Seriously, just when you think you’ve seen it all, one of the most bizarre bits of news you’ve ever come across rolls up and hits you in the face. Ubisoft have apparently stolen pirated code for one of their own games.

The Direct2Drive version of Rainbow Six 2: Vegas is, apparently, more broken than a prisoner after three days of being forced into stress positions. It’s all down to the needlessly draconian copy protection schemes, apparently. I’ve only played the 360 version, and I feel a deep and great sense of sorrow for any poor individual that’s had to suffer through Ubisoft’s lousy PC ports. Here’s where it gets interesting. In a weak and desperate move to fix the problem, Ubisoft quite shamefully (they’ve retracted the patch) shoehorned a crack by prominent warez group Reloaded onto the digital distribution service - hopefully taking a few seconds to marvel at their efficient coding - because coming up with their own cracked .exe probably seemed like too much work.

They didn’t even bother to remove the tag that Reloaded left from the file, as this image by Ubi forum poster Twingo lovingly depicts in all its stolen glory:

Ubisoft shock the world by doing shoddy work.

Posting a crack that directly violates their own rules on piracy. Whatever next? Valve to remove their encrypted files, letting Steam apps load faster for everyone? Bioware to remove the horrendous protection from Mass Effect? Or maybe Ubisoft will decide that cd-checks are a horrible product of modern PC gaming and they’ll send us all go back to the days of old DOS games where you have to enter a code by going to page fifty three of the manual and entering the first six letters on row seventeen.

Bask in Ubisoft’s ineptitude by reading the original thread on their very own forums here.

The Blizzard Store completely passed me by. With all the news of Diablo III exciting me like a flame entices a moth, I fancied another go on Diablo II. That’s enough exposition. The Store allows you to link the cd-keys of your Blizzard archive - let’s face it, most people own at least one - and then download them to your computers, removing copy protection in a legal and enjoyable way. It’s also really useful when you’re often moving about. I imagine Starcraft II and Diablo III will be integrated into it. The place also sells sweet merchandise.

Oh, Blizzard. I hate World of Warcraft, but you guys really know how to win me back.

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.

Shambles is a horrible term to apply to something, so I won’t use it.  I have to be frank here, though, so I’ll have to go ahead and admit that Assassin’s Creed is an absolute abomination of a game. I’ve just spent three minutes running around picking up flags - which have spawned for little discernable reason - to be told that my assassination target resides in his personal shitting tower? This is perhaps the most inept and disingenuous piece of level design I’ve run across since I got the 360, and I’ve played some absolute tripe.

Looking back, it’s clear that the game was a mess from the beginning. Instead of showcasing the game, Ubisoft funnelled its PR budget into transforming Jade Raymond from dishy gaming producer woman into cum-gargling dorky sex-on-legs developer superstar. Which lead to stuff like a comic, a backlash and a pretend lawsuit.  Ubisoft are exploitative bumholes at the best of times, so flogging the game as a veritable Jade Raymond Presents: Assassin’s Creed was just another step on the executive ladder to corporate bastard utopia. So, yes, damn Ubisoft. They’re probably the worst gaming studio around today, consistently pumping out lacklustre, uninteresting games with no soul and Assassin’s Creed is no exception. It’s just all so very average, yet unfortunately made heaps worse by the fact the game was hyped beyond reasonable proportions and was billed as the second fucking coming. Whilst we’re on the subject of Jesus, the developers have chronologically sandwiched their game smack bang in the middle of the crusades, only everyone involved with developing it is so desperate to be friends with everybody that even the loading screen reminds us that the whole affair was “produced by a multicultural team of various faiths and beliefs”

Let’s get things straight. You play an Arab assassin with an American accent who goes on a mission to kill people. They don’t use the word jihad, but it’s certainly implied. You think IO had this problem with subtlety when they managed to anger pretty much every religious clique in their Hitman series?

Which is pretty much where my main comparison will lie. IO’s Hitman series is an unappreciated little gem where you skulk around in the shadows, taking in the elements of your murderous playground and then land the killing blow in secrecy. Your victims are all bastards, and by the time you cut off their air supply with piano wire you’ve encountered more than enough evidence to see why, all without being hampered by tedious cutscenes that take the action away from the player. In Assassin’s Creed, you sit on a bench and eavesdrop some boring conversation then stalk up to the target and press one button to kill him and then run away. There’s just nothing to Assassin’s Creed to make it worthwhile. The assassinations are undoubtedly the best moment of the game but even if you stitch all of them together you’ve got less than an hour out of that. So the game, instead, revolves around simple uninteresting mini-games that are endlessly repeated because the developers just couldn’t think of anything better to add. Almost everything you see and do in the game has been tacked on. Buildings are endlessly recycled. The sci-fi element tries far too hard and works with much too little. Regular swordfighting is insultingly easy. The script is tame. The dialog repeats itself over and over. The cutscenes are dull and unskippable. The soliloquies of your victims do nothing to give them any character. The negatives just go on and on. Other, superior, games create atmosphere in their design; the mark of a great development studio. Ubisoft Montreal are, however, not a great development studio. The game has potential, but the execution is flawed beyond belief.

Basically, Assassin’s Creed is weak.

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.

New things are always nice. Especially when they make life better. So I was  expectedly excited when I heard the news that ePSXe 1.7.0 had been released after something ridiculous like four years of development hiatus. I was pretty chuffed as I’m contemplating playing Resident Evil 1, 2 and 3 again and the idea of some fancy OpenGL plugins or whatever will mean I can have all the fun of yesteryear without everything looking so bad. I have great respect for emulator developers, because most of the Internet takes their work for granted and are more than happy to whine about everything on forums.

So I thought I’d just write this post about my experience.

I want to whine about Resident Evil 1, 2 and 3 not working in 1.7.0. Bums. The sound doesn’t work properly. Whenever I get to the “Hold your fire! I’m a human!” bit in Resident Evil 2 everything goes a bit tits up. I think it’s got something to do with XA playing or something, but I barely know what that means myself. What I do know is that they all work fine in 1.6.0 and now they’re broken no matter what combination (and I’ve fiddled with everything, trust me) of plugins and settings I use.

Still, 1.7.0 is good news. Right?

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.

My problem with my degree is that after spending most of my day reading and writing I find it inexplicably troublesome to come home and spend a part of my evening doing it as well. In short, I’m just a bit lazy. But I have a good heart, so it’s okay.

I’ll administer a bit of tough love on myself here and call into question just how many times I have written posts about a vague intent to blog more? I’m a horrible sham of a being. So I won’t say anything about a desire to update the blog more.

Coincidentally, summer is here and in a fantastic and bold move against nature, the world of gaming is just about to anxiously leap into its annual impoverished wasteland phase. We all knew this already. Which is why I’ve been spending my entire life accruing an exciting agglomeration of old and new junk in DVD cases. Whilst your average gamer is wilting away, I hope they take a few seconds to ponder the truth of how I’ve got more than enough supplies on my shelf to last me until November. Plus I’m more than happy to play some old junk that was poorly received five years ago because I picked it up for about three quid on eBay.

Plus, I am going to embark on a mission to update the blog more.

Quick update.

These are the games I am currently playing:

• Crysis
• Blue Dragon
• Rez HD
• New Super Mario Bros.
• Command & Conquer 3
• Zelda: Link to the Past

That’s six games, and I’ve put that in bold to emphasise just how very many games that is. I have, however, recently received Devil May Cry 4. This game has such an emphatically humongous grip on my entire cosmos that if you snatched my copy of DMC4 off me and told me you’d only give it back if I buggered my way through half the sheep of Wales I would (admittedly begrudgingly) agree. I have to play this game. I need to play this game.
However, that’s only because I’m a raging DMC fanboy with a bigoted metaphorical hard-on the size of the Eiffel tower. At least I’m aware of my bias.

So, let’s be honest, I’m probably going to have to abandon playing some of these games. The first one to be abandoned is easy: Command & Conquer 3. I just don’t really like it. It’s a bit ho-hum, really. The cut-scenes are cheesy C&C fare it’s just amazing how little I give a toss. I’ve been plodding along in Blue Dragon for far too long now, and I’m pretty much ready to give that one up. But I’m so desperately close to the end that I just want to get it finished, unless I want to get all 1000 achievement points for it; in that case, I have at least another fifty hours to go.

I really enjoy all the other ones - including Crysis - so I’m going to put them on the back burner and come back to them when I’ve got all the DMC out of my system. This is a promise, and this post is evidence of that.