Halo Wars review

This time on video, apologies for quality, Youtube mangled it a bit, may use Vimeo next time.

XBox 360 send me a Valentine's gift

HOW exciting! It's been YEARS since I got a Valentine's Day surprise from anyone other than the gf or the cat so you can imagine how excited I was when a red package turned up on my doorstep. My initial thought was that it was from the Chinese and was some sort of Chinese New Year Celebration present - "Mr Rivers, thank you for your continued patronage of our country's fine exported food emporiums and takeaways, here's some money." However I quickly realised this was not the case.

So far so, mysterious, opening the red box simply revealed another box. It was a riddle wrapped inside an enigma, wrapped inside cellophane.

And the behold! It was from XBox360. They loved me this much? I swooned in a way usually reserved for wet cousins in Jane Austen novels. I unwrapped the shiny plastic, teased off the ribbon and slid my fingers into the box.

I gasped! A completely red controller! How sweet! This was a pretty cool present to receive I must admit... and probably the best one I've had for V-DAY for a while!



But I was a bloke... How would a member of the opposite sex react if I gave them the same token gesture? I decided to try it on my friend Kyla and see...

I tried the card first, how often was it a major corporate entity wished you a Happy Valentine's Day? Surely that's what it was all about? I tried to counter the look of disdain by offering the box.

I have to say this did not go down much better. The look turned from disdain to "What the fuck is this?" "For two player Gears of War?" I countered, there must be nothing more romantic than that! Kyla shook her head in disgust. I had one final try to convince her. With a gentle fingering, I teased back the red satin inside the box...

"See? It comes with batteries, it MUST be a girl's best friend!"




John will probably be spending Valentine's Day alone in the pub following the events outlined above.

Digitiser

I HATE YOU LEWIS!

As many of you will realise i have been out of the gaming, err, game for quite some time, however one of my favourite reads, back int he day, outside of Amiga Format or Zero was Teletext's completely surreal but nonetheless brilliant Digitiser.

Rude, controversial and very funny Digitiser poked fun at the games industry, fanboys and, as they said, "hated everyone equally".

Characters such as Mr T, Morse and Lewis, The Man, Socky the Sock, Zombie Dave and Fat Sow were but few of the multitude of figures gracing a seemingly innocent computer games section.

You can read all about Digitiser (complete with the run-ins the team had with Channel 4's Teletext producers) here or jump on the Fan Archive here and read the Man's brilliantly surreal diary.

And of course, Mr T's problem page:

"Dear Mr T, I'm a submarine commander, and sometimes when I dive my ears pop. Can you help?" Commander Collis

MR T SAYS: "I don't know much about submarines, Commander, but if Mr T ever finds you GOING through his bins AT ANY TIME, Mr T will be out HIS backdoor and ON you in a SECOND with a WRENCH."

Learning to Love Lara (again)

What is it about girls from Public Schools? The education and the accent for one thing. The thought that spending most of their time surrounded by other females deprived of male attention, feeds a fantasy that under the properness they're testosterone-hungry sirens is another. 

Oh yeah, and then there's the 34D cupsize boobs that stay perfectly in place while she spits bullets from two 9mm automatics that are kept strapped to her thighs in a crude imitation of a garter belt.

Over the years, since the first release of Tomb Raider in 1996, it's been hard not to see Lara Croft as a bit of a joke. She is a 14 year old wank fantasy, even her original designer Toby Gard protests that he wishes "they hadn't made her breasts so big".

I honestly believed the series to be dead. On Sunday I sat through Lara Croft Tomb Raider The Cradle of Life ("We need a snappy title... how about something eight words long?") in which Angelina Jolie's Lara is hired by MI6, along with Gerard Butler (who probably has the words 'something for the ladies' under his Spotlight listing nowadays) to take on some sort of Bond villain who wants to hold the world to ransom with chemical weapons. It was severely lacking in two respects: tombs and raiding. It was like the director Jan De Bont had been handed a James Bond script, reversed some of the genders, added in a monster and asked for his pay cheque. In short it was dreadful.

Lara arrived in the film by somersaulting a jet ski over a wave and then hoisting her dripping, bikini-clad self up on to a boat. For this reason I assume a lot of teenage lads have slow-mo functions on their blu-ray players. Lara was a cartoon.

So it was with some understandable trepidation that I started to play Eidos and Crystal Dynamics' Tomb Raider Underworld. Having been told that it had some 'visually stunning moments' by one of the less-rabid games magazines I decided it might be nice to look at on my telly. 

The opening of TRU is stunning. A slow-motion, reversed pull-back through the burning Croft Manor while suitably epic choral chanting is heard in the background sets the scene for something new, taking Lara in a new direction perhaps, wiping the slate clean. You're then invited to watch a series of cut scenes from other games to explain what's going on. I skipped these, if you can't tell a story without relying on the 'Previously' recap then you should go back to the drawing board. Luckily the smart plotters had included what I needed to know - a week before the destruction of Croft Manor Lara goes looking for something that may hold the key to finding her supposedly dead mother who might still be alive in a parallel universe called Avalon.

Armed with this sweet notion about reuniting the family I dove in. Literally. And spent the next four hours exploring a lost Norse underwater city.

Lara's probably never been so able to interact with her environment. Walls can be scaled, columns shinned up, cliffs rappelled down. Amazingly, her cleavage never gets in the way. The same goes for the acrobatics, Lara doesn't just climb up to something, she does a handstand and spiders up to it. It might be amazing in the bedroom for her, but you'd need a harness and six months training with the Moscow State Circus to keep up. 

And then I got the 'Wow' moment, as I ran into a chamber filled with one giant pissed-off looking Octopus.

That was the moment when I realised how much I had missed Lara and was taken back to the first game when the T-Rex first appeared. It wasn't about Angelina Jolie's accent* or the ridiculous outfits - it was about exploration, puzzle-solving and giant Harryhausen monstrosities. Second Life had spoiled me in terms of 3D exploration, all leisure time, no one shooting at me and more often than not completely deserted, but TRU showed me once again how exciting a game like this could be.

Surely the time for team exploration and not something as frenetic as World of Warcraft is here? I'm not talking about an XBox Live version of Time Team, but you must be able to create vast cave systems or castles that groups explore together online, pitting their wits and reflexes against other teams. Perhaps such a game does exist, but for now the XBox Live experience seems to be one about the team killing of underground insects, zombies, Nazis or underground-insect-Nazi-zombies. There must be a way of bringing TRU's puzzle-solving to a team environment... so for now I'll stick with Lara, the perfect partner... but only when it comes to scaling cliffs and killing giant creatures.

*In TRU Lara is voiced by Ashes to Ashes star Keeley Hawes who does a great job of putting on that voice you want to say "You've been a very naughty boy, now go to my room."