Amnesia: The Dark Descent

I both love and hate horror games. Not "horror" games which feature people carrying guns bigger than me shooting demons in space. I mean proper horror games, which pit you against nasties from the nether regions of hell with little more than a light source and one too few changes of underwear.

Amnesia: The Dark Descent is the latter. In fact, some of the time you don't even have a light, which makes the change of underwear even more precious.

As mentioned, games that try to be scary while giving you enough weaponry to take down a zombified Genghis Khan are not scary at all. Sure they can make you jump with cheap shock scares, but once that has worn off you can send a kilo of buckshot through their face... providing they have one.

The true horror game strives to terrorize the players mind for hours; subtly building the tension up to a pants wettingly terrifying crescendo. Or not, you never know when things are going down. This is exactly what Amnesia does, and it does it so superbly that I found myself not wanting to play it for fear that I wouldn't have clean boxers for a while. That is the hate aspect of my relationship with horror games, but I love that it can do that to me.

The story of Amnesia follows a young chap called Daniel. He awakes in a strange castle with, you guessed it, amnesia. From the very start it seems like the whole castle is alive and not terribly thrilled that you're there. He stumbles upon a note written by himself telling him it's what needed to be done and that a man must be killed. The note also explains the feeling of constant dread within the castle. The man you want dead has summoned a nameless evil which has enveloped the town. Classic horror themes, don't you agree? But hey, if it isn't broken don't fix it.

While the main genre of the game is horror, the larger aspect of the game is puzzle solving. You get the standard locked door puzzles, interspersed with things such as finding ingredients for potions and fixing sewer systems. The range is great and nothing ever really feels like a chore. However, that could just be the overlying terror crushing every other emotion I had while playing.

The only problem I found with the puzzles stemmed from my own incompetence. Several times I found myself flailing around in the dark, having wasted all my lantern oil, trying to find the one thing needed to advance the plot. In the end the thing needed would be right under my nose, which would make me feel so incredibly stupid. I didn't like it, but it's probably almost exactly what I would be doing in Daniel's situation. That and sitting in a corner crying.

Throughout the game we're given the story in that most recent of literary devices, the audio log. Although, it's not strictly an audio log, but a written diary entry read aloud in Daniel's head. They gave a great insight into why you need to kill that man, Alexander of Brennenburg, but I've always felt it's a strange way of delivering story. Even more so with hand written diary entries. Audio recordings I can understand, as they're quick to make, but sitting down to write something erudite while being chased by ghoulies... doesn't seem plausible to me.

It's even less plausible when you find these notes in some of the darkest, dankest places of the castle. Oh look, one of my diary pages in a torture chamber in a dungeon. So that's where I left it, how silly of me.

Speaking of castle locations, it's not often a game can accurately give off a sense of foreboding with something as normal as a study. When you are dreading walking around a guest bedroom for fear of having your nads lopped off by a monster from the black lagoon, the thought of setting foot in a dungeon is outrageous. Other areas include food storage (where I lost several years off my life), laboratories and book archives. I don't think there is an area in the game which you can consider safe, which ramps up the psychological terror to all new heights. This is especially evident when the room looks safe. You could argue that this could saturate the game with horror, but it balances everything so well it's never mundane or frustrating horror.

Daniel's sanity plays a big part in how you play the game. The more crazy stuff you see, the more crazy you become. What I really found great, which I only realised after playing, was that my own stress levels were mirroring Daniel's sanity level almost perfectly. If he was fine, I was fine. If he was stressed, I was stressed. I played a lot of the game with friends present and I think I can safely say we all let a little bit of wee come out at some points.

In my opinion, this is one of the scariest, creepiest and most of all best games of recent years. I can't think of many games that have drawn me into it's world and been so good at what it does. The only downsides to the game came from my own bumbling nature. It's a true horror game and it's almost perfect.

Royal Mail

Unfortunately, due to the absolute CHAOS caused by 3 inches of snow, there will be no review his week.

No wonder people think we're a nation of blundering idiots; it's because we are.

Halo: Reach

The Halo franchise has never been a favourite of mine. I regard it, admittedly from a point of complete ignorance, as "baby's first shooter". Without trying to sound completely biased against it, the fact that the player's character, Master Chief (or in Reach's case Noble 6), can jump 20 feet in the air and absorb a whole armoury before even his shield is depleted really does make it for people who might have lost some of their brain in a serious industrial accident.

Now, I try not to succumb to hype, but I have been known to buckle under the weight sometimes, even for games in a franchise that I don't like. I just thank all powerful Atheismo that I held out on buying this one. For you see, the game is not only ass, but ass made of nothing but cellulite with acne dimples you could suffocate a whale in.

All aboard the critic ship. Next port of call, the hilariously sub-par graphics. Games these days have a lot to live up to in the graphics department, so when a game comes out that looks a tad shoddy, it sticks out like an elephant in a penguin enclosure. Not that the graphics are bad per se, but compared to other games they are pretty shocking. The first thing that really caught my eye was the amount of aliasing. I was actually shocked. Console games tend to forsake anti-aliasing due to the impact on performance it has, but Jesus this needed something... anything.

Another problem with the graphics is the attempt at motion blur. While the rest of the graphics are bad in comparison with other games, this is just straight up bad. So bad in fact I thought my TV was on the blink. If you've ever played a launch PSP and seen the pretty dire ghosting that happens on that screen, that what you get in Reach. The combination of sub-par graphics and hilariously bad blur just makes me feel sorry for the people who actually like this game who have to stare at that mess for hours.

As with Call of Duty titles, there is an obvious bias in the game toward multiplayer. This leaves the single player campaign feeling tacked on and worthless, or written by people who had just taken a class in Movie Clichés 101. When a character says, with genuine sincerity, "may God help us all..." you know the writers don't care. I know I didn't after that line. All I cared about was stopping myself from dying with laughter.

When I wasn't losing vital organs from laughter, I was in a state of mild confusion. The planet Reach is where the war with the Covenant begins, so why would the characters know everything about the enemy before hand? I can imagine there being some knowledge through research and historical records, but to know everything like the game is set after all the other games is pretty stupid. While the people playing the game will most likely know everything about the enemy, the characters in the game shouldn't.

When I wasn't doing either of those things, I was losing the will to live waiting for the game to load. I can usually deal with long load times when the game has a lot to load, but when the game is as sparsely populated as Reach is, it's surprising how long it takes.

Once I had waited a life age of the Earth to get into the game I was back on the life support machine. I have never seen anything as funny as an NPC trying to navigate the terrain in a car. If these marines are the best Earth has to offer, I'm surprised the Covenant didn't go straight for Earth from the get go. Trying to drive them yourself, on the other hand, is a matter of pure frustration. I can see the attempt at having the controls mimic on foot controls, but it just doesn't work.

Now we come careening into the murky, racist 9-year-old infested waters of multiplayer. Or we would if the matchmaking had worked. I have read about Halo's matchmaking being very good, but it certainly didn't show here. For starters it tried to make me buy map packs before I had even got into the multiplayer part of the menu. I tried multiple game modes multiple times, but I never joined a game. Too bad Halo, it could have swayed my opinion. It would have been tough, and it probably would have had to perform some sort of act on my genitalia while playing to do that, but now I will never know.

What's really mind-boggling is how the series is admired by so many people. I don't know if this particular game is the errant turd in a bowl of sweets, but if the fans love it this much I'm willing to bet it's not much different to previous titles.

Batman: Arkham Asylum

I don't get Batman. Some guy murders his parents, so he decides to become a vigilante and make amazing weapons and gadgetry with the millions of dollars he inherited. If he really wanted to help crack down on crime, surely he would become Gotham City's biggest police equipment contractor, rather than beating up crooks in a stupid outfit? Imagine a whole police force of Batmen... *shudder*

It's obvious why Batman does it. His wealth and power has given him the most massive superhero ego ever. In his mind, only he can stop nefarious evil-doers with his superior detective abilities. What a tool.

So now we have another game based on this clown. The basic story is that the Joker has planned a take over of Arkham Island by having all his incarcerated gang members transferred to Arkham right before he deliberately gets caught by Batman. It's a fair enough plot, until the opening scene when Joker pretty much spells out his plan to Batman. Superior detective skills, my arse.

The whole scene itself is pretty awful. It's a 5 minute trek from the gates of Arkham Asylum to the point Joker breaks out. It's another instance of a game trying to keep the player involved when it's completely unnecessary. A minute long cutscene would be suited better than watching Batman amble at the pace of a sloth on barbiturates.

We then get a glimpse of Killer Croc, whose dialogue might as well just have been "I'm going to be a boss later raaaarrrgh!". He's also unaccompanied in a lift. How does anyone on that island think letting a 16ft monster, with teeth bigger than my hand, walk around on his own in rusty manacles is a good idea? Seriously, they would have deserved it if they all got eaten.

After sleeping through that intro, I got to actually play the game. Initially it's a fun mix of progression puzzles, hand to hand combat and stealth. The open nature of the game lends itself to the detective aspect of Batman's persona as well. However, the game pretty much cheats you of using intuition with the inclusion of "Detective Mode", an overlay on Batman's vision flat out telling you what things are. It even lets you see people through multiple walls. In essence, Batman goes through life with debug mode on.

When our man isn't fighting thugs, hiding on one of about 4 million gargoyles around Arkham or being a "detective", he's usually in a vent somewhere. For a place that wants to keep people from escaping they sure are big on vents large enough for a person to climb through that bypass most of their security systems.

That's another thing. Almost every objective is blocked by an "unhackable" electric fence at some point. The fact that they're unhackable makes it obvious that they're just an arbitrary diversion to add length to the mission. God forbid Batman use his explosive gel to destroy them. You do get a device later that can disable them (so much for unhackable), then they just move the fence controls to somewhere that's blocked by the fence you want to disable.

Once you start getting into the later stages of the game, it becomes a rather repetitive slog between infrequent boss encounters. It usually features a combination of find evidence, scan evidence, follow evidence trail, beat up on grunts on the way, crawl in several hundred vents, arrive at your destination, fight grunt hopped up on crazysauce. When you're not doing one of these things, you can bet you're in a Scarecrow hallucination.

These levels are confusing. I really can't see much of a point for them except for them being fan service. If Scarecrow was a major part of the plot, then these stages would hold more weight, but as it is it's just some asshole doping you up randomly to annoy you.

The stages themselves are pretty tedious, having to avoid Scarecrow's gaze before reaching a floodlight to blast him which makes you recover from the effects of the drug. What I did enjoy was some of the subtle mindfuckery that happened before each stage. At one point you go into a morgue from a normal corridor, go back out through the same door you just came in into... the morgue again. Those moments were great. If the drug was more of that, they would have been some of my favourite parts of the game. As they were, they were out of place and just padding for the story.

All of his leads up to the final showdown with Joker. I didn't really know what to expect in terms of a finale before playing the game, seeing as Batman is about four times the size of Joker. What I did expect was better than what it ended up being. What it turned out to be was a mass brawl between Batman and a load of goons that he had been destroying since the beginning of the game. The only instances of actually fighting Joker came down to pulling him off a ledge with the batclaw and punching him when he gets stuck in the floor. Do that 3 times and well done, you've beaten the game.

No other forms, no multiple attacks, just waves and waves of goons. It's a shame because Joker was the best character by far. Why is it that Batman always gets overshadowed by his enemies? Probably because we know he's just an egomaniacal rich boy, who doesn't want anyone to touch his toys, but wants everyone to watch him play with them.

While the game is decent, it's not great. The hand to hand mechanics are great, which would have been disastrous had they been bad, and the open world of Arkham Asylum is awesome in it's Gothic charm. The repetitive gameplay and anticlimactic end spoil a game that could have been really good.