The math based Risk: Fractions was scrapped due to lack of interest

Not since Arthur Percival surrendered his 138,708 strong army of Allied soldiers to a Japanese force numbering approximately 30,000 has such poor military nouse been exposed on such a large scale … until now.  Risk: Factions is based upon the classic Parker Brothers board game, Risk.  The basic concept of the game is simple world military domination, while smack-talking the crap out your opponents and attempting to rob them of any feeling of self-worth.

Games need a minimum of two players, with a maximum of five, but you can set each game up with a mixture of human and AI opponents.  Each player takes one of five factions: Humans, Cats, Robots, Zombies or Yetis.  In the traditional game you play a board based on a map of the world, cut up into territories and regions rather than the countries.  The gameplay is turn-based, with each player taking turns attempting to attack the surrounding occupied territories to build up their own empire.  At the beginning of each turn you receive extra soldiers based upon the number of countries and continents you control.  A traditional match ends when one player takes complete control, or (unfortunately more commonly) when the last remaining human player  disconnects in defeat.

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Sprinting for your life hasn't been this colourful in a long time

Reimagining a myth is a classic launch pad for entertainment.  The evolution of story, characters and themes nurtures these myths, keeping them alive in a world that can have the memory span of a goldfish.  Sometimes it goes well (the God of War franchise and Dan Simmon’s Illuim books being fine examples) and sometimes it goes quite badly (Clash of the Titans or The Bible … not so much).  Thankfully Enslaved: Odyssey to the West is a member of the former group. It’s not the first modern retelling of the myth of Monkey – you may remember the old TV show and might have seen the recent terrible movie adaptation starring Chairman Kaga from Iron Chef.  These kitschy retellings thankfully were followed up by Damon Albarn’s Opera last year.

Ninja Theory’s game leaves out some of the recognisable markers of the original story, but is thankfully no less enjoyable for it. There’s no Dragon-disguised-as-Horse, no demons, no overall journey to become a great immortal sage or collect scrolls. Monkey certainly can’t multiply himself or change into anything (except maybe from angry man who wants to kill Trip to an angry man who might be in love with Trip), but we do have the Cloud, the headband, the staff. We still have Pigsy and his lecherous ways, and we still have a story that ends in Enlightenment.

As the story goes, the nature of Monkey was … irrepressible.  In this version (written by Alex Garland) Monkey is a large, agile, brutish man, plucked by Slavers from the wasteland of post-apocalyptic North America and held in a an egg-shaped containment unit on a flying transport.  He watches an attractive and early 90’s fashion-inspired young woman escape, and then the ship begins to explode.  Nice timing, really.  Monkey escapes, just barely, in what is a rather nicely done spin on the Tutorial level, and crashes to Earth on the outside of the girl’s escape pod.  He wakes up to find that the girl he followed has now slapped a Slaver control headband on him.

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The colourful cast of Poker Night at the Inventory

All of us here at Armchair Diplomat have spent some time playing poker, at varying levels of seriousness.  While the others have all moved on to other, more interesting hobbies I still play regularly and Matt decided that meant I should be the one to review Poker Night at the Inventory.  Keeping in mind it’s a casual game I’ll do my best not to get all VPIP balanced ranges on y’all… here goes!

The premise of Poker Night at the Inventory is simple.  The Inventory is a club, it’s poker night and you’re there to play.  Your opponents are Max (from Sam and Max), Strong Bad (of Homestar Runner fame), the Heavy Weapons Guy (from Team Fortress 2) and Tycho (from the Penny Arcade series).

Each game has a $10,000 buy in and the winner takes all.  You never run out of money so you can play as many times as you like.  The game keeps track of how far up or down you are and each game shouldn’t take much more than 30 minutes to play.  Forget about all that though because, as we’ll discuss in a little bit, this isn’t really a poker game.  It’s actually a vehicle for getting the abovementioned characters together to engage in some witty banter.

Your opponents never stop talking.  Sometimes it’s prompted by the game and sometimes they just talk among themselves but they’re always jawing away.  Max is the deranged bunny rabbit we’ve come to know and love over the years, Strong Bad is Strong Bad-y, Mr Weapons delivers a good deadpan Arnie-esque line and Tycho’s dry nerdy wit balances things out nicely.  You don’t have to be a fan of their respective franchises to enjoy it but there are some in-jokes there for those in the know as well.  It’s reasonably clever too, and if for some reason the cards interrupt someone’s story they’ll wait until the distraction is over and then resume their story.  They’re not just responding to what’s happening on the table.

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I wonder if the crown would like to hold hands for a while?

The strongest memory I have from the entire Fable series is way back at it’s beginnings.  My hero is old.  Very old.  Deeply wrinkled skin and baggy eyes stare out of a face framed with grey hair and a golden halo.  He stares down at a woman who appears to be around half his age … his mother.

In a title packed with innovative features, it was this moment that defined the game for me, and remained with me all the way through the sequel.  A prime example of a brilliant concept that’s execution was fundamentally flawed.

Which is the stigma that surrounds the series as a whole, if we’re honest, due in no small part to the over-enthusiastic promises of lead designer Peter Molyneux.  After long ago promising not to discuss ideas that he can’t demonstrate, he’s actually said some rather interesting things in the lead up to Fable 3‘s release, but the one that caught my interest the most was the fact that Fable 3 would probably upset a great deal of gamers, most likely because the game has been redesigned to be less of an RPG and more of an action-adventure.

Now although that seems like a very strange thing to admit pre-release, and even though I’m generally a fan of RPGs, I took this admission as a promising sign.  I figured Lionhead finally was sitting down to fundamentally rethink Fable and enhance what worked while fixing what didn’t.

But I guess I figured wrong.

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Come on sweetie, we'll bludgeon him to death with a shovel together

It’s been four years since we initially wandered the Willamette Parkview Mall in a dress, guzzling orange juice while gleefully slapping hockey pucks into crowds of zombies, and in four years the world of Dead Rising hasn’t changed dramatically.  Although the zombie infection in Willamette was just the first in a series of large-scale outbreaks, the world has rolled with the punches and simply absorbed the undead threat as a part of everyday life.

Dead Rising 2: Case Zero is our first introduction to the series’ new protagonist Chuck Greene and his daughter Katey.  The pair are fleeing a zombie infested Las Vegas, trying to reach a safe distance before the military cordons off the surrounding area.  Katey has been infected by a zombie bite and now requires a dose of the suppressant drug Zombrex every twelve hours to keep her turning.  If the military manages to close of the area, Katey will be screened and taken away from Chuck as a potential zombie threat.

The escape plan hits a snag when they stop at the small town of Still Creek (population 758) to refuel and someone steals their truck.  This not only leaves Chuck stranded, but also robs him of the supply of Zombrex he’s accumulated.  With the military closing in Chuck has twelve hours to find a way out of the zombie populated Still Creek, while making sure Katey gets her next dose.

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Tier 1: Here Be Hirsuitism

While I’m thoroughly sick of first-person shooters constantly returning to World War 2 for inspiration, I have to admit to feeling slightly hesitant when EA first announced they would be rebooting their Medal of Honor series and setting the first new installment in the modern day War On Terror.  After all, you only have to look at the still-definitely-being-released-oh-my-yes Six Days in Fallujah by Atomic Games to gauge the public sentiment about creating games set in current military campaigns.  What I can appreciate, however, is the gargantuan pair of cojones it must have taken both the developer and publisher to say “fuck it” and run with the idea anyway.

The new Medal of Hono(u)r represents EA’s first attempt to wrestle back it’s share of the modern shooter genre, a genre that Activision is still managing to dominate with Call of Duty.  Obviously not wanting to leave anything to chance, they split the game’s development in two, giving the single player to in-house studio Danger Close and entrusting the all-important multiplayer to it’s DICE studio, creators of the addictive Battlefield series.

The fact that EA split the game in two just to allow a “proven” studio to handle the online component should already tell you where the real focus of the game is going to be.  But being a traditional type of lad, I’ll begin with the single player.

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F1:2010 - fans have been waiting years, has it been worth it?

November 3, 2008.  4:30am AEST.  My beloved fiancé is woken by muffled shouts of “Yes, yes, yes… what?!?  Oh you fucker!!!!  No!  No!!!  Eat shit and die Glock you incompetent twat!  Fuck!!!!”

Why begin this review with such a display of rampant retrospective profanity, I hear you ask?  It’s all in the name of context.

Y’see, the above was my reaction to the moment that decided the 2008 Formula 1 driver’s championship.  Ferrari’s Felipe Massa started his home race in Brazil, the final race of the season, seven points behind McLaren’s cocky young upstart Lewis Hamilton.  To win the championship Massa would have to win the race and have Hamilton finish outside the top five.  You’re right in thinking it was a long shot but Massa had pulled it off – he dominated the race, finished in first a full 13 seconds ahead of his nearest rival with Hamilton in sixth.  Until the very last corner, that is, when Toyota’s Timo Glock let Hamilton past to take fifth and victory in the championship by a single point.

The animated gif that’s probably still getting around of Massa’s father celebrating in the Ferrari garage, only to have a mechanic tap him on the shoulder and deliver the bad news, is both hilarious and heart breaking.

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Of course, the most important part of any home run:

Anyone will tell you that I’m a fan of baseball.  Babe Ruth, Joe DiMaggio and the pre-juice Barry Bonds: these are names I know well and careers I greatly enjoyed following.  Thus, it seems like a no-brainer that when a baseball game came out that I would jump at the chance to play it … but that’s not exactly how this game came to be in my possession.  For you to truly understand, I have to take you back on a trip through time and space: The year is 1998 and the place is my parents’ lounge room.  There, a young Moose is putting in a cartridge into his N64 that would forever change his life and bring out the horrifying OCD side of his gaming: Major League Baseball Featuring Ken Griffey Jr.  The moment I turned the console on and that baseball came flying at me, I was hooked.  I spent hours upon hours slogging through regular season mode, game after game to make my way to the World Series.  This game was heaven.  I played my way through the season mode 3 times; a painful exercise for even the most die-hard fan.  This was the best of times and it was the blurst of times.  The game made me so happy; however, it raised the bar to a level that (apparently) no other baseball game could live up to … until now.

A short while back the Armchair team went to an Xbox event held at the State Library in Melbourne with the express intent of making the building explode with irony.  Once there, Matt and I sat down to one of the few games that had an available console: The Bigs 2. I sat down, safe in the knowledge that Matt was only playing this game to humour me and because there were no other free games.  Then the strangest thing occurred: we got into it.  There was yelling; there was shouting; and most of all there was enjoyment.  But I was wise.  I had been burned before.  So I played it cool, unsure of whether or not this game was actually the real deal.  So when I finally acquired my own copy, with much trepidation, I sat down and prepared to let myself love again.

OK, so love is a strong word, but I opened myself up to the thought of holding someone other than Ken Griffey Jr in my arms.

Actually, now that I think about it, that wasn’t even close to being better.

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LeChuck's Revenge is a dish best served cold

A year or so ago when I reviewed The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition, I tacked a little comment on to my suggestion to purchase saying that we should all buy ourselves a copy to ensure that LeChuck’s Revenge: Special Edition was made.  Given LucasArts’ fine tradition of recycling their IPs I’m not sure what inside me ever considered that they wouldn’t deliver a special edition of the sequel, but a little over a year later and here I am sitting in front of a spectacularly re-rendered version of Monkey 2.

The game begins with Guybrush Threepwood (purveyor of fine leather jackets) stuck on the lawless Scabb Island, continuing his search for the mythical treasure of Big Whoop … but then you already know that story, and I’m sure almost 95% of people who end up buying MI2:SE do too.  The Monkey Island games are undeniably pure genius, but their continued creation relies on the fact that nostalgic gamers like myself will shell out the cash unquestioningly.  Luckily the brand new Monkey 2 will only set you back ~$10 however, a price that more than equals it’s value in lingering nostalgia alone.

But if the nostalgia isn’t enough then what you’ll be paying for is a completely voice acted, re-rendered, re-orchestrated, widescreen version of the original game, with a couple of neat little extras thrown in.  If you played Monkey Island: Special Edition then you know just what to expect … and if you haven’t played Monkey Island: Special Edition then why are you even considering buying it’s sequel? (more…)

Johnson the albino merc gets a bad feeling...

Our regular readers will all know by now what a giant Mass Effect fanboy I am.  Despite that, I’ve found most of the game’s recent DLC packs a tad underwhelming.  What then can Lair of the Shadow Broker, the latest add-on for Mass Effect 2, offer us?

The story begins, as usual, with a message from Charlie / the Illusive Man.  Somehow he’s managed to find information that could lead someone to the Shadow Broker, and there’s no someone in the galaxy more interested in finding him than your old teammate Liara T’Soni.  So you trot off to Illium to share the news with her and thus begins another merry adventure complete with mercenary battles, hostage negotiations and lightning rods.  That’s right – fucking lightning rods, kids. (more…)