Among the ports, remakes and the one Legend of Zelda title present at the Wii’s launch was Red Steel, a first person shooter/sword fighter intended to prove the Wii could be a platform for both hardcore and casual gamers. Unfortunately it suffered from some rather clunky controls due to the Wii not being able to do what it was supposed to.

Now, 4 years and one controller add-on later, Red Steel 2 has been released. While the core mechanics of the first game have been given an upgrade, everything from else has been scrapped. What was once a gritty, realistic yakuza setting has been abandoned for a desert punk setting, a new hero, and a new art style.

Our hero returns to his hometown to find his clan completely destroyed and the town overrun by violent bikers calling themselves The Jackals. From there the game’s narrative paints a fairly typical vengeance plot you see in most samurai and western flicks. As the last Kusagari, a samurai gunslinger, it is your task to find those responsible for the destruction of your clan and reclaim your honour.

Our hero, the Kusagari

The mixed bag of east meeting west, and old meeting new is quite interesting and feels like it was plucked from the head of Quentin Tarantino. It’s allowed the developer to create a unique visual flair to the game, creating towns with wooden buildings bearing automatic doors, and samurais wielding modified Tommy guns. Everything is cel shaded, which fits the Wii’s hardware rather well, and I’d love to see more games take the same stylised approach as Red Steel 2.

Cutscenes look good, though the character models could use some work as some of them can come off as a bit ugly. During your run through the game you never interact with no more than five NPCs, not counting enemies of course, and while they do look distinct some of them poorly realized.

Story progression is strictly mission based, stringing a number of linear corridors and some bigger hub worlds together. As I’ve said before, there’s nothing wrong with linearity, but the flow breaks somewhat when you have to trek back and forth from your last objective and the current mission giver.

I would have liked to see more mission variety as well. Most missions boil down to getting wherever you need to be, fighting a bunch of dudes, or activating something. This is especially common for the side quests, which are mostly made up of “Destroy x amounts of y”, or “fight x amounts of dude z”.

The various mission hubs are interesting, ranging from small ghost towns to bigger cities, but the hubs are completely void of enemies when you’ve cleared them out. Visual flair goes a long way, but padding makes the game feel a bit boring, and the lack of access to a bigger world map can make exploration and navigation a bit tricky. There’s always an arrow pointing to your next destination, but there’s nothing apart from your own memory telling you where you are and where you’ve been in case you’re out exploring.

But a game has got to have gameplay, otherwise you’re just watching a movie. The Wii is tailor made for FPS games, and firing your weapon is as easy as pointing and clicking. The various guns you’ll find throughout the game can be upgraded in the usual ways of clip size, reload speed and accuracy, but getting all the upgrades is well worth the effort, as each gun has an additional, special upgrade.

Red Steel 2 goes the extra mile to make you feel like the ultimate badass. You can’t help but trip over ammo and money and you’ll rarely run out of bullets. The game provides an okay challenge, but it loses some steam around the halfway point. I understand why I’m being made to feel like a badass, but the difficulty curve drops a bit too far for my taste.

The bad guys can be taken down in a variety of ways, and you’re encouraged to mix up the use of guns and swordplay. When it comes to the swordfights, the Wii MotionPlus provides some much needed depth to what would otherwise be a massive waggle fest. While it can still feel like you’re simply flailing your WiiMote around whenever you’re in combat, at least it’s flailing with a purpose.

Merely waggling at the wrist will get you absolutely nowhere in Red Steel 2, as the Wii MotionPlus can tell the difference between a strong swing and a weaker swing. The WiiMote is also a lot better at determining the direction of your swing, which is key when performing the various “arts” you’ll be unlocking throughout the game.

One such art already showcased is The Eagle, which lets you launch enemies into the air where you can turn them into bullet sandwiches. The variety these sword arts offer is satisfying, but you can get a bit bogged down with so many manoeuvres and combos, it’s difficult to remember all of them. Thankfully the game provides you with a handy list.

Combat is swift, fluid and incredibly brutal at times, which neatly brings me to my next point: the lack of in-game blood. When I first heard complaints about this, I merely dismissed them as simple whining, but seeing the game in action makes the lack of blood come off as egregious and almost pointless. Rushing an opponent and shooting him in the face, being incredibly brutal and fun all on its own, loses some of its impact without the red stuff.

I understand why the developers did this, seeing as M rated games hardly sell on the Wii, but No More Heroes avoided the M rating despite the copious amounts of blood, so why couldn’t Red Steel 2? The in-game graphics are stylised enough to circumvent realism, and the action is so over the top and silly it shouldn’t be such a problem.

Sound design, however, is awesome. The voice acting can be a bit touch and go at times as certain characters bring on the narm more often than not, but it’s pretty good all around. The guns all sound distinct and quite deadly, and the sword whistles through the air as you swing it.

Red Steel 2 also excels musically. I’m a huge fan of Joss Whedon’s Firefly, which Red Steel 2 seems to take a lot of cues from. The idle music is a simple guitar and fiddle combo, but once the combat picks up and things gets serious, you’re bombarded with a high energy melody that could have been lifted straight from Firefly, and different enemy types get different musical cues. The music definitely brings an added flair to the already heavy western setting and helps keep combat upbeat and frenetic. Definite kudos to composer Tom Salta.

Apart from the main quest there’s an extra challenge mode, where you replay chapters and try to beat them as quickly as possible. It’s all there to earn you extra money in the main game, but it feels like a pointless inclusion, as you already get tons of money in the main quest already. It provides an incentive to challenge your friends for bragging rights, but there’s really nothing special about it.

Red Steel 2 is a great game. As far as the narrative goes, it’s really nothing new, and the mission structure is a bit lacking, but overall the game is a lot of fun to play. There’s something inherently satisfying with blasting a leaping enemy away with a well placed shotgun blast, then jamming your own sword into his chest. The unique graphical style is an interesting one, and the feeling of being a badass out for revenge never goes away. All in all, Red Steel 2 is a fun and engaging experience that excellently shows off what the Wii can do.

- 8/10

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In some ways this is a follow up to my last Evening Topic where we discussed fanboyism. Everything from films to plays gets reviewed in some form or another and video games are, of course, no exception. But video game reviews have a tendency to stir up a lot of controversy, especially among fans of certain games.

Not only are reviews a source of fanboy rage, there’s also a strange eschewment of the review system in general. Certain sites and publications seem almost too soft on games, rarely giving out anything less than a 6/10 while other sites and publications are deemed too hard, rarely giving out their highest grade. So I ask:

- Do you consider certain sites/magazines’ reviews to be more professional than others’?

- Have you ever read a review you absolutely disagreed with, even if you respected the source of the review?

- How much playtime should go into a review?

- Does a game need to be finished in order to be reviewed properly?

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The original BioShock was considered a masterpiece by gamers and critics alike in 2007, and whenever something’s successful a sequel usually gets announced. Now the time has come to return to Rapture, but is this a welcome one?

BioShock 2 puts you in the diving suit of one of the prototype Big Daddies, the first one to be successfully bonded to a Little Sister. On New Year’s Eve, 1958, your Little Sister was forcefully taken away from you, putting you in a chemically induced coma. Now, ten years later, you have awakened to find a city in utter ruin, with a constant need to relocate your lost companion.

In the eight years between the first and the second game (story wise), Rapture has fallen even further; evident by just looking at the game’s logo which has been overrun with corral. The seas are starting to take over and Rapture’s citizens seem even crazier than before. BioShock 2 perfectly nails Rapture’s atmosphere, and there are still many audio logs to collect which provides further detail into the fall of rapture on New Year’s Eve 1958.

Pipes and glass windows are leaking, the lights fail flicker almost constantly, and paint and plaster is peeling off the walls. Every environment within the game seems to scream “This place got fucked up!” especially the various messages written across the decrepit walls of Rapture: “We will be reborn of the ocean,” and “Lamb is watching!”

The graphics have been given an update, but the odd slow texture pop-in ruins the immersion from time to time. Characters animate well, but we rarely see anyone but the Little Sisters up close and personal. Voice acting is top notch and several nationalities are represented throughout the characters we hear and meet. Sofia Lamb’s voice actor is particularly good, radiating madness, scorn and utter disdain for you and actions. The Little Sisters sound just as innocent and naive as before, but hearing them call you “Daddy” instead of “Mr. B” or “Mr. Bubbles” sounds incredibly dirty and unnerving.

Adding to the game’s atmosphere is the music, which continues the trend set up in the first game. Songs from the 40s and 50s drift out from broken jukeboxes and record players, only to amplify the differences between Rapture in its heyday and the Rapture you’re experiencing. “How much is that Doggy in the Window?” sings Patti Page as Splicers come charging at you.

There are several tense moments within the game that almost seems to overload your senses with helplessness and as a tool of immersion it works great, but eventually it boils down to things you’ve experienced before both in the original BioShock and in other games. The flickering lights, something moving just off camera and the constant chattering of the Splicers does get a bit repetitive. Once you’ve gotten far enough into the game most of the tense and scary moments fail to make you utter as much as a squeak.

The return to Rapture also marks the return on the game’s iconic weapons and plasmids, but everything’s gotten an upgrade, including a melee attack for all weapons. The wrench has been scrapped for a gigantic drill, delightfully carving your enemies into mince meat as long as you’ve got the fuel for it. The Big Daddy’s iconic rivet gun is another new addition, but everything else is just a variant of what we’ve seen before; the Tommy gun is now a machine gun; the shotgun comes with two barrels; and the crossbow has been replaced with a spear gun which can satisfyingly pin your enemies to the walls.

The grenade launcher also makes a return, not much different than before, but a welcome addition is the hack tool, which fires remote-hack-darts that lets you hack turrets and cameras at a distance. Hacking has been simplified, so you don’t have to play Pipe Mania every time you want to hack something. The hack tool also comes with the ability to fire small mini-turrets that lets you set up defensive perimeters.

BioShock 2 features a greater focus on defensive situations than its predecessor. Once you take down a fellow Big Daddy, you get the option of harvesting or adopting his Little Sister. The game then takes a page from Tower Defence’s book as you have to guide her to a suitable corpse and make her collect ADAM, genetic currency you use to buy plasmids and tonics. When the extraction process begins, Splicers will attack and it’s best to be prepared! While most of the locales in BioShock 2 are open enough to ward off attackers and set up traps to defend yourself, fighting off a horde of Splicers in a narrow corridor simply becomes one big giant clusterfuck as enemies swarm in from all directions.

These harvest-defend scenarios need to be done twice for each Little Sister, and can get very repetitive when there are three or four Little Sisters to find within each location. The girls themselves are never that difficult to locate, but for the sequel to a game that sold itself on atmosphere and a well written story, BioShock 2 seems to appeal more to your trigger finger than to your intellect.

After defending your Little Sister from Splicers you once more get the option of harvesting or rescuing her, echoing the original BioShock’s moral choices. And just as before, the “evil” path offers you immediate rewards, and the “good” path offers up more work, but greater rewards in the long run. You will also find yourself in situations where you can choose whether certain characters should die or not, but players of the first game will most likely adhere to the creed of “A man chooses, a slave obeys”.

Harvesting or rescuing every Little Sister within an environment also pisses off the game’s newest enemy: Big Sister. These are Little Sisters who have grown up and act as Sofia Lamb’s personal army of enforcers. These fights seem to turn into arena style battles between two foes, but with a few tricks up your sleeve they can easily be defeated without much hassle. They’re not that different from a regular Big Daddy apart from the ability to heal themselves by draining corpses of ADAM, as well as use plasmids. They also promote their arrival with three high pitched screams, giving you plenty of time to prepare for their assault.

In between shootouts you’ll be exploring the dilapidated ruins of Rapture: collecting money, health packs, ammo and various other things that either restores health or EVE. If you’ve played the first game, there’s nothing really new to see as far as items are concerned except some new types of ammo like exploding buckshot and heat seeking missiles. BioShock 2 seems like it tries to be many things at once: shooter with RPG elements, and moody and atmospheric survival horror both at once.

Fighting a Big Daddy, Big Sister or hordes of Splicers has a tendency to drain your supply of both med kits and ammo pretty fast, but you can’t help but trip over extra ammo and more med kits just down the hall. While the game has certain scares and shocks, you rarely feel weak or helpless unless the game actually wants you to in a scripted sequence. You also have a tendency to get bogged down with tonics, genetic upgrades that allow you to customize your character with various attributes, making it feel like the game is doing what it can to make you as powerful as possible when you’re already powerful enough.

Being confined to a diving suit means you’ll be able to explore the outside of Rapture, and these quiet moments of solitude are quite beautiful, in a very morbid way, to behold. Everything from giant squids, sharks, Big Sisters and Big Daddies swim and lurch by respectively as you wander about on the bottom floor, which adds to the atmosphere.

Entirely new to the game is the addition of multiplayer, which is your basic all-round multiplayer experience, but with a bit of a twist. BioShock 2 features a more story driven multiplayer mode. Set in 1959, the multiplayer portion allows players to explore the fall of Rapture first hand by taking on the role of a Splicer. At first you get access to basic weapons, plasmids and tonics, but gain better weapons as you gain rank.

Players can choose between 6 characters to use as an in-game avatar, but your choice of avatar has no effect on the overall experience. Apart from this, the multiplayer modes themselves are your basic deathmatch, team deathmatch and capture the flag. While the addition of multiplayer is an alright feature, it doesn’t really add anything to the overall package.

BioShock 2 is the kind of game that’s very hard to review. Everything you experience in the game has already been masterfully done in the previous game. While BioShock 2 never really does anything wrong, it doesn’t try to innovate either, apart from the odd weapons upgrade and new tonics.

It’s by no means a bad game, but it feels like it’s all been done before. While the game’s story adds more details to the fall of Rapture and the consequences of Jack’s actions in the first game, it wasn’t something that needed to be fleshed out. As a whole it’s a fun and engaging experience, but fans of the original are better off renting BioShock 2 than buying it.

– 7 / 10

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Another such title just released is Qix++, an improved version of the old arcade game from 1981. Originally released by Taito, the point of Qix (pronounced /kɪks/) according to Wikipedia, is to fence off, or “claim” a majority of the level’s playing field. Every level is a large, empty rectangle containing the titular Qix, a computer virus according to the game’s back story.

By controlling a Marker and drawing rectangles on the playing field, the player can cordon off parts of the playing field in order to trap the Qix and finish the level. Upon completing each level you can upgrade your ship to move faster, draw faster, resist damage and have more luck.

Qix++ is the kind of game that’s easy to learn and not that difficult to master either. The game features two difficulties in the single player mode, each difficulty consisting of eight levels. To be fair it’s more like four levels each, because the damned things repeat themselves halfway through each difficulty mode or “Section” as Taito calls it.

Gameplay is about as bog standard as you can get it; hold A to draw rectangles and control the marker with your control stick, but at least that part of the game works. As for the game modes, there is a promise of “Hunt Mode” and “Float Mode” in the “How to play” section, but no way of unlocking it in the Standard Mode. This is most likely something to be released later as DLC. So for now you get the Standard Mode with a total of 16 levels.

The downside to this is that each of those 16 levels can take as little as 15 seconds to finish. If this was an iPod or iPhone game I would have understood the shortness of the single player mode, but for an Xbox Live Arcade game it’s just too damned short.

Each level contains an individual Qix unique to that level alone, and learning how to defeat them can be a fun experience, for about 2 minutes or so. Every time you go back to play the game again, the Qix are about as bare boned as they can be. Sure, some of them shoot at you and some of them have irregular patterns of movement, but eventually you start to ask yourself: “Really? Is this is?” If you’re a score-whore there might be something for you here, and there are 15 achievements of varying difficulties, but you will probably get very bored very quickly.

At the start up screen the first thought that struck me was that the game seems a lot like Rez, mostly for its use of techno music. But while in Rez the music is a core part of gameplay, in Qix++ it’s nothing more than repetitive and boring background music. It might be fun to listen to if you’re on an acid-trip, but it won’t win any awards for best music anytime soon.

The same can also be said about the graphics, which are bright and colourful, but pretty much average for a Live Arcade game. I’ve seen games that both look better and worse. Everything looks and sounds like it belongs in a 90’s rave. What isn’t bright blue is bright green, and what isn’t bright green is blood red or orange. Everything looks like a neon-light construct; bright, but a bit hollow.

Does Qix++ reinvent the arcade experience? Having never played the original arcade game I’m not really sure if it does. What I do know is that Qix++ is a game with a lot of flash, but without a lot of substance. Everything from the graphics, the music, the gameplay and even the game modes are about as bare bones as it can get. Even the game’s back story, which you have to access through the pause menu for some illogical reason, feels tacked on and insubstantial.

I can’t really recommend Qix++ to anyone, unless you’re a huge fan of the original, in which case you may gleam a bit of entertainment from it. If you’re an achievement whore, then maybe you’ll be willing to spend the Microsoft Points on it, but even then I doubt it’ll be worth it. It’s fun for a few minutes, but quickly gets dull and repetitive.

– 6 / 10

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In this three part series we’ll be taking a look at the history of adventure games and possible try to predict a future for them as well.

In our third installment we take a look at the revival of adventure games, their current state and their various spin-off genres.

In the last article we looked at why the adventure game genre took a sudden downfall around the onset of the console era ushered in by the release of Sony’s PlayStation. Full 3D graphics were becoming the norm across all gaming platforms, with a strong focus on fast movement rather than graphical detail, allowing the action game to supplant the adventure game. There was also the matter of gameplay to consider, and most adventure games involved dragging various assorted knick-knacks in between moments of exposition and rubbing them against everything else, hoping the story would continue. The gaming industry itself was evolving as well, Sierra in particular had grown from a small company founded by Ken Williams and his wife Roberta, to a multi-billion dollar corporation.

Things looked rather grim for the adventure game in the beginning of the 2000′s. LucasArts’ last adventure game, Escape from Monkey Island, was met with a generally favorable reception, though it did receive some criticism for the difficulty of manouvering the game with keyboard controls rather than a mouse. Following the release of Escape, LucasArts put three more adventure games into development, but all three were later canceled as the company moved on to create and release games based on the Star Wars franchise.

Yet while things did indeed look grim, the adventure game genre did what it could to remain relevant, refusing to die out. The story heavy focus the adventure game lived and breathed on went on living through RPGs, a genre that still holds strong today with a style of storytelling split between two major branches; the WRPG and JRPG. The choice between bad gameplay and a good story or vice versa eventually fell away as limitations became less of an issue for developers. You could have satisfying gameplay and be able to tell a good story at the same time, so adventure games merely evolved, creating new sub genres.

Looking at genres like survival horror, it’s easy to see the underlying heritage of the adventure game; solving puzzles using various objects that also double as keys, not to mention the strict adherence towards telling a story. This is especially evident in the Silent Hill series which uses atmosphere, symbolism and careful exposition to craft their storylines. The less said about Resident Evil, however, the better.

There’s also the action adventure to consider, obviously a subgenre of both action games and adventure games, effectively created by games like The Legend of Zelda and Metroid. The action adventure genre still holds strong today, mixing together tropes, storytelling and gameplay variations from both genres, almost creating an umbrella term for games that include reflex gameplay (which adventure games don’t have); puzzle solving (which action games don’t have) and the occasional jumping puzzle (which both genres usually don’t have). The same physical skills required in an action game are usually present, but also offers a storyline, numerous characters, an inventory system, dialog and other features of adventure games. Action adventures can also be a lot faster paced than your typical adventure game. It’s not particularly easy to determine when a game stops being an adventure game and becomes an action adventure game. Justadventure.com describes action adventures as “‘…a game that has enough action in it not to be called an Adventure game, but not enough action to be called an Action game.’ Action/Adventures are very hard to define, since they are the gray area between Adventure and Action games. It would be safe to say that if you have a game with 2/3 action and 1/3 puzzle solving, in any form that requires thinking rather than reflexes, you got yourself an Action/Adventure game.”

But even to this very day, adventure games in their purest form remain, albeit not as strongly as they used to. Since its heyday the genre has branched out onto newer platforms. Adventure games on consoles are far from a new thing, as previously mentioned with Broken Sword 1 and 2 on the original Playstation. The Nintendo Wii and DS are arguably tailor made for adventure games, something certain developers have decided to act upon. Capcom’s Ace Attorney series, originally debuting in Japan on the GameBoy Advance, was ported to the DS for a western release. The “visual novel” is a Japanese subgenre of the traditional adventure games, almost universally played from a first-person perspective and driven primarily by dialogue, but features similar point and click mechanics to its originator. The last game in the Ace Attorney series features a more standard adventure game setup with the player controlling an avatar and collecting items to progress the story.

Cing, Inc. another Japanese developer has had successes with adventure games, teaming up with Nintendo in order to be able to fully take advantage of the gameplay options offered by the DS and Wii. In early 2005, the company released Another Code: Two Memories (Trace Memory in the US) for the DS, taking advantage of all of the DS’ capabilities without making it feel tacked on. The game was praised for its creative use of the DS hardware for puzzle solving, graphics and characterisation. Cing followed the moderate success of Another Code with another adventure game for the DS; Hotel Dusk: Room 215. Players took control of Kyle Hyde, a policeman turned salesman, as he’s tasked with finding some lost items at the titular Hotel Dusk. The game featured a unique film-noir art style and plot progression, which garnered a lot of praise from reviewers as well as the game’s layered characters and well-written script. Since then, Another Code gained a sequel and Cing is still hard at work with creating new and exciting titles for Nintendo’s two platforms.

On the western side of the globe, the adventure game is slowly being brought back to the fold, in part thanks to Telltale Games. One of the three cancelled LucasArts adventure games of the 2000′s was a sequel to Sam & Max Hit the Road (1993). Upon the cancellation, a group of LucasArts employees headed by Dan Connors, Kevin Bruner and Troy Molander founded Telltale Games. Telltale’s first few games were a poker sim, two adaptations of Jeff Smith’s graphic novel series Bone and a game based on the CSI tv series, but the company soon moved on to pursue episodic gaming with Sam & Max: Season One. Originally released as downloadable episodes for PC, the games spun off to the Wii and Xbox 360. Telltale has since then focused on episodic games, aiming to have a presence on as many platforms as possible, having released games through GameTap, Steam, WiiWare, Xbox Live Arcade and their own online store. Apart from the Sam & Max games, Telltale is also responsible for Strong Bad’s Cool Game for Attractive People and Wallace & Gromit’s Grand Adventures. The recent revival of the Monkey Island series can also party be attributed to Telltale Games, who recently released the third episode of the Tales of Money Island series.

LucasArts have somewhat returned to adventure games, but Star Wars still remains their bread and butter. The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition is a remake of the original game with updated graphics, music and voice work, and the Wii version of Indiana Jones and the Staff of Kings contains an unlockable port of the original Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis. LucasArts has also begun re-releasing a number of their classic games like Fate of Atlantis and LOOM on Steam. Since then the company has expressed a desire to “revitalize [their] deep portfolio of gaming franchises”. President of LucasArts Darrel Rodriguez said in an interview with GTTV that LucasArts were looking to go back to their roots and be more open to experimentation when it comes to game development. If this new direction turns successful, who knows, we might see some more classic adventure games reskinned and re-released. We might even see some new adventure games.

This concludes our third and final look into the history of adventure games. For all intents and purposes, the genre is far from dead, even though installments seem to be few and far apart. But consider the fact that the young gamers of the 90′s are now growing up, bringing memories of their favourite games with them as they become writers, programmers, developers and producers of video games.

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In this three part series, we’ll be taking a look at the history of the adventure game and possibly try to predict a future for them as well.

In this second instalment we take a look at the decline and near eradication of adventure games

In the last article we examined the factors that helped the adventure games evolve as a genre, a means to tell stories and how they helped tickle the grey areas of the brain. They were once kings, but pride must always come before the fall. Both Sierra and LucasArts were competing for the adventure game throne; Sierra focused on fiendish puzzle designs and franchise installments that constantly pushed graphics and gameplay to new heights while LucasArts took a friendlier approach with humour, slapstick and absolutely no dead-end situations.

Unfortunately, while the adventure games had changed from their humble beginnings as interactive fiction, so too had the industry changed with them. Sierra was founded in 1979 by a couple who sold software out off the trunk of their car, hoping to simply earn some money on their games.

he rapid popularity of adventure games had forced the company to continuously expand its operations by buying up other studios and having their shares go public. on February 22, 1999, a date that would be known as “Black Monday” among Sierra’s employees, the company announced they were going through a major reorganization, which lead to the shutdown of several development studios. About 250 people lost their jobs, among them being Al Lowe (creator of the Leisure Suit Larry series) and Scott Murphy (one of the creators of the Space Quest series).

Al Lowe, in an interview with Edge: “Sierra went from being driven by a couple of gamers with entrepreneurial spirit to one where the attitude was: You tell me how much this is going to sell, and I’ll tell you how much money I’ll give you to develop it.’  Which was the kiss of death for originality.

When Ken and Roberta Williams got bought out, the company had around 1,200 employees. Within five years they closed the doors and soon became little more than a label on a box. It was like one of those old WWII dogfight scenes in which an aeroplane’s wing is shot off and it starts its downwards death spiral with smoke screaming from it. That’s what watching Sierra was like.”

Adventure games weren’t profitable anymore and their US market share began to drastically decline. There have been many fingers pointed at the cause of this, the most common being the onset of the Quake era. Full 3D had kicked in with Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, and finally Quake. Around this time of 1996 the PlayStation had just recently launched and the general public seemed to favour action games and instant gratification rather than heavy story telling.

Some of the fault could also be placed on the nature of 3D graphics themselves. Most of the 90′s and early 2000′s, 3D graphics were more oriented toward fast movement rather than graphical detail, which is easy to notice in genre defining games such as Quake. Most adventure games of the day did the opposite by using detailed and static imagery. This could have been perceived as technologically regressive by many consumers. LucasArts did attempt to jump into fast and flowing 3D with “Escape from Monkey Island” and “Grim Fandango”, but by that time it was too late. Gamers had moved on, and action games had supplanted the adventure game as the public’s favourite.

Yet there is a third cause many gamers point to as the true cause of the adventure games’ decline; the games themselves. While they were praised for their well written and engaging stories, most adventure games (usually those created by Sierra) employed what has later been referred to as “moon logic” to most of their puzzles, in which players would walk around, collect various items and patiently rub them together in various combinations in order to advance the story.

The worst of such moon logic puzzles has been identified by sites such as GamesRadar and OldManMurray as the “disguise puzzle” from Gabriel Knight 3, in which the protagonist, Gabriel Knight, must disguise himself as another in-game character, Detective Moseley, so he can “borrow” a motorcycle in order to advance the story.

To make an incredibly long solution short, Gabriel uses duct tape, a spray bottle, a black cat and syrup to make a false moustache, a piece of candy and a hotel call button is used to steal a jacket and passport while a hat is readily found in a lost-and-found box. A black marker is used to draw a moustache onto the passport and, voila! Gabriel has disguised himself.

What’s interesting to note is the fact that Moseley is balding, short, fat and doesn’t even have a moustache!

Thus it can be argued that adventure games managed to commit suicide by accident.

Much like with Sonic the Hedgehog the leap into 3D wasn’t easy for adventure games, but that alone can’t be said to be the entire cause of the genre’s decline. Neither can the Quake era or moon logic puzzles, but a combination of the three seems to be a viable solution as any.

As previously stated the industry had changed from the 80′s and was continuously changing, with the final nail in the coffin being the 1998 release of Half-Life, ironically published by Sierra Studios. Gabriel Knight 3 was Sierra’s last foray into the adventure game genre, after which they moved onto bigger and, arguably, better titles, only to become part of Activision Blizzard and a mere shell of its former glory.

At the same time LucasArts discovered the Star Wars franchise was much more profitable than simple adventure games and decided to milk the Star Wars cow for all it was worth.

While the American market moved on to more action packed games, the situation was a bit different in Europe and Japan.

The Dreamcast and PS2 both had memorable adventure titles like Sega’s Shenmue and Konami’s Shadow of Memories, presented in 3D with a third-person. There’s also Hideo Kojima who created the classic adventure games Snatcher and Policenauts before returning to continue the Metal Gear franchise. As a designer who adores storytelling above all else it it’s not surprising he turned to the adventure game for a while.

The PlayStation also helped introduce new players to the Broken Sword series in Europe, with the first two games being released on the console. Charles Cecil, designer of Broken Sword, has since then declared the genre dead, but that didn’t stop his company creating both a third and fourth entry to the series, the last being released in 2006.

An honourable mention must be given to FunCom’s The Longest Journey, considered by many to be the final true adventure game ever to be released. The game was first published in Norway in 1999 (developer FunCom is a Norwegian company), but was later localised and released in France, the UK, Germany, Italy, Belgium, The Netherlands, Canada, Spain, Denmark, Finland, Sweden, Poland, Czech Republic, Russia and the US.

The Longest Journey told the story of April Ryan, an 18-year-old art student living in the world of Stark. April learns the world was once split into two dimensions; Arcadia, a world of magic, and Stark, a world of science and technology, and that the border that keeps the two apart is slowly failing. Chaos ensues, April’s power as a Shifter is awakened and she is tasked to restore the Balance between the dimensions.

While some of the puzzles were considered to be a bit too obscure, the game garnered a lot of praise and won the Adventure Game of the Year award by GameSpot and IGN. By mid-2002, the game had sold 450,000 copies and remains a perfect example of the right game released at the wrong time.

This concludes our second look into the history of the adventure game. Next time we’ll be taking a look at what became of adventure games after their decline in popularity, as genres begin to interbreed and storytelling and gameplay go hand in hand.

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When I was a younger man, during the PS1 days, my new console came packed with a demo disc, usually featuring one or two levels from released or upcoming games. And it was great, because it allowed me and my friends to experience a game before begging our parents to buy it for us. Demo discs seemed to be released frequently, through magazines or promo campaigns. Once the PS2, Xbox and GC generation of consoles rolled in, it seemed (to me at least) that demos suddenly stopped being released.

Now, however, it seems demos are coming back to their former glory, allowing players to experience a game before shelling out the $50 or $60 the game stores are asking for.

- Are demos valid again?

- Where they ever not valid?

- Do you download demos?

Authors note: Yes, I’m aware of the fact that PC demos have been released through Steam and what have you since the dawn of time, but article is from a mostly console centered viewpoint.

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Along game a relatively unknown studio named Rocksteady who wanted to create the super hero game to end all super heroes; Batman: Arkham Asylum. They set out to recreate the look, feel and experience of being the dark knight. Along with Batman writer Paul Dini it so far seems they have succeeded, garnering rave reviews of preview builds and generating a huge buzz around gamer and comic book communities alike.

Today the demo launched for Xbox Live Arcade and PlayStation Network, so naturally tonight’s Evening Topic is Batman: Arkham Asylum.

- Did you download the demo?

- From your impressions of the demo, does the game deliver what it set out to do?

- Could Batman: Arkham Asylum be the best super hero game ever?

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This is an official entry in the franchise, a movie in video game form if you will. The boys in grey have a lot of fans both young and old, and all those fans can rest easily, as Ghostbusters: The Video Game delivers on many accounts.

The game kicks off as a wave of ghostly energy emanates from a museum housing a Gozer exhibit. At the same time the Ghostbusters have hired a new member to the team, the Rookie, who’ll be working as an “experimental weapons technician” or Egon’s guinea pig. The team is reluctant to get to know the new recruit as half the equipment he’ll be testing can send him flying halfway to New-Jersey in case something malfunctions.

No mention is made of the fact that the Proton Packs houses unlicensed nuclear accelerators. Hysteria ensues as Slimer breaks out of his containment unit and escapes to the Hotel Sedgewick, his original haunting ground. The opening sequence and subsequent tutorial level does a great job of propelling you into the action.

BAR SOME RECYCLED ENEMIES, THE GAME ALWAYS HITS THE MARK WHEN IT COMES TO NAILING THE LOOK AND FEEL OF THE CLASSIC MOVIES IN VIDEO GAME FORM

The story will take you to various New York locations such as Times Square for a showdown with Stay Puft, the NY Public Library, a parallel dimension and Central park. The locations are varied and offer different enemy types, albeit somewhat linear. Considering the fact that Ghostbusters is considered the third movie, a little linearity can be excused. Not to mention that the game is a lot of fun!

Finding the ghosts are one thing, but trapping them a whole other. Thankfully Egon has equipped you with a venerable arsenal of Proton Pack upgrades, with the Ghostbusters equivalents of a shotgun, freeze ray, rocket launcher and machine gun steadily being unlocked as you progress through the game. The slime blower from Ghostbusters 2 has been downsized and now fits neatly into your Proton Pack, letting you coat enemies and the environment in positively charged slime until everything looks like it just had a violent sneeze attack.

When you’ve successfully weakened a ghost, slap down a trap, wrangle the ghost above it and watch as it’s slowly being sucked towards its new home. All your equipment is upgradeable, even the traps themselves, one of which allows you to slam a ghost directly into a trap. The weapons also feature secondary fire modes, of which the slime tether is the most fun to play with. It’s your basic physics puzzle solver: connect two objects together and the slime tether pulls the two together. Using it on ghosts allows you to slam them into walls and the floor, even slamming them straight into traps.

Adding to the fun factor is the sheer amount of work and details that’s gone into the game. This is especially true of the Proton Packs, which are shown off in full graphical detail during the game’s loading screens. The various dings, hisses and whistles are taken directly from the original movie, even the hum of the Neutrona Wand as it powers up. As you switch between the various weapon modes, lights on the Proton Pack changes colour and extra features pop up to show off the love and care that’s been put into rendering the most awesome backpack ever.

Developer Terminal Reality have decided to completely forgo the regular HUD and uses the Proton Pack to show your remaining health and how close your pack is to overheating. You can take a lot of beatings, but it’s easy to forget to look at your health meter during the more intense moments of gameplay.

Overheating the Proton Pack can also become an issue, but the game offers a lot of feedback to remind players to vent it manually. The Pack begins to chug dangerously as a warning bell goes off. And if that isn’t enough to keep you on your toes, the controller vibrates like you’d expect an overheating nuclear accelerator would. It all makes for an engaging experience and gives you the feeling of not being downright unstoppable. Crossing the streams is still a bad idea, but due to some of Egon’s helpful modifications a total protonic reversal isn’t as bad as it used to be.

THE GAMEPLAY MECHANIC ARE UNIQUE AND INTUITIVE, MAKING FOR A GAMEPLAY EXPERIENCE THAT FEELS VERY AUTHENTIC TO THE GHOSTBUSTERS FRANCHISE

The game’s script, penned by the original film’s writers Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis, deserves mentioning for being some of the funniest video game writing I’ve heard since playing Psychonauts. The humour is classic Ghostbusters and the script references various events from the previous two movies. It’s all tied neatly together in a story that continues the Ghostbusters mythos.

The original Ghostbusters themselves also return to voice their respective characters and they remain just as one remembers them; Venkman is still a sardonic ladies man; Egon is a giant nerd who hilariously delivers line after line of deadpan technobabble; Ray is the incurable optimist, even when faced with near death and Winston is the all-round regular dude. Rounding out the cast is Annie Potts as Janine Melnitz and William Atherton as Walter Dickless Peck.

The script well delivered on all fronts and the developer has gone to great lengths to recreate the look and of the original characters, even if they might come across as a bit too finely chiselled at times.

Thankfully the characters never venture far into the uncanny valley, with the animations being very lifelike, even in the in-game cut-scenes. It’s a common complaint in video games that cut-scenes boil down to a character speaking while the rest stand almost ramrod stiff waiting for their turn to speak. This doesn’t happen in Ghostbusters, as the characters actually behave rather human, reacting to other character’s movements and vocal taunts. This also trickles into gameplay, like the time when I accidentally slimed Egon and he took two steps back with a look of disgust on his face.

But then there’s the Rookie, who has the most generic face I’ve ever seen in a game. I often found myself mistaking him with both Ray and Venkman when I saw him in the cut-scenes. Add to the fact that he’s a nameless and silent protagonist his character doesn’t really come off as anything but filler. However what we’re really here is to experience what it’s like to actually be a Ghostbuster, something the game pulls off beautifully.

WHEN ITS COMES TO EMULATING THE CHARACTERS WE ALL KNOW AND LOVE, THE GAME REGULARLY EXCELS. THE LESS SAID ABOUT THE ROOKIE THE BETTER, THOUGH...

Like most modern games there’s also a hefty online multiplayer portion to the game, but no co-op mode. If offline, story based co-op is your thing, the Wii or PS2 versions might be the way to go.

The online multiplayer is completely separate from the story, but continues the game’s initial promise of making you feel what it’s like to be a Ghostbuster. You get to choose from different types of campaign modes consisting of three missions. They all revolve around trapping ghosts and destroying other enemies, and are unique in that they emphasise both teamwork and competition.

While you’re fighting to survive you’re also fighting to nab the most ghosts and earn the most money. Survival, Protection and Containment all feel somewhat similar, albeit with different objectives. What really shines is the Slime Dunk, where players are tasked with capturing as many Slimer ghosts as possible. It’s especially fun to fire upon your opponents with your Proton Stream, putting them out of play for a few minutes so you can steal his ghost.

Ghostbuster does a lot of things right, both for fans of the original films and for gamers looking for a good time. The script is well written, the voice cast is brilliant and the gameplay offers a lot of fun and variety to be had.

Unfortunately the game isn’t very long, clocking in some place around 6 hours. Someone I spoke to during the online multiplayer claimed to have sped through the game in under 4 hours. Finding all the cursed artefacts and hidden achievements might stretch the total game time to somewhere between 8 or even 10 hours, depending on how often you die or run into a snag. There are also some strange difficulty spikes where cursing will ensue, especially on the harder difficulty settings.

If you’re looking for a fun, engaging and sometimes downright silly experience, Ghostbusters: The Video Game is for you. Busting will make you feel good.

- 8 / 10

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Sony didn’t want to be left out of the bandwagon and showed off yet another camera based motion controller, with two wand like objects. Much like a Wiimote with the MotionPlus attachment, the PS3Wands feature 1:1 movement in a 3D plane and seems tailor made for rail-shooters and sword fighting.

While all three kinds of motion controls were lauded by most fans and critics alike, it does raise one question: are montion controls really a good thing? Sure it can help with immersion in certain types of games, I for one felt Twilight Princess was even more fun to play with a Wiimote, but what about games that actually require buttons and analogue sticks?

Can you imagine playing Gears of War with the Natal, or Uncharted with the PS3Wands? Sure it helps the casual crowd experience gaming without the controller being a barrier, but most of us play games to unwind. I can’t imagine playing Ricochet on the Xbox 360 to unwind, seeing as most hands-on features have all said the same thing: that it’s a tiring and sweaty experience.

- Are motion controls the future of gaming?

- Will you be getting Project Natal, a PS3Wands or a Wii MotionPlus?

- Do we really care what the bottom of an Avatar’s shoe looks like?

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Duke Nukem Forever was scheduled for a release in 1997, but was finally axed May 6 2009 when the developer ran out of money. Batman: Arkham Asylum was recently delayed by a few months, and Fable II’s DLC Knothole Island was pushed back from mid December to late January.

And who can forget Daikatana, the game by which John Romero was going to make you his bitch. Set to release in 1998, the game finally launched in 2000, only to bomb fantastically.

- Are delays a necessary evil that should just be accepted?

- Or is it an excuse for developers who clearly haven’t been doing their best?

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The argument was raised that there’s a profound lack of games that can be described as mature and sophisticated, tackling more adult subject matter because in the eyes of the general public games are still a very young medium. There’s no established set of ways for us to expect what’s going to happen in a particular scene like there is in film and literature.

- Is there a lack of real maturity in games?

- What could be done to rectify such a lack?

- What adult subject matter would you like to see explored in a video game?

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