Blue Man Sings The Whites

Tom Clancy Presents Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X. By Tom Clancy (Xbox 360)

It’s an arcade flight sim in a contemporary setting. And it wants to be Ace Combat 6 so badly it hurts, right down to the pre-mission target-percentage breakdown, the post-mission cinematic replay and the three camera view options, each practically identical to its equivalent in AC6.

Here are the things H.A.W.(ks – Ed) does better than Ace Combat 6: more planes (although they all feel pretty much exactly the same to fly), external fly-by “assistance off” view that looks hugely cool (but is completely unnecessary and massively difficult to control), your plane carries anti-missile flares (not that you’ll have any left when you need them because some idiot mapped “deploy flares” to a click of the control stick, something that’s incredibly easy to do accidentally when engaged in intense flight manoeuvres) no portentous and jarring cut-scenes about the hideousness of war (instead there’s a staggeringly nonsensical plot about a corporation as lacking in business-sense as they are in morals), moderately groovy R6: Vegas/CoD4 XP-O-Gain level system (which mostly only unlocks new planes which, as previously stated, aren’t much more than re-skins), looks hugely pretty in places (but extremely ropy in others – the Chicago level with the skyscrapers jarringly plonked down on what looks like a perfectly flat Google Earth map will take you back to the worst sins of mid-nineties flight-simmmery) and its whole campaign is playable in co-op (actually, that one’s pretty much an unreserved yay).

Here are the things it does worse than AC6: smaller maps with smaller, almost linear missions. One of my favourite levels in Ace Combat sees you asked to assist a massive amphibious assault on a coastal town. There are three different allied forces landing in three different places facing different compositions of enemy, and who you choose to primarily support in what way is up to you. Fly a mud-moving A-10 Warthog with iron bombs to easily take out enemy tank formations? Or air-to-ground missles for knocking out priority targets from a safe distance? Either way, you’ll be vulnerable to enemy interceptors and too slow to effectively support all three fronts. Go with a multi-role plane like the F-16 or the Mirage 2000 which’ll let you carve through enemy close air support bombers like a multimillion dollar supersonic knife through butter but is somewhat brittle in the face of ground fire? Should you take the risk of attacking the well-defended town in order to secure its airfield, giving you a base near the front-line where you can land to get repaired and re-armed?

All that light tactical layer is absent from H.A.W.(ks. – Ed). In your first playthough, you’ll have a lot of planes to choose from but generally only one weapons load and one approach to any given scenario. There’s no landing at carriers or airbases, no chance to change your payload mid-mission, no trading off effectiveness against X sort of target with effectiveness against Y. It’s pretty much just a shooting-gallery – hostile unit appears in front of you, press A to fire a missile, done, done and I’m onto the next one.

There are tons of smaller niggles. Hard mode is too easy (so I presume you could finish Normal mode without actually looking at the screen) while Elite mode doesn’t, y’know, make the enemy AI any more dangerous it just artificially and unfairly limits the number of weapons you can carry (which wouldn’t be as much of an issue except that, as previously mentioned, there’s no way of re-arming mid-mission). The targeting system is fiddly and thoughtless – if I’ve got AAMs armed, why on Earth does it let me lock onto ground targets that I can’t hit? And why oh why oh why is “change weapon” mapped to the D-pad? Did nobody twig that when you want to switch to, say, dogfighting missles you might possibly be in, f’rinstance, a dogfight and so not really be overly keen to LET GO OF THE HUGGING CONTROLS?

If the flight scenes in Top Gun mildly arouse you, you’ll have some fun with H.A.W.(ks – Ed). Me? They do and I did. It’s not a bad game by any means, it’s just shallow, workmanlike, a bit bland and lacking in charm. It’s like a tribute band – the songs are still good but the magic’s not quite there. H.A.W.(ks – Ed) is the Bootleg Ace. It’s the Counterfeit Combat. It’s the Tesco Value Ace Combat 6.

With an unnecessarily silly name.

John Woo Presents John Woo’s Stranglehold By John Woo (Xbox 360)

The graphics are ropy, the controls are slightly worse, its difficulty is up and down more than a manically depressed junkie kangaroo on a space hopper and it’s a pony that barely manages one trick. And that’s the exact same trick as Max Payne’s, only – and I appreciate this will be hard to believe – with a worse story. If I’d paid full price at release I’d have been a) insane and b) furious. But as a cheap, throwaway b-movie title it hits the spot. Stranglehold is the first game in history where the stuff you can do in-game is cooler than the stuff you’re shown doing in cut-scenes. The first time I slid down a banister, shot a sign that fell on a mook’s head, blew up a second mook by taking out the barrel of propane he was slightly foolishly hiding behind, then dove onto a wheelie-trolley and rolled across a courtyard shooting two more mooks in the face I’d pretty much had enough fun for the fiver the game set me back. And the massively over-the-top spinny-around-with-doves-flying-up-everywhere special move made me laugh every single time I did it. For that, I’m willing to forgive semi-frequent moments of frustration brought on by the lack of a Left 4 Dead-style “Spin 180 Degrees” button and insufficient information as to the location of the THOUSANDS OF ENEMIES currently shooting your wanger off.

Stranglehold is rubbish. But it’s extravagant, operatic, cheerfully stupid, generally good fun rubbish. It’s rubbish with the courage to be rubbish as loudly and forcefully as it can. Much like Face/Off, actually.

Russell T. Davis Presents Russell T. Davis’ Doctor Who Easter Special By Russell T. Davis (Alright, you can stop now – Ed) (Telly)

It was alright, wasn’t it? The Lara Croft wannabe pseudo-assistant was good fun, the visual of a London bus crashed in the middle of a desert wilderness was cool to the point that you strongly suspect that RTD started with that image and worked back to find a story that semi-justified it, I liked that the ugly menacing-looking aliens actually turned out to be innocent bystanders and the story rollocked along at a decent old pace even if it didn’t make a lot of sense and fell apart a bit in the final third. No change there, then. So not a boundary, but a controlled single that keeps the scoreboard ticking over. Still looking forward to seeing what Who will turn into in fresh hands, mind.

Nobody Presents Nobody’s Empire: Total War By Nobody (You’re fired – Ed) (PC)

Medieval: Total War is one of my favourite games ever, I’ve read every Sharpe book ever written (they are, after all, Mills And Boon for boys), and there’s nothing I like more in movies than some buckles being suitably swashed. So why oh why oh why hasn’t this game clicked with me? Am I just a bit Total Warred out? The real-time battles have a very different feel to Rome or either of the Medievals. Those games depended on you winning the scissors-paper-stone-lizard-Spock matchups (archers beat everything at range, everything beats archers up close, spears beat cavalry, cavalry beats swords, swords beat spears) and making practical use of flank and rear attacks on already-engaged units. Outflanking remains important in Empire, but its battles seem to primarily hinge on your ability to concentrate fire. Almost everyone’s got guns, so all things being equal what you’re trying to do is get two of your units shooting at one of the enemy’s. If you can do that, the opposition will rout before you and your freed-up soldiers can then start shooting at the next enemy unit, continuing a virtuous circle that will eventually see you “rolling up” the other fellow’s battle-line. It’s a different tactical challenge, and an interesting one, but for some reason the whole package isn’t quite grabbing me.
 
There are lots of little problems with it, but nothing I can see as being The Sticking Point. The naval battles are fiddly but easily-skipped. The battlefields seem a lot more varied than they used to be, with buildings that you can garrison, but occupied buildings are such easy prey for enemy artillery that they’re not remotely worth the bother 90% of the time. In the strategic layer, I don’t feel like I’m getting enough feedback on the socio-economic situation in my territories making it hard to determine which cities are performing well and which are on the brink of anarchy, although this may simply be down to not yet having spent enough time learning the nuances of the game.

Can’t put my finger on it. All I know is that this weekend I spent nine hours fiddling with a game I’ve had for six months and three quid’s worth of tower defence shenanigans rather than bestriding the nations of the Earth like a colossus. That can’t be right, can it?

Werner Herzog Presents Werner He… (*gunshot*) Grizzly Man (DVD)
 
Grizzly Man is a documentary about Timothy Treadwell, a failed actor who spent 13 summers living among bears in Alaska before he and his girlfriend were killed by a bear.

(Much as with Steve “Man Who Teases Dangerous Animals For A Living Killed By Dangerous Animal He Was Teasing” Irwin it’s such a horribly predictable fate I’m not even sure that it counts as ironic.)

It’s fascinating stuff with some beautiful footage of the Alaskan wilderness in general and bears in particular. The opening scene, with Treadwell talking the camera, describing himself as a “gentle warrior” who’s “earned the trust” of the bears and will never be hurt by them leads you to think that he’s going to be portrayed as an absolutely colossal tool. In fact the film gives a much more nuanced, interesting picture of a divisive, remarkable, quixotic and thoroughly tragic figure.

A few of the interviews seem weirdly forced, even staged – every time the guy who did the autopsy on what was left of Timothy Treadwell’s body is on camera for instance, or the scene where Herzog listens to the audio recording of Treadwell’s last moments. But that aside, it’s a terrific film that I’d thoroughly recommend.

Alright. Alright. I promised not to bang on any more about how awesome Rock Band is. But when I said that, I had no idea  what songs were going to be made available for download next week.

Richard motherhugging Thompson. Oh, HELL YES.

It’s a slightly odd choice of song on the face of it – The Way That It Shows probably isn’t even one of the three best tracks from a fifteen-year-old album that most RT fans don’t regard as a classic (although personally I like it a lot). But it’s a decent selection for playing in Rock Band – it’s got a great bassline, I think that vocal will be surprisingly good fun (particularly the practically-clenched-teeth wailing in the second chorus) and it’s one of the relatively rare Thompson studio tracks to feature a big guitar solo.

There really seems to be a difference in the approach to downloadable tracks for Guitar Hero: World Tour and Rock Band. Neversoft seem to think it’s more important to chase “scoops” and grab brand new songs of the new albums of name acts. Harmonix tend to focus more on having a wide representation of musical styles and, y’know. Good songs.

Obviously it’s a business decision above all, but to my eyes it’s a good one. Harmonix understand music and care about music. Between them, the first two Guitar Hero and Rock Band games must have introduced me to a dozen bands who’d previously either passed me by altogether or that I’d ignored because they played music I didn’t think I was into. It puts a huge smile on my face to think that someone, somewhere, is about to get exactly that same experience with a semi-obscure sixty year-old folk-rock guitarist who just happens to be one of the finest songwriters British music has ever produced.

Seriously. How cool is that?

(Although would a three-pack with Shoot Out The Lights and Can’t Win or bitterest-song-in-history When The Spell Is Broken have killed you? Also: seeing as you’re now apparently putting out tracks specifically to please me, can we have Another Girl, Another Planet next? Or a three-pack of monumentally stupid eighties stadium-goth shoutery by The Mish with Tower Of Strength, Wasteland and Deliverance? And some Up To Here-Fully Completely era Tragically Hip PLZKTHNXBAI!)

In this thread on amiable nerdhaven Be Excellent To Each Other, the splendid Dr. Lave from the doubly splendid Skeptobot questions the established wisdom that it’s a rarity for the average player to see a game through to the end. After a little consideration, I realised that on the FunSquareSuperPlus alone I’ve finished about a dozen games to Lave’s eminently sensible “If You’ve Seen The Credits It’s Finished” criteria in the last twelve months. Which I feel is pretty decent going.

I’m probably fractionally more persistent than most in this area – an unfinished game will niggle at me for an extended period (it took over a month of regular attempts to polish off Flirtin’ With Disaster and finish Rock Band’s solo guitar tour on Hard, f’rinstance) but particularly capricious or tedious game design can easily see me off, and with so many other shiny distractions available it seems ridiculous to endure frustration for any length of time. I feel no guilt at all for dipping into the marvellous resource available at GameFAQs to get me past particularly obtuse puzzles or aggravating difficulty-spikes. If that fails, well, there’s a wonderful feeling of liberation that comes with the realisation “hey, I’m just not enjoying this” and switching the offending game off for good. Mirror’s Edge and I are currently undergoing a trial separation based primarily on its fondness for unfair and irritating combat, f’rinstance. And I never got past the end of the first chapter of Neverwinter Nights after it was clear to me that a double-cross was about to take place but I was given absolutely no way of warning the party primarily involved. When said party then wanted to send me on a long-winded errand arising directly from said double-cross, I uninstalled the game in a fit of pique.

So. Here’s the full list of every EggBox game I’ve conquered over the past year then, with micro-reviews appended for your delectation, delight or at least fleeting distraction. Ranks are assigned on a Capcom tip, with a scale that runs from F for games which are functionally broken through to A for a slice of fried gold. The elusive S-rank is reserved for works of transcendent excellence, genuinely essential experiences that I’d recommend to anyone without qualification or hesitation.

In rough chronological order, then:

Crackdown
(Completed the story)
Still only got 99 of the 100 bloody agility orbs, though, and this generally excellent sandbox-em-up was marred slightly by the not-fun vehicle bits, unreliable camera, one-trick missions and touchy cops. Still, bounding from skyscraper to skyscraper like a heavily armed cyborg facist super-kangaroo was hours of fun, and “popping up” from behind terrain like an Apache gunship never got old. When dealing with large groups of n’er-do-wells, I’d hide behind cover then jump thirty feet straight up, lock on to an enemy, fire off a sniper bullet / missile at the top of the leap then drop back to safety giggling like a loon before their mates could shoot back. Triffic. Rank: A

Virtua Tennis 3
(Ranked 1 in World Tour)
The best thing about VT3 is that when you manage to set your feet and pull off a full-power groundstroke, the resulting shot genuinely feels like it should have a verb like “rips”, “unleashes”, “thumps” or “crashes” attached to it. It’s a game that repeatedly, pathetically drove me to make Tiger Tim fist-pumps at my TV as, f’rinstance, my heavy serve would see my opponent forced to float a diffident return allowing me to punch a volleyed winner into the open court. It’s a satisfying, nicely tactical game of tennis, it’s stuffed with fun, borderline-bonkers minigames and it had cutscenes featuring famous players who all looked absolutely terrifying. The cold, dead eyes of Zombie Lindsay Davenport haunt my sleep to this day. Rank: B

Ace Combat 6
(Completed all operations of all missions on Easy and Medium difficulty)
And I’m about halfway through Hard. It’s Outrun: The Dogfighting Game. All the thrills of barrelling about the sky at Ludicrous Speed blowing stuff up, none of the tedious realism to get in the way. Tearing through canyons at several zillion miles an hour chucking rockets at stuff with Cheap Trick or Gustav Holst in the background put a coathanger-wide smile on my face. Stupid, portentous, unintentionally hilarious cutscenes aside it might be my favourite game on the Eggbox outside of the towering monolith that is Rock Band. Rank: A

Guitar Hero III
(Five-starred all songs in main tour on medium difficulty)
If I never hear Raining Blood again it’ll be too soon. Could have done without so much forum-kiddie-pleasing heavy metal rubbish, could have done without the maHOOsive difficulty spike about 8 songs from the end, could have done without the casual misogyny, could have really, really, really done without the boss battles. Great guitar peripheral, though. Rank: B

Project Sylpheed
(Completed story missions, medium difficulty)
Or “Project Slaphead” as it rapidly became known. It’s a space-based action flight-sim – Ace Combat with lasers. To say that PS is a visually busy game is like saying that the England batting lineup is a bit below par. It looks like an explosion during a Jean-Michel Jarre gig at a disco ball manufacturer’s convention. That’s being held in a fireworks factory. Run by Martin Fry, still wearing his gold lame suit. On November the fifth. During a thunderstorm. Whilst seven volcanoes are simultaneously erupting in the background. In a… you get the idea. It’s also very anime. Very very anime indeed. This may be a selling-point for some people, but I’m not one of them. Within 15 minutes I sincerely wished lingering, painful death on every moronic, wittering, whining, mopy, stupidly-haircutted fourteen-year-old character in the game. Still, when you’re barrelling around space launching umpty-thrumpty thousand missiles in one eye-shattering salvo Project Slaphead is great, if a bit up-and-down in terms of difficulty. Rank: B

Call Of Duty 4
(Completed single-player, medium difficulty)
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder: The Game. For all that sandbox gaming is en vogue, there’s still a lot to be said for a really well-done rollercoaster ride. And that’s exactly what CoD4’s single-player mode is, so many ups and downs and loops and spins and adrenaline-pumping thrills only a pedantic moron would complain that it’s completely on rails. It’s got a strong story told in a novel, arresting way with several tremendous set-pieces – the entire sniper level and the eerie, weirdly affecting turn as the gunner on an AC-130 gunship being particular standouts. Rank: A

Dead Rising
(Completed main game, overtime mode, achieved “true” ending)
The first game I played on the 360 that would have been genuinely impossible on the previous generation of consoles. When it’s good it’s very very good. When it’s bad it’s horrid. The brilliant setting – a shopping mall teeming with zombies – and by-turns hilarious and terrifying mood is thoroughly undermined by a mental save system, rubbish controls and several baffling design decisions. The sequel’s just been announced, and with a bit of a nip and a tuck and an annoyingbitsectomy it could be a stone-cold classic rather than just a very good game. So long as it still lets me dress up my burly macho chump of a character in a teddy bear mask, floral print dress and slingbacks I’ll be happy. It certainly made all the puzzled looks NPCs kept throwing at me in cutscenes 300% funnier. Rank: B

Guitar Hero II
(Five-starred all songs in main tour on medium difficulty)
Its existence is justified by the presence of Sweet Child O’ Mine and the glorious final level with Freebird followed by just the perfect game-ending cutscene but the tracklist isn’t quite as good as the original game taken as a whole. This year I’m going to take my newly Rock Band-honed fifth-button skills and finish this bad boy on Hard. Rank: A

Conan
(Completed, medium difficulty)
It’s God Of War, but nowhere near as good. Bought for about seven quid to tide me over for the three days of my week off before Rock Band arrived. Featuring the delightful combination of slightly stodgy, imprecise controls and ledges that’ll happily let you plummet to your death without pause or warning. Further featuring comfortably the cheapest, most hateful, most hair-tearingly frustrating final boss I’ve encountered in 25 years of gaming. Rank: C

Rock Band
(Completed solo drum tour on easy, vocal tour on medium, guitar tour on medium and hard, band inducted to Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame)
“We’ve been The Red Winkiez, you’ve been terrific. Thank you very much and goodnight!” Rank: S

GTA IV
(Completed story missions)
A game I admired more than I liked. The story generally didn’t mesh well with the mechanics, the cars were uniformly horrible to drive, it wasn’t as funny as previous games in the series, the mission checkpointing was a bit of a mess and my GOD, did the clingy whiny friends thing needed to go. However, the gunplay was generally good, there were a couple of storytelling moments that genuinely stirred the blood and it’s impossible not to be impressed by the depth, scale and spectacle of the gameworld. On balance, it’s a good game just nowhere near as good as it might have been and nowhere near as good as its two immediate predecessors. Rank: B

FIFA 09
(Finished Be A Pro mode, won International Cup with England to become a National legend)
I’ve spent the majority of my time with FIFA on the play-as-one-bloke Be A Pro mode, and the longer I’ve played it the more niggles and irritations have revealed themselves. Chief among them is a crippling bug that seems to make players disappear from your club side over the course of a season. This got so bad that at the end of my year in Milan I was playing two reserve strikers and seven defenders, because Kaka, Ronaldinho, Pirlo, Ambrosini, Emerson, Gatusso,and Antonini had all inexplicably gone walkabout. And contrary to all expectation, Manchester City weren’t involved. Despite promises there’s no sign whatsoever of a patch to sort this out, which is hardly a surprise given that the Madden series had lingering issues that would last for 3-4 years at a time despite every forum dedicated to the game anywhere ever being chock-full of justifiably hacked-off gamers grumbling/screeching about it. Rank: B

1 – Fallout 3

Yes, alright, I probably ought to make some effort to explain why it’s my favourite game of the year. I’ve already covered the nuts and bolts in my last post, and there’s not a lot more to add there. So instead I’m just going to tell the story of what happened in a little over two hours’ worth of play last night.

Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin.

Starting from the ruins of a Washington DC suburb now turned into a stronghold for Mad Max-style leather-and-mohawk raiders, I set off south-south-west toward a tower-block I could see jutting up out of the lone and level wilderness on the horizon. Almost immediately I ran into a bunch of heavily-armed well-entrenched fanatics in power armour who told me that they were outcasts from another bunch of heavily-armed, well-entrenched fanatics in power armour who weren’t sufficiently heavily-armed, well-entrenched or fanatical enough for the outcasts’ liking. The folks I was talking to were on a mission to preserve what technology still remained in the wasteland, but I figured that I was doing a decent enough job preserving all the (mostly shooty) bits of tech I’d found so I bid them a cheery farewell and went on my merry way.

On the way south, my careful and quiet progress was interrupted by a wild-eyed fellow who came racing up to tell me that a bunch of raiders had rigged him with explosives. Never one to turn down a) the opportunity to help my fellow man or b) free explosives, I had a pop at trying to defuse the pack. Unfortunately, it was beyond my skill and before I could offer apology the poor schlub ran away back into the wilderness to take his chances with the mutant mad bears.

Arriving at the tower-block, I discovered that it was an enclave of insular bigots led by a spectacularly unpleasant former mercenary who spent his days sitting on his balcony with a sniper rifle taking potshots at passersby. I expressed my disapproval at his lifestyle choices by shooting him square in the noggin, stealing his clothes and his sniper rifle and chucking his corpse off the balcony.

It’s the only language they understand.

From the tower I turned east, walked past the headless body lying on the ground in its pants and started to make my way back across country toward the city. Walking along a ridge, I saw motion in the near-distance and whipped out my spanking new sniper rifle to get a proper dekko. It appeared that some citizen of the wasteland had bumped into a pack of four vicious mutated giant mole rats, and before I could get a bead on the creatures the poor sod went down under the combined weight of their attacks. With his fate sealed there was no point in wasting precious ammunition, so with a philosophical “rather you than me chum” shrug I shouldered the gun and ambled onwards.

On the outskirts of the city, I found a little community protected by rusty barbed-wire and barriers made of timber and corrugated iron. The only person in sight was a small boy who told me that he was annoyed that his father was making him marry the daughter of the only other family in the settlement. The lad wasn’t sure why, but it didn’t seem right for him to marry the daughter of his father’s brother. No, it probably isn’t but given that the land’s barren, the water’s poison and getting out and meeting other people means risking getting wired to explode by lunatic raiders, getting savaged by mutant mad bears or getting eaten by mutant giant mole rats, I couldn’t hand on heart say it definitely wasn’t the lesser of several evils. I said a slightly uncomfortable goodbye and picked up my journey east, making my way past a seemingly largely-intact cola bottling plant and paused only to use my mad technical skills help out a bloke with a faulty robot (and to get given some power cells for my laser rifle in return) before continuing on into Washington DC proper.

The wilderness was dangerous, but the streets were even more so. I had to pick my way carefully through the rubble and ruins playing a tense game of hide-and-sneak with unnervingly large packs of raiders as I carried on east. Every once in a while I picked off an isolated enemy with a sniped shot to clear my path and eventually I reached my goal – the building that’s spoken of as the last surviving library in Washington.

I could have stopped there. But I realised my wanderings had taken me as close as I’d ever been to what was rumoured to be the largest town in the DC wilderness. Given that I’d come this far I’d be an idiot not to investigate it, wouldn’t I?  So, onward. A short while later my radio picked up a long-forgotten Chinese propaganda station, presumably set up for the war two centuries ago and still broadcasting the message that the Alaskan front had been lost and that the US’ defeat was inevitable. The signal sputtered and faded away as I passed into the shadow of the imposing walls of the Pentagon, still largely intact and now home to the bunch of heavily-armed, well-entrenched fanatics that the previous group of heavily-armed, well-entrenched fanatics I’d run into had splintered off from.

Even with applied cajoling, these pantfish wouldn’t open the door to me so with a hearty “screw you, then” I went for a quick swim across the narrowest part of the Potomac. At that point the river was only maybe fifty metres wide and I was able to get across quickly enough to suffer no significant sickness from my exposure to the highly radioactive water, allowing me to reach the Jefferson Memorial more-or-less intact. However, the Memorial appeared to be absolutely crawling with giant, green-skinned, automatic-weapon-armed super mutants so I stayed low and hugged the coast, giving the place as wide a berth as humanly possible. I’d almost made it to safety when one inconveniently sharp-eyed sod spotted me, so I put a couple of bullets in his head and made a run for it over the bridge to the river’s eastern bank. There, I pretty much stumbled smack into a huge dust-up between a trader caravan and a nest of super mutants, and I dived in at the tail end of proceedings for some cheap experience points and cheaper salvage (which I cheekily flogged to the bloke who’d just done most of the killing, natch) before parting from my new chums and strolling over a slight rise to see the end of my journey – a  beached and broken aircraft carrier that a band of inventive settlers had cobbled together into massive, glorious rusting hulk of a city.

Dunno, does that sound appealing at all?

OK, OK, that’s it I promise. I won’t bring the flippin’ game up again. Cub’s honour.

3 – Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved 2
Seems bizarre saying this of a game whose graphics solely consist of little neon outlines of 2D geometric shapes, but GW2 is definitely the title that’s benefitted most from our recent upgrade to an Enorm-O-Telly. Before, it was merely a brilliant, addictive old-school arcade style twin-stick shooter which improved over its predecessor in pretty much every conceivable way. Yeah. That’s all it was. On the big screen, though, it’s even easier for the game to suck you into the zone, into a place where you’re no longer giving any conscious thought to controlling your ship and playing almost entirely using the Force. It’s even easier to get swallowed up into its absurdly simple, absurdly beautiful abstract world, particularly in Pacifism mode where your ship has no guns and you’re focussed entirely on mere survival.

I hesitate to say this, but it’s true – on the Enorm-O-Telly Geometry Wars 2 is the closest thing I’ve ever had to a psychedelic experience. Yes, I know, I need to get out more.

On top of that, GW2 was the first game in ages to make score-attack gaming compelling for me, which it did through the simple but brilliant move of making the high-score of the person above you on your friends list permanently visible in the top right of the screen. This means that you always have another seemingly achievable target to aim for making it difficult to turn the game off till you’ve passed that mark and promoting entertainingly petty, tit-for-tat rivalries (damn you, Numjerlunker! Damn you to HELL! Stupid young people with their stupid young people’s reflexes) with your FunSquare Live nerd-o-chums.

With the exception of the magnificent Pac-Man Championship Edition it’s the best original game on the Live Arcade service by miles, and for 800 points (about £6, give or take) it’s an absolute bargain to boot.

2 – Rock Band / Rock Band 2
Talking of bargains, Rock Band plus its sequel/expansion pack/general tidy-up of rough edges cost a hundred and seventy quid plus I don’t-even-want-to-think-how-much on downloadable additional songs.

I realise that may not fit everybody’s idea of a bargain.

But for that Christ-HOW-much? you’re effectively getting at least three full (and absolutely massive – more than 150 songs between the two disks) games in one – a Singstar-esque karaoke game (with better music than any Singstar game ever), the traditional Guitar Hero style button-matching guitar rhythm game and, best of all, the tie-around-your-forehead, Christ-my-arms-my-arms-the-music-it-is-trying-to-KILL-me drum section. It’s comfortably the game I’ve played the most this year, it’s the only game we own (other than the splendid and just-missing-out-in-this-roundup Fable II) that everyone in the family is into, and it’s the only game we own that 80% of us can play at once. And still regularly do. I’m not much for multiplayer gaming as a rule but when I think back to my favourite moments in gaming in 2008, 4-player Rock Band with all of us screaming into the chorus of Hard To Handle is right up there.

And talking of playing in the zone as we were (no, really, we were) – Harmonix’s rhythm games have always been the Daddies Of The Zone for me. The thrill of something like Guitar Hero wasn’t just based in the combination of two of life’s greatest joys – videogames and air guitar – it was also in those moments where your fingers take over and get you through a phrase with absolutely no input from your brain, where you stand like a statue, become part of the machine (SEE: the very last flourish of guitar at the end of the solo on Sweet Child O’ Mine or the riff leading into the chorus of More Than A Feeling).

That deaf dumb and blind kid sure play a mean plastic guitar. Or something.

Rock Band initially seemed a little weaker than its predecessors in that area, at least on guitar. The necessity of filling the game with songs that were more-or-less fun for all four participants seemed to dilute the challenge to the point that on Medium difficulty only one song on the disk required a retry to get through.

There was only one thing for it. I was going to have to bite the bullet and make the dizzying, terrifying leap to the Hard difficulty level. I’d tried a couple of times on earlier Guitar Hero games and ended up dyin’ at the bottom of a pit in the blazing sun, my brain totally unable to cope with the completely new skill I was being asked to develop. See, on Medium difficulty you’re only asked to hit the first four buttons on the fret so very quickly learn that green corresponds to your index finger, red to your middle, yellow to the ring finger and blue to your little finger. After a certain amount of confusion and faff it becomes second nature and it’s merely a question of your fingers keeping up with the notes on-screen. When you jump to Hard, a fifth button comes into play, meaning that you regularly need to shift your hand up and down the fret to cover all five. So not only are the finger-to-colour links that have become hardwired in your brain completely screwed up, but also you’re having to start considering each song tactically, planning exactly where to move your hand to make hitting the notes as easy as possible.

This is where Rock Band’s gentle difficulty curve was a blessing in disguise – the transition was still difficult, but the presence of more manageable songs encouraged perseverance and the brilliance of Harmonix’s game design is evident when you realise that your skills are developing even when you don’t realise they are. It happened jumping from Easy (only three buttons/fingers needed) to Medium back in the original Guitar Hero. I spent a week with my little finger aching like a pantfish and thinking “I’m never going to get this, never ever ever”, then almost overnight something clicked and I was totally comfortable with it. It happened again here – without any warning, I went from struggling along like the ham-fisted goon I am to managing runs of green-to-orange and back without a milisecond’s thought and, ah, THERE’S the zone again, I’d been wondering where it had gotten to.

Rock Band – and in particular Rock Band 2 – is chock-full of cool little touches that show how much the developer loves and understands this sort of game. If you’re doing the solo vocal tour, the game automatically edits out the long instrumental sections of songs like Green Grass And High Tides or Won’t Get Fooled Again so that you’re not sitting for five minutes with nothing to do. If your whole band is performing well, the crowd start singing along with the song, which is spine-tinglingly awesome the first time it happens. The song library is sortable in pretty much every useful way imaginable – alphabetically, by difficulty level for any individual instrument or by the overall band difficulty, by band, by musical genre, by decade and probably by a couple of other criteria I’ve forgotten. You can select specific characters to fill out the rest of the band if you’re playing with a less-than-full set of chums.

I’d love more customisation options for the characters – four different general move-sets and about ten different faces per gender isn’t really enough. I’d love the ability for the rest of the band to sing backing vocals (I mean, not that we didn’t do that anyway, it’d just be nice for the game to recognise and reward it). The archetypal “lead guitarist plants his foot on the stage monitor and wails away” is an egregious absence from the performance animations. Rock Band 2’s tracklist isn’t as strong as the original game’s, with far fewer crowd-pleasing, recognisable songs – this was less of an issue in the Guitar Hero series, but it’s almost impossible to sing something you don’t know beforehand.

These are all just quibbles, though. Rock Band is comfortably the best fake-instrument game ever made, comfortably the best in-room multiplayer game ever made and the game that revealed my middle son’s affection for the Sweet. That’s pretty good going, even for *coughcoughspluttermumble* pounds.

The Rock Band Charts

Top Five Best Fun Songs To Play (Solo)
Tied 5. Vasoline – Stone Temple Pilots (Vocals) / Everlong – Foo Fighters (Vocals)
4. Roam – The B-52’s (Guitar)
3. Wanted Dead Or Alive – Bon Jovi (Vocals)
2. Hysteria – Muse (Guitar)
1. Gimme Shelter – Rolling Stones (Drums)

Top Five Songs That Caused The Most Distress For Innocent Passersby When I Was Trying To Clear Them For The Vocal Solo Tour
5. Electric Version – The New Pr0nographers
4. Highway Star – Deep Purple
3. Run To The Hills – Iron Maiden
2. Ballroom Blitz – The Sweet
1. Maps – Yeah Yeah Yeahs

Top Five Best Fun Songs To Play (Band)
5. Hungry Like The Wolf – Duran Duran
4. Dani California – Red Hot Chili Peppers
3. White Wedding – Billy Idol
2. Are You Gonna Be My Girl? – Jet
1. Hard To Handle – The Black Crowes

Top Five Favourite Mis-Sung Lyrics
5. “I’m a leading man, and my eyesight’s bleeding also into cats, also into cats!” (This Ain’t A Scene It’s An Arms Race – Fall Out Boy)
4. “And for a thousand men are swimming every day” (Don’t Fear The Reaper – Blue Oyster Cult)
3. “Sheeps… running out the door… Sheeps running out, sheeps run, run, run, run!” (Creep – Radiohead)
2. “Burns like a redwood dolphin…” (Gimme Shelter – Rolling Stones)
1. “Ooh my little pretty one, my pretty one, when you gonna give me some Times New Roman?” (My Sharona – The Knack)

“Streets Of London” Award For Songs We’ve Now Played More Often Than The Original Artist
5. Eye Of The Tiger – Survivor
4. Say It Ain’t So – Weezer
3. Epic – Faith No More
2. Blitzkreig Bop – Ramones
1. In Bloom – Nirvana

Top Five Albums That Need To Be In This Game
5. Appetite For Destruction – Guns & Roses (Paradise City, Sweet Child O’ Mine, Welcome To The Jungle, oh my!)
4. Shoot Out The Lights – Richard & Linda Thompson (Genius guitar, vocals in a range I can actually sing and the awesome title track.)
3. Bat Out Of Hell – Meat Loaf (Don’t judge me.)
2. Road Apples – The Tragically Hip (I’d be happy with Up To Here or Fully Completely as alternatives.)
1. Raw Power – Iggy & The Stooges (My favourite rock album ever.)

1 – Fallout 3
Yeah, I’m still playing it. It’s still great.

5 – FIFA 09
Saints be praised, at give-or-take the 20th time of asking, EA have finally made a good football game.

Yes, of course it’s pretty. FIFA games always are. Yes, of course it’s slicky-presented. FIFA games always are. Yes, of course it plays a genuinely good game of football in which goals are relatively tough to come by and always completely satisfying to score, FIFA games… no, hang on, the other one.

Personally, the core of FIFA 09’s appeal is the Be A Pro mode where you create and control just one player and guide him through his career. You pick up experience to improve his abilities and renown to increase his standing with the fans, leading to the opportunity of becoming your club captain or being picked for your national team. Be A Pro mode is compelling and genuinely well put-together – one thing that really impressed me was how different teams don’t just have different skill levels or play in different formations, but actually have noticeably different styles of play. I started “my” career as Roy Race, a blond be-mulletted striker in the reserves of German 2nd division team FC St. Pauli (because a) they have a disgusting brown strip…

Eat Racey's Rocket, Fritz!

…and b) it was the team that Andrew Eldritch sponsored while he was living in Hamburg) and they were typical lower-league cloggers – racking up dozens of yellow cards getting stuck in at the back and building their attacks by flinging balls into the box from all angles. When I eventually joined AC Milan (following in the footsteps of the mighty Luuuuuuuuuuuuuuuther, obv) it was a complete culture shock – the team were practically allergic to passing more than 10 feet along the ground, and completely refused to dive in for tackles, rather standing off, keeping their formation, jockeying the opposition and trying to provoke a mistake.

It took some getting used to.

Be A Pro mode is pretty close to being a footy RPG, but it’s a bit bare-bones as it stands and I’d love EA to develop it further in later iterations. It’d be great if you had the press and managers big-upping or having a pop at individual players, dressing-room discord, Player Of The Year awards, the sort of stuff that games like Football Manager or New Star Soccer have been doing for yonks. Also, there’s unrealised potential in the transfer system – at the moment, you get a list of teams who’re interested in you at the end of each season and you get to pick a new team without fuss or repercussion. Wouldn’t it be ace to have a bit less control, to occasionally be put up for sale against your will or conversely to have to angle for a transfer from a team that didn’t want to sell you?

Yes, it would. Shut up.

Related to that, I’d really like the chance to slag off my team-mates in the media. In every RPG I’ve ever played I end up going down the “nice” path because I’m too wet and woolly to even be unpleasant to computer-animated marionettes but ten games into my second season at St. Pauli I suddenly turned into Nicolas Anelka.

“EVERYBODY on this team SUCKS but ME. Just give me the ball, you disgusting pantfishing NOBODIES, then get out of my way and ADMIRE.”

If you do decide to take the plunge with FIFA, I highly recommend picking up a few of the free alternative-language commentary packs that are available on EggBox Live. Brazilian bloke bellowing GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOAL! > Martin Tyler.

4 – Burnout Paradise
Grand Theft Auto IV was a game with some issues. Its stab at a more mature and thoughtful storyline sat uncomfortably with the over-the-top ultraviolence of the gameworld in general and missions in particular. I greatly disliked being hassled every five minutes by needy clingy gits wanting me to take them to play darts. It was the least funny game in the series and In common with every GTA game in the history of all things ever, its third island was a bit dull and anticlimactic. Its biggest sin for me though, was that it fixed something that definitely wasn’t broken – out went the drifty, cartoony, knockabout car-handling model that made it so enjoyable to tear about the streets playin’ the radio with no particular place to go. In came stodgy, heavy, more “realistic” cars that responded to even the lightest touch of the handbrake by spinning you out into somebody’s front garden.

Fortunately, I’ve found where GTA’s nimble, nippy stable of cars went after San Andreas – they’re all tooling around Paradise City at seventy squillion miles an hour. Burnout Paradise gives you a big, colourful city plus a bunch of big, colourful cars and leaves you to decide what you want to do with them. There’s a good variety of different events to take on, depending on your mood and whim – straight races, time trials, stunt events where you try to rack up points for skidding, boosting and flying of the dozens of ramps scattered about the streets and Marked Man races where your goal is to reach the finish line without being wrecked by two persistent and aggressive pursuit cars. Then there’s the hilarious and absurd Showtime mode where you control your car as it bounces down the road trying to cause as much destruction and traffic chaos as possible. My favourite, through, is generally the demolition derby Road Rage events where you’re simply tasked with causing as many opponents as possible to crash. Sideswiping opponents into bridge supports, nudging them into oncoming traffic or, best of all, flying off a ramp and landing on top of them (screaming “DEATH FROM ABOVE!” optional) is never less than satisfying, particularly combined with the game’s wince-inducing damage model.

Ah, the damage model. For all the occasional frustration when you clip an oncoming car and provoke a slow-motion cut-scene of the physics programmers dancing on your grave ((c) Yahtzee 2008), crashing in Burnout Paradise is almost as much fun as racing. After watching your car go spinning through the air, smashing into scenery and other road-users scattering wheels and body panels over a wide area before colliding with something immobile and ending up six feet shorter than it started out the standard joke in our house is a deadpan “I reckon that’s drivable”.

Burny Pee isn’t without its own problems. Whoever decided that the mini-map in the corner of the screen shouldn’t rotate as you turn (making it next to useless for mid-race navigation) needs a punch in the gentleman’s area. And for all Criterion’s insistence that the streets would be so packed with Stuff To Do that it wouldn’t be necessary, the absence of a “Retry This Race” button is the stupidest design decision since some nincompoop on the Mirror’s Edge dev team decided that what an already crazy-hard trial-and-error first-person platformer really needed was to throw a bunch of hateful nigh-invulnerable pantfish shooting automatic weapons at you every twenty seconds.

At the end of the day, though, it’s fun to weave crisp-handling sportscars through traffic. It’s fun to slide wallowing SUVs around sweeping corners. It’s fun to barrel-roll a rugged stock-car off a cliff. It’s fun to kick in the boost, hear the awesome afterburner-y sound-effect and go screaming through the streets at a decent fraction of light speed. Driving in Burnout Paradise is fun, and that excuses quite a lot of mis-steps in other areas of the game.

Get that, Rockstar North?

Inspired by this thread on the forums of the ever-excellent PC gaming site Rock, Paper, Shotgun (and by my FunSquare SuperPlus’s European Vacation), I’ve been pondering what games the complete novice needs to experience to understand the PC as a gaming platform.

It’s been a slow week, OK?

What we’re talking about here aren’t necessarily my favourite PC games ever, but rather the best games that you can’t play anywhere but on the PC or the paragons of those game genres that are fundamentally linked with the Big Beige Box. For that reason I’ve not considered things like Prince Of Persia: Sands Of Time, the Max Payne games, Oblivion, Beyond Good And Evil, Fallout 3 or the Grand Theft Auto series – all of which I played and loved on PC, all games for which the PC version is arguably superior to its console siblings but none of which are quintessentially “PC games”. The line’s a bit thin and wobbly in places (especially around the likes of Oblivion) but it’s like art – I can’t reliably define it, but I know it when I see it.

With a certain amount of pain and heartache I’ve whittled my personal list down to the magic ten. It’s entirely subjective and a long way from perfect -I’ve got no point-and-click adventures in there f’rinstance, despite that being pretty much the PC-iest gaming genre of them all.  Unfortunately, I came to the PC a few years after the Golden Age Of Lucasarts and so missed out. A mate and I did play through Loom in a slow afternoon while he was nominally in charge of a comic shop and I had a decent enough time, but I don’t have the fond memories of the likes of The Secret Of Monkey Island or Day Of The Tentacle that many of my contemporaries seem to. Sorry.

Enough of this self-regarding nonsense. On with the self-regarding nonsense!

The Top 10 PC Games You Need To Play, Part The First.

10 – City Of Heroes (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game, 2004)
The crowning glory of this rather groovy superhero-based MMORPG is its character generator. Practically unparalleled in terms of breadth and flexibility, it hugely increases your involvement in the game by allowing you right from the off to craft an in-game persona that’s recognisably and distinctively yours. Whether you’re starting with a fixed idea of what you’re looking to create, or just playing about with the tools until you come up with a character who’s suitably imposing/cool/ridiculous, the CoH character generator is a terrific bit of kit.

Mumorpergers aren’t my scene, partly because they require a time commitment that I’m unwilling stroke unable to make, partly because they feel a bit too much like actual work, mostly because I hate the overwhelming majority of people that I’m forced to share this ridiculous planet with and deeply resent being forced into contact with them. However City Of Heroes goes out of its way to make life easy even for lazy misanthropic n00bians like me. While soloing adventures is perfectly feasible, the game encourages you to form impromptu teams by offering XP bonuses that escalate with each person you’re teaming with, and gives you plenty of options to help integrate even characters with vastly differing experience levels.

City Of Heroes looks somewhat dated these days, but its graphic style is perfect for the four-colour world it’s recreating, and the game’s immersion is greatly increased by the cute addition of passers-by or enemy cannon-fodder speaking of your past deeds with awe/trepidation. Yes, there are dozens of berks in Spandex running around the streets at any given time but crucially the game never stops trying to make you feel special, like you stand out, like you’re making a difference, like Only You Can Save Mankind. If there were any actual role-playing on show in this so-called role-playing game it’d be close to being my perfect time-sink. But for that flaw you have to hate the players, you can’t hate the game.

As I said, Mumorpergers aren’t my thing but if you have to play one – and to get an understanding of the PC as a gaming platform you really do have to play one – it ought to be City Of Heroes.

Don’t Try That, Try This!
As mentioned, MMORPGs are rubbish. For similar damned-close-to-being-a-job-you-don’t-get-paid-for perverse thrills but without the huge  drawback of having to talk to other people, you can’t beat a Diablo clone. My recommendation is the rather lovely Greek-Em-Up Titan Quest. You click. You walk. You click. Monsters appear. You click. The monsters die. You click. You take all their stuff. You click. You juggle your inventory to fit your new stuff in your backpack. You click. You walk somewhere else. Every once in a while you go up an experience level and get to pick new skills that make monsters die quicker when they’re clicked on. Somewhere along the line, you realise you’re being entertained, but you’ve no idea by what. And you realise that it’s gotten dark outside. It’s awesome.

9 – Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory (Online Multiplayer First-Person Shooter, 2003)
While we’re biting the multiplayer bullet, let’s go ahead and get the nomination for the essential online FPS out of the way, shall we?

As previously mentioned ad nauseam, 95% of people in the world are worthless gits. If you’re restricting your sample to just people who play first-person shooters online, that number rises to just a few decimal places short of 100%. The general teenage wingnuttery of Xbox Live is deservedly the stuff of legend, but the untamed wilds of PC gaming servers really aren’t a great deal better. Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory (or ET to its friends), being a completely free, completely standalone team-based multiplayer game originally designed as an expansion for Return To Castle Wolfenstein, attracted more than its fair share of every stripe of online shooter idiots. It had abusive idiots, whiny idiots, loud idiots, over competitive idiots, idiots who didn’t understand the game, idiots who didn’t know the maps, idiots who pursued their personal score to the detriment of the rest of the team, idiots who deliberately set out to sabotage their team and idiots who didn’t even realise they were supposed to be on a team. It should have been unbearable.

It wasn’t unbearable. It was glorious.

Despite the abundance of dipsticks, the sense of teamwork and camaraderie generated by either playing with a couple of chums or finding a few other like-minded, vaguely competent players was wonderful.  And you only needed a few players co-operating to get a huge advantage over even the most skilled individual idiots.

And killing idiots is always fun.

With only six maps, even a chump like me learned to find his way around in fairly short order, leading to tense, daring two- and three-man end-run commando raids on enemy positions or ingenious, heroic defences of vulnerable objectives. Objectively speaking, there have been better-designed, better-looking and just plain more fun games than Enemy Territory. But ET is the game that I have the most affection for, that’s given me the most memories and the most war-stories, and it’s the game that makes me smile the most to think of it. And that’s why it makes my list.

Don’t Play That, Play This!
Yeeeeeah. Could try and be clever and confound expectations, but in all honesty it’s got to be Team Fortress 2 really, hasn’t it? I’ve banged on at length about my admiration for the Team-Based Shooter Game Of Champions before, so I won’t say too much more. It’s incredibly polished, it’s wonderfully well put together, it’s got a perfect character for every conceivable playing style, it’s utterly, utterly beautiful and you should play it. Really, play it.

Join us next time, when just for a change of pace I might be talking about games in genres that I actually like.

You may recall my mentioning in the dim and distant past that Bethseda’s first-person action-RPG Oblivion consumed well over a hundred hours of my life, most of which were spent either picking flowers or running backwards away from wildlife that I disturbed whilst picking flowers. There was some minor world-saving involved somewhere in amongst it all but I tried not to let that impinge on my adventures in extreme floristry.

So given the grip that Oblivion took on my life, it’s only with a certain amount of trepidation that I acknowledge Bethseda’s new game to be even better.

Fallout 3 is set in and around Washington DC following a nuclear exchange that’s left the area predictably devastated. Your character has grown up in an underground bunker in which generations have been raised completely cut off from what’s left of society and as the game proper starts you emerge blinking from the tunnels to try and find your way in the wider world by way of your wits, your charm and/or your shootiness.

Guess which one I went for.

Oblivion was and is one of the best-looking games ever made. A lush, larger-than-life world of rolling hills, thick forests and fanciful architecture, it made you feel like you were wandering around the cover of a high fantasy novel. It’s a playground of adventure, the natural habitat of characters with too many apostrophes and consonants in their names. Fallout 3 is beautiful in exactly the opposite way. It’s got the same rolling vistas stretching away as far as the eye can see in any direction, but rather than being grand and exciting it’s oppressive and melancholy, all bare trees, yellowed grass and gutted buildings. You wander through deserted towns filled with sad little Marie Celeste reminders of a society that was destroyed forever in the space of a handful of seconds – a children’s library full of ruined books and rusted toys, plates laid out on the counter of a diner, a charred skeleton in a hotel room’s bath. The largely-empty wilderness contrasts with the crumbling, claustrophobic concrete towers and broken tarmac of DC proper, which is packed to the gills with people and things that won’t think twice about killing you and taking all your stuff if you’re not prepared to do the same to them first. It’s a desolate, desperate place to live and one of the more atmospheric gameworlds in recent memory.

Pity that the NPCs aren’t generally as good as their surroundings. As in Oblivion the dialogue is generally iffy, the voice-acting is worse and the limitations of scripting often make characters’ behaviour odd at best and immersion-breakingly bizarre at worst. Fortunately other irritations have been resolved – the bonkers way everything in Oblivion’s world levelled up at the same time you did making you relatively speaking no better off for your increased experience is out, for example. There’s a new damage system which means you can pick on specific parts of your enemy’s body and opens up new tactical options – shooting the arm of a Super Mutant to stop him minigunning you to death, or wounding the antenna of a giant fire-ant to cause it to frenzy attacking its nest-mates or, best of all, a sniped headshot kill of an enemy who never knew you were there. To balance that, the AI is much more aggressive – in Oblivion most of the time if you missed or your opponent didn’t see exactly where your arrow came from a few moments after they were shot they’d go back about their business, clearly not wanting to make a fuss about the bloody great pointy stick that was jutting from their jugular. Miss your target in Fallout 3, or not realise that he’s got a bunch of mates hanging around, and you get a band of raiders in the face. And hurrah for that.

For all Fallout 3’s improvements over its stablemate, for me the bulk of its appeal still comes back to the world, though, the thoroughly impressive sense of place. You really wouldn’t want to live in the Wasteland, but my God it’s a fun place to visit.

ZOMG!

For the love of God, somebody take my debit card off me now. I can’t be trusted with it.

I’m telling myself that I wouldn’t pay £45 for a statuette of any of my Rock Band characters. Then I remember that I was nerdy and obsessive enough to spend the better part of half an hour painstakingly positioning all the letters for Kris (my heroin-victim vampire-punk guitarist)’s “YOUR FAVOURITE BAND SUCKS” shirt and I worry.

There is literally no chance I’ll resist the band t-shirts.

Between the cash-hoover effect of the regularly-released downloadable tracks (She Sells Sanctuary, Love Spreads, Bad To The Bone, All Right Now and the whole Blood Sugar Sex Magik album in the last 3 weeks alone, f’rinstance - bloody HELL) and the struggle I’ve had trying to clear the last few songs on Hard difficulty, living with Rock Band has been like frequenting a specialist club in Soho. Once a week I hand over money to get slapped around, and I absolutely love it. 

Let’s pause here to allow you to get that mental image out of your head. Sorry.