LHC broke the atom smashing record
After a two-year hiatus during which it was extensively upgraded, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has broken the record for smashing together sub-atomic particles. The LHC is now capable of reaching energies twice as high as it previously could, which scientists believe will open the door to realms of physics humanity has yet to explore. In the years to come, the study of hidden dimensions and dark matter is the main target for CERN’s researchers.
Infections can lower your IQ
A study has shown that there is a clear correlation between infection levels and cognitive impairment. Researchers found that all types of serious infection, not just those that affected the brain, lowered an
individual’s IQ. By discovering this link, scientists hope to learn more about the connection between the immune system and the development of mental disorders.
Bacteria help repair damaged siblings
An interesting discovery has been made which suggests that certain soil bacteria can help repair other bacteria that are damaged. This is possible due to the process of outer membrane exchange (OME), which is commonplace within the social behaviour of soil bacteria. This is the first time evidence of this activity has been seen, and it can be compared to the way cells in a human body adapt to heal a wound.
Drugs can be found in fingerprints
Using a new technique, scientists have found a way to identify cocaine use from a single fingerprint. This method determines whether the owner of the fingerprint has taken cocaine, rather than just identifying whether they have come into contact with the Class A drug. This was achieved by testing for cocaine metabolites such as benzoylecgonine and methylecgonine. Researchers are hopeful that this technique will have a wide range of applications in drug testing, as it is much more difficult to fake results.
Space debris will be shot with laser cannons
In 2017 scientists plan to begin the test phase of a laser cannon on the ISS that would be used to shoot down space debris. There are roughly 22,000 known objects in orbit that could threaten new and existing space missions, which could make this tool very useful in the future.
There’s a new trigger for volcanic eruptions
Scientists believe they have taken a vital step in furthering their understanding of volcanic activity. By creating a scaled down volcano, researchers examined how magma rises from great depths to the surface via a multitude of fractures known as dykes and sills. They found that a pressure drop occurred when a sill formed, which they believe can cause dissolved gases to be released, resulting in
the magma exploding and an eruption taking place.
A levitating bulb stays lit for 22 years
This incredible levitating lightbulb works using magnets and can be operated by simply touching its wooden base. It draws power wirelessly from the charger block that it floats above via a process known as induction. If the bulb is used for around six hours a day, it will have a lifetime of 22 years, and will endlessly levitate above the charger block to keep going.
There’s a jet-propelled paddleboard
Paddleboarding has been gaining popularity for a while, and now inventors have created a version that makes this fun hobby even more relaxing. The built-in jet propulsion engine will push the paddleboard along at up to 3.5 knots, around 6.5 kilometres (four miles) per hour, enabling users to enjoy the view without working up a sweat.
Salmon ears contain GPS trackers
By analysing a tiny structure that grows inside their ears, scientists have been able to map the journeys of hundreds of Chinook salmon. This bone-like structure is called an otolith, which form in layers as a salmon matures. As these layers form, they trap tiny amounts of isotopes that can be traced to specific areas. Scientists hope to use this data to pinpoint where salmon migrate to, so that
these areas can be protected from pollution and over-fishing too.
A teabag can change light lager into craft beer
If you have ever dreamt of customising your favourite alcoholic beverage, you may not have to wait much longer. A company called Hop Theory has created a type of teabag that turns standard lager into craft beer in a matter of minutes. It aims to provide the intense flavour of craft beer without the high cost and the calories, with each bag capable of flavouring four beers.
Tomb Raider A far cry from the old Lara
Lara Croft is one of those rare videogame characters that have transgressed the medium to become a cultural icon. Between Lucozade ads, hit films and Nell McAndrew, even our dear old nans have heard of the pioneering Ms. Croft. While the original Lara might have been revolutionary at the time, she now seems archaic and tired – a sexist non-character defined by her physical assets rather than her actions. The time is right for a reboot, reclaiming the good intentions behind the creation of the character.
This is a new Lara for a savvier and more inclusive generation. Gone are the enormous breasts, pouty lips and huge dual pistols. Realism, grittiness and simply surviving are the themes here, creating the first truly mature entry in the Tomb Raider franchise. Our new Lara is a 21-year old university graduate, assisting in the filming of a famous TV archaeologist’s show as he sails round the world. Searching for the mythical country of Yamatai, the ship runs into a horrendous storm, and Lara and co. are washed up on a desolate island. Lara is split up from her friends and learns the hard way that the island is home to a bunch of psychopathic, stranded pirates. Wham bam, you’ve got yourself a game premise.
It’s striking right from the start how stark and real Tomb Raider feels. Lara is not an all-powerful superwoman. She is scared, upset and obviously extremely distressed by the situation – the reaction of a real person. The opening hours of the game can seem at times like they exist for no reason but to
torture Lara Croft in various ways. The first five minutes have her falling onto a metal rod, impaling her through the torso, the player having to mash a button to pull it out. It’s extremely powerful, and difficult to watch, reminiscent of the famous finger-cutting scene in Heavy Rain. This is a world where violence isn’t shrugged off and forgotten about – it’s real, it hurts, and it’s horrific. Lara’s
default pose for several hours afterwards is her clutching at her wounded side, wincing in pain. Lara’s initial struggles do a great deal to endear her to the player. As she finally creates a bonfire to settle down for the night after escaping immediate danger, you realise that you already, after a mere ten minutes, care far more about this Lara than you ever did for previous, less realistic iterations. She
seems far more like a real person than a caricature, and it’s testament to Crystal Dynamics’ storytelling that you want her to succeed and overcome the horrible situation she finds herself in.
The opening hour is the most muted and perhaps the best. Lara is totally alone, wounded and hungry, hunting deer with a makeshift bow for something to eat. It’s a great way to get to grips with the core game mechanics, and learn the intricacies of the bow, which is going to be your best friend in the struggles to come. Lara is an athletic lass and can jump, climb and run with the best of them, despite her hastily-treated injuries. A key mechanic is her “survival instinct.” A quick tap of L2 drains all colour from the screen briefly as points of interest and objective markers are highlighted. It’s a neat trick that leaves the screen uncluttered from markers and such until you need a quick reminder of where to go.
Make good use of both instincts and bow and Lara bags a deer for some tasty eating. Not even this goes smoothly in the “real world” of this new Tomb Raider. The deer lies there, in pain, slowly dying, almost a parallel to the situation Lara finds herself in. She apologises to the deer and shakily finishes it off. It’s another great example both of how young and innocent this Lara is, and how different she is from her former self. The old Ms. Croft gunned down all manner of endangered species with
nary a backward glance.
Shit is soon hitting fans again though and Lara finds herself creeping through an enemy camp, searching for her friends. This is where the infamous “rape scene” occurs, the subject of much controversy in the press before the game’s release. In reality there is nothing to warrant the attention – a bad guy grabs Lara and holds her in a threatening and intimidating way, telling her how she’s about to die – that’s it. It’s unpleasant and disturbing, as it should be, but nothing specifically implies rape or the attempt of it.
A fight with her captor follows and one gunshot later, Lara has taken her first human life. This scene is extremely brutal, to excellent effect. The man lies on the ground, spluttering and choking with half his face missing as he dies. It manages to be far more graphic than your standard “exploding headshot” videogame trope, hammering home the realism of it all. Lara has killed someone, and even in self-defence, that is a terrible thing. Reflecting on it later, when asked if it was hard, Lara reflects that what is scary is “how easy it was.” It only gets easier From here, the game starts to throw human enemies at you, albeit slowly at first. Past Tomb Raider games have been puzzleheavy, 3D platformers with crap combat thrown in. This one is very much the opposite – gunplay is the order of the day, with a healthy dose of platforming to break it up and only the odd head-scratching puzzle. When it comes to comparative gameplay, the title that comes to mind is Uncharted. Tomb Raider offers a similar blend of action, platforming and theatrical set-pieces, albeit with a much darker tone.
We say gunplay, but the weapon you will be obviously spending the most time with is the classic bow and arrow. Allowing for stealthy kills and precise headshots, picking bad guys off with the bow is a thrill. Along with Far Cry 3, Tomb Raider is set to prove that bows are back in a big way. Can we have a Hawkeye game, please?
Lara only finds three other weapons in her journey – a pistol, a shotgun and an old machine gun (four if you count her ice-pick climbing tool). Four weapons may not sound like a lot, but each serves a distinct purpose and it fits with the realistic feel of the game to not overload Lara with weaponry. Players collect scrap metal and other resources from a variety of sources through the environment, from crates and supply stashes or looted from dead foes. These resources go towards upgrading your
weapons, increasing damage and accuracy, all standard stuff. Lara also finds key weapon parts that, once collected, actually transform the weapon into a shiner new model.
The bow, for example, transforms from a basic wooden affair into a more powerful recurve bow, eventually becoming the enormous competition bow. The machine gun goes from a WWII-era relic to a modern assault rifle. It’s a smart system. Upgrading your weapons into new versions feels like obtaining a whole new gun, when in reality your arsenal never expands beyond the original four. It’s not realistic but hey, videogame logic. Even in a game that prides itself on that real-life feeling, there has to be a bit of suspension of disbelief. One key part of Lara’s moveset that is extremely useful during combat is the scramble, accessed with a quick tap of O.
In any other game this would have been a roll, but here Lara quickly dashes across the ground on all fours, almost animalistic, in an attempt to get out of danger and avoid gunfire. It’s wonderful, managing to encapsulate everything that makes Tomb Raider stand out as a unique title. It just feels legitimate – this is the movement a real person would make, if forced into this horrific situation. To be fair, a second tap of O during the scramble will result in a roll, but again, it’s still a videogame at the end of the day.
Lara is simply a joy to control, her fluid movement and sprightly frame a world away from the weighty control of many other third-person games. Leaping across large gaps evokes the same visceral thrill of the early games, scaling cliffs is a breeze, scrambling between cover is useful and fun and aiming is responsive. One genius touch is that there is no crouch button. When Lara enters combat, she automatically assumes a crouching stance, keeping low to the ground at all times but still moving at the same speed. It’s that touch of realism that works so well it’s amazing no one else has thought of it before.
If you were in a gunfight, damn straight you’d keep your head down the whole while. Experience points are earned both with kills and from finding them throughout the world, used to upgrade Lara’s skillset. A good example of this is Lara’s melee attack. Initially this is a mere shove, ineffectual against the larger, stronger enemies she fights, aside from the odd plunge off a cliff. This becomes a
more useful swinging attack with her ice pick climbing tool, players eventually unlocking a quick kill move after a successful dodge, with brutal results – impaling a guy through the neck with an arrow but one of many. It’s yet another great example of how the game design complements the story – Lara is growing as an individual, learning to fight and survive, and the increase in abilities available to the player reflects this.
For the majority of the game, Tomb Raider maintains the dark, gritty tone of a girl out of her depth, surviving by the skin of her teeth. Most battles end with the player victorious, but feeling like it was a hard-fought, barelyattained win. It’s just the right balance, always difficult but not unfairly so. Frequent enemy use of Molotov cocktails forces you to stay on the move, never sticking behind one piece of cover for too long.
The story goes to some very dark places, with Lara being put through the proverbial wringer a fair few times as she grows from victim to hunter. Just when you think nothing worse can happen to this poor girl, something does. Mounds of corpses, rivers of blood, even more nasty injuries – this is a bad week in the life of lady Croft. It even feels more like a horror game at times.
Some of Lara’s deaths can occasionally seem a bit torture-porny, especially those that come as the result of a failed quick-time event. Metal rods through the jaw, skewered on tree branches, battered into rocks by strong underwater currents, it’s brutal stuff. Sometimes it’s a little over the top, but still
tends to feel fitting with the bleak setting. Unfortunately, the game tapers off slightly towards the end. The considered pace and dark, realistic feel of the story give way to huge shootouts and massive action-movie set-pieces, Lara screaming at her aggressors as she turns the tables and becomes a onewoman army. It does feel like vengeance of a sort, annihilating the enemies that have tortured you previously, but it lacks the same emotional attachment the game has done such a good job conjuring up to this point. The story itself also veers away from realism, taking some absurd turns into something more akin to the classic games.
It makes sense, we suppose – after all, this is a reboot of those same games – but it’s a shame to see a mostly mature story turn into something that’s frankly, a bit daft. Still, it’s nowhere near enough to spoil all the great stuff that comes before, and even when it’s being silly, Tomb Raider is still miles more involving and entertaining than most other blockbuster-style games.
Graphically, Tomb Raider is one of the best looking games we’ve seen, making great use of the extended hardware cycle to wring every last piece of power out of the machine. The island is stunning in its bleakness, with a hostile sense of beauty pervading the craggy cliffs, shipwreck-filled beaches and ruined ancient villages. It’s a world away from the sunny paradise of Far Cry 3, despite both being set in similar geographical locations.
Lara is the star of the show, and it’s her character model which is the most impressive. Not only does she look like a real person, she moves like one, with little mannerisms and facial expressions to further personalise her. Noticing the small things, like her arms shaking with muscle strain as she opens large chests, makes all the difference.
Gamers can expect to get a solid ten hours out of the main story, with a bunch of extra stuff to take up more time if they so choose. Chief among this extra guff are seven optional tombs to explore, the only time in Tomb Raider where you actually do so. These tombs are practically the only places in the game with puzzles, but all seven are extremely short. One puzzle apiece leads to a crappy reward
of some resources and a map, each time. It’s disappointing, especially if you remember some of the rock hard brain-teasers from the original PlayStation days. With only seven of them, the extra tombs barely add another hour of game time.
Dotted around the island are relics to discover, Lara offering a bit of information on each with some requiring additional examination to uncover all their secrets. It’s a nice way of adding some background detail to the island as well as portraying Lara’s love of archeology through gameplay.
Otherwise, it’s the standard open-world bunch of extras to find, ramped up to an extreme level. There is a LOT of random crap to pick up in Tomb Raider, all of it meaningless aside from upping a completion percentage and getting some trophies. It’s a bad, transparent way of artificially adding
replay value. The island is essentially an open world, but feels more like several large stages connected by corridors. Lara can fast-travel around from select bonfires, facilitating easy travel. Traversing the landscape is always a pleasure, but without any real reason to do so following the end of the story, there isn’t a huge amount of extra value here.
It’s lucky then that the initial Tomb Raider experience is so excellent you’ll more than likely just replay the whole story again instead. As a reboot it’s a huge success, stripping away all the crap from the old Lara and making her modern and relevant once more. As a game it’s a blast, with fluid platforming and responsive shooting. As an experience it’s mature and interesting, dark and gritty while rarely being exploitative. You will care about this Lara Croft and what is going to happen to her.
It falls off slightly towards the end, but a few other minor quibbles aside, Tomb Raider is still a triumph that is more than worth your time and money. Welcome back, Lara. We missed you.
Sam Smith
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This is a new Lara for a savvier and more inclusive generation. Gone are the enormous breasts, pouty lips and huge dual pistols. Realism, grittiness and simply surviving are the themes here, creating the first truly mature entry in the Tomb Raider franchise. Our new Lara is a 21-year old university graduate, assisting in the filming of a famous TV archaeologist’s show as he sails round the world. Searching for the mythical country of Yamatai, the ship runs into a horrendous storm, and Lara and co. are washed up on a desolate island. Lara is split up from her friends and learns the hard way that the island is home to a bunch of psychopathic, stranded pirates. Wham bam, you’ve got yourself a game premise.
It’s striking right from the start how stark and real Tomb Raider feels. Lara is not an all-powerful superwoman. She is scared, upset and obviously extremely distressed by the situation – the reaction of a real person. The opening hours of the game can seem at times like they exist for no reason but to
torture Lara Croft in various ways. The first five minutes have her falling onto a metal rod, impaling her through the torso, the player having to mash a button to pull it out. It’s extremely powerful, and difficult to watch, reminiscent of the famous finger-cutting scene in Heavy Rain. This is a world where violence isn’t shrugged off and forgotten about – it’s real, it hurts, and it’s horrific. Lara’s
default pose for several hours afterwards is her clutching at her wounded side, wincing in pain. Lara’s initial struggles do a great deal to endear her to the player. As she finally creates a bonfire to settle down for the night after escaping immediate danger, you realise that you already, after a mere ten minutes, care far more about this Lara than you ever did for previous, less realistic iterations. She
seems far more like a real person than a caricature, and it’s testament to Crystal Dynamics’ storytelling that you want her to succeed and overcome the horrible situation she finds herself in.
The opening hour is the most muted and perhaps the best. Lara is totally alone, wounded and hungry, hunting deer with a makeshift bow for something to eat. It’s a great way to get to grips with the core game mechanics, and learn the intricacies of the bow, which is going to be your best friend in the struggles to come. Lara is an athletic lass and can jump, climb and run with the best of them, despite her hastily-treated injuries. A key mechanic is her “survival instinct.” A quick tap of L2 drains all colour from the screen briefly as points of interest and objective markers are highlighted. It’s a neat trick that leaves the screen uncluttered from markers and such until you need a quick reminder of where to go.
Make good use of both instincts and bow and Lara bags a deer for some tasty eating. Not even this goes smoothly in the “real world” of this new Tomb Raider. The deer lies there, in pain, slowly dying, almost a parallel to the situation Lara finds herself in. She apologises to the deer and shakily finishes it off. It’s another great example both of how young and innocent this Lara is, and how different she is from her former self. The old Ms. Croft gunned down all manner of endangered species with
nary a backward glance.
Shit is soon hitting fans again though and Lara finds herself creeping through an enemy camp, searching for her friends. This is where the infamous “rape scene” occurs, the subject of much controversy in the press before the game’s release. In reality there is nothing to warrant the attention – a bad guy grabs Lara and holds her in a threatening and intimidating way, telling her how she’s about to die – that’s it. It’s unpleasant and disturbing, as it should be, but nothing specifically implies rape or the attempt of it.
A fight with her captor follows and one gunshot later, Lara has taken her first human life. This scene is extremely brutal, to excellent effect. The man lies on the ground, spluttering and choking with half his face missing as he dies. It manages to be far more graphic than your standard “exploding headshot” videogame trope, hammering home the realism of it all. Lara has killed someone, and even in self-defence, that is a terrible thing. Reflecting on it later, when asked if it was hard, Lara reflects that what is scary is “how easy it was.” It only gets easier From here, the game starts to throw human enemies at you, albeit slowly at first. Past Tomb Raider games have been puzzleheavy, 3D platformers with crap combat thrown in. This one is very much the opposite – gunplay is the order of the day, with a healthy dose of platforming to break it up and only the odd head-scratching puzzle. When it comes to comparative gameplay, the title that comes to mind is Uncharted. Tomb Raider offers a similar blend of action, platforming and theatrical set-pieces, albeit with a much darker tone.
We say gunplay, but the weapon you will be obviously spending the most time with is the classic bow and arrow. Allowing for stealthy kills and precise headshots, picking bad guys off with the bow is a thrill. Along with Far Cry 3, Tomb Raider is set to prove that bows are back in a big way. Can we have a Hawkeye game, please?
Lara only finds three other weapons in her journey – a pistol, a shotgun and an old machine gun (four if you count her ice-pick climbing tool). Four weapons may not sound like a lot, but each serves a distinct purpose and it fits with the realistic feel of the game to not overload Lara with weaponry. Players collect scrap metal and other resources from a variety of sources through the environment, from crates and supply stashes or looted from dead foes. These resources go towards upgrading your
weapons, increasing damage and accuracy, all standard stuff. Lara also finds key weapon parts that, once collected, actually transform the weapon into a shiner new model.
The bow, for example, transforms from a basic wooden affair into a more powerful recurve bow, eventually becoming the enormous competition bow. The machine gun goes from a WWII-era relic to a modern assault rifle. It’s a smart system. Upgrading your weapons into new versions feels like obtaining a whole new gun, when in reality your arsenal never expands beyond the original four. It’s not realistic but hey, videogame logic. Even in a game that prides itself on that real-life feeling, there has to be a bit of suspension of disbelief. One key part of Lara’s moveset that is extremely useful during combat is the scramble, accessed with a quick tap of O.
In any other game this would have been a roll, but here Lara quickly dashes across the ground on all fours, almost animalistic, in an attempt to get out of danger and avoid gunfire. It’s wonderful, managing to encapsulate everything that makes Tomb Raider stand out as a unique title. It just feels legitimate – this is the movement a real person would make, if forced into this horrific situation. To be fair, a second tap of O during the scramble will result in a roll, but again, it’s still a videogame at the end of the day.
Lara is simply a joy to control, her fluid movement and sprightly frame a world away from the weighty control of many other third-person games. Leaping across large gaps evokes the same visceral thrill of the early games, scaling cliffs is a breeze, scrambling between cover is useful and fun and aiming is responsive. One genius touch is that there is no crouch button. When Lara enters combat, she automatically assumes a crouching stance, keeping low to the ground at all times but still moving at the same speed. It’s that touch of realism that works so well it’s amazing no one else has thought of it before.
If you were in a gunfight, damn straight you’d keep your head down the whole while. Experience points are earned both with kills and from finding them throughout the world, used to upgrade Lara’s skillset. A good example of this is Lara’s melee attack. Initially this is a mere shove, ineffectual against the larger, stronger enemies she fights, aside from the odd plunge off a cliff. This becomes a
more useful swinging attack with her ice pick climbing tool, players eventually unlocking a quick kill move after a successful dodge, with brutal results – impaling a guy through the neck with an arrow but one of many. It’s yet another great example of how the game design complements the story – Lara is growing as an individual, learning to fight and survive, and the increase in abilities available to the player reflects this.
For the majority of the game, Tomb Raider maintains the dark, gritty tone of a girl out of her depth, surviving by the skin of her teeth. Most battles end with the player victorious, but feeling like it was a hard-fought, barelyattained win. It’s just the right balance, always difficult but not unfairly so. Frequent enemy use of Molotov cocktails forces you to stay on the move, never sticking behind one piece of cover for too long.
The story goes to some very dark places, with Lara being put through the proverbial wringer a fair few times as she grows from victim to hunter. Just when you think nothing worse can happen to this poor girl, something does. Mounds of corpses, rivers of blood, even more nasty injuries – this is a bad week in the life of lady Croft. It even feels more like a horror game at times.
Some of Lara’s deaths can occasionally seem a bit torture-porny, especially those that come as the result of a failed quick-time event. Metal rods through the jaw, skewered on tree branches, battered into rocks by strong underwater currents, it’s brutal stuff. Sometimes it’s a little over the top, but still
tends to feel fitting with the bleak setting. Unfortunately, the game tapers off slightly towards the end. The considered pace and dark, realistic feel of the story give way to huge shootouts and massive action-movie set-pieces, Lara screaming at her aggressors as she turns the tables and becomes a onewoman army. It does feel like vengeance of a sort, annihilating the enemies that have tortured you previously, but it lacks the same emotional attachment the game has done such a good job conjuring up to this point. The story itself also veers away from realism, taking some absurd turns into something more akin to the classic games.
It makes sense, we suppose – after all, this is a reboot of those same games – but it’s a shame to see a mostly mature story turn into something that’s frankly, a bit daft. Still, it’s nowhere near enough to spoil all the great stuff that comes before, and even when it’s being silly, Tomb Raider is still miles more involving and entertaining than most other blockbuster-style games.
Graphically, Tomb Raider is one of the best looking games we’ve seen, making great use of the extended hardware cycle to wring every last piece of power out of the machine. The island is stunning in its bleakness, with a hostile sense of beauty pervading the craggy cliffs, shipwreck-filled beaches and ruined ancient villages. It’s a world away from the sunny paradise of Far Cry 3, despite both being set in similar geographical locations.
Lara is the star of the show, and it’s her character model which is the most impressive. Not only does she look like a real person, she moves like one, with little mannerisms and facial expressions to further personalise her. Noticing the small things, like her arms shaking with muscle strain as she opens large chests, makes all the difference.
Gamers can expect to get a solid ten hours out of the main story, with a bunch of extra stuff to take up more time if they so choose. Chief among this extra guff are seven optional tombs to explore, the only time in Tomb Raider where you actually do so. These tombs are practically the only places in the game with puzzles, but all seven are extremely short. One puzzle apiece leads to a crappy reward
of some resources and a map, each time. It’s disappointing, especially if you remember some of the rock hard brain-teasers from the original PlayStation days. With only seven of them, the extra tombs barely add another hour of game time.
Dotted around the island are relics to discover, Lara offering a bit of information on each with some requiring additional examination to uncover all their secrets. It’s a nice way of adding some background detail to the island as well as portraying Lara’s love of archeology through gameplay.
Otherwise, it’s the standard open-world bunch of extras to find, ramped up to an extreme level. There is a LOT of random crap to pick up in Tomb Raider, all of it meaningless aside from upping a completion percentage and getting some trophies. It’s a bad, transparent way of artificially adding
replay value. The island is essentially an open world, but feels more like several large stages connected by corridors. Lara can fast-travel around from select bonfires, facilitating easy travel. Traversing the landscape is always a pleasure, but without any real reason to do so following the end of the story, there isn’t a huge amount of extra value here.
It’s lucky then that the initial Tomb Raider experience is so excellent you’ll more than likely just replay the whole story again instead. As a reboot it’s a huge success, stripping away all the crap from the old Lara and making her modern and relevant once more. As a game it’s a blast, with fluid platforming and responsive shooting. As an experience it’s mature and interesting, dark and gritty while rarely being exploitative. You will care about this Lara Croft and what is going to happen to her.
It falls off slightly towards the end, but a few other minor quibbles aside, Tomb Raider is still a triumph that is more than worth your time and money. Welcome back, Lara. We missed you.
Sam Smith
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TOP 10 VIDEO GAMES OF ALL TIME
TOP 15 SCARY HIDDEN THINGS IN VIDEO GAMESTOP 15 MOST SCARY THINGS CAUGHT ON VIDEO
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BIOSHOCK INFINITE THE DEFINITIVE VERDICT
WELCOME TO THE MOST AMBITIOUS FPS EVER SEEN ON PLAYSTATION – IRRATIONAL’S EPIC IS SO FAR A RELENTLESSLY GIVING EXPERIENCE, AS WELL AS YEARS AHEAD OF ITS TIME IN NARRATIVE DESIGN. BIOSHOCK INFINITE’S ART DIRECTOR, SCOTT SINCLAIR, TELLS US HOW IRRATIONAL BUILT A WORLD THAT TELLS A TITANIC STORY IN ITSELF...
If it takes two years to make an effects-driven, huge budget Hollywood film, then BioShock Infinite’s five year-plus development cycle tells you that making an equivalent videogame is a far harder undertaking. When we play the first few hours of Irrational’s long-awaited FPS, it becomes clear why that’s the case: this clearly exceeds the standard of contemporary shooters in a way that exposes the lack of maturity in games. And we don’t just mean that in the sense that every shooter has a story targeted at 12 year-olds or silly levels of violence – most of them do, true – but in the way that it shows off what the PS3 can do with storytelling through environmental design, world-building and writing.
It’s a startling piece of work that hits every audience on one level (it’s a shooter, after all, and you can throw fireballs at people), but has a layer of substance that’ll resonate with a more specific type of player. Crosshairs are drawn on certain elements of American history and the great façade of patriotism, that feel like they’re deliberately crafted to make the audience feel uncomfortable. When
we first witness BioShock Infinite exploring racism, for example, and the way it permeates the sinister culture of breakaway floating country Columbia, our initial thoughts are that it’s a brave subject to touch upon in a game – we get the same feeling when we’re walking around a morally dubious museum describing conflicts from America’s past, or watching the many in-game propaganda films that relay Columbia’s disturbing ideologies.
But this kind of subtext shouldn’t be the exception in videogames; it shouldn’t be the rule, either, but big triple-A experiences really could be offering us more narrative meat than they are now. BioShock Infinite is really refreshing in that regard. It’s like the result of years of progress in FPS design that never actually happened – the world of Columbia isn’t just a pretty backdrop, it’s telling you the story, in an even more heightened way than the intricate design of Rapture did in the previous two games.
“At Irrational, we create within a process for evolution that relies heavily on extreme iteration to answer tough challenges,” art director Scott Sinclair explains to us. “A core sample of our levels would reveal equal parts happy accident, narrative direction, historical reference, combat influence,
technical constraints, and painful course correction.”
Iteration was the key behind Columbia’s creation – the themes slotted in naturally around the subject
matter as Irrational developed the concept behind Infinite. “When you make games where the environment is a primary character, there are simply too many variables that need careful consideration to produce stories like this,” Sinclair recalls. “When resting on one’s laurels, this process allows you to back up and recognise that you are too comfortable to create at your peak. The only way we know how to zero in on the correct direction is by examining the exquisite corpse of a first idea as we flush it. Stormy night turned into summer sunshine, European Red Light turned into 4th of July Americana, and the narrative conflict started solidifying from American history.”
This process steered Infinite out of well-trodden fictional territory and into something a little richer. “This was a drastic departure from the cliché fictional struggle of the religious faction vs. the technology faction that we were building everything in the service of. The 15-year-old in me was bummed for a second, but it quickly became apparent that Ken made the correct calls to elevate our shooter.”
That thematic texture aids the tension within the world’s atmosphere, too. Without spoiling the dramatic, brilliant opening that recalls the original BioShock, Infinite introduces its world as a shiny happy utopia, with people praising Columbia’s leader Father Zachary Hale Comstock and morning sunshine dizzying your vision of buildings gliding above clouds. Your character, the Deckard-esque Booker, is after a specific girl, Elizabeth – and his checkered past as a Pinkerton agent is a point of ambiguity that’s delivered to the player through an early flashback.
The world is magnificently realised; we see two environments, a fair with a number of interactive amusements like target ranges, where you’re introduced to the game’s vigors (plasmid equivalents) and a boardwalk that collects shops and other attractions into one scenic locale. There’s far more
besides – but revealing them would dive too much into the story, a surprising, twist-heavy tale as anticipated that literally throws you around the city. After Booker is discovered in Columbia and
outlined by the authorities as a threat, the pace lurches forward, with players meeting and liberating Elizabeth, before the foundations of Columbia’s devious, false idol-worshipping society starts to come undone.
We ask Sinclair what lessons Irrational took away from creating Rapture for the original BioShock in building Columbia. “The no-spin answer would honestly be very little to nothing at all,” he says. “Everything, including process, was brand new. On a much higher level, the primary lesson learned is that story informs everything we create.”
That’s the advantage of having a story that’s continually moving – BioShock Infinite isn’t burdened by the same hours of downtime that we see in every other game. There’s no boring underground trudge, endless wall of spawning enemies in dull locations; every moment feels orchestrated, not to add extra time to Infinite’s lifespan, but to supplement your experience as a player. It all matters, and it all works. When BioShock Infinite is building up to the big action setpieces, you’re treated to fine moments of storytelling and characterisation, revealing more about the world and Elizabeth. The pacing is just continually exciting, and that’s something that feels like the result of having so many years of development, as well as a luxury of Irrational’s immense reputation that few other studios are afforded.
With the vigors in your hands and the skyline rails to traverse, it brings something mechanically new to the FPS, too, and as mentioned last issue this is a superior shooter in the way the previous BioShock was not. Later on, Elizabeth is able to spawn objects around you using ‘tears’ – wish fulfillment-powered rips in reality that can create cover for you or turrets, as well as some damn memorable gameplay moments that expose you to different parts of time and popular culture. Again, we don’t want to spoil it for you. There are a few characters whose intent is undeniably cloudy, as
well as a few choices that hint at multiple strands in the narrative, such is the DNA of the series as we understand it.
BioShock shows the lack of progress in layered narrative from its contemporaries by creating a world that is a living story piece. It’s a crucial part of what Irrational has been working on for so many years. “It is everything,” Sinclair explains. “Without it, the quality of your art amounts to texture resolution and frame rate. We are mostly artists, with traditional media art back grounds. I was
an editorial illustrator for years before I thought it would be cool to play with polygons. For better or worse, the quality of everything we create here is judged on an editorial and fine-art level before
we allow the engine to dictate anything. It makes for a one hell of a hair-raising optimisation phase, but the end result speaks to you many levels above the classification of ‘videogame’.”
Like any piece of entertainment that wants to hit a wide audience but still deliver something smart and specific, BioShock Infinite has relentless detail to draw upon, encompassing themes that you just don’t see in other videogames. While there’s still a huge capacity to muck it up past what we’ve seen, of course – there’s always a strange sense of irony in the parallel between BioShock’s idea of creating a perfect city gone wrong, with the idea of developing a ludicrously ambitious game about that subject – but we’ve rarely experienced such a consistently wonderful interactive experience.
BioShock Infinite is idiosyncratic, a game that dares to divide audiences in a way that won’t just amount to idiots bickering on Twitter about whether certain guns are overpowered or not. It’s about something. This will likely be a politically contentious work, a devouring interpretation of certain parts of American history and hero-worshipping elements of its culture. And you know what? Some of the very best pieces of fiction are in the ballpark of what Infinite is trying to do. Most of them don’t have funfairs floating in the sky or characters that shoot birds and fireballs out of their hands, but hey, you’ll soon find out that’s pretty damn good, too.
“I’m going to Disneyland!” says Sinclair when we ask him to reflect on Infinite’s extended development cycle. “There were some hardships along the way – some friends lost to the sea, and we are a very different studio from what we were four years ago. But we are stronger than ever now. I feel lucky that we were able to weather the scheduling nightmares, and that Take-Two believes in us. I’m still a giant ball of stress, but I’m finally able to put the water bucket down because the fire has subsided. I love this team so much right now. I can’t believe we pulled off what we did with what we were up against.”
10 VIDEO GAME EASTER EGGS THAT TOOK YEARS TO FIND
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If it takes two years to make an effects-driven, huge budget Hollywood film, then BioShock Infinite’s five year-plus development cycle tells you that making an equivalent videogame is a far harder undertaking. When we play the first few hours of Irrational’s long-awaited FPS, it becomes clear why that’s the case: this clearly exceeds the standard of contemporary shooters in a way that exposes the lack of maturity in games. And we don’t just mean that in the sense that every shooter has a story targeted at 12 year-olds or silly levels of violence – most of them do, true – but in the way that it shows off what the PS3 can do with storytelling through environmental design, world-building and writing.
It’s a startling piece of work that hits every audience on one level (it’s a shooter, after all, and you can throw fireballs at people), but has a layer of substance that’ll resonate with a more specific type of player. Crosshairs are drawn on certain elements of American history and the great façade of patriotism, that feel like they’re deliberately crafted to make the audience feel uncomfortable. When
we first witness BioShock Infinite exploring racism, for example, and the way it permeates the sinister culture of breakaway floating country Columbia, our initial thoughts are that it’s a brave subject to touch upon in a game – we get the same feeling when we’re walking around a morally dubious museum describing conflicts from America’s past, or watching the many in-game propaganda films that relay Columbia’s disturbing ideologies.
But this kind of subtext shouldn’t be the exception in videogames; it shouldn’t be the rule, either, but big triple-A experiences really could be offering us more narrative meat than they are now. BioShock Infinite is really refreshing in that regard. It’s like the result of years of progress in FPS design that never actually happened – the world of Columbia isn’t just a pretty backdrop, it’s telling you the story, in an even more heightened way than the intricate design of Rapture did in the previous two games.
“At Irrational, we create within a process for evolution that relies heavily on extreme iteration to answer tough challenges,” art director Scott Sinclair explains to us. “A core sample of our levels would reveal equal parts happy accident, narrative direction, historical reference, combat influence,
technical constraints, and painful course correction.”
Iteration was the key behind Columbia’s creation – the themes slotted in naturally around the subject
matter as Irrational developed the concept behind Infinite. “When you make games where the environment is a primary character, there are simply too many variables that need careful consideration to produce stories like this,” Sinclair recalls. “When resting on one’s laurels, this process allows you to back up and recognise that you are too comfortable to create at your peak. The only way we know how to zero in on the correct direction is by examining the exquisite corpse of a first idea as we flush it. Stormy night turned into summer sunshine, European Red Light turned into 4th of July Americana, and the narrative conflict started solidifying from American history.”
This process steered Infinite out of well-trodden fictional territory and into something a little richer. “This was a drastic departure from the cliché fictional struggle of the religious faction vs. the technology faction that we were building everything in the service of. The 15-year-old in me was bummed for a second, but it quickly became apparent that Ken made the correct calls to elevate our shooter.”
That thematic texture aids the tension within the world’s atmosphere, too. Without spoiling the dramatic, brilliant opening that recalls the original BioShock, Infinite introduces its world as a shiny happy utopia, with people praising Columbia’s leader Father Zachary Hale Comstock and morning sunshine dizzying your vision of buildings gliding above clouds. Your character, the Deckard-esque Booker, is after a specific girl, Elizabeth – and his checkered past as a Pinkerton agent is a point of ambiguity that’s delivered to the player through an early flashback.
The world is magnificently realised; we see two environments, a fair with a number of interactive amusements like target ranges, where you’re introduced to the game’s vigors (plasmid equivalents) and a boardwalk that collects shops and other attractions into one scenic locale. There’s far more
besides – but revealing them would dive too much into the story, a surprising, twist-heavy tale as anticipated that literally throws you around the city. After Booker is discovered in Columbia and
outlined by the authorities as a threat, the pace lurches forward, with players meeting and liberating Elizabeth, before the foundations of Columbia’s devious, false idol-worshipping society starts to come undone.
We ask Sinclair what lessons Irrational took away from creating Rapture for the original BioShock in building Columbia. “The no-spin answer would honestly be very little to nothing at all,” he says. “Everything, including process, was brand new. On a much higher level, the primary lesson learned is that story informs everything we create.”
That’s the advantage of having a story that’s continually moving – BioShock Infinite isn’t burdened by the same hours of downtime that we see in every other game. There’s no boring underground trudge, endless wall of spawning enemies in dull locations; every moment feels orchestrated, not to add extra time to Infinite’s lifespan, but to supplement your experience as a player. It all matters, and it all works. When BioShock Infinite is building up to the big action setpieces, you’re treated to fine moments of storytelling and characterisation, revealing more about the world and Elizabeth. The pacing is just continually exciting, and that’s something that feels like the result of having so many years of development, as well as a luxury of Irrational’s immense reputation that few other studios are afforded.
With the vigors in your hands and the skyline rails to traverse, it brings something mechanically new to the FPS, too, and as mentioned last issue this is a superior shooter in the way the previous BioShock was not. Later on, Elizabeth is able to spawn objects around you using ‘tears’ – wish fulfillment-powered rips in reality that can create cover for you or turrets, as well as some damn memorable gameplay moments that expose you to different parts of time and popular culture. Again, we don’t want to spoil it for you. There are a few characters whose intent is undeniably cloudy, as
well as a few choices that hint at multiple strands in the narrative, such is the DNA of the series as we understand it.
BioShock shows the lack of progress in layered narrative from its contemporaries by creating a world that is a living story piece. It’s a crucial part of what Irrational has been working on for so many years. “It is everything,” Sinclair explains. “Without it, the quality of your art amounts to texture resolution and frame rate. We are mostly artists, with traditional media art back grounds. I was
an editorial illustrator for years before I thought it would be cool to play with polygons. For better or worse, the quality of everything we create here is judged on an editorial and fine-art level before
we allow the engine to dictate anything. It makes for a one hell of a hair-raising optimisation phase, but the end result speaks to you many levels above the classification of ‘videogame’.”
Like any piece of entertainment that wants to hit a wide audience but still deliver something smart and specific, BioShock Infinite has relentless detail to draw upon, encompassing themes that you just don’t see in other videogames. While there’s still a huge capacity to muck it up past what we’ve seen, of course – there’s always a strange sense of irony in the parallel between BioShock’s idea of creating a perfect city gone wrong, with the idea of developing a ludicrously ambitious game about that subject – but we’ve rarely experienced such a consistently wonderful interactive experience.
BioShock Infinite is idiosyncratic, a game that dares to divide audiences in a way that won’t just amount to idiots bickering on Twitter about whether certain guns are overpowered or not. It’s about something. This will likely be a politically contentious work, a devouring interpretation of certain parts of American history and hero-worshipping elements of its culture. And you know what? Some of the very best pieces of fiction are in the ballpark of what Infinite is trying to do. Most of them don’t have funfairs floating in the sky or characters that shoot birds and fireballs out of their hands, but hey, you’ll soon find out that’s pretty damn good, too.
“I’m going to Disneyland!” says Sinclair when we ask him to reflect on Infinite’s extended development cycle. “There were some hardships along the way – some friends lost to the sea, and we are a very different studio from what we were four years ago. But we are stronger than ever now. I feel lucky that we were able to weather the scheduling nightmares, and that Take-Two believes in us. I’m still a giant ball of stress, but I’m finally able to put the water bucket down because the fire has subsided. I love this team so much right now. I can’t believe we pulled off what we did with what we were up against.”
10 VIDEO GAME EASTER EGGS THAT TOOK YEARS TO FIND
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Injustice: Gods Among Us
Could Catwoman beat Superman in a fight? Somehow, yes
First things first: this is a fighting game in which you can summon murder cars as a super move. If you’re playing as Batman, that is, and we’re guessing that a lot of you will be.
Bats chucks down a smoke bomb, electrocutes his opponent with two tasers (because one often isn’t enough) and then, to add injury to injury, summons the Batmobile to screech across the screen at top speed and flatten them. It’s like an Eidolon with wheels. It doesn’t matter where you are – on top of a building, in the centre of the Fortress of Solitude, floating in an orbital space station above the earth –
push down those shoulder buttons and the Batmobile magically screeches into view. Somehow.
Injustice is by NetherRealm Studios, the team behind Mortal Kombat, and it shows. This is gloriously overblown stuff. The Flash runs a quick circuit of the globe to build up momentum on an uppercut. Superman punches his opponents into space and then, crucially, back down to earth. Not so bad when you’re pummelling the robotic Cyborg or the immortal giant Solomon Grundy, but when you’re
subjecting Harley Quinn to extraterrestrial GBH it can feel like overkill.
And this game is overkill. Pure, unadulterated overkill. It plays, appropriately, like someone with a cocaine habit as serious as their comics obsession spat out four hundred of the best ideas they could muster in a single sitting and then crafted that into a game without sleeping once. Everyone is fighting everyone, all the time, in the most spectacular fashion available.
The fighting style has a lot in common with the recent Mortal Kombat reboot, even aside from the bone-crunching violence and nifty camera angles – various flavours of light, medium and heavy attack make up the bulk of a character’s moveset, coupled with a handful of specials and those aforementioned car-summoning gravity-punching super-moves. The supers are powered by a separate
Super meter, not unlike the EX meter from Street Fighter, which recharges as you pull off combos or get punched in the face. They give bad players a bit of an edge, as standard, and good players an excuse to showboat.
Taking control of the characters is fairly intuitive and, above all else, enjoyable – within a few minutes we were pulling off juggle combos and dodging enemy attacks without much of a problem. So that’s nice. If you’re into your frame counts and hitboxes, there’s the option to delve deeply into
the mechanics too, but there’s still plenty for the casual enthusiast of elaborate violence to get into.
With a tap of a button, you unleash each characters’ unique special ability which power up as they fight: in Batman’s case, it was a swarm of Batarangs that bother the enemy at range. There’s a wide variety of stuff on offer, here. Superman gets even more powerful for a few seconds, The Green Arrow shoots – yep – green arrows at folk, The Flash moves so fast that he slows down time for his opponent, and Harley Quinn pulls out a picture of the Joker and gives it a kiss. Not sure what effect that had, to be honest.
Hold off using them and they get better – Batman goes from one ineffectual Batarang to four, for example, and the Green Arrow’s projectiles cycle through a variety of funky effects. None of his trademark boxing-glove arrows, though, as far as we could see, which seems like a fairly major oversight. Maybe they’ll be put in as DLC.
Finally, for the full superhero standoff effect, players can initiate a Clash – after a brief series of close-ups and exchanging of words, both players secretly bid up to three sections of their Super-meter and, following a slowmotion smackdown, to the victor go the spoils. “Spoils” in this case being extra damage for an attacker or a health boost for a defender. While it might not necessarily be what you’d look for in a frantic fighting game like this one, it certainly fits the superhero theme.
Each arena – of which there are around fifteen, including the ruins of Superman’s hometown Metropolis, the orbital space station Watchtower and so on – has two or three distinct areas chiefly unlocked by kicking your opponent through adjoining walls and following along behind. The transition animations are not only high-damage combos but a return to that over-thetop violence; to go from the Metropolis streets to the roof of a nearby building, for example, you’ll knock your opponent though five painful stories of office blocks before they land.
Scattered around the arenas are a variety of dangerous objects that can be used to your advantage, and each type of character will interact with them in different ways. While Superman might pluck a flying car out of the sky and jam it bonnet-first into his opponent’s face – sporting! – Batman will blow up the same car with a bomb and let the falling wreckage do the talking. Elements vary from things you can drop on people to carelessly huge red buttons that trigger spaceship exhausts to honking great
lumps of crystal you can swing about to send the Green Arrow flying towards the back wall of the Fortress of Solitude like a baseball in eyeliner and a stupid hat.
The single-player campaign starts with an introduction that features pretty much every DC superhero you can imagine having one big fight that stretches from the surface of the earth all the way to space. When they appear onscreen, there seems to be a rule that either they or another character must mention them by name within three seconds so we know who they are, in case of confusion. The characters are voiced like their actors were reading their lines in separate rooms several years apart from one another.
But for all the janky acting and insistence on setting fights in big empty patches of sky, the cutscenes and the fights flow together very well, lending play a sort of breathless quality that you don’t commonly find in the genre as you’re shoved between fights without so much as a loading screen. Singleplayer puts you in charge of Batman, everyone’s favourite superhero-who’snot- really-a-superhero, and follows his quest to stop world devastation via the medium of punching.
The plot, then, in a nutshell – quiff-owner and walking wardrobe malfunction Superman is understandably upset after Lois Lane and his unborn son are killed in a nuclear explosion, so goes all-out mental and decides to form a new world order. As you do. Batman, ever the calm-headed diplomat, decides to form a resistance force against this injustice (geddit?) and can somehow stand
toe-to-toe with Supes and co in a fight for reasons that weren’t adequately explained. Maybe he handed around kryptonite sandwiches before everything kicked off?
Batman’s first fight is against Deathstroke – think Marvel’s merc-withthe- mouth Deadpool but with none of the charm and you’re pretty much there – and the second is against the freakish giant and chemically-altered Luchador Bane, before moving onto a scrap with Superman’s baldy nemesis Lex Luthor. After defeating Bane, Batman can swing the battle in his favour by throwing a bunch of batarangs at Luthor via an over-the-shoulder quick-time event; hitting all the buttons in order knocks down Luthor’s health bar a bit before the fight starts. It wasn’t clear how often QTEs would spring up in the game, but here’s hoping they’re rare.
Multiplayer is, of course, more fun than the single-player campaign because this is a fighting game and those are the rules. The characters split into two rough camps – big, strong types like Superman, Wonder Woman, Solomon Grundy, and Cyborg, and smaller, nippy folks like Nightwing, the
Flash, and Harley Quinn. Batman sits in the middle, brooding appropriately, which seems like a good place to be for the “main” character. Strong characters are slow by default – even Superman – which can take a little getting used to; while projectiles don’t feature heavily, the range of a character’s attacks can differ wildly depending on input so positioning and speed can be deceptively important.
The limited roster available to us seemed to rely on that split over anything else, and – isappointingly – characters often didn’t feel remarkably different to others in the same group. Combat’s fairly tight, but there’s something inescapably Mortal Kombat about that that suggests this is a game focused more on entertainment than mastery; there’s not the hair’s breadth precision you’d find in a Japanese
title, nor the breadth of fighting styles, and a lot of bombast. But sometimes accessibility is what you’re after. It’s not without moments of wideeyed joy, either. When playing as the psychotic Harley Quinn, there’s something to be said for mashing Superman’s face in with a giant hammer, knocking him underneath a falling spaceship and sending him crashing through the floor to an engine room eight floors below.
And that’s NetherRealm all over, that is. Injustice is a game built around a series of moments of grand, epicscale violence that are so brutal and so elaborate that the mach-5 slapstick of them makes you laugh out loud involuntarily. The sense of fun is inescapable, and the title already carries such massive flair that it’s hard not to be excited to see what the rest of it holds, even if it’s just bigger and better explosions. We love those.
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First things first: this is a fighting game in which you can summon murder cars as a super move. If you’re playing as Batman, that is, and we’re guessing that a lot of you will be.
Bats chucks down a smoke bomb, electrocutes his opponent with two tasers (because one often isn’t enough) and then, to add injury to injury, summons the Batmobile to screech across the screen at top speed and flatten them. It’s like an Eidolon with wheels. It doesn’t matter where you are – on top of a building, in the centre of the Fortress of Solitude, floating in an orbital space station above the earth –
push down those shoulder buttons and the Batmobile magically screeches into view. Somehow.
Injustice is by NetherRealm Studios, the team behind Mortal Kombat, and it shows. This is gloriously overblown stuff. The Flash runs a quick circuit of the globe to build up momentum on an uppercut. Superman punches his opponents into space and then, crucially, back down to earth. Not so bad when you’re pummelling the robotic Cyborg or the immortal giant Solomon Grundy, but when you’re
subjecting Harley Quinn to extraterrestrial GBH it can feel like overkill.
And this game is overkill. Pure, unadulterated overkill. It plays, appropriately, like someone with a cocaine habit as serious as their comics obsession spat out four hundred of the best ideas they could muster in a single sitting and then crafted that into a game without sleeping once. Everyone is fighting everyone, all the time, in the most spectacular fashion available.
The fighting style has a lot in common with the recent Mortal Kombat reboot, even aside from the bone-crunching violence and nifty camera angles – various flavours of light, medium and heavy attack make up the bulk of a character’s moveset, coupled with a handful of specials and those aforementioned car-summoning gravity-punching super-moves. The supers are powered by a separate
Super meter, not unlike the EX meter from Street Fighter, which recharges as you pull off combos or get punched in the face. They give bad players a bit of an edge, as standard, and good players an excuse to showboat.
Taking control of the characters is fairly intuitive and, above all else, enjoyable – within a few minutes we were pulling off juggle combos and dodging enemy attacks without much of a problem. So that’s nice. If you’re into your frame counts and hitboxes, there’s the option to delve deeply into
the mechanics too, but there’s still plenty for the casual enthusiast of elaborate violence to get into.
With a tap of a button, you unleash each characters’ unique special ability which power up as they fight: in Batman’s case, it was a swarm of Batarangs that bother the enemy at range. There’s a wide variety of stuff on offer, here. Superman gets even more powerful for a few seconds, The Green Arrow shoots – yep – green arrows at folk, The Flash moves so fast that he slows down time for his opponent, and Harley Quinn pulls out a picture of the Joker and gives it a kiss. Not sure what effect that had, to be honest.
Hold off using them and they get better – Batman goes from one ineffectual Batarang to four, for example, and the Green Arrow’s projectiles cycle through a variety of funky effects. None of his trademark boxing-glove arrows, though, as far as we could see, which seems like a fairly major oversight. Maybe they’ll be put in as DLC.
Finally, for the full superhero standoff effect, players can initiate a Clash – after a brief series of close-ups and exchanging of words, both players secretly bid up to three sections of their Super-meter and, following a slowmotion smackdown, to the victor go the spoils. “Spoils” in this case being extra damage for an attacker or a health boost for a defender. While it might not necessarily be what you’d look for in a frantic fighting game like this one, it certainly fits the superhero theme.
Each arena – of which there are around fifteen, including the ruins of Superman’s hometown Metropolis, the orbital space station Watchtower and so on – has two or three distinct areas chiefly unlocked by kicking your opponent through adjoining walls and following along behind. The transition animations are not only high-damage combos but a return to that over-thetop violence; to go from the Metropolis streets to the roof of a nearby building, for example, you’ll knock your opponent though five painful stories of office blocks before they land.
Scattered around the arenas are a variety of dangerous objects that can be used to your advantage, and each type of character will interact with them in different ways. While Superman might pluck a flying car out of the sky and jam it bonnet-first into his opponent’s face – sporting! – Batman will blow up the same car with a bomb and let the falling wreckage do the talking. Elements vary from things you can drop on people to carelessly huge red buttons that trigger spaceship exhausts to honking great
lumps of crystal you can swing about to send the Green Arrow flying towards the back wall of the Fortress of Solitude like a baseball in eyeliner and a stupid hat.
The single-player campaign starts with an introduction that features pretty much every DC superhero you can imagine having one big fight that stretches from the surface of the earth all the way to space. When they appear onscreen, there seems to be a rule that either they or another character must mention them by name within three seconds so we know who they are, in case of confusion. The characters are voiced like their actors were reading their lines in separate rooms several years apart from one another.
But for all the janky acting and insistence on setting fights in big empty patches of sky, the cutscenes and the fights flow together very well, lending play a sort of breathless quality that you don’t commonly find in the genre as you’re shoved between fights without so much as a loading screen. Singleplayer puts you in charge of Batman, everyone’s favourite superhero-who’snot- really-a-superhero, and follows his quest to stop world devastation via the medium of punching.
The plot, then, in a nutshell – quiff-owner and walking wardrobe malfunction Superman is understandably upset after Lois Lane and his unborn son are killed in a nuclear explosion, so goes all-out mental and decides to form a new world order. As you do. Batman, ever the calm-headed diplomat, decides to form a resistance force against this injustice (geddit?) and can somehow stand
toe-to-toe with Supes and co in a fight for reasons that weren’t adequately explained. Maybe he handed around kryptonite sandwiches before everything kicked off?
Batman’s first fight is against Deathstroke – think Marvel’s merc-withthe- mouth Deadpool but with none of the charm and you’re pretty much there – and the second is against the freakish giant and chemically-altered Luchador Bane, before moving onto a scrap with Superman’s baldy nemesis Lex Luthor. After defeating Bane, Batman can swing the battle in his favour by throwing a bunch of batarangs at Luthor via an over-the-shoulder quick-time event; hitting all the buttons in order knocks down Luthor’s health bar a bit before the fight starts. It wasn’t clear how often QTEs would spring up in the game, but here’s hoping they’re rare.
Multiplayer is, of course, more fun than the single-player campaign because this is a fighting game and those are the rules. The characters split into two rough camps – big, strong types like Superman, Wonder Woman, Solomon Grundy, and Cyborg, and smaller, nippy folks like Nightwing, the
Flash, and Harley Quinn. Batman sits in the middle, brooding appropriately, which seems like a good place to be for the “main” character. Strong characters are slow by default – even Superman – which can take a little getting used to; while projectiles don’t feature heavily, the range of a character’s attacks can differ wildly depending on input so positioning and speed can be deceptively important.
The limited roster available to us seemed to rely on that split over anything else, and – isappointingly – characters often didn’t feel remarkably different to others in the same group. Combat’s fairly tight, but there’s something inescapably Mortal Kombat about that that suggests this is a game focused more on entertainment than mastery; there’s not the hair’s breadth precision you’d find in a Japanese
title, nor the breadth of fighting styles, and a lot of bombast. But sometimes accessibility is what you’re after. It’s not without moments of wideeyed joy, either. When playing as the psychotic Harley Quinn, there’s something to be said for mashing Superman’s face in with a giant hammer, knocking him underneath a falling spaceship and sending him crashing through the floor to an engine room eight floors below.
And that’s NetherRealm all over, that is. Injustice is a game built around a series of moments of grand, epicscale violence that are so brutal and so elaborate that the mach-5 slapstick of them makes you laugh out loud involuntarily. The sense of fun is inescapable, and the title already carries such massive flair that it’s hard not to be excited to see what the rest of it holds, even if it’s just bigger and better explosions. We love those.
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KNACK DON’T KNOCK IT!
The first game announced was a new franchise from Sony Japan Studio called Knack. Set in a colourful, cartoony world where goblins and humans are at war, players control the titular robot who is capable of exponentially growing in size by absorbing matter around him. He starts off as a cute little guy who couldn’t threaten our nans, but give him the opportunity and suddenly he’s bigger than a house and punching you in the face. The little gameplay we’ve seen looks to be standard actionplatformer fare in a Skylanders vein, strolling through bright levels and smashing up the hordes of goblins in your path. The Pixar-style graphics look wonderful, with some of the animation in cutscenes perfectly mimicking the kind of thing you see in blockbuster CGI films. Along with SCE Japan, famed developer Mark Cerny, who had a hand in such PlayStation hits as Crash Bandicoot, Spyro and Uncharted, is directing and designing Knack. If it can evoke the same simple wonder that first exploring Crash Bandicoot can, we might be onto a winner with Knack. It might not appeal to everyone, but kids, and adults who never really grew up (that includes us here at Play) should have a ton of fun.
10 VIDEO GAME EASTER EGGS THAT TOOK YEARS TO FIND
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10 VIDEO GAME EASTER EGGS THAT TOOK YEARS TO FIND
TOP 10 VIDEO GAMES OF ALL TIME
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10 MOST MEMORABLE PRESIDENT TRUMP JOKES AND CAMEOS
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DESTINY THE FPS MMO WITH PS4 EXCLUSIVE CONTENT
Since saying goodbye to Halo and parting ways with Microsoft, anticipation has been rife for news of the next project from uber-developers Bungie. For a while we’ve known its name – Destiny – but little else. Now the wait is over, Bungie finally revealing some precious details.
Destiny is going to be a first-person, “shared-world” shooter – kind of like an MMO, but not quite. The setting is a post-apocalyptic Earth. Humanity has been pushed to the brink of extinction by some cause we don’t yet know, only saved at the last second by the extraterrestrial “Traveller” a huge white orb that now floats over the last remaining human city. Over time, humans have regained some technology and set out once again to reclaim their lost solar system, now rife with hostile alien activity. Players control a Guardian, warriors infused with some of the Traveller’s power, as they fight to reclaim lost frontiers.
Players live in a shared, online hub where they can interact, trade, and group up for missions, before flying off to a number of different locations to do some exploring. Character growth is permanent across all modes and customisation options will be abundant, Bungie claims. Guardians come in a variety of classes, such as the powerful Vanguard or the “magic”-wielding Warlock. Sounds pretty Warcraft, huh? Players will also be able to own their own spaceship, with aerial combat implied to play some part in the game.
With only a little gorgeous gameplay footage to speak of, narrative director Joseph Staten gave an anecdote that lends us the clearest idea yet of what to expect. Staten and a friend team up for a mission, flying to Mars in his ship. There, the pair find “the bones of a lost human civilisation”, an ancient city from the times before everything went to pot. Unfortunately, Mars is controlled by the Cabal, huge rhino-like creatures covered in armour. One thing leads to another, and after some gunfighting, the two are on their last legs. Lucky for them, a mysterious female player speeds in on a vehicle, turning the tide and helping them survive. Players drifting in and out of your game sounds a bit like indie hit Journey from last year.
This is made possible by Bungie’s invisible, behind-the-scenes matchmaking, linking the players in the same area so they end up interacting with each other. The new player tags along with the pair and the two complete their mission, Staten earning a new unique weapon for his troubles. Quests with loot at the end? It certainly sounds like an MMO to us, not that that’s a bad thing. We love Halo, we love good MMOs, and a combination of the two sounds like something we’d come up with in a dream.
Bungie has promised that the entire game will be playable solo but will requite a constant internet connection regardless. They have also made very clear that there will be no subscription fee to play.
We’ve heard a lot about co-op, but competitive, player-vs-player online play will also be returning. The best part, though? The PlayStation versions will get exclusive content. A Bungie game with a
focus on PlayStation! What a strange new world we live in, eh?
10 VIDEO GAME EASTER EGGS THAT TOOK YEARS TO FIND
TOP 15 MOST SCARY THINGS CAUGHT ON VIDEO
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10 CREEPY VIDEO GAME URBAN LEGENDS
Destiny is going to be a first-person, “shared-world” shooter – kind of like an MMO, but not quite. The setting is a post-apocalyptic Earth. Humanity has been pushed to the brink of extinction by some cause we don’t yet know, only saved at the last second by the extraterrestrial “Traveller” a huge white orb that now floats over the last remaining human city. Over time, humans have regained some technology and set out once again to reclaim their lost solar system, now rife with hostile alien activity. Players control a Guardian, warriors infused with some of the Traveller’s power, as they fight to reclaim lost frontiers.
Players live in a shared, online hub where they can interact, trade, and group up for missions, before flying off to a number of different locations to do some exploring. Character growth is permanent across all modes and customisation options will be abundant, Bungie claims. Guardians come in a variety of classes, such as the powerful Vanguard or the “magic”-wielding Warlock. Sounds pretty Warcraft, huh? Players will also be able to own their own spaceship, with aerial combat implied to play some part in the game.
With only a little gorgeous gameplay footage to speak of, narrative director Joseph Staten gave an anecdote that lends us the clearest idea yet of what to expect. Staten and a friend team up for a mission, flying to Mars in his ship. There, the pair find “the bones of a lost human civilisation”, an ancient city from the times before everything went to pot. Unfortunately, Mars is controlled by the Cabal, huge rhino-like creatures covered in armour. One thing leads to another, and after some gunfighting, the two are on their last legs. Lucky for them, a mysterious female player speeds in on a vehicle, turning the tide and helping them survive. Players drifting in and out of your game sounds a bit like indie hit Journey from last year.
This is made possible by Bungie’s invisible, behind-the-scenes matchmaking, linking the players in the same area so they end up interacting with each other. The new player tags along with the pair and the two complete their mission, Staten earning a new unique weapon for his troubles. Quests with loot at the end? It certainly sounds like an MMO to us, not that that’s a bad thing. We love Halo, we love good MMOs, and a combination of the two sounds like something we’d come up with in a dream.
Bungie has promised that the entire game will be playable solo but will requite a constant internet connection regardless. They have also made very clear that there will be no subscription fee to play.
We’ve heard a lot about co-op, but competitive, player-vs-player online play will also be returning. The best part, though? The PlayStation versions will get exclusive content. A Bungie game with a
focus on PlayStation! What a strange new world we live in, eh?
10 VIDEO GAME EASTER EGGS THAT TOOK YEARS TO FIND
TOP 10 VIDEO GAMES OF ALL TIME
TOP 15 SCARY HIDDEN THINGS IN VIDEO GAMESTOP 15 MOST SCARY THINGS CAUGHT ON VIDEO
10 MOST MEMORABLE PRESIDENT TRUMP JOKES AND CAMEOS
10 CREEPY VIDEO GAME URBAN LEGENDS
10 Best value DLC
Point Lookout
There’s plenty of choice for Fallout 3 DLC – some better than others – but if you’re after something more like the main campaign of Fallout 3, then look no further than Point Lookout. It’s like a condensed version of the game, with new areas to explore and NPCs to meet. Though it doesn’t increase the level cap like Broken Steel does (you may want to pick that pack up as well, actually), it’s still a must-have download for anyone who has seen everything the original game has to offer.
Undead Nightmare Pack
We could compliment the wealth of content available in the Undead Nightmare Pack. We could celebrate the distinct variety that zombies in Red Dead Redemption’s world provide, or even the fantastic job Rockstar has done at making such an incongruent piece of content work in the Wild West. But none of this is quite as appealing as the fact that you can find, tame and ride a unicorn, thereby automatically making it the best piece of download content ever. Fact.
Premium Pack
Whether you get value for money from the hefty £39.99 price tag will depend on just how much time you spend on Battlefield 3. If it’s your go-to multiplayer game and you’re still playing it now, then without a doubt it’d be worth getting. Each one is themed with a set of new maps, weapons and vehicles. Though they won’t all appeal to you – you’re either an infantry player or a vehicle player – they are all fantastic maps and great additions to an already jam-packed game.
Old World Blues
Old World Blues is to New Vegas as Point Lookout is to Fallout 3, but while this is a compact mini-campaign to work through it provides so much more. Humour being the primary feature: Old World Blues is genuinely funny and when that is added to a freeform and open area to explore – with 35 unique locations to visit – you could quite easily lose yourself in this content. Perhaps not as long-lasting as some of the others in this list, Old World Blues more than makes up for it with its originality.
Episodes From Liberty City
Considered the holy grail of DLC, the Episodes From Liberty City are almost entirely contained games by themselves. You don’t need GTA IV to play them, and not only does it give you a pair of new characters to play as and new missions to complete, but the entire sandbox of Liberty City – and its related multiplayer – is available for you to explore. Naturally the best part of this DLC is seeing how these two distinct storylines tie into the main game, but even alone these are better than most games.
Extravasplosion
Bit of a cheat this one since it’s more of a collection of DLC than any single pack, but at four quid per pack it’s impossible to deny the value of content here. There are parts that aren’t quite that special – Moxxi’s Underdome is a bit repetitive – but Borderlands fans nonetheless owe it to themselves to play each of these. More levels, more weapons, more quests, more midgets with shotguns: what else could you ask for from additional – and a good few hours worth of – Borderlands content.
Road To Devastation
If you haven’t yet played Housemarque’s superlative Dead Nation then go do it. As for this DLC addition, the nominal fee will gain you access to a new challenge mode. While it might sound kind of throwaway, fans of the game should trust us when we say it’s absolutely not. Though the objective is to see how far you can survive, there is a finite end and you won’t reach it until you’ve finally settled on the optimal route and best strategy. Try it on Grim for added longevity.
Metal Gear Solid Level Kit
Though this might seem a little outdated since the series has gone on to earn an improved sequel and the improved DLC to go with it, none of the content packs since then have been as revolutionary as the MGS Level Kit. The addition of the Paintinator and customisable enemy health bars was a revelation, bringing untold amounts of potential to the create-‘em-up. It’s a gamer’s right to shoot things to bits, and with this DLC it became considerably easier to do just that.
Artorias Of The Abyss
In true Dark Souls fashion, accessing this DLC is as hard as the content itself. But you forgive it because, for some reason, Dark Souls makes it okay to be a masochist. The fact that it ties so neatly into the main game should be complimented – even if it does mean that you’ll miss it entirely if you’ve played past a certain point – but the hours of trial and error you’ll get from hunting down Artorias is something that slots so neatly into the game it’s worth starting again just to experience it.
Awakening
Not only is Awakening a good chunk of content to add to your Dragon Age: Origins playthrough, but with it tying into the story and lore of the world it’s practically a must-have for fans of the series. It continues on from the end of the game, but teases the introduction of Dragon Age 2 – but if that wasn’t enough, new abilities, five new characters and six possible specialisations make this one impossible to ignore. The rest of the Dragon Age: Origins DLC, however, is probably best to avoid entirely.
10 VIDEO GAME EASTER EGGS THAT TOOK YEARS TO FIND
TOP 15 MOST SCARY THINGS CAUGHT ON VIDEO
10 MOST MEMORABLE PRESIDENT TRUMP JOKES AND CAMEOS
10 CREEPY VIDEO GAME URBAN LEGENDS
There’s plenty of choice for Fallout 3 DLC – some better than others – but if you’re after something more like the main campaign of Fallout 3, then look no further than Point Lookout. It’s like a condensed version of the game, with new areas to explore and NPCs to meet. Though it doesn’t increase the level cap like Broken Steel does (you may want to pick that pack up as well, actually), it’s still a must-have download for anyone who has seen everything the original game has to offer.
Undead Nightmare Pack
We could compliment the wealth of content available in the Undead Nightmare Pack. We could celebrate the distinct variety that zombies in Red Dead Redemption’s world provide, or even the fantastic job Rockstar has done at making such an incongruent piece of content work in the Wild West. But none of this is quite as appealing as the fact that you can find, tame and ride a unicorn, thereby automatically making it the best piece of download content ever. Fact.
Premium Pack
Whether you get value for money from the hefty £39.99 price tag will depend on just how much time you spend on Battlefield 3. If it’s your go-to multiplayer game and you’re still playing it now, then without a doubt it’d be worth getting. Each one is themed with a set of new maps, weapons and vehicles. Though they won’t all appeal to you – you’re either an infantry player or a vehicle player – they are all fantastic maps and great additions to an already jam-packed game.
Old World Blues
Old World Blues is to New Vegas as Point Lookout is to Fallout 3, but while this is a compact mini-campaign to work through it provides so much more. Humour being the primary feature: Old World Blues is genuinely funny and when that is added to a freeform and open area to explore – with 35 unique locations to visit – you could quite easily lose yourself in this content. Perhaps not as long-lasting as some of the others in this list, Old World Blues more than makes up for it with its originality.
Episodes From Liberty City
Considered the holy grail of DLC, the Episodes From Liberty City are almost entirely contained games by themselves. You don’t need GTA IV to play them, and not only does it give you a pair of new characters to play as and new missions to complete, but the entire sandbox of Liberty City – and its related multiplayer – is available for you to explore. Naturally the best part of this DLC is seeing how these two distinct storylines tie into the main game, but even alone these are better than most games.
Extravasplosion
Bit of a cheat this one since it’s more of a collection of DLC than any single pack, but at four quid per pack it’s impossible to deny the value of content here. There are parts that aren’t quite that special – Moxxi’s Underdome is a bit repetitive – but Borderlands fans nonetheless owe it to themselves to play each of these. More levels, more weapons, more quests, more midgets with shotguns: what else could you ask for from additional – and a good few hours worth of – Borderlands content.
Road To Devastation
If you haven’t yet played Housemarque’s superlative Dead Nation then go do it. As for this DLC addition, the nominal fee will gain you access to a new challenge mode. While it might sound kind of throwaway, fans of the game should trust us when we say it’s absolutely not. Though the objective is to see how far you can survive, there is a finite end and you won’t reach it until you’ve finally settled on the optimal route and best strategy. Try it on Grim for added longevity.
Metal Gear Solid Level Kit
Though this might seem a little outdated since the series has gone on to earn an improved sequel and the improved DLC to go with it, none of the content packs since then have been as revolutionary as the MGS Level Kit. The addition of the Paintinator and customisable enemy health bars was a revelation, bringing untold amounts of potential to the create-‘em-up. It’s a gamer’s right to shoot things to bits, and with this DLC it became considerably easier to do just that.
Artorias Of The Abyss
In true Dark Souls fashion, accessing this DLC is as hard as the content itself. But you forgive it because, for some reason, Dark Souls makes it okay to be a masochist. The fact that it ties so neatly into the main game should be complimented – even if it does mean that you’ll miss it entirely if you’ve played past a certain point – but the hours of trial and error you’ll get from hunting down Artorias is something that slots so neatly into the game it’s worth starting again just to experience it.
Awakening
Not only is Awakening a good chunk of content to add to your Dragon Age: Origins playthrough, but with it tying into the story and lore of the world it’s practically a must-have for fans of the series. It continues on from the end of the game, but teases the introduction of Dragon Age 2 – but if that wasn’t enough, new abilities, five new characters and six possible specialisations make this one impossible to ignore. The rest of the Dragon Age: Origins DLC, however, is probably best to avoid entirely.
10 VIDEO GAME EASTER EGGS THAT TOOK YEARS TO FIND
TOP 10 VIDEO GAMES OF ALL TIME
TOP 15 SCARY HIDDEN THINGS IN VIDEO GAMESTOP 15 MOST SCARY THINGS CAUGHT ON VIDEO
10 MOST MEMORABLE PRESIDENT TRUMP JOKES AND CAMEOS
10 CREEPY VIDEO GAME URBAN LEGENDS
Persona 4: Golden Going to school has never been so much fun
For a machine with ‘no’ games available for it, the Vita has a staggering amount of great titles. Sure the release dates are patchy, but when many games hit, and a lot have already, it’s hard to argue with their quality.
Take Persona 4: Golden, for example. Originally planned as a PSP game by developer Atlus, the Tokyo-based developer soon saw the error of its ways, and released it for the far more capable PS Vita. It was rewarded with exceptionally good sales in Japan, and if there’s any justice in the world, the same thing will happen in the West.
Persona 4: Golden follows the templates of previous Persona games, but adds more than enough new mechanics – particularly during combat – to make it the definitive game in the series. This is most notable in the story, which deals with your character moving to a small town, where a number of strange murders are being committed. Without giving too much away, you discover that there is an alternate world, which brings out all the dark desires of whoever goes there. A clever killer is pushing
people into this world via TVs and then letting their dark sides kill them, creating the almost perfect crime.
You catch wind of these dark shenanigans and soon go about rescuing targets, who in turn join your party upon rescue. It’s a long twisting story to be sure, but it’s filled with snappy dialogue, plenty of humour and some pleasingly deep characters.
Well-written characters are essential to Persona 4’s success as you’ll need to build relationships, called Social Links, with many of them to power your Personas (the strange avatars in the other world that are the main source of your powers). More great dialogue comes out as you start interacting with your peers – your cousin Nanako’s is particularly good, dealing with death, loss and isolation – and it’s possible for some relationships to go beyond being just friends. This takes time though, and time is one thing that you’ll find yourself managing furiously throughout Persona 4’s lengthy play time as you build the five key traits that fuel the narration.
In Persona, while you’re battling weirdly outlandish monsters, you’re also battling the peer pressure that any young teenager has to go through. As a result, making friends at school, finding sports and clubs to fit into, juggling odd jobs and doing chores are just a few of the things you need to master. You’ll be attending school most days and then you’ll typically have afternoons and evenings to plan your hectic schedule. It’s a clever mechanic, because you’ll never be able to excel at everything, so your best bet is to make your character as balanced as possible. Things become tougher however when school tests crop up, certain characters want to double book your precious time or you simply
want to build up your character by entering the TV and gaining new levels.
This intricate balancing act has always played a large part in past games in the Persona franchise and it’s no different here. It becomes even more hectic than before, as Persona 4: Golden delivers new areas once you acquire a motorcycle licence, allowing you to visit things like cinemas, which can further build your relationships and subsequently enhance your Personas. For all its time-management and dating aspects – which are highly enjoyable – Persona is also about combat, and Atlus has continued to build on the franchise’s popular mechanics. It’s possible to customise your Personas as they gain more skills, while characters no longer lose a turn if they’re knocked down. The ‘Once More’ combat also returns, where you’ll earn an additional attack if you strike out at an enemy’s elemental weakness. Although this in turn can be used against you.
Personas, like Pokémon, have a variety of elemental strengths and weaknesses, which can help or hinder you in battle, and they unlock more skills as you level up, or build relationships outside of combat. Add in the fact that Personas can also be combined in the Velvet Room (a mysterious location you’ll constantly revisit throughout your journey) to create new ones, and the depth of Atlus’s game becomes readily apparent. There are a total of eight characters to unlock and all of them play significantly different to each other, but you can only take three with you when you go exploring
dungeons, so you’re back to making those difficult choices again.
Persona 4: Golden may be a remake, but it’s a remake of arguably one of the best RPGs for some time. Enhanced with crisp new visuals, greatly lengthened dialogue and a brand new character (the mysterious Marie) it’s a superb game, with bite-sized gameplay that’s perfectly suited to gaming on the go. If you love games, you need to experience this delightful gem, it’s really that simple.
Darran Jones
10 VIDEO GAME EASTER EGGS THAT TOOK YEARS TO FIND
TOP 15 MOST SCARY THINGS CAUGHT ON VIDEO
10 MOST MEMORABLE PRESIDENT TRUMP JOKES AND CAMEOS
10 CREEPY VIDEO GAME URBAN LEGENDS
Take Persona 4: Golden, for example. Originally planned as a PSP game by developer Atlus, the Tokyo-based developer soon saw the error of its ways, and released it for the far more capable PS Vita. It was rewarded with exceptionally good sales in Japan, and if there’s any justice in the world, the same thing will happen in the West.
Persona 4: Golden follows the templates of previous Persona games, but adds more than enough new mechanics – particularly during combat – to make it the definitive game in the series. This is most notable in the story, which deals with your character moving to a small town, where a number of strange murders are being committed. Without giving too much away, you discover that there is an alternate world, which brings out all the dark desires of whoever goes there. A clever killer is pushing
people into this world via TVs and then letting their dark sides kill them, creating the almost perfect crime.
You catch wind of these dark shenanigans and soon go about rescuing targets, who in turn join your party upon rescue. It’s a long twisting story to be sure, but it’s filled with snappy dialogue, plenty of humour and some pleasingly deep characters.
Well-written characters are essential to Persona 4’s success as you’ll need to build relationships, called Social Links, with many of them to power your Personas (the strange avatars in the other world that are the main source of your powers). More great dialogue comes out as you start interacting with your peers – your cousin Nanako’s is particularly good, dealing with death, loss and isolation – and it’s possible for some relationships to go beyond being just friends. This takes time though, and time is one thing that you’ll find yourself managing furiously throughout Persona 4’s lengthy play time as you build the five key traits that fuel the narration.
In Persona, while you’re battling weirdly outlandish monsters, you’re also battling the peer pressure that any young teenager has to go through. As a result, making friends at school, finding sports and clubs to fit into, juggling odd jobs and doing chores are just a few of the things you need to master. You’ll be attending school most days and then you’ll typically have afternoons and evenings to plan your hectic schedule. It’s a clever mechanic, because you’ll never be able to excel at everything, so your best bet is to make your character as balanced as possible. Things become tougher however when school tests crop up, certain characters want to double book your precious time or you simply
want to build up your character by entering the TV and gaining new levels.
This intricate balancing act has always played a large part in past games in the Persona franchise and it’s no different here. It becomes even more hectic than before, as Persona 4: Golden delivers new areas once you acquire a motorcycle licence, allowing you to visit things like cinemas, which can further build your relationships and subsequently enhance your Personas. For all its time-management and dating aspects – which are highly enjoyable – Persona is also about combat, and Atlus has continued to build on the franchise’s popular mechanics. It’s possible to customise your Personas as they gain more skills, while characters no longer lose a turn if they’re knocked down. The ‘Once More’ combat also returns, where you’ll earn an additional attack if you strike out at an enemy’s elemental weakness. Although this in turn can be used against you.
Personas, like Pokémon, have a variety of elemental strengths and weaknesses, which can help or hinder you in battle, and they unlock more skills as you level up, or build relationships outside of combat. Add in the fact that Personas can also be combined in the Velvet Room (a mysterious location you’ll constantly revisit throughout your journey) to create new ones, and the depth of Atlus’s game becomes readily apparent. There are a total of eight characters to unlock and all of them play significantly different to each other, but you can only take three with you when you go exploring
dungeons, so you’re back to making those difficult choices again.
Persona 4: Golden may be a remake, but it’s a remake of arguably one of the best RPGs for some time. Enhanced with crisp new visuals, greatly lengthened dialogue and a brand new character (the mysterious Marie) it’s a superb game, with bite-sized gameplay that’s perfectly suited to gaming on the go. If you love games, you need to experience this delightful gem, it’s really that simple.
Darran Jones
10 VIDEO GAME EASTER EGGS THAT TOOK YEARS TO FIND
TOP 10 VIDEO GAMES OF ALL TIME
TOP 15 SCARY HIDDEN THINGS IN VIDEO GAMESTOP 15 MOST SCARY THINGS CAUGHT ON VIDEO
10 MOST MEMORABLE PRESIDENT TRUMP JOKES AND CAMEOS
10 CREEPY VIDEO GAME URBAN LEGENDS
Dead Space 3 Lost on a planet
When it comes to success stories of the current generation, Dead Space stands tall. Starting out as an
unknown new IP, albeit one with the financial power of EA behind it, the game was a big hit and saw a sequel that was similarly well received. A third game was a given, promising more scares, more action, and even deader space.
Unassuming engineer turned action superhero Isaac Clarke returns to face yet another slew of Necromorph outbreaks. Again? The dude has the worst luck, huh? At the start of the game, Isaac is being grumpy in his apartment, looking morose and sweeping things off desks in a display of his oh-so-tortured soul. He’s kicked out of his funk by the stereotypical army bros kicking in his door, and soon enough he’s back to his limb-severing best.
Isaac as a character is more assured than he was in 2. His sanity, so often called into question before, isn’t an issue, and aside from the odd angsty outburst, he tends to take control of the situation, in part due to the lack of competence from the gibbering cretins that make up most of the supporting cast. From his mute spell in the first game to his mental struggles into the second, Isaac has grown into
an interesting character, different enough to the standard space-marine archetype to stand out and be endearing. You’ll root for him as he struggles to survive and save the world yet again, and this time, he has help.
The big new feature of Dead Space 3 is co-op. That’s right, co-op, which has been in almost every game released in the last five years, is the major selling point in all the game’s marketing campaigns.
Player 2 controls John Carver, one of the standard army guys from earlier, who has a similarly tortured soul thanks to losing his wife and son in a prior Necromorph outbreak. It’s hard to care about Carver thanks to the utter lack of originality. This is a character you’ve seen before in plenty of other
games. Even his name is boring.
Fans have been understandably worried about this. Horror games live and die on their atmosphere, and the best way to ruin any sense of fear is by having another person with you, as Resident Evil has proven. Visceral has solved this problem in a smart way. In single player, Isaac is still almost always alone. Although Carver is still around in cutscenes, he is far less of an important character, with the story subtly changing depending on whether you are playing solo or not. The amount of increasingly contrived ways that Isaac gets split up from the group starts to get a bit silly, but if you want your single-player, lonely Dead Space experience, it’s still here.
But the thing is, even on your lonesome, Dead Space has never actually been that deepdown emotionally scary. If monsters jumping out of airvents, screaming BLAUGAHGAG and walking slowly towards you still scares you witless, then good for you, but that’s the sort of scare that only works the first time, and never when you’ve got plenty of ammo. Isaac has always been so well-armed that you rarely feel helpless. “But wait!” you cry. “On the harder difficulty levels, resources are far more scarce!” It’s true, and the harder difficulty you play on, the more survival-horror-esque the game becomes in regards to inventory management and being careful with your stuff, but it still isn’t scary. Having no ammo or health packs doesn’t make a game horrific, it makes it annoying.
The best scary games work on a dark, psychological level, implying horror rather than outright shoving it in your face. They let your imagination do the work, stirring up true terror through subtlety. Dead Space isn’t subtle. It shoves it in your face, then screams “THIS IS SCARY, ISN’T IT? BE SCARED!” in your ear just to make sure the message is getting across. Another holdout from the survival-horror games of yore is Isaac’s cumbersome movement. He still feels sluggish, and getting
caught in a corner with a bunch of enemies and no means of escaping raises a sigh. New to Dead Space 3 is the ability to roll, supposedly to avoid attacks. In practice, it just doesn’t bloody work. Attempting a timely roll to dodge an attack will almost always result in Isaac being hit anyway. One recurring boss fight in particular comes to mind, where the intention is clearly for the player to roll to the side when the boss charges at him. Yet every time you get hit, resulting in much annoyance and a strategy that involves a lot of legging it and very little shooting.
The second addition to Isaac and Carver’s moveset is a cover system. Astute minds might wonder why a game in which the player faces primarily rage-filled melee-based enemies would need cover, and rightly so. Thanks to the Hollywood Blockbuster Syndrome that seems to infect every horror franchise as they grow (cough Resident Evil cough), Dead Space 3 features human enemies as well as the trusty Necromorphs.
These sections are just awful. Isaac’s moveset doesn’t suit a fast-paced shooter and it shows. The cover system is extremely simple. Aim your gun while standing near a piece of customary chest-high wall and Isaac will crouch down a bit. That’s it. Despite your head and a large part of your torso still being visible, taking cover renders you near-immune to gunfire and makes these sections far too easy.
Towards the end of the game, human and Necromorph opponents are mixed, fighting each other as well as you. It’s here that it really works. Having to gauge the battlefield and adapt to different types of attacks on the fly is thrilling fun, and it’s always enjoyable helping some enemy soldiers take out a huge monster, only to finish them off when they are distracted.
Many old types of Necromorphs return, along with various new monsters like the morphing Waster, mutating depending on where you shoot it. It’s pretty impressive, despite being exactly the same idea as the J’avo from Resident Evil 6 last year. Huge boss monsters are suitably slimy and tentacled, and
the sound design is as spot on as ever. Growls, roars, high-pitched shrieks and human-like cries of pain – the Necromorphs are a noisy bunch. They all look wonderfully grotesque and, although not that horrific, it’s still easy to appreciate the gruesome designs.
Aside from the story differences, there are other subtle changes when playing in co-op. Thanks to the signals being sent out by the Markers and his general ill mental health, Carver suffers from bouts of dementia. This causes him to see things that Isaac doesn’t, while inhabiting the same space. Think of the much-applauded phasing feature in World Of Warcraft. Two players, standing in the same spot in the same shared world, each seeing two completely different things but still able to interact with each other. It’s a neat system that more games should use, and gives players a reason to try out Carver to see through his eyes.
This is the part where we would talk about how different it is playing in co-op, the changes in tone, how the two characters work together, and if the game still works when playing with a friend. Unfortunately, the review code we received from EA couldn’t connect to online co-op, so we haven’t been able to test it on this occasion. Keep an eye on Play, though, as we’ll be taking a look at it next issue.
The second big new feature is the weapon crafting system. This adds an RPG spin to the game, with Isaac collecting various materials as he progresses that go towards making shiny new guns. The system shows a surprising level of depth and is one of the best things about the game. Each weapon can have two guns in one – you can strap an assault rifle to a rocket launcher, or Isaac’s trademark plasma cutter to a hydraulic hammer. To these two base guns you can add attachments, upgrade
chips and various other miscellanea to create a truly unique weapon. There are thousands of combinations and each has it’s own model in game. It’s thoroughly impressive, and coming up with your own personal death-machine is a blast. Some of the stuff you can come up with is downright nasty. Want to add a stasis effect to every bullet your shredder/grenade launcher hybrid fires? Yeah, you can do that.
You may well create a weapon so powerful and awesome that you simply don’t need to bother making new ones, but even that isn’t much of a complaint. Weapon crafting is a total hit and the most welcome addition to the Dead Space formula.
Unfortunately, it’s in the resource gathering aspect of making weapons and upgrading your suit that one of the unwelcome spectres of this generation invades the series. An option for Downloadable Content is always present on the crafting screens, and microtransactions allow you to buy extra materials if you find yourself lacking. It’s never a necessity as there’s plenty of stuff to find, but it still feels like an unwelcome intrusion, and if we’re being cynical, rather like EA is pushing microtransactions a little too much. This isn’t iOS, after all.
Otherwise, core gameplay is business as usual. It’s practically the same as the last two games, but an old mantra about not fixing unbroken things comes to mind. Aside from Isaac’s clunky movement, the shooting mechanics are satisfying and stomping on stuff is still as meaty as before. You all know
the drill. Stroll around, shoot monsters, stomp on boxes, mash X to pick stuff up as you walk over it. It’s just a shame that it never amounts to more – it still works, but we’ve been doing rather similar things now for two prior games.
Dead Space 3 is interesting graphically, but also a decent metaphor for the game as a whole. It looks alright throughout, really lovely in some places, but for the most part is so standard it’s hard to get excited about. Character faces are a bit iffy; okay from a distance but get up close and you notice
things like the weird ears (trust us) that can be off-putting. Some of the environment design is stunning with wonderful vistas setting the scene. Vast swathes of space filled with destroyed ships and sprawling, denselypopulated lunar colonies take the breath away. On a smaller level though, design is dull and repetitive. Once you’ve seen a few dark corridors and nondescript snowy plains you know what to expect.
The theme of slight disappointment continues with the story, which is so unoriginal it’s often hard to care. Isaac is a compelling character, and Ellie Langford, returning from the last game, is interesting, but Carver is a cliché and the supporting cast are barely more than cardboard cutouts who exist to be
killed off in a variety of fun ways. The plot is a mishmash of Aliens and the whole “ancient creators” shtick that seems to be increasingly prevalent in modern media, Assassin’s Creed for example, with a good bit of unsubtle social commentary on religious fanaticism thrown in. Isaac and crew travel to another planet, thinking it to be the homeworld of the mysterious “markers” that cause all the
Necromorph nastiness, in an attempt to save humanity. Along the way they are accosted by the Church of Unitology, worshippers of the markers who see Isaac as a big threat in accomplishing their goals. Their leader is English, because he’s evil. Or is he evil because he’s English?
The plot is utterly awash with macguffins and barely explained lingo – Black Markers, Red Markers, Machines, Convergence, Pandora, Codex’s, jam donuts. There is always some all-important item for the group to attain which will open access to the next plot device, and so on. Supposedly important plot revelations are clumsily handled, failing to make much of an impact because you aren’t really sure what’s going on.
When the plot works is when it ditches all the high-concept jargon and focuses on the human element. Isaac is a likeable, interesting character and seeing him struggle with a huge responsibility he doesn’t want, coming to terms with it and growing into his role as a hero is good stuff. It’s about as original as the rest of the story, but because you’ve come to care about Isaac over his long, improbable journey, you don’t mind as much. As the story builds to a suitably epic conclusion, you’ll start to care about Isaac’s ultimate fate as he struggles to save the world, despite knowing that really, it’s all a bit silly.
Padding is an issue. Key plot points are few and far between, with the large gaps being filled by Isaac going on yet another wild goose chase as he searches for the next item he needs. Find that item, and guess what, it’s broken. You need to get two more items to fix the first one. But then, one of those doesn’t work either! Isaac has to fix the electrical system first. And so on, until it gets tiresome. Most games, at a base level, are at least in part about walking to where you are told, but Dead Space 3 rarely gives you a reason to be interested in where you are walking to and why. Samey environments and dull puzzles drag the game to an utter halt at times, and boredom can’t help but creep in.
Several optional missions are included, including some specific to co-op. Getting more bang for your buck is always good, but it’s easy to see why these missions are optional. Less effort has been given to them compared to the main game, with a few lines of dialogue setting you on your way and little else. Most end up with Isaac discovering some goodies that often weren’t quite worth the items he used getting to that point. Visceral made the right move making this stuff optional, and it’s appreciated. Completionists have extra content to enjoy, but those who want to power through the story can avoid some of the extra chaff.
Speaking of chaff, the competitive multiplayer modes from Dead Space 2 have been cut, Visceral focusing their online efforts on co-op. It’s not a huge loss. Multiplayer was a fun little piss-about every now and then, but never the main attraction. A few players might miss it, but most probably won’t even notice. What it all comes down to is simple. Dead Space 3 is more of the same, albeit a tad more action-focused and with more snow.
Diehard fans of the previous two games will have just as much fun this time around, assuming they aren’t expecting broad innovations. Everything is polished and this is clearly a title with a lot of funding behind it, but all the money in the world can’t buy innovation. By no means a bad sequel, it doesn’t quite offer a way for Dead Space to evolve as a series beyond its past two instalments, even if the formula here is still potent. Sam Smith
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unknown new IP, albeit one with the financial power of EA behind it, the game was a big hit and saw a sequel that was similarly well received. A third game was a given, promising more scares, more action, and even deader space.
Unassuming engineer turned action superhero Isaac Clarke returns to face yet another slew of Necromorph outbreaks. Again? The dude has the worst luck, huh? At the start of the game, Isaac is being grumpy in his apartment, looking morose and sweeping things off desks in a display of his oh-so-tortured soul. He’s kicked out of his funk by the stereotypical army bros kicking in his door, and soon enough he’s back to his limb-severing best.
Isaac as a character is more assured than he was in 2. His sanity, so often called into question before, isn’t an issue, and aside from the odd angsty outburst, he tends to take control of the situation, in part due to the lack of competence from the gibbering cretins that make up most of the supporting cast. From his mute spell in the first game to his mental struggles into the second, Isaac has grown into
an interesting character, different enough to the standard space-marine archetype to stand out and be endearing. You’ll root for him as he struggles to survive and save the world yet again, and this time, he has help.
The big new feature of Dead Space 3 is co-op. That’s right, co-op, which has been in almost every game released in the last five years, is the major selling point in all the game’s marketing campaigns.
Player 2 controls John Carver, one of the standard army guys from earlier, who has a similarly tortured soul thanks to losing his wife and son in a prior Necromorph outbreak. It’s hard to care about Carver thanks to the utter lack of originality. This is a character you’ve seen before in plenty of other
games. Even his name is boring.
Fans have been understandably worried about this. Horror games live and die on their atmosphere, and the best way to ruin any sense of fear is by having another person with you, as Resident Evil has proven. Visceral has solved this problem in a smart way. In single player, Isaac is still almost always alone. Although Carver is still around in cutscenes, he is far less of an important character, with the story subtly changing depending on whether you are playing solo or not. The amount of increasingly contrived ways that Isaac gets split up from the group starts to get a bit silly, but if you want your single-player, lonely Dead Space experience, it’s still here.
But the thing is, even on your lonesome, Dead Space has never actually been that deepdown emotionally scary. If monsters jumping out of airvents, screaming BLAUGAHGAG and walking slowly towards you still scares you witless, then good for you, but that’s the sort of scare that only works the first time, and never when you’ve got plenty of ammo. Isaac has always been so well-armed that you rarely feel helpless. “But wait!” you cry. “On the harder difficulty levels, resources are far more scarce!” It’s true, and the harder difficulty you play on, the more survival-horror-esque the game becomes in regards to inventory management and being careful with your stuff, but it still isn’t scary. Having no ammo or health packs doesn’t make a game horrific, it makes it annoying.
The best scary games work on a dark, psychological level, implying horror rather than outright shoving it in your face. They let your imagination do the work, stirring up true terror through subtlety. Dead Space isn’t subtle. It shoves it in your face, then screams “THIS IS SCARY, ISN’T IT? BE SCARED!” in your ear just to make sure the message is getting across. Another holdout from the survival-horror games of yore is Isaac’s cumbersome movement. He still feels sluggish, and getting
caught in a corner with a bunch of enemies and no means of escaping raises a sigh. New to Dead Space 3 is the ability to roll, supposedly to avoid attacks. In practice, it just doesn’t bloody work. Attempting a timely roll to dodge an attack will almost always result in Isaac being hit anyway. One recurring boss fight in particular comes to mind, where the intention is clearly for the player to roll to the side when the boss charges at him. Yet every time you get hit, resulting in much annoyance and a strategy that involves a lot of legging it and very little shooting.
The second addition to Isaac and Carver’s moveset is a cover system. Astute minds might wonder why a game in which the player faces primarily rage-filled melee-based enemies would need cover, and rightly so. Thanks to the Hollywood Blockbuster Syndrome that seems to infect every horror franchise as they grow (cough Resident Evil cough), Dead Space 3 features human enemies as well as the trusty Necromorphs.
These sections are just awful. Isaac’s moveset doesn’t suit a fast-paced shooter and it shows. The cover system is extremely simple. Aim your gun while standing near a piece of customary chest-high wall and Isaac will crouch down a bit. That’s it. Despite your head and a large part of your torso still being visible, taking cover renders you near-immune to gunfire and makes these sections far too easy.
Towards the end of the game, human and Necromorph opponents are mixed, fighting each other as well as you. It’s here that it really works. Having to gauge the battlefield and adapt to different types of attacks on the fly is thrilling fun, and it’s always enjoyable helping some enemy soldiers take out a huge monster, only to finish them off when they are distracted.
Many old types of Necromorphs return, along with various new monsters like the morphing Waster, mutating depending on where you shoot it. It’s pretty impressive, despite being exactly the same idea as the J’avo from Resident Evil 6 last year. Huge boss monsters are suitably slimy and tentacled, and
the sound design is as spot on as ever. Growls, roars, high-pitched shrieks and human-like cries of pain – the Necromorphs are a noisy bunch. They all look wonderfully grotesque and, although not that horrific, it’s still easy to appreciate the gruesome designs.
Aside from the story differences, there are other subtle changes when playing in co-op. Thanks to the signals being sent out by the Markers and his general ill mental health, Carver suffers from bouts of dementia. This causes him to see things that Isaac doesn’t, while inhabiting the same space. Think of the much-applauded phasing feature in World Of Warcraft. Two players, standing in the same spot in the same shared world, each seeing two completely different things but still able to interact with each other. It’s a neat system that more games should use, and gives players a reason to try out Carver to see through his eyes.
This is the part where we would talk about how different it is playing in co-op, the changes in tone, how the two characters work together, and if the game still works when playing with a friend. Unfortunately, the review code we received from EA couldn’t connect to online co-op, so we haven’t been able to test it on this occasion. Keep an eye on Play, though, as we’ll be taking a look at it next issue.
The second big new feature is the weapon crafting system. This adds an RPG spin to the game, with Isaac collecting various materials as he progresses that go towards making shiny new guns. The system shows a surprising level of depth and is one of the best things about the game. Each weapon can have two guns in one – you can strap an assault rifle to a rocket launcher, or Isaac’s trademark plasma cutter to a hydraulic hammer. To these two base guns you can add attachments, upgrade
chips and various other miscellanea to create a truly unique weapon. There are thousands of combinations and each has it’s own model in game. It’s thoroughly impressive, and coming up with your own personal death-machine is a blast. Some of the stuff you can come up with is downright nasty. Want to add a stasis effect to every bullet your shredder/grenade launcher hybrid fires? Yeah, you can do that.
You may well create a weapon so powerful and awesome that you simply don’t need to bother making new ones, but even that isn’t much of a complaint. Weapon crafting is a total hit and the most welcome addition to the Dead Space formula.
Unfortunately, it’s in the resource gathering aspect of making weapons and upgrading your suit that one of the unwelcome spectres of this generation invades the series. An option for Downloadable Content is always present on the crafting screens, and microtransactions allow you to buy extra materials if you find yourself lacking. It’s never a necessity as there’s plenty of stuff to find, but it still feels like an unwelcome intrusion, and if we’re being cynical, rather like EA is pushing microtransactions a little too much. This isn’t iOS, after all.
Otherwise, core gameplay is business as usual. It’s practically the same as the last two games, but an old mantra about not fixing unbroken things comes to mind. Aside from Isaac’s clunky movement, the shooting mechanics are satisfying and stomping on stuff is still as meaty as before. You all know
the drill. Stroll around, shoot monsters, stomp on boxes, mash X to pick stuff up as you walk over it. It’s just a shame that it never amounts to more – it still works, but we’ve been doing rather similar things now for two prior games.
Dead Space 3 is interesting graphically, but also a decent metaphor for the game as a whole. It looks alright throughout, really lovely in some places, but for the most part is so standard it’s hard to get excited about. Character faces are a bit iffy; okay from a distance but get up close and you notice
things like the weird ears (trust us) that can be off-putting. Some of the environment design is stunning with wonderful vistas setting the scene. Vast swathes of space filled with destroyed ships and sprawling, denselypopulated lunar colonies take the breath away. On a smaller level though, design is dull and repetitive. Once you’ve seen a few dark corridors and nondescript snowy plains you know what to expect.
The theme of slight disappointment continues with the story, which is so unoriginal it’s often hard to care. Isaac is a compelling character, and Ellie Langford, returning from the last game, is interesting, but Carver is a cliché and the supporting cast are barely more than cardboard cutouts who exist to be
killed off in a variety of fun ways. The plot is a mishmash of Aliens and the whole “ancient creators” shtick that seems to be increasingly prevalent in modern media, Assassin’s Creed for example, with a good bit of unsubtle social commentary on religious fanaticism thrown in. Isaac and crew travel to another planet, thinking it to be the homeworld of the mysterious “markers” that cause all the
Necromorph nastiness, in an attempt to save humanity. Along the way they are accosted by the Church of Unitology, worshippers of the markers who see Isaac as a big threat in accomplishing their goals. Their leader is English, because he’s evil. Or is he evil because he’s English?
The plot is utterly awash with macguffins and barely explained lingo – Black Markers, Red Markers, Machines, Convergence, Pandora, Codex’s, jam donuts. There is always some all-important item for the group to attain which will open access to the next plot device, and so on. Supposedly important plot revelations are clumsily handled, failing to make much of an impact because you aren’t really sure what’s going on.
When the plot works is when it ditches all the high-concept jargon and focuses on the human element. Isaac is a likeable, interesting character and seeing him struggle with a huge responsibility he doesn’t want, coming to terms with it and growing into his role as a hero is good stuff. It’s about as original as the rest of the story, but because you’ve come to care about Isaac over his long, improbable journey, you don’t mind as much. As the story builds to a suitably epic conclusion, you’ll start to care about Isaac’s ultimate fate as he struggles to save the world, despite knowing that really, it’s all a bit silly.
Padding is an issue. Key plot points are few and far between, with the large gaps being filled by Isaac going on yet another wild goose chase as he searches for the next item he needs. Find that item, and guess what, it’s broken. You need to get two more items to fix the first one. But then, one of those doesn’t work either! Isaac has to fix the electrical system first. And so on, until it gets tiresome. Most games, at a base level, are at least in part about walking to where you are told, but Dead Space 3 rarely gives you a reason to be interested in where you are walking to and why. Samey environments and dull puzzles drag the game to an utter halt at times, and boredom can’t help but creep in.
Several optional missions are included, including some specific to co-op. Getting more bang for your buck is always good, but it’s easy to see why these missions are optional. Less effort has been given to them compared to the main game, with a few lines of dialogue setting you on your way and little else. Most end up with Isaac discovering some goodies that often weren’t quite worth the items he used getting to that point. Visceral made the right move making this stuff optional, and it’s appreciated. Completionists have extra content to enjoy, but those who want to power through the story can avoid some of the extra chaff.
Speaking of chaff, the competitive multiplayer modes from Dead Space 2 have been cut, Visceral focusing their online efforts on co-op. It’s not a huge loss. Multiplayer was a fun little piss-about every now and then, but never the main attraction. A few players might miss it, but most probably won’t even notice. What it all comes down to is simple. Dead Space 3 is more of the same, albeit a tad more action-focused and with more snow.
Diehard fans of the previous two games will have just as much fun this time around, assuming they aren’t expecting broad innovations. Everything is polished and this is clearly a title with a lot of funding behind it, but all the money in the world can’t buy innovation. By no means a bad sequel, it doesn’t quite offer a way for Dead Space to evolve as a series beyond its past two instalments, even if the formula here is still potent. Sam Smith
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Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance Of Slice And Zen
This genre is changing. It might not seem like it at a glance, but whatever you call this brand of videogame, be it character action, brawler, hack-and-slash or anything else, there are subtle but significant changes afoot. And they’re definitely for the better. You see, games like Devil May Cry,
like Ninja Gaiden, have always been defined by two things – their precision, and their difficulty. These were wars of attrition, games to punish the weak; bastions for the strongwilled and patient. With Bayonetta, though, PlatinumGames changed that dynamic forever, and it’s a new tradition it is maintaining with the frankly wonderful Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance.
Neither Bayonetta, nor Rising, are hard. That’s not to say they’re not demanding, requiring extreme levels of concentration, aptitude and dexterity, but they don’t feel the need to kick you in the mouth constantly. Whereas games like Devil May Cry 3 and the wonderful God Hand frequently forced you
back to distant checkpoints upon death, these games do not. Where they forced the difficulty to extreme levels within minutes, these games don’t. They’re – for fear of alienating the supposed ‘hardcore’ – more accessible.
And the beauty of that, is, that you’re now given the time to learn the intricate, worldclass combat systems before you really do tackle the extremities of their harder difficulty modes. They’re just more palatable, aware of player’s time constraints, of the distractions of a gaming world that is inundated with other stuff to play and do. Metal Gear Rising will kick your arse, and take pleasure doing it, but it’ll then pick you up by the hand, nod its head, and ask you to fight again.
So, what exactly is Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance, apart from another genre entry from the masters of the art? Well, you probably know that you play as Raiden, aka Jack, the once-weedy second character from Metal Gear Solid 2 who forged a new role himself by kicking everything to death in Metal Gear 4. You’re still in the war-torn world of Metal Gears, but there’s no Solid Snake, Big Boss
or Otacon in sight. Instead, you’re teamed up with a PMC, and charged with looking after the president of Liberia.
Quickly, he’s kidnapped and murdered by a cybernetic group of terrorists, and you decide to give chase, uncovering all manner of conspiracies along the way. It’s a fun story, way less talky than most
Metal Gear games, but just as ponderous. It still rides the line between political soapboxing and anime-powered fantasy, and there are enough familiar names and nods that MGS-heads will feels satiated. It’s definitely a Metal Gear game. It just happens to be one with a tremendous, unprecedented level of destruction.
Raiden’s sword is capable of cutting through pretty much anything in the world, be it a hapless enemy, a stray car, or even the support pillar of an overhead highway. Along with his light and heavy attacks, he can activate ‘blade mode’ (with a jab of L1) at any time, putting you into an over-the shoulder cam where you can slice in any direction you choose to tilt the right stick. At first, this is a hilarious novelty, and you’ll likely spend as much time slicing weak baddies into little sushi chunks while marvelling at the ingenuity of such a system. Like everything in a Platinum game, though,
it soon becomes a crucial and integral part of the combat. Enemies become ‘sliceable’ when they emit an orange flash, and when you then activate blade mode, a small square will hover over their chest (or equivalent – there are a lot of weird robotic bad guys in Rising).
Slice through that square, and Raiden will yank out their cybernetic heart and squish it in the coolest way imaginable, which immediately replenishes his health and blade mode meters. It’s called a Zandatsu, it’s crucial to the game’s scoring system, and it’s astonishingly satisfying.
In fact, satisfying is probably the best word to describe all of Metal Gear Rising’s combat. Unlike almost any other entrant in this genre you care to think of, Raiden is not a counter-fighter. He doesn’t lay in wait like Ryu Hayabusa, or slip-and-rip like Bayonetta. He attacks. Constantly. Relentlessly. There is no block button in Metal Gear Rising, and until you go out of your way to buy it in the
upgrade menu, there is no dodge. There is, quite simply, only a parry. To execute this parry, you have to press the stick in the direction of your opponent and hit the light attack button as they’re hitting you. At first, it’s an utterly alien feeling.
We’re so used to hiding in our defensive shells in these sorts of games that the idea of using offence to defend is almost terrifying. Raiden doesn’t fight with lateral movement, though, he attacks in blitzes, charging through his opponents’ assaults, swatting them out of the way until he can sink his blade into their metallic flesh.
Enemies signify their attacks with a red cross – like a reflection from a car brake light – and it’s up to you to time your parry to stop them. It’s possible to spam the button somewhat and block the strike, but time it perfectly and you’ll be able to immediately set up a riposte and often decimate your foe in
seconds. Do that to three or four enemies in a row, and not only will you feel like the hardest person to have ever walked the earth, you’ll likely be rewarded with one of those elusive S ranks.
Despite the wide range of enemies, Raiden’s ability to destroy rarely falters. Whether you’re battling cyber soldiers, Gekkos, wolf robot things or even giant Metal Gears, you can always do damage with your sword, and there will always be an opportunity to slice and dice in free blade mode. This consistency frees up the combat system to concentrate on millisecond timing and devastating accuracy.
Being a Platinum game, too, there’s a tidy arsenal of secondary weapons that exponentially increase your attacking potential. For starters, Raiden can pick up rocket launchers and grenades on the
battlefield and use them just like Solid Snake would, although their actual usefulness is limited. Better, though, are the weapons you collect from the game’s startlingly brilliant boss battles.
There are four key encounters throughout the campaign that award you a new weapon, and while we won’t spoil the specifics, we will talk you through some of the gear. The first is a pole, made up from the arms of dwarf gekkos that acts as you might expect. You turn into some sort of cross between a helicopter blade and Kilik from Soul Calibur, basically. Beyond that, there’s a heavy two-handed sword that feels exactly as you’d imagine, and a tactical sai that doubles up as a DmC-style whip, so
you can pull yourself into distant opponents to set up attacks.
You don’t get to switch between these weapons on the fly, so it’s best to concentrate on one that you enjoy and level it up throughout your playthrough. The actual boss fights where you win them, though, are magical. This genre has been blighted with glowing hit-point powered nonsense forever,
and Platinum is quite simply not interested in any of that rubbish.
These are fights against enemies the same size of you and with equal levels of skill. To succeed, you need to concentrate, react and attack with unprecedented aggression and tact. One fight, in fact, could be the best boss battle of all time, from a purely mechanical point of view. And the beauty of them is that you could play them all and not even work out which one we mean.
So good are they, that it comes as quite a shock that the final battle is a bit of a letdown. It’s not a disaster by any means, but lacks the fine-tuned mastery of the other scraps. In a game that’s so well-balanced, it’s a shame that it finishes in a furnace of frustration. Perhaps he’ll make more sense on our second and third playthroughs.
Another aspect that doesn’t make much sense is the game’s fondness for stealth. Being a Metal Gear game, it’s fantastic to see question marks appearing over enemies heads, that familiar orchestral stab when they see you, and even a cardboard box to hide in. You can sneak up on enemies and slash them from behind, and the freedom of movement Raiden has means that it’s never slow. However, stealth is so antithetical to everything the game achieves that it seems mightily strange that the boys and girls at the other end of the codec are constantly encouraging you to either sneak by enemies or take them out unseen. Across the board, it’s more fun to just charge in and kick arse.
Perhaps it’s a narrative pull to make Raiden seem more rebellious, or perhaps it’s just a dissonance in tone. Thankfully, you’re never, ever punished for going loud, and the game never makes it too difficult to do so. There’s actually some fun to be had stealthing, too – even the larger enemies can be silently assassinated, and you can quickly switch to blade mode and hack them to shreds just as you would in a normal battle.
It’s a strangely inconsistent style, though. Atsushi Inaba, the game’s producer (and the man behind Okami among many other masterpieces) has defended the stealth by saying the game would be boring without it. He is very, very wrong. This is combat of the highest order, and we think he knows it. This feels like pandering to the fans of the series. Thankfully it doesn’t spoil a thing. Much like the
wildly inconsistent environments.
The game always looks great up close, and Raiden moves and attacks with beauty, but some of the places you fight through look like they’ve been knocked up in twenty minutes. An entire mission takes place in a sewer with repeating textures, and another in an airfield where every building is the
same. Presumably, a combination of time and budgetary constraints has led to this blandness, as there are sections which look fantastic and full of imagination. Compared to something as blisteringly imaginative as Bayonetta, or the constantly astonishing DmC, it does look bloody awful at times. Ultimately, though, the combat is so good that you could set the game in a white box and it wouldn’t matter.
In fact, that actually happens. Or a yellow box at least. There are over twenty VR missions to unlock throughout the campaign, and they distill the game’s stunning action down to its purest parts without any worries about backgrounds or buildings. The enemy design is brilliant, and the animation and
kinetic charge of the gameplay easily makes up for any starkness in the backgrounds. And we’re not talking God Hand levels of ropeyness here, just not the type of thing you typically see in triple-A gaming.
The real beauty of Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance, though, lies not in its looks but in its feel. Platinum (and Clover before it) has always excelled at making its games ‘feel’ good – even the sketchy Anarchy Reigns absolutely nails the crunch of smacking someone in the chops. In Metal Gear Rising you feel sharp and deadly and lightning-quick. The first playthrough feels like a warm-up, too, mere preparation for a run on Hard and eventually Revengeance modes.
It has to be noted, though, that Rising is not a long game. Our ‘normal’ playthrough clocked in at five and a half hours, which you can add 90 minutes of restarts to. Skip the cutscenes, though, and you can probably take them back off. And those cutscenes might be a bit much for people who are more used to action games than Metal Gear. It’s not as chatty as a Kojima game, but there are some truly awful actors tearing it up in there, and some lengthy talks about weird subjects. If you’re into that world, you’ll probably enjoy it as much as we didn’t, but be warned, if you just want action, you might be diving for the skip function with serious regularity.
For those prepared to look, though, the game is rammed with the types of gags, in-jokes and references that have always defined this series. Platinum has masterfully combined the MGS world, with its melons, codec chirps and porn mags with its own burgeoning universe. There are subtle references to Bayonetta, Okami, Viewtiful Joe, Godhand and even Anarchy Reigns in here, and a whole character who is pretty much a lift from Vanquish. Fan service doesn’t even cover it.
And it’s that commitment to its fans that really defines PlatinumGames. This is a team that has already shown its mastery and innovation within this genre, and once again it has hit a home run. Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance is a true beast, a 60fps (bar the occasional dip) warrior that manages to straddle the line between its own genre and the lore of a beloved series with the sharpness of Raiden’s blade. This genre has changed, and Platinum is its master.
Jon Denton
10 VIDEO GAME EASTER EGGS THAT TOOK YEARS TO FIND
TOP 15 MOST SCARY THINGS CAUGHT ON VIDEO
10 MOST MEMORABLE PRESIDENT TRUMP JOKES AND CAMEOS
10 CREEPY VIDEO GAME URBAN LEGENDS
like Ninja Gaiden, have always been defined by two things – their precision, and their difficulty. These were wars of attrition, games to punish the weak; bastions for the strongwilled and patient. With Bayonetta, though, PlatinumGames changed that dynamic forever, and it’s a new tradition it is maintaining with the frankly wonderful Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance.
Neither Bayonetta, nor Rising, are hard. That’s not to say they’re not demanding, requiring extreme levels of concentration, aptitude and dexterity, but they don’t feel the need to kick you in the mouth constantly. Whereas games like Devil May Cry 3 and the wonderful God Hand frequently forced you
back to distant checkpoints upon death, these games do not. Where they forced the difficulty to extreme levels within minutes, these games don’t. They’re – for fear of alienating the supposed ‘hardcore’ – more accessible.
And the beauty of that, is, that you’re now given the time to learn the intricate, worldclass combat systems before you really do tackle the extremities of their harder difficulty modes. They’re just more palatable, aware of player’s time constraints, of the distractions of a gaming world that is inundated with other stuff to play and do. Metal Gear Rising will kick your arse, and take pleasure doing it, but it’ll then pick you up by the hand, nod its head, and ask you to fight again.
So, what exactly is Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance, apart from another genre entry from the masters of the art? Well, you probably know that you play as Raiden, aka Jack, the once-weedy second character from Metal Gear Solid 2 who forged a new role himself by kicking everything to death in Metal Gear 4. You’re still in the war-torn world of Metal Gears, but there’s no Solid Snake, Big Boss
or Otacon in sight. Instead, you’re teamed up with a PMC, and charged with looking after the president of Liberia.
Quickly, he’s kidnapped and murdered by a cybernetic group of terrorists, and you decide to give chase, uncovering all manner of conspiracies along the way. It’s a fun story, way less talky than most
Metal Gear games, but just as ponderous. It still rides the line between political soapboxing and anime-powered fantasy, and there are enough familiar names and nods that MGS-heads will feels satiated. It’s definitely a Metal Gear game. It just happens to be one with a tremendous, unprecedented level of destruction.
Raiden’s sword is capable of cutting through pretty much anything in the world, be it a hapless enemy, a stray car, or even the support pillar of an overhead highway. Along with his light and heavy attacks, he can activate ‘blade mode’ (with a jab of L1) at any time, putting you into an over-the shoulder cam where you can slice in any direction you choose to tilt the right stick. At first, this is a hilarious novelty, and you’ll likely spend as much time slicing weak baddies into little sushi chunks while marvelling at the ingenuity of such a system. Like everything in a Platinum game, though,
it soon becomes a crucial and integral part of the combat. Enemies become ‘sliceable’ when they emit an orange flash, and when you then activate blade mode, a small square will hover over their chest (or equivalent – there are a lot of weird robotic bad guys in Rising).
Slice through that square, and Raiden will yank out their cybernetic heart and squish it in the coolest way imaginable, which immediately replenishes his health and blade mode meters. It’s called a Zandatsu, it’s crucial to the game’s scoring system, and it’s astonishingly satisfying.
In fact, satisfying is probably the best word to describe all of Metal Gear Rising’s combat. Unlike almost any other entrant in this genre you care to think of, Raiden is not a counter-fighter. He doesn’t lay in wait like Ryu Hayabusa, or slip-and-rip like Bayonetta. He attacks. Constantly. Relentlessly. There is no block button in Metal Gear Rising, and until you go out of your way to buy it in the
upgrade menu, there is no dodge. There is, quite simply, only a parry. To execute this parry, you have to press the stick in the direction of your opponent and hit the light attack button as they’re hitting you. At first, it’s an utterly alien feeling.
We’re so used to hiding in our defensive shells in these sorts of games that the idea of using offence to defend is almost terrifying. Raiden doesn’t fight with lateral movement, though, he attacks in blitzes, charging through his opponents’ assaults, swatting them out of the way until he can sink his blade into their metallic flesh.
Enemies signify their attacks with a red cross – like a reflection from a car brake light – and it’s up to you to time your parry to stop them. It’s possible to spam the button somewhat and block the strike, but time it perfectly and you’ll be able to immediately set up a riposte and often decimate your foe in
seconds. Do that to three or four enemies in a row, and not only will you feel like the hardest person to have ever walked the earth, you’ll likely be rewarded with one of those elusive S ranks.
Despite the wide range of enemies, Raiden’s ability to destroy rarely falters. Whether you’re battling cyber soldiers, Gekkos, wolf robot things or even giant Metal Gears, you can always do damage with your sword, and there will always be an opportunity to slice and dice in free blade mode. This consistency frees up the combat system to concentrate on millisecond timing and devastating accuracy.
Being a Platinum game, too, there’s a tidy arsenal of secondary weapons that exponentially increase your attacking potential. For starters, Raiden can pick up rocket launchers and grenades on the
battlefield and use them just like Solid Snake would, although their actual usefulness is limited. Better, though, are the weapons you collect from the game’s startlingly brilliant boss battles.
There are four key encounters throughout the campaign that award you a new weapon, and while we won’t spoil the specifics, we will talk you through some of the gear. The first is a pole, made up from the arms of dwarf gekkos that acts as you might expect. You turn into some sort of cross between a helicopter blade and Kilik from Soul Calibur, basically. Beyond that, there’s a heavy two-handed sword that feels exactly as you’d imagine, and a tactical sai that doubles up as a DmC-style whip, so
you can pull yourself into distant opponents to set up attacks.
You don’t get to switch between these weapons on the fly, so it’s best to concentrate on one that you enjoy and level it up throughout your playthrough. The actual boss fights where you win them, though, are magical. This genre has been blighted with glowing hit-point powered nonsense forever,
and Platinum is quite simply not interested in any of that rubbish.
These are fights against enemies the same size of you and with equal levels of skill. To succeed, you need to concentrate, react and attack with unprecedented aggression and tact. One fight, in fact, could be the best boss battle of all time, from a purely mechanical point of view. And the beauty of them is that you could play them all and not even work out which one we mean.
So good are they, that it comes as quite a shock that the final battle is a bit of a letdown. It’s not a disaster by any means, but lacks the fine-tuned mastery of the other scraps. In a game that’s so well-balanced, it’s a shame that it finishes in a furnace of frustration. Perhaps he’ll make more sense on our second and third playthroughs.
Another aspect that doesn’t make much sense is the game’s fondness for stealth. Being a Metal Gear game, it’s fantastic to see question marks appearing over enemies heads, that familiar orchestral stab when they see you, and even a cardboard box to hide in. You can sneak up on enemies and slash them from behind, and the freedom of movement Raiden has means that it’s never slow. However, stealth is so antithetical to everything the game achieves that it seems mightily strange that the boys and girls at the other end of the codec are constantly encouraging you to either sneak by enemies or take them out unseen. Across the board, it’s more fun to just charge in and kick arse.
Perhaps it’s a narrative pull to make Raiden seem more rebellious, or perhaps it’s just a dissonance in tone. Thankfully, you’re never, ever punished for going loud, and the game never makes it too difficult to do so. There’s actually some fun to be had stealthing, too – even the larger enemies can be silently assassinated, and you can quickly switch to blade mode and hack them to shreds just as you would in a normal battle.
It’s a strangely inconsistent style, though. Atsushi Inaba, the game’s producer (and the man behind Okami among many other masterpieces) has defended the stealth by saying the game would be boring without it. He is very, very wrong. This is combat of the highest order, and we think he knows it. This feels like pandering to the fans of the series. Thankfully it doesn’t spoil a thing. Much like the
wildly inconsistent environments.
The game always looks great up close, and Raiden moves and attacks with beauty, but some of the places you fight through look like they’ve been knocked up in twenty minutes. An entire mission takes place in a sewer with repeating textures, and another in an airfield where every building is the
same. Presumably, a combination of time and budgetary constraints has led to this blandness, as there are sections which look fantastic and full of imagination. Compared to something as blisteringly imaginative as Bayonetta, or the constantly astonishing DmC, it does look bloody awful at times. Ultimately, though, the combat is so good that you could set the game in a white box and it wouldn’t matter.
In fact, that actually happens. Or a yellow box at least. There are over twenty VR missions to unlock throughout the campaign, and they distill the game’s stunning action down to its purest parts without any worries about backgrounds or buildings. The enemy design is brilliant, and the animation and
kinetic charge of the gameplay easily makes up for any starkness in the backgrounds. And we’re not talking God Hand levels of ropeyness here, just not the type of thing you typically see in triple-A gaming.
The real beauty of Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance, though, lies not in its looks but in its feel. Platinum (and Clover before it) has always excelled at making its games ‘feel’ good – even the sketchy Anarchy Reigns absolutely nails the crunch of smacking someone in the chops. In Metal Gear Rising you feel sharp and deadly and lightning-quick. The first playthrough feels like a warm-up, too, mere preparation for a run on Hard and eventually Revengeance modes.
It has to be noted, though, that Rising is not a long game. Our ‘normal’ playthrough clocked in at five and a half hours, which you can add 90 minutes of restarts to. Skip the cutscenes, though, and you can probably take them back off. And those cutscenes might be a bit much for people who are more used to action games than Metal Gear. It’s not as chatty as a Kojima game, but there are some truly awful actors tearing it up in there, and some lengthy talks about weird subjects. If you’re into that world, you’ll probably enjoy it as much as we didn’t, but be warned, if you just want action, you might be diving for the skip function with serious regularity.
For those prepared to look, though, the game is rammed with the types of gags, in-jokes and references that have always defined this series. Platinum has masterfully combined the MGS world, with its melons, codec chirps and porn mags with its own burgeoning universe. There are subtle references to Bayonetta, Okami, Viewtiful Joe, Godhand and even Anarchy Reigns in here, and a whole character who is pretty much a lift from Vanquish. Fan service doesn’t even cover it.
And it’s that commitment to its fans that really defines PlatinumGames. This is a team that has already shown its mastery and innovation within this genre, and once again it has hit a home run. Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance is a true beast, a 60fps (bar the occasional dip) warrior that manages to straddle the line between its own genre and the lore of a beloved series with the sharpness of Raiden’s blade. This genre has changed, and Platinum is its master.
Jon Denton
10 VIDEO GAME EASTER EGGS THAT TOOK YEARS TO FIND
TOP 10 VIDEO GAMES OF ALL TIME
TOP 15 SCARY HIDDEN THINGS IN VIDEO GAMESTOP 15 MOST SCARY THINGS CAUGHT ON VIDEO
10 MOST MEMORABLE PRESIDENT TRUMP JOKES AND CAMEOS
10 CREEPY VIDEO GAME URBAN LEGENDS
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