Full thoughts to follow...

Just a quick post to say I am playing through Heavy Rain (PS3) and Sonic and SEGA All-Stars Racing with Banjo-Kazooie (360) as of today. It may take a couple of days to get far enough through the pair of them that I can post a review, so in the mean time I will leave you with my initial impressions from having played both of them for around four of hours:

Heavy Rain: More like "Heavy Handed Drama". In fact, the first trophy I recieved thanked me for "supporting interactive drama" so it has certainly nailed its colours to the mast. To start with the dialogue is cliche, drawn from every thriller movie ever made about the hunt for a serial killer. The voice acting is only one notch above Shenmue in terms of how natural it sounds (which I quite enjoy because it makes me laugh, so I'm not knocking it there).

I suppose this next comment is a SPOILER. The opening section where you lose your son as Ethan seems to demonstrate the best and worst of the game: there is nothing else like it, as you genuinely feel lost in a crowd, unable to get to your son, and it is a nightmare. However, it is also faintly ridiculous in terms of plausibility (Ethan allows his child to wonder off twice in two minutes, and not only does his kid disobey him by leaving his side, but he crosses the road outside the mall for some unknown reason)and because of the heavy handed way in which your sons red balloon floats into the sky after he is killed. It just made me laugh, which isn't the reaction David Cage wanted, I'm sure. It certainly isn't how I wanted/expected to feel playing this game. It is also oddly un-engaging as you never really feel in control of anything, just resonding to occasional button prompts and lurching ever forward with 'R2'. "Interactive drama" is about right, as you don't decide where to go or what to do there, with most decisions being pointless (orange juice or coffee?) and with most areas (so far) not letting you leave until you have found the important plot point.



Sonic and SEGA All-Stars Racing: This much more traditional game will not win anything like the plaudits of the above, but has still been brilliant fun (so far). It looks lovely (with notable frame rate issues) and plays just like Mario Kart, although is obviously as derivative as that sounds at its heart. I am just happy to be playing something on my X-Box that doesn't involve shooting someone through the brain in an alleyway or something. The cast of SEGA characters and the recognisable music have filled me with a nostalgic glee I never get from Smash Brothers, I suppose due to being a SEGA kid at heart.

On the negative side, the game doesn't go as far as Nintendo's Smash Brothers in really offering content to the fanboys. There is no unlockable art or models or anything like that: just characters (each with a little piece of biography), courses and music tracks are there to be earned. I never usually care about this sort of thing, but I would have loved it here. Also, in my first few games on X-Box Live it seems that the game may share a problem with Mario Kart Wii's online multiplayer: races tend to be dominated by one player who goes so far ahead you never see him again, whilst the rest of the pack blow each other up. Maybe I'm just not good enough at the game, and it's my fault, so I'll just keep trying!

Two very different games, as you can tell, with one trying to develop and evolve the medium with something a bit different, whilst the other is attempting to be a decent and polished example of a tried and tested formula. Anyhow, come back in the week for full and fair reviews of both!

Ode to the glory days...

When I were a lad, there were these brilliant things called ‘point n’ click’ adventure games, so called because you used a PC mouse to point at things, and then to click on them. You could click on things to look at them, to pick them up, to talk to them or to use them on other things. It was marvellous. Many of the best examples were British (Discworld - pictured - and Simon and the Sorcerer to name a couple), though most of the really good ones were being made by an ancient and forgotten American company known as “LucasArts”. Almost every game made by this innovative developer during the late 1980s up until the late 1990s was pure gold. But then sophisticated 3D graphics came along and rapidly every game was about a grizzled marine shooting the guts out of Nazis/aliens. It was a sad time.

LucasArts continued making adventure games with the new 3D graphics for a couple of years (making Grim Fandango and Escape from Monkey Island), before they realised that they would make more money whoring around the Star Wars license instead. They had always made a lot of highly rated Star Wars games, but for the last ten years they have been just about all LucasArts have made (and to a terrifyingly low standard). So adventure games died along with the reputation of their biggest advocate.

However, there are a few reasons to be cheerful, as in the last few years the genre has had something of a minor resurgence. A company of ex-LucasArts employees called Telltale Games has released new games in the old Sam & Max and Monkey Island franchises (as well as a number of new series), whilst the brilliant 1996 game Broken Sword has been re-released on everything from the Wii to the iPhone (pictured below) in recent times. The iPhone platform has also seen the re-release of Beneath a Steel Sky, an even older game also made by Broken Sword’s creator, Charles Cecil. Valve’s Steam service on PC has (in the last year) seen LucasArts cashing in on their former glory by re-releasing a bunch of the old classics including: Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis; The Dig; and Loom, as well as a remake of the original Monkey Island.



With the iPhone and small downloadable games (like those on XBLA or PSN) becoming increasingly popular, perhaps this once proud genre can find a new home and thrive once again. I certainly hope so. I leave you with some footage of a few of my favourites:

By far the best original point and click of the last half-decade, Capcom's largely unloved 2007 adventure Zack and Wiki: The Quest for Barbaros' Treasure, may not have the dialogue and story of most the classic adventure games of yesteryear, but it's every bit as good:



One of the most stylish and well-designed games ever made in any genre, 1998's Grim Fandango, published by LucasArts and created by the legendary Tim Schafer (Full Throttle, Day of the Tentacle, Monkey Island). I remember when my PC wasn't good enough for this:



My personal favourite Monkey Island game had nothing to do with the original creators (Ron Gilbert and Tim Schafer). The third game in the series, The Curse of Monkey Island, introduced the voice cast now associated with the franchise (with Dominic Armato as Guybrush) as well as giving the game a major graphical facelift. The Curse of Monkey Island maybe my favourite point-and-click game simply because it feels like you're playing a detailed cartoon (whereas its 3D successor has aged less gracefully):



Check out the LucasArts Classic Adventure pack on Steam. It's £6.99 and includes four great adventure games (The Dig, Loom and two Indiana Jones adventures).

Grow Up Australia!

Pardon the inflammatory title, but “Grow Up Australia” is the name of a high-profile campaign which is seeking to persuade the Australian government to allow the introduction of an ‘18+’ age rating for in-game content (read the full news item here). This has been a hot issue in Australia for many years, with a great deal of moral panic generated by the media and politicians regarding the dangerous moral sewer that is the video gaming industry. There are lots of good articles about the history of video game censorship in Australia and the video below depicts a notorious recent example of this policy in action, with footage of the Australian version of Left 4 Dead 2, released with significant changes to its content last year.



I won't get into whether or not media images can turn children into serial killers (though, for the record, I doubt it) as that is an issue for another day and a longer post. I am just baffled by the fact that this debate is even happening in modern day Australia. Censorship is an unpopular idea when it comes to limiting freedom of expression, so how is it possible for video games to be singled out in this way? Well, because they are still not are still not seen as a form of artistic expression and so they are easier to censor or ban than a book or a film, especially as they are still perceived by many to be children's toys. In the UK, many parents I have spoken to (whilst working in games retail) will happily buy their young children BBFC-rated '18' games, whilst they may be less keen on them seeing a film with the same certification. People simply assume that a video game is something produced for children. When I have explained to parents that a game they are buying include the similar content to that of a violent film, they often express surprise that a video game might contain such graphic content.

Isn't the video games industry partly to blame for this perception? Because whatever their content, most games are still too juvenile to be taken seriously. It is the games industry, as well as Australia, that needs to grow up, and once that happens games may be able to confidently contain the same content as a graphic movie, perhaps even with the consent of the Australian government.

The official "Grow Up Australia" website is full of information about the history and future of Australian video game censorship and those interested should check it out!