Category Archives: reviewlet

Reviewlet: Burnout Paradise, Castle Crashers and Braid.

It would appear that the graphics card in my gaming PC has decided that it is bored with the day to day drudgery of producing modest DirectX 9 compatible graphics, and has left to go and live in a commune in the forest with my old printer and that really stupid Linksys router I had that would always drop the Internet connection whenever a download reached ninety eight percent complete. Indeed, my graphics cards has decided to stick it to The Man, has abandoned the rat race life of 3D graphics, and now spends its days printing small tie-dyed Space Invader icons all across my screen. “No maaaan, Direct X is, like, bad juju. OpenGL is baaaad karma. Here, check out these totally rad icons I made in all the colours of the rainbow. They came to me in a dream, man! You wanna toke on this? All right, man, but I’m telling you, it’s good shit.”

So while I wait for a replacement to arrive I thought I’d take stock of what I’ve been playing recently that is not PC related. In this first instalment: Burnout Paradise, Castle Crashers and Braid.

Burnout Paradise: If you don’t know about Burnout Paradise, then you haven’t been a regular listener to the Van Hemlock and Jon podcast. Shame on you! I’d played an earlier incarnation of Burnout on the GameCube and had enjoyed it enough that, combined with the constant media praise for the ‘Next Gen’ edition of the driving series, and perhaps slightly more to do with the fact that I found a copy for sale at a disgustingly cheap price in a local electrical store, I decided to grab the Xbox 360 version and give it a try. So what is Burnout Paradise? One could say that it is a driving game, but that would be a lie. It would be more accurate to say that the primary single player experience is actually a very detailed, very gruelling, hardcore orienteering simulator. Orienteering at one hundred and seventy five miles per hour in super-charged V8s. The subtitle for the game should be Vin Diesel’s Extreme Orienteering Simulator. There are various events within Burnout Paradise, but I think it’s fair to say that the vast majority of them are a point-to-point race of some sort; some of these events are straight races, where others require you to avoid being taken down (run off the road so that you crash) too many times by a set of pursuers who are wolf-like in their relentless harrying. The problem is that unless you know the roads off by heart you have to rely on your map and compass to get you from start to destination; I don’t know about you, but I have enough trouble reading a map when I’m stationary at the side of the road and not in a hurry, let alone trying to decide whether I need to exit at the next turnpike whilst driving twice the posted speed limit, on the wrong side of the road, airborne halfway through an advertising hoarding, and trying to land such that I avoid the other racers who are determined to run me into the oncoming traffic. Essentially then, you’re expected to learn the layout of the city, to find the shortcuts and the crazy ways to literally cut corners, and commit them all to memory so that you need never experience that sinking feeling in your gut when you suddenly realise that you haven’t looked at the road for a good five to ten seconds, and you peer out from behind your map only to see nothing but sky. And then ground. Sky. Ground. Sky, ground, sky, ground… ‘the captain has illuminated the safety belt sign, please place your seat backs in the upright position and stow your tray in the seat in front of you in preparation for landing. Thank you.’.

I take it back, Burnout Paradise is an orienteering simulator only so long as it takes you to memorise the layout of the not inconsiderably sized city. For example, the stunt events require you to know where all the decent ramps and drifting places are with respect to your starting spot, so again it’s all about learning the area and knowing the optimal routes to take. Perhaps a better subtitle for the game would be Vin Diesel’s Extreme London Taxi Driver Knowledge Simulator, or Vin Diesel’s Bastard Hard Brain Training.

The game looks gorgeous and the physics simulation is excellent such that there is genuinely great pleasure to be had in just ‘free burning’ around the city, trying to learn the roads and find all the hidden jumps and shortcuts; it’s like a giant adventure playground for the Mad Max generation, and never does this become more clear than in the multiplayer achievement mode. Having tagged along with Jon’s Tuesday Console Club for a session of multiplayer achievement mayhem, where the game mode is a cooperative effort to try to complete various tasks set by the game – drift for a cumulative distance contributed to by all players, all players must achieve a barrel roll in a specific zone of the city, any one player must achieve a set amount of airtime from a jump, to name but a few – I have seen the level of effort that has gone into creating something that is more than just a simple arcade driving game. With Burnout Paradise, Criterion have created a driving sandbox game, it’s Elder Scrolls in American Muscle cars, and as such would have been worth its full retail price for the amount of time I will undoubtedly invest in it before I get bored. At the current clearance price it’s ridiculous value for money.

Castle Crashers: Ren & Stimpy meets Golden Axe. Need I say anything more? Expect lots of subtle yet childish humour and old-school arcade game-play with the respective rapid ramp-up of difficulty that coin-op machines would employ to keep you feeding them regular snacks of cupro-nickel. There’s a hat-tip RPG element in the form of points gained per level that you can invest in various stats in order to customise your character towards your preferred style of fighting. There are upgradable weapons; spells; potions and there are enemies. Lots and lots of enemies. There is one excellent tactic granted to you in order to deal with the vast relentless tide of foes that you face, and that is the fact that you can bring three of your friends along for the fight. The graphics are crisp, the animations traditional but fun, and the audio is that perfect blend of catchy tunes that bleed into the game without taking over from the arcade-homage sound effects. A very enjoyable, easily accessible, side scrolling hack’n’slash arcade game of the old school. It’s available on the XBox Arcade, and for me the only thing it lacks is a backing ambience of Penny-Go-Round coin pushers, an oppressively dark and smoky atmosphere, and a strange emo kid called Danny who stands slightly too close while looking over your shoulder as you try to play.

Braid: You remember that girl you knew at school? You do. The stunningly pretty one who all the boys fancied and half the girls did too, and they all waxed lyrical about how fantastic she was. Remember your disappointment when it turned out that no matter how much you or anyone else loved her, they would never be able to love her more than she already loved herself? Braid is what would happen if that girl was sucked into the Tron machine and transferred into the digital realm.

Braid is pretty. Braid is clever. Braid loves itself utterly, and no clearer is this in evidence than in its supposedly deep and meaningful story. Braid wants to be seen as high art, and Braid thinks it is too good for the likes of you.

What Braid actually appears to be is a delightful little Marioesque platformer combined with puzzle elements generated using the Prince of Persia: Sands of Time time mechanic. The puzzles are devious and clever in their implementation, and this is the one thing that I think Braid brings to the table that makes it special and perhaps more than just another amalgamation of game-play elements slapped together from existing games. Braid is an accomplished game, it presents a coherent, attractive, and innately comprehensible game world. It’s just such a shame that it clearly thinks that it is far more of a revelation than it actually is.

Reviewlet: The Steel Remains by Richard Morgan

Richard Morgan’s first novel, Altered Carbon, was a rather splendid hardboiled cyberpunk detective story, followed by four other sci-fi (or sci-fi-ish, I haven’t picked up the near-future Market Forces yet) books. Now he’s turned to fantasy; New Odd High Weird Old Noir Low Epic Fantasy, to be specific, in The Steel Remains.

The easiest comparison that springs to mind is Joe Abercrombie, not least ‘cos there’s a quote of his on the back, and Joe’s review (plus excellent unexpurgated version of the cover quote) is well worth a read. Like Abercrombie’s First Law trilogy, The Steel Remains is a gritty, down and dirty (in many senses) book with lashings of sex n’ drugs n’ rock n’ roll (only with the rock n’ roll replaced with bone-crunchingly visceral violence). Following three main protagonists, heroes of a previous war, getting to grips with a new world through three viewpoints took a bit of getting used to, then I got really caught up in their separate stories. As the three are pulled together at the end, though, it feels a little hasty; as the first book of a trilogy it strikes a balance, there’s enough of an ending that it could stand alone, it doesn’t just stop in the middle of a larger story, but there are plenty of loose ends to be picked up in future books that make it ultimately slightly unsatisfying on its own. Good introduction to the world and characters, though, and I’m looking forward to the rest of the series.

Reviewlet: Doctor Who, The Writer’s Tale

Doctor Who: The Writer’s Tale starts with journalist Benjamin Cook e-mailing Russell T. Davies, head writer and honcho of Doctor Who, suggesting an article looking at the process of writing one of the forthcoming episodes of Series 4. Davies thinks it’s a good idea and replies, starting a year long correspondence during a tumultuous time for the programme.

The book consists of these e-mails, lightly sanitised for language and spoilers (past series 4), and illustrated with copious photographs and Davies’ rather nifty drawings. This can make for a slightly uneven flow sometimes, but if you’re used to internet forums and message boards it shouldn’t be too jarring.

Obviously the main interest will be for Doctor Who fans. You get to see the Christmas special, The Voyage of the Damned and the rest of Series 4 take shape, including the evolving draft scripts of Davies’ episodes (some don’t make it into the book to keep it possible to physically lift, but they’re available on the aforelinked website), and over the course of the book Stephen Moffet is confirmed as taking over from Davies for Series 5. As The Writer’s Tale, it’s also got plenty of interesting stuff for writers, some practical, on dialogue, writing action etc., but mostly on the state of mind of someone trying to juggle the enormous workload involved in producing Doctor Who, writing six episodes, re-writing others, working on The Sarah Jane Adventures and Torchwood together with some shreds of a personal life. Davies manages to simultaneously display seemingly crippling self-doubt about the value of what he’s doing together with the unshakable self-confidence required to write anything like Doctor Who, the early chapter on the effect internet criticism can have on writers being particularly illuminating.

Slipping into the role of emotionally stunted stereotypical Doctor Who obsessive, there may have been moments when I might’ve muttered something like “yeah, yeah, you’re depressed, get over it and write more about the plans for showing Davros in his younger days”, but generally if you’re at all interested in writing and Doctor Who, you probably guessed from the title you might like this book. And bought it a while ago.

Reviewlet: TMWRNJ Reunion

Last night I headed for the Lyric Theatre in Hammersmith with PJ and the only other 548 people in the world who’d ever heard of This Morning With Richard Not Judy. Or 547, one person did shout out when Richard Herring asked if there was anyone who’d never seen the programme. Maybe 546, someone we overheard on the stairs during the interval didn’t seem very sure who Stewart Lee was, though it could’ve been the same person who shouted earlier. Anyway. It was a late 90s comedy series, and several of the participants were back together at one of Richard Herring’s comedy nights at the Lyric.

The evening started with Trevor Lock, he of Trevor and Natalie, they of being easy on the eye, who never spoke on the programme but fortunately didn’t reprise that role, instead delivering an odd set, a bit like a downbeat early-era Harry Hill, barely pausing, chucking weird images out and rapidly morphing them in even weirder directions. Few jokes as such, but a constant stream of quite-funny-ness.

Stewart Lee was up next, a total contrast in style, masterful, calculated pacing, timing and delivery even with a creeping flesh disease. An absolute great.

After the interval, host Richard Herring took the t-shirt slogan “Give Me Head ‘Til I’m Dead” to it’s logical conclusion, then a long way past, in luridly Herring-esque detail, before demonstrating his superpower (as he pointed out, easily enough to earn him a place in the third series of Heroes) of having small hands, and outlining how he’d use such a power for good. They are small hands too, you have to wonder if it hampers his Guitar Hero playing.

Speaking of guitars, following Herring was TV’s Emma Kennedy with her band, performing funked-up kids TV themes with dance accompaniment from a red-lycra clad gimp/ninja, concluding with a contractually obliged spot-on rendition of the TMWRNJ theme tune leading into what much of the audience had been waiting for, a brief Lee and Herring reunion.

Maybe it was driven by a wave of misplaced nostalgia, but even after seeing the original routines, and the Tedstock versions on YouTube, the two of them are brilliant together, and just as things seemed to have reached a moon on a stick-based peak, Paul Putner’s Curious Orange emerged, resplendent in full Davros regalia, for a truly magnificent finish.

The only minor disappointment was the lack of The Actor Kevin Eldon, he of Simon Quinlank, Rod Hull and Pause for Thought for the Day, and it would’ve been lovely to see everyone on stage together, maybe doing Sunday Heroes (ahhh!), but that’s being terribly churlish, it was always made clear everyone would be doing their own material. A fantastic night, roll on the next ten years, apart from the inevitable and massively depressing ageing it brings…

(Addendum: Richard Herring’s write-up is, weirdly, much better, almost like it was written by someone who was actually involved.)

Reviewlets: Making Money and A Computer Called LEO

Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series has been going for 25 years, as a little sticker proclaims on the front of the latest paperback Making Money, which is an impressive run. Though I no longer rush to buy the books as soon as they’re released it’s rare that they disappoint, and Making Money is no exception. It’s not Pratchett’s best, but like a comfy old pair of slippers the setting is immediately familiar, there are no wild surprises as Moist von Lipwig, central character of Going Postal, is put in charge of the Bank of Ankh Morpork and the Mint, hijinks ensue, and everything concludes most satisfactorily. The appearance of the mint hinted for a moment at Isaac Newton’s role at the mint in Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle, but didn’t really develop in that direction.

Making Money continues the evolution of Discworld as concepts from our universe emerge, in this case paper money, and also includes an analogue of an analogue computer (as it were). Previously we’ve seen computers come to Discworld in the form of Hex, somewhat reminiscent of the other book I’ve just finished, A Computer Called LEO.

I’ve been fascinated by early computers, originally from military history and their role in cryptography, then more generally at university in the history of computing. Among pioneering machines LEO (Lyons Electronic Office) is often overlooked, possibly because it was the first business computer, working on payroll and stocking rather than “sexier” projects, but Georgina Ferry’s book redresses this, covering the history of Lyons, a somewhat unlikely hot-bed of business computing, the development of LEO, and, as with many post-war British industries, decline and inevitable government-driven mergers. Most interesting.

Reviewlet: Run, Fat Boy, Run

We subscribe to the full Sky “six billion channels of stuff” package, and every now and again look to see if it’s worth trying to save a bit of money by removing a few channels. The expensive bits are sports and movies, but there’s enough rugby and NFL to keep the sports channels, and if you’ve got those, it’s not much more for movies; about the same price as a cinema ticket, or membership of a DVD rental scheme (but without the hassle of walking all the way to a postbox). It’s quite handy, then, for films that you wouldn’t mind seeing, but don’t seem worth a full cinema trip. Case in point, Run, Fat Boy, Run.

Run, Fat Boy, Run is a totally formulaic film. The most remarkable thing about it is that it’s actually simultaneously two totally formulaic films, the Sporting Underdog and the Romantic Comedy, specifically the lovable slacker (Simon Pegg) winning his ex (Thandie Newton) back from the seemingly-perfect new boyfriend (Hank Azaria). Sorry if I’ve given away the entire plot there; towards the beginning I thought it might actually subvert the form slightly and have Azaria be as nice as he initially seemed, but no, quelle surprise. It’s very much, as Mark Kermode would put it, a “tab A into slot B” film, ticking on to its inevitable conclusion. Within those parameters it works well enough mostly thanks to the cast; not a bad way of spending a brain-dead evening when too zonked to even log in to a game, and a couple more like that in a month justify the movie channels.

Waiting on Warhammer

So the European Warhammer Online beta didn’t quite go entirely to plan, as covered in far more detail elsewhere (particularly Book of Grudges, doing a splendid job with news and updates, plus cute skunks). It’s a bit of shame, I’d rather hoped to have a bit of a potter around on Sunday afternoon, but such is life.

On the plus side, I got to catch up with a few other things, so some brief reviewlets:

UFO: Enemy Unknown was my main gaming diversion, having just picked it up via Steam, still a wonderful game. No server problems or anything either, though the “fifteen year rule” is possibly a slightly extreme extension of the “three month rule”. I briefly fired up XCom: Apocalypse, but where the gameplay of UFO is somehow engraved in my brain I couldn’t quite remember what all the Apocalypse buttons did, so I’ll leave that until I can be bothered to dig out the PDF of the manual (or possibly the original paper manual, if I still have it in my Pile O’ Manuals).

Doctor Who: Logopolis, recorded from a SciFi Doctor Who weekend a while back. What in the name of buggery sod was that all about? Block Transfer Computation, mumbling weirdos holding back entropy to save the universe, a vital component being a replica of an earth computer circa 1981? Baffling, though enjoyably Doctor-Who-y.

Runaways by Brian K. Vaughn. I still have a big list of comics from the past ten years to catch up on, and somewhere around the top is “everything by Brian K. Vaughn”. Finally got around to the first volume of Runaways, and it was great. The story of a group of teenagers who discover their parents are supervillains, I’d been slightly hesitant about picking it up in case it was a bit Marvel: The Hollyoaks Years, and I really wasn’t sure I’d warm to the characters at first, but a few issues in I was hooked. Really effective ending as well, I’m looking forward to borrowing the second volume to see where they take it.

Reviewlet: Wisdom

As I mentioned in the previous comic catch-up, I picked up Paul Cornell’s Wisdom mini-series, and it’s really rather good. It’s very Marvel in style but with a distinctively British voice, an American art form with an English accent, like rapping about tea. Featuring fairies, Martians, Jack the Ripper(s) and a shape-shifting Skrull who’s adopted the form of John Lennon it’s far from po-faced, with some glorious one-liners dotted around the place (a couple of my favourites being “Mr Thompkinson, have you succeeded in finding S.H.I.E.L.D. in the Yellow Pages?” and “In my day, we only had the one universe. Now it’s like satellite telly, there’s billions of ’em. And they’re all shite.”) There’s also plenty of big fights, though, and some touching moments, particularly the end. Great stuff, and I’m looking forward to Captain Britain and MI13.

Reviewlet: Mistborn: The Final Empire by Brandon Sanderson.

Following Zoso’s post regarding the freebies available for a short time on Tor, I took the opportunity to grab a couple of the books on offer and have myself a bit of a read. Unfortunately the books listed didn’t have any descriptions listed alongside, and being the lazy bugger that I am I couldn’t be bothered to research each one on Amazon. So I went for the <voice style=”reverb: on; volume: booming; pitch: low”>random click of destiny</style> and hoped that I’d picked something I could get in to.

The first book was John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War, a decent enough space romp with a slightly different take on the ‘downloadable personality’ theme as seen in Richard Morgan’s Altered Carbon and elsewhere. Scalzi has created a universe that is both interesting and believable, with compelling races and individuals that leave you wanting to find out more about them, and although the main story is a little uninspiring, the secondary storyline – based around the main character himself, his history and the moral dilemmas he faces as life as he knows it is turned on its head – allows the reader to really engage with the book as a whole and to be immersed in the ideas and themes that Scalzi presents. Obvious comparisons can be drawn to Heinlein’s Starship Troopers and, as mentioned earlier, Morgan’s Altered Carbon, so if you enjoyed either of those two books then you probably won’t be disappointed with Old Man’s War.

The second book was Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn: The Final Empire, a really rather excellent fantasy story that pleasantly surprised me with its well presented world, its likeable-without-being-mawkish characters and the real star of the show: Allomancy.

Allomancy is the system of magic that Sanderson has created, and instead of having it as some innate unseen power that requires hugely bearded men to sit hunched over dusty old tomes for years on end to achieve, Allomancy instead manifests itself as more of a mutation that is powered by various metals that the Allomancer must ingest and then ‘burn’ to activate the power. There are a number of known metals that can be used in this way, each giving the Allomancer a different power when they burn the metal, but they gain this power only for as long as the metal lasts since it is consumed as the Allomancer uses the power, hence the term ‘burning’ to represent the use of the power. Unlike magic in many other books though, the art of Allomancy is still not entirely understood, and this leaves the door open for things to be twisted around and for plenty of surprises to be unleashed on the main characters and the reader.

The world of the Final Empire is one of a class of nobles who rule over an underclass of slaves known as Skaa, all of whom are presided over by the Lord Ruler, the hero of a past age, who is now immortal – a shard of God – and controls the land with an iron fist. The lands themselves are a depressing affair, with what little vegetation that manages to grow under the ash-filled sky being nothing but dull brown; nobody knows what colourful plants look like, although it is hinted that they did exist in the time before the ascension of the Lord Ruler.

The story is nothing out of the ordinary, with the standard framework of the underclass rising up to overthrow their oppressors through the efforts of a select band of unlikely heroes, but it does throw some nice twists in along the way. However, there is an undercurrent of another story which is not fully expounded upon, and The Final Empire clearly leaves the door wide open for the second and third books to sate the reader’s desire to find out more about the trials of the Lord Ruler a thousand years ago: what was this Deepness that he faced? And if he succeeded in defeating it as we are led to believe, why did the land change so much for the worse afterwards? There are some answers in the first book, just enough to whet the appetite and keep the reader wanting more as the main story of the first book comes to its, perhaps inevitable, conclusion.

I could best describe Mistborn: The Final Empire as having a strong bouquet of Eddings, with a light fragrant sensation of Jordan on the palette and subtle undertones of Lynch and Gemmell.

It’s a credit to Tor, and hopefully in its own small way encouraging to authors and publishers out there, that I’ve already ordered all three books in the series, and I’m certainly keen to find out what the story is behind this fascinating world that Sanderson has created. I bought the first book because, although having read it, I’d like to give the author the sale, and there’s nothing like having a paper copy of a book, the creased and wrinkled spine and loose well-fingered pages a simple testament to one’s enjoyment of the story within. So putting a free copy of the first book in the series on to the web has resulted in at least one new fan, and a few sales, and more importantly I’d like to think that I’m not out of the ordinary in doing so. Not only that, but it has also inspired this little reviewlet which I hope, in turn, might turn some of you on to the idea of trying this excellent little trilogy yourselves.

Well done Tor for seeing the advantage in this sort of marketing strategy, and I hope it works out well for the authors involved.