50Hz Gamer http://www.50hzgamer.com A video game website about sarcasm, skeptisism and niche games. Oh and news and savings... en-GB (C) 50Hz Gamer - All other assets are copyright to their respected owners. <![CDATA[Sonic CD (Xbox 360, Playstation 3, Android, iOS)]]>http://www.50hzgamer.co.uk/review/106/360/socd/Sonic_CD/Sonic Generations, SEGA has taken the only logical step in trying to undo some of the damage done to the reputation of their franchise... They've gone straight to the fans themselves and plucked Christian Whitehead -- developer of the "Retro Engine", a fan-made Sonic the Hedgehog game engine -- to remake a beloved fan-favourite Sonic game: Sonic CD. So is this ground-up recreation the start of something special or is it just business as usual for SEGA and modern Sonic games and just plain awful? Let's have a look.

Here and Back Again

It's funny that the first faithful remake of a Sonic the Hedgehog game had to be the almost "forgotten gem" of the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise; Sonic the Hedgehog CD, released on the Mega CD back in 1993 and developed by a completely separate branch of SEGA that worked on any part of the Sonic franchise thereafter. Sonic CD is perhaps the most least-known major Sonic game instalment to date, which is a huge shame considering it's also one of the best, most progressive Sonic games of the 90's. Due to a whole raft of boring technical reasons, the game hasn't been released on a lot of platforms since its initial release, unlike many of the other Sonic games on the Megadrive which can be found on mobile phones and pretty much every major consoles' digital-download storefronts. Still, the game has received a much-welcomed ground-up remake for pretty much every system imaginable except the Wii. To that extent, this review will cover both Xbox 360 and Android versions of the game, the differences between the two are minor, very, very minor but we'll touch on differences in a little bit.

Sonic CD opens with Sonic racing towards Never Lake, home of the fabled, mysterious Planet of Time: Little Planet. Much to its namesake Little Planet is a planet which quite literally hovers above Never Lake's waters. When our blue mascot arrives, he finds that the planet has been encased in a metal exterior and chained to a nearby mountain. Seems Sonic's arch rival; Dr. Robotnik has trapped the planet and is using the planet's power over time to conquer Little Planet's past, affecting the present and future, the latter of which Eggman resides in enjoying the spoils of his robot's work shaping the past. Sonic's adventure to stop the evil madman will be made all the more difficult this time as the Eggman has created a mechanical counterpart to him, the aptly named and fan-favourite: "Metal Sonic". There's also the introduction of eventually-annoying-side-character; Amy Rose in this game, though why she appears is beyond me as she does nothing to progress the plot, appears in-game a grand total of 3 times; one of which when she is kidnapped by Metal Sonic (for no reason) and another when she's saved late-on into the game. That's it. Still, for a game which was by far the least played Sonic game in the 90's, Sonic CD made a big impact on the Sonic series on the whole, mostly with the lasting design of Metal Sonic, which would be re-designed Sonic 3, with that design being completely ignored there-after.

The Gem That Time Nearly Forgot

I mentioned before that Sonic CD is an almost "forgotten gem" of the Sonic franchise and I meant it. It ranks highly on my personal "Best Platformer" rankings, with good cause. But there's a reason why I consider Sonic the Hedgehog 3 a superior game, in-fact there's several reasons. But before we linger on the negatives, let's talk positives. Sonic CD was, for its time, a radical platforming game. It introduced an almost seamless time-travel system whereby you could launch yourself into the past or future at any time by hitting "Past" or "Present" signposts dotted around stages and then run at near full-speed for around 5 seconds. Time travel was a pretty big thing in the 90's, mostly because of the influence of the "Back to the Future" films, so the concept on the whole wasn't all that novel at the time but execution of the time travel mechanic and how meaningful it was to the game without being out-of-place is perhaps one of the biggest achievements Sonic CD has. While not immediately apparent, there's a side-mission to every stage in Sonic CD which revolves around saving the future. To do so, you need to travel into the past and undo Robotnik's meddling, destroying his Robot Teleporters (causing all enemies within that stage to blow up) and destroying machines which produce holograms that scares away wildlife, however destroying the robot teleporter is the only thing which nets you a "Good Future." Get all "Good Futures" in all zones and you'll save Little Planet. Alternatively, you can collect all the Time Stones, this game's equivalent of the Chaos Emeralds, to automatically be given a "Good Future" and the best ending the game has to offer.

One thing which is a bit hit-or-miss for most people is stage design. Some people like Sonic CD's somewhat convoluted stage design while others hate it. Personally, I take the game as a breath of fresh air. Stages don't make an awful lot of sense when seen at a glance and yes, there are some ridiculous moments in this game which will want to make you tear your hair out just thinking about it. Metallic Madness Zone 3, for instance, is the very last stage in the game which has an opening portion that would make a Saint curse until he was blue in the face. I can't begin to explain how frustrating that part of the stage is, you just have to experience the tedium yourself to understand the pain. Overall the game is very well constructed and isn't as cluttered and visually jarring as many parts of Sonic the Hedgehog 2 and isn't as conformative to platforming norms as Sonic the Hedgehog 3 is. Pretty much the entire game is based around the idea that you can back-track through the whole stage, if you wanted to, and this is where the notion of Sonic CD being a traditional Sonic game is kind-of shattered. I say kind-of, because you can blast through the whole game in about half an hour just by playing the game as it were a standard Sonic outing, in-fact you're rewarded with extra in-game goodies if you can complete the game through the Time Trial menus with a time less than 25 minutes or so. But the game offers more by having you seek out the Robot Teleporters in the past to see each world's "Good Futures" and have somewhat hilarious coloured bosses in the boss stages.

In the end, Sonic CD is created to just be fun. And it is; save for Wacky Workbench, you'll have repeated play-throughs of fun with the zany time-travel, interesting boss encounters and the ability to back-track through stages. Notable stages in the game include Palmtree Panic, the very first stage in the game, just because it's a really memorable opening stage to a Sonic game, unlike Emerald Hill Zone (Sonic 2) or Angel Island Zone (Sonic 3) which are less impressionable on you when you look back at their respective games of origin, Collision Chaos, the second stage is your traditional Sonic pinball stage, but done right for once. There's lots of traps that will still get you, but the pinball mechanics aren't over-played and the whole stage isn't as garish as Carnival Night Zone in Sonic 3. Then there's Stardust Speedway where you race-off against Metal Sonic... There's just so many memorable parts of the game, a testament to stage design done right. I mentioned in passing the game's bosses and this is yet another place where Sonic CD really got things right.

Unlike older Sonic bosses and bosses thereafter, Sonic CD didn't much care for "keep hitting the boss until it blows up" as a lasting mechanic. Instead, Sonic CD opts for an almost puzzle-like boss design. For instance, a good example of this is Tidal Tempest, the game's dedicated water level, the boss here takes place completely underwater, Sonic being Sonic can't actually breathe underwater and after not too long, he'll start to drown unless he surfaces out of the water or finds an air bubble. But, the catch here is that Robotnik's ship creates air bubbles around him, so that by jumping at Robotnik, you'll hit an air bubble and be saved from drowning, but will be pushed away from Robotnik while he shoots projectiles at you which you're vulnerable to after hitting an air bubble. You whittle away the number of air bubbles he has until you find an exposed part of the ship and a single direct hit will take it down. These sorts of boss encounters are far more engaging and clever than anything any of the Megadrive Sonic games attempted and it's one of the things I love about Sonic CD.

Of course, there's more negatives about this game which I need to cover. Special Stages. Now, I could live with Sonic 1's Special Stages, I could cope somewhat with Sonic 2's special stages and I loved Sonic 3's special stages... But Sonic CD's Special Stages are by far the most aggravating part of this game. Showcasing the amazing power of the Mega CD at the time, Sonic CD's Special Stages utilised the buzz-word of the 90's: "Mode-7", a piece of old-school trickery to give the illusion of 3D on 2D-capable hardware. Unfortunately, since the game only pretends to be 3D, there's a lot of perspective-based problems which Sonic CD falls victim to. In these Special Stages, you need to hit 7 UFOs which fly around an almost race-track-like area. You have a set given amount of time to destroy all the UFOs, successfully taking down all the UFOs nets you a Time Stone. There are other hazards though, stepping on any water rapidly drains your time, hitting black zig-zag-filled squares on the floor will make you trip, giant arrows on the ground are boost pads which may send you off in the wrong direction and there's springs and fans which will throw you high into the air. Of course, the main problem with these stages aren't so much the traps or stage design per-se, instead it's more about how Sonic drives like a tank and has the turning circle of a small planet, mix this together with the fact that to hit a UFO you have to commit to a jump well in advance else you will phase through it with your jumps. It is really frustrating. The Special Stages are a super-cool idea and impressive technology demo, but it just wasn't done right. Better controls and better compensation for poor perspective would have been much more appreciated, but then again, this was before the "3D hell" of the late 90's and early naught-ies when the industry started to get good at 3D.

Remaking the Past

Now we get to talk about the the re-release of Sonic CD itself, the 2011 remake of the game. And yes, it's a from-the-ground-up remake of the game developed by Christian Whitehead, an industrious soul who has done Sonic proud. Having logged many, many hours into Sonic CD over the years, I can tell you that the work this fine gentleman has done easily trumps any remake of a Sonic game before it. Sonic CD looks and, more importantly, feels exactly like Sonic CD. The physics are all in place, the game has both American and Japanese/European soundtracks, a choice of Spindash options and as an added bonus, the game's Special Stages run at a smooth 60 frames per second. Not to mention the whole game now takes place in native widescreen, no stretching or any other trickery. Native 16:9, joy oh joy. There's a bit of creative license going on in the game at certain points, the new, fancy in-game menus are all brand new to this version of the game, which some may lament the passing of the more simplistic menu design found in the original Sonic CD, but given all the new options and settings the game gives you, it's understandable to see why a change of menus was on the cards.

One thing that irks me slightly about this new version of Sonic CD is that for the Japanese soundtrack, the vocal track has been removed from the game. I was quite upset about his, especially considering how awesome the full, lyrical versions of "Sonic: You Can Do Anything" (or "Toot Toot Sonic Warrior" as it's sometimes referred to), the opening song and "Cosmic Eternity" the ending song, really are. Sadly, it seems that some legal issue prevented the inclusion of the songs, there's some undisclosed rights issue to the song's lyrics which SEGA didn't have domain over and unfortunately, due to the fact Casey Rankin, songwriter for these tunes, is no longer with us; there may not be a whole lot of room for SEGA to do anything about this. Still, I thought I should mention it in passing as the songs' lyrics are indeed missing and replaced by a synth line... I think they should have just removed the lyrics rather than replace them with something which wasn't lyrics, but there you go. Can't expect much money to be thrown at a £1.99 downloadable title, not for licensing some lyrics at great expense, anyway.

Still, I've played the game quite extensively on both Xbox Live Arcade and on Android, so let's talk about the differences in console and mobile versions of the game. There's not an awful lot in it. The game is pretty much Sonic CD regardless of platform. The mobile version has a slightly re-worked HUD to keep your extra life counter, time period and signpost indicator away from your thumbs at the bottom of the screen, for example. I played the game on the HTC Desire and the Samsung Galaxy Nexus, while the Desire chugs a little making the game seem like Sonic was running through treacle, the Galaxy Nexus was far more accommodating of the game and ran perfectly fine, so moral of the story here: If you're hoping to get the game running on older hardware you may have to deal with a bit of lag. The touchscreen controls might be a slight turn-off for some, but they work really well. I only have a few rare instances of unresponsive controls or pressing the wrong direction by mistake. I only just wish I had semi-transparent thumbs, as sometimes my fleshy appendages can block on-coming hazards at floor-level, most noticeable during the Metal Sonic race near the end of the game. Haven't been able to play the iOS version of the game, however I will assume it's as responsive as the Android version of the game.

One unfortunate note about the Android version of the game is that you'll need to download some additional assets for the game in order to play. Essentially, you only get part of the game through the Android Market and will go through SEGA's servers to get the rest of the game. These servers have been the bane of the Android version, especially near-launch as they were constantly and consistently slow and unresponsive. I'm unsure as to the state of the servers post-launch, but you'll take that gamble if you decide to opt for the Android version of the game, which is a pretty good gamble to make, as it's a very good version of the game if you want some Sonic CD to go.

A Good Future

Sonic CD is the perfect example of remaking a game right. Other companies have made a good habit out of faithfully remaking their back-catalogue of games, Square Enix being notable for their awesome remakes of the Final Fantasy series on Gameboy Advance and DS, not to mention the more recent remake of Chrono Trigger for DS. SEGA either emulates or royally screws up any port they seem to embark on, so it's nice to see Sonic CD get the update it so desperately needed. Now let's hope SEGA takes this whatever magic is powering this remake and uses it for future games like, I don't know, the recently announced Sonic the Hedgehog 4: Episode II, which they're already talking up "improved physics" and availability on all the same platforms Sonic CD is available on... So one can only hope. Still, Sonic CD is a great Sonic game, not without its flaws but a solid game which will happily see you through repeated plays and is a perfect pick-up-and-play on your morning commute on mobiles. I'd definitely urge you to at least play the demos on Xbox Live Arcade and Playstation Network.]]> <![CDATA[The Alternative Game of the Year Awards 2011 (Category)]]>http://www.50hzgamer.co.uk/article/105/ART/agoty11/The_Alternative_Game_of_the_Year_Awards_2011/every year once again, you know, for old-times sake. It's also the time of the year in which video game outlets start waxing lyrical about what they think the "Game of the Year" was, giving publishers a reason to release a "Game of the Year" edition of their title including all the DLC early adopters had to shell-out for. But, I'm not here to give rise to yet another re-released game, instead here's the "alternative" Game of the Year awards, where we award companies for their shameful actions and punish poor judgement... Mostly because we can! So without further ado, let's start naming and shaming.

Biggest Cock-Up of the Year Award

The "Biggest Cock-Up of the Year Award" is given to the company which managed to balls something up so bad that it makes E.T. The Video Game look a bit more favourable by comparison. Let's look at the nominations:

Sony Computer Entertainment for the Playstation Network Security Breach

You knew this was coming, so why not get it out of the way. It's not so much the security breach itself which is why Sony has been nominated for this award, although it seems that anecdotal evidence does suggest that Sony was rather flippant about Playstation Network security, no, this award is being given for Sony's complete failure to communicate when, arguably, the biggest data protection violation in the last decade occurred on their watch. Millions of user's personal information and encrypted credit card numbers fell into the hands of hackers. It took Sony a whole week to admit personal information was stolen and even longer to come clean about the true extent of the breach. In the day and age of the internet, such a delay is unacceptable.

Nintendo for the Launch of the Nintendo 3DS

Name the last big-name console released which was met with extremely poor sales and the eventual price drop by about 35% within six months of release. Well, that's the story of the Nintendo 3DS. Over priced, under-featured and undeniably rushed to market, the Nintendo 3DS was rejected by-and-large by consumers. The only people willing to pony up cash for the device were Nintendo's die-hard fans who would eventually get given downloadable Virtual Console games from the NES and Gameboy Advance for their early-adopting troubles. Mix that in with a lacklustre games library for the first 8 months and you have yourself one hell of a mess.

EA & Activision for the Launch of Battlefield 3 and Call of Duty Elite

Picture this, you're a multi-national, multi-million dollar video game publisher and you have a title which you know will bring in millions upon millions of gamers, day-one, to your online-multiplayer-focused video game. Do you ensure the service you're giving to gamers is fit for purpose? Well, of course not. And this is exactly what EA and Activision did for their two big titles this year; Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 and Battlefield 3. In the case of Battlefield, the multiplayer servers were over-capacity for the first few days as EA struggled to meet demand, despite hosting both a public Alpha and Beta of the game and having massive demand for the title at conventions. Activision, on the other hand, didn't have problems getting gamers into the multiplayer itself, but the add-on component of the service; Call of Duty: Elite which is a premium service for die-hard fans. In either case, the shortages were unbecoming of companies which really should have anticipated such demand for their products. Hence their nominations.

The winner of the Biggest Cock-Up of the Year Award is... Sony, for the Playstation Network Security Breach.

It was the obvious one to pick, sure. But let's put nonsensical brand affections aside for a moment and realise that the scope and scale of the Playstation Network security breach was massive and communication during this breach was essential to those highest at risk of fraud and eventual phishing attacks. Trying to hide the breach while they starting running PR damage-control does not inspire confidence nor respect.

Special Mention: Shout out to Paul Christforo of Ocean Marketting for his on-going internal detonation after a PR disaster of monumental proportions. If you haven't heard the story yet, you can read the whole debacle right here. Sadly, his efforts came too late to make the normal nominations, but we have to page homage to a delusional man who refuses to properly apologise as his entire world falls apart around him.

Biggest Disappointment of the Year

This award is given to products, services or whatever else which has disappointed to the point of frustration. Don't think much more has to be said, roll on the nominees:

2K Games for Duke Nukem Forever

Why, oh why, oh why, oh why did they ever have to release this game. Duke Nukem Forever is, ironically enough, a timeless staple of bad video game management and how people just can't let things die gracefully. Duke Nukem Forever, originally slated for release 12 years ago and in development for 14 years has often been the running joke for all things vapourware in the video game industry. It enshrined itself in video game lore by failing to launch for over a decade, but when the game eventually hit store shelves, the sad truth that The Duke's so-called return was to end in tears. A just-playable, barely passable, outdated First Person Shooter is what fans received, a far cry from the hype that surrounded the game since before the days of Half Life.

Nintendo for the Nintendo 3DS

You can probably tell a trend emerging here, but Nintendo's latest handheld creation's launch was a catastrophe of proportions barely seen in the modern video game industry. While the original Nintendo DS wasn't all that powerful, looked somewhat ugly at launch and was experimenting in unfamiliar, casual-friendly waters, it was priced right and had a solid near-launch title lineup. The same things cannot be said about the Nintendo 3DS. The rushed-to-market system omitted several key features at launch, such as the Nintendo eShop and the in-built web browser. Putting aside the re-releases of Nintendo 64 games such as The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D and Starfox 64 3D, the game lacked any sort of competent or enjoyable games for 8 months or so. However much you may enjoy these titles, I for one do not enter into consoles for re-releases of games which were more at home on the previous Nintendo handheld.

Microsoft and Sony for Motion Controls

Last year, Microsoft and Sony unveiled their untimely solution to their "Wii Problem". Nintendo caught them off-guard with their unusual approach to the home console market back in 2006 and hoping to ride the storm, Microsoft and Sony dismissed the Wii as a gimmick. 200 million units later, Sony and Microsoft are now more willing to cash-in on what they once saw as a non-issue with Sony's Playstation Move controllers and Microsoft's Kinect sensor. Both intriguing new takes on motion controllers, both coincidentally using cameras to track 1:1 motion. Sadly, by the time these gadgets hit the market, Wii-Fever was over. The Nintendo Wii has lost all traction, new releases are few and far between, especially when looking for quality products. The mini-era of motion controls has all be disappeared, which leaves Microsoft and Sony peddling their solutions to a problem which already solved itself. And it shows, Microsoft is now trying to shoe-horn in support for Kinect any way they can with Mass Effect 3 acquiring voice commands with Kinect and some limited features in Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary Edition. Sony, meanwhile, continues to have an unsteady stream of casual-orientated Playstation Move titles and gimmicky, slapped-on control options for more "Core" titles such as Resistance 3. Neither of which are entirely convincing nor worth the investment in their prospective systems to bother.

**And the winners are... Sony and Microsoft for Motion Controls!**

It mustn't be easy for companies to have their market swept from under them, not after huge financial investment in the new control methods. Still, it's not all doom and gloom for the companies themselves, Kinect is finding a nice home in non-gaming applications and a healthy homebrew community being built around it. Sony will likely continue to dish out worthless casual titles for the remainder of the Playstation 3's lifespan and try to bundle-off the Move as best as possible to make up for the shortfall in direct consumer interest. How much benefit this will bring to gamers and consumers in general is... Well, depressing. Let's just leave it at that.

Best-Worse Video Game Title of the Year

This is a bit of a hastily thrown-together section and I'll be honest, it's merely here so I can make snide comments, so here it goes...

Konami for Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance.

Oh yes, when Konami and Kojima Productions revealed that Metal Gear Solid: Rising was not only cancelled, but rebooted into a more action-orientated title along the lines of Bayonetta or Devil May Cry, many fans howled at what they saw as Konami betraying them. And while they may have a valid claim, frankly, this is all outdone by the game's re-worked title: Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance, because Revenge or Vengeance itself just wasn't powerful enough to convey... The same thing, basically. Don't think this isn't a call to change that title, Konami. You don't dare touch Revengeance. There's a level of absurdity in that title which just makes it awesome. Oh and since this is the only nomination, I suppose it wins this award. Congratulations!

Most Underperforming Platform of 2011

This one's a big 'en, but let us explain what we mean by "underperforming". Essentially, it's a platform, be it a console or service, doesn't matter, which has failed to deliver to consumers and fans alike. Can't get much clearer than that. So let's look at the nominees:

Nintendo for the Ninendo Wii

I doubt I'll be corrected for pointing out that the glory days of the Nintendo Wii are over. It's been 5 years since it's fateful release in 2006 and the momentum of the reasonably priced system has come to a spluttering end. Attempts to breathe life into the system with the launch of the Wii Motion Plus and subsequent Wii Remote Plus controllers with the functionality built-in haven't inspired developers to make much more than countless minigame compilations and Ubisoft to release more of it's "Imagine" range upon an unsuspecting casual audience. While The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword or Xenoblade are signs of quality products still being released for the system, sadly, two eggs don't make an omelette. Not in the video game industry, anyway.

Microsoft for Kinect

As mentioned previously, the Kinect has had a pretty bumpy life and while it has already shared an award with Sony's Playstation Move for being a disappointment to gamers expecting innovative games based around full-body motion sensing, what they got instead was tacked-on gimmicks found in Mass Effect 3, Halo: CE Anniversary and even Ghost Recon: Future Soldier, none of which have or will add to the game in any significant way and the best we have received from purpose-built Kinect titles has been "The Black Eyed Peas Experience", "Disneyland Adventures" and "Sesame Street: Once Upon A Monster". The only decent Kinect game so far has seemed to be Twisted Pixel's "The Gunstringer" mostly because of its flawless delivery. Hardly the innovative, controlled-free future we were sold so many-a-moons-ago.

Sony for Playstation Move

Ah, well this is awkward. Seems one rant about how the Playstation Move has simply attempted to copy-paste Nintendo's best-selling strategy onto it's own just wasn't enough. There's several reasons why people flocked to the Nintendo Wii in their droves. While Microsoft was selling their be-all-and-end-all of entertainment for £240+ and Sony was lingering around the £300 mark both for the most basic model of the system sans-bundled-in-games, Nintendo was gladly offering up their system for £180 complete with Wii Sports. The system appealed to everyone with it's new, innovative motion-sensing controller. Fast forward to 2010, where Sony is still selling it's console for £280 without the additional cost of the Playstation Move controllers and camera required, it's not hard to see why people aren't lapping up what Sony has to offer on the motion-sensing front. Especially not when support for Move is lacking and where it is found is often either shovelware or clumsily added to First Person Shooters for no good reason.

And the winner is... Sony for the Playstation Move

I know this one will sting for all Move owners and lovers alike but if it's any consolation, I didn't make up my mind on this award until the very last moment before publication. In the end, I acknowledged that Nintendo, even though they made the bed they lie in, are doing the best they can with their already-outdated-before-release console and supporting it with 1st party gold like The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword and Microsoft is trying to facilitate those who bought the Kinect with a new dashboard interface tailored more towards them, not to mention some of the games which only really work on Kinect like Dance Central 2 or the "Experience" games... Even if it is the only new sub-genre to emerge from the Kinect so far. The Playstation Move just doesn't seem to have found its stride yet, and that's assuming it ever will. All we've seen from the peripheral is some shoe-horned First Person Shooter controls and games which would have been considered impressive as Wii launch titles. And for these very reasons, the Playstation Move can take this award.

Biggest arse who shouldn't be allowed anywhere near video game development ever again award

Yeah, well, that award exists. So let's see that nomination:

Brendan McNamara for L.A. Noire

It would be naive of anyone to assume that video game development is as glamorous as many would like to make it out to be. It's not. It's low-paid, high-stress, deadline driven work which is often thankless, much like any line of software engineering. But people do it because they love it and love the challenge. The least you can expect out of your line of work is to be surrounded by people you trust and rely on to get the job done. Sadly, for those who worked on the long-winded development of Rockstar Games and Team Bondi's 1940's detective thriller; L.A. Noire, things couldn't have been further from those expectations. Nicknamed the "Sweatshop in Sydney", Team Bondi was a place where people's dreams and aspirations of a career in video game development went to die. Long hours, unpaid overtime and an over-controlling, completely dismissive management made work at Team Bondi unbearable. The studio had an unusually high turn-over of staff as people's contract of employment changed unexpectedly, making working hours longer for no compensation of that time while the company continued to heavily invest in facial-capture technology which would ultimately define L.A. Noire as a game, but at the same time completely bankrupt the company after just a single title, this award cannot go to anyone but Brendan McNamara.

If you're interested in reading the specifics about just how awful the development process of L.A. Noire was, I direct you towards this Eurogamer article which will spell everything you need to know about this man and what a complete arse he is. Unfortunately, you'll be sad to hear that the man has already found himself home at another development studio (KMM Interactive) working on the subtly titled "Whore of the Orient". If I were you, boycott anything this man touches.

Best Show of Concept for Fans and Consumers At Large

And for our closing award this year, ladies and gentlemen, perhaps the most important award of the evening. This award is given to the entity, company, publisher, developer, news outlet, etc. which has shown a complete and flagrant disregard for fans and paying customers by-and-large. Let's check out the nominees:

Multiple publishers for Online Passes

You know what? I quite happily left behind the 90's and the early naught-ies. It seems we had finally left the days of the annoying "CD key" behind us by-and-large. Sure, PC gamers have to put up with draconian DRM which requires them at the very least to activate games online, some of which even insisting they play single-player, offline titles while connected to the internet, with any interruption to that connection bringing your whole game to a stand-still. That, unfortunately, doesn't look to be changing any time soon. However, a change that has recently started to affect all paying customers, not just those who game on a platform hosting a high rate of piracy, is the rise of publishers looking to destroy pre-owned game sales by limiting functionality of games not purchased brand-spanking new. This mostly affects online multiplayer as seen with Online Passes being distributed in game boxes, these passes are one-time-redeemable vouchers which enable aforementioned functionality. The passes can also be purchased for around £8 off various digital online stores, with many games more than happy to take you to the Online Pass Purchase Screen through the in-game menus. While I sympathise with publishers going after pirates who aren't contributing anything to the video game industry, I do not sympathise when they punish those who can't otherwise afford to buy the game. I think the industry might want to take a long, hard look at how it prices games and try to entice those who are looking to save a little money off the price of a £40 game, rather chastise them for being poor... Especailly when many countries are turning the screws on austerity measures, hitting everyone's pockets right now. Just a thought.

Nintendo for yes, you guessed it, various things about the Nintendo 3DS I haven't moaned about yet

Where was I? Oh yes, so Nintendo had a bit of a bad time with the launch of the Nintendo 3DS. So bad they had a huge price-slashing session which left some early adopters out of pocket. You always run the gauntlet of things falling apart when you make an early leap into a product or service. Sometimes you can get burned and this is exactly what happened to Nintendo 3DS owners... But most the time, when things end up going awry, big, well-known companies or organisations go out their way to make up for the error and thank early adopters for their support. It's all about building brand loyalty. "But Chris", you cry, "Nintendo gave us 20 free games for our troubles". And you are correct, but they are 20 "free" games which Nintendo are no longer making money off-of in the first place. For some people who lost-out on around £55 for supporting their beloved company, 10 NES games and 10 Gameboy Advance titles, some of which they could already own on the Nintendo Wii's Virtual Console or actually own the original game of in some form feels a little hollow. Nintendo also gets bonus points for getting rid of their digital currency; Nintendo Points and use real-world currencies... But then insists on you adding funds to your account in £10 increments in order to buy things off their digital, in-console store. Nice.

Various publishers... Again for day-one DLC which removes content from the actual game to be served up as pre-order bonuses or rewards for buying the game new

Now, you didn't think I would miss this one too, did you? Day-one DLC is nothing new to games in 2011, much like online passes, which have existed for some time now... But it's getting to the tipping point now. So many games are pushing digital pre-order bonuses that it can be a little bit maddening. And as you may have guessed, not all of these games will have purpose-made content especially for pre-order bonuses. Somewhere along the line, that content has to come from somewhere and where else would they find content to re-package than in the retail product itself. Perhaps the best example of this can be found in the day-one DLC of this year's Batman Arkham City. Players who purchased the game new acquired the ability to download the Catwoman "DLC" for free through a redeemable, online-pass-like code on the first day of release... Meanwhile, those who preordered the game at any participating retailer was handed a code for a costume for Batman to wear, although there were about a dozen different skins unique to each participating retailer... Not that I pine for the old days of the Nintendo 64, but these player skins used to be unlockables in games. Now they're micro-transactions waiting to happen. Roll on the fun times!

And the winner is, Nintendo for the Nintendo 3DS

They couldn't get away with three nominations and not a single victory to take away with them, could they? But I think we can all agree that since the above three are indeed actually happening at the moment, we're all losers thanks to them. So here's a big round of applause for greed and never letting good business get in the way of making obscene profits. Here, here!

And the wrap-up.

So that's it for this year. Hope you're all happy with the nominations and winners, I know I'm sure not. So Happy New Years, folks, hope 2012 in gaming doesn't provide enough fuel for another of these awards... Who am I kidding? Of course it will! So, see you next year, same place, same time.]]> <![CDATA[The Binding of Isaac (PC)]]>http://www.50hzgamer.co.uk/review/104/PC/tboi/The_Binding_of_Isaac/Nopub November - I'm a big fan of putting modern twists on old genres. Call me a sucker, but I have all the time in the world for well-executed reboots of old franchises for the same reason. So perhaps this is why I have such interest in Edmund "half of Team Meat" McMillen and Florian Himsl's: The Binding of Isaac. The game poises itself as a Rouge-Like/Overhead-RPG game in a similar vain as The Legend of Zelda (the original NES game) and classic, ASCII-art rendered PC games of old, thrown together with the art style which made Super Meat Boy stand out from the crowd. If any of that sounded remotely interesting to you, read on.

The game opens to a tongue-in-cheek prologue setting the scene, Isaac lives with this Christian-TV loving Mother and all was well until Mom starts to hear voices which she believes to be the voice of God. Stripping Isaac of his worldly possessions and isolating him from the society, his Mother re-enacts the parable from the Bible, which if you're unfamiliar with, Isaac is to be sacrificed as an offering to God. As his Mother approaches to sacrifice him, Isaac slips into a trap door leading to the basement, where he encounters unspeakable monsters. The game's story isn't much to speak of, it's mostly just flavour and, despite outwards appearances isn't actually any kind of social commentary. It isn't unusual for Rouge-like games to have little or no story and is much like the original The Legend of Zelda the way the game starts with no story at all, unless you peered into the game's instruction manual. Still, whatever story the game possesses sets a dark tone none-the-less, which clashes with the game's cute-grotesque visual appearance just as well as Super Meat Boy did.

The game consists of four chapters, each chapter consists of eight levels. Through-out each, you will fight a selection of 40-or-so bosses and mini-bosses, collect power-ups and die, a lot. As is normal for Rouge-likes, the levels rooms and enemies you encounter are all randomly generated. The game can be mercilessly difficult or pitifully easy depending what mood the game's auto-generation-algorithm is in. Although room order is randomised as well as enemy and power-up locations, each room you will encounter is hand-made and thus not impossible to complete by any means. It doesn't mean you won't get screwed by auto-generation stringing together several extremely difficult rooms in a row, slowly chipping away at the extremely limited health you possess. This random element to the game does offer a unique play-through each time you start or consequently die.

Speaking of death, Rouge-Like games embrace death as not so much a barrier or a wall players hit along the road, but as part of the game's flow. This is something many will seem as being too harsh. You can get to the very final boss, die and have to start from the very beginning again, losing everything, and I mean everything you have collected en-route. There is no Zelda-like "Continue", no second wind. You die, you restart. But again, this is all part of the game. Don't be afraid to die in The Binding of Isaac, it's just what happens, even if you're a master at these games, death will become you eventually.

The game's progression is very similar to The Legend of Zelda in that you complete a dungeon, or "level" by defeating the boss and moving on. By defeating the level boss, you unlock a new permanent power-up such as Life Up, Strength Up, Speed Up and so forth but that doesn't mean you have to take it. For real masochists, you can progress through the whole game without any of the power ups at all. Taking most of the power ups will actually change Isaac's appearance in some way. Each level will usually have a store, money dropped by enemies can be spent here or at vending machines which have a random chance of giving you an item or sometimes, no item at all. Alternatively, you can remove some of the random element of money-drops out of the equation by finding a blood bank, which will remove health from you in exchange for cash at an extremely harsh exchange rate. You may also encounter the Demon Devil by meeting certain criteria, mostly by performing well against bosses. By making "bonds" with the devil for items and power-ups, some of your health is replaced by "soul hearts", non-replenishable health depicted by blue-coloured hearts rather than the standard red-coloured variety.

Controls are basic, you move fairly freely around the world but shooting is fairly restricted. You can only shoot your one and only weapon in one of four directions. This can get rather troublesome when trying to take out some enemies, especially those which can shoot in diagonals. You can also place bombs, given you have any bombs. These can be used to blow up rocks and find hidden rooms, which there should be one per level. You can keep one on-hand power-up such as a card or pills which have varying affects such as the ability to teleport away from any room to the nearest shop or drop a whole bunch of bombs, all the effects can detrimental to you as much as they can be a force of good. Defeating enemies will have a chance of them dropping items such as hearts, which act as your health, soul hearts or even lit bombs with an appropriate troll-face upon them.

Bosses are what you expect from an RPG game of this style. Very repetitive and more about endurance than skill. Once you get enemy boss patterns down, you can easily defeat them. Sub-bosses are far greater challenge, you randomly encounter these enemies by simply walking into a nondescript room, where as actual stage bosses are clearly marked with their distinctive doorways. Sub-bosses resemble the Seven Deadly Sins, each one having a unique gimmick. Defeating them will drop special items like cards or other various collectables.

Visually, The Binding of Isaac isn't much to look at, especially not if you've already seen all of what this art style has to offer in Super Meat Boy, the other Team Meat game. Granted, its got charm but not an awful lot. Given the game was created as a side-project to whatever Team Meat is currently working on, it's perhaps being too hard on them to expect an innovative new art style from them. Alas, the game does a very good job at making everything clear and concise, enemies are well-defined against the stage backdrops, projectiles are, for the most part, clear to see and it allows them to get away with making you play as a naked, crying child which I don't think many other games with other art styles could really let you get away with. In the end, the cutesy-grotesque appearance of the game doesn't subtract away from the game but does feel a little tired.

The game's soundtrack is surprisingly good. Composed by Danny Baranowsky, known for his work on indie gems: Super Meat Boy and Canabalt, the music is pretty cool. While the game does fall back on some more "epic" set-piece music tracks, especially when fighting bosses, the game really shines with a haunting atmosphere when the game takes a more minimalist approach. The slow, brooding track played when you encounter the devil are perhaps the more stand-out moments of the game alongside boss battles which play a very low-key score. The game's soundtrack could have quite easily been a mash of over-the-top, cliché faux-orchestration or heavy-metal, yet the game decides to take the subtler path. I have great respect for this, makes the game far more memorable at the end of it all.

Overall, The Binding of Isaac is a pretty fine top-down-shooter/Rouge-Like RPG. It's cripplingly difficult, but after Super Meat Boy, are you expecting anything less? There are a few implementation issues, especially with the game's shooting mechanics which seem to be more geared towards console controller-like input rather than mouse and keyboard, but it's not game-breaking in any way. It's not really a thinking man's game, there's no undertones of religious satire or commentary, it's merely just what the game is wrapped around in. Still, the game is tons of fun and its randomly-generated nature will ensure that no two play-throughs are ever the same. If you're a huge fan of Rouge-Likes and Zelda games, this one is certainly for you. Like your games a little easier? Perhaps steer clear of this game. But, for the game's asking price of under £5, it's a steal. Go check it out.]]> <![CDATA[Sanctum (PC)]]>http://www.50hzgamer.co.uk/review/103/PC/sanc/Sanctum/Nopub November - Sweden has become a haven for the on-going renascence of the small video game developer scene. While multi-million dollar publishers are trying to make the biggest, simplest blockbuster game out there, indie developers are doing what the big money won't: Experiment. Take Coffee Stain Studios' Sanctum, a futuristic First Person Shooter-come-Tower Defence game. The concept sounds daunting at first, but give the game a chance and you may just have the knack for it.

You play as an elite soldier, Skye, who's protecting her home world from invading alien hoards of an unknown origin... Sadly that's about as far as the story really goes, it loosely ties the game together with some form of narrative and trickle-feeds you parts of the story through standing by certain terminals around maps at the odd occasion, these terminals give you little tid-bits of information about the Sanctum universe. I say sadly because the world the game takes place in is fairly interesting, it's a fairly typical (don't want to say "generic" as that does the game a great misjustice) Sci-Fi, futuristic setting but done with a fantastic art style and far-from-dull character design.

Sanctum, being a tower defence game, is based solely around defending a single point on the map, the single point being the "core". Enemies will use the shortest route possible to reach these cores and by doing so, deplete the health of the core. If the core's health drops to 0%, game's over. Your job is to erect blocks (towers) with defined build-able areas to block enemy paths and make them take the longest route to the core as possible. The longer you give yourself to fend off the hoards of approaching enemies, the better chance you'll be able to take them down. There's two ways to dispose of enemies; use of small arms the player has on them or use of "blocks" to mount weapons upon, once mounted they become sentient and damage enemies who wander near them.

The game's basic flow revolves around matches, usually consisting of 20 to 30 rounds depending on map size and difficulty. Each round can have up to three types of enemy, each with their own specific strengths and weaknesses. Killing all opposing enemies progresses the round. Before you do any killing, however, you are thrust into the "building phase", which as you may have gathered is where you erect "towers" by placing blocks on the ground. All ground forces will walk around the blocks and your basic idea is to block-off enemy paths, but you're unable to completely block enemy paths as the game would instantly be over (enemies can't climb walls). Building winding, twisting mazes is often the best solution. When building, you consume resources, in the normal game you're given a bonus of resources (think of it like currency) for completing rounds. Once you've placed blocks on the ground, you can build defences upon them. There are a multitude of defences one can place upon these blocks each with their own specific best-case uses. Where the game starts to get pretty tricky is the introduction of air units as they can bypass your extremely well-made block-labyrinth and blind-sight you in no time at all. Dividing your attention between ground troops and air troops is hair-raising to say the least, especially since some air units are hardly affected by anti-air defences.

Sanctum does require a mix of good forward thinking and planning but also good shooter skills. While it's often best and most effective to let your towers do most of the killing, some enemies will require direct intervention. You can equip three standard weapons with a choice between small arms like your standard machine guns, sniper rifles, shotguns and a curious "Freeze" weapon which slows down enemies for a set period of time. Some weapons have a set "ammo" count before a reload (which you can't trigger manually) while others will over-heat if used too rapidly or used at all. This heat-up/cool-down is shown in percentages, if a gun hits 100% heat-up, it will be temporarily incapacitated and unable to fire until the cool-down hits 0%.

During the "Build Phase", you have the opportunity to upgrade any weapons or towers you've built. Upgrading consumes resources which doubles with each subsequent upgrade level. When upgrading, stats of that particular tower or gun improves. For instance, the Sniper weapon in the game starts with just one shot before reloading, however, by it's maximum level (5) it will have four shots plus improved accuracy and damage. However, much like towers, weapon upgrade costs double as they progress. A successful player must balance tower and weapon upgrades carefully to optimise damage. Missing upgrades and focusing entirely on building will quickly come to bite you as enemies increase in number and strength as the match progresses.

Enemies themselves are also a major consideration when building defences, each enemy has their own unique strengths and weaknesses. Thankfully, the game is nice enough to give you an encyclopaedia of enemies detailing their behaviour, strength and weaknesses. Even if you don't care much for the encyclopaedia, enemies all have their weak-spots glow a distinct orange colour ready for you to land your reticle on. The most annoying enemies are those which have very small weak spots which tower defences have a hard time hitting leaving the player to pick up the pieces.

The standard game, which you can pick up for less than a tenner on Steam, comes with five maps which you unlock by clearing stages on any difficulty. Maps are quite varied, mixing up the configuration of the build able space offered to you, each have multiple ways for you to build your block maze in an attempt to ensnare your alien enemies, which come from various and often numerous directions. Some even spitting enemy convergence into two opposite directions for you to consider. Maps will often give you high-ground for you to perch upon to snipe from a distance (my personal favourite tactic) but aren't always capable of allowing you a good view of the entire playing field, making it possible for enemies to slip by. If you feel the need to get in-close to the battle, you can set up "Televator" blocks which allow you to quickly jump to any Televator block around the map by hitting the Tab key and clicking on the Televator you wish to teleport to. The Televator is one of two blocks in the game which are "passive", they're not really passive as they don't let enemies travel through them but they don't attack enemies. The other more friendly block is the "Holo" block which increases the power of any block augment on-top-of them. For an extra charge, there's two additional DLC maps and a handful of extra block augments like the "Violator" weapon, which is a crazy-powerful anti-air and anti-personnel weapon.

The standard gametype is also extended using the "Survival" modifier, which makes the round number endless and, as the name implies, you keep going until your core hits 0% health, which, by the way, is how the game will end if you fail to defend the core anyway. In the very latest version of the game, there's several modifiers to this survival mode including a "pre-built" mode which gives you a random selection of pre-built defences and you must work around or "bounty" mode which gives you resources per enemy killed, rather than a set number based off-of the round.

I've mentioned it in passing before, but Sanctum looks incredible. The game is built upon Unreal Engine 3, so all the minor graphical problems like texture popping are all apparent here, but it must be said that Sanctum, on some mid-to-low settings still ran perfectly fine on my somewhat antiquated laptop setup at a steady 40fps. This frankly amazed me as the game does look wonderful, with a generous draw-distance filled with various particle and distortion effects taking a common place during the action-heavy segments of the game. I would expect this level of detail and visual awe from AAA titles of this nature, just knowing it's an indie game makes everything just that little sweeter. Not that I want to put down indie developers, but they don't exactly have the man-power nor budget to afford such beauty most of the time.

The game's soundtrack is alright but nothing special. Each stage, as far as I can tell, has it's own soundtrack for both the Build and Extermination Phases but it's a fairly generic score. There's nothing in the soundtrack which really fits well into the game's atheistic and while it does sound nice, just doesn't seem like it was created with the intent of being used in this manner. The inclusion of subtle audio-cues are often an indicator of a polished product and Sanctum delivers, from the warning of incoming enemies to Skye's infrequent cheers from landing successful headshots. Sadly, Skye's vocal parts are repeated a little too often and loose their effect, her near uncontrolled joy over the death of an enemy was far more powerful and evocative of the character... The first few times I heard it. After the 20th, it didn't quite carry the same punch. Alas, indie game, small budget. These aren't criticisms.

Ultimately, I love Sanctum. It's a fantastic game at a fantastic price. It's genuinely one of the finest FPS games I've played in a long while due to it's genre-blending and out-right ingenious design. What more can I say? Oh right, it has multiplayer as well. Sadly, I haven't had enough time with the game's multiplayer to give a fair idea about how it differs from the single player, but the game's still fun by the bucket-loads. If you enjoy your shooters to have a little more thought in them than "he's an enemy, shoot him" or just love a good Tower Defence game, then look no further than Sanctum.

Although completely incidental to this review, Sanctum is currently 50% off on Steam (ends midnight 7/11/2011) with a Free To Play weekend deal as well. Check it out.]]> <![CDATA[Battlefield 3 (Xbox 360, Playstation 3)]]>http://www.50hzgamer.co.uk/review/102/360/bf3/Battlefield_3/Note: This review reflects the console versions of Battlefield 3. The game was played on Xbox 360 with both discs and the additional 1.5GB HD pack installed to the hard drive.

I wont beat around the bush, it's been a very long, uneven path for EA trying to find that property which could rival Activision's mega-blockbuster video game franchise; Call of Duty, perhaps more specifically the "modern" instalments of that particular franchise. Last year's Medal of Honor (a sequel to which is teased in the inserts included with Battlefield 3, by the way) wasn't quite the game everyone wanted, with a buggy, lacklustre multiplayer component just about making up for the game's plain and rather boring single player campaign. Personally, I care not for the petty rivalry between Battlefield fans and the Call of Duty fans and I'll be trying to keep the comparisons between CoD and Battlefield 3 to a minimum, mostly because they are two very distinct games angling for two different sections of the First-Person-Shooter genre. I'll also, shock-horror, be including the game's multiplayer component in this review which is a first for this site, I can tell you.

Battlefield 3 is, from the outside, just another military FPS game based in a modern day setting... Well, kind-of. Stop me if you've heard this one before but the whole premise of the game is that America, following the invasion of Iraq is having some problems with their old pals; the Russians. Well, the "PLR" to be specific, which is one of those generic "evil-dudes" paramilitary organisations led by some crazy, unstoppable, powerful dude. During the single player, you're primarily interested in stopping the aforementioned evil-powerful dude: Solomon. In multiplayer, it drives a weak narrative towards your objective-based shooter sessions as you try to capture flags, blow up weird computer-things or just firing sporadically at people not on your team. The parallels between this and the FPS-series-which-shall-not-be-named are quite striking to say the least, not that that franchise was the arbiter of all-things-original by any means.

So to the campaign then, it's interesting. You start the game pretty much near the end of the story itself and the bulk of the game is carried out through jumbled-up, out-of-sequence flashbacks to events which the main protagonist of the story, Sargent Harry Blackburn, helps the American Department of Defence evaluate the validity of a terrorist threat against the United States. It's a fairly predictable tale but not one which you'll walk away from feeling hard done-by. You'll sometimes find yourself joining other soldiers as the game varies gameplay, putting you in the cockpit of a jet or in the gunner's seat of a tank, but the bulk of the game will be of the typical First Person variety. You also have your staple First-Person segments including the obligatory sniper mission which also doubles as the sneaking mission, the chase mission where you're after a VIP and many others. There is moments of ingenious and frankly brilliant ideas interwoven into the generic mission types, however. This might spoil something of the game for you, so just skip past this paragraph if you don't want to hear it: You still here? Good, well, there's a moment in the campaign where a jet flies overhead, spots you and makes a U-Turn to start shooting you up. The way the scene builds up and the panic that follows it is amazing and was one of the stand-out moments of the game. Also, character deaths, regardless of how much we knew of that character are lamented on in such a fantastic style.

Perhaps the most annoying and frustrating part of Battlefield 3 is the scripting. Soldiers talking amongst themselves casually during the missions are so out-of-place and annoying. I get the distinct impression, given that later into the game there's no more dialogue like this, that it was a last-minute change to the game. Like DICE suddenly realised they needed more dialogue or needed some humour and character depth to make these two-dimensional soldier characters seem more real or believable to us. Though I think the scripting department wasn't too happy about this, as the occurrence of "dawg" in the game's subtitles clearly shows. There's also repeated dialogue in the game's main script, which happens far too close together not to be noticeable. The game also descends into more of a Battlefield: Bad Company game in terms of story-telling mid-to-late set through the campaign, putting more emphasis on the small task-force you're a part of, rather than trying to tell a broader story but focusing on a handful of main characters, the rest of your squad being disposable cannon fodder. It does however make the game's story feel jumbled and confused, we go from not needing to know about our squadmates to them being central characters in the space of a mission. Perhaps a slower burn into this narrative change would have been more effective.

Either way, the campaign is very nice and doesn't feel repetitive while giving you the basics for how the game plays and delivering you a few good solid hours worth of gametime for your troubles. Is it enough to sell the game on it's own right? Probably not. The fact EA has bunged the Single Player component onto the second disc on the Xbox 360 version is a heavy indicator how they feel about it. But it's not bad in any way, it's your typical modern FPS story mode with your typical modern FPS storyline. If it makes anyone feel better about it, it's a damn sight better than Medal of Honor, that's for sure. The main story also consists of a few big plot-holes and "why did he do that?" moments, but nothing too major.

So now let's jump to the main course of Battlefield 3, it's multiplayer. I passed up the opportunity of playing the game at the various UK gaming conventions earlier this year, mostly because queues for it were huge. I did get some hands-on time with the multiplayer with the open Beta test earlier this month and as was many, were pretty underwhelmed with what we saw, especially on consoles. The beta didn't show off many of Battlefield 3's bread-winners like vehicles and used the Rush gametype instead of a more lenient team-objective gametype like Conquest mode. There were also a multitude of bugs, many of which were pretty large for a game which was bound for release in under a month's time. Thankfully, most of the game's bugs have been squashed and the whole experience is better polished. Although how much of that is due to the huge 200mb day-one update for the game is up for debate. Either way, by the time you read this review and play the game, you're in for a fairly smooth experience.

What I find infuriating about a lot of FPS games is that while they normally tout an expansive multiplayer component with lots of gametypes, customisability of these gametypes when using public servers is often lacking. So I for one love how Battlefield 3 offers you not only the normal settings for each gametype but also a "Hardcore" and "Infantry" gametype. Hardcore, as the name implies, makes everything more hard around the core. Your HUD doesn't show you ammo or life remaining, friendly fire is on and generally anything which makes the game just that bit harder for the sadomasochists out there. Infantry removes vehicles from the game. The core gametypes consist of Rush; a game mode where Attackers push forwards towards defined "capture points" in which you need to demolish, once both capture points are destroyed you move onto the next set of objectives further down the map for two more rounds. Defenders must hold off the enemy, defuse any planted charges on the objectives and run down the enemy team's "tickets" down to 0. Tickets are used when players are forced to spawn or are revived on the battlefield.

Conquest is a gametype where you are given a set number of flags which you need to control. By staying in that area, you "capture" the flag, hoisting your team's flag or pulling down your team's flag so you can "neutralise" the area and then hoist your colours. Both sides have tickets which they must run the other team's tickets down to 0 to win. Just by capturing the points doesn't necessarily mean you win, tickets are depleted if players are killed, so even teams controlling all the points can still lose. However if the one team controls more than half the control points, the other team's tickets run-down automatically. Squad Deathmatch: Your squad (team of 4 players on the same team) must kill a defined number of the enemy squad in order to win. Pretty simple. There's also Squad Rush and Team Deathmatch which are smaller/larger variations of the aforementioned gametypes with team size and map size varying depending on what game mode you're in.

Battlefield 3 is also one of the few console multiplayer games keeping the ol' Server Browser alive-and-kickin' and anyone who plays online multiplayer bit more than casually will really appreciate this feature. Of course, the classic matchmaking hold-your-hand style is still present in the form of "Quick Match". The server browser is very good for jumping into matches on maps which are to your liking, however there's the down-side that often when you jump into a match (regardless of if it's a Quick Match or not) the chances of you entering a game at the very start of the match are very, very slim. Matches in Battlefield 3, since they're not time-constrained can go on for a long time if the teams are evenly matched. Most decent matches last around 15 minutes.

The game bases most of its own success on it's multiplayer component, and it's a keeper. Vehicles alone are a huge game-changer, even when you are not in a vehicle, their presence on the battlefield adds another level of depth to squad and team-based tactics. They could perhaps make a larger impact on the PC version which has up-to 64 player matches, where as the console versions are limited to only 24 player battles. Still, even without the extra numbers the game is insanely fun. Running into an enemy tank is still a frantic moment regardless of how many matches you play and that one moment where you're climbing ladders when a jet or two pass close overhead, knowing it's not a scripted event, is something pretty special. The vehicles and team-based mechanics run deep into the core gameplay of Battlefield 3 as you're required to "spot" enemy players, letting your team know where enemies are by highlighting them on the mini-map and showing a clear visual indicator above their head when they're in line-of-sight.

When you join the game and between each spawn, you can select one of four classes: Assault, Engineer, Support and Recon. Each class has its own unique abilities, weapons and gadgets which can be customised from a wide array of unlockables. For instance, Engineers can repair vehicles, Assault has heavy machine guns as well as healing and reviving items, Support carries light machine guns and can use C4 to destroy heavy artillery and blow holes in walls through destructible environments and Recon uses long-range weaponry and has the ability to throw down mobile deployment areas. As you unlock new weapons and gadgets, these items will automatically be added to weapons so you don't need to fiddle around in the menus to sort out your loadout while your team continues to battle, however you can use the rather awkward between-spawn menus to alter your loadout on the fly if needs be. From the spawn menu, you can also spawn on vehicles. Only just be careful when spawning on jets or helicopters... Those things are difficult to fly if you have no idea what you're doing.

The unlock system itself is pretty straight-forward with one huge caveat. You unlock items as you progress through the levels of each particular class and will always be informed -- even during a firefight -- when you unlock a new item. Rewarding long-time players is a nice way of keeping people attached to the game, but on the other hand it is rather daunting for new players. The ever-present cynic inside me feels that this is a shallow attempt to make people buy the game at launch so they wont have an up-hill battle against players with the best equipment on-the-go already. And now the caveat. Regardless of how much you play the game, the unlock system is already broken by EA's push to include codes to enable unlockables in the various editions of Battlefield 3, much like Medal of Honor there's the standard and "Limited" editions of the game, both going for the same price, however to go one further, there's even variants of the "Limited Edition" as well, with UK retailer GAME selling the "Limited Edition Physical Warfare Pack" which includes a bunch of unlockable guns, there may be other variations of the Limited Edition depending on region as well. Not sure how I feel about people buying their way into the best equipment from day-one, doesn't seem all that fair to be honest.

From a visual point of view, Battlefield 3 is gorgeous even on consoles... With the 1.5GB HD texture pack installed, that is. There can be a few shaky moments of the game, like when you're prone on the ground with long grass, you just get a face full of blurry green blocks. Otherwise, the game looks great. There's no texture-popping like a lot of modern games suffer from, the smoke effects in the game are amazing as well as the lighting in the game. Character movements are so fluid, with a lot of the base ideas taken from earlier DICE games like Mirror's Edge, most evident when you try to vault obstacles (you can see your legs as you shuffle over, for example). It's doubtful that games will get prettier than Battlefield 3. It's the little touches like the subtle "dirty" look of the camera and how it becomes apparent when light hits you at certain angles. All these little things add up in the end. Only thing that seems unnatural and out-of-place are the characters themselves, the pre-rendered campaign mid-mission story scenes look particularly bad, so it's not so much of an in-game issue you need to concern yourself with.

The game's audio design is, hands down, the best I've heard in any game. Not so much the subjective tastes of music, but just the accompanying sound effects. Utterly mind-blowing. This becomes most apparent when jets fly over your head in multiplayer, it's hard to explain, but the sound changes completely depending on your distance to the jet at any given time, just as it would in real life as the sound begins to echo the more it moves away from you. Another neat touch was footsteps, again, small touch but makes such a big difference. Each step feels weight-y, and not just the generic footstep and "gear shuffling" sound which many other FPS games settle for. DICE have done an outstanding job at these details and should be applauded very much for it. There's very little in terms of music in the game, whatever music there is, is heavily stylised in the distorted electronic sound which all the trailers have used for the game. Most the time music is used as multiplayer "fanfares" to signal the end of a game is approaching. Brilliant.

Simply put, Battlefield 3 multiplayer is, without a doubt, technically best in class. There's a few bugs that need to be ironed out and they most likely will with subsequent patches, but the game doesn't feel rushed or like the game's cut many corners to make it's release ahead of that other franchise's upcoming title in November. The single player needs quite a bit more work, though. The enemy AI is pretty dim, you can easily flank the enemy without them really caring, most seem to be on a set path and will not deviate. Saying that, however, your friendly AI isn't much better. I've had occasions where your team will stop firing, leading you to believe all the enemies in the area are dead and we can move on, but no objective change, no voice cue to signal we're moving on, no waypoint change... Turns out, there's one enemy left alive and the AI either can't take out the last guy to trigger the next event or these occurrences were just glitches and the friendly AI didn't realise an enemy was still around. Either way, this is annoying on Hard difficulty as sometimes they can be in-between friendly AI just waiting to shoot at you, rather than other AI. A very strange bug. There's also the occasional frame-stutter in the campaign, very noticeable but not off-putting at all. Would perhaps like having that fixed, though.

Other more non-game issues with the title, like the aforementioned "buy your way to better stuff" problem is the fact the game requires an "Online Pass" to play the multiplayer portion of the game. An Online Pass, if you're unfamiliar with this, is an extension of the "Project Ten Dollar" scheme which big publishers are trying to roll into their games as a means of revenue generation on used game sales. While it's a highly political issue I wont dig deep into in this review, I do know that putting in a 16 character redemption code after waiting a good hour and a half to install both game discs, the 200mb update and the 1.5GB HD texture pack was quite frustrating. The Online Pass comes with the game if bought new, however it's a one-time-use code to deter people from buying the game used as they will have to buy the pass for £7 (800 MSP). Just a heads-up on that one, since you can't lend your game out to friends or rent the game and hope to experience the multiplayer aspect of the game. All offline parts of the game are A-OK, though.

Overall then, Battlefield 3 is an amazing game. Technical issues are pretty few and far between considering all the amazing stuff DICE has been able to pack into the game. It's a unique experience which doesn't push the boat out too far in the modern FPS genre, but does offer some new and interesting features which other developers and publishers will have to take heed of for their next iteration of their respected FPS games. If you're after a rewarding, team-based multiplayer experience full of difficult-to-drive vehicles and lots of objective-based gameplay, Battlefield 3 is your game. If you're after a more arcade-style run-and-gun experience, Battlefield 3 will do nothing but frustrate you. If you're after a single player experience, this game's primary focus is and always will be the multiplayer, so perhaps wait for a price drop before investing in the title. If you're fine with the campaign being the orderve to the three-course multiplayer, you'll love Battlefield 3.]]> <![CDATA[Uncharted 2: Amongst Thieves (Playstation 3)]]>http://www.50hzgamer.co.uk/review/101/PS3/ucat/Uncharted_2:_Amongst_Thieves/Before you read even a sentence into this review, please read my rather negative review of Uncharted: Drake's Fortune. I'll be making a lot of references to the first game in this review.

So, Uncharted. Let's not beat around the bush. I hated the game, but only the "game" portion of it. I'm sure if it was a film, I would have really enjoyed it. Okay, the story's fairly generic for its genre, but it was funny, it was witty and it was different. The ultimate experience was completely undermined by awful standard and tacked-on motion controls, a lack of direction for the player, bullet-sponge enemies and a confusing lack of stealth gameplay mechanics, despite the fact the game is setup in a way which would imply it existed. Uncharted 2, on the other hand, doesn't quite fall foul of a lot of these shortcomings. The sequel is far more polished, with a greater emphasis on playing sneakily, thinking through actions rather than just leaping in head-first and work out the details after a big, dumb firefight. Not that Uncharted 2 doesn't force you into some gunfights, however.

The game starts up with Nathan Drake, star of the previous Uncharted game, sitting rather uncomfortably having been shot and involved in some sort of crazy train derailment. The train carriage Drake appears to be on is now more vertical than your usual train car... And dangling precariously off a cliff. The story then decides to jump back about half the story to some old friends presenting Drake an offer he seemingly can't refuse, a relatively easy task in which they attempt to track down the treasure of Marco Polo. His friends, Chloe (voiced by Claudia Black) and Harry Flynn, both of whom are "professional" treasure hunters, quickly betray Drake as it's revealed that they were actually working under orders from a crazy, powerful Russian war-lord: Zoran Lazarevic. Lazarevic's plan is to find the mythical "Tree of Life" and be granted immortality through the Cintamani Stone, the power he will use to create an unstoppable army and... Rage warfare forever? Rule the world? Who knows. Also making an appearance, despite my flippant dismissal of her return in my previous review comes Elena, the female protagonist of the first Uncharted game who can't keep herself out of danger and actively throwing herself into it by shadowing Lazarevic and reporting his ability to decimate Tibetan villages.

Uncharted 2 is a far more grandiose adventure over the first game, travelling the globe and having a fair deal of the gameplay set in villages one-way-or-another. The game unfortunately falls prey to what made Uncharted: Drake's Fortune fall a bit short by actually adding in more equally ridiculous mutated-human enemies into the game. The guardians of the Cintamani Stone who have become super-solider-esque and run around in crazy Yeti-like costumes to ward off those in search of the mythical life-giving stone. Their appearance in the story is perhaps less annoying than the enemy type themselves, which near the end of the game, they come out in their droves to make your time a living hell as they just wont die save for some well placed Crossbow shots... Crossbows, of course, you need to take from a fallen mutant anyway. The dialogue, pacing and execution of the story is very well done for the most part. If they didn't decide they wanted to show one of the biggest set-pieces of the game, the train sequence and the wreckage of the train in the opening scenes and then jump back half-the-game to fill in the much-needed blanks (read: the whole damn story), I'd say the story was pretty much damn-well perfect.

Much like Drake's Fortune, Uncharted 2 still relies heavily on cover-based shooting mechanics. However the game really wants to hit-home the idea of stealth, so the first half an hour of the game is nothing but a stealth-infiltration mission where you have no choice but to subdue enemies rather than brutally murder them... Which is a nice change. Yes, a lot of Uncharted 2 can now actually be completed by carefully sneaking around and disposing of enemies in a controlled manner. The game rewards you for such endeavours by giving you unique weapons or extra ammo which can only be acquired by being sneaky. Another much needed change has come from the melee combat system, which now relies more on countering or dodging enemy blows and hitting back, melee is pretty useless in most scenarios, however as you'll most likely be dragged into melee at the most inopportune moments i.e. when you're getting shot at, you'll just find yourself dying a lot more than just staying in cover or fleeing near-by enemies, but the system has been improved and we're all thankful for it. Speaking of combat, shooting enemies now actually feels impactful, enemies can still take a ridiculous amount of bullets to fall over and the tedium has been increased with the inclusion of shielded and armoured shotgun-carrying enemies but for the most part, enemies will kindly give way after 2 or 3 well-placed shots. Headshots are now actually counted most the time as well, rather than the predecessor where headshots weren't really headshots unless you hit them in a very specific part of the head.

Other improvements come in the way of the climbing mechanics, whereby you can now do hand-over-hand climbing where permitted rather than having to jump up every ledge. You can now just push the control stick in a direction and Drake will climb that way, same for hanging bars. It's a small improvement but will avoid some rather dubious deaths as you try and jump for things which aren't really climbable. Sadly, identification of what's climbable and what's not is still somewhat wonky in Uncharted 2. The game was designed with aesthetics in mind rather than player-direction, it seems. The most frustrating moments in this game, other than unfair firefights and the inability to throw back grenades was just being stuck somewhere with no idea how to progress. I was stuck on the top of a hotel in Nepal trying to figure out how to reach an obvious zip-wire I had to use for a good 10 minutes until I noticed a handrail was missing on one of the walls and only by going near the extreme edge of the building would the camera change to reveal the brickwork I needed to climb on. Second on the frustrate-o-metre is puzzle solving. It doesn't happen very often -- no where near as often as it did in Drake's Fortune --, but every time it does happen, you feel lost. Puzzle solving usually just means finding a leaver or repeating some arduous climbing sequence over and over again, none of which feels particularly intuitive or, well, fun.

Visually the game is amazing. The sweeping vistas the game presents are truely spectacular and whether or not there's some visual trickery going on somewhere to create such scenes is completely irrelevant. Fact of the matter is, is that the game is frankly the prettiest console game I've laid my eyes on, no doubt about that... Not saying that's the end of the matter, as I'm sure many Crysis 2 fans will contest, just my observation thus far. Of course, the game does sacrifice something for it's beauty, namely the aforementioned ability to successfully guide players to where they need to go. You would have assumed this problem would have been found and stomped out in playtesting... Either that or I'm not all that observant or have become far too complacent with the subtle guiding techniques that gaming has been pushing for over a decade now.

The game's soundtrack is equally amazing, with a wonderful orchestrated score which brings everything together. Voice acting is top-notch with some wonderful performances from the cast. There are some groan moments from the script and some all too predictable lines which I'm sure you could make a drinking game out of somewhere down the line but hey, it never said it wasn't going to ham it up at all and for what it's worth, the game has a nice charm as a result.

One complaint before I close out the review, no, it's not the super-human enemies... It's that train sequence. I'm sorry Naughty Dog, you spoke so fondly about how you loved the train sequence at EuroGamer 2011, but it was really, really annoying. Spectacular? Well, yeah, but it didn't need to have such a prolonged sequence where you're chased by a helicopter and you really didn't need so many damn hazards as you're slowly climbing on the train for the umpth-teen time. Most of all, you didn't need a mini-boss where you had to melee the guy... But then not inform you that's what you needed to do. I suppose once you run out of ammo that's what you're left to resort to, but after you melee him the first time and nothing really happened, you just expect that you were doing something wrong. At no point did that battle scream "run up and punch him". Seriously, Uncharted 3 needs a lot more direction... Which is a message coming a bit too late considering the game launches at the end of this month. (See how up-to-date I am with reviews?)

Overall then, Uncharted 2 is a fantastic game. I recommend just playing this and perhaps the third game over bothering with the first game considering it's bloody awful. You wont come away from the game thinking too negatively about your time with it, although you may need to think hard to remember the good times you had with the game over the closing hour-or-so which can be rather frustrating on your first play-through. Regardless, the game's well worth your money, especially as it's now a Playstation Platinum game. If you're wondering what all the fuss is about for Uncharted 3, pick up Uncharted 2. You wont regret it.]]> <![CDATA[Uncharted: Drake's Fortune (Playstation 3)]]>http://www.50hzgamer.co.uk/review/100/PS3/ucdf/Uncharted:_Drake's_Fortune/Over-Reaction Command - I now own all three major home consoles of the current generation. It took it's time, mostly due to lack of finances, but I got there eventually. And while I am quite content with my Playstation 3, racking up several joyous hours on LA Noire, I took a quick brake in cracking down on some 1940's crime to try my hand at another, more Playstation-exclusive third person shooter-slash-adventure title; Uncharted: Drake's Fortune. It's a fairly old game in the scheme of things in this generation, being a near-launch title for the Playstation 3 but I had heard nothing bad about the game. Although on reflection, I do believe I was hearing nothing but good things about the game's sequel. Frankly, this could possibly be one of the worst games I've ever played, which is a damn shame given the game's production quality and the developers; Naughty Dog, being so fondly thought-of from my youth. Alas, let me delve into just what's wrong about this game. And there's a lot.

Story wise, the game isn't so bad. It's your standard Indiana Jones or Tomb Raider schlock, our hero; Nathan Drake is that old chestnut of a hero archetype; a treasure-hunting rouge with a heart of gold. He, along with a journalist, Elena and an old guy, Sullivan, are out on the trail of a great treasure Drake's ancestor, Sir Francis Drake supposedly left clues to. The mythical city of El Dorado. Upon realising the city isn't infact a city and is actually just a golden statue, the entire game is then spent searching for it. All the while, an evil anti-Drake; Gabriel Roman and his gabble of hired goons try to find the statue first. To condense the story, the Spanish found El Dorado, moved it to some island. During World War II the Germans went in search of it (because, you know, Nazi's sure love their occult stuff...) and they and the Spaniards all met with the same fate: turned into horribly out-of-place demon zombies. Turns out the statue had some undefined curse on it which turned people into these zombie-things and much like a certain Indiana Jones film, opening the El Dorado statue/sarcophagus unleashes the said "curse". Either way, in the end, Drake decides that the plauge/curse needs disposing of and sends the thing to the bottom of the ocean along with all the game's ultimate villain. Drake gets the girl and they all live happily ever after.

Again, my quibbles aren't really with the story. The zombie-creature plot swerve was completely out of place, however. I'd call it a plot twist, but the game introduces these creatures and with it, the whole genre of the game changes within an instant. It goes from an action adventure game where you're shooting paramilitary to moving through a maze-like area with mutant Nazis and Spaniards chasing you. It's basically like if Call of Duty suddenly just flipped into it's Zombie mode without telling you. It's jarring to say the least. It seems that the game designers didn't know how to properly incorporate this otherworldly element to the game as these enemies are usually encountered with capacious amounts of ammunition just lying around, meaning that all balance the game had before was just swept under the rug. These enemies also put a pretty huge dent in the game's cover-based-focus to combat, as these things will just run up to you and murder your sorry arse the moment you reload or accidentally snap-onto cover.

The controls in this game are what let the whole experience down. And it's not hard to see why. The game is basically three genres mashed together with very little cohesion between them. For one part it's a platforming, almost Prince-of-Persia/Tomb Raider game where you're jumping between ledges and climbing things. Another part is an awkward puzzle-solving element and the final nail in the coffin is the game as a cover-based third person shooter, because they were all the rage at the time. A third person shooter, I might add, that has enemies which just act as bullet sponges. You unload whole clips into some enemies and they just wont. Fall. Down. To make matters worse, headshots in the game are damn near impossible to get since the game's definition of "headshot" means "a tiny area in the head-part of the enemy model". There will be times where the only part of an enemy is showing is his head, you shoot, he recoils from being hit in the face... But then gets up and starts firing at you again. What the bloody hell is this? When did a "headshot" become "a section of the head shot"? The best part about all this, however, is that while enemies take a good 4 to 5 hits to down, unless you catch them in the leg, in which case it takes even more, you can be taken down in a single shot by "laser sight" enemies and you can die in around 3 to 4 shots normally. So while you're battling bullet-sponging enemies, your efforts can all be in vein by some enemy creeping around behind you and shooting you.

Of course, the cheap, bullet sponging enemies aren't the only problem with the game. The cover system is utterly atrocious as well. You hit the circle button to snap to cover. It's a pretty basic function of a cover-based system, right? I mean, a game released not too long before Uncharted, the Xbox 360-exclusive Gears of War did cover-based shooting just right. Uncharted does just about everything wrong. While in Gears of War you snap onto cover which is immediately infront of you and you are facing at the time you tap the A button, Uncharted doesn't quite think that's enough and hitting the circle button will immediately make you snap onto cover, usually the wrong piece of cover or on the wrong side of the cover you were standing 5 feet away from. Why would this become annoying, you ask? Well, because the game has a (rather useless) "dodge roll" action in the game which is activated by tapping the circle button, which the game suggests you using to avoid laser-sight enemies. So inevitably, you'll roll to get away from something, probably a grenade (which you can't throw back) only to get automatically snapped onto a piece of cover you couldn't see behind you and get blown up. Same when trying to dodge close-range attacks from those mutant-zombie things later in the game. Try to dodge out the way, get snapped onto cover. To leave cover, you either need to press circle again when holding a direction away from your cover and a corner of your current corner, else Drake will simply turn a corner on the cover, usually leaving you even more exposed or just hold away from the cover until you snap-off of it.

Going back to Gears of War, since it's the only cover-based Third Person Shooter I can think of which did the whole cover-thing right, the game gives you a lot of visual feedback when playing. Little icons depicting what would happen if you pressed a button when at a certain point in the cover or where you were facing. Uncharted gives you nothing. Unsure if you're going to turn a corner or roll away from cover? Too bad. Just going to have to press the circle button and hope it doesn't turn the corner. The game also has destructible cover, so if you're forced away from some cover by a grenade, then crumbly-looking pieces of cover will be lost. Same goes for crates and a lot of other bits and pieces of cover. And much like Gears of War, Uncharted has a "blind shooting" mechanic, in which you just fire over the top of cover. There's very little control over where you're shooting, again, unlike Gears of War, without aiming. This mechanic works best with wide-spread weapons like the Shotgun, but even then it's pot luck if you can take down an enemy with it. And to make matters worse, while in cover, enemies are pretty much untouchable. Think you can just quickly snipe an enemy behind cover where his head peeks out? Well, you can't. You have to wait for him to start shooting at you, for him to be able to shoot you. But don't worry, enemies can damage you through cover just fine.

The whole cover system in the game is pretty bad from the get-go, mostly because of how many rounds it takes to down a single enemy, but the game just gets down-right silly at the end. After chasing this new, unexpected enemy to his waiting boat, you start having a shoot-out with him and his cronies. This guy has a laser-sighted shotgun which if you're hit by just once, you die. You go through three sections of increasingly aggravating showdowns where this guy is invincible. At no other point in the game is an enemy invincible. You would expect that this guy was just as vulnerable as any other dude you've been unloading bullets into the entire game. Not so. To progress, you must kill everyone but the main boss-guy and he then runs away to the next choke-point. One of which is separated by the game's awful implementation of Quick Time Events. Quick Time Events which only ever use the Circle button but give you a split second to realise the cutscene you're watching is prompting you for input (which you instantly die from if you do not press the button quickly enough). Doesn't at all help that all the indication you get that the game is prompting for input is a small circle button placed in the lower right-hand corner of the screen. At least other games (even awful ones like Sonic Unleashed) put that button right in your face at the centre of the screen. And most games, excluding Deadly Premonition, usually given you more than half a second to press the button it wants you to.

The game also has a melee attack, which for all intents and purposes is pretty bloody useless, which you perform by hitting the square button multiple times near an enemy. You also have a "brutal takedown" attack which you perform pressing the melee button (Square), then at the right point in that animation, hit Triangle and at the end of that, press Square again. Doing so will net you twice the amount of ammo you would otherwise get from downed enemies. Problem is, the brutal takedown is so difficult to perform with such a little pay-off. It takes just a little less time to perform than just mashing away at the Square button to normally melee an enemy and the only time you'd really want to simplify meleeing an enemy is if you are under fire, which by the time you've melee'd the enemy to death, you yourself are dead because someone was shooting at you. There's also a stealth death maneuver which you can pull of by getting behind an enemy and hitting Square. This usually only happens either by the game glitching out or you get the bizarre fortuitous occasion that an enemy isn't just facing towards you the moment you get within a 2 mile radius of him. The whole "stealth" element of the game is also sadly missing. While the game gives you the impression that you could sneak past enemies undetected and thus, not have to deal with annoying cover-mechanics, bullet-sponges and cheap one-hit kills, the feature just isn't there. You're constantly funnelled into combat situations with no way of progressing without some big, stupid shoot-out occurring. Even when Drake says "I have to get through here without being spotted", it usually just means "you're okay until you walk into an arbitrary point on the map, then enemies will immediately be alerted to your presence". I suppose the existence of the stealth take-down is evidence as to intentions to have a stealth element in the game, but it just didn't make the final cut, it seems.

Platforming is fairly solid in the game. It's very basic, you usually just jump from ledge to ledge, sometimes swinging on a rope, vine or chain to reach a higher ledge until you get to where you need to go. The game doesn't really define a standard jumping distance for Drake. He seems to just make certain jumps while not making others. It's very strange, but at least the game gives you visual cues as to what Drake will do if you jump from a ledge you're dangling from by reaching his arm out if you're able to make a distance. What is really annoying is how sometimes you can't make short distances when hanging from ledges, you must first climb up onto the ledge itself and then jump normally. Given that Drake just pulled off some near impossible upper-body-strength jumps to get to that ledge, you'd think a small gap like the one in question wouldn't be much of a problem for him, but alas, you need to climb that ledge and take the path the game designers intended you to take. And like it. The game doesn't always do a fantastic job of showing you where you're supposed to go, especially when the over-controlling camera jumps around to a less-than-ideal camera angle and all sense of perspective goes awry. There's the golden rule of "if it's slightly differently coloured, you can hang on it", but other than this, you're on your own. Near the mid-point of the game, ledges become less and less predominant against the rest of the scenery. The cynic inside me thinks this is to try and drag out play-time of the game.

Puzzle solving is interesting, but the puzzles are so awfully explained that it just turns into whole half-an-hours at a time of wondering around a room hoping that you happen to come across the answer to the puzzle. Sometimes it's just as simple as flicking some switches, sometimes it's as complicated as turning statues in various positions so they align with some drawing in Drake's magic hint-book. Doesn't sound so difficult, but they're just finicky. Puzzles seem like an after-thought in the game as there's very few of them and they're all just horrendously designed as if they were shoe-horned-in at the last moment. What's worse is that these puzzles kick-in at tense moments in the game's story and they bring the game to a grinding halt while you try and work out what the game designers were thinking.

One part of the game which deserves nothing but scorn are the pointless Water Ski segments. You ride around on a difficult-to-control Water Ski while being shot-at by enemies. The game never stops to inform you that you can shoot at enemies while on the Water Ski, that'd be just too simple, no you must work out by yourself that you're controlling both Drake and Elena at the same time, a concept never before introduced in the game (and never used outside these segments). Although the game does take pity on you for one of these Water Ski segments and hands you a grenade launcher with unlimited ammo, this being one of the few one-hit kill weapons in the game and the only multiple hit weapon in the game. For this segment you must awkwardly dodge enemy fire, exploding barrels just left in the water and try to just fight against the awful, jerky controls of the Jet Ski. The more annoying, second Water Ski adventure hands you just a pistol and makes you fight up-stream against rapids... With exploding barrels drifting downstream... And enemies shooting at you. This game hates you, and it wants you to know it.

As far as visuals go, the game is very attractive looking. It was definitely a game, more than anything else, to show off the potential the Playstation 3 had back in 2007. The game feels very much like a game all about form over function, one which Sony can parade around in adverts and promotional goods to say "Look what our system can do", while offering very little in terms of fun. I was constantly frustrated by this game, resorting to what is usually just reserved for crappy Sonic games; I was shouting at my poor TV again. It doesn't deserve this, people, TVs have feelings too. Anyway, bottom-line, game looks amazing.

Audio-wise, the game is equally impressive. Dialogue is delivered well by most the cast, enemies are vocal although there's no defined "death cry" from enemies. So you need to watch and see if they fall down and stay down, rather than wait to hear a distinct scream indicating that the enemy is no longer a problem. The game's soundtrack is nice, it's not distracting and is quite movie-like. It's wallpaper to the game rather than being another part of the game itself. Which is fine, nothing wrong with that at all. The game's presentation is top-notch. Infact the story telling and the characterisation is what made me continue playing on, despite the game's many flaws, so take what you will from that.

In the end, Uncharted: Drake's Fortune is a pretty big flop. The game's story is the most appealing part of the game, but it's on the level of pretty much every Indiana Jones-wannabe film ever made (The Mummy, Sahara, etc). Entirely predictable, but still very enjoyable. The gameplay, however, is awful. If you're looking for a solid platforming game, this isn't it. If you're looking for a solid third person shooter, this isn't it. There's a lot of flaws with this game that just can't be overlooked. And although I'm nearly 4 years late to the party in criticising the game, just know that if you're like me and a new adopter of the Playstation 3... Stay away from Uncharted: Drake's Fortune. Have yet to play the second game, but I am approaching it with caution. Expect my thoughts on that game sometime in the near future.]]> <![CDATA[Nintendo 3DS (3DS)]]>http://www.50hzgamer.co.uk/review/99/3DS/3DS/Nintendo_3DS/joke. And it pains me to say that. I've been an avid fan of Nintendo hardware since my first Nintendo console, the SNES back in 1993. I've had every major handheld release from the original Brick Gameboy to the Gameboy Micro, my household has 3 Nintendo DS consoles and I've had every major Nintendo home console to boot as well. I'm by no means someone who attacks Nintendo without good reason. And I have some reasons to hate the Nintendo 3DS, believe me.

While the Nintendo 3DS hardware is pretty solid, despite the odd screen size mis-match of the top and bottom screens, the top being a 6:9 ratio screen, where as the bottom is still the same-old 4:3 ratio screen as found on the Nintendo DSi. The 3DS' main 'feature' is the frankly black-magic-esque glasses-less 3D technology used by the top screen. There's been many complaints about this screen, some people getting migraines or feel dizzy after staring at the screen for a prolonged period, although in my experience people aren't following instructions properly and adjusting the 3D intensity using the 3D slider found on the top-half of the device. There are some people, however, who's eyes explode even with the faintest of 3D effect turned on, before you all start writing me angry emails about how wrong I am. People do seem to put a bit too much emphasis on how important the 3D effect really is, however. The 3D is much like the touch screen on the original DS, for a large portion of games, you didn't even have to use the touch screen, here the 3D effect is even less important to system as you should never be required to play games with the 3D turned on, even if the game has 3D features.

The Nintendo 3DS, much like the Nintendo DSi and Nintendo DSi XL before it has ditched the Gameboy Advance cartridge slot at the front of the system. This omission doesn't make the system significantly slimmer, however. Even compared to my original fat Nintendo DS system, the 3DS' bottom-half is about as tall as it's older bother's bottom-half. It feels pretty nice in the hand, though. Nicely weighted. Button placement was a major concern for me when I originally saw how the 3DS would look and while I was quite wrong about the placement of the "Start" and "Select" buttons underneath the bottom screen, it seems that the real problem for the system are the awful shoulder buttons. They're not at all comfortable and extremely narrow while the depression required to press the button is extremely shallow. It's a far cry from the far superior shoulder buttons which were bestowed to the original DS or the Gameboy Advance.

Another significant and warmly welcomed addition to the 3DS' control itinerary is the "Thumb pad", an analogue-stick replacement much like the PSP's "Thumb nub". Old favourites like the D-Pad are still there, the d-pad itself isn't bad, it's a bit on the small side and likes to wobble around in it's casing but it's not the awful spongy-d-pad which the DS Lite was burdened with. The four face buttons (A, B, X and Y) all share the same layout as the original DS and are again, firm and not of the spongy variety. The DS' touch screen is still, unfortunately, a resistive touch screen and not the stylus-less capacitive touch screens found in modern smartphones. Nintendo have stated this is because of backwards compatibility with original DS titles. Perhaps someone should have told Nintendo that there's capacitive screens out there capable of taking stylus input. Regardless, how the system looks and feels is not part of my complaint about the system. There are a few niggles I have with the 3DS' on-board cameras though. While the ability to take 3D photos is a nice feature of the system, unfortunately they're just plain awful cameras. Any picture taken is grainy and horrible-looking and it does not possess the ability to capture 3D videos. This perhaps makes sense, since I surely did not buy the Nintendo 3DS for it's photography prowess, nor care the system has this functionality, mind you.

My major complaints with the system stem from when Nintendo launched the Nintendo 3DS. While they shouted about how amazing the system would be at E3 2010 -- despite the last minute announcement that the Nintendo 3DS would not carry it's digital distribution system, the "Nintendo eShop" for launch -- everything seemed in order. It was not. The 3DS system rushed out in order to bolster Nintendo's lacklustre 2010 yearly earnings report (Nintendo's financial year ends on March 31st), which were down a whopping 80% over 2009. The 3DS was launched out with an extremely basic set of features, lacking the aforementioned eShop and the Internet Browser, despite there being an prominent icon on the home menu for the feature, which when tapped would inform you you'd need to wait for a software update to use the feature. The console did come with some Augmented Reality (AR) games such as Face Raiders, where you took pictures of yourself and those around you and shoot at them using the 3DS' 3D cameras or use the in-packed AR Cards to play a whole host of games, again, using the 3D cameras. And while they were a fun time-waster to start off, they soon became extremely stale and strikes me as technology demos bundled in with the console to make up for missing features. Neither are quite the "killer game" as Wii Sports was in 2006 when it was packed-in with every Nintendo Wii console.

The launch titles, most notable of which was Street Fighter IV: 3D Edition, were pretty lacklustre, but nothing far from what the original DS offered us. Sadly, while the original Nintendo DS had a whole range of amazing software ready for consumption by the end of 2004 and by the first 3 months of 2005... Well, the 3DS just hasn't had that support. Third parties aren't releasing big-hitting games for the system, so far we've had nothing but what appears to be an early influx of shovelware. Nintendo may have tried to stem the tide of awful games by releasing a 3D remaster of the classic Nintendo 64 RPG game; The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time but how long that will keep the 3DS buoyant is anyone's guess. I didn't buy a 3DS to play games I've already played on older systems (looking at you Starfox 64 3D), I was hoping for more of the crazy originality which the DS inspired, games such as Elite Beat Agents, Hotel Dusk and for what it's worth, even out-there games like Project Rub. Six months have passed and I still do not even own a single 3DS game. Although I am almost tempted to end this by buying up yet another Puzzle Bobble game... That's what it's come to.

Retail software aside, one of my plans for the 3DS was to use the system to play the DSiWare titles which I had missed out on by (quite rightfully) skipping the Nintendo DSi. Sadly, when the Nintendo 3DS eShop did eventually launch, half a month later than expected after the previous delay, there were a whole heap of issues, none of which have been resolved. As a gamer, I resent micro-transactions. I hate buying "points" to purchase things as often they force you to buy denominations of points which often leave left-over points sitting in your account, good business for the likes of Microsoft and Nintendo, but I've had far more than enough of left-over 100 and 200 points in my balance from buying a game which will never get used. It's a sham and I out-right refuse to blindly allow companies to do this anymore. So I've just stopped buying downloadable software for consoles. Mobile phone "appstores" and Steam seem to do just find by charging my credit card the amount required to simply purchase a game, why can't I do this for my games consoles? So imagine my surprise when I heard that Nintendo were dropping it's "Nintendo Points" system in favour of using real world currencies. The clouds opened and down came a blissful, angelic harmony, carried on golden streaks of light. Surely Nintendo had learned the errors of their ways?

Sadly, no. They haven't. While Nintendo may have stopped obscuring the prices of their games by using "points", they haven't fixed the problem which was most aggravating for users. See, in order to purchase games, you must first add funds to your account. These come in denominations of £10, £20 and £30. You do not have the ability to simply add a defined amount to your account, you must buy a minimum fund of £10. Which is a problem considering the average Virtual Console title is around £3.60 a purchase and you have some awfully priced DSiWare titles like "Shantae: Risky's Revenge" which sit pretty at a price of £10.80, so not only do you need to add £20 to your account to purchase this game, you'll be stuck with £9.20 left in your account thereafter. What the bloody hell is wrong with this? Why isn't Nintendo doing something about this? Surely no-one can be happy with this shopping experience, right? It's ridiculous. It's like buying yourself gift-vouchers to spend on what you want, even though you know exactly what you want. What if actual retail stores started doing this? There'd be outrage. So why do we allow companies like Nintendo get away with it? Quite simply, I haven't bought anything from the Nintendo eShop. No. I wont do it. It's awful. Absolutely awful.

The only thing I've played so far on the Nintendo 3DS was the stuff they've given me for free, which come next month "free" games will increase ten-fold. Amazing titles like "Pokédex 3D", "Nintendo 3D Video" and "Excitebike 3D Classics"... So yeah, pretty much played nothing of any value or interest to me. Can't play DSiWare games because Nintendo's payment system laughs at you for the notion of wanting to actually buy something, no retail releases worth the extortionate £34.99 price tag, bringing Nintendo's handheld games in parity with their console games (read: rip and off springs to mind) and to top it all off, now Nintendo has announced a price drop for their failing, game-less system, leaving "early adopters" like myself wondering why I ever bothered, despite the fact I'm being gifted 20 free titles for my troubles, most of which are NES and Gameboy Advance Virtual Console titles that I already own in cartridge form.

But hey, I know what you're probably thinking by this point and I'm not going to gloss over the fact. Why did I buy the system in the first place if none of the games at launch were of any interest to me? Well, I knew that I would eventually get the system at some point, given how amazing the original DS was and shops were in a fierce price war with one-another around launch. I was able to score the system for a pretty nice price a bit higher than the £150-mark (I actually paid about £180), a price which I had repeatedly said on Twitter, was the price the system needed to be at to shift units. Good to see Nintendo listened, 6 months too late. Still, I originally bought an original DS at Japanese launch in 2004 and it has been the best handheld gaming system I've ever owned. I picked up a load of cool games for the system around launch and didn't stop until about late 2009 when all the AAA titles started to dry up in preparation for the Nintendo 3DS, I would presume. And hey, the promise of the 3DS Professor Layton game (Mask of Miracle) was just too good to pass up. It was also too good to be true, as the only Layton game coming out this year in English-speaking territories is the fourth DS title; Professor Layton and the Spectre's Call. Good luck importing 3DS games from Japan to skip that long wait until English localisations as well, the 3DS is region locked, perhaps just to add insult to injury. The only solace I can gleam from the Nintendo 3DS is the fact that there should be a new Mario Kart and a new, pretty amazing looking Super Mario game out by the end of the year. Which should hopefully inspire some confidence in my over-priced, 3D-enabled, dust magnet of a game-console-slash-paper-weight.

The 3DS has been the only games console to date that I have regretted buying. It saddens me that I would have to deter anyone from buying a Nintendo 3DS, but that would be my recommendation. Just don't buy one. Nintendo clearly has no strategy towards the Nintendo 3DS and letting it run wild and free has done it no good. Whatever strategy Nintendo currently has in-place, which is basically "take old games, add 3D, resell for full price" is worrying. I did not buy a new system just to buy old games over again, especially not full price retail games, regardless of how fancy the new, upgraded visual trappings are. If you're eyeing up a Nintendo 3DS, leave it a year. See where we are next August and if things have improved, the 3DS should have an interesting back catalogue of games waiting for you. Let's just hope Sony has learned harsh lessons from the launch of the PSP in Europe and seen what's happened here to Nintendo and not rush into a premature release of the Playstation Vita.]]> <![CDATA[Machinarium (PC)]]>http://www.50hzgamer.co.uk/review/98/indie/mach/Machinarium/In-Indie - I seem to say this an awful lot these days, but the great genre of point and click adventure games is pretty much a watering hole that dried up once games made the leap into the third dimension. We've seen some small resurgence of the genre over the last few years with the sadly now defunct CiNG, makers of Another Code: Two Memories/Trace Memory and Hotel Dusk on the Nintendo DS and Telltale Games, makers of the Sam & Max, Back to the Future and the upcoming Jurassic Park adventure games, being the fore-bearers of this great resistance. Sadly, as CiNG's departure shows; there doesn't seem to be a very viable market for the genre in the modern day video game industry. So this is where indie video game developers come in. Independently developed video games are a bastion for dying or dead genres to get a fresh new start with some innovative and sometimes crazy ideas behind them as they're more geared towards taking risks.

Which brings us to Machinarium, a heavily stylised point and click adventure game developed by Amanita Design. Machinarium is an amazing title, not just because it appeals to my penitent for point and click adventures, but because it's a whole game which eloquently tells it's story without so much as uttering an audible word. Not only this but it's able to quite effectively explain most of the game's puzzles in the same, muted way. It performs this feat by showing often language-agnostic pictorials and animations. I say often because there are times in which the game can't escape from explaining certain objects or actions the player must undertake without sticking a written word or two on it. A shame, but hardly a deal beaker. Especially when the games atmosphere and ambiance us so wonderfully crafted that it captures your attention.

So I've been sounding rather pretentious during these opening paragraphs, but this is exactly what the game's like. Many will discard this game for the sole reason that it's a bit too artsy, a game which will find a solid audience with those who wear skinny jeans or people who just love an intriguing storyline and love some "alternative" music, which Machinarium dishes out by the boat-load. But, what exactly is the game's story about? Well, I can't say too much without spoiling things but the basic gist of the story is that our poor, unnamed robotic protagonist has been dumped on a futuristic, robotic landfill site after being carried out of a great mechanical metropolis and we need to help him get back inside, once back inside, we find some rather unsociable gentle-bots who are up to no good and in true point-and-click adventure styling, we need to put an end to their dubious reign of shenanigans. Again, doesn't sound all that interesting, but the story's simplicity is really offset by the amount of character the game's world has.

The game has an abundance of detail, no two scenes in the game could be considered the same, no two areas in the game repeat similar mechanics and for the most part have very distinct looks about them. Often just rolling your mouse over foreground and background objects will make them do something, be it birds which flutter about or plants that shake. It's sometimes the little details which make a big impression. Saying this, however, some scenes to lean towards being over-crowded and you can quite easily miss important or key items because they weren't clearly visible, sometimes it's just as simple as objects having a dual purpose. For instance, early in the game, you need to imitate a robot policeman, you do this by putting a blue-coloured cone on your head. So you pick up the cone from a stack and... Then what? Took me some time to realise that you had to colour the cone blue, I can tell you that much. Especailly since it wasn't made all that clear and there was nothing blue in sight in which to dye the cone with. Until you repeatedly clicked the cone stack from whence you originally picked up a cone to reveal blue paint. A nice idea and a good lesson in "click things multiple times", but could have been handled a little better. Perhaps a puddle of blue paint surrounding the cone would have been a better indication... Or perhaps it's just me. Who knows?

One of the aspects of the game is that when playing, our robotic protagonist can extend or collapse his body height. Something too tall for you to reach? Click him and drag up. Something too low to fit or reach inside? Click and drag down. Unlike other point and click games, Machinarium doesn't highlight intractable items outside a certain range of you. You'll find yourself walking over to stuff a lot in order to see if it is indeed an item you can pick up or use to make something happen. But here-in lies a pretty big and pretty infuriating design fault. If you're extended or collapsed and try to move anywhere, the robot will walk incredibly slow and you can't put him back to normal height unless he stops moving. So you need to click somewhere near by, usually where you were initially, set his height back and then go back to moving around. Other than this, the game is very slow going, animations take a good while to finish, the robot himself doesn't move all that spritely when he's at his fastest, let alone when pushing something off-screen, climbing or doing any number of actions which can get quite infuriating when you're attempting to solve a timed puzzle and it takes a good 4 seconds to get where you need to go. I'll tell you now, this game is unforgiving with difficulty in timed puzzles.

Puzzles can be either really simple or unbelievably difficult. Where as most games would hold players up as they complete a tedious slider puzzle, (I'm looking at you Professor Layton and Another Code) this game goes one further, having just about any logic or forethought puzzle being a complete hassle from start to finish. While there are no slider puzzles in the game, you are greeted to several incarnations of it's spirit, one being a strange three-circle rotation puzzle in which you need to light up green dots in a specific order by turning one of the three circles until eventually you get the right combination. You can blindly guess around these puzzles and get where you need to, but as time goes on, these puzzles will be the bane of this game's experience as it just drags the whole flow of the game to a grinding halt and remains there for a good period of time as you can't continue without completing the puzzle. (Infact, I don't think there's any optional puzzles in the game.) One which really annoyed me was a "connect 5" puzzle in which you need to line up 5 screw-nuts in a row, bit like a mega game of noughts-and-crosses. The AI behind this is sadistic, never giving you a chance while often out-right cheating. I'm not sure if the logic behind this puzzle is faulty or I'm missing something, but often at times the AI has won with only 4 screws in a row, sometimes I've managed to get 6 nuts in a row and not won (although the solution may very well be "5 and only 5 in a row", suppose this is where simplistic, pictorial based rule-explanations come to bite you). There's also a puzzle at the end of the game which is timed and you don't have an awful lot of that time to find the right solution.

If you ever get stuck on a certain part, the game is more than willing to let you see a solution by clicking the book icon in the top right-hand corner of the screen. This book will give hints and solutions to the puzzles in that area, but every time you need to access it, you need to play a crude, randomly generated side-scrolling shooter. It's a nice touch, especially if you're not quite an adventure game aficionado. Still, the barrier to enter these solutions is pretty low and can suck all the challenge and intrigue out of the game. Although if you ever need hints for the really difficult puzzles, like the aforementioned connect-5 game, then you're out of luck, since the game just gives you "the solution" without any way of getting to it. The game also makes an awful lot of assumptions and some broken logic to make some puzzles work, although they're nothing new for adventure games of this nature.

The game is sold, pretty much, on it's looks. The gameplay and the story are pretty barebones, so it's one of the rare times where playing the game is all about looking at pretty visuals and solving puzzles, which often revolve around said pretty visuals. The game's surreal, dystopian metallic metropolis setting has a quaint charm about it, from the grungy, bleak look of the city and it's inhabitance is the biggest character in the game. Unfortunately, our protagonist, the little unnamed robot we control is perhaps the thing we care least about in the game. Not sure if this was done purposefully, but despite his animated expressions and sense of urgency, all I see him as is a conduit to help far more interesting characters in the game so I can push forward, and that irritates me. This main character is integral to the game's plot, especially from the player's perspective, yet he seems so disposable and lifeless. I can't quite put my finger on why that is.

The game's soundtrack is frankly amazing. A mix of calming, light techno music really sets the tone of the game. "Surreal" and "laid back" is how I would describe it to you. Sometimes you'll just find yourself sitting in one area for a while listening to the music, and you'll often have to stop in that one area since the game is full of unique music for almost every area of the game. Again, helping with that all-important charm which the game really hinges on. Sound effects can get a little annoying at times, since there only ever seems to be two sound effects for robots walking but other than this, the game's soundtrack does a very effective job at holding your attention. Although your mileage may vary depending on how much of an audiophile you are.

In the end then, Machinarium is a flawed but loveable title, especially for an independently developed game and while I hated -- with a passion -- some of the puzzles in the game, they don't bring the whole game down with it. It does throw up a huge barrier for replaying the game as you never want to go through those hellish puzzles again, but for the most part, you'll enjoy the experience. The game's just a smidge under £8 on the Steam store if you're interested and there's even a retail special edition with a load of goodies thrown in if you love the game that much. Oh and if you're worried about being stuck on a PC or laptop to play the game, it's coming to a whole bunch of consoles and portable devices including the Playstation 3 and the iPad in the later part of 2011. Trust me, if you like point and click adventure games, Machinarium's well worth your time.]]> <![CDATA[Sonic Generations Demo (Xbox 360, Playstation 3)]]>http://www.50hzgamer.co.uk/preview/96/360/soge/Sonic_Generations_Demo/Impressions - So, here's a 'nice' surprise which SEGA dropped on us today, the day of Sonic's 20th anniversary. A demo for their next take on the Sonic franchise: Sonic Generations. I've not been anticipating this game at all, I think Sonic Colours shown exactly how much contempt SEGA has for the people like me, vocal old-school Sonic fans expecting just a little bit of respectability from a franchise which we grew up with, much like how comic book fans want better film adaptations of their favourite comics. It's not unreasonable, right? I'm not opposed to change in the Sonic franchise, infact I enjoyed the 3D Sonic Adventure games and even Sonic Rush on the Nintendo DS. They were fun. So when I play games like Sonic Colours, which the only fun they can drag out of the game is by making it a cheap Mario knock-off, I feel rightfully upset. Not just because Mario is a completely polar opposite of the platforming genre but because SEGA just don't have the calibre to pull of such a feat. They barely had it in the 90's and surely don't have anywhere near it today.

So here's the demo. It consists of 1 stage; Green Hill Zone, where you play as "Classic Sonic" as the game refers to him. I'm highly suspicious that SEGA didn't throw in "New Sonic" in this demo either, especially since they were more than happy to show him off to the gaming media at E3. I get the distinct, very cynical impression that SEGA just wants to get across the fact that they've made a game very similar to how old Sonic games used to play. Wow, did I really just write that? What's going on... Anyway, so keep in mind that this demo only focuses on one side of the game. Much like how the Sonic Unleashed demo only focused on the first Sonic (not Werehog) stage and look how that game worked out, at least three quarters of the game was stupid Werehog levels which no one liked, cared about or even found to be a remotely good idea in a Sonic game. I'm also rather suspicious of the fact that this demo is a timed demo, you only have access to it for 19 days and you must be connected to the internet to play it. Not entirely sure why, maybe transmitting play data back home to SEGA to improve the game? Just thought I'd like to point that out.

So, my first impressions of the game were... Well, not great. When booting up into the game, you get a strange, jungle-like beat before the game bursts into the Sonic the Hedgehog 1 title screen music. Still, this stylistic choice aside, I couldn't help but notice a shiny "3D Mode Options" selection on the title screen. Didn't know it supported 3D, but hey, it does. Sadly, I barely have enough money to support my gaming habits, let alone enough to buy a state-of-the-art 3D TV, so I can't comment on how that works at all. I suppose I should state that I did read the description of the demo while it was downloading, something about a new "evil" which is apparently ripping time to shreds and Sonic "and his friends" fall into some wormhole or something and come across Sonic's older self. Unfortunately stating that the game has a story which I'm pretty sure we'll be spoon-fed in the form of drawn-out cutscenes with two Sonics voiced by the same person, only one with a higher pitched voice, where we learn that Eggman was trying to build "Eggmanland" using this evil monster, then the evil monster betrays him, the Sonics team up to destroy it and just like in Sonic the Hedgehog 2006, the timeline adjusts itself and no-one remembers any of it... And the sad part is, is that this is most likely the actual story of the game. Hence why they haven't elaborated on the story at all.

Right, so, past this I start the game and are greeted to abstract flying shapes cluttering the screen... I can't say I like this 'theme' they have going, if I'm not explaining it well enough, go watch a trailer for the game and notice all the bouncing abstract shapes going on between gameplay footage, that's basically what the loading screen looks like. Still, once the game finished loading and the title screen vanished you were pretty much in control of Sonic. Running forward seemed to be okay, no weird momentum acquisition going on, breaking seemed fine. Jumping... Well, it's a bit off. Sonic doesn't jump high enough but they have the right amount of mid-air control going on. Just a slight tweak to the jump height and they've pretty much nailed it. Spindashing... Well, Spindashing is a huge problem. See, the Spindash, unbeknownst to me until a little on-screen indicator popped up telling me to hit a button, was that the Spindash has it's own dedicated button. So rather than holding down and the jump button (which is only A/X by the way), you can execute the Spindash move at any time, doesn't matter if you're running full pelt, you can still Spindash. Why would you do this? I mean, running at full pelt is as fast as Sonic Spindashing, right? Unless you're going down a slope to build momentum. Well, no. Because in this game, the Spindash is game is way, way too fast for seemingly no reason. I wasn't too bothered about the fact you can now hold down the X/Square button or hold down on the control stick and hold A/X to charge up the Spindash move, especially since you can just tap these buttons to build up speed as well but the amount of speed you get on the other side of the Spindash is a real problem. Also, if you accidentally tap the X/Square button, Sonic will go to perform a Spindash, but immediately cancel out and you stop dead, quite annoying. If they're going to at least keep that dedicated Spindash button, they'd do good to make it so that holding down the button performs a Spindash, not just tapping it. But hey, the game's in development, so they could be working on it already.

Other than that, the physics in the game seems pretty solid. You don't get automatically boosted around loops in the game like in Sonic 4 due to it's awful physics implementation and if you're on a hill, you wont just stand still on a slope, you'll walk backwards if it's steep enough. Positive signs. I think stage design needs to be tweaked a little bit, the loops that do feature in the game are huge and Sonic on his own steam (i.e. not Spindash or spring-powered) has trouble getting around them. Not a huge problem to fix, just need to modify the size of the loops. Other than this, the game is pretty solid. Some minor annoyances like how rocks break when you jump into the side of them, but that's really splitting hairs at this point. The game really is what Sonic the Hedgehog 4 should have been and it's about damn time that SEGA has stepped up and delivered us a game which is at least somewhere near what original Sonic the Hedgehog played like -- although not perfect -- 20 years ago. And I think that should be mentioned here, they released a game called "Sonic the Hedgehog 4" a game which took on the mantle of being in the game league of the original Sonic the Hedgehog games and they ballsed it up. Big time. If they had released a game which played like this for Sonic 4, I wouldn't have been anywhere near as mad. Infact, I sure hope SEGA does everyone a favour who bought that game and update it with this physics engine. I think those people deserve that much, SEGA.

Oh and a quick word on stage design. It's pretty good. Feels like a Sonic game in that regard. If it wasn't for the odd Spindash and tragic jump height I'd be very content with the game as it is. I can't speak for the whole product, I'm basing this entire article on a 1 stage demo, about 4 and a half minutes in length but SEGA have plenty of time to balls up the stage execution, don't you worry. But as-is, as I've played, the game feels good. Never thought I'd say that about the game, I'm genuinely impressed. Oh and another quick note is that when you get hit, rings bounce off everywhere and they're very hard to collect again. Yes, rings in older games had a similar behaviour but not if you hit standard enemies, if you get hit by exploding enemies or bosses, yes. Regular enemies? No.

Visually the game is very impressive, very nice looking. It fixes Sonic the Hedgehog 4's "zoomed in" problem and then some. I never felt I was at fault when I hit spikes or ran into enemies, well, other than when I wasn't adjusting for Sonic's shorter jump height. I didn't like the changing perspectives in certain parts of the stage but I can live with them. I really liked how the game had some nice shadow effects on the lower levels of the stage. "Classic Sonic" when seen in press shots looks strange, but his in-game look is perfectly fine. As I said, the only thing I dislike about the game is the menus, but I honestly can't sit here and critique the game off-of something so unimportant (unlike Sonic Unleashed on the Wii's town hub nonsense. That was terrible.)

My first impressions of this game then, they're good. I'm quite content with Sonic Generations. Can you believe that? I sure can't. Of course, here's where the praise ends and I start being jaded and cynical. Remember that this is a cherry-picked demo of the game to help it sell. The rest of the game could be completely awful, just keep this in mind. I've also had no time with the "New Sonic" style of gameplay, which looks like it's identical to Sonic Unleashed's day-time stages all over again and while they were unmistakably the best part about the game, it's not something I ever want to play again. Oh wait, I did in Sonic Colours and it was still as horrible then too, only with the added tedium of that awful Wisp mechanic. So be warned. This demo doesn't show most of the game and is still work-in-progress. Is Sonic Generations a hidden, unexpected gem? Possibly. Sonic Rush was a pretty cool game in a period where Sonic was really getting silly, there's every possibility that Sonic Generations will be too. Just make sure you rent it before committing to the purchase, okay?]]> <![CDATA[Sonic the Hedgehog 3 (SEGA Megadrive)]]>http://www.50hzgamer.co.uk/review/95/OTHER/sth3/Sonic_the_Hedgehog_3/Retro Recall - Having now laid waste to the sea of utterly horrible Sonic games which have all but tarnished SEGA's once illustrious mascot's gaming career, it's time to look back on a more favourable time. For Sonic's 20th Birthday, let's have a gander at what is arguably the best Sonic the Hedgehog game made to date: Sonic the Hedgehog 3. Well, that's not technically accurate. I'm also playing the 1995 'sequel' to the game: "Sonic & Knuckles" as well as Sonic the Hedgehog 3, so this is the full 14 stages and how the game was meant to be played.

Let me explain. Sonic the Hedgehog 3 was released in 1994 and consisted of 6 stages, each stage consisting of 2 acts and two playable characters; Sonic and Tails. This may seem short considering the original Sonic the Hedgehog game had 7 stages, each stage having 3 acts but that's nothing on Sonic the Hedgehog 2's 11 stages, each having 2 acts (except Metropolis Zone which had 3 for some reason). However what Sonic 3 lacks in quantity, the game makes up for in quality, don't you worry. Sonic the Hedgehog 3 wasn't always supposed to be like this, however. SEGA Technical Institute, the developers of the game, wanted Sonic the Hedgehog 3 to be the definitive Sonic game. They had planned the game to be 14 stages long with 3 playable characters; Sonic, Tails and the new character introduced in Sonic 3: Knuckles. Unfortunately, time constraints and memory concerns came-a-creepin'. Believe it or not, in 1994 it was horrendously expensive to produce 4 megabyte EEPROM chips (what old games used to be stored on), which is what the full Sonic 3 game would have required. So, instead the game was split into two. In 1995; Sonic & Knuckles was released as a stand-alone cartridge. It boasted "lock-on" capabilities, where-by if you placed Sonic the Hedgehog 3 in the top of the cartridge, you would get the full Sonic 3 experience, seamlessly adding 8 new stages to the game, these stages could be played without Sonic 3, however you couldn't play as Tails in the game and there was no save functionality. One down-side to all this was that fans had to cough up double for both Sonic 3 and Sonic & Knuckles at retail.

Sonic 3 is perhaps one of the greatest platforming games ever made, up there with Super Mario World. It took the best bits of Sonic the Hedgehog 2 and polished them to a near mirror shine, as you may expect from a sequel. Stages in the game are extremely well constructed, with much thought and obviously much revision to create vibrant, interesting and sprawling stages which I still manage to find new routes through after all these years. Each character in the game shares a lot of mechanics while being very distinct in how they play, not only this but each character in the game has their own routes through stages leveraging Tails' flying ability and Knuckles' ability to smash through certain walls. Knuckles himself is the game's "hard mode", he has his own routes through stages which he's forced to take due to his shorter jump height but these routes better account for his gliding and wall-climbing abilities. Knuckles also has to endure slightly modified boss behaviours and unique bosses which only Knuckles will face in the game, making them significantly more difficult.

While Tails is quite an over-looked feature in many Sonic games, he is actually worth playing in this game due to the fact that he could finally fly. Sonic the Hedgehog 2 saw Tails flying, but as a player, you couldn't make Tails fly. Tails' new-found player-controlled ability to fly opens up new routes through stages for both Tails and Sonic, so long as you're play with Tails following. An often over-looked feature of the game is to play with a friend and use Tails to carry Sonic, a mechanic which is used in a boss battle in which Tails carries Sonic to jump hit Eggman. This boss is also fought with Tails stand-alone where you have to fly into Eggman propeller-tails first to damage it, a risky maneuver since you can easily end up getting hit by the boss as much as you hit it, adding a whole new slant to the boss. Knuckles doesn't fight this boss and is one of the few bosses Knuckles has a whole new boss battle to face-off against showing just how much thought and effort went into Knuckles' implementation into the game.

It's not all sunshine and roses for Knuckles, there are times where it seems like his game was rushed, especially towards the tail-end of the Sonic 3 stages. Carnival Night Zone, for instance, has no act 2 boss and feels very rushed. Sonic's Hidden Palace Zone features a face-off between Knuckles and Sonic and/or Tails where as Knuckles' variation of the stage is an empty stage which ends with you jumping on a teleporter which takes you to Sky Sanctuary Zone, which again, was a whole stage for Sonic, but is merely two boss battles, one of them being the final boss, for Knuckles. Which, sort-of makes sense given that Knuckles' game takes place after Sonic and Tails' game and Sky Sanctuary was wrecked at the end of Sonic/Tails' game... Still, it means that Knuckles' game is cut short by at least 2 stages as he doesn't play the Death Egg Zone stage, again, mostly because at this point in the story the Death Egg is destroyed.

So what about poor old Sonic? He's still the same, rather limited, Blue Hedgehog we know and love. He can't fly, glide or climb walls. But what he lacks there he makes up for in abilities gained from acquiring "elemental shields", a new mechanic in the game which allows Sonic to use one of three new shields found in item boxes. The Fire Shield which protects all characters from fire damage but also gives Sonic a boost of speed when you jump mid-air, destroying any enemies in its path. The Water Shield which protects all characters from drowning under water but gives Sonic the ability to do a "bounce" attack and gain a slightly higher jump. The Electric Shield protects all characters from electric damage (which is rare, mostly bosses use it), attract rings towards you and gives Sonic a double-jump to make him jump slightly higher when jumping in mid-air. All these shields protect any character from losing all their rings when hit by an enemy, however the shield is lost in the process. Shields also deflect small projectiles like those shot from enemies or smaller falling objects. Fire and Electric Shields are also lost if the player touches water at any point in a stage. Looking back, this idea was so simple, so effective and genius to implement. It's a shame that subsequent Sonic outings have neglected these shields. If they ever get around to properly fixing Sonic the Hedgehog 4, these shields should make a come back somewhere along the road.

Stand-alone, Sonic 3 has 7 special stages which are entered by finding giant rings hidden with stages. Now, I know what you're thinking, I lambasted the Sonic Advance games for hiding their special stage entrances in strange and obscure places, well settle down. See, unlike Sonic Advance, these special stage entrances are plentiful. You'll naturally come across at least two per stage, three if you're really lucky. These can usually be found by sometimes obvious, sometimes not-so-obvious entrances hidden in innocuous-looking walls. Once in special stages, it's a matter of running around a pseudo-3D environment, doing as the game instructs; "collect blue spheres" while avoiding red spheres which, if touched, ends the special stage. Running over blue spheres turns them into red spheres. If you encapsulate blue spheres in red spheres, you can convert the blue spheres, including the ones transformed into red spheres into rings. Collect all the rings in the special stage to "Perfect" it and get a healthy bonus score as a result. Once there are no more blue spheres left, you are given a Chaos Emerald. Collect 7 of them, collect 50 rings and double-jump and you're Super Sonic or Super Knuckles. Tails is unfortunately left out of this 7-Chaos-Emerald club, although he can collect all of them.

With Sonic & Knuckles connected, there's an additional 7 special stages which are completely unforgiving. Once you decide to get these additional Chaos Emeralds, you forgo the ability to become Super Sonic or Super Knuckles until you've collected these new Chaos Emeralds and have the ability to become Hyper Sonic, Hyper Knuckles and Super Tails. These powered-up Super-forms enable Sonic to use a "Homing Jump"-like move by double-jumping, Knuckles has the ability to destroy enemies on-screen if he glides into a wall fast enough and Tails... Well, is just a normal super-state which requires twice the effort to get over Sonic and Knuckles' special states. And is a huge waste of time. But still, nice to see some reward for doing all those special stages. Knuckles has a pretty rough time with this, if you collected any Chaos Emeralds during the first 6 (Sonic 3) stages of the game, you'll be forced to hand them over once you reach Mushroom Hill Zone. Kind-of a kick in the balls, but you can get around this by just not collecting any Chaos Emeralds until you've completed the game and use your completed game data to choose which stages you want to play, skipping around Mushroom Hill if needed.

Not all things are rosy with Sonic 3, though. There was always one part of the game which got me stumped every time I played the game, a section in Carnival Night Zone which forces you in a room with a spinning octagonal oblong which bounces up and down when jumped on. For the life of me I could never figure this part of the game out, I knew I had to get underneath the gimmick so I tried jumping up and down on the thing but to no avail. It wasn't until someone pointed out that I could press up and down on the control stick to control the vertical speed of the gimmick that I found how to get past it. Now, I'm not sure who thought that was a good idea. No part of this makes any sort of logical sense, how would standing on-top of something control it? Especailly when your character makes no movement what-so-ever while standing on-top of it. I suppose it's a hint that you're not actually controlling your character at this point, but if that was the case, why didn't the camera shift down to have the oblong as the central object on-screen to re-enforce this notion? I'll never understand, but once you get past that section, you're pretty much home free.

While it's nothing new to the series, Sonic the Hedgehog 3 comes complete with a competitive 2-player mode. While Sonic the Hedgehog 2 had a similar feature, where you ran through 3 courses from the game itself (Emerald Hill, Casino Night and Mystic Cavern Zones) and a versus Special Stage, Sonic 3, again, improved the idea. Instead of featuring full-length stages, the game includes purpose-built versus stages; Azure Lake, Balloon Park, Chrome Gadget, Endless Mine and Desert Palace. The object of the race is to complete 5 laps before the other player. You can leave traps or inflict traps upon yourself by collecting item orbs which appear around the track, items like Banana peels that can be dropped onto the stage and trip-up whoever runs over them, while items like cement shoes makes the player who collected the item move slowly. These stages can also be played alone in a "Time Trial" mode, as the name suggests, you race yourself to get the best time you can. Nothing much more to it than that. As previously mentioned the actual game itself has some cooperative multiplayer in-built if you play as Sonic and Tails, with the second player controlling Tails.

Outside of Sonic the Hedgehog 3, you could take your copy of Sonic & Knuckles and stick your copy of Sonic the Hedgehog 2 inside to play as Knuckles in Sonic the Hedgehog 2, gliding ability and horribly out-of-place art design on Knuckles intact. Sadly, elemental shields don't come along for the ride. But not only does Sonic 3 get a whole new lease of life from Sonic & Knuckles, so does Sonic 2. You could also stick any game cartridge into the top of the Sonic & Knuckles cartridge and play Special Stages with them. Only certain cartridges worked, some would simply say "NO WAY". There was no way to be certain what cartridges would work, so it was pure trial and error. Still, funky little extras the game gave you... Although I should hope so given you had top purchase the game twice. I'm pretty sure I could work out a joke around modern day DLC, but let's not go there.

For it's time, Sonic the Hedgehog 3 was a very graphically impressive game. While it may look similar to Nintendo's Donkey Kong Country, which was also released around the same time as Sonic 3; the game wasn't actually pre-rendered stills of 3D models, at least not for the most part, they were hand-drawn in a daring new style to give the perception of depth. It paid off, the game still looks visually striking and impressive to this day. The level of detail which went into the game is amazing, from it's multi-tiered scrolling backgrounds to it's detailed character and enemy animations. What is perhaps so great about Sonic 3 was how it conveyed it's story without so much as uttering a word. Simple actions such as Knuckles laughing at Sonic, showing rivalry, Knuckles being betrayed by Eggman as he steals the Master Emerald in Hidden Palace Zone... All easily convey the game's story and allows you to fill in the blanks.

The game's soundtrack is perhaps one of the best examples of how the SEGA Megadrive soundchip could be used. The Megadrive was much berated back in the day for it's poor sound production capabilities in comparison to the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES), so much so that although the "King of Pop" himself; Michael Jackson, worked on parts of the game's soundtrack, he didn't want to be named in the credits because of how the songs turned out. But hey, we did get an amazing soundtrack out of the game complete with extremely iconic songs like stage music from Marble Garden, Ice Cap and Hydrocity Zones. Some of the soundtrack did fall flat on its face, however. Songs like Launch Base Zone just had no depth, felt very shallow in comparison to the rest of the soundtrack and overall seemed very unfinished. Then there were purely technical problems with the game, for instance Sky Sanctuary Zone kept being interrupted by sound effects using high-pitched notes. Still, Sonic 3 has a very memorable soundtrack and one a damn sight more adventurous and better produced than that of Sonic the Hedgehog 4, I can tell you that much.

Sonic the Hedgehog 3 is an amazing game. Was back in 1994, is today. And while we perhaps ended paying over-the-odds for it back in the day, I would gladly pay that all over again for another Sonic game as interesting, as fun, as brilliant. Games like Sonic Colours, Sonic Unleashed or Sonic the Hedgehog 4 didn't understand these games, but it's simply enough to explain: Sonic the Hedgehog 3 didn't do as these games did, focus on speed above all else, didn't try to shoe-horn in silly gimmicks like balancing on a ball or driving a minecart. It focused on fun courses with extreme replay value. I have extremely low expectations of the upcoming Sonic Generations as well, but I'll at least save my rage towards that game until I play it. Sonic the Hedgehog 3 is, to me, the definitive Sonic game. It's where the series peaked, it had everything that a good platforming game needed and then some. It innovated, it drove home solidly built stages with multiple paths and even unique paths for specific characters and is a complete blast to replay. If you like new-age Sonic, but never played the originals, do yourself a favour, look up this game on one of the many Sonic game bundles it's been re-released on like Sonic Mega Collection available on Gamecube (playable on the Wii), Playstation 2 and Xbox (playable on the Xbox 360), PC or even look up Sonic 3 and Sonic and Knuckles on Xbox Live Marketplace or Playstation Store. Trust me, you wont regret it. It's one of the best 2D side-scrolling games ever made. Happy 20th Anniversary, Sonic. Here's hoping the next 10 years wont be as bad as the last.]]> <![CDATA[Sonic the Hedgehog 4: Episode I (Xbox 360, Playstation 3, Nintendo Wii)]]>http://www.50hzgamer.co.uk/review/94/360/sth4/Sonic_the_Hedgehog_4:_Episode_I/Over-Reaction Command - You know a game's bad when you come away feeling personally insulted by just playing it. This is how I can eloquently sum up my experience with Sonic the Hedgehog 4: Episode I. It's insulting on a number of levels, first and foremost is the fact that the people behind this tragedy had the balls to pass the game off as a successor to the original Sonic the Hedgehog series on the Megadrive while having none of the charm, none of the gameplay and surely no input from the geniuses who made the games 20 years ago. The Megadrive Sonic series is gospel to Sonic fans, it's their childhood. This game is like someone in the Vatican writing a "New Testament 2" after just skimming through the pages of the previous scriptures. It's awful. I mean really, really bad.

I've moaned in the past about how New Super Mario Bros. Wii was no-where near as good as Super Mario World on the SNES and I stand by that. But I never said that New Super Mario Bros. Wii was a bad game. Far from it, the New Super Mario Bros. franchise is a very enjoyable take on the Mario series and Nintendo was more than able to draw a line in the sand between the original NES and SNES Mario games and the newer 2D platformers. They're nods to the originals, not designed to be their successor in any way. I acknowledge this. Doesn't stop the fact you can't take Yoshi's out of one level and into the next being an awful game design choice, but hey, I really enjoyed the games on DS and Wii. I was never a very big fan of Mega Man back in the day, but I have played most of the NES Mega Man titles all the way through and enjoyed them, Mega Man 9, a game which set out to recreate the classic NES experience but released 21 years after the first Mega Man title faithfully recreated the experience right down to the soul-crushing difficulty. So why is it that SEGA can't make a Sonic title at least on-par with Nintendo's retro-inspired-yet-brand-new gameplay experience? Answers on a postcard, please.

Sonic the Hedgehog 4 was announced to much fanfare from SEGA, trumpeted to fans on their official blog as a game which had learnt from past mistakes, going so far as to provide a daily teaser which poked fun at one of the larger complaints against the series; the ever increasing roster of useless filler characters the franchise has acquired over the years, striking them off as confirmed not to be in the game, it eventually led to all but Sonic himself remaining on the list. They then trickle-fed conceptual artwork of the game, short trailers which weren't in-game footage and other nonsense. You knew something was wrong when they were hopping about showing everything but gameplay footage for elongated periods. Then they revealed the name and frankly, the internet looked on in disbelief. SEGA was going to make a "fourth" Sonic the Hedgehog game in the original series. Who had they got back to make this new game? Had series director Yuji Naka and series creator Naoto Oshima reunited to make the game they always wanted to? Had they rounded up lost souls from SEGA's long-lost "SEGA Technical Institute" (creators of Sonic the Hedgehog 2 through to Sonic and Knuckles)? One big, last hurrah to an era long lost to the video game world? Of course not. Instead, they handed development over to an internal development team at SEGA (instantly making them "Sonic Team") and outsourced work to Sonic Advance and Sonic Rush developers: Dimps.

One of the biggest problems I have with Sonic the Hedgehog 4: Episode I is that at no point during this game, I felt like I was playing a Sonic game. I felt like I was playing a cheap knock-off version of it. Everything about it feels odd, Sonic controls funnily, momentum seems strange, hitting springs while rolling will force Sonic to stand upright and run, then you have problems like how they included the homing jump into the game, but not just any homing jump, that awful lock-on homing jump attack, so all you hear every time you jump is that "beep" sound effect as the bloody lock-on-target-indicator thing shows you that some rock can be homing attacked or you're locked onto a spring. Just, what the hell were they thinking? I know what you're probably thinking, seeing that Dimps helped develop this game, since I expected at least this much; "the game's just a HD Sonic Advance right? 'Cause I can live with that." Well, tough luck. It's not. It's not by a long shot. Sonic Advance is a far superior title for a few good reasons; that game at least tried it's damn hardest to be like classic Sonic titles while having an edgy new outlook for the series, this game just seems like it's loosely trying to be Sonic Advance. Sonic Advance also effectively used it's screen space, Sonic the Hedgehog 4 seems like it's too close to Sonic at all times. You can barely see 6 Sonic-widths (a very scientific measurement) infront of you. older Sonic titles weren't this "zoomed in", as it were. I think it's mostly the vertical height rather than the width of the screen which does it though. Makes you far more vulnerable to traps and the return of everyone's favourite stage design flaw: bottomless pits. Oh yes, they're back. Back with a vengeance.

You'll traverse 4 stages, 5 if you count the boss-rush at the end of the game. The stages are all reminiscent of stages which appeared in Sonic the Hedgehog 1 or Sonic the Hedgehog 2, Splash Hill is yet another take on Sonic the Hedgehog 1's iconic "Green Hill Zone", Casino Street is clearly a take on Sonic the Hedgehog 2's "Casino Night Zone", Lost Labyrinth is obviously "Labyrinth Zone" from Sonic 1 and Mad Gear is inspired by Sonic 2's "Metropolis Zone" with a Sonic 3-like kill-wall which follows you taken from "Hydrocity Zone" in Sonic 3. Each zone has 3 acts and a boss, making a total of 12 levels in the game with 5 unique bosses, the bosses, yet again, are heavily inspired from bosses from older Sonic titles. The game is designed from the ground-up to be a throw-back, but does this by plucking at the cheap, easily swayed threads around the Nostalgia-Centre of your brain. Once you realise that the game you're playing is full of stupid stage gimmicks, it gets pretty dull. Gimmicks like cards which take control away from you after you homing attack them a few times, a rolling ball or a cog which you need to balance on, stupid minecart segments where you rotate the stage to move... It's awful. Sure, Sonic the Hedgehog 2 had some of these gimmicks, by that I mean one gimmick, where by you're running on a bolt to make it move up or down. But that was one gimmick, in one stage and no, it wasn't done well there either. The rolling ball in Lost Labyrinth really gets super-annoying about the third time you encounter it in that stage but now it's over a bottomless pit, so any slip-up means instant death.

Stages designs are a complete contradiction to themselves at random intervals, the stage really wants you to move fast with speed boosters all over the place (which, by the way, make you roll whenever you hit them for no good reason. Yet when you hit springs when rolling, you'll stand up and run.) but with no warning, the game suddenly wants you to go slow, so while you keep mashing the A button to get a pitiful speed boost from the not-so-jump-dash the game has, you can sometimes find yourself missing a stage gimmick like a cannon, fly over it and end up falling into a bottomless pit. Horrible flash backs of Sonic Rush Adventure going on here... The game's speed isn't really a big issue, I feel that pacing in the game is just about right. It has a very Sonic CD feel about the game in terms of speed, minus the speed boosters which are over-done in this game. I do have issues with the game's physics, as do a lot of people on the internet, so you've probably heard all this before, but I will focus on one aspect of the game's physics which is so unnatural and so annoying coming from someone who's religiously played the older Sonic games for the last decade and a half; when Sonic stops on an inwardly-arced incline, he should not stop half way up that incline. He should keep walking backwards until he reaches a more level part of that slope about an eighth of the way up it, this has become an instinctive part of how I play Sonic so much so that when I was chased by the kill-wall in Mad Gear, I would wait for Sonic to slide back down a slope so I could spindash and not risk rolling backwards into the wall. But instead, Sonic just stood there. More annoying problems with the game is the fact you can actually get stuck on outward arcing corners, stuck inside loops and perhaps not so annoying but head-in-palms depressing is the fact that you can walk slowly on ceilings, breaking any convention of physics imaginable. How is it that modern consoles with all their advanced space-age-like technology in comparison to the early 90's consoles can't at the very least recreate the physics behind the older 16-bit Sonic games? It's crazy.

Bosses in the game are either really damn cheap or just uninspired. You have bosses which are similar to the original Sonic 1 and 2 bosses. They're pretty standard so I wont talk about them much. Just know that the Lost Labyrinth Zone boss is cheap as the day is long. Basically, the boss revolves around pillars protruding from the walls, floor and ceiling. They will come out in formations which wont crush Eggman, so you've got to position yourself near Eggman to avoid getting crushed yourself. Seems pretty easy, only you realise that the game will be damn well sadistic in you timing your opportunities to attack him. The first formation he will make with the pillars is one where the centre of the screen is safe, yet you can't jump up to reach Eggman without using the rising pillars to get a boost. However, if you stay on the pillar too long, you get crushed. Fair enough, I thought. So I jumped on, hit him two times and tried to get out, I was only half way up the screen and felt I had enough room. I didn't. So you have to quickly jump on, hit him and jump off all before Sonic, standing on the pillar, reaches the middle of the screen. Another big problem I encountered was one of the final formations he makes, where by you have to quickly jump from one side of the screen to another. You'd think that you could use the homing attack to hit Eggman and you would be safe. Wrong. You hit Eggman with the homing attack on any boss and it'll throw you backwards at least half a screen. So guess what? I homing attacked him hoping to get across there quickly and avoid getting crushed... When actually it threw me right into the path of another pillar just ready to crush me. Nice. Another problem is that if you hit Eggman, he blinks and you can't hit him, seems normal, right? But, if you're on a pillar which is retracting, you get pulled towards Eggman and if he stops blinking while you're pulled into him, you take damage. Of course, it's all perfectly timed so the time it takes you to hit him, the pillars to start retracting and him to stop blinking is done to perfection to ensure you're pretty much sure to get hit unless you jump at the exact right moment.

The final boss has it's fair share of flaws, although most are technical flaws. One big design flaw is the number of hits it takes to fell the boss. If you cotton on to a technique where just jumping into the boss doesn't send you flying backwards but the homing attack does, you can get in two hits on the boss by using the normal jump and the homing attack one after another. Still, the boss takes forever because once you defeat the boss' first form, it starts becoming invulnerable by being covered in electricity. The way you defeat the boss now is to follow it through it's long, boring pattern where it prances about and hope it decides to fire it's arms at you, doing so allows the arm to be sent back at him. The boss is pretty difficult if you're not sure what to do and yes, the final boss to Sonic the Hedgehog 2 also took far too many hits to die, but I thought games were supposed to learn from their mistakes as they progressed through iterations. Dimps has done everything in reverse, going from Sonic Advance, a decent, playable, enjoyable title through to this abomination which has nothing going for it at all.

Special Stages in the game are, for once, easily accessible again. Just take 50 rings to the end of a stage and jump into the big ring. Finally, no looking for Special Stage rings or collecting 7 impossible to find SP Rings or collecting Chao and then a key... No, just plain and simple take 50 rings to the end of a stage. Special Stages are a pretty interesting, well done take on the Sonic the Hedgehog 1 special stages, only rather than controlling Sonic directly in a spinning maze, you are the spinning maze and you guide Sonic to the Chaos Emerald. No complaints about this, really. And, lo' and behold, you collect all 7, grab 50 rings and jump and you get Super Sonic. Playable. In normal stages. Not only this but you get a special ending when you get all 7 Chaos Emeralds as well, hinting that there will definitely be a "Sonic the Hedgehog 4: Episode II"... Of course, this being written after E3, SEGA's already said there will be a Sonic 4, mostly because the game mad a shed-load of money on the game and has admitted that there were "problems" with the game, I wonder if one of them is "simply existing", 'cause that's the top of my problems with this game.

Visually, the game is pretty boring, really. It all looks rather nice, but it's very plain. It was about the same time Sonic 4 came out that there was a fan-made "Sonic the Hedgehog 2 Fan Remix" demo released and frankly, that game was so visually cluttered it undermined the actual visual awe the game had to show. A happy medium between this game and Sonic 4: Episode I would have been ideal. But even then, Sonic 4 can seem really cluttered, perhaps by purposeful design, since I'm really thinking of Casino Street Zone where just about everything on screen is begging for attention. I suppose they were going for the same minimalistic design as the Megadrive Sonic titles and by that I mean Sonic the Hedgehog 1 and Sonic the Hedgehog 2, which were mostly that plain because the hardware could only allow that at the time. Sonic the Hedgehog 3 is where stages got very interesting, very detailed while retaining clarity on the path you should take. Sonic the Hedgehog CD also did a very good job with it's scrolling foregrounds trying to add some flavour to the otherwise very dull stage scenery. Sonic's animations also seem... Odd somehow. As with all things 3D, there's a larger emphasis on animation over functionality, ducking takes just that bit longer in Sonic 4 than you would expect, makes quick spindashes a bit harder to pull off but nothing you can't adjust to. Overall, the game is very pretty but I don't think they went far enough in some regards. But everything is very clear, concise and the game does a good job pointing you in the right direction without actually pulling a Sonic Advance 3 and have arrows literally pointing you in the right direction.

Audio design, well... I can see what they were doing. The game's very synthesiser-heavy, as was all Megadrive games, as... Well, that's all the Megadrive could do. The Megadrive has been often criticised for it's lacklustre sound capabilities, going so far as to make Michael Jackson strike his name from the credits of Sonic the Hedgehog 3, it was that bad. They have the first game's rather iconic drum sound effect in most of the stage music as if that was supposed to make the game feel more like a Megadrive title. I get the distinct impression that a lot of the music in the game was actually supposed to use a Synth voice to make it actually sound like a Megadrive title, only it didn't work out as they expected, either do to time or technical reasons. But the soundtrack is okay, each stage act has it's own variation of that theme's music. Casino Street's songs are by far the weakest closely followed by the boss song, which is actually an unused music track from Sonic the Hedgehog 3D (which is another terrible Sonic game, only this time it's on the Megadrive itself) before shifting pace into a more Sonic Advance-series-like song for when the boss changes form. I really like the Lost Labyrinth songs, they match the feel of that zone exactly, something which the other two passable themes in the game; Splash Hill and Mad Gear don't really pull off, but they're not bad songs. Fairly catchy, not really memorable though, but again, do they need to be? The soundtrack's a mixed bag to say the least.

Sonic the Hedgehog 4: Episode I, then. The game is dire. It was a cheap, downloadable title which was once again rushed through to market with very little consideration for the fans it was supposed to be aimed at. And this game underwent significant changes after fans rebelled about certain features in the game which came to light by an embarrassing leak of the game in video form and the fans just tore it to shreds. It was still awful. But, it paid off for them. They made down to such a tight budget that they easily made back their investment in the game, as they do for all Sonic games. SEGA are PR and marketing geniuses, able to sway dejected fans, who played previous games in the series, hated them but believe SEGA every time they say "this time will be different". I mean, people keep claiming that these new Sonic games break the "Sonic cycle", but they're deluding themselves. These new games still suck and it seems no matter how much Sonic fans, passive or proactive, whine and moan about the state of the franchise, SEGA's doing dick-all to remedy the problem. So how about this guys. If you want a decent Sonic title, force SEGA into making good titles by not buying their crap. You know these Sonic games will suck, they have no reason to make a decent one until they find they find that they're not making any money off them. They will either then kill off the series, ending the pain every child from the 80's and 90's feel every time a new Sonic game is released, or they actually start investing money, time and effort into the games. It's the only way.]]> <![CDATA[Sonic Unleashed (Nintendo Wii, Playstation 2)]]>http://www.50hzgamer.co.uk/review/93/WII/soun/Sonic_Unleashed/Over-Reaction Command - I've previously talked about Sonic Unleashed and how much I hate this game. But what many of you may have either forgotten or maybe just didn't realise was that Sonic Unleashed was released across all major home console platforms on release in 2008. Since I need not point out the massive difference in hardware clout that the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 possess over the Nintendo Wii and the Playstation 2, these versions of the game were bound to be different. In-fact, they're so different that really, they're completely different titles sharing the same name and story. Unfortunately, whatever route you take with Sonic Unleashed, you end up with a crappy game which is neither a Sonic title nor a decent game by any stretch of the imagination. Let's take a look.

Sonic Unleashed starts out with a rather familiar series of story scenes taken from the more powerful versions of the game. This is a common occurrence, any story scene in the game is lifted from the Xbox 360 or Playstation 3 versions of the game, which can be a little jarring, but more about that a little later. Sonic is busy wrecking Dr.Eggman's space armada for no given reason other than implied wrong-doings by the good doctor. After a mildly entertaining 2 minutes of CGI, Sonic, now transformed into Super Sonic has Dr.Eggman cornered and trapped and instead of kicking his blubbery mass of a body into space at the first chance of submission, Sonic instead decides to hear out Dr.Eggman's pleas for forgiveness. This gives Eggman a perfect opportunity to spring his well laid trap, using Super Sonic as a catalyst to fire his evil, phallic orbital space laser into the Earth. By doing so, the Earth's crust is shattered into large chunks and the rupture awakens a sleeping evil beast that lives in the Earth's core. Fortunately, the beast; named "Dark Gaia" isn't powerful enough to sustain it's form and breaks apart. Not only this, but by using Sonic as a source of renewable energy it caused him to inexplicably turn into a Werewolf... Or as the game likes to call him; a Werehog. Eggman immediately flushes the now furry hedgehog into space and leaves him to die in the vacuum of black emptiness.

As you may have already guessed, that old chestnut of a story arc is recycled for the millionth time already; Dr.Eggman awakens ancient evil, ancient evil turns out to betray Dr.Eggman, Dr.Eggman doesn't ever get blamed for the mess he caused. Eggman is obviously out to use Dark Gaia to destroy the world so he can build Eggmanland upon it, despite the fact that over the course of all the game's he's seen trying to make his supposed mega city, he's constructed giant futuristic towers, massive bases and space armadas... Why exactly does the man need a giant city to call his own? I liked it when evil dudes with nonsensical evil motives just wanted to "conquer the world"... Anyway, when Sonic awakens, he finds that he landed on a little gerbil-like creature which he comes to name "Chip" for some reason. Chip has lost his memory after a reject from Sesame Street; Were-Sonic, landed on him. When daylight strikes Sonic he turns back into his hedgehog-self and he and Chip set off to restore the world's continents back to their original resting place and seal Dark Gaia back into the Earth's core. Along the way, Sonic meets several racial stereotypes presented in rather poor taste. Ultimately it turns out that Chip was some sort of guardian which got sealed away with Dark Gaia, so that if they were ever freed Chip would just re-seal them back. The game then ends with a giant stone golem fighting against Dark Gaia, Dark Gaia looses, Sonic loses the ability to turn into a Werehog and I slowly go mad as the game's credit song is so painful to sit through I nearly set myself on fire.

Once the game starts up proper, you're greeted to a bunch of tutorials which drag on forever and are unskippable. What makes these tutorials really bad is the fact that each part of the tutorial is broken up over several "courses". Simple things like "Press b Button to Jump" has it's own section, rather than joined onto another part which perhaps informs you about the homing jump attack. Or even if it was part of a course which told you about how to make variable jump heights, like tapping the jump button (which varies depending on what controller layout you use) will cause Sonic to do a slight hop, where as pressing and holding the jump button will make Sonic perform a large jump. These get rather irritating, mostly because Chip will appear on-screen, bringing the whole game to a standstill while he tells you obvious stuff which perhaps could have been better illustrated with on-screen prompts, but that would probably take effort to implement, so here's some monotonous text bubble to tell you instead. Each tutorial "section" is separated with a loading screen, complete with these "Mission Complete" messages and the acquisition of "Moon Medals" which we'll get onto a bit later. So prepare to look at the Loading screen and the "Mission Complete" screen an awful lot. I'm not joking, the tutorial section goes on for 6 minutes, six agonising minutes of hand-holding through a control scheme.

Finally, after boring you half to death, the game finally starts properly. You're Sonic in what we'll call "daytime stages", these are the parts of the game where you're playing as the hedgehog-version of Sonic through 3D and 2D segments of the game. These parts of the game are like other 3D Sonic games, there are a few alterations now. The homing jump is perhaps one of the largest changes that those familiar with 3D Sonic games will need to adjust to. SEGA started moving away from a 'free and wild' Homing Attack with this game and started implementing a "lock-on" homing attack, whereby you need to be facing an enemy to lock on, so even if the enemy is right next to you, you wont attack them unless you're looking directly at the enemy and there's a red target over them. Sonic has a persistent "Boost" mechanic now, which works very similarly to Sonic Rush's boost mechanic. As you collect rings and defeat enemies, your boost gauge increases in size, the gauge is split up into incremental segments which are used when you boost, rather than one single gauge which depletes as you boost as you hold down the boost button. what is perhaps most frustrating about the boost mechanic is now the game punishes you for using the boost while you have no energy in the bar. If you try to boost and have no complete gauge left to boost, Sonic trips up, killing whatever speed you had in the process. So even if you have most of a full bar in your boost gauge, you can't use it unless it's actually full. Well, how nice of you it was to omit that from your lengthy tutorial, game. New additions to a Sonic game includes the ability to strafe at speed to avoid obstacles when in a 3D perspective, a drift mechanic for getting around tight corners and the ability to pound the ground. Unlike the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 versions of the game, the Wii version of Sonic Unleashed doesn't have an upgrade mechanic implemented for Sonic, so what you start with is what you have for the rest of the game. Which is nice, but at the same time depressing since Sonic controls like a tank and nothing about the daytime stages feels polished or fun.

During many of these daytime stages, you'll have these intermittent "boss" battles where a giant robot will start chasing you. You must dodge the attacks using the strafe ability you have and when you're able to get behind the robot, boost into it. Do it enough times and it explodes. Of course, if you defeat the boss too early, you're left on passageways full of nothing until it ends. If you leave the robot and don't attack, you have a much more interesting, if not frustrating time with this semi-boss battle. This happens far too often and it's always the same boss. Some of these encounters are just down-right unfair as well, some of them take place on walls and if you get hit by the boss for whatever reason, you fall and you die. Not sure what the thinking behind these parts of the game are, really...

The main problem with the daytime stages is that they're so empty and void of any difficulty. You'll find yourself running through empty stretches of road with somewhat nice scenery, rings and speed boosters all over the place urging you to simply ignore the parts of the game where the level designers had to abandon due to time constraints as their deadline drawn near. I think you saw where I was going with this game already, this game doesn't look or feel finished in any way. It's so rough around the edges. I've played in-development, prototype video games before at the beta testing phases and how this game looks and feels is generally what I would expect. These daytime stages are short, not very entertaining and feel tacked on. Which is amazing, it blew my mind when I got about half way through the game and made that realisation. That a Sonic the Hedgehog game was more focused on something which was completely not Sonic the Hedgehog in any way. Instead the game is far more focused, far more insistent in pushing what should have never been included in a Sonic game, ever. I mean, even if you're like me and realise that Sonic the Hedgehog isn't all about speed and it needs to be offset by solid platforming, what I'll get around to explaining will sound bizarre to you. The "Night-time Stages".

Being so short (usually about 4 minutes in length), the daytime stages need to be "bulked up" a bit and by that I mean they need to be padded to hell. Not only are the stages so large that the designers didn't know what to do with them, but also you have a set number of missions you must complete before you can move on with the game. Since apparently the people behind this game thought that Sonic and the Secret Rings was onto something by forcing you to play asinine missions after you complete a stage. Missions like "Collect 100/200/300 Rings", "Defeat __ Enemies" or "Get to the goal in ___ seconds" are regular mission types. All are set to a timer and become increasingly infuriating as you progress through the game. You'll see why they went through all this trouble to make your blood boil once we start talking about those night-time stages.

But before we move onto that, let's explain how the "town hubs" work, these hubs are places where you go to progress the story. In the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 versions of the game, you roam around a fully rendered 3D environment asking towns folk stuff which is somewhat relevant to the plot in hopes that one of them will have the information you need so you can move on and continue your quest through the game's stages. In the Wii version, this has been boiled down to it's component parts with the hub being transformed into a menu system. A menu system which is extremely awkward to use. If you are using the control stick at all, it's damn near impossible. A quick tap on the stick is all you need to go to the next option, but more often than not, you'll see the selections go all crazy as the game doesn't accommodate for using the analogue sticks when using the hub. So you have to use the D-Pad, not a problem if you're playing on the Wii using the Wii Remote setup, but if you're on the Classic Controller or Gamecube Controller control schemes then good luck. These menus are like DVD menus, damn near impossible to get through. they circle around in one way, either "backwards" or "forwards" by pressing the left and right directions on the D-Pad. This may cause some completely understandable confusion for most people, as the layouts of these menus aren't uniform in a line or anything of the sort, instead they're laid out in non-linear formations, logically you would think that pressing "up" on an item which is underneath another item would take you to that upper item... It does not. It just moves onto the "next" item in the line, be that below or next to that current item. Did anyone playtest this at all? Well, silly question I suppose.

The point of these hubs is so that you can find information to move on, however other than a "New" icon which flashes over the top of places which have "New" content which you haven't seen before, there's no telling what's in each location other than the name of the place you're going to see a static screen of with people talking infront of it using speech bubbles. Some of these places you visit have no-one there, so even if they say "New" above it, they could be completely empty. Sometimes the game forces you to speak to everyone in the town just so you can trigger someone whom you've already spoken to, to say something different. There's no indication of what you're supposed to be looking for, you just blindly enter each area and hope that someone will talk to you and make the "Temple" for each continent appear. Hubs are different depending on if you're there at day or night, so not only do you have to go through this pain once... You go through it twice. Sometimes even multiple times over. You know you're going to the temple when you're given either a Sun or a Moon Tablet or Tablet Fragment. What gets me is that they try and bring in some level of interactivity when scrolling through the menus with the occasional "yes", "no" option. Usually this means "yes, give me the temple" or "no, I want to sit on these menus a little while longer". What's the point of all this? Just spoon feed me the story and get on with it. All these little pointless conversations with locals all speaking in round-abouts which is just dragging out the game's playtime artificially.

Once you get to the Shrine, it's basically pot luck which Sonic you play as. Sometimes it's Werehog Sonic, sometimes it's Hedgehog Sonic. Most the time it's Werehog Sonic... And there's perhaps good reason for that too. I'm not joking when I say Sonic controls like a tank, in the confined spaces of the temple's innards, Sonic can barely get around corners and his turning circle is enormous. It makes navigating these temples a real pain. Once inside the temple, you use the Moon or Sun Medals which you collect by completing stages in the games to unlock bonus stages and use Sun, Moon or Star tablets to unlock stages to advance your progress through the game. Each time you use a tablet, you go through the same animation over and over of Chip opening the door, going back to Sonic and they both watch the door slowly rise. Then you walk through, a new stage begins.

So, this is the part where I moan about the night-time stages. Now first thing's first; what the hell is this doing in a Sonic game? The Werehog, night-time segment of Sonic Unleashed is nothing but a cheap, poorly made Dynasty Warriors knock-off, no escaping that. These segments of the game just dominate the whole experience, by the end of the first Warehog stages, yes, stages, not a singular, you've already played three times as much playing as the Werehog than you have normal Sonic. And I think that sums up Sonic Unleashed. It's not a Sonic game with a tacked on fighting component, it's a fighting component with a tacked-on Sonic game. I mean, they even went so far as to distance any notion of "Sonic" from these segments that they removed the robots, changed how Sonic looks and even how Sonic controls. The only thing that is Sonic-like in the game are rings which you collect to restore health. If you removed the rings from the game, replaced them with, I don't know, gemstones and then shown the game in action to someone who's never played Sonic Unleashed, they'd never suspect it was a Sonic game. For their sanity's sake, I wouldn't tell them it was.

So what makes me hate these stages so much? Well, other than them being between 5 and 12 minutes in length, they are so tedious and I mean, really tedious and laborious. You swing away attacking enemies but it does barely any damage. Navigating the stages in the game are awful, you are often moving along abstract "ledges" in the game which make no sense, occasionally dodging enemies in the process. The progression in the game is short-bursts of platforming, short-bursts of fighting. In the fighting segments, you're often bottled inside an area and forced to fight a certain number of enemies. You'll know when enemies are around as a upbeat jazz tune will start to kick up. The same song. Every. Single. Time. To say it gets old is an understatement. The game has individual tracks for each continent the stages take place on as well as music for daytime and night-time stages, yet this damn jazz track is what you'll hear through most of the night-time stages. This is occasionally interrupted by a more ominous soundtrack when larger enemies appear. When you defeat enemies, you get Gaia Points, which are used to progress the abilities which you have access to. There's an arbitrary number of points required to get a new ability and doesn't work like the Xbox 360 or Playstation 3 versions of the game where you pick and chose where you want the points to go, although this is frankly an improvement since the game holds your hands in level progression rather than letting you put all your points into the wrong statistic and end up shooting yourself in the foot as a result because the designers intended you to have such-and-such statistics by this point in the game and gave no hints or clues as you were supposed to level up as they intended. So, kudos for them inadvertently fixing that problem.

Of course, as you may have guessed, the levelling mechanic in the game is made by nerfing your character from the get-go. Abilities you should have from the start of the game are earned over time. The only legitimate thing you get out of levelling up which makes sense is the fact you can get additional health out of the system. None of the new abilities fix the controls in the game, however, so don't get your hopes up in that regard. Basically, when you're platforming you'll be using your stretchy arms to grab onto stuff, be that a pole which you climb up, ledges which you either stand on and sidle across or hang from and move across and picking up the occasional box to put on a switch. That's outside the fighting and aimlessly wandering about you'll be doing waiting for the next platforming or fighting portion of the game, praying that the next corner will be the exit of the stage. How they drag these out through an average of 8 minutes of gameplay is beyond me. It's so boring, I didn't even sign up for this gameplay. I came expecting a Sonic game, it says there right on the box "Sonic Unleashed", was it unreasonable to suggest that by looking at the title that I would be playing a Sonic game? Okay, sure I knew there was a fighting element to the game, but I wouldn't have been so upset about it (though I would have been enraged if they included it at all, let's get that straight) if it was a Sonic game with some little extra bits where you're a Warehog and these segments were well-balanced, fun and didn't make it so that the shortest of these stages were at least twice as long as the daytime, hedgehog stages of that continent. It's ridiculous. Awful. Yes, that's the word I'm looking for; awful.

The only thing which really saves this game is it's visual design. For a Wii game, it looks damn well impressive, as does the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 versions of the game. I know I keep banging on about how pretty SEGA games are, but it's true. They may be a steaming pile to play, but if visually they're golden. So pretty to look at, so detailed. If they had spent half as much time trying to get the gameplay down right, perhaps spending more time in the placement of enemies or truncating stages so they were more concentrated on action rather than just artificially extending the length of the courses by having long passageways of nothingness then this game may have came out alright. But instead, we just have a very pretty game with very little meat on the bones. Of course the game makes no attempt to hide that it takes event scenes from the more powerful consoles' versions of the game, despite the fact that the scene shown in event scenes and the scene you actually pick up in are totally different from one-another. The game also skips out on what would be boss-fights in the other versions, but instead shows the build-up to the boss and the scene immediately after the boss with no intermediary scene to help cohesion between the two scenes. Nope; just "Here you are!". So that's something bad to say about the visuals for once. Oh and the endless text boxes in the hub world... Couldn't they have done something to brighten that up? Perhaps not having a novel's worth of text to read on each talking scene? Or I don't know, how about some light animation in the backgrounds to keep people amused.

The game's soundtrack is pretty bad, I'll be honest. Again, this is probably down to personal taste and yes, there are a few very well done tracks in the game which I like but for the most part the audio seems to be very bland, very dry, especially the night-time stages which are a lot more sedate than their daytime counterparts. What really grinds on you is the game's orchestral score. Obviously a response to Nintendo's massively popular Super Mario Galaxy, which launched the year before, Mario Galaxy had an amazing orchestral score through-out the game... Sonic Unleashed does not have that same calibre. Voice acting is once again abysmal, the voice cast phone in their performances and a lot of the throw-away characters give such uninspired performances that their minute appearances in the game are agonising to sit through. Not quite sure where it all went wrong for Sonic game soundtracks, we've come a long way since the catchy, melody driven soundtracks of the Megadrive era.

In the end, Sonic Unleashed is damn near unplayable. It has awful controls, isn't really a Sonic game and will bore you half to death. What more is there to say? If you want a poorly made brawler game with all the character and charisma of a newly baked clay brick then by all means, indulge yourself on this game. From start to finish, it's a poorly made, hastily "finished" game which needed far more time to get right than SEGA would have ever allowed. Seems that SEGA did learn a lesson about multi-platform releases on the Wii, though... That lesson being "don't do it". It's an incomplete mess of a game which was throw together as soon as they had something that resembled "playable". Avoid it at all costs. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go bash by head against a wall until I forget about this game, it's not the first time I've done this... I think.]]> <![CDATA[F-Zero GX (Nintendo Gamecube)]]>http://www.50hzgamer.co.uk/review/92/OTHER/fzgx/F-Zero_GX/Retro Recall - In a recent review of Sonic Riders, I -- more than once -- compared the game to another futuristic racing title, funnily enough, developed by the same company (although, not the same development team), that game was, of course; F-Zero GX. The game is twinned with it's arcade version of the game; F-Zero AX (The "G" in "GX" refers to "Gamecube", where as the "A" in "AX" refers to "Arcade", see what they did there?) The two games can share save data between the two versions and are nearly identical in terms of content. The arcade version has a bunch of frilly extras like giving out cardboard, physical "licenses" which track player progression, however that actually works is beyond me.

F-Zero GX has a story quite reminiscent of old-school comic books and, frankly, it works quite well. F-Zero is a world where spandex-wearing, super-hover-car racing pilots solve all the world's problems by racing, rather than fighting it out or doing strange bat-dances. The primary antagonist of this world is a one "Black Shadow", who wears a full-body black latex suit and prances around all the time. Black Shadow has two primary skills, the first being the ability to screw up just about everything he tries and the other being the most least-threatening villain possible. The very first scenes in the game show Black Shadow spiralling out of control and being taunted by a strange, vastly superior villain. Doesn't quite inspire dread towards this character. The next scene we see him prancing around on some TV sets which random passers by gawk at, almost like he's in some sort of surreal music video. Even more interesting is that Captain Falcon, the game's main protagonist, does some virtual reality training, only to find that Black Shadow's mug is still on the TV, claiming that he'll "win the grand prix". Well, nice to see he has his priorities right.

Alright, so the whole story is this; the menacing villain at the start of the game, the one which bullied Black Shadow is actually called Deathborn, the winner of the "Underworld Grand Prix" which we neither see nor learn anything about other than Deathborn is the winner of it. For reasons not quite made clear, Deathborn has enlisted the help of Black Shadow to win the normal world's Grand Prix... So he can take over the world or something. It's not quite explained why Deathborn can't just... You know, race in the normal Grand Prix, since he's shown himself to be better than Black Shadow and it's not a matter of "well, perhaps he's an outlaw" because Black Shadow is still able to race, despite being publicly named as the man responsible for a whole building exploding in the Lightning district, seen dancing and prancing around burning debris of said building. Well, anyway, as expected, Black Shadow loses, gets vaporised (or something to that effect) by a rather annoyed Deathborn, who then challenges Captain Falcon, the winner of the Grand Prix to a race in the "Underworld", which Falcon easily travels to... So why couldn't Deathborn race in the normal Grand Prix again? Deathborn loses, falls into a lava pit and explodes, Falcon claims the super-belt which was formed of the Underworld Grand Pix belt and the Normal Grand Prix belt. Only to find out that this belt actually contains the spirits of the "Creators", a bunch of strange floating orbs who apparently "created the whole world", they want to suck out Falcon's soul and use it to create another Deathborn for reasons completely beyond comprehension, maybe they were bored. Anyway, Falcon then races against the spirits, wins, is returned to his world, he takes off his helmet, walks out of a door and then the end credits roll... That's it. There's no real conclusion to the story at all. Not even showing what became of the Creators.

So, okay. The story isn't fantastic at all. In-fact, Sonic Rider's story seems more likeable and makes more sense in comparison but it has it's charms. If you think of the story as what it really is; a vehicle to progress a mission-driven story mode which comprises of unusual racing scenarios, it works quite well. But take it as a meaningful, well-thought story which drives an overall narrative and frankly, it's like watching the Teletubbies. I mean, at one point, Black Shadow captures Captain Falcon, makes an evil doppelgänger of him called Blood Falcon, attaches a bomb to Falcon's racer and tries to blow him up. The next scene and Black Shadow is rather surprised when Captain Falcon appears on the starting grid. Even though his very distinguished racer; the Blue Falcon is already on the grid right next to his. Now, I don't know about you, but rather than being calm, collected and settling this minor incident of attempted-murder by racing to see who was the best, I would climb Black Shadow's vehicle and beat him within an inch of his life, tie him to the back of my futuristic space racer and drag him along the track. But then the game may not get a PEGI 3+ rating.

The game's story mode itself is comprised of little missions which are separate from the game's main feature; the normal Grand Prix mode. The story mode comes in three different difficulty settings; Normal, Hard or Very Hard. Which sounds fair enough until you realise that the game is sadistic and it's "Normal" mode is actually "Extremely Difficult" mode. As an angry internet opinion box, because the internet definitely needs more opinion, I find myself shouting at the TV sometimes and I usually see this as a measure of what is a bad game. As if I resort to hurling abuse at my poor TV screen, then something's gone wrong with the game. Sadly, Story Mode in F-Zero GX is a very, very bad design choice from start to finish. My main complaint with the story mode is that the computer controlled AI opponents out right cheat. In the second mission, you're racing off against long-standing Falcon rival; Samurai Goroh as you race along a canyon path as boulders tumble down onto the track. You can boost all you like on this course, it will do you no good, your opponent has unlimited energy in which it can boost. Even if he hits boulders which would most likely take a good quarter of your energy bar from you, he is still able to boost ahead of you at any given time. After trying to win in a fair race and realising this was impossible, you have to figure out, on your own, that you have to destroy Samurai Goroh's vehicle and then finish the race or just have supreme luck. I don't know about you, but if there's one thing I hate about video games is when the CPU has to resort to cheating in order to feign difficulty. It's not cool.

Another thing which is deplorable about the story mode is that just completing a story mode mission isn't enough to see you through to the next part of the story. Instead, you unlock the ability to purchase story segments from the in-game store using in-game tickets which you gain from completing story missions and races. Of course, the story mode doesn't give you enough tickets from completing one mission to instantly go buy the next, so you must engage in races in the Grand Prix mode to acquire enough tickets. I'm not sure why they bothered to do this, perhaps in an attempt to make you complete races to ensure you have enough experience and skill to progress in the story or if they just didn't want people to realise the game's story mode is about 40 minutes in length... But, again, this isn't the game's primary mode, it's merely an extra side-feature to the game's Grand Prix mode. And now we've gotten our little rant about the story mode out of the way, let's move onto the more interesting parts of the game, the Grand Prix mode.

Out of the box, you'll have access to 3 difficulty settings, 3 cups each with 5 courses making a grand total of 15 playable courses, each one is lovingly crafted and each are incredibly varied. If you're good enough, you can unlock an extra difficulty level which borders on satanic on the evil-o-metre and 2 extra cups, one of which you'll probably never unlock unless you devote years of your life to the game which will bring the final course total to 25 courses. Sadly, I'm not in that tiny percentile which was able to unlock the "AX Cup", which is unlocked by beating the "Master" difficulty, a difficulty level so harsh it makes the story mode look like it was teasing you. Much like many other racing games, you start out in a grid, usually at the back but it all depends where you finished in the last race. The further up the rankings in the last race means you start further down the grid at the start of the next. Controls are pretty standard, A to accelerate, B to break. As you start off, you perform a single lap around the track and race normally, this is usually your time to butt-heads with other racers, pressing the Z-Button on the controller performs a spinning attack which can hit multiple enemies but is incredibly weak. A far better means of attacking an enemy is to press the X-Button and either left or right on the control stick to side-swipe another racer, dealing greater damage. This is helpful to either off-course or make an enemy take additional damage by hitting walls or other racers. Every 5 racers you rid yourself of gets you an extra life. Beware though, if you deplete your energy bar to zero, your racer will blow up. Your energy bar will deplete if you hit walls, boost or get hit by enemies or objects on the track.

After the first lap, you're given a "boost power" which as the name implies, allows you to boost. Just how much speed and how many times you can boost is determined by the racer you select. These are graded from D to A on Boost, Grip and Body. Boost determines how good your boost is in both how far a single boost will take you. Grip indicates how easy the craft is to handle and Body is how much punishment the craft can take or how much damage is taken from hitting other crafts or walls. Most of the crafts you unlock during the game are pretty well balanced, some seriously are not, but these are generally special machines you unlock. You can also make your own craft out of parts you buy from the in-game store with tokens. Balance goes out of the window once you start making a custom craft and build up substantial amounts of tokens, though it will take dedicated play to get the best parts, as most have to be unlocked either by completing story missions on hard mode or very hard mode, things which are like ripping nails out of your fingertips in terms of pain. You also have the customary "Air Break" mechanic, which is mandated by law in all futuristic racing video games. The Air Break is a kind-of-sort-of drifting control scheme, only you have more precise control over your turning. It's best to get this mastered before all else as it will make turning while boosting a hell-of-a-lot easier.

Courses themselves are characters all on their own in this game, you have a few different types as declared by what city or region it's located in. Mute City for instance is a futuristic metropolis area, Lightning is an industrial area, which so happens to be very stormy all the time and Green Plant which is a suburban area covered in trees and shrubbery with a race course or two within. They're, for the most part, extremely fun to play and their design, with many twists and turns not just horizontally but vertically. You'll find yourself in giant loops, corkscrews and some courses even double-back on itself upside down. At at speed when boosting and hitting on-course boost-pads it's an absolutely amazing experience. My favourite course of the game; Green Plant: Mobius Ring has a strange gut-tangling, almost euphoric pay-off when you speed through the corkscrew and see the blue sky and the green undergrowth twirl around you. The game's unrelenting speed also makes for an enthralling time, something which not a lot of games can really pull off, but F-Zero GX seems to pull it off effortlessly. Mix this with the dangerous tension that if you take too much damage or fall off the course that you'll have to start again, and you have a very limited number of lives. It all adds up to a fantastic and frantic game.

Of course, some stages aren't so fun. There are the stages that you will hate either because they're so confusing, such as any stage which has pipes, either ones where you're inside or you're on-top of, keeping track of your orientation while in the tubes can be pretty difficult, especially at speed and learning where all the boost pads are is a challenge, but quite a rewarding one. Sadly, as you get into the later difficulties in the game, the fun starts to diminish as the game becomes more a memory game, remembering where all the speed boosters are, which line to take to hit corners properly, which is odd for me to say that in a racing title, but F-Zero GX seems to chaotic, unstructured during the Novice and Standard difficulties that you can play how you like and still power into the lead. The game is understandably very arcade-y in that anyone can pick it up and play on the easy to medium difficulties, but as you progress into the harder modes, you start to see a more "hardcore" racing game emerge. And it's this balance which is most deserving of praise. The whole package is just amazing.

In terms of visuals, the game is just amazing looking. For a game from 2003, the game is utterly jaw-dropping. The detail on the tracks, the scenery and the speed of the game all add together and give just a wonderful looking game. Everything about it just looks great, the only real down-side I can think about with this game is the pre-rendered story mode scenes, in which there seems to be little direction and the scenes often just fade-out too quickly. Everything else just seems right, after all it has to look fantastic to pull in gamers at the arcades, so it's got to be bright, vibrant and visually distinct appearance. F-Zero GX is all of those things. It looks fantastic. One thing I can say that was perhaps a step too far in the game's visual appearance is that when you win a race, you're subjected to a TV interview, in which you ask a question like "What does it feel like to win?" or "Can I get an autograph?" Most of these are tedious and I struggle to work out why they're there, exactly, since they don't build characters or add to the story in anyway, they're just bland, generic responses. Some of these are hilarious, Deathborn is particularly amazing, go look up those interviews on YouTube or something, it's a good laugh.

Audibly, the game is equally amazing. Each track share's it's city/theme's music score but they are wonderful tracks. There's a lot of cheesy tunes as well, like the character theme songs or the music that's sometimes played in the story scenes that you only hear parts of, usually involving the parts where they talk about characters or just keep repeating "F-Zero" in some way. One stylistic choice which I still can't quite wrap my head around, but is so awesome and unique that it just blends in so well is the announcer voice, which sounds like a southern-American accent. It's not quite the voice I would have thought to have announce a game about futuristic hover-car-racing, but looking back at the Nintendo 64's F-Zero X title, where you had this very gruff and cliché sci-fi announcer, I think F-Zero GX made a pretty bold decision and it paid off. The voice acting in the game is awful, just terrible, but the whole thing's so cheesy that it just works. Characters over-act, lines are delivered poorly, but the whole story and characters come across that way anyway, so nothing is lost there.

Overall, F-Zero GX is an utterly amazing game that completely came out of no-where. This was SEGA and Nintendo working together, just a few years after the demise of the SEGA Dreamcast and a game produced before the SEGA-Sammy takeover in 2004. It's sad to think that if such a game were to be made today, that SEGA wouldn't have the ability to create such a masterpiece title such as this. Perhaps it's why there hasn't been a console F-Zero in nearly 8 years (there have been Gameboy Advance instalments to the series, though). Perhaps it's time for a new F-Zero either on the up-coming Nintendo home console or on the Nintendo 3DS, because we're long over-due and I think everyone who's played this game wants to see where F-Zero goes past this game. Somehow I think it's only downhill from this point, but what do I know? I want to be proven wrong, I really do. If you have a Wii, try and pick up this game, it's fairly cheap and a must-have for anyone who likes arcade racers or futuristic space racers, a game of high priority for everyone else. I promise you wont be disappointed.]]> <![CDATA[Sonic Riders: Zero Gravity (Nintendo Wii)]]>http://www.50hzgamer.co.uk/review/91/WII/srzg/Sonic_Riders:_Zero_Gravity/Over-Reaction Command - Let's be honest in saying that Sonic Riders wasn't exactly the epitome of hoverboard, futuristic racing simulation... If you want to even go so far as to call it "futuristic", let alone any other part of that description. It was a game with broken controls, an awful plot which seemed to drag it's heels and a difficulty curve which resembled a straight line from "rage-inducing" to "this is just damn well near impossible" in about 2 races. It didn't help that the controls in the game were never fully explained, nothing about the title seemed polished or even finished and that the only real thing going for the title was course design, but even then the awful controls in the game just kept getting in the way of all the fun. So when I heard that they were releasing a sequel to Sonic Riders, I dug my head deep into the palm of my hands and hoped that it was all a bad dream.

It wasn't. Sonic Riders: Zero Gravity was soon released for the Nintendo Wii and Playstation 2, this review covers the Nintendo Wii version of the game, so I'm not entirely sure how the Playstation 2 version fares in relation, but whatever. In a break from tradition, I'm going to not start this review by explaining the story of the game, as right off the bat this game started to infuriate me. When you load up the game for the first time, the game asks you to select a file which you want to use to save your game data, pretty standard, right? Well, I just blindly hit "A" on the Wii remote and it asked me to input a name. Now, naturally, you'd think that you would use the on-screen keyboard by pointing at the screen like many other Wii titles, correct? Wrong. I pointed at the screen, nothing. So I realised I had to use the D-Pad, which in-itself doesn't inspire confidence about the quality of the game. But then I noticed something funny, pressing down on the D-Pad made the cursor move left... Pressing left made the cursor move up... It then dawned on me that what the game was actually doing, was interpreting the controls as if I was holding the Wii Remote sideways. What the hell, there was no notice, no on-screen hint or even a little icon indicating that I should hold the damn Wii remote sideways. Well, that's a lie, actually. Since it does tell you that you should hold the Wii Remote sideways... After you've progressed past the name input screen. Did anyone playtest this game? First thing on my damn feedback sheet would be "Doesn't tell player how to hold Wii Remote." I mean, it's not game-breaking, but there's a reason why Nintendo's first-party titles inform you how to hold the damn Wii Remote when the game starts up, because from the Wii Menu, you're holding the Wii Remote like you would a TV remote as you had to point at the screen, not holding it sideways. So that put me in a bad mood, great start.

Sonic Riders: Zero Gravity starts out with Sonic, Tails and Knuckles all cruising along in their futuristic hover car in a futuristic transparent full-pipe, probably listening to futuristic indie music while thinking how futuristically pretentious this whole situation is. Tails is talking about a strange meteorite which fell in a CGI clip just before this CGI clip, in which a meteorite entered the Earth... Wait, is it Earth? Well, the Planet's atmosphere, this meteorite turned out to be a strange bracelet-like object which upon tapping the foot of a strange, futuristic robot, caused all other robots to go completely mad. Back to the cutscene I was mentioning before and the said robots are now attacking Sonic and co, trying to take the bracelet off him. Upon losing the robots in the futuristic hover car elevator, which didn't work as these robots were intelligent enough to assume that eventually the doors of the elevator would open again somewhere down the pipe and they can fly. Things get a little ugly as Tails tries to run over the robots to no avail and they eventually cause the car to tip over, the trio thoughtfully take their futuristic hover boards out of the car before the vehicle explodes, though. You know, priorities and all that. Unfortunately, a design fault of the futuristic transparent tube road-system is quickly highlighted in this action as it appears that if your futuristic hover car breaks down in the transparent futuristic pipe-shaped highway, you're basically screwed, as there's no where to run out of the way of speeding futuristic hover cars and you're elevated several hundred feet off the ground. Sonic discovers this the hard way by plummeting while Tails and Knuckles, either of which could actually make an effort to save Sonic at this point in time, helplessly watch.

Luckily for Sonic it turns out that the bracelet-like meteorite controls gravity and this somehow saves him from splattering over the futuristic pavement below. Are we all now aware how much Sonic is in the future yet? Trying to ditch the pursuing robots, Sonic dips into a futuristic dome-shaped botanical garden to lose the robots. They do, for a whole cutscene in which Amy, the bane of all modern Sonic games turns up with another gravity-defying bracelet. And while we're introducing characters, the Babylon Rouges, returning characters from the previous game, also turn up and, as you may have guessed, are after the gravity bracelets. As it turns out, the company who made the robots which are now rampaging; MeteorTech, is run by none-other than Dr.Eggman. Now, how exactly Dr.Eggman was able to build a massive tower in the middle of a futuristic city, head up a corporation and be able to mass produce dangerous robots at will is beyond me. At this point he should be locked up, although I'm starting to get the feeling that corruption runs deep through whereever Sonic is supposed to reside in this game. Perhaps I'm looking too deeply into a game about giant talking animals riding hoverboards... Anyway, Jet -- Leader of the Babylon Rouges and that Boomerang bird in Angry Birds -- still has this unusual grudge against Sonic and always claims to be the "fastest creature on the planet", which if you take it as a sexual innuendo can result in hilarious scenes in which Sonic tells Jet that "Girls don't like men who rush them".

Either way, the whole plot gets rather stupid at this point. Basically, the whole story is based around the Babylonians (remember, first game? No?) being aliens, these gravity bracelets are actually parts of the engine that powered the Babylon Gardens, which is actually a space ship that when its engines went critical, they had to eject the engine and hope that once the engine had cooled down, the parts would re-enter orbit so they could reconstruct the engine and continue exploring the cosmos. Sadly, the engine didn't just "cool" down and if at any point the parts of the engine were put back into the ship, it would cause a huge black hole. Since the characters in the game prevented Dr. Eggman from doing anything evil before the final boss, the story randomly throws a robot into the mix, who steals the engine parts, takes them to the ship and thus, causes a singularity which starts eating everything around it in a very expensive looking CGI scene. Ultimately, the robot who had somehow integrated itself with the ship's engine and grown exponentially in size for completely unexplained reasons in the space of a minute and a half, is taken down and the black hole just sort of stops. The game then ends with Dr.Eggman tried, convicted and executed for the crimes he's committed. The end. Well, no, actually, of course not. Instead, Sonic and Jet have a race inside the damn futuristic car-pipes and the credits roll, but not before Tails explains away all the plot holes in the story by answering the question of "who wrote the program which made the robot gather the engine part and take it back to the ship, put it in the engine and cause a black hole? Also, how come it was compatible with a robot from a completely different civilisation?" with "I don't know." Well, great. Good job we got that plot smoothed out, 'cause remember kids; there's no such things as plot holes if you make it seem like they're part of the story. It's like Independence Day all over again when they put the virus into the alien computer...

Controls. Now, there's some good news here... But why would you want to hear that first? The default control scheme the game lumps you with is absolutely horrendous, mostly because for some unfathomable reason, someone, somewhere decided that a racing game about dudes on hover boards should have a control scheme as if you were driving car. Yes, the game employs the use of motion controls while the Wii Remote is held sideways and you tilt the remote like you would a turn a steering wheel. There's something completely disjointed about the way the motion controls work. I mean, they work, you can play the game with the controls as they are... But perhaps not for very long. It took me until the second stage in the game to give up and see what other control schemes were on offer. Like in Sonic Riders, you start off the race by running up to the start line to get a good speed boost out the gate. Unfortunately, with the motion controls being so loose when tilting the Wii Remote nearly 180 degrees in order to walk backwards, as demonstrated by Sonic and the Secret Rings not too long ago, this can be a bit tricky to get a hang of. Another control scheme, which involves holding the Wii Remote like a remote and pointing at the screen was so damn unplayable that I managed to perfectly execute two dozen doughnuts without so much as actually doing anything. The game seems to just have a mind of it's own in this mode, that or the remote is possessed by a demon in this configuration and I need to exorcise it at the earliest possible convenience.

Of course, much like most SEGA games on the Wii, Sonic Riders: Zero Gravity includes a handy Gamecube Controller mode which works a treat. Once the motion controls are removed from the situation, the game becomes immeasurably better. Although one wonders why exactly there's no "Wii and Nunchuck" option within the game. Surely if there's already a control scheme which utilises a control stick, the Nunchuck would be a viable option for a control scheme. Especially since there's 4 buttons available within easy reach on the remote and nunchuck (A, B, C, Z) and the Gamecube control scheme only uses 4 buttons... No, instead they'd rather implement a control scheme which doesn't work at all. How kind. But to be fair, Sonic Riders: Zero Gravity is a game far improved over it's predecessor... Well, in some ways. Things they fixed included the stiff controls... Well, I think they have. I hardly ever bumped into a wall this game, which really can't be said about Sonic Riders in any way.

Changes come pretty quickly to the game, for starters there's less of a reliance on the Air Gauge... Mostly because there isn't one in the game. Instead you have a "GP" gauge, what GP stands for is vague, I take it that it's "gravity points", but who knows? Who cares? Gone along with the Air Gauge is the ability to boost freely and attack other players freely. A mechanic which was mostly broken in Sonic Riders, not that Zero Gravity is free of broken, cheap mechanics. Gone also is the game's "rubber-banding", where if you got too far into the lead, a rival will, in most cases, catch up to you somehow. Instead there's a much higher focus on item pick ups and rings, the latter are used to power up your "gear" (which has thankfully lost the "extreme" from the front of it since the last game) on-the-fly. Sonic Riders also did this in the form of "levels", whereby you would attack other players harder and dash for longer. But, it seems that the upgrade mechanic in the game wasn't thought-through properly, because in order for the upgrade mechanic to work, they needed to nerf your character's initial starting speed and abilities. What makes the upgrade mechanic really annoying is the fact that you need to micromanage the upgrades yourself. When you collect an arbitrary numbers of rings the game will prompt you to upgrade... But often you'll miss it as your attention is at the centre of the screen, not the top-left hand side where the prompt is. An audio cue informing you that there are upgrades available would have been a nice, but perhaps an even nicer mechanic would have been, much like the level system in Sonic Riders, for the game to just automatically upgrade your gear when you get the allotted rings. Basically, what happens is this; you collect the rings, forget to upgrade and then someone comes along behind you, attacks you, makes you loose all your rings and the upgrade option along with it. Annoying.

Thing that really gets me about the upgrade mechanic is the lack of abilities when you start out. In Sonic Riders, your "type" of character, a choice between "Speed", "Power" and "Fly" all had individual gimmicks which they could interact with. For instance, the Speed type could use Rails, Power could smash through weak walls and punch objects out of the way and Fly could use in-air shortcuts. And while this is still true in Sonic Riders: Zero Gravity, unfortunately, you need to level up twice in order to use said gimmicks. But, of course, these rules only apply to player characters. The AI is already fully powered when they start out, meaning that it's more a race to collect as many rings as possible rather than race for 1st place, as no matter how much skill you have, it's hard to beat AI which can use cheap, type-only shortcuts and have a speed advantage from the out-set, although I do think the AI is limited in speed for the first lap, usually by then you do have the "speed up" upgrade. But either way, trying to jump onto rails on the first lap and failing was extremely frustrating, especially since, once again, you're never told about these specific upgrades by the game's pathetic tutorial mode which is extremely poorly written.

Boosting may be gone in the game, as is the ability to air-break to turn sharp corners. Instead, these two traits were mixed into one with the use of the "Gravity Drift" a mechanic which enables the player to slow down and turn sharp corners with a boost out the other end. Whether you actually get anything out of the speed boost at the other end is questionable, since while the game world seems to slow down for you... The race carries on as normal for everyone else. Which makes sense, right? I mean, it's control over gravity, not time. The Gravity Drift is an interesting mechanic to say the least, it can sometimes be very awkward to use and if you come into contact with certain walls you can be kicked out of the Gravity Drift move and stuck momentum-less against a wall, most likely knocking you down several places as a result. Other times it can do crazy stuff like throw you through floors and walls. More interestingly and explained extremely poorly in the game's tutorial is the fact that you can use the Gravity Drift move to ride on vertical walls. When you jump from a trick, press the Gravity Drift button and aim towards a vertical wall which you can ride on and you'll go zipping along. The "boost" mechanic in the game does have some incarnation of itself much like the air-break does, the easily abusable "Meteor Dive" which throws stage objects into the air, which contact with, rather than slowing you down as you may expect, actually helps you gain speed. Of course, once you start hitting these objects and getting a significant speed boost out the other end, the AI starts to struggle. Just hitting three objects per Meteor Dive is enough to get a sizeable lead against the AI and once you realise this... The game's difficulty basically flatlines.

But let's talk difficulty. The game isn't very difficult at all. Where as Sonic Riders was a extremely infuriating game which was a mix between down-right tedious and honestly difficult, Sonic Riders Zero Gravity actually ends up being only mildly annoying in difficulty. In Sonic Riders, it would take a lot of painful practice and trial-and-error to get enough skill down to clear a segment in the story mode. In Sonic Riders Zero Gravity, the most tries I had to complete any given mission was 5 attempts. Two of those were restarts instigated by myself because I got off to bad starts or got stuck on a wall. This lack of difficulty highlights a real problem with the game, the two story modes; Hero and Babylon are about 1.5 hours a piece, meaning that your average completion time on a first-run will be about 3 hours. That's catastrophically short. I can see why Sonic Riders had such a steep difficulty curve, to hide the short story mode. 3 hours isn't the extent of the game, however. After you complete a level in the story mode, missions are given for you to complete from the story level-select screen. These missions are generally one of two things, collect a certain number of rings/perform certain number of tricks or complete a race in less than some given time. Grinding through these challenges will unlock you a special gear. And, of course, there's the multiplayer aspect of the game, which may have been a good idea if there was at least some sort of online multiplayer... Alas, there is not. And good luck trying to convince friends to play this game with you over, say, F-Zero GX?

There's also a "Survival Mode" which is basically a 1 to 4 player racing death match... With a crazy football-like game thrown in for no good reason. Did I say "crazy"? I meant "damn near impossible to play". You kick around a bomb or something which explodes after a given time, you must Gravity Drift near the ball and try and use the "boost" out the other side of the drift to guide the ball into numbered rings, doing so nets you points equal to the number shown on the ring. A simple concept undermined completely by a control scheme which doesn't easily allow you to turn around and a "shooting" mechanic which means that you can "steal" the possession of the ball when mid-air, sometimes from strange distances... While sometimes you can't interact with the ball when you're right on-top of it. Also doesn't help that the AI in this game will completely run rings around you. Survival Mode isn't really worth your time, so you're basically left down to the story and the missions to keep you occupied when playing alone and the split-screen multiplayer to make up the rest. You could replay the game half to death and buy some more gears from an in-game shop with the rings you collect during the game, but when the game's already so easy, why do you need the ultimate gears?

Visually, Sonic Riders: Zero Gravity is rather impressive looking... But there are a few problems. The team behind the visual effects were obviously very proud with their rain and water effects... So proud, they act like a kid who's found the preset render tools in Photoshop and have gone to town trying to throw as many as possible into an scene. Some stages are so busy that it's hard to clearly see what's going on. Other than this, everything's quite visually clear in most cases... Not quite as colourful as the original Sonic Riders, it seems like a lot more stages are darkened or just don't use as many vibrant colours as the original. Story scene choreography has been improved immensely, it's still rather hammy and doesn't look in any way natural, but it's very cartoon-like and fluid. Perhaps one of the big problems with the visuals is the lack of clarity in which you can make out some of the hexagon-shaped path markers which tells you which types of characters should take which path, it's not very clear at all, but once you learn the colour-coding, you're pretty much good to go. I should also mention that, unlike Sonic Riders, there's no clash of artistic styles as Sonic Riders seemed to suffer, everything's all CGI-like now and more relatable to the in-game visuals.

Audio is a tricky subject. I'll get it out the way that the voice acting and scripting are pretty bad in the game. Most story scenes are filled with pointless dialogue which serves to meet no end other than to seemingly annoy everyone watching. Music in the game can be pretty catchy, but it's rather odd to explain what's going on... See, when you go into the Gravity Drift or Meteor Dive, the music changes and you have an exciting "pinch" as you exit, releasing an up-beat part of the song in doing so. The problem is, is that eventually, you'll end up hearing that same part of the song, over and over and it gets just a little bit boring. Where as if music was left to run it's natural course and just, say, turn down the volume as you drift, then it perhaps would have been better. Not that the music in the game is much to speak of... It's mostly loops of vaguely techno-sounding music. Without the pinches the whole soundtrack might come off pretty boring... So it's kind of a loose-loose situation, really. It's either boring for just being bland or it's boring for hearing the same segment over and over, although more exciting. There are some exceptions, the music for "Security Corridor", one of the last stages in the game, is amazing. Why the rest of the soundtrack wasn't this awesome is beyond me.

Overall, Sonic Riders: Zero Gravity is a much improved, better-playing racing game over Sonic Riders... However it's still lacking in polish and execution. The single player is criminally short and the difficulty is pretty much non-existent. It's mediocre at best, and it's a shame, because at points in the game I really enjoyed playing it. Ignoring the mind-boggling "Survival Mode" and overlooking some dodgy AI and glitches, the game isn't so bad. But the core mechanics are betrayed by awful, but optional motion controls and an upgrade system which makes you buy into what should be default character stats. Sadly, this is as far as I go into the Sonic Riders series. There is another game in the Sonic Riders lineage; Sonic Free Riders, sadly the game is for Kinect, the Xbox 360 attachment which has a grand total of 0 compelling titles and a price tag of £99 to £130, so good luck convincing me to buy one just to rip apart a Sonic game. I have my limits, people. Go look up someone else's review of the game, it'll be overly negative anyway, so just inject some bland, unimaginative sarcasm into their words and you can pretend like I wrote it.]]>