Pixeljunk Shooter

This game's name is misleading. When I (and most other people, I suspect) think of shooters I think of arcade top-down scrolling shooters, or first person shooters at the very least. This game isn't really anything like either of those and although it's true that there are things lurking around to shoot, it doesn't take up too much of your time.

So, what's it all about?

As you've probably all seen videos of it being played, you'll be aware that you're the pilot of a small craft, heading down beneath the surface of a planet in order to rescue a bunch of miners who's done something rather silly. This is completely inconsequential, but it's explored in the paper-thin plot that probably spans a whole 500 words, if that. But were you really expecting a tensely written plot, interwoved with subtle undertones?

No, of course not; the game is called 'Shooter'.

It bears a superficial resemblance to games like Lander (or even Jetpac) inthat you navigate around a 2D playfield viewed side on, but the major difference here is that gravity doesn't effect your ship too much. If you've grappled and object and are dragging it about, you'll be slowly dragged downward but unburdened you'll happily hold position when you let go of the controls. Nor are you punished for collisions with the walls (by the end of second world, at least), which leads me to conclude that this is a puzzle game rather than a game of manual dexterity.

Don't get me wrong, the controls are instinctive and wonderful; your ship is agile and manuverable, borrowing from first person shooters in terms of the dual stickconfiguration. The left stick moves your ship in any direction (making it possible to fly backward!) and the second adjusts your facing and aiming. Pushing both sticks in the same direction for movement folds in your 'wings' allowing you to move significantly faster. Other than that, you've only got buttons for your grappling hook (for collecting survivors and other objects), and your cannon to shoot the various monsters that wish to murder you (or at least, drive the invading humans out of their caves). Holding down the fire button unleashes a non-stop hail of homing missiles which push you backward and increase your heat level.

Oh yes, the heat level. This is your 'health'. Getting shot, firing homing missles and getting close to heat sources (like Magma) increase the heat level of your ship, eventually causing it to malfunction and drop out of the sky, blowing up on contact with a hard surface. You have marginal control over your crash landing, so if you can ditch it in water you'll be instantly cooled off and returned to full functionality and you can use water at any time for this trick.

Water is one of many elements in the game that interact with each other. I won't talk about things further than what you'll find in the first few levels as discovering the interactions with them is part of the fun. If water interacts with Magma it cools it to rock, which you can shoot chunks out of, and this forms the basis of the games puzzles; you need to work out how to use the elements of the cave system against one another to ensure your progress and the successful rescue of the trapped scientists.

I played this for a few hours co-op last night, and it's possible to pick up Magma and Water suits for your ship, enabling you to spew lava and water respectively (duh). Great fun was had battling one another, resulting in much entertainment when my friend managed to seal me in a small dead end by turning the water into rock, creating an inpenetrable wall. I was most satisfied to learn that if I just sat in my small cave spraying water, the pressure eventually forced the blockage out explosively, with a huge gout of water chasing it.

Amazing!

Co-Op offers a few other features over single players, most notably the ability of one ship to rescue the other from crashing using the grapplin hook and dropping it in a water source to cool off, and whilst this does make the game slightly easier, the only punishment for death is a time penalty with the game over screen only appearing if you allow 6 scientists to die (or accidentally hill them!) in an area.

The game itself is quite short. My friend and I chewed through 2 of it's three worlds in about 3 hours last night, and I can't imagine the last forming any sort of impassable barrier; on the other hand, it's only £6.50, which really isn't a huge amount to ask for what I suspect will be about a 5-hour play through. I'm also looking forward to giving it a go single player, as some of the puzzles we've passed we've made explicit use of the fact that there are 2 of us floating around. I anticipate an increased challenge solo.

There's no online multiplayer, only scoreboards. When we finished last night, my friend and I were ranked 4th in the world on the second world boss, but I've not checked it this morning. I'm sure we're down to about 1,004,389th by now.

In conclusion, this is a charming game which more than makes up for it's potential longevity issues with some fantastic controls and a genuine sense of fun and experimentation as the number of interactable elements increases. For £6.50, I really can't fault it, especially if you've got a high-score chasing mentality.

Dragon Age: Origins

First off, I'm running the PC version here and my specs are: E6600, 2GB RAM and a 7900GT. The computer must be closing on 4 years old now, and I'm happy to report that Dragon Age is perfectly playable on Medium settings, although I've had to turn off the post-processing effects like heat haze, which seem to be too much for my GPU.

I'm sure you're all aware of the hype rollercoaster that this game has been through. announced 5-odd years ago, disappeared off the map, re-appeared with slightly iffy looking trailers and a questionable Marilyn Manson soundtrack and finally a bunch of good reviews from trusted sources bleeding through, leading some critics to hail it as the 'RPG of the Decade'.

Well, I don't know so much about that; RPGs mean a lot of things to a lot of people and despite all of the positive press I've doubted in my heart whether it can possibly be as amazing as Chrono Trigger, so lets just assume they meant "Western-styled RPG of the Decade", because really there's not much to compare between this and the JRPG genre. You can't easily compare Baldurs Gate to Final Fantasy, and the same applies here.

Now, if that last paragraph felt as though I was gently leading up to "this is shit", then I'm afraid I've slightly misled you. It is in fact absolutely amazing and I shall be recommending this for purchase at the end of these impressions with the caveat of "if you're into this sort of thing", as these games really don't appeal to everybody. So having completely spoilered myself there, I'm going to talk about the game a bit.

First up, Graphics. This game began development a fair few years ago, so the graphics engine really isn't cutting edge. It's certainly less impressive on a technical level than Mass Effect's engine but what it does have is coherency. Think about World of Warcraft for a moment. It's a technological dinosaur in many ways but it still looks decent today because it has it's own art-style and is aware of how it should be looking. The game goes for Dragon Age; it might not be the shinest game to ever be released, but it just feels to solid and real the sum ends up being far, far greater than it's parts. Although it does suffer slightly from Quakitis in places, with many many shades of brown on offer, it never looks drab or dead. And it's one of these fantasy/medieval swords and sorcery games. They didn't have time to invent more colours at this stage, rather having to spend their time surviving against the onslaught of Wandering Monsters.

The characters look good and have a sense of momentum and mass, and most importantly they feel like they actually inhabit the world rather than just having been placed in it, although I think every living thing here has some extremely high blood pressure problems. I stuck my sword in a couple of rats for an early quest (the game acknowledges it as a Cliche), and my entire party ended up covered in a fine mist of blood.

What the hell?

I mean, did these things literally burst under high pressure?

Nevermind, the "you're covered in blood" texture is well done, but I think it's going to be used for every single fight so there's a good chance you're going to get very familiar/bored with it/of it.

It controls like Mass Effect does. You run your character around directly (although you can click if you'd like) and on the PC version at least you've got the option of putting the camera behind your bloke, all the way up to an eagle eye viewpoint reminiscent of the old Baldurs Gate games. All of your abilities are easily accessable with command bars and I'm reliably informed that the console versions do a wonderful job with some radial menus. Everything else is as you'd imagine it for a Fantasy RPG though in terms of inventory management. It's a big list of gear, subdividable into different categories, but thankfully your party as a whole shares a single large backpack so no need to worry whether you had given that +4 Staff of Zapping to that miserable bastard you just told to piss off.

I'm not sure if people give back stuff they're wearing when they leave, but it's fairly easy to tell who's just with you for a quick mission and who's going to be sticking around for longer. So you know who to give terrible armour too and send out onto the front line!

The Story? I'm not going to comment on the story as I'm not all that far in (this game is larger than a very large thing) and I suspect that people are going to want to get their teeth into this as fresh as possible rather than me reeling off character reviews, but I will talk a little about the conversational system. Your character doesn't speak (unlike Shepherd from Mass Effect), but this is fairly understandable due to all the different races and sexes having their own voice, instead more traditionally you click you answer and the NPCs respond appropriately, in a fully voiced fashion.

Conversations are more of a minefield than in Mass Effect, where most of the things you could say could really have been labelled "I'm a Paragon", "I'm ambivilent" or "I'm a Renegade". Instead here even what seems to be a good answer can put another person in the conversations nose out of joint, and right from the get-go you feel as though there's no way to please everyone and you end up trying to be diplomatic (or not). It's very impressive and once again adds a lot of life and feeling to the game, but be warned; with some conversations you only get one run at it. You can't keep going back and starting again with everybody to explore every single conversational option.

So think about what you say!

Overall, I'm greatly impressed by this title. I enjoyed Baldurs Gate a lot, but so far I'm enjoying this more as the 'gritty fantasy' setting works a lot better for me. Although Baldurs Gate was never particularly High Fantasy, it's still a few notches above Dragon Age and whilst some see DA as some sort of 'Spiritual Successor', I don't feel that is truly the case. The tones of the game are very different. If I was forced to make an analogy, if Baldurs gate was Fellowship of the Ring, then Dragon Age is Return of the King in terms of tone and relative hopelessness.

Hope you've found these impressions useful, if you enjoy these sorts of games then I can recommend DA as a priority purchase. You'll love it.

Bowser's Inside Story

edit - posted in the wrong section, could somebody with Mod Powah shift it into Impressions for me?

I generally have a hard time finding room for RPGs in my life at the moment, but having never played one of these DS Mario ones before, I thought I'd give it a stab, considering all the positive press it's been getting lately. The press is deserved in my opinion, and having got it yesterday evening I've already sunk about 5 hours into the damned thing, which is pretty impressive considering last night I read a huge chunk of the Rogue Trader rulebook and watched Dark City too.

But I digress.

I've got nothing to compare it too in regard to the other Mario RPGs (with the vague, vague memory of the SNES original haunting me), but I'm a fan of the combat system, which is a hybrid turn based/reflex game, where you can increase your damage or avoid taking it in return through timely button presses. It's not like these bloody RTE things, either; every enemy gives you a visual cue as to how it's going to attack and you have to learn when to jump or swing your hammer to repel that attack.

Personally, I'm balls as it. I can see how it works though and I'd imagine it'd be pretty satisfying for anyone with reflexes faster than my pregnant-yak ones.

I won't spoil anything about the story, but the game switches between the Mario Bros and Bowser, with one needing to accomplish something to enable to the progress of the other, with the mandatory talky bits inbetween the action (that do go on a mite too long sometimes). Bowser is excellent, incidentally.

Anyway, it gets a thumbs up from me. Any RPG that can hold my attention these days must be worthwhile.

Bayonetta

Well, it's up on the Japanese stores and considering how easy it is to set up a Japanese account on the PS3, that's the one I went for. I was also curious to see how soul-crushingly bad it is on Sony's console, as that's the one I'll hopefully have winging it's way to me at the end of the month.

So, bad news first?

If you get the PS3 version, you are going to be playing the inferior version. It's playable, doesn't drop below 30fps, the controls are responsive and graphics are clear. You'll just always have that nagging thought in the back of your mind that the 360 version is going to look nicer, whilst apparently being locked at 60fps. This will drive some people to distraction naturally, so if you're prone to that line of thinking I absolutely recommend you wait for the 360 version of the game.

You'll feel better for it, trust me.

But is the PS3 version the slow, unplayable blurry mess that the internet would have us believe? No, it's not that either. The framerate irritatingly fluctuates between 30 and 60fps all over the place, especially in cut-scenes, curiously - and swinging the camera around too fast causes tearing. It detracts from the overall visual effects, but I can't say I noticed it at all during combat.

The combat itself is a mixed bag as far as I'm concerned, with a definite emphasis towards 'good'. As I've mentioned before, the controls feel responsive and the combat isn't confusing at all. I'm currently still in the 'Button Mashing' stage and did alright on 'normal', and tellingly already I can have an idea of what I want to do in any situation, and then manage a fairly close approximation. On the downside, it does feel a little... retro. I don't know about the rest of you but I've got used to 'distance closers' in these games, be it some sort of forward dash or lunge or something; I couldn't find anything of the like in Bayonetta and although it may well come in as a future upgrade, I almost resent having to walk all the way over to the enemy in order to start bashing them in.

The guns are useless, doing piddly damage. I can only imagine they're going to form parts of combo chains and such, but I'm in no position to comment on that just yet.

There are quasi-QTEs, in the sense that it'll flash up a button combination that you need to press for an immediate effect. It's better than most as the buttons are displayed on a disc where they are on the face of your control pad. It helps a lot with the quick reactions, especially for dumbasses like myself who still don't intuitively know where the Circle button is. For instance. You've also got a dodge button, which will be your best friend. Not only does it get you out of harms way, but also activates Bullet Time, so everyone stands still whilst you hack them into little bits.

Playing through the Demo on Normal, I feel like I've got passed the bosses more through button mashing tenacity rather than actual playing skill. I'm wondering whether this is going to be a feature of the game, where you can almost get through on blunt force trauma rather than finesse, which really doesn't sit well with the way the game has been advertised, but once again I'm not going to draw too many long-term conclusions from playing the Demo.

So anyway. Seems good. It's not the second coming, but it's a very well put together game. I certainly wouldn't resent it as a "Day 1" purchase (as hateful as that cliche is), but just to re-emphasise the point - If you have a 360, get the 360 version.

Jack The Ripper

Link

Stolen from News Reporting machine "The Sarge" on RLLMUK.

It's a bit of an odd one, really. As much as I understand the need to occasionally play against character or to put a historical figure (as swathed in folklore at Jack T. Ripper is) in an unusual context, this seems like a terrible, terrible idea.

Surely this would work better as a Hitman-esque game, where Jack believes London is being threatened by a supernatural force, and hunts down people he thinks are key to it. A bit like 'Dreamweb' on the Amiga, if you remember that at all. They could only hint at the supernatural, and keep it unclear as to whether Jack is actually a hero - fighting what no other man can - or a paranoid schizophrenic, desperately dissecting his victims to find proof of his delusions.

But as of now it sounds like Devil May Cry in a Top Hat.