Bloodstained: Ritual Of The Night is a really great game

I kickstarted Koji Igarashi's new super-not-a-Castlevania game "Bloodstained: Ritual Of The Night" 4 years ago and got my copy last Tuesday. Played it *a lot*.

It really is a great game. I think it's possibly better than a IGA-era Castlevania game because there are so many weapons to use, leading to so many play-styles, and I do like variety. Other than that - same basics you would expect from an "Igavania". 2D platformer, explore a huge castle, fight some bosses, collect enemy drops and skills, use new skills to explore further... and yes there is a "backstep" button. :)

The story of the game is alchemy / anti-church / experimenting on children / post-apocalypse (hmm, that makes it sound like Bat Out Of Hell 2100. It's not anything like Bat 2100!), but you can happily ignore that if you like. There are both English and Japanese voice options. I played in Japanese (honestly I don't think the English dub for Symphony Of The Night is worth celebrating, I know it became a camp cult hit for its awfulness but I have no attachment to it).

You can also change the colour of blood in the options. I like that you can do that, and I turned blood purple. There are lots of little Easter Eggs too. And cool weird things like... enemies that look like giant heads of people's pets (I think this was a kickstarter reward!)

The only thing I didn't think was great in the design of the game was that with the art they used in the game (which is beautiful); sometimes it was hard to see what's foreground and background, but I got used to it after a few hours of playing.

I started the game pretty much as soon as I could, so I started playing on version 1.01 and a few hours later they released version 1.02, but I read that it messed up the save file so I decided to finish the game as soon as possible and not update until I was done. Well, I don't know if that was the best idea, because version 1.01 was patched because a few of the last boss fights in the game didn't show up on the in-game bestiary list.

So I updated the game with patch 1.02 and started a New Game+ and completed the entire game again. There were a few things changed with the patch. I think poison was nerfed, I beat a lot of the bosses first time round using poison and keeping my distance, but that seemed less potent in version 1.02. Also I thought the secret boss fight with the vampire librarian was much harder in version 1.02.

I got the platinum trophy on PSN for completing every trophy on Sunday night after 5 days and 5 hours of intense gaming (the time taken is logged on psnprofiles). I think it was a really great game.  It's updated to version 1.03 now so everything I said specific to patches is probably irrelevant now too, haha.

I didn't fight IGA because his secret boss fight (not very secret) wasn't patched in to the PS4 version yet. I'll have to return at some point!

Conclusion: well worth waiting 4 years for this game, even though I finished the whole thing twice within 5 days!

MINUS ZERO - PC game review

Normally if I play a game on Steam and want to post a review, I just post it there. But I've tried to post a review for this game a few times this afternoon and it's just not working, so I'll post it here instead. :)

It's a fun little shoot-em-up by Triangle Service, originally part of the "Shooting Love, 200X" compilation, and is currently in Steam's big "Shoot-em-up sale", priced at £1.19 including 25% discount.

No Man's Sky - another post

I have played No Man's Sky almost every day since I got it but... I'm sort of bored already. I think I may quit until there's another update. I haven't gone to the centre of the universe yet, but... I don't really feel like it is going to be worth the trip.

I've maxed out my exosuit, I've got a nice spaceship with upgrades in columns so they connect, I've got 8 Atlas Stones, and I can understand so much alien language, I can sometimes even understand full sentences of Korvax.

I really like this game, but it crashes so often (there was a 1.04 patch released yesterday, and it still crashed twice after that!), and I feel like I've largely run out of interesting new content already.

Banshee's Last Cry / Kamaitachi no Yoru

An app came out on iOS a few weeks ago called "Banshee's Last Cry", it's published by Aksys and is described as "a thrilling visual novel that takes readers on a deadly thrill ride of murder and deception". It's a free download where you pay £2.49 as an in-app purchase to unlock the full game.

It's actually a localisation of an old game by Chunsoft for the Super Famicom, called "Kamaitachi no yoru", or "Night of the Sickle Weasel". I guess they primarily called it "Banshee's Last Cry" to make it look a little bit related to "Virtue's Last Reward" - well, enough to lure fans into spending their £2.49.

They've changed the location of the original story from a ski lodge in Japan to a ski lodge in Canada, made some technological changes to bring it into 2014, re-recorded the soundtrack (some music is the same, some different - some so it doesn't sound so traditionally Japanese, I suppose), gone to an actual Canadian ski lodge to take pictures to replace all the original background images, changed all the names of the characters, and changed the folk mythology from Japanese to Irish.

I've been reading it, and here's what I have to say:

The story is perhaps more "Choose Your Own Adventure" than you might expect from something described as a visual novel. It's what they used to call a "sound novel" - basically a light novel with atmospheric background images, music and sound effects. No character portraits or voices.

The main story really feels like a murder mystery from the 1990s. The murders and descriptions are really quite gruesome sometimes. The plot actually seems really familiar to me, perhaps similar methods were used in some Kindaichi manga I read, or some Detective Conan anime I watched. As such, it was fairly easy for me to pinpoint the correct suspect and details about the initial murder (though I certainly didn't get it on my first play-through). The main difficulty for me was finding the choices in the story where I could express my thoughts in order to trigger the ending.

Another comment on the 1990s feeling of the game - the attitude of the male protagonist and other characters is pretty much that females in the story only exist to be protected. They're rounded up together, and the way they don't seem to be suspects seems dismissive. Any attempt by them to be useful on their own ends up disastrous. I don't think they really even notice.

After my first play-through, certain new options appeared in the game, which is an interesting way of doing things. Your reasoning in previous play-throughs brings you closer to being able to solve the mystery. However, the player does not know - if I use this option it appears to be a short cut of a few pages, but is that relevant to any in-game path change?

Having said that reasoning brings you closer to the correct mystery ending... it's also the case that some endings completely diverge; one ending you can trigger very early in the story has you leaving before any murders take place - and so in that timeline the murder doesn't take place that night (why is that?). In the very worst ending (which is also the first one I saw), I still don't fully understand who committed all the murders at the end.

After I solved the main murder mystery and the credits rolled, a lot more options open up in the game. They lead to far more light-hearted stories, joke endings, and a lot of puns on the word "banshee". It is clear why they are not present when the game is first started. Two of the new endings also had end credits rolling, so they must be the "Occult" and "Spy" endings mentioned in the Wikipedia article on Kamaitachi no Yoru. One is just funny, the other a secret code message which I managed to decode straight away (but it was still fun to read the story). There's also a path with a reference to Chunsoft's "Mystery Dungeon" line of games. Oh it would have been nice if there really was a roguelike built into the app, hahaha.

Issues I have with the localisation - very few. One comment near the beginning about how silly it is to say "cheese" for photos because people end pulling an "ooh" face only really works if you consider the Japanese pronunciation of "cheese" ("chi-zu-"). There are some errors; in the "Snow Maze" path, there's a mistake where they give the incorrect name for one of the characters, accidentally marrying her to the wrong character ("Colleen Buchanan"). In the end of the path with the secret code, the font size messes up and you're left scrolling the page left and right to read.

It would have been nice to have something telling me which endings I've seen so I know if there's anything left to aim for. It would have been nice if like the original Super Famicon version, we could see silhouettes of each character in order to feed the imagination. It would have been nice to unlock some sort of diagram of branching paths for the after-story so I can see the last few things to do. It would be nice if there was a "clear data" option in the menu so I could compare the options available at the start to the ones available after many play-throughs.

Best of all, it would have been nice if it was on Android so I didn't have to borrow an iPad to read it! (I think that's "coming soon").

But overall, it's been a fun read, it was a good price, and it's been a pleasure to experience this little piece of sound novel history so long after the game originally came out. I hope they decide to bring more visual / sound novels out in English on mobile / tablet devices, because it's a very convenient platform for reading interactive fiction.

Fez is really really great

Fez is a really really great game. I bought it last Friday on Xbox Live Arcade for 800 Microsoft points.

It's a 2D platformer set in a cube shaped universe.

So you run and jump in a 2D landscape, rotate the landscape through 90 degrees left or right to change the perspective, and see new platforms to jump on, doors to go through and explore, etc.

It's a completely peaceful world, well, almost, apart from the distortion and the universe ripping apart.

There's no killing to do, no monsters after you, no penalty for falling off the bottom of the world and dying.

Just exploring, discovering, sometimes encountering strange monuments and levers for you to work out.

It's all about the feeling. It's a game that captures you by luring you in with sheer curiosity at every point. It rewards you by giving you a world far richer than you thought you'd see, and more curious things to explore.

It's all presented in a retro-style; 16-bit-esque to go with the 2D world.

There are a few different areas of landscape, each with their own style. You witness dawn and dusk every few minutes, and it's all very pretty. There's an atmospheric chiptune soundtrack as well, which I quite like despite being by "Disasterpiece" who made a few albums I got with bundles of games - and none of those I particularly enjoyed.

As you adventure, it populates a map so you know what you've found so far, and what's left to find. It's an enormous map, and it kind of reminds me of the huge and horrendously complicated maps that would take up pages and pages in old magazines back in the 1980s and early 1990s.

Earlier today, I saw some patterns on a stone and a larger stone lit up in tetrominoes depending on which buttons I pressed on the joypad. And I thought to myself "I need to replicate that pattern in these movements, don't I?" followed by "I wonder if I have any graph paper".

Which, oddly enough, was a good feeling. So I came here and wrote this blog post instead. :)

EDIT: I think I should mention... sometimes this game is downright creepy!

Nintendo 3DS - first impressions

I had a chance to try a 3DS in a shop over the weekend.

It didn't have any games for it, the lady demoing it was just taking 3D pictures with the built-in camera, and there was a little Augmented Reality game where you shoot a floating head in the room where you're standing.

It was kind of ok, but I didn't really like it.

It's got a 3D effect and if you move your head a little to the sides, it moves along with that, but if you move too far it really breaks the picture and you see two completely different ones.

I ended up feeling a bit odd after looking at it for a while. Mildly disoriented.

I don't really like it.

I found myself thinking.... it's really not going to be good as a proper portable like that; I mean, if you're planning on using it while on a bus or train - the bumps as you travel are going to mess things up.

Oh and it probably won't be the same for proper games, but when you switch the console from 3D to 2D, and you're looking at a photo, it makes the photo seem horribly fuzzy and low res.

So now I've seen one, I am definitely thinking [no thanks].

I dunno, when all you have to compare is *actual reality*, the fake 3D effect just isn't impressive.

My impressions of raptr

I signed up with raptr, the videogaming social network.

Here's my profile: tenshi_a's Profile

My opinions of it:

Good:

* It can automatically track what you're playing on XBLA, PSN and Steam
* You can see what all your friends are playing on the various gaming networks
* You can chat to your friends across the various networks
* You can add your own collection of games manually

Bad:

* I was really reluctant to hand over my login details for the various gaming networks to them.
* It doesn't track what you're playing on XBLA / PSN / Steam if it doesn't have achievements / trophies.
* It says it has 40000 games in their database, but I think most of them are flash games.
* I can't seem to get it to track me playing the flash games it lists.
* It's really bad if you own a lot of old games / obscure games / import games from Japan / you're in Europe and own a lot of Europe-exclusive games. And I have a lot of all of those! I just can't find my games in their database. :(
* They have a page for adding games, and I tried it but the game I added hasn't shown up after about a week or two, so I can't be bothered.

So yeah, it's much more of a social tool than a game collection / playing tracker. It's not ideal for me, but I might as well stick with it for now.

Bayonetta (Xbox 360 version) video game review

OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG I LOVE THIS GAME.

Hahahahahaha. I can't start this post off by saying anything else.

This... this is a game written (i.e. the story) and directed by the same man who directed the Devil May Cry games, it has similar gameplay, but is even more spectacular to look at.

The protagonist is a witch by the name of Bayonetta, a strangely proportioned woman (extremely long legs!), in squared glasses and skintight black catsuit, who speaks in a very posh RP/London English accent with an air of seduction and schoolmistress about her. She offers much titilation through her manner, her poses, her curves, the way whe moves, the way her costume sometimes becomes living hair and then moulds itself around her again... and the way she is untouchable and a complete badass at fighting. I cannot deny that this game is erotic. In fact, it may be the most erotic game I have ever played, and I feel a little ashamed because it's so loaded with obvious ploys that I know I have willingly put my brain on a shelf, walked into a trap and then been extremely happy to be there. But... it's just great. I can't help but like Bayonetta. She shoots things with high kicks with guns in her shoes, and pole-dances monstrous "angels" to death.

The story... the story is one of those great stories where people in Japan have read about hundreds of years of religious tension and Christianity and then feel free to act like it's all a nice bit of fiction they can add to. So you have the main character who is a witch, she fights off "angels" and travels to a place in Europe that's closest to "Paradiso" - it begins with a V but is definitely not Vatican. I think this game could really annoy some Catholics.

On top of the plot, you have a lot of hilarious and outrageously over the top and funny cutscenes. I mean, a lot of the time my eyes were out on stalks and I had a stupid grin on my face just down to how cool Bayonetta is, and I just laughed out loud really often.

The gameplay is mainly dodging and jumping and hacking and slashing. The combinations of buttons make up different moves and combos, and equipping different combinations of types of weapons creates new selections of moves and combos, so there is a lot of variety in the gameplay. There are big boss fights, and not only that, sometimes something you thought was a boss early in the game will come back as "just another monster" later on, you get the feeling that Bayonetta is so amazing and always becoming more awesome that eventually what you thought were boss fights mean little; they just become another routine thing to fight.

There are also some game diversions. The game contains various references to SEGA games, as it is published by SEGA. They talk about Eggman, Bayonetta collects halos that happen to look like Sonic rings. This also adds special gameplay styles as there's a motorbike racing segment (like Hang-On) which features remixed Outrun music, and her "fantasy zone" (?) which plays like Space Harrier. I also noticed that Enzo's car in the end scene is yellow so it looks like Crazy Taxi. Haha! I thought these little touches were very cute. :)

I only played the game on "Easy (Automatic)" mode because I don't normally play DMC style games, and it was indeed fairly easy. I finished the game this morning with just over 10 hours on the clock (I think it stops for cutscenes). Then I went back to attempt "normal mode", and with all the extras and items from my completed game, but after 8 more hours I have only done the prologue and 4 chapters! I'm so bad at these games! XD (Actually I found some tough bonus "Alfheim" challenges and they took up a lot of time...)

But for me to come back to a game immediately after completing it is a rarity. I just like this game so much! I think I would genuinely give this game a 10 out of 10. It's just packed with so much fun.

Ace Attorney Apollo Justice (Nintendo DS) video game review

This is the fourth Ace Attorney (Gyakuten Saiban) game, and since the 5th one came out recently (the Miles Edgeworth game), I thought I would hurry up and play this one before tackling that!

This was the first one that doesn't have Phoenix Wright as the titular protagonist, so that is something that I know puts a lot of people off. Perhaps it put me off? I can't say. I just know I only play a new game when I feel like playing that kind of game. I really like these games, they are about the only visual novel style games that have really become mainstream in English, and the stories are usually good mysteries to play through, and the characters funny and memorable. But, I have to be in the right mood to play them.

So, Apollo Justice was a really really good game.

Apollo's special gimmick in court is... a bit ridiculous really, and staring at people to look at their sweaty armpits is not my idea of good fun, but those moments are thankfully rather few.

There was really only one investigation I could consider weak in the whole game, but it was still a lot more fun than most of the stories in the second game. All of the stories seemed logical, maybe even more than in previous games where you know what is going on and you know what you need to say but are not sure what evidence to present in the given situation.

In the end, everything tied together really well. The story is really tight, loose ends are tied up well. The only thing I had a problem with at the end was that one character's back-story didn't really fit together and seemed artificially included at the end to making a happy ending. Still, overall it was really really good.

I don't think I'll start up the Miles Edgeworth game just yet; I may well start up one of the remake Pokemon Gold/Silver games as soon as the end of next week.

The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom (Xbox 360) video game review

It's a long time since I first heard of the Winterbottom game, but "The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom" came out on Xbox Live Arcade at the end of February 2010.

I played a little, then decided to buy a copy of my own and played through to the end.

Take a look at the external links above if you want to see some screenshots.

It's a collaborate-with-yourself puzzle/2D platformer with time manipulation elements, wrapped up in 1920s silent-film style graphics and a story about stealing pies. I like the style and the comedic simplicity of the story makes it charming.

Think Cursor*10, The Company Of Myself, and Braid (minus the annoying self-serving story) combined together... and you'll be almost there.

It's part action game and part puzzle game, but neither is compromised. Unlike the games I mentioned, your copies are not just ghosts - you can change what they do by hitting your copies to propel them, or get them to propel you by having them repeatedly strike thin air, then walking into them. There are also time trial and minimum-copies-made trials in the bonus levels, for those most interested in the action aspect, and those most interested in the puzzle aspect.

Overall, for a commercial game it is a bit short, but the levels have been well crafted. Maybe it could have done with a level editor and some way to share levels via Xbox Live Arcade.

Katamari Forever (PS3) videogame review

I really could play Katamari Forever.

Since I played the first one, Katamari Damacy has been one of my favourite games.

The first Katamari Damacy game is truly a masterpiece, in my eyes. Roll, roll, roll your clump of stuff round and pick up more and more things. Such a tactile game. Such a happy feeling. Such detail! Each level is crafted so that you start off small and scales up wonderfully, barely noticeably... you play it first of all to discover your landscape, then to figure out the best paths around the course so that you can end up with the biggest katamari possible. There were different goals on different levels.

The music was so good too. It would loop round to infinity - without a pause to restart tracks, and I couldn't get bored of it. It sang happy songs to you. Nonsensical songs about rolling things up and love and joy.

That first game had some magic which I think the later games could not capture. They possessed an almost maniacal attention to detail in creating memorable objects and worlds to roll around, arranging objects amusingly, and yet having level design that meant there was a distinct element of getting to grasp with the environment, learning your surroundings, figuring out what the best path through to success is.

In later games... the second game (We Love Katamari) was very good but didn't have the feeling of scaling up and felt a little too self-congratulory in places. Not only that, the first game feels eccentric but the second felt like it was trying to be weird and that just wasn't cool. The third game (Me & My Katamari) suffered from poor controls, levels that were just junk scattered willy-nilly leaving the game far too easy and levels far too short (I'd roll around with nothing left to roll up for the last few minutes) - plus, it was becoming for too into itself for comfort. The fourth game (Beautiful Katamari) is better than the PSP game, but is far, far, far too short and asks the player for too much downloadable content - plus its Xbox Live achievements system contains achievements for playing for 100 hours or something, which isn't an achievement, it's a waste of electricity. I wrote a little review of Beautiful Katamari in the past.

This new game is called "Katamari Tribute" in Japan. Perhaps that is a more descriptive title than Katamari Forever as this game is like a "Greatest Hits" of the older games. Various hand-picked levels from all of the previous games (including some that were paid-extra DLC) are in this game. There are also a few new levels, but not enough to really class the game as something new. It's on the PS3 so it's all in HD (in fact, it wil not let you play it on a standard definition screen, which was really annoying because it meant I had to buy a new monitor). You play the levels as before but with the ability to jump and with the inclusion of "broken hearts" which help you pick up lots more stuff. There is also a graphical filter on by default, which makes everything look like a chalk cartoon, which actually works really nicely. Later on you can unlock "drive mode" (the katamari moves faster and levels have shorter time limits), "classic mode" where appropriate (looks more like the older games and plays like them too).

It really is a game that I think serves as a good tribute. There's not much new content but I think they have chosen mainly good levels from the previous games and that to me is better than a slew of poor levels. The new gameplay modes do breathe new life into old levels as it sometimes encourages you to think up new strategies. The new graphical filters are mainly quite good looking. The music is mainly made up of remixes of old songs, and while it would have been nice for them to include the original versions of songs, these remixes are for the most part quite pleasant. Certainly there has been worse music in the 2nd to 4th Katamari games.

I do have some gripes with the game though.

The first is that the scoring system on the game seems quite harsh at first so even a seasoned katamari player like me got some not-excellent scores through my first playthrough. This is ok, it means you have to try harder and get better! What is not ok, however, is that the "King Of All Cosmos" and his robotic counterpart in this game use language in a way that seems far too abusive for what is otherwise a nice happy relaxing game. Even if you do reasonably well, they will insult and bully you. I just feel like... this game would be perfect for little children to play apart from that element. I would rather buy the Japanese version of the game and give it to them in a language they couldn't read than have them be abused in such a fashion.

In the past games... I used to really like the King Of All Cosmos, when I played the first and second games in Japanese. He spoke nonsense. Even though what he says is all in a language I am not fluent in, I could tell that a lot of his dialogue was often nonsense. And it sounded like someone messing round on a turntable, wiki wiki wah wah. When localised to English, his dialogue became proud and haughty as well as being random gibberish, and he would talk down to his son. I took a slight dislike to him, really. As time has gone on though, things have become steadily worse and in this game, he's just a jerk.

Maybe some people find that funny. I find it disharmonious to the rest of the game.

Plus, as the scoring system is stricter, you are more likely to have to suffer their abuse as you start, which is just plain unwelcoming.

My second gripe is that it's not entirely made clear how to unlock other modes, so the game ends up feeling a bit more repetitive than it ought to (even though I'm replaying levels I have replayed many times before).

I think I did originally have more gripes, but I can't remember them right now. Hehe!

Overall, I really like this game as a tribute to Katamari. I'm satisfied with it. I did wait and buy it for roughly 1/3rd of the original asking price though!

I'll leave this post with links I found to (yay!) translated stuff about the first game, just for the sake of golden memories.

Interview

How to build a King Of All Cosmos Kite

Sherlock Holmes VS Jack The Ripper - review

The title of this game almost put me off it. "Sherlock Holmes VS Jack The Ripper" sounds too much like a "I wonder what would happen if you get these two famous names..." type simple fanfic. It was going cheap in the January sales though, and I felt like playing a detective game as a warm-up before Heavy Rain comes out. ^_^

I played the Xbox 360 version of this from start to end, gaining all 1000 achievement points in the process. It was quite a short game, and not that difficult.

It's a pure puzzle adventure game in which Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle's famous fictional sleuthing duo of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson investigate the real-life case of Jack The Ripper, which was contemporary to when the stories were set.

The game is played with you playing as Holmes or Watson (whichever is appropriate to the scene), in either 3rd person fixed-camera perspective or 1st person view - switchable at the press of a button. I played in 3rd person all the way through. Most of the gameplay is walking around examining and picking up objects and talking to people, with many minigame puzzles to solve. I liked it, but if you are the type of gamer who feels like a game requires action scenes in order to be enjoyable, you probably ought to give this game a miss.

The authenticity of this game is excellent. It seems like a great deal of research went into this game. Graphically, the streets of late 19th century London have been faithfully recreated (well, from what I imagine from historical pictures and from living around English buildings of around the right age). The street furniture, the smog and filth, the prostitution, the gin-soaked population, the clothing, the prevalance of illness and medical practices of the time, and quietly negative attitudes between different people towards each other, all seem to fit well. There is a lot of detail, and it really gave the game the right atmopshere for investigating this mystery. To me, even though I had seen a documentary on Jack The Ripper in the past, it never conjured up the world and setting and hopelessness of the surroundings that this game got across.

Many of the actors seem to speak in London accents which don't seem to quite fit, or have an accent which sounds too modern, but I suppose that is hard to mask. I expect that barely anyone would notice apart from me anyway. It's really my one gripe.

I don't remember much of any Sherlock Holmes stories to know whether the representation of those characters was accurate, but there are small references to make me think that this Holmes is based on the one in the books rather than based on an actor's portrayal of the character. He speaks very quickly and is quite eccentric, loves searching for facts, hates journalists making up stories - all appears consistent with what I know about the character.

I also appreciated the ease of use of the game; it has nice little touches, like when you are examining all objects in a room, and could select from many things to look at in a small area, the game will automatically select the next thing you haven't already examined. You're not often hearing repeated dialogue as a result, and that's just nice. Holmes and Watson often announced where they needed to go next; on one hand this was useful and saved frustration, on the other hand, maybe it felt like it was holding my hand too much - in a game as linear as this, perhaps I should be working that out?

Most of the investigation, examination and deduction parts of the game are similarly structured (as is Holmes' methodology), but the little logic puzzles are all different, so there's a lot of welcome variety in the game.

The game is rated suitable for ages 16+, and you don't see a lot of graphic horror (thank goodness!), and a lot of what you need to investigate closely is done with cartoony drawings rather than the game's more realistic looking engine, but you do have to stomach reading reports on Jack The Ripper's deeds and other sordid goings on in the area.

There is certainly a blur between fact and fiction in this game. The murders did certainly take place in the ways they describe. If you have watched a documentary on Jack The Ripper you might have a good idea how this is all going to turn out, but... the involvement of Holmes and Watson, the exact dialogue from the suspects, some of the incidental characters, must all be fictional. I did also wonder at the end whether the authors of the story in this game told this tale in this way in order to express what attitudes were like and a small amount of a political view, but do it in such a way that it appears to be fact.

For me, just knowing that the terrible acts I was reading about were really carried out on women, that these things really did take place, made it a lot harder to get through. I'm hearing place names and looking at a map and thinking "I've been near there". It brought it all home. Some parts of this game really made me cringe and feel ill in a way that much 18 rated horror has not.

Without giving too much away, my final verdict is that this was a really good game but... not only is there absolutely no replayability in this (which I expected), and by the end, the exploits of Jack The Ripper had become so gruesome and vile that I was wishing the game to wrap up as soon as possible.

I think that it may have been the intention of the makers of this game to make me feel that way, because the feeling of characters in-game matched mine. So maybe that's actually their success. The effect it had on me was quite powerful. The conclusion of the story seems entirely plausable from the facts presented, though I don't know whether anything was left out to make it seem more definite or anything like that.

After this post, I don't really want to think about this ever again.

Grand Theft Auto - Episodes From Liberty City - review

This is a compilation of two side-stories set in the world of Grand Theft Auto IV, exclusive to Xbox 360 even though the game is out on many platforms.

The first part - The Lost And Damned - had been available as downloadable content for GTA IV for quite a long time, but the second part - The Ballad Of Gay Tony - only became available at the same time as this compilation.

The compilation is out as a standalone game, available on discs in shops. I decided to buy my copy this way as I could find a better price this way, and because there is limited space available for DLC on my Xbox 360 hard drive.

I played it last year, before Christmas, but only decided to do a write-up today. ^_^

My opinion:

The Lost And Damned (TLAD) was horrible to play. It's all about a biker gang and its members. I didn't find the story interesting, I hated the way those big American Choppers (i.e. motorcycles) handle (it's realistic! They handle like armchairs! Armchairs with broken wheels!), I didn't like the scenario, I didn't enjoy the random abusiveness of characters, and after the main GTA IV game it was just depressing to play another protagonist whose life just gets worse and worse as you play the game. The additions to the main game are not too good, and a lot of things seemed like they were made deliberately inconvenient. By the end of the episode, 10 in-game hours had passed and I was thinking "60% done? Oh no! there's so much more to go!" :( That sums up my feeling about the game.

Tips about TLAD: the moment you get a chance, switch off the movie camera effect, and the game is far more playable - you will actually be able to see well enough to aim! Also, use handbrake turns everywhere and the bikes become a little more bearable.

The Ballad Of Gay Tony (TBoGT) however, was a lot of fun. Maybe even more fun than even the main game (GTA IV). It's got an overall more uplifting story, much much funnier side characters, and I got to like the cool music a lot more than the biker's rock station, which was a surprise to me. In TBoGT, you play as a man who works for a nightclub owner, in fact, he's more of a business partner. You're the straight man; the one who keeps Tony from going over-the-top, as his personality leads him to. That's not to say you are boring; you're his man for driving, racing, piloting, skydiving / base jumping, gunfights and other exciting action type things. Plus as pastimes you can be a cage fighter, or get drunk and dance with women and have casual sex with them... which might not be your thing but it's a lot better than what they gave you in TLAD: arm wrestling and playing a card game which I can only think of as "Play Your Cards Right" after the TV game show. ^_^;;

There's also a system in TBoGT where you can go back and replay levels after you've finished the game, in order to get a better score. I thought that was a good idea.

Overall: I really like the way that a lot of the stories in the main game and these episodes are interlinked and woven together. However, I could honestly have done without TLAD. TBoGT is definitely a star game though, and I think it made up for the price of the compilation (NB: I got it half price!)

Ben There, Dan That!

Ben There, Dan That! is a freeware point and click adventure for PC which you can download from the makers here.

I liked it; it was funny and the descriptions for items were good clues as to what was useful and what was not, so I didn't waste too much time being infuriated.

I would recommend this to anyone, as long as they like point and click adventures, have a sense of humour, aren't just into games for the graphics, and don't mind a bit of strong language. It's comedy based around unlikely things happening, and humourous banter between two English lads.

The makers (Ben and Dan / Zombie Cow) have also announced that they're making a third one in the series, so that'll be something for me to look forward to.

The Maw - review

Earlier this month, I decided to buy the game: The Maw, which was the first game made by the company who made Splosion Man, which is still my favourite game this year. I bought it on Xbox 360 Live Arcade.

Three hours after buying it, I had finished it. The following day I played for another hour and 100% completed it. I then visited my boyfriend who had bought the DLC levels (I thought they cost too much, considering the main game was so short), and 100% completed them too, though I admit that they were more substantial.

So...

Pros:

• I liked the scenario; alien worlds, getting this monster to eat everything


• Really cute and funny characters, animations and voices


• Gorgeous graphics

Cons:

• Very short game, not great value for money


• The main character walks too slowly, and I felt I was backtracking too much over grassy areas to find hidden creatures for the maw to eat


• (Xbox 360) Bizarre leaderboards - averaging out amount eaten over time.
  

I can see why it won independant game awards, and I am glad they made enough money on it to make Splosion Man!

Darwinia (PC game)

I already owned a boxed retail copy of Darwinia (with a little key chain), but I didn't get round to installing it for years, then I ended up buying it again on steam through a special offer bundle on indie games, so I decided now was the right time to get round to playing it!

I will tell you, to me it was by far the best game I bought in that pack of indie games! (though some of the others are great too)

It plays a bit like Cannon Fodder (which I used to like), but your troops are completely disposable and mostly you are doing missions to assist an A.I. race called Darwinians, fighting to survive from a virus which has infected their world.

It may not sound that good, but the execution of this game is really great.

I really do feel like I am accessing a very small world built for the Darwinians, I am under the impression that this is their long-established home land I do feel like they have their little ways and beliefs and in a way I do feel like they are just wanting to live out their lives in peace, devoted to learning and exploring.

And so, I feel a strong form of compassion and desire to protect them.

It's a game that gave me interesting feelings; fixing the structure of their digital world and even more, their digital but tangible religion, is something that was mind blowing when I stopped to think about it.

The graphics are simple but completely effective, digitally generated landscapes populated with menacing viruses. The sound is also very effective. Most of the music is by someone called Trash80 and you can download some tracks used in Darwinia from his website, it's really good electronic music, a little retro chiptune in places.

The various startup screens for the game are fun references to old gamer geekery too, from watching the Darwinians play out life to the old 8-bit demo scene splash screens, I liked that touch to the game.

The game has a small amount of levels but some of them did take a very long time to do, so the whole game took about 7 hours to complete (according to the clock on steam) but that's over a duration of a few weeks.

I really really enjoyed this game, especially as an experience.

Freelancer

I decided to try some PC gaming for a change, since my boyfriend has a new PC and is all into space / strategy simulations. He's so enthusiastic that I thought I would join in the fun! I've had a copy of Freelancer on my shelf for a few years, I bought it in a charity shop and it had some decent reviews, so I thought I would try it.

The title on the box is actually "Freelancer - The Universe Of Possibility", and the back of the box says "Pirate, Hero, Merchant, Smuggler you decide!", so I thought this sounds good. It sounded like it would be a more up-to-date Elite style game - even though Freelancer was released in 2003 it's a good few years newer than the most recent Elite game, and I really like those! Space trading, perhaps signing up for army misions, perhaps engaging in space piracy, perhaps going space mining, or just plain exploring - yeah, I enjoyed the Elite games very much!

So I installed Freelancer on Windows XP (no problem), and gave it a go.

First impressions:

--

I've gone through one and a half missions before failing the 2nd one because someone on my side got killed. AND THANK GOD. This game is making me infuriated and sick. @_@

Whoever thought that using a mouse was a good system for space-flight control was an idiot. Dear god. It's awful. You accelerate with the "W" key, you slow down with the "S" key. That I can cope with. You've got hold-left-button-and-drag to head in different directions, you've got point and right-click to aim and fire guns. Now how are you supposed to effectively steer and shoot at the same time? You can lock onto an enemy but all that seems to do is put a box round them, it doesn't seem to help your piloting or weapon targetting. All I can do is spin around endlessly, shooting lasers while chasing round spacecraft; I've got a small fleet here - where are our tactics? Why are our tactics just "spin around constantly, shooting at everything"?

--

Then I realised that I could go into the options and change it so that I use the keyboard for steering my ship, and the mouse for firing. That made the game bearable. It is a bad default control system.

I carried on with the game for the following days, and got as far as becoming "level 6", but I think I will give up with this game.

I'm really bored by it. It's all dogfights and bus journeys. By which I mean, there's autopilot for everything so you just click some buttons to select the route you want to take, click some more buttons to go, and you wait. It makes me feel like a passenger, it's like being on a bus.

All missions are "go to X and engage in battle". Rather repetitive. If you want to be a trader, sometimes you get attacked, so, -=yawn=- another dogfight. If you decide to do something different, e.g. go mining, you will also get attacked, so, -=yawn=- dogfight. It's as though the game was thinking "hey, you're flying around not being in a fight, that must be boring! Have some attackers!". It just gets tedious. Well, the whole thing is somewhat tedious.

For a game that touts freedom as its main selling point, this game is really very one-track and repetitive. I do not care to play this game any further than I have so far.

Retro Game Challenge

I've been playing a Nintendo DS game which I imported from North America: Retro Game Challenge.



I haven't actually completely finished it; I have completed 7 of the 8 games available - just the long-drawn-out RPG to grind my way through, but I think it's enough progress for me to comment on the game!

So. This is a game that contains several other games, all in 8-bit console style. It was originally tied into a show on Japanese TV called Game Center CX. I don't know how far the localisation has gone with this game, but you wouldn't really know it was tied in with a TV show other than having Arino as a character (twice). The voice from the game speaks English and the photos of people in magazines do not look like typical Japanese people. Even if the localisation is heavy, it doesn't detract from the game at all, because the atmosphere in magazines is right and you are primarily here to play retro games.

I would say that if you have a hankering for mid-to-late 1980s console games, are about 30 years old and want to feel like a kid again, or liked Megaman 9 but thought it was too hard, this game is likely to suit you.

The overall story is that a guy (Arino) zaps you and sends you back to 1984 to play video games with him as a kid (I guess he was lonely). There, you have to play the games he orders you to, fulfilling the criteria he sets before you get to play a new game, hoping to eventually return to the present day.

It's very nostalgic even though the games you play are actually new. They are classic 8 bit style in graphics and audio (generally Famicon/Namco arcade style), they come with a manual to read (rather than in-game tutorials), and contain secrets and cheat codes which you can discover and enter if you need to. As you play, this little kid (also Arino) sits next to you watching, getting excited over new games that look ancient... and he buys magazines for the news and cheat codes. It really helps the authentic feel, having an excited kid next to you (until you hear him speak, due to mis-casting - he sounds like an adult).

The games are...

Cosmic Gate - A game that's a lot like Galaga. But, with warps to later levels, and not so fast but more bullets.
Robot Ninja Haggleman, which I quite like; you're a ninja and you swivel doors or jump on enemies' heads to kill them.
Rally King - An overhead-view rally game where you drift/boost and look for shortcuts to win. It reminded me of a game for C64 which I played, but with far more basic graphics. I wish I could remember the name...
Star Prince - a fairly easy mid-1980s style shmup (though the requirement that you play through it twice to complete it makes it harder)
Another edition of the rally game (zzzzz...)
Haggleman sequel (bigger levels, harder)
Guadia Quest - A simple RPG, Dragon Quest style
Haggleman 3 (more of a Shinobi type game than the other Haggleman games - or maybe I should say it's more Metroid as you progress through the game.)

I get the feeling that the games would be actually technically slightly too complex for an actual 8-bit console (especially Star Prince's later levels which give the DS slowdown), and there are lots more secrets to discover in a smaller space of game than would be normal, and yet the games seem overall simpler in content than actual 8-bit games.

They really do give the feeling of games of the year each game is supposed to be released, though. There are certain ways that these games play which have died out in games for years. The progress between games and their sequels seems really natural, like they were real games of the era. The feeling of anticipation for tips on a game you're currently playing in next month's games magazine was familiar and something I haven't felt in years; cheat codes are so old-style and you never have to wait long now we have the internet. There are also some classic comedy bits in the letters page of the magazines.

The interface to the game has you playing the games on the top screen, and you can pause as you play, and take out a manual or magazine or notepad to put on the bottom screen as you play, so it's like having a magazine on your lap to enter a cheat code or draw yourself a dungeon map or whatever.

All very nostalgic.

Drawbacks to this game:

* If you can't feel nostalgia for 1980s gaming, this game won't appeal.

* Comfort has been sacrificed for nostalgia. Remember before they invented useability? Yeah.

* You have to play through each challenge before getting to the next game even if you hate the current game. i.e. the racing game is pretty mediocre and you have to play it twice. Oh well, it didn't take long. It's really easy.

* There's not enough of a selection of games. Only 8 games and a few are very similar.

* The perceived depth to the games is more down to finding hidden secrets than it is to the number of levels.

* The games are way easier than your average 1980s game. No way a game would have been so popular in those days if it could be beaten by a person of my skills in the first playthrough! XD

* The kid sitting next to you while playing is a bit annoying, which is expected as he grew up to be the "villain" of this game. I wish the people who dubbed it would have got a kid to play the kid, as I think he's supposed to be about 6 by his attitude, but it's clear his voice has broken.

Although I thought I would like the RPG the most when I started playing, it turns out that my favourite games are the Haggleman games. (Guadia Quest isn't terrible - it's generic and very grindy / random battle heavy, but most of all I wish it had some more info on the items you can get than is available in the manual...)

Overall, I'm glad I bought this game. I wish it was a budget game at 1/2 the price though! It was quite short, as I started the game on a Saturday and had completely finished most of the games by Tuesday.

It's been fun, and relaxingly nostalgic. Somehow capturing something about the feeling I had about gaming pre-internet era way more than having the dozens of actual retro games in the recent Sega Megadrive Ultimate Collection. :D

Grand Theft Auto 4 - review

Although I was entirely underwhelmed by the prospect of playing another Grand Theft Auto game when it came out, I eventually bought a copy of the game last year (the Xbox 360 version) as I found someone selling it cheap online (£15 free delivery), plus the game gets overall very good reviews, even from people and magazines you wouldn't expect to give it good reviews.

I started playing it on the 25th of October 2008 until just before Christmas, then came back to it in February, finishing it on the 13th of February. I did a few sidequests after that, gained a few achievements. Stopped for a bit, then over the past weekend, I watched my boyfriend playing it through to the end, so I picked it up on Sunday and sped through the game, finishing it on Tuesday - total time of 13 hours, 8 minutes and 56 seconds. (I did the main story with no sidequests; completed a few social outings but that's all).



I really like this game. You might have gathered that already through the amount I have played it!

The story is set in Liberty City, same as GTA III (it's not really New York though it resembles it closely!), and the city itself has a lot of character. It really feels like you live in Liberty City. There are literally hundreds of people in the cast, just as voices in the crowds, and even after dozens of hours of play I still sometimes hear new dialogue from them. Somehow the acting from those hundreds of random people seems better than every star of a Japanese RPG dub into English I've ever heard. Maybe it's the quality of direction. Maybe it's the quality of the casting. They cast Russians as Russians. Irish-Americans as Irish-Americans. Italian-Americans as Italian-Americans. Jamaicans as Jamaicans. No put-on accents. Well, apart from the guy playing Niko Bellic who occasionally loses his accent. :/ On the whole, it sounds good.

There's a lot of bad language and off-colour remarks in the dialogue, but sometimes it's really amusing. I'm not normally one to find swearing funny, or laugh at the way a person speaks, but it is somehow very amusing when you nearly run over a man and he exclaims "Cheesy vaginas!" XD maybe because it's such an unwieldy and unlikely phrase to yell in surprise!

Each island in the city has its own distinct look and feel... no, it's smaller than that. You see a little portion here of Chinatown, a Koreatown, poorer areas that sprawl, poorer areas that are all boxy buildings looking the same, a theatre district, an expensive area with really huge expensive houses... one of the subquests is a guy sending you pictures of cars to steal from pictures, and by the end of the game I could recognise where it was parked by the background. It's that distinctive.

The writing in this game is very good. The story itself... hmm, I could take it or leave it, overall... but the characterisations, the uncomfortable choices the user is asked to make, and the humour of a lot of the dialogue and in-game advertising, radio and world, make it all worth it. The advertisements in the game are all brutally honest advertisements for scams and rip-offs and things that either play on stereotypes or things that seem useless except to extremely vain / peer pressured / gun-crazy / drug-addicted (prescription or otherwise) people.

The worst writing is if you go to the comedy club in the game and listen to the comics there; compared to the main game, they are completely unfunny. I guess they just can't compete; it's like if you eat an apple and a sugary dessert, it makes the apple seem totally unsweet.

The main character, Niko Bellic, is strangely likeable. Considering he's a cold and cynical killer, and all. Nicest mercenary / assassin / murderer I can think of. He heads to Liberty City in search of a "new start" in life, as well as tracking down someone bad from his past for revenge. He has really bad fortune. Most of the characters he meets in the game are bad people. Niko befriends some of them, all the same. Some of the characters are even worse than that, by a long way, and Niko often has to work for them. It doesn't seem so bad killing off dozens of people when you know that most of them were terrible people. Overall he lives a terrible life, though. The people are bad, the city is crazy and shallow and self-obsessed, and he can't even once buy food without the vendor describing it as something off-putting. If it wasn't for the humour, this would be a depressing game.

I wouldn't have it any other way though. As it is, it manages to be the exact opposite of all the critisisms levelled at it in the past. It is the exact opposite of glorifying gang culture. Although you see a lot of people doing drugs in the game, they are usually really messed up physically and psychologically so much that the game seems really anti-drugs. Most of the gangs in the city are divided by race, and so are full of racists, but they're all crazy bad people. Niko tries to make his money in the world by doing gangster work, but just digs himself into more trouble as he goes along, and even the top gangsters he meets are not living happy lives; either drug addicted or always having to live in fear of their lives.

It's a very good, very adult game. I mean in attitude.

(Speaking of adult, there are strip clubs in the city and you can go in and pay for a dance but it's just seedy, badly lit, and really ugly. The best thing is that Niko heckles the dancers through their routines, going "does your mother know you do this?" or whatever...)

There is now an add-on game that you can buy called "The Lost And The Damned", but I don't know if I want to buy it. It costs 1600 MS points, which is almost as much as I paid for the entire game, and you're part of a motorcycle gang (which I wasn't too excited about in the game), and I don't really like how motorcycles handle in the main game. And I only have a little bit of space left on my hard-drive for games (Microsoft charge far far far far far far far far far far too much for bigger hard drives, I'm not going to buy one!)

Fable 2 - review and thoughts

I played Fable 2 to completion last week. It's the latest game from UK-based Lionhead Studios, and I bought it before Christmas (it was fairly cheap) but waited for a patch to be released before playing because I had heard that it was really buggy. I guess that must have been a major factor driving down its popularity and the price, because even second hand copies of the game now sell for 1/3 more than I paid for a brand new copy before the patch came out. Even now it's been patched, I noticed it is still somewhat buggy...

"You mean like Dungeon Keeper 2?" my brother replied, when I mentioned that to him. "Funny you should mention that..." - you know, I don't even think he was aware of the fact that one of the founders of Bullfrog Productions - Peter Molyneux - created Dungeon Keeper, and later went on to found Lionhead Studios... ah, that man still hasn't learned the importance of quality assurance... yes, it's still a bit buggy, even though it's all patched up. The golden trail that guides you around the maps kept vanishing, and I got stuck in the scenery and had to reload a few times....

I didn't play the first Fable game for Xbox, though I have a copy somewhere... all I had heard is that it's an RPG with strong emphasis on good and evil; you choose what to do in various situations in the game and the game changes accordingly.

I heard that Fable 2 was more of an update than a sequel, that you now had a dog with you and could get married. I also discovered that people who do not listen to the hype about these games said by Peter Molyneux - the head of Lionhead Studios - tend to be a lot happier with his games than people who hang on what he says, because the games never turn out to have the freedom and features he talks about.

So, I avoided the hype and this is all I knew:

Buggy game, RPG, moral decisions, short, gets overall good reviews.

So I started it on Sunday, and finished it on Friday, having maxed out my character's stats completely, become max level in two jobs (blacksmith and bartending), bought every property I could, done almost every optional quest that was available, and having more money than I could possibly spend. (I had enough money for the mansion costing a million, with plenty of change left over. And in real life, I work full time Monday to Friday - I was only playing on evenings. So yeah, when they say short, they mean really very short indeed, for an RPG.

The first day I started the game, I went through the first bit of story, and then when I got to the first city (Bowerstone), I went and got a job and played the minigame to max it out and make a load of money, bought myself some new clothes, used some "expressions" on the locals, and some fell in love with me. I then married a nice lady ("Holly The Traveller"), bought a house for ourselves, had sex with my new wife, then got up and went to buy some nice furniture... ... ... ... ...then realised, hey! This wasn't supposed to be The Sims or Animal Crossing, this was supposed to be an RPG! >_< So I started to get on with the story.

The game felt like a Sims game with an RPG tacked on for a long time after that.

It's definitely a quirky game. I like quirky games. It's funny - there's a lot of hilarious dialogue in there, it does have this strong current of morality in it too... one that is... quirky and hiliarous.

Eating meat pies or drinking alcoholic drinks are considered immoral acts and will also make you fat, which decreases your attractiveness. Eating tofu will make you holy. Eating celery will make you thin, and there is no such thing as "too thin". Running hundreds of miles won't help make you thin at all!

Also, if you ever get "killed" in battle, you don't really die but you get a scar on your body, which permanently counts against your attractiveness. People in town also find "good" people attractive and will fall in love with them simply because of their heroicness. As attractiveness and morality seem so tightly linked, and the message seems to be "play well, be good, eat well, or the penalty is you'll get ugly!", are we then to think that vanity is a very "good" trait? It really seems like it, and the game forces you to make a decision about that later on. >:)

If you have a lover and if you're married, people will think you're more moral if you sleep together. No matter what gender you or your partner is. I noticed that putting a moustache or beard onto my female character would give her a +crossdressing stat, though wearing men's clothing didn't (?!), and neither that, nor having sex with someone of the same gender, affect morality. This is all "about right", I'd say, though I know my mother for one would disagree (to put it lightly)...

The relationships in the game worked strangely, though. It was as though there was a grand idea, but no-one really knew how to make it work right. As I became more famous and wealthier and "good", people would keep falling in love with me even though I hadn't met them, or in some cases, even gone to the city where they live. Now, I know that's kind of how things work with celebrities, except that there is no-one in the world who will dislike you if you're famous enough and that's just really un-individualistic and makes them seem more like some kind of hive mind. The generic "attractiveness" stat doesn't help either; everyone thinks you're attractive when you're an 8 foot tall muscle-bound woman with glowing blue skin and wearing upper-class clothes and purple / green eye makeup (really really not my idea of attractiveness) - there's no sense of individual preference in finding a partner beyond mere gender.

Also, all the townsfolk were all a little bit over-familiar (NB: this is understatement!), routinely following me everywhere around town, including following me to my bedroom when I've just beckoned my wife and she's said "I can't wait to rip your clothes off!". I mean, can't they take a hint? There's a huge crowd of people following me up the stairs! At the same time, they generally don't like it if you give their spouse or child anything (e.g. if they asked for an autograph). Except my wife who was always happy to see me flirting with anyone. What a warped sense of jealousy and voyeurism they have!

My wife... it became difficult to regard her as anything other than a generic clone by the end, when everyone was throwing themselves at me. When I was gone for 10 years and came back, the shopkeepers were all "Glad to have you back", and "oh am I glad to see you!" and it was nice to be back, and know I'd been missed. My wife... just wanted sex same as usual, as if my being away for a decade had had no impact on her, apart from making her a little hornier.

It was far too easy to level up and max out my character's stats. First of all, you can buy potions which act as experience points and if you buy a lot of property that's like having infinite money. Then with "The Crucible" (no, they don't play snooker there) where you can fight and get up to 5x experience bonuses. Combine the 5x bonus and the potions, and... By my 2nd time through I had maxxed out my strength stat, and by my 3rd I had maxxed out my will stat and most of my spells. Not that I really used most of them anyway.

By the end of the game, even though it was a short game I was glad to see the back of it because there seemed so little left to do that it had become boring. The characters in the storyline were all amusing, but the other characters in the game had completely lost their diversity and had become shallow. There was no feeling of challenge left, just repetitive tasks (though the treasure hunt quest broke it up for a bit).

The choices at the end of the game are supposed to leave you with a heavy heart, I think. For me, the choice was simple.

I might be in the minority but I remember seeing the film Titanic in the cinema when it came out and after it bored me for a few hours, it sickened and angered me as I watched the ship going down and all I could do was feel grief about the hundreds of innocent people dying; they had put so much hope into this journey, felt so much joy in getting to travel on this ship, and now were dying horribly in freezing seawater... whole families, parents and children, if not all the family, then you had children seeing their father give up his place for them to live on. And yet, the sickening thing was that I - the audience - was being asked, no, ordered, by the director, to care about this poxy couple and their piddling little holiday romance. Like that's anything compared to the great tragedy which has unfolded!

So bearing that in mind, if you have played to the end of Fable 2, you will know which of the options I chose. Yes I understand that it is to give the ending of the game a memorable bittersweetness, but due to one character being strongly tied in with a game mechanic, it's closed off some of the things I could have done in the post-game, and that is really annoying. I can't choose the ending I feel is right for my character and the world, and continue properly.

I don't think I like this game enough to buy the downloadable content. I was thinking the game was really short so the add-on probably isn't that substantial or value for money. I was getting a bit bored by the end anyway.