It’s hard to recall but this was one of the big PS3 releases, drumming up massive E3 excitement over the rolling demo several years ago. On first glance it’s just Godess of War, twin blades twirling, quicktime eventful and featuring an epic, mature, Conan-style fantasy storyline. To be absolutely honest, the first impressions aren’t too far off. This is every bit as action-packed as Kratos’ journeys, if considerably less gruesome. What sets HS apart is the level of elegance, both in the games heroine, and the design and flow of the game itself. Rather than just mashing the buttons and flailing the blades of Chaos, there’s a little more Ninja Gaiden-style switching of stances and timing of blows. Hammering square will get you blocked and killed fast. You have to time and counter. Nariko arcs about the screen, a lady-shaped death-machine, but each button-press has to be managed. There’s no hand-holding here. You have to earn your awesomeness.

The reason this game stands out in the mind, and why when you’ve finished it, it will stay with you and leave you wondering why other games don’t do it that way is the performances turned in by the mo-cap and voiceover actors. Gollum himself; Andy Serkis plays Bohan the tyrannical and brawny villain, injecting every line with easy, almost likable, poisonous charisma. He’s not some gloating D-lister with pretensions on being Emperor Palpatine, this is an award-winning actor at home in a digital role. He’s more like the terrifying man you meet in the pub and pray you’ll get away from before he snaps and you get a pool cue in the eye. The man who would be Kong also took up the role of dramatic director for the rest of the cast, and it shows. Every line is committed to, every emotion feels true. If every voice director in gaming took this much time and effort to get his crew emoting then games would honestly be further down the road to being taken as seriously as films. Nariko, Bohan, Kai, Shen are all excellent characters, none of them stereotyped, all of them interesting, with strengths and frailties making them far more human than we’re used to in this medium.

Looking back on the game, it’s really a pretty slick but standard slasher. Golden Axe brought right up to date (and not like the atocity that was Beast Rider) but the reason to find this game again is that if you own a PS3 and if you’re looking forward to God of War III for reasons of story and character as well as action then you owe it to yourself to get this played in the meantime. It has some annoying sections involving crossbows and catapaults and the sixaxis controls, but a little perseverence, aiming first and keeping a cool head will get these completed. Criminally overlooked on release and not likely to see the sequel it probably doesn’t need, this stands alone as a time when Ninja Theory (They of Kung Fu Chaos) truly excelled and made an action game with a bit of heart and soul for a change.

If you recently sold your DS Lite and bought a DSi, sorry pal, you’re a sucker!

Don’t get mad at me, get mad at Nintendo. They promised you an upgrade. The ability to buy brand new mini games and a sleek form-factor with a slightly bigger screen. All they took was that useless old GBA slot that was taking up so much room. Unfortunately for you, that means you traded the best SNES games and frankly some of the best handheld games for Mario Clock, Mario Calculator and the ability to buy small, or “express” portions of other games. On consoles we call these demos and don’t pay for them (Yet… God I hope I didn’t jinx us) It was, in effect, a downgrade.

Tell me, with your hand on your heart that DSiware is what you hoped it would be right now. Obviously it’s early days, there’s so much Nintendo could do with this new market. But if you look at their track record for the past year of WiiWare, they’ve yet to even approach the signpost for the parking lot to the ball-park of quality that some of the titles you lose in this transaction equate to.

Here’s just the briefest of lists of games you can buy as GBA carts cheaply on eBay.

• Super Mario Brothers 1,2,3, World and Yoshi’s Island (Advance)
  
• Zelda: A Link to the Past and Four Swords and The Minish Cap
• Metroid Fusion and Zero Mission
  
• Golden Sun 1 & 2
• Final Fight
• Street Fighter Alpha 3
• Warioware Twisted
• PoKeMoN Ruby and Saphire
• Fire Emblem
• Final Fantasy VI and Tactics
• Mario Golf
• Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow
• PLUS Guitar Hero on the DS
  

By all means add your own in the comments section. You may not want to buy games second-hand. If so, Nintendo loves you and you will probably be able to buy all the above again legitimately. You may also still have a GBA,  I have a GBA SP for when my wife’s using the DS, but the screen isn’t as bright. You may simply not care about these games. If that’s true of all the above, why do you own a handheld at all? Now in a year’s time, look back on this article and it may be that I’m dead wrong. I’m sure a few good games could come out. Nintendo could even pull some classics out of their magic hat to rival even A Link to the Past, and the others from both the shining days of the SNES and the quirkier inventive streak that the GBA development cycle represented, but let’s face it, it’s not likely.

Whatever your feelings on the demise of the king of pop, if you’re in your mid-twenties or older you’ll remember this game. Moonwalker was based on the movie, itself a collection of music videos and montages culminating in a lengthy,  naive adventure- tale involving Mike trying to save three kids from the evil, drug-dealing Mr Big, played by Joe Pesci. The centrepiece of this is the fairly spectacular video for Smooth Criminal. This imagery formed the backbone of the Sega arcade game and shortly afterward; the Genesis and Master System versions.

The arcade cabinet was an isometric beat-em-up that saw Jackson trawling the streets, rescuing children and throwing magic bolts at hoodlums, armed guards and robotic dogs. Utilizing the dance button activated a smart-bomb style dance attack that forced every enemy to get in behind Mike and dance along with him before expiring suddenly. The home console versions followed the same premise, only with a 2D platforming engine, more suited to the hardware.

The game was decried by many as a crappy license but think hard. How many other games feature singers kicking the crap out of thugs and then coercing them into highly coordinated dance routines? Most music fighters are rap-based and one-on-one. I’m thinking Def Jam Icon here and Wu Tang: Shaolin Style. There are simply no others. So in that way, Moonwalker stands alone. Also it contained digitised, chip-tune versions of Mike’s music. Smooth Criminal, Beat It, Bad, Billie Jean and the obvious choice for the graveyard level; Another part of me. (Licensing, precluded the use of Thriller outside Japan). It was plinky-plunky and exemplary of the limitations of the Genesis, but still funky and recognisible and it gave the game a musical identity.

It was simple stuff. Smack about bad guys and rescue the kids from around the levels. Bubbles the chimp then comes and sits on your shoulder and points the way to the boss, which invariably turns out to be a bunch of goons. Very occasionally you’d get a shooting star that would turn you into a missile-spewing flying robot. It really wasn’t bad at all… well it was Bad… in a good way. Licenses may mean this game will never see the light of day again, but I would encourage Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo to consider it for their online marketplace. It will obviously sell and for the youngsters who weren’t around when it came out, (before the premise of Mike hunting for children took on an objectionable aspect), it’s a great fun title with challenge and replayability. Well worth the 400 points or equivolent it would cost.

Michael appeared later in Space Channel 5 (parts one and two) and as a secret character in Ready 2 Rumble Round 2, both on the Dreamcast, so clearly his relationship with Sega and indeed video games stayed healthy. I would not be surprised if a Jackson-themed Singstar tore up the charts this Christmas. We gamers have definitely not seen the last of this man.

We’re very happy to welcome Leigh Alexander to the show this week. Leigh is the news director for Gamasutra, pens a monthly column for Kotaku and has written for Slate and Variety. Her personal, more casual blog is Sexy Videogameland. It becomes immediately apparent on meeting Leigh that she can talk, virtually nonstop on a professional level about the things she’s passionate about. Social and cultural issues surrounding games, as well as games themselves, music, twitter, the works. We decided she’d be perfect to tackle the tricky business of women in gaming; how they are portrayed, how they are marketed to and how they are percieved by the other half of the gaming species. To put it mildly, we got a great discussion out of her. Ms. Alexander kindly stuck around to chat about the news and what we’ve been playing and we got some great banter and points of view from that too. I’ll be honest, it’s one of my favourite episodes.

The news about Michael Jackson’s death came to me while I was editing the show and I was sorely tempted to make some reference, but it wouldn’t have worked in context so I held back. You can probably guess what the not-so-random game of the week will be for #112.

Link’s to Leigh can be found here. Many thanks go out to her and she’ll be welcomed back any time.

Gamasutra
Kotaku
Sexy Videogameland
Twitter

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It’s always been very easy to look at video games and find the obvious female stereotypes strewn across our thirty year history. Since we’ve been able to identify adventure characters by gender, they’ve been largely male. Pitfall Harry, Jet Set Willy, Mario, Link. In fact the big revelation at the end of Metroid (Samus was and remains a woman) was pretty groundbreaking back in 1986. When females turned up it was usually either as damsels in distress to be rescued (Final Fight, Mario, Zelda) or weaker, faster fighters to balance the mediocre man and the beefy guy (Streets of Rage, Golden Axe). Then with Street Fighter II we got Chun Li, the token female who was actually pretty good at holding her own and was followed by Cammy and eventually a deluge of lady Street Fighters, each tougher than the last. But women still hadn’t too often been the stars of games.

So it’s 1996 and Lara Croft is up on the posters, her gigantic polygonal mammary glands making all the adolescent boys dribble, and giving developers ideas. The move to 3D meant everything changed for one (well two) reasons. “Hey, let’s make some games with a sexy girl as the star,” they said. “I mean who wants to follow a guy’s tight, supple buttocks around for ten hours? Certainly not girls, they don’t even play these things.” And nobody thought to ask why. Surprisingly following Croft, developers actually managed to hit the mark a few times with slightly more well-formed female characters. So we got Jill Valentine (Resident Evil), Aya Brea (Parasite Eve), Darci Stern (Urban Chaos), Hana (Fear Effect), Cate Archer (No One Lives Forever), Joanna Dark (Perfect Dark), and Heather (Silent Hill 3). It wasn’t the done thing to have girls play the damsel in distress any more and the sexes became equals of sorts, albeit that women were still often the weaker choice with the bigger pockets. Until finally we started getting some real characters that weren’t just eye candy and sometimes the fact that they were female played into the story and had a real effect on their character progression; The Boss in Metal Gear Solid 3 probably being the best example of this.

But despite this short-changing of 51% of the species, I’d like to argue for the other 49% for just one minute. Looking back on these games it’s pretty obvious that men get just as rough a time of things as women. Possibly more so, because developers don’t even have to think, “Hang on, what does this say about how we view this gender?” they just pump up his muscles, stick a gun in his hand and send him down the chute into the battlefield. Chris Redfield in all his lumbering, sweaty glory exemplifies this point. His arms may look like condoms full of walnuts but does he ever say or do anything memorable? In contrast, Sheva of Resident Evil 5 at least has a back-story and some motivation other than simply, “Umbrella bad, Chris SMASH!

It’s embarrassing to say but video games in general, still being a medium on the brink of maturity, means that both genders are portrayed in broad brush-strokes and that comes down to lazy writing and a lack of focus on characterisation. But look to the best stories and you’ll find a better class of woman and man. Metal Gear may be absurd at times, and might not rank alongside the best cinematic storytelling, but Solid Snake is as great a male character as The Boss is a female one. Heavenly Sword pitches a girl born into the role meant for a boy in a male-dominated world and though she’s an incredibly strong fighter, her best characterisation comes in the form of her vulnerability. The mistake most inexperienced writers make (myself included at times in my shady past) is trying too hard to make characters look cool, tough and near-invincible. That’s very often boring as hell and impossible to relate to. Our flaws are where the reader and subject join up. Karla Valenti in Indigo Prophecy (Fahrenheit to my fellow Europeans) for example, is incredibly claustrophobic, a fear which impacts on the game itself as you struggle to push her through a darkened, cramped basement. In this case, it didn’t really matter that she was female, and some games have capitalized on this manner of storytelling.  Mass Effect pulls off the perfect balancing act because it’s absolutely immaterial which sex you pick, everyone reacts to you the same. And guess what; my female Commander Sheppard, with all her hard-bitten lines, scarred face and equally damaged personality is the best female I’ve seen portrayed yet. Taking the gender issue out is not the answer every time, but in this case it works perfectly. Clearly BioWare took a hard look at the story of Ms. Pac-Man and saw an equality they could relate to. So in conclusion, it’s not that games are sexist. It’s not even that game developers are gender-biased. It’s that bad writing is just that. When games get consistently good stories, written by mature adults, both men and women will be portrayed in a better light. We will get the rounded individuals who resemble real people. We just have to hold on through all the meat-headed heroes and buxom, gun-wielding vixens until the culture catches up with our ideals.

Our guest this week is indie podcasting legend Bobby Blackwolf. We talk about two hot-button topics; has the rhythm-action genre been exhausted this year and the state of piracy in gaming. Strong opinions, problems and solutions fly about like flaming arrows, which is what we love about this podcast.

Plus the eight questions we ask every guest, along with reader mail and random game of the week.

You can catch Bobby’s two shows here and check him out LIVE every Friday and Sunday. http://radio.allgames.com/radio/blackwolf/

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We’re proud to welcome to the show this week; David Crookes, gaming journalist and curator of the Videogame Nation exhibition currently on show at the Urbis in Manchester. It’s a celebration of the thirty year history of video games, largely focusing on the British creative side. Various themed areas take you from the bedroom to an arcade, a sports arena and eventually up to date in the living room. People of all ages and from all levels of game experience can try out classic titles and glean fascinating insight about the often misunderstood industry.

Here’s the link to the calendar of events. http://www.urbis.org.uk/page.asp?id=3332 I recommend anybody able to get there bring along their friends and family. Entry is only £3. David gave us an excellent 20-minute phone interview, going into more detail about the exhibition.

Also this week, we’ve been playing lots of games. Tony talks Fuel and we mop up after E3 with some aftermath news, including Peter Molyneux’s ascension to Creative Director of Microsoft Game Studios and how pre-E3 leaks harm our excitement. All that, plus Random Game of the Week and Reader Mail.

Listeners should go to Steven Jones’ blog and read his summation of six months of 360 ownership after a mostly PC-based gaming life. http://st.thomsen-jones.co.uk/?p=325 Steven is one of our regular letter writers and gives a particularly provocative submission this week regarding a theoretical way of Microsoft handling downloadable 360 games.

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This isn’t my review it’s just something that struck me as annoying while playing. Sloppy-ass storytelling via minimalist cutscenes.

Developers Sucker-Punch are clearly going for a dark, comic-book style to the game. It fits the gameplay perfectly as you’re playing an electric superhero/superantihero who leaps around a city in chaos, dealing death to wrongdoers and/or innocent bystanders. So that would fit with presentation that matches today’s black, gritty comic books from the likes of Frank Miller, Mark Millar, J. Michael Straczynski, Brian K. Vaughan and Brian Michael Bendis, right? Wrong? The comic scenes are spliced in between each major action section with such clumsiness it feels as though they’re just placeholders that never got replaced.

Here’s how it goes.

1. You do a mission, running from A to B, and killing dudes 1 thru 20.

2. The mission ends, we cut to a swift montage of pretty competent comic art, complete with a voiceover as gravely protagonist Coal explains how he met someone new and had a conversation with them. This process takes about twenty seconds to watch.

3. Cut to Cole, straight after that, somewhere else. Go do another mission.

Did you spot what was missing? Character interaction, development, empathy, identifying with our hero in any way.

“But that’s fine too!” You say. “All I want to do is bust heads. Make with the zapping already. We don’t like getting bogged down in those hour-long Kojima style cutscenes.” True, sometimes they can screw up the pace and have you longing for some more gameplay, but those bits between the action are absolutely crucial for us caring about what’s going on. If we’re simply told “Then I met this woman. She worked for some company or other. Told me I had to work for her.” we learn nothing except the basic framework for the maguffin Cole’s been sent on. He has no more motivation to complete his tasks than before. It short-changes us as an audiance and crucially it falls way short of Sucker Punch’s aim. The real meat of graphic novels are the taut scenes of character interaction. They define the story, justify and strengthen the action and give us something to really get hooked on. Imagine watching only the last third of The Matrix. Sure it would be cool, but we wouldn’t know why Neo was really fighting, or care what happened to him.

The game itself is fine. A prime example of accomplished, sandbox action with some spectacular moments. I just don’t care about what happens to anybody in it. Next time you’re riffing on comics developers be sure to read one or two first. I reccomend Powers and The Ultimates.

Having never played Ico or Shadow of the Colossus before, I have issues with how the recent trailer for The Last Guardian made me feel. The story seemed simplistic enough. Penny Arcade among others have remarked that there’s only two ways that game’s ending; The boy dies or the baby Gryphon thing dies.

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2009/6/8/

The music (courtesy of the Coen Brother’s; Miller’s Crossing) is manipulative in the way it tweaks at your  emotions and brings up all your regrets and happy memories at once. And of course, the look of the game is beautiful, in that way Team Ico alone seem to be able to manage. Vast, empty, ruined lands, lonely individuals and a tender friendship, tempered by heartbreaking loss. I knew all this going in, and I’m a grown man with a beard, so why was I blubbering like a schoolgirl who’s just been called fat by the boy she’s been crushing on for years?

I can only assume it’s because deep down I’m a sucker for the emotional kick some very select games are capable of delivering. Due to the interaction, it’s often even more engaging than a film, book or TV show when a character you’ve been playing for hours suffers a great loss. These games stick with us and we all like to pick over them fondly in the weeks, months and years after completion, strangely content with the haunting effect they have had on us. Yesterday I bought Shadow of the Colossus on eBay for a hefty price, just so I can finally play this celebrated game and stop feeling like I’m missing out on servicing my soul.

Here are my top ten recommendations for games with an emotional punch that will stay with you.

Possible spoiler warnings if just knowing the titles of these is enough to help you work out what happens.

——————–

10. Fable II

9. Grand Theft Auto IV

8. Call of Duty 4:  Modern Warfare

7. Secret of Mana

6. The Darkness

5. God of War

4. Heavenly Sword

3. Mass Effect

2. Final Fantasy VII

1. Metal Gear Solid 3: Subsistance

Throw in Ico or Colossus by default since by all rights they’re superb. Now  I’ll probably go and hammer up some drywall while drinking beer off of a Playboy model and cheering on my favorite team, just to remind myself how a real man is supposed to behave.

E3 2009 and two significant steps were made towards increasing the number of full games downloaded rather than bought in stores. Firstly the PSP GO with it’s built-in memory, lack of a UMD drive and focus on the PSN store. Secondly Microsoft launching full 360 games, pointedly canceling their sparse run of Xbox classics. It’s clearly huge, because soon we’ll be buying full games for these systems and Gamestop (and Game in the UK) as well as all the other stores won’t see a penny.

Yet, did you notice the utter lack of fanfare to that effect? It was as if Sony and Microsoft didn’t want to nip at the hand that feeds them with any grandstanding about the new services. In the future, like it or not we’re going to be downloading most, if not all of our games. That time will be different for all of us. Some (like me) will hate the fact that we don’t have a boxed, hard copy for our collection or something to sell again on eBay or Amazon to further fund our hobby. But a lot of people won’t care at all and will in fact be glad of the ease of use. No more having to deal with sales clerks, no more clutter on our shelves, just teaming hard-drives and instantly accessible games.

But clearly these two gaming giants would rather we took this in our stride and keep Gamestop happy with vouchers for downloadable content like Lost and Damned and exclusive demo access for top games like Killzone 2 (for all the good that did). This is a relationship that’s going to turn sour in the years to come as the market evolves. This was just the first, quiet change that still means a huge ammount. Now if you don’t mind, I’m going to go and gaze at my World of Warcraft disc boxes. They’re just meaningless bits of shelf-candy now. I may as well throw them away. But they’re so damn pretty.