Happy New Year everyone! Hope it’s going well so far!

The Christmas/New Year week is not typically a big gaming week for me (unless you count hundreds if not thousands of board game sessions), but I did get a bit of gaming done. The new Trivial Pursuit where you can place bets on other players getting their answers right or wrong is particularly good by the way.

Videogame-wise, the main staples for me were Rock Band (yes, I did cart all my instruments on the train down to Lincolnshire in the name of entertainment) and, perhaps surprisingly, definitely embarrassingly, Just Dance 2. My sister brought it with her. For Christmas, I also got Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood and Super Mario Galaxy 2 but didn’t play either (I thought I’d wait to get home first). My brother got The Michael Jackson Experience from (you guessed it) my sister!

Just Dance 2 - It scares me that I know which track this is...

Here’s something I never thought I’d say; Just Dance 2 is surprisingly good. OK, so it’s not nearly as accurate or good-looking as Dance Central and the dances are incredibly camp and silly rather than “proper” choreographed routines, but damn it’s good fun. And exhausting. It’s a genuine workout if you put the effort in! The Michael Jackson Experience is also really well made, but it’s considerably tougher than Just Dance 2, with faster, more difficult moves (that impressively go some way towards mimicking the actual music videos) and less in the way of on-screen assistance.

Rock Band 3 and The Beatles: Rock Band went down very well with the family and even my dad, who does like a bit of singing but hasn’t played anything other than Wii Sports since the Mega Drive era, got involved and tried out all the instruments. M bought me the new Pro Drums for Christmas (alas, they are still stuck in Edinburgh, awaiting my return) so I’ve left my old RB1 drum set to my sister’s boyfriend. I’m drumless!

The rest of my gaming activity was limited to trying to find stuff in the Steam sale that would actually run on my netbook. There’s really not a lot on offer!

RUSH - Very playable on my netbook!

RUSH is a fun little puzzle game where you direct different coloured blocks to their respective goals using instructional tiles that you can place as you see fit. It starts off very simply, but gets pretty taxing as you have to deal with and consider the consequences of many blocks that aren’t allowed to crash into each other! The hint system is also very nicely done, offering two different levels of help according to how stuck you are. It’s worth mentioning that it runs reasonably well too on the lowest setting despite the NF210 not meeting the minimum requirements.

Osmos - Out of this world!

Osmos is a difficult one to try and describe; it reminds me quite a lot of fl0w. As a circular, floaty object (cosmic entity or amoeba-style life form?), you spend your time absorbing smaller particles and avoiding the bigger ones. As you absorb the smaller particles you increase in size, enabling you to swallow up bigger “enemies”. You propel yourself with mouse clicks, the trade-off being that you jettison some of your body’s matter as you go. Enemy particles with different properties (attractions, repulsion, survival AI) provide each level type with an alternate spin on the formula, requiring a change-up of tactics to complete. It’s very soothing game with a great soundtrack and a “just one more go” style of play.

Outside of Steam, I grabbed the free-to-download GTA and GTA2 installers from the Rockstar Classics website which are both as good as they always were! Again, they run perfectly on a netbook.

I also completed VVVVVV this week but I shall wait to talk about it as it features somewhere in my Top Ten of 2010!

Full disclosure before we get started: I didn’t play the first Kane & Lynch game. From what I understand, Kane & Lynch: Dead Men was a pretty average game. Playing the demo of the sequel, released last week, it’s difficult to say if they’ve improved on it because I didn’t think much of this demo at all. It wasn’t that I hated it, I felt completely indifferent about it, which might actually be worse.

Strangely, I played through it three times. I don’t know if that was just because I knew I was going to write about it or just because the demo was so short, but I’m pretty sure it didn’t have any connection to my enjoyment levels.

The story wasn’t really explained (perhaps someone who’s played the first game can tell me if they understood what was going on) but you’re in a restaurant (in Shanghai?), some shit goes down and you start blasting away at some SWAT types. You also fight cops in the streets, back alleys and in some shops. The environments are rendered nicely enough, but they’re so boring to play through; tight, linear shooting galleries full of cookie-cutter enemies that for some reason look incredibly weedy.

Shooting is the bread and butter of the game, so it’s a shame that it feels so weak and unsatisfying. Bullets just don’t feel like they do enough damage and enemies can take some time to eliminate (which is weird since they’re so weedy-looking). One thing I did like was the hit indicators. As in Modern Warfare, when you hit someone you get a little hit indicator that shows up in addition to your standard crosshair. IO Interactive have taken this further by overlaying a mini crosshair where your bullets actually land on their target. This effect is most notable when using shotguns, with multiple markers peppering your enemies. It’s a tiny detail and it doesn’t make amends for the rest of the shooting mechanics, but I liked it a lot.

The game is rendered with a whole load of screen effects designed to emulate a digital handheld camera. The film grain is intense and lights flare and streak across the screen, invoking comparisons with Miami Vice (it was a pretty bad movie but the digital handheld cameras at least made it visually interesting, especially at night). This “YouTube-ification” of the game camera works quite nicely when you’re standing still, but does become a little distracting when moving. The bigger problem is how this sits with the framerate. At this point I’m sure you’re expecting me to slag off the jerky, laggy graphics and perhaps some unsightly screen-tearing issues. In fact, it’s quite the opposite; I think they might have made the framerate too smooth. Before you declare me mental and hurry to close your browsers, hear me out! I found the juxtaposition of camcorder-style visuals and the very smooth framerate (is it running at 60 frames-per-second? It feels like it might be) to be completely at odds with each other. If you’re going to have a handheld camera feel, you need to actually do that; you can’t pick and choose which aspects of the medium you think will be sufficient to be convincing. It feels totally wrong and even if I couldn’t put my finger on what the problem was straight away, it was obvious there was a problem as soon as I started playing.

This awkward mix of styles is compounded greatly when sprinting. Lynch, the somewhat overweight, middle-aged psychotic you play in the demo, can apparently move around at lightning pace, completely destroying any semblance of weight or heft that you would expect of someone his size. Given how cramped the levels are, it seems like there’s rarely any need for that kind of speed especially when it breaks what is meant to be a gritty, realistic atmosphere, so why do it? That isn’t even the end of matters though… there’s also the camera shake to consider. When you’re not sprinting, the camera shake is handled pretty nicely; just about the right amount of “warzone journalist” movement. When you’re sprinting, it feels like you’re running around drunk on a sinking ship.

I already mentioned that the shooting isn’t terribly fun and unfortunately there are a few more gameplay issues that I picked up on. For starters, the AI is pretty bonkers. When firing my gun into the air on a crowded city street, the civilians would often run towards me which doesn’t strike me as a particularly good idea unless you too are carrying a firearm and perhaps a kevlar vest. Some of the civilians sit in their cars, animating away, doing nothing in particular. Again, if you shoot at them they just sit there, trapped in their vehicles doing absolutely fuck all. I can appreciate that allowing them to drive off would cause countless gameplay and level design issues but why not give them an animation to hide down in the footwell out of sight or better yet, unweld the doors and let them escape!

The game is constantly bringing up tooltips to help you familiarise yourself with your abilities. One such tooltip talks about talking hostages and using them as human shields. Brilliant! But wait! It gets better! One of the face buttons is dedicated entirely to that function. Amazing! It does nothing else, it just takes people hostage and holds a gun to their head! Fantastic! So I run out into the street with reckless abandon, madly hammering the B button at every civilian I can see. It’s not working! What’s going on? Come on, I want to take this guy hostage! Why isn’t it working?! Apparently you can’t take civilians hostage, only police and SWAT. Why the heck not, after all they’re normally running towards me anyway! They’re asking for it! It’s stupid, nonsensical game design with arbitrary rules that lead to confusion and frustration. Aren’t I supposed to be an unhinged madman? Would he really be considering the feelings of some dopey civilian when taking them hostage? I don’t think so. Turns out that when you grab an acceptable candidate, the police are happy to shoot through their brother-in-arms to get to you anyway, rendering the entire thing pointless. What a waste of the B button.

The other gameplay feature that I didn’t really understand was when you get “downed” after taking too much damage; you fall to the ground and can crawl around, still able to shoot. In a multiplayer co-op situation one would assume that you defend yourself as you crawl to safety to be picked up by your partner before you bleed out and die. In singleplayer it seems like after you’re downed you can just get up again, right as rain. It wasn’t entirely clear what the seemingly arbitrary rules about death were; was it three downs and you’re out? Is it a certain number of downs in quick succession? Taking too much damage whilst being down? I have no idea. Again, what is the point of the feature if you can just stand up again into cover and act like nothing has happened? It wasn’t clear at all.

I tried the multiplayer; I was looking forward to playing some Fragile Alliance, one of the things most lauded over in the first game… It didn’t work. Reading around a bit on Eurogamer, it seems like a few other people were suffering the same problem. Again, full disclosure: my NAT settings were “Moderate” so that might have been to blame, but it was still disappointing.

For a game I felt so indifferent about, I’ve written rather a lot. I think what annoyed me the most is that they’ve got the bare bones here to make a great third-person shooter but some strange design and style choices let the whole thing down, leaving something that is simply mediocre. Here’s hoping they don’t drop the ball with Hitman 5.

Medal of Honor (Xbox 360, Multiplayer Beta) – The most ‘beta’ version of any (released) beta I’ve played, so much so that I was surprised that EA had thought to release it in this condition.

The controls and movement were pretty standard (read: a lot like COD:MW2) but shooting however felt a bit inaccurate and unresponsive. Most of my (many) deaths went as follows: 1) walk/run around the map, 2) see a momentary flash of red from the damage indicator, 3) see your player character on the floor, dead.

Every single time I got killed, there was an obvious freeze between catching the first bullet (seeing the damage indicator) and then suddenly being on the floor; it almost felt like the game lagged every time I died. And it did happen every single time. It made for a very uncomfortable, awkward experience.

On the plus side, it looked quite nice (after one respawn, my gun texture decided to not appear, leaving a bright, white gun taking up space on the screen). Hopefully the Beta version will get an update before the game releases, otherwise it could be rather damaging to sales.

Lucidity (XBLA, Demo) – A nice little puzzle game from the LucasArts team that did the Monkey Island 1 update. You steer little Sofi on her ceaseless march through a beautiful dreamscape, utilising various puzzle pieces (abilities) to navigate over, under and round danger.

It looks lovely, the animations are beautiful and there seems to be plenty of challenge and replay value, but I found the controls to be quite fiddly considering there are so few buttons and the way of holding and selecting new puzzle pieces left me feeling a little confused. One for a rainy day and excess MS points perhaps?

Lazy Raiders (XBLA, Demo) – A puzzle game where you rotate the world to move the eponymous lazy tomb raider, Dr. Diggabone, around the map. Rotating the map is fast and responsive, perhaps a little too responsive actually as I found myself getting a little dizzy and disoriented during some of the more frantic moments.

Axel & Pixel (XBLA, Demo) – I’ve played Samorost (which apparently is completely unrelated to A&P, I was surprised to learn) and while this idea worked fine as a little interactive curio on the web, I really couldn’t get into this offering on XBLA. It felt like a point & click adventure minus the thinking and when you consider that I’ve also been playing Monkey Island 2 this week with it’s great puzzles, unforgettable characters and hilarious dialogue… Well, there’s not a lot more to say is there?