There are some inherent challenges in limiting yourself to a mere 140 characters when trying to make a point, which some believe to be part of the fun. It can, however, come back and bite you on the ass.

I followed noted photographer and broadcaster Scott Bourne on the ol’ Twitters, at least until checking out his behaviour after posting this little bon mot:

“I’m consulting with a wedding #photog studio selling against a studio doing $500 weddings. Our new ad – “We fix $500 wedding photography.”"

Fine. Except he was taken to task by a number of people over the Twitter wires for playing a little fast and loose with the details. The underlying assumption to all of this is that the more money paid for a service or product, the better it is. Life, of course, is rarely that simple.

Value is a product of both cost and quality, and there’s no way to know whether or not the five hundred buck shots are significantly better than the (one would assume, otherwise we wouldn’t need the responsive ad campaign) significantly more expensive wedding photography he’s hawking. There’s no way of evaluating this from the frame of a 140 character tweet, so it comes across as reductionist and unpleasantly snobbish.

If you need any more convincing that cost != value, the Oppo/Lexicon Blu Ray fiasco described at Audioholics makes an enlightening case study.

Others found more to question. Folks starting wedding photography businesses, offering comparatively low rates to get a portfolio together, hoping to gain a foothold in a competitive market read it as a direct insult to their professionalism, and it’s easy to see their point of view. Many took him to task or sought clarifications.

Scott Bourne’s response? He called them trolls and blocked them.

I don’t doubt he’s a busy man and just wants to avoid multiple 140 character slagging matches. However, a better way to do this would have been to not throw the stones in the first place, as between that and refusing to answer any criticism at all he comes across as a massive ball of wrongheaded egotism. Which isn’t much of a brand to build for yourself.

I’m not, contrary to what you might expect having gone to the bother of writing about it, really all that bothered by his statements and it wasn’t the primary reason I hit the big Unfollow button. It was, however, the reason I reviewed his recent contributions and found them largely to be plugging his own website articles which I’ll read anyway, so essentially he’s an inefficient manually powered duplicate of his RSS feed. Hence he is consigned to Twitter digiblivion.

I’ll still listen to the podcasts, though. I’m not mental.

After a terrifyingly long, 70+ hour struggle with Oblivion: The Elder Scrolls IV on the Xbox 360, I find myself crowned Champion of Tolkiensville, after completing the main questline and reaching the conclusions of the Mages Guild, Thieves Guild, Fighters Guild and Dark Brotherhood storylines.

I have, in short, torn the arse out of it.

Despite this, the game does not show up as “complete” on the 360 dashboard, even though all off the 1000 possible Meaninglessnumberpoints have been extracted from it. Why?

Because, gentle reader, an expansion pack that I do not own exists, adding an extra 250 completely unobtainable gamerpoints to the tally.

This is nothing less than a tax on the obsessive-compulsive, especially given that the expansion pack download costs considerably more than the main game itself, these days.

Of course, I’m going to get a hold of it anyway because I enjoyed the game. It just the principle of the thing that annoys me.

The petty, petty principle.

Halo 3
Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Vegas
Rockstar’s Table Tennis
Shadowrun
Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory
Hour of Victory
LEGO Indiana Jones
Kung Fu Panda
Vampire Rain
Oblivion
Lost Odyssey
Skate
Ninja Gaiden II
Beautiful Katamari
Amped 3
Bioshock
LOTR: Battle for Middle Earth II
Blue Dragon
Condemned 2
The Club
Dead or Alive 4
Eternal Sonata
FIFA 07
Flatout: Ultimate Carnage
FEAR Files
Grand Theft Auto 4
Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter
Project Sylpheed
Phantasy Star Universe
Project Gotham Racing 4
Pro Evolution Soccer 6
SEGA Rally
Saint’s Row
Stranglehold
Test Drive Unlimited
Viva Pinyata
Forza Motorsport 2

Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess
Boom Blox
Nights
Super Mario Galaxy
Wii Play
Trauma Center: Second Opinion
Metroid Prime 3: Corruption
Heatseeker

Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance
Beyond Good and Evil
Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter
Dave Mirra Freestyle BMX 2
Devil May Cry
Escape From Monkey Island
Final Fantasy x
Genji
The Getaway
God of War
Gran Turismo 3
Herdy Gerdy
Ico
Kessen II
Killer 7
Kingdom Hearts
Manhunt
The Mark of the Kri
Maximo
Maximo: Army of Zin
Medal of Honor: Rising Sun
Metal Arms: Glitch in the System
Metal Gear Solid 2
Metal Gear Solid 3
Mr Moskeeto
Nightshade
Onimusha
Onimusha 2
Shadow of Memories
Silent Hill 2
Silent Hill 3
Silent Hill 4
The Suffering
Syberia
Tenchu: Wrath of Heaven
Tony Hawk’s Underground 2
Underworld: The Eternal War
WRC Extreme 2
Zone of the Enders

Zero Divide
Wu-Tang: Taste the Pain
Wing Commander III
Wing Commander IV
Final Fantasy IX
Final Fantasy VII
Final Fantasy VI
Final Fantasy V
Final Fantasy IV
Fear Effect

One of the nicer things about it is the presence of a small slider on the top of the phone which turns the ringer on and off, which is a far more civilised way of putting your phone on silent than rooting around in menus. The silent mode on phones out to be used more often by people, especially if your ringtone is La Cucaracha.

Another demand I make of my phones is to wake me up in the morning, as I’m too cheap to buy an alarm clock. The Treo manages this adequately, with a rousing midi rendition of Reveille, although why it can only be set in five minute increments rather than any arbitrary time baffles me.

Except, that is, if you’ve inadvertently left the slider on silent, in which case you are left politely unstirred by a rousing rendition of absolute silence.

I’m not saying that this is the single most retarded design choice in the world, just that it’s in the top five or so.

This review has been ‘repurposed’ from my other site, theOneliner.com

Something of an odd choice for Japanese game design deities Treasure, this. Departing from their recent run of Triple A shooters to do a sequel to the top notch Sega Saturn Guardian Heroes, an RPG tinted side scrolling beat ‘em up characterised by huge, er, characters, fairly spectacular spellcasting effects and the kind of graphical zooming trickery that set jaws dropping amongst those who hadn’t yet subscribed to the prevailing wind of 3D killing off 2D gaming. Above all, it was a tremendous amount of fun as we’ve come to expect from that particular codehouse. Jaws dropped again when the news came that Nintendo’s humble pocket system would play host to this welcome yet unanticipated sequel. Surely it could never do the original justice?

Sadly, no, it can’t. But it has a damn good go at it, and in the process pushes the hardware beyond the limits anyone had thought possible. The game starts with your death, which would seem unfortunate but allows the legendary Undead Hero to inhabit your body, the design of which owes more to Gunstar Heroes than Guardian Heroes. This big dead fella you may remember as your large sword swingin’ golden armoured CPU controlled helper in Guardian Heroes, and while the newest incarnation relies more on fisticuffs than swordplay you’re by no means defenceless.

In terms of moves available to you it’s hardly Street Fighter Alpha 3 but it’s certainly streets ahead of Final Fight One, probably it’s closest contemporary on the handheld. Standard ground punches chain into combos so it’s easy to start baddie bashing, although you’ll need to start mixing up attacks to survive the onslaught. Overhead attacks send enemies flying around the screen and a ground pounding attack that would seem more suited to the Hulk knocks down those around you. Aerial attacks prove effective also, and if that’s not enough you could always start laying the smackdown with one of your spell types, which differ slightly depending on your character choice. Homing attacks and lasers? What is this, R-Type?

All of which would probably get you off the first level but not much further unless you learn how to block and counter. The shoulder button when held creating a barrier from most attacks. A swift tap just as a blow is about to land not only stops any damage but knocks your attacker into a stun, or if it’s a projectile it’s returned to sender with extreme prejudice. This is so vital towards the game’s later stages it’s the only way to play it, which does make a short game harder (a good thing) it limits the amount of fun you can have with it (a bad thing). Defeating your attackers earns you crystals, which can be used to level up your characters attack, defence or magic stats as you see fit.

Oh yeah, the plot. There’s not as much pontificating as I remember clicking through on Guardian Heroes, but the Advance incarnation still has more development than you’d expect or probably want from the genre. A thousand years have passed since the last game, and the Heavens have decided it’s time to have another final battle, with mankind on the extermination agenda. You take on a huge but not too varied army of miscreants the heavens have thrown your way headed by Zur who inexplicably looks like a goofish Shakespearean extra but who’s also raised Guardian Heroes‘ fiendish magician Kanon from the dead. You’ll have to deal with the sword swinging footsoldiers, giant ogres, huge robots and mirrors. Don’t ask. In a canny reference to the original / recycling of assets you’ll have to have versions of the heroes of the first game, now unwilling soldiers of the Heavens, who are trying to raise the ultimate warrior.

Lovely, but somewhat superfluous. I suppose it has a better ring to it than ‘Walk right. Kill everything that gets in your way’, but it’s all faintly ridiculous and ultimately breaks up the action. At a short but challenging six levels, there’s a slight suggestion it’s only there to bulk up the playtime. In terms of additional lifespan you can unlock near enough every sprite in the game to play as, either through repeated playthroughs donating the crystals ordinarily used for levelling up your character to a research fella or by having a blast of the survival and time attack modes, themselves unlocked after completing the game on varying difficulty levels.

It’s not enough. There’s no real incentive to unlock all of these characters, no benefits apart from a sense of completion for the dedicated or anal amongst us. It shows attention to detail that essentially every character in the game is properly playable if you put the effort into it, but you’ll still be playing the same game through every time. Unlike it’s elder brother there’s no branching stages, no alternative paths through the game which made Guardian Heroes a viable prospect to replay through a few times. Understandable format constraints make such a scheme impossible on the GBA, but after you’ve spent four or five hours playing this through a couple of times there’s no added incentive to come back to it again.

Which would be a problem if this were a fun game to play, after all Final Fight One offers approximately nada in terms of extras but it’s still a great game to dig out for a half hour rampage now and again. The mechanics of Advance Guardian Heroes make it a more complex game, but also detract from the fun to be had from it. Quickly, and almost immediately on higher difficulty levels it become apparent that the only way to progress is to wait for an opponent to attack, stun him with a block/counter and then unleash a quick flurry of attacks. Repeat until bored. This quickly saps the fun from the game, reducing it to a mechanical exercise in timing.

Fine if you like that sort of thing, but I’m sure it’s not that significant a portion of the population. Technically it’s a very impressive game, pushing the sprite handling and scaling capacities of the GBA past what limits were imagined for it, although it goes a little to far. Slowdown rears it’s ugly head a few times when the spells are sent flying amongst dense crowds, and while it’s rare that it presents a hindrance to gameplay it does tarnish the presentation a little.

The main thing that’s bothering me about this game is that it really doesn’t feel like Treasure made it, despite the obvious reuse of their IP. The touches of personality that raised things like Guardian & Gunstar Heroes and Bangai-o above the normal genre standards was what made them legendary, and there’s only a precious few moments in this latest outing that come close to that. The rest seems somewhat…perfunctory, I suppose. It’s by no means a bad game in any sort of technical sense, just a rather joyless one that’s too mechanical and too short lived to be recommended to all but hardened beat-em-up fans.

Installing the shiny new MacOS X Leopard on to the less shiny old iBook that I have kicking about as, egregiously enough, a spare laptop (oh! Such wanton excess! Swiftly, to the vomitorium!) would seem to go without a merest hint of a hitch. After slapping the disk in the drive, setting the thing running then forgetting about it for a while, it’s drops one off to the updated Desktop including its really stupid looking new reflect-o-dock and mildly retarded transparent menu bar. Also, whoever came up with the idea of Stacks assuming the icon of the last file to be dropped into the folder needs to be brutally cudgled until they have been suitably chastised.

These, however are mostly eye candy related issues. Of more pressing concern was connecting up to the Network Attached Storage box containing a 750GB drive largely full of music files. Mmmmm. Music. Off we go, connect to server, enter the NAS’s address (192.168.0.2, IP fans!). Act slightly puzzled by a new login option that seems insistent on logging in with a name/password, which doesn’t exist as an option on my NAS, or as a guest. Well, guest seems like the better option. Click!

Boom.

If you answered b) The system crashes like a total feckin’ Colin, congratulations! You win the respect of your peers, should you have any.Days of alternately changing every vaguely related setting possible and hitting it with a hammer have yielded the vast improvement of it now simply not connecting, rather than seizing up so badly it has to be powered down. Awesome.It’s always a brave move for a company to change their business model. While it might be a laudable example of chutzpah, changing from “it just works” to “it doesn’t work” might not be the crowd pleaser Apple were apparently expecting.

Edit: 12th Feb 2008: The 10.5.2 update seems to have fixed pretty much all of the above. Huzzah! Only took four months!

Anyway, the time came to drag my PC into the modern age, largely because I want to play Bioshock. One minor spending spree later and I have a deliciously dinky Shuttle case, 2GB of turbo-nutter RAM, one not-quite-turbo-nutter-but-with-capacity-to-plug-one-in-later Core2 Duo and a nVidia 7600 based graphics card. Nifty. The hard drive, a 500GB beast, for this was repurposed from the existing machine.

Now, here’s the thrust of the piece. When you plug a drive into a Windows XP machine, as the old machine was, and go through the ritual of formatting and assigning drive letters (which itself is an asinine process, but that’s another rant for another day), the default option is to turn it into a ‘dynamic disk’. I wager most people when faced with the options of ‘dynamic disk’ and ‘basic disk’ will have no clue whatsoever as to what the difference is. Certainly I did not. On doing some subsequent reading before writing this, it’s certainly the better technical option. Excellent. No problems, then.

Well, apart from the fact that you cannot install Windows Vista on a dynamic disk, for reasons that seem to be clearly mentioned precisely nowhere. I assume XP is similarly afflicted. No problems though, as the disk was already emptied of everything it ought to be a simple-ish matter of the Vista installer program re-partitioning and reformating the drive into something it can work with.

Except it can’t do that. It just sits and stares back at you with cold, disinterested eyes. It’s not going to install, it’s not going to reformat, it’s not going to budge. You can try to stare it down, but you’ll lose. What an excellent way to introduce yourself, Mr. Vista! Truly, “the Wow starts Now”. Or rather doesn’t. Start. Now. Or at all, without help.

How to progress past this sticky wicket? Delving into my archive of arcane resources I majick up a disk containing Ubuntu 7.04, which happily boots a functional OS straight from a DVD and can run the GNOME partition manager software. This can be used to delete the dynamic disk and leave it in a raw state that Vista can work with. Excellent, now the otherwise blissfully smooth install can continue. Should you find yourself in this situation, the gParted live cd will be a less hefty download that can achieve the same ends.

While I’ve barely used it, initial impressions are that Vista does seem overall a more pleasant OS experience than XP, but I’m not seeing anything to justify the £370 list price of a shiny new copy of Vista Ultimate or any of its myriad derivatives. It’s a little more cohesive, but still nothing like as unified as the MacOS X it’s imitating. It’s a little better, but seemingly not by much more than a nicer skin and a sidebar. It’s not that there’s very little ‘Wow’, it’s that there’s very little new that’s the issue here.

The real thing that gets my goat here isn’t the money it costs, or the seeming lack of advancement over the aged Windows XP. It’s that for something that’s claiming to be the best and most intuitive Windows ever to issue forth from Redmond I had to boot into Linux to install the fecking thing. If this is something that open source, zero cost to the punter operating systems can do, and have been able to do for years, is it too much to expect the same capability from the company that’s by far the biggest dog in the yard?

Ice, ice, baby, Vanilla Ice, ice baby.

Um, sorry. While Vanilla Ice is certainly a problem, it’s probably not the one at hand. However, if for some strange reason you’re trying to play an MP3 from this horrible man, it may well be. These sentences come to you courtesy of the Seamless Linking Corporation, all rights reserved.

The problem is described thus – on slapping your MP3 files in the appropriate directory for the Sony Audioplayer app to find them, it bafflingly only plays about two seconds of them before skipping on to the next. This is teeth grindingly frustrating, especially when the solution is something not hugely intuitive, albeit something that admittedly should already have been done as best practise.

Essentially, make sure you’ve downloaded the latest Sony drivers to allow the Clie to support the Memory Stick Pro, not just the standard, out-of-the-box support for common or garden Memory Stick. Yeah, yeah, obviously you should have put this on already but note this – without the driver the Clie happily recognises and uses the MSPro, and most apps save to and run from MSPro without the driver. Also, as the driver isn’t stored in the permanent flash memory, after a hard reset it doesn’t get automatically restored along with the rest of the system.

Which as it turns out was my problem, as I knew I’d installed it so didn’t bother checking, making for weeks of frustrating irrelevant setting tweaking. Conveniently, I’d forgotten about having to do a hard reset that had removed it in the interim. One three second install later and the problem evaporates.

So concludes this episode of “Fringe Interest”, we hope you have found it both entertaining and informative.

Theoretically, this is an excellent plan hampered only by EA’s coding being so, shall we say, sub-optimal that the thing just wouldn’t work. Installs to hard disk fine, then just falls over on having the temerity to attempt to play it. Patched to the latest revision. No worky. Do the usual messing around with the never-yet-useful compatibility options of WinXP. No worky. Download and install 60-odd meg of the latest graphics drivers, a ludicrous size itself worthy of another rant. Still no worky. Consult Google. No answers, but lots of whining about it’s status as ‘fuxxored’.

I have, naturally, solved this problem. I have solved this problem and can now happily make mincemeat of red commie scuzzbuckets to my little heart’s content. How have I solved this? Why, by heading off to the ever useful Megagames website and downloading the No-CD patch, which in this case is perhaps better described by calling it an ‘Actually Make Game Work’ patch. So despite having paid good money to the corporate monolith for a legit copy of the game, the reward that gave me was a few hours of needless head-scratching that I wouldn’t have had to endure had I just downloaded the damn thing of a newsgroup in the first place. Grrr.

It’d be unfortunate were this an isolated incident, but hardly noteworthy. Of course, it isn’t, as between plain poor coding and increasingly ludicrous DRM and anti-copy measures all of which are defeated by serious pirates within days, anything you buy has a better than evens chance of falling over at some point. Some of the ruder schemes will even see a game refuse to install if you’re running perfectly legitimate CD image mounting software like Daemon Tools or Nero Drive Image, for no readily discernible reason I can come up with. Again, if you’d taken the dark path and downloaded it this is handily stripped out for you. Sure, the publisher doesn’t their pound of flesh but at least you can play the damn thing.

Piracy is often sited as the force that will destroy software development, typically by, er, software developers and their Federation Against Software Theft PR branch. If so it’s taking a damn long time to do it, as any number of playgrounds with any number of C90 tapes stuffed with ZX Spectrum games will attest to.

Piracy had better not be stamped out. It’s the only way most of us can actually play the damn things even after buying them.

I suppose they could just be coded to work in the first place.

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Bwahahahahahaha! I crack myself up, sometimes.

Wait! Give it a chance. They’re not all as bad as the Star Wars books, y’know.

Ender’s Game sets itself on an Earth of the not inconceivably distant future, with a crowded, population controlled world preparing itself for a seemingly inevitable future war with an insectoid alien menace, an advance force of whom that they’ve just barely managed to fend off. Deciding that nature needs a little help in producing a suitable leader for the Earth forces, a little genetic fiddling of the Wiggan family sees a generation of exceptionally gifted children. Valentine has a little too much empathy in her to make an effective, ruthless military leader, and Peter is a few shades too close to psychotic. In accordance with the Goldilocks theorem, the third attempt, Ender, is hoped to be just right. The consequences if he’s not are grim.

Surviving six years of a childhood alternately tormented by his elder brother and protected by Valentine, Ender is taken away to an orbital battle school by a military leadership determined to push Ender to his limits, even if that does mean alienating everyone else from Ender, already marked as an outsider by being younger than any other recruit, and cutting him loose to survive or fail on his own wits and intuition.

Of course, you don’t get pegged as humanities’ last best hope of victory without having some aptitude for the role. Navigating a course of unwanted rivalries to be put in charge of his own squadron of children for the zero gravity wargames that the school and the book’s title revolve around, the consequences of pushing Ender to his limits and beyond prove to be compelling reading.

Ender’s Game is often held up as one of the best sci-fi novels of recent years, and there’s few bones to pick with such statements. Indeed, enough people seem to be voting with their wallets for the series to support three direct sequels telling the rest of Ender’s story and another three concerned with the kids from battle school and Peter Wiggan’s ascent to hegemony of Earth. Ender’s Game isn’t just a hugely enjoyable novel in and of itself, it’s the introduction to a series that deals with consequence and identity in ways that haven’t been seen since Phillip K. Dick.

Now, I’d be recommending you read Ender’s Game were it the only time Card had put quill to slate, or however it’s done these days. Instead of this, I’m recommending you read Ender’s Game because its direct sequel Speaker for the Dead is as good a book as I’ve ever read, but would be best enjoyed by absorbing this novel first.

Of all the classic games in this current retrogaming fad lauded for their playability in lieu of the graphical fripperies that many more clock cycles are devoted to in this age of technological wonders, one example stands head and shoulders above all others. One game that scrambles Chuckie Egg. That flies higher than Jet Set Willy. That sends Sabrewulf Head Over Heels. That really needs no more cut-rate puns to enhance its reputation. That game, of course, is Advanced Lawnmower Simulator.

Tapping into the Great British obsession with all garden based activities, this barnstormer was released to an unsuspecting world in April 1990 to the astonished silence of all, particularly publishers Codemasters who had their own prolific line of ‘Advanced’ prefixed games but crucially not in the lucrative lawnmowing sector. Providing the most comprehensive grass cutting simulator that has yet to grace the world, you take the role of young, idealistic uphill gardener Fingers McGovern as you try to take your company to the top of the gardening world. Starting off with only the standard issue ‘Patio Sprintette’ mower you have to build up your reputation and equally importantly your bank balance as you progress up the ziggurat.

Upgrading your lawn tending technology as you go, you’ll have to face stiff competition from your rivals and the never ending forces of nature in your quests to keep lawns the country over neatly cropped. Will you be able to join the halcyon ranks of the gardening elite such as Percy Thrower and Alan Titchmarsh or will your burned out career end up on the compost heap? Perhaps a more important question, will you be able to tear yourself away from one of the best games ever created?

You almost certainly will, given that the game revolves solely around holding down the ‘m’ key for a while. Advanced Lawnmower Simulator was a practical joke perpetrated on unsuspecting readers of the popular and deeply funny Your Sinclair magazine, receiving a glowing write up in the April 1990 issue from Duncan MacDonald, one of the most popular Speccy writers of the time, now an author having recently released the novel S.C.U.M.. Confirmation of the gag came in the next issue, with Advanced Lawnmower Simulator appearing on the covertape with a writing credit of none other than MacDonald.

As the screenshots show, even for a Speccy the mechanics and graphics were …minimal. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the game itself was its line of insults on completion of a lawn, as your poor pixel avatar slowly proceeds block by block and line by line up a poorly realised lawn. The game rewards your tolerance with statements along the lines of ‘Call that a mow-job?’ and ‘That’s a bit of an erratic cut. Hellen Keller could have done better’. Still, mow well and you could earn yourself a nice corned beef sandwich.

Hardly a glowing recommendation for a game, or even a passable concept in the first place, but it spawned a wealth of YS reader produced knock-offs all of which being the same game with a few colour codes changed. Striking a chord with the ever quirky British sense of humour, Advanced Lawnmower Simulator lived on not only in the timeframe of its initial release but in a baffling array of ports for platforms as disparate as the VIC-20 and the Gameboy.

Among the admittedly slim ranks of great gaming April Fool wind-ups (the only other enduring ones I can think of off the top of my vacant little head being EGM’s Photoshopped Street Fighter 2 screenshot claiming the inclusion of the legendary Shen Long, their ‘Lara Croft nude’ codes and the idea that Duke Nukem Forever will ever be released), Advance Lawnmower Simulator stands above all else in terms of invention and endurance.

If this has taken your fancy and you’re up for a spot of hot mowing action, there’s a very decent online Flash version for your delectation and Duncan MacDonald’s original review is archived for posterity and the shrine of all things YS The YS Rock’n'Roll Years.

You wouldn’t look twice at this game if you saw it sitting on the shelf in your local gaming suppliers. At least in the U.S. it gets the slightly more exotic name of Ninja Five-0, but for it’s British release Konami no doubt thought we’d assume it’s a football game and they’d missed out ‘Preston North End’ off the end of the name. So we get a generic title, a generic and unimaginative cover picture and a generic write up on the back that really isn’t going to convince the idle browser to splash out thirty notes on it. That’s a great pity, as it’s one of the best games that’s yet graced Nintendo’s pocket rocket.

As the title suggests, you take control of a ninja who happens to be a cop. Fair enough. There’s some tortuous plot to justify the fact that you’ll go up against a coalition of common thugs, military types and other ninjas, but it’s hardly essential to your experience. Something about masks and the quest for power and whatnot. To this end, or because of this, or perhaps in spite of this (I wasn’t paying much attention. The important thing is that there was ninjas present in some capacity) this alliance of evil takes over certain buildings key to their plans, whatever those happened to be, such as the airport, the factory by the docks, the banks and, err, a cave. Your job is simple, rescue the hostages they’ve taken in each building by simple means of slicing and dicing the bad guys until they’re reduced to small puddles of blood.

The goons come in the usual assortment of gun toting baddies and knife wielding thugs, as well as some chaps who rather care freely lob sticks of dynamite in your general direction. However, you are a ninja and this kind of mundanity isn’t going to be too problematic to deal with, seeing as your shurikens can not only do a serious mischief to miscreants but also knock their bullets out of the air. A swift tap of the left shoulder button whips out your chopper. Ooh-er, missus. Your katana can rather usefully slice through both the flesh of your assailants and the dynamite sticks, neutralising them. Your ninjitsu avatar Joe Osugi can dish out a two hit slice combo with another tap of the button, or if he’s in the middle of a jump he does a rather nifty somersaulting slice of doom that does some serious damage.

These low level goons aren’t too much of a problem, although you’ll have to be a bit more careful with the ones holding a hostage across them as a human shield. Wait for them to shove their captive aside and attempt a few pot shots before either slicing them up or inserting a shuriken in them, or sneak up behind them using the usual assortment of crates and barrels as cover and take them from behind. Ooh-er, missus. You may have a little more bother with later foot soldiers with a penchant for flame throwers, assault rifles and laser cannons however. Also standing in your path are a selection of evil ninjas, who look rather similar to Joe and can attack in similar ways which will present more of a challenge for you to counter. There are also a few lumbering mecha-ninjas wandering around who can take a bit of a beating, but their sluggishness means you ought to be able to dispatch them.

The areas themselves harkens back to the days of Revenge of Shinobi and platformers of it’s ilk, with supposedly commonplace buildings having been designed by someone with scant regard for the safety of anyone inside it. Even as a highly trained police ninja you’ll have difficulty progressing through some fiendish levels that are as difficult as any I’ve seen in recent years. You have one skill above all that’ll help you with this – your ninja grappling hook. Taking inspiration from Bionic Commando and combining it with the acrobatic antics of Spiderman, this enables you safely swing over the various pits of spikes and dangerously placed exhausts that game designers seem to think lurk at every turn in everyday life. You’ll need to learn how to swing over pretty much the entire length of the level in some cases, which is initially a little tricky but very gratifying when learnt. This also enables you to pull out some nifty ninja moves, jumping at the end of your upwards arc to soar in the area and drop down on some unsuspecting thug, slicing him up like a baloney.

Each level holds a boss of various fiendishness, some looking more or less like inexplicably large ninjas and one looking like a normal sized ninja on the back of an inexplicably large frog. Uh-huh. Some of their attack patterns can seem as fiendish as the level design on first encounters but they’re all beatable once you work it out. It’s a good job you’ve got unlimited continues as there is the occasional section that has a slight reliance on trial and error (or trial and death) which can be get annoying, and it’s about the only significant flaw the game has.

An advantage of being a ninja is that you’ve got some ninja magic to dish out. Once you’ve killed enough goons to fill a power bar or grabbed the appropriate pickup you can tap A + B to destroy any common or garden chappie on the screen, or do a chunk of damage to a boss. There are also a few power ups knocking around in addition to health bonuses, which allow your ninja to fire three flaming shurikens in a spread formation rather than your basic variety and eventually to fire one very powerful, almost laser like shuriken that’ll take down any of the normal guys instantly and do some real damage even to a boss.

It is, I suppose, not all that different to a lot of platformers, but it’s more fun than the majority of them. The control method is probably responsible, it’s terribly intuitive and it’s easy to be lost in a little ninja based world. The graphics have some nice animations and a couple of ropey ones, but there’s always a trade off between character detail and how much playfield you can squeeze of the GBA’s ickle screen. It’s a balance that I think Konami have got right, although you do have the ability to scroll the viewpoint by holding down the left shoulder button. This is rarely needed and it’s easy to forget it exists, which is probably the cause of a few of those trial and error scenarios I was bitching about earlier now I come to think of it.

I suppose if we’re being picky it can’t be a five star game. While it’s the best platform game I’ve seen in years it’s also blatantly nicking Revenge of Shinobi and crossing it with Bionic Commando and the old Megadrive Spiderman games. That alone wouldn’t stop me doling out the top marks but a few additional niggles with some of the levels almost ensuring that you take at least a few hits on a first play and remember to avoid something or jump as soon as you enter a room take the shine off a little. The lack of more than one tune for the normal levels is plain sloppy, and it features another of my pet hates with games such as these. When you as much as brush against a bad guy you lose a chunk of health. Why? Are they coated in acid? Are you allergic to them? Are they undercover porcupines? Were their suits made of scorpions? Likewise killing a hostage by accident or design results in an inexplicable loss of health. Not the sort of thing a skilled ninja should be doing to be sure, but why does this dishonour result in your own disembowelling?

Slight flaws perhaps, and it’s still a fine game. Perhaps the best recommendation I can give it is that with so many varied and interesting ways of pirating games in this age of lasers and particle accelerators (and internet newsgroups, emulators and flash writers, more to the point) I still ponied up the dough to buy a legit copy. If you’ve got a GBA, I’d recommend you do the same. Easily the best ninja based game on the platform given the balls up THQ made of Revenge Of Shinobi.

Not that “More Tekken” is necessarily a terrible thing, but I can’t help but wonder exactly who was hanging on tenterhooks for another minorly updated revision of Namco’s long running, bafflingly popular pugilist simulator. ‘Popular’ doesn’t necessarily mean ‘best’ and it’d be a brave man who nails their colours to the Tekken mast for the latter. It retains the usual spit ‘n’ polish the series normally has lavished upon it, with the exception of the rough-around-the-edges Tekken Tag Tournament, and carries out the usual incremental upgrade threat of being slightly prettier, slightly shinier and a few more characters slapped into the box.

If I’m going to have the nerve to call this a review, I suppose I’d better at least mention the game mechanics. You select a character and punch, kick and throw an opponent character in a vaguely unsatisfying way while trying to ignore the silly translucent explosions of colour that accompany every hit to mask the fact that it still doesn’t look like characters are making contact even after umpteen years of development. If you hurt your opponent more than they hurt you, you win and go on to the next round. Repeat this often enough and you win.

Surprising, this is not. Also, Yoda, I am not so why write I this like know I not. Anyhoo, why do we play fight-o-games? As much as we’d like to think of it as a pure test of skill and reflex, really it’s all about the staisfying crunching of bone and skelping of the head. Thing is, Tekken 5, in common with all of its predecessors, has an annoying, floaty, indifferent fight engine that never looks, sounds and thus feels like there’s any pain being dealt out which really stymies proper bloodlust. The entire series has never once made me dole out a sympathetic “ouch” on behalf of my poor little pummeled avatar, something even games as geriatric as Last Bronx can achieve.

I am not, I suppose, the best person to tell you about any intricacies and tweaks made to the game engine. I’ve long considered Tekken to be Virtua Fighter’s clunky, unwieldy, sluggish, tactically naive younger brother and Tekken 5 proves not to make much of a dent in that opinion. Hell, Tekken even struggles to make it into my top 3D fighters, with VF, Soul Calibur and Dead or Alive all being a damn sight faster, fluid and fun. It’s probably better than King Of Fighters: Maximum Impact and Street Fighter EX. Just.

What colours my judgements on this game more than anything else is that after two hours of uneventful, uninspiring play I felt I’d seen quite enough of it. A few more hours confirms this. It’s just More Tekken, and by this point in my life I think I’ve seen Enough Tekken. Unless the inevitable next-next-next generation Tekken 6 does something radically different, I suspect that this will be my Last Tekken.

The answer was to turn the game into an isometric shooter, a forced third person perspective that’s been happily utilised since the ZX Spectrum was a jumpin’ and a jivin’ around with Batman. After falling out of favour for a while it seems to be enjoying a mini revival of late, also used in the recent resoundingly average GBA version of Terminator 3. While the developers Mobius have managed to achieve level layouts that are at time scarily reminiscent of the original PC versions, they’re ultimately hamstrung and defeated by a sheer lack of horsepower.

Unsurprisingly taking the same plotline as the original version, the broad details concern undercover cop Max Payne avenging his murdered wife and child by infiltrating the local Mafia outfit, cracking the case of new designer drug Valkyr with extreme prejudice. Seeing as I’ve already regurgitated the storyline in excruciating detail in my previous review I think I’ll spare those gory details this time through, but rest assured that despite a trimming to fit the cartridge space the story is as noir-riffic and enjoyable as the previous versions.

Dealing with the first thing that’ll strike you on flipping the power switch first, the presentation remains exceptional and frankly astonishing given the space limitations. The glorious graphic novel artwork that made the games’ name remains albeit in slightly less resplendent form, and the overblown gravelly voiceovers are in full effect. Well, as long as you can take ‘full effect’ to mean ‘raspily overcompressed’, but this is still an impressive and largely audible addition to the atmosphere. It’s the presentation of this game’s bigger brother more than anything else that made it one of the most talked about and fondly remembered games of recent times and Mobius deserve great credit in translating as much of this as possible to the handheld version.

The palpable atmosphere ported over allows the player to perhaps be a little more forgiving of the actual gameplay mechanics, which while maintaining a certain amount of fun are flawed enough to prove exceptionally irritating on occasions. On stepping off the train at Roscoe Street station in the games first level, it’s quite likely you’ll be perforated by bullet holes rather quickly. The reason for this is simple, your Mafioso enemies can see you well before you can see them. Being shot at (and more often than not hit) by ne’erdowells that lie somewhere three screen lengths ahead of you and certainly not in your field of vision isn’t exactly an optimal gaming experience.

It’s the best the graphic engine could hope to do really, and it already struggles when the bodies start piling up. The polygonal mini-Max runs and dives around with commendable fluidity while dispatching lead salads, and somehow Mobius have contrived to have fistful of slowdowns only after the action has subsided so I’m inclined to let it off on this charge, although it does knock some of the polish off the game.

There’s a full range of weaponry to dispatch your enemies from the humble Beretta to the M4 assault rifle, although strangely the Ingram seems to have the best accuracy and firing rate, which is more than a little odd. Max seems to be a little more accurate in this version, auto-aim generally doing a good job of taking down your targets as long as you’re pointing in roughly the right direction that you’ve guessed those targets are in. I can only guess that he’s been doing some heavy lifting recently and Max has strained his arm muscles, because aiming at anything above waist height seems to cause the engine a few problems. Several times you’ll be attacked by bad guys upstairs from you, and several times your bullets will fly harmlessly into concrete resulting in your untimely demise.

It’s an extreme annoyance and perhaps unduly so, because for most of the game there’s a lot of fun to be had diving around shooting wildly. Shootdodging is certainly recommended, as it seems to render you more or less invulnerable. Perhaps it’s easier to forgive it it’s flaws given the presentation, the style making up for the substance. And certainly there’s not a lot of substance, the already short original being fairly drastically abridged in its newest form. Poor Vlad, dearest amongst all my friends, is almost excised from the story entirely and does nothing more than offer Max a lift. The essential plot progress remains, although how well it’s received by those not familiar with the original is a question I can’t answer.

Judged as a direct port of the original Max Payne fails on several points, but that’s hardly a fair comparison given the vast gulf in power between the formats. As an arcadey shooter it has far more success, although it still fails in several crucial areas. The presentation is solid as a rock, and by far the most accomplished on the GBA. It’s failing is a basic one, you just cannot see who’s shooting at you and this does mean you’ll spend most of your time shootdodging around firing test shots hoping to hit someone. Viewed as such it’s surprising that the game is any fun period, and Mobius really deserve a lot of plaudits for pushing the envelope of what’s possible for the now underpowered handheld. It’s just taking on a task too big for it, but hopes have to be high for the studios next release. As long as it’s not a chopped down Max Payne 2.