I just read an announcement about the Wii that made me think. I do a lot of thinking.

The Wii’s storage worked in an annoying way – not a lot of onboard space for downloaded games, applications and extra game content, but the ability to store things on an SD card. However – no ability to run things from the SD card, leading to having to copy things back to the minimal internal storage if you want to run them – a backup method rather than extending the internal storage.

Now they’ve changed their mind a bit and are releasing a new dashboard that will allow not only the use of SDHC cards (removing the previous 2gb limit on compatible card capacity) but will also allow software to be run from the cards, although save games will still have to stored in the internal memory. And thus did the thinking begin.

In ye olden dayes storage was all about the removable disk. I used to carry a 5 1/4″ floppy around in my school bag at all times, shipping my (not very good) programs between school and home, as well as between computers in the computer room (they’d ‘upgraded’ from a Spectrum network to BBC Bs by the time I started at a school with more than one computer). I dug out my Commodore 128D at the weekend, inspired by a visit to The National Museum of Computing, forced the lock on my old disc box, flicked through my games and had a quick blast on Winter Games and Magicland Dizzy. Removable media, even down to the industrially sized disk packs that were manhandled between mainframe readers, was the core of data storage. Then the hard-drive revolution happened and things became fixed in place – removable media was still around but after a transitionary period was very much the poor cousin. Networking rose in prominence and became The Way to exchange data, with CDs and DVDs being looked at as a necessary evil for those without fast connections, as a distribution media for commercial software or as a consumer backup solution. Even thatuse of optical media for backups has fallen away as external harddrives came to prominence as large reliable storage devices.

And then it changed again.

The external hard-drive got smaller and more portable. Ruggedised versions of drives, as well as enclosures built to protect the media inside, appeared and became affordable. Data density increased leading to smaller devices and Moore’s law kicked in on price, driving terabytes of portable storage down to affordable levels. USB sticks are now pretty much ubiquitious, almost being given away as freebies with cornflakes – cheap and universally compatible storage that fits into a much smaller package than any disk ever did, with a customisability that adds to their commodification as objects in themselves – how many times did you see people comparing disk labels and sleeves? Well, unless you were me and my mates…

Add into this the advent of the memory card – the natural successor to the disc. The explosion of digital cameras has rolled them out as something that the public are used to and the continued rise in capacity at the same time as an increasingly swiftly falling price per GB has left them as almost as cheap as memory sticks. So now we have Nintendo introducing the concept of having a stack of cards, full of games, sitting in a (Nintendo branded?) ‘disc box’ beside your console, ready for you to flickr through and load up the game of your choice.

Now, where have I seen this before?

My roster:

• Left leg, Sciatica. Game: Fallout 3. Who knew that sitting motionless, apart from the occasional spasmodic hand movement to unload yet another hunting rifle shell into the face of a Mirelurk, for upwards of 7 hours at a time on a sofa that rigidly enforces a text book bad posture would cause someone injury? My physiotherapist, it seems, who shook her head and tutted as I explained my addiction to the buggiest game in living memory. I now have 7 exercises to do on a daily basis in an attempt to loosen up my left buttock, the tenseness of which is throttling my sciatic nerve in a way that can only really be described as ‘fucking painful’. I generally forget to do my exercises. I am a bad person.
• Right leg, bruised foot. Game: Wii Fit. Having been diagnosed with sciatica (and not only the self internet diagnosis, which also involved a slipped disc and a potential knee cancer – hypochondria FTW!) I decided to compound the issue by buying Wii Fit. At first there was no issue, as I worked my way through onscreen yoga poses and did step aerobics, watched intently by the onscreen Mii-avatars of my entire family, whose vacant faces displayed a seemingly patronising look of encouragement. However, when I stepped off the balance board, put a wii-mote in my pocket and went for a virtual run I added to my continued catalogue of miseries. Who knew that running barefoot on a thin carpet covering a concrete floor could cause a debilitating injury? My physiotherapist certainly did, picking it out as a Wii-fit injury within moments of me limping into the hospital last week for my appointment. Luckily it seems that she is a newly emancipated gamer, loving her Wii-fit and Wii-sports to the extent that she had injured herself in an identical fashion. Rather than talk about my (rather fine) legs we rushed through the physiotherapy bit of the session and focused on the important ‘what games can be considered MAN games’ as her husband’s birthday was coming up and she wanted some inspiration…
• Left wrist, RSI like agony. Game: Puzzle Quest. My most recent injury and almost healed after a night of not sleeping on it. This is what happens to you when you decide to have a ‘quick go’ with a previous addiction and find your self curled into an uncomfortable ball, wrist jammed into the sofa at right angles, cradling your Gameboy in a claw like grip 2 hours after you were meant to be tucked up in bed waiting for the next morning’s glurgle-pluch-beep that indicates that coffee is waiting for you in the kitchen. It really hurt.

One useful thing about that final injury is that I can at least pin the blame for it on the evil that is Game.net’s mail order service. Tied in with reward points and offering free delivery, I pre-ordered a copy a of Mad World, the new Sega produced ultra-violent Running Man-alike, which they sent in the middle of last week hopefully for a release day (Friday 20th March) delivery. It is now Tuesday of the next week and I still haven’t had a chance to jam upwards of 20 road signs through the head of a single person. There is a gaping hole in my gaming life that can only be filled by road signs. Naughty Game.net, no biscuit. Or orders from me again. Especially as I have a branch of Game about 5 minutes walk away…

So, I now limp from place to place, occasionally waving my walking stick (a present to myself for my birthday, and pretty much useless for my current injuries, making me feel more than slightly a sham for having it. At least it did get me a seat on the tube on the one time I took it outside of the house. I need to get braver, take it with me and then wave it at the yoof. Although, as I live in Ealing our yoof is hidden away from the normal people by PCSOs with stern looks and exclusion orders. As is right and proper) at people I can see out of the window. My mother takes great delight in telling her friends that her son has been crippled by computer games and picks out Rock Band and my fake plastic drums as the aggressor. But as I repeatedly tell her this is far from the truth – Rock Band could never hurt me, apart from maybe break my heart.

Note to self: Buy new drum pedal, the old one is snapped in half and if I don’t start playing again soon then Rock Band will run off with someone else. That can’t happen.

The Wii doesn’t get a lot of love these days. Games companies seem to mainly see it as a breeding ground for the newly emancipated gamer – people who haven’t necessarily got the years of playing that has turned them into cynical XBox owners, sniping at the PS3’s apparent lack of content. So, it’s shovelware galore, with dodgy film tie-ins, internet mini-game ports and now, showing that Nintendo aren’t beyond trying to make a fast buck, rereleases of GameCube games with gesture controls grafted on top. So, when something comes along that tries to buck that trend my little ears (the ones hidden beneath the licensed pointed rubber Link ear extensions that I always wear when playing with my Wii) perk up.

I like light gun shooting games. From the days of my dad’s BBC Micro, where we had a ‘tap em up’ using a light pen, to Operation Thunderbolt and House of the Dead in the arcade (never finished the first level of HotD, but completed Operation Thunderbolt during an otherwise rather boring holiday to Majorca during my ‘rebellious’ teen years) to House of the Dead 2 on my Dreamcast (never got past level 2), there is a strange pull that giving me a moulded plastic facsimile of a weapon and pointing it at an oversized television incites. Ever since my abject failure at all shooting games, a situation that ties in nicely to my general mediocrity at computer games, has become to much too bear I’ve avoided the light gun shooter, preferring to remember my Operation Thunderbolt glory days rather than humiliate myself with another running out of credits before a first level’s boss. However, as my Wii has been sitting in the corner pining at me (well, flashing its slot in a “There’s new stuff to download! Go on, turn me on. I’ll promise I’ll be good and not get in the way. PLEASE PLAY WITH ME” kind of way) I decided to give it a bit of love and grab the new House of the Dead – Overkill.

I read an interview with the creators over on the British Gaming Blog and they’ve taken a slightly different approach from the previous games. Rather than have cheesy dialogue which people laugh at despite an effort to make it serious they have now embraced the ridiculousness and taken things to the next level. Tarantino and Rodriguez, especially Mr Rodriguez with his Planet Terror, have a lot to answer for and despite the claims in the BGB article of all the various films that the dev team worked there way through to put together the game you can see its main influence prominently placed upon its blood stained sleeve.

The game is very much as you’d expect – zombies come at you, you shoot them in the face, their heads explode, more zombies take their place. This hangs together in a framework of over the top exploitation parody, with painfully stereotyped characters, a plot that makes no sense, articifially distressed visuals (thankyou messrs Tarantino and Rodriguez) and even a borrowing of the Planet Terror ‘Missing Scene’ conceit. Despite the potential for this to descend into a painful bowel of awfulness it manages to be so deliberately shocking (although my unfortunate inability to be shocked by anything apart from that one special scene in the 3rd season of The League of Gentlemen does mean I am guessing a bit here) that it strangely works. Whether it be the appearance of the female lead, Varla Guns, wearing little but a belt and cleavage, the constant cliches falling from Isaac Washington’s mouth (along with a stream of ‘oedipal expletives’) or the painful dialogue stretched over scenes of characters peeing down their legs or ‘returning to the womb’ it pulls together well and provides a nice surround for the rather limited, but fun, gameplay. Added to the visual style and story is an excellent soundtrack of horror b-movie tunes providing enough ambience behind the bangs, thuds and sticky explosions to keep you amused even between headshots.

Added to the Wii’s plasticky arsenal comes the HOTD HandCannon – listed at £15 but generally knocked down to a tenner to try and show people that there is some level of value left in the world – a heavy duty plastic shell to slot your wii-mote into. It’s not a bad bit of kit – it’s solidly made, the remote doesn’t rattle around and it just about fits in my hand – and matches the game quite well, looking vaguely like the in game hand-cannon, a very expensive in-game power-up that I’ve yet to get. It’s also not too badly weighted, despite having the heavy wii-mote up front, leading to a mildly knackered middle finger that the whole weight will rest on and try to pivot around. I was going to whinge about the reloading controls, but just had another go and found that an upward tilt of the gun does that – a rather nice mechanism, even if I couldn’t find it anywhere in the light on detail but otherwise excellent and amusing manual.

The gameplay is solid, the graphics very much Wii-like and there are slowdowns from time to time that really hamper gameplay. However, on ordinary mode I still managed to drag my not-great-at-games arse through the entire game, and I didn’t even have to use too many of the infinite continues (each continue taking half of your remaining points – I’m not sure what happens when you get to 1pt left…). So, it’s easy. After your first run through you get a chance to go again with ‘deleted scenes’, more zombies and limited continues, but it’s still not all that hard and even with the second run it won’t take more than a few hours to rumble through it all. It does have a pretty good ending sequence, featuring one the most worrying sound effects I’ve heard in a while as well as some of the best dialogue in the game, and it pretty much makes up for the comparative let-down of the final boss. There’s enough fun in the gameplay that even if you are going to skip all of the previously seen cut-scenes there’s something to go back to.

Overall a nice enough game, very much added to by its style and soundtrack but pulled down by the technical limitations of the system. However, there’s not many games on the Wii that even approach an 18 certificate, as this has proudly emblazoned on its box, and on that merit alone it’ll fly off the shelves. Luckily it does have enough to back up that inevitable popularity.

The “one in, one out” policy I am currently operating on my games shelf (a rule that I will break next week with my purchase of Rock Band 2, although I am justifying that by claiming that Rock Band is not just a game but a lifestyle choice…) was activated a couple of weeks back when I traded in the quite excellent Dead Space for one of the most eagerly awaited games of recent memory, amongst gamers of my vintage at least, Fallout 3. The original was one of the first games I played through to completion, even if it did take me almost a year to get into it enough to actually play it. The second was duly purchased, but I couldn’t get into it and it’s still sitting pretty much unplayed somewhere in my flat. The announcement of the third in the series filled me with worry – the original studio had disbanded, much to the dismay of Fallout fans, and the project was taken on by Bethesda, purveyors of Daggerfall, Morrowind and Oblivion, games that annoyed me enough that I gave up on them faster than Force Unleashed. Suffice it to say, my worries and doubts were all for nought – Fallout 3 is an excellent game.

I got home at about midday after buying the game, made myself some lunch and sat down to have a quick play. For the first hour or so I grumbled a bit about a few annoyances but then all of a sudden it was dark outside, my hands had seized up due to the cold, as the heating had gone off, and I needed to visit the bathroom in a somewhat urgent manner. It was 7:30pm – about 7 hours of play without noticing. Despite its many flaws, which I will enumerate shortly in my usual fashion, it is one of the most immersive and addictive games I have played in years.

The scenario is similar to before: The world is in ruins after a series of cataclysmic nuclear exchanges. However, humanity lives on both in the ruins and in hermetically sealed vaults, filled as the end of the world was chimed. You, in this iteration, are a citizen of Vault 101, known for never having opened its doors since their sealing, but a series of events forces you out into the outside world – the Capital Wasteland, the ruined remains of Washington DC, and from here the adventures begin…

As with the previous iterations there is a main quest, but as you interact with the rich world of the wasteland numerous other side quests appear, varying in difficulty and length, as well as the environment itself throwing at you monsters to kill and locations to explore. The map is large with at least a hundred named locations to find (with a ‘Find 100 locations’  XBox achievementto tempt your inner explorer) and there are hours of entertainment to be found in simply wandering.

Graphically it is quite beautiful, with the Capital Wasteland rendered in glorious detail as day turns to night and shadows move across the land. The centre of the city is complete with the landmark buildings, in the expected states of disrepair, and the out of town wastes are put together in an intelligent manner with hills and the dried up remains of the Potomac providing scenic views as you search for cover to avoid rampaging super mutants. There are towns on decaying freeway bridges, settlements in underground stations, the remains of satellite uplink stations pointing their dead dishes towards the sky, and countryside dotted with the remains of civilisation ready to be explored.

It’s not without its problems, immediately noticeable in the ill-advised third person view. The default view is that of the FPS – over the gun, through the eyes of the hero. However, with a tap of the left shoulder button you zoom through the back of your head and see yourself from above and behind. At this point realism disappears at anything over a slow walk (the slow walk used in the gameplay videos put out as trailers), as with any greater speed the connection of foot and ground is broken and you skate across town and country in a rather immersion breaking fashion. The first person view is not without its problems, with its totally smooth movement feeling especially strange after Isaac Clarke’s loping run in Dead Space. However, as long as you don’t use the third person mode, easier said than done with its annoying button assignment, you can get used to the motion in FPS mode and the game doesn’t suffer too much.

Despite its various FPS trappings, this is at heart an RPG. Taking its lead from the engines behind Morrowind and Oblivion, it combines the first person viewpoint and realtime attacks with a stats based approach to hits and damage. You have the traditional base traits, customisable with your appearance during the “birth and childhood” intro to the game, along with a pile of skills which can be specialised as you level up as you play. On top of those you receive an additional “perk” at each levelling, giving you immediate stat gains and special effects (from animals not attacking you, to experience points clocking up faster, to a mysterious trenchcoated stranger sometimes appearing in a fight and gunning down your opponent with his inexhaustable .44 magnum). Experience points are earned by completing quests, killing enemies and successful skill usage (from picking locks to disarming mines and coercing people) and tick up at a good rate as you progress through the missions.

The key to the combination of FPS and RPG is VATS (acronyms rule!) – The Vault-tec Assisted Targeting System. While you can fire your weapons at will in true FPS fashion, you can also drop into an “action point” governed mode in which you can use up those action points by selecting areas of your target to attack, each with a corresponding percentage likelihood to hit, and queuing up attacks. On clicking the ‘go’ button the action drops into a cinematic camera mode showing the outcome of your attacks, as well as any counter attacks, occasionally (and more frequently as the game goes on) leading to slow motion cataclysmic damage to the various extremities of your target and, sometimes, yourself. Action points tick up slowly when you are outside of VATS, whether you are running around avoiding your enemies or finishing them off. VATS was often quoted as a divisive factor in previews by fans of Bethesda’s games and the original games in this series both, but I reckon it works well in practise, combining the old combat system with the new gaming perspective at the same time as bringing in the now almost obligatory cinematic scenes. It takes some getting used to, with shots in FPS mode often not hitting despite being seemingly on target due to the stats based targeting operating under the covers, and VATS mode sometimes indicating you can hit a target when your weapon is hidden behind cover, but once you are used to it it becomes an integral part of the way you play, especially as later perks make it a continually more powerful tool.

The missions are at the core of what makes the game, with the main story line driving you along and side missions popping up as welcome distractions from the rising intensity of the plot. It’s not the most surprising of plots, treading the path of many a post-apocalyptic story and mining the last two games quite extensively, but it rumbles along gaining speed and dragging you along with it. It does helpfully let you out from time to time to explore the world and work on the other missions dotted around and this is the main strength of the game. The large map hides towns, villages and caravans as well as Vaults and military bases, all full of booty, as well as bad guys, monsters and allies. Sometimes you’ll crest a hill only to see the wasteland stretching away into the distance, with ruined towers and buildings all around, sometimes you’ll turn a corner into a town and see a scripted set piece setting up a mission playing out in front of you, sometimes you’ll just find a bunch of skeletons and debris that hint at what was happening before the apocalypse. Not all of the missions are excellent, with a couple of annoying fetch and carry ones thrown in for good measure, but when they are good they are really good. From the surreal high point of Tranquility Lane (a rather good chunk of science fiction) to the tedious low point of The Waters of Life (a boring, overly extended fetch and carry mission), they keep you eager to finish (and get the loot and achievement attached to the succesful completion of each) and seek out the next one.

They are not without their problems though, with my completing at least one mission before having properly starting it (I accidentally found the mission completion location and finished it without being assigned it) and the flexibility in the number ways of finishing missions, with most offering at least one way to finish both with and without the murder of innocents, does sometimes lead to you accidentally finishing a mission in a different way to the one you were aiming to by accidentally performing a mission finishing action (be it paying someone off or taking their head off with a shotgun).

I’ve now played through the main storyline and there is one further problem – due to the ability to wander around and level up at your own speed, as well as dipping into the story when you feel like it, I’d hit the level cap by the time I’d hit the end of the game. Tooled up with the best armour and weapons in the game the cataclysmic final mission was a bit of a stroll, taking minimal effort or tactical thought. On top of that, when the final mission is completed (in, as usual, one of a variety of fashions) the game simply ends. You get the traditional cut scene (stuck together from a variety of different potential pieces, based on the choices you made during the game) and some credits and are then dropped back to the title screen ready to start again. Luckily I had a save game not too far back from the end and have now returned to the wastelands to explore and finish the rest of the game, but the abrupt end (especially after the lack of challenge) did grate somewhat.

The mission system along with my issues with the graphics are just minor annoyances. The game is also rather buggy on my XBox (with reports suggesting that it’s the same on PC and PS3 as well), with numerous occurrences of monsters and people being stuck in walls and rocks, and it also suffers occasionally from horrendous slow down, sometimes lasting for several juddering minutes, although that has yet to interrupt a battle. There are numerous random graphical glitches, but they hit their peak for me when I was exploring the wasteland and saw the effect in the video below:

Displaying region bounding boxes and slowing down massively is not fun. Luckily I had a large super mutant following me around as a body guard and he gunned down the radscorpions that decided to try and eat me just as this hit, but it does seem that the game might have benefited from a bit more QA (as is so often the case). The PC has a first patch out already and I’ve heard tales of both and XBox and PS3 one going through the various approval processes at the moment.

Also, the controls are occasionally inconsistent, with X sometimes being a confirm button and sometimes being a cancel button, the shoulder buttons paging in some inventory views but not others and a general confusion of function on occasion. The interface is sometimes clunky, with no immediate cancel button in dialogue, and occasional unexpected losses of control of your character for “especially important” plot points but not for others. However, you don’t hit the graphical glitches all that often and the others fade to being a background niggle, as the rest of the game delivers the experience in such a manner that a few mere annoyances barely chip away at it.

With the game now “over” it’s quite scary that I am continuing to play as much as I am. I’ve been advising easily addicted acquaintances to avoid buying the game for now, having seen its dangerous effects on my sleeping patterns (Leading to my standing statement of “There is no sleep, only Fallout” when people ask me why I am looking tired). I suspectthat my sustained playing sessions have heavily contributed to my current inability to walk (maybe due to a slipped disc or bad posture induced sciatica – wikipedia is not a friend to hypochondria), and I’ve seen several cow-orkers dragged into its tempting maw. It’s a good game mechanic made into a great game by the story and missions, but pulled back from the brink by a few QA issues and some dodgy interface decisions. However, when I close my eyes all I see is the ruin of the Washington Monument lit by the ignition flame of a rocket leaping from the arms of a gnarled super mutant. I think that means I’m addicted.

Links:

Quick synopsis is that it’s Event Horizon. Slightly longer synopsis is that it’s Event Horizon meeting Aliens. Still slightly longer synopsis is that you are an engineer (Isaac Clarke…) on a repair ship going to help fix the comms array on a planet cracking mining space ship that has gone dark When you get there you find things are not as it seems. ie. You know the story. It twists and turns in the ways that you expect, but there is enough there to drag you on through the game and give the excuses the designers want for dragging you back through the same areas of the ship a couple of times, each time with a twist on what you’re meant to do. It has mad doctors, relgious cults, conspiracies within conspiracies and everything else you’d expect. It also has a level called “Betrayed”, which you notice pretty quickly if you look through the XBox achievements for the game, which shows the level at which the developers care if you work out the story in advance. The story had a few comics people behind it, with Warren Ellis helping out way back at the dawn of time and Anthony Johnston building the final version as well as the accompanying comic (with Ben Templesmith on art), and Jimmy Palmiotti and Justin Gray putting together the screen play for the accompanying anime.

Firstly, it is pretty. I hit upon a few graphics glitches, but as far as badly lit space ship games go this is up with the finest. Some of the set pieces are really impressive and the reveals as doors open to giant spaces do occasionally stun. There are lots of little touches that make it: Your inventory and all the in game video communications are projected by your suit and therefore being in game objects – as you rotate the camera around your character they stay still; The backgrounds have the obligatory scrawled bloody messages and defaced motivational posters from the ship’s captain (in true gaming tradition the faces of the developers appear all over the shop, with the producer that I met holding a bucket of veggies on a poster).

The sound is really very good, with the XBox’s surround capabilities being used quite heavily with drips, whispering voices, shifting piles of limbs and monsters jumping out from all around the sound field. The music flows from tension building plinks and plonks to full on fight music as necromorphs (as the baddies are suddenly called later in the game) jump out of the darkness and try and turn you into small chunky pieces of jaded engineer. Walking through the piles of limbs that you often find lieing around the deck causes them to scatter with squishy thumps, often masking the sound of the many taloned thing stalking up behind you. Suffice to say it’s quite atmospheric. Set pieces (whether it be a randomly swinging body, a movement seen in the distance or monsters jumping out of piles of corpses) are punctuated with stabbing sounds from the orchestra and occasionally they’ll throw in a tension breaking explosion of orchestral sound, or a burst the silence with a static crack before one of your surviving teammates appears on the projected holo-screen to feed you the next slice of plot, all when you least expect it. It all makes you a bit twitchy. Moving into the vacuum kills all sound apart from things going on inside your suit, giving muffled breathing, grunts of effort and muted screams as monsters hack away at you as your air slowly gives out – despite having a projected “Air remaining” meter on the back of your suit it’s often easier to judge how much you have left by the raggedness of Isaac’s breathing as you run away from yet another stabby thing. There are occasional bugs, with monsters appearing without their musical cues or fight music hanging around too long, but these strangely just add to the atmosphere and add more unpredictability to the game.

The controls work well, although even after finishing the game I still had issues using the stasis (obligatory time-slowing mechanic) and kinesis (obligatory gravity gun) modules, as well as using medikits accidentally, a side effect of having too many things to operate and not enough buttons. Standardly walking around you can’t use your weapons, they only come into play after holding the left trigger to enter aiming mode. In walking mode fire and secondary fire punch and stamp, and the stasis button uses medikits – an issue when you accidentally let go of the aim button and launch into a slow swinging punch or stamp animation as a monster starts slicing off your face and very annoying when you use up your stasis energy by repeatedly trying to use medikits while shooting the faces off the same monsters. You play the game in an over the shoulder 3rd person view, and you move quite sluggishly, adding to the tension when you get rushed by the later bad guys and to the frustration as you laboriously try to turn towards the thing nibbling at your ankles.

Death is, as it probably should be, annoying in the game. It occasionally sneaks up randomly, it is sometimes obviously on it’s way, but however it comes it is followed by loading. Lots of loading. Worryingly long loading. The save points are generous and autosaving checkpoints are all over the place, but you still have to wait a fair chunk of time between each respawn. In some sections this gets very annoying, but surprisingly you don’t die all that often – a generous supply of medikits and stores along with carefully placed respite between the fights with creatures are well designed to stop the loading screen appearing too much.

Monster-wise there isn’t much variation – three or four standard enemies with faster and harder versions of themselves as you move through the game, a tanklike thing, an immobile enemy generator, a recurring regenerating super beast and “zombie makers” that start turning the dead against you. One of the latter categories has triggered my not particularly deeply hidden creepy crawly fear and if I knew what to call them I would have shouted their name rather than “HEADCRABS!” as I ran around the corridors to try and get away from them. Each level ends with a boss battle of sorts, with our friend the regenerating guy taking on the role a couple of times (leading to puzzle based mechanisms to stop him, as normal damage is just regenerated), a Metroid Prime style patterned attacker half way through and at the end, and set pieces involving hordes rushing you in enclosed spaces for most of the rest of the levels.

Gameplay is very much the standard “go to X and get part Z for area Y” with the player entering and exiting pretty much every level via the ship’s central tram, the remaining car of which you get working in level one. The developers have claimed that even though it’s linear there’s loads more of the ship to explore, but I didn’t see much of that despite taking every single corridor I could and trying to properly clear out each level of monsters before moving on to the next. There’s a handy built in GPS-like system that projects a blue line onto the floor for a few seconds to tell you where you’re meant to go next, as well as the obligatory confusing 3d map, and there was little in the levels that I could see that you weren’t forced through at some point or another.

The main innovation in the fighting is the way that the weapons work. They are almost all about some form of shaped damage, with the Line Gun and Plasma Cutter shooting in horizontal lines, the Ripper shooting a chainsaw like disc, the Pulse rifle cutting along its thin line of sustained fire and so on. Early in the game you are given a large push towards the secret of playing successfully – cut off the limbs of the monsters. Take off a leg and they go down to one knee. Take off another and they drag themselves along by their arms, take off their arms and by then they are generally dead. Shoot off missile shooting appendages to stop things attacking you, chop off heads to confuse, take off arms to stop them hitting you – the game happily caters to your dissection needs, awarding achievements to acknowledge your amputation skills. It leads to a more refined game than the standard hold the trigger down and fill the enemy with ammo style, a factor often emphasised by the lack of ammo that can be found around, leading to breakneck runs through the ship’s corridors looking for an energy pack or the frantic grabbing and firing with kinesis of whatever objects you can find lieing around, be they exploding canisters, chairs or the torsos of the crew.

That’s all mainly good so far, but what annoyed me? One of my favourite pet peeves – the misjudged “vehicle” section. I put the quotes around “vehicle” as it’s not really to do with actual vehicles but breaks from the core gameplay which detract from the game in general – the tank sections in Call of Duty and the boss fights in Force Unleashed are now joined by the asteroid defence guns in Dead Space.

They may only be used twice in the whole game (the second time being a lot easier than the first) but breaking away from the claustrophobic 3rd person atmosphere to be strapped into a deck gun and shoot asteroids (or a big boss thing) with slightly dodgy controls does not strike me as a good plan. It doesn’t seem to have any place in the game and adds another game mechanic that we don’t need. Yes, I was quite crap at it and it took me more attempts to do than anything else in the game, but it almost caused me to stop and give up despite enjoying everything else.

My second annoyance is the final boss battle. The game twists and turns its way through some not particularly unobvious twists and turns in the last level, and you get a big old final boss. In my opinion the entire fight section is broken and here is why. Yes, this is probably a spoiler, but I see it more as forewarning:

1. You pop out of a building, walk round a corner and are then knocked to the ground in a cinematic sequence by the emergence of the boss. A ten/twenty cinematic sequence follows that cheaply finishes off a chunk of the story and then you are thrown into the battle. If you die then you are treated to a cinematic of you corpse being rendered into so much finely chopped mince, again taking a grindingly long time, and are then returned to the building after the traditionally eon-like reloading of the level. When you emerge you have to sit through all the unskippable cinematics again, and as you get better at the easier pieces of boss dispatch, but not at the actual final dispatch, you end up having significantly more time in cinematics and loading than you do playing. This is not Metal Gear Solid and thus should not be.
2. The boss himself is very similar to the guy from Level 6 – THE LEVIATHAN!!1! This is no bad thing, Lev (as his mates call him) is a classic Metroid Prime style boss, as mentioned earlier, and has several stages to taking him down, learning the patterns of his attacks and taking out the weak points. The final boss, even with numerous deaths on my part, took less time to take down than the one attempt I needed to close out level 6, and only adds challenge through breaking the controls. One of the little minigame-like pieces that pops up during the game (but that isn’t as annoying as the asteroid gun) is when a giant appendage grabs you on opening a door and drags you down a corridor towards its gaping maw. You then have to shoot a big yellow bulging bit of tentacle a few times until it explodes and you are left alone with the bits of the appendage fading around you (unlike every other severed body part in the game… Consistency please, gentlemen). The breaking of the control scheme here is that as you are on your back being dragged along the axes of movement for your aiming are not quite the same as normal, making it slightly difficult to aim, which works. The final boss takes this to the next level, hanging you upside down and throwing you around making aiming totally random before dropping you into it’s more in the already mentioned laboriously slow death scene. This does not work.

So on finishing the game the strongest emotion I felt was relief that I didn’t have to piss about with the final stupid boss again, a let down after a rather good final level of the game (very linear with a series of puzzle rooms, but still fun and scary). For a mediocre game player like myself it took eleven hours of gameplay to knock the game on the head. A well crafted eleven hours of play across twelve levels, but it did feel like I’d tapped pretty much the whole game on the first run through.

However, that all said, the first thing I did after finishing the game was to start playing again – I kept all my upgraded weapons and items and walked through the first five levels of the game in superquick time, further upgrading everything and slicing the monsters up like the inexperienced killing machines they now were in comparison to myself. However, midnight then tolled and I packed up the game to be traded in the next day. I recommend it to anyone who likes a bit of twitchy jumping and a good, but far from perfect, shooting game, but Fallout 3 was out and I have a one in one out policy on games at the moment. I may well pick it up second hand a few months down the line and work my way up to “Impossible level”, but after one play through it has now faded to a fairly standard shooting game with a few nice tricks.

Piccies pinched from Team XBox

The demo didn’t particularly impress, with a dodgy quick time event at the end (something that I have ranted about in the past), but after a couple more plays I found the Stormtrooper throwing mechanic compelling enough that I thought I’d give it a go.

First impressions were good – you stomp through Kashykk as Darth Vader in the prologue, throttling and slicing up wookies all over the place. The force powers seemed to work well in your super-powered Vader form, although the duel against the Jedi at the end seemed to be entirely different to the rest of the game and also rather crap – switching away from the normal 3rd person perspective to a further away fixed position camera, leading to a lack of depth cues that means you bounce around like a loon slashing at an enemy that’s 10 yards in front or behind you. However, it did pop up the best achievement that I’ve seen on the XBox so far:

Thank you Chad Vader. Anyways, the next level is the one from the demo (although without the Vader-like superpowers) and here we start seeing the problems. The force powers aren’t as powerful as you may want, which is probably a good thing. However, the camera is broken, the controls are sluggish and unpredictable, the difficulty is entirely random and overall it’s a bit crap. The much vaunted storyline isn’t too bad, with a nice twist on the beginnings of the rebellion, but the love interest that the pre-release interviews pushed feels tacked on, almost as if they excised the storyline that might have actually set it up. My other big issue is the loading – loading levels is fine, but every time you switch a menu it sits there for 10 seconds loading up the next screen. Does it really take that long to load up an unadorned set of options?

However, I’m still playing it. You get to pick up and throw stormtroopers around, zap people with force lightning and saber them upside the head. The animations on the moves may be all just a little too long, leading to the sluggish feel in the gameplay, but they do look quite pretty, and bisected droids fall happily at your feet, even if all your other enemies remain prudishly intact.

So, in summary – shit and disappointing. But, as with many games I will try and slog my way through, although I am already getting bored with it after only a couple of days. There’s only so much that bashing a Stormtrooper against a wall can cause me to forgive.