Three words, people: Fable II DLC.

Dear Sir or Madam, I regret to inform you that your beloved Max Payne is dead because he was stupid.

Yeah: I just saw it. I’m not going to pretend I was expecting it to be good, least of all because I saw the Metacritic scores before I watched it, but also because I know that videogame movies are doomed to failure. See: Doom.

I want to at least try and address why I think this true in this week’s post – because it should be easy right? Videogames and movies have so much in common, after all. These days, landmark videogames are cinematic in nature, are usually narrative based, and require a charismatic hero to lead you through the ride of your life.

Unfortunately, what movies and videogames don’t have in common these days is the amount of money they both make, and this is why Hollywood is investing in more and more videogame titles. The truth is that Hollywood is lagging behind the videogaming industry significantly in terms of initial sales. Spiderman 3, if not the biggest grossing movie of all time to date, grossed $59 million on opening day. Grand Theft Auto IV grossed $310 million on day one.
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So, Fallout 3. I guess I should explain first of all that I hate almost any game that’s played in first person perspective, right? However, I should add that I’m able to supress this hatred if the game is worth it (see: Portal, Bioshock, Timesplitters 2), so it’s not like I’m totally biased.

I tried to write this piece a couple of times before I remembered that this isn’t a games review site – it’s a place where I get to hang with my blogging pals and shoot the shit about games. So I don’t need to go for the traditional compliment sandwich model, or recommend it to people who like that sort of thing, or what have you – I can just tell you why I didn’t dig it and leave it at that. Liberating, non?

Here goes, then: I didn’t like Fallout 3 because I found the combat clunky, the interactions with other characters wooden (and limited, to say the least – try setting your INT to 1 in Fallout and compare the results) and the graphics boxy, over-serious and totally charmless. It is, as the naysayers warned us, a slightly tarted up Oblivion with guns. Guns and no “wait” feature (nngh!). And don’t get me started on VATS (the innovative turn-based combat system that isn’t turn-based and basically involves pressing one button a few times every couple of minutes). Oh, and the character animations suck, especially the unintentionally hilarious third person view in which you appear to be hovering through treacle as you traverse the post-apocalyptic landscape.

Yes, yes, there is a lot of good stuff in there – the sense of creepy desolation is pretty impressive, there’s a huge old world out there for you to explore and you can become an alcoholic if you like. And yes, it does have a robot butler. But that’s not enough for me, I’m afraid – while there’s no one game-breaking downer that made me hate it, the cumulative effect of all those little niggles just left me stone cold. After a dozen or so hours of trying to enjoy myself, I sold it on Amazon and bought Fable 2 instead. Now, as Carrie pointed out a couple of weeks back, that’s a game.

Something is slightly unnerving about the way this Entertainment Tonight anchor is staring at my childhood hero’s new incarnation.

This new Prince of Persia movie looks dire. I hate how video game movies always seem to go the cartoony way. Can’t we just make a videogame movie that has some style and all get along? And Jake Gyllenhaal….. what are you doing to your career? I mean, good five o’clock shadow and all, but is it going to distract us from the painful one liners that we are about to experience? I also think it was a mistake to compare this movie to Lawrence of Arabia Jerry. It’s kind of setting yourself up for a fall already…. Oh and by the way, I can’t remember the last Jerry Bruckheimer movie that was good. Oh wait, yes I can, it was Coyote Ugly. ….Just kidding. Good luck cast and crew. You will need it. Of course I will eat my joypad if I actually get any enjoyment out of this film at all… I promise.

Hola skirts and sleuths. I spend a great deal of time wondering when a badass female hero will emerge in videogames; one who doesn’t have to hide her sexuality, like Nintendo’s Samus, or one who isn’t oversexualised, like erm… all the other videogame dames. Then I remember a character who almost did it for us, fellow gamers. Do you ever think, “Hmm, I wonder what happened to Joanna Dark?” I do.

When Rare decided to make Perfect Dark, a sort of spiritual sequel to that handsome and accessible homme fatal Goldeneye, I think pretty much everyone was happy. Mostly because Goldeneye was so good, and it signalled that Rare were going in the kind of adult direction that everyone wanted. I remember also being faintly shocked when I heard that Perfect Dark was going to feature a woman in the lead. Bladerunner-style, and a woman operative? Perhaps they are smoking something. This was one of the best ideas I’d ever really wanted to work. Whatever barriers there were against games developers making female protagonists, the barriers were no ideological impasse for Rare. They leapt right in. My knights on horseback! I’d go to another castle for you, Rare.
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The one drawback of videogames is that they are completely inedible, despite Cooking Mama’s claims of deliciousness. If you want baked goods, you have to look elsewhere. Unless, of course, you’re looking at this awesome Lego Batman Videogame cake. Apparently everything in it is edible, from the tarnished-looking drainpipes to the little figures.

There’s no word on whether if you were to hit this cake it would explode into a pile of cupcakes shaped like Lego studs, but let’s assume it would.

Hello readers!

Just a quick note to let you know that I’ve made some improvements to our RSS feed. If you’ve already subscribed, I recommend that you unsubscribe using your feed reader and then click here to resubscribe. You’ll thank me for it!

If you haven’t subscribed yet, get with the times, daddy-o, and give it a whirl.

You may not remember Beyond Good and Evil. It’s a much-underrated last gen action-adventure game where you play Jade, a lady with myriad skills in sneaking and photograph taking. I was just re-watching the teaser trailer for Beyond Good and Evil 2. There’s no word yet on when the actual game may be out, but in the interim I’ve been thinking why Beyond Good and Evil was such a great game.

For starters, Jade is awesome. She looks like a greener version of Natalie Imbruglia from the video for Torn and, unusually for a female lead, wears all the clothes you would expect a normal human to wear. The result is that, unlike with Soul Calibur IV, you can read an article about it in public without looking like some kind of fetishistic lady-ogler. Unlike some of her more badly-packed contemporaries there is also a pleasing lack of jiggling which leaves you free to concentrate on the game, rather than wincing at the long-term sagging problems she’s creating for herself. Her fighting skills are largely stealth-based. There’s a large amount of incapacitating baddies by firing discs at gas canisters strapped to their backs, firing them into the air and leaving them waving their limbs around like little upturned turtles, which makes a refreshing change from shooting people in the head.

Another great feature of Beyond Good and Evil is the way incorporates Jade’s photography. Lots of games now seem to have camera missions tacked on – like the 50 Photo Ops in San Andreas which add hours to the game as you traipse round the map looking for little ‘photograph this building’ icons. The photography sections of Beyond Good and Evil were much more integral to the game. From the start of the game Jade is commissioned to takes photos of the various animals in the game for the Science Centre. And they really meant all animals, from the birds perching on Uncle Pey’j’s lighthouse at the beginning to the giant hideous monsters that you fight as the game progresses. I particularly like the rush to take photos of the huge boss monsters in the few seconds after they appear and before they attack which results in some great photos of monsters rushing towards you, gigantic teeth first. I like to pretend that Jade is one of those Victorian explorers muttering “You’re a magnificent beast – it’s a shame I have to kill you”.

And then there’s the brevity. Yes, it’s a short game. This tends to be something that people bring up as a criticism against it, but I’ve always thought it was one of its strengths. The great thing about having a short game is that you don’t have to suffer through time-fillers that have been shoe-horned in at the last minute to bulk the game out. It also has the advantage that, like Portal, you can play it in a weekend. When you get that warm glow of achievement when you finish it, it isn’t slightly soured by the realisation that you’ve sunk tens or hundred of hours of your life into it and are now a complete shut-in with nothing else to fill your days. Having said that, I hope that Beyond Good and Evil 2 has a bit more bulk to it. Having an excellent game that isn’t filled up with needless bits of time-wasting is good. Having an excellent game that has many hours of gameplay in it is even better.

Big news. So momentous, in fact, that it was immediately followed by the Bank of England reducing interest rates by one and a half percent.

To celebrate ten years since the release of classic LucasArts point and click adventure Grim Fandango Tim Schaefer has dug out the puzzle document and put it up online. It has lots of interesting background information, sketches and bits on characters and puzzles that didn’t make it into the final cut. In some cases you can see the editing process was definitely needed – the original extended fork-lift truck puzzle looks ridiculously complicated – although it’s a shame that some of the other bits were excised. For a fully immersive Grim Fandango experience I suggest you read the puzzle document while listening to the soundtrack, with a Day of the Dead Sugar Skull in one hand.

If you enjoyed Grim Fandango then it’s worth a look, although it’s a bit of a mammoth file, so be careful. If you haven’t played Grim Fandango then you are in a privileged position of being able to play it for the first time and this terrible document will only ruin it for you, so be careful.

Ah, Kevin Bacon! Chameleon of the silver screen! Is there anything he can’t do? You may have played the game where you try to link him to any other actor via six or fewer films, but with an actor of Kevin Bacon’s stature why would you limit yourself to just the seventh, cinematographic, art? Why not stretch yourself and ask the big question: if you were to recreate iconic moments from Kevin Bacon’s varied and occasionally illustrious acting career through video games, what would those games be? I submit the following:

Hollow man = The Secret of Monkey Island

Released in 2000, this sorry tale of a scientist who accidentally (symbolically, traumatically) turns himself invisible was not a high point for Kevin Bacon. The film provoked a fair amount of criticism for being a misogynistic, badly scripted piece of cod-psychology and an all-round bad film. No doubt there are plenty of equally uninspiring games that would recreate the experience of seeing Hollow Man fairly closely, but that seems a little like jabbing yourself in the leg with a chainsaw to achieve an authentic Doom experience – a bit hair-shirt wearing and unnecessarily unpleasant. If you don’t have ascetic leanings, a far better alternative is the Secret of Monkey Island. There are many many excellent things about the Secret of Monkey Island including the opportunity to swordfight with words. Crucially for this list, though, one of those excellent things about the Secret of Monkey Island is a necklace that renders you invisible, albeit only invisible to a very specific portion of the population.

Tremors = Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass

The film was a deserved if slightly cult hit which pitted Kevin Bacon against giant subterranean worms that were incredibly sensitive to sound. As you might expect it involved a lot of Kevin tiptoeing around attemptig to avoid being grabbed from below and chewed to death. And what’s this? Why, it’s Phantom Hourglass, the most recent Legend of Zelda game, in which the plucky hero (I like to call him Valentine McKee, although traditionalists among you may prefer Link) encounters giant subterranean worms that are incredibly sensitive to sound and… well, you get the point. The underground hungry worms section of Phantom Hourglass is actually only a very small part of the game but any point that your tiny pixellated Link is being chewed on by giant subterranean worms he does look distinctly Baconian. We can only hope that the Zelda influence on Tremors will lead to a reciprocal Zelda influence on Tremors. The Tremors TV series would definitely be improved by Burt Gummer being armed with a boomerang and bow and arrow.

Flatliners = Trauma Center 2: Second Opinion

The film is about guilt and making amends and the afterlife. More importantly, though, the film is also about defibrillating people. Until recently there weren’t a huge number of opportunities for those of us with natural defibrillation skills to use them to our advantage in video games. The advent of the Wiimote (or “handheld pointing device” as wikipedia have it, which seems a better description of a finger) has brought a whole range of activities that in the real world are suspiciously like work, put them on your television and called them fun. Included in this category Cooking Mama, a game where you go through all the motions of cooking, including being berated by a scary flame-eyed kitchen mother but without any of the usual associated benefits, like having a tasty meal to show for it. In a similar like-work-but-not vein comes Trauma Center: Second Opinion, which gets you to perform various surgeries in the name of fun. As part of this you get to defibrillate to your (and your patient’s) heart’s content. I’m not sure how much similarity the game bears to actual surgery, but it has the bonus that the anonymous torso that you’re saving could well be Kevin Bacon. Or Kiefer Sutherland, if you squint.