Be warned that this is going to be all over the place.  I don’t think it’s even possible for me to plan a piece like this.  It’s long and it’s wordy and I think I’m as incoherent as the game itself, but that’s how this experience requires me to express myself.  If anyone thinks this would be more entertaining as an audio file, do let me know and I’ll do that, but that just seemed a little self-indulgent.

SPOILERS

Look at how lovely it is

I’d like to prefix what comes next with something: I absolutely love Bionic Commando: ReArmed, the remake of the original NES game that Grin made for XBLA.  It was truly perfect.  I can’t comment on how it compares to the original game, but the concept and application of the mechanic, the design of the levels, the music and the bosses were all wonderful.  And it was only 800 points.  I think it may still be my favourite XBLA game, but Perfect Dark is coming up soon.  Why this is important is that it shows the pedigree that Grin had.  That game is really intricately designed; you could tell that extreme care, attention to detail and love had been put into this game.  From what I can tell they’ve cleaned up the story too and made it a lot more coherent although, as a product of the age, it’s still rather thin.  There are some really funny exchanges accessed by hacking the enemy network which also reveal boss weak points: a great idea.  The collectibles are also extremely well implemented: one Yashichi per level and they’re thoughtfully and challengingly placed, particularly the one on the construction yard area.  The swinging mechanic feels perfect and I’m sure it’s a lot more consistent than in the original game and this precision makes it remarkably robust.  It had a fun, if disposable multiplayer as well as some completely new “challenge rooms” which asked you to take your ability with the bionic arm to whole new level.  And on top of all that one of the best soundtracks I’ve ever heard.  Now why have I mentioned all of this in a review of a different game?  Because, apart from the music, everything Grin, the same fucking company, did oh so right in Rearmed they do utterly wrong in Bionic Commando.  And herein lies the true source of the intensity of my vitriol for this game:  It could have been so much more.

Not smiling anymore

Before I go nuts with this let me point out that in all areas apart from story the problem with this game seems to me to be that the development team ran out of time and had to put together something they could ship.  Whether this was because the project was too ambitious or that they could have been able to do it in the time given, but didn’t work fast enough or misappropriated their time, or whether they spread themselves too thin, I can’t say.  But I do know that a lot of the game feels unfinished and poorly thought out and given what I’ve said about ReArmed I know that this is not something inherent to the team.  That said, this tragedy leads to a whole lot of bullshit in the game but I wanted to exonerate Grin in some way before I launch into it because I know these guys could have made a much better game if they’d had more time.  And maybe in that time someone would have burned the script and shot Mike Patton.

This is easily, easily the worst video game story I’ve ever come across.  And I mean that in every facet of storytelling I  can think of.  It’s way down there worst things I’ve ever seen as well but I don’t know if I’m willing to actually give it that title.  That probably belongs to something posted on a Friday at Topless Robot.  Let’s start with the characters.  One big problem here is that they’ve tried to make the characters badass and gritty and mean.  But they all sound like fifteen-year-olds.  You know how, if someone’s a bit nasty it’s usually because of something, even if that something is utter bollocks.  Being an asshole is supposed to be a symptom of some deeper personality flaw, like pride or greed or something, but as far as I could tell, in this, everyone is just an asshole.  That is the long and short of their characterisation and seemingly the philosophy behind the dialogue.  But they’re assholes to the extent that it becomes silly.  There’s a bit where a brand new character introduces himself quite politely and our protagonist, this is meant to be ME to a certain degree is a complete cock to him for no reason.  The exchange is something like,

General: Colonel Spencer, my name is a General Armstrong.  I’m the commanding officer on this mission and I just wanted to introduce myself.

You: Ffffffffffffuuuuuuuuuck Yooooooooouuuuuuuuuu.  I don’t fucking take orders from fucking nobody, you massive cunt

And this is the first time these two men have ever spoken.  So at this point I can understand the general getting defensive with this guy.  But I’m meant to be this guy.  Now,  I like playing as a character in games.  I can be that character to an extent.  I don’t need the silent protagonist like Gordon Freeman or Link.  I’m quite happy to roleplay to some degree as a character who is not me in a situation I would never be in.  That’s great.  But it becomes impossible when the character is someone you would never want to be.  Everyone wants to be a badass, but this character isn’t a badass despite how hard he’s clearly trying.  He’s a twat.  Nobody wants to be a twat.  And all of this is only exacerbated by Mike Patton’s fucking voice.  He’s the lead singer of Faith No More,

Hold on for ONE SECOND!

proprietors of a style of music that evokes a physical reaction from me in my distaste, but different people like different things and I’m not going to talk about the band.  But he has that whiney American faux-angsty singing voice.  You know the one I mean.  And he pretty much talks like that as well, but he gruffs it up a bit and it sounds worse than if I was gruffing up my voice.  And he’s not a voice actor either!  I don’t know why they hired a singer to do voice work but it’s fucking disastrous.  Bad dialogue made so so so much worse.  I considered muting the fucking game.  And the one liners?  Jesus.  You’ll be fucking begging to be playing Warrior Within again after this.  I sincerely hope no-one was paid for producing the things he says; quips that make no sense and wouldn’t be good even if they did.  One of them is “I’ll send you the bill later”.  I don’t know what that means!  Bill for what?  Killing him?  But he’s dead, how can you send him the bill?  But there’s one that I just can’t describe.  After I had shot a man, crushed him with a car then picked up his body and hurled it into a helicopter my character was heard to say, “You’ll thank me for that some day”.  But there’s no hint of irony.  It doesn’t think it’s absurd and silly and fun.  It’s taking itself seriously.  It’s meant to be cool.  The most tragic thing about it all is that through all of this ridiculous behaviour and stupid swearing he not only fails to be a badass he ends up sounding like a teenager in a strop.  As opposed to a war-weary soldier objecting to following arbitrary directions from a system that chewed him up and spat him out but that he still serves out of a misplaced sense of loyalty not even he fully understands he sounds like a 12-year-old who doesn’t want to tidy his room.  Take this for example:

General: Spencer, status report!

As far as I’m aware, in a war zone, where time is of the essence, this is a perfectly acceptable way to ask to know what’s happening on the ground.  There are no formalities, but I certainly wouldn’t consider it rude.

Spencer: Muhmuhmuhmuhfuckmuhmuhmuh I only talk to Super Joe muhmuhmuhmuhfuckfuckmuh

Then the general pulls rank on him and reminds him who’s providing him with equipment etc. so Nate finally breaks and says

Spencer: The city’s a fucking wasteland and everyone’s fucking dead. <and here’s the kicker> Is THAT what you wanted to hear?  Is it?

I mean, that is literally something a child would say.  And this nonsense goes on for the duration of the game and it becomes absolutely unbearable.  It gets to the point where, despite the fact that the this mission needs to succeed to save mankind or something, the general dude basically tells your character to get himself killed.  Not having completed the mission or anything, just fucking die.  This cannot be how professionals behave!  It makes you want everyone to shut the fuck up because the game would both be less annoying and make a whole lot more goddamn sense.  On top of this they’ve given our hero a bit of a redesign.  Instead of the blond-haired, sunglasses-wearing, archetypal soldier we have a (brown) dreadlocked, stubble-faced wanker who is clearly not the bloke from the first game.  I fear they were trying to make the character “cool” but as soon as you consider that an objective you are doomed to fail.

Super Joe: As he was

And poor Steve Blum.  He does what he can with what he’s given as Super Joe.  But even he’s trying to gruff up his voice and it isn’t quite working.  This is Spike Spiegel here, people, but he can’t save this sinking ship.

As you can probably tell from the above exchanges (although they may be a little exaggerated) is that the swearing is terrible.  It’s not enough to just have swear words in something.  That’s just patronising and shit.  If you go into something with the intention of having the characters swear then it’s going to be a fucking disaster.  The characters should be speaking and some people swear when they speak.  Watch “The Thick of It” for a masterclass in swearing, but the characters aren’t just cursing, they’re talking or ranting or shouting but there are swear words too.  All of the swearing in the game is utterly misplaced and always poorly delivered.  Like, when you get shot one of the exclamations can be a simple “Fuck!” but he doesn’t say it right.  There should be surprise or pain or annoyance or fear in it.  It should sound like a reflex.  He sounds like he’s been told to say fuck.  And say it badass.  And it sounds fucking absurd.  There are other bits where they forget to mix their curses.  No-one who’s a human being will ever seriously say something like, “Oh Fuck!  What the fuck was that!? Someone tell me where the fuck these fuckers are!”  People don’t talk like that.  Committees think people talk like that.  You might say something like “Oh SHIT! What the fuck was that!?  Can anyone see where these assholes are shooting from!?”  Now you could even put in a motherfucker where it says asshole and it would still be ok, but no-one ever uses the same curse as an exclamation, then a modifier, then a noun.  That doesn’t happen.  Now, Grin were a Swedish company.  So maybe this whole thing was written by someone who had English as a second language and that would explain a lot.  Even if I spoke French I don’t think I would know where to put the swear words.  I mean “Putain!” means “whore” so I would have assumed that is was something you call someone, like asshole.  But I’ve seen movies where someone has fallen over and hurt themselves and shouted “Putain!” so I would have gotten that totally wrong.  Maybe that’s what happened here.  I don’t know.  But as I say, the dialogue and the writing itself is terrible, but that says nothing for the story.

Clearly the bionic arm and the dreadlocks weren't quite hardcore enough...

Again, this is the most incoherent thing I’ve ever encountered in a video game.  You play as Nate Spencer.  In the original game he’s a soldier who lost an arm to, I think, a grenade, but was given this bionic grappling hook arm as a replacement by a government scheme.  But popular opinion turns against “bionics” and the whole program is scrapped.  And I think a whole bunch of bionics are then put in prison for no reason.  But the game keeps hinting at some beef between Joe and Nate, but since that’s mostly displayed by Nate being an asshole to Joe, which is how he treats everyone, it loses a lot of its impact.  They exchange some cookie-cutter dialogue about something Nate did or didn’t do and how Joe had to let him take the fall or something.  I don’t know.  It’s never properly explained, like so much in this story.  Spencer’s wife has also gone missing.  So then some group called BioReign drops a bomb on Ascension City.  BioReign is a pro-Bionics terrorist organisation.  So they take Nate off death row, give him back a bionic arm and send him into Ascension City to beat them.  Now, that’s bollocks but it’s very standard bollocks.  All games need some massive central conceit that puts you somewhere by yourself so that’s not really a problem.  Nor is the fact that they can send you weapons and power-ups at any point in the game by shooting them out of the sky.  So, say you have to fight a helicopter, instead of shooting the helicopter out of the sky they’ll shoot down a drop pod with a rocket launcher in it for you to take the helicopter out with.  Again, that’s not bad, it’s standard, but it’s still funny.  What is stupid is some of the lengths the game goes to to be “cool”.  The casting of Mike Patton and Nathan Spencer’s entire new persona is a testament to how far off the mark whoever conceived this game is in terms of “cool”.  Instead of reattaching the arm in a lab where they can make sure everything works properly and fix any problems, or even just put it on in the fucking plane on they way there they send Nate and his arm into the battlefield separately, but instead of parachuting in, or landing or something they have to do it awesome.  So Nate and his arm are put in two separate fucking missiles and fired into the side of a building.  You then have to find your fucking arm, but you find it so quickly that I have no idea why they bothered, but it was pretty novel to be playing as a genuinely one-armed protagonist for a little bit.  Even with all the issues here this is the story at its absolute most coherent, so buckle your seatbelts.

You make your way through the city and at the end of the first level we are treated to what I think is the most WTF cutscene in the whole game.  Pod thinks it’s one of the cutscenes towards the end where everything goes nuts, but I still think it’s this one.  You get to an arbitrary point in the city and then suddenly FOUR characters appear in the same cutscene with 3 of them not to reappear until the very end of the fucking game.  You look across a vista and see a dude in a Dr. Fate mask talking to Gottfried Groeder, a memorable Nazi introduced in ReArmed, but this game is meant to stand on its own so at this point many players won’t know who the fuck he is.  I never caught the dude in the mask’s

Sometimes you can just tell what people are like by how they look

name or why he was important since he hadn’t been mentioned yet and then wasn’t again until much later on.  I knew Groeder already, but I think someone lets you know he has something to do with BioReign.  But while you’re looking at these two trying to figure out who they are you’re suddenly attacked by a woman with bionic legs.  You can infer that she and Nate know each other but it’s never properly established which wouldn’t be a problem unless the story clearly required an emotional investment in her.  The legs make her able to run very fast, but every time she shows up (always completely at random) she gets the shit knocked out of her, so clearly they aren’t doing her much good.  So the two of you fight for a bit and then some dude with a Sniper rifle shoots a gun out of someone’s hand.  This is the first time he’s seen and he isn’t just a random sniper.  He’s Thomas “Sniper” Clarke, a piece of information I only found out in the fucking end credits.  He isn’t even actually seen again but he does play a role later.  I have no idea what the fuck they were trying to do with this character.  Maybe he was meant to be really mysterious but mysterious only works if you have a desire to solve the mystery.  We know absolutely nothing about him, but since he’s a sniper he never interacts with Nate making him about as far from compelling as you can get.  He’s not mysterious like someone who appears from the shadows and saves your life and says something cryptic.  He’s “mysterious” like the person whose shopping you pick up for them and they smile at you.  Now there is such a density of previously unmentioned characters popping up onto the screen trying to seem important that I laughed at this cutscene, and that was the highpoint of my enjoyment of the story.  After this the story spirals into banality until the end.  I have no idea what drove me from location to location.  I think I reactivated some communications.  Then there was something called the “Carrion Device” that I had to secure but it was so classified the higher-ups wouldn’t tell me what or where it was.  I’m still not sure what it actually was, or given what happens at the end why BioReign sent an entire force in to get it.  Mag shows up again around this point and gets the shit kicked out of her in a cutscene, then fucks off again.  Then it turns out that BioReign have a giant spider walker base thing stomping around the city that I end up on.  But that’s after I fight a giant mechanical worm in a car park.  There’s also an oil rig involved but I can’t for the life of me remember why.  The location sort of jumps around.  There’s no cohesion in the cutscenes.  Like a cutscene will end at a seemingly arbitrary point and then the next will pick up somewhere equally arbitrary, but it doesn’t feel like when a film is cut together, it feels like something’s missing.  Often the gameplay will start somewhere totally different to where a cutscene leaves off which is incredibly disorienting.  There’s a bit where he jumps off a building, but he only jumps off the top, then suddenly I’m on the ground in a valley nearby the building I jumped off.  I have to assume he landed.  They never do the usual thing of having the cutscene camera settle into the gameplay perspective that allows everything to be joined together well and again I think it’s because no-one had the time to add that sort of polish.  The whole experience is very disjointed.

Please understand that what I’m about to talk about happens a full game later with no mention in between.  That’s a full 8 hours later.  At least.  And you’ve been learning abilities and PLAYING A GAME between these points.  Also, I’ve only mentioned them here because I know they’re important but during the game you pay as much attention to them as you do to the serial number before any piece of machinery with a name, you know like “XG-577 Demolitionator”.  But what happens next is that it turns out that Super Joe is a massive bastard as well as an asshole.  Apparently he was the dude in the Dr. Fate helmet and has been playing you the fuck all along.  This didn’t actually come as that big of a surprise because they’d spent the whole time vilifying Super Joe and distancing themselves from his depiction in the first game and Steve Blum is clearly doing what can only be described as his “evil voice”.

Super Joe: What he became

I’m sure someone thought it would be “so fucked up” if Super Joe was the bad guy, but unless you give him some depth and motivation…really?  Good guys turned bad only works if they’re fallen heroes not 10p comic superviallains.  But the fact that he was this dude I’d completely forgotten from the start of the game?  That was a huge shock.  So he takes what I think is “The Carrion Device” from you and fucks off in a helicopter leaving you to fight Groeder in a really bad boss fight.  If you think about it, the plan was to go into Ascension City and get this device and trick you into going in and getting it as well, killing half of his organisation.  I really don’t understand.  But at this point you’re too busy fighting the hilariously-accented, psychotic Groeder on a helipad.  You kill him in a ridiculously gratuitous manner, which I think is again meant to be cool.  I’d really lost track at this point.  There’s no established bitterness between the two of you at this point other than what I knew from ReArmed, so it just feels like Spencer’s a complete dick.  To be fair, though, Groeder is obviously an insane Nazi Cyborg, so maybe nothing’s gratuitous for a guy like that.  You follow Super Joe and I think Mr. Sniper contacts you at this point, but I can’t remember.  The General dude is completely nonplussed by this stage.  So then Joe goes in and activated whatever the fuck the machine is and it puts him in a mech so ridiculous it would make a Gundam Wing fan cringe flanked by a whole army of slightly less absurd-looking mechs.  I have absolutely no idea why he wanted to do this.  I don’t know if it’s ever explained.  Mag shows up again at this point but gets herself killed this time instead of beaten up.  Her death’s meant to be an emotional moment for Spencer but since they spent the entire game shooting at each other, beating each other up and telling each other how much they hated one another it really lacks any punch.  There are some character bios that you can unlock and read but I shouldn’t have to do that to understand the story.  They’re optional extras.  Back-story, maybe, but they’re not meant to be essential to understanding the story being told.  Batman:  Arkham Asylum might be pretty confusing and random if you’d had no exposure to Batman, but it’s fucking Batman!  Plus, you can’t assume that knowledge in any story if the character has only been introduced in THIS story.  But BEFORE ALL THAT the BIG TWIST is revealed.  Bigger than Super Joe’s betrayal.  It turns out that:

YOUR WIFE IS YOUR ARM!

YOUR WIFE IS YOUR ARM!

YOUR WIFE IS YOUR ARM!

YOUR WIFE IS YOUR ARM!

Pictured: Your Wife

There is nothing I can say, or the game offers, to allow this to make any more sense.  There’s no greater context and it’s not explored properly.  It isn’t clear if they transformed her into the arm, if they used her DNA to make the arm and she died in doing so.  It’s not clear if the arm is sentient.  That above sentence is all you are told.  The word catalyst is thrown around but it’s just technobabble.  Your wife is your arm.  That is all.  There is nothing I can say that will make this funnier or more absurd.  So I’ll just say it again.  Your wife is your arm.

My only regret is that at no point does Spencer say “My wife is my arm” otherwise that shit would be on the internet faster than a TMZ photographer’s picture of a celebrity in underwear.

So there’s a boss fight that’s more of an interactive cutscene and you headbutt Super Joe to death and fall into a hole.  The End.  Really.  That’s literally how the game ends.  You fall into a hole.

Except there’s a little post-credits bit where there’s a transmission between the sniper and a mysterious thrid (sixth?) party.  It’s in code.  The first bit is decoded for you.  The second, if decoded, is in German, which you then have to translate.  This whole thing is hilarious.  It takes such a high opinion of the production to do something like this.  The alien languages in Futurama work because Futurama’s awesome.  The little Ocelot “Mr. President” bit works in Metal Gear Solid because Metal Gear Solid is awesome and I know who Revolver Ocelot is and the Mr. President thing is hilarious.  This game does not have this sort of heft.  There are loads of little Easter Eggs that are only allowed to be in good games.  There are diagetic sources of music that play Mike Patton music.  It’s all so self-referential and masturbatory but it’s in such a shitty product that it’s embarrassing.  The menus are also very slick, if a little phallic, but none of this should be in there because THEY SHOULD HAVE FINISHED THE FUCKING GAME FIRST.  If it meant they could fix the diabolical first level (more on that to come) then the menu should have been a silent black screen with white Time New Roman options and an underline to select.  It’s all infuriating.  Oh, and that bit of German?  Sets up a sequel.  Bwaaaahahahahahaha!

Join me in part 2 where I talk about everything that isn’t story-related and also everything that’s amazing about the game.

The first part of the level is basically just a 3D remake of the first few rooms from the original Resident Evil, but now you can run about them and explore instead of moving through pre-rendered backgrounds at fixed camera angles.  Pod’s a lot more heavily invested in the RE series than I am so he got a lot more out of just looking at the mansion, which I imagine a lot of other player’s will as well.  The first enemy you meet is maybe only halfway into the DLC so before that it’s all just exploration and sound design.  It successfully builds tension because you’re fucking waiting for an enemy to show up and the longer that doesn’t happen, the more anxious you become.  There was a bit where a window smashed and it scared the shit out of me; I was expecting a Licker to come through.  It was nice to do runny about put thing A into slot B puzzles with someone there.  There are the usual diary entries knocking about and we ended up reading them aloud to often hilarious effect.  There’s one wonderful moment where you have to play Moonlight Sonata again, but there’s a pretty tragic Diary Entry in the room as well, so we did the obvious thing: read the diary with a backing of Moonlight Sonata, trying to keep to the flow of the music.  It was awesome.

Things pick up a bit later on.  There’s a deathtrap or two, which were great, particularly as both players panic at the same time as they rush to save one another.  The enemies are pretty scary, but we did start calling them “Ron Burgundy” and you’ll see why.  There’s a sequence later on where you have to use teamwork to take out a couple of enemies.  It’s a sequence that really demands communication but you don’t know exactly what to do at first and you’re under pressure.  It was great to be able to share that feeling of panic and confusion and then work out a joint solution.  The sequence really demands communication in order to beat it and it’s one of the most enjoyable co-op experiences I’ve ever had.

The last boss is a bit silly, but it’s fine.

The only other thing I would say is that I enjoyed this principally because of the coop partner I had.  We were able to joke the whole way though it and laugh about the tropes that kept popping up but all of that was without ruining the atmosphere at all.  If you can find someone to play with who understands the genre and the medium then this will be a fantastic, if brief, experience.  I really would like to see more puzzle-centric coop games in the future.  I definitely got my 400 points worth.

Stars:  Mark Wahlberg, Michael Pena, Danny Glover, Kate Mara, Ned Beatty

Run. Time: 124 minutes

Year: 2007

Shooter follows veteran expert sniper Bob Lee Swagger (Wahlberg) as he is taken out of retirement by a mysterious Colonel (Glover) to help prevent a presidential assassination.  At the assassination events turn against Swagger and he uses what few resources he has and the help of disgruntled federal agent Nick Memphis (Pena) to track those behind his misfortune and bring them to his own idea of justice.  Parallel to this he is trying to protect the wife of his spotter from the military after she helps him, exposing herself as a target.

Essentially this is an action/conspiracy movie with the hook that the action is principally sniping as opposed to what you would expect from this type of movie; car chases, lots of pistols, running about, shooting from behind cover, a fist fight or two.  That’s not to say that I don’t enjoy that stuff, I love it, but this film very deliberately went in a different direction and it works.  It works really well.

I’ve never served in the armed forces or even handled a gun but the impression I got from this film was that they were really trying to give an accurate depiction of what goes into the operation of a long-range sniper.  If anybody reading this can let me know then please do.  They show how a sniper is only as good as his spotter.  That’s the guy that pics the targets and gives the shooter the information he needs to judge the shot, here he has a hand-written table to consult for humidity, flight-time etc.  Later on in the film Mark Wahlberg’s character discusses these things as well as the Coriolis Effect.  The reason it felt accurate was because if I hadn’t been interested in it, it probably would have been dull.  Fortunately, I did find it interesting and I really enjoyed what I perceived as a great attention to detail.  Again if anyone can tell me that this film is utter bullshit, then please do.

When I mentioned that it would have been dull, I was referring only to the points of discussion early in the film.  The sequences themselves are shot with a wonderful sense of tension that makes them gripping and enjoyable, despite the fact that all our hero does is lie in a fixed position, but I like that because that’s what he is fucking trained to do.  You wouldn’t expect him to be able to win his battles any other way and he doesn’t.  He has a very particular set of skills and he ensures that every battle he fights allows him to utilise these.  This was another element of the film I enjoyed: many of his confrontations are intricately planned, from where reinforcements are likely to come from to placement of improvised explosives to take out said reinforcements that he couldn’t hope to any other way.  Although a lot of the battle were pretty large in scope I really felt that they could have been pulled off in this world, not a movie one.  But that feeling of reality lets another aspect of the film down completely.

The villains in this movie are cartoon characters.  They’re so ridiculously evil and are portrayed with such serial villain performance by their actors that they feel completely at odds with the rest of what’s happening.  There’s a bit close to the end where they’re discussing what’s happened before in a hunting lodge of a glass of brandy and their dialogue is as subtle as if you had some rich people sitting in a country club wearing golden suits just saying “Pff. Poor people” and then cackling uproariously.  Now, if the film had opened with Mark Wahlberg using the air humidity to curve a bullet around a mountainside and shoot someone using a buxom blonde as a human shield inside a moving freight container whilst he was in free fall having jumped from an exploding plane, then I would have went along with these characters.  But the movie presented itself to me as having a bit more depth.

Another manifestation of this depth is in the character of Bob Lee Swagger himself.  I found him to be a conflicted, fallible hero that it was easy to get behind but that I didn’t feel distant from.  The writers never feel the need to conform to the usual tropes of action movie heroes.  He’s stoic, but he’s pained and it leads to a clear social discomfort, as you might expect from someone who’s trained as long as he seems to and who’s best friend a man he had to be with for the duration of his service.  I thought Mark Wahlberg played him really well and was a great choice for the role.  I also enjoyed the relationship with his spotter’s bereaved wife.  There is an awkwardness but with trust and an obvious sexual tension between the two, although it’s left enjoyably unclear as to how conscious of this Wahlberg’s character is and I enjoyed the resolution of their relationship.  Kate Mara’s deeply affecting in the role as well.

I’ve gone to great lengths pointing out all of the ways this in unlike other action movies, but make no mistake that it is one, almost old school and I kind of loved that.  It follows the same sort of beats and has a refreshingly simple story at its centre giving the film a strong drive throughout, something I’ve felt has been missing from more modern flicks.  It also brings back an honest-to-goodness sidekick in the form of Michael Pena’s character who serves as the lookout Swagger needs on his missions, although he does seem to learn conveniently quickly within the time frame of the film.  But, it really made me smile to see an unashamed sidekick again and I enjoyed the character a lot.  Despite its grounding in reality it does have a couple of awesome bits as well.  There’s a bit at the start where he manages to take out a helicopter, not the pilot, the helicopter, with a single shot from a sniper rifle.  Maybe that’s possible, I doubt it, but either way it was awesome but it didn’t jar me too much, not as much as the villains anyway.

The movie has a lot of style as well, that’s present in how it flows to how it looks.  It also felt very slick, and I don’t mean that to say that it was soulless, I just meant that it all felt very well-made, fully reasoned and well executed and it’s nice to be impressed by a movie instead of finding things to complain about.

Whilst I enjoyed the film it does have some flaws.  Now, I like Danny Glover, but he’s terrible in this.  He snarls and gravels his way through the performance and it’s really distracting.  The movie also runs out of steam a little bit towards the end and there’s an odd lull just before the end for a weird sort of courtroom scene that, whilst a nice set piece, I thought didn’t really fit.  The depth of the conspiracy is a bit silly, like those perpetrating it and its thesis on the nature of the military-industrial complex is a little bit simplistic.  There’s also the fact that it never really deals with the fallout of Swagger’s actions or in any way asks us to question the idea of justice that he adheres to even though I thought it was necessary.  I would have traded that courtroom bit for a little bit more reflection time.  Aside from that I just have a couple of little niggles.  There’s a character in it who, to my mind, arbitrarily kills himself and I’ve been seeing it in a few films recently and it never makes any dramatic or personal sense to me and it happens way too easily.  It’s a cheap script convenience and it never sits properly with me.

Finally, what is happening to the right-hand-man villain?  This used to be a great character.  Think of Karl from Die Hard.  I have fond memories of Stamper from Tomorrow Never Dies.  The penultimate boss is usually really cool, but recently they’ve felt totally extraneous.  District 9, Avatar and Taken all had completely unnecessary, stupid ones and so does Shooter.  The guy’s needlessly vicious but without any justification.  I mean, even if it’s just a little motivation like, say, the death of your brother, give us something!  I mean, that dude in Avatar was a meat-head, but all he did was make a snide remark about Jake at the very start of the film and suddenly at the end this makes him an important villain who gets a dedicated and brutal death?  Book of Eli, did it right, though.  That guy was great, but COME ON PEOPLE!  You’re wasting one of the great secondary characters here.  Let’s pick it up!

I really enjoyed Shooter; a lot more than I was expecting.  It offers a familiar structure and feel whilst giving an alternative idea of action.  It’s got a great, fallible protagonist and some good performances.  It’s fun, well-paced, stylish and intricately constructed.  It’s let down by poor villains and a bad performance as well as a lack of depth in some of the issues it presents, but it’s well worth your time.

***SPOILERS…of a sort.  I would argue that it’s difficult to “spoil” a story this fucking incoherent, since none of the “reveals” have any weight when your only reaction to ANY development is “Wha?”***

LIKED

Graphics – This is maybe the best looking Xbox Live Arcade game available.  I don’t mean in terms of style, though.  ‘Splosion Man and Geometry Wars Retro Evolved 2 are both beautiful in their own ways, but in terms of games that adhere to a more standard aesthetic, this is great.  And I don’t mean standard as a bad or demeaning thing.  I want movies like Star Trek as well as movies like Sideways.  Different genres and aesthetics within a medium exist symbiotically.  So, in terms of the sort of modern image of a “video game” (remembering that it’s an XBLA game) Shadow Complex looks really fucking good.  It’s got detailed & varied character models and environments; an abundance of effects on guns and explosions; lovely water; great texture work; atmospheric lighting; fluid animation and a solid frame rate.

Overall Production Values – This kind of follows on from the first point, but the whole game feels like it was made by professionals.  It feels like any full price game, but which has been made for a slightly different market.  A lot of arcade games are sort of curios and I love that it’s a place for games like that to shine, where your game has to have a hook (literally with BC: Rearmed…ahohohohoho) to get you to play, but bigger games can now clearly have a home on arcade too.  Everything about the presentation makes you know it was made by people who knew what they were doing.  Even down to things like the menus and the voice acting, but more generally in scale and scope.  It’s just bigger, grander than a lot of stuff out there and you really feel it when you play.  It’s a good thing!

Metroid – This game is a modern attempt at the classic Metroid formula and it’s about time we had something take a stab at it.  Why Nintendo haven’t put a team on creating a Metroid game with 3D models and, crucially, sold it cross-platform is beyond me.  The market is there.  It’s right there.  It was nice to have a chance to revisit that style of gameplay but without any hint of nostalgia.  This is a construct that works, and works well.  Only having 2 Dimensions to consider allows a certain focus of gameplay and design.  Look at Bionic Command: Rearmed and Bionic Commando: in the former timing the swings is a huge part of the gameplay because you’re able to implement it on a plane, but in the 3D sequel you just hold down the grapple button and you’ll latch on, so the focus of the challenge is shifted.  I think we need to see more games that use constructs we know work, even if they seem old.

Size – The point I’m making here is not that the game is unbelievably huge, although it is for an XBLA game but that it is a good size.  It feels right.  It’s not too big to make backtracking feel daunting (although the way some of the areas connect, or don’t, is questionable at times) but it’s big enough to feel like an entire setting.  Also a small point, the overworld does feel like there’s more world out there, in Metroid games I always felt confined.

Upgrading the Suit – Obviously inspired by Metroid you have the ability to add different abilities to the suit.  These then open up new areas and give you new options versus enemies.  I thought most of the upgrades in the game were well-implemented and were made use of in ways other than letting me access new areas (and running across the lake for that achievement was AWESOME!)  The melee attacks also became delightfully more blunt and vicious as the need for finesse disappeared.  They all looked cool and they were fun.

Power Progression – What I mean by this was I felt the difficulty curve of the game matched with how powerful my character was becoming because of the upgrades.  Now I don’t mean that enemies were always as tough, since doing that basically negates all of the upgrades, but I felt they were all tough enough for long enough and I like being able to go back through the game as a walking death machine, which I was able to do here.

Highlighting – I really appreciated the ability of your flashlight to highlight vulnerabilities in the scenery or what needed to be used to activate a switch or whatever.  I read an interview where they talked about Metroid games being built around tiles, so it would be obvious where openings were likely to be etc. but they had to think of something new and this really worked.  It was subtle, but easy to spot, although I would have appreciated the game explicitly telling me about this feature instead of realising it after some frustrating time with the game.

All of the upgrades are marked on the map – Now I know this won’t be all that popular, and I’m a fan of the challenge presented in Metroid games of finding all of the upgrades but this is born out of one my big problems with the game: I didn’t know where the fuck anything was in relation to anything else.  If you’d asked me to search that map I wouldn’t have had a clue and it would have been an absolute slog to search for the items and I definitely wouldn’t have done it.  With everything marked on the map, though, disengaging as it may have been, I was able to navigate using that and it got me a couple more hours gameplay, which actually turned out to be the period I enjoyed the most.

The Prologue – Although it did nothing but bewilder in terms of story I liked the little prologue (which was also in the demo) where you play as a somewhat upgraded agent.  I enjoy a game giving me a look at what I will be able to do and beyond.  Many games are crippled by very tedious openings where you really feel limited in what you can do and I think giving you this glimpse and this little bit of fun beforehand helps to avoid that.

The Weapons – Although it would be easy to complain about the fact that the weapons just get better and better with no scope for variety I enjoyed that streamlined nature of the gameplay.  I liked the look of the weapons and I enjoyed the crazy final weapon you end up with.  It feels like a…pulse…shotgun or something and it’s a lot of fun to use.  By collecting all of the gold bars you can unlock a secret room that lets you use a gold version of any weapon in the game but I stuck to my shotgun thing

The Fusion Helmet – You need to collect all of the key cards before you can get this final upgrade and I would actually recommend that you complete the game before you get it because it makes the last battle a fucking joke, but in a cool way.  The Fusion Helmet has a wonderful conceit that necessitates your looking even cooler when you use it than you already would.  It makes you 100% invulnerable to damage (cool) whenever you stand still or WALK (fucking badass).  The net result of this is that in the last battle you can fucking stroll through a barrage of plasma, bullets and missiles, unharmed obliterating everything in your path.  It doesn’t sound it, but it is unbelievably fucking fun and it just looks so badass; one of the most rewarding optional final upgrades I’ve ever seen in a game.

The Flooding Sequence – There’s a bit in the game where you walk past a big mess hall filled with bad guys that you can’t enter, but you’re like “Oh Shit, that’s a lot of dudes” but you end up flooding that entire floor and presumably murdering every last one of them, but as you swim back through the area, as your path demands, all of the furniture and incidental items are floating and there are fucking drowned corpses that you have to move out of the way to get through.  Now I don’t know what the intention of the designers/writers was here, but I found this very affecting.  It really made me think about the cost of what I was doing and the apparent callousness of my character.  It’s accompanied by a wonderful bit of music as well and it was a moment that I enjoyed so much, I wish it had been in a better game.

The Final Boss – I thought the last battle was a fucking blast.  It’s a semi-scripted sequence where you have to trigger a number of events to kill the giant, main, non-interactive boss while everything is thrown at you, but you’re so strong by this point that you can take it and, as I said, with the fusion helmet it’s fucking hilarious.  I thought the sense of necessity in destroying the thing was cool.  The way you use the Shadow Complex’s own defenses to take it down was neat and I just found it a suitably dramatic battle, regardless of difficulty.  I didn’t think it was “too easy”, I felt that it in all ways it was an appropriate conclusion.

The Last Challenge – The game has a whole bunch of challenge maps that I played through as well.  I’ll go into more detail in the next section but I really enjoyed the very last challenge.  it’s basically a little level peppered with upgrades but you have to choose where to go first, when to upgrade what, use health upgrades as regeneration as well as expansion and think carefully about how you use your ammo.  It’s basically an assault course for all of your skills from the main game as well as adding a bit more planning.  It was challenging and very rewarding to play and complete.

DIDN’T LIKE

Story – Jesus Fucking Christ.  Where to begin?  This game has one of the most incoherent, poorly told and oblique stories I’ve ever come across.  The only thing that saves it is that it’s barely detectable throughout the game, unlike Bionic Commando where it’s just being shit in your face every goddamn second (more on that soon).  Ultimately, I think, there’s a group called “The Restoration” who want to rule America (the world?) for a reason I can’t remember, mightn’t have been there and if it was there, it was fucking stupid anyway.  They have a three-step plan for doing this:

1. Build a “Shadow Complex” with all of the most ridiculous weaponry in the world, including the aforementioned invincibility helmet and build it under a mountain without anybody noticing.  Then connect every room with a vent.

2.  Kill the Vice President with an attack helicopter.  Y’know, to keep a low profile.  (This happens in the prologue and is barely mentioned again but it seemed to be a pretty big part of the story)

3.  Launch an hilarious Airship of Doom from the depths of the Shadow Complex by draining what was presumably a natural lake to reveal the launching bay.  If they put the lake there themselves, then that just raises even more questions.  Then use this to go and destroy a city.  But what that’s going to do is somehow start a new American Civil War, the chaos of which “The Restoration” will step into to restore order.  And by the way, that Airship of Doom gets shot down by the Shadow Complex’s OWN FUCKING TACTICAL NUKES, which they don’t think to use instead of the Airship.  And finally, even after you hit the bastarding thing with the first missile, instead of fucking off it just hovers above the base taking it.  The dude SAID he was on his way to the target.  WHY DIDN’T IT LEAVE!?

And all of this under the apparent leadership of a man who we only meet five minutes before the end of the game but is apparently hella bad and makes Cobra Commander seem like George Fucking Patton.  There is also a distinct possibility that your character’s father is the President, but that’s unconfirmed.  Now, thrown into this mix is you.  I can’t remember the character’s name and I’ll be damned if I’m going to look it up.  You were trained by the secretest organisation there is, but turned your back on that life much to President Dad’s chagrin.  You go on a rock-climbing trip with a girl who I assumed was a long-term girlfriend.  Now, it turns out later on that you met her at a club. Once.  And as I said it’s not even clear if you fucked her, or you thought a rock-climbing trip was what it was gonna take to get into this woman.  I don’t know.  There’s very little exploration of this point.  Now while you’re out there she gets captured by a couple of robot-looking motherfuckers and your derring-do hero follows the bastards in.  If I’d known that the extent of the relationship was a shared phone number in a club and then a pathetic attempt to get laid by going on this trip I would have had great difficulty just following those guys inside.  At that point anyone would have just fucked off and TOLD THEIR PRESIDENT FATHER and gotten the whole mess sorted out.  I really thought they were like long-term partners or something to justify diving in after her.  The central character spends the whole game with almost no motivation.  Anyway, so you use your black-ops or whatever training to make your way to her.  And when you find her, what happens?  You say, “Claire, we need to get the FUCK out of this place, like NOW.  I can fucking DOUBLE JUMP in the air.  Do you understand that?  I don’t know what the fuck is happening or what the fuck I’m doing wearing this insane armour but I came to rescue you and we have to go.”  Then she basically says, “Um…nooooo.  We need to, like, stop these super bad guys.  But what’s going to happen is I’m going to sit here and possibly hack something that will be of no use to you whatsoever and you’re going to go stop them.”  So after this exchange we’re supposed to be surprised when it turns out that she’s actually an NSA agent.  But she chooses not to give you any information about anything.   It also transpires that she looked you up and seduced you in the club to make you do this mission.  I can’t even remember the bullshit reason they gave for this.  Maybe the restoration had people everywhere or something.  I have no fucking clue.  But at the end this is supposed to be made all better by the fact that she gives you a single line of flirtatious dialogue and then fucks off in a helicopter.  But that’s after she puts a bullet in Motherfucker Commander’s skull.  And THAT’S after you, who has been murdering people in a full HEMISPHERE of ways from Sunday, hesitate to pull the trigger on the asshole RESPONSIBLE for the whole mess.  I’d feel sorry for your guy for falling victim to a woman who is clearly the biggest cocktease ever recorded if he wasn’t so stupid himself.  The entire game makes no sense.

You see all that plot I just laid on you?  All of that is delivered through one brief monologue (from guess who) and incidental dialogue. That’s right, the guards’ conversations are how you get the story.  The guards that you will have to kill and almost certainly will kill immediately.  It isn’t difficult to see why this isn’t a more widely used story-telling device.  But, as I say, this story is barely there.  The first time the villain appears, cackling, is so late in the game that it’s impossible not to just go “What!?” and laugh.  The fact that it’s barely there is the only thing that makes it tolerable.  Otherwise it’s utter bullshit.  Maybe a lot of people don’t expect anything more than this and I’m familiar with video games having rubbish or silly stories, but I expect them to be competently told and constructed.  If you’re going to have a villain with no depth who’s just a big badass then do it like RAMM in Gears of War.  Have him show up, kill someone, grunt a bit and look mean.  Then have someone state who he is.  Then kill him at the end.  These are all standard techniques.  When you use them, the story/character can still be rubbish, but at least it’s coherent.  Also the last line is, I-shit-you-not, “I am everyone.  And no-one”.  Boom.

There’s also an idea that this is meant to be a cross-media story with some novel Orson Scott Card wrote with the express purpose of tying into the video game, but the game really ought to stand up by itself and either tell me I need to read the book or give me a recap because I had no idea it existed until afterwards.

It’s only LIKE Metroid – Yeah, so I said it was nice to see another game taking a stab at the Metroid formula?  That didn’t mean this did it well.  I just got this feeling the whole way through that someone made a list of all the things everybody liked about the Metroid series and they just ticked them off as they went along and then connected those bits quite blandly in the game.  It just didn’t feel as intricately designed or as fun to play as Metroid.  When I started just running about trying to get the upgrades I came to enjoy the game a bit more and there were some nice little puzzles but the whole time I was playing it just felt that there was something missing and I’m reasonably certain it wasn’t playing in the knowledge that under the armour was a hot, sweaty blonde in a bikini.

Shooting – Ugh.  The shooting in this game just did not work for me and I am willing to admit that this may be partly to do with the fact that I wasn’t great at it.  There were a number of problems with it:  I thought the use of the second analogue stick was a little imprecise.  I found it hard to land headshots consistently.  The fact that you have this panoramic aiming mechanic also so means that they didn’t implement jump-shooting unless you wanted to use my patented “The Claw” position and break your hand.  Not being able to jump and shoot feels very unnatural in a game like this and it made the combat move at a much slower pace as I had to stand still and shoot at enemies before i could move through the room.  Then there was the big innovation in the game.  One of the hooks for playing it.  There are enemies in the BACKGROUND!  Because the game is pretty much full 3D enemies can come up corridors in the background and can shoot at you from there.  You can use cover that’s displaced from you a little bit.  Sounds like a cool idea.  But the way you shoot into the background is by sort of putting your cursor at the right height and then the game aims for you.  And it doesn’t fucking work.  Sometimes the thing just fucking refuses to shoot into the distance and when it does you have no control over which target you select.  It’s a very neat idea but I thought it was very poorly implemented and caused nigh infinite frustration: there’s nothing worse than feeling that your failure wasn’t your fault.

Bosses – Most of the bosses in this game are get out of range and lob grenades at it affairs, but there are a couple of walkers which the game seemed to suggest had a knack to killing them, like pulling out circuitry or something, but I couldn’t get it to work.  They’re not fun and they don’t feel very imaginative.  Apart from the fucking wheel.  That was crazy.

Experience Points – Apparently you spend this game levelling up.  I never noticed it.

Zelda Syndrome - As much as I praised the upgrades, one or two of them only serve the purpose of opening a new area and doing very little else.

The Shadow Complex – I didn’t like the whole feel of where the game was set.  It didn’t have any character of it’s own and I never felt absorbed in it.  I could never have navigated it without the map.  On the map the different sections have different colours, like in most metroid games, but unlike those I wouldn’t have been able to tell you when I moved from one colour to the other.  The areas didn’t have any individual identity, maybe apart from the factory bit, but it feels fractured.  In Metroid the areas all look and feel different and they have their own wonderful music cues and atmosphere and enemies.  Here, everything just felt a bit generic and there are vents fucking EVERYWHERE.  You spend a good 15-20% of this game crawling through vents which is boring and serves to make the entire map feel very disjointed because a vent is not a memorable transition.  However, I did like that you couldn’t miss any of the items.  I hate it when that happens.

Goals – Symptomatic of the storytelling I never had any idea why I was going anywhere.  I was just following the magical blue line, which I was immensely grateful for.

The Challenges are way too easy – As much as I enjoyed the last challenge and a few of the others the bar was set really low here.  I don’t know if this was just an honest misjudgement but some of the tasks were so banal or simple that it either wasn’t fun or I got a platinum medal on my first go.  You should never get a platinum medal on your first go at anything.  They’re supposed to be fable, mythical.  I should be questioning whether or not I can get one and feeling insecure about my golds, not being king of all things on my first go!

Niggles -

Last Boss Trigger – I’m pretty sure anybody that played this last game walked into the final boss by accident, I know I did.  It isn’t really signposted and it sort of just happens.  You’re walking along and then suddenly there’s a cutscene and boom the game is over.  Really strange.

Nolan North: – Video Game Industry.  HIRE SOME OTHER FUCKING VOICE ACTORS!  I like Nolan North.  I like how he plays a lot of his characters, but for the love of God, games are generic enough at times without them having the exact same fucking main character.  He does loveable rogue really well.  But there are other voice actors out there who can do it too.  Please stop having me play as the same dude in every game.  Please.  Please.

I paid 600 MS points for the game and I think it’s probably worth that just for the experience of an Arcade game this well produced, but there are a number of elements of design that I felt were flawed and an utterly impenetrable story, so watch out.

***MAMMOTH SPOILERS***

LIKED

Everything I’ve always liked – It’s still Battlestar Galactica.  Whatever reasons you had for watching it up until this point, they’re still here now.  The production values are extremely high.  All of  the deep, varied characters that have been built over the previous three seasons are still here.  All of the great ship and costume designs obviously persist and the new designs this season are the most ambitious yet.  The writing is still original and nuanced.  The performances are still mind-bending.  Almost everything I loved about the previous seasons is here, with only a couple of exceptions, so bear in mind when reading the negatives that this show is as strong as it has been and the fourth season was maybe the strongest since the first.  There’s an urgency about it that, I think, allowed them to avoid duff episodes like Scar and Black Market from previous seasons.

Characters – As I think there is a tendency to do in a lot of long-running shows the last season moves away from the initial hook of the show and focuses a lot more on the characters that have been built up throughout the show’s run.  Fortunately for Galactica they’ve built up some of the most nuanced and compelling characters ever seen on the small screen.  Almost everyone develops in some way over the course of the season and those more minor characters who don’t, like Doc Cottle, stay gloriously the same, so that we enjoy every second of their screen time.  A few characters stood out this season:

Gaeta: who had one of the most tragic and shocking stories in the entire show.  His descent from one of the less offensive, but reliable and talented members of the crew to the bitter leader of the mutiny was both well-planned and well-executed; his lack of recognition from other characters in the show serving as a personal tipping point following the loss of his leg; the fact that his mutiny was not unjustified particularly in light of how Roslin and to a lesser degree Adama had been behaving; and his deep regret proving to be the undoing of the mutiny as Gaeta was always at heart a good man, pushed beyond his limits by events he couldn’t control.

Adama: Edward James Olmos continued to give us what I think is one of the best characters we’ve seen in the past decade. It’s impossible not to love Bill Adama.  His character has the benefit of almost always being right from the shows writing and that means we trust him, even when his actions seem questionable.  He commands utter respect, shares the audience’s skepticism over the religious writings, understands the role he plays and is just a complete fucking badass.  In this season he starts to put his personal concerns first, but at as a limited a detriment to the fleet as possible.  His willingness to believe Starbuck and how that leads to Gaeta’s injury and the mutiny mean he doesn’t come away clean but that his heart always seemed to be in the right place.; his utter disdain for the mutineers, showing his colours as a military man through and through.  Even though I disagreed with his refusal to acknowledge a vice-president in the absence of the president, regardless of his feelings towards him, he was proven to be right as Zarek went to extreme measures in the mutiny.  Some blogs didn’t like the more personal aspect of Adama’s story but I thought that it served to make the character human, and strengthened the character, when he broke under the pressure of losing three of his great loves: the Ship, Saul and Laura.  I loved the portrayal of a man reaching the end of what he could endure, despite already having endured so much and Admiral William Adama is as memorable a character as I have ever encountered.

Cavil: I think this character came the most out of the blue.  Certainly in the first season it was nice to have Dean Stockwell as part of the cast but in this season they really brought the character into his own.  They made him  megalomaniacal and deeply, deeply flawed.  He was perhaps a little bit too grandiose for the overall tone of the show but I thought that given that he was quite clearly borderline insane it sort of fitted with the direction in which they took the character.  And, as much as I don’t care for the big expository episode itself, his monologue in which he whinges like a petulant, but articulate child about all the things he wants but doesn’t have was utterly compelling and made me understand how dangerous he was with the power he wielded.

Acting – Of course none of this investment would be possible without the performances of the actors portraying these characters and the acting is as good as it’s always been.  Those actors given more screen time and asked to do more with their characters than before all rise to the challenge.  Many of the Cylons have multiple characters to the same actress and Tricia Helfer does a commendable job of differentiating the sixes.  Sorry to again speak in superlatives, but this is one of the finest ensemble casts I’ve ever seen, on par with Deadwood or Six Feet Under.

Effects/ Artistic Design - One of the things that really kept this show compelling was the ability to be come absorbed in the world, to be anxious at the outcome of every major conflict and the only way to achieve this is to build and present a tangible reality.  I felt that the design of the ships and the costumes and their ultimate execution in the show constantly astounded and pushed the boundaries of what we can expect from a TV show.  In this last season in particular the designs for the Cylon ships became even more outlandish and the concept and appearance of the accretion disc where the true climax of the series happens was stunning.  I really enjoyed the increasingly twisted Cylon vessels and respected that they were all created simply to be spectacularly destroyed.  The battles became grander, but more crucial and were a thrilling to watch, with an emphasis still on tactics and formation that I enjoyed so much in the naval-inspired engagements of the previous seasons.

Sound Design – One thing I only really noticed upon watching this last season is how effective the sound design is.  How the sound of the Dradis is unique and foreboding and always makes me assume the cylons are coming; the low-frequency hum as the red eye of the Cylon centurion sweeps across; the noise the different fighters make, Cylon and human.  All of it is designed so that everything has an immediately recognisable cue and it really lends these elements a familiarity and makes the show more absorbing.

Endless, Unrelenting Suffering - All of the other seasons had reprieves somewhere.  There has always been a sense that all of the survivors were living on borrowed time, particularly in the constant jumping sequence of the first episodes and the time one Cylon-occupied New Caprica, but never before for an entire season have I felt the weight, magnitude and breadth of all the shit that is raining down on these characters.  The sleeper agents, home lives, betrayal, the first mutiny, the second mutiny, the shattered dreams of earth, slow death, suicide, helplessness, blind arrogance, fear all constantly consuming every facet of the show.  I watched this in two extended stints encompassing Christmas Day and I found it pretty tough going to suffer along with the characters over that brief and intense period and the ability of the show to make me feel that level of compassion but also keep watching is a real achievement.

Dead Earth - The culmination of all of the “signs” that they were following leading to a dead, broken planet was delicious.  The shot of Adama bending over and rubbing the dirt through his fingers juxtaposed with the moments of hope and joy from beforehand was heartbreaking and the washed out photography of the planet immediately let us know that this was not what they had been looking for.  I also appreciated the philosophy exemplified by this moment.  We weren’t left with them finding a planet at the end of an episode and then being crushed at the start of the next, we saw this at the end of that episode and then the show dealt with the consequences in the next episode.  It just feels like a subtler storytelling method.

Mutinies - Both mutiny storylines were compelling, complex and heartbreaking.  Helo really stepped up as the true heart of the series.  He’s more easily relatable than Adama and lead the way in accepting Athena, is a bit of a badass and is also almost always right.  The build-up to his relieving Starbuck of command is subtle and gradual as he does all he can to hold the crew together under the command of a negligent and obsessed captain until he feels he has to act.  The speed with which the mutiny ends was also impressively fresh as Starbuck comes to her senses in some way.  But Gaeta is shot in the leg and Helo won’t bring him back to Galactica until Starbuck is satisfied that she’s finished and in doing so Helo contributes to the second mutiny.  The idea of dissent begetting dissent was really wonderfully showcased here.  Then the second mutiny, the big one, that saw the cripples Gaeta take control of the fleet from an Adama-Roslin leadership that was not acting in the interest of the fleet, but of themselves, which was true to an extent.  How this showed characters’ willingness to be carried away and the feelings towards Adama bubbling under the surface and how Zarek showed himself to be a dangerous opportunist.  All of this resulted in some of the most riveting storytelling I’ve ever encountered and the resolution of the plotline was satisfying and fitting.

Cylon Civil War - This whole story about the splintering of the Cylon force as they disagree over steps taken with regards to the treatment of the humans and also the “lesser” Cylons was fascinating.  I was actually a fan of the time spent with Baltar among the Cylons in Season 3 and I enjoyed our time with them equally on this occasion.  The schism really showed how the experiences during the show had affected the different Cylons and how they’d diverged from their original programming and cemented their identity as sentient beings and not just machines.  The uneasy Truce that followed and the brinksmanship employed during it with Deanna were wonderfully tense as well.

Adama/ Roslin - The second half of the season was really concerned with Adama and his relationship with the dying Roslin and how they fall in love and come to depend on one another.  That stolen kiss on New Caprica was one of my favourite moments in the whole show.  Here we finally see that moment, and all of their shared strife, defeat and triumph bring the two together in a physical relationship, while both continue with their usual roles.  The tragedy is that Laura is dying of cancer and both know that even if they survive the Cylon War they will not be able to celebrate their emancipation together for very long.  I found this entire arc moving and natural.  A lot of shows tend to keep characters apart, because their courtship is a part of the show.  But the exploration of their relationship, particularly Adama’s utter honesty with himself over its nature was original and enjoyable.

Lee’s Efforts - Lee’s career move into politics gave us an interesting, if brief, look at what motivated the man.  In the fantastic court case that closed Season 3 we saw the stirrings of a man with a strong sense of justice and fair play and here we see him try to act on that in the political sphere.  I found myself agreeing with Lee the strongest out of all of the convictions of all of the characters and I enjoyed his side story as he comes under Zarek’s wing only to use his intuition to know not to get too close to him and how he felt crippled by the personal squabbles of the Quorum.  All of this was rendered moot in the wake of the mutiny and the ensuing war but I would have happily spend more time with this subplot.

Awesome Moments - These are just a few moments that I remember in particular being amazing:

Tigh offering himself as a bargaining chip during the hostage situation

When Tigh and Adama stay behind in the airlock

Adama and Tigh dual wielding an assault rifle and a pistol during the mutiny

The horror as Athena watches from her incapacitated position in the locker room

Six and Baltar realising they can both see…ugh…”angels”

Lee saying “I wanna explore!”

DIDN’T LIKE

Niggles - I had a couple of niggling complaints throughout this season that I think I’ll get out of the way first before I move onto the big stuff:

Nudity: Whenever I say this it’s going to sound like I just wanted to see tits (yeeooooo) but that’s not the point.  People in Battlestar Galactica have sex.  They do.  And when they do the characters are naked, as people are wont to be when engaged in such activity.  But the angles and the positions and everything go to such EXTREME lengths to make sure that we never see a penis or even so much as a nipple, god forbid, that it became DISTRACTING.  The lack of nudity distracted me.  It broke my suspension of disbelief.  People are not at all concerned with covering themselves up from someone they’ve just fucked and they don’t sit like that and they don’t do that with the cover.  For being honest enough to address sexuality I just wish either they’d stayed further away from the sex and had it a lot tamer or just stopped being concerned with the idea of nudity at all.

Roslin’s Bald Skin Cap:  This one really got me.  It was so fucking distracting.  Peoples’ heads are not shaped like that.  They do not do that.  She looked like the Borg Queen from First Contact without the tubes.  Now, if Mary McDonnell wasn’t prepared to shave off her hair then I don’t know what they could have done instead but in every scene about her dying I lost my emotional investment because of that fucking cap.  And there was a shot where there got an actual bald woman to sit with her back to the camera and it was then so obviously not her.  Grrrr.

“Frak”: I don’t like it when they use frak as a verb.  I know what they’re doing with it.  It literally means “fuck”.  That’s all it is.  Yet you’re allowed to say it and not fuck.  It’s absurd.  I get it.  But it sounds really, really goofy when they use it as a verb.  One line in particular is something like “You don’t know whether to shoot me or frak me” and it just made my toes curl.  I didn’t like it.

All Along the Watchtower: I like their version of this song.  I really do.  It’s great, as is the rest of Bear McCreary’s score, but its inclusion as a diagetic source just confuses me.  It doesn’t make sense to me.  I understand that it’s just a cypher, but it still doesn’t sit properly with me.

Endless, Unrelenting Suffering - I think we’d better get used to my putting things in both sections.  It might happen every time.  Like I said in the previous section this was one of the most physically trying things I’ve ever done in terms of watching TV.  I mean Requiem for a Dream and 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days are both rough going but at least they fucking end.  2 hours and you’re done.  But in this it just goes on.  It was extremely draining and I don’t think I would advise watching it like this.  Maybe watch four episodes at a time and then watch Amelie or something.

BULLSHIT! - The number of times you get to call bullshit in this show is unreal and in the final episode you’re calling bullshit faster and more frequently than the characters can deliver their dialogue.  There are things that just don’t make any sense or are waved away with the pithiest remarks you can imagine.  Undoubtedly the biggest one of the whole show is Starbuck’s departure in the finale.  That can fuck off.  But during the season the most irksome was the explanation of how Tigh aged when the other Cylons don’t.  “Uh, he’s another type of Cylon, why CAN’T he age? HMMMM!?”  There was an awful lot of shit like that going on.  AND WHO LEFT THAT NOTE ON ADAMA’S DESK IN SEASON 1!?

Lack of Consequences - It’s been a while since i watched the show, over a month in fact, but when I did a got a sense that there was sometimes a lack of consequence to certain actions.  The biggest exceptions are how Tori’s murder fucked EVERYTHING up at the end which I really loved, The Mutiny as a result of Gaeta’s injury (but we’ll get back to that) and Anders’s injury as a result of the mutiny.  However, in the latter two no-one was held directly accountable.  I mean, Anders shot Gaeta but suffered no direct consequences.  Sure, he was paralysed in the ensuing mutiny, but he wasn’t held to account.  The same with Starbuck and Roslin and Adama.  There didn’t seem to be any immediate, direct repercussions from a lot of their questionable, or wrong, decisions.  We never really learned how the mutineers were dealt with or what the scale of those who mutinied was.  They were allowed to fight at the end but I never knew how crippled the fleet was without them.  I’m struggling to think of other examples but I wrote it down so it must be true.

Focus on Characters – As much as I praised this in the first section I also missed all of the finer grain stuff from the earlier seasons.  The more in-depth explorations of politics and trade unions and military vs political power or the examination of how people dealt with the war.  When the show moves towards a character focus you lose a lot of what defined it as a SHOW.  Even though you’re happy to spend time with the characters and I understand a sudden jolt into a bit of social commentary would talk the show backwards against the inertia of the characters’ colliding stories I still missed those wonderfully insightful little episodes from before.  We did get a look at hour for some of the characters (Adama especially) the war essentially improved their life, and I loved that, but I wanted more.

Rampant, Unaddressed Hypocrisy - The crucial thing here is the word unaddressed.  I felt that a few of the characters, particularly Roslin (who I went from loving to despising and wanting to die except that it would hurt Bill) were being amazingly hypocritical throughout this season and before.  But the show never calls them on it, it never draws attention to it and shines a light saying, “Hypocrite!” and to me that always feels like a tacit endorsement of their actions which makes me feel like that’s how the VIEWER is supposed to feel.  Some movies only work if you view them in the way they were intended.  For example, House of Flying Daggers ONLY works if you believe and believe IN the “True Love” that blossoms between Takeshi Kaneshiro and Zhang Ziyi’s characters.  I didn’t.  I wanted Andy Lau to win because he’s had his heart broken and the writers betrayed their character by putting in a cheap scene of him trying to rape her to make him into a villain.  It was a happy ending for me, and that is NOT the film.  In this, I just, I had no desire for Roslin to hold on to her post any more.  I didn’t think she deserved it.  I was almost wanting Zarek to take over and the show never made me feel like this was what I was supposed to be thinking.

Lack of Peripheral Cylon Characterisation - Who the fuck are Simon and Aaron?  Particularly Simon.  The Aaron Cylon played a bit more of a role in the earlier seasons when he was an infiltrator, but all of the other models had a personality and a purpose.  Those two seemed to exist purely to vote with Cavil in this season and they stood out as being the shallowest, least interesting characters in the show.

Baltar - This is a big one.  What happened to Baltar?  He was far and away the best character on the show; the most compelling, interesting and conflicted; the most fun to watch and to ask “How the fuck is this man still alive?”  He was wonderful.  But he spends this season doing almost nothing.  Being something utterly counter to what he had been before without the show ever really exploring his motivation for it.  For the whole season I was uncertain as to whether or not he was buying into what he was saying and maybe this was the point.  But in the “unrated” version of A Disquiet Follows My Soul” there is a line where he explicitly states that he doesn’t, so is this cannon?  I was too perplexed to find Baltar’s story interesting and while it may have seemed delicious to the writers to have Baltar, the great scientist become a spiritual leader through his self-preservational instinct, I found it to be unsatisfying and missed what I had come to expect of the character in previous seasons.  It doesn’t strip him of his title of one of the greatest characters ever seen on television, but all of that work was done in seasons 1-3.

Tigh and Caprica Six – While I enjoyed how incredibly strange this storyline was the sudden revelation that the two of them had fucked and no-one noticed or reported anything was a little jarring.  Having praised Battlestar for its mature storytelling in terms of “cliffhangers” I don’t know what dramatic purpose it served to reveal that the two had had sex with 6′s pregnancy.  I also felt it was unclear as to whether there would always be a miscarriage in a Cylon-Cylon pairing or whether it was just this time.

Chief and Cali – I don’t know why I didn’t enjoy this story-line.  It wasn’t character driven.  It was examining how the chief’s happiness with Cali in peace time didn’t last but I thought it reduced these characters to a cliché as a couple with everyone on the deck inexplicably turning on Cali as the needy wife.  It just didn’t sit well with me.  I did enjoy the revelation of the true father of Cali’s child and thought that was all tied up well enough and Cali’s death was really quite tragic, but I thought the storytelling was just a little heavy-handed and I’ve come to expect something more subtle from the show.

EXPOSITION! – There is an entire episode of this show that is just a conversation between Cavil and Ellen Tigh, whose identity I was fine with although not exactly thrilled.  In this episode the writers explained to the viewer what the fuck was going on.  And it’s nonsense.  It’s the worst way possible to present this information because everything else had unfolded so naturally and because it all comes so thick, fast and unengagingly that I didn’t take any of it in.  I still have questions as to the precise nature of the 13th colony which presumably were answered here but it was like trying to pay attention to a lecture and I shouldn’t have to watch the episode twice to pick up crucial plot details.  Worst of all it was dull.  Even though it had my much-beloved Cavil rant, everything else was lacking.

24 Syndrome – In season 5 of 24 they killed EVERYONE and gave us the best season since the first because of it.  Coupled with their killing of a major character pretty much per season that meant that in season 6 there was no-one of any value left for Jack to interact with or for the audience to care about and it hurt the show.  Right at the end when the fleet needed an admiral and a president, the show had used up anyone of any note and they came up with Hoshi (who?) and Romo (what?).  The scene of the passing of command lacked any emotional weight because we hadn’t seen any of these characters approach or want these roles.  Gaeta would have been a great choice for admiral before all the shit went down and maybe if we’d gotten to know a bit more about one of the Quorum for president, but as it stood it was something I didn’t care about.

The Romo Lampkin Episode – Jesus Christ.  Where do I even begin with this mess.  Romo was a great character in Season 3.  Fucking brilliant.  Enigmatic, awesome, RIGHT.  He was wonderful.  And that was all we needed of him.  Understandably people loved him and maybe they wanted more, but unless the writers deliberately went about taking a great fan favourite character and making him fucking stupid and shitting on him on purpose just to piss people off then I don’t know what was going on with this episode.  The two possibilities are, as above, they did it to poss everyone off because they were…bitter that people loved their character?  Or they were genuinely trying to expand on this character, in which case they went with the worst fucking ideas possible.  I don’t even know what happened in this episode and its whole structure was bullshit. And Romo went nuts over, over what the fuck I have no idea.  It was so stupid it MUST have been deliberate.  But then I have no idea why they did it.  It was a fucking mess and one of the worst episodes of the whole show and I can’t conceive of why it ever got past the draft stages.

Character Niggles – I started with niggles and I’ll finish this section with them, but these are more in terms of events in the show, as opposed to observations as a viewer.

Ellen Tigh Sex Paradox: Ellen goes nuts at Tigh for essentially fucking his daughter, but HE DIDN’T KNOW.  But never addresses or mentions the fact that she did EXACTLY THE SAME THING WITH CAVIL.  In fact, Cavil was the only participant fully aware of his actions in these trysts, so fuck him.

Zarek: I understand that Zarek has always been portrayed as unpredictable and dangerous.  But I didn’t really believe when he just had the Quorum shot.  It didn’t make much sense to me.  It seemed unnecessary, both conceptually and tactically and since Zarek wasn’t portrayed as having lost his mind I found it hard to accept.

D’Anna: Unless I missed something she just fucking vanishes after the hostage crisis.

Seelix: Seelix was my favourite tertiary character, mostly because I though she was hot and looked good with short hair.  She was involved in the mutiny but we didn’t get to see her after that.  Racetrack got her redemptive death in the final battle, but nothing for Seelix, who I missed.

Despite all of the complaints I really enjoyed this up until the end.  I might do a post on the very end of the show at some point, but I would just like to say that it was bullshit.  Particularly the central conceit about everyone abandoning all of their technology but apparently not their SYNTHETIC FIBRES.  It was fucking nonsense.  And Starbuck?  And the bit in the future.  And the shit with the “force”.  Bollocks.  Fucking bollocks.

Batman:Arkham Asylum

Liked

***minor spoilers***

Everything - The review isn’t going to be this glib but in essence this was how the game felt.  I can’t remember the last time I was so awed by every facet of a game that I just wanted to tell everyone and, more importantly, keep playing.  I played until I had found all of the Riddler challenges and gotten golds in all of the challenges.  That gave me 100% completion for the file.  I don’t think I’ve ever gotten that in a game before.  Damn you, 499/500 agility orbs in Crackdown!

Atmosphere – To specifics, now, and the atmosphere generated in the game.  From the moment you step into the asylum everything feels dense and oppressive.  This is accomplished by wise choice of colour palette, with a heavy green hue as well as the artistic design of each room.  Everything feels dirty, dank.  Even the outside feels cluttered due to very uneven terrain, heavy foliage and the look of the asylum buildings and guard posts towering overhead.  The graphics themselves are amazing, really showcasing what the unreal engine can do.

Character Redesigns - Everyone looked good.  Batman’s light armour, Joker’s purple suit, Harley Quinn’s sexier new look, Ivy’s college dorm girl look and the scarecrow’s sinister new duds.  It all feels a little bit darker, a little bit more twisted now that they’re aiming at a slightly less mainstream audience than the Chris Nolan movies but a more adult one than The Animated Series.  In fact, a lot of the audience for the game will have grown up  on the animated series, so maybe the new looks are aimed at us, only grown up.  Importantly, it all feels consistent.  Everyone has been designed with the same goal and feel in mind.

Story – The story is ultimately disposable, but I mean that in a good way.  It’s a great romp from start to finish.  An elaborate plan to destroy Gotham, slowly unravelled by The Dark Knight’s detective work, a setting that allows the inclusion of an arbitrary number of villains, but the creators have wisely kept the cast of recognisable enemies down, so as not to clutter the experience.  There’s no stretch made to ensure everyone’s part of the Joker’s plan either, so nothing feels forced.  There may be no deep insights or shocking reveals (not that stories like this in comics always have something to offer the reader) but it’s full of great lines, wonderful character moments and lots of charm and respect for the mythos.

Voice Acting – Whenever we heard that one of the Batman games was going to have Kevin Conroy, Mark Hamill and Arleen Sorkin we were all giddy with excitement.  There has never been a better Batman than Kevin Conroy.  He captures the toughness and sinister nature of Batman’s voice without sounding absurd and his contrast between Bruce and Batman is nigh perfect.  Mark Hamill’s Joker is always excellent, expertly flitting between playful and deadly and always a joy to listen to.  And there has never been another Harley Quinn, although Sorkin wisely drops the pitch a little bit.  We knew these people were good in the series but they’re just as good here.  It’s so good you almost don’t notice it, it just feels like you’re wrapped up in that world you fell in love with as a kid, but it never feels like it’s shooting for cheap nostalgia.  This is an event unto itself.

Harley Quinn – As a side note I feel I have to mention that as the game went on I found myself intensely attracted to this version of Harley Quinn to the point of discomfort.  I applaud the vision of the designers to accomplish but hope they don’t do it again so that I don’t have to admit to it.

I’m fucking BATMAN! - What I mean by this is you play as Batman.  Batman.  He’s not just your avatar.  You are Batman and it’s not Year One or any bullshit.  This simple idea seems to have been the central design philosophy for a lot of the game as well.  You get a small, but enjoyable, versatile and more grounded set of gadgets too.  The grapple hook and several types of batarang as well as a couple of others you pick up later that are a lot of fun.  The “detective mode” allows you to identify and track enemies, since Batman would always know where everyone was, through a sort of X-ray display.  Everything you do, you do as Batman.  I loved that.

Combat – I can’t remember the last time I had this much fun with the combat in a game.  This is literally the best combat system in an action/adventure game that I’ve ever come across.  It plays to the above sentiment: You are Batman.  That means that it’s perfectly conceivable that you should be able to defeat 24 thugs at once without taking a single awesome and being incredibly awesome, and oh you will. You have attack, instant counter, cape stun, evade, special moves that you have to earn and some gadget moves.  The idea is to string them all together in as long and varied a combo as possible and it’s difficult, but rewarding.  Most moves can be counter with the instant counter, but knives need the cape stun and electric batons need the dodge.  It’s so much fun.  It’s difficult to describe exactly but play it and you’ll know what I mean.  You’re really playing against yourself, to see how impressive a combo you can pull off, as opposed to trying to defeat the enemies.

Silent Predator – In the combat sections all (or nearly all) of the enemies are unarmed.  The other parts of the game have you moving undetected around a room taking out armed, patrolling guards.  There are myriad way of incapacitating the guards, from a simple batarang to the head followed by a ground takedown to ledge takedowns and suspending them upside down from the roof.  The challenges become more complex and remaining hidden more difficult as the game goes on.  As with the combat mode, the onus is on the player to make the experience enjoyable and impressive.  It’s easy to tag enemies with the batarang and then swoop down but it isn’t rewarding.  There’s a room where you can throw a batarang through a metal detector to set it off, which distracts two guards giving you room to deal with the third silently, but it took a few goes, some where I cleared the room but restarted anyway, before I was satisfied.

Challenge Mode - In the main game there is a certain pressure in the combat and predator sections since you need to move on and progress the story, but by completing Riddler challenges you unlock a Challenge mode, where you are given particularly tasks to complete within a room in the game.  There are combat and predator challenges.  The combat ones are a great place to maximise your combos.  You can earn up to three medals on any challenge.  For combat, it’s simply points, but you’ll need to string large combos and use every move Batman has to reach them.  The predator medals are awarded for carrying out certain moves whilst you take out the enemies in the room.  Some of these are extremely satisfying.  The challenge mode is a great way to explore the depth of both of these excellent systems.

Exploration – The game was surprisingly Metroid-like but I loved this as well.  The ability to move freely between objectives searching for Riddler puzzles or just getting a feel for the map, how everything links up.  It expertly teases future locations before revealing their significance.  Searching for these little puzzle didn’t  take me out of the experience, either.  Arkham Asylum understands that it’s a game.  Besides, there’s a nice little narrative payoff when you find complete all of the Ridder Challenges.  The size of the map is also well-judged.  It’s not meant to be an open-world experience, so the pressure of making the map function by itself isn’t there.  It’s still an intricately designed experience, but the ability to move through it is welcome.

Riddler Challenges – The challenges themselves are really enjoyable.  Finding the trophies is fun and destroying three sets of joker teeth with the multi-batarang always looks cool and never gets old.  The patient tapes and chronicles of Arkham are a nice addition but I didn’t give the character bios much time.  The other types of challenge are to find particular things in the environment, but most of these amount to little nods to the wider Batman universe which I enjoyed immensely.  Ultimately you get the point where if you see a Batman reference, scan it and you get a Riddler challenge.  Pod pointed out that it was better than Metroid Prime because the things you scan are interesting and draw your attention, instead of just being any fucking thing under the sun.  The Riddler challenges also include finding a map that leads to the other challenges in that area.  I liked this map.  Although there isn’t the same sense of achievement (or disappointment or frustration) as collecting everything in a Metroid game it made me want to play longer and longer.  I was happy to get all 240 as part of my first playthough.  That’s the other thing: You can’t miss any!  I hate that in games.  There is an achievement you can miss.  And you will miss it if you care anything for the atmosphere and drive of the finale.  Very unfair achievement.

Scarecrow Levels - I won’t spoil them here, but there are several sections in the game where Batman falls under the influence of the Scarecrow’s fear toxin.  The sequences are disturbingly brilliant.  There’s some great imagery (but nothing oblique) and some great gameplay tricks.  There’s also an effect that I don’t think I’ve seen before, where a library corridor gradually transforms into a street, so it starts raining inside and the wet brickwork gradually impedes on the wallpaper and carpet as you walk along the corridor.  These sequences are almost entirely removed from the main game and offer a welcome break from the main story.

It’s a great GAME – Finally, I have to say, that this is really a great game in its own right: Not just a great Batman game, not just a great comic book game.  This has an appeal beyond Batman fans although that added to the experience for me.  It isn’t just a game with Batman stuck in it, though.  The designers really set out to create a unique and extremely enjoyable experience

Didn’t Like

Perspective Puzzles – There are certain puzzle where you need to align the camera to display a Riddler question mark in two parts.  These are not described well and the first time I came across one I didn’t know what to do.  Later on, there’s one in the sewer which is very difficult to find.  Although it’s cool when they line up, the difficulty in finding some of them is too great.

Grappling Hook Inconsistency – I only noticed this in the challenge maps when you need to be pretty quick in some places, but often you’ll be focused on a ledge to grapple on and then as you press fire the point of aiming will change.  It doesn’t happen too often but it can be very frustrating.

Strike Aiming Inconsistency – Again, I only noticed this in the challenge mode, but sometimes in the freeflow combat, when you direct the stick to aim your strike it doesn’t quite do what you tell it, which is frustrating if it breaks a particularly long combo.

Lengthy Restart Time - The challenge maps require, by their nature, a lot of repetition.  I don’t mind that: it takes time to master something and you WILL have to restart a lot if you want to get all golds, but when you select restart in the option menu it takes a while to actually get back into the action.  It’s a minor presentation gripe but one that irks me.

Final Boss – I found the last fight a little easy and a little underwhelming, particularly coming off the more challenging one beforehand, although the last boss itself does look extremely cool.

Jim Gordon – This was the only character I didn’t think they got quite right.  His model is extremely beefy and his voice in incredibly gruff.  I didn’t think they captured the fatherly warmth of the character or got his relationship with Batman quite right.

Everyone who works in Arkham is Steve Blum – Given that this is a top-tier title I was surprised at this, but the vast majority of Arkham staff are voiced by the same actor, whose voice I recognise instantly thanks to Cowboy Bebop.  Given the quality of the rest of the package I would have expected them to be able to spread a bit of variety about the minor characters

Dir: Brad Bird

Stars: Eli Marienthal, Jennifer Aniston, Harry Connick Jr, Christopher MacDonald, John Mahoney, Vin Diesel

On Saturday past I watched The Iron Giant with my parents.  I really quite enjoyed it.  It looked really lovely and the seamless blending of traditional animation with what I would call cell-shaded 3d provided a luscious and affecting visual spectacle.  1950s America is faithfully recreated in animated form and there’s a little bit near the start where Hogarth sits up to watch a B-movie horror and the main character from it sounds like Rod Sterling.  The little snippet of the film we see is brilliantly funny, although my mum and dad didn’t really get the joke.  The rest of the film also has a great sense of humour, ranging from little nods and observational comedy, to very enjoyable physical humour and a delight in Hogarth’s flights of fancy.  The relationship between Hogarth and the eponymous metal man is touching and speaks to our own memories of childhood, of that trusting nature, as well as simply wanting a giant robot friend.  The character of the robot as friendly, bumbling and childlike is brought to life brilliantly by the animation and sound design, and the design of the robot itself is wonderful.  The voice cast is also excellent, with Jennifer Aniston performing particularly well, given her limited experience with voice acting.

There’s a lot more going on than a simple boy and his robot story.  There’s a lot of commentary about social perception with the inclusion of a “beatnik” character who’s an artist and a good-guy and a wonderfully slimy government agent, who personifies the hawkish nature of many people during the cold war, albeit in fevered monologues, but it all works within the confines of the film.  The ultimate nature of the robot is a keen representation of the principle of mutually assured destruction and more subtly the rage and power bubbling beneath the surface of any child.  I thought the social and warfare commentary worked very well and was clear and easily understood, as were the issues of accepting an alien creature and the mistrust of the unknown.  The only part I didn’t think was handled well was when Hogarth and the Giant talk about death and souls.  It felt a little “crowbared” in to me and slightly awkward.

I enjoyed the film a lot and am sorry that it’s been so long since I read the Ted Hughes book that I can’t compare the two.  Funny, pretty and powerful, I give The Iron Giant a strong recommendation.

Xbox 360

Assassin’s Creed

Batman: Arkham Asylum

Borderlands

Devil May Cry 4

Fable II

Fallout 3

Grand Theft Auto IV

Mass Effect

Mirror’s Edge DLC

Ninja Gaiden II

PGR4

Saints Row 2

PC

Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars/ Kane’s Wrath

Command & Conquer Red Alert 3

Company of Heroes/ Opposing Fronts/ Tales of Valour

Frontline: Fuel of War

Full Spectrum Warrior/ Ten Hammers

Juiced 2: Hot Import Nights

Red Faction II

Red Faction: Guerrilla

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. : Shadow of Chernobyl

Titan Quest/ Immortal Throne

Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II

Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War/ Dark Crusade/ Soulstorm/ Winter Assault

Wii

Boom Blox

House of the Dead: Overkill

MadWorld

Metroid Prime 3: Corruption

Okami

Punch-Out!!

Resident Evil: The Umbrella Chronicles

DS

Chrono Trigger

Ninja Gaiden: Dragon Sword

Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney: Justice for All

SKY MOVIES

Counterfeiters, The

Day of the Locust, The

Dreamgirls

Hard Target

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)

Iron Giant, The

Man on Wire

Rescue Dawn

Shooter

Sunshine

Tell No One

Y Tu Mama Tambien

DVD

TV Shows

Armando Iannucci Shows, The

Battlestar Galactica Season 4

Curb Your Enthusiasm Series 1-6

Ghost in the Shell Stand Alone Complex 2nd Gig

Life on Mars Series 1

Madmen Series 1

Monty Python’s Flying Circus Series 1-4

Prisoner, The

Sopranos Seasons 1-6, The

Tom & Jerry Volumes 1-6

X-Files Seasons 1-9, The

Steven Seagal Movies

Out For a Kill

Out of Reach

Today You Die

Black Dawn

Mercenary for Justice

Shadow Man

Attack Force

Flight of Fury

Renegade Justice

Pistol Whipped

Kill Switch

Movies

American Dreamz

Barton Fink

Before Sunrise

Before Sunset

Blood Simple

Caramel

Dawn of the Dead (2004)

Don’t Look Now

El Mariachi

Fall, The

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

Fido

Fly, The

Garden State

Gomorrah

It Happened One Night

Lady Snowblood: Blizzard from the Netherworld/ Love Song of Vengeance

Legend

Local Hero

Milk

Monty Python: And Now for Something Completely Different

Monty Python: The Meaning of Life

Monty Python Live at the Hollywood Bowl

Mr. Smith Goes to Washington

Night of the Living Dead

Quiet American, The

Resident Evil

Seven Samurai

Stop-Loss

Strings

Until Death

Weird Science

Willow

You Can’t Take It with You

BOOKS

A Short History of Nearly Everything

Ancestor’s Tale, The

Arabian Nights Tales of 1001 Nights, The

Before the Beginning

Catch 22

Dune

High Fidelity

Innocent When You Dream

Memoirs of a Geisha

Moab is my Washpot

Mostly Harmless

Oliver Twist

Selfish Gene, The

Stuff of Thought, The