If you are any of these things (and, let’s be honest, who wouldn’t be at least one?), then you will assuredly want to attend the Arc System Clash, a chance for fans to meet the creators of BlazBlue and Guilty Gear. Toshimichi Mori and Daisuke Ishiwatari will be on hand to meet fans from 3pm on Saturday, March 5th, at HMV Gamerbase at London’s Trocadero. They’ll be kicking off with a short presentation before moving on to a Q&A session and a signing session. You’ll also get the opportunity to check out Arcana Heart 3.

Toshimichi Mori

Daisuke Ishiwatari

Spaces are limited, we’re told, so if you want to attend this awesome event, head over to the Gamerbase site and register.

And so, in no particular order, and with no real need for the foregoing rambling preamble, here are some of my favourite board (or, perhaps more accurately, tabletop) games. Some of these have also shown up on gaming systems in one form or another, but I tend to feel that they usually lose something in the translation.

Ticket To Ride

Days of Wonder

Available in USA, Europe, Germany, and Nordic Country flavours, this game is often recommended as being the soft introduction, the “gateway drug” if you will, to get people who don’t currently play board games to start playing them. It is simple enough in concept; collect train cards, earn points for collecting railway routes by spending the train cards, get bonus points by making particularly long routes, and win the game by having the most points when one of the players is unable to make any more routes. The strategy lies in blocking off key routes to prevent other players being able to make connections, while also making side routes to prevent your opponents from guessing your bonus routes and blocking you. Easy to play, no complex turn mechanics, no dice, only takes an hour or two for a full game. I greatly enjoy it.

Mwahahaha: A Card Game of Mad Scientists and Global Domination

White Wolf Games

At pretty much the far end of the complexity scale from Ticket To Ride lies Mwahahaha, a game I loved immediately on seeing the title and continue to adore to this day. It is not an easy game to play, as there are a lot of mechanics to master on the way to constructing your chosen Doomsday Device and holding the world to ransom.

It’s a long game (plan on spending several hours the first time you play), and not without its flaws; the rules are complex and should have been explained more clearly, and the production values could do with being a touch higher. On the other hand, I can’t think of any other game where you get to be Hitler’s brain in the body of an ape.

Kill Doctor Lucky

Cheapass Games / Titanic Games

While Cluedo is about working out whodunnit, Kill Doctor Lucky is about making sure the one what dun it is you. Not as easy as one might think; as the good Doctor’s name implies, he’s imbued with almost supernatural amounts of good fortune, and the other players will constantly thwart you as you attempt to off him with such diverse weaponry as a Civil War Sabre and a Tight Hat. Fun and easy to play.

All of these should be available in any decent board game emporium; failing that, there are any number of web-based retailers catering to the board game enthusiast.

Enjoy.

Why does it take place in a world where nothing can happen unless it happens on a dirt race track?

This isn’t a particularly serious problem. I’m starting off slowly. But it is mildly ridiculous that when homicidal maniacs are pursuing you with the intent of turning your vehicle into a pile of mangled metal and minced flesh, the way you defeat them is by completing eight laps of the track.

Why are the “simple mode” controls all on the left side of the pad?

Steering on the left stick, brake on the left trigger. Again, hardly a major gripe, but it just seems weird. On the other hand, if you want any degree of success in this game at all, you’ll be using the advanced controls anyway.

You'll be seeing this screen a lot.

Why can you only have four cars in your garage at a time?

Now we’re starting to get to the real deal-breakers. It seems to me that it would have been better for the player if, once you’d earned a car, you could just upgrade and use it whenever you wanted. As it is, you have to choose carefully which ones you want to have in your garage and which ones to remove, which also leads on to the next question.

Why, when I swap out a car that’s in my garage, do I lose all the upgrades I’ve bought for it?

This is not a joke. If you’ve spent a lot of money on upgrading a car, and you swap it out for another one from the junk pile, you lose all of your upgrades. I’m pretty sure this was done to require the player to grind more in order to re-buy upgrades (to artificially prolong the gameplay, in other words) and the only way to effectively do that is to re-play one of the low-level easy races over and over again.  Note to game developers: This isn’t fun. Stop doing it. If  your game is too short, make more of it. Or leave it short and charge less. Either would be preferable to this.

Why are there cars with close-range weapons when the guns are clearly so much more effective?

In a game where some cars have guns and others have chainsaws and circular saw blades, the melee-range weapons had better be damned effective to make up for their massive range penalty. They’re not.

Why do the speed and grip stats on cars appear to have no effect on their speediness or grippiness?

This is one of the most annoying things about this game. If I switch to a car that has up to five stars for speed and grip, and I pay to upgrade it to those five stars, and I then enter a race against cars which have a maximum of three stars in those categories, I had damn well better go faster and corner better than they do. Otherwise, what’s the point in spending all that cash on upgrades?

I couldn't agree more, Alex.

Why does my car just spin out with apparently no provocation? For that matter, why does it sometimes fly up into the air?

Seriously.

So, one has to wonder, why were these questions not asked? And if they were, why weren’t they addressed? On first sight Scrap Metal’s a fun little Super-Sprint-With-Guns type game, and as a long-time fan of Super Sprint I think that’s a concept which is well worth exploring; that just means that when I found out what this game actually is, I was all the more disappointed.

Anyway.

Being a fan of the first game, I was naturally very interested when Square Enix invited Ready Up to their offices in Wimbledon to take a look at the sequel. When I arrived, they basically handed me the DualShock 2, said “have fun”, and left me to it for about five hours. Here are my impressions.

The plot, in brief, is as follows:

An evil dictator has taken over the island of Panau, and a fellow agent has disappeared in the area. Rico’s job is to get in there and sort everything out, mainly by BLOWING STUFF UP.

The new Ryanair "Cheap as Chips" package.

You must ingratiate yourself with the three local underworld gangs in order to obtain more information about the people you’re looking for. There are agency missions (advance the story), stronghold missions (expand the area of influence of one of the gangs and unlock more side missions) and side missions (races etc). In order to gain access to more agency missions, stronghold missions, and black market goods, you need to earn Chaos. You earn Chaos by BLOWING STUFF UP. In order to buy upgrades for weapons and vehicles, you collect upgrade parts from around the map and obtain them from completing missions. In order to buy the weapons and vehicles themselves, you need money. How do you get money? BLOW STUFF UP.

The grapple and parachute from the first game return, but have been significantly improved. The grapple can be used to haul Rico towards vehicles or buildings, or to pull enemies off high places to their death; there is also an additional mode which allows you to tether one thing to another, usually with hilarious results. It seems like pretty much anything in the game can be tethered to anything else, which means that the different ways in which you can torment your enemies are legion. Which is nice. You can also tether statues to vehicles to pull them down, tether cars to helicopters and smash them into stuff, and tether enemy vehicles to various bits of scenery in order to get them, rapidly, off your tail.

Sometimes, for a change, Rico liked to take the bus to work.

The parachute is now a stunt ‘chute which can be deployed and retracted at any time, and with practice this can be combined with the grapple to quickly vault into the air. This turns out to be pretty much the fastest way to get around an enemy base when you’re looking for more stuff to blow up. You can also, once the ‘chute is deployed, use the grapple to gain speed and altitude, and it’s possible to get around most of the island this way. I spent quite a bit of time just using the grapple to climb buildings, then jumping off them and faffing about with the parachute.

Another neat thing for the more OCD-inclined of us is the near-constant updating of statistics at the top of the screen; hang kills (tethering enemies to buildings and then shooting them), juggle kills (yanking enemies towards you and then shooting them), headshots, unique vehicles driven, petrol stations exploded, there seem to be statistics for practically anything you can do in the game and it will keep you up to date on how well or how many of them you’ve done.

A lot of fun can be had simply by failing in hilarious ways, like spending several minutes grappling my way up a tall mountain so I could BASE jump off it, only to be smeared across a ridge that was slightly higher than it had looked from above. Or when, during an early mission, I set myself up to pilot a helicopter right up to the side of a building, leap out, and grapple in through a window in a totally awesome fashion, but entirely missed with the grapple and went sailing past the side of the building looking decidedly less than awesome.

It occurred to Steve that today was probably going to be one of those days.

I did find that, on occasion, aggressive use of the grapple and/or parachute could lead to Rico being stuck inside some scenery; hopefully this will be fixed in the final version. Other than that, Just Cause 2 looks like it should be splendid fun and I’m looking forward to getting my hands on it.

In summary: BLOWING STUFF UP.

Just Cause 2 is due for release on the 26th of March.

Buttons. Lots of buttons.

The Naga differs from other mice principally in the addition of a twelve-button keypad to its left side. By default, these are mapped to the “number row” across the top of the keyboard, but a switch on the base of the mouse changes the mapping to that of the numeric keypad instead. This gives you thumb-level access to the skills you’ve mapped to those keys in your MMO of choice, and if that choice is World of Warcraft or Warhammer: Age of Reckoning, Razer also supplies an Addon to help you manage your buttons in-game.

It’s a good-looking piece of hardware. All the buttons emit a blue glow, and the Razer logo on the back gently pulses; very pretty, but completely covered by your hand when you’re actually using it as a mouse. For numbers fans, the mouse has a 5,600dpi sensor, a 1ms response rate, and a 24-position click wheel. For non-numbers fans, those are quite good numbers.

Among the bewildering array of options in the driver software is the ability to switch the lights in the keypad and mouse buttons on and off independently, which may prove useful if you find the keypad lights distracting or just too warm. There are also the usual non-aesthetic options, including adjusting the sensitivity for when you’re taking a break from your MMO to play something a bit more twitch-based. The Razer software also allows independent adjustment of X and Y sensitivity in case you feel the need to tweak those individually. I left these settings at their defaults, as they worked fine on the desktop and in World of Warcraft.

In terms of “being a mouse”, I have to compare the Naga with my usual mousing weapons of choice, the Logitech G5 and MX500 series mice. I like the Logitechs because they’re good quality, reliable, and a good size for my hand; smaller mice tend to give me hand cramps and can bring back my tendonitis (RSI is no fun, kids: avoid it if you can). The Naga suffers a little here, for me, by being slightly smaller than the Logitech mice, but I used it extensively throughout the recent Ready Up redesign and didn’t encounter any problems. So, for regular desktop and web site construction use, the Naga holds up well. However, the placement of the keypad on the side of the Naga necessitates the shifting of mouse buttons 4 and 5 from their usual position under the thumb to a new spot alongside button 1, so if you’re used to using those for web browsing you’re probably going to find that frustrating, at least initially.

Side-by-side: the chunky Logitech G5 and the slightly more svelte Naga.

The purpose of this mouse, however, is to help you in your MMO mastery, which is where the keypad comes in. My thumb naturally rests above the top row of the pad, and there are raised edges on the 5 and 11 keys which help you to determine which row of the pad you’re currently on. Razer also supply a number of stick-on rubber pads to help you feel your way around the keypad, although they recommend that you remove these once you’ve become accustomed to using it.

The main problem here is one of scale. I mentioned that the mouse was slightly smaller than I might usually like; this is, according to Razer, by design, but it makes the keypad buttons feel a bit cramped. Conversely, the bottom row of buttons can’t be reached without folding the thumb, which makes that row difficult to reach. The conflicting needs of spacing the buttons enough to make them usable without spacing them so as to make some of them unreachable have led to an uneasy compromise which, for me at least, makes the pad awkward to use. With practice, I think the thumbpad could prove useful in-game – the first two rows are certainly within reach – but my hand isn’t the right shape for me to be able to use it without problems.

The other issue with it is that, once again, the altered placement of mouse buttons 4 and 5 makes them awkward to use, and as someone who does use them in-game (for autorun and jump) that’s a bit annoying. Again, this could be overcome with practice, but I’m just too lazy. I think I’ll continue to try, though.

The basic premise of Defense Grid is fairly standard tower defence stuff: aliens will enter the map, proceed to your stock of power cores, nick them, and leave. Your job is to place your towers in such a way that the aliens all die before they are able to make off with any of your precious cores. Some of the maps are fairly straightforward paths with tower emplacements alongside, while others are more puzzle-oriented and allow you to place towers in the path of the aliens to force them to follow a longer route.

Eat hot leaden death, alien scum!

Aliens come in a variety of forms, from weak aliens in large groups through to large slow bosses, with various cloaked, shielded and flying variants in between. When killed, they grant extra resources which you can then use to purchase more towers.

As is traditional in any tower defence game, there are several different types of tower, each of which has two upgrade levels available to it. These become available to you one or two at a time as you progress through the 20-level campaign and, depending on your play style, will be either essential or largely redundant most of the time.

"Quiet as you can, lads, I think we might get away with this."

Gun towers are cheap and therefore useful in blocking off sections of the map; they will almost always be useful, at least at the start of a level. Laser towers have a slightly longer range and melt aliens’ faces off. Cannon towers have a longer range again. Missile towers are your primary anti-air weapon but cannot be used against ground targets. Meteor towers spit FLAMING BALLS OF DEATH. Inferno towers project flaming flames of flame, with a short range. Temporal towers slow down aliens caught in their area of effect. Concussion towers set off myriad small explosions around them. Tesla towers unleash a bolt of lightning which is more powerful the longer they are able to charge up. Finally, the command tower reveals stealthed aliens in its area of effect and also slightly increases income gained from aliens killed in that area.

Unlike a lot of TD games, Defense Grid is presented in full zoomable 3D, and very good-looking it is too. Generous use of particle effects make all the explosions look pretty, although too many meteor towers can lead to it being difficult to see what’s going on. But there again, that many meteor towers also tends to lead to lots of dead aliens, so it’s all good.

"Does anyone else smell burning?"

Sound is good; some nice atmospheric music and meaty gunfire effects are complemented by the voice of your world-weary assistant, a general who was uploaded into a computer at the end of the last war in order to help fight the next and occasionally flashes back to the horrors he encountered. Or blathers about raspberries. Mainly he’s there to shout encouraging phrases about the efficacy of your weapons, and he does so with gusto.

As remarked earlier, there are twenty missions in the main campaign, and an additional four in the new XBLA-only “Borderlands” mission pack. Once you’ve completed a mission in the story mode, new mission modes for that map are unlocked, which vary from one map to another. These include (but are not limited to) modes which only allow non-ungraded towers, modes which give you a fixed budget to work from, and “grinder” modes where you must survive 99 waves of aliens rather than the story mode’s more usual 10-30 waves.

Fear not. We are here to help. Because games come in a mind-boggling variety of shapes and sizes, and there are more games available to play in your browser than any sane person would contemplate shaking a stick at. Allow me to be your guide and show you but a tiny fraction of the huge number of games that are out there which you could be playing right now.

Let us begin with shooting.

Death vs Monstars

A nice little arena shooter, with purchaseable powerups and a quirky aim method – you fire in the opposite direction to the direction in which you move, or can hold down a mouse button to lock the firing angle and strafe. Takes a bit of getting used to, but thoroughly enjoyable.

Desktop Tower Defence

A Tower Defence game. If you don’t know what a tower defence game is, well, it’s like this: you build towers in order to defend something. Generally the objective is to prevent any of the enemy from reaching the exit of the level alive. Desktop Tower Defence does things a little differently from most, in that your towers also form obstacles to force the enemies to take a longer path through the level, thus keeping them exposed to attack for longer. This one can suck up hours of your life.

Minotaur China Shop

A heart-warming yet poignant tale of one Minotaur and his simple wish: to own and operate a china shop, serving the needs of his mythical creature friends. Sadly, he is a little bit clumsy and is also unfortunately prone to outbursts of rage, smashing everything in his path. You must help him make sales without wrecking his shop too often; failing that, you must make sure he makes a decent profit from his Rage Insurance.

Unlike the other games here this one isn’t Flash, and so will require another browser plugin to run. It’s worth it, though, especially as you would then also be able to play some of Flashbang’s other excellent games, like the splendid Off-Road Velociraptor Safari.

Robot Dinosaurs That Shoot Beams When They Roar

You don’t need more than the title, surely?

OK, fine. It’s a shmup. You control one of the titular Robot Dinosaurs (Dinomite or Tyrannosaurus-X). You move with the mouse and press the button to roar. When he roars, he shoots beams. Beams kill things. It’s amusing and short.

These are but four of many; people keep making more and more of the things all the time. Check out sites like blurst.com, ArmorGames, Kongregate, ArcadeBomb and Newgrounds for many, many more.  I shall no doubt bring more of them to your attention in the future.

Batman enjoyed making the Joker stand in a hole.

Batman is one of the most interesting comic book heroes around. He’s your regular everyday millionaire tycoon driven to forever bring criminals to justice after watching his parents murdered in front of him when he was a small child. Just like anyone, really. But he’s also been around for ages in a variety of different formats, some dark and moody, some a bit campy and Adam West-y; as a result, most people at least know who the Dark Knight is. As he’s 70 years old this year (and still looking very sprightly) what better way to celebrate than to release a video game? And so it was that about a month ago Ready Up was invited to get a hands-on look at a decent-sized chunk of Eidos’ forthcoming title Batman: Arkham Asylum, and on one blistering day in late June John and myself went along for a butcher’s. This is what we found.

Arkham Asylum is a third-person action game, and drips with style right from the thundery opening cut-scene. The character design is strong and distinctive (Joker and Harley standing out in particular), albeit with a hint of the usual Unreal Engine shiny-skin uncanny valley effect. The voice cast is largely drawn from “Batman: The Animated Series” (although the look is completely different) and they reprise their roles well. Mark Hamill’s Joker is excellent as usual.

"Mind if I rest my foot here for a minute?"

Unlike a lot of his previous video game appearances, Arkham Asylum has more of a focus on Batman’s detective abilities as well as his fighting skills. Special vision modes for his cowl help the caped crusader to spot clues in the environment, and is often used during the game to track people, e.g. by their fingerprints or alcoholic breath. It also reveals destructible walls and the location of enemies, along with their heart rate, state of mind, and whether or not they’re armed.

The level design is excellent. Arkham Island is suitably dark and gothic, with gargoyles and pointy bits all over, and offers plenty of opportunities to use the grappling hook to attain a high position. I particularly enjoyed the ability to swoop down from a high location, kick a guy in the face, sleeper hold him, and then use the grapple to zip away before watching his friends run over to him in a panic. Then doing it again. A later upgrade allows Batman to hang upside-down from gargoyles, grab enemies from above, and leave them trussed-up and dangling from his perch. Which is nice.

Sometimes you can’t get by entirely on grappling hook and boots to the face, however, which is where the rest of the combat comes in. It feels good. The left strick controls direction and the main attack button delivers punches and kicks, which connect solidly with various parts of the opponent’s anatomy. Darting around a group of opponents to lay into them looks very stylish. A second button is used for to counter an opponent’s attack and once I got the hang of the timing, Batman began to deliver some pretty brutal-looking counterattacks. A third button is used to swish Batman’s cape into the face of nearby enemies, stunning them; for some enemies this is necessary in order to open them up to regular attacks.

Once an opponent is downed, or your combo rating is high enough, Batman can deliver a finishing move. While he doesn’t kill, he definitely incapacitates, and the finishers are, as the name implies, pretty final. They will often involve gristly noises and, in one memorable case, brought sympathetic tears to the eyes. The last enemy in a fight will go down in slow-motion however you finish him off, too.

Steve suddenly had the weird feeling that he was being watched.

Abilities can be upgraded with XP earned from defeating enemies and finding collectables; Some finishers are unlocked this way, along with upgrades to armour and the various gadgets you’ll be using along the way. Earned XP also replenishes your health, although it will only do so once combat is over. Batman’s costume also shows wear as time goes on, with rents appearing in his cape due to all the insane people trying to kill him.

An action game probably wouldn’t be an action game without the odd boss encounter, and Arkham Asylum is no exception. A number of Batman’s enemies are at large in Arkham and we ran into a few of them during our time with the game. There are also a couple of visually impressive set-pieces to look forward to.

We played from the beginning through to the end of Chapter Four (at which point we were politely but firmly told that we were Not Allowed to go any further), and were both very impressed by what we saw. The combat is fluid and flows well; the game both looks and sounds great; the characterisation is excellent and the locations are suitably dark and moody. Batman: Arkham Asylum is looking very good indeed, and I’m looking forward to playing it upon its release later this year.

Bloody kids today, don’t know they’re born, when I was your age, etc.

For the benefit of today’s ill-educated youth, The Secret of Monkey Island was one of the great adventure games from the heyday of LucasArts, in a time when they made a lot of great adventure games and before they switched over entirely to churning out crappy Star Wars tie-ins. It was well written, it was very funny, and it was also – on occasion – punishingly obtuse.

The Special Edition now downloadable from the Xbox Live marketplace is that game, only with shiny high def graphics and new audio, including fully-voiced dialogue. In fact, if you don’t want the shiny high def graphics and new audio, a press of the Back button gets you the old blocky VGA graphics and AdLib-style music. You can flip back and forth at will. It’s fun to do if only to see how bad things used to look.

PICTURED: Some pirates.

You are Guybrush Threepwood, wannabe pirate and proto-swashbuckler, who comes to the island of Mêlée in order to seek your fortune. During the course of your adventure you will seek wondrous treasures, learn the art of insult swordfighting, battle the undead, meet a dodgy used-ship salesman, and (eventually) get the girl.

The screen, by default, is free of clutter, with just A and B button prompts at the bottom of the screen (which will most often correspond to “walk to” and “look at” respectively). A press of the left bumper brings up the verb list, with the right bumper displaying the contents of Guybrush’s apparently bottomless pockets. Compared to the mouse control of the original, this is a bit on the clunky side. The thumbstick isn’t an adequate substitute, and the game does suffer a little for it, especially on one puzzle where taking too long to do something means you’ll have to restart the puzzle from scratch. It’s not an insurmountable problem, but it does sometimes annoy.

The Secret of Monkey Island is a point-and-click adventure of the old school. What that means is that you will need to pick up everything that isn’t nailed down, because at some point you might need it. It also means that you’ll probably get quite frustrated at times because you can’t work out which particular arcane combination of items is required to solve a particular puzzle.

NOT SHOWN: Chunky VGA original.

Every time I got really stuck in this version, I found myself remembering that I had previously got stuck at all the same places in the original, which probably says more about how far I’ve come in the last 19 years than anything else. One problem this version also shares with the original is that there are a couple of items which are quite hard to see against the background. Remember to check the ground near the chickens. I shall say no more. Just remember:  chickens.

There is, however, a quite clever hint system built in to this version. Holding down the X button will show a hint on screen. There are three levels of hintage, culminating in a bright yellow arrow pointing you in the direction you need to go. It’s also impossible to die, except for one puzzle where it’s just extremely unlikely, so perseverence will generally see you through.

In many ways this is the ideal remake. Not only did they pick a great game to refurbish, but should nostalgia get the best of you and you start to think that the original was better than this, a simple button press grounds you back in reality.

This may not go well.

It’s not a very long game by today’s standards; it’s possible to blow through the whole thing in less than three hours (and there is an achievement for doing so) but you’d miss out on a great deal of the funny dialogue if you did this. The best part about LucasArts adventures was always the writing, and that has certainly held up well.

I’m not 100% sold on some of the new art style, and some of the voice acting is less than stellar (commonplace when American voice actors try to do “English” accents) but overall it really is the best of both worlds: a game with great writing which now has great graphics and sound to go with it. I hope it does well, partly because I think it’s a great game and partly because it might lead to other classic LucasArts adventures getting the makeover treatment.

So I hear on the Internets that there’s a new Mechwarrior game coming. I found out about this a few days ago. As you may know, I quite like my big robot games; my subsequent internal monologue went something like this:

New Mechwarrior game! Awesome!

Christ, I hope it doesn’t suck.

Woo! New Mechwarrior game!

Hm. These developers worked on Revenge of the Fallen. I hear that game’s not good.

Hey, Jordan K. Weisman! This might be proper Battletech!

Cool, a Warhammer!

Awesome trailer.

Maybe I should be cautiously optimistic about this.

NEW MECHWARRIOR GAME!

If this turns out to be another MechAssault 2, I will stab someone.

I am a long-time Battletech fan; I played the original board games way back when and have played almost every video game based on the property that’s ever been released.

Yes, even The Crescent Hawk’s Inception. That game was awesome.

I remember reading that Jordan Weisman, one of the creators of the original game, had recovered the licence from the now-defunct FASA Studio in 2007, and at the time thinking “cool, now maybe we’ll get a new Battletech video game that doesn’t suck”. Then nothing happened for a while, and I forgot all about it, as is my way.

Then along comes this Q&A at IGN and the accompanying trailer and my teenage self wakes up inside my brain and starts jumping up and down and shouting about how awesome this is going to be and my cynical adult self is really, really worried that it won’t be and is steeling himself for another MechAssault-2-esque disappointment.

Some of you may at this point be wondering “why all the hate for MechAssault 2, Simes? It wasn’t that bad a game, surely?”

Well, if I may digress briefly: MechAssault 2 was a good game. But for all the trappings, it wasn’t a Battletech game and that was what disappointed me most about it. If they’d made that game but invented their own universe for the story to take place in, I would probably have been happier with it. I tend to feel that if you’re going to play in an established universe you should not throw out the bits of how that universe works which disagree with the story you want to tell; if your story doesn’t fit with the universe you’re trying to tell it in, that means it’s not the right story for that universe, not that the universe is wrong. That said, I’d probably still have given up at the stupid near-indestructible giant jumpy spider robot even if the game had been set in a universe where those actually existed.

So, anyway, Mechwarrior. From the Q&A it seems like they are much more keen to be like previous Mechwarrior games than like MechAssault and I hope they bring back the customisation that I enjoy so much. I wouldn’t mind a Mechwarrior 4-style hardpoint system for people who don’t want to deal with all the details, but I at least want the option of having all that customisation available. They also say that they’re rebooting the franchise entirely, which is why this game won’t be called Mechwarrior 5 but will be set in 3015, pretty much right at the beginning of the “playable” timeline in the Battletech universe.

(And on the subject of Mechwarrior 4, they’ll apparently soon be giving away Mechwarrior 4 and all its expansions for nothing at battletech.com. Seems like a pretty good deal.)

So, yeah. 3015, classic BattleMechs, “action sim”, and a trailer which claims to be in-game footage and looks pretty cool. I’m going to go with “cautiously optimistic” and see what happens.

We had many excellent entries for our Smashing Things With Hammers photo competition; but, in the end, there can be only one winner.

Er, ten. There can be only ten winners. Whether it be cruelty to animals (real or fake), giant eggs, or actual self-harm, you’ll find it here. Thanks, folks; your dedication to the cause is an inspiration to us all.

So, without further ado, here are the winning entries:

Firstly, Johnny, who is either very small or knows someone with a very large chicken:

"And two enormous slices of toast, please."

Next, Kapzer, with some good sledgehammer technique:

Take this, accursed vegetables!

Rob’s photo is, appropriately, titled “Dedication”:

Please, hammer, don't hurt 'em.

Mark brings together cruelty, motion blur and a croquet mallet in a single scene.

If Tom Nook offers you a mortgage, say no.

Excellent motion blur action from Alex:

Our second “simulated cruelty” winner comes from Mark Boss:

There's something unnerving about this.

The Rook’s entry paints a picture of a man truly dedicated to his work.

Another of Tom Nook's debt collectors.

Bonus points to Dave for using an actual Red Faction Gorilla.

"Do you hear something?"

Adrian says Munkeh was “the cutest thing I could find as the neighbour’s cat wasn’t around”…

"Johnny Vegas sends his regards."

… Linda’s bunny Bob was not so lucky.

I don't think that towel's going to be big enough.

Thank you very much to everyone who entered; prizes will be on the way very soon!

I thought I should write up some stuff from the player’s point of view, while throwing in some of our statistics from the event as gleaned from criteriongames.com, and finally thanking, once again, the people without whom the whole thing would have been impossible or at the very least a hell of a lot harder.

So. Let us first speak of Paradise City and the things we did there. Our initial plan was “we’ll start off with some challenges and see how we go from there” and, as it turned out, we did challenges most of the time, because there’s enough variety there to keep going for quite a while. When the challenges started to get a bit samey, we’d throw in a few games of Marked Man or Road Rage to change the pace a little, and then we’d go back to doing more challenges again. Some of the team had never played Burnout Paradise before, and the rest of us hadn’t spent significant time with the game since before they began putting out big updates (and we deliberately did not play before the record attempt), so the timed challenges were new to everyone.

We also played with the bikes for a few hours. It must be said that while they add a bit of variety, they are definitely not the game’s strong point. Some of the team didn’t like them at all, and all of us expressed a definite preference for the cars. So back to cars it was.

During the whole of our time in Paradise City, two of the slots in the game were open for people to join us; there was a spare 360 at the end of our area in ESC Gaming where people present could sit and join us in the game, and we were also taking friend requests and sending out invites to people on Xbox Live during the event. Most of the time at least one of our two game slots were taken, either by people at ESC or people online, and it was nice to see so many jumping into our game to support and be crashed into by us.

Now, stats. Oddly, Criterion’s site doesn’t have stats for the number of challenges you’ve completed, so I can only guess based on what I remember of the event; I think we got through around 150 of the 490 which were available. However, they do have other stats, so here are a few, with our highest and lowest scorers.

• Takedowns: Martin (332) / Kirsten (227)
• Times taken down: Shaz (334) / Kirsten (194)
• Crashes: Dan (1279) / Shaz (808)
• Jumps found: Kirsten (37) / Simes & Fran & Martin (30)
• Smashes smashed: Kirsten (358) / Martin (279)
• Billboards broken: Kirsten (72) / Fran (57)

From this we can conclude that Martin is the most vicious of us, with Kirsten the least vicious; Kirsten is also by far the keenest explorer.

Additionally, Shaz seemed to have rivalries going not only within the six of us but with several of the people who joined, leading to a lot of people taking her down. Kirsten, conversely, was wise enough to stay out of people’s way a lot more than anyone else.

Finally, Shaz (with the help of her nippy Toy Jansen P12) was able to avoid smashing into walls more than anyone else, while Dan’s preference for wrecking his car to get a fresh one whenever the paint got scratched makes him the crashiest member of the team.

“But what,” you must be asking, “of world records in general? How does it feel? What should I do if I want to set one myself?”

After being sleep-deprived for over 24 hours, the knowledge that you and your pals have succeeded in doing what you set out to do is a big rush. I am proud of what we did; I know there are a lot of people who will not consider it to be much of an achievement, and I know that there are many things more difficult than the thing we did. I am nevertheless proud of what we did and of the other people on the team with me, and I feel honoured to share in this achievement with them. I think they’re all awesome.

If you want to set one yourself, you should. Talk to the Guinness people about doing it, and find out what you need to do. If you decide that you want to go ahead, and arrange it, a bunch of us will be there to cheer you on. We now know what it’s like, some of us more than once, and we’ll happily back you up.

It’s very important, though, to choose the right game. Burnout Paradise is a great example because there is a variety of things to do in it. You’re not going to be stuck doing effectively the exact same thing over and over for the whole marathon. Variety is all-important. Street Fighter IV is an awesome game in about a million ways, but it’s probably not the right choice for a marathon event like this one. You need to find a game you’d be happy to play for a very long time, and being happy to play it for five straight hours at home isn’t the same because that isn’t a situation where you’re unable to just stand up and go and do something else if it gets boring.

Marathons aren’t the only type of record, though. Different games will suit different types of record. Decide on the kind of thing you want to do. Then go for it. Our hobby needs more public demonstrations of awesomeness, and you don’t need to have your own web site to be able to do that.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, there are some people who need to be thanked. They’ve been thanked already, but in my opinion, probably not enough. So here we go.

Firstly, thank you to the people at Guinness World Records and in particular our lovely adjudicators Karolina and Gaz.

Thank you to Elephant for providing such comfortable seating. 24 hours in that beanbag and my dodgy back didn’t act up once. I can’t really think of higher praise than that.

Thank you to EA and Criterion for getting behind us and for making a game which is such great fun to play. I can’t think of many games I’d come off a 24-hour stint on and still feel I’d be happy to play for longer, but Burnout Paradise is now unquestionably one of them.

Thank you to the awesome folks at ESC Gaming in Glasgow, for giving us a place to do our thing and for looking after us, and all the other people who travelled up to see us, so well. If you’re in need of a place for an event, folks, I can heartily recommend ESC.

Thank you to the members of the Ready Up community, who joined us both in person and online. It would have been a hell of a lot harder without your support, and I’m still surprised and quite humbled that so many of you would travel all that way to watch six people staring fixedly at TV screens. You guys rock.

Thank you so, so much to Anthony, Jake, and John, our fantastic support crew, who kept us fed and watered and tended to our every whim, and who took care of all the annoying niggles (like helping us clamber out of our bean bags) so we didn’t have to. We literally could not have done it without you.

And finally, of course, my fellow drivers. The Burnketeers. Team Awesome. The members of the Paradise City Residents’ Association. Dan, Kirsten, Fran, Martin, and Shaz. What can I possibly say? I’m proud to have been part of this with you. Respect and much love to you all.

As the site has grown, so our server needs have grown with it, and our new home should be better able to cope with those needs.

How does this affect you, the reader?

Well, at some point during Saturday the site will be replaced by a page stating that Ready Up is offline for maintenance. Then, if all goes well, at some point during Sunday, the site will return. That’s it. You should be deprived of Ready Upness for less than two days.

See you on the other side.

For myself, I resolved some years back not to bother making any more New Year’s Resolutions. It’s about the only one I’ve ever managed to stick to.

However, as gamers, there are more tools than ever available to us should we want to attempt the feat of burning calories while never moving more than a few feet from the couch. But I’m not here today to talk to you about Wii Fit; others have said more about it than I ever want to. Today I am here to talk to you about something else. A subject close to my heart which is, I’m sure, also close to the hearts of many of you.

Today we will burn calories with the Power of Rock.

A little while ago Ready Up popped along to a Guitar Hero: World Tour event in London, where we were given our first showing of the new instruments along with the new game, and I got my first opportunity to have a go with the new drum controller.

One of the things I was told while we were there was that Clem Burke, the drummer from Blondie, had been taking part in a research project which measured him as having a heart rate of 140bpm and burning over 400 calories an hour while drumming. Because of these findings, the University of Gloucestershire aims to develop community outreach programmes targeting “overweight and disengaged youngsters” (see the project’s web site).

I fought the flab, but the flab won.

400 calories an hour and 140bpm. That, right there, is your actual cardiovascular workout. I wouldn’t expect to come anywhere close to that without being able to play on Expert difficulty, but it’s nevertheless good to know that one can work out while also rocking out, and not only do we not need to move far from the couch, we can actually burn calories while sitting down. That, surely, is a dream we can all believe in.

No doubt game rentals are another thing, along with second-hand sales, which will be decried as the death of the industry, but I treat such decryings as the shrill hysterical squawkings they are. To me, renting’s a good way of checking out something you might not have bought anyway, and if you like it, you might buy it, and if you don’t, no big loss. Another facet of the industry, another strand, another way to experience games, and something that doesn’t seem to have done the movie industry a lot of harm. So screw the nay-sayers, frankly.

So what, you are no doubt asking, have I rented recently?

Well, I’ll tell you.

In the last few months, I’ve rented:

• Ace Combat 6 (Ace)
• Frontlines: Fuel of War (Not bad, not great)
• Football Manager 2008 (Impenetrable)
• Army of Two (Appalling)
• Timeshift (Nice concept, flawed execution)

Ace Combat 6 was something of a revelation. I don’t think I’d ever have considered buying it, but what a fun game it turned out to be. I’d have missed out on it if not for renting.

Army of Two, not so much. It pretty much turned out as bad as everyone said it was. But at least now I know for myself.

So there you have it. It might expand your horizons, but even if it doesn’t, it’s a cheaper way to be disappointed than if you’d actually bought Army of Two.

Renting. It’s a bit like borrowing, only you have to pay for it.

GRR GRR IM A DETH KNIGHT

So, with this whole new continent waiting, I did what any self-respecting level 70 warlock would have done and hopped on the first boat to Northrend.

Blizzard are well-known for their art direction and Northrend is a beautiful place. The Dragonblight in particular is a lovely snowscape, and the first time I topped a rise and saw this, I just had to stop and look at it for a while:

Beyond this wall, the Lich King lurks in his icy lair.

It’s quite a big wall.

I’ve only just started to explore Northrend, a very large place, and I’m looking forward to being able to fly over it in a few levels’ time and gain yet another perspective.

A lot of people have said that Wrath is just more of the same, and although there’s quite a bit of new stuff that is true to an extent; but when the same is as good as this, I really don’t think it matters all that much.

Pretty trees!

To Northrend!

All these questions and more will not be answered through playing EndWar, the newest product of the mammoth Tom Clancy franchise factory.

A brief plot synopsis: terrorists (curse them!) have nuked the oilfields in the Middle East, leaving Russia as the principal oil and gas supplier to the West. Flush with cash they institute a massive troop buildup. Meanwhile, an anti-nuke missile shield goes live, the nations of Europe (except the UK; clearly the Tories are back in power in 2017) merge to form a single European superstate, the US builds a military space station. Then zomg terrorists, the evil Russians provoke a war between Europe and the US, everyone starts fighting.

Big bada boom.

Much of the plot is covered in the opening cinematic, with the rest dispensed with by the time you play through the “Prelude to War” mini-campaign, which acts as a tutorial as well as an introduction to the three different factions. By the end of it you’ll have chosen a faction, and then you’ll be dropped into “World War III” mode, giving you a strategy map of the world with a few territories available to fight in for any given turn.

You choose a territory to attack or defend, and depending on your choice you’ll find yourself fighting one of a selection of mission types:

Assault is a straightforward kill-all-the-enemies-before-they-kill-you battle;

Raid involves destroying a set number of key structures within a time limit, or preventing the enemy from doing so;

Conquest requires you to capture and hold at least half of the Satellite Uplinks on the map for five minutes, or destroy all enemy forces;

Siege requires the attacker to capture a specific uplink within ten minutes, or to prevent the enemy from doing so.

An addition wrinkle of Conquest mode is called Defcon 1. As soon as one side gains control of more than half of the uplinks on the map, the losing side gets access to a WMD strike. This can tip the balance wildly and seems to have been included more to differentiate Conquest mode from the other modes than anything else. My preferred strategy so far has been to take half the uplinks and then slaughter all the enemy units on the map. Things are a lot more predictable that way.

Anyway. Capturing and upgrading uplinks gains you access to off-map support in various forms, including air strikes and Force Recon squads. Units which survive a battle may increase in rank, improving their health and damage and allowing the use of increasingly sophisticated (and expensive) upgrades.

Bloody pigeons.

It’s a slightly different take on RTS than the norm: deliberately removing some of the complexity and flexibility to gain a control system which quickly becomes intuitive, particularly if you make use of the voice command system. When it works, which is the majority of the time, it’s excellent. You can rattle off sentences like “Unit one plus unit four attack hostile three” and it will just do it. Sometimes it will fail to work, and I think there’s a slight niggle with the timing of when you press the right trigger to issue a command and when it actually becomes responsive to voice. You may occasionally find yourself speaking slowly and clearly, as you would to a naughty child.

Perhaps the most disappointing part about the game is that, for a Clancyverse title, it seems almost entirely lacking in Clancyness. Sure, the Russians are the bad guys in that hackneyed old harking-back-to-the-cold-war sort of way, but that’s hardly unique. Fans of Ghost Recon will probably appreciate the fact that Scott Mitchell’s been promoted to General and gives you your mission orders if you choose the US faction, but the occasional references to Third Echelon and the fact that the US Riflemen units are called “Ghosts” just feel like they’ve been shoehorned in to please the fans.

Overall, though, I like it. It’s not especially deep but it’s entertaining enough, and the camera view is close enough to the action to make things a bit more visceral than the usual god’s-eye-view you get from an RTS. I can think of worse ways to spend a couple of hours blowing things up.

But now they’re laying off 600 staff worldwide, Spore and Red Alert 3 are causing an outcry (and being massively reviewbombed on Amazon) due to the DRM they insisted on using, and things don’t seem to be quite so rosy any more. How did it go so wrong? What could they do differently?

Here’s my tip:

Try and be a bit less stupid.

Let me give you a couple of examples.

There’s the aforementioned DRM. I’ve gone on about this already so I won’t say much about it again here, except to note that they’ve clearly chosen the path of not listening to their customers, and that never strikes me as a particularly clever choice to make.

Also, with the official launch of Red Alert 3 this week, it appears that a lot of copies have gone out with the printed CD keys missing the last character, making it impossible to successfully install the game. EA’s response:

There is currently a work around that may allow you to bypass this issue. Since you have the first 19 characters of the code already, you can basically try “guessing” the last character. To do this, simply enter your existing code, and then for the last character, try the letters A-Z, and then the numbers 0-9. You should eventually get the right combination, and be able to play the game.

To be fair to them, this has now disappeared from the official support pages and been replaced with a simple “Contact Us” message, but the games should never have left the distribution centre in that state in the first place.

And finally, and the main impetus behind my choice of this subject today, we have the EA online store. Theoretically, this is a good thing, offering online purchasing and download of EA titles direct to your PC without the need to even stand up. Digital distribution is considered by many to be the wave of the future and, given the reduced costs due to the lack of a need to manufacture, warehouse, distribute, ship and/or stock in shops should make for better value for the gamer.

Unfortunately, that’s where it all falls apart. The EA store charges the exact same amount as the RRP for a boxed retail copy of the games. None of the massive savings are passed on to the customer, who doesn’t even get a physical copy of the game for their money; and it’s possible to get a boxed copy of the game for less money by buying from somewhere like Amazon or Gameplay, who don’t have the costs of running game stores and do pass some of the resultant savings on to their customers. EA make less money this way than they would by discounting downloadable versions of the game. Doesn’t seem that smart to me.

In summary:

1. Listen to your customers.
2. Don’t ship broken products.
3. Try and price your online store in a way which makes it seem like good value, rather than poor value.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, somewhere in the world someone else needs my aid.

Away!

So first, a quick word on what it is. DRM is (usually) software that restricts what you can do with a piece of digital media (software, movie disc of whatever colour, often music CD). It manages your rights (by restricting them) in the name of protecting the rights of the producer of that media.

Now, you might say, fair enough, so far so funky, what’s the big deal?

If all it did was prevent you from copying the disc and handing it round to all your mates, probably not much.  Unfortunately, that’s not the case. DRM software on PCs will prevent you from running other software it considers wrong, even if you are using it for a different and non-infringing purpose. It may prevent you from playing the game you’ve bought if for whatever reason you don’t have an internet connection that day. It will interfere with the operation of your PC, write corrupted data into your system registry and in extreme cases may break your operating system altogether, requiring a reinstall. This last scenario is extremely unlikely, but it has happened.

So they’re spending a lot of money and causing a fair amount of inconvenience to their customers – but at least nobody’s ripping off the games, right?

Spore was out, without DRM, on the torrent sites a full week before release. All that money spent on DRM is utterly worthless when the only people it inconveniences are your legitimate paying customers and completely pointless when non-protected versions of the game are leaked prior to release.

Right. It inconveniences your customers, costs a lot of money, and doesn’t stop people copying the game, so there doesn’t seem to be much point in having it at all. If you shift your view away from the PR spin slightly, other possibilities do swim into view. Locking a particular copy of the game to a single computer does prevent people from selling it on second-hand. Managing your right to sell the game on means potentially more first-hand sales for the publisher, and we’ve already heard from several luminaries in the industry who are quite keen on that idea.

I also think that pirates can be a useful scapegoat for some sections of the PC games industry. Turn out a shonky port that nobody in their right mind would pay good money for? Nobody in their right mind paying good money for it? Blaming the pirates keeps the shareholders from asking awkward questions about why you’re making stuff that doesn’t sell.

On the subject of Red Alert 3, specifically, I’m torn. I’m a huge fan of the Red Alert games but not at all a fan of DRM. I may well wind up not buying the game because of it, but in all likelihood EA will just assume I ripped it off instead. I maintain that assuming that your customers are thieves, and treating them as such, is counter-productive and will lead to more lost sales, not fewer. There are already people who refuse to buy DVDs because of the inane “you wouldn’t steal a car” messages contained within them.

The ugly truth is that often pirated copies work better (because the DRM that screws with your computer is gone) and of course they cost less. I’m not a supporter of ripping off people’s work, but I’m not a supporter of the assumption that I’m a thief either. The fact is that if you’re charging people more to provide a user experience that’s less pleasant, you can’t really be too surprised when people turn to the alternative.

Is it worth your money?

Travel the world, meet new and exciting people, and explode them.

Right from the off, I would say that how much you enjoy this game will be determined greatly by your choice of character. I don’t mean the different statistics they have (Matthias: faster health regeneration; Chris: can carry more ammo; Jen: runs faster) or even whether you like looking at a woman in an improbable leather catsuit. It’s the incidental dialogue. There’s not a great deal of it, and you’re going to hear it an awful lot during your stay; there is little intelligence in the context-sensitivity, and as you run past that exploded enemy tank for the tenth time you will almost certainly be informed of how the bad guys have a tank and you could maybe steal it or blow it up. My tip: don’t choose Matthias.

You will also need to get used to Fiona, your partner, support operative and ever-present voice-in-your-earhole, telling you things you already know and which she has already told you several times. As far as I can tell this is impossible to switch off, although there’s a patch coming up which may make it less annoying.

So. The plot. You have helped a bad person overthrow the government of Venezuela and take control. In return for this, he betrays you and attempts to have you killed. During the escape, one of the many assault rifle rounds whizzing through the air hits you in the ass. Cue endless repetition of “the merc who got shot in the ass” from practically everyone you meet. Anyway, you vow revenge, blah blah, death, explosions, everyone pays, etc.

Much of the gameplay involves doing work for the various factions within the game, which earns you money, reputation, and the option of buying shinier toys from their shop. The twist, of course, is that most of the work you do for the factions will involve going against the other factions, who seem to take a dim view of you blowing up all their stuff and will radio their boss to inform them that the merc, yeah, the one who got shot in the ass, is there doing unpleasant things to them. If they complete their call, your reputation with their faction will drop and reinforcements may be despatched to your position. Happily, this problem is easily solved by killing absolutely everyone in the area, concentrating on the ones making calls as a priority.

There are also side missions from the factions which will also earn you a bit of extra cash and some more toys. They usually involve driving a vehicle of some kind from one place to another via the most awkwardly indirect and bullet-and-explosion-filled route imaginable, and come in three increasing difficulty levels. Your support crew also have side missions for you, which are similar, but generally involved fewer people shooting at you. There’s also a sidequest involving the collection of spare parts in the world, which enable your mechanic to provide you with a variety of not-exactly-military-spec vehicles. I recommend the Panzercycle.

Tanks very much.

What the game is really about is blowing stuff up. And arranging things so that you may buy more spectacular methods of blowing stuff up. And then using those to blow up more stuff. The plot is largely incidental and almost a distraction from the main appeal of the game; the only real reason to advance it at all is that the later factions have all the really cool toys. You meander across the countryside, flinging airstrikes left and right with careless abandon, pausing occasionally to use a helicopter to winch up a jeep and drop it on someone’s head. This is where the game is at its most fun, and the more destruction you’re causing, the more fun it is. Add co-op to this mix and the fun goes up even more. The game does co-op the way more and more games are doing it, and the way it should be done: at any time, a friend can join your game, and help you blow the hell out of stuff.

But (and there is always a but) this game is as buggy as the main hall at the International Mosquitoes Convention on Free Blood Night.

Whether through slapdash QA or just rushing the game for release (although as it was delayed for almost a year, the latter seems unlikely) there are glitches everywhere. Look at the credits and count the number of names listed under QA; I guarantee that by the time you’ve played through to the end, you’ll have encountered at least one unique glitch for each name. Most of them are just annoying, but there are a few game-breakers in there, with reports of saves being corrupted and of being randomly switched to a different character when loading a new game. I did not encounter these during my time with the game, but I encountered plenty of others.

It’s a shame, because once you get past the glitches and the occasionally random physics there is, as mentioned, a great deal of fun to be had; sure, the AI is pig-stupid, but they’re just cannon fodder to be obliterated in your next huge round of explosions. The problem is that the glitches are so plentiful and so often experienced that you may well find it hard to get past them to the creamy centre of fun beneath. I like it despite its problems, but because of its problems, it’s not a game you should buy unless you know you can live with them.

Graphically it’s OK. Not great. Decent draw distance, slightly naff textures, significant and noticeable pop-in. Sound is reasonably good, with decently meaty explosions offset by not-too-impressive vehicle engine noise. Not much to choose between the PS3 and 360 versions; they’re more or less the same, including glitches, with the exception of the now-obligatory five-minute install period on the PS3 and associated slight improvement in load times.