Computers are supposed to get better as time goes on. Moore’s law states that the number of transistors that you can fit on a circuit will double every two years. Despite there being laws – rules! – about this I have a PC which, after being moved to different flats and dropped a few times, is now working on its own inverse of Moore’s law. It’s getting progressively stupider, regressing back to the earliest forms of computer, dropping a generation of development every few months. Before Christmas it was just about running Theme Hospital, but even that’s too much for it now. We’re probably at about the level of Pong just now, so I imagine that in a few weeks time it will disappear altogether, possibly drawing the entire world into some reverse technology black hole.

All of which is a roundabout explanation of why I didn’t play the new episodic Sam and Max games when Telltale started bringing them out on PC. I love to both point and click, but devolving technology was standing in my way. For all these reasons it was a happy day when the first series of the Sam and Max games recently came out on the Wii. Point and click adventures work surprisingly well on the Wii (Zack and Wiki being another case in point), but there are a few differences to the PC which take a bit of getting used to. For one, on my giant TV Max is transformed from a small, cute, psychotic rabbit a worryingly large, cute, psychotic rabbit. Also the pointing part of pointing and clicking becomes a little more laboured on the Wii. Picking out tiny areas of the screen with the remote requires a much steadier hand than on the PC and, in my case, a fair bit more shouting at Sam for going the wrong way.

Despite an initially-jarring change in voice actor for Sam, the game’s got all the things you’d want from a Sam and Max game. There’s lots of graphic and ridiculous threats of violence from Max, there’s fantastic bizarre plots (I particularly liked the Mafiosi dressed as giant teddy bears), and, just as Conroy Bumpus provided musical accompaniment for Sam and Max Hit the Road, there are a load of songs, one of which I am seriously considering adding to my list of great songs in games:

Because the release of the game on PC was episodic the Wii game is divided into six mini-stories that are vaguely linked around a story about mind control. The second series was released in full for the PC last year and Telltale are currently working on the third for release in 2009. Over a three year period 18 discrete Sam and Max stories will have been unleashed on the world, which is surely a very good thing. The one bad thing is that the Wii release wasn’t well advertised. In fact, it was so poorly advertised that I had to go to three different game shops before I found one that even knew it had come out. Quite how they are going to justify releasing Series 2 and the upcoming Series 3 on the Wii if no one bought Series 1, I don’t know. They’d better work it out, though, because I now have a large collection of fairly unsavory threats of bunny-perpetrated violence if they don’t. As a final thought on the subject of Sam and Max I would also like to add:

Sam and Max + Max Payne 2 =

While playing about with the free one-month download of Photoshop which you can get from the Adobe website I rediscovered the type of fun you can have with image manipulation that I may have mentioned before, which I really do find ridiculously entertaining. It goes like this:

1. You take two games.
2. You weld them together, preferably in some way that involves a terrible pun.
3. You run it through Photoshop.
4. You stand back and try to work out whether the resulting game is a monstrous affront to nature or an evolutionary step beyond the two games that have birthed it – a ludo-superior, if you will.

To this end, may I present three games which developers could be exploiting to link different gaming genres, challenge preconceptions and (in at least one instance) annoy the Hell out of gamers if only they had the vision to make it happen.

Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem
+
Dr Kawashima’s Brain Training =

I think this could well be everything you could ever want in a game. You would get to battle gigantic Cthuloid monsters from the dawn of time while also attempting to reduce your brain age. Plus you would be hampered by the fact that your character has had one of those traumatic Jack Bauer lives full of incomprehensible horror, so as your brain age decreases, so does your sanity level. I believe the Sudoku promised on the box – the final boss, a giant Sudoku puzzle with ever changing numbers – should be creepy in a Pyramid Head from Silent Hill 2 way.

Nintendogs
+
Okami =

Nintendogs is big news. It’s sold over 21 million copies in its different iterations, so apparently people really like fake dogs. More specifically, if the adverts are anything to go by, it’s ladies that love to play Nintendogs as the combination of cute little puppies and special pink girl DSs nullify the scary testoterone power of video games to the point that they’re safe for girls to use. Good to know you’re looking out for us, Nintendo. Anyway just as Ladies Love Cool Nintendogs, all people with taste also loved Okami, meaning there must be a huge market for this as a Wii game. There can be beautiful Okami animation and drawing subgames with the Wii remote and, if Amaterasu will let you, a bit of God-dog belly tickling.

Gears of War
+
Wario Ware =

This could work as a game in which you fight the Locust Horde, one baffling minigame at a time. To be honest, though, I think it would be a disappointment if it was anything other than what the cover promises – Gears of War, but with that corpulent mustachioed moron taking the place of Marcus Fenix. There’d certainly be a bit less emphasis on strategic use of cover than in Gears of War and more on eating garlic and cackling to yourself, but he’d add a bit of colour to the proceedings. The one downside of this yellow and purple utopia is that I imagine you’d spend most of the game wanting or trying to kill Wario. He is very annoying, after all.

So there we have it: the future of games. There’s no need to thank me, developers – you can just put the cheque in the post.

Well, the gauntlet has been thrown. I’m not a Splinter Cell player, but if various dames have (loudly, repeatedly) extolled Sam Fisher’s many *ahem* virtues, then as far as I’m concerned he’s on the list. The question that bothers me is who, other than the ever-lithe Sam Fisher deserves to take his place among the Game Fatale top men? And I have to say, it’s a tough question to answer. While there are a barrel-load of “hot” female games characters in various levels of undress, I’ve never been too impressed with the pick of guys in games. I imagine that this is because for years the logic ran that the male protaganist, well that’s you, isn’t it? You’re a fourteen year old boy and this is a burly, no-necked version of you that can tear off people’s heads with a snap of his fingers. But not a sexy, burly no-necked version of you because it would be confusing if you were attracted to yourself. As a result, when you look through the roster of male human protagonists, you seem to get the same big interchangeable and decidedly un-hot formula again and again. Thankfully it’s not all like that. There are games where the main guy has a discernible neck and doesn’t look like a Bane-style human tank monstrosity. Very occasionally, he’s also kind of hot. I have a modest example of the oeuvre below.

I’m slightly wary of saying this, as it’s from another game with an unnecessary colon and suffix (which had better not become a requirement of our choices as that way lies madness) but I submit Kyle Hyde from Hotel Dusk: Room 215. If it passed you by it’s a very entertaining monochrome mystery on the DS. What’s he got going for him? Well he’s a noir detective which means he must have some place on this site. He has both lady trouble and a difficult past. He manages to wear a trenchcoat without looking like a flasher. He engaging despite – and possibly because of – being massively rude to pretty much everyone he meets. As if all of this wasn’t enough, he’s animated just like Morten Harket in the video for Take on Me which elicits in me an actual Pavlovian response where I drool slightly when I see it.

I’m entertained to see that Cara’s top choice is a fully-rendered pixel-exact action figure powered by the heat of a million physics engines and that mine is essentially an animated charcoal sketch. Unless one of us is harbouring a mad-on for the blockiness of the old-school NES Link, I’m assuming that any other candidates will fit somewhere between Sam Fisher and Karl Hyde aesthetically.

A little while ago, when Game Fatale was just a twinkle in selected sassy dames’ eyes, we discussed the idea of a top twenty sexiest videogame characters list. Of course, we were discussing male characters. I believe the female sex is just as susceptible to a shallow droolfest as much as the next man.

In fact, to demonstrate exactly how juvenile I was going to be in this post, I wish to enlighten you as to some titles I had prepared. Often, in the drunken nights of my first year at university, I would participate in hazy conversations over Teamspeak whilst my then boyfriend would heroically attempt to manipulate Sam Fisher away from ever present Mercenaries despite my cackling in the background. These conversations often landed on the subject of the absurd be-coloned title of Splinter Cell : Pandora Tomorrow, and how you could choose virtually any two words to be post-colon. At the time, we settled on calling Splinter Cell Pizza Thunder (a somewhat lazy nickname, we could have done much better with all of our combined perversity). “Game of Pizza Thunder anyone?” “We can’t play Pizza Thunder, my internet’s fucked.” “Will Pizza Thunder run on this?”

The laziest and most disgustingly bad titles I could think of to do with leering at Fisher’s ass like he’s some sort of piece of meat:
Splinter Cell: Sweet Ass
Splinter Cell: Breakfast Tomorrow
(and its more obvious sister) Splinter Cell: Shagyou Tomorrow
Splinter Cell: I Can See Your Cock In That Suit

I know! I didn’t even retain the P T or C T pattern. I should tell you that I have watched most of imdb’s 20 worst horror movies and they made me laugh instead of cry, just so you get the extent of my finding absolute crap hilarious. Perhaps someone should exchange the colon for a semi-colon on an official document, and do a survey on how many fans it confuses… Juuuuust that extra half-beat less on the punctuation; total freaking panic? In any case, Penny Arcade also found the Pandora Tomorrow title pretty funny too, and came up with some excellent suggestions in my favourite comic strip of all time.

By now, Sam Fisher is all over platforms like a delicious svelte rash. The only one he’s not on is the NES, and they had a hell of a time trying to port Double Agent to the Gamecube (I hear). Good I say, since it gives us oft forgotten lady gamers more ways to perv on him the way male gamers have been perving on Lady Lara for years (although, given, her ass was two pyramids for a while).

If I’ve not made myself clear yet, I am talking about how lean, svelte, sinewy and conveniently third person Sam Fisher is in the early skin-tight Splinter days. What makes Sam so fantastically different from all those other dull male heroes out there is firstly that he is not so beefy as to look like he is composed of horrible over-swollen glands knotted together in a line. As much as I adore fun (and I do, I really do) when I put down the controller after something like Gears of War I feel a bit like I want to bonk some lady on the head and drag her into a cave. And those kinds of heroes are everywhere! I think the punchline to that train of thought is Army of Two, and I don’t even have to finish that joke to have myself chuckling away like a maniac. Oh, all right then, Army of Two is like Hyper-Masculine Gay boxed and put on a shelf, which is certainly not what they intended (Pimp my gun, dahling!). That is what you get when you go down the uber-testosterone path for the gazillionth time.

No, our Sam is all man but in a more compact, intelligent and graceful (dare I say it) package, and a much more realistic hero model compared to the likes of Gears, Doom, and all that other caveman stuff. My next point. Should you get bored of looking at Sam’s kevlar covered thighs (that Pandora Tomorrow bodysuit is like the male equivalent of the tightest little black dress you can find in Harrods) you can always hit a cutscene and have Michael Ironside’s gravelly voice make a genuinely funny quip about the state of world terrorism or a brutal comment that you kind of hope one day someone will say to you before taking you in a manly fashion. And I guess that’s point two: his lines aren’t disgusting, and they are delivered perfectly and professionally by someone who was made for the role. Nothing puts you off fantasising about some virtual bloke like the exchange from Gears of War 2: “I heard there was a shitload of Grubs there sir!” And our hero (just to make him cooler, named ‘Fenix’ instead of the obviously passe correct spelling) replies wittily, “More like ten shitloads.” … The survey says no. Instead, I’d rather have a little of the tongue in cheek, “I’m the good guy here to save your world.” Guard: “I thought I was the good guy.” Sam: “No, no you’re the side with the super secret underground base and I’m the guy who’s trying to break in to the base which makes me the good guy.” Or the aforementioned quip about terrorism. Lambert says in Pandora Tomorrow, “Nobody knows whether he’s a US Agent or a terrorist.” Fisher mumbles, “Those things aren’t mutually exclusive.” Nice. Or, indeed, you could have a little badass if you wanted. Guard: “Who are you?” Sam (emerging from the dark like a tall menacing shadow, bracing the guard’s neck): “The monster in the closet.”

If all that doesn’t get you, there’s still the remaining fact of Sam’s being able to stealth into a building and neck crank everyone in the place into a stupor, fatal or otherwise. He can hack a terminal upside down. He crawls up other men’s similarly svelte, bodysuited curves with a delicate finesse. He’s a political realist, according to Wikipedia. And Wikipedia should know…ish. And I guess there’s the very real fact of his stubble, which features regularly in headshots of the guy. Mmm, virtual stubble. There’s a lot of talk on the superhighway too of Clooney being perfect for the role of Sam – invited, probably by the cheekbone, dark eyes, dark stubble combo, and well, I’m not complaining. If they cast Clooney in the movie, you can be sure I’ll be in the front row, perving at his not so virtual ass.

So, Carrie and Kerry, I propose a motion for Sam Fisher at the top spot. Give me anything you got.

As you completed each world in Super Mario Bros. and beat each fake Bowser you would repeatedly hear the phrase that has gone into videogaming history. “Thank you Mario! But our princess is in another castle!”. And while the 43 million of people who bought this game presumably cursed Toad for continually being the bearer of this unwelcome news did anyone every stop to think what it was like for him, sat waiting for you to turn up?

It turns out that actually, yes, someone has. On their Black Pear Tree EP the Mountain Goats have written one of the bleakest songs about videogames I’ve ever heard, entirely from the point of view of Toad in Super Mario Bros, which you can hear here.

As a small child one of my favourite holiday pastimes was to go to the beach and make a small town of little sandcastles and then destroy them by hitting them with a plastic trowel. It recently struck me that, in the couple of decades since, I haven’t played nearly enough games that have pandered to my need to be some kind of God-like creator and destroyer. You can imagine my excitement, then when I played two games last week: the construction-based World of Goo and the destruction-based Boom Blox.

A demo of World of Goo is available to download as a PC game from the website and the full version is available as a PC or a Wiiware game. People have tried to tell me it’s a physics game but given the amount of opportunity it gives for you to comment on struts and weight distribution it’s really an ode to structural engineering. In each level you take a collection of goo blobs and use them to create a variety of gelatinous-looking structures to reach the exit pipe that will be inconveniently placed, usually just beyond a meat tenderiser or giant pit full of spikes. The evolution of goo has clearly been an eventful one, resulting in goo with different characteristics. It’s a very stylish-looking game and one that’s very satisfyingly to play. Even better, the progression between the stages is also handled in old-school Mario style progression, moving from one illuminated blob to the next on a big map. Plus every blob you save in the main game is added to your blob pile for building gigantic structures in the big sandbox section. I imagine they don’t call it a blob pile in the press release as my mind can’t even come up with an image to go with that phrase.

On the other side of the creator/destroyer divide is Boom Blox. It was advertised widely as the result of a team-up between EA games and Steven Spielberg which, to be honest, was completely unnecessary information. All anyone really needs to know is that it’s a game where you can destroy structures which look completely stable with one well placed shot. As such it’s a salve for anyone who’s got so frustrated with playing Jenga that they’ve wanted to just kick the entire tower of blocks over and shout in the face of the person who suggested playing it in the first place. It’s entertaining, like World of Goo it has a variety of blocks with different schticks and like World of Goo the physics of it is spot-on. I only have two gripes about Boom Blox. One, there’s sometimes a lack of precision in the targeting system which results in you hitting something you never aimed at. Two, I like my destruction to be leisurely and considered and there’re a few too many timed sub-games for my liking. Admittedly that second point is fairly personal to me and it may be that frenetically throwing bowling balls at bears in suits of armour is everyone else’s idea of a good time.

All that remains now is for the Wii to feature a game which combines the creation and destruction in one, set in a city made entirely of sand where you rain down destruction using a giant trowel, controlled by the Wii remote.