A lot of games have dropped in the past few weeks that have enjoyed the kind of pre-release hysteria that persuades publishers of lesser titles to consider foregoing the holiday season sales rush and launch their own offerings in the New Year. These are the kind of games that enjoy such juggernautingly, bone-crushingly, behemothanical, titanic hype that they don’t need to float a demo to meet their colossal sales estimates. So, in this curious winter garden, cast in the dark shadow of recent monoliths, I find the demo of Tropico 3, a game so good and so well marketed, that I’ve never in fact heard of it. Consequently, I had to dare myself to download it. You don’t want to know what the forfeit for not doing so was.

There must be at least five games I’d rather be playing right now that the Tropico demo, but since I do not presently enjoy gainful employment, I have to be a little more frugal in my video game expenditure. I really did expect 2009 to be the year in which I gently tanned on the rotisserie grill of Beelzebub’s own satanic barbeque, yet it would appear that even my best Faustian intentions were well and truly scuttled. Indeed, as it happens I now have plenty more time to play video games, but no means by which to acquire them. And this is a painful and cruel irony that is not lost upon me.

The intro Tropico 3 illustrates a conflict on a tropical island in 1949, and then again in 1952, and 1957, then 1961 (tourists with nuclear explosions), 1965, 1970 with industry and construction, 1973 dudes being chased by army types, 1978, very urban, some simcityesque driving about, 1982 and its dépêche mode and more tourists. Once this has played through once, it invites me to ‘press any button to rule’. This introduction has given me absolutely nothing to go on gameplay wise, and instead alludes to a foul dictatorship full of wanton debauchery, opulence and human rights violations. It is a clear nod a certain Carribean Island’s chequered history, throughout the cold war. It’s a thin veil of obscurity, which won’t fool anyone who has read a history book. It’s Cuba, okay? Let’s move on.

New game: tutorial. Why not? After all, I probably ought to know how to play it before I get stuck in. The loading screen has quotes by Robert Orben and Victor Hugo, which give me some clues as to the game’s political and comedic leanings. The tutorial tells me one thing and one thing only. This game would be easier to play with a mouse and a keyboard. And with the music turned off. And with the tutorial voice actor turned off.

Tropico as it turns out is a 3D topdown managethemup in the vein of SimCity, Ceasar, Settlers, SimCity 2000, and er, every game since that has aped SimCity in any shape or form. This is probably a good thing, because if could have back all the hours I’ve sunk into SimCity in one of its many guises, I’d have enough time to make my fortune, start and raise a family, or at least build a small wall. However, all these experiences have been on the PC. Shuffling through menus of citizen stats and telling minions to go off and build stuff has never transposed especially well to the console controller.

So I’d love to give this demo a fair crack of the whip, but I’m damned if I’m gonna sink a couple of hours into learning how to play a game with a controller that I could just pick up and play without much introduction on the PC. There’s still some mileage to be had from Civ4 instead, and the myriad expansion packs I got with the complete edition. I feel that I’ve only scraped the surface of the extra content on that one, and what about Empire Total War? Looks like I have some busy days ahead of me before I get stuck into something different.

The whole not having a job thing is weighing heavy too, since I found myself refraining from dropping a mere slice on Rolando 2 because I hadn’t in fact successfully conquered the first one. As with Tropico 3, there’s no way I’m gonna drop any cash on the full game because a) games like this suck using a controller, b) I don’t have any cash, and c) I didn’t complete the first two games. Not that jumping into a series isn’t worthwhile further down the franchise (can’t think of an appropriate example), but as time-sinks go, I’m not especially enamoured at the prospect of putting a jaunty latin spin on what essentially boils down to SimCity Cuba.

It was a cool reminder for me to hear the Valve splash motif when the demo starts up. It’s been a while since The Orange Box and this is irrevocably linked in my mind with Half Life 2, so when I hear it I’m already expecting Gordon Freeman to show up. It’s a bit like no matter how many episodes of The Wire I watch (appropriately I was playing as Coach, who will bang your mom), when I hear and see the HBO ident, I expect to hear the intro music for Curb Your Enthusiasm. Now I’m imagining Gordon Freeman running around City 17 committing social faux pas and making it worse with a crowbar and headcrabs.

If Curb your Enthusiasm is a show about people’s differing social conventions, then Left 4 Dead 2 is similarly about trying not to upset your teammates. As much as it’s about shooting hordes of fast paced zombies as they bear down on you, it’s just as much if not more about looking after the three people at your shoulders. In the thick of it, it’s pretty easy to get carried away hoofing vicars that you neglect the safety of your teammates and rip through them with whatever automatic weapon you’re currently toting.



One of my friends was playing the demo, so I jumped straight into her game. She tweeted earlier in the evening that she was going to try it, and hoped that she didn’t get nightmares. I am certainly gonna have nightmares tonight, about being shit at video games. Having never played Left 4 Dead until this very demo, I had no idea how difficult it was. It also didn’t help me, or my allies that my mic headset is busted right now, which made me a bit like Rob Lowe in The Stand. Deaf, mute and devastatingly handsome, if a little annoying.

Ordinarily when I write up demos, I try to describe things as I see them. Study the intro, critique the menus, and point out the obvious and the not so obvious. I didn’t really get that chance with L4D2. You see, it kind of drops you right in it, and then doesn’t let up. After an hour I found that a good way to recover was to press start and choose “Take a Break”. This brought me into spectator mode, and the AI took over my character. Being able to jump in and out like this is nice for toilet breaks, beer breaks and lying on your side and crying breaks. It wasn’t that I was bored, it kinda felt like it, but it wasn’t until I sat out for five minutes that I realised what it was. I was exhausted.

Those first few rounds, where I deduced we must have been playing on the Bastard Hard difficulty, I felt like the useless dude holding everybody back. They had to constantly get me back on my feet, as I bumbled about trying to figure the controls. When I managed to get my shit together, I realised just how much I had been holding them back, and even no words were spoken between us, the resentment was palpable. I felt guilty every time I used a medpack and my teammates were themselves circling the drain. I felt like I owed them. I don’t usually feel like I owe people in real life. Let alone in a video game. Let alone in a demo.

With the amount of opportunities to save my compadres from the unrelenting zombie horde I found myself falling over my teammates in an attempt to revive downed allies, either with some harsh words (“You telling me that scratch was keeping you down??”) or with a handy disposable defibrillator. The satisfaction of helping your buddies out with medpacks is that when you’re on the fine-dining end of a big plate of zombie mixed grill, they may swoop in and return the favour.

Or they may not, because for all the buddy-buddy, I got your back, you got mine camaraderie, at the end of the day everyone is trying their best to take care of their own shit. If that means that by the time you’ve dragged yourself to the ammo drop all the medpacks are gone and your so-called allies are looking pretty well fed, you can rest assured that when the shit inevitably hits the fan, they will be chewing off the end of that health picking your sorry ass out of the zombie juice and dusting you off. As painful as it can be to constantly be looking out for the other players, it’s a damn sight easier than running the gauntlet with a man down.

So the experience of playing with friends was completely overshadowed by playing with douchebags in a quick match fixture. Despite having near 100 health in the park, getting hit by a hunter was game over for me, because the other players weren’t too interested in helping me out. It also didn’t help that at the first checkpoint, someone closed the door before I made it through, and every time I opened it, the jackass on the other side closed it immediately. This went on for about a minute, which in the Zombiepocalypse, is a really long time. The exact same thing happened when we made it to the truck, but this time with two people on the outside. It culminated in the other player inside the truck shooting the doucheplayer, and when we got in and managed to finish him off, the fourth guy revived him, but not me. WTF is up with that? When we finally managed to kick him, he just came straight back in to pick up where he left off.

Left 4 Dead 2 strikes me as a game of social niceties. I had a lot of fun playing with the guys who stuck together, helped out every chance they got, and understood that part of the reckless charm of a good co-op game is just trying to get shit done, even if sometimes that means you have to hog the last medpack. Considering I was micless, they were pretty sporting when I bumbled around a corner on my own to disturb witches. Playing with douches utterly derailed the whole experience for me, because this game simply does not work with a deathmatch, every man for himself, teamkilling mentality.

Brutal Legend has been a long time coming. I’ve spent quite a bit of my life playing games that were created by Tim Schafer and I can still give you step-by-step instructions on how to complete Monkey Island 2, even after sinking a few beers. I'd then drunkenly explain why Psychonauts is still worth shelling out for on Xbox Live and why I love you.

So true to form, I’m reviewing this demo at least 10 days after the game is on general release, and if I weren’t presently so embarrassingly destitute I would have no doubt bought it already. Unfortunately for me, times are tough, the recession marches on, and I have to make-do with whatever Tim Schafer Esq cleared for ‘promotional purposes only’ on Xbox Live.

The Double Fine splash screen has the ever-endearing conjoined twins Axl’d up with bandanas and leather trousers. A suitably glam voice screams “Dooouble Fiiiii-aaaayn!” after a little guitar crunch. This cuts to a wooden tabletop where some real-life hands (Jack Black’s one would believe) place a Brutal Legend LP front and centre. Some diegetic Judas Priest/Iron Maiden-esque metal is played low in the background, like a turntable in another room. I recognised Sabbath’s Symptom of the Universe. The LP looks to be well loved, with nice worn edges. The grimy price sticker in the top right reads “6.66” and the Brutal Legend motif is reminiscent of any number of METAL! insignias. A big red sticker glows “Press Start.”

This is no splash screen: the LP is the menu. This is a Nice Touch. The music gets a little bit louder. Flipping the left stick right cycles through the menu, and Jack Black’s hands explore the whole LP. Back cover, pulling out the sleeve, then the disc, and then the reverse of the disc. It is neither premature, nor needless hyperbole, to hail this menu as the “Best Menu Ever” – a work of staggering genius. I recognise [strike]Metallica’s[/strike] Diamondhead's “Am I Evil?”

Okay, enough of this, let’s hit New Game before I tear up in wanton nostalgia. The difficulty levels come up. I’m a little disappointed that they’re not worked into the LP menu, but they come in three flavours: Gentle, Normal and Brutal. I’ll just go with Normal in this instance.

It zooms into the mountain on the LP, all the way, and it becomes a stage and backstage, we see Eddie Riggs hunched over a guitar smoking a cigarette. The pop culture references are spread thick, like peanut butter on a bagel, and this is undoubtedly a Good Thing. Not just because it’s a witty sideswipe at the rap-metal-electro-emopop-teenybashers, but because it illustrate perfectly just how medieval leather-strapped, oversized-beltbuckled, black-number-one’d Heavy Metal is in comparison. I’m gonna guess that most people’s exposure to Ozzy is through MTV’s The Osbornes.

The cutscene continues and one of the bandmembers bounds up the giant stage monument and out on one the protruding beams. Eddie Riggs doesn’t like this, so clenching his fist he cries out to the hapless popstar, “Get down from there you stupid motherfu…” and a neat little menu comes out of his mouth. It gives you two options regarding swearwords: “I want to hear every nasty syllable” or “It’s funnier if you bleep it out.” I’m gonna be honest with you here: having just referenced The Osbornes, I think it probably IS funnier to bleep it out. Even so, this is a very novel and unpatronising approach to game censorship.

In saving the teenybopper, our hero manages to unleash a giant metal helldog when he bleeds onto his beltbuckle. Another choice pops up, this one regarding gore: “Okay, but only when it really would look very awesome” or “No gore, please!” I’m not prudish about the old ultraviolence, so I hit the claret option. The crowd go wild for this shiny chrome helldog and it all fades to black, spare his burning eyes. Another nice touch, the “loading” font in the bottom right is reminiscent of Black Sabbath’s logo.

Eddie wakes up in another realm, there are some badguys, they go right for him, and in a perfect Benny Hill moment, they come up one flight of stairs while you peg it down the other and grab a giant axe, Sword in the Stone style, out of a burning crack in the room’s floor. He holds it aloft, and the screen overlays a comicbook style introducing this weapon as “The Separator”. I could cry. I'm definitely welling up.

Having hacked and slashed the metal-wraiths into red mist, you get hold of Eddie’s Flying V guitar, “Clementine” – the range attack element. Hitting X wails out some truly face-melting solos, and the wraiths promptly vaporise. Those strings get pretty hot though, and Eddie blows on them to try and cool them down. A giant range attack literally brings the house down.

And that is really all I need from this demo. If it ended here, I would be completely fine with that (it doesn’t, there’s a demon bossfight you may remember from the trailer). This is certainly the first demo I’ve played on Xbox Live where I knew I wanted to buy the game anyway, but this has done nothing to dissuade me. Now if only I could scrape together the cash to do so.

Update: I played through the rest of the demo, and it has all the elements of a Tim Schafer game including a nice little nod to Grim Fandango. The combat gameplay is no more involved than Psychonauts, but to call it simple or repetitive would be to miss the point. I'm gonna guess that like Psychonauts, this game is going to be about exploring another world, and from what I've seen of it thus far, I'm in.

Firing up the Forza Motorsport 3 demo for the first time is an unnerving affair. I never played Forza 1 or 2, preferring to get my racing game kicks by drifting around Super Mario Kart. I have only recently assuaged my driving sim desires by picking up an old copy of PGR 4, so I am either in the perfect position to judge whether this demo is any good, or so thoroughly sick of braking for corners that I will be pawing for my SNES controller before I’ve even finished a race.

It’s unnerving because the intro is essentially a giant advertisement for Audi and their rather Minority Report looking RS8 V10. Audi have certainly been getting their product placement kicks at our expense, and I’m just thinking of their turn in Ironman as a recent example. As it happens, I had been thinking of getting an Audi as my next car for a while now (just putting it off), perhaps an A3 or A4, but I overheard a self-righteous clothing store clerk in a trendy baseball cap say “Audi, they’re the new car that’s only driven by complete cocks” which clearly means that BMW M3 owners can breathe easy. Well, as easy as you can through all that aftershave.

The intro that loops after the splash screen finishes with the new concept Dodge Challenger literally bucking off the line. Can rear wheel drive cars create so much torque from standstill that the front two wheels will actually lift off the asphalt? I’m gonna have to check youtube for this one, because I call bullshit. Yeah, bullshit.

Hitting start drops you straight into the Car Select menu. It’s nice an clean and it has a few cars which are mostly red. There’s a Mini, an Evo, a Ferrari, the R8, and a 911 which looks like someone vomited decal all over it after a boozy night out.

I went for the R8, and the screen drops away to give me a full Audi Logo which dissolves into a slow pan across the CAD lines of the car itself. It’s nicely rendered, but it doesn’t look real. If you squint slightly, it might even be cell shaded. I can only assume it’s accurately portrayed and the inside of the car looks like it might be real, but there’s definitely some uncanny valley stuff going on here. Also, this car lust session is an infinite loop, so you’re stuck with the calming relaxation music and the floating red car until you hit a button. But you’ve already done this, cos you wanna drive cars fast. And rightly so.

A menu of options, for difficulty and all the bits on the car that come as standard in real life so you don’t die (ABS, traction control etc) and that you’d only turn off if you were on the Top Gear test track and you were filming a section for Top Gear and your name was Richard Hammond, or Jeremy Clarkson. James May would keep all that stuff switched on, and choose Easy, which is what I’m going to do. Easy mode got me through PGR 4 and it’ll get me through this demo.

There’s only one course to try and it’s the Camino Viejo de Montserrat. Now obviously the mountains of Montserrat are far too bloody dangerous to be sliding a fast car about on, but this is why man invented video games, so that his every greatest wish and desire could be pixellated and made very very safe.

There’s a Rewind button? Ala Prince of Persia: Sands of Time? This should make for some interesting game sanctioned cheating, on account of my inability to miss the jutty out sections of the railing which turn my car into a flat spin.

Alright, so I whipped through my 2 laps without too much trouble. The car feels nice and heavy and responds well to input. I clipped a few cars and walls and the damage model shows my R8 to be less than pristine. This is already a marked improvement to PGR 4, where I could drive at 200mph into a wall and the worst that would happen is the windscreen might crack.

Having never played Forza 1 or 2, I don’t know if this guide line is new or not (I’ll assume it’s not), but it’s new to me. A series of green arrows guide you through the best line for each corner. When you’re going too fast, the arrows go through the traffic light colours and return to green when you’ve got the right speed to hold the line. This is a capital lettered Nice Touch. However, it does take a great deal of the skill out of it, what little skill is left having chosen the Easy difficulty, and reduced all the complex nuances of driving to accelerate, brake, turn left, turn right. Which is what driving boils down to I suppose, so er, bravo?

The Rewind function doesn’t work quite as I expected. I thought it would be like rewinding live TV, so that you’d hold the back button until it spooled to the part you wanted to pick it up from, but instead it rewinds a certain distance and then asks if you’d like to pick it up from that point or go back further. When it drops you back in, it doesn’t seem to do so cleanly, almost as if the position of the car gets corrected a degree or two. It’s a bit disconcerting, but I like that idea that you don’t have to redo a whole race just because you borked a corner, or clipped the wrong car. I tried to drift one corner, and the heavyset R8 did not like that. I’m sure like all driving games, it’s a knack that’ll come with a little practice.

The screen stills in the loading screens look nice, but everything in game seems a bit sparse in detail. I kind of expected the driving sim genre to be near photo realistic by now, at the very least the cars, but I guess they have just a little way to go yet.

I think if I give myself a little space between Forza 3 and PGR 4, I might actually enjoy this game. First impressions are good, but the thought of sinking another 30+ hours into a driving sim fills me with a certain degree of travel nausea.

It's been a while since I reviewed a demo from Xbox Live, so I've taken a look at Wet, which is described as a “highly stylized third person shooter that seamlessly blends gun play, sword kills and over-the-top acrobatics to create the ultimate interactive action experience.” Although none of that guff actually motivated me to download it. Instead, I downloaded it because the cover features a saucy leather clad fembot and the title is Wet. I'm gonna imagine 'Wet' refers to the gameplay being bloody, like CIA 'wet work', but let's be honest – this is the cynical internet world of teenage fantasies here and I'm absolutely convinced that 'Wet' is just subtle enough to maybe be a single entendre. Will it earn its 18 certificate?

I admit, I've never heard of this game, which is pretty rare for a new release. Booting it up for the first time, it clearly wants to play like a 70s exploitation movie. The splash screen has the main female hero, a sword toting MJ Smooth Criminal looking dude, a Sam Jackson shotgun guy with flatcap and aviators, a sword chick on a motorbike, and a Snake Pliskin eyepatch longhaired almost halo'd by the sun. The screen has film lines, pops and crackles and every 8 seconds on loop the whole thing blurs like the crummy projector lost focus as someone nudged it.

The tag line is “Get Read for Monkey Business”. I don't even know what monkeys have to do with stylized violence, but I'm gonna hit start and find out.

The Story Mode selection has a Bruce Lee (of course) looking character with a Triad suit, a sub machine gun and a suspiciously long cigarette. There's a real wild-west motif that permeates all the typeface and the background decals. I think it would be a bit obvious to say that this isn't an unfiltered view of exploitation movies, but rather it's once or twice removed through the hard boiled lens of a more contemporary filmmaker, who professes a deep-seated love for such Grindhouse cinema.

A title card explains Wet as being sort for Wetwork. The kind of work where you have to get your hands bloody. I get the feeling that this isn't going to be cold clinical execution carried out by well trained assassins, but pulpy messy squirty violent twitchy bloodbath stuff.

The demo opens with some kind of deal. An exchange of suitcases, guys brandishes large handguns and the inevitable double cross. The game's female lead observes all this from the rooftop and upon seeing the antagonist scarper with what she claims is her briefcase, she swan dives through the glass ceiling (feminists rejoice) with dual wielded pistols like a den-of-inequity Lara Croft. Before relinquishing control of this cutscene to me, the game helpfully freeze-frames the girl to identify her as “Rubi” and then explains “JUMPING: Attack enemies while jumping through the air.” Ok, here we go.

I shitcan one dude, whilst performing a floaty-light, no-physics-of-this-world jump and the game immediately cuts again to say “SLIDING: Attack enemies while sliding on the ground.” I already get the impression that this will be sort of game (like Max Payne) where every single person you meet will require you to dispatch them in relentlessly violent ways.

Next is Wall Running. So this demo is a glorified tutorial after all. Wait, what? I unnecessarily ran along a wall (inside no less), capped the bad guy in the gut and the whole thing rewinds with the timestamp reel (1, 2, 3...) and I get to try the thing over. It seems I didn't quite shoot him enough. Try again.

Ok, so once that's nailed, it drops you into it proper and asks you to take out the remaining baddies. So to recap, I can jump, I can slide along on my knees, and run up walls should I choose to. It's a good job that she can do all these things because she's gonna have to keep moving because there's no fucking cover system. Hey, that's a perfectly good table, why don't I flip it over and use it as cover, or movable cover? Nope, I can jump over it though (can't slide underneath it). The bad guys also take a lot of shooting. You really gotta fill these guys up before they keel over. So I found myself running up to them and shooting them in the face. Luckily Rubi can eat up a lot of lead too, and it's much easier to shoot them in the face from close range. I even managed to run up one dude and do a backflip off him whilst shooting him in the face and even though I was impressed by this acrobatic feat, I felt it was fairly unnecessary given that since I was close enough to run up him, I was already close enough to simply shoot his face off. I'm gonna assume that Rubi has had a high carb breakfast and needs to burn it off. I had a little fun with it by knee sliding across a table full of party cakes and glasses. I didn't shoot anyone, but it made me feel good.

The next section (as the main bad guy 'Simmons' legs it) introduces 'Split Targetting' whereby you can target two baddies whilst performing an acrobatic stunt, in this case, jumping. Jump up, click down the right stick and this will lock on one of the goons leaving you free to target the second guy and shoot them both. When your health gets low, or at least when it's down to one bar, the quality of the 'film' degrades. The jutter becomes pronounced, the lines and pops more constant and you begin to see the reel appear at the sides of the screen. Yeah, that's not fucking annoying at all. I'm gonna take a wild leap here, and predict that when you die, the film burns up as though the projector's stuck.

In the middle of the room is a toy monkey bashing a cymbal. In running over it, it breaks up and the caption reads something like, “try to find all the hidden toy monkeys”. Hidden? I couldn't help but run over it. I imagine that this 'collect them all' was added to the game for no other reason than they were short on achievements to include.

I guess that I'll have to find out what it does when you die later on, cos the very next thing shows how you get your health back. Now bearing in mind this is an 18 cert, what could it be? Munching down tylenol would be a bit too Max Payne, and injecting painkiller would be a bit pulp fiction, but booze? Hell yeah, it's whiskey just like the wild west! You are invited to 'take a swig' but given that she takes the bottle and tosses it in the air just to shoot it in half implies to me that she necked the whole lot. This chick is tanked. If only booze really did bestow young women with magical health gaining properties and allowed them to still function well enough to pull of remarkable acrobatic feats (and shoot straight). Friday nights in the city centres up and down the UK would make for pretty great CCTV clip shows on ITV3.

The next part involves standing on a glowing sigil on the floor and pressing Y which then prompts you to press X which makes Rubi stick her sword between the locked doors and prise it open. So far, so unnecessary, given that the doors are set in a wall barely 8ft high with no ceiling. If she's so acrobatic, why didn't she run up the adjacent wall and leap over this one? Jackie Chan could do that, and he's a good foot shorter than Rubi. The element of surprise would be retained, rather than 8 goons watching the door get slowly ripped open.

The game then introduces the sword, which from what I can tell it pretty much a one hit kill as she whips it around the bad guys. I could probably have put this to better use back in the first room, because it's a ton easier than trying to shoot them in the face. However it does suffer from wild targeting, as Rubi happily locks on to nearby crates (oh the crates!!) instead of slicing open the lower intestines of, you know, the guy with the gun.

You can slide down ladders backwards! Leaning backward and shooting people in the face from distance. It's difficult not to be impressed by this. Oh so now she can run up walls to vault over them. Just not when there are doors in them, huh? The sword has pretty much taken over here, given that it's easy to cut people up than to shoot them 12 times. I wondered earlier if you could slide under stuff, and it would appear that the answer is yes you can, but only when the game says you can. I knee slide (like Angelina Jolie in Wanted) under some pipe and then up a dude into an automatic backflip, completely failing to hit him anywhere near his face, so once back on my feet, cut him up with the sword. It occurs to me now that I haven't seen an ammo count, or even a reload. I think it might have dispensed with such processes as a sly nod to the exploitation films it apes. Or it's just been overlooked by the designers.

After a quick cutscene the game kicks in to what it refers to as 'arena combat'. A wide open space in Chinatown where bad guys endless pour out of doors until you can get above them and slash a junction box with your sword. Really? I have to lock the doors so that they can't get out? What kind of genius henchmen are we dealing with here? “Oh the door won't open, I guess we're stuck in here.” Well that was rubbish. You can pretty much just run around and ignore all the bad guys while you smash in the junction boxes to make the metal shutter fall. I then had about 4 guys to mop up after this was done. Inexplicably the game allows your health to automatically regenerate at this point, so the whole strategy of ignoring the baddies cost me only a quarter of my health. The perpetual flicker of the screen and vignetting of the edges has become an eyesore by this point. There's also no penalty for my just standing around while Simmons gets away. Rubi does nothing when left alone other than look left and right and unnaturally wave her arms.

I was tempted to exit to the dash at this point. This game seemed to offer nothing new and the controls are dreadful. Then it surprised me. Rubi goes into a corridor, shoots a guy in the face (he dies with one shot, mind) and his blood sprays all over her face. Rather than being horrified by this, it sends her into a bloody rage, and here is where it gets interesting. The game takes on a animated feel with a black, red and white motif, the environment turning red and all the character models silhouetted in black with dashes of white. It looks pretty cool, and sliding around on your knees in slow motion whilst shooting these black and white cut outs and watching them atomise into a black mist is pretty damn sweet. However, the sword is still your one-hit-kill friend here, and the controls are still like three day old leftovers. The music that kicks in at this point livens things up, with the memorable lyric “Zombie Killers of the Wild Wild West” which sounds like the kind of exploitation movie I'd like to see.

Unfortunately, Wet isn't. It's derivative in the worst way. I said it earlier, but this is twice removed from the source it tries to emulate. Once through the parody pastiche of Tarantino, and also through all the other games that tried before it. Playing through the demo, it's very hard not to think of Kill Bill, with Rubi aping the bride character, but without any of the charisma or motivation. Bad guys just appear for you to slice through while you try to chase down the suitcase mcguffin.

With the inclusion of a quicktime event along a highway, I've gotta bin this off. At least when you fail it shows Rubi's body ragdoll down the central lines, but there's nothing that can make me play a quicktime event these days. The game has style, there's no doubt about that, but it never really feels like a gelled experience. The weapons seem unbalanced, the signature acrobatics unwieldy, and the bad guys are flimsy stereotypes. Expect a sequel.

I’ve just done watching the third season of Battlestar Galactica on DVD. It’s not the best TV show I’ve ever watched, but I haven’t got a job at the moment, my 360 is largely bereft of decent games, and I’ve already watched all five seasons of The Wire (which cured the cold I had at the time, incidentally).

If you haven’t seen the third season of Battlescar Gelacticus then you might want to stop right here. That’s the only spoiler warning you’re gonna get.

I stopped watching Heroes because, let’s face it, the quality took a serious nosedive around episode 1 of the second season. If I had to point to a moment where it absolutely positively jumped the shark, it’s gotta be when the new Spock killed Veronica Mars on the beach. For the love of all that is holy, did she piss off one of the writers? Incidentally, if you’re reading this Tina Fey, and you want me to stop watching 30 Rock, likewise, kill off Katrina Bowden’s character, Cerie. I’ll just watch Arrested Development on DVD for the rest of my life.

So Battletoad Spartacus most certainly nuked the fridge (ooh, how up to date I am) at some point in the third season. There are so many possible candidates for nomination, let alone the actual prize, that it’s difficult to know where to start. It could be the Cyclon three-way between the British dude from Bridget Jones’ Diary, the Ford model and Xena Warrior Princess (I had to look her up on imdb.com incidentally, cos I had no idea who she was, oh it’s Lucy Lawless). It could be the babbling precog in the vat of KY-Jelly who everyone seems to ignore for spouting gibberish, until the posh British dude says, er hang on, you might want to actually listen to the lubricated muppet. Perhaps it’s the fact that they didn’t just allow Helo to carry on getting biblical with the defective vending machine, instead of conveniently sucking him and the misguided replicant out of the nearest airlock, but instead allowed him to get away with manner of mutiny and murder.

Or how about Brit in disguise Jamie Bamber wearing a fatsuit and shedding what looked to be about 4 stone in an episode and a half with just a mere mention of a skipping rope (and it explains how he managed to get so fat so fast, whereby in a later episode there is a fleet-wide food shortage). I could also mention the ridiculous boxing match between Peewee Adama and the blonde fighter-pilot chick which ends with them in a good old fashioned clinch, punch drunk and whispering sweet blood-bubbles in each other’s ears, while everyone walks off in disgust, mirroring the reaction of the audience at home. Also ran is the female Kirk Benedict (Faceman from the A-Team, yeah!!) bursting into a misty cloud of space-debris only to pop up in the rousing season finale of All Along the Watchtower as if nothing happened. Which let’s face it, means she’s more than likely a frakkin Cylon.

Which brings me neatly to the Starfleet Academy Award for biggest thing wrong with Season 3 of Battleship Potemtica, and the award goes to, blah blah and so on… the Human Disease which Kills the Cylons! Hear me out on this one, because it goes to the very root of why that for all the things Battlemoth Spatula gets right, they are utterly undermined by this shocking piece of near-sighted writing.

Ok, so if you recall, there is a Cylon base station floating about full of the thus-far revealed seven Cylon ‘skinjobs’ (Phil K Dick called, he wants his dignity back) all keeling over and being generally quite poorly, because they pulled in some beacon from outerspace that some filthy human had sneezed on 2000 years before. Okay, so far so Andromeda Strain. I can buy all this, cos the milk ain’t sour, and finally the pathetic meatbags have a weapon they can use against the machines. Hurrah and rejoice.

Then there’s the whole thing about how this biological disease could become biomechanical and that should any of the Cylons die and respawn into their bathtub of lubricant it would infect the whole Cylon race. So the Admiral’s bratty son comes up with the sublime idea of sneaking up on the Cylon’s KY-Jelly factory and spraying the floor of the brig with the poorly Cylons, thus infecting the whole Alien Resurrection ship in the process. A genuinely decent idea, only marred by Helo suffocating them on the behest of his terminator girlfriend before they can get in proper download range (Cylon wifi is good, but not that good). Everyone looks a bit silly, but not as silly as they do to the audience at home sitting on their cheeto-stained couches, when they collectively decide not to do a frakkin thing about it. Oh well, they say, best be moving on. Helo’s alright by us.

So the colossal and unmitigated dick-move error on behalf of all of the writers, producers and directors of the show is this. If they have a disease, described by them as a ‘biological weapon’, then why after the above plan goes tits-up, is it never mentioned again? Humans are immune. Conveniently, so is the Battlebarge’s pet Cylon (something to do with a placenta?), but they know full well that are still plenty of Cylons running around any of the other numerous ships in the fleet. So knowing this, and having taken blood samples from all of the infected Cylons that they had in the brig, and further knowing that this virus happily lives in a vacuum for a couple millennia, why not, I dunno, PUT IT IN THE WATER. Or on all the door handles, or in the food, or in the washing powder, or on the tip of sharp sticks. If it doesn’t hurt humans and is cyanide to Cylons, I dunno about you, but I’d be using it as wallpaper.

That way, the pedestrian humans could have continued their quest for Earth (I hope it’s a present day one, and they have to infiltrate the academic institutions of the world it to bring its technology up to date before the Cylons arrive, er hang on…) safe in the knowledge that there are no friggin stowaway Cylons on board. And more importantly, they’d immediately uncover the remaining five unrevealed Cylons, about when they start coughing, falling over and dying, thus avoiding the utter catastrophe that was the final episode of Season 3. There would be no nasty surprises, and just in case you haven’t seen it, it reveals that four of the main characters, who have had the temerity of walking around in front of the camera for most of the season (or more), are in fact toaster-loving skinjob Skynet replicants of the Cylon variety. In all manner of douchebaggery, it’s 3 of the main-main characters, and 1 minor recurring character, who have all between dispatched their share of Cylons in the past, making them dirty great hypocritical morally-ambiguous motherfrakkers. Which is just a giant writing-by-committee clusterfuck. It’s a good job no one watched this show, cos otherwise they might have organised one of those internet petitions (that so work) to get it cancelled.



Just so you know, it’s Chief, the Jock from Caprica, the drunk XO and the President’s new Miss Lyningham (cos she died in a car accident). Yeah, I was as insulted as you are. My intelligence took some pretty hefty jabs that day, I can tell you. Not least of all, because my intelligence was telling me that all these frakkin idiots should be dead already.

I’ve not watched the fourth season yet. I’ve half a mind not to, but I’ve got it on DVD and it’d be rude not to. I have the giddy delight of finding out who the fifth and final Cylon is. As I said above, it’s probably the girl Faceman, but that might be too obvious. In fact, I’d bet a squeezy bottle of pancake mix that the hot Ford model Cylon points directly into the camera and says, “It’s You. You’re the last Cylon” and the whole thing ends with a Vaudeville dance number.

Or someone will spoil it for me in the comments.