I love you Ninja Gaiden Sigma, but…

By Dave
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Dear Ninja Gaiden Sigma

I really want to love you, but I can’t see past your flaws. I know this is shallow of me, but perhaps I’m just a shallow person. Please listen to what I have to say- I hope you will understand how I feel.

There are some things that I really loved about you though. Your combat system was beautiful and full of joie de vivre. It is a skilful system, requiring me to constantly keep guard and be alert and on my toes. I adore games that keep me aware and active. Sure, most games like to keep me entertained through a general glaze of past experience and see it all before know-how- you however, challenged me in a way that no game had ever challenged me before. In fact, I still remember the time that I had to tell you to go easy on me; the intensity was too much for me to take. Even then, you had me pulling off things I never thought that, as a gamer, I would be able to do. I learned your combat skill set, and you pushed to do more and more, enabling me to become a mighty ninja in your arms.

I will never forget that. Your core game was a superb balance of button pressing and positional awareness. It was the small things that let you down.

For example, the time you asked to jump across multiple platforms had me in tears. Why would you give me these tasks, when you knew that your control system wasn’t designed to enable me to do such things? I tried and I tried, but I kept overshooting jumps, falling down large gaps, jumping aimlessly and awkwardly in incorrect directions. You just looked on, letting me become infuriated. I felt it was unnecessary to our relationship, but still, time after time, you forced me to interact with this anguish.

Another major gripe I had was your erratic level design. I loved it when we were in feudal Japanese settings, slicing foes with our blades, but why did you take me to the unholy monastery catacombs? It was full of guff enemies, ugly textures and poor platforming. There was no need for you to force that upon me, and it lasted so long as well. I think perhaps in the future, maybe you should hire more beta testers to pick out these poor points in your profile.

Overall you were a good game, the best I’ve played in a while. But it could never last- you could never satisfy me fully. I’m happy now, I’ve found a new soulmate; she’s called God of War. She’s not as unforgivingly tough as you, but she doesn’t infuriate me half as much. She has a sister called God of War 2, but I am yet to meet her.

I hope we can keep in touch, and maybe I’ll come round and give you another whirl at some point. But for now, goodbye, and good luck.

Best wishes, David.

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Audiosurf, or how I learned to stop worrying and ride my music collection.

By Dave
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I stumbled across Audiosurf almost by complete accident – hiding in the Steam collection for $10. It’s basically the PC equivalent of a live arcade game for the Xbox 360, although the control scheme is definitely PC-centric, using the sensitivity of the mouse to its fullest. And what a find Audiosurf has turned out to be.

Based around the idea that each level is made from the rhythm and feel of a song (of which literally anything can be a level – any audio format that may be lying around your hard drive), you play a ship that moves through each musical level. There are numerous modes for you to play, although all use similar mechanics. Every level has three ‘pathways’ that pan out in front of you, each filled with coloured blocks that are placed in time with the song that the level is based on. Depending on the mode, you either have to dodge the blocks or collect different coloured blocks in order to arrange them on a grid around your ship to score points.

The idea itself is both ridiculously awkward to describe (as I think I may have just proved very well), but also stupidly simple as a play mechanic. Not to say that Audiosurf isn’t a deep game; indeed, it’s only as limited as your music collection. On top of this, Audiosurf is one addictive little game. The simple, ultra-violet graphics, the accessible but ultimately deep and rewarding gameplay and the fact you can listen and play along to your favourite music makes this a small, appealing chunk of gaming crack.

Probably the best feature of Audiosurf though, is that every single song has its very own online leaderboard scores, making every song a challenge to prove you’re the best, or even the thrill of finding a song that no one else has ever played is brilliant. On top of that, if you own a high score for a song and someone else beats it, you receive an email telling you that you’ve been ‘dethroned’ on that particular song, and urges you to try and reclaim your title. Which is brilliant.

So overall, Audiosurf is a fantastic little package that’s worth anyone’s time and money. Also, buying it through steam also means you get the Orange box soundtrack, which is almost the worth the entrance fee alone.

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Heavenly Sword? More Like… well, it’s bad anyway.

By Jack
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Heavenly Sword has been hailed as the must-have next-gen action game. It has even been branded ‘Goddess of War’, after the fantastic God of War series. Well, to call this game ‘Goddess of War’ is like putting a monocle on a turd and calling it Sir Patrick Moore.

Admittedly, I only played the demo of Heavenly Sword. But unless I’m very much mistaken, the primary objective of a demo is to impress you with the game, make you want the game, make you lust after the game. This demo chose a different approach.

You are thrown into the fictional world of Whogivesafuck, where your character; an attractive, impossibly red-haired, apparently Asian lady, whose name I didn’t bother to find out, has some quest that involves vengeance. Probably.

The game is appalling. The main aim is to face hordes of faceless foes. When you kill them, some slightly harder ones come out. Then you move to a new area. Repeat, repeat, repeat. If this is the future of gaming, call me a taxi to the ‘90s, ‘cause me and Streets of Rage have some catching up to do.

*Note to Readers: At this point in the review Jack wrote no more. He was in hospital for over a month with an almost fatal ‘combustion of cool’. This is where he attained a level of such ultimate coolness that his body gave out. We are told that ‘coolness’ works like a performance-enhancing drug. With some of it – you are better at everything you do. But if you have too much, you die. Jack had far, far too much. Because, let’s face it, Jack is awesome.
Anyway, Jack has not played this game since he started the review over a month ago.
Deal with it.

(The above ‘note to readers’ was in no way written by Jack.)

Heavenly Sword? That’s the game with the redheaded chick and all those Asian people, isn’t it? I played that a while ago. If I remember correctly, as I usually do, that game was AWESOME!

I was all like *Pew Pew* with this huge sword and the enemies were all like *dying noises*. Damn, that was a good game!

Now get the hell off my porch. (We are unsure whom Jack is talking to here.)

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Picross, you puzzling bitch….

By Dave
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I seem to have a bit of a soft spot when it comes to puzzle games. There’s just something about a puzzle games that, when perfected, is just completely addictive and impossible to put down. It happened last year with my Tetris addiction, that lasted about 3 months. I literally could not stop picking up my DS; every spare moment I had, I worked on perfecting my block spatial awareness, increasing my block rotation speed and associating the different coloured blocks to the others and how they would best fit together. If I ate cheese before going to bed, I would have strange cheese dreams about Tetris blocks invading my home and trying to crush my family. I was addicted, and there was nothing I could do about it- I had to become a Tetris master.

And I became a Tetris master. Now, every time I pick up Tetris, I can perfectly match all the shapes together. I never fail. I could literally keep going forever.

I eventually weaned myself off it’s beauty, and for a while, I was fine. I was a perfectly adjusted member of society. I went out drinking with friends, talked about interesting topics and could almost converse with girls in a normal manner.

Unfortunately, now Picross has now come along, and it threatens to ruin my life all over again. In Picross, the aim of the game is to make a picture on the grid given to you through placing blue blocks on certain bits in accordance to numbers lined up on the sides of the grid.

Now, the way I’ve just described it makes Picross sound like some kind of retarded maths quiz that your teacher used to force upon you when giving you a rest from proper work, or for a ‘Christmas treat’. But refrain from accusing me of being a boring maths nerd who enjoys logic puzzles for a minute. Picross rocks. Or at least it rocks in the same way that Belle and Sebastian rock. Picross is not a cool game- it doesn’t have the flashy graphics of the big consoles or the amazingly awesome main character that everyone wants to look like, but it does have a simple charm. It’s laid out to you simply, and in an uncluttered way. It just gives you lots of puzzley goodness.

And that’s all it needs to give you. It realises that all you want is the puzzles, and that’s all it does. It gives lots and lots of puzzles. It even gives you an option for you to design your own puzzles and send them to people via WiFi. And oh, what lovely, wonderful, brain taxing and fun puzzles it gives, like Gary Kasparov setting you chess task after chess task, but making it fun by giving you sweets whilst you play.

And now, I want to master the art of Picross. I want to be able to work out every puzzle in the shortest time possible and look at all the funny little block pictures I create, then laugh as they don’t really look like anything. Goodbye life, hello Picross.

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Dave reviews Bioshock, and mutters…

By Dave
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Bioshock is one of the most disappointing games I’ve played in a long time. There, I’ve said it. Despite the high scores the published press have been lavishing on it, this game is not deserving of any awards. However, before I basically whine about the entire game, let me give you some info about Bioshock.

After the plane you were on crashes into the sea, leaving you as the only survivor, you find what looks a bit like a lighthouse in the middle of the sea that has an elevator going down deep into the murky bowels of the ocean. As you descend, you are introduced through a voiceover that you are about to enter a new world, the world of Rapture.

And I must say, at this point I was enraptured with Bioshock. Simply put, the opening sequence is astonishing, perfectly introducing this underwater paradise to you, and quickly giving a sense that something within is amiss. The first thing that really hits you is the graphics- this game looks stunning. From the grandiose art-deco architecture to the puddles of seawater seeping in through the cracks of the not totally safe walls, the setting is unlike any other game on the market, and immediately sets it apart as an individual in a market swamped by boring and samey settings. The atmosphere just feels right and you can’t help but be dragged into the new and strange world.

Also, the start of the games does a very good job of setting up the story of the warring factions within Rapture, and introduces you well to the world that surrounds you, from the combat techniques, to the currency of Adam, which is the key to a large portion of the game. Adam allows you to buy in game powers, called plasmids. These plasmids range from being able to shoot fire from your hand to burn enemies or set fire to patches to enhancements that make you better at hacking all the in-game cameras and turrets. All very well and good.

Now, before I go on a rant about every single part of the game that I don’t like, I should say some nice things about Bioshock. The graphics and sense of place are very good. The story has enough pace to pull you through the game and keep you interested. The voice acting is really rather good.

Ok, rant time.

Firstly, the shooting part of the game was imperfect in many ways. I played Bioshock on PC, which may negate some of this argument for anyone who plays it on the 360, but I found the shooting annoyingly imprecise. Targeting different body parts made no difference to the damage the enemies took, negating any kind of accuracy that a mouse would lend to the game. Also, the weapons, apart from the shotgun, never felt weighty enough to make you feel like you were dealing out great fiery bundles of pain, instead merely taking a bit more out of the enemies’ health. For a game based around shooting, I found it disappointingly average.

Also not making the shooting, or any other part of the game any better is the plasmid system. My main gripe with the plasmids was that there were too many of them and they were rarely explicitly needed in order to progress in the game. They felt far too much like a tacked on afterthought to me, there to aid you a little bit in a fight, much like a power-up. I would have liked to have seen them used much more integrally in the game, for example to solve puzzles or find alternative pathways through the levels.

There was too much choice, as I previously mentioned, making your plasmid selection rather pointless. Presumably, this was to give the player a sense of choice and help them shape and individualise their character, but it felt too loose for me. I would have preferred a set roster of plasmids that the player had to carefully use in order to progress through the game. This would have given them a use of their own, rather than merely bolstering the weapons.

However, the most disappointing aspect of the game has to be the story. Well, that’s a bit of a hyperbole; the story itself was good enough, and well told through various voice-logs and people speaking to you via radio messages. However, for such a well-written and cleverly woven narrative, it missed one very important thing – it forgot to make you care about the characters. For all the atmosphere it had, the interesting (if hardly ground-breaking) story, I finished the game without caring for a single character I was in contact with. It’s a real pity, as I would probably forgive some of its flaws if I felt emotionally involved in the game. However, I always felt like an outsider looking into the world objectively, I never actually got immersed in the world as a living character experiencing the events, which is something only the best games do.

So then, now that I’ve thoroughly had a dig at the intricacies of Bioshock, I’m now going to recommend you play it. Yes, you heard me, and yes, I am a contradictory fool – despite its flaws, it’s still an enjoyable game to play through and to come to your own conclusions with. As I stated at the start of the review, the press loved it, and I’m sure many others will feel the same way. For me though, there were just a few too many niggles that stopped it from being an amazing game. As it stands, it’s flawed, but still fun and definitely worth your attention.

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