The Witcher

Like The Witcher itself this review is too long, poorly written and chock full of nudity. Well, two out of three anyway: but which two will it be? Let’s find out…

We’ll start with an extract from Andrzej Sapkowski’s ‘The Indefinite Stave of Misplaced Vicissitudes’, first in his series of ‘The Witcher’ novels upon which the game was based. Translated by myself:

‘Geralt followed the path over a nicely animated stream, to a clearing in the realistic SpeedTrees. His journal told him his target was up ahead: it also told him to burn things, but all things to those who wait. A giant wolf had been frightening the villagers, eating babies and chewing on furniture and such. Wolves. Geralt hated wolves… almost as much as he hated giant wolves. Even more than those, he hated parts of himself: what a tortured soul he was. Suspecting this was not the best time to be riddled with self-doubt he decided to suck it up and prepare for a fight. He opened his inventory: a poison to apply to his sword blade and a healing potion would be prudent. Where did he leave that potion? Was that it? No, just a bottle of goat’s milk. This one? Shoe polish. Fuck, where was it? Wishing he had bothered labeling his equipment Geralt closed his non-existent but surprisingly capacious backpack, and supposed he’d just have to do this sans performance enhancing substances.

He shuffled forward into the clearing. The wolf turned, and began stiffly bounding towards him, growling. Geralt reached for his sword and assumed a stance to fight one strong opponent. Then he realised he’d drawn the wrong sword. And chosen the wrong stance. The wolf drew rapidly nearer as he fumbled to get out his steel sword- when suddenly he was struck from behind. Four Drowners had just crawled out of the stream he had his back to, and were damply twatting him something rotten. He tried to switch to group style, to deal with all these assailants, but only ended up spinning in a circle, putting his sword away and accidentally hitting the Windows key, thus crashing to desktop. When he came to several wyverns had descended from the skies, carrying with them a squadron of heavily armoured war-spiders. He could feel his life trickling away, but could not move, encircled as he was and hampered by the framerate dropping into negative figures. As he shuffled about awkwardly on the spot, nineteen enemies biting, bashing, clawing and licking at him, he had time for one last, tortured thought...

[Translation difficult- nearest equivalent ‘quite the clusterfuck this turned out to be’]

Clunkiness. That’s ‘Mr Clunkiness’ to you. Everything about The Witcher oozes clunkiness. The quick-save generates a new save file each time, leading to my accruing 6GB of saves without realising. The menus couldn’t give two tosses whether or not you understand them. The alchemy system is crippled by the inability to organise ingredients beyond mousing over each one to see the pop-up description. Combat is an orgy of spinning about when you don’t mean to, shuffling forwards, accidentally putting away your sword and then getting murdered by something that’s popped up out of the ground behind you and eaten the back of your skull.

Drawing your sword gives you the option of three fighting styles; fast, strong and group. But the game never stops to ask why you need that option: why can’t it just select the best style automatically and use that set of moves? It’s not like you ever intend to use the wrong style on an opponent because you thought it might be fun to try and fuck yourself over. This means you’re only ever going to use the wrong style accidentally: why does the player need that choice? No aspect of the game seems remotely concerned with operating smoothly, doing anything for your convenience. I half-expected it to randomise the controls each time I started it up, just to see what I’d do (answer: carry on playing but grumble in a British way and not cause a scene).

And an RPG that starts with amnesia? Honestly? Even complaining about that has become cliché, if you’ll excuse my paralipsis. ‘But if there’s no pre-existing story then you get to choose your own path, forge your own destiny!’ cries the ‘shoddy-story-telling’ apologists brigade. Oh can I, can I really? I have to pay £35 so that someone else can get me to do all the character back story? Anything else you want me to do while I’m here? Touch up the textures a bit; rewrite the lackluster dialogue; maybe administer a speedy hand job to the dev team?

So then: lesson learned, life too short, yadda yadda. Let’s not fritter away our time discussing The Witcher. Who likes riddles?

‘You move house to a remote town which has two dentists. Dentist A has an immaculate set of white-as-the-driven-snow teeth. Dentist B has grotesquely mouldy Victorian gnashers jutting out of his head at improbable angles. But which do you choose to be your dentist?’

Answer: dentist B. Reason: given the dearth of dental professionals in the town we can infer that A treats B and B treats A: therefore B is proficient at his job, and A is just a smiling, damned villain.

Now keep that logic swirling about in your mind-helmet for just ten second and consider this brain tickler:

‘You meet two people at a party: person A claims ‘I single-handedly wrote all the English dialogue for the PC RPG The Witcher’: Person B, meanwhile, claims ‘Eye, with few fingers, rote all the Inglisch dyer clogs for the Politically Correct Real Thyme Strategist game The Whicher.’ As you open your mouth to respond person B then bellows ‘perchance to sufficiently resound the wardrobe template considers multifarious variables and brave hermeneutic parodies!’ turns away and walks into a wall. Witch...sorry...which of the men do you believe?

The correct answer was person B, and as a result The Witcher is a poorly written game. Not just a ‘poorly written compared to a fine Keatsian ode’ level of bad writing, but fairly often so poorly written that you haven’t a fucking clue what’s going on, who you’re supposed to be talking to, why your shoes are on fire and just whoa man has to fellate to get a decent cup of tea around here.

Bad dialogue, though...pshaw, at least it makes me giggle. Challenging a man to a fistfight in a pub leads to him defiantly proclaiming ‘I’ll kick your arse and make money doing it!’ except the dreadful voice acting (think a Polish person impersonating a Scotsman impersonating Dick Van Dyke from Mary Poppins) leads to it sounding more ‘Ah’ll keck yer aaahhhrze end meck moonay doing eht!’ Which is just fabulous. The bizarre ‘fight’ which ensues, consisting of you ducking as a fat and unremittingly stupid man punches the air above you, is pretty amusing too. The first few times. Good dialogue, I can quite sympathise, is very hard to write, even in your native tongue. I can forgive the writing because it’s trying its best, in much the way I’m inclined to give The Witcher a chance because it tries to be more grown-up than most games. Sadly it almost completely fails, but life’s a bit like that. Mine is, anyway.

It’s riddle time again!

‘What has two wings but doesn’t fly?’*

No, that’s just plain irrelevant. We need something with some philosophical mileage, an existential, brain molesting conundrum…like:

‘What’s an infallible way to tell a good choice from an evil one?’

Hear that? ‘More-rall-ee-tea’. Let’s have a one sentence, foolproof answer then? Fortunately video games have it sorted, even if us dull-witted carbon-based apes are still mulling it over. So, Monsieur Silicon; enlighten us?

‘Well... good choices are in blue text, evil choices are in red. Foolish meatbag...’

Morality in games has, rather more often than not, been a polar choice. Choose your end of the spectrum and go sit on it, and be so kind as not to make a scene… sir. As any gamer will tell you, evil people tend towards pale, veiny skin, strikingly white hair and menacing looking eyes, and will always demand paying for their services. And occasionally they’ll throw orphans into volcanoes, as is their prerogative. It’s a description that matches The Witcher’s Geralt almost exactly, apart from the volcanoes business. Self-righteous ‘good’ characters will strut around like Neitzschen turned Nazi Übermenschen, flicking their blonde hair over their broad shoulders, rolling their blue eyes, twirling their blue lightsabers, spouting even bluer text and obstinately refusing to get paid for their good deeds:

CRONE: Thanks for killing those stray cats with your legendary two-handed battle sword and lightning spells: could I tempt you with a small amount of monetary compensation or a salve to heal your scratches lest they become infected?

HERO: Heaven forfend, hideous crone, for ‘tis honour enough to aid defenseless quest-givers such as yourself. Virtue alone shall be my reward! Although I don’t suppose you might be able to spare just an ounce of bread, I’m starving after stamping on all those malnourished kittens-

CRONE: No. Now get out of my mansion.

God, in His wisdom, did not think to provide blue or red subtitles when we go about our daily lives. We’re lucky to get any subtitles at all, colour coding be damned. As a result morality is often a very grey thing, and sooner or later games were going to figure this out. The Witcher is aiming to occupy that ‘grey is the new black’ niche. ‘Tolkienesque Dystopia’ pretty much sums up the setting in two gratifyingly pompous words. So it is that conspicuously absent from The Witcher are hints on morality: no binary ‘light side/dark side/renegade/paragon/Tony Blair/Mother Teresa’ colour-coded sentences here- just choices leading to consequences. These consequences can often be surprising, meaning that trying to do something for the right reasons can come round ten hours later and bite you on the arse. I’m going to slip into a Platonic dialogue mode here for a second and suppose that, someone, somewhere out there is going to throw on a toga and say ‘Ah, you all too readily disparage Knights of the Old Republic and other such games, which you claim offer clear ‘good and evil choices’, but what of the ‘help the beggar’ scenario in KotoR II? What of that, good sir?’

I’ll indulge. In this scene a vagrant at a spaceport (aren’t they the worst kind?) asks you for some spare change, providing you the choice of lavishing him with a few shiny coppers or refusing him, slapping him with the back of your hand and laughing callously as he crawls off. The obvious evil response is one of slapping and callous laughter: but the ‘good’ response, throwing the chap some pennies and giving him a patronising pat on the head, only leads to the beggar wandering off and being beaten up for his newfound wealth. I’ll admit, when I first came across this incident my initial reaction was ‘blimey Mary Poppins, what a profound lesson on the impossibly complex ramifications of our actions in an unpredictable universe, a vivid allegory of moral chaos theory’, or somesuch bollocks.

But with hindsight it’s not half as clever as it wants to be. Imagine if every decision in KotoR was like that: it would just be confusing and frustrating. The whole set-up seems to be more like a person standing on a path by a road: if they step into the road they’ll be hit by a car, and if they stay on the path they’ll be crushed by a falling piano. Weighing up the two, we see this is really just an extension of the ‘good or evil’ argument, but it replaces the binary ‘right or wrong’ with plain old ‘wrong or wrong’, which is even worse. ‘Car or piano: choose your poison, friend.’ In the circles which I make it my business to frequent, saturated as they are with pretentious twats, we would liken it to being between Scylla and Charybdis, but really it boils down to being fucked if you do and fucked if you don’t. Does The Witcher really do enough to escape this simplistic moral dichotomy?

‘Long but Wrong’ is:

i) what my ex used to call me (only jesting! She used to call me ‘short and impotent...’) and

ii) ii) a tri-syllabic review of the game.

Here’s a quote for the box: ‘Hey kid! You bored of A-B fetch quests? Not nearly as bored as you’ll be of A-B-C-D-E-F-G-H-B-H-B-H-I-B-J fetch quests!’ Quantity- not always a good substitute for quality, as it turns out. The Witcher is a long old game, but a slender fraction of that time is enjoyable, consisting as it does of tramping between areas to go talk to some old lady who you don’t care about because some homeless person or arbitrarily naked chick told you to. Or even more bewilderingly, being told to do things by your journal, with no apparent external motivation. I can understand recording the progress of quests in his journal, but at what point does Geralt stop writing the journal and the journal start writing him?

But that good fraction of the game shows some promise, it just needs expanding on. Using magic is quite fun- it has a reassuring physicality to it: rather than the ‘super over the top of the top of the top Final Fantasy school of destroying a solar system to kill a cactuar’ spells we see so often, The Witcher has a limited, coherent set of spells that have useful applications. Likewise, Geralt’s swordplay has a pleasingly balletic feeling to it, although its florid style juxtaposes rather uncomfortably with the overall clunkiness of the combat system. The game also features one of my favourite pieces of animation ever: when Geralt takes out one of the swords strapped to his back he yanks it out of it’s strap and then catches it in mid-air, and when he replaces it he hold it by the blade and feeds it back into place. It’s little, but nice (that’s what my girlfriend called me). If the game could only focus more on providing moral dilemmas which encourage the player to think, rather than boring ‘go here and talk to this old git’ quests which encourage the player to turn the computer off and fetch some biscuits, then it would be onto a winner.

This just leaves us with one last issue I want to address before I scurry back into the undergrowth: misogyny. In the style of the opening to a secondary school English essay:

‘The Oxford University Dictionary defines misogyny as ‘hatred of women.’

Some of the characters in The Witcher are deeply misogynistic; others are religious fanatics; then there are the drug dealers, grave robbers, fences, rapists, racists, pimps, crooked cops and professional killers. It’s not a place you’d leave your child unattended. The world of The Witcher is a broken, divided and unhappy one, and logically an absence of misogyny within it would be a serious continuity error. The question of whether or not the game itself, not the game world, is a misogynistic one is a trickier one to assess. Sex scenes are blurred out and indistinct, but upon bedding a woman the player is presented with a page 3 style trading card of a lady merrily bearing her breasts and looking sultry. Consistent logic schmonsistent schmogic. There may not be any malice on the part of the developers of the game, really: it could just be that they’ve never gone so far as actually talking to a real woman, and therefore could not know that foreplay generally consists of more than loudly proclaiming ‘My, what a fine looking strumpet you are! Let’s go out back and I’ll give you a damn good rogering!’

Should you buy it? Honestly, probably not. Should you buy the sequel? If it’s refined and improved, definitely. Will there ever be a sequel if you don’t buy this one? Probably not. Never any simple answers, are there? Let it never be said life is not interminably riddled with paradoxes.

*and it was a penguin buried in concrete

Bully: Scholarship Edition

Atavistic regression to a blood soaked Lord of the Flies dystopia is one thing, but boys kissing boys is the straw that broke the media’s back.

Bully! No longer a word used largely by overly effusive Victorian gentlemen expressing heartfelt approval for the latest innovations in top-hat design: ‘What’s that old fellow? Make them tall and black instead of squat and electric pink?’ Bully is also a computer game made by Rockstar, a company better known to the nation’s worried parents as ‘the people who made that sex simulator game’, whose evil tendrils have now extended to chillingly indoctrinating your brood into persecuting and killing other children and sodomising their corpses. It seems no force on Earth is capable of stemming the relentless tide of corruption pouring forth from these depraved an-

---THE DISC YOU ARE USING MAY BE DIRTY OR DAMAGED---

That was easy. For the moment I can confirm that Bully features the steamiest man-on-man action you’ve ever seen in a video game. That’s a bona fide fact in a similar vein to George Bush being the most intelligent current President of America: given that there’s not a lot of competition in either field the statement becomes a sloppy mush which is neither indictment or praise. In Bully’s case it is revealing about the industries attitude to gayming, comprised apparently of one part titillation fuelled childish giggling, one part self preservation induced fear of the censors. Say what you will about game developers condoning, advocating and downright encouraging horrible acts of wanton violence, but as far as portraying gay characters as being well adjusted, unremarkable people goes, things have remained comparatively prudish.

Not surprising, really, given the blustering furore that springs up over depictions of heterosexual, above age of consent sex: cf. that flash of naked buttock in Mass Effect or that Warm Mocha farce. Jack Thompson’s initial remonstration with Bully was the fear that its content would fuel inter-infant violence: the fear that he would be compelled to take on lucrative lawsuits and get some extra publicity no doubt lost him a great deal of sleep. But once the news came out that little Timmy could take little Jimmy, hold the left trigger and press A and go kiss little Freddy...boy, did the focus of the controversy ever shift fast. ‘Teaching kids to bully the crap out of each other I could take, but boys kissing boys? Mother Teresa will be selling McFlurries in hell before I let that slide!’ That’s an actual quote, I swear.

So it’s a paedophile-pleasing gay-porn sex and blood fest with a hint of training manual for bullies thrown in? Okay, I’ll stop being silly: Bully doesn’t encourage bullying in the least. It encourages violence, hell yes, but only towards people who deserve it. The player is frequently prompted not to bully other characters, and the game offers no incentive to go around whaling on little kids and smacking girls with fire extinguishers aside from the player finding it funny, and since only an already maladjusted specimen would find it funny it exculpates the game somewhat. The title under which the game was originally released in Britain, Canis Canem Edit (or, for those rusty on their Latin, Dog Eat Dog and Suck On This BBFC) may at first glance appear a rudimentary way of making the game seem more palatable to concerned parents: ‘Buy this game for me mum. Look, the title’s Latin- nothing bad ever had a Latin title!’ But ‘dog eat dog’ gives a more accurate view of the school, a setting painted in broadly Darwinian strokes- it’s less about bullying than surviving the bullies. And then you whale on them with a fire extinguisher, which is precisely what secondary school’s all about.

So it’s a paedophile-pleasing gay-porn sex and blood fest with a hint of training manual for bullies thrown in? Okay, I’ll stop being silly: Bully doesn’t encourage bullying in the least. It encourages violence, hell yes, but only towards people who deserve it. The player is frequently prompted not to bully other characters, and the game offers no incentive to go around whaling on little kids and smacking girls with fire extinguishers aside from the player finding it funny, and since only an already maladjusted specimen would find it funny it exculpates the game somewhat. The title under which the game was originally released in Britain, Canis Canem Edit (or, for those rusty on their Latin, Dog Eat Dog and Suck On This BBFC) may at first glance appear a rudimentary way of making the game seem more palatable to concerned parents: ‘Buy this game for me mum. Look, the title’s Latin- nothing bad ever had a Latin title!’ But ‘dog eat dog’ gives a more accurate view of the school, a setting painted in broadly Darwinian strokes- it’s less about bullying than surviving the bullies. And then you whale on them with a fire extinguisher, which is precisely what secondary school’s all about.

Bully controls tightly enough, certainly handling a lot better than any GTA we’ve seen thus far, even if that is another of those ‘not a lot of competition in the field’ dicta. The controls are rather too sprawled out across the pad for my liking and the camera is as much use as a GTA camera ever is: we make the best of them, though, and seem to take them as a necessary evil, which is odd given how long they’ve had to get the hang of it. Perhaps Bully is easier to forgive because the stakes are lower than in a GTA game- combat is satisfying but omits the gory viscera, and the game as a whole is easier than its (dare I say) parent series. Instead of taking an assault rifle round to the face if the controls let you down you’ll probably get a wedgie or some itching powder in your less than bulletproof school-vest. Such is the variegation of activities you get tangled up in that it seems churlish to bitch and moan just because you sometimes run into walls or get stuck with the camera fixated on Jimmy’s bald spot. It's not unlike a beautiful mosaic made out of dead painted cockroaches, this heady mix of proficiency with occasional staggering ineptitude carrying over to the game's presentation.

Remarkably passable: faint praise and contradictions abound in describing Bully’s looks. Character models are firmly last generation, although slightly shinier textures and lighting spice up the 360 version. As broadly competent as Bully comes across one feels it would benefit from a next-gen engine no bounds. Characters in cutscenes possess that trademark Rockstar swaggering gait which I’ve yet to see anyone in real life exhibit- maybe the people I hang out with just aren’t badass enough, I don’t know. The strength of the cutscene direction and the quality of writing is undeniably charming, but the quality of the voice acting is vividly juxtaposed with lip syncing that looks like a rubber band flopping about on a piece of string. Bottles of whiskey will aim for said lips but clip straight through people’s foreheads- a more direct route on the road to inebriation, perhaps, but aesthetically distracting. Give them another engine, I say, and let’s see what they can achieve with GTA IV. Colour me excited over that, incidentally.

You’ll have heard a lot about technical issues, chiefly with the 360 version. You’ll also have heard a lot people saying ‘pish and tosh, it’s not that bad: just another case of the intraweb blowing things out of proportion, because I’ve not had any problems.’ Well bully for them, but it pleases me no end to report that the game is absolutely riddled with problems; plagued and damn near ruined. There’s niggling problems: sometimes animations will get stuck in a loop, characters stuck on scenery. There’s also a lot of loading- between cutscenes, between areas- but gallingly there’s only about four different loading screens, each with a bit of game art on, which rotate in sequence. It sounds pedantic but it’ll start to annoy you: trust me. There’s bigger problems: many of the QTE based classes are ridiculously difficult because the game will not recognize button presses properly; sometimes the random missions needed to get a hundred percent clear rating won’t occur (although it’s something of a niche issue for those anal enough to want a hundred percent completion from a Rockstar game). The frame rate, too, oscillates between less than optimal and noticeably choppy. Then there are serious problems: during the course of my playing the game it crashed no fewer than IIIIIIIIII III times. That’s just a fun little tally I etched into the back of my hand with a cocktail stick. Thanks to Rockstar’s doggedly idiosyncratic save system each of those crashes meant I had to replay missions and classes and soon enough Damocles’ Dirty Disc Error hung constantly over my head, leaving me compulsively saving at every opportunity. In a Rockstar game this means laborious treks to save points between each and every noteworthy event which rapidly becomes indefensibly choretastic.

Bully earns itself the dubious plaudit of having the most dirty disc errors and freezes since The Witcher, which took its own crown from Morrowind on the Xbox. The great thing about this generation is that when games crash this much I'm left unsure as to who to blame: maybe the developers? My console? Hyperion, Titan of Greek mythology? Perhaps I should qualify that, because I didn’t really mean this generation- I meant, quite specifically, one console: my 360. Say what you will about our contemporary triumvirate of disc-spinning noise-making entertainment pukers, but I think we all know who was outside having a crafty fag when the Powers That Be were doling out build quality. I love my 360 in the same way I would love a kitten made out of tissue paper: as much as I’d enjoy playing with it, I’d so in the knowledge I’ll only end up breaking it and having to scrumple it up and flush it down the loo.

Might need to flush that twice.

Rockstar has promised prompt and ruthless patching, but since the game has no Xbox Live multiplayer functionality it seems a lot of people out there will have bought it for the single player: as such there will be a generous quantity of people out there without Xbox Live who are left tallying up their dirty disc errors(it wouldn’t be so bad if the disc were actually dirty) and mentally crossing the Houser brothers off their Christmas card list. I’ll tell you this much: if GTA IV is equally problematic then Rockstar are going to see a demonstrable case of videogame induced violence when I get a bus up to Edinburgh and thrash them with a cricket bat.

So much negativity for a game that, when it hits its stride, can be as engrossing and funny as any. All that faffing about with kissing boys is just one paint stroke on the canvas. Among the cast are an alcoholic English teacher who reminds me of myself in twenty years time; a sociopathic would-be dictator with dreams of grandeur who decides to stop taking his medication and start taking over the school instead; and an ever-so-unhinged Vietnam Vet hobo living behind the school bus who’ll teach you beat-down techniques in exchange for radio transistors. The geography classes, in which you deposit flags down onto a map, are a superb riposte for all those haughty twats who say ‘aren’t Americans dreadfully stupid? Look, they can’t even point out Finland!’ As a card-carrying pretentious guffawing European myself I confess to smugly strolling through the map of Europe before smacking into a wall, completely unable to place more than three state flags on the map of North America. So that shut me up.

It’s a well-worn and depressing way to end a review of a special edition version of a game, and you have my sympathy for reading it, but… the game is well worth buying if you don’t already own it and it’s probably not worth buying if you’ve played a version of it already. As a non-Xbox Live subscriber myself I find it difficult to recommend the unpatched 360 version with a straight face, not while I gather the PS3 version tends to avoid crashing every quarter of an hour, and the Wii version no doubt touts all sorts of super fun RSI inducing wiggling just to load a save-game. I can only hope that one performs a sharp upward jerking gesture of the Wiimote to simulate giving passing kiddies a wedgie, but this remains chiefly conjectural.

Crackdown

A succinct disquisition on the importance of blowing shit the fuck up...

One of the following sentences will be central to this review. Feel free to ponder which it could be as you read them- for extra points, try to spot the common theme which links each sentence:

i) Let them eat cake.

ii) You can't have your cake and eat it.

iii) The cake is a lie.

Easy, wasn't it? Too easy, I’ll wager, for a person as intelligent and handsome as you. The common theme is that each sentence was preceded by a Roman numeral in brackets (as the author I can promise that any other correlation was wholly coincidental).

Take another glance at sentence ii). It is, depressingly enough, a truism in life that you can't have it both ways, whatever those ways may be. You can't skive off school just because you forgot to do your homework; you can't have a lightsaber, because they're only for Jedi's, and APPARENTLY they're not 'real'. And obviously, obviously, you can't jump off a skyscraper, fire a heat seeking missile launcher at a car full of mafia goons, land on a truck, pick it up and throw it at some innocent bystanders who you've developed an irrational but irresistible dislike to because...what?...I CAN do the last one? Sweet. Can I get a lightsaber as well? No? How about 'instead of'? Still no? Alright, alright. Better than a kick in the balls though...speaking of which...

'Better than a kick in the balls' sums up the reaction of many people who bought Crackdown. Expectations were not high: for many it was a free bonus game they got after shelling out £40 for access to the Halo 3 beta, kind of an inverted Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved. But you know what? Crackdown's brilliant. It's abso-cocking-lutely mental, and it doesn't care who knows it. Ironic, perhaps, that it was packaged with the Halo 3 Multiplayer beta- Crackdown’s main quest offers maybe ten hours of fun, but not much more: Halo 3 Multiplayer will be played until the Horsemen of the Apocalypse decide to make an entrance, the sun goes supernova, or Halo 4 gets released. Maybe those things will all happen at once- that's gonna be one hell of a weekend: 'Someone at the door? Hey, Pestilence, just need to finish this Capture the Flag...woah, could you dim the lights in here? Can't see the screen...'

Crackdown hits you like...well, a bit like that kick in the balls someone mentioned earlier. You select an angry looking avatar (possibly bald: most categorically angry). Strong but silent type- think Gordon Freeman doing freerunning…on LSD. You proceed to wander around a big ol' cartoon metropolis, happily murdering ethnic stereotypes until the game tells you the plot is over. But what a stunningly realised metropolis! It evokes a special type of joy medical experts call 'Jet Set Radio Future Super Happy Time'. The most superficial similarity is the cel-shaded beauty of both games, but a common structural trait is you can be sure that, if you can see somewhere, you can go there. Things start diverging when you consider that in JSRF there are certain semi-sensible limits about what can be done: you can do precisely what a cel-shaded, weirdly attired, ambiguously gendered skater ought to be able to do, within the logic of the game. But Crackdown… Crackdown turns the speaker up to 11...then throws the speaker through a wall and then lobs a grenade through the hole in the wall and then shoots whatever's left with a machine gun.

View distances are important. On a practical level a good draw distance will let you whip out a sniper rifle and forcibly put into operation a cessation in some ill-fated twit’s respiration from four miles away. But like a wrestler who dabbles in flower arranging, Crackdown has a surprising understanding of the importance of aesthetics. It allows- actually, it encourages- you to climb up to the top of a skyscraper, leaping from the ground, 25 feet in the air, grabbing onto a windowsill by your finger tips and hauling yourself up the side of the building (surprisingly nimble for such a big guy) for little better reason than to see the view. And the view distance is such that you can look in a direction and just see everything there is to be seen. As a child reared on a strict diet of Xbox Morrowind this always strikes me as a wondrous luxury.

Scattered throughout the map are 500 green orbs which can be collected to incrementally level up your agility. There are also various other colours of orbs for leveling up your strength, your skill with explosives, your accuracy, your touch-typing ability and your driving skill: these are all gained from using the relevant skill on passing thugs...and particularly ugly civilians, if you're in a foul mood, although you'll get no orbs from civilians, tight bastards to the last. Ostensibly these orbs help encourage the player to explore this urban playground, although I don't know what kind of morose wanker, when handed this super-agent to use as he sees fit, would actually look at a skyscraper and go 'Pfff. Don't really wanna climb that. Probably rubbish up there. Think I'll go for a drive instead.'

...(Seamless segue)...

Which brings us, pootling along sadly but inevitably, into the land of flaws, and as implied by my seamless segue, driving is a resident in that land. Driving in Crackdown is boring. Like everything in Crackdown, it's a Catch-22: if you don't do something, you'll never get good at it, but you're unlikely to ever do it if you're no good at it. Thing is, running around lobbing grenades and leaping off skyscrapers and touch-typing a Word document are innately fun activities- I'd do them all the time if I got the chance. But the driving...it feels so initially clunky, when it's not been leveled up, that there's simply no reason to upgrade it. Why drive the streets like some preposterous loser when you could be bounding from rooftop to rooftop like a bald badass dude with somewhere important to be (probably a date with a hot lady...who you'll throw a car at! 'Cos that's how you roll!)? Knowing this, the developers tried to spice the driving up; streetraces litter the cities like discarded johnnies; purple hoops float tantalizingly in the sky like levitating cock rings, normally in proximity to something ramp shaped, just begging to have a car propelled through them and cause Sigmund Freud to get all excited. Did these ring things convince me to convince myself I found the driving interesting? No sir, they did not.

But fuck it, and fuck the naysayers. Crackdown's all 'Hey, hey you! Are you saying nay?' 'Well, yes I am...' 'Well fuck you!' Crackdown knows what it's about, and it doesn't pretend to be anything more than it is, unlike some recent Bioware space RPG's. Naming no names. It's a game about finding orbs, normally by shooting someone in the head until orbs fall out. It's about climbing that skyscraper to see what the view's like. And it's got a sense of humour as it goes about it. Like a certain portal shooting extravaganza of brilliance of late (narrows it down), it understands the importance of a good narrator. Explode too many bus-loads of orphans and the narrator will wryly remind you that civilians, whilst often an intolerable nuisance, are not there for you to slaughter.

But you can tell he doesn't mean it.

Granted, the narrator gets a bit repetitive a bit quick, but that just reminds you that you should be done playing this game by now and doing something else: 'go on, go play that Halo 3 beta you've been weeing yourself about' it taunts you. And you think 'oooh, maybe I should. I could do with brushing up on my Spartan Laser before tea-time'. You reach for the power button, but then it hits you, right in your long suffering balls: 'Won't somebody please think of the children?' 'Yes...' you say; 'Yes. Think of all the children... who I haven't driven a rocket powered supercar over yet. Think of all the children I've yet to stick a limpet mine to, and then juggle in the air with my rocket launcher. Think of all the children that are sitting safely at home, having never been thrown off the top of a skyscraper...by me.' If not you, agent, then who? You sit back in your chair, briefly chastise yourself for your dereliction of duty by giving your balls one last, swift punch, and get back to work...

Viking: Battle to Remain Conscious

W.W.B.D?
What Would Beowulf Do?

So. The Spear-Danes in days gone by and the kings who ruled them were notorious bureaucrats. If we are to believe Creative Assembly then there was only one thing the Vikings loved more than slaking their bloodlust by cleaving asunder the skulls of their foes to revel in the cascade of crimson riches within, and that was paperwork. “Nearly time to lay waste to that settlement, lads: we just need to fill in this P137 Insurance document and mail a copy to Horgvar the Collator, and we’ll be all set to pillage in four to six weeks.”

The justification for this entirely facetious assertion is this: attacking an enemy-held settlement in Viking requires the player to meet a checklist of “assault criteria.” Oh yes, you can tell you’re in for a fun ride when they break out the c-word. Some of these criteria are fairly mundane: capture a lumber-mill to facilitate the construction of siege equipment; recruit more men to your army. Others sound more outlandish, but somehow come across as being humdrum in practice- something like summoning a dragon takes on a unexpected level of monotony. The setting for this thrilling quest of heart-pounding box-tickery is the realm of Midgard. The player assumes the role of a Viking warrior, Skarin, roped into a battle between two goddesses, Freya and Hel. Skarin travels between islands, raising armies, razing enemy strongholds, and repeating this process until ennui overcomes the player and they slump into a coma filled with nightmares about compulsory stealth sections.

In terms of art design Viking is remarkable. I’ve remarked upon it, so I guess it must be. Exaggerated Nordic vistas yawn about the player; enormous pillars of carved stone jut from a stylised, undulating sea; it looks the biz, pure and simple, provided it’s not in motion. If this were a review of the game’s screenshot potential it’d be right up there in the rarefied air of Mount Average. For fans of nice scenery, I would certainly suggest splitting a rental with a friend or stealing a copy, just to take in the sights. So much effort has gone into making the game look attractive, though, that the gameplay quickly runs out of things to say about itself and becomes the archetypal one-trick pony*. Raise army, find gold, buy upgrades, do execrable stealth section, attack enemy town, fight boss, get teleported to next island, raise army, find gold…

The game appears to see nothing wrong with expecting you to do the same thing over and over without complaining. The game appears to see nothing wrong with expecting you to do the same thing over and over without complaining. Oh, I’m sorry, did I repeat myself? Annoying, no? Viking just glances up occasionally and says “oh- you’re still here? I thought you would have left by now. Well...I guess you could go liberate this vineyard if you wanted to. Then there’s this watchtower...if you’ve got time.” Well, how about you think of something interesting for me to do, and I’ll think about doing it? Is there not enough boring junk to do in real life, now, that we need to simulate it?

Catering for the player’s enjoyment is not Viking’s main concern. You wander about the large-ish maps with only an uncooperative, stubbornly non-zoomable map and a Viking compass for company...sorry, apparently, the compass is called a “Brisingamen”. Not a compass.

“Brisingamen”.

The game simply doesn’t explain what to do a lot of the time, a consequence of an “approach the objectives in whatever order you see fit” mindset which just leaves the player without direction. Consider it a silver lining that this lack of direction is alleviated by there very rarely being more than one thing to do. Free bastard Vikings. Stealth section. Kill bastard enemies. Bastard repeat. It’s hard enough to get motivated to free the bastard Vikings: never have I encountered a landscape as full of ungrateful, thankless cretins as I did while saving Midgard from Hel’s forces, and this comes from someone going to university in Yorkshire. Liberating Viking plebs from the jails dotted about the landscape generally elicits a reaction of:

“Cheers for freeing us, Ska (I can call you “Ska” can’t I?)...but we’ll need you to fetch this item for us before we join you in your noble quest of ridding our homeland of its demonic plague.”

Or,

“Nice of you to release us from our fetters, but you’ll have to prove yourself before we follow you.”

“Prove myself? I killed your captors and I freed you, you lazy, unappreciative fucker! They even let you keep your swords and armour when they put you in that flimsy, wooden jail, and you just sat there! You know what? How about you fight the rest of them off on your own and come find me if you want some backup?”

It ill befits a Viking to be everyone’s bitch. You think Beowulf would put up with this shit? “Hey Beowulf, before you go can you fix this shelf?” Pshaw! Get Unferth to do it: I’ve got a dragon with my name on it.

Happily, the game does allow you a Vita-Chamber type method of resurrection. Say what you will about this killing the challenge, but it’s better than me killing my cat when the clumsiness of the combat mechanics compel me to throw him through the window. It’s clear that the devs wanted a certain clumsiness in combat, and if I was in a good mood I’d concede it gives things a bit of weight and lends the proceedings a slower and more measured pace than other games of its ilk. The combat system is best applied in one-on-one encounters, where careful blocking and dodging, and slow but strong counter attacks are called for. No sweeping area attacks here: this is personal.

Is it pretty? No. Is it effective? Erm…no.

Problem being, as the box proudly touts and as any frickin’ idiot could have told them, Viking is about “epic” battles. Massive battles. “Hundreds of people on screen” big epic massive battles.

Technical limitations are not without their uses. Time was people would ask “when will we be able to have hundreds of people fighting on screen at once?” and the devs could reply, quite earnestly and without fibbing, “oooh, not for a while yet- technology just can’t cope.” As technology comes closer to being able to cope with such scenes, though, it’s time to admit that advances must be made in combat systems, because the ones we have now simply can’t cut it when so many people are brawling. Viking’s is an intentionally graceless system, but intentional incompetence is still incompetence. It’s little solace when you’re surrounded by thirty enemies but you have no area attack beyond a disappointing buff for your comrades, leaving you to be hacked to pieces and respawn. The “epic” battles are too flawed to be fun and too reliant on perpetually reappearing enemy forces to be taken seriously.

“So, what you’re saying is the combat is flawed?”

Well surmised.

“Maybe I should just avoid the enemies, then?”

You could be forgiven for thinking that.

“In order to do that, I’d need some sort of well thought out and skilfully implemented stealth section…”

“DID SOMEONE CALL FOR A POORLY THOUGHT OUT AND LAZILY IMPLEMENTED STEALTH SECTION?” bellows Viking, getting quite the wrong end of the stick and feeling like its longboat has finally come in. It may sound as though I think the game is shallow: I do. But if a shallow game does what it does competently (Crackdown, say) then the game can still be enjoyable. Viking’s stealth sections are a super example of what Crackdown did well to avoid. The enemy AI, the whole game, is not designed for stealth. There is no gauge to show how visible you are, and exactly how far the enemies can see or hear is never made explicit. These are important, fundamental things to know in order for the player’s experience to be tolerable. Ever since the “2001 Bill of Compulsory Inclusion of Stealth Sections in Action and Adventure Games”, it has often been overlooked that stealth sections need a certain amount of predictability and logic about them. Such a mantra sits uncomfortably alongside Viking’s “explaining things is for gays and pussies. Let’s go crack some skulls!” philosophy.

And clearly, I wasn’t invited to the awards ceremony at which QTE’s won all the prizes for “Most Sensible and Intuitive Way to Control a Game.” QTE’s are not exciting; they’re not fun. If they’re too surprising then you’ll almost certainly fail them meaning you have to reload or just try again, begging the question of why it was there anyway. Viking genuinely believes that a QTE will spice up the otherwise intolerably pedestrian existence of the player, and it is wrong. Just try doing anything in this game: “Tap B to open door”; “Tap B to open chest”; “Tap B to set explosives”; “Tap B to quit”. When did just pressing a button once become so embarrassingly passé? It’s not as though the speed at which you tap B is challenging in itself, so the requirement to tap becomes arbitrary. Combat with boss characters is also resolved in a QTE fashion: you hack at them to weaken them, then jump on them and follow the onscreen prompts. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that it’s almost as thrilling as surveying mineral deposits in Mass Effect.

At one point the Wikipedia page for the game claimed, “Throught (sic) the game the player has the ability to attack other factions (sic) villages and rape their women. This plays out much like the mini game in grand theft auto San Andreas where the player had to sexually please his girlfriends in many different ways like San Andreas this caused much controversey (all very, very sic).” Given the state of near catatonic boredom I spent most of the game in, I’d have thought something that eye-catching may have jolted me out of my stupor: either Wikipedia was wrong (needless to say, this is unlikely) or I completely missed out on this barrage of graphic rape imagery. What the game does have is oodles of dismemberment: too much, actually. Enemies fall apart from your regular attacks as though their limbs were attached with blu-tac. If they survive your initial onslaught, you can employ the finishing moves, a deluge of impaling and torsos being hacked in two, which quickly become tiresome. How in good fuck do you make hacking off limbs boring? The same way you make summoning dragons and leading an army of bloodthirsty Vikings into battle against a horde of demons boring, I suppose. The game has a knack for it.

Is there anything to like about Viking? Skarin’s running animation shifts in a nicely reactive way according to the slope he’s jogging about on. Running to the edge of a platform causes Skarin to stand on the edge and wobble his arms for balance, rather than just plummeting into the void as if you’d meant to accidentally kill yourself. Given that I very rarely run over the edges of platforms and fall to my death on purpose this is surprisingly considerate of Viking. Penultimately and ultimately: some of the scenery is nice, and Brian Blessed narrates. Yes indeed, Brian Blessed lends his considerable vocal talents to the proceedings. The apparent poker faced ethos of the game is starkly at odds with the outrageous verbosity of Blessed’s Flash Gordon-esque narration. This leads me to conclude that it’s a funny beast, this Battle for Asgard, although most definitely not a “funny ha-ha” beast. Apart from one crude shagging joke, I’m not sure there’s a single piece of humour in the game, unless the whole thing is one giant piss take to see how long you’ll play the same level over again, or a surprisingly subtle comment on the hopeless tautology of violence in a society based on a warrior code.


There is a hint of dramatic irony about the plot, a smugly Crackdown-esque ‘ooh, maybe you weren’t working for the good guys after all...whaddya think of THAT, college boy?’ But by the time you’ve got to the point where you might find out what’s really going on with the story, you just want to stick two fingers up at the game and say “You actually think I give a fuck after all the garbage I’ve just put up with?”

The thing I found most amusing during the game wasn’t even “funny”, although I think it speaks volumes about how the experience damaged my mind-state. The main “villain” (“ooh, maybe she’s not a villain because...screw it, who cares?”) is called Hel, meaning frequent references to “Helspawn” and “Hel’s forces”. You know, like “Hellspawn”. But with one “L”. I looked it up, actually, and ‘Hell’ derives from the Germanic ‘Hel’ which…yes, I know, I’m talking etymology. That’s a good indication of how bored I was.

It’s a difficult game to like. It seems either oblivious to, or contemptuous of, how bored the player is getting, and is impressive looking enough to make this belligerent attitude a real waste of opportunity. This game needed a sense of humour, which Fable, surely the source of its visual design inspiration, at least got right. It needed more than one, very boring, side mission. It needed interesting conversations and less denture-grinding dialogue: one of the first things an NPC tells you is:

“Gold is a valuable currency, Skarin, even in these dark times.”

“Well, no shit Milton Friedman! Gold is a valuable currency? There was me thinking I’d be paying for my axes with magic beans.”

It needed a better tutorial, and it damn well needed to explain what the player is supposed to be doing. Fortunately, it’s not a disappointment because I hadn’t really heard anything about it: silver linings all round. Viking is not a sleeper hit, or more than the sum of its parts: it’s boring, and it doesn’t care if you’re having fun or not. Avoid, and get your testosterone fix from this instead:

*and what is this one trick ponies do? Juggling? Fire Breathing?

Psychonauts

The following piece contains:
3 instances of defenestration imagery
2 particularly tortured metaphors
1 flirtation with punctuation free paragraphs
0 1 occurrence of the word "cataptromancy"

I was perusing my (surprisingly well thumbed) copy of "Encyclopaedia of Conversational Condescending Fuckwitisms" recently, and stumbled over the following entry for Psychonauts:

Topic: Psychonauts.
Recommended response to conversation about topic: "Ah yes, the 2005 platformer by DoubleFine Studios. Shame about that; commercial failure but critical success, don't you know?"
Cross.ref: overlooked gem; criminally undervalued; sickeningly unappreciated; too good for the hordes of drooling working-class philistines who persist in dogging my otherwise Utopian existence.

This is objectionable, and this is my objecting face. To call Psychonauts an unappreciated gem nowadays is to willfully ignore the point that every last bloody gamer worth their crunchy saline granules knows Psychonauts backwards. If unappreciated computer games were a row of Dickensian street orphans sprawled along the gutter, Psychonauts would be the one at the end with the saddest puppy-dog expression on its face, being gifted money by sympathetic members of the public as the others fought over scraps: then at the end of the day Psychonauts would stand up, fling away its fake crutches, dance a merry jig and go stay in a fancy hotel for the night throwing foie-gras out of the window at the real crippled orphans. It is an electric guitar playing Judas to the underappreciated games cause, because when a game tops every gamers list of unappreciated games, it is no longer unappreciated.

High five's all round! Good work everyone- Mission Accomplished, right George? Maybe it's just the rarefied critical and intellectual circles I move about in which have given me the impression that people appreciate Psychonauts when it is, in fact, still completely obscure. I'm not the type of retard who starts bellowing "sell out" every time a game garners a modicum of recognition (I'm a quite different type of retard to that...) but if you're going to sit around bemoaning the game's tragic past, don't be surprised if I jam my fingers in my ears and start screaming QFT to try and drown you out. And not the nice kind of QFT either: I mean the GTFO, STFU kind. Psychonauts is brilliant, but it's not the only brilliant, underappreciated game about.

Now, I know, I know, that it's not Psychonauts' fault. I know that critical appreciation's one thing and sales figures are quite another. If you're the impulsive type and feel inclined to experience Psychonauts immediately, it's on Steam for 19.95 of your puny American dollars. According to my "British National Party Currency Conversion Chart" that's a mere £1.99 of mighty British Sterling. If you're the impulsive type, go download it, and then come back here and read the rest of this as those billions of ones and zeros seep into your hard drive: I shall do my level chuffing best to vindicate your pecuniary outgushings.

So let's imagine you don't know what Psychonauts is about. You don't know it's set in a summer camp for psychically gifted children. You don't know that the game's main gimmick, a hub system based around flitting in and out of people's psyches like it's going out of style, facilitates a staggering, beautiful diversity of settings. People will tell you all sorts of stuff about Psychonauts. They'll spill the beans on some of the most surprising level design you'll ever encounter in a video game, and they'll do this because they want you to know how and niche and esoteric their interests are, and because they have a deep seated hatred toward you which they can only express through passive-aggressive spoiler flinging. But you should raise your eyebrows quizzically if they propose the following: that it's a brilliant platformer.

I've long been of the opinion that telling a great story through a platform game bears more than superficial likenesses to stirring a cup of tea with a JCB- it's clumsy, it's unwieldy, and like this metaphor, it's largely surplus to requirements. While I strive to be a proponent of the Yahtzee school of "it's worth the occasional rough patch for a work of such staggering imagination" game theorising, I have difficulty reconciling this lofty ideal with my own short temper and limited attention span. It's Grim Fandango all over again. I adore Schafer's tales, but I have a natural disinclination for the media he uses in telling them. Point and click adventure games?

"Use Eau d' Toilette on hole punch. Use hole punch on Gandhi's headstone."

Must I? If gaming's a journey, I'm having a First class ticket on the Number Nine. Y'all can walk if you like, take in the scenery: I'm just here for the free booze. The platforming elements, the minutiae of item collection and double jumping, go a long way to obscuring a brilliant yarn. Tim- and I mean this in the sweetest way possible- have you considered making movies?

Platformers of Psychonauts' ilk aren't a very trendy genre these days: Galaxy's recent contempt for gravity was the mouth-to-mouth resuscitation that the wheezing old nag needed to keep going a bit longer, but seemed to fall more on the side of exception than rule. Tumbling off platforms and hoarding finite lives seemed to go out of the "Hey, I just thought of a fabulous idea, chaps" fenêtre around the same day that health packs got surgically excised from First Person Shooters and replaced with recharging shields and carrying no more than two weapons. Psychonauts' best ideas, those that people discuss in reverent hushed tones over the dying embers of campfires in the Savannah, would have been brilliant ideas in any genre. Except maybe pinball simulators. Still, a platformer is what we got, and we can but deal with it as best we can. Suffice to say that if you trawl the mean streets asking people about
Psychonauts, precisement zero percent of those surveyed will reply:

"Oh yeah! Man, I loved that bit where you had to jump onto that narrow platform, but the camera kept moving at the wrong time and the jump button delay was just a bit too long so you kept on falling off to your death! And when you did make it, you slid straight off the ledge because it was slightly too steeply angled, so you had to do it all again! They sure don't make 'em like that anymore!" [presumably accompanied by a hearty thigh slapping gesture]

Just so you know, what they will say is this:

"Don't get me started, dude! That bit where that (SLIGHT SPOILER) lures you into that (MODERATE SPOILER) and you beat the (MILD OBSCENITY) out of it and jump in its mind and suddenly you're a (MY, WHAT A BIG SPOILER YOU HAVE THERE) and you look around and it's all (IBID.) and the...hey, come back! I want to tell you all the best bits of the game!"

Actually, while we're being honest, more likely by far than either of those is:

"Psychonauts? Can't say I've heard of that. Sounds like a child's game. Why are you touching yourself there?"

Unlike our heavily censored friend above I forgo spoilers here only in the most likely vain hope that someone out there who has yet to play the game and through an extremely improbable defiance of the all pervading "key plot information" distribution center that is the internet does not know everything about it already will pick it up or download it and be desperately surprised and moved by the whole experience and possibly be inspired to go into games journalism years from now and credit me as their inspiration and make me feel all warm and tingly and fundamentally validated inside.

Hey, Mr Cynical: it could happen.

Psychonauts tries. It's evident that the designers put in a lot of thought about the player experiencing something new, and if more games nowadays showed a third of the imagination that Psychonauts does then the games industry would be pissing all over the film industry in terms of audience engagement and emotional relevance, and probably sizing up the writing industry for an imminent urine dousing too. There's a point in the game where you gain a clairvoyance ability, to look through the eyes of other living creatures. Damn near every animate being in the game (and a few ostensibly inanimate ones too) can be mentally hijacked, and the way that each being views the player character in a different way, reflecting their own attitudes towards him, continues to amaze this otherwise world-weary reviewer.

The game flaunts the kind of ludicrous attention to detail that would be vetoed in the early development stages of any other game, because of the disparity between the time it would take to implement compared to the number of people that would ever actually see it. I'd imagine the project meeting in which these ideas are discussed would feature a sweaty man with a flipchart drawing a graph with two divergent lines, and then a bunch of people wearing ties and sitting round a table would mutter and shake their heads, and the idea would go spiraling out of that (very busy) window. But since Psychonauts abounds, positively revels, in these myriad details the whole thing takes on a giddy, reckless joy. Go ahead, try and break the game in some way with your psychic powers; but don't be surprised if the developers thought of it first and pre-empted a comic reaction. Punch any character in Psychonauts and they'll react, generally in a pretty amusing way: shoot your team-mate in the head with a sniper rifle in Mass Effect and you'll be lucky if they give you so much as a dirty look. It's indicative of Psychonauts' happy-go-lucky "feel free to try and sink the boat, if that floats your boat" mentality.

And what is it about psychic bears that makes them so damn disturbing? It should be simple: it's a bear- but its psychic. I mean, I've shotgunned things in half during my computer gaming career that'd make Bosch blush, but something about the way it floats silently above the ground, paws dangling and eyes bulging. You don't hear it coming, you just hear it growl when it's too late. Running into one of these in the woods when you've just started the game and are all but defenceless is a singularly alarming experience, unfortunately exacerbated by the downright ham-fisted targeting system and stubborn camera. All you can do is display a certain amount of tactical imprudence by running sideways into a tree while said Ursidae staves the back of your head in with a fuzzy psychic paw. Grr.

Schafer and his team spent a characteristic amount of time and imagination on Psychonauts and it seems a bit rude not to reciprocate by spending a decent amount of time in their character's imaginations. It's a confused beast of a game: one second it'll recklessly smash through the boundaries of the avant-garde, and the next it will apologise, dust off its "I Love Rules and Regulations" hat, and rigidly, blindly adhere to all the conventions of the genre whether they make sense or not. It ain't perfect, but bugger me if it's not trying. Gleefully, my extensive vocabulary gleaned from my Bourgeois book learning means I can sum up Psychonauts in one handy, bite size adjective:

"Oftensurprisinggenerallymessyfrequentlyhilariousbutstubbornlybloodyexasperating."

Catchy. So, the big "shouldyou": should you buy it?

No. Get this instead:

Fuck it, buy them both, it'll only cost you £20. Thank you, and good night, ladies; good night, sweet ladies; good night, good night.