus experience to a Persona during fusion, their friendship has an arguably greater effect on you.

The night time part is where the majority of the game takes place. On the stroke of midnight, we enter the Dark Hour, a secret time between 12:00:00 and 12:00:01. During that period, the game's only dungeon, Tartarus opens up. Tartarus is a 260+ floor randomly-generated dungeon that, chances are, you'll rapidly grow to hate. You won't be able to tackle it all at once, thank god, as new areas are only opened after certain events, mostly boss fights. Added to that, is the fact that your characters will suffer from fatigue the longer you stay in the dungeon, potentially rendering them unusable for the next few days. This only really affects you at the beginning of the game, and past the halfway mark, probably won't even factor in to your decision-making, but it's at the beginning of the game that you'll want to spend as much time as you can in there, not only to gain money and experience, but also to get a feel for the combat, and limiting you in such a way is frustrating.

More than that, the dungeon designs are, frankly, poor. The decor only changes when you complete a full block of the dungeon. There are a total of about five or six blocks in the whole game. The game takes place over a year or so. Get used to seeing the same bleeding floors quickly, because they're not going to be changing any time soon. Of course, when they do change, it's not always for the better. The progression of the first couple of areas is nice, leading on from one area to the other visually, keeping the same motifs, but towards the end... come on, who thought it was a good idea to have an area that's best described as 'blacklight disco party freakout'? And then decided this was a good area to put black enemies in? Don't be surprised if you spend most of your time watching the radar in the corner of the screen than the game itself, because otherwise, you ain't seeing shit, buddy. Then the block after that goes even more into whiplash by apparently being made entirely of crystal. It's like the designers went "Yeah, I know we've been trying to have each area thematically consistent with each other, but we're, what, three weeks away from deadline, let's just throw in some wacky crap and be done with it!" Smooth move there, guys, doesn't show at all, really.

Of course, the Tartarus music isn't that much better. It starts off low-key, subdued, but, as with the level designs, it only changes with each block. And when I say 'changes', I mean 'gains an extra instrument'. It's horribly repetitive and droning, and it was only with the aid of an mp3 player at my side constantly, that I was able to tolerate it. Of course, that leads in to the main battle theme, Mass Destruction. The Megaten series has a reputation for some of the best boss and battle themes in gaming - Hunting: Comrades from Digital Devil Saga and Battle For Survival from its sequel, the boss theme from Nocturne and so on - and as a piece of music by itself, it's great. Seriously, can't fault it, I love it. However, those of you out there reading this, quick question: how quickly did you come to dread the words "Baby baby baby baby"? Like I said, it's a great song, but they always play the track from the very beginning each and every time. When the intro rapidly acquires the Pavlovian response of your hand hitting the mute button, it's probably a sign that you should rethink putting lyrics in a battle theme (or not, since Persona 4 did the exact same thing, albeit with a slightly less irritating song intro).

Actually, much of the music in the game suffers from this problem, as anyone who ever felt like da da-da-da-dah can attest. It's not that its bad, its just that it's repetitive, and it has to start from the very beginning of the track each and every time you enter a new area. And trust me, you're going to be doing that a lot. As I've said before, lyrical themes are a great idea, but only if they're used sparingly, otherwise you're going to be driving a lot of people hopelessly mad on a scale your average Elder God could only dream of.

And then we get to the combat itself. The Press Turn system from Nocturne is reused here, but with a minor difference: any character who scores a critical attack, or exploits a weakness gains an automatic chance to attack again. If they do the same thing again, this time on a different enemy, they get to attack again, and so on until they miss or run out of enemies. If they manage to do this, the enemy (or character, as it can happen to you as well) is knocked down and has to waste a turn getting back up, assuming they're not hit with a physical attack in the meantime. If all enemies are down, you get the option for an All-Out Attack, where everyone bum-rushes the enemy dealing massive physical damage to everything. Needless to say, exploiting weaknesses is arguably more important in this game than others in the series. Unfortunately, that's not particularly easy with the AI exhibited here.

If you know anything about the game, it's probably this: you only directly control the main character throughout the game. You can issue orders to the others, which they will follow, but it's mostly broad suggestions like 'support the group' or 'hit the enemy with everything you've got', and its up to the game how they choose to interpret that. For example, if you get someone to act in support, they'll immediately heal any and all damage or status affects. Great in theory, but that means they'll heal all damage, no matter how insignificant, effectively meaning they'll never heal otherwise. Tell them to cut loose? Enjoy watching Mitsuru use Mind Charge or Ice Break, thus wasting a turn that could've been used just stabbing the damn thing! Of course, if your character is incapacitated for whatever reason - status effect, knocked down, whatever - you'll be incapable of ordering them at all, further flirting with death. And, in proud Megaten tradition, if you die, it's all over. Your milate may vary, of course: some have found the system perfectly agreeable, and have never had the computer make stupid mistakes on their behalf. Personally, I prefer direct input as to what happens. Call me a control freak if you will, but I like to know any deaths are the result of my screwups, not anyone else's.

The only other main flaw comes in the voice actresses for two of the main characters, Fuuka and Ken - Ken starts off bratty, before becoming dull, and I'm sorry, but no high schooler should sound like a 30-year-old housewife. Of course, this is balanced by an otherwise phenomenal cast. You'll recognise most of the characters from other previous roles (the cast has credits from series such as Fullmetal Alchemist, Bleach, Digimon and Disgaea to their names), but after a while, you'll be hard pressed to imagine anyone else in their roles, the voices are that perfect. Special mention has to go to Derek Stephen Prince, voice of Takaya, who manages to straddle the line between controlled madness and charismatic evil. In a game filled with a stellar cast, the fact that he's able to outshine them all tells you all you need to know. The man knows how to play a charming villain on a par with Crispin "I'm Allucard, y'know" Freeman, and that's a hell of a compliment to both.

The characters are, without a doubt, what makes this game. Most of you will probably find yourself liking Junpei most quickly, because, when you get down to it, he's the easiest to relate to. He likes games, he's fairly laid back, in a lot of ways, he's a lot like us. When he finds out that sealing the Dark Hour means the loss of his Persona, he goes into a slump. In his mind, his powers make him a hero, and if he gives that up, he's back to being a nobody. In that, it's hard not to feel even the merest twinge of sympathy for him. He doesn't want fame or recognition. He just wants to be somebody, something more than he is, and who hasn't wanted that? Then there's Akihiko, who initially comes across as brash and imposing. As you start to learn about him, you realise he's not such a bad guy after all. Then, a close friend, practically a brother, is murdered in front of him. Rather than running off wildly for revenge, however, he uses this to drive himself further onward to try and live up to his friend's memory. Honestly, I think that's the first time I've ever seen someone do that in a game, standard protocol is to charge head on, screaming like a lunatic.

And then... then there's Ikutsuki, and here, the game plays its cruellest trick. Y'see, in the previous games, there was a character called Philemon, a benevolent (sort of) deity (kinda) who gave the characters their powers, known for wearing a camel-coloured suit and a porcelain mask adorned with a butterfly. You never had much contact with him, but, by and large, Philemon was on the level. Philemon himself isn't in this game, but here's Shuji Ikutsuki, head of the team and, by and large, a guy who's seemingly on the level. He's dressed in a similar outfit, and while he didn't expressly give you your powers, armed with this prior knowledge, you're probably more inclined to trust the guy than someone unfamiliar with the series. And then events unfold, and you realise how much of a fool you were to believe him. The game told you he was okay, but while everyone playing it was fooled, series veterans would've been fooled that much harder. You went the extra mile. No one else did. It's heartless and messes directly with the player. I loved it.

Persona 3, more than anything is a story about stories. Everyone has one, from the main characters, to the social links, to even the people standing around doing nothing. Everyone has a tale to tell that unfolds slowly as the game progresses. And at the tale's close, when you find out exactly how much you meant to everyone, even the people who didn't know what you were doing at midnight every night, it's hard not to sit up that little bit straighter. You're no longer playing a game. You're fighting for these people. You're fighting to ensure the sun rises tomorrow. The effect it has will vary from person to person, but if you've made it this far, it's impossible not to get swept up in the story by now. And with the ending... I can't spoil that here, not even a little, but if you didn't find your eyes just a little moist, you have no soul. Even now, writing this, the throat's tightening just a little, and at the time... let's just say I lost a little of my manly composure and be done with it, huh? The end is played beautifully - another five minutes and those final moments would've been positively heartbreaking. As it is... there's no way I could see it as sad. It doesn't end badly. It ends exactly the way it was intended to. The way it had to.

There was an updated re-release, FES, with an extra 30+ hour epilogue that caps the whole saga off. I haven't played it yet, so I can't comment on it. In all honesty, I'm not entirely sure I want to. It's not that the extra content is bad or anything, more that... I liked the way it ended. It was a subdued ending, the likes of which you don't often see in games these days. A quiet, melancholy finale that lets the game wind down to a natural stop. No. Better to leave Kazuma, sitting on that bench, enjoying the warm Spring morning, as a hand strokes his hair softly. He's earned his rest.

To Kazuma Tenryu. The young man who fought a god to a standstill. Twice. I can think of no better tribute, than starring in a game such as this.

The Best Game Ever (Pt.1)

2009-07-16T18:58:00.006+01:00

Devil May Cry 3

Capcom, 2005

PS2

The adventures of a narcissist with OCD on a quest to beat up his brother.

When you were a kid, someone - probably a well-meaning elderly relative or aunt or something - told you that no one likes a show-off. It's one of those things everyone had to go through at least once. Well, Grandma Hilde, I'm afraid to say you were so horribly wrong. Showing off may not be big, and it may not be clever, but it is awesome and it makes you awesome. This is Scientific fact, and trying to say otherwise makes you a fool. Just look at Dante.

Dante, as I'm sure you're all aware, is the walking personification of Awesome incarnate. Everything he does and says has to be as OTT as possible, no matter how mundane, and, as a result, he winds up reeking of the Awesome, and possibly pizza. Or strawberry sundaes, if the anime's to be believed (which we're all hoping it isn't). Devil May Cry 3 is a prequel to the series as a whole, detailing the events some time prior to the first game. While setting up his titular (as yet unnamed) agency, Dante receives an invitation of sorts from his long-missing twin brother, Vergil. Seems he's planning some shenanigans, and wants Dante to come along with party favours for all his friends! Except by 'shenanigans' he means 'summoning a demonic tower in the middle of the city', by 'friends' he means 'demons' and by 'party favours' he means 'violence'. So, Dante, never one to miss a shindig, ventures forth to figure out what in the hell his brother is up to. And, I dunno, stop another demonic incursion into our world if possible, or something.

This is the intro to the very first stage:

That tells you just about all you need to know about the game. Over the top acrobatics? Check. A cocky main character just the right side of obnoxious? Check. A fantastically thumping soundtrack? Check. Riding enemies like the devil's own skateboard, firing and whooping like a lunatic all the while? Oh hell yeah, check! Of course, if the game were all improbable sword-slinging and nothing else, it'd be a pretty piss-poor show. Thankfully, the DMC3 has the chops to back up its boasts, with chutzpah to spare.

So, after the intro, and once you've stopped laughing at how insane that opening is, you finally get to take control of Dante himself. And it's good. The controls are as fluid as you could ask for, and while they do take some getting used to at first, once you have them down, pulling off the myriad combos will be child's play. It's okay if you start feeling every bit as cocky as Dante when you start facing down the legions of enemies ahead of you, we all do it ourselves from time to time. Even better though, showing off actually has a practical application in the game. The style meter, trademark of the game, makes a return appearance. As you beat up on demons, the bar fills. The more impressive the combo, the more red orbs, the game's currency, you get after they die. In the grand scheme of things, you don't have to invest much in the combo system: it makes things easier for upgrading and the like, but, other than investing in a couple of key moves and some extra health, you can easily murder your way through the underworld with the same basic attacks. The very existence of the bar, however, almost guarantees that, like it or not, you'll be driving yourself to reach the upper ranks as often as possible, for no other reason than the fact that you can. After all, you're Dante! No way in hell he'd do anything less than the craziest moves known to man or demon!

The soundtrack is similarly fantastic. The ambient music that makes up the majority of it is inoffensive and fits into the background easily. Not that you'll really be hearing it that often, as the game's main battle theme, Taste The Blood kicks in each and every time you encounter an enemy. And there's a hell of a lot of enemies. If you've played games like, say, Persona 3 and 4, you'll know it's hard to have a battle theme with lyrics in it. It's a nice idea in theory, but it all falls apart when you remember that your average player's going to be hearing it several hundred times during the course of a normal game. More so if they're grinding for whatever reason. Thankfully, unlike the Persona games, Taste The Blood and its variants work well as both a stand-alone piece of music and as a battle theme, probably due to the emphasis being on the music rather than the voice (and due to it fading in, rather than crashing in with the same repetitive intro every time). The boss battle themes are, likewise, of a high calibre, being, at turns, dark foreboding pieces, as in the case of the Cerberus fight, or frantic electronica when you're fighting the succubus Nevan. The game's overall theme, Devils Never Cry is easily the standout piece. It accounts for what seems like half the tracklist by itself, showing up in various remixes and rearrangements and as a piano version on several occasions. Give the song its due though, it's a fantastic track, and while your mileage may vary, it's not a bad piece of music to riff on.

Devil May Cry 3 was eventually re-released as a budget-priced special edition. While there were a few extra modes - Bloody Palace, a 9999 level endurance mode, extra costumes and art and so forth - two spring to the forefront most clearly. First off is the ability to play as Vergil. While this is touted as a separate storymode, that's actually something of a lie. There's a few extra cutscenes as Vergil, mostly at the start and end, but between stages, there's nothing. There's not even any difference between the stages or the order you tackle them in - the first stage takes place in Dante's office, note for note, for God's sake! Vergil mode basically amounts to little more than a palette-swap with a new set of moves and no story, rather than a 'true' new gameplay mode, and while it's a nice addition, it's really nothing to get excited about.

What's more interesting is the re-jigged difficulty levels. We all know how crushingly hard the game gets on account of the difficulty levels being moved up a notch during the translation to Western Shores - our 'Normal' is the Japanese 'Hard', our Dante Must Die mode doesn't even technically exist over there, and so on. With the release of DMC3SE, they decided to throw us a bone and moved the settings closer to the original Japanese settings. The end result is a game that's not exactly easier, as much as it is less frustrating. Lots of people out there wanted to like the original, but were put off by the monumental challenge it offered, even on the sarcastically offered Easy Mode (to unlock: die. That's it). With this, and a few refinements and tweaks here and there, the game is finally within the reach of even the less than godly of us out there.

DMC3, if you haven't already guessed, is a phenomenal game, and easily one of the best ever seen in the action genre. The cutscenes are wonderfully overblown, and there's a healthy vein of self-mocking humour running through it from end to end - anytime Dante does something cool, and takes a moment to congratulate himself on it, events never fail to remind him that he's still an utter goofball. The controls, the gameplay, the graphics, voice acting and characters all come together to produce an absolutely amazing finished product. It's even more amazing considering it came out after the second game in the series, an offering so laughably poor, even Capcom themselves are doing their best to distance themselves from it. When a company is more ready to consider a cameo in another company's game (see Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne) more canon than an actual instalment of the series itself, it gives you some indication of just how dire that offering must be. DMC3 puts you in the boots of a qualified badass and lets you go wild with some of the most demented attacks and weapons you're ever likely to see - if you can find a weapon more spectacular than an electric guitar that doubles up as a scythe that also fires electrically charged bats with every riff that, fyi, was also originally a virtually naked succubus not ten minutes ago, for the love of all that is holy, keep it to yourself, less its magnificence tear the very fabric of the universe asunder!

Devil May Cry 3: Dante's Awakening is, without a doubt, the craziest party you're ever likely to visit. Let's rock!

2009-07-13T11:34:00.003+01:00

Baroque

PS2

RPGs are a weird breed. For all the crowing made about pushing the boundaries of gameplay forward, by and large, the settings are inevitably the same: the same cod-Tolkein medieval landscape, the same large expanses of nothing with the same few hamlets and forests, and the obligatory village of ninjas and samurai, despite the rest of the world ostensibly taking place in 14th century Europe. And on the few occasions when they take place in a more modern or futuristic setting, there will always be, without fail, one person, more than likely the hero, running around with a sword. Or a laser sword.

In any case, it's rare that anyone actually tries to do something different with the setting. There has never been, to the best of my knowledge, an RPG set in the Renaissance. I've never seen a film noir strategy game, and if you want something in a recognisable modern day setting, if you don't like the Shin Megami Tensei series, you're pretty much boned.

Baroque is something different. Following a catastrophe that nearly destroyed the world, known as The Blaze, the land is left in a twisted state. Twisted abominations known as 'meta-beings' roam the earth. The only semblance of order and authority comes from the False Angels of the Order of Malkuth. Their leader, the Archangel, claims to have God trapped at the bottom of their former headquarters, the Neuro Tower, and charges the main character with purifying her. If he does so, he will receive absolution for the terrible sins he has committed - sins he has trouble even remembering.

Right from the off, you're thrust into a landscape charitably described as 'hellish'. The sky is a painful crimson, the buildings crumbling down to girders and rusted metal gratings and beyond that, blasted sand as far as the eye can see. The only building of any real worth in the area is the Neuro Tower, home to the game's main quest. The area's not completely devoid of inhabitants: there are several people in the area you can talk to who will offer help and advice, after a fashion. The Bagged One will hold items for you, the Coffin Man talks about building the world's greatest dungeon (goddamnit), while the Baroquemonger will read any Idea Sephirah, glowing pearls that contain the thoughts and feelings of its former owner, that you've found. Other characters, like the neurotic Longneck, the cryptic Horned Girl, and the worryingly pleasant Bagged One offer up interesting tidbits of background and advice depending on your actions. Eventually, you head towards the tower. As you near it, a vision of the Archangel appears and hands you the Angelic Rifle, reminding you of your mission to purify God. Picking it up, you enter the tower, and the game proper begins.

Baroque is a Roguelike, a modern-day version of the classic dungeon-crawlers of yore, exemplified by games like Diablo 2, Azure Dreams, Nethack, and, to a lesser extent, games like the Marvel Ultimate Alliance series, and that means one thing: crushing difficulty. If you haven't already noticed by this point, you have two main meters onscreen: the first is your health, which is pretty self-explanatory. If you take damage, it recharges itself over time as long as you avoid more hits. The other is your vitality meter. No matter what you do, this is always ticking down. When it empties, it starts draining your life meter at the same rate until you die, so its in your best interests to keep it topped up as much as possible. There's a few ways to do this, but the main way should clue you in to what kind of game this really is:

You eat the hearts of your fallen enemies.

Yes, for all it's RPG trappings, Baroque is really closer to the survival horror genre. The environments are lifted right out of Silent Hill, the atmosphere out of a David Lynch movie and the enemies right out of that unsettling dream you could never quite remember. They start off reasonably enough - mutant fish, hopping bugs that are easier to step on than hit with your sword - but before long, you're encountering wicker and mesh manikins that fire balls of dark electricity at you, fake walls with grotesque faces that try to consume you, and floating monstrosities with more appendages and status effect attacks than is strictly necessary. This is a game that manages to put the creatures of Silent Hill, long a World Leader in the export of Freaky Shit to shame, though they're usually less outright horrifying, and the sense of isolation is easily on a par with it. You never really get to a point where you feel capable of taking on everything with ease: in the back of your mind, you always know there's a trap or a group of enemies that will shut you down for good, so you're always on your toes. And all the while, you're eating the hearts, flesh and bones of your foes. No one said this was a happy game, after all.

Eventually, after some probable mishaps, you will encounter the God of the Order of Malkuth, and more than likely do as instructed by the Archangel. One confusing cutscene later, you'll be dumped back outside the tower with none of your equipment or levels, and even less of an idea of what's going on. Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to the two core mechanics of the game. The first is that you're going to be assaulting the tower. A lot. Be prepared to restart from nothing repeatedly, because that's the only way to unlock the story and further floors of the tower. Woe betide anyone who forgot to give Eliza their Idea Sephirah on the 15th floor, because you're going to have to do the entire thing aaaaall over again. Granted, while the tower itself is always randomized, the NPCs that appear on each floor are almost always on the same floors, so if you screw up, really the only one at fault is you. Thankfully, you'll level up fairly rapidly just by killing enemies as they appear, and items are always plentiful, so a lot of the time, restarting is more of a hinderance than a game-breaking flaw.

Of course, you'll want to repeat the tower, because this is the only way you'll uncover the other main draw of the game: the storyline. It's drip-fed to you in the most agonizing way possible. At the start, all you'll know is that the world is ruined, and that, somehow, you were the one responsible for this. As you continue to assault the tower, you start piecing together the background to the story. You're told fairly early on that the Archangel knows more than he's letting on, which even the least attentive of players will have worked out, but then you begin to start understanding how much he's not telling you. Then you find out exactly what happened. To the game's credit, no matter what you thought was going on, somehow, it's even more twisted than you ever dared imagine. It's almost a shame that Baroque isn't a more traditional RPG as the darkness of the story is easily one of the most intriguing I've ever encountered. It's so hideously warped, and it's a wonder that it manages to surpass even the darkest of expectations, and if I could recommend a game based solely on its premise alone, this would be getting the highest marks imaginable.

Unfortunately, I can't and I have to judge it on gameplay, and there's several gaping flaws here, first and foremost being the difficulty. It's a Roguelike, so you expect there to be a steep learning curve attached, but somehow the game manages to outdo itself at every turn. It's hard to feel like you're making any progress at first, and when you finally start gaining some ground, you're inevitably dumped back outside with no equipment again. Characters will eventually start dropping hints as to what to do to - how anyone would work out what 'pure water' actually means without a gigantic leap of logic is beyond me - but the going is slow, and the majority of players will drop out long before they uncover the good stuff.

Secondly, for all the items the game throws at you, it's oddly stingy in some respects. Good weapons and armour are maddeningly difficult to acquire, and wandering around with a Puny coat and Junk sword does nothing for morale. That wouldn't be so bad if, like in other Roguelikes, items to power up your equipment were plentiful, but here, you'll be lucky to encounter a single stat-up item every half-dozen tower runs. Of course, that doesn't stop certain enemies tossing around weapon-degrading attacks like confetti at a funeral. Keeping items from run to run is also needlessly hard. On certain floors, you'll encounter a fixture known as a Consciousness Orb. As well as being an important plot element, any one item, and one item only, thrown in will appear in the item collector's inventory back in the town. You're guaranteed to encounter at least two on the final (enemy-free) floor of the dungeon, allowing you to keep your sword and armour between runs. Unfortunately, you're not likely to encounter many more than that. So if you also happen to find a really awesome item the level before that you'd like to keep for the next journey, tough noogies, it ain't happening. It adds a maddening degree of unfairness to an already hard game. Surely letting us keep anything equipped, and using the orbs to send back extra goodies would be a far better idea, with the bonus of making the game that little less masochistically hard.

It's a shame that the difficulty and repetition will put of just about everyone who plays Baroque, because in every other way, this really is a fantastic game. The levels are nicely atmospheric, the music is fantastic, a heavy industrial influence underscoring the journey well, the enemy designs are gleefully grotesque, even the swords are fascinating, being less sharp bits of iron, more borderline organic slabs of metal. There's also a ton to unlock, with every voice clip and cutscene going into a gigantic directory, and an extensive list of every character and enemy in the game. If you have a high tolerance for basically restarting a game over and over again, or a lot of patience in the face of ludicrous difficulty, this is well worth a look. If, however, you're like me, and just want to try something different, you could do a lot worse, and if you can get through the difficulty barrier, you're in for a real treat. A shame then, that that single barrier will put off most everyone who'll play it - even the ones who'd enjoy it most.

2009-07-13T11:07:00.000+01:00

I've always been disdainful at best of Dreamworks' CGI output, but if this is in any way, shape, or form true, their movies just dropped from 'shallow' to 'outright soulless'.

Depressingly, it also explains a hell of a lot.

2009-07-11T09:06:00.001+01:00

Akira Psychoball

PS2

Little known fact: I love pinball. Seriously, love it to bits. While other kids were dreaming of full-size arcade cabinets in their bedrooms, I would've offered up any number of bodyparts for a decent pinball cab. Of all the arcade games out there, pinball arguably requires the most skill: crane games and the like are hideously rigged, and you can brute force your way through virtually every arcade game available - SNK fighting games infamously aside - if you have the credits available. No chance of doing that with pinball, either you've got the moves, or you don't, simple as that.

Slightly more well-known is my love of all things Akira. The manga is one of the best I've ever read, and over 20 years on, the film still manages to outclass virtually everything since in terms of animation and design. Condensing a 2000+ page manga into a two hour movie may not have been the best idea, but for my money, it's still one of the most visually stunning films ever. On the games front, however, it's been poorly serviced, with some of the worst titles ever to appear on any format bearing its name. In order to be classified as the Best Akira Game Ever, it would simply have to have the sole virtue of not being atrocious.

Akira Psychoball is an attempt to retell the epic and complex story of the film through the medium of pinball. Yes, you read that right.

Released in time to cash in on the Remastered edition of the film in 2002, the game is liberally peppered with clips from the movie. While they do look pretty, they're pretty much devoid of any context, so good luck trying to follow the plot. Though if you're playing a pinball game for the story, you have no idea how wrong you're doing it, and you're probably having more fun making up the story yourself so, y'know, go wild!

First thing you'll probably notice is that yes, this is actually a pinball game. Somehow, it's actually a surprise starting it up and seeing all the ramps and bumpers, but no, this really is pinball and we're actually going through with this. You're given a couple of main options to choose from: Story Mode, where you work your way through the tables, clearing targets and goals as you go; Stage Select, where you pick a table and play as you want; and a help mode, which gives you info on what each of the targets on the various boards do, as well as background info on the characters and the vague plot of the film. Thinking about it, that's pretty superfluous, since anyone with any actual interest in this game probably knows who the angsty kid in the cape is and why he's turning into monstrous silly putty, but, again, we'll ignore that and carry on.

So, to the game's Story Mode, a description skirting with the Trade Descriptions Act at best. Each board consists of two parts, a top half and a bottom half, and there are three of each, themed off various set-pieces from the movie. As you hit targets and complete mini-games, you'll progress to the next table. Here's where it gets tricky though: rather than moving tables wholesale, the top part of the table will remain, while the bottom half will be 'switched in'. Once you've gone through all three bottom halves, the top half will change and you'll have to do the same thing again until you've run through all three. Once you've done that, congratulation! You win at pinball!

The pinballing itself is pretty solid, if mostly unremarkable. Once you get the timing right, it's possible to make any and all shots with reasonable regularity. Thing is, on a console, you kinda expect a little more. Consider games like the Crush series - Alien Crush, Devil Crush and Jaki Crush, all popular mainstays of the 16-bit era. These took the viewpoint that on a console, you were never beholden to such boring concepts as, gravity, physics or even reality, and spiced the gameplay up with moving targets, boards that changed physically depending on what you hit, and little monsters that would wander around, giving you points and extra bonuses if you hit them. Hell, they even included bosses if you were any good at the game! Here, there's a few extra cutaway bonus stages, where you have to take down flying platforms, crack open the Akira capsule or destroy SOL, but they're still sadly limited. As for board invasions, I saw a teddy bear wander across the screen all of twice, and in the final stages, you have to dodge blasts from the SOL laser satellite which do approximately bugger all to you, seeing as they tend to fire at the other end of the map from you. And as for actual proper bosses, other than SOL, there are none. How hard would it've been to include a final fight against Tetsuo's monstrous form at the very end of the film, with you trying to ricochet shots off of him?

The other main mode is the Versus mode: two players with two sets of flippers sit side by side with their boards joined in the upper middle. They try to fire balls over to the other person and score when a ball drops through their flippers. First to whatever arbitrary number wins. Really, there's not much more to say than that, the game's simplistic as it gets. No doubt it'd be a hell of a lot of fun with friends while drunk, but as I was annoyingly sober and alone while playing it, it gets a resounding 'meh' from me.

More worthy of note is the music: while they've managed to get the rights to the characters and scenes from the movie, someone somewhere forgot to license the soundtrack. So if you're hoping to listen to all the iconic themes from the movie, tough noogies, original music for you! Actually, that's unfair, the new music is actually pretty good on the whole. Surprisingly so, some of it actually being borderline excellent. There's a few musical nods to the original, so subtle you'd barely even notice, but on the whole, probably the best thing on offer here.

The options are fairly limited: there's no option to switch to the original Japanese voices, surprisingly, and as the game's based on the Remastered edition, you're stuck with Johnny Yong Bosch screaming TETSUOOOOO at the top of his lungs, rather than Cam Clarke. The game also lacks a sound test, which is a disappointment considering the excellent music on offer. There's also absolutely nothing in the way of unlockables: what you see when you start up the game is all you're ever going to get, so no concept art, no way to view the clips, not even a chance to get a look at the artwork on each table. An extra challenge mode - a few dozen tasks of the 'score X points in Y minutes, make Z number of shots, etc.' variety - would've added to the replay value of the game substantially, but as it is, once you've finished the main mode, there's practically nothing else for you to do, and for just about everyone out there, that's the point where it gets buried beneath other, more interesting games.

Psychoball is a remarkably solid pinball game that, as a physical machine, would probably be one of the best around. As a game on a console, however, it's not that great, and as an overall package, lacking. Don't get me wrong, it's a fun game: the gameplay is never anything short of smooth, and the tables are nicely realised. Just that there are things that make a physical pinball table fun, and there are things that make a pinball game fun, and the two are drastically different. If you like collecting Akira-related stuff... well, you've probably already got a copy. If you're looking for something different from the norm, give it a shot. Just don't go in expecting more than pinball.

2009-07-01T09:56:00.000+01:00

Blue Gender

26 30-minute episodes

Mankind sucks. You know it, I know it, even the Earth itself knows it. Thankfully, despite our immense propensity for failure, She's not decided to do anything overt about it. Well, not that any of us knows, at least. Other worlds out there, on the other hand... not quite so lucky about it.

Yuji is a Sleeper. Infected with an unknown, seemingly incurable disease, he is placed into cryogenic storage for a year or two while a cure is worked on. Unfortunately, when he's finally awakened, 20 years have passed and mankind is no longer in charge. Gigantic insects known as the Blue have wiped out the majority of humanity and forced the rest to the stars. A few scattered enclaves eke out an existence here and there, but by and large, this is not our world anymore. He's found by a group of soldiers from Second Earth, an orbiting space colony where the remnants of humanity live. They're looking for Sleepers to assist them somehow in their war against the Blue. Unfortunately, over the course of a few skirmishes, the unit is all but wiped out, leaving Yuji and Marlene, the only other survivor to make it to home base alone.

Blue Gender is a weird show. It forgoes many of the traditions you'd expect to see in virtually any show. Characters are vaguely introduced with original, non-generic designs and you expect them to be important later on. Except they're not, and they won't because they've just be eviscerated by a stag beetle the size of a minibus, all without any warning at all. Blue Gender is not shy about offing characters left and right by any measure, and it's rare that anyone mourns them. Any other mech show, be it Real Robot ("war is hell) or Super Robot ("war is awesome and makes you a MAN!"), would at least have a flashback montage for the death of a long-running character, but not here. It makes a refreshing change, and it does keep you on your toes, since anyone and everyone's a target, but it also makes it damn near impossible to care about anyone when you know they're potentially seconds away from becoming bug bait. Literally, considering the majority of the deaths in the show are literal 'blink and you'll miss it' moments, sometimes comically so.

The other weird thing about it is the random sex scenes. They thin out a lot as the show progresses, but at the beginning, it seems like you can't go ten steps without someone groping you. Yeah, I know, it's supposed to highlight that everyone knows there's a good chance they're going to die horribly any second now and they're desperately trying to find any kind of comfort they can whenever they can - several characters explicitly state this on more than one occasion - but when you see two women molesting each other in the middle of Ops while others look on, barely batting an eyelid, it starts looking a little less than credible.

Thankfully, the fight scenes are much more impressive. The Blue are remarkably resistant to damage, with the result being that a single bug can easily wipe out a whole platoon. Okay, so we're talking about bugs with armour that can deflect bullets about half an inch in width, and it doesn't help that the mechs in this show seem to be made of candyfloss and sunbeams as far as armour plating goes. In any case, the fight scenes are nicely fast-paced and suitably brutal. The mechs themselves receive remarkably little attention, and there's virtually no fanfare whenever a new one is introduced. Indeed, other than one model, which has a very distinct plot-related hook to it, there's every likelihood you won't even notice a new model's been rolled out until several episodes later.

The story itself is decent, if a little heavy-handed on the environmental message, though it all falls apart in the last episode. Blue Gender was released about five years after Evangelion had made its impact (no pun intended) on the scene, and for some unfathomable reason, someone on the production crew thought it'd be a fantastic idea to end this series with a similar metaphysical ending that, again, makes no goddamn sense. Fine enough, except, barring a few ideas about the Earth itself triggering an 'extinction gene', there's no real reason for it. And don't get me started on the 'rocks fall, everyone in space dies THE END' post script which literally comes out of nowhere, that was just taking the piss. In its defence, however, the last few episodes are dedicated to wrapping the story up neatly. Absolutely fantastic considering how many shows, both Eastern and Western wind up running the closing credits before the Big Bad Evil Guy's corpse is even lukewarm.

Blue Gender is a fine action show that tries too hard in the final stretch and takes a wrong turn at Batshit Junction. Ignore the moments of misplaced titillation and the painfully bad closing minutes and you're left with a solid series with some great moments and pleasingly icky enemy designs. And if that still doesn't grab you, imagine its a Starship Troopers spin-off. With the casual nudity seen in both the show and the original movie, it's a closer fit than you'd ever think, and that's before you remember the power armour that they forgot to include in the film.

2009-06-27T00:54:00.000+01:00

If there's a single film out there that doesn't deserve all of the hate it gets, it's Alien 3. The film's reputation precedes it to a highly unfair degree: ask anyone about it and there's a It's the poster child for executive meddling, with tales of lengthy reshoots, gaps in production (the entire film ground to a halt for over three months at one point) and more dogging it.

Following the events of the last film, Ripley awakes to find herself on a hellish all-male prison planet, the only survivor following the crash of her escape vessel. She believes at first that she's lost everything, however it quickly becomes apparent that something else survived the crash.

Okay, lets get the obvious targets out the way: yes, it is complete bullshit that Hicks and Newt die in the first five minutes - off-camera, no less. This simple decision is what garners much of the hatred for the film, and rightly so. But, in the context of the film, it actually works. The idea is that the alien has taken everything from her in one way or another - her crewmates in the first, her daughter in the second, and in the third, her replacement family, Hicks, Newt and Bishop. She basically says as much in the film. This is supposed to be a tragedy, a complete 180 from battle-hardened Ripley, breaking in to alien-infested hives with a pulse rifle and flamethrower.

The cast all look the same? Yes, but that's intentional. They're on a prison planet. A highly religious one at that. That alone should clue you in to the themes of rebirth and sacrifice alone. But even beyond that, the idea is that the shaved heads are supposed to de-humanise the characters, further emphasising Ripley's crusade against the xenomorphs. By the end, her single-minded extermination of the species isn't too far removed from the Queen's hatred for her in the last movie. Whether it's intentional or not is up for debate, but it's a nice counterpoint. As for the cast being utterly unlikeable, again, that's kind of the point. Nice people don't get sent to maximum security hellworlds (usually), and while they may not be as likeable, it's perfectly arguable they were able to handle the Alien a whole lot better than the marines in the last film: nice bunch, but the Keystone Kops could've put up a better fight.

The film itself is a mess? Ah, now that's a more difficult one. Practically from Day One, David Fincher seemed to be director in name only. He was inundated with executive orders, demands and missives. At one point, he was due to direct one of the key scenes of the film, only to be told he was not, under any circumstances, to film it in any way. Upon hearing this, he grabbed Weaver and a hand-held camera and shot it before anyone could stop him. That's the kind of backstage fuckery he was encountering on a daily basis. By the end of shooting, he was so disgusted by the whole thing, he asked to have his name removed from the production, and has refused to comment on it ever since. All things considered, it's a miracle the movie has any coherence at all.

The Assembly Print (as opposed to a Director's Cut, due to the director basically telling Fox to fuck off) adds a lot back in to the finished product. Rather than the Alien being birthed from a dog, it comes, as originally intended, from an ox, making the creature's comparative lack of intelligence far more understandable, oxen being possessed of considerably less animal cunning than a dog. Of the other added scenes, the two most important ones are right at the end: in the original cut, Ripley is told she could have the Queen implanted in herself removed, giving her back the life she always wanted. There's a short pause before she continues on her course of action. In the AP, this pause is much, much longer. she actually seems like considering it, before continuing, making the moment much more ambiguous: the Last Temptation of Ripley. Pretty apt considering how she falls at the end. The other is at the very end, with Ripley's closing report from the end of the original film being played over scenes of the prison being shut down. It adds a nice bookend to the trilogy, and adds a sense of finality and melancholy to the end. It's a shame that the one change that didn't need to be made was the removal of the moment of the Queen's birth, as Ripley's triumphant smile in the original was arguably one of the better moments of the film.

When you consider what the film could have been with the Assembly Print, and all that went wrong with it, it's hard to be so critical of the original. If anything, it's difficult to not be more sympathetic towards it. Alien 3 was, in part, trashed because it was a bastardised version of what it could've been, but also because it wasn't a sequel to Aliens. People were expecting more gung-ho marines vs. xenomorphs, and when the film failed to deliver, they hated it. It was an attempt to return to the pacing and tension of the original, but events conspired against it. It's not a bad film, and the Assembly Cut goes a long way to restoring much of what could, and most likely should have been. Even for all that went wrong with it, it's still worth a revaluation. After all, it could easily have been worse.

Next Time: It Gets Worse

2009-06-26T15:12:00.000+01:00

New Megaten game on the DS (Devil Survivor - you see what they did there and you liked it, yes?) is good. A far cry from the other games released so far, unless you're one of those freakish obsessives who have played every game in the series (hello!) and recall a largely forgotten/ignored sub-series called Majin Tensei. First things first, despite what you've probably heard, it is NOT like The World Ends With You: yes it's set in and around Shinjuku, yes it features a 'You must complete this task in X days or you die' mechanic, but that's about it. The battles are turn-based strategy RPG-style, there's about 6 or 7 different paths/storylines/endings with different characters on each one and, sadly, the music really isn't as good. I know, not much of a surprise considering the WEWY OST was phenominal (it could've been 30 remixes of Twister alone and I would've been happy) but even compared to the other games in the SMT series it's not that interesting. I haven't checked, but I'm pretty sure neither Shoji Meguro not Kazuma Kanneko were involved in this one. Well worth checking out though, especially since we're in for another drought on the DS front. Unless you like Let's Imagine Our Pet Baby Farm Boutique-type games, in which case... well, in which case you probably couldn't care less anyway, since you're too busy irritating everyone within earshot with the most irritating mutant baby noises imaginable. They're called headphones, invest in a fucking pair!

2009-06-26T00:48:00.000+01:00

Lunar Legend Tsukihime

12 30-minute episodes

You think you've got problems? Try being Shiki Tonho for an afternoon. for one thing, he's having to move back to the family estate after the death of his father, meeting his sister for the first time since they were kids. For another, there's a series of strange murders going on after dark in the area. And for another, he's just zoned out and awoken in a pile of a girl he doesn't recall dismembering for some reason.

Yeah, I'd say he's got you beat.

Y'see, Shiki is blessed with suck. He has what is known as the Mystic Eyes of Death Perception. Dumb name, I know, but hear me out. What this does is let him see lifelines as a physical presence. Everything has them - you, me, cats, dogs, chairs, running all over us like scribbles. By running his trusty knife along these lines, he can effectively 'kill' the object, no matter what it is. Still doesn't sound too great? Try imagining what would happen if he tried doing it to a block of steel. Or a building. Or the Earth.

As the story opens, Shiki is trying to get accustomed to his new life with his almost needlessly strict sister and their two maids. While taking some time out at a nearby park, he spaces out as a young woman passes by. When next he wakes up, he discovers he's sliced her to pieces and, unsurprisingly, freaks the fuck out. When there's no news of any dismembered women on the TV, he heads back to make sure it wasn't a dream. He's a little surprised when he not only meets the woman again, but she then proceeds to tell him, in great detail no less, exactly how he carved her up into 17 neat pieces. It turns out the woman, Arcueid Brunestud - Arc for short - is a vampire, and was on the hunt for another before Shiki sidetracked her into little pieces. As penance, she asks him to help her, since there's no way she'd be able to stand up to her quarry in her weakened state, and he is somewhat responsible for her current predicament. Feeling just a little guilty, Shiki agrees, and soon realises that absolutely no one around him is exactly what they seem.

Tsukihime is part of the larger Type-Moon universe. If the name sounds familiar, it's probably because you've encountered it in the better-known Fate/Stay Night series, or the Melty Blood fighting games. Or at the very least, the phrase "A CAT IS FINE TOO' All of these take place in the same shared universe, though, Melty Blood aside, there's very little crossover between them. Tsukihime was one of the first projects in this shared universe, and began life as a visual novel. The game, started as a simple piece of amateur work, quickly gained in popularity, becoming one of the most popular games of its kind, even compared to more professional commercial games. Japan being what it is, the game was swiftly snapped up and a manga and anime produced alongside it.

The original game is renown for two main reasons: first off, there's the plot. Like all VNs, it features a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure-style form of play, eventually branching off into one of two distinct storylines. The writing, however, is widely regarded as exceptional, with some of the best world-building and character-based moments seen in the genre. Unfortunately, it kinda goes a little downhill when you encounter the other thing the game is famous for: the sex scenes. Y'see, both Tsukihime and Fate/Stay Night feature several fully-illustrated and scripted sex scenes, and while, in fairness, they are integrated far better than in most other games (none of this 'Oh, she's unconscious, perhaps loosening her clothes will make her feel better' nonsense here) the writing is, well, painful to read. There is an option to turn these scenes off, but the game will always have a sad reputation as a hentai game, turning a lot of people off.

Thankfully/unfortunately, none of this is in the show. I say thankfully, because the sex scenes are, as I said, hard to read. I say unfortunately because much of the character of the game is somewhat absent from the show. Don't misunderstand, it's still well worth your time, just that much of the sparkle from the original source material has been lost in the transition. For one thing, the designs aren't as visually pleasing, somehow becoming a lot flatter. Sure, the original art was a little amateurish, but it had character. In ironing out the creases, they've ironed out the detail and it hurts just a little. As for the writing, that's mainly the fault of it being an adaptation. You're constantly shown tantalising glimpses of a bigger world with more depth just around the corner. Of course, being a linear show, they can't even begin to cover any of it, and with only 12 episodes, even what they do cover is fairly glossed over, vitally important clues and details being given a vague allusion to before being ignored. The pace, on the other hand, I'll cheerfully blame on the writers. After the first main story arc, the entire thing grinds to a halt. Compared to the game, which carried the momentum with its writing and dialogue, it's horribly slow, and compared to the manga, which carries it by being more action-packed, it's positively glacial.

What the series does do that's interesting, is give the proceedings a strange dream-like atmosphere. The show floats along idly, and it made me wish they'd capitalised on some of the weirder moments from the game: the words 'this chair is an eyesore' spring rapidly to mind, as does Arc 'rewarding' Shiki with a visit from one of her minions.

Watching Tsukihime, if you're at all familiar with the parent series is frustrating. Again, it's not entirely the fault of the show itself, though the bland designs certainly don't help. By itself, it's a nice primer to the universe as a whole, and in tandem with the manga, a far less daunting excursion to the series than the game alone would be. As a show itself though, its disappointing. Nothing happens for long periods of time, and it doesn't help that it keeps dropping hints at the bigger picture, making you wonder if you've just seen something significant or not. If you're looking for a basic introduction to the Type-Moon universe - something I'd highly recommend, for what it's worth - this is a decent place to start. If you're looking to watch a solid show, on the other hand, check out Fate/Stay Night or Kara No Kyoukai.

2009-06-24T22:51:00.000+01:00

After having finally had the opportunity to play Clive Barker Presents: Clive Barker's Jericho (By Clive Barker - obligatory link to the review I stole that joke from here) I have to say, it's actually not all that bad. Granted, I've always had a soft spot for Clive Barker (Cabal, the book Nightbreed was based on was a favourite of mine as a kid, and the second Hellraiser movie is one of the finest horror films around, no ifs, buts or maybes) and I could devour any kind of horror-themed game the way Cthulhu devours player characters (1d4 per round if you don't already know), so my opinion's probably kinda biased. But I'm about a third of the way through and - shock horror - having fun! Okay, so some bits are needlessly obtuse, like the astral projection/making things explode parts you're forced to do every so often. And the quicktime events happen in the middle of combat, with the markers being on the edge of the screen (rather than, say, blocking off easier paths - developers, use them to screw us out of goodies, not the last 20 minutes' hard work!), but all in all, it's really better than everyone else seems to think it is.

Kinda helps if you take the game a little less seriously than intended - not a problem when you bear some of the dreadful dialogue in mind (exactly how much input did Barker have beyond the basic storyline?). That, and one of the characters you can play as, Cole: a techy girl who can 'hack' reality? A fondness for explosive pyrotechnics? Sounds remarkably like Ty Lee? Have her boxed up and sent to my room, if you don't mind.

2009-06-24T00:53:00.000+01:00

If the worth of a film can be measured in how much it's managed to invade the public consciousness, Aliens would rank in the Top Three. If you've played virtually any game in the last 20 years, there's a better then likely chance you've encountered at least one line or allusion to the film. It's easily one of the most quotable films of all time. You all know it, you've all seen it, and if you hate it, it's probably because you liked Alien better. So, in lieu of an actual review, since there's no way I could write anything you don't already know by heart about the film, 15 random facts about the first three movies that you (probably) never knew.

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The original head for the Alien in the first film utilised a real human skull in it's creation

When Dan O'Bannon was asked why the crew don't just shoot the alien on sight, he added the acidic blood, accidentally creating one of the most infamous features of the creature's biology

The original script for Alien was... well... pretty bad. Also, kinda gay.

The lasers used in the egg chamber scene were actually on loan from The Who, who were testing them out next door

The original ending of Alien called for Ripley to die at the end, decapitated by the alien after sending her distress signal. It was vetoed as it would've been way too dark an ending

Aliens was one of the first films to be released in a Director's Cut/extended edition. This was done partly to woo Weaver back to do a third film as she was unhappy with the original cut

There was, at one point, going to be a Saturday morning cartoon based on the second film known as Operation: Aliens. It didn't get much further than toys, promotional material and an apparent opening title sequence, Why anyone thought this was a good idea is still, as yet, unknown. The toys, on the other hand, were suitably awesome

In a surprising turn of events, the 15-minute countdown at the end of Aliens does actually last a full 15 minutes

Both Lance Henriksen and Bill Paxton have the dubious honour of being killed by an Alien, a Predator and a Terminator

On a related note, Henriksen discussed the scene where he adds Hudson's hand to the knife trick scene with everyone but Hudson's actor, Bill Paxton. Much of his confusion and fear was actually real

The smooth motion of the power loaders was achieved by having a bodybuilder moving around inside the power loader shell in tandem with Weaver

The iconic pulse rifles are based around a Thomson machine gun - better known as a tommy gun - and a SPAS12 shotgun

Michael Biehn (Hicks) was so upset at the plot of the third movie, he refused to allow the producers to use his likeness for two scenes. Eventually, they paid him for the use of his image in one scene. He payout was allegedly more than he received for his stint in Aliens

Originally, when the 'Bambi' alien crawls out for the first time, they used a whippet covered in foam 'alien bits' to try and simulate a more organic alien/dog hybrid. It worked about as well as you can imagine

David Fincher was so angry with the interference he received during the filming of Alien 3, when Fox offered to let him recut the movie however he wished with absolutely no executive meddling for the Alien Quadrilogy DVD boxset, he outright refused. He was the only person asked to take part in the set who refused to do so

Next Time: The One Everyone Hates

2009-06-23T23:22:00.000+01:00

I call it Rule#72:

Anything set to Don't Stop Me Now automatically becomes 346% awesomer. And, in certain cases, 72% funnier, and 112% wronger.

2009-06-23T00:48:00.000+01:00

It is the year 1979. Star Wars is already well on the way to becoming an unstoppable cultural juggernaut. Buck Rogers is having shiny spacesuited adventures in the discos of the 25th century. Star Trek is slowly but surely making a comeback, reminding us all that peace, tolerance and Orion Love Slaves are the keys to making the galaxy just that little bit better. Space and the future is, in every way, a bright and happy place to be.

Alien changed all that.

We all know the story by now. In an unspecified future, a crew of glorified space truckers on the return trip to earth are awoken from suspension by a signal coming from a nearby planet. Investigating, they encounter a colossal derelict spaceship of unknown origin that seems to have been there forever. As they enter the ship, one of the crew disturbs an egg pod and winds up with an alien parasite attached to his face.

Hilarity does not ensue.

It's interesting to note that, before Alien, there weren't many horror movies set in space. Sure there were plenty of films in the 50s that used aliens as their star monsters, but very few that were actually set out in the black, and even fewer that stand up today as solid films in their own right. But 30 years on, Alien is still as effective in its shocks as it ever was. The duct hunt is tense, the scene with Harry Dean Stanton searching for the cat is played wonderfully, set to the sound of falling water and chains, and the famous chestburster scene still retains its impact, even after a million billion parodies of the scene.

The future in this universe is a worn down one. While the Millennium Falcon had a warm, almost friendly decrepitude to it, there's no way you could describe the Nostromo as 'homely'. With its cold interiors and identical corridors, it's almost a forerunner to the cyberpunk movement that would come in the following years. The Nostromo is a corporate vessel through and through, and it's a nice touch that it almost subliminally reinforces the idea that no matter what, this is an unfriendly place to be.

And, of course, how could we forget the real star: over six feet of relentless death and merciless instinct. I am, of course, talking about ~~Sigourney Weaver~~ the Alien itself. Ascribe all the rape and Freudian metaphors you want, the alien is one of the most terrifying creatures ever to stalk the screen. The director, Ridley Scott, wisely chose not to show the full alien at any point, always hiding it in shadow or closeup, and it becomes all the more terrifying for it. Even with more recent films seemingly doing their damnedest to destroy the mystique of the beast, the original maintains an inhuman menace few other movie monsters have ever managed to achieve. H.R. Geiger has been repeatedly screwed over by Hollywood in the decades since, which is a shame, since the potential to see more monsters and landscapes based on his art would've been like mainlining pure nightmare fuel.

The Director's Cut doesn't add or alter as much, compared to the DCs of the other movies in the series. There's a few extended scenes, a couple added, but more interesting is that some scenes have actually been trimmed or outright deleted. Granted, most of these are just people walking around, staring intently at things, that kind of nonsense. It's a shame that the DC doesn't add as much as I'd like, but maybe it's a testament of sorts to the movie that it doesn't really need it. Everything's already there to begin with, padding it out any further is superfluous.

Alien is a classic, not just of the genre, but full stop. While the series would eventually take a slightly different turn into outright action over the years, the slow-burning tension is, without a doubt, the perfect introduction to the series, and as it stands alone, one of the best horror/thrillers ever made.

Next Time: That One Film Everyone Knows

2009-06-22T12:56:00.000+01:00

Simon Clark - Blood Crazy

397 pages

I've always had a fascination for the end of the world. Don't get me wrong, I don't want to see the world destroyed - it's where I keep all my stuff - but the images, the iconography, all of it captivates me in a way nothing else does. I first read Blood Crazy at exactly the right time. The hero, Nick Aten ("Rhymes with Satan" as he likes to inform us) is 17, the exact same age I was at the time. He awakens one Sunday morning to find that the whole world has gone mad. Well, half of it at least: the adult half. Overnight, the adult population has somehow managed to convince itself that everyone 18 and under needs to die, painfully if at all possible. Nick swiftly finds himself in a community that, at its heart, has good intentions, but when things start to go wrong, they go wrong badly, and he finds himself having to cross the country to try and save everyone there from the oncoming horde of adults, and each other.

When I first read Blood Crazy, it was the best book in the world ever. I wouldn't credit it with kickstarting my interest in armageddon (which would be the best publishing blurb ever if it were true) but it was, most likely, one of the first. The problem is, my horizons have expanded since then. I've seen and read and even played more and more, raising the bar appropriately, and going back to revisit the book feels like just that - a step backwards. Right at the beginning, we find out that the book is being written by the main character, who promises right there and then that there will be no flowery language or purple prose. Then mentions casually how it's snowing like someone's torn a hole in the sky. Hmm. The book falls into the usual trap of Teenagers-Don't-Talk-Like-Thatism, but that's nothing unusual. The dialogue that never quite gels and prose that hits the wrong side of purple, on the other hand, could've been done a hell of a lot better.

The single worst fault in the book, however, is the exposition/explanation moment. Throughout the book, everyone has their own theories on why all the adults went mad, from EM radiation, to a biological attack from an enemy state to aliens to God smiting the wicked. In fairness, no theory is ever truly discounted as being completely lunatic, and some of the wilder ones are actually given a degree of credence, leaving you to come to your own conclusions. Then, towards the end, we're given something like a 50-60 page infodump that, despite an lack of actual, 100% honest-to-God explanations as to what happened, immediately becomes the most authoritative conclusion on how it all happened. Nothing wrong with that, though I preferred the idea of leaving it all up to you to decide the truth, it's how it's presented. For one thing, it takes too damn long to actually play out, for another, it's literally two people sitting in a room talking to each other over the course of a couple of days. Not the most thrilling of setups, by any standards. As for the big revelation itself? Go crack open a couple of books giving you in introduction to Carl Jung. That's pretty much got you covered. 'Underwhelming' is not the word, though considering what happens after 'deus ex machina' certainly applies.

Don't get me wrong, there's some excellent moments and scenes in the book - the causeway made of people, the attack on the convoy, motorway full of the crucified - but the book is damned by nostalgia. Revisiting it, I'm sad to say it's really not as good as I remembered - not a bad book, not by any stretch, just that, in the years since, I've read and seen so much better, a revisit would never have stood a chance.

2009-06-18T01:16:00.000+01:00

No, I don't know why I thought this was a good idea either

2009-06-17T23:48:00.000+01:00

PC*

13 hours 32 minutes

It was the marines who'd started it. In their zeal to cleanse the city of infection, they didn't care who they opened fire on. Here, on the outskirts of the infected zone, most of the people fleeing were still healthy, not that that mattered to the military. So they were surprised when someone not only fought back, but did so by throwing at wrecked taxi at them. Before they could get their bearings, I charged up the side of a nearby building, got to about 50 feet up, then gracefully backflipped off the side. I aimed right for the chest of the one in the middle, hit him squarely, killing him and causing me to slide back on his corpse a good 20 feet. Before the other two could react, I picked up a nearby garbage can, forced all my strength into my arms, bulking them up considerably, and hurled it with the force of a tank shell. The effect was, to say the least, explosive. The third I picked up by the throat, threw him up into the air and dropkicked him into the side of the nearby gym. He exploded on impact. The whole thing was over in less than five seconds. Not bad for a guy who woke up on a slab with only a name - Mercer, Alex J - and nothing else less than a week ago.

Allow me to describe the plot of Prototype in one sentence: Alex Mercer Saves The World From An Alex Mercer Fuckup. Our 'hero' Alex Mercer, wakes up in the mortuary with three main problems: first off, he should be dead. Very dead. Second, he has no memory. Third, he quickly discovers he's capable of running at high speed, far faster than any human should be able to run, can lift cars with no effort at all, able to run horizontally up the sides of buildings and, oh yeah, can devour and absorb people wholesale, gaining access to their memories. Escaping from the labs of the Gentek corporation, Mercer starts off on a relatively simple quest to recover his memory.

Anyone wanna guess how long it takes to go south? I'll give you a hint: it happens within the first 5 missions of the game.

We start off with the mandatory tutorial mission, because no one who buys games these days is capable of reading manuals, apparently. But wait: what's this? We're starting out on day 18? The sky's blood red? The army's fully mobilised on the streets and firing at anything and everything that moves, and there's tanks and genetic atrocities and awesome music and oh dear lord, did my arm just transform into a giant fucking scythe blade? No, wait, back the fun bus up a sec - did I just elbow drop a fucking TANK?! If you're not saying 'holy shit, did I just do that?! That was fucking awesome!' every 30 seconds, you're playing it wrong. Radical know exactly what the strengths of this game are, and they show you exactly what's waiting for you later the second you start up the game for the first time: complete fucking anarchy. It spells the game's intent right from the off: this ain't your daddy's free-roaming sandbox game. This isn't even an action game with fancy moves. This is how the end of the world looks at ground zero, and you're the one thing standing between it and the rest of humanity. This is Armageddon in hi-def and you've got frontline tickets. And, as an opening gambit, dear Christ it works. The tutorial (you almost forget it's a tutorial stage, you're having that much fun) only lasts about ten or 15 minutes tops, but for sheer impact, it beats the hell out of any game I've ever played.

How do they follow that up? By dialling it back down to Day One and showing how things get so bad over the next two and a half weeks. It's a complete mood whiplash, but by that point, you either hate it or you're hooked with a pathological need to find out how you get from a quiet and ordered New York to open warfare on the streets of Times Square.

I had invented a new game. I called it 'Climb A Bigger Building'. See, what you do, is you pick a building. Any building will do. And you run up the side of it. Then you look around and find a bigger building. Then you glide over to that one from the top of this one, and run to the top of that. Then you look around, find a bigger building and repeat the process. If you ever find yourself with superpowers, you should give it a try. This time, I was standing on top of the lightning rod at the top of the Empire State Building, looking around. I could see for miles in every direction. I was taking in the sights when I remembered the SUV I was carrying over my head. You tend to forget about these things after a while, y'know? I looked about and saw a tank driving past a street or two away. That gave me an idea. I hurled the SUV as hard as I could, then jumped after it, following the trajectory I'd thrown it in.

The SUV bounced off the heavy armour of the tank. Me, less so.

As the tank exploded behind me, I sprinted down the street, easily outpacing even the fastest cars around me as rockets and gunfire exploded at my heels. I vaulted over a couple of buildings, ducked into an ally, shifted my appearance to that of the Blackwatch soldier I'd consumed earlier and walked out, no one any the wiser.

Sometimes, random destruction was almost fun.

Manhattan Island is your playpen, and you are free to enjoy it however you wish. Want to spend your time taking in the sights, collecting the 250 TACOs (totally arbitrary collectible objects)? Have at it. Want to see how far you can fly or run? There's the financial district over there, pick a building and jump from the rooftops. Want to wreak a bloody trail of havoc from Harlam to Central Park? Grab a taxi, grab a pedestrian and combine the two til one or the other explodes. Want to hijack a tank, take out every military base and viral hive on the map and make a daring escape in an attack helicopter, all while disguising yourself as Aunt Martha from Delaware? Try to keep the maniacal laughter to a minimum, people are starting to stare. You can't enter buildings, unfortunately, so introducing the interior of the Met to the remains of a thermobaric tank isn't an option, alas, but pretty much every other famous landmark in the city short of Lady Liberty herself is yours to see, climb, jump off and shoot at. Navigating it is simplicity itself once you get a grip of the controls, which is easily done within a few missions. Tearing through Soho on foot gives a feeling of speed greater than anything the GTA series has been able to accomplish in a car. Bombing down a road, jumping from car to car, like any number of action movie heroes gave me a feeling of sheer joy I hadn't seen in ages. It's a simple thing, to entertain those superhero fantasies of rooftop running and the like. To see someone take those fantasies and present them to you and say 'go wild' is another thing entirely.

The beast in front of me was called a Hunter. One of Elizabeth Greene's deadliest, twelve feet of muscle and murderous intent. It let out a roar to shake the skull. Even the Infected were backing off from this one, and I'd seen them charge heavily armed marines bodily. I sized up my options. Running wouldn't do me much good, these things were as agile as I was. I could pop my claws, but those were better suited to fast flurries of damage. My whip arm was good at a distance or with crowds, but here it would be next to useless. Right now, that left me with one option. I forced the biomass that made up my body into my arms, bulking them up considerably as I smiled grimly. Time to go toe-to-toe with the son of a bitch.

At the heart of the game is combat, and Prototype is no slouch in this department. Over the course of the game, you'll unlock over a hundred forms, skills, moves and abilities, from extra health, to faster running speed, to increased jump height, to dozens of combat moves. You do this with experience - Evolution Points in this game - earned from killing enemies, completing missions or beating bonus challenges. New upgrades are made available periodically, usually at the end of every block of stages, usually with a fairly hefty pricetag attached. You don't have to go grinding EP for them, since end-of-mission bonuses are pretty generous, but considering how creative some of them are - one word: Bodysurfing - you'll find yourself wanting to just to see how you can mutilate your enemies this time. Combat, like the rest of the game, is frantic and fast-paced, and you'll often find yourself running like a lunatic just to catch your breath and acquire a health refill from any nearby enemies, consuming being an instant kill for all humanoid foes, and also boosting your lifebar. Boss fights are similarly hectic, despite everyone on the internet seeming to think that the rules have changed just because it's a boss. Of the three fights, the second, an encounter with a colossal monstrosity known as 'Mother' stands out - rather than being in an enclosed area, all of Times Square is your battleground, and you'll need every last inch of the surrounding area to survive. The only thing really missing is that she's sadly stationary. The sight of a beast like that chasing you around the cityscape is something that has to be in the inevitable Prototype 2.

And finally, we come to the story. The tale, as its presented, is admittedly flimsy, little more than a compass that points you in the direction of your next victim. The real meat lies in the Web of Intrigue, 131 targets you have to track down and consume to gain their memories, and the heart of the story. It's weird that the game should be upfront about everything else, but make you work for the detail. The story missions themselves are surprisingly varied, and even those missions we all hate are made awesome within the context of the game: enforced stealth missions? Sneak into an army base, eat everyone, you won't blow your cover unless you actively attack anyone, no matter what you do (and that includes running vertically up walls). Escort missions? We do it with tanks around here, motherfucker! Protect missions? Armour up like the Guyver, pop your sword arm and watch the organs fly! If there was an underwater stage, you can bet they'd even find a way to make that a thing of wonder.

Prototype is, without a doubt, the most fun I've had with a game since Devil May Cry. I swear the thing was catered specifically to my tastes. There's very little in the game I'd change - perhaps a little mercy invincibility while the military rectally violating your lifebar with missiles would be nice - but lots I'd add. The feeling of the army and the Infected escalating to deal with the growing threat represented by yourself is good, but it doesn't go far enough. The most powerful units in the game, the thermobaric tanks are only seen a handful of times, and on one of those occasions, you're piloting one! More variation would be a welcome sight. A reason to care about the general non-infected populace would be good to see as well. I'm not saying we have to implement a badly-designed morality system, just give us more to do with them beyond eating them, slicing them or picking them up and hucking them at things. Make them more than health packs on legs. And maybe a branching storyline, one path helping the military, the other spreading the infection, with different storylines and upgrades available on each (oh dear, I've accidentally described inFamous, whoops!). Other than that, give us more of everything and I'll happily see you next year for Prototype 2.

There's monsters in Central Park. Something evil and obscene lurking under the streets of Times Square. The skies have turned a sickening orange, the colour of oblivion. The screams of the dying mix with the cries of the carrion birds, the only real victors of the viral outbreak. These are the end times. And I'm the only one who can keep things from getting worse. I know the men responsible for this. They'd better hope whatever they have between them and me is enough, because I'm just getting started.

*Staticnote: since the release of this game, Activision have announced that they will not be supporting the PC version of the game. A bad move considering that, for a lot of people, the game has a lot of flaws and bugs, chief amongst those being a lack of proper graphical options; the game failing to register any attached pads or controllers at startup, including official 360 pads; and a game-breaking issue with the sound, which not only ruins all cutscenes and voices, but also cripples the performance of the game, rendering it all but unplayable. By contrast, the PS3 version had a minor problem with optional installs that was identified and patched within 3 days. The lack of effort shown by Activision has been, in a word, atrocious, with all of the fixes being discovered by the community at the technical support forums, rather than any official channels. While there are hacks and workarounds for most of these, I cannot, in good faith or judgement, recommend the PC version of this game to anyone. The game itself is wonderful, easily the single best game I've played this year, but for the love of God, please, don't bother with the PC port.

2009-06-14T01:20:00.000+01:00

My thoughts on the fact that the PC version has a horrible bug that completely wrecks the sound and gameplay:

And my thoughts on the media res intro stage:

If the game has even a tenth of the atmosphere shown in that intro (you can't tell from the 10 or so seconds of gameplay at the end, but trust me, it's fucking awesome) when we finally get around to it, I'll be happy as all hell. I've been waiting for a game with an atmosphere like this since I played Abomination: The Nemesis Project (obscure realtime XCOM-lite game on the PC - shallow, but fun as hell, and with a similar vibe to it).

tl;dr This game, it was made for me drr... drr...

Now, if only they could get rid of those glitches that've been plaguing everyone...

Describing the intro of Super Robot Wars: Endless Frontier to the unwitting

2009-06-09T20:13:00.000+01:00

So there's a cowboy, with, what can only be described as a Swiss-Army FAMAS. And his partner is a kung-fu android with a split personality. And while exploring the ruins of a crashed spaceship, they encounter the scantily-clad princess of a land that's pretty much the living stereotype of feudal Japan, with cherry blossom and ninja and torii gates everywhere. The princess is completely oblivious to any and all jokes about her gigantic breasts. And somehow, it's all a sort-of sequel to Namco X Capcom. And a little bit for Xenosaga as well. And don't even get me started on how it ties in to the SRW games or we'll be here all night. This is all within the first two or so hours btw, it somehow manages to get weirder later on.

Did I mention that, for a 2D game, it somehow manages to have jiggle physics? Kinda impressive if you think about it.

2009-05-31T23:59:00.000+01:00

House of 1000 Corpses

89 minutes

The late 1990s was a weird time for movie fans in the UK. For a long time, movies like Driller Killer, The Exorcist and, most famously of all, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, had been denied a release by the British Board of Film Certification. While that doesn't technically count as a ban, no cinema would normally take a film without and no shop would stock it, all but killing it until it falls in line with their standards. As a result, most of these films received a mystique to them. These were sights so horrifying, so disturbing, that to see them was to invite madness. A modern day Necronomicon. Those who saw them would inevitably watch them on 35th generation VHS copies, the picture quality so degraded, you were never entirely sure of what you'd seen, thus preserving the legend for another telling.

Then they finally released it for all to see on pristine DVD. And all decided it was actually a bit shit.

The legend, like all legends, failed to meet the reality. It was a decent enough movie, sure, but the stories, man, the stories! They had us expecting brutality on a level we'd never experienced before! Violence to sicken even the most hardened of hearts! The shitty quality of VHS had actually managed to enhance the atmosphere of the film, making you see more than was actually there.

House of 1000 Corpses faced a similar fate. The film was denied a release by the studio this time, on the grounds that there was no way they could release it without hefty cuts. Rob Zombie, writer, director and pretty much everything else in between, was an avid fan of the horror genre, as anyone who's ever listened to his music or watched his videos could testify to. The man knew his shit, and if he said that this was a violent, brutal movie, well, it was pretty safe to say that this was indeed so.

The film starts off relatively 'safe': four college students, travelling around researching a book on weird roadside attractions hear of a local legend: the story of Doctor Satan. They commit a breach of one of the cardinal rules of horror movie safety when they stop to pick up a hitchhiker at the side of the road, an oddly unhinged girl by the name of Baby. The car suffers a blowout, and the group is forced to take refuge for the night, blah blah blah. We all know how this goes, we've all seen it before, right?

Well, not really, no. Sure, you've seen the basic premise a million times or more by now, it's one of the classic horror movie setups. But somehow, Rob's managed to make it even bleaker than usual. The Firefly clan, primary villains of the piece, are closer to the Manson Family than Leatherface's brood, the spliced-in footage of them ranting and raving to the camera only further emphasising the idea. The tortures inflicted on the clueless corpses-to-be are impressively inventive - the 'Behold: Fishboy' scene straddling the line between funny and freaky perfectly. The movie's the posterchild for the trope It Got Worse.

The cinematography and soundtrack are especially worthy of praise. The opening titles and many intercut scenes were shot in his basement with grainy handheld cameras, setting the tone nicely, and the obligatory chase scene towards the end has some simply stunning shots. The background music, as you'd expect, is of a high calibre, Zombie himself having composed the majority of it for the film. Some of it saw release on the album The Sinister Urge, released during the three year period when it looked like the film would never see release, and divorced from the visuals, didn't carry that much impact. Once you get to see the two combined, it fares that much better. The man also loves his soundtrack dissonance, with songs like I Wanna Be Loved By You underscoring some of the outright weirder moments. When the two combine, it adds an odd beauty to the sights - the scene where Otis holds a gun to a sherrif's head for about a minute while the camera pans out is hypnotising in its simplicity.

While Zombie couldn't go quite as far as he wanted, he does it better than most. Not long after the release of House of 1000 Corpses, a new genre of movie, the Torture Porn genre, sprang up, focussing more on the violence and blood than the execution. All of the gore, with none of the style, brutality without brilliance. It's something Rob managed to avoid with this film, making it worth any number of Saw sequels. Off the back of this and the sequel, The Devil's Rejects, he was given the opportunity to work on the renewed Halloween series of movies. Frankly, I couldn't think of anyone finer.

2009-05-31T10:41:00.000+01:00

Al Ewing - Pax Britannia: El Sombra

291 pages

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, children of all ages, I can sell you this book on the strength of two words and two words alone. Two words that will make anything and everything you're currently reading seem like mind-numbingly boring trash. Two words that, in my utterly humble opinion, should be in every book known to man.

Steampunk Zorro

What's that you say? Not enough for you? Really? Okay then, time to break out the big guns - three more words that, quite frankly, can't fail to make anything awesome, and when added to something that's already that goddamn awesome, threaten to collapse the book into a singularity of condensed magnificence:

Fights Nazi Robots

If none of that moves you, then I'm sorry, I'm pretty sure there's no hope left for you. I'm afraid the diagnosis is terminal wasting of the awesome gland, you have no chance to escape, make your time.

El Sombra is set in an alternate reality where Britain came out of the Second World War stronger than ever. This is a world where Britain is a land of dirigibles, steam-powered robots in every house. This is a world where They Saved Hitler's Brain, and put it in the body of a three-story-high brass and copper monstrosity, a steam-powered behemoth with a voice made of broken glass and nightmares. Of course, most of this is only vaguely alluded to (with the exception of the Hitlerbot 9000), as the book takes place in the Mexican town of Pasito. The Reich, weakened, but still very much alive, invades the sleepy town on the eve of a wedding. Most of the wedding party is massacred, the Nazis setting up shop in the town for some unknown, yet nefarious purpose. Only one man manages to escape, running off into the desert, driven insane by the carnage. Nine years later, and the subjugation of the town is almost complete, the townspeople firmly under the thumb of Generaloberst Eisenberg and his son Alexis. A critical mission is nearing completion. Just the perfect time for a masked man with the remarkable ability to ruin everyone's plans to walk out of the desert...

Let's be honest. When it comes to bad guys, it's hard to top the Nazis. They're probably the last major force in the world that you can point to and say 'yeah, those guys are dicks' without any unfortunate implications. And they're so easy to write when it comes to horror and steampunk. When you consider the desperately batshit plans they considered and very nearly initiated on more than one occasion, it doesn't require too much of a suspension of disbelief to consider them rolling out gigantic transforming coal-powered tanks, or signing infernal pacts with the underworld for just a little extra power - science and mysticism were two of the main pillars of their organisation, after all. So we have literal airmen of the Luftwaffe, taking to the skies on wingpacks made of the wonder metal cavorite, gigantic sandcrawlers winding their way across the desert bringing supplies and troops, and the pre-requisite steam-powered automaton, a huge combat robot with a blazing furnace at its heart, which it always has to keep stoked (wood, paper, people, it's not entirely fussy).

The Nazis themselves are an interesting bunch. Cannon fodder are, as to be expected, dropped with the regularity you'd expect. Except the writer has taken it upon himself to give almost each and every one their own little story. And these aren't a couple of lines talking about how their last thoughts were of their mother, or how they never saw it coming, oh no, it's a couple of paragraphs, easy, sometimes a page or two, detailing their life story, their career in the Ultimate Reich. Two soldiers early on, we're told, share a dreadful secret, something so very despicable. Yet the story makes it a point never to tell us what the secret was, despite making a point of mentioning that, in their dying moments, they so desperately wanted to tell someone, anyone, their dark tale, thus utterly negating the whole point. It's interesting, but it doesn't exactly do much to humanise El Sombra's enemies, since the majority of them are painted as being a sadistic bunch of cutthroats and bastards to a man. It does add a nice aspect to the story (even if we're shown almost nothing about the civilians by comparison), but considering how little we're actually told about this world - for the bigger picture, you have to read the other books in the series: bad form considering this was one of the first books released in this line - I couldn't help but think it's prose that would've been better spent world-building. Hell, I didn't even know it was set in more modern times til a throwaway line about 3/4 of the way through about Andy Warhol!

Then we come to the man himself, El Sombra, a hero right out of a pulp novel from the 1950s. Barefoot and bare-chested, dressed in only a pair of ragged trousers and a bloodstained sash for a mask, armed with only a sword, his wits, an uncanny aim and a lunatic laugh as he runs headlong into danger. The man pulls off stunts that in any other book would have me frowning in disbelief. Yet in this one, it's only fitting that he should be so insanely over the top. As mentioned earlier, he's plainly modelled after Zorro, and as such, it's only right that he should be able to kill a dozen men armed with only a handful of stones. Some things just need to be so. The author seems to have something of a fetish for blisters, however, as we're constantly told about him accruing them on his hands and feet. Unsurprising when you consider he walks around virtually (and literally at one point) naked, but it seems to happen every time he goes anywhere anything the wrong side of 'warm'. Yes, Mr. Ewing, we know, hot things burn, can you stop reminding us of this now please?

El Sombra, despite the lack of broad detail, is still a fantastic book, a modern-day slice of pulp with a devil-may-care hero. There's some great moments and references - Nick Fuhrer, Agent of S.T.U.R.M. being a particular favourite - many delivered with a knowing wink in the audience's direction. The book ends with the promise of a follow-up: El Sombra Punches Mecha-Hitler In The Face. I pray it never arrives, because if this book is any indication, the world may not survive the fallout of a punch so almighty, it'd make Captain Falcon look like the tired meme he really is.

2009-05-28T13:22:00.000+01:00

Ever wondered what would happen if you combined Deadpool and Dante?

Sheer, fucking, magnificance, that's what.

(and on a side note, if Marvel Vs. Capcom 3 ever gets released, my team's consisting of Deadpool, Dante and Viewtiful Joe. They shall be called Team ~~Seaslug~~ Maximum Ludicrous Awesome Spectacular - pronounced with the pre-requisite Mexican accent. And none shall stand before their might)

Liking the Juggernaut design as well. Looks more like a tank turret had sex with a set of American Football armour, and surprisingly, it works. Juggernaut's design always bothered me for some reason, but this one I actually like. Kudos, guys.

2009-05-23T01:17:00.000+01:00

Metroid Fusion

GBA

4 hours 29 minutes

I remember playing Super Metroid on the SNES one summer when I was about 13. I'd play it til stupid hours of the morning, determined to explore every last corner of the map. A sort of penance/revenge for getting utterly stuck about two hours in on the Gameboy version, Metroid II. I have vivid memories of exploring the Crashed Spaceship level, shooting everything with the Ice Beam. I was so out of my tree on lack of sleep, I was convinced the weird noises the enemies were making were telling me how the ship crashed in the first place. Of course, that only made things worse, since it only compelled me to stay awake that much longer. For some reason, I don't quite recall how that night ended. Probably for the best.

A lack of games for my machine resulted in me playing the few games I owned endlessly. People still don't believe me when I tell them I was able to run through Super Ghouls and Ghosts (a legendarily hard game on a par with the infamous Battletoads) perfectly, playing through the game twice in a row to get the best ending, losing only a handful of lives from one end to the other. At the time, the record for running through Super Metroid (without sequence-breaking, glitching or performing any other acts of skulduggery) was somewhere in the region of about 2:29. My best time was about 2:34. The fact that I was about five minutes off the world record was enough for me. While time has dulled my skills with these games (witness me derping into each and every enemy whenever I try and play SG&G), when you consider my experience with Super Metroid (and all the recent 2D Castlevania games which 'borrow' almost every play mechanic from the series wholesale) it's pretty fair to assume when it comes to these style of games, I know my shit.

So tell me then: why did I find Metroid Fusion so unbelievably goddamn hard?

Fusion follows on almost directly from the climax of Super Metroid. Samus Aran, poster girl for both armour and latex fetishists everywhere, has finally eradicated the Metroid menace once and for all... only to discover that they were keeping something even worse in check the whole time. A new type of parasite, dubbed the X is discovered, which can absorb and mimic whatever it comes into contact with. The parasite immediately makes a beeline for our bounty hunting heroine and gets to work on her. Barely making it back to home base, in a moment of oh-so hilarious irony, she's given a vaccine made of Metroid DNA, along with a new suit of armour. This comes with several advantages and disadvantages: first off, she can now absorb the X, much like Metroids could. Unfortunately, it also means that, like the Metroid, she's especially vulnerable to cold. Not much of a problem as long as no remnants of the X parasite remain in her old armour, ready to reanimate it and have it chase after he with that nifty Ice Beam of hers.

...oh dear.

Give the designers credit where it's due, it's a good way to explain why Samus starts off the game armed with nothing but a popgun and a stylish suit of armour. It's always somewhat funny to play a sequel to a game where you ended a borderline demigod, only to start the next game as vulnerable and weak as you were at the start of the last one. At least they justified it here. Anyway, you're dropped off on a research space station which has been infected with X. There's lots of rare and exotic (read: dangerous) lifeforms up here, which The Federation, Samus' employers, would like to see kept safe. Doesn't take a genius to work out how this goes south rapidly.

The major complaint you'll hear about Fusion is its linearity. Super Metroid had a sprawling map that rewarded exploration with power-ups and new weapons. With Fusion, you're directed to your next goal via Navgation Rooms, computers that explicitly tell you where to go next. They're not optional either, helpful little terminals you can visit whenever you're stuck that give you a vague pointer on what to do now, oh no. They all mandatory and tell you exactly where to go next. Of course, there's always something in the way that prevents it being a straight A-B trip, but for a series based on exploration, this constant hand-holding seems completely contrary to the spirit of the series.

Musically, the game doesn't do anything really spectacular. With the other games in the series, there was always at least one or two pieces of music you'd have stuck in your head. Thinking about it, there's only one song that really stands out, and it's a pretty puny rendition of the classic Ridley boss theme (because it's not a Metroid game til Ridley shows up). The few pieces I do try and recall inevitably segue into tracks from Super Metroid. Graphically, things are better. Samus moves with a practised fluidity, the areas are nice and vivid and the enemies are nicely designed, if often awkwardly placed. Several classic enemies show up, with Space Pirates inexplicably making an appearance before the end. Much like with Ridley, I guess it's not a real Metroid game til these dicks show up, getting in the way of your carefully-timed acrobatics. Of all the bosses, the one that stands out most is Nightmare, not just because it's one of only two bosses actually named in the entire game. Nightmare is described as a bio-mechanical monstrosity capable of warping gravity. In practice, it looks like a TV with bad posture. In order to beat it, you have to shoot the glowing ball on it's underside. Yeah. He stands out for two reasons: first off, he's fucking hard. Not in a 'Hell yeah, I could do with a challenge' kinda way, but in a 'why the hell are you flying around like a lunatic with no real pattern DID YOU JUST DO THAT MUCH DAMAGE WITH A SINGLE HIT?! WHAT THE FUCK?!!' kinda way. Second, when you do enough damage to him, his face melts. No, really. It's surprisingly grotesque for a game that, well, isn't.

This is the main problem with the game though: enemies hit way harder than they should. In In past games, each new full suit would give you extra abilities, like being able to move freely in water, as well as well as significant damage reduction. In Fusion, it doesn't seem to matter how much damage reduction you have, the enemies will still cheerfully cut huge chunks off your life bar. Even with the damage reduction, it's like the difference between taking 60 damage per hit and 56 per hit. One boss will happily rape you for two whole tanks of life with a certain attack, which it uses every opportunity it gets. The balance of the earlier games seems lost, the areas between boss fights becoming a war of attrition. Not what I'd qualify as fun.

Then we get to the single hardest section in the entire game. You encounter Samus' old suit several times during the game. Since its infection by the X, it's known as the SA-X, and if you ever see it, you start running. No ifs, buts or maybes, you make a run for the exits ASAP. It only shows up on a handful of occasions, and most of the time, you just need to wait somewhere for it to do its thing and leave. One of the final times you face it, it starts chasing you. You can stop it in its tracks with Freeze Missiles, which do exactly what you'd expect, but that holds it in place for about two or three seconds tops. Whenever the SA-X hits you - and it will hit you - it does a ton of damage. And its rate of fire is surprisingly high. AND IT'S CHASING YOU. Hope you like repeating sections, because this one's going to take a while. Oh, and the save point was a ways back yonder. Have fun!

By the time you get to the final two bosses, you're expecting a monumental encounter, a battle of hair-tearingly sadistic difficulty. Only they aren't. The final obligatory fight against the SA-X is pretty simple, and in the actual last battle, your biggest foe will be time, the mandatory self-destruct timer ticking down in the background. The final boss' most deadly attack? A claw swipe that stuns you for a couple of seconds. That's it. They've tried to replicate the Mother Boss fight of the last game, but it just doesn't work. There's no build-up, no sense of grandeur or finality, just 'I shoot u now ur ded'.

I wanted to like Fusion - I must have on some level, I played it from start to finish. But this is a series you expect more from: merely 'good' isn't good enough. It's frustratingly hard in places and the hidden paths are often a little too well hidden. More than once you'll curse the God of Fake Walls. It's good for what it is, but a complete let-down when you think of what it could have been. At least it's not Metroid Prime: Hunters, my official point of Ruined Forever.

2009-05-16T00:38:00.000+01:00

Zeno Clash

PC

When I was a kid, I was fascinated by Heavy Metal - the comic, not the music. That would come later. I was raised on comics like the Beano and the Dandy - good, solid British fare, filled with jokes and funny stories. I don't know how or where I first encountered Heavy Metal - there were no cool uncles or older siblings taking me to one side and saying 'yeah, those comics are fun, but this stuff will put hairs on your chest' - but somehow I did. Heavy Metal was a world away from the adventures of Dennis the Menace, Sid's Snake and Minnie the Minx. The stories, almost entirely artsy European comics, featured within were violent, twisted. There was a weird sense of the taboo within the pages, a feeling that I've never really gotten with anything else since, and as a child, I liked it.

Probably explains a lot, huh?

The reason for this anecdote, as I'm sure you're all wondering, is that Zeno Clash, current Indie Game darling of the week, is, in every essence, a tale out of Heavy Metal made manifest. The atmosphere, the visuals, the overwhelming sense of the bizarre, all of it could be taken, cut up into panels, put in the magazine and nobody would blink.

I'm going to impose a challenge on myself for the rest of this review: I'm going to try and write as much as I can without resorting to the words 'strange', 'bizarre', 'weird' or 'odd' because frankly, that would make things way too easy and boring to read, when you consider the fact that those words apply to 100% of everything ever in this game. So, to business: you are Ghat. Ghat is a member of Father-Mother's family. Father-Mother is a hermaphroditic bird-like creature, parent of what seems like almost everyone in the town of Halstedom. As the game opens, Ghat has apparently tried to assassinate Father-Mother for some unknown reason, something the rest of his/her children don't take too kindly to. On his escape from the town, he is joined by his sister, Daedra, who becomes his companion for the length of the game. The pair of them try to find a new home, while being beset on all sides by bounty hunters, Corwids, statues and the persistent forces of Father-Mother's brood. You follow all that? Yes? Good, because that's as simple as it gets. The rest is sheer madness.

The game itself is a self-admitted throwback to the fighting games of yore - names like Double Dragon have been invoked in interviews by ACE Team, the Chilean developers. Combat is simple: hold down the left mouse button for a three-hit combo, press the right for a stronger right cross, hold the spacebar to block. There's more depth if you want it, with counters and deflections available, but those few moves will serve you the vast majority of the game. Gunplay is similarly stripped down, with four different types of projectile weapon at hand. There's dual-wielded pistols, a rifle, a two-shot crossbow and a grenade launcher available, all with infinite ammo. Keeping hold of them is the tricky part, as anything stronger than a stiff breeze will inevitably knock them out your grasp. Thankfully, the same is true of your enemies, who won't hesitate to use them against you at a moment's notice.

The real treat is with the game's design. Zeno Clash has been praised from every direction on its artistic sense, and it's easy to see why: the game is, to be perfectly honest, beautiful. Halstedom is carved out of coral walls inlaid with coloured glass and skulls; the End of the World is a dark and foreboding place filled with statues of living metal; the sewers are... well, the sewers are pitch black and filled with water, but it's the first sewer level I've ever encountered that doesn't make me want to slaughter the dev team, so it deserves mention. The characters are even better. Daedra's face has a quality about it I found myself staring at without realising whenever she walked over to me. Same with the non-human characters as well, but in a different way. The pig-like creatures are made to look like they've been made out of plasticine, the Corwids, mask-wearing lunatics that do whatever they do because that's what they do, have a tribal feel to them, dirt and muck covering every inch of them from headgear to toe. The statue people look like they're made of melted steel, scraping and clanking with every movement and give a satisfying clunk with every hit. These are some of the most tactile designs I've ever seen, and I found myself repeatedly wanting to reach in and pick them up just to run my fingers across them to see how they'd feel. The deliberately stylized art direction is a welcome shift away from the 'more real than real' aesthetic in games today - it's all very well and good giving us a photo-realistic field, but I've got a real one I could go cavort in ten minutes down the road. This is what games should be giving us more of: wild and outlandish realms straight out of a fever-induced delirium. Take us places we could never go, rather than accurate representations of our own back yard.

If there's a snake in this outlandish paradise, it's this: the game's way too short. The 18 stages can easily be finished in a matter of hours. I wasn't given a final time upon completion, but I don't think it'd be out of the question to say it was 3-4 hours tops. And that was with constant game overs (some of the stages can be outright bastards, even early on). Granted, it's nice to play a game that packs four hours of constant fun into four hours, rather than stretching it out for 20 like a few other recent games I could mention - being able to play a game without feeling I had to commit time to it is a surprisingly refreshing feeling in an age where 30 hours of gameplay is considered 'short'. The problem is, the game ends as its starting to get interesting, and nothing is ever explained. We know there's some kind of connection between Ghat, Daedra, Father-Mother and the seemingly omnipotent Golem, but whatever it is, we never find out. The game doesn't really end, it just... stops. There was a writer in the 1930s and 40s called Harry Stephen Keeler, a Corwid of the Free if ever there was. Legend had it, he would set up his typewriter with a big roll of paper, not unlike a toilet roll, and just start writing. At some point, he'd stop, tear off the paper, call it a book, send it off and start on the next, no matter how little sense it all made. That's how it feels - they were writing up the plot, stopped and decided that would be the game, even though what we're presented with makes an arguable amount of sense. They're probably working on the next roll as we speak.

A lesser problem, but still a nagging one, is the lack of different enemies. Rimat, arguably the primary antagonist, is fought five or six times throughout the game. The only significant difference in her fighting style is that she gains one or two extra attacks in her last few fights. And that's still more than some of the other characters get. It's ironic: as different in looks as each character is, there's really no difference in fighting style from one opponent to the next. You'd expect Rimat to be a fiercer fighter than, say, the rat creatures, who you'd be sure would cheerfully suckerpunch you when the opportunity arises, or you'd figure the tower guards would make a beeline for weapons the first chance they get, but there's a sad lack of personality quirks along those lines. It's a shameful missed opportunity, and I only hope that ACE take the opportunity to expand on this in future games.

I sincerely hope that this is a sign of things to come from ACE: if Russia is the land of dark, hopelessly depressing games, I really want Chille to be home to unceasingly inventive digital acid trips. There's a horrible lack of the fantastic in today's gaming climate, and while Zeno Clash as a game is somewhat forgettable, as a concept and a world, I need to see more. The world of Zenozoik is filled with a colour and lunatic clarity rarely seen in games today, or ever for that matter. Here's hoping the next trip is even brighter and more vivid than the last.

2009-05-15T09:24:00.002+01:00

Wandering around trying to find info on the new Clive Barker book, The Scarlet Gospels (current word has it it may not be ready for another couple of years. Blast!) when I came across this fantastic quote about The Undying, a PC game he was closely involved with a few years back:

"We had this fellow called Magnus. Count Magnus Wolfram. Who was bald, tattoed, looked like a comic book hero. And I got them all in a room, and I said, 'Look, does anyone in this room know a count? No. Does anybody in this room know anybody called Magnus? No. Does anybody really want to be in this guy's skin? Since this is a first person play, why would you want to be in this man's skin? Why would you want to play [as him]?' And so we threw him out, and I said, 'Look. You've got a gay man in charge here. Bring me somebody I want to sleep with. Bring me somebody fabulously sexy.'...

"Brian Horton about ten days later sent me the character that now appears on the screen. Who was wonderful, he's everything I wanted. He was just the right kind of character. He seemed like somebody you would want to be, somebody you would want to play, whose skin you would want to occupy for a period of time. Even if you are going against the hordes of hell, at least he was going to do it with a smile on his face."

Makes a nice change from the 'Immortal Bald Man In Box Armour, Also Tits McGee' design aesthetic present in virtually every game today. Unless they're following the same design principal. In which case, eww...

2009-05-10T03:51:00.000+01:00

That 70s Show Season 1-6

153 24-minute episodes

When I was in high school, there were two shows I used to follow religiously. One was Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the other was That 70s Show. The timing of both was uncanny, since they were both lined up with my own high school experiences. Okay, so I wasn't fighting vampires and demons on a nightly basis, and I didn't exactly live next door to a hot redheaded neighbour girl, but everything else? Spot on.

The show centres around Eric Foreman, resident of the town of Point Place, Wisconsin, and the, generally dumb things he and his friends get up to in (wait for it) the 1970s. As set-ups go, that's all you need, and placing it in the 1970s ensures you don't get any unfortunate dated pop culture references, the bane of any show that trys to be 'modern'. Sure, you're looking smart by talking about the latest big band now, but give it six months, and you'reprobably going to look just a little bit silly.

The first two seasons are as sharp as you could hope for. The dialogue is often hilarious and the cast deliver it with spot-on timing. It's hard not to like the cast, from Kelso's idiocy, to Hyde's repeated manifestos about his distrust of The Man, a trait that sadly gets phased out as the series progresses. If the show doesn't remind you of someone you knew as a kid, or something you did, you probably should've done more.

THe one failing of the show is the same one that all sitcoms go through - complacency. Eric and Donna remain much the same from the first to the last, but all the other characters wind up being identified by their character traits more than anything: Red threatens to put his foot in someone's ass roughly three times a second, to the point where they start to throw it in if they can't think of a punchline. Kelso, prone to moments of insight and actual intelligence at times, is made the living avatar of Derp pretty swiftly, amd Jackie... well, she was always meant to be annoying, abrasive and irritating, so it'd be hard to have her devolve into a one-note character.

On the whole, though, the series is still damn funny - it must be, or I wouldn't have watched six seasons of it back to back over the course of about 5 days. Watching it reminded me of all the stupid crap we used to get up to in school, sitting around, talking absolute bollocks while listening to music, deciding we were going to conquer the world before the age of 21. The show manages to capture that feeling perfectly, even though half the cast are over the age of 25 by the third season. Yeah, the show's trading on nostalgia in a way, but sometimes, that's a good thing. Watch the first season at the very least, try to pretend the last season didn't happen. Blonde Donna... what the hell were they thinking?!

2009-05-01T02:53:00.000+01:00

Charles Stross - The Atrocity Archives

319 pages

Charles Stross likes science. You can tell this because the amount of jargon present in this book is staggering. Charles Stross also likes the Cthulhu Mythos. You can tell this because he once wrote a story where the US weaponized the Big C himself. Rule of Cool full in effect, y'all. The Atrocity Archives is the first in a series dealing with Bob Howard, employee of The Laundry. The Laundry are your typical Spookshow beyond-top-secret shadowy government department specialising in Weird Shit in all its forms. Of course, this being set in Britain, things are a lot less glamourous than you'd hope, with nary an Agent J, Jakita Wagner or as much as a Scully in sight. Bob is about as low on the foodchain as you can get, having been forcibly recruited by the group when he nearly turned half his hometown into a hellish abyss, dicking around with mathematical formulae as a student. Bored with being the departmental bitch, thanks to a boss who relishes every opportunity to make his life misery, he jumps at an opportunity to spread his wings with some fieldwork. Needless to say, shit gets very real, very quickly, and a decades-old Nazi plot to win the Second World War is swiftly rearing its ugly head.

Stross comes from the same school of writing as Grant Morrison: throw enough ideas at the reader and some of them are bound to lodge in their head. As a result, the number of concepts you're introduced to are almost too dense to take in, and less time is spent on any of them than you'd like. Maybe I've been spoiled by writers like Frank Herbert and China Mieville lately, but when I'm being introduced to a new world with new rules, I like to have some clue of what I'm doing before the game starts. Stross' frantic pace doesn't help in this respect either, and with the overall shortness of the book (the first 5 pages are an unrelated introduction, the last 103 are a short story, afterword and glossery of acronyms and abbreviations), you find yourself wanting more. Another 150 pages or so to fully explain the theories and ideas - or at least the terminology - within would've helped immesurably. Still, it's interesting finding out exactly how the core of an atomic bomb goes boom.

What we've got though, is damn good stuff. Bob's flatmates, nicknamed Pinky and Brains also work for The Laundry and are known to take their work home with them, resulting in some great moments - Pinky's attempts to disprove the old omelette/shell-breaking axiom will stick in your mind if only for the outright weirdness of it all. The idea that Alan Turing, honorary Grandfather of Steampunk, developed a mathematical formula to basically summon demons and punch holes in the spaces between dimensions is wonderful (and begs to be used in an RPG campaign somewhere). And then there's the moon with Hitler's face carved onto it. Can't forget that one. The thing that strikes you is the mundanity of it all though. You're cheerfully dicking around with arcane weaponry, disarming nukes that may just give demonic forces the oomph they need to play merry hell (literally) with our edge of reality, but there's always the chance you'll get shitcanned for showing up late once too often, and the training courses are still as boring as ever, if a little more deadly than the norm.

The Atrocity Archives is a solid book that needs to learn to catch its breath. I haven't read any of Stross' other books yet, but if this is any indication of the rest of his lineup, it's well worth checking out.

2009-04-29T00:33:00.000+01:00

The Butterfly Effect - Director's Cut

115 minutes

If you know me, you know that love my mindfuckery. Seriously, I thrive on the stuff. Nothing better than a movie that plays with the audience, twisting their perceptions, forcing you to re-evaluate the entire plot, or a film with a storyline twisted like a coiled rope. Welcome then, to The Butterfly Effect, a film best described as Quantum Leap's troubled younger sibling.

Ashton Kutcher, better known for his part in ~~Demi Moore~~ That 70's Show plays Evan Treborn. As a boy, he suffers from frequent unexplained blackouts. His father suffered from the same blackouts, resulting in his being committed to a mental asylum. He is encouraged to keep a journal to try and jog his memories of these episodes. While going through them as an adult, he finds he is able to travel back to certain moments, enabling him to essentially redo or retcon moments of his life. When his childhood sweetheart commits suicide after he asks her about some of the abuse she suffered at the hands of her father and brother, he tries to use this ability to set things right with his friends' lives. Of course, dicking around with the timestream, as we all should know by now, is a shortcut to fucking things up royally, and Evan's good intentions lead him to redoing the events over and over again, trying to make things 'perfect'.

The Butterfly Effect was Kutcher's first major dramatic role, and he handles it well. It's easy to think of the film as a vanity project, a vehicle solely to show off his range, especially since Kutcher himself stumped up the cash to produce it, but, contrary to expectations, it's a surprise to learn he can do drama as well as idiot comedy. Evan comes across as a likeable guy, and his frustrations as his good intentions keep tumbling down around his ears are believable. There's one moment where he seems to have achieved his goal of a perfect world - his sweetheart, Keyleigh, is fine and happy, her brother isn't a sadistic monster, having turned to Jesus Christ and his best friend, committed for an accident involving a stick of dynamite, is stable and in love with the girl of his dreams. Unfortunately, that girl is Keyleigh. And Evan's mother is dying of cancer. And he's got no arms. As he tells his mother he can fix everything, with a look halfway between hope, helplessness and insanity, you start to wonder how noble his goals actually are. His aim has been fulfilled - everyone's happy and bright, but it's not perfect enough, despite the fact that, considering some of the other realities included suicide, drug addiction and prison rape, this one is idilyc. IS the fact that his mother is dying his reasons for taking another trip back? Or is it that he didn't get the girl this time?

The storyline too, is solid, playing its cards close to its chest, revealing them at the right moments to greatest effect. The revelation of moments like the picture he drew as a child take on a whole new significance once you stop and realise exactly what the implications of that moment actually mean. And then there's the ending. The original version had a 'happily ever after' ending tacked on at the studio's insistence. Everyone involved went ballistic at the suggestion, as it flies in the face of the dark tone of the film. Unfortunately, the studio brought its foot down, and the movie was released with said crappy ending intact. It's weak, it's sappy, and it just feels wrong. It's be like if Fight Club ended with all the people from the Narrator's support groups coming in to stop him blowing shit up with the power of Love and Peace (oh, wait). The Director's Cut thankfully changes it back to the original ending, giving a horrific spin to a single throwaway line in the middle of the film. And dear God, it works. It's bleak in a way, oddly optimistic in another, but I guarantee you will remember it.

As it was originally released, The Butterfly Effect is a decent, but forgettable film. With the tweaks and additions, the Director's Cut is a fantastic film that hints of great things for Ashton Kutcher, both as an actor and a producer. If he knows to back a few more winners like this, he might just atone for leaving the cast of That 70's Show when it needed him most.

Topher Grace? Blonde Laura Prepon? Take notes. You two are still in the bad books.

2009-04-28T02:24:00.000+01:00

Neil Gaiman - The Graveyard Book

312 pages

The temptation to just write 'It's Gaiman, so you know it's going to be good' is a strong one, but I did that already with American Gods, and I don't think I can get away with using it more than once. Damn you, conscience!

The Graveyard Book is, by Gaiman's own admission, a loose attempt at a modern day reinterpretation of The Jungle Book (the original Rudyard Kipling version, as opposed to the Disney version which people are more than likely more familiar with). The story opens, as all the best children's stories do, with a murder, a family killed by the man Jack. Only the youngest of the family, a toddler, manages to escape, wandering down to the local graveyard, where he is taken in and cared for by the local residents - in this case, the ghosts of the dead interred in the graveyard. He is named Nobody - Bod for short - given the Freedom of the Graveyard and, as he grows, learns how to haunt, fade from sight, and about the night that took his family from him.

For a children's book, Gaiman spares none of the punches, as expected. Gaiman's always been a fan of the G.K. Chesterton quote about how all children know about the monsters that wait in the dark, biding their time, and how it is the duty of the writer to tell them that while they do exist, they can also always be beaten. There are dark things out there. Evil things. But never doubt for a second that with a little cunning and bravery (always the most important characteristics in the fairy tales of old) anything can be overcome. Even a night-gaunt can be a friend in times of trouble if you know the right words. Never once though, does he talk down to the audience. The text is simplified just enough to let younger readers follow along, but still retains the typical wit and sophistication we've grown to expect from Neil.

The book is laid out in episodic, almost self-contained fashion, each chapter building on the last. The fact that each chapter's also the perfect length for bedtime reading probably isn't entirely unintentional. As the story grows, we follow Bod, from a toddler, to a teenager. As with every Gaiman story, it's the details and touches that make the book a pleasure to read; learning how to deal with 400 years worth of changing customs and manners through the various dead people buried in the graveyard; werewolves calling themselves the Hounds of God, believing that they are charged with destroying evil wherever it is found; ghouls, having lost their memories, naming themselves after the titles of famous rulers and leaders (not the names - the titles) making their home in a city of wrong angles... it all adds detail upon detail to an already engaging storyline that, at its heart, deals with the rewards and tragedies of growing up

Everything comes together neatly at the end, as you realise everything has been relevant and leading up to the finale. Every weapon in Chekhov's Arsenal is fired, and evil receives its just rewards. There are still mysteries left unresolved, but they're the best kind, the ones that make you wonder about the greater world and what else might be out there. It ends, once again, in classic Gaiman fashion, on a bittersweet note. Friends are lost and the world moves on, but it's never the end for the people left behind. Bod, like Mowgli before him, leaves the comfort of his home to rejoin the rest of the world, scared, but stronger for it. This, along with the lesson about defeating the monster above, is something every child - and more than a few adults - should learn to remember more often. Gaiman is the kind of storyteller we all wish we could've had as a child. If you know any, do them a favour: introduce them to this book. They'll thank you for it someday.

2009-04-24T01:40:00.001+01:00

Robotech: The Macross Saga

36 22-minute episodes

Mention the name Macross to any decent old school anime fan and they'll probably be able to regale you with tales of the Itano Circus, the affectionate name for the show's trademark missile barrages, contrails filling the screen like so much silly string of death, and of songs so powerful, they could change the course of war. Mention the same name to a child of the 1980s... and they'll probably give you a blank stare that'd do a cow proud. Ask them about Robotech, on the other hand, and they'll probably launch into the same speech as the anime fan with as much enthusiasm and the same dewy-eyed middle-distance gaze.

Somehow, despite being both a long-term anime fan and having the misfortune to be born in the 1980s, I completely managed to miss this. I had a few large figures based on the Zentradi mecha, and I know I saw a few Minmay dolls in the early 90s, but the show was never shown on any British non-satalite TV channel. So while the toys were admittedly very cool, I had absolutely no connection to them beyond 'I dig giant robots'. So, when I saw the box set for the first arc of the Robotech series for £10, I figured it was probably worth picking up, if only for the sake of getting it.

A little background for those still unaware of the show: back in the 1980s, three (mostly) unrelated mech shows were edited together to make a larger show suitable for syndication on US TV, the end result being unlike anything else shown on kids TV at the time. Two of those shows - Southern Cross and Genesis Climber Mospeada - have been all but forgotten, but the third, Super Dimension Fortress Macross, has had a lasting appeal like few others, both in Japan and in the West, with regular updates every few years. The most recent series, Macross Frontier, was released in time to celebrate the original show's 25th anniversary. In Western terms, it's comparable to Transformers, a classic well-loved show that's never really gone away, as so many others have.

Note: the following is a review of Robotech, the rewritten and redubbed version of Macross. I would've reviewed the original, but there was no option on the discs to switch to the original version. Hell, there wasn't even any subtitles for the hearing impaired! So if mentions of 'Rick Hunter' or 'Protoculture' make you physically ill, you may wish to stop reading right about...

...now.

The story starts in the far of year of 1999. An alien battleship crashlands on Earth, and the governments of the world put aside their fighting to try and find out what it is, where it came from and if there's any neat tech that can be ganked from it. Ten years later, the original owners of the craft come looking for it, and are less than happy to see it's been appropriated by a lesser race. So in a First Contact manoeuvre that would do Kirk proud, they open fire on the ship and the city that has since sprung up around it. So, the Captain of the battleship, since renamed the SDF-1, does the smart thing and gets the fuck out of Dodgem activating the ship's as-yet untested warp engines. This gets them away from the immediate assault, but leaves them with two more problems: the first, is that they've accidentally transported the surrounding city with them, a human population to the tune of around 70,000 people. The second, and slightly more pressing issue, is that they've now ended up somewhere in the orbit of Pluto, facing the crew with a journey that will take them at least two years to make, all while under constant attack.

Picking any holes in Robotech feels almost needlessly cruel: yes, the animation's ropey at times, the dialogue's outright dumb and much of the characterisation boils down to 'I did it just 'cus' but when you consider the show's coming up on 30 years old, none of it's very surprising. We've been spoiled in recent years by more sophisticated artwork and storytelling - even your average weekly shonen series can routinely impress in both these days - so in those respects, there's no way in hell the show could even hope to compare. And that's before you consider that the show's a bastardisation of the original. With all in mind, it's hard to know where to start. So we'll start with probably the single most important character in the show: Minmay.

I hate her. Well, that's not true. I just really can't stand her. Minmay first meets Rick Hunter, the dashing male lead, after he almost demolishes her house with a Veritech, the show's transforming mech/fighter jet in the second episode, and I spent much of the remaining series wishing he had. After Macross City is rebuilt aboard the battleship, they hold a beauty contest to raise morale, with Minmay being the winner. She's swiftly catapulted to stardom, becoming an idol singer, then a psychological weapon against the zentradi. In this role, she excels, not just against the invading aliens, but also against the viewer, singing the most insidious earworms you'll encounter outside of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Kahn. Her songs are terrible, but catchier than anything I've encountered in some time. And she brings them out at every opportunity, no matter how inappropriate the situation, and there are some doozies. We're told repeatedly that she's lovely and wonderful and is capable of making even her enemies switch sides, blah blah, but if she's anything, she's the epitome of flightiness, stringing Rick along for the better part of four years, only really telling him she loves him when Lisa Hayes, the other main female lead, decides she likes him.

Then again, Rick and Lisa aren't that much better. He's a hot-headed pilot pining after two women, both of whom spend most of their time pining after another man (and when you consider that one of them's related to the guy in question, that gets a whole lot squickier). She's an officious wench who falls for Minmay's cousin because he reminds her of her last boyfriend who died on a mission. We're meant to believe all three of these people are wonderful and brave and blah blah blah, but from what we're shown, Minmay's an airheaded attention-whoring Pollyanna, Lisa's an arrogant stuck-up bitch hung up on someone or another the entire length of the show, and Rick's an idiot savant (with a heavy emphasis on the idiot part) who's good at flying but not much else. Really, for a show that lists the power of love as one of it's major themes, it frankly sucks at it. The worst offender is the romance between Max and Miria: he beats her at piloting, then at an arcade game, so the feisty warrior chick does the only reasonable thing and tries to knife him. Max, never accused of being the quickest plane in the hangar, then tells her she's pretty and asks her to marry him, at which point she loses her will to fight, her knife and her personality in swift order.

And then we have the music, because I don't feel I've gotten across precisely how bad it is. Don't get me wrong, the idea of music being so powerful it can swing te tide of a war? I get it. Hell, I believe it. Not to the extent that it's shown in the show (well...) but the idea that a piece of music can change things dramatically? The only people who couldn't believe that are the terminally cynical or the utterly soulless. And, contrary to what you may have heard, I'm not quite all the way there on either count. So yes, the concept, I'm utterly behind, 300%. Just... why in the name of Clapton's time-distorting appendages would you pick those songs?! They're terrible! Sure the actual song played during the key battle is probably the best of the bunch, but the rest makes me want to hunt down the reanimated corpse of Keith Richards and ask him if he'd mind using his powers as a level 25 lich to flay the writer and composer of the songs alive and force them to wear a suit made of lemons for the rest of their unnatural pain-filled lives.

Finally, there's the pacing. I can only look at the show from the perspective that it's the first third of an ongoing series. In that respect, the fact that the show just peters out after the end of the war between the Zentradi and Earth is understandable: it's not the end, since there's another 40 or so episodes still to go. By itself, however, it looks like they're just trying to drag it out another 10 episodes to fulfil some kind of contractual obligation. Nothing much of any consequence happens, beyond the last two major villains getting drunk, riding a mech into battle like a pony, then deciding to kamikaze the SDF-1. I hope the original series ended a little better than that, because it's sad watching any show flounder like that for so long.

So there you have it: a show that's a relic of it's time, incapable of standing proudly with its descendants, outclassed and outpaced by them at every turn.

And yet...

And yet, somehow, I couldn't stop myself from watching. Really. There have been a multitude of shows I've never been able to get past the first few episodes - sometimes barely even making it past the opening credits for some reason - that I have little doubt are probably better in every possible way. Why should it be that I get nowhere with them, yet I sit and finish all six discs of this over the course of a week? It's not because I actually paid for these discs, as anyone who knows my DVD buying habits can attest. And it's not because I was desperate to find something to do for this article: my original plan was to watch the first two seasons of Transformers Animated, something I'm about 6 episodes away from finishing. As ropey as the animation is, they took the smart decision to save the budget for the fight scenes, with the end result being stylish acrobatic dogfights, even if they do play fast and loose with the laws of physics all the freakin' time. The mech designs have never been bettered, as timeless and as classical as any Gundam, and the scope of the story, leaving aside the spotty execution, is still remarkable. Can you imagine watching this as a kid, getting to the episodes where the Zentradi directly attack the Earth, and seeing them wipe out 95% of the surface - and life! - on the planet in one go? With shots of people and cities being vaporised for good measure to boot! I think, when you get down to it, that's probably my main problem with the show - I came to it at the wrong time. As a kid, it would've fulfilled every craving I had for a cartoon - a series with continuity, where changes actually happen from one episode to another, where people actually die. Since the days of Babylon 5, these things aren't just common, they're virtually mandatory - networks won't even look at your show if you don't have some kind of year by year plan in mind. But back then, the only kind of shows that had any real continuity were soap operas, so seeing this in a cartoon? Mind blowing.

So there you really have it: A show that's probably better in its native language, but it doesn't matter because I'm just really bitter about being unable to watch it when I was a kid who would've enjoyed it infinitely more.

Hey, at least I'm honest about it.

2009-04-22T01:31:00.000+01:00

I have absolutely no reason for posting this, other than the fact it's probably the cutest thing I've seen in ages. Just try and stop yourself from d'awwwwing over it. I dare you.

2009-04-20T17:44:00.000+01:00

Shoot Em Up

93 Minutes

When Shoot Em Up was released in cinemas, it was to - at best - lukewarm reviews. 'It's too shallow and brutal' they said. 'Too many gunfights, too much violence, no depth whatsoever and an utter dearth of meaningful characterisation. Just action, action, action from one end to the other, 3/10.'

Never did it seem to occur to anyone that that was precisely the point.

The movie opens with Clive Owen, a man with a face hewn from finest teak, sitting on a bench. He looks mean and moody, the most dangerous hobo ever to stir his tea with a carrot. His name - of course - is Smith. When he sees a pregnant woman being chased by a man with a gun, he finds himself drawn into a conspiracy involving a powerful anti-gun lobbying senator, a baby farm and a firearms manufacturer. And yes, this is about as simple as things ever get.

This is a movie that thrives on the Rule Of Cool - it doesn't matter how idiotic or improbable (or outright impossible) it would be in real life, if it sounds cool, it's gonna work. So we have gun factory deathtraps that would require a ludicrous amount of luck and/or planning to set up; giving birth in under five minutes while under (and returning) heavy gunfire, then shooting the umbilical cord in lieu of cutting it; and, lest we forget, killing several people with carrots. And again, these are the least convoluted moments in the entire movie, it gets worse! It's somehow fitting that the end features the slowest quickdraw contest ever seen in cinema.

Shoot Em Up is really little more than an extended love letter to the action movie genre. Clive Owen delivers a suitably pithy one liner after every massacre, while Monica Bellucci plays... well... Monica Bellucci, this time as a lactating prostitute. Standout of the show is Paul Giamatti, better known for his role in the criminally never-picked-up pilot for Mike Mignola's Amazing Screw-On Head (around these here parts at least) who is, by turns, a complete bastard and the most understanding boss ever. There is a vague attempt to give the characters some depth, which either works well (Giamatti's dealings with his family) or really, really badly (Bellucci's revelation before the obligatory 'passionate pants-on hugging' scene). How much more fun (and in keeping with the spirit of the movie) would it have been for the subplot surrounding Smith's background to have ended with him saying 'By the way, that guy? Not me!"

Shoot Em Up really is a brainless action movie - as far as the plot goes - with enough violence to make even the most jaded 80s action hero smile, and enough firepower to leave a Tetragrammaton Cleric walking funny for a week, if he was capable of feeling anything. When it comes to the inventiveness and originality in its action sequences, you'd be hard pressed to find anything smarter.

2009-04-16T01:33:00.000+01:00

Thinking about it, isn't Macross really the Japanese Battlestar Galactica?

2009-04-13T07:32:00.000+01:00

Rengoku II: Stairway to H.E.A.V.E.N.

PSP

14:52 Hours

I don't do it on purpose y'know. It's not like I actually go out of my way to track down really obscure games. I just sit and think 'I'm bored of all these cod-Tolkein RPGs set in the same pseudo-medieval realms. Why can't I find something in a more modern or futuristic setting?' Then, ten minutes later, I'm playing Persona 2: Eternal Punishment, and finding myself utterly addicted to a franchise that's offering me everything I've ever wanted in an RPG. It's not just role-playing games either. I go out looking for an FPS - arguably the most mainstream genre today, outside of sports - and walk back with two Russian games, one based loosely on a classic of impressionist cinema, the other one of the most crushingly depressing games you'll ever play. It's not deliberate, it's just that, more and more, I find myself having to venture off the beaten track to find games that scratch the gaming itches I'm afflicted with.

Take Rengoku II. The original, Rengoku: Tower of Purgatory was a launch title for the PSP. It sucked. The graphics were tiny and pathetic, the stages consisted of boxes with uninspired textures, the combat, while hiding a few good ideas, was laughable at best and with a name that literally translates to Purgatory: Tower of Purgatory, owner of the most redundant title since Manos: The Hands of Fate. Sure, the ideas were great, the story was fantastic, and the music was solid, but the execution was abysmal. In a better game, they would've been something special. Thankfully, someone at Hudsonsoft agreed and gave us Rengoku II, an infinite improvement on the original that delivers everything the first game promised, but failed to deliver.

I tried explaining the story to a friend of mine recently. Didn't go down too well.

Friend: So, tell me about this game.
Me: Okay, there's these combat androids inside this tower. They're relics of a war long since ended, but they're functionally immortal, so they can't be destroyed. So, mankind, in its infinite wisdom, puts them in these towers to endlessly fight for their amusement. Except mankind, by this point, is pretty much extinct. With me so far?
Friend: I think so...
Me: Good good. So, the droids are made of this kind of malliable resin called Elixier Skin, that lets them mold their limbs into weapons, like swords, revolvers, railguns, flamethrowers and the like. And when they're defeated, they simply melt down, only to reform some time later.
Friend: Uh-huh...
Me: Now, when the game opens, the main character, Gram, is showing signs of self-awareness. Which is unusual, because the droids - they're called ADAM units, by the way, did I mention that? - aren't supposed to have any real memories or anything. Yet every time he's defeating one of the floor guardians in the tower, he's recovering memories. So he climbs the tower trying to work out who he is, and why he knows the guardians so well. Also, the whole thing's based loosely on The Divine Comedy.
Friend: The band?
Me: No, the classical poem. All the levels are named after the various circles of Hell, there's a chick named Beatrice and a guy named Dante shows up on occasion, and some of the bosses have names similar to characters in it.
Friend: But there's robots.
Me: Well, obviously it's not a direct adaptation. That would, admittedly, be cool, but no, it's just influenced by it in terms of references and maybe atmosphere.
Friend: Meep-! *sound of a water balloon exploding quietly*
Me: What was that?
Friend: Either my brain or my suspension of disbelief, I'm afraid to look.

The story, as weird as it is, makes a lot more sense in-game, thankfully, rapidly turning from a quest for identity into nothing less than one of the most twisted love stories this side of Twilight. It's scant, drip-fed between chapters, but fantastic stuff that really deserves to be developed further. I'd kill for an expansion on the story alone, but sadly, no novels or manga were ever released alongside it in Japan.

As for the game itself, it's simple, but effective. In each floor, there is a map. In each map, there are several challenge rooms containing harder than normal enemies. Clear all the challenge rooms to open up the way to the next boss, kill the moss, move onto the next level, repeat. There's no out of place puzzles, barring a few one-way doors, no forced stealth sections, and absolutely no fetch quests or escort missions, just walk into a room, wipe out everything, then move on to the next. It's a distillation of the action genre as a whole, and something we could do with more of these days. After all, if the action is fun and polished enough to begin with, do you really need to break it up by shoehorning in elements that don't belong?

The combat is frantic. Imagine playing Devil May Cry 3 on fast forward, in the middle of a caffeine rush, while a relentlessly booming techno-industrial metal soundtrack pulverises your eardrums into sawdust. Things start off slow, giving you a chance to get your bearings on the first few stages. There, you'll only fight one reasonably weak enemy at a time. Though it's not long before you're taking on several at once, dodging and rolling desperately, waiting for an opportunity to slice the enemy from hell to breakfast. Though, crucially, you never feel overwhelmed. It's tough, make no mistake, but never to the point of frustration or where you're crying foul. This is because, in one of my favourite aspects of the game, anything the enemy can do, you can do as well.

Gram starts the game naked. In simple terms, this means you have no weapons equipped. First goal of the game is to rectify this post haste. Beating an enemy droid makes them drop one of two things. The first is Elixir Skin. This is used to increase your health, defence, and so on. The other thing they may drop is their equipment. Every enemy in the game, with the exception of the bosses, is made of several random pieces of equipment, and you can take and equip all of it. Not all at the same time, obviously, and the item they drop, if they even drop one, is chosen at random, but its possible to assemble a pretty formidable arsenal fairly swiftly.

Weapons can be equipped on the arms, head, torso or legs. Some weapons have restrictions on their placement - heavy weapons are often restricted to the torso, shields can only be placed on the arms, and legs are restricted mainly to defensive equipment such as speed and evasion boosters - but aside from such restrictions, there's nothing from stopping you assembling the deathbot of your dreams. Head-mounted revolver, a chainsaw on each arm and a Gatling gun sticking out your chest? You can do it. Dual-vibroblades twinned with a railgun and flamethrower? Works remarkably well. There's 300 different weapons, broken down into about 40 different types, with about four or five different levels of power for each class. The more powerful the weapon, the more likely it has additional effects: extra attacks, stun damage, knock down, launching the enemy for air combos, all are things to take into consideration when outfitting your robot.

As if that wasn't enough, weapons can also be powered up further through repeated use. Weapons have limited ammo/usage before being rendered unusable. Attacking with them repeatedly can increase their ammo count, raise the number of times special features are triggered, and lower the heat generated by their use. Y'see, every weapon raises the temperature of the body part its equipped to. If the temperature gets too high, it's rendered unusable until it cools down. Certain weapons, such as napalm grenades and heat swords, can further raise your temperature as well if successfully attacked by them. Of course, this works both ways, so there's nothing to stop you busting out a relatively weak flamethrower and leaving your foes unable to shoot, strike or even dodge properly.

To further sweeten an already impressive deal, the presentation is superb. While the first game featured such stunning locales as 'warehouse with dirt floor', 'slightly different warehouse with dirt floor' and 'shiny warehouse with shiny dirt floor', the programmers wisely decided a little more variation was in order. So while the game starts off in a shiny (though more graphically interesting) warehouse, it's not long before you're thrown into blast furnaces, industrial forest-like areas, cyber-gothic castles and an idyllic domed garden, filled with ponds and waterfalls in stark contrast to the havoc you've wrought over the last few stages, the whole thing feeling like the videogame adaptation of BLAME! we've always wanted, but never gotten. The weapon designs are similarly outstanding, just the right side of wrong, organic in ways that chainsaws and shotguns really shouldn't be. You wouldn't think they could successfully implement the body horror aesthetic in a game featuring virtually no humans whatsoever, but somehow, they found a way. The designs are reminiscent of the Guyver in many ways, and it's easy to cobble together the biomechanical monstrosity you've always wanted, and it helps that many of the weapons are already insectile to begin with. The fact that you can change your character's colour on the fly is a nice touch, the end result being that, before the end of the first stage, I'd accidentally put together a teal droid with swords for arms, an oddly familiar-looking chestplate and legs, and a wicked blade sprouting out of the top of my head. As I said, completely unintentional, but the moment of realisation was so worth it.

And finally, we have the music. As mentioned, its all fierce electronic beats, the perfect accompaniment to the tale of a droid trapped in an endlessly repeating hell. The second stage music is worthy of note, a dark piece that I can't get enough of, as is the challenge room music, a theme oddly reminiscent of Breed by Nirvana. Crowning moment has to be the final boss battle theme, a driving remix of the opening title theme. It's a damn shame that the OST seems unavailable anywhere online, as it's easily one of the best I've heard in a while.

Upon it's release, Rengoku II pretty much tanked. Perhaps the first game was still fresh in the memories of those that reviewed it, but somehow, the game managed to slip under the radars of virtually everyone out there. It's sad, because this is truely a game worthy of greater acclaim. It's Armoured Core-levels of customization, as reimagined by Tsutomu Nihei, with a soundtrack by Alec Empire, back off his meds, but more than that, it's the single biggest improvement to a series I've ever seen in my life.

There's a third game, End of the Century, supposedly on the way for the PS3. Hopefully, with this one, the series will finally receive the respect and admiration it deserved in this instalment.

2009-04-07T01:34:00.000+01:00

Give it it's due, Fangirl Fanservice: Crisis Core is a pretty good game (though I think I preferred it more when it was called Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories). I'd just like it more if it didn't feel like a big ol' fanfic given a budget.

Come on, the game even has an Original Character Do Not Steal in the form of Genesis, who's consistantly shown to be stronger and better than God of the Fanboys, Sephiroth Himself! And if the bonus video in Dirge of Cerberus is anything to go bythey're making a big push for him to be a major threat the future.

Still can't take the idea of Shinra being a glorified electricity company seriously though. I mean, a mega-corporation with its own private army? Anyone who's ever read any cyberpunk (or is familiar with Shadowrun) can understand that in a heartbeat. But the idea of Scottish Gas experimenting on soldiers in its private army, a group that happens to be better funded and equipped than anything the government can muster? Yeah, unless this is Tank Girl (well, the movie version at least), I'm not buying it, sorry.

2009-04-05T18:50:00.000+01:00

Modded PSP gets!

Yes, thanks to the technical awesome that is Sean, my PSP is now fully cracked and ready for action. It's that familiar rush of excitment when you get a new console and a load of games and you realise you can play anything, but you're so overwhelmed by the choices, so you end up playing one thing for a few minutes, then another for a few more and so on just because you can! Already got a few PS1 games on - I've had a strange craving for playing the original Parasite Eve of late, so that was one of the first things on there - and I've tried a few other random games so far. First impressions:

Final Fantasy: Crisis Core isn't as bad as I thought it would be. The remixes of the familiar themes from FFVII feel like they've taken a few pages from the books of the fan remixes, with heavy crunching guitars everywhere, but that's okay, because the fan arrangements have been pretty good so far. It's still hideously fancervicey, and the slot machine mechanic seems to have no real purpose, other than to throw you a bone every now and then and be loud and flashy, but I'm only really past the prologue, so we shall see.

Ultimate Ghosts and Goblins is a nice attempt at updating the classic franchise, but it doesn't quite feel right. Can't put my finger on what it is, but it may have something to do with the fact that, even on the easiest setting, there's too many enemies on screen at once. The original was about precision timing, aiming, jumping, not flooding the screen with enemies like the bastard offspring of Contra and a Touhou game.

Prinny: Can I Really Be The Hero is nice, but lacking. The hip drop, a key mechanic in getting items, is difficult to aim, and the sucky PSP pad really ain't helping much. It's also weird playing a Disgaea game and not racking up experience points by the ~~dozens~~ ~~thousands~~ millions. I'll give it another shot, but so far, oddly disappointed.

2009-03-24T02:20:00.000Z

Sapphire and Steel Seasons 1&2

14 30 minute episodes

Back in the 1970s and 80s, the differences between sci-fi TV in the US and the UK couldn't be any greater. Compare if you will, the original Battlestar Galactica, with it's shiny chrome and disco music, with the haydays of Doctor Who, with it's wobbly sets and crap monsters. Or the hopelessly optimistic Star Trek with the none-more-grim Quatermass serials. What they lacked in (literal) shininess, however, they more than made up for in atmosphere and setting. Sapphire and Steel was, in many ways, the ITV's answer to Doctor Who which, in the 70s, had become a lot more playful and *shudder* campy. There was still the occasional story to make you cower, but when you've got talk of Venusian kung fu and jelly babies... well, it's a little hard to take seriously. Even for Doctor Who.

Sapphire and Steel couldn't be any more different. Over six series - one story or 'assignment' per series consisting of between 4 and 8 episodes - we follow the adventures of the titular duo. We never really find out anything about them beyond what we're told in the opening titles: that all 'irregularities' will be handled by the 'forces' controlling each dimension. Heavy elements may not be used where there is life, but medium-weight atomic elements may. Of all the elements - Gold, Jet, Lead and so on - Sapphire (Joanna Lumley) and Steel (David 'I've been in almost every genre show from 1965-1998' McCallum) have been dispatched to deal with this particular case. We never find out who is behind these assignments (and one or two of the elements mentioned aren't even elements in the strictest sense) but as an intro, it's damn effective and sets the tone nicely. The characters live up to their names: Steel is hard and unrelenting, both in his tasks and his dealings with people, while Sapphire is warmer and, as people keep pointing out, incredibly beautiful. In each assignment, they show up without warning to deal with... something.

Their main foe is Time. In this show, Time is a malevolent force, capable of taking things. Once again, we're never told precisely why it's so... hungry, but that just adds to the atmosphere. It's so alien, so outside our realm of understanding, we simply can't understand it, even if we tried. The best you can do is hope to survive it and minimise the damage, help those affected by its need. The idea that Time is a sentient force, and that it can be triggered by something relatively small and benign - a train station waiting room, a children's nursery rhyme - is on a par with the greatest of Lovecraftian horrors. You're not safe. You never were safe, you just didn't know it. And you can't run. No matter where you go, Time will always be waiting right there for you. And even those who know how to deal with it don't always win.

For a show made in the 70s, it's aged pretty well. Sapphire's hair and dresses are of the time, and one of the kids in the first story has a very unfortunate haircut, but on the whole, it's nothing too jarring. You're never left rolling your eyes at the dialogue or the plot or the acting. It's occasionally a little stilted, but again, nothing unforgivable. The only really objectionable thing in the show is the kid in the first story who, in addition to being a gigantic tool, has the most unfortunate accent, sounding not unlike Little Britain's parody of Dennis Waterman. When Steel tells him he needs him to do something important, you almost expect him to reply "What, write the feem toon, sing the feem toon?" It's all a little unfortunate.

The one thing Sapphire and Steel excels in, however, is the setting and atmosphere. There's an ever-looming sense of dread in every dark corner of the screen, in every doorframe. The series uses shadow and mood as a weapon against the viewer, and it works well. The jolts are used sparingly, and while you'll be sitting laughing at them after the fact, that one moment where Sapphire's eyes are pitch black while communicating with the Dark will linger in your mind for just a little longer than you'd expect.

Sapphire and Steel never reached the same level of recognition Doctor Who achieved, even though they're very similar. The show received one run on TV at the time, and was then forgotten until Bravo picked it up some 15 or so years later, with a DVD release only coming out relatively recently. It's likely because the series was so dark and grim. The title characters aren't particularly nice people when you get down to it: any help they give is often a side-effect of their actions, rather than the intended outcome. The mission, for Steel at least, is often the only important thing, and when you consider the forces they regularly encounter, it becomes a real "needs of the few/many" dilemma. Considering how much sci-fi and fantasy in the 70s was about the Shiny Jetpack Future, about jetting off into space to make new friends and have fantastic adventures, the slow-burning darkness of Sapphire and Steel probably stood out a mile off. Ironic, considering the 80s was undoubtedly the age of the anti-hero. In this case, Sapphire and Steel were as much out of time as the menaces they so often encountered.

2009-03-23T06:47:00.000Z

Forbidden Siren

92 minutes

Doing an adaptation of a game is a dangerous thing. It seems to get stuck in the writer/director's heads that it's a game first, and a story second. So, rather than embellishing the story that's already there, they follow the structure of a game, to the point where you can usually pick out exactly when the next 'boss fight' is about to occur. And that's when the film actually tries, most just take the path of 'well it's only a game, it's not like anyone's actually going to care' and just screw around for 90 minutes, making you feel dumber with every second. It's gotten to the point that, with one or two possible exceptions, it's easy to argue that there has never been a decent live-action game adaptation.

Into the ring steps Forbidden Siren, an adaptation of the crushingly hard survival horror games of the same name. Released to coincide with the second game on the PS2, Forbidden Siren tells the story of a girl and her family who move to the remote Yamajima Island. The family is there to seek treatment for the little brother, who is unwell for some vague reason. While there, the girl is told that there is one rule amongst the islanders that she must never break: if she hears the sound of an air raid siren, she is never to go outside. After finding a diary describing some worrying events, and dealing with the strangely suspicious locals, she eventually hears the siren, and tries to get to the bottom of the strange grip it has on the villagers.

This is a film filled with fanservice. Lots of little references to the games have been thrown in everywhere if you know where to look: the shots taken from the viewpoint of characters stalking Yuki, the heroine, are shaky and feature heavy breathing, just like the trademark sightjacking ability from the games that lets you see things from another's perspective. The song featured at several points features the same music as used in the ritual at the beginning of the first game, and as sung by a character in the second. The red water is another big nod, being a key plot device in all of the games so far, and the island itself is supposed to be the same one visited in the second game. The problem is, it all feels so tacked on. It's the same problem with films like Constantine and Wanted: you're left with the nagging feeling this was an unrelated script someone changed a few details on to make closer to the source material. Beyond the visuals and the like, there's really nothing linking this to the games at all.

Okay then, as an adaptation, it's tenuous at best. How does it rank as a film then? Well, sad to say, not that much better. The biggest problem lies with the pacing. By the point where you think the story's starting to pick up, there's only 20 minutes left. The buildup goes on way too long, and by the point they finally start answering questions, it's already too late. Then there's the ending, pulled right out of an M. Night movie. I'm really not joking, the Big Reveal tries to turn the whole movie on its head, and instead, comes across as laughable. Yes, it explains why the townspeople were acting so weird the whole time, but it's such a hackneyed twist, it's laughable. Throw in a final 'Or Is It?' moment at the end, and you'll be rolling your eyes the entire time. At least the direction is better, with a nice use of red (another element from the game) in every scene. It's subtle at first, but as the movie continues, it becomes more and more prevalent, the final shots using it as a malign invading force.

Forbidden Siren could have been better. It should have been better, considering the excellent storylines seen in both games.The film just sort of happens with no feeling of threat or tension, and virtually no shocks at all. Considering this is a film based on a horror game that prides itself on both, that's unforgivable, and the lacklustre final twist ends up feeling like the twist added in a kid's campfire story, right up there with 'because it had turned to wood" and "but who was phone?" It's not a bad film, but then again, it's not particularly good either. An interesting curio, but little else.

2009-03-16T23:18:00.000Z

Bloodrayne 2

PS2

9 hours 39 minutes

Hey there, kids, do you you like any of the following:

Vampires
Needless violence
Explosions
Gigantic blades
Sassy take-no-crap-from anyone chicks
Red hair

You do? Then mister, have I got the game for you! Allow me to introduce you all to Rayne. She's a dhampir (half-human, half-vampire) who works for the Brimstone Organisation, a group dedicated to the eradication of all supernatural nasties. In the last game, she wiped out half the Nazi war machine single-handed, all in a quest to find her father who had killed her mother, blah blah blah. Let's face it, the plot is irrelevant here. All that really matters is that she's hot, she dresses in skin-tight leather and kicks more ass than a mechanical ass-kicking machine set to full-auto, right? Fuck yeah, I'm right!

In all honesty, it's easy to be cynical about the Bloodrayne games. They feel like they were designed by writing up a checklist - probably one not too far off the mark from that one up there - and trying to hit as many points as possible. They're shallow, bug-ridden and reek of early 2000's marketing zeitgeist. But stab me with a mythical weapon and drain me of all my blood if they aren't fun as hell!

First thing you'll notice is the camera. Actually, that'll be the second thing you notice, first is Rayne herself, striding out into battle in a black PVC dress and hair that I last saw in a bottle marked 'haemorrhage red'. By herself, she's interesting to look at, in all the various costumes you can eventually deck her out in, but her voice actress, Laura Bailey (better known for Fruits Basket, of all things) manages to make the whole thing that little bit more interesting, somehow being able to redeem even the most facepalmable one-liner. Its her that makes the character, and, if we're being honest, probably a large portion of the game.

But back to the camera. The camera in this game has four main aims: focussing on Rayne's cleavage; focussing on Rayne's ass; trying to focus on both Rayne's cleavage and ass at the same time; and pissing you off when you least want it to. And in all these respects, it succeeds admirably, zooming in on her butt when you're surrounded by about a dozen mooks, giving you a pristine shot of her rack when you're failing to make a jump for the Nth time, and making you wonder if they really did spend more time on giving her standard outfit just the right amount of sheen than tightening up the controls just a little more (the correct answer is, of course, 'yes'). Once you get to grips with the beast, it becomes a lot more manageable, and being able to ~~get a closeup of Rayne's assets whenever you want~~ stop the camera from hurtling all over the place (or at least minimize the damage) makes the game a lot more enjoyable.

The camera isn't the only thing that makes combat fraught with danger, as enemies hace a nasty habit of corner-trapping you, repeatedly pummelling you to within an inch of your life. It's not uncommon to be pinballed from one foe to another, resulting in large chunks of your life vanishing before you can even catch a glimpse of Rayne's Peak District. Your main weapons consist of two giant blades strapped to your arms, with pointy bits on the obligatory high heeled shoes for good measure. When you kill certain enemies, you'll receive extra attacks, or extensions to your basic combo. Most of the time, you won't use them though, as your feed attack trumps pretty much everything. Don't forget, Rayne is part vampire, and that makes almost every enemy you see a health pack on legs. While feeding, you can rotate yourself and your victim (which is impressive considering she usually wraps her legs fully around the poor/lucky bastard she's nomming at the time, moaning suggestively all the while) to shield yourself from further attacks, healing yourself and protecting you from further damage. It doesn't work on everyone - some enemies are armed with melee weapons and can fend you off (knocking you to the ground and hitting you square in the groin. Each and every time), and some are just too big, being hideous mutants or incorporeal humanoids formed out of bugs. In the case of the former, you can either knock their weapons out their hands, if they're standard mooks, or just get behind them and start chowing down that way.

Your other main weapon is your harpoon, which is mainly used in the 'puzzle' elements of the game. I use the term loosely because virtually every puzzle involves using the harpoon to launch a hapless minion into some pointy bit of furniture, a fan, a printing press, or in one memorable moment, the blades of a downed helicopter. Doing this for pure giggles isn't exactly frowned upon, however, as it nets you Carnage Points. Keen to prove it's not just another mindless hack-and-slash, you can increase your health and rage meters by ripping people to shreds in the most creative means possible, be it tossing them off a roof, hurling them into electric fences or executing them while feeding. It doesn't add too much to the basic gameplay, but it gives you a valid reason to brutalize your foes beyond 'what, that stuffed rhino head was just looking bare without a flunky bleeding on top of it'.

And finally, because there clearly wasn't enough blood in the game, you've got your guns. At the end of the first batch of stages, you come across the Carpathian Dragons, vampyric weapons that - get this - run on blood! Yes, while feeding, you can plunge them into your human lunchbox and suck out their blood, then fire it back at their friends! They're the only firearms you'll acquire throughout the game (which will piss you off no end when you encounter enemies running around with Pancor Jackhammers. It starts off as a piddly little peashooter, but along the way, you unlock other modes that fill in the traditional shotgun/machine gun/rocket launcher roles. The guns can also level up, increasing their destructive capabilities and ammo counts, but unless you make an effort to use them at every opportunity (which is pointless when the feed attack is a confirmed kill, health up and human shield all in one) you'll only use them for one or two bosses at most.

It's impressive that a game this shallow still manages to be such fun. It's the gaming equivalent of the brain-dead action movie, pure and simple. There's no deep meaning to be found, no important lessons to be delivered, just endless action from one end of the game to the other, all delivered in a black Japanese schoolgirl outfit which, of course, shows plenty of fanservice (one of about a dozen or so outfits unlocked when you complete the game, and no, I'm not making this up - you can't say Terminal Velocity doesn't know their audience). It shouldn't succeed as much as it does, and often doesn't, being needlessly frustrating at times. But it manages to retain that certain something that keeps you playing in spite of yourself, and that deserves some respect.

The ending of the game promises an all-out war between Rayne, the Brimstone Society and the remaining vampires. but so far, we've seen nothing, probably because of Uwe Boll. Allowing him to ~~brutally rape your license~~ ~~get away with a gigantic tax dodge in cinematic form~~ make a movie out of your game is never a good idea, but Terminal Velocity, Rayne's parents, went the extra mile and allowed him to do it twice. Twice! That's grounds for auto-Darwination right there in my book. I mean, I know the games weren't going to win any awards for outstanding excellence, but no one deserves that! (as an aside, one of his upcoming movies, Stoic involved a poker game where the loser is forced to eat, puke, then eat the puke. Anyone who's witnessed one of his films will know just how that feels) There's always a chance we'll see a third game, but alas, it looks like Boll has killed this vamp stone dead.

Thanks, Uwe.r

Silent Hill: Homecoming - because even the fourth wall can't protect you forever

2009-03-08T20:55:00.000Z

Static...

In my restless dreams, I see that town.

Silent Hill.

You promised me you take me there again someday.

But you never did.

Well, I'm alone there now...

And you're stuck playing a shoddy port of a mediocre game.

I hope you get raped.

Twice

Love

~~Mary~~ ~~Maria~~ ~~The Demons~~ Ah, who the fuck knows anymore

2009-02-24T10:48:00.001Z

Neil Gaiman - American Gods

592 pages

You should read this book.

2009-02-19T19:02:00.000Z

Devil May Cry 4

PC

Total Playtime: 18 hours 37

Okay, let's get the bad stuff out the way first: Devil May Cry 4 is an excellent game hampered by a handful of niggles, a couple of bigger flaws and one absolutely huge gaping issue that makes you wonder what in the hell they were thinking. It's like having the star of your hilarious and genuinely touching romantic comedy come out at the end and start talking about that time he buggered a goat to death while out of his tree on perscription medication, we're talking critical levels of 'no wait, what?' here.

Devil May Cry 4 switches focus from professional badass Dante to new kid Nero. Nero belongs to a church known as The Order of the Sword as... well, it's never entirely stated what he does, but it's safe to assume he's part of some kind of elite guard by the simple fact that he has a big sword, he likes slaughtering demons and gets to dress however the hell he wants and no one gives him any shit for it. Rank clearly has its privileges, and all that. The church is dedicated to the worship of Sparda, who, as you might recall, sealed the gates between the demonic world and our world oh so long ago. While in the middle of a sermon about The Saviour, a major figure in their doctrine, who should bust in, but Dante, fabled Son of Sparda. Rather than sitting around to discuss dogma, however, he quickly rips the other guards in attendance several new ones before capping the pontiff right between the eyes, which is where the game begins.

To be honest, the storyline, while fun, is merely a gigantic plot device to get you moving to the next slaughter. You never really have to think to hard about it, which is a good thing: the brevity of the premise - there is a church, they are secretly bad, you must stop them - is a blessing in an age where everyone wants to create an astounding visual narrative that pushes forward the boundaries of what can be done in a game, yadda yadda. Yes, Hideo Kojima, I'm looking in your direction. You're a great game designer, but if anyone sees you heading towards a typewriter, their first priority should be to break your fingers. That's not a spoiler about the church up there btw: a) it's a Devil May Cry game, plot twists are less shocking events, more addendum to the list of people you have to beat the crap out of and b) it's a church in a video game: that already means there's a better than 95% chance they're gonna be evil to begin with.

So then, to the flaws. Right off the bat, there's the difficulty. Even on the easier settings, the game cheerfully kicked your ass from hell to breakfast. DMC3 Special Edition had its difficulty settings re-jigged to be more in line with the Japanese original, and still put up a decent fight. This game, not so much. In a single sitting, I was able to rip my way through pretty much all of Dante's campaign with no problems at all. The only stumbling block ever came with the bosses, one of whom strays way too far into frustrating bullshit territory for my liking. The fact that you have to face him again right at the end filled me with no end of joy.

Then we have the music. It's no secret that I value the soundtrack to a game highly. Give me a good OST and you've won half the battle and coming off the back of DMC3, I had high hopes. Perhaps too high, as the soundtrack is, as a whole, meh. The battle themes are okay, but nothing special, the boss musics are so-so and the ambiant stage music... well, you don't really notice it, so I suppose it's doing its job admirably.

The one trick they really shouldn't have missed is with the enemies. We're on a next-gen platform here, the future has arrived and all that bollocks. Why then, can I never fight more than 5-6 enemies in a single area? The DMC series has always been about action, about kicking everyone's ass all the time. From the moment you hit start to the moment you shout 'goddamn it!' and turn the game off because you were just served an entrée of your own derrière, you're beating the unholy crap out of demons from one end of whatever island you're on this time to the other. In the transition to the almighty PCS360 (see what I did there?) Capcom should've similarly upped the ante, throwing us headfirst into armies of abominations with only a pointy bit of metal for defence, sitting back with its arms crossed and a smug smile and asking 'now what are you gonna do?'. The only time they ever do anything even remotely like that is with the Scarecrows, the absolute weakest enemies in the game, and by that point, you should be more than capable of handling them anyway. I don't want to see the series go the way of Dynasty Warriors, I just want to live the cutscenes, cutting down minions of whatever Dark One we're beating up ths week, feeling like the baddest mofo this side of Hokuto No Ken.

Finally, we've got the biggest issue with the game, and in this day and age, one that's downright unforgivable. The repetition. So you're playing as Nero. You get to stage 10, finish it and get to take over as Dante for the next chapter of the game. How do they reward this? By making you run through the game in reverse. Yes, they make you go through all the stages you just played as Nero, but this time, in reverse order! So, you've got the joy of facing the same stages and bosses - including that one fucking boss - and they're all exactly the same, except for the fact that you don't have Nero's Devil Arm to slam things into the ground with. Though when you consider Dante and Nero play very similarly, there's very minimal difference between the two halves of the game anyway. If the game had been done from two different perspectives with accordingly different storylines, that would've been fine, but no, you're doing the same thing, just the other way around. It's so brazen, you almost don't notice all the steals from the very first DMC game - Nero's battle theme is a tarted up version of the original's, several enemies are lifted lock, stock and barrel from the first game, and you can't tell me Trish's appearances aren't unintended. It's lazy, it's sloppy, and Capcom, of all people, should know better.

Compared to its immediate predecessor, DMC4 is a disappointment. The third game was a triumph, breathing new life into a franchise everyone assumed was kaput after a disastrous second game. Devil May Cry 3 is easily the pinnacle of the combo-carnage style of gameplay, and will be a hell of a hard game to topple. It's worth stating then that, on its own merits, Devil May Cry 4 is still leaps and bounds ahead of everyone else, and that even with these horrible flaws, it's still more than worth playing. The controls are as tight as you could hope, making stupidly long and impressive combos a joy to pull off. Being able to get SSS ranks on the all-important Style Meter has never been easier, and as early as the 1/4 mark of the game, I was regularly hitting the upper end of the gauge with ease. The graphics are solid, Capcom somehow able to remember the one thing everyone else has forgotten in the rush to show off their new graphical prowess - colour. The stages are often bright and vibrant, the sudden transition to a sunshine-flooded jungle after traipsing around a dark and foreboding castle a very nice touch. More importantly, new boy Nero isn't the Scrappy Doo clone everyone feared he would be. He comes across as a more serious version of Dante (not that that would be hard) with occasional bursts of cockiness, making him less of a blatant copy than you'd expect. It'll be interesting to see what happens to him next - my bet is on a spin-off with probable cameo in DMC5 - but it's clear we haven't seent he last of him. Just wish he had better taste in women, because his primary love interest, Kyrie gets absolutely no character development whatsoever beyond 'she gets kidnapped and she can sing' making me wonder why in the hell I was bothering to traipse after her bland ass the whole time.

Devil May Cry 4 is a solid entry to the series, and it's a testament to the game itself that it manages to be fun even in the face of it's glaring faults. If Capcom hadn't been quite so lazy, and if the third game had never been released, it would probably be the best in its field, but as it is, it sits very comfortably right up there with the best. It could've been better, but for what it is, it's as good as it gets.

2009-02-18T21:47:00.000Z

Aaaaaand done, Devil May Cry 4 has fallen before me like logic before a fangirl's wrath, I'm twitching like a cat on crack and Bart's sitting warming his harbls by the radiator. That has nothing to do with the other two, in case you're wondering, but you always have to do these things in threes. Just the first game in the series to do and I'll have finished all three DMC games! Don't seem myself tackling that one any time soon though.

Also, interesting fact, the PC version comes with a turbo mode in case your system runs it a little sluggishly, apparently a common problem with the PC version. On my setup, without, it runs about 10-15% slower than normal, with, it runs about 10-15% faster. So this entire time, I've been having to react faster than anyone playing it on the PS360. I think that pretty much settles that question then - I really am a hell of a lot better than I thought. Can I get a hell yeah?

Think I'm gonna go play some Secret of Mana for now. It's a nice game to chill out with. Hopefully it'll let me forget what they did to Lady as well. Once again: combat Catholic schoolgirl - good. Whore - bad. The first one might be fanservicey by itself, but it's a good kind of fanservice, y'know?

2009-02-18T16:49:00.000Z

New Futurama movie is the best of the bunch. Was considering doing a writeup of it, though it's a bit of a grey area - technically, it falls into the 'feature-length episode' category, though really it's a full-length movie conveniently chopped up into four parts. Bit of a grey area, so I decided to err on the side of caution. If I'm gonna do this, I'm gonna do it right, damnit, my conviction is strong! Blame the case for the Prosecution on that one. Still, it's a major improvement over The Beast With A Billion Backs, which had no clue what it wanted to be, and Bender's Game, which was okay, but meh. Into The Wild Green Yonder is probably the closest to the classic Futurama feel thus far and, more importantly, has the most coherent storyline out of the bunch. Ending's a bit rushed, but, come on, it has Snoop Dogg as a judge. That's worth the price of admission alone!

2009-02-17T18:38:00.000Z

Dune: The Alternative Edition

182 minutes

It's hard to bash Dune when you get down to it. Yes, the acting is hammy as all fuck, the story's a convoluted mess in the translation from book to film, but when you consider the difficulties that were had in the decade of development it went through - a dozen different writers, with as many scripts being re-written from scratch, having its original running time cut from over four hours, if the legends are to be believed to less than two, having Kyle "Kiss of Death" MacLachlan in a leading role - hating it is like hating that well-meaning kid in school who used to cause mass destruction wherever he went, purely by bad luck. You can do it, but damn if you won't feel like a complete dick about it.

The plot is set in the year 10,194. The galaxy has been carved up like a terducken by three forces; the Spacing Guild, who are the only ones capable of transporting mankind between the stars since artificial intelligences were outlawed due to a rather unfortunate robot apocalypse several millennia ago ; the Great Houses of the Lansraad, an alliance (sometimes) of powerful noble houses; and the Padishah Emperor, who's nominally supposed to be in charge of the whole shebang. All three forces are vying for control of the desert planet Arrakis, the only place in the universe where the precious spice Melange may be found. Spice has many properties, such as extending a natural lifespan, unlocking mental powers and in great doses, can even alter the user's physiology. Considering the Spacing guild needs it to safely plot courses between planets, the universe literally runs on Spice.

Still with us? Good, because that alone was the backstory - here's what happens in the film itself.

The film opens (after the lengthy prologue/infodump) with the Spacing Guild informing the Emperor that they fear the power that may soon be born in one of the Great Houses, namely the Atreides. The head of the house, Duke Leto is due to take over Arrakis and all Melange harvesting, and the Emperor naturally assumes that the power lies with him, only to be told that the threat lies not with the father, but with his teenage son, Paul. The Emperor dicides to sic their hated enemies and former tenders of the planet, the Harkonnens on them with the intent of wiping them out, a job they take to wth great relish. During an attack, the House is destroyed, Duke Leto is killed and Paul and his mother are left to die in the deserts that make up 99% of the planet. Here, they encounter the Fremen, the people who live on the planet, and Paul discovers he may be a being prophecised as the one who will finally bring water to the waterless planet.

Dune is not a book that makes for a good movie. The plot is filled with political intrigue and backstory that has to be understood in order to follow the main storyline, let alone appreciate it. One of the original scripts would've resulted in a 14-hour long movie, and would've made a better TV series than a film (which, funny enough, is exactly what the Sci-Fi Channel would do 30 years later with a far more faithful and successful mini-series). The book itself is fantastic (as long as you stay the hell away from anything not written by Frank Herbert - the 'authorised' sequels and prequels written by his son are abysmal), but that's because it's the epitome of 'as long as it needs to be'. The movie tries to condense everything and, unfortunately suffers as a result.

The cast somehow manages to struggle along with what they have. Impressive when you consider the amount of sceneryvores that often appear on-screen: when you've got Patrick Stewart dueling with Max Von Sydow (better known to most of you as Ming the Merciless from the sublime Flash Gordon) for screentime, its a wonder the film doesn't tear in half. All it's missing is BRIAN BLESSED and the whole thing would disappear into a singularity of ham. It's Dune as pantomime, and when the Baron Harkonnen declares that he will see Duke Leto and his son driven before him, you have to resist the temptation to shout 'Oh no you won't!' Then there's Kyle MacLachlan. It's a wonder he never really managed to take off the way he should've. With the right script, he's a superb actor - just look at Blue Velvet, also by David Lynch. The problem is, he never really seemed to hitch his horse to the right film, instead deciding that The Flintstones and Showgirls were good ideas. His name on a film is something of a death sentence - you know he'll be good in it, but then again, you know he'll probably be the only good thing in it to begin with. And let us not forget Sting. How could we when he's oiled up and wearing a codpiece the members of Dethklok would consider excessive. If you take anything from this movie, it'll be Sting's groin.

The version I watched was a fan-edit, apparently cobbled together from about a dozen different sources, and it shows. While the majority of the film is pristine, every so often, the quality of the film will degrade horribly. It's fairly jarring whenever it happens, though thankfully the sound quality remains much the same. The edit is apparently about as close as we'll ever get to Lynch's original vision of the movie, seeing as how that legendary original cut will probably never surface.

As I said from the start, it's hard to dislike Dune. It's got a lot of problems; the plot's fairly incomprehensible to anyone not already versed in the books; hearing the character's inner narrative all the time takes a lot of getting used to; the cast is comprised of Large Hams to a man; but watching it is like watching a kitten trying to jump up onto a sofa - it's trying, but you know with just a little more effort, it'll finally get there.

And for those who've struggled this far: What do you mean my codpiece isn't sexy?!

2009-02-10T01:26:00.000Z

Drawn Together Uncensored S1-3

36 30-minute episodes

It's an interesting fact of television that, when someone thinks a show isn't going far enough, someone eill come along to push things that little bit further. So when sitcoms aren't biting enough, someone makes The Simpsons. When The Simpsons is becoming too complacent, along comes South Park. When South Park isn't being entirely offensive enough... well, Mat Stone and Trey Parker tend to do something about that themselves. They have a reputation to uphold y'know. So when someone decides that both South Park and Family Guy just aren't quite crude or twisted enough... then you have Drawn Together.

The central concept is of an animated reality TV show, and that gets abandoned as soon as they run out of jokes to make at the expense of Big Brother and Survivor (about 13 or 14 episodes in if you're interested). The characters are all broad parodies of cartoon archetypes - Princess Clara is a racist, homophobic Disney Princess, Xandir is Link from The Legend of Zelda if he was screamingly gay, Toot Braunstein is every fat joke you've ever heard rolled into the body of Betty Boop, and so on. The cast starts off broadly-defined, before quickly settling into their niches. It happens a little too quickly though: could they not have got a little more milage out of Xandir being a closet case before outing him? Isn't Princess Clara's unknowing racism a little more humourous than her being perfectly aware of what she's doing and reveling in it? Does Captain Hero have to have a storyline revolve around him in every last episode from the second season onwards? Really?

The uncensored tag, a major selling point for the DVDs certainly lives up to its name. Was it bleeped in the first run on TV? Then you get to hear it in all it's glory. Was it blurred or obscured in any way? Then it's there for all to see. While it's nice to hear what they think FCC stands for (hint: not Federal Communications Commission) half the humour is in the bleeping itself. The jokes just aren't as funny when you can hear every last 'fuck'. A few scenes are extended or altered as well, such as Captain Hero's line in "Xandir and Tim, Sitting in a Tree", changing from "...and I was leaking like a sieve" to "...and I was getting fucked in the ass more often", and in "The Other Cousin", when Blah's ride arrives at the end of the episode, rather than just being 'generic' retards, the bus is filled with likenesses of the rest of the DT cast. It doesn't add too much to the series, but it's a nice bonus for those who've seen the show a dozen times or more. And those who really want to see Toot naked. Which is a surprising number of people if the 'fanart' is anything to go by.

If the show has a problem, then it's not with the nudity, the swearing or even the racial slurs - give the guys their due, they manage to avoid the really, really obvious ones. Y'know, the kind that you have to be rocking HBO to get away with saying. No, it's the overlong jokes that are clearly there for timewasting purposes. You know the ones I mean, where a character sits and umms and ahhs for a solid 30 seconds, or repeats the same action for about a minute. If you've seen Family Guy, then you'll know and most likely have fast-forwarded your way through them more than once. It's trying to copy the "funny-not funny-funny" pattern you'll remember from the 'Lisa Needs Braces/Dental Plan' scene from The Simpsons, only instead of doing it sparingly, it's in every episode. It becomes really tiresome really quickly, and manages to grate even more than Captain Hero screen-hogging - at least that manages to be funny every so often.

If you've never seen the show or you're a fan who wants to know exactly what the balls of Captain Hero's nemesis look like in Charlotte's Web of Lies (and if you're a fan, you'll know exactly the scene I mean) this is the place to go. Otherwise it's still the same subtle-as-a-dead-whale show we all know and love with a few (questionably) nice extras