Elk's blog

Open world games and World War II games have been done to death, but put the two together and it seems somehow, new?

The Saboteur takes place in Nazi occupied Paris with you in the shoes of Sean, an Irish race driver with a talent for scaling buildings, playing with explosives and making life miserable for the Nazis. The open ended play style here works out much as you’d expect: There’s a main storyline, side missions to complete, cars to steal and buildings to climb, so you can safely check off all the boxes on your open world check sheet. What really sets The Saboteur apart from most other open world games is the setting of Paris at an interesting time in history. When the game begins there’s no sign of the French resistance, the Nazis are terrorizing the citizens and the city is drained of colour. Later as you begin to raise the spirits of the people you’ll see less Germans in in the areas you’ve worked in, colour will return to the world and the people will help you fight or hide from the Germans. This mechanic works very well and you feel like your actually making a difference to the world rather than just grinding through missions.

The missions will take you to some interesting locations beyond just the cities streets and to notable places like the Louvre or sneaking around buildings. Often you have the option to use stealth to complete a mission rather than running in guns a blazin’ but sadly the stealth approach is often hindered by the rather erratic AI. There’s several ways to go about a stealthy mission and blowing up nearby guard towers and sniper nets before your mission begins can help you remain undetected as well as helping you earn contraband which is used to purchase weapons and upgrades. Getting hold of a silenced weapons and wearing a stolen Nazi uniform can get you far but the guards can get a little too jumpy. Carrying a gun or walking just a little hunched over is a good way to raise suspicion but walking along the roofs of Paris towards a guard tower, standing out of sight and blowing the tower to pieces doesn’t register with the Nazis at all and neither does stealing a car and running down all the Frenchmen in sight. Fortunately any stealth is purely optional and there’s no missions that you’ll fail for being spotted because some grunt guard had eyes in the back of his head. The combat works well for the most part and there is a reasonable selection of weapons and unlockable perks to explore, sadly though combat does have a few kinks. The controls and interface clearly weren’t designed with a PC in mind which can cause a few issues when switching weapons and performing some action. The health system also seems a little unfinished, getting shot by a single nearby guard can drain your health very quickly where as being shot at and hit by many guards a reasonable distance away drains little health despite your character jerking around like Peter Weller.

The art direction is one of the most striking things about The Saboteur, viewing the city in black and white with a warm orange glow coming from the windows and the red of the Natzi flags remains a good effect throughout the game, it’s a pity that you have to return the world to a mundane art style by helping the French resistance. The script, voice work and the story work well together, and hearing Sean shout “Bollocks!” after falling off a building just doesn’t get old, unlike some other often repeated lines of dialog.

The Saboteur is a fun game with many great moments, it’s a shame that some parts of the game feel so well executed and others feel so rushed. Should the developers had another few months work on The Saboteur I’ve no doubt that they could have turned this good game into something great, but as it stands the few glitches in the engine and rough edges hold this game back in a way that can’t be ignored.

Mark Dell

Originally posted to CitizenGame.co.uk on Dec 9, 2009

There’s a charming simplicity to seeing Mario run across the screen in a two dimensional platformer. New Super Mario Bros Wii keeps this simplicity that has made the Mario series so popular while adding just enough to  justify calling it NEW Super Mario Bros Wii

Ever since Mario chose to become Super Mario back in the eighties, the flat two dimensional Mario games have been pretty simple platformers where the challenge usually lies in reactions rather than any kind of problem solving. In each game the princess is kidnapped by Bowser triggering Mario and his brother Luigi have to run across several worlds, collecting coins, avoiding fire and lava while bouncing off the heads of the Bowers minions to find her. Fast forward about 20-25 years with New Super Mario Bros Wii where the princess is kidnapped once again by Bowser and Mario & Luigi have to run across several worlds, collecting coins, avoiding fire and lava while bouncing off the heads of the Bowers minions to find the princess. Perhaps thats a little harsh, as in actuality New Super Mario Bros Wii brings us a feature which Mario players have been wanting for some time; multiplayer.

The biggest and most advertised advancement here is being able to play four player cooperative throughout the entire story as Mario, Luigi or a couple of Toads (mushroom people). It does feel a little strange to have a pair of Toads rather than Wario and Warluigi but I’m guessing that would require a degree of story telling beyond: Princess is captured, Go! Of course cooperative is just a suggested play style, it’s all too easy to grab the Toad that just scarfed all four fire flowers and throw him into a chasm but most likely you’ll end up causing enough accidental of your friends due to you colliding while performing a tricky jump. There are people out there who know Mario games so well that they could moonwalk their way through any level that you can throw at them, well fortunately if you get teamed up with someone like this, just a simple tap of the A button and your character will be encased in a bubble and drift towards the leaders location where you can avoid whichever jump has been troubling you. In theory this should keep everyone together and stop anyone from getting too frustrated but with too much skill difference between players, it may not always play out like that for the newer players. Fortunately should these newer players fancy playing through the single player they’ll have the option to skip through any level (even the final one) should the level prove too tough for them but only after they’ve been shown how to complete it properly. The new suits and items in the game aren’t a major factor in gameplay except the propeller hat that willturn some of the toughest jump into a memory as you sail over them by shaking your controller to victory.

The difficulty can be inconsistent and there can be no worse frustration than dying from poor controls, an issue that seldom plagues the Mario series. In rare occasions you’ll be introduced to a new mechanic such as tipping the controller to move a platform or light. The problem is moving the controller a little too roughly triggers a spin jump and often spin you all the way to your doom. These issues don’t occur too often as the primary focus of the levels is to cram them full of nostalgia rather than new elements. Water and sand levels are a given but you’ll also have throwbacks such as airships and moles hurling wrenches before a battle with one of Bowers long forgotten Koopa Kids. These throwbacks are all well and good but the level map design feel more like a trimmed Super Mario Bros 3 in most places, where a more diverse Super Mario World would have been a far better fit as we are three console generations further down the line.

New Super Mario Bros Wii is a great game, but it just falls short of the grand standards that the series had set for itself. The biggest redeeming feature here is the multiplayer which may not be the most effective way of getting through the game but, four times the people really is four times the fun.

Mark Dell

Originally posted to CitizenGame.co.uk on Dec 4, 2009

The creators of Dragon Age: Origins, have an epic history when it comes to its role playing games. If the name Bioware doesn’t sound familiar then perhaps you’ll better recognise games such as Baldur’s Gate, Neverwinter Nights, The Knights of the Old Republic or more recently, Mass Effect. I’ve seen worse back catalogues!

The ‘Origins’ of Dragon Age, besides being a potential setup title for sequels, are the six vastly different origin stories that begin once you’ve rolled your main character. Unlike most games which take place after a series of events have happened to bring any character to the game’s beginning, Dragon Age includes roughly an hour of gameplay before the events of the larger story begin. The interesting consequences of this is that a character from your origin story may turn up further down the storyline and although you may see them if you had a different origin story, their reactions to you would be quite different.

Consequence is one major component of Dragon Age, unlike most games with black and white choices such as: Help old lady cross a street or drown some puppies, the moral choices here have many varying shades or grey or challenge duty over loyalty. Some decisions go far deeper than others and may effect the survival of an entire race or may simply effect which of your companions you may end up in a relationship with. To a large degree these choices are superficial as your route through the main story will undoubtedly end up mostly the same regardless of whether you feel that little Timmy should live or die, except that Dragon Age makes you feel as though you have found your own way to get there and does it with far greater diversity than any other game that comes to mind.

Much like in Mass Effect you’ll be taking a diverse trio of companions along with you on your missions, each with their own backstory, unique mission and opinion on your actions as they jabber backwards and forward between themselves. Should you purchase a new copy of Dragon Age you’ll get a download code for the tenth companion: Shale, who comes across as a stone version of the metal HK-47 from KotOR who has a pulsing hatred for squishies (meat bags) and epically birds. There is a benefit of building up a relationship with these characters as new combat bonuses will unlock once they warm up to you, such as increased spell power or you could convince them to train you or one of your other companions in one of their combat skills. During combat these companions can be ‘programed’ to perform specific actions along the lines of: If you are shot at with arrows then use an ability and cast a spell on the attacker. These commands sound complex but there are some default templates for character types, with a little tweaking these templates can make a difference from defeat to victory.

Combat can be approached in many ways: a mass effect style over the shoulder view or a traditional overhead view; whichever view you choose combat is rarely something you can hastily run into and expect to become victorious. Having a good selection of characters available is crucial, having a mage to inflict area damage while the warrior charges in is one of the more basic strategies, but with the combination of spells things can become a little complex. Should you enter a room full of targets your mage could cover the floor in oil, buying you time while your foes to slip and fall to the ground as your archer takes out the distant targets, then a fireball into the oil will ignite it and scatter anyone nearby, then cast an icy blizzard, extinguishing the flames and freezing everyone in the room except your warrior who is holding equipment that protects him from cold damage.

If you plan on playing through anything but the easiest difficulty then having a strategy is a must, Dragon Age can be very tough. Some side quests can be especially difficult which makes frequent savings important as you may have to revisit an area once you’ve leveled up a few times. An interesting choice here is the lack of a hard level cap, instead there’s only a finite number of battles to have and creatures to kill so you’ll likely not progress any farther than the early twenties and there’s no going back once your through with the story.

There’s something special about the way that the story is told in Dragon Age and while many may dislike the rather old idea of a silent protagonist the story and lore behind the world cannot be overstated. From the castleless Dwarves of Orzammar to the mages tower on the lake each area has its story to tell and it’s a story that’s so deep that by the end of the 50 plus hour story you’ll be feeling as if you’ve known the world forever. Throughout the story your character remains mute, although all other dialog is both well written and spoken. However, the world is generally a serious place with just some moments where your companions may try to make light of the gloomy situation around them, but nothing about the dialog felt as jarringly out of place as a dwarf using the words “Epic Fail”. Otherwise the audio is great and the music is the typically powerful orchestral affair that is interchangeable between just about any game of this type. Graphically Dragon Age looks great however you may experience some frame rate problems at some points in the game, however as is the way with PCs, this might be the exception rather than the norm depending on your setup and the alignment of the stars.

Anyone who enjoys a solid medieval RPG and has roughly fifty hours to spare would truly be doing themselves a huge disservice by not picking up a copy of Dragon Age. The combat feel deliciously classic and the choices along with the story raise the bar for this generation of role playing games.

Mark Dell
Originally posted to CitizenGame.co.uk on Nov 25, 2009

2010 is upon us and I can’t help but look back over the changes in my life over the last decade:

• I’ve moved out from my parents house and lived in nine other places since, across both the UK and the US.
• I started and ended my career at a company in Bristol, UK.
• I got married.
• I’ve met a tonne of great and interesting people, both online and off.
• I’ve gone from ‘knowing enough about PC’s to get by’ to learning several languages, ASP, AJAX, C#, CSS, HTML and I’m sure many more and right now I’m learning PHP.
• I decided to make a hard push towards getting a career as a journalist and since then written over forty reviews.
• I started writing for Citizen Game and made some good friends there, even @macacd
• I’ve played an INSANE amount of video games and owned an equally insane amount of hardware
• and I’m sure I’ve “unlocked” many other achievements I’m forgetting

Things are pretty darn good and I think it does us all a world of good to make a list of all the great things that have happened over the past decade to help us look at the good things and help us decide where we want to be after another ten years.

But really, this wouldn’t be much of an end of year blog without some kind of gaming list, but I’ll try to make this a little different.

Game that stole the most of my time:

Yes it’s kind of a cheat to start off with two games instead of one, but between these two (three) games I’ve put in countless hundreds of hours. I’ve gone through 24 hour play session on Ultima Online and played the heck out of the Civ series, heck I even slipped in four to five hours of Civ 4 last weekend.

Game that changed my life the most:

Only those who know me pretty well would expect a game like Sims Online under such a prestigious banner, but I did meet my future wife while beta testing this god awful game. I won’t get too far into the details (right now) but without this game my life would have turned out very differently and most certainly for the worst.

Biggest OMG moment:

And I’m still not convinced it was a good idea, either the name of the control scheme.

Biggest disappointment:

Don’t get me wrong, I loved the Dreamcast but like so many others my heart sunk when I heard the changes Sega were making.

I was reluctant to try, but glad I did:

I never saw the appeal in either of these until I really tried them. Honestly I thought guitar hero was.. well it just sounds ridiculous, even now, but it’s also great. The 360 is a little more of a surprise. I never enjoyed the Xbox or the PS2 as much as I did the PC and the GameCube was just there for all the unique games on it, when the 7th gen systems rolled around I was reluctant but of all things it was Dead Rising that caused me to finally try out a 360, that and the PC scene was drying up fast. I wish I’d tried both of these sooner.

Biggest cry for attention that everyone has already forgotten about:

I couldn’t resist, but can you blame me? Yeah all of that Jack Thompson buisness started and died in the ’00s

That all for now, stay awesome everyone and have a great new years!

Rachet and Clank Future: A Crack in Time is the final part of the PS3’s Rachet and Clank trilogy and despite some small deviations it’s about as pure of a platformer as you can expect to find. There are not many games out there that have the timeless charm of the Rachet and Clank. Perhaps it’s the simple nature of the games and their lack of innovation that keeps their games comfy and familiar, like an old pair of trainers.

As a Crank in Time is part of a trilogy a little knowledge of previous games ‘Tools of Destruction’ and a ‘Quest for Booty’ is expected if you want to get the most out of the storyline. Such details aren’t exactly required and you’ll get the gist of what’s going on rather quickly epically thanks to a cut scene explaining parts of the narrative. The story continues on from Quest for Booty, Rachet has now found the kidnapped Clank’s location while Clank is captured aboard a giant clock at the center of the galaxy (give or take 50 feet). Throughout the game you’ll switch between the disconnected duo and experience both sides of the story.

Life as Rachet hasn’t changed a great deal from previous games, combat is mostly about collecting a massive arsenal of insane weapons and using the right tool for the job while breaking everything in sight. There’s a rail section or two and some platforming to break up the combat, but nothing unusual. The biggest difference for Rachet is the open world(s) gameplay. You can now take your ship and fly between planets and solar systems and land on smaller planets for minor quests as well as engage space pirates in dogfights. The combat feels a lot like an Xbox Arcade or Playstation Network game viewed mostly from overhead and is a fun diversion for a short period of time, the real problem is with the side quests. A pet peeve of mine is when shorter games try to make their game feel longer by forcing side quests on you in order to progress rather than offering something interesting that you ‘want’ to do, as is the case here. Fortunately the diversions aren’t overly used and the side missions aren’t tedious, but you are left feeling that Insomniac Games had the idea of an open world without anything truly compelling to use it for.

When you’re not touring the galaxy as Rachet you’ll be exploring the giant clock as Clank at a much slower and cerebral pace. There’s still a share of platforming and combat to be had but with the introduction of time mechanics there’s some very unique, interesting and challenging puzzles to experience. In certain rooms you’ll have the ability to record a series of actions and play then back, while you perform a different set of actions. This starts out nice and simple: Go stand on a button, the button opens a door, stop recording, start playback, run through door. But when you have four recording panels, jumps, moving platforms and seven or eight buttons things get a little crazy. Clank’s gameplay definitely helps to break up the action, but those who are looking for a mindless platformer might find a pair of Clank’s puzzles to be a little too much.

The graphics and sound of Crack in time are up to the usual high standards, perhaps a little higher as you can switch through a handful of radio stations while flying around in your ship. Dialog is well spoken, cutscenes are both interesting and funny. The entire presentation package is right up there with the excellence of rest of the Rachet and Clank series.

It seems hard to believe that there’d be many people looking to get Crank in Time that haven’t already experienced a game in the series but if you haven’t then I’d suggest you pick up the first in the trilogy. For those who love the series then you may find that Crack in Time is the best Rachet and Clank game that there’s been. For anyone who’s never enjoyed a Ratchet and Clank game, you’ll find nothing new here.

Mark Dell

Why have twenty guns when you could have – millions?

That’s the question behind role-playing-shooter Borderlands. But Borderlands brings more than just an excessive amount of choice for blowing your foes away. Vehicles, classes and quirky characters are all present in this Science-Fiction role player that feels like a first person Diablo.

Far in the future, Pandora is a planet reported to be packed with riches, but later found to be a barren wasteland. But there’s still one legend left on Pandora: a vault filled with alien technology more powerful than anything seen before. You take the role of one of four characters destined to head for Pandora in search of the vault and its weapons. Each class of character has their own benefits, such as the big bruiser that can launch into a punching frenzy or the sniper who can learn to bypass shields and attack with a falcon. The skill trees for each character are rather diverse with over twenty different skills for each.  Also in traditional RPG style, you’ll be accepting quests from people throughout the world, which involve killing, collecting and killing some more. The storyline itself doesn’t drill too deep and surely won’t be winning an award anytime soon, you’ll be wanting to get back into the fight and collect more guns.

Guns are everywhere in Borderlands and after a single play through I had been in possession of over 350 guns, all of which ‘unique’. The problem with all these procedurally generated guns is that although they may technically all be different you’ll eventually become detached from the random look of the guns and more interested in their specifications, after all, that’s what matters. Guns are rated on many factors: damage, accuracy, elemental effects, fire rate, zoom… All these features and choice builds a loot fever that is exactly what makes games such as this so addictive. Oddly however the randomness stops at the weapons. Locations aren’t randomized as originally expected and there’s no random armor, actually there’s no armor at all. For defense you’ll have to buy and upgrade shields which regenerate but your health does not.  Should your health run out you’ll have to ‘Fight for your life’ and quickly take down an enemy to restore your health, unless you have a companion around to revive you.

Multiplayer is truely Borderlands’ best feature, splitscreen and four player co-op is available throughout the game, although playing with random folk online has a few issues. Playing through the game online is great fun and specializing and cooperating to take down different enemies gives the game a whole new dynamic that you don’t have in the single player. The problems arise when you’re playing with someone you can’t trust. Unlike most modern RPGs, Borderlands doesn’t have any loot policies or trade windows, so anyone can grab a weapon that may have dropped from an enemy, then to trade guns you’ll have to drop ‘em and swap ‘em rather than use a trade window. Settling disagreements in a duel or in the area is one way to go, except that some character classes are far better suited towards PvP than others, fortunately this isn’t a major part of the game.

Perhaps borderlands’ greatest failing is that tedium can set in at a few points due to a lack of variety in the landscapes and the creatures. You will come across a few caves and structures but on the whole the landscape doesn’t have much more diversity than you’d expect to find in Fallout 3. You’ll also be fighting variations on the same handful of foes throughout the game, except they’ll have more health and drop better weapons. This is the floor with most Online RPGs and if these failings don’t bother you there then you’ll likely feel at home on Pandora.

Borderlands is a great and unexpected game, it’s definitely not to be experienced alone and it can wear down on you a little somewhere shortly past the midpoint, but with the different classes to choose from, interesting characters and enjoyable combat there’s plenty of reasons to reasons to grab a few mates and enjoy the world.

Mark Dell

The Forza series has taken pride in being one of the most technically advanced racers on the market. It’s hard to argue with that fact when one of the most talked about features of this sequel is something like tire deformation & flex. Such features may irrelevant to the layman but it leaves the ‘gearheads’ salivating. Perhaps the greatest feature to the rest of us who don’t know our axles from our elbows is the added focus on accessibility. While Forza 3 will never be mistaken for a classic arcade racer, every effort has been made to ensure that those lower-skilled players can still easily progress and have a tonne of fun racing around the games hundred tracks on any number of the whopping 400 cars. Difficulty is adjusted my switching on or off the driving assists. For extra difficulty you can give yourself a manual car and clutch, or to ease things up you can even enable automatic breaking when you approach a corner, having less assists on makes each car feel a lot more unique and will give you greater winnings at the end of your race. For those who don’t want to worry about upgrading their cars or tweaking features you also have the option to quick upgrade your car to a recommended level and buy custom tuning setups off Forza’s in-game player-run marketplace.

The marketplace has received several welcome upgrades too. Previously only cars could be traded, now tuning setups, full car designs and individual vinyls may be sold or given away for free. There’s also storefronts so if you like a particular players designs and car tunes you can browse through what else they have available. Perhaps my favorite feature is the ability to sell smaller designs as this opens up a lot of options for those who want want to add a design to their car without buying a full car design or building it themselves. For instance you can buy a licence plate for your car and put on your own text, or stick a GhostBusters logo on the bonnet and Yoshis on the doors. Having an alternative to building your own artwork is such a huge benefit, as despite the power of the vinyl generator, it can be hugely time consuming to build a piece of detailed artwork with rudimentary shapes and layers.

Once you’re done playing around in the menus and finally hit the road, you’ll be greeted by one of the finest looking racers out there. Allegedly these new cars have been redesigned with ten times more detail than before, no wonder the four hundred cars spill over onto a second DVD, so have a spare 1.9gb free on your Xbox should you wish to have access to all the tracks and cars. Not only has the exterior of the car been improved but each of the cars has a fully modeled dashboard which goes into so much detail that cup holders and door locks can be seen and compared to the car’s real life counterpart. The tracks themselves seem to overflow with color when compared with the previous game, it’s remarkable that Forza 3 can show so much detail while the world whizzes by at a tasty 60 frames-per-second. Each car roars along with authentic sounding engine noises and my Honda Fit does sound as truly pathetic on the road in Forza as it does in real life. You won’t have to just listen to engines all day as a soundtrack is included which’ll run while you’re racing, it’s nothing spectacular and it sits in the background playing away so quietly you might even forget it’s there.

Forza Motorsport 3 introduces new drift & drag races. These modes can also be used online in eight player races along with one of the most robust multiplayer options I’ve personally seen in a racer. There’s the usual racing and elimination along with the mentioned drag and drift races, but there’s also modes like cat and mouse as well as tag that can be played and configured to a ridiculous level of detail. There’s also a split-screen mode however it’s unfortunately limited to just the single race mode.

There’s a lot of good to be said about Forza Motorsport 3, but I do have a couple of nits to pick. Colin McRae’s Dirt brought us the ability to rewind time should a mistake be made in a race, while I’m not sad to see it here in Forza 3, I am sad to see that it can be used unlimited times with no penalty. Sure there’s no one forcing your hand to hit the little rewind button should you make a mistake, but having unlimited mulligans is a little too tempting. Also the AI drivers have been enhanced with a new ‘pressure system’ that may cause the other drivers to make mistakes when under pressure. This can cause the computer controlled drivers to feel a little less real as they drive like true professionals around 10-15 laps and then suddenly without warning turn radically into a wall for seemingly no reason.

Forza Motorsport 3 isn’t the perfect racing game as there are always more cars that could have been included (*ahem* 1996 Ferrari Testarossa) but it has nailed just about every feature you’d hope to find in a racer and retained the most important thing: It’s a tonne of fun to play.

Mark Dell

Way back in 1997 when mankind was ruled by animatronic squirrels the Grand Theft Auto (GTA) series of video games were born into existence as a pair of overhead PC games. But since GTA 3 was released on the PlayStation 2 the series has taken the leap into a full 3D series, with the exception of spin off games appearing on the Nintendo portables. Now we have GTA: Chinatown Wars on the PlayStation Portable, a port of a Nintendo spin off that brings classic 2D game play along with some of the new features that we’ve enjoyed on the recent console releases.

Despite the overhead view not everything is sprites and fixed cameras, instead the world is rendered in 3D and the overhead view had a little tilt to it, unlike the early GTA games, which gives a good feeling of depth. The overhead viewpoint does have some downfalls, the most obvious of which being view distance. Races can be extra frustrating if you don’t know the route as you’ll only have a moment to react before you collide into an object you couldn’t possibly have avoided. The also ground combat just doesn’t work as well from above and you sadly won’t have many times when you can enter a building.

Each generation of GTA brings with it more complexity, new features are added and there’s more to do even if it isn’t immediately obvious, such as kidnapping the passenger of the car you just jacked. GTA:CTW pulls in a lot of these new features from GTA 4 and although the mini-games are absent most of the other new content is along for the ride such as hailing cabs and having to pay tolls. The touch screen events of the DS have made the transition into basic quick-time events. Hot-wiring a car will have you twisting the ‘joystick’ to undo screws and twist wires together. This feels like one of the DS features that the PSP could have done without, especially when you’ve got a squad of cops baring down on you. It’s a pity that the darts, bowling, pool or any of GTA4’s other events are absent from CTW, but the removal of these events also comes with the removal of constant phone calls from your buddies wanting to hang out, which isn’t a bad thing. Instead you’ll be spending your free time with a little drug trafficking on the side

All the staple GTA iconography returns. So too the angry coppers.

Missions don’t pay squat in Chinatown, so you’ll have to make ends meet elsewhere. Although GTA: CTW does have small side missions as well as the classic taxi missions, vigilante etc. nothing puts cash in your pocket quicker than a little dealing. You’ll start off by picking up some cheap weed and selling it for a minor profit and later move up to selling harder drugs like heroin, for larger risk, but also larger reward. As you drive close to a dealer he’ll be bookmarked on your map and he’ll later send you messages to let you know if he’s has got any good deals going, either buying or selling. The drug dealing is an interesting distraction and it forces you to explore the city to find new dealers. Trafficing drugs pays off so well that you may find that towards the end of the game you’re making more money in a single deal than you did on every one of your missions combined. Also if the mood strikes you then you can trade your drugs with another player through the wonders of the internet and shared with any friends you’ve added through multiplayer.

Multiplayer in CTW offers several fun time wasters for you to try. Races and death match are of course included also along for the ride are coop defend the base modes and an assault mode where you and a team of AI will assault the enemy base and then reverse roles. None of these matches are going to be the core of anyones experience in CTW, but it’s still worth a look.

Presentation is kept at Rockstar’s usual high standard, interfaces are clean, art is well stylized, music plays from one of several radio stations while you cruise around town. However unlike the previous PSP renditions the radio and voice work is kept to a minuim due to the port from the DS. Voices are restricted to just the pedestrians in the street and their inane chatter and abuse, cut-scenes are told with text and static images, radio stations play instrumental tunes all day without the humorous radio presenters or ludicrous adverts. The cut-scenes tell more like a comic book and the dialog as well as story tell a good plot that makes the game well worthy of the GTA name. The radio also has different styles of music under each of its station, while I personally haven’t recognised any of the tunes they’re still good tracks.

For those who have already played through the DS version of Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars then there isn’t anything here to pull you back for another look. Sure the graphics have been spruced, widescreen-a-sized and the music has been redone but the game is exactly what you’ve seen before. However unless you’re really into this touchscreen business and the lightning quick load times of the DS then you’ll find Chinatown Wars in the PSP to be the definitive version for newcomers to play.

Mark Dell

Cities XL may not be as in depth and as refined as such games as Sim City 4K but with the online features that promise a lot of upcoming content this average game has the potential to be great.

City-building games aren’t as common as they once were after SimCity set the bar and the market was flooded with ‘Tycoon’ games, but Monte Cristo’s City Life series continues to try and breathe new life and new features to this stagnant genre.

At it’s core, Cities XL is like any city building game you may have played in the past, it requires good planning and forethought and an almost Zen like balance to succeed. Most games will start the same way: Build houses for people, people need jobs and food so you build farms and industry, the industry need paperwork done so you build office buildings and buisness hotels, these buildings require more houses for qualified works, which in turn now want schools. The balance can be hard to achieve as too many buildings of one type without enough buildings of another will cause spaces to go unoccupied and drain your city funds. This all sounds rather complex on the surface but you have numerous charts and overlays at your disposal to see where your problems lie.

Just like other games of this ilk you’ll be zoning out areas for residential, commercial and industrial and choosing the density of the structures (higher density will mean denser traffic to contend with) but now in Cities XL you’ll also be choosing what class of person will be living in each residential property.  It seems rather ridiculous for a mayor/city planner/deity such as yourself to have to choose if this residential area will be lived in by the uneducated or high paid executives rather than the citizens themselves deciding who will move into an area and this will give you one more thing that you’ll have to balance in your city.

If you’re choosing to play (and pay) online then you’ll have the option of being able to trade for resources with other players. This opens up some new options to players, such as building a city that has no dirty industry and pollution and trading your office space and vacations for power and industry goods. While online your city will exist in an always running online world with other players where you can communicate with other players through a chat window, complete trades or visit each other’s cities. These ideas are unique to this type of game and all come with their own problems. Trading online can be a risky buisness, should you be sustaining your entire economy through trade and some of those deals are cenceled or the entire trade system fails (again) your city will fill with bankrupt buisness and your coffers will hemridge cash. The chat window can also be troublesome as it whizzes by with the voices of a hundred players all trying to get help or sell their recourses, this might be familiar to players of World of Warcraft who like to watch the drama of the larger cities.

Graphically Cities XL looks pretty sharp and offers several different ways of placing structures which can keep your city looking interesting, having a fair few designed for each type of building also helps keep things interesting. It’s claimed that the game has 500 different looking buildings and they’ll be adding a further 200 each year along with new maps, quite a bold statement but when you consider that there is a monthly fee it’s good that they’re offering extra content along with the subscription. Sadly the performance of the game can be a little rocky, performing trades through the game can have you waiting a considerable time between screens, the performance actually got so bad that I had to use a second computer to perform the trades through the website. It seems that these problems are due to some bugs in the release version of the game and after seeing Monte Cristo staff visiting the chartrooms I’m confident that they’ll have issues like this wrapped up shortly.

Cities XL may not be as in depth and as refined as such games as Sim City 4K but with the online features that promise a lot of upcoming content this average game has the potential to be great. That said Cities XL is a full price game that also asks for a subscription fee equal to that of a cheaper tier online RPG for access to all of the online features, which is hard to recommend to all but the most dedicated city builders.

Mark Dell

Originally posted to CitizenGame.co.uk on October 20, 2009

The creators of Dragon Age: Origins, have an epic history when it comes to its role playing games. If the name Bioware doesn’t sound familiar then perhaps you’ll better recognise games such as Baldur’s Gate, Neverwinter Nights, The Knights of the Old Republic or more recently, Mass Effect. I’ve seen worse back catalogues!

The ‘Origins’ of Dragon Age, besides being a potential setup title for sequels, are the six vastly different origin stories that begin once you’ve rolled your main character. Unlike most games which take place after a series of events have happened to bring any character to the game’s beginning, Dragon Age includes roughly an hour of gameplay before the events of the larger story begin. The interesting consequences of this is that a character from your origin story may turn up further down the storyline and although you may see them if you had a different origin story, their reactions to you would be quite different.

Consequence is one major component of Dragon Age, unlike most games with black and white choices such as: Help old lady cross a street or drown some puppies, the moral choices here have many varying shades or grey or challenge duty over loyalty. Some decisions go far deeper than others and may effect the survival of an entire race or may simply effect which of your companions you may end up in a relationship with. To a large degree these choices are superficial as your route through the main story will undoubtedly end up mostly the same regardless of whether you feel that little Timmy should live or die, except that Dragon Age makes you feel as though you have found your own way to get there and does it with far greater diversity than any other game that comes to mind. 

Much like in Mass Effect you’ll be taking a diverse trio of companions along with you on your missions, each with their own backstory, unique mission and opinion on your actions as they jabber backwards and forward between themselves. Should you purchase a new copy of Dragon Age you’ll get a download code for the tenth companion: Shale, who comes across as a stone version of the metal HK-47 from KotOR who has a pulsing hatred for squishies (meat bags) and epically birds. There is a benefit of building up a relationship with these characters as new combat bonuses will unlock once they warm up to you, such as increased spell power or you could convince them to train you or one of your other companions in one of their combat skills. During combat these companions can be ‘programed’ to perform specific actions along the lines of: If you are shot at with arrows then use an ability and cast a spell on the attacker. These commands sound complex but there are some default templates for character types, with a little tweaking these templates can make a difference from defeat to victory.Combat can be approached in many ways: a mass effect style over the shoulder view or a traditional overhead view; whichever view you choose combat is rarely something you can hastily run into and expect to become victorious. Having a good selection of characters available is crucial, having a mage to inflict area damage while the warrior charges in is one of the more basic strategies, but with the combination of spells things can become a little complex. Should you enter a room full of targets your mage could cover the floor in oil, buying you time while your foes to slip and fall to the ground as your archer takes out the distant targets, then a fireball into the oil will ignite it and scatter anyone nearby, then cast an icy blizzard, extinguishing the flames and freezing everyone in the room except your warrior who is holding equipment that protects him from cold damage.If you plan on playing through anything but the easiest difficulty then having a strategy is a must, Dragon Age can be very tough. Some side quests can be especially difficult which makes frequent savings important as you may have to revisit an area once you’ve leveled up a few times. An interesting choice here is the lack of a hard level cap, instead there’s only a finite number of battles to have and creatures to kill so you’ll likely not progress any farther than the early twenties and there’s no going back once your through with the story.

There’s something special about the way that the story is told in Dragon Age and while many may dislike the rather old idea of a silent protagonist the story and lore behind the world cannot be overstated. From the castleless Dwarves of Orzammar to the mages tower on the lake each area has its story to tell and it’s a story that’s so deep that by the end of the 50 plus hour story you’ll be feeling as if you’ve known the world forever. Throughout the story your character remains mute, although all other dialog is both well written and spoken. However, the world is generally a serious place with just some moments where your companions may try to make light of the gloomy situation around them, but nothing about the dialog felt as jarringly out of place as a dwarf using the words “Epic Fail”. Otherwise the audio is great and the music is the typically powerful orchestral affair that is interchangeable between just about any game of this type. Graphically Dragon Age looks great however you may experience some frame rate problems at some points in the game, however as is the way with PCs, this might be the exception rather than the norm depending on your setup and the alignment of the stars.

Anyone who enjoys a solid medieval RPG and has roughly fifty hours to spare would truly be doing themselves a huge disservice by not picking up a copy of Dragon Age. The combat feel deliciously classic and the choices along with the story raise the bar for this generation of role playing games.

Mark Dell