Are you sure we got all the key points in the box art? Did you remember to add explosions? Very good!

The camera tracks a lone Agent, clad from head to toe in cybernetic armour, as he leaps across the deserted rooftops of Pacific City.  He jumps effortlessly, only seeming to graze the concrete surfaces before he hurls himself forward again.  Suddenly, wings snap open between his arms and he glides down to street level, bathed orange by the light of fire and flickering street lights.  Below, shambling mutants cover the ground like ants, moaning and baying in their lust for blood.

Cut camera to the ground.  The Agent slams into the pavement fist first, scattering mutants left and right with the shockwave.  Those unfortunate enough to break his fall explode into a green mist, the impact leaving no remnants.  The Agent stands, unhooks the machine gun on his back, and begins to fire indiscriminately into the swarm.  The mutants fall before the hail of bullets like wheat before the harvester, green blood spraying everywhere and staining the asphalt.

The scene continues for a few minutes, the only pause in the carnage comes when the Agent needs to reload.  When the last mutant falls to the ground, and the final tinkle of shell casings has echoed away, we hear the Voice of the Agency.

“Good work, Agent,” he says in a confident, authoritative tone, “now how about we see how many rings you can drive a car through?”

I’ve been struggling to write a review of Crackdown 2, because I’ve found it a little difficult to work out just what the game is trying to present to the player.  On the one hand it’s a very simplistic, fairly enjoyable sandbox game with a focus on exploration and experimentation.  On the other hand, it appears to want to imply a very deep, immersive experience that just isn’t there … and charge you accordingly.

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Your Kinect unit will travel to you in style, international gamer!

Microsoft Australia today delivered the official pricing plans for their upcoming motion controller Kinect (nee Natal).  EB Games have had the RRP estimate at $199 AU for a while now, and this announcement now makes that number gospel.  Still no release date available, but as the press release makes a big deal of talking about Christmas trees, so you can probably assume November/December sometime.

The standalone Kinect bundle will include the Kinect Adventures game, which is good news considering I’d have expected to pay a lot more for a game that lets you go anywhere you want.

America have lead the pricing announcements, stating that Kinect will retail over there for $150 US.   Which I guess leaves only one question for us non-US gamers to ponder:

Why the fuck is it so expensive for us?

Apparently Microsoft care so much about the release of Kinect later this year that they’re going to be shipping each Kinect unit in it’s very own air-conditioned shipping container covered in solid gold.  Or at least I assume that’s what they’re doing, because how else do we explain the ~$30AU price hike that seems to have attached itself to each Kinect somewhere over the Pacific Ocean?

I guess we should be used to it by now.  After all, we are the continent that’s expected to pay ~150% of a game’s original US RRP.  I suppose at the very least we can be thankful that we’re not the UK, who’ve been given the stunningly inflated RRP price of 130GBP, the equivalent of around $200 US.

So with prices this artificially inflated consumers better take heed of Xbox AU’s David McLean advice, and “will definitely want to pre-order at their retailer of choice to secure their Kinect”.  Unless of course we discover there is no region locking for the Kinect, in which case I’m sure we can always find less lavish ways to ship ourselves a unit from the States.

Check out the full announcement over at InsiderX, and don’t forget to pre-order! We don’t want to all gouge ourselves stupid at once and cause a shortage!

New and improved, Colin McRae: Dirt 2

I’ve been thinking for the past few months that I don’t have enough decent racing games and I could really do with something to tide me over until F1 2010 finally rears its head.  I was tossing up a few options when Matt solved all my problems by shipping me half a dozen different racing titles on Steam.  Colin McRae: Dirt 2 is the first cab off the rank, so to speak.

One of the first things you’ll notice is that the game probably could’ve been called Ken Block: Dirt.  Colin McRae died tragically in 2007 so he obviously played no active role in the game.  Respect is paid to him at various points but it’s the current stars of the X-Games circuit that you’ll be racing and interacting with: Tanner Foust, Dave Mirra, Travis Pastrana, a bunch of others and of course everybody’s favourite sideways shoe salesman, Ken Block himself.  That’s right, there’s hardly a Finn in sight and it’s almost like the WRC doesn’t exist which makes you wonder, really, just how serious a rallying game this is?  We’ll get back to that question later.

I’ll get the main gripe out of the way first.  I had a lot of trouble with bugs in this game.  For the first couple of days it’d take half a dozen or more attempts at starting and then restarting the game to convince it to run without crashing in the first race.  This issue eventually sorted itself but ever since there’s been regular visual glitches and random crashes.  I consulted the forums, couldn’t find any reasonable fixes but did note with interest that plenty of other people were complaining about all sorts of different bugs of their own.

The whole thing is a massive pain in the arse, to the point where I almost chucked the game in.  I’m glad I didn’t though because once you’re finally behind the wheel of a car this game is a hell of a lot of fun.

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Marine, gun and gimmick? Check.

I’ve always had a little bit of a soft spot for Raven Software ever since they released Heretic, the fantasy inspired Doom clone.  The game established Raven as a company who weren’t afraid to make something original in an unoriginal format.  The Star Trek nerd in me enjoyed Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force too, another of Raven’s creations, which turned out to offer not only a good fan service but also a highly decent Quake-inspired shooter.

So I was fairly optimistic when I picked up a copy of Singularity, Raven Software’s latest first-person shooter, as it seemed to tick all the boxes for an interesting game.  First-person shooter, with temporal puzzles and effects, set in a mutant infested Russian military research facility.  Unfortunately, upon playing the game, I was left with the lasting impression that ticking boxes was all Singularity did in the hopes of creating an imaginative new title.

The story surrounds Captain Nathaniel Renko, your typical US space marine Black Ops soldier, who’s been sent on a recon mission to the supposedly abandoned Russian island of Katorga-12 after reports of a massive electro-magnetic pulse.  After crash landing, Renko finds himself thrown back through time to 1955, where the facility is self-destructing.  While in the past he saves a scientist from a burning building, and after returning to the present day finds that time has altered radically.  The scientist, Nikolai Demichev, has used the power of Katorga-12′s experimental Element 99 (or E99 for short) to overthrow the government and has proceeded to conquer the globe.

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Previously titled (Gears of) War for Cybertron

It’s a little difficult to describe the feeling you get when you first start playing Transformers: War For Cybertron, but it must be something akin to finding a $100 bill in an old pair of dirty underwear.  It wouldn’t have occurred to you to ever look there for a $100 bill, but when you accidentally find it you’re so happy that you don’t mind the company it’s been keeping.  The entire Transformers property has fallen on hard times recently, with some questionable movies and some truly hideous games based on those movies.  That’s why it’s such a delight to pick up War For Cybertron, a game I’d only been vaguely aware of up until the week of it’s release, and find out that here is a Transformers game that doesn’t suck.

Set before the original animated series, the game chronicles the ongoing battle between the Autobots and Decepticons over their home planet of Cybertron.  Although players can choose to play either the Decepticon or Autobot campaign first, the narrative begins with the Decepticon’s rise to power and concludes with the Autobot’s scramble to defend themselves.  You can play the game solo or online co-op, with each level offering a selection of three Transformers to control.  Transformers are split into different classes, each of which have their own vehicle form and selection of special skills.

The game plays out as an over-the-shoulder shooter, and to say that this game shamelessly plunders elements from Gears of War would be putting it nicely.  Many elements of the control scheme are identical, as is the feel of both movement and shooting, and both games share a penchant for oversized bosses.  During the section of the Autobot campaign where you take on a corrupted cyber-slug, all I could think was: “Hey! Sure is Robo-Corpser in here”.  But the brilliant thing about War For Cybertron is that you won’t care.  The Unreal Engine works so perfectly in the Cybertron setting that it’s almost impossible to feel any ill will towards recycled mechanics.  Personally I felt like they could have borrowed a little more, in fact, like at least a basic cover system.

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Ah, the ubiquitous Final Fantasy artwork

Games like Final Fantasy XIII come from a pedigree not unlike a royal family. It has elements of all the JRPGs that have come before it, including the bastard children that are never really mentioned and improvements made through breeding out negative elements. You get duds and revolutionaries, bigger wars, bigger guns and prettier women in less clothing. But after a little while, you realise that you’re looking at breeding cousins and that the faces are starting to all look a bit samey. You start to notice grandiose loopholes in the history and it all gets a bit convoluted in parts, trying to figure out which country in what timeline affected which scantily clad lovestory.

FFXIII is trying to be an elegant game, with high concepts. It’s nonlinear story is rife with terrorists and freedom, enemies and victims, death and fear. We start off on a train of rounded up ‘tainted’ people (called l’Cie), who are undergoing a Purge. But that’s really all the information we get before being thrown into a fight, which crashes the train and sets in motion the events which lead to the main characters being infected with the brand of the mysterious and supposedly evil fal’Cie. They must now complete their focus or mission, or risk becoming Cie’th – twisted agonised creatures who were once human l’Cie. If they complete their focus, they have an eternity of being a giant naked crystal to look forward to.

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Violet Summer ... or her ass at least

So I’ve been meaning to play Velvet Assassin for a while now, and before you all decide to heave rotten fruit at me let me explain myself.  Firstly because I’m a big fan of the stealth genre, and secondly (and probably more importantly) because the moment someone tells me a certain game is absolutely crap, I’m always curious to find out why.

And there was no shortage of people to tell me that this game was absolute crap.

But just like a car crash on a highway, I was compelled to slow down to take a look … once the price had dropped to around $20.

The game is “based on” the real life experiences of Violet Szabo (renamed Violet Summer in the game), an undercover agent for the British Special Operations Executive during World War 2. I haven’t personally read Young, Brave and Beautiful, the biography with which Velvet Assassin has taken it’s liberties, so I’m a little unsure as to the validity of claims that Violet once killed an entire squadron of sadistic Nazis wearing only a silk nightie.  I’m guessing that’s what Replay Studios are choosing to call “artistic licence”.

The plot is standard stealth game fare, so I can’t really rip into it for being too ridiculous. Violet’s missions usually center around a singular target that needs to be killed, which for some reasons necessitates the violent murder of every other soldier in a five kilometer radius. The missions are told in flashback, recalled by Violet as she lays in a coma on a French hospital bed. Every now and then you’ll regain lucidity long enough to overhear discussions about your eventual fate, but the majority of the game is spent inside the memories.

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Overlord is watching. He knows all your secrets.

I can’t help myself: I’m going to begin this review with a complaint.  Please bear with me.

I guess I can understand why Microsoft felt the need to implement the Microsoft Points system to purchase DLC on the 360.  Among other business-case related things I guess credit card numbers and billing information can be hard to enter when you don’t have a keyboard.  But we PC gamers have been blessed with the alpha-numeric keyboard since the day dot.  So, Bioware, when you make us buy points to buy your DLC when there’s no practical / technological reason for making us do so, and then don’t even offer us the option of buying the right number of points for any given pack … yeah, it makes us feel kind of exploited.  Or at least, that’s how I feel.  Can you just let us buy our games like grown ups in the future please?  Not even a bunch of leftover points will make me want to download that stupid sunglasses pack.

Right.  I don’t actually feel any better for having said that, but I’ll move on regardless to the subject of today’s review: the new Overlord DLC pack for Mass Effect 2.  It’s about 1GB to download and will set you back 560 of the abovementioned Microsoft/Bioware Bison Dollars points.  Installation is dead simple, same as every other pack thus far.

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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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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.

Sounds spooky, huh? (more…)