Red Dead Redemption is a sidestep for Rockstar in some ways. Despite the franchise having a precursor Rockstar’s usual method of making games is to design a playground (be it a city or a school) fill it with weirdoes (school kids or gangsters) and then allow you to run rampant causing terror and provide some story based missions for you to see the main character beat up someone who deserves it. So it should come as a massive surprise to you that Red Dead Redemption is set in a huge, but fictional, part of the Wild West and features your main character trying to kill his former partner whilst he’s not shooting deer for his mates… oh. You may be wondering where the sidestep is, well it comes in the level of maturity that’s brought to the game. Whilst the Grand Theft Auto franchise has a lot of knob gags and characters with odd sensibilities and Bully featured the same sort of characters but miniaturised, Red Dead has constricted these traits and allowed character humour to sometimes poke its head up and each characters different eccentricities are explained by their interaction with the plot. Basically, the characters aren’t just caricatures of gangsters, they’re more complex and each have motivations which feels a little more than the shallow “I wanted money” that seems to pervade the Grand Theft Auto series.

A lot of criticism has been levelled at this game for being Grand Theft Horsey and as much as I didn’t want to use this term and think I was clever the parallels have to be drawn. Like I said, it features a huge map, guns and various ways to break the law which hardly wins it in the originality stakes, it also features wild animals (different), cacti (different) and a horse riding mechanic (different) which I hate. The controls in this game aren’t BAD they’re just not EXCELLENT. To make horsey (I called mine Simon) go faster, you have to tap A. This is supposed to represent you jabbing it with your spurs I suppose but it doesn’t quite work. As any horse rider will tell you horses have 4 levels of running: walk, trot, canter, gallop and you can never quite get the speed right. I suppose this is because they guessed you’d probably run at full pelt everywhere but some of the side quests involve being slow and checking for plants and things so it would have been nice to canter as opposed to full to full on gallop. Despite this, the horses LOOK stunning and I found myself ending up very attached to Simon. The gun mechanic is functional and you have to hold A to run, so I’m hardly going to praise this game for its controls.

What I shall praise this game for is its feel, I stopped thinking of it as a game and started thinking of it as a “Wild West Simulator” and that’s when I started to enjoy it more, in some ways I ended up treating it like an MMO having more fun with the fetch-quests and side missions just to soak up the gorgeous scenery. The writing helps this feel, because Rockstar seem to have grown up and abandoned their knob gags and started going for deep characters, all of whom really open up the world because they contribute to the character of where they live. If a character is a world-weary sheriff you understand how fragile law and order is in the area and how the town feels about their sheriff, seriously, that is how strongly I feel about the writing (and voice acting) in this game.

I feel I’ve gushed a little too much because a lot of this game is broken as fuck. You have bullet-time (called Dead Eye) and it isn’t needed in the first quarter of the game and it might as well be unlimited considering it regenerates so bloody quick. You have regenerating health AND med kits which kind of ruins any pretence of this game being a challenge. Timed missions don’t have timers which therefore made me shout at the game for essentially not allowing me to complete the mission out of skill, but out of trial and error. It’s sometimes so glitchy you have to reset and occasionally plot points are so big and so obvious you have the tendency to think “HOW FUCKING THICK ARE YOU JOHN!” at the telly. Also, I did as much of the sidequests as I could from the first half of the map and found by the time I’d entered Mexico I had full fame and full honour. I shall briefly talk about these systems because they annoy me. Fable 2 managed to get this system basically right somehow. If you go about the game trying to be good by the end of the game you’ll have roughly reached full good on your first play through and this is how it SHOULD be, you should see your achievement in upgrading as an indicator that you’re coming to a close on the game, not that you’ve entered the second act.

I’d like to put a big disclaimer over this review. The game IS good, in fact it’s absorbing and gorgeous and extremely funny witty and clever in a lot of places. However, it has its problems and despite the recommendation from me to buy this game I warn you that it has its issues and you should only buy it if the things I’ve mentioned won’t destroy the experience too much for you.

I don’t know why I’m doing this to myself, I really don’t. I remember when the Wii was announced, when I was a slightly shorter (about 6’2″), slightly less disgruntled chap. I laughed at the name,  I looked at the games that were coming out and thought “cool, it sounds okay”. Then I found out it had motion sensor controls. Then I swore.

I hate to shovel spoonfuls of my private life at you but I happen to be incredibly lazy and I also happen to be spatially retarded. I didn’t want a Wii when I found out, I wanted to bury my head in the sand and cry. What is wrong with a normal controller? Why can’t you do what Sony will inevitably do and change fuck all about the controller?

The GameCube controller is easily the most comfortable, best designed and most well-weighted controller of all time. I can say this with a degree of certainty because there are complaints about controllers which you must always take note of. 1) It’s too big- never heard this about a GC controller, 2) It’s too small- never heard or had that about a GC controller, 3) I can’t reach the <insert> button- never had that problem. Everything about it is designed to fit perfectly into your hand and never give you carpal tunnel or RSI. The wiimote on the other hand seems to have been designed by Ann Summers if Ann Summers was run by Nazis. The wiimote has a long smooth shaft with nodules designed to reach all a woman’s pleasure centres and the nunchuk is clearly a clit-stim with a 3d control for intensity.

… where was I? Yes, that’s right. It’s designed for anything other than fitting in your hand. It is designed to be “ergonomic”, in this case “ergo” meaning “errr, go away now please, I’m trying to look cool”. It doesn’t fit in your hand, the d-pad is twenty miles away from your thumb and the A and B buttons make very little sense in their positioning the +,- and home keys are too small for anyone but the fucking Borrowers and the 1 and 2 buttons have never been used by me, ever. The Nunchuk’s button placement is similarly annoying as I STILL don’t know which is the Z and which is the C button. This is a problem I never had with the GC controller as it was so brilliantly designed even a dyspraxic moron like myself can use the damn thing.

Enough of the controller, let’s look at the other hardware. I can buy a little cable which connects my GBA to my GC… why would I want to do that? Oh, I can put a game from the same franchise in my GBA and my GC and then use the GBA as a controller to open different content. Wow, that sounds pretty good. The Wii has similar features? Oh… I can only send Pokemon to “My Pokemon Ranch” for no clear fucking reason. This is the problem with the Wii, it does stuff for the sake of it and gives no clear reason why we need it. Why would I want the weather on my Wii? I clearly have a television and the internet so I see little reason to switch another device on when teletext will do just fine.

Let’s move on to the games before I kill someone. It seems to me that the GameCube was able to do something extraordinary with games that shouldn’t have been good. Super Mario Sunshine sounds like a flawed premise in a way, take a character who has been jumping from platform to platform for almost 40 years and make him fight paint. Yeah it sounds stupid, but how many times have you played a game where you have to jump and immediately press any of the 4 main buttons to switch to your hover nozzle before realizing the game you’re playing ISN’T Mario Sunshine? That’s right, none, because you’re not thick like me but it’s this level of immersion which brings about these thoughts and why Mario Sunshine is so good.

Super Smash Bros Melee is another case in point because it took a fairly fun beat ‘em up on the N64 and turned it into a fantastically funny and creative beat ‘em up in which nothing ever seems broken. This is something the Wii managed to break because as long as you’re Falco you will ALWAYS get the Smash Ball in SSBB and it will ALWAYS annoy people. What Melee managed to do is make losing fun. It didn’t matter if you were shit because watching Link fly off the screen because he’d just had a bob-omb thrown at him is, and always will be, hilarious. Allowing any muppet to break the game if he gets the right item detracts from the fun because there’s no sense of “Yes, my friend deserves that kill”, all you feel is “fucking smash ball!”.

Another game brilliantly brought to life by the GameCube is Mario Kart Double Dash, a game I have already wrapped my lips around and pleasured fondly but it deserves the praise I give it. It took a game which already existed (Mario Kart) added a new dimension to it (2 characters) which managed to freshen the whole approach to both single and 2-player co-op. In single player you would think which 2 characters would give you the best karts, items and weight and this in turn allowed you very different styles of gameplay with each different team construct. In 2-player you thought “which of us is shit at driving? You? Well you can be him because he has the best item and I’ll be whichever will allow me this Kart” which is slightly different. Mario Kart Wii sought to do something different from Double Dash and made Mario Kart 64 but without any soul. Just Mario Kart by numbers with shit items that no one gives a fuck about.

There are plenty of other games for the GameCube that now have Wii partners and I can guarantee you that everyones complaint will be “I DON’T GIVE A SHIT ABOUT MOTION SENSORS”. No one cares, if the controls were used effectively then maybe people would like it. Unfortunately, because it’s there almost every single action has to be replaced with a flail to mimic an epileptic receiving electro-shock therapy and so you get very physically tired very quickly and turn the game off to do something else… like get a GameCube game.

I know it’s unoriginal to rag on the Wii but I have some advice for you. Go out and buy as many GameCube games as you can find, yes even some not very good ones, play them on the Wii with a Wavebird or GC controller. You will not be dissatisfied, in fact you’ll probably enjoy yourself and have a good time. You also won’t get carpal tunnel syndrome, won’t look like a tit in your window and will never, ever, ever play “Wii Fit”. Which is about as effective for weight loss as squirty cream on tap.

Assassin’s Creed II is an odd choice of game for me to play because I never played Assassins’ Creed I. I had seen it being played, I tried to do the tutorial at the beginning but it ended up making me feel ill (it’s just so bright). I have heard that the first one is riddled with faults- it’s too repetitive, it seems to think that the eastern world is the size of Kent and that the side missions are a little… meh, so approaching Assassin’s Creed II was a strange step for me. It’s a little embarrassing then that when your main gig is ripping on games that you find one you actually rather like.

You play as Desmond Miles reliving the genetic memories of his Italian ancestor Ezio Auditore Da Firenze, who is trying to uncover a conspiracy in the past to unfold a conspiracy in the future. You start off seeing Ezio’s birth where you are taught how the controls work, you follow his development from spoiled teenager to grim and determined assassin. The development of the story is unimaginably immersive… I still don’t care about Desmond that much, although he seems like quite a nice guy. Accompanying Desmond are Lucy (who looks like an attractive woman with a rhombus for a mouth), Rebecca (who is super excited about everything and has that “cute”, nerdy-girl voice that makes you want to stab things) and some other bloke played by Danny Wallace. I want to bring this up because it’s something that made me want to die. Danny Wallace is a funny bloke, not denying that, he isn’t a voice actor however. Every single line he has is annoying, not because that is what the character is supposed to be (the character is SUPPOSED to be disdainful and stoic, concerned with the mission and exasperated at the time he sees as being wasted) but because Danny Wallace isn’t a voice actor. You can TELL it is him because the voice acting is so bad. The only people allowed to voice act are as follows: Tim Curry and Patrick Stewart. NO ONE ELSE.

I’m going to get the nice stuff out of the way quickly because a lot needs to be said. Firstly, this game is fun. Do you remember that? Fun? I enjoyed running around the rooftops of 15^th century Itlay, I enjoyed finding all the feathers, I enjoyed stabbing people with knives, slicing them up with swords, piercing their faces with hidden blades, poisoning them and stealing their pikes to perforate their gizzards. This game simply allows you to have a lot of fun running around tricking guards and eviscerating them with your arsenal of mildly similar weapons. I found that a good proportion of the time I would use the hidden blades, as there’s nothing quite like walking up behind a guard and despatching him with a muffled “hmph!” and then running away to a little hidey hole and giggling as their rag doll falls to the streets below. I sometimes spend an hour just running around the rooftops taking out guards and finding more and more creative ways of killing them (which I should probably see my psychiatrist about). Secondly, it’s immersive and on occasion quite nerve wracking. Thirdly, it is visually a treat. I know I say I don’t care about graphics but when a game gives each area you visit a different style and a different area with different kinds of people it adds to the sense of scale, it makes me feel as though I’m travelling between different cities. Florence is dusty with terracotta roofs, Tuscany is green and pleasant, Forlí is darker and slightly seedy, an air of oppression creeping in and Venice is expansive and holds an austere atmosphere. And what is and isn’t a ledge are clearly definable, which is so welcome when you’re playing a game which consists ENTIRELY of jumping between ledges and hoping you don’t fall to your doom.

It does have faults, however. It is exceptionally easy, I’m on my second playthrough of the game and I managed to clear a good deal of that in 6 hours. Secondly, there is a micro-economic town building side quest that doesn’t seem to make sense. I can only assume it was put in as a visual indicator of how your questing is influencing and changing the world, but because it’s so far removed from any of the other cities you lose that sense. Perhaps a safe houses system like GTA, with one in each city would have made sense but it would just feel like a rip off so I can see why they didn’t bother. The armour system baffles me, I know they tried to remove regenerating health from the game and in some ways this makes it harder, but the regeneration had a good explanation in the first game. It becomes even more baffling when I had the best armour in the game before I had managed to buy the armour set before. The mandatory vehicle sections are given a nice twist in this game though; driving a runaway cart through mountains, punting yourself to victory and flying on a glider are all hilarious in the way that they seem to be taking the piss out of everyone else’s vehicle sections whilst actually contributing to the narrative.

The middle of the game gets confusing, you seem to get ordered to one place or another with no clear reason and I had to play it again to realise who these people were but at least you can take them out whenever you want and they don’t all reveal long cutscenes WHILST THEY’RE DYING. This is the most annoying feature and I wish it would fuck off. I have stabbed them, why would they suddenly reveal vital information with a blade through their throat? Also annoying is the fact that the last half of the game takes place in Venice. The first half of the game takes a while to manoeuvre through different areas, broadening your sense of scale immersing you deeper and deeper into 15^th century Italy and the wide range of places which it consists of. So why do they take the breadth away from you and insist you play the last half in the same fucking place? I could have revisited earlier places, see how they changed over time, especially if they had broadened the villa concept. It just makes me think they got bored towards the end.

The combat is also a little… spongey. I can’t quite vocalise what I mean, but it essentially comes down to waiting for them to attack you and then countering. This changes if you play a second time and fully explore all the combat options, whereby you end up being a cross between an Assassin from Italy and a ninja. One neat little feature is the way that Ezio can steal weapons from guards by selecting fists and then gut them with their own weapons. If you spend your time training (but why would you when the story is so compelling) then you can end up dispatching enemies quickly through dodges, strafes, counters and full assaults but it just shouldn’t be that much effort to get it right.

One thing I have to mention before I wrap up is a genius gag which nods towards one of out favourite portly video game characters. I literally howled with laughter as it was completely unexpected, little things like this can sometimes make a game and it is worth playing the first hour for that alone.

So overall I recommend Assassin’s Creed II. The graphics are pleasant, the gameplay is good and the story is cracking, and if you don’t like the ending and credits you have something SERIOUSLY wrong with you. However, by no means is this game perfect and I’m never going to let my personal enjoyment of a game override the fact that I’m a reviewer. It’s worth renting and I have felt like playing it again and again so take from that what you will.

I actually bought a new game this week to review; I shan’t be doing that a lot of the time though, I envisage myself trawling through my current games collection and thinking up new and more interesting ways of accusing them of not being good enough for the while. So I bought Sonic and Sega All-Stars racing, what of it? I bought it as a curiosity and because I have a certain soft spot for “battle-racers”, one of my first ever games was Wipeout 2097 which was a joy to play and fun even to the end of my Playstation’s life and my love of Mario Kart Double Dash has also been well expressed here, so it was interesting to play Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing.

It should be mentioned that, as a battle-racer, The controls for All-Stars are simple, intuitive and perfectly functional… and better than Mario Kart Wii. Everything seems to work and it never feels as though the controls are letting you down, only your use of them. It should also be noted that when you take damage from a weapon your recovery time is a lot less than that of Mario Kart, which is good, it means you only fall back 2-3 places instead of the 4-5 of Mario Kart, which removes the frustration of making a mistake on the last lap. The levels are very well designed and visually sumptuous, the characters all have enchanting voiceovers and the commentary is amusing enough not to get too boring after repeated play throughs. Right, nice stuff out the way, on to the problems.

The racing is actually pretty boring, beginner difficulty seems to be for chimps but then again this game is aimed at children. The game does offer you a tutorial when you put the disc in and I’m glad it did, I wish Double-Dash had a similar feature because I remember being TERRIBLE at that when I first started. The grand-prix side of it is enjoyable enough, it’s just no Mario beater. The levels are pretty enough and it certainly takes a degree of skill but it lacks the “charm” of Mario Kart by trying to ram other franchises down your throat. It’s not the grand-prix segments you should be concentrating on though, the game comes alive in the missions. They’re a little repetitive but they let you play as every character before unlocking (like some of the Super Smash Bros Melee challenges) and are a good way to spice up the normal “race until your thumbs fall off” mantra of most battle-racers. If anything, it seems to be taking its cue from NFS Pro-Street with the campaign what with the drifting, boosting and timed challenges. There are also 2 battle challenges (the last mission being one of them) which don’t serve the game too well, they’re too vague and the graphical quality of the opponents is sadly lacking making for a less than enjoyable experience although the idea is good it becomes frustrating rather than fun.

I would compare this game, in a way, to Smash Bros rather than Mario Kart. I can’t really say why but it just makes me think of melee more, perhaps it’s the campaign mode and the unlockable features, but it just has that feel to it. The unlocking mechanic has nothing in common with either Mario Kart or SSBM. I don’t know whether to hate or love it actually. You accumulate “Sega Miles” by how well you do in terms of speed etc and these can be spent on characters, tracks and music. This sounds okay but since I completed the beginners grand prix all in one go (just so I didn’t look like a cocky prick jumping in at advanced) I could buy a good proportion of the characters straight off and then completed almost all of the missions and bought the other small percentage and a good deal of the tracks along with some of the music, rendering it a little useless. I understand that this is a children’s game, but surely unlocking through beating tracks or cups at certain difficulties would be better? Or perhaps after a certain number of Sega miles you could buy the chance to beat them in a race? I just found it all too easy and thus unlocked most of the achievements by accident meaning I could trade it in almost the next day (along with fucking Risen).

One of the stylistic complaints I want to make about this game concerns the weapons as (along with most of the game) they are mostly quite bland. Everyone’s special move is the Star from Mario Kart with a different animation which is both better and worse than the aforementioned game. When you released a signature move in Mario Kart it was usually something similar to a normal weapon but larger or more of them or stronger which was good fun and meant that although stars were still better and rarer, you had a slight advantage. The weapons don’t seem to tie into any of the games either, there’s a shield which is green and as far as I’m aware shields in Sonic are blue (I know there were fire and other shields in later Sonic games, but the blue one is most iconic), so even that feels as though it wasn’t from that game. The weapons are perfectly functional, and in some cases great fun but don’t “fit”, there’s no link between them and any of the games. There are no weapons from Billy Hatcher or any of the Sonic games specifically so I’m going to assume that this is the case for all the weapons (not having played Super Monkey Ball or Jet Set Radio Gaga or whatever it’s called) and this detracts from the integration, I’m glad that Sega didn’t go for a celebratory circle jerk with the weapons but that’s kind of why people are here and it leads to a very bland but functional playing experience.

The main problem with All-Stars is that there is no real variety to the actual levels. Everything is very pretty and there are obstacles but they’ve made a bizarre decision in having 3 levels per game series (selected games series I should say) and having them all around the same theme. Nothing sets this up more than the sonic levels of which there are 3 within 3. There are 3 levels set in seahill zone, 3 in final fortress and 3 in casino zone, all with pretty much the same features, all with pretty much the same layout and preferred kart types. Also, every level has 3 laps. No differentiation, just 3 laps. Some of the missions have 2 but every single level in grand prix is 3 laps. Double dash had some levels with 8 laps, some with 2 and this made for a slightly more interesting experience whereas All-Stars feels like a slog. The only time it does get interesting is on the FUCKING MONKEY BALL LEVELS! Designing the levels around kart-types is fair enough, but making it virtually impossible to get around the circuit without being that specific kart? Fuck off. It’s this sort of badly designed feature which makes All-Stars racing so fucking annoying on occasion, especially as one of the mission levels actually ASKS you to play through all 3 monkey ball levels… in a race… only one of which I can competently do and I’m no slouch at this game.

Actually, I want to bring this up. I understand that this is a children’s game first and foremost and that the beginner level is for them and that expert level is for people who don’t have brains but small super-computers with central processors equivalent to bugatti veyrons, but it quickly becomes very easy to do (apart from the Monkey Ball levels) and I’d hate to presume that it is any actual talent at the game considering I played the demo with friends and I sucked more arse than a german fetishist. When I say “I’m no slouch at this game”, I actually mean “I have thumbs, therefore I am no slouch at this game”.

Lastly, why the fuck does Sonic need a car? I know everyone has raised this point and I can kind of see why they did it because Sonic racing on his own would be unfair, but it doesn’t combat the fact it’s fucking moronic. Why aren’t there more Billy Hatcher characters? Billy Hatcher was great and even just a little more expansion would have been nice! I’ve tried to keep away from Mario Kart comparisons in this review and I’ve tried to keep away from slagging it off for being a copy and with good reason, this is better than Mario Kart Wii by a long shot but ultimately a little bland. It’s like a ham and cheese sandwich from a sandwich shop, it’s tasty enough and it’ll fill you up for a while but you’ll never say to yourself “this is one of the best sandwiches I’ve had in a long time”. If I was going to describe this game in one word that word would be “functional”, if I was going to describe it in more than one word it would be this review. I can only recommend this game if you WANT to buy it, that sounds like a pretty tautological statement but unless you are actually interested in it then this isn’t for you, and that’s the way it is.

I was chatting with some friends earlier today (Yeah, I do have some) and I said how bored I was with my games collection. I told my friends clearly what I wanted, “I want a game called “Generic Beat ‘Em Up”” or perhaps “Generic Shooter”. I almost went for Battlefield: Bad Company but had to abandon it lest the game try and smother me with its story that’s as weak, limp and lifeless as Ashley Cole was before him and Cheryl split up. It was during this conversation that I said “We should just have a series of games which are generic; no story, no cutscenes, just 4 cliché levels and cliché weapons.” Later on I had a little jaunt through some Yahtzee columns and saw that he said something pretty similar so being the enterprising chap that I am I thought that I would outline you my plans for Generic Shooter, Generic Beat ‘Em Up, Generic Fighter, Generic RTS and Generic Platformer. I shall go through their Setting, Gameplay and Design in order.

Generic Shooter:

Gameplay- Simple really; first-person perspective, health bar, radar and ammo on the HUD, lots of guns and some baddies with some boss-fights. I’d have the weapons embarrassingly cool too, pistols which shoot green lasers, automatic weapons which shoot blue lasers, lightning guns, flamethrowers, rocket launchers and the obligatory MASSIVE gun which would simply be called “Anne” and fantastically over-designed. I’d also have all the baddies with completely distinguishable characteristics; clawed melee specialists, weedy snipers, big brutes which categorically carry big guns and drop armour and Bosses which can be identified by looking like big versions of whatever specialist enemy is in that area. Doesn’t this sound great?

Setting- This, is easy. Temple, City, Snow, Desert, Tropical Island, Volcano and Sewer. It would be great fun.

Design- the more exploratory you make it the better, big open levels with plenty of places to climb and kill shit, lots of big spaces to throw grenades into and end to the level which is a lady and the better you do the more clothes she removes.

Generic Beat ‘Em Up:

Gameplay- You know the wireframes from Super Smash Bros Melee? Them, just 4 of them, and simply controlled mechanics. A for jump, X for punch, B for kick and Y for special, Right Trigger for grab. Simple, brutal, effective, fun.

Setting- This is easy too, shaolin temple, city, forest clearing, warehouse and somewhere stupid… um… top of a lorry. Yep, sorted.

Design- I’d probably have 2 male and 2 female characters. They would be Skinny Powerful Kid, Massive Tank Dude, Agile Teen in Mini-Skirt and Character Inevitably Called Agatha.

Generic Fighter:

Gameplay- You have a sword and plenty of combos, bonuses for racking up hits, floods of enemies, third person perspective lots of corridors and bosses with increasingly large weapons. Also, whenever you score a critical hit it goes to a mini-cutscene like in Assassin’s Creed.

Setting- large open environment filled with enemies.

Design- You know how this works, it’s Fable 2 without the pretention of a story but proper combos. Might include tits for good measure.

Generic RTS:

Gameplay- You have men, big men, scout vehicles, light tanks, heavy tanks, jets, scout boats, attack boats and floating gun platforms also plenty of stationary weapons.

Setting- Different planets. Moon, Ice planet, dust planet, weird planet, strange alien planet and industrial planet.

Design- Y’know Starship Troopers? That.

Generic Platformer:

This is actually a little trick one, testing to see if you’ve read this far (and if not, why not, you should have been laughing and agreeing with everything I’ve said). Buy the Mega Drive ultimate collection, go to Flicky. There. Play that. See if you DON’T get hooked. It’s got everything, simplicity, intriguing level design, collectibles, enemies and a clear goal. Also fun bonus rounds. Go on, off you go.

I know I said that eventually I would do Dante’s Inferno but this has sort of come up and needed to be done. For the purpose of this review I will be looking at the Console versions only, I have played the SNES version, the Gamecube version, the Wii version and the DS version. I may well have played the N64 version in my youth but I don’t remember it and I will declare now that when I do, I will put a little edit here telling you how it went.

The original Mario Kart idea was a little fun title so that you could arse about with your mates and enjoy yourself  (which is what games should be about…), Mario Kart 64 is its next incarnation with the same emphasis but with updated graphics and tracks, Mario Kart Double Dash brought an unprecedented level of innovation to the proceedings and Mario Kart Wii… eurgh…

I have played the original Mario Kart and I loved it, simple, addictive, fun and a joy to play, most of the tracks and characters are on the DS version of the game (which some call the best, but it isn’t a console version so we sadly have to ignore it) and as it is technically “genesis” it should be praised for creating the whole genre (just as Eddie Van Halen should be praised for “inventing” tapping). Like most racing games applying a story is a little like applying commentary to a funny animal: ultimately pointless, so Nintendo thought “fuck it, they’re racing, deal with it” and you have to give some respect to them for being so brazen with their testicles and just making a game which really doesn’t make much sense in the “Mario World”. So what? Games don’t HAVE to make sense, they can just be fun. Tetris has no plot and yet it is easily recognised as one of the greatest games of all time, so fuck you story people (I can’t believe I said that either) and Graphics people you can fuck off too, this is about game play and level design and it’s virtually ALL perfect.

In fact, I’m willing to spread that sentiment across the entire line… if it wasn’t for Mario Kart Wii. Before I crucify that slime-shit of a game with my bare hands, let’s skip merrily to Double Dash and cuddle up to it for a second. I bought Double Dash for my Gamecube. I loved my Gamecube, 2 of my top 5 games come from that console (of which Double Dash is one) and I am willing to admit that perhaps my adoration of that console may colour my judgement slightly. Mario Kart double dash was the first game I’ve ever played where it didn’t matter if you lost because you would probably laugh your face off as you got blown up by a shell, or a bomb or as Wario drove past (“WAH-HAH!”), unlocking characters was fun and combining different characters for different car/special weapon combos was a slight science and me and my sister would spend hours with me being my beloved Parakoopa and my sister flitting between any of the light characters (sometimes we would go for a Yoshi/Parakoopa combo which ended up being a can of rape driven by me and my sisters impeccable timing and devious statistical cunning) It is this 1p & 2p Vs 3p & 4p system which made Double Dash so different to the other games and so much fun. The battle mode was an excuse to piss about looking for bombs/favourite weapons in specially designed arenas whilst giggling your face off as everyone exploded around you and the chance to unlock new modes, karts, levels and records was just too much fun to ignore. I remember vividly spending ages in time attack getting corners and tracks perfect, finding all the shortcuts and still enjoying it. I will happily admit I’m the kind of nerd who will happily sit down and work out army lists for tabletop games arguing the merits over whether a Fast Attack or an Elites choice is favourable in my 1,000 point game, but playing with Double Dash was a joy. This is partly down to the Gamecube itself, which I still proclaim has the best designed controller on earth.

Just quickly, I should point out this raised some debate amongst friends. Matt and others have rallied around the x-box 360 controller (which is the only controller out of the current 3 major consoles which actually fills my whole hand comfortably), Ant rallied behind the N64 controller (completely understandable when you take into account how innovative it is) and many others rallied behind the playstation controller, which has remained unchanged for decades since the original playstation analog controller. I hate that controller, simply because my giant man hands demand that I cripple myself just to use any other button during a racing game or fumble as the minute shoulder buttons become indistinguishable from each other.

Back to Mario Kart and after the tongue flicking which Double Dash got we come to Mario Kart Wii. What I’m about to write I don’t want to say, I want to tell you that the motion controls are slick, the levels fun and diverse. the characterisation is fun and that the wii graphics do the newest game justice.

Unfortunately I can’t. The controls are actually the thing I hate most about the game because it is simply better to use a gamecube controller, gimmicks are all well and good but they are only useful if they WORK. It seems to me that the wiimote can only understand that you are turning it, not by how much or to what degree, just that you happening to be turning it. I am fully prepared to admit I may be wrong, but it’s how it appears and this shows the complete lack of subtlety that the new version has to offer. The levels are more about spectacle than actual skill and are shoved so full of gimmicks it’s somehow hard to understand what the fuck is going on. Instead of the fresh, almost child-like simplicity of the original games it has become an over-loaded cluster-fuck of shite. Perhaps that is a bit harsh but I can’t help feel that having a wheel takes away the “game element” and simply replaces it with a gimmick. I know I have raised a contradiction here in that falling of the edge is funny in Double Dash and not in Wii, well it’s not a contradiction. If you fall off because YOU are shite not because the controls are then it is funny, if you end up playing a game of luck you might as well leave the controller where it is with a dead goldfish to weight the accelerator button down, luckily there is an option to use a gamecube controller, unfortunately anyone who uses the gamecube controller will instantly win because it’s better and will then proceed to shit over everyone. Great, you win the game but look like a sad wanker for doing it, this actually happened the other day during a friendly meet up and proved 2 things to me:

A) The Gamecube controller is the tits and should be hailed as a god.

B) Double Dash looks REALLY pretty when played on a Wii.

So there ya go, why you shouldn’t buy Mario Kart Wii- because it’s on the Wii, and why you should buy Mario Kart Double Dash- because it’s hilarious good fun.

It’s nice that we’ve got the introductions over with, because now I can really let rip on a game I’ve wanted to talk about for quite a while; Battlefield: Bad Company. I hear some faint murmurings at the back there, what was that? Why am I reviewing a game from last year and not a new one? I think we should cover that point first.

I’m a student and therefore spend all my money on nice things to eat whilst lying down on comfortable things which I bought with taxpayer’s money.  Well, I don’t actually. I shall review Dante’s Inferno soon enough (after I’ve completed a bit more of it!) and we’ll see if I can really do this game reviewing business. Until then, however, we’re stuck with me and my backwards-looking, eagle-eyed hindsight.

This game has quite a lot going for it at first glance: It’s quite pretty, the levels are reasonably well designed, the controls are intuitive and fun, and it has one of the best online multiplayer services I’ve ever experienced. For those of you chomping at the bit to shout at me about that rather garrulous claim, please calm down, all will be explained in due course. Like most modern FPS’s you play a character with a name so boring you won’t remember it, who is sent to work for “Bad Company”, a company where all the naughty children go who can’t play nice. You spend a good proportion of the game listening to your witless “friends” babble about how they’re so amazing because they have to do this all on their own, and the other half calling in air strikes and waiting for supply drops whilst being spoon-fed your next objective by a rather stern sounding woman whose voice makes me cross my legs slightly.

As I have outlined before me and graphics don’t always see eye to eye, but there’s something to be said for the graphics in Battlefield: Bad Company that might seem slightly contradictory. Firstly, one of the major problems with shoot ‘em ups (when was the last time you heard that term?) is that you want to be able to see your enemy so that you can shoot at them, yet also you want to be hidden enough for them not to be able to shoot at you. You can already see the clusterfuck this creates. Originally shooters were quite well-balanced in that you were a red blob, your enemy was a blue blob and everything else was either grey (castle/city/public toilet/office), green (jungle/woods/Travis Perkins), brown (desert/mud huts/Australia/Mexico/Pyramids) or a combination of all 3 (Amazonian Temple/Hull/English Countryside) and very occasionally the surroundings would be blue for underwater (meaning the blue team were either invisible or had now become yellow) or white for a collection of giant’s cum-rags. Then as graphics became more and more advanced it transpired that people wanted it to be more realistic, so everything became brown/grey/green/Hull/white and no one could see who or where the fuck anybody was. Battlefield: Bad Company however manages to present a wide enough pallet of colours and rich enough textures so that you can see if you’re shooting at a foe, a friend or in fact a camouflaged portaloo.

Whilst we’re discussing scenery I’d like to discuss Battlefield: Bad Company’s main selling point: Destruct-o-scenery. Whilst a lot of games have managed some sort of destruct-o-scenery, Battlefield: Bad Company does it the best. Some scenery is destructible, some is not, although this seems a little like cheating it means that you can’t just blow the shit out of a bridge and sit back with mortars whilst your enemy advance, but it also means you can grenade the fuck out of a roof of a house then happily mow down everyone inside (which is very satisfying). The best way to describe why this is the selling point of the game is because at no point do you curse the fact it’s there. It’s not broken, if you hang around after a wall blows up that shit’s on you, it also means you develop a sense of “move and fire” and also you never get games where Mr.Kill_Snipe (as they’re always called in some sort of variation) sprints for indomitable cover and spends the whole game laughing his face off as he snipes your pretty little faces and calls missiles down on tanks. It brings the fun back to it. I suppose balance is fairly prevalent throughout the whole game actually; tanks aren’t indomitable (like fucking Call of Duty), helicopters aren’t flying rape and no class is overwhelmingly better than the others.

The controls are especially easy to get to grips with; Right trigger is for shooting things… um… that’s about it really. You’ve got a switch weapon button, a reload button, sprint and Close Quarters Instant Click of Death (pressing the right analogue stick) and also a delightful innovative little tactic whereby you cycle through items with the Left Bumper then press B to use. This saves so much time over an inventory screen and shows how well thought out the controls actually are. If I really wanted to showcase the point I’d point out that pressing the Right Bumper automatically switches to the secondary weapon on your gun so you can fir grenades then to switch back is the same button. Simple, effective, elegant and totally intuitive.

You may have noticed something about this review; I’ve written 850 words and not once brought up the story or the actual gameplay. Yeah… there’s a reason for that. Battlefield: Bad Company’s main problem can be summarised horribly easily and I don’t really want to do it because it’s so much fun to play. The single player is boring, indelibly dull, overwhelmingly numbing and repetitive. Foxy base-lady tells you to go somewhere, you go there (and you will, or no snoo-snoo for you), complete an objective then get told where to go next. I don’t actually know anyone who’s completed the story mode. We’ve just arsed about on multiplayer killing each other and laughing as buildings and people explode. It’s a lot of money for what it is, when what it is, isn’t very much.

In summary then, the game is well executed, beautiful, balanced, intuitive, innovative and great fun… as long as you play against mates and NEVER look at the campaign. EVER. Which is a lot of money for a multiplayer… shame really.

Being a friend of Pzomb’s for a while now it was kind of self-evident that we would eventually come to some sort of collaborative effort. I am SoulIsTheGoal, a friend of Pzomb’s from Twitter and will be an addition to this site as a games reviewer. Hopefully you will enjoy what I write, and if not then we will have to find some way of setting fire to your crotch.
~SoulIsTheGoal~