That's me on the left

I experienced one of the perks of moving to London this weekend when I spent the weekend at that Eurogamer Expo (can we start calling it E2?). I’m not going to say much about it because I should really be reading ‘The myth of sense-date’ by some berk called Winston Barnes but I want to mention a few things so I’ll just jot a paragraph or two down on each of the highlights and shove them up below. First (or rather last since I’ll post this post last to delibrately break the reverse time order blog format of the site) let me tell a bit of my story of the weekend because it was quite cool dammit.

This confuses me, why is it that people are rewarded for being first the queue? I mean really, why is it considered good to turn up to events incredibly early? Why is it a good thing to wait six bloody hours early when turning up an hour early will get you in the venue at about the same time? It makes no damn sense. However as a selfish consumer if there are freebies on offer for turning up six hours early then they’re going to bloody well be mine! So yeah, I sat in the cold on a dreay monday morning and for my troubles I got a free copy of Uncharted 2, the chance to meet Ellie and Bertie of Eurogamer, a WET t-shirt (I also tried out the game when I was in there, my impression: it’s rather shit) and an apearence on the Eurogamer website. I don’t own a PS3 which did lessen my excitement at what was theoretically the main prize but I intend to get one once my university gets round to paying me so you know, still cool and it’s great to have a physical momento of the event.

I also managed to purely accidentally sneak in early to the Split/Second presentation and for some reason nobody threw me out (maybe Eurogamer thought I was with Black Rock and Black Rock thought I was with Eurogamer? Or maybe it was just because I was wearing a shirt and thus obviously important? I dunno) but appart from the heart pounding induced form my the growing realisation that I really wasn’t meant to be there that was actually pretty dull. Apart from that my experience was probably quite normal. I went to a lot of presentations on a lot of cool games. I got to ask Tom Bramwell why the heck he changed the scoring policy in the Ask Eurogamer session and then made a right mess of my second question because two ideas got mixed up in my head. I got some hands on time with a lot of other cool games, the highlights of which I’ll write about below. I chatted to a few random people, one of whom turned out to work for a friend of mine and another turned out to be LewieP of savygamer. In short I can’t wait till next year. I wonder how much I have to write here in order to qualify for a press pass…

Now for some links to what I saw: -

Plain Sight – my personal game of the show

Split/Second – a new one for my watch list

Aliens vs Predator – very good fun so far

Heavy Rain – the other reason I’ll need to by a PS3

The stand such that it was looked oddly out of place with four very ordinary PCs (in contrast all the other PCs on show looked like this) set up in a spare corner of the show floor that wasn’t listing in the program and decorated with with some very home made looking posters (home made in the home of someone with an obvious talent for graphic design but still home made). It looked suspiciously like first time indie developers Beatnik Games had called Eurogamer at the last minute and begged for some floor space. Whoever decided to let them come made a good call because what they had on show was damn good.

Plain Sight is a mutliplayer game where you play a little insanely agile robot with a katana that double jumps it’s way around all sides of a floating level where gravity seems to be defined partly by the last surface you jumped off and partly on the centre of gravity of the object you’re jumping around on (I’m not sure, it’s weird but you get the hang of it very quickly). Combat is a bit TPS and a little bit modern flight sim because you run and jump arround in third person but spend most of the time (once you work out how to do anything but run, jump and die which does take a while) trying to get target lock-on and when you do you click again and go flying towards the other robot and bash him, at least assuming he doesn’t dodge or block. It’s very unique and enormously good fun. There’s also this points scoring system that ties back into how powerful you are which looks like where the depth might come from.

I had a brief chat with one of the devs and apparently they’re hoping to do another beta later this year, one more early next year and then release it on PC. I suspect it’ll be a bit of a cult hit to begin with because it certainly isn’t pick up and play because the combat mechanic is so odd but it has that jena se qua. I also suspect that it’ll be a huge hit on the consoles once they get a console version done because the attack system would be a good fit for a joypad since aiming doesn’t really come into it, however when that will I did not ask so cannot say.

Heavy Rain aka the other reason I need to buy PS3. Heavy Rain is in many ways the next stage in the evolution of the adventure game. First there were the text adventures, then the point and click adventures and now Heavy Rain. People have been struggling to say what genre Heavy Rain is but I think it’s fairly obviously a choose your own adventure but in graphical videogame. Narratively Heavy Rain is a traditional thriller, the son of one of the four viewpoint characters has been kidnapped by a serial killer and according to the killers modus operandi this means he’ll show up dead in exactly four days. It looks very dark and nasty like the film Seven and the stories of the four characters intertwine in a fashion that’s probably something like Magnolia.

The multiple player characters, although nothing new, is still a brilliant and underused storytelling device for a story based video games. The big problem with games is that your main character is always fine unless they’re not meant to be. The first time you watch Halloween you don’t know if Jamie Lee Curtis’s character is going to survive or not, you think she is but then you think quite a lot of things and John Carpenter is far too good a storyteller to let you get away with all of them so maybe she doesn’t. When you play Dead Space you know the dude in the lower left corner of your screen is going to survive because if he doesn’t then there’s no game and you know, he’s died a couple of times in the last few hours so if he dies again I’ll just reload and everything will be fine. Not so in Heavy Rain because you have four characters they can die, they’re each expendable, it’ll change the story but if you screw up and, as happened to me during the demo level, you “fail” an action sequence and the player character gets beaten to death by a car mechanic then that’s what happened and the story moves on. Maybe he was bound to die in that scene and it was just an illusion that my lack of familiarity with the PS3 controller killed him, I don’t know and that uncertainty makes it exciting. One things for sure, when I get the full game I’ll play that action sequence like my life depends upon it.

Now let me talk Quick Time Events since they’re the elephant in the room. The action sequences in Heavy Rain are controlled by QTEs and the problem is that in my opinion most QTEs suck. However I’d argue that while these are QTEs they have a couple of vital saving graces, firstly they aren’t replayable and secondly they’re unique to the context of the events. Combined that means that during a play through of the game you never know what button you might need to press next, you never have to learn the sequence and you never repeat it until you produce it perfectly because if you screw it up then the moment is gone. When my character got beaten to death that was it. Full stop. No second chances, the moment is gone, the game goes on to the next scene with whatever the consequences your failure. There’s no practising and getting these things right and being held back until you do get them right, basically no awful QTE grinding. There’s just a story that you can control in a fairly meaningful fashion using controls that adjust dynamically to the actions the in game character wants to make, push right to roll right, move the six-axis sharply down to smash a bottle over someone’s head etc. I think it’ll work really well, I couldn’t get the full impression in the demo because I spent the whole time trying to remember which was the triangle and which was the square but I think once I can “touch type” a Playstation controller like most PS3 owners it’ll work really well. I’m really looking forward to this and you’ll probably be hearing more about it here in Q1 next year when it releases.

The best moment was taking out both the guys sitting on either side of me who were playing semi-cooperatively as marines in an attempt to survive. I got the first with a stealth kill and the second, who had just seen me kill his buddy, by making a semi-suicidal leap directly towards him and going mental with my attack buttons. He swore. I smiles and then got stealth killed by a predator. Good times. I think the problem is those stealth kills are rather too easy. In theory they’re just like a back stab in TF2 but they’re actually far far easier than that and you get a pop-up telling you when it’ll work that’s far easier to read than the knife changing position in TF2 so it often didn’t feel particularly skilful. Still that just console multiplayer deathmatch among a bunch of n00bs based on some early code. I should think the Marines would certainly get a healthy buff from mouse control and the sneaky bastard Predator looks like it’ll be formidable in the hands of someone who knows how to use it but for a n00b like me on this code it was Alien for the mid-table obscurity. I’m still more excited by the prospect of the single player campaigns which I didn’t an opportunity to look at but I think I’ll be spending a fare few hours with both halves of this game and there aren’t many games I’ve ever thought that about. Definitely looks like a must buy when it comes out in February. I’ll be getting it for the PC but it’s also coming out on 360 and PS3.

So yeah… that was a bit of a pork pie as the cockneys might say. The site isn’t dead but it is rather comatose at the minute and probably will be for the next couple of weeks. I know you probably don’t want to hear about my private life but I can’t explain why I’m being so rubbish without it.

Basically in the real world I’m a postgraduate philosophy student and I’ve been coming to the end of one of my courses so for the last couple of months I’ve been working stupidly hard to do two things: finish the thesis for my MPhil and secure PhD funding. Neither of those is easy, the first is hard and time consuming the second is quick but incredibly stressful. Oh and I’ve also moved house. All this hasn’t left a lot of time or energy for other things so I’ve mainly been playing Team Fortress 2 and written pretty much nothing except my thesis and the odd ramblings I post on RPS form time to time. That’s why I haven’t posted anything for the past two months. Sorry.

Fortunately for me I did achieve both of those goals so in the next few days I’ll be moving down to London to do my PhD and I’ll be there until September 2012 (a date that is clearly in the Future with a capital F). So where does that leave you as a reader? Well most likely not here. Seriously though The New Flesh is currently a much lower priority than moving to London and getting my PhD started so don’t expect too much of me for the next couple of weeks. However I do still of course love gaming and this site so I don’t intend to let this place die but it might never get the daily updates I’d like and would be able to provide if I was unemployed. Also since I’m moving to London I might be able to do some exciting stuff like go to the Eurogamer Expo later this month and do some reports of that.

Now if you’ve made it this far you’ve clearly got too much time on your hands so let me see if I can do anything about that. I happen to own two copies of Neverwinter Nights 2 which is a pretty darn good PC fantasy RPG and so I figure I should give one of them away rather than have it collect dust. If you’re interested the then drop an e-mail with the address you’d like me to send the game to thenewflesh [at] persus-9.co.uk. I’ll leave it one week and then pick the subjectively best (as in most amusing) e-mail I receive in that time on the subject of “1985 in Norway” (what can I say I just clicked random article on wikipedia). If I don’t receive any (which doesn’t seem unlikely given my current traffic figures and the fact I’ve hidden this at the end of the post) then I’ll roll it over for another week.

Lets talk about the good things first because in fairness to the developers Sakari Indie there are many many good things about Foreign Legion and I’d like to get them out the way before I proceed with the crucifixion.

Foreign Legion is an over the shoulder third person shooter. The premise is simple, you’re the last survivor of a group of army folk who is tasked with defending a group of civilians who are barricaded inside a nearby building against waves of attacking enemies until the helicopter arrives and rescues you all. There are three different types of enemy and they’re quite nicely varied. The standard soldier types with assault rifles who try to shoot you or if you hide they start shooting the building and damaging it. The suicide bombers are armed with pistols and explosive vests, they run towards the building at all times and if they get there they explode doing a fair chunk of damage. Finally there are the rocket men, they have RPGs, like the soldiers they’re shoot you if they see you and the building if they can’t, either way they’re big trouble and you’ll want to kill them as fast as possible. Perhaps not the most inspired list in the world but each class does represent a different kind of threat and demands a different response so they do the job of keeping you roughly on your toes.

Zoomed in for the kill

Gameplay wise most of the time it all amounts to standing roughly in front of the building you’re defending and shooting people in the face! Generally with your assault rifle, sometimes with RPGs, occasionally with air strikes, rarely with a minigun that you can sometimes collect from right the other side of the map that isn’t really worth the walk and never ever with your pistol because it might as well be a banana. The shooting itself is quite good fun and oddly considering the cartoon look to the game counter-strike style rules apply so most of the time your looking for head shots and shooting more than a quick burst results in a large decrease in accuracy that makes all the difference at the hard and veteran difficulty level. I found that little detail very pleasing, there’s just something about the juxtaposition of using my limited counter-strike skills to shoot what look a lot like Lego men that makes me smile.

Thankfully you can’t just just pick the obvious spot and turtle because at some point you’ll need to collect ammo from half way down the map or go to your radio and request more ammo is dropped half way down the map and there isn’t quite enough time to do one of these things between waves of enemies so it all gets quite pleasingly chaotic. It’s quite exciting but also fairly generic, it is after all basically just the defend the point scenario that has come up at least once in almost every shooter made in the ten years. It’s solid but it isn’t the sort of thing to inspire any great love for the game.

The graphics are what really make Foreign Legion stands out from many other indie games. Now that I actually think about it there are a fair few indie games that do the whole 3rd dimension thing but there aren’t that many that do it with the professionalism and style of Foreign Legion (by the way, click on the screenshots for full size version). The whole thing has a very stylised cartoony Lego look to it that reminds me a bit of Battlefield Heros. The desert theme works very well and the early sunset lighting is a nice touch and all in all it’s really quite a pretty game. The giant yellow chickens standing about the place waiting to be shot are rather odd but what the heck.

The minigun makes a rare appearance.

The sound design is also very good. The weapons sound right, right in this case is rather weedy but since my mind insists these are Lego guns that does seem. The dynamic soundtrack also works very well, it’s generic rock that sinks into the background quite well and and keeps up with the action a lot better than say the one used in Far Cry 2.

Ok, now for the crucifixion. Lets start off with difficulty, the game has four difficulty modes, easy, medium, hard and veteran. They seem to purely adjust how much damage the enemies can take before dying, maybe also number of enemies but I wasn’t really keeping count. I’m ok at TPSs, definitely not good because I’ve never really felt at home with them but I can hold my own so I’d have said I should probably be having a bit of trouble on hard and veteran should kick my ass. As it turns out easy and medium are cake walks, hard is medium at best and I beat veteran on the 2nd attempt so I’m sceptically of it qualify as a hard setting never mind anything above that. This has obvious implications as to the value of the game, basically if you’re a competent gamer then you’ll likely find there’s no real challenge here and you’ll likely die once or twice on your way to beating the hardest difficulty level. That ain’t good.

Now for the real killer, length, this game is about 10 minutes long. Yep, that ain’t no typo, 10 minutes. There’s only one level and it takes a maximum of 10 minutes because after that long the chopper will arrive even if you haven’t beaten every wave. I beat every difficulty level, messed about, deliberately lost, got all 10 steam achievements (most of which you get during normal play) and took some screenshots for this review. The total time I played at the end of all that was 1.2 hours. There very basic online leader boards but without even a basic view friends option I think you’d have to really get into this game to want to more than glance at those and there just isn’t enough of a game here to demand that level of devotion.

Ok so is at best an hour long, that’s bad but we have to compare it the price before we can make a proper judgement on value for money, well at the time of writing it’s £5.24, $5.24, €5.24 for the PC version Steam (Mac versions are also available from Gamersgate but then it’s even more expensive). Ok so because I’m a self centred Brit let me assess this according to the £5.24 price. I think the politest thing I can say is this game is a total ripoff.

Now I know the sort of things people are going to say. They’ll say it’s an indie title and we should make allowances. That’s utter nonsense, the whole point of the current Indie revolution is that many indie titles like World of Goo, Darwinia, Defence Grid, Braid, Zeno Clash, Blueberry Garden and The Penny Arcade Adventure to name but a few are competing with the big name games without any special allowances, they’re competing on merit alone. Sure some of them are very short, Blueberry Garden in particular but Blueberry Garden is also longer, cheaper and a lot more interesting than Foreign Legion and unlike Foreign Legion it can still compete with the big name titles without any special allowances being made.

People will also say that I should stop moaning because it’s just the price of a couple of pints of beer or a sandvich or whatever. Well fortunately when I’m buying entertainment my choices aren’t limited to Beer, sandvich or Foreign Legion. I could for instance choose to spend three times as much and choose to buy the ‘Bioshock/Oblivion’ double pack for £14.99 from play.com or if I wanted something newer for less than three times as much I could get ‘Fallout 3′ for £12.99 from Gameplay.co.uk. If I didn’t have that much and wanted to stick to Steam I could buy the original ‘Far Cry’ or ‘Beyond Good and Evil’ each of which are only £4.99 on Steam and both of which are far better games than Foreign Legion on top of each being at least ten times as long.

Adding insult to injury is that fact Foreign Legion is currently 25% off, the normal price is going to be 6.99 so if your reading this in a weeks time then you can amplify every bit of criticism here by 33% (trust me that works out). If you’re rich and you really fancy a fun shallow little TPS to occupy the next half hour of you life then by all means ignore the price concerns and buy Foreign Legion and then after you’ve finished it could you please send me a bushel of cash. Over £30,000 ideally so I could fund my PhD, if you can’t find a bushel I do also accept paypal, just send it to spam(at)persus-9.co.uk. If you don’t have near unlimited amounts of money at your disposal then the answer is simply no, do not buy this game [In it's present state, see below - Ed]. I did and I had fun for half an hour or so but when push comes to shove £5.24 is too much to pay for an hours entertainment so I’m feeling rather ripped off.

5/10

UPDATE: I’ve just been reading a bit more on the Sakari Indie website and felt this was worth mentioning: -

As we firmly believe in supporting our community we’re already planning the future updates of our game. These updates will be completely free and will include additional content to Foreign Legion. We’ve got some cool things in the works and hopefully we’ll be able to tell (and show!) you about these really soon.

Given that my only real criticism of this game is it’s length then continued after release support like this could turn this little game around and make it live up to it’s initial promise. I’m not going to adjust my score because I’ve got to review what’s sat in front of me and at the moment what’s sat in front of my isn’t up to much but I’m now rather more hopeful that this will in the end prove a good buy. If you like the sound of the game then it might well be worth checking it out in a couple on months time to see if Sakari Indie have been able to deliver the goods and it might even be worth a taking a gamble on it now while it’s on sale rather than waiting for the price to go up to 6.99. If and when new content is released I’ll add more updates to this review to re-access the games worth.

I can’t shake the feeling that this is big. The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition is more than just a game, more than just a port of an old game onto modern computers, a paradigm for the future of video game preservation, that LucasArts has made the move to produce this game may ultimately prove as important as the Abandonware movement, Good Old Games or DOSbox. Right now it’s an amusement but culturally this is a big step forward. Also as a game it freakin’ rocks.

What LucasArts have done, in case you haven’t heard is update their classic 1990 point and click adventure ‘The Secret of Monkey Island’ and release it over Steam and XBLA for a very reasonable £6.99 and 800 MSP respectively. The special edition contains the original version and the that has updated version that has new high resolution graphics and voice acting (the original being text only of course). What’s more you can hot-swap between the two versions at any time by pressing the F10 key so you can take a peek at how it used to be while playing the game with the new graphical prettiness.

I can almost agree with that.

I’ll get to the review of the game in a minute, in fact look for a subheading a little further down if you aren’t interested in reading me wax lyrical on video game culture and the preservation of old games. The thing is that apart for just being a good game ‘The Secret of Monkey Island’ is also an important game, a true classic that defines a whole period in the early development of interactive storytelling and thus storytelling in general, that makes it of historical importance. In my view the point and click adventures of the 80s and 90s are at least as important in the history of storytelling as the plays of William Shakespeare, after all Shakespeare was basically just a good entertaining playwright, he didn’t revolutionise storytelling to anywhere near the same extent as the creators of the point and click adventures did when they were playing their part in the invention of interactive storytelling. I also agree with Peter Molyneux, I believe that the greatest story ever will be told through the medium of a computer game. This seems obviously true to me because computer games, unlike every other medium, don’t just show you or tell you the story, they let you live it! Computer games are at the moment in their infancy as a medium but the potential is enormous. I’m sure I’m preaching to the converted here but still it deserves to be said because it’s said surprisingly rarely, in fact I can’t think of anyone except Peter Molyneux who really talks about the true potential of the genre rather than just the next few steps.

A historic moment. No really.

Yet for all it’s historical importance for about half it’s short life it’s been out of print and without the work of dedicated people behind ScummVM it would have been almost impossible for most people to play. Now to my mind the work of people like Sarinee Achavanuntakul (who incidentally has just given a really good interview) who are willing to break the law for the sake of abandonware is undoubtedly crucial to keeping 95% of old games alive but since they do operate outside the law it only gives then an uncertain future, if a commercial future can be found for some of these title then their future is assured. Now short to medium term Good Old Games have proved this is actually the case for, well good old games. However long term I have my doubts, I very much doubt whether many people who grow up with graphics at the level they are now will ever want to pay to play games with graphics like this: -

It looks worse close up. Click for the full size version.

It’s just ugly and ugly is off putting. Back in the day we were either used to or impressed by this level of graphics but now, now it’s jarringly ugly even to some of us that grew up with it. But this: -

I wish I had a giant lemon on my head

Now we’re talking! That’s a fairly pretty picture, 100 years from now that’ll still be a fairly pretty picture and our great grand children will hopefully still be able to appreciate it. Basically since the original 1990 release we’ve got to the stage now where mainstream computer graphics are at that base level that painting has been at for the last 500 years or so where for 2D works it’s not about really increasing technical wizardry, it’s simply about beauty. This means that for ‘The Secret of Monkey Island’ the ugly barrier has now been removed and in 100 years time (assuming they can find a machine that can run it) people will be able to look past the graphics and connect with it’s core gameplay while at the same time having the opportunity to press F10 to remove the make-up and see it as it was, hopefully some of them will find it and fun and interesting bit of history. What’s more LucasArts have also released non-updated versions of couple of their less iconic point and click adventures so it’s a fair guess that LucasArts held back from re-releasing their other iconic titles like ‘Full Throttle’ and ‘Day of the Tentacle’ in order to give similar special edition treatment if this one was a success and since it’s been sitting firmly in the Steam top 10 sellers list ever since it was released just over two weeks ago it’s a fair bet that it’s gone pretty well and we’ll be seeing more of these graphical overhauls in the future and of course that will prove it as a business model that other companies could use. It’s another important step forward in games preservation.

Another historic moment. Yes, I really mean that.

Ok enough general rambling. Now for the review rambling.

The Review

Somehow I never got round to playing ‘The Secret of Monkey Island’ in it’s original format, pretty shameful considering I just spent 500 odd words comparing it to Hamlet but there you have it. This put me in the good position of being able to look at it completely fresh, no warm fuzzy memories of this particular title, no half-remembered solutions to protect me form the more diabolical puzzles so I’m perhaps in a better position that most of the professional gaming press to judge whether this holds up to 2009 standards. The short answer is it does, particularly at the £6.99 price point. It’s about 10 hours long so it ain’t the longest game in the world but it more than makes up for that in quality terms. The story is simple and goofy but effective at driving the game and the lovable eccentric cast remove any possibility of boredom. The plot is basically wannabe pirate Guybrush Threepwood come to Mêlée Island seeking his fortune and while trying to become accepted as a pirate falls in love with the beautiful Elaine Marley who just happens to be the Governor of Mêlée Island and when she’s kidnapped by the undead pirate Le Chuck he must travel to Monkey Island to defeat Le Chuck and rescue Elaine (Sound familiar ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ fans?), simple, goofy and exacly what the game needs. I found the comedy to be consistently funny, perhaps not laugh out loud funny but I was smiling from start to finish and I can’t ask any more than that. The voice acting is great (although if you slow down the text speed then the intonation becomes odd as I discovered because I bound the key that game uses to slow down text to take screenshots) and they wisely got back a lot of the actors who did voice work for the later games in the series so if you go on to play the other games the voices will be consistant.

Governor Elaine Marley, still at least twice as beautiful as Keira Knightley

The puzzles, the gameplay heart of any point and click adventure,  are just about the best I’ve ever encountered. I’d say there are maybe three that aren’t top notch, once I felt the solution was a bit silly and twice I felt that the solution boiled down to a little too much like pixel hunting but generally they were all very good. Good enough to render the hint system, that’s also been added as part of the Special Edition, almost as useless as it should ideally be.

I find myself comparing it to Braid. Sure there are a lot of differences: one it a platformer and the other a point and click adventure; one is a deep commentary on the nature of human relationships and the other is about saving the girl you love from a ghost pirate; one takes itself far too seriously and the other is one of the funniest games ever made. But they’re also both beautiful, story driven, low cost, 2D puzzle games. How does ‘The Secret of Monkey Island’ compare? I think favourably because where they can really be compared is on the quality of their puzzling gameplay and on this point although Monkey Island isn’t as varied or innovative as Braid the execution is just so much better and where as Monkey Island has humour to carry it through the bits where the puzzles are failing to amuse Braid has… yeah.

The in game interface is unfortunately quite poor and lets the rest of the game down quite badly. Gone are the functional but extremely clunky looking verb and inventory lists at the bottom of the screen from the original, replaced by stylish minimalism with far to little emphasis on functionality. The only permanent feature of the new interface on the screen is the cursor and unfortunately even that doesn’t work particularly well under vista without changing the properties of the game executable and that really isn’t good enough. Also if you’re playing full screen on a multi-monitor system (okay I know that won’t be that many of you but a significant few) then the cursor will move outside the game and I found it all too easy to accidentally minimise the game by clicking on my desktop when trying to get Guybrush to walk to the right edge of the screen in order to make the camera pan. The new verb system is just about ok if you learn the hotkeys (U for ‘use’, P for ‘pick up’, G for ‘give’ etc) but the inventory system is really pretty rubbish, to access the inventory you have to press the I key, fair enough but that’ll just show you the first twelve icons so if you’ve got more than twelve items (and you’ll have about 36 later in then game) then you have to scroll around to find them. It’s just a niggle and your never more than one key press and two clicks away from the item you need but considering the fact that at some point you will run out of ideas and you will end up trying every item to see what happens, it’ll already be the lowest point in your game experience and then trying to do it with a poor inventory system is adding insult to injury.

The interface problems are never much more than a minor annoyance, it’s just a shame that this one area is lacking in polish considering the brilliance of the core game and the rest of the work that’s gone into this port is brilliant, I mean apart from the obvious things like the new art and the voice work, it’s the little things they’ve done that really shine like how seamless then version switch process is and how when you start a new game the first screen you’re presented with is this: -

Something old

which then seamlessly fades into this: -

Something new

It’s a perfect moment. A perfect nod to the original game that from that point on you never have to see again. The game is full of little touches that make it really the perfect respectful update except for the interface. I’d recommend this game to pretty much anyone who doesn’t definitely know that they hate all point and click adventures. That includes non-gamers by the way, if you want to introduce a non-gamer to gaming I think this might be a very good choice since pretty much none of it’s timed, it’s almost impossible actually lose and the story and humour should appeal to anyone with a soul. Even if like me you also own the original then it’s still worth it just to see it for yourself, relive the memories (assuming unlike me you actually played it) and support what they’ve done.

9/10

Starting up a new website while writing up my thesis probably wasn’t the smartest thing to do but in my defence I never expected anyone to read it. The plan was that I wouldn’t do much with this place before September 30th and then when that ticked round I’d put some real time into it and start telling people about it and maybe get some readers after that so really this pre-October phase is a beta that I threw up to get a feel of what I would do and so I’d have some sort of short archive under my belt once I really started to devote time to it.

Anyway what I’m really saying is sorry it’s rubbish at the minute and I’m not updating a reasonable amount at the moment but come October… come October it’ll still be rubbish but there should at least be more of it.

P.S. I swear I’ll my ‘Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition’ review finished in the next couple of days.

Just a quick post to give you the good news that in an interveiw for CNET News Bill Gates himself has said that they’re bringing Project Natal to PC and also to say that I called it. It may have been obvious, sure anyone with half a brain could have called it but guess who did call it? ME! Jack Black wrote the one note song and I called Project Natal for PC.