Alan Wake
"I'm Alan Wake, and I'm a writer" narrates the eponymous protagonist before a sweeping camera shot showcases Bright Falls, roughly thirty minutes before he starts exploding the town's shadow-covered inhabitants with a combination of torchlight and plenty of bullets. Crikey. In my experience the lifestyle of a writer involves being able to have a nap on command and spending hours every day worrying about whether or not you'll ever be seeing another paycheck.
Dante’s Inferno
Nobody has actually read the whole of Inferno, though many Literature students keep a copy on their shelf to look clever. Dante Alighieri's fourteenth-century poem opens with Dante, a middle-age man, pondering his existence in a dark wood. Pretty boring. Dante's Inferno, the 2010 videogame, starts with Dante pulling off a 100-hit combo in Jerusalem, killing Death so he can nick off with his scythe and falling into hell so he can rescue his woman Beatrice. Cha-ching!
Zombie Shooter 2
Collate the headshots clicked out in a decade of Counter-Strike alongside the number of Diablo’s minions felled by frenzied depressions, and you’ll end up with a number to put dual-stick controllers to shame. Sigma Team’s Zombie Shooter 2 is determined to exist as the most extravagant example of the venerable work-and-play input device’s clicky-clicky gore-dealing abilities. So hyperbolic is the game’s penchant for guts, limbs and blood spatters that the terrain of most levels is quickly obfuscated by the entrails of popped zombies. Well, some zombies, as the title is both entirely apt and a misnomer: the game is hardly discriminatory in what constitutes its eponymous monsters, instead opting to present all sorts of grimy nasties to disembowel, including dogs, giant fat women and hulking, steely beasts toting enormous rocket launchers, with spikes protruding from their back end.
Assassin’s Creed II
The first twenty minutes of Assassin's Creed II, which kicks off from the very moment the previous game finishes, nicely summarises what's gone on since the credits scrolled: former lab technician Lucy has popped out of her lab jacket and squeezed into something less comfortable, Desmond can finally go through the front door and new Renaissance man Ezio has the personality that Altair sorely lacked. Ubisoft have been mindful of the criticism levied at the first game, but their ultimate goal is clear: to evoke the series' central concept of using swift, agile parkour skills to nip across glamorous historical architecture, and then jamming pointy objects into the faces of naughty men. That's what we've seen so far, anyway.
Star Wars: The Clone Wars – Republic Heroes
The Star Wars franchise is very interested in your wallet, and with the approaching holiday season comes a deep annual scraping of its lucrative barrels. This year's fare is the lengthily titled Star Wars: The Clone Wars - Republic Heroes, which has Krome Studios translating the poorly-received 3D animated children's series into a lukewarm 3D action platformer.
Splinter Cell: Conviction
Whilst Splinter Cell Conviction's slick E3 demo featured Sam knee-deep in his vendetta to find out who killed his daughter, the level on show at TGS 2009 has Sam wading through the middle of another problem: EMP bombs scattered around Washington DC. Despite his grumbles, Sam stalks around the terrorist's run-down building like a natural. Not bad for a man supposedly born in the 1950s. It just goes to show that you can take the man out of his SIGINT ninja suit, but you can't take the ninja out of the man.
Army of Two: The 40th Day
Bringing back Salem and Rios was never going to be easy. It would be like inviting a pair of frat-boys back to a party after they stole your toilet seat and urinated in the punch. It's hard to imagine the direction EA would take with the sequel, but it was never assumed they were going to try and tone it down. Instead of cruising into their sequel in a party wagon with pounding hangovers, they show up to Army of Two: The 40th Day in casual attire, menacing hockey masks nowhere to be seen, and casually saunter about downtown Shanghai. To report for work, of all things. Which is probably for the best: Salem and Rios were about one fist-bump away from causing serious damage to their hands.
Splinter Cell: Conviction
For a game subtitled Conviction, Ubisoft's tentative approach to Sam Fisher's latest adventure has often appeared to have everything but. The game's protracted development suggests uncertainty, and 2007's poorly-received gameplay trailer has been forced into the creative shadows. The game reappeared at 2009's E3, greeted by applause, and in the first few minutes of our hands-on session with the same build we've been told that the team at Ubisoft Montreal were sent back to the drawing board, forced to consider a difficult question posed by creative director Maxime Beland: who, exactly, is Sam Fisher?
Bionic Commando
Personally, I think the biggest surprise to come out of the Bionic Commando series is that protagonist Nathan 'RAD' Spencer dyes his hair. How he ever managed to put one of the little plastic gloves on his humongous, metallic bionic arm I'll never know. He's gone back to his natural brown hue for this game, a direct sequel to a twenty year old NES classic, because I doubt bright red colouring is standard prison issue. He's been banged up for years because, like in real life, nobody knows exactly what to do with him. He's kept himself busy in the clink, though, growing a set of dreadlocks massive enough to make Dave Lister green with envy.
X-Men Origins: Wolverine
I don't know how it happened: perhaps somebody smudged some ink somewhere, or lazily misread a memo. Maybe somebody crossed the streams. But, regardless of how, Raven's accompanying videogame to Hugh Jackman's latest cineplex adventure, X-Men Origins: Wolverine, was designed around an 18 rating. Gratuitous, uncensored and rampant violence oozes from every grizzled, vicious pore. Heads get lopped off, people get skewed on poles, and faces get blasted wide open with shotguns. Facing an elite military unit with a genetically engineered arm, Wolverine rips it off and hits him with it until his head caves in. And there's blood. So much blood. That's the game. The movie's a 12A.
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