Zero Punctuation

Zero Punctuation is a series of video game reviews done by Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw, originally for YouTube, and later for The Escapist Magazine.

Heavenly Sword and Other Stuff

• Part of me feels that, from an artistic standpoint, there may be some merit in RE5 because the point of a horror game is to be unnerving; and forcing the player to do something that they find distasteful as well as frightening is a rather groundbreaking method of doing that. But then again, this is Resident Evil, the series that brought us "squeaky-voiced midget Napoleon"; and if there’s anything sophisticated in an idea of theirs, it’s probably a total accident. [1]

Psychonauts

• [listing the good points of the game] Firstly, it's something original in an industry that seems to be built on ripping off everyone else. Secondly, it's genuinely funny, while most video games attempting humor are like unanesthetized bowel surgery. Thirdly, every single character is well-defined with their own quirks and personalities, even the tiny, unimportant bit part players that get less screen time than Christopher Lee in the last Lord of the Rings movie. And lastly, it's fun. Remember that? Fun? What we used to have before gaming felt like a second job? [2]

Console Rundown

• With the current generation of consoles we've reached or nearly reached the point where graphics aren't going to get much better, so we can all stop rushing to top the last generation's technology and concentrate on making some games with actual depth. Except of course that the console wars are all ultimately futile because the best game ever, Fantasy World Dizzy for the Commodore 64, has already been made. Or maybe all gaming is pointless, just toying with the gravel on the big road of life. But hey, at least there's violence and tits! [3]

BioShock

• There are only two endings, a good one and a bad one, and the extreme contrast between them is rather jarring. In the good ending, you're a virtuous flower child with love and a smile for all the shiny-coated beasts of God's kingdom, and in the bad ending you're some kind of hybrid of Hitler and Skeletor whose very piss is pure liquid malevolence. I'm sick of games that claim to have choice but that only come down to Mother Teresa or baby-eating. All I'm saying is that a little middle ground is nice now and then. [4]

Tomb Raider Anniversary

• [helping game publishers find ideas] Here's one: A genetically-engineered Taiwanese chef teams up with a newt in a fez to rescue his large-bosomed girlfriend from mummies. There, you see? It's easy. A breast cancer specialist with large bosoms journeys through time to pay for a breast enlargement. A race of bosom people set out on an armada of bosoms to find a new bosom homeworld. Bosoms, melons, milk factories, busts, funbags, knockers, boobies, jugs, nipples, jubblies, STONKING... GREAT... TITS. [5]

Manhunt

• I seriously don't know whose side to be on when it comes to the debate about whether or not games like Manhunt mess with the heads of underaged, impressionable thickies. There's a very clear certification indicating that twelve-year-olds aren't supposed to be playing it, but there's no denying that they play it anyway because no one other than twelve-year-olds are into this sort of thing. Gushing breathlessly about garrote wire decapitation and baseball bat cranial explosion is a good way to win friends in middle school; but around the office water cooler, it's a good way to lose them. [6]

Peggle

• What I can say about it is that I started playing it around noon and emerged from my room sometime later to find that the authorities had declared me legally dead. If the whole "casual gaming" thing has slipped you by, then let me hold your face under the putrescent waters of knowledge. At some point in the recent past, someone noticed that simple Flash-based 2D colour-matching games like Bejeweled were making, frankly, embarrassing amounts of dosh; and the reason for this is that as time has gone by, bored housewives stuck at home all independently decided that shagging the TV repairman is no longer appropriate and have turned to video games to amuse themselves instead. [7]

Halo 3

• The difficulty curve wavers up and down like the knickers of an indecisive whore before plunging dramatically into a Sunday stroll down Easy Street for the last hour or so. There were sequences really near the beginning that kicked my arse until I was wearing my buttocks like a hat, while the closest thing to a final boss fight is basically you versus a wheelchair-bound, cross-eyed hobbit and you’re armed with the BFG 9000. [8]

Tabula Rasa

• Tabula Rasa is a Latin term meaning "blank slate" and generally refers to the school of thought saying that humans are born with no inherent programming. For example, Richard Garriot is an utterly demented game designer who wears a crown and insists that people call him Lord British. But was he born with the galloping crazies, or was it a lack of appropriate social contact that caused him to descend permanently into an insane fantasy world? [9]

The Orange Box

• (On Portal) If you're a regular viewer you'll understand how insane these words sound, but I can't think of any criticism for it. I'm serious, this is the most fun you'll have with your PC until they invent a force-feedback codpiece! I went in expecting a slew of interesting portal-based puzzles and that's exactly what I got, but what I wasn't expecting was some of the funniest pitch black humor I've ever heard in a game. Okay, it's only two to three hours long, but that's a good length for it - it means it doesn't outstay its welcome and it shortens the gap between you and the balls-tighteningly fantastic ending. Absolutely sublime from start to finish, and I will jam forks into my eyes if I use those words to describe anything ever again! Yeah, I know it's not very funny to love a game, but fuck you, Portal's great and if you don't think so you must be stupid! [10]

Super Paper Mario

• I don't think America is populated entirely by assholes and cowboys; I know that some Canadians live there, too.[11]

MOH Airborne

• As evil as the real Nazis were, it seems they weren't evil enough for the developers, so the accuracy's a little skewed against them. And then it's skewed a little bit more. And then it's put into a thumbscrew until it resembles a slinky. I'm no historian, but I'm pretty sure there wasn't an elite unit of stormtroopers who wore gas masks, wielded miniguns and could take three sniper bullets to the forehead before they died. And I'm also pretty sure the Nazis didn't have a gigantic armored concrete tower that can only be described as a doom fortress. [12]

Zelda Phantom Hourglass

• A world without Nintendo would be a far bleaker one than this, and yet there's something about them that I find incredibly infuriating. They've got enough money to buy Earth and all the heavens and a fanbase so devoted and rabid that they could release a game about a sewage-encrusted rapist and it would still sell like billy-oh. And while they sit in this position that many game developers worldwide with slews of new and interesting game concepts would happily hack off their wedding tackle to occupy, all they do is constantly remake the same games! Okay, so sometimes you've got an ocarina, and sometimes you're in a boat, and sometimes you're a werewolf getting repulsive erotica drawn about you by people on DeviantArt; but pick any one of the ninety billion Zelda games there have been so far and odds are good that you're the same bloody guy saving the same bloody girl with the same bloody boomerang. [13]

Clive Barker's Jericho

• Maybe some of this could be forgiven if the seven main characters weren't all completely unlikeable. There's so much black leather on display its like someone took the goth clique from a small town high school, pinned them down in front of a 24-hour Rambo marathon, then smacked them brutally around the head with a baseball bat made out of frozen stupid. [14]

F.E.A.R. Perseus Mandate

• I guess if you're a huge fan of F.E.A.R., and I mean huge, like, if you play it twice a day and you have Jason Hall's face stenciled onto your toilet seat, and if you've got a love of repetitive tactical combat that borders on the fetishistic and if you really badly need to know what happens next to the faceless characterless protagonist of the ongoing storyline, then I heartily recommend Perseus Mandate. Maybe you can play it while you hang around the labyrinth with Theseus, because you're obviously a nonexistent creature of myth. [15]

Assassin's Creed

• [A] good way to blow your cover is to randomly stab innocent civilians, and trust me when I say that forcing yourself not to do so is a lot harder than it sounds. Those wacky, fun-loving lepers have this hilarious tendency to shove you with all their retard strength and send you flying ye olde mosh-pit style, which I feel makes me well within my rights to lamp them one; but then everyone turns against you because apparently it's not as funny when YOU do it. And then there are the beggar women who latch on to you like a lamprey eel and constantly run in front of you whining for coins in a manner scientifically designed to get on my tits. Then I give them a gentle, discouraging knuckle sandwich, and they run off yelling like I'M the asshole. It hits particularly close to home for me, because this is pretty much how all my relationships turn out. [16]

Guitar Hero III

• Then I got to the last venue and the last group of songs on hard mode and came to a screeching halt because they are fucking impossible. NO. STOP. Do not reach for your e-mail client, I do not want to hear about how you five-starred "Blood Rain" on Expert, because if you did, you are a fucking freak, a freak with either three arms or a trained pet spider working the buttons for you! [17]

Mass Effect

• People often say to me, "Yahtzee, you callipygian superman, how can you, a game writer yourself, complain about a game having too much dialogue?" I would reply for the same reason a hairdresser is entitled to complain when someone fills their car with shampoo. [18]

Super Mario Galaxy

• Don't be fooled, this is your standard fill-in-the-blanks framework. Mario's hateful emotionally retarded ball-and-chain gets kidnapped again but before you can do the rescue you have to collect a whole bunch of stars - and it is always stars for some utterly arbitrary reason. And in the end Mario succeeds in rescuing the needy bitch who once again fails to put out although frankly I've given up expecting any actual human intelligent reaction from that clueless bint. [19]

Silent Hill Origins

• You have one second to name any game in which weapon degradation's been a good idea. Time's up. That's what I thought. There's something very wrong about a katana that shatters after five or six hits, one that ostensibly isn't made out of glass or chocolate. [20]

Crysis

• There is one section towards the end where you're forced to pilot a futuristic helicopter jobbie and... well, imagine that you'd just woken from a 20-year-coma, celebrated the occasion by drinking six bottles of Madd Dogg 20/20, then were called upon to pilot a light aircraft bearing a cargo of hippopotami. That's what controlling this section is like. And they expect you to enter dogfights in this thing. That's like trying to solve a Rubik's Cube with your elbows. [21]

The Witcher

• As I progressed through the starting village a set of red flags came up that brought me to a sinister realization. One-click combat? Endless drudging from place to place? Quests involving killing X amount of monster Y for lazy stationary cockhead Z? This is a mumorpuger! A single-player mumorpuger with no Alliance dipshits teabagging your corpse, but a mumopurger nonetheless. [22]

Resident Evil: Umbrella Chronicles

• It's gratifying to see Capcom continue their proud tradition of unintentionally hilarious dialogue. "I have a bad feeling about this," announces Jill Valentine after having been repeatedly savaged by the undead, demonstrating her vital intuitive ability to sense danger about an hour after it has commenced. "Where did all these webs come from?" wonders Chris Redfield aloud whilst staring directly at a giant spider. And then there's the recurring series baddie and backstabbing enthusiast Albert Wesker, whose every line of dialog is solid gold because he sounds like Lloyd Grossman with throat cancer. [23]

Call of Duty 4

• All you need to know is this. There are two kinds of games: games that I stop playing because I've been bored or frustrated into a state approaching rigor mortis, and games that I stop playing because I've just noticed I should have had dinner two hours ago. And Call of Duty 4 is in the latter category. It's a truly shining example of the genre that sucked me in like - well, like a triple-cunted hooker. And now since this review has left me with a lot of surplus bile, let me close by requesting that if any more of you would like to tell me how to do my job, then please get hurled out of a plane and land anus-first on the spire of Winchester Cathedral! [24]

SimCity Societies

• It's an idea that many people seem to latch on to that if we were created by some kind of god, then obviously he did it because he loves us so huggy-muggy much. Never are the holes in this theory more obvious than while playing god games: because it seems when you place most people in the position of a god and give them responsibility over many tiny lesser beings, then their attitude towards them is usually less about beloved children and more about target practice. [25]

Yahtzee Goes to GDC

• All games are about realizing a fantasy, whether it be the fantasy of being a courageous war hero, or the fantasy of being a future space adventurer, or, in the case of some Japanese games, the fantasy of possessing eight prehensile dicks. [26]

Uncharted: Drake's Fortune

• You play Nathan "Indiana Jones as written by Joss Whedon" Drake as he scavenger hunts for the inevitable lost golden treasure in the standard exotic locales as aided by the troublesome initially hostile blonde love interest and the elderly mentor-type figure who might as well wear a T-shirt saying "I will die or turn evil." [27]

Devil May Cry 4

• It would be fair to say there are certain popular trends in anime that set off my cynicism alert. I would list them, but thanks to Capcom I don't have to - now I can just point to Devil May Cry 4 and say "Pretty much that." Now don't get me wrong, I'm not some spectacle-adjusting model railroad enthusiast who can't function without absolute realism at all times. Jumping eight times your own height, swinging swords the size of small cars around and deflecting bullets with other bullets are all fine with me as long as it's entertaining. I'll even accept that getting a seven-foot katana jammed through your torso is totally survivable, if a bit homoerotic. A game starts widdling on my chips however when it populates itself with smug self-satisfied dicksperts and starts neglecting gameplay because it's too busy letting them swagger invincibly about until I want to flatten their androgynous faces with a kayak paddle! [28]

Burnout Paradise

• People often ask me, "Yahtzee, you herculean exemplar, you have so much to say about what makes a bad game, but what is your measure of a good game?" Well, actually, no one's ever asked me that. Mostly they just ask retarded questions like when am I going to review 20-year-old Nintendo games like everyone and their dog. But it's the kind of question I'd like to be asked, so I'm going to answer it. One of my measures of a good game is one that teaches me something. Burnout Paradise for example teaches me that if Princess Diana honestly couldn't survive a trivial little crash like that, then the girl must have been made out of wafers. [29]

Turok

• Most of these problems with modern FPSes can be explained with four words: "Let's be like Halo." But I remember a time when FPSes didn't all march in step behind that inexplicably popular festival of mediocrity, when FPSes weren't all about soldiers and space marines, when they could be about undead cowboys, or backwoods pig-rapists, or wise-cracking misogynistic wankers. I remember a time when FPSes had a sense of humor about themselves and included colours other than gunmetal gray and dogshit brown. I remember titles like Exhumed and Chasm and Witchhaven II — though on reflection, I'd rather forget about them. [30]

Zack and Wiki

• Long ago in the mists of time, when main characters didn't need to have biceps bigger then their faces and when bump mapping was just something cartographers did to their wives, there lived adventure games. This shy, thoughtful tribe was known for its great story telling tradition and ruled the great PC gaming plains for many years before mysteriously dying out around the onset of the Quake era. Some blame the aggressive expansion of neighboring first-person shooter tribes; but personally I think it's more to do with the fact that most of them were shit. [31]

Army of Two

• We're quickly and frequently reminded that the military is shit and so is everyone in it, while mercenaries are unstoppable immortal badasses who make tons more money and like it rough from men with hairy bums — NO! Bad Yahtzee! I meant to say: and you get to wear funky skull masks like it's Halloween every day, except that it's you giving out the candy, and the candy is bullets. [32]

No More Heroes

• (Suda 51's) last game was killer7, and let's get one thing straight: I fucking loved killer7! There we were, living our gray, predictable lives, playing our gray, predictable games when along came killer7 in a technicolour dream coat, leaving slightly perplexed joy in the wake of its huge motorbike, showing exactly could be done when you flout all established convention and just start exploring what can really be done with gaming as an art form. I still don't know how to classify it: puzzle, action/adventure, rail shooter... well, whatever, it was it was a preciously unique amusing cartoon whale in an ocean of second-hand bong water. Now we have No More Heroes, a Grand Theft Auto clone. "Shine on you crazy diamond," said Yahtzee, his voice thick like sarcastic Marmite. [33]

Condemned 2: Bloodshot

• There's a final boss sequence in Condemned 1 in which you run down a dark claustrophobic labyrinth with a serial killer in hot pursuit. It's really intense and genuinely terrifying, and part of what makes it so effective is that it takes place in a normal house, exactly like, oh say for example, YOURS! Right down to the psychotic serial killer who lives under your bed and is standing behind you right now but don't look because that'll really piss him off! Condemned 2, by contrast, ends on a stupid sci-fi tower thing resembling something the Combine would throw together if they were all drunk, and a piss-easy final boss fight that you win by shouting at him so loudly his brain explodes. I wish I was fucking kidding. [34]

Super Smash Bros. Brawl

• As I've said, time and again, Nintendo is a company that does altogether too much wanking off of their old franchises. That might be fine while the Wii is still riding high, but all it'll take is a few more Virtual Boys and they'll wank the whole company away! Some of it gets really obscure too. Who the fuck is Marth, and why is unlocking him considered a reward? Oh and thanks Nintendo for putting in a character from Mother 3, a game you're never going to fucking release outside of Japan despite the fact I can fucking guarantee that more people would play it than Mario Kart Eleventy Billion: The Next Generation! [35]

God of War: Chains of Olympus

• Chains of Olympus is a PSP-exclusive prequel installment in the God of War series, a bunch of games that combine an, at best, loose understanding of Greek mythology with a level of violence that hovers somewhere between excessive and completely off its tits. [36]
• Around weaker enemies there's really no reason to use anything other than the instant-kill grab attack, or as I like to call it "The 'Fuck You' Button."

Mailbag Showdown

• It’s true, I didn’t like Brawl before I even started playing; but then the same is true for every game, object, animal and human being I encounter these days. Since the Internet is almost diametrically opposed to quality control, in recent years it’s been a lot easier to just assume everything’s shit until it proves itself otherwise. I like to call it the "Guantanamo Bay" approach to reviewing. [37]

Grand Theft Auto IV

• Once you inevitably grow tired of the sandbox mayhem and start on the mission path, you'll find that GTA is initially about as fast-paced as a Jacob Bronowski documentary playing at half speed. The first hundredweight of missions are all tutorials, which highlights the inherent problem with incorporating so many gameplay elements that you have to spend half the game explaining the bloody things! You have to learn how to drive cars, how to drive trucks, how to drive geese, how to use your phone, TV, internet, how to fist fight, how to gunfight, how to shoot from cover, how to shoot from the back of a giant tyrannosaurus... [38]

Painkiller

• The weapons are a bold effort to escape the usual lineup of melee, pistol, shotgun, machine gun, rocket launcher, and overpowered exotic thing that you never get any ammo for and only use in boss fights anyway. The default melee weapon is the titular Painkiller, a rotating blade arangement perfect for forecasting light showers of body parts and reenacting the lawnmower scene from the movie Braindead. (That's Dead-Alive if you're American and fat.) As for the guns, I could mention the hugely satisfying penis-extension gun that pins baddies to walls with entire trees, but all you really need to know is that there's a gun that shoots shurikens and lightning. I wish I could make something like that up; it shoots shurikens and lightning. It could only be more awesome if it had tits and was on fire. [39]

The World Ends With You

• The major thing that turns me off JRPGs and a lot of games in general is when I don't feel that I, as a player, am contributing anything to the story. All I ever seem to do is wheel the characters from one whingy boring dialogue to the next. The events are driven by their actions, not mine. All I am is a little angry Id who takes over for the combat, spending the rest of the time jumping up and down in the back of the main character's mind yanking nerve endings, trying to make him stop acting like a pillock. What I'm saying is that I like games where the gameplay and story go hand in hand, and in most JRPGs they're kept on either side of a wrought-iron fence made of tigers.[40]

Oblivion

• For a game that is obviously trying so hard, Oblivion is one of the least immersive RPGs I've ever played. The world map is huge, granted. If you intend to walk from one end to the other, you'd better pack a few sandwiches. But frankly, take one good look around the first time you emerge blinking into the daylight and you've pretty much seen everything. It's like they took 200 square yards of medieval English countryside, added a few wolves, then copy-pasted it until it was roughly the size of Yorkshire. [41]

Haze

• I think it's safe to say that very few people were madly trampling babies underfoot to grab Haze on launch day - I know whatever atrophied dregs of enthusiasm I had breathed their last when I glanced at the back of the box and saw that it was an outdoor first-person shooter about space marines. "Whoop de fucking doo," I said. "I look forward to the vehicle sections with horrible steering and spending half the game hiding under a table waiting for my health to regenerate." But then up popped the hateful little angel on my shoulder who spends most of his time talking me out of buying a cornetto every time I pass the 7-11. "Shame on you Benjamin Yahtzee Sebastian Godzilla Croshaw!" spake he. "Have you forgotten Call of Duty 4 already? You should give every game a chance to surprise you or you're no better than those dipshits who never played Mass Effect but condemned it as some kind of child-corrupting boobstravaganza." [42]

Metal Gear Solid 4

• I'm going to recount as much of the story as I can before my brain starts to hurt: Solid Snake is a cloned mercenary who is suffering from premature aging due to a planned obsolescence scheme worthy of Microsoft. He lives with his support character (and "best friend") Otacon, and the two of them have adopted a child together. (That oozing sound you just heard was made by all the world's homoerotic fan fiction writers simultaneously emitting torrents of hot lady-spunk.) Anyway, Solid Snake is tasked with the assassination of his evil clone brother, who is dead, but lives on through his possessed arm, which was grafted onto the body of - OH CHRIST, I can't go on; this shit is bananas! Play the games themselves if you want to know what's going on, although I can't guarantee that that will be enough - to truly get into the mindset of Hideo Kojima, you'd need to do something pretty drastic, probably involving experimental brain surgery and a complete X-Files box set.[43]

Webcomics

• Drama is the mortar that holds the webcomic community together, and there are so many wonderful ways to create it. Make absolutely no effort to improve your horrible drawing style, act like a prick at a convention, respond to constructive criticism with hostility, and just generally behave like the kind of monstrous egotist that blossoms like mushrooms in the darkened trough of shit that is the Internet. [44]

Lego Indiana Jones

• I've been ignoring the whole Lego-LucasArts coalition so far, partly because, as you'll recall from my Psychonauts review, LucasArts is run by douchebags, but mainly because it sounds utterly retarded on paper. I mean once you accept Lego Star Wars where does it end? Playmobil Battlestar Galactica? Duplo Firefly? Meccano Dune? Yeah I'm done milking that joke. I guess you could say I've - Wait I've got another one! Stickle Bricks Babylon 5? ...Sorry. [45]

Alone in the Dark

• What's tragic is that the Good Ship Alone in the Dark can see Port Good Game without a telescope, but they were apparently in such a hurry to get there that they accidentally landed at the Cock-Up Peninsula. It's full of great ideas balanced with terrible execution, which I will illustrate using two hypothetical designers I'm going to call Terry and Gonad. "Hey!" says Terry. "Let's have a damage system where you actually see persistent wound decals on your character's body." "Okay!" replies Gonad. "But let's put them on the outside of his clothes so they look like someone glued slices of ham to his jumper!" "Hey again!" says Terry. "How about a dangerous gooey black floor that gets neutralized by bright light?" "Okay again!" replies Gonad. "Now let's make the flashlight incredibly ineffectual against it and make it a one-hit kill!" Then a broken and jaded Terry starts sniffing glue while Gonad goes into the fetal position and softly giggles to himself. [46]

Age of Conan

• Contrary to popular belief, I don't hate mumorpugers. I hate what they do to people, turning them into nocturnal blobs of flesh and Cheetos that communicate entirely in mouth-breathing; and I hate when I look back on my time with a mumorpuger and realize that I just flushed away months of my life that I could have spent writing a bestselling book or raising a child or pounding nails into my face. But I have had fun with mumorpugers at the time, or rather a mumorpuger, and since comparisons are going to be inevitable let's just get the fucker over with. Age of Conan is not World of Warcraft. Some people might say "Ooh, maybe it's not trying to be," but those people are going to Hell for lying because all MMOs are trying to be World of Warcraft: same controls, same terminology, same arduous blocks of motherfucking grind, same interfaces right down to the quest-givers with big golden exclamations marks growing out of their heads like they just spotted Solid Snake shuffling through the undergrowth.[47]

The E3 Trailer Park

• I'd like to clarify that somewhere in the flinty pits of my petrified heart I'm open to the possibility of all these games potentially being fun (except for Final Fantasy 13 obviously). But my intention is not to troll for once but to argue that it makes the most logical sense to be pessimistic. After all, if the game's good, great! But if it's bad you've lost nothing, plus you get the satisfaction of knowing you're cleverer than fanboys, which is right up there with winning a beauty contest against Steve Buscemi but still, it's a good overall rule: never let yourself get excited by trailers, unless it's the one for the new Watchmen movie. Oh yes, I can never get enough big glowing blue men with their celestial lads hanging out! [48]

Ninja Gaiden 2

• Anyway, fuck you if you want a story; here's your story: demons over there, KILL THEY ASS. Among Japanese games, Ninja Gaiden II is almost unique in its immediacy. It has none of that Metal Gear Solid bullshit of cutscene dialogue that could fill a modest paperback. None of that Devil May Cry cockpiddle where the cinematics selfishly hog all the fun. None of that Zelda... erm... applesauce where you spend the first six hours on a starting island learning the subtle arts of waving a sharp stick around going Yah! [49]

Prince of Persia Retrospective

• Between them, the three Sands of Time games have the ingredients of probably the best game ever, and I don't say that lightly. The first game still very resolutely sits in my top five games of all time, but it could have been better. Like a variant of the uncanny valley effect, the closer to Portal perfection a game gets the more glaring the flaws become, and their attempts to repair those flaws in the sequels were akin to removing flecks of dirt from a birthday cake with a shovel. But we live and learn, so let's move on and hope the new Prince of Persia will be as good as Sands of Time. And that my ass will sprout wings and fly me into space! [50]

Soul Calibur IV

• I don't really understand fighting games. I don't hate them, but I've never frosted my pants over any of them, either. I just don't get them. And whenever I mention this, people say the same thing: "What's there to get? Violence is cathartic. It's like squeezing a great big stress ball, except you're kicking it in the face and you're a skinny Japanese schoolgirl in your underpants." If you want to relieve stress, you take a herbal bath or bang your head against a wall, neither of which cost ninety dollars at your local electronics retailer. There's got to be more to it than that. [51]

Braid

• And do you know who I blame for all of this? You! That's right you, the public — especially you, Adrian! (That probably isn't your name but it was worth it to mess with the heads of all the Adrians in the world.) Ye unwashed masses who ensure massive profits for the same old cookie-cutter sequels because anything that isn't safe and familiar makes you dive for your security blanket! And since you spent all Daddy's money on a next-generation console you won't even give the time of day to anything that doesn't have environment-mapped surface reflections and you're more interested in buying Master Chief novelty condoms than actual gameplay innovation! In fact, I don't even know why I'm talking to you. Piss off! Close the browser and fuck off back to Gears of War! Has he gone? Good, I hate that guy! [52]

Eve Online

• The unspoken goal of exploration is to make the entire planet completely boring. Life was at its most interesting back when we still thought grass huts were a bit hoity-toity and when there could have been dragons made of raisin bread over the next hill for all we knew. Nowadays, everything's mapped out. We've even spent enough time on the moon and the very bottom of the ocean to know that: firstly, there aren't any dragons there either; and secondly, we're definitely not in a hurry to go back and double-check. Now it's only the depths of space that remain unexplored and unboring, plenty of gray area where any number of interstellar sparkle dragons could be hiding. Eve Online does the impossible by making deep space boring, and demonstrates the best way to do that is to let nerds colonize it. [53]

Too Human

• So you'll die. You'll die a lot. And by Christ does the game want you to know it. A valkyrie who is clearly in no fucking hurry slowly flies down, picks up your corpse and ascends gently back into heaven as if to say "There there, baby, it doesn't matter that you're a ten-thumbed cripple who literally can't fight to save their lives, let's get you tucked into beddy-byes." Then you respawn fifty feet away with no penalties, scratching your head in bewilderment. And this happens every time you die! You can't skip it! No one could look at this and think "Yep, this will never get old!" The only remaining explanation is that this is some kind of test - maybe if anyone defends this on a forum they automatically get added to the government depopulation list because their minds are clearly deviant and must be purged! [54]

Spore

• You also get to design your own buildings and vehicles further down the line; so if all you're after is some kind of 3D art program for eight-year-olds, Spore is definitely for you. If you're holding out for an actual game, you get to eat shit, but never mind! You can always design a creature that looks like a huge cock and imagine it pounding you in the arse. [55]

XBLA Double Bill

• Nostalgia is a mouthful of balls. Children will like anything — the stupid, diminutive cunts — and you weren't any different. Games, or should I say the potential for games, has only gotten better as technology advances in direct proportion to the worsening of your memory. When the gaming kids of today become the hairy, winding twenty-somethings of the future, they'll be declaring that Halo 3 was miles better than a game of interstellar bum pirates on the astral thought planes of the universal overmind and they'll be just as wrong then as you are now. I played both Zelda: Twilight Princess and Super Mario Sunshine before I played Ocarina of Time and Mario 64, and I thought the first two were better in every buggering way! Drink down that burn sauce, fatboy! Also, I think Hitler was right! [56]

Mercenaries 2

• There's an insidious thought that frequently goes through the minds of gamers; and I'm not talking about the ones you get when Ivy from Soulcalibur's pants ride up, which are perfectly natural for growing young men. I mean the thought that goes "But I might need it later" — the niggling little doubt that prevents you from using all your most powerful insurance policies in case there's some kind of no-claims bonus at the end it all. So we have scenarios where you're sitting on a nuclear stockpile to shame North Korea and are throwing peas at a giant robot crab on the off-chance that there might be a bigger giant robot crab at the end of it all. No game illustrates this phenomenon better than Mercenaries 2, or as I like to call it, "Airstrikes 2: Hooray for Airstrikes." [57]

Star Wars: The Force Unleashed

• The Force Unleashed on the Wii did not endear itself to me. Now, I don't blame the developers for this, and I'm not just saying that because they're based in this city and might kill me. I blame the Wii for being tightfisted with its hardware upgrades; I blame myself for failing to research the different versions; I blame Michael Atkinson, the attorney general of South Australia, for quite a few unrelated things; but most of all I blame George Lucas, that hirsute chinless git, pummeling his own franchises with such ham-handedness you could put a piece of bread around both of his mitts and call them BLTs! [58]

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky

• I don’t think I would do very well in a real-world combat scenario. I hate being shouted at and I can’t run very fast while wearing a backpack the size of a cow. Before I would willingly enter a gunfight, the enemy are going to have to strap big glowing red arrows to their heads and promise to stand next to windows, loudly vocalizing every thought that crosses their minds. And by the time my comrades have persuaded them to do that, I’ll have remembered that I’m a massive coward and legged it. [59]

Silent Hill Homecoming

• Maybe if the original creators of something don't want to continue it then you should listen to them, because otherwise you're only making it to please the fans. And why would you want to do anything for fans? I mean, I'm a Silent Hill fan and I've just spent the whole review whining like a broken motor. Fans are clingy, complaining dipshits who will never ever be grateful for any concession you make. The moment you shut out their shrill, tremulous voices, the happier you'll be for it. Incidentally, why not buy a Zero Punctuation t-shirt? [60]

Saints Row 2

• Saints Row 2 shows a much better understanding of its audience: it is fully aware that most gamers are dickheads and if you give them any kind of freedom, their first instinct will be to abuse it. If you give them guns, they will shoot old ladies. If you give them cars, they will run over old ladies. If you give them aircraft, they will ascend to the highest possible heights and hurl themselves out onto an old lady. And if you give them customizable outfits, their first instinct will be to take off their clothes and run around the streets hip thrusting in the faces of old ladies. If you try to stop them doing all this, they'll hate you for it. Not only does Saints Row 2 not stop you, but it keeps score. [61]

Dead Space

• Just for once, I'd like to see a spaceship in a horror game that actually seems like it might have been a nice place to live. You know, tasteful light fittings, elegant laquered wood panels, or at the very least, throw a fucking carpet down now and again. At least that way, it would almost be a surprise when it gets invaded by a horde of flesh-eating mutants. Frankly, if you paint your spaceship gunmetal-gray and fit it with about half as many flickery-ass fluorescent lights as are necessary, then you might as well rename it the USS Kill Beast Buffet! [62]

Fable 2

• Then you have the option of marrying someone, although why you'd want to is a question the game skillfully avoids. Everyone has the same voices and endlessly repeated dialogue lines, so you'll run into nine clones of your beloved down any given street and none of them will get their tits out when you're bonking them. These are just a few of the excellent reasons why I grew bored after around twelve minutes of happy marriage and decided it was time to murder my entire family. This was the point where I discovered you can't kill children, of course. So much for total freedom, eh? What, so it's all right for someone else to shoot me in the face and throw me off a building when I'm a kid; but the moment I try to spread the love, ooh, suddenly we're getting off message? And while we're on the subject, why can't I marry my dog? [63]

Fallout 3

• If I had Liam Neeson's phone number, I'll tell you what I'd do: I'd nervously call him up and blurt out something about how Darkman was all right before slamming the receiver down and running away. But hypothetically, if I wasn't an idiot and talked him into doing voices for my video game, I'd have him voice a character named Captain Dynamite, who has the face of Frank Zappa and nuclear missiles instead of legs. He'd fly around the player in a magical space buggy for the entire course of the game sprinkling rose petals and friendship. What I'm saying is I'd make the most of the talent. Bethesda seems to be in the habit of finding the biggest name voice actors they can find and then having their characters fall off the map before you've even picked a class. They did it to Captain Picard in Oblivion and they've done it to Oskar Schindler here. [64]

Guitar Hero World Tour

• The first problem we ran into was that nobody wanted to sing! This is less a problem with World Tour specifically, and more an inherent problem with the original concept and possibly with the people I hang around with. You see, people who like pretend guitar are introverted nerds who picture themselves as the aloof, crazy-skilled lead guitarist whose hands rattle away like nervous little crabs while he stares into the middle distance pretending to have forgotten he's holding it. Whereas people who like pretend singing are either screechy center-of-attention types or a normal person who has rendered themselves massively drunk and stumbled upon a jukebox full of 80s power ballads. [65]

Mirror's Edge

• And yeah, maybe it would be realistic for all that white scenery combined with bright sunlight to bleed together into a big blinding blob, but it doesn't help you avoid dropping off a building for the umpteen bazillionth time. "Oh," says Mirror's Edge, here manifesting as a designer with a bicycle pump embedded in his skull. "Well, since that's your problem, I guess I'll just set half the game in linear claustrophobic tunnels that undermine the very concept of free running, and then fill them with excessive bloom anyway!" So he did. And then he ate his own shoes. So, essentially flawed concept, dodgy detection, indecisive design, muddy story, unlikeable characters, shocking brevity: put them all together and you get essflawcondodgeckindesimudstorliketersockity! And of course Mirror's Edge.[66]

Left 4 Dead

• It's my observation that zombies are second only to ninjas, pirates and monkeys in the list of things that nerds like and need to shut the fuck up about. They watch movies about them, they dress up like them and wander around irritating commuters in major cities; and it seems every time a hot new engine comes out, some craven optimist will try to make a zombie mod for it, post up one gun model and a piece of concept art before the level designer realizes that he's only worked in Lego and the whole thing falls apart. I guess it's just that the breakdown of society is attractive to people with absolutely no social skills; and while you may have to hide from slavering mutants your whole life, at least the big boys will never again tape you into a bin and kick you down the stairs. [67]

Sonic Unleashed

• Sonic the Hedgehog is sort of a rock star of the video game industry. He fronted a succession of extremely popular titles, made enough money to buy St. Paul's Cathedral and grind it into a fine snortable powder, hung around with a lot of suspiciously effeminate young boys, abused a number of forbidden substances, spiraled downward as inevitably as Al-Qaeda Airways, weathered a few very embarrassing attempts to regrab the spotlight, and now his shows are attended only by people's dads, who can only shake their heads in despair at the unshaven drug-addled spaz on stage whose pathetic spurts of activity masquerading as entertainment only serve to highlight both his and his audience's mutual decline into inexorable piss-dribbling old age. All he needs to do now is hang himself on a doorknob while having a wank! [68]

Prince of Persia

• The Prince of Persia series as it stands can best be equated to a man who owns a goose that once, when the conditions were exactly right and after being fed a particular brand of food, laid a golden egg. He then spent the next few years experimenting with the goose's bedding and vitamin intake hoping to recreate the ideal conditions, and after nothing more than a couple of bronze and silver eggs plopped out he went the scientific route of chopping it into fritters looking for the secret. And after that didn't work he hastily stitched it back together, dressed it up in glittery fabric and attached some googly eyes. And that's the new Prince of Persia, an appealingly gaudy appearance that fails to disguise the fact that the old bird is dead inside.[69]

Awards for 2008

• The Turd in a Chocolate Box Award for Surprising Poor Quality: Grand Theft Auto IV

  Mirror's Edge was a hot contender for this award, until I remembered that the game's badness didn't come as any surprise to me because it was by EA, and I am apparently more skilled in pattern recognition than most. So the award goes to none other than Grand Theft Auto IV, which decided that the best way to bring in specialty madcap sandbox fun to the new console generation was to dip the graphics in filthy dishwater, construct all the vehicles from depleted uranium, and break up the gameplay every five minutes to make you wheel your fat cousin to places and shovel burgers into his gob. Congratulations go out to all those at Rockstar, as soon as someone wakes them up. [70]

Tomb Raider: Underworld

• Tomb Raider Underworld's story goes as follows. Lara's looking for her mum, who is dead, only she isn't really; she's just stuck in the afterlife, so maybe she is dead, I dunno. And there's this evil lady who blows up Lara's house because... er... I guess she really doesn't want Lara to find her mum. The story follows on from Tomb Raider: Legend, which I haven't played, so I spent the whole game trying to figure out what was going on and who I was supposed to care about. The answer to that last question I discovered: absolutely bloody no one! Especially not myself.[71]

Far Cry 2

• You see, for sandbox gameplay to work you need a deeply varied world that calls for exploration (a la Saints Row 2) and/or some kind of clear ultimate goal hovering overhead (a la Assassin's Creed). Far Cry 2 has neither. Its approach is to plunk us off in the middle of nowhere and knock off for lunch. It brings to mind an animal rights activist freeing a captive bunny rabbit, only to have it bewilderingly sit on a daisy for a few hours before a predator comes along and bites its entire body off. [72]

Gears of War 2

• This is a game for big manly men with pecs like paving slabs. Anyone who shows any emotion besides grim determination or detached gallows humor is either going to die or get his balls kicked so hard that they blast out of his ears. Other ways to tempt fate in this universe include wearing a helmet, not having a sense of humor and basically being anyone but the kind of person who'd replace their genitals with a minigun if they thought they could get away with it and found something else they could piss out of! [73]

Little Big Planet

• I feel there's a fundamental difference of philosophy between me and the developers of LittleBigPlanet. They believe that every single person is an extra-special god-child with a bud of creativity aching to burst out into a single perfect flower; and I believe that every single person is a tosser, and any flowers that pop up out are going to be buried under garbage, fiery penises and countless recreations of the levels from Super Mario Brothers. All of which the moderators hastily delete, along with anything that looks at them funny. [74]

Thief: The Dark Project

• It was left to Thief to have strange and deviant thoughts like "What if there was a first-person game where you were trying to achieve something other than genocide, where even one or two measly deaths would have the game slap you hands away from the controls and yell 'What the fuck?'" And thus was born the stealth-em-up. [75]

Skate 2

• Personally, I felt more sympathetic for the police than the skaters in this game no matter how many times they were depicted as power-tripping authoritarian toolbags diabolically infringing on our personal right to fling ourselves at top speed down a busy pavement and knock somebody's mum into the path of a Fiat Bravo! [76]

Fear 2

• Now I want you to imagine something for me. Imagine a world where sequels are banned. Would this not be a beautiful place? Sure, we'd miss out on genuinely good sequels like Thief 2 or Half-Life 2, but I think that's a small price to pay. Every story would have to be fresh, so the writers would have to work extra hard to make the characters relateable. With no sequels there are no franchises, so there'd be less fandom, so all the nerds would go off and become doctors and scientists and rid the world of all known diseases. And best of all, endings would have to have some fucking closure! Under this regime, ending the game with ambiguous "to be continued" bullshit, when you have no idea if you're even going to make a sequel, would be punishable with prison time! Cautions will be issued for recurring themes and metaphors, and remakes would carry the death penalty! [77]

Spiderman: Web of Shadows

• Web of Shadows makes the high-speed web-slinging stay in mopping the floors while the combat goes out to beat up faggots. And combats are never going to be unique again. Fists, chains, ropes with spikes on the end, guns, swords, guns that are also swords - these are all roads well traveled. If I want to hurt people I'll play God of War, or prowl the homeless shelters with a knife and garrote wire, but if I want to swing around on webs very fast I'll play Spider-Man! [78]

House of the Dead: Overkill

• House of the Dead as a series has long been the butt of jokes for its atrocious stories, disastrous translation and calamitous voice acting; but at the same time it's also got a history of canny self-parody. House of the Dead 2 was re-released as a surprisingly hilarious typing tutor in which the guns were replaced by magical keyboards that blew off zombie limbs and heads with deadly shuriken-like nouns and verbs, and which I heartily recommend to anyone who feels that zombie massacres need not be precluded from the development of secretarial skills. [79]

50 Cent: Blood on the Sand

• You know what? A society where anyone can make jokes about anyone else and everyone laughs is a truly tolerant society. Political-correctness-charged censorship only serves to engender resentment and distance between social groups. Besides, gangster rappers don't need defending, they've got guns for that! [80]

Resident Evil 5

• But let’s close this review with a revisit of that lovely matter of racism that’s been hanging around like a bad smell. RE5 actually does a lot to defer that accusation. Your partner is black (a bit), quite a few whiteys are scattered throughout the early hordes, and real effort has been put into a somewhat realistic and sympathetic depiction of modern Africa. And then... Halfway through the game, we suddenly find ourselves in a succession of mud hut villages fighting crowds of jabbering black people in loincloths and war paint, chucking spears. Oh, dears. Talk about sidestepping a pothole only to fall off a bridge, but one needn't be worried unless there's genuine hatred behind it, and I don't get that impression. Capcom aren't bad people, they're just idiots. [81]

Halo Wars

• The story so far: I'm embarking upon an occasional quest to play games belonging to genres I've never really gotten into; a campaign I thoroughly expect to wholeheartedly regret the next time a big JRPG comes out, but mostly due to my excremental boredom with the procession of identical power-armored space marines that clog up mainstream action gaming like so much hyper-masculine mildew. As part of this venture I've been playing Halo Wars, which may come across as a curious choice as it's about identical power-armored space marines — GYAAARGH! [82]

Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars

• It seems that the weird thing about Chinatown Wars so far is that all its faults are balanced by its other flaws. Stupid enemies compensate for shitty controls, the easiness of trading compensates for its banality — all the foulness mixes together to create something halfway decent in the middle. It's almost prodigious in its retarded genius. [83]

MadWorld

• There really needs to be a name for this sub-genre, so I'm going to make one up: spectacle fighters - games in which most of the standard baddies are about as effectual as a panda's love spuds, and the emphasis is less on them being challenges to get past and more on them being squirty punching bags to be dispatched in the most spectacular ways. Devil May Cry, Viewtiful Joe, God Hand and arguably Manhunt are the foamy-mouthed horses that already populate this rowdy stable. [84]

Tom Clancy's H.A.W.X.

• Now I'm no expert on this (or indeed, anything except dick analogies) but I do know that modern military jets are very fucking fast things. By the time you see one it's already over there, so combat in such a thing would usually amount to pressing a button and watching something half a mile behind you burst into flames, and that's not just idle fact it's cold hard speculation. But real life makes not for entertainment, so for this game we're all just going to dogfight in jets like it's nineteen-forty-fucking-five, okay? [85]

Siren Blood Curse

• Survival horror is what I might call my "pet" genre, a pet that I keep in the tool shed and feed broken glass, and in my awards for last year I accused everything that claimed survival horror status of being nothing but a parade of action games where some of the enemies jump very suddenly out of cupboards. But some viewers took issue with that: "What about Siren Blood Curse?" they cried. "While you were blindly clinging to the hope that the new developers would recover Silent Hill from the dustbin with the baked beans and fish heads cleaned off, the PS3 was enjoying a true original survival horror game full of all that Japanese-style horror you hold in such high esteem, watashi wa baka gaijin, etc. etc." So, all right, I guess I'm going to have to put my hands up to that one. Yes, there was at least one survival horror game last year - it's just that it was rubbish. [86]

The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena

• Riddick in Pitch Black had some personality, a sense of humor, actual flaws and ambiguous morals — you know, like one of those tiresome human beings have. Now he's just an infallible cardboard cut-out who does nothing but growl threats and pretentious bullshit one-liners that are supposed to make him sound like a warrior poet but more get the impression that he has fortune cookie papers glued to the inside of his goggles! [87]

Valkyria Chronicles

• Valkyria Chronicles helped me come to two distressing realizations about myself - firstly, that I might technically be a Nazi sympathizer, and secondly, that turn-based strategy is something I might be able to get into. Here and there in game I caught myself being slightly entertained. but Valkyria Chronicles messes itself around too much. Besides the combat being outnumbered five to one by cutscenes and muddy menu-driven micromanagement motherfuckery, enemies should not be able to shoot you when it's not their fucking turn! It's like an opponent in chess flinging elastic bands at your pawns while you're trying to think. [88]

Velvet Assassin

• I have a special little black hole in my cold obsidian heart for stealth gameplay, but it's like owning a tiger. It's very impressive if you know how to take care of it, but if you don't you're going to be cleaning massive dollops of your former children off of the kitchen floor. Instant game overs the moment the guards so much as smell your farts are an example of bad stealth. And while Velvet Assassin does give you the opportunity to fight back or evade when you're spotted, they have assault rifles, you have a pistol, they have several friends, you have a bad haircut, so they might as well dump you to the load screen to try again for the sixteenth hyperbolillionth time.[89]

Duke Nukem Forever

• My one criticism for Duke Nukem Forever is that it comes on fourteen DVDs, but I'd expect nothing less from a game with such a long development time! And every second is on display, and a good thing too. I mean, hypothetically, if 3D Realms hadn't used the time to put together a titanic super-game and had merely been jerking off for twelve years, then it raises unfortunate implications. It means not only can a studio be staffed entirely by howler monkeys, but there are also investors (who probably consider themselves to be quite serious people) who will pay them to jump about and wee on things for over a decade while talented people with great ideas for games are snubbed because they never had dinner with John Carmack or whatever. And when the monkeys present nothing more entertaining than a fistful of poo on a tray and they get sued for all their bananas, a bunch of extremely thick people who still genuinely believe that something half-decent could come out of this rigmarole say, "That's tragic". NO IT IS NOT TRAGIC! If you get sued because you were paid to do a job you didn't do, that is not tragic, that is how the world should be! And you are a magnificent retard who should have their brain taken away by Social Services. But anyway, the point was, I'm just glad I don't live in a world where such scenarios exist. Now I'd better stop here, because I promised Jimi Hendrix that we'd go pony trekking under the sea.[90]

Bionic Commando

• The bionic commando, a character so lasting and dynamic that I completely forgot his name, is on death row for... being a bionic commando apparently. But then a group of radical bionics nuke a city to make everyone realize what harmless and level-headed people they are, so the government give our hero his arm back and send him in, but they call him up every five minutes to call him a tosser so at least they're not hypocrites. Also, there's a subplot concerning his missing wife, and the twist that resolves that subplot is officially the most retarded thing I've heard since I called the walrus hotline! Whatever, I don't give a toss about no wife, bitch - I'm here to make my little bionic monkey swing on shit! [91]

inFamous

• In my FEAR 2 review I made the point that government supersoldier projects are a flawed premise because any death machine with free will will inevitably notice that there's something iffy about taking orders from cabals of aging generals when they could beat bears to death from across the room using only their prostates. If superpowers are to be had handing them out to random passers-by seems as good a system as any, because then we could all ask ourselves whether we'd use the gift to help people or blow up the entire world. Of course I would ask why we can't have more options. Can't I just help people as a day job and destroy the world on the weekends? Or maybe I'd just fuck the whole complicated business and go back to working at Wal-Mart, using my powers to jump-start the little carts the fatties ride around on. [92]

The Second Annual E3 Hype Massacre

• Project Natal! I know they pronounced it "Nat-ahl", but I'm going to keep calling it "Nay-tal" because that's what it looks like, and it's a really fucking creepy image. The only thing creepier than that would be a grown woman flirting with a dead-eyed CG ten-year-old while Peter Molyneux stands in the background gushing about it. It may be an amazing bit of technology, but all these motion sensor concepts have to eventually face the fact that people play games to unwind, and no one "unwinds" by coming home and waving their arms about like an air traffic controller covered in beetles. [93]

Prototype

• Prototype still wins though because a sandbox is only as good as the method by which you get around in and Cole has a tendency to get get bogged down with climbing while Alex can shoot blood out of his wrists at jet engine velocity and fly like emo Peter Pan. I'd say it was "made of win" but if I did I'd have to strangle myself. [94]

The Sims 3

• This may sound a little bit hysterical but The Sims is probably the most evil game in the world. It's not the Manhunt kind of evil that convinces children to put each others' heads in plastic bags - that's pussy evil. It's not even the World of Warcraft type of evil that turns millions of people into mindless zombies, doomed to walk the earth devouring pizza and Cheetos. No, The Sims is evil out of a sense of underlying wrongness. Despite physical appearance every character feels the same, a facade of wholesomeness stretched over a dead empty interior, a hive-like community of beings who make an effort to imitate human behavior but don't quite grasp the subtleties. And you just know that if you peel their skin back you'll find reptilian scales or a black chitinous exoskeleton. [95]

Ghostbusters: The Video Game

• People or properties more commonly associated with famous movies, books, birthday card messages, etc, decide to grace the video game industry with their presence and everyone's all like, "Ooh, show us how it's done great sensei, because we've honestly just been guessing up to now!" It belies not only the endless disrespect video games recieve, but also gaming's collective self-esteem problem. If something worked as a movie, then that qualifies it to work as a sequence of amusing lights and sounds that hold the average scumbag's jaw slacked for around two hours. Whereas a video game has to stand up to about ten hours of unpleaseable nerds like me turning over every rock looking for stuff to complain about. My point is, asking a filmmaker to make a game is like asking a sausage maker to suck off a pig. You can sort of see the logical connection there, but it's a completely different skillset and the effort will just leave a bad taste in someone's mouth. [96]

Overlord 2

• Overlord 2 plonks you in the usual generic fantasy world and into the big Renaissance faire bootees of some guy who at least subscribes to the same magazines as Lord Sauron, and your task is to use an army of giggling imp minions to... Actually that's a good point, what the fuck are we doing here? Taking over the world probably, not that they ever tell you that. I guess once you put your big spiky helmet on over your glowing eyes and raised an army of demons to do your bidding you can't exactly go back to business school. [97]

Red Faction Guerrilla

• After that a load of boring plot happened, and I was let into the real game and still brimming with Viking rage, my first instinct was to see what effect Mjöllnir would have on the nearest human being. For the first blow they just told me to stop arsing around, and on the second their spine snapped neatly in half. Hah! Teach him to tell me what to do. But then a little message came up saying that my morale had gone down. No, it fucking hadn't, Red Faction Guerrilla! Now get out of the way so I can break all your stuff! [98]

Wii Sports Resort

• Wii Sports Resort is mostly functional and you could probably have a lot of fun playing it with friends or some children you intend to molest. But I oppose it because I see what it represents: a dead end. Your motion sensor could have full 1:1 control and incorporate a twenty-two function Swiss Army knife, but that won't change the fact that without physical feedback, motion controls are unimmersive! In the long run, they can only hope to sucker in casual gamers with teaspoon-shallow minigames like Wii Sports, the gaming equivalent of the cartoon cinemas used to play before the film. I say stop buying the Wii, fuck Project Natal up the arse, and maybe this whole motion sensor trend can fuck off and make room for the next innovation. Like cyberspace! Or a controller made of fruit! [99]

Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood

• At the start of each mission, you choose which of the two effectual brothers you want to play as and the AI will control the other. As Thomas, you can shoot more accurately, throw lassos and climb ledges, and as Ray, you can open the pause menu, restart the mission and choose Thomas instead, you fucking idiot! [100]

The Conduit

• I read in the gaming journals that The Conduit uses special technology that makes it look as good as games on the PS3 and Xbox. Then I waited a few minutes for the punchline, but apparently they were serious! To put it charitably, the game is fucking ugly! This isn't even because of the Wii. I've seen better-looking Wii games and even Gamecube games - this is more on the level of a PS2 that someone's trodden on. I can't remember the last time I saw a game depict a skyline by painting one on a wall and erecting it a few feet away from the window. That's shit I'd expect from a Tex Murphy game, and Christ, this is turning into a good review for obscure references, isn't it? [101]

Silent Hill 2

• Silent Hill 2 is very good at telling a story without words. Everything is drenched in symbolism, the basic monsters are all suspiciously effeminate, with the exception of Pyramid Head (in his first appearance before he totally sold out) an uber-masculine powerhouse repeatedly seen plunging his massive throbbing knife into the other monsters' moist quivering bodies, which obviously symbolizes...neo-conservative imperialism. You start to think that James' nightmare might be entirely of his own creation, as if the town is just handing him a set of jump leads and watching as he sticks them on his balls. It's a fascinating voyage of pain and despair that leaves you emotionally drained and satisfied, like fucking a burning dolphin. [102]

2.5D Hoedown

• Splosion Man puts me in mind of N+ crossed with Portal, and then crossed with Portal a few more times until very little of N+ remained. It's set in a futuristic laboratory like the one in Portal, but it doesn't get suspicious until you find your first cake. There's one on every level you can get for extra points, which is obviously way better than Portal which just had the one, and even that one was of questionable status. And you remember how Portal memorably featured a jaunty song with quirky lyrics? Splosion Man has three. I appreciate that you have to do whatever it takes to stand out in the indie market, but Splosion Man really is trying too hard, like an insecure man who goes to work in bright green trousers so the people will pay attention to him, if only long enough to tell him to change out of his stupid green trousers. [103]

Tales of Monkey Island

• Monkey Island was part of my childhood. I had the first two on my Amiga - don't suppose you embryos would remember those days when a game like Monkey Island 2 came on twelve floppy disks and playing it was like operating an old-fashioned electronic switchboard? The first two games are still timelessly imaginative, sparkling and very very funny, and therefore have no place in this review. The problem with the later installments is the usual one that occurs when a series has been in cryogenics for a few years in that the new developers are almost always fans, who in their eagerness to show "respect" for their beloved franchise prefer to lavish it in tongue baths in place of any significant evolution. In the second episode of the new Tales of Monkey Island a character whistles a snatch of music from Monkey Island 2, which might have been kind of cool if he didn't almost immediately say "GEE I WONDER WHERE THAT MUSIC'S FROM, HMM?! Wink-wink slurp-slurp tongue bath!" I'm reminded of a cat showing affection to its owner by gobbing a dead bird on his rug. [104]

Wolfenstein

• You know what future historians will say about us, right? There were two very different games within the same twenty-year period, both called Wolfenstein and the second one was not strictly speaking a remake of the first. From this we conclude that the people of the early 21st century were taking the piss! It feels weird to call it generic, since this is the franchise that practically invented the genre, but Wolfenstein (the new one that is) subscribes to so many of the cliches of current generation action games that it's like The Spy Who Loved Me of FPSs. So any attempt to review the game in my normal manner would be equally dull. That's why I'm going to review it... in limerick form!!! [105]

Batman Arkham Asylum

• I had my doubts about Arkham Asylum because it looked like a dark, gritty game with scary horror elements, and how can you have scary horror when you're Batman, ostensibly the most capable fictional character since Jesus? (Ooh, edgy!) And how can you have dark grittiness when you're Batman, a man who swishes about in his underpants and a fabulous cape? This does feel like reaching for the low-hanging fruit - and Batman is nothing if not a low-hanging fruit - but I just love that bit in The Dark Knight when Gary Oldman and Aaron Eckhart are talking about bringing down the mob, and it could almost be a scene from The Departed, until Batman flounces in wearing pajamas and a bucket on his head and no one bats an eye. [106]

Beatles Rock Band and Guitar Hero 5

• Rhythm games are a bit of an indictment of our generation, aren't they? Why yes, I would like to clarify that position! We've never had a decent war to give us any sense of mutual achievement or confidence, so we place anyone with the slightest talent or notoriety on ridiculous pedestals and tell ourselves we could never reach them because we're just so shit! And then Rock Band and Guitar Hero say, "Yes, you are shit! Real guitars aren't in your league, all the shit will come off your shitty fingers and clog up the fretboard! But never mind, here's something that isn't much like playing real guitar but kind of looks like it, and that's the best you could hope for, isn't it, you empty, hopeless turd?!" Let me ask you something, Guitar Hero. Do you really want to create a generation surfing across mediocrity on a wave of plinky-plonky plastic? And when the fuck are you going to license "Stairway to Heaven"? [107]

Darkest of Days

• When you're dealing with time travel it's important to establish whose rules are in play. Is this 12 Monkeys rules where you can't change shit? Or Back to the Future rules where you can change shit but the time line is kind of easygoing about it? Or Terminator rules where you can change shit, but then maybe you can't change shit, and then you make a God-awful TV series and Christian Bale yells at someone? [108]

Scribblenauts

• If I were feeling charitable, I'd liken it to having infinite amounts of Lego and only being allowed to access ten blocks of it at a time. But it's not even that. It's more like no-clipping through Doom 3 with all the lights turned up; all the content with no structure or entertainment value; not so much a game as a developer showing off. Congratulations guys, you've proved that you have a fuck-load of free time and a dictionary. Come back when you've looked up what "fun" means. [109]

Wet

• The main character is Rubi, a tomboy-ish assassin who's about as likable and sympathetic as a deep-sea angler fish in an SS uniform. She's arrogant, rude, surly, psychotic, selfish, greedy, joyless, and really rather dim; and this may be a cheap shot, but she looks like a fifteen-year-old boy wearing a dirty mop head and a corset. The only way she could appeal is if your name is Russ Meyer and you built an entire film-making career around the same masochistic fantasy in which domineering women bite your knob off. Also, she seems to confuse swearing with wit. That's MY thing! [110]

Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story

• I don't have a problem with aiming games at kids, although I do despise kids. Seriously, I don't think you quite grasp how much I loathe children. Given three wishes, I'll ask for a puppy, a decent chip sandwich and for every child-bearing womb on the planet to pop out and fly away like a cheery parade of greasy red balloons. But while kids are pretty fucking stupid - I mean, even with all the crayons in the world, they still can't draw a fucking house - that doesn't mean you can't try to challenge them. When I was a kid, we played games where you had one life and every bird, insect and blade of grass was trying to murder you! Kids today get their hands held so hard their fingers turn white and drop off! [111]

Brütal Legend

• I ask you now: How many more genres have to be sacrificed to the sandbox monster before we remember the importance of specialization? We've already lost the RPGs, the racers, the shooters, the brawlers, the bakers, the candlestick makers - all stouped together into games of all trades, masters of none. Now we're losing real-time strategy; where does it end? Will I one day be refused the straight-line block in Tetris until I've journeyed to the Sargoth Plains and recovered the fifty sacred horse-bollocks? [112]

Washington D.C.

• By the way, that raises the question, if you have sex with a clone of yourself, is that incest or masturbation? If you got, like, Siamese twins... who share the same downstairs parts, and one of them consents and the other one doesn't... is it rape? It's like... a timeshare vagina. [113]

Uncharted 2: Among Thieves

• Like a supermodel who was considered ugly because she wears a baggy sweater, Drake is generically handsome beneath the strategically-placed grime and inexplicably green designer stubble; supernaturally athletic despite his ceaseless grunts of exertion and retarded, gibbon-armed-flailing jumping technique; and constantly spouts appalling wit and panicky self-effacement in the hope that you don't notice that he is a remorseless career thief who kills more foreigners than malaria - although having rid the world of blacks, Asians and Latinos in the last game, he has now moved on to non-American whites. [114]

Dragon Age: Origins

• Dragon Age calls itself a "Dark Fantasy". It's rather cute, really, like a D&D nerd getting his ear pierced because he fancies the goth girl who works at Starbucks. Dragon Age isn't Dark Fantasy, nor is it Light Grey, Avocado or Caffeine-Free Fantasy-- it's just straight Fantasy Classic; a straight-line Tetris block wiping out four big, fat rows of demand for traditional single-player RPGs. Its got elves, dwarves, dragons, it's got a title screen depicting a sword sticking out of the ground and the world map looks like a fire-breathing coffee-drinker's been sick on it. We're talking 100% commitment here, where every single element could be taken out of context and every single one could make your girlfriend legitimately call you a sad bastard. [115]

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2

• "Unimpressed by our controversy, are you?" says Infinity Ward. Well suck on this - Russia invades America. Bam!" Remember how in my HAWX review I said that in today's enlightened times modern-day warfare games never tie the baddies directly to a foreign power when there are loads of perfectly good terrorist groups and PMCs that no one cares about offending? Well, MW2 skullfucks all that with an American flag wrapped around a baseball bat, and the whole thing plays like the violent delusions of a Cold War fantasist with his head stuck in a lathe. [116]

Assassin's Creed 2

• Being a European, there's an old saying that I'm quite fond of. In Heaven, the food is Italian, the police are British, the platformers are French, the shooters are Croatian, and it's all run by two international software giants and an electronics corporation. In Hell, the food is British, the shooters are Canadian, and I forget the rest, but basically the gist of the saying is that Italians are all tossers. About the only important things Italy ever did were the Renaissance and murdering Jesus - deicide and a whole bunch of painters running around being gay. But it's in that gay painty period that we find the setting of Assassin's Creed 2, or to use its proper name, "Ubisoft's 20-hour Long Assassin's Creed 1 Repentance." [117]

Left 4 Dead 2 & New Super Mario Bros Wii

• Nintendo's Mario team really don't seem to have any ambition besides subsisting on bits of crust they can scrape from the pimply underbelly of nostalgia, lest anything as dangerous as a new idea appear in their brains and give them a fucking seizure! But as the disbelieving friend said to the inventor of the feces-powered helicopter, "This shit will not fly!"[118]

Demon's Souls

• Eventually though I got through the first dingy castle full of jerks and found the first demon, which was a giant slow-moving cowpat. Probably fitting for the very first tier but I was starting to think the game was making fun of me. Anyway, some helpful prior player advised me via the medium of floor to use fire-based weapons, so I opened the menu to put some fire on my sword, whereupon I was cowpatted to death because opening the menu doesn't pause the game. "Pause?!" it seemed to say. "What kind of faggot are you? I don't care if you need to answer the phone, real gamers have no friends!" [119]

Holiday 2009

• Oh, what the fuck are you doing here? It's Christmas! Haven't you got families to resent? This is my one week off, I'm going on holiday! ... (That's summer holiday, by the way. Hope that Northern Hemisphere weather is workin' out for ya.) [120]

Saboteur

• I've honestly lost count of all the ways I've killed Nazis in my life as a gamer. I've killed them in linear first and third-person, sandbox first and third-person, I've shot their planes down in flight sims, I've invaded their installations in RTSes, and in the Indiana Jones adventure games, I've point-and-clicked their lights out. Now The Saboteur has let me beat the Nazis in a go-kart race, so all I have to do now to have the full collection is smack a Nazi to death with a Guitar Hero controller! [121]

Awards for 2009

• The Everything-Proof Shield Award for Most Obstinate Refusal to Die: Michael Atkinson

  After Super Mario Bros. Wii was just an NES Mario game with four times the bullshit, I was tempted to give this award to Mario, but frankly, it's a little too obvious and complaining about Mario's undying nature is like using a shield and claymore to take on a speeding train. So instead I'm giving it to Michael Atkinson, a South Australian attorney general who continues to ensure that half the games get banned or censored and whose ancient, black, dried-up little heart still manfully strives to keep him alive in the face of the searing waves of hatred that are broadcast to him all over the nation and the world every second of every day. Well done, you miserable old fuck. [122]

Torchlight

• I have a lot of respect for the fantasy peasant village economic model. It seems like those guys got a good scam going on. First you accidentally build your settlement within easy walking distance of the local gnoll encampment or dragon cave or directly on top of a gateway to Hell, then all you have to do is build a big fat checkpoint in the village square and keep giving birth to potential kidnapping victims, and your storekeeper, your blacksmith, your tailor and your innkeeper, they'll all be set for fucking life! Okay, someone's pretty daughter gets dragged off by kobolds every other night, but hey, you've cornered the lucrative adventurer market. Just buy another one! I bet this is why peasants in RPG peasant villages never move from a single spot directly in front of their place of business; if they move, all their adventurer money will pull their trousers down. Presumably, they pay a helper gnome every morning to shovel breakfast cereal into their mouths. [123]

Darksiders

• War has absolutely no personality; he's a great big brick that gets in fights, going about things with an air of cold, angsty dispassion. He doesn't seem to give a toss about anything he does, so why should I? And what right does War have to be angsty about his life? He's fucking War! He's never had to queue up at the job center or pine after ex-girlfriends who left him for a surfer; he just breaks things! If I were War, and I'd just hoisted a seven-foot demon into the air and chopped him in half with a single swing, I wouldn't stand there scowling; I'd go, "Fucking hell! Did everyone see that? I am squirting machismo out of my nipples over here! I am a monster truck that walks like a man!" [124]

Bayonetta

• I strongly advise not trying to follow the story on your first run-through, there are some things for which the human mind just isn't equipped. Bayonetta was found at the bottom of a river twenty years ago and now works with demons from Hell to kill angels, who are apparently evil because they keep attacking Bayonetta because she keeps attacking them. The baddies or possibly the goodies are trying to resurrect some big evil god thing which is linked to some ancient clan of witches and rival clan of sages and some associated evil corporation who presumably felt a bit left out. And there's this guy in a Harry Potter scarf who wants to either kill Bayonetta or bone her silly, and there's this little girl who's either Bayonetta's daughter or a younger version of herself - AAAARGH! Sometimes I miss the old Pac-Man storytelling method: eat pills, avoid ghosts. That's it. Only sometimes you can eat ghosts as well if you - AAARGH! [125]

Dark Void

• After two years of this, I thought I was immune to being disappointed by games. Whoops, that's my entire opinion of Dark Void given away in one sentence, isn't it? But stick with me, there's more to this! It's not that I went into Dark Void thinking it would be good, because I don't go into any games thinking they'll be good. If I have to search through a dumpster for a lost wedding ring, I could try to convince myself that the dumpster will be full of cakes and freshly-picked flowers, but I'll only be fooling myself. Dark Void is a dumpster that appeared to be full of rusty dog food tins, but once I got in I realized they were actually delicious novelty cakes made to look like rusty dog food tins. But then once I started eating them, I discovered that the icing was made of wallpaper paste and cyanide, and that's why I feel it let me down. I wonder if the Geneva Convention covers torturing metaphors? [126]

Borderlands

• I suppose this is geared toward the mumorpuger crowd, who are well known for putting up with all the samey grind in the world if it means they get experience points and fancy weapons with blue names at the end of it. I've had a great idea for a game that these people would love. It comes with a special USB glove peripheral and you get one experience point for each time you punch yourself in the face! [127]

Mass Effect 2

• So Mass Effect 2 is very well-written and epic and immersive and all that, but gameplay-wise, it's still flailing around like a neurotic twenty-something checkout girl trying to find the right combination of hats and dresses. They discarded the ugly yellow sunhat of vehicle sections, then tried on the frumpy brown frock of resource mining and it's still not quite working. For Mass Effect 3 - and I know there will be a Mass Effect 3 because the loading screens rather unsubtly remind you to hang onto your save game - they should try bringing back the planet surface exploration, but let you navigate the terrain with jetpacks! And populate it with giant wolves that shoot lasers out of their mouths! If I wanted to be a space quantity surveyor, I'd play EVE Online! [128]

Dante's Inferno

• You have one set of upgrades for holy experience and one for unholy. "Ah ha ha ha ha ha!" you might say. "Moral choice system, hmmm?" "Well, not really," I would reply. "More a violent option or equally violent but better spirited option." "And I suppose," you would continue, "that since holy points are slightly harder to get that holy upgrades would be slightly better, and that it all might be leading toward some alternative ending scenario where too many damnations land you a big, fat, steaming two-bedroom apartment made of poo and sawblades on the Ninth Circle?" "No," say I. "I presume that was the original intention, but I guess they used up the ending cinematic budget rendering Dante's hairy bum (spoiler alert) and the upgrade tracks are pretty much equivocal." "So what's the point of having two separate experience levels?" you ask. "Well, it's like my right hand on a Sunday night," I say. "Why is that?" you ask. "It beats the fuck out of me!" [129]

BioShock 2

• So the wallpaper paste-squirting bean counters from 2K asked themselves what was a popular aspect of BioShock 1 we could focus on in the sequel in order to wring as many pennies as we can out of the property, and someone said "The Big Daddies of course! I think you should get to play as one." "What?" said someone else. "Those haunting monstrous things that trudge around as if they can barely support their own weight? Those tragic figures reduced to single-function robots with no trace of humanity left that seem to embody the downfall of the city as a whole? That's a stupid fucking idea, it'd be like a sequel to Half-Life where you get to play as a gun turret." [130]

Aliens vs. Predator

• This is Aliens vs. Predator, though, so there are Predators too, who show up now and then to a chorus of "What the fuck was that?" from nearby human NPCs. And I'm waiting for someone to reply, "It's a fucking Predator, you moron; the human race has only encountered them like fifty times. Did no one document anything? Didn't at least one survivor put an entry on his fucking LiveJournal? Or did we use up all the data storage media recording all these fucking audio logs?" [131]

Heavy Rain

• Heavy Rain is the spiritual sequel to Fahrenheit (aka Indigo Prophecy, aka Baron Von Teapot's Fucking Ludicrous Adventure) and is presumably an attempt to make this particular brand of brown, drippy lightning strike twice. Now, say what you like about Fahrenheit - thank you, I think I will; it was a pretentious river of quick-time events with a plot that got its head caught in a bucket of doolally halfway through, but say what you like about Fahrenheit - at least stuff happened in it! Game starts: BOOM - you stabbed a bloke, you've got thirty seconds to wash off the blood and stuff the corpse into a bin, and you haven't even pulled your socks up. Meanwhile, Heavy Rain starts: You wake up, have a shower, get dressed, slap yourself in the face, have a drink, go sit in the garden for a while, your kids come home, you play with your kids, then you stab your kids with a knife! (Oh no, wait, that was just me stabbing an electrical socket to make something interesting happen.) [132]

Battlefield Bad Company 2

• Perhaps "Realistic Shooter" isn't the right term for games like Bad Company 2. In a truly realistic shooter you'd get shot once, then laid up for six months before the hospital you're in gets blown up by an IED and you're forced to crawl to safety with half a leg missing before getting shot by twitchy border patrolmen. All of which is preceded by about six months of doing push-ups with sweaty people you're not allowed to make love to. A better name for the Modern Warfare thing would be: Deranged Paranoid Power Fantasy For Right-Wing Shut-ins Who Would Blow Their Own Nuts Off The Moment They Were Handed An Actual Firearm And Probably Already Had Done...shooter.[133]

Final Fantasy XIII

• Some people have told me that FF13 gets good about twenty hours in. You know that's not really a point in its favor, right? Put your hand on a stove for twenty hours and yeah, you'll probably stop feeling the pain but you'll have done serious damage to yourself. The story is paced like an ant pushing a brick across the desert, the characters are either completely unlikeable or act like they're from space, and the art design is like a painting of a fireworks display - lots of garish colour and flash, but take one step to the side and you'll see it's completely two-dimensional. I played Final Fantasy XIII because I am an unbiased critic (shut up I am!) and I must give everything a chance to surprise me. After five hours, the only thing that surprised me was how I managed that much without chewing off my own face! [134]

April Fools

• Ay, in the very temple of delight/veiled Melancholy has her sovran shrine,/Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue/can burst Joy's grape against his palate fine:/His soul shall taste the sadness of her might/And be among her cloudy trophies hung. [135]

God of War III

• I've always liked Kratos, although I suspect he wouldn't like me because I'm alive. In a medium saturated with generic dark-haired clear-skinned hypocritically violent self-righteous white boys assigned the role of hero by virtue of being the handsomest guy in the plot - usually voiced by Nolan North - it's nice to play an admittedly ugly hate-ridden fuck with no heroic qualities and who crushes people's skulls against jagged rocks as a form of greeting. I'd like to see Nathan Drake get locked in a room with Kratos, see how far smug wisecracks get him when his head is getting sandwiched between a concrete floor and a foot that kicks so much ass that it permanently smells of farts. [136]

Red Steel 2

• I've got to admit, this is probably the best motion-control combat I've seen on the Wii. Of course, it still isn't very good. It's like being the best at jerking off to your sister in the shower, you only won because no one else entered and you probably shouldn't have been doing it in the first place. [137]

Just Cause 2

• How To Be a Video Game Journalist, Lesson 37: Using Game Titles for Puns and Cutting Swiftian Jibes. A game name like Just Cause is absolute gold for the reviewer since it can mean both "a just cause", a righteous agenda, or the phrase "just because", a dismissive explanation of whimsical or reckless behavior. The opportunity for puns is obvious. Why would you steal a passenger jet and fly it directly up the bum hole of a sunbathing prostitute? Just cause! Praise and large quantities of gamer pussy will swiftly follow. However, this pun is so obvious that every game journalist and their cat and their cat's squeaky toy will have used it, so you may have to post-modernly draw attention to that fact at the start of your review so everyone assumes that you're using the joke ironically. Remember, the ironic gamer pussy is just as soft and lovely as the regular kind. Next on How To Be a Video Game Journalist: Digging out your higher brain functions with the end of a ball-point pen. [138]

Silent Hill: Shattered Memories

• The unique feature of the game is that it psychologically profiles you as you play, altering itself to fuck with your head better, which I was dubious about. Who you are in a game is a very different person to who you are in real life, a sort of high-functioning autistic you probably wouldn't want to leave your children with. If I go into a ladies lavatory for example, in real life it would be to sniff the seats for some illicit sexual thrill, but in a game it's because I want to make sure someone didn't leave first-aid kits in the cistern. [139]

Splinter Cell: Conviction

• Here is a brief list of things that these professional soldiers, guards and career mercenaries have never been trained not to do: stand facing each other and jabber about how much they hate democracy and apple pie and the smiles on little babies' faces instead of guarding the fucking room; give away their position every five paces by screaming out personal insults at the professional killer they can't see but know for a fact is in the room currently training his sights at their big flapping potty mouths; after catching a glimpse of said professional killer unload every clip they have in the spot where he used to be with their backs to about twelve different entry points; and walk around in circles repeatedly checking for the professional killer in the same square yard of floor space, loudly announcing their discoveries with each revolution. Of course none of this eclipses the stupidity of going up against Sam Fisher in the first place, when he's the one who got most of the solitary brain cell that everyone had to share. [140]

Nier

• You know how in some RPGs you start off in your lovely idyllic green-grass home village where smiling neighbors bid you how-do-you-do and which is virtually guaranteed to get Hiroshima-fied before the second act? Well, Nier is like that but never quite gets as far as the second bit. Frankly I wish it would. Here we have a stalwart fighter who in between fighting cosmic death beasts from beyond the veil of time and space has to repeatedly run back home to water his melons, spend quality time with his child and see if anyone needs him to run down the shops to buy them a healing potion and a Mars Bar. It's one of those games that seeks to challenge the notion that gamers need to get a life by attempting to simulate one. [141]

Dead to Rights: Retribution

• In case you never played the first game, here's a Dead to Rights Recap: BANG! PUNCH! BANG! PUNCH! BANG! PUNCH! WOOF! It's the kind of over-the-top balls-to-the-teeth action that I honestly can't tell if it's being deliberately camp or if it was written by a paranoid NRA member shaking off a debilitating addiction to horse tranquilizers. You play the preposterously named Jack Slate, a cop so close to the edge he has to wear a safety harness who surgically implants rare steaks into his muscles and who missed a golden opportunity when he chose policing rather than opening a roofing business. Someone murdered his father, so he's out searching for answers, and he's letting his gun do the talking, and his gun only knows one very loud word! [142]

Monster Hunter Tri

• Actually, speaking of the title, we should probably drop the word "Monster" as well since you usually just kill blameless wildlife that only attacks because you're invading its territory or you just pushed a sharpened stick down the ear of its favorite child. But I guess calling it "Hunter/Gatherer of Innocent Young Dinosaurs Pathetically Mewling Their Last as the Memory of Their Mother's Warmth Drifts Away to be Replaced by the Unforgiving Coldness of..." Oh fuck it, let's just call it "YOU BASTARD!" [143]

Alan Wake

• The environments do a good job of building atmosphere with eldritch light illuminating the mist that coils around the trees, flickering shadows making an innocent mulberry bush momentarily look like a round-shouldered murderer with an axe and a massive erection. It's just that the game is fully aware that it does dark spooky forests best but little else, so every half hour it has to contrive a new reason for Alan to be lost in a spooky forest at night. It's like a crime drama about a detective who can only concentrate when he's around pastry, so every week the crime has to conveniently take place in a bakery or within walking distance of a pie shop. [144]

Red Dead Redemption

• You know Rockstar, you don't have to keep bending over backwards to please me. When I said that all the cars in GTA IV handled like there was a fat baby attached to the steering wheel, they brought out The Lost and Damned which centered around a motorcycle gang. But that was even worse, because characters in GTA always seem to hold onto motorbikes as loosely as possible in case they catch crotch rot from the seats, and the graphics are so murky that riding down a busy road at high speed is making a foolish wager with the quintuple-somersault head injury fairy. "Alright then," said Rockstar. "Here's The Ballad of Gay Tony, where every other mission is helicopter-based." But the helicopters handle worst of all! It's like you're constantly airlifting a fucking merry-go-round with a hippo on one side. "Alright then motherfucker!" said Rockstar. "Let's just set GTA a hundred years ago so you don't have to drive motorized vehicles at all! Are you happy now?!" To which I reply, "My horse appears to be lodged in a wall!" [145]

Alpha Protocol

• What's important is that however you play him, Mike Thorton is the ponciest ponce that ever ponced past the poncing parlour. The dialogue system lets you switch between three attitudes - a professional by-the-book sort of ponce who wouldn't emote if the Angel Gabriel blew off in his face; an aggressive ponce who sounds like he's five seconds away from snarlingly flipping the global crisis onto its front and pounding away at its nether hole with a Franchi SPAS-12; and the suave ponce, who might as well save time and mace himself every time he opens his fucking mouth. Best of all, even if he only ever talked about his favorite breakfast cereal he'd still sound like a wanker because the voice actor delivers every line in the level, smug tones of a high-brow film critic archly dismissing the latest superhero blockbuster as he spoons himself another helping of baby seal. [146]

Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands

• Overall, there's just something terribly cynical about Forgotten Sands that makes me uneasy. It's all so by the numbers - when the large bull-like enemy was introduced, I instantly paused the game and announced, "This enemy will charge at me but if I dodge out of the way at the last second, it will run into a wall and stun itself." Then I unpaused the game and thus were proven my powers of clarivoyance. It seems like if you've completed a trilogy and, lest we forget, rebooted the fucking thing, going back to mine the last game you were sure was good just isn't very classy, like stealing leftovers from the bins outside an upmarked restaurant and serving them to your dinner guests. Plus it was brought out to capitalize on a film, and films are a load of old cobblers. See, Roger Ebert, that's what it feels like! [147]

E3 2010

• Let me make my position clear - gaming should be about games, not about controllers. Controllers as they stand are a perfectly adequate conduit for connecting man to machine by way of thumbs. It doesn't matter if A Tale of Two Cities is printed on the side of a horse, or if every other word is in Greek, what matters is that Sydney Carton sacrifices himself for Charles Darnay at the end (spoiler alert). Delude yourself all you like with videos of happy families in pastel-coloured shirts spending quality time with bouncy-castle simulators, but in the long term people want to play games the same way they want to read books or watch TV: slouched on the settee with a big bag of Malteasers. How on earth do you think forcing them to do a sit-up every now and again is going to revolutionize entertainment? [148]

No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle

• No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle has finally gotten past the border patrol of the PAL territories and having played through it I can confidently state that there is absolutely no worry of Suda 51 getting more mature. At some point between Nomeroes 1 and Nomeroes 2, someone introduced him to the concept of jiggle physics and thus has begun a friendship to last a lifetime. The fact that all the women in the game wear fetish outfits and are either in love with you or have to be bloodily murdered with your giant throbbing sci-fi memorabilia does feel a little bit backward. I wouldn't usually have a problem, but I thought I'd express disapproval so I don't get stabbed by Rebecca Mayes. [149]

Super Mario Galaxy 2

• I guess the fanbase will get the franchise it deserves, but is this really all you want? Yes, there are games I like, games I love, do I want to play a new installment of the same thing every few years? NO! The fastest way to spoil your pleasures is to make them routine. Variety is the spice of life and status quo is the starch. The star that shines brightest is all the more glorious for its brevity, or to bring this metaphor down to a broader cultural level, The Simpsons has been running for 21 seasons and hasn't been good since the fifth. I would rather see things evolve, and before any defenders of motion controllers get in touch, evolve in ways that aren't stupid! [150]

Singularity

• Naturally, the plot ends up with more holes than Blackburn, Lancashire. If all the history up 'til 1955 gets changed, than why am I still in the present? How do all the other characters know that history was changed? Actually, they do explain that -- someone left a note. Now I don't know about you, but I'd like to think of myself as credulous enough not to form international secret societies at the behest of time-travel conspiracy theories on random pieces of paper. It'd be like seeing some bathroom graffiti and forming a religion around "Big Hank". [151]

Crackdown 2

• I've got nothing against multiplayer as a concept, but you shouldn't try to make it carry a game because there are logistical problems. Me and my friends have enough trouble splitting the bill after pizza, and navigating labyrinths of lobbies and servers is rarely worth the effort when everyone would rather just stick Guitar Hero on. And joining random online gaming is like walking into an aviary full of nitrous oxide and trying to play Scrabble with the kookaburras while they stand around having sex with your mum! [152]

DeathSpank & Limbo

• The final question I suppose is which of the two games I recommend most. Well, if you're rich enough to patronize the arts now and then, put on your tuxedo, uncork some pricey Chablis, and experience for yourself an evening of Limbo. But if you're more in the market for a bulk-buy economy-brand kind of entertainment, then order out for a barbecue Meat Lover's with a two-liter Coke and try DeathSpank. Alternatively, if neither option appeals and you'd prefer something bland and unchallenging, then why not try eating a dick. [153]

Shadow of the Colossus

• Shadow of the Colossus is usually filed under "action-adventure" like everything else that's hard to classify, but really it defies genre. The gameplay is divided between adventuring alone through the silent wilderness and the sixteen tussles with monsters so large you could hollow out their carcasses and repurpose them as low-income housing. In the former, everything is peaceful and contemplative with no combat and no puzzling besides navigating the occasional mountain that sits obliviously between you and your destination like a fat guy at a cinema. And in the latter, everything is noisy and intense like you're playing Hungry Hungry Hippos backstage at a Dragonforce gig. It creates effective contrast, like riding your bike down a long and peaceful country road and every other hundred yards the bike turns into a bear. [154]

Split/Second: Velocity

• Which brings me to Split Second: Velocity, or rather Split Stroke Second, 'cause that's how it's written. So what the fuck does that mean, Disney Interactive Studios, Split or Second? Do we have to pick one? Or does the game alternate being themed around standard units of time measurement and serving suggestions for bananas? Anyway, it's an extreme racing game... you do know the hyphen is the horizontal one right? Look down, it's right next to the zero. I know it's hard to focus when Mickey Mouse is badgering you for results, but honestly! [155]

Transformers: War for Cybertron

• People will say I didn't like the game because I don't care about Transformers - well, the point is this was the game's chance to make me care about Transformers and it cocked it up! Tie-in games in the past have been good enough on their own merits to make me interested in the subject matter. All I'm seeing here is a bunch of tumble dryers bumping into each other under overblown disco lighting! [156]

Kane and Lynch 2: Dog Days

• Reflect on what huge masochists the developers of Kane and Lynch must be, famously having gotten Jeff Gerstmann fired from Gamespot for not realizing that the Gamespot super-sellout advertising package included a free happy ending on the review table. Solidarity therefore was the main ingredient in my root beer float of reasons why I didn't review Kane and Lynch 1, with a hefty scoop of the ice cream of "couldn't be arsed." But now that Kane and Lynch 2 is out I sincerely hope the publishers don't intend to follow the same policy as last time because if they do there will not be a reviewer employed by the end of the month! Or to put that another way, Kane and Lynch 2 is worse than deep-fried tampons! [157]

Mafia II

• Why does society insist on demonizing organized crime? We all agree Prohibition was a stupid law, right? So why is it socially acceptable to crave a nice cup of tea in the morning or a cigarette after a nobbing but the moment I try to pound half a kilo of smack into my eyeballs everyone thinks there's something wrong with me? [158]

Metroid: Other M

• Oh, yes, and there's this murder mystery plot set up early on. Six different members of a military squad are introduced and established with names and slightly anemic personalities. But then it transpires that there's a traitor among them, picking them off. You even have a boss fight with him, his face cunningly concealed by camera angles and bits of scenery. So, do you want to know who the traitor turns out to be? ...So the fuck would I, because the game kind of forgets about this whole subplot and hopes you do, too. "Hey, wasn't there some intrigue from the first half of the game we were supposed to be resolving, Metroid Story Writer A?" "Doesn't ring a bell, Metroid Story Writer B. Now let's make Samus' suit fall off again so everyone can see her bum." On an educated guess though, the evil guy was probably the one with the evil mustache. [159]

Amnesia: The Dark Descent

• It's quite a while before you even glimpse a monster, and let me just transcribe my thought process at the time: "Dum-de-dum, well, this isn't very scary. Oh, look! Physics. I can throw chairs around like a removal man who's completely stopped giving a shit. Doors suddenly blowing open in the wind? Yawn-a-rama. Guess I'll just look around upstairs and then might as well play Halo: Reach for a bit. Nope, nothing much up here, either; I'll just go back and... Whoa, what was that thing I just glimpsed running down a hallway? I don't know, but it looked cross about something, so I think I'll go down this other hallway instead. Oh, it's blocked. Guess I'll turn around and WHERE DID YOU COME FROM!? AAGGH, RUN RUN RUN I'M SORRY I DIDN'T MEAN TO MESS YOUR CHAIRS UP, OH PISSING BLIMEY, THERE'S JAM COMING OUT OF THE WALLS!!" [160]

Halo: Reach

• Everyone in this prequel seems to be fully aware of their ultimately doomed status. No one's particularly surprised when the Covenant do show up (with incidentally all human characters immediately being totally familiar with the operation of Covenant weapons and vehicles, you'd almost think they'd just built this game off the engine of a previous one or something) and the story is focused on a small commando unit whose members spend the entire game having a prolonged "Who can have the noblest death?" competition. Oh come on, this isn't a spoiler! They wouldn't characterize this many NPCs if they weren't going to pick them off like after-dinner mints. The very first image in the game is a brief flash-forward depicting your helmet lying discarded in the dust of battle-scarred terrain, what the fuck do you think happens in the end? Your character climactically and thrillingly gets a little bit hot? [161]

Dead Rising 2

• What I like about it is that it's a true watercooler game, and I'm not talking about all that Facebook game bollocks where you can boast to all your friends because you stuck a radish up an imaginary cow's arse. You get together with your other Dead Rising 2 mates and you can discuss for hours what combos you found, boss-fighting tactics and where to find the chainsaws and mankinis. Perhaps a romance could blossom that will last a lifetime if you discover similar tastes in weapons and women's clothing, but what we don't want to know is what you'll do on the first date. [162]

Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions

• Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions plays like marketing material for Marvel Comics' range of alternate Spider-Man continuities. See, every now and then, some writer at Marvel's creativity-fuelled dream factory gets bored of repeatedly typing the words, "Spider-Man punches the villain in the face", and transfers the characters to a different setting or time period, so they can instead type, "Spider-Man punches the villain in the face... in space!" [163]

Castlevania: Lords of Shadow

• Stop me if you've heard this one before: beefy bloke with poor coping skills gets a big nark on after something kills his wife and takes it out on mythological creatures, with a weapon on the end of a chain that can do light attacks and heavy attacks. But before I can bring down my well-used 'Like God Of War But' stamp like the terrible hammer of judgment that it is, the game dodges my swing and goes "Wait! Here's something original! Every now and again you have to have thrilling boss fights with monsters so big you have to ledge-climb all over their bodies, pausing to hold on when they try to thrash you around like a little murderous nipple tassel, and chip away at their health by picking at glowing weak spots." "Say," I reply, "Another word for 'giant monster' is colossus, isn't it?" "I know what you're thinking," retorts Castlevania Lords of Shadow of the Colossus, "but we're not like that game at all! That game had sixteen colossi and we've got three! That's a completely different number!" ..."So where do you want this 'Like God of War But' stamp?" I ask after an embarrassed cough. "On my face, please." [164]

Enslaved: Odyssey to the West

• If you said to me, "Sci-fi reimagining of another culture's mythology mostly concerned with robots," I would immediately think, Too Human! and punch you in the bollocks for reminding me of it. But wait! There's a new sheriff in sci-fi reimagining mythology town! Enslaved: Odyssey to the West, a post-apocalyptic action-adventure inspired by the classical Chinese epic called Journey To The West, in which the monkey king is replaced by a sweaty white guy with neck muscles like mating dolphins. Hopefully this will keep us going until someone makes Space-Pilot Jesus Christ vs. Mecha-Pontius, but don't delude yourselves - Enslaved isn't inspired by Journey To The West, is it? That is something I find considerably difficult to swallow, because the game takes liberties with the original story in the same way that Jason Voorhees takes liberties with cheerleaders. [165]

Fallout: New Vegas

• And then I made it! I stepped out into the glittering lights of the city, the towering buildings noisy monoliths to the sheer potential of... why the fuck can't I move? The game froze up! I mean, my life froze up! I mean, all that radioactive toilet water must have given me some kind of paralysing... oh, bollocks to this. Roleplaying in Fallout 3 is difficult enough without the interface and the terrifying fixed eye-contact conversations without it bugging out as well. And it'll take more than having to stop for a sandwich and a piss to make Fallout 3 more immersive. Maybe if you ground it into powder and poured it into a swimming pool, but it would probably only turn the water brown. [166]

Star Wars: The Force Unleashed II

• You've got to feel sorry for Star Wars fans in this day and age - when you're not mocking them or kicking them down flights of stairs, I mean. They haven't exactly rolled a double-six in the great game of life to begin with, and now the one thing that has made their existence marginally less wretched is crumbling before their very eyes like old pastry in a dishwasher. Between movies, games, books, and tea towels, the shit of Star Wars now vastly outweighs the good, which consists of the first two movies and arguably Knights of the Old Republic. Not that they'll ever admit that. It's quite entertaining to watch the level of denial die-hard Star Wars fans operate on as they try to convince you that the romance in Attack of the Clones was totally believable. To say Hayden Christensen and Natalie Portman had chemistry in that film is like saying that a chair stacked on another chair is a sizzlingly erotic love scene. So I look forward to seeing how the fanboys justify The Force Unleashed II, because it is the most grossly offensive and mishandled application of intellectual property since the Schindler's List Easy-Bake Oven. [167]

Call of Duty: Black Ops

• And there are many moments when I just want to yell, "Time out!" and demand someone explain what the fuck's going on before another thing explodes. Because the thing about all the Call of Duty games I've played lately is that they all seem to be hooked up to I.V. drips full of Pop Rocks. Black Ops just can't calm the fuck down. If five seconds ever pass without a gunshot or an explosion, then it's probably because you just passed out from an epileptic fit. The game's like a nagging spouse slapping you 'round the back of the head every five seconds: "GO THERE! KEEP RUNNING! TAKE COVER! NOT THERE, YOU'RE GETTING SHOT! THERE! SHOOT THAT GUY! NOT HIM; HE'S ON YOUR SIDE! CAN'T YOU TELL? HE'S WEARING A SLIGHTLY DIFFERENT HAT! QUICK! PICK UP THAT GRENADE AND THROW IT BACK! I DON'T KNOW, OVER THERE SOMEWHERE! Oh, there, see? If you'd thrown it sooner, that wouldn't have happened, you stupid cunt!" You only get a break on the loading screens, which will generally helpfully remind you that grenades explode, and you should probably avoid getting exploded in future. [168]

iPhone Games

• Completing the iPhone game chart top 3 at time of writing is Fruit Ninja by Halfbrick Studios. This is about as simple as games get, there isn't even the paltriest context for what you're doing. You're not exacting revenge on limbless pigs or feeding your pet bitch lizard: you're a ninja, fruit is flying up in front of you, and fuck fruit! Sitting around all smug on trees and in pies. [169]

Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood

• My understanding was that Asscreed as a series was about exploring various historical settings with future Desmond as a framing device. But as much as I like Ezio, my concern after two games is that we're getting bogged down with our spaghetti-scoffing friend. I hate to say it, but maybe it's time for the inevitable game entirely about future Desmond. He's still got the personality of a damp fish (which might explain what his fish-lipped girlfriend sees in him) but the other characters in the Scooby gang are actually quite appealing, especially the snarky sarcastic misanthropic British man. He really rubs me up the right way. Can't think why! [170]

Splatterhouse

• Once you're mentally tuned into the Caligula mindset, the gore swiftly starts to feel repetitive and unsatisfying. One of the posters I saw for this game bore the tagline "He'll rip your head off." This is at least accurate, but it would be even more so if it were followed by the words "...and that's all he'll fucking do." In classic Wad of Gore fashion, you can grab weakened enemies to do finishing moves, and most of them just involve pulling off the closest thing it has to a head. How about a little creativity my man? That one fellow you killed by shoving your hand up his arse and pulling his rectum out was original, or at least it was before you did it fifty fucking times. [171]

Epic Mickey

• Disney, having long been as artistically bankrupt as a vending machine, care less about interesting new reinterpretations than their copyrights being depicted in the slightest negative light, so the specter of compromise hovers around Epic Mickey - sorry, Disney Epic Mickey - like a bad smell. There's this one vintage Mickey Mouse comic in which he breaks up with Minnie and spends the rest of the comic attempting suicide. I swear this is true, and it was way edgier than this! Chip 'n Dale Rescue Rangers was edgier than this! Fucking Kingdom Hearts was edgier than this, if only for the usual JRPG pedophilia subtext. Two child abuse jokes and we've barely started, that never bodes well! [172]

Top 5 of 2010

• But to the yin must come the yang, to the cream must come the cheese, to the giddy high of new love must come irritable bowel syndrome. The worst game of the year, a game less substantial than a fart in an lift but no less unpleasant for those caught in its wafting cage, a game that killed its franchise so thoroughly that the only acceptable sequel would be a box containing nothing but an apology note and some chocolate. I refer of course... to Halo: Reach. BURN! Had you going for a second there, didn't I - actually it's Fable 3. BURNED again! No, seriously now - a game I found literally as headache-inducingly unpleasant as impacted wisdom teeth surgery in the middle of a rave, step forward, Kane and Lynch 2: Dog Days. Step onto your first place podium, and then put a rope around your neck so we can kick it away. [173]

World of Warcraft: Cataclysm

• But it's not about items, is it? You don't honestly care if your new crystal nethersword is going to clash with your elite boss-clogs, it's about the numbers! You want the items with the best numbers so you can use your numbers to decrease the enemy numbers until your numbers are the best in the land, and all the other guilds flock to regard your numbers with jealous awe! And before you argue that lots of games are about numbers when you get down to it, no one ever ruined their lives to get 100 percent items in Super Metroid! [174]

Fable 3

• I think I've realized what I don't like about Fable: it's essentially fascist. Heroism, rather than a quality that anyone can exhibit, is reduced to some kind of inherent biological thing unique to a single genetic line of handsome white people. All the support characters who do the actual organizing of the revolution take it as read that you will be king because you're the only one with the king genes, despite being an embarrassing out-of-touch mostly silent privileged fop who fucks his dog! And I'm not even being disingenuous - when you pet your dog it strongly resembles making out. Especially when you dip it and stick your tongue down its throat like you're teaching it Dirty Dancing. [175]

Minecraft

• This is one game where there's officially no shame in looking up the FAQ. A tutorial wouldn't go amiss. "See those trees?" it would begin by saying. "Chop them down with the flat of your hand. Now make a workbench. Now make a pickaxe. Mine some stone and make a better pickaxe. Now find some coal. If Lady Luck consents to smile, you'll find some in a wall somewhere - no, I don't know how you were supposed to figure all this out. And while your workbench is open make a shovel, because the sun's going down and now you're going to dig a big hole and cry in it until the exploding bush monsters go away." It's like their only reason to live is to ruin other people's artwork. There but for the grace of God go I, suicide hedge. [176]

A Shadow's Tale

• One late game mechanic is magic archways that let you temporarily turn back into a physical object, but I'd noticed several of those archways on various levels before you acquire this power. Oh, you're going to make me backtrack aren't you, you little bastard? Sure enough, after however many samey boring levels it took to get to the top of the tower, I then had to go back through some samey boring tedious levels to gather some items to open up another set of samey boring tedious interminable levels, which I thought would be the end but then some more samey boring tedious interminable prosaic levels started up, and even reading this sentence is becoming samey, boring, tedious, interminable, prosaic and when does this fucking game end?! There are many ways to analyze a game, but uttering that sentence aloud never shines a positive light. [177]

Dead Space 2

• Now if I were a paranoid man (which I'm not, whatever people have been saying about me), I'd say Dead Space has started deliberately trying to provoke me. The very first thing that happens in Dead Space 2 is a bloke turning into a Necromorph, fully illuminated and literally six inches away from your face, then it grabs you by the lapels and screams at you while his eyes pop out. This is the horror equivalent of a small child banging its head on a wall so you pay it attention. "HEY LOOK AT ME, ARE YOU SCARED YET?! WHAT IF ALL THE SKIN ROLLED OFF MY FACE, ARE YOU SCARED NOW?! AAAAAAHHH!! DOING THIS REALLY HURTS ACTUALLY!! AAAAAAHHH!! I CURRENTLY REPRESENT A THREAT IN AN EXTREMELY UNSPECIFIC WAY!! AAAAAAHHH!!" [178]

DC Universe Online

• Just for fun, let's examine the premise as if we don't know who any of these characters are. A bunch of poorly dressed motherfuckers have a great big apocalyptic punch-up until only one survives, whereupon aliens invade, so said survivor travels back in time (no they don't say how, put your arm down!) and brings a warning to two rodeo clowns and a prostitute. Then he does a weird thing that bestows superpowers upon a whole bunch of random civies, his assumption perhaps being that if the entire world consists of poorly dressed motherfuckers having a punch-up then perhaps the aliens will just get freaked out and quietly leave. [179]

Mindjack

• Cover-based shooting is a little bit dry and overdone, even if it's perfectly executed, and the only way to perfectly execute Mindjack would be with a lethal injection. Once you've persuaded little Jimmy Meathead to take cover rather than perform roly-polys in front of the chosen wall, he has a terrible habit of firing into it, and at one point I couldn't see where I was shooting because the ammo counter on the side of the gun was in the way. Can't see the killing for my gun, how philosophical. [180]

Two Worlds II

• As is fairly typical of western RPGs, once you actually start playing the establishing plot gets swiftly dog-piled under a labyrinth of side quests and intermediary objectives. And within a matter of hours I paused to reflect while escorting an old man into the sewer to make a trade with some underground organization on behalf of a crime lord so he'll eventually tell me about some tower that the orcs seemed really keen for me to visit, and realized I'd completely forgotten how any of it related to the overarching possessed princess/dark lord motivation that I still don't get what was going on there! This is always the problem with western RPGs I have because I always lose the sense of flow. After a few quests and a particularly financially ruinous trip to the armor shop, I find myself floating around a peasant village dressed like a dandy cutlery drawer with no smegmachucking idea of what to do next! [181]

Bulletstorm

• Thank Christ for companies like Epic, for games like Gears of War, that popularized fat space marines trundling between chest-high walls like they're in wheelchairs. But in 2004, a company called People Can Fly shirked modern trends to create Painkiller, a fast, frantic and shamelessly fun evocation of the bygone age and one of my favorite shooters of all time. "Wow!" said Epic. "You really showed us how it's done, People Can Fly. Why don't you step over here for a second? Come on, don't be shy, we're not going to hurt you... NOW! DROP THE NET! HIT THEM WITH STICKS! Phew, nipped that one in the bud!" So now that People Can Fly have been whipped into line, they and Epic can bring you Bulletstorm, a game about fat space marines. [182]

Killzone 3

• Anyway, let it never be said that I'm some ignorant Loom-smashing Luddite, because I started playing Killzone 3 not only with the PlayStation Move controls but also with the 3D option on my new massive 3D TV that I bought with all my ad revenue money, much obliged Internet! The motion controls didn't last ten minutes. After calibrating (Calibrating, fuck! Starting up a game these days is like starting up a fucking cruise liner) the aim was wavery and difficult, I didn't know where they'd moved all the buttons to and my big red glowing controller was reflecting in the screen and giving people hilarious clown noses! So after getting sniped silly for a while that went out the window and I took up a nice sensible sixaxis which didn't stop the game from throwing in motion-controlled turny switches whenever it could get away with it. The 3D held out a bit longer - yeah, things in the foreground were getting all prominent and shit but everything from the middle distance on looked like a big flat matte backdrop like the game was taking place in a puppet theater. After a while I turned it off and suddenly I was astounded by the detail in a nearby wood texture now that I wasn't wearing those stupid glasses. Things ten feet away stopped popping in all the time and my dog came back to life! So fuck modern technology right in its cutting edge! Ow! [183]

Kirby's Epic Yarn

• Obviously the game starts about as challenging as a polystyrene prison, but over time it remembers its heritage and gains a few teeth. A Meta Knight boss fight in particular - and I haven't played a lot of Kirby games, but the whole Meta Knight thing seems rather glaringly out of place, in a game where the principal antagonists are a fat penguin in some knitwear. It's like an episode of the Care Bears where they all climb into giant mecha suits and sword fight over the last Jelly Baby. [184]

Dragon Age II

• Before a subtitle can be thought up we need to determine exactly what Dragon Age II is about. Much like the first one, it's all about the representative messages, and can't go five minutes without someone being really heavy-handedly racist against mages, elves, dwarves, goldfish et cetera, which is why I find it somewhat ironic that you're only allowed to play as a human this time around. When the first game let you pick from an entire Burger King Kids' Club of races and backstories, here you're always a human with the surname "Hawke," so to compensate for the lack of choice other characters can actually address you by name. Whoop di fuckin' do. And I'd just like to point out that this is quite a long game, so being a male character with the first name Ethan is going to stop being funny very fast. [185]

Pokemon White

• In an alternative world in which the school system is regarded with universal contempt, children are encouraged to roam the wildnerness siccing wild animals on every motherfucker who crosses their field of vision. You know in the intro to Syndicate Wars where the lad who lives in the dystopian nightmare city has this chip in his head that makes him think he's living in picturesque small town America? I like to think the protagonists of Pokemon all have the same chips and in reality are exploring various murky basements with a sack full of rats and mangy attack dogs. [186]

Yakuza 4

• The amount of modern Japanese culture that gets worked in makes me wonder if this is not actually aimed at foreign tourists. The equivalent would be a British game in which you play a Bobby in ol' London town, healing up by eating fish 'n' chips and using a fighting style that mainly employs rugby tackles. [187]

Crysis 2

• An aspect of the plot I actually liked is that Alcatraz is basically a collection of broken bones and ruptured organs held together with spit, and the suit is acting as some combination iron lung and wheelchair and is the only reason he's still upright, and nowhere is this more apparent than when you've run out of suit power in the middle of a pitched battle, and are trying to waddle behind a bit of wall like you've just caced your pants. It's refreshing to see an unstoppable action protagonist who also comes across as vulnerable and tragic. Nathan Drake could perch his rectum at the top of a flagpole and wisecrack all the way down to the floor, and he still wouldn't be an ounce as sympathetic as a silent protagonist who has essentially been reduced to a load of beef stew in an thermos flask. [188]

Nintendo 3DS

• So with motion controls on the way out - my theory is that if I keep saying that it will become more and more true - Nintendo needed to get started on next week's wage packet. The interesting thing about Nintendo is that they're kind of like Nicolas Cage in that they don't do middle ground, they're either doing really well or shitting a hole straight through the bed. When they get bored of making solid Mario platformers and attracting a strong user base, they create consoles that make your eyes explode and license Team Ninja to make Metroid games. 3D may be an utterly pointless gimmick that adds about as much to games as putting glittery rainbow stickers on the cover, but will the 3DS be what changes that? Well, sort of, in that the glittery rainbow sticker is in a small wooden box and you have to look at it through a hole. [189]

Portal 2

• Portal is the only game I've been unable to find a fault in. It's like Ahab and Moby Dick, if Ahab regarded Moby Dick with asexual lust and Moby Dick's owners once invited Ahab to come visit their ivory tower and flick cashew nuts at poor people. In the time since then and the release of Portal 2, you'll be pleased to hear that I eventually did come up with a criticism for Portal 1: it's got the worst fucking fans in the world. Nothing ruins a good thing quite like knowing you share your opinion with mindless little tits who bray like mules if you so much as mention the word "cake," and the good thing in question can never be the same again. This is technically known as the "Knights Who Say Ni" Effect. [190]

Castlevania: Symphony of the Night

• Visually, Symphony of the Night is dense as all shit, but then it was on the PS1. With the advent of CDs for console gaming, games suddenly had lots of disc space to spread their elbows out, and a lot of developers used that to have FMVs up the butt or make games in that hideous first-generation 3D that looked like origami modeling with used toilet paper. But Symphony of the Night stuck to 2D and completely tarted itself up, and it's still nice to look at than the many incarnations of Captain Greybrown Loadsofbloom. [191]

Mortal Kombat

• I am frankly flabbergasted that a game like Mortal Kombat can seriously be considered relevant in this day and age, at a time when fighting games are thought to have humiliated themselves if they don't show up with their roster filling at least two school buses, Mortal Kombat should by rights have been kneecapped for showing up with only seven playable fighters, two of which being the same guy wearing different coloured jumpers. And while fully-rendered graphics might be a little overkill for a 2D fighter, using photo cutouts of people in costumes has got to be the most ghetto-fucking solution short of cutting out pencil doodles on the sides of milk cartons. And what I understand least of all is why people are calling this a new release when Wikipedia clearly states it came out in August 1992...oh, do you know what I've done? I've got Mortal Kombat, the 2011 release, confused with Mortal Kombat, the game from 20 years ago with the same exact name! Do you see how confusing this gets?! [192]

Brink

• Incidentally I'd like to invite fans of Brink to take a shot every time I mention Team Fortress 2 - hopefully by the end of this video you won't feel so poorly disposed towards me. You know how Team Fortress 2 (take a shot) introduced optional hats and unlockables that did nothing but mess with perfectly good visual design like a bunch of jelly beans sprinkled on a wedding cake? Well, Bethesda saw this and cried, "Valve will never outdo us when it comes to making bad decisions! Fully customizable outfits for everyone! You won't even be able to fucking see the wedding cake behind all the jelly beans!" You want to know the ironic thing though? Even with this feature every character looks exactly the bloody same. That's failing to a new level, like standing on a rake and the rake has a grenade taped to the end of it. [193]

L.A. Noire

• Mind you, it's not exactly a brain-melter to deduce whether someone's lying or not. This is the inherent problem when you tell your mo-cap actor "Look like you're lying, and I know you're acting and therefore lying all the time, so this time exaggerate it," so of course they're going to spin their eyes like fruit machines and shift around like someone's trying to work an ant farm up their bum. The much-touted realistic facial animation is indeed very impressive and you can often recognize the real-world actor who did the mo-cap, such as TV's Greg Grunberg! But while the faces are very realistic and well-animated somewhat less attention has been afforded to the bodies, with the usual game problem of weird-looking joints and cardboard clothes. So a rather eerie effect is created, and some characters look like Gerry Anderson finally snapped and started taping the decapitated heads of jobbing work actors to his Captain Scarlet puppets. [194]

The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings

• Amongst the 700 subcategories of inventory items you can gather like a bum with a shopping trolley are mutagens and weapon upgrades. But if you ask how you're supposed to equip them then you're committing a social faux pas again. Why do I even have an inventory screen if double-clicking on every single item makes the game slap you across the wrist and say "No, we do that from a different screen! No we won't tell you which one! And put on a fucking tie! Where were you raised, Azeroth?!" [195]

Hunted: The Demon's Forge

• The first boss fight is the most disheartening moment. Through a lengthy network of caves and dungeons (some sections of which were so fucking murky I literally ended up resorting to casting fireball everywhere just so I could see where the fuck I was going), I was buoyed by the ongoing promise of a boss fight with a giant spider that kept appearing over the horizon like the bedroom eyes of a courtesan peering coquettishly over her fan. Although it very clearly only had four legs, so I don't know why everyone kept calling it a spider. For tedious multitudes of chambers the game went "Ooh, it could be in the very next room! I guess you'll only find out if you keep going, won't you?" And then finally the giant spider found a window in its meeting schedule and chased me through a big cave for a bit before I lobbed two bombs at it and dropped a rock on its head. "Exciting!" said I, "Can I fight it now? What do you mean it's dead? What, we're just gonna move on?" I felt like I'd queued for hours to get on a roller coaster that went down one dip and then dropped you off at the gift shop. [196]

Duke Nukem Forever (for real this time)

• The interesting thing about Forever is that you can practically cut it in half and see the entire fourteen years of shooter evolution it's tried to keep up with, like the rings in a tree stump. It starts out campy and colorful in a SiN/Blood II: The Chosen kind of way, then it moves into the dark, sweaty unpleasant Doom 3/Prey/Quake IV period when you go into the alien hive (and incidentally, this section contains about as jarring a shift of tone as you can get without splicing five minutes of The Human Centipede into the middle of Mallrats). And by the last mission Duke has finally embraced the FPSsof today, meaning you run around a grey/brown industrial area for a while and then get a shit ending. [197]

Infamous 2

• I know inFAMOUS is kind of stuck with the whole moral choice thing since the game's pretty much named after it, but no fairy godmothers have shown up since the first game to wave her wand and have it start making sense. Look, if you have two equally viable, equally difficult solutions to a problem - say, humanely suffocating your costly vegetative wife with a pillow or digging through to her femoral arteries with a cheese grater - than the evil option (which if you're having trouble keeping up is the second one) is just irrational! And you can't relate to a character whose actions don't make any fucking sense! Surely the evil option is supposed to be the more convenient but riskier one that would appeal to someone weak-willed. You could spend a lot of time and effort sprucing yourself up and trolling the bars to find someone to romance and settle down with, or you can just fuck a cow and risk angry farmers with paparazzi connections. That's a moral choice.[198]

Alice: Madness Returns

• Even the trademark creepy imagery seems a bit phoned in and over-reliant on creepy dolls. Yes, a porcelain doll head with no hair or eyeballs is a creepy thing, but after the five hundred millionth one they get kind of devalued in the global creep economy, falling right below creepy Uncle Dan and the feeling of another person's bum warmth on your toilet seat. [199]

Shadows of the Damned

• For a game that seems to have set out with the plans to bring three big names together and wait for the explosion, none of the three amigos brought their A-game. Akira Yamaoka randomly smashing his banjo strings suited the disquieting surreality of Silent Hill but not so much a quirky action/horror game that seems to be mouthing along to a squealing heavy metal soundtrack that it doesn't have. On the gameplay side, where was the Shinji Mikami who once made a game where dozing off for one second led to you getting your head chainsawed off by a mad Spainard? And while enough of the disposable income of the alternative crowd glimmered invitingly in the eyes of publishers to be marketed "A Suda51 Trip," for all Shadows of the Damned's demon skull nobstitutions, this is probably the most grounded Suda51's ever been. Killer7 was a trip, this is more like a bank holiday day out to go watch someone fling horse giblets at a lingerie shop. [200]

FEAR 3

• You know, publishers, when you replace a letter with a number for your clever douchebag sequel name, it only means that other douchebags like me will just insist on pronouncing it that way when they read it out loud, as in Sesevenen and indeed Fthreear. Still, I prefer both of those to whatever the hell Thief 4's logo is playing at. When the fuck has it ever been acceptable to replace an "E" with a "4?" If you let that kind of bullshit scoot by too many times then our daughters will all be shagging Communists by this time next year. [201]

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D

• I remember Twilight Princess being too easy because it was compensating for the Wiimote being as friendly as an attack dog that's been trained to administer Chinese burns. Then again, I've been trained by all the more recent Zelda games that have really just been building on Ocarina of Time, so playing Ocarina of Time now is like a surgeon that's been re-training as a fishmonger. I know that you should look to the side missions to replace that rat scrotum you call a coin purse, but 1998 audiences didn't. Is it fair to say that later Zelda games had better gameplay and characters with actual story arcs and more personality than a lungfish in a moist bath towel, when Ocarina of Time was the template from which all those games arose? Probably not. But if you ask me, Nintendo has shot themselves in the foot. With N64 technology being emulatable on dried leaves and bits of old twig, Nintendo were this close to having a new generation who wouldn't have known Ocarina of Time existed, and Skyward Sword might have blown their minds. [202]

Call of Juarez: The Cartel

• But the AI don't go after collectibles; they usually just stand there staring at you with gormless uncomprehending eyes. They were also never programmed to drive, so in the occasional vehicle section, if you perhaps would rather take riding shotgun to its literal heart, then fuck you and your haughty airs. The AI will pile into the back seat without a word and just look at you like a dog with its leash in its mouth. And as I said, they can't aim for shit. But after you've single-handedly cleared out an entire room, they'll unfailingly say the one of their four or five endlessly repeated lines that goes, "You don't have to do this all by yourself, you know." THERE IS NO MIDDLE FINGER BIG ENOUGH! [203]

Bastion and From Dust

• So enough with these iron-sight examination simulators, I'm going where the worlds are bleak and the heads are large for my third XBLA double bill! And with characteristic convenience, the XBLA has recently chundered up two games that both approach the theme of world-building from vastly different directions. Perhaps this speaks to some larger trend within society today, or a prevailing desire on the part of indie designers to recreate the entire world into one where you can charge more than fifteen bucks for your game design degree course work. [204]

Catherine

• Video games seem to be a little bit frightened of relationships, in a curious reflection of their predominantly male and sweaty customer base. Oh, there are plenty of games that depict the commencement of a relationship, generally as a consequence of Party A rescuing Party B from a giant fire-breathing lizard thing or an evil general or their own virginity depending on the genre. Very few games are about a relationship that's already going on except when one half of it exists solely to get murdered at one point so that the other half can seek revenge without someone constantly asking them how they think jumping over turtles or shooting mercenaries or getting fucked all day in the butt is going to bring in enough money to raise a family. Well, now the balance is being restored by Catherine, a Japanese game centrally about the difficulties of relationships such as unexplained pregnancy, the impetus of commitment and being chased up an infinite staircase by a giant monstrous girlfriend trying to eat you with her butt. Did I mention it's Japanese? [205]

Red Faction Armageddon

• The title was the first telltale heart murmur. "Armageddon" is one of those words from the subtitle bucket, along with "Chronicles" and "Resurrection," a word you stick on the end of your sequel name to communicate you have less creativity than a pencil sharpener. Red Faction Armageddon is the final game of a trilogy that began with Red Faction Guerrilla (don't worry, you didn't just turn over two pages at once). You pay Darius Mason, the grandson of Alec Mason from Guerrilla, who is engaged in conflict with an evil cult leader who was apparently defeated once before by Darius' dad. And everything indicates to me that Darius' dad's actions were the events of a second intervening game that wasn't actually made. In which case, what frightens me is that someone at THQ looked at Darius and Darius' dad and decided that Darius was the more interesting one! Mason Sr. must have been a geography teacher who defeated the cultists by diligently doing his taxes at them! [206]

Deus Ex

• Having deliberately avoided any exposure to Human Revolution up to the time of writing I sincerely hope to be dining on these words with tartar sauce by the time this video comes out, but I don't see how these days you can have a game with anywhere near as much depth and complexity as Deus Ex 1! And before all you people who liked Witcher 2 start banging on your keyboards so hard it starts snowing Cheeto dust, I mean the kind of complexity that I like! A plot where people can reference philosophy and G.K. Chesterton in really, really bad accents! And that has intuitive inventory sorting, and a health system where you can get all your arms and legs blown off and have to slither over to a health station using only your lips! [207]

Deus Ex: Human Revolution

• I don't know how many more times I have to say this, but I guess at least once: a boss fight is not just a random enemy who's eaten three times as many protein bars as everybody else! A boss fight is supposed to be a final exam for everything we've learned up to that point! Ideally, Human Revolution would have given the option of gunning the boss down, or maybe hacking some turrets to fight for you, or sneaking up into the rafters to drop pianos on their head - but no, all you can do is shoot them. And considering I was going for the non-lethal pussy run, my tranq rifle and stun gun were a fat lot of good against a bloke who appeared to be occupying the same space as a combine harvester armed with a gun that shoots exploding furniture that kills you in two hits, so I had to basically quicksave every time I successfully made it to the other end of the room before my internal organs did! [208]

Driver: San Francisco

• Switching instantly to any car anywhere is the main gameplay gimmick that's woven nicely into the storyline. John Tanner, cut as he is from the generic white bread wise-cracky douche hero template, starts getting pretty likable when he has the Groundhog Day revelation that he can now live life without consequences, immediately possessing a driving student and speeding through the oncoming lane just to make the dick instructor mess his corduroys. Serve and protect, ladies and gentlemen! [209]

Dead Island

• One day I'm going to make a zombie game of my very own. It'll be an apocalyptic survival game in which you and a small group of desperate survivors with complimentary skills must navigate a deserted city without being crushed under an avalanche of zombie games, movies, and reinterpretations of classic literature. I'll call it "ENOUGH WITH THE FUCKING ZOMBIES ALREADY!" Honestly, at this point you people just won't be able to cope if civilization ends any other way, will you? If the fucking Daleks could invade or the entire world gets covered in carnivorous jam, you'll have to make papier-mache zombie facsimiles just to get through the day! Except let's face it, however you might imagine zombie apocalypses giving you a new lease on life we all know most of you would start talking suicide pacts if the Internet went down for more than a week. [210]

Resistance 3

• So here we go, another bloody brown shooter for the current age with two weapon slots, cover mechanics and regenerating health. Wait, what are these glowing green things lying around everywhere? Medkits, you call them? What an intriguing novelty! Yes, Resistance 3 does not have regenerating health! Holy bum-nuggets, I'm having to desperately seek aid under fire while hopping around on my last remaining limb and things are actually tense and exciting! Oh, but it's small comfort if I can't carry ten weapons at once... I can carry ten weapons at once. Huh. And there's a freeze ray and a lightning rod and a thing I like to call "The Jimi Hendrix Experience" because it makes people puke themselves to death. They're quite fun to use, and there are no cover mechanics because the game assumes you can strategically use a wall without having to rub yourself on it and give it kisses. Erm... Sony, are you all right? I'm not complaining or anything but I'm kind of feeling how the Greeks might have felt if the Trojans had just surrendered before the wooden horse was finished. [211]

Gears of War 3

[212]

Hard Reset

[213]

Rage

[214]

Kinect

• First of all, I tried out Child of Eden, the polygon murder spree from the creators of polygon-murder-spree Rez, essentially a rail shooter about the internet being under attack by an amassed army of forgotten screen savers. Certainly a spectacular display, but even a cosmic dance with a hundred large-breasted space fish loses something when you have to replay it for the third time because you weren't clear on what you were supposed to be doing. Yeah, I know, game, "Use my left hand to shoot down the purple projectiles before they hit me." Now in what specific way did you envision me using my left hand, 'cause that could mean anything from waving it to sticking a bowling pin up a gorilla's ass. Eventually I figured out that "use" meant, "Do the same thing you do with the right hand to use your normal weapon, but keep your right hand pinned to your side because I might think you're trying to strangle me and go in to a panic." And even then, the usual delay motion sensors have before registering your action led to several frustrating game-overs. And every now and again, the game would pause itself right as it was getting excited, because it assumes that any ambiguity of motion on your part means that you have suddenly been abducted by space monsters. But doing panicky improvised t'ai chi to amuse graph paper is not gaming. It's more like therapy for geometry-phobics. [215]

Batman: Arkham City

[216]

Battlefield 3

• Battlefield 3 was built on the Frostbite 2 engine - I know this for a fact because it can't go five minutes without banging on about it. This is a game that isn't trying to sell an engaging experience or even the military lifestyle, it's trying to sell destruction physics and the lighting engine. This becomes clear around the second time a building collapses with the camera angled in such a way as if to say "You may now appreciate this. A minimum level of appreciation is required to continue." [217]

Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception

[218]

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3

[219]

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

• Nitpicking is unhelpful, however, and I'm in the kind of mood that I'm prepared to overlook a lot of flaws in Skyrim, which is good, because there are a lot of flaws in Skyrim. But I'll applaud it if it means we can have less games that treat me like a child stuck in a pipe, Games Industry. I will applaud it as hard as you like. I will slap at my palms until my future children suffer masturbation guilt. No I don't know what I'm on about; go away. [220]

Saints Row: The Third

• Now, the first Saints Row game was comparatively straight. It wasn't exactly Homicide: Life on the Street, but you weren't going to climb on board any rocket-powered jet-bikes either. Saints Row 2 leaned wackier, with a slight unhealthy fascination with spraying poo at things other people would rather you didn't spray poo at, but was at least slightly grounded in reality at least. Saints Row: The Third drinks wackazade from a clown shoe. This is a trilogy progression we academics call "Evil Dead Syndrome" and I'm not sure I like it. The funny parts of Saints Row 2 shone all the brighter alongside its more stone-faced aspects - it's when you're wearing full lucha libre gear, thwacking a zombie with a big floppy dildo as part of the everyday routine that it starts to feel less special. [221]

Assassin's Creed: Revelations

• The cynic is an isolationist beast but can always recognize one of their own, and the Assassins Creed series is getting very cynical. I like the games but I feel my like is being exploited for coin, and at the risk of devaluing one of my favorite words, it's now faffing about like it's never faffed before and the faffing is getting out of hand. All of this bullshit - the championship manager human resources management games, the Templants vs. Zomsassins - all of this is just more and more layers of flaky pastry between me and the succulent meat of the Assassins Creed Cornish pasty: one bloke in a bedsheet hopping about on the rooftops, carefully planning a stealthy guerrilla assault, to surgically strike like a thumbtack in a McChicken sandwich! [222]

The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword

• Speaking of Wind Waker, spiritually Skyward Sword feels quite reminiscent of it, except you're exploring an ocean of clouds rather than the more traditional ocean of water. But if the surface world is supposed to be so completely covered in clouds that you and your ivory tower friends aren't even sure it exists, then why when you're exploring the surface world is it always a bright sunny day? I found a plot hole! Nurse! So obviously Zelda ends up in an embuggerance, and Link has to pick up a magic sword and sort her out. This time the magic sword comes free with a standard-issue support character, who deserves special mention because, besides a twitchy enraged badger that points out important quest items by breaking wind at them, I cannot imagine a worse assistant. [223]

Serious Sam 3: BFE

[224]

Top 5 of 2011

• Interestingly enough, the crown of greasy brambles and throne of compacted garbage to be awarded to the worst game of 2011 are in this case two crowns and perhaps some kind of chaise lounge affair, because I can't decide which creepy, masturbatory, lead you by the nose, flimsily justified violence upon vastly inferior enemies, open-quotes "realistic" shooter with a 3 on the end I despise the most: Battlefield 3 or Modern Warfare 3. I don't hate them because they're poorly made or fail in what they set out to do, I hate them for what they represent. Modern Borefare and Twattlefield not only show that people should stop making realistic shooters, but also make a convincing case that people should stop existing generally and perhaps we should save time, form a big circle and on an agreed signal all cap the person to the right. Oh, Happy New Year by the way. [225]

Super Mario 3D Land & Rayman Origins

[226]

Sonic Generations

[227]

Star Wars: The Old Republic

[228]

Amy

• Using the word, "Escort," to describe core gameplay is like using the words, "Bloody and viscous," to describe a urine sample, but Amy pulls her weight by having the power to heal you, create cones of silence, and telekinetically blast things aside. Obviously. I'd have been rather put out if she didn't. In horror circles, small mute autistic girls are second in power only to Jason Voorhees listening to people fucking. [229]

External links

Zero Punctuation