Remember when Billie Joe had really cool hair?

Harmonix is one of those developers that always seems to have made the right moves when it comes to their games. When they originally split from the Guitar Hero franchise and started Rock Band, they put a lot of thought into their product, introducing both the vocal and drum tracks into the music genre. They focused on bringing both quality and upcoming artists to their track lists, and built an expansive library of downloadable content that worked across multiple titles in the Rock Band series.

You’ve always been able to describe them as Guitar Hero‘s more mature older sibling. While Guitar Hero was releasing disc after disc of band or genre themed full retail titles, Rock Band continued to support it’s core titles with optional track packs and community events. And when Harmonix did decide to release a band-themed stand alone title, The Beatles: Rock Band, they put so much effort into making it a unique experience that the result was one of the most critically acclaimed music games of all time.

Which is why I’m a little bit disappointed this week as I play my way through Green Day: Rock Band, Harmonix’s second band-themed stand alone title, and surely the low-light of their development career to date.

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I get the feeling the name was just to throw you off the scent last episode

Do you ever have those heavy gaming months? You know, those months that leave you feeling bloated, tired and irritable for no reason after spending extended amounts of time in front of your screen? The months where you’ll find yourself uncontrollably weeping at the worst scripted cut-scenes, wearing white pants as you scoff Malteasers off your pregnant friend?

Well with the exception of that last item (my pregnant friend won’t visit) it’s been one of those months for me, and with a great bevy of AAA titles to work my way through it’s taken me this long to get around to playing the newest installment of Telltale Games’ new Sam and Max series: The Tomb of Sammun-Mak.

And after I’d blown the dust off my neglected PC and fired up the new episode (coal-operated computer), I had to curse my own foolish procrastination.

Sam and Max: The Devil’s Playhouse – Episode 2: The Tomb of Sammun-Mak is probably the finest piece of work Telltale Games have created since Chariots of the Dogs last season, and really manages to capture what we all love in an adventure game: puzzles, puns and … is there a ‘p’ word for time-travel?  I’ll get back to you on that one.

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Novelists with shotguns? Fuck yeah.

For he did not know, that beyond the lake he called home, lies a deeper, darker ocean green where waves are both wilder and more serene.  To it’s ports I’ve been.  To it’s ports I’ve been.

Gamers looking to play Remedy’s new action/thriller Alan Wake will do well to remember this little poem, heard in the very first chapter of the game, because by it’s own admission this is a game of many questions and few answers.

But there are surprisingly good explanations for those lack of answers.

Alan Wake bills itself as a “psychological action thriller” and if that sounds more like a movie genre than a game genre to you, well there’s good reason.  The story plays around Alan Wake, full-time famous novelist and part-time moody asshole, who is plagued by writer’s block and decides to retreat to the remote mountain town of Bright Falls with his wife Alice for some much needed private relaxation.  Before he even gets the chance at the customary holiday shag, Alan gets into an argument with Alice and decides to storm out of their cabin, returning moments later upon hearing her screams to see her plunging into a lake.  Alan dives in to save her … and wakes up a week later in a crashed car and no memory of what happened following his dive.

Bright Falls has also apparently taken a turn for the worst.  Sure it’s odd enough during daylight hours, but when the sun goes down a peculiar dark presence actively stalks Alan, taking control of helpless bystanders and turning them into shadowy killing machines.

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The article title rhymes!

Let’s just get it out there: I’m not a puzzle gamer. They just shit me, I get frustrated and tend to start throwing things; keyboards, tantrums, etc.  But after picking up World of Goo as part of the Humble Indie pack, I’ve been secretly playing it whenever I can.

World of Goo is really quite good. The premise is simple: a bunch of goo balls need to get to the pipe leading to the next level. They can do this by building structures (bridges, towers) by joining to each other, and there’s different types of balls to play with (oh grow up!). Some are single-use: they can be placed in a structure, and that’s it. Others let you dismantle the structure at your whim, others stick to surfaces, others are like water and will ‘drip’.

It can be a bloody hard game at points. Unlike other bridge or structure building games, the goo balls have an amount of flexibility, so if the structure isn’t as strong as it needs to be, it will bend, flex and topple. And naturally, some levels have hazards that must be avoided: spikes, blades, and a range of other sharp pointy things. All of which will burst your goo balls, rendering your lovely bridge a little less structurally sound.

The difficulty of levels is a little inconsistent. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as the alternating challenge means you get to do simple, fun levels in between the incredibly tricky ones. There are also a good selection of challenges to overcome. Some focus on structural integrity, building a large bridge in as few ‘blobs’ as possible or building a huge tower that, if you don’t place your goo balls properly, will send your tower toppling over. Others require very little building, relying on timing and simple shapes to get through the level.

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What IS the square-root of Lost Planet, anyway?

Harry Nilsson once famously sung “One is the loneliest number that you’ll ever do”, and if you ever have the misfortune to play Lost Planet 2 singleplayer then you’ll discover all too well what he was singing about.

Yes, I’ve been having a mixed experience back on E.D.N III this week, homeworld to any number of warring humanoid factions and a wide variety of enormous deadly fauna.  Lost Planet 2 is the sequel to Lost Planet: Extreme Conditions, and features multiple protagonists from different backgrounds to tell it’s story.

What that story might be, who it pertains to and why we should be interested is a matter of debate at this point, as most of the game appears to be centred around not being squashed by a giant animal with glowing orange weak spots.  There were only a few chapters during the game’s campaign that seemed to book-end properly, and even then it was a little difficult to figure out who these people were or what they wanted to achieve other than survival.

But who cares, right?  This game isn’t about compelling characters or intriguing plot, it’s just about fighting sky-scraper tall beasts and living to tell the tale.

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Curse that Ripper and his snappy dress sense!

Take the greatest detective known to fiction and have him investigate one of history’s most famous unsolved crimes.  A great adventure game should come effortlessly, right?  Unfortunately, things aren’t quite that … elementary.

A few weeks ago I picked up a copy of Frogwares’ latest adventure offering Sherlock Holmes vs Jack the Ripper.  No, I hadn’t been hurtled a year back in time to when the game was actually released, more I was looking for a modern adventure game that hadn’t been brought to us via Telltale Games.

The premise is relatively simple:  Sherlock Holmes (rumoured pipe enthusiast and master of deduction) hears the news about the murder of a prostitute in Whitechapel, and decides to  “unofficially” assist the authorities in their investigations.  This lands him and his companion Dr. Watson right in the middle of the famous serial killings of Jack the Ripper.

See? Fiction and history are so easy to combine!

If you read about Jack the Ripper in school, then you’ll notice a whole cast of real life Ripper suspects crop up during Watson and Holmes’ investigation, although most of them are discredited as actual suspects quite quickly.  A few are most likely only mentioned to bolster the suspects board on the Baker Street wall (artist Walter Sickert, for example), but it’s nice to see that Frogwares had no qualms with setting up a host of era specific character for players to enjoy.

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Those Telltale types certainly know style

It’s a brand new year, and Telltale has turned loose a brand new season of everybody’s favourite dog and rabbit crime fighting duo.  The newest addition to the adventure library is entitled Sam and Max: The Devil’s Playhouse, and the first episode The Penal Zone was released mid-April.

My inner-child loves the fact that adventure games are making a slow but steady return to the gaming landscape, but Telltale Games faces the same challenge every time they release a new game: keeping things fresh.  After all, we can gush all we like about a game’s writing and sense of humour, but if it turns out it’s just the same old game repackaged then interest is sure to dwindle.  Even for someone with their nostalgia goggles strapped on as hard as I do.

So it’s nice to see that, with a certain level of respect for the format, Telltale Games has begun to experiment with their usual gameplay style.

From the get go, The Penal Zone aims to show off these new elements.  Our heroes begin the game trapped in a cell by interstellar outlaw General Skun’ka’pe, a militant baboon with dreams of galactic conquest.  To achieve this end he’s scouring Earth for the Toys of Power, objects of terrifying psychic power, two of which just happen to have fallen into Max’s possession.

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Eight billion times better than Game Room

Gaming as a charity has been on the increase of late. Maybe it’s something inside our heads that wants to prove that even the laziest of us can make a difference for the less fortunate. Maybe, as a group, we’ve become more and more aware of the terrible toll gamers take on the world’s precious reserves of Mountain Dew. Whatever the actual reason, the majority of this karmic contribution always centred around Child’s Play, the gaming charity founded by the team at Penny Arcade. In 2009 alone Child’s Play raised over 1.7 million dollars for children in hospitals, and fundraising events, gaming marathons and auctions are continually cropping up to help increase this figure every year. Last year, to tie in with the release of The Beatles: Rock Band, the Harmonix dev team paired with the band to donate the proceeds (now over $200K and rising) of the game’s first downloadable track “All You Need Is Love” to Médecins Sans Frontières. Even Activision, who by all accounts are run by the devil, has joined in the act of giving, donating a cool million in sweet US currency for veteran’s affairs after the success of Modern Warfare 2.

Of course, after grossing more than half a billion dollars in profit I’m sure they could afford it.

Well now you can add Chime to the pile of games that prove that being a couch potato isn’t all bad. Developed by UK outfit Zoë Mode, and published by OneBigGame, the game donates 60% of it’s price (or all the profit, in other words) toward the Save the Children Fund and the Starlight Foundation, which in turn uses the funds to put a smile on sick kids’ faces.

But keep in mind, you don’t just have to buy Chime because it’s helping charity. You can also buy it because it’s just a damn good game.

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Dante's Inferno. Abandon all hope of faithful adherence to the original, ye who enter here...

Disambiguation: This is a review of the anime released to accompany the recent video game of the same name.  It’s not a review of the video game itself and it’s definitely not a review of any old Italian poems.

I’m really not sure what it was about Dante’s Inferno – An Animated Epic that inspired me to pick up the DVD and actually watch it.  It’s intended as a companion to the Dante’s Inferno game that was released recently (it with the lulzy / offensive achievements) that I’ve never played and none of us have even bothered reviewing because frankly, the marketing for the launch seemed more interesting than the game itself.  So I guess I’m reviewing this as a work in its own right.

First up, both the game and the anime take some… erm… liberties, I guess you could say with Dante Alighieri’s original work.  It’s still broadly about Dante’s journeys through the nine circles of hell, accompanied for whatever f&*king reason by the Roman poet Virgil*.  So far, so broadly in line with the original.

It’s at this point things start to take a different line.  There’s some backstory, y’see, where Dante falls for a couple of the oldest tricks in The Book.  He makes some crazy promises to a woman, Beatrice, in order to get laid.  He also believes a priest who promises him something that sounds too good to be true.  Then he up and runs away to Jerusalem to join the crusades.  Once there he proceeds to make, all things considered, a bit of a cock of himself.  He returns just in time to find everybody at home has been murdered and Lucifer is dragging his darling Beatrice off into hell.  Turns out she must’ve been a pretty good root because our muscular-hero-of-dubious-intelligence gives chase through all nine circles of hell.  A bit of the old ultra-violence ensues.

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