Enemies trust a mock surrender from Rios' giant soulful eyes

“Let’s do the math on whoever screwed us later, and concentrate on getting the hell outta dodge…”

This line, spoken by Rios near the beginning of their latest title, Army of Two: the 40th Day, borders on a prescience that John Edward would probably kill to achieve. With this one simple line, he’s not only accurately encapsulated the entire game’s plot, but also predicted the reaction most gamers will experience by the time they finish. It’s probably close to the most succinct review I could give of this game, so if you want to save yourself ~1000 words of reading then by all means take this as my official sentiment too … you lazy bastard.

Army of Two: the 40th Day is the sequel to EA Montreal’s firefights ‘n’ fist-bumps co-op shooter Army of Two. The “just good friends” duo of Tyson Rios and Elliot Salem find themselves in Shanghai, employed to complete a simple mission that unfolds into the city’s complete destruction and occupancy by the enigmatic 40th Day Initiative. The 40th Day is commanded by an ex-military soldier called Jonah, a fact that will possibly escape you all the way up until you decide to kill him.

The majority of the game follows Salem and Rios’ attempt to escape the city. While I can appreciate what the developers have attempted here, to recreate a somewhat realistic military situation based on lack of information and rapidly changing situation, the result is less than impressive. The open nature of the plot strips most of the purpose out of the combat, which means the combat feels somewhat dull. (more…)

Zombies improve everything. It's science.

It was only a short time ago we got our hands on the RPG-shooter Borderlands, and we’ve been loving it ever since.  So naturally when it’s first DLC chapter, The Zombie Island of Dr. Ned, was released I automatically put up the points to buy it.  Why?  Well most likely because I’m a good little consumer who’s been deeply ingrained with the compulsion to hand over his money.  But that aside, what’s the best way to make a great game even better? Why you add zombies, of course.

Once downloaded, the new chapter isn’t too hard to access.  Jakob’s Cove, where the action takes place, can only be accessed via a New-U station’s fast travel menu.  It should be noted that you can travel there before even technically activating the fast travel service in the game’s plot.  I suppose this early availability is required, however, as Jakob’s Cove is a completely stand-alone area (hence the “island” part of the name), and the only way to enter is to fast travel.

Once you’ve made your way to the island, you’ll be greeted by the local Claptrap, who wants you to take care of this rather bothersome zombie apocalypse they seem to be experiencing lately.  He points you in the direction of the camp’s doctor, Dr. Ned (who totally isn’t Dr. Zed, as the game keeps reminding you) and from here on inwards you’ll be up to your armpits in undead minions.

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Every now and then a game crops up that gains so much love that we can’t agree on who gets to write it up.  Assassin’s Creed 2 is one such game, and both Mark and Matt want to have their say.

It would probably be classified lower if it wasn't for all the Italian swear words

Mark says: Ubisoft Montreal have seriously broken the usual stigma regarding sequels.

Assassin’s Creed 2 has you once again playing as modern day assassin Desmond, who in turn plays Ezio Auditore di Firenze, a decendant of previously played assassin Altair.  Yeah, I think that’s about right.  I had to try and explain the concept of the game to a friend who isn’t down the Assassin’s Creed 1 backstory.  It was … trying.

Okay, so the run down.

Set for the most part in 15th century Italy, you’ll be playing as this Ezio Auditore di Firenze fella. Standard sob story; your family gets knocked off by this dude, and you are out to settle the score.  But revenge doesn’t turn out to be a simple as Ezio might have expected.

Well, you could sum it up that way, but that kind of makes Assassin’s Creed 2 sound like an 80′s cop film, which doesn’t exactly do justice to the awesome writing that’s gone into this series. The game opens with Ezio facing what essentially is his boyhood enemy, Vieri de Pazzi, who is naturally a coward and hence, must eventually be stabbed in the face in the middle of the night. Beating up his posse leads you into a beautiful vista of Firenze, standing next to your brother on top of a church, exclaiming how life is kind of ace, and that things should never change.

And then they hang your father, older brother and younger (sissy, feather collecting) brother.  It was the plot twist that absolutely no-one saw coming from nine miles away (or 14.4 kilometers away, if you’re in the EU/AU).

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Obviously we're not talking interactive Parkinson here

Sony announced the launch of its very own television recording device in Australia this week for use with the Playstation 3 and they’ve called it… *drumroll please* …the PlayTV.

This probably isn’t surprising news to our readers outside of Australia – the device has been available in the UK for over a year. But we’re catching up at least, and it seems we get the device ahead of America (due to NTSC adaption issues) and with the same name.

Sony expects to sell 150,000 of the imaginatively-named units by Christmas in Australia, making it a major competitor with established names like TiVo as well as newcomers like Telstra’s T-Box. OK, so maybe Sony aren’t the only ones choosing obvious names for their products.

The PlayTV box with cost $169 on its own, or you can pick up a PS3 bundled with PlayTV for $599.

Read more optimistic quotes from the Sony brass about expected sales at The Australian.

We! Are! Faaamily!

Some of my fondest gaming memories from when I was younger involve the finger-crippling madness that was Tekken 3. For a group of dirt-poor students who barely had enough money to eat, the amount of time we’d end up drunk in front of our friend’s PSOne mashing buttons at one another could be referred to as “disturbingly frequent”.

So now I should say that up until Tekken 6 landed in my lap last week, Tekken 3 was indeed the last installment in the series I’d played. Although I’d always found Tekken‘s control scheme to be perhaps the best layout in fighting game history, I’d been cruelly woo’ed by Soul Calibur and it’s offspring ever since I’d obtained an Xbox.

So I’d built up a lot of personal anticipation for giving Tekken 6 a try. From what I could read, not a great deal had changed in the Tekken timeline since the end of Tekken 3 anyhow, so that wouldn’t cause any problems. Most of the characters I knew were still in it (what is Heihachi now, like 400 years old?) and the controls were the same as they’d always been.

Now Tekken, for whatever stage in video game technology it inhabited, has always been a good looking game, and T6 is no exception. Character models, environments and FMV are all beautifully sharp and well detailed. The detail put into the animation is also off the scale, and is clearly making good use of the hardware that the PS3 was throwing behind it.

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As recommended by Ice T

Damn, son.

Without sounding like every other fanboy on the net, I’m going to try and give a critical, even-handed (if possible) opinion on this mega-title.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, in this reviewer’s humble opinion, is a solid game. It continues a long history of excellent first-person-shooters and great multiplayer games, but primarily I have become a huge fan of the single player campaigns.

Traditionally the story missions have been quite short, but after cranking through the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare single campaign a little while ago, I was eagerly looking forward to this next installment.

And how was I pleased.

The game picks up where the last left off; albeit five years have passed.  You now play a new range of soldiers, but some familiar faces (and voices, which for some odd reason, made me think of a fictitious uncle I have that sounds surprisingly like Bill Nighy) crop up along the way.  (more…)

Blowing his own brains out will just save you some time later

I’ll admit to the fact that I was a little skeptical when I originally heard about Borderlands. A game that’s structured like Diablo, but plays like a first person shooter? You probably couldn’t shove the chalk any further into the cheese, as far as pitching a game is concerned.

But the art style did look fantastic, and once there were a few gameplay videos to peruse the concept became more palatable. In the end, Borderlands managed to close the deal with me by emblazoning “splitscreen co-op” on the back of the case, and that was that.

As strange as the idea sounded when I first heard it, everything clicks the moment you pick up the controller. The gameplay is simple, yet addictive, as it simultaneously appeals to both the item scrounging RPGer and headshot focused shooter fan inside nearly every gamer. If you love power-levelling and kitting out your character with the best gear you can find, then this game is for you. If you enjoy fast-paced firefights, then this game is for you.

And what backs you up in these firefights? Well the game boasts an estimated seventeen million different guns (which I believe technically qualifies as a “fuck-tonne” on the metric system). While this is certainly impressive, many people may be a little disappointed to discover that most of these seventeen million weapons are variable instances of the same gun, much in the same way that everyone used to trade different versions of their “Lapis Plate of the Wolf” in Diablo. So while there are millions upon millions of guns, they still distill down into eight or nine catagories, so don’t walk in expecting to discover a gun that shoots guns or anything equally crazy (like a certain reviewer did).  (more…)

Streamers are the new decal, apparently

The Need For Speed series has been something of a mixed bag in recent years. They returned to massive popularity with Need For Speed Underground a few years back and since then installments have ranged from sublime (Most Wanted, my personal favourite) to… erm… unappreciated (Pro Street and Undercover).

And now Need For Speed: Shift has arrived on our doorsteps, claiming to be a no-shit serious racing simulator. It’s got loads of cars, loads of tracks, new racing modes and for the first time in a long time a proper driver’s-eye-view mode.

The thing that tipped me over the edge, that made me have to have this game, was finding out that the Spa Francorchamps circuit was included. The Nordschleife? Sure, it’s in there, but being able to have a crack at Eau Rouge, the Best Corner in Formula 1™ all for myself? This I had to try. Oh was I in for a shock.

The first thing you’ll notice is this game is hard. Very hard. I started out with what I thought was a fairly forgiving bunch of settings – automatic transmission, visual-only damage, ABS and traction control – and even in the second tier races I was having a really difficult time of it. You won’t be going anywhere fast without logging an awful lot of practice hours and getting intimately acquainted with the apexes and braking points of each circuit. A single mistake, a single wide run in a corner, and you’ll often drop three or four places if not all the way to the back of the field.

It’s been a long time since a game in this series, or indeed many other series too, has attempted a proper drivers-eye view mode and Shift does a bloody good job of it. The car interiors are very detailed, it’s not as hard as you might think to concentrate on the action and your view even shifts slightly as you’re subjected to g-forces. Playing rFactor in the same mode made me seasick within three laps. No such problems with Shift.

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Once upon time, there was blood everywhere

Fairytale Fights is based on the idea that a group of characters – Red Riding Hood, Snow White, The Emperor with No Clothes and Jack of the Beanstalk – are becoming passe. So they have to hack and slash their way through Taleville to get their fame back.

When I picked up the controller to play Fights, I was anticipating something close to Conkers Bad Fur Day. You know – cute, crude-minded and crazy-coloured. I wasn’t completely disappointed on the Three C’s, but I wasn’t immediately drawn into the world either. The graphics, while being displayed on a decent sized plasma TV, around 34 inches, still seemed small. The playable sprites were tiny! I think I lost sight of my Little Red Riding Hood at least five times, and I’m only assuming it was her because she looked like she might have some red thing on her head. The world was bright, colourful and definitely cute enough to come from somewhere in the Pixar region of animation, but there was something slightly cut and paste about it all. For example, there are lumberjack characters that get their own still screen introduction but the only thing different between the four I fought? Hair colour. Maybe. I think three of them were blonde and my eyes were playing tricks on me.

Am I asking a bit much? Well … when you have games like Zelda: The Wind Waker clocking some beautiful cute graphics, I guess I’m spoiled. Rotten. Just call me Veruca Salt, because I want good graphics now, Daddy.

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Surrounding courtesans not pictured

Without a doubt Assassin’s Creed 2 has been one of my most highly anticipated titles of 2009.  It used to be a little overshadowed by BioShock 2, but since Ubisoft have managed to stay true to their original release dates: Welcome to first place, AC2!

It was to my childlike delight that I managed to get my hands on the hotly contested controller at the recent eGames Expo, and found out that this sequel is not going to disappoint.

We’ll start with the most obvious factor: the gameplay.  It took me a little while to reverse engineer the control scheme from what little my booth model (what do we call male booth babes again?) knew and what I remembered of the controls from the Xbox version of AC1, but the basic “puppeteer” premise still applies.  Ezio has two control modes, just like the original, that allow him to move in Low Profile and High Profile.  Low Profile allows you to blend in with a crowd, while High Profile gets you running, jumping and climbing.

A little practice later, and Ezio is scaling wall in a fashion that would make Spiderman jealous.  The demo was set in Venice, and almost every building was smothered with convenient handholds.  The climbing mechanics remain almost identical to Assassin’s Creed 1, where your ascent is fairly fast and easy but requires constant small shifts of direction to get you up to the next grip point.

Up on the rooftops, you’re given far more free movement.  While there are various city guards patrolling the rooftop, your mini-map highlights their locations, and so can easily be avoided (or quietly removed, if the fancy takes you).  As most of the streets and canals of Venice are tightly packed together, just letting Ezio sprint and leap from rooftop to rooftop was great fun, and the controls flow smoothly enough to allow for last minute direction changes without feeling twitchy.  You’ll also meet groups of thugs on the rooftops, who you have the option of hiring to assist you in your missions.  Just try not to wonder how they got up there.  It was probably a thieves patio party or guild wine mixer or something.

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