A jet black Dodge Charger slides from the freeway with a screech, running onto a dirt track barely wide enough to accommodate it. The panicked driver just manages to avoid losing control of the car altogether, steadying the nose as the accelerometer nudges 100. Back on asphalt, a 1967 Chevrolet Camaro is also nearing a ton, switching lanes to avoid head–on traffic. The Charger tumbles across clumps of mud and stone, sliding back on to the tarmac. In doing so it connects with the back end of the Chevy, launching it high into the air where it flips on its side twice and lands back on the road, a smoking ruin.
This is 2007, and I’m watching Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof.
See, I missed out on the golden age of car chases on the big screen. Vanishing Point, The Italian Job, The French Connection… all of these were lost on me and my pathetic post–1970’s birth. With this in mind, it’s probably fair to say that I wasn’t the target audience to Reflection’s late–90’s gaming revolution (Incidentally, it was a genuine revolution – perhaps the first 3D game to wrestle sandbox game play away from the jealous clutches of the time-rich sociopath and have it land squarely at the feet of the well-adjusted young go-getter that comprised the Playstation’s fan base, Driver couldn’t help but feel like seriously new shit). This was no skin off my nose: what fun, I reasoned, could be extracted from a game bereft of enemies, obstacles, or any real objective to speak of?
I was, of course, being relentlessly ignorant. Today any game offering less freedom of exploration than Driver seems hopelessly dated, with play restraints of any kind being questioned by a player base that have learned to expect endlessly pushable boundaries. Since 1998 the realisation that some area, object or function of a game is inaccessible has ceased to be met with the query, “So what am I supposed to do instead?” Now the question on everybody’s lips is, “Why the hell not?”
Of course, the Grand Theft Auto series has become the watchword for non-linear gaming of this kind, a beacon of choice which a horde of “me too” bastardizations have no qualms over following religiously. For many, Rockstar’s low budget E3 2001 booth was the breeding ground for the new wave of urban sandbox games, with both headliner (and eventual flop) State Of Emergency and vaguely promising side project Grand Theft Auto III being unveiled. In reality, the ground work to this exciting new genre had been laid several years before in Reflections Newcastle-based studio. Unfortunately for the latter developer, the huge success of the post-PSone Grand Theft Autos, coupled with the deteriorating quality of the Driver series (from genre-defining revelation to tired, cheapened experience within 4 games) has justifiably moved the limelight somewhat.
But anyway, back to me and my experience, or lack thereof, of car chase movies. With only a handful of modern, CGI filled chases knocking about my head space, it made sense for me not to fully understand the tantalising prospect of recreating the best of the bunch. What I could understand, when I finally got around to playing the game, was the immense pleasure to be had from power sliding round corners in Miami, scattering debris from ill-placed garbage in San Francisco, and… well, that’s as far as I got. Epic though the Driver experience was back in the day, a massive slice of the fun was cut off from me because my miniscule thumbs and childish hand-eye co-ordination couldn’t cope with a training level so hardcore that it once played Russian roulette with a fully loaded gun and won. (Later it kicked Chuck Norris’ ass when he started bitching about meme theft.) This kind of unassailable hurdle has a sort of halcyon charm attached to it today, but as a child it proved to be teeth-grindingly frustrating, effectively reducing the game to two handfuls of roads for my 10-year-old self to cruise about in to my heart’s content. That this never got old, despite such a massive amount of game play being kept behind lock and key, speaks volumes of the quality of the game.
Forget all that, though; today I return to my PSone a veritable driving God. Police blockades, once an inescapable burden, now crumble before my lane-weaving proficiency. The blank spots which occur just before gaining air at the top of Californian hills, once a frightening game of chance, have become easily manageable with my intricate steering. Where I used to cower in fear at the prospect of coming across rubbish tips, shop windows, traffic light posts, parking meters, park benches, post boxes, fire hydrants, picnic tables, cars, vans or buses, now I happily eat up all obstacles with my feet at the pedals of a machine I feel perfectly in sync with. Be it my experience with slightly more complex driving films or with far more complex gaming hardware, I come to the driving fore with a great deal more confidence than before. And that tough-as-nails training mission? Bitch, please. Done within one go, dusted in two.
And here things go a bit hairy. Launching you into an undercover police campaign, the main game features a storyline which is never easy to follow - and probably not worth doing so, even if I could. The dialogue is an embarrassment, full of cringe worthy lines delivered by lazy voice actors which at best comes across as cheesy and at worst, xenophobic. Cut scenes which must have looked crazy cool at the time are now painful to watch, their noticeably slow movement only exacerbating the sense you get that the whole thing would have been better without them, or any story at all. If, by the time you get to the Big Apple, you’re not begging for a simple series of challenges without a superfluous plot to drive it, you’re a better man than me. In most games, particularly those from a bygone age, this failing would only constitute a small slap on the wrists, but Driver is a game firmly nailing its colours to the “cool” post, and the transfer from cinematic experience to interactive plaything really ought to have been more seamless than this.
But hell, do what you have to do to avoid this getting you down. Make copious amounts of tea during the FMVs. Sing to yourself in your head while Tanner shoots the breeze with generic Afro-American drug pusher no.34. Zone out completely until you’re back behind the wheel, chasing down proper bad guys and avoiding well-meaning bad guys once again. Because as an artifact, Driver is of historical importance to the advancement of videogames, and as a playing experience, few can touch it for the sense of speed and edge-of-the-seat action it provides. If you know your history, you’ll already have played it, and if you don’t, you better have a damn good excuse.

Blog's Closed

Thanks to everyone who popped on for a look, but from now on all content will be hosted here thanks to a discount DreamHost promo code that Limmy handed out. It's still under construction, but there are a couple of things on there now and I have a basic template up. Cheers, and see you over there.

Some games can be summed up with breathtaking succinctness. Various publications may well waste their time with lucid prose and detailed analysis of their content, but there is little to really be gleaned from these beyond what is found beside the score. These games are in increasingly short supply in the games industry, with 10 – page spiels becoming a more common phenomenon – can you imagine anyone spending 10 pages extolling the virtues of Space Invaders, finding relevant tactical information about Sensible Soccer, or even writing walkthroughs to some of the first beat-em-ups?
Games of such staunch loyalty to their genres do still exist, however; nobody can blame the reviewer who tells of Dr. Kawashima’s Brain Training being “Enjoyable maths and English puzzles”, Mercenaries 2 as “Blowing shit up”, or Jimmy White’s Snooker as, well, “Snooker”. These games do exactly what they’re supposed to do, delivering to loyal genre fans but rarely offering any innovation or major surprises in content.
Do not, under any circumstances, be coerced into thinking that Hogs of War falls under this category. A game of such magnificence is let down massively by the caveat of “Its Worms, in 3D”. While Worms is a game of instinct – do you have enough time to ninja rope over to that weapons crate, before wildly firing into that crowd of enemies? – Hogs of War is an intensely tactical affair which will have you pausing the game for some quick maths on several occasions.
Worms is a game which rewards quick thinking and quicker trigger fingers. Hogs of War rewards patience and single-minded adherence to a well thought-out plan. We played through the single player campaign co-operatively with friends, and extensive debates on the use of tactics were not uncommon. Experimentation proved fruitful – the tunnel vision of AI soldiers is exploitable to a fault and the “gas and pass” game plan which we put to use (when pinned back to a few pigs hopelessly out-gunned and out-numbered, bear in mind that once gassed by poison grenades, enemies will do nothing to counter their slow death if everybody on your team is able to hide themselves) brought us many an unlikely success. The quality of Hogs of War by no means belittles that of Worms – both games are good alone and great with friends – but they remain different enough for preferences to be justified, and we set up camp firmly in Hogs of War’s side of the divide.
And even if it wasn’t for all that, another important aspect sets Hogs of War apart from Worms, or just about any other video game for that matter. This game is funny. Today’s technology allows for thousands (oh vague cop-out figures, we do love you) of lines of speech to be pre-recorded into a game and spewed forth as the situation calls for, but the likes of Fable or Fallout cannot begin to charm as much as Hogs of War’s old school general of the main campaign, who’s morale boosting attempts include lines like “I am gob smacked! I thought this was a suicide mission!” The same is true for the friendlier voice of the multiplayer game, who occasionally admits to finding players overwhelmingly attractive. The visual style, too, is disarmingly racist in a “Never mind Uncle Nick, he’s from a far simpler time” kind of way. Thus, the French are portrayed as cowardly soap-dodgers, the Russians as treacherous sneaks, the Americans ignorant war-mongers, and the Brits as insulted prudes. “See,” says Uncle Nick with a sense of satisfaction, “at least I’m honest about our guys, too.”
And in this way Hogs of War really is the perfect summarization of what Playstation, as a brand, is. It’s staunchly un-PC but undeniably endearing, it knows what it’s there for but isn’t afraid to think outside the box, and most importantly it stands for all things good, clean, and fun.
It’s a bit like Worms, right, but 3D, you know?

Game of the Year Awards

For the next month or so, we'll be running our GOTY Awards right here at Games You Should Buy. As long as the game has been released at some point, in some territory this year, it is eligible (for example Rock Band, which came out last year in North America). It can be on any platform, and we'll dole out the awards by genre before the final three games are named between Christmas and New Year (giving us time to storm through any possible Christmas purchases). Please remember, GYSB is mostly just one guy, who doesn't own every platform under the sun, so for now, PS3, DS and PSP games will have to go unmentioned (although some may be included if they recieve glowing report cards from said guy's friends and online hangouts). Each genre will have a best game and one runner up, but the final award will have both a second and third best. Let's get started!

Paul's excellent (PSone) Adventures

The column so old - school it points out its own sarcasm... NOT!

Worms Armageddon

You know Worms, right? Team 17’s invertebrate mascots hell – bent on the destruction of one another, their motives more mysterious than that of the American military?
Well, the trio of forays into three – dimensional territory (Worms 3D, Worms Forts: Under Siege, and Worms 4, all available for Xbox, Playstation 2 and PC) may have tainted your memory of the original. Their unrelenting shittiness may even have given you the impression that Worms, as a series, is no good. But, as those who have played the recent handheld versions will attest, this impression is mistaken. 2D Worms still delivers big on mindless explosions and multiplayer thrills with a design scheme which has gone through only the most minor of changes in its decade of existence.
For those of you foolish or stubborn enough to have missed out on Worms or Worms Armageddon, there is much to learn. Our scene opens on a randomly – generated, simplistic landscape to which the general laws of physics apply (Up is up, down is down, and the latter has priority unless you can break your fall with some scenery), with some notable exceptions. Things blow up with no regard to what they are made of – so a rock is as easy to break through as a tree trunk, which in turn has the same properties as a satellite dish – and everything which isn’t a player is treated as a single object, so that a ladder propped up against a tree will not fall over when shot at. It’s traditional turn – based action / strategy with a huge variety of ker-azy weaponry, and oil barrels, land mines and the like are thrown in for good measure. Got it? No, of course you don’t. It becomes intuitive when you begin to play it, though, so just get your hands on the game and stop wasting our time. Believe us, you won’t regret it.
Team 17 and Infogrames have done a commendable job of skipping daintily along the line of throwaway plaything and heart – capturing avatar with Worms. When Charlie uses his final few breaths to mutter “Oh dear” after being shot to pieces by your wriggly horde, only the coldest of hearts would fail to feel for him. But then he explodes, leaving behind only a modest gravestone, and it’s time to concentrate on finishing off his mates.
And why wouldn’t you? The game seems to have found the pinnacle realisation of man’s incessant desire to maim and destroy, and it lies in placing ridiculously overpowered weaponry in the hands of the most timid of God’s creatures. Suffice to say this wouldn’t work with humans – can you imagine anybody having gleeful childhood memories of sending a bad guy to his watery grave at the hands of a baseball bat? Well, of course you can, we’re talking about videogames after all, but can you imagine the BBFC letting all this pass under their noses?
In the end, it’s this balance between chaotic violence and hilarious irrelevance that makes Worms Armageddon an accomplished single player, and virtually unparalleled multiplayer experience, all these years later.

Review: Mirror's Edge

Fundamentally, Mirror's Edge is a game about balance. During those tentative first steps, it's literally about not falling from the ledges, poles and bars that seem oh so daunting to cross. Once the controls have been acclimatised to, it's a case of keeping encounters in check and learning how to deal with disarms and hand-to-hand combat. Finally, as Faith's movements become muscle memory and the Speed Runs tower ahead, it's about balancing the insatiable lust for speedy shortcuts and risky jumps with the safer, more assured routes: go too fast and you'll inevitably fall to your doom and force a restart, but go too slow and you'll simply take too long.

Ignore the dissenting voices. When you're sprinting desperately down a corridor, pulse racing, palms sweaty, ignoring the wailing sirens and the bullets shattering the scenery around you, gaze fixated on that one point fifty yards ahead, it hits you like a brick wall. This is nirvana, the pure gameplay moment that so many seek yet fail to achieve. MMOs deliver something comparable, but it's drip-fed, for the patient and the patient alone. Perhaps Mirror's Edge's most astounding trait is that it can, depending on skill of course, provide that thrill within a matter of hours.

There's so much to praise in Faith's world. The arresting visual design, the pitch perfect score, the superbly realised level layouts, the tightest controls this side of a spaceship... but let's get some things out of the way. Mirror's Edge has been pretty heavily criticised by some quarters of the gaming press. They feel frustrated, cheated, and short changed. They are flat out wrong. Almost every single time something goes awry, it's the player's fault. Ineptitude is not a flaw. Secondly, the game's length is not an issue given the tremendous replay value. If anything it's as much Radiant Silvergun as it is Prince of Persia, the quest to repeat certain sections until they are hard-wired to the fingers; hours and hours can be sunk into this game if approached with the correct mindset. Last, and most importantly, it seems many have missed the point. The whole angle was to create a first person platforming game, not a Lara Croft reskin. It does what Portal did for the puzzle genre last year. The immersion is paramount to the experience, the player is meant to feel at one with Faith. If escapism is the reason we play videogames, Mirror's Edge hits the mark absolutely dead on.

Of course there comes a time in every single high scoring game review when the reader is informed that "___ is not perfect". This remains a truth for Mirror's Edge, obviously, but it comes within frightening distance of that Holy Grail. There are problems with Faith's characterisation. It's not a case of Masterchief syndrome whereby the player is meant to envisage themselves in the suit, because we already have a talkative, established character in place. This works for third person games, when we appear to be merely influencing what this preconceived avatar is doing, but one can't help but feel strangely detached from the character one is meant to be. This surfaces only during the jarring hand-drawn cutscenes, which in themselves add nothing meaningful to the storyline. They look out of place and infact serve to the detriment of the experience overall. Why could they not just be rendered in-engine, from the same viewpoint as the rest of the game? The plot is also a relatively throwaway affair, nothing that hasn't been done a thousand times previously, and the thinly veiled loading times so prevalent in modern gaming are by no means dispelled. However, dwelling upon these hangups becomes mind-numbingly irrelevant about thirty seconds into a level as the already slight feelings of ill will are washed away.

It's difficult to say whether DICE are aware exactly what they have created. Mirror's Edge is an incredible piece of software. The studio has nailed each and every crucial element with such considerable equanimity and poise that it truly sticks out like a sore thumb among the reams of first person action games that rely so heavily on catering to the atavistic urges of young men and little else. There are those who are afraid of change, but Mirror's Edge dares to be different, and incase you hadn't guessed, it succeeds in nigh on every feasible aspect. That is why it has earned the very highest accolade. That is why you need to play this game.

10/10

One-liner sum up: ...

One Year On

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare

It's been interesting to see the criticisms of this third installment of Infinity Ward shit crawl out of the internet's woodwork over the course of this year. Cries of balancing issues, infinitely respawning enemies and a lack of fixes for some aspects of the online play have surfaced recently, and they aren't totally unfounded. However, it's not too much a stretch of the imagination to think of this as a not too subtle example of familiarity breeds contempt. It's not uncommon to enter a lobby of sixteen to hear at least half complain that they "hate this effing game", but a quick glance at their spot on the leaderboards and their playtime of the online aspect tells a different story altogether.

Yes, there are many out there who have been playing the same maps and the same modes, using the same loadouts and the same tactics, with the same perks and the same friends that they have been for a full twelve months now, and going back to play it objectively, as if one were someone who had never touched the game before, will indubitably display exactly why so many have suffered for so many hours for so few Gamerpoints. It's a thrilling, engaging, intense experience, one of a sort that only a select few games can claim to deliver. The visuals are gorgeous, creating a unique atmosphere in amongst all the dilapidated greyness. The sound is a symphony of chaos, as wood splinters around you and dust flies up into the camera amongst the thunderous cacophony of the perfectly weighted weaponry. All of these elements gel into what is a pretty exceptional whole.

Aside from perk imbalance with the online modes, Call of Duty 4 remains a glimmering beacon of concentrated insanity, a perfect storm burned to disc that stands out from the "Shoulder-Pad FPS" crowd not because it reinvents the wheel, but because it is such a refined vision of what one could expect from an action game. Call of Duty virgins eager for some blasting could do a lot worse than pick this one up at a knockdown price; for instance, pay £50 for its sequel, World at War. A year later, CoD4 still stands head and shoulders above its peers.

RUJOOGWHP

Pirates vs. Ninjas Dodgeball on Xbox 360



Ah, this old nugget. An argument that has raged for eons; who is actually cooler, pirates or ninjas? PvND sets out to finally put that to rest (along with robots and zombies thrown in for good measure), but does it measure up to the epic real life battles we're sure the two sides have had in the past (so what if they never coexisted!)?

No, it really can't measure up to these crazy battles that we talked about whilst tripping on some sugar-spliced variant of Acid. Infact, it's not very good at all...

The biggest issue here is the camera. It never seems zoomed out enough, and when a character runs to the edge of the screen the game's controls and ideed the player's senses aren't able to cope. Who'd have thoguht that placing something off screen would make it difficult to control?

Other than that, there's the overly vague nature of the play itself, which simply requires you point your stick roughly in the direction of your foe and mash some buttons. That said, there are some neat touches such as parries and catches, however once sussed they effectively break the game as no further skills are required.

There's a degree of fun to be had, the cartoony visuals are nice enough and dodging with the right stick never gets old. It's a shame then, that in the end, it's the frankly baffling design choices that hamper Pirates vs Ninjas dodgeball beyond repair. A lack of stages (seemingly just four) and little to discern between the three modes means this is one you should probably steer clear of, never mind waste Microsoft Points on.

One liner sum up: Thar she blows!

Video Blog!

15 Second Review

Crysis on PC



Crysis looks nice. Very nice. Even on the lowest settings it is more than easy on the eye. It's a technical feat, a physics toolbox, a living, breathing, semi-open world bursting at the seams with detail. Disappointingly, the guns themselves aren't the stars of the show, and neither are the characters or indeed the story, and sadly, realistically splintering palm trees an FPS does not make. Firing weapons lacks the audiovisual punch we're accustomed to with Triple A shooters, the structure is suspect, enemies can often swamp the player unfairly, the AI is competent if unexceptional and there's virtually no multiplayer enjoyment to speak of. Still, worth checking out if you can run it; good for a play through but nothing more.

6/10

One-liner sum-up: The Jessica Simpson of games: looks great, but that's pretty much all it has going for it.

Games You Should Buy

Halo: Combat Evolved for Xbox



We're now a year on from Halo 3's release. People still play it, people still love it, and a lot of people grudge it basically because it wasn't as good as the first. Don't get us wrong, Halo 3 is a pretty good game, it's just that everything it does, its 2001 grandfather does about five times better.

If you need a reminder of just how superior a shooter Combat Evolved is than the last two installments in the franchise, check out the PC demo for a quick reminder or nab it off of the Marketplace for roughly a tenner. Obviously if you already own it then it shouldn't be a big ask to fire it up for a few minutes, so disregard the previous sentence... Anyway, Halo is a fantastic demonstration of how a console FPS should be done, and it pulls off almost every element you'd look for in a modern shooter with aplomb and then some, practically setting the standard for FPS controls on the Xbox that are imitated by every big shooter today.

Aside from the excellent, responsive controls, there is plenty to rave about. The level design, particularly in the game's middle section, is nigh on peerless, with some fantastic vistas popping up in every stage (except The Library, eugh). Additionally, enemy AI remains a superb achievement to this day as the Covenant dip around your line of sight just as adeptly as a human player. Also, remember when the story in Halo was actually engaging? Yeah, this is it.

No online, no dual wielding, no fancy features, but a solid framework that was revolutionary at the time and remains exceptional today. Reward yourself and play this again as soon as possible.

One Liner Sum Up: Original and best

Face Off!

[Sorry about the lack of updates lately, one half is busy, the other is just downright bastard lazy]

In Face Off! we pit two similar games against each other in a battle to the death. It's just like Allies vs Nazis, North vs South, Ali vs Frazier, Jack Thompson vs His Own Stupidity! Today, we see a Clash of the Half Life 2 Total Conversion Swords and Swashbuckler Mods; who will emerge victorious?

IN THE RED CORNER
Age of Chivalry, a methodical, medieval based sword 'em up.

IN THE BLUE CORNER
Pirates, Vikings and Knights II, of which the titles says all you need know.

FIGHT!


Round One: Graphics
Both games pack a good punch in this department, especially considering their price of precisely nil (assuming you have the Source Engine lying around somewhere on your PC). On full graphics they are roughly equals, however some unexpected juttering was experienced when using these settings on AoC. Terribly annoying considering it was running on a PC that can pump out 40 FPS with Crysis' most GPU melting efforts. Stylistically, also, PVK trumps AoC, utilising bright colours and superb character models to rather excellent effect, contrasting totally with the latter's muddy browns and greys.

Winner: Pirates, Vikings and Knights II

Round Two: Gameplay
Again, the two diverge completely. Age of Chivalry takes a more tactical tack, while Pirates... aims for an almost Timesplitters-esque pace. This is all down to personal preference and is undoubtedly a bit of a marmite situation. While GYSB slightly favours the considerable lick of PVK, there are those out there who simply would rather the back-and-forth nature of Age. It could be said, however, that each indulges their trait a little too much at times, with PVK becoming almost too frantic and AoC occasionally feeling like trying to race turtles in molasses. We'll call it a draw.

Winner: Nobody, or everybody. Is the glass half full or half empty? Even the conclusion is down to what you'd rather...

Round Three: Maps
This is a toughie. AoC's maps range from completely awe inspiring to utterly atrocious, while PVK's are pretty robust across the board. Though there's no doubt that Age of Chivalry's painstakingly recreated Helm's Deep is an epic stroke of genius, the same can't be said for the utterly confuddling greys and browns of the ultimately painfully generic castles that can lead a whole team down the wrong path, or the ill advised arena level which forces players to rush to get to a door before it shuts that sometimes won't open because some poor bastard is standing just a bit too close. Pirates, Vikings and Knights II doesn't contain any exceptional maps, but on the same token they're all solid, easy on the eye and not any hassle to navigate. 2-0 Blue.

Winner: Pirates, Vikings and Knights II

Round 4: Multiplayer
The pair are online-only experiences, and this functionality can make or break a game of this relative obscurity. Sadly, there aren't exactly a myriad of servers to pick from on either game, but for the overall ease of connection, ability to get into games, lack of bugs and least scope to ruin the experience for others, PVK triumphs again. AoC's little connection window may display a low ping on connection (assuming there's a spot in the few overcrowded servers that exist), but too often does one enter a game with a reasonable latency only for it to jump up to a consistent 200+ twenty seconds in and be auto booted for the trouble. That said, even low latency can mean considerable lag, with GYSB experiencing stuttering and crazy jumps forward through the very fabric of space and time with a ping of less than fifty. PVK's handful of servers generally deal much better with connection speed, and the absence of Age of Chivalry's multitude of bugs and glitches help it forth to another effortless conquest.

Winner: Pirates, Vikings and Knights II

Round 5: And the winner is...
Pirates, Vikings and Knights II by knockout in the fourth. Age of Chivalry's valiant and most definitely entertaining display was thwarted by its candidly superior rival. Both are worth a look, no doubt, but PVK is simply the far less frustrating and overall more rewarding experience.

Winner: Pirates, Vikings and Knights II
[Even if we're crap at it and awesome at AoC, which is very much the case]

Paul's Excellent (PSone) Adventures

Rejecting the fancy shmancy graphical sheen and technical whizz-bang of newer games consoles, Paul has followed the example of the amish and looked to the past for his technological fix. In a regular column, we'll be following his progress as he checks out decade-old cutting edge on the PSone. FIFA 2002



Imagine you walk into a small café during your lunch hour and, because you’re a sweet – toothed individual, take a chocolate cake to the counter along with a crisp fiver. The enthusiastic young man behind the counter tells you that your money is no good here, and that instead you are to engage in tribal dance with him for a few minutes, at which point he’ll be happy to let go of his chocolate cake.
The transfer system in FIFA 2002 is a bit like this – charming and pleasant, but makes absolutely no sense from a business point of view. You see, instead of the usual bid – reply – negotiation method which has become standard practice for all football games, not just management sims, FIFA in the early 21st century chose to operate a system which gave you far more freedom of movement. So long as your team has the readies to match the (exceptionally reasonable, as a rule) asking price for your desired player, the transfer is instantaneous and hassle – free, with Zinedine Zidane seeing no reason not to join Kilmarnock provided they can stump up the 15,000 credits (or roughly two of Killie’s mid – range midfielders)
Interestingly though, this is the same for selling players – other clubs never show any interest in your players; this isn’t necessary. Instead, whenever you find yourself landed with an over – priced flop, you simply select the team you want to sell him too and it’s done. This isn’t only true of the team you play as – every team is as malleable as this, a whole transfer market which stops and goes as you tell it, allowing you not only to manufacture the best team in the world, but the best league or continent too.
You may be thinking this all sounds a bit pants, but you’re damned wrong. Unlike today, games during the PSone era knew what they were supposed to do, and did it. LMA Manager had the realistic (if you can call it that) transfer market; FIFA removed all that obtrusive nonsense and gave you maximum bang for minimum buck.
This commendable dedication to doing what it does well continues throughout the front – end of the game, as it famously would in future iterations of the series. The soundtrack, though woefully threadbare by today’s standards, had some real standout tracks, most notably “19-2000” by Gorillaz, which I still hold to be the best title song for a FIFA game, ever (Kings Of who?).
Other future FIFA hallmarks seem to have made their debut around the turn of the century, too. The wealth and depth of teams and nations involved in this outing is enough to labour any statistician’s breathing (Anyone for the Israeli Premier League?), and even manages to put today’s portable FIFAs, not to mention a certain Pro Evolution Soccer, to shame. Scottish football fans outside of the Old Firm won’t find any joy in FIFA 2007 for the Xbox 360, but their teams are all present and correct in this primitive kick - about.
Have the gall to kick off a football match, though, and those familiar bugbears come a-flooding back, multiplied by an entirely unnecessary power – up function for shots, crosses and passes. Though this has passed into standard fare for football games today, what you are presented with in FIFA 2002 is a function which is rough and far from complete. Passes of any description take an age to charge up, which means to get any power into a lob, you first need to ensure you have a few metres of defender – free space. What’s more, link – up play of any kind is made completely obsolete by the incredibly weak passes produced by the button taps which have become second nature to a generation of football fans who have never had it so good. Trying to set up a one – two, are you? Don’t be so God damn stupid. This is FIFA on the PSone.
Add to this major pain in the backside any complaints you have about FIFA today. Treacle – like pitches, you say? Players today react like Sonic the Hedgehog in comparison to this sorry lot. What’s that? Nonsensical shooting physics? In 2002, players in FIFA were likely to fire balls into the crowd, tap them out into touch, and blast them into the air - essentially, anywhere but the back of the net.
Still, FIFA 2002’s saving grace is the simple fact that it’s cute. What would have you biting you cheek or mashing your fists in childish frustration today is easy to laugh off in a game produced 7 years ago. When Henry messes up a shot which looked destined for the honey pot, it probably won’t cause you to scream expletives at the screen. Instead you’ll turn to a loved one, guffaw and say something to the tune of “Look, honey – we thought this was cutting edge once!” The fact that you paid less than the cost of a Happy Meal for the privilege can’t hurt, either.
What’s more, play the game on its own terms and it yields a playable, if basic, tactical game of football. Put in the effort with the ridiculous power bars and you’ll find yourself occasionally creating beautiful through ball maneuvers, even if these are outweighed by scores of frustrating miscalculations. Mash triangle (that’s right, because why just hold in R1 to sprint when you can give you thumbs RSI at the same time? Honestly, did we never think at the time that the feeling of speed could be re-created in a more sensible – and safer – way?) for long enough and you begin to see a strategy to the use of pace.
The sad truth, however, is that FIFA 2002’s real party trick is making you see the good in EA Sports more recent outings.

Free Online Game of the Month

Off Road Velociraptor Safari



Off Road Velociraptor Safari is utterly awesome. It's a browser based, 3D game in which you try to run over or bludgeon the other 'Raptors in the area. All it demands is a plugin download, but don't be put off, it takes all of twenty seconds to download and install, and you won't even have to restart your browser.

ORVS is a very accomplished little game. The graphics are impressive, the area the jeep gets to roam in is pretty sizeable, there are built in achievements, and it doesn't take long to load either. The gameplay is somewhere between Total Overdose's kill chaining and PGR's kudos system. There are many things that help you nab a better score, and if you can keep up the combos by doing more stuff, you'll score a fuckton of points. Killing the dinosaurs themselves is where the most fun lies. Your jeep trails a mace of sorts on the push of the Spacebar, and using a bit of skill and timing you can swing it round to smash the oversized chickens and hopefully stick them to it at the same time. The big points are grabbed by "Teleporting" the dinosaurs in the orange terminals scattered around the landscape, and you can pick up dinosaurs you've left lying around with the mace to assist you in doing so. It all works very well and is pretty complex and ambitious in scope for a simple browser game. What the hell are you still reading for, don't you have some time to waste?

One liner sum up: Go go Godzilla!

Bargain of the Month: Riiiiiidge Racer

Kaz Hirai's wet dream at a cut down price on PSP




Ridge Racer On Amazon Marketplace

Ah yes, good old Kaz. Not content with thrilling absolutely nobody with his Ridge Racer presentation at E3 2006, he only had to go and make it the funniest, most cringe worthy moment in the event's history with his now infamous imitation of the series' signature quote. He may have become the laughing stock of the gaming community in a few depressing moments, but his enthusiasm wasn't exactly unwarranted.

The pick of the launch titles along with Lumines and WipeOut Pure, Ridge Racer was something of a mini-revolution on Sony's portable powerhouse at the time, effectively single handedly ushering in an era of console-quality 3D gaming on the go. Blindingly fast, with superb controls and an awesome soundtrack filled to the brim with both old and new, it was the sparkling gem in PSP's considerable crown. Although its star has faded with time, it remains an utterly compelling and immensely enjoyable racing game, and indeed a contender for best game on the handheld.

Much of this is down to the racing itself; a fast, responsive and slick balancing act that demands a deft touch and strategic use of drift and boost to master, but very little in the way of skill to enjoy. It is reminiscent of Sega's blue sky games in the visual department, and has enough challenges to keep you interested for months, especially as it's basically a "Best Of" compilation for the series as a whole. In layman's terms, Ridge Racer is balls out fun, and now that it's out there for little over a fiver, anyone in posession of a PSP and indeed a central nervous system owes it to themselves to pick it up.

One liner sum up: IT'S RIIIIIDGE RACER!

Games You Should Not Buy

Rainbow 6 Vegas 2 on Xbox 360, PS3 and PC

The first Rainbow 6 Vegas was a superb, tactical crawl through Sin City's most glamorous spots. It has a strong campaign, excellent multiplayer, and at the time was one of the best games to grace the year old 360. Rainbow 6 Vegas 2 arrived little over twelve months later with barely enough time to make sure its shoes were tied and its hair looked alright...and by God does it show.

"Rush job" is not a title we especially delight in branding games with. In the past it was the sort of tag associated with EA (particularly their sports franchises) until they got their act together, and isn't bandied about often. There's a reason for that; to most developers, their games are labours of love, so they spend an inordinate amount of time polishing it and striving to ensure it's a well presented and slick piece of software before releasing it into the wild. This doesn't appear to have been the case with R6V2. Ubisoft Montreal have released what is essentially an unfinished game. Don't criticise just yet, allow us to elaborate.

We aren't saying the development team didn't do their best for the game to be a success. What we're saying is that they needed more time. It's understandable that Ubisoft management wanted their sequel out the door and onto shelves as soon as humanly possible, but it wouldn't be unreasonable to suggest that not enough time was afforded for the Montreal studio to create the best product possible. Simply put, Rainbow 6 Vegas 2 is not a good game. Infact, it just barely scrapes into the realms of average.

Essentially it's the first game plus one. Then minus ten. Some locations are recycled and the plot follows the same old thread from a different viewpoint, dragging the player through Vegas' less glamorous side, including downtown areas, junkyards and large, empty convention centres. Unfortunately, this is not why anyone visits the place in the real world, and it doesn't exactly let you lap up the sights like the original did. The gameplay remains largely untouched, bar a few features "borrowed" from Call of Duty 4, and to its credit it is still solid in that aspect. The biggest new addition comes in the shape of persistent character building through all the modes, and it works well, giving you a real sense of attachment to your soldier as you build up points in the pretty nicely implemented ACES system for XP and other rewards.

So far, so R6V.5, but unfortunately the glitchy nature of the first game remains intact in an even greater degree. Considering it was the main complaint last time round this could be pretty hard to believe, but once you've had to actually give up on the campaign because it's running at under 30 fps and skipping 90% horrendously, you'll know what we mean. What could have been a solid if unremarkable squad based shooter turns into an utter farce of broken single player and incomprehensibly laggy online play. Once you actually get into a lobby, a Herculian task itself, you're left to contend with the unplayable mush Ubisoft try to pass off for multiplayer. Bullets don't connect, disconnections are rife, and it simply doesn't work half the time. It's unfinished, and this is whatwe noted previously, there obviously wasn't enough time to get the core issues ironed out.

Yes, R6V2 has some neat ideas, but there's nothing worse than an utterly broken game, and although some fun can be squeezed out from Co-Op Terrorist Hunts, it simply doesn't justify the hassle. There may seem few grounds for complaints otherwise, but there's no doubt that a large chunk of the players have had similar experiences, and this is the kind of practice that turns potentially decent games into ones that come within a stone's throw of dire. It doesn't help that the graphics are dated, the environments are boring and the crux of the game is nigh on identical to the first, but sadly problems like those we experienced exist are unforgivable and result only in the wasting of a good thirty pounds.

One liner sum up: "This city has a few too many sins to overlook"

4/10

News: GYSB Podcsat

Our brand new podcast can be found here. Currently, there exists only a test episode that I recorded at the weekend, however we're hoping to do another one every Tuesday night. The podcast team will be revealed when tonight's episode goes live. Make sure you give it a listen!

http://gamesyoushouldbuy.mypodcast.com/index.html

RUJOOGWHP

Random Unqualified Judgments On Old Games We've Hardly Played



This is the first of a regular feature, in which we take a demo of a game we haven't played and attempt to base a full review on it, to be known as the slickly titled "RUJOOGWHP". Fun, but you should probably ignore the text and try it out for yourself if you have more than a passing interest regarding the game in question.

Dark Messiah: Might and Magic for PC
Demo courtesy of Steam

The picture above pretty much sums up Dark Messiah. It's essentially all about hacking into loads of fugly orcs, goblins and hard looking blokes in armour until they fall over in a big dead heap. You can hit them, hit them harder, crush them with planks by hitting the support, kick them, kick them onto spikes and kick them off the edge of various high up places. Well, you can zap them with magic and shoot them with arrows, but these are mostly peripheral to the core concept of chopping things with swords and then booting them while they're on the floor.

As you perhaps guessed from the above paragraph, Dark Messiah is a no nonsense game. The only unwieldy elements are the skill upgrades, which end up being neglected in favour of kicking more goblins off cliffs. At first glance it seems a bit like Bethesda's classic Oblivion, and one could do worse for one's inspiration, however the similarities are largely superficial. Where Oblivion had an enormous open map to discover and pretty deep Role Playing, Dark Messiah has linear levels and the aforementioned RPG-lite level up system, where Oblivion had beauty and finesse, Dark Messiah has dank environments (even the outdoor ones) and a slightly clumsy touch. Where Oblivion had bugs, Dark Messiah, has, well, more bugs.

Still, it'd be unfair to compare it in this way as it's clearly not trying to be an Elder Scrolls game. What it's trying to be is a game where you derive fun from twatting stuff with an ever expanding arsenal of increasingly huge weapons, and to its credit, it pulls it off fairly well. Fun was certainly to be had with all the hitting and kicking, but there was a niggling feeling that it was all pretty much the same thing over and over, with some needless fetch-questing in levels seemingly there not to break up the action, but to prevent the player from engaging in it whatsoever.

Overall, Dark Messiah looks quite nice, sounds quite nice, and plays smoothly. The combat is fun- after all stoving in big, ugly Orc faces with maces will never get old- however the game has more than its fair share of issues and there are a few niggling doubts about how much you really are enjoying yourself. Nonetheless, it's worth a whack, with the kicking itself worth the $20 alone.

One liner sum up: "Kick creature off cliff; repeat for 15 hours"

Star Wars: The Force Unleashed Demo Impressions

Lucasarts' latest effort shows its face on Marketplace

Previewed on Xbox 360

Pleasing people can sometimes be difficult; hundreds of thousands of budding comics, authors, musicians and directors will tell you that without hesitation. Sometimes it can be very easy, by, for instance, slapping "Star Wars" on the front of pretty much anything, from lunchboxes and drinks to shoddy sequels and games. If the logo's there, the happy faces will appear alongside the cash.

That's not to say that The Force Unleashed is your typical lazy, Lucas-branded cash-cow. Far from it, the game impresses on many levels, even in the short segment of time the demo allows. Stylistically, it seems to capture the Star Wars universe to a tee, while in purely graphical terms it cranks out an expansive array of lighting effects, anti-aliasing and explosions. The touted Euphoria AI is every bit as astounding as it was hyped to be, and although there wasn't a great opportunity to test it out, the DMM engine for realistically breakable objects looks tantalisingly worthy of the claims as well. Pretty much all the tech going on behind the scenes packs a considerable punch.

Sadly, the same can't be said for character movement. Simply running around and jumping feels nowhere near as meaty as it should be, and watching Starkiller leap about in an almost cartoonish fashion jars with the surprisingly lifelike AI and Physics. The lightsaber combat also falls victim to this. There is no sense of power to be had from your supposedly deadly weapon, and although they feel less like shiny batons than in some games in the franchise, you can't escape the fact that it's little more than a glorified stick.

Force Powers, on the other hand, work fantastically well. Endless fun can be had from picking up Stormtroopers and lobbing them around with Force Grab, Force Push busts open doors with aplomb, while Force Dash neatly serves as a dodge function when locked-on. The only power in the demo that seemed lacking was Force Lightning, with no real consequence from zapping an enemy other than them falling over like a pole. This spoils the illusion somewhat and is evidence that Euphoria is great for some elements of the AI, but not so much for others, as a simple animation would have better suspended one's disbelief on these occasions. When it comes down to it, the whole point of The Force Unleashed is to make the player feel as if they're in a Star Wars film, and when the player doesn't have this sensation for more than a second, the effect is ruined.

Were this an unlicensed game, we'd be chastising it, calling it foul, but, for the most part, it maintains the feeling of "being in" the films pretty well, and for that it must be commended. Though the combat seems a bit on the unimpressive side, the Force Powers are well implemented, the technology running everything on screen is polished and the score is a rousing halfway point between the Trilogies. Some small criticisms include the lock on system, which is a little odd and distracting as the camera adjusts to an unhelpful angle and the game sometimes struggles to find what you want to be facing. Similarly, the awkward character movement is often the only thing on the screen that appears stilted and out of place, causing it to stand out even more than it should. Sadly, given the nigh-on complete code of the demo level, none of this is likely to be altered before release. Overall though, The Force Unleashed looks set to be a boon for dedicated fans, who will be so amazed by how legitimately Star Wars an experience it is they'll need to pick their eyes up off the floor when they see it in action. It doesn't come close to justifying how much hype it's had, but when it hits shelves it will doubtless be an enjoyable romp through some familiar territory, although one wishes that little extra spit and polish had been applied that would have made all the difference.

One liner sum up: "The Force is average with this one"

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