It’s that time of year again where I collate all of my articles together and encase them in the shell of a juicy, easily digestible word-nut. Next year I’ll probably start writing these posts monthly, otherwise my 2013 self-indulgent roundup will be absurdly long (he says hopefully). Anyway, to summarise this year’s events, I finished and passed my MSc, began writing a monthly article series in a proper magazine made of paper and everything, and learned how to fight with a sword.

The year teed off from the first of twelve holes with the publication of a couple of articles I wrote at the end of 2011. A piece I wrote for PC Pro on bionics and human enhancement was published online in January. Then in February I finally put four years of studying English Literature to use, with a piece that looked at Skyrim and the theory of the Sublime, my own little contribution to the burgeoning field of games criticism. Twenty thousand pounds well spent, I think.

In March I wrote a piece for IGN that looked at the increasingly popular service-model for games, with input from Gaming Law Zulu Jas Purewal. I’m fascinated by games publishers who are willing to forsake direct profit in exchange for control over their consumers, and I think in more general terms the conflation between profit-making and market control often explains an awful lot of bizarre corporate behaviour, such as imposing oppressive DRM that only serves to frustrate your customer base and has minimal success in preventing piracy.

Meanwhile, a few people had taken interest in my Skyrim piece, in particular Ed Key. I had no idea who Ed was, so I looked him up and discovered Proteus, an intriguing little game about exploration and wanderlust, the concepts behind which chimed with a lot of my thoughts in the Skyrim piece. It’s also a very relaxing game, great to boot up and play for half an hour. I wrote up a short preview of it for IGN in April.

Before that, however, something else happened. For about six months I’d been mulling over an idea for an article series that looked under the skin of game engines; the technology behind all the games we play, which are absolutely vital to the medium but never really get discussed. I pitched it to Custom PC, and they picked it up, in the format of kicking the tyres of a different game engine every month, with input from those who created it or have worked with it. That’s right, I talk about the graphics. If you want to know how many graphics a game has, I’m your man (the answer is four, four graphics.)

Obviously I can’t link to the articles as they’re in print, but so far I’ve lifted the bonnet of Unreal, Source, Unity, the Dark Engine ( the power behind Thief and System Shock), HPL (the engine behind Amnesia and the Penumbra trilogy), CryENGINE, and Avalanche. What has surprised me most while writing this series is there are very few bad engines. The weakest current engine I’ve covered so far is Source, though that is mainly down to its age.

It makes sense when you think about it. An engine is ultimately a tool, so while it’s entirely possible to create a bad game with an engine, if the engine itself was rubbish then developers wouldn’t use it, and would opt for an alternative solution. Some engines are better than others, though, whether through being more powerful like CryENGINE or more user-friendly like Unity.

In May I wrote a retrospective on Max Payne’s 1 and 2 for IGN. Then I pitched an article to PC Gamer about some experimental space games I’d been keeping an eye on. They declined the pitch, but hired me as a freelancer anyway, based on the Proteus preview I’d written for IGN. I mention this because a lot of young writers get disillusioned, believing that you can only get into these industries by being in the right place, and getting chummy with the right people. No doubt that does happen, as it does in all creative industries, and I pity those who act like that when they are eventually found out. But editors are always looking out for new writers, and if you’ve got the skill, and are determined enough and persist in getting your work (as opposed to yourself) in places where editors can see them, someone will eventually notice.

For the rest of the year I wrote various things for Custom PC, PC Gamer, and IGN. I can’t show you stuff from the first two, but in June another retrospective I had written was published, this time on Medal of Honor: Allied Assault. In July I wrote an article about the ways music can be used in games, with input from Jack Wall, Dylan Fitterer, and David Kanaga. As the summer progressed I slowed down on the freelance side of things, in order to complete my MSc, which if you’re interested (you’re not interested) was on the topic of reinterpreting Shakespeare’s Richard III for a modern audience. World changing!

I also started work on a substantial feature which is still yet to be published, that led me to learn how to fight with a medieval longsword. Or more accurately, it led me to learn how to get hit about the head by far more experienced people with medieval longswords. I only meant to give it a try for the sake of personal experience, but I ended up going to the club most weeks. I’d forgotten how much I enjoyed martial arts as a form of exercise, and as a method of catharsis. Sitting at home in front of a computer all day can drive you slightly mad, especially on days when things aren’t going your way.

Since September I’ve been concentrating entirely on freelancing. It’s gone as well as I could have hoped. The Engine Room has trundled along nicely, and I’ve continued doing bits and bobs for PC Gamer. In October I wrote by far my most ambitious article this year, a large feature for Custom PC on the theory and science behind quantum computing. It’s a subject I’ve always had an interest in but known relatively little about. Again, we haven’t yet invented 3G paper, so I can’t show it to you.

In November I wrote two final pieces this year for IGN, a retrospective on Far Cry 1 and 2 and a piece which looked at the difficulties faced by young people trying to get into creative industries, the subject of a recent BAFTA report.

And that’s it! Should anything else be published online in December, I’ll include it as an edit. For now though, until next year!

Oh SHODAN, when you came and you gave me an implant...

For over a decade System Shock 2 has protruded from my pile of shame like a loose Jenga brick. I played my uncle’s copy when I was twelve, but never finished it on account of being a relatively sensitive child and of System Shock 2 being a deeply, deeply unsettling game. Then it masterpiece famously vanished through some legal wormhole and is currently floating helplessly in a red-tape galaxy far, far away. Fortunately, a good friend recently provided me with a copy, and about a week ago I finally managed to pull that loose brick out…more or less.

Basically, this play-through of Looking Glass’ Cyberpunk masterpiece culminated in one of the most bizarre experiences I’ve had in gaming. System Shock 2 emphasises choice in play, as opposed to choice in story like Mass Effect or The Witcher. There are three skill-sets, weapons, tech, and psionics, each of which has its own subset of abilities. There are standard weapons and exotic weapons, hacking and repairing, cryo blast and levitate and so on. What generally happens is you end up with some eclectic mixture of skills. In fact, it’s probably wise to have a basic grasp of all three and then specialise in one or two.

I didn’t do this. I eschewed psionics entirely, focussing mainly on tech skills with a sideline in standard and exotic weaponry. And for ninety percent of the game this strategy worked brilliantly. I could hack pretty much anything without trouble, be it security systems, vending machines, or electronically sealed crates. What’s more, the plethora of nanites (the game’s currency) this left me with meant I could purchase as much ammo for my weapons as I required.

This always happens when I order vanilla coke

I thought I was so clever. Around the midpoint I ceased concentrating on important game-y things like conserving ammo and specifying my upgrades, instead concentrating on exploration, and paying attention to the story and atmosphere. Incidentally, these remain both scintillating and punishingly disturbing all these years on. It doesn’t inspire raw terror like its sister game Thief, or more recent bowel-quakers like Amnesia, instead it has a more consistent, more subtle undercurrent of wrongness that gradually erodes your nerves. I felt fine when playing it, but later when I went to bed I found myself unable sleep, my mind subconsciously rolling over it like a tongue over a fresh filling.

This was partly as a consequence of extended exposure to that twisted atmosphere, but also because of what I knew it was doing to me. The way it puts a direct, fourth-wall-breaking challenge to the player right at the start sets the tone perfectly, and for the first half of the game it strings you along like one of Skinner’s pigeons, feeding you little rewards for completing your objectives, for pushing the right buttons, for being a good boy. Then it reveals the puppet master, the reality of what you’re actually doing, and yet you continue helplessly in your lab-rat existence. Seduction and control, that’s System Shock 2 in a nutshell. And worms, it has a thing for worms.

Anyway, lasting mental damage aside, I proceeded through the game relatively unhindered. That is, until I reached the final level – set inside the pulsating, squelching body of a vast hive-minded organism – with the objective of destroying its brain. Here, my brazen attitude throughout the second half of the game came back to haunt me, with a thick concentration of enemies and few opportunities to rearm.

By the time I reached the brain, I had six well maintained, fully upgraded weapons…and six bullets, all of which I used destroying three spinning stars that apparently protect the brain because of reasons. I couldn’t believe it, after twelve years of waiting and twelve hours aboard the Von Braun, I had still failed to complete this most venerated of games.

I searched my inventory for something…anything, that I could use to finish the bloody thing (all the while being chased by a group of hulking “rumblers” and what I can only describe as floating psychic bastards). It turned out all I had was “a shard of annelid crystal” – essentially a fancy stick, and a large pile of speed boosters.

Looks more like the world's most rotten cocoa bean

Cue the most macabre Benny-Hill sketch you’ve ever seen. I sprinted frantically around the revolving, oval brain, at the head of a conga-line straight from hell’s retirement home, intermittently leaping up and trying to destroy the giant electric sponge using a stick with ideas above its station. This continued for half an hour. I can’t remember the last time a game allowed me to screw up this spectacularly. I died so many times. It wasn’t entirely clear whether my pretentious stick was having an effect on this gargantuan mind, so concerned was I with juggling speed-hypos and avoiding the death-train behind me.

Eventually, I ran out of hypos. Injecting the last one, I decided the only course of action was a stick-based banzai-run, a dog’s kamikaze mission. I ran straight up to the brain, thwacking its squishy exterior with all the force, fury and despair I could muster. It was hopeless. It was futile.

It exploded.

For a moment the absurdity of the situation (and insignificance of the achievement) were forgotten. All I felt was pure elation. I leapt into the ragged hole left by the freshly exploded brain, and flowed merrily down the blood-vessel of victory. It felt fitting in a way that this final accomplishment had been so Neolithic, given the gradual degradation of humanity which occurs through the story. Most interestingly, however, what I had initially perceived as the game’s mechanical breakdown had actually created a far more intriguing and personal ending.

And then the game told me it wasn’t actually finished and I still had to defeat SHODAN. So I told it to fuck right off and watched the ending on YouTube. It seemed fitting given that we’re all Cyberpunks now. How do you defeat a perfect immortal machine? ALT+TAB.

Rather than repeat the torture of last year by posting everything I’ve written individually on this site, I’m going to cobble all of my witterings together into one single, hardy word-boot. 2011 was a fairly good year for my various writing endeavours. Alongside finishing my degree, I wrote for several major publications, extensively experienced the weird world of videogame news, and even won a prize for something that had nothing to do with computer games.

Indeed, while the vast majority of last year’s work was related to virtual entertainment, 2011 began by surprising me with a small accolade for my creative writing. In January I got an email from Lesley Glaister – the writer in residence at that time – informing me that I’d won Edinburgh University’s Lewis Edward’s memorial prize. Given that this was the first prize I’ve been awarded since I won a school easter-egg-garden competition when I was ten, I was insufferably smug for days.

I spent nearly all of the prize money on our pet rabbit, whose twenty-minute spaying procedure turned into a three-hour life-saving operation, costing the best part of £600, when the vet discovered a severe infection in her stomach and bladder. According to the research I’ve done (none), this officially makes Qi-Lin the most expensive rabbit in the entire world. Then again, if it hadn’t been for that op, we wouldn’t have been able to dress her up like Santa and use her as a Christmas card:

Totally worth it. The winning piece is here, along with a lot of my other creative stuff. I’ve never linked to this before. I’m oddly self-conscious about these stories, probably because subconsciously I think they’re all rubbish. Then again, that could just be false-modesty, and sub-subconsciously I really believe they’re collectively the greatest works mankind has ever produced, and that such unbridled works of genius were never meant for your philistine eyes.

The next three months consisted of the three main university food groups, namely dissertation, dissertation, and dissertation.  Then in April I finally took-up the games-journalism again by  becoming the news editor of Plughead.net, the cliché that arose from the ashes of PC Zone. I very briefly worked for Zone in 2010 before the Executive Druids of Future Publishing sacrificed it to the god of financial mismanagement. Apparently, the desk-space is now occupied by What Satellite. That’s What Satellite in case it didn’t register the first time.

As for the Plughead news gig, it’s given me perspective on just how strange gaming news is.  For those who know nothing about videogames, gaming news largely consists of tediously reconstituted press releases blithely informing you of how astonishingly original the teaser trailer for the pre-order-only retail-only DLC of Faces of Men of War VII is going to be. Sometimes an interesting nugget of news will crop up, like the time two French guys hijacked a truck full of Modern Warfare 3 copies, but a lot of it is just spoon-fed PR hype.

What always baffles me about gaming news is how often it strives to imitate real news, which results in unintentionally hilarious sentences like “Bobby Kotick announced today that the Call of Duty MMO will be officially announced on Thursday.” I made that one up, but it genuinely does happen.

Also, nearly all newspapers are horrendously biased anyway. That typical news-report style, ostensibly for the purpose of clarity and neutrality, is now mostly used to obfuscate facts and deliberately mislead the reader. Fortunately this doesn’t really happen when it comes to games, as games-journalists are extremely honest people, if somewhat susceptible to hype. So I feel it’s unwise to adopt a writing style that has earned a reputation for being notoriously untrustworthy.

Anyway, I don’t want this to turn into a manifesto, as games-journalism manifestos are equally irritating. This is primarily because they’re generally written by people like me who have only been in the industry for five minutes. Complaining is fine, but actively pursuing what you believe to be the correct way of doing something is better. I quickly learned this during the mistaken enterprise that was GameGripe.

In terms of the Plughead stuff, there’s far too much to link to, but a couple of fun news posts include the recent Planetside 2 trailer which is mostly men talking, a news post about Hideo Kojima which explored how Japanese games can compete better in the Western market, and a little rant about Windows 8. I also managed to squeeze in a few reviews. These included the likes of Dungeon Siege 3, Dirt 3 and of course, the incredible Skyrim which pretty much was November for me.

In May I started writing for PC Format, and that continued until September. None of that is online so I can’t link to it. Around the same time, however, I got back in touch with Strategy Informer after a year or so away, and ended up doing quite a lot of work for them. Most of it was reviews, all of which are linked to below:

Age of Empires Online

Cthulhu Saves The World

Dungeons: The Dark Lord

F1 2011

King Arthur: Fallen Champions

Men of War: Vietnam

Off Road Drive

Pirates of Black Cove

Red Orchestra 2

Stronghold 3

Serious Sam 3

Supreme Ruler: Cold War

Trine 2

Unity of Command

WRC FIA World Rally Championship

Then there were a few previews, which go like this:

MDK2 HD

Serious Sam 3

Serious Sam 3 again

TrackMania 2

Apparently I really like racing games, which is strange as driving in real life utterly terrifies me.

The last three months of 2011 saw my first feature commissions. I did a feature for bit-tech about the peculiar influences of 9/11 on videogames. Then I wrote two pieces for IGN – a fairly straightforward article on the psychology of achievements, which was enormously popular and very well liked, and another piece which examined the perceived price-gap between PC and Console gaming. This one was much harder work, and typically everyone hated it.

Lastly, in November I stepped out my comfy games-journalism slippers to write a feature for PC Pro on bionics and human enhancement. This was the biggest feature I’d ever done, and the most difficult to write. There were some hiccups, but I was pleased with it in the end, and I learned a lot in the process. Again, no link for this because it was printed, and trees haven’t evolved Internet ports yet.

So that was my self-indulgent 2011 compilation binge, hopefully 2012 will involved twice as much stuff. That’s basically my New Year’s Resolution “More stuff”. Cheerio!

Alice: Madness Returns

Aliens vs Predator

Alpha Protocol

Assassin’s Creed II

Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood

Batman: Arkham Asylum

Battlefield 3

Borderlands

Bioshock 2

Brink

Bulletstorm

Brothers in Arms: Hell’s Highway

Call of Duty: World at War

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2

Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood

Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena

Crysis 2

Darksiders

Dead Space

Dead Space 2

DiRT 2

DiRT 3

Dragon Age

Dragon Age II

Deus Ex: Human Revolution

Duke Nukem Forever (I know, I know)

Dungeon Siege III

Fable III

Far Cry 2

Fear 2

Fallout 3

Fallout: New Vegas

Grand Theft Auto IV

Just Cause 2

Left 4 Dead

Left 4 Dead 2

Metro 2033

Mass Effect

Mass Effect 2

Mirror’s Edge

Portal 2

RAGE

Red Faction: Guerilla

Skyrim

The Sims 3

Star Wars: the Force Unleashed

Street Fighter IV

Our exclusive interview with Pope Benedict XVI

On the EUSA Byelections

Red Ed Redemption

Incredible discoveries at the Edinburgh Old College Archeological dig.

Our solution to surviving the tuition fee hike - part one

Surviving the tuition fee hike - part two

The Ultimate Slasher Movie

Going out with a bang.

]]> http://www.ricklane.co.uk/?feed=rss2&p=182 0 http://www.ricklane.co.uk/?p=179 http://www.ricklane.co.uk/?p=179#comments Sat, 01 Jan 2011 16:40:16 +0000 Rick http://www.ricklane.co.uk/?p=179

Original Illustration by Sarah-Louise Thomas

To put it crudely, there are roughly two types of author. On the one side there are your genre specialists, the high fantasists, romantic novelists, horror masters etc. Then, on the other, there are those whose work occupies no particular genre other than that which can be categorised as “mainstream”, or, if you’re feeling  suitably pompous, “literary”.

However Scottish maverick Iain M. Banks has consistently defied such stringent categorisation by being one of few novelists to have successfully written in two entirely separate strands of fiction. And yet, he seems remarkably nonchalant when asked whether he finds it difficult to come up with new ideas for the two genres within which he writes. “Fairly, I guess. No shortage but no glut, either.”

Banks studied English, Philosophy and Psychology at Stirling University. He came to prominence in 1984 with his controversial debut novel The Wasp Factory; a gothic tale set on a small Scottish island, telling the story of Frank Cauldhame, a self-confessed multiple murderer awaiting the return of his insane brother Eric.

Three years later he moved into the science fiction genre with the galaxy-spanning space opera Consider Phlebas. “I’m still proud of them”, he remarks, twenty five years on from their publication. “There’s a kind of youthful vigour to them I’d struggle to emulate these days!”

On occasion he has even attempted to entwine his twin career paths within one single work, such as last year’s Transition, a novel set in multiple realities, and detailing events between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the destruction of the Twin Towers. “It was interesting and mostly fun. I just wanted to write something like my earlier book The Bridge, bringing the mainstream and SF back together for a sort of one-night-only reunited gig.”

As a genre-blending enterprise it experienced bilateral and trans-Atlantic success: in the States, Transition was published with that crucial “M”, the middle initial that demarcates Banks’s sci-fi stuff, while in Britain it was released under the authorship of an M-less, “literary” Banks.

Although he has flitted between mainstream and science fiction since the inception of his writing career, there has been a gradually greater emphasis on his science fiction work in recent years. Of which his latest novel, Surface Detail, is the latest in the long running series of “Culture” novels.

“Partly it came from an earlier Culture novel, Look To Windward, which first introduced the idea of a sort of post-death virtual Valhalla as a developed idea (in my work, anyway). The more I thought about this over the years the more I thought lots of civilisations would have something similar, and that some of the crueller ones might have virtual Hells, as well.”

The Culture is the core of Banks’ science fiction novels. It is a utopian, pan-galactic alien society in which technological advances have provided an abundance of raw materials, making the concept of personal possessions obsolete. The society is presided over by powerful artificial intelligences known as Minds, which negate the corruptive potential of human influence over the social structure. With Surface Detail, Banks is taking the Culture further into the future than ever before.

“It’s set 800 years after the previously latest-set novel, so there’s been time for Contact to develop other specialist agencies besides Special Circumstances… Turf wars beckon… There’s also a greater degree of Cultural contextualisation within the greater Galactic community (cripes!). Aside from that it’s business as usual with giant spaceships, sarcastic drones and demented weaponry.”

Outside of writing, Banks spends his time “Hill walking, reading, mucking about with music processing software”. He writes to strict deadlines, working intensely for three months then spending the rest of the year pursuingother activities. Currently he is gearing up for another writing stint with “The next mainstream, which I hope to start writing in January.”

Asked whether he feels his writing style has changed over time, he responds. “It’s hard for me to be that objective, but I hope the books have become better written at the sentence-by-sentence level.”

Regardless of the genre he is writing in, his politics are always clear. In 2003 he cut up his passport and sent it to Tony Blair in protest of the Prime Minister’s decision to invade Iraq. Seven years on, and his opinions have changed little. On the subject of the coalition government he states “I despise the flippers (polite word-choice version there), [though] I doubt Ed will be sufficiently left wing to persuade me to vote Labour again”. When questioned about his views on the Pope’s recent state visit, his  response is short and straight to the point: “Dearie me”.

Banks signs off with some advice for the University’s budding creative writers. “It’s all about the three ‘P’s: Practice, practice, practice. Writing is like anything else; the more you do it, the better you get. Also: Get To The End. Don’t over-polish as you go or you might never get beyond page one.”

An ugly game in every sense of the word.

Kane and Lynch 2 contains so many uses of the word fuck I almost mistook it for punctuation. Imagine the infamous crime-investigation scene from the first series of The Wire, only stretched out over a period of several hours. And rather than mumbled passively under Dominic West’s faux-Baltimore breath, the F-bomb is screamed in your face, with added spittle, audible above the sound of gunfire and actual bombs.

Now, I’m hardly what you would call prudish, but I like variety in my swearing.  Kane and Lynch 2, however, has an agenda in it’s monochrome cursing. It wants you, desperately, to believe it’s a game for adults, for mature people, who drink alcohol and have boring jobs and stuff.  Sadly, it’s plain to see that Dog Days is really a six-year old girl wearing it’s mother’s make-up, and wearing it poorly.

This isn’t to say Kane and Lynch 2 is a terrible game. Actually it’s a solid shooter with a unique visual styling and the occasional inspired moment. But the equating of maturity with the number of fucks you can cram into a sentence (other swear words get a cameo at best) is just one of many instances where Dog Days falls short of its ambitions.

At its core, Dog Days is no different from the burgeoning number of third-person shooters on the market. The over-the-shoulder camera, regenerating health and cover-based combat system could have been cut and pasted from Gears of War, Mass Effect etc. In fact the only thing that slightly distinguishes Kane and Lynch 2’s gameplay from other games in the genre is the fact that cover actually works like cover, and not like an impenetrable wall that you can safely hide behind until your adversaries poke their heads out and await to be blessed by your bullets.

What really makes Kane and Lynch 2 stand out is how it looks and, to an extent, feels. The visuals are styled as if somebody was filming the action from behind with a cheap video camera. As such, the camera shakes as it follows Lynch through the streets of Shanghai, juddering violently when you break into a run. Additionally, nudity and particularly violent scenes are pixellated out, adding to this idea of the game being amateur footage playing out after the events portrayed have occurred.

Frankly, it’s a gimmick, but it’s a very good gimmick. Not only is it currently unique in gaming, it also genuinely affects how the game feels. For example, you might locate an enemy in your sights, only to have the camera rocked by a nearby explosion. Furthermore, the handycam style fits perfectly with the relentless pace of the plot. Kane and Lynch are constantly on the move as they attempt to seal a lucrative arms deal that will set them up for life. That is, until the accidentally kill the daughter of a powerful gang boss, after which everything begins to unravel, and the pair are caught up in a whirlwind of set-ups, betrayals, and gruesome revenge.

Unfortunately Dog Days’ gritty styling can’t make up for it’s shortcomings, foremost of which is that the game is far, far too short. Even on the hardest setting you should expect to be seeing the end credits in less than four hours, and shave another hour off if you’re playing with a friend. This has major implications for the story.

Aside from the abundance of hysterical swearing, dialogue is pretty sparse, and so, as with the first game, Kane and Lynch are never properly developed. There are glimpses of emotion amid their unstable partnership, but they are little more than token gestures toward character. Most annoyingly, Lynch’s supposed psychosis is barely apparent at all, pathetically excused from the story by the fact that he is taking new medication.

The end result is that, for all its adult themes, Dog Days feels rather puerile, sipping at the wineglass of maturity before staggering around, pretending to be drunk. Ultimately this does not make it any less fun, but there is no escaping the fact that Dog Days could have been much better.

You can take our lives, but you'll never take our Whiskey!

If you like Mafia, you will like Mafia 2. Normally you would see this  line at the end of a game review, but I figured I would spare you any tedious preamble and get straight to the root of the matter. After all, that’s pretty much how the rest of the gaming community has pigeon-holed 2K Czech’s latest creation.

In fairness, it is quite understandable that so many reviewers have resorted to this lowest-common-denominator of  conclusions. There’s no escaping the fact that Mafia 2 is very, very similar to it’s seven-year-old prequel.Yet games like  Starcraft 2 have seen nothing but praise for their similarities to the original, so it seems odd that Mafia 2 has been so harshly criticised for following the exact same development outline.

One reason for this is that many people expected Mafia 2 to be GTA IV in a sharper suit, and were disappointed when they discovered that, rather than being a free-roaming experience filled with wacky side missions and absurd challenges, the city of Empire Bay turned out to be little more than a backdrop for an intensely linear, plot-driven experience. 2K Czech want to tell a story, and they’re not going to let you get sidetracked by an irony achievement for running over a hundred people in an ambulance.

This is a good thing, because it’s a story you’ll want to listen to. The tone is considerably darker than that of the original Mafia, and the plot is more complex and involving, dealing with multiple ‘families’ vying for control of Empire Bay. Your character, Vito Scalletta, is a callous and uncompromising figure, as is his hedonistic companion Joe Barbarro. There are moments, however, when the pair’s humanity shines through the endless betrayal and back-stabbing that are otherwise seen as an occupational hazard. There are plenty of references to classic gangster movies too, including a hilarious drunken homage to the burial scene from Goodfellas, and a brilliantly executed crossover of the first game’s plotline.

While Mafia 2 is plot-heavy, it’s also more than an interactive story. Driving through Empire Bay is a joy, especially in the early winter missions when the snow and ice genuinely affect how the cars feel. The city itself is a work of art, bustling with life and filled with little details such as newspaper hawkers. The gunfights are suitably intense, and while they bring nothing particularly new or innovative to the table, combat is fluid and, crucially, gets the basics right.  Enemies stumble and stagger convincingly when shot, and the cover system actually works properly, insofar as a a wooden fence will only provide limited cover, whereas a stone pillar is a much more effective shield.

Most importantly, the combat scenarios are varied and entertaining. One particularly memorable mission sees Vito, Joe and Henry attempting to assassinate a rival gangster with a mounted machine gun. The hit is botched, resulting in a frantic escape from a burning building, with Vito forced to cover Joe as he carries a severely wounded Henry on his shoulders.

None of this is to say Mafia 2 is flawless, but the complaints that it is too linear, and too similar to the original, are misguided. In actuality, the game’s issues stem from a lack of ambition to build upon the successes of the original. So where many have bemoaned the lack of side missions, the real issue is the relative brevity of the main storyline. Mafia 2 is considerably shorter than its older brother, and too much playing time is spent doing menial tasks. This has implications for the storyline. Multiple characters, such as Henry Tomassino and Leo Falcone, are not given enough time to let their characters develop, which lessens the impact of several major plot twists.

So while it’s true that if you like Mafia, you will like Mafia 2, you will probably enjoy it somewhat  less than the first game, and you might feel that, after nurturing this game for seven years , 2K Czech should have brought something bigger and bolder to the table.

Yes, I know this screenshot have a "Move" Icon on it, and the review doesn't mention move.

No, I’m not going to go there. We all know what Tiger Woods did, and all the opinions that could possibly be held on the matter have been well and truly voiced, as have all the bad jokes that have surfaced since the incident. I’m as guilty as anyone else for participating in the worldwide mocking of one of the world’s greatest golfers, but right now I’m here to review a game, so let’s concentrate on that, shall we?

What I want to talk about is whether there’s any point whatsoever in buying this iteration of PGA Tour on the PS3. It’s been quite a while since I played a golf game other than the minigame on Wii Sports Resort, and I think this is somewhat understandable. After all, surely tapping the buttons on a gamepad pales in comparison to swinging a wii mote around.

Read the full review here

Lights! Colours! Sounds! Fruit!

Space Ark is so cute it verges on the point of being creepy. Imagine Iggle Piggle vomiting glitter and rainbows onto a giggling Tellytubby. That’s the scale of cuteness we’re talking about here. If the eyes of the Arkonauts were any bigger they would probably fall out of their sockets. Don’t let the fact that the game is aimed squarely at younger kids lead you to automatically assume it’s rubbish. While that might usually be the case, Space Ark is actually a decent chunk of (incredibly) fluffy fun.

Taking command of the sickeningly cute Arkonauts, it is your job to help them repopulate the galaxy by terraforming planets so that they are suitably luscious for the Arkonauts to reside on. So how is this terraforming process performed? A mixture of atmosphere engines, air purifiers, water generators and life-seeders? Don’t be silly, the best way to create habitable worlds is by playing a game that combines Breakout, Peggle and a sprinkling of space-invaders, of course.

Read the full review here.