Game Review - Shadows of the Damned (X360)

Japanese games are having a hard time in the West. Nowadays people seem to think that they've been overtaken by their Western rivals, that Japan's game output is a little stuck in a rut, in a ruthless circle of similar sequels and JRPGs. As such, a lot of gems get missed either because of poor publicity or Japano-phobic stigma, or just plain dismissal. Vanquish was one of those games. Shadows of the Damned is another.

The story concerns Garcia Hotspur, a demon hunter whose girlfriend is stolen by the demon lord Fleming as revenge for him having eliminated so many of his minions. Garcia must travel into Hell to try and retrieve his lost love, killing many demons along the way.

The game this shares some similarities with Devil May Cry. Oh no, you might think, not another Hell-based demon-slaying shooter. Well, what sets this game apart is the style, the darkness mechanic and the mental sense of humour it exhibits. Turd-laying save points, ridiculous amounts of innuendo, side-scrolling shooter levels, drinking alcohol to gain health...it's all a hilarious mix of over-the-top silliness. Add to that the voice of Steve Blum (who got up to more innuendo hijinks in Bulletstorm) as Garcia, and you've got a winning combination.

The use of darkness is particularly fascinating - you must try and remain in a lit area in the game, for if you walk into an area of darkness your health gradually depletes and your enemies become invulnerable to damage. Darkness can be lifted by shooting a "light shot" at - of all things - goat heads. Yes.

There are several boss battles throughout the game, all very exciting and different and full of scary monster types (who are sometimes suddenly made less scary by silly things happening, like a horse farting). Along the way you are accompanied by Johnson, an ex-demon who floats around in the form of a flaming skull and who becomes your weapons as needed (including one extremely phallic instance), upgrading gradually along the way.

The demented nature of the game makes it tremendous fun to play, and the gunplay itself is polished (you can move while shooting!). The voice acting is excellent, the innuendo perverse but hilarious and the darkness mechanic gives it that nice extra edge to differentiate it from other third-person shooters. Sure it's very linear, sure the story's thin, but I don't care.

Great fun. I got it for £5 not long after it came out - a sign of the times.

8.5/10

Argument

John Carter is coming out soon, and with it a bucketload of so-so and bad reviews, which is a little disappointing considering how many people enjoyed the novels. Judging by the trailers, the producers just couldn't decide which direction to take, whether to be a SF adventure for young and old adults, or to Disney-ify everything and shoot for the kids. I'll see it regardless, so I can look at it properly.

The impending release has pushed interest a bit in the original books, and the first three are at number 3 on Amazon's Kindle chart for SF. Now, Amazon are charging £4-ish for the first three books in Kindle format, which doesn't seem like much, but considering that the books are long out of copyright and freely available for e-readers on Project Gutenberg, why bother paying at all? So, being the good guy that I am, I left a product review to that effect, to warn folks to not be taken for a ride.

When you review an ebook on Amazon, the same review is used in the print version listing of the same book. This is a problem if you're like myself and only commenting on the digital edition, but the review itself clearly states this just before the actual body of text. However, some folks don't register this and it seems to them that I'm attacking the print version of the book, and print versions of books in general, and thus take it upon themselves to have a go at me.

After reading their comment, which came with a "not helpful" vote, I spent a good hour and a half (maybe more) composing an extensive rebuttal of their accusations, shortly after which they backed down and I was chuffed with myself, as I'm no good at arguing and I often lose the rare ones I am in.

Check it out HERE.

Book Review - Before I Go To Sleep (SJ Watson)

This book was recommended to me by a close family member who recently received a Kindle for their birthday and very quickly started buying books, this being one of the most talked about, and a great price to boot. I was dubious, as am I about most popular fiction (with no good reason of course), but it was cheap, well-reviewed and I promised I'd give it a go, plus I haven't used the Kindle in a while.

The book concerns the story of Christine, a woman in her mid-forties who, due to a supposed car accident, loses her memory every time she goes to sleep. She wakes up every morning in what seems to be a strange bed, next to a strange man, and she looks older in the mirror than she last remembers. A doctor presents to her a journal she has been keeping to try and help her short-term memory, but as she reads nothing seems to be as it appears...

Let's get the obvious out of the way and say that yes, this has Memento written all over it, marketed for women - the writer is male and writes in first-person as a female very well, but the abbreviation of his name is a clear marketing step. As Christine works her way through her memories in the journal (perhaps a similar mechanic to Guy Pearce's body in Memento), memories change from one thing to another as gradually the shocking truth is revealed. The main difference is that this story isn't told in reverse order (although I would argue that Memento is told from both forward and reverse directions and ends in the middle, but that's another story), but you still feel the same mind-manipulation that you felt with the film.

This isn't necessarily an intentional influence on the book and perhaps I'm being a little unfair, but the similarities are unmistakable. The book is nevertheless a very compelling read, more so in some parts than others, full of twists and heartache right until the chilling revelations at the end. I'm a slow reader, but I started this book no more than a week ago, and that should speak volumes.

Some of the prose is a little leaden and stale, and often the same phrases are repeated such as the likes of "my heart sank", "I felt a chill" and so on - shorthand comments to convey an emotion efficiently that become a little to familiar as time passes, but this is a small gripe.

One last whinge though - I found it annoying that, as was the case with Perdido Street Station, a book by an English author that's set in England and published in the UK and fucking bought from a UK store is the AmericaniZed text. I find this glib, lazy, infuriating and contradictory to the character that's being portrayed in the novel.

A very compelling debut that captures the innermost thoughts of a damaged and terrified individual very well, with a straightforward story that's told is a pleasantly complex manner and keeps you guessing for a long time.

8.5/10

Book Review - Perdido Street Station (China Mieville)

Judging by my last book review, it must have taken me a little over two months to finish this massive book. It's no fun being a slow reader and taking on huge works such as this, but I'm glad I did. And I'm most certainly glad I finished the damned thing.

The book concerns the release of an unspeakable evil into the city of New Crobuzon - a grimy, ill-fitting, sodden place full of crime, filth and degradation, as well as many strange races of people - through a sequence of unfortunate, interconnected events, beginning with the arrival of a disgraced visitor from the outside into the city. His request is odd, and in pursuit of it one thing leads to another, then everything goes to hell.

Mieville certainly takes his time with the build-up to the aforementioned release of unspeakable evil - a cast of many characters is introduced, including the city itself (extensively), and each one has a part to play in the Magnolia-esque weave / chain of events leading up to the event. In taking so much time, Mieville paints a very detailed picture of the gruesome, nasty world of New Crobuzon that he has created. As one event or character segues into another, the tension slowly builds with mystery upon mystery until everything comes to a head and New Crobuzon falls victim to an alien terror.

This comes with unfortunate baggage though - there are several awesome action scenes within the story, shortly after which the pace is dragged back into the murk with overdescription of the mundane - I remember one particular example towards the end of the book where several pages are dedicated to describing in minute detail how a cable is unrolled from one part of the city to another. In short, some parts are a slog and the book is in need of better editing - I believe it is still possible to produce a world as vivid and wildly different as Mieville's if he was perhaps a little less indulgent with his expansive lexicon and tightened things up a bit, without losing anything.

Despite this there is still a lot of pleasure to be found in book. Mieville populates the city with creatures from different mythologies (from Norse to Ancient Egyptian to Hindu) and forces them to live together in collective squallor. Mixed into this are the hideous Remade - criminals whose bodies have been 'retooled' into all manner of weird things as their punishment, from taxis to fake bird-men, often replacing body parts with metal counterparts, or even boilers instead of a heart. In doing so, he creates a vibrant, varied, fantastical place, somewhere far removed yet also not too distant from what we may be familiar with. From the chilling criminals to the squabbling, jealous scientists and those just trying to survive, the characters are reasonably well drawn-out, some more than others, but the story of the character Lin in particular is the one that will move people most. The terror itself is well-realised, the mechanics by which it works purposefully unnerving and chilling.

There is a turning point shortly past the half way mark in the book, after the evil has been released to terrorise the city and the characters wonder how they can beat it, when a character is introduced that takes the term deus ex machina so literally that you can't help but smirk a little. The beauty of writing in this genre (whatever that may be) and creating your own world is that you can get away with almost anything without having to explain how, and Mieville takes such an opportunity a few times with this being one such example.

By the end of the novel you feel you have gotten your money's worth, plus a little extra stuff that you could have done without. The ending is moving in different ways, from certain characters you felt for previously having horrible things done to them, to revelations about a character that changes your mind about them completely. It provides a great deal of satisfaction, whilst not providing total closure on the ongoing story of Bas-Lag and New Crobuzon - in a final, knowing irony, one character remarks that life continues on in the ingrate city, as if nothing had happened at all.

Overall a very good read, very well written albeit with a few eyebrow-raising terms and overwritten, overdescriptive sections that bring the pace right down. With a bit more editing, this could have been a masterpiece. As a sidenote, I found it a bit disappointing that despite this being the UK edition, the text we ended up with is actually the AmericaniZed edition, full of the wonderfully irritating idiosyncrasies of that dialect.

8/10

Game Review - Assassin's Creed: Revelations (X360)

Ubisoft raised a few eyebrows when they announced that the follow-up to Assassin's Creed II would follow just a year later in the form of Brotherhood. They raised more eyebrows again when, shortly after Brotherhood was released, another game in the series was announced, again to follow a year later in 2011. The result is Revelations, which acts as a closing chapter for the stories of Ezio and Altair and a lead-in to Assassin's Creed III, which comes out in October.

Desmond has entered a coma after the events at the end of Brotherhood (which, you should know, remain mostly unexplained in this game even after completion) and is placed in the animus to try and save his mind by rebuilding his memories and those of his ancestors. So, another excuse to play as Altair and Ezio.

An older Ezio has travelled to Constantinople in search of 5 "keys" that are used to open Altair's library at Masyaf. In his quest he is also compelled to help quell a Templar coup after the current Ottoman leaders request his aid. Along the way he encounters fellow Assassins in Constantinople and other historical figures, in true AC style. Ezio finds that the Masyaf keys are imbued with memories of Altair, which gives us the opportunity to see how his story ends.

Essentially the gameplay is the same as that of Brotherhood, only in a different city. Anyone who has played any of the previous games will fall into a familiar control scheme straight off the bat. You can purchase landmarks, renovate shops and call other assassins to your aid, as before. The primary change consists of the addition of the much-lauded "hookblade", which is ultimately quite disappointing as it doesn't make that much of a difference. There are things you can do with it in battle, but like many other things in the game they're quite needless and add no advantage. Sliding down ziplines with it is quite fun. On top of this you can also craft different types of bombs, allowing the player to be a little more creative in their bloodlust - a neat addition.

The city of Constantinople is meticulously rendered with some nice attention to detail being implemented with the various landmarks, though the whole engine is starting to look a little worn out. The map of Constantinople is smaller than that of Rome (I believe), there are no horses to ride, no catacombs to chase people through and no oblique puzzles to solve. There are no more thief / mercenary / courtesan (Romani in this game) missions save for one for each faction, instead replaced somewhat by master assassin missions which are undertaken to promote your recruits from normal assassins to den leaders. In some ways these are good things as it gives the game more focus, but ultimately it lacks variety (I do miss some of the side missions from Brotherhood) and is not particularly difficult for AC veterans. Borgia Towers are repeated as Templar Dens, shops are renovated to earn money...you see the picture here - more of the same under slightly different circumstances.

A lot of the missions and activities ultimately turn out to be of dubious value. For example, renovating shops has no end-point to aim for after everything has been renovated, no incentive. There are also what are called "endemic events" which usually consist of beating someone up or, ahem, helping someone carry their cargo a few metres for a small payment. Is this what Ezio has been reduced to? Next thing you know Ezio will take a brush to the streets to get rid of rubbish. Exciting.

Another dubious addition is the "den defense" element, whereby you must occasionally defend your assassin dens against Templar attacks in a tower-defense-style fashion. This doesn't really fit in the AC gameplay paradigm, and in fact I was careful enough to only have to play it once and get the achievement. Just once.

To this end it doesn't seem like ACR is different enough to warrant its existence. Indeed, most of this stuff could have been put into ACB - put the Masyaf keys in Rome etc. However, the game makes up for it somewhat with the Altair memories and the Desmond backstory memories. It is nice to see Altair's story fully concluded, as well as Ezio's (presumably), and it's also helpful to find out where Desmond came from and how he ended up in Abstergo in the first place. Changing Altair's voice was a wise move, but this new voice is a little too accented for comfort.

The overall story is satisfactory, with the usual "someone attempting to overthrow someone else" storyline in place and reasonably straightforward enough to follow, with a mature romance between Ezio and Sofia presented. We get some very good answers regarding the whole mystery of the First Civilisation at the end of the game (finally), but Ubisoft leave enough questions unanswered to make sure we buy the next instalment. This leads me to one final point of annoyance - somehow Desmond's dad arrives to help save him whilst in a coma in the animus. He wasn't in the last game (actually he was, but for me there was no way of telling who the disembodied voice during the credits belonged to). In fact, he wasn't in any previous game that I can recall. However, it seems he is in comic books and novelisations of the game series. So once again, as with Gears, those who want to focus on the main games have frustrating plot holes to deal with for no reason other than the developers wanting to make a few pounds on book sales. Damned extended universes.

In summary I am in two minds about Revelations. This is a good game, but I can't help but feel my time has been wasted for a few scraps of well-presented answers. There is nothing new here of any real worth in terms of gameplay and while I found the story decent I don't think the answers I got were worth the time I invested in the game, considering how much of what there is to do is ultimately pointless in the grand scheme of things. Things like this make you wonder what else you could have done with your time. It's good if you like retreading, but it's certainly not as...revelatory...as the transition between AC and ACII.

7.5/10

Apologies to Mr. Rees

I have finally passed the half way point in Perdido Street Station, and I think all the world building and setup is passed, so the back of it is broken.

Apologies to Rod Rees for the delay in getting to Spring, but I will make a start on it as soon as I finish this one!

Game Review - Gear of War 3 (X360)

I came into the whole Gears phenomenon a little later than most, a couple of years at least. The 360's flagship title was a great achievement in gameplay, graphics and storytelling, taking the long form approach and leaving many questions unanswered. The sequel was a game that improved the formula, added new features and provided a great multiplayer that wasn't Call of Duty. It also posed more questions to be answered. In steps Gears of War 3.

Spoilers will follow.

The lambent are all over the place and things are getting bad. The COG has disbanded, leaving everyone as essentially Stranded, and Marcus Fenix is still desperately searching for his father. Chairman Prescott, former leader of the COG, gives Marcus a clue to finding him, and the search is on, whilst the lambent seem to get stronger and stronger.

Those who played the previous Gears games will become instantly comfortable with the gameplay in this latest entry - it's the same, right down to the controls. Epic have taken a "ain't broken, don't fix it" approach, much in the same way as Naughty Dog with Uncharted, but a couple of new things have been added, such as new enemy types and the ability to pilot walking vehicles capable of carrying large loads or shooting lots of enemies. This is by no means a bad thing, as the gameplay in all three games has been excellent. There are some problems - your squadmates are meant to revive you should you get downed, but on more than one occasion I have crawled right beside a squadmate in dire need, only for them to completely ignore me and keep on shooting. Frustrating. Also your team can often run blind into battle and you can't issue commands (except one, with limited effect), meaning you will have to run in also to revive them.

Graphically the game is as good as you can expect, with the creators of the Unreal Engine 3 illustrating their virtuosity with their tech, providing atmospheric and varied environments, constant frame rates and great amounts of detail. It's certainly no Rage, but it's still great. Sound is top notch, with rousing score in place, superb voice acting and sound effects. With the amount of money spent on a game like this, you would certainly hope so.

The story is the strongest part of this game. It opens with one time period played out from two different perspectives, first Marcus and then Cole. At this point it's Cole's story that shines, taking him back to the time when he was a sporting hero, his memories of that time, and how he wishes he could go back. This story was so tantalising, but it stands out a little as a diversion from the main story and didn't fully explore Cole's wishes to go back to a younger, freer time. Also it may have been more poignant to go into the back stories of the other squad members to even things out - Baird, Dom, Anya etc.

That aside, the story reveals itself satisfactorily, answering many questions along the way, and finally resolves what everyone was wondering about since the first game. It's all excellent, and the script brings our characters to life. However, a problem I have with the story itself is that in order to get the most out of it you need to have read the Gears books. I'm all for reading (as you can tell) but why leave out crucial plot points, relationships and character introductions from the games, to put them in the books instead? I'm not a great fan of multi-format storytelling in this sense - just keep everything in the damn games. Where did Sam and Jace come from? Why are they on a boat at the start? Why is Jack broken? Who the fuck is this Trescu? Use books for interesting side-stories, not important stuff like this. Had I not read the brief synopses on Wikipedia, I would have been at a loss. Yes there is a "Previously on Gears" movie to watch, but it was at the bottom of the menu, easily missed, when it should have been right at the start of the game.

After playing through the campaign the game ends on a bittersweet note, with the Lambent and Locust defeated, yet Marcus losing everything. His father passes away to save the world at the very end, which is touching in itself, but the greatest moment comes when Dom sacrifices himself to save his squad from a seemingly unstoppable horde of Lambent. The scene is presented with a cinematic sensibility, using the music from the original, trend-setting trailer for the first game ("Mad World"), and Dom makes it clear that he will be glad to meet his wife and children in the afterlife. This can't be described, simply experienced, though it's possibly the best death scene in a game since Final Fantasy VII.

Overall a great game with great gameplay, great story and characters, and is just great, despite the rants I wrote previously.

9/10