1. The limited arsenal works well, and I enjoy that you get all the guns from the beginning and have all of them with you at all times.
2. The tranquiliser gun made me happy at the thought of not having to kill tiger-kitties anymore, but once I realised they woke up after a while, I might as well have thrown it out – self-imposed time limits on every fight are not my idea of a fun time.
3. Lara’s animation is great as usual, but it can be a little jittery, and she tends to get bloody stuck in some of her transitional animations if you place her at an awkward gap or similar.
4. The third-person camera can go fuck itself.
5. The rock climbing controls great – I like that you actually have to move in the right direction so it’s a bit more involved than eg. Assassin’s Creed.
6. The graphical details such as water moistness or dirt on Lara’s model are at once very impressive and uncomfortably creepy.
7. There’s a setting in the options for how lenient you want the insta-death “saving grabs” to be, and that is the best idea in the entire game.
8. The combat remains utter, utter rubbish – there’s no cover system and no stealth, and enemies take a ton of hits to die, even regular humans; you end up just running around aimlessly, emptying entire mags into your opponents. The only good thing about it is that your kill count is pretty low compared to most action games.
9. The level design is probably some of the most beautiful I’ve ever seen. Much is owed to the subject matter of course, but the lush jungles and ancient ruins are done justice by the sprawling levels and the way the core mechanics of the game mesh with them.
10. The story has gone a bit nuts, and I didn’t realise Anniversary continued the plot from Legends, so I skipped an installation and am now fairly confused. I’m digging the Norse mythology theme though.
11. The motorcycle level in this game is way better than the action movie ludicrousness of the one in Legends. Also far less of a break from the core mechanics of the franchise.
12. GIANT SPIDERS! FUCK!

It seems to have no built-in screenshot key that I could find, which is why this post has no pictures.

So I’ve played Gears of War 2 in co-op with Casper (as it really should be played). As far as I can tell, we made it almost through act 4 out of 5, and I loved it. It’s the same solidly entertaining core gameplay as the first game, but with many many welcome additions. Its vehicle sections are far better executed and more fun than its predecessor’s, the parts where you have to split up are much better at making you assist each other, and the plot is not only slightly deeper, the background story is actually in the game.

To get any idea about Gears of War 1‘s story, you had to read the manual. The sequel actually features exposition! Groundbreaking. In the junction between story and gameplay, Gears 2 has some outright extraordinary setpieces and scripted sequences. Especially one of the boss fights is completely ludicrous but so awesome – Gears 1 seems low-key and modest in comparison, even that game’s train sequence has absolutely nothing on Gears 2.

My only real complaint, delivered in as spoiler-free a manner as possible, is that the worm-level is way too fond of killing you instantly when you make a wrong step. Honestly I thought we were past the teach-by-death phase by now.

So it’s still not an intellectual game, but it gets several thumbs up from me. It excels at everything that its predecessor does well, and then it fixes almost every complaint I had about the first game. It even has a couple of really well executed character development cutscenes. It’s not out yet, but if you liked the first one, make sure you get this when it’s released (on Friday). And for the love of God, play it in co-op.

Since I bought my 360, I haven’t played any games like that either. Gears of War, Army of Two, Mass Effect, Halo 3, Assassin’s Creed, Grand Theft Auto 4… these are all games I might as well have played on PC. Viking feels like a “return” to a “typical” console action game model… that I’ve never actually experienced. I’m not, however, ruling out that the feeling is based on a set of complete misconceptions about what most console action games are about.

So how about I start talking about the game that I have played instead?

Viking doesn’t really seem to be anything special in most regards, but it does one thing that I’ve never seen done anything near as well before, and if you don’t wish to endure my rambling on about the less interesting features of the game, feel free to skip down to the bold marker. Viking seems similar in structure to the parts of the Zelda games that I have played on my friend Torsten’s Gamecube or Wii, but stylistically, it’s more like God of War, with lots of combat moves and gore all over the place. It’s a fun game though – solidly constructed and with very powerful and easy combat moves.

The story is… adequate, I guess. Norse goddesses Hel (of the underworld) and Freya (of, uh, love) get in a fight and all but destroy the human world Midgaard in the process. Skarin, viking warrior, is killed by Freya’s former champion, now champion of Hel, Drakan, but resurrected by Freya and granted immortality as her champion in the fight against Hel.

As Freya’s champion, Skarin is off to take back Midgaard, one village, farm, quarry, or fortress at a time. Whenever you liberate an area, its ambience changes from dark, rainy, and sinister to bright, sunny, and green. This is what we call positive reinforcement, and it works pretty damn well. Most of the time, all it takes to liberate an area is to wipe out the enemies and free some vikings, but sometimes there are so many enemies you pretty much have to sneak around and take them out with sneak attacks before you can free the captured vikings.

When I say “you have to”, what I actually mean is “I have to because I’m really not very good at the combat, so I get wiped out if I fight more than 5 enemies at a time”. You can actually fight your way through these missions, and that’s highly beneficial for my opinion of the game because forced stealth sequences mix horribly with a checkpoint-based save system. Some of the infiltration missions can get awfully frustrating when you are spotted, killed, and have to start all over several times in a row – notably without having your items replenished because the game isn’t actually loaded, Skarin is just resurrected back at the camp (don’t ask me why you don’t get your spent items back despite the enemies respawning).

The stealth is pretty solid though, supported by the level design and thoughtfully designed patrol paths. Getting spotted is far from always an instant failure, only if you’re unfortunate enough to alert a hornblower to your presence (as I did in the last one – three times). If not, you can usually just dispatch the enemies who saw you and proceed. Furthermore, the sneak attacks at your disposal are not only potent, but also extremely satisfying (a leap forward to instantly close on an enemy and cut him in half).

Which is actually true of all the combat in the game: It’s very satisfying. Gametrailers say most of it was copied quite directly from the God of War games, but they agreed with me that it does work very well, so I find the apparent lack of originality acceptable (good artists borrow, etc.). The basic components of combat are a quick attack, a slow attack, and a block stance. As you spend gold in the arena to learn new moves from the spirits of your ancestors (I guess the living existing costs are pretty high in Asgard?), you can combine these basic attacks into sequences and combos that are especially useful against specific enemies. Killing enemies makes them drop a single red orb that increases your Rage when picked up, and if you take them out with a finishing move, they’ll drop three orbs so you get more Rage. You can spend this Rage to activate your weapon runes that add lightning, fire, or ice to your attacks.

It all works pretty well, especially because the animations are gruesome and carthartic. One particular feature lifted right from God of War is special finishing moves for boss fights, which are basically player-initiated quick-time events. I don’t particularly like quick-time events (in fact, like most sensible people, I really really hate them), but since I actually get to start these ones myself, they’re alright. They’re not optimal, but they’re alright.

One of the most enjoyable aspects of Viking is the structure of the game. I mentioned it was akin to Zelda, at least as much of the Zelda games as I know, which is admittedly not very much. The game is structured into islands, each of which has a number of objectives, some of which (the objectives, not the islands, try to keep up) will only be revealed as you find them or when you talk to particular NPC’s. There’ll always be 2-4 major objectives such as “Liberate the Quarry”, “Liberate the Farm”, “Locate the Dragon Runes”, etc., and to move to the next island, you’ll have to capture a major town.

And this is where the game really shines: When you have to capture a major town. I’ve captured two so far, and the process was quite similar for the two of them: First you sneak into the town to reach a particular objective (blow up the barracks, for example). Then you call in your viking army for an all-out assault. The assault is broken into stages where you pick certain objectives to achieve in order to obtain dragon runes that you can use to make your dragon handle other objectives. For example, you charge the enemy positions with your army, heading for the enemy shaman who is summoning soldiers on a nearby hilltop. Killing him (you have to knock out his totems before you can finish him off) yields two dragon runes that you can then use to call your dragon down on the enemy archers or the enemies guarding the main entrance to the town.

Once you’ve taken out all objectives (in my example: shaman, archers, entrance guards), the battle moves to the next stage inside the town. There will also be one or two boss fights (champions) throughout, each of which will yield another dragon rune. The final stage of the fight is an assault on the enemy portal, where you must summon your shaman (by tapping a button quite rapidly) and then defend her as she converts the portal to your side. It works extremely well thanks to technology that effortlessly renders hundreds of combatants in a scene.

The objectives give you a purpose and make you feel like an integral part of the fight, but at the same time there can be no doubt that you’d be wiped out in all of about 10 seconds without your viking army to help you clear a path to the objectives. The ability to let your dragon handle certain objectives is an inspired way to deepen the meaning of your choices: Without it, your only choice would be which objective to handle first (which is incidentally the type of choice you’re given in the adventure part of the game, when liberating the rest of each island), but the dragon lets you actually pick which of 2-3 objectives to handle yourself, and let your dragon take care of the others. Furthermore, the cutscenes where your dragon nukes your enemies are pretty cool to boot.

There’s no doubt in my mind that the best part of Viking is the big battles, and if the game was nothing but that, my money would’ve been well spent. It’s the best battle system of any action game I’ve ever played, as it makes you feel both extremely important and yet a part of something much bigger. But I’m also quite enjoying the more adventure-like parts of the game (exploring caves and ruins and mountainsides in the search of captured vikings to rescue and recruit), and the stealth is challenging, fun, and rewarding in spite of the occasional frustration.

I was expecting a mediocre game, but Viking has definitely exceeded my expectations.

Still waiting on an historical, realistic viking RPG, though. Surely it should be possible to secure government funding for such a project?

Excuse me… I’m off to write an application for the ministry of culture.

So, to hell with what GTA4 is. You already know. It’s everything, it’s 10 different games crammed onto one disk, it’s everything that made San Andreas good without most of the things that made it suck. Here’s what I want it to be, in my boundless ingratitude.

I want it to be a police game without having to steal a police car. I want it to be a game about saving people without having to steal an ambulance. I want it to be a game about fighting fires without having to steal a fire truck. I want to make money hunting down crooks and saving lives. I want to rat on all these terrible people the game makes me work for, and I want to become an undercover agent for the FBI – I’m sorry, FIB – so I can meet up with my contact at regular intervals and make up for all the crap they make me do.

But all that’s just details. I can steal my way to being good if it’s necessary and still enjoy the game. What I really really really want, what I think I just might enjoy so much that it’d be worth learning to program so I could create it myself once the game comes out for PC, is a Game Master client. A seperate client that you can use to control a multiplayer game. Imagine that.

A whole city, complete with pedestrians, traffic, shops, apartments, minigames, radio, TV, cell phones, an almost fully functional Internet, and then the tools necessary to control it all. 2 GM’s, 4-5 players, and the means to spawn and possess characters, award money or equipment, control the behaviour of the police, jump players around, etc. I would put together a really epic The Departed-style campaign with the players taking the roles of undercover FBI/FIB agents charged with infiltrating a network of gangs and criminal organizations. Each player would have a car, an apartment, and even a family if they’d want it.

Imagine the sucker punches you could pull off in a setting like that. The more a player has, the more you can take away from him. You could have the bad guys trash a player’s apartment, you could have them abduct or even kill a player’s family. Liberty City is a dangerous place, and as an undercover agent it’d be a fine balance between maintaining your cover and maintaining your morals. It’d be The Shield in game form, with a hard-working GM pulling the strings.

All that’s pretty much a pipe dream of course. I would be a huge asshole to demand that of Rockstar, it’s just not what the game is about. But I could throw it out there to the modding community – Jedi Knight 2 had a similar client thanks to its modders – or I could get off my ass and implement it myself, maybe find a good coder or two to help me out. Of course Rockstar would have to release that PC port first. Until then, I’ll just enjoy GTA4 like everybody else. Well, maybe slightly less – some of those missions are still too damn hard.

Co-op tends to be two people playing through the singleplayer campaign together. This is great, we all love it (by which I mean I love it) because it’s a noncompetitive social situation. Two players against computergenerated enemies and (when done well) with a story just as good as singleplayer. Some games go the extra mile to add specific co-op content such as Splinter Cell 3‘s co-op moves where you can lift each other to reach high ledges.

Army of Two (let’s call it A2 because AoT is a somewhat unwieldy acronym) is in a whole other league. It’s pretty much in the title of the game: It’s designed explicitly for two-player co-op, and as such it provides the most powerful cooperative experience I’ve had since Ruben’s QFG campaign in NWN. A2 is such an improvement because co-op isn’t just the singleplayer with more players. It’s not even limited to a few impressive co-op moves like in SC3. In Army of Two, certain fundamental design elements encourage constant cooperation between the players.

The major feature is of course the aggro meter. At first it seems like a pretty odd idea to put aggro in a shooter – aggro is a feature MMOG’s use because nobody has yet come up with a good way to implement proper, convincing AI in an open environment with hundreds of players. In Army of Two, however, it works a bit differently – for starters, it has nothing to do with proximity. Enemies will see you when they see you, aggro simply serves to make them decide which player to attack. This gives the players a really easy, intuitive tool to execute flanking maneuvers and a completely new type of stealth gameplay based on distraction.

One player buys a really big and intimidating weapon, hunkers down behind some sandbags, and blindfires in the general direction of the enemies, hitting nothing. Meanwhile, the other player becomes practically invisible to the AI, which is focusing all its attention on the guy with the big gun, so he can sneak up to a position where the enemies are completely exposed and take them out with a silenced weapon so he doesn’t pull too much aggro from his friend. For extra satisfaction, the stealthy player can use melee attacks which attract no aggro, and thus take out a whole group of enemies without getting noticed. Some enemies can’t even be killed from the front, forcing the players to flank them in order to bring them down.

Furthermore, the level design does a good job of encouraging and rewarding co-op. Though there are some linear, narrow hallways to traverse, most of the levels are reasonably open so players can split up and flank enemies, leapfrog from between cover, or cover each other from different positions.

A2 isn’t content to be all fun and games though. It also wants to be a political game with a message about the dangers of private military corporations. Unfortunately that aspect tends to seem a little out of place. In between bouts of slaughtering hundreds of soldiers and subsequently fist pounding, you’ll hear the mercenary protagonists engage in serious discussions about the merits of a pending bill to privatize the military. Happily these mini-debates are quite well written and the two avatars have enough personality to make it tolerable. They’re not nearly as hideously macho as Gears of War‘s steroid golems.

My only real complaint so far would be the very long and very elaborate cutscenes. I didn’t like seeing my avatar perform amazing feats of superhuman ability in Halo 3, and out of principle I don’t like it in Army of Two. They are very exciting cutscenes with some crazy effects, and they really get you psyched for the upcoming levels, but while I do enjoy watching them and while I acknowledge that they tie the missions together, they do raise questions such as: “Why don’t I get to raid a weapons cache on a moving train!?” or “Why don’t I get to fight the bad guy on board a crashing cargo plane!?” It kind of seems like these cutscenes should’ve been intros or outros for actual missions in the game, not just well-directed filler to move the story along.

The storyline is predictable and its message is more than a little self-contradictory, but the gameplay speaks for itself. Whatever you do, do not play A2 in single-player. There’s an achievement for completing the whole game with the AI buddy, but that’s just not how the game was meant to be played and frankly I think it was a mistake to include that achievement. If you do get the game, let me know so we can set up some co-op

In SP, the game is… alright. It’s not bad, it’s just not very good either. PC Gamer gave it 60-something in their review of the PC version, and this seems fair for the Xbox version too. Thanks to the usually terrible credibility of game reviews, 60 seems like an awful score, but when you think about it, it means a slightly above-average game, which is what K&L is. Compounding the issue, I’ve been playing nothing but fantastic games for months – Mass Effect, Assassin’s Creed, The Witcher, Mask of the Betrayer, Guitar Hero 3, Call of Duty 4, Bioshock, etc. It’d be like watching Die Hard 4 after months of nothing but film classics – an otherwise decent film will seem embarrassing in comparison.

Kane & Lynch has some issues. First of all, the camera positioning is very awkward. You get used to it after an hour or so, but the camera is way farther to the left of your avatar than it should be, making you seem strangely detached from the action, and sometimes complicating the controls. Secondly, as has been mentioned in several reviews, the cover system is crap. Gears of War probably had the best cover system I’ve experienced, where a button press would lock you into position behind cover. Mass Effect comes close enough to that, where moving up against an object will reasonably reliably make Shepard snap into cover behind it, but it’s not quite as good as Gears’ system because your movement tends to break you out of cover if you’re unlucky. Kane & Lynch has the same problem as Mass Effect and is further haunted by annoyingly unreliable cover detection, making it a lot harder than it should to snap into position.

Finally, the snipers. Who thought it would be fun to take me out with a single shot to the head if I stand still too long? The appearance of a sniper scope in the bottom left corner to warn of the impending danger helps diminish the problem, but snipers can still be a huge pain in the ass, even on the easiest difficulty. It can also be damn hard to hit anything because of the weapon recoil and general inaccuracy. This seems almost like a leftover from the Hitman series, but the recoil that raises your aim with every shot, forcing you to lower your crosshairs manually as you shoot, is almost a too realistic touch that seems out of place in an action game – you’d expect to find it in games like Hitman or Deus Ex where you’re not meant to charge forward into the action, but hectic action is what K&L is all about, and the recoil almost sabotages that.

Still, it managed to be an overall reasonably entertaining game, and I especially enjoyed the night club level full of civilians, reminiscent of New Orleans from Blood Money, and I look forward to playing the game in co-op.

In one particularly cinematic fight, I attacked 5 guards who were harrassing a poor woman. Anybody who’s played AC will recognize that situation because there’s something like 10 of them in each city district in the game. I walked up to one of the guards keeping passers-by away and stabbed him covertly. Before his friend had turned to see what was going on, I jumped on him and stabbed him messily in the throat. The three harrassing guards immediately let go of the woman and attacked me, but I kept my guard up, waiting for the right moment. As the first of them struck, I activated a defensive counter that let me stab him in the foot and then slice upwards to put him out of the fight. Immediately I spun around and attacked the second guard, hitting attack again with perfect timing to activate a counter kill by which I kicked him in the guts, bent him over, and stabbed him in the neck. And just as he went down, I spun around again and threw a knife at the last guard, killing him as well.

That was a particular good fight, but in general I think AC’s combat does a good job of representing the need to know when to hold back and when to strike, like how I imagine a real fight to be. Especially near the end when you’re battling upwards of 30 soldiers at once, you feel pretty damn empowered. Speaking of the end, the conspiracy stuff reeks of Deus Ex / Da Vinci Code and really makes me anticipate the sequel (yay @ trilogy).

The reason I didn’t post about AC before is that I’ve been working on the small paper that constitutes the second half of our AV: Web project that was due yesterday. The site we produced was pretty much a digital university paper about Danish tv-fiction between 1960 and 1980 (plus a bit on either side) and was very well received by our teacher. He was especially pleased with the design, which he called very professional and impressive. As usual I must extend thanks to OiNutter for his invaluable help with the PHP and the more problematic parts of the CSS. And if anybody from the W3C is reading this, please get around to implementing float: center! PLEASE.

A few days ago I was reading this moderately interesting post on Damion Schubert’s blog when a link sent me to another blog, to this entry about movement in Crackdown. In this entry, Craig Perko has some pretty positive things to say about the most fundamental features in Crackdown, and how it actually becomes more fun to move as you progress through the game. I thought this sounded pretty interesting, so I bought the game.

I played it for a few hours last night, and I have to agree with Craig that movement in this game is pretty elaborate and well tuned. The thing is, it’s basically the centerpiece of the game. I guess I misunderstood Craig’s entry a little, because I thought he was saying that the basic feel and implementation of the game’s movement was just very responsive and satisfying, but as it turns out, the entire game has been designed around the idea of movement.

As you may know, Crackdown pits you as a futuristic supercop in a metropolis that can best be described as a “wretched hive of scum and villainy”. It’s structured pretty much like Grand Theft Auto, just with less arbitrary minigames (though there are some rather entertaining races in car or on foot) and with superpowers. This seems to be one of the things Craig praises – free movement. That’s true, it’s absolutely true – but it’s also not at all what I thought he meant. You spend a lot of time just moving through the city in Crackdown, and the rhythm, speed, and patterns of that movement is really great. In fact the game design in that aspect is so great that I can’t even be arsed to drive anywhere; I run, jump, and climb across rooptops and through alleys.

And it changes, as Craig says. The skill system in Crackdown is pleasingly simple, effective, and responsive, and as your Athletics or Driving skills improve, your options and your fun in moving clearly improves as well. But that’s the thing – it’s unfair to compare the movement in Crackdown to other games, because in Crackdown the movement is the game. Even when you’re in a battle, your movement options and skills are hugely important. The reward for your progression through the game is better and more advanced movement. You can’t really compare most of Crackdown’s movement to other games because most other games are about other things than moving. Bioshock is about the tactics, exploration, and character progression, for example. For Bioshock to have as detailed movement options as Crackdown would’ve demanded completely different priorities during development, I think.

In other words, Craig is right, but not in the way I thought he meant. And I still have a really hard time defining what makes movement in games fun – why moving in Half-Life 2 or F.E.A.R. feels so right but in Deus Ex or SWAT 4 feels so wrong. Surely it’s not just about the speed…?

Annoyances
There were a few things that bothered me about the game. First was that it would often crash when Next Generation Content was on, which was a bother. It looks fine without next-gen on, but since you can toggle it in-game and actually compare the two modes fairly easily, the difference is striking, and it looks a HELL of a lot nicer in next-gen mode. However, it crashed on me three times in Kazakhstan (which was otherwise a pretty great level, btw) until I realized I could fix it by toggling next-gen off, then I optimistically turned it on, only to have it crash half-way through Nepal. Again I turned it on during the England mission, but then it crashed on me as soon as I tried opening the game at the end in Bolivia, so I had to play the neat boss fight at the end without next-gen on. Great pity.

The second annoyance was that the motorcycle sequences seemed sort of pointless and were ridiculously easy. And I generally suck at games (with the possible exception of stealth games), so if I say something is too easy, it really is too easy. The only challenging part of either of the motorcycle missions was having to jump onto the train at the end of the second one; I had to try that a couple of times before I managed not to crash and burn.

The final thing that actually annoyed me to a surprising degree was the lack of lipsynch of Lara during gameplay. I suppose they reckoned everybody would be watching her from behind, eyes firmly fixed on the person talking to her (or her bottom, I guess), but being an RPG player by heart, I kept rotating the camera so I could see her face when she spoke over her comm link thingy, and it annoyed me muchly that her lips did not move! A nit, I know, but you may hereby consider it picked.

Good times
In spite of these quirks, it was a very enjoyable game though. The two-weapon system worked well, although it could’ve done with more interesting weaponry (one very interesting weapon was indeed given at the end, but I won’t spoil that for you), the combat system was uninspired and consolish but very fast-paced and generally effective, and one thing I particularly liked was the toned-down Fahrenheit-style interactive cutscenes they used.

For example, right after the screenshot included above, you have to make a really nasty jump across a bridge connecting two skyscrapers in Tokyo. At the other end of the bridge is a wall, so Lara needs to grab onto the suspension above the bridge with her magnetic grappler and swing to the other side while the bike crashes into the wall, then jump off the bridge away from some chemical barrels set ablaze by the crash. It all happens way too fast for you to have any chance of doing it yourself, but instead the game shows you a cutscene, and you then need to press 3 specific directional keys at different times so Lara avoids the unpleasantries. Since it’s only 3 buttons, it works a lot better than in Fahrenheit, because you actually have time to look at the action here, but it still requires pretty quick reactions, so it works quite well.

Many of the puzzles also made good use of the physics system, and while it wasn’t as obvious or original as in Half-Life 2, it did make the puzzles a lot more logical than I remember the old TR2 puzzles.

I think what impressed me the most about TR:L was actually the amount of detail put into Lara Croft. I know you should probably expect nothing less from the game whose main selling point by far is the lovely curvature of its protagonist, but I was pretty fond of how her compulsory torch was a high-powered LED strapped to her shoulder, which would move as she did when walking or running, and how you could see the line for the magnetic grappling hook curled up in a little round box on her belt. And how her grenades showed up on the back of her belt. And last but not least: How water would actually drip from her and her clothes would be slightly wrinkled whenever she emerged from water! I think more games could do with such details, even games without eye-pleasing female avatars.

Replayability
While I doubt I’ll ever play TR:L again, Crystal Dynamics (which may have the most pleasing company name in the world) really went out of their way to imbue their game with replayability. Throughout the levels are hidden many little bronce, silver, or gold tokens that will unlock things for you as you find enough of them. The bronze ones are all pretty easy to find, the silver ones can be more challenging, and I only managed to find 2 of the gold ones in the entire game – one in Croft Manor and one in Japan. By finding these tokens, you can unlock bonus material (which I have yet to watch, but definitely will), weapon upgrades, and new outfits for Lara. The utility of the latter can be discussed, but judging from the fact that TR:L allows you to mod Lara’s weapons and outfits, but there no weapon mods among the sea of outfit mods, I definitely think the fanbase appreciates that particular feature.

Speaking of Croft Manor, that was without question my favourite level. No real danger there, just one big puzzle to find the hidden tokens in as much time as you please. Especially the gym was pretty neat, with the way you had to use the grappling hook to readjust certain instruments so you could reach the most difficult-to-get tokens. I also appreciated the little treasure hunt for the gold token, that was a nice touch.

All in all, definitely worth the $20 I paid for it via Steam.

And now an arbitrary rating! Why, you ask? Because I spent the time making these awesome paw icons, and I’ll be damned if they’re not put to use once in a while!

Tomb Raider: Legend

The story appeared to be a very simple fairytale set in an extremely odd fantasy world, but turned out to be a bit of an analogy for the role of the media during war time. Although I’d rather not start analysing the pants off of the game (please excuse the stupid metaphor), it really added a great layer of satire to the game, making it that much more enjoyable to play. The theme song of the game, “Propaganda”, really just says it all I think. In terms of plot progression, the game was very reasonably structured and with a few emotional sequences thrown in for a bit of flavour. The characters were very enjoyable, most notably it featured one of the coolest heroines I’ve ever encountered. I would pick Jade over Lara Croft any day of the week.

The setting was equally interesting, being some sort of fantasy/steampunk/sci-fi combination with a very unique (I dare say, very French) visual style and lots of weird friends and enemies.

The gameplay had a lot of funny features, such as the eager use of vehicular elements. Mainly, the world had to be navigated in a hovercraft (with jet engines O_o), same craft could be used to participate in races for fun and profit – and, impressively, to find a way into one of the mission locations; it’s always great when devs find a way to integrate side-quests and game-within-a-games with the actual plot. There was also some very well-designed and fun space ship sequences towards the end. One thing that might’ve ruined the game for me was the inclusion of boss fights. I invariably grind my teeth at the recollection of the innumerable boss fights in the games of my youth. But luckily the boss fights in BG&E were quite well designed, often requiring a bit of cooperation between you and your companion, and none of them took me more than 3 tries to defeat. The last one was particularly cruel, but luckily I’d brought a royal tonne of healing, which granted me success in my second attempt (the first being a sort of recon-attempt to figure out what was necessary to bring the beast down).

Another nice gameplay feature was the use of Jade’s camera. Seeing as Jade is a reporter and thus periodically required to report things throughout the game, the camera is used to obtain sufficient documentation to support your revolutionary articles. Additionally, it is a permanent side-mission to photograph every species of creature you come across for the local science center, for which they will reward you with money and the occasional mission-critical pearl. I cannot stress how awesome the various creatures you meet are. They range from insects and floating balls of light over strange living plants that grow on cave walls to giant snails, blobs of jelly, or whales floating in space! If the game had consisted entirely of finding and taking pictures of all these animals (I read somewhere that there are 56 unique species), I would still have enjoyed it.

Anyway, I should stop before this becomes the worst structured review of 2005 instead of a random bit of opinion. I would have said that BG&E is not for people who like complex PC RPG’s or rich simulations, but since I’m one of those people and I really enjoyed this game, I will instead say this: If you don’t mind to play a nice simple adventure game ported from the XBox every now and then, give this one a try. It’s a lot of fun.

Beyond Good & Evil