Easter

In the style of The Fast Show's Jesse, this Easter I have mostly been working. I'm apparently not allowed to say what company for exactly, because I was recently told to sign something saying I wouldn't say anything remotely slanderous about said company. At some point while manning the shop floor at work I seem to have come into contact with a number of children suffering from chicken pox, and whose moronic parents thought it'd be a good idea to bring the infectious little cretins into a busy town centre to spread the joy. And here I am, further extending my Easter break in a very unpleasant way under doctor's orders.

And aside from concussing myself at work by being a bit thick, I also got word off my dad that he was finally able to pay back the money I spent the entire first semester lending him, and so I decided to splash out on a TV the size of many walls in my flat and a suitable stand that weighs more than myself. And gorging on chocolate.

Come to think of it, Easter itself was pretty good. Finishing Easter and becoming infected with a lesser form of the bubonic plague wasn't particularly fun.

What else happened over Easter... well, I saw someone wearing a chicken suit and was tempted to ask him if he had any expired coupons so I'd be able to escape work for 10 minutes while we had an epic fight, but it wasn't to be. Oh yeah, Sponge (my brother's kitten, not to be confused with his cat, Pudding) decided to try his luck with the kitchen window over Easter. While normally not an issue, least of all for cats, it's important to know my brother lives in a 1st floor flat. And the flat on the ground floor is raised a few feet too. Somehow he missed the huge area of soft land, and landed very flatly on a solid grid. Needless to say, he made a hell of a noise. Don't worry though, he was fine last time I saw him.

And that pretty much concludes my Easter, and indeed this Blog, I guess. If you want to keep up to date with my own ramblings, games reviews and other geeky shenanigans, you can find me posting regularly in my personal blog. But I recommend you watch one or two Zero Punctuation videos before you take everything I write for face value.

No update?

Well, not technically true, seeing as this is an update. For the pair of you who like my reviews, you can now find them here. This week it's Frontlines: Fuel of War, because I couldn't get hold of Army of Two. The main reason I've decided to make a new blog is because this one is supposed to be for an assignment, so I spend a lot of time going of on a tangent. With my own personal blog, I can go off on many other tangents, hurrah!

That's about it. The only other thing I can think about writing is I think I bit my tongue in my sleep, otherwise I've got an ulster. Lovely.

10 Reasons Why Students Shouldn't Answer Their Phones in Lesson

We were given the first one already so the other 9 reasons will probably still be really hard, in all fairness. Well, here goes:

1. Nicky will answer it
2. You look like an asshole
3. Ear cancer!
4. You're sat infront of a computer, why not use MSN instead?
5. You're sat infront of a computer, why not go on Facebook instead?
6. The Welsh are coming
7. You'll make Santa cry
8. It uses up your battery
9. Someone will be determined to steal it off you and make allegations of bestiality
10. Someone else, or the same person for that matter, will probably whip out his or her phone, claiming it's superior and leaving the pair of you locked in an uncomfortable silence

Remember kids, answering your phone in class isn't cool. Save it for the cinema.

Kingdom Under Fire: Circle of Doom

As some of you may already know, but I'd sleep better at night knowing you don't, my entire knowledge of the Kingdom Under Fire series comes from seeing the adverts between Star Trek: Enterprise on Sky One, a few years back. So this week I thought I'd broaden my horizons a little and go for a new RPG, rather than another shooter or action game such as Turok. The problem is, I really wish I'd chosen Turok instead now.

Don't get me wrong, I do like a good RPG. In fact, Fable is one of my favourite games and I've spent the most part of my life following the Zelda series. Sometimes I like nothing more than playing a game with a good story, getting sucked in and appreciating the talent involved in development. Call me a geek, but I like a game to be like a good movie, only interactive. Similarly, sometimes I'm just in the mood for some good old-fashioned action, violence and gore. Lovely-jubbly.

Alrighty, let's get started with Kingdom Under Fire: Circle of Doom. And with a title that dramatic I was expecting a story deep enough to drown a giraffe in. A giraffe with gills. Either that or a really poor Japanese translation, but I preferred the giraffe thing. First impressions were good, with an instruction manual that thick I was expecting all my bottles of Frijj to explode, and to play a game more complicated than advance astronomy. Well, after playing Blacksite, I was all for something with a decent story and some interesting gameplay mechanics.

Things started going badly very soon when I spotted the interesting fact on the back of the box (I know, most people read the box before even seeing the instruction book, but I wasn't buying it though, was I?), that mentioned something about randomly generated environments. Now, last time I played a game with randomly generated maps was Dark Cloud - one of my first games for the PS2. Which I began to hate with a passion after my favourite weapon was destroyed and my save file was lost. Dark Cloud betrayed me like a lover and I always hated it's silly randomly generated maps.

So with that in mind, I set my sites nice and low for Circle of Doom, hoping that the Japanese love of overly complicated stories in games would cheer me up. That rollercoaster done with, I started the game. When you start a new game, you're asked to choose a character from a list of people who I'd imagine are probably well known in the KUF series, and I thought the best idea to start with would be a a fast character with the best trade off against power I could find. For some bizarre reason you're offered the choice between someone who is "very fast but very weak" and someone who is "very fast but weak". I chose the latter, safe in the knowledge that eventually I'd be able to find some form of super armour and a massive sword to make up for the skinny bloke with a worrying dedication to acrobatics.

The game then starts with a very odd cutscene... immediately followed by a tutorial in some field somewhere. A short and sweet tutorial, teaching you the basics of moving (left thumb) and fighting (right thumb), but leaving me wondering how to talk to all the wonderful and interesting people I'd need to acquire knowledge from in order to succeed, as all the traditional buttons had been placed directly in control of no fewer than two sharp objects each.

Nevermind, we'll cross that bridge when we get to it, to the quest! Ah yeah, about that...

Having played the game for about 4 hours, I didn't actually come across a story of any kind. I came across a lot of bad guys, but the story remained more illusive than a healthy meal at McDonalds. Teases and promises, but only delivering something minuscule and still, at the end of the day, bad for you. That was alright though, because I was quite happy hacking my way through hoards of little lizard men for no apparent reason, confident I'd figure out what was going on once I got out of this bleeding forest.

Speaking of which, the combat worked well against the hoards of things Circle of Doom chose to send my way, with the cooldown bar thing meaning I had to put some thought into which of the numerous attack buttons to press; knowing that pressing the almost-one-hit-kill-button would leave me temporarily defenceless while I developed a symbiotic partnership with a bunch of lizards in a very uncomfortable region. And it also lead me to the conclusion that the best time to use said button was on the rather larger, more angry looking lizard. Presumably angry because I'd just slaughtered his entire offspring under the cue of dramatic music, having not considered they wanted to say hello. Who knows, maybe if I'd just said "hello" rather than reaching for two katanas, I would have made a lot of interesting new friends and not had to spend the next four hours fighting wave after wave of angry people.

Can we just stop a minute and focus on something.

"spend the next four hours fighting wave after wave of angry people".

I wasn't kidding. I played this game for more than four hours and so far hadn't stopped to so much as read a bloody road sign. All that had happened at this point was I'd left a place with a thoroughly disturbing Japanese name, stabbed a giant turtle with a small arsenal of sharp objects, and worked my way through another place with a slightly less disturbing Japanese name.

Disturbingly Japanese places? Stabby boss battles? More linearity than the day is long?

Yes. It took me more than four hours to realise I'd been playing a rip off of Devil May Cry, without any of the style and absolutely no gun-toting. This now left me bewildered by the option in the, well it wasn't a pause menu seeing as how you have to press "back" to get to it, of "quests", seeing as all there would ever be in this game to do was to kill things and collect gold and health potions. By chance (seriously, I was button mashing), I found out that these quests were goals you had to achieve to earn new abilities, and you set them by talking to someone while you "sleep". Which, I guess, also cleared up why a) you could sleep at all, and b) why a promiscuous vampire would be dreaming about a weird old man.

If the list of achievements was anything to go by, then Circle of Doom was planning on defining its name by being a bland and repetitive hack and slash game launched too close to Devil May Cry 4 for another 7 crappy areas, broken up into about 4 areas each, and each area getting progressively darker until the point where you can only guess where your enemies are by mashing the control pad for an hour straight and listening out for the contact from your swords. As if that wasn't enough, the game finally managed to piss me right off by decided for no reason whatsoever, that the boss area for the region I'd just battled through was locked, just to shake things up a bit. With a complete lack of keys, switches and any other interaction with the environment, I decided I'd had enough and decided to finally start playing Mass Effect.

Now you see, Mas Effect is a game I bought initially for two reasons. First, from what I've seen the graphics looked better than any RPG I'd every played before; and second, because there was a screw-up at work, so I got the collectors edition for £20 a week after it came out, rather than forking out the ugly side of £40 for the standard version. Bargain. (For you Americans out there, double those numbers and it'll probably make more sense to you).

I played Mass Effect briefly, taking great care setting everything up just right to play a game following in the footsteps of Knights of the Old Republic (as this was a big game, and I wanted to make the most of this new, improved version), and I was then told after but 20 minutes that my parents were kicking me out and getting a place of their own. Eventually I managed to have another attempt, and was rewarded with two hours of sublime RPG-age, until my brother came home and implied he'd quite like to watch rugby instead. After that two hours, I realised that to play Mass Effect, I was going to need to dedicate quite a lot of time to it, so I wouldn't forget what the hell I was doing, thus saving me from diving into the Massive journal. But seriously, it's a great game, seems really really big and I look forward to playing it properly some more.

Hmm? Oh yeah, Circle of Doom. It is in fact a repetitive circle of... well, doom and I wish I'd spent the last few days doing something with a more clear future, say stabbing myself in the legs a few hundred times. Not so recently I mentioned that Crackdown was really sparse in the story department. By comparison, being a supercop taking down three gangs by any means possible because you're told to classes as a best selling novel alongside Circle of Doom; which couldn't even boast any interesting gameplay features. Or features at all for that matter. Kudos go to my 360, however, for actually managing to generate the levels for me to fight in, where the designers gave up and decided to follow the story team down to the pub.

Backside

A more appropriate title for this week's game, Blacksite. Or as Midway really wanted to call it "Six Gears of Rainbow War", but probably themselves realised that although they copied both games and mashed them together, they didn't do a good enough job to even get away with plagiarism.

And that, I guess, sets the tone for this review. Let me explain this whole plagiarism thing. First off, they've jumped on the recent bandwagon of making an FPS and immediately using the Unreal engine, rather than being, I don't know, unique. And fair enough, as anyone who's played Gears of War will know, the Unreal engine is quite good. But that by no means guarantees a decent game. That, I swear, is all the geeky, nerdy, technobabble out of the way. It's average drooling Joe Triggerhappy from here on.

An immediate comparison with Gears can be made: it's Earth, and weird aliens come out of the floor. There's also the annoying fact that the bullets appear to be at melting point in each game, which didn't bother me too much in Gears, but that was because there was a frigging chainsaw at the end of the gun, so I assumed the bullets were supposed to be superheated in some form of military strategy to deliver more hurtin' to those Locust scum.

Ahem.

The reason the glowing bullets doesn't work in Blacksite is primarily down to the fact that it's supposed to be present day with real, present day human weapons. There's also the fact that the game itself is so downright annoying to play. Other critics have criticised the game for being too short and having limited multiplayer functions. Personally, I'm glad it's short and I can't play it with my friends. I was glad I'd finished it, knowing I'd never have to play it again, and I like my friends too much to put them through it too.

By now you're probably wondering about the other random words I appear to have used as an alternative name for Blacksite. Try them the other way around. That's right, Rainbow Six. I liked Rainbow Six, even though it was the most frustratingly difficult shooting game - actually, it's probably the most difficult game, end of - I've ever played. That was fine though, it just made me certain there was no way in hell I'd survive 5 minutes in any form of military career, putting my lazy mind to rest knowing there was one more painful job prospect I could cross off my list.

The two simple feature remarkably similar to Rainbow Six in Blacksite are a), it's also an FPS (sorry, but I had to start somewhere), and b), it utilises point and click squad command. That's where the similarities end, although they could have ended before the squad bit because it's frankly, God-awful. And pointless. Midway tried to cover up how pointless this was by having a squad morale message pop up every few seconds saying whether your soldiers were having a jolly good time or not. Personally, if I was standing in the only wet part of Nevada, I wouldn't be too happy about it, let alone if I was being shot at by anything at all.

Commanding the squad, both members, is useless. If you tell them to go anywhere that isn't surrounded by allied tanks, they'll sure as hell come running back after a few seconds, bringing some new, heavily-armed friends with them. Should you be dumb enough to ask them to shoot an enemy, they'll probably be happy to do so, after they run back to the armoury as far away as possible, have a picnic, then spend a few days choosing which gun would be best for the job but also be reasonably fashionable. The only reason I bothered to give them a target was because it gave the victim a big red circle over his head, so I knew where the hell he was hiding.

Before I get too far into the mechanics of battle and everything else that's wrong with this game, I'd like to take a minute to tell you of my first impressions of this game. When starting the game, the only imformation you get is that you're either a soldier, a prisoner, a terrorist, of an odd combination of the three, somewhere that's probably Iraq. You only know this because you start off in the back of what looks like a shed, facing two American soldiers who aren't shooting you (which definately means you're not British), and for some reason there are two goats.

Actually I lie. There's a screen that says "Iraq, Three Years Ago" before you end up in this shed with goats and Americans. It turns out that despite this box being clearly made of wood with a floor made entirely of grass wasn't a shed after all, it was supposed to be a truck. Obviously things go tits-up and you have to start shooting people, but not the Americans, so you're probably an American too. That's about all the backstory you're getting sunshine, even if you read the instruction book, which for some reason tells you one of the soldiers plays American Football, probably in some closet-denial attempt regarding the size and shininess of his arms. Seriously. I didn't notice until about half way through the game that my character was called "Piers". Then when I looked back at the book it was "Pierce" these dim-witted morons were trying to say.

Next was a simple observation, but is it just me, or is overly-muscular-probably-in-the closet-guy-with-beard voiced by the same guy who did one of the dubs for Vegeta in Dragonball Z? If it was, he sure as hell wasn't proud of it, seeing as no one bothered to put it on his Wikipedia page, or the Blacksite page itself.

And this final first impression is that everyone in the game seems to be imiting some kind of weird aura (which supports my Dragonball Z theory, incidentally), which had me worried that the twist in the story was that I'd actually spend the last few hours shooting angels and was working my way up to Jesus himself.

Enough of that, back to the terrible squad command thingy. One thing you'll immediately notice is that, although you probably wont remember his name, your character is totally inept and needs his good chums to press every button and open every door for him, in a similar relationship between a mother and her baby. Who's drunk. Which one's drunk? Both. It's something to that effect, trust me. As such, you never get to enjoy the simple pleasures of most FPS's, which is setting high explosives, then choosing when to make them go big-badda-boom. This left me calling for Vageta (as I spent the rest of the game calling him because his real name was so gay) to plant explosives for me. This was a mistake because it took him 10 minutes to get back when he'd done, I suspect because he was busy tripping over the massive erection he got from playing with bombs.

Somewhere later on in the first "chapter" (as all games are determined to call them, because apparently it's not cool for a game to have "levels" anymore) Vegeta made some references to Star Wars and the Death Star while we drove through... hang on, what the hell were flood controls doing in Iraq? You know, the chase scene in Terminator 2... the bit GTA San Andreas ripped off in a suprisingly witty manner? No? Philistine. Anyway, literally 30 seconds after these references, I came across a big sign with (seriously) "Tatooine" written on it. At that point I left the room in disgust for a few minutes.

Speaking of disgust, Blacksite is home to some downright shameful advertising with Dodge. The second vehicle you see in the game is a Dodge... as are the five conveniently stuck in traffic directly ahead of it. I mean, obvious Dodge's. Big, new, horrible, chuncky things that aren't going to be anything else even if you slapped a GreenPeace tarp over them. And I know Dodge advertised in Crackdown too, but the adverts were in actual billboards. Billboards that turn into scoreboards when you look at them. This is something very different. After all, I remember Crackdown using a phrase such as "...and it's about to hit the fan", which gave me a cheap giggle, having pictured that scene from Aeroplane! as soon as I heard it. I swear, the following is a very accurate line of dialoge from Blacksite:

"Quick, get behind that car. Damn! A Dodge Avenger! This thing's brand new!"

I immediately shot my comrade for that shameful piece advertising in an attempt to remind him that the big ugly aliens are the priority right now, partially because they were shooting at us with sniper rifles, mostly because no one wants a Dodge that isn't a Viper.

Next, we get to the part of the game that highlights it's biggest frigging flaw. Two things are universally accepted as "not fun" in any FPS. 1) Dying. 2) Infinate respawning enemies. These are two things that occurred a lot in Blacksite, always going hand in hand like a newly wed couple with a penchant for getting under my skin. In fact, just like any newly wed couple then.

When playing an FPS and put in a situation in which everyone is shooting at you, the sensible thing to do is to take cover and take your time changing the odds with Ol' Killy in your hands. At no point is it ever a good idea to cheese it to your goal when it's surrounded by enemies with big guns, then start worrying about defending yourself. Should you use that tried and tested tactic on chapter 3, you're going to be playing Blacksite for much longer than anyone ever intended, should you actually bother sticking to playing at all. This simply because of the unlimited supply of pain from the side of the corner you can't see while cowering in a pool of your own urine.

I would also like to mention that Pierce once decided that 3 seconds before a checkpoint was a great time to have a heart attack. Having just killed the last of the big bad aliens between me and my goal, he just died on his own, leaving me to plough through the blasted mess of aliens and the aforementioned pain.

Now, I'm being cruel to Blacksite, so I guess I should pay it its dues by giving it a well deserved award. So, Midway, if you're reading, I present to you "Marksman of the Year Award". I know, I know, it's still early in the year, but you deserve it for Blacksite. No other game has ever been able to show me an enemy with the ability to shoot me, with an assault rifle, from half a mile away, through a fence, some trees and a few layers of American pickup truck in the face. Congratulations, you vicious bunch of b******s.

I did learn, however, from Blacksite something about America I've never known before. And that is that American suburban houses are really really big. I mean, even playing as a trio of 6ft something marines, I felt dwarfed when I entered a family home, only to find the ceiling... somewhere up there I'm suprised my eyes could focus on.

Swiftly back on track, Blacksite has a really annoying feature, wherein it will reset you to your default armourments (excluding grenades, because they're pretty useful) after every blackout. Yes, blackout. Not checkpoint, or end of level. It occassionally get's bored mid-level and decides to warp you to somewhere more interesting you probably don't want to be.

My final two bones to pick with this game are the horrendous framerate issues (sorry, technobabbe again), which I can honestly say are worse than any other console game I've ever played. Then there's the fact that due to some glitch at the end of chapter 3, manly man Somers (pronounced Summers) decided to thank the guys for saving him by giving us all what looked like a pole dance in the helicopter, because he sure as hell wasn't sitting down.

The most annoying thing about this game though, is that it's not really as bad as I thought it'd be, having played the demo. Yeah, it's annoying. Yeah, the "advacned AI" promised turned out to be in reference to how much pointless messing around your team mates can get up to rather than helping you. But it does manage one principle of FPS games. You're not a superhuman. So on that basis, you're not going to fly through the game having never spilt a drop of blood. That said, however, I strongly recommend against buying this. Don't even rent it. See it in the shop, look at it like it just fed you sour milk, and walk past.

The Wonderous Applications of Facebook

I've been asked to list my top 10 applications on Facebook, and being one of those people who chooses to ignore most requests on Facebook, I've managed to come up with these:

Addicted to Scrubs
Chuck Norris
Friends for Sale
Likeness
Superbad
Videogames
What Type of Music are You?
All about me
Super Mario Worlds
Texas Hold 'em Poker

I can start by categorising these applications, mostly to make it easier and faster to describe them.

The Obsessive:
Addicted to Scrubs
Friends for Sale
Texas Hold 'em
Super Mario Worlds

These are the applications I have found to turn the user into a hyper-obsessive, foaming-at-the-mouth, twitchy mess. Anyone who's played Texas Hold 'em for longer than 5 minutes will understand. I myself use a version on the Xbox 360, and frequently spend hours playing, so I don't actually use the Facebook one much, but it's still damn addictive. Addictive to Scrubs is addictive, in my eyes, because of the trivia section. Now that sounds dull, but it actually gives me the upper hand on another community website I use, which has a Scrubs trivia thread in the forums. It also gives you points and a classification, which for some reason, I quite like. Super Mario Worlds is a rather excellent interpretation of the SNES game, Super Mario World. Now, I am aware there are plenty of other flash versions of 15 year old SNES games available, and plenty of emulators for all you pirates out there (because piracy is bad, kids), but being able to play Mario on Facebook quite a novelty. This one falls into obsessive, because it has that classic Mario element: frustratingly and embarrassingly difficult, being able to fall to your doom all too easily. And finally, Friends for Sale. I like this for one reason, it has people bidding over me, making me more and more valuable. Boo-yeah.

Stuff to see if you're anything like your friends anymore:
Likeness

Well, what can I say, it's the only decent "comparing personalities" application I can find, seeing as how Movies only has one quiz and it keeps suggesting I should consider divorcing all my friends. Oh yeah, loads of my friends use it too, so it's one of my few applications that can work properly.

Things to Show Your Friends:
Chuck Norris
Superbad
What Type of Music are You
All about me

I like these ones becasue they're random assortments of things to show to your friends and a subtle way of shoving your believes up their ar- I mean, down their throats. Basically, I try using these as a subtle hint as to what people should get me for my birthday. Unfortunately, no one was listening this year.

The Downright Geeky:
Videogames

This is what happens when I start getting too close to my Xbox 360 for my own good. In the same way I like showing off my gaming accomplishments with my Gamercard and Gamerscore to, well, no one actually cares that much. But basically, it's a way of me showing what games I own and what games I'm waiting for. That's about all I use it for.

Now, I have to pit two of these applications against each other in a battle to the death. The winner, will be hailed as a decent Facebook Application. The loser, will probably not be mentioned all to much in the future with few consequences come to think of it.

Chuck Norris vs. Friends for Sale
I believe that I should better explain these applications. The Chuck Norris application is a button you can put on your Facebook profile, each time it's clicked, a new Chuck Norris fact is displayed. My current favourite is the NASA one:

"Chuck Norris once bet NASA he could survive re-entry without a spacesuit. On July 19th, 1999, a naked Chuck Norris re-entered the earth's atmosphere, streaking over 14 states and reaching a temperature of 3000 degrees. An embarrassed NASA publicly claimed it was a meteor, and still owes him a beer."

Friends For Sale gives everyone on Facebook a starting price of $500, and around $1000 virtual cash. You can then buy your friends as pets, and they can be bought back off you by other people, each time increasing their value, and they get a cut of the profits from the sale to increase their virtual cash. It's the most effective way to promote capitalism and vanity simultaneously.

And now, the judgement! My chosen favourite Facebook Application is...

...Friends for Sale!

That's right, this is just about the only application I pay attention to notifications for. I like knowing who wants me as a pet and I like keeping track of who keeps buying my bloody pets off me, then giving them nicknames like "My Biatch Now!". Lovely.

Crackdown

If ever there was proof of a game not needing a story, then surely Crackdown is it.

There are a whole two elements to the story:
1- It's the future, there are gangs. They're not nice.
2- Someone's been playing with genetic engineering.

End of story.

Not a promising start to my current all time favourite game, I grant you, but it's the most fun I've ever had in a game. The only drawback I have about it is that it was the first Xbox 360 game I owned and it set the bar really damn high.

As an "Agent" of the, um, "Agency", you have lots of really cool superpowers - that need working on. And to show that you're a superhuman but not really that super yet, you start the game in what appears to be a set of pajamas and a really big pair military boots. Where would the fun be if you actually started a game with a set of cojones big enough to use as a spacehopper?

You're then set out into the big wide world of Pacific City with access to a handful of guns, a supercar, an SUV and of course a truck cab. Everyone knows how useful a truck cab is. The first thing you will probably notice, after you've caught at least one of every bullet using your torso (which will take no more than 30 seconds, thanks to the very nice gang members being heavily armed), is that you're able to jump really quite high. After you catch every kind of rocket in Pacific City (again, heavily armed gang members, who want to become your friend, probably about the hour mark), you'll notice you can jump stupid distances. Get used to it, it's great fun.

Basically, when you've finally got people to stop using rockets as suppositories on you, I guarantee you'll spend all your time jumping off the tops of buildings for no apparent reason. There's just something about that whole Matrix meets Robocop thing that will steal your life and your friends.

It's even better if you're an achievement whore, because even you will have fun! Yes! You who spends in excess of £40 a week in an attempt to add another 1000 points to your Gamerscore just to make up for the fact you have no friends! The achievements are actually fun to do, and some are pretty skillful - such as using a harpoon gun to nail 5 people to one car (after you download the Gettin' Busy pack). Others, not so fun, like hijacking 100 gang cars for a measly 10 points.

That blasted thing took me 3 days of solid carjacking to do get it, then when it came up to only 10 points, I got angry and threw a few gang cars at fellow agents. And civilians. Then I was asked to stop.

By now (surely), some of you will have criticised the graphics, mostly because you're probably not all that bright... or you bought a PS3. Which accounts to the same. If you want to say "oh no, the graphics look crap and cartoony, I'm never playing that", well, then good sir, I have this to say to you. If you want a game that reflects reality, why the hell are you playing a game where you play a superhero cop who can clear buildings with a single leap, hmm?

Exactly, it's a stylised game that's fun to play, and comics are probably the best way to reflect it. If you don't like Crackdown because the graphics are a little too cell shaded for you, then you're also the kind of person who complains about Star Wars having lightsabers that can cut through anything like butter. And thus, you have no soul. And you're really dull.

Now, prior to release, the hierarchy of the gangs was explained, stating that if you take down a gang's recruiting officer, their numbers will dwindle; if you take down their arms dealer, they'll be stuck with pea shooters etc etc. This sounded really cool and not really that hard to pull off. So why the hell doesn't it work? If it was true, then taking down a gang's arms dealer with a big, veiny penchant for explosives, and everyone and everything for half a mile around him would result in quite a blow to a gang's weapon distribution. It's clear we were lied to, because even after doing the aforementioned, I've still had to stop and pull Renault Clio-sized pieces of shrapnel out of my supercop arse.

Similarly, I've been swarmed after destroying every trace of "Evil Gang Job Centre Plus" man and then run over by a turbocharged pickup after dissecting the gang mechanic using half of Italy's stock of grenades. I understand marketing, I do! I spent the equivalent of 5 years studying the ins and outs of it for reasons I don't understand! But I don't understand why these damned developers keep feeding us such lies about their games.

Take Fable 1 for example, now, I liked it. A lot. But Peter Molyneux promised the world and was appropriately bitch-slapped by everyone else at Lionhead and forced to not talk about anything they haven't already got working in Fable 2. For a similar reason, I'm looking forward to Duke Nukem Forever, just to watch 3D Realms walk onto the stage at E3 some time in the future and admit they haven't actually known they were still a developer anymore, then show us an Xbox Live Arcade version of Duke Nukem 3D.

Speaking of which, I've also discovered something interesting on the answer to all of life's problems, Wikipedia.

"Duke Nukem Forever (DNF) is a first-person shooter video game being developed by 3D Realms"

As anyone who's ever played a racing game since Gran Tourismo 1, and crashed in one, will know, DNF generally stands for "Did Not Finish" ... interesting.

Burnout Paradise

In preparation for another part of the assignment (uploading a video to Youtube), we've been asked to go out and acquire video footage for editing. I unwittingly blurted out "Superheroes" when asked to pick a topic - much to the delight of the rest of the class. I blame Facebook, because I was busy looking through my notifactions only to find about 6 from "My Heroes Ability", and that was the first word that came to my head. Seeing as how everyone had left the room really quickly, I was left working on my own, so I made a still-image montage using the PG Tips monkey and Mr Flibble. It does not look good.

In yet another attempt to "revolutionise" the racing genre in gaming, EA have presented the world with Burnout Paradise; where all the track racing has been replaced with one single city, the idea being you can drive and play around as and when you please.

Being allowed to play and drive as you is please, is as you obviously all know, a fantastic new feature which I personally welcome with open arms having spent the last decade or so being forced into playing racing games at damned inconvenient times against my will. Sarcasm aside, Burnout Paradise is in a nutshell a racing game with free roam. And big crashes.

I remember playing the first Burnout on the PS2 and found myself ooing and aahing at the, well, ability to crash into stuff. Lots of stuff. After failing to scrounge enough cash together to buy the game, I only briefly looked at a demo of Burnout 2... oohing and aahing quite a lot more. Again, no money. Then the third was released and made me cry. From past experience, I knew I'd never actually own it, but always want to. But no! I actually managed to buy my first Burnout game! And Takedown was by far the most insane take on racing I'd ever experienced - being encouraged to crash and do so spectacularly.

I somehow missed the launch of Revenge completely, so I was never actually too bothered about it. And that's that for a brief history lesson.

I think I should get it out of the way now, this is the first and (God willing) only time you'll catch me comparing the same game on the PS3 and 360 with any level of praise for Sony's blasted monolith.

Having managed to completely overlook Revenge, I wasn't psyched about Paradise at all, probably down to the fact that at this point I'd realised they'd given up with simple names like Burnout 4, 5 or 18 trillion and 3 point 2. Alright, not that simple, but God dammit, the weird new names just keep reminding me of the world's most irritating radio DJ. And I swear, Mr Automica, or whatever your real name is; if I ever see you walking down the street, I will bludgen you to death with a damp cricket bat.

Where was I? Ah yes, I wasn't psyched about Paradise, even after it was released, until I saw my flatmate playing it on his PS3 (forgive me while I go brush my teeth) and it looked amazing (and now I feel unclean). Now, let's put things into perspective here, while my flatmate has a pretty decent Samsung HDTV, my poor 360 is hooked up to my relatively measly 19in PC monitor. And I will admit, from memory, the P...S... I can't do it. From memory, the Monolith version did actually look marginally better, but I firmly grasp to the hope that it's down to the better TV... even if there appeared to be more debris.

That felt sick and wrong, and I will never do it again. Promise.

As anyone who has played the game (at all) will have noticed, while Paradise City is a very lovely and diverse place, with only an obscure desert of some description finishing the illusion of "micro world", it's not actually that big. And to silence your protests, here's some perspective. A "burning route" involves taking your car from one random corner of the map, to what usually works out as the opposite corner in a time limit... of about 1 min 30 secs. Yes yes yes, the cars are very fast, but that still means that when you think about it, the city is only about 3 by 2 miles. That's only 6 miles of city, before taking into account all the places you can't go (most places with grass, quite a lot of buildings...), and this is sold to you as "over 250 miles of open road".

Excuse me, 250 miles? If that's true, then about 200 of those miles are the bloody shortcuts littered across the city as if an executive's child was given string and a paper shredder to play with while he walked around a scale model of Paradise City. Then got bored and took a massive dump on the western side, leaving the finished game with about 4 roads in total on the entire western side of Paradise City.

But let me get back to that 3 by 2 miles lark. I specifically remember playing GTA San Andreas a couple of years back, and I had to get from somewhere in the middle of the map, to the south east. Even travelling by motorbike, as the crow flies, it still took me about 3 minutes. So EA, remember that next time you try using the words "massive" and "open".

I degress. Burnout Paradise is in fact a fantastic looking game, with crashes more eye popping than the 30 bloody second car chase in Casino Royale. The idea of having every even start from intersections not only gives the impression that the councillors for Paradise City hired an eight year old as their transport minister, presented him with a bag of cheap lollies and told him to come up with a traffic solution. I suspect that poor child is still bouncing around a room somewhere shouting out "TRAFFIC LIGHTS!" day and night. ...but this whole event fiasco also means you pick one route and go like stink, some back, go around the corner and do pretty much the exact same route again, only you inevitabley get cocky and are immediately punished by the game sending a rather large bus in your direction/face.

To sum up this game, all I can say is...
CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS CRASHY CRASH CRASH.

Enjoy.

Fun with Photoshop

I was asked to get 2 pictures, play with them in Photoshop and explain my interpretation when I'm done. So here goes:

Image 1 (real)

Image 2 (also real)

The first image is a photo taken on a mobile phone during my second year of sixth form. Yes, it's a human pyramid. Why? We got bored and it was sunny. The second picutre is none other than Chuck Norris. By combining them, I have aimed to show that our inspiration for randomly making a human pyramid in our free time was the the philosphy, WWCND?

Image 3 (not so real)

I've been asked to talk about and justify my decisions regard my photoshopping of these photos. Well, the ethics behind it are that I'm not actually trying to fool anyone. Judging by the fact that Chuck Norris appears to be about 8ft tall by comparison in this picture, I think that should be obvious enough. The inspiration for manipulating the picture to include Chuck Norris comes from sites such as this. Those of you wondering which one I am, I'm the one second from the left (not including Chuck) looking at the floor. This is because of two reasons, first, I wasn't going to let my mate's rogue hand out of sight, and second, the weight of four people was being channelled through the elbow belonging to the guy on top of me. That elbow that's dead centre on my spine.

As such, our beloved pyramid collasped moments after the picture was taken, with me at the bottom.

The Simpsons

We have been asked to take some photos with the themes of "education", "computing" and "student life". To which I replied with the library, a local Gamestation and 25p. Job done.

It may have been released a good few months ago now, but if you've been paying attention, I'm not particularly concentrating on new releases. I have a good reason for this, not that I'm worried about being overshadowed by professional and more successful reviewers - if I was, I wouldn't have bothered in the first place. But no, my reason is quite simple. "Meh".

Anyway, The Simpsons Game initially struck fear into my very soul because of how badly I thought the Movie went, and the last half decent Simpsons game was Hit 'n' Run (or rather, Grand Theft Simpson), which was about as long as the average person takes to get annoyed at a bus stop in the rain. With someone using the loudspeaker on their mobile.

Although Hit 'n'... screw it, I refuse to use that abbreviation anymore. Although GTA Simpson was generally actually pretty fun to play, it was stupidly short, a little confusing and desperately trying to be a racing game in disguise. Not a decent racing game, but a budget bodge-job. Think Mario Kart, only without Mario or any weapons. Yeah, everyone knows how fun the time trial mode was.

After seeing a clip of the movie on a big TV in Selfridges, something possessed me to buy the DVD and somehow it was a lot better than I remembered, so I decided to give the game a chance. At this point you would assume the game would be a tie-in with the movie at some level, but no. It's basically an episode (albeit long episode) where the Simpsons world turns out to be a video game.

My first word of advice with this one is do not, under any circumstances, play the demo available on Xbox Live, or your inferior console's equivalent. All you'll do is waste time and get angry. For some reason, EA decided that the best level to demo was one more or less half way through the game. And it's easy enough, if you've had half a game of practice, not so much when you're dropped into a situation wherein Lard Lad is running around trying to kill you for no apparent reason.

The best way to describe the game itself is that it's like playing a cartoon, only entirely in co-op mode. Great if you have a friend (ok, I wont make that comment, too easy), but kind of annoying playing solo because there's no form of "sit" command, allowing the computer to occassionally guess where you want it to stay. And it's usually wrong. There are no stupid detailed textures that you wouldn't find on TV, the sky is bright and blue and the cutscenes are actual recreations of the TV animation. Nice. Another cool and quirky thing is that should you do embarass yourself by being a bit of a spanner, your teamate will probably laugh at you.

OK, so that doesn't sound very good, but I challenge you not to react when you, as Bart, miss a ledge by mere inches, sending you plumetting towards a spikey failure, and in the background you hear Homer giggling at you for being thick.

I guess the only bad things I can think of is that while the camera angle makes the best of the cell shaded graphics so that the characters actually look like the real deal, it is in fact allergic to walls. Your best bet is to avoid walls where possible and cry when you can't. Another let down is that some cutscenes use the game engine to save a bit of time - I guess - but realistically, the pay off isn't good enough to constitute highlighting blocky, rigid mockeries of characters.

Oh yeah, there's also the drawback of the price. It came out in about November and it's just been hovering around the preowned £30 mark. Pretty damn pricey when you consider that Halo 3 came out only a month of two earlier and it's about £10 cheaper.

And if for no other reason, try this game for the world's easiest achievement, even easier than on PGR3. Trust me, try it!

Kane & Lynch

When reviewing a game, it is generally accepted that said reviewer should finish a game before providing a final verdict, of which I am happy to agree with. Kane and Lynch, however, is one game I am willing to break this rule for; or rather, willing to break my own legs to avoid playing at all.

Let me explain. I remember reading about this game prior to its release, in which it sounded interesting, gripping, and generally, well... good. Then the game itself was launched, inundating the shop I work at with hundreds of copies of a game with an interesting cover and more interesting name. Then we get to the back of the cover. At this point, my expectations sunk like a bleeding stone. The graphics even on the case for a "next gen" game should never leave it looking like Hitman 2.Don't get me wrong, Hitman 2 was a very good looking game - for the little Gamecube.

My grasp of the basic idea behind Kane & Lynch: Dead Men is that they're two blokes who don't like each other very much but are forced to work together. Ironically, this appears to be the main story behind Dead Men and myself.

It's not like there could be any hardware constraints, Kane & Lynch is a current (and face it, 360 and PS3 are out now, making them the current generation of consoles) generation game, only being available for Xbox 360, PS3 and uber PC. Having actually played it, I have no idea why it looks so bad.

The enemy AI appears to be based on one soul objective: fill Kane with bullets - which would be fair enough if they didn't frequently charge at a man with a machine gun, hoping that their comrades will absorb all the bullets for them. One interesting thing about the game is the idea of the environments being quite destructible; no wait, that's not interesting, Red Faction had that nailed quite a few years ago and Stranglehold pulled it off with really rather nice visuals only a few months ago. Maybe the ally AI? Maybe if the squad system off Rainbow Six ... I would say Vegas, but come to think of it, any of the Rainbow Six systems would have been an improvement on Kane & Lynch. The only thing your allies can actually do well is shout at you.

And so, having spotted these problems before the end of the first level, I knew I wasn't going to enjoy this game. In fact, I only made it to what I guess was half way through the second level before wanting to gnaw off my own hands. I guess if I'm going to be mean about this game, I should start from the top.

Firstly, as player one, you play Kane. And player one you will play because I doubt there's anyone else willing to play at all. So, Kane is the alias for the character you play, and Lynch is the alias (and surname) of your main ally. Enter problem number one, why? "Kane's" real name is Adam Marcus, now forgive me, but how can you get Kane from Adam Marcus? Nevermind, I guess I can let it go.

Next off, sticking to the character bios page of the instruction book, we find "Nationality: British Citizen" on Kane's bio. I may be one of the least politically informed members of this planet, but I am pretty certain that there are some complications involved in putting the citizen of another country on death row in America, especially a British Citizen... Should that turn out to be false I do have quite a bone to pick with his accent. In what world does a slightly sinister American accent sound like any British accent? Who the holy hell dropped the ball on that one?

The great thing about video games is that death isn't generally a painful experience. I say generally, because I've never experienced such a bad death system in any game I've played to date, and I've played Body Harvest on the N64. Death in a game generally involves being shot, laughed at by your enemies, laughed at by your real friends (if you have any) and restarting from some form of checkpoint. Bish bash bosh, job done.

So many times, we see developers messing with this system to try and make it... something. I don't think "better" is the right word, because dying works pretty well as it stands. Either way, on Dead Men, the system first appears to work out that you get shot, you die, you then have to watch Kane bleed to death while hearing some weird voices and the screen goes white, very slowly. The whole thing takes so long, you could leave it to play out on its own while you go make a cup of tea for you and everyone in your neighbourhood.

Next time I died, I started to frantically mash the pad to speed the process up a bit, only to find one of my allies had come over and punched me in the face, having apparently just given me a huge dose of adrenaline. After which, I became fearless and started jumping in front of anything with a gun, expecting a magic injection to cure me of all ailments. But no, although in the wonderful world of Kane & Lynch a small injection can cure a shotgun blast to the face, 2 or 3 of these injections counts as an overdose and you die... um... more. Somehow.

Having made a brave attempt at soldiering on in this game, I became very worried that I had somehow broken one of the analogue sticks on my control pad, only to find everything was working perfectly and the aiming system was about as agreeable as a heavily pregnant woman skewered atop a spire. Movement starts off sluggish, before flying off in any direction of its choosing so long as it's not where you wanted to be aiming.

The camera itself is... odd. Now, when it comes to cameras on games, I'm usually very forgiving. Up to the point where I think my view is constantly being obscured for some cheap effect. I wouldn't describe it as "over the shoulder", more as "film crew attached by a steel tube at a weird angle". The camera switches from being way to far to the right, to looking over the wrong shoulder when it pleases, with no way to remedy it at all.

You allies themselves seem to be made just to make your life difficult, not by merely catching bullets for the person you were previously aiming at, but by being the ones carrying all the ammo in the world and only sharing when they feel like it. Genuinely, only when they want to. In my opinion, the middle of an armed robbery is a bad time to decide you don't want to share ammo with the only person who can shoot while you play with something on the wall.

And finally, we end where I gave up forcing myself to play the game. For some reason, no one in Kane & Lynch can finish a sentence without swearing at least twice. Don't get me wrong, I don't care about swearing at all, in fact I think it shows humanity, or something to that effect, but I do mind when the ration works out at "word 1:1 expletive". When trying to run out of the bank on level 2, I was shot by a sniper, which I thought was odd because I managed to put a pillar and a wall between myself and the sniper, but I noticed that when Kane hit the floor, he had a bullet hole in the crotch. All in all, it's very clear that the game's maturity levels are on par with a game of "who can pee the highest?"

Introduction & The Godfather

As part of an assignment, I have to maintain a blog on apparently any topic of my choosing. Considering the perks of my job - I can't say what they are or where I work - I think a weekly games review could work.

So, let's start with The Godfather on Xbox 360. First impressions are frankly, bad. It looks like a straight port from the PS2 version and as anyone who read a review of Pimp My Ride will know, this is a very bad thing. It can be argued that the graphics hardly push the 360 to its limits. More realistically it can be argued that the poor machine would be very, very bored with a small chance of suffering dementia playing The Godfather.

Although I will accept that it's set in New York in 1945, EA have done something which really annoys me on GTA clones. And face it, that phrase can be used to describe any free roaming game involving cars, guns and crime. The annoying thing is that the roads all seem to look about 3 miles wide and are met with a tiny, overpronounced curb and the buildings surrounding the roads are as square and flat as something really square and flat. Let's say a big glass box.

That's a pet peeve out of the way, now down to being more mature and professional. In an attempt to give the vehicles weight (all 4 of them), there's a very subtle sound from the suspension when you drive over a bump too fast. An original idea, mostly because no one actually cares. The illusion of weight was only slightly destroyed when a hit squad chased me at blistering speed, and rammed me off the road. Literally off the road, the pavement and indeed the laws of physics when my car jumped 15 feet in the air and spun around, landing completely unharmed. Speeking of blistering speed, another thing I noticed very quickly was that the game governed the speed of everything chasing me based on just how much they wanted to kill me.

Driving more vigorously when chasing someone is fair enough, but these are 1940's American cars travelling at mach 2. On the other hand, some of the cars the game will let you drive can achieve mach 1 and corner like house flies when the mood suits them. The rest of the time, they'll happily slide uncontrollably into a civillian sideways, crushing the poor soul and making you very unpopular with the local police.

I suppose at this point I'm just being a bit childish about the driving sections, partially down to having titles such as Forza Motorsport 2 on my shelf, but mostly down to enjoying the downright evil reviews by one Yahtzee Croshaw. On a serious note, The Godfather is actually a rather enjoyable game, with an interesting (if stupidly named) control system.

Rather than the traditional idea of pressing buttons until you're foaming at the mouth or even the "radical" idea of using timed controls (I'm looking at you Assassin's Creed), The Godfather replaces the use of buttons in favour of controlling your mobster's hands using the right analogue stick. One problem of this is that the only way to do any melee attacks is to lock on to your victim, even if it's a bin in the street that rubbed you up the wrong way. The system takes some getting used to, which the game caters for by kneecapping all your victims for the first few missions so you can spend hours removing their teeth without sucking any bullets yourself.

The targetting system itself is very good, similar to Crackdown's system of locking on and selecting a body part to shoot, although it has its flaws. Firstly is the selection. For the live of me, I have no idea how it works. In a room full of enemies, the game chose to target someone far away in the corner of the screen picking his nose, rather than the bloke dead ahead getting very appreciative of his tommy gun. There is also the use of weakspots at the shoulders, knees and crotch (seriously, when I found this out I explored it extensively). A headshot is an instant kill, which is fair enough as long as you can actually hit your target, and the weakspots occassionally disappear.

The story is basically all the hits in the original film you didn't see and some you did (such as Fontane and his horse), with some dialogue lifted straight from it, which is nice. The rest of the game involves being not so gentlemanly and smashing merchant heads off cash registers to get them to pay protection money. This however, is genuinely fun, provided you don't push them too far leaving you to either kill them in any manner you choose, or running off like a little girl and pretending nothing happened. Although not as fun, the latter is the best way to make money.

So that's covered the driving, shooting and the missions. All I have left to say is that the Mobface thing is totally pointless to me as I can never be bother to make my own character because the graphic artists couldn't play nice with the writers and decided to be very lazy, and there's the fact that everytime I do try using one of these, I usually make some ugly Spanniard after playing around for hours on end.

All in all, I recommend The Godfather until Grand Theft Auto IV comes out, provided you can still stand the sight of PS2 "power".