In the 2 years that have passed since my Assassin’s Creed review Ubisoft have been working on a sequel that should address many of drawbacks to the first game. It’s not like Assassin’s Creed was that bad. I really liked it, so much so I could forgive the crushingly repetitive nature of the missions and the long, and boring monologues. Oh, yeah, those drawbacks.

So what’s changed in Assassin’s Creed II? Well, the cites are much more detailed and are positively heaving people to interact (kill, bribe or buy stuff from) with. Ubisoft has done a great job optimising the Anvil game engine used in the first game. I just love the whole look and the feel of the game. It’s perfect. Wandering around Venice during carnival is just spectacular. Venice really thrives with people, fireworks, costumes and face masks. Your character, Ezio is also a joy to control. After a few hours (even if you’ve never played the first game) you will be running around rooftops and killing people like a pro! This all helps really pull you into the game.

Assassin’s Creed II has a better plot, shorter more meaningful cut scenes (thankfully!!!!) and characters in the form of Ezio and your best mate Leonardo Da Vinci that are not total arseholes. There is even more variety in the missions. Admittedly, you either kill, follow, fedex an item from A to B, chase or beat people up in these missions so there isn’t a hug amount of variety, but it is a very welcome and much needed improvement. Such is the improvement, Assassin’s Creed II becomes even more of a time killer than the first game. Entire afternoon’s will disappear playing this game. I promise you.

The music in Assassin’s Creed II is just awesome. All the tracks that Jesper Kyd has composed complement the gameplay perfectly. In fact, I have the official soundtrack on my iPhone it’s so good. My person favourite is the Venice Rooftops track (listen on iTunes).

The missions aren’t the only aspect of the game that has been expanded. Multiple weapons, armour, items, money and property development are all now included. Ezio can earn money from the various missions, or pickpocketing people in order to buy better weapons, and develop his home villa (e.g. fix up shops and buildings). Whilst all this brings another aspect to the gameplay, once you get to about half way through the game money becomes pretty pointless as you have so much of it. Well I did anyway!

The only other thing I can find wrong with Assassin’s Creed II is the clumsy way several “memories” are missing from the game, only to turn up – at cost – as downloadable content (DLC). Will I be buying this particular bit of Assassin’s Creed II DLC, well, no I won’t.

In summary: Assassin’s Creed II fixes many of its predecessor’s faults to produce an excellent game. Highly recommended.

Screenshots:

Assassin’s Creed II is out now on Xbox 360 and PS3.

The MAG launch event that I attended earlier on this month is featured in the latest Eurogamer TV show.

For those eagle eyed TAG readers, you get to glimpse me playing MAG at 2:56mins and 3:05 – 3:07mins in the Eurogamer TV video as well as the following MAG players: flamingcarrot and FlecheMe (these are their PSN IDs).

What is a little more obvious in the video is my tweet which was projected onto one of the walls at the event. Check it out at 4:40 – 4:44mins:

It kinda summed up just how useless Team IGN were on the night ;-)

MAG is out now only on the Playstation 3

Here is the MAG launch trailer for your enjoyment for those of you who haven’t played the game yet. I was fortunate enough to get to play it just over a week ago at the Eurogamer MAG tournament. Full review coming soon, when I’ve clocked up some more hours with my brand new S.V.E.R character.

If you want to join me in MAG my PSN ID is: thefluffyfist

Before I start talking about SNKs King of Fighters XII, I’d like to share a little bit of history about me and fighting games. To be honest, fighting games have never been my first love. Sure I liked playing IK+ and Body Blows on the Amiga, but then I never really got what was so good about Street Fighter II on the SNES, which everyone loved so much. But then in 1995 Sony launched the PS1 with Tekken as one of the first games available. I loved it. Played it all the time. Completed it and then traded it for Tekken II some months later and subsequently played that to death.

But then I just got bored of fighting games, and moved onto other genres, particularly racing games. So I thought it was about time to see if I’d been missing anything in the meantime with King of Fighters XII. Unfortunately, as it turned out I hadn’t.

I know that many people have been waiting for this game for some time. It was a very popular series of games on the Neo-Geo, which it must have been since this is number 12! Also I’d been hearing about the oodles of time that SNK had spent hand drawing all the characters, so I expected so much more from what is a fairly basic fighting game.

Visually the graphics look terrible on a big LCD TV. I was playing this on 1080p setting on a Toshiba 46 inch LCD, and to be honest I wish I wasn’t. It was like plugging in the Wii with the component cable, looking at the screen (aaaggh, the horrible graphics) and plugging the scart cable back in (mmm, better looking fuzzy graphics). I thought I was playing an Xbox Live Arcade game from the early 90’s. Everywhere you look your eyes are assaulted by nasty looking pixelation. I honestly thought that I’d missed a setting when loading the game as the screenshots I’d seen and even the ones I’ve used on this post, don’t really show just how rough the graphics look. Seeing as everything on the screen (backgrounds etc) is hand drawn, there is no escaping the pixelation.

However, there are some nice touches amongst all this graphical carnage, mainly centred around each characters individual moves. Many of them just look really good, very smooth and well, hand drawn. So hats off to the SNK animators and all their hard work. Oh, hang on I’d forgotten about the huge wrestler character “Raiden”, there is nothing redeeming about him what-so-ever. He looks terrible. Bad, bad, bad, bad, bad artists.

The next thing to assault my senses shortly after the grpahics was the game sound. Aggghhhh. After playing precisely 3 rounds I quit the game, found the SFX options and muted the in game music. What on earth possessed SNK to include such terrible music in this game I really don’t know. Were they trying to make you angry so you’d enjoy beating up the other characters. TAG top tip: Do not play this game with the in game sound enabled using a home cinema system, your ears will bleed.

Ok, so what about the fighting action. Well, when it comes to the battles they are fun while they last. Standard fighting game set-up really. Choose up to 3 characters in your team and go fight. The gameplay does lean heavily towards combination fighting, rather than 1 punch and a kick here and there. So I did get to experience some pretty spectacular combination action, usually from the console kicking my ass.

You do have new moves available in this version namely, guard attack (escape being trapped), emergency evasion (run away), blow back attack (anti-special move) and critical counter (special attack). Of these I had all sorts of trouble activating my characters critical counter move. Fortunately, SNK have included a n0ob’s setting allowing for easy special attack critical counter activation. Yay, for easy activation.

The arcade mode is a bit limited in that you only play five 3 round fights and that’s it. No boss battle or anything. That’s a bit cheap SNK don’t you think? Ok, there is a practice mode and a gallery, but very little else. Also when playing 2-player against Weefz, it was about as awkward as Resident Evil 5 (just try playing it with 2 players, annoying as hell) to set up. The menu system was just not intuitive when you throw 2 controllers into the mix. Come on developers, it’s not that hard to let the 2 players select their characters at the same time! And yes, there is online multiplayer available too.

In summary:

Average fighting game, with terrible music and few gameplay options. Recommended only to fans of the series and those without big screen LCDs!

Screenshots:

King of Fighters XII is out on the 25th Sep 09 for Xbox 360 and PS3.

Lets get this out of the way first. I absolutely, totally, unreservedly suck at this game. I didn’t think I could be so bad at a game until I played this. I’m much better at Warhawk on the PS3, honestly.

Right, so Battlefield 1943. In short, it’s a World War II shooter, with some nice island environments and lots of blue sky. It’s like being on holiday, only you get to shoot people, drive tanks and blow stuff up. Awesome.

There are 4 maps, maximum of 24 players per map and 2 different game modes. The 2nd game mode is called air superiority which is plane-only combat essentially. The island environments look lovely, as you can see from the screenshots. Lots of palm trees huts, bunkers, cluster of petrol barrels and gun installations. The fun part (for me) of the game is blowing things up. Almost all of the environment can be blown up to some extent. The palm trees and buildings mostly bear the brunt of the destruction. It is really, really satisfying to hop in a tank and trundle down the road to blow up a building full of the enemy (helped by the maps on the HUD showing everyone’s location).

There is some some added variation to the game as some of the respawn points are on aircraft carriers so you can either fly a plane, use the carrier guns to bombard the islands or get in one of the boats with your mates and attack the coastlines. I did enjoy being driven around the coast line whilst machine gunning the beaches. I killed a lot of trees and buildings but not many people.

One thing I did seem to have in abundance, was the ability to always be in the wrong place at the wrong time. I was always in the building that got carpet bombed (when you fly the planes you can bomb stuff too). Or I’d be driving a jeep with my team member in the back as a gunner, whizzing down the road, over a hill… and straight into an enemy tank. Dead, again! Not only was I a danger to myself but my team mates too. Oh, and flying. Well, let’s just say I have much better control of a real plane (as I’m currently learning to fly) than the ones in Battlefield 1943. They aren’t the easiest things to control, which is probably for the best as they are really destructive with their quite awesome bombing capabilities. I did end up losing points for my plane “suicides.”

What’s not so good in this game is the small number of maps and the limited weapons available. I did get a little bit bored of playing the same maps after a while. Hopefully, this will be addressed in future downloadable content (no idea if this is planned). However, the are lots and lots of people playing it at the moment, so you almost always get a 2 full teams and tonnes of action.

Overall is it worth the 1200 MS points? Yes if you are into first person shooters and aren’t quite as useless at them as me!

Screenshots:

Battlefield 1943 is now available now on Xbox LIVE Marketplace for 1200 MS Points (and the PlayStation Network)

I’ve been playing The Sims 3 every day since its release. I love it!

I know I’m usually the one going “narrative, blah blah, games need plot, blah, characterisation, blah blah blah…” Screw it. These are not hard and fast rules. I like virtual dollhouses open-ended simulations too.

In a nutshell, The Sims 3 is The Sims 2 only more awesome. Here are just some of the annoyances that they’ve fixed:

• Lives were too short: When I wanted to focus on career or relationships, my sim would insist on aging and dying. It takes time to build up all those logic and charsima points while trying not to set fire to your dinner! Now you have the option to give your sim a double-length lifespan or switch off aging entirely.



• Customisation: You can now put a custom skin on everything. Should you, for some obscure reason, wish to have suite of cow-print kitchen appliances, there’s no need to trawl websites looking. You can go straight into the Design function, chose from a huge range of textures and pick the colours you want. Or you could download them from my Sims 3 studio ;)
• Other sims are no longer a mystery: In 2, you could talk about certain subjects but you’d have to squint at the speech bubbles to see reactions and track inter-sim relationships, likes and dislikes by yourself. Yeah, right. I’d just guess and occasionally kill a friendship outright by flirting with the wrong person. Now you can discover traits, partners and jobs of the other Sims and look them up later when you’re planning parties. No more time wasted ringing people who are at work.



• Mood triggers and timers: Previously, you could sneeze at the wrong time and completely miss what your sim was complaining about. Now there’s a tracker that shows all the things affecting your sims mood and a rough guide as to long until she hits her tolerance threshold. Yep, she’ll still wet herself but you can’t say she didn’t warn you.
• Lifetime rewards are useful: Rather than buying effort-inducing gadgets like the money tree, your reward points are now spent on traits that make the game easier. I wanted a totally career-focused Sim that didn’t care about cooking, but a lot of my free time was still spend preparing food. With the Hardly Hungry trait, she now eats once every three days. Way more time to spend in the gym to become a a super-fit super-spy!

I should be balanced here; it’s not all brilliant. The community areas are smaller. Some of them don’t have interiors at all. I went on a date to a fancy restaurant with a prospective partner. All the camera got to see was the outside of the restaurant while the meal progress bar ticked away. Even so, it’s nice to be able to wander around the town watching other Sims living their little SimLives.

Content creation is limited to reskinning, so you can’t build your own custom items. It also seems to me that there are fewer interesting models of each appliance/furniture available out of the box. Everythings so far is very… conservatively designed. As in, they mostly look like furniture you’d find in Argos. Hopefully some more outlandish stuff will turn up in the online store over the next few months.

On balance though, it’s the Sims 2 upgraded, with lots of usability tweaks. Exactly what the franchise needed.

Screenshots

As my Twitter followers will know, just after Christmas I got a load of back pay through from a promotion at work. Like any other video-game-mad ex-band-member would do, I bought myself the Ion Drum Rocker. (I played the bass guitar in a band at school because our flat didn’t have the space or isolation for a drum-kit. We mostly played Metallica covers.)

Let’s get the most important points out first:

1. Yes, drum sticks are included
2. Yes, the Drum Rocker is awesome!
3. Yes, it works with Guitar Hero: World Tour

The Rocker comes in a box roughly the size and shape of the Rock Band Instrument Pack. When you open it, you get…

…a bunch of little boxes. And some poles with bits on them. And Empty Box “A”.

Open all the boxes….

Lots of thingies. Have no fear, the included instructions are fairly idiot-proof and have lots of pictures. For the record, Empty Box “A” contained air.

You may be tempted to disbelieve reports that the kit will take about an hour to assemble even for experienced… er… assemblers. It’s true. The gear isn’t complex but there are lots of parts and lots of connections to hook up. The thing cost 230 quid, so now is not the time to skip steps.

The finished product is big.

That TV in the background? That’s a 46-incher. It’s about 2 feet behind the Drum Rocker, so you can try to gauge the size yourself. Or, y’know, I could just go measure it.
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Right, I’m back. In a playable configuration (as pictured) it’s 177cm wide (46 inches), 67cm deep (26 inches) and 110cm high(43 inches). If you don’t want to take it apart between sessions, you can fold in the arms holding the red and green drums. That’ll bring it down to 76 cm wide (30 inches), which isn’t exactly small but is less dominating. If that’s not enough, keep hold of your allen keys and get used to doing lots of unscrewing and reassembly coz there’s no easy way to fold bits up for storage. You do need everything screwed tightly coz it’s fricking annoying when the drum pad drops a millimetre every time you hit it.

Performance-wise, the Drum Rocker is fantastic! Sure, those missed notes on the original Rock Band kit miiiight have been my fault… With the Drum Rocker, you get much better feedback. If you miss the drum pad and hit the edge, you know what happened. There’s no ambiguity to that click of drumstick on frame. I haven’t noticed the kit itself dropping any of my good hits and the rebound off the drum pads feels much nicer than the original kit. The physical sound is less annoying than the original plastic kit but still enough that you need to turn the volume way up to hear the drum sounds properly.

The bass pedal is still a bit soft. I never liked feeling that I have to consciously hold my foot above the original kit pedal and this kit doesn’t address that at all. I have no experience with other electronic drum kits but I know that you can rest your foot on a standard mechanical pedal between songs with no problems.

The cymbals feel very strange. If you’ve ever hit a real crash, you’ll notice it straight away. These don’t move at all. You hit them, they go *clonk* and jar your hand like you’ve hit something solid. Oh, and if you turn your volume way up you can just about hear
the cymbal noise above the clonk. That being said, they are responsive and you learn not to hit them so hard. Better than not having cymbals at all.

The Verdict: If you have the space and you really enjoy the drums, this kit is well worth it. You do still need to turn volume up but the drumstick noise is noticably quieter. The Drum Rocker is a great stepping stone to real drumming, if you’re considering that. Plus, it looks way cooler at parties :)

In part 1 of this review I talked about the plot exposition and death. Here, I’m going to talk about controls and movement.

Movement and Environment

I have to admit, when I first saw the visual style of this game, I thought it looked absolutely bollocks. The characters appear to be 2D cartoon models against 3D backgrounds (okay, yes, just like one of my favourite films, Titan A.E.). It looks so jarring in the screenshots. Surprisingly enough, it actually works well in-game. Great job by the art and animation teams.

The 3D environment itself is, frankly, amazing. Click on the screenshots to see bigger versions. The stuff in the background isn’t background matte-painting-style art. It’s the actual gameworld in the distance and you can run right up to it, for the most part. The only time you’ll see load load screens is during map travel, which isn’t really necessary if you plan where you’re going. The world is technically free-reign but really it follows the standard platformer design with the slight twist of “power plates” that let you fly or run from A to B. Along with Elika’s ability to point you in the right direction it’s pretty much impossible to get lost. All good by my standards.

Game controls are absolutely brilliant. Everything has been carefully designed to streamline the experience. Where moving Altair in Assassins Creed is can be painful, jumping from pole to pole is a joy in this game. The Prince is intelligent enough to automatically swing round to the other side of the pole on landing. You don’t have to jump, rotate 90 degrees, rotate another 90 degrees, jump, rotate, rotate just to proceed in a straight line. It’s jump, jump, jump all the way.

The camera does a nice job of following and if it ever moves when you’re in the middle of lining up a jump, I didn’t notice. You get a good locus of control over it and can look pretty much everywhere that is reasonable for the Prince to see. In other words, when he’s clinging to a rock face, no you can’t see what’s behind him even though it would sometimes be really, really useful. His running speed is suited to the world size as well, which is a nice and unusual touch. I even managed to get all the Time Trial achievements.

Challenge

The one thing that really affected my view of this game was the thinking. It’s wild! There are like, actual puzzles that you have to like, solve… all by yourself and everything. Nothing too mind-boggling – they’re mostly about pulling combinations of levers in the correct order to manipulate some machinery. Still, the sheer novelty of not being able to just open a locker and get a combination was impressive in a console game. Even better, Elika doesn’t nag you if you haven’t solved it within 30 seconds.

The other requirement for thinking was collecting the light seeds. (When you clear an area, glowing balls of light appear in both obvious and almost-inaccessible places. It’s apparently good to collect them, though I’m not really sure why.) Not all the light seeds were near the beaten path and some of them were postively evil to track down. I got all 1001 in the end without any help from the interweb or game guides :) See?

You can unlock the Altair costume by signing up to Ubisoft’s website and linking your account to your gamertag.

The Downside

My only real complaint is that the wall-running routes are too blatantly signposted, which takes most of the early challenge out of working out the route. There are bloody obvious scratch marks across the wall of every major path and a lot of the less-travelled ones as well. This aren’t as much help when you’re collecting light seds later in the game, but I do think they detract more from the game than they add to it.

In Summary

I love this game. You have to think a little and the penalty for failure isn’t the rage-inducing annoyance that it is in so many other games. Prince of Persia is just relaxing and fun. Everyone should buy it.

I love Ubisoft’s new Prince of Persia game. It’s not perfect, but it’s as damn near close as I’ve ever seen.

Story

There’s an actual plot with actual personalities and natural sounding dialogue. It’s like they hired a real writer and everything! Elika is a great female character with her own motivations and while yes, she is the obligatory hourglass shape, she wears clothes and has more purpose in the story than just looking pretty and supporting the hero.

Plot exposition is very well handled. Cut scenes are kept short to give you the bare minimum of information that you need to get on with the game. They haven’t let that destroy the story however – those of us who actually enjoy narrative can continue the conversation whenever we want by pulling the left trigger. Plot points are nicely interspersed with character and relationship-building dialogue. They’ve hired some talented voice actors, too. I love it.

Death

The death cutscene is barely a second long – no frustrated bashing the button to try and speed up the same slow-mo death-panning shot you’ve seen a hundred times before, a la Mass Effect. It’s quick and simple and you’re back on your feet, ready to go again. Best of all, the resume point is the last flat surface you were on which is rarely more than 30 seconds back.

Some people might complain that this makes the game too easy but I completely disagree. I think it opens up the world for experimentation that much more. In the recent Tomb Raider demo I spent more time clinging onto vines being afraid to jump because I knew I’d have to do the whole tedious climb-jump-traverse-jump-climb again and again if I was wrong. Even worse, if the camera popped over to a weird angle just as I was about to jump, it wouldn’t even be my failure but I’d still have to pay the price. In Prince of Persia, you’re not afraid to try risky moves in order to reach that light seed that seems just out of reach because the penalty isn’t so bad after all.

Combat

Battles are… interesting. Well, they were interesting for a while. I was very proud of spending an hour or so working out how to break each of the special defences used by the bosses. Then I flipped through the manual and it was right there on page 14 :| After that, the battles got a bit tedious but then, combat isn’t really the point of this game at all. Prince of Persia is all about exploring the environments, and they are beautiful indeed.

That it for part 1. Come back in a few days to read more about the environment and the sheer joy of moving around in this world.

Woo hoo, a high def WipEout game. This is the game that I’ve been waiting for every since the PS3 was launched. First off, it’s a great game. The graphics are fast, high def (ok, the game does cheat a bit with the HD stuff) and stunning. The tracks are almost all brilliant to drive fly, with the exception of the Chenghou Project track which I hate with a passion! The soundtrack is entirely composed of Cold Storage tracks (awesome music), well it is on my PS3 as I’m suing WipEout HDs custom soundtrack feature. And finally, the online component is great. It’s simple to start or create races and there’s always enough players around to start a race pretty quickly.

The pilot assist feature works well and it’s pretty unintrusive. It’s like a passive autopilot that gently nudges you away from the track walls. It won’t save you every time, but for people new to WipEout it makes the game much more accessible, which is a good thing. Also the other great thing about WipEout HD is that I don’t have to use the SIXAXIS controls at all. I still fly using the good old d-pad.

So what’s not so good. Well, I know lots of people really love the new look to the zone tracks, but I’m that impressed. To be honest I was never that big a fan of zone tracks. I much prefer the challenge of perfecting a time trial or the all out mayhem of the races. With the zone tracks it’s all at little, well, boring. In particular the new zone “look” actually makes it harder to play (maybe that’s the point?). When your zipping around at rapier speed the whole environment is eye blindingly red, which makes it an absolute arse to see where your going. Not fun.

The other aspect of WipEout HD that is a little bit of a let down is the tracks available. There is only 8 and 6 are from Wipeout Pure and 2 from Wipeout Pulse. Being a big WipEout fan I have played these tracks to death, so I would have welcomed some new ones. However, new tracks are supposedly planned for future DLC, at a cost obviously.

In Summary:

It looks amazing (especially on a HDTV), plays brilliantly and you can finally blow people up online. Buy it.

Screenshots:

WipEout HD is available now for £13.99 on the Playstation 3 from the PSN store