Killed in a Smiling Accident.

A quick comedy catch up: saw Stewart Lee a couple of weeks back, on his “If you prefer a milder comedian please ask for one” tour. Opener Henning Wehn, the German Comedy Ambassador to the UK, was pretty good, and Lee himself was fantastic. Covering the heinous crime of coffee shop loyalty card stamp faking, the joy of moving to the country or indeed another country for the quality of life (particularly with respect to prawns) and his admiration and respect for the Top Gear team, the high point was the finale, a brilliantly crafted, slowly building epic, beginning in a doctor’s surgery before moving into pear cider, the magpie culture of advertisers and the internet, and finishing with a song. Yup, a song.

Last night was Boffoonery at the Bloomsbury Theatre, a comedy benefit for Bletchley Park. Both informative, with Simon Singh doing a bit on the bible “code” before giving a live demonstration of an Enigma machine in action, and entertaining, with stand up from Robin Ince, Dave Gorman and Richard Herring and skits, spoofs and humorous vignettes from Punt & Dennis, Laurence & Gus, John Finnemore, Margaret Cabourn-Smith and the voice of Stephen Fry. All most excellent, but particularly most excellent was Captain Ridley’s Shooting Party, a Bletchley-themed panel game chaired by Robert Llewelyn featuring Maggie Philbin and Richard Herring against Johnny Ball and Robin Ince. Ince deployed fearsome, if ultimately futile, lateral thinking that put even Ted Rogers on 3-2-1 to shame, Herring dropped in deft asides, Maggie Philbin, having read up on the subject, actually knew the answers to the questions in great detail, and Johnny Ball is a legend. At the age of 71 he’s as full of passion and enthusiasm as ever, with that vital hint of lunacy, as several questions fortuitously allowed him to launch into a whistle stop tour of binary and Egyptian multiplication, Euler and the seven bridges of Koenigsberg and finding square roots with Euclidean geometry, demonstrated with a string of beads that have hopefully given Richard Herring another half hour of material.

Batman: Arkham Asylum was much lauded upon release by game pundits and players alike, and reported pretty much universally as a firm indication of the imminent second coming of our lord and saviour – J. Holy-Christ O.B.E, until the mania died down, people got bored, and everyone moved on to the next effusion of orgasmic halleluiahs, which seem to currently being ejaculated for Uncharted 2, with Brutal Legend surprisingly and sadly being cast down into the pits of gaming Hades where, ironically, it’s probably most comfortable, and is even now rocking out with the Lord of Hellfire; although, if a game that revels in the satanic imagery of the heavy metal scene is sent to Hell, does it really go to the fiery pits of the Inferno, or is it perhaps forced to reside in a quiet country field full of sheep and bunnies and forced to play Singstar: Annoying Whiney Girl Band Edition for all eternity? Regardless, the crowd of gourd worshippers have rushed off after a new messiah, and so I decided to pick through the debris of their wake and see what all the fuss was about.

The introductory sequence instantly lets us know that this game is aiming more at Dark Knight than the television show of the sixties, or even the much acclaimed slightly more serious-but-still-aimed-at-kids animated show of recent years, despite many of the actors from that show being employed to work their vocal voodoo on this game. Indeed, Mark Hamill’s Joker is a masterful work, and had it not been for one Heath Ledger, would probably be considered the definitive acted interpretation of the master villain. The other insight that the introductory sequence gives us is that the game is running on Epic Games’ Unreal Perspiration Engine, a curious piece of technology which can render landscape environments in stunning and immaculate detail but always manages to make skin look overly shiny as though it’s covered with a sheen of sweat. Maybe it’s a deliberate commentary on the future side effects of global warming, or perhaps a reflection on the greater existential problem of mankind’s permeability of thought, that our motives and desires inevitably leak through to the facade that we present to the world, and the people we interact with can see themselves reflected in the sweat-like sheen of this psychic projection. Either that or someone left the PHONG_SHADE_ALL_SKIN_TEXTURES flag set to TRUE again.

If you want a dry but detailed account of the game I would recommend the Wikipedia article. The game has a story typical of the genre, it’s a suitable vehicle to allow Batman to go forth and verily punch punks in the teeth with wild abandon, but it’s hardly going to win any awards for originality. It’s a super hero comic book adaptation, and as such it follows the trend of Big Bad Boss quite astonishingly escaping from a maximum security facility – for the third time this week – and contriving a huge and convoluted plot to destroy the hero’s City of Protective Choice whilst giving our hero every opportunity to stop him under the pretence of needing to toy with the hero first. The Joker is one of the few villains where a writer can get away with this script over and over again, because it’s basically the Joker’s modus operandi – he has to pick at the bat-shaped scab that scars his mind – but even so, if you couldn’t see the whole plot laid out before you from the very beginning of the game – like the walls of the Matrix in that scene where Keanu Reeves finally, oh thank the lord FINALLY, realises that he is Of Course THE ONE, You Plank – then you probably don’t read comics much. The important thing with the story in Batman: Arkham Asylum is that it doesn’t get in the way of running around and giving generic goons a darn good kicking, this is more important than one might think, and I’ll come back to why in a moment.

Giving generic goons a good old fashion knuckle sandwich is what super hero comic book games are all about, because it’s what super hero comics are all about. You can pretend that super hero comics aspire to a higher art status, that they reflect the nature of society’s doubts and tackle the difficult issues of the time, but in the end they resolve those issues by finding someone that they classify as naughty and punching them hard in the teeth. Watchmen – resolved by punching people in the teeth. V for Vendetta – teeth punching. Grandville – there might have been some animals in there who don’t have teeth, but whatever tooth-like substitute they have, you can be sure that they were punched in them. The combat in the game is beautifully realised, it’s not just the simplicity of the Rock-Band-like rhythm system that it uses, where timing your punches to the beat of the fight awards you with a linked combination of moves that cause greater damage, but the fact that these moves flow seamlessly together and look totally natural. If someone attacks from behind and you counter the move, Batman doesn’t just turn mechanically and punch the assailant, but grabs the kicking leg and snaps it with an elbow drop, or back-fists them in the face. There are a huge variety of moves, such that, even if you aim at an enemy who is across the room from you, Batman will move to attack them in a way that couldn’t have been choreographed any better: back-flipping across the room and kicking the goon while Batman flips himself onto his feet being just one example. It’s another nod to the ‘less is more’ style of game design, you essentially mash just one button to attack, use the directional stick to aim at the enemy you want that attack to land on, and the game does the rest. The subtlety is in the timing, in using the counter attack button judiciously, and in working your way around the room of enemies in a systematic fashion such that none of them even get a chance to retaliate. Because the combat is simplistic yet nuanced, and because the player is not having to constantly remember five or six different button actions along with the thousands of additional combinations of those buttons in order to progress, the combat is utterly immersive, you come out of the other end of a fight with Batman standing over a pile of incapacitated felons, adjusting his Batsuit cuffs in the nonchalant manner of one who has just single handedly pummelled an entire steroidally overdosed American Football team armed with baseball bats into submission (they tried fighting with the implements of their chosen profession, but hitting someone with an American football just doesn’t have the same impact), and you think “Wow, look at what Batman did!” and then you check yourself and think “No, wait, look at what I did as Batman!”.

As good a game as it is, I think that immersion is the real triumph of Batman: Arkham Asylum.

Coming back to the fact that the story doesn’t get in the way of the game, this also helps with the immersion. The cut scenes are kept to a minimum, as such you don’t have your immersion broken by suddenly becoming a passenger in a scene that you were moments ago in control of. These cut scenes often change the camera angle so that you view your character in a way that can only be seen as you peering in from the outside, they eject you from the world you were living in and make you watch, helpless, as the entity that was you a moment before is now under the control of Mr Story-Teller. Honestly, I think that Rocksteady Studios could have removed the cut-scenes altogether and had the player play through them in an interactive way, but since they are kept to a minimum they provide, if nothing else, a suitable reminder that it might be time for a quick cup of tea, or to evacuate the previous five cups of tea.

The attention to detail magnifies the level of immersion. Batman’s costume gets ripped on several occasions, and that battle damage stays with you throughout the rest of the game. Therefore, when you come back to the game you are instantly reminded as to what Batman has been through up to this point in the game and you are reminded of your previous battles, as such you are able to settle back into the game that much quicker, even having been away from the game for some time. Batman’s outfit tells ‘the story so far’ and you get your reminder almost subliminally.

Adding further to the feeling that you are Batman is the fact that the game embraces the way Batman generally operates: he piles into groups of enemies and martial arts them into submission, or he sneaks around and uses fear and the shadows as his weapons, picking off heavily armed opponents one at a time. With the former method the game positively encourages you to wade into groups of enemies and revel in fighting against overwhelming odds and winning through, although you quickly come to realise that you are the Goddamn Batman and that unless there are twenty or more of them facing off against you, the odds are not going to be in their favour. The latter method is equally well handled, with Batman quickly being able to learn the inverted takedown manoeuvre from the obligatory character progression mechanic (often incorrectly using the appropriated term RPG, it seems). With the inverted takedown available, Batman is able to hang from the rafters unseen until an unsuspecting enemy walks underneath, at which point you drop down on a line, grab the enemy and whip back up into the shadows, stringing him up for his friends to find. The AI is well programmed, such that the remaining felons come running to their compatriot’s aid, and finding him all Bat Bondaged, exclaim in terror to the room in general “Who are you?!” and other such phrases, and then stick together more often, reflecting their increased fear. This all serves to make the player feel utterly powerful as they sit in the shadows of the ceiling and gloat. The game goes to great lengths to make sure the player always feels like Batman, and feeling like Batman means feeling in control. There’s this dark brooding menace and arrogance of self belief that serves Batman well in the comics, and the player is never thinking “how am I going to overcome this challenge” when it comes to combat, they’re simply thinking “what’s going to be the most entertaining way to overcome this challenge”. It’s never a matter of ‘if I overcome this’, it’s merely a matter of ‘when I’ve overcome this’. There are a couple of disappointments with respect to the immersion in this case: the stealth aspect of the game relies on Batman strategically using oh so conveniently placed gargoyle statues around the ceiling of the rooms in order to execute his divide and conquer strategy; it may just be that the architect of Arkham Asylum was as insane as its inmates, and this manifested itself in stuffing gargoyle heads at random into rooms that were clearly otherwise not designed for them, but in all honesty it just screams game mechanic, which is all the more stark when compared to the cleverly hidden mechanics in the rest of the game. It’s perplexing when considering that the mechanic for the Bat Grapple when used to move around the rest of the game world is, like most elements of the game interface, simple and enjoyable to use. Another immersion breaker is that the stealth sections are clearly defined, you can’t use the inverted takedown in the outside areas, despite there being many walkways and guard towers that would make perfect ambush spots. Apparently it only works from gargoyles. These are minor niggles though, and quickly forgotten when you realise that no matter the environment, there are punks who need to be taught a lesson, and you’re the one who is ideally suited to give it.

So the combat is delicious, and this being a super hero comic game that makes it ninety percent perfect straight out of the gate. There are a few other things worth mentioning though. For example, this being a super hero comic game, all of the female characters (barring Token Dowdy Doctor Lady) are over-sexualised to the point of driving all the way past the suburbs of Parody and heading deep into downtown Juvenile Masturbation Fantasy. For good or for bad, foxy females are a staple of super hero comic books, but in recent years it seems to have devolved from the innocence of pubescent infatuation into a more demeaning, derogatory and dark place better suited to seedy Soho stores. It’s a shame to see the game follow this trend, because although the Dark Knight had an adult audience as its intended focus, it refrained from such cheap thrills.

The Sandman levels are also worth a mention, making excellent use of the villain’s hallucinogenic devices to twist the game on its head and provide a nice change of pace to the ‘explore and conquer’ mode of the main game. Think American McGee meets Mario and you won’t be far wrong.

And finally two design decisions which show the curious nature of game development, where on the one hand the old tropes of past games are ignored, and yet another is included for no added benefit. Throughout the game there are numerous ventilation grates which Batman can yank off in order to sneak around obstacles and enemies, but to do this you have to go up to the vent, press the A button to start the process and then repeatedly mash the A button in order to pull the vent from its housing. Why? It seems utterly pointless, there’s no game to it, you either press A enough or you don’t, there’s no timing or rhythm mini-game, the amount of noise you make isn’t affected by the speed of your button presses, it’s just utterly pointless, and I’m totally curious as to why it’s in there. On the other hand, Rocksteady Studios completely resisted any urge to add a token and utterly inane driving section to the game. Possibly a first in any Batman game to date, and something that they should be congratulated on. When the Batmobile blows up somewhere near the start of the game, I couldn’t have cheered more.

There’s no doubt that Batman: Arkham Asylum is an accomplished game; whether it’s actually worthy of the Second Coming praise that has been showered upon it, or whether that was just a product of a games journalism industry floored out of left field by a competent and compelling super hero game, I think it must be for the individual player to decide, but if you love the idea of the being the one, the only, the true “Goddamn Batman”, then welcome to Judgement Day.

Last week Melmoth and I headed up to Birmingham for the International Comic Show, a definite highlight of which was Bryan Talbot’s Grandville. As well as the opportunity to pick up a hand-badgered copy, Bryan gave a talk on the book within the anthropomorphic tradition, starting with his original inspiration, a book of illustrations by Gerard who worked under the pseudonym of JJ Grandville. As well as old animal favourites like Beatrix Potter and Wind in the Willows characters, he covered some areas I wasn’t at all familiar with, like the early 20th century popularity of animal cartoons in tabloids, the Daily Mirror’s Tiger Tim being countered with Teddy Tail in the Daily Mail and then Rupert Bear in the Daily Express, the only one still going.

The setting for Grandville is a Steampunk version of Belle Epoque Paris, in a timeline where France won the Napoleonic War and England only recently regained independence. Our hero, Inspector LeBrock, can detect with the best of them, starting the adventure with some distinctly Holmesian deductions, but is also a man’s man (badger’s badger?) who’s popular with the ladies (sows?) and handy with his fists when needed, a bit like Daniel Craig’s Bond. An apparent suicide (in Nutwood, home village of Rupert Bear, whose father shows up in a couple of frames) leads to a deeper conspiracy, as these things do, and lots of fights, chases and a spot of “badger-on-badger action”, as the man put it.

Grandville is utterly gorgeous, as the preview images show, and packed with details. One frame is based on Manet’s Bar at the Folies-Bergere (with a slightly different bartender), where our hero orders a Bass ale as seen in the bottom right corner of the original; the whole palette of the surrounding pages is then taken from that image. Another frame, in the apartment of an exotic badger dancer, takes the furnishings from a photograph of Sarah Bernhardt’s apartment. There are a few humans around as well, part of a menial underclass, including Spirou as a bell-boy and Becassine as a maid, long running European comic characters I wasn’t at all familiar with. There’s also a white terrier who may seem familiar to readers of Tintin, but Talbot cunningly conceals his true identity by naming him Snowy Milou.

If I was forced to criticise it in some way, perhaps at gunpoint, like if a slightly odd mugger leapt out brandishing a pistol and demanding comic book criticism instead of money, there are some slightly unsubtle political allegories, and the plot isn’t terribly original, but those are piffling trifles really, and overall I wouldn’t hesitate to award it the highly coveted KiaSA “Best Steampunk Graphic Novel With Badger Protagonist EVER” award.  It’s a fantastic setting, in many senses, so it’s splendid news that there’s already a sequel in the works, “Grandville Mon Amor”.  C’est tres bon!

“People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint, it’s more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey… stuff.” So said The Doctor in Blink, but it might well have been Jonathan Blow talking about Braid, for it’s a very timey-wimey game.

Like Blueberry Garden, it starts off with the platform game staples of the cursor keys to move and space to jump. Unlike Blueberry Garden, it continues with the platform game staple of a wandering thing you have to jump over or stamp on the head of to avoid death, and ladders to climb, and moving platforms, and things to collect (pieces of jigsaw puzzles). Time starts going wibbly-wobbly the first time you die: press shift and time rewinds, enabling you to put right what once went wrong. It’s a little like having Quick Save/Quick Load keys that we’ve become accustomed to in many genres, but even better, a retrospective quick save where you decide after the fact where you saved the game. This changes the basic gameplay similar to the way Sky+/TiVo changes watching television; it’s remarkably convenient, but it doesn’t change the fundamentals of the platform.

I was hopping through the third world of Braid, enjoying the freedom that rewinding time gives you, not worrying that a slight slip would force you all the way back to the start of a level to re-do everything, when it began to annoy me. I just couldn’t see how to pick up certain jigsaw pieces, or how to kill a boss who needed five chandeliers dropping on his head when there were only two chandeliers available. I didn’t want to totally spoil things with a walkthrough, but a quick Google on “Braid hints” turned up a splendid page that understands that too much information would ruin the game, and just nudges you along. Literally one line was the hint I needed, I’d seen the glowing objects in the level, of course, but hadn’t twigged that they existed outside the timeline you control (the very first puzzle you have to solve depends on that property, but I thought it just applied to keys as opposed to all glowing objects). As soon as that clicked, the game transformed from “quite fun platform game” to “work of fiendish genius”, and you really have to start thinking in non-linear time. Subsequent worlds employ different mechanics; the one in which time moves forward when you go right, and backwards when you go left is a particular mind-bugger.

Braid is beautifully styled, with visuals like a painting. It even has a plot about, would you believe it, a lost princess; finish a world and, in a stunning turn of events, it turns out the princess isn’t in that castle. Just as the gameplay twists the standard Super Mario fare, though, so does the story, with books in lobby areas peeling back layers and looking at time, loss and regret. If that sounds a bit too arty for you, though, you can pretty much just ignore it and get on with the puzzles, or even the simple joy of rewinding time and going “beeeeoooowwwww!”

Braid ran perfectly smoothly on the laptop, and £9.99 is a more than reasonable price. It’s a very close-run race between Braid and World of Goo for “game of the pack”; I’d say World of Goo *just* edges it, but they’re both wonderful games that, in the world of ever-increasingly budgeted blockbusters, show there’s joy, innovation and real quality out there in indie-land. Two thumbs up, one of which travels into the past while the other remains in the present timeline.

In some ways Everday Shooter is so Old Skool it would spell “Old School” properly; it’s a shooter in which your “ship” is a blob, on each level you fly around a single screen, you have three lives and die when you touch pretty much anything. In other ways it’s as much of an “art-game” as The Path; the author describes it as “…an album of games exploring the expressive power of abstract shooters. Dissolute sounds of destruction are replaced with guitar riffs harmonizing over an all-guitar soundtrack, while modulating shapes celebrate the flowing beauty of geometry.” The combination of the two works rather well.

You move your ship with the cursor keys and can fire in one of eight directions using WASD, or a combination thereof. True to being an “album of games”, you’re on each level for the duration of its background song with the objective of firstly surviving, and secondly scoring points by collecting blobs left behind after destroying certain enemies. Each level has a different “chaining mechanism” that enables you to cause much explosion-ism for great justice (and scoring opportunity). The points you earn, as well as being a simple measure of score, also allow you to purchase extras, such as more lives and graphical filters.

One of the real strengths of Everyday Shooter is that you can pick it up and play straight away, and put it down after five or ten minutes feeling like you’ve actually done something, a little like the golden age of arcades only without needing so many 10p coins, so it was ideal for a bit of holiday gaming. It ran well on the laptop, and at £5.99 is pretty reasonable. Overall, an eight-way shooting thumbs up.

Gish is yet another game featuring a 12-lb ball of tar as its hero. Honestly, developers, can’t you come up with something original? Here’s an idea just off the top of my head: there was a conflict around the middle of the 20th century, where most of the World had a War (for the 2nd time, as it goes), surely there’s scope for some kind of shooting-based game there? Anyway, at least there’s a twist to Gish that sets it apart from all the other tarball based games: you have a human ladyfriend who gets kidnapped, and you have to get her back!

You may not think a ball of tar is ideally equipped for such a rescue mission, lacking as it does opposable thumbs (any thumbs, in fact, not to mention hands, arms or limbs in general), but Gish has three rather handy abilities: he can extrude spines, enabling him to stick to surfaces, he can increase his density and he can become slick. This allows a variety of actions, such as sticking to, and climbing, walls and ceilings, smashing blocks and enemies, and sliding through narrow spaces.

Gish is a very kinetic game, there’s a real sense of movement in the character and its interactions; your default jump isn’t very high, but when you land you compress slightly, and if timed correctly and you jump again when compressed you jump a little higher, compressing more on landing, enabling you to build up to more impressive leaps. Gish also has a surprising amount of personality for a ball of tar with yellow eyes and fangs.

After a simple opening level introducing you to the basic control mechanisms and a fairly straightforward squish through some sewers, I started to get a little frustrated as the game got a bit trickier. I’d tend to get past sections with trial, error and random key mashing, die further on in the level, and have to re-do the earlier bits with more trial and error. I suspect I just need a bit more practise to get various techniques down and repeatable; it’s another game I hope to get back to with a bit more time (if only Steam did sales on Time). No technical problems on the laptop at all, it ran very smoothly, and very reasonable at £5.99. It even includes some player vs player modes like “sumo”, and “football” featuring opposing blobs of tar attempting to manoeuvre a football past the other side to score a touchdown, which look like they could be quite fun with a few people. Overall: a blobby tar thumbs up. Just please, developers, no more platform/puzzle games based around balls of tar with structural altering abilities! Here’s a tip: some fellow called Tolkien wrote an obscure book almost nobody’s heard of, I reckon a Game in which you Played a Role in that sort of setting could sell like hot cakes.

Blueberry Garden won the Best Game prize of this year’s Independent Games Festival. It’s an “interactive fairytale” in which you control an odd en-beaked individual (possibly Raymond Luxury-Yacht, though there’s no guide to confirm whether it’s pronounced “Throatwobbler Mangrove”) on his travels around a hand-drawn world.

At first glance it seems a fairly conventional platform game, you move with the cursor keys and jump with space, but you soon get the feeling you’re not in Miner Willy’s Mansion or Vorticon VI any more, Toto, with the distinct lack of enemies you have to carefully jump over to avoid losing a life. In common with The Path, Blueberry Garden is about exploration and discovery, but where The Path is dark, disturbing and heavy on the death, Blueberry Garden is fresh, whimsical and much more interested in fruit (so far, at least; I’m presuming you don’t fall into an inescapable pit of doom and despair further into the game). Something else Blueberry Garden has in common with The Path is relatively high system requirements: a 2GHz dual-core processor and 256MB graphics card are suggested, and the laptop did struggle with it. The game was just about playable but slowdown and stuttering did spoil things slightly, so I didn’t fully explore the garden, though I did start to make a fairly impressive tower of a giant pencil, block of cheese and a tomato…

Again it’s not something I’d go out of my way to pick up, but if I had to go exploring and the choices were a nice garden with some blueberries or The Forest of Death and Blood (“is there a story behind that name?” “why yes, everyone who goes there dies of death and blood”), the garden would edge it, and at £3.99 it doesn’t even need to last two hours to achieve Sherbet Dip Dab hourly cost parity. Overall: a blueberry-stained thumbs up. If, of an evening, I’m tempted to plunge into the sound and fury of Angry Internet Man forum debates over the bitter controversy of the day, I might go and wander around Blueberry Garden for a while instead; I suspect it would be far better for the blood pressure.

Difficult one, this. If I’d come to The Path totally cold I really don’t know what I would have made of it; as it is, there were several good articles and interesting debates over at Rock, Paper, Shotgun around the time of release. The Steam page says: “The Path is a game about growing, about changing, about making choices, about accepting the consequences of these choices. A game about playing, and failing, about embracing life, perhaps by accepting death.” I say: it’s not exactly a game, more an “interactive experience” or “downloadable installation piece” or “experiential user-controlled unstructured narrative conveyance” or perhaps “Neville”, if you prefer. Once again one of the RPS collective does it full justice in a Eurogamer review, and perhaps the key phrase I’d slightly out-of-context-edly extract from that is: “It’s totally no fun. It’s interesting, but there isn’t a fun bone in its mopey body.” Not really what I was after when unwinding of an evening; still, I fired it up for a bit of a wander around the forest, and hit something of a problem in that the laptop couldn’t cope very well and juddered through the introduction (the systems requirements do specify “no integrated graphics”). Turning all the graphics options down rendered it almost playable, but it still juddered and stuttered during interactions, which robbed any atmosphere that was building up. I’ll try and give it another go on my main PC sometime, perhaps at two in the morning when sleep deprivation is starting to kick in to give it more of an unreal vibe (not an Unreal vibe, though, I’m not sure a voiceover of “MULTI-KILL!” and “RAMPAGE!” would entirely be in keeping with the spirit of the game).

I’m glad something like The Path is out there, pushing boundaries, exploring the meaning of games n’ all that, but it’s not something I’d go out and buy, though £7.25 seems reasonable enough if it’s your bag. That’s one of the nice things about the multi-game pack, it gives you the opportunity to try things you wouldn’t normally bother with (even if only to confirm your preconceptions). Overall: the stuttering idea of a thumb in a forest at an indistinguishable angle.

In Darwinia you pitch up in a computer world under attack by a nasty red virus, and are tasked with helping its creator save the native Darwinians. It has strong RTS elements, but scales things down so you only control a few units, and increases your part in the action so that rather than just clicking your squad and clicking an enemy to get them to attack you directly control laser and grenade fire.

The prologue/tutorial is quite in-depth, introducing you to the various elements of the game, but I was somewhere towards the end of it when I had to shut down and couldn’t easily find a save option (might just be me, though). Next time I started it up the game crashed just after building a second unit (probably more to do with the crufty Windows install on the laptop than the game itself, it ran pretty smoothly with a couple of the options turned down), and with limited time I didn’t get back to it again. Still, from what I saw there’s plenty of game there for a most reasonable £5.99; it was released a couple of years back, and I remember PJ spoke most highly of it at the time. Another one I’m looking forward to returning to in a spare moment; an electronic thumb up, in between battling a virus.

Crayon Physics Deluxe does exactly what it says on the tin: you draw stuff with Crayons, it’s subject to Physics, and it’s Deluxe. The object is to navigate a red ball into a star, and the method is with whatever you can draw: weights, ropes, pivots, hatstands, marmots, members of Alec Douglas-Home’s 1963 cabinet…

It’s a very well realised game, technically ran absolutely fine on the laptop, but it never quite clicked for me. I think I have two main shortcomings: a lack of crayon-based physical imagination, and a lack of drawing ability (not that you need to produce masterpieces, but even my blocks and rectangles were a bit wonky), which results in a combination of not really being sure how best to approach a level, and then having some difficulty executing those plans I do come up with (I just can’t get Reginald Maudling’s hair right). Perhaps the mouse is a bit of an obstacle, and either an iPhone version or some sort of graphics tablet would work a bit better with the central drawing motif of the game. At £15.99 it’s pretty expensive for an indie game, I don’t think I’d personally be too tempted at full price. Overall, a slightly ropey crayon drawing of a horizontal thumb.