A creed you should pay attention to

Get ready to don the cowl of an Assassin and become a killer for hire in a tale of treachery, revenge and a machine that can see genetic memories in peoples DNA. Assassin's Creed 2 is here.

Taking off right from where the first game left you, Assassin's Creed 2 has you jump back into the Animus to witness the birth of our new main character, Ezio. Desmond Miles is the character who we view the memories through, but it is the Assassin's themselves who are the protaginists in this tale. However right after the birth of Ezio, you are out of the Animus and trying to escape your captors. Pretty soon you are in a new base and you are about to use another Animus machine, dubbed the Animus 2.0, but this time you go in voluntarily. Soon you are in Ezio's shoes an a young man in Florence, Italy. What happens for the next hour or so is an extended tutorial that actually feeds the plot to you at the same time. In fact I would say for most of the game you are learning new tactics and gaining new weapons and accessories to help you in your sneaky sneaky stab stab fun. After an hour and half into the game Ezio finally dons the cowl of the Assassin and its time for Ezio's life as a killer to begin.

The story of Assassin's Creed 2 is a huge improvement over the first gamer, now I did not hate the first game like most, I quite enjoyed some of it but as far as your motivation went with AC1, it was pretty bare bones. In AC1, you played as Atlair, a disgraced Assassin who was stripped of his rank and made to start from the bottom and work his way back up to the top. The reason you were disgraced, because you liked killing and then broke the core rules of the Assassin's, their creed if you will. You accepted it at the time, but once this game begins and the story unfolds, you'll look back at the first game and go "pfft, digraced assassin indeed, that story sucks". This game has you start off as a spoiled son of a noble, you run around the rooftops for fun, you engage in street brawls with your enemies and you bed the sister of your enemy but its all in the name of fun. Then when tragedy strikes, you learn that your father was an Assassin, you don his old cowl and his weapons and strike back against the men who betrayed your family. Things get more and more complicated from there and you soon learn to become an Assassin and uncover a vast conspiracy that will have you travelling to different cities and learning skills that will leave the memory of Altair as a joke.

The controls are fluid, free running, as always is easy to do, the combat remains the same. You rely on counter attacks when it comes to sword fights but when it comes to Assassination, your choices vary.

But instead of running the gambit of what you can do in this game, let me describe a series of events that happened in AC2 that shows what you can do.
In a small Italian town, I run towards a pidgeon coop, inside I take out a pidgeon and read the note attached, it is from my contact in Florence, he wants me to kill four guards in this town as they are planning treason, however he asks that I do so without weapons if possible. I track down the first guard, he is browsing stalls in the local market, I walk through the crowd, come up behind him and strike, my blade slides into him, it administers poison to him once injected. I step away and walk on, no one has noticed a thing, except for the victim. The poision works fast, he starts to get dizzy and halucinates. I blend into the crowd, watching from a distance as he draws his sword, spins on the spot, swinging the sword and then softly falls to the ground and dies. The next 2 guards force me to use weapons, but the last guard is up high on a wooden perch, I climb up quickly, behind him and once again slide the poision blade between his ribs, then I am gone, down on the ground. The guard staggers, he also starts to hallucinate, he starts to draw his sword as he steps back, over the edge of the structure and falls to the ground below. My job is done, not exactly as requested but the job is complete. Next I meet my contact who informs me that they have tracked one of my targets, linked to my family's death. He has locked himself atop the tallest tower in the city, he has gone mad and now just shouts scripture down to the people below. However, he may have gone mad but he is not stupid, he has positioned archers on all the higher towers around this building to guard him. I will need to take them all out before I go after him or trying to get to him will be very difficult. I spend ten minutes circling the area, getting a look at every approach from every angle. I could just climb the highest building but it would put me in view of the archers and I cannot out climb a barrage of arrows. I noted a few of the towers had ropes connecting them, I could use them to get easy access to each tower. Another problem surfaced, the climbing relys on handholds and its not a straight climb up the towers, some handholds means I have to climb around towers to go up, again some of them lead to me getting in view of the archers, so to stay out of sight I would need to pick my first target carefully. My scouting made the traversal to my target easier, I was able to take out all the archers on the towers and eventually climbed up to my target. He was facing away from me, I slid in behind him, used the poision blade and watched him turn to face me, he was staggering, I moved forward again and used my wristblade and stabbed him. I wanted him to see me before he died.

Those 2 examples show that Assassin's Creed 2 has evolved from the first game, you cannot run blidly into a situation, scouting must be done, and there is a variety of ways to do things within the game. The poision blade, to me, is one of the best additions I have seen in the game, it allows you to do those kills where you watch from afar and cannot be implicated.
They have improved this game from the original in every way, the setting is more vibrant, your actions have meaning and they have filled every map chock full of stuff to do. One of the most interesting additions, which happens only a few times mind you, is hunting for the tombs of former assassins, you need to find all six tombs to... well that would be telling. But to find these tombs you actually end up in some excellent Prince Of Persia style platforming. And I am talking about The Sands Of Time Prince Of Persia, not the new guy who seems to wrapped in too many scarves. I have went through three of these tombs and had a blast each time, no doubt that in Assassin's Creed 3 they will put more of these in because these are one of the biggest highlights of the game. I am barely halfway through the game and already enjoying it.

Assassin's Creed 2 is a great game, even if you didn't like the first one, this game fixes all its mistakes and puts a greater emphasis on the player having a good experience. I have said so much about it but haven't even mentioned the commerce system, your own villa in the game, the glypsh and weird puzzles and the counter and disarms moves that are a big focus of the game. Its huge. My biggest seal of approval that I can stick on this game is that the other night I was about to turn off the game, I pulled up the map and saw I had three viewpoints left to get in this city, so I figured I would get those three completed before I turned the game off for the night. One hour later I am still there playing the game because whilst getting those viewpoints I found myself getting sidetracked by finding hidden loot, finding a glyph, hunting down a thief and then buying some new armour and weapons. The time had flown by and it was well worth it.
This is what the first Assassin's Creed should have been.

The post where Ed falls asleep

Once every 400 years the Darkspawn cause a blight against the world, and only if all the armies of Ferellden stand together, can it be stopped. As a Gray Warden, you are tasked with getting the armies to stand together and stop the blight, but with the land of Ferellden torn apart by greed, duplicity and corruption, it's not going to be an easy task. This is Dragon Age: Origins.

Bioware go back to their roots with this new RPG and new franchise that has launched on PS3, Xbox 360 and PC. Set in a fantasy world filled with all the usual suspects: ancient evils, dark sorcerers, trolls, dwarves, elves etc this game harkens back to the old RPGs Bioware made. There is more Baldur's Gate than there is Mass Effect to this game.
Instead of taking a world already created, like Dungeons and Dragons mutliverse, Bioware went about creating a fantasy world all of their own, this world is rich with lore and dripping with atmosphere.

Why is it called Dragon Age: Origins? What is with the Origins part? Well the game focuses on the origin story of your character, you can choose from 6 types of character to start your Origin story. You can choose a Human Noble, A City Elf, A Dalish Elf, A Noble Dwarf or a Dwarf Commoner. Then you choose a class for your character, Mage, Warrior, Rogue are the three types. Each class is open to all races except Dwarves who have no magic affinity and cannot be Mages. As you modify your class your decisions send you into one of 6 origins story, each one leads to the same point but its how you get there and what you do in the beginning that will have an effect on the game as a whole, seemingly small and simple decisions you made at the start of the game will have an impact of later parts of the game. This game is about choices, the choices you make as your character will affect everything including the world around you and your party. Nevertheless your quest remains the same, unite the armies and fight the Darkspawn.

Combat in the game is a tactical affair, unlike Mass Effect where its action based and you are in complete control of every gun shot and every biotic you use, Dragon Age goes for the Dungeons and Dragons approach, you initiate combat, choose specialities for the character to use and he will use them, like shield bash, but the game relies on the dice roll system, dice are rolling behind the scenes determing if you hit the target and for how much damage. To cover this the game bathes you in blood, blood sprays from all the enemies, splattering your armour and any exposed skin. A nice effect, but it is to a persons taste and interestingly enough, you can turn it off in the menu.

Right lets cut to heart of the matter because Ed has accused my posts of being too long. I love this game. I first played it on the PC, my starting character a human noble in a tale of true betrayal and the desire for revenge. Right away I jumped in and immersed myself in the world, I had good fun and got involved in the stories that played out. My decision to play on the PC was cemented, or so I thought. Then the Xbox 360 Special Edition in Game caught my eye, if you buy this version you get the full game, a bonus DVD but also you get some added DLC. The downloadable content that comes with the special edition is a full pack containing a new character for your party, a large section of new land, plus loads of new voiceovers and dialogue choices because of this new character and what he does. This pack contains a new questline to follow. Along with this pack you get 3 exclusive DLC items that only can be downloaded with the special edition and cannot be purchased. And finally you get special Dragon Age blood armour, along with the blood armour is code to have a version of the blood armour available in Mass Effect 2! Damnit I was in at that point, I want Mass Effect 2 and getting some neat armour in the game, that suits me down to the ground. Long story short, too late, my wife went out and bought me the special edition of the game for Xbox 360. I started a new game, this time choosing a City Elf Rogue, and damn the City Elf storyline is brutal but very very good. Like I said all stories lead to a story point called Osteggar where King of Ferelden decides to make a stand against the Darkspawn. Pretty soon after this you have a party and choose where to go next to unite the armies, but it will take you at least four to five hours since starting the game to get to this point. Now stop and think about that second, four to five hours to really get the game started. I have played games where four to five hours in and they are just about to ready to start wrapping up for a big finale. Hell the game of Wanted is only about six hours long so four to five hours to get started is pretty damn impressive.
Combat is fun in this game and given that you can pause combat, jump into the role of another party member and order them to use certain attacks, you will find that this is a more tactical affair. Or you can let them do their own thing, its entirely up to you. Be warned, if you leave them to do their own thing, battles will not go well for you, so it is best to use the system Bioware set up that pretty much lets you program the AI of your party members during battle. Like the system in Final Fantasy 12, you give your character traits for example, one trait is : If Health <75% use healing potion, or if party member health <75% use healing spell. There are so many choices that if you spend the time and effort into using this system you could have your entire party acting like you want them to without having to take direct control.

Dragon Age also has the Codex system, which I was first introduced to in Mass Effect. Whenever you come across a new race, ship, person, system, or hint at back story your codex is updated. The codex is all the information you need about the game. You can read it or ignore it. I have started reading it and if your into Fantasy fiction but are playing the game, then I'd skip the codex, otherwise you are in for a treat, every entry in the codex is informative and builds up your appreciate for not only the game but the entire world that Bioware have created.

I consider Dragon Age: Origins a triumph because by being put onto 3 platforms and the large amount of press and PR EA have invested into it, Dragon Age has caught peoples attention. Now on the PC you can change the camera angles to have a top down view like Baldur's Gate and Neverwinter Nights but on the consoles you have the fixed 3rd person view, a few people are annoyed about that but I think thats a good thing for console owners. The argument has been made that you can plug usb keyboards and mice into the PS3 and 360 so surely you could have a top down view for the consoles, but seriously if you are that desperate to play the game in that view point then get yourself a PC and play the game. This game does not require a super PC with Crysis like stats to run. One thing Bioware have done right in this game is the difficulty slider can be adjusted at any point, so say you are finidng a part of the game too difficult, go into options and lower it, finding another part too easy, back into options move the difficulty up. By doing this your more casual players are likely to stick around more because they don't want to keep attempting something to the point it gets frustrating, they will walk away, but by adjusting the game to make it easier for themselves they can get past a harder part and continue on with the game. Incidently if you are interested in the game but you wont be buying it just yet, then check out the Dragons Age: Journey website, this is a browser based game Bioware created to promote Dragon Age. This game is actually a fully fleshed RPG in your browser. The combat is a tile based combat system but I had some fun with it and I will go back to it and invest more time in it, it is a lot of fun and has hours and hours of content in it but best of all it's free. That's right, to promote their upcoming game Bioware created a fully fleshed out RPG to be played in the browser, the graphics are basic but stylised and the combat mechanic takes a few turns to wrap your head around it, but if your an rpg nut then check both these games out.

Wow, just wow!

Uncharted: Drake's Fortune was one of my favourite PS3 games, it still is. I loved the feel of it, it was like a movie that you took part in, everything about it worked... except the end boss fight which became a Quick Time Event, that kind of sucked. Ever since the ending of that game, I had been looking forward to Uncharted 2, well I didn't have to wait for long because Uncharted 2 was released and I got myself this game as soon as I could.

The game begins with Nathan Drake waking up in a train, he looks bad, like he's been through hell and then he winces, he's been shot in the side and is still bleeding. As he takes in his surroundings he realies he is still strapped into his seat, when he undoes the seat belt he falls, the train carriage he is in is dangling off a cliff. Nathan grabs a rail before he tumbles completely off the train and to his death. The game starts you right then, you have to climb up that train and onto solid ground. Talk about starting with a bang, your already questioning what is happening and why. Why has Drake been shot? Who shot him? How did he end up hanging off a cliff? The game tells you everything in a sequence of flashbacks which take up the biggest portion of the game, thankfully you play those flashbacks. This is where Uncharted excels, instead of showing a cut scene with cool shit happening (yes Metal Gear Solid 4, I am looking at you), Uncharted 2 lets you do the cool shit and the cut scenes are there for brief exposition and do not last long, I think the longest cut scene in the game is four minutes and that is really pushing it. You'll recognise 2 faces from the previous game apart from Drake himself, you'll see Sully and Elena again and as always the writing in this game is sharp. The characters have conversations as they go through the levels and Drake will talk to himself at points, muttering as things happen. At one point on you are progressing through a speeding train, on one of the open top carriages an attack helicopter suddenlys bears down on Drake, shooting at him. Up ahead 3 guys appear and start shooting at Drake, I took cover and Drake shouted to the guys head, "Can't you assholes see the helicopter chasing me?!". Things like that add the personality to the game that it has, its little touches that you notice and think "that's pretty cool" but when you think about it compared to other action games out at the moment, Uncharted 2 just does everything that bit better.

The core gameplay mechanics of Uncharted 2 are the same as the first, you climb and explore ancient ruins and other such Tomb Raider-esque stuff for some of the game, but the biggest portion of the game is combat, you take cover and fight off numerous enemies, thankfully they fixed the combat in this game. It no longer takes 2 full clips from a pistol to take down one single enemy, but combat isn't easy, your constantly pushing forward trying to gain ground because pretty soon your ammo will run out if you remain in one position, you can scavenge ammo from your dead foes so trying to push forward is key. Now let me stress something about the combat, you will die.... a lot. The combat is solid and you need to think through every fire fight, you just cant shoot and hope for the best, at times you need to pick when to take time to aim a head shot and other times you just need to get to a different angle to shot the gas tank beside the group of soldiers. Grenades fly thick and fast in this game, both from you and the enemy so your always wary of your surroundings and make sure you have sufficient space to dive out of cover if a grenade lands next to you.

The puzzles in the game are not head scratchers, they are basic and you have help, but personally I think that is a good thing because it keeps the pace of the game going and you don't grind to a halt at every puzzle, you'll take a few moments to look around and check the notebook that Drake carrys and then you're off solving the puzzle.

The game takes about 10 hours or so to finish and there is not a better 10 hours you could spend using your PS3 at the moment, Uncharted 2 is the new barometer on which action games should be measured against because nothing out on any platform beats this game for sheer action and fun.

You know you're getting old when...

... a seminal 3D game that you spent much of your late teens and early 20s playing til 3am most nights has been ported... to Flash. And it's perfectly playable, if, like Robert and I, you were a late adopter of mouselook and don't mind looking like a demented pianist while playing it.

Behold, Quake 1, in Flash.
http://www.freewebarcade.com/game/quake-flash/

My What A Big Gun You Have....

Diablo and Diablo 2 are the two loot dropping games that got people addicted and some are still addicted to those games today. The premise of the games is simple, you fight enemies for the promise of the loot they will drop, the loot being new weapons, money and health potions or special items. Seems simple enough, but what happened was that they crafted weapons you would only find through the loot drops, a vendor didn't sell all those items, but they bought them from you. So as you completed quests, you found loot, sold the loot and gained money to buy what you needed and levelled up to venture into other areas with bigger enemies to get more loot. A simple hook took you through the game, it didn't drag you or leave you floundering, it was there subtely guiding you with the promise of a better sword or crossbow if you killed the next mob of enemies. The people who thrived on these games affectionatly became named loot whores. Loot whores are at home in MMORPGs like World of Warcraft, where items that are dropped can be sold on the auction house for gold. In Warcraft Loot has a huge impact on the in game economy, an economy that works, much to the doubters surprise. The feeling of getting an item which is a "rare drop" is a thrill, a small thrill but that thrill is enough to drive people through loot driven games.

Despite the simple appeal, the imitators that try to make these games never really deliver. Many imitators sprang up right after Diablo and Diablo 2, the closest anyone came to being on par was Dungeon Siege. 2 games that have tried to bring the loot whore game to a different perspective are Hellgate: London and Too Human. Hellgate: London let you go into first or third person perspective depending on the class of character you play. A gun based character focuses on first person play, but a character who uses swords and melee weapons goes into a third person perspective. Hellgate: London suffered from a myriad of problems, not the first of which was being subscription based. I wont get into how stupid an idea that was, but that model they presented did drive a way a lot of people who were interested in the game, me being one of them, I had been hyped for Hellgate for a long time. That was not the only reason the game failed however, the game failed because it was too unweidly. Also it could not decide whether it wanted to be an MMO or not. They went on and on about their randomly generated levels within the game, well I had a chance to play Hellgate for a few months, the levels may be random, as they claim, but what the main is they have 6 or 7 level structures and the game chooses one, tosses it in and switches up the pallete so you know if your in a sewer or if you are outside. A lot of the levels I played were the same no matter what character type I played as. But the big problem, like with most loot based games, it dispensed too much loot. You would get a fantastic gun or sword and weild it, it would look cool and deal epic damage, suddenly a few minutes later there is something better and you switch out that weapon, the same with armour. In fact the game dropped so much loot that you were overwhelmed within the first hour of playing it, your inventory was always full and you were constantly selling stuff to the vendors, but you never felt good about this, you felt quite bad, because you knew there was at least 20 or 30 other items you left lying in one level and you can't go back and get them. Hellgate: London flopped and the servers for the Multiplayer section closed their doors earlier this year as did the company that made the game.
Too Human, by Silicon Knights, was very high concept. It mixed Norse Mythology with science fiction and had the gods of Norse Mythology mixed into a techno-punk style future. To try and explain the story in simple terms is not something I feel I could do and personally I feel the makers of the game got wrapped up in their own little bubble and didn't realise that the story itself was utter drivel.
The game was a third person perspective games, you went into long dungeons, killed everything that moved and got loot. Simple, huh? Well not so fast. Too Human flopped as well.
Why? Numerous reasons. First of all Too Human was in development for too damn long. Almost ten years of development for this game, and they hyped it to holy hell. Secondly, the control system. For this game, the developers decided to do something you should NEVER do in a third person perspective game, they moved combat to the right stick of the controller.
Lets take a break for a second, okay here is a simple lesson when it comes to game design. If you are making a game in the 3rd person perspective for consoles, here is a simple design rule you must follow: For movement control, the left stick on the controller must be used and for control of the camera, the right stick must be used. When these 2 things work together you generally have a good control system, the noteable exception is God Of War, they never put the camera in your hands, but they didn't map combat to the right stick either. However in a weird move they mapped gun combat to the triggers on the control pad. So imagine this situation, your playing this game, robots are swarming at you from all angles, you are firing your guns at them, suddenly your character is shot at from the right from something off screen, instincitevly you hit the right stick to swing the camera round, instead your character performs a sword attack to thin air. So not only were you fighting robots, you were fighting the game's controls. It didn't work. But they took the Hellgate London loot problem to a new level. In Too Human you could customise your armour and your armour had lots and lots of parts, down to the shin protectors to the shoulder pads. The loot that would drop could be those parts themselves or runes that could boost these parts. It was all very involved and was meant to mean you could customise your character as much as you wanted and it would be as unique as you wanted your character to be. This created a problem because the mobs of enemies would drop loot all the time and it was always better loot, so you spent a lot of time in the menu screen attaching that loot and having to drop things you didn't want or need. It got the balance too wrong, to the point where it was silly. Every time you picked up loot you had to jump into a menu and see if it was better than what you already had, then futz around with that to make sure you always had the best stuff equipped. The problem being that you picked up loot a lot.
Too Human flopped, it was planned as a trilogy and if we see a Too Human 2 in development we can consider Silicon Knights dead in the water because it would kill their company dead to make that game.

So why all the took about loot based games? Simple, the new contender to the throne of next gen loot based games is here, and it is called Borderlands.

Set in the desert world of Pandora, you play one of four treasure hunters searching for a fabled alien vault that is said to hold wonderous treasure for whoever finds it. Finding it wont be easy so you need to make friends, get yourself a good weapon and be prepared to fight a lot of bandits and alien creatures along the way.

The game starts you off with a very brief introduction and then has you choose your character, you can choose from one of four characters: A Hunter, a Soldier, a Spell caster and Melee Specialist. Once you choose your class, your dropped off at Firestone, where you meet the loveable robot Claptrap. Thus starts a brief tutorial that seamlessly gets you into the game but also sets you off on your without any real hassle. You defend Firestone from bandits, meet the local doctor and your soon killing skags and bandits whenever you can.
Skags are the local wildlife, small four legged alien creatures that's head literally splits apart into a giant mouth. The best way to kill the Skags is wait until they roar at you and shoot them in the mouth.
The game from this point becomes grindtastic, you are constantly grinding levels, taking quests and finding guns and you will find a lot of guns. The tag line for the game jokes about 87 Bazillion Guns, but trust me there is a lot because the guns are procedurally generated. What is helpful about Borderlands is that when a gun drops, a bubble comes out the top of it on your HUD and it tells you right there if the gun is better than the ones you are already carrying and using. So you don't need to leap into a menu and figure things out, your inventory space is limited but thankfully you don't bemoan leaving behind weapons because money is everywhere, you are never struggling to buy anything. Maybe in the first couple of hours its a tight squeeze for somethings but after then the money is never a problem.
The gunplay in this game feels good, the sniper rifles have a satisfying feel to them and machine guns have the nice almost out of control feel that you believe they should have. As the games main focus is the gunplay it is a relief to know that they got it just right.

The look of Borderlands apparently changed rapidly in the past 12 months, now I remember picking up a PC Magazine and seeing Borderlands and to me to looked like the new iD game Rage. A desert wasteland that is very grey and brown, and everything looks very... well Unreal 3 engine. Granted the Unreal 3 engine powers this game but they changed the art direction and style in the past 12 months to give it a semi-cell shaded look. In doing so they put Borderlands apart from all the Unreal 3 engine games that are out there right now. It looks bizare, like a Gorillaz music video but with a bit more detail.

My experience of the game has been positive, I played and leveled up a Hunter to level 15 then started a soldier. The reason I started a new character was due to a troublesome boss I had encountered. I will go back and try again as the Hunter at some point but I really want to play as a more frenetic class, the Hunter relies on long range sniping and fire fights tend to be quite slow affairs but as a soldier I can get into the thick of it without having to worry too much. The solider has a special ability of throwing down a turret that has some shields for you to take cover behind, you can bolster this turrent in a number of ways. The turrent can be used to heal, or if you pour points into one aspect, it actually distributes bullets of the gun you currently hold.

But back to this troublesome boss. I was having problems, numerous attempts to take him down had led to failure, I knew I needed to level up some, but I wanted to take one last run at him before I went on a grind fest. On a whim I took the game online and left it open, right away someone leaped into the game, he was a couple of levels higher than me and instantly started dispatching bad guys. Right away my thoughts were "right on, he's going to help me out" but extended play time with this guy revealed he was not AS good a player as first hoped. He packed some punch in his shots but he was aimless, I had to slow down a lot to get him to follow me and a lot of time he would stop and stare at me as if to say "what now?". Well eventually, after he stole not only ammo, but first aid I vitally needed, we made it to the boss only for me to get killed right away. I respawned not far and as I ran to the boss again I could see the other guy's health meter, it was doing okay. I got to the boss and just as I got there, the other guy died. The boss came charging at me, it's health lowered, I aimed with the sniper rifle, causing critical hits, the boss hit me and the screen started to go black. I was in a phase that is called "Fight for your life". This happens when both your health and shields are dropped to zero you have a short amount of time as the screen goes to black to shoot at the enemy that killed you, and if you are able to kill it before you black out then you get what is killed "Second wind" and this regenerates a quarter of your health and also full shields to continue fighting. So the boss is coming at me as the screen goes to black, I am firing for all it's worth, its too late because the screen is almost completely black, I pull the trigger one more time in frustration and suddenly "Second wind" appears on screen, and the boss lies dead in front of me. I had done it! I scooped up all the loot and revelled in the glory, when the other player arrives he sees what is happened, he must be pleased because he doesn't abandon the games. Well we ventured outside this small dungeon and back into the wilds to be joined by two other players and what happened next was 45 minutes of chaos, a lot of fun and so many enemies on screen that the PS3 actually couldn't keep up for a few brief seconds, this is the only time I have ever seen the PS3 struggle with anything.

All in all Borderlands is a great game for the casual player like myself or the loot whore because it appeals to both ends of the spectrum. I could walk away from Borderlands for weeks upon end and come back and pick up where I left off with no problems at all, or I could spend every night getting better gear and better weapons and exploring every nook and cranny of Pandora looking for that alien bunker, either way I would be having fun and that is all that matters when it comes down to it.

Laying The Smackdown, Properly

The WWE games have been notorious for being very ho-hum every single year. Since we got Smackdown on the PS1 the makers of the game have tried their hardest to put you in the middle of the wacky action that takes place in the WWE. But in reality the Smackdown games quickly became a yearly franchise where it jumped leaps and bounds from the first to the second game, then the jump from PS1 to PS2 pushed the boundaries of what they could do in a game and for 2 years they cranked out 2 very middling games then released the best Smackdown game to date : Bring On The Pain. Soon the games were rebranded Smackdown Vs Raw and since then its been a yearly franchise with very little changing. A new control scheme was implemented in the midst of all this but it didn't fundamentally change the game. I have played every single iteration of the franchise to a good extent, all except for Smackdown Vs Raw 2009, which I messed around with on the Wii but was unimpressed with the horrible control scheme.

Smackdown Vs Raw 2010 is out now, and I have my grubby mitts on a copy of this game for the PS3. I have tinkered with it for a while, right away I am impressed. The level of customization and depth in this game is staggering. Gone is the boring GM mode and instead we have a new mode that I will go into in depth later on. The career mode is still there, you fight matches towards a belt depending on who you choose, its just a series of matches with no story in between. However if you want your dose of story led action then look no further than Road to Wrestlemania, a story based slice of wrestling action that has customised stories for characters in the game, but only for certain characters. Its interesting but I need more time for it.

The graphics from this game have taken a HUGE overhaul, everything looks better, the entrances are smarter with shorter load times. So you play, for instance Smackdown Vs Raw 2008 and have a match, you do some chops to your opponent, yeah it fine. But in this game, you do some chops to your opponet you see the red marks on his skin from the impact of the chops. Your opponents chest gradually gets redder and redder. Also most of the on screen indicators are gone, there is no action bar at the top of the screen, instead a small circle around your wrestler's feet is the Smackdown meter, it allows more realism into the game. Blood has been improved, though you may not think it at first, you might think it looks like a blob of red on your wrestlers face, but as a match progresses the blood will spray onto the mat, your opponents chest and even your wrestler's chest from impact. They have taken everything up a notch with this game.

Controls, its still the old right stick to grapple controls that I am none too happy with but you get used to it and once you have the knack you can string togethers moves pretty fluidly. Certain controls have been changed about and I have not had enough time to fully invest in learning the controls so my first couple of matches I found myself repeating a lot of moves, that can get quite boring so as I spend more time with the game I will figure out how to learn the controls 100% and string together fun matches.

Now the big thing I was talking about is a story creator mode. It allows you to create storylines and scripted events within any or all WWE shows. You more or less can create a full storyline going from week to week, deciding how a match should go and why. You know those wacky cut scenes you see in the season mode of the previous games, well you get to write the script for those scenes and then direct them. Its a long process, a time sink that requires patience and an idea of where your crafted story is actually going.
The story mode is actually very simple, you have a calender interface that shows you when each show starts, you choose which show to start your story on, saw you choose Raw. Once you've made that choice, you now edit the show. You choose to have a match or a "segment" which is those wacky cut scenes we talked about. There is a HUGE list of cut scenes, but that is not to say there is everything there, you'll create a story and think "if there was a scene like this, it would be perfect," then you realise there is no scene like you require, so you make do with something else. So you choose a scene, now each scene has a set number of peope, you can't add people to add a scene but you can remove people from some scenes. You can choose how long the scene is, what music plays during it, any titan tron video that needs to play, what the crowd are chanting and even the copyright sign at the end of a show can be thrown up on screen for that mark of authenticity. In the advanced editor, which you need to use to add text, you can adjust the camera angles and the emotions the chracters use in the scene, its limited but it is a sign of things to come. If the makers of Smackdown expand on this feature in the future, we can expect bigger and better things to come out of the comminity.
But let me stop for a second, the community is a big part of this feature, if you connect to the net over PSN or Xbox Live you can download created storylines or peoples own created wrestlers. Within a couple of days of the game being released there was already Hulk Hogans, Kurt Angles, Brock Lesnars and Stings flooding the network, also some initial created stories too. I didn't download any stories at first. I stuck to getting some Wrestlers into the fold.
But a couple of nights ago I downloaded a few created storylines, honestly I wasn't impressed. A few of them didn't make sense, others were just a mess and I think only one of them was actually playable without cringing.
If you think of this mode in terms of Little Big Planet. When Little Big Planet was released a lot of people created levels, people still do and they upload them, the levels range from terrible to amazing. That is the way it is going to be with the stories uploaded. You need to sift through them, rely on user reviews and find the good stories to download, because potentially if the story mode is a hit, then there is unlimited free content for this game. Currently I am working on a storyline for the game, I have written it out on paper to transfer to the game, in total the story takes place over 22 in game weeks. The next story that is planned after that is shorter and runs over 8 in game weeks. During each of these stories there will be numerous matches and fun content to witness.

Each year Smackdown iterates on the previous generation, sometimes it is small tweaks and other time it is huge changes. Smackdown Vs Raw 2007 was the controls changeover, right stick was grapple. In 2008 it was the tweak of character types, Hardcore, Super Heavyweight and each of these characters had a particular perk to them, in the case of Hardcore, once you get busted wide open it made you spring back to life and have a finishing move ready to use. In 2009 the makers really emphasised Tag Team matches and scrapped the season mode and introduced the more focussed Road to Wrestlemania mode.
Now in 2010, the control system is still in place from 2007, from 2008 the character types are now perks that you can add to existing wrestlers or add them to your created wrestler, and from 2009 Tag Team Matches are actually fun to play and Road to Wrestlemania is a highlight of the game. 2010 has given us the story mode, which is the best thing to happen to the series in a long time, I know the makers add and remove things from the Smackdown series in every iteration, but if they remove this mode like they removed the dull GM mode then they are just stupid.

Honestly the Smackdown series was not worth buying for 3 years, From 2007 onwards there was no reason, I owned 2007 on 360, then saw 2008 going for £5 last year and I didn't bother with 2009. But this story mode made we want Smackdown again, the game has re-invigorated my love for Wrestling again, and with a good community supporting this game, it could be entertaining us right up until Smackdown vs Raw 2011.

Inmates Running The Asylum (Arkham Asylum that is)

The room is silent, only one person is moving and he is nervous, in fact he is terrified. Nervously he fingers the shotgun he is weilding and mutters to himself. A noise behind him makes him spin round and open fire, it was just a boiler letting off some steam. This man is nervous because 5 minutes before, he and his 4 friends had been shouting to each other in this large room, egging each other one. His four friends now lay unconscious around the room and he is all that is left. He is your prey to take down because you are Batman. Your perched on top of a stone gargoyle and your prey walks under it, suddenly you flip upside down on the gargoyle and zip down on a grappling ling and grab the bad guy. Its all over, 5 guys taken down without being spotted.

Batman: Arkham Asylum was released a couple of months ago to a lot of fanfare, the hype for this game grew very quickly in a very short time. Previews and reviews were suddenly glowing and people expected this to be a huge turkey, like mostly all the Batman games had turned out to be. Not so for Arkham Asylum. Why?

Well lets start with the story. This game disregards all the movies, completely ignores them and pulls all its lore and information from the comic books. You start off the game having just captured the Joker and you take him back to Arkham Asylum. You start controlling the game as you lead the Joker down to his cell, he has been strapped to a gurney and has an armed escort. You walk Batman down these corridors as you listen to the Joker crack wise and come off as mentally unstable as he is supposed to be. Brilliant voice work from Mark Hammill makes the Joker the best character in this game. However things suddenly go wrong when the Joker manages to free himself when he is out of Batman's reach and challenges Batman to chase him. You soon find out that the Asylum has been taken over and The Joker now has the run of the place. So you set off into the Asylum to regain control. A lot more happens in the story and I dare not spoil it but you run into a whole slew of Batman's enemies along the way.

The gameplay of this game is amazing. First off you have freeflow combat, which is contextual depending on where you are and what enemy you aim for and it feels solid. It doesn't feel like a bunch of animations that don't quite fit. You wont throw a punch then hit another button and suddenly the animation jars together and it doesn't look right. Everything about the combat flows, it looks like he is puting up a hell of a fight and the counters slip into the combat so well. You will soon find yourself fighting up to 8 guys at a time and if you are good at the combat you can fight all 8 without taking one hit, and they don't all line up to get hit one by one, they come at you as and when they please.
The combat is easy to pick up but hard to master, but master it you will simply because it is so fun.
Next up we have the biggest selling point of the game, the stealth aspect where you must hunt your enemies. The classic scenario is you get into a large room, stone gargoyles line the ceiling are and you use these to survey the surroundings and take out the enemies with the room, the enemies are most likely armed with guns, and even though you are Batman you can't take a lot of bullets before its game over, so you must hunt them down and try not to get spotted or you will be shot down. This section of the game can take anywhere between 1 minutes to 10 minutes as the men will often times group together for safety and they don't follow strict patterns in their patrols, they change it up, stop and talk to each other. These sections are the highlight of the game and the makers obviously put a lot of thought into these sections and it shows. But they do also mix it up and at one point I found myself going back into one of the rooms I had cleared a few hours earlier during one of the frequent backtracking missions you will do, it was repopulated with guards but they had also set the gargoyles with bombs. So if you landed on one of them, a 3 second timer started and it exploded. So suddenly you found you couldn't use the Gargoyles to survey he surroundings like you had been accustomed to. There are multiple ways to traverse the rooms and take out enemies and hours and hours of replay value in these rooms alone.
There are some other aspects to the game, one section where you are forced to use stealth to not been seen and not take out any enemies either. And another section where its a side scrolling platformer.
You also get a load of Battoys to play with in the game, a grappling hook, Batarangs, Batclaw, a sonic disrupter and explosive gel which you spray as a batshape on weak surfaces to get through.
Its all distributed over the course of the game at a fairly even pace.

Speaking of Pace!
I want to take a few seconds to talk about the pacing of this game. When it comes to games in general you need to be able to pace things well. If you get a game that is a one trick pony, like the new game Wet, the big thing about Wet is the stylistic way to kill people. Now any time you engage an attack with guns everything goes in slow motion, that to me gets really annoying. Now I like bullet time, but I like to have control over it, some games demand bullet time to help you survive, like Max Payne, but you control because sometimes you don't need it. Wet takes the control of bullet time away from you so your always going in slow motion when you attack and I only played the demo and I became bored of the slow motion before I finished the demo. So Wet throws that feature at you time and time again,.
Batman: Arkham Asylum is quite possibly one of the best paced games you will ever encounter. I am not saying that as a knee jerk reaction, I have had the game for at least a month and a half and played it on and off since then. Currently I feel I am at least 90% of the way through the story and the pacing is perfect. How can I say this?
Well let me give you an example, you will come into a section where you have to fight some bad guys, so you will take down say 8 bad guys and then find yourself in a wide open section, there are some bad guys around but you can get round them using the enviroment or take them on head on. So you make your choice and find yourself in a stealth section and you need to take down the guys one by one. Then you will find yourself solving devilish puzzle of exploring Arkham island. The game mixes it up so your not really sure what is coming next and it also does something a lot of other games don't do. It doesn't let you do something for so long that you get tired of it. You do just enough so you can look forward to doing it again but it never goes overboard. The story itself is paced really well and you feel yourself moving along with it at breakneck speed and nothing feels too drawn out.

Graphically the game looks good, Unreal 3 engine, surprise surprise, but it looks really good. It captures the look and feel of Batman perfectly and also has a neat feature that basically is an x-ray vision of everything. You click this on and visor come down over Batman's eyes and get can see through walls, find weakspots and see enemies through walls beside, above or below him. You see the enemies walking around as skeletons. This visual feature is so useful you will use it a lot and sometimes forget to turn it off, which in itself is a shame because the game looks so good.

Batman: Arkham Asylum is an awesome game, it makes you feel like Batman as you use your enemies fear against them, it looks great and plays even better and has huge replayability with the Riddler challenges everywhere in the game it will keep completists coming back to this game until they get 100%. If you don't have this game and own a 360 or PS3.... shame on you.