Alien Breed

Probably the most iconic top-down shooter ever and a rare example of a rip-off of a famous franchise becoming a famous franchise itself.

So what that Alien Breed look, act and screech like Alien? So what that there are facehuggers running around, so what that ISRC 4 station bears close resemblance to Nostromo and the immortal "Welcome to Intex system" might as well have been said by MUTHUR (or "Mother" as most people call it). The truth is, no one cared about any of these things, because Alien Breed was a great game. Forget about the plot, although there is one, told by a couple of weird introductory drawings. Forget about NPC's. It's just you, you gun, and about a load of alien scum, exactly the way shooters were meant to be designed.

The basic scheme of Alien Breed levels looks like this: you emerge at the elevator and you need to find another one which will take you to the next level. On your way, you have to open locked doors with keys you find scattered around, which is good, because it makes you think twice before opening every door you come across, and of course - shoot aliens. You also find money which lets you buy weapons and other supplies at the Intex terminals (oh how I loved the little interference showing up each time you log into a terminal). Just throw in some side quests like destroying some nodes and there you go. Simple, yet very entertaining, the game ROCKED back in the old days.

Things got polished up even further in the Special Edition '92 (the screenshots below are taken from that version) featuring more levels, more bosses and wide variety of color themes (including the infamous dark levels). The introductory drawings were removed, thank God, and the ending sequence was replaced with... something interesting. :-) As far as I know, the DOS version of Alien Breed is the port of the Amiga's SE'92 version, but with minor graphical changes.

What about the follow-ups? The sequel Alien Breed 2: The Nightmare Continues was everything above and then some. It featured brand new ground levels and a LOT more of enemies including a dozen of new alien species (some of which actually look very ugly), cybernetic lifeforms and mechanical traps. The next release was a game named Tower Assault, about which I will probably write in one of the next Press Play on Tape episodes. And since no great 2D series would be complete without a failed 3D transition attempt, there were also Alien Breed 3D and Alien Breed 3D 2: The Killing Grounds, both of which being abysmally sluggish FPS games.

I often thought about Alien Breed while playing Starcraft's indoor levels, wishing that someone would revive this short-lived franchise. There IS an unofficial remake called Alien Breed: Obliteration and it plays well, but still a little strange and empty. I mean don't get me wrong, this is a really decent remake and I honestly think its creators ought to be congratulated, still... You just want more. More, more, more, more..............

The screenshots are taken from Hall of Light - the site which future generations will call the one true God.

Great Minds...

I wanted to write about my opinion about some developers much later, but something gave me an incentive to write about it right now.
I had a chance to read an interview with Kojima in recent Edge. It seems that poor Kojima-san is not really pleased with his latest creation – Metal Gear Solid 4. Of course he wasn’t talking about gameplay or the plot. With these he keeps his I-made-this-game-all-by-myself-with-my-bare-hands and I’m-the-best-game-developer-ever-bow-to-me posture. What he doesn’t like is the graphics and it’s Cell that limits his god-like abilities (probably Kutaragi did that on purpose). Kojima is not happy with the level sizes and motion-blending. He also states that, and I quote: “We're using the Cell engine to its limit”. Maybe the translation from Japanese was not so good and what he actually said was: “I don’t think it’s possible to lick your own elbow”. How the hell does he know that they used Cell’s full potential if they barely made one game that uses it? They measured it with a ruler? Maybe they asked?
Seriously, my love to the MGS series is proportional to my dislike to Hideo Kojima.
I don’t know, maybe this happens when everyone keeps telling you that you’re a genius and a visionary and you actually believe it to be true. I don’t think that a man who’s making the same game for 20 years (ok, he made Policenauts and Z.O.E, but how many people actually know that?) has the right to say he reached a limit of anything unless he’s talking about MGS.
Let me also add that that is the man who supposedly makes games for the fans but has no compunction about making them pay twice for the same game, releasing it for the second time with questionable “additional” content that should be included in the original game and claims that it’s the “only, true experience”.

Not that I’m defending Sony. They are about to receive their own dose of bashing through the head with a shovel. Maybe not Sony in whole (even though they sure deserve it), since I’m not writing about companies (even though I could… and probably will). The person that deserves a rebuke is none other that the father of Playstation himself – Ken Kutaragi.
To shut up any fanboys that might come my way I will tell you that the Playstation platforms are my favorite among all gaming devices (Dreamcast would be not far behind), but that doesn’t change the fact that I’m really pissed off at Kutaragi about what he did with Playstation 3. I started to worry when first ideas about Cell were released to the internet. Kutaragi’s vision was a processor that would share computing power over the World Wide Web with other Cells. Kutaragi wanted to do something revolutionary, but he obviously forgot about the end consumer. Did he wonder what will happen if games would require more power than a single Cell could provide, but the user wouldn’t have internet connection? I doubt it. Later he conceived this “ingenious” idea about making the PS3 more like a PC – with the ability to upgrade its core components. Not Cell of course - Cell would be so powerful that it would last till the end of the world, and it would probably help Jesus count sinners during the final judgment. And I bet it would still cost 600 bucks on the day of the release. Could you imagine that? That would be worse than having your liver removed with a wooden spoon. That would be a complete contradiction to the whole console put-in-and-play concept. Fortunately those ideas didn’t make it to the final PS3 design, but we got a console that was initially too expensive and, due to its construction and lack of proper tools, is hard to develop for. Why? Because Sony gave Kutaragi a free hand when designing PS3 and they paid a hefty price. To complete the picture I will bring up two statements that our Ken made regarding the price of the PS3. First he said that Playstation3 is not at all expensive, because if you look at it in a broader sense you’re not getting a gaming machine, but a multimedia center. So what? It could have a shaver and a microwave oven build into, 600 is still too much for a, like it or not Ken, gaming console. His second statement is even better. Believe it or not, but Kutaragi actually said that he’s not worried about the low PS3 sales, because if they sell less, they lose less [money]. I will leave that without comment.

Next we have people like Gabe Newell and Devid Jaffy.
The first is best known for being the co-founder of Valve and making the Half-Life games. He is also known for having a total disregard for Playstation 3 and calling it a “complete disaster”. I guess a guy who worked for Microsoft couldn’t really say anything else. This is also the guy who didn’t want to do the PS3 conversion of Orange Box, because he basically thinks it wasn’t worth the effort. Is it really the only reason? Or maybe it’s too much to muster the PS3 for someone who needs a decade to make two games? Seriously, as good as Half-Life games are they could have been made in a much shorter time span by pretty much anyone. And don’t even get me started on the Episodes. Sorry dude, I guess your Source engine isn’t really THAT flexible.
Last but not least we have Jaffe – one of the creators of the God of War franchise. For this guy only a short note. Just because you swear in public and don’t have respect for anyone doesn’t mean you’re open and sincere. It means you’re rude and don’t have manners. Say “sorry” to your mother, I’m sure she wanted better.

If you’re starting to wonder why the hell I am bitching about those guys so much let me “paint” you a picture. Imagine that the next generation of consoles is developed by men like Kutaragi, the games are created by ego-maniacs like Kojima for as long as Newell would create Half-Life 3, and then after you’re allowed to actually buy them you are bad mouthed by Jaffe. Unlikely?
Those people are not only regarded as role models and respected among both the developers and the gaming community, but also looked upon by other game creators when they make their own games. You see, people with that kind of influence tend to create trends, and trends tend to become standards. We bitch about companies like Electronic Arts that they destroy our once perfect gaming world by creating mainstream games for people with and IQ of a carrot, but at least they make games for gamers, not for themselves and right now I would hesitate to point a finger at the one who is the biggest threat to the industry.
Of course the four above are not the only people that shape the gaming reality. On the other side of the creativity river we have people that, as Seth in From Dusk Till Dawn said, are in my cool book. They are not bragging about their work, even though they deserve more praise for their achievement that anyone else. To name two – Shinji Mikami and Shigeru Miyamoto.
The first one is the person who shaped the whole genre of survival horror. Yes, I know that Alone in the Dark was created before Resident Evil, but it was the latter game that set standards for all that came after it, and it was thanks to Mikami that today we have Dead Raising and Silent Hill. Mikami is a man that not only is humble, but also honorable in what he’s doing. After the release of Resident Evil 4 for the Gamecube the Capcom stock holders pressed Mikami-san to develop a PS2 version of the game. He didn’t submit however and said that he would leave Capcom and would not take part in the development of RE5 (Actually, he said that he would “cut his head off if RE4 would be made for PS2”). After Capcom’s decision about making a RE4 port against the creator’s will Mikami resigned.
The second person that I truly admire is Shigeru Miyamoto the creator of Donkey Kong, Zelda and most notably Mario. If it wasn’t for Miyamoto-san video games today would probably be completely different. Over the years he created the most playable and innovative titles. He created the first truly 3D platformer – Super Mario 64 and pretty much defined the action-RPG genre. He makes the best games he can, often scratching the whole project and starting from the very beginning (Mario 128 anyone?). Miyamoto makes games with passion for all generations of players and even in with all the successes and awards remains the same adorable man. Ok, he had a few “unfortunate” events but when you pair it what Kutaragi say they really aren’t that big a deal.

Dear game developers. You are prospering in a treacherous market. Keep in mind that real gamers won’t give a damn about how hard the game is to make, what drives you when you’re creating your digital offspring, they don’t care what kind financial problems you need to struggle with and what technical limitations hinder your work. All they care about is if the game is good enough to let them forget about the sad, painful reality they live in. And if the game is good enough then maybe, just maybe they will buy the collectors edition and thank you for making a wonderful experience with fan art and fan fiction. Hope that it happens, because that should be your biggest reward (along with millions of dollars from sold copies).

A side note.
I have two more men to mention in this article, Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk. Those guys graduated from medical school in 1992, but were drawn to the computer game industry. For the first few years of their medical practice they put all their saving into their dream company – Biowere. This is what I call devotion. To this day they create the highest quality games. Titles like Knights of the Old Republic, Baldur’s Gate or Mass Effect speak for themselves.

Episodes

This post was started as a review of Command & Conquer 3 Tiberium Wars / Command & Conquer 3 Kane's Wrath but at some point I decided to turn it into an editorial as I realized there's one relatively new interesting tendency among the game developers. Look at the title.

Why did they actually start releasing games in episodes? The first explanation, which came supposedly directly from Valve, said that creating an entirely new game (Half-Life 3) would take far too much time, so instead they had decided to cut up the project into parts and release them one by one in shorter periods of time, introducing new designs and improving the technology in the process. Well, it sounded like a damn good reason at that time - I mean, who would prefer to wait another six years for the next ground-breaking Half-Life installment? Today, however, when even C&C switches to episodes (Kane's Wrath being the first in C&C3 series), things look a little bit different.

Firstly, what is the difference between the episodes system of today and the add-ons system of not-so-long-ago? In many cases there's usually one or two add-ons per game, rarely more (like, let's say Counterstrike and Aftermath for C&C: Red Alert), while the word "episodes" in a sub-title definetely suggests plural. Why would that be bad? There are several reasons:

1. Making episodes makes people lazy. Most of them feature just another set of familiar innovative maps (with one notable exception - the Antlion Hive in HL2: Episode Two - it looks awesome), maybe one or two new weapons and some new enemies, how difficult to make can that be? All that's left to do is to push the story a little more forward, like tell the player to run all the way from one end of the map to another "because it's very important for the story".

2. Speaking of the story, what did we actually learn from the two Episodes of Half-Life? Well, that the Combine Advisors have a tentacle and that they can fly. And that's it. In TWO EPISODES, while the original Half-Life 2 introduced us to a whole new nightmarish reality, dragged us through it, eventually gave us the chance to try and set things right, starting with the death (or so it seems) of the main bad-guy. All in one game. Now take a look at the episodes again and tell me how much did actually happen there, apart from Gordon Freeman running his ass off all the time. Pretty much the same in Kane's Wrath - there's a new Nod AI whose intentions remain unknown and now Kane finally has his Tacitus. Full stop. I don't think the deprivation of decent storyline will become a habit of every episode series to be released, but I am willing to bet my car that some assholes will release a couple of episodes with no story whatsoever just for some more money. Right, the money...

3. How much will we be required to pay for the series? The price for the episodes of the games mentioned so far isn't all that low (again with one notable exception of Valve's Orange Box, but the low price won't seem strange if you think about how much money they have earned so far selling HL2 and HL2:E1) and considering everything I've written so far, this may prove to be money spent for just killing time - running around on the familiar-looking maps, killing the same old monsters, shooting a single new weapon), while at the pretty much same price you could have been given a full game which you would probably enjoy about a thousand times better.

4. The last thing I don't like about episodes is that most of them end with cliffhangers, which is rarely the case with add-ons or expansion packs. See, most of them are like mini-games themselves - they have some sort of a beginning and some sort of an end which is supposed to leave you happy at the job well done (I like to call that the "Mission Accomplished" Feeling), while Episodes, often leave you just guessing what will happen next. Just look at Half-Life Episodes and compare them with Opposing Force and Blue Shift, or even at Kane's Wrath, for that matter, compared with the previous C&C expansion packs like Firestorm or Yuri's Revenge. It feels like a really like a cheap trick to make you want to run to the store and get the next episode as fast as you can, once it comes out.

Finally, there is always a fate which Sin Episodes suffered: cancellation. The grand predecessor, the game Sin, was at the time a fairly strong competitor for Half-Life (although Half-Life crearly won in the end, considering Sin a loser makes no sense, because the two games had almost nothing in common, apart from both being FPS'es - I mean, show me another FPS with that variety of nicely-done levels: the bank, the construction site, the sewers, the subway, the dam, the bed of the ocean, the oil rig, the jungle, the high-tech underground research facility, the high-tech underground research facility FROM HELL, the old manor... but yes, Sin had bugs. It crawled with bugs.) but the first attempt to revive the franchise in the shape of episodes produced just one: Emergence, which didn't earn enough money for many people to stay in its development team. Thus, the story suddenly ended just after it has begun. Now consider this: if Ritual Entertainment chose to make a full game right away, they would probably think twice before placing as much as four weapons and two or so enemy models. They wouldn't deprive Blade the protagonist of voice (in Sin he had a reeealy huge mouth, I loved his lines). They would maybe make a nice game. Instead Sin is dead again, and what a painful and disgraceful death it was.

Making episodes hasn't become a habit yet, so I mean this post to become a kind of warning or/and a piece of advice (for once I actually LIKED the episode examples mentioned above, except for Emergence, although they could have been better in many ways):
For all you game developers out there, if you really want to make episodes for your games, go ahead make them. But for heaven's sake, make them worth something more than just useless single player map-packs. Make them worth our damn time.

Lock me up!

Do add my discontent I will say that the whole brutality-in-games issue is “puffed” for the sake of moaning about it.
The violence is not the real issue. Children were always exposed to violence. Take the tales of Grimms or Andersen – murder, humiliation, pain and sickness. Were those stories censored? The problem is the fucking parents who let their children grow up alone without any guidance on what’s good and what’s evil. Most problems with mentally unstable teenagers derive from the same thing. Parents are simply not interested in their kids. Unlike animals, human children are mentally fragile at young age and will not develop properly on their own.
But violent behavior is nothing unnatural. I’m not saying it’s nothing to worry about, but for Christ’s sake, even sports induce violent actions. Parents should teach their kids how to deal with it.
The reason for games to get such bashing is that they are becoming wildly popular and that seems to be a good enough reason to have something against them.
Censorship seems to be directly connected.
What is the reason to make blood green or black? It’s still blood. Kids have enough imagination to figure it out. Censorship like that just makes gamers pissed off because they get a modified product against their will. And most censorship is applied for some abstract reasons.
Let me tell you a story from Poland. It’s not about games but gives a good image how it all works. We have a governmental body called The National Council of Radio and Television. It’s basically five people who take a shitload of money for doing more harm than good. There was a commercial by one of our mobile telephony provider – a little red riding hood was walking through the forest; an amusing song about her playing in the background. When she went behind a tree there was this metallic “snap” sound and the RRH was shown screaming with a leg stuck in a bear trap. The slogan was something about them not being able to tell stories.
What did the council do? Ban the commercial because, as they claimed, children were confused and didn’t know what happened to the little girl and why she was screaming, and that could damage their psyche. Yeah, right, like they didn’t see that a thousand times before in every single cartoon. Most of them seen a lot worse – in cartoons, news and movies.
I am all for rating games. If a game is brutal tag it with an “M” or “18+” rating, but leave the fucking content alone. Let the parents control their children and let adults play the game as it was intended.
In recent years I see this absurd situation escalating - the banning of Manhunt 2, changing No More Heroes and banning Kane and Lynch ads. It all balances on the edge of being ridiculous and serves no real purpose other than fattening the censors’ and moral screamers’ egos.

F*c#ing C#ns%&sh!p

Today, for the first time on this blog, I don't intend to fuck around and will tell you what's what without any moral (or verbal) constraining.

Behold this.

The background:
The name of the game is No More Heroes. The creator's name is Suda 51. The developer company's name is Grasshopper. Suda 51 previously released Killer 7, the game which has been placed on my extremely short personal list of the best games of all times (along titles like Silent Hill 2, Resident Evil 2, Portal, Half-Life and Another World). I wanted to buy Wii for this very game. The European version (and the Japanese one, as far as I know) got censored.

"Toned down" as they neatly put it. To quote James Rolfe:
"WHAT WERE THEY THINKING?!?"

When I look at Germany, the nexus of all the gaming censorship in Europe, I honestly feel sorry for its game-playing population. The green blood. The soldiers in Half-Life replaced with weird-looking green robots. All these banned games. Why? Are they scared of their young ones growing up to start another World War or something? When I look at Japan, the confusion becomes even greater - I've never been there, so I don't know all that much about their mentality; but why on Earth do they censor THEIR OWN GODDAMN GAMES, only to release them in other countries in their original version? Finally, why oh why does Nintendo want to be a toy company? The Gamecube was a little bit childish, yes, but it had Resident Evil exclusives, it had Eternal Darkness, there were lots of games not really intended for small kids. With Wii, everything’s for kids. Even the Umbrella Chronicles is as simplified as possible, degraded to a mere rail-shooter, which is less than the Gun Survivor series...

This post in entirely devoted to censorship and here are the four things I’ve got to say about it. In a word: IT’S FUCKING BAD!

The first point:
First of all, let's establish one thing. Is the scene you saw a realistic depiction of violence? Nuh-uh. So why on earth would that be harmful? Is this something which would encourage us to do violence? Just go ahead and ask yourself what kind of a sick, deranged retard you would have to be to believe that if you hurt somebody his blood would burst all over the place like that? (and while we're at it, can you imagine anyone stand before you and fucking talk to you after you've just chopped his hands off? realism, anyone?)

The second point:
Speaking of the retards, the violence (realistic or otherwise) in video games has little to do with the real world. This is my opinion, I've listened to some psychologists who deal with games, read some of their articles and believe me, I'm not the only person who thinks so. Now I don't want to delve deep into the video-games violence issue, although these two problems are closely related, what I will say, however, is this: if someone thinks that by censoring or banning things he will protect his children from harm, he is plainly wrong. And dumb. And ignorant. The world is a bullshit place, and one can belie them for only so long, before they grow up and see for themselves.

The third point:
If the aim of your game is killing people, you should show it. It's as simple as that. More than that – you should make it entertaining, unless you just don't care about the money people would give you for it. Remove the gore and the fun will drop. Remove the gore for just some regions of the world, and the fun will disappear altogether, replaced with bitter jealousy of all the U.S. gamers who get to play, let's say, No More Heroes, in all its red glory.

The final point:
Games like No More Heroes are works of art. The blood is just another artistic element added for a greater effect. It's like the blood in Kill Bill, the cursing in Pulp Fiction or Eminem's lyrics or the body deformations in Tom and Jerry cartoons. You can like it or not, but for heaven's sake, don't change it. Just how would "The Scream" by Edward Munch look like if I removed the black color and replaced it with pink simply because I found it too gloomy?

I don't intend ordering NTSC Wii from U.S.A. just for this game. If Ninten-dada wants its wii-wii console just for infants, let them. If they don't want to believe there are gamers who are actually more than 20 years old, let them. If they care more about their children-friendly image than the actual fucking MONEY, let them.
It’s their choice.
I just wish the fuckers drowned in diapers.

Sanitarium

I came across Sanitarium by accident a few years ago when browsing through my collection of old computer games magazines. As a fan of all horror/thriller/bizarre games I decided to give it a try and I can say today that it was an excellent decision as it’s one of the best point’n’click games I’ve played.

The game starts of with a car accident and right after that it puts you in the shoes of a bandage-wrapped man suffering from amnesia, struggling to find his identity. You wake up in a burning asylum with madmen all around and… But I won’t go on. Don’t want to spoil the excellent plot of the game. It’s enough for you to know that you have nine chapters of horror, grotesque and psychological thriller waiting - some of which tell a story of the main protagonist and some that journey into his mind. The story is well written and features a distinctive set of characters as well as some strong emotional movements and plot twists.

The graphics are sharp with a lot of small details in the backgrounds and are presented from an isometric view. The visual style is characteristic and differs a bit from chapter to chapter (there is even one where everything is presented in sepia making it look like an old photograph). The sound is creepy to further enhance the mood, but the voice acting could have been better. Sanitarium spans over three CDs as it features quite a few FMV cut-scenes that present the game’s more important moments.

The gameplay itself is a classical point’n’click adventure game with a few minor action sequences and thankfully it doesn’t try to be anything else - puzzles are logical for the most part, but may be a bit too easy for veterans of the genre. In the end though, the game is really fun to play as you try to unwrap the mystery behind our hero’s tragedy and traverse the different levels of consciousness.
This game should satisfy fans of adventure games as well as those who enjoy “scary” stories.
You should definitely check this game out.

The Art of Storytelling

Let’s make one thing clear – this review will not be objective. On the contrary, it will be more subjective than Christians during the crusades. This comes from the simple fact that I fell in love with Mass Effect and the universe created by BioWare, and love is blind.
This game is by no means perfect. It has more flaws that I would tolerate in most games, but it has this “something” that let it occupy a place in my personal top ten games.
But to quote Takayoshi Sato – “You know, if always she's perfect, I guess ah, you won’t love her.”

Let me deal with a few problems Mass Effect has first. Most annoying thing for me was the fact that most of the side quests are very schematic. What’s more they are all made using only four location types. Same problem exists with the planets that you’ll explore – they may look a bit different, but they feel exactly the same – they are mostly just barren hills and valleys.
Second thing is the loading times that are too frequent and too long. ME is build on the third unreal engine and it shows – both in a good and in a bad way. While you get excellent lighting and special effects, you’ll also get preposterous texture pop-in that can even take several seconds, and while it’s no big deal when you transit from one location to another when it happens during cut scenes it looks like somebody spit into your eye and everything is blurry and ugly from the mucus. Developers call it engine limitations, I call it sloppy coding.
But to be honest, all those problems mean nothing in the long run, because the rest of the game is friggin’ brilliant.


Let me tell you why I like this game so much.
I’m a big fan of Science Fiction. I like aliens, artificial intelligence, space ships and all that stuff. Mass Effect has it all and more. The most impressive thing with this game is how much effort BioWare put in creating the universe. It’s not like in most Sci-Fi games or flicks, where you have all the incredible technology and alien races but nothing is really explained. You just take everything for granted – it’s just there. In Mass Effect pretty much everything is described in detail – the history and even biology of the aliens, the theory behind the technology. Damn, they even explain how come you have unlimited ammo in your guns – it’s all believable.
And the background behind the game’s story isn’t just we-were-attcked-by-mutant-squirrels-from-outer-space-so-we-fight-back nonsense. There’s politics, economy, armed conflicts, law and history. You will learn that even the distant future isn’t that much different than our presence – the bureaucracy is still more important that welfare of an individual and even if the governmental organism is called a Council and is consists of members of three different races it doesn’t mean that everyone in the interstellar community is treated as equal. And yet BioWare manages to sew into this a mystery about races that existed before the known times, creatures that constructed the great mass relays – portals to different solar systems, a mystery about their disappearance and the grim menace from the deepest parts of the galaxy.
This is all happening around you – the main character Shepard and you feel that he or she, whoever you choose, is a part of it even if insignificant.

This is a role plying game at its very core and I mean a Role Playing game, where it’s actually up to you who your character will be and what will be his or her personality. You can choose to be the Councils lapdog or a self-righteous, cocky bastard that won’t hesitate to kill to get what he wants. It’s unlike most RPGs where you are restrained by the confines of the plotline and must act accordingly.
This game is dialog-heavy and that is the main reason why some of the dumber-than-a-cart-of-coal gamers have been bashing the game for being too slow. If they wanted a shooter they should have bought something else. This game is more about the plot than anything else. Of course the action is there and it’s good. The combat is solid and the presence of biotic and tech powers makes it more than fun.
But anyway, this game is about role playing and as such gives the player a lot of freedom. It goes for everything – from the class creation where no class is at a disadvantage because your party member can make up for anything that your character misses, through the choices that influence the outcome of your actions up to the weapon and armor modifications. You will be the one to choose where and when to go, what missions to undertake and what people to kill. You will also have the ability to develop your character skills as you please.
To help you immerse yourself you get great graphics and phenomenally modeled characters with life-like faces and excellent mimics. You get top-notch voice acting and a musical score that perfectly fits the nature of the game. The icing is the usage of cinematic special effects like noise filter, motion blur and beautiful lens flares and the cherry on top are the skillfully directed cut-scenes.

I could tell you a lot about the whole plot, the controls and all the gameplay elements, but I really wouldn’t want to spoil too much like most reviews do.
This is a game that should be experienced by everyone individually without preparing too much beforehand. Let yourselves devour the content and don’t haste to the finish. Just play it.

Changes

Our blog is undergoing changes and might look like crap for the next few days. Fear not though as it should look much better once we're done with it.

WTF?

For anyone disapointed with Microsoft's or Sony's customer support...

I am a long time World of Warcraft player. I stared during the open beta and has been playing ever since (with two short breaks).Now, about three weeks ago my account was stolen by some dimwited mothefucker. I wasn't a big tragedy for me to be honest, because I wanted a short WoW break anyway and the game masters assured me that my account will be back to it's pre-hack state. What seemed like a compulsory vacation turned to be a fully-fledged assault on my account by keyboard and mouse wielding morons from Blizzard.
First I would like to say that I was positively surprised by the GMs on my server because they didn't tell me that they didn't give a shit about me and I can shove my account up my ass so deep that my intestines will reach level 70*, and they hope that my entire family up to the 9th generation will be cursed with freakishly small feet.
Instead they asked me for almost two weeks the same questions about how, when and who hacked my accound, what characters were affected and what gear I was missing. After five days I simply decided to write it down in the notepad and copy/paste the whole damn thing when I get asked again. And so I did.

About a week ago when I wanted to log into WoW to immerse myself in an intellectual converstion with my giold master about planting carrots and making tinfoil hats. I was stopped by an information about my account being susspended.
And here's where the fun begins. I got no information whatsoeven what is happening to my account neither before nor after its banning. I did sent a query about it via Blizz's webform, but it was a no-brainer that I won't receive a reply soon or .... well, ever, probably because. I decided to browser the offcial tech support forums and found out that it takes at least three weeks for do anything about a stolen account.

My question is... why? Why three weeks? What can possible take so long?
I have heard that there were a lot of account compromised recently and the wait time increased, but for God's sake, three weeks? I imagine it takes time and hordes of armed marauders to overcome a crisis of such monstrous proportions.

So this basicly means that my account will be usless for about five weeks barring a mirracle.
I'm just wondering why can't a company that makes tens of milions of dolars every month hire a few more people...or at least monkeys? A monkey would probably be a lot more helpfull than an average Blizzard employee.

Today's show is sponosred by "database rollback".

Flashback

If you come across an Another World review, you will probably find a Flashback review somewhere nearby. It's actually pretty funny how people seem to instictively associate these two games. I remember walking to my hometown's only game store about fifteen years ago and asking the man behind the counter if he knew anything about Another World 2 (I'd read about the then-upcoming sequel in a magazine). He replied with "Of course, we have it right here" and showed me Flashback. By that time, I had already played Flashback for months, so I was kind enough to tell the guy "that's not quite what I meant, sir" and leave the premises. (a ten-year-old kid laughing at an thirty-year-old bald guy would be a little inappropriate and that was the ONLY game store in my town, I did want to go back there someday).

The truth is, that, if you think about it, these two games don't have quite so much in common as people say. The story is again science-fiction, but this time we deal with distant future, interplanetary travel, teleports, aliens, high-tech devices and so on. The protagonist actually SPEAKS, as most of the NPC's do. The gameplay is more platform-based as on each screen we have three levels which are constant. We have a much wider array of movements which are always executable, unlike Another World, where most of them were trigger-based (they worked in specific locations, under specific circumstances). And we have an inventory screen.

The game was a huge success (the most successful French game ever) and on the Internet you could probably find hundreds if not thousands of reviews, so I'll just skip the casual stuff and tell you why *I* like this game a lot. First of all, I like games which mix the genres. Take a shooter, take an adventure (with usable items, puzzles, dialogues etc), pour a good or even decent enough story all over it and you got me. Why oh why weren't there more games like that? I was able to find just one, and that's onEscapee (maybe I'll write something about it in the future) but even in spite of the remarkably good graphics and the great music (I especially like the intro song, but, really, the guy might have used some singing lessons) the game wasn't even remotely as good as it's two grand predecessors.
And what about today? Today we have sandbox games, which I enjoy a lot, large RPG-FPSes like Mass Effect, which I enjoy a lot as well and unconventional games like Omikron or Fahrenheit (also known as Indigo Prophecy) which I simply adore (Okay, okay they screwed up the shooting and fighting sequences in Omikron, but damn it, at least they tried!) The world of today's games is much richer than it used to be fifteen years ago and as everyone tries to make their games more realistic, they throw in elements from different genres every now and again. The golden line of ultimate balance between thinking and fighting is really thin however, and one can easily see not a lot of games in the history have achieved that level. Many don't even try. What a shame.

Alright, back to Earth...
The direct sequel, Fade to Black, disappointed me a little. The controls were a little awkward - especially aiming - the graphics were... Let's just say the game was a fully 3D Third-Person-Shooter and the year was 1995, the glorious Doom-clone era. There were virtually no textures (let alone low-res ;-P). The game turned out anything but successful, simply because everyone felt this was NOT Flashback.

A similar thing occurred with the so-called CD versions of the original game (these include DOS-CD, Sega CD, CD-i, Jaguar and probably 3DO ports) which featured new music, dialogues read by actors (pretty badly, I might add) and, above all, the cutscenes remade into 3D. If you look at some screenshots of those ports, you'll see what I mean. The colors are all wrong, completely different from what we see during the actual gameplay, the scenes are considerably shorter (for the sake of disk space, I guess) and therefore more chaotic, finally, in some cases their sci-fi action style manage to completely alter the game's atmosphere. Some people might have liked it, I believe, but despite the obvious eye-candy features of the CDs, most people, including Yours Truly, prefer the original.

One last thing...
There was an attempt to revive the franchise on portable systems, but I'm actually glad it failed. Just take a look.

He'll make games of your dreams

Some interesting news come straight from Germany. Uwe Boll decided to finish his career as a movie director and open his own game design company - the Stuhldrang Studio will, simiallry to Maxis, focus mainly on making sim games. Their first title will be a movie director simulation.

When asked what made him change careers Boll responded laconically - "I got bored with making movies."

Stay tuned for more info about the infamous director's games.