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’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.

A) I am a cynic. I don’t like anything and I’m entirely skeptical of everything.

B) I don’t like hype, and I don’t like spectacle, part of the reason why I haven’t watched a film in a cinema for 3 years.

C) I like taking the piss out of things, even if I like them, so try and be objective about this review and imagine that I’m a slightly sunnier person than appears here.

Dragon Age is an RPG available on PS3, x-box 360 and PC. This alone should tell you about the kind of person that plays it. Saddos, freaks… VIRGINS. This is exceptionally true of me (apart from the last, because I get more pussy than the RSPCA), as the game seems to appeal to the small subsection of society that read the Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien and thought “Fucking hell, at last, a reference tool to put the other books into context.”

Dragon Age: Origins is like almost every other fantasy RPG on the planet. Stuck somewhere between Middle-earth, Narnia and Topshop lies Ferelden. A world in apparent peace but occasionally assaulted by Darkspawn (fallen mages who have succumb to dark magicks, temptation and sexy naked demons). A mystical world of Elves, Dwarves, Dragons, Darkspawn and Rats… Sorry, Humans. Yes, it appears that like every other fantasy setting humans are the biggest wankers since Leslie Grantham in Ferelden, and that Dwarves are borderline elitists who have to bear grudges lest they be seen as hippies and the Elves are either grim, stoic, self-important, nihilistic arseholes or over-optimistic proles. It’s up to you to decide which of these you want to be before you find out what they role they fit into.

I suppose this is Dragon Age’s biggest selling point. It allows you to make choices at the beginning of the game that can affect your path throughout the game and ultimately the choices you can make at the end. A choice system automatically means a lot of text and it is this premise on which Dragon age relies. You can’t walk 4 steps in Dragon Age without falling over something which updates your amazing codex of exposition, of course, you don’t have to read this but if you ever want to have a hope in hell of understanding why people react in a certain way you really have to. This appeals to me because I am a wordy bastard (you should be able to tell by now), and so I gleefully spent a whole 2 hours doing the starter mission asking every single elf I came across what an elf like me thinks. Turns out, incidentally, that an elf like me thinks everyones a pussy for not hiding in a wood. No, I can’t quite work it out either.

Wandering through the game as an elf everyone assumes that you’re subservient to man and when they finally realise that the huge sword on your back isn’t for someone else they show immediate deference to you as a weird apology. Playing as a Dwarf means everyone thinks you’re a bourgeois pisshead and playing as a human means everyone treats you with respect but expects you to behave like Charles Manson with a fetish for darkspawn.

You have 3 options of class: Warrior, Rogue and Mage. This is then seperated into 3-4 different types which essentially equate to “Fuck Magic/Rogue/Warrior up and Fuck Darkspawn up but with more blood” which is by no means a bad thing, it’s just slightly confusing on your first time through.

Most of the game is spent fucking shit up, which is good but based on the World of Warcraft style of “click and let die”, which I like. It actually gives me the chance to accurately press Y for my super deadly combo of death and then X for my not so good combo of death whilst Mr. Super Deadly is having a breather. Along the way you can learn how to make traps, poison shit up, making potions and talk to animals. You will never use any of these, you will invest all your points in coersion meaning people give you shit and combat tactics, allowing you to get the best combos. When you’re not fucking shit up you’re looting for better stuff than you have and equipping yourself with the best shit and occasionally letting your minions wear some old bicycle knee-pads you stole off a skeleton. In between killing and looting you will be bargaining the shit out of people in what is essentially a series of quick-time events in which you don’t have to be quick and you have a choice between being a saint, a twat or ambivalent.

You’re accompanied by several feckless morons who have nothing better to do than follow you around. Each comes with their own agenda, side-quests and likes. You have the option of sexing some of them up (Which I have successfully done with EVERYavailable partner I’d like it known), bargaining with them, sending them home like a naughty school-child and occasionally upgrading them. It’s this which brings Dragon Age to life, the interaction with the other elements of the world in which you occupy and how they react to you, the different types of party member and how willing they are to fuck shit up and their motivations. You will only ever use 2 combinations of squad though, if you wanna be a twat you’ll choose Zevran, Sten and Morrigan and you will fall in love with Morrigan. If you wanna be a pious saint (like me) then you will choose Wynne, Alistair and Leliana and fall desperately in love with the buxom redhead… hmmm… buxom redheads… If you decide for some variety you will choose the Dog or the Dwarf.

Enough of the mechanics and backplot, lets examine the actual game itself. Yes, it’s quite pretty and the story is engaging, the characters are well rounded and it’s actually got some lasting gameplay. You will WANT to progress with the story because you will WANT to know what happens next, and if you’re paying attention and the kind of person who likes these games then you’re going to pick up on all the tantalizing little tit-bits they leave lying around to pique your interest.

In essence the main point of this game is “If you’re that kind of person”. I know this is a pretty generic point to some,  but virtually everyone has played Fable 2, it’s accessible, fun and pretty quick to play through whereas that is not strictly the case with Dragon Age. You will need to be “of a certain type” to want to play this, and by that I mean someone who isn’t drawn in by Hype and Spectacle. If you need immediate action, constant enemies and only the slightest excuse to kill something play Halo, if you need a story line, engaging characters and a completely immersive world then buy Dragon Age: Origins.