Blood Bowl is a direct video game adaptation of the table top game. Two game modes are available in single player, Classic and Blitz. Classic is the table top game. Nearly every action requires a die roll based on the player’s stats, out of Movement Allowance, Armor, Strength and Agility. Every race has different median stats for their players and ‘classes’, as well as different starting talents. The goal is to score touch downs to win the game. Touch downs are achieved through running or passing the ball down the field. Murdering the entirety of the other team is optional, but highly recommended because it makes scoring easier. Blitz adds a number of micro-management options, like negotiating contracts, buying player equipment, and so on. It also allows the game to be played in real time, which is stressful, hectic, and awesome.

A lot of care has gone into some of the game’s details. Each stadium has stands full of cheering spectators who cheer and boo at the appropriate moments. Two commentators create a dialogue based on what takes place during a match. However, the commentary is preset phrases and I had heard every single comment possible after playing three or four matches. Fortunately, there is an option to turn off commentary. Every race has a unique touch down dance, but not unique animations for catching, passing or tackling. The most customizable races are Chaos and Skaven (rat men), who have an additional ‘Mutation’ field for their leveling players. Given enough experience, a Skaven or Demon player may develop something like additional limbs to aid in ball handling, or tentacles which create an additional hindrance when an opposing player attempts to break away or run past a player with tentacles. The mutations do appear on character models, altering their physical appearance. The largest disappointment in the aspect of models and animations is some of the games more vivid incidents are hand waved away by text boxes. “Angry spectators storm the field and incapacitate some of your players” is read from a few lines of text, and the match simply begins with people unconscious.

The rule set as a direct adaptation poses a problem. On the player’s turn, they are allowed to perform any number of actions until they choose to end their turn, or a roll is failed which results in turning over to the opposing side’s turn. Un-opposed movement is the only safe action. My biggest complaint regarding this system is the die rolls required to move the ball. Passing the ball and catching the ball are two separate actions and require two separate die rolls. Distance is not factored into the two separate rolls, so there is a chance that a player will fail at handing the ball off to another player even if the player is standing right next to them. I will never begin to comprehend how it makes any sense. In my imagination, I see the ball carrier attempt to hand the ball to someone, someone that is not paying attention, or someone that slaps the ball out of their hand in order to be a jerk. Picking the ball off the pitch is another die roll. I recall one game very fondly, where a freshly kicked ball at the start of the round ended up at my catcher’s feet, who proceeded to chase the ball around the field because it took him three turns to pick the damn thing up.

Teams are given a point value based on the average level of the players on the team. In order to even things out, money is awarded to a team if it plays another team with a higher point value. This money can be used to benefit the team, buy penalties against the opposing team, or buy a star player. The star players are absolute badasses, and thus brings me to my favorite moment of playing Blood Bowl. My team, Dwarves, could only be matched physically by Orcs. The opposing team hired a star player, an Orc so strong that it required me to keep three of my linebackers on him to prevent him from doing whatever he wanted. The game was in its second half and I was barely winning. The star player kept knocking my players unconscious. After knocking out two of my dudes, the star player tried to break free from my last line backer. My line backer, level one and totally pissed, hit the star player so hard that it broke his back and took him out of the game. I cheered so hard.

To me, Blood Bowl was an emotional roller coaster. Failed rolls brought absolute anger and fury, while rolls that passed phenomenally made me absolutely ecstatic. I never played multiplayer, but only because I felt the capacity for the game to make me angry would be multiplied online. It did get me rather excited to play a sports game, and I enjoyed it immensely.

Cash Cow’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (PS3 | 360 | PC)

I had this five days early. Did I review it then? No! I am a stupid man who does not like selling you games. Anyway, I was surprised by how much I liked this game, given the sheer amount of hype. The single player campaign is filled with superb scripting, which it doesn’t forget toward the middle and end of levels like most games. The Call of Duty series has this tendency to go for dramatic scenes where you get knocked on your ass and picked up by another member of your squad… they play to it to extreme absurdity here. Not a chapter goes by where you don’t find yourself tossed on your ass by an explosion and picked up by a screaming Keith David.

The deathmatch mode is surprisingly underwhelming in most cases. Occasional excitement, but easily overshadowed by the extremely entertaining Special Ops missions which will have you and a partner teaming up to take on goal-oriented side missions on maps from the campaign mode. They start off kind of challenging and quickly become raging infernos, akin to being fed through a meat grinder made of rape. Addictive and time-consuming.

This game is pretty much kind of the shooter heap, which is a nifty accomplishment considering the genre fatigue we’re facing. I mean hell, we have a shooter starring Doogie fucking Howser on the market now.

Jade Raymond’s Assassin’s Creed 2 (PS3 | 360 | PC | DS | PSP)

Well look who started fucking listening to peoples’ feedback! For a game that uses the same engine as its sucky predecessor, Assassin’s Creed 2 takes the scalpel and a surgeon’s precision, using it to carve out most of what made the first game an experience in tedium and pausing the game just to jerk off to relieve the intense boredom.

Where to start with that list. Combat, while still clunky, is no longer limited to the mostly-effective counterattack. Dodges, counters, throws, and even (GASP!) regular attacks are now pretty useful. The stealth mechanic has been changed so that jogging is no longer a crime in the old world. The long stretches of pointless landscape have been curtailed. Even the climbing is a bit sped up!

Worth a look, especially if you liked the first game, but not limited to people that dull.

Martin Scorcese’s Grand Theft Auto IV: Episodes of Liberty City (360)

On one hand, I dig that you don’t need Grand Theft Auto IV to play this… judging from the volume of used copies on my trade-in shelf, everybody has long since gotten tired of GTA4. And no wonder, it was rather limited after one playthrough. I also like the fact that they only coddle you for a few missions, ramping up the challenge for veterans. This game can get pretty damn hard, pretty damn quick.

Some of the gameplay mechanics they added don’t feel too tacked-on, either. They blend into the existing gameplay you’re familiar with and compliment it nicely.

But the problem is, like I said, Grand Theft Auto IV just isn’t cutting it anymore. Maybe it’s the gameplay that updated for the next gen but didn’t bother adding anything new. Maybe it’s the fact that there’s a scriptwriter who can’t GET THE FUCK OVER THE RELUCTANT CRIMINAL SCHTICK. Seriously, here’s your next GTA title, Rockstar: Grand Theft Auto: Every Time I Think I’m Out, They Pull Me Back In! Sound familiar?

And lastly, how can you create a game called The Ballad of Gay Tony and NOT have the character play as Gay Tony? You would have been instant Youtube stars with all the mash-ups of the player nailing dudewhores. Instead I’m playing another dick with a permanent scowl. Great.

Remember San Andreas? I do. Get back to it, Rockstar.

Also, no matter how the games get sequentially, radio personality Laslow keeps getting more and more shrill and unfunny. The guy’s real life radio show is pretty damn good, but in-game he’s just losing it.

This time, though, there was extra horror. I stood there, not daring to move a muscle lest I release the 37-eyed, five-assed horrors that lay before me in digitial form, exposed by the semi-stuck lid of the chronologically confused Dreamcast.

As a general rule, I try to avoid touching a Shenmue disc for two reasons. It’s not that I’m that freaked out by the game… okay, I am. Growing up on a steady diet of video games full of visceral thrills and excitement and then playing Shenmue is like finding out your best childhood friend is one of those intense anime fans. Sure, they were polite enough to never tell you, but now you’re stuck with a head full of mental images of them dressing up as gay ninjas with day-glo wigs and furiously masturbating to violent rape comics while haphazardly waving around the shittiest katana money can buy at that cutlery store near the mall food court.

How awful is this game? Despite some bright spots, Shenmue belongs in the firm, sweaty grasp of parents who want to convince somebody to ban games. Not because the content is objectionable, but because it’s a tutorial on the merits of doing anything else at all besides playing video games, including murdering cats or Santa. The game is so horribly written and implemented that the only people who like it are people who wish fervently that they’re angsty Japanese teenagers, exploring one of the most boring towns on the planet. Except when it’s having freakish outbreaks of violence from punk kids and a completely out of place mafia.

I know, I know. You like this game. Here’s the thing, you suck and so does everybody who agrees with you. So I might as well start where the inevitable backlash will begin.

“It’s so epic!”

No… no it’s not. In fact, it’s no more epic than Sesame Street, and not nearly as well-written. Take the basic trappings; a revenge story with a young man trying to find his father’s murderer. Basic, classic, really depends on what you do with it. The revenge motif is a blank template that has seen many interesting variation.

Dear reader,

NONE OF THOSE VARIATIONS MAKE YOU SPEND OVER TWENTY HOURS TRYING TO GET A FUCKING BOAT TICKET.

Oh, that’s epic. Epically stupid. Epically boring. And don’t try arguing the incidentals. The first rule of writing is that you should summarize your plot in one or two sentences and THEN see how it sounds. Just break it down to the clear essential drive. Shenmue fails before it even begins, in this regard.

For those of you who haven’t traded your souls to Naruto, I’ll explain. Your father is killed. You swear revenge. You quickly find out the killer is Chinese and is returning to his country. You vow to follow him.

I tried playing the game again to get a fresh impression. Really I did. But then the notebook popped up to remind me what I was supposed to do… this being so fucking epic… and a few minutes later Mike came by to investigate the crying noises. I waved the controller at the screen.

“Sailors hang out in bars at night.”

Either this game really sucks or my Dreamcast is trying to induct me into the Inverted Fraternity. Eh, I’ll give the system the benefit of the doubt, what with all the other glaring flaws the game possesses. First, it’s boring. There’s a day/night cycle that goes by painfully slowly, which is a good thing in most games as it gives you time to finish the most tasks during a cycle (hands up those of you who had the slow-down song active in Majora’s Mask CONSTANTLY), but here it’s a nuisance as the pacing of the game is absolute shit when you realize a lot of the obstacles to what passes for progress can only be passed during a certain time of day… usually the same time or earlier, making you waste a day in Shenmue’s various arcades, slot houses, and other activities that make a nice side dish but quickly drag the fuck on when you’re forced to go to them just to pass the time.

The game makes you find ways to distract yourself because it just can’t keep up with you doing more than one or two things a day.  In fact, I ran into about three or four events in a row that made you wait until the next day to continue. For a story to be engaging in any medium, you have to have pacing appropriate to the field you’re working in. The idea that it’s acceptable to toss you out of the story for a prolonged period of time and say “Hey, go entertain yourself” is an interruption of freedom of choice that should be pointed at and scorned. That any of the assorted time wasters aside from the awesome Space Harrier is incredibly dull just highlights the fact that the game’s mechanism grinds to a halt on a regular basis.

The plot, such as it is, involves the aforementioned murder and vow of revenge. Then you go and take care of an orphaned kitten and get a job driving a forklift, with awful side games including racing the aforementioned forklifts. That’s pretty much it, and when the MMO was announced nobody could figure out what the hell the game would be like. Maybe hundreds of players had to be the first to catch the kitten by racing it down with forklifts.

Fuck it, bring on the next theoretical whiner.

“It has an excellent fighting engine!”

True. It has an incredibly complex engine for a hybrid game, in fact the best. It’s a pretty good combination of simple combos and semi-involved fighting moves that seems to have been competently tooled for multi-opponent battles. You can spend the greater part of the game learning the system, building up your stats through practice, and the pacing of learning new moves is pretty well-integrated.

It’s still hopelessly stupid for two reasons.

One, the fighting seems like a mini-game. Certainly, for the vast majority of the game, no combat revolves around the plot. The villains are practically unseen for the whole game, with the exception of the Gollum-esqe motherfucker who eats the boat ticket you had to slave away to earn. Mostly, the game creates dozens of superfluous school bullies and asshole foreigners for you to beat to a pulp on a repeated basis. They don’t matter to the plot, and they don’t matter to characterization… they just don’t matter. They’re a series of line-drawn caricatures who are there to provide some momentary excitement after hours of dull verbal fetch quests.

They are exciting. They just didn’t belong in this game. They belong in Shenmue’s spirital successor, the Yakuza series. Yakuza has a much less involved fighting system, with enemies who are just as pointless, and yet it’s a better game. Why? Because it didn’t make the pretense of being massively fucking EPIC movie drama. It lets you know that it knows it’s a video game and throws the appropriate experience at you.

“Well… the forklift racing was the best part!”

I’m kind of weirded out that I’m the only person on the fucking planet who has played a racing game. If your game features a heavy object with a lot of momentum scraping a wall at a two degree angle coming to a full stop, it sucks. NES games have better physics.

“It’s an emotionally moving experience!”

I want you little gi- and yukata-wearing homos to make me a promise. Never watch the Lifetime Channel and for fuck’s sake, never youtube Korean dramas.

If Shenmue has any drama, it’s something like Closetland except YOU’RE the prisoner and Shenmue is the inquisitor. A parallel line of similarity is that you will witness the same question asked over and over and over, as Ryo questions his neighbors in the same dull monotone throughout the entire ordeal. In fact, every single person sounds like they took English as a second language and have been SPECIFICALLY INSTRUCTED to act like a bunch of retards on Ny-Quil. And the fanboy credo of not translating to fit intent but keeping things PAINFULLY LITERALLY FAITHFUL must have taken hold, because it sounds like they barely bothered inserting English modifiers into the script. The results are sometimes completely nonsensical unless you’re used to heavy, heavy Janglish. Give it a listen for yourself. Then check out the AA archives here.

So the pacing is shit, the majority of the gameplay is shit, there is no plot so that’s spared the shithammer, but the writing is definitely shit, the minigames are shit with the exception of Space Harrier… is there anything worthwhile here?

Well, yes. There’s a wonderful amount of attention to detail here. You won’t have to try doors to shops to find out if their closed, as there are typically open/close times marked clearly on each building, security shutters, and even an open sign that will be displayed. These aren’t copy-pasted buildings you see in virtually every other game, there was some serious work put into these that doesn’t show in any other aspect. And it’s really impressive. If only that weren’t like baking a diamond inside a shitmuffin.

There’s Space Harrier. That’s always awesome.

A neat idea was turned to shit by a complete lack of foresight. In Shenmue, you can waste your time and money by purchasing little capsule toys from vending machines, themed from many different Sega games like Virtua Fighter, Sonic, and NighTs, and you can try to collect a full set. It seemed kind of useless to me, until I found out that the sequel had you penniless in Hong Kong, able to sell off your toy sets for good money.

It was a neat idea, but seeing as the US never say Shenmue 2 on anything but the Xbox, you couldn’t port your save file. Maybe the team should have thought to implement a good old NES password in regards to your possessions, but I suspect they were busy spending part one and two’s SIXTY MILLION DOLLAR BUDGET on crack and metal detectors. They certainly didn’t spend it on talent.

I wish I could compliment the graphics, but saying something was “amazing for its time” is pretty stupid. It looked pretty damn good, but in some cases they went into way too much detail. When your character reaches out to grab an object with all the mechincal precision of one of those science lab robot arms, you’ll notice his 18-year-old hand is about as veiny as a giant, blood-gorged erection. Unless Ryo’s been a career drinker since age 5, this is just stupid.

I almost forgot to mention the QTEs, which is impressive since they’re reponsible for a large patch of seared, blackened flesh on the left side of my soul. Quicktime Events, or QTEs, is what Shenmue calls the elementary technique of avoiding all that hard planning and coding work that would allow the player to accomplish fantastic feats and instead make you follow a series of button-matching prompts while they just show you your character rocking on along. It’s lazy, it’s stupid, and Shenmue seems to have reintroduced it into popular gaming, and for that reason alone Shenmue should be shunned and its creators nailed to various structures at a certain height off the ground by their evil little wrists.

When you put it next to the astounding level of detail, it seems like a curiously lazy decision, but then again there’s not much you can do with the heinous placement of the analog+d-pad on the Dreamcast as far as intricate control work.

What was Shenmue’s legacy? One sequel out of a planned six (that later got mercifully shrunk) and a much more interesting sequel with better pacing and some actual goddamn story. Mostly, I think it encouraged developers to avoid bigger, more ambitious games. All the fine detail in the world can’t save a game with poor planning. Eventually, people started to use Shenmue as a blueprint in what to avoid and we got games like Yakuza, that had all the exploration and combat, without the hideous drippy shit involved in the mundane, real life activity involved in going between the two.

Shenmue is a sentimental (or sympathetic) favorite of diehard Sega fans and idiots who wish to god they were no longer the obaka gaijin paleskin that they see themselves to be when they’re not dressed up as whatever horrible fucking Japanese cartoon character is ripping off Dragonball Z this month. In fact, until it became not-reviled to be so pathological about anime, I could only grasp liking Shenmue as some sort of Stockholm Syndrome that kicks in around hour 26 of looking through peoples’ drawers to glance at single flat textures of silverware and socks, which this game has in fucking spades.

But mostly, Shenmue taught us that no matter how much we suffer, it will get better eventually. Because it will end, and you’ll have to do something else.

Hunger gauges how hungry the fish are as a collective whole. Fish food can be purchased with money, received as a gift from thoughtful friends, or gained through the fish training game. A starving fish can not be mated or trained, and will not continue to mature to adulthood. Hunger is a bit harder to fill, unfortunately. The fish food icon switches the cursor to a little food shaker. Fish flakes enter the tank from the top, and trickle down in a burst of seven or eight flakes. This provides a number of problems, as fish continue eating even if they are full, and hungry fish are lulled into an inactive state. Sometimes, hungry fish settle at the bottom of the tank and not the top. The other fish will swarm the food enough that no flakes reach the bottom and the starving fish at the bottom sit around and mope about being hungry, oblivious to their owner actively trying to feed them. It may take a few attempts to get food to the bottom of the tank, and often involves leading the fish at the top off to one side. The sides of the tank are a bit inconvenient, as it is possible to shake food outside of the tank. The flakes fall as if they were in water, but the fish mash their faces against the wall in impotent fury, unable to reach the little red flakes of sustenance.

The store allows one to buy new fish, props and decorations for the tank and so on. A treasure chest at the bottom of the fish tank mysteriously fills itself every day with gold coins and awards an amount based on the number of friends one has with the game. Money can also be obtained through fish training. Once a fish is full, it can be sent through a little obstacle course once every four hours in order to learn a trick, up to seven tricks. The little fish zooms forward through an obstacle course and the player must move cats, umbrellas, mines, fishing lines and piranha plants out of the way, while being careful not to click on poison or squid ink. Yes, you read that right. If you play this game, someone is throwing umbrellas, mines, and poison into your fish tank to make it harder to train fish. Of course, this does not make a whole lot of sense. Avoided poison canisters could be a potential hazard after training, as they would build up and potentially contaminate the entire tank, and why would someone store their umbrella in a fish tank, or more than one umbrella for that matter?

Training the fish allows them to do tricks when the player switches to the hand cursor and taps on the glass of the fish tank. The fish do not synchronize their tricks and choose one out of their repertoire completely at random. The result is every single fish will flip out completely when their owner obnoxiously pounds on their home. Fish mating is available, and probably the best way to make money. Once mating is selected from the fish options, a percentage is given as the chance that mating will happen and if it does occur, the fish will rush to meet each other and swim around the tank in an explosion of red clouds. Initially, I thought these red clouds were blood, but they are clouds of love punctuated by hearts. A little fish egg will then sink to the bottom of the tank, and a new fish will emerge a few hours later. However, the fish is released into the ocean when it is ‘sold’, and as a result, training does not influence how much the fish sells for. Training a fish only makes them go nuts in the event of glass tapping and seems to be a purely aesthetic portion of the game.

After a few days of playing, I was rewarded with this screen:

Turtle, carrots, leeks. Turtle soup done simple.

This poor orphaned turtle is about to be murdered, possibly by the very man who murdered its parents. The man obviously works at a sushi bar of some sort, and there are hungry patrons waiting for their expertly prepared turtle soup. I was given the option to save the turtle, and deny hungry, paying restaurant patrons their meal. The man shows up for every ‘save the animal’ screen, and has been denied other turtles, and some squid. I let him have the turtle, because other players are hurting his potential business by stealing food from him, food he has paid for at his local fish market, which is also struggling due to over fishing and ocean contamination.

Character creation is made up of naming a character and choosing a stat to emphasize, out of money, energy and health. Money, in Mafia Wars, is not too much of a problem. Every job done provides some amount of money, in which the later jobs exchange a reasonable amount of energy for a boat load of money. Also, there is the ‘Hit List’, where people pay to get another player killed. Some people, likely super pissed, pay stupid amounts of money for this service. All I had to do is win a few hit list fights which paid over ten billion dollars and then I had more money than I knew what to do with. Not too hard of a feat to accomplish either, even when just starting out. The base rate to hire someone to kill someone else is only eight thousand dollars, so the big paying jobs usually have people clamoring for them. Health is not too big of a deal because a few thousand dollars will bring anyone back to full health.

Energy is the big concern. Energy lets you do jobs, and jobs give you money and experience. Jobs are the fastest way to progress through the game, which makes energy the most important stat, and it recharges one point every five minutes, or one every three minutes if you choose the character type to emphasize it. Every level gives five points to spend between all the stats, and I found myself sinking all of five points into energy at every single level. Stacking energy allowed me to level faster, and more importantly, play the game less. Starting out with a low amount of energy in the early stages of the game is a hassle, because energy is wasted once the maximum energy limit is reached. If the cap is thirty, then I would only have an hour and a half before I would start wasting points. It is a very odd concept, as many games probably want people to play them more, but this one gave me the goal of reaching a point where I could start playing less, and I was glad when I hit the point where I could visit the game once a day for a half an hour, rather than five minutes through out.

The progression of the game leads players to other countries, but the jobs never change. All of them involve clicking a little button, sometimes repeatedly. Each job is different in name and concept, but all of them are the same fundamentally: “Click here to perform x action to receive experience and money… alright, good job”. There is no chance to fail a job, and it is the ultimate fantasy mob world where a variety of different illegal operations are performed with no chance at failure. With no chance at failing, the element of realism is completely vacant. Also, if it only cost eight thousand dollars to get someone killed in real life, then I could have easily afforded it when I worked part time at minimum wage. A whole lot more people would be dead if it were that cheap, and as easy as opening up the ‘Wanted’ ads in the newspaper to find someone willing to exchange a corpse for cash.

There are a few fights with NPC’s that provide some possibility of risk, and fighting other players has an element of danger to it as well, unless you, like me, only fight people with fewer friends than you. Adding friends adds another set of hands to fight other mobs with, but it is strictly a numbers game. The person with the most friends is probably going to be the victor, though equipment and a few other factors play into the equation.

Most importantly, Mafia Wars spammed my Facebook wall with up to date information about how well I was doing in the game, and provided me with no option to stop or delete the notifications it left. There were also times where I continuously received error messages and had to restart my browser. Oddly hilarious, as my machine can easily render thousands of polygons at frame rates faster than the eye can even comprehend, yet a little flash game brought everything to a screeching halt on occasion. Ending my involvement with Mafia Wars was a happy occasion, like finally being free of the nagging thought regarding whether or not I remembered to lock the door, or turn the stove off.

I was excited when I got my shipment of Gran Turismo for the PSP, one week late. I had been reviewing the somewhat stinky Kingdom Hearts for the DS, and tossed the system with such force that it legally destroyed my dog. This was no fey Totilo toss; that DS cannot be repaired.

I was amazed, Sony. I don’t know how you did it, but this game looks great and plays just like a console version. PS3 physics and damn near PS2 graphics.  Just like GT5, I can just about feel the individual wheels dip. I bought my first car, a Mitsubishi 3000GT, and tore into the “challenges”.

They say that if you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all. If you’re one of the 80-year-old church ladies who likes to say stupid shit like that, stop reading right now.

Who the FUCK told you to ship this game as a barebones engine with no career mode, Sony? Find the idiot who let this out the gate without that and hit him in the face until he complains that the teeth are chafing his anus, because this is absolutely unfor-fucking-giveable. Maybe if this had been titled Gran Turismo Ad Hoc, I’d be okay with it because I’d have known it held no interest for me whatsoever, but you didn’t and I played it and I’m left with the realization that the skinned “Prologue” model is probably the rule from now on and I can forget about the series.

You know how fucked up that is? I hate racing games, and yet I’ve loved GT from the start. The car selection, the attention to detail. The sense of progression, which is now GONE… I should start over.

Okay, the “challenges”. Basically renamed license tests, except that A) they’re not necessary and B) they give you so much money you’d never need a career mode anyway. I finished six challenges, Sony, SIX CHALLENGES, and I had twice as much money as I started the game with. That’s BEFORE I bought the first car. And it’s cumulative! If I get the gold medal, you automatically give me the prize money for all three medals at once.

Here’s my prediction; Everybody is already playing 4-player ad hoc with the bestest car available.

Sony, I need to know. At what point do you decide that it’s okay to charge full price for an engine that forces the player to create the gaming experience? From THREE options. Sure, you crammed every possible track (30, not counting reverse runs), car (over 800), and bit of physics processing the PSP could handle, but I’m no longer proving anything to the game except that I can grind like a natural-born Korean, dying of exposure in service of Starcraft. I’m just inviting three imaginary playmates into three eternally-looping variants.

For fuck’s sake, Sony, I was very accepting of the term “Prologue”, but now you’re just fucking with me. I hate this game so fucking much. I could conceivably hate a Sony product more, but it would have to be called Home.

Yours in Jesus,

Probably Jeff Gerstmann, giantbomb.com

People are DESPERATE to play pretend football, especially, and the only way we can be sure of selling the games is by taking pre-orders. And nobody pre-orders. The only way stocking sports games could be less attractive is if the cases came with free jail rape.

HALO 1.7: ODST – In other news, we received ODST nearly a week before release, officially. Unofficially, we received it on November 15, 2001, when Halo 1 came out, a date that also roughly coincides with the end of the golden age of gaming. Yes, the dream team of Bungie and Microsoft are so deathly afraid of alienating their core audience that they won’t even improve the sluggish look speed. You have to go into the options screen and make the game playable all by yourself.

And that two hour campaign to make the Halo 3 Ultimate 1337 Map Pack value up to $60? Imagine a six-inch wide middle finger doing unspeakable things to Mickey Mouse and you have a good idea where we stand on this turd. Sure to delight the hardcore fans, but then again so do shiny blue bottle caps.

Kingdom Hearts: 358/2+27X5 Days – Does for Kingdom Hearts what Crisis Core did for Final Fantasy; Turns it into a miserable fucking grindfest through environments that might have been put to decent use in an actual RPG. Tells the story of the KH universe’s Raiden, Roxas, for all the yaoi fangirls who give a shit.

Square-Not Square keeps doing better and better things with the DS’s 3D graphics, which means this game is somewhere near peak PS1 visuals. Which counts for… what, exactly? Also, you’re kind of a passive observer to the story this time around, meaning you’re only really catching glimpses of what made the other games interactive.

Another interesting Square attempt at a modular experience system makes it worth a rental, but only if you’re really, really into Kingdom Hearts AND yaoi (kids: Google it!)

He did something I couldn’t see. There was a loud crack and I didn’t feel any physical sensation for about four days. Thanks to my father’s Irish sense of health care (if the skin’s not broken, it’s not worth the hospital bill) I didn’t know exactly what for about a decade and some change.

So my love for the “strategy RPG” or “tactical RPG” or “real time combat” game that is Valkyria Chronicles on the PS3 is pretty notable. Despite the general lack of agreement on what compound genre it is or, in the case of “real time combat” Sega’s misunderstanding about their own product, it’s a solid game that takes the concept of fun, kneads it into a beachball, and pops it right over the net at you.

First off, let’s stare at a screenshot intently:

Okay, I’m not a big, syphilitic anime dorkus, but this screen brings me joy for associated reasons. Sure, the cross-shading is nice, but if I compliment it then I have to say nice things -albeit how indirect- about Afro Samurai. But let me show you where the most awesome part of this screenshot is:

See that? It’s color. Holy crap, it’s so much color! Even the outside edge, rendered in monochrome, is a nice artistic touch. The only real loser here is the IGN logo, denoting their grey little souls.

For a fantasy alternate World War II game, Valkyria Chronicles manages to use the full spectrum of color in most every scene and still retain a reasonably authentic “war is hell” feeling. Compare that to this screenshot I took of Wolfenstein that didn’t make the cut for our previous review:

It doesn’t hurt that this is all attached to a super-fun game. Give it a couple of missions to draw you in, and welcome yourself to your new addiction. Valkyria seems a bit trifling from the demo and the first couple of missions, but it’ll soon start upping the ante until you think it can’t push you any further. And then it does. And you think NOW you’ve passed through the gauntlet. And then it tosses you another screwball. And it does this at least five more times until you’ve hit the end of the game. You’ll have to keep learning and adapt your strategies to some insane situations.

It’s all played out in a tactical shooter that’s about as real-time as an iceburg, despite the term “real time” being on the back of the box twice. Yes, there are some elements that demand your immediate attention; during your movement phase, being in range of any enemy units will result in real-time suppressing fire that keeps you from rushing past footsoldiers. Fail to kill an enemy at the end of your move? Most units get a reflex shot. Think carefully, and think fast.

Half the battle is spent planning your moves on an overhead map, and specific attacks pause to allow your character to attack. This is not real time, but if it were this would be another damn shooter with a very confusing interface. The mish-mash is unfamiliar, and seems a bit absurd at first, but it’s incredibly rewarding to figure out.

Successful battles reward you in experience points and money, which allows you to enhance your character in several ways. Experience points can be used to level up your different soldier classes -every soldier in the respective class levels up- and money can be spent on tank upgrades and even side missions.

All this is wrapped up in a rather unconventional war plot with large doses of fantasy, the appropriate levels of drama, and even a few really big plot twists. A lot of predictable ones, yes, but also some surprising reversals of expectation here and there. The story compliments the gameplay extremely well.

I’m not the only one who likes the game, according to how easy it is to accidentally find Selvara porn when Google’s SafeSearch is off.

I can’t gripe much. Reflex shots seem kind of gimpy at first, until you realize they keep people from exploiting the game engine. My only other complaint was how the game gives you a better rating, and thus more money and experience, for completing the mission in the fewest turns. Doesn’t really promote the best strategy. Then again, completing a map with skill and speed is a good barometer for a successful player, and also Mike glares at me whenever I criticize something he likes, even if it deserves it.

With all this and even a couple of extra treats for a second playthrough, including carrying over your experience and upgrades, there’s little reason not to own this game. Download the demo, play it a few times, and see for yourself.

But the latest id shooter, Wolfenstein, proves that the graphics engine guru is either losing his touch or passing on his high level work to complete shitheads. This is an average game engine wrapped like semi-burnt bacon around a turd called terrible design, both graphically and gameplay-wise. And I guess you heard it here first, because gamerankings.com sure as shit doesn’t have any reviews of it up yet.

Here’s the environments I’ve played through: Sewer… yes, it starts with a sewer, really setting your expectations low. So sewer, train station, war-torn city, cave (the other sewer), war-torn city, warehouse, house, war-torn city, five minutes of farm with half an hour of underground base, sewer, canals… In accordance with whatever laws govern game design, everything is rendered in a drab, unrelenting variety of brown gradients. Just as Mike has about eighty differently definitions of what “Kotaku” means (example: Kota meaning small boys, ku meaning to touch) the developers at Raven have about the same number of words to describe their color pallette. To your mortal eyes and my semi-mortal ones, it ranges from light brown to dark brown, but to the boys at Raven it starts somewhere around tan or ecru and just gets fruitier from there. I mean hell, I can barely tell the buildings from the ground, but I guess there’s a reason for that.

A little more playing and you shouldn’t be shocked to find out that Nazis’ homes are also decorated solely by that nasty-ass hue that you get when you combine every single one of your watercolor paints into a single, gloopy stain. Seriously, the only notable deviations from the scheme are the giant swastika flags that are hung about ten feet apart, constantly.

And on top of that, it’s really dark. My friend Tim, of former Working Designs glory, was admiring the HDR lighting and advanced surface textures. Okay, Carmack still has it. But when you pass this on to a group that uses it to create the most goddamn boring, bleak game world I’ve seen since the last American war game, all your effort means jack and crap.

Dear developers: Cut this shit out. SIMULATE darkness, don’t actually make me fucking squint at my screen hoping to see through a patchwork of murky black assitude. You guys have advanced power-ups beyond a picture of a beef joint on a white square, bordered in blue. Do something that doesn’t just sum up the history of Iron Maiden covers dumbed down, stripped of what little cover they have, and given motion!

Don’t believe me? First, fuck you. Second, check this out:

The story? Just as patently stupid as the design. You’re sent into a war-torn city to investigate… something nebulous. You run around an ill-advised hub level that forces you to fight your way to each linear mission, and then you return to spend whatever Nazi gold you found strewn around in random places on black market upgrades… that are perfectly legal.

Upon finding gold in a locker in the hospital:

DIET MIKE: Where you want your gold, doctor?

I think Raven and id are basically endorsing Uwe Boll with this.

The plot is never fully explained, and is so poorly expressed that you’d never imagine World War II was happening. Hitler is never even mentioned, which is stupid; the point of Wolfenstein is killing a hypercephalic Hitler who is piloting a mech suit. It seems like everybody’s just there to shoot each other for no particular reason, and the only revelation around the Nazis building a spiritual superweapon is that they intend to blow up the city. And then… win the war! I think.

DIET MIKE: (All color drains from the screen and we find a floating, spinning device that emits some form of energy.) Oh, it’s a device that steals all the color.

ME: (Melees the device, destroying it. The color returns.) Holy fuck, you were right.

DIET MIKE: This is the first game that makes me LIKE the Nazis.

ME: They are basically the Beagle gang from Duck Tales.

DIET MIKE: Yeah, they’re just cuddly and inept.

ME: HOOGAAAAAAAAAAN!

“IGN gave the game 5.9, stating that Ubisoft hasn’t done enough to the original game to justify its price point, comparing its value against ‘Splosion Man. It also criticises how there is no option to play the game in its original form. Many gamers were upset about the lack of effort that went into the game.” “Yeah, total arcade. Cement Man, Shredder warping you in the sewers, no Super Shredder. I’ll skip.”

“Ok, the port kinda sucks. The Konami music? NOT THERE. Technodrome level? GONE. It just sent me from the sewers to Prehistoric Turtlesaurus with no rat king fight.”

“Turtles in Time: We Cheaped Out on Character Licensing Edition. Slash was replaced by some fucker named Cement Man I never heard of, AKA a giant turd made of mud, and Bebop and Rocksteady replaced with Tokka and Rahzar.” “He’s from Megaman. They actually went overboard with licensing. The final boss is Mickey Mouse, now owned by Square-Enix.” “The level Tokka and Rahzar appear in wasn’t even in the arcade, Bebop and Rocksteady weren’t ‘replaced’.” “Yeah, I’m pretty sure Bebop and Rocksteady are in the train level.”