Matt:

Game of the Year: This was actually quite a tough decision for me, but I’d have to give my official thumbs up to Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood.  Although the single-player was interesting enough, it was really the multiplayer aspect which had me hooked.  There is something about the “hide in plain sight” concept that translates so well to a riveting multiplayer experience, and you couldn’t care less if it takes you several minutes of planning just to pull off that perfect incognito kill.

Of course, matchmaking needs some serious fucking work (you can stare at a “Loading” screen longer than playing the actual game), but the game itself is just too much fun to let it get you down.

Shame of the Year: Although there have been plenty of average games released this year, I’d have to say Army of Two: The 40th Day was my low-light.  It wasn’t even the worst thing I scored this year, but the fact that EA took what was such a humerous action licence and turned it into a “serious” shooter with morality moments just reeked of wasted potential.

If the series gets another installment, I’m hoping they go back to doing what Rios and Salem do best: bro-fists and explosions.  Of course, 40th Day potentially killed one of them off, so how’s that going to work?

Jess:

Game of the Year: Though not a complete surprise hit (quite a few people have lauded it), Ninja Theory’s Enslaved: Odyssey to the West ticked all my happy gamer boxes. Post-Apocalyptic? Check. Excellent characterisation and dialogue? Check. Mythology? Check.  (Button  mashing fighting style? Check). Mix in some very pretty graphics and I’m sold. While not the high-punching Triple A title like the guys have picked, Enslaved was a game everyone could play, accessible and enjoyable. There was humour and heart in the plot which hooked me in and kept me interested where other games this year fell short.

A sneaky second for me was Alan Wake: clever, original and well, nothing beats this: Poets of the Fall – The Poet and the Muse

Shame of the Year: Speaking of falling short, holy shitting eels did Final Fantasy XIII come up flush with boredom, repetition and those bloody clippity-cloppity footfalls. Playing this game was a chore. At first glance, FFXIII impressed me with its design and cinematics, but after nearly 5 hours of tutorials masquerading as gameplay, I was ready to frisbee the first of the three discs out the window. It was overblown, obtuse and there was no pleasure in the time I put into it. Square Enix should have spent the money and time making an animated movie, or done something like Heavy Rain, rather than churning out another cookie cutter JRPG.

Stu:

Game of the Year: This one was a total no-brainer for me: in my eyes Mass Effect 2 pissed on every other game released this year from such a great height there just wasn’t any other choice.  Bioware took all the good points from the first game, made them better, ditched some of the irritating bits and only found a few annoying things to put back in their place. The game was visually stunning, the sound design was excellent, combat was fun, there’s been some decent DLC to keep us coming back and the voice actors were top notch.

But it’s the story that really makes Mass Effect 2 work for me. There just aren’t enough studios out there that can compete with Bioware in terms of the time and effort they put into their stories and they’ve already got me dying to get my hands on the next installment. Game of the year for me, no contest.

Shame of the Year: Since there’s no such thing as trade ins on PC games I don’t take a punt on many games that might suck – if I’m going to be stuck with it I want to have a decent idea it’s a game I’ll like before I bother with it.  It feels kind of unfair to put Poker Night at the Inventory up for worst game because I don’t think it had many pretentions towards being a proper game in the first place. Whether Torchlight was released this year or not depends very much on how you feel about physical boxes and discs – suffice to say I didn’t think much of it regardless of the release date.

But I’m not actually going to nominate a “worst” game. Instead I’m going to nominate F1:2010 for the “y’know, I might’ve got that one wrong” award. Since reviewing it I haven’t been able to bring myself to play it – finishing even my first season of a potential seven just seemed like way too much hard work to be bothered with and I don’t see myself picking it back up again any time soon, if ever. It’s triumphs speak for themselves but along the way I missed the fact that they forgot to bring the fun.

Moose:

Game of the Year: Without a doubt (and I don’t expect any major disagreements from my fellow reviewers) the high point of the year as far as gaming goes is Red Dead Redemption. With the expanded online mode and the classic GTA style gameplay, it was always going to be a success. In many ways, I feel this game succeed where GTA IV failed. GTA on horses. Can you think of a better idea?

Well, I could. It’s called MacGyver Under The Sea. Keep your eyes peeled for that.

Shame of the Year: Well, there were a few stinkers to sift through this year, but I would definitely go with Iron Man 2. Given my man-boner for Tony Stark and all things related, I found myself wanting this game to reward my rigidity … it did not. The one good thing I can say about it is that it was short. And may we never speak of it again.

This week’s new release list is brought to you by the Christmas spirit.  Want some?  ‘Course you do!

This is going to be the shortest release post ever because as far as we can tell nobody’s got anything slated for release this week in Australia.  Must be that public holiday that’s coming up interfering with the schedule or something.  So you’ll all have to console yourselves with old games until the new year when I’m sure somebody will release something.

A merry Christmas to all our readers from the entire staff here at Armchair, we’ll probably be too stuffed full of food to post anything over the break, but we’ll be sure to take a look at that mountain of back-log and see if we can have some new stuff ready for you in the new year.  We will be posting up our Game Of The Year nominations before the end of the month, so be sure to check back in and see what our diverse-taste staff picked as their favourite!

You think this car crash looks bad? Wait until you see our update!

So if you’ve been enjoying Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit as much as I have, then you’ve probably also come to love (or loathe) Autolog, the social engine that allows you to troll all your friends by beating their fastest times and tell them so next time they log in.  So when a free patch to update Hot Pursuit arrived this morning promising new cars and an “upgraded experience”, I downloaded it gladly and unknowingly joined the ranks of Xbox 360 players to have their career progress wiped.

Download complete, I was treated to those insufferabledandy trailers for Shift 2 and Autolog (again), told thank you very much for playing the demo (again), and then went to check my Autolog Recommendations, only to find them completely empty.  When I logged into Career I found that my entire bounty and event progress had been erased, and I’d been demoted back to a Level 1 Cop and Racer.

I’m not alone either.  From the looks of things only Xbox users have been affected, but there are multiple accounts coming in online with the same results.  The official word from the Need For Speed Twitter account is that Xbox gamers should avoid downloading the update until Criterion can figure out just what is going on.  They don’t sound particularly optimistic about being able to recover gamers progress either, here’s what they had to say to me when I asked about the chances of recovery:

Depends on how much is saved to the servers. If it can’t be fixed, we’re thinking up ways to make it up to users that lost data.

-@NeedForSpeed

Maybe they’ll send me a poster or something, who knows.  Whatever the case, EA is asking any gamers encountering the same problems to leave their details on an official forum post so they can try and find the reasons behind the bug.

But the offical message is clear: If you’re playing Hot Pursuit on 360, do not download the 1.1 update until further notice.  Now if you’ll excuse me, I guess I’ve got some Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood to play online.

I'm looking forward to Patapon 3, Alot!

This week’s new releases are brought to you by that most mythical of beasts – the Alot, a perfect pet for grammar nazis and people who never graduated the second grade alike.

When you’ve finished working out whether or not you like this Alot more, you could mosey on down to your local games store where the following games should be appearing on the shelves this week:

• Dodge Racing: Charger v Challenger (December 16, Wii)
• Speed (December 16, Wii)
• Nickelodeon Fit (December 17, Wii)
• Patapon 3 (December 17, PSP)
• Tangled (December 17, DS)
• Battlefield: Bad Company 2 Vietnam (December 19, PC)

Well I acquired them all legally, you can be sure of that ...

“Red keycard?  Shit, where am I supposed to find that?  I haven’t shot anything in at least 30 seconds and my ctrl finger is getting itchy … bugger it: i-d-k-f-a and I’m on my way!”

I’d reckon anyone old enough to recognise that internal monologue had the exact same discussion with themselves at some point.  Something dawned on me recently that made me think about it again: the relationship between games and cheating has changed a hell of a lot since I first started playing.

Once upon a time it seemed pretty much every game had cheats built into it – all you had to do was find the right keystroke combination, probably from the cheats and codes pages of your favourite gaming magazine.

The thing that really made me start thinking about this was the recent blowup over Starcraft II players being banned from the game for life for using hacks and trainers in the game’s single-player campaign mode and Blizzard’s threats of legal action against some of the people responsible for developing them.

I’ll get back to that later but in the meantime, what’s changed?  At what point did we decide that, actually, we don’t like cheats any more?

I guess a lot of things have changed.  Maybe we used to be OK with cheats because, as Matt postulated a little while back, games used to be a fuck of a lot harder.  Sometimes it was either cheat or tear your hair out and never finish the game – or at least it was for people like me, who were especially crap at the kinds of games we had back then.  This was doubly relevant with the old console games that may not have even let you save your game.  All of that has changed now – save games and checkpoints mean you can do the hard bits over and over and over again until you get them right and if the missus/Mum/real life calls you away for dinner it’s not the end of the world.  And if you’ve run short of health in your FPS all you need to do is duck behind cover and wait for the red mist to dissipate – no more being screwed because you’ve already used all the health packs in the level.

You alright, Tychus good buddy?

Maybe we were a bit more frivolous and carefree as well.  Sometimes you wanted to play a game seriously and sometimes you just wanted to blow the living shit out of as many demons as possible with steaming hot balls of plasma without having to bother with pesky things like dying or starting the level again.  Sometimes gaming these days feels more like Very Serious Business.  I know there were times playing a game like Rainbox Six: Vegas where I would’ve liked to do the same thing, just fire up the hotel lobby level and run rampant with bullets flying everywhere and little thought for the consequences.  I never actually went looking for cheats for the game at the time though and now that I look there are third party hacks but seemingly no built-in codes.

Once upon a time when games were predominantly single-player it was only your own experience that was effected and if you wanted to downgrade your sense of achievement by turning on god mode for the hard bits there was nobody to judge you but yourself and any mates who may or may not have been in the room.  These days everything is about achievements and gamer scores e-peen and I heaven forbid someone inflate that fraudulently.  Again, they’re Very Serious Business.

Of course, multiplayer games have become huge now and I can fully understand the need to prevent cheating in a multiplayer environment.  There needs to be a level playing field, after all, especially with reputations e-peen on the line as it so often is.

Pfft, we've beaten Kerrigan befo ... wait, is that Lu Bu in the background?!?

But back in the day it seemed that every game had cheat codes right out of the box.  It was almost like a developer wouldn’t consider releasing a game without them, they were as essential as a main menu screen and probably even more important than the end-game sequence.  These days a few games have them built in but it seems like every game (on PC, at least) has a bunch of third-party hacks available for it.  How did this end up happening?  Did developers make the decision, for whatever reason, that gamers didn’t want cheats any more and the third-party hacks materialised to fill the void or did developers decide that since someone is going to hack the game anyway they may as well just save their time and leave it to the third parties?  Was it the chicken or the egg?

Funnily enough, this thought might actually help us make sense of the Starcraft II example.  Y’see Blizzard actually built cheat codes into the base single-player game, complete with their trademark amusing references to things like Firefly, The Dark Knight and Lord of the Rings.  They obviously decided they were in the “provide it rather than leave it to third parties” camp and it was those found using the third party hacks that got banned.

Blizzard have justified their actions by stating that the hacks, even if they were only used in single-player mode, may have had multiplayer functionality as well and that the cheat codes built into the game itself were safe to use.  When the case is put like that it sounds pretty reasonable and Blizzard have obviously chosen to send a very strong message not to fuck with their fancy new showpiece.  They were also up front about what they were and weren’t going to stand for when the game first came out.

But how many people understood that meant never being able to play a game you’ve paid for again, even offline?  To me that feels like going a step too far.

I’m very keen to hear what our readers think – both on Blizzard’s actions and the issue of cheats in general.  Did they go too far with the bans?  Are cheats in general something we just don’t do these days?  Have we outgrown them?  Comment away…

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.

That’s just the traditional rules, however.  To crank up the pace a little (traditional games can take up to an hour or more to resolve online) Risk: Factions introduces Factions rules.  Factions is introduced in the single player campaign, where your success or defeat relies upon completing various objectives instead of simple domination. There are only five levels, and you’ll play a different army each time, essentially pitting you against the previous armies that you played as.  The levels aren’t overly taxing as they’re essentially a slightly longer than normal tutorial setup, in which the player is introduced to a variety of different additions that have been made for this game.  The general tone is light-hearted, in between each of the levels there are some hilarious cartoon cut-scenes.  On first viewing you’ll probably assume the characters were designed by the Penny Arcade crew, but although these are the same animators who worked on Penny Arcade Adventures, none of the Factions art comes from Mike Krahulik.

Newly introduced "Overkills" allow you to decimate your opponents with a single roll

Once you have worked your way past the single player campaign, then you enter the area that this game is made for: multiplayer.  Having played against others on the same console AND over the internet, there is one truth about this game that is self-evident: I’m not the strategist I thought I was.  It is, of course, partially down to luck when it comes to this game; every battle is decided through a series of dice rolls, and if you’re unlucky enough you can see an attacking force of 20 wiped out by a defending force of 2.

However, the new rules do tend to give those that go hard early an advantage.  In each game, there are bonuses that one can gain by completing required tasks (ie. holding three continents; taking 10 territories in one turn; kicking Matt in the nuts etc.).  The most advantageous of all these are the extra dice, which can give you an additional roll for either your attacks or your defence.  Once you have the defensive die, you’ll automatically become the most frustrating player on the board.  Matt would regularly cock-block  my impending vicotry by sneakily picking up an extra dice and ruining my chances to push forward.  He’s a pain in the arse pretty gool guy (-Ed) sometimes.  Other bonuses range from extra troop movements to region specific dice modifiers.  Certain boards also give bonuses for controlling certain strategic positions, the most overpowered of which would be the Temple, which allows the controlling player to convert any territory and it’s troops to their own team at the beginning of the turn.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that this boardgame remake is geared completely towards it’s multiplayer facet.  Happily, despite being released six months ago, I am yet to have any trouble  finding an opponent  online. The beauty of Risk is that it is a great leveller and, as mentioned in the opening sentence of this article, has been the source of some of the greatest simulated military blunders in history. Perhaps because of this, there doesn’t appear to be any great matchmaking system in place, with regards to who plays whom. Aside from how quickly the game can turn, one of the rules specifically made for Risk: Factions is that all one has to do is keep hold of his capital and take hold of three continents to win the game. This game equalises the foolhardy with the brilliant all too easily.

The game does have a few minor drawbacks, mostly surrounding the questionable actions of the computer AI. If you add AI players with your multiplayer games, they typically fall to in-fighting before they can become any concern for the human players.  They’re also a little obsessed with owning their own capitals, and seem more than willing to throw all of their troops into fruitless attempts at regaining them once lost. I’m not asking to have it based on Robert E. Lee, but at least not on Sean Penn in I Am Sam. Another disappointment is how short the single player campaign mode is. Five levels that you can complete in 2-3 hours is about half the length of what I was hoping for with a game of this calibre.

The Verdict:

Pros: The faction characterisation is great, and lends a personable touch to what can otherwise be a somewhat sterile game.  Factions hasn’t messed with the basic original concept, additions to the game have all been positives with no negative impacts … and if you don’t like the new rules you can always find plenty of people to play a traditional match with.  Multiplayer works well locally and online.

Cons: A short single-player campaign is unfortunate.  “Handicapable” AI.

Overall: This title is exactly what it should be: an enjoyable port of a classic game, with enough updates to keep the attention of the modern day gamer.  It’s a brilliant multiplayer game that allows you to blow the crap out of your friends, but with enough strategy/luck to make your victories/losses worth bragging/complaining about. The sense of humour and replay value make it a very solid purchase on XBLA. If you enjoyed the boardgame, or just greatly enjoy having a mental tussle with your friends then I highly recommend this for you. 4.5 out of 5 stars.

Tetris art courtesy of Naolito.com

This week’s Australian new release list is brought to you by the public’s fascination with magic falling blocks.  To this day scientists are still unable to explain the why but the what has been abundantly clear for decades: put a human being in front of a screen with falling blocks on it and they’ll be mesmerised by that shit.

Secret diplomatic cables* received by Armchair Diplomat this week reveal that several countries are even looking to harness the effect for military purposes.  “We’re probably about two or three years away from being able to drop a giant projector screen into a warzone and stop the enemy in their tracks by showing footage of falling blocks,” said one general who we can’t name because we value our bollocks in their current locations.  “The sticking point has been trying to immunise our own troops against the effects – it’s no good reducing your enemy to a bunch of drooling halfwits if your own troops are left in a similar state.”

Early attempts at developing an immunisation have been deemed failures.  While they were successful in rendering immunity to the falling block mesmerisation effect, word got out that the trial group also stopped seeing the “funny” side of Two and a Half Men and since then no soldier has been willing to take the drug.

If you’re not mesmerised by falling blocks yourself, you might want to try one of the following games that are due in stores this week:

• World of Warcraft: Cataclysm (December 7, PC)
• Bejeweled 3 (December 8, PC)
• Game Party In Motion (December 8, 360)
• Cabela Big Game Hunter (December 10, Wii)
• Def Jam Rapstar (December 10, 360 / PS3 / Wii)
• Goldeneye: 007 (December 10, Wii)
• Hide and Secret Trilogy (December 10, PC)
• Nickelodeon Fit (December 10, Wii)
• Pac Man World 3 (December 10, DS)
• PDC World Championship Darts (December 10, 360 / PS3 / Wii)

* Resemblance to actual cables written by an actual government may vary

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.

So this is the "unexpected challenge" my horoscope mentioned this morning ...

From here, you’re under the instruction of this girl. Tripitaka (or Trip, as you’ll come to know her) demands that you escort her back to her home village, carrying her, throwing her, protecting her and fighting for her along the way.  While she can’t help physically, Trip is something of a technomage.  She’s hacked the headband to give you a commlink, enemy specs, powerups, upgrade menus and a HUD, but to ensure you help she’s also linked your biosigns.  If she dies, you die.  What a bitch. So you, as Monkey, are now glorified babysitter to one of the most easily freaked out girls in gaming history.  The way she yells ‘MONKEY!’ … well, if you ever start a drinking game for Enslaved, you’d better hope that isn’t the buzz word.

So there’s the premise and the plot remix.  You’re set loose into a world of post-apocalyptic prettiness.  In a wonderfully refreshing move (or perhaps a throwback to the old Utopia’s of the Victorian era), Ninja Theory have created a bright and vibrant world of tomorrow.  The city of New York is overrun with lush vines and flowers, there’s insect life (both organic and robotic) and very little signs of any humans.  There are, however, slavers and Mechs.  Slavers and their organisation PYRAMID are the game’s main conceptual enemy, but the Mechs are the physical enemies that Monkey will fight.  Over and over, in fact.  You’ll meet most of the different varieties of Mech in the first couple of levels and from there you’ll battle slightly stronger versions … in ever increasing numbers.  While the difficulty level does curve slowly but steeply upward, it’s more a case of difficulty via numbers than the enemies or puzzles being strategically harder.  This didn’t really bother me, but I could see it being frustrating for someone who plays this kind of game on a regular basis.

It's also programmed to shock you if you think impure thoughts.

True to the original tale, Monkey is armed with a staff of adjustable length, which doubles here as a bludgeon and long-range cannon. You’re able to pick up ammunition (conveniently placed in areas where it’s going to be needed) that arm it with either EMP or plasma blasts, designed to take down Mechs with shielding and the Big Boss Mechs.  The aiming controls are fluid and targets a forgiving broad area, which is really useful when trying to take down the Dog Mechs.

While the movement and combat controls are simple and easy to work with, they can suffer from some excruciating camera angles.  I was caught a few times by overlapping scenery obscuring where Monkey was, all while getting my arse handed to me by a fairly easy Mech that I also couldn’t see.  It’s more of a problem with the game’s camera-guided spell-every-puzzle-out approach than any real control flaw, but it was random, annoying, and usually only solvable after a bit of button mashing.  In a similar vein, much of Monkey’s movement leaping from handhold to ledge to handhold.  It’s beautiful to watch, really well animated, but the actual mechanics can occasionally get a little iffy.  You really do have to have the directional joystick pointing exactly the right way or Monkey will just sit there while you repeatedly push buttons, which can be highly irritating when you have to do the odd time-dependant jumps.  The controls for Monkey’s ‘Cloud’ were also, unfortunately, a real son of a bitch.  It felt slippery, like I had little to no control over the direction, often resulting in dozens of U-turns just to get up a ramp.

Well if you HAD to enslave someone, you could do worse than a guy who could punch through giant robots

But in the end, what truly impressed me about Enslaved was the obvious work that has gone into the characters.  The voice acting was a great match for what you imagine Trip, Monkey and even Pigsy to sound like.  Monkey’s rough, 2-seconds-way-from-coughing growl expresses his frustration so very well, especially when you have Trip plaintively wailing ‘Monkey! Help me!’ in increasing panic as she gets stuck or attacked.  Pigsy swings between braggart and letch and back like a rusty gate.  The dialogue is definitely up there with the more ‘natural’ offerings out there at the moment and while the plot is sometimes very simplified, the cut scenes are not wasted. While I wasn’t completely impressed with the ending, it didn’t suffer from lack of empathetic characters, I just felt that it was too quick.

Overall, Enslaved is an entertaining and mildly challenging platformer that delivers the level of engagement you want from a game to play in between the dark and super-serious offerings out at the moment. It’s might not be a spiritual journey, but it’s a damn good story.

The Verdict:

Pros: Great characters coupled with a lighthearted, yet complex and interesting plot.  The game world is beautiful,  a welcome change to the bleak post-nuke worlds that seem to dominate games at the moment.  Superb voice acting gives rise to some really nice, natural exchanges between the characters.

Cons: Controls can get a little erratic at points.  The ending is somewhat abrupt.  Not necessarily bad … just abrupt.

Overall: An enjoyable game that will keep you interested until the end.  Definitely worth a play, though probably not a replay.  Pick it up and have it on hand to play between your epic Triple-A titles.  3 and a half stars of out 5.

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.

Strong Bad claims his winnings... with a shovel

What’s great about this is it means you can even enjoy the hands were you’ve folded.  Sure, there’s a button that lets you skip straight to the next hand after you fold but more often than not you’ll just listen to the banter… for a little while, at least.  While there’s a good amount of material included (apparently there’s more dialog in this game than an average Sam and Max episode), obviously it’s not endless and at some point the characters will start repeating themselves.  At which point you’re left with no option but to concentrate on the poker itself and this, unfortunately, is not such a fun experience.

The interface is clunky and annoying for the most part, which is odd because it’s something that’s been done right forty bajillion times before this game was released.  I’d have thought this was the easy part.  The one that confused and irritated me the most was having to click after each hand to have the next one dealt.  Why exactly was that necessary?

Also, whoever coded the game doesn’t seem to know some of the basic rules of poker.  For some reason the button is on the big blind playing heads up, not the small blind where it should be.  The game also allows under-raises and I can’t work out what’s more stupid – the fact that they’re in the game or the fact that the AI players actually take “advantage” of the fact and make them.  And maybe I’m paranoid, but I’m pretty sure the game handles dead buttons and blinds wrong too.  There’s a bunch of other glitches and niggles that I won’t bother getting into.

Playing Tycho heads up. Little does he know that if he calls here it's gonna be all over, baby...

As for how your opponents play… I can explain that in one of two ways:

For fellow poker nerds: Your opponents are all droolers.  It doesn’t seem to matter whether you have the difficult set on normal or hard, they have zero idea about bet sizing or (seemingly) anything much else.  At best they’re calling stations and most of the time they’re just plain spewy.  Strong Bad once called a three-bet shove on the river, o a 2Q9JT board (four diamonds), holding 64o with no flush.  And that was heads up when I had the chip lead.  At least Max had two live cards when he called my preflop shove with 42o.  Your opponents regularly overbet the pot, they also do other dumb stuff like bet $7000 and leave $300 behind or fold on rivers where they’re getting 16:1 on a call – which is even harder to explain after seeing the Strong Bad hand discussed above.  Employ even the most basic TAG strategy and you should be shipping the nickels most times.  And no, it’s not compatible with PA-HUD, HEM or PT3 but you are allowed to use Sharkscope during the game.

For non-poker players: Max, Strongbad, Heavy and Tycho are all bad at the pokers.  Really, really bad.  This guy (or maybe even this guy* on a good day) could beat them.

Like I said above, I don’t think this was ever really meant to be a poker game.  If it was, somebody failed dismally.  As a vehicle for some amusing writing and jokes it works OK and given the price maybe we can forgive some of the mechanical issues.  But there’s no real point in continuing with the game once you’ve heard all the jokes.  There’s an option for turning the dialog off if the repetitiveness starts getting to you but then all you’re left with is a third-rate poker game and if you want to play one of those there are plenty of options that are cheaper and better.

The Verdict:

Pros : Some of the banter is lulzy, I like the way the characters pick up where they left off if the cards distract for a moment and the whole thing costs less than a $5NL buyin.

Cons: The “game” itself is shit and the lulz won’t last forever.

Overall: If you ignore the poker there’s probably at least $5 worth of entertainment in this package.  Unless the humour isn’t your cup of tea either… in which case there’s absolutely no reason to play this game ever.  2 out of 5 stars and it’s all for the writing.

* Sorry, there was a poker in-joke in there too**.

** LOL, it actually says “toolbox” on the side of the page.

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.

Your collaborators plan their escape from a half-baked plot

Set many decades after the events of Fable 2, players take the role of Albion’s young prince (or princess) and next in line for the throne.  Your older brother Logan is a cold and heartless monarch, and his rather oppressive style of rule has led him to be despised by the people.  After being forced by Logan to choose between the life of your friend and the life or several strangers, the princess (or prince) decides to leave the castle to walk the path of a Hero and overthrow Logan’s rule.  Accompanying you is your long-time mentor Sir Walter and your butler Jasper.

But before you can begin your little revolution you have to recruit allies, which sends you across the entirety of Albion (three cities and a couple of villages anyway) in what seems at times to be more like a campaign trail than a worldwide uprising.  Wander in, beat up some wolves/bats/bandits that have been bothering the locals, make some solid election promises then watch as they join your cause.  Rinse and repeat a couple of times and you’ll be knocking on the castle doors before you know it.

In what could have been a rather clever mechanic, the game measures your progress towards taking the crown on the Road To Rule, a metaphorical path with many gates that you have to unlock before confronting Logan.  Along the Road you can also unlock chests to afford you extra abilities or improve your combat skills.  When you first begin the Road looks quite impressive.  It’s long and winding, and has plenty of gates barring your way.  Once you get going, however, you’ll soon realise that you’ll be opening one of these gates every fifteen minutes if the game has it’s way.  Winning the trust of an ally and gaining their support will unlock a gate … but so will meeting important character or surviving a boss battle.  Consequently the Road To Rule is more like the Highway To Rule, an express route with occasional stops to refuel and grab a snack.

To be fair to Logan, killing peasants was the equivalent of Tivo back then ... only it was more difficult to rewind the action

But that’s fine, because surely gaining the crown is only half the game, right? Once you’ve overthrown Logan, you’re going to have a whole three cities and several villages world to run, right?

Sadly, ruling Albion is something more akin to the game’s epilogue.  You’ll be tested to see if you can keep all the promises you made to your allies with a larger threat looming on the horizon, but even that threat will arrive sooner than you’d expect … and be dealt with before you know it.  All your supposedly big decisions on ruling Albion will come down to money, which if you’ve been a good little real-estate mogul will be easily obtainable.

You might have noticed by now, but I haven’t really been enjoying myself in Albion this time around.  Perhaps my main issue with the game is that everything about the world is so shallow.  If Albion were a public pool, 3 year old toddlers would be happily wading waist high through the supposed deep end.

Lionhead seems attached to this idea of being able to interact with every person in the world, but by offering this level of freedom they essentially shoot themselves in the foot because what they can’t provide is a unique personality for every NPC.  Albion’s inhabitants are uniformly bland, uninteresting characters, who will fall in love with you after two conversations, then agree to marry you if you go and pick up their laundry from the dry cleaners.  The Expression system makes this whole affair extra ridiculous, because instead of talking you have to play pat-a-cake or flex your muscles or some other pointless bullshit that just makes you want to bash your head against a rock.

Which is fine, if all Fable 3 was aiming for was a little lighthearted fun while adventuring.  But the game also wants to have a serious side and the two elements just do not mix.  The game wants to explore the darker elements of morality and politics, something which I was surprised to find it did quite well, but when you can kill a man in cold blood then make up for it by having a bit of a dance with the witnesses then something is clearly out of whack.

The game holds your hand only slightly more often than you hold it's.

The game does offer drop-in/drop-out co-op play over Xbox Live, which can prove to be unintentionally hilarious, but is mildly pointless on the whole unless you’re a completionist.  The mechanic works fine, as players can trade weapons, clothes and even form relationships, but outside of socialising there aren’t many enemies that can stand up to one Hero, let alone two.  It makes an easy game even easier, something which I wouldn’t suggest at least for your first playthrough.

Visually the game is fine, although nothing ever seemed to jump out at me as truly impressive.  The world of Albion has entered an industrial phase, meaning a lot of the larger landscapes have become a little dreary and bleak.  If you played Fable 2 then you’ll know what to expect, but don’t hope for too many improvements.  There are a wide variety of character customisations available, although I found all the male’s options to be better suited than anything on offer for the princess.  My princess ended up being bald and wandering the world in a fur cloak and ugg-boots, because it was honestly the outfit that made her look the most feminine.  Her face is manly enough to begin with, and dressing her up in a skirt and long hair only seemed to make her look more and more like a transvestite.

In the end, Fable 3 is a game about revolution that’s a long way from revolutionary.  In a series that was fairly uncomplicated to begin with, much of the core gameplay seems to have been stripped back (perhaps “streamlined” is a kinder word) to make things even simpler, and the result is a rather bland experience that’s forgettable at best.  Peter Molyneux repeated over and over before release that Fable 3 was supposed to be about making the player feel powerful but all it left me feeling was unimpressed and, just like it’s predecessors, vaguely disappointed.

Oh, and it still doesn’t have acorns.

The Verdict:

Pros: The mechanics linked to the players choices are well oiled as always, Albion inhabitants react to you according to your alignment and past decisions.  There is some superb voice acting on show, although I have to say I never thought I’d see the day when I’d get bored of hearing John Cleese talk.  There are a few quite inspired quests, in particular the one that sees the Hero shrunk down to play through a Dungeons and Dragons table game.

Cons: Most of the elements from Fable 2 have been dumbed down streamlined considerably.  I found myself with little to no emotional attachment to the main character as the plot veers from comedy to tradgedy haphazardly, a decision that by the game’s own admission fails to engage the audience.  The plot is deceptively short, and while there are plenty of side-quests to be had, there is oddly little to do in the world of Albion once you become ruler.

Overall: I suppose it’s actually quite impressive that Fable 3 still has the power to unexpectedly disappoint me, but that’s all it’s managed to do.  It will probably be remembered as a short, silly little diversion that didn’t hold enough entertainment value to make up for it’s shortcomings. 1.5 out of 5 stars.

ADDENDUM:

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