Yuletide game review grabbag

Shopping for presents? There's a lot of great second-hand and discount XBox 360 games out there, including ones I've played over the last year or so and have sort of meant to review on this blog but never got around to doing, so here they are. Pictures provided by the cast of Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3, or as I still maintain it should be known as, Dune 2 2 2 3.

Blood Bowl: Playing Cyanide's Blood Bowl is the most fun I've ever had with such a hideously badly made game. It's ugly, the interface is clunky, there are bugs galore and the overall quality is just appalling. While PC users got the "Legendary Edition" featuring all the teams from LRB5 except Chaos Dwarves (?!!), XBox players have to make do with only eight teams, but can download Dark Elves for Microsoft points. The AI, of course, is mind-bogglingly stupid, and you can't compensate for that by playing online as apparently that just doesn't work.

Even though the game is basically rubbish, and in places insultingly badly made, it's still damn good fun. There's some kind of real-time mode that I've never tried, because the basic game simply is Blood Bowl, and it delivers. Somehow the game is enjoyable enough that despite all its flaws, I like playing it. I'd say it's definitely worth picking up on the cheap.

Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3: Around here, you can get this for something like 10e or less. Do, because although the single player campaigns are fairly short, they're great fun. For the ridiculously low price this is retailing for, it's great value for money.

F1 2010: Be clever and pick up the previous edition for cheap instead of dishing out an obscene 70e or whatever new games are being sold for these days. This is an awesome game. There are realism and difficulty settings that let you customize the driving experience, and you get to work on the car set-ups just enough to keep an F1 fan happy. When you turn everything up to as high a level of realism as you can handle, driving even a half-length Grand Prix is an awesome experience. I highly recommend it. The game makes you feel like you're driving an F1 car, and really, that's all you need.

Batman: Arkham Asylum: Now that Batman: Arkham City is out, do yourself a favor and pick up its excellent predecessor. The best superhero game by miles since that one decent Spider-Man game for the old XBox.

Space Marine: I may do a proper review of this yet, but for now, I'll just say that it apparently did poorly, like all GW games tend to, and is available on the cheap. It's definitely worth getting at a reduced price: if Gears of War was fun, it would be Space Marine. I'm thoroughly enjoying it.

I think that's about it. If you want more game reviews, read Arcadian Rhythms.

Mass Effect 2 is a white supremacist game

To begin, a disclaimer to avoid misunderstanding. I have no knowledge or opinions of the Mass Effect 2 designers' and developers' actual political views, so I'm not talking about them. What I intend to show is that Mass Effect 2 tells a story that shares many characteristics with the way white supremacist movements see themselves, and co-opts the player into sharing that narrative. Contains spoilers.

Despite being a big fan of the first Mass Effect, I really didn't like its sequel. I found ME2 incredibly disappointing in many ways, and I share many of the views put forward in this article. While the gameplay in itself was a big letdown, what made the game actively distasteful for me was the way it not only trampled all over continuity from ME, but it does this to make you participate in a white supremacist story.

In Mass Effect, the player encounters a rogue Alliance black project called Cerberus, which aims to create super-soldiers. During the course of the game, it becomes obvious that they've gone totally insane, fighting Alliance personnel, including the player character, and perpetrating all kinds of atrocities. They're basically Unit 731, only worse. In fact, if your character has the Sole Survivor background option, it turns out that the people responsible for the death of your former unit, who spent years torturing the only other survivor, are in fact Cerberus. Because the first game is quite immersive, I have to admit that by the end I figured my character had a fairly negative opinion of Cerberus, to say the least.

Having said that, it was a bit of a shock for me when the Cerberus we meet in Mass Effect 2 seems to have nothing to do with Cerberus from the previous game. In the second game, Shepard dies and is resurrected by Cerberus to work for them. The Cerberus operatives you meet enthusiastically explain to you that you've got it all wrong: Cerberus isn't a bad organization at all! They're an independent human supremacist group, bankrolled by a reclusive millionaire, and not some horrible terrorist organization that murdered your entire unit!

What makes the game truly shocking, and totally killed the series for me, was that your character is forced to go along with this. Yes, that's right: my character, who's an Alliance military officer and has seen first hand what Cerberus does, who indeed was mainly known before the events of the first game as the only survivor of a Cerberus atrocity, is now gladly putting on a Cerberus uniform.

It gets worse when you're introduced to your new ship, which is exactly like the old ship. There are even some of your old crew members on board, but they all seem to have entered some strange parallel universe, having renounced their former loyalties, if not even their personalities, and gladly joined a paramilitary human supremacist organization. If this smacks rather strongly of rewriting history in general and Holocaust denial in particular, that's because the game does. What's worse is that this isn't just a couple of characters talking. It's not like this is their version of what Cerberus is; instead, this seems to be the common view of everyone you encounter on Cerberus. Back in Mass Effect, Cerberus and its atrocities were headline news; now it seems collective amnesia has set in, to such an extent that the in-game documentation now gives a whole new view of Cerberus. You're also effectively prevented from seriously questioning it; such topics as the Sole Survivor background being pretty much taboo.

The absolute nadir of the game comes when you encounter a former squadmate from ME, who asks you how you can possibly be working with a disgusting terrorist organization like Cerberus. This isn't even lampshading, it's much worse: your character is being called out on the game's retconning. What are you supposed to say? My answer: because the game forced me to. I can't even begin to imagine what my character would say, because I'd pretty much lost all immersion in the world by then.

The jarring continuity problems are so bad that the most sensible explanation for ME2 would seem to be that your character wakes up in a parallel universe. I've been struggling to find a good analogy to how the rebranding and whitewash of Cerberus felt for me. It's rather like if one were to write a story about an Israeli commando who wakes up from a coma to find that his unit has defected en masse to Hamas, and explain to him that Hamas isn't a terrorist organization at all but a pacifist charity. Or a British left-wing pacifist deciding that maybe the SS isn't so bad after all and joining it when he's told that the Holocaust was really just a lie. And Josef Mengele, who would have fit right in at Cerberus, was a good Samaritan.

**

If it was just that Mass Effect 2 is really bad at continuity, I could just chalk it up to the generally juvenile and subpar quality of the writing, which produces memorable scenes like this one:

The "ass" in "Mass Effect" seen in the picture is one of the new characters, whose only real game functions are to explain away your previous notions of Cerberus and, well, that. Speaking of characters, most of the recurring characters are also more like parodies of themselves, from Tali and Garrus both actively ridiculing the previous game and delivering frankly embarrassing fan service, to the totally ludicrous transformation of Liara that reminds me very strongly of the Mad parody of Steven Soderbergh's Traffic. Liara's reinvention as a gangster and "information broker", and Garrus's new personality as a sort of lame Turian Punisher, are not only ridiculous but again, offensive to the previous game. Remember the whole side plot with Garrus, where you investigate an unsolved case from his C-Sec days? Where you can guide him in either the "paragon" or "renegade" direction? Turns out you needn't have bothered, because he's going to go and become the Turian Punisher either way.

One of the new NPCs you recruit is Jack, a powerful biotic who was the victim of cruel Cerberus experiments and, unsurprisingly, hates them. You get the same old propaganda line from Cerberus and their on-board cheerleader: the great leader didn't know about it and so on. That may be an attempt at narrative ambiguity; either you believe them or you don't. But the problem with that is that you're not allowed to act on it in any way.

By the way, biotics have been completely nerfed, so you don't actually need her for anything. She only has special cutscene powers.

More jarring universe-breaking follows when you meet the ship's AI. That's right; in the first installment of the series, everyone completely freaked out when AIs were even mentioned, and now here they are, happily living on a ship with a built-in AI. The only person who even notices is Tali, and even she can just be talked out of it. Then again, you can talk her into happily co-operating with a Geth, too.

But the problem isn't just poor continuity: what's being done with Cerberus is morally distasteful as well. In Mass Effect, Cerberus was an organization dedicated to human supremacy and the creation of a "super-man" in order to defeat the aliens and conquer the galaxy for man's living space. Sound familiar? It should, because Cerberus seems to be rather directly based on the SS.

So in Mass Effect 2, you're revived by the SS, and two cheerful SS officers explain to you that you've got it all wrong! They have nothing against the Jews or Slavs as such, it's just that they're concerned with maintaining Germany's racial purity and standing in the world community. Of course, some individual SS members or member organizations, even, may have undertaken some suspicious activities in the past, but those have probably been misrepresented and anyway, they can't keep track of everyone. (The really atrocious examples are simply ignored, and you're not allowed to ask.) What matters is that their leader is a great man with a great vision for the future of our race. Surely you'll put on this SS uniform and follow his orders!

**

So right at the start of the game, you're forced to go along with rewriting history in a manner that rather too strongly resembles Holocaust denial. It then starts getting worse. Soon enough, you're initiated into the main plot of the game. Evil aliens are abducting thousands of people, and the Alliance government doesn't care. Therefore, it's up to the heroic racist militia of Cerberus to stop the evil aliens and save humanity. You see? It turns out the racists were the good guys! The government is corrupt, and its entanglement in a sinister one-galaxy government means it doesn't care what happens to ordinary folks. Luckily, the racist militia does care, and by defying the government, they save lives from the alien threat.

This is a narrative that could have been cooked up for a video game by a Midwestern racist militia or a European neo-fascist group. The main character is a brave government agent fighting on the side of good. He's resurrected by a racist group he's previously fought against, but finds out that after his death, the government has stopped caring about the people. Some of his former colleagues are now members of the racist group, and talk about their alienation with the goverment and its cover-ups of their heroic deeds and the coming alien menace. Only the enlightened elite that make up this militia group understand that the government's destructive policies of multiculturalism are leading to the destruction of the human race, but for saying this they're branded as racists. So the main character realizes that the racists are, after all, really the good guys, and the corrupt government is evil. He gladly joins a racial supremacist organization and battles the evil aliens.

In sum, Mass Effect 2 is the most disgustingly racist game I've ever played in my life.

Oh, sure, there are aliens on your team. That's not historically inappropriate; there were all sorts of nationalities in the Waffen-SS, too. The plot of the game still is that the government doesn't care if thousands of people are dying, because it's more interested in covering up alien attacks for some senseless nefarious reason, and people need armed anti-government racists to protect them from foreigners. I'm surprised they don't make you plant a truck bomb at an Alliance office building.

From what I've heard, in ME3 Cerberus will once again be your enemy. I wonder how they're going to pull that off. Retcon the retcon? Unless ME2 is rewritten out of existence (it was all a dream!), the fact will still remain that while the Alliance (federal government) stood by and did nothing, Cerberus (white supremacist militia) saved thousands of people from the aliens. Never mind that this whole notion of the Alliance being so corrupt and evil that they don't care about people any more comes out of nowhere.

I'd like to take this opportunity to suggest some more plot points for Mass Effect 3, in line with the new creative direction taken by ME2:

- the Alliance bans firearms and sends squads of aliens to collect them from human patriots
- main character discovers the "Protocols of the Elders of the Volus", proving the Volus are secretly allies of the Reapers
- the Council races join forces to create a New Galactic Order, a socialist one-galaxy government
- the New Galactic Order brands all humans with a barcode and bans the non-coded from buying and selling
- main character finds out that an ultra-secret cult, the Space Masons, secretly controls the Alliance

There's a lot of mileage to be covered here. The game could be called Mass Effect 3: The Shepard Diaries.

**

Mass Effect 2 was an insultingly bad game. If you were a fan of the first Mass Effect, ME2 went out of its way to slap you in the face. Instead of a dynamic, ambitious CRPG, we get a second-rate Gears of War clone that occasionally masquerades as a racist adventure game. Oh, and don't forget the planet-scanning mini-game, which was almost as much fun as stabbing yourself with a rusty knife.

The game also manages to be disgustingly sexist. As part of your crew, you have a sort of SS yeoman, who, of course, is a cute girl. If you get talking with her, it's possible for your character to develop a kind of romantic sub-plot with her. The consummation? A kiss? A sex scene? No.

You get to use her as a cabin ornament.

It's literally sickening. And, of course, there are no more same-sex romance options, because in the Space SS, that's just wrong.

In this hyper-sexist environment, what was merely poorly executed in the first game becomes actively troubling: every alien race is made up of a single gender. The only exception is the quarians, who seem to come in male and female; in neither of the games do we encounter a single krogan, salarian or turian female. On the wiki, we can have some reasons: the salarian "females are cloistered on their worlds out of tradition and respect". The krogan: "Female krogan rarely leave their home worlds, focusing on breeding in an attempt to keep krogan numbers from declining too quickly. The few remaining fertile females who can carry young to term are treated as prizes of war, to be seized, bartered or fought over." And even though there's no "fluff" justification for never meeting a turian female, we just...don't.

In the first game, the stated reason for never seeing a turian female was, as per the wiki, insufficient time and resources. I can believe that, and I'm certainly not saying that every permutation of alien race and gender needs to be represented in every sci-fi game. Still, for every major alien species we meet, the females are cloistered on their homeworlds or kept as chattel, or are just inexplicably absent. The quarians are the only exception, and when it comes to the more exotic aliens, gender isn't even mentioned but the assumption seems to be that everyone is male. The more unusual alien species are confined to brief walk-on roles, so they're not very relevant. Notable among them are, of course, the volus, a mysterious race of merchant profiteers with prominent noses whose race is denied membership in the galactic council because it's inferior.

And then there are the asari. Even though the asari have only one gender, the in-game Codex describes them as an "all-female" race, surely a mindless statement. The Orion slave girls of Mass Effect, the asari look and act like blue-skinned human women. They're promiscuous bisexuals who, despite looking very human, are inexplicably sexually desired by all of the major races of the Mass Effect universe. The asari can be found throughout the galaxy as strippers and prostitutes, and the game makes sure to bring some loose blue women your way for flirtation and more regularly.

So each major race maps nicely onto a gender. The turians, krogans and salarians are all men, and the asari are all women. The former provide NPC soldiers and scientists, while the asari get by on their biotic powers. As a point of note, while ME1 included a female soldier, in Mass Effect 2 your squad members divide neatly along gender lines. The men are soldiers or scientists, or at best semi-biotics, while the women are biotics, plus a thief added in the downloadable content. In other words, in ME2 women need special powers to be useful team members, while men can just pack a gun and come along.

Yes, it's a man's life in the Mass Effect galaxy.

So, if you've always wanted to be a space nazi, heroically rescuing the overwhelmingly white and heterosexual human race from evil space foreigners, this is the game for you. It made me want to vomit.

Screw you, EA

Earlier, my co-blogger suggested giving EA games a miss, because of the annoying nonsense with DRM and EA Online. I'm now going to make a firm commitment: I'm no longer buying EA games. If they come out with something fantastic that I absolutely have to have, I'll buy it used, but until that, I'll be boycotting them.

Why? Because this stupid DRM nonsense has gone too far. We recently got a new XBox, and transferred all our stuff over from the old one. It was remarkably easy: take a normal USB "stick", let the XBox format it and use it to move profiles and save games. All the Arcade games and downloadable content you can easily re-download, because anything you've bought from XBox Live you can download again any time you want.

Except, that is, if you bought it from EA.

What we found was that first of all, we were unable to redownload the Dragon Age: Origins DLCs via the game itself. Having then moved them over from the old console, what we now found was that only the person who actually downloaded them can play them. The rest of us get told by the game that the extra content is "corrupt", and we can only access it through an idiotic workaround. All other DLC for other games works just fine. Thanks, EA.

Why on earth can't they just use the XBox Live system for managing downloadable content and user accounts? Why do they persist with this nonsense of separate EA accounts and their own DRM systems? It's damned annoying. In multiplayer games like Army of Two, online multiplayer is only accessible if you have an EA account. Why? What the hell is wrong with my XBox Live gold account? Why do I have to jump through additional hoops? And why can't they use the XBox DRM for downloadable content, which can handle moving from one console to another just fine?

Further, EA and Bioware have known about this problem for as long as it's existed, and haven't bothered to fix it. Also, one of the patches for Dragon Age broke a couple of achievements, which they also know but haven't fixed. Nice after-market support, guys.

This may seem like a small thing, but frankly, it pisses me off. As long as they persist with this stupidity, I'm not buying their games.

Traci Lords kicks ass

I understood from Traci Lords's Twitter that she's going to be releasing some music again this summer. You know Traci Lords, the famous underage porn star, who used to be really hot:

Heck, for all I know she's still really hot. I don't keep up. I recommend her autobiography, Underneath It All; it's a fascinating, if at times slightly grim read.

If she does release some music this summer, it won't be her first foray into the music business. Back in 1995, she released an album called 1000 Fires:

The album was produced by Juno Reactor, and it's through them that I can make the perhaps unexpected connection between Traci Lords and Laibach. On their 1997 album Bible of Dreams, Juno Reactor published a song called God Is God, which I can't embed here because YouTube is stupid. I have to admit that I'm more familiar with this version of the song:

So there. Didn't expect that. Perhaps an even stranger connection is that the female vocals on the Juno Reactor original are supplied by Natacha Atlas, and one of her songs is on the soundtrack to Project Gotham Racing 4 on the XBox, a game that I play like alot.

The first single from 1000 Fires was Control, which some of you may remember from Paul W. S. Anderson's movie Mortal Kombat. It's an awesome song with a great music video.

Lady Gaga? Fuck Lady Gaga.

Game review: Harms Way

Here's an XBox Live Arcade game that everyone needs to get. If only because it's totally free.

Harms Way is a really sweet little Live Arcade game where you play as either a shooter or a driver. There are four teams, one shooter and one driver each. The drivers race their cars around a circuit with the first one to complete three laps winning; the shooters jump from turret to turret and shoot them, with the one destroying the most cars winning. The winning shooter and winning driver get the most points, and the team with the most combined points wins.

The single player or split-screen co-op is fun enough, but when you take it online, it gets really sweet. We've spent a good part of the past week in Harms Way's online multiplayer...

Seriously, you can download the full game for free. Do that. It kicks ass.

New Vegas: First impressions

I was kind of taking a break from blogging anyway, but now I really am.

Fallout: New Vegas is like Fallout 3, only better. The engine has been tweaked, the world is huge, and there's a lot to do in it. The beginning is a bit sketchy, but once you get into the spirit of the thing, this game will eat up every second of your leisure time. It's awesome.

I love it. Well done, Obsidian. And it's only crashed once!

Dispatches from the front lines of 2K10

I'm concerned my previous post may not have conveyed an accurate impression of how, for lack of a better term, stunning the 2K10 experience is. Yesterday I watched my co-blogger try to create a team and franchise.

One of the first things we noticed while looking through the players' stats was that in the Finnish version, goaltenders have two stats called "speed". For example, Henrik Lundqvist has a speed of 88 and a speed of 60. Of course, it's a longstanding 2K tradition to not explain these stats at all, so you don't know what they actually mean. Besides, as far as we can tell, most of them mean absolutely nothing. So far, though, at least they had different names.

We could check what they are in English, but that would require quitting the game, changing the Locale of our console to the UK, and restarting the game. We're not that interested. Overall, the translation quality is poor; in Franchise mode, each team is marked as either rebuilding, buying, selling and so forth. We're guessing that in English, this was called "Team State", because the Finnish version has "Joukkueen osavaltio"; that's state as in Missouri.

Also, looking at stats too closely is hazardous. There's a menu where you can look through the free agents and players on different teams, and select them for your team. If you look at someone's player card, when you close it the game has unsorted the lists and always returns you to the Anaheim list, regardless of whose player card you were looking at. I've rarely seen anything so brainless.

As an aside, 2K claim that there are more customization options than ever. In team creation mode, there are less than in previous 2K games, so we're not sold on that, either. There are lots of customization options we don't understand, though, because again, there is no online help, and the manual doesn't even tell you what the controls are, let alone explain anything more complicated.

If you look at your match results, you get a table that tells you what games you've played and the results. For example, 11th of March, so-and-so o'clock: Washington @ Calgary, 2-4, winner: Washington. Now read that again. Yes, it says Washington scored two goals against Calgary, and won the game. In fact, the Caps scored four, so the result is right, but the numbers are wrong.

Rather surprisingly, there were no penalties called in that game. It turns out that was because the "Penalties" setting had changed from "on" to "off" on its own accord before the game. The last time we saw it, it said "on"; no penalties were called, and after the game, we found the setting was "off". The difficulty level also switches between Amateur and Pro, seemingly at random.

Also, the offside bug I mentioned in the previous post (where one of your players gets stuck in the offensive zone and won't come out), has so far recurred on average once per game. That's playtesting.

Founding a franchise was also harder than we thought. In previous 2K games, you could create your own team and replace an NHL team with it, with no trouble at all. In this game, sure, you can create a team. You pick players from either other teams' rosters or the free agent list, and you can enter your created team in the league. Here's the catch: you don't actually move players to the new team, you copy them. So if you pick a free agent for your team, let's say Peter Forsberg, for your team, and start the season, Forsberg has been copied onto your team; when the season starts, there's one Peter Forsberg on your team and another on the free agent list.

Not only is this unthinkably stupid, but it's just another example of 2K taking something that worked fine in the previous editions of the game and breaking it. The hopelessly confusing menu system is another example. In my opinion, the menus and overall presentation in general has just gotten more and more confusing over the years. The 2K5 and 2K6 menus weren't pretty, nor was the franchise management system, but they were infinitely less confusing.

One of the big problems 2K always had is that your players are idiots. You control one player on the ice, and the rest of them shamble around brainlessly. Despite what the promotional materials say about "intelligent hockey", this is still the case. I've never been able to understand what exactly it is your players are trying to do. When your defenseman has the puck and passes it forward, the winger or centerman is almost invariably facing your own goal. On the power play, both wingers hang around the halfwall, effectively guaranteeing you're not going to be able to set up a one-timer. Overall your forwards seem to be doing their best to not get open. This is "intelligent" as in "design", exactly like the previous 2K games.

You do get to choose from several different power play tactics. They don't explain what any of them are, beyond a name, and if previous 2K games are anything to judge by, they don't actually do anything.

**

The overall impression 2K10 gives is just shocking. I should stress that I've played 2K3, and 2K5, 6, 8 and 9 extensively, and my co-blogger has much greater experience of console hockey in general and 2K in particular. With this background, we find 2K10 hopelessly confusing, have trouble figuring out what the controls are, and find the menus nearly impossible to navigate, let alone make sense of. I can only imagine what it must be like if this is someone's first experience of NHL 2K.

We're simply shocked that a game like this is released. Again, the gameplay itself isn't hopeless, it's just almost exactly the same as 2K9. And 2K8. And 2K7, 2K6 and 2K5. And the menus, the franchise management, the fact you can't pick the language, the total lack of any kind of online help or manual, the tired commentary with lines that were written for 2K5... Popping this game into your XBox is a confusing, frustrating, horrible experience. In almost every way, this is worse than NHL 2K9. I reiterate: don't get it. Just don't.

This is the last NHL 2K game we're getting. Playing it has been a horrid experience. As soon as we get over the psychological trauma, we'll be getting EA's NHL 10.

Game review: NHL 2K10

I think this is probably the most awful XBox 360 game I've ever played.

The initial impression is, to say the least, dramatic. For a long time, hockey games sold in Finland have come with several language options. This one, too, has English, Swedish and Finnish. Once you pop the game in, you learn that it automatically sets the language to your Xbox's "Locale" setting, and you cannot change it. So if you play 2K10 on any console in Finland, it's going to be in Finnish, and you can't change it in-game. The only way to get English menus is to change your console's locale to the UK or USA; the console's separate language setting doesn't matter. So sorry about that if you're, say, Finnish-Swedish, or a foreigner living in Finland. Our XBox is set to Locale: Finland and Language: English. That gets you a Finnish-language game, and let me re-iterate, you cannot change the in-game language in-game.

This is so shockingly idiotic we couldn't wrap our minds around it. We spent at least ten minutes looking through the confusing Finnish-language menus, trying to find a language option. The menus themselves are thoroughly confusing. When the game starts, you're thrown into a screen where you can start a random NHL game. If you want to get to the main menu, you have to move the right stick to get to a really confusing pop-up menu. You have no choice but to browse them aimlessly, because there is no on-line help, and the manual only explains the controls.

Wait, did I say the manual explains the controls? It doesn't. Some years back, both EA and 2K started using the "Skill Stick", which means using the right thumbstick to basically control your player's hockey stick. 2K10's "Pro" controls use the Skill Stick, so all the manual tells you is that the right stick is "Skill Stick". It doesn't tell you, um, how to use it. Or what it does when you, say, push up on the thumbstick. And again, there is no online help (or if there is, we can't find it).

So interfacewise, we can't work out how to play the game properly, because it won't tell us. No matter, I gave it a shot anyway. The box advertises "intelligent hockey", and sure enough, when your opponent is on the power play, for the first time in NHL 2K history, it actually kind of looks like they're trying to play an NHL power play. Other than that, though, I've seen few signs of it.

The AI opponent's ineptitude was only one failure of intelligence in previous 2K games: far more frustrating was your own players' utter stupidity. I'm unhappy to report that that, at least, hasn't changed a bit. While the AI plays the aforementioned power play, your own players are content to stand around in their penalty kill formation, and ignore everything that happens around them. So in short, they're still the brainless position-playing zombies they were in all the previous installments of 2K.

In the offensive zone, your players are just as moronic. To set the scene, I watched the Tampa Bay-Montréal game a few nights back. Montréal scored three goals (IIRC) on backdoor plays, i.e. where the player with the puck passes to the other side of the net. Just try setting one up in 2K10! If the player with the puck is somewhere between the net and the faceoff dot, most of the time the other forwards are either behind the net or out behind the faceoff circle. You simply cannot execute perhaps the most basic scoring play in modern hockey, because the AI-controlled players on your own team play like idiots. Not that you can usually pass to anyone, really, because I've never yet seen a player even try to get open, much less into a scoring position. Nothing makes you really believe Alex Ovechkin is on the ice like seeing him aimlessly wandering around behind the net on the power play when the puck is in front of it.

In most other respects, too, the gameplay feels identical to 2K6, 7, 8 and 9. Your players, from Ovechkin to Brooks Laich, all feel totally and identically incompetent. Even the simplest action takes ages to execute, and it feels like everyone is skating in tar. Nothing they do feels or looks like NHL hockey.

Add to this the build quality we've come to expect from 2K games. In every game we've played so far, at least one forward has gotten inexplicably stuck in the offensive zone, causing an offside. They face the boards and stand there, shaking, until they either snap out of it or the offside is called. The commentators are using exactly the same lines as they were in, um, 2K5, and in the first game I played, the commentary consistently failed, calling a 5-on-3 goal a 4-on-4 and similar dumb mistakes.

So in short, this is an awful game. We bought in on sale for a ridiculously low price, but it wasn't worth it. Just don't get it. There's very little discernible improvement over 2K9 or 2K8, and in many ways, this seems to be much worse. I'm starting to think the high-point of 2K games was 2K5, and if you've played it, you realize how pathetic that is.

2/10, only because I have faith that there are even worse games out there.

Monkey Island!

Sometimes good things do happen. For example, yesterday Lucasarts released the original Secret of Monkey Island on XBox Live Arcade. It's only a lousy 800 Microsoft Points, and is, in fact, the original Monkey Island. So what have I been doing since? Insult swordfighting. Brilliant.

I got this scar on my face during a mighty struggle!

Doing something with your life

Not really. If there's one thing summer is good for, it's being useless, especially if you have a four-month stint at Her Excellency's pleasure coming up around August. This is how useless I've been:

Man, that round number looks good!

Fallout 3: Enclave Deathclaws

Okay, so this is weird. The Fallout Wiki says:

Deathclaws make another appearance in the game as the Enclave camps begin to appear. These camps are likely to house cages containing Mind-Controlled Deathclaws, which are just the same as regular ones with the exception that they will not attack Enclave forces.

Is that the way it's supposed to work, then? On my XBox 360 version of the game, fully updated, the Deathclaws held in Enclave cages attack the Enclave soldiers almost as soon as they've been let out of the cage.

In one memorable incident, the Enclave officer outside Dukov's Place was shooting at a Radroach and decided she needed help, so she opened the Deathclaw cage. The Deathclaw killed the Radroach, stood around for a moment, and then killed the officer.

So far, every time I've seen the Enclave unleash their Deathclaws, they've turned on the Enclave soldiers. According to the Fallout Wiki, they're not supopsed to do that. I wonder which is wrong? The game is so loving buggy that I wouldn't be surprised if it was a bug, but it's not in the wiki's list of bugs.

It's been funny, yeah, but I'm just wondering. I mean, the Enclave aren't meant to be that stupid, are they?

On reflection, my theory is that when the Deathclaw is released, it doesn't attack Enclave soldiers. If there's no-one else around to attack, however, it will attack the Enclave. This would explain the behaviour we've been seeing.

The question remains, though; is that supposed to happen? It makes the Enclave officer releasing a Deathclaw into a lose-lose situation for the officer; either the Deathclaw loses, and anything tough enough to kill a Deathclaw is also going to kill them, or the Deathclaw wins and then kills them.

So it's either a bug or really dumb game design. Hey, wait, I've just accidentally described most of the game. Oops.

(okay, I'm exaggerating, but if you've played it...)

Game review: Fallout 3

Great game, shame about the plot. 8/10

The good part is that Fallout 3 is a tremendously enjoyable and somewhat addictive game. Most of the game mechanics work just fine, as does the user interface. As a level design issue, I'd just like to say that I got really tired of the practically identical dark, ruined buildings after the third one, and there were still, what, 500 more left? Okay, you don't have to explore them, but still, there's been a tremendous amount of level design done, with nothing to show for it except dozens of identical levels. That's a bit lame, really.

The bad part is basically almost all of the writing. In parts it's good and even engaging; in parts it's so embarassingly bad you need to steel yourself to keep playing. I'll keep this spoiler-free, so I'll not treat the main plot other than to say that at times it's so mind-blowingly stupid it makes you want to bash your head into a wall.

There are two glaring flags of disbelief that the game can't help but make you hoist. The first, and most serious, is the claim made in the game that the events take place 200 years after nuclear war. When you play the game, it very quickly becomes obvious that that doesn't make any sense at all. In places they're trying to give the impression that it really has been ages since our civilization stood; in other places they give the impression that the bombs fell just last year. It feels like they can't make up their minds, and at times the discrepancy is really bothersome.

Another serious problem I have with the game, which might not be so bad if you don't know about these things, is that none of the damage you see in the game is in any way consistent with nuclear weapons. If I played the game without knowing it was called Fallout, I'd never guess they were trying to present a picture of a world after nuclear war.

There is radiation present, for example in bomb craters. This is totally ridiculous as no nuclear warhed would create radiation effects that persist for 200 years. Most of the radiation one encounters in the game, however, comes from barrels of nuclear waste or some other radioactive goo that seem to be basically lying around at random. There doesn't seem to be any reason or explanation for this, but apparently in the dystopian future of Fallout, people used to, um, store nuclear waste in subway tunnels before the war...

The game is set in the "Capital Wasteland", supposedly the ruins of Washington, D.C. Apparently nuclear war has dried up the Potomac river and turned DC into an arid wasteland where it never rains. Only it must rain, because there are pools of stagnant water everywhere, and that water has to come from somewhere. An easy guess would be those numerous clouds in the sky, but during the entire game, never once do you see it rain.

I can't for the life of me figure out how a nuclear war would turn the DC area into a desert or dry up the Potomac river. It should be pretty much exactly the opposite. But as we know, the earlier Fallout games were set in a desert, so maybe they felt this one needs to be in a desert too. And as we know, it's a generally accepted rule of fiction that postapocalyptic stories are set in the desert (Mad Max), where it doesn't rain. Therefore it can't rain in Fallout 3.

Overall both the plot and the overall writing of the game is designed to give you certain impressions and rather ham-handedly prod you into feeling emotions for your character or other characters. All of the writing places giving impressions far above realism, consistency or even sense. This is even more blatant because mostly the game is very atmospheric and great fun to play. You just have to grit your teeth and think of England when the cutscenes start.

I really wish this had been a better game. As it is, I really like it. It just saddens me to see such hideously bad writing in an otherwise well-executed game.

Bioshock revisited

I finished Bioshock yesterday. Last month I gave it a grade of 9/10, and I'm afraid I have to downgrade that to 7/10.

On the one hand, Bioshock is a great game, and one that I'm sure I'll remember for a long time. On the other hand, it's kind of boring. Seriously. The game consists of something like eight levels, and from like the third one onward, it's just the same stuff.

And as for the vaunted "plot", it's necessary to make some distinctions here. In gaming, when people say plot, they usually mean either the plot, the backstory or the setting. Bioshock has no backstory at all, a fairly humdrum plot and a great setting. Seriously, the whole survival-horror-evil-genetic-manipulation-people-going-insane thing is getting more than a bit old.

I liked playing it, but sadly, it became a bit boring toward the end. Also, at times they were laying it on pretty thick, and the plot really doesn't live up to the hype.

I still liked it, and I guess my final recommendation is to get it, but not for full price. Frankly, I thought Mass Effect was better.

**

As it stands, Take-Two is making a franchise out of Bioshock. Wikipedia:

"In response to the game's high sales and critical acclaim, Take-Two Chairman Strauss Zelnick revealed in a conference call to analysts that the company now considered the game as part of a franchise."

The way I understand that, later this year we'll get Bioshock 2010, which will be exactly the same game, only with improved machine gun controls and some roster updates, and this time Houdini Splicer will get to be on the cover.