Denial

I'm horrified to admit that I quite liked Deus Ex 2. Took a while to get into, but it did a good job of setting up the stakes. Also, you could kill the occasional speaking-part NPC, which I realise makes me sound like a bed-wetting psychopath, but made the whole thing feel a bit meaty. Chunky. Oh, god. The bed again.

Totally unrelated to any of these people, but I always find the "he can't be a misogynist - he's married!" argument really odd. I mean, unless he's married to Terry O'Neill, president of the National Organisation for Women. In which case, OK, probably not. But you were lucky.

Offtopic, but in every context I've encountered Anna Anthropy identifies as a woman, so, yeah, she is a she, without quote marks. I think this is a useful anecdote, but I think I have a different angle on it. Homophobia is a crappy thing, and the way smack talk focuses on homophobic abuse is also a crappy thing. And what you were aiming to do was to give an object lesson, along the lines of: Those are hateful words. When you use them, it's the same kind of shit for gay men as it is for you if somebody N-bombs you. These are words gay men hear just before they get beaten up by bigots. They are words with a whole history of oppression and violence. Show some damn empathy. But that's not the message he got from being N-bombed. Take Michael Richards - what he wanted to do was to get some hecklers to shut up, and he went for the most forceful tactic he could think of, to get them to shut up, but that didn't result in quiet hecklers. (Incidentally, Tanikitsune, I think that's the answer to your question about whether people can laugh at a comedian's act up to a point, and then stop laughing and take offence. Historically, they can.) Is a slash story or obscene cartoon about two straight men a useful reprimand for their perceived objectivation of women? Is calling a woman a feminazi, a bitch or a slut, or telling her to get her husband's permission to use the computer a useful response to that? Generally, I'd say that, just like racist abuse isn't a useful tool against homophobia, homophobic abuse isn't a useful tool against misogyny and misogyny isn't a useful tool against homophobia. And I think it gets even trickier if, say, misogynist abuse is being used against a woman on behalf of the fight against homophobia by a straight man or woman. What was kind of great about it was how quickly everything settled down once Felicia Day got involved. I'm wondering if there is some sort of way to use Felicia Day for good. Like the SETI@home program that crunches numbers for SETI in the spare capacity of your computer - maybe random tweets from Felicia Day's twitter account to people saying "the thing you are doing is making me sad. Please stop." World peace, guys. It is achievable.

Dave Gilbert is building an interesting little point-and-click publishing stable, isn't he? Which is not a bad thing at all.

Why is Gandhi always a bloodthirsty psychopath in Civ games? Is it an in-joke? He's there, calmly advocating mutual respect while his armies are chopping you into hamburger. No wonder the British left India...

Yes. yes, a thousand times yes. I'm good with L4D or L4D2...

I downloaded the XBox demo but haven't played it yet - played the PS3 version at the Eurogamer Expo today. It felt.. OK. It may just be that I recently played through Bionic Commando (bad idea; nostalgia is not your friend), but the environments looked a bit samey, and the jumping seemed to be a matter of holding onto something and then trying different left stick directions while pressing X until you leap to another handhold. I like the character design, and I think the level of involvement Andy Serkis had is interesting - Monkey's movement animations are nice, albeit a bit limited so far. Still, it's a post-apocalyptic version of Journey to the West, which is kind of awesome. It's a video game written by a quote-unquote serious writer, and I didn't get very far into the Monkey-and-Trip co-op, on which the game is likely to stand or fall. Will try the 360 demo and see how that goes... Oh, and .

The only thing I'd say on the Mesh is that you might come to resent the 310M graphics card - although the i5 processor will cover a lot of non-graphical applications very comfortably. I guess it depends how important gaming is to you, and whether by gaming you mean the latest games or indie games... For what it's worth, I just got an Alienware M11X and I like it a lot, but it's definitely a gamers' laptop - in the sense that it looks like it was designed in a wind tunnel by a serial killer. I mean, as if the serial killer was in the wind tunnel, shouting instructions to the design team over the noise. Once I toned down the LED lighting, though, the design started growing on me, and the backlit keyboard is pretty useful for typing in the dark. Which is lucky, because the screen is super reflective at anything but max brightness. However, I'm using it as a portable secondary laptop which I also play games on - so the 7-hour battery life with discrete graphics off and the small form factor are important to me (I have huge hands, so this is about the smallest keyboard I can type on). Im not sure I'd want it as a primary computer, because the screen is small (and the native resolution is crazy). I'd certainly want it hooked up to an external optical drive, keyboard and monitor at my home base. (The other thing is that the M11X R1s - with manual graphics switching and low-voltage Core 2 Duo processors - are dropping in price now the R2s are out. The Core 2 Duo SU7300 model, if you can get one which can be overclocked, doesn't seem to be giving away much in performance to the mobile i5s, so the premium is mainly on futureproofing, inasmuch as you can futureproof a laptop, and Optimus-driven automatic graphics switching) If you can afford it, dpp's Sony Vaio Z is awesome, but out of your price range. A compromise might be the HP Envy 14, which a friend who wanted to get back into PC gaming got recently - it's a much more "normal" laptop than the M11X - bigger screen, scrabble-tile keyboard, built-in optical drive and so on... I think a lot depends on what else you want it to do, though.

I thank Sid Meier for the regular autosaves in Civ 5. To be fair, I'm running it on an Alienware M11X R1, which has a processor/GFX card combination pretty well unknown outside... the Alienware M11X R1.

Three endings of Dead Rising 2: Case Zero, including the happy one, although I only got it by throwing my fellow zombie survivors to the shambling wolves. It's really faithful to the original - even down to the presumably deliberate slightly off dialogue. Barring some graphical polish and the combo weapons, really very little has changed. The combo weapons themselves are fun, but either too useful or not useful enough - combining a bucket and a power drill to make a death hat is fun, but putting a hat on a zombie that kills it is actually less amusing than putting a hat on a zombie that doesn't kill it. GAP advert douche Chuck Greene seems immediately less endearing than the burly and permanently bewildered Frank, although having him dress as a waitress remains disproportionately amusing. His dead-eyed Polar Express daughter promises to be a bit wearing over the course of a whole game, but maybe she won't have much of a role. Something that seems to have carried over from Dead Rising, which I really do appreciate, is that it's hard - not that hard moment to moment, but hard to achieve even a consciously limited set of objectives. The limited save points are a nice stiffener - three feels fairer than one without ruining the game's rigour, when in DR1 a bad save could basically force you to restart the whole game from the beginning - but the real killer is the inexorable march of time. I really like Inafune's refusal to make the perfect game easy, or even achievable, for the average player. It nicely captures the Romero vibe - the zombies are pretty slow and weak, but they force a choice between fast and safe in every interaction with the playing space, whereas the real threat comes from humans - not just the mad or evil ones, but from human intransigency, stupidity, weakness and, on occasion, lousy pathfinding. As a demo-you-pay-for, it's pretty successful, I think. After Fort Zombie I could do with some zipless zombie slaughter.

Bloody Hell. Trying to play Fort Zombie, which - and I know that this is not the point - isn't even that good, has made me want to throw my PC into the sea. I had to install an older version of XNA, update PhysX and do something unpleasant to .NET before it didn't immediately quit to desktop. Once it's actually running, it _still_ quits to desktop more than I would really like to. I know this isn't really my PC's fault, but Jesus.

Mike Patton voices the perspective character, Nathan Spencer - in fact, the voice cast is really impressive, if odd: Stephen Blum, Fred Tatasciore, Gabrielle Charteris... The "fuck it" dialogue seems to be an Easter Egg, of sorts. The standard dialogue is: Minion: There's no way around. You'll have to fight it. Spencer: My pleasure. But sometimes you get: Minion: There's no way around. You'll have to fuck it. Spencer: Um... But with the regular subtitles. I think that kind of messing around with the fourth wall worked nicely with Bionic Commando: Rearmed, which was a pretty loving reworking of Bionic Commando, but not as well in a quote-unquote realistic treatment.

I realise this is pretty late, but I finally got around to finishing Bionic Commando on the PS3 - and I can understand why I was so reluctant to do so. It really doesn't seem to like the player very much. For starters, the swinging. The bionic arm is almost certainly the most fun part of the game, as it should be, but you fire it by hitting the left trigger, and release it by releasing the left trigger. In Heavy Rain terms, this makes perfect sense - the gripper isn't a grabbling hook but a hand, and you have to keep your finger tense to simulate the hand continuing to grip. However, in practice it means that any significant time spent swinging from anything results in the game turning into an arthritis simulator. Then there's the odd momentum cancellation of the swinging. If you release at a particular point in your arc, you will shoot up and forwards. If you release a moment to either side of that point, you drop like a stone. In many parts of the game, dropping like a stone means falling into water, drowning and then having to experience a long, long load screen. There are also invisible walls, except instead of actual walls they are irradiated areas which kill you, often in mid-swing and without much warning. Where freedom of movement does exist, it is occasionally counterproductive - one section allows you to jump back accidentally to the previous section, with a deeply dull set of obstacles to negotiate again. The fact that the blue fog of radioactivity eerily resembles the blue smoke signalling weapons drops doesn't help much, either. So, the deadly floor and radioactive walls and ceilings are a bit of a pain, but you have to limit the map - ultimately, this is a linear fighter, not a sandbox. But, really, a surprising amount of proper care and expense has gone into expressing hatred for the player. First up, Mike Patton. He is not cheap, and has dedicated his considerable skills to making the perspective character a really unsympathetic douchebag. When he lectures another former bionic commando now turned terrorist about the consequences of violence (voiced by Andrea Zuckerman), it really highlights how he has been whooping and shouting "Nice one!" or "That had to hurt!" as he killed her allies. There's a difference between the player celebrating a good kill and the perspective character doing the same, I think - because to the perspective character these are still people, even if they're the bad guys, if the game is being played straight. (Incidentally, the bad guys have the most remarkably impolite barks - basically, if you like being called names, this is worth getting.) Except that the game isn't entirely played straight. Before one boss battle Patton smirks "Is that a really big health bar, or are you just pleased to see me?" - breaking the fourth wall for no purpose at all except to make a nob joke. At the same boss, your Cortana (voiced by Spike Spiegel) sometimes and apparently at random substitutes "fuck it" for "fight it" as your helpful boss battle instructions. Maybe by then the grim and grittiness was all getting a bit much for Grin, or they were starting to realise that things were getting out of hand, but it punches a hole straight through immersion - if RAD Spencer, Bionic Commando, knows he is in a video game, why is he bothering? If he doesn't, why is he acting like a teenager playing Halo on XBox Live? Certainly after that the game starts to mess with your expectation of what a game ought to do, especially in the sense of be fun. The penultimate boss battle involves waiting for an invulnerable enemy to stop slowly circling you while shouting in a ridiculous fake accent and attack, dodging the attack and using a specific attack on him, about ten times in a row. The climactic battle is a set of QTEs. Said battle being against . It's just nonsensical. Although admittedly only as nonsensical as the two other bionic characters who appear only in cutscenes, or the late revelation that . It's a shame, because the music is atmospheric, the environments are very pretty, if a little repetitive, and it does very nicely convey the sense of the murdered city as both a tragic graveyard and an awesome playground for a man who has been in prison for five years. It's a great argument, I think, for the role of writers in games: I've loved games with bigger mechanical faults, but in this case the script and the plot twists were so alienating that I, and I think many reviewers at the time, just didn't feel warm enough towards it to give it a break. Ahem. Long writeup of an old game.

I've ... kind of finished Scott Pilgrim (as in, levelled to 16 with the four characters and ), so I'm pretty much in line for some more 2D goodness. I've been interested in this for a while... looking forward to playing it.

Back ontopic, this was apparently partly Bryan Lee O'Malley's idea - the idea for the game (for which he has a creative consultant credit) was to make it feel like a goofy movie adaptation of the early 90s, when studios didn't really have a handle on games and they were not really seen as part of the revenue stream. So, you'd get the film farmed out to some programmers who didn't know the IP, and they'd create something tangentially related to the film. ET is obviously the most horrifying example of this, but it also created the SNES Tim Burton Batman tie-in. Whereas the Ocean Software Batman adaptation for European machines was remarkably faithful, the SNES version had Batman firing harpoons at robots and was by all accounts awesome.

I have to confess that on my first playthrough I relied on the Brayko AI - specifically, waiting until he ran into a wall and then repeatedly shooting him in the head. That was a stealth and pistol character - the second time I specialised in SMGs, and basically just sprayed him to death on his first run from the stage. Not terribly sophisticated. The boss fights in general felt like a bit of a letdown - partly because they are alive for longer than the grunts, so their AI has more time to do stupid things (I ended up playing peek-a-boo with , stepping out from behind a door, shooting him in the head with a pistol and then stepping back in while my chain shot recharged, as he stood politely outside the closet I was hiding in, telling me he was going to kill me). Also, they are either pretty simple or pretty much impossible, depending on your skill approach and the equipment you have with you. I blogged a review of this, the one-liner of which was "Vampire the Masquerade: Bondlines". It's not fatally buggy so much as incomplete - sudden shifts in animation, inexplicable AI, a mix of rush and repetition, and occasional back-to-the-last-checkpoint camera bugs or cover bugs. In the end, especially once I'd broken the combat system, I played the action sections as basically a minigame full of minigames, and treated the conversations and relationship management as the actual game. You probably do need a couple of playthroughs to see the variation, but it is pretty impressive. I found that I could engineer boss battles with former allies, and that decisions like the order I took missions in had consequences. Also, at one point I think I might have buddied up with someone quite a lot like Osama bin Ladin. At the price it's getting to be now, though, having not sold nearly as well as expected, I'm thinking it's actually worth taking a crack at if you're prepared to tolerate its quirks. Then again, I played Bloodlines straight through about twelve times, so you may not want to trust that opinion.

If it helps, syntheticgerbil, that isn't why I think less of you at this point at all. I mean, I'm very sorry that friends of yours liked Juno - I understand that must have been very traumatic for you, and you were absolutely right to cut them out of your life. I'm very sorry, also, that some more people you know are letting you down by being enthusiastic about some comic books. I hope that when you explain what happened to the people who liked Juno, they will dial it down. However, I don't think this is an appropriate or therapeutic safe space to deal with those feelings of betrayal. On the plus side, the experience of being called Mr. Defensive, without apparent irony, by somebody who has just written: has kicked my day off with a smile.

Patters Fair enough - in essence, you're reviewing the audience. You don't want to talk about the game, so there's not a huge amount to add in a thread at least notionally about the game. Likewise, if I'd known that syntheticgerbil was an angry comic book afficionado, whose fundamental antipathy towards Scott Pilgrim and anyone who failed to slag it off (with or without the experience of reading it) was part of an ongoing beef with its US publisher, I probably would have approached that one differently. Cigol - I can see where people are coming from on the slowness - there's a point, specifically around the Shopping District (world 1, level 2) where if you're still doling out 4 points of damage with a strong attack it feels kind of treacly. That was frustrating until I worked out that the the thing to do is to head to the bookshop as soon as you had $24.95 and buy the strength-boosting book. That, and the ability to dash-attack enemies on the ground (annoyingly absent from Stills' move set) really speeds up the game. On my third run through I cheated by grinding between World 3, where you can pick up a lot of coins, and the Shopping District until I could afford to buy the bionic arm in Wallace's secret shop, which turned worlds 4 to 6 basically into a massacre. (I'm afraid that the fact that this can be described in a manner morphologically indistinguishable from Zelda is, for me, quite gratifying. I may be part of the problem). The art and the soundtrack of the game are, I think, quite interesting - more interesting in many ways than the gameplay. In the same way that Edgar Wright is on the arty side of pop culture - not that he's making Wild Strawberries, but he's a kind of populist auteur in a pre-Spiderman Sam Raimi sort of a way - Scott Pilgrim vs the World: the Game is kind of what I imagine a AAA art game might look like. Or rather what one approach to a AAA art game might be; playing it and Limbo back to back got me thinking about how they both represent different approaches to a highly stylised visual and sonic approach which is consciously out of step with the current SRS BSNS approach - realistic worlds, carefully researched weapons, orchestral scoring.

Defensiveness. You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

I'd still be curious to see if Milo and Kate actually comes out as a game. I've played with Kinect a bit (although in a very controlled environment), and what I was able to do was a lot more basic than the stuff in that first demo - I have a hunch that Molyneux is absolutely sincere in his desire to see it released, but that it's running at the edges of what Kinect can do under optimal conditions, and quirks in people's voices/living rooms/competence to set it up might cause problems which Microsoft are understandably reluctant to see reported in a big game launch early on in the technology. Molyneux has a reputation for making statements about Lionhead/MGSE games which don't entirely stack up in the final product, which might make him seem like a salesman or an idealist, I guess depending on where you stand. I think Milo and Kate's useful, at least - because it's making a case for Kinect games which aren't variations on sports games without a Wiimote, Nintendogs without a stylus or Rock Band: Human Leg Edition. If you put a simplified version of this kind of mechanic into, say an Alpha Protocol sort of game, and got it working, it could do some interesting gameplay things.

So, are we still avoiding spoilers? At this point I guess the US people have had a chance to see it... Yeah, the editing is interesting - the absurd quick cuts (somebody comments on Scott's hair, cut back to Scott wearing a hat) and the Reservoir Dogsy cuts where the same conversation is carried on through cuts across several different scenes are quite familiar from Edgar Wright's direction on Spaced. But the fights scenes are very consciously not cut in a Paul WS Anderson or Michael Bay way. I saw a preview of SPvTW in London, and I was reminded of a screener I'd seen for Transformers a few years ago. Everyone in that was hoping for an awesome experience, and there were moments where that promise was delivered, but a lot of the action took place in a rapid sequence of crash zooms and quick cuts, to the point that you didn't have much of an idea what was happening - and then you got a pull back and a slo-mo sequence of robots jumping across each other's lines of fire (like idiots) to relocate you in the scene. Compare that with the Lucas Lee fight, where the camera basically stays focused on Michael Cera, with attacks coming in from the sides of the screen.

You're absolutely right. What sort of a cock am I to suggest that any familiarity with a written work at all would be useful in criticising it? And what sort of a bandwagon-jumping assclown must I be to have read a book? Honestly, I disgust myself. Funnily enough, segueing neatly across media, Linda Holmes of NPR noticed a tendency in negative reviews of the film to review the audience rather than the film itself. For reference, Patters, we've played together a fair few times. I don't think I'm illiterate, although I can't type for toffee during Left 4 Dead, and I'd hope you didn't come away from that thinking that I was an illiterate hypocrite. I like the books. I enjoyed the film. I'm enjoying playing the game. It feels like a fairly rare example of a properly interrelated set of media. Possibly it's just an age thing - as Linda Holmes points out in that NPR article, the people who actually experienced 8-bit gaming as an event in their lives rather than a piece of learned cultural history are going to feel different about reference to it. I'm happy to accept that it's not your bag without making a judgement about you as a person.

I didn't mean to offend, but I must respectfully disagree. You moved onto speculation about the essential qualities of the text here: As has been suggested, you might be in a better place to condemn Scott Pilgrim's representation of video gamers once you've become more familiar with the work. If you don't want to gain that familiarity, that's fine, but what you have to say about it is going to be pretty limited - limited, in fact, to metacommentary. Back on the video game - if I'd been hesitating about recommending it, which at $9.99 I don't think I am, my mind would have been made up by something I noticed just now. At one point, you find yourself fighting wild wolverines (not a huge spoiler, I hope), which attack using Wolverine's berzerker barrage move from the Capcom X-Men arcade games. That realisation was, I think, the highlight of my week.

Hello, all - I've been vaguely around for a while, on the forums and in multiplayer with Thumbs people - I didn't realise that I hadn't posted to say hello. I'm Daniel, so the username is less than original. I play games, write about games when I can, live in London. That's... about it. My entire life. Oy.

Although Alyx was scene-breakingly indestructable - the quality of her animation and writing made you care for her safety, but that solicitude was undermined when she could be slashed repeatedly by mawmen or riddled with bullets and be almost totally undamaged. I guess that has to be balanced against the frustration of having an AI partner who dies as easily as a "regular" human NPC, and forces the player to restart the level each time. Possibly one interesting thing you could do with a telekinetic AI partner is have systems that explain a greater survival capacity without the Vance damage soak effect kicking in - by attackers being automatically pushed back or projectiles deflected on a stochastic but not wholly predictable basis, say? So the player is incentivised to protect her in case of a(n) (un)lucky shot, but the consequences of minor failure would not usually be an immediate restart... Sorry, wandering off again. The thought of a new world as detailed as Rapture, but with non-murderous people in, is pretty interesting.