At first, I thought I was never going to get the damn game in the first place, when I consider the amount of horrendous run-arounds, bullshit and grief it took to actually get the game into the console’s disc-tray in the first place.

Two weeks before release, I took a look at my bank balance, bit the bullet, and placed a pre-order for the collector’s edition, ignoring the jibes from digital customers (Warden’s Keep DLC free for them) or American gamers (free tin box, cloth map – anything that makes up for living in the States, I suppose). I entered my details, hit the order button, and waited. An hour later, e-receipt in hand, I began forming plans for my character whilst working on getting the PC character-builder to work (it didn’t – any time you see a sticker on your laptop that says you’ve got a certain amount of graphical memory, half it and you’re closer to the truth).

On the Monday night before release, GAME cancelled my order. And the replacement order the night before release.

After moaning about my bank, and moaning at GAME, the order finally went through on Friday morning, and I got to wait until Monday when my wonderful girlfriend brought it back from the house it was delivered to (couldn’t even get the right address), and I finally chucked it in the drive, installed it (I know it makes no difference to loading times, but Christ that noise is horrible) and went for it.

It was around this point I realised this game was going to completely dominate my spare time up until Christmas, if not afterwards as well.

Dragon Age: Origins is, quite simply, the most addictive game I’ve encountered since World of Warcraft. Never have I played a game so rich with back-story, well-written dialogue and engaging, well thought-out side quests, every option open to you from the second you’re done with the Ostagar story. At the current time of writing, I’m near finishing my first play-through, spending around thirty hours delving into the various areas of the game, knowing I’ll notch up somewhere in the region of two hundred before any new downloadable content makes an appearance on the Marketplace.

Like I said in my other post, I’m a massive fan of Dwarves, their lore and the characters that evolve out of said lore. Whilst not considering myself a veritable scholar on the subject, I’d wager I’m comfortable enough with the angry little bastards to be able to judge their incarnation in Origins well enough.

So let’s travel through the origins, trials and tribulations of Grumnir Aeducan together.

With any good origin story comes an even better set of sweeping camera shots and deep, rumbling narrated bits of dialogue about the respective race you are about to become involved with for the next hundred hours (or in the case of my Tauren, several hundred days). Warcraft did this perfectly, and Origins doesn’t shirk this duty either. Orzammar, city of the Dwarves and last true bastion against the murderous Darkspawn, sits beneath the stone of the over-world; dark, ancient, and full to the brim with small people who pride themselves on honour, tradition and an intricate caste system.

False loyalty, circles within circles, two-faced politics – all of this surrounds you from the moment you are thrust into the mind, body and soul of your chosen avatar: the chosen son of Dwarven royalty. You are instantly surrounded by both the harsh and the welcoming; brothers, friends, and politicians enticing you with gifts in order for you to lend your name to their cause. But who are they enticing? Grumnir, or myself? Are they wanting his support, or for me to engage with a moral choice system so inherent to the genre, now?

The contemporary games-design choice worth speaking about as a journalist of the last decade is the moral choice system. Good, bad, evil, noble – so many choices, and all displayed on a little bar divided into sections of blue and red, black and white, or simply monochromatic; an indication of how far gone you are, or how nauseatingly nice you’ve been to everyone for fear making questionable choices with a controller will somehow lead to the replication of said choices in real life. Absurd? I no longer think so. Origins does away with the bar, and through doing so forces us to confront what it is about ourselves we fear so much when wondering whether or not to save the Council in Mass Effect: whether or not we’re prepared to sacrifice those we care about less to save those we care about more. The definition of the greater good, that ultimate choice we can make to enable humanity to reap the greatest benefit is something we have sought for millenia, and even influenced this website’s domain name.

Soon enough, I am seeking out the evil in the small slice of world the developer-gods have afforded me, sword and shield gripped tightly in hand and coming to terms with a genius method of controlling both my character and his various compatriots. Damn the PC version of the game, in my opinion: both have merits, but there’s nothing like being able to use the right trigger as a hot-swap function in the heat of battle – just inching that part of the controller back into its chassis makes me feel like I’m taking things up a notch, and – as great as PC RPG titles may be – unless you’ve got at least four other people on Vent, it’s an experience you’ll never replicate with a mouse and keyboard. PC gaming is fantastic, but console gaming was designed with adrenaline in mind, and it’s now I thank those Ritalin-popping console FPS addicts that have so influenced the design demographic of this generation’s games.

The mobs I am currently locked in combat with are not new to me in any way. I could say that this is because of the fact that whether I fight goblins, mages or skeletons that I am, indeed, fighting the same thing: the will of evil, the dark side of the souls of the development team who seek to ruin my fun by sending wave after wave of the undead or the green at me, swords flailing as their repetitive death animations take their toll on their dwindling numbers.

However, this is not the case.

The reason they are not new to me, is because, quite frankly, their faces remind me a little too much of the Locust race from the Gears universe, and it’s an uncomfortable memory. The Locust, quite frankly, are ridiculously fucking scary, their third-degree-burn aesthetics, sharp teeth and predilection for guttural, retro-evolved communication triggering a primal sense of fear, panic and will to retreat in me that becomes hard to fight down as time goes on and my stamina levels and health pot reserves begin to drop. The Darkspawn, however, are at an advantage when compared to their Bleszinski-created counterparts: their humanoid appearance is explained through their background, twisted emulations of the forms power-mad human mages once wore before being cast down.

It begs the question – why aren’t the other races simply defeating the Darkspawn, then turning on the human race to make sure this kind of ridiculous bullshit never happens again? It’s a valid question, is it not? Take any major problem in a fantasy universe, and you’ll usually find human mages with inferiority complexes at the god-damn center of it. Anything from trying to become gods to simply trying to save a dying relative, and the demon demographic throw up their collective hands in celebration, as it’s time, once again, to raid the land of the normal and the living in order to sow chaos and havoc because Gordon the Mystical forgot to put away the ritual candlesticks.

But it’s refreshing and soothing to slowly cleanse the land of these despicable little creatures; every one that falls is another notch on my belt as a soon-t0-be Grey Warden, heart burning with the fresh betrayal of my race’s nobility, and the loss of love from my father, the king. Cast out of Orzammar and with only an axe and the desire to atone for sins I did not commit, I launch myself into the first few enemies I see, Grumnir’s sorrow and my frustration at being cast out of a location I adored exploring for the past two hours providing me with the motivation I need to carve my way through the Deep Roads towards Duncan, leader of the Ferelden Grey Wardens.

The last time I saw the Deep Roads was in the first chapter of Bioware’s Origins tie-in Flash game, and I rambled about it at length along with its location. I didn’t understand, then, why the city of Orzammar was arranged in a baffling circle around a black area of the map, not understanding then that a third dimension to the aesthetical proceedings would grant me the knowledge that the city was based around a massive hole in the mantle of the planet on which I am stood so deep within. It also granted me my first insight into the Dwarven passageways that stretched across the entire continent, if not the entire world. The Deep Roads are a place of many design possibilities; their accessibility across vast swathes of countryside means that, feasibly, any race or manner of horrors could take up residence, never saddling the developers with the inglorious task of having to explain why the elves have made a camp in a Dwarven tomb. Not that they have, presently, but the possibility is there and this is important if Bioware are willing to stick to the two years of downloadable quests and new locations they have so passionately advocated in the press.

It’s an odd feeling, to begin your journey down the path of becoming a Grey Warden, knowing that you’re always going to become one. The armour that comes with the Collector’s Edition is Grey Warden armour, and the achievements even indicate to you that you’re doing the work of these fabled guardians simply by killing many, many Darkspawn. Personally, I find their name to be the most interesting part of their mythology. If you’ve ever done an English degree, you’ll know that most coursework tends to lean towards reading into words and phrases and their respective symbolism to an almost fanatical degree, and that this comes in useful when looking at the various names and colloquialisms you’ll encounter in Origins.

To be grey is to be boring, to be bland. To be grey is to be old, withered, but wizened and loyal to a just cause forgotten long ago. Are these brave men and women wardens of humanity, elves and dwarves, or are they guardians of a deep mythology that holds importance above all the humanoids walking the earth in the name of the Stone, the Maker or nature itself? It begs the question of what these people are really guarding. Are they so arrogant they have never questioned what about them makes them so fanatical about defending the realm? It can’t be the desire to live themselves, or they would never take up sword and shield. To shun the rest of humanity with an initiation process that kills more people than it initiates is another negative sign. So what is it? Some secret held by their order that the Darkspawn must never uncover? Or something more sinister?

Ignoring this, we are confronted early on with a colossal battle, of which you are more a part of than the game’s mechanics would indicate to you. Looking down from the battlements on a war you sorely wish you could be in the thick of (though judging by Normal difficulty’s ridiculous spikes, you’re probably thankful you’re not), it’s easy to forget that this isn’t just a set-piece you’re supposed to gawp at before running along to your various anal little quests, the moment forgotten like so many bad microwave meals. Stand in one place too long, and you’ll be hit by an arrow arching up from the battle surging below. You are not some invincible hero to the Darkspawn assaulting Ostagar; you’re just another speck on the castle walls, another little cog in a machine so huge that for one single moment, your place in the Origins universe becomes uncomfortably clear and you back away, fearful that your character no longer holds sufficient relevance to survive through to the inevitable sequel (let’s not fuck around, it’s called Origins).

But what of these moments? What significance do they hold? Are we expected to take up the mantle of the Wardens and fight the good fight, once Duncan falls? It has become RPG tradition for the wise mentor to fall early on in the narrative, leaving us to fend for ourselves like so many panicked university students with low attendance and even lower motivation shortly before the dissertation is due. Or are we expected to simply have fun, grab some achievements, and only play every origin story simply because it’s ten gamerscore closer to finishing the game in terms of the amount of points, and no longer the emotional investment in a universe created by those who see Origins as a labour of love and not a literary masterpiece?

Do we see games as literature, currently? As art? It’s a difficult position to argue, and one certainly a lot of my journalistic compatriots have strived to do for some time. Braid is artistic, yes, but do we hold its off-center literature in such high regard we are able to ignore the flaws in the fluidity of the writing?

In Origins, the dialogue is as important as it was in Mass Effect, Oblivion, Final Fantasy VII and Grim Fandango. Yes, it’s an action RPG on the Xbox 360, with 1100G of achievements and a load of DLC that seems fun for five minutes. But you also need to listen, persuade and intimidate, and a lack of these three approaches to engaging with various characters is a lack of appreciation for the universe you’re engaging with so deeply. You can call up protective spells of denial all you like, but ultimately, there’s no way the average hundred-hour Origins player is going to know nothing whatsoever about the universe. The developers sneak in small ways of coaxing you into a world slightly altered from generic fantasy, even down to changing the name of potions to poultices, a decision which, at first seems ridiculous, and then when a journalist’s spell-checker doesn’t render the word new and therefore void in the eyes of the God-author of the Queen’s English, less so.

But after engaging with the player for so long, how can we then encourage them to run off and bring the quest-giver in question ten rat’s tails as well as a mystical item crucial to saving the world as we know it? We can’t, simply. But we can, however, expect them to veer off course and complete side quests that involve fighting witches-turned-dragons, saving golems from a life of magical servitude and imprisonment, and doing favours for the characters our avatars fall in love with.

The love quests are the oddest of the bunch; almost like an enjoyable rom-com (there are a few), the dialogue slowly turns from the heroic and noble to the coy and suggestive, with tentative kisses and polygon-light lovemaking whilst still mostly dressed (thank Christ) another interesting deviation from the norm. Bioware are refining their methods of setting the tone, turning the lights down low and slipping on some Barry White whilst putting on something a little more comfortable, and it’s a far cry, thankfully, from the “drop and give me twenty” innuendos of their ongoing sci-fi epic. Ashley and Sheperd are in direct competition in my household for the crown of fictional romance against Derek (Shepherd, hilariously) and Meredith in Grey’s Anatomy, and it’s because they are a loveable couple, but ultimately none too realistic. Here, other characters will confront you about your choices, and gossip between themselves behind your back, literally.

However, my dwarf is a little bit of a bastard, as he had an affair with Morrigan.

Oddly enough, he did this at camp, in full view of a certain priestess who was completely and utterly in love with him, having spent the night together less than a week before his night-time exertions with this witch of the wilds. There was no accusation, no reaction, and I remain half tempted to kiss one of them in front of the other simply to find out what, exactly, the rules of engagement are in this fictional universe. For a developer to put so much faith into their romance mechanics only to code in no consequences for cheating on your companion, is extremely at odds with the strong moral counterpart to the rest of the game’s mechanics, especially when playing a character who, in Grumnir’s case, is most definitely a nice guy, most of the time. I found it disappointing that having an affair didn’t count as a negative moral choice, and I lost a significant amount of faith in the game’s realism for a few hours.

Then I fought a fucking dragon, and I stopped caring so much.

The thing with Origins, is that even two years down the line, there’ll still be DLC and things to talk about, and it’ll be a recurring theme on this blog from now on. I’m a big Mass Effect person, also, but I don’t see two years of life in the sequel. My acid test for this game, admittedly, was my girlfriend, of whom I was expecting to see Origins with the eyes of a sci-fi loyalist and simply look at me with pity, her eyes communicating nothing more than “this is complete drivel.” However, two hours in and she’s completely hooked, so I know it’s not because I dig orcs and elves myself that I’m ignoring any major faults, blinded by my bias for the genre.

I hope you enjoy the game as much as I do, and I’ll return from Ferelden with more thoughts as time goes on. For now though, it’s Sunday and I’m itching to kill an archdemon.

The idea behind the game is simple: a click-to-move RPG with turn-based combat, set in a world of dwarves, humans and elves, all set on freeing their lands from the evil that lurks below Orzammar (I’ll refrain from commenting on the fact the name sounds like Orgrimmar and the place looks a little like it, too). You’re set upon by various beasts, and your task is to complete three simple quests per chapter, all involving exploring the caverns beneath the ancient dwarven city.

The user interface itself is pretty advanced if you consider the fact that this is just a simple flash game. At the bottom you’ve got your classic WoW-esque approach to hotkeys, and the set of keys displayed will depend on who you’ve currently got selected, though everyone moves as one outside combat. In the first gallery picture (screencapped from my own save as GamesPress are lacking assets, odd as this game is better than all that FIFA tripe) I’e currently got Ardum, the party’s resident healer/spellcaster selected. What you use him for is up to you, but if you take a look at the hotkeys, I’ve got him geared more towards healing than anything else. In true Diablo style you can chuck pots and various other items onto hotkeys. However, this becomes tiresome quickly as the game insists you click a pot, then a portrait. Odd when you have a pooled set of resources and could simply select a toon to heal.

However, the rest of the UI is pretty swish, with the obvious circles of health and mana/stamina set around character portraits. You can also see that Ardum is pretty close to level six at the moment, due to the genius idea of actually putting the experience bar on the main UI, which is something that, due to it being missing, ruined the flow of Mass Effect by a significant amount. Next to it is a button set for switching between two weapon sets; in most cases, a melee and ranged weapon, though the caster wasn’t a swap I experimented with, though it’s for two different staves (healing and damage, for example).

Menu’s up top and you’ve got a compass in the form of two icons that flit around your screen in geosynchronous position relative to where your current objective is, and the nearest door back to Orzammar, your hub for this particular chapter (and I’m hoping only this chapter). Quick travel is, as you can see, most definitely an option, and the smartest element of it is it’s not based on place names, but instead what you’d be doing in that particular area once you arrive, for example “going back to Orzammar” or “destroying the Darkspawn machinery,” transporting you to Orzammar and a sub-level of the Deep Roads, respectively.

All this travelling, however, may wear thin the soles of your shoes, so it’s important to keep your armour and various other bits of meanie-bashing equipment to a high standard relative to your level (or level of arrogance; we all know the one person whose WoW character has a “poser set”). The inventory screen is very clean and straightforward, split into two main windows. Your toon, in this case, my own character Ordan Doomseeker (who’ll be transferring his name into the next-gen title next month), and on the right, a list of equipment. Equipping this angry little fellow is a simple drag-and-drop affair, with slots for one- and two-handed weapons, ranged weapons, weapon sets, armour, accessories, and so on. His stats are shown above and below, handy if you’re wondering how to best tweak your character’s numbers to suit a particular role.

There are two elements of this screen that make equipping characters a joy in Journeys. One is the item comparison system, originally a basic addon for World of Warcraft that then not only made it into the game’s core set of UI mechanics, but spread to almost every RPG released since. Hover over, and compare. Beautiful. The other is the set of category buttons just below your money count, which allows you to sort your items as all/weapons/armour/accessories/potions/quest items. Glorious.

Right, combat. I’m aware this sounds like a checklist, but this is a roleplaying game. To not organise everything into anal little semi-bullet points would be remiss of the characteristics of the genre itself: lots of little details all under helpful headings. Not that my journalistic style is in any way helpful. That being said, thank god the combat system is.

What you’ve got here is actually a fight very far into the game, against a couple of normal mobs and an ogre, who you can think of as That One Ridiculous Mob, or TORM for short. At the moment, the caster is selected, and he’s just finished moving forward, about to cast a spell called Staff Bolt – no mana cost, decent damage. I know. No mana cost. Makes you cry, doesn’t it? His range is shown by the blue hexagons, and the red indicated where he can fire. The hand hovering over TORM’s right foot is my mouse cursor, to give you an idea of what the mouse changes into once you’re hovering over a viable target, helpfully indicated to you by the red hexagons. Also interesting to note is that the larger mobs take up more than one space, though it seems to be either one or three spaces in a line, indicating they’re all very long, but very thin. Silly Bioware. Abilities remain on the bottom, and you can handily see mob health/mana/stamina on the right, with an order of combat up in the top left, which proves incredibly helpful for timing alternating waves of offense and defense in the later, harder battles.

Combat is fun, and – for a turn-based combat system – very swift. Characters move around very smoothly and respond immediately to commands. There’s no victory dancing or ridiculous taunts by your team or the enemy, just pure, visceral combat. It’s incredibly fun and really accelerates the combat to a pace that even non-flash-RPG fans can appreciate whilst racking up items for the game on PC/Xbox/PS3. Healing is a simple job, as is casting and melee, but it’s important to remember that there will sometimes be boulders and small trees on the battlefield (though this is clear, frustratingly, in the screenie), so you’ll have to plan around lines of sight, which can be used to your advantage in a melee heavy party fighting a team of casters.

Your characters can and – on Normal and above difficulty levels – will die during combat. This is remedied in one two ways; either level your caster’s healing talents so he can ressurect in and out of combat, or simply use Injury Kits, which come into use automatically once you’re out of combat. Interestingly, the second I bought an Injury Kit at a shop, the game instantly used it on one of the KOed members of my little fantasy-platoon, saving a fair amount of time digging through my inventory screen.

However, if you’re thinking about boosting your caster into a Super Healer who can bring people back to life by simply blinking, you’ll need to plan his abilities carefully, and this is where the talent tree screen comes into play. In the last picture you can see Ardum’s Mage talent trees, though we’ll focus on Spirit Healer talents as the example, selecting his most recent spell-based acquisition; Revival. Select a spell and spend your points. Simple, right? The different trees are sometimes named a little cryptically, but it’s easy enough to figure them out. “Class name here” is usually basic stat boosting across a wide range of categories, whilst you’ll get the ability to tank, heal, and deal fire-wrath damage should you want to specialise with anyone. Personally I ended up with two offense Warrior class members and Ardun, who was a Healer with a mean Staff Bolt spell that kept mobs from stomping his face into the cave floor.

At first you’ll get a few talent points to mess around with, but sadly it soon drops to one per level. That said, there are only four levels to every tree, so this makes a fair amount of sense, as otherwise by level 20 you’d be proficient in everything and the game would begin to resemble Animal Crossing more than a fantasy brawler RPG. It’s a nice, clean talent tree screen and it makes no bones about what it does, which speeds up your character advancement as there’s no auto-talenting in this. But that’s for idiots anyway, so it’s all good.

Right, that’s basically everything there is to Dragon Age: Journeys so far, and I won’t talk about the quests. Though simplistic (it’s a flash game, let’s not expect Ikaruga), it’s a great storyline and sets up the narrative of the next-gen title very well, introducing you to the various antagonists in the simplest way possible: getting you to spend hours on the web bashing the living daylights out of the little bastards. There are five achievements overall, and another five per chapter, so after twenty little metagames you’ll be sitting on a pile of four or five items at least, transferable into DA:O once it releases on November the sixth, or the third if you’re over the pond. Remember to fill out the surveys, because unlike most people, Bioware do actually take criticism into serious consideration, though if Ubisoft mention more quest-types in Assassin’s Creed II one more time I may go postal.

And, of course, a link to the game itself. Enjoy, all.

I’m a massive fan of the official Halo fluff and its accompanying literature, and through this I’ve developed personal favourites in character types. My personal favourite, more than Spartans, Marines and Covenant, was definitely the Orbital Drop Shock Troopers, alias “the Helljumpers.” Gritty, suicidally brave and taking absolutely no shit whatsoever, they were John’s constant companion throughout several of the books and proved their worth both there and later on in the Halo 3 campaign itself. Dark armour and dark senses of humour, they were standout troopers that really encouraged folks to pay attention to the moving shields in front of their hallowed protagonist.

When they first announced the game, naturally I wasn’t sceptical. They invented it, how could they mess it up? Health bars were making a comeback (finally, some sense out of people designing FPS combat), and we got silenced weapons and a unique “nightsight” addition int the form of the ODST trooper’s VISR mode. Ignoring the tempting criticism of game designer’s tendencies to take a perfectly normal word such as “visor” and turn it into “VISR” whilst at the same time making up a ridiculous sentence to go with the shiny acronym, the game appealed to me. Soon enough, preview time rolled around recently. I had an invite, but I ended up doing something else that day, which was an odd choice, but I realise why I’m glad I didn’t go.

I wanted to experience it in my own way.

With preview events, no matter how good the game you’re playing may actually be, you’re still engaging in virtual escapism surrounded by hundreds of journalists, noise, booth whores and people talking about how the prequel had better storyline and how that weapon, yes, that one, has been neglected and, god forbid, removed. This is not what I wanted. Thanks to the lack of a Firefight matchmaking system, that event would have been my only way to actually play that mode with other people, but nonetheless, I relented and waited for my own copy.

I sat down last night, and began to play the campaign at around ten at night. I chose to play on Heroic. Let me establish here and now that this was by no means me waving my proverbial gaming manhood around; I simply wanted to get a serious challenge out of the game. When you think about it, what’s more likely to make you think of stealth as a welcoming old friend; a grunt on Normal, or a hunter on Heroic? I booted it up, played, and finished at about five in the morning, which is the longest I’ve sat up playing something since Oblivion. I thought I’d grown out of that habit, but I suppose it was Malcolm Rey-sorry, Nathan Fillion, Adam Baldwin and co that suckered me into the plot.

Game designers, hear this, for god’s sake. If you want characters playing cocky bastard marines, please consider using people from programs like Farscape and Firefly. I was ecstatic, as a huge Firefly fan, to hear the voices of good old captain Mal and the grumpy but (sometimes) loyal Jayne engaging in witty rapport throughout the campaign. It made a nice change to the “three words per level” rule that John 117 had abided by for three games, and an even nicer change from Cortana (aka Navi: Remixed) and her constant droning and flirting with the man who’s spinal cord she’s currently hugging.

The weaponry frustrates me, though, and this is for one simple reason. When Bungie began talking about the silenced rifle, we were ld to believe this was essentially the Halo 3 battle rifle with a long tube on the end. Not so. There’s recoil, of course, as you’re no longer an eight foot behemoth with arms like steel cables. However, the main problem comes from how weak the weapon actually is. A headshot to a grunt, even on Legendary, is an instant kill. However, here you could go through an entire clip and still the little bastard is frolicking around like he’s watching Fantasia on LSD.

It does make for some interesting changes to strategy, however. And that’s what ODST is really all about; forcing you to reconsider the threat of the Covenant. With no shield, tiny health, and even tinier melee strength, this is no longer the “charge in, melee, spray bullets” game that we fondly play every weekend with one eye on the clock (sleep is valuable, sometimes) and another on the kill-tally. This is now a game where, if you choose to get cocky, you’ll simply die, over and over, regardless of whether you’re tackling Legendary gold-armour brutes, or simply easy grunts. Hunters in particular, were tough in Halo 3, but I never actually found them at all frightening. However, in ODST I was panicking to the point of verbal exclamation, and it took over ten attempts to find a tactic of killing them that worked (lots of grenades, health packs, and luck). Even brutes, a tough nut to crack for John, are now on par with playing people in multiplayer. It’s all about getting the drop on people, in the dark or the daylight. And that’s where being a Helljumper comes in bloody handy.

Your VISR, when in the nightime New Mombasa (yay, I was worried I’d never hear that awesome South African accent again post-District 9) as the Rookie, is a fantastic tool for putting the fear of the UNSC into the Covenant. It feels stupid in a franchise that’s never once rewarded excessive stealth, but it works wonders. Lobbing a grenade as a distraction, I sprint across the plaza, darting from shadow to shadow, coming up behind the brute with the fuel rod gun that’s been making my life a misery. A quick switch to grenades of the plasma variety, and he’s running into his subordinates, before detonating. Ten Covenant down, and not a single bullet fired between either party.

The VISR makes this all possible, though it’s advisable never to use it in the daylight as it turns everything into bloom-light-messy confusion and a quick, embarassing death. It’s a shame, as outlining enemies two hundred metres away in red is the most useful tool I’ve seen in a Halo game. It’s just a shame it’s only useful in about 10% of the campaign. Sneaking around the city was an amazing, atmospheric experience, but I can’t help feeling the VISR has gone to waste save for the final few underground sections of the end levels.

The one thing I do look forward to in every game from Bungie, is the predictable “jump in a Warthog and drive like the Dickens” final section that involves at least twenty minutes of non-stop, skin-of-your-teeth driving and a lot of hope for the AI moron behind you firing the mounted weapon at anything vaguely purple. Interestingly it wasn’t the end of the campaign, which was a shock, but I suppose Bungie were already changing things up, so there’s no harm done.

I have but one major criticism, and that’s the lack of multiplayer save for Firefight. Imagine a VIP game where the VIP’s a Spartan, and you’re all Helljumpers. Sound fun? Of course it does. Will it happen? No. For all Bungie do fan-service-wise in terms of new maps, they’re shoddy when it comes to making major additions to gameplay. ODST could have been simply added on, and I’m insulted by the second disc containing only three new maps for those loyal enough to the franchise to have bought the other nine earlier in the game’s lifetime, especially considering the lengths we’ve gone to (Halo Wars: CE, anyone?).

It’s been an amazing journey into the mind of an ODST trooper, and I really do hope Halo: Reach isn’t a massive “let’s go back, ooh, shit, it’s different” farce, and actually is what it should be: John’s childhood, abduction, reprogramming and adolescence, along with all the memorable supporting characters that made The Fall of Reach such an engaging and breathtakingly immersive novel.

And it better not have any more “get four friends, and a vehicle there’s only two of, and do something, for armour no one cares about. Otherwise, you’ll never have your achievements maxed out.” Mainly because sadly, Bungie, if you’re going to take the multiplayer route with the most story-heavy game to date, you’ll find your prices better be prepared to drop, too.

That's a lot of different species. And a lot of teeth.

I remember the day I first bought a video game guidebook.

I’d gone along with my mother to W.H. Smiths, and I’d seen it on a shelf, next to a ton of other random literary tripe and paraphernalia. “Final Fantasy VII walkthrough,” it said. It also spoke of cheats, and guides to a few other PSX titles I owned at the time. Seems like a logical purchase, I thought. And so I began to convince my dear parent to part with her hard-earned cash for a book I didn’t really need. I wasn’t stuck in FFVII. I just wanted to see how other people, older people, played it.

As I turned the pages, I realised that the guide was, as I’d known already, a poorly manufactured ideal of someone who believed they knew everything about a game, but sadly, nothing about publishing. All the pages of information that would guide me through a game I had already guided myself through regardless, were in the wrong order. So I began flicking through the guidebook, reading into a topic that, little did I know, would become something of a literary addiction for me: walkthroughs to games I never owned, and never would.

Abe’s Oddysee happened to be one of those games. As I began to flick through, instantly I was stunned by how horrendously ugly he was. As of that moment, I’d been exposed to nothing but Super Mario, his pixel perfect friends at Nintendo, and the various titles on PSX that ranged from childlike anime art style, to the clunky but functional Crash Bandicoot. Abe was a monster, plain and simple. But he was also the most innocent looking fella I’d seen in a videogame thus far. His mouth stitched shut, his eyes yellowed and bloodshot: he was far from a picture of health. But there he stood, smiling. He was malnourished, beaten down and enslaved, but he still smiled and seemingly, was goodhearted, judging by the various tasks the player would undertake, all listed in great deal within the pages of my guidebook.

Abe is a picture of the one thing that makes the Western white man uncomfortable to this day: slavery. No matter what age you are or where you’re from, there’s nothing about a moral mind that could ever agree with seeing another human being and shackling them to your will. Abe had the look of the pious about him: his topknot hairstyle reminiscent of a Tibetan monk, wearing nothing but a hairband and a loincloth. A true tarzan of a tyrannous world, you might say.

Fast forward almost a decade, and I’m sitting at my laptop, furiously typing through what I’m hoping will be the last dissertational piece on Gothic literature I’ll ever have to write. I alt-tab out of Word, frustrated with the lack of progress, and find out via my addictive RSS feed what’s going on in the world. Apparently, Abe’s Oddysee and Abe’s Exodus have popped up on Steam, and Valve are vendoring both titles for the sum price of £2.25. I buy the copies for myself, and gift purchase the copies for my missus, remembering a fun conversation we had on holiday about the PSX era of gaming where she mentioned it with a smile, as the PSX was the only gaming console we had with us in the quaint Italian town her getaway was situated in.

The thing about Abe’s Oddysee is it isn’t trying to actually become an enjoyable videogame. It’s hard, unforgiving, the controls are clunky, and in this day and age the resolution is smaller than, well, something extraordinarily minute. Yet, it’s still such a fantastic title, and for so many reasons.

Ask yourself this: when playing a game on the PC, that doesn’t make use of the mouse at all, how do you feel? Confused? Frustrated? Disorientated? Perhaps all three, as I was certainly guilty of those particular emotions. I’m used to the RTS-FPS way of thinking when gaming on the PC platform: mouse rules all. It is my selector, my gun’s trigger: what it does for me I can’t do with anything else. Even playing Doom feels odd if you’ve just spent the last few weeks on Half Life. There’s a lack of control.

So when attempting to play a game that not only transported itself from console to PC, but did so so diligently it didn’t even bother considering the fact your keyboard isn’t a gamepad, it blew my mind. I missed jumps, I couldn’t remember the controls for longer than five minutes… I was a mess. But at the same time, I was having a lot of fun, because I found it extremely challenging, as it took my contemporary game-control mindset to task and pitted it against the monolithic keyboard-only predecessor I felt that, after playing, I should have more respect for.

What the game can also do very well, albeit if very subtly, is tell a story. Abe is a slave, simple and straightforward. There’s no history given, no motives: he is a slave, and he has masters. They employ repulsively ugly soldiers to keep the peace, and everything keeps on ticking. It’s dark, this dystopian alien future, and it feels dark. The pre-rendered cutscenes depict the boss of the company in a ’20s ganster zoot suit, his cohorts in similar suits, and his minions in metal suits to give them movement. The game’s character design makes a lot of political implications in reference to unfeeling global corporations, and it gets away with it because at the time, we were playing Crash Bandicoot and talking about what colours the feathers on Aku Aku’s face were, not ranting about racism in Resident Evil 5. The “political statement” in videogames didn’t exist, and character design is more free, the implications of their aesthetics and the subtext of the plot more cohesive, given more depth, as a result of this freedom.

The monsters and enemies you will have to face are, in a word, horrifying. Ever wondered what a squid with mechanical legs looks like weilding an M16? Well, head on over to Steam and find out. Starship Troopers, Alien, the inspirations in character design are all here, and they make such a refreshing (if retro at the same time) change to the alien grunts of contemporary videogame design. Covenant, Super Mutants… they’re all the same, really. Humanoid aliens without any redeeming features, or simply mutated humans. The Elites lack a human jaw, but they still talk in flawless American English. It’s farcical.

The Scrabs are something I’d like to highlight. If someone ever asks you what you’d least like to be chased by, this is your answer. This enemy can follow you across gaps, hunt you in the dark (where you hide from Sligs, the mobile squid lifeform that forms the majority of the paid gun and muscle in the title), and they can call out to eachother. Behemoths, each taller than you, a four-legged crab-like entity that consists of jegs, a muscled humanoid torso, and a long, sharp mouth for goring you with. The simplicity of their design is also their strong point: they are violence and rampant genetic disorder personified, created with nothing but violence and flesh-rending in mind. In fact, they’re so violent you can pit them against eachother, if you’d like.

It begs the question of where the simplistic side to game-design creativity has gone, though notably there are a few exceptions. Valve still have their various creations from Antlions to Vortigaunts, Nintendo their Goombas and Koopas, and the various Locust that populate the Gears universe, to name but a few. But as for Super Mutants, zombies in any form (“infected” humans, I’m looking at you), and other such same-old same-old content in the way of videogame antagonists, after playing the Oddworld titles, you begin to question why every title that involves species that don’t originate from either Earth’s biological catalogue don’t seem to look that different to us, at all.

Abe’s voice is something that’s going to come as a shock. Personally, looking at someone with a mouth stitched shut, I barely expected him to stop breathing through his nose, let alone venture into the realms of basic speech. With commands like “hello”, “follow me” and the inevitable farting emote, it makes titles like Tom Clancy’s Endwar look pointlessly complex. I don’t need to tell someone to go somewhere myself if my in-game avatar’s going to do the job for me. You could argue immersion, but when immersion comes through the form of the same headset I use to listen to thirteen year old males question my sexuality because I beat them at Halo 3, it tends to miss the mark.

This wasn’t a review, nor a “retro love” article, simply something to highlight the fact that old games will, more often than not, show up their contemporary counterparts as unoriginal and clunky. You’ll never capture the smoke-filled jazz “cool” of Grim Fandango, nor will you ever horrify in the same way the insane Milkman did in Psychonauts did. However, you may just be able to recreate the fantastic world of Abe and his Mudokon brethren, their plight for freedom in an oppressive, corporate, profit-driven slaughterhouse of a universe, and the storyline, gameplay and character that goes with it. But first, you’d need the rights to a sequel.

See what I did there? Enjoy your Monday morning.

Venom makes himself very much at home.

With great franchises, come great responsibility. No, I’m not quoting Uncle Ben, I’m quoting myself, damnit. The thing with Spiderman games is they can either be stunningly brilliant, Spiderman 2 for example, or horrifyingly bad, like the film-to-video game incarnation of the first Tobey Maguire film. It’s a nightmare getting it all right, but if you’ve got the right tools, a taste for sandbox game development, and a colossal passion for comics, it’ll be a success.

Spidey: Web of Shadows is most definitely a success. From the moment you hear Tobey Maguire’s voice vanish from underneath the ‘ole Red and Blue, you know things will be different, and Spiderman will be a lot less wimpy. I for one, actually prefer Tobey Maguire. He looks, sounds like and is Spiderman, to me; slightly annoying, funny when he wants to be, and intimidatingly furious whenever things go sour for our arachnid hero.

You’re essentially playing in Manhattan, though sadly it is just Manhattan, this time. Spiderman 2 was a lot more open-ended due to the added Roosevelt island and various other additional landmasses that made the gameplay area a lot bigger. However, with the amount of things to do in Spidey, there’s not much reason to expand the area past 20 by 100 blocks or so. The atmosphere is brilliant, people walking around, driving cars, sitting in parks, gang warfare, street crime; it’s New York as you know it, just with the added superhero element.

You could say you’re going to see this vision of New York through two very different pairs of eyes; those of Peter Parker, hero of the people, and the white, soulless eye-sockets of his Venom-skinned counterpart. At the click of the left analogue stick, you can switch between the old-school suit and the slick, black, evil costume that comes with a lot of physical power, though ends up as a magnet for police bullets, as if you’re not bothering to save anyone and constantly making evil choices, people aren’t going to be your biggest fans.

Honestly, the most frustrating choices come in the form of whether or not to be good and bad on a personal level. Spiderman’s history with Black Cat stretches back tens of years in comic book history, and she’s probably a pretty darn sore subject for Mary Jane. So, you can either side with the good girlfriend, made to look “tough” by dressing her like a deranged prostitute and adding a combat shotgun, or side with the even more whorish Felicia, who’s catsuit is questionable to begin with.

What the hell is wrong with game developers? Where’s the choice there? There’s no good person for Spiderman to be with, simply two complete nutcases who dress like they’ve just stumbled out of a club at four in the morning. I’m not a woman, but my God, even I find that extremely offensive. Predictably, Black Cat gets her suit slashed to ribbons at one point in the storyline, and lo and behold, my “frat boy” alarm starts to go into overdrive. Soul Calibur, Spiderman, X-Blades, Bikini Samurai Squad, Flirt Up Your Life… it’s all getting worse and worse. I’m all for freedom of expression, but borderline pornography is something I’ll never support. If you’ve got Xbox Live, and therefore an internet connection, go to seedier places to get this odd “fix” of yours, and stop polluting entertainment.

Ranting aside (you got off lightly, trust me), the actual game itself is very engaging. Swinging around feels as natural as it did in Spiderman 2, even though my girlfriend was clever enough to point out that half the time, the web isn’t actually attatching to anything. Seriously, pan the camera up 90 degrees and watch that sucker float in mid-air. It’s disturbing. That said, I think the camera needs a ton of work in general. When locked onto something, you’ve got two choices. Up, or down. The camera will either face your feet or the sky, and there’s no in-between to help you out, here.

It makes combat difficult, which is irritating because combat in Spidey is ridiculously complex to begin with. I’ve never seen so many hidden quick-time events in a title before, not to mention the obligatory four quick-time button pushes in order to defeat every single boss fight in the game. Look, guys, just because you’re telling the player to “press X just before you reach the bad guy” doesn’t mean I’m not going to translate that as “press X to not die”. I’m not stupid. I’m fine with open quicktime events. Bar the odd time-based button mashing, the regenerative health system is actually remarkably well balanced. Low on health, you’ll have to make sure you’re hiding for a fair while in order for it to return, but then again, swinging around on the same web so they can’t hit you for a minute and a half also does the same trick, disappointingly.

The graphics are, sadly, only what can be expected from a game that contains thousands of character models, and at least fifty to a hundred on screen at any one time. GTA IV was a brilliant game, but the graphics were questionable at times. Spidey suffers from a serious drop in frame rate when you’re swinging through the city at serious speed. I know my Elite makes a ton of damn noise as it is unless I install my games to the hard drive, but Jesus, I could really hear the thing chugging to make sure I didn’t swing into a fifty-story wireframe box instead of a skyscraper.

The missions are varied enough, with everything from evacuation supervision to flying about getting samples from the Venom-possessed locals, and they’re good for extra experience and passing the time. Experience is pretty important, as if you want the best moves, you’ll be paying through the nose for them at the Upgrades screen. Luckily, the game’s fairly generous with it, and you’re rewarded with more for mixing up your combos and the ways in which you despatch your foes on the New York battlefield.

A ton of old faces make an appearance, though my hands-down favourite has to be Wolverine. The moment he arrives, he attempts to kill you, on the assumption the Venom parasite has taken you over completely. He then, oddly, subjects you to several rounds of Marvel comic trivia questions before you can beat him. Erm. What? Now, I can understand questions like “what’re your parents names?” with trick answers like “Uncle Ben and Aunt May”, but “who refused to join the New Avengers?” Seriously guys, are you even looking at the target demographic? They’re not going to know that. I got a couple right, but most were trial and error. What’s worse is, you get Black Points (evil karma, evil points, you know the drill by now) for getting them wrong. Tell me if I’m whining too much, but isn’t that a bit unfair to someone trying to be a good character and being punished for not being Stan Lee?

All this aside, it’s an enjoyable experience, and with around 2260 collectible Spider-icons sitting around the city, not to mention side missions, unlockable moves and other content, this will last you quite a while. If you can get past the corrupted-by-men look of Mary Jane and CatWoman (which I did, just about, with a lot of groaning), it’s worth renting it at least. Which is, coincidentally, exactly what I did. In fact, I originally asked for SFIV and they sent me this as that was out of stock. Nice bit of luck there. It’s just a shame you can’t get Spidey to choose neither woman at the end of the game, really. He’d be a hero I’d look up to, then.

Yeah, you wish it was him. Suck it up.

 

 

 

The game itself is a work of art, quite literally; all the textures are like something out of Watercolour Challenge, and it’s an energizing take on the cel-shaded revolution put in place by Nintendo’s Wind Waker title. However, the initial look was a shock to gamers searching for that gritty mud-brown and meh-grey bleak colour scheme that seems all too popular nowadays. Hell, the only game that got away without the cliché stamp was Fallout 3 and they had to nuke the landscape to have an excuse.

However, there’ve been a ton of colourful, wonderfully designed game worlds in the last few years, but for the vast majority, they’ve all been horrendous. Mainly because the only games that even dare to put colours verging on happy are titles intended for children, such as the Viva Piñata series. But the colour was the first thing that struck me in the game, as the visuals made me feel like I was watching a very well crafted film. The dust sprays away from the princes feet as he lands, and the cartoony wisps of mineral-based smoke that dwindle into the air are reminiscent of something out of the creative mind of Nintendo, or Disney, and the game settles into a more relaxed pace.

The “relaxed pace” schematic is something Ubisoft have followed with this title to a T – gone are the furious rattling-off of button combinations in order to simply not die, as Warrior Within so melodramatically demonstrated, and in are occasional button pushes that feel like slight nudges towards the Prince’s goal, as opposed to the rigorous constant control of Assassin’s Creed, the Ubisoft title that this game’s control system takes a lot of influence from.

It’s part of the whole parkour uprising in titles. Speaking as someone who played Mirror’s Edge, loved the concept, thought the gameplay was amazing but the story dismal, same going for Ubisoft’s medieval hitman experience; Prince of Persia is a refreshing change of pace. You can run along walls, up walls, across ceilings (albeit briefly), jump, double jump (it’s a double jump, people who try to name it via the manual’s definition are lying to themselves) and so on and so forth. It’s a brilliant system that adds one element to the genre that both Creed and Edge really did suck at; instant restarts.

I’m running along a wall, I don’t jump off in time, and I fall. In Creed, I would have to run along the street, away from guards, get onto the rooftop five blocks from where I was, hide, fail, hide twenty blocks away, then slowly slog my way back. Mirror’s Edge just reset you to a checkpoint miles away - literally sometimes. However, here, I fall, Elika (the game’s thankfully not scantily-clad female sidekick, bless you Ubisoft for being mature) reaches out her magical hand, and I reappear on the last flat surface I jumped off. Brilliant. But the problem with this is I stopped caring. I fell, went, fell, went, and slogged my way through the harder bits by landing often enough that I was slowly moving my checkpoint forward bit by bit. It’s like the Vita-Chambers in Bioshock; lack of penalty for failure will result in lack of interest in it, too.

A small suggestion here, Ubisoft; video game enthusiasts are okay with the concept of dying in a game. It’s not real. We did it a thousand times in Ghosts and Ghouls, Geometry Wars and the wonderfully unforgiving Library level on Halo‘s legendary difficulty setting. Let him die. Let him restart from the beginning. Don’t go all the way and give us a “lives” system, because the only franchise still doing that so anally is Sonic, and I don’t even need to mention Unleashed before everyone groans. Instant restarts do indeed speed up the pace and help not interrupt the flow of the game experience, but playing the same five seconds of a path over and over is boring. Let me go back a minute or so, pick a different route, and go that way. Or, I would, if you hadn’t secretly structured the game world so that’s impossible and only ONE path leads to ONE area and that’s that. The gameplay begins to feel a bit military then, and it’s a tad depressing to know that a game with freerunnning elements isn’t actually very free at all.

The gameplay does help support the experience, though, as the free-running adds a lot of pace to a storyline that doesn’t need any, but benefits nonetheless. Big Evil God, four lieutenants, some creature-like underlings and a big cage to chuck them all back in. I’ve done this before. But I liked the twist; this time the Big Nice God isn’t here. In fact, he left ages ago because he couldn’t face the music for the Big Evil God being so nasty and not wanting to be caged for a thousand years. This left me with a sense of independence, that it really was up to my character and not some half-arsed celestial long-term contingency plan involving a mere mortal and a god who can shape landscapes but apparently can’t keep one shaped around his evil counterpart.

So, the story pans out, the gameplay is fun, and the art style is great. The music’s a nice touch as well, as I think you can notch up any music you find yourself humming days later, or simply leaving on in the background when you’re not playing. It’s all comprised of enjoyable orchestral pieces, and they’re tame enough to be background-esque without taking charge of the experience, which is another reason why I’d never buy a game John Williams wrote the score for, as the only thing I got out of Lego Star Wars was sixteen notes stuck in my head for a month.

It’s a title worth a look, and definitely something you shouldn’t pay too much attention to the bad reviews about. Those who slam bold adventures in today’s gaming scene, such as this, Mirror’s Edge and others, should really learn to stop and take a look at the sales figures for LittleBigPlanet, Viva Piñata, Grim Fandango and interestingly enough, Gears of War in my opinion.

He who dares, wins.