kupote - deathmatch at tiffany's

PC Quarter 1 2011: Who will survive?

2010-11-08T16:00:00.081Z

After questioning how a crowded first quarter may effect PC games sales (and maybe even the future viability of the platform), I predict which titles will thrive in the mad rush and which will get crushed underfoot.

So. The first three months of 2011 leave consumers spoilt for choice and there's an intense likelihood that no matter what you game on, you won't be picking up everything that dares to score a metacritic 8.5 or less until you can rent it, buy it second hand, or buy it first-hand off a shopkeeper who has had to sell his hands to subsidise the ridiculously low RRP you're happy to hand over. Anyway, here's a handy, completely opinion based guide to who will sink and swim on PC unless something gets shaken up, ordered from top to bottom in chance of survival. Just like the decks of the Titanic.

Portal 2

Even if this game wasn't the sequel to the critically acclaimed original (or the sequel to a game that made gamers sick of cake references regardless of whether they'd played it or not) the grip Valve has over the PC Games market is such that Portal 2 can't help but succeed. Steam front-pages will be dominated by monolithic advertisements, every schoolchild will get a second copy of the Source back-catalogue and crucially, Team Fortress 2 will gain at least one new hat.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution

Add something as seemingly insignificant as health regeneration to your Deus Ex game and expect to get one hell of a negative response. The franchise is a sacred pillar of PC gaming and this alone has made the release a safe bet. Better still, the way Eidos Montreal has dealt with this and less petty criticism has displayed not just good PR sense, but a genuine understanding of the series' high points and a desire to improve upon them, not merely repeat them. How it will perform as a console title is a little cloudier, but supposing that the PC players of a decade ago aren't among the console masses now is a very unsafe assumption anyway. It's worth remembering too (though yes, painful for some) that both console dynasties have had a Deus Ex before. Playstation devotees will doubtlessly be supposed the richer.

Dragon Age 2

Bioware command barrels of respect among PC gamers, and any misgivings over the occasionally generic looking Dragon Age IP are offset by the prospect of a Mass Effect 2-esque presentation shake up. It's perhaps true that the coming changes are as much a way of bringing the console versions up to the PC version's higher spec, but Bioware can be assured of a great deal of faithful repeat custom on this one.

Crysis 2

If the promise of the setting and general refinement of what was already a very solid shooter fail to deliver, there may be enough vanity sales generated through graphics card benchmarking tests to keep Crytek's offering afloat. On the other hand, the original game was a slow burner (partly because it was so graphically taxing) and even despite the positive critical reaction to the original, PC Gamers proved their usual opinionated selves. And then there's the wider picture: with such an action heavy first quarter, are console owners going to care about this urban shooter sequel and its phantom limb?

Dead Space 2

Dead Space was at one time supposed by its own bosses as a long-term money maker, rather than an instant success. But the interest the sequel appears to be generating has delivered on this promise. Aside from the PS3 version's tangle with Mass Effect 2, the game also has the benefit of being at the vanguard of these releases. Barring some major disaster, I fully expect Dead Space 2 to be one of the successes of Quarter 1. The problem lies with the PC version. Or at least, when we consider that it was touch and go for a while whether there would be a PC version, it must be assumed that even a slightly duff performance could spell the end of the line.

Bulletstorm and Homefront

We know nothing whatsoever about the quality of any of the titles in this list, but somehow, when it comes to new IP, the market knows even less. Bulletstorm can probably expect a degree of brand loyalty on Xbox 360, but I suspect PC Gamers' goodwill for the Epic Games brand expired around the time they wandered back from the big consoleland buffet with only the lukewarm doggy-bag that was Unreal Tournament 3. To be successful titles on the consoles during this quarter of death, these games will have to be special. On the PC, they're going to have to be exceptional.

F.3.A.R.

Whereas Deus Ex: Human Revolution has been fighting a tooth and nail PR battle to bring disillusioned fans back to a PC stalwart in the wake of an unpopular second instalment, F.3.A.R. just seems to be playing the same sorry tune with an occasional by-line in odd discordant giant mech trailers. And how out of touch do you have to be to drop a leetspeak three in your title? Oh wait, I'm asking this of a game still using a trope from The Ring. Silly me.

On the bright side, numbers here will probably convince WB Games to put this franchise to sleep altogether, but there's no telling what shoddy PC sales may be held up to prove later on.

Others:

Driver: San Francisco pretty much has a genre to itself, so we can hope that it will be judged by its own merits. Well, assuming that genres carry equal weight which they really, really don't. Also key here will be what kind of digital rights management that Ubisoft saddle the game with, something that will also be true of Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood. Fable 3 will make it belatedly to PC also, unnecessarily busying up a schedule it wasn't originally in. What it loses to Dragon Age 2 it will make back simply by being a known quantity: successful but not exceptional.

Releasing anything else? A sincere care-package of good luck to you. You may need it.

Skipping to the end to see what happens? It turns out that some people can write well over a thousand words just because they won't get any decent toys to play with this Christmas. Part one was here.

Quarter 1 2011, or Too Much Of A Good Thing

2010-11-07T11:15:00.003Z

The holidays are coming, but don't expect any new toys until the new year...

Why, hello again...

It's the run up to Christmas once more, and that can only mean one thing: all those big-name titles you've been waiting for all year suddenly hove into view, a convoy of hope to a nation crippled by X-Factor finals. Your mother phones you for gift ideas and you send her a list of items number five through eight on your prioritised wishlist, because you know that you can bare waiting two months to play them. You sad, impatient person.

Nope, sorry. That's your biscuit-tin Christmas of yesteryear. For the second year running, the convoy of hope has recieved word that the Call of Duty juggernaut is on the same tarmac, and rather than tangle with its incomprehensible callsigns and impressive wheelspan, they've pulled over into the Welcome Break to enjoy some tepid tea and a crossword. Four down, eight letters. "Quaint British English semi-expletive". Bollocks.

Q4 2010

Oct

Medal of Honor

Pro Evolution Soccer 2011

Fallout: New Vegas

Star Wars; The Force Unleashed

NBA 2K11

Nov

James Bond: Blood Stone

Call of Duty: Black Ops

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part One

Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit

Tron Evolution

Dec

World of Warcraft: Catacylsm

Sometime Q4

Gran Turismo 5

Q1 2011

Jan

Dead Space 2

Littlebigplanet

Mass Effect 2 (PS3)

Feb

Portal 2

Bulletstorm

Deus Ex 3

Killzone 3

March

Dragon Age 2

Crysis 2

F.E.A.R. 3

Homefront

Sometime Q1

Driver: San Francisco

Now look at this sample of games coming out in the next two quarters. Not a complete picture by any means (Nintendo Waa?), but it illustrates the point: what's going on here? Why are so many big action sequels deserting the Christmas sales period, leaving Call of Duty alone to digest a whole lot of turkey whilst sports titles and movie franchises entertain themselves in the hallway? Yes, Call of Duty's hold on the market is intimidating but the situation publishers are building for themselves in the first three months of 2011 isn't any better by any stretch of the imagination. Out of the frying pan and into the OH GOD IT BURNS.

But the biggest loser here? The PC. The majority of titles I've cherry picked above are multiplatform ones. The decisions are ultimately made with the console market in mind, with the PC version dragged along for the ride. Whilst I believe that the numbers will be down across the board due to the Q1 dumping ground, the PC alone simply doesn't have the kind of userbase to absorb such a deluge of content. Console games are often a lot better at sustaining their RRP, whereas new PC releases can enter budget price-points with the passing of a single season (though the extent to which this is counteracted by the stronger second hand and rental markets on consoles is a valid counterpoint).

In conclusion, the PC versions of some of these under-performing titles could well return some absolutely abysmal numbers, making only small change in the long run. We're talking the level of cataclysmic failure that could be offered up to prove that PC versions aren't worth the risk, and all because of some daft scheduling. Yes there's a summer wind-down, but this doesn't mean everything has to be released in winter and early spring. The developers of two of this year's biggest PC releases - Starcraft 2 and Civilization V – reckoned that quarters two and three weren't entirely toxic to successful game releases and yes, they were completely right about it. If this means delaying PC releases for some games, perhaps it really is better in the long run? (hell, most multiplatform games could use some extra time to ship a better PC version).

Rather than throw all 1,500 words of the planned article at you, part two will follow tomorrow evening. In part two, I counter-productively single out doomed titles and arrange their premature husks into some kind of vantage point from which to shout 'I told you so' for no noble reason.

Review: Lucidity

2010-03-31T23:26:00.003+01:00

Point, Click, Curse.

It's old news, but let's take a moment to honour the fact that Lucasarts don't just make Star Wars games again. Ok, so news that Lucasarts are starting to make good Star Wars games again would probably be just as welcome, but a return to point and click seemed about as likely as EA suddenly becoming the lesser of two evils and well... doesn't hell seem slightly colder to you these days?

So here we have Lucidity, an obscure little game from Lucasarts that is arguably their boldest move yet. And whilst the resulting game has significant disappointments, it's an interesting little experiment and hopefully a sign that the new 'Workshop' division won't simply end up as an assembly line for point and click Special Editions.

The art of Lucidity has a wonderful children's storybook feel that's instantly charming and nostalgic. Sofi, (the protagonist) is a dot-eyed, button-nosed little cherub who seems to have wandered in from It's a Small World. It's a cutesy design that comes to contrast perfectly with the progressively murkier background palette, as the story too takes a darker tone and Sofi herself moves into more fantastical and dangerous surroundings.

Sofi doesn't speak at any point in the game and whilst the art-style calls for her to be basically expressionless, a remarkable amount of personality is communicated through her animation: the way she happily skips through each level contrasts nicely with the way she cowers against obstructing walls as a fog full of snapping fish advances to cut her journey short. Even her red bobble-hat features two perpetually swinging pom-poms that arguably have more character in them than a dozen action game protagonists.

The game as a whole displays a refreshingly high level of fluid animation, particularly after the static disappointment of Lucasarts Workshop's previous effort The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition. Even when in the sparse cutscenes a few in-betweens go missing and the fluidity drops, it all seems strangely appropriate, giving it a Raymond Brigg's The Snowman-ish quality (though the soundtrack, whilst soothing and appropriate, doesn't show any danger of Aled Jones).

With its Mary Blair protagonist and Pixar-lighting plan layouts, you'll have to forgive an animation sadact for having a moment of gushing praise for a title that feels a lot like playing through a concept for a cartoon short inspired by some obscure children's story book. Because ultimately, all this hard work and inspired creativity has little pay-off. I'm not going to fall into the trap of pointing out how difficult a game featuring a kids' book artstyle has turned out: Yoshi's Island gave us some of the most intelligent yet most difficult platforming ever seen with a similar starting point. But I am going to note what a shame it is to view such appealing art through the red haze of gamer rage, because I haven't sworn this hard at the competency of a toddler since Puyo Puyo.

The playable element of Lucidity frankly feels like an afterthought. The player must plant a series of action instigating 'pieces' in Sofi's way, in order to propel or walk her across the terrain to a mailbox goal at the end of the level. Elsewhere, the comparrison has been made with Lemmings, but the system is nowhere near as complex: travel is one-directional, there are only six playable pieces, and the player cannot move freely to view the upcoming terrain. In short, there is very little strategy involved, and much of the game is a mad rush of chaining whatever string of often unhelpfully random pieces you are given. If a useless piece comes up, there is no quick way to dispose of it without first placing it in the gameworld: only a single piece can be saved to the right mouse button at any one time. This slot is usually best reserved for the versatile 'bomb' piece, but playing a constant roulette with six items that cover a far more limited range of actual applications (four of the pieces can move Sofi diagonally upwards) seems pointless.

Actually placing pieces is easier said than done. Though mouse controlled, the pieces are placed on an invisible grid, which would be useful for setting up long pathways if the game was just a touch slower. In practice, because the grid is invisible and the screen is nearly always moving, placing a piece even slightly lethargically means placing it in a neighbouring square by accident (where it's bound to mess up your entire strategy). Whereas, trying to follow an airborne Sofi requires tea-reading skills and the flow of genuinely useful pieces you're sure the game is incapable of favouring you with. I'd suggest this ghastly grid was some kind of console co-development hurdle, but the gamepad-like implementation on the keyboard keys has all the same annoyances and a frustratingly slow response time.

Astonishingly, the game isn't even as hard now as it was upon release, when Lucasarts Workshop felt a checkpoint system was unnecessary. It interesting to consider what the November update has done to the game. Certainly, death is a regular occurance in Lucidity's world of chasms and controller awkwardness, and I suspect the number of times I've aced a level to be embarrassingly low. Still, the addition of checkpoints has removed any sense of difficulty by concious design, and now the game feels somehow more lazily designed, despite some welcome extra effort on the part of the developer.

The checkpoints do make the content of the game more accessible however, and players are now more likely to be drawn into discovering new routes and fireflies. Every 100th firefly rewards you with a bonus level and accompanying piece of concept art, and since these levels actually present some interesting gameplay (such as one where you must bomb a route through a cavern, without a timelimit), they're almost worth suffering the gameplay for.

That's the dilemna with buying Lucidity at all. As a little gaming trinket, Lucidity, is an attractive prospect and one I'm happy to have paid a pitance for in the inevitable Steam discount spree. Those wonderful visuals only improve in motion, and the very existence of the Lucasarts Workshop, an indie-styled division at a developer that has been in a creative rut for some time may well be worth your appreciative pounds. Just don't expect much game for your bold idealism.

6/10

Review: Darkest of Days

2010-03-14T00:58:00.004Z

Causality and the American Civil War? Frankly my dear, Darkest of Days doesn't give a damn.

First Person Shooting is a crowded pastime, and in such a genre the breathing room for innovation seems to get narrower with every passing year. Sluicing through the killing floor comes Darkest of Days, a FPS that lets you rip into the space-time-continuum, treading the poorly beaten path travelled by Daikatana.

That's probably not a good sign.

Briefly under General Custer's command at the Battle of the Little Bighorn, the player steps into the silent shoes of Alexander Morris, a man whisked away from a pin-cushiony death and employed by a time-governing NGO named Kronotek. Your saviours offer you the chance to shoot conscripts of famous historical conflicts if you do some temporal house-keeping at the same time. It's an unusual premise and it's clearly the unique selling point of the title, perhaps to the extent where it's easy to imagine it being specifically thought up in a room where the phrase 'target demographic' was wielded with nefarious intent.

It's an impressive undertaking, but then I'd describe you sprinting the first quarter of a cross-country race as 'impressive' even after I pass your glucose deficient corpse at a walking pace at the halfway point. Executing a FPS set in large open levels is difficult. Executing a decent story involving time-travel is even harder. Darkest of Days attempts both at the same time and it's barely surprising to find it first from the blocks but last over the line.

With all of time to choose from, Darkest of Days spends the majority of its time in the American Civil War and on the Russian front of the First World War. Both are appropriate enough choices considering the mandate of open-plan, large scale battles, though as the game also ducks into at least four other periods, and only for brief missions, little is saved on resources. In these supposedly open maps, you're bread-crumbed through labyrinths of glass-walled corridors towards objectives that don't stray nearly far enough from 'kill the enemy', 'blow up the objective' and 'hold this position'. Coupled with shooting that's passable but never quite right, you'll be inclined (but too ashamed) to compare the time-travelling plot to a journey through FPS history.

The game's proprietary engine puts a brave face on it all, with a smattering of decent effects and plenty of variably impressive vegetation making for above functional visual flair. However, even on its highest settings, the engine makes very noticeable compromises to maintain a decent framerate. Whilst expansive, the terrain isn't exactly high-poly, a fact covered up ineptly by the aforementioned plant-life which frequently pops up at a short-distance detail horizon also shared by already poorly articulated enemy models. Advanced filtering features send the framerate (and mouse responsiveness) plummeting, even on a respectable gaming PC. The end result is a game running on quite similar settings to PC carnivore Crysis and... well, this sentence doesn't end favourably.

Taking visual design rather than a more technical perspective, there are labours of love worth mentioning. Despite their rigid animation, the soldiers of each historical time period carry off the appearance of authenticity, even if beyond my hunch that neither side in the American Civil War had a clone-army programme, I'm hardly an authority. This authenticity carries over to the weapons, which - if nothing else - are strangely entertaining to reload. Ducking behind a rock to stoke your musket-rifle before popping up to shoot a Confederate cavalryman from his horse is a genuinely memorable gaming vignette. It's just that standing in-front of a soldier nonchalantly reloading the same rifle as you mow him and his twelve oblivious colleagues down is the rest of the vineyard.

To occasionally mix things up, the game throws glowing-blue enemies at you who must be wounded rather than killed, but a leg shot has never felt so terribly different from a headshot to me. Failing to wound these soldiers docks points from a simple RPG system that can be used to upgrade attributes of your historical arsenal. Larger-scale army pruning is facilitated by an assortment of automatic pistols, machine-guns and incendiary devices, handed out 'for the hell of it'. Lacking the historical dimension, they're rather standard weapons used to engage in some Doom-era carnage. It's not exactly cerebral shooting, but variety doesn't hurt and the weapons become more relevant as encounters with sci-fi agents of the antagonistic 'opposition' start shooting at you.

A time-travelling action game from a first-time developer was always three-strikes certified to have a pretty appalling story, but Darkest of Days delivers it all so strangely that it still finds a level to disappoint on. The majority of the story is told in an empty chamber with dimensional properties that make you feel like you're no higher than four feet tall. In this room you talk with the massive projected eyes of 'Mother' and a gruff cliché spouting ex-fireman named Dexter. Amusingly, as the one flesh-and-blood bodied member of this expositionary duo, Dexter gets to be both the gruff drill-sergeant father surrogate and your Barney Calhoun buddy go-to.

'Mother' meanwhile chiefly welcomes you home and nags you for making a mess of the timestream. It'd be half-clever detail if the script wasn't delivered like an Ikea flatpack. To compound matters, the story is largely back-loaded: you'll spend the first three thirds of the game chasing the same two men in the same two periods of history and only after this does the game explain who the mystery antagonists are before shuffling you into a couple of new time periods. And then the curtain suddenly falls on a clumsy final scene which sets up a sequel on the back of a conflict you've already forgotten.

I can't help but feel mean spirited turning on Darkest of Days. There are flashes of genuine inspiration here and there: a fixed-turret mission on the underside of a Zeppelin; a formation infantry advance through a cornfield; a long-distance sniper mission where you aim for 'wind-corrected' targets. At one point, unarmed and behind the barbed wire of a POW camp, you even see how the developers can create reasonably atmospheric story-telling sequences, and it's a refreshing change from the nonchalant treatment of the mass butchering of the history you're rather sinisterly helping to create.

So let's leave it on this high-note: Darkest of Days is probably the best time-travelling FPS title beginning with 'D' ever created. So yeah...

4/10

This review originally appeared over at www.halflife2.net. Elements from an earlier draft have been included and other general changes have since been made.

Review: Saw

2010-03-13T20:00:00.015Z

Konami's Saw game finally arrives, but is it video nice or video nasty?

The horror movie genre has always been peculiarly vulnerable to sequelitis and the Saw series is surely its most obvious victim. Still plopping out an annual Omen child to entertain halloween movie-goers, it was only a matter of time until horror gaming found itself knocked up with a little jigsaw-puzzler of its own.

Set sometime close to the conclusion of the very first Saw movie, 'Saw the game' casts the player as Detective David Tapp, presumed dead for five films but here apparently saved by the Jigsaw Killer who has brought him to the derelict Whitehurst Insane Asylum to subject him to another particularly unpleasant lesson in life appreciation.

The dark and decaying ruins of Whitehurst accurately mimic the dank setting of the movies and the presentation throughout is suitably faithful to the tropes and general spirit of the franchise. In each chapter, Jigsaw's doll peers at you through fuzzy televisions as you go about completing your rat-in-a-maze tasks, with his sinister voice (Tobin Bell) narrating you through the challenges he has set. Unfortunately, these tasks include far too many fetch-quests, constantly sending you after that 'key to the door to the office which opens the gate to the ward with the electric coupler for the fuse box'. And despite the all too infrequent documents, bloody messages and sideshow 'how did this guy die?' corpses, the asylum itself remains a somewhat stereotypical, characterless place.

Like an increasing number of third-person titles, the PC version of Saw is a frustrating console hand me down. Playing the game with a mouse and keyboard feels totally unnatural: the action buttons (shoot, fighting pose etc.) have been bizarrely mapped to the numbers 1 through 6, and whilst movement is on the WASD keys and looking is delegated to the mouse, these inputs pick up all kinds of strange uses in puzzles that were clearly never designed with the PC in mind. The very first puzzle is particularly telling, and has you scrubbing your desk with the mouse and completely missing the fact that the 'countdown' on the helmet is actually a visual prompt to which of the oddly assigned, uncustomisable action buttons you should be using. The sane (and completely lazy and unsatisfactory) option is definitely to plug in a controller, but be aware that the puzzle button prompts correspond to the Xbox 360 controller for Windows.

However, even if you have this ideal controller setup, the fact is that controlling the player character is never as fun as it should be. Punctuating the game's many puzzles are encounters with inmates after a front-door key supposedly sewn into Tapp's body. These close-combat encounters involve the player character unethusiastically responding to any suggestion of attacking, and you have to learn to request a swing of even a lightweight scalpel a few too many seconds before your enemy is in front of you. To its credit, Saw does leave fighting somewhat optional even despite its impressive collection of makeshift weapons: there is usually a puddle of water to electrify, or a way of barricading a door shut in order to avoid or delay combat. But even in these situations, getting a switch activated or closing and then bolting a door involves unnecessary manual turning and slow button responses that usually end in an unfair and frustrating death.

The game resists having end of chapter boss battles, demanding instead that you solve various puzzles against the clock. However, all too often these are simply time-trial marathon versions of the various pipe, switchboard and cog style-puzzles you find attached to chests and doors in the environment, and others draw inspiration from family board games like Downfall and Pairs, which is jarring to say the least. Whilst there is not a complete absence of good ideas behind the puzzles in the game, many are recycled altogether too far: by the end of the game, you'll have discovered so many lock combinations in mirrors that you'll be quite embarrased you ever considered the first one you saw a good idea.

The lack of inspiration in the puzzle-bosses has a more sinister element of course. The deadline you're racing against isn't a ticking clock, but a needle, spike or circular blade mutiliating a restrained character. If you fail, you're subjected to their violent death scene... or are you rewarded? Ultimately, there is the question of who Saw, movie or game is for. To me, the game's almost unrelenting sequence of exploding body-parts and painful screams seem to be trying to overcompensate: the fact is that the functional but hardly photo-realistic graphics don't recreate the relative unsettling believability of the violence in the movies. Games are simply a medium where pain and death are (currently) meaningless, and this is bad news for a franchised game about how pain and death can be used to construct meaning.

It's certainly not all bad, and because the reasonably well-acted story adds further detail to the twisting Saw lore, I find myself concluding that the game is worth a playthrough for fans of the film. But I'm disinclined to even go the puny distance towards recommending it to 'fans of the genre', particuarly as the shoddy port-work reduces the impact of what is already a by the numbers survival horror title. I suspect that the chapter-selection and harder gametype options will seem like overly optimistic inclusions even to Saw devotees.

5/10

This review originally appeared over at www.halflife2.net. Elements from an earlier draft have been included and other general changes have since been made.

Review: Mirror's Edge

2010-03-13T19:37:00.003Z

A verdict on the other ultra-white first person title that's Still Alive...

I can't help feeling that Mirror's Edge isn't the smartest place to start out reviewing games.

True, its weaknesses provide ample material for criticism, cut-throat negativity and sardonic observations about the state of the gaming industry, but if you're looking to boil a product down to a simple good versus bad statement, slap a score on it and move on, there are definitely better places to start. The checklist for a quality title is left virtually unmarked by a game that feeds on cliches and frustrating mechanics, yet the few things Mirror's Edge gets right enter into some complex equation that results in one of the most importantly average games ever created.

The game I'm most tempted to invoke, rather banally, is Sonic the Hedgehog. Platforming. Running. Trial and error leaps over pitfalls: you get the idea. One of the defining products of the 16-Bit era, an undeniable milestone in gaming history. Yet, given what the blue-spiked money-machine has chugged itself into, we forget all to easily how this great series was never a peerless one. Only in the second Sonic title was the speed promised in the first delivered on. Only in the third was that speed contained within the kind of expansive, intricately designed levels that 2D platforming had managed under Mario's reign.

Mirror's Edge set out with many of the same design goals in an equally popular genre, so where was the fanfare? Of course, Mirror's Edge's Faith is no family friendly corporate mascot, but I fear the industry has simply counter-artistically matured to the point where even something as significant as Sonic the Hedgehog would just be viewed as a quirky title with equally frustrating and short-lived gameplay, lost in a sea of brilliant by interchangeable products.

What I'm getting at is the sense that certain games, of which we can include Sonic the Hedgehog and Mirror's Edge, are 7/10 experiences with a 10/10 significance. There are far better games you will play that will mean less in the long run. This may not necessarily even mean that you will ever have the urge to replay Mirror's Edge: its influence simply deserves to be felt in how first person gaming evolves from this point on.

A significant title influences your thought when you're not even playing it. I find my mind shimmying up pipes and leaping between rooftops when out in the street, and I've attempted to vault railings and roll out of falls in every FPS I've loaded up since. The impulse is possibly more about the fact that the world needed a First-Person Parkour game: Mirror's Edge satisfies a basic human need to run and jump from things, to explore the inaccessible. Whilst it's not unusual for the urban FPS to seek out back alleys and rooftops to satisfy this need, Mirror's Edge performs solely in these areas, with enough forays into drainage systems and subway stations to keep the experience varied, though not a little too predictable.

Many a floating gun-hand has been defeated by a waist-high wall it couldn't hop onto (though considering their limited anatomy, perhaps that isn't so suprising), and whilst Mirror's Edge presents a highly specialised version of movement, it brings to an extreme things so basic and essential to first person immersion that they instantly become noticeable by their absence in other titles. Despite the best efforts of the daft plot, you've never had the experience of becoming a character in a first person game to quite the same degree as you will experience in Mirror's Edge.

You get your money out of a Sonic the Hedgehog comparrison when you inevitably turn to how Mirror's Edge trips over itself in its endeavour. Showstopping falls to oblivion are a feature of both, though Faith inevitably suffers a bit more for the restricted nature of the first person camera, taking a face full of wall where the spikey blue one would simply have to trust that the designers saw fit to provide a bottom to the chasm ahead. It bares mentioning that on both the PS3 and PC, reloading the usually fairly placed checkpoints is as quick as you could reasonably wish for. Nontheless, you're left wondering whether the third-person camera couldn't have been cracked out for some tasks, because for all its HUD-less, momentum emulating out-of-breath brilliance, the game plain abandons first person in inter-level FMVs that, whilst stylistically in keeping with the mega-bloom aesthetic of the rest of the game, are a couple of animators short of animation.

These vignettes come across as soulless pieces of flash-work that you'd probably expect one of the many in-game corporations to splash on their front-pages, appropriately adding to the confusion of why exactly the protagonist 'runners' are supposed to be better than the mildly corrupt government who, when all is said and done, have made a city that looks uncannily like a perpetually sunny utopia. The runners then seem less AVALANCHE than the People's Front of Judea. The story and characters aren't uninteresting to any offensive degree, but like many other recent titles their tendency towards being either gruff, straight-faced or straight-laced is grating. Mirror's Edge stands as a reminder that video games largely have a lot to answer for when it comes to their scripts. But even the smirk inducing seriousness of banal lines like 'It isn't news anymore, it's advertising' won't stop what is fundamentally an interesting, flawed game, from being an enjoyable and recommendable one.

8/10

"So I said what about ..."

2010-03-09T22:39:00.011Z

Presenting a quick manifesto about - and apology for - the content of this blog.

About me and my writings:
Having recently graduated from the University of Sussex, Falmer with a 2:1 in English Language and Literature, I'm working on converting three years of writing about renaissance gender politics into something more contemporarily useless, ideally involving headshots and other genuine words that cause my spell-checker to redline.

So yeah, video game reviews. First and foremost, this blog exists to showcase my writing, so any useful recommendations and shining insights are a welcome but unintended byproduct. This is especially true right now as my currently less than ideal financial situation has me feeding off Steam weekend deals and living-room hand me downs (boo-hoo). You'll see lots of old friends and the occasional quirky stranger you were vaguely intrigued about until everyone posted a 6/10 last month.

Occasionally, expect to see reviews originally posted on Half-Life 2 dot net, where I'm currently a community reviewer until we stop getting freebies because we're not nearly positive enough. And yes, this may have already happened.

And yes, this is all so that I may just convince someone that I'm good enough to be paid for it all. Just in case you're a potential employer stumbling into this remotest of remotest corners, I have provided my email address below. More likely, (but no-less importantly) if you're absolutely anyone and you have feedback on any aspect of the blog, please share it by the same means or in the comments for each post!

About "Kupote" / "Deathmatch at Tiffany's":
If I were a bad person, I'd make some statement about how this blog is the vanguard of a new wave of literary inspired video games criticism and about how it required a name linking an established auteur to furry cat things with pom-pom antennae. The truth involves a large, round container and the abrasive removal of matter from the bottom with my dirty word-spoon*.

Apologies to the family, friends and fans of the legendary author Truman Capote insulted by my double-pun assault on his good name and canonical works. Will it make things better if I mention I've yet to read a single one of said works? No? But I've seen the movie version of Breakfast at Tiffany's, and I barely remember how racist Mickey Rooney's buck teeth were!

Thankfully moogle Capote looks more like Hayao Miyazaki, so there's one less thing to apologise for.

*as opposed to a dirty-word spoon.