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.