Come clean – who’s been screwing with the time-stream?

Well?

It’s the only reason I can think of for this bastardised Mario clone on a SEGA system…

GAME is struggling with its creditors

As has been reported on pretty much every site in the whole internet, GAME and Gamestation are struggling to make ends meet. Weeks of heated speculation has culminated in EA pulling their support from the ailing retailer, citing concerns about being renumerated for the stock.

But you didn’t come here for that. This blog is in the style of the much-missed UK:Resistance and as such is the equivalent of an angry tramp wanking into a cup in the street while shouting boozy obscenities. So with that in mind, I went undercover…

Red Faction: Guerrilla – a belated review

Basically, it’s fucking awesome.

An open world destroy-em-up with little obligation to follow the moronic plot, Red Faction: Guerrilla pretty much lets you play the way you want to. It also has a fantastic physics system, utilising Geo-Mod 2.0 and Havok physics. You can play stealthy and sneaky, but there’s no more fun than blowing up a skyscraper or leaping off a cliff in a humvee and crashing through the roof of a building.

The guns are great, explosions are chunky and the vehicles are all overblown Tonka Toys. If you ever smashed your sibling’s sand-castle you need to play this game.

EA are still cunts

Image provided by a kind person from RPS. From the Bioware forums – click for bigness.

…I fucking despair. I really do. Fuck you, EA.

“Oh, I wanna hold your hand…”

It’s midnight. The moon flitters through the dense canopy of the Venezuelan jungle. You swat a mosquito off your sweaty brow as the heli touches down on the hastily-prepared LZ. You and your squad file out as shadows dance crazily from the light cast by the emergency flares.

A loud gunshot and Mercer goes down, a fine red mist spraying from a sizeable hole punched through his head.

“Press C to crouch,” barks your Squad Leader.

Time slows to a crawl, and you find to your horror that your feet are planted firmly to the ground. Bullets pass by your head in slow-motion, and the moment you crouch down the world lurches back to full-speed.

You notice that your Squad Leader has a massive neon FOLLOW sign hovering over his head. You assume it must be shellshock affecting your eyes. You both reach a steel gate, and your Squad Leader barks at you, “Press E repeatedly to pick the lock on the gate.”

*

Handholding in games is nothing new – tutorial levels are as old as the hills. But there’s been an increase in games designed to handhold all the way through. Games where you’re told, “Go there, do that and for god’s sake DON’T TOUCH THE RED BUTTON.” Even Skyrim, surely the antithesis of the hand-holder opens with a lengthy, slightly patronising interactive tutorial ripped straight out of an EA game from 2007.

But why?

Some gamers might mutter darkly about ‘casuals’ taking over their hobby, but it probably goes much further than that.

Nobody would deny it’s damn frustrating when you get most of the way through a level only to be shot in the back within piddling distance of the exit. Of course in games with quicksave you can spam away to your heart’s content, but not every game affords such luxury. So there’s probably a non-sinister reason behind it, most of the time – mitigating some of the game’s difficulty and explaining things so that even the most fumble-fingered feel comfortable.

But then there are those companies whose intentions are less honourable – those who merely wish for the player to whisk briefly through a minimally-interactive 4-hour-long corridor before being ejected the other side with an exhortation to buy the next instalment. I’m sure you can fill in the names for yourselves.

What’s the solution? There isn’t one – don’t be so asinine. It’s all horses for courses. If some people just want the shooty bang-bangs without frustration then let them be. It takes all sorts to make a world, and after all somebody has to clean the toilets.

Youtube is still THE place for intelligent debate…

…or maybe not.

Adventures in Skyrim: a review, of sorts

I recently got my hands on Skyrim. Via complex and arcane means I managed to source a copy without actually paying any money for it.

Note the hyperbolic praise on the cover, from such august and esteemed publications as Eurogamer (cough). Will it live up to the ALL CAPS HYPE? Click ‘Read More’ and prepare thyself for a vast wall of text, as the best way to review Skyrim is to tell it like a story. Imagine it being said in the voice of Ian McKellen if you like.