Mega Derived

Iron Man was pretty terrible. What else can you say? Well, about nine hundred and ninety five words if my review over at play.tm is any indication. Which it should be. Here’s an excerpt:

In a peculiar twist, the game is sometimes hampered by its own over-ambition; Secret Level have tried to keep everything chugging along with a desire for both fiddly and scattered aerial fighting juxtaposed with redundant and unnecessary ground combat - an attempt to blend both Ace Combat and God of War into the same game. Unsurprisingly, it doesn’t work. Realistically, it’s hard to even conceive how this was judged to be a good idea. Bland, cookie-cutter movie tie-in games are notoriously rushed out of the development studio, yet Secret Level somehow assumed they could make something obviously hard to implement from the offset magically possible with Iron Man. It doesn’t work. A spectacular failure as soon as the first eye-curdling cinematic unfolds, Iron Man is a game that has no idea what it’s doing.

Read it all here. You’d be doing me a favour.

Call of Duty 4 is a mighty fine game that, like its predecessors, is best played on the hardest difficulty because it’s so short if you’re not dying every six seconds you’ll have it polished off within three hours. Probably. It’s also a very successful game, having sold something like eleven hundred and twenty million copies and becoming the backbone of Xbox Live.

It’s modern warfare this time around, so the weapons are much easier to aim and it’s easier to blow people apart. Also there’s helicopters and everything feels suitably modern and stuff. They’ve got the atmosphere pegged. You spend most of the game trotting around Russia (because it’s okay to say Russia is evil) and an unnamed Middle-eastern country (whereas that is not okay) as a member of the S.A.S and a little bit of it as an American marine. This is all super, because the British team have a bit more character and their accents are better as they sound like they’ve been plucked straight out of The Bill. It scores bonus points with everyone in this country for portraying the Americans as a load of cock-swinging idiots that plunge head-first into their own futile, high-tech demise and the British as a group of highly-trained elite marines that work behind the scenes to save the day because they’re rough, tough, smart and in such an adrenaline fuelled war rage they can run around sporting nicknames like “Soap” and “Gaz” without any shame whatsoever. Which is nice. The loading screens work to forward all this completely unnecessary narrative and portray the world in a whizzy, high-tech sort of way, reaffirming just how gosh damn modern the combat in this one is. As you play, however, you spend ninety percent of your time looking at walls and various other bits of cover and the other ten percent shooting things with meaty-feeling guns and legging it between places hoping to god you don’t catch a bullet on your way. I won’t dilly dally around: Call of Duty 4 feels good.

There’s not much I can really do to explain the sensation of actually playing it, partially because it’s better experienced without knowing much about it and also because the rest of the internet has probably rambled on about Call of Duty 4 enough in the last few months that anyone who stumbles across this will already be more than familiar with it. If you like your frustration to feel rewarding, you’ll love Call of Duty 4. If you’d rather just enjoy yourself, pop the difficulty down a bit and enjoy romping around with a bunch of war-mongering marines in-between staring at a bunch of anti-war quotes plucked out of real life that show up on the screen whilst you lament the fact you’ve just been blown to bits by three stray grenades at once.

The whole game sails by with more ease and flash than Call of Duty 2, although the ultra-vexing ‘Mile High Club’ epilogue mission more than compensates in terms of difficulty. That thing is hard. I’ve been working away at it for two days now - I pretty much did the entire single player campaign in the same amount of time -  and I’m still no closer to actually getting the thing done. You’re plonked, with no explanation, onto a plane crawling with terrorists and given sixty seconds to blast your way past all of them and save a hostage. It sounds much easier than it really is. It unlocks a twenty point  achievement that I imagine most people who own it wear with an extreme, undying pride.

Infinity Ward are a cracking developer that seem to understand the mechanics required to make an excellent videogame. While they seem to be playing it a bit safe by just churning out FPS games, they’re always bloody good; all you need to do is take a quick peek at the Treyarch-reared abomination that was Call of Duty 3 to see just how much talent Infinity Ward have as a studio. I don’t necessarily want to, but I love their games.

Initially, the game is a slow burner. For the first couple of hours I felt like I’d been here before, just without ever getting myself embroiled within the launch frenzy. For the record, I casually sauntered into Norwich’s HMV just after lunch and came out with the last copy, gently appreciating the classy embossed cover. My initial suspicions were wrong; I hadn’t wasted the forty quid.

A lot of San Andreas has been trimmed away, which leaves us with a rather peculiar sequel that is leaner, gentler and altogether more accessible. What’s gone? The gym, the variety in customisation, taxi and ambulance missions, turf wars, buying properties, buisnesses and bicycles. To name a few. In return, Rockstar have given us bowling, darts and pool minigames. The cynic in me says the reason it’s so comparitively sparse is so they can suck more money out of us later in the year with downloadable content. It will remain to see if this is true or not. But none of it really matters. This is a game that was going to be lauded before it was even released. For some reason, Rockstar and GTA get venerated to the brink of insanity, much to the chagrin of Daily Mail readers. With GTA IV you’re not really playing a game as you are sampling a swiss army knife of various gameplay mechanics, stitched wonderfully together in an atmosphere that’s interesting enough to allow you to forgive the flaws you’ll bump into along the way.

Which is what Saints Row never managed to understand.

The new mobile phone is worth mentioning. It’s a tool that’s brilliantly designed and perfectly executed, an in-game companion that ties the whole experience together. You interact with the game through the phone, even using it to launch a multiplayer game. Your friends occasionally call you up and send you texts, anchoring you into the cityscape and reminding you what’s going on. If you fail a mission, you get a text message which gives you the chance to have another go. If you need a taxi, or some guns, or fancy a helicopter to come pick you up, it’s all done by making the right phone call. Like most things, it’s all about who you know.

There’s been much furore about the story and characters of the game, with some reviewers even going as far as to suggest that GTA IV weaves a narrative so innately complex and sublime that the game doesn’t end without questioning the very moral fibres of society itself, anxiously poising questions about ethics and decency in twenty-first century planet Earth. This is - pardon my French - bollocks. The storyline is a bit more complex than it has been before because Niko bumps into a few problems, though it’s hardly redefinining the very concept of storytelling in videogames. It often doesn’t even make sense: in the cutscenes Niko is forver complaining about having no money, but I spent the entire game strutting about in a designer suit and ended it with about nine hundred thousand dollars in the bank. He’s richer than me, that’s for sure. Most of the ethics come from the fact that at various junctions in the game you’re asked to make a choice to kill or not kill somebody, and the game throws a bit of dialog at you specific to the choice you made. But this is hardly a deep philosophical debate contained within a GTA game, and it smacks of impropriety that you’re expected to want to feel bad about killing various characters when five mintues before you were beating a hooker to death with a baseball bat and setting six cars on fire because one of them had to audacity to clip you as you were sprinting across the road. It just doesn’t really work.

What GTA IV tries to sell you is a deeper interaction with Liberty City than you’ve had before. Niko Bellic feels like more of a character than what’s come before, and the game is all the more better for it. The more vibrant, cartoon style of the previous games has been kicked into the corner and replaced by an attempt to be a bit more gritty and interesting - a change that i’m not overly fond of. I blame Gears of War for it, personally. And whilst we’re here, Gears is probably also responsibile for the new cover mechanic they’ve implemented to make the combat in GTA IV not completely suck like it did it its precious incarnations. Fighting is still a bit rough, but at least it’s not a chore anymore. The cars handle like they’re straight out of Life on Mars and after a while you get into it, sliding around corners with a drifting sensation that, when it works, evokes a great sensation of happiness not entirely unlike being touched in the naughties by a rather pretty young lady.

Which pretty much sums GTA IV up. When it works, it’s great. When it doesn’t, it’s a bit average. Whilst some missions are splendid - mid-way through the game you rob a bank with deliciously disastrous results - a few missions are frustrating and, at the end of the way, most of them are still quite similar. The new checkpoint and autosaving system helps relieve unneccessary tension, and that previously-mentioned atmosphere pierces your heart and warms your soul. It’s the first GTA game that I’ll likely achieve the 100% in, and whilst that’s partially because it seems like the emptiest in the series since III, it’s also because it’s the most immersive and - whilst I did occasionally pine for the style of Vice City or the gameplay of San Andreas - the most enjoyable.

Old LucasArts adventure games are revered by the kind of people that enjoy resurrecting the romanticised ideals of their youth. Like me. Of course, this doesn’t have to mirror reality. I didn’t actually play Full Throttle in 1995, because I was eight years old and I didn’t even have a PC.

Romanticism is pretty much how I see Full Throttle, because I’m a 21 year old Literature student and I need to apply the eighteen thousand pounds of debt I’ve racked up into my actual life somehow. Venerable design guru Tim Schafer’s probably looked back at fifties motorcycle culture, reflected on how ace it was - likely complete with a little sigh at how real life is never as interesting as it should be - and bunged it into an adventure game set in the future. And that’s all you need, really. Job done. Play Full Throttle. And you probably will, at some point. For a while, anyway. Then you’ve blinked and the game is over. How is it so short and easy? Originally I thought it was because of my mountainous mental ability, but it’s actually because it’s just really short and easy.

Story doesn’t matter to the extent that it’s good. Schafer’s universe suffers a bit from an inability to specify itself, which is a solid narrative structure at the start but no answers are ever really dished up. Throwing the player into a clouded universe and slowly unravelling its boundaries and reality is something Schafer has gone on to perfect in Grim Fandango, one of my favourite games of all time and something everybody should have a chance to play.

Lack of length and a general simplicity doesn’t make it inherently bad, though. If that were true then my sex life would be more tragic than something Shakespeare would write after being dumped and remembering that the bastards shut down Clover studios. Besides, it’s almost a certainty that anyone who actually plays this game these days has just spent twenty minutes grabbing it off a torrent site. You really can’t complain. Like the Orient Express, Full Throttle is a beautiful ride. It’s probably one of the first games that showed how much character decent voice acting can lend to a title and the ending credits feature a selection of motorcycle related haiku’s. It’s a good five hours.

Never have the words “Checkpoint Reached” been so gratifying as when I see them in Call of Duty 2, Infinity Ward’s fairly seminal World War II based FPS sequel that propelled the Xbox 360’s launch out of the realms of miserable failure and into a rather murky area of tolerable. Almost decent enough at the time to allow one to forgive the lacklustre array of launch titles, it retrospectively allows us to blot out the mess that less than sterling titles such as Perfect Dark Zero and King Kong left upon the collective minds of the tech-hungry 360 early adopter.

I’m late in playing CoD2 properly, leading to a tardy review, but from the sheer amount of joy I exhibited through a good eighty percent of the campaign, I’d say its appeal is still very current. Recent stirrings into Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare have reignited a spark of interest in the series that developer Treyarch lost by thrusting an inadequate Call of Duty 3 onto a world with very high expectations. In the wake of this Call of Duty 4 frenzy, there is no better time than now to experience, or re-experience, its predecessor. Time has taught us that the game was a resounding success, met with a critical accolade that few could have honestly expected. It’s quite hard to pin down what makes CoD2 so special, especially when I treated it with disgust upon launch and unfairly lumped it into the same category as Brothers in Arms, a game that only excels in its seamlessly insulting combination of faux-homage and tiresome gameplay. How could I have been so wrong?

My only possible reasoning can be in the choice of difficulty setting. On my first playthrough in 2005, I waded through the game on normal difficulty, bashing the ten campaigns out of the way in the course of an afternoon. Call of Duty 2 was too easy. It was wasted on me. I never got the time to appreciate Infinity Ward’s masterpiece of design, a sombre impact of the levels and scenery juxtaposed with intense carnage and aural frenzy; otherwise peaceful settings that were being destroyed by the theatre of war as you played through them. I never got to experiment with the weapons - each of them feeling weighty, vicious and authentic - as I had no need; the game was a breeze, I had no reason to explore the ins and outs of the fighting as you could decimate the entire Nazi war machine with little more than a sneeze.

This is not how the campaign plays out on Veteran difficulty. Forever being forced to duck behind cover, you, as a player, are forced into a lethal exercise of attack and defend. Some enemies will be flanking you, others firmly entrenching themselves behind deep cover, popping their Hitler-worshipping noggins out to take a few pot-shots at you and your comrades. You need to adjust your style to accommodate the defeat of both, but one thing continually remains; you are fragile. Your health recharges, but the enemy is a decent shot and being on the receiving end of even a small spurt of SMG rounds will have you staring at your demise. Veteran poses a whole new kind of challenge, one that demands a whole new kind of outlook. CoD2 becomes a slower, more intense experience where you learn to appreciate the value of staying alive, slowly edging closer and closer towards your goals whilst falling victim to a constant barrage of grenades and bullets.

The essence of the game is linear. Linearity is not, in itself, a bad thing; Infinity Ward’s penchant for tight, slick scripted sequences demand a linear experience. The game is unapologetic about it, too. It’s confident with itself and this, in turn, impresses the audience. It features the inclusion of no modern gimmicks, relying only on its crafted levels to shock and awe. If you stop to take in your surroundings you will likely be disappointed, especially in our post-Gears world. Environments are not beautifully designed or textures, and the settings are the epitome of cliché. It’s rare to see, but the atmosphere in CoD2 comes from the sound and the gameplay itself, mixing together to provide one of the most convincing fictional explorations of World War II ever produced.

For all its merit, it’s romanticised portrayal of World War II is something that all players should consider before embarking on it’s frantic journey. Its inclusion of quotes from various influential figures in history could be considered a touch crass; especially the quotes that deal with the horror of war and the folly of it’s glamorisation. It’s by no means worse than the presentation of war in Saving Private Ryan and similar ilk, but it can occasionally prove irksome. Comforting, then, that Infinity Ward seem like a studio that really care about the history behind their game, instead of just using the struggle of millions to slap together an uninteresting action game. Gearbox and Ubisoft, I’m talking about you.

It’s a clever game, an influential one, that both rewrites its genre whilst laughing triumphantly against the mood of current gaming trends. Exploration and freedom are cast aside in what can only be described as the most apt setting to do so. Events are entirely scripted and, at times, it feels like the game is quite happy to carry on without you. Whilst the elements of the game are entirely linear, it creates an experience that feels dynamic and, dare I say it, authentic. Enemies rush out of buildings and assemble themselves into military formations, ducking and weaving in an out of cover with each other in an attempt to flank your squad. But, as you reload for the sixth time, what once looked like a clever display of AI programming is revealed to be a remarkable display of game scripting. Call of Duty 2 stays with you; I swear I’ve heard the sound of a grenade clinking nearby in every game I’ve played since. The sound of rain, too, has become synonymous with CoD 2’s machine gun fire. Call of Duty 2 isn’t perfect, but it’s one of the most memorable games I’ve played in a long time.

Gears of War refuses to sit right in modern gaming. It’s best experienced by not believing the hype that it’s the first true soldier in the high-definition, next-gen war, which probably wouldn’t even exist if it wasn’t for the fact that our humble Microsoft stuffed the gaming media with so many bank notes they’re liable to explode like gruesome human pinatas. That, and the phenomenal graphics. It’s dubious if this game would have actually been well received at all if it wasn’t for the incredible graphics: exquisite visuals that are so good they cannot be mentioned without at least one superlative. This game looks amazing. There, it’s been said. No game (at time of writing) has graphics that surpass this, a title entirely unrelenting in its visceral charm. When I’m playing I quite often want to gouge my eyes out, as a man so dirty and corrupt should not be allowed to behold such beauty. But running parallel to the luscious visuals you have the game itself which, while fantastic, is not pushing any boundaries. You see, what Gears of War really wants to be is a title from the early 90s.

The engine throws you in to a land of destroyed beauty, a world ruined by war. You view this through the games cast of characters, whom are so muscular that one more protein shake and a simple clench of their butt cheeks would cause their body to spasm so hard their backs would snap. These guys are goddamn buff. And they’re also men. They’re big, tough, armour-clad, angry, gruff, gun-toting badass men. Chromosome XY on full display, rippled and defined muscle groups coated in a light sweaty sheen; battle-hardened faces and wrinkles expressing that they knows the true pain of war. The atmosphere these guys give off is attacking you, the player, in a testosterone fuelled adrenaline rage, working your face with its gigantic behemoth fists until reduced to a miserable pate of blood and sinew. Gears’s protagonist has spent the last god-knows how many years rotting away in a jail cell but is as strong as three Arnold Schwarzenegger’s, in their peak, combined. I imagine that If you challenged Gears of War to a drinking competition it would kick you ass and then sleep with your wife.

Games haven’t been so blatantly homoerotic since the days of Quake II, when the most technologically advanced games were a penis-swinging display of male dominance. Then things changed. Tomb Raider and Half-Life showed up and it wasn’t cool to have incredibly muscular protagonists anymore. Metal Gear Solid snuck in an age of stealthy revolution, evolving any number of Tom Clancy tactical squad based shooters. It never used to be this way, no, your graphical powerhouses used to be a character sneering with delight when you got your hands on the double-barrelled shotgun, then blasting fourteen hundred nightmarish monsters before advancing to the next level. Gears of War might function as a squad based shooter, but it is not one of them. It’s revving up the machismo age of gaming by punching you in the gut and curb stomping you when you’re down. And it doesn’t give a damn what you think about it.

The single-player campaign is a five-act cacophony of destruction. Hurled from one bloodbath to the next, protagonist Marcus Fenix and his posse indulge in a storyline that amounts to a bloody good excuse to blast seven shades of crimson out of an assortment of freaky bug-like villains, fifteen years after their freaky locust army emerged on the planet and started wiping out humanity. A copy of the art book in the limited edition version of the game tells you more about the Gears universe than the game itself, a testament to the sparse moments of storytelling revealed as you play. A traditional FPS style has been replaced by a cover-based third person adventure, and ducking behind anything that will stop a bullet in its path changes the flow of game, giving an extra development to heed: you can blind fire around cover, hoping you’ll hit something, or pop your head out slightly to give yourself a crosshair at the cost of exposing yourself. If you’ve never sampled it before, it takes about twenty seconds to adjust to this cover-oriented gameplay and soon the routine become ingrained into your soul itself (run into room, find cover, press A to hide behind it, begin shooting anything that moves). Perhaps this exposes the games biggest flaw itself, that of repetition. Other than getting cover and then shooting stuff, there’s not much more it has to offer. The story, which has definite potential, is so disparagingly sparse and designed for at least six sequels that it’s hard to be engrossed by it at all and the banter between you and your sidekicks only has to be heard once before it becomes routine. It’s all about hooking you, the gamer: if it gets you from the start, you won’t let go until the end. For the majority, it will be a success. Epic have managed to keep Gears of War sustain its flashy surprises and excellent set-pieces from the start until the end of the game. If Gears of War is a one-trick pony, it’s certainly exceptionally good at performing it.

Other than graphics and cementing in the wonderfully trendy ideal that making the single-player part of games available in an online co-op mode is an exceptionally fine idea, perhaps the first real inkling of next-gen potential comes from the games manual, as CliffyB (semi-famous game developer/lead designer) provides an introduction to the game. Perhaps, in our internet and reality TV driven age, this is a sign of thing to come? Current industry laughing stocks Ken Kutaragi and Kaz Hirai have become notorious internet superstars after E3 2006. Celebrity designers using their name to sell their product is the next logical step and, with development costs at all-time high, publishers will likely be looking to invest in other ways to ensure a games success. Or, perhaps, Gears of War is just an excellent dive back into the blood-filled pool of yesteryear - a time when the idea of chainsaws your enemies into pieces wasn’t a rare sight to behold - and an adrenaline-pumping, albeit basic, shooter that rarely fails to impress.

Project Gotham 3 isn’t nearly as good as everyone says it is. For a start, we all act like it was, and still is, the defining moment of next-gen racing. The example that the others follow. Here’s some news: it runs in a clunky half-resolution with sloppy graphics. It wouldn’t be nearly as sucessful as it is if it wasn’t one of Microsoft’s babies, because it’s just not very good. PGR2 was excellent. I don’t know where Bizarre got lost, maybe they all went crazy trying to get this out in time for launch, but they forgot to program in the fun. The whole game plays out like this:

• Get enough money to afford F50 GT
• Win Game

Oh, wait, did I forget to talk about the wonderful tracks? Each of cordoned off by big fences, so you can’t actually see any of the cities you’re driving in? Or the hundreds of races, each more tedious than the last? “Hey”, you’ll think, “I really fancy some of that racing”, only you won’t get to do any because the game wants you to do sixty two different go-fast-past-the-speed-camera levels first. Whoop! They’re where the fun is. And that’s just not a good racing experience. Besides, the tracks aren’t even fun. Most of them are just a selection of cramped, tiny little back alleys, likely generated by random with the games in-built track creator, which you complete by slowing down to 3mph before you take corners. Where’s the love, Bizarre? Take Outrun 2006, a delightful little number that mixes up blisteringly fast corners that you blaze through with selections of careful sharp turns and hairpins and stuff. Those are the complicated ones. Okay, so I’m not really an expert on racing games, but I know that I enjoy the tracks on Ridge Racer 6 and Outrun 2006 but that I think the courses on Project Gotham 3 suck.

That, and all the time you’ll spend looking at loading screens. Jesus, this game likes to load a lot. And it’s not even bad enough at loading to win that crown, no, that went to Sonic 360.

To cap it all off, you’ve got the ridiculously broken online mode where being in pole position actually means you’re 100% likely to lose the race. The physics are so screwed up in this that if another car gets anywhere near the rear of yours, you’re going to madly spin out, lose complete control and watch whilst every other car overtakes you. People actually choose to play with invisible cars because the online mode is so buggered up. Are Microsoft being serious? I don’t know what’s more confusing, that this game made it out of beta or the fact loads of people put up with it on Xbox Live.

Is there anything this half-arsed racing game actually excels at? No. Apart from being bundled with stuff. It’s ace at that. The only reason I played it all the way through to completion is because all my friends were doing it, because we all got a copy bundled in with our shiny new Christmas 360’s. Okay, I’m being pretty rough on it here. If I’m being fair, the in-car driving view is excellent. You get hands, and a steering wheel and everything. It’s so good that sometimes, just sometimes, I feel like I’m having some fun with the game. But the rest of it needs serious work.

But overall, bad. Hey, Bizarre, here’s an idea, fix this franchise up for PGR4, would you?

Another day, another GTA inspired title. Here we go again, then. In Saints Row you play the new recruit into a gang of thugs determined to take out the other three gangs and rule your city. Or your ‘turf’. Whatever. Your character doesn’t speak and doesn’t have a name. There’s a customisation thing, here. And it’s good, too. When you’re not engaging in overtly misogynistic acts of beating up hookers, shooting other dudes in the face and snorting a line of blow off a toilet seat, you can fulfil your dreams of spending hours playing dress-up. There’s something for everyone. Only you can’t actually snort coke. Shame.

Basically, the city - named Stilwater - is a shithole. It’s no wonder it’s in such total disarray, though, the economy of the city has gone to hell: the cheapest burger at the local “Freckle Bitch’s” fast food resturant is twenty dollars. In comparison, you can buy a gun for a hundred bucks. Let’s work it out: for five burgers you can buy a handgun. In England you can barely afford a bullet for the price of five burgers (and, obviously, I’m talking from experience here). It’s no wonder I just shot everyone eating at the burger bar and stole their burgers, it just makes better financial sense. It gets even more ludicrous: for the price of five deluxe burgers, which look roughly equivalent to a Big Mac, I can afford to have a police car - that I stole by shooting a cop a few times and making off with his wheels - re-spawn in my garage. A strong economy is the backbone of a society, people, and that’s why this place is such a dump.

That, and everybody speaks with such venom. This is a rude little state, and rather unlovable. There’s not much redeeming about Stilwater at all, really. That said, I’m quite a fan of Saints Row. It’s obviously a rather neanderthal attempt at remaking Grand Theft Auto, but i’m okay with that. There’s plenty of driving, and plenty of shooting, and the combination works. I couldn’t give a damn about the storyline, however. The voice acting is almost entirely without charm, and the script just isn’t up to much.

Technically, it’s all a bit average. There’s a system of “respect” in Saints’ Row: you do enough stuff to impress your gang, you get a bar of respect. You have to spend one bar of respect to play a storyline mission. Therefore, you need to work away at various mini-games scattered around the land to complete the game. It can create a rather stunted experience, sometimes, as you reach a cliffhanger moment in the narrative and you’re forced to do some drug running for half an hour before you have enough points to continue. The menu is good, and the map is friendly, and there’s lots of nice little touches here and there. But nothing amazing.

This is probably how THQ seems gang culture, though. Think about it. We, the players, can view a world of urban crime presented to us by a load of middle-class white designers. If there was ever a game that epitomized “wigger“, this is it. Still, not bad. Not particularly great, either. If you see it going for cheap, consider it.

One word: TERRORISTS.

It’s a good game, and I like it, but there’s so many sloppy little bits here and there that are annoying. Chiefly, Ubisoft’s insistence on using an inferior version of the Unreal Engine for multiplayer. What I don’t understand is how multiplayer is being pitched as Vegas’s main selling point; you play a spiffy looking single-player game and then it dumps you into this rough, decrepit hell hole. I imagine you could probably pull off the multiplayer graphics on the original Xbox. Graphics don’t make the game, obviously, but they certainly don’t hurt. Sure, I get the argument that there’s no way the server code can handle 16 players AND produce such nice graphics, but they should work around that. There’s got to be something they can do. Other than that, multiplayer is pretty neat.

Let’s just compare the visuals, shall we? Here’s two images I shamelessly lifted off the internet. See if you can guess which is which:

Single player, while doing justice to my ludicrously expensive games machine, is about twenty minutes long. Blink and you’ll honestly miss it. I regret not playing it through on Realistic difficulty because at least then i’d probably still have some levels left to do. You start off fighting some nasty terrorists in Mexico, which is a boring level, then you do some levels in Las Vegas - which are all pretty good fun - and then you finish off the game at the Nevada Dam. With a fairly enjoyable level. There’s only six. It just doesn’t feel right. I’ll break it to you now; this game ends on a massive cliffhanger. It’s half a game. It really is. It’s even worse than Halo 2. You’re thinking “ooh, this will get pretty good now” and them BAM it’s all over and you’re left watching the credits roll while they work away on the sequel, which they’ll demand another forty quid for. Don’t worry though, it’ll be £25 new within 3 months if it’s the same length as this one.

Gameplay wise, it’s sweet. I’d write about the story but it’s entirely inconsequential. Okay, then, I’ll give it a go: nasty terrorists are attacking Las Vegas. There we go. You run around trying to stop them, often with the music getting you into the mood. The atmosphere the game builds often is a real treat. Vegas is another game that employs a cover system, just like GRAW and Gears of War, and it again works to great effect. I enjoyed playing it, anyway. Rappelling down lines, breaching doors, shooting up evil terrorists with MP5’s, that’s all fun. It’s a good game. Its success lies in its set pieces and the way you go about attacking them. And a lot of them are really fun. You get to an especially good bit and it will play some of that aforementioned nice tense music in the background to remind you of how cool you are. So, fun game. But it’s such a bloody short one. Ubisoft are effectively turning the Tom Clancy games franchise into a factory, pumping out regular updates and saturating the market beyond all logic. As much as I liked shooting the terrorists this time, and with Splinter Cell: Double Agent, and with GRAW, I’m not entirely sure if I’ll be in the mood to blast away any more Mexicans (they’re always Mexican. I think Ubisoft hates Mexico) for a good while. Which can’t bode well for GRAW 2, which is due out any month now. Their formula won’t work forever; compare Vegas to Gears of War and it feels sloppier, rougher around the edges and, frankly, less fun to play. It’s been pushed to the sidelines in Gears’s wake, and rightly so. While it’s fun, it’s not that fun.

Ridge Racer 6 is a fascinating little title that, as far as I can tell, was lost almost entirely in a world that worked itself into a PGR3 launch frenzy. Unlike Bizzare Creations, however, Namco could actually make a racing game that ran at 60fps. But, still, the game is virtually unplayed. It’s also bloody hard. You wouldn’t think so at first, as you rocket around corners without having to do anything else but occasionally let go of the accelerator. No, at first, Ridge Racer 6 seems like a dumb game.

It’s not.

If you don’t believe me, why don’t YOU try and complete the World Xplorer mode? That’s essentially the meat of this title. Again, at first it seems weird and alien. You’re dropped into a bizarre hexagonal grid. I spent the first two hours of the game expecting Bob Holness to spring out at me and ask me some questions. It seems basic, yet complicated. Which is confusing in itself. There are 108-odd hexagons sprawling out in a spider-diagram like shape from 01. The paths higher up are harder. The further right you move, the faster the cars get. Yet, the game’s introduction encourages you to ‘chain’ together various races. Why? I’ve got no idea, I don’t think it changes the game whatsoever. The bottom route (the route we all do first, no matter how good we are at racing games) is, admittedly, pretty simple. You see the courses. You meet the cars. It’s all good. It won’t challenge you, and it won’t get your blood pumping. You need to push past that. Ridge Racer 6 is all about the later levels, where you’re fighting every corner for those few milliseconds that will guarantee you victory in the race. Late in the game, fumbling a single corner results in your failure. It starts a nice game, sure, but it ends a mean one.

The gameplay is basic. More basic than your average racing game. You don’t actually need the brake. It’s only there because Namco thought it would be a good laugh. You see, if you press the brake button, you might as well just lose the race. I spent a good hour or so thinking that in order to fly the car into drift mode i needed to brake slightly. No. That isn’t the case at all. Fly into a corner at full speed, let go of the accelerator, turn the car a bit, hold the accelerator down again. That’s all you do. Honest to god. This is effective; it makes the games about the tracks. Instead of fiddling with controls, or trying to make it realistic, Ridge Racer 6 is all about its own universe. Look at the screen, not the pad. You get better at the game by performing the right powerslides, perfecting them, making them an artform.

If this sounds wrong to you, don’t let it disparage you. It’s a fun game. It’s pretty. The tracks are detailed, colourful and varied. That’s more than a lot of 360 racing games can say. You can get a good few hours of racing out of Ridge Racer 6. And you should.