Apparently jet-packs and 3D are the stuff of young men’s dreams. This is news to me, do people dream in 2D, or 3D, how does that work? Anyway a recent online article title of  “Jet-packs plus 3D. Our boyhood dreams come true…”  made me unnecessarily angry, in a ridiculous womanly sort of way. Why use the word boyhood? Why not use childhood, or just simply go with the sentence “Our dreams come true”.

This simple semantic slip up is the title for an article on Killzone. I can see that Killzone has some stereotypical little boy elements. There are soldiers and guns and stuff, a bit like action man. But surely if there is anything the world of gaming has taught us it’s that all young children like colourful happy games, hence the rise of Mario.

Anyway boys should not be playing Killzone, it’s a teenage/adult game with a fairly high age rating. Now in all the groups of teens that I know (weirdly quite a few) the girls are just as likely to play jetpacking 3D kinda games, so why can’t they dream of jetpacks? (Women already dream in 3D so don’t need to dream of it.)

Men don't even know what to do with a jet-pack. Grab it man!

I have a horrible urge to go out and spend many pounds becoming 3D ready just so I can play Killzone 3 and write about how pretty it is and how every girl will love it, but that’s just stupid so I won’t. Instead I give you my own girlised version of the article:

Extract modified from: http://www.computerandvideogames.com/article.php?id=255980

Killzone 3 3D

“Jet-packs and 3D. Our girly dreams come true…”

Killzone 3 launches Sony’s picturesque voyage into the crystal clear waters of 3D. But don’t get too emotionally involved with all that: It’s a graphical wonderland regardless of whether you press the special button on Sony’s new shutter glasses.

Look into my burning orange eyes and make me 3D.

When us ladies got our hands on the E3 version of Killzone 3 we wanted the full and glorious 3D experience. With this in mind, we go straight for every girl’s dream accessory: the beautifully crafted silver jet-packs.

Movement and combat are good even in mid-air, and one of the best design features of the jet-pack is its strikingly luminescent afterburners hanging close to your eyes in a sparkling array of orange and purple flames. The pack doesn’t actually offer full flight, but as this would make the game too easy, we are content with the leap and glide scenario.

It certainly adds a new dimension to the gameplay. The jet-pack level we played spreads across cinematic terrain and multiple platforms. Negotiating your way from one glistening chunk of diamond ice to the next is tricky, but with a woman at the controls we never messed up our Gucci combat wear by hitting the icy water.

The pack, like a new man, has limits to its range and stamina, but once you’ve mastered it you’ll really appreciate the approaches it offers. Surrounded left, right and centre? There’s always up baby. It’s this ability to pull out in dramatic fashion right at the last which creates some of the most cinematic moments (or disappointing ones depending on whether we are now talking about men or jet-packs…) – the best bit being that they aren’t cut scenes, they’re your movements, your decisions, in gorgeous real-time. Grrr.

What’s this being placed in my tiny hand? A free game, with complementary friend endorsement? Excellent!

I slide it into the Xbox 360 and bingo, it is indeed a bit of stabby stabby action. My dying child hides in the back of a dilapidated shop while I, the almighty Nier, fight off the Shades. They are creepy and sort of spectral, but I am strong and have a wicked crotch jump at my disposal. With my power and that of a mouthy book combined, I manage to clear all the Shades and take my daughter to safety. Lucky she found that cookie….

Why are the Shades made of roof tiles?

Oh but what’s this? The screen has changed and suddenly I’m in a side scrolling wonderland. It seems to be some sort of room, and there is a staircase… ahh yes it is my house. There is my daughter, coughing in the upstairs room, there is my medicinal herb, and there is my front door. This is pretty good, a bit of side scrolling action can liven up anyone’s day and I think that I could really ease into this, but then I step outside…

What is this? A green and leafy town centre, scattered buildings, and friendly looking townsfolk to chat to. I seem to find myself in the world of the RPG. Now this is a step in the wrong direction as far as I am concerned, I talk to a passing guard and he is boring, I go to the library and talk to Popola who gives me a rubbish mission and I complete it. This is not the stabby stabby dream I had in mind, nor is it the intriguing side scrolling action that I had momentarily been temped with, but just as I was about to give up on it, it became something else…

And finally – what’s this?? That’s right this game had one last trick up its sleeve, it throws me the top down action. That’s right, the joy of walking into small rooms, with boxes to navigate around and some stuff to stab, all in top down fighting glory. I mince through the Shades to work my way to the top of the tower and rescue my straying daughter, how did she even get here when she is so afflicted by the black scrawl (see what they did there, no black plague in the magical game world, just a badly designed tattoo. Oh the horror!).

So Nier tries to give a lot, but is it enough? Initially I wasn’t drawn in but its simplicity makes it a fun ‘pass round the controller’ game if you have a few friends (and a few beers) in your flat. The dominant theme here is RPG, and for my tastes that’s a killer. Nier may never see the light of my Xbox 360 again, but it was fun while it lasted!

That is not to say that I didn’t have any expectations for my birthday. I expected my close friends and family to remember and text me, which they did, and I expected my immediate family to get me some sort of presents, because they always do. The difference this year was that there was no talk about it beforehand.

Oh mystery envelopes, what will you contain? A game, some anthrax, who knows?

There are only so many things you can buy a girl who lives in London, has a job, and generally doesn’t rely on presents as the main source of getting stuff she wants. So usually I get money, vouchers, games, or DVDs. The last two normally come after some sort of prior consultation… but since there had been none of this I got excited about the prospect of unwrapping a mystery game.

Here is an example of a game that I will never buy for myself, but should I be given it....

What game do you buy for someone if:

a) you don’t know anything about games

b) you don’t know what games they already own

c) you can’t really remember which consoles they own

d) and the last time you saw them playing a game it was on a Megadrive?

I place most of my present bearing family members into this dilemma category. From their point of view a choice game would have to be something nice, but not patronising. So I was thinking it was probably going to be a fitness game for the Wii. These games seem like a ‘well she is a young professional living in London now’ type of granny buy, and they loudly hint at being a bit ‘girly’. I don’t have any Wii fit stuff, but if a free one comes my way I’d be willing to give it a go. Anyway, if I didn’t like it there is always the super fun trade in trip, a ritual that I enjoy.

So there I was, ready in my pyjamas to receive the morning mail. I was one day older but clearly none the wiser. Even as I write this down I see the logical flaw in my over zealous excitement. Obviously anyone who hasn’t seen you in a while, hasn’t talked to you about what you want, and knows nothing about games doesn’t buy you a game. Yes, it is blindingly clear to me now, but as I stood by the letter box full of childish excitement the rather card shaped deliveries really disappointed me. They were vouchers, a hoard of vouchers. This is of course great, now I can buy what I want, but that means I won’t try something outside my comfort zone, and I think that is all I really wanted.

Ryanair get a hard time but they certainly have their place in the world. They are cheap, even with the taxes and mystery costs, they deliver me on time, and they seem to own air worthy planes. Now having said that there are no little extras to make me smile along the way, but I always know just what I’m getting: bog standard and nothing else. Except that time in January when Ryanair surprised me.

Everyone in the world probably knows about this except me, but I generally burn the paper if it is giving Ryanair too much media attention. I never really know what they are up to, because when it all boils down to it they are not up to anything, they are just flaunting their name to remind us all that if you want a bus on wings they have one. So it was news to me that you can now use your mobile phone on a flight.

Totally worth a fiver.

At first I thought this was great, then about five seconds later I realised it actually meant that my rubbish flight would now be too noisy with phones ringing and teenagers chatting to actually get the hour of sleep I so badly needed. So then I was grumpy for a while before realising that this opened up a whole new entertainment avenue for me that I normally crossed off the list for flights — mobile gaming.

Ryanair only let you take a teaspoon of stuff onto the plane so my brick DS generally doesn’t make it. However my phone is always with me. Being a diligent flier I never normally have it out in-case someone quizzes me about ‘in flight mode’ or some such functionality. Now with phones a free for all on the plane I can game away to my heart’s content.

So what really makes a game good for these trips? I always feel Tetris has everything you could possibly want out of a good mobile game: easy to see on the little screen, not so taxing you fall over stuff, and totally engrossing so the flight takes all of three mental minutes.  However if I’m going to game on the plane then I’m going to game all through the airport, and on the way to the airport. No more whiling away the hours by buying McDonalds and eating it really slowly before coating myself in every branded perfume known to man, oh no, just gaming now. So where Tetris loses is in the pause department. If I pause then go through the boarding gate, fumble for my passport, smile at the nice people, and find a seat that doesn’t smell, I can’t unpause. Well, I can but I am no longer in the right mindset to pick it up and I lose within a few moments. This is really annoying if you just spent the last half an hour getting a pretty great score.

Up to the clouds and beyond...

So the answer is a game that only lasts a minute or so, like quick races, or mini levels of stuff. Things that if you have to pause and then die it won’t matter because on that bit you were only several seconds in anyway. It also has to be something with re-playability, no story or it will feel like hard work, and totally engrossing. The jury is still out. I was pretty happy on 3D roller-coaster the other day on my Sony Ericsson but once I have beaten all my high scores a few times I think it is going to wear pretty thin.

So lets start at the beginning, and lets face it, this is the most important part for me anyway, with the food. Now I arrived a little late so I was worried it might all be gone, but I was in luck. Waiters in indescribably pink shirts were still floating around the miniature Edwardian tables. Their sliver trays adorned with tempura prawns,  green chilli salsa nibbles, bite size pies, and for dessert tiny cupcakes and cream filled meringues. It was great, I set my self up on a prime waiter route and filled up to my hearts content.

Now on to the less important stuff, like the gaming and the film…. ok, they were important too, but just a bit more everyday. The consoles were rammed when I arrived so I casually snuck about waiting for some unsuspecting fool to lay their controller down for just a fraction of a second. Then I saw my opportunity, the controller was on the table, the man was turning away and I leapt into position. It was all mine, the success of the take over temporarily blinded me to the act that I had managed to bag myself a sports game. I was deflated, but decided to give it a go anyway.

If you have a bit of a sadistic streak  I now thoroughly recommend Trials HD. Not a game I had ever considered playing but there is a small masterpiece hidden away inside. This is a Trials game, as the name suggests, so you drive your motorbike over bits of wood and metal pretending to be ramps until you get to the end of the course. The best thing about the whole experience is the overly used rag-doll physics, your character is so floppy you just want to shake him. Leaning too far forward on a jump makes him crash head first into the landing zone, creating a tantalising splatter of blood before he slides so satisfactorily off his bike to his doom. He hits everything, with limbs bouncing about and head lolling. I don’t think I made it round a single track all the way, it was just so glorious watching how his flying corpse interacted with the different jutting out stuff strewn about. Before I had the chance to tire of Trials HD and change game a nice lady ushered us out and into a mini cinema. I was sad to leave my squishy motorbike man, but even sadder that the only other woman in the midst of an Xbox community event was just there to chaperone us about.

The mini cinema in the Soho Hotel. Sadly all the chairs were red when I was there.

I hadn’t given Green Zone much attention except to acknowledge it as a potential thing to see if I was really bored. I enjoy Bourne but somehow the tag line of ‘Bourne gone epic’ on every bus made me suspicious of its actual worth. Of course we had to start with the obligatory introduction from our host, Xbox Live’s  community manager. He informed us that Live is about more than just gaming, it is a whole social experience. With the launch of Facebook and downloadable movies people could live their online lives through the console. In the month of March this service will be even more special due to the addition of all three Bourne films available for download. So there.

Yey, it's Matty D in all his camo glory.

The film started, I was way too close to the screen and felt slightly overwhelmed, then it all made sense.The first 20 minutes of Green Zone are like sitting behind your mate playing some three year old next gen FPS. It’s dry and dusty, there are palm trees, the soldiers are moving about in small groups with the leader providing one sentence dialogue and plenty of wavey hand movements, and the explosions are big, grainy and yellow. Ubisoft or EA could just run it as their next advertising campaign for just about anything.  Sadly a gamer would probably demand more action, more realistic characters, more stuff on screen, and generally just a bit more happening. I can see that it is the perfect film to sit a bunch of Live gamers in front of. Presumably the audience was all made up of competition winners from various sites and forums that Microsoft had approached, and presumably they were asked to run a community competition on an FPS to select the attendees. So logically the only way to amuse said crowd is to stick with what they know.

The rest of the film felt more like a movie, but still lacked an interesting plot or characters with any depth. If you are tempted to go and see it in the cinema may I recommend that you just rent the Bourne trilogy and treat yourself to something worth taking a few hours over. Then again, maybe this was the whole point and I have just fulfilled a marketing dream.  Microsoft show a rubbish film that wets your appetite for Bourne, you go home to the comfort of Live, and lo and behold look whats on offer for the tiny price of your soul….

Why is Seinfeld so popular? I have never understood it, each episode seems to be a tedium of very little happening, and yet even I have seen the infamous Frogger episode where George Contanza racks up an impressive score before the console is hit by a truck. I guess this must be an episode of choice for re-run TV channels.

As far as I am concerned the Seinfeld ’high score’ was a pretty minor event in the life of man. For a start it wasn’t real, and it doesnt quite rank up there with mass extinctions, or horrific acts of terror, it was just a bit of mundane TV… and yet it is everywhere. Damn all the people (like me) who have put fingers to keyboards and bashed out the name of that show. Damn all the people who have hosted pictures of actors making fictional gaming trivia scores.

I demand that Pat gets the real attention he deserves. I want to know his story behind the score, how long did it take him, how pleased was he to get such an amazing score, and why the hell was he still playing Frogger when so many better games now exist? But all I can read about is Seinfeld, and maybe that is what he wanted, his name immortalised along with TV elites… suddenly I feel myself losing respect for the guy, another soul lost to the world of their sitting room.

So this is the heart warming story of a virus going viral. Ohhhhhh.

I have been playing sneeze, a delightful little game where you are a virus controlling some pathetic human host. The aim of the game is to make your host sneeze on some unsuspecting passers by to spread the virus. Each person you infect has the potential to sneeze on others and infect them. The more people you infect the better you do, easy peasy. There is some thought to put into who you sneeze at; old people don’t walk very far, and adults may have immunity to the virus; but you can pass the levels with pretty much no brain power at all.

Fire that snot!

This little office time waster was originally commissioned to teach children how germs spread. It cost an extraordinary amount of money for something that looks like a school child knocked it up in their lunch break just to gross out their mates. It managed to be fairly popular as these things go, and kids kinda liked how quickly you could skip through the science facts and get on with spraying snot about the place.

Then swine flu came along and changed everything, suddenly the game went viral and people all over the world were playing it and passing it on. Sudden success made people question it and, as with most games in the world, a lot of people don’t like it. As an educational tool it was targeted by those who think children should only be taught about puppy dogs and candy canes. The makers were interviewed for American television and found themselves entering into the ethical battle of ‘is it socially acceptable to teach children to sneeze on other people?’.

Ummmm, tastes like porky death.

Interestingly this game has really only been noticed because of swine flu. A quick glance at Wikipedia says that it was commissioned to teach people about swine flu, which is a filthy lie. Forum links to it exclaim it as a swine flu animation, which again it is not. The game came first, so maybe swine flu was then invented to increase its publicity, who knows.

Right story time over, I am off to warm up in case I start to grow trotters and thus lose the ability to type. If you want to join the hype don’t forget to get your vaccination lest a heard of swine trample you to death over the Christmas holiday and check out Sneeze: http://www.routesgame.com/games/?challengeId=2

Some children have the unfortunate ability to destroy their own pancreas, ending up with life long diabetes. This is a charming disease where you can’t regulate your own blood sugar leading to ulcers, nerve damage, and a strong possibility of slipping into a life threatening coma… the only way to avoid these problems is monitoring the sugar levels in the blood and regular injections of insulin. Unfortunately children are not very good at monitoring things and prefer to mess about and generally take life a lot less seriously than an adult would.

Diabetes management

Luckily gaming might just be able to save the day and slap a little discipline into those care free tots.

A sneaky blood glucose meter company have come up with the cunning plan of making a meter that plugs straight into a DS or DS lite. They call it Didget. All you do is get some blood  into the Didget, look at the reading, and decide if you need a needle full of insulin in your side.

Super Didget

That’s the diabetic bit done and dusted, now here comes the gaming:

Plug the Didget into a DS and enter a password protected online world. The Didget tells the DS if regular daily testing has been carried out and if blood sugar levels have remained within optimum ranges. Regular testing earns points that can be used to purchase in game items, unlock mini-games and customize the Didget online world. Managing to keep blood glucose levels in the optimum range results in additional rewards.

Plugged in

In theory this virtual area is so good that children will want to keep their blood testing regular and thus keep up  a stream of fresh gaming content. It creates a unique virtual environment for children with diabetes where they can meet other children and game in a customisable landscape. Hopefully this will lead to well trained little diabetics who know how and when to test themselves letting Mummy and Daddy get on with other things… like playing the blood free Xbox.

Well my life was grey and dull, for about two months now I have been stuck in a game rut. I started things, tried to like them, found that I really didn’t, persevered not really wanting to play them, but in the end I was just getting bored. I had slipped into a slow grinding gaming apathy.

Worse still the games that I was managing to squeeze some enjoyment out of were party games. I was becoming the loud obnoxious girl who ruled the room as long as there was a glass of wine in her hand and a stupidly shaped controller available. I hate that girl!

Ummm, manly.

Thank God for Batman: Arkham Asylum. It is all the great things Ready-Uppers have been blogging it to be. I wanted it so badly but held myself back because of the ever growing pile of unfinished tat, but in a moment of frivolity I splashed out and took it home. I love the story, the characters are spot on, the combat is good and there are secrets! So many little things to stumble upon and make you feel you are creating your own gaming experience. The girls are sexy, the men are hard (or wonderfully insane) and it’s gritty and dark too.

Of course we all know Batman is the saviour (and ironically the destroyer) of Gotham, and now he has become my saviour too. I once again have that drive to run home and cross up on a cushion ready to game. The evenings slip into nights and I go to sleep dreaming of how hard that fight with Killer Croc is going to be. I just hope it stays this way and keeps me invigorated for the next game, then I can clear out the pile of unwanted gaming rubbish, banish the hellish party games and reinstate the gaming karma.

So what happens when you amalgamate the two? No, I am not talking about the child and the evil seed, no no, I mean the two most potent powers of evil: Games and rock. Oh yes, the two purest forms of nasty. A sauce so strong it is sure to create bitter twisted swine flu carrying zombie lambs out of the cutest and most innocent of all fluffy things. Well I can tell you what happens, I can tell you because I have been down that road.

I harmlessly bought Guitar Hero Metallica last month. No crime there I’m sure you will agree. I then started to play said game, still no problem. I then realised that I hate Guitar Hero and always have because I am awful at it. So I tried one of the other options available to me. I got myself a mic and attempted the vocals… we are now verging on a crime.

Of course any game that involves large plastic props lends itself nicely to having friends over, so I invited people. My friends came and they played bass and guitar while I ’sang’. It was good, we were happy.

Sadly not everyone was happy, the evil began to spawn in my flat and it seeped through the floor… It seems that downstairs were beginning to hate ‘Sanatarium’. They were probably beginning to foster the thought that I was not such a nice tenant after all and that maybe I was  someone that they should not have smiled at in the hallway or lent half a cup of sugar to.

So finally it all came to a head. I had some friends over and we were watching a movie. It was about 12:30 when the final credits kicked in and the soundtrack notched up a level. This was clearly the final straw and the little flat shook as downstairs banged on my door. I opened it to the sound of: ‘All this ****ing Guitar Hero, it’s just too ****ing much, turn it off!’

It was hard to take, my lips began to form the sentence: ’you fool we are watching Lost Boys as homage to the mini vampire season we are having. If you can’t tell the difference between credits and Guitar Hero maybe I should just give you an all night lesson on how to distinguish the two.’

But I didn’t say it. I had not let the evil get me. I was very refrained, very civilised and I let the game take all the blame.